Hamilton County residents will know next week whether they’ll be able to vote on a proposed sales tax increase to fund the region’s Metro bus service, officials with the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority announced last night.
SORTA will hold a special meeting at 9 a.m. July 25 to vote on the sales tax ask. The transit agency’s board has been discussing a boost between .5 percent and 1 percent, though the board could opt to ask for as much as 1.5 percent without the approval of the Hamilton County Commission.
The announcement came just before SORTA’s regularly-scheduled board meeting yesterday evening, when the board was originally supposed to vote on the sales tax increase. A number of transit activists attended the meeting to push board members to vote to put the increase on the November ballot.
Hamilton County Commission President Todd Portune, a vocal opponent of the increase, was also in attendance. Portune wants SORTA to hold off on the levy while he formulates a larger, regional transit plan incorporating eight counties in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. Portune has predicted that voters would bat down a tax increase.
We should get more clarity about that this week. Commissioners Portune and Denise Driehaus voted last month to raise the county’s sales tax rate .2 percent to plug a $28 million hole in the county’s budget. That triggered a petition effort from conservatives to get a repeal of the tax increase on the November ballot. The anti-tax effort needs 23,600 signatures in order to come before voters. If it’s successful, it could be a sign that the transit tax increase will face an uphill battle.
The stakes are high: SORTA will run a $184 million deficit over the next 10 years at its current rate, and a recent study by Ernst & Young found there is not a lot of fat to trim in the transit agency’s budget.
That deficit is split more or less evenly between daily operations, the need to replace aging buses and facilities upgrades. Declining ridership has played a big role, E&Y’s report says. Metro’s ridership has gone down steadily over the past number of years. The bus system gave about 17.4 million rides in 2012. Last year, it gave 14.27 million. This year, it is on track to give just 13.74 million. That translated to a loss of $3 million from the $22 million in fares Metro collected in 2012.
Those declines look likely to continue over the next several years, according to E&Y’s report, and are fueled by lack of geographic reach for Metro, unreliable and infrequent service and Greater Cincinnatians’ dependence on cars.
About 40 percent of jobs in the city — some 75,000 — aren’t reachable by transit at all, according to a 2015 report commissioned by the Chamber, and many others require long, daunting commutes. The region ranks lower than 11 other peer cities when it comes to job accessibility via public transit, including regional neighbors Louisville, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus and Pittsburgh, as well as cities like Denver and Austin, Texas.
There is also the fact that the state of Ohio is among the stingiest in the nation when it comes to transit funding. Ohio ranks 45th among states when it comes to public dollars per capita spent on transit, even though it ranks 14th in ridership.
Then there’s the fact that only the city pays into a system that extends throughout Hamilton County — a highly unusual funding arrangement for a major city’s bus system. The city’s contribution comes from a .3 percent earnings tax.
Improvements to Metro would vary widely depending on how much the board opts to ask taxpayers for, should it choose to put a tax on the ballot at all.
The .5 percent tax — a plan supported by Mayor John Cranley during his reelection bid — would result in bus service staying the same due to coming deficits and looming needs for the system. But with a .6 percent or .8 percent sales tax increase, Metro says it could expand access for people with disabilities, add new crosstown and circulator job access routes, increase the frequency and hours of weekday and weekend service on existing routes — including 24-hour service on major routes — extend some routes further into the county, and, if voters pony up for the .8 percent increase, even provide some so-called bus rapid transit. Those are routes that mimic light rail with dedicated lanes and fewer stops, speeding up commute times.
This article appears in Jul 11-18, 2018.
