The County Wants More of Your Money. It’s Already Giving Ours Away.

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On May 11, the City of Burbank forwarded us a cheerful announcement: the Los Angeles County Commercial Acquisition Fund is open for applications again. Translated out of government language, the county is preparing to hand out public money so that hand-picked organizations can buy commercial buildings.

The first round gave away ten million dollars — federal pandemic relief from the American Rescue Plan Act, which is to say borrowed money that you and your children will spend the next generation repaying. The newest round adds another $2.6 million. That is more than twelve million dollars of public money, distributed as “recoverable grants” of five hundred thousand to two million dollars apiece, steered by the county’s Department of Economic Opportunity and its nonprofit lending partner, Genesis LA.

The very same county says it is broke

Here is what makes this so galling. Just weeks after inviting a favored few to line up for building money, this same county government turned around and asked you for more.

Measure ER, on the June 2026 ballot, raised the countywide sales tax by another half-cent — from 9.75 percent to 10.25 percent — to raise about a billion dollars a year. The pitch was that the county simply cannot keep its hospitals and clinics open without it. It squeaked through with 50.35 percent of the vote.

So which is it? A county too broke to keep the lights on — or a county flush enough to go shopping for real estate on the public’s dime? It cannot be both.

You already pay more than almost anyone in America

While the county gives money away, you pay for it at the register. Burbank shoppers already hand over 10.5 cents in sales tax on every dollar — among the highest rates anywhere in the country. And once Measure ER’s half-cent takes effect this October, Burbank’s sales tax climbs to a staggering 11 percent — eleven cents of every dollar you spend, taken at the register before you have bought a thing.

And for all of that money taken and all of that money handed out, the one number that actually matters to a working family keeps going the wrong way:

The part they never mention: your rent pays their property tax

Here is the piece that never makes it into a county press release. Every apartment in Burbank carries a property-tax bill — and California law reassesses a building to its full market value the moment it is built or sold. So the newest apartments, and the ones that have recently changed hands, carry the heaviest property tax of all. The housing provider does not absorb that bill. It is an operating cost, and it is built straight into your rent.

The math is not complicated, and every figure below comes from public data we have saved at the bottom of this page:

And it only goes up. Every new school bond, every parcel tax, every reassessment when a building sells raises that number — and it lands in the rent. This is the quiet engine of your rising rent: not simply greed, but a government that keeps finding new ways to tax the roof over your head. The newest housing — exactly what we need more of — is taxed the hardest, and renters pay it. A county serious about affordability would be cutting that burden. Instead it is raising the sales tax and handing out millions to buy still more buildings.

Connect the dots

Record sales tax. A property-tax load baked into every rent check. A brand-new tax hike the county swore it could not live without. And, at the same moment, millions of dollars the county is happy to give away to buy buildings for the organizations it likes best.

Why the handouts never fix anything

Government is a poor judge of winners and losers. When it hands public money to the groups it favors, it does not lower your rent or your grocery bill — it rewards the connected, distorts the market, and grows itself. Every dollar routed through a county “fund” was first taken from a worker, a shopper, or a small-business owner who knew far better how to spend it.

Prosperity is not handed down from a county committee. It is built by people who are allowed to keep what they earn. The affordability crisis will not be taxed and subsidized away. It is caused, in no small part, by a government that takes too much and spends it on itself.

The documents — saved here, not out there

Every claim above is backed by a public record. We have saved a permanent copy of each source on our own server, viewable right here on the page — so if a government office quietly pulls a link after this story lands, the evidence does not vanish with it.