Streetsblog San Francisco

Last week regional transit bloggers sat down with BART management and asked questions of General Manager Dorothy Dugger about her transit operation.  This is part two of that roundtable:

• Impact of economy on operating budget
  

The biggest challenge that I'm focused on right now is certainly the effects of the economic reality that we're living in on our ability to do our job. We're no more immune than any other facet of society, be it personal family budgets or other government or private organizations. We're really seeing the impact of the economy on both of our major sources of operating revenue: fares (customer revenue is the workhorse of our budget) and ridership.  After a very robust fiscal year ending this summer, after seeing very healthy growth rates in ridership starting about the first of this year, those numbers are trending down and trending down pretty rapidly. I think the last two months ridership has been down about 6 percent for those two months. Overall for the year the reduction will be less than that, but going into next year we're looking at about a 4 and a half percent drop in ridership.

Sales tax, which is the second major source of our revenue, [is] tied to how the local economy is performing.  Last quarter we had the second worst sales tax receipts in our history, with about 11-12 percent drop in sales receipts.  There's a quarter lag, so that would have reflected taxable sales activity October, November, December.  [That] makes up about 35 percent of our revenue.  Fares are about 62 percent.  The rest is a mishmash of a small amount of property tax, other revenue from advertising on the system, leasing of properties, etc.  About 95 percent of our operating budget comes from those two sources....

We've made some good progress this year in closing what we're forecasting as a $54 million deficit for next year.  The board acted on a series of revenue increases where their objective was to try to minimize the impact on the regular, everyday customer.  So the biggest piece of that revenue package was moving our regularly scheduled inflation-based, every-other-year fare increase forward six months, not increasing it, but just bringing it forward in time.  Other elements include increasing the fare at the [SFO] airport station and expanding parking charges to eight additional stations in the East Bay.

• Expansion Versus Core Capacity
  

We've been working hard to create awareness around core capacity issues, which is really expanding the built systems to handle more and more demand.  In my mind it is new service, it is expansion, it's just not geographic expansion.

Generally we do not borrow or use BART funds to build an extension.  I mean, there has probably been some BART money in every expansion that we've built, but the bulk of the funding for those capital improvements have come from special purpose fund sources that have been made available for those purposes, the local sales tax measures in the BART counties that have been passed historically with a BART extension as a marquee project.  The voters have said, 'yes,' we're willing to approve a new sales tax to generate revenue to build those extensions.  Grants from regional, state, federal sources.  SFO attracted $750 million in discretional federal money.  Warm Springs is a real hodge-podge of funding sources.

• On plans for future urban BART extensions
  

We have for many many years been working with San Francisco Planning and in our own work looking at things like a Geary Corridor line.  There hasn't been anything very recently and I think the San Francisco decision making and thrust has been to go with the BRT-type improvements on Geary on the surface street.

We participated in a leadership role with an MTC effort to look at a region-wide study of metropolitan rail system to look at some of those issue to look at what solution is suited for what demand, what would it take for BART to become a more urban rail system, not just primarily commuter--about half of our surface looks like commuter, half looks like urban rail--identifying some opportunities for infill stations on existing lines.  We looked at another study a few years ago--again MTC was in the lead--looking to add more capacity in the Transbay tube or more capacity.

Our most immediate focus is on how we eke more capacity out of what's already been built, as we look to replace our rail car fleet.  Looking at a three-door design to the cars rather than the two door so that we can get more people on and off without increasing the dwell times in the stations and therefore reducing capacity.  In our preliminary assessment [of weight issues] we think a three-car is doable.  We certainly have answered the question to our satisfaction that it achieves more capacity. We are moving forward hopefully to be in a position this fall to begin the procurement process, to identify a car builder.

• Labor Negotiations

We've also looked at and proposed a series of cost reduction measures we can take outside of our contracts with our represented employees that save about $16 million dollars revenues generated.  That leaves about $23 million for next year alone deficit that we need to resolve and we are focused very intently on our contract negotiations… to achieve those savings.  Lots of options on the table, ranging from increasing the employees contributions to the benefits, capping the cost of those benefits, as well as getting some ability to change some of the pretty inefficient work rules that we work under. 

Our forecast, which includes an assumption that our economy improves… by FY 2012, we still over the next four years are forecasting an imbalance between our revenue stream and our cost picture that produces about $250 million deficit.  This is a long term issue and contract negotiations are a critical opportunity to make some improvement on that structural imbalance between revenues.  Contracts expire June 30th, so we are into our last month of negotiations.

I'm hopeful that we can get there.  We certainly need to be mindful that our customers are living in the same environment.  I think we're seeing lots of changes being made in benefit and compensation packages across the employment horizon and I don't believe BART can expect to be exempt from that or ask our customers to pay for things that are really out of line with their own experience in their workplace.

• "What if BART could get out of the healthcare business altogether?" Question from Greg Dewar, N-Judah Chronicles

As an employer I believe people ought to have benefits.  So if this country came to grips with a health program…  I can give you one number right now, which is of that $250 million deficit that I described over the next four years, $116 million of that is cost attributed with the expected increase in the cost of maintaining existing costs of BART health, retirement and ancillary benefits.  That's the increase, not the base cost.

Read Part I of the roundtable here