What's at stake:
Everyone seems to agree that fixing Fresno County’s crumbling roads should be a top priority in the next version of Measure C, Fresno County’s transportation sales tax. With a $7 billion spending plan expected on the ballot in 2026, who should pay for the damages?
Research shows that trucks cause far more damage than passenger vehicles, while the industry isn’t paying as much as residents to fix it. But shifting the tax burden to the trucking industry could be complicated.
Each 18-wheeler that barrels down a Fresno County road delivers as much damage to the underlying pavement as up to 6,000 passenger vehicles.
As a result, a state-funded analysis found that the trucking industry should pay $50 for every dollar a resident contributes to road maintenance.
But currently, the trucking industry – now Fresno County’s fastest-growing source of traffic – pays roughly 40-50 cents for every dollar residents fork over via gas taxes, sales taxes and registration fees, documents and interviews show. Residents are having to make up for this deficit with higher gas taxes, paying much more for good roads than the damages they cause.
Right now, Fresno County leaders are discussing how to change this math of who funds the upkeep for the region’s road network, with the renewal of Measure C, the county’s transportation sales tax which has been on the books since 1986. The measure being crafted right now needs approval from two-thirds of county voters next fall – a steep hurdle that will determine whether residents continue subsidizing truck damage for another generation.
But instead of asking agriculture landowners and logistics companies to pay for the damages they cause, these leaders are considering a familiar path: Asking county residents to vote, yet again, for a plan that would have them shoulder the vast majority of the road maintenance costs for the next 30 years.
“Everyone needs to pay their fair share,” said Sandra Celedon, president of Fresno Building Healthy Communities and member of community coalition Transportation for All. “We cannot ask working people to keep subsidizing big industries.”
Up to 70% of future Measure C revenues — $5 billion of the overall $7 billion expected to come in over the next 30 years — could be taken up by paying for road maintenance needs.
This approach, which maintains a similar funding structure to the plan that failed to receive voters’ approval in 2022, would result in billions of dollars being taken off the table for other county-wide infrastructure priorities, such as public transit, sidewalks, congestion reduction, dealing with climate change or reducing the county’s road fatalities.
County leaders do not have much time to debate these trade-offs. The 38-member steering committee for Measure C has given themselves until the end of September to come to an agreement on how much each transportation need will potentially receive from Measure C’s $7 billion pot, including road maintenance.
The fast timeline was part of a historic agreement that brought together the two opposing sides of 2022’s failed Measure C renewal.
Whatever consensus is reached in the next 60 days could lock in Fresno’s transportation spending patterns for generations to come.
“With the renewal of Measure C upon us,” said Celedon, also a candidate to represent Fresno in the state Assembly, “we must ensure strong fiscal responsibility protections and use this opportunity to ensure taxpayers do not continue to bear the cost of road deterioration for which they are not primarily responsible.”
How we pay for roads now
In 2022, Measure C’s main focus was road maintenance: It asked voters to approve a plan which would have spent $3.5 billion in resident-generated taxes for road maintenance over the next 30 years.
Voters said no.
The major reason why voters rejected the measure, outreach results show, is that residents felt they already pay high taxes for road repairs to begin with.
The data pointed to a paradox which, so far, has failed to be addressed. For years, residents have been saying road repaving is a top issue. But they already pay gas taxes, vehicle registration fees and local sales taxes for that.
Neither the city nor county use your property taxes to fund road maintenance.
Despite Fresno’s massive suburban footprint, the city spent $490,637 from its general fund over the last 10 years to maintain its 1,600-mile street network, according to city spokesperson Sontaya Rose. That’s only $31 per year on upkeep for each mile of road in Fresno.
For Fresno County, according to spokesperson Sonja Dosti, they don’t spend a single dollar from their $800 million general fund to maintain their 4,500-mile road network — the largest of any county in the state.
Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer has taken the lead on changing this trend, helping the city council greenlight a $100 million “Pave Now, Pay Later” bond this June which would commit some general fund revenues toward repaving projects. But it’s only a 10% dent on decades of neglect, as the city’s road maintenance backlog runs to more than $1 billion.
“We need to focus on fixing our roads in our neighborhoods. That’s what people want, and absent Measure C and absent Pave More Now, Pay Later, we won’t be able to do that,” Dyer told Fresnoland in an interview. “Not with our general fund today.”
What about developers? Developer fees don’t fully address the problem either. The developer fees charged by Measure C, which bring in roughly $6 million every year, can only be used to expand roads and highways, not maintain them. These projects often generate even more traffic, accelerating the very deterioration they can’t legally address.
To renew Measure C by 2026, the Transportation for All coalition has engaged thousands of county residents over the last several months to gather input on what Measure C’s $7 billion pot should be used for.
Part of what they’ve heard from residents, Celedon said in a statement, is that they’re tired of bearing the brunt of road repair costs when the bulk of that damage is caused by big trucks.
This interest in industry ponying up for road degradation is shared by some county mayors, including Rey Leon of Huron.
“We shouldn’t subsidize these corporations that are already spewing all these emissions,” said Leon. “And now they’re screwing up our roads and we’re having to pay for it? That’s totally uncalled for.”
How could truckers pay their fair share using Measure C?
California’s logistics industry has grown by 40% since 2020, far outpacing Fresno County’s population growth over that time span of only 1.2%.
But despite their explosive growth and outsized role in road damage, trucks end up contributing a fraction of what passenger cars pay into the state’s transportation system. Diesel taxes generate just $4 billion annually, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, while gasoline-powered vehicles contribute $7.8 billion.
The state has a fee for big rigs based on their total weight, which brings in another $1.3 billion, but those dollars don’t normally go to road maintenance either. Like Fresno’s local developer fee, the big rig fee is mostly used to pay down debts for road and highway expansions.
California now faces a $200 billion transportation funding shortfall, according to the California Transportation Commission. The transition to electric vehicles threatens to increase that by another $30 billion.
In the gap, the state has come to rely on increasingly unpopular gas tax hikes on residents. The last major one, from 2017, added $175 to drivers annually (more than three times Measure C’s overall cost to residents) and hasn’t kept up with the pace of road deterioration, according to state legislative analyst Frank Jimenez.
“The revenues [from higher resident taxes] are helpful in terms of keeping conditions stable with some improvements, but revenues still aren’t enough,” Jimenez said.
Critics say the reasons why diesel trucks don’t pay more into the state’s transportation system are simple: political power and technical hurdles.
“If we’re looking at why don’t trucks pay proportionally more, I think one of the key reasons is that the trucking lobby is extremely powerful,” said Asha Weinstein-Agrawal, director of education at San Jose State’s Mineta Transportation Institute.
“My guess is that when you’re an elected official looking at the cost-benefit of taking on the trucking industry, it’s a hard sell. And there’s not a huge ground swelling of people on the other side.”
The trucking industry has historically opposed new road fees on the grounds of fearing double-taxation — but, according to a Reason Foundation analysis, their participation in pilot programs to explore what implementation could look like signals a willingness to acknowledge the reality that current funds aren’t keeping up with road needs.
In 2017, CalSTA, California’s top transportation agency, engaged county experts from Madera to Riverside County to explore road user fees. While the state agency has conducted additional pilots since then, efforts to implement such fees at either the state or county level have stalled with no actual policy moving forward.
But even if political hurdles are cleared, Weinstein-Agrawal added, there are also technical problems which need to be solved for a trucking fee to be carried out at the local level.
These include staffers at weigh stations tracking how much trucks weigh and how much they drive on county roads. Caltrans is currently working on pilot programs on how to implement similar road user fees right now, and Weinstein-Agrawal wonders if the state could help take the lead.
“To measure their mileage, you need to build them out [weigh stations for the trucks]. It’s just really an administrative issue, and it can be done, but I think it would be costly and difficult at a county level.”
No county in California has attempted a fee on trucks.
County leaders hesitant to put pressure on trucking industry
Fresno’s mayor and some of his allies, however, aren’t so sure about taxing trucks. Some of them question whether such types of taxation belong in Measure C discussions in the first place.
That includes Brooke Ashjian, a local businessman who owns a road paving company and a fleet of heavy duty trucks. Ashjian was on Dyer’s shortlist to represent Fresno on the Measure C steering committee.
A longtime driver of Fresno’s teeth-rattling commutes along Shaw Avenue, Ashjian blames shoddy contractor work from decades past for the current state of roads. He believes resident-funded Measure C revenues — not the trucking industry — should foot the bill for repairs.
“We’re paying our fair share,” Ashjian said about the trucking industry. “I’m paying $10,000 just in registration fees for a single truck.”
Earlier in the process, Ashjian was controversially booted — and shortly thereafter reinstated — to the steering committee. But he says the disagreements as of late over visions for road repairs were enough for him to quit the committee altogether, again.
“My personal opinion is the design on these roads is faulty,” Ashjian said. “I would hope [the committee cares about road maintenance goals], but they don’t. That’s the problem. I quit. I’m off the deal. I resigned from the committee.”
While Dyer said he’s been in discussions about a fee for residents commuting from Madera, he is not considering one for the trucking industry. He thinks that adding in something like a trucking fee would complicate the renewal discussions too much.
“Measure C right now, as you have witnessed, is challenging enough with all of the complexities involved and the diversity of opinions as to what the measure should look like,” he said. “I would like to make sure that we don’t add any complexities that would cause it ultimately not to be passed.”
What about developer impact fees?
The last time Measure C was renewed in 2006, it created a developer fee to pay for the costs of highway expansions. But taking a similar approach with a user fee for road maintenance has not been raised.
This sticks out because, since 2006, many other local communities — including Fresno and Clovis — have adopted a similar approach. When a new warehouse opens up, the city of Fresno has fees to build wider roads, decreasing the amount they would have to dig into other resources, like Measure C.
Fresno County doesn’t have a countywide road impact fee – but it does collect some transportation mitigation fees from developers, on a case-by-case basis.
Beyond brick-and-mortar businesses, residents have also been asked by local government in recent years to pay for their fair share of costs — a quirk in California municipal finance since the 1980s. In Fresno and Clovis, new subdivisions are required to create community facilities districts, which tack additional charges onto homeowners’ property tax bills to help fund roads and sidewalk maintenance.
Can the coalition find a winning path?
In the end, organizers experienced in navigating Measure C renewals pushed back on Dyer’s assessment that a user fee would be an unnecessary complication.
“The first premise of a tax measure that requires a two-thirds vote is that you cannot sell it with keywords. You can’t sell it to a community that has any active opposition. It just won’t work,” said Mary Savala, a member of the League of Women Voters who was part of the 2002’s failed Measure C renewal as well as the successful 2006 renewal.
The major task of any Measure C plan, Savala said, is very simple: listening to a residents’ gut reaction.
“People know justice when they see it,” she said. “And if there are people who make a profit when using our public facilities that are not paying their fair share for the use of it? That’s an injustice.”
The Measure C steering committee plans to finalize recommendations on what percentage of revenue should go toward broad spending categories by the end of this month.
The general categories the committee has adopted so far include existing neighborhood roads, public transportation, active transportation, regional connectivity, administration and other.
Polling is also supposed to begin later this month.
