High stakes, lower bar: SMART needs just a simple majority on Measure B to lock in crucial tax revenue for 30 more years

Was this the SMART train, or the Lexington Avenue local during a New York City rush hour?

It took several minutes on the morning of April 18 for passengers on the platform at the Santa Rosa Downtown station to pack themselves onto a southbound train. With the Butter & Egg Days festival happening in Petaluma, four stops south, this was an especially crowded day on SMART, with over 7,200 riders - about 2,500 more than its daily average.

"There's nowhere to park near the parade," a mom explained to her two young children, once they were all aboard. "So we're taking the train!"

On one side of the tracks, as SMART trip No. 9 eased into the Petaluma North station 20 minutes later, was the paved pathway for cyclists and pedestrians, part of a trail network that one day is meant to stretch 70 miles when completed, from Larkspur to Cloverdale. On the other were seven half-finished apartment buildings on land sold by SMART that will eventually hold 131 affordable housing units.

The bustling tableau - packed trains within walking distance of low-cost housing, connecting communities with less reliance on automobiles - was precisely what the founders of the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit district envisioned in their successful campaign almost 20 years ago to return passenger train service to the North Bay after a decades-long hiatus.

The quarter-cent sales tax passed by voters in 2008 now brings in around $50 million a year, covering about half of SMART's total operating expenses. The agency has been especially adept at leveraging that stream of tax revenue - $657.8 million since its inception - to win regional, state and federal grants.

"We've doubled the community's investment, bringing in $735 million in outside money," said Eddy Cumins, the agency's general manager, who then cited studies showing that some 75% of that money "stays in Sonoma and Marin."

But Measure Q expires in 2029. That means, in the June 2 primary election, Marin and Sonoma county voters will have a chance to deliver their latest verdict on the SMART train, which began service in 2017 and now serves 14 stops along a 48-mile corridor between Larkspur Landing and Windsor. Service to Healdsburg is scheduled to start in late 2028.

Measure B, if passed, would extend the quarter-cent tax another 30 years. Unlike its 2008 predecessor, and unlike Measure I in 2020 - the previous, failed attempt to reauthorize SMART's tax - Measure B needs only a simple majority to pass.

Still, Measure B arguably occupies the marquee spot on North Bay ballots, which went out in the mail Monday.

Friends of the train see an agency now hitting its stride, increasing post-pandemic ridership at a faster clip than other Bay Area and California public transit systems while providing a crucial alternative to the stubbornly heavy traffic on Highway 101.

SMART's passenger count has been boosted further by the April launch of the Marin-Sonoma Coordinated Transit Service Plan (MASCOTS), an overhaul of North Bay transit service designed to connect local buses to the railway, rather than put them in competition.

That ridership boom contrasts sharply with the hangover that followed the 2008 Great Recession, which drastically shrunk SMART's sales tax revenue. The blow fell not long after its establishment and forced the district to move from a full-system build-out to an incremental expansion, delaying the start of service.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 cratered ridership while ratcheting up financial pressures, a double whammy that hit transit systems nationwide. SMART has fared better in its ridership recovery than all other systems across the Bay Area and most nationwide. It is on track this year to nearly double its pre-pandemic peak of 716,847 trips in 2019.

SMART critics say that's because its pre-pandemic ridership was no great shakes to begin with.

They view it as a misbegotten commuter rail line between suburbs. They contend it hasn't put a dent in Highway 101 traffic and doesn't connect to any major population center, meaning it can never generate enough farebox revenue to justify its existence.

Big stakes in latest campaign

SMART appears to have significant momentum going into this election, having posted record ridership in the 2024-25 fiscal year, with 1,123,686 train trips. It also showed 1.03 million pathway trips during that period, using data gathered by automated, installed counters along the corridor.

Though SMART is not steering the Measure B campaign, the agency hasn't been bashful in the run-up to this election about touting its bigger projections for the current 2025-26 fiscal year: 1.4 million train trips and 1.2 million pathway trips.

SMART opened a pair of new stations in 2025: North Petaluma in January, then Windsor in May, while completing key segments of the bike and pedestrian pathway adjacent to the tracks - one between Petaluma and Penngrove, the other connecting Rohnert Park to downtown Santa Rosa.

"I'm very optimistic," said Cumins of his outlook, as the Measure B vote approached. "We're in high gear right now, to be honest with you. But I don't think we're close to peaking."

SMART supporters, of course, would rather avoid an encore of the bruising 2020 ballot measure loss, when they were up against a litany of complaints about the agency and its leadership lacking transparency and failing to make good on the promises made to voters.

The opposition campaign in that election was bankrolled with nearly $2 million by a member of the Gallaher family, the wealthy Sonoma County-based developers whose efforts to thwart this year's tax measure took on a different form - underwriting and promoting a book that lambasts the transit system as a sure-to-fail boondoggle.

SMART "will never function in a cost-effective manner," warns the dust jacket cover of "The Great Train Heist," released Feb. 3 and written by Michael J. Coffino.

Measure B, the book contends, presents taxpayers with "a critical decision about continuing to subsidize this failed experiment. The answer should be a resounding ‘NO.'"

The Gallahers say they believe public funds would be better spent on numerous other projects, including drug rehab centers, or repairing pothole-strewn roads, or addressing Sonoma County's "homelessness and housing crisis."

The lone organized opposition comes from the Marin-based Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers, whose arguments against Measure B appear in both counties' voter information guides. The group has registered an independent expenditure committee for the 2026 election cycle to communicate with voters about "multiple local taxes" on Marin ballots. Campaign finance records show the committee has spent $3,000 out of $25,000 on campaign consultants, literature, a website and office expenses but has not reported any spending specific to Measure B.

Sensible Taxpayers have also condemned the 2024 legislative maneuvering, by then-Assemblyman Bill Dodd, D-Napa, which lowered the threshold needed for passage to a simple majority in cases where a tax measure qualifies by voter signatures.

That move could be challenged on the November ballot by a separate state initiative backed by the anti-tax Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. Seeing a threat, the state Legislature is likely to offer its own initiative requiring the association's proposal to pass with the two-thirds majority threshold.

Meanwhile, The SMART Initiative-Yes on B, a political action committee supporting the tax renewal, hauled in just over $1 million in contributions between Jan. 1, 2025, and April 18, 2026.

Leading the donations were labor groups, unions, construction companies and affiliated PACs, including the California Alliance for Jobs, which topped the list with $200,000 in total contributions. Significant donations also came from Stacy and Witbeck, the contractor for SMART's Petaluma North Station, and various branches of Santa Rosa-based Ghilotti Construction, a leading road and transit contractor.

Other notable donations include $127,850 from the Petaluma-based Eames Institute and $20,000 from Bank of Marin. Rounding out the contributions were members of the local political class, including Sonoma County supervisors David Rabbitt, James Gore and Chris Coursey, Cotati Mayor Sylvia Lemus, who is running for supervisor, along with prominent Democratic Party donor Anthony Crabb, and the campaign committees for Assembly members Chris Rogers and Damon Connolly.

Heading into the final stretch before Election Day, the campaign's latest available finance reports showed $217,471 in cash on hand.

Weighing cost, benefit of public transit

Daniel Chatman, a professor in UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, teaches transportation and land use planning, and has conducted studies addressing which U.S. transit systems succeed, and why.

He doesn't necessarily disagree with a key criticism lobbed at SMART over the years, including by the Gallahers.

While it's true that transit systems, like roads, schools, libraries and fire departments, deliver public services and aren't expected to turn a profit, SMART's 6% farebox recovery rate - the percentage of operating costs covered by passenger fares - gives Chatman considerable pause.

"Six percent is very low, even for the United States," he said. "So that's certainly an issue. Let's face it, (SMART) is a costly service, per passenger."

A subject he often brings up with his students, Chatman said, "is that there are opportunity costs for funds being spent.

"So the question is, if you were going to collect a quarter-cent sales tax, how could you create the most value with that?

"Considering the cost of providing ridership on the SMART system," he said, "My guess is there might be a lot of other uses for that money that would be more environmentally beneficial, more equitable, that sort of thing."

That, however, "is not the choice facing voters," he acknowledged. "It's not like voters can choose to spend the sales tax on ‘whatever.' It's going to be used for this specific purpose."

On the benefit side of the equation, SMART and its supporters are most often taken to task for an unkept promise made during the 2008 campaign: to "relieve traffic," a selling point largely tied to the Highway 101 corridor. Gains against global warming and increased transportation options were the other selling points.

Eighteen years and over $1 billion in taxpayer funds later, lamented the Novato economist and longtime SMART foe Mike Arnold, "congestion on Highway 101 appears to be worse than ever."

SMART, he pointed out in a recent editorial, "simply does not operate on a scale capable of changing traffic conditions" on that freeway - on which 8,000 vehicles per hour pass a single point between San Rafael and Novato on a typical weekday morning.

Train advocates counter that congestion would be worse, still, without SMART. "We're on pace this year to take 29 million passenger miles off Highway 101," Cumins said. "That's huge."

Susan Handy, a UC Davis professor specializing in transportation, points out that Caltrans' decades-long Highway 101 widening project in the North Bay, completed in September, also failed to fix the congestion problem on that stretch.

"All that widening, all the work that's been done on the 101 over the years - that hasn't solved the problem either," said Handy, whose research includes strategies for reducing automobile dependence, and whose book, "Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking About Transportation," explores why it's difficult in America "to unseat the deeply embedded prioritization of the car when we're making decisions about the transportation system," she said.

While SMART hasn't ended Highway 101 congestion, Handy noted, "it has given people an alternative. You don't have to be in your car stuck on 101. You can get on the train and speed right by."

But at what cost?

Arnold, the economist, said Marin and Sonoma county residents "subsidize SMART passengers at $78 per round trip."

That number that will shrink to $57.94 in 2026, according to the agency's figures. (No precise comparison was available to calculate the taxpayer subsidy for a round trip by a motorist on Highway 101, where the $1.5 billion widening from Windsor to Sausalito, begun a quarter-century ago, stands out as the North Bay's largest public works project of its generation.)

Because it is a regional rail system, said SMART's communications manager Julia Gonzalez, with riders traveling longer distances - 20 or 22 miles per trip, compared to roughly three to five miles on local bus systems - a "more meaningful" measure of SMART's efficiency is "subsidy per passenger mile, which accounts for how far riders are traveling."

With its subsidy per passenger mile at $1.83 - and projected to come down to $1.40 in 2026, she said - SMART leads the North Bay, and ranks fifth among the Bay Area's 18 transit agencies, in that metric.

Regardless, writes Arnold, "The financial realities of running a suburban passenger rail system are stark." For now, "fares cover only about 6% of operating costs, which means 94% comes via taxpayer funding."

Those numbers - underwhelming at best, alarming at worst - are due, at least in part, to SMART's decision in 2024 to sacrifice some ticket revenue to get more people on the train.

Skyrocketing ridership

That effort has succeeded beyond expectations. The 1.4 million rider trips projected by SMART for the current fiscal year represent a 65% increase over 2023-24.

Cumins recalled making a presentation to SMART's board early that year, discussing "the tension that always happens between ridership and farebox recovery."

To get more people on the train, the agency in April 2024 unveiled a "free fare program" for youth under the age of 18, and seniors over 65.

Cumins said he expected that policy to cost SMART some $300,000 a year, while increasing ridership by about 25%.

"What ended up happening," he recounted, "is that the farebox didn't go down, it actually went up 16%."

The calculated decision to juice ridership was well-timed, allowing the agency to point to that steep upward trajectory at the same time it is going before voters, asking for a 30-year extension on the revenue stream that is its lifeblood.

While farebox recovery is a significant gauge, and should be monitored, he said, "It's not the only measurement." SMART's upward trend in ridership will be accelerated by its expanding role in the recently implemented MASCOTS plan, the joint effort involving nine regional transit agencies aimed at creating a more efficient, connected network in Sonoma and Marin counties.

It has reduced regional bus trips linking Sonoma County to San Francisco. In exchange, SMART has increased weekday trips from 42 to 48 and weekend trips from 16 to 24. Service hours now go from 4 a.m. to 11:15 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Who is riding and why?

Cumins came into the job in late 2021, after the agency's ridership bottomed out amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, Gonzalez said, SMART has "taken a deliberate approach to better serve the travel needs of entire households, not just traditional commuters" by expanding weekday and weekend schedules.

Right now, according to Gonzalez, SMART's ridership is composed of 57% adult riders, 26% youth riders, and 17% senior riders. An onboard "snapshot survey" of SMART passengers, conducted by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission between September 2023 and February 2024, found that just under half used the train to commute to work, while 36% were engaged in social, recreational and shopping trips, and 15% are students, using the train to get to and from school.

The median household income for riders surveyed was $110,000 - a finding often noted by critics who argue that the sales tax that largely funds SMART operations lands hardest on lower-income residents, who end up subsidizing more affluent passengers.

Those arguments are undercut, at least somewhat, elsewhere in the MTC survey. A third of respondents reported a household income of less than $60,000. A third of SMART riders lacked access to a car, while 5% reported having a disability limiting their ability to travel.

Those findings, Gonzalez said, "underscore that SMART is not a niche service, but an essential transportation option for a broad cross-section of the community."

The percentage of students on the train has undoubtedly spiked, she said, since the "free fare" program went into effect.

‘A game-changer for us'

Each weekday morning, SMART's southbound Trip No. 13 pulls into the Cotati Station at 7:56 a.m. Two minutes later, northbound Trip No. 6 arrives at the opposite platform. Both trains then disgorge up to 40 Credo High School students, who rely on scooters, bikes, skateboards or their own two feet to cover the final mile to their public charter campus at SOMO Village in Rohnert Park.

Andrea Akmenkalns, Credo's executive director, said launch of SMART service in 2017 "was a game-changer for us."

There are a half-dozen K-through-8 Waldorf schools in the North Bay that feed into Credo. Once the SMART train began rolling, she said, "We started to get a lot more families coming up from Marin."

Many Marin parents, she noted, "are working in that county, or in San Francisco - they're not necessarily coming north." Access to the train allowed them to enroll their kids at Credo.

If voters this time reject Measure B, the 2028 general election cycle would offer another chance. Beyond that, the agency and its allies would likely mount still another push to get the tax reauthorized. If presented with a strikeout, the rail line would tap its reserves to keep trains running for as long as possible. Once those funds dried up, Gonzalez said, SMART would "cease operations."

That would be bitter disappointment to many, including Handy, the UC Davis professor who sees SMART as "a really important part of this growing, improving Bay Area transit network."

In her book, she calls a shift in the way people think about transportation, a reframing that could help make it clearer, she said, that "having a rich array of choices is better for everybody."

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com.

You can reach Staff Writer Emma Murphy at 707-521-5228 or emma.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MurphReports.

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