Borenstein: $73 million of Bay Area toll money for transit diverted to bridges
About $73 million of Bay Area bridge toll money that voters approved in 2018 for public transit and freeway improvement projects has instead been diverted to pay for maintaining the bridges.
That’s just one small example of how officials of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission have for years been comingling different portions of the tolls for the region’s seven state-owned bridges.
The troubling financial practices came to light as the agency sought our editorial page support for its plan to once again raise Bay Area bridge tolls.
The automobile toll is slated to increase from $7 to $8 at the start of 2025. A commission committee overseeing bridge tolls is scheduled to vote this coming week and the full commission board the following week on a proposal to add another $2.50.
Right now, because of the comingling, the commission lacks the data to intelligently evaluate the toll hike. The plan should be shelved until the agency’s finances are transparently accounted for.
Latest toll hike plan
The proposal calls for 50-cent annual increases starting in 2026 that would boost the cost of an automobile trip to $10.50 by 2030. To understand whether the increase is needed, I asked to see the financial tracking of the different portions of the toll the agency now collects.
District officials responded that they pool the money rather than budget it separately. That’s stunning and problematic because the different toll components are designated for very different purposes.
The first dollar, approved by voters in 1988, was designated for operating, maintaining and replacing the bridges, as well as improvements to BART, Caltrain and San Francisco Muni.
Another $3 — approved in $1 increments by the Legislature, in 1997 and 2007, and MTC, in 2010 — was supposed to help cover the cost of seismic retrofitting, including the replacement of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span.
And voters in 2004 and 2018 approved toll increases totaling $4 to help fund transit service operations and freeway, transit, bicycle and pedestrian projects, including BART’s seismic retrofit, new rail cars, and extension to Warm Springs Station and San Jose; the Caldecott Tunnel fourth bore; and the eBART rail extension in eastern Contra Costa County.
The voter material for the 2018 ballot proposal, Regional Measure 3, listed the projects but didn’t mention that the money would go toward maintaining or rehabilitating the bridges. Indeed, backers emphasized at the time that the measure would fund projects off the bridge to reduce congestion on it.
But apparently voters should have read the fine print in state law. Rebecca Long, the agency’s director of legislation and public affairs, and Derek Hansel, the chief financial officer, insist the law allows them to use any of the toll money for any bridge maintenance, construction and improvement projects.
Worse, none of the components of the tolls have expiration dates, but the list of projects they are supposed to fund is finite. So Long and Hansel argue that there will eventually be more money than projects, leaving them free to use excess for any bridge purpose.
Indeed, they say, they are free to use money from the individual programs even before the promised projects are completed. The commission’s only obligation, they say, is to provide the funding for the projects at some point.
$10 billion of debt
They also argue that the toll revenues must be pooled because they are used as security for selling bonds. That’s a bogus rationale for the lack of transparency.
Aggregating the numbers for the bond market is understandable. And it’s no different from what most government agencies do. But that’s not an excuse for failing to track how the borrowed money is spent for the separate programs.
The commission has nearly $10 billion of bond debt. Not only does the agency fail to track the use of the money by program, but it also fails to apportion the liability.
The result is that there’s no way to know what part of the financial obligations for each of the programs has been fulfilled, nor when it will be.
As the commission considers hiking tolls further — again permanently — for bridge operations, maintenance and rehabilitation, it should be asking itself how much of the current toll money could now or in the future be used to offset the need for such a large increase.
But, to determine that, commissioners would need an accounting and projections that separate the funding and spending by each of the components of the bridge tolls.
To his credit, Hansel, who took over as CFO in 2022, says it would be “good practice” to track the revenues and expenditures by each program. He says he has the information to do that for Regional Measure 3. And he has told others he will need a couple of months to figure it out for the other programs, which began long before he arrived.
Commissioners should insist that he finish that as quickly as possible to provide transparency to the public and ensure commissioners make a well-informed decision about further increasing tolls.
The proposed hike is not slated to begin until 2026, so there’s no need to rush the plan through. Until the tracking data is available, the bridge toll hike should be tabled.