Highway Construction and Financing

By Dale Detwiler

Completion of highways promised, recovery of State and Federal gasoline taxes, and review of BART financial status

If elected as Mayor my priorities are to:

Improve traffic flow

• Return the State and Federal gasoline tax moneys to highway construction and maintenance in San Jose and Santa Clara County

• Redesign and rebuild freeway interchanges such as Tully Road/US-101 and I-280/SR87 to eliminate off-ramp congestion and freeway backup.

• Redesign the Berryessa Road access to US-101 to eliminate both the routing via Commercial Street and the poorly designed traffic signal system on Oakland Road.

• Widen I-880 to 8 lanes without carpool lanes from Warm Springs to I-280.

• Redesign and widen SR-17 to 8 lanes without carpool lanes from I-280 to the summit.

• Widen US-101 to 8 lanes without carpool lanes from south San Jose to Gilroy.

• Reroute and widen SR-152 to 6 lanes from Gilroy to the San Filipe Y.

Residential Street Traffic: Our residential and arterial streets now are clogged with drivers attempting to avoid the congested freeways. Completion of the freeways and removing the bottlenecks would move much this traffic back to the freeways and reduce residential and crosstown traffic.

Gasoline Taxes: Each time you put 10 gallons of gasoline in your car you pay $3.64 in State and Federal gasoline taxes. After deducting $0.042/gal for the Federal Debt reduction this works out to $262 Million in gasoline taxes collected in Santa Clara County each year. The Federal tax, established during the Eisenhower administration, is supposed to go into the Federal Highway Trust Fund to be used only for the National Interstate Highway construction. Since 1938, all California State gasoline taxes were also to be used only for highway construction and maintenance. Since 1993 more than $2.2 Billion in Santa Clara County has been diverted to non-highway projects such as light rail, CALTRAIN, ACE train and BART instead of the needed highway projects. Some argue that gasoline taxes are not within the jurisdiction of the City of San Jose. They are wrong. The citizens are entitled to know how much gasoline tax is collected, how that money is spent, and if it spent as intended by the citizens.

BART: What is BART's financial status? Based on BART's most recent budget, it appears that BART no longer is collecting enough in its basic income of sales tax and fares to pay its operating and maintenance costs. More important, the budget does not show line items for amortization, depreciation, deferred maintenance, pension liability, and needed equipment replacement. Additionally, BART's contract for low cost energy from Bonneville and other power producers will soon expire and BART will have to purchase expensive power on the open market.

BART's expansion appears to have been financed entirely with State and Federal transportation funds. BART apparently no longer has plans for an extension to Antioch and Eastern Contra Costa County. Money is not available for the extension to Antioch and funding for the Warm Springs extension is not assured. BART's financial status appears to be very bleak. Recently Santa Clara County (VTA) made an agreement with BART to pay $48,000,000 annually (first check already issued) and to pay for the entire upgrade to the BART train control system. No cost estimate was given for the upgrade. The agreement apparently also calls for Santa Clara County to design, build, and to pay for the entire expansion from Warm Springs to into Santa Clara County. The costs for BART's extension will far exceed the tax money available from the Measure A sales tax funds. At this time there is no credible estimate of the overall costs for the BART extension into San Jose. San Jose and Santa Clara County taxpayers will have to approve another tax increase to fund the BART extension. The details of this agreement have yet to be released to the public.

BART capacity: BART supporters who pushed for the San Jose extension claim that BART will carry 88,000 riders each day. That is equivalent to 110 10-car trains each loaded with 80 riders per car. That's a fully loaded train in and a fully loaded train out every 23 minutes during BART's 21-hour operating day. Is that possible?

ON MARCH 5TH VOTE FOR DALE DETWILER FOR MAYOR