Highway Experts Seek New Revenue Sources

Declaring that “the freeway-building era” is not over, highway experts told the California Transportation Commission Thursday that the state needs new sources of revenue--including bonds, county sales taxes and possibly a new state gasoline tax--to keep its highways from becoming obsolete.

“There seems to be a growing awareness: the price (of maintaining California’s highways) may be huge but we’ve got to pay it,” Paul Shay, a researcher with the Stanford Research Institute of Palo Alto, said at a commission workshop Thursday in Irvine.

The price is measured in billions of dollars, researcher after researcher said. According to David Grayson, engineering director for the Automobile Club of Southern California, new highways will cost about $20.5 billion between now and the year 2000. And Peter Hathaway of the California Transportation Commission ticked off these ongoing costs: $600 million a year for maintenance, $150 million a year for replacement of worn-out roads and $100 million a year for safety improvements. “That’s $800 million, and we haven’t laid an inch of new pavement,” Hathaway said.

Constitutional Amendment

Also at Thursday’s meeting, state Sen. Wadie P. Deddeh (D-Chula Vista), the incoming chairman of the state Senate Transportation Committee, said he soon would be proposing a constitutional amendment to remove highway funds from the reach of the 1979 Gann spending limitation initiative.

Though the state could raise about $1.3 billion a year for transportation by levying a half-cent sales tax, that money could not now be spent because of the Gann restrictions, Deddeh said. The Gann initiative limits certain kinds of appropriations from tax revenues, preventing them from growing faster than the rate of inflation plus the rate of population growth in any year.

Deddeh said he would be trying to persuade Gov. George Deukmejian, business leaders from the California Roundtable and California voters of the need for the change. Without it, “this state is going to be in terrible shape with regards to transportation,” Deddeh said. Transportation commissioners took no action Thursday. Rather, after hearing four hours of speeches, they pulled a blackboard to the front of the room and chalked up a list of the most interesting ideas.

New Sales Tax

One of those came from William Kempton, executive director of the Santa Clara County Traffic Authority, who described how voters in his county had agreed to levy a half-cent sales tax to improve their congested roads. Since Santa Clara County imposed its tax, Alameda and Fresno counties also have imposed half-cent taxes for local roads and highways.

In an interview after his speech, Kempton described his county’s traffic as “horrible,” with an afternoon rush hour along Highway 101 that is bumper to bumper from San Jose to Palo Alto from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The tax now raises $70 million annually for highways and roads in the county, Kempton said. Since it took effect in April, 1985, Santa Clara County has spent $5 million widening four miles of Highway 101, is about to get bids for a $17-million project and is considering a $65-million grade separation project.

Voters Are Happy

“The voters are very happy,” Kempton said. “We figured it would take 30 to 40 years before we’d have gotten these improvements” from the state.

Interested in the tax, Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande, a Transportation Commission member, suggested that counties adopting such a tax receive priority for state transportation money.

“We need to give some kind of incentive to locals who pony up” the money for their own projects, Nestande said. In a year or two, Orange County might want to impose a tax like this, too, he added in an interview.

Another idea that intrigued commissioners was a proposal by Dave Doerr, consultant for the state Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee, that the state use part of its bonding capacity for highways. Doerr said bond funding was not affected by the Gann limitations.

Several speakers, including state Sen. John Francis Foran (D-San Francisco), said they believed voters might be willing to approve an additional state tax on gasoline.

Foran, who sponsored a two-cent tax on gasoline in 1983, called the issue of a tax “a bogey man” that “is not as explosive as many might think.” Voters would accept the tax if they realized that their roads and highways would not be maintained and improved in any other way, Foran said.