Image from Flickr – some rights reserved.
Last year, someone approached me to get help on launching a sugar sweetened beverage (SSB) tax done in Palo Alto. Unfortunately I was heavily involved in another campaign and could not take on another effort like this one. However, the benefits would have been pretty great.
Berkeley enacted one a few years back and the results were phenomenal for Berkeley Unified School District and other recipients of the generated tax revenue. Specifically talking about Berkeley Unified:
Berkeley Unified School District received $637,500 during the 2016-2017 fiscal year. Jezra Thompson of the district’s gardening and cooking program said the funding allowed more than 1,000 students in 17 schools to help plant – and eat – fresh produce from school gardens while learning skills like how to read food labels. Six family events in 2018 helped educate and feed 194 families.
$637,500 is a significant amount of revenue and was designated solely for the use of nutritional purposes and nothing else. If we had such a tax in Palo Alto, which is about the size of Berkeley’s population, we could have netted roughly $300,000 to be used for nutrition purposes and would have been a great contribution to our efforts.
Sadly, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law back in 2018 that bans new local taxes on groceries, essentially putting the brakes on many efforts to mimic Berkeley’s SSB tax.
All of this I found out as I strove to renew efforts on a Palo Alto SSB tax this year (being freed up from the other campaign I was working on), but unfortunately this will need to wait. It is so unfortunate that a potential source of funding designated solely for nutritional programs at the district.
Note also that 3 years into the soda tax in Berkeley, they have found that soda consumption has dropped by half. This is a significant result for the health of our residents – if only we could get it done here… Sugar sweetened beverages are linked to many health issues, from SugarScience.UCSF.edu:
In fact, drinking just one 12-oz can of soda per day can increase your risk of dying from heart disease by nearly one-third. Other studies show that people who drink one to two sugar-sweetened beverages per day have a 26 percent higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, compared to people who drink less than one per month.
from Over time, too much liquid sugar can lead to serious diseases, UCSF.
One can only hope a state-wide SSB tax will come into being. Or perhaps the various advocacy groups attempting to reverse Governor Newsom’s law will be successful.