5/7/08 Letter to the Weber County Commission

Dear Commissioners and others,

I've taken the liberty of transcribing some of the discussion that took place at Monday's WACOG meeting, and adding some commentary that I hope will shed light on this controversy. As most of you know, I have followed this issue closely ever since I was appointed to the stakeholders working group for the 2004-05 feasibility study.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions on these issues.

Sincerely,

Dan Schroeder
Conservation Chair
Ogden Sierra Club
801-xxx-xxxx

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Weber Area Council of Governments (WACOG) Meeting, May 5, 2008

Excerpts from the discussion of the proposed transit corridor from downtown Ogden to WSU and McKay-Dee Hospital

With added commentary by Dan Schroeder

Mayor Godfrey: There are some serious problems with the uh, the proposal, and that's why it hasn't moved forward, is because what has been proposed in the study, um, has several fatal flaws.

Fact: The main purpose of any feasibility study is to determine if the proposed project has any fatal flaws. The 2005 feasibility study, conducted by Ogden City and UTA with the help of an outside consultant, found no fatal flaws with the concept of a streetcar or BRT system in the corridor from downtown to McKay-Dee Hospital.

Godfrey: So we believe, I believe that there are other um corridors and methods that need to be examined... There's no way a streetcar is gonna work on that corridor, for a host of reasons.

Explanation: By "other ... methods", the mayor is presumably referring to the gondola.

Commissioner Zogmaister: You're saying this corridor is out.

Godfrey: It's out. There's no way to pay for it, first of all. So, um, why would you study a corridor that you have no way to pay for. The, the study several years ago, and I'm just giving this as one example, in the study that's now several years old, showed the cost of the system as over a hundred million dollars.

Clarification: The 2005 study put the cost of the streetcar at $77 million. The consultants then added on a 30% contingency margin to arrive at a final cost estimate of $101 million.

That did not include any right-of-way acquisition, which everybody acknowledges would have to take place.

Fact: Actually the cost estimate in the 2005 study did include a line item of $581,000 for right-of-way acquisition. A footnote in the report explains that the cost of acquiring property was estimated at $6.50 per square foot, a figure that came from UDOT. Obviously these numbers are preliminary, and further study could show that additional property would need to be acquired. But the only outside estimate we have at this time shows the amount to be inconsequential.

You'd have to buy up the homes on both sides of the street to do it.

Fact: This statement is highly speculative on the mayor's part, and has never been documented. It seems probable that a few homes would need to be purchased, especially where there is a need for extra right of way at station locations or intersections. But it is highly unlikely that all the homes along both sides of the entire route would need to be purchased. To determine the extent of this impact, and avoid the need for speculation, would be relatively easy; Wasatch Front Regional Council staff have offered to do a rough analysis upon request. In any case, nearly all of the homes along Harrison Blvd. are low-value rentals, hardly desirable as single-family residences.

So the real cost, if you talk to [unintelligible] and that's, and if you escalated construction costs, you know, you're talking somewhere in the range of 150 to 200 million dollars.

Fact: It's possible that the cost of the streetcar could go this high. It's also possible that it could be built for $100 million or even less. The Alternatives Analysis will help pin down the cost, and will tell us exactly what we would get for our money.

And the local match is 50%. So, at least that's where, everything that's been funded in recent years has been at about a 50% level and it's getting more and more competitive. And so if you want to be more competitive you gotta put more local money into it. But, but UTA's been pretty successful and they're telling us that we should bet on about a 50-50 match.

Fact: It's prudent, as UTA suggests, to plan for a 50% local match. However, it's simply not true that this is the most we can hope for. The recently completed FrontRunner line received an 80% federal match. Recently funded Small Starts projects have typically been funded at levels of 50% to 80%, with plenty at the higher end of the range. And the feasibility study showed that our particular corridor will be very competitive already, because Ogden has the density and demographics to make for a successful transit investment.

So the question is, where are we gonna come up with, you know, best case scenario, maybe 75 million dollars? Where are we gonna come up with that?

Fact: Actually, $75 million is close to the worst-case scenario. In the best case, the local match could be as little as $25 million. But even if it is $75 milion, we do have the money. The new quarter-cent sales tax is projected to raise $363 million by the year 2030.

And if we can't pay for it, why would we study it? Why would we want to spend $400,000 to get a report that tells us, great, this is, you know, build your 150 or 200 million dollar system when we can't pay for that? So those are some of the issues and there's a host of others like that that are, as I say, I believe that are fatal flaws.

Question: What are all these other issues, besides cost and right-of-way impacts? Again, the 2005 feasibility study found no fatal flaws.

Unless the constituency of Ogden City is willing to double their property taxes to pay for that kind of a system, you know, I don't know how we pay for it.

Fact: This statement is a gross exaggeration. According to Ogden's latest Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the city currently collects over $17 million in property tax annually. Doubling just Ogden's share of our property tax would therefore raise another $17 million. With bonding, this would be approximately enough to pay for the downtown to McKay-Dee streetcar twice over, including operating expenses, without any federal matching funds.

...

Godfrey: There are other routes which really, um, you know, either technologies or routes that avoid the problems that keep it from being realistic. So there are other options, it's just been-

[Commissioner Bischoff?]: They're more economic?

Godfrey: Yeah, they appear to be, yes, very much so.

Explanation: Again, the mayor must be referring here to the gondola. According to the 2005 feasibility study, a gondola with about the same functionality would cost only half as much to build as a streetcar. However, because it would be ineligible for federal matching funds, the local cost would end up being about the same, perhaps more. And its operating costs would be considerably higher than for the streetcar (about $4 million per year), so in the end, the local cost would actually be greater.