Analysis: What doomed RM4?
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Obvious and pronounced tax-fatigue among Bay Area residents (who are some of the highest-taxed people in the country) is at the core of BAHFA's decision to pull RM4, notes Ben Christopher at Calmatters. Which makes one wonder what kind of bubble BAHFA's board was living in such that they couldn't see citizens' financial pain until the election was nigh.
The change of heart {on the part of BAHFA} was born out of concerns about the public’s appetite for costly new measures, a pending lawsuit against the regional bond, and worry about another ballot measure, Proposition 5. That statewide constitutional amendment would make it easier to pass local and regional affordable housing and infrastructure bonds by lowering the electoral threshold for victory from the current high bar of two-thirds down to 55%.
The Bay Area bond appeared to have issues of its own. Opponents of the measure, including former San Jose city councilmember Johnny Khamis, transit consultant Thomas Rubin and anti-density advocate Susan Kirsch, filed a lawsuit against the Bay Area authority last week, arguing the proposed language to describe the measure in Bay Area voter guides was “false and/or misleading.” The authority’s executive board already acted on one of those claims, fixing what it described as a “mathematical error.” The annual cost of the measure was stated as $670 million. The corrected value was nearly $911 million.
It costs money to fix ballot language and address lawsuits, which also appeared to weigh on the board.
The agency “has a budget of approximately $8 million set aside for costs associated with putting the ballot measure and…some of that budget has been expended getting us this far,” said Andrew Fremier, executive director of the region’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
Calling into the hearing this morning, Khamis applauded the decision to pull the measure: “I don’t think that the voters are ready to pass another very large tax measure that’s going to make it very hard to keep their homes,” he said. “We have enough people living on the streets now and I don’t think a very large new tax is going to help.”
Today’s sudden reversal puts on hold for now a legislative debate that had been playing out in Sacramento over whether to subject the bond funds to stringent labor protections.
This has been a tough few months for affordable housing developers and subsidized-housing advocates, who had hoped for a torrent of new public funding.
An effort in the Legislature to put a housing bond on statewide ballots fizzled earlier this year, shunted aside by two competing borrowing measures focused on climate change and school facilities. Some Northern California affordable housing developers saw the record-breaking Bay Area bond as the main event. Enterprise Community Partners had touted its own estimate that nearly 41,000 new homes for low-income Bay Areans were ready to go and simply required additional funding.
Read the whole thing here.
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