As BAD As It Gets
VIEW FROM THE RIGHT

Adam Sparks, Special to SF Gate


Imagine waking up to a science-fiction world in which voting involves no secret ballots -- the government knows how you voted -- no opposition statements are permitted, multiple votes can be legally cast by the same voter, only property owners vote, nongovernmental friends of the political power structure literally run the elections and voters can change their votes as many times as they like before election day. Is this a scenario for the next century, the voting pattern in Saudi Arabia or Saddam's Iraq or what? No, it's what voters are now facing in Contra Costa County, with mail-in ballots due July 27.

It all sounds nightmarish and hellishly bad, and it is. BAD is in this case both an acronym and an apt description. Benefit-assessment districts, or BADs, permitted under the California Constitution, are formed by groups of property owners who vote among themselves to create a special assessment district to finance local improvements to sidewalks, streets, landscaping and lighting and so on. BADs, however, need only be authorized by a local government and then validated by a vote among a small percentage of the population -- property owners -- to provide a very localized, finite and tangible capital improvement.

Historically, this system has worked well; it's been going on quietly for about 50 years now. But, in recent years, some cash-strapped governments have been looking to BADs to do an end run around Proposition 13, which requires that all bond measures for general improvements, such as school construction and park development, be approved by a two-thirds majority of the electorate. Proposition 13 concluded that bonds are essentially de facto property-tax increases and that it's reasonable they should have the overwhelming support of all those who will pay them.


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This is the same basic reason that cities across the country are mandating CID construction. They are getting around the need to raise money the old-fashioned way--by raising taxes or cutting existing services. Instead we have these pay-as-you-go arrangements with various kinds of special districts that impose specific tax burdens on this or that group of residents. With CIDs, it's the new owners.