BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
Bay Area political leaders have revealed their strategy for getting voters to approve a half-cent sales tax increase for mass transit: Crying wolf.
Caltrain said on Thursday that if you don’t approve the tax increase, they’ll close 10 stations, end weekend service, stop trains at 9 p.m. and eventually wind down operations.
Horrors! We’ve never heard this before, right?
Actually, they pulled this stunt in 2020 in order to get voters to approve a sales tax increase called RR.
Caltrain said that if voters rejected RR, they’d have to close during the pandemic.
Voters passed RR. It was supposed to give Caltrain $108 million a year to help them deal with declining revenue because fewer people were taking the train.
‘Citizens initiative’
Now Caltrain is back for more money. Caltrain is part of a $980 million Bay Area-wide half-cent transit tax proposal headed for the November ballot.
The strategy is two fold:
1. Cry wolf.
2. Pretend it’s a “citizen initiative” so that it can pass with only a majority vote, not the two-thirds that a tax increase would normally require.
Usually, if the government wants to increase taxes, it would have to get a two-thirds vote of approval. But the state Supreme Court, in the 2017 case California Cannabis Coalition v. City of Upland, said that the two-thirds threshold doesn’t apply if the measure was the product of a citizen initiative independent of the government.
Who are these ‘citizens’?
So with a wink-and-a-nod, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is pushing this transit tax, handed the baton to a recently-created citizens initiative committee. This committee is funded by Genentech, Meta, PG&E, Visa, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (that donates money on behalf of the super rich) labor unions (some of whom represent workers for transit agencies) and the owners of the Golden State Warriors among others. I guess they’re all citizens.
Now this citizen initiative is circulating petitions to put the tax increase on the ballot in November.
Of course, MTC says the committee is totally independent of the government. If they get the signatures they need, this tax increase will hit the November ballot in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Clara and San Francisco counties.
Does it need to pass in all five counties? Nope.
If voters in San Mateo County, for instance, were to reject the tax, but it drew enough votes in the other counties, the tax would go into effect in San Mateo County. Same for Santa Clara County.
In addition to Caltrain, the money would support BART and other transit agencies.
Audit their spending
Before going to the ballot, Caltrain and the other transit agencies should have hired outside experts to go over their spending to find fat that could be cut.
An outside observer would ask the question — why do these agencies have so many white-collar bureaucrats and why are they paid so much?
Michelle Bouchard, head of the San Mateo County Transit District and CEO of Caltrain, got $371,696 in total pay in 2024 and $500,733 in total benefits, according to Transparent California, the salary disclosure site.
The transit tax proposal would have more credibility if taxpayers were presented with an audit that showed whether they were spending money wisely now. Outside auditors like Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG perform such services for businesses all the time.
Sure, the agencies do a state-mandated bare-bones audit, but it doesn’t provide insight about spending.
Long-range thinking missing
Nobody is talking about the bigger issues, such as whether it makes sense to keep pouring money into Caltrain. Caltrain’s ridership was dropping before the pandemic. Today, it has only recovered 64% of its riders.
Caltrain may not be needed in the future because San Francisco isn’t the job center it once was. When Caltrain began, people needed a way to get from the Peninsula suburbs to the city for work every day. Now jobs are spread out throughout the Bay Area. Employers have fled San Francisco due to its high taxes, crime and filth.
Does Caltrain have a place in the Bay Area of the future?
Trains summons feelings of nostalgia. People like taking them to Giants games rather than dealing with the hassle of parking. Some Caltrain supporters dress up as conductors or engineers and run toy train sets in their basements.
Nostalgia is fine, but a half-cent sales tax penalizes everyone. Remember, the costs of this railroad were previously covered by people who paid fares to ride the train. Caltrain doesn’t work as a business anymore, so people are being asked to dig into their pockets to support this bloated bureaucracy that just got a $108 million annual tax bailout.
No more money, Caltrain. You got your tax increase in 2020. Live with it or die.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
This is exactly right. Transit agencies never tell the whole story they just try to scare everyone. Is this the way government should act?
Yesterday at Caltrain in SF, rush hour. A line of commuters waiting to board the express train. Four Caltrain employees are checking tickets with handheld devices to ensure everyone has paid.
This task could be performed equally well by a fare gate, supervised by one employee—not 4.
Caltrain does not need more money. Its well-compensated leadership must cut costs, including unionized staff, and will surely find savings for at least half the anticipated shortfall. Until they do this, absolutely no new tax dollars for our wasteful transit system.
Snip: “Does Caltrain have a place in the Bay Area of the future?”
Answer: Yes, it does. I ride it every week from Palo Alto to San Francisco and back. It greatly approves my quality of life in the Bay Area.
[Portion removed — Terms of Violation. Inaccurate information. Caltrain counts riders twice, when they board in the morning and again in the afternoon, inflating their ridership numbers.]
So I’m voting for the ballot initiative for new funds for CalTrain and other bay area mass transit.
I’m glad the editor caught this error. Transit agencies exaggerate their ridership by counting a rider when they get on the train in the morning and when they get on in the afternoon. So Caltrain, with 20,000 people served each day, will claim it has 40,000 ridership. The media usually goes along with these exaggerated numbers, giving the public a distorted idea of the importance of mass transit. If we’re going to have an intelligent conversation about the future of mass transit, we need accurate information, not inflated numbers.
It might be nice to take Caltrain to see the Giants but shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the City of San Francisco who owns and operates the stadium through the Port Commission, or the owners of the Giants (a SF business) to provide adequate parking and/or transportation to their events? Why are taxpayers in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties paying to transport customers to these two for profit entities in San Francisco?
Taxpayers spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the 101 between San Jose and San Francisco, whether or not they own a car. Likewise, taxpayers spend money on the CalTrain, whether or not they ever ride it. For that matter, taxpayers spend money on public schools whether or not they have children. In a democracy with a government that has a constitutional duty to “promote the general welfare”, we all pay for government services that improve our community, whether or not we personally use those services.
Everybody uses 101, even people who do not own cars. People who don’t own cars get their groceries from a long haul truck and their purchases from an Amazon delivery van. They use busses, taxies, ride-share vehicles, and autonomous vehicles. If they get mail, it was delivered by a mail truck. If they need fire, police, or emergency service they come in a truck or a police cruiser. Need a plumber, Carpenter, or landscaper? they come in a truck. Even Caltrain riders use the roads. You might have noticed Caltrain stations have large parking lots… so how many of the 20K Caltrain users don’t own a car?
Stew, you have accurately identified some of the ways that people in a society are interconnected. Yes, people who don’t drive benefit from people who do drive. And likewise, people who don’t use CalTrain benefit from people who do use CalTrain. For example, Palo Altans receive health care from nurses and doctors at Stanford hospital who arrived every morning by CalTrain. Wise public policy is to spend taxpayer funds on both roads and trains, because both serve the common good.
Unfortunately, manufactured crises are a staple of politics. Fear motivates. I was approached by a signature gatherer recently and was floored to be informed that the brand new electric train system was in peril. How did this come about?
I’m not so sure the “shortfalls” have to do with too much staffing on trains or at stations since I usually don’t see too many employees standing around with seemingly nothing to do.
The new trains are great. Smooth, clean, and fast. Were there major cost overruns during the electric conversion? It’s too bad ridership is down because the experience is good overall.
What would the impact be if all of the current riders had to jump into cars instead? Surely there would be costs of some sort whether it be wear and tear on the roads, or increased air pollution. I hope Caltrain sticks around one way or another.
Taxpayers are on the hook for the same reason taxpayers are on the hook for BART, etc. You live in the area. Is it fair? Of course not. No one ever said life was fair. That’s not the way taxes work. We vote. You don’t have to like the results, but you have to accept them. There’s a difference.
I’m going to speculate that a large percentage of those who travel by train are mostly desk workers who do not have to travel far from their arrival or destination point. I’m also going to speculate that many of those desk workers can work from home a few of those days. I met a younger gentleman who tells me it takes about 3 hours to get from his home in south San Jose to his job at CVS in Palo Alto when using bus services. That, is if he also rides his bike. I’m pretty sure the train is not much different. Why would anyone use public transit if you can afford a car and insurance? Charging a tax for something rarely used does not make sense. Imagine a carpenter or road worker with all his tools and bag getting on a train. Won’t happen. People travel to get the extra cash the area pays. Taxing is not going to fix anything that helps the majority. Tax hotels and motels if you really want the non local money but don’t tax the people living here.
If we junk Caltrain, how much can the citizens get back? The project cost $2.4 billion, but i would imagine only part of that are the locomotives and passenger cars. Maybe we’ll get $750 million to $1 billion for that. The land they call the “right of way” has got to be worth something. The big benefit is eliminating the taxes that now fund Caltrain. No matter how you cut it, we’re money ahead compared to giving heavily-subsidized rides to less than 20,000 people a day.
Nobody is advocating eliminating Caltrain. The idea is to eliminate at least some of the deficit without raising the sales tax yet again. It certainly can be done and very easily.
The Bay Area has 27, TWENTY SEVEN, distinct and separate transit districts. Absolutely insane . Just think of the duplicative costs being incurred each and every hour of each day: Management, Motor pool, security, and on and on. We have a massive and destructive out of control spending problem from transit districts through city hall to the state capital. I will be voting a big fat NO on any tax increases anywhere.
The average cost of a new car is $50,000, probably more in the Bay Area. BART has been receiving three quarters of a cent from the sales tax and now an extra half-cent is being proposed for transit in general, one cent in San Francisco. So, on top of the $50,000 you will be paying $625 for transit and a total north of $5,000 overall in sales tax for that new car. That’s on top of your federal and state income taxes, property taxes if you own a home and/or business and parcel taxes every time someone comes up with a new spending idea. European-style socialism is already here.