San Diego County’s SANDAG was forced to vote to remove the Mileage Tax from the San Diego county’s regional transportation plan!

The board, which consists of mayors, councilmembers, and County Supervisors, voted to remove a contentious “Regional Road User Charge,” AKA the “mileage tax,” from SANDAG’s 2025 Regional Plan. The original plan proposed a 4- to 6-cent-per-mile tax that would cost the average driver $900 per year on top of registration, license, sky-high gas taxes – and possibly an electric vehicle surcharge to compensate for the lack of fossil fuel tax revenues. An equivalent of an 80-cent-per-gallon hike in now outrageous gas tax!

The proposed tax was to assist in funding The mileage tax, originally proposed to fund a $162.5 billion railway expansion that included a transit connection to San Diego International Airport, a fix for fragile rail tracks along Del Mar bluffs, and kickstart a 200-mile commuter rail system.

All apparently to advance the progressive communist agenda to curtail the ownership and use of private vehicles stemming from the uber-progress Governor Jerry Brown and his appointment of Adriana Gianturco as the director of the California Department of Transportation in 1976. Unlike his father, Pat Brown, who was a proponent of large infrastructure projects to keep California golden, his son Jerry was little more than a hippie/Jesuit Democrat wingnut.

The joke is that drivers would be gouged just to drive on poorly maintained freeways already paid for and maintained with the original gas and sales taxes! Of course, the politicians have diverted those funds elsewhere and replaced them with moldering IOUs.

However, the biggest joke on taxpayers remains California’s multi-billion High-Speed Rail project to planning, design, build, and operate the first high-speed rail in the nation, sold on the progressive promise to connect the mega-regions of the state, contribute to economic development and a cleaner environment, create jobs, and preserve agricultural and protected lands—a political boondoggle benefiting developers, consultants, contractors, and unions. Ridership estimates and cost recovery are a joke, and the project appears to be little more than a money-losing, highly subsidized transit system to move illegal aliens from the hinterlands to employment centers.