Palo Alto Mayor Pat Burt’s comments to the Peninsula Joint Powers Board
Joint Powers Meeting April 1st.
Pat Burt, Mayor of Palo Alto, thanks the staff for the collaboration that they have been addressing the security issues and ways we can address the suicides in a certain segment of our city.
Second, Most of you probably realize Palo Alto is the second largest boarding city for the entire Caltrain system, not just by circumstances. We have decades of transit-oriented development and comprehensive planning that have built that ridership. We have agreements we have negotiated with Stanford University, their shuttle and our shuttle feeding into Caltrain and we have additional agreements on the horizon. We have a great history of a community that will support taxing itself to provide valuable public transportation.
I wanted to address three different ways we might be able to move toward some of the goals that were discussed here by the Board and the Executive Director. First is to strengthen the relationship with your constituents- cities and stakeholders- as a foundation for going forward. Second, to do that we need to leverage the greater public focus that has been happening as a result of High Speed Rail (HSR) being considered for this corridor. It’s a transformative period right now and it’s both an opportunity and a risk. Third, we want to focus on our regional transportation interests as our foremost concern. That may seem self evident but there are going to be some cross roads and decisions ahead that will be critical .
Palo Alto has participated in the Peninsula Cities Consortium. That consortium came about partly because many of the mostly highly impacted cities on the peninsula- those with residential areas that straddle the corridor, those that are great believers and committed to Caltrain- have not felt their voices adequately represented. We have, in this board for instance, some outstanding representatives but there are no representatives in Santa Clara county north of San Jose, We don’t have an adequate ongoing relationship with the board as an entity. The voices of the communities, your constituents on the peninsula, really don’t have an adequate voice to lend the support that you clearly need going forward.
The Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority (VTA) has a governance structure that recognizes the geographic areas for representation on its board. It also has a sub-tier structure that has a policy advisory group representing each city which feeds into the VTA and those cities are grouped into sections of the county. We’d like to recommend that you consider a similar structure for Caltrain going forward.
That would not only strengthen this organization, it would assist in achieving some of the severe Caltrain financial sustainability challenges discussed today. We need to leverage our current focus. Since the inception of Caltrain there hasn’t been as great a focus on this transportation corridor and the train system as there is now. This is the result of HSR now under consideration. That’s both a risk to this organization and an opportunity. It’s a risk if a HSR system should be implemented in a way that undermines the support for Caltrain among your constituent cities, your stakeholders and your populous. It’s an opportunity if we can figure out a way to leverage all of that engagement into support for a system we truly believe in.
We need to focus foremost on Caltrain. Prior to High Speed Rail we didn’t appear to have funding for the Caltrain 2025 Program. Then we appeared to have HSR manna fall from the sky. It was going to enable us to do what we needed to do. But there must be a careful distinction between the interests of HSR and the interests of Caltrain. As we‘ve gone forward we’ve heard the state Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) and experts throughout the state question the viability of the business plan that was presented by the Rail Authority and questioned the legitimacy of their ridership projections. We need to make sure Caltrain has a Plan B. Experts are recognizing that what the HSRA has been presenting is not necessarily where this is all going to play out and we need to have a plan that will be focused on the success of this organization. The potential for a regional or a sub-regional bond measure , as Ms.Lempert and Mr.Scanlon have mentioned, is a real possibility. I think we can engage the cities and the stake holders to achieve this goal. We can take this opportunity to build a greater political support and translate that into permanent financial support for the success of this organization.
I hope you would consider these recommendations. Thank you very much.