leads other incumbents in victory
Despite fierce challenges in several districts, the majority of BART’s incumbent board directors held onto their seats Tuesday night.
Board President Lateefah Simon won in three counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Francisco — with a platform that emphasized police reform, robust train service and job protection for transit employees.
Simon’s broadly backed campaign drew contributions from transit advocates and unions, including $ 15,000 from Service Employees International Union Local 102, which represents the largest share of BART employees. Challenger Sharon Kidd struggled to secure donations, despite an endorsement from the police union.
A wave of national protests on racial justice this spring triggered a reckoning — and emotional discussions — at the transit agency. In June, the transit board redirected $ 2 million of its police department budget to antiracism train
ing, and shifted mental health and homelessness calls from officers to unarmed “ambassadors.” Two weeks before the election, the board voted to double that program, despite protests from some directors that it had failed to reduce crime.
“I am not in any shape or form saying we need to ditch our police department,” Simon said.
“If someone is in trouble, do they need to call for help? Absolutely. Do I think the civil rights of Black and brown people have been violated by people with badges? Absolutely. Do I think we need to respond to someone who’s homeless and in a mental health crisis? Absolutely, but I think that’s a bad use of police time considering there is always violence in public spaces.”
In District 1, board Director Debora Allen won on promises of fiscal conservatism amid a budget crisis. She pushed to cut operating costs to fill the agency’s $ 33 million budget shortfall.
“We’ve been disrupted and we probably will not go back to the old normal,” Allen said. “There will always be a need for BART and BART won’t go away, and BART will recover from this as it did from economic downturns in the past, but it’s something we have to carefully walk through.”
Allen wants to fund and install new fare gates and hopes to beef up partnerships with counties to provide social services to riders who are homeless or struggle with mental health or addiction. She also supports more training for police, especially when it comes to racial inequities, but doesn’t envision reducing the size of the force.
In the leadup to the election, the board’s liberal directors butted heads with Allen; Simon said Allen never showed the “sensibility or wanting to work with other members of the board.” Allen, who represents a suburban ridership concerned about crime, often criticized urban directors.
“They don’t like me injecting other ideas in the debate,” she said. “Their response to that is, ‘ Let’s get rid of her voice, because we don’t like what she’s saying.’ ”
Challenger Jamie Salcido, a marketing manager and Walnut Creek Transportation commissioner, jumped in the race after Allen’s controversial comments this summer that the agency’s police don’t “murder” people, which a public commenter had accused officers of doing during a board meeting. Salcido campaigned on homelessness outreach teams, environmental improvements to BART, and new fare gates.
“I’m not here to defund or abolish the police, I just think we need to be smart about using the right resources to address the right problems,” Salcido said.
In San Francisco’s District 9, Bevan Dufty prevailed over three opponents.
“I do think BART is the bloodstream of the Bay Area,” Dufty said. “It’s a difficult year, but the budget team is really trying to scrub the budget and figure out cost savings.”
Dufty, who refused donations from police unions and, in past elections, gave away such contributions to a group affiliated with Black Lives Matter, advocated for the unarmed ambassador program.
“I’d like to have more of a prevention approach, and I think having eyes and ears on the system is one of the best ways to achieve that,” Dufty said.
In District 5, incumbent John McPartland was ahead on Tuesday evening with 38% of votes. His closest challenger, Steven Dunbar, an electrical engineer for bus company Gillig, received 34% of votes.
McPartland, who is retired from the Oakland Fire Department, pushed for new fare gates to make up for lost revenue from the pandemic. He said that ambassadors should relieve cops of mental health and drug addiction calls, which he said officers weren’t equipped or trained to do. He also said the board needed to build better relationships with local municipalities.
“Then we’ve got the best of all worlds,” McPartland said.
Dunbar ran on a platform of increasing the board’s transparency and accessibility, proposing rescheduling morning board meetings to a time when more people could attend. He leaned toward staffing BART with these unarmed ambassadors, although he said police were still needed to respond to violence. He said he prioritized safety and cleanliness as a means to attract riders back to BART.
“We do need to make a really solid effort to get people back on transit so that transit is sustainable fiscally, but so that we don’t have this huge increase in car travel that increases our greenhouse gas emissions when we need to be reducing them,” Dunbar said.
Mike Wallace, a water agency financial analyst, was trailing McPartland and Dunbar with 28% of the vote.
In District 3, Rebecca Saltzman ran unopposed.