“There will not be another one of these,” San Diego County Supervisor Pam Slater said the day after the stinging March 2 defeat of Proposition L, a quarter-percent sales-tax hike approved by only 50.2% of voters. The proposition, which would have infused $423 million into the holdings and technology of the 79-branch system over the next five years, fared even worse than a similar November 1996 measure that garnered 58% of the vote; a supermajority of 66% is needed for passage.
According to the March 4 San Diego Union-Tribune, officials are weighing other options, including the reintroduction of a bill to tap into growing property-tax revenues, which then-Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed.
Anti-tax activist Richard Rider is now targeting plans to build a new main library with hotel-room taxes, explaining that even as “Yes on L” campaigners purported the branch library system desperately needed improving, “they want to spend $130 million on a downtown monument that nobody wants.”
Posted March 8, 1999.