Stop, Drop and Roll

02 October 2007 | Alameda City Council, Alameda Community, Tranpsortation | John Knox White

At to night’s meeting (10/2/07), the city council will discuss Alameda’s ferry system, the main impetus for this discussion is the city’s Short Range Transit Plan, which is a well written document that must be submitted to the MTC every three years. 

More interesting/important is a discussion about the state legislature’s plan to effectively seize control of the Alameda ferry system. Covered by Lauren Do here and here, and The Alameda Journal.

Some of my initial concerns about the Alameda Ferry becoming a part of the existing Water Transit Authority (WTA) “system” were allayed as I learned of the access that the WTA has to money not available to the City of Alameda. But I think that the council wisely asked everyone to slow down the last time the issue came before them. The council clearly wanted more assurances that the City’s on-going needs would be met by any future service provider.

The WETA proposal, having been crafted quickly and at the last minute, has many holes and unanswered questions. I realize that some people are encouraging a plan of “support the proposal and figure out the details on the back end” but that concerns me. The way in which this deal was put together, without any input or even notice, to the city’s affected by it, speaks clearly that all parties should be concerned about its intent and expected outcomes.

Alameda will lose its voice, which it has on the current WTA board, and it will lose control of its ferry as well, quite possibly without appropriate reimbursement for its assumed costs over the past 18 years. Possibly most important, without some guarantee that the boats we now have will be used to ferry people to Alameda in an emergency, we may have 5 appointees from Sacramento performing triage during a catastrophe and deciding that the larger population that is located in the East Bay and Central Valley have precedence over the island-bound families in Alameda. We have no bridges or tubes engineered to “lifeline” status (the level at which it will remain usable after The Big One.

I would hope that the city would urge the governor to veto this legislation based solely on the fact that it was slapdash at best, and sneaked through in the dead of night at worst. This is not the way to good governance.

If this is a great proposal, it can certainly survive until the next session of the legislature, when the directly affected cities of Alameda and Vallejo can join the authors at the table to hammer out important details like, how much we’ll get for our 20-year old system, how we will maintain local input into both the daily and emergency planning processes.

There are pros and cons to both local control and regional control, this bill seems to be pointed at the worst of regional control with a complete lack of local (or even Bay Area) input.

The City of Alameda and its residents, who have supported the ferry for nearly 20 years, need more time to provide meaningful input into this process. Between the WTA, Alameda, and Vallejo, the Bay Area already has both existing ferries and plans for new ones. Waiting 6-12 months to put together the right plan won’t stop any of this.