College Trustees’ Decision Fuels Tax Foes’ Campaign

Joel Fox may be a staunch tax foe, but when Los Angeles community college trustees foisted a new assessment on the owners of 1 million county properties last week without first seeking their approval, even he saw a silver lining.

That’s because Fox and other activists now plan to showcase the college district controversy as a prime example of government taxing run amok. In the coming months, the colleges’ levy promises to become a centerpiece of the activists’ campaign for a state constitutional amendment aimed at finally 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 Fox, president of the Los Angeles-based Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. “You can’t kill it. We’re going to talk about it over and over again.”

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

Though thousands of angry taxpayers demanding a public election were rebuffed when college district officials approved the tax Thursday, Fox and his allies came away with a potentially huge victory: the perfect symbol with which to advertise their cause.

In 1978, state voters passed Jarvis’ landmark Proposition 13 measure to limit property taxes, restrict increases in them and, supposedly, to require a two-thirds voter approval for a variety of other special taxes that might be levied at the local level.

In the 18 years since, however, local government agencies such as the college district increasingly have found ways to raise revenues without voter approval. And tax foes, feeling their original task left undone, hope the latest initiative will close those legal loopholes.

Jarvis’ disciples will be reaping another strategic advantage from the college trustees’ action: County officials confirmed Friday that 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.” Although campaign plans are still in flux, Fox said mention of the college tax controversy will probably show up in mailers and radio spots for the state ballot measure. His group, which traces its origins to the late Proposition 13 co-author Jarvis, expects to spend at least several hundred thousand dollars.

Apart from campaign advertising, tax foes said they also expect to be talking about the college tax constantly and using it as a rallying point among supporters. 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. Fox himself said, “This is going to be a big part of it. You saw the anger” people expressed at the college tax. “People are upset this went through without going to the voters.”

More than 1,000 property owners attended two college district hearings on the assessment, largely to protest the lack of an election. And in what Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs called the largest public response he’d 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. Instead, they stress that they complied with a 1972 state law, the Landscaping and Lighting Act, that 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 worth of improvements at the district’s nine campuses.

But a wide and bipartisan range of elected officials--including Los Angeles City Council members and state lawmakers--disagreed, accusing college district leaders of cynically trying to evade the spirit, if not the letter, of Proposition 13 by invoking an obscure law.

“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. As early as 1982, Fox said, the state Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed local governments to charge general purpose levies such as utility-user and hotel occupancy taxes without voter approval. The city of Los Angeles charges both.

Tax foes tried to remedy that by passing Proposition 62 in 1986, requiring majority voter approval of general tax increases. But in what Fox admitted was a mistake, the measure did not amend the state Constitution, so many charter cities such as Los Angeles maintained they were exempt. Then finally in 1992, the state Supreme Court held that so-called landscaping and lighting districts also were exempt from the voter approval requirements of Proposition 13, causing many public agencies such as the college district to rush to explore the new revenue-raising tools.

Now, 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 broaden the majority voter requirement for general tax increases to include all local government agencies.

Most significantly, 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.

Apart from the lack of an election, the thing that seemed to rile residents the most at the recent college tax hearings was the admission by district officials that many of the proposed projects were thrown together only 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 for scoreboards, another a $6.9-million equestrian complex, and City College has offered up a more than $50-million plan to buy land in a nearby neighborhood and develop a park there to solve complaints about blight and crime.

College district trustee Lindsay Conner, an opponent of the tax, predicted those and other projects would only “invite the scorn of a tax-wary public.”