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San Francisco’s Proposition H, a parcel tax to save Muni from financial ruin, was leading with 72% of the vote as the first round of votes was counted tonight.
Regional Transit Measure RTM, which would increase sales taxes in five Bay Area counties to shore up BART and other regional transit, was passed in five counties by a combined 61% of the vote. In San Francisco, the measure won more than 77% of the early votes.
Backers of both measures, who say without them local transit systems would deteriorate and cripple the Bay Area’s economy, cheered. “Oh my God. I’m so happy,” said Manav Patel, a volunteer who said he’d been working for eight months on RTM. “The possibility of losing the Dublin line is what sparked something in me.”
In recent years, the pandemic closures and a shift to remote work emptied San Francisco’s downtown and decreased transit ridership around the Bay Area, creating a perfect storm that left both the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and Bay Area Rapid Transit facing a massive fiscal crisis.
Businesses, elected officials and transit advocates put San Francisco’s Prop. H and Proposition RTM on Tuesday’s ballot through two separate signature-gathering drives.
Both measures had a broad base of support from officials across the political spectrum and faced little to no opposition spending. Prop. H raised over $5 million from San Francisco businesses invested in the downtown recovery, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Airbnb, Visa and Ripple. Proponents of Prop. RTM raised over $7.5 million from contributors including Salesforce, Meta and Genentech.
San Francisco’s Prop. H imposes an annual parcel tax on residential and commercial properties for 15 years, and is expected to raise $177 million a year. Rates would vary depending on property usage and size, starting at $129 per year for a single-family home, $249 for a multi-family residential property and $799 for a commercial one.
The controller’s office estimated the parcel tax would net at least 800 jobs and increase the city’s gross domestic product by at least $310 million over the next 15 years.
Regional Measure RTM imposes an additional 1% sales tax in San Francisco and a 0.5% sales tax in Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties for a 14-year period. It would raise close to $1 billion a year for local agencies including BART, Muni, Caltrain, San Francisco Bay Ferry and AC Transit.
If RTM had not passed, BART warned that it might have to close more than a dozen stations, cut service hours by 70% and stop operating evening train service. The SFMTA laid out contingency plans if Prop. H failed that could have included cutting up to 20 Muni lines, aeducing service on main lines, ending service at 9 p.m. and laying off up to 2,100 workers.
Brian Davis, a San Francisco resident who canvassed for both measures, hailed the results coming in from counties around the Bay, and said it would have been “tragic” to lose public transit.
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