SacRT has released its draft 2024-2025 budget (it is referred to by the ending date, therefore FY-2025). The budget was considered at the May 13 Board of Directors meeting and will be considered and adopted at the June 10 meeting. Looking at the budget documents, STAR has to wonder, what are budgets for? It seems that SacRT thinks budget numbers are a minor concern in a budget document, and that the categories used by staff are what is of interest to the public.
The staff report for the May 13 board meeting agenda item 5.1 (SacRT_2024-05-13_agenda-5.1-budget) does not mention the existence of a budget document. One would have to look at SacRT’s budget page (Notice of SacRT Fiscal Year 2025 Preliminary Budget Public Hearing) to discover that. Since it is so hard to find things on the SacRT website (no search capability!), the budget document is here: SacRT_FY-2025-Abridged-Budget-Document.
Staff Report
The staff report offers at table of expenses, below. But it lumps all salaries and benefits into one line item. Where are fuel costs for operating the transit system? Does utilities include electricity for the light rail system, or is that elsewhere? Where are maintenance costs? Who knows.
It then shows staffing positions, with 82.1% allocated to operations. But what positions are included in operations? How many are actual drivers, and how many support and supervision staff? And for which operations? It doesn’t say.
Ah, well, the important details must be in the budget document…
Budget document
Actual budget information does not show up until page 17 of the budget document. All of the information preceding this page may be of interest, but belongs in appendices, not in the main body of the document.
The staff report does not indicate the portion of revenues due to fare revenues and contracted services is 7.3%. But the budget document states Fare Revenue, “This is money paid by the transit riders to use transit services, but also includes special transit fares from Los Rios Community College District (Los Rios) and California State University, Sacramento (CSUS) Student pass programs.” and “Contracted Services include the City of Rancho Cordova contract for transit services, as well as UC Davis Causeway Connection and Elk Grove Medical Center shuttle services.” STAR does not believe that fare recovery should be the primary criteria for judging the success of service, but does feel that it is an important detail. RydeFreeRT is strangely not mentioned at all. We will post soon about the RydeFreeRT budget.
Revenue line items are not presented as a table, but as text, making it difficult to see patterns. If STAR has the resources, we will create these tables and share them.
The projection of $59M from SB 125 funding is problematic. These are not guaranteed funds, and the negotiations between SACOG and SacRT over these funds have not gone well this past year. SACOG has been slow to commit to allocations, and SacRT has changed its mind a number of times on what it is requesting funding for.
The real issue
All of these are minor issues that could be corrected by SacRT before the budget is submitted and adopted in June.
The real issue, though, is that the budget provides absolutely no information about what the public and transit advocacy organizations want to know, which is: how much is being spent on what operations services, and what are the performance measures related to those services? Everything else is just obscuration.
What the budget should contain is information about each of SacRT’s major programs:
- light rail
- fixed route bus service
- SmartRide (on demand rides)
- Community Bus Service
- RydeSmartRT
- SacRT GO paratransit
- other services such as Airport, Causeway Connection
For each of these, we want to know how much it costs, in staff time, other expenses, and purchase of vehicles (which is a capital cost, but related to operations). We want to know how many people are served, what the fare recovery is, the demographics of those served, and how many people have no other choice but to use these services. We are not questioning the efficacy of any particular service. We can’t, because SacRT does not provide that information.
The upshot
Sacramento Transit Advocates and Riders (STAR) finds the draft FY-2025 budget offered by SacRT unacceptable because it provides almost no information about operations programs and their effectiveness. SacRT has the information, and the public wants to see it.
Sacramento Transit Advocates and Riders (STAR) 