Schrag: Proposition 13 Turns 30: Compounding California’s Mess Something Awful

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

Joel Fox, the amiable former president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, used to complain vociferously about people who he thought blamed too many of California's problems on Proposition 13, the landmark property tax limitation measure that voters passed on June 6, 1978.

Fox, no fuming curmudgeon like Jarvis, who was the prime author of Proposition 13, was partially right. Proposition 13 did not cause every public service calamity of the last 30 years, much less the Northridge earthquake or the San Diego County wildfires.

But in the years since Proposition 13's passage, it has compounded California's governmental and fiscal mess something awful.

California's per pupil school spending, which was among the top 10 states in the 1960s, is now among the bottom 10. Proposition 13 alone is not responsible, but along with two major court decisions that preceded it, it helped decouple school funding from the local tax base and thus undercut voter incentives to fund education generously, as it had been in the generation after World War II. Our roads, once a national model, are an embarrassment.

More certainly it entangled state and local accountability to the point where it became increasingly hard even for diligent voters to understand who was responsible for what. When streets didn't get paved, was it City Hall that was wasting money or was it state government, which now controlled the local property tax and wasn't providing enough of it?

Worse, Proposition 13 reinforced the distrust of representative government that helped bring it on and vastly increased reliance on the initiative process and the sway of what became known as the initiative-industrial complex, the network of lawyers, consultants, petition circulators, pollsters, direct-mail operatives and the various outsiders attached to them.

It brought the gush of "auto-pilot" ballot-box budget measures that's both driven and restricted state spending and otherwise limited elected government. Here's a partial list:

• Proposition 4 in 1979, Paul Gann's state and local spending limits measure, later revised and Jarvis' Propositions 5, 6 and 7 in 1982 eliminating the inheritance tax and indexing the state income tax.