BART Strike Settled With Tentative 4-Year Pact

The Bay Area Rapid Transit District and its striking unions reached a tentative agreement Saturday that should have trains running again by Monday morning, both sides announced in the predawn hours.

It was good news for stressed-out Bay Area residents, who had slogged through a frustrating work week of endless traffic jams, nightmarish commutes and increased air pollution as BART management and the unions quarreled over wages and pay scales in marathon negotiations.

“Bay Area, the unions feel bad this internal dispute had to affect you,” said Paul Varacalli, executive director of Service Employees International Union Local 790, one of three unions that walked off the job Sept. 7. “This has not been a good experience for the Bay Area and is one that should not be repeated,” Varacalli told reporters at a predawn Oakland news conference where the tentative agreement was announced.

Union leaders said they will recommend the contract to their members, who are expected to vote on its ratification this week.

“What didn’t we get?” asked a jubilant Bill Lloyd, spokesman for Local 790. “It is an excellent package, a win-win-win for riders, union and management.”

“Everybody walked away feeling pretty good,” said BART spokesman Mike Healy.

In Chinatown on Saturday, Mayor Willie Brown pronounced himself “delighted” with the tentative agreement. Brown had intervened in the strike, holding informal talks between BART management and union leaders in his office Monday and Tuesday that both sides said helped propel them back into serious negotiations. Brown described the strike as a crisis on its second day, and said it was hurting San Francisco’s economy by tripling commute times for some workers coming into San Francisco and clogging city streets.

BART normally carries about 275,000 riders daily on 93 miles of track that connect San Francisco and East Bay bedroom communities. Tens of thousands of commuters who travel west into the city daily switched to ferries, buses, carpools and telecommuting during the strike, and coped with major disruptions in their daily routine.

“I guess this means I can go home again,” said Jerry, a security guard for a financial district building who declined to give his last name. The guard lives in the East Bay community of Walnut Creek, about 10 miles from San Francisco. He normally rides BART to work, he said, but he moved into a friend’s apartment in San Francisco the first day of the six-day strike and slept on his friend’s couch all week.

“I will be back on BART Monday,” Jerry said. “But I won’t be talking to any BART employees, at least not for a few days. I’m still mad at them. This strike never should have happened.”

BART management and union representatives said that the breakthrough in their often bitter negotiations came when BART agreed to offer a four-year contract instead of the three-year contract it normally reaches with its unions.

The $43.5-million tentative agreement will give each of BART’s 2,600 employees a lump-sum payment of $3,000 in the first year and a 4% wage increase annually for the next three years, Healy said. It also will shorten the time it takes new employees to reach top scale, and ends a system that paid employees hired after Jan. 1, 1995, no more than 90% of top scale.

The unions reportedly had sought a pay raise of 6% the first year, 5.5% the second year and 5% the third year for their employees, who are the highest-paid public transit employees in the state. They said such increases were necessary to help BART workers cope with the high cost of living in the Bay Area. Top-earning members of the union now can make as much as $48,000 a year.

Before the strike, BART management’s last offer was a 3% annual pay raise for three years. Healy said that by switching to a four-year contract and granting employees a lump-sum payment the first year, BART will be able to pay for the new package without increasing rider fares.

Healy and other BART officials acknowledged that both management and the unions have fences to mend with Bay Area residents who throughout the week expressed anger at both management and unions for disrupting their lives.

“Our job is not only to restore services for the Monday morning commute, but to restore civility and a sense of purpose,” BART Board President Margaret Pryor told reporters at a 4:30 a.m. news conference in Oakland. “I want to express our deep regret and our deep appreciation to the people of the Bay area for enduring this disruption of their lives.”

When negotiations faltered Thursday, state mediator Ruth Blanco said the talks were the most bitter she had seen in 17 years as a negotiator. She blamed what she called the inexperience of both sides for their inability to reach agreement. “There are millions of people sitting on the freeways but there is no cohesion” in the negotiations, Blanco said.

Both management and the unions are hoping to quickly put the acrimony behind them, Healy said. BART workers were expected to begin checking tracks, testing trains and performing routine maintenance Saturday night, and trains were expected to be running on their regular schedules again early Monday, in time for rush hour.

Many angry commuters have vowed that they will not return to BART.

But management and labor seemed confident Saturday that the public’s anger will dissipate once the trains start running again.