Situation

Briefly, here's the gist of what's going on.

Prior to 1996, cities could do whatever they wanted in gouging money from property owners. The City did so. When Proposition 218 passed in 1996, the City was in a dilemma. It could change the street lighting assessment methodology to comply with the new law or it could try to convince voters to place a special tax (2/3 vote) on themselves. The City did neither. The earlier street lighting assessment was grand-fathered in by the new law. It's been in place for 30 years, unchanged.

Now, the City wants to gouge property owners again. They need to pretend that property owners get a special benefit from street lighting over and above the benefit to the general public. The City comes up with a point system to account for proportionality (constitutional requirement) for allocating the cost among property owners. The City has to separate the property owner benefit from the general public benefit (constitutional requirement). It presumes that all benefits (100%) fall to the property owners. Then the City comes up with a method to determine public benefit, but can ONLY find benefit based on street traffic. The result is a fraudulent 11% public benefit, sticking the property owners with almost the entire bill, without proving that they get any benefit at all.

Resources

Resources

Neighborhood Councils

The over 200 neighborhood councils (NCs) in the City could be a local resource. The entire list of NCs can be found here here.

The web site has a link to each NC that lists the names of all the officers and board members including a public e-mail address. We don't know who controls the domains for the e-mail. Is it the City or the NC board? In either case, we don't think that blasting e-mails to these people would be very effective.

If you are a property owner in the NC geographic boundary, we'd suggest that you contact the president or secretary to start. While the NCs are politically active people, their politics, unless they are die-hard pro-city-government, might not be an issue. In other words, they may be willing to oppose the assessment if they were to learn that the City is cheating to place the entire burden of street lighting on property owners.

We're open to suggestions here. Constructive comments are welcome, below.

NextDoor

We're not fans of NextDoor however, it might be useful for engaging with property owners who are not particularly politically active. Depending on the neighborhood, there may not be many members who have joined.

We've heard that NextDoor moderators, who can suppress speech (remove posts), may reject political dialog. That may be a NextDoor policy or it may just be the local moderators.

If you already use NextDoor, lets us know the lay of the land in your neighborhood.

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