San Francisco News Blog

Thanks to ink finding its way onto a hastily assembled contract Friday evening, BART escaped the specter of its Halloween trick being hundreds of thousands in wasted state funds. Still, the day of financial reckoning may not have been eliminated but only postponed .

BART's Oct. 30 pact with contractor Solar Eclipse allows the builder 10 business days -- starting from today -- to fulfill the bonding requirements it could not line up in the proceeding weeks. If the company is unable to obtain bonding at that time, however, the contract expires -- and, it seems, so does the state's offer of roughly $800,000 to redo lighting at North Berkeley BART.

"Let's cross that bridge when we get to it," said BART spokesman Linton Johnson when asked what would happen to the state grant if Solar Eclipse's contract was voided. "I'm not sure we know the answer to that just yet."

Our calls to Solar Eclipse's proprietor, Nedar Bey, have not yet been returned. Bey made headlines by receiving the contract from the very BART board he once dismissed as "servants of the devil." Last week he refused to speak with SF Weekly, stating he had no idea of knowing if "real journalists" were calling his cell phone.

Several BART board members described the anxiety surrounding the last-minute contract as the byproduct of a misbegotten process. After receiving authorization to spend more than $3 million in state funds for lighting at 12th Street Oakland and North Berkeley stations back in December of 2008, Board member Lynette Sweet noted that it wasn't until September of this year that BART management came to the board and, noting the Oct. 31 deadline, requested an "emergency contract" be put out to bid. Bey won that bid -- but he turned in his paperwork on the wrong forms. Rather than be informed of this misstep via a certified letter, he was sent an e-mail -- which he says he never received.

"Our policy never has been to send an e-mail," Sweet told SF Weekly. "And he turned in his proposal on the wrong paperwork because BART gave him the wrong paperwork."

When the contract went out to bid once more, LINC Corporation -- which had done similar work at San Francisco's 16th Street and 24th Street stations -- came in with the low offer. But this created a sticky situation for the agency (several board members pointed to BART's abysmal record of awarding contracts to minority-owned firms). So, at the BART board's Oct. 22 meeting, it split the contract in two -- LINC would work the 12th Street Station and Solar Eclipse would do North Berkeley.

Both firms were subsequently informed they would have to provide voluminous packets to BART proving they'd lined up the necessary bonding and insurance by Oct. 26. LINC complied. Solar Eclipse did not -- and, for the next week, the company and BART blamed each other for the builder's inability to obtain bonding.

If Bey has subsequently obtained bonding -- or has a line on it -- he hasn't returned our calls to tell us. And no one we've contacted at BART knows definitively what will happen to the government money if Bey cannot come through.

"I don't think anyone knows for certain what is going to happen if Solar Eclipse doesn't come up with that bonding," said board member Bob Franklin. "I think that money would go away. If it were, it's worth asking the question of the granting agency if we could get an extension."