Golis: How mistrust breeds more mistrust

How does a road tax morph into a train wreck? Just ask the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, which spent $450,000 on a special election and managed to receive only 37 percent of the vote.

This is not an outcome that can be explained away. After a tough defeat, it may be a long time before the county tries again to pass a tax in support of road and street repairs.

The postmortems to the ?June 2 election are focusing on voters’ unwillingness to trust the board to spend the new money, as it promised, on road projects.

Fair enough. So long as the board doesn’t come up with a better answer about the long-term costs of retirement benefits, its credibility on every major issue will be questioned.

But this was also a campaign that seemed unable to sustain a clear and consistent message. Recall that it was going to ?be a November election issue, ?then a March election and finally, a June election. Recall that the language was changed along the way - and not in ways that made voters more confident of the board’s intentions.

Sometimes it felt as if the board was making it up as it went along. And the campaign that emerged was too little, too late.

Successful tax campaigns require commitment, patience and passion. Just putting a measure on the ballot wasn’t going to get it done.

Having served up the requisite criticism of the Board of Supervisors, however, it’s important to recognize that California doesn’t make it easy for local government to be successful.

In recent years, elected officials have been obliged to try and solve problems while shouldering 30 years of accumulated baggage - tax limits, convoluted election rules, state mandates and more - all of them designed to make it more difficult for government to do anything.

Many people seem fine with this arrangement - until the day comes when government lets them down. What do you mean you don’t have the money to fix the potholes in front of my house? I pay taxes, you know.

Once upon a time, road repairs would have been financed by some combination of gas and property taxes. And why not? There’s a straight line between the people who pay and the people who benefit.

But the way gas taxes are allocated now punishes counties with large road systems (read Sonoma County) and otherwise fails to keep up with how automobiles are changing.

And beginning in 1978, Proposition 13 served to limit property tax revenues and transfer taxing authority to Sacramento, leaving local governments with the leftovers.

Now local officials must make do with the most regressive tax of all - the sales tax. In effect, the board decided that Wine Country road repairs should be financed on the backs of the people least able to afford it. By what measure of fairness or logic does that make sense?

In trying to navigate within these convoluted rules and pass a quarter-cent sales tax, the Board of Supervisors was left with two bad choices.

It could earmark the revenues for roads and streets and try to secure a two-thirds majority of the votes cast.

Or it could call the measure a general tax, while promising to spend the money only on roads. That requires only a simple majority.

The latter option didn’t work out, but there seems little or no likelihood that the measure could have secured a two-thirds majority either. It’s a long way from 37 percent to ?67 percent.

The next time someone complains about the condition of the roads, the Board of Supervisors - and city councils, too - can say: We tried. It’s not much of an answer, but it’s what they have.

So here we are. Our system of allocating tax revenues between state and local government doesn’t make sense, and it can’t be repaired because many voters don’t trust the political institutions not to make the situation worse.

The tax system could be reformed without raising taxes. What California needs isn’t more taxes; it’s a more rational and equitable way to share revenues. But don’t get your hopes up.

As the defeat of Measure A reminds us, we live in a time in which you can’t go wrong playing to people’s distrust of political institutions. People will continue to flail away at our politicians. Often enough, they deserve it.

But there’s a down side to our reflexive cynicism. When we don’t trust government to repair the roads, we shouldn’t be surprised when the roads don’t get repaired.

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.