Taxpayers' Ire Stings O.C. Pest Control Board

By KEVIN JOHNSON and MARK LANDSBAUM

Aug. 6, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

SANTA ANA — With killer bees swarming for an invasion from Arizona and rats a persistent problem, the last thing county vector control manager Gil Challet expected was an old-fashioned revolt propagated by humans.

Every day for a few weeks, letters have been streaming into his Garden Grove office from angry residents protesting a proposed $2 increase in annual pest control fees.

Like a swarm of hungry mosquitoes, the missives have mounted in such startling numbers--about 4,000 so far--that staff members have spent up to five hours a day cataloguing and acknowledging them, all for what amounts to a fee increase of about 20 cents per month.

It is an unusual display of discontent which, Challet and some letter writers say, reflects the sour public mood likely to greet a range of government fee increases--from the likely federal gas tax hike to a possible entry fee for local libraries.

“We’re taxed to death,” said Ken Cox of Huntington Beach, one of the thousands who submitted a protest to the Orange County Vector Control District. “Between the federal, state and local government, they are taking half of our income now and there is no end in sight. All we get out of it are more politicians.”

In some pockets of Orange County, hundreds of residents this year will bear increased costs for such services as street sweeping, hillside landscaping and sewer maintenance. For 465 landowners in Laguna Terrace, for example, the cost of publicly subsidized landscaping for slopes and street medians will jump from $52 to $99 each.

The state’s budget crisis, which prompted the shift of $2.6 billion in local property tax revenues to public schools, so devastated the Orange County library system that officials have recently talked about ideas such as entry fees.

But the public outrage aimed at the relatively obscure vector agency should be particularly worrisome for Orange County officials who are pushing a November ballot measure to extend a half-cent sales tax to pay public safety costs. At stake is more than $70 million and the continued operation of at least one county jail.

Supervisor William G. Steiner said Thursday that recent callers are expressing more frustration than ever, characterizing government as increasingly distant even as it demands more money from residents.

“I’ve talked to some of these people upset with vector control directly,” Steiner said, “and what they don’t like is this take-it-or-leave-it approach by government. It offends their sense of fair play. It seems like I’m hearing about increased assessments everywhere I go. There seems to be this mentality of ‘pass it on.’ There is no end to it.”

For some people, Steiner said, government services have become splintered into so many agencies or special districts that basic understanding of their workings has been difficult even for those who help make the rules.

“I don’t even know how vector control is organized, and I’ve been around for a long time,” Steiner said. “When you could recognize a clear benefit from government, the (fee increases) were more palatable. . . . Now, (government) is like a Stealth bomber. It creeps up on you and you wonder if there was a sneak attack.”

Given the mood in the county, Steiner said, passage of a sales tax in November could be in jeopardy if the campaign fails to relate how citizens would benefit directly.

“There has to be a connection with the people,” the supervisor said.

In the Garden Grove Vector Control office, meanwhile, 50 more protest letters arrived Thursday. In addition to their displeasure with the prospect of this year’s $1.10 charge rising to $3.19, people like Cox of Huntington Beach say the process is unfair.

Operating independently of the Board of Supervisors, the Vector Control District would be allowed to increase its fees unless more than 300,000 property owners register protests with the district.

“My rap is that it is an illegal tax,” Cox said. “Even though the amount is small, eventually there probably will be no limit. This agency shouldn’t have the authority to tax.”

But Challet said the taxpayers really should be directing their acrimony at state legislators who approved the massive shift of local property tax dollars and left the vector control district with slightly more than $1 million less than what was budgeted in the 1993-94 fiscal year.

The money is needed, the district manager said, to continue the county’s war against such pests as mosquitoes, rats, spiders and killer bees. Last year, the district fielded 10,000 calls for rats, 2,000 for mosquitoes and thousands of requests to identify other troublesome insects.

“Most people aren’t really aware of what the Vector Control District is or what we do,” Challet said. “People are just upset about tax increases in general.”

Faced with the possibility of laying off as many as a third of its 33 employees, the county’s official bug controllers sent postcards to 707,000 property owners two weeks ago advising them of the decision to increase the annual fee.

But Fred Beams, the district’s assistant manager, conceded that considerably fewer protests still could dissuade the agency’s board of trustees when it meets Sept. 1.

Beams already speculates that the scores of telephone calls and thousands of letters probably mean the public hearing will have to be moved from the 80-person-capacity room to the district’s garage.

“If every district (and) agency in this county solves their problem by socking it to the taxpayer, we will soon be spending more for government services than it costs us for food, housing and clothing,” complained property owner and activist Shirley L. Grindle in her formal letter of protest.

Grindle, who has led citizen protests resulting in reforms of campaign spending and ethics standards for county government, criticized the “service fee” as a euphemism, “a back-door approach to avoid calling it a tax.”

Beams conceded that “most people believe it’s a tax even though it’s called a service charge.”

“We would not have done this if there had been any other alternative,” Beams added.

But Grindle is unsympathetic.

“What if all these districts do that?” Grindle said. “You and I are going to be service-charged right out of existence.”