After the County Commission voted 4-1 last month to reject the idea of putting a half-cent sales tax referendum on next year’s ballot to fund road improvements, Commissioner Bill Braswell suggested that supporters try to gather petition signatures and put it on the ballot themselves.
It seems road tax supporters have accepted the challenge.
Next Tuesday’s County Commission agenda includes a provision that authorizes the county attorney’s office to work with as-yet unnamed initiative supporters to use the procedure laid out in the county charter to try to put the tax on a future ballot.
Meanwhile, during Thursday’s Transportation Planning Organization meeting. Lakeland Mayor Pro Tem Sara Roberts McCarley suggested that the TPO staff work with Polk Vision to set up a series of community forums to discuss transportation issues with an eye toward building support for the tax.
As some may recall, Polk Vision sponsored a series of carefully choreographed meetings a couple of decades ago that resulted in political pressure to impose a major property tax increase to fix problems caused by the County Commission’s refusal to impose transportation impact fees on new development for decades at the behest of the local development community. Instead, taxpayers were told to foot the bill.
Later in Thursday’s TPO meeting, Bartow Commissioner Trish Pfeiffer, the TPO Chair, discussed the need for safety improvements on the county’s road network, arguing the proposed sales tax increase would advance that by providing funds for more sidewalks and additional streetlights.
County Commissioner George Lindsey, who was the lone supporter of putting the tax to a vote., said revenue is needed to keep the county from falling further behind.
Now for some perspective.
Getting an initiative on the ballot is a lot harder than it used to be.
That’s because the County Commission successfully pushed a charter change to raise the threshold for signatures after a group of activists put measures on the ballot to impose term limits on commissioners and to cut their salaries in half. Voters approved both of them.
If this referendum were to get on the ballot and win approval, it would reflect a major change in public sentiment. County officials and their allies in the development community have put similar measures on the ballot beginning in 1992. Voters have rejected all of them.
There is a reason for that.
The road projects that commissioners appear to prioritize often do not reflect solutions to current transportation problems, but instead reflect plans by developers to build new roads deeper into rural areas to open more land to more development to create more urban sprawl or to “improve” existing roads, such as the plan to realign Deen Still Road to construct a new truck route through the Green Swamp Area of Critical State Concern that would cut through state conservation lands, including a portion of Colt Creek State Park, and increase hazards to wildlife moving through a statewide corridor for which the Green Swamp is a major hub.
At the same time that the claimed road deficit is increasing, county commissioners have been unwilling to impose full transportation impact fees and, in some cases, not to charge fees at all.
Additionally, the idea that you can solve road congestion problems in one of the fastest growing counties in the third most populous state in the nation is simply delusional.
Finally, the roads about which people complain the most are state and federal highways such as U.S, 27 and Interstate 4, whose improvements the sales tax would not fund because they are not county or city roads.
It should be an interesting campaign.