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Why Kansas Needs a Proposition 13

The following article appeared in The San Diego Union-Tribune on October 4, 2005:

Prop. 13 started slowly, turned into a groundswell

By John Marelius
STAFF WRITER

The man credited with launching the greatest American tax revolt since the Boston Tea Party cut his political teeth working for the man blamed for the country's worst economic disaster.

As a young Utah newspaper editor, the late Howard Jarvis signed on as an advance man for a whistle-stop train trip during President Herbert Hoover's ill-fated 1932 re-election campaign.

Jarvis, a one-time amateur baseball player, would later say his job had been to wield a pillow to deflect the rotten fruits and vegetables hurled at the reviled president.

"I'll bet I saved him from getting hit with 500 tomatoes." Jarvis claimed. "It served me in good stead for Proposition 13."

He dabbled in politics for decades after moving to Los Angeles -- running for office and losing, sponsoring ballot initiatives that didn't qualify, showing up at public meetings to rant about taxes.

"He was a gadfly and proud of it," said Joel Fox, former president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and a close adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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Jarvis and Sacramento anti-tax activist Paul Gann joined forces in 1978 to sponsor a ballot initiative that would slash runaway property taxes by two-thirds and limit future assessment increases until the property was sold.

It would become Proposition 13, which was passed by a 2-to-1 ratio and set off a nationwide tax revolt.

It also was an example -- arguably the last example -- of the initiative process working the way Gov. Hiram Johnson intended when he won its public approval in 1911.

"Prop. 13 is exactly what Hiram Johnson had in mind," said Allan Hoffenblum, publisher of the "California Target Book," which analyzes state political campaigns.

"It really was a crisis. The state Legislature wasn't addressing it. People were losing their homes because they couldn't pay their property taxes. Howard Jarvis, who was seen as something of a kook, quietly got it on the ballot."

Jarvis held forth from the threadbare office of the Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association. The shabby office on a rundown stretch of Sixth Street, just west of downtown Los Angeles, was a good fit for Jarvis, whose blustery demeanor and rumpled suits matched his social graces.

"He had one drawer that he would spit tobacco juice in and another drawer that he had a bottle of vodka in," recalled Stu Mollrich, a young aide on the Proposition 13 campaign.

Proposition 13 hardly seemed a juggernaut in the making early on. A succession of tax-cut initiatives had qualified for the ballot and been voted down during the previous decade. The ragtag collection of homeowner groups supporting it seemed no match for the opposition: big business, organized labor and most of the major political figures of both parties.

A month before the June 1978 primary election, a Field Poll found the electorate statistically divided over Proposition 13 -- 42 percent in favor, 39 percent opposed.

But beneath the surface, something remarkable was happening. As the "No on 13" campaign was raking in big donations from the state's largest businesses and labor unions, proponents were keeping pace, almost entirely through small contributions from homeowners.

Mollrich's company, the Newport Beach direct-mail firm Butcher-Forde, brought in an unexpected windfall for the "Yes on 13" campaign by obtaining property records and sending letters to homeowners telling them what their property taxes were and how much they would save if Proposition 13 passed.

"We were able to personalize it and show people in quantifiable terms what they would save," Mollrich said. "It had the additional benefit of being true."

Then a succession of events helped propel Proposition 13 from a dead-even race to a rout: The Legislature placed a too-clever-by-half alternative on the ballot, the Los Angeles County assessor issued assessment notices showing that most homeowners were about to have their taxes go through the roof, and the state was revealed to be sitting on a massive budget surplus.

A quarter-century later, Proposition 13 remains a powerful political club. In its immediate aftermath, it was a politically lethal one.

Hoffenblum, then a strategist for the California Republican Party, targeted 16 Democratic congressional and legislative incumbents in the November 1978 general election. All had opposed Proposition 13; 14 of the 16 were defeated.

"To voters," Hoffenblum said, "if you were tagged as opposed to Proposition 13, that meant you were for tax increases."

The URL of this article is:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051004/news_1n4prop13.html