Raiding transit funds is shortsighted

Sacramento —  The current fight over transit funding in Sacramento is a struggle between two competing philosophies. One holds that bus lines and light rail are local responsibilities. The other believes that the state should be doing much more to coax Californians out of their cars.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sides with the first sentiment, motivated by his obsessive determination to avoid a tax increase. That’s why he’s trying to raid $1.3 billion in public transit money to spend on other government programs.

Politically, the governor’s no-tax mantra is about the only thing he consistently chants in sync with fellow Republicans.

Never mind the hypocrisy: He’s also proposing to raise taxes on doctors and hospitals to help pay for universal healthcare. (He spins these as fees.)

Meanwhile, during Schwarzenegger’s reign, university tuitions keep climbing. Many students consider that a tax.

He’s trying to deny the impoverished aged, blind and disabled -- plus welfare moms -- their regular cost-of-living increases. That’s not a tax, but it’s seizing money that should be going to California’s most vulnerable.

So if your paramount goal is to escape raising taxes at all costs, the decision to grab $1.3 billion in transit money is a breeze. Start with that, regardless of rationale.

Schwarzenegger’s proposal, included in the $146-billion budget revision he sent the Legislature last week, is to use $1.3 billion in transit money for programs traditionally paid for out of the general fund, the state’s all-purpose cash account. The money would be diverted this way: $827 million to busing kids to school, $340 million to paying debt on transportation bonds, $144 million on shuttling the developmentally disabled to regional centers.

That frees up the $1.3 billion for other general fund purposes, such as prisons, parks, schools and healthcare.

“Legislators can choose not to do this,” says H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state Finance Department. “It just means they’re going to have to find $1.3 billion to cut either in education or health and welfare or public safety. And they’ll have to weigh that against the fact we’re already proposing to spend $1.5 billion on transit.”

But it’s probably not what California voters had in mind last November when they approved a $19.9-billion transportation bond issue. Although most of that was targeted at road construction, at least $3.6 billion was sold as public transit money.

Voters probably figured that meant $3.6 billion extra, on top of already anticipated transit spending.

Likewise, when voters approved Proposition 1A, advertised to preserve the gasoline sales tax for transportation spending, they didn’t expect it to be raided for general fund purposes.

Schwarzenegger administration officials insist that there are no raids, that all the disputed money still would be spent on transit. But they’re trying to change the definition of transit and laboring over semantics.

What the governor is calling “home-to-school transportation,” for example, is what Joshua W. Shaw, executive

director of the California Transit Assn., asserts that everyone

else calls “yellow school bus service.”

“It’s a program run by local school districts,” Shaw says. “Public transit means transit service that is open to the public -- to all of us and is paid for by each user in the form of fares.... School bus service, on the other hand, is available only to schoolchildren and at no direct cost to the rider. That’s not transit.”

But Palmer insists that “transporting tens of thousands of students from home to school is public transportation.”

One high hurdle to having a coherent public policy discussion about transportation funding is the arcane, nonsensical language used by government officials, politicians and other insiders. Perhaps the key technical word in the current debate is “spillover,” which I am incapable of explaining.

Suffice it that “spillover” tax revenues are created by escalating gas prices. But instead of the excess taxes paid at the pump by wallet-drained motorists being used for traditional transportation purposes, Schwarzenegger is proposing that this “spillover” be siphoned into the general fund.

At the heart of all this is the state’s historically low commitment to helping communities operate transit systems.

The legislative analyst’s office points out that for the 10 years between 1995 and 2005, the state supplied only 2% of transit operating revenues. Local funds accounted for 65%, passenger fares 27% and the federal government 6%. The Schwarzenegger administration uses the state’s paltry contribution to argue that its funding raid will have little impact on transit programs.

Moreover, it says, the governor’s proposed budget would increase state transit funding by $300 million, mainly bond money.

Still, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimates it would lose $198 million under the governor’s plan, hastening the need for stiff fare hikes.

“The state has a role to play in transit, but it traditionally has been a minor role and will continue to be,” says state Finance Director Mike Genest.

That irritates Assemblyman Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles), a former L.A. city councilman, who contends that the state long ago should have invested in more bus and rail commuting.

“Budgets can either be about looking backward and serving the needs of the past or about imagining what the state should look like in the future,” Feuer says. “Building freeways is not the way to solve our transportation crisis. That reflects the old way of thinking.

“L.A. is back to having the most polluted air in the nation and the most congested roads....

“The state’s future is strongly tied to public transit. And that’s true for all Californians of every income level. If there’s more transit ridership in your city, there’ll be less congestion on your freeway.”

Ten years from now, Californians won’t remember whether or not Schwarzenegger raised taxes. But they would remember gratefully if he provided them with more transportation options.

George Skelton writes Monday and Thursday. Reach him at george.skelton@latimes.com.