Salinas, county officials back ballot initiative

Salinas Californian

January 8, 2010

By Mike Hornick

A campaign to stop the state from taking or borrowing local tax revenues signed up some of its first volunteers Thursday on the steps of Salinas City Hall.

Dennis Donohue and Victor Gomez, mayors of Salinas and Hollister, respectively, joined about 25 officials from Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties, pledging their time to a signature-gathering drive aimed at putting a measure on the November statewide ballot.

They then signed the petition, which aims to keep legislators' hands off local gas tax, property tax and redevelopment revenues.

The campaign, Californians to Protect Local Taxpayers & Vital Services, held similar volunteer rallies statewide this week. The group needs 700,000 voter signatures to get the Local Taxpayer, Public Safety and Transportation Protection Act on the ballot.

But it plans to collect 1.1 million, said Deanna Sessums, Monterey Bay regional public affairs manager for the League of California Cities. Paid staff began circulating petitions in the final week of 2009 and have already gathered "tens of thousands" of signatures, Sessums said.

Salinas loses about $4 million annually to state takes and loans, according to city budget documents. Monterey County, its cities and special districts have no choice, Sessums said, but to loan the state $19.7 million in property tax income. The monies are used to balance California's budget.

Cities' advocates have tried similar measures before to little avail. Sessums, who's coordinating the campaign in the tri-county area, thinks this time will be different.

"This initiative closes the loopholes that have been opened up in the last few years by the Legislature," Sessums said. "When we passed Proposition 1A in 2004, we believed that it stopped the state from taking local revenues unless there was an emergency.

"In local government, we think of an emergency as being a tornado or a fire, we don't think of it as being the inability to come together across party lines to solve a budget problem. This stops [Sacramento] from borrowing under any circumstances."

Voters can expect to see the petitions being offered in front of some businesses and at various community events.

Carl Sedoryk, general manager of Monterey-Salinas Transit, said his agency has lost $13 million to state grabs. "We had to raise our fares to one of the highest base fares in the nation at $2.50 and eliminate nine positions," he said. Sedoryk worries that budget proposals to be unveiled today by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will siphon off the gas tax revenues that fund local transit services.

"We're pretty convinced that Friday's proposal will include a scheme to swap the current gas tax for one that will take the money from transportation and put it toward the state's general fund obligations," he said.

MST has enjoyed a boost from $7 million in federal stimulus funding, but with no new influx in the pipeline, cuts may be on the horizon. "If the economy does not improve and the state continues to divert gas tax monies, we will be forced to look at service reductions," Sedoryk said. "Those would result in the loss of jobs."

"These [state] raids come at a time when cities, counties and special districts are already reeling from a down economy and when local governments have been forced to make drastic cuts to police, fire, parks, libraries and health services," Donohue said. "We are asking voters to close these loopholes once and for all."

Gomez compared state legislators to 19th-century railroad barons who took, he said, "whatever's not nailed down."

"Voters have voted time and again to nail these funds down," he said.