Council Rushes Five Tax Hikes

In one session on June 8, 2006 – two days after the June 6 election that includes two spending measures – the Oakland city council is scheduled to raise your parcel taxes on:

• Measure M
• Measure N
• Measure Q
• Measure Y
• wildfire assessment for residents in the hills
• and an entire roster of fees

Most of the parcel tax laws allow for an optional inflation increase. With this city council, the increases are essentially automatic.

What justifies, for example, an increase in the Measure Y parcel tax? Councilmembers insisted it would add 63 police to a guaranteed base of 739 officers, for a total of 802. Instead of getting even one officer, we have several dozen fewer officers than when the city council wrote Measure Y two years ago. We are more than 100 officers below what the City promised. With the police department in crisis, we will not reach 802 police for years to come.

So it is no surprise that Measure Y tax collections to date, which began Jan. 1, 2005, have not been spent; the unspent funds are being carried over to the next budget year. We paid the money, yet while the fiscal year passed we suffered a rising number of armed robberies, disruptions from "boom cars" and other nuisances, car thefts, and open drug dealing. The question again is, how does a councilmember justify an increase of the Measure Y tax?

Or consider Measure Q. The council convinced voters to double this assessment, allegedly for the libraries, in 2004. However, when the council wrote the 2005-06 budget, it cut four library positions from the general fund – using new parcel tax proceeds not to ensure service but to make general fund money available for other, non-library uses. What justifies a Measure Q "inflation" increase after such looting?

An "inflation" adjustment would be money required to maintain service as costs rise. When the City does not come close to providing the service, the idea of an inflation adjustment for non-existent costs is nonsense.

In fact, the revenue from these parcel taxes only frees up general fund and other money, which the council doles out to favored developers and ineffectual little programs. Even when the councilmembers have an $8.5 million surplus in the general fund, they vote to raise parcel taxes – because their greed for political pork is insatiable.

For the current mail-in vote on the LLAD tax, the council has written in the same power to raise the assessment every year. There is no sunset clause. This is another reason why we should vote NO on the LLAD tax increase.

One Concession Given, Rest of Taxes Pushed Through

According to a newspaper report, the council pushed through all the parcel tax and fee increases described above, with one tiny exception. The council decided against "increasing by 2 percent the taxes levied by Measure Y – the amount equivalent to the increase in the cost of living in the Bay Area – because the fund has a surplus." (Oakland Tribune, June 9, 2006)

The council thus felt 2 percent of its rightful shame. Since we began paying the Measure Y taxes, we have fewer police than were budgeted when the measure was proposed, namely, 739 police. Furthermore, the ordinance was sold with insistent commitments by councilmembers that the tax would not be collected when the City could not start from 739 officers. That was the floor to which Measure Y would add 63 more police. Measure Y tax money is being used while equivalent general funds are freed up for who knows what. The council should simply have not levied the parcel tax this coming fiscal year.

At the same session, the council also refused to set aside money from the budget surplus for the Landscape and Lighting Assessment District. Instead, the council is campaigning hard (and unethically) for a mail-in vote that would raise the LLAD tax and make annual hikes permanent. Once again, the council showed that parcel taxes have nothing to do with their alleged purpose of public safety or basic infrastructure. Parcel tax revenues merely give councilmembers general fund money to play with. In this case, in the words of the Tribune, "each of the eight council members will get $250,000 to spend on whatever project tickles their fancy – as long as the rest of the council approves." As for the 400,000 other residents of Oakland and their basic needs, forget it.