Well yes, that's one reason it probably isn't being raised. But if you could let the people know that "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.
"The Democrats claim for just the cost of Pizza each month we'll save our roads but we know what's really going on (pause) (dramatic music) and this is just the beginning.
Next it will be a Chinese takeout meal to help a library (show red Chinese flag to increase fear slightly), then the cost of a new refrigerator to pay teachers more (stock footage of a liberal looking nerdy professor), when will it end?
The tax and spend Democrats have an agenda and all they are looking for is an opening. (stock footage of snake slithering into nursery during the night)
We have to be vigilant to protect our families future (stock footage of 60-70 year old man, slightly overweight, wearing a red plaid shirt, jeans, and standing in front of an American flag) vote no on proposition 205 and say no to big government
(paid for by the committee of republicans and their rich supporters who need to convince poor people to vote for them)
It's possible that the city is currently in equilibrium between tax rate and quality of roads. You can check the road that it getting fixed on and it's ok [1]. There are potholes here and there but otherwise it's perfectly drivable. There are roads of similar quality in much wealthier places in Bay Area. It's possible that reaction from poor people in town to increased taxes for roads will be - why? it's ok as is now.
I also checked a few random streets in the town and pavement is actually pretty good with few if any potholes. Random street as a point [2]
#1 is pretty rough especially as this is the summer w/o frost heaves. That is also from Aug 2019 and it's now 2022.
Separately, but related, I have always found it interesting that no one tries to calculate the wear on vehicles for things like bad roads, salt use, etc. Bending a wheel, accelerating suspension breakdown, and other issues from bad roads could easily outweigh some arguable savings of waiting longer. I'd rather push for adding less roads, allowing some paved roads to become dirt roads where low traffic weights & #s exist, and better maintenance of the remaining ones.
It’s likely hard to quantify and would require an in-depth survey of people over the course of 5-10 years with extreme diligence.
There is another quality that is missed out in these discussions too - which is the quality of life improvement. If you’ve ever driven on a nice road - you know it and you feel it. It’s pure bliss compared to most of the roads out there. Your car might go from feeling cheap and unbearable to luxurious - and if you have a nice car already then it feels sublime.
That aspect is one part where I’d gladly pay more for roads. The other aspect is prevention. I see very little emphasis put on the prevention of deterioration of roads. I think road quality could be improved if there were crews working all the time to keep the roads in shape and if people felt like their city would listen when they issue a complaint about the road. I figure this might save money and improve QOL over the long run.
It would be helpful if you could just go to a website, enter in a code from your property tax bill and see exactly how every dollar of the taxes you paid were used. This is one of the valid uses of a public ledger I can think of. In my opinion, all tax funded spending should be traceable like this with each transfer recorded and reported to the tax payer.
Money is fungible so it doesn't really make sense to ask where your specific dollars went. But in most if not all places in the US you can see the city or town budget and see where money came from and went in general. (It's mostly to schools in the majority of places with the per student expenditure actually often higher in more urban populations.)
While you cannot trace the money all the way through the economy, you can definitely trace the funds allocation by the articles of the budget, and pro-rate the amounts to the sum of the taxes paid by a person.
It's similar to the way you see amounts that went to taxes, insurance, etc on your payroll.
I don't feel like that addresses the part of the comment I was speaking to:
> "hey, this is going directly into fixing the roads, and your property tax will only go up $8 per month to afford it, otherwise your roads will stay shitty", I think most people could be convinced to go along with it.
At a minimum, you could create a system that takes the budget and shows a percent breakdown of where your money goes. If you packaged it nicely so that you could understand it at a glance it would go a long way towards what the comment I was responding to was talking about. After looking at my city's budget, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement. For my municipality at least, it seems to be a mix of specific and extremely nebulous items. I can see that the fire department purchased several new vehicles and even the type of vehicle but the road works department just lists additions to their "fleet" and the sanitation department just lists "new vehicles". I see items for sidewalk and street repairs along with the name of the street but no indication of how much pavement was repaired or what the breakdown of labor vs materials was. I think knowing all of the details would help the public assist their representatives to correct overages and would be a bulwark against corruption. e.g. If I run a business that sells fasteners and I see that the city government is overpaying by 30% for the bolts they use to put up new street signs I could bid on the contract next time around or maybe tip off the newspaper if it's more like 200% over retail.
On a property tax bill, it tells you which entity is paid what from the bill. It’s broken down to the entity (city, pensions, schools, parks, cemeteries, libraries). If you want to dig deeper, you can go to the budget for each one of those entities
