BY ELAINE GOODMAN
Daily Post Correspondent
A Caltrain board member’s push for the commuter rail line to pursue greater independence from the San Mateo County Transit District, or SamTrans, has sparked a harsh rebuke from SamTrans lawyers.
The Caltrain board will discuss the issue Thursday (Jan. 8).
San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton, who sits on Caltrain’s board, wants Caltrain to work “step by step toward becoming an independent regional agency,” he said in a memo to fellow board members last month.
The Caltrain board includes three members each from San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties – the three counties where the rail service operates. Although Caltrain has some of its own employees, including an executive director who reports to the board, SamTrans is the managing agency and handles much of Caltrain’s operations. That has raised concerns over the years that San Mateo County has too much influence over Caltrain.
Walton said in his memo that he wouldn’t support further funding for Caltrain from San Francisco until the board resumes “meaningful work” on Caltrain’s governance.
In response, SamTrans’ lawyer fired off a letter to Caltrain’s lawyer, warning Caltrain of a potential breach of contract if it tried to boot SamTrans as its managing agency.
Attempting to do so would be “an extraordinary act of bad faith,” said the letter from James Wagstaffe of law firm Adamski Moroski Madden Cumberland & Green. Past agreements among the agencies state that SamTrans can remain Caltrain’s managing agency “so long as it desires,” the letter said.
The city and county of San Francisco would also be in breach of contract if it decided to withhold funds from Caltrain, the letter said. In that case, the Caltrain board should consider legal action against San Francisco.
The Caltrain board will discuss Wagstaffe’s letter in closed session on Thursday. They’ll talk about Walton’s proposal during the open portion of the meeting.
SamTrans’ role as managing agency for Caltrain came about because SamTrans contributed $82 million of the $202 million needed to buy the railroad right-of-way from Southern Pacific in 1991. The remainder came from state bond funds.
SamTrans didn’t start receiving any repayment for the right-of-way purchase until 2008. SamTrans agreed to accept $53 million as the two counties’ share of the repayment and waive $38 million in interest, in exchange for being designated Caltrain’s managing agency for as long as it wished, according to a report to the Caltrain board for Thursday’s meeting.
In 2020, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties balked at putting on the ballot Measure RR – an eighth-cent sales tax measure to support Caltrain – until an agreement was reached to work on reducing SamTrans’ role.
The measure passed in all three counties and, in 2022, an agreement was reached regarding Caltrain’s governance. It included the hiring of a new executive director who reports directly to the Caltrain board, rather than to Samtrans’ general manager. Five new positions were created that report to the Caltrain executive director.
Although SamTrans remained Caltrain’s managing agency, its role was whittled down.
The agreement also included repayment to SamTrans of $19.8 million for its funding of the right-of-way purchase and $15.2 million for the payment delay. Those amounts have now been repaid.
If Caltrain ousted SamTrans from its managing agency role, there could be financial consequences, the report to the board noted. SamTrans might want to be compensated for losing the job. There’s also the issue of the $38 million in interest that SamTrans previously waived.
According to SamTrans’ attorney, studies leading up to the 2022 agreement found that Caltrain was efficiently run under its managing agency format.
The studies “revealed the obvious,” SamTrans’ attorney said. “Creation of an independent agency would be cost prohibitive and unwise.”
Shamann Walton doesn’t speak for San Francisco. He doesn’t even live in San Francisco.
This is a great article. But I would like to know more about WHY Walton is pushing for Caltrain to “becom[e] an independent regional agency,” i.e. what does he have against SamTrans or San Mateo county?
Does he think San Mateo county gets favorable service or preferences from Caltrain as a result of the arrangement?
Does he think santrans is corrupt? Is Walton himself corrupt, and he wants to exert his corrupt influence over the agency without San Mateo as a check against him? It’s impossible for me to know based on the information presented.
Yet another transit agency lol. The Bay Area transit system is already too fragmented. I think we should be doing the opposite: consolidate into fewer agencies.
Hector seems to be following the simplistic, ahistorical Seamless-Bay- Area line. True, it would have been better if public transit in the region had been planned and grown, as a single unified system, with the increasing need for efficient regional travel during the last century. But from the late 40’s-early 50’s, public policies turned to funding and promoting an automobile centered infrastructure and way of life. The resulting fragmentation was simply a consequence of the various jurisdictions doing what they could locally, with Greyhound (for those of us old enough to remember) providing a substantial amount of regional service– through the ’70’s and decreasing thereafter–with some sort of publicly awarded franchise.A big problem with advocacy of consolidation through the MTC is that it’s local- government directors retain an ambivalence towards following through on committing to replacing unnecessary automobile use with transit on account of their ongoing constituent and revenue interest in the automobile-centered way of life…and in some cases, no doubt, the attitudes of the individual directors themselves. It would be better if the transit special districts and agencies-minus-their-county-supervsor- directors were convened, funded, and mandated to coordinate and consolidate their operations with the assistance of appropriate MTC STAFF. Unlike local and state government officials, these agency operators’ interest in increasing ridership at the expense of automobile use is unambiguous.(Shedding some administrative, planning and executive positions whose incumbents were unable to fill operations functions might still be thorny.) As for CalTrain, Samtrans seems to be on solid legal ground, and an agency with an acknowledged interest in integrating bus and rail is a plus (vs SMART, which retains a good deal of segregationist drive-to-the-train inclinations). On the other hand, a special district, spanning four counties (with San Benito) also strikes me as positive.
Oops! Gilroy is in Santa Clara county…though San Benito County Express ( as well asMonterey/Salinas Transit 59) connects to Caltrain there.
Nancy Pilosi’s financial disclosures state that she has an ownership interest in the Salesforce building in San Francisco. The Salesforce building would be worth a lot more than it is now, if it was the northern terminus of a rail system sucking people, and what’s in their pockets, out of the peninsula.
The solution will be whatever increases the size of the Caltrain/SamTrans bureaucracy. The public doesn’t want that, but the employees could care less about what the public thinks. They just want high-paying jobs where they do nothing all day. Of all the Bay Area transit agencies, Caltrain is at the bottom when it comes to recovering ridership lost during the Covid lockdown. They celebrate small increases, yet they’re at 50-60% of what they were in 2019. Caltrain’s performance is lousy despite the fact that we taxpayers spent $2.4 billion on electrifying the rail system. The only certain prediction one can make about Caltrain is that the bureaucracy will be bigger next year than this year, and that it will keep on growing. (Oh, and the cities that want grade separations to reduce traffic backups and suicides, sorry, Caltrain isn’t paying. You’re SOL.)