Another benefit touted by the supporters of Measure B is the accountability built into the ballot language. This includes:

• Independent Taxpayers Oversight Committee
• periodic performance audits
• annual financial audit by each agency
• cost sharing: “The objective for Measure B is to assist jurisdictions to achieve – but not require – a local match of 33% of total capital project costs.”
• documentation: “The five-year programs will be updated biennially and submitted to the Authority for approval.”

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But it is important to look at how the Transportation Authority and the entities have performed under Measure A. For a comprehensive look, please see Eye on Sacramento’s report “EOS Report on Spending of Measure A Taxes & Summary of Findings” on the EOS Reports page. Though STAR does not necessarily agree with every statement and conclusion in the report, we do feel that it is an extremely valuable effort to answer the question of whether sales tax income from Measure A is being invested wisely.

Items of interest from this report and other sources:

• meetings of the Indepedent Taxpayers Oversight Committee established under Measure A have happened very erratically, were not announced to the public, minutes were probably never kept, and no information about the meetings has ever been made available to the public; some people doubt that the committee has actually ever met
• the current Indepedent Taxpayers Oversight Committee members are three: a city staff from Sacramento, a city staff from West Sacramento, and a large organization consultant; these are hardly citizen taxpayers
• SacTA is using bonds to front-load road projects, rather than doing projects on a pay-as-you-go basis; this means that much of the sales tax income will go to interest payments rather than maintenance, operations, and projects; when the deferred interest bonds come due, there will likely be no money left for anything other than paying off the bonds, and all transportation work may grind to a halt; this in fact may be why SacTA is so desperate for Measure B, because they know all the money will be gone long before the end of Measure A in 2039
• the SacTA website has annual financial reports, and extensive documentation on the funds that were given to the various entities, but absolutely no reporting on the benefits of the projects nor whether any of them met the objectives of the measure
• significant amounts of Measure A income could have been spent on maintenance, but very little was; hence the deferred maintenance backlog has continued to grow during Measure A; the policy under Measure A has pretty much been “fix-it-last”

 

• Measure B 2016