Riverside County voters will decide on November 3 whether to renew Measure A, the half-cent sales tax that has bankrolled road repairs, freeway projects and public transit across the county since 1988 — more than a decade before the current tax is even scheduled to expire. The early ask has put transportation officials, civic leaders and a pair of local business voices on opposite sides of a question that sounds simple but isn’t: lock in the money now, or wait and see.
According to the Riverside County Transportation Commission, the renewal would continue the existing half-cent sales tax rate without any increase, and is projected to generate about $280 million a year for transportation projects and services. The measure funds local street and road improvements, freeway and highway work, and public transportation services, the commission says, and it does so without raising the rate voters have paid since Measure A was last renewed in 2002, according to Coachella Valley Weekly.
The timing is the sticking point. Riverside County’s current sales tax authority is set to run out in 2039 — RCTC materials put the cutoff at June 30 of that year, while the measure’s own expenditure ordinance lists March 31, 2039, so the exact end date isn’t entirely consistent even in the agency’s own paperwork. Either way, that’s roughly 13 years of runway left, which is exactly what NBC Palm Springs reports gave Barton CPA chief operating officer Chauncey Thompson pause when he first considered the ballot question.
A Skeptic Comes Around
Thompson, speaking with Roggin Report host Fred Roggin alongside education and sales director Jerry Granata, initially questioned why voters needed to extend a tax that still had more than a decade left on the clock, per the same NBC Palm Springs report. But Thompson told the program he changed his position, pointing to projected population growth and the need for advance planning as reasons to settle the funding question well ahead of the deadline. He said locking in revenue now would mean that planned investments beyond the next 13 years already have funding in place, and he argued that making Measure A permanent could offer more long-term certainty for transportation planning — eliminating, he said, the need for voters to revisit the issue every few decades…