California Serfdom

Are we back to the days of the landed gentry, or maybe the city-state kingdoms and the lowly serfs? Take your pick. Proposition 218, which gives a heavily weighted vote to big property owners on assessments and fees and the like, may have gotten us close.

That ballot measure, passed last November, requires local governments to win approval from property owners in order to continue special assessments, charges or fees for certain public services or to enact new ones.

The appeal of 218 was simple: Local governments, said proponents, were too wasteful and too lazy to tighten their finances and were billing property owners for services, like street lighting, that should be paid for through general funds.

Well, Proposition 218 was never that simple. If the following comes as a big surprise, then maybe it’s time to think about the benefits of repealing 218. The owner of a large tract can cast just one vote for a candidate for office, the person who will decide how tax monies are spent. Ah, but when it comes to special fees the same person’s vote wields far more authority than that of someone who owns less land. People who own no property get no vote at all.

Does this sound like a throwback to the days when power was based on land ownership? That’s not far off the mark.

Under Proposition 218, property owners in San Clemente could and did turn down a parks assessment. And a factory owner like Melkon Abadzhyan can cast his vote against a special assessment for street lighting near his property in an industrial area of Los Angeles. That leaves the city with the choice of turning off the lights, finding some other way to pay for them or returning, hat in hand, to ask the property owners to vote again.

Why did Abadzhyan have such authority? It’s because ballots were mailed to the owners of the four tracts that benefited from the street lights and Abadzhyan was the only one who bothered to vote. But here’s the distressing part. Abadzhyan would have lost if just one of the others with a bigger tract than his had voted for the street lighting charge.

In effect, Proposition 218 distorts votes. There will be situations in which a majority will support a fee, perhaps for park and playground maintenance, and lose out to a far smaller fraction that happens to own more land. This is the unequal power over the government’s right to impose assessments and fees that Proposition 218 has generated. From any angle, it’s wrong.