Council Member Snyder On Proposed STA Cuts
Spokane City Councilman Jon Snyder, who is a member of the Spokane Transit Board of Directors, had the following to say on his blog this morning:
The Council also heard from STA on their proposed 2011 service reductions. This reduction is due to dramatic reduction in STA’s primary funding source: sales tax. You can read about that in detail here. The question on my mind is how many more cuts can we endure to public transit before we go back out to voters to request further funding?Here's a link to the Councilman's blog if you want to read the rest of his post regarding last night's City Council meeting. Comments?
About SRTC
SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.
SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.
3 comments:
There are other transit systems in the state already using the maximum allowed by the state (.009) instead of the .006 STA gets now, and while I do not like the idea of more sales tax it is possible it may be needed, but that is still over a year before that has to be brought before the STA board for their decision to ask for more sales tax, and so there is hope that a turn around in the economy may make that not happen also.
Just don't link too many gas taxes to public transportation. Then we'll have a scenario and a half on our hands. Gas prices go up, then consumption of gasoline goes down, ridership skyrockets while funding plummets.
It's kind of like when you link state government revenue to sales tax... Funding is down and more people need the services than before when tax collections were high.
From what I was told last night, pretty much all the other transit agencies in the state are already at the maximum tax level or have a ballot initiative in the works to raise to the maximum level. STA has made it clear to me that they're not willing to go to a vote right now, that that's not where they want to go considering that people are already tapped out due to the economy.
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