Significant Steps towards Reforming Prop 13
The day after Proposition 13 passed in 1978 Jerry Brown, then in his first term as Governor, gave a speech about the state’s path forward given the devastating revenue cuts required to enact Prop 13. “The path forward and transition will be difficult and painful.” Forty years later, it’s no less painful. Prop 13, the state’s regressive property tax law that pegs the taxes land owners pay to the value of the property when it was purchased, is still in place. But not for long.
This year, the TechEquity Collaborative has been working as a part of the Schools and Communities First Coalition to reform Proposition 13. The proposed reform will remove Prop 13 exemptions for corporate and industrial properties, while leaving them in place for residential properties, agricultural lands, and small businesses. This reform, often called “split-roll,” will raise six to ten billion dollars in funding every year for vital local services like education and homelessness support.
We’ve been working hard to gather signatures for the reform to qualify it to appear on the ballot in November 2020. Our signature gathering effort concluded at the end of June with a weekend of action. Over the course of our signature gathering campaign, 47 of our community of tech workers have hit the streets, spoken with voters, and gathered 1,312 signatures, blowing through our original goal of 1,000 and our stretch goal of 1,250.
This number might not sound huge but it represents a significant chunk of the Coalition’s volunteer-gathered signatures (the vast majority of ballot measure signatures for all ballot measures in California are submitted by paid signatures gathers). Proportionally, we far outpaced organizations with budgets over fifty times larger than ours demonstrating that when tech workers show up we can be meaningful contributors to the political coalitions we need to make our economy work for more people.
This is all down to the work that those 47 volunteers did, whether it was showing up at signature-gathering events, taking the petitions into their offices to get their co-workers to sign, or bringing it along to social events and enlisting their friends. When the ballot initiative wins in two years, you can take credit for restoring much-needed funds to the state’s budget.
Our signature gathering campaign has concluded, but the road to qualification is long. Read on to learn what’s next on our path to putting split-roll reform on the 2020 ballot, and for our campaign in general.
The Long Road to Qualification
The ballot measure qualification process is long and complicated, here’s an outline of everything we can expect in our next steps.
July 2018
First, the coalition will do an internal check of signatures for validity, and to ensure the coalition member organizations, like TechEquity, have together gathered enough signatures to qualify. How many signatures are enough? We need 585,407 valid voter signatures, or 8% of all the votes cast in the last Gubernatorial election, to qualify. It’s expected for a typical campaign that 20 to 40 percent of all signatures gathered will be invalid for a variety of reasons. Campaigns must gather many more than the 585,407 needed to qualify to account for those signatures that are illegible, belong to someone not registered to vote, or otherwise invalid.
August 2018
All signatures must be submitted no later than 180 days after petitioning begins, in our case that’s late August. Petitions will be sent by the coalition to each county registrar of voters or elections office. First, the county offices across the state do a “raw count” of the petitions to determine the total number of signatures received. This phase in the process does not check the validity of the signatures. The raw count allows state and local officials to determine whether it’s necessary to do a more in-depth evaluation of the signatures. If the Secretary of State is notified by the counties that the total number of signatures submitted is below 585,407 the measure fails to qualify and does not advance to the next phase of checks. If the total number of signatures is above 585,407, the county officials will then conduct a “random sample check.” In a random sample check, county officials take a random sample of ten percent of all signatures submitted to them and check each signature for validity. The result of the random sample check is extremely important to the process, a bad sample can trigger a full check, delaying validation for weeks. A good random sample means that the number of valid signatures is greater than 110% of the total signatures needed, or 643,948 signatures. This allows the measure to qualify with out a “full check,” meaning every signature needs to be validated one by one.
September 2018
So long as we don’t trigger a full check, we expect our signatures to be verified and our measure to be certified by September.
September 2018 and Beyond
Once our measure has officially qualified, we will have a lot of work to do in educating voters before 2020. The vast majority of California voters have never heard of Prop 13 or have very little understanding of it’s devastating effect on our state. We’ll need to lead a massive voter contact effort to ensure that voters are informed. We’re working closely with the Schools and Communities First Coalition to develop a strong voter contact campaign. Stay tuned here and sign up for our newsletter to make sure you are notified when our voter contact campaign launches later this summer!
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We believe the tech industry, built on the internet — the most democratizing communications platform in human history — can and should contribute to broad-based economic growth that benefits everyone.
