CA: SMART coalition launches campaign to renew tax that provides operating cash for North Bay passenger rail system

They’ve won seven of their last eight games, but even the San Francisco Giants aren’t having a better spring than the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit system. On May 29, SMART carried its millionth passenger of the fiscal year — a record for the eight-year-old passenger rail service.

Two days later, the rail line’s Windsor station officially opened, at long last, for passenger service. On June 5, the train carried 5,010 riders, a single-day record for SMART, which announced on June 7 that it was in line for an $81 million grant from the state of California to extend the line north to Healdsburg. 

“Right now,” said SMART general manager Eddie Cumins, “we’re hitting on all cylinders.”

The timing was optimal, then, for friends of the commuter rail system to take steps to secure its future. A giant leap in that direction is set for today, when a coalition of SMART advocates — separate and distinct from the agency itself — was set to announce the launch of their campaign to renew the voter-approved quarter-cent sales tax that is the system’s main source of operating cash.

That group will soon begin collecting the minimum 48,500 qualifying signatures from registered voters it will need to place a measure on Marin and Sonoma county ballots in 2026 to extend the tax, passed in 2008 and otherwise set to expire in March 2029.

Bruising defeat 5 years ago

An attempt to reauthorize the tax in 2020 failed resoundingly. Facing stout opposition from a group called NotSoSmart, funded by nearly $2 million from Molly Gallaher Flater, daughter of the prominent Sonoma County developer Bill Gallaher, that measure fell well short. Needing at least two thirds of the vote, SMART got just 54%.

The loss set in motion an extensive public listening campaign. That, along with leadership turnover at SMART and a series of service expansions that have helped grow and sustain higher daily and annual ridership, have propelled the North Bay’s rail line into a different era — one which finds it better off than many other struggling public Bay Area transit systems.

Any test at the ballot box, however, comes among a wider set of consumers and potential skeptics, such that SMART allies sought to lower the bar it would need to renew its sales tax. In 2024, then-Sen. Bill Dodd, D- Napa, authored a bill approved by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom clarifying that a voter-led initiative to reauthorize the tax would be considered a special election. As such, it would require a simply majority to pass, rather than the two-thirds threshold the agency couldn’t clear in the face of the well-funded 2020 opposition campaign.

“We will rely on a robust group of dedicated volunteers to gather signatures,” said Suzanne Smith, chair of The Smart Initiative, “then augment that with paid signature gatherers, as the need arises.”

Smith, who retired in 2023 after 26 years as executive director of the Sonoma County Transportation Authority, helped spearhead a generational haul of state, federal and local dollars for North Bay highway and road projects — and public transit.

SMART, she said, is “this huge community investment. To protect it, to ensure that we have it in place for the future, we need to go back to voters.”

Within the past six months, SMART has opened two new stations in Sonoma County — including its second in Petaluma and its new northern terminus in Windsor — while continuing to expand the bike and pedestrian pathway set to eventually parallel much of the line that one day is meant to span from Larkspur to Cloverdale. And last week, SMART announced it had secured the windfall in state transit funding that represents most of the money it needs to build its extension to Healdsburg.

The idea that SMART’s future “could potentially be derailed,” Smith said, pausing briefly to acknowledge the pun, “is distressing, frankly.” An initiative requiring a mere majority “allows us to be responsive to the will of the voters, and not the tyranny of the minority.”

Survival at stake?

SMART campaign representatives have been careful to note that the proposed ballot measure would not raise taxes. Rather, it “continues an existing source of funding that has powered SMART’s clean, reliable service and expanding network of rail and pathway connections for nearly two decades,” the campaign said in a prepared statement.

Without a renewal, the campaign warned, “SMART’s current funding will expire, potentially forcing the service to shut down when its tax revenue dries up at the end of the decade. That would mean walking away from over $1 billion in rail and infrastructure investment in the two counties and leaving behind the youth, seniors, workers, and families who rely on the system every day, campaign supporters note.

Having topped more than a million riders in its latest year, the campaign noted, the rail system offers free fares for youth and seniors. In the past year alone, ridership has surged by nearly 30%. The group is aiming to get its measure on the June primary ballot, Smith said.

That’s wise, said David McCuan, a Sonoma State University political science professor, who has published research on the politics of ballot measures and teaches courses on them. The November 2026 ballot will be crowded with a dozen or more initiatives — “and that’s before you even get to the county measures.”

In addition to being less cluttered, said McCuan, the June primary election tends to draw a higher percentage of SMART-friendly voters — including Democrats who tend to view it “as an environmental initiative, and a jobs initiative for labor.”

Polls look good, for now

Pro-SMART types were buoyed earlier this spring by polling which showed a tax extension has two-thirds majority support.

“Among likely voters,” said Chris Coursey, the Sonoma County supervisor who also chairs SMART’s board of directors, “it’s above two-thirds. But that’s in a poll.”

Indeed, those encouraging numbers have not been subjected, as they were in 2020, to a withering barrage of negative campaigning. Going up against a $2 million campaign, said Coursey, a former SMART spokesman, “I don’t know that Mom and apple pie could get two-thirds of the vote.”

When it comes to ballot measures, said McCuan, “the ‘no’ money” — funds spent opposing the initiatives — “is much more mathematically powerful.”

Five years ago, NotSoSmart, funded exclusively by Molly Gallaher Flater, dropped about $2 million to oppose the tax extension. The pro-SMART campaign at that time, with funding predominantly from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, owners of the Rohnert Park-area casino, countered with about $1 million in support of the ballot measure. Might there be a sequel to that arms race in 2026? Molly Gallaher Flater did not respond to emails requesting comment.

SMART, said Smith, is “a great project, with a great story, and we’ve got an opportunity to make sure the community’s aware of it, and give them the opportunity to continue it, and grow it.”

One remarkable aspect of that story, she noted, has been SMART’s ability to “leverage” its local tax revenue — which amounts to about $51 million annually — to get hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal grants. Between 2019 and 2025, said Heather McKillop, SMART’s chief financial officer, the agency collected $271.7 million from its sales tax, while reeling in $272.5 million in grants.

The citizens of Marin and Sonoma counties “had their tax dollars doubled,” said McKillop. “Having been in this business my whole career, that just does not happen very often.”

In the three-year period between now and the end of fiscal year 2028, by which time the Healdsburg station is scheduled to be finished, SMART will collect some $150 million in sales tax. At the same time, said McKillop, the agency is expecting to get grants totaling $344 million — a 230% return on taxpayers’ investment. She deflected credit to Joanne Parker, a gifted grant writer who serves as SMART’s grants and legislative affairs manager.

Working in Colorado’s Department of Transportation two decades ago, “I used to be on the other side of the grant money,” said McKillop. In doling out those funds, she recalled, “you want to give money to people that are going to spend it according to the rules, and get the job done. “That’s one of the things SMART is really good at. It delivers on its projects.”

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