The Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit District is having a second go at passing an ordinance to slightly increase the sales tax for local residents in the two counties, in order to resurrect train service between Cloverdale and Larkspur.
The ordinance was close to passing in 2006, when residents in Marin and Sonoma voted 65.3% in favor, just short of the 66.7% needed for passage. “Conventional wisdom,” said Chris Coursey, Community Outreach Manager for SMART, “states that 25% of any given electorate will vote against any types of tax. We had some organized opposition in Marin County, but two-thirds – that’s a tough vote.”
“As far as actual building, we put our first dollars into construction just last month,” said Coursey, though he declined to say what that actually was. “Basically we’re ready to start the final engineering process, and have a good idea of what we want to do. It’s not just a matter of buying some trains to have run up and down a track.”
Coursey is one of five full-time employees of SMART, which the California state legislature created in 2002 with the passage of Assembly Bill AB2224, signed by Governor Gray Davis. According to Coursey, Governor Davis provided funding in 2003 under the state’s Traffic Congestion Relief Program to promote public transit use,.
SMART received $30 million and has used this money frugally over the past five years, according to Coursey. “We received the money for planning, engineering and environmental work,” he said. “We’ve existed on money from five years ago that we still use now.”
The $540 million proposal, now known as Measure Q, needs to be passed in order for SMART to move forward with construction plans. If passed, the two counties could begin contracting for goods and services and employing labor for construction.
“It would be a quarter-cent sales tax, which would be enough to provide for the development,” said Marge Macris, co-chair of SMART’s campaign committee. “It would also allow us to get matching federal funds.”
Macris thought that SMART received financial support from the counties, as well. “SMART is a public agency and gets support from both counties, who pay for the staff,” she said. “Exactly what their sources of money are, I don’t know.”
On a visit to the SMART district offices in a new high-rise in San Rafael, those funding sources and amounts could not be identified. While SMART as a public agency is subject to Brown Act requirements, officials declined to provide information on the revenue of the district itself or on its expenditures in the last five years.
Cynthia Murray, the other co-chair of the campaign, was happy to talk about Measure Q, mentioning the jobs that would be created during the construction. “I think this train will function as our own local economic stimulus package,” she said, noting that, “Because of inflation alone, the price of this project has gone up by $80 million in two years.”
