Rare Opportunity - Spectacular Candidate for AC Transit

Chris Peeples, the incumbent, has been an At-Large Director for over eleven years, and currently serves as the Board President. We endorsed him for re-election in November 2004. Since then, challenger Joyce Roy’s vigorous, detailed, and effective criticism of the Van Hool buses, extensively covered by the East Bay Express, has led to some interesting revelations. Although Peeples is a widely respected Board member, Roy is clearly qualified to serve on the Board. In view of her dedicated work on behalf of riders and drivers and fiscal integrity, this year we are endorsing Joyce Roy.

Peeples’ questionnaire answers list many achieve¬ments, for example, the effort to provide free transit to lower-income youth and the current low-cost 31-day youth pass. AC Transit does Environmental Justice “analyses on all of our major decisions to insure that our actions have the greatest possible benefit for and least detriment to disadvantaged communities.”

Peeples refers to the “antiunion and anti-public sec¬tor attitude that we must fight all the time.” For example, there was a recent Federal Transit Administration “attempt to prohibit transit agencies from providing supplemental school service so that schools would contract with private providers of “yellow bus” school service.” (The local school districts can’t afford to pay private school bus companies to provide the service that AC Transit now provides.) Peeples says air pollution has been reduced, due to some equipment that was developed locally and was tested, installed, and maintained by AC Transit’s union mechanics. However, in reading Peeples’ answers to our questionnaire, it was sometimes hard to tell when some of his achievements happened, and also hard to tell whether he was taking credit for improvements (such as the major reduction in air pollution) that were mandated by State law. As of this writing (mid-September), the union (ATU 192) had not yet made an endorsement decision in this race.
Roy is well qualified to serve on the AC Transit Board. She has been active on regional transportation issues for many years. For example, she served as the Chair of the Regional Transportation Committee of the League of Women Voters, Bay Area, from 1996 to 2004. Roy does not own a car and is a frequent bus rider. When she ran for AC Transit Board (Ward 2) in November 2000, we endorsed her in a race in which we also endorsed Greg Harper (see writeup for Ward 2). Roy is well known (at least to Oakland Greens) for her lawsuit against the Oak to Ninth proposed development and her participation in the “Better Oak to Ninth” referendum effort of 2006-2007.

Roy is running primarily because Peeples supports the Van Hool buses and Roy represents the many driv¬ers and passengers who find Van Hools hard to drive, uncomfortable and dangerous, especially for older and disabled riders. In her persistent effort to understand how such problematic buses could have been purchased, Roy brought larger issues to light—issues about the “special relationship” between AC Transit and the Van Hool Company, and about the General Manager and some of his expenditures. The voter may accept Peeples’ descrip¬tion of the changes Van Hool has recently made to the bus design (to put more seats at floor level, for example), and still credit Roy with being the public-minded citizen activist who persuaded independent local journalists to tell the story that pressured the District to insist on improve¬ments.

We are especially critical of Peeples because he appears to have involved AC transit staff in providing evidence used in a court case filed against Roy’s ballot statement by “a longtime supporter of Peeples, William Rowen of Alameda....In the lawsuit, Rowen complained that parts of Roy’s statement were false or misleading, and asked a judge to strike the offending passages. But the case would have never gotten off the ground were it not for Peeples. Rowen’s Oakland-based attorney David Stein admitted that the AC Transit board president helped obtain a pivotal series of sworn statements from agency staff that Rowen used to make his case against Roy. In addition, Peeples helped get a sworn statement from a Van Hool employee from Belgium. In the end, the sworn statements tipped the scales for Rowen and Peeples and against Roy, who is running a grassroots campaign and defended herself in court.” Source: East Bay Express. (For the entire article see the East Bay Express article “Agency Brass Fights Candidate” by Robert Gammon, dated 9/10/08.)

Peeples supports Rick Fernandez, the current General Manager at AC Transit, in large part because according to Peeples, Fernandez improved the maintenance department from an understaffed facility which could not keep the buses running, to an award-winning facility with well-trained mechanics who keep the buses on the streets in good working order. Peeples also credits Fernandez with finding ways to use Federal funds for bus maintenance. In contrast, Roy says “The General Manager’s all consuming interest is buying more buses that people hate and selling off the older buses that people like. The board had a hard time convincing him that increasing ridership should be AC Transit’s main goal.
“I support firing him and the General Counsel im¬mediately.”

Vote for Joyce Roy for the AC Transit Board’s At-Large seat.