Posted on 10/31/2006 12:20:22 PM PST by calcowgirl
UNIVERSAL CITY - Studies show the average motorist in Los Angeles County spends 93 hours stuck in traffic annually. And despite the strictest emissions programs in the country, the region continues to suffer from the nation's worst air quality.
A $19.9 billion infrastructure bond on the ballot Nov. 7 seeks to address these problems, but experts say it's only a start.
On Monday, local and federal lawmakers met with business and transit leaders for the annual , where they urged voters to pass Proposition 1B as a down payment on California's long-neglected infrastructure needs.
"If you look at the top 20 most congested places in the country, California has five of those places, and Los Angeles and Long Beach are No. 1," Sen. Barbara Boxer said.
Passage of the bond would provide about $4 billion for infrastructure, security and air pollution reduction projects around the ports and Long Beach.
The bond's biggest local impact would be on the movement of cargo trucks and trains out of the twin ports, which together comprise the largest seaport in the nation, handling 40 percent of the nation's consumer goods.
Cargo volume is expected to triple at the ports in 20 years, straining an already congested road and rail system and potentially spewing more emissions into the region's unclean air. Projects eligible for Prop 1B funding include adding truck lanes to the Long Beach (710) Freeway between the ports and East Los Angeles and adding more train tracks to the area.
There would also be funding available to build a new, taller Gerald Desmond Bridge, allowing cargo mega ships to travel into the Port of Long Beach's inner harbor.
Opponents, led by State Senator Tom McClintock, say the bond irresponsibly puts California deeper in debt.
"Californians pay the third highest tax per gallon of gasoline in the country - and yet we rank 43rd in per capita spending on highways," McClintock wrote in an editorial on his Web site. "Our neglected roads are not the taxpayers' fault."
The bond provides $1 billion for programs and technologies to reduce air pollution created by the shipping and transportation industries.
Locally, that could mean money to retrofit or replace older diesel trucks and to fund replacement of the polluting terminal yard equipment used to load and unload cargo ships.
With interest, the measure puts the state $37 billion in debt and requires matching funds at a ratio of between 1:1 and to 1:6; depending on project, location and priority.
So far, nobody has said exactly where the majority of those matching funds will come from, although Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated he will present a matching fund plan in December if the bond passes.
The Mobility 21 Summit was sponsored by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Yet a few more examples of what 30 year general obligation bonds should NOT be used for.
Vote against ALL bond measures (foreign or domestic)!
They're usually just a scam to get public funding for pet projects - they spend millions of their own money to get billions from taxpayers / homeowners. They also lie when they say it wouldn't increase taxes - where do the money come from to pay off the bonds and interest that government borrows from financial institutions?
How much state funding has been wasted on light rail lines to nowhere, remediation of wetlands that are actually muddy fields, and, illegal aliens? I find it easy to decide my vote on most props - if it involves a bond issue it gets an automatic "NFW!" vote from me!
You're going to have to change your screenname to "SmartPuppy". ;-)
By all means we must have those cargo mega ships in our inner harbor. The inner harbor folks are now forced to walk around in a state of shame because they lack even the basic necessity of a cargo mega ship. They will never be accepted as a memeber of the Long Beach community without them. Children of inner harbor residents face years of intensive counciling to overcome the shame of their humble circumstances as their playmates on the other side of the Gerald Desmond Bridge, convort in, and proudly display, their cargo mega ships.
How callus are we California tax payers that we would emotioinally scare our children over a few billion pennies.
I agree completely on Bond measures and new taxes of any kind.
Government seems to think it can spend existing tax revenues on new projects and giveaway programs, then cry poor and get tax increases passed to fund the infrastructure and other projects that SHOULD have been funded by the old taxes.
This is ludicrous. The FIRST question people should ask whenever somebody says they need higher taxes, is "What have you done with all the existing tax money ??"
It is so galling to see people debate the worthiness of a project and skip over the issue of why there is no existing revenue stream to pay for it.
California property values have tripled over the last five years. Granted that the property tax revenue lags behind that because Prop 13 only allows reassessment when a property changes hands or is improved. Still, there should be billions of unexpected revenue coming in from higher property taxes. It will quietly disappear away while government insists it needs entirely new tax sources or additional indebtedness.
Of course, as a funding source, that sounds a bit more appropriate than socking the cost of these bonds to Californians
to build world class ports so it can handle "40 percent of the nation's consumer goods"
We could name it the Gerald Desmond Recuperative Gateway.
Spending Federal tax dollars on the ports and the congestion they cause doesn't seem right to me.
The volume of goods moving through those ports should be paying for these infrastructure improvements via port fees. The cost gets added into the price of the goods as they are purchased all across the nation. Capitalism can take care of this just fine. Maybe some local property tax revenue as it is an investment that benefits the people in SoCal by providing jobs and infrastructure. But using taxes paid in Iowa to pay for port improvements in Long Beach seems like an unnecessary level of government involvement.
I'd love to see a wave in Congress where congress-critters get re-elected by promising NOT to bring Federal monies back to their district. That would be a caucus that was really working for lower taxes and smaller government.
I don't disagree with many of the points you make. I honestly don't know enough about the ownership and funding of port operations to know what the right answer is. I do know that using 30 year general obligation "infrastructure" bonds, to be paid by California taxpayers, is not the right formula for buying new trucks. ;-)
Well, a 30-year obligation to buy something that will be worthless in ten years should make anybody do a double-take.
Except Dems, of course. Heck, you could probably get Dems to vote for bonds that would fund welfare payments.
Only in the minds of the governing class.
In 2001, studies showed that California property owners holding the same title for 20 years were in the 25th percentile while those holding title for less than 5 years were in the 75th percentile.
Under the circumstances, property values have tripled over the last five years, roughly equates to a 15% increase in property tax revenues each year if property values are increassing 20% annually. That's a 200% increase in tax reveneus over that same five year period.
A good question. What the hell have you done with it?
Exactly. After five years of rising property values and high turnover, it adds up to a huge chunk or property now assessed for current values. In 2000, total CA assessed property values were only $2.2T, in 2003 that had risen to $3T. I couldn't find a number for 2005/2006 assessed values, but it's got to be close to $4T.
Which means a property tax that brought $22B to local coffers in 2000 could now be bringing in almost twice that.
Over the past five years, a cumulative $20B - $25B should ALREADY have flowed through those local coffers. Money that was NOT forecasted or expected in any local government's five-year plan back in 2000.
Where did it go ? Why do we still have all these infrastructure projects that "need" bonds and tax increases to fund them ?
I suspect it disappeared into "long overdue" raises for public employees and their pension and benefit plans, covering increasing costs for illegal aliens, penal system, interest on past indebtedness, etc.
Of course, I could just be paranoid, but ...
Thanks :~). I have two puppies (medium-large breed, rescued), they get you with their cute looks, and keep you with their smarts and unconditional loyalty and love... Of course, you just want to kill them when they do something like chewing more than their usual daily ration of furniture or seriously reshuffling important papers on your desk like it was a deck of cards, but one look in their loving eyes and you hardly have enough anger left to even read them a riot act. Can't live with them, can't live without them. :~)
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