Mosquito Abatement District asks voters for a small funding bump.

For about the cost of a sandwich each, property owners in the Northern Salinas Valley Mosquito Abatement District can keep enjoying services they’ll probably never see. Or feel, in the form of a bite. That’s the point.

The district has been operating since the early 1950s, when the port at Elkhorn Slough brought a surge of salt-marsh mosquitoes. “It was so bad they were coming into Salinas and Monterey,” says District Manager Ken Klemme. “The tractors out there were so jammed up with mosquitoes, they would clog the intake.”

The district operates on a $1.4 million annual budget, with six staffers (reduced over the past decade from 13) and a nine-member board of trustees. About two-thirds of its funding comes from a tiny percentage of property tax, the rest from an annual flat assessment of $5 per single-family home.

“That’s like a can of Deet right there,” Klemme says.

The assessment expires in 2016, but the district has asked voters to replace it with a $7.08 assessment that would generate about $558,000 in the 2014-15 fiscal year.

Klemme says there are 18 species of mosquito in the county, each with its own biting behaviors. The district mostly treats them at the source: stagnant water such as street drains, pools and ponds, both at a maintenance level and in response to homeowner calls.

He says the district never uses toxic organophosphate pesticides. Instead, staffers most commonly employ mosquito-eating fish, along with mowing, weed control and applications of organic pesticides such as Bacillus thuringiensis, spinosad and pyrethrins.

Mosquitoes can carry diseases such as West Nile virus, dengue and yellow fever, none of which have been contracted locally. But Monterey County Health Officer Edward Moreno says the district’s mosquito surveillance work will alert officials if certain disease-carrying species show up in these warmer drought conditions.

“With climate change, we may be seeing a shift,” he says.

The district was the subject of a favorable interim report from the Monterey County Civil Grand Jury, released May 2, which recommends its services continue to be provided at current levels and expanded to include all of Monterey County.

Ballots were mailed out to the district’s 75,000 property owners in mid-March. Results will be released next Tuesday, May 13.