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In 2022, 58% of Los Angeles city voters approved a hefty tax on mansion sales.
In 2024, 62% of Sonoma County voters backed a half-cent sales tax to fund wildfire response and other emergency services.
Neither would have become law under the threshold set by Proposition 43, which would require a two-thirds vote to pass any local tax measures that pay for specific services.
Anti-tax advocates such as the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which helped get Prop. 43 on the ballot, say it should be harder to tax Californians in a state where tax rates are already high. They argue that the measure would apply an equal standard to whoever wants a special tax, whether the government or citizen groups.
Californians voted in 1996 to establish a two-thirds threshold for special tax measures. For decades, it was widely assumed that the threshold applied to all special taxes — until 2017, when the state Supreme Court said the law specifically applied only to tax measures put on the ballot by local officials.
But what about special taxes proposed by citizens? The court declined to clarify. Confusion ensued. Since then, several high-profile local special tax measures placed on the ballot by nongovernmental groups have passed with a simple majority.
Local government officials, labor unions and affordable housing advocates oppose the measure, arguing the proposal would make it difficult to collect revenues for essential services, such as firefighting, education and healthcare. They argue it would allow “minority rule” because it would only take a third of voters to block special taxes.
Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, said Prop. 43 would clarify that the two-thirds rule applies to all special taxes. He said that the two-thirds vote requirement dates to the 1849 state Constitution, which required a supermajority vote of state lawmakers to ask voters to borrow money.
“The power to tax is (the) government’s most draconian power,” he told CalMatters. “The people of the state of California have made it a policy that when you are going to exercise that power, it should require a higher degree of consensus.”
But opponents say the initiative risks kneecapping funding for local services. Darrell Roberts, president of the California Professional Firefighters union, which represents 38,000 firefighters, called Prop. 43 an insurmountable roadblock to raising money for community services. This November, Los Angeles voters will decide on a half-cent sales tax proposal to hire more firefighters, Roberts noted.
“Under Prop. 43, it’s clear that the powerful few would be protected at the expense of everyone else,” he wrote in the Marin Independent Journal.
Supporters have poured almost $15 million into the measure, nearly $10 million of it from the California Business Roundtable PAC. Opponents have collected $6 million, with the biggest contribution, $1.5 million, from a PAC affiliated with the Service Employees International Union of California.
Prop. 43 originated from L.A.’s ‘mansion tax’ fight
Prop. 43 stems from a bitter fight over Los Angeles’ “mansion tax,” a 4% tax on real estate sales of more than $5.3 million and 5.5% on sales more than $10.6 million. The tax rates rise with inflation. It has generated $1.4 billion in revenue since it became law in 2023, according to the city.
The tax angered real estate developers and business groups, who said it impeded new construction of all kinds of developments, including affordable housing. The opposition fueled a campaign led by Coupal’s group earlier this year to qualify a ballot measure that would have slashed real estate sales taxes statewide, applied the two-thirds vote requirement to all special taxes and revoked taxes that previously passed by a simple majority, such as the mansion tax.
Prop. 43 is a more modest proposal resulting from an eleventh-hour negotiation between Coupal and Democratic leaders in the state Legislature to kill the more extensive version. Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, authored the compromise language. The measure is limited to the vote threshold and does not apply retroactively to taxes such as the mansion tax.
Just days after the Legislature placed Prop. 43 on the ballot, Wicks said she is “adamantly opposed” to it.
“The clock was running out, and we had a choice to make: Leave a retroactive measure on the ballot that threatened billions in local funding, or accept a much narrower constitutional amendment that I still believed was bad policy,” Wicks said in a social media post.
Is there public appetite?
This isn’t Coupal’s first rodeo. In 2024, his group sponsored a much broader ballot measure to make it harder to raise taxes, but the California Supreme Court unanimously blocked it before the election, deeming it an illegal attempt to change the state’s constitution.
How will a narrower Prop. 43 perform this year?
A September survey from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found 51% of likely voters would vote no on Prop. 43, versus just 43% who would vote yes.
But Coupal hopes the proposal taps into voters’ concerns about affordability and their frustration with the high cost of living in California.
“We are in a general climate right now where Californians really feel overtaxed,” he said. “California needs to prioritize its spending before it asks for more.”
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