Sacramento-area community college tries to fool voters by claiming bond won’t raise taxes

I’ve lived in the Sacramento region for more than a half-century and paid local property taxes, some of which support the Los Rios Community College District.

My latest property tax bills, received just a few days ago, contain levies to service bonds that the district issued in years past. I’ve never begrudged those taxes, even though neither I nor members of my family have ever attended Los Rios classes. My sense is that its four campuses provide vital, low-cost opportunities to prepare students for transfers to four-year colleges or training leading to gainful employment.

In fact, I would say that California’s more than 100 community colleges overall provide immense bang for the taxpayer bucks they receive.

However, Los Rios demeans itself by trying to fool voters into passing the new $1.1 billion bond issue on next Tuesday’s ballot. The proposal’s summary on the ballot reads like an advertisement rather than a factual statement:

“With funds that cannot be taken by the state, public disclosure of all spending, and no increase in tax rates, shall Los Rios Community College District’s measure to prepare students, workers, veterans for jobs with affordable college and career training facilities; provide safe drinking water; and repair leaky roofs be adopted authorizing $1.1 billion in bonds with legal rates, average levies below $17 per $100,000 assessed valuation ($74,500,000 annually while outstanding), independent audits, oversight, and all funds staying local?”

The summary’s pledge of “no increase in tax rates” is untrue. Issuing bonds triggers an automatic property tax that the summary itself describes as “below $17 per $100,000 assessed valuation” to generate $74.5 million each year until 2051, to repay investors who purchase the bonds.

The assertion that the bonds will not increase tax rates is based on an assumption that the taxes currently being raised to repay previous bond issues will just continue on for additional decades. But whether that occurs depends on variable factors such as interest rates, and even if the current rate just continues it’s still an increase in taxes over what they otherwise would be.

Another troublesome aspect of the Los Rios proposal is found in the lists of potential projects the bonds would finance.

There’s an old adage that long-term debt, either personal or institutional, should not be spent on anything that doesn’t last as long as the repayment period. A number of the projects mentioned in the official voter guide for this bond issue are really maintenance items, such as fixing leaking roofs.

California’s local governments have a bad habit of neglecting maintenance to meet demands for other spending, such as salary increases, and then catching up by issuing long-term bonds.

Robert Jones, a former Los Rios trustee who wrote the ballot argument against the bond proposal, contends the district’s buildings are underused due to rising levels of remote learning.

“Why would the district want to add at least 32 new buildings when half of the existing buildings remain empty or underused,” Jones asks rhetorically. “What kind of logic is this?”

I’m not singling Los Rios out for criticism. It presents Measure H the way other local entities have, violating the spirit and perhaps the letter of a state law banning the use of taxpayer money “to support or oppose the approval or rejection of a ballot measure, or the election or defeat of a candidate, by the voters.”

Earlier this year, a state appellate court upheld a lower court ruling that Hemet Unified School District misleadingly declared in ballot language that a $225 million bond issue would not raise taxes, which hinged on exactly the same tricky rationale that Los Rios employs.