WE DID IT!!!

July 2002

Those three little words say it all. As the front and ensuing pages of this month’s Tax Fax make clear (if not a Sacramento Bee article by the time you read this column), your Sacramento County Taxpayers League made good on its commitment to the voters, ratepayers, and City Council of Sacramento of last year...THE FAIR UTILITY TAX ACT OF 2002 IS QUALIFIED FOR THE NOVEMBER BALLOT!!!

I cannot begin to thank all of you who made this possible. Without question the credibility of our organization was on the line in seeking to qualify a ballot measure, and I can tell you that more than a few “downtown wags” didn’t think we were equal to the challenge. Well once again, they were wrong.

There is so much to say with respect to this effort — not to mention the upcoming campaign — but two points stand out most clearly in my mind. First, there can be no question that were it not for our effort to qualify the Fair Utility Tax Act, the City Council would NEVER have voted to increase the existing rebate program by a full $2.5 million from its budgeted $694,000. Teddy Roosevelt said it first and best: “speak softly, and carry a big stick”, and once we demonstrated by our 7,123 signatures (out of more than 15,000 collected) that we had a VERY BIG STICK, the Council was forced to act. I don’t know about you, but a $2.5 million dollar annual tax cut is one HECK of a return on our investment to qualify the initiative...and that’s if we lose, which we have no intention of doing.

Second is the contrast between our citizen-signature gathering process and the craven — look up the word, for it certainly applies here — effort by the City Council to vote its own pay raise measure onto the ballot after it became clear they could not gather sufficient signatures from the voters and taxpayers themselves. During the next several months, every member of the Sacramento City Council is going to argue against the Fair Utility Tax Act, and make wild accusations of what drastic and Draconian cuts in vital services will result from the mere act of giving the people back their own money, and only taxing a necessity of life at the same rate as the County, not three times higher. BUT WITH ONLY ONE ABSTENTION, THE COUNCIL VOTED TO PLACE ON THE BALLOT A MEASURE WHICH WILL COST AT LEAST AN ADDITIONAL ONE MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR FROM THE GENERAL FUND, after all new salary, benefits and (you heard it here first) additional personal staff are included. Another word leaps readily to mind: hypocrisy.

I’ll end this column as it began, with a sincere note of thanks to all who played a role in our success. This is the first time in our 41-year history that your Sacramento County Taxpayers League has conceived and qualified its own tax reduction ballot measure. It is now up to us to see this measure into law, and to provide real tax relief upon necessities of life to literally hundreds of thousands of our friends and neighbors. Our work is very well begun, but it is far from over, and I look forward to seeing each and every one of you “in the precincts” as we see our grassroots effort prevail in the upcoming election.

Richard Mersereau