Tag: weighted voting

SACOG Board and voting

Dan Allison1 Comment

I have attended several SACOG board and committee meetings over the last two months, and seen the pushback that smaller cities and more rural areas are providing to the innovations of the 2025 Blueprint, in particular Scenario 3 which promotes infill rather than greenfield development. I will have more to say about this in the future, but for now, want to address the question of why these areas have such a strong voice in SACOG. It is the very structure of the Board of Directors, to give every member one vote, not matter the size of the population they represent. This is called one-member/one-vote.

The SACOG Mission and Governance page provide information about the structure and voting of the board. The table below (pdf, xlsx) shows the 31 voting members, the votes assigned to them, the population of the entity, and the votes that would be allocated if votes were population weighted, rather than one-member/one-vote. Caveats: I have not excluded the population of the Lake Tahoe basin in Placer and El Dorado counties, which are not in the SACOG region, because it is difficult to calculate, and not that significant. County supervisors represent all the citizens of a county, whether they are in unincorporated county or within a city. However, in looking a government bodies, I think it is useful to look at unincorporated population, and have used it in the table. County supervisors often seem to forget that they represent the entire county. All figures are from the 2020 census.

There are dozens of striking insights from this table, but I’ll focus on four.

  • In Sacramento County, the City of Isleton has 794 citizens, which is less than 0.1% of the county, and 0.1% of the region. That means the member representing Isleton has about 16 times the power of the member representing Elk Grove. Other counties have similar disparate representation.
  • In the region, Sacramento County has 61.5% of the population, yet only 35.5% of the vote, while Yuba County has 3.2% of the population, yet 9.7% of the vote. Sacramento County has 20 times the population of Yuba County, yet only 3-1/2 times the vote.
  • If Sacramento County were not assigned three voting members, and City of Sacramento two voting member, the disparity between population and voting would be even more prominent. This higher number of voting members is meant to compensate, in a minor way, for the egregious imbalance in representation that would otherwise result.
  • The town of Loomis, not a city, has one member, with a population of 6,836. In Sacramento County, the ‘towns’ (CDPs, census designated places) have far larger populations, yet no representation except through the county: Arden-Arcade 94,659, Carmichael 79,793, North Highlands 49,327, Orangevale 35,569, Fair Oaks 32,514, and several smaller CDPs. How did Loomis get this seat?

I am a believer in democracy. I realize that many people consider us a republic rather than a democracy, but other than the US Senate, we make the effort at all levels of government to approach as closely as possible the democratic ideal of one-person/one-vote. Yet we have entities such as SACOG (Sacramento Area Council of Governments) that, by using one-member/one-vote, are as far from representative of the people as can be.

So when you wonder, why do small cities and rural areas have such a large voice in transportation funding and sustainable communities strategies (the SCS part of the Blueprint), and why we continue to promote greenfield development in the region when we know that greenfield equals climate disaster, please refer back to this governance model.

tolling authority at SACOG Transportation

Dan Allison1 Comment

The proposal for a tolling authority JPA for the Sacramento region came before a special meeting the SACOG Transportation Committee yesterday. Agenda item 2 was to recommend to the SACOG Board that the JPA effort move forward, and that was passed after a whole lot of information and even more discussion. The reason for it coming back is that several options for governance membership are now included, which were not available in December. The tolling authority would be called Capital Area Regional Tolling Authority (CARTA). The meeting can be viewed on YouTube, and the supporting documents are available from SACOG.

presentation page on tolling JPA governance options
presentation page on tolling JPA governance options

For reasons that were not clear to me, SACOG staff added an addendum to the item at the last minute, Evaluation of Voting Options, about how votes might be allocated on use of excess revenue. At least one-third of the meeting time was taken up by discussing this issue, though it was not to be voted on, and is not even relevant in the near future. It will be years before there is any excess revenue to be spent, there will not likely be a large amount of excess revenue, and there is already a long list of mitigations to be funded by excess revenue that are part of the Yolo 80 project. Just when the committee was ready to move on from this topic, SACOG staff brought it up again. Argh!

It is typical of government councils or boards, when composed of more than one government agency, to spend an absurd amount of time haggling over membership. The situation is created when these boards adopt a one-member/one-vote policy, where the vote of each member weighs equally with each other. This sounds like representative government, analogous to one-person/one-vote that our democracy is founded on (with the exception of the US Senate, of course). But it is NOT analogous, and it is NOT representative. Smaller agencies have an outsized affect on the outcome, which is the case of transportation related boards means that smaller cities and rural areas have a much larger voice than they would have if voting were population weighted. We recognize this in creating city council districts, supervisor district, legislative districts, and US House of Representative districts, where each district has an approximately equal number of people. And it is why we do redistricting, so that this balance is maintained over time as population shifts. But for some reason, when it comes to transportation, the usual solution is to give each entity the same voice. I believe this is wrong. In most cases, voting should be population weighted.

In the case of the tolling authority, however, I believe that membership and voting should be weighted by tolled lane miles. This means that initially, only Yolo County, through YoloTD, would have that voice, and other counties would gain that voice over time as they added tolled lane miles. It would make sense to add membership and voting rights at the beginning of construction, not at opening of the toll facility, since decisions about tolling amounts, discounts or exceptions, and hours would start to be made at that point. Since Sacramento County has the largest number of freeways likely to be eventually tolled, it would end up with the highest membership and weighted voting, but not at this time.

Caltrans spend an inordinate amount of time in the meeting defending their right to one or two voting memberships. They had a long list of expertise they could provide, though when challenged to put a dollar value on in-kind or contracted work, was flummoxed. Though both Caltrans District 3 denied it, it was pretty clear to me that they had their eye on excess revenue for future capacity expansion projects. Caltrans has never really had to justify its work or existence to anyone, and when challenged to do so, is quite inept at it.

I spoke at the meeting, the only member of the public to do so. My points were:

  • Support creation of regional tolling JPA
  • Support governance options with one Caltrans voting member, not two
  • Support inclusion of Sacramento Transportation Authority as Sac county agency
  • Voting options for excess revenue can be deferred because there likely won’t be any for a while
  • Tolling advances user pays concept, which transportation advocates support
  • HOV lanes don’t work for management because they are routinely violated
  • Support does not indicate that I support adding lanes in Yolo, but if lanes are added, they should be tolled

For additional posts on managed lanes in general, this regional tolling authority, and the Yolo 80 project, see category ‘managed lanes‘.