Court Opinion

ID: 9551675
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:57:08.989191+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:24:22.629976
License: Public Domain

RICHARDSON, J.
I respectfully dissent.
For the reasons expressed at length so recently in my dissenting opinion in Los Angeles County Transportation Com. v. Richmond (1982) 31 Cal.3d 197, 209-219 [182 Cal.Rptr. 324, 643 P.2d 941], I conclude that petitioner’s payroll and gross receipts tax is invalid. Not having drawn the support of any of my colleagues, I believe that no useful purpose would be served by repeating my analysis here. Nonetheless, I conclude that this tax is a “special tax” which is constitutionally deficient because it was not approved by “two-thirds vote of the qualified electors” of the City and County of San Francisco (City), as required by article XIII A, section 4 of the California Constitution.
Using a very restricted interpretation of the term “special tax,” the majority decides that petitioner’s tax is exempt from the limitations of the constitutional provision. The majority thereby widens still further the hole which they have cut in that protective fence which the people of California thought they had constructed around their collective purse by the adoption of article XIII A, a fence which the majority first breached in Richmond.
*58In effect, petitioner City is allowed to replace the general revenues concededly lost to it by article XIII A’s limitation on real property taxes through the simple device of a new tax, adopted by a bare majority rather than by a “two-thirds” vote of the electorate. The purpose of the new tax remains identical with that of the old—namely, to increase the general revenue of City. Thus, the constitutional limitations of section 4 are easily circumvented except in that extremely narrow category of taxes which the majority defines as “special.” With due respect to my colleagues, it seems to me that the majority thereby rejects the clearly expressed intent of the people.
I remain mystified as to how, as the majority claims (ante, p. 57), such an interpretation “will provide the voters with the ‘effective’ property tax relief” which we identified as the purpose of article XIII A in Amador Valley Joint Union High Sch. Dist. v. State Bd. of Equalization (1978) 22 Cal.3d 208, 231 [149 Cal.Rptr. 239, 583 P.2d 1281].
I would deny the petition.