Transit agency is not riding on a path to peril
As others struggle, SMART is bound for an expansion
BART, Muni and several of the Bay Area’s cash-strapped transit operators are mulling fare increases and scrambling for ways to cut costs and raise money to avert their projected doomsday scenarios.
But there’s one transit agency in the region not forecasting financial gloom.
Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit, known as SMART, is a 6-yearold rail operator in the North Bay and not immediately facing the “fiscal cliff” others project will happen in the next two years.
SMART, which spans from Larkspur in Marin County to the Sonoma County Airport north of Santa Rosa, in recent weeks inched closer toward resuming a long-envisioned expansion to Cloverdale near the Sonoma County border.
The $118 million windfall coming from the state and federal governments and the dismissal of a yearslong lawsuit brought a jolt of momentum for an extension project that was initially scheduled for completion in 2020.
SMART officials are banking on approval of three other grant applications worth $113 million to fully fund the 35-mile, $230 million extension to Windsor, Healdsburg and Cloverdale. They’ll know by June whether they have the money to complete the project.
At a time when transit agencies in the Bay Area are struggling to recover from the pandemic and grappling with massive deficits, SMART is an outlier.
The North Bay rail agency currently has about $104 million in cash “available for operations,” including $33 million in reserves, according to recent financial reports. While some Bay Area agencies that rely heavily on fare revenues to maintain service face steep budget deficits because of depressed rider
ship, SMART hasn’t taken a similar financial hit because it’s mainly funded by local sales taxes.
“That’s kind of been a saving grace for us,” said general manager Eddy Cummins.
SMART is also closer to regaining its pre-pandemic ridership compared with other local transit systems. The agency has seen an average of 2,238 riders in February, which is about 75% of SMART’s peak in February 2020. The rail system debuted in 2017 and was growing its ridership base when the first shelter-in-place orders went into effect in March 2020.
While the agency is not in the same imperiled financial boat as larger agencies such as BART, Muni and Caltrain, SMART leaders acknowledge they face challenges this decade.
SMART’s current quarter-cent sales tax expires in 2029. A March 2020 ballot measure to extend it for 30 years, which needed two-thirds approval to pass, failed with 53% of voters in opposition.
Michael Arnold, a Novato economist who was the treasurer for the 2020 measure’s “no” campaign, said SMART’s reserves and funding structure have positioned the agency to be “the best off financially of any transit operator in the San Francisco Bay Area, by far.”
But the couple thousand riders SMART attracts on weekdays haven’t made a noticeable dent in traffic congestion on Highway 101 during peak commute hours, Arnold said, which has essentially returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“SMART’s challenge is political,” Arnold said. “They have to win back voters to pass the next tax extension.”
SMART lowered fares during the pandemic in part to attract more riders, and even though the agency is close to fully recovering its pre-pandemic ridership, Cummins said reaching that benchmark should be “just the beginning.”
“We need to grow ridership well beyond where we were pre-COVID,” he said.