Sacramento Mayor's Office Misses Important Sales Tax Measure Deadline

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) - Did Sacramento's Mayor Kevin Johnson drop the ball with the new sales tax measure? That's exactly what happened, according to the city clerk.

The mayor missed a critical deadline to craft ballot language for November, and now the ballot language will be left blank.

There is no explanation, not even a comment from Johnson nor any member of his staff of why he missed a critical Election Day deadline -- a deadline City Clerk Shirley Concolino says the mayor's staff was warned about.

"There were three or four [emails] that had gone out in the last two weeks," said Concolino.

Were they ignored or unread? The mayor's staff isn't saying. But after volunteering to write the ballot argument against a proposed sales tax measure, the deadline to file came and went Wednesday. The mayor missed it.

"It's a tragedy," said Sacramento Taxpayers Association Vice President Craig Powell. "A tragedy in two parts; from my perspective the bigger blunder is that the public is deprived of seeing the arguments against this."

Powell says his group will look at taking the issue to court.

"The mayor has a management problem in his office on this matter, and I'm gonna leave it to his good offices to solve it," said Powell.

But so far no solution has been made public.

The mayor's miscue will now leave voters with a blank spot on their ballots.

Johnson was not at council chambers Thursday because he and his wife were scheduled as speakers at an "Ethics in Education Forum" in Hawaii.