New Tax Nixed!

Residents of the San Diego Rural Fire District voted recently on whether to assess all property owners a new tax ($120/year for homes, other amounts for other kinds of property). The tax was voted down, by a very narrow margin. The votes were weighted according to assessed value of property, but the margin was so small that a single vote could have swung the outcome the other way.

I was against this proposal, for reasons I detailed in this post. I'm glad it failed. Two things particularly bother me, however.

The first is the cost of running the election. When I saw the slick, multi-color pamphlet promoting the new tax (this came with the ballot, and no counter-argument was included), I knew this was an expensive election. Now I know how expensive it was:

The election, which was run by a private firm, Koppel & Gruber Public Finance of San Marcos, cost about $26,000, Nissen said. The district mailed 3,458 ballots. On Wednesday night, two members of the consulting firm and three people from the fire district counted the 1,338 ballots that were returned.

That's money we could have used for actual fire protection. Just to cite one obvious example: we could have cleared a lot of brush around structures for $26,000!

The other issue bothering me is the lack of secrecy in the vote. As the Union-Tribune article says:

At a public hearing before votes were counted Wednesday, several residents said they were upset about the non-secret ballots. They said they feared firefighters wouldn't respond to an emergency at their houses if they voted against the tax measure.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that having firemen count the vote, looking at every ballot, is going to be intimidating to some voters. The most likely result is that some voters who opposed the tax measure would simply not vote – afraid to vote no, unwilling to vote yes.

Shame on the Fire District for (a) wasting taxpayer money on a sham election, and (b) structuring the election to intimidate the voters.

I'd sure like to see reform of our disjoint fire districts along the same lines as the way San Diego County Operations reformed itself decades ago. Governments from around the world come to see our county operations, marveling at its efficiency and service levels (which are, in fact, stellar compared with most governments – though, sadly, not when compared with for-profit businesses). People everywhere marvel at the unrelieved stupidity of our fire protection organizations, and they wonder how many massive firestorms the population will have to endure before they throw the bums out and get a real fire protection organization...