By: Gregory Roberts
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
November 29, 2007
Original article
Voters rejected the roads-and-transit proposal on the Nov. 6 ballot because they feared the package was too big and too expensive -- even though they weren't clear about just how much it would cost, according to a post-election survey released Wednesday.
"It just became too much," pollster Andrew Thibault said.
Thibault works for EMC Research, which polled 1,013 voters by telephone in the week after the election for Sound Transit, the agency that proposed a tripling of its light rail system as part of the ballot measure. A less expensive set of bridge and highway projects, to be overseen by a different agency, also was part of the measure. The combined Proposition 1 was turned down 56 percent to 44 percent in the urbanized areas of King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.
Of the no-voters surveyed, 25 percent identified the high cost of the proposal as the best reason for voting against it and 16 percent cited the tax increases needed to pay for it, making those the top two motivations for turning the measure down. The margin of sampling error for the survey as a whole is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, although it would be higher for subgroups.
But two-thirds of all the voters surveyed said they didn't know how much the package would cost, and nearly as many said they didn't know how much they'd have to pay in taxes if it passed. Many of the rest were wrong about the numbers. That kind of uncertainty bodes ill for tax measures, the pollsters said.
The road and transit agencies described the proposal as an $18 billion package. But that included construction costs only, stated in so-called 2006 dollars (not accounting for inflation over the 20 years it would take to build the projects). Factoring in inflation raised the construction total to $28 billion -- and when interest payments on construction loans and other projected costs were rolled in, the total reached $47 billion, the number used by the Seattle P-I in its reporting.
To pay for the work, the measure would have imposed sales taxes amounting to about $150 a year in 2008 for the average household, plus an annual motor-vehicle excise tax of $80 per $10,000 of value. Opponents of the proposal claimed those taxes, combined with taxes already in place for Sound Transit's planned light rail line from Husky Stadium to Sea-Tac Airport, would add up to $160 billion by the time the agencies finished collecting them.
It was the overall scope of the proposal, rather than objections to light rail or highways or specific parts of the plan, that daunted voters, Thibault said: "The election became about the package as a whole."
The poll results will be formally presented to the Sound Transit board of directors Thursday, and the board will decide when and whether to put its own measure on a future ballot.
"The clear message was that Prop. 1 was too big, too costly and too complex," one board member, King County Councilman Larry Phillips, D-Seattle, said Wednesday.
When voters were asked if they would support a package of transit improvements only (with no specific price tag), 53 percent said yes. And when they were asked if they would support an unspecified package of road improvements only, 50 percent said yes.
The level of support for a transit-only measure closely tracks the results from an Election Day exit poll of 5,004 voters commissioned by the Sierra Club, which opposed the measure because of concerns that highway building would worsen global warming.
Zeroing in on pro-transit voters who rejected the combined proposal, the Sierra Club poll reported that the main reason for their opposition was concern about global warming and other environmental effects, inferring that absent those fears, the election would have been much closer. But the Sound Transit poll found that only 1 percent of no-voters mentioned environmental concerns.
The Legislature decided to join roads and transit in one package -- an approach that was backed by pre-election polling -- and in the immediate aftermath of the vote, Gov. Chris Gregoire reaffirmed that position. But in the November survey, more than two-thirds of the voters said future transportation proposals should not be combined like that.
"They want us to come back with something smaller, more discreet, bite-sized," Phillips said. He pointed out that county voters comfortably approved a 2006 proposal to increase the sales tax 0.1 percentage point to finance an expansion of Metro bus service.
Other findings in the Sound Transit poll included:
More than half the voters ranked transportation as the region's top problem. No other issue was close.
Seventy-two percent of those surveyed agreed that expanding light rail is a good investment for the region.
Motor-vehicle excise taxes make the most sense to voters for financing transportation improvements, selected by 51 percent of those surveyed. Tolls came in second, at 49 percent, followed by a gasoline tax (42 percent) and congestion pricing (40 percent).
Sales taxes -- the major financing element for the Nov. 6 package -- ranked next to last at 23 percent, edging out property taxes (22 percent).
P-I reporter Gregory Roberts can be reached at 206-448-8022 or gregoryroberts@seattlepi.com.
