Short answer: Vote “No”.
What does a No vote mean?
Voting “No” on the so-called Greenway Measure instructs the County Supervisors to continue with their current plans and public processes that have been ongoing for some time.
- This includes continuing to design, fund, and build a 32 mile trail from Watsonville to Davenport, and eventually connect to trails even further North and South in neighboring counties.
- This includes acting on the previous studies over the last many years regarding potential public mass transit using the 32 mile corridor alongside the trail. These summarize as: “Public mass transit spanning the county is a great idea, the best implementation would be some form of quiet wireless electric rail, and at the moment it’s on hold due to lack of funds.”
It doesn’t mean: Higher taxes (that would be a publicly voted decision if ever).
It doesn’t mean: Noisy stinky trains (our community hates noise and pollution; any acceptable choice would be clean and quiet).
It doesn’t mean: That they’re compromising our trail network, in time or quality. In fact, as of this writing, the Santa Cruz County Regional Transit Commission, who owns the branch line corridor, is leaning towards a number of sections of temporary track removal to expedite trail construction, while still maintaining a forward path to implementing transit if funding should materialize.
What does a Yes vote mean?
Voting “Yes” instructs the County Supervisors to ignore their previous process and the conclusions of engineering, transportation, and policy experts.
If you read the Greenway Measure, it contains a lot of positive-sounding fluff about future transit. This is by design. Crafting a measure and shepherding it to the point of being printed on a ballot is expensive. Part of the artistry is to make it sound so obvious that one is inclined to simply say, “That sounds good.”
Despite all the positive-sounding fluff, there are only a few substantive, legally actionable elements to the Measure. It modifies the county’s General Plan to remove all mentions of future public transit utilizing this precious county-spanning North/South corridor. That’s it. That’s the measure. It essentially directs the county government to not look at rail transit, and not accept funding opportunities. The only actual purpose of the Measure is to prevent light rail.
Will it help build trails faster? No. The majority of trail design and fund-seeking is already in process. Despite their campaign claims, it will not accelerate trail completion.
Will it help build a better trail? No. The County and the Transit Commission are well aware that this active transportation project (the trail) is intensely popular! They are already making reasonable tradeoffs (that, incidentally, do sadden rail advocates), in order to deliver a quality trail within current public sentiment and feasible budgeting.
Then why are they pushing this ballot measure? Why are they spending a million dollars on their campagin? That is a good question. Some of the cartoons on this site speculate crudely on why that is. Public transit has always had opponents, wherever it is implemented.
In summary, vote No
(Unless you are a hard-core opponent of public transit.)