Endorsement: Reject Measure G. SANDAG is dishonest, dysfunctional.

It’s impossible to recall a ballot measure backed by a major local government that had less credibility than the San Diego Association of Governments’ Measure G. It would raise the sales tax by a half-cent countywide to help SANDAG pay for its comprehensive plan to oversee regional road repairs, carpool lanes, and expanded bus and rail transportation. It only needs a simple majority to . But here’s how many votes it deserves: zero. SANDAG’s history of dissembling and dysfunction shows it can’t be trusted.

Consider Measure A. SANDAG’s proposed 2016 county sales tax was marketed with what agency leaders knew to be profoundly dishonest projections of how much revenue it could generate and how many projects it could fund. The discovery of this scandal led to the ouster of Executive Director Gary Gallegos. But did this lead SANDAG to clean up its act?

To the contrary, audits showed that new Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata (salary: $414,000) improperly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, including outrageous bequests to employees, in open defiance of agency rules. They also showed Ikhrata (who resigned in December) and other top officials simply didn’t care when SANDAG employees amassed more than $300,000 in improper bills on taxpayer-funded purchase cards.

But the SANDAG scammers weren’t done yet: Last year, it emerged that agency officials had long charged up to 45,000 local drivers for a South County toll road they did not use, then hid their deceit for more than a year from the local officials who make up SANDAG’s Board of Directors.

This history of malfeasance — and this is the short version — made it absolutely no surprise that in March, it was confirmed the U.S. Justice Department was investigating SANDAG.

Yet SANDAG’s dereliction goes far beyond its financial chicanery. Incredibly, the agency has for three years refused to respond to basic, difficult questions about its $160 billion long-term regional transportation blueprint. Its main feature is a 200-mile network of elevated or tunneled high-speed rail. , the state’s high-speed rail project is in its second decade of endless delays in building new rail lines in the lightly populated Central Valley. Yet SANDAG has never even tried to explain why it thought it could fare better in far richer, far more densely populated San Diego County — even though Gov. Jerry Brown gave up on voter-approved plans to build a state high-speed link between San Jose and San Francisco in 2012 because of the exact same obstacles. He knew it was impossible.

In normal circumstances, raising taxes to pay for needed transportation improvements is often a very good idea, and San Diego County’s need to respond to the climate emergency by reducing vehicle greenhouse gas emissions is obvious. But these are not normal circumstances. Since 2016, SANDAG has responded to scandals not with a new emphasis on propriety but with a new round of scandals. At the same time, it responded to pointed, informed questions about its plans by ignoring the questions. This appalling history demands the rejection of Measure G.