Seamless Bay Area Ballot Measure Guide
YES on Regional Transit Measure and San Francisco Prop H
The Regional Transit Measure will prevent drastic cuts to Caltrain, BART, AC Transit, and transit across the Bay Area. Together with Prop H in San Francisco, these measures will prevent drastic cuts to Muni.
The Regional Transit Measure won’t just prevent service cuts, it will help make transit more seamless, rider-friendly and affordable, with funding for 14 years of free and reduced price transfers, standard low income discounts, unified wayfinding signs, faster and more reliable buses, better paratransit, and improvements to safety and cleanliness. And it requires agencies to improve efficiency.
If you’ve already been supporting the RTM and Prop H, please share with your friends and family and sign up for a phone banking or canvassing events! For people who don’t take transit that often, let them know that if there are big cuts to transit, car traffic will get a lot worse, according to this new report from SPUR.
YES on Prop 1 Statewide Affordable Housing Bond
Transit plays an important role in improving housing affordability. In the Bay Area, two thirds to three quarters of new housing is planned near frequent transit. Making housing more affordable requires building lots more housing, including subsidized affordable housing.
Prop 1 authorizes the state to issue $11.5 billion in bonds to fund a variety of good programs to build new affordable housing for groups including veterans, students, farmworkers, and others who need. “Affordable” in this context means that rent is set at a fixed percentage of the household income.
No on Prop 43 - Adds barriers to raising public funds for transit, housing parks, and other needs
Proposition 43 would require a two-thirds vote for local special tax and property tax citizen initiatives. Currently these can pass with 50% plus 1 of the vote. Proponents of Prop 43 want to increase barriers to raise funding for affordable housing, transit, parks, fire departments, etc.
It does not retroactively impact measures that are currently on the ballot (the RTM, Prop H), but it would make future funding for public investments harder.
No on Prop 45 - Speeds environmental review for highways and sprawl housing
Prop 45 changes the California Environmental Quality Act to speed up environmental review for some projects. In recent years, the legislature has already reformed CEQA to make it easier to build environmentally beneficial infill housing, transit, bike and sidewalk projects. This law would mostly benefit greenfield “sprawl” development in agricultural lands and fireprone wildland borders, highway expansions, and industrial projects that cause environmental harms to nearby communities and habitats. It does not mention High Speed Rail
There are opportunities for the legislature to make more changes to CEQA that make environmentally beneficial projects easier, but this ballot measure is a blunt instrument that could only be changed by another ballot measure.