BART’s aging cars too old for new ones
The hundreds of new BART cars headed our way will be quieter, airier and roomier than their predecessors — but one thing they won’t be able to do is hook up with the 669 older cars already in use.
“When you try to connect the cars, the electronics are incompatible,” said BART spokesman Jim Allison. BART’s rolling stock dates from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, he said, and “the technology has changed.”
As a result, once the new cars come into service, BART will be
running two types of trains for a while — the very old and the very new.
“But we do plan to rotate the new trains on the different lines,” Allison said.
BART plans to phase in its 775 new cars, costing $2 million apiece, and ease out most of the old ones over the next five years. All the old cars are supposed to be gone by 2024.
An additional 306 new cars also may come to BART, if voters approve a toll increase on stateowned bridges in the Bay Area to help pay for them.
BART hopes to put the first new trains into regular service by Thanksgiving. In the meantime, it’s testing one train of new cars — so you may see it rolling into your station.
It will be easy to spot. It’s the clean one. Burned: Despite the recent fire damage, property owners in Wine Country will still be on the hook for the full assessed value of the land that their homes and businesses stood on before the flames hit, says Napa County’s assessor.
That could easily be up to a third or half of the overall property value.
According to John Tuteur, Napa County’s assessor-recorder-county clerk, there is no provision in the state revenue and taxation code for treating land as damaged property when it comes to a fire calamity — even if that land is covered with charred rubble.
“Land cannot be destroyed by fire,” Tuteur said, “though it can be destroyed by an earthquake or landslide.”
Bill Rousseau, Sonoma County’s clerk-recorder-assessor, tells us he hopes to have corrected tax bills reflecting the fire damage to structures in the mail by December. Although residents will see a post-fire reduction for the losses to their homes and other buildings, he said, they will still have to pay the full value for the first three months of the fiscal year, when those structures were still standing.
The corrected bills also don’t apply to homes and businesses that survived the fires — even if they are in areas where the blazes may have hurt property values.
Both Tuteur and Rousseau said the fires’ full effect on home values won’t be known for a year or two, at which point residents could be eligible for “a temporary adjustment until the market recovers.”
“We have to actually have market evidence” that a home has dropped in value, Rousseau said.
In other words, a record of property prices going down.
Peter Fatooh, a property tax agent in San Francisco who makes a living filing assessment appeals, said Wine Country officials should brace for long lines of people demanding tax adjustments.
“These are people still paying mortgages, and they aren’t going to take this sitting down,” Fatooh said. Differences aside: No one was more surprised at first lady Melania Trump’s visit Monday to a “No One Eats Alone” lunch at a Michigan middle school than the program’s Bay Area founders — Laura Talmus and her husband, top Democratic consultant Ace Smith.
“No one contacted us about the appearance,” Talmus said.
It was the first time a first lady had attended one of the programs.
“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Talmus said.
The No One Eats Alone lunch program is in 4,000 schools nationwide. It is also a centerpiece of Beyond Differences, the nonprofit set up by Talmus and Smith after the 2009 death of their daughter Lili, who was born with Apert syndrome.
The group’s goal is to fight social isolation among adolescents.
The first lady wouldn’t seem the likeliest ally of any effort run by Talmus or Smith. Both are close to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Smith is a consultant at San Francisco’s SCN Strategies — whose clients include Gov. Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sen. Kamala Harris.
Talmus, who is Beyond Differences’ executive director, said, “We want to thank the first lady for embracing the program. We want to work with anyone who is serious about helping fight this health care crisis.”
Then, in what could be seen as a veiled reference to the first lady’s husband, Talmus added: “Everybody needs to be treating each other with respect and acceptance.”