Sacramento City Manager Howard Chan has proposed in the 2024-2025 budget to ‘eliminate the free fare transit program’ (RydeFree RT), under Citywide Strategies on page 52.

The Budget and Audit Committee, and Sacramento City Council, had their initial discussion yesterday of the staff proposal of the reductions necessary to balance the budget’s $66M deficit.

STAR responded to this proposal with this letter, created by STAR Action Team member Coco Cocozzella. Other letters opposing elimination and supporting continuation of the program were submitted by SacTRU, Civic Thread, and ECOS.

eComments on agenda item 9 were submitted by Jackie Kahrs, Nicole Gustafson, Nur Kausar, Luke Wilson, Cathy Creswell, Kimberly Sow, William Pavao, Coco Cocozzella (STAR), Kiara Reed (Civic Thread), Kim Williams (Sac BHC), Adrian Rehn (Oak Park Neighborhood Association), Jose Navarro, John King, Dan Allison, and Susan Herre (ECOS).

Twelve people also spoke in person at the city council meeting: Vanessa, Tamie Dramer, five representatives or members of ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), Sacramento City Unified district 2 board member, Tahoe Park Elementary teacher, and John King.

Every single organization and person wrote or spoke supported the student free transit fare program.

Every council member who commented on the budget also mentioned support for the student free fare transit program. Some simply supported it, while some supported the concept while expressing that the program should be paid for by the school districts and not the city.

Howard Chan and Mayor Steinberg claimed that discussions were underway with SacRT and Sacramento City Unified to preserve the program. No mention of this was made previously, nor has SacRT mentioned it. It was also claimed that the school districts are not contributing anything to the program, which we do not believe is true. STAR has requested a detailed budget for the program from SacRT, showing the program partners and their contributions, which we will post when it is available.

STAR is extremely concerned that if the city pulls out of the program, it is likely that all the other partners will as well. Though it is reasonable that school districts (Sac City is only one of 13 in the county) support the program as part of their mission to get students to school, it is unlikely that support will come in time to save the program. If the program dies, it will be very, very hard to restart it. Is the city willing to be responsible for the death of RydeFree RT?

The amount to be saved is $1,000,000. That sounds like a lot of money, but it is a fraction of the $66M to be saved through reductions and a tiny fraction of the $1.6B overall budget. For comparison, this is one new traffic signal. This is less than the cost of two average city staff. This is the very definition of “penny wise and pound foolish”. It shifts expenses from the city onto students and their families, most prominently low-income students whose school attendance will be affected.

This is the first city council consideration of the budget. There will be several more discussions, and then a final adoption by June 11, for the new fiscal year that starts July 1. The May 20 meeting of the Measure U Commission may be critically important, as this is Measure U funding.

The SacBee had an opinion piece on the issue: SacBee: Sacramento just proposed a horrible budget idea that belongs at the back of the bus | Opinion. There was also an article that we haven’t been able to find again.

We were not able to post about this before the May 7 meetings. We will try to do better going forward. We will also post more information about the benefits of the program. Stay tuned!

• City of Sacramento
• RydeFree RT