Santa Clarita Says No to Roads : Measure P: Voters decisively rejected the $285-million tax plan. The winning campaign had accented developers’ responsibilities.

Voters in the Santa Clarita Valley overwhelmingly rejected a tax initiative that would have raised $285 million to build and improve roads in the fastest-growing region of Los Angeles County.

Final election results today showed that 15,714 voters, just under 80% of the total, cast ballots against Measure P. The measure got only 4,000 votes.

The decisive vote against Measure P was a blow to the valley’s political leadership, which had endorsed the tax and raised more than $86,000 to promote the measure. Many of the region’s leading citizens, including Mayor Jan Heidt and state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia), supported Measure P.

A small group of homeowners, all political unknowns, raised only $1,900 to fight Measure P. The group, known as SMRT for Stop Mello-Roos Tax, said the measure was a developer-backed ploy that would have forced homeowners to pay for roads that should be built by developers or local and state governments. Mello-Roos refers to legislation allowing such tax proposals.

When campaign spending reports released last month showed that most of the money raised by the Roads Now Committee came from developers and contractors, SMRT pounced on the issue.

The spending reports showed that SMRT was right, said John Machin, a SMRT spokesman. “It gave us credibility,” Machin said.

The public also knew that SMRT was made up of people not tied to the valley’s political power structure, he said. “People saw we were just other homeowners,” Machin said.

Kenneth Dean, another SMRT member, summed up Measure P’s demise: “It’s very simple,” he said. “People are taxed-out.”

The measure would have created a joint-powers agency, made up of county and Santa Clarita officials, to select the road projects to be supported by the tax.