As local leaders and doctors rally behind Santa Clara County’s proposed sales tax measure, sheriff’s deputies and county prosecutors are urging voters to think twice.
Dozens of health care workers and elected officials gathered at Valley Medical Center in San Jose on Wednesday in a show of public support for the five-eighth cent general sales tax increase known as Measure A, which will appear on the Nov. 4 special election ballot. County leaders are pushing the tax and say it will bring in $330 million annually to protect against devastating federal cuts to California’s second largest public hospital system.
But for the first time, the county’s public safety unions are signaling concern over the measure.
In a joint statement released Wednesday, unions representing county sheriff’s deputies and prosecutors cast doubt on whether the tax is worth the support. Instead, they’re calling the county out for making cuts to their departments while expanding the hospital system.
“Before deciding on this sales tax increase, voters should demand to know if the County Administration plans to protect public safety and stop cutting the number of deputy sheriffs who work to keep our parks, transit lines and neighborhoods safe,” Marcus Barbour, president of the Santa Clara County Deputy Sheriffs Association, said in the joint statement.
Barbour’s union has long called out the decline in staffing at the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office from 532 deputies in 2020 to 370 today.
“That’s 31% fewer deputies and our most vulnerable communities suffer the most because of these dangerous cuts,” he said.
Max Zarzana, a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office and president of the Santa Clara County Government Attorneys Association, blasted the county for cutting prosecutors and public defenders to “fund a hospital spending spree.”
“Will Measure A support keeping our streets safe or will it create more crime victims in need of hospitals to treat their injuries? Voters should know before they decide on this tax increase,” Zarzana said in the statement.
Supporters of the measure say safety net hospitals like Valley Medical Center will lose resources or close entirely, causing extensive wait times for critical care.
“Those wait times will spill over to ERs and hospitals throughout the Bay Area, including academic and private hospitals,” Praveen Anchala, a radiologist at VMC which saw the highest trauma patient volume in California last year, said at the rally. “The gridlock created by that will be like closing multiple lanes of Highway 101 — except we’re talking about people’s lives.”
The rally comes after an effort by the local Libertarian Party and Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association failed to stop the measure from appearing on the ballot. They argued the spending cuts under President Donald Trump did not constitute an emergency required to place a sales tax measure on a non-general election year. A superior court judge disagreed — though she did order the county to strike several words from the measure that opponents deemed biased, including the mention of President Trump by name.
Meanwhile, numerous San Jose councilmembers are announcing their support. This includes District 7 Councilmember Bien Doan, who has been vocally anti-tax and even supported a controversial statewide anti-tax measure last year that was slammed by some of the same people pushing Measure A.
“While new taxes are never easy, I believe this is a short-term step we must take to save lives and protect the services we depend on to keep our hospitals open, expand mental health treatment and support other critical health services,” Doan said in a statement on his support for Measure A. “My hope is that, at the end of these five years, the County will have streamlined its budget and strengthened our hospitals’ financial position so this tax can expire as planned.”
Mayor Matt Mahan, however, has been silent on the tax after publicly casting doubt on the county’s hospital investments. Mahan has long been at odds with the progressive Board of Supervisors — dismissing the county’s public health care investments while arguing the county doesn’t do enough to help San Jose resolve its homeless population problem. At a county town hall last month, Congressman Sam Liccardo indicated San Jose leaders were negotiating their support for Measure A in exchange for more county investments into interim shelter.
Santa Clara County’s system of four hospitals and 15 health clinics are mostly reliant on Medicaid reimbursements. But the July signing of H.R. 1 — also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — makes sweeping cuts to the federal insurance program. That will translate to approximately $4.4 billion in losses to the county hospital system over the next five years, the life of the sales tax measure.
Half of the county hospitals’ patients pay through Medi-Cal. The rest pay through a mix of other means and Medicare, a separate federal program serving patients 65 and older and patients of all ages with certain disabilities.
One speaker at Wednesday’s rally was Ashley Mompoint-Michel, the mother of 7-year-old Bastian Michel who was hit by a car last year after leaving a Willow Glen children’s center without supervisors’ knowledge. He suffered a fractured skull, multiple broken bones and a ruptured bladder. His case — and the parents’ lawsuit against the children’s center — was covered extensively in the TV news.
“We are lawyers who work in the tech industry and have private insurance. We didn’t know anything about Valley Medical Center. Immediately upon arriving we demanded our son be flown to Stanford hospital which we were accustomed to,” Ashley said at the rally. “But we also did not know what a Level 1 trauma center was … and Bastian needed to be here. Thanks to this hospital and all the resources available to it – our son is now an 8- year-old.”
Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X.
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