The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

The City of Dayton is asking the city’s voters next month to approve a sales tax increase within the city of 0.2%. The funds will be used to help improve the city’s streets and sidewalks.

If the February 10 measure is approved by at least 50% of voters, Dayton will set up a new “Transportation Benefit District” (TBD – get it?) which will collect the new funds and can use them only for transportation improvements.

So the future of potential projects to improve the city’s ailing streets is to be determined by the voters.

The tax increase is miniscule: it will add 20 cents to a $100 purchase within the Dayton city limits. Twenty cents! The next time I buy a ten-dollar bag of cat food at the grocery store, I’ll be contributing two cents to the improvement of Dayton’s streets.

The amount of revenue to be collected is modest as well. According to city officials, the new tax funds will amount to roughly $69,000 per year.

That’s a small part of what’s needed to make the streets right – the city estimates it would take over $7 million – but it will be a big help. Not only will the money pay for getting started on projects, but it can be used as matching funds for state and federal grants as well. It could also be used to pay interest on bonds for larger projects.

I’ve spent enough time driving around Spokane to know that Dayton hardly has a monopoly on ailing streets. Every city in the world that has cars has potholes. And every city in the world struggles to figure out how to pay to fix them.

Grants from the state and the feds has been the main way street projects in Dayton have been funded, but those funds have gotten a lot scarcer in the last decade. Local streets have suffered for it.

Voters in Dayton should jump at this chance to help get the city’s streets back to where they should be. I’ll keep feeding Buddy the cat, even if it costs me a couple of extra pennies to do it.