Funding

A Pavement System Preservation report is summarized on page 22 of the SCTA’s TAC agenda for this Thursday, September 26.

The report says that an additional $964 million would be needed over the next 30 years just to maintain existing pothole conditions for all of Sonoma County—$32 million per year! That’s about $7 million per year more than the money raised last year by the current 1/4-cent transportation sales tax (Measure M, enacted in 2004).

If we expect to rebuild roads in all of the jurisdictions of the County to achieve a “state of good repair” over the next 30 years, $75 million would be required every year—more than twice as much as is needed just to keep the number of potholes from increasing.

Clearly, policy makers made a mistake decades ago, when they allowed so many developments with so many roads to be constructed. They should have calculated the burdens that such projects place on public treasuries.

Last week we saw the Board of Supervisors approve up to 1,900 new accessory dwelling units. But the planners say the impact of several thousand more autos would be “negligible.”

Where does it all stop, and how do we get adequate funding for bike-pedestrian trails and more transit into any extension of the Measure M sales tax?

Transportation funding is a complex web of money, taxes, and fees that is determined and handled at all government levels. Ostensibly, the rules are set up to assure that tax funds will be distributed equitably and will be spent efficiently, and that the requests for government funds will be limited to what is actually available. But there are other reasons as well, that generally involve pleasing one group of constituents at the expense of other groups – groups being transportation users, or taxpayers, or manufacturers or many others – the list is endless.

To put together a new transportation project, or to keep past projects running, the proponents must understand what they must say or do to draw funds from the “buckets” or accounts in which they are held. The “spigots” through which the funds flow from the buckets are complex combinations of rules of approval.

In the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, funding is largely controlled by the MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission). MTC provides some helpful information on funding at https://mtc.ca.gov/our-work/fund-invest.

A quantitative overview can be obtained from some graphs used by MTC in public presentations. They show declining purchasing power of State and Federal fuel taxes, expected increases in population and travel, and a breakdown of future Bay Area expenditures on transportation.

Category: Funding

Fixing potholes could suck up all the new “Measure M” money

The funding game