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Posted Sep 11, 2007, 2:41 AM
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BANNED
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: San Francisco & Tucson
Posts: 24,088
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For those who missed this article in yesterday's Chron, it's pretty sobering and explains some of the high hurdles ahead in this project:
Quote:
Transbay Joint Powers Authority: Low-profile agency's big decisions
Robert Selna, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, September 9, 2007
When a panel of experts delivers its verdict Tuesday on which team of architects and developers should build the tallest building on the West Coast, a little-understood agency that has operated largely outside the limelight takes center stage to make one of the most important land-use decisions in recent San Francisco history.
The Transbay Joint Powers Authority will mull the panel's recommendation, but it has ultimate power to decide who wins the contest and the right to negotiate a deal to erect the new Transbay Terminal and its adjoining tower - two buildings that together are meant to become a Grand Central Station West, connecting Bay Area transit systems and serving as a possible high-speed rail link to Los Angeles.
Originally created to carry out a much less transformative project - extending Caltrain from Fourth and Townsend streets to downtown - the Joint Powers Authority's agenda has morphed in ways that mean its decisions now rival those of any other local government body in terms of their impact on San Francisco's future look and feel.
Those decisions are being made by a body whose political accountability to voters isn't what might be expected given their significance. Only one elected San Francisco official sits on the authority's five-member governing board, Supervisor Chris Daly, whose District 6 is home to the project.
One member, Mayor Gavin Newsom's base reuse director, Michael Cohen, is a designee of Newsom. The other three are Bay Area transit representatives - San Francisco Municipal Railway head Nathaniel Ford, AC Transit board member Elsa Ortiz, and San Mateo County Supervisor Jerry Hill, who serves on the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board, which runs Caltrain.
Moreover, the Authority's executive director, Maria Ayerdi, is a former lawyer for UPS who had modest professional public transit and land-use experience when she got the job, though she has received praise since then for her organizational skills and fundraising.
And a nagging truth is that the Transbay Joint Powers Authority is $2 billion short of the $2.4 billion estimated cost of extending Caltrain to downtown, which is the reason for the agency's existence in the first place.
"The rail extension is fundamental to this project because the terminal was planned to be a transportation hub for this area and well beyond it," said Jose Luis Moscovich, executive director of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, which oversees spending of special tax dollars for transportation improvements in the city.
"There needs to be a clear plan and timeline to get that done and it's not clear to me that there is one," Moscovich said.
A shared goal
In 1999, nearly 70 percent of San Francisco voters backed Proposition H, a local ballot measure to extend Caltrain to a new Transbay Terminal that would replace the obsolete 1939 bus depot at First and Mission streets.
Moscovich and other proponents have extolled the virtues of connecting the major transit systems in the Bay Area in one location along with future high-speed rail.
The Caltrain rail terminus at Fourth and Townsend was seen as discouraging commuters who wanted to travel downtown without having to make multiple transfers, though things have gotten easier with the expanded Muni service to the area, which took place as a new neighborhood grew up around the Giants ballpark at China Basin.
Prop. H required the San Francisco mayor and Board of Supervisors to carry out the plan to bring Caltrain to a rebuilt station downtown, and the city took the lead setting up a regional agency that would finance, construct and operate the new terminal.
In 2001, the city came together with AC Transit and Caltrain and, under state law, formed the Transbay Joint Powers Authority.
The San Francisco members on the authority board represent the mayor's office, the Board of Supervisors and Muni.
Ayerdi, who worked to put the agency together as then-Mayor Willie Brown's transportation policy adviser, was appointed by the board to serve as its executive director, no doubt with at least a nudge from Brown himself.
While the job of the board was to construct a new transit hub, it quickly became clear that state, federal and local funding sources would not be enough to cover the cost of the project that is estimated at $3.4 billion.
As a result, the authority, in collaboration with city planning officials, made a series of decisions to increase building heights in the area to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in new property tax revenue - money that normally would go into the city general fund for services but instead will help fund the terminal project.
A morphing agend
The rezoning allowed seven skyscrapers above 300 feet on public land and it was decided that a "signature" tower should be built adjacent to the terminal. The city Planning Department has since suggested allowing two towers as tall as 850 feet and bumping up the signature tower to more than 1,000 feet.
The three competing designs reviewed by the expert panel range in height from 1,200 feet to 1,375 feet.
While the authority and city planners have collaborated on decisions about the transit tower and other land-use changes, the authority has acted independently in awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to engineers, environmental experts and other consultants.
Started with $9.5 million in federal seed money, the authority has now spent more than $80 million in design, engineering planning, and land acquisitions.
The authority's design competition decision will not be reviewed by any higher body and cannot be appealed. And while board members say they will give strong consideration to the jury's recommendation, the final decision rests with them.
"I'll make my decision on what I think is in the best interests of the Transbay Terminal project," said Hill, who represents Caltrain and is the president of the board. "My decision will be based on what the jury says, but also on the policy of the board."
Learning on the job
Ayerdi, the authority's chief executive, didn't appear to possess the experience normally sought to run an agency with such autonomy and power.
She landed her previous post as Brown's transportation adviser after meeting the mayor at a Saturday open house he held at City Hall in 1998.
A year earlier she had obtained her license to practice law, and had worked in the legal department at United Parcel Service for several years. In a recent interview, Ayerdi, 40, characterized UPS as a quasi-transportation agency. She said she learned a lot about transportation after Brown hired her.
"I educated myself and learned from other transportation agencies first hand," she said. "I learned a lot on the job."
Hill said that Ayerdi has done a good job securing funds for the project and managing the design competition.
In February, however, Ed Harrington, San Francisco's city controller, who also serves as the authority's chief financial officer, questioned the assumptions the authority leadership seemed to be making about how it was going to get its job done - meaning extending Caltrain to downtown.
In a report, Harrington described the rail extension as a "very high-risk project," given that no money had been identified to cover most of the $2.4 billion cost.
Some funds have been secured, but a state high-speed rail bond, which could have brought $475 million to the terminal project, has bogged down in the Legislature. Meanwhile, a proposal for an extra fee on AC Transit riders traveling to the terminal has not been finalized.
Call for clarity
In an interview in February, Harrington said that those officials leading the terminal project need to devise a clear plan to fund the rail work.
"The fact that there is no one talking about where the money might come from is simply not good enough," Harrington said at the time. "A solution is not going to come out of nowhere."
In a recent interview, Ayerdi said that she and the authority's board have been meeting on a regular basis to resolve the funding shortfall and that she would have a plan by the first quarter of 2008.
And as the board prepares for the biggest decision in its brief history, some members admit that they may never achieve the lofty dreams that were the genesis for the Transbay Joint Powers Authority.
"It's still an open question of whether Caltrain will ever come downtown," Hill said. "That's a substantial amount of money for that to occur ... it's not available today and it hasn't been in the past."
E-mail Robert Selna at rselna@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg.../BAJ1RVRAG.DTL
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And in case anyone isn't familiar with Ed Harrington, he's a highly respected and very capable bureaucrat. if he says the money ain't there, it probably ain't there.
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