CA’s County Taxpayer Groups Are an Endangered Species – The Free Market Movement Should Save Them

When Californians think about tax fights, they usually think of statewide battles: Proposition 13, the perennial split roll initiatives, the latest wealth tax proposal. But most of the taxation imposed on Californians is decided much closer to home, by cities, counties, school districts, and special districts that place hundreds of sales tax, parcel tax, and bond measures on local ballots every election cycle. Whether these measures pass often depends on whether anyone bothers to oppose them.

Local taxpayer associations are the institutions that do this work. They write the ballot arguments that appear in county voter information guides, analyze fiscal claims, communicate with local media, and occasionally go to court when governments bend the rules. When no organized opposition exists, tax measures frequently appear on the ballot with no argument against them at all, leaving voters with only the proponents’ side of the story. The Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association filed the sole argument against a school bond in San Mateo County this June; had it not acted, voters would have received a one-sided guide. And the stakes extend beyond any single measure. Each local tax that passes enriches the public employee unions, construction contractors, and consultants who finance these campaigns, and the revenue and political momentum they gain locally strengthens their capacity to fund initiatives and candidates at the state level. Local tax fights are the farm system of California’s broader fiscal politics.

Unfortunately, the taxpayer side of this contest has been weakening for decades. The organizations that flourished in the era of the Proposition 13 tax revolt have been hollowed out as their activists retire, leave the state, or pass away. The Alameda County Taxpayers Association, incorporated in 1938, illustrates the pattern: it was sustained for decades almost single-handedly by executive director Arthur Geen, went dormant when he died in 2014, and was only revived in 2016 by a new generation of volunteers. Other groups never found successors. A statewide directory compiled last year lists the Marin United Taxpayers Association, San Diego Tax Fighters, and Tulare County Taxpayers Association, as closed, and marks several others as questionable. 

Los Angeles County, with nearly ten million residents, had no general purpose county taxpayer organization for decades until Aidan Chao formed a new association in 2023. Chao is trying a new organizational style: rather than organizing as an IRS Section 501c4 as a social welfare organization, LA Tax is a Section 527 organization that can and does support candidates.

Roughly two dozen counties, including sizable ones like Santa Cruz, Merced, and San Benito, have no known organization at all.

Where groups do exist, most are small volunteer operations with no staff, minimal budgets, and limited capacity. A handful of impressive exceptions prove what is possible. The San Diego County Taxpayers Association maintains professional staff and tracks every tax and fee measure across the county’s eighteen cities and forty-two school districts. Marin’s Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers has become the lone organized check on the roughly twenty local measures hitting that county’s ballots this year. The revived Alameda group has won a published appellate decision against the City of Oakland using pro bono counsel. And our own Contra Costa Taxpayers Association recently helped defeat a county sales tax measure by a fourteen-point margin. But these successes depend on a few dedicated individuals, and organizations that rests on a single individual is one retirement, relocation, or obituary from becoming dormant.

The broader free market movement should treat this as a solvable institutional problem. Three decades ago, free market state think tanks were scattered and undercapitalized until the State Policy Network built an infrastructure of mentoring, training, shared services, and donor development that helped them professionalize. Nothing comparable exists for county level taxpayer organizations, even though the scale argument is at least as strong. Los Angeles County has more residents than forty US states. Santa Clara, Alameda, and Orange counties are each more populous than a dozen states. Even my home county of Contra Costa exceeds the population of eight states. If it is worth sustaining a free market think tank in Wyoming or Vermont, it is surely worth sustaining a taxpayer watchdog in counties many times their size.

State and national organizations could nurture these groups without bureaucratizing them. Established associations could mentor startups in neighboring counties, sharing templates for ballot arguments, fiscal analyses, and Proposition 218 compliance challenges. Shared back office services could handle the legal filings, web hosting, and bookkeeping that exhaust volunteer energy. National donors who fund statewide initiative campaigns could dedicate a small fraction of those budgets to permanent local capacity, and experienced fundraisers could teach local leaders how to build sustainable membership bases.

The November 2026 ballot will bring another wave of local taxes, including a five-county Bay Area transit sales tax measure in November. Whether voters hear both sides will depend on institutions that today survive on borrowed time. Rebuilding them is among the highest leverage investments the free-market movement can make.