All four incumbents hold onto BART Board director seats

All four BART Board directors running for reelection won bids to retain their seats, with embattled Director Debora Allen cruising to victory with a wide margin.

According to the latest voter tallies, Allen defeated her District 1 challenger Jamie Salcido with a little more than 64 percent of the vote, compared to Salcido’s nearly 27 percent.

Allen’s other opponent, Emmy Akin, earned just over 9 percent of the 130,899 ballots cast in the race.

Allen said:

“I’m not just doing the job at election time. I’ve been working hard at this almost at a full-time basis for almost four years. I’ve been very visible and transparent with the media.”

Allen said:

“I’m out there working on issues that people want, working on behalf of riders on what they want and on behalf our taxpayers and what they want.”

District 1 is in Contra Costa County where the Concord, Lafayette, Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre and Walnut Creek stations are.

Allen has often clashed with her fellow BART directors over the transit agency’s budget and policing issues, among other things, and six of her fellow directors — Lateefah Simon, Bevan Dufty, Mark Foley, Janice Li, Robert Raburn and Rebecca Saltzman — all endorsed Salcido during the campaign.

Allen said:

“We should not be defunding the police. I heard that over and over from my voters, but I had an opponent that was backed and recruited and funded by my fellow directors who have been pushing that directive.”

She added that she does think the system needs to find ways to “improve our policing techniques and processes.”

Allen said Wednesday that one of the transit agency’s biggest challenges revolves around its drastically shrinking ridership and revenue in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Allen said:

“We’ve been bleeding money.”

At an Oct. 22 meeting, BART directors were told the system could face a $33 million deficit by next summer if it doesn’t recover ridership — which is hovering at about 13 percent of normal — or if the federal government doesn’t pass another relief bill.

Allen said she is advocating for a combination of budget cuts and new revenue to shore up the struggling system.

In the wake of Allen’s victory, Saltzman used Twitter to express her disappointment, saying, in part, that:

“[I]t’s important to note that the candidates she and BART police union recruited to run against (Simon, Dufty and John McPartland) all lost badly, and they were unsuccessful recruiting a candidate to run against me.”

Saltzman ran unopposed.

Dufty, who earned nearly 67 percent of the vote, defeated three challengers to retain his District 9 seat, which encompasses most of San Francisco.

Simon defeated challenger Sharon Kidd with nearly 56 percent of the vote in District 7, which includes parts of Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties.

John McPartland, was able to kept his District 5 seat but won by the narrowest of margins compared to his fellow incumbents.

McPartland earned nearly 38 percent of the vote, while challengers Steven Dunbar garnered 34 percent and Mike Wallace earned roughly 28 percent.

McPartland said:

“I am grateful for the confidence of the voters to allow me to continue to do the job I’ve been working at for the past three terms.”

He said:

“(He’ll work to) provide for the safety of the public and to sustain ourselves against the financial challenges during the low ridership and regain the trust of our patronage and provide for the safety and efficient transportation and well-being of our passengers.”