Tax Appropriation

For better or worse, you really can’t blame California cities for pursuing the sales taxes generated by “big box” retailers (“Cure the Sales Tax Addicts,” editorial, Dec. 27). They’ve been left with no other choice.

Several years ago the state decided to balance a bloated budget by expropriating the lion’s share of property tax revenues, leaving cities and counties with no recourse but to court sales-tax generators. The solution to the problem lies not in redistributing sales taxes, as Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) wishes to do, but in getting Sacramento’s hand out of our back pockets and returning to local governments the property tax moneys that were once rightly theirs.

Brooks A. Pangburn

Duarte