Funding gap demands cheaper option for BART extension

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Agency’s planned South Bay BART extension is in big trouble after the federal government this month announced that it would not provide all the hoped-for funding for the project.

The six-mile extension would run from the Berryessa/North San Jose station through San Jose and up to Santa Clara. For 15 years, everyone thought that the five miles of tunneling through downtown San Jose would consist of two 20-foot diameter tunnels, like the rest of the subway portions of the BART system, with passenger platforms about 50 feet below the ground.

But then, in 2018, it all changed, supposedly to appease some downtown merchants. From then on, the VTA staff has been struggling to plan for a single-bore tunnel, about 53 feet in diameter with platforms buried eight stories underground, that will require tunnel lining twice as thick as originally planned and excavation of millions more cubic yards of soil.

Despite objections raised for years by outside experts, media outlets, the Bay Area Transportation Working Group and other groups, the VTA continues to move doggedly ahead with the single bore despite its escalating costs, now put at $12.7 billion, a figure that will undoubtedly continue to rise.

If the VTA keeps pursuing this fanciful scheme, the result will be a subway costing more and taking longer to construct than necessary. It will be more expensive to maintain and less accessible to would-be riders than it should be, as well as being potentially unsafe during emergencies, especially for the elderly and handicapped.

The Federal Transportation Administration, in its monthly evaluation reports and risk assessments of the project, has repeatedly warned the VTA of conceptual design and administrative defects.

For this reason, the FTA’s decision announced this month to drop the federal contribution from the hoped-for 49.5% of the price previously shown in VTA financial reports to just 40% comes as no great surprise. The result of this change is a federal contribution of $5.1 billion instead of the hoped for $6.3 billion, leaving the VTA staff with a huge $1.2 billion funding gap to fill.

The VTA general manager’s plan is to sit down with the contractors and consultants to “negotiate” cost cuts and reductions in their profits as needed to cover the funding shortfall. Consultants and contractors do not give away profits to help bail out overbudget public projects. And, aside from a rethinking of the tunneling plan, it would be virtually impossible to make significant cost cuts without further degrading the quality and safety of the future BART operation.

The only other option for the transportation agency appears to be a further diversion of funding from Measure B funds, approved by Santa Clara County voters in 2016. At the time Measure B passed, the estimated $4.9 billion cost of the BART extension made the $1.6 Measure B allocation look reasonable.

But the cost estimate for the extension is now 2½ times as great. Unfortunately, any further diversion of Measure B funds would come at the expense of dozens of other projects promised in the ballot measure, including freeway congestion relief and interchange projects; enhanced transit options for seniors, the disabled, students and the poor; road and pothole repairs in all of the county’s 15 cities; improved bicycle and pedestrian safety; and improved safety at Caltrain grade crossings.