Thor Swift for The Bay Citizen

The BART line to Dublin-Pleasanton now ends outside Dublin

John McPartland, the new president of the transit agency’s elected board of directors, has made it his mission to extend BART to this East Bay suburb of 80,000, which is home to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

“That was the condition of employment very clearly stated by my constituents, that ‘if you don’t get BART to Livermore, we’re certainly not going to vote for you,’” McPartland said. “I’ve committed myself to that.”

McPartland, a military man who drives a pickup truck and lives in suburban Castro Valley, has ambitions that clash directly with those of Tom Radulovich, the board’s vice president. Radulovich runs Livable City, a nonprofit group that advocates for public transit and pedestrians. He lives in San Francisco’s lively Mission district, and his only vehicle is a bicycle.

“It’s just not the best use of a billion and a half dollars, especially with our capital needs,” said Radulovich. “Some of it’ll end up coming out of funds that otherwise would have gone to the maintenance and rehab, system capacity, seismic safety and car replacement.”

Proponents put the cost of the proposed extension at $1.2 billion. It is more than a rift between the suburban mouse and the city mouse. It is a fundamental disagreement over how scarce funds for public transit should be spent: expanding the 104-mile BART system or maintaining what already exists. The transit agency needs $7 billion over the next 25 years for track maintenance, station upgrades and a fleet of new train cars, BART officials say.

“That’s an internal struggle that we’re just going to have to deal with,” said McPartland. “I’m hoping that we’ll both be able to get what we need in the long run.”

Injecting a sense of urgency into the debate is a plan by Alameda County officials to put a sales tax proposal on the ballot in November that would raise $7.7 billion for county transportation projects over the next 30 years. A total of $400 million is slated for the Livermore extension in a draft of how the money would be spent, that the Alameda County Transportation Commission could complete on Jan. 26.

If voters approve the 1 percent sales tax, that could effectively force BART into building the extension, to the dismay of Radulovich and other critics who believe that system will fall into disrepair if more money is spent on what he called boondoggles.

“When you’ve got a house where the roof is failing, you don’t take out your savings and build an addition,” said Jeff Hobson, deputy director for TransForm, a transit advocacy group. “We feel like it’s nutty to go ahead and plan for more multi-billion-dollar extensions.”

But supporters from Livermore say that BART owes them an extension, because they have been paying taxes to support the agency since its inception.

“The citizens feel that they paid for it and it’s only fair that they get it now,” Linda Jeffery Sailors, the former mayor of Dublin, said.

Sailors, who now lives in Livermore, led a successful campaign to alter the extension plan chosen by BART. A study by the agency in 2010 recommended an 11-mile, $3.8 billion extension with a stop in downtown Livermore and another outside town. But the concerns raised by Sailors and other citizens about property acquisition issues and years of construction led Livermore leaders to favor a version of the plan that the study rejected: a 5-mile, $1.2 billion extension with just one stop, on the median of the 580 freeway on the outskirts of town.

Support for that plan has thrown the exact scope and cost of the project into uncertainty.

McPartland said he supported the extension along the freeway and was set to introduce a proposal to finance a new study of the project.

But Radulovich called the freeway station an anachronism from an era when BART catered to commuters driving from the suburbs to catch the train. Downtown stations encourage housing to be built nearby, requiring less car use, he said.

“We have all this logic of prior commitments and it’s predicated on this sprawling pattern of growth,” he said. “That’s not the way the region is growing anymore, so why are we building these extensions as if it were?”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.