Placer County transportation tax for Roseville, Rocklin, Lincoln fails to get needed majority
Measure B, the south Placer County transportation tax that aimed to ease congestion largely through making Highway 65 wider, failed to secure the two-thirds majority needed to pass in November’s election.
After the final vote tally from county election officials, the measure had nearly 64% of voters approving the measure; 36% of the 146,377 voters in Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln who cast a ballot were against it. It would have needed a two-thirds majority to succeed.
“The intent behind (Measure B) was to address critical infrastructure needs,” said Shanti Landon, who sits on the Placer County Board of Supervisors and represents Lincoln among other west slope areas. “The fact that it reached nearly 65% ... that really speaks volumes to the desire. There clearly is a desire amongst 65% of the population.”
Officials expected that the half-penny tax on retail purchases in the three incorporated cities would have raised $41 million a year, and they planned to spend just over half of the revenue on highways and making roads wider. The tax would have been in effect for 30 years.
These revenues would have provided a pot of money from which to draw the relatively small “local match” demanded by many state and federal grants for capital projects. Landon said that last year, the county was ineligible to even apply for $800 million in funding because the county had no funds it could kick in to partially cover costs for projects.
That funding pickle, Landon said last month, was hard to communicate to voters. A similar Placer County measure failed in 2016 — also with around 64% of votes in favor.
“I’m fiscally conservative, and I don’t normally want to support new taxes, but again, this one was necessary in order for us to be able to access any state funding. We just don’t have a local match,” she said. “That concept, I don’t think, is intuitive for people. And explaining that local taxes might be necessary to leverage those state or federal funds can be nuanced and difficult to relay in a 30-second soundbite.”
Tax largely slated for highways and large roads
The measure this year gave voters a chance to see many of the plans the sales tax would fund and exactly how the money would be apportioned.
A majority — 52% — of the tax revenue would have gone to “major highway and road programs.” One of these projects would widen Highway 65. Now two lanes in each direction for most of the 8-mile stretch between Galleria Boulevard in Roseville and Twelve Bridges Drive in Lincoln, the tax would have funded an additional one to three lanes in each direction. Officials also wanted to widen about 12½ miles of road to Highway 99 starting at Baseline Road and Foothills Boulevard in Roseville.
Landon said that traffic in the rural county affected hospital access. When someone in Lincoln has a medical emergency during rush hour and has to travel to the hospital in Roseville, the ambulance may get stuck on the freeway for 45 minutes to an hour. She thought new lanes would help.
Decades of research, however, show that widening freeways and roads does not reduce congestion in the long run.
The research shows that more lanes only temporarily relieve congestion and ultimately spur more drivers to get on the road. Two researchers explained in a 2011 article in the American Economic Review that there is a “fundamental law of highway congestion: People drive more when the stock of roads in their city increases.”
Alternatives to driving would have gotten short shrift in the new revenue scheme. Officials wrote that they intended to find “a reasonable balance between competing highway, rail, transit, bicycle/pedestrian, and local streets and road needs,” but earmarked only 5% of the funds specifically for bike and pedestrian infrastructure improvements. Another 12% of funds would have been slated for transit.
Some of the money would have had more flexible uses. A quarter of revenues would have gone to local roads, and cities could have used the money for projects including but not limited to road maintenance, sidewalk maintenance or installation, new road safety features and bike paths.
