{"id":63038,"date":"2024-02-29T18:06:36","date_gmt":"2024-03-01T02:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=63038"},"modified":"2024-02-29T18:06:36","modified_gmt":"2024-03-01T02:06:36","slug":"against-huge-deficits-5-billion-won-for-bay-area-transit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=63038","title":{"rendered":"Against Huge Deficits, $5 Billion Won for Bay Area Transit"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Facing massive state deficits, advocates won $5.1 billion for Bay Area transit last year by framing transit as an issue of climate and housing, with Californians\u2019 wellbeing at stake.<\/p>\n

Against a shortfall estimated by Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s office to be $38 billion but projected by the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst\u2019s Office to be as high as\u00a0$73 billion<\/a>, the grassroots campaign convinced lawmakers to carve a lifeline from the $310.8 billion budget to avert a transit \u201cfiscal cliff,\u201d by passing a bill under Sen. Scott Wiener (D-11).<\/p>\n

At a San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) forum, leaders involved in the campaign, through a coalition organized by SPUR and Transform CA shared what it took to win.<\/p>\n

Gaining traction<\/h2>\n

By December 2022, it was clear to local transit funding agencies SFMTA and MTC, which worked with the coalition, that California was nosediving into a deficit.<\/p>\n

The Bay Area, while containing 20% of the state\u2019s total population, contains nearly half of its transit riders.<\/p>\n

That month, the groups had the California Transit Association \u201cwrite a letter urging the legislature to take action,\u201d said Rebecca Long, director of Legislation & Public Affairs at MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). In January 2023, the governor\u2019s budget was released \u201cwith not only no help for transit operations, but setting us back\u201d by $1 billion dollars, against $2 billion that was promised.<\/p>\n

The coalition urged business, labor, climate and housing organizations statewide to write more letters. In response, in February the state held a joint Assembly and Senate Transportation Committee hearing about what transit needed as federal COVID relief funds waned amid financial strains caused by shifting travel patterns, remote work and inflated operating costs.<\/p>\n

At the hearing, coalition members testified that \u201cthis is not just about funding public agencies. Transit is a climate remedy. It\u2019s an equity issue,\u201d said Long.<\/p>\n

Escalating on the ground<\/h2>\n

\u201cOn the news, it seemed like public attention came out of nowhere, but there were months of really methodical preparation,\u201d said Adina Levin, co-founder and policy director of Seamless Bay Area, a transit advocacy group that worked with other groups to mobilize thousands of people to contact representatives, attend demonstrations, distribute flyers and speak at hearings.<\/p>\n

\u201cLightning activism really highlighted the diversity of our supporters,\u201d she added. \u201cWhen we were flyering, we wanted to use multiple languages, so Tenderloin Neighborhood Development really quickly generated Tagalog, the Bay Area Council generated Chinese, and so on.\u00a0 In those last few weeks, we generated over 10,000 calls and letters.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the ground, the turning point was a May 12 town hall with Phil Ting in San Francisco,\u201d said Cyrus Hall, a public transit advocate.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe gathered 20 to 30 activists to get them to answer the question, as state Assembly budget chair, \u2018Are you supportive of operational gap funding for transit agencies?\u2019 We did not get an answer,\u201d continued Hall, \u201cand when we followed up after, we got a very direct answer that, at that moment, was, \u2019No.\u2019 I think this signaled that the state was not about to step in and provide the funding necessary to make sure that our agencies didn\u2019t collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response, continued Hall, activists associated with \u201c10 to 20 groups\u201d like Safe Street Rebel, Telegraph for People and Kid Safe SF held a June 3 \u201ctransit funeral starting in Oakland, marching on BART under the Bay through the Transbay tunnel, coming out in Civic Center, and then marching down Market Street to San Francisco City Hall where we held a rally\u201d with politicians including Wiener, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and City Supervisor Dean Preston.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome activists followed up a week later on June 8, blocking Octavia and Marquette in San Francisco \u2014 an intersection that also happens to be an off ramp,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe got incredible media coverage from helicopters and people filming on the ground, and we made that footage viral.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result, \u201cmore people got involved writing and phoning into Sacramento,\u201d Hall added. \u201cTalking to people directly on BART trains was also generating many letters and phone calls. Always being ready to escalate just a bit more was key to media covering the issue, so that more people were learning and speaking out \u2026 about why it\u2019s so important that Sacramento find the operational funding necessary to give our agencies time to rebuild ridership and find new funding.\u201d<\/p>\n

The homestretch in Sacramento<\/h2>\n

While two more major Bay transit coalition letters by May had already pressured the governor\u2019s budget update \u201cto verbally acknowledge that transit is very important \u2026there were no specifics in dollars,\u201d Long said. \u201cThat\u2019s when we stepped up the direct action: transit rallies on the ground, joint letters from Congress members \u2026 and from big city mayors, elected officials and City Councils, urging the legislature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Activists and officials had \u201ctwo very strong justifications for why transit was the state\u2019s responsibility,\u201d said Monique Webster, SFMTA Regional Government Affairs Manager: \u201cone, the transportation sector is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and so the centerpiece of the state\u2019s decarbonization climate strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSecond,\u201d she added, \u201cpublic transit also expands access to opportunity \u2014 access to education, jobs, health care, for many vulnerable Californians \u2014 and the state simply cannot make progress on that goal if transit goes under.\u201d<\/p>\n

Key to convincing the state was \u201cpointing to what other states were doing,\u201d said Raayan Mohtashemi, legislative aide for Wiener. \u201cNew York and Minnesota, which were facing similar ridership and sustainability problems, had passed longer-term funding agreements to avert fiscal cliffs.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2022, for instance, BART was able to cover only 70% of pre-pandemic operating expenses from rider revenue.<\/p>\n

One year later, in June 2023, BART averaged only about 40% of weekday transit traffic during weekdays and 60% of weekend traffic compared to pre-pandemic numbers.<\/p>\n

That June, Newsom\u2019s office and the legislature finally struck a deal to set aside $1.1 billion in \u201cflexible\u201d funding for transit over four years, with transit agencies allowed to dip into a remaining $4 billion in state aid for operations as needed \u2014 diverting from infrastructure projects the money was originally set aside for, like the extension of BART to San Jose.<\/p>\n

Though the money is enough to prevent shortfalls and service cuts through \u201croughly mid-2026,\u201d said Mohtashemi, \u201cthere\u2019s still a need for long-term sustainability.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Sen. Wiener, having last year withdrawn SB-532 \u2014 a defunct proposal to raise Bay Area bridge tolls by $1.50 to fund transit, which was met with public opposition \u2014 is planning for legislation this year to allow a regional ballot measure on long-term transit funding.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Feb 29, 2024 Facing...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-ca-local"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63039,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63038\/revisions\/63039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}