In the Sunday, April 3 Insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle, BART Director Zakhary Mallett’s opinion piece entitled “Support a bond measure to reinvest in BART” appeared.  In this article, Mallett explains how BART’s system reinvestment needs and labor cost overruns are two distinct issues with two distinct solutions...

"For a financially sustainable and more reliable BART system, in November Bay Area voters must do this:
(1) Vote for the BART bond measure, and
(2) elect financially responsible leadership to the BART board.

Some associate BART’s deteriorating infrastructure with historic poor financial decision-making. Examples include lucrative board-approved employee contracts and investing in system expansion. They say that these practices have been at the expense of keeping BART in working condition and, because of this, our proposed 2016 bond should be rejected.

I’ll be the first to concur that BART’s labor rules and benefits are out of control. I was the sole BART director to vote against the 2013 labor contract that I felt rewarded our employees for bad behavior after they went on multiple strikes. I also consistently have voted against many annual pay requests of board-appointed officers that match what our union workers get. Our employees continue to receive heavily subsidized pensions, pay a single, low rate for medical coverage regardless of family size, benefit from work rules that limit getting the most out of their time on the clock, and more. None of it is acceptable, and all of it is costly. But the amount of money BART would save by eliminating high salaries and benefits would fall far short of the money needed to replace aging infrastructure..."

For the full story, visit the San Francisco Chronicle.

In response to demands for BART to extend its current labor contracts to protect the public from strikes for the next five years and dissuade political leaders from opposing BART’s bond measure, Mallett expresses the following:

“I voted against the 2013 BART labor contracts because even after the unions went on multiple strikes, the final agreements rewarded the unions for their bad behavior.  The contracts are laden with expensive work rules and costly benefits, including wage reimbursements to employees for paying into their pensions. Why would we want to further reward this behavior by extending this costly deal another four years? We must address our contract deficiencies and get costs under control. If we were to request BART’s unions to agree to an extension, it would give them the leverage to name the price for the extension, which would only make the problem worse.”

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