Santa Rosa pushing back at county over road tax plans

Santa Rosa leaders unloaded last week on Sonoma County’s plan to put a road tax before voters in June, signaling that county supervisors will have to work harder to win the support of the county’s largest city.

During an update Tuesday about the ¼-cent sales tax anticipated to raise?$20 million per year for roads, City Council members found little to like, criticizing aspects of the plan ranging from how much funding Santa Rosa would receive, to how long the tax would last and how county officials have communicated their intentions.

“It is rare that we find all seven of us united in our frustration and incredulity,” said Councilwoman Erin Carlstrom, “but at the same time all acknowledging that we have to have some additional revenue for our roads.”

All agreed something needs to be done to raise money to repair deteriorating city roads. The city is spending about?$6 million a year to maintain its nearly 500 miles of roads, less than half what should be spending, said Colleen Ferguson, deputy director of public works.

The city used to try to keep its pavement index at 70, but in recent years that figure has dropped to 62, she said. A new road starts at 100. Anything under 49 is considered poor.

Earlier this month, county supervisors revised the proposed tax measure several ways. They dropped it from 20 years to five, removed the nonbinding ballot advisory measure that outlined how the funds should be spent and pushed the March election date back to June 2.

They tweaked the measure after private polling showed trust in government at low levels. The extra three months is meant to give the county time to build support in part through an education campaign.

Several council members felt the county was presenting them with a done deal and expecting their support instead of working collaboratively with them on a measure all could support. Some likened it to the pressure politics the supervisors engaged in last year to try to get the city to join Sonoma Clean Power.

“We’re feeling like we’re being handed something and (told) take it or leave it,” Mayor Scott Bartley said. “I’m not sure how collaborative that is, at least from our standpoint.”

Bartley questioned the reduction from 20 years to five, noting that didn’t represent a long-term solution.

“It’ll make the current council feel a little better because we’ll have a couple potholes filled, a couple of streets repaved, but it doesn’t address the problem,” Bartley said.

Instead of proposing the measure as a general tax, which only needs a simple majority to pass, the county should consider making it a specific tax, which would require the support of two-thirds of voters to pass, he said. If it takes longer to educate the voters about the need for such a tax, so be it, he said. Such a deliberate approach succeeded with 2004’s Measure M, he said.

“It works if we do our homework,” he said, adding that the current road tax seemed to have “just popped up” earlier this year.

Several council members and a few members of the public lamented that a sales tax was being proposed to fix roads, noting how regressive and untied to road usage the tax is. Sales taxes long have been criticized as having greater impact on the pocketbooks of the poor than on wealthier people. Other options such as increasing gas taxes or the vehicle licensing fee either are not possible to do at the local level or insufficient to address the scope of the problem, several said. The county has pegged its road maintenance backlog at $268 million.

Councilman Gary Wysocky took sharp aim at the funding formula, which would divvy up the money using a combination of population and road miles. It’s the same 50/50 formula that’s been used by the Sonoma County Transportation Authority for years.

Using that formula, Santa Rosa could be expected to receive 27.4 percent of the $20 million brought in by the tax, or $5.4 million per year. Up to 10 percent could be used for transit projects.

Wysocky questioned the fairness of that approach, however, calling it flawed because it gave no consideration to traffic volumes. That formula effectively treats Pacific Avenue in Santa Rosa, which has high traffic volumes and significant maintenance issues, as equal to Ida Clayton Road, a windy, rural road in Franz Valley in good shape with minimal traffic.

If the goal is to fix failing roads, the formula needs to account for heavily trafficked roads because those are the ones getting the most wear and tear, he said.

“I think the allocation formula is biased against Santa Rosa,” he said.

The county decided to use the existing formula in consultation with city managers and because it was a simple, understandable and fair formula, said Mary Booher, an administrative analyst at the county who briefed the council at Tuesday’s meeting.

She noted that “every formula favors somebody differently.” While it may be theoretically possible to use average daily traffic volumes in the formula, it’s a more complicated and somewhat subjective approach that might favor some entities over others, she said.

“I think it could be unfair depending on how it’s interpreted,” Booher said.

Some council members, including Julie Combs and Erin Carlstrom, suggested the city ought to explore passing its own ordinance.

Existing ¼-cent sales taxes like Measure P generate around $7.5 million per year for Santa Rosa. So if the city did its own measure it could expect to keep about $2 million more than under the county measure.

It’s not clear whether that proposal is a bluff or a viable course of action. The city just failed to pass an extension of its utility users tax, so it’s not clear how receptive Santa Rosa voters would be to another local sales tax. The current sales tax stands at 9 percent.

Even as she remained open to Santa Rosa going solo, Combs urged her colleagues to think about roads as an economic issue for the entire county. Local manufacturing leaders, especially those in the business of shipping high-tech test and measurement equipment, have told her that roads are their top concern, she said.

“You get a fine measuring instrument and rattle it down the road, it’s not a fine measuring instrument when it arrives,” she said.

The city also needs to bear in mind the potential impact of its actions on smaller cities that don’t wield as much political clout as the city.

“Sometimes we can be a pretty big dog in the room,” she said.

The council asked for additional information from its city manager, including the latest polling data supervisors relied on to postpone the measure and more detailed financial data about the county’s measure and other funding scenarios.

Board of Supervisors Chairman David Rabbitt said there are lots of ways to divvy up the revenue, but he stressed that the nine cities would be receiving more than half of the money under the existing plan. Under the current plan, the county would receive?$8.7 million, the cities?$11.7 million. That was done specifically to ensure the cities were full partners in the effort, he said.

The kinds of concerns expressed by the council are exactly why the board chose to delay the vote until June. He said he believed there had been significant communication between city and county staff on the issue, but if that wasn’t the council’s impression, then that is a problem, he said.

“If people feel there is a problem with communication, then there is a problem with communication,” he said.

The reduction from ?20 years to five years should be viewed as a phased approach that increases accountability and gives the supervisors the chance to prove to voters that they’re doing what they said they would with the money, Rabbitt said. Voters would then get a say in whether or not to renew the tax, he said.

While Rabbitt understands the council members’ concerns about equity, he urged them to take a more holistic view of the city and county road networks.

“I think the county benefits if the cities have good roads, and I think the cities benefit if the county has good roads,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.