Anatomy of a landslide: How SMART went from existential crisis to lopsided victory in its quest for long-term tax funding
Eddy Cumins seemed completely unconcerned, after two days of angling for trout on Lake Siskiyou, that he had yet to catch a fish.
"We've got this beautiful view of Mount Shasta," Cumins said Wednesday morning from the cabin where he and his wife, Vivian, were staying. "We're just relaxing, enjoying the scenery."
It helped that Cumins, general manager of the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit agency, had reeled in a massive prize the previous week. Measure B, which asked voters in Sonoma and Marin counties to extend for 30 years the quarter-cent sales tax that keeps the SMART train running, had leapt to an insurmountable lead that has edged upward since.
Needing only a simple majority to pass, it was ahead Friday with more than 73% of the vote.
That Secretariat-like margin was one of the more remarkable results from the North Bay's June 2 primary election. With the win, SMART flipped the script from six years ago, when a measure seeking renewal of the sales tax was trounced. Needing a two-thirds majority, and up against a roughly $2 million anti-SMART campaign bankrolled by a wealthy local family, it limped in at 53.6%.
A second defeat, had Measure B also tanked, would have pushed the commuter rail system - which started carrying passengers in 2017 and has spent over $1 billion laying 48 miles of modernized track connecting 14 stations from Larkspur to Windsor - to the cusp of extinction.
Instead it won in a landslide, a testament to the numerous ways SMART has upped its game since 2020: beefing up its schedule throughout the day, improving connections with local bus service, opening the North Petaluma and Windsor stations, launching a free-fare pilot program for seniors and riders under 18, setting new ridership records - 1.1 million passenger trips in fiscal year 2025, up by a third from the previous fiscal year.
In that same period, SMART showed over 1 million trips on the bicycle and pedestrian pathway running alongside the train. It improved first- and last-mile connections to and from the rail line, and broke ground on the nine-mile extension to Healdsburg, where service is scheduled to begin in late 2028.
Creating momentum
That cavalcade of milestones and good news created a sense of excitement and momentum - this was not an accident - that helped carry Measure B to the landslide victory.
That tax revenue, which had been scheduled to expire in 2029, provides SMART with around $50 million a year, roughly half its operating expenses. It also allows the agency to leverage hundreds of millions of dollars from regional, state and federal sources.
One of his concerns, Cumins said, was that at some point, those funding agencies would say, "Wait a minute, we're not going to invest in this - we're not sure if you're going to be able to pass the sales tax."
With that revenue source all but locked in until 2059, "that's not a conversation anymore."
Measure B's lopsided victory also validated feedback that SMART staffers and friends of the train have been hearing for at least a year.
Suzanne Smith, a former longtime Sonoma County government executive, led the SMART Initiative, the citizens group that collected the signatures - 72,000 of them - to get Measure B on the ballot. The group hoped to complete its signature collecting in four and a half months.
"We were done in three," she said.
While wrangling those signatures, Smith recalled, "we had this experience that was so positive - almost universally positive - it made us feel we had a chance to go over two-thirds on Election Day."
And so Measure B did - even though, this time around, clearing that high bar wasn't necessary, thanks to the California Supreme Court, which determined in a series of rulings in recent years that voter-proposed special taxes, such as Measure B, are an exercise in direct democracy, distinct from taxes proposed by municipalities and lawmakers. As such, they are exempt from the state's two-thirds supermajority rule for special taxes, needing only a simple majority to pass.
The great unknown around Measure B, said Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt, a SMART board member, was, "Would there be an opposition campaign?" Would the Gallahers drop another seven-figure sum to prevent its passage?
"And there wasn't," Rabbitt said, "aside from a book."
Bill and Cindy Gallaher, the deep-pocketed Sonoma County developers who have long viewed SMART as a misbegotten resource suck, underwrote the publication of "The Great Train Heist" by Michael Coffino. Released in February 2026, it repeats and amplifies criticisms that SMART lacked transparency, failed to fix congestion on Highway 101, and could never recoup enough farebox revenue to justify its existence.
While an advertisement promoting the book did appear on a Gallaher-controlled billboard alongside Highway 101 in Rohnert Park in the run-up to Election Day, it did not appear to move the needle on the Measure B vote.
"I've got to give credit to (SMART's) leadership," Rabbitt said. "Eddy and his staff have done all the right things."
Pivot in leadership
In October 2021, SMART brought in Cumins to replace general manager Farhad Mansourian, a longtime Marin County public works executive who had led the the agency for nearly a decade, through its initial buildout and launch of service.
Mansourian was "disheartened" by the faceplant of Measure I in 2020, he told The Press Democrat at the time, and announced his retirement in April 2021.
Cumins, an Oklahoma native who spent 20 years in the U.S. Air Force before embarking on a career in transit, took an unconventional path to the C-suite.
During his last two years in the military, where he served in the "vehicle management" field and spent four years as an Airman Leadership School Commandant, he earned a master's degree in Organizational Leadership at Colorado State.
After retiring from the service in 2011, he was hired by the Utah Transit Authority, tasked initially with overseeing the maintenance and performance of 360 buses. Within eight years he was chief operating officer of the entire agency.
A quick study, Cumins recognized, during his interviews with the SMART board in 2021, that its members sought a candidate who could do one thing more than any other:
"Pass the sales tax," he said. "When the board hired me, that's really what I felt I was being hired to do."
More generally, he added, his role was "improving public perception of the agency."
Mansourian, an engineer by training and enthusiastic champion for SMART, had nevertheless bristled under some of the more barbed criticism of the train system and his leadership while withholding detailed ridership figures that the agency now routinely discloses.
After getting the lay of the land, and getting to know a staff Cumins describes as "the most dedicated team of professionals I've ever worked with in my life, and that's including my military career," he devised a strategic plan, pinpointing four objectives – growing ridership, extending service and pathways, and takeover of freight rail – which also serve as the pillars of an in-house graphic agency that employees recognize immediately as "the SMART House."
"People bought into it. It clicked," he said.
"What it really came down to is this: Whatever you're doing that particular day, if it's not aimed at one of those four strategic objectives, you're probably doing it wrong."
Among those disappointed by the agency, under Mansourian, were cyclists who'd been promised, in exchange for their original support for SMART, a pathway that would be ready for use as soon as trains started rolling.
Financial reversals tied to the 2008 Great Recession made that impossible, creating some ill will between SMART and some in the velo-community.
When Measure I rolled around six years ago, both the Marin County Bicycle Coalition and its Sonoma County counterpart, the SCBC, made the decision to neither endorse nor oppose it.
"SMART had not been advancing the pathway," said Warren Wells, policy & planning director for the MCBC, "which had been a central promise" made by agency to bike groups whose support it needed.
Cumins' arrival created "a sea change," Wells said. "It really transformed our experience working with the agency."
Under Cumins, he said, there has been "transparency and a willingness to focus on the pathway. It's one of the pillars of the SMART house!"
Yes, gaps remain in that byway. But SMART now invites biking groups to review the early design of pathway segments. "And they're taking our suggestions, as much as they can."
The right moves
Increasing a ridership that had cratered during COVID, as happened at transit agencies around the world, was the "most complex" of those challenges, said Cumins, and became a top priority.
When the pandemic hit, recalled Ariel Kelley, a Healdsburg City Councilmember and SMART board member, the fledgling agency had only been carrying passengers for a few years, and was still figuring out its identity.
At a time when many U.S. transit agencies are still operating below 2019 ridership levels, due to the rise of hybrid and permanent work-from-home schedules, SMART has rebounded strongly, faring better in ridership recovery than all transit systems across the Bay Area.
While SMART serves commuters, "it isn't just a commuter train," Kelley said. "We also serve students, and families, and seniors who want to go grab lunch with their friends on a Tuesday afternoon."
Since Cumins came aboard, said SMART communications manager Julia Gonzalez, the agency has "taken a deliberate approach to better serve the needs of entire households, not just traditional commuters."
It has done that by expanding weekday and weekend schedules - most recently with the launch of the Marin Sonoma Coordinated Service Plan (MASCOTS), a joint effort involving nine regional transit agencies, aimed at creating a more efficient, connected network in Sonoma and Marin counties.
MASCOTS has reduced regional bus trips linking Sonoma County to San Francisco, while increasing SMART's weekday trips from 42 to 48. Trains now run from 4 a.m. to 11:15 p.m. Monday through Friday.
After praising the agency for "adapting and evolving" to the changing needs of customers, Rabbitt, who is ending his 16-year tenure in county office at the end of this year, said he hopes to see SMART "continue to be aggressive as it has been" in securing grants and extending the line.
In the wake of his agency's latest win, said Cumins, "There might be people out there who think we're going to take our foot off the gas.
"That's not going to happen."
With the $269 million Healdsburg extension underway and paid for, he said, "Now we're beating the streets for grants to go further north."
That's music to the ears of Jack Swearengen, longtime chair of the nonprofit Friends of SMART, whose members' advocacy for the train dates back, in some cases, to the past century.
His advice and plea to the SMART board: "Don't stop now, don't rest on your laurels. There's too much left to be done. Go north, go east, doubletrack it."
SMART has yet to give a tentative date for when it expects to begin work on the 17-mile extension from Healdsburg to Cloverdale, the planned northern terminus, for now at least.
With SMART's financial future on much firmer ground, Smith predicted, its leaders will have the bandwidth to fine-tune those visions.
One such potential project is an east-west line along Highway 37, connecting Novato and Suisun City, and giving North Bay riders access to Amtrak's "Capitol Corridor."
That project "is definitely on our radar," said Cumins, who pointed out that "it's in the state rail plan as a future passenger rail line," and that it also "lines up" for potential federal funding.
"As we're building the new Highway 37, which will be the region's most expensive project for the next generation," said Kelley, who is also chair of the Transportation Authority for Sonoma County, "we are absolutely looking at SMART going east-west.
"I'm also talking to people in Sonoma and Sonoma Valley about how we can get them to be a part of this transit picture, because they are definitely out on an island."
Should a SMART train someday run east-west, she said, it wouldn't be that far from Sonoma.
"So I think that conversation needs to happen."
The bigger and bolder the vision, the better, Swearengen says.
"This was a dream for decades," he said of SMART. "And look where we are now."
You can reach Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @AusMurph88.
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This story was originally published June 12, 2026 at 6:41 PM.