Full Citation

Title: The Equty Challenges and Outcomes of California County Transportation Sales Taxes

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: This report examines equity among local option sales tax (LOST) measures for transportation in California between 1976 and 2016. Since the first was enacted in 1976 in Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley), 76 LOST measures have appeared on county ballots, 48 of which (63%) were approved by voters. These measures have proven to be popular methods to finance transportation system construction, operations, and maintenance over the past four decades, increasing in number even after a 1995 ruling in Santa Clara County Local Transportation Authority v. Guardino required that LOSTs secure two-thirds support to pass. LOSTs are currently in place in 24 of California’s 58 counties that are home to 88 percent of the state’s population. Sales tax revenues dedicated to transportation today produce over $4 billion per year for transportation construction and maintenance in these “self-help counties.” Sixteen counties have enacted more than one sales tax measure: Alameda, Los Angeles, and Santa Clara counties have three, four, and five passed measures, respectively. Despite their popularity with voters and the local public officials who craft them, LOSTs raise several important questions concerning equity and fairness:Sales taxes are regressive with respect to income, meaning that they collect larger shares of household income from poorer households, on average, than from richer ones. While fuel taxes are similarly income regressive, their incidence rises and falls in proportion to fuel consumed—and therefore in rough proportion to road system use.1 Transportation sales taxes, by contrast, are levied on nearly all consumer purchases, and their payment is not directly related to travel. This means that, unlike fuel taxes, light users of transportation systems pay more in transportation sales taxes per mile travelled than heavy users of transportation systems. In this way, transportation sales taxes might be “doubly regressive.” These issues concern income equity. Securing supermajority (two-thirds) support for a LOST measure entails persuading enough voters to support a tax increase that will pay for the proposed expenditure plan. These plans (and the limited resources available to fund them) can pit groups of voters against one another, raising additional equity issues. How should LOST expenditures be divided among roads, public transit, and other travel modes? Even within a given mode, should priority be given to an expensive closure of a gap in the freeway network in one part of the county, or on resurfacing existing roads across the entire county? Should public transit expenditures support building a single new rail line, or improving bus service across the county? Should expenditures go to already built-up, congested parts of the county, or to outlying, growing areas where new transportation infrastructure is needed? These questions concern both modal and geographic equity. LOST measures are almost always linked to itemized expenditure plans, which specify how much is to be spent on which projects or programs, often in order of priority. Since LOSTs are typically in place for 20 or more years, when a specific project is delivered is key to determining the benefits of the plan. That an expenditure plan may propose widening a rural highway a decade before commencing an urban public transit project thus raises fairness questions as well. Further, such detailed expenditure plans may usurp transportation planning processes designed to solicit input and adapt to new circumstances. Is it fair that such plans can be locked into place, leaving certain projects or programs out, or at the back of the line, even when expert and popular opinion regarding priorities might change over time? Such questions concern temporal equity. These several dimensions of equity—income, modal, geographic, and temporal—can be conflated into more general assertions about the benefits and fairness of these taxes and their associated expenditure plans. In this report, we use the term “general equity” to refer to this conflation of equity concerns. To understand how these dimensions of equity have played out in the crafting of LOST measure expenditure plans, debates over the merits and fairness of the measures put before the voters, and in the delivery of the expenditure plans for approved measures, our research uses a mixed methods approach in which we draw from quantitative analyses of measures, financial, voter, and demographic data, as well as qualitative analyses of theories of equity and the language used to debate them.

Url: https://www.its.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/05/LOST-Report_final.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Albrecht, Maxwell; Brown, Anne; Lederman, Jaimee; Taylor, Brian D; Wachs, Martin

Publisher: University of California, Center on Economic Competitiveness

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Land Use/Urban Organization

Countries: United States