SELLING A TAX HIKE SHERIFF TAKES HIS BUDGET NEEDS TO THE PEOPLE.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

LOS Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca wants your money. He wants it every time you buy a box of paper clips, each time you upgrade your computer and for every new addition to your wardrobe.

And he wants you to want that, too.

That's the important part, because without getting love from two-thirds of the county's voters in November, Baca's going to be out of luck in his plan to raise $500 million a year for public safety through a half-cent sales-tax hike.

The money would pay for hiring more cops and deputies across the county, new police equipment and homeland security measures (whatever they are) to stop terrorists from blowing up LAX or the Academy Awards show.

The reason the head of the largest sheriff's department in the USA is holding his hat out to county voters is because cuts in funding to most every government agency in the state mean the local police and sheriff's departments can't get all the money they feel they need to keep the 10 million or so people in the county safe.

And the reason Baca is out collecting signatures from voters with the help of celebrity volunteers such as Won-G - a Haitian rapper with a fondness for SUVs who says his music is about faith, not violence and crime - is because that's the only way to get it on the ballot.

After the success of a parcel tax in November 2002 for trauma care, Baca asked the county Board of Supervisors to put a sales-tax increase on the ballot. The supervisors said no. (Maybe they thought he should first consider selling the multimillion-dollar plane he bought for the department a few years ago before asking for money. I don't know.)

So Baca sidestepped the board, with which he is often at odds, and took his appeal directly to the people.

For the average consumer, his proposed tax would cost about $6 a month, Baca estimates, or $72 a year. And, in the land of Hollywood and Surf City, visitors will contribute a big portion.

``We are a tourist place,'' Baca said last week when he visited the Daily News to sell his plan. ``As long as the tourists come here to spend stuff, we'll have plenty of sales tax (revenue).''

That aside, the prevailing theory among California's political pundits is that any new tax faces an uphill battle. Californians are tax weary. We want to keep our money.

But Baca's not prone to any prevailing theory, and he often doesn't follow the program. He won his office after his opponent, incumbent Sherman Block, dropped dead. And Baca's quirks - the eastern spiritualism, his daily eight-mile run, his love for gimmicks, showmanship and bizarre metaphors - have been written about extensively over the past six years of his tenure.

He's not what you'd expect from a career law enforcer - or from a Republican, for that matter. And he doesn't take rejection very well.

Two years ago, when the county supervisors were contemplating budget cuts to his department, Baca also turned to the public. He called reporters and TV cameras to a press conference at his Monterey Park headquarters and announced he was releasing criminals from jail unless the supes restored some money to the budget.

Although he later backed down, the message that he, the crime-busting sheriff, was trying to keep the county safe, no thanks to the stingy supes, was already out in the world.

That's the basis for the message now. That in order to keep us safe, police need more money, from us.

``This has never happened,'' Steve Whitmore said of the sheriff's crusade. And Whitmore, Baca's spokesman both on the campaign and off, has been on the scene for a long time. ``I do not ever remember when a sheriff has launched a localized campaign for something other than his own campaign.''

If it's a first, then it's also a second, because Baca is also backing an initiative that would force Indian tribes to pay a quarter of their revenue to the state or the state would allow gambling off Indian land. The Indian tribes, as you might expect, are not happy about it.

As for the sales tax campaign, Baca's got reason to believe people would dig deeper into their pockets to feel safer in this post-9-11 world.

A recent survey of by the Public Policy Institute of California posed a hypothetical sales-tax question to about 2,000 county residents between Feb. 27 and March 9. Based on their overwhelming affirmative answers, the PPIC concluded that, contrary to popular belief, about 65 percent of adults in the county would support the sales tax increase if it was on the November ballot. That's just 1 percent shy of the two-thirds needed to pass.

A majority of Los Angeles city officials is behind it as well. Why wouldn't they? It would raise an estimated $168 million a year for the Los Angeles Police Department, money City Hall can't steal for itself. So far, the county supervisors haven't given an endorsement and don't seem likely to do so, considering their original positions.

But not everyone is convinced the PPIC poll is a harbinger of things to come in November.

``The real poll was Prop. 56,'' said Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association, an anti-tax organization in Sacramento.

Proposition 56 was the measure on the March statewide ballot that would have allowed the state Legislature to adopt a budget with only a simple majority of legislators, rather than two-thirds.

To tax foes, the measure was a clear attempt to make it easier for tax- friendly pols to push through new levies on the people. The measure failed miserably, a loss that was compounded by the victory of all the other propositions on the ballot.

``The problem with polling is they poll in a void,'' said Arnold Steinberg, a Republican strategist in Los Angeles. So many other factors outside the vacuum of the hypothetical could affect the turnout, he said, from the sequence of propositions on the ballot to whether there are other tax measures on the ballot, which there will likely be.

About what fellow Republicans think of Baca's proposal, Steinberg is circumspect. ``Republicans tend to be anti-tax, but if they support a tax at all they would favor public safety,'' Steinberg said. However, ``There is a feeling that government spends too much on frills and not enough on public safety.''

Can Lee Baca buck the odds and pull out a win? Maybe. But remember, this is the guy who had to fight it out with a dead guy for his job.

CAPTION(S):

photo MEMO} Mariel Garza is an editorial writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News. Write to her by e-mail at mariel.garza(at)dailynews.com

Photo:

(color) L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca speaks in Palmdale last month about his proposal for a half-cent increase in the sales tax to fund public safety.

Jeff Goldwater/Staff Photographer