The Tax That One in Five Burbank Voters Passed

On the first of October the sales tax you pay in Burbank goes from 10.5 percent to 11 percent, and stays there for five years. Nobody will send you a notice. It will simply be there, on the receipt, the next time you buy a washing machine or a set of tires or a birthday present.

That increase became law on June 2. Los Angeles County Measure ER passed with 1,013,747 votes in favor and 987,977 against. The whole thing turned on 25,770 votes. Reversing it would have taken 12,886 people voting the other way.

Now the number that should stop you. 40,264 registered Burbank voters did not vote on it at all. Our city, by itself, sat on more than three times the number of votes it would have taken to defeat a tax on ten million people.

We are not going to tell you Burbank tried and lost

It would be comfortable to write that Burbank fought this and was outvoted by the rest of the county. That is not what happened, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Burbank voted yes. Of the 28,611 Burbank ballots that recorded a position on Measure ER, 15,435 were in favor and 13,176 against. The tax carried this city by 2,259 votes. Burbank did not fail to stop the increase. Burbank helped pass it.

But look at how few people that took. There are 72,003 registered voters in Burbank. Only 31,739 of them returned a ballot on this measure. So the 15,435 yes votes that carried Burbank amount to about one in five of the people registered to vote here. That is not a mandate. That is what is left when most people do not take part.

Three thousand people mailed a ballot and skipped the tax

There is one figure in the county’s own returns we cannot stop looking at.

31,739 Burbank ballots came back on this measure. Only 28,611 of them recorded a yes or a no. The difference is 3,128 people who filled out a ballot, sealed it, sent it in, and left the tax question blank.

Those 3,128 were not lazy. They registered. They received a ballot. They marked it. They mailed it back. They did every difficult part of voting and then declined the one question that is now going to cost them money on every purchase for five years. That is not a story about people who do not care. It is a story about people who were never given what they needed to decide.

So why does nobody vote?

This is worth answering honestly, because “people are lazy” is not an answer and it is not true. Several things are going on, and only some of them are the voter’s doing.

The election was in June. Turnout in a June primary runs far below a November ballot, everywhere, every time. Putting a five-year tax on a June ballot is a choice somebody makes, and it reliably produces a smaller electorate.

Nobody explained it. Studies of ballot completion find that voters in towns with a working local newspaper finish more of their ballot. Burbank is the case study. The Burbank Leader printed its last edition under its previous owner in April 2020 and was picked up weeks later by Outlook Newspapers, but the era of a well-staffed local daily walking this city through a county tax measure is over. A ballot measure nobody explains is a ballot measure people skip.

National politics has driven people out. The tone of national politics has become so ugly that a great many reasonable people have simply opted out of the whole business, and taken their local ballot with them when they went. That is understandable. It is also exactly backwards. The shouting on television is not on your ballot. What is on your ballot is what you will pay for a refrigerator.

And people believe it will not matter. Measure ER is the answer to that. It came down to 25,770 votes across ten million people. There has rarely been a cleaner demonstration that a small number of people, in one city, could have decided what everybody pays.

What this costs, and who pays it

Half a cent does not sound like anything. Spread across five years and every taxable purchase a household makes, it is real money, and it falls hardest on the people with the least room. It takes a bigger share from a retiree on a fixed income than from anyone comfortable. In Burbank it lands on the same shopkeeper on Magnolia already absorbing eleven cents on the dollar and hoping the customer comes back next week.

Burbank already carries some of the highest taxes and fees in the state. And the requests keep arriving. On the November ballot, residents will be asked to raise the hotel tax from 10 percent to 12 percent, the first change since 1983. You cannot make California affordable and keep raising what it costs to live here. Those two things do not fit in the same sentence, and at some point somebody has to say so out loud.

Getting out the vote is the fix, and it is not a partisan one

None of this requires anybody to take a side on any measure. It requires people to show up. Four things are within reach:

Explain the ballot. Publish, in plain language and well before every election, what each measure would cost a Burbank household. Not advocacy — arithmetic.

Use the channels the City already owns. Utility bills, the City website, the City’s own channel. A county tax that will cost every household money is worth a notice.

Start in the high schools. Teach students what a local election decides and what half a cent costs a family over five years. People who learn that at seventeen vote at twenty-seven.

Argue about timing. Where the City has any say over when a measure appears, put it where the people already are. A question that binds this city for five years deserves a November electorate, not a June one.

Most cities put very little effort into turnout, and Burbank is no different from its neighbors in that. We think Burbank should be the exception — not because it would change any particular outcome, but because a city where one in five registered voters can set the tax rate for everybody is a city running on a very thin idea of consent.