With Proposition A, VIA seeks secure funding
The local transportation proposal on the Nov. 3 ballot called Proposition A is full of fractions and legalese, but the basic truth underlying it is that San Antonio’s mass transit historically has been underfunded compared to Austin, Dallas, Houston and larger U.S. metropolitan areas.
Consequently, VIA Metropolitan Transit has relied for decades on a shifting set of revenue streams, including a small percentage of San Antonio’s sales tax, an ever-changing amount of federal dollars, rider fares and usually some amount of city funding that is only as permanent and secure as the political majority that passed that year’s budget.
So, Prop A asks that voters reallocate another fraction of the city sales tax, 1⁄ cent per
8 dollar, to VIA beginning Jan. 1, 2026.
With the enlarged funding, VIA would be in a position to expand service under a broad program — once called VIA Reimagined before the pandemic hit — that would introduce dozens of new buses running on dedicated lanes, reduce wait times and improve operations, equipment and passenger amenities.
Now called Keep SA Moving, the plan VIA describes as a way “to connect more people to jobs and economic opportunity” is based on a strategy that urban
planners variously call bus rapid transit or advanced rapid transit.
But why the long wait for the funding?
Meet the city’s Proposition B. The VIA board agreed to hold its place in line while San Antonio, if voters approve, uses the revenue first, to try to repair the pandemic’s damage to the local economy.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg and supporters on the City Council, in the face of dramatic unemployment and the recession’s widened exposure of housing and education inequities, hope to use the 1⁄8- cent sales tax for a program called “Ready to Work SA Workforce,” designed to bring job training, scholarships and higher education to thousands of residents.
It’s not a new sales tax. The same bucket of money has been funding the city’s linear parks and protecting the Edwards Aquifer, a perennially popular program with voters that is set to expire soon.
On Sept. 17, the City Council addressed pushback against its proposed diversion to other uses by committing to allocate $100 million for the program for up to 10 years from other funding sources.
The workforce initiative would be funded through the end of 2025, then the money, estimated recently at about $38.5 million per year, would go to VIA.
That agreement came this summer after weeks of heated public rhetoric from VIA board members, some of whom said they were tired of begging for transit funding for a transportation lifeline that, in a recession, was desperately needed by hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class riders.
Officially, the VIA proposition was placed on the ballot by something called the Advanced Transportation District, which is VIA’s state-authorized taxing authority (their boards are identical). For that reason, it appears as a separate “Proposition A.” from the city’s proposal to renew funding to its Pre-K 4 SA program.
But while not legally linked in a procedural way, the city’s workforce proposition and the VIA proposal are connected in a political and urban planning sense.
Transit boosters long have desired expanding VIA’s sales tax funding because it would be “in perpetuity,” not subject to periodic referendums or repeal by a City Council responding to changing priorities.
It was earmarked for local transportation needs by the Legislature, and the long-ago decision to spin off a piece of it to aquifer protection required voter reapproval every five years.
The permanent nature of the funding is one reason some have opposed the change. A “robocall” this week urging voters to reject both propositions and claiming City Hall and VIA wanted “new taxes” was paid for by former City Councilman Greg Brockhouse.
Brockhouse repeated the “new taxes” claim Tuesday, when he accused VIA of overspending because it outsourced what he said was hundreds of thousands of dollars last year in communication and public relations work to the private sector.
He provided invoices totaling less than $40,000 to HDR Engineering, an architectural design firm that helps companies with branding, and KGB Texas Communications.
Brockhouse said the documents would not be found in an open records request, and called on the City Council to order an audit of the agency. VIA spokeswoman Rachel Benavidez said Brockhouse did not submit such a request and its budgets are presented monthly at public board meetings.
“VIA is fully transparent with all of its processes and contracts,” she said. “There is no effort to conceal any of this public information.”
Since VIA receives federal funding, the transportation agency also is subject to annual outside audits, Benavidez said.
The pro-transit lobbying group, Yes For Transit, reported that a phone poll of 500 likely voters conducted by Austin-based Baselice & Associates in midSeptember showed respondents favoring the VIA ballot proposition by 62 percent against 30 percent opposed.
If the city’s workforce proposal fails and VIA’s passes, the transit agency still would have to wait until January 2026 to begin taking the 1⁄8- cent sales tax revenue, and Nirenberg would have to look elsewhere for funding a job training program.
But if the workforce proposition passes and VIA’s fails, the transit agency’s funding would continue as is, buttressed for the near-future by the city’s assurance that it will continue to send VIA $10 million annually, specifically targeted for getting more buses, more often, on some of the city’s busiest routes.
Under that scenario, VIA would postpone its most farreaching bus rapid transit ambitions. The pursuit of more advanced rapid transit and more secure funding wouldn’t stop, VIA CEO Jeff Arndt said Monday, and planning would continue for perhaps another election in 2024.
But, he said, obtaining matching federal funding for big capital improvement projects like advanced rapid transit would be made more difficult, because it requires local transit agencies to already have secured their local share of the funding pie.
“If we can’t prove we have that funding, we fall to the bottom of the pile for getting our plans approved” by the federal government, Arndt said.
Early voting started Tuesday and runs until Oct. 30.