Enter the Measure M spin cycle
Having just received another costly mailer from the supporters of Measure M I thought I would share some additional data from my County files. You will not see this information in any of their materials.
“City By City Measure M Allocations” (since inception 15 years ago)
Each of our 34 OC cities get a percentage of the Measure M taxes returned in two buckets, the first of which is the apportionment or “turnback.” This rebate is based on city size and mileage or some formula. The second bucket of money is given to cities in what they call “competitive” Grants. Through June 30, 2005 Measure M collected $2.7 billion dollars of which $1.1 billion has been returned to the cities.
I previously listed La Habra Vs Placentia and Santa Ana Vs Anaheim. Let’s now compare some additional Orange County cities to show another area where this program is flawed.
Huntington Beach Turnback $26,740,578 Grants $14,396,422
Irvine Turnback $28,217,236 Grants $56,213,764
So the residents of Huntington Beach get shortchanged because they want to save taxpayer money while the staff in Irvine say there’s a bucket of money looking for a home. Why not grab it. After all. Everyone in OC contributed to the fund and it’s just sitting there doing nothing. So Irvine grabs four times the amount of Grant funding as it’s northern neighbor.
Or let’s compare another set of similar South County cities.
Laguna Niguel Turnback $8,718,402 Grants $9,138,598
Lake Forest Turnback $8,776,585 Grants $16,609,415
In this example Lake Forest gets almost double the amount of grant money awarded to Laguna Niguel.
In effect we penalize those cities who have maintained their roads and reward other cities who show up at the “public troth” with hat in hand.
OC Report note: “These sums do not include city benefit from Measure M freeway, Metrolink or bus fare stabilization” Don’t you just like the word “stabilization” rather than “subsidy.”
When you read this latest mailer be sure to check out the area entitled “Transit.” They continue to promote their social engineering by trying to force us out of our cars and expect us to approve spending $1 billion dollars, or 20 to 25 percent of $11.86 BILLION dollars, on a light rail system when less than 1/2 of one percent utilize that method of transportation. We need to tell them NO on Nov 7th.
Larry Gilbert
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