COG’s governance flaws and gross mismanagement, which produces
empty County Transit and JDA buses running at 99 percent
taxpayers
‚ expense, and which deprives San Benito County’s residents of
job-creating industry and commerce by fostering socialist-transit
solutions and ignoring private-sector transport solutions, must be
reformed ASAP.
Editor,
COG’s governance flaws and gross mismanagement, which produces empty County Transit and JDA buses running at 99 percent taxpayers‚ expense, and which deprives San Benito County’s residents of job-creating industry and commerce by fostering socialist-transit solutions and ignoring private-sector transport solutions, must be reformed ASAP.
COG’s charitable works, its transit welfare, burdens SBC’s taxpayers with unsound, unsustainable transport policies that inflict much more harm than the small amount of good its directors crow about.
I’ve watched COG’s directors, year after year, focus their microscopes on “unmet needs,” throwing large quantities of taxpayers‚ money in the hopeless task of eradicating all human suffering, all the while they totally ignore, and won’t spend a dollar on SBC’s transport needs to increase commerce and industry and job-creating business.
This is a policy mistake multiplied by the state, which requires SBC to send them a dollar so that they can return 11 cents. We are idiots to accept their Transit First policy, which works well in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but not in the 37 rural counties that send the cities substantially 90 percent of our tax dollars.
COG’s directors‚ preoccupation with Transit First policy and growing the malignant cancer of County Transit and JDA, has blinded them, under the direction of COG’s executive director. They are so blind, so near-sighted, that they would not even respond to the Union Pacific Industrial Development Department’s offer to pay for transport infrastructure to increase rail-oriented economic development.
Notwithstanding my many pleas, and showing them the UP Industrial Development Department’s videotape that they distributed to Northern California local government and Economic Development Corporation executives at their Economic Development Forum two years ago in Pleasanton, our COG Directors did not lift a finger. Now, we reap the fruit of their pro-socialist, anti-business policy.
Lack of freight revenue originating on the Hollister Branch Line, and no likelihood of any future increase, has caused UP to sell an option to purchase the Branch Line to San Benito Railroad, LLC. Once UP ceases service on the Branch Line, we can expect to see the cannery close. If the cannery does remain in operation, we can expect that UP will offer trailers and containers in lieu of boxcars, affording the cannery cheaper boxcar freight rates, but transporting their tonnage over-the-road to its piggyback ramp in Lathrop. We will see the consequences in the rapidly deteriorating conditions of local highways.
Conclusion: It is a crisis. Now. Not in the future. San Benito County’s Board of Supervisors must stop it, or bear responsibility for allowing COG’s Transit First policy to plunge the county into bankruptcy.
We must have a major course correction, a paradigm shift. The “unfunded mandate” from Sacramento should be thrown back; toss the “Trojan Horse” out. Rectify past COG mistakes.
Otherwise, our present policy will give us greater “unmet needs,” less affordable housing and ruin SBC for future generations. Stay the same as COG presently steers, and you can put up signs saying, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter this County.” Then our children will be forced to look to casinos, brothels, gangs and drugs for any hope, unless they flee this God-forsaken County.
Our supervisors can prevent it, but they must act now.
Caveat Viator!
Joe Thompson, Tres Pinos
