Yesterday the proposed election for a transportation tax died a quiet death in the Board of Supervisors chambers. I was disappointed because I would like to see the roads fixed, and I do not believe they will be fixed without one in any reasonable time frame, but I agree it was the right decision. Taxpayers are scared right now for a lot of reasons, and I think the final blow was our Governor proposing the 1 percent state sales tax.

On my part, I have done a lot of research into the question of the roads and road tax, and want to share some of what I have found. This is going to be a bit longer than usual but I hope you can hang with me, because this is an important issue.

Our roads are in dire straights right now, and without a major cash injection from somewhere soon many of them are going to turn into gravel. Some roads already have, as you probably know.

Traditionally, road improvements have been paid for by taxes related to transportation, mainly gas taxes and vehicle fees. Roads are traditionally viewed as self funding, as little or no general funds from property taxes or other taxes were put into roads. This is true not just of Napa County and the city of Napa, but in counties and cities throughout the state.

What happened is the state gradually began to take more of that money back, leaving cities and counties to adjust the best they can. Proposition 42 gas tax funds from the state have been taken by the state due to budget problems; the half-cent we get back of our own local sales tax is by law to be used only for transit not roads; the per-gallon tax stays at 18.4 cents regardless of how much gas prices go up; and gasoline use is going down, thereby reducing the amount from that. Finally, the city is getting more sales taxes from rising gas prices, but so far other taxes are going down so much that there is no new money there in total.

Meanwhile, the cost of fixing the roads has skyrocketed, and like gasoline prices are never really going to go back down. On top of that, asphalt roads have a 15-20 year life span, and when you don’t maintain them — which is what we are doing, not maintaining them — they cost four times as much to fix in the last quarter of that lifespan.

I hope you can see where all this is heading. The key point here is they have been trying to handle increasingly expensive roads off of an increasingly diminishing budget and it isn’t working.

Prop 13 had a lot of unintended consequences, one being that it created a steady constant flow of rising income for local governments. Another lesser known fact is it also set in stone who in the local government got a percentage of the property taxes, and it also set in stone what the percentage was. For instance, schools in Napa get about 65 percent of all property taxes, by law. So if there is a big increase in property tax collections, 65 percent of it automatically goes to the schools, whether County Supervisors think that is the best use of the money at that time or not. They cannot put any of that money into roads, even if the schools are getting new desks every two years.

When Prop 13 passed, the Congress Valley Water District got 0.0197 percent, the Fairfield Suisun School District gets 0.0158 percent, and the County General Fund only gets 17 percent of total collections. By law. So that is the amount that the county actually has to work with regarding property taxes. Last year it was about $42 million out of a $255 million budget.

That means all the extra non-covered needs of the county have to come out of that amount, for the most part. There were two areas of need that were not receiving property tax revenue at that time, roads and flood control. That is part of the reason that we need to support those with other taxes.

Now, I am not criticizing Prop 13, to me it is holy writ that has saved the taxpayers in this state. But what I am saying is the fact that roads were not on the list when it passed means road money has to come from other sources. If we are going to put more general fund money into roads, it either has to come from other parts of the budget, human services, law enforcement, etc. or it has to come from other taxes, which for the county are slim to none. Therein lies our dilemma.

My belief is citizens are going to have to get more involved in this if they expect things to change. You cannot sit back and expect everything to just run itself anymore. When budget issues come up, the vast majority of people there to speak are demanding more services, more spending, not less.

Now, $42 million is still a lot of money, and in my opinion both the county and city could make cuts to provide more of that for roads. I have frequently mentioned I believe the employees are overpaid, particularly some of them. Whenever I do that, I get bombarded with criticism, as any regular reader of my blog knows. The people who agree we are overtaxed need to speak up more, and need to be more specific about what they think should be cut.

We spend a lot of money on human services of one sort or another. Are you prepared to go to bat to cut that spending to shift some of it to roads? Then you need to speak up and be specific.

I have reached the conclusion that given these and many other factors, such as the fact that employee contracts are not going to be changed any time soon and will first require a large public outcry which has yet to happen, we cannot afford to let the roads go any longer.

So it is disappointing to see the tax vote pulled. What you are going to see is both the city and county try to put some more money into roads, which they will, but it won’t be nearly enough and you will therefore also see a continued degradation of our roads, along with no needed traffic improvements in south County to deal with the traffic down there.

Hopefully some constructive dialogue will come out of this and we will find a way next year to do better.