{"id":491469,"date":"2026-10-10T10:52:50","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T10:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/491469\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T10:52:50","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T10:52:50","slug":"prop-43-what-you-need-to-know-about-ca-tax-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/491469\/","title":{"rendered":"Prop. 43: What you need to know about CA tax initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Yue Stella Yu<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

In 2022, 58% of Los Angeles city voters approved a hefty tax on mansion sales.<\/p>\n

In 2024, 62% of Sonoma County voters backed a half-cent sales tax to fund wildfire response and other emergency services.<\/p>\n

Neither would have become law under the threshold set by Proposition 43<\/a>, which would require a two-thirds vote to pass any local tax measures that pay for specific services.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anti-tax advocates such as the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which helped get Prop. 43 on the ballot, say it should be harder<\/a> to tax Californians in a state where tax rates are already high. They argue that the measure would apply an equal standard to whoever wants a special tax, whether the government or citizen groups.<\/p>\n

Californians voted in 1996<\/a> to establish a two-thirds threshold for special tax measures. For decades, it was widely assumed that the threshold applied to all special taxes \u2014 until 2017, when the state Supreme Court said<\/a> the law specifically applied only to tax measures put on the ballot by local officials.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what about special taxes proposed by citizens? The court declined to clarify<\/a>. Confusion ensued. Since then, several high-profile local special tax measures placed on the ballot by nongovernmental groups have passed with a simple majority.<\/p>\n

Local government officials, labor unions and affordable housing advocates oppose the measure, arguing the proposal would make it difficult to collect revenues for essential services, such as firefighting, education and healthcare. They argue it would allow \u201cminority rule<\/a>\u201d because it would only take a third of voters to block special taxes.<\/p>\n

Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, said Prop. 43 would clarify that the two-thirds rule applies to all special taxes. He said that the two-thirds vote requirement dates to the 1849 state Constitution, which required a supermajority vote of state lawmakers to ask voters to borrow money.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe power to tax is (the) government\u2019s most draconian power,\u201d he told CalMatters. \u201cThe people of the state of California have made it a policy that when you are going to exercise that power, it should require a higher degree of consensus.\u201d<\/p>\n

But opponents say the initiative risks kneecapping funding for local services. Darrell Roberts, president of the California Professional Firefighters union, which represents 38,000 firefighters, called Prop. 43 an insurmountable roadblock<\/a> to raising money for community services. This November, Los Angeles voters will decide on a half-cent sales tax<\/a> proposal to hire more firefighters, Roberts noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder Prop. 43, it\u2019s clear that the powerful few would be protected at the expense of everyone else,\u201d he wrote in the Marin Independent Journal.<\/p>\n

Supporters have poured almost $15 million into the measure, nearly $10 million of it from the California Business Roundtable PAC. Opponents have collected $6 million, with the biggest contribution, $1.5 million, from a PAC affiliated with the Service Employees International Union of California.<\/p>\n

Prop. 43 originated from L.A.\u2019s \u2018mansion tax\u2019 fight<\/p>\n

Prop. 43 stems from a bitter fight over Los Angeles\u2019 \u201cmansion tax,\u201d a 4% tax on real estate sales of more than $5.3 million and 5.5% on sales more than $10.6 million. The tax rates rise with inflation. It has generated $1.4 billion<\/a> in revenue since it became law in 2023, according to the city.<\/p>\n

The tax angered real estate developers<\/a> and business groups, who said it impeded new construction of all kinds of developments, including affordable housing. The opposition fueled a campaign led by Coupal\u2019s group earlier this year to qualify a ballot measure that would have slashed real estate sales taxes statewide, applied the two-thirds vote requirement to all special taxes and revoked taxes that previously passed by a simple majority, such as the mansion tax.<\/p>\n

Prop. 43 is a more modest proposal resulting from an eleventh-hour negotiation between Coupal and Democratic leaders in the state Legislature to kill the more extensive version. Assemblymember Buffy Wicks<\/a>, an Oakland Democrat, authored the compromise language<\/a>. The measure is limited to the vote threshold and does not apply retroactively to taxes such as the mansion tax.<\/p>\n

Just days after the Legislature placed Prop. 43 on the ballot, Wicks said she is \u201cadamantly opposed\u201d to it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe clock was running out, and we had a choice to make: Leave a retroactive measure on the ballot that threatened billions in local funding, or accept a much narrower constitutional amendment that I still believed was bad policy,\u201d Wicks said<\/a> in a social media post.<\/p>\n

Is there public appetite?<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t Coupal\u2019s first rodeo. In 2024, his group sponsored a much broader ballot measure to make it harder to raise taxes, but the California Supreme Court unanimously blocked<\/a> it before the election, deeming it an illegal attempt to change the state\u2019s constitution.<\/p>\n

How will a narrower Prop. 43 perform this year?\u00a0<\/p>\n

A September survey<\/a> from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found 51% of likely voters would vote no on Prop. 43, versus just 43% who would vote yes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Coupal hopes the proposal taps into voters\u2019 concerns about affordability and their frustration with the high cost of living in California.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in a general climate right now where Californians really feel overtaxed,\u201d he said. \u201cCalifornia needs to prioritize its spending before it asks for more.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Yue Stella Yu, CalMatters This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491470,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,1708,9,8,35072,47,1694],"class_list":["post-491469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-elections","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-election-2026","tag-los-angeles","tag-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}