County Board Seeks Vote on New Sales Tax : Funds: The money raised by the half-cent tax would go toward new jails and courthouses and law enforcement needs.

Ever more desperate to pay for the cops, courts and jails the public demands, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday renewed its bid to seek voter approval of a half-cent sales tax increase for the third time in six years.

If approved despite long odds in November, the tax would generate more than $100 million annually to build jails and courthouses, staff those facilities and help municipalities pay for their own law enforcement needs. The last provision is new--supervisors openly acknowledged that it is designed to help them gain the two-thirds vote needed for approval.

“This is a very difficult time to be optimistic about passage,” said Supervisor Susan Golding, who joined colleagues George Bailey, Brian Bilbray and Leon Williams in the 4-1 vote to begin preparing the measure for the Nov. 3 ballot. “But never has the need been so great.”

“The worst thing we can do is not try, considering our problems,” added Bailey, the measure’s sponsor.

In another vote on the same issue, the supervisors voted unanimously to place an initiative on the ballot that would mandate a minimum number of deputy sheriffs to staff county jails and patrol its unincorporated areas.

The reluctant board was legally required to place the initiative on the ballot after the county’s Deputy Sheriff’s Assn. gathered sufficient signatures on petitions to bring it before voters.

But the board simultaneously acted to gut the initiative by ordering County Counsel Lloyd Harmon to draft language for a county-sponsored ballot measure that would prohibit local initiatives that do not contain new revenue to pay for them. The deputies’ initiative contains no new revenue.

Bilbray, who has been sharply critical of the deputies’ initiative, and Bailey have proposed a County Charter change they dubbed the “Just Say No” amendment to defeat the deputies’ plan. But Harmon said that may not be the only way to accomplish the objective.

The board also authorized Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen to write a ballot argument against the deputies’ initiative.

The supervisors’ latest attempt to persuade voters to swallow a sales tax increase comes nearly seven months after the state Supreme Court struck down Proposition A, a half-cent sales tax approved by a 50.6% majority in 1988 that would have generated $1.6 billion over 10 years.

The court ruled that the county had violated a requirement set forth in the 1978 tax-cutting initiative Proposition 13 that special taxes must receive a two-thirds vote to pass.

Approximately $370 million in revenue and interest generated by that levy sits in a bank account, awaiting a decision by a state appellate court on whether the county can spend the money or must rebate it to taxpayers. The account is earning about $2.5 million in interest each month.

Two years earlier, the county failed to win voter support for a five-year jails tax under the two-thirds rule, when just 50.7% supported it.

As a result of those defeats and the county’s ongoing budget deficits, San Diego’s criminal justice crisis has continued to worsen, county officials say. County jails remain some of the most overcrowded in the nation, many courthouses are dilapidated and overburdened, and Sheriff’s Department staffing in jails and on the streets is dangerously thin, they claim.

A 1,500-bed maximum security facility at East Mesa remains unopened because the county has no money to operate it.

Critics, however, say that a tax increase is not the answer. “It’s a fraud, a complete, total, utter fraud,” said attorney Lewis A. Wenzell, part of the team of lawyers who represented the Libertarian Party activists who challenged the last tax increase.

Wenzell said that the supervisors would use the special tax to free up general fund money “for their pet projects, translated: pay off people who gave (them) campaign funds or voted for (them).”

Supervisor John MacDonald, the lone dissenter in Wednesday’s vote, said that the sales tax has too little chance of passing to justify the $100,000 it will cost to put in the county-wide ballot.

“I just feel we’re using $100,000 that’s not going to bear fruit,” he told his colleagues. “So I just have to vote my conscience and say I can’t support it at this time.”

The list of obstacles to passage of the tax increase appears longer than in 1988. The local recession is lingering, unemployment is higher and the state Legislature, grappling with a crippling budget deficit, is threatening to take millions of dollars from counties that could be recouped only by a separate sales tax increase.

Bailey acknowledged the odds, saying that “a lot of it is going to depend on what the state does in the meantime.”

But Bailey noted a January Los Angeles Times poll in which 64% of voters said they would support a measure reinstating the half-cent sales tax to improve courts and jails.

Bailey’s plan would devote 50% of the tax revenue to construction of courts and jails, 25% to operate them and 25% to law enforcement agencies throughout the county for local purposes, such as hiring more officers and funding prevention programs.

The current version contains no sunset provision, an aspect that Golding said would be essential before she could support the measure. The supervisors have until Aug. 7 to formally place the measure on the Nov. 3 ballot.