Patrick Aleman discovered the Libertarian Party in California when he was searching for someone to help him fight high taxes in Barstow, a city of 22,000 midway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Nevada.

"The city is spending a lot of money right now, wasting money, and at the same time they're making serious cuts in City Hall," Aleman said. "They're wasting money on their pet projects, then talking about eliminating the police force in Barstow.

"We're having real problems here."

While sending out feelers to taxpayers' rights groups in the state, Aleman encountered the California LP's "California Tax Freeze" -- a series of model tax-reduction initiatives co-authored by state LP chairman Aaron Starr and a volunteer attorney with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

Aleman recently presented Barstow officials with a proposed local ballot initiative for the upcoming elections. The initiative would freeze all local taxes and fees in the city at their current level, allowing increases only for population growth and inflation, Starr said.

"If tax revenues in the city exceeded that level for whatever reason, they would have to find a way to cut taxes," he said.

Neither Starr nor Aleman expects any difficulty getting the initiative on the ballot this fall, as doing so will require fewer than 200 petition signatures.

"We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association for their role in drafting and enacting Proposition 218, the Right to Vote on Taxes Act," he said, adding that the act has been in effect since 1996.

"Very few people understand the full consequences of what this act has done. It makes it very easy to get a tax-reduction initiative on the ballot. Before Prop. 218, it required signatures from 10-15 percent of all registered voters. But when Prop. 218 was included in the California Constitution, it reduced the number of signatures required to only 5 percent of those who voted during the last election for governor.

"For tax-reducing initiatives, this reduces the signatures required significantly, often to just one-fourth of the previous requirements, depending on the jurisdiction."

That means the tax-freezing initiative Aleman presented to the Barstow city council will require only 196 signatures to get on the ballot; he said he plans to get 300-500, "just in case."

"Any other sort of initiative would require 1,000 signatures or so," Starr said. "And we've got six months to collect those signatures."

Aleman is also planning to run for city council, so he can personally put the anti-tax measure into action once it's approved -- which he believes it will be.

"The city council already held a special meeting to discuss this, which surprised me," he said. "When I called the city clerk to get a copy of the meeting tape, she told me she forgot to record the meeting. I suspect that once it gets passed, they're going to take it to court."

That's very likely, Starr said.

"The few previous initiatives that have taken advantage of this amendment to the constitution focused on reducing or repealing specific taxes, such as utility users taxes," he said. "Unfortunately, the cities have learned how to defeat these attempts to reduce or repeal taxes by convincing the public that services they most value will be the first to be eliminated."

By asking that taxes merely be frozen at the current level, though, the proposed initiative may forestall any "claims that there will have to be cataclysmic cuts in services," Starr said. "We're not asking them to cut taxes, just to freeze them at the current level."

The model initiatives put together by the California LP can be found on the party's Web site, www.ca.lp.org, and they are suitable for use in any incorporated city in the state, he said.

Meanwhile, the effort put into the initiatives has already convinced at least one man -- Patrick Aleman -- of the value of libertarian thinking and action.

"Aaron has been a great help," Aleman said. "He's been helping me out a lot, and I'm not even a member of the party."

Or at least he wasn't a member of the Libertarian Party when this process started, he clarified.

"The more I examined this tax plan, the more I liked it, and the more I liked this party. I've been a Democrat, been a Republican, but about a year ago I went 'no party,' because neither one of the two big parties does anything about taxes. All they do is raise taxes."