Senate Bill 863 is a double dose of sneakiness—combining, in just 17 words, two separate efforts to block Californians from knowing what their elected officials are doing.
First of all, it continues the unseemly practice of misusing “budget trailer bills” for purposes that are unrelated to the budget.
. . . In this particular case, Senate Bill 863 suspends, for two years, legislation passed in 2017 requiring local government and school bond measures to give voters some straightforward information about their financial effects.
Voters were to be told, among other things, the property tax rates that would be required to service the proposed bond issues, how many years the additional taxes would be in effect and how much money they would raise every year.
Local officials didn’t like the new transparency requirements and complained that they were too difficult to implement. However, their more likely motive is that they feared voters would reject bonds if their full costs were revealed.
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