San Diego’s public transit system is heading toward a fiscal cliff, and Coronado leaders have mixed opinions about handing it a lifeline or letting it figure things out on its own.
It took two votes and about an hour of debate for the Coronado City Council to land somewhere in the middle on whether to support a regional transit funding bill.
The item concerned Assembly Bill 2484, a state measure that would give the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) the ability to place a quarter-cent sales tax on the ballot for voters in the MTS service area. The council had already taken a position on the bill at its last meeting — voting to send a letter of opposition — but the item returned at the May 5 meeting for reconsideration.
Council Member Carrie Downey, who serves on the MTS board, made the case for flipping that position to a letter of support. She didn’t get that, but she did, after more than an hour of debate, get the council to pull back its opposition letter.
The final vote: 3-2 to take no position, with Mayor John Duncan and Councilmember Mark Fleming dissenting.
The case for the bill
Downey made no secret of where she stood. As an MTS board member who sat on the agency’s fiscal subcommittee, she walked the council through years of cost-cutting measures the agency had already taken — route consolidations, a hiring freeze, fare increases — and argued that none of it had been enough.
“Even with all the cuts we made, it wasn’t enough,” she said. “So then we had to vote on increasing rates to get more money from the people that use our system, to try and balance it, to keep the system afloat. That still won’t be enough.”
While MTS is seeing a rebound in post-pandemic ridership, it has lost special one-time funding sources, and concerns abound about diminishing funding at the state and federal level.
The bill, Downey explained, doesn’t guarantee a tax increase. Rather, it creates the mechanism to put one before voters. If the bill passes the legislature and is signed by the governor, the MTS board could choose to place the measure on the ballot. Voters would then decide. If they say no, the agency faces what Downey called its “fiscal cliff” in 2030, resulting in cuts to routes and service.
“Before the board was willing to go that far and make those cuts, we wanted to give the public the opportunity,” she said. “If the public doesn’t want to, that sends the message, and there’s going to be draconian cuts, and that’ll be the way it is.”
The case against it
Duncan wasn’t buying it — or at least, not the framing.
He acknowledged no one on the council wanted to cut MTS service. His objection was more structural: he didn’t think the City of Coronado should be weighing in on a tax measure that would primarily affect residents outside the city, and he was skeptical that any sales tax increase would pass a Coronado ballot test.
“I can guarantee you, 100 percent, that if we put a proposition on the ballot in Coronado, ‘Do you support a tax increase for MTS?’ it would fail,” he said. “We had a bond measure for the schools, and we love the schools, and that failed pretty miserably.”
Duncan said he believed MTS could run more efficiently, and within its means, and suggested that the agency must make changes, such as increasing fares or changing routes, rather than raise taxes.
Fleming was more pointed. He placed the bill in a broader context of what he called runaway tax increases at the state and county level — a mileage tax, a real estate transfer tax, a proposed county income tax — and said he’d had enough.
“The conclusion, to me, is that (the tax environment) is not sustainable,” he said.
Both Duncan and Fleming also took issue with what Duncan called the bill’s “litmus test” quality. Duncan argued that a no vote on MTS funding would be read as hostility to public transit or low-income riders who depend on it.
“There are definitely people in this community that will take a no vote as, ‘He wants oil derricks off Coronado,’ and that is false,” Duncan said, drawing an analogy to a separate council debate that evening over an offshore oil drilling resolution. “I don’t think we should be doing that to each other.”
A split council
The first vote, on Downey’s motion to send a letter of support, came abruptly. After it was seconded by Councilmember Amy Steward, Duncan made his closing remarks, and then called for a vote, before Steward or Councilmember Kelly Purvis had a chance to speak. The motion failed 3-2, with Purvis, Fleming, and Duncan voting no.
Downey immediately made a new motion: not to support the bill, but to rescind the council’s prior letter of opposition and take no position. Purvis seconded it, and this time, everyone got to speak. Fleming, Purvis, and Steward all weighed in before the final vote, which passed 3-2 to take no position, with Fleming and Duncan dissenting.
Steward, who had supported the original letter of support, said she could live with a neutral position. She didn’t want Coronado to look like “the big entitled people saying, too bad for you, we don’t care about you,” and pointed out that the Naval base has a heavily-used bus stop.
Purvis said she wanted to support Downey, but had concerns about the bill’s override of the two-thirds supermajority requirement for tax measures (it instead requires a 50 percent simple majority) and that it could exceed the 2 percent cap on local sales taxes. “I really like to see taxes at a two-thirds vote,” she said.
The second motion — to take no position — passed 3-2, with Fleming and Duncan again dissenting.
