Local option transit tax

GOP to voters: We don't trust you

Richardson likes DART. It's paid into the system for years. So, too, Plano. What about Allen, McKinney, Frisco, and other growing cities to the north? They've said no in the past, but some want to give voters in those cities a local option to raise taxes to pay for the kind of public transportation their exploding growth could benefit from.

One of the suspenseful questions as the Texas legislative session approached adjournment was whether the transportation bill, reauthorizing the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), would make it. Richardson's Senator John Carona (R-Dallas) threatened to filibuster the bill unless a provision allowing local option taxes to pay for public transit projects was in the bill. The session expired without consideration of the bill, eliminating the need for Carona to filibuster.

So, the expansion of light rail to the northern suburbs is in limbo. So, too, is TxDOT itself. And any claim that conservatives make about supporting local options is dead and buried. Michael Landauer, in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, blasts the Texas GOP for using a "bucket of half-truths and comical spin" to kill the bill:

"The Legislature is not considering raising the gas tax. That's simply not true. It is considering giving YOU the option of raising it if you want to. You would have to vote twice to raise this tax, first in a state constitutional amendment election, and second on a local plan. The GOP does not trust you to make this decision."

Peggy Venable, conservative activist and state director for the "Americans for Prosperity", pretty much admits to hypocrisy in an essay published locally by Dallas Blog (where else?). She says, "We conservatives usually like local options. But not when the cards are stacked against taxpayers." How does a bill giving taxpayers a vote stack the cards against taxpayers? Venable explains in another opinion piece published on the AFP Web site. "It’s a tax and local officials would put it on the ballot until it passed." In other words, Venable doesn't trust taxpayers to vote the way she wants them to vote and so she opposes even giving them a say. If anyone is stacking the cards against taxpayers, it's Venable. So, the next time you hear a conservative talk about solving problems at the local level, or about giving power to the people, remember the hypocritical position they took to kill the transportation bill.