Politics Report: The Tax Measure That SANDAG Requires But Will Not Speak Of

By Scott Lewis Andrew Keatts, the Voice of San Diego

March 12, 2022

The San Diego Building Trades Council, IBEW, carpenters and other unions along with contractors are paying $7 per signature right now to qualify a measure for the November ballot that would raise the sales tax and support the SANDAG transportation plan.

They’re rallying under the slogan: “Let’s Go! San Diego. YES for Traffic Relief. Transit. Jobs.” And obviously, like everything else, proponents promise it will “fill the dang potholes.”

It’s shaping up to be a central focus of the November ballot in the local political world.

The news: This week, SANDAG’s executive board refused to consider whether the agency should put its own measure on the ballot. That came just three weeks after SANDAG Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata said he would.

On Feb. 25, Carlsbad Mayor Matt Hall pressed Ikhrata on whether the agency would take charge of the situation and control any ballot measure it put in front of voters.

Hall probably has two major motivations behind that. The first is, Hall and the rest of the SANDAG board may want to influence a measure that will be a major component of the agency’s policy direction in the coming years. This is their chance to dictate what it says and how much it sets aside for transit versus roads, etc.

“I want us to be the ones to put whatever the ballot initiative is on the ballot,” Hall said in the February meeting.

The second motivation could be more cynical. If SANDAG controls the measure, it would be easier to defeat.

Background on that: SANDAG could put a measure on the ballot itself without working people having to put up a dime to pay signature gatherers to qualify an initiative for the ballot. But the labor unions are going at it as an independent citizen’s initiative for a distinct reason: The California Supreme Court now has repeatedly affirmed that citizen’s initiatives only need a bare majority support from voters to pass. Special taxes put on the ballot by government agencies – like a transportation measure proposed by SANDAG – must get two thirds support from voters.

Nonetheless, Ikhrata assured Hall that SANDAG would run it.

“There will not be any request for any sales tax without this board approving,” Ikrata said. “Whatever a third party does is their business. We’re not involved. We cannot be involved. We won’t be anywhere close to that. But you’re absolutely right, this board will be the final say on whether we go to the voters or not and the voters will be the final jury on whether this passes or not.”

He must have had something different in mind than what Hall was pushing for.

Friday, Ikhrata told the SANDAG executive committee that he had no plans to bring forward an item to have the board discuss a sales tax the agency would put on the ballot. Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey tried but the committee, led by Encinitas Mayor Katherine Blakespeare and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, shot it down.

Bailey was not pleased. The Politics Report spoke with him Friday. To him, either the board was letting someone else control a process it should influence, or the board was actively influencing the process, which would mean it is not really a citizen’s initiative.

“Refusing to even consider an agenda item on a supposedly essential new funding source is, at best, a dereliction of the board’s responsibility. At worst, it’s potentially illegal as it has the appearance of circumventing election law since it relies on a third party to carry SANDAG’s water and raise taxes as the plan requires,” he said.

Blakespear, in an email, said she and others on the board are aware of the citizen-led initiative, having encountered signature gatherers out in the community.

“It takes substantial work, planning and financing for an agency to put a measure on the ballot and at this time SANDAG is not planning to put anything on the ballot,” she wrote. “So there is no reason to have a SANDAG agenda item on a non-issue. We welcome all funding streams, like revenue that would come from a citizen-led ballot measure or revenue that would come from the state.”

She said there was no need for anything more than for the board to hear a report about the status of the citizen initiative. If the need arises for SANDAG to take some specific action, she said, then the board will do that.

Keep in mind: There’s a good reason Bailey referred to the measure as a “supposedly essential funding source.”

The agency last year passed a new, multi-decade plan for all the major transportation investments it expects the region will need. That plan lays out all the money the agency expects to bring in, whether from local sales taxes, new funding sources like the controversial fee charged to drivers for every mile they drive (which was written up this month by Time Magazine), or state and federal money they anticipate rolling down hill all the way to us.

SANDAG spent last year consumed with the culture war that grew from its assumption that the state by 2030 would begin charging drivers for every mile they drive – which would require both legal changes and technological advances – and that the agency could piggyback on that effort by charging its own local version of the fee.

What got less attention was that the agency also assumes that voters will approve a sales tax increase this fall – and that voters will approve another similar sales tax measure in 2024, and that they’ll do it again in 2028.

If voters fail to approve any of those three measures? The math no longer adds up on SANDAG’s long-term regional plan (and the math in that thing is already getting a little wobbly, since Gloria and Blakespear are pushing the board to amend the plan and remove the mileage fee assumptions).

So whether SANDAG’s board decides to explicitly weigh in on the measure, or if sits on its hands and lets the citizen’s initiative lead the way, under no circumstances is the agency a bystander. If the measure doesn’t pass, the big plan that outlines Ikhrata’s vision is already in the red.

Notes

How much it takes to live here: Voice of San Diego will begin Monday morning with a week-long series of stories about San Diego’s cost-of-living crisis. There’s nothing new about it being expensive to live here, but the pressure facing working families right now feels especially acute. We tried to pull together a specific, intimate look at all the burdens facing households right now. We hope you like it.

It has been exactly two years: Since what we call Tom Hanks Day. We had scheduled a live podcast to review the March 3, 2020 election results with Democratic political consultant Eva Posner and former San Diego City Councilman Mark Kersey. But as the virus news spread, we canceled the live event and recorded the podcast in our studio.

When we started recording, things were normal-ish. When we finished recording, we looked at our phones and the world had changed. Tom Hanks had gotten COVID-19 as had an NBA player and the NBA shut down its season. The experts at the World Health Organization had declared the virus a pandemic. (BuzzFeed did an oral history of that surreal day.)

We sat there stunned and yet we still had no idea that for now two years and counting, things would not be the same again. Years from now, that will be the moment we both remember when we think back on these surreal years.

Speaking of the podcast: This week we discussed Will Huntsberry’s viral story about regulators who entered three preschools at the same time as part of a mask-enforcement inspection, separating kids to interview about the facilities’ lack of mask usage, a fact operators had already acknowledged. Huntsberry followed that up Friday afternoon, revealing that officials are not willing to tell parents why they thought they needed to interview preschoolers about the preschools’ policy. We also reviewed Andrea Lopez-Villafaña’s piece about the mysterious death of Luis Antonio Armenta.

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