Voters in nearly 20 states will consider approximately 300 state, county, city and other local transportation investment questions on the November 5 General Election ballot, according to early research by ARTBA’s Transportation Investment Advocacy Center (ARTBA-TIAC).
Notable measures include:
- Eight counties in South Carolina will ask voters to enact or renew a local sales tax specifically for transportation purposes;
- Seven counties in Georgia will seek approval of a new or renewed sales tax that is entirely or partly used for transportation purposes;
- Voters in Seattle, Wash. will decide whether to renew a local property tax for a $1.55 billion investment in the city’s transportation infrastructure; and
- Maricopa County, Ariz. seeks to renew a half-cent transportation sales tax, which would generate revenue for another 20 years.
Additionally, voters statewide in California will decide if the threshold to pass local bonds and special taxes should be lowered from 66.67 percent voter approval to 55 percent voter approval. This would ease the burden for counties, cities, and towns seeking ballot approval for revenue to maintain and improve roads, bridges, trails, and other transportation-related infrastructure.
Washington state voters will also determine whether to keep or eliminate the state’s carbon credit market, a portion of which is used for the state’s transportation budget on projects to improve transit, electrify ferries, advance high-speed rail, and for initiatives to improve pedestrian safety.
Support for such measures has been high. Nationally, voters last year approved 88 percent of transportation investment measures on the ballot. This result tracked with historical trends; since 2014, voters in 43 states approved nearly 2,600 – or 85 percent – of state and local ballot measures.
Follow ARTBA-TIAC and visit the Election Dashboard for research on current and past ballot measure results, and check back with us after the November 5 election for full analysis of this year’s results.