Projects on course after Prop. 6 fails
The significance of Tuesday’s vote to preserve California’s new gas-tax hike was not lost on Gov. Jerry Brown.
“This is bridges, and girders, and overpasses, and cement, and concrete — this is real stuff,” he said during an election night speech, referring to the $5.2 billion stream that the tax hike generates annually to fix roads and keep mass transit running.
That money would have evaporated if voters had passed Proposition 6, a ballot initiative to repeal the taxes and fees that state lawmakers enacted last year as Senate Bill 1. After a hard-fought and at times acrimonious campaign, Prop. 6 went down with 55 percent of voters opposed and 45 percent in favor.
State and county officials had already
directed the first batch of SB1 revenue toward 6,500 infrastructure projects, said Caltrans spokesman Matt Rocco. They include 400 retrofits of state highways, such as the continuous carpool lanes under construction on the Marin-Sonoma Narrows, which will eventually thread from Windsor to the Robin Williams Tunnel. SB1 also is paying to repave most of Interstate 880 in the East Bay.
If the repeal had passed, hundreds of construction projects might have been frozen in place.
A new report from the Mineta Transportation Institute, “The Future of California Transportation Revenue,” predicted that by 2020, California will collect $10.4 billion from SB1 — the gasoline tax increase of 12 cents per gallon and diesel fuel tax increase of 20 cents per gallon, along with other vehicle fees.
Lawmakers had last raised the gas tax in the 1990s, and the money it supplied before SB1 wasn’t enough to prevent highways from deteriorating and keep commerce rolling in the fifth largest economy in the world.
The effects of Prop. 6 would have been severe in the Bay Area, which already has the worst roads in the country according to a recent analysis by the Washington, D.C., transportation research firm TRIP. Rural counties would have been hit even harder. Rugged northern areas such as Trinity County — which is nestled along the Trinity River and flanked by the Salmon and Klamath Mountains — would have lost funding to plow snow in winter and clear a path for emergency vehicles, or to cut back brush and trees so they don’t ignite forest fires.
Even so, voting maps provided by the secretary of state showed that residents of rural areas — including Trinity — supported the repeal. Its defeat came from the more populous coastal counties.