A recent SacBee opinion article by Yousef Baig on the Measure A 2022 transportation sales tax measure being proposed quotes Henri Li, General Manage of SacRT, that there is $3.3B in funds for transit in the measure. That is an interesting amount, but is it real?

The measure’s Transportation Expenditure Plan, in section “II. Measure Revenue Percentage Allocations by Spending Category”, part “B. Sacramento Regional Transit District (SacRT) Maintenance, Operations, and Transformative System Improvements” allocates 25.11% to SacRT, which if the revenue estimate of $8.5B is in the ballpark, is $2.13B. Part “C. Congestion Relief Improvements” allocates 10.85% to SacRT specifically for ‘congestion relief’. More about that in a moment. The amount from this part would be $0.92B. I addition, part “D. Senior and Disabled Transportation Services” allocates 3.05%, which is $0.25B. The total equals, more or less, $3.3B.

But part C is dedicated to congestion relief. Not to meeting the needs of new or existing transit riders, not to designing and implementing a transit system that works with walking and bicycling to offer travel without requiring a motor vehicle, but to mitigating the increased motor vehicle travel induced by both our existing roadway system (notice that Highway 50 is being expanded right now, which will lead to increased motor vehicle travel) and the additional roadways to be funded by the measure. Though the language of part C is fuzzy, as is much of the language in the measure, the implication is that this is for infrastructure projects only, not for operations. So the funds to operate whatever transit mitigation is built would come out of the part B. Whatever the projects here, it is unlikely that they would be ones that SacRT would identify or prioritize for meeting the needs of the transit using and transit dependent public.

The entirety of part C should be seen as roadways capacity expansion, through the Capital Southeast Connector, and the mitigation necessary to make up for that project. So, 22.43% of $8.5B is $1.9B for a single project and its mitigation.

A future post will take a closer look at the SacBee opinion by Yousef Baig.

• Measure A 2022