SACRAMENTO — When Californians go to the polls in November to consider the largest public works projects in 40 years, their first decision won't be whether to borrow $20 billion for transportation or $2.8 billion for affordable housing.
The first proposition they'll see is a measure that would limit lawmakers' ability to use gasoline taxes -- meant for transportation projects -- to bail the state out in tight times.
The proposition's enviable placement atop the ballot is due to an alliance of construction companies, engineers and unionized contractors -- a group with strong pull in the Capitol. These interests played a critical role in cementing the biggest legislative deal of the year, a $116-billion public works package that lawmakers portrayed in a statewide tour Monday as a triumph of bipartisan deal-making by elected officials.
After foundering in March, that deal came together early Friday -- just in time to halt an initiative the transportation lobby was threatening to place on the November ballot. The initiative was replaced with a compromise struck by the Legislature.
"It is clear that it got done Friday morning because of our measure, and I think our measure did a public service because of that reason," said Jim Earp, executive director of the California Alliance for Jobs, which represents 1,700 heavy-construction companies and 50,000 union construction workers in the northern part of the state.
Voters passed a law in 2002 to protect the sales tax collected on gasoline, about $1.4 billion annually. But lawmakers have used a loophole to siphon $2.5 billion from those funds in recent years to pay for school operations, healthcare and other expenses.
The coalition initiative would have prohibited lawmakers from ever doing so again and would have required them to pay back to the transportation fund what they took out.
Legislative leaders had been trying to ward off the coalition's measure with their own less restrictive one, which would allow them to borrow gas tax money in tough fiscal times as long as they paid it back within three years. They would also agree to repay the transportation money they borrowed earlier this decade.
But the powerful California Teachers Assn. and other school lobbies -- major campaign donors to the Democrats who dominate the Legislature -- balked at limiting a potential source of money that could be directed to education.
