On Tuesday, June 4, the Mercury News and the East Bay Times published our Op-Ed. The Marin Independent Journal will follow soon. We believe an appropriate response by MTC would be a retrospective look at two decades of its decisions: How did we do?
The best thing to have come out of Washington D.C. in decades: A letter from Committee Chairs (or Ranking Members) in the Senate and House asking Secretary of Transportation Buttigieg to explain why his Department gave CA HSR a $3.2 billion grant, despite its inability to show how that project will ever be useful to anyone: Congressional Letter to Sec. Buttigieg on HSR This letter bears a striking resemblance to TRANSDEF’s analysis from a decade ago as to why CA’s HSR project can never work. We also remind everyone that HSR would be running now if the CHSRA had not…
Terrifying tales of transit agency layoffs and service cuts, known as the fiscal cliff, loom as the consequences of the pandemic and the drop in ridership from the shift to working at home. The Legislature and Governor have responded to the frantic lobbying by kicking the can down the road. The East Bay Times responded with a powerful editorial, Why Newsom’s Bay Area transit bailout will likely fail. Excerpts: Rather than directly address these problems, the new bailout plan from Sacramento doubles down on an oversight commission [MTC] that has failed since its establishment in 1970 to fulfill its state-mandated…
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (HJTA) filed a Petition for Review with the California Supreme Court in August 2020. The Petition asserts that prior to Proposition 26, a clear body of law differentiated between taxes and fees. Whereas the Proposition was enacted to close several loopholes, the Court of Appeal decision opened up a brand-new huge loophole that would allow any fee for access to public property to be imposed without a two-thirds vote. In addition, the Petition points out that a different division of the same Court of Appeal had issued a ruling (Zolly v. City of Oakland) that…
After Appellant Michael Arata filed his Reply Brief and Motion for Judicial Notice, the case is now fully briefed. Previously, Contra Costa County had filed its Opposition Brief, and Contra Costa Transportation Authority had filed its Opposition Brief and Appendix. The Opening Brief, Motion for Judicial Notice, and a description of the case can be found here.
After its role in drafting the ballot arguments opposed to Contra Costa Transportation Authority’s (CCTA’s) Measure J on the March 2020 ballot, TRANSDEF became concerned about the misleading language of the question on the ballot. Working with our attorney, we sent multiple letters to the County Registrar of Voters, the Board of Supervisors, and Contra Costa County Counsel. The second set of letters was sent after we discovered that County Counsel had modified her Impartial Analysis of the measure, taking out the first paragraph reference to the proposed sales tax being an additional tax. We decided that this was an…
The Contra Costa Transportation Authority placed Measure J on the March 2020 ballot. Measure J would have doubled the existing transportation sales tax. On election night, Measure J received a humiliating 48.94% of the vote, where 66.67% was required to pass. That vote slowly climbed until it reached 51.69%, a resounding rejection of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority and the leadership of Contra Costa’s elected officials, who nearly unanimously endorsed the measure. TRANSDEF organized the submission of ballot arguments opposed to the Measure. See Recent Contra Costa Transportation History for a broader understanding of the issues facing voters.
In its second editorial about Measure J, the East Bay Times hits at the failure of County Counsel to provide a legally mandated Impartial Analysis that is, in fact, impartial.
Measure J was discussed in a powerful article in the East Bay Times, with the sub-heading “Critics charge tax measure is ‘greenwashing’ in car-centric county.”
