Council sets date for road tax election
Levy would raise $10 million annually, enough to repair 20 miles a year
If Yuma voters approve a road tax, the levy could raise about $10 million annually, enough to fix 20 miles of city roads per year.
On Wednesday, the Yuma City Council adopted a resolution calling for a special election on Nov. 6 and placing a citizens initiative on the ballot. The political action committee “Fix Our Roads” filed petitions on July 5. The petitions asked voters to decide whether they want an increase in the transaction privilege tax, commonly known as retail sales tax, by one-half of 1 percent to provide funding solely dedicated to fixing potholes, improving existing roads and replacing asphalt in the city.
The charter allows the city to raise money by collecting taxes. To increase the transaction privilege tax rate above 1 percent, the city must call an election and the rate increase must be approved by a majority of qualified electors voting on the question.
City Clerk Lynda Bushong previously notified the council that her office, as well as the Yuma County Recorder’s Office, had reviewed the signatures and found that the number of valid signatures exceeded the minimum required to place the measure before voters.
Following notification by the clerk, by law the council had to either adopt the initiative measure within 50 days or set a date for a special election no later than the next primary or general election.
During a Tuesday work session, Councilman Mike Shelton asked how many miles of streets the pro-
posed road tax would fix in a year and when would the repairs start. City Administrator Greg Wilkinson said that the way the citizens had worded the initiative, the tax would be effective Jan. 1, 2019, and the first revenues would start coming in February.
“The intent would be that we would start right away,” he said.
The additional revenue would allow the city to fix about 20 miles of roads per year, enough to make a “significant impact,” Wilkinson noted.
But the city cannot exceed the overall expenditure amount already set in the budget for fiscal year 2018-19. However, the budget has contingency and grant funds that could be reassigned to get some of the work projects started as soon as possible.
When the new fiscal year comes around on July 1, the city can then include the new revenues in the budget and capital improvement plan.
Deputy Mayor Gary Knight pointed out that there will be accountability. The revenues will go into a separate enterprise account, which is set up to handle special purpose funds and cannot be spent on anything other than for the purposes stated by the citizens initiative.
Mayor Doug Nicholls noted that this year the city has a large amount of funds that will be used to fix roads, but won’t have the same amount of money in subsequent years. The CIP for this fiscal year has $14 million for roads because the city has been making an effort to sell off property. In the following years the road fund will drop back to an annual average of $3.7 million.
Stephen Smith, principal engineer with Infrastructure Management Services, recently assessed city roads and said that the city needed $13 million a year to properly fix and maintain roads.
City officials have repeatedly said that the city does not have enough funding to fix roads. Funds for roads have been steadily decreasing for years. The last time the gas tax was adjusted was 1991. Since then, the cost of roads doubled and gas mileage in vehicles increased by 50 percent, which means less taxes collected at the pump.
In addition, the state has been sweeping Highway User Revenue Funds meant to fix roads for about two decades. The city’s share of fund money dropped to a quarter of what it used to be. At the same time, the city has a lot more roads than it used to have.
Nevertheless, for years citizens have complained about the condition of city roads. The city turned to the community for help and about nine citizens volunteered to meet to come up with solutions.
“They were all volunteers, no one was appointed,” Wilkinson explained.
They came forward for different reasons, but most wanted to see something done about the roads. Some wanted to approach the issue through a sales tax and not by raising the property tax, he added.
Karen Griffin, chairman of Fix Our Roads, previously told the Yuma Sun that the initiative grew out of a grassroots effort with “folks in town” deciding that a citizen initiative would be “the best way to do this.”
“A group of us knew we weren’t going to get more money from the state to fix the roads,” Griffin said.
Jeffrey Polston, treasurer of the group, said the effort came out of a focus group of citizens talking “about the needs of the city and how bad the roads are.” The group launched the initiative effort and encountered “a mostly favorable reaction from the community,” Griffin added. “From everything I heard, citizens understand. Nobody likes to hear the word tax, but it’s not always such a bad thing. If we don’t do this now, there aren’t going to be any roads here.”
Yuma currently collects a retail sales tax of 1.7 percent, which applies to most retail goods, grocery items and food for home consumption, restaurants, bars, transient lodging, residential and commercial rentals or leases, and other categories. The total tax rate for general retail is 8.412 percent when the state, county and city tax rates are combined.
The city has an additional 2 percent “hospitality” tax for transient lodging, bars and restaurants and prepared foods that is collected directly by the city.