VOTE YES ON PROPOSITION 218. IT WILL GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO VOTE ON TAX INCREASES!

Proposition 218 guarantees your right to vote on local tax increases--even when they are called something else, like ''assessments" or ''fees" and imposed on homeowners.

Proposition 218 guarantees your right to vote on taxes imposed on your water, gas, electric, and telephone bills.

Proposition 218 does NOT prevent government from raising and spending money for vital services like police, fire and education. If politicians want to raise taxes they need only convince local voters that new taxes are really needed.

Proposition 218 simply extends the long standing constitutional protection against politicians imposing tax increases without voter approval.

After voters passed Proposition 13, politicians created a loophole in the law that allows them to raise taxes without voter approval by calling taxes ''assessments" and ''fees."

Once this loophole was created, one lawyer working with politicians wrote, assessments ''are now limited only by the limits of human imagination."

How imaginative can the politicians be with assessments? Here are a few examples among thousands:

• A view tax in Southern California--the better the view of the ocean you have the more you pay.
• In Los Angeles, a proposal for assessments for a $2-million scoreboard and a $6-million equestrian center to be paid for by property owners.
• In Northern California, taxpayers 27 miles away from a park are assessed because their property supposedly benefits from that park.
• In the Central Valley, homeowners are assessed to refurbish a college football field.

TAXPAYERS HAVE NO RIGHT TO VOTE ON THESE TAX INCREASES AND OTHERS LIKE THEM UNLESS PROPOSITION 218 PASSES!

Proposition 218 will significantly tighten the kind of benefit assessments that can be levied.

Here are examples of why fees and assessments and other nonvoted taxes are so unfair:

• The poor pay the same assessments as the rich. An elderly widow pays exactly the same on her modest home as a tycoon with a mansion.
• There are now over 5,000 local districts which can impose fees and assessments without the consent of local voters. Special districts have increased assessments by over 2400% over 15 years. Likewise, cities have increased utility taxes 415% and raised benefit assessments 976%, a ten-fold increase.

Non-voted taxes on electricity, gas, water, and telephone services hit renters and homeowners hard.

And, retired homeowners get hit doubly hard!

To confirm the impact of fees and assessments on you, look at your property tax bill. You will see a growing list of assessments imposed without voter approval. The list will grow even longer unless Proposition 218 passes.

Proposition 218 will allow you and your neighbors--not politicians--to decide how high your taxes will be. It will allow those who pay assessments to decide if what they are being asked to pay for is worth the cost.

FOR THE RIGHT TO VOTE ON TAXES, VOTE YES ON PROPOSITION 218.

JOEL FOX
President, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association

JIM CONRAN
President, Consumers First

RICHARD GANN
President, Paul Gann's Citizens Committee