The North Central Regional Transit District is trying to take a step toward financial independence by asking Rio Arriba County voters to condone a one-eighth cent onto our gross receipts tax. If passed the tax would provide the District with $750,000 toward its $10.5 million budget.
Proponents of the tax say we would get big bang for our buck. The $750,000 would result in $1.2 million in services. We’re not sure how they arrived at that number. Most of the budget is vans, buses, gasoline, maintenance and infrastructure. To their credit, only $1 million, or ten percent, of the budget is going toward administration.
Arguments can be made either way regarding the spending of the remaining $9.5 million. But it’s a simple enough question. Do you want to be taxed an additional one-eighth of a cent so the District can operate a transit system in your town and to a lesser extent, the County?
The gross receipts tax option is the easy way out. The city just hit us for a quarter percent and no one said a word. Before that voters overwhelmingly gave an eighth percent to E911. Before that was three-eighths for water and waste water projects.
Should this tax pass, we will have a 7.875 percent tax on goods purchased in most of the city, which is where the tax base lies. It will be 8.3125 percent on the Santa Fe County side of Española. Scanning the tax schedule, we would be in the top five for tax rates. We are in the bottom five for average income.
The routes between Española and Santa Fe and Española and Los Alamos have been heavily used. That’s great to get cars off the road.
However, the routes inside the city remain sparsely used and are more of a taxi service for people who can’t drive. Executive Director Josette Lucero said, give it a chance. Ridership will go up with time.
We agree with Mayor Joseph Maestas when he said this is a regressive tax, forcing the poorest of us to pay for a bus service. He was disingenuous saying the District shouldn’t go after the GRT, though. He did it a few short months ago with little explanation and the public stood by and watched him and the city council do it.
We suggest the people riding the bus from Española to Santa Fe and Los Alamos start paying their share. They’re riding the bus to save money. Great, but they need to support the mechanism allowing them to save money. People who work the state and Los Alamos National Laboratory jobs are making much more money than the predominant population that will be paying this tax.
The District’s report rightly points out that collecting for rides costs more than the collecting is worth.
For the whole County to pay for a service relatively few people use is not right. A gross receipts tax should benefit the whole city or county. We all benefit from the quarter percent tax imposed by the city because it goes into the general fund. We may not like how it’s spent but it’s spent on city projects or payroll or infrastructure. No one wants to use E911 but we all pay for it so that it’s available to us. Almost everyone in the city uses water or sewer. The three-eighths percent tax is evenly shared. Taxing everyone to fund a bus system used by few isn’t fair.
Vote no on the County Regional Transit Gross Receipts Tax Question.