Transbay authority chief to resign in fall
The man who got the Transbay transit center opened only to have to lead an extensive investigation and repair job will leave the agency that built and operates the center in September.
Mark Zabaneh, executive director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, announced his resignation by a letter to the authority’s board of directors Tuesday.
Zabaneh joined the Transbay authority in 2013 after 26 years with Caltrans. He took over as executive director in 2016 after Maria Ayerdi, the original leader of the project, was pushed out as the cost of building the transit center soared.
The construction of the transit center — and the sale of public land around it — created a residential and commercial neighborhood in San Francisco. The vision is to eventually connect the center to Caltrain and highspeed rail, opening up transportation links throughout the state.
The $2.2 billion transit hub, officially named the Salesforce Transit Center, opened in August 2018 only to close six weeks later when a worker discovered cracks in a massive support beam. A second beam also was found to have cracks. The center remained closed for nearly 10 months while contractors bolstered the damaged girders and engineers looked for other construction flaws, which they didn’t find.
“The discovery of the fissures was the biggest disappointment of the project,” Zabaneh told The Chronicle on Wednesday.
But he said he was proud of how the authority handled the crisis.
“Our response was done with the highest integrity, the highest transparency,” he said, and in a way that reassured the public it was safe to reopen.
Zabaneh said he’s confident that public appreciation of the threeblocklong transit center, which is topped by a popular rooftop park, will eventually cause people to forget the struggles to get it built as well as the discovery that closed it for months. Both remain open though the park is limited to those exercising. He said he was also proud of the Salesforce naming agreement, though some have criticized it as commercializing a public facility.
The 25year deal brought the Transbay authority $110 million to help pay operating expenses.
Zabaneh is leaving for another job he said he cannot yet disclose. But in the next three months, he hopes to help the center recover from the COVID19 outbreak, which drove down bus ridership and shuttered some justopened retail outlets, help prepare the agency to bring trains into the basement of the center if money becomes available, and help hire his replacement.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who has been critical of the authority and proposed that someone else take over the construction of a rail extension to the center, said that he appreciates Zabaneh’s service but that his departure and the COVID19 crisis leave the city “with profound choices to make as to who the director is and what the future of this multibilliondollar project will be.”
The second phase of the Transbay project, which could cost as much as $6 billion, would complete the vision of making the transit hub “the Grand Central Terminal of the West,” as transit planners have called it, by bringing highspeed rail and Caltrain to the basement of the transit center.
Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, which aims to make San Francisco more transitfriendly, said the next head of the Transbay authority will need not only to be able to get the downtown rail extension built, but also to liven up the transit center and its surroundings. As the region recovers from the coronavirus and fewer people ride transit, this could become particularly important.
“The next director has to have some real intelligence around running and creating public places that will make the Transbay a place to go to,” he said. “It isn’t a lively neighborhood aside from 9 to 5 weekdays. We don’t really need an engineer as much as a placemaker.”