Posted on: Thursday, February 10, 2005

EDITORIAL
Transit tax plan makes good sense

At first blush, it might seem strange that the Legislature is moving toward approving a county-option tax increase to fund mass transit when there has been no decision on what that system would look like, where it would go or whom it would serve.

But the move, by both the House and Senate Transportation committees, makes a lot of sense.

This is a case, to set an old cliché on its head, of properly putting the horse before the cart. That is, before you decide on a new cart, you have to have a way to make it go: horsepower or, in this case, enough tax revenue to pay for it.

Fundamentally, it should be up to the individual counties to decide how they wish to solve their traffic and transit problems.

Every solution costs money, but today the counties are stuck: Unless they want to raise the politically difficult property tax, they have no way of paying for their solution. Unlike the state, the counties do not have access to a broad-based tax that easily reaches all citizens and visitors.

In fact, it might be argued that any state involvement at all amounts to an anachronism. Our system, in which the state decides whether the counties can raise taxes, is a vestige of the days when a highly centralized state government controlled just about everything.

What the House and Senate Transportation committees are effectively suggesting is a plan to get out of the way and let the counties decide.

Another advantage of this move, if the county follows through with a decision to approve the tax, is that it makes it far easier to obtain federal transportation funds.

Uncle Sam has made it clear he will not participate in a local transit project unless there is a local "dedicated source of funding." This doesn't have to be a new excise tax, although that would be an obvious choice.

In short, legislative authorization and county adoption of a new transit tax will set in place the first critical piece of O'ahu's effort to build a transportation system for the 21st century.