Hemet’s Measure E Comes Up Short

Backers of Hemet’s Measure E spent Wednesday sifting through the numbers and wondering what went wrong.

As for their next move, assuming there is one, it’s a little early to say.

“We’re obviously disappointed, and a maybe little surprised,” Hemet Fire Chief Scott Brown said of the defeat of Measure E, the proposed one percent sales tax that would have raised money for more police and fire protection in the city. “We came up about 900 votes of where we needed to be.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, Measure E – which would have raised about $10 million a year for 10 years exclusively for Hemet’s police and fire departments – was leading 62 percent to 37 percent, having received 7,332 of the 11,721 votes cast, according to the Riverside County Registrar of Voters.

A simple majority, however, was not enough. Because it would have raised taxes for a specific purpose, Measure E needed to receive two-thirds of the votes cast, meaning it came up about five percent short.

Brown and other supporters of the measure argued that city desperately needed the extra funding to keep up with the demands being made on both departments. Overall crime in Hemet is up 21 percent since 2010, with violent crime up more than 50 percent during that time, Police Chief Dave Brown said.

During the campaign, both chiefs said they had cut their departments back as much as they could without endangering public safety.

“Maybe we weren’t compelling enough in arguing why this was so needed,” Scott Brown said. “Looking back, I don’t know what we could have done differently. We ran a good campaign and we did well with social media. At the end, we felt like the community support was out there.”

Measure E supporters came close enough to try again, perhaps soon, said Robert Righetti, a Hemet businessman and a member of the Hemet Taxpayers Association, a community group that opposed the proposal.

“They clearly have a huge budget problem, that’s obvious to everyone,” said Righetti, who said he does not live in Hemet. “I think the city council needs to sit down and take a very hard look at the situation.”