The proposed transportation sales tax measure imposes some very specific requirements on SacRT for transit expenditures and reporting, in Chapter II: Measure Revenue Percentage Allocations by Spending Category, section B: Sacramento Regional Transit District (SacRT) Maintenance, Operations, and Transformative System Improvements. Specifically:
During this period the following performance metrics shall also be met:
Exhibit A: Transportation Expenditure Plan
1. SacRT will meet or exceed generally accepted industry standards for the percentage of buses and light rail vehicles that meet or exceed useful vehicle life or average vehicle age benchmarks.
2. SacRT will meet or exceed generally accepted industry standards for miles between road calls, on-time performance, missed trips, and safety/security key performance indicators, unless factors outside of SacRT’s control impact the ability to meet these metrics.
3. SacRT will meet or exceed generally applicable requirements of state law, as may be amended from time to time, including those of the California Transportation Development Act (TDA), which currently include meeting minimum farebox recovery ratio requirements and independent performance audits conducted every three years.
It should be noted that currently very few transit providers in the state of California are meeting the fare box recovery ratios specified in state law. Even before the pandemic, most agencies were falling below the standard, and it may be several years before they again get back to that lower level. Transit agency budgets have been saved by federal assistance, but that assistance is one-time, and when it runs out, there is a looming crisis for the agencies related to the fare box recovery portion of their budgets. A few transit agencies in the US have gone fare-free, and a lot more are considering it, to meet concerns about equity, fare enforcement, and the expense of collecting fares. Is it that the authors of the measure are unaware of these issues, or that they are intentionally setting up a catch-22 that would result in denial of funding to SacRT?
These types of requirements are not imposed on any of the other agencies funding under the proposed measure. STAR is certainly not against performance measures, which are generally lacking from transportation infrastructure projects, but feel that all agencies should be treated equally. By setting a higher bar for SacRT than the other agencies, the measure reveals its bias against transit.
SacRT would also be subject to fix-it-first and five-year plans, which is consistent with the other agencies, though the language varies a bit.
Sacramento Transit Advocates and Riders (STAR) 
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