EDITOR: The Santa Clara VTA Riders Union (SCVTARU
– www.vtaridersunion.org), a transit advocacy and watchdog group
for the South Bay, has found a number of wasteful entries in the
2004/2005 Fiscal Year Recommended Budget recently released by the
Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA).
EDITOR:
The Santa Clara VTA Riders Union (SCVTARU – www.vtaridersunion.org), a transit advocacy and watchdog group for the South Bay, has found a number of wasteful entries in the 2004/2005 Fiscal Year Recommended Budget recently released by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA).
One example of the waste we found in the VTA’s 2004/2005 Fiscal Year Recommended Budget is on pages 115-117 of its 128-page Recommended Budget. There, we found $307,000 were being allocated for office furniture and office reconfiguration for the office of General Manager Peter Cipolla. SCVTARU questions why this expenditure is being made while VTA continues to raise fares and reduce transit service.
Another example of waste is in how VTA’s Outreach paratransit service serves the southern portion of the county. We recently interviewed a former Outreach paratransit driver regarding paratransit service in South Valley. In that interview, the former driver revealed that, in order to serve South Valley paratransit riders, Outreach vehicles (white vehicles driven by employees of ATC/Vancom, a Texas-based contractor) must drive 25 miles from their garage in San Jose to reach the passenger, drive the passenger to their destination, and return to San Jose.
In other words, to take a paratransit rider from Morgan Hill to a destination in San Martin, the Outreach vehicle will have traveled a total of at least 50 miles to take a paratransit passenger for roughly three miles.
Worse, Outreach paratransit vehicles serving South Valley cannot obtain gasoline at commercial gas stations – they must fill up at their garage in San Jose. The former driver revealed that, by using Yellow Cabs with wheelchair capabilities based in South Valley and not Outreach cars based in San Jose, VTA can save up to $9 million per year. This is funding that can easily offset the proposed fare increases and paratransit service reductions VTA claims will save $5 million this fiscal year.
We find it very disturbing that VTA did not initially disclose budgeted positions by division and classification to the general public. I had to call VTA’s fiscal administration just to obtain another missing section in the recommended budget – classifications by division and pay ranges. Both missing sections appeared in the VTA’s 2003 Fiscal Year Recommended Budget.
By not having this information available to the general public at its recent budget meetings, VTA has made those budget meetings a complete sham.
Our findings on the VTA’s 2004/2005 Fiscal Year Recommended Budget can be found online at http://www.vtaridersunion.org/regional/vta_fy0405_budget.html
Eugene Bradley, founder,
South Bay Transit
