Davis, CA – Barring something truly unexpected Measure Q is going to pass by a comfortable margin. That’s twice this year that community members have attempted to send a message by defeating a tax measure – but come up well short.
In the spring, it was a largely separate group or groups of folks, who attempted to send a message to the school district. Needing a two-thirds margin in order to pass the measure, the effort largely fell short and the parcel tax passed.
Because Measure Q only required a bare majority to pass, it always seemed like this was an uphill battle. You had to fight against tendencies in a community like Davis to pass tax measures. You had a tax measure that frankly wasn’t going to be a hard hit on most people’s pocket books. And in a presidential election there was going to be a huge turnout meaning that you had to convince people who don’t follow city issues that a one-percent sales tax increase was a bad idea.
On some levels, I suspect that the folks opposing the tax knew that this was a tough lift and they simply wanted to raise concerns they had about the leadership in the city.
In some ways they succeeded. There were long and contentious debates over Nextdoor. Measure Q seemed to push the council election in District 2 into the background.
At the end of the day, I’m not sure what they accomplished.
They started out with a core argument that the council is out of touch with the community.
But is it? Not only did 62 percent of the community back the tax measure, there really is no sign of discontentment in most of the public. After all, two of the three council districts the incumbent ran unopposed and in the third, probably the candidate considered most establishment is the one that prevailed – relatively easily.
That led one person I talked with yesterday to speculate maybe it’s not the council that is the one out of touch with the community.
Indeed I think there will be a tendency to write off the opposition as the portion of the community that is angry, locked out of power for the most part, therefore forced to wage these sort of proxy wars to undermine the county leadership.
That has occurred most notably on growth issues. It has been well over a decade since a truly slow growther has won a seat on council. That prospect is further diminished by the nature of district elections and it’s single member, winner-takes-all formula.
The opposition in this town seems to be able to block land use projects, but not much else. That fact could set up an epic battle next spring when one of the Measure J projects comes to a vote and opponents will be geared up to block it despite potential threats from the state if they succeed.
While it is tempting to write this off as a failed revolt of the vocal minority, I offer here another perspective that I don’t believe that the opponents of Measure Q were altogether wrong.
I’ve said it many times, but I question the wisdom of exclusively prioritizing a revenue measure when there were other serious issues that need to be tackled. They compounded that mistake with the ill-advised move on the commissions – and people can write that off all they want – the core of opposition to Measure Q was based on their anger over the commission decision and the process by which it took place.
I also remain very concerned about the state of the city’s finances. A decade and a half ago the Vanguard was leading the charge on this issue. Concerns about compensation increases that seemed out of whack, pensions, and unfunded infrastructure were of great concern. Those problems persist.
But part of the problem that the city faces is that it has to compete with other communities in the region for quality employees, and during a time of both inflation and the housing crisis driving up housing costs, that’s going to put a lot of pressure on the city’s finances.
Measure Q was never going solve this problem, but $11 million a year is a helluva band-aid.
As we have been arguing for over a decade now, the city’s retail base is below par for a community its size. Our analysis from 2015 showed the city lagging in per capita sales tax. The fact that a one-percent sales tax increase buys Daivs $11 million annually but buys the smaller West Sacramento $20 million is a sobering fact.
The city’s economic development plans have largely been thwarted by the loss of Rob White also well the failure of three economic development projects in 2016, 2020 and 2022.
The city will attempt to reboot that through the Downtown Plan and the hiring of a new economic development director, but the problems that led to the failures of the plans that emerged from 2010 to 2014, remain squarely in place.
So it’s not that I think the opposition to Measure Q was wrong, it’s simply in the end, I thought the defeat of Measure Q would make things worse rather than better.
But yes, at the end of the day, the criticism of lack of leadership on council continue to resonate with me and I remain concerned about the city’s long-term fiscal sustainability as well as issues of housing, affordable housing, and homelessness.
We have a lot of challenges and not one of them was solved at the last ballot box.
This was a resounding victory for the council and reflects their good judgment. Had they gone with a tax for a specified purpose, it would have failed.
Councilmembers such as Donna Neville were patient and polite as they argued on social media for the passage. The opposition was shrill and made the mistake, once again, of attacking popular incumbents.
The margin was higher than I expected, and that’s partly due to the very poorly conceived opposition campaign and the whole tone of their commentary. Basically there’s several people who have just guaranteed that they won’t have a place at the table going forward.
With this now behind them, the council can turn to other issues. I think it’s safe to say that housing, and hopefully economic development, will be their next focus.
“Basically there’s several people who have just guaranteed that they won’t have a place at the table going forward.”
Says you. I’ll bet there’s “several people” who beg to differ.