When you see the projected economic benefits of the new RTA Next plan, you might be wowed.
I know I perked up during a Wednesday presentation on the plan at the El Rio Neighborhood Center when I saw these numbers flash up on a slide highlighting the 20-year plan's projected benefits:
• 48,000 + new jobs
• $3.7 billion + total economic benefit
Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller
And I worried when I saw the next slide highlighting what the effects would be if we don't pass RTA Next:
• 54,000 job loss
• $3.5 billion economic loss
God knows Tucson doesn't need that!
But the truth, it appears, is somewhat tamer than those slides expressed — something we should keep in mind as we decide how to vote March 10 on the two propositions that would give us a new 20-year transportation plan.
And the immediate economic benefits, while they may be real, are likely to be focused in the transportation industries. Political donations supporting Prop. 418 and Prop. 419 show how much they cherish the half-cent per dollar sales tax that funds the RTA Next plan.
This issue came up during a pre-recorded episode of The Press Room on Arizona Public Media that I participated in Thursday night. During the recording, which airs Friday at 8:30 p.m. on Channel 6, two other journalists and I questioned RTA Executive Director Michael Ortega and board member Ted Maxwell about the plan.
Suffice it to say, I expressed skepticism, but it was not deeply grounded in the economic impact projections. Since then, I've had a little more time to look into them and come to understand what these numbers really mean.
Numbers need context
They are based on a December 2023 study by Rounds Consulting, the Phoenix firm hired to estimate RTA's past and potential future economic impacts. This is one of the respectable Arizona firms that carry out such studies, but these studies are always fraught with the threat of bias.
This is true of any study carried out on behalf of an entity that wants to prove its worth, not just RTA. They get what they pay for.
Pima County voters will be asked in March to approve a nearly $3 billion plan for major transportation projects over the next 20 years.
Beyond that, I covered economic development for the Star for years back in the early 2000s, before becoming business editor, and learned that economic impact studies sometimes exaggerate by using multiplier effects that expand the benefits of a given project for greater public appeal.
I'm not accusing the Rounds study of exaggerating, but I am saying that those numbers demand a little context to be correctly understood.
Take, for example, another number in the study, the estimated number of jobs created by RTA 1 from its founding in 2006 up through 2023.
"Looking back, it is estimated that the current RTA half-cent sales tax not only supported temporary construction jobs, but also helped create 40,000 new permanent jobs throughout Pima County. In other words, if the existing tax were not previously approved, the region would have produced 40,000 fewer jobs over the previous two decades."
To understand this number, I contacted the Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity and asked them how many jobs were added in Pima County between 2005, before the first RTA took effect, and now.
They told me that between November 2005 and November 2025, the Tucson Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is basically Pima County, added a total of 30,000 jobs.
Get that? The Rounds study says the RTA "helped create" 10,000 more jobs over most of the life of the project than the Tucson area actually added in real life. Now, this is not mathematically impossible — we could have lost jobs over that period. But it does raise skepticism.
Benefits and opportunity cost
So we should keep that in mind when we consider the future projections made in that study and used in RTA Next presentations like the one I saw at El Rio. What the study attempts to do is project the difference in job growth if we approve or if we reject the RTA plan. The projected job growth from 2025 to 2045 in Pima County is 87,600 jobs, the study says.
The study's language is cautious. Extending the tax and spending on transportation, the study says, "could yield an increase in economic activity over the same 20-year timeframe equal to an estimated 48,000 additional jobs above the baseline projection."
If we don't approve the tax? "A reduction in regional transportation infrastructure investment could reduce the projected baseline job gains (i.e., 87,600) by an estimated 54,000 jobs. This means the economic damage from a deteriorating transportation infrastructure system is equal to 54,000 lost jobs by 2045 and a loss of $3.5B in cumulative tax revenues."
Now, I don't doubt the special significance of transportation infrastructure in sustaining economic strength, because it facilitates commerce and makes Tucson more attractive. But RTA Next isn't necessarily the only way to do it.
If the RTA Next plan fails, I expect Tucson and other local towns to take their own plans to their cities' voters over the next couple of years. Whether they pass is, of course, unclear, but the economic benefits that accrue from RTA projects would accrue just as well from city-sponsored projects.
Beyond that, a half-cent-per-dollar not spent on a sales tax doesn't necessarily do nothing in the economy. I checked on this with UA economics Prof. Mark Stegeman, who told me in an email, "that is the fundamental concept of opportunity cost, as I was just teaching to a business class yesterday."
"Opportunity cost is the idea that resources (financial or otherwise) consumed in one activity are not being used for another (the sacrificed 'opportunity')," he added. So, while transportation infrastructure is generally a good investment, a lot of the money not spent on a sales tax will be used on something else that will have some economic impact.
Road-construction donations
What's clear about the economic impact is that it will be concentrated in road construction and related businesses. This self-evident point is also visible in the pattern of donations to Connect Pima, the campaign entity created to help pass RTA Next.
Connect Pima is a PAC chaired by Mimi Coomler, the CEO of Tucson Medical Center and also chair of the board of the Southern Arizona Leadership Council, a leading entity pushing for RTA Next.
The donations that make the Connect Pima campaign possible are primarily from companies in the construction, engineering, equipment and related industries.
Out of $554,070 contributed to Connect Pima so far, about $400,000 comes from entities connected to industries that would get business from RTA's passage. The largest contribution, $90,000, is from the Arizona chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America. The second largest, $60,000, is from the Arizona Transportation Builders Association. And so on.
So when you see the many ads from Connect Pima promoting Props. 418 and 419, take into consideration that they are paid for by an industry that would benefit directly from us extending this tax.
And when you see estimates of a booming benefit, realize that those numbers should be viewed in context, and could potentially be replicated by the cities if they manage to convince voters to pass their own transportation plans.
