Belmont weighs in on Managed Lanes

The decision belongs to both City/County Association of Governments and the San Mateo County Transportation Authority and those boards must come to a consensus by mid-February or else the project will be delayed and construction costs will go up. An ad hoc subcommittee comprised of members of both boards will meet again Friday in hopes of achieving consensus before the boards cast final votes next month.

For their part, Belmont councilmembers were interested in retaining local control, though Councilman Doug Kim, the city’s representative on C/CAG, challenged the local versus regional control dichotomy that is often invoked with regard to the looming owner/operator decision.

“The two most important words that people tend to focus on with this issue are local control,” he said. “The BAIFA option gives us local control but defined differently.”

For that option, ownership and operating duties would be given to the Bay Area Infrastructure Financing Authority, or BAIFA, a joint powers authority between the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Bay Area Toll Authority, or BATA, that manages express lanes elsewhere in the state.

Another option is to keep ownership in San Mateo County — which is to say C/CAG and the TA would own the tolling facility — and have either BAIFA or the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority operate it.

The operator manages day-to-day operations, while the owner gets to decide tolling policies — whether two-person carpools or clean air vehicles can use the tolled lanes at a discount or for free, for example — as well as any equity program it decides to implement and how net revenue is spent.

If BAIFA owned the tolling facility, then its board would make those decisions and one representative from San Mateo County would be added to that board, which is currently comprised of five voting members and one non-voting member from three separate counties.

If ownership remains in San Mateo County, then C/CAG and the TA would have to figure out how it will share that responsibility. C/CAG is a joint powers authority comprised of board members representing each city and the county that works on quality of life issues such as air quality and transportation, among others. The TA oversees the county’s half-cent sales tax revenue for transportation, and is under the umbrella of the San Mateo County Transit District.

The half-a-billion dollar Managed Lanes project aimed for completion by 2022 will construct a new lane in each direction of Highway 101 in San Mateo County and then the far left lane will be converted to an express lane with real-time surveillance equipment. Those lanes are free for buses and carpools of three people or more while other drivers have to pay to drive on those lanes; initial projections suggest tolls will average $1 per mile in San Mateo County. Such a facility promises speeds of at least 45 mph on all lanes at all times.

Local control

The express lanes in San Mateo County are projected to generate between $10 million and $20 million a year, money that by law must be invested into the corridor. The ultimate goal is to use the tolling revenue to help fund an extension of the express lanes into San Francisco and then also invest that money in complimentary express bus service.

Councilwoman Julia Mates said she’s leaning toward the two options in which San Mateo County agencies own the tolling facility and not the one in which BAIFA owns it.

“In terms of local control, setting the toll rate, toll violations, the equity program — those are the types of things that resonated with me and threw me over the edge,” Mates said.

Councilman Charles Stone suggested he prefers those two options as well.

“On an issue as large as this when you’re talking about millions of dollars, how the net revenue will be spent, equity concerns — for me it’s important that we retain that control,” he said.

Kim suggested that BAIFA ownership and establishing a Managed Lanes equity program are not mutually exclusive.

“There’s been this misperception that BAIFA and the members of that enterprise don’t care about all of the different variables that you can control. If you look at the conditions in each of those counties, they share the same concerns about providing equity for low-income folks,” Kim said. “The idea that we would not be able to control how these equity and ownership concerns are done through an enterprise like this is not true.

“If we differ with BAIFA on how they treat the electric vehicles in other parts of the regional system then that’s an issue we can bring before the BAIFA board and either ask for a different treatment in the corridor or work with our partners to say this needs to be handled differently,” he added.

Stone argued that San Mateo County would have minimal influence on the BAIFA board.

“We don’t have any meaningful assurances [from BAIFA] that we would have any real input, we would have one member of a six-member board. … The even-numbered board always freaks me out. Our voice would be small on that board,” Stone said. “MTC is going to do what MTC wants to do. It’s not going to do what San Mateo County wants them to do — I believe that firmly. … If we’re on the losing end of votes, we don’t have the power to dictate what the toll price is, how we handle electric vehicles, how we handle the complexities of the equity issues.”

Independence or influence?

Stone was also concerned about the composition of BAIFA.

“Yes, BAIFA is a distinct legal entity, it’s a JPA made up of BATA and MTC members, but it does not have independent staff. It’s a JPA and then MTC staff carries out the orders of the board. I am extraordinarily concerned about that,” he said.

But Kim suggested San Mateo County would have significant influence on the BAIFA board if that agency were to own the tolling facility.

“We have an opportunity to be the big dog in BAIFA,” he said, adding that extending the express lanes from Interstate 380 into San Francisco is critical to the success of the facility. San Francisco is currently studying that project. “We have to think about ourselves as San Mateo and San Francisco and with that partnership in mind, we will be the single largest entity in BAIFA. … We have more leverage now than we ever did because it’s not just us, it’s San Francisco and several miles of facilities that take us to Fourth and King.”

That said, Kim stressed that he wasn’t pushing for one option or the other, and despite any suggested differences among councilmembers, Kim’s colleagues reiterated their support for his work on C/CAG and respect for his transportation expertise. Kim previously served as director of planning for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority when express lanes were installed there.

“I think we have excellent representation on the C/CAG board, we’re very lucky to have someone with real world expertise,” Stone said. “We don’t often get a chance to weigh in on this and this is darn near a once-in-a-lifetime [project]. Things like this that churn out this kind of revenue in San Mateo County transit don’t come along that often.”

Belmont appears to be the only local council to address the owner/operator options for the Managed Lanes project leading up to the C/CAG and TA votes in February.

zachary@smdailyjournal.com

(650) 344-5200 ext. 102