Opinion: Board to mull property tax increase for trauma care

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Seven and a half cents, Doris Day and Jack Straw sang, doesn’t buy a heck of a lot. So what does seven and a half tenths of a cent get you?

If county supervisors adopt a Tuesday board motion (pdf) on property taxes, it will get the struggling hospital trauma network $45.2 million annually. It will also cost the owner of a 1,500 square foot home approximately $10.80 a year.

Just 12 weeks before voters face a ballot filled with sales taxes, telephone taxes, property-tax-raising school bonds and, in Long Beach and Los Angeles, a parcel tax, the Board of Supervisors will consider whether to invoke its voter-approved power to add 72 hundredths of a cent to the current trauma network tax of 3 cents per square foot of improved property.

Voters agreed to the trauma and emergency room tax in 2002 by adopting county Measure B. It was considered a long shot, especially with a two-thirds threshold requirement and a post-9-11 and post-dot.com bubble economy. But it ended up with an astounding 73.2% of the vote.

Los Angeles County voters have repeatedly agreed to raise their property taxes, but only indirectly, by approving school bonds and, occasionally, other local bonds. But Measure B was the first time since Proposition 13 was adopted in 1978 that L.A. County voters raised their property taxes directly.

The measure authorized the supervisors to increase the tax each year, without returning to voters, by an amount pegged to the medical component of the consumer price index. They have never done it.

But costs of emergency and trauma care at public and 11 private hospitals in the county network have continued to increase each year, in part due to increased patient load. Those costs add to the mounting budget deficit of the county’s Department of Health Services.

The $0.0072 cents per square foot is a cumulative amount representing the CPI increases in each of the years since 2003. On a 1,500 square-foot house, it would raise the current $45 tax to $55.80. Other than the CPI, there is no cap on annual tax increases.

If the board doesn’t act at Tuesday’s meeting, it will have two more weeks before it loses the chance to get the increase on property owners’ 2008-09 tax bills.