Officials Vexed by 66.7% Tax Vote Rule

Stymied by the same daunting barrier, county library and Camarillo school officials said Wednesday that they don’t know if they can ever get the two-thirds voter support needed to pass tax levies to keep libraries open and renovate aging schools.

“I think it is a nearly impossible hurdle,” said chief county librarian Dixie Adeniran, who spent $2,600 herself in support of library initiatives that failed Tuesday.

After falling far short of the required 66.7% super-majority, the Ventura and Ojai Valley areas now face the closure of three small libraries in Meiners Oaks, Oak View and the Avenue area of west Ventura, Adeniran said.

The issue of saving library services countywide is expected to emerge again in March during races for the County Board of Supervisors and in a tax measure the Camarillo City Council may put on the spring ballot.

Tuesday’s defeat has already prompted discussion about whether the sprawling countywide library district--which serves 440,000 people--should remain intact or be divided among its seven member cities.

Acknowledging another lesson of the election, Pleasant Valley School District officials said Wednesday that they have no plans to put a $55-million bond measure back on the ballot next spring.

“We’re not going to do it right now,” said Dolores (Val) Rains, president of the board of trustees of the 7,000-student district in Camarillo. “We did everything we possibly could. We really worked. We thought we covered every base.”

But for the fourth time since 1991, the district failed to pass a bond sale that officials say is desperately needed to build three new schools and repair 14 existing ones, most of which are 30 years old or more.

Without the funds, officials said that within a year or two, they might be forced to take money budgeted for teachers and students to fix dilapidated classrooms.

“The last money I want to touch is anything that diminishes instruction in the schools, but I must give those children adequate, safe facilities in which to learn,” Rains said. “There are going to be some tremendously difficult decisions to make.”

About 41,000 voters, less than 33% of those registered, turned out Tuesday in the handful of local communities with off-year elections. And they generally showed their distrust of government and their traditional scorn for new taxes.

Ventura voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure that limits future contributions to candidates. And they transferred from the City Council to the electorate authority to approve urban development on farmlands in and around the city.

These results reflected Ventura County voters’ belief that elected officials are not getting the most out of each tax dollar, said Michael L. Saliba, president of the Ventura County Taxpayers Assn.

“I think the library taxes were defeated because most people feel that the funding for libraries should come out of local taxes that already exist,” Saliba said. “Local governments have to put libraries on the same priority list for spending as other popular programs.”

Before this week’s vote, leaders of the all-volunteer effort to restore library budgets had been confident that voters would support a service so important to their family-oriented communities.

Spending by the library district has been cut 40% by the state over three years, reducing library hours and raising the specter of seven libraries countywide closing when $1 million in stopgap county funding runs out on March 31.

But on Tuesday, only 53% of Ventura voters and 55% in the unincorporated Ojai Valley favored a proposed $35 annual parcel tax for libraries. In Ojai itself, 64% of voters favored the tax--about 60 votes short of two-thirds.

From those results, campaign participants said they learned lessons about organization and getting out the vote next time.

Volunteer Gregg Kravitz, who helped raise the Ventura campaign’s $23,000, said that in future library battles, “experience will be a benefit. Running more of a political campaign, walking precincts instead of a PR campaign would help, too.”

Supporters of the library measure said they were encouraged despite the defeats.

“I felt pretty good about it,” said Ventura Mayor Tom Buford, co-chair of the city’s library campaign. “It fell short only because we placed such an extraordinary two-thirds burden on property-tax measures.”

Since tax-slashing Proposition 13 was passed in 1978, a two-thirds majority of voters has been required to pass new property taxes.

There have been several legislative attempts to lower that threshold, most recently in 1994 when a proposed constitutional amendment would have required just 60% approval in school-bond elections. But that measure failed to escape the Legislature and was never submitted to voters.

That has made it difficult for school districts to gain approval for construction bonds and hard-to-pass taxes for special services such as libraries.

Still, tiny 8,000-resident Ojai almost reached the two-thirds requirement.

“Our library is a place where people meet to socialize, and no matter who you are you can go and read a book and get warm,” said Councilwoman Nina Shelley, who worked on the campaign.

Shelley favors putting the library measure back on the ballot in March but this time removing a clause that allowed the $35-per-parcel fee to increase as much as 6% a year.

Officials in Santa Paula, the only local city to successfully pass a library parcel tax, said they think Ojai could emulate their success of 1993, when voters approved a $25-per-parcel tax.

“Ojai is close-knit and community-minded, like Santa Paula,” said Daniel Robles, librarian for the Santa Paula district. But Ventura has many newly arrived residents that don’t yet identify strongly with their community, he said.

Several supporters of library taxes, including Buford and Kravitz, said they would be inclined to try another ballot measure soon.

“I’d like to sort of keep the momentum going,” Kravitz said.

Still, the effort would remain a long shot, although a handful of California jurisdictions--Goleta, Pasadena and South Pasadena included--have passed parcel taxes to support libraries.

Special assessment districts are also sometimes used to pay for basic community services. In such districts, property owners can be assessed a special fee if it can be shown that real estate directly benefits from the improvement.

Buford, however, said that library supporters thought an assessment district would be unsalable.

“The name ‘assessment district’ strikes fear in the hearts of elected officials because they are widely viewed as a means of escaping Proposition 13,” he said.

Regardless of whether new measures are placed on the spring ballot, library services will be a key issue in the spring campaign, said county supervisorial candidate Roger Campbell, a Fillmore councilman.

Campbell does not favor a parcel tax, preferring a resetting of county budget priorities. He said the county could make cuts in other departments, including environmental health, planning and the air pollution control district, to pay for library service.

“In those regulatory agencies, I think that there is an awful lot of waste,” Campbell said.

Supervisor John K. Flynn, who is up for reelection, dismissed the idea of funding libraries through a parcel tax because of the two-thirds requirement. Flynn said the county instead should establish partnerships with cities and school districts to fund and run libraries.

Supervisor Susan Lacey said she would back another parcel tax measure, since cities and taxpayers should pay more to support libraries.

With or without a spring library measure, the funding of libraries has already prompted debate.

Ventura Councilman-elect Jim Friedman, who voted for the library tax, said city leaders should consider pulling Ventura’s property tax dollars out of the county library system.

“We are obviously more concerned with our libraries than the county is because the county has other cities’ libraries to be concerned with.”

The last city to pull out of the county system was Thousand Oaks, in the early 1980s.

As county officials pondered library funding, Camarillo school administrators analyzed the damage done Tuesday to their plans to accommodate steady growth and fix old structures.

Because nearly 66% of voters backed the same $55-million bond measure in June, school officials were surprised when just 64.6% backed the measure this time--the first time support had dropped in four tries.

The measure again received strong backing in fast-growing east Camarillo, especially in Leisure Village, Mission Oaks and the Santa Rosa Valley.

“The areas that were low once again . . . was western and central Camarillo,” Associate Supt. Howard Hamilton said at a somber election debriefing Wednesday. “They are not seeing the need, they’re not feeling the pinch with the growth.”

Supt. Shirley Carpenter said the bond’s failure means program cuts could occur as early as next fall to pay for needed repairs.

“These things are going to have to get done,” she said. “These aren’t frills, they’re very real needs.”

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Kelley is a Times staff writer and Wahlgren is a correspondent. Also contributing was correspondent Nick Green.