The Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors is moving forward with plans to put a new sales tax on the ballot for voters in the upcoming June election.
The board at its meeting Tuesday directed county staff to create a measure that would propose a sales tax of five-eighths of a cent per dollar for five years in response to federal cuts passed by Congress last year.
Supervisors said the measure would return to the board at its Feb. 10 meeting to be approved to go on the ballot ahead of a March deadline for the statewide June 2 primary election. If passed by a majority of the county’s voters, it is estimated to generate $151 million annually for the five years it is in effect.
County officials said the money is needed to backfill federal funding cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs passed last year by the Republican Congress as H.R. 1, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, though the measure would be a general tax with revenues that could be used for any purpose.
“It doesn’t make sense to wait to see how much worse things can get,” Supervisor John Gioia said at Tuesday’s meeting. “This funding is not going to cover the full projected shortfall we’re going to face.”
The agenda document for Tuesday’s meeting said nearly 100,000 Contra Costa residents could lose health insurance coverage, among other impacts from the federal cuts.
“It doesn’t make sense to wait to see how much worse things can get. This funding is not going to cover the full projected shortfall we’re going to face.”
Supervisor John Gioia
Members of multiple local labor unions came to the meeting to express support for the proposal, including Quinton Silket from IFPTE Local 21, which represents health services professionals, engineers, planners, librarians and other county employees.
“We’re very concerned at impacts of these losses,” Silket said. “These cuts don’t just affect programs on paper, they affect real residents here.”
The lone person who spoke out against the proposal at the meeting was Marc Joffe from the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association, who noted that the county’s voters already recently approved a half-cent sales tax as Measure X in 2020.
The county would need approval by the state Legislature to raise a sales tax cap — state law caps the total combined tax rate in a county at 2% unless granted exceptions by the Legislature — and Gioia said state Sen. Jesse Arreguin, D-Berkeley, has indicated he will add the county to existing legislation that could be passed this year to allow the new tax to take effect.