Lessons From the San Leandro 49ers, Tax Reformers

The San Leandro 49ers were not a football team, nor did they have anything to do with the San Francisco gold rush.

The year 1949 was, however, a pivitol year in San Leandro history. First came the Charter Reform which reorganized the city government, followed immediately by a land annexation campaign that doubled the size of the city, drawing many industrial companies into its borders, as well as thousands of people. 

The reform of the city's charter, which is like its constitution, was initiated by a group called the Freeholders (a land owners' organization) who were given $3,000 in 1949 dollars to develop a new charter over the course of a year.

The other issue, annexation, was an even more important one in the 1940s. It pitted the business community against the homeowners and neighborhoods. Most local industry was built outside city borders. Companies used some city services but payed limited local taxes.

The business community liked the setup and felt they could attract more industry by giving companies tax breaks. The homeowners and citizen organizations felt that industry could easily pay its fair share of taxes, and should.

Things began to heat up in 1947 when the business-dominated city council gave Chrysler a big tax break, infuriating local homeowners and neighborhoods. Local citizen and homeowners organizations ran grassroots campaigns and swept the conservative incumbents from office in the 1948 election, also setting the groundwork for the annexation campaign. 

Author Robert Self, in his respected history of Oakland and its suburbs American Babylon, notes that "taxes in San Leandro was not a mundane issue."

The local newspaper noted, "Chroniclers of San Leandro progress may some day put down September 17, 1949 as one of the most important dates in San Leandro history. Because today annexation petitions will be put into circulation for the first time, which will ask the annexation of territory which will more than double the city's present geographic area...." 

The fight for fair taxation not only meant justice for local homeowners, it also meant a significant tax stream for the city. What began in 1949 was felt by generations to come.

(The downside of San Leandro's history is that the city was also very segregated, with less than 20 African-Americans living in San Leandro in 1950. Primarily taking their marching orders from a racist national real estate industry, local residents were part of a racist housing order in San Leandro, but especially in California, which was referred to as "genteel apartheid.")

Today, we again have a property tax problem, where commercial property tax payers are driving through tax loopholes and "laughing at us," as State Assembly Member Tom Aminano put it. With our service sector economy, the new tax dodgers are more often than not large retail corporations — some of them local, but many national.

This is both a city- and statewide issue, where the so-called eighth richest country in the world (California) is unable to collect $10 billion a year to close its deficit and significantly improve schools and other services (see www.caltaxreform.org).

We are much more widely educated than the original San Leandro 49er group that pushed for charter reform, and yet, ironically, they were much better able to organize and get their fair share, even without cable television or the Internet.

While being tough negotiators on taxation, the 49ers were also able to attract industry, adding 15,000 new manufacturing jobs to the city in a time economists now call the American Golden Age.

The city could initiate a San Leandro 49ers project in honor of the old timers and use a property information system like Dataquick to at least know who's driving through the local loopholes and laughing at us.

We should also at least entertain the idea of a more regional sales tax system, which some, more progressive states like Minnesota have adopted, to help less fortunate communities.