Pleading L.A.’s Case in Capitol

To find an elected Los Angeles official today, the best place to look is 400 miles away in Sacramento.

Mayor James K. Hahn and 12 members of the Los Angeles City Council will be prowling the Capitol, pleading with legislators to keep the safety of Los Angeles streets in mind as they struggle to solve California’s mammoth budget problems.

The meetings are expected to be friendly. Hahn said he planned to tout the city’s falling crime rate and emphasize that it would be difficult to keep as many police officers on the streets if the state cut any more money to local governments.

But Los Angeles officials acknowledge that it will take more than a lobbying field trip to persuade the Legislature to restore $1.3 billion in property tax money that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed taking from local coffers statewide. So they also are joining with counterparts across the state in a coordinated campaign to hold on to funds they say belong to local government.

Ripping a page from Schwarzenegger’s playbook, local officials plan to go door-to-door to gather signatures for an initiative on the November ballot that would amend California’s Constitution to prevent state officials from using local funds without voter approval.

On the political front, locals also have ratcheted up the rhetoric against politicians in Sacramento, hoping to put pressure on the Legislature and governor by raising the specter of dire cuts to local services.

“The very principle of home rule is at stake,” Hahn said recently, comparing state officials to a schoolyard bullies who say, “ ‘Gimme your lunch money.’ ”

“If local government can’t count on its local property tax as a source of revenue, we really don’t have home rule anymore,” the mayor said.

But as California moves toward the most serious confrontation between state and local government in more than a decade, Los Angeles and other cities and counties face a tough fight -- one they historically have been unable to win.

“Unfortunately, the way government works is cities will rip off special districts, then counties rip off cities. States rip off counties, and the federal government rips off states,” Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) said in an interview.

Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget would take $1.3 billion of local property taxes -- used by cities and counties to pay for everything from law enforcement to street repairs -- to help plug Sacramento’s enormous budget hole.

That would be on top of about $5 billion in property taxes that local governments have lost each year since the state shifted property tax revenues in the early 1990s.

Local officials maintain that the system is supposed to guarantee them a certain share of local property tax, which for most of the last century was controlled by local governments and used to pay for local services.

But in 1978, voters passed the landmark Proposition 13, giving control of local property taxes to Sacramento. And in the early 1990s, state officials confronted with a yawning budget gap decided to use some of those local property taxes to fund schools.

Local officials were outraged. They donned Colonial American garb and staged a mock Boston Tea Party outside the state Capitol. They also filed lawsuits, but the courts ruled in favor of the state. And though cities and counties won a measure of relief when Sacramento backed a new sales tax, they could not regain control.

This time, the governor has said the scale of the state’s looming deficit -- now pegged at $14 billion in the coming fiscal year -- calls for sacrifices from everyone, including students, doctors and sick children in addition to cities and counties.

“Everyone has to come in and help,” the governor said when he unveiled his budget earlier this month. “If it is the counties, if it is the cities, if it is the education community, if it is the prison system ... everyone has to come in and help.”

Law in State’s Favor

The Schwarzenegger administration can point to well-established law that gives Sacramento -- not local government -- control over how property taxes are spent.

But local officials say they have no choice but to fight because the state’s rapacious ways are threatening to devastate police and fire departments and, in some cases, threaten cities’ very existence.

Los Angeles leaders project that the city stands to lose $50 million a year if the latest proposal is approved. With the city already facing a $200-million shortfall next year, officials are drawing up plans for layoffs.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the county stood to lose $289 million a year.

“Some of the impacts may not seem dramatic at first, but in the end they are very profound,” said Megan Taylor, communications director for the California League of Cities.

“You’re accustomed to taking your kids to a local park,” Taylor added. “And then, one day, you realize that the trash hasn’t been picked up. The next time, there is graffiti. Then you notice gang activity. And then, you may say you’re just not going to go to the park again.

“That’s the phenomenon that occurs when there’s this gradual process of the state taking local resources to balance the state budget.”

Over the last few months, local officials have mounted an increasingly strident campaign to rally public support for the idea that legislators would do grievous harm to public safety and vital services if they cut funding to local governments.

Yaroslavsky said he thought the message was getting out. He pointed to a recent statewide survey by the nonpartisan Field Poll showing that, by a 2-to-1 margin, Californians opposed taking money from local governments to balance the state budget.

Turning to the Initiative

But in case this message falls on deaf ears in the Legislature, officials are pinning their hopes on the initiative process. The California League of Cities and the California State Assn. of Counties are among the organizations working to put an initiative on the November ballot that would prevent state officials from taking local funds without voter approval.

At the same time, former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, a San Fernando Valley Democrat and emerging Schwarzenegger confidant, is planning a second initiative that would guarantee that local property taxes remained in local coffers in exchange for shifting other taxes, such as on sales, to state government.

Hahn, who backs the League of Cities initiative, said that having competing initiatives “presents a problem for us,” and that he hoped officials could work out a compromise.

Hahn said he thought voters would embrace the idea of keeping their tax dollars at home. But he also acknowledged that success was not assured.

Ballot initiatives are risky and expensive.

Officials estimate they need at least $10 million to mount a successful campaign.

They might get some help from allies in the Legislature. Sen. Tom Torlakson, an Antioch Democrat and former Contra Costa County supervisor who led the fight against Sacramento a decade ago, is working on a plan to get the Legislature to put the initiative on the ballot.

But it is unclear how many state leaders would join that fight.

Even some legislators who only recently served in local government themselves have expressed reservations about yet another initiative campaign.

“I’m committed to helping local government get what it needs from state government, but we need to be very careful about how much we rely on a ballot initiative,” said Los Angeles Democratic Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who served on the City Council before he was elected to the Legislature in 2002.

“I understand their point of view,” Burton said of local officials. But, he asked, “where do they want the money to come from? Everybody’s dying. If they take a look at the state budget, there’s billions of dollars in cuts against the elderly, blind, disabled.”