SEIU: Mayor Agrees to Push 'Tax Hike' For November Ballot

Following a marathon negotiating session with the mayor's office, the SEIU last week agreed to a series of concessions that could save the city scores of millions of dollars. The details of those concessions were not released to the public, but SF Weekly tracked down an inside SEIU source who explained what was going on.

A series of "key provisions" posted today on the SEIU's Web site confirmed much of what our source told us -- with one intriguing addition:

The city and county agreed to work with local 1021 members and other community allies to put a measure on the November 2008 (sic) ballot to increase revenue and save jobs and services.

What's that mean? "It appears to be a tax hike," notes an inside source at SEIU. "Whether it's a sales tax increase or a property tax increase or they might call it a carbon cost increase -- something fashionable -- it comes down to asking the taxpayer to pay a little more money."

The amount of this tax as well as the name have yet to be determined. "That is going to take a while to work out," says the SEIU worker.

Messages left for the mayor's office have not yet been returned. And while Gavin Newsom has long bandied about the possibility of a November election, he has never truly thrown his support behind raising taxes (or, perhaps, "carbon costs" or some other revenue-raising measure) as the SEIU now claims.