Calling for Regional Cooperation on Caltrain
Although I do not sit on the Caltrain Board, I have spent several hours over the last several days attempting to negotiate — unsuccessfully — to achieve a consensus on a ballot measure that would enable the agency to secure the funding necessary for the rail line’s much-anticipated future growth in transit service. As a Board Member of the Valley Transportation Agency and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, I have long recognized the importance of Caltrain service to our region, and have repeatedly supported efforts to save the service from financial demise, as we did in 2008.
I believe we have fashioned — with colleagues in San Francisco and Santa Clara Counties — a viable compromise that addresses the core needs of the agency to operate in the immediate future, and to substantially expand service in the future. The resolutions considered jointly by those two counties would provide — upon passage of a revenue measure — some $40 million in automatic funding to support operations, more than the partner agencies contribute for operations today. It also anticipates larger allocations with support of a supermajority of the Caltrain board, as demonstrable progress is made on outstanding issues relating to governance and past financial obligations in the months ahead. For an agency dependent wholly on the voluntary annual contributions of transit agencies in each of the three partner counties, this approach provides Caltrain for the first time with a dedicated source of revenue, but still prods the board to collaboratively resolve these longstanding disparities in governance.
For more than a decade, leaders from Santa Clara and San Francisco Counties have vocally expressed a straightforward concern: our residents provide the overwhelming majority of the annual funding to Caltrain, an agency operated and run by SamTrans staff, yet those senior staff have no accountability to our taxpayers — only to San Mateo County’s. Those concerns become more compelling as we consider a measure that would extract even more revenue from our local taxpayers to support Caltrain. Recent conduct by senior staff — leveraging media and social media to attack their own Caltrain board members who offer dissenting views — have reinforced a widespread conviction that they have an actual conflict of interest in serving a large region while serving under the hire and fire authority only of San Mateo’s transit agency. Nearly three million people who live outside of San Mateo County’s borders pay taxes to support a highly staff-controlled agency without any elected representatives capable of hiring or firing that senior staff.
The one million residents of my own city of San Jose contains a more racially diverse, more transit-dependent, and more populous community than all of San Mateo County. It is intolerable for my City’s and County’s taxpayers to be told to simply ship $56 million annually to SamTrans staff, but not to worry our pretty little heads about longstanding inequities of governance when staff recommends how and where to spend that money. The proposal being offered today in San Francisco and Santa Clara Counties enables our region’s voters to support Caltrain’s financial viability while moving forward with long-overdue dialogue on governance. The residents of our region can only hope that San Mateo County’s elected and appointed leaders will rise to the collaborative spirit that this moment requires.
