Measure E Parcel Tax Passes for Los Altos School District

Measure E, the parcel tax proposal for the Los Altos School District (LASD), has passed, according to the final tally released Friday by the county Registrar of Voters.

The final vote was 9,187 "yes" and 4,512 "no," a 67-to-33 percent margin that was virtually unchanged from Wednesday's count.

"This a great win for kids in the Los Altos School District and for the community as a whole, and we thank the community for their continued strong support," read a message that the "yes" campaign sent out Friday afternoon.

Reform LASD said it was considering a request for a recount, said Ron Haley, who had spearheaded a campaign against the $193 parcel tax measure.

The group has up to five days after the results are certified by the registrar's office to request a recount. Although the  67 percent "yes" votes was certainly enough to pass, the margin, in numbers, was quite slender—just 54 votes. 

"We are seriously considering a recount," Haley said. "It's well within our budget, and we have to figure out if we want to do that."

All tax proposals need a two-thirds-plus-one-vote majority to be approved, not a simple majority.

KLASS, or Keep Los Altos Schools Strong, the proponents of the "yes" campaign, acknowledged the difficulty of passing the measure.

"While the margin of victory was small, it is important to put this in perspective," according to a KLASS statement. "The two-thirds requirement—the highest approval threshold in politics—is a very high bar to clear, even in the best of times. Measure E was the only parcel tax measure on the May 3 ballot that had organized opposition and still won."

Three "no" votes were reflected in Friday's count. Those three ballots had been flagged by the vote-counting machine, because they had been included in a batch from a different precinct, said a spokesman for the registrar's office. The ballots were valid; they simply had been included in the wrong batch.

Three other parcel tax measures passed in Santa Clara County. They include Measure A, a $49 proposal for the Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union High School District; Measure B, a $59 first-ever parcel tax proposal for Sunnyvale School District; and Measure C, a $125 parcel tax proposal for Cupertino Union School District, which was singled out as having two schools scoring being among the top API base scores in the state (Murdock-Portal with 998 out of 1,000, and Faria Elementary with 997).

To see the official results go to the Santa Clara County Registar of Voters website.