Transportation

TRANSPORTATION. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. Creates Southern California Monorail Transit Authority for construction of monorail transit system within counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura. Establishes 15 member board which will create two transit districts per county. To finance system, imposes 1/2 of 1% gross receipts sales and use tax on personal property transactions in region; empowers transit authority to direct state to issue general obligation bonds. Design, construction, operation, maintenance and performance standards of system under control of master developer. Specifies qualifications for master developer. Requires bidders seeking master developer contract pay $2,500,000.00 nonrefundable fee. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local governments: Measure creates substantial costs to monorail authority, state and local governments. Costs to monorail authority could be several tens of billions of dollars through year 2010 for construction, and multimillion dollars annually for operation, more if the authority issues bonds. Costs to state and local governments could be hundreds of millions of dollars depending upon public land granted to the authority, additional sales and use taxes on government purchases in the area served by the authority, and costs to transit districts for meeting operation obligations imposed by the measure. Costs could be partially off-set by annual sales and use tax revenues to authority of $900 million by 1991-92, increasing thereafter, and revenues to transit districts from increases, if any, in ridership.