(Editor's Note: This is the second in a two-part series about newly elected BART District 4 Director Robert Raburn. Monday's article discussed his philosophy on transit and today, delves directly into BART's more controversial subjects.)

Q: When is BART going to raise its parking fees?

A: I think that we have to go after parking fees in a fairly cautious manner. When the parking fees were first implemented, it was a realization that, hey, we’re spending $25,000 or $30,000 to develop a new space in each garage. Who’s paying for that? The passengers? Who’s benefitting? A fraction of the passengers. And so it becomes a social equity issue. As we encounter budget difficulties, it will arise. We cannot be expected to provide parking at a fraction of the market rate.

We should look at travel trips in general and try to evaluate the overall cost. The Clipper Card will give us the opportunity to do that. Imagine someone starting a trip in Alameda, they take a bus to BART and BART takes them into San Francisco. Look at the comparative cost. The motorist, they paid a peak hour $6 toll, and we should price our BART and bus trip so that it’s competitive and people can see a bargain in taking BART. But that’s not how it’s worked in the past.

We should be cognizant of the fact that our base fares are growing faster than the cost of living and not continue to balance the budget on the shoulders of our passengers and expect them to suffer ... maybe find that for some passengers, it makes economic sense. But there are still a lot of people lining up at the toll plaza every morning, pushing through the Caldecott Tunnel, or saying “oh, I’ll just drive” even along a 10-car train that runs absolutely empty. My goal is to put passengers in those seats.

What’s next for the Oakland Airport Connector - OAC?

I’ve been very careful to say that Robert Raburn would not be able to unilaterally dismantle the Airport Connector, but I do see several problems with it.

From the bicyclist point of view, there will be disruption of the Bay Trail that was just opened.

The ADA access will be even more difficult for someone in a wheelchair to get to the airport than it is today, partially because it will require at least two and if not three elevator trips. When you’re looking at three elevators, and you see the notices about elevators being out, it’s a big risk that you might not be able to get there.

We haven’t budgeted for operations. We need station agents to be at the coliseum station to look over all the novice passengers arriving from the airport, to help them out with the ticket machines and fare gates and elevators.

And foremost, we just don’t have the money. We still have to fund the project and there’s over a $100 million shortfall that will require some sort of bonding. BART had hoped to receive a low interest federal loan that would have had attractive terms, but that was denied back in November of 2010. The option is just to float a sales tax revenue bond, but the problem is that the terms are very ugly – you pay the most upfront over the first couple of years. Where will that come from? The general fund ... the passengers.

In order to balance the budget in 2010, we had to eliminate 210 positions, raise the fares and reduce service. We’re in no better shape than we were then. In fact, given our needs to replace the car fleet, given our needs to repair the existing fleet and trackways, I would argue that we have higher priorities to serve the core customers and provide better service. Rather than attempt to build extensions that it doesn’t look we’ll actually pay off. The airport traffic has been declining rather than increasing. And finally, there was another part of the funding picture. There were some high speed rail connectivity funds, some $5.4 million, allocated to the airport connector and those funds evaporated as the state wasn’t able to fill those bonds.

So instead, BART staff has proposed to use some Proposition 1B bond monies that were allocated to station modernization. Holy smokes! I want to make our stations look better, tidy them up. They’re long in the tooth. Twice in December we had absolute outages in our trackways because insulators had corroded and caused a fire. It will not take many incidents with one, two or longer delays before passengers say ‘BART is not reliable.’

Right now we have an admirable on-time performance - on the order of over 95 percent on time - but we’re at risk if we allow the system to deteriorate. On Feb. 18, a piece of trim fell off one of our cars near West Oakland. The fastener holding it had corroded. The trim shorted out the third rail, during the peak evening hour commute and the Transbay tube was out for over an hour in both directions. We need to invest in the core system for its reliability as well as to enhance transit service.

BART isn’t sure how it will pay for the OAC, so what have they been doing since the October 2010 groundbreaking?

Ah, yes. The groundbreaking. I have a lovely photograph of it. They pulled out a tarp with dirt, there were gold shovels, it made for great pictures. The only directors that attended were up for re-election. It was a charade. There was no groundbreaking.

There’s been some clearance of the right of way. A [BART-owned] union hall was demolished, as far as I know that’s the only thing that required construction equipment. You can go out today, you’re not going to see equipment, construction or jobs. [District 7 BART Director] Lynette Sweet was shown a photograph of 50-70 construction worker, and asked, 'I only see five to six people of color. What happened to those jobs for Oakland?'

It looks like it’s not going to come through on the jobs point. And we look at the jobs that were eliminated from BART, and those were good jobs, they kept the stations clean. What are we looking at now? The seats, and they received a low priority. When you make cutbacks you decide on your priorities and cleanliness fell down the list.

There’s been talk for a while about extending BART’s hours of service, but it really seems to have picked up since the 2010 election. What’s the next step?

I think we’ve done a good job taking care of commuters. Now we have lifestyle users. Someone says “I want to live downtown, not own a car and have access to nightlife” and it’s unfair of us to close everything down and say you can’t stay for the encore performance and catch BART home.

We do need to work on providing for everybody’s needs. I believe that on the weekends, we can begin to extend the hours, definitely Saturday night, probably Friday and Saturday nights. Maybe it won’t be system-wide, maybe we need to work on a trial basis, and provide service between the areas that would most benefit, but we’re expecting to get a report back on our next budget system.

When will that report be made public?

For us to be able to get our budget together on time, it has to come out some time in April.

Speaking of those lifestyle users, how late will BART be open for Halloween this year?

[Laughing] I would hope that we would have our new extended hours by Halloween. I would hope that we could make a policy change that would be enacted this year. I would want to promote that change for the East Bay. Oh my gosh, people could come over to Art Murmur from San Francisco, come to our restaurants here in the East Bay. I think it’s very exciting to consider what really could happen with extended BART hours.