“VTA spends more to operate one bus for one hour than nearly every other transit agency. For the same money, we could get more transit:

If VTA could match the average cost structure of MUNI, SamTrans, and ACTransit, VTA would save more money than this tax would generate.”

We defended this statement with a declaration that transit expert Tom Rubin wrote up for us, and our Exhibits AA-CC.

Everybody in the transit industry knows Tom Rubin, a transit finance expert who has held top-level positions in the industry. He is highly credentialed and also respected across the political spectrum.

VTA had argued that their cost per mile numbers were better than the other agencies’. Well, our argument clearly referred to cost per hour. VTA pays its employees by the hour, not by the mile!

The judge did decide to take this sentence out of our argument. He didn’t explain why he chose to do that. We’ve speculated that one or more of the following reasons might apply: that he was just wanting to give our oponents something so that he wouldn’t have to consider our anti-SLAPP motion and could take off early for the Labor Day weekend; that he wasn’t a numbers guy, that he couldn’t follow our chart and calculations and got confused by the competing claims, that he found Rubin’s expert declaration to be confusing and not unambiguous enough on this point. I really don’t know. I wish he’d explained his decision. Some of the folks on our campaign team were terribly disappointed about this, and thought that this should have been the easiest claim to defend.  After the initial shock wore off, I was not as devastated about it because it had always seemed to me to be a difficult assertion for the general public to understand.