Sound and Fury over Taxes

Howard Jarvis and the voters send a message: "We're mad as hell!"

  • Share
  • Read Later

(9 of 11)

federal, state and local — now account for more than one-third of the gross national product (33.5%). One measure of the explosive growth of spending at all levels of government: in 1965 the total was $205.6 billion; by 1975 it was up to $556.3 billion, growing at more than 10% a year and now hovering somewhere around three-quarters of a trillion dollars.

Many experts feel that Californians have acted unfairly in aiming all their fire at the property tax. Claims C. Lowell Harriss, a Columbia University professor of economics and consultant to the Tax Foundation Inc.: "The property tax is a better tax than people give it credit for. It's a way to capture socially created values of the locality. It's inexpensive to administer, impossible to avoid and the one tax that people can actually see working for them. I hate to see local government lose that autonomy."

Ironically, Californians became so angry at the property tax partly because the state has one of the nation's most effective systems for administering it. While assessment procedures are a scandal in many states, California's elected assessors —who act independently of all local authorities and have nothing at all to do with setting actual tax rates—have been highly efficient at keeping homes and business property tagged at actual market values. That has not, however, made them popular with taxpayers.

Appraiser Eugene Aronson, 45, who works in the office of Los Angeles County Tax Assessor Alexander Pope, has been called a "dirty Nazi" and a "dishonest Communist" while making his rounds. When he meets strangers at parties he often tells them he is an insurance salesman rather than admit his true trade.

Aronson's turf includes the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles. He knows just which blocks have the really elegant homes—and just what kind of prices they command on the market. He also knows which ones look deceptively more valuable than they are. He is an expert at determining which kind of hardwood floors, plumbing, tiling and shingles really add to the sale value of a house. "We don't care whether we raise or lower a property," says he. "We just want to give it its proper value."

State law requires California's nearly 3,000 appraisers to determine the market value of all property and list it on tax rolls by July 1. Not every home is visited every year, but when enough houses in a given neighborhood change ownership to establish a "price pattern," the whole tract is reassessed at the new value. Reassessments must be made at least once every three years. The rolls tell the county board of supervisors the total value of property available for taxing—and it is the supervisors, not the assessors, who determine how high a rate will yield the tax income they think they need.

What frustrates California taxpayers is that while the state's land boom has sent the value of their homes soaring, local officials have rarely been content to lower their tax rates so as to keep the total bite relatively stable. Instead, they have found ways to spend the extra money. A crucial example: Los Angeles County has had a stable population for ten years, yet its expenditures have ballooned during that period from $500 million a year to $1.6 billion. The result is a growing volume of taxpayer complaints

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11