Local Highway 101 money all spent
Published: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 6:34 p.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 6:34 p.m.
The Sonoma County Transportation Authority sold the last construction bonds for the widening of Highway 101 on Wednesday, raising enough money for the local share of all work that is currently underway or about to start.
It includes the widening of Highway 101 from Santa Rosa to the northern edge of Petaluma, the new Wilfred Avenue overpass and a new Airport Boulevard overpass, which together cost about $340 million.
A bond sale two years ago financed the local share of widening the freeway from downtown Santa Rosa to Windsor.
“The Measure M program for 101 will be done, we will have spent all the money,” said Suzanne Smith, transportation authority executive director.
The bonds are backed by Measure M, the quarter-cent sales tax voters passed in 2004.
The sales tax and bonds were used to leverage state and federal funds for the Sonoma County freeway widening.
It was not enough, however, to widen the freeway through Petaluma and the Novato Narrows and to rebuild the Petaluma River bridge, estimated to cost $350 million.
“We will finish design on the Petaluma widening, the bridge, but we still need construction funds,” Smith said. “We are putting them into a position to be shovel ready, that is the way you have to be these days.”
Measure M appropriates 40 percent of the sales tax for Highway 101, 10 percent for transit, five percent for the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit district and four percent for bicycle and pedestrian projects.
Without the sales tax, the widening would not have been done, Smith said.
The transportation agency sold $25.2 million in construction bonds at an interest rate of 3.55 percent. The rate was lower than expected and generated $1.1 million more in revenue than expected.
In the bond measure, $18.2 million is for Highway 101 construction and $6 million for SMART, with the remainder in fees and reserves.
In 2008, the authority sold $46 million in construction bonds that financed the local share of the widening through Santa Rosa to Windsor.
Since Measure M passed, the downturn in the economy has resulted in an 18 percent decline in sales tax revenues, from $19.8 million in 2006 to $15.3 million in 2010.
Smith said, however, that the 2008 bond sale was held two weeks before the bond market collapsed, giving the authority an interest rate of 3.7 percent on the bonds.
Since the downturn, construction bids have also come in substantially below estimates.
“Our timing has been such we did not have any direct impact from the economic downturn,” Smith said. “Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.”
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