Recently, San Mateo County Transit District (SamTrans) officials revealed that a new half-cent sales tax in San Mateo County is being discussed as a means to bail out the failing SamTrans district.
Such a proposal is an outrage, as the causes for SamTrans’ budget woes are the direct result of mismanagement. The taxpayers must not be punished for bad decisions of our local transit managers.
The causes of SamTrans’ budget crisis have been blamed on high fuel prices hurting both SamTrans and Caltrain, which is managed by SamTrans. Officials have blamed a diverse transit portfolio, including service for the disabled, as contributing to the budget debacle.
But those same officials, including SamTrans general Manager Mike Scanlon and county Supervisor Jerry Hill, obscure the real truth — the BART to SFO disaster.
SamTrans announced earlier this year that it is more than $24 million in the red. The transit district budget continues to hemorrhage under its contractual obligation to cover the operating losses for the BART-SFO extension, which opened in 2003. The four-station extension has been a money loser since it opened and, due to the deal brokered by county transit officials, SamTrans must cover the losses. This year alone, the BART payment will be approximately $11.2 million, and has averaged around $10 million every year.
How did we get here?
In the late 1990s, the BART extension was pursued by county transit managers over the more cost-efficient and sensible investment of electrifying Caltrain. Local transit officials invited BART to service northern San Mateo County.
In lieu of joining the BART district, wherein San Mateo County voters would have had to approve a permanent property tax, county officials agreed to cover the operating costs for the extension predicated on the idea that the extension would one day turn a profit.
Boosters such as Supervisor Hill repeated the mantra that “BART at any cost is worth the price.”
Three years after the extension opened, ridership has never come close to what was proposed and SamTrans has had to pay millions of dollars to BART each year with no relief in sight. Because the county is not part of the BART district it will never have an elected representative on the BART board to advocate for local interests.
These same officials claim that the ridership predictions were based on the economic context of the dot.com era; however, that’s not true. The ridership projections were developed in the early 1990s, before the average person had heard of the internet.
What’s true is that fuel prices have increased dramatically. Ironically, if SamTrans had invested in electrifying Caltrain 10 years ago, for half of the cost of constructing the BART-SFO extension, the effects of increased fuel cost would have been significantly reduced.
In 1995, the county’s Civil Grand Jury reviewed all proposals and urged SamTrans and Caltrain officials to invest in Caltrain and to abandon the quixotic pursuit of BART-SFO/Millbrae. The grand jury was rebuffed and the Jerry Hills of the world won out.
Now these same officials would like to increase sales tax in San Mateo County to the highest in the Bay Area to compensate for their mistakes.
This disaster is man made. Let those same men find another solution, and let us, the taxpayers, not forget those men who made this disaster.
Tom Dempsey lives in Portola Valley and was a member of the county’s 1995 civil grand jury.
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