It’s hard to complain about Gilroy’s poor public transportation
services after learning that no one on City Council seems to care
enough about the problem to attend Valley Transportation Authority
meetings for the last six months.
It’s hard to complain about Gilroy’s poor public transportation services after learning that no one on City Council seems to care enough about the problem to attend Valley Transportation Authority meetings for the last six months.
Why should the VTA worry about the poor bus and Caltrain service in Gilroy and all of South County, for that matter, if neither Mayor Al Pinheiro nor City Councilman Paul Correa, who sit on the Policy Advisory Committee, can bother to attend its monthly meetings? Correa hasn’t attended a meeting all year. Pinheiro hasn’t attended since March.
Eugene Bradley, founder of the VTA Riders Union, is exactly right when he says that before Gilroy can expect to get its needs met, it must participate in the process.
“It’s going to take a lot of voices to make that happen,” Bradley told reporter Matt King. “What disturbs me is that I don’t see anybody from the South County at those meetings.”
That applies, sadly, not only to South County residents advocating for themselves, but to Gilroy’s representatives on the VTA Policy Advisory Committee, who have been no-shows for most of this year.
We can’t expect the VTA to know about Gilroy’s needs, much less take them seriously, if Gilroy’s elected officials who serve on the VTA Policy Advisory Committee are chronic no-shows.
We know it’s a hassle to get to meetings in San Jose. We know that the mayor, especially, has many demands on his time. But these are the responsibilities of the posts for which Pinheiro and Correa ran and with which the voters of Gilroy entrusted them. It’s not glamorous to talk about transportation policy, but it’s absolutely essential.
If Pinheiro and Correa can’t cover the vast majority of VTA Policy Advisory committee meetings between them, they need to pass the responsibility along to other council members who can.
This is doubly important in light of the poor representation Morgan Hill Mayor Dennis Kennedy is giving to South County on the Policy Advisory Committee – he voted to endorse the ill-advised quarter-cent sales tax measure to fund the BART to San Jose extension that is not in South County’s best interest.
We need Gilroy’s representatives to speak up for Gilroy and all of South County. We need them to make VTA directors and employees understand the inadequate bus and Caltrain services that currently exist in Gilroy and South County. We need them to point out, when Kennedy fails to do so, that BART offers nothing to South County residents but higher taxes to fulfill Measure A promises that were already paid for, that BART has failed to fulfill its ridership projections for the San Francisco Airport extension and that building and operating the BART extension will bankrupt the VTA.
What exactly, then, is in this for the residents of Gilroy and South County? The answer is nothing, and we need our elected officials to make sure the VTA hears that.
Instead, we’ve got no-shows on the VTA Policy Advisory Committee. Gilroy residents need and deserve better.
