The 'S' stands for sham

Let there be no mistake. The political power elite of the city of Los Angeles is so anxious for you to pass Proposition S that they're willing to ride to victory on bad-faith efforts. Nearly every element of Proposition S, which is on the ballot for the Feb. 5 election, is engineered to baffle a negligent voter. And you can start with the name.

Officially, Proposition S is called by this disingenuous and elliptical mouthful: "Reduction of Tax Rate and Modernization of Communications Users Tax." That sounds confusing, but mostly it sounds like less taxes, doesn't it? Silly you.

This "reduction" and "modernization" actually extends and potentially expands the city's tax on communication technologies, mostly with cellphones in mind. It also gives the city the right to collect taxes that two courts have found it couldn't collect without your approval.

In the last two years, courts determined that the way the city was cashing in on your cellphone calls violated Proposition 218, which requires voter approval for new taxes. (In case you're wondering, the city didn't immediately stop collecting any questionable dollars.) Now more court cases are pending about other technicalities related to the tax. If enough of you vote yes, Proposition S will outflank the court cases, establish the requisite voter approval and open the door for taxing more "communication services" in the future. If the city were playing fair, Proposition S would be labeled "Legalizing and Extending the Phone Tax"-- except voters would never go for that. So the proponents included a meaningless 1% drop -- from 10% on various services to 9% -- so they could call the thing a "tax reduction."

The proposition was born in bad faith. In order to get it on the Feb. 5 primary ballot, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council had to declare the city to be facing a fiscal emergency. But what emergency? It's so extreme the $178,000-a-year City Council members voted for a pay raise for 22,000 of the city's workers, just in time for the holidays.

If voters get beyond the hype and the title, they'll see that Proposition S is hardly a reduction in taxes. From the proposition's Section 21.1.3 in the voter information pamphlet:

"(a) There is hereby imposed a tax upon every Person with a billing or service address in the City of Los Angeles who uses Communications Services. ..."

Or how about this one from paragraph (d)?

"Charges subject to the Communications Users Tax include, but are not limited to, the following: connection, reconnection, termination, movement, or change of telecommunications services; late payment fees; detailed billing; voice mail and other messaging services; directory assistance; access and line charges; universal service charges; and regulatory, administrative and other cost recovery charges."

That's the kitchen sink when it comes to "communication services," right?

But let's say you don't read the fine print and head instead for the city's analysis of the proposition's financial consequences.

City Administrative Officer Karen Sisson's "financial impact statement" says that the sacrificial 1% sliver of existing phone tax "is expected to reduce revenue by approximately $27 million in the first year"-- an amount the City Council routinely spends in a day, sometimes even in an hour. She omits the key fact that the city actually hopes its "kitchen sink" language will allow it to gain revenue.

Or maybe you go straight to the pro-and-con arguments, where the "against" side has a single signatory, Walter Moore. He was not allowed to identify himself as a candidate for mayor, though he ran in 2005 and is planning to run again (the filing date for the 2009 election hasn't arrived yet; he isn't technically a candidate, says the city attorney). Conveniently enough, Moore is up against a phalanx of plutocrats and community activists with resplendent titles like "Mayor of Los Angeles" and "Fire Chief."

The mayor's office also has lined up organized labor and top developers to contribute to the "Yes on S" effort, just in case some kind of organized opposition were to emerge between now and Feb. 5. (AEG, whose tax breaks on its planned downtown hotel amount to about a year's worth of phone taxes, is "spearheading" the fundraising, according to The Times.) But they won't need to spend that money.

Until the voters demonstrate that they will not vote propositions up or down on the strength of their titles alone, the city will send them fraudulently titled, bad-faith ballot measures into perpetuity.

Joseph Mailander is a writer in Los Angeles.