‘Sin Tax’ Proposal for Schools Withdrawn

A proposal to slap stiff taxes on cigarettes and alcohol to raise billions of dollars for the state’s public schools has been withdrawn, after failing to win the backing of education groups representing teachers, administrators and school boards.

Mike Roos, the former state legislator who heads Los Angeles’ largest school reform movement, said he pulled the plug on the “booze and butts” initiative because of a politically unfavorable analysis by the state legislative analyst. Roos, president of the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, announced the proposal in November but had yet to begin gathering the 695,000 signatures required to place it on next fall’s ballot.

The analysis said taxing cigarettes 50 cents a pack, as proposed in the measure, would reduce purchases and thereby cut $35 million from anti-smoking and breast cancer research programs that also depend on tobacco taxes for their funding.

Stu Mollrich, a Newport Beach political consultant who was working with Roos on the measure, said well-heeled opponents in the liquor and tobacco industries would have used the analysis to their advantage.

“We don’t need to be in the position of fighting $10 million worth of [political] ads . . . saying ‘Don’t vote for this, it’s going to hurt the fight against breast cancer,’ ” Mollrich said. “It’s the kind of thing in a campaign that can kill you.”

The proposal, which also would have imposed a dime-a-drink tax on alcohol, would have raised $2 billion annually to reduce class sizes in the early grades, purchase computers, improve campus safety and offset fee hikes at the state’s public colleges and universities.

Mollrich said polling found that 67% of voters favored the measure. But it failed to win the backing of any of the major educational groups that would have been its beneficiaries.

“When you lose the support of the very entity you’re trying to help, it doesn’t say much for your ability to get something passed,” said Kevin Gordon, a lobbyist with the California School Boards Assn.

The California Teachers Assn., the powerful union that has the ability to spend millions on behalf of measures it supports, had taken a neutral stance on the tax. The Assn. of California School Administrators opposed the measure, in part because it did not provide enough money to achieve its goals.

For example, reducing class size from kindergarten through third grade to 22 students, as the initiative envisioned, would cost $1 billion a year for teachers alone, but the measure would have generated only $800 million for that purpose.

“It didn’t provide enough money and it was a declining source of revenue,” said Dennis Meyers, a lobbyist for the administrators group. “At the same time, it would have increased expectations from taxpayers that the problem had been addressed, and they wouldn’t understand five years from now when we said we needed more money.”