.
.
.
On the other hand, failure to repair our infrastructure can lead to some interesting and artistic photos!
Longtime Democratic activist, structural engineer, and all-around decent guy John Vassiliades wrote a blog post for us without realizing it when he sent out this open letter today:
My fellow sisters and brothers,
I urge your support for SB1 (Beall) and SCA 2 (Newman).
SB 1 seeks to generate additional revenue to address California’s growing backlog of maintenance and rehabilitation projects on our state highways and local streets and roads. SCA 2 (Newman) ensures that this new revenue is dedicated solely to transportation and not diverted to other purposes.
This bill is important to ensure our roads, highways, tunnels and bridges are safe, structurally and functionally while the cost to users is minimal. It will cost less than $10 a month to an average driver, but the benefits of safer and faster mobility will outweigh the higher insurance premiums and claims that will increase due to our failing infrastructure.
In addition the deteriorating pavements, crumbling bridges, the lack of synchronized traffic signals, lighting, striping, markings and bad drivers, are primary causes of deadly motor vehicle accidents (more than those from guns, drug abuse, etc.) each year. The result is also tort liability that the state’s tax payers pay the cost to settle each year.
Investment in our transportation infrastructure is long overdue – the gas tax in California has not been raised in 23 years. The result is a $59 billion backlog in needed repairs on the 50,000 lane miles in the state highway system. Over 25% of California’s 12,000 bridges show significant deterioration and need to be repaired or replaced. If we don’t repair our failing highway and bridge infrastructure now, it is estimated that it will cost 8 times more to rehabilitate or replace them later.
Transportation funding is needed now to protect the system, it will also create about 65,000 thousands of good-paying jobs (Federal government estimates up to 15,000 jobs for each $billion spent), reduce congestion, help preserve the environment and greatly improve the quality of life for every Californian.
Please, I strongly urge your support for SB 1 and SCA 2. Thank you very much for your consideration. If I can be of assistance, please call me at home at [judiciously removed] or contact me by email. For more information please see below:
Some of you, I suspect, may be inclined to discuss this. Here ya go!
I presume that SCA-2 is Josh Newman’s price for his support of SB-1. If so, it is a good and appropriate price to impose.
Now, when are we going to pay attention to our water infrastructure?
No. To all of this. It’s ridiculous.
We have plenty of tax revenue. This is just more BS coming from politicans who refuse to make hard choices.
To Senator Newman: The price shouldn’t be a Constitutional Amendment for the state to do something it already promised to do. You have plenty of other remedies to correct the states long standing misappropriation of transportation taxes. Perhaps you ought to get busy doing them. This Amendment does nothing to stop lunacy in Sacramento. It simply creates a Goreian Lock Box from which only more stupidity originating from Sacramento will emerge.
We’re taxed enough already. Stop passing on responsibility to the tax payer, stop the stupid projects, stop pandering, and get busy fixing our roads.
Hard to support more taxes when Brown is wasting billions on HSR.
You can bet that’s exactly where this money will go.
High speed rail, street cars to no where, and Lexus lanes where free lanes used to be.
It’s not going to fix pot holes. It’s just not.
I’m actually quite interested in knowing how you know that it’s not going to fix roads and bridges, but instead fund High Speed Rail and Lexus Lanes. If this is just sardonic cynicism, well, OK then. But what safeguards are in the bill and why do you think that they’re worthless?
I’m not spending time researching it (as I’m otherwise occupied), but you presumably have — if this isn’t just bluster.
Where do funds go now?
HSR. Street cars to nowhere. Toll road conversions of publically owned freeways.
This amendment does absolutely nothing to change that. Not a damn thing.
Ryan, it’s one of the great unspoken scandals in California how much money is raked off the top of public works projects for “contract administration.” And then there is the doubling down on management as always happens at the County of Orange, under the guise of “privatization.”
Then there are the billions written off because the cost of delayed projects were really caused by the public agency (see, for instance the Anaheim Convention Center).
I doubt if Josh Newman knows any of this, of course.
And the idea of sequestered funds provides no sense of confidence for me. The Legislature has and will raid funds whenever it gets into trouble again.
Don’t forget all the salaries and pensions for our worthy unionized CalTrans army of engineers and bureaucrats. All eligible expenditures, right?
David, the salaries and pensions of your so called “unionized Caltrans army of engineers and bureaucrats” are only a small portion of the annual expenditures on the state budget. Construction projects are built by private construction firms via a competitive bid process which is open to all legitimate companies. Caltrans’ engineers role is to protect the public by ensuring that standards and all practices used in the procurement of contracts are consistent with the applicable laws. The US has the most open, transparent and accountable government in the world and our government employees’ salaries are much lower than the private sector.
Your government employees salaries are NOT, not even close, to being lower than the private sector.
That’s absurd.
One of you, perhaps both, will have evidence for your assertions. I’d love to see it? (OK, “love” may be a bit too strong, but: please provide it!)
Transparent California. Pick any occupation you like.
Range on Road Maintenance Manager or Superintendent rolls from $138,091.04 to $197,937.
I’m all for good people who do good work making good pay (so, not arguing that these wages aren’t legit.) That’s fair, but the idea that CA Government Employees make less than their private counterparts is false.
Government employees’ salaries are posted online on SacBee, SFGate and many other news organizations websites. The State controller also has a link to look up salaries of government employees and state officials. This is considered public information, however in the private sector nobody knows how much they are paid. In other words you can find any official’s or government employees salary but not for private. It is absurd to state that a Road Maintenance Manager or Superintendent rolls from $138,091.04 to $197,937, Caltrans Maintenance employees or superintendents make less than half.
Don’t forget that as of a 2014 report, Caltrans has about 3,500 unnecessary positions. At the time, that was $500 million in salary and benefits expenditures. All for redundant positions.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/dan-walters/article2599870.html
JV:
“our government employees’ salaries are much lower than the private sector.”
That’s ridiculous. And it also ignores the monumental pension burden on the taxpayer and the inconvenient fact that it is almost impossible to get rid of a bad, lazy or inept public employee.
I’ve seen how much Gas Tax money (and Measure M here in OC) is wasted on all levels to keep government engineering departments staffed with warm bodies. The amounts for in-house contract administration can reach 10-15% and are wildly over budgeted given the actual work involved in managing road and traffic projects.
At Orange County Public Works takes its cut, then hands out the contract and the responsibility to private sector consulting engineers, doubling down on the cost.
But thanks for being polite.
No, John. They make exactly that much.
Exactly.
Not half. Not three quarters. Exactly that much. Look it up yourself.
Ryan, please read the bill LINK TO TEXT OF SB-1 above.
This bill would create the Road Maintenance and Rehabilitation Program to address deferred maintenance on the state highway system and the local street and road system. The bill would require the California Transportation Commission to adopt performance criteria, consistent with a specified asset management plan, to ensure efficient use of certain funds available for the program. The bill would provide for the deposit of various funds for the program in the Road Maintenance and Rehabilitation Account, which the bill would create in the State Transportation Fund, including revenues attributable to a $0.12 per gallon increase in the motor vehicle fuel (gasoline) tax imposed by the bill with an inflation adjustment, as provided, 50% of a $0.20 per gallon increase in the diesel excise tax, with an inflation adjustment, as provided, a portion of a new transportation improvement fee imposed under the Vehicle License Fee Law with a varying fee between $25 and $175 based on vehicle value and with an inflation adjustment, as provided, and a new $100 annual vehicle registration fee applicable only to zero-emission vehicles model year 2020 and later, with an inflation adjustment, as provided. The bill would provide that the fuel excise tax increases take effect on November 1, 2017, the transportation improvement fee takes effect on January 1, 2018, and the zero-emission vehicle registration fee takes effect on July 1, 2020.
John, ditto. You read it.
Pay attention to the section on certain mass transit projects.
Mass transit projects. Where public money goes to die. After the consultants, lobbyists and politicians have raked off the top.
Hello Ryan, thank you for your argumentation against this bill. Cars nowadays are more fuel efficient and some actually do not use fossil fuel at all. In recent years the special fund from gas tax collection has dropped dramatically rendering our ability to upkeep, maintain and improve our roads very ineffective. Drivers have seen car insurance premiums going up because claims have gone up. By having this 12 cents per gallon paid at the pump, our roads will be safer to drive. Look at all other services that we have seen increases, from cable TV, to utility bills and so on. This bill is an investment to a more safe and efficient transportation system that would benefit all of us.
John, the issue isn’t revenue.
The issue is how the revenue is spent.
Road maintenance costs what it costs and I’m happy to pay it. That being said, my existing gas taxes don’t go where they’re supposed to go.
When that problem is fixed and when we’re spending the money we already pay in a reasonably efficient manner, our politicians will have earned the right to ask for more money.
As of today, they have not earned that right. They simply want more money for more stupid projects that do nothing to fix our crumbling infrastructure used by tens of millions of taxpayers daily.
Yes Ryan, I write as a private citizen here although my entire career of 34 years is on transportation. Everything we buy or use has a price to pay. Property taxes, sales, utilities, groceries etc. have all gone up. My cable TV cost is far more than I pay for gas each month. Our roadways especially here is SoCal are not the best in the world. Paying a few cents to fix our roads is no different than fixing or maintaining our homes. We never paid too much to start with on transportation.
You didn’t address his (and my, and a lot of other people’s) issue with the current tax money being spent on a lot of projects that aren’t road maintenance. So far, Sacramento has done nothing to prove to us that revenue allocated to infrastructure maintenance will actually be used for that and only that purpose. I agree with Ryan. They haven’t earned the right to ask for more money.
^^^ ditto.
Don’t forget we’ve tried before to ensure that transportation dollars are only spent on transportation projects. Prop 42 in 2002 sought to do what Newman’s amendment is attempting. The legislature got around it in 2002 and I suspect they’d find ways to get around it in 2017 if this amendment passes.
We need to stop bailing out our legislators’ poor practices by giving ever more of our tax dollars to them ever few years. No to this. No to all of it. Find another way. Do your jobs.
……..” – the gas tax in California has not been raised in 23 years….”
Bulls**t, bulls**t, and bulls**t. Do you people just let syllables drool out of your mouths because you like the sounds they make? Or was I visiting out of state relatives when I missed the mass lobotomies ? 2014 wasn’t THAT long ago, was it ? This is pathetic. MY wallet still remembers when that hit. Fact checking on Google took less than 3 minutes, and most of that was scrolling past about 100 announcements of Brown’s proposal. Gruber was right, there is just one big echo chamber. Pathetic.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/27/california-hidden-gas-tax.html
Oh, and stay off my lawn !
And this from 2011-
…”The biggest reason for the better state performance was the fact that California overhauled its transportation funding system in 2011, so that it is more reliant on gas taxes. California accounted for more than two-thirds of the change in revenue in that period…..” (combined states vs federal transportation funding)
http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-gas-tax-revenue-states-inflation.html
Is it any surprise to learn from Google / Linkedin that “in transportation for years” actually means “project manager at CALTRANS ” ?? Should I be surprised ? Ain’t this internet thing wonderful ?
Have y’all read this? Someone who has done more research than I have disputes the “programs in transportation bills have wasted lots of money” story. Just wanted to put this out there.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-transportation-plan-opposition-20170406-story.html
The author does absolutely nothing to address, what he says is, the biggest complaint: Wasting money.
Road maintenance costs what it costs. We’re $7,000,000,000 a year short?
Then why are we spending $60,000,000,000 a year on a train to no where?
Why hundreds of millions on street cars that hardly anyone rides?
Why hundreds of millions to convert public highways into toll roads? We already paid for these.
Why is highway maintenance per mile considerably more in California?
Why isn’t the fifth highest tax rate in the United States enough?
But hey, why ask why? Just raise taxes and claim the people asking questions are just wrong. Their job is to pay the bill, nothing more.
Move along.
Reading that article was a lot like reading David Whiting with the Register reporting on the cops.
Let me guess — because both times you were moving your lips?
Alas it would be impolite to list the words he was mouthing,
You’ve never let impoliteness stop you before, nipper.
Let me see if I understand your position:
There seems to be no strong disagreement on the need to repair roads, bridges, and tunnels. And I’ll agree that we should do what we can to reduce the effect of skimming by middlemen (although I do favor the use of union labor here.)
Your complaint is that too many *other* projects (related to transportation — but also presumably those not) are being funded despite being wasteful.
In that case, you have at least two options. One is to attack those wasteful projects (and practices) head on. You’d find allies within the Democratic Party — likely Sen. Newman included — as well as adversaries within the Republican Party, but this is conceivable.
The other option is to hold these necessary road repairs hostage until the government complies with you about these other issues.
I don’t agree with holding road repairs hostage. One good-sized pothole can lead to thousands of dollars in necessary repairs to cars hitting it each day. I’d rather pay $100 for a new tax than $1000 in new struts and alignment — multiple times.
Believe me, I understand your not wanting to raise taxes. But holding road repairs hostage is cavalier.
Summary:
Throwing money at pot holes is neither a solution nor good leadership.
This is nothing more than throwing money, MY MONEY, at potholes.
It’s like handing over a bunch of money to junkies. Sure it might make you feel good and yes, some of it will find its way into the shared economy.
A good investment?
Ryan, I think that the idea is to purchase asphalt, hire workers to fill the potholes, etc. Thrown money just blows away.
You actually agree that spending money to fix potholes is fine. You just don’t want it to be new money.
Yes. I agree road maintenance costs what it costs.
I also agree it is important.
By the way, one of the main things that we CAN do to lower the cost of road repair is to require much lower maximum weights on trucks. That — combined with the elements — is what wrecks the roads. You could have a million 10-gram house wrens land on the same spot on a road ten seconds apart from each other and never damage it. But one 22,000-pound laden truck, with the same mass (and probably less aggregate force) going over it just once can bust it.
Truckers hate this idea — although it would mean a lot more jobs for truckers. For a while, it could mean more pollution from more trucks — though less so as we successfully move towards lower-or-zero emission vehicles.
Hence the higher tax on diesel fuel.
I’m not as familiar with costs to operate a freight company versus typical CA resident costs, but I would not be surprised if truckers— particularly those crossing state lines– don’t pay their fair share.
But, maybe they do. I really don’t know.
In any case, I do not support the $100 electric vehicle fee. I’d much rather see that fee applied to any vehicle over 6000 lbs.
As a proponent of electric cars, that fee does sadden me — but how else do we charge people not for the damage they cause to roads (the gas tax does that) but also for the benefit they receive from the fixing of damage that neither they or lighter gas-powered vehicles cause?
The other proposal out there is a mileage tax, which is also disturbing. (And, of course, your proposal not to fix potholes until your demands are met, but that’s not directed at resolving inequities between gas and electric drivers.)
We don’t.
They provide a public benefit: Reduced air pollution. We shouldn’t get that for free.
Besides, they’re paying a disproportionate share to fix our aging electric infrastructure.
I’m happy to call it a wash.
Also, let’s kill this little slogan quickly and mercifully.
I’m not holding anything hostage. Your position that I am assumes that tax increases are inevitable. We’ll have to do them eventually, so do it now while we sort everything out.
This is false. It wasn’t inevitable.
If it is possible to kill the programs that you want to be killed — which I may or may not agree should be killed, based on a case-by-case analysis — then that would free up money that could be used for other items or to rebate taxes. I have no problems with your having those fights.
But, until that happens, the choice is clearly between potholes and taxes. You want to increase the heat on legislators by denying them the tax dollars they could use to fix the potholes until they follow your preferred policies. You may not like my calling that hostage-taking, but it sure looks like that to me.
As for electric cars — people who drive them have benefitted from public subsidies in purchasing and in priming the pump that has led to their development and manufacture. I don’t think that asking them for $100 a year to help keep their cars from breaking — electric cars have axles and thrusters and suspensions and tires as well, after all — is unreasonable. For those who can afford electric cars, this is not a major expense compared to the savings in fuel.
False dilemma!
There are a myriad of options between living with the status quo and new taxes.
Stop. Your shoebox will never fit this scenario.
Also, “They can afford it” is bad policy.
No, NOT ASKING whether “they can afford it” is bad policy. Making assessments of who can and can’t afford a given tax is good policy. You seem to presume that the conclusion must be cavalier as opposed to being the result of serious analysis. It’s unclear why.
As for your “myriad of options” – ok, let’s hear some! Doesn’t need to be the full myriad.
Why, so you can pick them off one by one to retroactively defend the Legislature’s rush to taxation as the inevitable solution?
No thank you.
They taxed first and will ask questions later. That’s sad. I’m not giving you ammo to spin this poor decision.
It is cavalier.
You have no evidence supporting that drivers of electric cars can afford an additional $100 a year on new taxes. None.
Absolutely cavalier. You couldn’t pick a better word.
I’m making an inference from the price of electric cars.