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Fortunately, South Bay transportation officials have signaled a firm no to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s plans to put a ½-cent regional sales tax on the ballot for BART and other transportation systems that included their county.
If there is additional sales tax revenue, they want to control it and are prepared to put their own ½-increase on the ballot.
The regional tax is primarily about BART and San Francisco Muni and amounts to shafting East Bay commuters, who already pay the bulk of the bridge fares that are diverted to BART operations often at the cost of necessary bridge repairs and updates as East Bay Times Opinion Editor Dan Borenstein reported in his column last weekend.
MTC officials approached him about publishing an opinion piece laying out their plans for the 2026 measure. Instead what he discovered was mortifying. MTC officials basically confirmed they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted to with bridge tolls and the tax increase should they move ahead with it and voters pass it. That includes the current toll revenue.
MTC board members, for the most part elected officials appointed to the board thus immune from answering to voters, were set to decide on the ballot measure next Wednesday unless wiser heads prevailed and a decision was delayed.
Given the miserable recovery of the downtown San Francisco financial district and its major buildings (buildings and hotels have already gone into bankruptcy or foreclosure) and nobody can predict what the situation will be five years from now. The BART board already pushed through a 5,5% fare increase for next year.
What seems very clear is that service needs to be reduced to be brought in line with current demand, not what it was five years ago. That should mean layoffs. BART, like the city of San Francisco, already has far too many employees that are paid far too much because of their unions negotiating with politicians they play key roles in electing.
Whether a new BART board will stand up for riders and, more importantly, other taxpayers is an open question.
While the news isn’t good on that front, it’s better on dealing with long-term water supplies for California. A consortium of water agencies broke ground on the expansion of San Luis Reservoir that can be seen from Highway 152 between Gilroy and Santa Nella. Highway 5 crosses the channel that moves water back and forth from the California Aqueduct. It raises the dam 10 feet that will allow the storage of an additional 130,000 acre feet, enough to serve 650,000 people annually.
The good news offset the announcement last month that the agencies partnered in the expansion of Los Vaqueros Reservoir northeast of Livermore, had walked away from the plan. It was led by the Contra Costa Water District, the operator, and Zone 7 and other potential partners could not agree on how to share the risk thus it was shuttered.
The project had been supported by multi-million dollar state and federal grants. The hope now as Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Tuesday press conference, is the money can be diverted to the Sites Reservoir near Corning. Like San Luis, it is an off-stream storage facility designed to capture high flows and store them for release in summer months. Releases potentially could offset releases from Lake Shasta that could be reserved to help spawning salmon that need colder water.
Sites would be the state’s 8th largest reservoir and the first built in decades. Zone 7 is one of the many partners. It would be fitting to shift money that won’t go to the $1.5 billion Los Vaqueros project to Sites.
A couple of just-say-no environment groups are the only opponents and they oppose almost all storage.
