Vote no on the county’s half-cent sales tax measure
Trust is the heart of the matter, and we just don’t trust the details of the half-cent sales tax measure that county supervisors, on a 4-to-1 vote, placed on the June ballot. The county, which is facing a $120 million budget deficit this year and a $55 million deficit next year, was considering a quarter-cent sales tax that would have balanced the budget in two years.
While, in principle, we don’t like the idea of a sales tax to fund ongoing, regular county expenses, backers might have been able to make a case for supporting a quarter-cent sales tax.
But there’s no way to justify this greedy, half-cent money grab that many understandably suspect is an end-run around voters to fund the BART-to-San Jose extension.
The money it will raise, $163 million each year, is not tied to any specific project. Officials can spend it any way they want, because it’s all heading to the county’s general fund.
“You have to trust us,” said District One Supervisor Don Gage, who voted to put the measure on the ballot. “We’re putting that money in our general fund, and we will have the money to spend as we see fit.”
But trust is what we lack. With the VTA’s polling showing that its proposed sales tax measure to bail out the BART extension won’t meet the two-thirds threshold of voter approval required for passage, many folks suspect that if the county’s half-cent measure passes, the extra county money is headed the VTA’s way.
The county supervisors once helmed one of the most trusted municipal agencies in the region. With this half-cent measure, and the stench of a backroom BART extension deal in the air, that trust has been squandered.
Gage, the lone Republican on the board of supervisors, whose district stands to gain the least and suffer the most if the BART boondoggle becomes reality, was an obvious choice to vote no on this half-cent money grab. A no vote on this half-cent sales tax proposal should have been a no-brainer for Gage.
The fact that a no vote from Gage would have doomed this measure makes his support incomprehensible. The measure needed four of the five county supervisors to support it to be placed on the June ballot.
“There’s an underlying feeling out there that this proposal is a way to circumvent the two-thirds vote requirement,” Supervisor Blanca Alvarado said. “It becomes quite deceptive if we don’t tell it like it really is … and take our chances that voters will accept that more money is needed for transportation.”
Alvarado is right. Now it’s time for voters to tell the county that we don’t trust them with our hard-earned $163 million. Had they asked for what they needed, not more, had they been forthright, as Alvarado advised, about where the money will go, our recommendation might have been different. But they got greedy and squandered our trust.
We’ll say it now and several more times before the June election: Vote no on the county’s half-cent sales tax measure.
