Taxpayer protections are under attack in California, but they’re not dead yet.

Under Proposition 13 (1978) and Proposition 218 (1996), voters have the right to vote on local taxes. Last week, the city of Long Beach lost a court case in which it was arguing that it should be able to collect a sales tax that voters didn’t approve.

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Stephen Acquisto sided with state’s Department of Tax and Fee Administration, which had refused to collect the tax, and the Long Beach Reform Coalition, which was suing over it.

The dispute relates to two temporary sales tax increases and to the state law that caps local sales taxes at 2% on top of the state’s 7.25% sales tax. The problem occurred because the temporary taxes were not temporary and the cap was blown off.

Here’s how it happened. In 2016, Long Beach voters approved city Measure A, a 10-year temporary 1% sales tax that would take effect on January 1, 2017. On January 1, 2023, it would be reduced to 0.5%. On January 1, 2027, it would expire.

Sure it would.

By 2020, the city of Long Beach was asking voters to approve an extension of Measure A to prevent the tax from being reduced and to make it permanent.

However, the city had to work around a county sales tax increase that had passed in 2017, Measure H, a 0.25% sales tax to fund homelessness services. Because Long Beach was already at the 2% cap for local sales taxes when Measure H passed (Measure A’s 1% plus a 1% county sales tax for Metro, the transportation agency), the homelessness tax could not be collected in Long Beach until 2023, when the city’s tax was set to be reduced to 0.5%.

Measure H was set to expire in 2027, because it, too, was a 10-year temporary tax.

Sure it was.

The Measure A extension in 2020 was crafted carefully to collect the most money allowed under the 2% cap on local sales taxes. The measure specified that the rate would be 1% through 2022, then 0.75% through September 30, 2027, to accommodate the 0.25% county Measure H tax, then, because Measure H would expire on October 1, 2027, Long Beach would collect 1% again after that date.

The Measure A extension passed by 16 votes, 49,676 to 49,660, after trailing on election night and in every update of the vote until the very last one. The Long Beach Reform Coalition requested a recount, but because of new vote centers under the 2016 Voters Choice Act and new voting machines, the cost of locating and recounting the ballots from Long Beach had surged into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A lawsuit to obtain a recount at a reasonable cost was unsuccessful, and the recount could not be completed.

The narrow approval of Measure A demonstrates that voter approval of tax increases can be contentious, which explains why governments are so anxious to pitch them as “temporary.”

Four years after Long Beach’s “temporary” Measure A tax was made permanent, Los Angeles County voters approved county Measure A. It replaced the Measure H “temporary” tax permanently, it doubled the rate of the tax to 0.5%, and thanks to a special bill in the legislature, it was exempt from the cap of 2% on local sales taxes.

The Long Beach City Council promptly passed an ordinance to ditch the dip in the city’s Measure A tax rate that was intended to keep the total sales tax rate under the 2% cap while Measure H was collected. The newly permanent replacement for Measure H was exempt from the cap, knocking the local Long Beach sales tax total subject to the cap down to 1.75%. Though taxes had gone up, there was room to raise them even more. So Long Beach did.

However, the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration refused to collect the extra 0.25%, citing Proposition 218 from 1996; voters approved the city’s Measure A renewal with specific rates and dates, and that’s binding. The court agreed, saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

Taxpayers have rights in California, though it’s a costly battle to keep them.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley