Voters this fall will have another chance to consider a half-cent sales tax increase for San Diego County.
The measure will appear on the November ballot after the county Registrar of Voters reviewed signatures submitted by unions and advocacy groups and confirmed more than 121,000 of them.
That’s far above the nearly 103,000 needed to make the ballot.
Supporters dub the measure the “Protect San Diego’s Health and Safety Act,” and argue that the funding will support projects to ease the Tijuana River Valley sewage crisis and fight wildfires, while also backfilling programs left vulnerable by federal cutbacks by the Trump administration.
If approved, the county’s sales tax rate would rise from 7.75% to 8.25%, generating an estimated $360 million a year, according to proponents.
“Washington is gutting healthcare, turning its back on the sewage crisis poisoning our community, and Sacramento isn’t stepping up,” Courtney Baltiyskyy, the director of Children First San Diego, said in a statement. “It’s time for San Diegans to come together and vote YES to protect our region’s working families.”
Language in the measure bars the county from spending proceeds on salaries and benefits for elected officials, bonuses or raises for executives or other top staff, contracts for lobbying or public relations and construction or renovation of county offices.
Groups backing the proposed sales-tax increase include SEIU 221, the union that represents county workers, Children First, First 5 San Diego, San Diego County Firefighters Cal-Fire Local 2881, the San Diego County Hospital Association and American Academy of Pediatrics CA Chapter 3.
Local voters, though, buffeted by high housing costs and consumer inflation, have resisted recent sales tax measures – but only by a slight majority.
In 2024, the county and the city of San Diego saw sales-tax measures narrowly fail. For both the county’s Measure G and the city’s Measure E, the nays outnumbered the yeas by less than 1%.
The framing of the county effort was similar two years ago, but focused more on transportation, road safety and infrastructure than the environment or social programs. Measure G also proposed a half-cent sales tax increase, with estimated proceeds of $350 million annually.
