From episode: CCTA Executive Director Tim Haile - Episode 08 With Jared Asch
Welcome to the Capstone Conversation. I'm your host, Jared Asch. I'm joined by Tim Haile, the head of the Contra Costa Transit Authority, otherwise known as CCTA. And today we're going to be talking about the future of transportation. We won't solve all your transit problems today, especially the commute down Ygnacio Valley Road, but we're going to look at where transportation is going.
Well, yeah, thank you, Jared Asch. I appreciate you having me on the podcast. This is a lot of fun. I'm Tim Hale, the executive director of Contra Costa Transportation Authority. I have to make sure I get that right because it can get kind of confusing because we have a transit operator called Central Contra Costa Transit Authority. We always refer to ourselves as triple CTA and two CTA.
This blog post is generated with AI, based on a transcript from the podcast and it may contain errors.
What is CCTA? Let's get to a basic thing. What is your jurisdiction? What is your responsibility? Contra Costa Transportation Authority is actually a voter-approved agency here in Contra Costa County. We were created by a half percent, which is one-half of one percent sales tax here in Contra Costa County. We got we were created in 1988 with the first measure, which was measure C, and now we closed out that measure. I'm happy to say that we delivered all of our commitments as part of that measure. Then there was a renewal of that in 2004 called Measure J, which is our current measure that we're currently operating off of. That measure generates about $2.7 billion dollars over the life of the measure. It's a twenty-five-year measure. It sunsets in the year 2034.
What we do is we use those sales tax dollars to fund programs. For example, if you live in the La Miranda area or the San Ramon Danville area, we provide funding for all the school bus programs in those sub-regions. We also have to provide funding for transit, and local transit operators here in Contra Costa County. We also provide funding for educational programs like street smarts, and that's an assembly program where we go into all two hundred and sixty schools in Contra Costa County and teach kids how to walk safely and ride their bikes safely across roads and intersections. Then we also build large capital projects. A lot of people think the work that's being done in Contra Costa County is usually Caltrans, which is the Department of Transportation here in California. But all the improvements that you've seen, major capital improvements you've seen, like, for example, the fourth boar, the Caldecott Tunnel, the modernization of Highway 4 all the way out to Brentwood. That was a one-point two-billion-dollar investment using Measure J funds and Measure C funds. Then all the improvements you've seen on 680, the express lanes, the widenings, the intersection improvements, and so we also provide 18 percent of our revenues go to local jurisdictions for roadway paving to fix potholes, to fix intersections, fix roadways. Over the last 10 years, CTA has leveraged about $1.4 billion dollars in local sales tax revenue to build $5.6 billion dollars of total transportation improvements in Contra Costa County. That's really important because in order to attract additional state and federal funds into Contra Costa County, we have to have this local revenue source to be able to do that. Most of the state and federal funding is competitive and that requires us to bring money to the table to be able to attract those dollars in Contra Costa County. It's really critical as we look towards the future that we have these local revenues to continue to build and improve the transportation system here in Contra Costa.
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