Orange Trustees Approve Disputed ‘Recreation Fee’

In an action one critic called a “thinly disguised property tax,” the Orange Unified School District has become the first in Orange County to make property owners foot the bill for maintaining school recreational facilities.

Hard-hit by state budget cuts and the recession, the school board voted 4-3 to impose the $30-a-year fee as a way to pay for the maintenance and construction of tennis courts, swimming pools, baseball fields and other school properties used by the public.

Other financially strapped school districts, including the Huntington Beach Union High, Ocean View and Westminster districts, are moving toward imposing a similar fee on property owners.

“School districts are desperately trying to avoid making drastic cuts,” said John Nelson, assistant superintendent of business for the County Department of Education. “And paying this nominal fee is the alternative to keeping facilities open that would otherwise need to close. . . . Taxpayers no longer have the luxury of not paying for something they are going to use,” he added.

More than 250 people showed up for a heated, three-hour public hearing on the Orange Unified fee. At 1 a.m. Friday, the school board voted 4-3 to impose the fee, rankling the overflow crowd that filled the meeting room, hallways and spilled onto the lawn of the district board offices.

“You are all traitors to the American system!” shouted Elizabeth Livingstone of Orange as she filed out of the board room.

“Traitors! Recall!” echoed others.

The fee is being imposed through the creation of a Maintenance Assessment District, most commonly formed by cities to finance capital improvements such as sewer systems and street lighting.

District officials expect the fee, which will show up on December property tax bills, to raise $1.6 million in the first year. Senior citizens and others with incomes of less than $24,000 a year can defer paying the fee until their properties are sold.

Orange Unified board members were divided about whether to impose the fee.

Board member Jeff Holstien said he had been prepared to vote against it, but he changed his mind after hearing testimony from residents who favored improving school facilities.

The fee would pay for repairs so that the district could provide “an environment that children feel comfortable in,” said Holstien, who was joined by trustees Lila Beavans, John Hurley and Alan Irish in voting for the fee.

However, board member Russ Barrios said the fee should not be imposed without voter approval.

“There is going to come a time when the public is going to have to decide what they will pay to support public education,” Barrios said. “That time may not be now. . . . I do believe the public has a right to vote on this issue.”

Trustees Barry Resnick and Nancy Moore also opposed the fee.

The authority for creating maintenance assessment districts comes from the Landscaping and Lighting Act of 1972, which allows public agencies to form such districts without a vote by residents or property owners.

However, the more than 40 citizens who spoke in opposition to the new assessment district called it a scheme to circumvent Proposition 13, which requires voter approval of new taxes and tax increases.

In the first decade after the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, there has been a 672% increase in funds raised through various types of assessment districts as local agencies seek alternative ways to increase revenue, according to Joel Fox, president of the Los Angeles-based Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

Jonathan Coupal, an attorney with the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports property rights, is studying whether it is legal for a school district to create an assessment district under the Landscaping and Lighting Act.

“We’ve been inundated with calls from very angry taxpayers on these kinds of assessments,” Coupal said. Orange Unified’s use of a flat fee as a means of assessment is “a very thinly disguised property tax,” he charged.

However, Orange Unified officials say residents ought to start paying for the upkeep of facilities used by the public.

Richard Donoghue, the district’s director of business services, presented a slide show demonstrating examples of the repairs that would be funded by the new fee. They included repairing cracked asphalt, rusted fences, damaged pools and brown fields that need new sprinkler systems.

Budget cutbacks in the last three years have reduced the district’s maintenance budget by $500,000 and eliminated 45 maintenance workers, he said, causing district facilities to deteriorate “almost to an unacceptable level.”

Calling the maintenance problems trivial, the crowd at times shouted Donoghue down and offered to help fix the grounds themselves.

Diane Montgomery of Orange, who opposed the assessment, told the board that the district’s problem is not “a lack of funds, but a set of priorities that are completely out of order.”

Linda Elliot and a handful of other speakers spoke in support of the assessment, calling it an investment for the district’s children.

“Students are becoming injured because they cannot go out and play in their regular physical education classes because of the disrepair,” said Elliot, mother of a 14-year-old El Modena High School student.

Then, at what she said was the request of her son, she presented his $2.50 weekly allowance to the board, about the amount residents will be required to pay each month to fund the the maintenance district.

“If you want to reside in a community and be proud of a community, you have to take care of that community,” Elliot said.