News

Taxation with Representation

Voters Support Transportation Tax--With Conditions

by Erica C. Barnett

The bad news: The transportation package voters say they'll support doesn't look much like the plan local politicians have put together.

The findings, from a three-county poll to determine the viability of a regional transportation tax package, were being kept under wraps until their official release this Wednesday, December 10. But the results, according to several who had seen them, speak loud and clear: Puget Sound-area voters are willing to take a tax hit as high as $14 billion to pay for transportation improvements. However, nearly two-thirds of voters oppose another sales-tax increase, and say they're willing to vote down any transportation plan if leaders don't offer them another taxing option.

Unfortunately, nearly two-thirds of the regional plan currently being crafted for the November 2004 ballot--a plan known as the Regional Transportation Investment District, or RTID--would be funded by increasing the sales tax by as much as half a percent. Complicating matters, a 0.4 percent statewide sales-tax boost for education, which could go on the same November ballot, decreases support for a transportation sales-tax hike even further. That could push the transportation vote back a year, the second major delay this year for the embattled project.

The upshot, according to state transportation secretary Doug MacDonald, is that "if we want to pass a package, we'd better not be putting all our eggs in the sales-tax basket."

Worse still for those trying to piece together a viable package, the most likely alternative to the sales-tax increase--the motor vehicle excise tax (MVET)--is under fire. Anti-tax crusader Tim Eyman's Initiative 776, which repealed part of Sound Transit's MVET, was recently upheld by the state supreme court, setting a precedent for future MVET challenges.

The poll's most surprising news? Light rail, which many assumed would be an anchor that could drag the package down, slightly improved its odds; getting light rail to Sea-Tac International Airport actually topped voters' list of transportation priorities. It's unlikely, however, that light rail will ever be part of the RTID package, because state legislators didn't include light rail in RTID's authorizing legislation. Including it now would require a change in state law, a move that won't happen unless state senate transportation committee chair Jim Horn, a Republican roads hawk from Bellevue, has a radical change of heart.

That's a lot of hoops to jump through by November. As Peter Hurley, director of the Transportation Choices Coalition (which helped fund the survey), sums up wryly, "If they rewrite the authorizing legislation and rewrite the investment package and rewrite the financing package, they stand a chance of passing it."

barnett@thestranger.com