Insects Helped Push Tax Increase

In Seal Beach, residents voted overwhelmingly in 2001 against paying an extra 96 cents a month -- the cost of a soda at McDonald’s -- to have their streets swept every week instead of twice a month. City officials sold it as a boon to catching more urban runoff before it polluted oceans and beaches, but 61% of voters said no thanks.

In Ventura, 62% of property owners said no last year to paying an extra $10 annually for a new street-lighting tax, which the city said was needed to offset higher electricity costs.

So how in the world did the Orange County Vector Control District, hardly a household name, persuade property owners to cough up as much as an extra $5.42 a year?

Simple: The district touted the twin threats of fire ants and mosquitoes bearing the West Nile virus.

With the final ballot counted last week, you’d figure the vector people would be in party mode. Instead, humility was the watchword Tuesday from district manager Gerard Goedhart, a veteran of Orange County municipal government who knows there’s no such thing as a slam-dunk tax increase in these parts.

“By nature, people are a little skeptical of giving more money for programs that they don’t understand,” he says. “The average price of a house in Orange County is $523,000, so this was a very minor part of the tax bill, but you still have to justify it.”

He wouldn’t buy my suggestion that Orange County taxpayers are reflexive penny-pinchers. “They will approve items they think is in their best interest,” he says, pointing to the massive Measure M transportation initiative of the early 1990s that is still cranking out projects.

I give Goedhart every chance to proclaim himself a marketing genius, but he won’t bite. “It’s a quality-of-life issue,” he says. “It’s an economic issue for the county. [The ants] can attack kids, and there’s a lot of problems associated with them, but generally it’s a quality-of-life issue. You’ve got a home worth $523,000, and these red ants, when they get established, can overrun a community.”

Reed Royalty doesn’t fear fire ants nearly as much as government, and his Orange County Taxpayer Assn. would have opposed even putting the proposed fee increase on the ballot, he says, if vector officials hadn’t agreed to let private pest-control companies compete for some of the work.

Royalty, the association president, says the group didn’t take a position on the need for the increase but didn’t campaign against it. “They at least perform a service that is useful and people understand what it is,” he says of vector control, quickly adding that he’d never say that about every department in state or local government.

While it wouldn’t have surprised me if homeowners had simply tossed the vector ballot (the proposal was exclusively voted on by mail) into the trash, Royalty says taxpayers will pony up if the cause is right. He noted his group supported Measure M, even though it carried a half-cent sales tax increase, because it met the group’s criteria for worthiness: it was fair, understandable, cost-effective and good for business.

Those criteria, he says, are more important than the size of a proposed tax. Of the vector district proposal, Royalty says, “It’s not a big deal. It’s a little fee, and people probably don’t mind paying it, but that’s how government works -- they nibble you to death by ducks.”

Goedhart understands that.

“We just can’t take property owners or taxpayers for granted,” he says. “As long as they see what the money is going for and how it will benefit them, they’ll support it.”

Tell that to officials in Seal Beach and Ventura, who now know that mosquitoes and ants pack more wallop than street lights and runoff.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana. parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.