Cigarette Tax Revenues Stalled in Bureaucracy

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI

Sept. 12, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Last November, California voters narrowly approved Proposition 10, which imposed a 50-cent tax on every pack of cigarettes sold, and earmarked the estimated $750 million that would be generated by those taxes annually for spending on early childhood development.

Ten months later, not a dime has apparently been spent on the promised new programs for children under 5, according to state officials.

Proposition 10 advocates say there is a good reason. Not only does each county have to appoint a commission made up of community activists, county bureaucrats and elected officials, but those commissions must submit plans to an appointed state panel that oversees the money. That state commission--whose executive director was only appointed in July--has yet to approve any plans that would allow counties to spend their money.

In Los Angeles, which is expecting $150 million from the tax, the 13-member commission said it would rather proceed deliberately than spend the money haphazardly--which, members add, would exacerbate some of the very problems they hope to fix.

A study released this summer by Los Angeles County’s Children’s Planning Council found that county agencies spend $3.8 billion annually on children but frequently duplicate one another’s work. The study urged new, unified programs such as those being considered by the Los Angeles Proposition 10 commission.

It will take longer to create something new than to add to existing bureaucracy, some say.

“The basic beauty of what we’re trying to do is make this a long-term improvement,” said Dr. Neil Kaufman, an L.A. commissioner and doctor and professor of public health and pediatrics at UCLA. “There are a lot of quick fixes we could make, but that’s not happening.”

Though they speak in lofty language about hoping to improve the lives of children and create a new battery of government programs, commissioners are aware of other pressures. A group of cigarette retailers is circulating petitions to repeal Proposition 10, which passed by a mere 80,000 votes out of more than 7 million cast.

“From our customers’ standpoint, it’s unfair that 25% of the population pays [hundreds of millions in taxes] for a program that serves everyone,” said Ned Roscoe, president of Cigarettes Cheaper!, who hopes to place the repeal on the March 2000 ballot.

Commissioners acknowledge that the repeal effort is speeding up their process.

“If they don’t spend that money soon,” said Supervisor Don Knabe, chairman of the commission, “they’re asking for trouble.”

Something Other Than Government as Usual

Proposition 10 was born of the idealism of one man: Rob Reiner, better known as a film director and for acting roles such as “Meathead” on TV’s “All in the Family” than for engineering public policy.

A longtime Hollywood activist, Reiner launched Proposition 10 after talking to a group of experts and discovering, to his dismay, that only 10% of all government money dedicated to children is spent on them during the years before they enroll in first grade.

Reiner campaigned furiously for the measure, which was opposed just as fiercely by tobacco interests. After it passed, the state’s 58 county governments scrambled to appoint their commissions by the Dec. 31, 1998, deadline laid out in the ballot measure.

The initiative made its network of commissions separate from existing government bodies. The law strictly details how the state commission, appointed by the governor and Legislature, can spend its roughly $140 million--5% on parental education and assistance, 3% on child care and development, 1% on administration and so on. It calls for regular audits of county commissions.

“The idea is that . . . this really isn’t government as usual,” said Jane Henderson, executive director of the state commission. “It’s really intended to get broad family and taxpayer participation that you really don’t get by going through the normal governmental processes.”

Neal Halfon, a professor of pediatrics at UCLA who coauthored a paper on how to spend Proposition 10 dollars, said the state and local commissions “should go about this in more than a categorical sense, rather than just partitioning an amount for the health people, an amount for the children’s services people. . . . “

That is also the tactic urged by the Los Angeles County Children’s Planning Council. Twenty-four county departments last year provided more than 200 programs for children and parents, a huge increase and splintering of that responsibility since 1985, when only 17 departments provided 90 programs, the planning council’s report found.

The net effect, said Jacquelyn McCroskey, a member of the council, is that families have no single place to go for help, and turf wars between departments lead to redundant programs and wasted money. For example, she said, the mental health department once had a program in which it would send 10 separate monitors to the same classroom to watch 10 mentally ill schoolchildren individually.

“What you’ve got here is a political system where it’s each department head going to the board [of supervisors, which allocates money] on behalf of their own department,” said McCroskey, a nonvoting member of the Proposition 10 commission.

Slicing Up the Proposition 10 Pie

Halfon and others recommend spending the money on a wide range of programs that do not fall under the county’s department system, such as parental education, literacy or “family resource centers,” a sort of one-stop-shopping community social service agency to assist new parents. Halfon pointed to the Hope Street program at the California Hospital Medical Center as a possible model.

There is a long list of other groups that want a piece of the Proposition 10 pie, however. More than 200 speakers packed one hearing at KCET’s Silver Lake studios this summer, suggesting possible ways to spend the money. The commission is preparing for a series of public outreach meetings next month throughout the county to gather more recommendations and ensure that all communities are heard.

“It’s a slow process, and even though they’re trying to push it along at a fast pace, it’s hard to include everyone in Los Angeles,” said Patricia Curry, a nonvoting member of the Proposition 10 commission who also chairs the county children’s commission. “But if the commission just goes out and makes decisions without involving the community, I think that’s a big mistake.”

But others, although encouraging the outreach, say the commission needs to spend its money faster.

“I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the county family in terms of needs that have to be met,” said Knabe, who is the sole member of the Board of Supervisors on the commission. “We can do all sorts of things through an existing network” of county agencies, he said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Southern California’s Kids

Projections for the numbers of children 4 and younger:

Los Angeles County

July 2000: 839,680

July 2010: 834,087

Imperial County

July 2000: 14,134

July 2010: 21,524

Orange County

July 2000: 242,957

240,715