LOCAL ELECTIONS / MEASURE P : Tax Proposal’s Narrow Defeat Will Result in Deeper Cuts for Schools : Sports and science instruction are targeted. An Irvine district official blames the outcome on a late ‘hit piece.’

Irvine Unified School District officials were dejected Wednesday at the narrow failure of Measure P, a $35-a-year property tax increase that would have benefited district schools.

“What it means is we couldn’t get a two-thirds vote in Irvine to spend 10 cents a day in support of quality education,” Deputy Supt. Paul H. Reed said. “It bespeaks volumes about the attitude of the community” toward raising taxes.

The measure would have raised about $1.4 million a year for four years. Without the money, the school board will have to make deeper cuts in next school year’s budget, which it will consider later this month, Reed said.

“There was never a threat that we were going to cut,” Reed said. “It was a matter of fact. We don’t have enough money.”

Programs likely to be reduced are sports, science instruction for grades 4-6, library services and guidance counseling. The school board also will consider cuts to staffing and supplies, a one-third reduction in district office staffing and support services, and the elimination of the zero period--an extra class before the start of the regular school day--at the middle schools.

Measure P, which needed the approval of two-thirds of voters to pass, failed by 369 votes. Final results released by the county showed 64% of voters favored Measure P and 36% opposed it. Tuesday’s voter turnout was 24%.

Rather than a condemnation of Irvine’s schools, Measure P’s loss probably was due more to the slumping economy and fears that the state will be increasing taxes to get rid of its huge deficit, school board member Mary Ellen Hadley said.

“It’s too easy to say (voters) don’t care,” she said. “Folks do care.”

But Bruce E. Peotter, 32, an Irvine resident who helped lead a last-minute, door-to-door campaign to defeat the proposal, said voters concluded that Measure P wasn’t the best way to help schools.

“We’re not against education,” said Peotter, a Newport Beach attorney. “We’re totally for it and want to do everything we can to improve it, but throwing good money after bad isn’t the way to do it.”

Peotter, president of the Greater Irvine Republican Assembly, said the group distributed about 4,000 flyers over the weekend to neighborhoods with conservative, anti-tax voters. The flyers said, “We’ve been bled dry already,” and listed local, state and federal taxes that have recently increased.

Reed criticized the flyer as a “hit piece” because it didn’t say that the tax was for only $35 a year and that important education programs probably will be cut without the additional revenue.

“I remain personally convinced there was sufficient support for (Measure P) until that last-minute scare tactic,” Reed said. “I think that hit piece did us in.”

The flyer went out at the last minute, Peotter said, because members of the Republican club couldn’t decide earlier how to campaign against the measure. Prominent club members opposed the tax but didn’t want to appear as if they were against schools, he said.

With such a close vote, a last-minute campaign could have helped defeat the measure, said Kent Price, a San Ramon public opinion pollster and consultant who helped the Irvine school district’s Measure P campaign.

“It doesn’t take much to stir up an opposition,” Price said. “Orange County’s not an easy place to talk about raising taxes.”