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Originally Posted by hughfb3
Something to take into consideration is the world we live in today and for the foreseeable future. Metro's ridership has been decimated by the pandemic. People no longer want to be indoors or underground in enclosed spaces with crowds of people. Metro's ticket fares have all but depleted. County Sales taxes are indefinitely impacted by the closing of stores and restaurants as shopping for non essentials moves online. The structures in technology and communication have solidified the remote working of a large portion of the workforce.
Any Heavy Rail option from Van Nuys to LAX is minimum $20 Billion Dollars. Metro has a projected amount of $9.7 Billion allocated for this project from Sales tax projections that were crafted in 2016... and that did not take into account a pandemic.
At this point, we will be "lucky" if we can get anything.
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California collects sales taxes for online purchases and the sales tax collections for Metro have not had as large an impact on Metro as was initially expected. Metro received $862 million in the March 2020 stimulus bill, will receive a similar amount from the December 2020 stimulus bill and will probably receive something like $1.3 billion from the upcoming stimulus bill if it passes the Senate in the same form it passed the House. In other words, they will be receiving nearly $3 billion from the COVID relief packages. With an infrastructure bill in the works, and a plan for Congress to allow earmarks again, Metro might receive even more funding.
Meanwhile, as of January 2021, their sales tax revenues have only been down $260 million since the pandemic began. That looks like a lot, but in 5 of the past months, sales tax revenues were actually higher than the year before.
Metro’s finance team itself predicted that total sales tax losses across 3 years will only be around $190 million and that sales tax revenues are expected to be up next year. “ It is anticipated that sales tax revenue will finally exceed the pre-COVID-19 peak set in FY19 and reach $865.0 million per ordinance in FY22, a 2.9% increase from the FY21 Midyear Reforecast.”
https://metro.legistar.com/Legislati...EB0&FullText=1
You are incorrect that the sales tax calculations didn’t account for the pandemic. Of course it doesn’t predict pandemics, but it expects recessions that have a larger impact on Metro’s revenues than the pandemic has had. The sales tax expenditure plans for Measures R and M leaves a huge amount of unallocated amounts to account for things like downturns in the economy. This is why Measure R projects like the Purple Line, Expo Line 2, Gold Line to Azusa, Crenshaw Line, Regional Connector etc. were not affected by the Great Recession, which had a far larger impact on Metro’s budget. For example, in Measure M, they estimate $60 billion in transit and highway funding for 40 years, but only program for about $30 billion.