Is your city using taxpayer dollars to campaign for higher taxes?

By Will Swaim
03/25/2018
STEAL MY ORDINANCE: Newport’s O’Neill   For two years beginning in 2014, Stanton, California, residents were pounded by half a million dollars in advertising calling for a hike in the city’s sales tax. They surrendered to the wall-to-wall messaging, voting once for the tax hike and then against a repeal effort. In a painful irony, the...

TAGS: Stanton

Just in Time for Halloween, City Manager Uses Official Letter to Scare Voters

By Andrew Heritage
10/17/2016
Faced with the potential repeal of a controversial one-percent local sales tax, Stanton City Manager James Box mailed voters two weeks ago to warn that passage of a sales tax repeal will “terminate funding approved by Stanton voters” and result “in cuts to essential city services.” The timing of Box’s letter, just weeks ahead of...

TAGS: Stanton

Survey Says! How One City Used a 'Poll' to Raise Taxes

By Andrew Heritage
10/04/2016
On Halloween 2014, Stanton, California, city manager James Box wrote to the city’s residents. City officials were at the end of a year-long campaign to stampede residents toward acceptance of Measure GG, creating a one-cent city sales tax, the first of its kind in Orange County. They had warned residents that failure to approve the...

TAGS: California, Stanson v. Mott, Stanton

Stanton officials launch propaganda war on tax-repeal effort

By Will Swaim
04/21/2016
Downtown Stanton, 1913: More innocent times. STANTON, Calif. – It was a Wednesday afternoon in early March, a more innocent time in Stanton, California. Gathered in the community center of the Plaza Pine Estates, we were like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before they ate the apple that gave them a second-grader’s...

TAGS: bonds, debt, pensions, Stanton

'Outsiders': The powerful government unions that brought OC's highest sales tax to Stanton are at it again

By Will Swaim
04/20/2016
Stanton city officials have taken to the streets to fight a November ballot measure that would repeal the city’s one-year-old sales tax. In 37 community meetings and in a stream of communications from City Hall, officials tell residents the tax is essential to the city’s survival – and that its victory at the polls in...

TAGS: Orange County Firefighter, Stanton

Tax hike masks Stanton's public-safety pay problem

By Will Swaim
03/18/2016
Stanton has become the stage for a political brawl: in one corner, city officials and the public employee union leaders who backed the measure to give Stanton – Orange County’s smallest city and one of its poorest – the county’s highest sales tax; in the other, residents and business owners working to repeal Measure GG,...

TAGS: pensions, Stanton

City of Stanton Faces Taxpayer Revolt

By Edward Ring
07/14/2015
Back in November 2014, in a 54% to 46% decision, less than 20% of Stanton’s registered voters approved “Measure GG,” which increased their sales tax rate from 8.0% to 9.0%. Needless to say, this measure will not encourage retail businesses to relocate to Stanton, nor will it encourage residents to shop there. But like local tax...

TAGS: Stanton