By Jon Wiener
County supervisors continue to deny the existence of a secret deal to direct general use sales tax revenue to BART-to-San-Jose, but the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) is joining the ranks of those who hope the county will do exactly that.
Last week, the VTA Board of Directors decided to put off a vote on a new spending plan until after the results of this June’s special election, when the proposed half-cent sales tax goes on the ballot. In an 11-1 vote, the board created a five-member task force to finalize a list of projects for the agency to complete, including BART-to-San-Jose. The task force will assume that the VTA will either collect a new quarter-cent sales tax (an alternative that has been polling poorly) or get an equivalent amount of money from the county.
But Supervisor Liz Kniss, who represents North County and sits on the VTA board, said that if the tax passes, she will vote against giving any county money to the BART project.
County executive Pete Kutras echoed her thoughts, saying that he would recommend the supervisors not give any money “to anything having to do with BART.”
Staff members from the county and the VTA have been in talks about a combined tax since at least late January, when the VTA issued and then retracted a memo mentioning those discussions.
At last week’s VTA board meeting, sparks flew between Kniss and Mountain View Vice Mayor and fellow VTA board member Greg Perry, who hinted at a back-room deal between the VTA and the county.
“I have no recollection, no knowledge, no anything that any deal has been struck or any agreement made,” said Kniss.
Excluded from the five-member task force, Perry was the lone dissenter in the 11-1 vote that established it. He also questioned the timing of the proposal, which was written after the supervisors approved the ballot measure and released in a last-minute memo that was not made public until just before the meeting.
“This committee looks like more of a committee to negotiate with the county than to achieve consensus with this body,” said Perry. “It looks like an effort to avoid people asking questions about the wrong things here.”
San Jose Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez, who serves as VTA board chair and co-authored the proposal, called Perry’s remarks “inaccurate” and “insulting.”
After the meeting, Chavez said that she came forward with the proposal because of “my own sense that people were feeling uncomfortable.”
The VTA and the county supervisors were poised to place separate quarter-cent measures on the ballot until the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the business organization that has led the charge for BART-to-San-Jose, proposed the idea of a half-cent tax to cover both social services and transit. The supervisors kept the ballot language free of any specific plans for the money, allowing them to get it passed as a general tax, which requires only a simple majority to pass. A tax specifically for the VTA would have required two-thirds approval.
Even without a prior agreement, the supervisors could still vote to give some of the money the county collects to the VTA, which has long said it would need an additional tax to build the projects it promised under Measure A in 2000. The half-cent tax, if passed, would provide from $154 million to $170 million a year to the county.
SVLG joins campaign effort
The Silicon Valley Leadership Group is lining up behind the tax measure. A number of lobbyists from the organization will be working full-time on the campaign, and the group is expected to spend heavily to support it.Laura Stuchinsky, SVLG’s transportation director, said the group knows there is no guarantee of getting the money for BART.
“The board hasn’t made any commitment,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see. It’s just way too far to speculate.”
Perry, though, questioned why the leading proponents of BART-to-San-Jose would get behind the tax.
“I just don’t believe the Manufacturing Group is going to pour $2.5 million into the ballot measure and have nothing to show for it,” he said. “To expect that over the next 30 years the Manufacturing Group will never be able to get a board majority is naive.” (Until recently, the Leadership Group called itself the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group.)
Most of the players in the debate agreed that if the tax does not pass, any ulterior political motives will be rendered irrelevant.
Kniss said she was concerned that allegations that the county measure is somehow a BART tax may wind up scuttling the money for other, less controversial county services.
“At the end of the day, this whole tax probably isn’t going to go anywhere,” she said. “It’s sort of been hung without a trial.”
E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener
