The Plot to Kill ‘M’ : Reprehensible attack on what the voters want and need

Residents of Orange County became so exasperated in 1990 with years of worsening traffic that they voted themselves a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for $3-billion worth of transportation improvements. They did so despite increasing fourth-quarter worries about a deteriorating economy and a sudden increase in gas prices brought on by the Persian Gulf crisis. They did it despite the fact that they already were shelling out for new gas taxes for transportation improvements under Proposition 111, and despite their own history of rejecting all previous incarnations of Measure M, the county sales tax proposal.

Orange County’s congestion is arguably as bad as can be found around the state, and more significant, it contributes to regional gridlock all over Southern California. Commuter Transportation Services, a nonprofit company that works with transportation agencies around Los Angeles to reduce congestion, recently issued some fascinating statistics about life on the road in a five-county region: It estimates, for example, that we spend collectively about 628,000 hours in traffic every day, and more than 4 million of us on the road are single occupants of a vehicle. We travel a total of 221,294,000 miles each day. The group says that in 20 years the average speed on freeways could drop to 19 m.p.h. if nothing is done to ease freeway congestion.

Orange County voters last fall simply reached the point at which such data had become all too self-evident. Indeed, the same conclusion to act was reached much earlier by enlightened voters in nearby counties that already had passed similar measures.

In Orange County, persistent critics of the sales tax measure indulged in the wishful thinking that the economic climate would carry the day for their own increasingly weak and parochial arguments. But now, having lost their case at the ballot box and in the face of the overwhelming regional imperatives to reduce congestion, they have taken the measure to court in a desperate attempt to overturn the will of the majority. A coalition of opponents, including a strident group that has opposed car-pool lanes, is trying to get Measure M declared unconstitutional. Its most significant argument is that such a tax increase should have been required to pass by a two-thirds margin because of provisions of Proposition 13.

The two-thirds question was considered for Los Angeles County in 1982, when the state Supreme Court upheld the right of the Transportation Commission to impose a similar tax, after voters had passed it by a majority. The court held that if an organization cannot levy property taxes, and that is true of a transportation commission, then it is not bound by Proposition 13’s requirement that special taxes be approved by two-thirds of the electorate.

But state Proposition 62 extended the two-thirds requirement to any agency created to perform a government function. That has spawned a challenge to a sales tax for law enforcement in San Diego, now pending before the court. The opponents of Measure M are shamelessly trying to piggyback their thin case along with San Diego’s issue--a last-ditch move that is hasty and inappropriate.

Orange County saw the wisdom in setting aside its vaunted reputation as an anti-tax haven in the face of its compelling interest in helping itself and the region. And if there were any doubt that the passage of a sales tax for transportation within one county had profound implications for others, one needed to look no further than to adjacent Riverside County.

At one point last year, that county was so concerned about its neighbor’s failure to tax itself for road improvements that there was talk of Riverside County lending money to Orange County to get some of the job done.

Similarly, residents throughout Southern California benefit or suffer according to the quality of roads and availability of mass transportation. That’s why this litigation is a reprehensible challenge to what the voters want and need.