SHIFT-Bay Area's Tom Rubin Wins Statewide Award

If you're in the Bay Area, he helped save *you* money!

Our very own Tom Rubin was selected by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to be their 2024 “Taxfighter of the Year”. As we detailed in our very first substack post, Tom uncovered the math error that helped sink Regional Measure 4, an astonishingly badly designed proposal that would have cost you $21,000 over 53 years for every million dollars of property you own.

Tom was characteristically humble and self-effacing in his reaction to receiving the award, choosing to highlight the contributions of so many others to the effort to defeat RM4. In his words: “Beating Regional Measure 4, and its $20 billion bond to be paid off by $48.3 billion in new property taxes, was very much the product of group effort of many dedicated taxpayers and voters who knew what had to be done and worked hard to get it done.”

It’s true that the polling for RM4 hadn’t looked good for a while. But Tom’s work alerted the press to how badly the MTC had screwed up its presentation to the voters, and the torrent of negative press that resulted was the final straw that broke the camel’s back and forced the MTC to realize that there was no path to getting the voter approval they needed.

So the MTC pulled RM4 from the ballot. And it was due in no small part to Tom.

So be sure to thank Tom when you can- he helped save us all a ton of money. Tom continues to serve on the SHIFT-Bay Area board, where he’s helping us prepare for the 2026 fights to come. Will Tom have yet another superhero performance in 2026? Stay tuned with SHIFT-Bay Area and find out!