Cara Brown McCormick
On June 28, California’s Secretary of State certified 14 statewide measures for the November 3 ballot, five placed there by state lawmakers directly and nine that earned their way on through citizen signature gathering. All fourteen now carry the official proposition numbers.
A measure that gathers enough signatures does not lock into the ballot right away. It enters a waiting period that ends on a deadline called E minus 131, the last day its backers can still walk away from it, usually in exchange for something better. This year that deadline fell on June 25, and four separate negotiations came down to the wire. Three ended in a deal. One did not.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association squared off against state lawmakers first, and it was the biggest trade of the bunch. The Jarvis group, led by Jon Coupal, agreed to drop its own tax measure once the Legislature passed a replacement, Proposition 43, which moves the vote threshold for local special taxes from a bare majority up to two-thirds, while lawmakers also quietly killed an older 2024 measure that Jarvis allies had taken to calling the poison pill. Coupal pronounced the outcome "a tremendous turnaround.”
The California Hospital Association and the state's health care unions settled the next dispute. The unions had qualified a measure capping executive pay at nonprofit hospitals, the hospital association had qualified one limiting how much unions could spend on ballot campaigns, and rather than fight either one out in front of voters, both sides simply agreed to drop them altogether.
Uber and California's trial lawyers reached the third deal. One measure would have limited what accident victims could recover in medical costs and legal fees, backed by Uber; the other would have made rideshare companies more liable for driver misconduct, backed by the trial lawyers themselves. When a settlement closed on June 18, each side got something: new passenger safety commitments from Uber, and new limits on certain medical expense claims for the attorneys, with both measures coming off the ballot in exchange.
The fourth negotiation is one that never came together. Governor Gavin Newsom spent the weeks before June 25 trying to talk the health care union SEIU-UHW into withdrawing its billionaire wealth tax measure, Proposition 40.
Proposition 40 would tax the assets of roughly two hundred California billionaires, at a rate of up to 5 percent paid out over five years, with $9 of every $10 raised going toward health care for low-income residents and the rest split between education and food assistance.
The Governor expended quite a bit of his political capital and brought serious firepower to the effort to get rid of the billionaire tax measure, recruiting Planned Parenthood, the state's teachers union, its primary care association and its medical association to help make his case. Union leader Dave Regan said no anyway, and Proposition 40 emerged intact.
Proposition 40 will not get a free ride, though. Two measures that will also make the ballot are Proposition 41, which would require audits of any program funded by the new tax and would route that new revenue through the state's existing spending cap, the rule that forces surplus money back to taxpayers or into education instead of wherever the tax was meant to send it. Proposition 42 would ban new taxes on personal property and any tax applied retroactively, in language broad enough to reach the very categories of wealth that Proposition 40 is written to tax. Both Prop 41 and 42 carry the same trigger: if they and the wealth tax (Prop 40) all pass together, only the one with the most votes survives, and the rest are wiped out.
Proposition 1 would authorize an $11 billion dollar bond for affordable housing and veterans' homeownership.
Proposition 37 would set up a $25 billion mortgage assistance program for middle-income buyers.
Proposition 2 would raise the state's rainy day fund cap from 10 to 20 percent of general fund revenue while allowing some of that money to pay down $20 billion dollars in federal unemployment insurance debt.
Proposition 3 would make permanent an existing income tax of up to 12 percent on households earning more than $721,000 as couples or $360,000 as individuals, a measure the California Taxpayers Association opposes.
Proposition 4 would legalize public financing of political campaigns for the first time since 1988, Proposition 5 would change how the state fills a vacancy after a recall election, and Proposition 39 would require voter ID at polling places.
Proposition 44, also sponsored by SEIU-UHW, would require community health clinics to spend 90 percent of their revenue on direct patient care, while Proposition 38 would authorize an $8.4 billion dollar bond for immunology research.
Proposition 45 would speed up environmental review under state law for housing, transportation and clean energy projects.
Whether the billionaire wealth tax survives will come down to a simple count: if Proposition 40 beats both Proposition 41 and Proposition 42 this November, it will stand. If either of them beats it, the tax Governor Newsom couldn't kill in June will get erased anyway, just later, and by voters instead of by him.