Prop 13
In the early 1970's property tax rates peaked and were still rising each year, which was driving people out of their homes. Even though this gave the state and county governments a surplus of $3.8 billion by the end of the1970's, something had to be done. Homeowners' were also getting angry because as their property taxes rose the quality and quantity of their public services didn't. Legislature tried to respond with an introduction of three major reform packages in 1977, that was not enough. When legislature returned in 1978, which happened to be an election year for statewide officeholders, two men have already been working and submitted 1.2 million signatures for an initiative. This was enough signatures to place what was called Proposition 13 on the June ballot. The Governor at the time disliked the idea of cutting property taxes because he didn't want to use the states surplus to make up for the lost revenue. He put forth an effort against Proposition 13 and legislature rushed to put a competitor proposition, but it was too little, too late. Therefore, in June of 1978 California voters went out to the polls and Proposition 13 passed by a vote of 65 percent to 35 perce
Government spending on the public and public services also changed, in fact government as a whole decreased after the passing of Prop 13. Not only have state and local revenues declined in California, they have remained below the national average in all but two years since 1978. Government shifted the burden of paying for public services from local to state levels. One great shift from local to state government was to school systems, local, and federal dollars have also been spent. Before Prop 13 California was one of the nations leaders in school funding and now we are toward the bottom. Kathleen Connell has made the SMART Task Force which is the State Municipal Advisory Team and gave it the job of improving the relation ship between local and state governments. One of their plans is to make a trade with the state government for either property tax or a sales tax distribution based solely on population. They want to adjust sale tax based on population , rather than were the sales occurred. The overall result of SMART's proposal is to allocate $450 million in funding to offset the loss of property tax revenue and increase tax revenue on a county wide basis. In Kathleen Connell's report I found that she has no plans to try and change Prop 13, instead change the way government controls its money. In her proposal she insist that local governments should receive property tax because it is closest to that community. That is very smart because local governments know the problems and issues of that area better than the state. A tax policy subcommittee considered whether property tax should be permanently returned to local government and schools and not go to the state. They say local government should get the property taxes because the property is in the local governments jurisdiction; and the taxpaying public should get the money to be put back their local community. The subcommittee also believes that the state should take full funding for items that are within the Legislature's responsibility, such as trial courts. In many ways Proposition 13 didn't quite help as much as hope
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1426
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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