Irvine Property Owners Approve New District Fees to Fund Schools

Irvine property owners voted to charge themselves an estimated $3.2 million a year to help the cash-strapped Irvine Unified School District, but administrators aren’t celebrating their first victory in five tries at the ballot box just yet.

With the votes barely counted Wednesday, district officials were bracing for legal challenges by the city’s anti-tax constituency, which contends that assessing property owners for the upkeep of school district recreational facilities is in effect a tax that should have been put to all city voters.

The measure to create the assessment district won with nearly 64% approval. Most homeowners will pay about $48 a year, starting this summer. The school district plans to include those funds in its 2003-04 budget. And funds now used for playgrounds and other facilities can be freed for use in the classroom, district officials said.

Of the 38,000 ballots mailed to property owners in the Irvine Unified district, 15,000 were cast. Property owners’ ballots were weighted according to their parcels’ assessed value. The Irvine Co. and its properties, for example, represent 23% of the eligible votes. Company officials said Tuesday that it supported the assessment district.

A final tabulation was expected by early next week, district officials said.

Irvine Unified’s four previous fund-raising efforts were school bond measures that went down by narrow margins. Most of the 24,350-student district’s financial problems are due to an antiquated state system that funds the district based on tax rolls from decades ago, when the city consisted of fields rather than today’s high-value homes.

“If California funded its schools [properly], we wouldn’t be talking about measures like these,” District Supt. Dean Waldfogel said.

State law allows public agencies to create such districts to impose fees if they can prove property owners receive extra benefit from a facility such as a playground, park or ball field. Such measures, which require a simple majority, have passed in several California cities and two school districts.

The money generated through Irvine’s new fee will help offset proposed state budget cuts that could slash the district’s roughly $160-million budget by $7.5 million next year.

At a school board meeting Wednesday, several speakers mentioned that they would try to pursue legal action if the fee passed. Jon Coupal, president of the anti-tax Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., said that at a minimum his organization would provide advice.