The Operating Expenses subsection of the FY 2026 Operating Budget Summary is even less useful to transit advocates and the public than the revenue subsection. What STAR, and other transit advocacy organizations, and the public want to know, is how much does each of the major components of the SacRT transit system cost: fixed route bus, light rail, SacRT GO (paratransit), and SacRT Flex. This is no information about this. We understand that many expenses are ‘overhead’, necessary for the entire agency, or cannot be allocated to a particular service, but of those that can be, should be. As shown in the chart and table below, salaries and benefits are 69.5% of expenses, but this fact is well known, that operators are the most expensive part of a system.

Traction costs, the electricty used for the light rail system, is lumped in with other utility costs, not allocated to light rail. In the employee table, ‘operations’ includes operators for the three major services, but with no break-out. At 1129 employees, the bulk of the agency, we’d like to see some detail.

There is a decrease of employees, almost all in two related categories, ‘Community Bus Services Operator’ and ‘Community Bus Services Operator – S/R’ accounting for 57 positions. STAR assumes that this is due to the termination of the on-demand SmartRide program, which used SacRT employees, and the initiation of the SacRT Flex program, under which the service contractor hires its own employees. But the budget doesn’t mention this idea, so we can’t be sure.

The SacRT separation into operating budget and capital budget does not mean what a person familiar with budgets might mean. Capital means grants, and Operating means everything else. There are personnel allocation to Operating Expenses which have little or nothing to do with operations. For example, ‘Chief of Staff/ Real Estate’, ‘Planning, Grants and Procurement’, ‘Capital Programs’ in the divisions list (page 24) should be partially or entirely allocated to Capital Expenses.

• SacRT Budget