SMART Funding

Surely the visionaries in the 1990s must have been pleased: with an acronym like SMART, how could the “Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit” project fail? At that time, planners were considering how to transfer to public ownership the property of the failing Northwestern Pacific Railroad.
In 2002, the California state legislature created the SMART District, governed by a 12-member board appointed by the two counties and by certain cities along the old train route, to connect Cloverdale in the north and Larkspur in the south.
Since then, SMART has been in search of major funding in order to build out the planned 70-mile rail service. At the budgeted figure of $7.7 million per mile, more than half a billion dollars needs to be raised, much more than the $23 million coming in over the next 20 years from Measure M, according to Lillian Hames, General Manager of the SMART District, that Sonoma County taxpayers had approved in 2004.
The quarter-cent sale tax proposal in 2006, Measure R, received 65.3 percent support, tantalizingly close to the 66.7 percent “super majority” required in California to approve new taxes. Together with income from fares and from renewed freight service north of Novato, that would have secured the budgeted capital and operating costs. Whether or not voters put Measure Q, the same proposal on ballots today, over that hurdle, the SMART District remains in existence, holding the rail rights of way between the two counties, valued at more than $1 billion.
SMART financial statements show that only a quarter of the original $35 million funding granted by the state in 2003, under Governor Gray Davis, has been spent thus far, so planning work would continue in any case, according to Chris Coursey, Community Outreach and Education Manager for SMART.
Construction work would also take place on certain parts of the system, like the $25 million reconstruction just begun at the Cal Park Hill Tunnel between San Rafael and Larkspur; SMART’s half share in that project is funded with part of the revenues from the Bay Area bridge toll hikes in recent years, according to Coursey. And presumably, if Measure Q fails, the SMART Board of Directors would in due course put another tax proposal before the voters in the two counties.