San Jose to VTA: Don’t divert roadway funds
San Jose leaders want to squash an effort backed by a vocal group of residents, environmentalists and transit advocates to divert voter-approved transportation funding away from repaving roads and toward expanding public transit.
The city council on Jan. 28 voted 7-2 to send a letter to the Valley Transportation Authority Board of Directors urging them against shifting any money from the funding priorities promised to Santa Clara County voters with the 2016 transportation sales tax, Measure B. Councilmembers Raul Peralez and Sergio Jimenez dissented.
At a public meeting in December, advocates began by lobbying the VTA’S board of directors to put more Measure B funding into expanding bus routes and services across the county.
Measure B — a half-cent countywide sales tax to repave roads, improve transit operations, widen highways and build tunnels and bridges over Caltrain tracks — passed in 2016 with support from nearly 72 percent of county voters.
The measure — expected to generate $6.3 million over its 30-year span — set aside $1.5 billion to expand BART through downtown San Jose, $1.5 million to reduce connection and widen county expressways, $1.2 million for repairing local roads and $500 million to increase bus frequency within the county. But it also gave leaders the ability to shift funding if they deemed it necessary.
Proponents of the reallocation say that it would demonstrate regional leaders’ commitment to combatting climate change and getting residents out of vehicles and onto buses and trains.
“Cuts in transit service over the past 20 years have systematically reduced transit options and severely reduced ridership,” said Judy Purrington, a San Jose resident and frequent user of VTA buses and light rail. “We all pay the transit sales tax, and we all should have good access and opportunity to stay out of the traffic gridlock and travel with a lighter carbon footprint.”
Despite arguments from nearly two dozen voters, the majority of the council members worried that shifting the Measure B funding priorities would tarnish their reputation with voters.
Although Measure B was passed in 2016, a lawsuit kept the money tied up until last year. With only about one year into using the 30-year funding source, Mayor Sam Liccardo said that it was too soon to have this conversation.
“I appreciate that there are many folks who think they could have done better, but it is fundamentally disempowering to community and democratic processes whenever we engage in that much outreach and that much engagement and then within a year of us being able to spend these dollars, we say that’s not exactly what we meant,” Liccardo said.
In about five weeks, the city will go to the voters with hopes that they can pass Measure E — a real estate property transfer tax that could raise tens of millions of dollars a year to fund affordable housing projects in San Jose.
With the city’s Measure E on the March 2020 ballot and a statewide $100 billion transportation sales tax, dubbed Faster Bay Area, planned for November 2020 ballot, city councilmembers said now is no time to pull a “bait-andswitch” and risk losing the trust of voters.
“We have other measures that are going to the ballot — both regionally about transit and locally about other issues, that if we pull out the rug under the voters now, we directly imperil the passage of those measures,” Councilmember Dev Davis said during the meeting.
The VTA board, which is made up primarily of city council members from across the county and county supervisors, has yet to put the discussion on an agenda for an upcoming meeting. Liccardo and four San Jose city council members — Lan Diep, Magdalena Carrasco, Davis and Raul Peralez — are members of the board.
The San Jose Sharks treat veterans and their families to a day of hockey on the flight deck of the USS Hornet in Alameda on Jan. 30.