The Bus, Again
Back to the bench. Fifteen appointees. None ran on transit. Now you can read the chart.
The bench at the 944 stop in El Cajon is still there. The 6:14 AM commuter still comes on Saturdays. Now you know the names of the rooms.
15 APPOINTEES · 0 RAN ON TRANSIT
MTS BOARD COMPOSITION
Fifteen voting members on the MTS board. None of them ran for election on transit. Each holds the MTS seat as a side duty of a different elected job — city council, mayor, county supervisor — somewhere else. The bench at the 944 stop is part of their portfolio. None of them campaigned on it.
The bench hasn't changed. The metal is still cold before seven in the morning. The shelter still catches the wind from the wrong direction. The sign at the pole still lists the route number — the metal hasn't moved, the paint hasn't faded, the city has not yet sent anyone out with a screwdriver to take down a number that no longer corresponds to a Saturday bus. What changed is you.
Seven parts ago, you stood at this bench and felt the absence. The bus that isn't coming. The timetable on the phone that doesn't match the reality at the curb. The woman with the plastic bag who knows the bus is gone and comes anyway, because the body keeps the schedule the city forgot. The man in the hi-vis vest sitting beside her — not waiting for her bus, waiting for any bus, with the patience of someone who has run out of other options. The sky going from grey to grey-blue. The delivery truck passing. The bench accepting all of it with the same indifference. Her standing, finally, hoisting the bag, starting the walk.
That scene was always a result. Part 1 said so. The bench cannot read the meeting minutes. The minutes do not see the bench.
Now you can read the minutes. You came in through the Mayor's office. You counted the City Council's nine districts. You traced the County's five-seat geography. You found your way into SANDAG's weighted-vote chamber, the Port's tidelands trust, the Airport Authority's nine voting seats divided among a patchwork of city mayors and county supervisors. Six bodies. Seven parts. And at the end of the list — Part 8 returns here — the board that voted on the bench.
The difference, standing at this bench now, is that you can name the room where the cut got decided. In Part 1, you could not. You knew the cut happened. You could feel the absence. You could not trace the hand. You can now.
The board that runs the bench
The Metropolitan Transit System is a transit district created under California Public Utilities Code §120100 et seq. — the San Diego Metropolitan Transit Development Board Act, since reorganized as MTS [1]. The statute established a structure that has been running, more or less unchanged in its fundamentals, for decades: a multi-jurisdiction board representing the cities and county that share the transit network, with each jurisdiction's seat going to whoever already holds the relevant elected office. The design is tidy on paper. No separate election to run for. No separate accountability cycle to manage. The transit board seat rides along with the city council seat or the mayor's office or the county appointment, as a side duty attached to the main job.
Fifteen voting members. City councilmembers and mayors from San Diego, Chula Vista, Coronado, El Cajon, Imperial Beach, La Mesa, Lemon Grove, National City, Poway, and Santee. Plus the County of San Diego's representative. The seats are not elected directly — they arrive as a consequence of winning some other election, in some other race, on some other set of promises. The transit network is not on that promise list. The bench at the 944 stop is not on the campaign literature. The Saturday-service suspension in El Cajon is not in the voter guide for any of the races that filled these fifteen chairs.
Read the statute once [1]. What it describes is a board whose members are accountable, technically, to their home jurisdictions — but accountable for the thing they were elected to do, which is not run a transit system. The City of San Diego councilmember on the MTS board is accountable to their district constituents for the zoning vote, the budget amendment, the library hours. The transit portfolio is appended. A side duty. Not a campaign promise, not a mandate, not a thing any constituent can directly punish at the ballot in a transit-specific election.
None of this is a secret. It is in the statute. It is in the joint-powers framework. It is the unremarkable operational structure of every regional transit authority built on this model in California. The structure produced the bench. The structure is the thing to trace.
What fiscal responsibility looked like
The vote was not dramatic. Budget votes rarely are. There were line items and amendments and a staff presentation and public comment and a roll call. At the end of the roll call, the FY25 operating budget was set at $448.2 million [3], and the things that had been in the plan before the deficit math arrived were smaller, or gone.
Planned bus expansion: $54 million in the prior plan, $30 million after the vote — cut roughly in half [2].
Planned trolley expansion: $39 million before, $21 million after — nearly halved [2].
Bus-stop improvements: $4 million. Eliminated [2].
Otay Mesa border-crossing study: $5 million. Eliminated [2].
California SB 125 transit funds: $19.7 million available. Frozen rather than spent [2].
The board called it fiscal responsibility. It was, by one definition. A $126 million gap is a real number. A board that closes a real gap with real line-item decisions is doing the work it was constituted to do. The MTS staff presented options. The board chose among them. The documents are public. The vote is in the minutes.
We are not claiming any of the fifteen voted for worse bus service. We are not claiming anyone in that room wanted the bench at the 944 stop to keep being a bench. What the record shows is this: fifteen people whose primary elected jobs are not running a transit system sat in a room and voted to right-size a deficit by halving the things the system was about to add. The bench, which had already been a bench since September 2022 because of a separate driver-shortage service change, kept being a bench. The connection is not causation. The shape of it is.
The OnTrack process, launched after the September 2024 vote, engaged the consultancy TMD to map which routes face cuts in the FY28-30 cycle — against a forecasted deficit of $120 to $145 million. Community review wrapped early 2026. The next board vote on those cuts arrives late 2026. That vote will be taken by whoever holds those fifteen seats at the time. Which is to say: the next bench is already in the pipeline. It will be decided by whoever wins the upstream local races that fill these chairs.
The bench at the 944 stop is not the last bench. It is the most recent one visible.
What one home-jurisdiction seat changes
The fifteen seats are not replaced on a transit-board election calendar. They rotate when the underlying offices rotate. A city council seat flips in a November election and the MTS seat goes with it. A mayor's race ends in an upset and the board member from that jurisdiction changes. The new city councilmember or new mayor holds the same MTS voting weight the previous one did — no confirmation vote, no separate transit ratification, no grace period. The seat transfers with the office.
That mechanism — the side-duty transfer — is also the lever.
A single home-jurisdiction seat flipping changes who holds that jurisdiction's MTS vote [fact packet]. Which changes the chair election, if enough seats flip in the same cycle. Which changes the agenda priorities. Which changes whose route is on the cut list when the FY28 deficit math arrives — because the chair sets the meeting calendar, the committee referrals, the staff direction on which alternatives get modeled and which get dropped before the vote even happens.
The fifteen seats aren't replaced all at once. They turn over one city election at a time, one district at a time, years apart, in races where transit is rarely the top issue. The effect accumulates. The board that closed $126 million in 2024 was not assembled in one night. It was assembled over a decade of city council races in which transit accountability was not a deciding factor, in most jurisdictions, in most cycles.
The same assembly process is running right now, building the board that will decide the FY28 cuts.
The bench will still be there on Saturday morning. That is a given. The metal doesn't move. The paint doesn't fade.
What you can do now, that you could not do in Part 1, is trace the line from the bench to the room. Find the bus stop closest to where you live. Open the timetable and the service-change PDF and read which trips are scheduled, which are footnoted "service modified," and which simply aren't there anymore [fact packet]. Then open the September 2024 MTS board minutes — public, free, searchable — and read who voted yes on which line. The vote and the bench live in the same city. You can walk the distance between them now.
The series gave you seven rooms. You have traced the appointment chains into all of them. You know that the Mayor's appointments reach into SANDAG and the Airport Authority and, by political adjacency, into the Board of Supervisors. You know that the County supervisors appoint to the Port. You know that fifteen local officials share a transit board that none of them primarily ran to be on. You can read the chart.
Part 1 called this literacy the opposite of despair. It still is. The wiring is not magic. It is wiring. It can be traced and — one election at a time, one council race at a time, one appointment challenge at a time — it can be rewired.
Here is where the count lands. Fifteen seats you vote for directly: one Mayor, nine City Council members, five County supervisors. Forty-seven you don't — distinct appointment slots across SANDAG, the Port, the Airport, and the MTS board, many filled by the same elected officials wearing different hats. Sixty-two seats in total, across seven governance bodies, taking decisions this week that will show up in your commute, your water bill, your air, your bench.
You vote directly for some of them. You vote indirectly for others through the appointment chains this series traced. And one of them — the one this series has been building toward since the bench in Part 1 — funds the investigation of all sixty-two.
Part 9 is your seat.
Next: Fifteen seats you vote for. Forty-seven you don't. The eighth seat is yours.
Part 9 — Your Seat.
Continue →Sources
[1] CA Public Utilities Code §120100 et seq. — San Diego Metropolitan Transit Development Board Act (MTS). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=PUC&division=11.&title=&part=&chapter=&article=
[2] "San Diego MTS Scales Back Expansion" — Transit Talent, September 13, 2024. https://www.transittalent.com/articles/index.cfm?story=San_Diego_MTS_Scales_Back_Expansion_9-13-2024
[3] "MTS Board Approves $448.2 Million FY25 Operating Budget" — Mass Transit Magazine. https://www.masstransitmag.com/management/press-release/55090679/metropolitan-transit-system-mts-san-diego-mts-board-approves-4482-million-fy25-operating-budget
[4] The Trolley Question — file dossier. MathPolitics. /ca/sandiego/the-trolley-question/