Sheriff Lines Up Heavy-Hitting Team to Back Prop. 172

Just about the time World Series stars become household names, Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates is expected to bring a quiet campaign out of the closet and into your living room.

The sheriff, who has spent months before small dinner groups and on radio talk shows touting the merits of extending a half-cent sales tax, is preparing to unleash a $2-million media blitz he hopes will carry the tax extension to victory on Nov. 2.

To compete with baseball’s Mitch (The Wild Thing) Williams, Gates has recruited a lineup of Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams, San Diego County Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller and Alameda County Sheriff Charles Plummer to help deliver a simple message: Law enforcement needs money.

At least $144 million each year would be generated in Orange County for the Sheriff’s Department, district attorney’s office and local city police departments if Proposition 172 is approved. Opponents claim the money would be diverted to cover other bureaucratic costs.

And Gates has crisscrossed the state digging for dollars to fund a little-noticed effort that is not expected to materialize fully until the final days before Election Day.

With Gates having assembled a powerful lobby of law enforcement groups and businesses, opponents of the measure now worry that their arguments will drown in the sheriff’s prime-time campaign.

Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), Orange County’s leading tax extension opponent, said the opposition has raised no local funds, relying on sporadic guest spots on radio talk shows to assail the proposition.

“I feel completely outgunned,” Ferguson said, recently preparing for another radio show in Burbank. “There is no real organized effort. We’re in a bad position.”

While proponents have raised $151,000 in Orange County alone, including contributions from such notables as California Angels owner Gene Autry, a band of local tax groups are largely passing the anti-tax message by word of mouth.

“I think we’ll try to put up some signs this weekend,” said Carole Walters, president of the Orange Taxpayers’ Assn.

Ferguson, like his colleagues throughout the state, has criticized the measure as a tax increase disguised as an aid to law enforcement and has issued stinging indictments of public safety leaders for “lending credibility to the fraud.”

“The fact that these people would allow themselves to be the point men on this great fraud scares me worse than anything else,” Ferguson said. “It’s a disturbing thought.”

At the center of Ferguson’s campaign and that waged by local tax groups is a general distrust that the sales tax revenue would be dedicated to keeping more officers on the streets or prosecutors in the courtrooms.

“I think you’ll find that there will be much money spent on paper-pushers, not police,” Ferguson said. “The only thing left for us to do is challenge the Board of Supervisors to honestly explain how the money will be distributed. If they can’t be honest with us, the people eventually will find out where the money went.”

Walters, who remains optimistic that local voters will cast their ballots against the proposition, said government at all levels has not proven itself to be responsible with existing tax revenue.

“They say the money is going one place and you eventually find out that it went to another,” Walters said. “Every time the government wants more money, it raises taxes. They should have to budget their money just like everyone else does. I really don’t think it’s going to pass.”

Since the spring, however, when the state announced that it would shift $2.6 billion in local property tax revenue from local governments to balance the state budget, Gates and public safety groups have remained single-minded in a quest to find other revenue.

Extension of the half-cent tax was proposed to replace part of the money lost to local governments in the tax shift.

The half-cent sales tax was added in 1991 as a temporary measure scheduled to expire in June, but it was extended until January.

In Orange County, Gates raised the curtain on the local campaign for the tax by announcing that further budget cuts would force him close the James A. Musick Branch Jail and issue layoff notices to dozens of deputies.

During his local appearances in support of the tax extension, he has replayed that warning over and over. The tactic, Ferguson said, is nothing more than an appeal to voters who have become intensely concerned about rising crime and their own safety.

But Gates said he “hasn’t spent much time” thinking about Ferguson and considers the criticisms representative of “only a handful of detractors.”

“I think we have support from the community across the board,” the sheriff said. “We have people who have high credibility, and people tend to stop and listen to people who have that kind of credibility.

“People know that criminal activity of all types is out of hand and its presence is felt everywhere,” he said. “These days, it’s not like you get up in the morning and find out that there had been one ATM robbery down the street. Now, people are asking, how many? I think people are looking to resolve that. They are looking to recapture their safety.”

Proposition 172 Spending

On Nov. 2, voters statewide will be asked to extend permanently a half-cent sales tax under Proposition 172. The money raised in Orange County, about $144 million annually, is earmarked for law enforcement. How revenue would be distributed:

Agencies Amount Percentage Orange County Sheriff’s Department $109.0 million 76% District attorney’s office $27.5 million 19 City police departments $7.1 million 5

Source: Orange County budget office