A decade of trying to raise L.A.’s sales tax

The half-cent sales tax increase proposal on the March 5 ballot known as Proposition A has been around for a long time in many guises, sometimes as a county tax, sometimes a city tax. Threats and reasons offered by Los Angeles city officials have included, in essence, pass it or risk another riot; pass it or risk a terrorist attack; pass it to fight a (nonexistent) surge in crime; pass it to fund a new gang-prevention department. The only time it actually came before voters, they rejected it. In other instances, county and city officials refused to put it on the ballot in the first place.

There have been temporary statewide increases in the sales tax, and Los Angeles voters have willingly taxed themselves for transportation improvements and environmental cleanup.

One interpretation (mine) is that voters just don’t believe the pitches. It could be that they believe the real purpose for the increase is to pay for salary increases for police officers and other employees. The Times has come out against Proposition A. Los Angeles voters may well need to invest more in their city’s future, but they deserve to first be part of a longer, and franker, discussion about how the additional revenue is to be used. And such a discussion should not come on the eve of new contract negotiations for employee unions. Nor should it come on the eve of a major turnover in city government, with neither the departing nor the incoming officials being held to account for the imposition of the tax or the use to which the revenues are put (although in fairness to council President Herb Wesson Jr., who rushed to put the measure on the ballot, he at least has the gumption to stand behind his action and will be around to be blamed or credited for the outcome).

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Here is a brief history of the Los Angeles half-cent sales tax.

In November 2002, a few days after Gov. Gray Davis won re-election and Los Angeles County voters raised their own property taxes to shore up the trauma network, Sheriff Lee Baca called for a half-cent sales tax increase to protect the county against terrorism and to add more emergency hospital care. The county sales tax was to rise from 8.25% to 8.75%. The increase was to apply countywide, but most of the new revenue was to go to Baca’s department, which polices only about half the county.

At the time, Baca’s deputies were pushing for salary increases and backing up their demands with wildcat strikes.

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County supervisors rejected Baca’s request for a ballot measure, so he launched a signature campaign to get his tax on the ballot without their help. This time he wrote it so that some of the money would go to city police departments. Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn and the Police Commission quickly announced their support.

Baca’s petition drive failed, but by then Hahn and the City Council had become quite enthusiastic about the tax idea, so they went to the county supervisors and asked them to do for them what they earlier has refused to do for Baca. The L.A. city officials said the money would allow them to hire 1,600 more police officers, for a total of around 11,000, and to expand gang-intervention programs. New police and sheriff hires in the county and other cities would result in the net increase of 5,000 officers countywide.

This time the supervisors agreed to put the tax increase on the ballot and they dubbed it Measure A. It would need a two-thirds supermajority in the November 2004 state and county election to be adopted.

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Meanwhile, Antonio Villaraigosa, termed out of the state Assembly and defeated by Hahn in his 2001 bid to become mayor, had dropped his plans to run for the state Senate and instead was elected to the City Council. During his 2003 council campaign, he promised that he would serve out his term; but he instead quickly challenged Hahn for re-election and moved $500,000 from his state Senate campaign treasury into a new fund to back Baca’s sales tax. Of course, the fund was under his own control, not Baca’s, and as the sheriff and LAPD Chief William Bratton raised money and campaigned for Measure A, Villaraigosa ran a parallel sales tax campaign, featuring himself in TV commercials. Villaraigosa denied any connection between his Measure A commercials and his mayoral campaign.

The official Measure A campaign (not Villaraigosa’s) featured an image of a newspaper article – from Arkansas – and fake headlines that asserted crime in Los Angeles was at “an all-time high.” In fact, Los Angeles County was in the midst of a historic and precipitous drop in crime. The fear card backfired; voters defeated the sales tax increase in the November 2004 election.

On the same ballot, Los Angeles city voters adopted a bond measure called Proposition O to pay for storm water cleanup.

After the defeat of the countywide sales tax increase, Hahn almost immediately began lobbying the City Council to put a city-only half-cent sales tax hike for more police on the May 2005 ballot. City Council President Alex Padilla urged that the tax revenue not be restricted to police hiring, making it a “general tax” needing only a 50%-plus-one voter margin to be adopted, not the two-thirds needed for a police-only tax. But he also called for a separate “advisory vote” to make the revenue available only for police.

Villaraigosa’s usual ally, Councilman Martin Ludlow, called for the city sales tax vote to go forward -- in order to fund his proposed Department of Urban Affairs, which he said would pay for gang prevention and intervention.

Villaraigosa countered with his own plan to again try a countywide half-cent sales tax for more police on the 2006 county ballot. Baca and Bratton urged that voters just give them the tax, in whatever form, because more officers were desperately needed.

Meanwhile, crime in Los Angeles continued to plunge.

As the City Council debated whether to put the tax on the ballot, Bratton said the fatal police shooting of 13-year-old Devin Brown as he drove a car toward officers showed why a tax to pay for several hundred more additional officers was necessary. Without it, he said, the city risked rioting.

“We have seen over the last two days the outrage of a community that feels it is not being policed either appropriately in terms of numbers of officers or effectively in terms of the way that our officers feel they must police,” he said.

He added:

“At each incident we risk this city going up in flames once again, which has happened twice in recent history.”

The Hahn-versus-Villaraigosa mayoral campaign shifted into high gear, and its most contentious question became whose half-cent sales tax to put on which ballot. On the City Council, Villaraigosa led the charge against Hahn’s proposal. At first he denied that his stance had anything to do with the mayoral election. But in the final council debate, he changed his tune.

“A few of you have mentioned mayoral politics,” Villaraigosa said. “You’re right. It is about mayoral politics. It’s about four years of failed leadership in this city.”

The mayor’s sister, Councilwoman Janice Hahn, responded:

“Antonio, you can keep your crappy speeches for the candidate debates.”

The council voted not to put any sales tax increase on the ballot. Villaraigosa then defeated Hahn in the May 2005 mayoral runoff. The new mayor did not press forward with the half-cent sales tax measure that he previously said he wanted on the 2006 Los Angeles County ballot.

Baca again asked the Board of Supervisors to put a sales tax increase on the ballot, this time for November 2006, for only a quarter cent, and for the purpose of fighting gang crime. The supervisors said “no.”

Villaraigosa and the City Council, instead of seeking a sales tax increase, for the first time imposed fees on homeowners to pay the costs of collecting their trash (residences previously paid only for equipment but not the cost of hauling, which had been subsidized by the rest of the city). The new fees are now generally referred to as Villaraigosa’s “tripling” of trash fees.

Villaraigosa said the fee increase would help him to make good on his promise to hire an additional 1,000 LAPD officers.

“Every new dollar residents pay for trash pickup will be used to put more officers on the streets,” the mayor said in a news release. Critics later complained (and still complain) that some of the money pays for equipment and services that support the new officers rather than merely the salaries of new officers.

The fees were initially to be phased in over four years, but the increases were accelerated to be accomplished within a year and a half – at the same time the mayor and council approved a 10.25% pay increase for officers over three years.

Villaraigosa also began to work to put a half-cent sales tax on the 2008 countywide ballot on behalf of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority to raise money for transit projects. Voters adopted Measure R with just over the two-thirds vote needed. During the same election-heavy year, they approved construction bonds for K-12 schools and community colleges and adopted a measure that ratified a long-imposed utility tax, reduced the rate and extended it to cellphones.

But voters the same year rejected a parcel tax measure to fund anti-gang programs. Connie Rice of the Advancement Project had said before the election that pumping new money into the city’s ineffective anti-gang programs would have been like putting the cash in a pile and setting it on fire. “You might as well just have a bonfire,” she said at a City Hall meeting. But she later came to support the parcel tax.

In February 2009, as part of a budget agreement, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature approved a temporary statewide 1% sales tax increase. The governor called a special election for May of that year to ask voters to extend that increase for an additional year past its July 1, 2011, expiration date, but that measure was rejected. For a year and a half, because of Schwarzenegger’s one-cent state sales tax increase and the Measure R half-cent sales tax increase, the sales tax rate in Los Angeles County was 9.75%. It fell to 8.75% in mid-2011.

Beginning in 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown called for a new temporary half-cent increase in the state sales tax. He later lowered his request to a quarter cent and began to campaign for what became known as Proposition 30. Voters passed it in November 2012. The additional quarter cent brought the sales tax rate in Los Angeles to 9% on Jan. 1 of this year. If no new sales taxes are added, the rate will revert to 8.75% on Jan. 1, 2017.

In October 2012, Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson Jr. proposed a half-cent sales tax for the March 5, 2013, city ballot. Without it, he said, the city would have to cut deeply into basic services, including police protection. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said that without the increase, the city would lose 500 police officers – 300 from attrition plus 200 layoffs. Beck said the loss of officers would dramatically affect his ability to fight crime.

Villaraigosa said he would not support a tax increase unless the council adopted cost-cutting measures, including privatizing the city zoo and the Convention Center. The council at first did neither, but still voted to put the sales tax measure on the ballot. In December, the council voted to seek a private operator for the Convention Center, but did not commit itself to actually accepting a bid. The council has taken no such action on the zoo. It previously approved a bid process for city-owned parking garages but then rejected any sale.

On Jan. 7, 2013, Villaraigosa and Beck announced the continuation of a decade-long plunge in crime, including violent crime and gang crime. They also announced that the number of uniformed LAPD officers exceeded 10,000 for the first time in history, owing in part to the transfer of officers from the Department of General Services force to the LAPD. The figure represents a net increase of 800 officers during Villaraigosa’s tenure.

On Feb. 7, Villaraigosa announced his support for Proposition A, the half-cent sales tax increase.

If passed, the measure would make Los Angeles’ sales tax rate 9.5%. When the Proposition 30 tax increase expires in 2017, sales tax rates in Los Angeles would be 9.25%.

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