Property Tax Hike Plan Loses Backing : Community colleges: Trustee Elizabeth Garfield withdraws support for measure to raise $8.9 million.

A plan under consideration by the Los Angeles Community College District to increase property taxes without voter approval, condemned by critics as an end run around Proposition 13 restrictions, appeared to have unraveled Monday.

Elizabeth Garfield, a member of the district Board of Trustees who voted last week to explore the proposal, announced she will oppose it--apparently leaving the board without a majority in favor of the controversial plan.

“I am not in favor of it. That’s the bottom line,” Garfield said in an interview Monday with The Times, confirming reports circulating among her board colleagues.

“If the voters voted in favor of Proposition 13, we as a governing board should support that,” she said.

Relying on an obscure state statute intended to fund municipal landscaping and lighting projects, college officials had proposed raising $8.9 million a year by imposing a small annual tax assessment on virtually every privately owned parcel in the 882-square-mile district, about a million homes, businesses and other tracts.

State officials said the nine-campus, 101,000-student district would have been the first of California’s 71 community college districts to create a so-called landscaping and lighting assessment district. The proposed charges would have included a $4-a-year levy for single-family home parcels.

Under state law, the assessment revenues themselves could be used only for outdoor maintenance and improvements, including recreational projects. But by using about half the money to replace funds the district already spends for such purposes, officials said they could free up money to add more than 1,000 new classes.

Last Wednesday, Garfield was part of a 4-2 board majority that voted to hire a consultant to begin working on the tax plan, although she said at the time she was undecided about how she would vote.

On Monday, Garfield confirmed she intends to vote against the plan when the board takes up the issue again June 14.

The trustees who opposed the plan last week, Lindsay Conner and Althea Baker, said Monday they will again vote against it. So the board faces a 3-3 deadlock and failure of the proposal, even if trustees Kenneth Washington, David Lopez-Lee and Julia Wu remain in favor.

In light of that scenario, Garfield, Conner and Baker all said Monday they believe the tax plan is doomed, less than a week after its first full public airing at a board meeting.

“It appears to be dead on arrival,” Baker said. “My sense is it will not proceed,” Garfield added.

Washington, the board’s president, could not be reached Monday. But on Friday, he predicted the same outcome, saying “I’m not sure the happy road I thought we had embarked on Wednesday will become a reality. It may scuttle the only opportunity we’ll have to do anything profound for the district.”

Under court rulings, the type of assessment the district proposed would have been exempt from the provision of Proposition 13 requiring a two-thirds voter approval of special tax increases. But tax foes nonetheless accused the district of violating the spirit of the 1978 tax revolt measure.

Garfield, an attorney, said she decided against the plan for that reason, and because of uncertainties about the propriety of the district’s intention to shift the supposed maintenance money toward instructional use. She said she was also concerned about consultant fees and other costs the district could incur.

District officials said the board needed to formally initiate the assessment district at its June 14 meeting in order to impose the assessments on residents’ property tax bills due in December. Garfield’s decision appears to kill that prospect.

But the plan might have some slim chance of revival because the seventh seat on the board is vacant. It will be filled in an election today when voters choose between professor Gloria Romero and businessman David Kessler. The winner will take office in late July, and could provide a fourth vote for the tax plan. The candidates’ opinions of the plan were not known.