In a news cycle packed with major breaking events, it got little attention last month when the California Fair Political Practices Commission reported that Poway Unified School District broke clearly written state laws to use taxpayer dollars to pay for 60,000 campaign mailers that brazenly lobbied voters to approve a $488 million school bond in early 2020.
For that, Poway Unified leaders should be thankful. Their claim that the violations were unintentional is laughable. The mailers the district sent out didn’t even mention who was paying for them, making it far less likely the hard-sell language would raise eyebrows among savvy voters. Also, the district worked on the mailers with a veteran consultant. Yeah, sure, no one involved realized what they were doing was an illegal use of the district’s public money to lobby the public to spend more money on the district. The $13,500 FPPC penalty is inadequate — even if the hard sell didn’t work and the bond failed.
But what must always be stressed in cases like this is what’s truly outrageous isn’t how local government bodies flout state laws to take more money from taxpayers. It’s all the legal tactics that local governments use toward such ends. San Diegans have just witnessed an obnoxious example of this. Act 1 came in 2022, when voters were persuaded to change a 1919 law and to directly charge 285,000 households for trash collection instead of continuing to have them pay for it via property taxes. Measure B’s obvious attempt to add revenue was instead dishonestly pitched as a vanilla attempt to improve services.
Flash-forward to Act 2 in summer and fall 2024. Key details about how the new trash fee would be implemented were still under wraps, beyond a plainly incomplete city analysis from 2022 that suggested that newly charged households could expect to pay just $23 to $29 a month. Why wasn’t City Hall being more forthcoming as it became obvious that estimate was laughably low? Because elected leaders were trying to get voters to Measure E, which would raise the city sales tax by one cent per dollar and provide a $400 million annual boost to city coffers. It was only shortly after voting was over that City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera suggested matter-of-factly the new fee could be in the range of $75 a month. Thankfully, after thousands more votes were counted, Measure E was narrowly rejected. The margin wouldn’t have been close if Elo-Rivera or Mayor Todd Gloria had told the truth about the size of the burden Measure B would be for hundreds of thousands of their constituents.
So what’s coming in Act 3 — will a new era of honesty emerge at City Hall? If you’re guffawing with laughter at the thought, you’re not alone. Instead, expect more manipulative machinations. It’s the San Diego way.
