San Francisco County Transportation Authority weighs support for Caltrain with ballot measure
Next week, on Tuesday July 20, San Francisco County Transportation Authority, which acts as the city’s congestion management agency, may consider putting a $10 vehicle license fee increase on the November ballot. That $10 fee would fund various transportation programs. But the SFCTA is currently leaning against using the some of the money to support Caltrain.
Last week, San Mateo County’s congestion management agency – C/CAG (City/County Association of Governments), approved the same fee on the ballot in San Mateo County. For the San Mateo County’s ballot measure, half of the funds would go directly to cities for local streets and roads, and the other half would fund county-wide programs including SamTrans and Caltrain. Although the funds generated from the fee is not large (about $6 million per year), it would be a partial solution to the funding problem at SamTrans and Caltrain. Each train between SF and San Jose reflects about $100,000 in Caltrain’s budget, so using some of these funds to support Caltrain will keep a noticeable amount of service.
Currently SFCTA is not planning to use any of the license fee revenue for transit operations. While half of the revenue would fund street repair and reconstruction, the rest would be split among pedestrian programs and “transit reliability” improvements.
According to the staff memo regarding the fee, there was a discussion about whether to use some of the money for Caltrain:
“The issue of whether or not to commit a portion of the revenues to support transit operations has been raised throughout the Expenditure Plan development process. Two members of the stakeholder advisory panel in particular felt strongly that San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties should commit all or part of their respective SB 83 revenues to support and preserve Caltrain service, given its current budget crisis. The CAC subcommittee and other members of the stakeholder advisory panel felt that Caltrain’s and the MTA’s operations needs are too large to be a good fit for this small fund source. They also recognized that since the revenues will not likely be available until mid-2012, this would not be a solution for filling budget shortfalls during the current or next fiscal years. Several members of both committees also felt that the approach to resolving Caltrain needed to be a regional one given the governance structure that includes San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.”
While a longer term solution needs to be found, SFCTA should take an active role in solving Caltrain’s funding crisis. SFCTA already funds various Caltrain capital projects with its Proposition K sales tax. It makes sense for SFCTA to support the continuation of Caltrain service.
If you can make it, please attend this meeting, and leave a message in comments.
July 20, 11am
San Francisco City Hall, Room 250
If you are unable to make to the meeting, please send a note to the SFCTA board encouraging them to use the $10 DMV fee to support continuing Caltrain service.
The board members are the SF Supervisors.
Michela.Alioto-Pier@sfgov.org
John.Avalos@sfgov.org
David.Campos@sfgov.org
David.Chiu@sfgov.org
Carmen.Chu@sfgov.org
Chris.Daly@sfgov.org
Bevan.Dufty@sfgov.org
Sean.Elsbernd@sfgov.org
Eric.L.Mar@sfgov.org
Sophie.Maxwell@sfgov.org
Ross.Mirkarimi@sfgov.org
And copy your letter to the SFTA clerk, erika@sfcta.org
Thanks for supporting Caltrain and Bay Area transit!
