Santa Rosa voters get two chances to tweak tax measures

Santa Rosa voters will get the chance to decide this fall whether they want to extend one quarter-cent sales tax and tweak another.

The City Council on Tuesday put aside political differences and unanimously agreed to place proposed changes to Measure O and Measure P on the November ballot.

The vote was a reversal from last week when two council members, Gary Wysocky and Julie Combs, voted against putting the Measure P extension on the ballot.

Both reasoned that extending Measure P, the eight-year sales tax passed in 2010 to bail out the city’s budget, should have been packaged as a single measure with a proposal to amend Measure O, the 20-year public safety sales tax passed in 2004.

But, lacking the votes required to link the two, they agreed with their council colleagues that voters should have the chance to approve both separately.

“While I am disappointed that these two ballot measures have not been linked … we very much need this tax measure to be extended,” Combs said.

Wysocky said he worried that separating the two items left open the possibility that public safety unions or groups aligned with them might mount a campaign to convince voters to leave Measure O funding alone.

Critics have argued that Measure O is flawed because of the mechanism that requires the city, absent a vote of six members of the council, to fund baseline police, fire and gang prevention programs at unsustainable levels. Voters will be asked in November to amend Measure O by removing the requirement that it increase with inflation annually.

Both taxes raise about $9 million per year for the city.

Wysocky said he felt the chance of both measures passing would have been higher had they been linked, but his colleagues disagreed.

“There is a time to join together to do what’s best for the town, even though I think the better solution would have been a combined measure,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.