Santa Rosa City Council split over how to put tax measures before voters

Santa Rosa voters may get to weigh in this fall on the future of two sales taxes supporting key city services, but the City Council was torn Tuesday over the best way to go about it.

Some council members felt the tax measures should be combined, while others thought voters needed the opportunity to vote on them separately.

The issue won’t be formally decided until next week, but Tuesday’s debate gave a glimpse of the divisions that remain over the best way to address the issues facing each tax.

Hanging over it all was council members’ awareness that if they couldn’t get on the same page, voters would be less likely to do so.

“I’m very worried about taking this to the voters with a split vote of the council,” Councilman Chris Coursey said.

One tax measure is set to expire and the other has been criticized as flawed.

Measure P, which was passed in 2010, is an eight-year quarter-cent sales tax designed to help the city through the worst of its post-recession budget woes. It’s running out in two years, and the city wants to ask the voters this fall to extend the measure for another eight years, something that polls show voters strongly support.

Measure O, which passed in 2004, is a 20-year quarter-cent sales tax for public safety services. The tax requires the city fund those services to a baseline level that increases every year by inflation. The mandate has been called out by critics who say it forces the city, in times of recession and without a vote of six members of the council, to fund police, fire and gang prevention programs at unsustainable levels, to the detriment of other departments, like parks.

Some council members want to ask voters to remove the annual inflationary increase and set the baseline at the allocation in the current budget.

Several council members argued that the two measures should be combined into a single measure on the fall ballot. They argued it would prevent public safety groups or others from opposing the Measure O piece because doing so would jeopardize the Measure P portion, which raises $9 million annually for the city.

After Mayor John Sawyer, Vice Mayor Tom Schwedhelm and Ernesto Olivares opposed the combined proposal, it fell short of gaining the required five votes. Schwedhelm and Olivares are retired Santa Rosa police officers who have steadfastly opposed amending Measure O. They supported placing it on the ballot separately.

The council then voted on the measures separately. Placing Measure O on the ballot passed 7-0. The proposal for Measure P passed 5-2, with Gary Wysocky and Julie Combs voting against.

Both said they felt voters needed to be assured that the problems inherent in Measure O were being fixed before they would support extending Measure P.

Wysocky said he always viewed the measure and linked, and said separating them would amount to a “bait and switch.”

Combs said she worried that extending Measure P without fixing Measure O would mean Measure P funds would continue to “drain into” public safety programs.

“We were paying $1 million into the police budget when we could not get $200,000 to keep the bathrooms open and clean in our parks,” Combs said.

Coursey said he voted in favor of the Measure P going to the voters in the hopes the council could somehow come together between now and next week, when the council will formally move them onto the ballot.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com.