Farewell Glance at the ‘View Tax’

It all depends on your point of view.

To Port Hueneme City Manager Dick Velthoen and his City Council bosses, levying a special assessment on residents with ocean vistas back in 1991 looked like a dandy way to add a few bucks to the city’s threadbare purse.

To the residents targeted by the proposed assessment, it looked like they were being singled out to pay maintenance bills for a beach the whole world was welcome to use.

And so, as often happens when parties don’t see eye-to-eye, the notorious Port Hueneme “view tax” landed in the courts--where judge after judge saw things the residents’ way and ordered the city to look elsewhere for easy income.

Now the city has started paying back the $621,617 it collected from hundreds of property owners over a four-year period that ended in 1995. Including fees for the challengers’ attorneys and interest earned on all assessments collected, the bill will come to $1,215,885--plus the city’s own legal fees.

The big noise in a small city got national media attention as an example of how money-hungry government stood ready to tax just about anything.

City officials protested the “view tax” label, insisting that it had nothing to do with the view and wasn’t a tax at all but an assessment to help pay for beach maintenance, which they reasoned would mainly benefit those whose windows looked out at it.

But the courts disagreed. In a 1996 opinion, a Superior Court judge declared that assessing 40% of the cost of maintaining a 52-acre stretch of beach on the owners of some 1,250 properties was “grossly disproportionate to the benefit received by these homeowners.” The California Supreme Court declined to hear the city’s appeal.

So Port Hueneme ends up owing about twice the amount it collected. A long, lively dispute comes to an end at last. And in retrospect, the view tax doesn’t look like such a good idea after all.

Hindsight, it’s often said, is 20-20--and it’s tax free.