ORANGE COUNTY VOICES ON MEASURE R : Defeat Would Send a Message to a Bloated, Inaccessible Government

Tripping through the mind-numbing legalese of the “Bankruptcy Recovery Transactions and Use Tax Ordinance” (Measure R) achieves little in the way of clarity as to why Orange County voters should foist additional taxes upon themselves June 27. Indeed, it’s a fine example of why they should not.

A troubling specter rises from the ordinance’s wrenching prose, which symbolizes government’s increasing inaccessibility even as its reach into citizens’ pocketbooks lengthens. Worse, it champions the pop political principle of the day: that the tariff born from a lumbering government structure bankrupt by the folly of its officers should be exacted from the people it serves.

In themselves these are unsettling doctrines that should compel voters to scuttle Measure R in dry dock.

But wait. It gets worse.

That Measure R fails to prescribe how the $1.3 billion it would raise over 10 years would be spent, preserves the Board of Supervisors’ suspect discretion for allocating these funds, and assigns the empty task of “recommendation” to a powerless oversight committee, underscore why it is worthy of defeat.

Measure R should be rejected by Orange County voters, not because it confiscates an additional half penny for every dollar they spend (about $52 a year for every man, woman and child in the county). Rather, it should go down because it assumes that the current government apparatus with its profusion of public services is so essential to the people’s quality of life that it deserves preservation regardless of its cost.

This is, of course, the very same mentality that navigated the county straight into Judge John E. Ryan’s Bankruptcy Court last Dec. 6.

Rather than acknowledge the county’s financial train wreck as the clarion call for the fundamental reform of county government and public service financing, Measure R proponents are pressing doomsday messages along two beachheads. Without the half-cent sales tax boost, they warn, investors holding $430 million in county bonds could be left standing at the rail platform with worthless paper. That would trash Orange County’s credit rating and annul its ability to borrow money at reasonable interest rates in the future.

Second, Measure R proponents hold up an imperiled future for the county’s schools and children as the price to pay for rejecting the tax increase. Class sizes will swell and learning resources will dwindle.

Both arguments are emotional political bait more than they are certain outcomes.

By rejecting Measure R, county taxpayers can send several trenchant messages to the county and Sacramento:

* Investing is risky by definition. Public agencies are no more entitled to full pay-back for lousy investment practices than the private investor.

* It’s time to dismantle the state’s Byzantine school financing laws. State ADA (average daily attendance) money should be sent directly to the school district instead of the county general fund. Defeating Measure R creates the leverage to wrest control of local schools from Sacramento’s meddling hand.

* County and city officials should stop bowing to powerful unions and interest groups by giving short shrift to serious proposals for the privatization of county services and assets.

* Use untethered monies from Measure M (the last sales tax increase of four years ago) and proceeds from bankruptcy-related lawsuits for bond insurance and repayment sources for new “recovery” bonds.

To defeat Measure R is to slay the stuffy presumption that the people are willing to shoulder creeping taxation to preserve the far-reaching role of government in their lives. It’s a message Washington received last Nov. 8. On June 27, it should be delivered here as well.