You’re not voting for the Board of Equalization
State Board of Equalization (2nd District)
If you read this CalMatters article, you might end up believing the state Board of Equalization does nothing. If you go to the state Board of Equalization website, you might end up believing the state Board of Equalization does, if not nothing, then not that much. If you live in Contra Costa County, you may think that if the board is responsible for ensuring county tax assessors do their jobs in a fair and consistent way, then, uh, they are not doing a very good job.
Nevertheless, two Democrats—Sally Lieber, the incumbent, and John Pimentel—are currently engaged in what appears to be a very expensive and mostly self-funded race for the right to do nothing and do it apparently without teeth on behalf of most of the California coast. Why?
This is when voting gets really fucking dumb. Don’t think about the state Board of Equalization. Don’t waste several minutes figuring out that the roughly $10.2 million that the board collects through an antiquated tax on private railway cars is next to nothing in a world where California’s general fund is $251.2 billion. Instead, think about the bench.
Oakland Review of Books
Before she became state treasurer, Fiona Ma served on the state Board of Equalization. Before they became state controller, both Betty Yee and her successor, Malia Cohen, sat on the state Board of Equalization. (Yee, for the record, thinks the board does nothing and should be abolished.) When you vote in this race, you’re not voting for someone to do whatever it is the state Board of Equalization does; you’re voting on who you want to collect a six-figure salary while networking and preparing to run for an office that actually does have some teeth.
So then who should you vote for? We’d love to be able to tell you to give Pimentel, the largely self-funded Democratic challenger, a chance to sit around and network while doing nothing, but we simply cannot because he’s running a campaign that claims he will actually do things if elected to office. “The Board of Equalization is failing ordinary Californians,” his campaign website declares. Well, is it? What expectations should ordinary Californians have had of the board? Is it the board that’s failing Californians or is it the state executives who failed to abolish the board when they had the chance? And do we want someone on the board who either believes it does more than it does or wants it to?
The West Bay’s Chronicle thinks Pimentel is willing to eliminate the board and endorsed him on that basis alone. While it’s true that, “I’ll abolish this seat once elected” doesn’t have the same ring as “End the sales tax on food,” it does seem odd that Pimentel doesn’t announce his intent to immediately start stripping down the office he’s devoted at least $250k of his own funds to pursuing anywhere on his campaign website (or maybe he did and we just couldn’t hear it over the terrible sound editing). What we do hear from Pimentel is the voice of someone who’s willing to say what whoever he’s speaking to wants to hear to get elected.
And of course, every politician does some of that, but one of the only bright sides of having a machine is that machine politicians have to do very little of it. Aside from a mystifying misrecollection, Lieber seems to have a pretty straightforward understanding of her position. She’s there because she understands the board does very little, and her long list of endorsements from the usual suspects—not, incidentally, the Howard Jarvis orcs, who’ve thrown in with Pimentel—tells us that she gets along well with people while she does it. She does not feel compelled to lie about having the desire to eliminate her job to get her job, and that’s not much, but it’s not nothing. If we have to have a bench, Lieber seems to be doing a perfectly fine job warming it.
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