Friday, Feb. 15, 2002 | 11:06 a.m.
The already congested streets of Las Vegas will face nearly total gridlock by 2025 unless officials find more money for roadwork, the head of the Regional Transportation Commission warned Thursday.
RTC General Manager Jacob Snow said "mushrooming" traffic congestion, up 246 percent from 1990 to 2000, also demands more funding.
The RTC has set aside $6.5 billion for road and mass-transit projects until 2025, but it needs more, he told the board.
The RTC, responding to the plea, recommended a package of $2.6 billion in tax increases and other financing plans to boost agency coffers. The $2.6 billion tax package still has significant obstacles to overcome before it can become law.
The package will go to local area governments for endorsement and then to voters in the fall, if RTC policymakers and staff are successful. If the plan passes electoral muster, it still would have to be enacted by the Legislature.
Snow said his agency has planned the projects that would ease traffic problems, but doesn't have the funding to complete them all.
"We will implement these projects," he said. "The public will receive them as soon as we can deliver them."
He warned that failure to fully fund the programs would cause already dangerous roads to become even less safe. Snow cited a Texas Transportation Institute research study that called Las Vegas' roads the fifth most unsafe of major cities nationwide.
Members of a community coalition who back the proposal attended the meeting. Among the coalition members, who spent a year studying the traffic problem and various potential solutions, were elected policy makers such as Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, regional government staffers, environmentalists and mass-transit customers.
E. James Gans, vice president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and also a coalition member, outlined some of the projects that the $2.6 billion would fund.
Among the projects are:
* 425 miles of high-speed lanes on area highways; * 225 buses and seven new bus routes; * New synchronized traffic lights and freeway-entrance systems; * 400 miles of bicycle routes.
Guy Hobbs, chairman of the Governor's Task Force on Tax Policy and a Las Vegas consultant to numerous government agencies, spoke to the RTC board regarding the source of the money.
He and his consulting partner, Kathy Ong, told the board that six tax and financing proposals could bring the extra $2.6 billion the RTC needs. Among them:
* Additions to the existing $500 per unit development tax for new homes and apartments in the county, gradually rising to $1,000 by 2020. Over 25 years, the tax would provide $125 million.
* Gasoline fuel taxes, now at 9 cents per gallon, would be tagged to inflation rates. The measure would provide $762 million.
* A 1-cent per gallon jet fuel tax would provide $128 million.
* The RTC would like to have 40 percent of the nickle per $100 property tax on capital projects, providing $300 million over 25 years.
* "Smog fees" for automobile exhaust certification would go up by a dollar, providing $6 for local air-quality uses and $194 million until 2027.
* An eighth of a percent addition to Clark County's 7.25 percent sales tax would provide the biggest single revenue source -- $1.075 billion for transportation programs.
The RTC board -- well aware that the agency is swimming in red ink because of declining sales taxes and turnstile recovery on its buses -- approved the proposed tax measures without dissent.
The measures also appeared to have broad community support. Environmentalists and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority don't always see eye-to-eye, but Jane Feldman, an activist for the local arm of the Sierra Club, said her group sees positives in the package.
She said transferring the cost for new transportation work to drivers through the fuel tax makes her happy. Feldman said environmentalists also welcome the new bike trails and buses.
Only one person spoke against the tax package. Juanita Clark, a member of the Charleston Neighborhood Preservation Group, a neighborhood association, criticized the RTC for not aggressively seeking ways out of the traffic-congestion quagmire.
Instead, the board is "maintaining the status quo with ingenious ways of taking pennies from my pocket," Clark said.
But backers of the tax package said the generally positive reception during Thursday's RTC meeting -- a meeting packed with agency staffers and coalition members -- bodes well for broader community support.
But Snow warned the board and the public should not expect miracles even if the taxes eventually pass.
The area will still suffer traffic congestion, Snow told the board. The best area governments can do is avoid a dramatic worsening of the present situation.
"We'll be able to keep it under control," he said.
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