I have concerns about every portion of the LOST measure. It’s easiest to start with the funds designated for roads.
Issues I find with the Road (40%) portion of LOST:
1) Funding Long-term, Ongoing Expenses with Temporary Funds.
One of the most unwise things anyone can do is fund long-term, ongoing expenses with temporary funds. What happens in 23 years when the tax might go away, but we have become dependent on this money in order to fund roads? It’s like a family that is falling behind in debts inheriting money, and thus decides they don’t have to find a better job or trim waste from their spending. Usually, more money given to those that mismanage it just makes the problem worse.
2) Regardless of how it's written, as much as is raised for roads can be spent on ANYTHING.
The current road use fund (gas tax) money dumps into the city’s general fund; it does not remain a separate fund. This then allows the city council to allocate the funds as they wish. As admitted by a city council member at a recent neighborhood association meeting, the city has cut funding to roads for at least 40 years. If they underfunded it in the past, what makes anyone think they won’t make similar cuts going forward? Oh, perhaps the mandate that 40% of the LOST money would go toward roads? Who says that wouldn’t just replace money currently coming from the general fund? Nothing prevents the city from no longer funding road work from the general fund. So every dollar designated for roads from the LOST is another dollar they could free up in the general fund for ANYTHING they want to spend money on.
Note, I considered the over 57% cut in funding to roads in this year’s budget compared to last year that at least one local media outlet reported on in January. However, city council members put that in perspective by pointing out that FEMA funded the repair of roads damaged from the flood & the clean-up efforts (extra trucks damaged roads). That funding appeared in last year’s budget, but the funding has returned to roughly the pre-flood spending levels. Thus, although I might have argued that if roads are a priority, why are they making such deep cuts just before putting it to a vote. However, considering the evidence, I could only focus on the admission that there has been a 40-year period of underfunding roads.
3) Repair or Improvements? There's a big difference.
The city council members seem to like how they limited the verbiage to ‘existing’ roads. That way, they believe this cannot be used to build new roads, but fix what we already have. However, the verbiage doesn’t say ‘repair’, it says ‘improvements’. Most people want better roads. Thus repairing existing roads is good. But improvements could widen, add lanes, extend, or do any number of other additional things to existing roadways. If we haven't funded them well so far, improvements could make it even most costly to maintain.
4) Roads were added to make citizens more likely to vote to tax themselves more.
As identified by the mayor in January, the two main things on the minds of voters were flood protection and roads. Now, the city uses what they already know are popular issues to convince us to tax ourselves more. But if they know these are priorities of the people, then why aren’t they doing one of their primary jobs of allocating more funding to these areas and cutting more waste or low-priority items from the budget? We need elected officials that budget properly so they can't take things they know we want most to justify higher taxes.
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