Feudal Appetite Fuels Pork-Barrel Plan : Civic affairs: City Council is considering reneging on plans to use Prop. A money for city roads and instead spend it on “neighborhood improvements projects.”

In 1987, the voters of San Diego agreed to tax themselves through a half-cent increase in sales tax to pay for road improvements that would reduce traffic congestion. That was an extraordinary act in post-Proposition 13 California. It said just how fed up our citizens were with traffic congestion.

The proponents of the measure presented the voters with a very specific plan for spending the transportation tax dollars that would be collected. We’d spend one third of the money for important state highway projects such as California Routes 52 and 125. Another third of the money would go to expanding the trolley and bus service. The remaining third would go to local road projects that addressed congestion and safety problems in individual cities. Each city adopted its own list of priority projects that would be part of the Proposition A package.

Five years later, the San Diego City Council is toying with the idea that the local roads portion of Transnet money should be used for “neighborhood improvements projects.” They have another term for these kinds of projects in the United States Congress: pork-barrel projects.

At the Dec. 11 meeting of the City Council’s Transportation and Land Use Committee, council members indicated that they are ready to throw out the list of priority local road projects first adopted by the council in 1986 and confirmed every year since then. That list includes projects such as Mission Trails Parkway (Jackson Drive extension), which its proponents, myself included, believe will provide significant relief to traffic congestion on Mission Gorge Road and result in safer neighborhood streets in the communities of Allied Gardens and San Carlos.

Although the attack on Mission Trails Parkway is distressing for the solution-oriented community activists in the 7th Council District, the crime is compounded by the fact that the council committee is sharpening its knife to carve up the Mission Trails Parkway monies eight ways to satisfy the purely parochial interests of council members. Council members obsessed with the politics of district-only elections won’t lift their eyes above the feudal walls they are building around their districts.

Filling potholes and landscaping a center median on a neighborhood street are not without merit. But they do little, if anything, to reduce traffic congestion. Only the immediate neighbors are blessed with any benefits. Those kinds of projects are properly part of the city’s capital improvement program and should be prioritized along with projects of similar benefit.

The raid on transportation tax funds raises two very important questions:

1. Is the City Council serious enough about solving traffic congestion to build the roads and rail lines necessary to complete our transportation system? Or will the council continue to duck difficult decisions that aren’t universal crowd-pleasers?

2. If this City Council is unwilling to honor the planning process and subsequent commitments of previous councils, can voters have faith in its future commitments? For example, can we trust the city to honor a list of branch library improvements that would be part of a bond measure to build a new main library? Can we trust the City Council to fund citywide curbside recycling if we vote to amend the City Charter to allow the city to charge for trash collection?

At my request, the council will take up on Monday the issue of whether Mission Trails Parkway should continue to be a part of the City’s Transnet program. If the answer is “no,” then I will propose that the Mission Trails Parkway monies be reallocated to the completion of Route 56--another vitally needed road that fulfills the tax measure’s promise of traffic-congestion relief.

The transportation tax should be used for congestion relief, not neighborhood pork-barrel projects.