City of Angels 25: Chamber et al plan to fight VT election results, it will cost millions for city to defend itself against a handful of power elites who run city, against people's will

[Here is transcript of the Keep Community First / Chamber of Commerce speakers during public comments at the South Lake Tahoe City Council meeting June 18. I've included my reaction to what they say in brackets here because … it's my blog]

Better headline: Chamber to crush election results, dictate its preferred outcome

[Transcript is AI generated so imperfect, also time code seems to be about 6 mins off from the YouTube video of mtg here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjKxAk85d0s&t=8788s }

***

Good evening Mr Mayor and members of the council staff ladies and gentlemen Steve Teshara for the record on behalf of the Tahoe chamber and the Keep Community First Coalition. was a very instructive

1:55:28

discussion and presentation on the part of your staff. Our concern with the report is that it doesn't really meet the intent of the law that requires or allows a legislative body to have a report like this.

[hasn’t the Chamber been dead set against this measure since first time they heard of it? How are they expert on the intent of the law? ]

So the purpose of the

1:55:42

report under the law is to help the voters understand what they're voting on and I think this report fails. We understand it was a limited time and a limited budget but frankly based on the presentation they should have interviewed your staff the staff has more pertinent information as to what the impacts would be than the consultant who went hither and thither and looked at things that really don't bear on our situation.

With me tonight are

1:56:08

colleagues of mine Sharon Kerrigan, South Tahoe Association of Realtors, Jerry Bendel [general manager of the Forest Suites Resort, a 120-unit property on the California side tucked behind the Heavenly Village Shops ‘’ Duane Wallace [he's everywhere!] we've divided up our comments on the report so that we can meet your three-minute requirement. So my my purpose is to summarize there are many assumptions in this report and there's very little to back up why the assumptions were made. We heard already about the cost of implementing this it's significant I think your staff understands that it's not a couple people Dialing for Dollars [sigh hither and thither, dialing for dollars, really? ] it's a lot

1:56:39

more complicated than that the setup costs the what happens if it's litigated

[Right, if it's litigated,’ they're probably already writing briefs.]

[Measure T passed 50 to 42% in 2018, and realtors et al filed a lawsuit against it weeks later and it's still tied up in court. These people do not respect the will of the people when they lose elections. I bet they're the same ones who kicked and screamed trying to prevent Tahoe from having a retail source of marijuana, even as medicine, about ten years ago but I have to research that, stay tuned.]

Anti Measure T claimed “resident exception unconstitutionally discriminates against nonresident homeowner”

[Jumping like a virus from a bat in Hunan Market to a constitutional argument, as the same people are doing now with the vacancy tax. When in doubt, shout “constitution” and since most Americans have really never read it, how can they respond. Back to the transcript ]

if somebody litigates, which they will if it passes and then the role of the oversight committee as I think council member Wallace pointed out. And the City attorney concurred that it's no different than any any of your other advisory committees they don't have the ability to oversee what you're doing so that is a misnomer and a pretty serious one and then privacy issue that was just raised these are huge. So I've been on the phone a lot with property owners

1:57:10

who would be affected by this if it passes. They're crying they're angry they're mystified.

[Have they heard anything but the misinformation put out by Stop the Vacancy Tax? What were those callers saying before they started crying? Did you tell her Communists are coming for your house and make her cry? Or did you say she could always file with the city for an exemption and calm her down with some truth?]

And I think this puts a black label on the city for a long time to come just that you would even think about doing to this this to them.

[Nope, from where I sit, it's the Chamber and other elite groups that have been in charge of this area for decades are putting a black label on the city already]

and the the terminology in the report is bothersome units, these are not units. these are people these are their homes that they struggle to get and they're not all the same.

[If an owner of multiple properties feels aggrieved, they can appeal to the Council for an exemption, but no one from the Chamber mentions that. It's the Libertarian millionaires taking advantage of South Lake’s lax tax attitude while they watch the value of their investment property grow, that is who this tax aims for. If the Chamber were concerned about what is going on economically globally and how it affects locals, they would be ecstatic at finding a revenue source for our town, and a way to keep our homes from turning into global investment products.]

[The chamber only cares about businesses, the ones that pay into their coffers. This ain't your daddy’s chamber of commerce, but Duane et al will never admit it, Duane probably thinks he's really helping people who live in Tahoe by repeating the chamber's right wing sound bytes… SMH ]

1:57:40

and they've come to them by different ways and they don't want to be assessed the same that's an inequitable situation and as the mayor said this was pushed on the city

[that's not what the Mayor just said, jeez]

this is not the evening that you decided as a council when you thought about this you didn't want to pursue it litigation. was one one concerns you had

[And boy are we going to sue you we don’t care how people vote we're going to sue]

other ones but here it is pushed on the city and I don't think that's fair for the city if there was a way for the city

1:58:07

to decline to deal with this you know that would probably be something good so let me uh pass the Baton on other issues uh to my colleague Sharon Kerrigan thank you.

My name is Sharon Kerrigan I'm also with keep Community First Coalition

[doesn't mention she's from Association of Realtors]

and as my colleague Steve Teshara pointed out one of the critical ways in which this 9212 report really completely misses the Mark is in the likely massive bureaucracy

[Every right wing politician in USA for last sixty years probably longer has used that “big Bureaucracy” argument against EVERYTHING that progressives, aka people who want progress, try to accomplish, and LOOK AROUND YOU, see how well that's working? ]

that it's going to take to set it up administer and enforce it states it

1:58:41

would take a million the first year to set up and then just over 600,000 a year after that and ongoing cost but even a cursory review of that shows how quickly that assumption falls apart it seems to be based on just a quick chat with the staff at Oakland who administer their vacancy tax, that's the only other one operating something similar in California and based on these quick conversations the consultant concluded only three full-time City staff would [The Arrogance of telling the staff they couldn't have done more than a cursory look] needed to administer this but if you do the math.

Iif Oakland has 4,000 vacant

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units and we have almost 17,000 housing units that sounds to me like four times the number of staff that would be needed

[and four times the amount of revenue our city is missing out on because the Chamber is against it] if they have five or six that sounds like 24 staff to me [wow, more jobs] so South Lake Tahoe is vastly different than Oakland

[we have four times the need to collect this revenue than Oakland then]

as well uh that is we've got

1:59:35

single family residences we've got condos we've got mobile homes are those going to also be un subject to the tax if 40% of these simply refuse to comply is it really worth it to pursue this there's going to be be thousands of individual cases files and appeals and people that are trying to avoid this tax

[our friends don’t want to pay their taxes so let’s give our friends a free ride]

2:00:06

that the staff is going to have to go through so if the city has just over 200 employees now 110 in public safety and 90 in other government services we would need to increase our non-public safety Staffing by over 50% just to administer

[JOBS JOBS JOBS]

[oh the chamber only believes in private sector hiring I guess, or their members are government haters]

this program and on top of that what about the cost to set up the software the systems the hardware uh to monitor 177,000 homes when has a government ever set up a new computer system on time and under budget even if you charitably call that another million dollar you're now talking about $10 million or more uh tax which would cost 8.5 million to set up and

[even if that's accurate it's 1.5 million in new revenue, plus solving the problem of blight and comatose ghost-town eeriness in some neighborhoods from all the empty houses, what are you arguing against]

02:40:06

administer and enforce it would become a tax increase whose proceeds go almost entirely to pay for the enforcement of the tax and what is the point of that [1.5 million] so this report completely missed the mark on the cost of enforcement but rest assured that we are going to be working very hard to get the truth out to the voters.

[AH THERE IT IS, the phrase that caused me to want to deconstruct this transcript. The CofC promise a massive “information campaign” that will fill our heads with Chamber of Commerce right wing anti-tax anti government sound bytes for the next four months]

2:01:03

Thank you for the record Jerry Bendell also with the keep Community First Coalition I want to drill down on some points about the enforcement that the the report actually completely missed even though the measure starts costing taxpayer money to the tune of millions of dollars starting in early 2025 that Sharon just outlined the start of the vacancy tax period calculations don't begin until