Dear Editor,
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors will hold a special
meeting Tuesday at 6:30pm to consider voting to put a half-cent
general tax on the ballot this June.
Dear Editor,
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors will hold a special meeting Tuesday at 6:30pm to consider voting to put a half-cent general tax on the ballot this June.
A presentation Wednesday revealed that a quarter-cent is more than enough to cover the county’s projected structural deficit for the next few years. That information plus the proposed language for the ballot measure should be posted on their Web site..
Apparently, Carl Guardino of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group threatened supervisors with an opposing the tax unless they went with a half-cent instead of a quarter cent, according to a reporter from the San Jose Mercury. The unspoken plan is that they would funnel the excess revenues to the BART-to-San Jose project. They can’t say that publicly or it would become a specific tax instead of a general tax and need a two-thirds vote instead of a 50-percent vote to pass.
The meeting Wednesday was to encourage nonprofit service groups that get money from the county, to show up at next Tuesday’s meeting and push for them to put a half-cent tax on the ballot this June.
Guardino is pushing for a slam dunk in June and has offered to put $2 million into the campaign.
Supervisor Blanca Alvarado has indicated that she will vote no on the half-cent tax. We need former Gilroy mayor and Supervisor Don Gage to do the same. They need four out of five votes to put a measure on the ballot, and Gage has not indicated how he’ll vote.
Any backfill of VTA at this time means they go full speed ahead with BART, even if the supervisors say the money will go for non-BART transportation things. VTA is very good at shuffling money around.
Margaret Okuzumi, BayRail Alliance
