The California Senate approved June 4 two measures that, if signed into law, would shift back in FY 2003–04 to the state’s 24 county libraries and 11 independent library districts a percentage of the property taxes that in FY 1993–94 began being directed to schools with the establishment of the Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund (ERAF).
“It’s been a love-fest,” Gay Strand of the Santa Clara County Library System said in the June 18 San Jose Mercury News of the senate bills’ passage. The state assembly companion bill lists $3.6 billion as the amount of diverted property-tax revenues in the past eight years, and characterizes libraries lacking dedicated local tax revenues as “ERAF orphans.” The bill has been referred to the state assembly’s Appropriations Committee.
That same day, the California Supreme Court upheld taxpayers’ right to challenge local taxes imposed without voter approval—which municipal entities lacking an incorporating charter must seek since the1986 passage of Proposition 62. Jon Coupal, president of the plaintiff Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, said in the June 5 Sacramento Bee, “Illegal taxes cannot be put beyond challenge merely by the passage of time.”
A survey of local governments by the League of California Cities estimates that up to $300 million in revenues could be affected, some of which support library operations.
Posted June 25, 2001.