Marin Independent Journal Sunday, July 30, 1989

Tax-sharing plan needed

By Dwayne Hunn

Dwayne Hunn is co-director of

the North Bay Transportation

Management Association

and assistant executive director of Novato

Ecumenical Housing..

Marin and Sonoma could learn from the approach the seven-county metropolitan area of Minneapolis-St. Paul has taken to deal with its growth problems.

During the 1960s and 1970s, a significant migration occurred from the Twin Cities urban area to the surrounding area. During the 1960s, Minnesota state policymakers began to view the region as an integrated whole rather than au array of independent governing entities.

In 1967, the Metropolitan Council was created as a regional planning body. its powers included the imposition of an areawide plan upon cities whose growth plans conflicted.

Part of the reason for establishing the council stemmed from time wide fiscal disparities between communities in the region. These fiscal disparities caused:

• Businesses to expand in communities whose fiscal capacity (revenue generating ability) was already high.”

• Cities to compete for commercial-industrial property, believing the tax benefits would outweigh the cost of providing

services and the possibly adverse environmental effects.

• The promotion of urban-suburban sprawl and the resultant increase in costs for providing regional services such as sewage facilities and transportation

Nine years after the Metropolitan Council was created, the Metropolitan Revenue Distribution Act was implemented. This tax base-sharing legislation offered a potential solution to the problems caused by cities with unequal revenues.

If one community substantially increased its commercial-industrial tax base, a small percentage of the increase went into a regional pool. The communities with the ability to generate less than average revenue (In this area, Novato would be among them) would receive funds from this pool.

Minnesota's Fiscal Disparities’ program has reduced the concern over commercial-industrial development. Communities have been more willing to have been more willing to allow land to be used for parks or open space when the know they can share in the fiscal benefits (revenues) of other communities that develop large shopping centers, industrial parks, and so on. This program should be part of the discussions regarding how to handle regional growth problems in Marin and Sonoma.

It took five years for the 101 Corridor Action Committee to pick a transportation plan and propose a gas sales tax to deal with freeway gridlock. It took nine for the Fiscal Disparities Act to move from the Metropolitan Council discussion stage through court challenges and into implementation in 1975,

Based on Minnesota’s rate of progress in dealing with land use and fiscal disparities, the 101 Corridor Committee’s job may take another nine years. The committee must immediately begin work to ensure passage of the sales tax and. then deal with resolving the conflicting city planning policies that cause traffic.

Over the past 10 years, the chief cause of traffic congestion has been the Sonoma-to-Marin commute. This traffic pattern stems from uncoordinated land use policies. It is reflected most clearly in San Rafael, which, for its municipal fiscal welfare, has developed a very strong commercial-industrial tax base. While developing that base, neither San Rafael nor the rest of Marin produced enough nearby affordable housing for those who held those jobs.

Pooling commercial-industrial property values, and then reallocating them on the basis of need, can help address the transportation needs that imbalanced jobs and housing have created. Effective use of Marin’s and Sonoma's’s remaining land so land development effectively concentrates jobs, housing and tax bases in pockets along the rail right of way would be even more cost-effective than regional tax sharing. Such planned mixed-use development generates revenues from each pocket and produces a second “freeway” on which trains, not single-occupant vehicles, move people to work, shop and home.