Read Her Lips: Anti-Tax Activist Says ‘I Was Wrong’ : Finances: Covina councilwoman won office with stand against utility tax. She says harsh reality forced flip-flop.

This is the confession of anti-taxer Linda Sarver.

Yes, Sarver admits, she led a successful campaign last year to recall the entire Covina City Council because it had passed a 6% utility tax.

And yes, she later rode the anti-tax wave to a seat on the Covina council, running a campaign that emphasized the old “read my lips” vow of no new taxes.

Then her new perspective struck: The fat that Sarver assumed was lying just under the skin of government turned out not to be there, she found. She came to believe that there was no way to balance the city budget without doing horrible things such as closing the city library and abolishing the Parks and Recreation Department.

And so, yes, Sarver joined a council majority earlier this month that voted for a new, bigger utility tax of 8.25%. Joining her was another council member who had pledged not to impose the tax, Mayor Thomas M. O’Leary.

“I was wrong,” Sarver said of her no-tax pledge. “Maybe I was a little naive; I thought we could make the cuts to make up the difference. At least I’m big enough to say I was wrong and do what’s best for the community.”

This is a cautionary tale about taxes and truth, about how simple things can look from the outside and how complicated they can be from the inside. It is a journey from “Throw the bums out,” that sermon of the streets, to the Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

Still, the judging goes on: Anti-tax forces are planning a new recall.

“Covina can no longer afford Tom O’Leary, Linda Sarver and Tom Falls” (a third councilman who voted for the tax after saying he was opposed to it), said William C. Mason, co-chairman of Covina Citizens for Good Government and an influential backer of the July, 1993, recall of Covina’s council.

Sarver has a response for Mason: “It’s easy to be an armchair quarterback.

She should know.

Sarver got involved in the tax controversy as one of the founders of Covina’s Stop the Utility Tax Committee, the group that sparked the recall.

It was another example of how recall votes, particularly over local tax or fee issues, are growing more common, experts say.

“Quite often the citizenry is persuaded that what is needed is a change of face,” said Alan Heslop, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College who has studied the issue as a member of the California Constitutional Revision Commission. “And the citizenry thinks they will get a change of policy. And they don’t.”

Sarver entered the recall effort without ever studying the Covina city budget. Her true-believer assumption that she could find fat somewhere is a common contention among many recall proponents, Heslop said.

“Very, very few people really understand city governments’ different budgets,” which have grown more complex over the years, he said. “Very, very many people involved in a recall don’t understand the financial problems they face.”

In hindsight, Sarver said, she and her council colleagues should have been aware of how tenuous a financial situation they were inheriting.

When they were elected, the one-year utility tax passed by their predecessors had just expired. The city was losing $11,000 in revenue every day it was not reimposed.

Choosing not to collect that money, the new council balanced the 1994-95 budget by using much of the city’s reserves and cutting $1.7 million by axing 11 positions and deferring some purchases.

Gradually, however, the council members realized that they were only putting off the inevitable, and that a $2.3-million deficit loomed for the 1995-96 budget, which will take effect July 1.

“(Councilman) Tom Falls and I sat down together to see what we could cut for next year until we got to the point where we were shocked at the amount of services we were going to have to cut to come up with $2.3 million,” Sarver said.

They concluded that they’d have to close the library, abolish the Parks and Recreation Department, shut down one of the city’s three fire stations--and still lay off 33 of the city’s 213 full-time employees.

Without those cuts, they decided, the city of 44,000 faced three options: a special district to assess fees for fire services, allowing a card club to do business or a utility tax.

“I woke up in the night after having arguments in my sleep over the decision,” Sarver said.

The councilwoman said she attended dozens of meetings and called people who had been her supporters during the election in search of an answer. The residents said reimposing the utility tax was the way to go, she said.

And indeed, more speakers at the council’s Oct. 4 meeting voiced support for the tax than opposition. The council went along on a 4-1 vote.

The new tax will raise $3.6 million per year, about $185 per household. It should cover the deficit and provide funds for needed street repair while bolstering the police and fire departments. A final vote will be taken tonight.

“I never thought I’d be for a utility tax,” said Sarver, a single mother of four. “I thought of my two younger children growing up in a community without a library, a parks department and good public safety. I did what was morally and ethically right and voted yes.”

Said Falls: “I thought I may have committed political suicide, but I did what’s best for the community.”

Mayor O’Leary said the moment that changed his mind about reimposing the tax occurred when a council member asked what would happen if the city went bankrupt.

“I was going to do whatever I had to do to avoid that,” he said.

O’Leary said he still doesn’t care for a utility tax and would have preferred an assessment on property for fire services, but a council majority would not support the idea.

The former council members who were recalled by Sarver and her colleagues by an almost 2-to-1 margin last year feel vindicated but peeved.

“I think the council owes us an apology (for criticizing the utility tax), and I think Sarver and O’Leary should resign,” said former Mayor Henry M. Morgan.

Sarver and O’Leary say they don’t regret the recall because the previous council acted arrogantly, approving the tax with a minimum of public comment at a 7 a.m. meeting. They were wrong about the taxes, they said, but not the people they threw out.

Of all the council members elected last year on a no-new-tax policy, only Councilman John M. Wilcox stuck to his guns in this month’s vote.

“I think they (Sarver, O’Leary and Falls) are hypocrites. They ran on a no-utility-tax platform,” Wilcox said. Instead of a tax, he said he would like to see the city sell its Proposition A state transportation funds to another city, consider merging fire services with other communities and cut all city salaries by 7%.

Critics of the recent council vote are also frosted because the council went against one of the guiding principles of anti-taxers everywhere: They didn’t submit the utility tax to a vote of the people. Hank Vagt, a leader of last year’s recall, said the lack of a vote the first time the utility tax was imposed was a key reason for the recall campaign.

O’Leary, an attorney who drafted last year’s recall petition and who has given recall advice to residents of other cities who are considering such a move, said his change of heart has to be understood in the context of Covina residents’ new willingness to pay such a tax.

“More people understand today than two years ago,” he said.

Three more, anyway.