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California Local Tax Ballot Measures, 2013 to 2016

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Cite This Work

Martin, Isaac W. (2023). California Local Tax Ballot Measures, 2013 to 2016. In California Local Tax Ballot Measures. UC San Diego Library Digital Collections. https://doi.org/10.6075/J03J3D57

Description

California local tax measure archive, 2013 to 2016.

The files included in this archive are public records associated with local tax measures that were put before California voters in the years 2013 through 2016. Most of them were collected during the years 2018 to 2020 as part of a research project “Social Context and Revenue Measures” funded by the National Science Foundation (award number 1823821). Most were downloaded from public agencies' websites and by addressing public records requests to relevant county officials.

The documents included in the archive include extracts from the official sample ballot and voter information guide, often including the ballot question, impartial summaries, and arguments for and against a given measure; and the full text of the proposed ordinance where it was available.

The coverage of the archive is incomplete. We have included all such documents from every local government tax measure presented to voters in the state of which we were aware and that we could acquire. We worked from lists published by the California Election Data Archive and the California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission (covering the whole period, but with limited coverage of special elections and elections in odd-numbered years).

Scope And Content

All files are in pdf or rtf format. The files are arranged by county. Within county, files are named according to the following convention:

Year-County-Agency-Letter-Label

“Year” is the 4-digit year, and in rare cases may include an alphanumeric suffix for the month (e.g. “1990Feb”) in order to disambiguate otherwise identical measures.

“County” is the county name, with spaces omitted.

“Agency” is the name of the relevant local government agency whose revenues are to be provided by the tax, with spaces omitted. The agency name may be omitted if the agency is the county itself and the measure concerns county government revenues. Agency names without further specification generally refer to cities. School districts and other special district types may be abbreviated (e.g. “USD” for unified school district). Some city names may be abbreviated (e.g., “MtShasta”). San Luis Obispo is generally abbreviated “SLO.”

“Letter” is the letter uniquely identifying the measure on that year’s ballot for that jurisdiction. In some cases, a single file may include sample ballot information for multiple measures, in which case the “letter” term in the filename may include multiple letters joined by an ampersand. In a few cases, local governments identified measures by number, or by a combination of letter and number; the identifying information in the filename will generally correspond to how the measure was identified on the ballot.

“Label” describes the type of documents included in the file. Labels used by the project research team and their interpretations are as follows:
“All” - file includes sample ballot information and measure text
"Impartial" - file includes an "impartial analysis" of no more than 500 words, usually prepared by the County attorney or City attorney; this is a subset of sample ballot information, but sometimes is recorded in a separate file
“SampleBallot” or "BallotSample" - file includes sample ballot information guide but not measure text
“Incomplete” - file includes partial information from a sample ballot or voter information guide, but not all of the relevant information about the measure
“OrdText” or “Ord” - file includes the full text of the proposed ordinance
“Res” or "Res2" - file includes the full text of a local government resolution describing the proposed tax measure; typically used in cases where there was no ordinance text drafted prior to the balloting. "Res2" is used in cases where there is more than one local government resolution describing the same measure.
“SampleBallot&Res” or "BallotSample&Res" - file includes sample ballot information guide and resolution text, but no proposed ordinance text (in such cases, proposed ordinance text may not exist)

Occasionally a label may have the suffix “(v2)” when two versions of the documents were provided to us.

Date Collected
  • 2018 to 2020
Date Issued
  • 2023
Principal Investigator
Funding

National Science Foundation (award number 1823821)

Geographics
Topics

Formats

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Language
  • English
Identifier

Doi: https://doi.org/10.6075/J03J3D57

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License

Rights Holder
  • UC Regents
Copyright

Under copyright (US)

Use: This work is available from the UC San Diego Library. This digital copy of the work is intended to support research, teaching, and private study.

Constraint(s) on Use: This work is protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). Use of this work beyond that allowed by "fair use" or any license applied to this work requires written permission of the copyright holder(s). Responsibility for obtaining permissions and any use and distribution of this work rests exclusively with the user and not the UC San Diego Library. Inquiries can be made to the UC San Diego Library program having custody of the work.

Digital Object Made Available By

Research Data Curation Program, UC San Diego, La Jolla, 92093-0175 (https://lib.ucsd.edu/rdcp)

Last Modified

2023-07-31