Honyocker's Perspective

Are we going to be SMART about this?

…or are we going to continue being narrow-minded, short-sighted press democrat lemmings?

I’m hearing lots of chatter about the “news” that SMART, our beloved underfunded regional railway system, doesn’t have the cash.  See also:  references in the “agenda packet”

How short our collective memory is.

When we passed Measure Q to fund SMART in 2008, we all thought that we were AT the bottom of the economic meltdown!  We figured (and SMART calculated, and we voted supporting) that there’d be the standard post-recession boom right around the corner!  So while the feds & Wall Street argue about who knew the economic collapse was coming, when, and how bad, certainly we-the-voting-public had no idea just how bad it might still be, several years later.    We’re all still waiting for the boom.  We’re all waiting for the uptick in tax revenues that SMART’s (our) measure Q was designed around.  Well: Surprise!

We passed a sales tax initiative to accomplish commuter rail in the North Bay – an ideal public goal (which still stands as an ideal public goal).  So now that sales taxes haven’t stacked up like we all thought they would, this has suddenly become another government boondoggle?  No.  That’s just not accurate, no matter how many times you say it!

SMART doesn’t have the money because WE haven’t paid it in the form of the sales taxes WE agreed to pay!  It’s OUR freaking fault, gang!  While there may ultimately be a handful of cost overruns, we voted for it anyway knowing full well that’s the nature of the beast!  Today’s issue isn’t about inflationary overruns either.

Now, hindsight being what it is, the taxation equation of the SMART measure probably SHOULD have had some sliding scale consideration to account for this.  It didn’t.  Perhaps a rewrite of measure Q is in order?

We have to decide: do we take the long view and accept it for what it is with a revised longer timeframe?  Or do we come up with an additional stopgap funding measure?

We can choose to stand back and point fingers at the problem, get all blearey eyed mad and make fun of it, -OR- we can buck up, take some personal ownership of the problem and decide what’s right is to give it a hand back onto its feet, pat it on the butt, and push it along down the tracks.

What’re you going to do?

11 | 03 | 2010 Posted by jake | blog-o-rama, News, Trains | Leave a Comment