$100B transportation measure on hold over coronavirus.

One-cent sales tax hike initiative needed state OK to be on fall ballot

The campaign for a $100 billion “mega measure” funding big investments in Bay Area public transportation is being put on hold amid the disruption to public life being caused by the coronavirus, backers have announced.

Faster Bay Area, a campaign asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax increase that leaders say will pay for transformative public transit projects, is dropping its plan to put that measure on the November ballot. The campaign, led by business and urban planning groups, will instead try to pass the measure in an unspecified future election.

The reason: The Faster Bay Area campaign needed to get approval by June from twothirds of the Legislature, as well as Gov. Gavin Newsom, for its measure to appear on ballots across the Bay Area’s nine counties this fall.

“Under normal circumstances, this was a very challenging task,” campaign officials said in a statement last week. “These are not normal circumstances.

“Considering the uncertainty of the legislative season, the urgent need to focus all our attention on immediate challenge of COVID-19 and the complexity of what we are trying to accomplish with FASTER, it has been determined that we need to push out beyond the 2020 election cycle and continue our efforts

on a different time frame.”

Backers plan to keep working on legislation that would authorize the measure at some point in the future.

Led by business organizations Silicon Valley Leadership Group and the Bay Area Council, as well as the urban planning think tank SPUR, the campaign was inspired by similar transportation funding taxes in Seattle and Los Angeles.

The goal was ambitious: create a “world-class, seamless, integrated transit system” across the entire Bay Area from what is now a fractured network of poorly coordinated local public transportation agencies,

giving commuters more efficient options that free them from the traffic that chokes the Bay Area, or at least did in the days before working from home and social distancing became the norm.

After the campaign was announced last summer, public transit agencies and supporters had plenty of big ideas for how they wanted to spend the $100 billion the measure would raise over 40 years, such as a second transbay tube for BART or more frequent Caltrain service.

But while Faster Bay Area leaders downplayed the results of a spring primary election in which voters in three Bay Area counties rejected smaller local transportation sales tax proposals, that outcome signaled that the “mega measure” could have a hard time winning the two-thirds majority it would need to pass.

Taxpayer advocates already were bristling at the idea.

And it drew criticism from a coalition of progressive and pro-transit groups, which shared the Faster campaign’s goal of improving public transportation but launched their own campaign for a measure funded with new levies aimed at businesses and the wealthy, rather than a sales tax.

“Of course, this pandemic changes everything, and a transportation funding measure may not make sense to put on the ballot this year,” said Hayley Currier, policy advocacy manager for the group TransForm, an organization belonging to the coalition, Voices for Public Transportation.