MST board considers a sales-tax measure for November ballot.

Asking voters to subsidize public transit tends to be unpopular. Asking them to subsidize public transit for older, disabled or veterans riders might be just popular enough. 

The Monterey-Salinas Transit board voted unanimously on Monday to move forward with gauging support for a one-eighth sales tax hike that would fund transit programs for senior, disabled and veteran riders. That's the most modest of several sales-tax proposals that pollsters from Tulchin Research considered last year. 

Today's vote doesn't mean the measure will appear on the November ballot, but direct MST to seriously canvass support. The measure requires a two-thirds vote to pass.

"Two-thirds is a very very difficult hill to climb, and you want to be certain," MST General Manager Carl Sedoryk says. "What we found is we have the most support for a very small, targeted sales tax measure. Initial results are very promising."

The proposed one-eighth-cent would generate an estimated $5 million a year, about enough to backfill popular unfunded programs for riders with disabilities and seniors. A taxi voucher program that launched two years ago provided 6,000 rides in 2012, and about 18,000 rides in 2013. It's currently powered by leftover grant funds, which Sedoryk expects to dry up by mid-2015 without another funding source. 

The tax measure would also help provide transit to the new VA clinic under construction in Marina, which is expected to generate lots of veteran traffic. 

Military transit benefits have already taken a hit as MST has been operating on a stop-and-go budgetary system lately, dependent on increasingly unreliable state and federal funds for basic operations. Nagging labor disputes have left big questions about the reliability of federal funding.

This would be MST's first such effort at getting support for a voter-approved tax, since the transit authority in its current governance structure has only existed since 2010.

Prior to that, MST participated in two failed efforts by the Transportation Agency for Monterey County to get two-thirds support for tax increases that would've helped to provide a local funding source to bolster state and federal money.