Cogdill bill would give Stanislaus County a break

Stanislaus County is finally getting a break in the complicated and patently inequitable distribution of property taxes in California.

Sen. Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto, wrote Senate Bill 85, which has been approved by the Legislature and is on the governor's desk. We urge him to sign it.

This bill would put a cap on how much money Stanislaus and five other counties have to transfer to schools under a funding shift that has been occurring since 1978. The shift was supposed to help counties in the wake of revenue losses from Proposition 13, but it had the opposite effect for the six counties.

Stanislaus County estimates that since 1982, it has paid $52 million to schools that it should have kept.

Cogdill's bill would cap the transfers, establishing a new baseline in 2011. Cogdill's office and county officials offer slightly different estimates of what the financial impact will be, but in both cases it's a positive for the county of several hundred thousands of dollars a year.

We applaud Cogdill for his effort on this issue, and we hope that his replacement in the state Senate and other other local legislators will make it a high priority to remedy another gross unfairness related to property tax allocations.

Stanislaus County gets back from the state only about 11 cents for each dollar of property tax collected here, compared with an average statewide of 19 cents on the dollar. So far, our legislators have not succeeded in persuading their Sacramento colleagues to remedy this situation because other counties would have to get less in order for Stanislaus and the other short-changed counties to get more.

Meanwhile, SB 85 is a good start at a good time. Gov. Schwarzenegger needs to make it law.