Hey Rich,

where did you get SMART's annual cost was only $10 Million per year?
My guess is you pulled the $10 million per year figure from one of SMART's
marketing emails or its website. It is SMART's low-ball number that
excludes debt service payments and depreciation.

Consider the following:

1) The sales tax increment would raise $660 million over 20 years, which is
$33 million in local tax expenditures per year. And this doesn't cover
all of the costs because some of the costs are covered by fare revenues
and federal and state funding.

2) If you use SMART's expenditure plan distributed to voters in sample
ballots last fall,it claims the total cost was $1.2 Billion over
20 years or $60 million per year. But this too contains all kinds of errors
which OVERSTATES than annual cost figure.

3) A more careful accounting treatment of expenditures and costs
(operating expenses, debt service, and depreciation) puts it about
half way between $30 million and $60 million.

If the public understood they were also buying a pig-in-a-poke, I doubt
that the noise issue would even be raised. Unfortunately, many enviros
in Sonoma are so anti-car (as they drive to meetings in their Prius') they'll
spend any amount even on a few rail riders. They're nuts that way.