‘Split’ Property Tax System Fails to Get on June Ballot

A proposed initiative that would have granted hefty property tax breaks to homeowners while more than doubling business property taxes has failed to qualify for next year’s June ballot, Secretary of State March Fong Eu said Friday.

A random sampling of petitions in support of the initiative showed that the so-called “split-roll” proposal had not mustered enough qualified voters, Eu said.

“Based on these figures, I have certified to the proponents and to the counties that this measure has failed to qualify,” Eu said.

A spokesman for Voter Revolt, the group that launched the automobile insurance rate-cutting Proposition 103 that passed last year, said the proponents will try again in 1992.

The initiative was strongly opposed by the state Chamber of Commerce and various business groups, which were getting ready to finance a multimillion-dollar campaign to defeat it at the polls.

“Because of the devastating impact that this massive tax hike would have had on the California economy,” said Chamber President Kirk West, “the business community pulled together a broad-based opposition campaign very early on to spread the word about the damage the split roll would do to business and consumers.”

The initiative would have split the property tax roll into two parts. Business property taxes would have more than doubled, from 1% of assessed value to 2.2%.

Residential property taxes would have remained at 1%, although homeowners and renters would have received a $500-per-family tax break as part of the package.

The initiative also would have set aside a large chunk of new business tax revenues to finance a state program to provide affordable housing and aid the homeless.

Although the split-roll idea has been put forward numerous times in the state Legislature, it has failed to make any progress there because of strong business opposition.

Supporters of the initiative, who had to submit their petitions by Oct. 30, said that signature-gathering was hampered by the Oct. 17 Bay Area earthquake.

Nevertheless, they said, they submitted more than 840,000 signatures, substantially more than the 595,485 needed to qualify the measure for the ballot.

But Eu said Friday that random sample reports from 55 of the state’s 58 counties indicated that only 543,221 out of 844,599 signatures were valid. She added that the signatures remaining to be verified in the three other counties were insufficient to trigger a requirement that every signature submitted be verified.

“We took on opposition composed of most of the special interests of the state,” said Bill Zimmerman, political director of Voter Revolt in Santa Monica. “We were trying to do something critically important for the future of the state of California.

“The importance of what we are trying to do has not been diminished by our failure to qualify. As a result, we will be back to try to do it again in 1992.”