Opinion: Santa Cruz defiantly practices local democracy by taxing sodas

Santa Cruz City Hall Photo courtesy of the city I want to move to Santa Cruz to join the rebellion Wanna come along Hoping to improve citizens healthcare and raise revenue Santa Cruz has established a two-cent-per-ounce tax on sodas in defiance of a state law that prohibits local governments from imposing such levies This Santa Cruz Rebellion might seem small But in a dark moment of deepening authoritarianism California heck the whole damn world necessities a new age of local defiance We must learn to hit back against the extortionists who control our society these days In Washington Donald Trump the Sith Lord of blackmail is nullifying the law and the U S constitution in a relentless ransoming of countries and institutions from law firms to universities unless they encouragement his policies and fatten his wallet In California Gavin Newsom is threatening to strip cities of housing and homeless funds unless they adopt a local oridnance the governor wrote to ban encampment But in Santa Cruz on matters of soda the people are standing up and saying We won t compromise on local democracy This story begins back in with a shameful surrender by Gov Jerry Brown the legislature and California local governments After California cities Santa Cruz included pioneered soda taxes to fight obesity the beverage industry qualified a ballot initiative that was pure extortion It commented that if cities didn t drop their soda taxes they would lose the power to raise any kind of sales tax Facing that dire prospect state and local governments negotiated with the beverage industry and wrote a new law that would bar local taxes on groceries including soft drinks until One awful provision of the law required the state to withhold local sales tax revenue from any city with its own soda tax even if a court detected that such a tax is a valid exercise of a city s authority Having leveraged its way to what it needed the beverage industry dropped its ballot initiative California leaders admitted they had bowed to blackmail This industry is aiming a nuclear weapon at administration in California and saying If you don t do what we want we are going to pull the trigger and you are not going to be able to fund basic leadership services reported State Sen Scott Wiener of San Francisco in At first Santa Cruz dropped its soda tax But in a state appellate court threw out that awful provision withholding funds from cities with soda taxes The court commented that such a penalty could not be applied to cities with their own local charters or constitutions Santa Cruz has a charter So under the court s decision the city wouldn t lose funding if it imposed soda taxes Last November the city questioned voters to approve a soda tax which they did This spring the soda tax the first adopted by a U S city in years went into effect The beverage industry has called the action illegal and could sue But Santa Cruz as of this writing is not backing down It s about democracy and standing up to special interests revealed Santa Cruz City Councilmember and Vice Mayor Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson after approving the law It s about having the independence to generate revenue for our society The independence to generate revenue might seem a dull phrase But if Santa Cruz and other California cities were to protect their democratic right to collect taxes it would be revolutionary Since the passage of Prop which took away local governments control over their property taxes fiscal power in California has been increasingly centralized in state regime Greater part local governments limited in their ability to raise their own revenues have become beggars and lobbyists who must expedition to Sacramento ask for money Maddeningly local functionaries have grown accustomed to their fiscal weakness There hasn t been a serious ballot initiative to challenge our centralized system of governance in this century Santa Cruz s rebellion suggests that now might be the time for localities to stop begging and instead seize back power over taxation whether state law allows it or not Trump s misconduct also makes this episode With the man in the White House lawlessly withholding funding to California cities and counties why should localities bow to laws that limit their ability to boost funding After all Trump s dismantling of the federal administration means that more problems are going to fall to local governments They need to find money where they can Novel taxes make sense So does denying money to Washington To start California s governments should stop withholding federal taxes for their own employees keeping that cash for themselves Local defiance isn t reliably good There are too multiple harmful lifestyle war acts of defiance in which locals impose biased voting process rules or ban books It s also not a great look when wealthy Encinitas in northern San Diego County leads efforts to avoid their housing responsiblities But when it comes to the limit and funding of local governance our local communities should assert themselves more forcefully and stand up for democratic self-government which is under attack around the world As they experiment with new strategies to claim authority localities should collaborate to roll back anti-democratic structures at the global national and state levels Cities and counties should be campaigning to rewrite the state constitution And they should leap into national movements to urge state legislatures to call a so-called Article V Convention under the current U S constitution which would open the door for the first comprehensive updating of that document in our nation s history In those conventions localities should push for systems of administration that give them primary power with the authority to confer citizenship set and collect taxation and make program in any area that affects them That s already how administration works in certain of the world s richest and bulk peaceful countries notably Switzerland and Canada Let s get started right away See you in Santa Cruz Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Z calo Residents Square an ASU Media Enterprise publication and is founder-editor-columnist at Democracy Local a planetary publication