Yes on 6 and End Bike/Ped Studies

I spoke at the Republican Party Labor Day picnic and made the following remarks:

“On the November ballot is Prop 6, Repeal the Gas Tax. This new tax could honestly be called the Caltrans Corruption Tax. We have all witnessed Caltrans in our local area. Projects are broken into smaller and smaller pieces. I’ve gone to Pine Grove/Hwy 88 meetings for at least 20 years now. Caltrans appears to organize their work to employ their staff and enrich their consultant buddies. I would consider this as structural or institutional corruption. But Caltrans employees handing out No on Prop 6 flyers to motorists during their work day clearly illustrates a more fundamental corruption. Plus reliable sources claim the existence of the more traditional types of corruption in contracts and construction, but without details. However, I will relate two of my direct experiences with Caltrans.

With an original estimate of a mere $64 million dollars Caltrans wanted to build an HOV- high occupancy vehicle lane- on the Hwy 50 Freeway in Sacramento. They needed an endorsement from Sacramento Transit. This landed on my desk, but I could not find any benefit from this project. The only bus route this lane could possibly use, the one from Orangevale, required more time to transition in and out of the HOV lane than if it stayed in the right lane. I turned in my negative findings. I was later layed off with this project having been given to someone else. Caltrans did receive their needed Sacramento Transit project endorsement by promising them $7 million for a light rail extension as mitigation money. So in their logic light rail mitigates a busway.

This imperial arrogance surfaced when Los Angeles decided to reopen the LA-Long Beach for an initial cost of $400 million. Caltrans’s transportation dominance was so threatened by this that they built a billion dollar busway on the parallel Harbor Freeway. I’ve always been curious about how and who made this decision.

We can temper their power by repealing the gas tax. Yes on 6 yard signs are available to order right now. Please talk to your friends and neighbors to vote for repeal. This should also help to bring out the nonvoting Republicans.

And there is a thing we can do to improve our roads that doesn’t involve Caltrans: Abolish the Bicycle/Pedestrian Fund.  The sales tax on gasoline goes into the Local Transportation Fund for roads and transit of which 2% goes into this bike/ped fund. While some has been spent such as sidewalks in Ione, most of the funds are banked for future matching grants from Washington to build a probable million plus bike trail. Of course, this fosters the future vision of a select few Amadorians. However, the flow of Federal dollars into our county is a valid and seductive argument. But the reality is quite different. As slight as these grants possibilities are, they have also hopefully diminished with President Trump. But to get these grants you must have an updated Bike/Ped plan. So every ten years or so tens of thousands of dollars flow to consultants as a subsidy to the environmental left.

The bike/ped fund is not large, about $330,000 now plus some uncalculated overhead. But it is our money sitting there rather than filling potholes. This fund should be abolished for us and the other 14 counties in California with under 50,000 residents. Can we contact our supervisors, state legislative representatives and RCRC, Rural County Representatives of California, to bring this to a vote in Sacramento?”