Rebuttal: San Diego Gets Stiffed in Bond Deals

The pie chart concerning San Diego funds from Prop 1B is indeed instructive. First, it shows that, with a population of about 8.3 percent of the state, San Diego County will get only 6.8 percent of the bond funding. The bulk of the money will indeed go to Democrat strongholds.

Second, an astonishing 46 percent of our county’s (under)funding is for public transit. But public transit carries only 2 percent of the people moving by vehicles around San Diego. We need money to improve our ROAD capacity, not more trolleys.

Indeed, the public transit funding is only for CAPITAL costs – we taxpayers get stuck with an annual OPERATING deficit as the fares collected don’t come close to paying even the operational costs of passenger rail and buses.

Ms. Lutar gives the impression that Prop 1B will substantially reduce traffic congestion. Would that it were true! Quite the opposite is the case. Most of the money will be spent on public transit and road maintenance – only a small fraction will be spent on increasing capacity.

According to the REASON Foundation’s comprehensive report on Prop 1B, in San Diego if we took only 24 percent of the bond’s local earmarked funding and put it into highway capacity increases, we’d solve our traffic congestion by 2030.

As it is, REASON projects a significant INCREASE in our traffic congestion even with the passage of this bond.

The Prop 84 chart showing the directly allocated funds for water-related projects also is informative. Included in the $154 million of San Diego “region” funding is $47 million for Salton Sea restoration – an Imperial County project that provides zero benefit to our county. Hence the San Diego County funding comes to only $105 million, which is only 6.4 percent of this allocation – once again a poor value for our local taxpayers.

We need infrastructure spending, but these two measures are fatally flawed. Vote NO on Props B1 and 84.

– RICHARD RIDER