Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsay Holbert speaks about homeless numbers on Friday, June 28, 2024. Homelessness declined 0.27% in Los Angeles County and 2.2% in the city of Los Angeles this year. (Photo by David Crain, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Firefighters were called to the Sepulveda Basin on Monday afternoon to respond to a brush fire at a homeless encampment where something exploded, injuring 10 firefighters, one of them seriously.
Officials said the cause of the fire and explosion was “under investigation.”
It’s a suspenseful story. It could turn out that the petulant squirrel has finally had enough. Or, wait, maybe the fire and explosion was caused by a homeless encampment in the Sepulveda Basin.
How much of California’s fire department budget goes to fighting fires in and around homeless encampments?
As is usual in California, government officials’ answer is, “Here’s why you have to pay higher taxes.”
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to put a new sales tax increase on the November ballot for voter approval. The measure is an initiative measure, meaning supporters collected signatures from Los Angeles County voters to put it on the ballot. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors technically had two options: either put it on the ballot now, or vote to require a report to be returned within 30 days and then put it on the ballot.
They voted to put it on the ballot now. If they had waited 30 days, the initiative may not have made it in time for the November election deadline, and the Board of Supervisors has been fighting to put this tax increase on the ballot since June 2023. They pushed for a bill that would allow Los Angeles County to raise sales tax more than allowed by state law, specifically to raise sales tax for homeless assistance programs. That was Assembly Bill 1679, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 10.
The problem for the supervisors is that while voters approved a 0.25% sales tax increase in 2017 to fund homelessness programs, it was only temporary, lasting for 10 years. The homelessness crisis has only worsened since taxpayers started pumping hundreds of millions of dollars of extra tax money into the county each year in sales taxes paid by people to buy the necessities of life.
Measure H was expected to collect about $355 million annually from Los Angeles County residents, but will instead collect $527 million in the 2022-23 fiscal year. Inflation is driving up both prices and sales taxes.
But inflation is nothing compared to the efforts of LA County officials and their allies in the tax-funded community of nonprofits and developers, groups that have devised a tax increase proposal that would double Measure H’s sales tax to 0.50% and eliminate an onerous expiration clause so the tax would last forever.
That’s why it’s an initiative. The state constitution requires a two-thirds voter majority to pass a “special” tax increase, meaning the money goes toward a specific purpose and not general government spending. But in 2017, the state Supreme Court suggested in California Cannabis Coalition v. City of Upland that the state constitution may not apply when a tax increase is put on the ballot by initiative, meaning a simple majority is enough to pass an “initiative” tax increase.
The Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act would have closed that loophole and restored the two-thirds vote, but last Thursday, the same state Supreme Court struck the measure from the ballot, preventing voters from passing it.
So, the measure is done. A simple majority vote on a new tax increase measure will once again raise the sales tax for Los Angeles County’s homeless assistance programs, on top of the 2% local sales tax the county already collects to fund the never-ending construction of the crime scene known as Metro.
Because revenue from the old or new version of the Measure H tax may not be used to pay for firefighting or for Metro’s homeless riders, Los Angeles County voters can expect further proposed tax increases for fire departments and transit agencies in the next election cycle.
Thanks to your elected officials and the California Supreme Court, taxes are only moving in one direction: up, and for an increasing number of residents, taxes are moving in the other direction: down.
Email her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley.