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Summer is coming, and so are the mosquitoes. For years, the county’s vector control district has been fighting the itch on a shrinking budget. Now, property owners have voted to scratch it.
The Santa Clara County Mosquito and Vector Control District’s proposed $15.75 annual assessment increase passed by the skin of its teeth, with 51.23% of the weighted vote in favor and 48.77% opposed.
Of the 414,304 ballots mailed to recorded property owners across the county, only 94,203 came back, a 22.7% return rate that suggests a lot of residents either didn’t care, didn’t notice, or were too busy swatting the little pests to fill out a form.
Among those who did return their ballots, 53,573 voted yes, 40,630 voted no, and 789 couldn’t quite make up their minds.
The stakes are higher than they might sound, according to the district. The Mosquito and Vector Control District has been quietly bleeding money for years, relying on dwindling reserves to keep its operations running. Without new funding, it warned that services could be cut by as much as 30%, gutting the surveillance programs, disease testing, and public inspections that keep West Nile virus and other vector-borne illnesses in check across the county.
“This is the only mechanism we have to generate funds and revenues to support our services,” Jeremy Shannon, the district’s assistant manager, recently told the Mountain View Voice.
The new assessment takes effect in July, bumping the total annual bill for single-family homeowners to $30.86 when combined with older assessments from 1996 to 2005. In exchange, the district expects to bring in roughly $8.5 million a year, enough to keep it financially stable through at least 2043.
The vote itself was a bit unusual. Under Proposition 218, this wasn’t a regular election open to all registered voters. Only recorded property owners got a ballot, and each vote was weighted by how much the owner would actually pay under the new assessment. Anyone without their name on a deed had no say, which may have left some residents puzzled when their neighbors got ballots and they didn’t.
The district serves all of Santa Clara County, from the tree-lined streets of Palo Alto to the sprawling neighborhoods of San Jose, monitoring not just mosquitoes but ticks, fleas, flies, rodents, and other critters with a propensity for causing public health problems.
