No proposition during the last twenty years has affected Californians as much as Proposition 13. It was passed in 1978 during a recessionary period when inflation was high and property values were soaring. The soaring values were cause by an influx of emigrants and immigrants who created a shortage of housing. With high property values the property taxes rose proportionally. However, for many elderly homeowners who were living on fixed income, the increased property taxes were something they could ill afford. As a result, Paul Gann and Howard Jarvis created Prop. 13, which proposed capping property taxes at 1% of the properties' assessed value, down from the original 2 or 3%. In addition, they proposed using a properties' value that was assessed before the recession when the assessed values were lower. They also proposed a capped on how much property taxes could be raised each year.

Since the state budget was financed mainly by property taxes, the result was a loss of 200 billion dollars in property taxes during the next decades. However, these are only in property taxes, and have been suppemented for by sales tax, which now is a californian city's main source of revenue. Here are several articles on Prop. 13.

The decline and fall of California became apparent to me one autumn night in 1992 soon after I moved back following 10 years away. I was riding with Los Angeles Police Department narcotics officers in a caravan of five unmarked cars. Suddenly the caravan stopped, and the men and women began running from car to car. They had to do that. It was the only way they could exchange messages they had heard on three incompatible radio and telephone frequencies.

"Our communications sytems and equipment are obsolete; some of it is donated by manufacters," said then deputy chief Glenn Levant. "People in California don't want to pay taxes anymore -- even for cops."

That discouraging word resonated for me exactly a year later during the public soul-searching after the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in Petaluma. The suspect in that horrible crime had been stopped that night for trespassing and then released by Sonoma County deputies who did not know of the all-points bulletin fro the hour-old kidnapping 23 miles away. The town and the county operated on different radio frequencies, and no one was quite sure who was talking to whom. "It's going to take us time to figure out what happened," assistant Sonoma sheriff Dale Moore told me two weeks later. "A lot of agencies have experienced communication problems over the years because the equipmetn is so expensive -- and there's been no money."

What had happened to the California I knew in the late 1970s, when I lived in the same town as Ronald Reagan, in Pacific Palisades? You could drive from the center of town to the beach in one minute. it was right down on Temexcal Canyon Road, a wide new street built throught the ranch that Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Risher owned when they were married for a while. Palisades High School had been built there, too, overlooking the Pacific, and when kids graduated, many of them went on to a college in the University of California system -- one of the best higher-education complexes in the world -- practically for free.

There were old jobs and new companies, and everyone seemed to be getting richer as the land and the houses on it came more valuable day by day. Life was perfect in the free sunshine. Or so it appeared. And in California, appearance goes a long way.

That was once upon a time in a golden land by the sea. The rising real estate prices, 70 percent from 1975 to 1978, were making homeowners rich -- on paper. But there property taxes were inflating in lockstep -- and those tax bills had to be paid promptly in cash. Politicians let the stat's share of the money pile up in the capitol, Sacramento -- a golden heap higher than $5 billion -- while people with relatively fixed incomes worried about losing their homes because they could not keep up with the exploding taxes.

A lot of Californians were mad as hell and ready to listen to an angry old man named Howard Jarvis, who invented a state intiative called Proposition 13. The result was a tax revolt. Prop. 13 was approved by 65 percent of state voters on June 6, 1978, reducing and effectively capping property taxes -- and making it damned near impossible to raise other taxes.

Prop. 13 worked -- and then some. Property tax revenue droped 57 percent the next year, and the cumulative tax reduction on that property has been estimated at more than $200billion from then to now.

But 15 years later, the lessons of Prop. 13 read like cliches: There's no free lunch; you get what you pay for. Inevitably, as revenues fell spending and critical public services were cut. In California, those cuts have led to crises in education, medical care and public safety. They have triggered civil war pitting the old against the young, longtime residents against new, whites against black and brown, have against have-nots.

What's more, the repercussions of Proposition 13 have sounded a warning to the 22 other states that have imposed limits on taxes and spending ever since the passage of California's Prop. 13: By going too far to make their lives comfortable today, people all over the country may well be selling out their tomorrow.

Most recently, in Oregon on November 9, voters turned down a state sales tax, a move that was in keeping with their 1990 vote to cap property taxes. And in the state of Washington that same month, voters passed Initiative 601, which requires a two-thirds majority of the state Legislature to impose new taxes. Arizona, Hawaii, Lousiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada and Texas are among the other states that have restrictions. Already, Michigan is facing a crisis in education, with no funds available for the next school year, and Massachusetts has had to defer essentail maintenance on crumbling roads.

But no measure has as yet had the impact of California's Prop. 13, which became Article XIIIA of the state constitution. As local property tax revenue has declined in California, the power of its principal collectors, county and municipal governments, has been reduced. In reaction to a tremendous hsift of power from local to state government, 25 of the state's 58 counties passed what they called Boston Tea Party resolutions in 1993, vowing to refuse to send locally collected tax revenues to the state capital of Sacramento.

It was a gesture more symbolic than practical because under state law a local official holding back the money would be committing a felony offense. But anger and economic problems have been particularly intense here ever since two of the sate's largest industries, defense and aerospace, collapsed along with communism and the Cold War. While there has been a net gain of 900,000 jobs in the nation since July 1990, California has suffered a net loss of more than 600,000.

he Life that once was perfect has changed. Lately:

There have been potholes in Temescal Canyon Road, and its intersection with the Pacific Coast Highway has become a haven for muggers and car thieves. Rather than leaving your automobile on the street, it is wise to spend $7 to get into the beach parking lot, being carful not to run over the homeless as you enter.

In Pasadena last summer, children were selling lemonade as part of a sucessful campaign to privately raise $200,000 to keep their city's public libraries from shutting down. Other cities and counties were not quite as lucky. In Los Angeles County alone between 1992 and 1993, 10 libraries were eliminated, and in November 1993, Merced County announced the largest cutback yet: To save $1.4 million a year, all 19 of its public libraries, which served 180,000 residents, would close this month. "I want to grow up to be a librarian," 9-year-old Jeremy Olguin said at a meeting of Merced County supervisors, "if there's still a library."

"It seems so unreal that this could be happening in California," said Jo Wahdan, director of San Benito County Library, which had to shut down for two months in 1993 because it ran out of money. Her county also laid off four of its 22 sheriff's deputies even as it took on the additional responsibility of policing San Juan Bautista because that town of 1,600 went broke and let go of all but one of its 19 employees.

In Riverside and San Joaquin counties, with populations of more than 1 million and 480,000 respectively, police have stopped bringing in people to be booked for crimes such as shoplifting and assault with minor injuries but are merely issuing citations for them to appear for trial at some future date. Reason: no room in the courts. There's no room in the jails either. Lacking funds, state prisons were at 184 percent of capacity on November 1, with 109,081 inmates crammed into 27 institutions that were built to house 59,385. Moreover, the caseload for state parole agents has escalated from about 50 to 85 felons. So it is harder not only to incarcerate criminals but also to monitor them when they return to the streets.

Shasta County, population 150,000, ran out of money and was forced to shut down everything but its outpatient and psychiatric services at the county hipitals. Humboldt County, population 120,000, had cover tos worn roads with gravel rather than with more expensive pavement. Said Robert Hendrix, the fromer administrative officer of that rural northern county: "We're on our way back to 1934 in the way our roads are maintained."

At the University of California, fees have risen from an average of $720 a year in 1978-79 to $4,000, not including books or room and board, thereby outpacing inflation by 320 percent. And getting a seat in the class at one of the nine University of California campuses or 20 California State scolleges can psoe the same problems as getting on on an airline the day before Thanksgiving. The California State schools, for example, are offering 6,000 fewer courses this year than they did in 1990, so students can no longer routinely compile enough credits to enable them to graduate in four years.

But even though money for higher education has declined from $2.1 billion to 1.2 billion in the past three years, the problems of college students are relatively minor when they are compared with those of kids in kindergarten through grade 12. California's spending per public school pupil in those grades, which was roughly $4,600 in 1993, was dropped from the top five in the nation before Prop. 13 to the bottom 10, about $1,000 less than the national average and half of New York and New Jersey.

Changes in California life have been gradual enough that people no longer seem aware of how bizarre their world has become. While the libraries are closing, the prison doors are opening, and on may 18, 1993, the Los Angeles Times published a breezy feature story under a big color photograph of happy women exchanging high fives -- they were being released early from ounty jail to save money.

In San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district, wher people once taunted cops as "pigs," residents demonstrated against plans to reduce the local police contingent because of a budget crunch. "If they're upset in Haight Ashbury," said A.G. Block, managing editor of California Journal, the state's equivalent of Congressional Quarterly, "what do you think it will be like in Simi Valley and other suburbs when you can't get a fire engine -- or the police take an hour to get to your house?"

or Califronia's "Seventy-Eighters," the name given to the people who owned homes, apartment buildings or commercial property in 1978, Prop. 13 essentially rolled back taxes to 1 percent of assessed levels in 1975, the year before the real estate boom started. The taxes on our Pacific Palisades house dropped immediately from alomst $4,000 a year to just over $700.

Beyond that, and perhaps more important, the new law limited future property tax increase to the annual rate of inflation or to 2 percent, whichever was lower, and required a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to impose any new state taxes; a subsequent amendment required a two-thirds "supermajority" of voters to approve local taxes or bond issues for "special purposes," such as fixing roads or hiring more police.

Under the law, however, people who bought homes after 1978 had to pay property taxes that reflected the market at the time of their purchase. In Los Angeles County a decade later, the assessment was $106,199 on the ocean-view house at 2209 Paseo Del Mar in Palos Verdes Estates and $107,000 on the bungalow at 2206 E. 105th St. in Watts, even though the Palos Verdes house was worth nine times more. Which meant each owner paid abou the same taxes. The little houses at 923 and 927 Nowita St. near the beach in Venice are virtually identical, but the 1993 taxes on 923 are $3,710.62, compared with $316 for 927 -- because 923 sold in 1990 for $358,000 and the owner of 927 has stayed put since 1959.

A suit challenging Article XIIIA that went before the United States Supreme Court last year speculated that "within 10 years many new-home buyers will be paying 70 to 80 times the taxes of their stay-put neighbors." The suit failed, as have all legal challenges to Prop. 13.

"Stays put" is in the language of Article XIIIA. It's what old people do in what used to be the land of the young and the mobile. The Seventy-Eighters are staying upt, and new laws make it possible for them to pass on their Prop. 13 tax breaks to their children. It's the modern equivalent of a hereditary royal grant. But not only homeowners have benefited. Business property owners have enefited. Business properties accumaled 28 percent of the tax reductions, with Standard Oil of California, for one, saving $47 milllion the first year alone. And landlords got 12 percent of the reduction, a gift from Jarvis, who was a lobbyist for apartment house owners.

With property tax revenues plummeting, all state and local taxes on Californians dropped during the 1990s -- from $148 per $1,000 of personal income to $110 per $1,000. Much of the margin that had been lost was money that counties and towns had been able to keep for their own use. They now found themselves desperately bidding against one another to get WalMarts, automobile dealers or any point-of-purchase business that could drop sale tax crumbs into their bare treasuries. They slapped user fees on parks ($75 to hold a group picnic in Los Angeles County) and even on helicopter rescues ($1,980 an hour) in the mountains of Sonoma County.

But it has been a losing game: Unable to deal with their own financial problems, communities have had to go to Sacramento, municipal hat in hand. And because money is power, the substitution of state revenues for lost local revenues -- and the resulting state takover of local control -- has been an especially frustrating turn of events for education.

hen put comes to take, it has not been towns or roads or prisons that were most affected by Prop. 13; it has been the children. prop. 13 at its meanest and most enduring was generational warfare. The old chose themselves over the young in 1978. Many Seventy-Eighters, plus their children and often their grandchildren, were educated in good schools, which were backed by the wealth of California property, from kindergarten tot eh expensive university that was once the jexel in the crown of democracy, the University of California system. but they voted to trade lower property taxes for themselves in exchange for other people's children -- many of them, it happerns, black and Hispanic kids.

"The notion is gone completely that if I pay for your education, I get something because the state is a better and wealthier place," said Richard Zeiger, the editor of California Journal. "The most insidious thing Prop. 13 did was to reinforce the ahves agianst the have-nots of California. It severed the tie between most of the people and the few who govern. There is nothing people can do to improve their children's schools."

Before Prop. 13 became law, 55 percent of elementary and high school funding was raised locally, almost all of it from property taxes, and was dispensed with communal itnerest by local boards of education. By the beginning of the 1990s, less than one-third of school funding was local, more than 60 percent came directly form Sacramento and another 7 percent came from Washington through Sacramento. Before Prop. 13, the state ranked among the nation's top five in achievement for kindergarten through grade 12, but since then it has steadily dropped in the bottom 10 of the 50 states.

That may not change, particularly when many schools have to deal with gangs, drugs and immigrants speaking more than 80 different languages in the most diverse of the United States. "Prop. 13, I think, makes it almost impossible to reverse this fall," said Michael Kirst, a Stanford professor who is co-director of policy analysis for California Education. "The state doesn't have enough money, and you can't get to the local property tax base."

With local communities powerless to raise or cut revenues and considerable education decision-making centralized in Sacramento, the California Teachers Association became one of the largest financial contributors to state political campaigns. Public interest and participation were replaced by special interest: In many places, most school board candidates were teachers. They were ready and anxious to use the one local power left -- dividing up the money from Sacramento. Classroom size escalated to the second largest in the country, an average of 29 in elementary school. Half the school libraries closed, giving California a student/librarian ratio of 8,512 to 1 toady, compared with the nation average of one librarian for every 826 students. But California's teachers remained among the highest paid in the nation. Only in the past two years, in Los Angeles Unified and some smaller districts, have teachers been forced to take pay cuts.

The necessity of a two-thirds vote to raise most taxes means that 34 percent of California voters can exercise their version of Alexis de Tocqueville's "tyranny of the majority." In describing how local politics now works around the state, "buying off the old people" is the phrase used by insiders. For example, the school budget for the Elk Grove district, which covers part of Sacramento and its suburbs, was approved by voters in 1987 only after senior citizens were given 65 percent tax exemptions on school costs, their argument being that they have no children in school so why should they pay.

In Los Angeles last June, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association opposed an initiative to use earmarked property taxes for the "special purpose" of hiring 1,000 more police officers by arguing, in the words of its president, Joel Fox, that "police services is used by all citizens of Los Angeles, not just property taxpayers." The initiative got nearly 60 percent of the vote, but that was not enough. Since 1978, in fact, more than two out of three local tax referendums have drawn more than a 50 percent majority, but only about one out of six has received the necessary two-thirds "supermajority" to become law. "It's so shortsighted," Zeiger of the California Journal has said. "Eventually the have nots are going to win and seize control of the political mechanisms. I would not want to be an old white person in California 30 years from now."

At the moment, however, the Seventy-Eighters have no financial incentives to move; quite the opposite. Living longer and healthier lives, 82 percent of Los Angeles County's 900,000 citizens 65 and older are in the same homes they lived in when Proposition 13 passed. In Alameda County, the figure is also 82 percent, and in San Mateo County it is 81 percent. Moreover, in Los Angeles County, 43 percent of all householders have not moved since 1978. And as they stay put, California faces constant fiscal crises.

They are many things the state might try before more damage is done to the infrastructure once so golden. All property could be returned to market-value assessment, for example. But that's not going to happen. Also, the tax rolls could be split, raising billions of dollars a year by taking commercial properties out from under the protection of Proposition 13. But that would seem anti-business and will have little support while the state stays bogged in recession. More platable might be the initiation of some of the property tax relief taht is variously provided in 44 other states, including partial exemptions for the poor and the elderly, and defferal plans that exempt a portion of taxes until a property is sold or the owners die.

But in the end there is no real political will to fight Proposition 13. In fact, Proposition 13 may be forever. "It's a totem like no other totem, kept in place by those who vote and those who benefit: white people over 35, the relatively affluent," said Peter Schrag, editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. "It's awful -- but Californians love it." Some Californians.

Devastation of Prop. 13

Mammoth Lakes
WAS AMONG the people who came here this winter to ski and to try to forget the real world in a white week of downhill mind-cleansing. But when I picked up the local paper, the Mammoth Times, the first thing I saw was a long interview with the chairman of the Mono County Supervisors, Andrea Lawrence, who ended the interview by saying: "There is potential insurrection out there."

Hard to believe while you are looking at or skiing the Sierra. But Chairman Lawrence has a grey-haired, no-nonsense look about her that persuades a visitor.

"The obvious (issue) is how we are going to survive as a local government. You're getting now into whether we can fill pothiles, build community centers, put fish in our streams and provide fire and police protection...if we are down to our last dollar, where do you want us to spend it?"

Did I need this? That's the way they talk in Los Angeles, where I was coming from. I had just finished several weeks of work for Money magazine trying to evaluate, in harder numbers, the impact of 1978's Proposition 13 on life in California.

Money'e editors asked me to do a study because I had often deplored the victory of the old vs. the young when the state voted to freeze propety taxes at 1975 levels for homeowners who stayed put.

These are some of the numbers we picked up in trying to chart the decline in California's living as revenue collection inevitably centralized all government in Sacramento.

Prop. 13 worked -- to well! There was a reduction of more than $200 billion in local revenues and, predictably, a decline in the services provided by local governments -- and the essential local services are education, health care and public safety.

New homeowners are paying as much as 10 to 20 times the taxes of neighbors in identical houses who have stayed put. That figure is predicted to reach 70 or 80 times early in the 21st century.

More than 90 percent of the homeowners who benefited from Prop. 13 are in the same houses they owned in 1978. Why should they move, when other taxpayers are being forced to pay their share of the cost of government?

California school funding and achievement have both dropped from 1970's rankings in the nation's top five to 1990's rankings in the bottom 10.

More than 40 percent of the property-tax relief has not been for homeowners at all, but has been an annual windfall for corporations and landlords.

Local governmnets have tried to survive by inviting in auto dealerships and Wal-Marts to get a share of state sales taxes on high point-of-purchase volume. "Fees" are another way for localities to try to grab a few loose bucks: In Los Angeles County, there is now a $75 charge for group picnics in local parks.

Prisons in the state are at 184 percent of capacity, and prisoners are being released before serving minimum sentences to make room for new ones.

The state's ratio of librarians to students has reached 1 to 8,512, compared with a nation average of 1 to 820.

California state colleges have eliminated 6,000 courses in the past three years. Tuition and gees have been increased by 320 percent above the rate of inflation since Prop. 13 was passed.

So it goes in the Golden State. It will take a miracle or a tragedy to arrest the California decline. The people who own the homes of 1978 are now passing their tax exemptions on to their children -- the modern equivalent of royal land grants. Perhaps a giant earthquake, massive unemployment or riots by less-than-royal taxpayers might force a change, or at least a reconsideration of what California is doing to itself.

I assume that's what Chairmen Lawrence meant when she used the word insurrection.

back to the top