Six months ago, county Supervisor Liz Kniss might have been an unlikely candidate to stump for Measure A, the half-cent sales tax increase the board of supervisors has placed on the June 6 ballot.
Kniss was a staunch critic of plans to extend BART to San Jose, an expensive proposition that could suck up more than a quarter of the new tax revenues.
Even after casting the board’s crucial fourth vote in February to put the measure before voters, Kniss bemoaned rumors of a back-room deal between the supervisors and the Valley Transit Authority, which was seeking more funding for the BART-to-San-Jose extension. She added that public accusations about the origins of the tax proposal would kill voter support for it.
Now, as Election Day nears, Kniss has taken it upon herself to convince voters in Mountain View and the rest of her North County district that voting no on Measure A won’t stop BART-to-San-Jose, but will only make the project’s feared impacts on bus and train service exponentially worse.
“So many people have asked me why I supported doing this,” said Kniss. The reason, she said, is that “BART will happen no matter what. It won’t make a difference whether this tax passes or doesn’t pass.”
With less than two weeks to go, backers of the tax have a lot to be happy about — an ever-growing list of endorsements, a huge war chest that dwarfs that of their opponents, and poll numbers that show a slight majority favoring the tax.
“The organization base for Measure A is the biggest I’ve ever seen in Santa Clara County,” said Bob Brownstein, campaign spokesperson and head of Working Partnerships. “It’s a very, very broad coalition.”
Those on the other side, led by Mountain View Vice Mayor and VTA board member Greg Perry, clearly have their work cut out for them. They have sought to turn the campaign for Measure A, a general tax that would cover transportation and a laundry list of social service needs, into a debate over BART-to-San-Jose and the $5.6 billion hole it will blow in the county’s transit budget.
Perry said that BART backers have sought to bolster the project with questionable accounting methods; even with Measure A, he said, the only way to build the line will be to cannibalize existing services.
Up in San Mateo County, huge cost overruns and low ridership on the BART extension to San Francisco Airport forced the transportation district to cut back elsewhere.
“The money that [voters] thought was going to make their commutes easier is digging a tunnel that no one’s using. We’re just going to watch the money go into a hole,” Perry said.
But even with the opposition of local leaders, the tax continues to poll favorably. In a survey conducted this March, 63 percent of Mountain View residents said they were likely to vote yes on the measure, while two recent polls of the county as a whole both showed approximately 54 percent in support. Perry and others, like Mountain View City Council member Laura Macias, who sits on the VTA’s Policy Advisory Board, say that defeating the measure will simply be a matter of explaining the numbers to the public.
Six years ago, voters overwhelmingly approved a half-cent sales tax for VTA projects, including BART-to-San-Jose. At the time, the agency said an additional tax would be needed to operate trains on the 16-mile extension from Fremont to Santa Clara University. But sales tax revenues quickly fell, and the agency put the projects it had promised on hold until it could find a new source of revenue.
A lot is riding on future projections. The VTA already receives 1 percent of every taxable dollar spent in the county — a dedicated half-cent sales tax and the additional half-cent from the 2000 Measure A. Under the growth estimates it uses, that will amount to $12 billion (in 2006 dollars) over the next 30 years. Under the county’s projections, that number will be closer to $10 billion.
Officials estimate that the new Measure A will generate about $150 million a year. Even though VTA officials hope that the county will give them half that amount for transportation, the measure on the ballot refers only briefly to transportation and never mentions BART.
Television commercials put out by the San Francisco public relations firm hired to run the campaign seem focused on the fact that the state government is prevented from raiding local funds.
“It’s saying if you raise this money, you can count on it being spent here,” said Brownstein. “Voters care about that.”
Tax backers have been careful not to make specific promises for the tax revenues. Because the measure is a general tax for the county, it needs only majority support to win. A specific tax with legally binding funding commitments, such as the 2000 Measure A tax for VTA, requires two-thirds support.
“I’m cautious of supporting something like this because it’s so vague,” said Macias. “We have no assurances that the monies will be spent for transit for everyday people.”
Even the VTA has not yet arrived at a plan for how it would spend the windfall. The agency was poised to approve a long-term expenditure plan calling for a new quarter-cent sales tax in early March, when the board of supervisors surprised many observers by putting the half-cent proposal on the ballot.
The VTA then stalled on its plans, instead setting up a task force to reprioritize the list of projects promised to voters in 2000.
E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener@mv-voice.com
