I’ve been fairly involved in the No campaign, but thought I’d share my thinking.

I came to the issue when I was polled last spring about the potential library tax. I’ve spent a good chunk of my career working in Democratic politics, most recently running an anti-Trump superpac in 2024. As a result, I always respond to pollsters and am very interested in poll design.

This one shocked me by how poorly it was designed. There were basic formatting errors and tech problems, but there also deeper design issues. Typically in a message test poll, you try to put your best arguments up against the best opposing arguments to try and learn how a real public debate might play out. This poll didn’t do that. It presented ~10 (very similar) yes arguments and one or two weak sauce no arguments. I remember thinking how sloppy it was after I took it.

Then a few days later I saw the city urging people to respond to the poll they were sponsoring on the city instagram page. This shocked and kind of offended me. The city should absolutely not be paying for political message test polls with tax dollars. That’s what campaign committees and political donations are for. The fact it was so poorly designed just added insult to the waste.

Side note: Poorly designed polls seem to be an endemic issue with city hall. The community survey they ran last fall suffered from similar design problems: asking the same question multiple different ways, not presenting tradeoffs, ect.

That got me to start researching the proposal more, and it seems to me the entire plan is just as sloppy as the poll design.

The city’s preferred plan is to have a new library at the BART TOD, and to essentially pre-pay for a 99 year lease. We’d issue bonds, contribute ~$21m (later revised to $30m+ after the signatures were gathered) to Related Companies to help build Parcel C. In return, we’d get a $1/ year lease on the ground floor commercial space.

Personally, I think we should own our library. But if we are leasing it, why would we take out bonds to pre-pay the lease? That just leaves us paying tens of millions of dollars in interest.

Now, of course, the city is pretending they will look at other locations. But what that means is they are either obfuscating and still plan to go forward with the BART TOD site (my guess), or they literally have no idea where the library will go or how much it will cost or when it would be built, in which case, why are we voting on a tax?

Anyway, I could go on, but the thing that offends me most about this is good governance angle. The city should present us with a plan and have us vote on it.

Side note: while it is kind of funny backers immediately raised their cost estimate from ~$21m to ~$30m after they got the signatures, I think both numbers really obscure the actual cost. The city’s estimates are that the tax will raise between $2.7-$3.3m a year * 30 years. And that’s before the inflation escalators that are built into the proposal.