This year was no different. A plan to provide them with a fraction of the money, about $3.4 billion annually, that the state takes routinely to balance its books was rejected in the final days of this year's legislative session. Another bill to ease their trial-court funding burden was approved, but it doesn't take effect until 1998.

But one proposal that would help the counties in a significant way squeaked out of the Legislature at the 11th hour with the bare majorities needed, 21 votes in the Senate and 41 in the Assembly, and it will provide about $100 million -- if the governor signs it.

Right now, that's a big "if."

The legislation by Assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni, which has received little attention from the media, deals with a complex legal tangle resulting from a gray area between court rulings and voters' approval of a pair of initiatives a decade apart, Proposition 62 in 1986 and Proposition 218 in 1996. One, Proposition 62, said voters' approval was needed for local taxes, but two years after the initiative was approved, several appellate courts found that the initiative was unconstitutional in certain cases and that local boards of supervisors could enact taxes under limited conditions.

Using the court decisions as the guide, including the state Supreme Court's refusal to review the rulings, the boards did approve some taxes, such as utility user levies and increases in hotel occupancy taxes.

But in 1995, the Supreme Court found that Proposition 62 was constitutional after all, although the court left ambiguous the critical question of whether its decision applied prospectively or retroactively.

The Mazzoni bill essentially lets the counties retain those revenues raised by the taxes allowed during the period that the courts said Proposition 62 was constitutional, and it says the counties don't have to refund the monies they collected. The counties' lobbyists estimate that the bill will save the counties about $100 million, but the proposal is facing a tough lobbying effort aimed at Gov. Wilson from taxpayers-rights groups, such as the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers' Association, who contend that the bill is an unconstitutional violation of the intent of Proposition 13, the landmark property tax cutting initiative that voters approved in 1978.

Moreover, they contend that the counties knew that legal uncertainty surrounded the issue, but that they went ahead and raised the taxes anyway, even though they know the levies likely would not have been approved had they been presented to voters.

The Republican governor has given no indication whether he will sign the bill. But he doesn't have much time to make up his mind: The deadline for acting on bills -- signing them, vetoing them or allowing them to become law without his signature -- is less than a week away.

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*** 1998 Directories ***

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