The Crushing Blow of Howard Jarvis

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The man who got us into this mess

By Greg Katz

Margaret Todd is L.A. County’s top librarian, but in 1978 she was nearly done in by Howard Jarvis and his Proposition 13. Not that the tax-cut monomaniac would have cared, of course. Asked what Prop. 13 would do to libraries during a televised debate three decades ago, Jarvis underscored his broad disdain for libraries and public schools when he guessed that “63 percent of the graduates are illiterate, anyway,” and would have no use for books.

Todd clung to her job and fought for the library system’s survival during one of the darkest times for public institutions in California history. “I was fourth on the layoff list for four years,” says Todd, who was 23 and working at the county library’s La Mirada branch at the time. “It froze everything. We didn’t buy books for a number of years. We did not hire anybody, and it was very, very difficult.”

The way the measure insinuated itself into the routines of everyday life surprised many of its supporters, who arrived at the La Mirada library to find it with neither recent encyclopedias nor bestsellers. “What we found over and over again, people would come in and say, ‘We needed to control our property tax, but we never meant it to affect the libraries,’” recalls Todd. “That was the hardest thing for the communities, because when they voted for Prop. 13, their property taxes were out of control, and they needed to do something to protect their homes. But they never intended that local services be devastated, and that’s what Prop. 13 did.”

Proposition 13 celebrates its 30th birthday this year. Revolting against out-of-control property taxes that outpaced growth in wages, 65 percent of California voters passed the anti-government measure and state constitutional amendment on June 6, 1978. It not only rolled back property taxes, but forced residents to rethink, virtually overnight, the role of government. A generation ago, the “forced-out-of-home-by-property tax” story had become a staple of California newspapers, and many considered the measure badly needed tax relief. And relief they got: Prop. 13 cut property taxes – the locally-controlled revenue source that city and county governments, school districts, and special districts had relied on for their funding since the early 20th century – to 1 percent of a property’s assessed value, reducing local governments’ property tax revenues by 57 percent at the time. Properties could only be reassessed after a sale instead of every year. To punish politicians, it also stipulated that taxes could only be increased by a two-thirds majority in the state legislature.

Controversial from the start, the measure was denounced by major newspapers and, in the early days, even politicians. The L.A. Times editorial board surmised that Prop. 13’s “passage would surely result in chaotic conditions in the cities and the schools.” Governor Jerry Brown declared its property tax relief “a temporary mirage that in a few months will blow up in everybody’s face.”

Prop. 13’s coauthor and public face was a 75-year-old businessman-turned-Republican organizer-turned-landlords’ lobbyist named Howard Jarvis, an oft-belligerent L.A. government gadfly, best known previously for his failed single-issue Los Angeles mayoral campaigns. (The single issue: Taxes.) In his ballot argument, Jarvis asserted that Prop. 13 would have no negative effect; he even went so far as to claim that school funding would be basically untouched by the amendment, which a state judge ruled to be “misleading and perhaps even false,” before striking the assertion from the ballot. It couldn’t have mattered less to Jarvis what happened to education in California; during his 1977 mayoral run, he declared, “What we’re really doing in the public school systems is nothing short of manufacturing people for the welfare rolls.” Asked how he felt about the cancellations of summer school programs post-Prop. 13, Jarvis chided, “If they have a babysitting thing for nine months, I don’t think they need it for three months more.”

That Californians turned to Jarvis speaks to their desperation. By 1978, astronomical tax bills had whipped the anti-government fervor into a force that could no longer be denied. Previous attempts to knock down property taxes had failed, including one pushed by Ronald Reagan.

In the 30 years that have elapsed since Prop. 13 became the rule of the land, L.A. County’s population has grown by 50 percent, adding plenty of residents who can’t plunk down $35 for the new Harry Potter, but its county libraries haven’t even been close to keeping pace. “Until the last, maybe, five years, the newest libraries I had were built prior to Prop. 13,” Todd says. “We were almost 30 years without any capacity to build anything. That really shows in my libraries. If you go to Lennox, which is my oldest, from the late ’40s, [it’s a] tiny, tiny library … huge population to serve. My Cesar Chavez Maywood Library, a postage stamp with a huge population now in Maywood. Even my communities like Rowland Heights and Hacienda Heights, where lots of construction has taken place since those buildings were built in the ’60s and ’70s, there’s been no capacity to really increase the size of community libraries to fill the need of the population.”

California has lived with the effects of Prop. 13 for a generation now. While the unmitigated anarchy that the Times predicted didn’t pan out – Brown’s state government, sitting on a fat budget surplus, bailed out the programs it mandated, which saved welfare but left libraries in the lurch – Prop. 13 created a new and often disturbing status quo in California:

By neutering local governments’ incomes, Jarvis’s amendment made beggars of city and county governments. When they need money to provide services their constituents demand, they must crawl to the state government on their knees – the political equivalent of calling a plumber in Sacramento to fix pipes in L.A.

California’s mostly embarrassing, 47th-in-the-nation public schools remain pitifully under-funded and understaffed, particularly in poorer districts that have lost their property tax revenues. (Meanwhile, in the richest communities, puny taxes on valuable properties flush schools with money, maintaining the educational inequities that have made the state infamous.)

Up against the wall, city governments court big-box retailers because they bring in sales tax, and snub affordable rental housing because it generates a piddling amount of property tax.

And, because assessments only happen when property is officially sold to a new owner, businesses exploit ownership loopholes to ensure they never get reassessed at higher rates, even when their property in fact changes hands.

CityBeat’s challenge to cowardly legislators: Fix Prop. 13

Yet, despite the obvious problems, many of California’s elected representatives are, at best, reluctant to discuss (or, at worst, silent) about Prop. 13, earning it the dubious distinction of the “third rail” of California politics. Attorney General Jerry Brown doesn’t return phone calls about it, having flip-flopped to supporting it after it passed. State Senator Gloria Negrete McLeod, who thinks Prop. 13 is a disaster, maintains that she won’t legislate to reform it. In 2003, when Berkshire Hathaway zillionaire Warren Buffett called for reforms from his perch in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first campaign, the tough-guy candidate ducked and covered, distancing himself from his volunteer financial adviser. The governor, who recently remarked that “you can’t find even 1 percent” of the state’s budget deficit in government waste, prefers to run up the state’s credit cards with bonds and license more pai gow tables for Morongo Indians, rather than reconsider the state constitutional amendment that lands students, affordable housing, special districts, and local governments at the state government’s fiscal mercy. Assemblymember Mike Feuer, one of L.A.’s representatives in Sacramento, tells CityBeat he is “open to looking at” reforms to the way Prop. 13 treats business properties, but offers no specifics.

With three decades’ hindsight and what has become a perennially disastrous state budget, California’s residents and elected officials must examine the Prop. 13 watershed and fix the torrent of problems unleashed by Jarvis a generation ago. While some homeowners would surely suffer if the measure was repealed, it’s proved a lucrative deal for businesses who can take advantage of it in ways impossible for homeowners. There’s no reason for Prop. 13 to remain taboo when it creates hardship and inequity.

http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail...rd_jarvis/6623/

[Jasman0717 9]

With three decades' hindsight and what has become a perennially disastrous state budget, California's residents and elected officials must examine the Prop. 13 watershed and fix the torrent of problems unleashed by Jarvis a generation ago.

I don't think we will see it any time soon