(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 476: Saving Transit from the Fiscal Cliff

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast we’re sharing a San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) forum on how a statewide coalition of transit advocates were able to organize a funding bridge to avert a fiscal cliff for transit operators in the state. The discussion led by SPUR’s Laura Tolkoff, shares how they did it and what’s next.

Featured guests include…

Laura Tolkoff / Interim Chief Policy Officer & Transportation Policy Director, SPUR  | Rebecca Long / Director, Legislation & Public Affairs, Bay Area Metro | Cyrus Hall / Independent Sustainable Transportation Advocate | Zack Deutsch-Gross / Policy Director, Transform CA | Raayan Mohtashemi / Legislative Aide, Office of California State Senator Scott Wiener | Monique Webster / Regional Government Affairs Manager, SFMTA | Adina Levin / Policy Director and Co-Founder, Seamless Bay Area

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You can listen to this episode as always at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode.

Pacita Rudder (1m 52s):
Hey everyone, my name is Pacita Rudder and I’m the director of engagement at SPUR. Thank you so much for joining us today. I wanna thank those of you watching today who are SPUR members. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to host programs like this, so thank you for your support. If you are not a member, I encourage you To Join, to support Spurs ongoing work. Your financial support enables us to continue our work, including the hosting of programs like today’s. You’ll find more information about membership online at SPUR dot org slash join. Today’s digital discourse is called What it Took to Win, keeping Transit Moving.

Pacita Rudder (2m 33s):
So in 2023, Senator Scott Wiener in a coalition of Regional and state advocates successfully won $5 billion that can be used to temporarily avert transit’s, Fiscal Cliff facing a huge statewide deficit. This campaign was far from easy. Today we’re gonna take a peek behind the scenes of this collective impact campaign to learn how local Regional and state advocates works together with public agencies to persuade elected officials to ensure the Bay area keeps moving. So I’m now gonna ask each of the speakers to introduce themselves with their name, their affiliation, and your organization’s role in the campaign.

Pacita Rudder (3m 14s):
So we’ll start with Ryan.

Raayan Mohtashemi (3m 17s):
Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. And thank you to Laura and the SPUR team for organizing this event. My name is Raayan Mohtashemi and I’m a Legislative aid in the office of Senator Scott Wiener Senator Wiener represents San Francisco and parts of San Mateo County and the California Senate. The Senator championed the cause of increased Transit operations funding in the state budget this past year. He led a coalition of legislators in collaboration with the Survive and Thrive Coalition, including the California Transit Association, metropolitan Transportation Commission, and other supportive interests, many of which you’ll hear from today in a successful push for this additional transit operations funding. Thanks for having me.

Zack Deutsch-Gross (3m 58s):
Hi, have there Zack Deutsch-Gross. I’m the Policy Director at Transform. Transform is a Bay area and statewide Advocate for affordable, accessible and sustainable housing and Transportation. We were part of the group of advocates working closely with Ryan and Senator Wiener and transit agencies to secure this big win for transit.

Adina Levin (4m 18s):
Adina Levin advocacy director and co-founder with Seamless Bay Area, which is a nonprofit focusing on world class and abundant and Equitable public Transportation for the Bay area. And increasingly in California, we worked with advocacy allies to build up the coalition in the region and around the state and coordinating with the legislator with the institutions, the grasstops advocacy groups and the grassroots advocacy groups to keep everyone aligned in a campaign to secure funding.

Cyrus Hall (4m 52s):
Hey there everyone. My name is Cyrus Hall. I’m an Independent Sustainable Transportation Advocate here in San Francisco. And I’m also a longtime volunteer for the San Francisco Transit Writers. I was mostly on the ground helping to organize rallies, flyering, I’d take it out the vote, but it was get out the calls to Sacramento and making sure that we could have writer voices engage with politicians in Sacramento.

Rebecca Long (5m 14s):
Hi there everybody. My name’s Rebecca Long, I’m the director of Legislation and Public Affairs at MTC Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is the Region’s Transportation Planning and Funding Agency. My main role was trying to get MTC to define a very clear ask and unify the Bay area public agencies around that ask to protect transit funding and Transit service and then coordinate with a lot of folks on this call around building a really strong coalition to make that ask and and rallying support among the Bay area’s. State delegation for that. Thanks.

Monique Webster (5m 50s):
Hi. Good afternoon everyone. I’m Monique Webster Regional Government. Affairs Manager with the SFMTA, which is the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. And SFMTA was one of the Transit operator members of the Bay area’s Survive and Thrive Coalition. And we also served as one of the 15 members of the statewide operations funding subcommittee of the California Transit Association.

Laura Tolkoff (6m 14s):
Hi everybody, my name is Laura Tolkoff, I’m the transportation Policy Director for SPUR. Along with the other groups on this call today, we helped build up the Survive and Thrive Coalition and that coalition was really a pro equity, multi-sector coalition of civic groups rooted in the Bay area, working together with public agencies like MTC and transit agencies to really save and improve public transit. Spurs role in this was really doing a lot of the inside work on policy research and advocacy to kind of shape the Legislative and budget advocacy and really coordinating advocates alongside Transform and Seamless Bay Area.

Laura Tolkoff (6m 56s):
So I do wanna note that there are seven of us on this webinar today, which is quite a lot for a webinar and still not enough. This was a real collective effort with so many advocates and transit agencies from across the state who played really critical roles in this campaign. And I just wanna name a few of them and thank them for their work even though they’re not on this call today. So California Transit Association, which was just a huge critical link for the statewide advocacy. Of course the Bay Area Council, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, NRDC, public Advocates Urban Habitats, California, YBI Streets for All, SF Transit Writers Union, KidSafe sf, and many, many others.

Laura Tolkoff (7m 40s):
So although they’re not here, I do wanna acknowledge the important contributions to this effort that they made. I’m gonna actually start us off. I’m both a moderator and a speaker for this program. And so just to start us off, I’d love to hand it to Rebecca and I’d really love it if you could give a timeline or a sense of the key moments and milestones of this campaign that we’re gonna talk through over the course of this program.

Rebecca Long (8m 6s):
Yes, thank you Laura. This campaign really started in November of 2022 when the Survive and Thrive Backbone Committee, which is really a lot of the folks on this call, was convened. And I do wanna give a shout out to Laura who again is hosting and a panelist here today for really urging MTC to co-lead this backbone committee as the public agency that is the Regional coordinator for transit and funding in the region. It was really critical that MTC lean into this and and we were happy to do that, but forming a formal coalition that was going to meet every Wednesday or whatever it was regularly and really identifying, what are the key sort of ground rules of this committee, which just a fundamental thing.

Rebecca Long (8m 53s):
I think that helps if we talk more about that later. So we kick that off in November every year MTC identifies our advocacy program. So that’s sort of on the top, it’s the next key item for the next year. And we in December and then in January formally adopted finding a multi-year fix to the transit operating fiscal Cliff as our top priority for Sacramento. So that was in January. And then even before that, right, we’re having a lot of conversations with our partners at CTA, again that’s the California Transit Association. And so in December they identified, and that’s sort of the next one on the top there, they wrote their first letter urging the legislature to take action.

Rebecca Long (9m 34s):
That was followed by the governor’s budget coming out in January with not only no help for transit operations, but actually setting us back. And so the governor had proposed to cut funding by $2 billion that had been promised and that was gonna deal a very significant negative impact to transit agencies overall budgets. This was capital funding, but it nonetheless, was very terrible timing and there was no support offered for transit operations. So that really followed this joint Bay area letter. We already had a very strong coalition. You’ve got labor in there, a TU, you’ve got the business community as well as all the public agencies.

Rebecca Long (10m 14s):
You can see SPUR in there, Transform. So a lot of the folks, I think everybody on this call was already there to show that, this is not just about public agencies that support this, that transit, it’s a climate remedy, it’s an equity issue. And so that was our first letter. And then, we just sort of continued to put the pressure on. I think it, the next really notable item was in February there was this joint assembly and Senate transportation committee informational hearing. And I think that was a testament to the fact that the legislature and staffers were already hearing a lot of this pressure, right? They were getting these letters, they were realizing that this is a top concern.

Rebecca Long (10m 54s):
So they held this informational hearing and many of us were invited to testify about what was needed. And a lot of this was about, how are we recovering from the pandemic? But just urging that, federal Covid relief funds, which had been a lifeline, they aren’t lasting forever. We’re gonna need the state to step up. And then, we had another letter, the joint Bay area letter number two in March with an even bigger coalition. And so we just kept growing this and, and one thing I would note is that even though this was a Bay area led coalition, the advocates, many of whom are on this call, did a great job of engaging folks across the state. And so you had climate grassroots organizations from San Diego, from Southern California.

Rebecca Long (11m 38s):
So it really was starting to build that statewide ask. So then you have may revise another letter in May because we really hadn’t seen any traction. So we just kept applying more and more pressure that preceded the May revise, which is the governor’s update to the January budget. And, many of us were hopeful that there would be some kind of a nod to transit operating funding. And I think there might have been some verbal acknowledgement that transit’s very important, but no specifics in terms of dollars, no commitment made. So that was very concerning and I think that’s really when the advocate stepped up the direct action. So you can see this transit rallies and funerals, which I’m sure many of you were aware of that read about that, saw that on social media, very dramatic visuals of model BART cars being covered in res and just drilling home like can you imagine the Bay area without transit.

Rebecca Long (12m 34s):
And that was followed by letters from members of Congress. There was a joint letter by many members urging the legislature to take action. Like we’ve done our bit, now it’s the state’s turn. We started to really see more local government engagement too with the big city mayors. There were other local elected officials, city council letters. And so all of this was happening until we finally got an announcement through the budget process that there had been a deal. And the state budget can be quite opaque. And in this case, it really was through the formal committee process. We were not, we were seeing some statements that were suggesting that we were breaking through, but we didn’t see any commitments in the formal budget committees until there was basically a, a deal made with key leadership and the budget committees that identified not only restoring the governor’s budget cuts, so that was restoring 2 billion, but adding an additional 1.1 billion to the overall pot.

Rebecca Long (13m 33s):
And it wasn’t everything we asked for, it was a little less than half, but it, it was enough to sustain the need for the next three years basically once MTC brought some additional funding to bear. So with that, I will close and see if you wanna add anything on Laura or anyone else.

Laura Tolkoff (13m 52s):
Thanks Rebecca. So we’ll be returning to this timeline over the course of this webinar. So really important to start with that general look. I’d like to turn it to Ryan and ask him to talk a little bit about what was happening in the fall of 2022 Rebecca. Maybe you could speak to some of those early warning signs that we were starting to see. And then Ryan A. Little bit about how would you say the Bay area’s outlook compared to the rest of the state when we started to kind of get a sense of what the picture was looking like.

Raayan Mohtashemi (14m 24s):
Sure. And I can definitely start in terms of addressing what we were hearing. And at this time I was in the senator’s district office located in the capital office. So I got to kind of see both the in-district lobbying around the issue and then also work on the budget advocacy side of things. The fiscal cliff, as Rebecca alluded to, is something that we knew as an issue shortfalls would be coming when federal aid ran out. And the exact timing and runway that we had was kind of a moving target that took time to stabilize. And you could argue that it’s not necessarily fully stabilized from a perspective of understanding where the financial situation is at. But we definitely understood that this was an issue that needed to be monitored and addressed at some point.

Raayan Mohtashemi (15m 8s):
And as was mentioned, starting in the fall of 2022, we started getting those signals from key interests and stakeholders that this year would be the year that we needed to step up, that the state would need to step up for federal funding, was going to be running out for operators throughout the state and in the Bay area especially. And it’s important to emphasize that transit agencies across the state and the country all experienced and in many cases still continue to experience some degree of financial strain caused by These shifting travel patterns, remote work, inflation driven operating cost increases. And so while this was a statewide and national issue, it is also true at the same time that the pressing financial shortfalls that we refer to as this Fiscal cliff were and continue to be particularly acute for the large historically high ridership urban operators.

Raayan Mohtashemi (16m 0s):
And these operators, they’re both more fair reliant and that’s more vulnerable to financial impacts from major ridership shocks like we saw with the pandemic. But they also have been more sluggish to recover the ridership that’s important for their financial situation. So they haven’t been recovering to pre pandemic their revenue levels as quickly as other systems. And I just wanna point out that systems in New York City, Chicago, Washington, DC and Bay area transit operators, they all are facing similar issues and we’re facing that in the fall of 2022. So the dynamics within the state though, were that the Bay area, while having roughly 20% of the state’s population, it does carry a disproportionate share of the state’s transit ridership.

Raayan Mohtashemi (16m 45s):
I think it’s close to 50% if I’m correct. And so there was an especially dire situation for our operators because of all of those that I just discussed. The Bay area’s, transit systems, they’re some of the most fair reliant pre pandemic and the most impacted by slow return to office rates. As an example, BART and Caltrain saw pre pandemic fair box recovery at roughly 70%. What that means is that both BART and Caltrain could cover roughly 70% of their operating expenses with the fair revenues that they collected from their riders. And these were some of the highest fair box recovery ratios in the entire country. And it’s not necessarily something that we would expect of most public infrastructure.

Raayan Mohtashemi (17m 29s):
And then again, they serve major employer centers that have been slow to recover ridership. So given that situation, there was an especially dire need in the Bay area to address the issue.

Laura Tolkoff (17m 42s):
Thanks Ryan. So I’m gonna have us spend a little bit more time kind of in these early days, specifically talking about how the coalition came together. And I’ll call on Zach to help me with some of this. So let’s go back to winter of 2022. And SPUR and other advocates really came together and, we all have our different kind of missions and things that we’re working on and different orientations and approaches to our work. But I think what was so unique about this campaign was really two things. The first was we all realized that something really, really big was at stake and it was gonna take all of us working together and with our public sector partners and with state advocates across the state to really solve this problem.

Laura Tolkoff (18m 26s):
And then the second thing that I think really grew from that understanding that made this unique was that it was really rooted in collective impact principles, which meant that it was very intentionally designed to harness each other’s collective and complimentary strengths towards one common goal. And to really organize ourselves and our networks and partnerships around a set of mutually reinforcing activities, which is what we’re kind of outlining today. We are coming from different sectors, we’re coming from different organizations, but we’re all working together on specific milestones towards a common goal. And I think we really realized that this kind of approach was necessary because in general we knew it was gonna be a really tough fight in the legislature with a really bad budget year.

Laura Tolkoff (19m 11s):
And so it’s something I think that we’re all really proud of building together

Zack Deutsch-Gross (19m 16s):
And as we’ll get into later, it took an incredibly diverse coalition. And I think Laura, your vision that of Rebecca and others from the start was truly we’re gonna need this diverse coalition focused on key milestones in order to win. We knew it was an uphill battle and so we built a framework to get there.

Laura Tolkoff (19m 34s):
So I’m gonna keep moving us along in this timeline. So January, February it becomes clear that we’re really going to have to ask the state for funding. I’m wondering, Monique if you could talk a little bit about that decision and then I’ll turn it over to Ryan to talk a little bit more about how the Senator really began to build support in Sacramento for this cause.

Monique Webster (19m 56s):
Yeah, so we were really at the point where we were staring down the end of the federal relief funds and we were really only being held up and able to provide services that were essential to people because of the amount of federal relief funds that we had received. And after providing that support, the federal government had reached the point where it was sending a very clear message that this figo was turned off and that the federal government was not prepared to provide any new funding support. So we went to the state and we had two very strong justifications for why it was the state’s responsibility to stand up. One that the transportation sector is a single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state.

Monique Webster (20m 37s):
And the overall success of the state’s climate strategy rests on decarbonizing the ways that people and goods move in the state and public Transit is really the centerpiece of that entire solution. So if we’re really to have a fighting chance of combating climate change, the state could not let transit ve. And second, the state had acknowledged that public transit also expands access to opportunity. In other words, the ability to get education, to get to jobs, access, healthcare, et cetera for many, many vulnerable Californians. And that the state simply cannot make progress on that goal if transit goes under. Yeah.

Laura Tolkoff (21m 13s):
How did you begin building support in Sacramento?

Raayan Mohtashemi (21m 16s):
So prior to the release of the governor’s initial proposed budget and January, 2023, we were very focused on stakeholder engagement with the various key entities that would end up comprising the coalition. So that was a lot of engagement on strategizing and providing input on how to increase the likelihood of a budget campaign success given the headwinds that have been discussed, including a projected budget deficit. But also at the same time the importance of Transit in the state in terms of meeting key state goals. And so we were engaging in scenario planning for how to react to the governor’s proposed budget, whether or not that budget would have proposed addressing the fiscal clip or not.

Raayan Mohtashemi (21m 58s):
So when the governor’s budget was proposed on January 10th of that year, we were prepared to both react via a statement from the Senator and uplift statements from supportive entities. And we followed up those statements with a Legislative member letter. So kind of a, a letter from members of the state assembly and Senate to kind of plant a flag about the issue. A little bit over a week after the governor did release his proposal with, as Rebecca had mentioned, a proposed cut, $2 billion cut to transit capital programs that also didn’t address the cliff. So on that initial letter, there were 13 members of the legislature signed on, that’s out of a 120 member body.

Raayan Mohtashemi (22m 38s):
And I’d say that just so that we can track as time goes on, how we built up support. So at the same time as that letter went out and as we continued the senator’s public communications work, the Senator was also having various internal stakeholder meetings with Senate and assembly subcommittee chairs, various decision makers to discuss the importance of the issue. We would discuss the operational shortfalls in those meetings and I would be having follow-up meetings with staff to discuss the issue in more detail. And then of course throughout this time we were continuing that stakeholder engagement to continue strategizing and remaining coordinated with the various interests. So it was a long process.

Laura Tolkoff (23m 18s):
So now we’re gonna jump ahead to the spring and at this point, just as a reminder, the governor has released his budget message and the legislature has also issued their priorities and we really were not seeing a lot of traction for this cause. And I think to put it mildly, we were starting to get really worried and this is where we really started leaning into direct action and organizing and using kind of the media and public opinion to bring attention to this cause. So I am gonna ask Cyrus and Adina to talk a little bit about some of the work that they did as part of this campaign.

Adina Levin (23m 56s):
So in the timeline, and I think if you were watching the story on the news, it seemed like the grassroots activity really came outta nowhere. But there were actually several months of really methodical preparation for this. As the coalition grew in the Bay area and around the state, we built up a set of tools and we built up a website that had presentations where we would give presentations to groups all around the Bay area and all around the state engaging their membership that this was a critical issue, tools where people could send a timely letter or put in a call to their representatives.

Adina Levin (24m 38s):
And using those grassroots outreach, we were able to turn out dozens of people to speak at the hearings that had happened earlier. So with all of that, we had really built up quite a network that was ready to spring into even more intensive action when we found out that things were not going well and we really needed to amp up the volume. And with that, I’m going to turn that over to Cyrus to talk about the transit funeral and to talk about what we realized in the Bay area was that key budget shares were in San Francisco and in Oakland filtering and Nancy Skinner. So we hadn’t really an opportunity to elevate this issue with the budget shares Cyrus.

Cyrus Hall (25m 21s):
Yeah, and I would say on the ground the turning point was really a May 12th town hall of Phil Ting here in San Francisco and, we had gathered 20 or 30 advocates and activists to go to that town hall to really try to get assembly member ting to answer the question as budget chair in the assembly, are you supportive of operational gap funding for transit agencies? And we just did not get the answer that we wanted out of that discussion. And when we followed up after the town hall directly of staff, we got a very direct answer. And that direct answer at that moment in time was no. And I think this really signaled that escalation was necessary, that we needed to be doing more to get the word out that the state was not about to step in and provide the funding necessary to make sure that our agencies didn’t collapse.

Cyrus Hall (26m 16s):
So after that event, the idea of a transit funeral started to percolate quite quickly and I sort of, I took a leap, I decided to pick it up and run with it and it was immediately clear that we needed a tremendous amount of help. And the the preexisting structure that had been built with Survive and Thrive Coalition was helpful as we quickly had to bring in 10 20 groups to put this together, including some that Laura mentioned at the beginning, like Kids Safe SF who were critical in really bringing a lot of political factions to the march and to the rally. And also groups like Safe Street Rebel who provided bike marshaling and brought in a huge number of people, a huge number of groups in East Bay Telegraph for people like East Bay all came together in the course of one week to put on this event, to find the music, to find a person to lead us all in mourning as we march down market.

Cyrus Hall (27m 17s):
And to gather the supportive politicians like Scott Wiener, like Mayor Breed, also like Supervisor Preston. So all across the Bay area political spectrum to speak in support and to speak why it is so important that Sacramento find the operational funding necessary to give our agencies the time to shift their strategies and rebuild ridership and find new funding. So on six three on June 3rd, we held the funeral on rally starting in Oakland, marching on Bart underneath the Bay through the Trans Bay tunnel and coming out in civic center and then marching down market to San Francisco city Hall where we held a rally with speakers including Mayor Breed, Senator, Scott, Wiener, and a number of other local politicians and agency heads.

Cyrus Hall (28m 9s):
And at the end of the rally it was really clear that we’d produced a bunch of energy and momentum and then we needed to quickly figure out what are we going to do with all of this energy and momentum? We had been so in the moment producing this event very rapidly and so quickly, some activist associated Safe Street Rebel followed up about a week later on June 8th and ended up blocking Octavia and Market and Intersection that also happens to be an off ramp for us 1 0 1. And we had some good luck, a happy accident. The media alert went out late, we got incredible media coverage from helicopters, from people on the ground with cell phones.

Cyrus Hall (28m 49s):
And we were able to take that footage edited into very spicy social media that really went viral and helped us spread the word again and get more people activated, more people sending letters, more people phoning into Sacramento. And that pivoted further into flyering on Bart and Advocate in East Bay really found that talking to people directly on the train was generating a lot of letters and phone calls. So it was just one thing leading to another and building on energy every step of the way and always being ready to escalate just a little bit more in order to make sure that the media was covering the issue, that people were learning about it and that people were reaching out.

Adina Levin (29m 35s):
And that lightning activism really highlighted the diversity of the coalition when we were going out and doing the flyering, we wanted to use multiple languages and I believe the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Group Corporation, yeah, generated Tagalog. And we had someone from the Bay area Council, a business group generate the Chinese language. So people across from the political spectrum working at lightning speed to get the word out on the flyers. And as we started to hear that there was negotiation happening, there were cracks in the no position. We used the thousands of people that we had built up in a list encouraging people to call the governor, call the budget chairs, call the leadership that we’re negotiating.

Adina Levin (30m 25s):
And in those last couple of weeks we generated over 10,000 calls and letters really amping up that volume as they were making those final decisions.

Laura Tolkoff (30m 35s):
So I think one of the things that struck me about this whole experience was that you need both the inside game and the outside game to really be successful. And I think this is a perfect example of how being able to do the organizing work and really amplify the issues was something that was really, really critical because that’s when I think a lot started to change. And at that point we started to hear the word accountability and we started to hear that , if the state is going to be providing funding, they wanted to see more accountability, which luckily in the Bay area, we had been thinking about this for quite some time, and what we interpreted it as was making sure that this funding would help support better customer outcomes and performance.

Laura Tolkoff (31m 22s):
And so that was sort of a key point in the negotiations that where the space was opening up. So Rebecca and Monique, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about what the response was to that from the public agencies.

Rebecca Long (31m 35s):
Yeah, so as you pointed out,the Bay area had done a lot of work around this already. So just a quick refresher on that. In the wake of the pandemic, MTC pulled together what we called the Blue Ribbon Transit Transformation Task Force. And it was a multi-stakeholder panel that met virtually for about a year and a half and put together about 27 recommendations for really making transit more attractive with a focus on rebuilding ridership, attracting new riders, all of that. And so when we started hearing about accountability from the state, we frame that as we are going to hold ourselves accountable, both MTC and the operators to implementing this vision that we’ve adopted.

Rebecca Long (32m 20s):
We had already done a lot of pretty deep analysis into some of the strategies there, which include fair integration for example, and how that could translate into more riders. Another one was unified mapping and way finding so that the experience on transit really feels like one system. We had all these strategies and we were very intentional about educating the legislature about those strategies and making the case that, what we’re asking for is a multi-year funding bridge. Extension of the runway was one of the metaphors that was used. We are not asking for a long-term kind of bailout and that we do intend to both implement these strategies that are going to help us attract new writers and by doing so, help reduce the deficit, but also long term we have a plan to go to the voters and put forward a Regional transportation measure.

Rebecca Long (33m 10s):
And we we’re already talking about 2026 as a timeline for that, but we need the state to step in now to assist. And I think transit agencies were more nervous than some maybe about the accountability language, but I think there was widespread recognition that committing to some kind of transparency and timeline and just achievement of these core strategies was gonna be what it took in order to receive the funding. So it was a strong partnership and in the final language that was adopted, it provides for reporting mechanisms on showing what strategies are you implementing? So every agency that’s receiving the funding has to report out on what they’re doing to help bring back riders as well as being very transparent about their funding shortfalls.

Monique Webster (33m 57s):
I can just add that I think that everyone agrees that oversight and strong accountability measures as a condition of receiving funding as well as making sure that the public has full visibility into how the funds are being used and that they’re being used in the way that we want them to be used are quite reasonable and expected requirements. And so I just also wanna call out that the California Transit Association worked as part of the subcommittee to put together the an accountability framework proposal that was formerly delivered to legislature in the governor in late May. And as Rebecca’s already touched on, serve at its highest level, it required the submittal of detailed plans to recover ridership, addressing operating deficits prior to any dollars flowing.

Monique Webster (34m 40s):
And then sort of after the money was received that regular progress reports would be submitted and that there would be a lot of transparency around how the money was being used.

Laura Tolkoff (34m 49s):
So I’m gonna ask Ryan very briefly to talk about the home stretch. So clearly a lot was happening at this time, may, June, both inside and outside of the building. And I would love to hear from you sort of how did Senator Wiener really land the plane, so to speak, and really what did we win and what was left to be done?

Raayan Mohtashemi (35m 11s):
Yeah, so after April 25th, which is when the Senator released an official detailed budget ask, there were, as we have discussed, several months of discussion that ended up leading to a budget deal at which point there were various points where it seemed like externally there was maybe not so much traction being gained from that. But we kept on plugging away with repeated internal and external communications and discussions, including via press conferences, a select committee on Bay area public transit hearing in May, which I believe is on the timeline and additional Legislative letters as key developments happen. For example, the May revision, the release of broad senate and assembly budget plans.

Raayan Mohtashemi (35m 53s):
And we really worked to rally legislators in order to define what we viewed as good aspects of the May revise, kind of promising morsels indicating an openness that potentially the administration had heard discussions of the fiscal clip are important. And also reacting to specific plans provided by the Senate and assembly leadership regarding restoring transit capital funding, but not necessarily providing additional funding, instead relying on flexibility of that capital funding to address fiscal shortfalls. And we work with colleagues in the legislature and external stakeholders to discuss potential issues with that strategy and to urge the leadership to do more.

Raayan Mohtashemi (36m 36s):
And I think eventually through the final deal, we were successful and what helped improve that success was the engagement and repeated communications that we discussed the support of leadership, which was critical developing and attractive statewide ask. And thank you to Michael Pimentel, the executive director of the California Transit Association for working very closely with everyone as well on that matter. And also pointing to what other states were doing. Notably that year it was New York and Minnesota that had kind of passed kind of longer term funding agreements through their budget processes to avert fiscal cliffs for transit agencies in those states to kind of put pressure again to show that other states are addressing this issue, so we should too.

Raayan Mohtashemi (37m 22s):
And I think that that was helpful in in pushing it in terms of what was actually one, we did win a reversal of the proposed $2 billion transit capital program cut plus a $1.1 billion infusion of transit operating funds sourced from the state’s captain trade revenues and to an extent from the public Transportation account over a four year period. So Fiscal year 23, 24 to fiscal year 26, 27. And as mentioned, there were accountability measures attached to that funding, including the requirement for regions to have a short and long-term financial plan that addresses financial sustainability and ridership growth, as well as the establishment of the Transit transformation task force to begin discussing long-term reforms in the transit space related to many issues.

Raayan Mohtashemi (38m 10s):
But that was not enough for the Bay area, specifically $400 million directed to the region in addition to the previously committed capital component, which when combined with Regional aid that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission followed through on later this year has helped avert shortfalls and potential service cuts that would result from shortfalls through roughly mid 2026. So as discussed, there is a need for long-term sustainability in June and July of last year as it became clear that whatever was going to happen, there wasn’t necessarily going to be a long-term solution through the budget that we needed to focus on potential additional near term and long-term solutions.

Raayan Mohtashemi (38m 54s):
So the Senator introduced Senate Bill 5 32 last year, which was a temporary bridge toll increase to basically supplement whatever funding was coming to the Bay area. Over the period of the budget proposal, the Senator was proposing a $1 50 cent bridge toll increase on the Bay area state owned bridges. And what that proposal did, although that proposal did not pass and has not gone into effect, bridge tolls are not $1 58 cents more expensive than before the proposal. It did help further define and delineate to the public and to decision makers that we have succeeded in the campaign to address the near term shortfalls, but we haven’t necessarily identified a full runway through the potential time for a 2026 Regional measure, which could happen hopefully in November, 2026, and that this is in general transit is worthy of investment.

Raayan Mohtashemi (39m 47s):
So thank you to all the folks who did help with that effort. And now this year, Senator Wiener introduced Senate Bill 9 25, which is designated as authorizing Legislation for Regional transportation revenue measure, which the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is sponsoring in order for us to achieve that very long term sustainability and resolve the structural shortfalls. So there is much work yet to be done.

Laura Tolkoff (40m 13s):
Thanks, Brian. So as you can see, an enormous amount of work went into this campaign, but we’re not finished, right? There’s so much more to do. The problem is not yet solved, but I would love to turn it to my colleagues here to very briefly round Robin style, talk about their biggest takeaway and reflection from this effort. I’m gonna start with Ryan and then move to Monique. And then Zach,

Raayan Mohtashemi (40m 40s):
For the budget campaign specifically, I would highlight the need to pursue significant state buy-in for a statewide advocacy effort. So really thinking about how can we ensure that the entire state transit stakeholder space and others who are supportive, including and like the environmental housing and business worlds are bought into the issue and understand that this is of import to the state, not just the Bay area. And the coalition was able to successfully do that. And in all of our Legislative sign-on letters, there is diverse geographic representation amongst the Legislative membership. And that was because there was advocacy from across the state on this issue.

Raayan Mohtashemi (41m 22s):
And also something that I think we could continue working on is how to define the need early and ask early. The official ask was transmitted in late April, and that’s about four months after the governor’s proposal. And of course it takes time. That’s because so much engagement was being done to ensure a unified advocacy effort and the sooner the better, spreading a positive message is always important and noting that transit needs a diverse set of revenue sources to succeed because over-reliance on one specific source such as fair revenue can lead to instability and volatility from a financial sense. So those were all takeaways I think are important for us to think of as we go into future advocacy and future work in the transit space.

Monique Webster (42m 8s):
Yeah, what really struck me during all of this was just how much, unfortunately the negative narrative got the most attention. And it was when you’re in the middle of things, you think, oh, we’re doing all these great things and we’ve made all these adaptations and we’ve changed all these things. And it felt like no one knew that. And so that was very eyeopening. So just the lesson that I took forward from that or that I think everyone should take forward from that is that, we just have to keep getting our voices out there and we have to keep talking about the positive things that are going on because at some point, the tide did turn a little bit and we started to see more recognition of those kinds of stories in the press.

Zack Deutsch-Gross (42m 48s):
Yeah, and I would just add that I think we had a really unprecedented set of diverse allies that provides a model that were all unified around a collective ask and impact, and that that proposes like a pretty dynamic, exciting model for future advocacy. So , we had Housers bought in who understood the connection between transit and solving our housing and homelessness crisis. We had EJ groups and CBOs whose constituents truly understood why Transit was vital to their communities. And we had grassroots activists from across the state who understood the nature of the crisis. And I think that Bos well for the impact we know we need to continue to make so that transit can survive and thrive.

Laura Tolkoff (43m 24s):
Thanks. I’ll go next and then Adina and then Rebecca will take us home. So just to echo some of the themes that my colleagues have said here, I think that it’s really easy sometimes to kind of create this false dichotomy between inside game and outside game in the advocacy world. And I actually think that what this showed us is that you really need to have the full spectrum in order to be able to make a change and that there’s different kind of modalities that you have to draw on at different times to be successful. And , there are some things that public agencies can do really well that advocates can’t do. There are some things that advocates can do really well that public agencies can’t do, and so you really actually need everything.

Laura Tolkoff (44m 5s):
The second thing I would just offer, which is related to that, is like having good research and a shared understanding really matters. So to Monique’s point, there’s a lot of things that are happening that are very positive that people didn’t know about, but also, we had, I think 34 new legislators last year. And having some grounding in what does the state do now on transit operations, how does that compare to other places? How are the needs different for individual operators relative to others in the state was actually really important to be able to have a shared problem definition and to be able to start identifying solutions. And then finally, I think just having seasoned political leadership and was really, really critical.

Laura Tolkoff (44m 49s):
So Senator Wiener is really unique in that he loves and knows transit in his bones, and he also has the gravitas and influence in the legislature to be able to make things happen. And we would’ve really been lost without that. And so with that, I’m gonna turn it over to Adina

Adina Levin (45m 6s):
Building on what Laura was saying and providing more color to some of the questions that people are asking in the chat. Yes, there is absolutely work going on to make use of the coalition built in the Survive and Thrive state funding campaign, both at the state level in keeping and growing a network of statewide organizations, focusing on that transit transformation task force at the state level to provide support for policies and funding from the state in a more long-term way that builds on the emergency funding that was granted in this campaign, but working on more long-term solutions.

Adina Levin (45m 48s):
And then also at a Regional level, continuing to build up the Regional coalitions that can help pass the authorizing Legislation for a Regional funding measure. And also at the end of the day, get that measure passed. And then the last thing in terms of building up and some of the questions in the chat and about regrowing transit ridership is one of the broader lessons is that in North America and around the world, the Transit systems that were the most resilient to the pandemic were the ones that had coordinated and multipurpose systems that were not very narrowly focused on commuting, but served a wide variety of riders and a wide variety of trips.

Adina Levin (46m 29s):
And so the things that we are doing in the Bay area are already taking us in that direction to have a more resilient system.

Rebecca Long (46m 37s):
I would just say, what an important role. The media played both Bay area media, statewide media, and then we did have, I guess the benefit of this having a national and even international kind of focus in the sense that , it is a challenge facing pretty much all Metro areas more extreme in the Bay area, but that was just able to kind of keep it as a key item that journalists just kept covering, especially as , this coalition, what kept giving them more and more to write about. So I think that was very instrumental. And then I would just say kind of overall lesson learned was just kind of keeping your eye on the prize I mean. I think we all felt in our bones that this is the only answer.

Rebecca Long (47m 18s):
There is not a plan B, the state is the only entity that is in will have the capacity to provide short-term funding and. It’s, it’s an urgency. And we just sort of never let up on that, that, and I think through our regular meetings, we were just constantly identifying new action items. Let’s keep applying pressure in new ways so that we really never let up until victory.

Laura Tolkoff (47m 43s):
Thank you. Well, you can see that a lot of work went into this effort. And I just wanna thank our speakers for the enormous and often invisible work that they’ve done to really make the Bay area better. And for the many, many people who are not on this call but contributed to this victory, this was really incredible. The odds were very much against us, and there’s still more work to do. So just a big round of applause for everybody here and everybody who contributed. And thank you to everyone who is attending today,