WARNING: This article is biased and contains the personal views of the author. The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of LA Mundi News.
As LAUSD flounders amid teachers’ strikes and a history of incompetence, Mayor Eric Garcetti has called on voters to blindly approve Measure EE in the June 4 special election, saying that it will boost our public school system. But business groups and homeowner’s associations are worried. Why?
Well, for one, Measure EE will raise Los Angeles (and greater Los Angeles) landowners’ taxes. For every square foot of land you own, you have to pay an extra sixteen cents (this blanket measure doesn’t account for the value of the land). And although that may not sound like much, each landowner will have to pay an extra (on average) $500 a year, in addition to the (on average) $2000 each landowner pays to the LAUSD public school system. But that’s not the worst of it.
Even landowners who don’t benefit from LAUSD services will pay the extra tax, already dubbed “the yard tax”. For example, a middle-class family who sends its three children to a private school to preserve unique cultural heritage (as is the case with many ethnic groups, like Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians) who also owns a large tract of land in a low land-value area will pay more than a family who rents in Beverly Hills and utilizes the public school system.
There have also been questions of legal issues regarding Measure EE, but they have mostly died down as a result of the mayor’s consistent pushes on the issue.
The bigger problem, according to business associations like BOMA/GLA, isn’t just the money, but what the money is being used for.
We all want an effective public education system for our children and support greater funding to get there. Unfortunately, money from the tax won’t add resources to classrooms. It will be used to temporarily fix a budget deficit and to pay for LAUSD’s over-promised pension and health insurance costs. District bureaucrats and defenders of the failed status quo want taxpayers to bail out a school district with a history of red ink, appalling education results, declining enrollment, runaway administrative hiring, and exploding retirement and health care costs.
BOMA/GLA
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