SANTA CRUZ – With its submission of a petition with an estimated 16,200 signatures to the Santa Cruz County Clerk’s Office, pro-trail group Greenway launched a multi-step process to further its efforts for a ballot measure in 2022.
County Clerk Tricia Webber said Tuesday that 11,919 valid signatures are needed for the petition filed by Greenway’s campaign, YES GREENWAY, to pass the first step of becoming a ballot measure.
“We will make sure it has all the necessary parts. I never saw it being circulated myself; Apparently, I must not live or shop in the areas they were targeting,” Webber said. “We will stamp it in and do a raw count.”
After it is determined that there are enough valid signatures to call the initiative legitimate, Webber will take the petition and its sufficiency to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors.
“It does not automatically become a ballot measure,” Webber said. “The board has three options: To make the proposed changes, to ask for further study or to put it on the ballot.”
When or if the initiative becomes a ballot measure largely depends on the elected officials.. If the Board of Supervisors chooses to make the changes, no measure will be needed. If it asks for a study, a vote around the creation of the measure will be delayed. If it is delayed past March 11, 2022, the measure will no longer be eligible for the June ballot and will need to be pushed to the November ballot. If the supervisors choose right away to put it on the ballot, before the critical March date, talk of transit use will be the highlight of the Santa Cruz summer.
What’s inside
The YES GREENWAY petition, which will be considered for legitimacy in the next 30 business days, has been circulating in the community since July. According to an impartial summary provided by County Counsel Jason Heath in accordance with the California Elections Code, those who signed the countywide ballot initiative paperwork support modifying the chapters in the county’s general plan that act as a policy statement around transportation facilities and programs serving the area.
Heath explained that the initiative outlines three goals. First, it aids the development and interim use of a portion of the Santa Cruz Branch Line corridor as a “high-quality, multi-use Greenway.” A Greenway, the organization for which it is named explains on its website, is a two-lane, wide path that would allow for commuting, active transportation and recreation.
The option for future rail use would be “preserved” by the practice of railbanking, or separating a rail line from the national freight rail network monitored by the Surface Transportation Board through either a physical or metaphorical removal of the tracks from the corridor, the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission explained in a recent fact sheet.
This would effectively release the railroad, in this case local operator Progressive Rail, from its obligation to offer freight service along the rail line so long as it has proposed to abandon the tracks and their current use. Progressive Rail has gone back and forth between keeping and abandoning the railway in recent years.
Second, the initiative prioritizes the interim use of the corridor’s existing trestles and railbed for the Greenway.
Finally, it preserves the use of a portion of the rail line for existing freight service such as Santa Cruz Big Trees & Pacific Railway recreational freight or Roaring Camp Railroad and commercial freight in Watsonville. It even plans for a future junction station in south county.
The ballot initiative’s text states that money from Measure D can be used for the development of the Greenway since voters supported the sales tax dedicated to bettering transportation in 2016.
Previously, Greenway’s longtime opponent in Friends of the Rail and Trail (FORT) has criticized the initiative. FORT and its subsidiary in Coast Connect, a campaign fighting for the establishment of both rail and trail, state in their literature that the initiative will delay the building of the trail as it would disrupt RTC’s Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail Network Master Plan. FORT also claims it will prevent transit from ever being planned within county limits. Greenway and FORT both advocate for their preferred transit options with the same predicted outcomes: Safer streets, connected routes and reduced traffic congestion, to name a few.
Greenway boasted this week that its petition collected the most signatures in Santa Cruz County history. Webber, who was at a state-level training in Sacramento, said she was unsure whether she could get her hands on that figure to verify the organization’s claim.
“I’m unsure if we have had (that number) of signatures because the number of signatures needed varies. It’s based off of, in a countywide election, a percentage of the votes cast for governor in the last gubernatorial race,” the clerk said. “I honestly don’t know if this is the largest number of signatures turned in.”
Greenway leader Bud Colligan pulled data from the county’s elections website to illustrate that voter turnout totals prior to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s election in 2018 were all less than the number of voters who turned up to vote for or against Newsom. This means the bar of required signatures was lower for previous initiative organizers, he explained.
“If an initiative was done in 2004, for example, it would be based on 10% of the 2002 vote total of 78,022 or 7,802 required signatures,” Colligan wrote to the Sentinel in an email. “So the signature total from 2018’s (gubernatorial) election is by far the highest total… We exceeded that number by 4,280 signatures. Mathematics tells the story.”

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