Grand jury also recommends restructuring VTA board
Following a nearly year-long investigation, the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury is recommending delaying BART-to-San Jose and restructuring the Valley Transportation Authority’s board of directors because its members are too distracted to provide oversight.
In an in-depth, 13-page report released Friday, the grand jury said the VTA board did not efficiently provide management oversight and “has not reacted to the present budget problems with diligence,” depleting financial reserves.
Also, the $4.2 billion BART extension to San Jose – for which the VTA won’t have funds for another 20 years – should be suspended in favor of funding other transit projects, the grand jury said.
Don Gage, District 1 county supervisor and VTA board chair, said Monday that the issues laid out by the grand jury are what the board has been dealing with for more than a year, but that the transit board won’t make any decisions on its recommendations until December or early next year.
“The grand jury report was pretty accurate, but it didn’t factor in the data the full board needs to make the decision,” Gage said. “We have to wait until probably December, when we have all our financial data gathered to make a determination on whether we can go forward with our 2030 plan. … There’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle here.”
One of those is a new half-cent sales tax that would go to maintaining roads and operating the county’s existing bus and rail network. The VTA plans to ask voters to approve the tax in November 2006.
The 19-member grand jury report does not require that the board follow its recommendations, but does warrant an official response.
“We owe them a reply and we’ll give them a reply, but from my own personal experience right now, I’ve got to have more facts before I deal with them,” Gage said.
The grand jury found that the VTA board, which oversees the VTA and its $350 million operating budget, is “too large, too political, too dependent on staff, too inexperienced in some cases, and too removed from the financial and operational performance of VTA.”
It criticized the 12 voting members, consisting of county supervisors and city councilmembers, for not requesting in-depth explanations from VTA staff and rarely engaging in “frank and open discussions on important matters of policy.”
Grand jury foreman Richard Woodward said the board members’ lack of focus was at the core of the issues examined throughout the course of the investigation.
“That was sort of the crux, is that this is not their primary job,” Woodward said. “And therefore it just follows that the amount of time they’ve got to focus on this isn’t as focused.
“That seemed to be obvious when you went to the meetings and could see that often the members of the board really needed to spend a lot of time getting educated on the issues.”
To allay these concerns, the grand jury said the VTA board should be smaller – five to seven members – and members should be either directly elected or appointed.
“Everything you do in this process is political,” Gage said. “If you went to an elected board, people would vote for the people who would think like them.”
Nevertheless, a committee headed by VTA Board Vice Chair Joe Pirzynski is looking into changing the board’s membership. Doing so would require a legislative change that probably could not happen until early next year.
“For me, we’re right in a critical path right now, and it’s not the wisest thing to do to change horses in the middle of the stream,” Gage said.
The VTA board’s distraction led to other problems cited in the grand jury report, Woodward said. For one, the board allowed VTA finances to deteriorate badly before taking action.
When reserves were depleted during the recent economic downturn, the board borrowed $275 million plus interest against future Measure A sales tax revenues to pay current costs. “That action prevented a 21 (percent) cut in transit services this year but has not solved the current financial problem,” the jury reported. “It merely pushed it into the future… .”
The grand jury found that the VTA has refused to consider cheaper BART plans, such as extending only to Milpitas or Berryessa and connecting to light rail. BART, a $4.2 billion project, would largely be funded by a half-cent sales tax. About one-third of the cost would be covered by state and federal funding. At present, the VTA cannot afford to build and operate BART to San Jose.
“Spending limited resources on BART could squander an opportunity to build, maintain, and operate a far larger network of transit options throughout the county as enabled by voters approving the half-cent Measure A sales tax in 2000,” the grand jury said.
In fact, moving forward with the San Jose BART extension may be to the detriment of other the transportation network throughout the region. If the board decides to alter its BART plans or Measure A-funded projects in some way, it will be with voter approval, Gage said.
“We’re probably going to have to go back to the voters, especially if we say we’re not going to do it because they’re the ones who voted for Measure A,” Gage said,” and ask them, ‘What do you want us to do?”
Lori Stuenkel covers education for The Dispatch. She can be reached at 847-7158 or [email protected].
