Council Will Craft New Language for Utility Tax Ballot Measure

The Pinole City Council will ask voters to decide whether to renew an 8 percent tax on their utility bills, but first will re-work the proposed wording for the ballot measure as drafted by a consultant.

The council on Tuesday night agreed to schedule a meeting for 5:30 p.m. Monday to simplify the ballot language. The council also will decide whether to continue using the services of the consultant in the remaining month before the Nov. 6 election.

Council members rejected the suggested language for the measure as unwieldy and confusing.

"I think it's the most confusing, wordy measure that I've ever read," Councilwoman Debbie Long said. "If I didn't know what we were voting on I wouldn't understand it. It's all one sentence. You're exhausted by the time you finish reading it."

Long said that as written, the measure would mislead voters into false assurances that the tax renewal would deliver more than it might in actual practice, given future uncertainties.

"It backs us into corners," she said. "It says not only do we have all of our  police and we have all of our fire, we're going to have all our parks maintained."

Such assurances should be placed in the ballot argument supporting the measure rather than in the measure itself, Long said.

The measure will ask voters to continue collecting for eight years an 8 percent tax that is applied to electricity, gas and phone bills. Revenue from the tax provides about 20 percent of the citys' annual $10.4 million general fund budget. It is due to expire in December unless voters extend it. That would leave the city about $1 million short in its budget for the current 2012-13 fiscal year.

Without the continuation of the tax, the city would have to cut about 15 jobs and revoke subsidies for Pinole Cable TV and the Pinole Swim Center, city staff have said.

Councilman Roy Swearingen agreed with Long that the proposed ballot language needs to be pared down and clarified.

"Brevity is probably the most important thing in getting this passed," Swearingen said. "People who are reading it in November are going to be reading a long, long ballot."

The language should simply make it clear that the measure is renewal of an existing tax, not a new levy, Swearingen said.

City Attorney Ben Reyes said the consultant hired by the council earlier in the year had drafted the language and he made minor changes. The draft then had been approved by City Manager Belinda Espinosa and Assistant City Manager Michelle Fitzer, he said.

Nonetheless, Reyes conceded that the language, while based on the consultant's experience with previous successful ballot measures, reads as "political-speak."

The council hired the consultant, Lew Edwards Group, at a cost up to $32,000 to prepare the measure but declined to include public opinion polling as too costly and unnecessary.

The special meeting to re-write the ballot measure is needed to meet the legal deadline for placing measures on the Nov. 6 ballot.