The city of San Diego and the county dodged a bullet Thursday in the leadup to the deadline to put statewide initiatives on the ballot. As reported by Politico, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association had qualified an initiative for the ballot that would have ensured tax increases for special purposes needed two-thirds of the vote.
That includes initiatives. Not only that, it would have retroactively thrown out any tax increases for special purposes that didn’t get two-thirds voter support.
Background: It has been law for decades in California that if a government puts a tax increase on the ballot for a special purpose – say a new stadium, or convention center – voters must approve it with two-thirds support.
But in 2017, the California Supreme Court ruled citizens initiatives don’t fall under that part of the California Constitution. That created a new and now popular path for groups wanting to increase local taxes without the burden of trying to persuade more than two-thirds of voters to support them: they ran signature-gathering campaigns and put them on the ballot.
The initiative to kill that: However, as Politico chronicled, several developers that helped fund the measure to close this loophole were most concerned about the so-called mansion tax in Los Angeles. In marathon negotiations this week, labor unions, business groups, legislative leaders and others agreed to pull the initiative after Los Angeles leaders agreed to make changes to the mansion tax that would exclude the sale of big apartment buildings.
The deal was done but Howard Jarvis leaders weren’t on board and still wanted the initiative to go forward. They made a last-minute compromise: It would go forward but without the language that would throw out tax increases already passed. It would not be retroactive.
That spared the city of San Diego from having to stop collecting its hotel room tax from Measure C in 2020 and spares the new countywide sales tax initiative going on the November ballot.
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