Lawsuits, Delays, and Political Drama as Salesforce Transit Center Fallout Deepens

After barely more than a month of operation, the $2.2 billion Salesforce Transit Center was closed in September after inspectors discovered cracks in two of the building's four steel support beams.

Since then, the legal and political drama has taken hold.

"San Francisco city officials are withholding $9.6 million meant to fund expansion planning for the Salesforce Transit Center, in a bid to hold its leadership accountable for alleged mismanagement of the $2.2 billion project," reported Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez on October 18. 

"That funding was aimed toward design and engineering of a planned future phase of the transit center, in which the basement floor will be converted to accommodate California High Speed Rail and a soon-to-be electrified Caltrain," adds Fitzgerald Rodriguez. (There's more on the threat to future planning efforts later in this article).

News of the city's reluctance to continue funding the project came a day after news of a lawsuit, reported by Rachel Swan, over mismanagement of the project. That lawsuit doesn't even mention the cracked beams. Swan explains:

The suit covers the $2.2 billion center’s construction phase and makes no mention of the current problems facing the facility....But the action is the latest in a series of lawsuits stemming from the project’s delays and cost overruns, and it blames the authority for “mismanagement, failures, and delays.”

Fast forward to this week, when the San Francisco County Transportation Authority Board voted to finalize the decision to suspend funding for next planning steps for the project "until The City can evaluate what led to the discovery last month of cracks in two steel beams, shutting down the newly constructed $2.2 billion transit center," according to the most recent article on the subject from Fitzgerald Rodriguez.

From another article by Rachel Swan comes more bad news that testing of the cracked steel beams has been delayed—results are now expected back in mid-November. "Only then can officials determine what happened and how to fix it, said Mark Zabaneh, executive director of the Joint Powers Authority, speaking to the authority Tuesday. A reopening date has not been set," according to Swan.