After more than a year of hemming and hawing, the board of the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority will not vote to put a sales tax levy on the November ballot after all, multiple sources say.
The levy was set to be between .5 and 1 percent and, depending on the amount the board chose, would have addressed the transit authority ‘s coming $184 million deficit over the next decade and potentially added new routes, more frequency and later hours for some routes on SORTA’s Metro bus system. The board reportedly looked into a number of options for the levy, including a scheme first reported by the Cincinnati Business Courier that would have split a 1 percent sales tax with .7 percent going to buses and .3 percent going to road maintenance.
Now, however, the transit agency will need to find other ways — likely fare increases and service reductions for an already struggling bus service — to address the deficit. A report earlier this summer by Ernst & Young showed few redundancies or areas of inefficiency left to cut for Metro.
“It has become clear to me that we have not reached an appropriate consensus within the Board and the community to vote tomorrow to present Hamilton County voters with a sales tax option to address the significant financial and operational needs of the Metro bus system,” SORTA Board Chair Kreg Keesee said in a statement this afternoon. “I do not believe that the current environment provides a clear path to victory at the polls even if consensus had been reached. With that in mind, we will still have a meeting tomorrow, but we will not have a vote to put a levy on the ballot this fall.”
Hamilton County Commission President Todd Portune has pushed SORTA to drop the levy, saying he favors a more comprehensive eight-county, three-state regional transit overhaul. Critics, including Cincinnati transit activists with the Better Bus Coalition, have said that the region’s bus service needs investment now and that a regional plan will take too long, if it happens at all.
SORTA’s board will still hold a scheduled meeting tomorrow to explain the decision. Among the likely culprits: a bevy of other tax increases in Hamilton County, including a .2 percent boost Hamilton County Commissioners voted in earlier this year to cover a $28 million budget gap. Conservative groups, including the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes and the Hamilton County GOP, mounted a ballot initiative to repeal that tax increase. It is unclear whether the groups gained the 23,000 signatures needed to put their repeal on the ballot in November.
Metro’s funding woes come from a perfect storm of adverse conditions.
Declining ridership has played a big role, E&Y’s report said. 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 geographical 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 Greater Cincinnati 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.
Compounding the transit agency’s fiscal difficulties, only the city pays into a system that extends throughout Hamilton County via a .3 percent earnings tax — a highly unusual funding arrangement for a major city’s bus system. The proposed bus levy would have ended that practice, eliminating that earnings tax in favor of the county-wide sales tax.
This article appears in Jul 18-25, 2018.