The Los Angeles area business community said they were ready to battle for the half-cent sales tax dedicated for transportation. They better roll up their sleeves and get ready for a tough fight. The reason? The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority board voted 11 -2 to put the tax on the November ballot with no end date, “no sunset” in the parlance of the board.
In a decision that could delay or complicate Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to build two huge tunnels in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a Superior Court judge ruled Friday that a comprehensive management plan for the estuary is no longer valid.
We are already No. 1 in congestion, but the prevailing ethos in Sacramento, as laid out in a new Brown administration transportation plan, is to avoid adding capacity, in hopes of compelling Californians to shift from cars to mass transit – even though transit systems are, overall, losing patronage, not gaining it.
By inching below the 1,075ft threshold, the lake’s historic low provoked a Level 1 Water Shortage declaration, signaling the start of potential water cuts to Arizona and Nevada. If Lake Mead sinks to 1,025ft (312m), the Department of Interior will seize control of its management and water allocation, and if it falls to 900ft (274m) it will be considered “deadpool,” meaning that water is no longer passing through the turbines. Falling water levels are the result of a drought in the Colorado River Basin that has dragged on for 16 years and counting.
First, the good news: This winter, much of the Sierra had a near-average snowpack. Now, the bad news: It has melted early.
Transportation: There is no plan to pay for a $57 billion backlog in repairs to California’s crumbling state highway system, despite Brown’s plea earlier this year for lawmakers to “bite the bullet” and approve taxes or fees for it.
The fate of BNSF Railway Co.’s new terminal near the Port of Los Angeles is now in jeopardy even though it has been in development for 10 years at a cost of more than $50 million and would provide badly needed rail capacity.
Revenues have dropped so precipitously that the California Transportation Commission last week eliminated $754 million in projects from the state program and had to delay another $755 million in project work. This action represents the largest funding reduction since the current state transportation funding structure was adopted 20 years ago.
The planners and analysts who watched vehicle miles traveled (VMT) trends seemingly peak are no doubt anxious as the preliminary 2015 VMT numbers produced by the U.S. Department of Transportation showed new record total VMT well ahead of the 2007 number that many had hoped signaled peak U.S. VMT. Perhaps even more disconcerting was the sharp increase in per capita VMT, up approximately 2.6 percent for 2015.
Citing the threat of brown-outs this summer, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors urged Southern California residents to conserve electricity this summer and be prepared for possible 100-degree days without air conditioning.
The California Transportation Commission has adopted more than $754 million in cuts to planned highway, transit and other projects because of falling tax revenues tied to gas prices.
All three Democratic proposals include some form of higher taxes or fees, such as boosting the gas tax rate or adding annual road-user surcharges for electric vehicles that don’t pay into the gas tax fund. Republicans have balked at permanent taxes while California revenues have been on the rise. They want concessions like changes to the state’s complex environmental review process and revisions to how the start awards transportation contracts.
The Failure to Act report series answers this key question — how does the nation’s failure to act to improve the condition of U.S. infrastructure systems affect the nation’s economic performance? In 2011 and 2012, ASCE released four Failure to Act reports in a series covering 10 infrastructure sectors that are critical to the economic prosperity of the U.S.
The report from the American Society of Civil Engineers paints a dismal picture of the country’s economy in the decades ahead unless local, state and federal governments dramatically increase their infrastructure spending. Funding gaps could cost the economy almost $4 trillion and 2.5 million jobs by 2025 and $14.2 trillion and 5.8 million jobs by 2040, the report said.
Throughout the state, projects were abandoned, sometimes with pieces of elevated highway left dangling. The paperwork of years, even decades, of complex and often heated local negotiations over routes was filed away and began gathering dust. Land that the state had acquired for projects became choked with weeds, or was sold off for other purposes.