American Dream

For some reason, the San Jose Mercury-News doesn't think the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) should give $7.7 million to public relations firms to boost its image. Could be be because VTA projects a $100 million shortfall on its $328 million annual operating budget? Or maybe because VTA's shortsighted planning has forced it to raise fares and cut back on transit service, thus losing 35 percent of its riders in three years?

It couldn't possibly be because light rail is a bad idea. After all, the Mercury-News always supported the idea of going heavily into debt to build more rail lines in San Jose. Now VTA says that it can't afford to operate any more trains even if it could afford to build them, which it can't. So it wants to hire the PR companies to sell voters on the idea of raising the sales tax yet again. At least the Mercury-News has finally figured out this is a bad idea.

Let's see, we got so far into debt building light rail in San Jose that we couldn't meet the monthly payments on the bonds. So we cut back transit service and lost 35 percent of our riders. What should we do next?

I've got it: Let's pay a public relations firm $7.7 million to tell everybody what a good job we are doing! As a first priority, we will have them sell the idea of building a BART line to San Jose, even though we don't have enough money to build it because we are spending the money the voters approved for that line to operate the bare-bones system we have left after cut backs.

Portland has wanted to revitalize Martin Luther King Avenue for fifteen years, so it spent nearly $30 million on various subsidies, including $7 million on traffic calming and $9 million on transit-oriented developments. Yet development in the area has stagnated, and some blame the planners for creating too many hurdles for developers to jump. So much for the idea of "build it and they will come."