Earlier this year, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association turned in 1.3 million signatures and successfully qualified the Local Taxpayer Protection Act to Save Proposition 13 (LTPA) for the November ballot.
The LTPA will make it harder to raise local taxes in California. It’s desperately needed at a time when affordability is a top concern of state residents. Proposition 13, now part of the state constitution, limited annual increases in property taxes while a property is under the same ownership, and it cut the tax rate from a statewide average of 2.67% to 1%. In addition, Prop. 13 made it harder to raise other taxes. It required a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to pass state tax increases, and it required new or higher local taxes to go on the ballot for voter approval – with “special taxes” requiring a two-thirds vote.
That’s still in the state constitution, but the California courts have reinterpreted the plain language to allow some “special taxes” to pass with less than a two-thirds vote.
As a result, Californians are paying billions of dollars in new taxes that they should not have been required to pay. This began in 2017 with ambiguous language in the state Supreme Court’s decision in California Cannabis Coalition v. City of Upland. It suggested that if citizens put a measure on the ballot to raise taxes, the two-thirds vote requirement didn’t apply.
The “Upland” loophole now allows special interests to write their own tax increase, direct the money to themselves, collect signatures to place it on the ballot, and evade the two-thirds vote requirement to pass special taxes.
That stops after November.
The LTPA requires a two-thirds vote for special taxes, all of them, without the made-up “exception” for special interests that write their own tax increase on a petition.
In recent weeks, we were heavily pressured by special interest groups and elected officials, including the governor’s office, to pull the LTPA from the November ballot. Moreover, many of our supporters in the business community received even more intense pressure, with demands that they stop helping HJTA’s campaign to pass the Local Taxpayer Protection Act to Save Proposition 13.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association refused to pull the LTPA initiative off the ballot unless something of even greater benefit to taxpayers was offered.
Then, with just hours to go before the deadline to finalize the ballot, we won a tremendous victory for taxpayers. The governor’s office and the Legislature reversed their previous stance and offered us their full support for the two-thirds vote requirement to pass special taxes. They offered to pass a legislative constitutional amendment, ACA 22, that would close the “Upland” loophole once and for all.
But that wasn’t enough. We also insisted that the Legislature reverse its vote from 2023 that put a “poison pill” constitutional amendment, ACA 13, on the November ballot. ACA 13 would have required the Local Taxpayer Protection Act to meet an unusually high vote threshold to pass, potentially making it far more difficult to enact taxpayer protections through the initiative process, permanently.
The governor’s office and the Legislature agreed to our terms. On Thursday afternoon, ACA 21 was passed to remove the “poison pill” from the November ballot and clear the way for the LTPA to be approved by a majority of voters.
It was a remarkable turnaround. Just two years ago, the California Legislature sought to make it easier to raise taxes with Proposition 5, which the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association defeated at the ballot. On Thursday an overwhelming majority of the Legislature voted to make it harder to raise taxes and also erased a barrier to passing new taxpayer protection measures.
With the Legislature’s strong endorsement of the two-thirds vote requirement to pass all special taxes, and the removal of “poison pill” ACA 13 from the November ballot, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association has agreed to withdraw its original initiative from the ballot. Instead, voters will have the opportunity to pass the Local Taxpayer Protection Act as ACA 22, soon to have a proposition number for November.
The new Local Taxpayer Protection Act is exclusively focused on restoring the two-thirds vote requirement in Proposition 13, after courts have eroded its protections. A large coalition of supporters is growing by the hour.
We look forward to an energetic and successful campaign to pass the Local Taxpayer Protection Act to Save Proposition 13, now ACA 22. We invite all Californians to become members of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, a member-supported nonprofit organization, by joining online at hjta.org. We are proud to have achieved this victory and we will never stop fighting for taxpayers.
Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.