The Votes Are In!
2024 Readers' Choice is back, bigger and better than ever!
View Winners → Opinion Nov 13, 2020
by
share with
Large commercial properties would have faced higher property taxes under Proposition 15. Proposition 15, the “split roll” measure on the Nov. 3 ballot, was always going to be a tough sell. The measure would have raised taxes on commercial and industrial property as much as $11.5 billion a year by exempting those parcels from the tax breaks in Proposition 13, which was enacted in a 1978 taxpayer revolt.
Since then, efforts to tinker with Proposition 13’s provisions have been met with such furious backlash that it has become known as the third rail of California politics. The COVID-19 pandemic made it even more challenging for proponents of Proposition 15.
How do you persuade voters to raise taxes on businesses when so many of those firms are struggling to survive? In the end, the campaign just couldn’t pull it off, and the measure was declared officially dead on Tuesday.
Even so, the fact that it lost by a slim margin — 3.6% as of Wednesday afternoon, though ballot counting continues — rather than a landslide gives us hope that the third rail may be losing some of its charge and that the kind of tax reform the state needs might […]
