Area’s Lawmakers at Odds Over Fate of Half-Cent Sales Tax : Budget: Six area Democrats favor keeping the levy, set to expire June 30, to ensure funding for police and schools. Three Republicans oppose it.

If it were up to most San Fernando Valley lawmakers, the cash-starved state of California would set aside its promise to repeal a half-cent sales tax this summer and continue collecting the money.

Six of the area’s Democratic lawmakers say they want to keep the tax, which nets $1.5 billion a year for the state’s General Fund.

Three Republicans are just as adamantly opposed to it.

Undecided is Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Panorama City), one of Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s top lieutenants and a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles.

Katz has indicated that he is torn between conflicting desires to curtail the tax bite during hard times and to make sure that there are enough police and teachers to serve the public.

“I’m generally not for extending a tax in the middle of a recession,” Katz said. “But if the tax were used for keeping cops and firefighters on the streets of L. A., I’d consider it.”

Katz’s dilemma reflects the arguments that many expect to flare into a full-scale political war this summer over what to do with the half-cent levy, which was approved as part of Gov. Pete Wilson’s $7.5-billion tax-increase package in 1991.

Wilson says he wants to allow the levy to expire at midnight June 30, as planned. To do otherwise, he has argued, would further sap the state’s recession-ridden economy, drive more businesses out of California and--most importantly--break faith with the voters.

Elimination of the tax is an assumption that Wilson built into his austere $51.2-billion spending plan for 1993-94, proposed earlier this month. In Los Angeles County, that half-cent saving would drop the overall sales tax rate from 8.25% to 7.75%.

But Brown (D-San Francisco) said he wants to extend the levy. And a majority of Valley-area legislators say they are willing to back the powerful Speaker with their votes.

While acknowledging that Wilson and the Legislature promised that the tax would be lifted, area Democrats argue that times have changed. It would be a more serious breach of public trust to go without the money while schools, law enforcement, mental health and other state services continue hemorrhaging from the pocketbook, they say.

They also note that there has been little, if any, outcry from their constituents over the tax--or little public pressure to do away with it now.

“Since people have been paying it, I don’t hear anybody clamoring for its removal,” state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles) said. “I don’t think anybody, the average citizen, knows it’s coming off.”

Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Encino) said that allowing the tax to expire would inflict “unacceptable” cuts to local law enforcement budgets.

Out of the county’s 8.25% tax, 1% is turned back to local governments, which can spend the money on such items as police and fire services.

“The last thing we need in Los Angeles is to lose police,” Friedman said. “The governor’s budget proposal, without the extension of the half-cent sales tax, would devastate the city of Los Angeles.”

Other Assembly Democrats supporting the tax include Burt Margolin and Barbara Friedman, both of Los Angeles.

In the Senate, the Valley’s most powerful legislator, Senate President Pro Tempore David A. Roberti, threw his support behind the tax.

“I would support it at the very least to support schools,” he said last week through a spokesman.

Joining him were Rosenthal and newly elected state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica).

“I’d leave it on,” said Hayden, whose district includes parts of the Valley. “It pays for higher education and other ongoing programs I feel deeply about.”

Although they are smaller in number, area Republicans are just as vocal in their opposition to keeping the tax. Typical was Assemblywoman Paula Boland of Granada Hills, who took umbrage with the notion of some Democrats that it would be OK to extend the tax, in part, because the public isn’t aware of its planned expiration.

“Just because somebody doesn’t know a law” is supposed to expire “doesn’t mean we aren’t bound to uphold our word,” she said. “You make a commitment to the voter that it’s going to expire and then you find 15 excuses for it not to do so--that’s unconscionable.”

Rookie Assemblyman William J. (Pete) Knight (R-Palmdale) said that allowing the half-cent tax to expire would be one step toward making California a friendlier place for business and a cheaper place for its residents, some of whom are leaving because of the expensive price tag of the California Dream.

“People are giving up the idea of having a California address because they can improve their quality of life and standard of living elsewhere in the country, with the same income,” Knight said.

Sen. Don Rogers (R-Tehachapi)--whose district includes Lancaster, Palmdale and Santa Clarita--said he voted against the temporary tax in the first place. It is time for it to die, he added.

“The feeling I get from people is, ‘Get off our backs, government, and get out of our pocketbooks,’ ” said Rogers, one of the Senate’s most conservative members. “People need it more than the state does.

“There’s still a lot of fat in state government.”