California Voters FIRST Act will get California on the Right Track
Among the many measures that will appear on this November’s ballot, one of the most important is the California Voters FIRST Act. On Election Day, Californians will have the opportunity to send a message to their elected officials and to make sure their votes count in passing this important redistricting reform measure.
Year after year, partisan gridlock prevents our state lawmakers from effectively addressing the issues Californian’s care about most, including the state budget, health care, education, the economy, the impending water crisis, and the environment. Contributing to this ongoing problem is the fact that Legislators are allowed to draw their own district lines to guarantee their reelection. As a result, our lawmakers are simply not accountable to voters. In fact, even as legislative approval ratings are at historic lows, nearly 99% of incumbent legislators are reelected every year.
The California Voters FIRST Act will end the conflict of interest that exists in our current redistricting system and help put voters back in control and make lawmakers accountable to their constituents. The initiative will change the way legislative districts are drawn by creating a 14-member independent redistricting commission, including five Republicans, five Democrats and four members not affiliated with either major party. And, unlike the current process, the California Voters FIRST Act will ensure that the redistricting process is open, transparent, and protects the Voting Rights Act.
A Split Property Tax Roll is a Bad Idea
Not surprisingly, considering the size of the projected state budget deficit, some are calling for tax increases that are unique or rarely heard: A tax on beer, on iTunes and movie downloads, even on strip clubs. Then there is the old standby—raise business property taxes; Peter Schrag called for an increase of business property taxes in his column yesterday in the Sacramento Bee.
This effort is commonly called the “split roll” because the idea is to split the property tax roll placing residential properties in one category and business properties in another while increasing the tax rate or assessment requirements that will tax business properties more heavily.
Even when Proposition 13 was on the ballot in 1978 an alternative was offered to the voters to treat business property differently from residential property. That measure went down to defeat. Since then a number of efforts to create a split roll have gathered signatures. The one to reach the ballot was defeated.
A split roll has not been passed for very good reasons. Those reasons have not changed even with the shadow of a large budget deficit hanging over the state. In fact, considering that the budget deficit is the result of a sour California economy there are even more sound reasons to reject the idea of a split roll.
Back to the future? Not so fast..
Joel Fox wrote an interesting piece yesterday about returning to the budget approval process that was in place from 1933-1962. Oh, if life and budget making were so simple…
The so called current services budget format simply tells us what the Governor thinks it will cost Californians to pay for our collective statutory and constitutional spending requirements. In the post-WWII period, life was neat and simple and so was the current services format. The state’s obligations were small with a significant portion of the general fund expenditures going to infrastructure.
Today, current services budgeting has a whole new meaning. It is filled with entitlements, caseloads, judicial requirements and pesty lobbyists. If we could find a way to measure the value of a dollar spent rather than the simple measurement of the growth in spending, some progress toward budget reform could be made.