Nation is watching as city votes on sugary-drink tax proposal
Both sides make urgent push to reach voters in election that could make or break movement’s momentum
Juliet Staveley spent a cold and snowy Saturday on the phone in an office along Cerrillos Road filled with volunteers, posters and all the trappings of a heated political campaign. She was urging residents who already have been bombarded for months with phone calls, mailers, TV and radio ads and other campaign tactics to go out and vote Tuesday in favor of a proposed tax on sodas and other sugary beverages to fund preschool programs in Santa Fe.
“There’s a lot of people who aren’t answering,” she said before quickly dialing the next voter on her list, as nearly a dozen other volunteers with the Pre-K for Santa Fe group worked on their own lists.
In the final stretch of one of the city’s most divisive special elections, there’s a sense of urgency and worry among proponents of the 2-cents-per-ounce tax that voters might reject it.
“I’m just going to get to the point,” campaign manager Sandra Wechsler wrote in an email to supporters and others Friday morning. “This election is very close. In fact, it is a dead heat.”
Whether Wechsler was sandbagging to get people to vote, a defeat in Santa Fe would be a setback for the soda tax movement, which for years was overpowered by the beverage industry but more recently has scored a string of victories in cities across the country. And after pouring more than $2 million into the Santa Fe campaign, both sides have piqued voters’ interest.
Early voting numbers suggest that turnout will be much higher than the last special election in Santa Fe, when a tax was also on the ballot.
More than 7,800 ballots were cast in early voting, which ended Friday. By comparison, a total of 8,404 people voted the last time the city held a special election, in 2009. In that election, the city asked voters whether buyers of homes costing more than $750,000 should pay a tax to help support affordable housing
initiatives in the community. The measure was narrowly defeated.
In this election, the votes so far have been fairly evenly distributed among three of the city’s four districts. According to preliminary figures provided by the City Clerk’s Office on Friday, 2,412 of the early ballots were cast in the north-side City Council District 1; 2,159 ballots in District 2, which covers the southeast-side of the city; 851 votes in District 3, which encompasses southwest Santa Fe; and 2,391 votes in the city’s southwest-central council District 4. The result of the early ballots won’t be known until all votes are counted on election night.
“Across the city, Santa Fe voters appear to be energized and ready to have their voices heard at the ballot box,” said David Huynh, a spokesman for the anti-soda tax PAC, whose supporters were also out in force Saturday, making campaign signs and knocking on doors.
“Voters are tired of seeing the cost of living in Santa Fe skyrocket year in and year out,” he said, “this time with a proposed tax that would drastically raise prices on everyday beverages and result in loss of jobs.”
Backers of Santa Fe’s proposed tax on distributors, which are expected to pass some, if not most, of the tax on to consumers, say it would generate an estimated $7.7 million annually to send nearly 1,000 3- and 4-yearolds to preschool, though not every child will attend for free. Rather, the proposal calls for giving the neediest families priority, so some parents wouldn’t have to pay anything while others would be subject to a sliding scale.
The ballot question has created a whirlwind of campaign activity seldom seen in Santa Fe.
The two political action committees on opposite sides of the issue have poured more than $1 million each into the battle for votes. The next deadline for campaign finance reports is Monday, but in reports filed last week, the political action committee working in favor of the proposed tax had a slight fundraising edge over the anti-tax group, funded primarily by the American Beverage Association.
Wechsler predicts turnout in Tuesday’s election will be between 30 percent and 35 percent — a number not seen in recent city elections, including the 2014 mayor’s race, when about 28 percent of Santa Fe’s registered voters turned out to vote, or the 2016 municipal election, when voter turnout citywide was about 15 percent.
“This election will be extremely close,” Wechsler said. “Every vote will make a difference.”
The voter turnout so far in District 4 could be telling. The district, historically one of the lowest-voting districts in past elections, is represented by City Councilor Ron Trujillo, who opposes the proposed tax and cast the lone dissenting vote when the governing body decided to hold a special election on the issue. District 4 is a largely middle-class area with longtime residents living in some of the city’s big postwar housing subdivisions.
The early votes represent 18 percent of the district’s 13,349 registered voters. By comparison, 14 percent of registered voters in Districts 1 and 2 — which traditionally have the city’s highest turnout — voted early.
Mayor Javier Gonzales, who is championing the proposal, declined to say whether he thinks the measure will pass or fail. Gonzales, who was in El Paso on Saturday to pick up an award for Santa Fe’s immigrant-friendly policies, instead touted an endorsement from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe. The archdiocese jumped into the fray after a prominent local priest, the Rev. Adam Lee Ortega y Ortiz, rector of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, wrote on his personal Facebook page that the tax should be defeated because it is politically motivated.
“Like me, they have heard Pope Francis’ call to do all we can to support our children,” Gonzales told The New Mexican in an email Saturday.
“I put this proposal forward because I know two things: what we have now isn’t working, and pre-K is the key to tilting the tables back in favor of our kids,” the mayor said. “This is our chance, and I’m calling on Santa Fe to embrace it and go vote ‘yes’ on Tuesday.”
There are just over 53,000 registered voters in Santa Fe, a city that soda tax supporters nationwide will be watching closely as election results roll in Tuesday night.
“Every [soda tax] that passes encourages another community to try to pass it,” said Marion Nestle, a New York University professor and author of the 2015 book, Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning).
The soda tax movement started decades ago, with cities and states imposing either small sales or excise taxes on sugary beverages to generate revenue.
In a few states, voters repealed legislatively enacted beverage taxes through a popular vote. However, in those cases, the taxes targeted more than just drinks: in Maine, voters repealed a tax on wine, beer and soft drinks in 2008; and voters in Washington state rejected a tax that targeted candy, soft drinks, bottled water and some processed foods in 2010.
A new generation of sugarydrink taxes began in 2012 with proposals in the California cities of Richmond and El Monte.
Both initiatives failed after the beverage industry “came in gangbusters,” Nestle said.
“In the Richmond campaign, which has been heavily analyzed, there was no community organizing. None whatsoever,” she said. “There was no attempt to frame the issue as anything other than a public health measure.”
Proponents of the tax didn’t anticipate the “aggressiveness and intensity” of an industry with deep pockets, said Jim Krieger, executive director of Healthy Food America, a Seattle-based advocacy group that supports soda taxes.
“Basically, they were using the Big Tobacco playbook and relentlessly applying that, and that was just a much higher level of intensity than I think anybody was expecting in Richmond, for example,” he said.
In 2014, the cities of Berkeley and San Francisco proposed soda taxes with mixed results. Berkeley’s passed, but San Francisco’s failed, even though it received 55 percent of the vote. Because San Francisco earmarked the revenue for a specific purpose, it needed a supermajority threshold, or twothirds of the vote, to pass.
Nestle said billionaire philanthropist and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg supported Berkeley’s soda tax financially. As mayor of New York, Bloomberg successfully pushed to limit the size of sugary drinks sold there before a court struck down the rule in 2014. He has contributed more than $1 million in cash and in-kind contributions to Santa Fe’s proposal.
“Bloomberg … didn’t put money into San Francisco because he didn’t think it would win,” she said. “Bloomberg only supports campaigns [his foundation] thinks it can win.”
Two years later, San Francisco, along with four other municipalities, including Philadelphia, scored major victories when voters approved soda taxes in their cities. That same year, commissioners in Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, passed a penny-per-ounce beverage tax.
“In 2016, lots of soda taxes passed, so everybody learned from the initial experiences,” Nestle said.
“Berkeley, I thought, had a brilliant, just absolutely brilliant frame,” Nestle said. “The frame is the way you market the program, and Berkeley’s frame was Berkeley against Big Soda, so it was a very, very clear statement that if you were for the soda tax, you were making a statement to corporate America that you don’t like corporations trying to sell you things that aren’t good for you.”
Big cities in the Pacific Northwest could be the next to vote on sugary-drink taxes. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray plans to propose a 2-cents-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks to fund education programs, and Portland, Ore., health advocates have started collecting signatures in the hopes of getting a soda tax on the ballot in Multnomah County.
“I can’t disclose the names, but there are at least a half-dozen other cities working on taxes right now and considering rolling them out,” Krieger said.
Even if Santa Fe’s soda tax proposal fails, Krieger already considers the initiative a success.
“Just by virtue of having a tax campaign, you raise awareness among the public that sugary drinks are unhealthy and that sugary drinks aren’t just soda. They’re fruit drinks. They’re sports drinks. They’re energy drinks,” he said. “All of these have the same negative health effects, so the campaign itself is a great public health education campaign, and the fact that you’re labeling a product as unhealthy and worthy of a tax also sends that message out.” The stakes are high, he said. “I think the industry is viewing sugary-drink taxes as the single policy most threatening to their business interests, so they are willing to campaign and spend relentlessly and aggressively to defeat these taxes,” Krieger said.
“After they lost six out of six campaigns last year, which was unprecedented, they’re even more worried now and willing to spend [large amounts of money] to try to keep this from becoming the norm of taxing sugary drinks just like it’s normal to tax tobacco right now,” he added.
Sentiments are so strong on both sides of the issue, even a heavy spring snowstorm Saturday couldn’t quash a day of campaigning.
Community activist Gloria Mendoza, who lives in La Cienega outside city limits, said she almost didn’t drive into Santa Fe to participate in an anti-soda tax sign-making gathering at the Boxcar Bar and Grill in the Santa Fe Railyard.
“The weather was really bad out in La Cienega, and then I thought to myself, ‘You know what, Gloria? How important is this?’ I said, ‘This is so damn important. I have to go.’ And I got in my car.”
Saturday afternoon, Alina Guido knocked on doors in the Bellamah neighborhood in council District 4 and urged residents to vote against the proposed tax. Guido was among about 30 paid workers canvassing Santa Fe neighborhoods Saturday.
In the 2900 block of Alamosa Drive, Guido encountered voters such as Robert Madrid, who was awakened from a nap and said he had already voted against the proposed tax, and Wayne Carrier, who said he planned to vote against it Tuesday.
“I’m not saying they’re great, but me myself, I enjoy a good, cold soda every now and again,” Carrier said. “So no, I do not want to pay more.”