Four Reasons I’m Against Prop T

On November 5th, Kirkwood voters will head to the polls to make an incredibly important choice. I speak, of course, of the question of whether or not the city should institute Prop T, a city-wide Transportation Development District (TDD) that would fund street improvements through a new city-wide half-cent sales tax levy.

While the condition of Kirkwood’s Streets has long been decried as unacceptable for such a wealthy, prosperous city, and TDD held up as the only solution of any merit, the reality is much more complicated and reflects much more poorly on past and present city leadership. Today I want to take an earnest look at what TDD is, how our streets came to so desperately need such a large transfusion of funds, and why I don’t think Prop T is the ideal vehicle for making the situation any better. Then next week we’ll take a look at some of the alternative solutions that are available, whether City Hall wants to admit it or not.

First though: What the hell is TDD? Glad you asked!

TDD Explained

If approved by a majority of voters, the Transportation Development District would raise money by adding an extra half-cent to city sales taxes —bringing the current total sales tax rate from 9.238% to 9.738%— in order to fund the backlog of maintenance on city streets. It is estimated that such a tax increase would raise $2.8 million per year over the next 15 years, a $42 million increase in the streets budget over the full life of the district.

That $2.8 million in additional annual revenue would be in addition to the $1.8 million the city currently dedicates to streets projects each year, but it would be administered slightly differently. First, 5% of that $2.8 million annual total —approximately $140k a year (summing up to $2.1 million over the full 15 years of the tax)— would be earmarked for transportation project-related use by the Downtown Kirkwood Special Business District. Then, the remaining 95% of the revenue would be appropriated not by the City Council as the rest of the streets budget is, but instead by an independent TDD board of appointed officials. The only stipulations are that the money has to be uses for the transportation-related items outlined on the ballot: streets, sidewalks, and potentially parking.

Convincing the city’s voters to approve such a tax increase for streets will not be an easy task for the city leaders. Voters rejected a very similar proposal back in 2021, with 54% of voters against the increase. By law, the city had to wait two years to bring a TDD proposal before the voters again. Now that waiting period has run out, city leaders are hoping that a few tweaks to the proposal —reducing it’s levy from 1-cent down to half-a-cent and reducing the amount of time the tax increase would be in effect from the maximum of 40-years down to 15— will help overcome the previous opposition.

Still, the Council is expecting a fight. Earlier this summer, they approved more than $43k to a consultant to try and help them shepherd TDD towards approval. That funding has helped yield a fancy new page on the city’s website showing which streets the city plans to repave using Prop T revenue (should it pass) and in which years. That’s a step in the right direction in terms of transparency, but I also leaves out a large chunk of the story, like how we got into this mess in the first place and how we make sure we don’t wind back up here again.

How We Got Here

Kirkwood’s streets were not always this bad. In fact, up until about a decade ago, they used to be pretty good. Then everything started to fall apart. What went wrong? Well, luckily, in 2015, the city commissioned a Pavement Conditions Assessment to find out. Ultimately, that report pointed to four main causes:

1. The discontinuation of the chip seal pavement preservation program
2. The effect of new construction single family housing
3. The need for pavement standards
4. The city’s use of mill & overlay when full street reconstruction would have been more appropriate

Each of those sections is full of stinging indictments against city leadership (pages 10-17 are well worth the read), but I think the most prevalent of the critiques comes in the examination of the city’s decision to discontinue its long-running and highly successful “chip seal” pavement preservation program in 2002:

The City’s Street Maintenance Division had for a number of years conducted an annual chip seal program. This program provided for the application of a chip seal surface treatment on every asphalt street in the City on a 5 year cycle basis. At one time it is estimated that 65% of Kirkwood’s streets were maintained in this fashion. This low-cost surface treatment (because it was performed in-house with City employees) essentially maintained the City’s streets in a good condition for many years. However, the decision was made in 2002 to discontinue the chip seal program and sell off the equipment used to apply the chip seal treatments. This decision resulted in the resumption of the majority of the City’s streets continued deterioration. The average condition of Kirkwood’s asphalt streets is now 60.3, roughly 5 points difference from the critical PCI (The Critical PCI is 55). There presently exist a number of alternative surface treatment options (such as; micro surfacing, NOVACHIP, slurry seal and other similar products). Frequently, loose stone is cited as the principle objection with chip seal. If that objection was the basis for deciding to discontinue the chip seal program that would be understandable. However, there were other options that should have been implemented in place of the chip seal program. None of these alternate surface treatments cited above share chip seal’s loose stone “problem.” Unfortunately, this group of asphalt streets which have been previously chip sealed is now in a state of disrepair that makes surface treatments a poor choice for extending their service life.

Unfortunately, in the decade since that report was published, the city has made no progress on restarting the chip seal program (or any of the other recommendations suggested by the report) and now most of our streets are too far gone for chip seal to save us. Is Prop T the magic bullet that will bring us back? I’m deeply skeptical.

The Problems with TDD

Given what we know about TDD. here are four main reason why I don’t think the math on TDD adds up:

1. A Band-aid on a Bullet Hole

My biggest gripe with Prop T is that it’s a bit like the issue of forgiving student loan debt: It’s nice for the people who currently hold student loan debt, but it does nothing to address the long-term factors that got us into the mess in the first place. According to the city engineer, asphalt streets can last between 10-15 years. If this proposal covers the street funding gap for the next 15 years, what happens when it expires? The first few TDD-funded roads will have started to degrade by that point and we’ll be back where we started.

This is why the 40-year timeline of the original 2021 proposal made some sense even if that long of a timeline was unpopular with the voting public. At least 40-years worth of TDD revenue would give you something closer to a long-term solution (the reconstruction of the city’s streets followed by funding the restarting of the chip seal program to make sure we can then maintain those streets), rather than the faux one-time fix proffered by Prop T’s supporters.

And I think that 10-15 year estimated lifespan might even be too optimistic. Because when we look at the way cars are evolving, we can see pretty clearly that streets are under more stress than ever before:

2. It’s a Bad Time to Be a Street

Over the past 30 years, the average weight of US vehicles has increased from 3,400 pounds to 4,300 pounds as consumer preference has increasingly swung away from sedans towards larger pickups and SUVs. The ongoing transition towards electric vehicles is only expected to exacerbate that trend. The battery alone on an EV can weigh nearly 3,000 pounds, often causing EVs to weigh nearly 30% more than their gas counterparts. The additional weight wrought by those two factors is going to have a monumentally negative impact on our roads. That’s because it is generally understood in the engineering field that the relationship between vehicle weight and road is not linear, but rather something like a power-of-four relationship. That means that each additional pound of vehicle weight causes an increasingly severe amount of damage to the roads:

That means that when vehicle weight goes from 7,500 pounds, to 10,000 pounds, an increase of just 33%, the damage that vehicle causes to the pavement increases by more than 215%. To visualize it more clearly, here are that relationship plotted out on a graph:

In a world in which vehicles are getting heavier and heavier, both because they’re bigger and because they’re increasingly running on electric, the average lifespan of our roads will decrease to something less than the 10-15 years currently estimated. My fear is that means Prop T could yield 15 years of higher taxes with very little to show for them in the form of improved streets.

3. It’s a Tax Hike on the Poor

The other big problem with Prop T is that it’s funded via a sales tax and economic research tells us that sales taxes tend to be very regressive. That means they eat up a larger percentage of lower income families’ budgets than wealthier families.

That might sound a little counter-intuitive at first (wealthy families buy more stuff, so you’d think a sales tax would hit them harder) but you have to think about the proportion of income people dedicate to different kinds of items. Everyone, rich or poor, has to spend money on the basic necessities of life —food, household supplies, clothes, a car, etc.— and those basic necessities tend to be goods (i.e. real tangible items) rather than services (tutoring, gym memberships, a massage, etc.). Because sales taxes typically only apply to goods and not services, families that dedicate a larger portion of their overall income to buying goods (i.e. poorer people) tend to be hit harder by sales taxes than richer people who either can afford to save a lot of their income or spend it on services.

Here’s a chart showing that the lowest income families spend more than 60% of their income on things like groceries and gasoline that are hit by sales tax, while basic goods account for a much lower percentage of the overall income of wealthy families:

A poor mom with four kids and rich mom with four kids both going to have to spend $300 at the grocery store each week, and both are going to have to pay the same amount of sales taxes on those groceries. But in doing so, we’re taxing wayyy more of the poor mom’s overall expenses to pay for our streets than the rich mom’s. That’s not ideal. What’s the poor mom supposed to do, skip out on the eggs this week?

At a time when Kirkwood is becoming less and less affordable due to our increasingly high cost of housing, further exacerbating that inequity feels misguided, especially since lower income families own fewer cars and drive less than richer ones. That means lower and middle class families would bear a disproportionately high share of the cost of TDD and derive and disproportionately low share of its benefit. I think we can do better.

4. We Can Do Better

City leaders have framed the TDD sales tax increase as our only way out of the streets funding mess. When we look at who has contributed to the pro-Prop T political action committee (PAC), we see that this is a consensus that is widely held by political actors of all stripes:

$2,500 from former Mayor Tim Griffin (who I think of as someone broadly aligned with my policy priorities), $2,500 from current Council Member Al Rheinnecker and a $5,000 transfer from current Mayor Liz Gibbon’s campaign war chest (both of whom I have deeply held differences with when it comes to policy), $2,000 from Mark Melman (developer of The Aria mixed-use multifamily development currently under construction in Downtown Kirkwood), and $5,000 from David Sabada (the president of A-Mrazek, the company that Kirkwood acquired the property of the new public works facility significantly above appraised value from).

It’s sort of a funny list, but I don’t think it’s indicative any sort of corruption or nefarious intent. It’s simply the case that lots of people who are really invested in Kirkwood are convinced that this is the only way forward. The only problem is that they have yet to try literally anything else.

My hope, in encouraging people to vote against a proposition that enjoys such broad elite-level consensus, is that we can break that fixed mindset and force our leaders to look instead to solutions for funding our streets that are fairer, more sustainable in the long-run, and which will yield an overall higher quality of life rather than just higher taxes. We’re already at a 12-minute read-time though, so a full exploration of those alternatives will have to wait until next week.