SB County Roads Paying Price for Cheaper Gas
It may take awhile longer to fill that pothole or pave that street or road where you live in Santa Barbara County or perhaps anywhere on the Central Coast.
Cheaper gas is putting more money in consumer pockets but its also taking tax revenue away from local counties and cities that rely on that money to maintain streets and roads.
The money you save when you fill up at the pump is not without cost somewhere else down the line on the Central Coast.
“With less gas being purchased as well as the price of gas going down that’s kind of a double-whammy if you will”, says Santa Barbara County Road Commissioner Scott McGolpin, “so we see less in gas taxes which means the State of California doesn’t deliver historically the money that used to come to us to help us maintain our roads.”
Its particularly hard in Santa Barbara County which already has an estimated $250 million road maintenance backlog.
“For us what that means in Santa Barbara County over the last two fiscal years, this fiscal year and next, will be about $6 million reduction in our ability to maintain the roads”, McGolpin says, “everybody is having the same conversation, with limited funding come out of Sacramento to help us maintain our roads I think the residents are going to start seeing a difference in their pavements because pavements have always been a really high priority for us in the County of Santa Barbara.”
How to make up the drop in State gas tax revenue and the growing need for county road repair rests with the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors as it hammers out its next budget in June.
“The Board has some tough decisions certainly across all of our departments in the County of Santa Barbara”, McGolpin says, “they have to balance the limited local funding that’s available to address all these needs.”
The historic, ongoing drought and lack of serious, heavy rain from predicted El Nino-driven storms has had a positive impact for Santa Barbara County in that it has help keep County roads more intact and buys the County more time for its overall road maintenance program.
