School Tax on Lots Faces a Stiff Fight : Beverly Hills: Most residents don’t have school-age children, and of those who do, many are ineligible to vote.

Selling a tax increase to voters is an uphill struggle anywhere. Beverly Hills school officials and their allies may find their own hill especially steep as they try to persuade the city’s voters to support a parcel tax next month designed to bail the school district out of its financial troubles.

The parcel tax initiative, Proposition B on the June 5 ballot, must be approved by two-thirds of the voters to take effect. The five-year tax would raise about $4.5 million a year for the schools, or about $22.5 million in all, through assessments on each of the 9,472 residential and commercial parcels of land in the city.

Parcels would be taxed each year on a sliding scale ranging from $250 for condominiums to $750 for commercial plots larger than 10,000 square feet.

Supporting the tax is a broad coalition of school officials, teachers, parents and city officials. They say the tax is necessary to maintain the quality of education in the Beverly Hills Unified School District and, indirectly, the property values and the city’s image. A low-key group of opponents is fashioning a platform of tax revolt and back-to-basics in education.

Despite the apparent popularity of their cause, supporters of the tax know the odds are not in their favor. Statewide, of the 80 school district parcel tax elections held from 1983 through last November, only 30 have passed. (One district that has approved them is the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, where voters have twice approved a $58-a-parcel tax.)

Among the failures was Beverly Hills’ last parcel tax attempt, in March, 1987. In that election, the proposed tax was favored by 59% of the voters--but was well short of the two-thirds needed for passage. A criticism of that tax measure was that since it proposed a flat fee of $270 on every parcel, small plots would be taxed the same amount as sprawling estates. The variable rate this time around will eliminate such inequities, supporters say.

But there remain some special circumstances in Beverly Hills that make it particularly difficult to push a school tax increase through. Consider that:

* Beverly Hills contains an unusually high percentage of residents with no current ties to the public schools. School district spokeswoman Hali Wickner gives a rough estimate that less than one-fifth of Beverly Hills residents have school-age children.

* Meanwhile, as a result of the influx of immigrants in recent years (particularly from Iran), an unusually high percentage of parents with school-age children are ineligible to vote because they are not U.S. citizens. Sherman Kulick, a leader of the campaign against the tax, estimates that 40% of the parents of the district’s students are not eligible.

* Teachers, who in most school districts could be counted on for a significant pro-tax bloc of votes, are mostly on the sidelines in Beverly Hills, because few teachers can afford to live in the city. Judy McIntire, president of the teachers union, the Beverly Hills Education Assn., estimates that just 12% of the district’s 300 teachers, nurses, counselors and librarians live in the city.

If the tax passes, teachers will receive an additional 3% pay increase for the 1990-91 school year, on top of a 7% raise already provided in the settlement reached after the teachers’ 13-day strike last fall.

If the tax is rejected, a lot more than the 3% raise is at stake. Union and district officials say it will be necessary to lay off 48 teachers, counselors, librarians and nurses. All told, the district will have to cut $3.2 million in spending to balance the projected $30-million budget for 1990-91. Among the casualties will be elementary music teachers, elementary computer and science lab specialists and the Academic Decathlon coach. Two nurses will also be cut, leaving only one for the entire 4,700-student district.

Although it serves a city of extraordinary wealth, the Beverly Hills school district has had chronic money problems in recent years. As a result of a 1976 state Supreme Court decision, the state allocates money for public schools based on enrollment rather than on the amount of property taxes a community generates. Declining enrollment has brought further cuts in state funding, and Proposition 13 and other laws require any additional local taxes for schools to be approved in a referendum by two-thirds of the voters.

Despite these restrictions, the Beverly Hills school district still manages to spend more money per student than any other unified school system in Los Angeles County. The district receives a substantial direct subsidy from the city of Beverly Hills--$4.6 million this year. It gets about $350,000 a year from a nonprofit fund-raising foundation and sells clothing emblazoned with the logo of its famed high school.

McIntire, the teachers union president, said one high-school teacher has already accepted a position in another district for next year, and others are looking, rather than face the uncertainty of the election. “You can’t wait (until after the tax election), because the majority of the best jobs (in other districts) will be taken,” she said.

While non-resident teachers cannot vote, they are not sitting out the campaign. About 100 teachers have pledged to work for passage of the tax, McIntire said. This weekend, for example, teachers will join parents, residents and other members of the Yes on Schools Committee in distributing flyers door to door. In addition, the teachers union has contributed $4,000 to the campaign chest and its parent organization, the California Teachers Assn., has given $8,000, McIntire said.

The tax also has the support of the City Council, the Chamber of Commerce and a student committee at Beverly Hills High School, which is registering 18-year-olds to vote.

The Yes on Schools Committee, which launched its campaign with a rally last Sunday, plans a vigorous, high-budget effort to try to sell the tax to voters. “If we can raise $75,000, $100,000, we’ll raise it, and not apologize for doing so,” said committee co-chairman Bernard Nebenzahl. “We don’t feel that’s vulgar or obscene. . . . This is not a campaign of silence. We have to get (two-thirds) of the vote.”

Opponents of the tax have formed the Beverly Hills Citizens for Cost-Effective Quality Education. They say they will only spend $500 and will prevail.

“You can’t fool the public. You’re asking the public to tax themselves on a nebulous record,” said group chairman Kulick, adding that his organization has more than 200 supporters. “It’s a tax revolt,” he said.

Kulick, who was a leader of the anti-tax drive in 1987, contends that the district is not spending its money wisely. San Marino, La Canada, Palos Verdes Peninsula and other school districts in wealthy communities spend less money per student, yet their scores on statewide tests are just as high as in Beverly Hills, he noted.

“Money does not buy an education,” he said.

The expenditures of Beverly Hills schools are “way out of line,” he added. “We don’t trust people who are in government to be responsible for spending within their means. If you give them $2, they’ll spend $3,” he said.

Pro-tax campaign leader Nebenzahl disagreed. “The parcel tax is not about throwing money at the district,” he said, “it’s about retaining programs. We’re not adding to the budget.”

Nebenzahl acknowledged that some other affluent districts spend less per pupil and produce test scores as good or better than in Beverly Hills, but the more diversified programs offered by Beverly Hills--including Advanced Placement drama, art and computer programs--mean that it is offering education “for the total person,” he said.

He continued: “What we don’t want to have is our district homogenized to be the same as all other districts.”

Unlike in 1987, the district has no reserves to fall back on, he said. “The district is in fact out of money.”

Kulick scoffed at the need for computer, music and other specialist instructors. “Education has to do with the basics, not the frill courses,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to learn math on a computer. We had to do all the adding in our head, by hand--that’s the essence of learning.”

The district, he said, is crying wolf. “They told us the school district would go to hell” if the tax lost in 1987, Kulick said. “The school district didn’t get destroyed,” he said.

Background

The proposed parcel tax grew out of an acrimonious 13-day teachers strike last fall, which was settled only after a group of frustrated parents intervened. They persuaded the teachers union and the district officials to return to the bargaining table, pledged to raise up to $600,000 to go to employee salaries and benefits and helped hammer out a contract containing a two-year, 12% pay increase. As part of the deal, all parties to the settlement also agreed to support a parcel tax, on the understanding that if it passed, some of the revenue would be used to add 3% to the teachers’ salary schedule in 1990-91.

Heated Meeting: Parcel tax is praised and denounced at heated Beverly Hills council meeting. J3