The Schools and Communities First Initiative, which would raise property taxes on many California businesses, will evidently qualify for the November 2020 ballot. The campaign submitted 1.7 million signatures yesterday, easily surpassing the required one million required.
A sample of these will still need to be verified by the Secretary of State, but the sheer number almost certainly ensures success.
The campaign stated that volunteers, which would include public sector union members, collected more than 410,000 signatures — “an unprecedented number,” according to the campaign.
That may be, but the campaign had assigned a quota of 450,000 signatures to volunteers. This means that about 1.3 million signatures were gathered by paid circulators.
Ballotpedia computed the average cost-per-required signature for California ballot initiatives in 2018 as $6.07. Even if the price hasn’t increased in the last two years, that would mean the campaign spent about $6 million just on signature-gathering — in addition to the money spent to qualify the first version of the measure, which will be withdrawn once this version is official.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that raising taxes on businesses when so many are shutting down would be a non-starter, but the labor unions behind this initiative are willing to spend mounds of dues money on it. Even if it fails, there is always more where that came from.
