As of late, Auburn residents have been sending email and other messages to members of the Auburn Transportation Benefit District Board, composed of every member of the City Council.

About the $20 car tab fee the TBD approved Dec. 13, 2016.

Turns out most people don’t like it.

And they resent how state law allows a TBD to impose a car tab fee without a public vote.

Responding to the heat, the TBD, on Feb. 22 tabled further action on the car tab fee, that is, making it official by sending the legislation to Olympia.

“We’ve received a lot of email and information from people that gave us good reason to hold off. We’ve decided to table it to determine if it meets all the requirements and is fair for our people,” said TBD member and Councilman Bob Baggett.

On Monday the City Council set up an ad-hoc committee, composed of four members of the council, to work with the City’s finance director to scout alternative funding for the $800,000 year the TBD estimated would flow in from the car tab fee.

Because City streets and roads still need maintenance and repair, and there’s a paucity of money in the street and road kitty at the moment to make it happen.

The actual mission of the ad-hoc committee and whether it would be open to the public or not occasioned a few sparks between two members of the City Council.

While John Holman declared himself in favor of discussing the car tab fee and where to find funds, he didn’t like the idea of all that happening in an ad-hoc committee, where the typical membership of three council members puts the meeting below the four-person threshold that demands a meeting be open to the public, according to the state’s Open Public Meetings Act.

“You’ll be looking for new resources I’m sure, talking about cutting programs that are already cast in the biennial budget,” Holman said. “I don’t think that should be done in an ad-hoc committee. That should be done in public so people can hear the reasoning behind why you are looking to cut from this or that.”

If something comes out of an ad-hoc committee, and then comes back to the council for action, Holman continued, it’s a done deal, with an an up-or-down vote on it.

“I would prefer that debate take place in the public view, so we debate where that money should come from, what should be cut, and do so with the reasoning open for everybody’s attention,” Holman said.

Concerned about getting the committee’s work done within the 120-day window suggested by the TBD, a visibly-annoyed Peloza responded that the TBD had already discussed the issue, “to New York and back.”

“… John, you really take me back. You keep discussing ad-hoc committees as being … back-room politics, when the truth is an ad-hoc committee is the fact-finding committee, basically,” Peloza said. “We are out there picking up data from where we can pick it up. You keep hammering away like ad-hoc committees are a failure, and they are not.”

As said above, the meetings of the ad-hoc committee will be open to the public.

In 2005, when lawmakers in Olympia made transportation benefit districts possible in Washington state, they authorized them to impose license tab fees for street and road improvements within their jurisdictions without a public vote.

So on Dec. 13, 2016, when the TBD, voted 6 to 1 to establish a tab fee on car owners within the city of Auburn, it was acting under that authority.

But there are other TBD fees that do demand voters within the district approve them by at least a simple majority.

And on Monday, the uncertain fate of the car tab fee delayed another council vote, this on an agreement between the City and the TBD relating to a potential 0.2 percent sales and use tax to fund significant transportation improvement projects within the district.

That is, a memorandum of understanding, agreeing that the TBD and the City Council would work together to educate voters before they vote about the potential imposition of the sales and use tax.

“I feel at this time for us to move forward with this action when we haven’t quite figured out what we are doing with the $20 tab is putting the cart before the horse, and I would like to have this tabled until we have the tab issue resolved,” said Deputy Mayor Largo Wales, who in December cast the lone no vote against the car tab fee.

What the MOU said was that the TBD and the City of Auburn agreed they had a mutual obligation to engage in substantive efforts, before any public vote on the sales and use tax measure, to provide “factual and relevant information” to voters so they would know what they were voting on when they voted on it.

It affirmed that the TBD and the City of Auburn would work together to provide voters information to ensure they knew how much the tax would cost them, and what they would get in return.

The sales tax cannot be imposed for longer than 10 years at a time, except to repay debt.