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The Mountain View Whisman School District is eyeing a parcel tax for the November ballot, but polling shows that it might be a tight race to get the necessary two-thirds support.
The district hired a polling firm to survey voters about their support for potential parcel tax options. Of the three versions polled, the most popular got support from 67% of respondents, just over the 66.67% threshold needed to pass and well within the poll’s margin of error.
The district’s current parcel tax raises roughly $2.8 million annually and runs through June 2025. The school board is looking to get a new one passed before it expires.
The existing tax, approved in 2017, levies a flat charge of $191 on each parcel of land within the district’s boundaries, both residential and commercial.
From Dec. 18 to Jan. 16, FM3 Research asked residents likely to vote in the November 2024 election for their opinion on three options: a $315 flat tax, and two taxes based on square footage. The first would cost 11 cents per square foot and be capped at $7,500 per parcel, while the second would cost 15 cents per square foot with a $1,750 cap. All three options would raise roughly $5.4-5.5 million annually.
The 15 cent option got 67% support (a combination of those who said they would definitely vote yes, probably vote yes and were undecided but leaned towards yes). The 11 cent option got 62% support. The $315 flat tax got 60% support.
Representatives from FM3 told the school board at a Thursday, Feb. 29, meeting that the 15 cent model appeared to be the most viable.
“With the 15 cent measure, there is a clear path to success, but it will require a strong program of public education, just because support is so close to the two-thirds (level),” Lucia Del Puppo of FM3 told the board. “That’s mainly frankly because the two-thirds threshold is very challenging. It is a very high threshold.”
All 544 respondents were asked about the flat tax, while half were asked about each version of the square foot model. The margin of sampling error for the full group was 4.2 percentage points, while it was 5.9 points for the split sample questions, according to FM3 research.
The square foot options would be calculated based on building size, not the full size of a parcel. The 11 cent scenario was designed to cost the average single-family homeowner roughly the same rate as the current flat tax, Jeremy Hauser of FM3 said.
The 15 cent option would be more expensive for single-family homeowners, but place a smaller burden on large commercial property owners because of the lower cap – $1,750 versus $7,500.
The 15 cent option nonetheless saw higher support in the poll (though it was within the margin of error). Hauser pointed to the complexity of the tax structure to explain this result.
“Although not a single single-family homeowner will actually qualify for that cap, they are hearing that … number and they can’t do the math on the fly and so they are thinking that it might apply to them,” Hauser said. “This is just our best guess in looking at the data.”
A building would have to be over 11,600 square feet to hit the cap in the 15 cent model and more than 68,100 square feet in the 11 cent model. The average single-family home in Mountain View is about 1,700 square feet, Hauser said.
The lower the cap, the more the burden is shifted from commercial property owners to single-family homeowners, Hauser said.
Board President Devon Conley expressed dismay that a lower cap looked like it would be more popular.
“I would far rather make sure that single-family homeowners don’t have to pay significantly more, but that we’re actually bringing in the amount that should be coming in from commercial property owners – and I’d like to be transparent about it,” Conley said. “And it just kills me that that fails at the ballot.”
The path to the ballot
The deadline to place a measure on the November 2024 general election ballot is Aug. 9 and FM3 recommended the board plan to vote on going forward with a measure in early June.
If a parcel tax measure fails in November, the district could place another measure on a future special election ballot before their current measure expires in June 2025.
According to Hauser, the most common options would be March or May of 2025. However, a special election would likely be substantially more costly for the district. Special elections tend to have fewer items on the ballot and the various measures share the cost of running an election.
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This tax is the best way to keep housing prices up by supporting the schools. (Just look at Los ALtos) Seems cheap to me.
Every year, another school bond or tax.
It really makes you wonder what they do with the money.
And do they realize that people are coping with high electricity bills,
food /rent inflation?
A pollster called me and gave me the marketing version of what they are going to do with the money. Sounds beautiful until you start asking “Why are they spending money on that?”. Is that within the mission of a school district? Or “Gee, that sounds awfully like Mission Creep?”
Maybe the School Board or their management should come back with a plan on how to spend money within a prescribed mission and boundaries. Get back to the fundamentals of teaching kids reading, writing, and arithmetic. I would like them to teach them objectively about many different types of economics, governments, and history. These last three things should not be controversial, but they are. Because it seems that educators have an agenda to make the kids think a certain way, rather than be objective and preparing the kids with tools to figure things out for themselves when they grow up.
Net/Net: Get back to basics, stay within your mission, actually prepare kids so they can think
I think the school board has lost our trust. How can they be trusted with a new tax when they’ve messed up so many things — the crazy math program at Graham that drove so many families out of the school district, the arbitrary fencing of school yards, the alienation of employees under the rule of our arrogant superintendent. We need a new board before we pass a new tax.
This is about a Special Tax.
The two highest supported proposals are both about Per Square Foot BUILDING SIZE (improvement). This is a “uniform tax” that is assessed on real property / based on the number of Total Square Feet of Building improvements on a property.
The tax rate is “uniform”. This makes it a legal school Special Tax on real property.
It is ‘using the vernacular’ to call this a parcel tax. The law, California Government Code 50079 calls these school district taxes, I quote: “qualified special taxes”.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=50079&lawCode=GOV
How to get >> 2/3 voter approval.
Ah, just don’t Push quite So Hard for More money. More total revenue. These 3 survey test cases – all are adjusted to make the same new Revenue. A Revenue ASK increase of about 65%. Another way to think about the “fairer” PSF tax, is also to Ask for a 30% total revenue increase! (simple – don’t sweat getting A Lot more money!
=== in the weeds – Statistical Experimental Design – ===
President Coney being surprised at results (well) …
Most of this survey was a Two Variable ‘experiment’ where unfortunately the Two Variables were ‘confounded’. = ” mix up (something) with something else so that the individual elements become difficult to distinguish:” (iOS dictionary V2.3.0).
“RATE” per sq ft cents is confounded with “CAP” in dollars.
Their effect on the survey Cannot Be Separated mathematically.*
If U talk to a semi-conductor process engineer / or other STEM professional in the experimental sciences, they will explain what this means. The survey contractors sort of admitted this – Conley’s confusion/surprise cannot really be explained! It ‘might be’ that people are just focusing on the $7K vs $1.7K cap and the 11 cents or 15 cents gets ‘conceptually ignored’. If you track the video recording – U can hear the consultants sort of explain that. ‘sort of’. 🙂
*Math Level – not even The Calculus ( matrix/linear algebra is sufficient)
a former R&D engineer / UC / Xerox PARC / PekinElmer
In the NEW News: Alameda USD just passed a PSF Building Size special tax. It will raise about 20%, YES 1/5, of revenue for this district! BTW – AUSD is one of the leaders in Fair PSF Building taxes to support public education! They ‘went to court’ to secure a ‘dollar CAP’ in this type of taxation.
56 cents per BUILDING square foot! CAP at almost $16,000 (yes)
Ballotpedia link:
https://ballotpedia.org/Alameda_Unified_School_District,_California,_Measure_E,_Parcel_Tax_Measure_(March_2024)