California voters will soon decide whether it should become harder for local governments to pass taxes earmarked for specific purposes, from wildfire prevention and schools to emergency medical response.
Proposition 43 on the November ballot would require a two-thirds supermajority vote to approve any local special tax — a standard that, on paper, has technically been in place since 1996, when Californians first approved the requirement. But the rule’s reach has been murky for years.
In 2017, the California Supreme Court ruled that the two-thirds threshold applied only to special tax measures placed on the ballot by local elected officials — not to those brought forward by citizen initiative, where residents or advocacy groups gather signatures to force a public vote. That distinction opened the door for several notable tax measures to pass with a simple majority, including Los Angeles’ widely debated tax on high-end real estate sales and a Sonoma County sales tax approved to bolster emergency services.
Prop. 43 would not undo any taxes already on the books. Instead, it would apply the stricter two-thirds requirement to all future special tax measures, regardless of who puts them on the ballot.
Supporters, led by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, say the measure simply restores what voters intended nearly three decades ago. Association president Jon Coupal argues that requiring broad consensus for new taxes is a long-standing principle in California governance, tracing back to the state’s original constitution in 1849, which required a two-thirds legislative vote for the state to borrow money.
“The power to tax is government’s most draconian power,” Coupal said. “The people of the state of California have made it a policy that when you are going to exercise that power, it should require a higher degree of consensus.”
Opponents — including local government associations, labor unions and affordable housing advocates — warn that the measure would effectively hand veto power to a minority of voters, since just over a third of the electorate could block a tax that the majority supports. They argue this would make it significantly harder for cities and counties to fund essential public services.
Darrell Roberts, president of the California Professional Firefighters union, has been especially vocal in his opposition, noting that Los Angeles voters this November are weighing a separate half-cent sales tax increase intended to help the city hire more firefighters — the kind of measure he says Prop. 43 would make nearly impossible to pass in the future.
“The motivation behind Prop. 43 is clear,” Roberts wrote in a recent opinion piece. “It’s the same motivation that is behind efforts to restrict mail voting and otherwise rig the system to prevent everyday citizens from having a say in their own government.”
The roots of Prop. 43 trace back to backlash over Los Angeles’ so-called “mansion tax,” approved by 58% of city voters in 2022. That measure imposed a 4% tax on property sales above $5.3 million and a 5.5% tax on sales exceeding $10.6 million, generating roughly $1.4 billion in revenue for the city to date.
Business groups and anti-tax organizations have fought the tax aggressively, arguing it discourages real estate investment and slows housing development, including affordable housing projects. Earlier this year, Coupal backed a sweeping ballot measure that would have retroactively repealed the mansion tax altogether. However, facing a looming deadline, he struck a last-minute deal with Democratic legislative leaders: withdraw that measure in exchange for placing the narrower Prop. 43 before voters instead.
Some Democratic lawmakers who supported that compromise are now urging voters to reject Prop. 43 outright. Assembly Appropriations Committee Chair Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who authored the measure’s language, said she viewed it as the lesser of two bad outcomes.
“The clock was running out, and we had a choice to make: Leave a retroactive measure on the ballot that threatened billions in local funding, or accept a much narrower constitutional amendment that I still believed was bad policy,” Wicks said.
For Southern California communities — where local tax measures often fund fire protection, transit improvements and public health programs — the outcome of Prop. 43 could shape how easily cities and counties are able to raise money for community priorities in the years ahead.
Original source: CalMatters
