December Special District Roundup
HUSD Squabbles at the expense of unhoused students, AC Transit decides on a map, and BART didn't have a CFO before now??
Okay, so I’m still catching up from December, but this makes up for the fact that City business is quiet in January. In the meantime, let’s take a look at what our local Special Districts have been up to in the last month.
HUSD Squabbles and Ignores Student Homelessness
The Hayward Unified School District Board held its final meeting for 2023 in early December and the biggest item on the agenda was the Interim Financial Report. Unfortunately, the majority of the meeting was spent squabbling about past grievances between School Board members. You can read a run-down of what happened at the East Bay Echo.
This behavior does absolutely nothing to help our students or the District that serves them. That’s not to say that racist behavior shouldn’t be checked in a public forum. But when you have a choice between spending time on publicly airing grievances or addressing the District’s continuing financial decline, maybe we could focus on the students for a minute.
The interim financial report paints a dismal picture of the District’s financial future given how its funded. Enrollments continue their steady decline (6,000 fewer students than in 2000) due to families leaving the county due to cost or putting their kids in private schools. Of those who are left 73% of students are low-income and eligible for free/reduced meals and at least 532 students are unhoused.
The 300 page report covers too much to get into right now, from the financial outlook to student demographics to test scores to all the budget resolutions for the past 5+ years. Like many other East Bay school districts, Hayward Unified is watching rich families pull their kids out, low-income families flee to cheaper areas, and middle-income families squeezed into poverty.
The takeaway is that students are getting fewer and poorer, the district may not be able to afford to pay its teachers and staff, and there is no relief from the State on the horizon. With the increased services for at-need students and reduced income due to declining enrollment, HUSD is being bled dry. There isn’t much the District can do about it directly, but they could at least spend some of their meeting talking about how the District may not be able to pay its bills over the next 2 years.
HARD Board Boosts GM Salary
The Hayward Area Recreation and Park District (HARD) Board of Directors voted to increase the General Manager’s salary by 3%, followed by an additional 5% increase starting in July of 2024. The final increase will bring Jim Wheeler’s salary to $24,375.93 per month, for an annual salary of $292, 511.16. For context, that’s the equivalent of over 7 people working for $40,000 per year.
The praise heaped upon him in the Staff report is likely due to him taking leadership during the pandemic. According to the report, the financial stability of the District is largely due to Jim’s leadership. Whether the praise comes because he is an outstanding administrator or because a staff member is writing about their boss’s boss in public is impossible to know.
But according to the mid-year budget review, HARD is healthy financially in large part due to its extensive reserve of $16,000,000. They’ll also receive cash injections of tax dollars from the County in December (presumably after this report) and April.
During the pandemic, HARD elected to lay off many part-time staff, which is likely the reason for most of their $16,000,000 reserve. If an agency is mostly funded by taxes, those taxes didn’t stop because the pandemic hit—I know I was still paying them. So if this plan was the brain-child of the current General Manager, he’s more than paid for his own raise in cost-savings at the expense of dozens of part-time workers.
AC Transit Selects a Map
After months of meetings and outreach, AC Transit finally decided on a new map. They landed on the Jade map that puts Hayward, Fairview, and Newark together as Transit Besties. Look for a new Director to be elected soon as Ward 6—that’s us—will get its election for Director in 2024.
But What’s Going On With AC Transit in Hayward?
Hayward reps also met with AC Transit to go over the realign plans again. The only part that was new or interesting was the slideshow outlining the actual route paths.
They also discussed the East Bay Greenway project and how that’s been moved around. New recommendations will be coming and the City should be entering into the outreach phase soon. If you have strong feelings about where bike paths should go, keep an eye out for focus groups, pop-up events, and door-to-door outreach.
On the development front, the corner of D and Main (across from the Credit Union) is apparently slated to become 12 3-story townhomes. It sounds bonkers to remove commercial space Downtown for residential, instead of trying to have a mixed-use development like the one proposed on 966 B Street. That would seem to fit better with the Downtown Specific plan, but developers get to do what they want.
On 1190 Russell Way some developers are proposing a 5-story 64 unit complex with underground parking right next to the San Lorenzo Creek. And elsewhere on Russell Way there’s plans for a 3-story multi-family building on a podium of parking with 14 units. I’m generally excited about high-density developments, but if you’ve seen Russell way, you know that it’s a no-lane road that is in really bad shape. I hope that they at least repave it as a part of the development or the shiny new building is going to clash with the potholes in a big way.
It would be pretty neat if there were a place to get development updates that aren’t hidden in a joint meeting with another agency, but we can always dream.
BART Does Financials
I’m not a financial wizard. I don’t understand too much of the ins and outs of finance, but I know that when you’re paying $1,400,000 to develop a roadmap to reorganize your entire financial structure, you’ve got some issues. The money is going to UPlift Collaborative, and they’ll be tasked with spending over a year developing and implementing a plan to reorganize how BART does financials.
I don’t know the details and I don’t have time to look into it, but suffice it to say that change of this magnitude being forced on them from the Office of the Inspector General means that BART’s money issues may go a bit deeper than decreased pandemic ridership. But that’s always been my suspicion, ever since I heard that both BART Management and the BART Unions were banding together to fight off more stringent fiscal oversight. Not a good look.
One of the biggest immediate steps is hiring a Chief Financial Officer—not sure how they never had one before—and approving the search and relocation fees. There’s no word yet on how much the CFO would be making or what their exact duties are, but if you’re an administrative money-type interested in a big project, keep an eye out for the position in the coming weeks.