Senate OKs Plan for Sales Tax Increase for New Jails

Despite warnings that it could hurt ethnic neighborhoods, the state Senate on Friday passed a controversial measure allowing Los Angeles and five other financially strapped counties to ask their voters for a half-cent sales tax hike to pay for new jails.

The bill, by Assemblyman Dan Hauser (D-Arcata), was approved 23 to 11 and then returned to the Assembly for approval of Senate amendments.

Besides Los Angeles, the measure affects Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside and Humboldt counties.

The proposal prompted emotional debate and parliamentary bickering reminiscent of the acrimonious fight two years ago to keep a planned state prison out of East Los Angeles. Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) claimed that without a special prohibition, the measure will be used by Los Angeles County officials to add 2,408 more prison beds in the already jail-glutted Chinese and Latino neighborhoods of his district.

Critics’ Arguments

“Where will they build these jails?” Torres asked. “Right in East LA. Right in downtown Los Angeles.”

Critics have also complained for months that the sales tax increases, which require only a simple majority of voters in each county to approve, are nothing but illegal end-runs around Proposition 13 restrictions that call for a two-thirds majority. A similar sales tax hike, approved by San Diego County voters in 1988, was held unconstitutional by a Riverside Superior Court judge in May.

One of the jail tax measure’s chief advocates, Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), warned Friday that the half-cent increases are desperately needed to maintain “law and order.”

‘We Don’t Have a Place’

“We cannot continue to enact laws with mandatory incarceration only to turn people loose because we don’t have a place to put them,” she argued.

For Los Angeles alone, the half-cent hike would translate into $388 million annually for the county, which voted Aug. 29 to expand the men’s detention facility by 2,408 beds. The change would expand capacity to 9,000 beds in a facility where prisoners are forced to sleep on the floor and even in the chapel.

Orange County stands to gain $126 million annually from the increase. In anticipation, county supervisors have approved the construction of a $700-million central jail near Anaheim Hills.