Goals: Fix roads, get Rainier built

Last month, members of the Petaluma City Council dedicated an entire Saturday to setting goals for the upcoming year, with a fair amount of discussion dedicated to solving the city’s two biggest infrastructure problems: Fixing city streets and alleviating traffic congestion.

Not surprisingly, these same dual priorities were found to be the most important ones for local residents when the city conducted polling one year ago that became the basis for the ill-fated Measure Q sales tax measure on the November ballot. As they had done the prior year, council members agreed that finding a new source of revenue would be necessary to get the job done, and work is expected to begin soon to craft a more acceptable tax measure to be placed on the ballot in 2016.

Petaluma is not alone in its infrastructure purgatory. Statewide, roads and highways are a mess. This is because the primary funding source for their repair and maintenance, the state gas tax, has not been raised in decades. Making matters worse, increased fuel efficiency of vehicles in California, which now average about 35 miles per gallon, means that gas tax revenues are steeply declining at a time when billions of dollars are needed to fix California’s highways. The Governor and legislative leaders have finally gotten around to discussing alternatives, such as a mileage tax whereby motorists would be charged a fee for miles driven annually. But this concept is still many years away from implementation.

Unlike the state, city officials have no control over the state gas tax, and cannot charge a mileage fee. They must, instead, forge agreement on a new revenue source - probably a sales tax increase of some kind - to fund the rebuilding of the street system and construction of the Rainier interchange and crosstown connector.

To do this, the council and City Manager John Brown will first need to carefully assess what went wrong with last year’s sales tax proposal that lost by a wide margin.

This should not be a difficult task.

Measure Q proposed a large, permanent one percent general tax increase, yet carried no guarantee regarding how the money would be spent over the coming decades. Sure, the council adopted a companion spending plan, with a big laundry list of items that included everything from hiring cops to fixing roads. But there was no assurance that the spending plan would not be altered by a subsequent city council vote. The size and permanence of the increase, coupled with the lack of specificity on how it would be spent, was a huge turn-off to voters.

What had made the general sales tax measure so appealing to city officials who crafted it was that its approval required only a simple majority. But with Measure Q’s failure, the city should now give serious consideration to a specific sales tax measure. Unlike a general tax, a specific tax requires a higher threshold (two-thirds voter approval) to pass, and funds derived from the tax must be spent on specific items like road repairs.

Yes, the higher threshold makes it harder to pass, but a specific tax would assure voters that the money will be spent as promised. With a unified city council endorsement and a guarantee that the money will be spent to fix roads and build Rainier, approval of such a tax measure is very achievable.

It’s the unified city council that will be the most important, and potentially elusive, element in the next sales tax campaign. But, nanimity is not something we’re not used to seeing on the Petaluma City Council.

In the Measure Q election, two of the seven city council members did not support the tax measure, including Mayor David Glass who worked overtime to convince voters it was the wrong approach to solving the problem. Glass, who was running in a tough re-election campaign, capitalized on underlying voter discontent and distrust by dubbing Measure Q the “forever” tax. Undoubtedly, his dogged opposition to Measure Q helped his own campaign, but did nothing to raise funds to fix roads.

As mayor, Glass is uniquely positioned to build consensus among his colleagues around a specific sales tax proposal to fix streets.

It was Glass, after all, who last year was a vocal proponent of a specific tax to fix roads, but lost out to a majority of council members who got behind a general tax measure instead.

In addition to building consensus on the city council, a broad base of grass roots supporters throughout the community should also be assembled, and the sooner the better. Measure Q was developed and promoted by a handful of city officials and had very little community-wide support. The campaign for its passage was poorly planned and executed, and lacked the essential door-to-door canvassing necessary to educate the electorate and get out the vote.

Additionally, Petaluma officials should enhance the level of dialogue with their counterparts in county government, especially Supervisor David Rabbitt. That should start with support for a countywide roads tax measure in June. The as-yet unnamed measure - a quarter-cent sales tax increase for five years to fund road maintenance needs - would generate an estimated $20 million a year, with 56 percent of the money going to cities’ roads and the rest going to unincorporated county roads. Petaluma’s share would come to about $10 million over five years, and while that’s not going to fix all the city’s streets, it’s a good start.

Without additional tax revenues, Petaluma’s streets will remain in a perpetual state of disrepair.

For Petaluma’s new City Council, finding consensus on how to fix such problems should be its top priority in 2015.