District’s Levy Fuels Push for Amendment

California’s anti-tax activists believe they have been handed a new rallying point for their cause: the action by Los Angeles community college trustees last week imposing an assessment on a million county properties without first seeking approval from owners of the properties.

The Los Angeles-based Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. plans to showcase the college district levy as a prime example of government taxing run amok--making it the centerpiece of a campaign for a state constitutional amendment aimed at locking in the public’s right to vote on virtually all local tax hikes.

“The college tax is going to be like the Frankenstein monster,” said Joel Fox, president of the anti-tax group. “You can’t kill it. We’re going to talk about it over and over again.”

The proposed constitutional amendment was approved Friday for the Nov. 5 ballot, but had been in the works long before the Los Angeles Community College District announced its assessment, which includes a $12-a-year levy on homeowners.

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The district’s action, taken Thursday, came over the protests of thousands of angry taxpayers demanding a public vote on the assessments, which they said violated the spirit of the state’s landmark Proposition 13.

That measure, co-authored by the late Howard Jarvis and adopted by the state’s voters in 1978, was designed to limit property taxes, restrict future increases and, supposedly, require a two-thirds public vote for a variety of other special taxes that might be levied at the local level.

In the 18 years since, local government agencies such as the college district increasingly have found ways to raise revenues without voter approval. So tax foes launched the current initiative drive to close those legal loopholes. The Jarvis’ disciples say the college trustees’ action will give them a strategic advantage--property tax bills containing the district’s first assessment will be mailed in mid-October, just weeks before the state election.

“It’s a campaign manager’s dream,” said Bill Reed of the county treasurer and tax collector’s office. “I’m sure those people who are not in favor of the community college assessment will see it and it will hit a nerve.”

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Although campaign plans are still in flux, Fox said his group expects to spend at least several hundred thousand dollars pushing the state ballot measure through mailers and radio spots. Los Angeles, California’s most populous county, has about 3.7 million registered voters, one-fourth of the state’s total.

“The college district is running our campaign for us,” Fox recalled an aide telling him last week.

More than 1,000 property owners attended two college district hearings on the assessment, largely to protest the lack of a vote. And in what Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs called the largest public response he has seen in 25 years of public service, the owners of 29,000 parcels filed written protests.

College district officials who favored the tax are making no apologies. They stress that they complied with a 1972 state law, the Landscaping and Lighting Act, which allows local governments to levy assessments for public improvements without going to voters.

“I don’t see how we can be punished for using a law that has existed for 24 years,” said Trustee Kenneth Washington, part of the 4-3 college board majority that favored the tax. It is supposed to pay for $205 million in improvements at the district’s nine campuses.

A wide and bipartisan range of elected officials--including Los Angeles City Council members and state lawmakers--opposed the assessment, accusing college district leaders of cynically evading the intent, if not the letter, of Proposition 13.

“The college district is trying to sugarcoat this property tax increase with words like ‘assessment district,’ but it is a tax, plain and simple,” said Assemblyman Bill Hoge (R-Pasadena). “The manner in which LACCD is proceeding is outrageous.”

But the college district’s tactic is hardly new. The state Supreme Court ruled more than two decades ago that local governments did not need voter approval to impose general purpose levies such as utility-user and hotel occupancy taxes.

Tax foes tried to remedy that in 1986 by passing Proposition 62, which required majority voter approval of general tax increases. The measure, however, did not amend the state Constitution, so many charter cities--including Los Angeles--maintained that they were exempt.

In addition, the state Supreme Court held in 1992 that so-called landscaping and lighting districts were not subject to the voter approval requirements of Proposition 13, prompting many public agencies such as the college district to explore such revenue-raising tools.

The Jarvis group’s new state initiative would restate Proposition 13’s original requirement of two-thirds voter approval for special taxes that go toward specific government programs. It also would extend to all local government agencies the majority voter requirement for general tax increases.

Most significant, perhaps, it would require majority approval among property owners for all new--and some existing--property assessments, including landscaping and lighting districts, starting July 1, 1997. Residents now can legally stop those only through a cumbersome protest process.

At the recent college tax hearings, residents seemed angered not only by the lack of a vote but by district officials’ admission that many of the proposed projects were thrown together to justify the tax proposal and had not been studied in detail, let alone approved. The money may not be used on instruction.

One proposed project involves $2 million worth of scoreboards, another a $6.9-million equestrian complex. And Los Angeles City College has offered a plan worth more than $50 million to buy land in a nearby neighborhood and develop a park to address complaints about blight and crime.