Who has not had the temptation at an all-you-can-eat buffet (remember them? They're a pre-Covid thing) to take some of everything, on the reasonable ground that once you've agreed to pay the fixed price for the meal, all the food is free. The food is even more delicious when someone else has to pay for it.
A long time ago Metro's transportation wage tax proposal, Measure 26-218, started life with good intentions, and then its planners discovered the buffet line. Metro proposes to tax private employers with more than 25 employees up to 0.75% of their payroll. Metro put the measure on the ballot without committing to a specific tax rate. At the maximum allowed rate, an employer with 26 employees who are paid an average of $50,000 each would pay $9,750/year in additional taxes.
Metro has designed its proposal to appeal to the voters as much as possible: first, by scattering the gravy far and wide across the region, promising not just light rail to Tigard (the main consumer of the future revenues) but also to highway, bike, and sidewalk projects from Cornelius on the west to the near edge of Gresham on the east, and second, by designing the tax in the spirit of that old verse from the 1930s: "Congress, Congress, don't tax me; tax that fellow behind the tree." (Senator Russell Long later popularized a slightly different version of the idea.)
The measure's proponents boast about that feature, pointing with pride to the fact that "91% of our region's businesses are exempt from the tax." What is not to like about a tax that provides goodies for nearly everyone and puts the bite on hardly anyone?
Well, for starters:
1. The tax marks Metro's entry into the field of big-ticket transportation, a new venture for the agency. The field is already occupied by many other jurisdictions, including cities, counties, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and TriMet. On a deep level Metro's request tacitly acknowledges that those units of government are failing at dealing with transportation issues, or that they have simply decided that issues other than transportation are more important to their citizens.
2. Related to point 1, Metro plans to spend a significant part of the funds to remedy the deficiencies of those other units of government, for example, by building sidewalks for students that the City of Portland has not seen as a priority, by improving pedestrian crossings on state highways that ODOT has messed up, and by stepping into the minefield of reducing gentrification in Portland's Albina district.
3. Metro won't say what the actual tax rate will be, nor how long it will keep the tax in effect.
A cynic (who, me?) might surmise that Metro included the other suburban projects in the measure as inducements to voters to make their bosses chip in to pay for a light rail line to serve a corridor that already has two major arterials, Interstate 5 and Barbur Boulevard. The more fundamental reason that I'm voting against Measure 26-218 is that until Metro demonstrates a compelling reason for the voters to let it enter the field of big-concrete transportation, it should focus on improving its current services.
Vote NO on 26-218.