The board chairman of San Joaquin County’s public transit agency is firing back against allegations that RTD’s operations are wasteful and inefficient.
Lathrop City Manager Stephen Salvatore, who has led a move by administrators in all of the county’s eight cities to rein in the San Joaquin Regional Transit District, has mischaracterized data and engaged in “juvenile sniping” with “uncontrolled antics,” said Gary Giovanetti, the transit agency’s chairman.
“We can no longer stand back and allow these unprovoked accusations and immature/childish emotionally charged hyperbole to continue,” Giovanetti wrote in a letter to the Lathrop City Council.
Moreover, Giovanetti alleges Salvatore leads his city’s own local transit experiment that’s eating through millions in tax dollars and competing with van service already provided by RTD. Giovanetti accuses Salvatore of failing to inform council members that the “microtransit folly” has tripled in cost to $2.9 million.
Salvatore, who made headlines in May when Stocktonia disclosed he has been handed a consulting contract, later canceled, to advise Interim City Manager Steve Colangelo, quickly replied to Giovanetti’s allegations. In a new letter to the agency, he defended Lathrop’s transit efforts, saying they demonstrate “nimble, innovative, community-focused solutions can
deliver results without bloated overhead.”
This back-and-forth is the latest development in a bureaucratic drama that began last month when city managers or administrators from all eight incorporated cities in the county sent to a letter to RTD CEO Alex Clifford warning of a “transit disaster” from a wasteful expansion of intercity bus service. The letter, spearheaded by Salvatore, claimed that RTD costs were ballooning at a time when ridership hasn’t recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Salvatore followed with another letter Aug. 14 that said that RTD data show that its bus fleet is wastefully underutilized and that some intercity bus lines have sky-high public subsidies. The most egregious example cited was $359 per passenger on Hopper Line 97 that serves Tracy and Manteca.
(RTD contends that over the past couple of years, some highly subsidized RTD lines have seen ridership increases that cut the average per-passenger subsidies, though some are still high by any standard.)
“Salvatore chooses to cherry pick and exaggerate the significance of individual pieces of data time and again,” wrote Giovanetti, who is a former two-term city councilmember (1999-2006) who also served as vice mayor in Stockton.
Giovanetti pointed to figures that show RTD had a lower operating cost per passenger — $18.40 a ride — in 2023 than city transit operations in Lodi, Tracy, Escalon or Manteca. That year, RTD carried 2.3 million passengers.
“Why is the Lathrop City Council allowing Mr. Salvatore to make such inflammatory public statements and allowing him to place the services RTD provides to Lathrop in jeopardy?” Giovanetti asks.
He made his appeal directly to the City Council:
“Please don’t allow Mr. Salvatore’s transit-ignorant, irresponsible, unprofessional, childish and misguided transit approach to prevail another day.”
Salvatore didn’t hold back in his response. He said RTD appears more concerned about “empire building” than providing cost-effective transportation.
“While you claim you do not wish to ‘engage in juvenile sniping,’ your letter itself is filled with insults, mischaracterizations, and finger-pointing,” he wrote. “As an accomplished CEO and city manager, I find it ironic, though not surprising, that you would resort to name-calling, using words such as ‘juvenile, childish, irresponsible, unprofessional and ignorant’ rather than addressing the very real concerns about transparency and accountability.”