This afternoon, the board which controls the North Bay’s only commuter train service will hear a staff report on just how badly the transit agency’s finances have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Even before the pandemic drastically reduced the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit agency’s ridership, the transit agency was facing a somewhat uncertain future.

In early March, voters in Marin and Sonoma counties rejected Measure I, a ballot item that would have extended the sunset date of the agency’s quarter cent sales tax from 2029 to 2059.

Supporters of the measure said that approving the extension well in advance of the end of the current tax’s lifespan would allow SMART to refinance its debts and repurpose the money to bolster train service.

But, after an insanely well-financed campaign for and against Measure I, skeptics of SMART won out. Measure I’s backers failed to win the two-thirds support the measure needed.

Since then, a worldwide pandemic has lowered transit ridership across the country and SMART is expecting a drop in ridership and sales tax revenues in the coming years.

At their meeting today, SMART’s board will hear an update on the agency’s budget projections for the current and coming fiscal year.

The meeting will be streamed on Zoom beginning at 1:30 pm. The agenda and information about how to view the meeting are available here.

A crucial deadline in a complicated deal intended to finance Petaluma’s second train station—and hundreds of housing units along with it—has been set months back.

At a May 4 meeting, the Petaluma City Council voted in favor of an agreement with the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) agency, the last agreement meant to seal a three-party deal.

The third party in the deal is Lomas Partners, a company that hopes to develop housing on sites near the planned second station at Corona Road and the existing Downtown Petaluma station. Lomas Partners is owned by Todd Kurtin, a Southern California businessman.

If completed, the deal—which already includes separate agreements between SMART and Lomas Partners, and Petaluma and Lomas Partners—will define the appearance of downtown Petaluma and a long-planned Corona Road station for decades to come.

Lomas Partners would be allowed to develop 110 housing units at the Corona Road site in exchange for giving 1.27 acres of land to SMART for a 150-space parking structure.

To finance SMART’s construction of the Corona Road station, Lomas Partners will purchase 315 D St., an underused downtown Petaluma lot, from SMART for $8 million. Lomas Partners plans to sell the land’s development rights to a Texas-based developer that plans to build 402 on-site units of mostly market-rate housing.

Under an Oct. 12 agreement between Lomas Partners and SMART, the 315 D St. property was required to be in escrow by May 19, 2020. Otherwise, the whole deal would fall apart.

But, a week before the Petaluma City Council’s May 4 meeting to consider the city’s agreement with SMART, Lomas Partners and SMART changed a crucial date in their agreement. Instead of requiring SMART to close the sale of the downtown property by May 19, they pushed the effective out to November 19, according to Eric Danly, Petaluma’s city attorney. Julia Gonzalez, a SMART spokesperson, said that Lomas requested the delay and SMART agreed to it.

Prior to that, at a meeting in February, the City Council approved an agreement with Lomas Partners and directed city staff to develop a separate agreement with SMART in order to give the city more certainty moving forward.

Since then, the city and SMART have held multiple negotiations over the agreement with SMART.

Meanwhile, SMART’s financial standing has become much more uncertain. In March, North Bay voters rejected Measure I, a quarter-cent sales tax extension that would have given SMART more long-term certainty. Then the Covid-19 pandemic eliminated most of SMART’s ridership.

To complicate the matter further, the Petaluma Community Alliance, a group of residents represented by Hanson Bridgett, a San Francisco–based law firm, filed a lawsuit against Petaluma over its handling of the development-approval process.

The city council discussed the Petaluma Community Alliance case in private during its May 4 meeting and ultimately voted 5 to 2 in favor of the agreement with SMART.

Councilmembers who voted in favor of the agreement said that, although it is flawed, the current deal represents the city’s best opportunity to construct a second station.

“There are definitely things in it I don’t care for and things that were added by SMART that appear to give them wiggle room, but this is important to our community,” city councilmember Kathy Miller said before voting for the agreement.

Mayor Teresa Barrett and Vice Mayor D’Lynda Fischer voted against the agreement, citing concerns about both the possibility that the station may never be built despite the agreement with SMART and what will happen if construction costs on the Corona Road station run over the current $8 million project budget.

North Coast Congressman Jared Huffman has introduced legislation intended to bar fossil-fuel companies from receiving relief funding from the $500 billion federal CARES Act stimulus bill.

Huffman and other Democratic lawmakers introduced the legislation, known as the ReWIND Act—the Resources for Workforce Investments, not Drilling Act—on May 5.

The bill comes after the Trump Administration began signalling the president’s intent to steer CARES Act funds to the struggling oil and gas industries.

The ReWIND Act would make “sure [that CARES Act funds] are not used to pay off bad debt taken on by fossil fuel corporations before the public health crisis,” according to a statement released by Huffman’s office.

“The relief allocated by Congress in the CARES Act is intended to benefit families and small businesses, not bail out oil and gas companies that were failing long before the coronavirus pandemic hit,” Huffman said in a statement.

Among other things, the ReWIND Act would prevent banks using certain CARES Act programs from issuing loans to oil companies, and institute a moratorium on new federal fuel leases until the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.