County Jail Tax Measure Resurrected : Bill Brought Back to Life for 3rd Time but Its Fate Is Uncertain

In biblical lore, Lazarus was restored to life after being entombed for three days. The event was counted among Jesus Christ’s greatest miracles.

In Sacramento politics, a “Lazarus bill” is a legislative measure left for dead in one committee or another only to miraculously reappear.

So it went Monday as state Sen. Marian Bergeson resurrected her measure to allow Orange County residents to vote on a half-cent sales tax for new jail and court construction--a Lazarus bill if there ever was one.

Bergeson, a Newport Beach Republican, revived her controversial measure for the third time this year when she convinced her colleagues in the state Senate to add it to a similar measure up for debate on the floor.

One More Chance

The move now means that the half-cent sales tax proposition will have at least one more chance to become law before legislators finish their business for 1989 in a frenzy of activity this week. The Senate will debate the merits of the Orange County tax proposal later this week, and could still vote it down.

“It’s stop-and-go, stop-and-go,” Bergeson said after the Senate voted to let the measure live again through amendments to the existing bill. “We’re certainly pleased that we got the amendments passed” on Monday.

If approved by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor, the sales tax proposal could go to Orange County voters as early as June, 1990. County supervisors have voted to build a new $700-million jail in Gypsum Canyon, near Anaheim Hills, and they are counting on the sales tax to generate $121 million a year in seed money. (Voters in November will consider another half-cent sales tax increase for transportation improvements.)

Monday’s last-ditch revival of the sales tax bill prompted some senators--led by Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), Bergeson’s Orange County challenger next year for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor--to cry foul.

Seymour and others claimed that Bergeson is trying to “subvert” the process and sneak the jail tax increase measure through at the last minute, rather than live by the legislative rules and face the fact that her proposal has been defeated.

“We have a policy in this house that when a matter has been turned down by a committee, you can’t take that matter, amend it into some other bill and then bring it to the floor,” said Seymour, who nonetheless agreed that Orange County is desperate to find some way to pay for a new jail.

He Upholds the Rules

“Every time we argue that there is a crying need, does that give us the right to break the rules? I say no,” Seymour declared in an interview.

But Orange County’s desperate state is exactly what Bergeson cited to persuade her colleagues to revive the bill.

“We are turning criminals loose,” she told them. “The frustration level continues because the problems are acute and we are simply not having our problems addressed in a way that is really meeting local needs. . . . “

Earlier this year, Bergeson killed the bill when Santa Ana city officials had it amended to make sure that the new jail wasn’t built in their community. She later agreed to take it up again after striking a delicate political compromise that resulted in elimination of the Santa Ana amendment, instead placing the question of where to put the jail squarely in the hands of county supervisors.

The second death knell seemed to come just before legislators broke for their summer recess in July, when an Assembly committee held up the tax measure because of nagging doubts about its constitutionality, since it would require only a simple majority vote, not the two-thirds majority mandated by Proposition 13, the 1978 tax-cutting initiative. Although the measure eventually passed committee, it was entombed in yet another Assembly committee, where those same doubts were expressed.

Bergeson immediately began behind-the-scenes negotiations to incorporate the Orange County measure in a similar bill sponsored by Assemblyman Dan Hauser (D-Arcata). Hauser’s bill would allow voters to consider the half-cent sales tax for jails in Humboldt, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

With Hauser’s consent, Bergeson and Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana) on Monday moved to add Orange and Los Angeles counties to that list. The Senate allowed the amendments by a vote of 20 to 10.