Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Care for sidewalk trees and the damage they can cause, like on Balboa Street in San Francisco, may shift to property owners

When Mayor Ed Lee of San Francisco unveiled his $6.8 billion budget earlier this month to a standing ovation from the city’s supervisors and other officials, it featured something that would make most politicians duck for cover: Tax increases.

To close a $306 million deficit, Lee proposed raising the sales tax and decreed that property owners should henceforth be responsible for maintaining thousands of street trees and sidewalks previously tended by the city.

He also proposed borrowing $248 million to fix crumbling streets.

With this agenda of more taxes, fewer services and debt financing, Lee avoided what is really the unspeakable political act here: Layoffs.

In most of the country, tax increases are anathema. Not in San Francisco. The city’s public employee unions are a potent political force; business groups are focused on business taxes; resident taxpayers are disorganized and inconsequential, politically.

San Francisco has about 26,000 public employees. San Jose, a much larger city, has just 5,300 (though San Francisco is also a county and provides services a city does not). While Lee’s plan anticipates that the city’s police, firefighters and nurses will forgo $21.7 million in previously promised raises, it’s surprising that the mayor didn’t take a harder look at the work force.

The taxes-before-layoffs ethos reflects the cultural divide between San Francisco and, well, pretty much anywhere else. The city “is tax happy,” said Scott Macdonald, a spokesman for Californians for Tax Fairness. “Taxes are not such an ugly term there as elsewhere in the state.”

Lee hardly stands alone. Local politicians are hustling to invent or support new, creative ways to raise taxes. A proposed state law that would enable voters to create new local taxes, including an income tax, drew a John F. Kennedy-esque campaign email from Dennis Herrera, promoting the idea as “government’s last, best hope.” (Herrera, the city attorney, is running for mayor.)

Californians have the sixth-highest state and local tax burden in the country, at 10.6 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. If San Francisco were to enact a 2 percent city income tax, residents would carry the highest tax burden in the nation.

Meanwhile, Sen. Mark Leno, Democrat of San Francisco, is pushing legislation that would let local governments roughly double the fee to register a vehicle in the city. In San Francisco, that would yield about $44 million in new revenue.

Normally, business groups like the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce express knee-jerk opposition to tax increases. But James Lazarus, who oversees the chamber’s public-policy efforts, appeared at a press conference with Leno in support of his proposal. Lazarus said that the chamber supported the measure because the city did need to raise revenue and that the measure restored the license fee to its level of a decade ago. So it’s not really a new tax, as he looks at it — it’s a revival of an old one.

Similarly, a spokeswoman for the mayor said that Lee proposes no tax increases, because his sales-tax boost is "just a sales tax recovery."

San Francisco has the second-highest sales tax — 9.5 percent, including a 1 percent state surcharge — in the country, according to Vertex, a tax-consultancy. If the surcharge is allowed to expire on July 1, Lee proposes that the city then tack another 0.5 percent onto its sales tax, making the rate 9 percent. San Francisco would then slip behind Chicago and Phoenix to have the nation’s third-highest rate.

Car retailers and high-end jewelers say the differential would not hurt big-ticket sales much. Car buyers pay sales tax according to their official county of residence (so San Franciscans would pay more, regardless), and buyers of luxury goods are apparently impervious to an extra percentage or two.

“At this price point,” said Glen Ross, the president of Shreve & Co., the august jeweler on Post Street, “1 percent, a half a percent, it’s neither here nor there.”

The real impact, ruminated Ross, is “just on us residents.”

Ross gestured toward the sales clerks and cashiers standing at the ready on Shreve’s sales floor. Those who work and live here are the ones who will really feel the sting, since they are “purchasing on a daily basis,” he said. “It all adds up.”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.