School Tax Backers Drop Legal Appeal

BEVERLY HILLS — To reassure Beverly Hills residents that they will not be taxed twice for the benefit of the city’s schools, supporters of the parcel tax on the ballot next month have dropped a lawsuit challenging the narrow failure of a similar levy last year.

A school district parcel tax measure last June fell just four votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority needed for passage. Nine voters who are also members of the California Teachers Assn. sued, alleging that dozens of “yes” votes had been wrongly excluded from the tally. Allowing those votes would have meant victory for the tax.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismissed the case, saying it had not been filed in time, and the plaintiffs appealed.

With another parcel tax on the June 4 ballot, anti-tax campaigners argued that if this year’s measure won and the lawsuit also prevailed, property owners would be taxed doubly. School district officials say that is not the case.

Last year’s tax proposal and this year’s are similar: Commercial and residential plots of land would be assessed between $250 and $750 a year for five years.

“There was no way there’d be a double taxation,” said Ara Prigian, executive director of the California Teachers Assn’s Westside branch, accusing tax opponents of making the issue a “political football.”

Prigian said withdrawing the legal appeal “makes it clean and simple. . . . We want to make sure we don’t cloud the issue and jeopardize the election.”

But anti-tax leader Sherman Kulick hailed the move as a coup for his side. “They didn’t do us (Beverly Hills residents) any favor. They just backed down because we put the pressure on them. They realize what we said was true.”

Kulick argued that the school board would have tried to collect both taxes. And if the June measure lost, he said, the board wanted the court case to fall back on. “They want to have their cake and eat it too,” he said.