Getting voters to approve a transportation sales tax for Pima County was expensive because it was initially unpopular, according to Connect Pima, the group behind the yes campaign for Propositions 418 and 419.
Proposition 418 consisted of the Regional Transportation Authority’s 20-year plan for the county, called RTA Next, . The ballot measure re-authorized a 0.5% sales tax to fund it.
On a call with reporters Wednesday, Connect Pima’s general consultant Joe Wolf said the group’s early polling showed support for the plan to be upwards of 60%. But support for the tax was much lower, at 44%.
“419 was in a tough spot, to be candid. I want to be very clear, we immediately saw the gravity of the task, and again that reinforced why we needed such a large budget,” he said.
According to Wolf, Connect Pima raised more than $1.4 million for the yes campaign, and spent almost all of it on ads, mailers and signs. Before that campaign, Connect Pima’s polling showed only one-eighth of voters knew what the RTA was, according to the group's co-chair Alejandro Angel.
In the end, almost 60% of voters said yes to the sales tax, according to unofficial results from the Pima County Elections Department.
Opposition to ballot measures was concentrated in certain areas of county##
In total, about 40% of voters rejected Propositions 418 and 419. The measures attracted opposition upwards of 30% throughout Pima County, but some voting precincts rejected the two propositions outright.
Those precincts were concentrated in downtown Tucson, the city’s east side and in rural parts of the county, including around Green Valley and Sahuarita, according to unofficial results.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said she wants to listen to opponents’ concerns as the city plans future transportation investments beyond RTA Next.
“It’s not a matter of this or nothing else. It’s a matter of this and how do we move forward as a community to continue investing in ourselves,” she said.
A range of groups, from the Pima County Republican Party to bicycle and public transit advocates, opposed the propositions.
At the press conference, Romero gave a nod to transit advocates in particular, floating the idea of creating a public transit authority that could make funding for Tucson’s buses and streetcar more secure in the future. Currently, that funding jostles with competing concerns in 20-year RTA plans and in the City of Tucson’s annual budget process.
“The best way for us to follow up on this vote is to implement elements of the Move Tucson plan that weren’t included in these propositions and to create a Transit Authority that meets our needs,” Romero wrote in a Wednesday newsletter.
Opponents of RTA Next had argued the city should instead pursue its own sales tax to fund the Move Tucson transportation plan, which focuses more on pedestrian, bicycle and public transit investments compared to road-heavy RTA Next.
Romero said she understood those concerns.
“I had been sitting at the RTA governing board table, and I had been pushing for — to be honest with you — many of the same concerns that the people that got on the ‘No’ coalition were saying,” she said.
But she expressed confidence that the RTA, now led by former Tucson City Manager Mike Ortega, would be friendlier to the city's concerns in the future.
In a newsletter sent Wednesday, the Living Streets Alliance, a prominent pedestrian and bicycle advocacy group that opposed RTA Next, encouraged its supporters to tell local elected officials the reasons they opposed the plan.
“Movements like this don’t end on election night. They grow from it,” the group’s director, Vanessa Cascio, wrote in the newsletter.
RTA Next includes $2.67 billion of spending, with about two-thirds going towards road projects including widening, repaving and pedestrian improvements. Most of the remaining funds will keep the Sun Tran and Sun Link systems running while making modest investments in transit expansions, including a bus rapid transit line that would need matching state or federal funding to complete.
Note: this story was updated to correct an error. Connect Pima's co-chair Alejandro Angel, not its general consultant Joe Wolf, said that about one-eighth of voters knew what the RTA was in initial polling.
