These stimulus funds, contrary to popular belief, can be used to fund transit operations and not just capital projects. The share of the $70m which would go to AC Transit would be almost $7m, with MUNI and BART receiving even more. AC Transit’s $7m share of transit stimulus funds would give the agency about six months before it had to slash service more than already planned because of state budget cuts, which could be enough time to secure additional taxpayer funding without ending night and weekend service.

Here’s the choice before the MTC Wednesday: give BART one last but impossible chance to save their Airport Connector and lose $70m forever, or keep the $70m for the region. The OAC, which becomes more expensive and less useful with every passing year, needs to be put out of its misery. Though the federal government won’t give the OAC a penny, BART has been willing to bankrupt every rival agency and steal from every available pot of money to fund their pipe dream, up to and including robbing their own seismic retrofit bond of funding to fix the Transbay Tube, so losing the FTA’s nod may not actually kill this zombie project.

If you care at all about transit in the Bay Area, I urge you to make your voice heard to the MTC. TransForm has an excellent email form that allows you to communicate with the entire Commission. Please take a minute to send a note to the MTC and urge them to make the OAC’s death throes less harmful, preserve much-needed stimulus funding for less glamorous but more necessary transit operations across the reason, and save Hegenberger from the fate that befell 7th St. For the MTC to do otherwise would just prove the civil rights complaint’s point: that BART and the region place suburban comforts over urban necessities.

The “Buy American” resolution passed by the Board (PDF) was proposed by Director Elsa Ortiz (East Oakland – Alameda) and strongly supported by new Director Joel Young (at-large). In her statement proposing the resolution, Director Ortiz called complaints about Van Hool buses “exaggerated” and made it clear that her resolution is an attempt to support local jobs rather than to stop buying European buses (“American-made” buses are actually made abroad anyway). The resolution is also non-binding. That did not stop Berkeley Daily Planet reporter Jesse Douglas Allen-Taylor from declaring that the resolution, which is not a policy, “would be the death knell for AC Transit’s recent practice of buying buses exclusively from Belgian bus manufacturer Van Hool.” East Bay Express reporter Robert Gammon says that “the board voted to effectively end the agency’s controversial relationship with Belgian bus maker, Van Hool.” Those statements are simply wrong: no contracts were changed, though obviously staff is being directed to look at alternative sources for buses. Since AC Transit has no immediate plans to buy new buses, the effect of the nonbinding resolution is unclear. And for the record, AC Transit does not buy buses “exclusively” from Van Hool, but continues to purchase other manufacturer’s buses for what is a pretty diverse fleet (ACT does not source from Hayward bus manufacturer Gillig).

Rick Fernandez proposed swapping capital funds for operating funds to stave off 15% service cuts that had been proposed and discussed in a months-long public outreach process that the agency could undertake because it had ample cash reserves (by contrast, BART cut off-peak service 20% with no outreach). The Board rejected Fernandez’s recommendation to seek a funding swap with BART for Regional Measure 2 funds, and instead only asked that CMAQ funds, already dedicated to the organization, be reprogrammed from capital to operating. Because a big source of BRT funding, the state’s STIP contribution, is already in doubt, and there is no date certain for starting construction, it made sense to take some funds away from BRT because the agency will have to rethink the funding plan anyway. This was misinterpreted by people who don’t seem to like the BRT plan, with Mr. Allen-Taylor writing that it means “at least a one-year delay in construction of AC Transit’s long-planned Bus Rapid Transit line, with a possible scaling down of the proposal or even abandonment of BRT altogether.” That is claim is wishful thinking on behalf of the anti-transit Berkeley Daily Planet.

One statement in particular, from the East Bay Express’s Mr. Gammon (who, we cannot forget, penned a wildly inaccurate article about Van Hool and AC Transit last year), stands out for its falsehood. He writes:

AC Transit has repeatedly slashed service and raised fares in recent years, while requiring loans from other agencies to stay solvent and growing increasingly dependent on taxpayer funds to keep its buses running.

Not a single phrase in that statement is true. AC Transit hasn’t substantially cut service since the last recession, in 2003, which is not a recent year. Fares went up this year for the first time since 2005, but service has not yet been cut. AC Transit has not taken out a loan from other agencies, and has no plans to do so (he must be confusing AC Transit with BART), and is not “increasingly dependent on taxpayer funds.” AC Transit did successfully seek a parcel tax hike to make up for some of the state budget cuts it and other agencies suffered, but again unlike BART, AC Transit has not received any net increase in taxpayer support. (BART has also raised fares repeatedly. Come to think of it, if you replace AC Transit with BART in the statement, it becomes true.)

Finally, the departure of Rick Fernandez was used by these media outlets, who generally don’t like AC Transit, as validation of their positions. Mr. Allen-Taylor even interviewed leading BRT and Van Hool critic Joyce Roy about it. However, had he bothered to ask any of the pro-BRT activists that have been going to public meetings and organizing to support the agency, he would have found that they are also displeased by Mr. Fernandez’s job performance. Mr. Gammon says that Mr. Fernandez “resigned abruptly,” yet two paragraphs below writes that he “came to the Board several months ago, seeking a lucrative severance package.” Rick Fernandez’s departure could just as easily be interpreted as a statement of support for BRT, since Mr. Fernandez sought to reprogram much more money away from it than the Board approved.

It is disappointing that the East Bay Express and the Berkeley Daily Planet, leading reporters of the East Bay’s largest transit agency, are so blinded by their own biases about bus service that they report remote possibilities or questionable interpretations as settled fact. AC Transit is the lifeline of the East Bay, and though it certainly needs critical oversight, the resistance to its mission that local weeklies sometimes display is inappropriate for community-based papers. BART, on the other hand, regularly screws Oakland over, but the weeklies only pay attention when something rises to the level of a riot or a billion-dollar boondoggle. Unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse: Mr. Allen-Taylor will not longer report on AC Transit, Oakland government or anything else – the Planet has laid off its reporting staff. Commentaries will continue, of course. Though the Planet’s firm editorial stances certainly colored their reporting, the loss of coverage of local issues will just make it harder for people to understand what’s going on at AC Transit or other public agencies.

Yesterday I had an hour between meetings to have coffee with my mother in Rockridge. I thought it would be a good opportunity to twitter the latest BART protest, and hopefully to pick up a few more readers of my microblog thanks to intrepid, live reporting of what promised to be a large and potentially riotous demonstration in the heart of Oakland’s supposedly “power elite” neighborhood. Unfortunately for me and for the protesters, it was a complete bust. The media outnumbered the handful of protesters, and BART and the neighborhood took no chances securing the transit station. I enjoyed no discernible uptake in my twitter popularity, and the protesters looked pathetic and marginalized. But lost in their divisive and extremist rhetoric is the fact that the protesters are basically right: BART is a deeply flawed and unjust organization.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system opened in the early 1970s with a promise of uniting the central Bay Area with a high-speed rail system. The system’s construction wreaked havoc on Oakland and San Francisco’s downtowns, precipitating the fall of the DTO as an upscale shopping destination by tearing up Broadway for years, and driving the final nail into the coffin of West Oakland’s once-vibrant 7th St. As the system expanded throughout the 80s and 90s, far-flung suburbs received high-intensity transit service far out of proportion to their size and density, and the residents of central cities found themselves subsidizing suburban transportation at an ever-increasing rate. Despite failing to meet ridership projections, a uniquely costly construction type, and decades-long problems with escalators and elevators, BART remains the most politically popular transit service, receiving a share of regional transportation dollars far out of proportion to its ridership. Today, BART’s legacy is an ever-expanding regional development footprint and fantastically wasteful expansion plans that starve the much more efficient and larger bus agencies of needed operating funds. This is not just an issue of priorities, it is an issue of social and environmental justice.

BART’s per-rider public subsidy (at an average of $6.14) is more than twice that of AC Transit ($2.78), neatly intersecting (PDF) with the fact that its ridership is twice as white as AC Transit’s (43% to 21%). Its subsidized parking lots in the suburbs encourage driving and transfer additional funds to the suburbs at the expense of the inner cities. Most galling, fares from the outer suburbs don’t come close to covering the operating costs of those train lines, while intra-city fares in Oakland are actually more than the operating cost of a trip from, say, Fruitvale to the DTO. This means that every trip within Oakland is subsidizing a trip from the outer suburbs. Both the structure and the operation of BART is subsidizing suburbanites at the expense of the central cities, and its low-cost parking has been shown to encourage more driving.

This is not just a legacy of the 1950s BART plan, it is a result of continuing policy choices by the elected BART Board. The same Board that for decades refused to create a civilian oversight board for its large police force has chosen to create an unjust fare structure and repeatedly break promises made to voters. Those broken promises include a shockingly wasteful Airport Connector that bears no resemblance to the project approved by Alameda County voters, and the VTA’s 2008 tax measure that took all of a month after it was approved for the transit agency to announce that it would jettison all of the local-serving projects in the tax and redirect the funds to the duplicative San Jose expansion (which won’t even go to downtown San Jose, as promised to Alameda County voters when they approved the Warm Springs extension).

The BART Board flies below the radar of public and media interest. The last contested BART election, for the North Oakland-Berkeley seat, saw a transit advocate unseated by Bob Franklin, a union leader upset by Roy Nakadegawa’s efforts to run the system more equitably. The wasteful nature of BART is part of its political power: the construction companies and unions are strongly supportive of the enormous costs of expansion, which go directly into their pockets, while low-cost bus systems aren’t lucrative to big political donors. AC Transit is relentlessly criticized for buying nice buses and for attempting a widely successful Bus Rapid Transit project, yet nary a peep is raised by the media when BART embarks on trains to nowhere, at the cost of over half a billion dollars a mile.

So how does this relate to Oscar Grant? The protesters are eager to connect Oscar Grant’s death with wider social justice causes, yet they focus exclusively on the BART police. BART’s unjust operating structure, the subject of a racial-discrimination lawsuit, has been utterly ignored, and the protesters appear to fail to understand that the elected BART Board is fully responsible for a lack of civilian oversight for the BART police, as well as the despicable response to the incident in the first place. This gives BART Directors, like the aforementioned Bob Franklin, cover to claim they “take the protesters’ demands seriously” while in fact doing nothing to address the substance of those criticisms. Unless and until the protesters connect the dots of BART’s deeply unjust operations and the culpability of its elected officials (who are accountable to the voters), lame attempts to shut down urban stations will do nothing to improve transportation equity or social justice.

Of course, because of the legal difference between taxes and set-aside laws, Kids First 2 passed and Measure NN, to increase cops, did not, despite receiving thousands more votes. Though, as a set-aside, the threshold for passage was lower for OO (an option that anti-crime activists had considered in the Spring), nonetheless the difference in votes, about 3000, shows that cops are indeed more popular than kids’ programs. The difference in campaigns only reinforces this point.

NN met with far stiffer opposition than OO. Opposition came from those influential over potential Yes votes: the anti-police argument was strangely missing from this election, even from its most strident proponents, Councilmember Nancy Nadel (who sat the entire election out, as the only Councilmember not to endorse either Council candidate) and PUEBLO. The Safety First funding mandate’s leaders opposed NN, as did anti-crime advocates like Charles Pine and Ignacio de la Fuente (PDF). Support from Mayor Dellums and the Chamber of Commerce consisted of weak mailers sent only to poll voters. Despite this, the measure won 54% of Oakland votes. The consensus for cops, even without the support of activists, is clear.

In October, No on OO campaigners including Sharon Cornu of the Alameda Central Labor Council and Susan Montauk of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board begged the City Council at Open Forum to campaign against the measure. They didn’t. No on OO only had the funds to send a mailer to absentee voters (Yes on OO sent a mailer to poll voters), and I never saw Councilmembers do more than a make brief mention in their newsletters. The old and new media fell in against OO but their influence is limited, and the largest, the Chronicle, didn’t do Oakland endorsements. Overall, OO was a low-information campaign that most voters probably decided just by looking at the ballot question.

OO was packaged, deceptively, as a costless means of keeping existing youth-serving programs. NN was a tax increase to expand policing resources. Three thousand more Oaklanders voted to tax themselves for more police than to keep existing children’s programs for free. In November’s election, Oakland voters were more supportive of cops than kids.

Today’s blog is critical of recent news. No, I’m not yet ready to comment on Mayor Dellums’ attempt to take the Second Start program away from destitute, illiterate mothers of small children, or put an end to community gardens, or reduce library service by a quarter. No, the surprisingly tiny savings from eliminating such direct services are not the focus of this blog, and neither is the evidence that Oakland’s city workers are the highest-paid in the entire country and are significantly overpaid by several measures. This blog is not about the bad budget. It’s about the bad media.

The SF Weekly publishes parts of former Berkeley Daily Planet reporter Judith Scherr’s email to colleagues explaining that she quit the NIMBY mouthpiece because she could not longer stand editor Becky O’Malley’s constant meddling to make articles more ideologically bent. The Weekly’s comments are hilariously dismissive of the Planet. BeyondChron, which occasionally swaps articles with the Planet, rises to Ms. O’Malley’s defense, but doesn’t address the issue of altering articles to be more one-sided (for example, this article about a Berkeley hearing on BRT is so different from what a friend at the meeting reported to constitute disinformation).

The always-relevant SF Bay Guardian, in a pioneering work of political journalism, reveals that former Don Perata Chief of Staff Kerry Hamill enjoys the support of Senator Perata in her bid for the Oakland City Council. The article also handily summarizes all the relationships between Councilmembers and interest groups in a single phrase, which is quite illuminating. Not!

The Chronicle’s popular urban design critic John King discusses the new Cathedral of Christ the Light, but completely neglects its unfortunate pedestrian presence that is the talk of downtown and Westlake. That, and the, um, yonic design concept. Also, he thinks the building is modest?

That lazy blogger from The DTO finally posts something.

The New York Times shows some love for Oakland’s ambitious office developers, but kinda skips the issue of who exactly will occupy these new commercial highrises. Meanwhile, a prominent North Oaklander calls for exorbitant business taxes to balance the budget on a neighborhood listserv.

After running biased articles in favor of the city’s “industrial preservation” policy adopted this Spring, the Trib now criticizes industrial pollution and thinks that converting industrial land to housing helps revitalize neighborhoods. Confusing!

When I’m disappointed in the MSM, I can go directly to the primary source or just make my own news through activism. Tomorrow (Thursday), there’s an opportunity to do both. Rather than read analysis of the pundits’ analysis of public reaction to the Vice Presidential debate, you can watch it yourself with a crowd of energetic young Democrats at downtown’s Geoffrey’s Inner Circle. The event is a fundraiser for not-quite-so-establishment Council candidate Rebecca Kaplan, whose election would be big news. See you newsmakers there!

Over the last month, A Better Oakland has presented three different measurements of Oakland’s employee compensation, which is currently being negotiated with the unions by a professional team under the direction of the Interim City Administrator and the Council. These are excellent data to determine an appropriate level of city employee compensation. The data show that Oakland has the highest average payroll in the entire country, that most employee positions are paid far more than in regional municipalities, and that city employees have received cost of living raises totaling more than 10% over the CPI since 2002. To put that in perspective, 10% of the city’s payroll* is $59m, more than enough to pay for the LLAD deficit and the police service ballot measure.

To put both the number and pay of Oakland’s bureaucracy into perspective, V Smoothe shared a chart from the Census Bureau (PDF) listing the number, per-capita number, and average monthly payroll of every US city over 250,000 residents. While there are vast differences between the cities (for example, many cities perform duties assumed here by Alameda County and the OUSD), Oakland appeared to have a significantly above-average number of city employees per-capita. But more stunning is that Oakland has the highest average monthly payroll of all mid-sized and large American municipalities. How can cash-strapped Oakland have higher average employee pay than New York City, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle?

The answer lies in a little-noticed city survey (PDF) unearthed at A Better Oakland today. Comparing Oakland’s city positions to those of other Bay Area cities, 67 of the 72 job classifications are paid more in Oakland. The unfortunate five underpaid positions include Neighborhood Services Coordinator, Recreation Supervisor, Plumber, and Gardener II. The salary figures were adjusted for a 40-hour workweek (Oakland city employees are only expected to work 37.5 hours, 6% less than standard) and include pension contributions. The average position enjoys a 14% compensation premium over the median compensation of a Bay Area colleague. In addition, the city’s cost-of-living raises have been a compounded 10.1% more than the actual inflation rate since 2002, meaning that the city employees have experienced a real income gain of over 10% in six years while the average American worker’s income has declined in real terms.

The factor that is not taken into account by these data is productivity. The figures above suggest that Oakland should be performing at 110%, 114%, or even better than any other city in the US. Oakland clearly is not doing a superior job delivering services. 10% from the payroll, the sum of overpaid inflation increases, is $59m, more than the LLAD deficit ($10m) and the police services proposal ($40m) put together. Are city employees performing well enough to justify tax hikes to cover their excessive pay? While I have had the pleasure of working with many excellent people from the city, as a whole it’s clear that the city employees’ productivity does not justify gross overpayment. There is no excuse for Oakland to have the highest average monthly payroll in the entire country. Face with a budget deficit of up to 8% of payroll, and two tax proposals this year totaling 8.5%, comparative data show that employee compensation is too much, not that tax receipts are too little. With salary negotiations ongoing, city leaders will have to make decisions now about how much compensation Oakland can actually afford.

* According to the City Auditor (PDF, p. 10), the payroll in 2006 – 2007 budget year was $589m, 56% of the total budget.

I have adjusted some figures since this was first posted.

Last week, the City Council discussed a compromise hastily placed on the Council’s agenda by Councilmember Jean Quan to have the Council place its own compromise with Kids First (a long-term spending mandate) on the ballot. It was rejected by all but Ms. Quan and Councilmember Nancy Nadel, with the Council majority citing the expense of the measure. However, it was never presented publicly that the initiative had to be placed on the ballot by the Council even if they didn’t want to support one themselves, because enough signatures were gathered. The Berkeley City Council scheduled citizen ballot measures for its last two meetings, but neither Kids First’s backers, or the City Attorney or City Clerk, realized that Oakland had to do the same. Now the the Council is forced to call a special meeting with the hope that there are enough Councilmembers in town to avoid a lawsuit from Kids First.

Taking advantage of this extra meeting, Councilmember Pat Kernighan collected the signatures of two of her colleagues to force an additional item onto the agenda. The Council is now to discuss “clarifying” the police ballot parcel tax, presumably to address concerns raised by opponents. It is unclear what was wrong with the regularly-scheduled discussions at the Rules Committee and City Council which produced the once-final version of the ballot measure. Now, with only the bare minimum of 48 hours notice, the Council is to revisit the ballot measure with the possibility of substantial changes to major tax investment Oaklanders will be asked to make in November. Hopefully interested citizens will notice.