Sick of getting stuck in Roseville, Rocklin traffic? This sales tax may be an answer

Commuter congestion is choking south Placer County’s highways. And soon, thousands of homes will spread across open fields near Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln, bringing more commuters and cars.

Is the problem bad enough for voters in one of California’s biggest anti-tax bastions to go so far as to tax themselves for a fix? That soon may be the hottest political question of 2020 in Placer.

Unable to pass a countywide transportation sales tax in 2016, county leaders are back this year with a work-around plan: They hope to place a similar measure on the November ballot, but this time only in the county’s three biggest commuter cities: Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln.

The half-cent sales tax would focus on transportation projects that directly benefit residents of those cities, but will be paid by anyone who shops or dines there.

The approach is so unusual it required special state legislation last year to allow it. That’s prompted one critic to call the move “gerrymandering,” essentially drawing a new political boundary to achieve a desired effect.

But backers in the urbanized south end of the county say it is a fair way to move forward on critically needed work in a county with three sub-regions – valley, foothill and mountain – that increasingly have distinctly different personalities and needs.

Roseville Mayor John Allard is among those pushing for the vote, saying he fears the south county’s powerhouse economy could be stifled if mobility problems worsen.

“Our community is growing rapidly, so our traffic is increasing dramatically,” Allard said. “We need to make improvements, not just for residents of south Placer but to continue to be an economic driver for the state of California.”

But it’s an especially thin line. Placer voters have long been anti-tax, including in the urban areas. Distrust of government nationally and, to a degree, locally is high. According to a January poll, the majority of voters in Lincoln in particular distrust their City Hall after a scathing state audit last year found poor financial management.

Highway 65 not wide enough

The three-city measure would generate about an estimated $41 million annually over 30 years, according to the Placer County Transportation Planning Authority, the agency that is proposing the measure. The battle plan is to focus on adding new lanes to highways and adding or improving freeway interchanges, but also to include money for passenger trains and other car alternatives.

Over the last 20 years, Placer has widened numerous roads – including building a Highway 65 bypass of downtown Lincoln – added lanes and interchanges on Hwy. 65 , and recently extended a clogged transition lane from eastbound Interstate 80 to Hwy. 65 north.

It’s helped, south county leaders say, but it is not nearly enough in one of the fastest growing areas of the state, where most commuters drive solo to work.

The project list includes:

Ballot lesson learned in 2016

In 2016, when county officials floated the Measure M countywide sales tax, south Placer voters overwhelmingly said yes, topping the 67 percent threshold. But lower approval numbers elsewhere in the county pulled the overall number down to 64 percent.

Even though that proposal included road improvements throughout the county, the vote differences delivered a clear message.

“If you’re in Foresthill, what do you care about widening Highway 65?” Placer County’s transportation chief at the time Celia McAdam said after the vote. “But if you are in south Placer, Highway 65 is your lifeblood.”

Colfax Councilmember Trinity Burruss chairs the PCTPA board, but notes the economic differences between mountain and south county residents. “We have some impoverished communities up here. You tend to see more high income, more large companies, more tax base (in south Placer) versus up the hill.

“It hard to swallow the tax when they know most of the money would go to those cities.”

Burruss supports the current plan, and said PCTPA board members are talking about transferring some existing county transportation funds to uphill communities as part of an agreement with the three south Placer cities.

Loomis says ‘no’ to new tax

Placer and two other California counties sought and received special state permission last year to try ballot measures in sub-regions of their counties. The other two are Solano and San Diego counties.

Initially, county officials thought Loomis would be included in a four-city voting district. But the January poll showed strong opposition among Loomis voters. Loomis, far smaller and more rural than nearby Roseville and Rocklin, maintains a no-growth stance similar to uphill communities.

Last week, the PCTPA board voted to drop Loomis from the voting area, and focus the vote only in Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln. Loomis Mayor Jan Clark-Crets expressed regret, saying Loomis leaders in fact support the tax plan, but the poll “numbers don’t lie.”

Even with Loomis no longer in the mix, the PCTPA poll this month showed that more voters in the other three cities will need persuading in order for the measure to pass.

Sixty-three percent in those cities said they would vote yes on the tax. That’s a solid majority, but short of the 67 percent required for a a California special tax.

In one sense, that is a surprise. While Placer remains a Republican bastion in a blue state, Republican voter registration has dropped from 48 percent to 41 percent in the last decade, according to county voter records.

The number of county voters who classify themselves as independent has increased from 19 to 24 percent. Democrats dropped a point from 28 to 27 percent. The increase in independent voters likely is fueled in part by newcomers, many of them Bay Area and coastal emigres.

That group, however, includes many retirees, and the recent poll suggests many of them are fiscally conservative and worried about pocketbook expenses. When asked what they considered the serious problem their communities face, 63 percent of them said the high cost of healthcare. It’s the first time health care has shown up at the top of the annual survey, PCTPA officials said.

Sixty-three percent also identified traffic congestion as a top concern. That concern is consistently at the top of the annual poll. Behind those, in order, were: homelessness, cost of housing, taxes and government waste.

“We have our work cut out for us,” consultant Cherri Spriggs told the PCTPA board last week. “We can’t assume the support is going to be here that we had in 2016.”

The county’s transportation authority, PCTPA, which includes two county supervisors, six City Council members and a citizen representative, plans to conduct a more detailed poll in March, then visit each city and the county board to present ideas and get feedback.

Conservative voters disagree

Most members of the PCTPA board support the plan, some strongly.

Lincoln City Councilman Paul Joiner, a fiscal conservative, has mixed feelings. He said he will vote to request the measure go on the ballot to allow voters the opportunity to debate it and vote their will. When asked if he would vote as a citizen for the measure in November, he exhaled slowly before saying, “probably, yes.”

“I don’t see any other solutions to making the improvements that are necessary,” he said. His constituents are caught in traffic jams virtually anytime they leave their city to head toward Roseville and Sacramento.

Joiner says the federal and state governments have been inconsistent financial partners on local transportation projects. But the state and feds still do offer large chunks of grant money for transportation – if the local area has its own tax-revenue source to put up as matching funds for big projects.

“At this point,” Joiner said, “the only way we are going to solve this is to take an action to solve it ourselves to become a self-help county and be able to compete for those state and federal funds.”

So far, 26 of California’s 58 counties have similar voter-approved sales taxes, most of them counties with sizable urban areas. Placer is the second largest county in the state not to have a local transportation tax in place, behind Ventura.

But County Supervisor Kirk Uhler says the state and federal governments are running “a rigged game” that he is unwilling to play, at least for now. He supported the failed 2016 tax measure, saying he did it to promote business growth. This time, he said he believes the measure will be too divisive.

Uhler pointed out that the state already passed the SB 1 gas tax increase in 2017 to provide money statewide for transportation. Even if Placer approves a local tax, he said he believes the county will get shortchanged by the state because Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic state legislature want to fund more transit projects rather than highway construction.

“I firmly believe this is the wrong time” to request a tax hike, he said. Instead, he says the county can use some local development fees and other small sources to move projects incrementally forward, including the Placer Parkway, which would connect Highway 65 with Highway 99/70.

Does Placer County have smart growth?

The measure has stirred debate over whether Placer is growing in a sustainable way, and whether it is taking a broad enough approach to mobility issues.

Auburn resident Leslie Warren, chair of the Alliance for Environmental Leadership, calls the plan “gerrymandering,” and says the road-heavy project list will encourage more sprawl in south Placer that will in turn fill up the new lanes with more cars.

She argues that Placer County leaders need to rethink land-use and push developers to design more of what she calls “smart growth” or urban-style and infill housing that over time will make south Placer a place where buses, rail lines, Uber-style microtransit and even bikes and walking can get a bigger percentage of people to and from their jobs.

“Residents are being pushed to the level of frustration that they might vote for their least best interest,” she said. “We want to encourage the county to look at alternatives, to encourage a mode shift to transit.”

This story was originally published January 28, 2020 at 5:00 AM.