Why did the Schools and Communities First initiative lose when other progressive measures passed in California?
Capital & Main speaks to local leaders and policy authorities about the potential effects of Prop. 15’s passage.
Donors to a campaign claiming to represent small shopkeepers and homeowners include North America’s largest freight railroad network, two New York real estate giants and one of Earth’s richest men.
Many progressive electeds have ignored an initiative that would revise California’s constitution to assess commercial property at higher rates.
So why is the opposition using the solar industry to defeat it?
Proposition 15 leaps feet first onto California’s “third rail” of state politics—the property tax system created in 1978 by Proposition 13.
Property taxes plunged with Prop. 13’s passage in 1978. But so did the revenue supporting California’s schools and fire service.
Inside the epic ballot fight to reform California’s “taxpayer rebellion” initiative.
How changes to California’s Proposition 13 could reduce inequality.
About 13,200 minors held in detention facilities will have funding for their educational services, recreational programs and legal aid cut by the federal government.
After winning a Los Angeles school board seat, Goldberg speaks about charter schools, money and what it means to fight the good fight.
Advice for California’s new governor collected from interviews with three authorities on poverty and income inequality, and from stories in our Waiting for Gavin series.
Gavin Newsom’s most dramatic break from the Jerry Brown era is the governor-elect’s fierce commitment to high-quality child care and universal preschool.
The failure of this homeowners’ tax-break measure might have been predictable–its creators didn’t mount much of a campaign, and evidently left it for dead.
The state Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that California schools and local government losses will run $1 billion annually if voters approve a new property tax measure.
Co-published by International Business Times
Proposition 13’s backers have fended off legal challenges and watched as many efforts to amend it in Sacramento fizzled. What they haven’t faced is a sustained ground campaign, but that will soon change.
Co-published by International Business Times
Of all the national trendsetting ballot measures decided by California voters in the last generation, perhaps none was more divisive than Proposition 209. It banned racial considerations — otherwise known as affirmative action.
The last time California enacted comprehensive tax reform, FDR was president, Babe Ruth was still playing baseball and the Golden State was five years away from seeing its first freeway open.
California is earthquake country but one seismic shift rumbling through the state won’t require bottled water and a three-day food supply.
That would be the political and demographic groundswell toward challenging elements of Proposition 13, the property tax measure passed by California voters in 1978 by a landslide and which has been considered untouchable ever since.
“Prop. 13 has been a contentious part of the political landscape for 40 years,” says John Kim of the Advancement Project, one of the organizations comprising Make It Fair, a coalition of 22 statewide organizations and 200 endorsers seeking Prop. 13 reforms.
The watershed initiative became synonymous with protecting the little guy after homeowners’ property tax rates grew so high in the 1970s that people on fixed incomes couldn’t afford to pay them. But from the start, a piece of the measure has protected the not-so-little-guys.
Who ate the California Dream? Why is the state that once led the nation in education now at the bottom? Why is the state that pioneered infrastructure miracles at war over building a bullet train or shoring up the levees in the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta? Why has our state been a fiscal shambles for most of the past dozen years? What brought our Golden State to its knees?
Some might conjecture about the focus on prison construction that dominated a couple of decades of state budgets or the Great Recession’s deficit years. Some people blame public sector unions and their members’ retirement funds. But to really understand what happened to California, you have to go back further, to 1978 and the passage of Proposition 13.
Oops, we just touched the “third rail” of state politics, so let me offer this caveat. The residential property tax limits installed by the passage of Prop.