Quote:
Originally Posted by BTinSF
[...]Read what I posted above about the funding. It's pretty clear where the funding is or isn't coming from at this point. Here, once again, is an exerpt:[...]
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That article was a hit-piece planted/sole-sourced by staff at the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, and should be read in context.
The SFCTA's power-mad executive director, in particular, has been engaged in turf wars for years, seeking to
expand his remit, at what was created as a
funding agency administering sales tax receipts, to be the lord and master of all he surveys,
designing freeways,
designing subways, controlling huge project budgets, cutting deals to sabotage state-wide infrastructure (HSR via Pacheco is a SFCTA deal cut with VTA to ensure Central Subway pork flows), etc.
The TA's unmitigated
record of failure at all of these tasks, of course, not to mention its profound past incompetence at the
very most basic,
checkbook-balancing-level of financial management,
doesn't need to be recounted.
And do recall that the TA's Mr Moscovich personally, through
active agency collusion with a private real estate developer along with the SF Mayor's Office, acting directly contrary to the public interest and in gross breach of public fiducial interest, has already cost the Transbay project many hundreds of millions of dollars in construction cost escalation alone, beyond the payout made to the developer. Quite the achievement!
The fact that a nominally independent,
regionally-constitituted, legally-formed JPA is responsible for designing, building and operating an important and hugely expensive transportation facility and
that the TA staff are not calling all the shots, is something that some power-hungry apparatchiks find unacceptable, and have since the turn of the century.
The Chronicle piece reads like a character assassination of another bureaucrat and a salvo in an inter-agency takedown war because, well, because it is. Read through again. Who are the sources? What are the substantive points made? Why is this appearing now?
Qui bono?
And if any of you still have any doubts that we will never see any real progress of any type in our corrupt little third-rate fiefdom of city, well, this sort of thing shoud dispel them. It's hardly unique, of course.
(Oh, and please note I am no fan of the TJPA's technical accomplishments, though its political record is simply amazing to anybody who has followed the sordid record of the City and County of San Francisco's attempts to completely destroy the Transbay Terminal over three decades.)
Good thing we have nice weather, a beautiful physical setting, and not of lot of recent seismic activity, or one could get quite dispirited about the place.