County sees uphill road to 1-cent sales tax hike
For all their research and charts demonstrating the urgency of the situation, county staff recognize a limit to how welcoming voters in unincorporated Kern might be to the idea of raising their sales tax by 1 percentage point specifically to improve local public services.
They recall the last time a similar proposal came up, in 2018, and how it failed by a vote of 65 percent against to 35 percent in favor, despite a warning from Sheriff Donny Youngblood that without the tax increase, his already understaffed department might have to close substations in the outlying reaches of the county.
Kern’s revenue base continues to diminish: Profound threats facing the local oil and ag industries have become more dire, and new revenue to replace them has not come forward. The resulting fiscal crunch undermines the county’s ability to pay for crime prevention, libraries, emergency response and other services for Kern residents living outside cities.
Staff aren’t supposed to campaign one way or the other, but they say there’s a strong case for joining the 58 percent of California counties that have raised the minimum sales tax to support local services. But they’re not kidding themselves about how tough that’s going to be in a place as skeptical of tax increases as Kern County is.
“A tax measure in Kern County is never a slam dunk,” county Chief Operations Officer James Zervis told The Californian on Thursday.
A vote set for Tuesday would raise an estimated $54 million per year for vital services ranging from law enforcement and emergency medical response to mental health and addiction treatment and “general government use.” It would come with an oversight committee of residents from the unincorporated areas as part of an emphasis on transparency.
Four of five county supervisors would have to vote in favor of putting the proposal on the ballot if the measure is to go before voters in the general election Nov. 8.
County staff see hope in survey results from May and June, when 56 percent of survey respondents living in unincorporated Kern indicated they recognize the county faces a “great need” for additional funding.
When asked if they are interested in a potential, unincorporated-only funding measure, 64 percent responded with a “yes” or “probably yes.”
“They see the need and they want at least the opportunity to consider it,” Zervis said.
The number of unincorporated residents the county surveyed, 387, represents just 13 one-hundredths of 1 percent of Kern’s 303,557 voters in unincorporated Kern.
To take effect, the proposal would have to win a simple majority — at least 50 percent of votes cast plus one.
If there is significant opposition to the tax proposal, it did not turn up for last Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. That said, there had been little indication on the meeting’s agenda that a staff presentation of survey results and other research would lead to discussion of a tax increase.
Representatives of different county departments voiced support for the measure immediately following the staff presentation. So did one of Kern’s most prominent taxpayer representatives, Executive Director Michael Turnipseed of KernTax, the Kern County Taxpayers Association.
He focused on expectations tax property revenues from the oil and gas industry will continue to fall, maybe drastically because of an asset writedown proposal before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission he estimated could chop county receipts from the industry by a quarter.
“KernTax feels that this affects the quality of life for everyone,” especially in the unincorporated county areas, he said. “You need to ... ask them, ‘What kind of government do you want?’ Because the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.
“And nobody likes to pay more than they have to, but we are on a path,” he continued. “There’s nothing that the staff can do on this path, there’s nothing really you can do on this path except let people decide their own destiny.”
County staff’s rationale for raising the sales tax rate in Kern’s unincorporated areas to 8.25 percent largely centers on a seven-year slide in property tax receipts used to fund various public services.
Presentation materials put together by staff highlight a nearly 4 percent increase in non-petroleum property valuations between 2014 and 2021 — juxtaposed with a 23 percent decline in oil and gas property assessments during the same period.
Chief Administrative Officer Ryan Alsop noted county government has cut almost $60 million from its budget since 2017, and that efforts continue to make its operations more efficient. But with an inflation-adjusted decline in discretionary income of 6 percent since 2014, he said, “We are losing revenue and it’s getting worse.”