The Facts

Passing local taxes may get a bit harder this November, with a return to pre-2020 rules. California voters will decide ACA 22, which would re-instate a two-thirds vote requirement on any local tax earmarked for a specific use and placed on the ballot by citizen initiative, after the California Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that voter-initiative taxes only needed a simple majority. The text does not appear to retroactively cancel taxes voters already passed.

The Context

The measure is the result of legislative dealmaking with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer's Association's ballot measure that would have forced local real-estate transfer taxes down to the state rate of 0.11%, automatically repealed any local taxes that didn't meet the 2/3 vote requirement, and threatened San Francisco’s Muni parcel tax.

The GrowSF Take

Voters may or may not like this deal (we'll find out in November!), but its definitely better than the measure the HJTA had qualified for the ballot. Their measure, had it passed, would have wiped out a bunch of important funding for SF government services and pushed the city and state to replace that lost funding with new (likely even more distortionary) taxes.