The San Diego County Registrar of Voters has notified supporters of a half-cent sales tax hike that their measure has made the ballot.
Let’s Go! San Diego pursued the ballot initiative to pay for a slate of transit and road projects sought by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG).
The registrar’s office, in a letter to backers of the campaign, cited a total of 172,916 signatures that were submitted, 127,249 of which have been deemed valid. That exceeds the number needed to qualify for the Nov. 5 ballot by about 14,000 signatures, according to Fox5 San Diego and the San Diego Union-Tribune.
This is the second attempt to put the proposed increase on the ballot.
The first, last May, failed despite the groups turning in 165,000 signatures. A month later the registrar informed the campaign that 23,000 of the signatures were missing, and that they had failed to qualify for the November 2023 election.
Organizers had re-grouped by August and pledged to collect signatures again, this time with a 2024 election as the target.
The San Diego Alliance for Traffic Relief, Reliable Transit and Jobs, which is behind the Let’s Go! San Diego effort, is sponsored by labor organizations and businesses.
The committee’s top funders, according to letsgosd.org, are the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 569, Southern California Partnership for Jobs and Flatiron Construction.
The last attempt to pass an additional half-cent sales tax for transit and road projects, in 2016, failed and later SANDAG was mired in controversy following revelations that staff knew of faulty revenue projections linked to Measure A, but neglected to inform board members or voters.
One key difference between the current measure and the one from eight years ago – as it is an initiative, it would only require a simple majority to pass, unlike Measure A, which needed a two-thirds vote.
