PHOENIX — Business and community groups took the first steps Tuesday to convincing Arizonans to raise the taxes on virtually everything they buy to build new roads, widen and repair existing ones and fund a series of mass transit projects including a rail line from Tucson to Phoenix and perhaps beyond.

Papers filed with the Secretary of State’s Office will allow the group, organized as the TIME Coalition, to start gathering signatures to put the $42.6 billion project on the ballot.

Time is running out: Backers need 153,365 signatures by July 3 even to put the question to voters in November.

Realistically, that translates to at least 200,000 signatures, given the number which are routinely disqualified because of bad addresses and people not registered, about 3,500 signatures a day.

But Marty Shultz, treasurer of the committee more formally named Transportation and Infrastructure Moving AZ’s Economy, said he believes businesses that want all that new construction, for whatever reason, will provide him enough money to hire the paid circulators  and eventually to wage a campaign designed to convince voters to hike their own sales taxes by a penny for every dollar they spend beginning Jan. 1, 2010, for the next 30 years. That computes out to everything from an additional dime on a movie ticket to $250 more tacked on to the price of a $25,000 new car.

Many of those dollars for the campaign are likely to come from the construction industry. In fact, the chairman of the coalition is Doug Pruitt, chairman of Sundt Construction, a firm which makes money building roads road and also has a $135 million contract to build part of the current Phoenix light rail project.

Exactly what taxpayers would get for that $42.6 billion, however, is not yet in cement. In fact, there is nothing in the 15-page initiative the document Arizonans are being asked to sign and eventually enact into law that spells out a single road that will be constructed.

Instead, Shultz, a lobbyist for Arizona Public Service, said he expects the state Transportation Board to approve a priority list next month. That list, he said, will form the basis for what will be financed.

Even that, however, would not be legally guaranteed: Shultz said changes could be made if the state’s growth patterns defy projections during the 30-year life of the tax.

Still, the initiative does contain some general categories.

The biggest chunk of the money  — more than $23 billion —  is specifically earmarked for “strategic highway projects,” including freeways and other state highways that will be identified as priorities. Preliminary studies have included widening all of Arizona’s interstate highways as well as new lanes and improvements on many of the current two-lane roads.

Cities, counties and tribes would divide up another $8.5 billion in revenues to spend on their own priorities.

The balance includes money for bikeways, scenic roads, protecting neighborhoods  and more than $7.6 billion for mass transit, with the lion’s share of that designated for that proposed intercity passenger rail service.

Here, too, the initiative does not spell out a specific route. But Shultz said the general idea is to have it run from Tucson through Phoenix and perhaps beyond to Wickenburg, Prescott and even into Northern Arizona.

Shultz said he sees nothing wrong with asking voters to commit now to financing construction of a rail system from scratch in a state with no history or hard evidence of how many people would use it.

“You look around the world and you see examples of people who, when their populations are large enough and their economy is of a particular configuration, they do use it,” he said.

Closer to home, he said light rail systems that have been built in other cities “have immediately blown the doors off” usage estimates. He predicted the same result in Arizona when the light rail system being built through Phoenix and Tempe begins operating in December.

“With the population projections, the ‘megapolitan’ concept of the population between Phoenix and Tucson, there’s no reason to believe that a major rail system in Arizona won’t work,” Shultz said.

The same is true, he said, of money earmarked to expand that Phoenix-area rail system as well as new funds for a Tucson light rail system. And he said that will be helped along by $4 a gallon gasoline and increased congestion.

The one guarantee in the initiative is creation of what he called “firewalls” between the various categories. He said, for example, that means money earmarked for freeways can’t be spent on rail, or rail dollars can’t end up going for bike paths.

Overall, he said, the package is designed to attract voters by having a little bit of something for everyone.

Some people, he said, want more mass transit. That, he said, will include not just the intercity and commuter rail projects but also things like dial-a-ride service in rural communities.

Others who commute to work, Shultz said, will be attracted to putting more dollars into road improvements, not just in the major urban areas but in other communities. And he said urban residents have an interest in improving rural roads between communities if for no other reason than making it easier for them to get to their summer homes in the mountains.