Developers should never again try scamming Sacramento voters into a sales tax increase | Opinion

After Sacramento County voters rejected three proposed sales tax increases in seven years, a very different discussion about addressing our transportation and climate goals is needed.

It began the other day on a positive note at a meeting of the Sacramento Transportation Authority, the county entity that disperses funds from this century’s only successful sales tax effort, Measure A in 2009.

To his great credit, STA Executive Director Kevin Bewsey asked our top regional planning agency, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, for its list of priorities to reduce traffic and greenhouse gas emissions. A top priority was more housing in the right places.

“The strategy in Sacramento County that will have the largest impact on reducing (emissions) from transportation is primarily a housing and economic development strategy,” SACOG wrote. Existing urban corridors need upgrades in the water, sewer and utility capacity. If there were public funds to make these upgrades, “that will ‘unlock’ housing in areas where residents don’t need to drive as much for their daily needs,” SACOG wrote.

That STA officially asked our region’s smartest planners and relayed their thoughts to its board is a milestone.

In his 16 years at SACOG, this “never happened. Not once,” said Mike McKeever, its former executive director, whose tenure spanned from 2001 to 2016.

To think of smarter housing strategies as a transportation solution is outside of our political experience.

At the STA meeting, resistance to the concept came quickly from Supervisor Pat Hume, whose fifth district encompasses the south county.

“Any effort, whether directly or quasi from this body, has to be transportation-related,” he said.

While that has certainly been the custom, voters are free to invest in what they actually support. And so are elected officials in what they decide to propose to them.

An unsavory aftertaste lingers among some of the county’s leadership from the failed 2022 effort to raise local taxes. What started as a process advanced by STA and other local governments ended up as a private initiative effort funded largely by developers seeking to build outwards. Sales tax measures placed on the ballot by a government require two-thirds support. A court decision created the opening for a “citizens” initiative through signature-gathering to pass with only a bare majority.

The construction interests took an initial package of transportation projects backed by government leaders and then added new and expanded roads that were not contained in SACOG’s long-term plan. Voters clearly understood the proposal’s sprawl-inducing as it got resoundingly defeated.

“There was criticism that the last go-around, that the polling that was done was scrubbed and not unbiased,” said Supervisor Patrick Kennedy of the second district.

A new polling effort is under way, being led by the Greater Sacramento Economic Council

“We need to approach it with evidence and realities,” said its president, Barry Broome. “People will have to compromise.” Broome has intentionally hired a pollster from outside of Sacramento.

A half-cent sales tax could generate about $9 billion over 30 years. This can be the leverage to go after federal funds, particularly through President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, for perhaps double that money.

“We are too small of a town to leave $18 billion on the ground,” Broome said.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg holds enormous power shaping a future sales tax proposal, and he should not be afraid to use it. Nothing can pass without Sacramento. In the last two failed attempts to pass a sales tax the city led all jurisdictions in its approval percentage.

The region would pay a severe price for another failure. By Broome’s estimates, “we would lose $27 billion. That would be a mistake.”

So would repeating the same failed last-century political playbook of asking voters to underwrite emission-inducing sprawl that violates climate goals. There are plenty of investments within the existing urban footprint that make our quality of life better, not worse. Let’s give the investing public a sales tax proposal that is entirely within its own self-interest

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