30 Years Of Proposition 13, And The Loss Of Local Control

And that evil thing is still there:

Proposition 13 celebrates its 30th birthday this year. Revolting against out-of-control property taxes that outpaced growth in wages, 65 percent of California voters passed the anti-government measure and state constitutional amendment on June 6, 1978. It not only rolled back property taxes, but forced residents to rethink, virtually overnight, the role of government.

...In the 30 years that have elapsed since Prop. 13 became the rule of the land, L.A. County’s population has grown by 50 percent, adding plenty of residents who can’t plunk down $35 for the new Harry Potter, but its county libraries haven’t even been close to keeping pace. “Until the last, maybe, five years, the newest libraries I had were built prior to Prop. 13,” Todd says. “We were almost 30 years without any capacity to build anything. That really shows in my libraries. If you go to Lennox, which is my oldest, from the late ’40s, [it’s a] tiny, tiny library … huge population to serve. My Cesar Chavez Maywood Library, a postage stamp with a huge population now in Maywood. Even my communities like Rowland Heights and Hacienda Heights, where lots of construction has taken place since those buildings were built in the ’60s and ’70s, there’s been no capacity to really increase the size of community libraries to fill the need of the population.”

...By neutering local governments’ incomes, Jarvis’s amendment made beggars of city and county governments. When they need money to provide services their constituents demand, they must crawl to the state government on their knees – the political equivalent of calling a plumber in Sacramento to fix pipes in L.A.

...Elisa Barbour, who recently authored a paper on Prop. 13’s aftermath for the Public Policy Institute of California, observes how the measure undid the old system. “It removed [the local control] that allowed the property tax to reflect, more than any other source, the community-wide taxing decisions of a given set of residents. The state was now responsible for allocating what had been the single largest local revenue source, yet local governments were still responsible for implementing programs locally.” Many theorists agree, she says, “You need to connect revenue raising ability with policymaking responsibility. The point I’m making is that, after Prop. 13, those waters got far muddier in relation to property taxes.”

...The outcome of these types of battles: While cities’ and counties’ inflation-adjusted total revenues are now about the same per capita as before Prop. 13, their general revenues – the funds they actually get to allocate – have shrunk to the tune of more than one-third for cities and more than one-half for counties, according to reports compiled by budget guru Michael Coleman for Californiacityfinance.com. Coleman says that, with so much money already earmarked when they get it, city governments “have less latitude to be able to govern.” The general revenues that cities still get, he says, go to emergency services at the expense of other programs. “It’s not police and fire that are likely to get hit the most,” Coleman explains. “It’s parks, libraries, and streets. You can tell a city is in [budget] trouble when there are potholes, park closures, and cut library hours.”

Edelman governed through these dramatic changes, and their damage has been far reaching, he says. “It has made our education system, made our local government system – we used to have the best in the United States – now ... we’re way down at the bottom. Now, people are going to Sacramento, fighting for their own little areas, and it takes away the flexibility of local government to meet the needs in their area as they see them. We had to go up to Sacramento to get money to keep the county afloat. Eventually, they took the [revenue] they gave us as a substitute [for property taxes], and used it for their own needs,” he says. “We lost control of doing the things that we should be able to do as elected officials. We should be able to tax, and if we tax too much, the voters can vote us out of office!”

Edelman says that, despite the best efforts of the supervisors, county programs evaporated. “All the county services were cut ... whether it be for schools, whether it be for libraries, whether it be for mental health, whether it be for police and fire, it set us back,” he says. “We still have to go hat-in-hand up to Sacramento, and we can’t really run the county with the same ability we ran it previously. We have to release people from prison earlier than we should, the sheriff doesn’t have enough money, we’re still trying to do the best job we can, but revenues are not there.”