Ian Patton
This is an opinion piece submitted by a member of the community. Their views do not reflect that of Downey Latino News. Got a rebuttal? Email us on this or any other issue affecting residents of Downey at [email protected].
We at the Long Beach Reform Coalition offer the following recommendations in line with our mission of promoting local government accountability, transparency, and responsiveness.
In 2018, we came together as a network of resident volunteers who were fed up with a lack of representation on the municipal level. Too often elected officials see their true constituencies as the powerful vested economic interests who provide the lion’s share of the resources needed to get them elected and who offer a revolving door to them after leaving office.
Much as Facebook’s customers are actually the advertisers (not the millions of free users providing all the content and the views and clicks that it sells to those advertisers), government–especially local government–often sees the special interests as its customers, not the taxpaying residents.
The taxpayers provide the tax money (government ‘revenue’), from which the, in effect, real customers as they see it (special interests seeking contracts, tax breaks, project approvals, etc.) feast upon. When one views confusing, anti-resident actions of a city government–such as approving a development that may destroy your property and quality of life, for example, or raising city employee pensions while city services are cut or languish, as another example–through this prism, suddenly everything starts to make sense. Developers get politicians elected. City employee unions get politicians elected. You’re just the taxpayer.
Thus our first recommendation to any voters reviewing ballot measures is caveat emptor! Or perhaps we should say, caveat voter! Voter beware! Most ballot measures are placed on the ballot by elected officials because they want something they cannot otherwise have. Often what they want is more tax money, if not to give directly to those they see as their real customers, to backfill the profligate or wastefully or even fraudulently misspent money they have already allocated to those powerful, big money special interests.
With that in mind, here are our November 2024 election recommendations for LA County residents:
We say NO on Los Angeles County Measure A.
County Measure A represents a doubling down on the failed and graft-riddled current approach to homelessness in LA County. It would double the County Measure H (2017) quarter-cent sales tax, making it a full half-cent on every dollar spent, and removing the ten-year sunset provision, rendering it a never-ending infinity tax. This would take LA County cities which also have city sales taxes up to a maximum of 10.75% sales tax, thanks to a bill in Sacramento allowing LA County cities to surpass the state sales tax cap (in anticipation of Measure A).
Measure H has made homelessness worse, not better, by wasting hundreds of millions of (regressively collected) taxpayer dollars, enriching developers, consultants, and nonprofit execs while feeding into the failed Housing First (rather than shelter first) model and hardly adding any new shelter units or substance abuse / mental health / life recovery services.
The solution to homelessness isn’t more taxpayer money (especially not a sales tax, which burdens the homeless and low income residents disproportionately) when billions are already being spent, mostly in federal and state grants, and wasted. We need to change how the money is being spent, and we need to begin with a massive audit of homeless spending (as a federal judge has already ordered in the City of Los Angeles).
We are NEUTRAL on County Measure G, but offer these considerations:
Currently the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors wields enormous power largely under the radar of public scrutiny. Measure G would increase the five-member board to nine, reducing the size of each district by nearly a million constituents from the current 2 million-person supervisorial districts. Perhaps even more significantly it would shift the governance model from the current board-appointed County CEO managing the bureaucracy to a countywide elected CEO, effectively an elected ‘mayor of LA County’ for the first time ever.
There are pros and cons to Measure G, including the possibility of electing one or two more supervisors who might be more independent of the LA County Federation of Labor controlled county political machine. And an elected County CEO might draw more public and media attention to the functioning of county government, with all its sprawling responsibilities and bureaucratic dysfunction. On the other hand, an elected CEO would be an incredibly powerful position, which might overshadow the Board of Supervisors, concentrating political power to an even greater degree, rather than democratizing it.
We say YES on California Prop. 36.
We all know that property crime, especially retail smash and grabs, are out of control due to Prop. 47 (2014) making theft under $950 a misdemeanor. Prop. 36 is polling with overwhelming public support for obvious reasons, despite passive opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom. Restoring felony status for property theft crimes is essential for bringing back order to heavily impacted localities like Long Beach.
Relatedly, we ENDORSE Nathan Hochman for Los Angeles County District Attorney.
Prop. 36 reforms the disastrous Prop. 47, which was co-authored by the current LA County District Attorney, George Gascón. For over a decade, he has been part of the movement to tie the hands of local prosecutors rather than addressing the root causes of crime. Gascón’s own prosecutors, along with families of crime victims, have been up in arms that they aren’t being allowed to do their jobs.
Plus, the Public Integrity Division within the DA’s office—supposedly the cop on the block to prevent corruption in local government and among local elected officials—has seemingly been effectively decommissioned. Gascón took personal control over the unit, and you never hear of any prosecutions of elected officials by the DA’s office (not that we have seen any action out of that unit since the days of DA Steve Cooley, when he famously prosecuted the City of Bell officials). All the prosecutions in LA in recent years (three City Council members and Supervisor Ridley-Thomas) have been by the feds, the FBI investigating and the US Attorney’s Office, not the DA. Gascón is a Long Beach resident (Naples) and chummy with local politicos, like former Long Beach police chief, LA County Sheriff Robert Luna.
Hochman, when personally questioned by LBRC’s executive director, emphasized the importance of the Public Integrity unit and pointed to his experience leading the LA City Ethics Commission. He has made reversing the extreme non-prosecution policies of Gascón his centerpiece and vows to be a moderate, even-handed crime fighter, who would value fairness for the accused without condoning lawlessness.
We say NO on California Prop. 33.
Prop. 33 is yet another attempt to unbalance the housing market by opening the door to potentially extreme versions of local rent control, a demagogic ploy for the votes of renters who would be its main victims in the long run. In particular, Prop. 33 would allow for vacancy decontrol, meaning a city could pass an ordinance permanently converting units to non-market rate, even when the tenant moves out. This would completely destroy the mom & pop housing provider industry, which provides the vast majority of the most affordable housing locally. Rather than leading to lower rents, it would lead to many units being removed from the housing market entirely and greatly increasing the cost of rental housing, whatever is left of it.
To prevent future dangerous measures like Prop. 33, we say YES on California Prop. 34.
Prop. 34 would end the loophole allowing the sponsor of Prop. 33 to abuse its nonprofit status, continually pumping millions of dollars into trying to pass state propositions election cycle after election cycle.
Ian Patton is the Executive Director of the Long Beach Reform Coalition and has been a resident of Long Beach for way too long.
