Proposed tt post mar 18 2016

links to reference:

Summarizing:

• Increasing the "temporary" income tax from 0.75 percent to 1.00 percent would have generated an additional $18.6 million each year.
• For 2016, Mayor Hicks-Hudson promised to devote $16.6 million of that $18.6 million to residential street repair.
• For the following years, no guarantee exists that the city would devote nearly 90% of the revenue generated by the tax increase to street repair.
• Voters rejected the tax increase, and the mayor claims Toledo has zero dollars for street repairs in 2016.
• The mayor said Toledo has more than $750 million in street repairs.
• If the tax increase had passed, and if $16.6 million were devoted to street repairs in 2016, that means approximately 2.2 percent of the roads would have been repaired. It depends upon what type of road is fixed.
  • For each lane mile of a res­i­den­tial street it costs roughly $275,000 to re­sur­face and $750,000 to re­con­struct.
  • For each lane mile of a ma­jor street it costs roughly $320,000 to re­sur­face and $1 mil­lion to re­con­struct.
• Let's say that the state/feds matched Toledo's $16.6 million, providing Toledo with $33 million. Then about 4.5 percent of the needed street repairs would have been funded this year.
• Doug Ste­phens, the city’s com­mis­sioner of en­gi­neer­ing ser­vices, said Toledo would need $1.1 bil­lion over the next 20 years to fix all of its streets, which comes to $55.5 mil­lion an­nu­ally. Toledo typ­i­cally spends less than $20 mil­lion a year to main­tain its streets. About two-fifths of that amount is state or fed­eral money. The city is on a ev­ery-50-year re­place­ment cy­cle when it should be on a 20-year cy­cle.

It seems like this road problem did not begin in January 2014. Two recent bad winters cannot be solely responsible for our decrepit roads.

It appears that this colossal governmental neglect, probably due to financial malfeasance, has been in the works for many years, spread across multiple mayoral administrations and city council configurations.

Every current and former living elected Toledo governmental official should be charged with some kind of a crime, or they should be forced to explain why they failed to satisfy one of the basic functions of local government.

But then again, the small percentage of Toledoans who vote have placed these blight-contributors in positions to do harm.

Toledo has $750 million worth of street repairs, and the new tax increase would have covered 2 percent of that for 2016. We definitely do not need new taxes.

The need to reorganize city government is an understatement.

Blade stories referenced:

• Nov 30, 2015
• Dec 8, 2015
• Mar 17, 2016

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http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2015/11/30/Toledo-could-turn-to-tax-hike-request-for-road-repairs.html

http://www.toledoblade.com/image/2015/11/30/800x_b1_cCM_z/Streets30.jpg

http://m.toledoblade.com/Politics/2015/12/08/Mayor-seeks-income-tax-hike-for-roads.html

http://m.toledoblade.com/Politics/2015/12/08/Mayor-Benefits-of-increasing-tax-outweigh-costs.html

http://www.toledoblade.com/Politics/2016/03/17/Toledo-looks-for-options-after-failure-of-Issue-2.html