Orange County Commission kills transportation sales tax referendum

Despite Orange County Mayor Jerry L. Demings’ attempts to bring a proposed transportation sales tax back to the November 2024 ballot, the Orange County Board of County Commissioners voted Tuesday, April 9, not to add the item following a motion made by Demings himself. 

Throughout the discussions, a majority of the commissioners, including District 1 Commissioner Nicole Wilson, said they could not support the tax plan no matter how it was structured.

“I’ll be talking to people in Oakland, Winter Garden, Windermere, Horizon West and Dr. Phillips, and I got nothing for them,” Wilson said. “I mean, I literally have nothing to show them. … There’s a lot of people moving to that area, and I just don’t have anything to show them for voting on this measure.”

The vote was unanimous by the board following a two-hour work session. 

Demings said he is OK with suspending the effort until 2026. 

“From the beginning, I wanted to at least have the conversation, because so many people in our community wanted us to have a conversation, they wanted to give input,” he said. “We certainly have made a noble attempt to do that.”

TRANSPORTATION TAX
Two years ago, the transportation sales tax referendum, which would have raised an estimated $600 million per year, failed substantially. It garnered just 41.5% of the vote in November 2022. 

Locally, the tax would have funded $270 million over the next 20 years in transportation projects in the cities of Ocoee and Winter Garden and the towns of Windermere and Oakland. 

Furthermore, county projects in District 1, which covers all of Horizon West, totaled about $913 million, county officials said.

Recently, Demings brought back the possibility of adding the transportation sales tax to the upcoming November 2024 ballot. 

Demings hosted several community meetings throughout the districts to evaluate resident opinions, including one in District 1 Monday, April 1, at Windermere High School.

“As a growing community, we have growing traffic congestion and significant challenges as it relates to that,” Demings said at that meeting. “What I can tell you, is our community has said to me — on many, many occasions — they want us to do something about the traffic problems we have, as well as the myriad public issues we have as a community. … What we’re doing at this point is taking that robust plan we had in 2022; with your input, we can try to perfect that plan … If this was so easy to do, we would have already solved this problem, but this is a challenge. … So, as a community, eventually, at some point, this traffic conjunction is just going to simply get worse if we don’t come up with other solutions. We’re looking at you to help us.”

Brett Blackadar, deputy director of the Public Works Department for Orange County, led the presentation at the meeting.

“We’re not coming here with a plan to tell you what we’re going to do," he said. "We’re coming here to ask you for your feedback, to ask you to give us some suggestions to help develop maybe what we may move forward with in the future. In the interim, when the sales tax initiative did not pass two years ago, the mayor was able to move forward with a five-year accelerated transportation safety program, and what this is doing is trying to address immediate safety and transit needs over the next five years. This is a $100 million, five-year program. You saw that this is still only a small fraction of our overall needs, but the purpose of this was to be able to deliver projects that we could do quickly and meet the safety and Vision Zero needs.”

Forty-five million dollars of the funding would have been used to provide bus shelters and more pressing service enhancements by leveraging state funding. Fifty-five million dollars would have been allocated to address priority pedestrian, bicyclist and motorist safety needs.

Blackadar gave a brief recap of the 2022 effort and said residents completed more than 19,000 transportation surveys. The county hosted 300 community engagement opportunities with 10,000 participants and received more than 8,000 comments and recommendations.

According to the 2022 survey results, the highest-rated transportation challenges included traffic congestion, transit needs, and bicycle and pedestrian safety. 

The survey also found residents believe the top five priorities for improving transportation in Orange County are building a mass transit system, maintaining and repairing existing roads, improving traffic signal time, improving the SunRail system, and widening existing roads. 

According to estimated costs in 2019, the total transportation needs in Orange County range from $13.5 to $17.9 billion, including funding for transit, roadways, safety, and operations and maintenance. The county’s overall total budget this year is just under $7 billion. 

If the sales tax had passed, the first year would have generated about $759 million per year for a full-cent tax and about $379.5 million per year for a half-cent tax.

Looking 20 years down the road, the one-cent tax would have generated about $20 billion.

If placed on the ballot, the initiative would have needed support from 50% of voters, plus one person to pass.

CONTRASTING OPINIONS
Several residents shared their opinions at the recent District 1 meeting.

Matthew Grocholske, local student and member of the Sunrise Orlando Movement — a youth-led community and climate advocacy group fighting for bold economic and environmental change — said widening roads would not help traffic, and he believes more accessible mass transit options should be available.

Local resident Sarah Hibbs said Horizon West and Windermere are not major metropolitan areas, but instead the suburbs, which are areas not typically serviced by mass transit systems. 

“We don’t necessarily need mass transit right now; we need functional roads,” she said. “Functional, good roads. The LYNX bus can’t even go down our roads, and neither can we. If Disney wants to have the SunRail extended into Disney parks, cool. Let them pay for it. Not my tax dollars that we need to pay for our roads. You guys are telling me that this county is in the top 10 worst for pedestrians and bicyclists, but yet, Horizon West is designed for kids to walk and bike to school every day. … This is not safe. So, now the county has no money and is worried about putting in LYNX buses, but I’m just worried about my kid going to school safely and alive. Horizon West is supposed to be a master-planned area with the existing residential that it was designed for. Why doesn’t county transportation give realistic information to the county commissioners to accurately represent the conditions before they vote on even more ultra-high density residential apartments when they’re clearly not designed for it?”

“Why are we doing it now? I don’t think a good answer is to do nothing about the traffic congestion,” Demings said. “I wish that, as a community, we would have addressed this before now. But the fact of the matter is, because we have grown so tremendously, you see the outcome of that tremendous growth, and it’s clogging our roadways.”

Local resident Wendie Finnan said she does not see how the proposed tax would benefit District 1 specifically.

“What are you doing for those of us currently in District 1 where mass transit is not going to alleviate the traffic congestion, because it seems to me that every benefit that you’re talking about is for the other districts, and I don’t see what’s in it for us,” she said. “Orange County is allowing indiscriminate development, and they’re allowing infrastructure to come after the development, and that is just wrong. … It’s not acceptable the way it is today, and I count too. I matter. I’m a resident, and I matter.”

“I cannot continue to drive on these roads where kids and everybody else is looking at their cell phones, and there are more and more accidents, and it’s taking longer and longer to get where I want to go,” another resident said. “I have always voted no on taxes, because I didn’t see the big picture. So, I’m not sure what the answer is, but I know what we’re doing right now isn’t working. A half penny, a penny; I’m not so much worried about that. I can live with that. But I can’t live with the way things are going around here right now.”