Our View: Mayor Dennis Kennedy’s latest vote does count, and
it’s a big disappointment for South County
After some promising noise from Morgan Hill Mayor Dennis Kennedy that demonstrated he was on to the transitory nature of Valley Transportation Authority figures and projections, he rightfully called them “too good to be true,” he went ahead and gave a yes advisory vote to a possible proposed tax that would, in essence, fund the ubiquitous BART-to-San Jose project. This despite the fact that the VTA’s figures change whenever objections are raised.
Ridership and projected income figures climb substantially. It’s as if the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, partners in crime with the VTA project, merely sprinkled water on the numbers and they magically grew.
Kennedy’s myopic vote revealed the lack of a united front in South County, and it was extremely disappointing to South County residents who have been saying for a while that the commitments to improvements in South County transit must be very clear and concrete before they’ll consider paying an extra tax for the funding the extension of BART-to-San Jose.
Kennedy called the vote only preliminary and said it didn’t matter in the long run, because the vote failed anyway. He still says he is undecided and will base his vote on whether or not the VTA plans to deliver on South County improvements.
We’re not exactly clear on how giving a yes vote before the South County commitments will make them materialize. We give the benefit of the doubt to the mayor that he was doing some political maneuvering by demonstrating his openness to a “regional approach” and may have been trying to score some points with a yes vote. But we remind him that the players on this issue are some of the same who ran over him without looking back regarding the planning of Coyote Valley. We’re not sure that the same conciliatory approach will work any better than it did then.
And now, the SVLG is pondering whether to hook the BART tax to something that will sell better, linking its tax proposal with the county’s proposal for a sales tax to increase funding for basic human services. An astute move, as most people are still not buying that BART is as necessary to our quality of life as the human services that are needed immediately. Even better, such a tax would need only a simple majority vote to pass rather than the two-thirds the BART tax would require standing alone.
This new wrinkle is why our South County leaders need to be more vigilant than ever that our needs are represented on this body. We need our leaders to send clear and consistent, not mixed, signals. We need them to stand together and oppose this public transportation tax.
