General Purpose Measures vs. Special Purpose Measures – How to Choose

If your City is considering placing a revenue measure on the ballot, one of your first decisions is whether to pursue a Special or General Purpose Tax measure. This decision is unique to every City and depends on your needs, community priorities, and what your voters will ultimately support.

Special Purpose Measures are used to fund specific, clearly defined projects and services to meet community needs. Typically, Special Purpose measures create a designated fund and/or defined line item separate from the General Fund to establish direct funding for the outlined needs/services. All the items are consistent with a focused expenditure purpose. For example, a City may wish to pursue a Special Purpose measure to fund Public Safety, Library Services, or Street Maintenance. Under this mechanism, all revenue is spent solely on projects/issues related to the “special purpose” defined by the measure. In some cases categories can be combined if there is a clear and logical link between the needs and services.

General Purpose Measures can be used to fund any scope of projects and services that are part of a City’s General Fund expenditures. Because the money becomes part of the City’s General Fund, these measures provide greater flexibility in the number of issues that can be addressed; and the issues are not required to be categorically linked. Cities with across-the-board needs may be better suited for a General Purpose measure.

Before deciding which mechanism is the most appropriate for your City, take a look at the some pros and cons of both:

SPECIAL PURPOSE vs. GENERAL PURPOSE AT-A-GLANCE

Pros and Cons of Special Purpose Measures

Special Purpose measures give cities the opportunity to address a focused community need. Whether your community is plagued by gang & drug issues or feels strongly that the city’s landscaping needs an overhaul, special purpose measures can help to satisfy community concerns by addressing the needs that matter to them most.

While counter-intuitive, these two-thirds requirement measures are sometimes more attractive to voters due to their specificity and fiscal accountability components.

A detailed “Expenditure Plan” can be crafted outlining each project and it’s projected cost. Coupled with Public Opinion Research, the Expenditure Plan can be tailored to reflect community priorities, increasing the odds that your voters will support your measure, once on the ballot. An effective Expenditure Plan provides the community with fiscal guarantees and specificity on how their dollars will be spent.

Voters are aware of problems with State “money grabs” and want to protect and maintain the quality of their local services, however, they are also wary of “government” in general. Additional fiscal accountability components, such as a Citizens’ Oversight Committee and/or segregated “Trust Fund,” can be built into a Special Purpose measure to assure voters that their dollars are being spent as promised.

A city may also opt to include a Sunset Clause in the measure, in which the tax expires after a predetermined number of years. Some voters are more likely to support a tax increase if they know that it is to fill a temporary gap in funding and that the tax will be repealed when it is no longer needed. Sunset Clauses are one of the few fiscal accountability components that will also work with a General Purpose measure.

Because of the specificity of the Special Purpose measure, there is typically a defined constituency that plays a lead role in the Partisan campaign once the City places the finance measure on the ballot. The campaign committee then builds on the informational momentum the City has already established with the voters, and can advocate in favor of the measure, which the City cannot.

Pros and Cons of General Purpose Measures

General Purpose measures can cite key issues or service examples that resonate with voters as the main purpose for the measure, while also providing expanded flexibility to acquire necessary funding for a wide array of projects/services. However, unlike Special Purpose measures, benefits cannot be specified to voters unless in an advisory measure. Even then, voters may not feel confident that their money will be allocated in the manner in which they feel important.

The 50% + 1 threshold for passage is much lower than its Special Purpose counterpart. However, because of the inherent lack of focused attention to a specific community service or priority, it can be more difficult to garner the necessary support, even at this lower level. Public Opinion Polling can help determine whether your voters are more likely to support a General and/or Special Purpose measure.

Another consideration for the City is election timing. While there are no restrictions on when a Special Purpose measure can be placed on the ballot, a General Purpose measure may only be placed on the ballot during a regularly scheduled Municipal Election. This provides the City with fewer opportunities to feasibly place their measure on the ballot. The City must also consider that the nuances of local candidate races may influence voters’ perceptions of the proposed revenue measure.

In contrast to the Special Purpose measure, typically there is no defined constituent group that continues on to advocate for the measure once it is placed on the ballot. This puts more of an informational burden on the City to amply educate the voter as to the City’s needs, rather than relying on library boosters or Public Safety Association members to disseminate information through a partisan campaign, for example. The City’s planning investment can be significantly larger if it is anticipated that the City will be the sole or primary “information disseminator.”

Key Considerations

Public Opinion Research can help shed light on your community’s awareness of the City’s needs, what messages are most effective, determine areas/demographics where voters need further education, determine ideal election timing, and see if there is initial voter support for a General or Special Purpose measure. Once polling is completed, a compelling non-partisan public information campaign can be an effective tool in further educating voters of the City’s needs, thereby garnering the necessary support to make your revenue measure successful at the ballot box.

The exact ballot language, including appropriate citing of priorities in a General Purpose measure or the linking of categories in a Special Purpose measure, should be thoroughly reviewed and approved by your City Attorney.

Final Decision

The final decision of whether to pursue a Special or General Purpose measure will be determined by a number of factors. What are the City’s needs? Are the needs more appropriately addressed with a General or Special Purpose measure? And most importantly, what will the voters support? The answers may not be self-evident, and compromises may have to be made in order to address community priorities.

Catherine Lew, Esq. is President and CEO of the Lew Edwards Group, California’s leading firm on successful municipal revenue measures and a contributor to the League’s “Countdown to Success” manual on how to effectively plan for these types of campaigns. Lew has more than 25 years of experience in the communications and political arena. She is a veteran of over 400 political campaigns, many of them difficult two-thirds requirement public tax measures. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and the University of San Francisco School of Law, Catherine Lew is also a member of the California State Bar. Reach Catherine by calling 510-594-0224 x216 or email . Visit the company’s website at www.lewedwardsgroup.com.

next » Government Affairs

« back to Getting Started