ICYMI: Former Speaker & San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr. Warns Split-Roll Measure Will Severely Hurt Minority-Owned Small Businesses

SACRAMENTO, CA – This week, former Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr. penned an opinion piece in CALmatters explaining how the $12.5 billion-a-year property tax hike measure will hurt minority-owned small businesses. Brown argues the flawed measure will negatively impact small businesses due to rent increases from skyrocketing property taxes. Small businesses are particularly hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic shutdown.

As the longest-serving Speaker in California history, Brown has come to support Proposition 13 through the years as he witnessed the benefits of stable property taxes. He argues that minority-owned businesses are more likely to rent their property and be less profitable, so they are most at risk from rent increases due to higher property taxes that the ballot measure will impose.

Read excerpts from Former Mayor Brown’s column, “Changing Prop. 13 will generate a tax bill that will harm small businesses, especially those owned by minorities” below:

When Prop. 13 was on the ballot in 1978 I opposed it, but the voters approved it.  As chair of the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee, I had a responsibility for the legislative implementation of Prop. 13 to make it work.

However, in the decades following Prop. 13’s implementation, I’ve come to recognize the law’s many benefits.  For homeowners, small business owners and employers – large and small – Prop. 13 has provided stability, predictability and certainty.  This certainty is even more important for the 46 percent of California businesses that are owned by racial minorities including African Americans…

This November, many of the same groups that opposed Prop. 13 four decades ago are pushing the largest property tax increase in California history – a shortsighted act made even more myopic given the walloping we’re experiencing with the COVID-19 crisis…

Worse still, as a former legislator and leader in California’s African American community, for African American small business owners, the measure’s skyrocketing property tax increases will be devastating…

Even before the unpredictable, tumultuous events of COVID-19, this massive property tax increase demonstrates an insensitivity and lack of awareness about the struggles that small businesses, particularly minority small businesses, face…

Changing course on Prop 13 will not only be costly to you and me, but it will be costly for California and our economy as a whole.

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