Measure A Is Not a Tax. It Is a Blank Check.

Who pays for a raise that no elected official approved and no voter can overturn?

The mailer in your mailbox

This week, Burbank voters received a glossy mailer that says Measure A is “fair and helps protect public safety — with no new taxes.” Here it is, front and back. We blacked out only the name, address and postal barcode of the household that received it. Nothing else on the mailer has been changed.

What Measure A actually does

Measure A is a change to the Los Angeles County Charter. It sets up what is called “binding arbitration.” When the county and a public safety union cannot agree on a contract, a three-member panel of arbitrators would decide. The county picks one member, the union picks one, and the two sides choose the chair. The panel takes each side’s last offer on each issue and picks one of them.

After 30 days, the decision is final. In the words of the county’s own lawyers, “No further action by the County Board of Supervisors or by the electorate” is permitted or required. The elected Board of Supervisors, who answer to you, would no longer have the last word on the pay of these employees. Neither would you.

The mailer is correct that Measure A does not create a tax. The county’s Auditor-Controller says it “does not directly affect County revenues.” But the same official says the county has “no basis on which to predict” whether costs will go up or down, and that awards could spread to other county contracts that are tied to these. The county’s chief executive warned the Board in February that arbitration awards “could … materially and detrimentally increase” costs and could put the county’s pension obligations and credit rating at risk.

The Board of Supervisors voted 4 to 1 on March 3, 2026 to place Measure A on the ballot. The county’s chief executive noted at the time that the unions had already begun gathering signatures for an initiative of their own. Measure A needs a simple majority to pass.

Follow the money

The mailer was paid for by “Yes on A — Safer Los Angeles County, Sponsored by Labor Organizations Representing First Responders and Other Essential Workers,” committee number 1485027. Its treasurer is Derek Hsieh, identified by the Los Angeles Times as being with the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. The return address on the mailer, 445 South Figueroa Street, Suite 2400, is the office of Kaufman Legal Group, a political law firm that files the committee’s reports.

These are the contributions of $5,000 or more that we could verify in the committee’s filings with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder through June 30, 2026, plus one later report:

The deputies’ association amount includes $49,819 of staff time, travel and office costs it gave as an in-kind contribution. The committee reported about $7.45 million raised through June 30, 2026, and the Los Angeles Times reported $7.7 million through mid-October. The difference is in reports filed electronically after June 30, which we could not yet itemize.

Where the money went. The biggest early expense was $841,008 to PCI Campaigns of Calabasas for signature gathering, with another $37,464 to The Monaco Group for the same work. The committee also paid Kaufman Legal Group, consultants The Strategy Group of Chicago and Paloma Public Affairs, and J&Z Strategies for web work. By June 30 it still had about $6.2 million in the bank for the fall campaign, which is the season of mailers like this one.

Who is on the other side? Nobody with money. No committee has been formed to oppose Measure A, and no argument against it was filed for the official voter pamphlet. When one side spends $7.7 million and the other spends nothing, voters hear only one side of the story.

What county public safety employees are paid

Public pay records posted by Transparent California for 2025 show that many county public safety employees already earn far more than most of the people whose taxes pay them. These are total pay plus the county’s cost of benefits such as pensions and health care.

Among the Sheriff’s Department employees over $300,000 were 1,585 deputy sheriffs and 960 sergeants. In the Fire Department they included 652 fire captains and 361 firefighters. Much of it is overtime: the employees over $300,000 alone were paid $261 million in Sheriff’s Department overtime and $209 million in Fire Department overtime. The Los Angeles Times reported that the Sheriff’s Department spent $458 million on overtime in a single recent fiscal year.

Some examples from the 2025 records, by job title. We show titles, not names.

These are individual records, chosen to show the range at the top. They are not averages. The deputy sheriff shown is the middle of the 1,585 deputies paid over $300,000. Neither Transparent California nor the county publishes a median for these titles. For comparison, the middle Burbank police officer record for 2025 was $213,311 in pay and benefits, and the middle Burbank firefighter record was $229,008.

How public safety is already paid for

Measure A’s supporters say public safety pay should not be set by politics. It is not set by politics. It is set by budgets, paid for with taxes you already pay. Here is where the money comes from in the county’s 2026-27 budget.

On top of this, Measure E, the fire parcel tax voters passed in 2024, is projected to raise another $146 million for the Fire District this year, kept in a separate fund. Figures are from the county’s 2026-27 recommended budget, the latest version that breaks each department down by funding source.

And the taxes keep coming. On October 1, 2026, the sales tax in Burbank went up again, from 10.5% to 11%, after county voters narrowly passed Measure ER in June. Burbank residents also pay the county’s homelessness sales tax, approved in 2024, and the city’s own Measure P sales tax from 2018. Burbank has its own police and fire departments, so Burbank residents do not pay the county fire taxes, but they do pay the property taxes and the Proposition 172 sales tax that fund the Sheriff’s Department.

Los Angeles County’s total budget this year is $54.2 billion. Public protection is $12.3 billion of it. There is no shortage of tax money going to public safety. The question Measure A raises is who decides how it is spent: the officials you elect, or arbitrators you cannot remove.