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Placer County’s sales tax increase effort failed in the 2024 election. What happens now?

A Placer County Transportation Planning Agency representative said it could be more competitive to obtain grants for Highway 65 and Interstate 80 improvements.

PLACER COUNTY, Calif. — Measure B in Placer County, a proposed half-cent sales tax increase in Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln to fund transportation projects, narrowly failed in the 2024 election, making it more competitive to obtain grants, one county official said.

Matt Click, executive director of the Placer County Transportation Planning Agency (PCTPA), said — if it passed — the tax would’ve raised nearly $1.6 billion for transportation infrastructure improvements and given the county access to grant funding where a local match is needed.

“... We often can't go and compete for those grant dollars because we don't have the local matching dollars,” Click said. “Every year there's an estimated $800 million we're not competing for because we don't have this local funding like a lot of counties like Los Angeles, Orange County and San Francisco, etc."

Click said he foresees transit needs with local bus systems will be OK, and the county can pursue grant funding for bicycle lanes and sidewalks.

“Where we're really going to struggle is with our regional roadways like State Road 65 and the State Road 65 (and) Interstate 80 interchange, where the roadway and the interchange are operationally deficient,” he said. “They have safety issues.”

Some grant funding is still attainable despite Measure B failing, and that money is now one of the more prominent avenues to fund transportation projects in Placer County, Click said. The PCTPA is actively pursuing $25 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation and has roughly $7.5 million from developer impact fees to match it.

“But let's say we're successful with that grant, which is due in January, that total would be about $32 million, which is less than 10% of the total overall cost of what we need to do the ultimate improvements to (Highway) 65,” he said. “What we would focus on is just the southern-most part, which is the most deficient (and) has the biggest operational bottleneck.”

Measure B in the election

Per state law, the PCTPA put together a project list ahead of the 2024 election that delineated what the tax’s garnered funds would be spent on provided voters approved Measure B.

Only voters in Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln voted on Measure B because only Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln were affected by the potential sales tax increase, according to Click. Separate legislation passed in 2018 allowed Placer County to carve out a special taxing district, he said.

“Placer County is really big,” he said. “You've got southwest Placer, where Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln are (and) where the vast majority of the population is. You've then got sort of the middle Placer, I think Auburn and the foothills. Then Eastern placer, think of the Sierra Nevada and Truckee and all that…So, we wanted to just focus on the very most congested, most populous part of the county in Roseville, Rocklin and Lincoln.”

As a special tax, Measure B needed a 66.67% super majority to pass. It received 63.83% of the vote; approximately 93,436 ballots were in favor, while 52,941 voters said no.

“At that vote count, 2,077 who said ‘no,’ if they would have said ‘yes,’ we would have passed,” Click said. “I don't look at the fact that we got nearly 64% of our local residents to vote ‘yes’ as necessarily a failure. I think it speaks to the fact that we really have to look at what really should be the standard for us to be able to to move forward with these sorts of infrastructure projects.”

Click said it’s unclear if there will be a future effort for a special sales tax.

“The truth is I don’t know,” he said. “What we've learned is that there's about 28% of the population that just will not vote for a tax regardless of what it's for…and I understand that. So, when you have to get (66.67%), really what that means is you can't lose more than 5% of the remaining vote. So, it's very difficult. Sitting here today, it's hard to imagine that PCTPA would pursue a measure again in four years. Obviously, that'll be a decision of my board, and that's nothing that we've discussed at this point in time.”

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