Tax Cuts From ’70s Confront Brown in California

LOS ANGELES — The last time Jerry Brown was governor of California, voters passed Proposition 13, drastically slashing local property taxes and constraining lawmakers from raising any other taxes. Mr. Brown first fought the proposition but then executed it with gusto and sent billions of dollars from the state to school districts and counties to help offset the lost revenues.

That may be a decision that Mr. Brown has come to regret, as his career has come full circle and taken him back to Sacramento 33 years later to confront yet another budget crisis.

As much as Proposition 13 signaled a national revolt against taxes that reverberates to this day, its actual legacy in California — not just the proposition itself, but the way Mr. Brown and the Legislature responded to it — has emerged as a major obstacle to the new governor as he confronts what is probably the worst fiscal crisis in this state’s history.

The measure cut off a major source of revenue by capping property taxes at 1 percent of valuation and required a two-thirds vote by the Legislature to raise taxes. And because it cut property tax collections by local government by nearly two-thirds, the state, initially at Mr. Brown’s behest, took on more and more costly responsibility for financing schools, welfare and other services that were once the responsibilities of local governments.

An estimated 70 percent of the taxes collected by the state now goes to local governments.

On Monday, Mr. Brown will propose a fiscal rescue plan to deal with the state’s budget crisis that aides said would propose shifting back to local governments many of the programs that the state took over. In effect, it is an about-face from what Mr. Brown did the first time he was governor.

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