West Contra Costa County voters next year will likely be asked to renew Measure T, a parcel tax that generates about $10 million a year for local schools.
First approved in 2004, voters have re-authorized the tax every four-eight years since then to fund student programs including athletics, libraries and guidance counseling at the West Contra Costa Unified School District. Property owners currently pay 7.2 cents per square foot of total building area — about $72 per year for an average homeowner (senior citizens and disabled property owners are exempt).
The measure is expected to appear on the June or November 2026 ballot. While it has faced little opposition in recent elections, growing frustration with the district could threaten its renewal.
“There is some concern that, because there’s a lack of trust in the district from the parents, that it might not be renewed,” said Sky Nelson, a physics teacher at El Cerrito High School. “And that’s really my group’s chosen mission … to build trust.”
Nelson has been working to build a community online where people share updates, budget documents and other information to demystify what is happening at the district level and bring parents into the conversation.
He conducted a survey that found that while parents support the mission of the parcel tax, they would like to see more opportunities for community input to shape how dollars are spent. They also said the district needs to do a better job of showing the tangible impact of the tax.
“It’s challenging for people to have (so) many parcel taxes to pay but see the school district in such despair,” a parent wrote in the survey. “While there are larger structural issues for why the District continues to have financial problems, tax payers may not get the connection.”
Last year, WCCUSD failed to approve a budget on time and faced threats of a state and/or county takeover, with community members furious about what they said was a lack of transparency and communication. This year has been a smoother process, with the district securing a “positive rating” from the Contra Costa County Board of Education for its financial plan.
However, to balance its budget, the district has already made $19.7 million in cuts this past academic year and has said it must cut an additional $13 million in the next two years. It also plans to deplete one of its reserve funds by 2027 to balance the structural budget deficit.
Legally, the school board cannot campaign for the tax. That role falls to teachers, parents, and other community advocates like Nelson.
“Every parent I talk to wants the school to do well,” Nelson said. “They care about teachers. They also care about the district, and want everyone to get along and find ways to work stuff out.”
He said the biggest concerns are around money, especially in light of recent budget cuts and teacher’s demands for more pay. The teachers union, which has also criticized WCCUSD for its lack of transparency around the budget, recently declared an impasse in its contract negotiations.
Parcel tax failure would hurt student programs, school officials say
District leaders say if the measure were to fail it would directly impact student programs.
“If it doesn’t pass that means that $10 million will have to be either found somewhere else or will come out of the budget,” WCCUSD Board President Leslie Reckler told Richmondside.
If the tax measure passes, it would avoid service interruptions when the current version expires June 30, 2027. It will need two-thirds of the votes cast to pass. Last time it was renewed it passed easily, with 76% of voters saying “yes.”
To prepare for the election, the board earlier this year approved $50,000 to hire a political consulting firm to assess voter attitudes and determine whether June or November 2026 would offer the best chance of passage. At Wednesday’s school board meeting, the board finalized a contract with Godbe Research, a firm that has conducted WCCUSD’s ballot measure studies for more than 20 years.
The firm’s president Micheal Godbe said he anticipates a higher voter turnout because of Prop. 50, which would redistrict California in favor of electing more Democrats, and that may change how people vote.
“It’s not a tax measure, as you all know, so it doesn’t impact our results from a substantive point of view,” Godbe told the board. “However, depending on the campaign and the intensity on both sides, we may have our results right in smaller districts … in a district of your size, that’s less of a problem, but it’s something that we think about as moving forward.”
Reckler said the frustrations around President Donald Trump — particularly his threats to cut funding to public services including education — may encourage voters to support a local tax that the federal government cannot take away.
“These are local dollars that no one can take away. It’s our people, it’s our schools, and the feds can’t touch it,” Reckler said. “So that might be very poignant, especially in this community, which is very pro-education.”
Don Gosney, president of the WCCUSD Bond Oversight Committee, said the district is starting the process to put a measure on the ballot too late and believes there is a good chance voters won’t be as generous this time around.
“The district needed to win all the hearts and minds of voters before the survey is made so the responses will be favorable,” Gosney told the board. “Right now you all come across as these used car sales (people) and asking us to trust you when you’ve done so very much to convince us that you cannot be trusted.”
Godbe will survey some of the 144,185 registered voters in the district’s boundaries via phone and online. Results of the survey are expected in six to eight weeks.
If the district chooses the June 2026 election, it must submit final ballot language to the Contra Costa County Registrar of Voters by March.
Your coverage of the parcel tax is excellent. However your quotes by Don Gosney may give the public the false belief that he was speaking for the WCCUSD Citizen’s Bond Oversight Committee (CBOC), of which he is the President.
The WCCUSD CBOC monitors the propositions on school construction and has nothing to do with parcel taxes.
You should have mentioned that in your article. By not mentioning this you may have given more weight to his comments than they should have had.
Thank you for pointing this out.
We continue to pay these taxes to school programs, yet we still see kids struggling in school. We need to see growth and improvements first before we approve these bonds.
Get back to what used to work, bring back shop classes, home economics. Get back to basics.