The sales tax spending plan

If you can't blog three times a day about a sales tax proposal, you're just not trying. So, here goes.

I posted this morning (post one and post two) about the state Senate holding a hearing on AB 2321, the bill that allows the Metro board to take a half-cent sales tax increase to voters in November. The board is going to vote on its own sales tax ordinance on July 24, then must wait and see if the state Legislature allows it to go forward.

In fact, that approval may not come until after August 8 -- the day that the sales tax bill must be submitted to the county registrar. The nut of it: something could end up on the ballot that isn't legally allowed to be there.

The document below explains a lot of the problems (click on it to see it better). While AB 2321 sets some minimum funding levels for several projects ($900 million for a subway extension, for example), it's up to Metro to figure out how to spend the $30 billion or more that the sales tax would generate over the next 30 years. The document is that plan (pages two and three of the plan are after the jump).

Some elected officials at the state level are leery of the above plan and the accompanying local ordinance. In particular, officials are focused on how much money is going to different projects and, just as important, when those projects start to receive money. Officials in the San Gabriel Valley and south county cities have complained that the sales tax doesn't throw enough money or projects their way.

Metro spokesman Marc Littman told me this morning that Metro Chief Executive Roger Snoble is on the verge of releasing a new expenditure plan. It will largely be similar to the one above, but will try to do two things: show that many of the road improvements -- including those on the 5 Freeway -- will benefit parts of the county that may not get a new rail project AND show the money spent in some parts of the county is proportional to the amount of tax expected to be generated there.

All that is a long way of saying that Snoble wants to persuade public officials that not all the expected sales tax revenue is being dumped into two rail lines on the Westside, namely the second phase of the Expo Line and a subway extension.

If state legislators love the new spending plan, they can take their sweet time passing AB 2321. If not, they can sit on AB 2321 or change it -- raising questions whether Metro would have the time to follow. This is incredibly wonky stuff and what legislators in Sacramento do could impact mass transit funding for years to come.

The other mighty interesting thing about the plan is this: the projects it would fund don't start opening until the middle of the next decade and many much later. Maybe gas will stay cheap, maybe we'll be driving more fuel efficient vehicles, maybe the economy will return to form, maybe people will begin moving closer to their jobs.

Those are a lot of maybes.

The rest of the expenditure plan after the jump; click on the pages for better viewing in a pop-up window.

--Steve Hymon

Comments

[Dan W.]

I think Dana said it best.

100% of nothing is still nothing.

Let's cut the "deal" and go out and sell it.

[Dana Gabbard]

I understand what TonyR is saying (BTW, the same could be said for lottery proceeds and education). But as a partical matter this is how you build support to be able to get a 2/3 vote for a sales tax. It should be noted this isn't rocket science - many urban Califiornia counties (dubbed self-help) in the past few years have enacted or renewed such taxes and the lessons learned from those successes infom this effort.

Something else to remember is this tax would in some circumstances be freeing up monies in the existing funding sources that otherwise (albeit very slowly) have been dedicated to the projects now being paid for with the new tax. Especially in 5-10 years that opens up possibilities that currently reside on unfunded wish lists.

[TonyR]

I think the problem here is that the scope of the improvements from the proposed sales tax is too large. I am 100% for a sales tax increase for transit purposes. My definition of transit purposes is mass transit in the form of light-rail, heavy-rail, commuter rail, bikeways and busways. I do not want to fund pothole repair, soundwall construction, any freeway construction/repair etc. This is what our substantial gas taxes are for.
What ends up happening is politicians cut back on infrastructure repairs assuming that bond money will make up the difference. They then spend that general fund money elsewhere. In effect, our transit bond money goes to pay prison inmate health costs. We have approved two half-cent sales taxes for transit in the past. This amounts to billions of dollars every year but yet we don't have money to build a subway. The politicians proposing this tax and the other backers are going to sell it using mass transit. Want more Metrolink cars? Subway to the sea! Light rail coming soon to a neighborhood near you! Nobody is going to even mention the operations costs for bus agencies, freeway construction, and related repairs which is where most of the money will be going (see the spreadsheet above). High Desert Truck Corridor? Left turn signals? Our "mass transit sales tax" is going to fund this? Are you kidding me? Can you imagine the mass transit we could build if more than 20% of the sales tax proceeds actually got to these projects?