San Diego county already has one of the highest cost-of-living burdens in the nation and working families are being crushed by recent spikes in inflation.

Despite this, San Diego local politicians want to make things even more expensive by putting 35 separate tax hikes on the November 2024 ballot.

What’s worse, many of these tax hikes are hidden behind deceptive ballot titles that the politicians write to fool voters into approving them.

That’s why in each election, Reform California publishes a “Plain English” voter guide to flag all the tax hikes on the ballot and expose the deceptive word games being played on these measures.

In San Diego county, there is one county-wide sales tax hike on the ballot, 11 city sales tax hikes, and 23 local property tax hikes – mostly tied to bonds.

Measure G is a half-a-percent sales tax hike countywide that backers say will fix our roads. But not a single penny of Measure G is legally earmarked for roads.

Worse, the funds in Measure G will go to SANDAG – the same agency that raised your taxes in 1988 and 2004 promising to fix roads, but has repeatedly raided those road funds ever since.  Recent SANDAG audits have also uncovered millions in waste, fraud and abuse at the agency.

Just like with Measure G, backers of city-specific sales tax hike measures also make false claims on where the funds from their tax hikes would go.  Every city measure has been placed on the ballot claiming the funds will go to specific purposes – with the magic words of “police, fire, 911, road repairs, etc.” being used in almost every measure. Yet none of the city measures contain language legally earmarking the funds for these popular programs.

All of the city tax hike measures go into the general fund of the cities – and politicians can spend the money any way they want. In fact, the fiscal forecasts for each of these cities prove that a massive portion of funds are being diverted by city politicians to cover bloated and overly-generous pension payouts to city workers.

With the exception of a National City property tax hike for their general fund, the 23 property tax hikes on the ballot across the county are tied to bond measures that include parcel tax assessments.

These bonds are all being sold as improving school facilities – with all kinds of promotional language on improving academic outcomes.

The reality is these bonds and associated increases to your property taxes do nothing to improve the quality of instruction in our schools, but instead simply seek to build fancy new facilities.

What backers of these bonds do not tell you is we have a growing problem of underutilized facilities in school districts across the county. That’s because local public school enrollment has plummeted in the past five years – and is expected to drop even more in the coming years. Only a handful of our rural school districts have had stable or modest increases in enrollment.

Instead of building more facilities during a time of declining student enrollment, school districts should be required to do a comprehensive needs assessment of their existing facilities and right-size – using the proceeds from this process to invest in deferred maintenance and improvement of remaining facilities.

Several of these bonds are from school districts who have passed requirements that all of their contracts must be awarded using Project Labor Agreements (PLAs).

PLAs allow school districts to avoid fair and open competition on contracts in favor of union-only firms. In doing so, PLA’s discriminate against small and minority-owned businesses.