For the most part, voters of Sonoma County have given strong endorsements to their local state senators Mike McGuire and Bill Dodd and assembly members Jim Wood and Marc Levine. These men just cast big votes to support affordable housing, parks and water projects, climate and environmental protection and for a sanctuary state declaration to limit federal raids on innocent undocumented residents.
All these and other legislative actions were completed last weekend in a rush against the final bell of this year’s California legislative session. While the hot action was all taking place in Sacramento under the Capitol dome, all the eventual impacts (and costs) will be lived out right here in our Sonoma County towns and communities.
In just a few hours of maddening vote leveraging, lobbying, horse trading and arm twisting, our legislative delegation and the full membership of the State Senate and Assembly passed floor-to-ceiling piles of new laws and taxes. Like watching a taxicab meter click up the dollars, the bundles of housing, carbon cap-and-trade, parks and infrastructure laws added over $12 billion to our future tax bills.
Maybe we said our local legislative team was good, but we never said they came cheap. Real government that actually responds to local needs, like better roads and more housing support, costs real money. We think lots of good work just got accomplished in Sacramento. It’s just a bit shocking to be counting everything by the billions these days. Remember when a million here and a million there used to be a big number?
All these numbers and new laws may seem a bit abstract to individual voters who can’t remember all the past school, road, water and pension bonds they voted for over the past decades. Most of us don’t like to study our annual tax bills. We’re told paying them is better than life’s other certainty — which is death.
Well, come Nov. 1, just a few weeks from now, local taxpayers and voters will get a rude reminder of legislative cause-and-effect when they go to the gas pump. That’s the day a new 12 cent-a-gallon state tax will be added to each fill up. Last April, Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislative majority approved a $52 billion transportation package that promised $1.2 billion each year to fix local roads in the state’s 58 counties. At the time, everyone was thinking about fewer potholes but in a few weeks tempers might flare over the 30 cent tariff (the total of both old and new gas taxes.)
Next comes a $4 billion housing bond (SB3) passed in Sacramento last week, plus a new $75 per transaction fee. These new sources of funds will begin to address the local and state affordable housing crisis, where more than 50 percent of all renting households now spend more than half their total income on shelter. Because $4 billion won’t go very far, taxpayers can expect to see other housing bonds on many future ballots for years to come.
To their extra credit, our legislators also passed SB 35 which seeks to regulate the regulators and limit costs and requirements for zoning, permits and environmental study fees for new housing.
Wait, there’s more.
Next June, voters will be asked to approve a $4 billion parks and water project bond. The included projects are a mixed bag of earmarked projects all over California, including big Delta projects, new urban parks for Los Angeles, $3 million for Russian River restoration and 100 more. If approved, the bond funding will continue a formula first endorsed in 2006 under Prop. 84 — not that any of us voters can remember that choice either.
Well, at least the next legislative session in Sacramento doesn’t take place until Jan. 3, 2018.
