Prop. AA for Community College Funds Angers Anti-Tax Groups

With a host of made-for-media statewide initiatives on Tuesday’s ballot, little has been made of Proposition AA, a relatively obscure local measure that embodies the ongoing debate over raising taxes.

Proponents say Proposition AA, which seeks $205 million to improve landscaping and lighting at the nine campuses of the Los Angeles Community College District, is a frugal and fair use of the property tax assessment.

Anti-tax groups say the measure is the perfect example of how property owners are made to unfairly subsidize community services. Opponents have made the measure the centerpiece of their campaign for a statewide initiative that would guarantee the public’s right to vote on such levies.

Trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District board were threatened with recall after approving a property tax increase earlier this year. They subsequently agreed to put the tax to a vote.

Proposition AA would cost homeowners throughout the 882-square-mile college district about $1 a month. The owners of other types of property would be charged varying fees, from $9.36 per unit for apartments and condominiums, for example, to $123.12 per acre for mobile home parks.

Officials of the nation’s largest community college district say they need the new money because they have been spending their shrinking budgets on academic and student services, with little left over for maintaining school properties.

College district Chancellor Bill Segura said schools have been meeting the immediate needs of students at the expense of maintenance and physical improvements. “If somebody’s at the door, you feed them,” he said.

Among the planned improvements are a host of safety-related jobs, including new campus lighting at several poorly lit parking structures and walkways.

“Over 50% of our students are female. Many of them come at night. And many of them express fear,” said Gloria Romero, a college board trustee. “The safety issue is one that’s really important.”

Responding to criticisms of how tax money is distributed, Proposition AA supporters say property owners would see an immediate return on their investment. The $12 a Woodland Hills homeowner would pay, for example, would return to nearby Pierce College, not to a campus across town.

Led by the Los Angeles-based Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., opponents of the measure say it violates the spirit of Jarvis’ landmark property tax legislation, Proposition 13.

Proposition AA is a classic example of government trying to skirt Proposition 13, said Jarvis Executive Director Kris Vosburgh, who mocked the arguments of Proposition AA backers: “Oh, this isn’t a tax, this is an assessment. Oh, this isn’t an assessment, this is a fee.”

Under the 1972 Landscaping and Lighting Act, the college district did not need voter approval for the assessment. But when the trustees voted 4 to 3 in June to initiate the levy, anti-tax activists cried foul.

Then they rejoiced. The board vote was the precise reason, said the Jarvis group, to support their own Proposition 218, which would automatically require voter approval for such assessments.

After being threatened with recall, members of the district board agreed to put the issue on the ballot. They also trimmed its list of proposed projects, including a $6.9-million equestrian complex that critics called frivolous.

Such concessions came too late for anti-tax voters such as Opal Young of the Baldwin Hills Homeowners Coalition.

If the board had asked first, “I’d have considered it. Maybe,” Young said.