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TRANSACTIONS NEWSLETTER ONLINE

October 2004

John F. Foran Legislative Award:

State Senator Jackie Speier

Jackie Speier

State Senator Jackie Speier celebrates the delivery of Caltrain's Baby Bullet at the June ceremony in San Francisco. (Photo: Scott Buschman)


Throughout a courageous career in public service that spans more than a quarter century, state Senator Jackie Speier has combined both the passion to tackle myriad problems confronting Californians and the tenacity to forge a remarkable record of results. Nowhere is this record more evident than in the field of transportation.

As the tech boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s transformed her San Francisco and San Mateo County district, Speier recognized that generations-old commute patterns were being overturned, and that Peninsula residents were just as likely to travel south to Palo Alto, Mountain View or San Jose — or east across the Bay — as north to San Francisco. Knowing the new alignment would endure even after the high-tech bubble had burst, she set out to find a long-term solution.

The search brought Speier to San Carlos, where she brainstormed with Caltrain staff on how to take fuller advantage of the railroad’s more than century-old Peninsula infrastructure to combat congestion on U.S. 101 and Interstate 280. The result was a plan for a modern express rail service carrying commuters long distances both north and south along the Caltrain corridor at speeds faster than driving. Inspired by Japan’s famous bullet trains, the idea soon had a name, the Baby Bullet, and Speier had introduced a bill to finance the project with $127 million in state funds. The plan captured the fancy of then-Governor Gray Davis, who incorporated it into his statewide Traffic Congestion Relief Program.

Speier’s success in propelling the Baby Bullet through Sacramento’s political thicket is characteristic of the second-term Democratic senator’s entire legislative career. After a 10-year Assembly stint in which two Republican governors signed 181 of her bills into law, Speier in 1999 moved on to the state’s upper house, where more than 100 of her bills have been signed into law. As the San Jose Mercury News once noted, “No one comes close to Speier’s remarkable record of getting substantive legislation signed into law.” Born of equal parts passion and persistence, it is this record of achievement that earned Speier this year’s John F. Foran Legislative Award.

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