To sell or not to sell — that was one of the questions fairgrounds officials considered this week as they discussed the possibility of eBART coming to Antioch’s fairgrounds. With the idea of a train station on the premises more real than ever, the nine-member board posed questions to several consultants at Wednesday’s meeting.
The 80-acre property at L and West 10th streets is one of the East County sites where Bay Area Rapid Transit is considering building stations for eBART, diesel-powered trains that are smaller and less costly than conventional BART trains. Although eBART officials began eyeing the fairgrounds as a possible site while doing a feasibility study in 2001-02, they have not yet approached the fair board about using the property.
Even so, real estate attorney Richard Hyde advised board members to start talking to BART officials right away instead of costing the agency time and money by waiting until that agency has finished planning the project to raise any objections. “You need to know what the ramifications are of all the various options,” he said.
BART doesn’t have the authority to acquire the state-owed fairgrounds by initiating eminent domain proceedings, Hyde said. If two public agencies want the same property, by law the state’s wishes would trump BART’s, he said. But it’s government officials in Sacramento who would decide whether to sell the land — not the local fair board, Hyde added, although he also noted that the state Departments of Food and Agriculture and General Services likely would follow board members’ recommendation.
Board member Jeff Clark wondered whether the fairgrounds could be rezoned if necessary to fetch the best possible price. “(I want to be) sitting on a pile of gold rather than a pile of dirt,” he said. Another option for the board to consider is leasing all or part of the fairgrounds, said urban development consultant Andrew Plescia.
Plans for eBART have prompted debate in recent months over whether the fairgrounds should move to a more central location in Contra Costa County to attract more visitors. Plescia and Hyde cited the cases of other fair boards that were faced with decisions about their property. Like the one here, the fairgrounds in Madera was an unincorporated site surrounded by a built-up area of the city. Fair officials negotiated a lucrative deal after deciding it made sense to lease part of the fairgrounds they were not using to a commercial developer, Hyde said.
While fair board members mull the possibilities, BART also is considering five other locations that, like the fairgrounds, are leading contenders to become eBART stations. The proposed sites are: Railroad Avenue in Pittsburg; just east of BART’s Park and Ride lot on Hillcrest Avenue in Antioch; near Empire and Neroly in an area that straddles the Antioch-Oakley city limits; near Walnut Boulevard and Oak Street in Brentwood; and in Byron’s north downtown, west of Byron Highway.
The cities of Pittsburg and Brentwood already have chosen precise locations, and eBART officials now are helping the others do the same, said eBART Project Manager Ellen Smith. The estimated $390 million eBART project is just one of several options BART is considering in an effort to make mass transit more accessible to East County’s beleaguered commuters.
Also on the table is a proposal to extend conventional BART train service beyond the Pittsburg/Bay Point station. A third alternative is rapid transit buses, which would use a dedicated lane down the middle of Highway 4 as well as along a railroad corridor and be designed in a way that allows passengers to get on and off quickly.
Most East County communities are preparing to hire consultants who will help them come up with ways of generating enough riders to justify building eBART. BART has shelled out $2.4 million to pay for these ridership development plans. Making the project a reality depends on building clusters of homes and businesses around each station, Smith said.
These so-called transit villages would be an attempt to satisfy the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a regional funding agency that last year adopted a policy to encourage local jurisdictions to maximize the potential ridership along new public transit corridors.
Every new mass transit extension now must have a certain number of housing units within a half-mile radius of that project — an average of 2,200 homes in eBART’s case — to qualify for eBART officials are working on a state and federally mandated analysis of the project’s potential effects on the environment, which is scheduled to be complete by summer 2007.
Smith said they also are expecting some time in the next couple of months to hear from ePAC, a group of eight elected officials from East County who are trying to decide which mass transit option would best serve this area. The recommendations of ePAC — along with comments from East County’s four cities, the county, and the CCTA — will carry the most weight as BART’s board of directors ponders which of the mass transit options to adopt or whether to scrap the whole idea, Smith said.
BART is expected to make that decision once it has finished its environmental analysis of the proposed sites in July 2007. eBART trains are scheduled to be operational in 2010.
