Colleges Consider No-Voter Tax Hike : Education: Critics protest as the L.A. community college board studies a way used by some other agencies to circumvent Prop. 13 limits.

In a move that critics protested as an attempt to evade Proposition 13 limits on tax increases, the Los Angeles Community College District is considering raising taxes on nearly 1 million properties under an obscure provision of state law that allows the tax increase without voters’ approval.

Relying on a statute intended to fund services such as landscaping and lighting, college officials are considering a plan to raise $8.9 million a year by charging property owners $4 per single-family home, $16 per commercial parcel and $17 per multifamily parcel within the 882-square-mile district.

If it is enacted, officials said, Los Angeles would become the first of California’s 71 community college districts to impose the levy, known as a special assessment. Some elementary and high school districts have enacted such assessments in recent years, often amid public uproar and even lawsuits.

“It’s an effort to shove a property tax hike down people’s throats without their ability to vote on it,” charged Lindsay Conner, a member of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees who voted against the measure at Wednesday night’s meeting of the board.

However, other district officials and trustees called the proposal an entirely legal method of raising funds for the cash-strapped nine-campus district, the nation’s largest. “It’s a way . . . to maintain and improve our campuses. They’re falling apart,” countered Trustee David Lopez-Lee.

The board voted 4 to 2 Wednesday to hire a consultant to prepare the initial paperwork for the assessment plan. That research, by the Newport Beach-based firm of David Taussig & Associates, could cost more than $50,000.

The district is scheduled to decide June 14 whether to formally pursue the plan, which the board could enact after notifying all affected property owners and holding two public hearings. That means the levies could show up on owners’ property tax bills in December.

District Chancellor Neil Yoneji, who sponsored the proposal, said the additional revenue would permit the district to increase class offerings by 10%, improve maintenance and add up to $46 million in new capital projects around the district.

Legally, the assessment revenue can be used only for facility maintenance, landscaping and related improvements. But it would free $3 million to $4 million in general funds the district now spends for those purposes, and that money could be used to supplement class offerings.

That budget sleight-of-hand--imposing a levy for maintenance and facility purposes but channeling about half that amount to the classroom--could prove particularly controversial. Conner, for instance, called it “wrong in principle and possibly challengeable in law.”

Around the state, officials said a variety of public agencies are showing increased interest in the assessments permitted under the state’s 1972 Landscaping and Lighting Assessment Act because it is one of the few ways remaining for public agencies to raise levies on property without voter approval.

Joel Fox, president of the Los Angeles-based Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., said his group plans to begin gathering signatures soon for a 1996 state ballot initiative that would eliminate that option by requiring that future such assessments be approved by two-thirds of the voters.

“We’ve been getting a lot of calls from people around the state” reporting similar proposals, Fox said. “We don’t think the landscape and lighting districts were meant for school districts. We think the system is being abused.”

Before Proposition 13 passed, public agencies such as the district could annually set their own property tax rates to generate enough revenue to meet their needs. But the landmark ballot measure imposed a basic 1% tax rate and limited increases in property valuations. The measure required that special tax increases obtain two-thirds voter approval.

After Proposition 13, cities’ and other public agencies’ use of landscape and lighting assessments--passed by the Legislature in 1972 to allow the city of Manhattan Beach to assess fees for street lights--grew substantially. But it was not until 1991 that school officials realized they, too, could make use of the exception.

In fact, Los Angeles County officials said there are at least 180 such landscape and lighting districts around the county, but only eight sponsored by school districts. School districts that have them--including Torrance, Claremont, Alhambra and several in the Whittier area--used them to raise $6.3 million in 1994-95.

Although the state Supreme Court has ruled that schools can use the assessments without getting voter approval, public opposition and a lawsuit by the Jarvis group prompted a group of Orange County school districts to abandon their assessments four years ago.

The law provides that such a levy can be blocked only if more than half of the affected property owners file written objections--which in the case of the community college district would require action by more than 480,000 property owners.

The levies proposed by the 101,000-student Los Angeles Community College District would affect virtually every private property owner within its area, which stretches from Sylmar in the north to San Pedro in the south, and includes most of metropolitan Los Angeles and 961,576 of the county’s 2.24 million parcels. The district is proposing to continue the assessments for at least 20 years.