Santa Clara County VTA and its predecessors gave top priority to
their county’s transport plans for three decades to the detriment
of this county’s needs during that time, causing our No. 1
industry, agribusiness, to suffer losses.
Santa Clara County VTA and its predecessors gave top priority to their county’s transport plans for three decades to the detriment of this county’s needs during that time, causing our No. 1 industry, agribusiness, to suffer losses.
Our county lost jobs, while our neighbor gained them. Our shippers and receivers lacked the efficiencies of intermodal service – while VTA’s boondoggles consumed substantial tax dollars from this county’s taxpayers. Their insane love affair with socialist transit boondoggles like Lite Rail (Heavy Socialism), BART to San Jose, etc., partially funded by this county’s taxpayers, has and is at the price of our county’s lost business, lost jobs, and decreasing livability thanks to their myopic socialist disease. We pay for their wastefulness, and the wastefulness of other cities in California.
VTA has no lawful jurisdiction in its own county, let alone the sovereign County of San Benito. VTA’s been indicted by their Grand Jury for governance flaws, taxpayers abuse, and fiscal irresponsibility. The MIT study of all the nation’s transit agencies ranked VTA last in efficiency. Together with AMBAG they’ve made this area the largest one on the entire Continent of North America without intermodal facilities, which means that hundreds of thousands of tons of air pollution have been released into our air due to their socialist policies. Combined with the wastefulness of transporting empty bus and rail passenger seats most of the time, VTA has proven itself worthy of our leaders’ condemnation. Our board of supervisors has lawful jurisdiction over us – just read the San Benito County Code, and they have the mandate from our voters to decide transport and housing issues for us, not VTA, and not COG nor AMBAG.
Our General Plan is ours, not VTA’s nor AMBAG’s, nor COG’s. For our leaders to capitulate to unconstitutional MPOs like VTA, AMBAG and/or COG is sufficient grounds to have them recalled from office. Only our county’s leaders can lawfully plan highways. Only our leaders have first hand knowledge of the capabilities of our taxpayers to shoulder the burdens of highways. With motorists paying 100 percent of their own costs, plus 99 percent of the costs of transit riders’ rides, our leaders have shown that VTA’s insanity is not affordable here, now or ever. So, our leaders ought to reject the Trojan Horse being offered by VTA’s socialist extremists. We don’t tell VTA or Santa Clara County how to do things, and they have no right to tell us.
Joe Thompson is a transportation lawyer and a Tres Pinos resident.
