Lawmakers throw BART a lifeline after massive budget shortfall

Faced with a massive budget shortfall, BART has been warning riders severe cuts to service could be inevitable. But now, lawmakers are throwing it a lifeline. 

“It’s very critical, a huge importance to me,” said Wisdom Washington.

She relies on BART to get just about everywhere. She doesn’t have a car so BART’s her ticket to get where she needs to go. 

“It matters a huge deal to me without BART,” she said. “I barely have a portion of the Bay available to me.”

Last month, the company warned if the state doesn’t step up to help fill its massive budget void, BART could have to close stations and eliminate weekend and night service. Now lawmakers are answering that call. 

“The legislature has agreed on a lifeline for transit agencies, where that will probably address about half of the problem,” said Sen. Scott Wiener.

He said that lifeline includes $1.1 billion to help fund the state’s transit operations, about $400 million of that earmarked for the Bay Area. 

The plan also rolls back $2 billion in proposed cuts to transit capital projects.

“If you try to imagine the Bay Area without BART or without BAR on the weekends or no BART at night or a bunch of Muni lines evaporating or AC Transit collapsing or Caltrain collapsing that doesn’t work for our region,” said Wiener.

“That’s certainly a relief. The original ask was $5 billion. It sounds like they will fund about 20% of that,” said Debora Allen, BART board director. 

While the funds will help, Allen says it’s not nearly enough. She says the transit agency will need to make cuts to spending to sustain the system long term. 

“We have a tremendous amount of management costs, management levels that could be consolidated. And we may need to look at putting on pause some of the spending that we do on developing parking lots, some of the spending on our PR department,” said Allen.

It’s still unclear if Governor Newsom is on board with the transit subsidy. The budget must be passed on Thursday.