A capacity crowd attended a meeting at Old Town Pizza in Lincoln last night to hear officials of the Placer County Transportation Planning Agency address the projects that are in planning and or under construction stages in South County. The projects outlined have direct effect on the cities of Roseville, Rocklin, and Lincoln.
The listed projects are: Expansion and reconfigure of Highway 65/and I-80, widening highway 65 southbound, Improve I-80 bottlenecks, build Placer Parkway which will interconnect Highway 65 and 99, and widen baseline road. The total cost for these improvements exceeds 3 billion dollars and with only 50% gas tax money coming from the state, and after county funds ear marked, over 1 billion dollars remains unfunded.
The agency is proposing an increase of sales tax by A1/2 a cent from the three south county cities to fund the projects. Officials said their Board of Directors, made up of supervisors and a council person from each city, selected the sales tax because it is fair to all concerned. They noted that 30% of the people daily using these highways are from out of Placer County, and a sales tax would equally distribute the funding over a base of users, not just residents in the cities and the unincorporated parts of Placer County surrounding the cities. Several questions from the audience addressed the burden that new housing should pay, and it was noted they already pay their fair share from fees that are charged through the permitting stage of development. Several projects are in response to increased traffic on county and state roads as new development is progressing and additional traffic, new school traffic, and public transportation needs increase quickly as rapid development progresses. There is major new home development underway in all the South County cities and surrounding county land, which will bring several thousand new families into the area starting almost immediately and last over several years. To accommodate this growth there are several commercial developments underway to serve this population for medical, grocery, fuel, and other services.