Joffe: Contra Costa promoted Measure B with misleading math, federal cuts “less of a problem than we thought”
Contra Costa health director wildly inflated the cost of federal cuts to public health, owing to a math mix up. When CoCo Taxpayers Association corrected the record, Supervisor Candace Andersen turned her vote. Why didn’t the other supervisors? After all, says Marc Joffe, the County already has “plenty of money coming in.” The transcript of the interview with Capstone’s Jared Asch begins at minute 28:31:
Jared Asch, Capstone Government Affairs: Talk a little bit more about your process to view a new proposed tax. How do you analyze it and maybe explain that as part of an example of a tax?
Marc Joffe, Contra Costa Taxpayers Association: We would look at the case for the tax or the bond in conjunction with what else is happening financially with the entity.
If you don't mind, I'll talk about Measure B a little bit more because that is our big push at this time that we're recording this.
If you look at Contra Costa County's revenue, it has increased rapidly over the course of about 20 years, including on the health program.
It seems like plenty of money has been coming in.
Contra Costa had a sales tax increase in November of 2020, Measure X. I think there are real questions around how effectively that money has been spent, although the supervisors will probably tell you that it's been fully audited and there's a citizens’ oversight body.
One of our members was involved in the citizens’ oversight body and they had absolutely no input into what the prioritization of that money was.
One of the things that upset our member was that some portion of the money was going to provide a guaranteed basic income for people who were just released from prison.
That might be nice, but that also is something that a foundation could fund.
I think there's real questions as to whether that should be a taxpayer responsibility.
We have a lot of nice-to-have programs and now you're complaining that there's now this financial crisis.
Maybe we should be revisiting some of those.
And then I want to get to the core of what [CoCo Taxpayers Association] did and what the benefits are.
The supervisors were going to pass an ordinance that included a statement that because of federal cutbacks, Contra Costa County was going to lose $300 million a year.
Turned out that was a mistake.
There was a slide presentation given by Grant Colfax who’s the head of the health department in Contra Costa County, saying that for the four fiscal years ended 2028–2029, the county was going to lose $307 million approximately.
Someone made the mistake of converting that cumulative number into an annual number, and we informed the supervisors of that.
Candace Andersen changed her vote from yes to no.
And I think it's not to the credit of the other supervisors that they didn't step back and say it looks like this is less of a problem than we thought.
Maybe we don't need to rush with this tax increase, or maybe we can go with 3/8 of a percent or a half a percent as opposed to 5/8 of a percent.
And the question is, who's going to do that?
If you don't have a taxpayer organization, there's nobody there to be on the other side.
Most people are very supportive of the government and more government services and more revenue. I have to believe that there are a lot of people in Contra Costa County who appreciate the fact that there's somebody on the other side who's going to dig in and ask questions about, do we really need this?
What's the case?
You might end up being a yes, but don't you want to hear both sides of it?
Marc Joffe is President of the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association. Follow him on X and listen to the whole interview here.
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