Will It Be Gridlock or Taxes?

California needs to spend $20 billion on transportation systems over the next decade to prevent gridlock on every state road and highway where commuters travel and truckers deliver goods, and on state rail projects as well. It will take nearly that many more billions of dollars to bring local streets and local rail programs up to speed.

Those costs represent a consensus of Gov. George Deukmejian’s transportation summit meetings and his own Transportation Department. He could ask the Legislature to raise gasoline taxes by 9 cents to cover the costs of the state part of transportation needs. Instead, he insists on putting the gasoline tax proposal on the November ballot.

Then, instead of getting in front of the program and telling Californians that it is their only hope for a smooth ride to their global destiny, Deukmejian describes it as a collection of ideas passed on by colleagues at his summit meetings. He will not even say whether he would campaign for higher gasoline taxes even if they appeared on the ballot.

Even if California voters were to approve higher gasoline taxes without virtual round-the-clock campaigning by the governor and every other officeholder in the state, the plan as it now stands still would be flawed.

One item now being discussed would peel the Gann spending limit away from transportation spending to allow the state to spend all of the money the higher gasoline taxes would raise. But as things now stand, the Gann limit would be left in place to hold down all other kinds of spending that still come under its limits. The arrangement would impose even tighter limits on health, higher education and everything else the state does except kindergarten through l2th grade. Without language to give the state adequate spending authority under Gann, the November proposal would deserve to fail.

The proposal will fail anyway if the governor continues to try to have it both ways on the state’s desperate transportation situation. He wants to look helpful. But he also wants to preserve an unsullied record against tax increases. He is going to have to decide soon whether he would be better remembered for breaking a tax promise or breaking gridlock around California.