When Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and a coalition of prosecutors, public defenders and law enforcement officers endorsed a county sales tax hike, it was a political turning point for last fall’s Measure A campaign.
But it turns out that the ballot language that misled voters to think some of the new tax money would be used for public safety also fooled key political leaders who lent their name and financial backing to the measure.
“It said protect public safety on the ballot,” Rosen says. “I, as the DA, along with the prosecutors and the deputy sheriffs supported Measure A because it would help prevent cuts to public safety.”
Some members of the group had threatened to campaign against the measure. They say they reversed course only after seeing new ballot language that included public safety support and after securing agreements that left them feeling County Executive James Williams understood their funding concerns.
With the backing of the DA, mayor and public safety workers, the measure passed with 57% support in the Nov. 4 election. But now, as Williams vows to spend the new tax money only on health care and seeks from the District Attorney’s Office some of the proportionately biggest county budget reduction targets, public safety advocates say they were misled.
“I feel double-crossed,” says Rosen. “I don’t understand it given that I worked very hard to get this measure passed. It’s a funny way to say, ‘thank you.’”
The fight highlights the deep political split over years of ballooning county health care funding at the expense of public safety agencies; the ambiguity of deals cut during the campaign; and continuing use of misleading ballot language by California local governments to pass new tax measures.
Mahan says he would not have endorsed Measure A if Rosen hadn’t.
“I’m deeply concerned with an approach that would put all of the (Measure A money) into the hospitals, disproportionately concentrating the cuts in the criminal justice system,” he says. “I already feel we’re not doing enough on criminal justice.”
Santa Clara County, when compared to six other similarly sized California counties between 1.5 million and 3.5 million people, has the largest per-capita general fund budget and spends the smallest portion on public safety and criminal justice, according to analysis by Peter Jensen, the district attorney’s finance manager.
As county leaders battle over how to spend the new sales tax revenues that they will begin collecting April 1, voters and public safety advocates have good reason to feel deceived.
The ballot wording
Measure A will add five-eighths of a cent for five years to each dollar of taxable goods, pushing the total rate to 10% or more in most of Santa Clara County. The sales tax increase is expected to raise $330 million annually and cost each county resident at least an average $113 a year.
In late August, during a court challenge by taxpayer advocates, county officials agreed to change the ballot wording to explicitly state that public safety would be among critical local services that could be funded by Measure A.
The new wording indicated the money would “support critical local services such as trauma, emergency room, mental health, and public safety; and reduce the risk of hospital closures at Santa Clara Valley Healthcare and other service cuts.”
But, despite the ballot wording, county supervisors are under no legal obligation to use the money to support the listed services. That’s because of the byzantine rules for local tax measures.
California has generally two types of local tax measures. A “special” tax requires two-thirds voter approval, and the use of the money is restricted to a specific purpose. A “general” tax, like Measure A, requires only majority approval, and the money can be used on any legally permissible government purpose.
Williams told us during the campaign that Measure A money would be used solely to shore up the health care system. But, he explained, county supervisors sought a general tax because it had a lower vote threshold for approval.
While a general tax allows supervisors to spend the money on any of the services mentioned on the ballot, it does not require them to do so. They are free to spend the money just for health care, even if that’s not clearly disclosed.
That spending flexibility is only hinted at in the middle of the voter guide “impartial analysis,” written by Deputy County Counsel Nick De Fiesta. He writes that Measure A money could be used “to support Santa Clara Valley Healthcare hospitals and clinics, provide social services, promote public safety, or for any other legitimate governmental purposes.”
Nothing on the ballot or in the voter guide clearly states what Williams says was intended — a new sales tax entirely to bail out the county’s health care system.
Fiscally ‘unsustainable’
Further deceiving voters, county officials pitched the measure as critical to, as the ballot wording said, “address severe federal cuts enacted by the President and Congress.”
But Santa Clara County was in financial trouble and planning the ballot measure long before President Trump returned to office. Total county spending had increased from $6.4 billion in the 2017-18 fiscal year to $13 billion in 2025-26. Santa Clara County expenditures now rank highest per capita by far of the 10 largest California counties.
The biggest cause of that increase has been health care, which includes the county’s network of hospitals and clinics. The county, which already ran Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, rescued O’Connor Hospital in San Jose and Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy from bankruptcy in 2019, and purchased Regional Medical Center in San Jose in 2025. The county now operates a much larger health care system per-capita than any other California county.
But health care losses rapidly increased, from about $97 million in 2017-18 to $532 million expected in the current fiscal year, before Trump’s budget bill made it much worse. It’s a shortfall that the county has been making up with increasing general fund subsidies, money that could otherwise go to other county services, including public safety.
In 2024, before the county purchased its fourth hospital, the Board of Supervisors’ outside auditing firm warned that “large increases in subsidies for the hospital system are not sustainable indefinitely.”
“The system will never generate enough money to cover its costs,” warned Harvey M. Rose Associates. “Subsidies will always be required. The larger the system gets, the larger the subsidies will need to be.”
Then, when Congress passed Medicaid cuts as part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which would significantly affect Santa Clara County’s health care system, a local problem that had been mounting for eight years got much worse.
Ballot politics
It’s against that background that public safety advocates were threatening to mount a campaign against Measure A. They had seen hospitals subsidies drain general fund revenues from public safety.
The Sheriff’s Office had 34% fewer deputies in 2024 than in 2020, according to county data analyzed by Tom Saggau, a contract negotiator and political strategist for deputies and criminal attorneys. Response times for urgent calls had increased as much as 73% in some parts of the county.
The union representing prosecutors and public defenders had prepared a 30-second television commercial against the tax increase. “What is the spending plan for Measure A?” the ad asks. “… (W)ill the county keep buying hospitals it can’t afford and gut public safety to pay for it? You should know before voting on Measure A, the county’s massive tax increase.”
Rosen, Mahan and the public safety labor unions unified to ensure key demands would be met before they considered supporting the sales tax increase. Polling then showed a strong opposition campaign might have defeated Measure A, Saggau says.
But then the county reached agreement with prosecutors, public defenders and sheriff deputies on contracts with raises in line with other county employees; Mahan received promises of county health services at San Jose-funded homeless shelters and interim housing; and Rosen received permission from Williams to fill eight prosecutor positions that had been budgeted but frozen.
“It looked like folks were committed that public safety is protected in some way, so we all endorsed,” Saggau said. With the new ballot language and what they thought were assurances from Williams, the coalition supported the sales tax, Rosen, Mahan and Saggau said.
Rosen explained in an interview when the endorsement was announced that he had not received county commitments to directly fund public safety with Measure A money, but expected it would free up county money to protect law enforcement. “If the sales tax measure doesn’t pass, then it’s clear to me that there’s going to be cuts to law enforcement in the county, cuts to the DAs Office and cuts to the Sheriff’s Office,” he told reporter Grace Hase.
The opposition ad was shelved. Instead, the government attorneys and deputy sheriffs’ association spent about $625,000 on digital ads and mailers featuring county Sheriff Bob Jonsen, Mahan and, most prominently, Rosen.
The ads targeted conservative and swing voters, and touted the measure as a way to reduce crime and homelessness. “Without Measure A, our safety takes another hit,” reads one of the mailers. “Public safety leaders we trust support Measure A to reduce crime and homelessness,” reads another.
But if Williams gets the cuts he’s suggesting and directs all the new sales tax money to the county health care system, the promises in the mailers and in the ballot language will turn out to be empty.
For example, the roughly $18 million Rosen is now being asked to trim from next fiscal year’s budget dwarfs the roughly $2 million annual cost of the eight entry-level prosecutor positions unfrozen before he endorsed Measure A.
It certainly won’t be the first time voters have been deceived by local government officials’ ballot wording. I’ve been writing for years about such electoral dishonesty.
What makes this case different is that key backers of the measure got conned, too. The question now is whether they will spend political capital trying to reform the broken election system.
Reach Editorial Page Editor Daniel Borenstein at dborenstein@bayareanewsgroup.com.
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