SBCTA sends a permanent half-cent transportation tax to the November ballot

San Bernardino County's voters will decide this November whether to replace Measure I, the half-cent sales tax that has funded the county's transportation system since 1989, with a new version that does not expire. The SBCTA board adopted the replacement ordinance and a resolution asking the County Board of Supervisors to place it on the November 3 ballot; the board held its first reading of the ordinance in May.

The structural change is the story. The current Measure I, which voters extended in 2004, is written to sunset in 2040. The replacement ordinance carries no such date: under its terms, the tax is collected until county voters repeal it through a future ballot measure, and until outstanding debt and committed contracts are satisfied. A finite tax becomes a standing one.

That distinction matters to anyone who underwrites or schedules around capacity. The county's freight and commuter movement leans on a handful of chokepoints — the I-15 climb through Cajon Pass, the I-210, the Metrolink line into the valley — and the projects that widen and maintain them are financed against the tax's revenue stream. A 2040 expiration caps how far that financing can reach; a permanent levy lets the authority bond and plan past the current horizon. For a developer weighing land near a planned interchange, or an operator betting on a corridor's throughput a decade out, the funding cliff was a real variable. The new measure proposes to remove it.

It is also a full rewrite, not a renewal of the existing project list. The replacement comes with a new expenditure plan — the document that dictates which projects the money funds — developed over the past year by an SBCTA committee. The plan, not just the tax, is what voters are being asked to approve, which means the specific project commitments are themselves on the table for the first time since 2004.

The vote is not yet set. SBCTA has asked the supervisors to place the measure; the county has to agree to put it on the ballot, and a transportation sales tax of this kind requires a two-thirds majority to pass. Both steps come before any of this is settled. What changed in June is that the option in front of voters is now a permanent tax rather than another dated extension.