(3 of 11)
All but overshadowed by Jarvis' celebrity has been the other sponsor of Proposition 13, retired Real Estate Man Paul Gann, 66, who heads People's Advocate, a Sacramento-area antitax lobby. Scoffs a Jarvis aide: "We thought we needed the 150,000 votes his group could deliver in petition signatures. We alone got a million names and we didn't need him at all."
In the wake of what he wrought, Jarvis left pain as well as tax relief. California officials faced some brutal choices as they scrambled to figure out how to live with budgets now scheduled to shrink significantly with the beginning of the new fiscal year on July 1, when Proposition 13 takes effect (unless one of the five court challenges that have already been made proves successful).
State Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy predicts that 75,000 local employees will be fired statewide out of a total of 1.2 million, plus an additional 76,000 federally funded employees. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley proposed layoffs of 8,300 city employees (out of 49,349), including 1,600 cops. More than half will be trainees recently hired under the Federal Government's CETA (for Comprehensive Employment Training Act), which is aimed at helping unskilled, unemployed people, many of whom are black.
San Francisco Mayor George Moscone was studying a worst-case budget: the $84.9 million to operate city buses, trolleys and cable cars would be more than halved, the street-cleaning fund would drop from $783,000 to $90,000, and the city's human rights commission (scheduled to spend $332,101) would get no money at all. Even so, Moscone said: "I don't take a doomsday approach to how this city is going to react to crisis. We've been through earthquakes, don't ya know?" An anonymous poet was less optimistic, leaving this ditty taped to the door of San Francisco's city hall:
City hall is filled with gloom
As civil servants wait their
doom,
For the voters have spoken on
Jarvis-Gann
And left many of us for the
garbage cann.
The degree to which the tax-quake produces the chaos forecast by its opponents is now the problem of California's ambitious Governor Jerry Brown. Indeed, his re-election prospects and future White House hopes may well rest on how he handles the highly complex crisis. Brown, who only last March warned that Proposition 13 would replace "one monster with another," had pushed a more modest Proposition 8 instead. It would have rolled back property taxes by about 30% for homeowners and tied state and local spending to rises in personal income. But as 13 picked up unstoppable momentum, Brown performed a pirouette that would have dazzled Diaghilev. By election night, as 13 rolled up its huge majority and 8 lost, 53% to 47%, the Governor was almost sounding as if the Jarvis-Gann proposal had been his own idea.
In a subdued Los Angeles Hilton ballroom, where only 200 turned out for what was billed as a "Democratic election celebration," Brown dwelt but briefly on his easy primary victory over token opposition (he rolled up a 79% vote to 4% for his closest