|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Office building values continue to fall
PG&E gets bargain buying Workday building for about one-third of assessed value.
It’s no surprise that the BART staff threw the most damaging potential impacts of its structural financial shortfall at the proverbial wall.
It’s worst case strategy would eliminate the millions in public investment to build the Dublin-Pleasanton line by closing both stations here in the valley plus the Castro Valley station. Commuters would have to return to the ugly days of driving to the Bay Fair BART station — a journey San Francisco-bound commuters made prior to the extension.
Eastbound I-580 already loads up in the mid-afternoon with the combination of 18-wheelers coming from the Port of Oakland as well as returning to San Joaquin County delivering to Bay Area retailers and early commuters. Mix in commuters formerly riding BART and it would get nastier.
BART and Bay Area transit advocates are pushing a 14-year ½-cent increase in the sales tax for every county except San Francisco where it would be 1-cent. The effort is gathering signatures now — by placing it on the ballot as a referendum, it can pass with a simple majority.
The agency is in deep financial do-doo because its management and board have consistently given raises and rich benefits to its unionized staff and bloated the budget. The deficit is structural, not entirely driven by a drop in ridership revenue.
The plan also demonstrates the disdain that the staff holds for our taxpaying residents. The BART board already backed away from its decades-long promise to build an extension to Livermore. That actually could work better for the local folks because it opened the way for light rail service that eventually could run from Stockton to the terminal BART station in the valley with two stops in Livermore and a connection to the ACE train traveling south to Silicon Valley. That, of course, presumes it still runs.
The BART folks along with San Francisco Muni has been pushing hard for another regional sales tax to support transit services where ridership has been lagging, particularly post-pandemic although BART ridership starting falling in 2019, before the pandemic lockdown. That lockdown showed business leaders that they may not need to lease all of that fancy office space in downtown San Francisco—both lease rates and sales values have plunged in the last few years.
We saw an example of this around Stoneridge mall. The five-story office building that once Safeway’s headquarters facing Interstate 580 had been sold to Workday as its expanded its campus around the mall with new headquarters building combining with three other buildings in the corner of the interstates.
Workday has been adjusting its workforce and real estate. It walked away from the former JCPenney home store shopping center (only Cost Plus and Office Max were successful there) that is now home to a 10X Genomics facility. It sold the former Safeway building to Pacific Gas & Electric for $21.8 million, less than one-third of the $67 million on the county tax rolls. Workday bought the building from Safeway for about $47 million in 2016.
Incidentally, Workday co-founder Aneel Bhusri assumed the CEO position again last week when Carl Eschenbach stepped down. Workday announced another 400 layoffs including vice-presidents and directors in Pleasanton. It’s a familiar role for Bhusri who has been CEO several times at Workday since founding the company with Dave Duffield in 2005.
Turning back to BART, former Dublin Mayor and Congressional candidate Melissa Hernandez wasted no time sending staff back to its drawing board to figure out a better plan. She gave up her Dublin seat to join the BART board two years ago and currently is president.
What’s sadly lacking in these discussions is the high compensation for some BART employees, particularly station agents. Paying the skilled technicians who maintain the system and its vehicles is appropriate and necessary, but station agents only require a high school degree.
We don’t know what commute time will look like if BART reduces service frequencies and perhaps closes for more hours overnight. It’s been a Bay Area mantra about how important public transportation is to our economy — I wonder just how true that is.
The absurd effort to complete BART around the bay with the prohibitively expensive tunnel under San Jose, like the high-speed rail, are projects that should stop in their tracks. Both have obliterated budgets by millions and timelines are a joke.
Stay tuned to see how voters weigh in come November.
One dollar should be added to every Bart fare.
That is an instant million dollars plus.
Motor vehicle operators pay a gas tax, a license fee,
and purchase government required insurance to use
the freeways and city streets.
Bart riders should do the same.
Pay for their ride.