Local opinion: What Tucson can learn from Houston's Prop B

As we analyze Tuesday’s election results, one of the most interesting and perhaps instructive outcomes for Tucsonans didn’t take place in Pima County at all.

Houston’s citizen-led, grassroots initiative Proposition B gathered 23,000 signatures to force the Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC), their regional government similar to our Pima Association of Governments, to consider population and address underrepresentation of Houston and Harris County residents in regional decision making. It passed by 30 points.

Now that it’s passed, Houston and Harris County have 60 days to negotiate a more balanced voting structure within H-GAC. Failure to do so requires Houston and Harris County to leave their metropolitan planning organization and start their own.

Why does this matter to Tucson?

Recall in 2021 when Mayor Regina Romero and I pushed for an alternative voting structure at the Pima Association of Governments’ (PAG) Regional Council and RTA Board (Regional Transportation Authority), one that took into account proportional representation by population?

Like Houston, our metropolitan planning organization, PAG, and our local transportation funding program, RTA, give equal voting power to each of the nine jurisdictions in our region — resulting in a reality where 83% of our regional population (Pima County and Tucson combined) gets just 22% of the voting power. Vail voters rejected incorporation this time, but if they choose to incorporate in the future under our current structure they’ll automatically get a seat on the Regional Council and RTA Board, further diluting urban votes and empowering an even stronger suburban bloc.

Like Houston, our metropolitan planning organization is governed by our Regional Council which controls and distributes federal funds and state-shared revenues for transportation projects including roads, transit, sidewalks, bikeways, and more.

Our one-vote per jurisdiction model may have worked earlier in this century but today we continue to see Highway User Revenues from the gas tax fall and transportation priorities shift in urban versus suburban communities. It has become harder for Tucson and Pima County to advocate for their needs, which include maintaining the roads we have, improving safety for all road users, and expanding investment in reliable, frequent transit service.

Too often, smaller jurisdictions vote to support unilaterally-created, staff-directed policies that deny our largest population centers access to a fair share of flexible funding they could use to pay for badly needed transportation improvements.

The Biden Administration’s Carbon Reduction Program sent $11.5 million in flexible funds to our region, half of which has been unilaterally siphoned off by PAG to backfill budgets for its existing programs that have little proven record of reducing any carbon emissions. This was done with approval from our Regional Council over the lone objection of the City of Tucson, which has 52% of the population but only 11% of the voting power at the Regional Council.

When we had this discussion in 2021, leaders from our smaller jurisdictions easily steered the conversation away from proportional representation and instead offered empty gestures that included more members on subcommittees. Why would they change a system that clearly benefits them at the expense of urban taxpayers? Those empty gestures have resulted in little change as subcommittees either don’t meet or have their input iced out.

As we head into the sixth year of negotiating RTA Next, a continuation of our County-wide, half-cent sales tax for regional transportation, remember that unless we address the systemic inequities within our regional government’s voting structure, we can expect to see the same story unfold, one where the suburbs enjoy pothole free roads paid for by our lowest income residents who struggle to move around safely in their own communities.

Houston’s Prop B shows our community another way. If our local leaders can’t address the imbalance in our regional government, perhaps the grassroots can force them to.