“The Santa Ana City Council Tuesday night approved a November ballot measure that calls for adding prepaid cellphones to the utility users tax rolls and reducing the overall rate by 0.5 percent.

“If voters approve the measure, the tax will be levied on all prepaid cellphone customers, which represent 40 percent of the city’s population, according to a city staff report. Voice Over IP users, a phone technology that uses the Internet instead of traditional lines, would also be taxed.”

Skype is the king of VOIP services. Google Voice, which I use, is also hugely popular. Hundreds of millions of people make billions of calls a day. Some premium VOIP services charge $5 to $25 a month and are subject to a 3 percent federal excise tax.

But by and large, the most popular VOIP services are free — of fees and taxes.

Here’s a bit of background on VOIP from a CNET story:

“VoIP refers to voice calls that are routed over online networks using the Internet Protocol — the IP that serves as the backbone of the Internet and is used to ferry e-mails, instant messages and Web pages to millions of PCs or cell phones.

“VoIP calls are just another application riding over the Internet. And these calls are unregulated. So at their core, they are no different from e-mails, instant messages or Web pages, which all can be distributed for free between Internet-connected machines. Those include computers and wireless devices, such as cell phones and handhelds, that are set up to receive online information.”

So, yes, the Santa Ana City Council wants to tax an Internet app that people have long used for free. I read the 32-page staff report available here on the proposed utility tax, and it shows not the slightest bit of understanding as to what VOIP is and how it works.

If anyone did have a clue, then of course the question of how would it be possible to enforce a tax on a particular use of the Internet might have come to mind.

Instead, members of the Santa Ana City Council just followed their first instinct: If it moves, tax it!

Ronald Reagan saw this coming long ago.

“According to city documents, [newly hired City Manager David] Cavazos would earn $558,625.85 his first year, $515,395.08 his second year and $515,895.08 his third year. The annual compensation includes his $315,000 annual base salary plus retirement, medical insurance, life insurance, relocation allowance, temporary housing and time-off costs. …

“… when he retired in 2011, former City Manager Dave Ream received payments of $431,158, making him the second-highest paid city manger in the state for that year, according to a database maintained by state Controller John Chiang. Included in Ream’s compensation was a $365,000 lump-sum payout in unused time off.

“Ream’s payment came after the city gave a controversial $191,000 payment to former City Attorney Joe Fletcher. Fletcher had collected that amount in unused vacation, holiday and sick leave through unusual clauses in his employment contract that allowed him to accrue time as if he had been hired 13 years prior to his actual hiring date.

“And most recently, former City Manager Paul Walters received an severance package valued at $706,396. “

High pay doesn’t translate into well-run city

What’s striking about this generosity is how it is simply not linked to reality. Santa Ana is simply not a well-run city. This is in sharp contrast with Anaheim, its neighbor and — except for the affluent Anaheim Hills community — its demographic doppelganger.

I worked in Santa Ana for seven years and know many people who work or live in the region. Large parts of the city have a dusty, depressed vibe. Traffic is routinely horrible. Crime is far higher than the U.S. norm and auto theft rates are among the highest in the nation. Scandal is common.

Instead of lavish pay, Santa Ana executives deserve rebukes.

By Chris Reed

The city of San Bernardino’s defiance of CalPERS’ demands for payment will be remembered as the first in a very long line of defiant acts from local governments in California as budgets that don’t add up force local officials to make tough and often unprecedented decisions. For local officials, telling Sacramento to take a hike is a much easier call than taking on those who benefit from city compensation policies or who benefit from city services.

Given CalPERS’ central role in so many local governments’ pension nightmares, there is a perverse sense of karma at play in San Berdo’s using bankruptcy protection to avoid its overdue pension payment. The decision of a judge to side with the city in its maneuvering will absolutely prompt other cities to copy it.

But a new act of defiance is more complicated. The city of Santa Ana’s decision on Friday to stiff the state on the $56 million it owes for redevelopment funds that state grabbed in 2011 has no legal cover such as a bankruptcy filing.

Redevelopment is a farce that deserved killing. The city of Santa Ana is poorly run. So was its redevelopment agency. So it’s tough to side with Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido, a very interesting fellow.

But the state government has been preying on local governments for so long when times are tough that it’s impossible to root for Jerry, Darrell, John A. and Monsieur Maviglio. And given that a redevelopment refund may help the state to keep the bullet-train fiasco alive, I’ve decided to root for Santa Ana.

There is also this: An era of local governments refusing to honor contracts will underscore what a disaster California has become since union power metastasized after Gov. Pete Wilson left Sacramento in January 1999.

Meanwhile, no one tell Politico’s crack staffers. They’ve bought Jerry Brown’s spin that his tax triumph means he’s a genius. Groan. Par for the course for East Coast saps.