State to Eliminate Transit Fund
Submitted by DW on 19 February, 2010 - 12:44pm
At the Transit Forum, OCTA Director Will Kempton kept saying there was this lawsuit they were fighting against the state to get our transit money back, and this would be the lifesaver to protect us from more brutal cuts in the fall. Remember?
I looked into it, and it turns out that, yes, there was a lawsuit fought by the California Transit Association (not OCTA), and they won it last fall. But it doesn't mean any more money will be coming transit's way. That's because the suit was over a fund paid for with voter-approved initiative money from the SALES TAX on gasoline & diesel.
To 'solve' our budget crisis, both the Democrats in the Legislature AND the Governor are now proposing to simply end the sales tax, which has all those court restrictions (like you have to use the money for mass transit), and just tax something else. So they would replace the money with a 10.8 cent raise in the gasoline tax (per gallon of gasoline). Then siphon the money off to other accounts and continue to stop funding transit.
I know that's all very convoluted, which is what the Legislature & the Governor are hoping for, because maybe voters just might fall for it. Would the voters approve this change? The Governor's Office is claiming a gas tax would be more 'stable,' wouldn't go up and down with the price of gasoline. And they're probably right. But this isn't the reason they're trying to do this. They want to use that money for other things our state needs to pay for--but they would be eliminating one of the few accounts guaranteed to fund mass transit in California.
And if they succeed, that means all OCTA's guarantees will be as reliable as their bus service. It will be their justification when they try to cut our service again this fall. Yet I would ask, what is OCTA doing now to prevent this? What other tax increases are their directors looking for to prevent the state from taking from transit?
Probably none. They're all staunchly ant-tax. But there's no reason for them to keep blaming the state, and the state keep shifting the responsibility to the counties. We're all in this together.
Comments
In a perfect world tax
In a perfect world tax revenue would not be "pre-spent" on specific types of expenditures. Reserving tax revenue from the sale of gasoline and reserving it for roads and highways is just as retarded as taking sales tax revenues from restaurants and spending it only on food safety.
Mass transit's only hope was to latch on to gas tax revenue by making a case that transit is a public good and that it would benefit drivers by taking cars off the road or something, because we are too stupid to properly fund a viable mass transit system in this state and country, a system that would benefit everybody.
Actually...
The Governor has proposed raising the excise tax to a level that would actually cut effective per-gallon taxes by $0.05, and eliminate all state transit spending. The Democrats in the Legislature have actually proposed a revenue-neutral tax swap, that would make the effective per-gallon tax rate the same, and take that $0.05 that's not in the Governor's proposal and use it for transit. While this is complicated, and is obviously a means to circumvent the initiative restrictions on the gas sales tax, the Democrats' plan may prove to be advantageous. The current sales tax funds can be appropriated if the Governor declares an "emergency", as he has for the past several years. This is not true of excise tax funds, which must be spent on transportation, and universally have been. It's also possible the Democrats' plan may pass, as it would be at least closer to complying with the CTA lawsuit decision.
Of course, spokker's right. We need to find sustainable funding sources for transportation. I think things like Measures R, M and A (sales taxes for transit in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside Counties respectively) are wonderful, except that most of them currently have funding forumlae that dictate a certain percentage of funds be spent on roads, and another on transit, and the former is universally larger. A repeal of Prop 13 would allow for a sensible, stable property tax (esp. on commercial properties) to help fund local government services. In the short term, though, working with our state legislators to make this excise tax swap happen in a favourable way (because it IS going to happen) is probably in our best interest.