2016: Voters Approved Most Road Funding Measures

Date Posted: November 14, 2016

Posted In: News,

From Trucks.com:  Traffic-weary voters overwhelmingly passed measures to fund road and highway repairs and construction, according to an analysis of 2016 election returns.

Some 69 percent of 280 transportation funding ballot measures up for vote in 34 states Tuesday were approved, according to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association’s Transportation Investment Advocacy Center.

The successful ballot measures — which prevailed in 23 states — will provide $201 billion in new revenue and funding extensions for local and state road and transportation projects.

In California alone, 15 of 26 measures worth $133 billion were approved, including a 1-cent sales tax in Los Angeles that would funnel $120 billion over 40 years into local infrastructure projects. The state’s roads are regularly called out as being among the worst maintained in the nation.

California, as well as many other states, requires at least a two-thirds majority for a ballot measure to succeed — ARTBA noted that 10 of the failed measures in the state collected more than half of the vote, but failed because they did not pass the required threshold.

Illinois and New Jersey passed so-called lockbox measures to prevent state legislators from rerouting revenues from transportation user fees to non-transportation users. In Georgia, a collection of measures to raise more than $3 billion for road and transit projects in the Atlanta metropolitan area using local sales tax increases were approved.

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