Transit projects on track

The Wasatch Front Regional Council, the metropolitan planning organization for all the Wasatch Front counties except Utah County, recommended in October a number of tax and fee hikes to fund future transportation projects. Among them was a suggestion that UTA's sales tax share be increased to a uniform half cent throughout its service area.

It also recommended increasing property taxes by .0012 in UTA's service area to fund general obligation bonds, which UTA general manager John Inglish said would give his agency greater ability to construct planned light rail extensions and a commuter rail network between Provo and Ogden.

"If we get funding in 2006, then we will go all out to build all of those things we've talked about in the next 10 years. It's doable," Inglish said. "If we do it with the resources we have, then it's going to be a slow, painful process."

Several of the ballot measures passed in November are similar to what UTA and its supporters could be looking for in 2006:

• Voters in San Mateo County, Calif., approved a half-cent sales tax increase, 30 percent of which will go to transit projects.

• Voters in Sacramento, Calif., agreed to extend a half-cent sales tax for transit and road improvements, which was scheduled to expire in 2009.

• Lexington, Ky., voters approved $6 million in property tax increases to fund transit expansions.

• Voters in Charleston, S.C., and Port Huron, Mich., also approved sales tax increases to fund public transit, and Branson, Mo., residents did likewise in August.

The growing tide of support for transit in the United States is something Inglish has seen, in microcosm, here in Utah. UTA's TRAX light rail system, which opened five years ago, was not universally accepted. Salt Lake County voters, in fact, rejected a tax increase in 1992 that would have given only partial funding to light rail (but it was that association that doomed the initiative).

"Certainly, over a couple of years, communities that had been opposed to us — in fact, passed resolutions opposed to what we were doing in the early '90s — became advocates, and in fact began looking for funding to move their projects along," Inglish said of current plans for light rail extensions in the Salt Lake Valley. "And that's the process we're going through right now."

It's a process that could be advanced or hindered by local voters two years from now.

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E-mail: zman@desnews.com