Bus riders should find better jobs — if they could get to them — and buy cars. Economists for the Florida Legislature estimate that a 1-cent sales tax in Alachua County would raise $32 million a year. Over the course of eight years, that would exceed a quarter of a billion dollars. Painful. We need to come up with something better than Moving Alachua County Forward. Plan A: Sell naming rights to our roads — Busch Boulevard, Miller Road, Jack Daniels Bourbon Street, Apple Avenue, Toyota Trace. Nope, thats not us. It would mess up our road-numbering system. Plan B: Charge congestion tolls, mileage fees and higher gas taxes. Great ideas, but itll be 10 years before were ready for tolls or charges, and were at the state limit on the gas tax. Plan C: Churn up potholed roads and mix the asphalt with gravel. Who needs pavement? No, too many type As are in a hurry. Plan D: Slash non-road spending. Come up with $32 million to cut, and lets talk. That leaves us with the sales tax. Luckily, a chunk of it would be paid by visitors. Using a crude analysis that puts Monroe and Orange counties at around 50 percent of their revenue from visitors, I conjure up 22 percent as a plausible current figure for Alachua. That reduces $32 million a year to $25 million. Wont our commissioners waste the money on narrowing Northwest Eighth Avenue to zero lanes, replacing Interstate 75 ramps with roundabouts, and funding a subway study? Not this time. The proposal puts a monitoring committee in place. Plus such spending, though annoying, is minor in the overall scheme of things. How did we stray into this fix? Theres plenty of blame to go around. The federal government since the 1980s has spent much less on roads than have other rich countries, partly because our gas tax is low. Equally important, Florida got cheated. Congress spread road spending across states partly in proportion to population at the time, with no concern for growth. Per capita, Florida has a lot fewer lane-miles that were built in 1970, 1980 or 1990 than do most states. Then theres Florida itself. The state maintains its roads well, better than most. But it does that by limiting its roads, either by passing them down to the counties or by never building them. Worse yet, back in 1985 the Legislature passed a growth management act requiring that roads be funded along with development. To pay for growth, the sales tax was extended to services. That extension was soon reversed, however, leaving infrastructure poorly funded. As for Alachua County, as of last December, we were one of only 21 counties with less than a 1-cent optional sales tax. Most of the other 20 were property-rich coastal counties. With over 40 percent of our assessed value exempt from the property tax, we should be the first, not the last, to have an extra-cent sales tax. For that failure, we all share the blame, not just our commissioners. At last, county leaders are united behind a tax. We need to keep repair costs from rising and avoid digging ourselves into an even deeper budget hole. A deeper hole would devastate us whenever the next recession hits. Maybe youre concerned that a sales tax takes a larger share of low incomes than of high incomes. Thats true, but the sales tax is only slightly regressive if you measure it as a share of consumption instead of income. Also, driving rises less with income than do purchases of taxable items, making a sales tax-road spending combination progressive as a user charge. Even better, a share of the revenue will go to improve bus service, a boon to those with low incomes. Oops, I didnt mean to remind you of that. All of the money should go for roads, but activists captured 5 percent of it for pedestrian and bicycle improvements, and a whopping 17 percent for transit. If man had been intended to walk, ride bikes or take a bus, Henry Ford would not have been created. Anyone not compelled to command hundreds of horsepower twice a day has issues. Maybe walkers and cyclists have a right to travel as they wish, but their safety belongs in the public health budget. Bus riders should find better jobs — if they could get to them — and buy cars. Economists escape such dilemmas by making assumptions. Assume that the 22 percent for peds, bikes and transit is paid for by visitors, not by you. Then go for a walk or a bike ride and relax. Dave Denslow is a local economist. He can be reached at [email protected].
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 11:21:27 +0000
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