An open letter to Hillsborough County Commission – will we get all of the facts about the 2010 Light Rail/Penny Tax Referendum?
By George Niemann
PoHo contributor
Hillsborough Board of County Commissioners:
It appears likely that you are going to ask us to approve a 1% sales tax increase in November of 2010 to fund a long range multi-modal transportation package which is highlighting the introduction of light rail to the Tampa Bay region.
At Wednesday’s Regular BOCC meeting it was revealed that, although the referendum’s top billing will be “light rail”, only 37% of the proposed tax will end up going toward an inter-city light rail system. The balance will go toward other forms of transportation, as well as road improvements that are long overdue.
The big question is this – are you going to give voters all of the hard facts surrounding this proposed referendum? And will you incorporate this into your referendum campaign? I know that it will be tempting to take the soundbite approach without providing detail because, as you know, the devil is in the details. Considering that a good portion of this tax would be used to fix infrastructure problems that were created by approving sprawl, how do we know that you’ve learned your lesson? Or that you won’t come back to us 10 years from now and say we need an additional 1% on top of the first 1% because we couldn’t help ourselves from approving more sprawl without getting the money for the infrastructure?
(click button for feed)
(follow us on Facebook)
(follow us on Twitter)