City Parks Tax Heads for Ballot Despite Protests

Despite massive opposition, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday moved to place a $500-million assessment on November’s ballot to improve parks throughout the city.

That measure would join similar proposals by the school board, community college district and county on the same ballot with a statewide initiative that would require a two-thirds vote to impose such taxes in the future, rather than the simple majority needed now. Dubbed “L.A. For Kids” by its supporters, the city’s assessment would cost homeowners about $18 a year for two decades and would fund a host of yet-to-be-determined projects.

“The voters of the city of Los Angeles ought to be entitled to determine whether we can improve the park system,” Councilman Mike Feuer said before the 14-1 vote, in which Nate Holden was the only lawmaker opposed.

Together, the new taxes could cost people whose properties lie in all the overlapping districts more than $150 a year:

* Los Angeles Unified wants $75 per $100,000 in assessed valuation to build and renovate schools and buy computers for students. (The county’s median home sales price in May was $164,000, so a typical homeowner would pay $125.)

* The county hopes to collect $6 to $7 per family to buy land, improve the zoo and Hollywood Bowl and create a greenbelt along the Los Angeles River.

* The community colleges are requesting about $12 per household to improve dilapidated campuses.

Although unrelated, the group of taxes prompted unprecedented protest from residents, with hundreds of people storming public hearings at City Hall and the college board over the past month.

About 21,000 filed written opposition to the city’s tax proposal. Although that is only about 3.5% of the property owners--far fewer than the 50% required to kill the measure--longtime City Hall observers said they have never seen such an outpouring. Nearly 30,000 written protests swarmed the college district, which originally voted to impose the new fee without a vote of the people, but then decided under threat of recall to place the measure on the ballot.

Though they voted to support sending the measure to voters, council members Hal Bernson and Joel Wachs said they join Holden in opposing the parks tax, suggesting that the city could find money to improve parks in its $4-billion budget, and that any new fees should impact all park users, not just property owners.

“I am not prepared to circumvent the process, to impose a property tax without a two-thirds vote,” Holden told his colleagues. “My vote today will be no, and my vote in November will be no.”

Stung by criticism over mismanagement of previously approved bond measures, the council approved several amendments that would tighten oversight of how the parks money is used.

Even as lawmakers moved to put the parks tax in front of voters--a final vote on the specific language of the measure will come at month’s end--they also killed a proposal to place a public safety tax on the November ballot, saying they remain unsure about how much the proposed expansion of the Los Angeles Police Department will cost.

Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said holding off on the police tax should increase support for the parks measure.

Feuer, vice chairman of the council’s budget committee, said he does not rule out the need for a police tax in the future. For now, though, the pace of police hiring remains unclear: Mayor Richard Riordan proposed adding a net of 710 new officers over the coming year, but the council reduced that number to 450 for fear the city would not be able to pay the officers’ salaries in the long term.

Besides the amount of hiring, lawmakers disagree about how much it will cost to provide new facilities and equipment for the expanded department. Also in dispute is how much money can be squeezed from the budget and diverted to the LAPD.

The council Wednesday also placed a host of charter amendments on the ballot, including items that pave the way for elections by mail and allow the Department of Water and Power to compete with private utilities, in part by advertising outside the city.

Most of the changes are routine attempts to clean up the city’s 700-page governing blueprint by consolidating related rules and deleting outdated ones. Among the proposals are:

* Allowing DWP and the airport and harbor departments flexibility in the competitive bid process for bond financing.

* Exempting 165 top officials from Civil Service requirements to provide more discretion in hiring and firing.

* Deleting the requirement of in-person elections, so City Council could move to authorize mail-in votes.

* Streamlining rules for recall elections and strengthening requirements for sponsors of initiative, referendum and recall petitions.