Unfortunately, I don’t think anything is going to happen to change the current situation. It’s not good, but it creeks along, and most legislators don’t want to deal with the outcry that would result if they started to tinker with it.

Measure S needs a two-thirds majority to pass.

Diana

Thanks for the further explanation. Absolutely unreal. Can we do away with the whole the system and start all over?

Sam

So here goes.

As Bob pointed out, Prop 13 rolled back and essentially froze property taxes at the 1% of assessed value level. When this happened, there was a mad scramble to figure out how to allocate that 1% collection (prior to Prop 13 each taxing agency just got whatever taxes were approved for its property owners; there was no sharing).

The first thing that was used was a simple allocation formula: if Public Agency X received Y% of the county’s total property tax collections prior to Prop 13, they got Y% of the reduced 1% collections.

A few years after this was done someone noticed that the net effect was that community’s which had chosen to tax themselves less before Prop 13 were subsidizing communities that had taxes themselves more highly. As a relatively low taxed community I bet San Carlos was on the short end of that particular stick.

This was an unintended consequence of adopting that simple allocation formula. It was also a political nightmare. The State responded by crafting AB 8, which established a complicated set of formulas which, over time, were intended to fix this problem.

I once asked the County Controller’s office whether San Carlos was “still” subsidizing neighboring communities. I was told that it was a pretty difficult thing to figure out. That’s a true statement (I’ve played around with the math on it myself). But my intuition tells me there’s more than a little bit of “don’t upset any apple carts” going on, too.

Sorry to bore you all with this lengthy post. Feel free to drop me a line at mark@arcabama.com if you ever have any questions about district stuff.

- Mark

Another factor is the much reduced proportion of voters with children in school. In the 1960s — the heyday of California public education — about 2 out of every 3 voters had a child or grandchild in school. The current proportion is much lower (I believe in the 35 – 40% range), but it hit a nadir of around 30% before rebounding.

So in the past communicating with parents was a pretty good proxy for communicating with a community. Nowadays that’s not the case.

- Mark

Thanks for your post. I think the district has tried to get the word out. At a certain point I think residents have to take the opportunity to educate themselves on certain topics such as this. All I had to do was send one email to Seth and Mark. They were more than willing to discuss the issue with me and answer all of my questions. I think as we get closer to November, you will hear much more about the effects of Prop 13 and Measure S.

Bob

Well done. I am wondering why this information is not more readily available. I don’t think most residents of San Carlos are aware of this. Why has the district not made this better known to San Carlos?

SC Barbara

I agree 100%.

Bob