SFMTA board vote may knock Caltrain off the rails.
After a long board meeting Tuesday night, two San Francisco supervisors — Shamann Walton and Aaron Peskin — posted a Twitter selfie with a toy train, bragging that they had approved a November sales tax measure to save Caltrain.
By Friday afternoon, the measure appeared to be dead, and the Peninsula rail system in severe danger of shutting down.
The Board of Directors for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency voted against San Francisco’s version of the 1⁄8-cent sales tax during a special meeting Friday.
To get on the November ballot, the sales tax measure needs approval from four transit boards and three county boards of supervisors by Aug. 7. San Francisco has stood firm on its demand to change Caltrain’s governance structure, a demand that San Mateo County officials say is illegal.
Santa Clara County officials, meanwhile, have largely stayed out of the fray, though San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo expressed support for the governance changes and signed a joint statement with San Francisco Mayor London Breed and other officials, urging San Mateo County to give
in.
San Francisco’s proposal differed from a more straightforward measure introduced in San Mateo County, in that it would force Caltrain to make governance changes to give San Francisco and Santa Clara counties more control over its management.
Since the SFMTA is down to four board directors — a side effect of the supervisors rejecting or postponing recent nominations by Mayor London Breed — it only took one, Cheryl Brinkman, to strike the measure down.
“It certainly would be easier for me to hold my nose and vote yes, but I cannot,” Brinkman said, noting that the conditions San Francisco added made the measure “unwinnable” because it might confuse or dissuade voters, and would lose support from a powerful coalition of business leaders and transit activists. The measure needs to pass by a twothirds threshold of voters in three counties, so it can’t afford to lose any endorsements.
Were San Francisco’s version to pass, the measure would be vulnerable to lawsuits: San Mateo County Counsel John Beiers said in a legal opinion that it would violate a 2017 state law that enabled the three counties to place it on the ballot.
In an interview Friday, Caltrain board member Charles Stone, who is also a city councilman in Belmont, seemed exasperated. He said the likelihood of Caltrain stopping service is now “pretty high.”
“This is not a threat, this is not a joke,” Stone said. “This is not a game of chicken, although some officials in Santa Clara County and San Francisco seem to think it is.”
Caltrain officials began discussing the November sales tax long before the COVID19 pandemic. At the time, they envisioned the tax as a means to beef up service, particularly outside of rush hour. The agency was thriving with 65,000 riders each weekday whose fares covered 70% of the system’s operating costs. Its brass were pursuing a longrange service vision to coincide with new development along El Camino Real and Google’s forthcoming megacampus at Diridon Station in San Jose.
But the system lost 95% of its riders when COVID19 swept into the region, and it has stumbled along with nearempty trains for months. Supporters of the tax changed their campaign message and began pitching it as a lifeline. Without it, officials said, the rail system might go dark.
While transit advocates and Peninsula politicians lobbied for the tax measure, leaders in San Francisco and Santa Clara counties saw an opportunity to press for governance reform they’d wanted for a long time. The San Mateo County Transit District operates Caltrain on behalf of a threecounty Joint Powers Board, an arrangement that’s been in place since SamTrans purchased the railroad rightofway in 1991. Although San Francisco and Santa Clara counties collectively chip in $35.8 million each year for the system’s capital and operating costs, they don’t help pick the CEO.
Under the tax measure the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved Tuesday, the estimated $108 million generated by the tax each year would be deposited in an escrow account controlled by the Joint Powers Board. The board would release $40 million to Caltrain in the first year of the tax, and San Francisco and Santa Clara counties would end their annual contribution. The rest of the tax money would sit until the three counties hammer out a deal over management of the system.
The plan set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2021 for the Joint Powers Board to agree on a “governance solution” for Caltrain. If they don't reach a solution, and Caltrain receives no more federal stimulus money, the board could dispense up to $40 million in 2022.
Officials in San Mateo County flatly rejected the proposal, and for weeks the leaders from all three counties waged a battle on Twitter. Transit activists and political observers chimed in, some accusing the supervisors of elevating petty politics over regional transit. Others disparage Caltrain, saying that taxpayers shouldn’t have to shell out more for a train that serves so many affluent tech workers.
Those arguments spilled into Tuesday’s board meeting in San Francisco, during which several supervisors criticized Caltrain for serving Silicon Valley commuters — a demographic they said was less diverse than the population that rides Muni buses in San Francisco. Walton, who serves on the Caltrain board and helped write the alternative tax measure, accused Caltrain — without evidence — of using funds to subsidize SamTrans, and said that without governance reform, the “good ol’ boy policies and practice” would continue.
Still, Peskin insisted Friday that “all is not lost,” because the SFMTA had left open the possibility of holding another special meeting next week. If six boards pass the revised measure next week, it will go to voters in November.
“This is not a game of chicken, although some officials in Santa Clara County and San Francisco seem to think it is.”
Charles Stone, Caltrain board member