Countywide : Official Says Road Tax to Be on Ballot

Armed with a poll showing far stronger support among county residents for a half-cent sales tax for highway construction than previous surveys have found, the new chairman of the Orange County Transportation Commission said Monday that the tax initiative will be put before voters in November.

Dana Reed, elected Monday to head the commission, said a majority of the seven commissioners favor putting the proposed tax on the November ballot. The commission is scheduled to vote on the proposal July 23 and it will then go to the Board of Supervisors for final action.

Reed, a Costa Mesa lawyer, said his selection as commission chairman indicates strong support among his colleagues for a November sales tax initiative. Five of the seven commissioners voted for Reed as chairman; Irving Pickler and Roger R. Stanton, who is also a county supervisor, were absent from the vote.

“The answer is yes, we’re going to put it on the ballot . . . ,” Reed said. “I went around to all of my colleagues. They all know that I want to be chairman when we put this measure on the ballot.”

Last November county voters rejected a similar transportation sales tax proposal, Measure M, by a 53% to 47% margin.

In a poll released last week, only 48% of the respondents said they would support a transportation sales tax. In the poll provided Monday by the Transportation Commission, 65% of the respondents said they would support such a measure.

Both surveys were conducted by the same Sacramento pollster. But the second poll, Reed noted, told respondents how the money would probably be spent in a series of questions leading up to the question of whether they would support such a tax.

“A very substantial majority of voters are telling us that they ought to have another shot at it,” Reed said. “As they learn more about it, its (favorable rating) goes up.”

Stanton dismissed the results of the survey, saying it had been worded to elicit favorable responses. Stanton said that he will vote against placing the measure on the November ballot at the Transportation Commission’s meeting next month and that he does not believe that voters will approve the measure.

If a majority of the commission votes to place it on the November ballot, however, Stanton said he will vote for the measure when it comes before the Board of Supervisors for final action. That vote is largely procedural, and the board generally bows to the wishes of the commission on such issues, Stanton said.