Placer County’s hideous traffic deadlock is a self-inflicted wound by stubborn voters | Opinion
Placer County’s dramatic growth in places like Roseville and Lincoln is only matched by voters’ unwillingness to pay for the traffic consequences. This part of the Sacramento region is facing a gridlock crisis rivaling anything in Southern California — and Placer has only itself to blame.
Voters are on a path to rejecting Measure B, a 30-year, half-cent sales tax measure to widen Highway 65, Baseline Road and other key arteries in the county. It marks the second such rejection in just eight years, and it is leaving transportation planners few options other than to make road improvements at a snail’s pace.
“They’ll take longer to do,” said Matt Click, executive director of the Placer County Transportation Agency. “They will get more expensive over time.”
Placer’s traffic predicament is a result of a confluence of factors all working against it. While a simple majority of voters have supported a local transportation sales tax proposal, the constitutional requirement remains two-thirds. State and federal funding sources are increasingly assuming a local contribution that Placer cannot supply. And fees from developers building new projects only cover a small fraction of their actual regional transportation impacts.
The average Placer County resident spends an estimated 119 hours of their life every year in their vehicles. They should prepare to spend a whole lot more (particularly on Highway 65) going forward.
A pretty impressive cross-section of the Placer political community thought they had come up with the solution in the form of Measure B, which was on the November ballot. Measure B called for a half-cent sales tax increase solely in the cities suffering from the worst traffic problems — Lincoln, Roseville and Rocklin.
Backed by business leaders, local elected officials and firefighters, Measure B called for widening the two-lane Highway 65 to as many as five lanes between Interstate 80 and Lincoln. The interchange between the two arteries, a daily nightmare for Placer motorists, would have been improved. The measure also dedicated money to the three cities for their own transportation priorities.
In 2016, voters county-wide narrowly rejected a sales tax measure. Residents in far-off Sierra communities and Lake Tahoe disproportionately voted no.
“There’s not a lot of congestion there,” Click said, so their reluctance to pay for something that didn’t have a local benefit for them “made sense.”
Since then, the California Legislature passed a bill allowing Placer to propose a future transportation sales tax measure for only in certain parts of the county. Asking only the voters feeling the traffic pain, so the thinking went, would increase the chances of success with Measure B.
But the conventional wisdom was proven wrong: Based on the ongoing tabulation of ballots by the Placer County Elections Office, Measure B will get close to the required two-thirds threshold — but not close enough.
Measure B would have started generating an estimated $41 million in its first year. That, Click said, would have allowed Placer to start competing for about $800 million worth of state and federal transportation dollars that are only available to communities that help pay to fix their own problems.
Even with adequate funding to widen Highway 65, Click said it would have taken about a decade to finish the project. Without the necessary local funds, it’s now anyone’s guess how many decades it will take to do the same project.
The amount of money Click’s agency receives from developer impact fees would have to increase roughly five-fold in order to make up for Measure B’s failure. That is simply not going to happen. The same political forces at play in Placer have made it a growth-friendly environment.
Placer County is the largest in the state without a local transportation tax. As an urbanizing county, it is truly an outlier in California when it comes to its unwillingness to invest in its own future.
While some Republican elected officials supported Measure B, the local party apparatus did not.
It’s hard to get two-thirds of voters to agree to tax themselves. That is why the Democratically-controlled Legislature placed on this same ballot Proposition 5. It would have lowered the approval threshold for Measure B and similar local initiatives to 55% instead of two-thirds.
But Prop. 5 is going down to defeat statewide, and that is because of voters like those in Placer County. There, opposition is overwhelming to making a local transportation sales tax measure easier to pass. It’s another example of how gridlock in Placer is a self-inflicted condition.
The failure of Measure B is a red flag warning signal.
Placer County cannot sell itself as a business-friendly society if it refuses to invest in basic infrastructure. It is at risk of choking on its own prosperity in the form of one traffic jam after another. Placer is building a society resembling Orange County with a mindset about the role of government more befitting rural Modoc County.
Sacramento and other counties that have local transportation funding are now taking money that could be going to Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln. Placer voters should think about that the next time they are sitting in traffic.