The Pinal County Public Works Department has launched an awareness campaign to inform residents about the half-cent ballot road excise tax and its implications for transportation maintenance and project expansion.

The ministry launched a “Protect Our Future” campaign ahead of the 2024 elections, when voters will decide whether the “pothole tax” expires or is extended at the end of 2026.

According to the Pinal County Public Works Authority website, “Protecting Our Future” will “focus on Pinal County’s transportation history, current road tax performance, and future road maintenance, safety, and The need for economic development is growing as the debate over the current tax expiry begins.”

In 1985, Pinal County had a population of just under 100,000.

A year later, the first pothole tax was enacted to build critical infrastructure in incorporated cities and towns in Arizona’s third most populous county.

Currently, Pinal County has over 400,000 residents. This is partly due to paved roads that were mostly dirt and gravel over the last 40 years.

Pinal County Oversight Board Chairman Jeff Sardy said the county’s size and growth rate mean that transportation improvement and maintenance programs have a uniquely important role compared to other states’ municipalities. said.

Pinal County is “about the size of Connecticut and growing like crazy,” Saadi said. “I’m from Ohio. There are 88 counties, one-third the size of Arizona. In Arizona, he has 15 counties, three times the size of Ohio.”

While the size of the county is not necessarily unique to Pinal, Serdi said public input is needed on the amount of transportation projects and maintenance required in that part of the state.

In smaller counties in other states, local leaders can more easily determine the highest priority projects and allocate funds to those projects, Saadi said.

To plan transportation projects and encourage resident feedback, the Transportation Advisory Committee (TAC) meets annually to “review, update, and recommend” a five-year transportation plan, according to the Public Works Administration’s website. It is said that The Commission will consist of two residents from each supervisory district appointed by the Pinal County Supervisory Board.

Commission member Kevin Lewis, who represents Supervisory District 3, previously worked as public works director for Casa Grande and has served on the Pinal County Transportation Advisory Board for more than 10 years.

Louie called the Traffic Improvement and Maintenance Program “a very unique program where residents have the opportunity to go online and make requests such as pavement maintenance or changing gravel roads to paved roads.”

“Then, county officials go through a process of evaluating each request, matching it to the program amount we receive through a sales tax of 0.5 cents, and then the annual program recommended to the county by the Transportation Advisory Board. We’ll formulate it.” Overseers,” added Lewis.

After a six-month planning period and receiving public feedback earlier this year, the commission submitted a draft plan to the oversight board. The plan will be reviewed and voted on in the coming months.

The largest item in the draft plan for the next few budget years will be countywide road maintenance projects, which will account for $7 million in budget allocations for 2022-2023 alone.

The next costly portion of the draft plan for the next few years includes the restoration and expansion of Hunt Highway and Skyline Drive in Santan Valley, Selma Highway at Casa Grande, and Kenworthy Road at Apache Junction.

“My feeling is that (Pinal county) is a fairly conservative county and we are conservative regulators,” Saadi said. “But conservatives and Republicans usually don’t mind paying taxes as long as they understand what they get for their money.”

The 0.5-cent pothole tax, which will be on the ballot in the next election, is separate from the non-optional HURF tax, the Highway Passenger Revenue Fund, and is related to gasoline, insurance, registration, and owning and driving a motor. Collected from other expenses. vehicle.

Lewis said HURF is “per capita income” and “depending on the municipal population, we get a percentage of that income from the state.”

Some of the most important aspects of the draft transportation plan, Serdy said, are in the form of improving the highway near the U.S. 60 highway corridor to keep drivers traveling to eastern Arizona from being stuck in traffic. It is said that it is packed with

In addition, Sardie believes that widening Arizona Route 347, the two-lane “John Wayne” highway that connects Maricopa, Casa Grande, northern Pinal County, and Maricopa County, is an urgently needed improvement. there is

SR 347 is “a long, terrible commute and needs to be extended,” Serdi said.

In Pinal County, previous transportation tax initiatives have not always had strong support.

Most notably, the version of the Pinal County Transportation Tax that went into effect in 2017 split the tax on purchases under $10,000 and purchases above $10,000. Critics argued that the tax would disproportionately affect low-income earners and reduce the tax that high-income earners pay on valuables such as cars and jewelry.

This version of the transportation tax was challenged in court by the Goldwater Institute, and the case went all the way to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2022. The court nullified the traffic tax over how it was structured.

When Pinal County amended its tax laws and sent questions back to voters in the form of Proposition 469 during the 2022 midterm elections, the initiative failed to pass by thousands of votes.

“This puts the county back about a decade,” Saadi said, adding that the next time voters decide whether to support the next transportation tax initiative, things will be different than they were in 2017.

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