Petitions for Prop. 172 Limits Get Mall Signers

Ventura County’s top law enforcement officials hit the malls again Monday, intensifying their campaign to prevent the Board of Supervisors from spending money from Proposition 172’s half-cent sales tax on anything other than public safety.

Outside the United Artists movie theater at The Oaks shopping center--one of 40 locations countywide where supporters of a petition drive gathered to collect signatures--Sheriff Larry Carpenter and District Atty. Michael D. Bradbury urged shoppers to support the effort.

Backers of the drive say the Board of Supervisors broke its promise last year when it allocated part of the $28 million collected from the initiative to agencies other than police, fire and court services.

“I think it’s necessary,” said Margaret Burn of Thousand Oaks, who visited the mall just to sign the petition. “We voted for this money to go to safety, and they used it for other things, bailiffs, PETITIONS: Mikels Joins Signing Drive

whatever they wanted. They just viewed it as more money in their coffers.”

To ensure that never happens again, supporters want to collect the signatures of 44,000 registered voters by April 10, enough to force a special election. Last week, Bradbury and Carpenter gathered signatures at Oxnard’s Esplanade Mall.

Otto Stoll, president of Citizens for a Safe Environment and one of the organizers of the so-called Close the Loophole initiative, estimated that about 10,000 signatures had been gathered by Monday morning.

But organizers say they hope to avoid the election, which would cost taxpayers $350,000, and instead persuade the supervisors to adopt an ordinance binding them to spend Proposition 172 money on public safety.

If supervisors wanted to spend that money on something else, they would have to win the approval of county voters.

“We don’t want to fight this every year,” Carpenter said. “If they want to make a run on public safety dollars, they’ll have to go before the people, and I don’t think that would ever happen in this county.”

Carpenter said he has spoken to sheriffs of several counties, including Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, and they are considering similar petition drives.

Proposition 172, widely supported by California voters in 1993, established a half-cent sales tax to fund public safety programs. Supervisors struck a deal to provide $24 million from the initiative for public safety, but they later voted 4 to 1 to divert more than $1 million to other programs.

Volunteers, many of them law enforcement workers, have been collecting signatures at shopping centers and post offices and in neighborhoods for about three weeks. Supervisor Judy Mikels joined Carpenter, Bradbury and several deputy district attorneys and sheriff’s employees at The Oaks Monday.

“For the most part, you can’t trust the politicians,” said David Williams, president of the Deputy Sheriffs Assn., a union that represents about 800 current and former law enforcement personnel. “If they adopt it now, it only takes three of them to overturn it later. I don’t want to take that chance.”

Shannon Kellogg, who voted for Proposition 172, said she resented what supervisors had done.

“If we voted for money to go toward something, we have to make sure the money goes toward that thing,” Kellogg said after signing the petition at The Oaks.

Supervisors Mikels, John K. Flynn and Frank Schillo have said they do not believe in spending Proposition 172 funds on agencies outside of public safety and expressed support for the petition drive at a press conference last month.

“The other two still think they know better than the public,” said Bradbury, referring to Supervisors Maggie Kildee and Susan K. Lacey.