BART Broke Ground Thursday on Extension Through Milpitas

 Officials gathered near the site of the future Berryessa Station in San Jose on Thursday afternoon to celebrate the groundbreaking of a new, 10-mile BART extension project that many said has been decades in the making.

Hard-hat wearing, shovel-toting officials including U.S. Rep. Mike Honda, former Gov. Gray Davis, and Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, symbolically shoveled rocks at the site of the new, long-awaited BART tracks.

Originally considered in the 1950s, but waylaid in favor of other projects, the BART extension is something that Honda said, "should've been
done a long time ago."

BART's Silicon Valley Berryessa Extension Project is the 10-mile first phase of a 16-mile extension from Fremont to Milpitas, San Jose and Santa Clara.

The first phase of the extension, which includes the Berryessa station and a new Milpitas station, is expected to add 2,700 local jobs, Honda said.

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed said at the groundbreaking today that the project was a "great way to grow jobs without growing traffic."`

The 10-mile extension will serve some 23,000 daily passengers per year with 60 BART train cars. Service is expected to begin sometime before 2018, according to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority.

The second phase of the extension project, which includes a 5.1-mile subway tunnel through downtown San Jose, ending near the Santa Clara
Caltrain Station is expected to cost $3.6 billion.

The project is the largest public works project in the county's history, according to the VTA.

The first 10-mile phase -- with a cost of $2.3 billion -- is 50.6 percent locally funded, 10.8 percent state funded, and 38.6 percent federally
funded, the VTA said.

Local Santa Clara County funding comes from increased sales tax revenues, which were voter-approved through two measures passed in 2000 and 2008.

Davis, whose administration set aside $714 million in funding for the project, said the state contributions had come from billions in unexpected revenues generated by Silicon Valley in the year 2000.

Although he said he had not expected the project to take this long to finally break ground, he did say that he had "boundless faith in Silicon Valley."

The VTA received a major chunk of necessary funding for the project last month when the Federal Transit Administration pitched in $900 million for the project.

The federal funding comes from the FTA's New Starts and Small Starts Program, which gives money to locally planned transit projects, which FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff said fit in to some of the current administration's core priorities.

Rogoff said that the project will provide residents with "a real choice in transit."

Rogoff added that BART is currently using the oldest rail cars in America and needs re-investment for replacement cars.

-Bay City News