By Jon Wiener
For nearly two years, county transit officials have been trying to figure out a way to win voter support for a new sales tax, one that would make up the massive funding shortfall for BART-to-San-Jose and other projects approved in 2000. They may finally reach a decision next week.
The County Board of Supervisors will meet Tuesday to determine whether to place a half-cent tax measure on the June ballot. Two days later, the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) board of directors will vote on the same question.
“Everybody has to move quickly on this,” said VTA spokesperson Jayme Kunz, citing a March deadline for getting a measure on the June ballot.
Kunz denied charges that the agency has not been open about the process of arriving to this point. “We’ve been working on this and holding public meetings for two years now. There’s been a huge amount of due diligence done.”
Even the Mountain View City Council will weigh in on the issue, discussing the sales tax Tuesday night after the supervisors meet. Council member Greg Perry is a VTA board member, and Laura Macias serves on an advisory committee.
Winning the support of the supervisors would be a political coup for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group — the pro-BART business lobbyist organization that financed the campaign for the 2000 tax measure. Unlike the VTA board, the supervisors are able to structure tax measures in a way that requires only a simple majority, rather than two-thirds, to pass.
Supervisors had expressed opposition to the VTA’s spending plan ever since the transit agency board rejected their call to examine building BART to Milpitas, an approach they said would capture a large majority of potential riders at a fraction of the cost.
But the leadership group’s polling suggests that, like a new tax for the VTA, a proposed county tax for social services would be destined to fail on its own.
“If they both go up at the same time, they lose. If they go up together, they pass.” said Laura Stuchinsky, the leadership group’s transportation director. “There are some folks who would vote for one, some folks who would vote for the other, and other folks who would vote for both.”
County counsel Ann Ravel and others have said the mechanism the county used for a transportation tax in 1996 — dividing it into a “general” tax measure and an advisory measure on how it is spent — could create legal difficulties.
But supervisors could still put forward the combined measure without an advisory measure to go along with it, and north county leaders and others who’ve spoken out against the BART project will find themselves on the defensive. Not only will they need to muster many more votes in order to kill a project they have for years said is inefficient and prohibitively expensive, they will also need to convince those voters to say no to social services at the same time.
“The idea to combine the two measures really complicates what you can support,” said Macias. “That’s not the most appropriate way to ask voters what they really want.”
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