While the GOP won the House and key state posts in the rest of the union last Tuesday, California saw its own Tea Party takeover of sorts—albeit one with a Left Coast bent.
Democrats swept the statewide offices, with Jerry Brown handily defeating Republican Meg Whitman and Gavin Newsom, a “liberal San Francisco Democrat” (that’s “Satan” to Central Valleyites) winning a tight race against sitting Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, a moderate Republican who made a name for himself by voting against his party—twice—to break the budget impasse.
Voters also supported Proposition 25, which will allow legislators to pass a budget with a simple majority. The new law goes a considerable way toward weakening the Republican minority’s grip on the state’s budget process. It could almost be read as a vote of confidence in the Democrats.
But—and here comes Tea time—voters also said no to new taxes and took away some key tools lawmakers have traditionally used to balance the state’s spending plan. They said no to repealing corporate tax breaks (Proposition 24) and imposed a supermajority vote to pass new fees and taxes (Proposition 26). They also banned the state from borrowing money from local governments to fix budget gaps (Proposition 22), and they defeated Proposition 21, the $18 vehicle fee to pay for state parks.
Additionally, voters flashed their environmental bona fides by shooting down Proposition 23, the attempt to suspend California’s landmark anti-global warming legislation, and showed the limits of their famed tolerance by voting against Proposition 19, which would have legalized pot.
Former Santa Cruz Assemblyman John Laird says voters sent mixed messages to Sacramento, some of which are positive and some simply confusing—or, perhaps, confused.
“I felt very good about the overwhelming defeat of Prop. 23 and the strong passage of Prop 25,” Laird says. “Voters said, ‘Even in the worst economic times we stand by our environmental concerns,’ and they finally felt that gridlock is unacceptable and it was time to include California with the other 47 states that have majority rule.
“But they sent a slightly contradictory message because they passed 26 and defeated 24, which said, ‘We’ll take away some of the tools for some of the ways you can do this [pass a budget].’”
Is it a sign of schizophrenia?
“Nope,” says Santa Cruz County Tax Collector Fred Keeley, also a former state assemblyman. The Nov. 2 vote wasn’t so much about taxing less as it was about legislating more, Keeley says.
“That doesn’t mean I agree, but I think there was a coherence to what voters did,” he says. “They said, ‘We want tight fiscal controls: yes on two-thirds vote for fees, no on [the vehicle license fee] increase.’ They also said: ‘We want the legislature and governor to do their jobs—majority vote budget, move ahead with greenhouse gas reductions, no to legalizing pot.’ Overall, I think there is a rational reasoning in the proposition outcomes. Virtually none of them were close. Voters seem to want to not see much more spending, a clean environment and for the electeds to do their jobs.”
Parks And Wreck
How serious are voters about no new taxes? Consider the outcome of Proposition 21, which had its origins as a solution proposed by Laird in 2008 to fix chronic shortages in parks funding. In 2009, when Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed closing 80 percent of the state’s parks to save money, an outcry went up.
“Look what happened when the governor tried to close parks—voters came unhinged,” Keeley says. Schwarzenegger made most of the cuts elsewhere.
And yet voters rejected Prop. 21, which would have provided funding for state parks by tacking an additional $18 onto vehicle registration fees paid by California motorists.
Pundits and analysts see a couple of explanations for this vote.
“They didn’t say, ‘We’re not going to pay for parks’—that’s not what they said,” Keeley says. “They said, ‘This is not the time to ask us to start micromanaging the budget.’”
UC-Santa Cruz Professor of Politics Daniel Wirls says the vote follows the national trend: rejection of anything seen as a tax increase. It’s also in line with another love of Californians: their cars.
“You attach anything to people’s cars and they get very testy about it—as much as people love furry little animals, they don’t want to pay a tax on it,” Wirls says.
Park closures may happen in 2011, parks officials said late last week, also telling reporters that they’ll take a look at higher entrance fees and other funding options.
“I don’t know what the next step is for state parks,” says Laird. The vehicle license fee for parks polled statewide at 73 percent in 2008, but could not be enacted because of the state’s two-thirds budget requirement, which is why it was put on the November ballot. Now it’s back to the drawing board.
“I worked with a bunch of people and we looked at a lot of different alternatives while I was in Sacramento,” Laird says. “Now it’s going back and pulling out those alternatives to see if one will work. I’m really disappointed, although it carried by two to one in Santa Cruz County.”
Statewide, voters rejected Prop. 21 by 58 percent to 42 percent, but local voters went against the tide, supporting it 67-33. Similarly, Californians as a whole signaled their preference for the two-thirds vote requirement for taxes and fees (Prop. 26) by voting 53-47, but Santa Cruzans defeated it 63-37.
Santa Cruzans were less enthusiastic than other Californians about repealing $2 billion in corporate tax breaks (local support for Prop. 24 was 54 percent, compared to statewide support at 59 percent). They were also more moderate about prohibiting state lawmakers from taking local funds to balance the budget (Prop. 22 garnered 56 percent locally and 61 percent statewide).
“People in Santa Cruz County have a different feeling about trying to solve problems,” Laird says. “They stepped up.”
This may also explain why, in the midst of a national rejection of new taxes, Santa Cruz said yes to Measure H, which will increase the city’s utility users tax by 1.5 percent to help fund police and public safety.
For Laird, Santa Cruz County’s behavior at the ballot box is an encouraging sign in a day that brought lots of troubling news.
“Everybody says the red tidal wave stopped at the Sierras,” he says. “I’m beginning to wonder if it stopped at the coastal range.”
