On Thursday, BART Director Debora Allen scolded BART leadership for not providing what she believed was enough details on the budget and the fiscal impact COVID-19 will have on the transit system going forward.
Allen accused General Manager Bob Powers and staff for not providing leadership and not discussing the hard topics.
Her comments came after a $251.6 million bailout without strings attached from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in federal CARES Act FTA funding. The allocation is the first installment of the $1.3 billion in funding provided to Bay Area transit operators in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. BART is currently serving 6% of its regular ridership
BART has taken a wait and see approach with its budget and now projects, on its low model, a return to 20% of the prior year ridership by June and up to 30% by the end of the year. In their best case scenario, a return to 65% of last years ridership.
It’s budget scenario is still including the same sales tax in all three scenarios and the presentation showed they have not done cost cuttings or savings—something Allen pointed out.
Allen explained how the presentation shows they are only cutting $75 million in a $425 million deficit while the other items were deferrals which was the equivalent of kicking the can down the road.
“I am just not seeing a strong leadership right now and I really keep hoping its coming,” said Allen. “I am not seeing a real drive for making the hard decisions or bringing up the hard topic in discussing the hard topics… this slide is like rearranging the deck chairs in my opinion and we are going to see the long-term deficit just get bigger.
Allen stated labor and benefits make up 63% of the budget and the Board was not seeing the potential for cuts saying the only way to make this up was to raise taxes or make cost cuts, such as cutting labor which she said no one wants to see people lose hours or their job.
“Our job is to oversee the budget of this agency and we are not doing our job if we are not putting everything on the table and having a real discussion about everything,” said Allen.
She continued.
“For us to rely only on taxpayer funding to bail us out and not have serious conversations now about cutting costs. I think it is completely irresponsible of us, all of us,” said Allen. “As a board director, I do not have any better knowledge today, right now, after this presentation, after 3-hours of this meeting, I have no better knowledge today of what fiscal year 2021 as a budget than the end of the last meeting. We can’t keep going with wait-and-see method of projecting the financial state of our agency. We cannot keep hoping that the financial crisis is not real and we certainly cannot keep hiding the reality of the public. This is our third budget update since COVID-19 arrived and we still have no information or even a projection of what our fiscal year 21 budget will look like beyond revenue.”
Allen believes they needed cost numbers by the next meeting and hoped it would include a lot of details, while suggesting they cut the COVID-19 discussions and talk about masks as they had already “hammered it to death” and the issue is being handled.
“Maybe we can just focus on the elephant in the room the entire next meeting and talk about the financial health and going forward of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit,” stated Allen.
Powers rejected that idea saying they will continue to provide as much information as possible on the COVID-19 crisis upon them which included masks and PPE and impacts on frontline employees and riders safe along with police deployment.
“As for the budget, we have been working very hard on the budget side of the house, we got the update from MTC yesterday. We have dialed in a couple of scenarios; we are going to be coming back in May for the usage side of those funds and the budget. I think we have been very transparent with this BART Board,” said Powers.
Pamela Herhold, the BART’s assistant general manager for performance and budget, explained they were working has hard and as diligently as they could to identify where the budget stood with scenarios and what service looks like in the future.
Allen responded saying that doing a budget in PowerPoint wasn’t cutting it stating five line-items in a billion-dollar budget with costs was a “why bother?”.
In response, staff said when compared to other transportation agencies, they were “way ahead” of them because others were using the strategy of “wait and see” and that they were the ones “putting themselves out on a limb with scenarios”.
Allen challenged them saying they have only provided the revenue side, not the cost side.
Staff explained they would be coming back in May with more details than what was showed on Thursday, before the board would adopt a budget.
Allen then addressed Powers stating while she appreciated the COVID-19 updates, it didn’t need to be 90-minutes long and urged him to condense it down and spend their time on larger items.
“Let’s start talking about budget numbers and spend a lot of time on that,” stated Allen. “I think there is a lot of cost cutting items and we are going to have to have to have some lengthy discussions on that.”
To view the meeting and view documents, click here.
