back to vtaridersunion.org main page| Santa Clara VTA | Riders Union |
Robert Carvalho was at the Campbell proposed service cut meeting, and has this to report below.
I attended the transit cut meeting last night at the Campbell Library. There were about 20 members of the public in attendance. Overall, the mood was quiet and polite, almost resigned.
The meeting started off with Scott Buhrer, CFO of VTA talking about the overall financial picture. He told us that staff was planning on presenting 3 alternative "Live within our means" budget alternatives to the Board on December 12th. This set of service reductions is expected to save 15-20M$. Someone asked if he had looked at using bonds to cover the near-term budget crisis until some new funding sources could be identified. He responded that they would be extremely reluctant to bond without knowing if they could pay them off with some new funding source, especially given the uphill battle that any new taxes would face.
He then got into some more general numbers about the shortfall: The largest part of the steep sales tax growth in the 90s was the B2B sector of spending. All of the others grew slowly or stayed flat. This was also almost all of the drop, the other sectors only going down slightly. He talked about how relying on sales tax alone is becoming riskier, and that they don't expect sales taxes to recover to 2000 levels for at least 2-3 (more like 5) years.
Someone asked about delaying the construction projects. He indicated that all construction projects were being reviewed, that some had already been recommended to be postponed (including Caltrain Electrification), but that some were running off of dedicated funding sources that couldn't be switched to operations. Specifically, the ongoing studies for BART are being paid for by state grants specifically for that project, and couldn't even be transferred to another capital project.
In response to a question, he told us that the operating reserve on June 30, 2002 was 41M$, and that in October, they projected the reserve as of June 30, 2003 to be 3.5M$, but that number keeps dropping. Someone suggested fare hikes instead of service cuts. Scott indicated that fares are not large enough to cover the shortfall. The shortfall this year is currently about $80M, and fares this year are estimated at $29M
Then they talked about the service cuts in general ways. A member of the Route planning group showed a confusing chart that had the following:
| Weekday | Saturday | Sunday |
| 39.8 Riders/hour | 40.4 Riders/hour | 37 Riders/hour |
| 13.7 Riders/hour | 9.9 Riders/hour | 10 Riders/hour |
The top line is the current average ridership system-wide. The second line is the current average ridership on those lines/runs that are being cut. This doesn't mean that their weekday ridership will fall to 26.1 Riders/hour, it's just trying to show that they are cutting the least-used lines. They hope to keep ridership above 30 Riders/hour after the cuts.
There was brief discussion of a few lines of personal interest to particular members of the public. Staff indicated that most of the drop in ridership on LRT was north of downtown SJ, especially Tasman west. Someone asked about the Almaden spur, and staff indicated that it had around 100 Riders/hour, so they were cutting the bus line that parallels it instead. Someone expressed concern about all the late night service being cut, staff re-iterated that the cuts were made almost entirely to the lines/runs with low ridership
--Robert
back to vtaridersunion.org main page