HUMBOLDT — Residential streets here won’t be improved any time soon.
Voters in a mail ballot election turned down a half-cent sales tax by better than a two-to-one margin, 441-218. Ballots were tabulated Tuesday evening.
The tax would have been in effect for 15 years and would have been the centerpiece financing for a $1.7 million project to rebuild 300 miles of residential streets and improve curbs, gutters and culverts. Estimate was the tax would raise about $90,000 a year.
“I guess it was all about perception,” that the tax would have been a burden for consumers, said Mayor Nobby Davis. “But, that’s fine. The voters had their say.
“We’ll do what we can with the streets,” he added, which essentially will be a continuation of chip-and-seal treatment, a process that mainly seals a street’s surface.
The plan was to use $30,000 of $50,000 in annual fuel tax distributions in conjunction with the sales tax money to fund the long-term project. About 20 blocks of streets would have been renewed each year.
Davis noted street improvements would have cost about $5,000 a block, but that would not be the case with a less aggressive approach.
“I doubt if we can get that price ($5,000) on a small number of blocks each year,” he said.
“Maybe we (city officials) should have made a bigger effort to campaign for the tax,” Davis concluded.
Ballots were mailed to 1,148 registered voters and 665, 58 percent, were properly marked. Four others were set aside as provisional, meaning they had minor problems but might have been deemed countable in a review by Allen County commissioners. Another 24 were improperly handled by voters; 50 were “returned to sender” because the recipient had moved.
