Panel to Discuss Trying Again on Measure M

Orange County transportation commissioners are expected to say “one more time” at a workshop today focusing on whether to try again in November for voter approval of a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for highway and transit projects.

If the workshop participants decide to go for it, the staff of the Orange County Transportation Commission will develop an election proposal for formal approval in March, county officials said.

Drivers for Highway Safety, an Irvine-based grass-roots organization opposed to car-pool lanes, is expected to try to talk the commission out of placing a Measure M before the voters again.

Measure M, a half-cent sales-tax proposal, was defeated in November by a margin of 52.6% to 47.4%. Political experts said the measure lost because voter turnout--22%--was low. Critics of the tax plan said it would have earmarked too much money for car-pool lanes and mass transit at the expense of new highways. However, a post-election survey paid for by Measure M supporters concluded that it failed simply because of anti-tax and anti-government sentiment and that it probably would have passed in a general, rather than a special, election.

Measure M was the only countywide issue on the ballot last November; only a few city and special district elections were held at the same time.

Bill Ward, a member of Drivers for Highway Safety, said that group will propose alternatives to Measure M today, although the commission is not expected to allow testimony, as the session is a workshop and not a public hearing.

His group is seeking nighttime public hearings, Ward said, so that the commission “can get closer to the people and really hear what’s on the public’s mind. They’re really out of touch with what the public really wants.”

Ward recently urged the panel to explore the possibility of a local gasoline tax that would be devoted to highway improvements, but commission officials pointed out that it would take a local gas tax of 19 cents per gallon to raise the same amount of revenue that a half-cent sales tax increase would.

“I expect to go for a November election,” commission Chairman and county Supervisor Thomas F. Riley said Wednesday. “The state is out of money, and the federal government is using money (the highway trust fund) for purposes other than which it was intended.”

Riley said federal officials are refusing to spend highway trust fund dollars so as to make the federal deficit appear smaller.

Riley and Transportation Commission Executive Director Stanley T. Oftelie said some minor changes may be made in the implementation ordinance for the measure so that cities could use some of the money from sales taxes for other transit projects. One such project could be the central Orange County monorail system that various cities, Santa Ana among them, have proposed.

As proposed last year, Measure M would have raised an estimated $3.1 billion over 20 years for highway and transit projects. The proceeds would have been split, with $1.325 billion earmarked for freeway improvements, $350 million for local streets and roads, $650 million for regional highway projects, and $775 million for mass transit.

Oftelie said a new measure for a sales tax increase may retain the same “Measure M” ballot designation.

Orange County is the only urban county in the state without such a sales tax surcharge.