Bike Vouchers, School Budgets, & Fences

Updates From City Hall

Today we cover assorted updates from around Hayward. The City Council agenda is pretty thin this week, so we thought it’d be good to see what else the City is up to.

Bike Voucher Program Takes Shape

Mayor Mark Salinas has been discussing a bike voucher program that he proposed at the Alameda County Transportation Committee (ACTC) for several months. This month, we get to see what that program would actually entail. Using $6,200,000 in grant money from California Air Resources Board (CARB), the City intends to meet two goals:

1. Construct 12 different Safe Routes to Schools projects—many of which are alarmingly modest
2. Create a bike voucher program, particularly directed at residents in disadvantaged and low-income neighborhoods.

After doing months of research in 2024, Staff discovered a few things that need to be addressed in order to have a successful program.

• Hayward doesn’t have a bicycle shop anymore. The closure of Cycle Path puts severe limits on distributing and maintaining any bicycles
• The Hayward bicycle network has significant gaps and people don’t feel safe biking to other parts of the City
• Voucher programs are costly to operate. Income verification is difficult and a barrier to use and other programs make use of multiple bike shops—Hayward doesn’t even have one.

Not to be deterred, City Staff have identified several categories of Hayward residents with different needs and how to meet them. Middle to high school students can get adult sized bikes distributed by HUSD, while elementary to middle school students would get loaner bikes that can be reused as the kids grow out of them.

College students and families, meanwhile, may benefit more from e-bikes—to help with the big hills to CSU East Bay and carrying small kids, and Seniors/disabled residents could benefit from adaptive bike ownership or sharing programs.

Apartment residents might make more sense for an e-scooter program, since many don’t have bike storage, and mildly interested cyclists may benefit from a small-scale bike share program.

The biggest barrier is not having a local bike shop. The City is thinking of addressing this with ideas like a bike fair where vendors could come to Hayward so residents can test ride the bikes and use their vouchers. But even with that, the ongoing maintenance is a big issue—I’ve had issues with my gearshift for weeks and haven’t had time to learn how to fix it myself.

The whole plan hinges on extensive partnerships with other agencies, including HUSD, Community Resources for Independent Living (CRIL), regional bike shops, and community organizations. And if all goes well, Hayward’s broken and incomplete cycle network may prove too big of a barrier for residents to overcome. If you don’t feel safe riding a bike, it may risk gathering dust in the garage.

Garbage Rates Increasing

Waste Management of Alameda County (WMAC) is increasing the garbage and compost rates for Hayward residents. Apparently the agreement between the City and WMAC requires that Waste Management gets a 5.5% return on investment for at least the first 5 years of the 10 year contract. After that, it’ll be tied to the Consumer Price Index—so basically, it may go up even more after 5 years if WMAC needs the money.

What’s The Damage?

The initial rate change isn’t too huge—anywhere between $1/month increase for 20 gallon single-family dwelling garbage bins to $21/month for commercial and apartments customers. The biggest cost comes from the garbage itself, but that’s also the hardest to reduce.

If you have a bigger bin as a residential customer, you’ll have a slightly bigger increase. But if you decrease the size of your garbage can, you’ll save well over $10/month—over $50/month if you go from the biggest to the smallest bin.

Like with everything else, costs are going up and the more you use the more you pay—at least for single-family dwellings.

Police Headlines

The Council Public Safety Committee met this month—I’ll dive deeper into what went on in the coming weeks—but here are some headlines that you should know if you’re keeping an eye on the people with a license to kill you if they even perceive you as a threat.

Crime rates

Property crime rates are down 30% in October-December of 2024 when compared to 2023. Crimes against people went up very slightly, only 6%, and Crimes against society were also down 18%. So no matter what anyone else says: by the numbers, crime rates are down.

Most of the crime is theft. There was apparently a trend of driving cars into shops in order to break into them—Brick by Brick had it happen to them twice in one day. Arsons are still happening downtown despite arrests—the report doesn’t go into who was arrested or why. And there was apparently a series of robberies targeting shops for cigarettes—they are really expensive these days.

Schools

Local schools called HPD 394 times between October and December. There is no information about what the calls were for—Mental health calls? After-hours break-ins? Drug offenses? Fights? Overwhelmed teachers who have no other available recourse due to defunding our education system and support services?—but the high number of calls will likely continue to be used by police boosters as a justification for putting police officers back in schools.

Staffing

The staffing rates for HPD were unchanged—the sworn workforce available actually slightly decreased—while crime rates fell. This goes to show that the number of police has no direct correlation to the number of crimes committed.

Police don’t prevent crimes, they respond to them. Increased community resources and services, however, has a direct effect on crime rates. People don’t do crimes because it’s fun, they do it because they’re desperate.

HUSD and County Confront Budget Shortfall

Tomorrow the Hayward Unified School District will discuss the report from the Alameda County Office of Education (ACOE) addressing their structural budget deficit. According to the report, HUSD has enough money in the bank to get them through this fiscal year, but only barely. For Fiscal Year 25/26, there will be a shortfall of over $39,000,000 which will grow to almost $78,000,000 by the end of FY 26/27.

And that’s just the Unrestricted General Fund—the money that HUSD can do whatever they need to with. Their Restricted General Funds will also almost run out by FY 26/27, which may require more funds to be moved from the already overburdened Unrestricted General Fund—the problem could get even worse.

What’s Being Done?

As you’ve no doubt heard, HUSD has been doing Town Hall meetings to try to prioritize what to cut and how badly. There hasn’t been a formal recommendation yet—but I also haven’t been to one of the recent Town Hall meetings. Unfortunately, because the budget is so dire, ACOE has to step in. There’s a pretty tight timeline with this, too:

• ACOE has likely already appointed a Fiscal Advisor to help manage HUSD’s plans
• By January 31, HUSD has to provide ACOE a Fiscal Recovery Plan
• By February 14, the HUSD Board of Trustees gets to take a look at the recovery plan—after ACOE has already approved it first
• By February 28, the HUSD Board of Trustees has to actually approve that plan and balance the 2025-2026 budget

So by the end of February, HUSD has to develop and implement a plan that will eliminate the $50,000,000 budget deficit in the 2025-2026 budget. These cuts are going to be huge.

But that’s not all, the ACOE is going to be the body ultimately approving any actions taken by the HUSD Board. The ACOE and the Fiscal Advisor will be in weekly meetings to make sure HUSD balances the budget. At the same time, HUSD can’t take on non-voter approved debt and the County Superintendent has to look at any union contract for at least 10 days before the HUSD board has a say.

How Did This Happen?

The biggest driver of the continually-decreasing school budget is declining enrollment. HUSD expects to lose about 250 students per year which costs them almost $2,000,000 per year. This is a part of a cycle of decline with enrollment decline causing wealthy people to leave the district which causes more enrollment decline.

There’s no telling what the plan will actually be yet—unless they’ve given some ideas at the recent Town Halls—but no matter what happens, it’s going to be bad. And the students will suffer—often those who are already disproportionately impacted by our underfunded and unjust systems.

HARD To Fence Off Weekes Park

The Hayward Area Recreation and Park District (HARD) is looking to renovate Weekes Park. This will be a huge boon for residents of South Hayward who rely on the park already for baseball, Weekes Branch Library, play structures, and pickleball courts. The proposed renovations include a bike pump track, a dog park, a natural turf soccer field, and a 50 stall parking area.

All of these are fantastic additions to Weekes Park and would activate a lot of the otherwise open areas. This would improve safety, bring more people to the park, and generally improve things for the residents of South Hayward. Unfortunately, there’s a final proposed addition to the park: a metal picket fence around the perimeter costing $250,000.

In an effort to address the numerous unhoused people who live in the park, HARD has decided it’d be best to fence them out—much like the Weekes Branch Library has already fenced itself in as a barrier to unhoused residents. While some on City Council have pushed for the removal of unhoused residents from Weekes Park in the name of safety, advocates and services providers say that fencing in the park will only move the unhoused residents into the residential areas.

Pastor Aaron Horner, Outreach Director for South Hayward Parish, said that enclosure isn’t the answer. “If the idea is to shoo away this problem,” he said, “it’s not gonna improve anything.” In an interview he said he asked HARD to include showers in the proposed restrooms, which would provide a hygiene option to the approximately 30 people living in the park, but was told that it was a step too far.

It is unclear what, exactly, the HARD Board of Directors had to say about the proposed fence because the item was brought up in a Study Session, which was not recorded for the benefit of the public.