Last week I took Santa Cruz County to task for proposing a transportation sales tax that would fund roads and not rail. Unfortunately Monterey County has decided to follow in their footsteps with a truly reckless plan that would spend over $1 billion for roads but provides nothing for rail projects that have been in the works for a long time:

A Caltrain rail extension is no longer on a list of projects that Monterey County transportation officials hope a sales tax will help fund over the next quarter century.

On Wednesday, the Transportation Agency for Monterey County board approved a 25-year improvement package wish-list that boasts more than 20 road and transit projects at a cost of $1.8 billion.

TAMC is working to place a half-cent sales tax on the November 2008 ballot that would generate an estimated $980 million. The county would seek matching state and federal funding to pay for the rest of the work.

And why isn’t rail included? From yesterday’s Monterey Herald:

Over the summer, officials from the Monterey County Hospitality Association and the Monterey County Farm Bureau withheld their support from an earlier draft sales tax proposal, arguing there wasn’t enough focus on highway and roads projects that would benefit their industries. They also complained about proposed spending on a Caltrain rail project included in the earlier draft.

But after TAMC officials eliminated the rail spending, both groups sent a letter last month indicating they would back the sales tax effort.

This is madness. The TAMC proposal is reckless planning and poor public policy – locking Monterey County into a roads-only future for the next 25 years puts our economy at risk and will cause us to miss out on leveraged funding opportunities. We can become nationwide leaders in sustainable tourism and sustainable agriculture, but not if we believe against all available evidence that the 20th century dependence on roads can be continued for much longer.

image from TAMC

As I explained last week there are two fundamental reasons why rails, not roads, need to be emphasized in any new transportation plan: global warming and peak oil. Freeway widening projects produce significant amounts of carbon emissions, something that supposedly environmentally-conscious Monterey County residents should not be promoting. Peak oil is the name given to the end of cheap oil as supplies begin to shrink and demand continues to rise globally. The peak, which many researchers believe is either already here or just a few years away, is already manifesting itself in sky-high gas prices.

These phenomenon both suggest environmental, economic, and physical factors that should lead us to prioritize rail over roads. Even a “mixed” funding package with some road widening as the cost of a fully funded Caltrain extension and light rail on the Monterey spur line (a line TAMC owns) would be worth it, as Monterey County has a stronger need than most other places of alternatives to the car. 100 miles long, Monterey County would be crippled in the event of an oil shock, either in the form of supply disruption or even more dramatic price increases. In either event the ability of workers to get around, tourists to come to the region, and agricultural products to get to markets, would be negatively impacted.

On that basis alone, dropping rail funding is a truly reckless act. But it gets worse. The proposed sales tax would last for *25 years*. Not until 2033 would we be able to realistically return to voters with a new funding package. By that point it will be too late – peak oil and climate change are already unfolding. This specific package shackles us to our cars at the exact moment when alternatives must be developed.

Further, there is political movement at the regional, state and federal levels for rail. TAMC’s Caltrain plan has been in the works for many years. Caltrain is willing to provide service to Salinas, but only if TAMC can upgrade the track, secure trackage rights, provide new cars, and guarantee that Caltrain will not be financially exposed. The cost of meeting all these requirement has been put at $90 million – less than a tenth of the overall cost of the transportation package. Democrats in Sacramento have long been supportive of rail, and the Democratic Congress has moved to create a federal matching funds program for local rail, similar to that which has long existed for highways. To abandon rail now is to ensure that Monterey County will miss out on these new opportunities to help defray the cost of providing badly needed sustainable transportation.

And then there is the opposition of the Hospitality Association and the Farm Bureau. That TAMC would bow to the pressure of these two groups is itself a disturbing sign. But let’s question the sanity of these groups. By throwing a fit on rail, they are actually hurting their own industry quite significantly.

Monterey’s tourism industry owes its life to rail. In the first decades after the American conquest, Monterey was an isolated town, hard to reach (it took a day just to travel here from Hollister). That all changed in 1880 when the Del Monte Express began service to Monterey from San Francisco. The rail line enabled the rapid growth of the tourist industry here on the Monterey Peninsula. The Del Monte Hotel, the Pacific Grove Methodist retreat, and by the early 20th century, Pebble Beach were all products of rail.

The last Del Monte train ran in 1971, when Californians wrongly assumed that cheap oil would enable automobile-based transportation to meet our needs for many years to come. Now that we face the end of cheap oil, Monterey’s future as a viable tourist destination depends on rail. Without it, we WILL lose tourist dollars as the cost of getting here becomes too expensive for Northern California families and visitors from around the country.

And we would be missing out on a perfect opportunity to take the lead as an environmentally sustainable tourist destination. Much of Monterey’s value as a destination is based precisely on environmental preservation, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary to the forests, coastline, and dramatic beauty of Big Sur. Rail would allow tourists to get here in a carbon-neutral, or even carbon-reducing manner, complementing the mission and values of our region. TAMC already owns the tracks from Castroville to downtown Monterey, so all that’s needed is investment to rehabilitate the tracks and buy the rail equipment. And it would take pressure off of Highway 1, which can get congested at rush hour.

It’s not as if the Hospitality Association hasn’t been told this. Just last week, Monterey hosted a conference on sustainable tourism. Speakers from around the nation met with local stakeholders and, from the reports, all agreed on the importance of sustainable tourism:

Many local businesses and agencies employ environmentally conscious practices, said John McMahon, president of the Monterey County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“A lot of these things being discussed are already going on,” McMahon said. “This is a catalyst to solidify that and to bring together all the entities with an interest in sustainable tourism.”

McMahon said the Monterey area is viewed by potential visitors as a spiritual and environmentally friendly retreat.

“Now it’s being able to validate that viewpoint. We can easily be a capital for green tourism,” he said.

Emily Reilly, former Santa Cruz mayor and candidate for the Democratic nomination in AD-27, who has championed sustainable transportation planning, discussed the importance of collaboration:

“It seems there’s a knee-jerk reaction by cities and counties of ‘what’s in it for me’ when someone else decides to do something different,” said Santa Cruz Mayor Emily Reilly. “I think we’re really at a point here of getting over that.” [quoted in the Monterey Herald article linked above]

For the Hospitality Association to not have gotten this message is, to me, a stunning failure on their part to envision the future needs of our region and to grow their own business. Someone at the TAMC or on the Monterey County Board of Supervisors should have sat down with them and explained the vital role of rail in providing for a viable 21st century Monterey County.

The same holds true for the Farm Bureau. The Salinas Valley, salad bowl to the world, is well positioned to benefit from an improved rail corridor to the Bay Area. Agriculture is especially vulnerable to peak oil, as Cuba discovered in the early 1990s. As fuel costs soar and with the possibility of supply disruptions, every aspect of agriculture – from getting workers to the fields to powering the tractors to producing fertilizer to getting food to market – is imperiled.

The money spent rehabilitating the rail line between Salinas and San José would, even though initially intended for passenger rail, have obvious benefits for agriculture. With the massive population of the Bay Area needing a stable, local food source, as well as offering port facilities tying the region to a world market, expanded rail infrastructure would help secure local agriculture’s future.

Unfortunately, we the people are going to have to educate our leaders and civic groups about this. I wasn’t able to attend yesterday’s TAMC meeting, but there is another in January where the sales tax package will be finalized, and I plan to voice my concerns there.

We have other opportunities to help prevent this disaster. Each city in Monterey County must vote to approve the proposal, and then the Board of Supervisors must do so as well – those votes will take place later in 2008. The city of Monterey has signed the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement and UN Urban Environmental Accords, which are a good starting point for reminding city leaders of the need for a more balanced plan. These votes could be used to push TAMC to restoring at minimum Caltrain funding.

There is, of course, the possibility of voting against the plan itself in November 2008 – the 2/3 rule for tax votes applies here, and a similar transportation plan in 2006 received 57% support, short of the 67% needed for passage. And while that may ultimately be the only way to stop this bad plan, it would be much more preferable to work with county residents and officials to educate them on the need to provide rail and then go to voters in November with full funding for rail.

It is long past time for California to abandon the 20th century fantasy that cars and roads alone can meet our transportation needs. Let’s get Monterey County moving in the right direction.

( – promoted by Robert in Monterey)

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a brilliant metaphor for how the debate over problems often totally misses the root of a given problem itself: “How Best to Fill a Sieve With Water”:

There are many arguments over which is the correct course of action which I liken to debating how best to fill a sieve with water. By this I mean that they ignore the fact that their premise is wrong.

Obviously the first thing an impartial observer would say when the two camps are debating whether to use a spoon or a cup would be to point out that one can’t fill a sieve without first plugging the holes. This seems to be my current role, pointing out assumptions which are either wrong or taken as being obvious without any examination.

Here are a few current (and not so current) examples.

The best way to stimulate the domestic economy is by raising/lowering taxes. Perhaps the best thing is not to stimulate the economy at all but to redistribute the present wealth better or to shrink the economy to a sustainable level. “Growth is good” is the sieve.

The best way to aid the development in the third world is by foreign investment/local projects. That the goal should be “development” goes without saying. What development means is the sieve.

[…]

The way to control foreign powers is by the use of military might/diplomacy. That other states need to be “controlled” is the sieve. Perhaps they just need to be left alone.

The writer, rdf, offers a bunch of other examples, but the principle is clear enough.

Then, I came across this post at Davis Vanguard that brings out one such example of debating the filling of sieves with water, in the context of intra-educational battles over California’s Proposition 92, which would set minimum levels of Community College funding and limit tuition to $15 per unit, paying for it out of prop. 98 funds.

There is no doubt in my mind that community colleges are one of the most laudable aspects of the American educational system, if not the most laudable. The second chance (and third chance, etc) that they offer to students who may not have been ready for college at 18, or people for whom life’s hard realities intervened, or who don’t have the cash to go to a state college, or who are just interested in a skill or a given subject serves to make the American educational system far more democratic in terms of openness and serving the whole population than the far more tracked systems of Asia or Europe (even as our structural flaws and barriers to true equality of access to education place our systems at a distinctly inferior position when looked at from the vantage point of the systemic or societal level). Community colleges are, in a broader educational context that leaves a lot to be ashamed of, a justifiable point of pride. And they only serve that critical educational function when the cost of attending is nominal if not entirely free. So at a gut level, while I’m unsure if prop. 92 is the best means to get to that end, generally I’m quite sympathetic to what they’re trying to do with it.

But it is a mistake to get sucked into fighting over scraps of the pie, when we should be asking why the pie is insufficient for public education at all levels in this state. The CCs work synergistically with the UCs, CSU and the primary educational system. If they’re all hurting for funding, let’s look at where waste can be rededicated toward more productive ends (namely, by moving funds from the embarassingly overpaid administrative area to the long-neglected salaries of staff and faculty or physical plant area). It would probably cut costs significantly were we to have decent public health insurance, to contain that exponentially rising cost of forking over a grotesque profit margin to the insatiable insurance and pharmaceutical corporations. But after you cut the obvious waste, we really need to get serious and start acting like adults about raising taxes to pay for this public good. Jacking up fees is a terrible (and illegal, if you look at the 1960 California Master Plan For Higher Education‘s requirement that fees never go to pay for educational costs, long since breached in bipartisan practice from Gov. Reagan on down to another B movie actor-turned-Governor) way to make up the shortfall, because it strikes at the very heart of an open public educational system by rationing the common good of education by ability to pay (or at least by willingness to accrue sizeable student debt).

Tuition in Calfornia has risen at a rate far exceeding inflation or state costs since 2003, while state spending on higher education has been falling as a % of the state budget for decades now. This is not by accident, this is the result of a deliberate plan to gradually privatise the whole educational system by Governor Schwarzeneggar’s finance director, Donna Arduin. From an LA times article two months ago:

To reorganize the state’s finances, Schwarzenegger recruited Donna Arduin, an advocate of privatizing government services who had been Florida budget director under Gov. Jeb Bush. As California finance director, she soon became known as Schwarzenegger’s “bad cop.”

Her budget plan for UC and CSU called for hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts for the third consecutive year, major student fee hikes, a reduction in enrollment and a plan to steer thousands of students to community colleges instead of the universities.

These “crises” are not accidental or temporary, they’re structural, and are instrumentally used to set different parts of the educational community against each other to distract from the privatization and slow destruction of what was once a world class public institution with free tuition and low fees, open to anyone with the grades. With every tuition and fee hike, and every shift to corporate or private donations (with strings attached, it should go without saying), the very idea of the public is watered down and eroded, and we all get suckered into just accepting it as a natural state or random “crisis” instead of as a system under deliberate atack on ideological grounds.

The solution here is not to fight over the scraps from the table, but rather to demand that funding matches the needs of a world class, accessible educational system. you cannot have quality on the cheap, and there is a vast public interest in having the social mobility and economic dynamism that comes from such an educational system, from the CCs on up.

When you look at what benefit has accrued and continues to accrue to the state of California from the existence of our public higher educational system, it is well worth the money. As these fees continue to be raised, that once great engine of social mobility will slow down and eventually grind to a stop, and those social benefits will not accrue in the same way. Cutting a segment of the population out makes it harder to justify paying for the system collectively. Turning away California’s poor, California’s working class and increasingly its middle class as well as starves our economy and our culture from the dynamism and works that those students might have created with the stimulus of a world class education.

If one believes in an educational meritocracy, education ought to be completely free, to let the cream rise to the top. What privatizers like Schwarzeneggar and Arduin mistakenly assume is that those with the money are the cream by virtue of their having all that money in the first place. The history of America and the history of California suggest otherwise.

I’m going to have to read up on prop 92 to decide whether it’s worth pursuing, but in the big picture, it’s a symptom of a greater problem that we’re not addressing as a state.

(This grew out of a comment on the Davis Vanguard thread, that got so long I figured it needed its own diary. Originally at surf putah)