Opponents of the BART-to-SFO plan note that a BART station could be built outside the airport, and be connected to terminals with the airport's own "people mover," for hundreds of millions of dollars less than would be spent on the current extension plan. Such a configuration would also eliminate the need for a Millbrae BART station.
The Millbrae station would be one of four necessitated by the current extension plan -- and by far the biggest. It would be a combined facility for riders of BART and CalTrain, the commuter rail service from San Jose to San Francisco, as well as a transfer depot for the region's bus service, run by the San Mateo County Transportation District. Some 33,000 passengers would pass through the station each workday, if official estimates pan out.
Transit activists and environmentalists have lambasted the project as a wasteful government boondoggle. As a private real estate deal, however, it could be judged less harshly.
The city of Millbrae expects the 16-acre BART station to serve as an economic catalyst, igniting a transformation of the sleepy bedroom community on the outskirts of SFO into a contemporary commercial, employment, entertainment, and transportation hub, located midway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
Ground zero for the BART-CalTrain station is a Hertz rental car lot just northeast of the intersection of El Camino Real and Millbrae Avenue, the city's east-west arterial hookup to Highway 101.
If Sen. Feinstein and other members of the local congressional delegation bring home federal funding for the BART extension, waves of economic prosperity are expected to ripple across El Camino to property owned by two companies, Mandalay Holdings I Inc. and Mandalay Holdings II Inc. Anthony Chan is listed in public records as an agent for Mandalay Holdings.
According to Ralph Petty, the Millbrae official managing the station-area redevelopment effort, Mandalay's property, home to a strip shopping center and an asphalt parking lot, is ripe for change. It could, Petty suggests, become intensive commercial office space or a hotel, built lot line to lot line.
Also on the west side of El Camino, a half-block south of Millbrae Avenue, is the Friend property, part of which is leased to a Lucky supermarket and a Lyon's Restaurant. Friend also owns a small parcel on the east side of El Camino Real; a Coldwell Banker real estate office occupies the smaller site.
Petty says the Friend land also could host an office building or a hotel, although, he notes, airport height restrictions would cap such a project on that property at four stories.
Hotel construction is of particular interest to Millbrae, because officials there see the city as uniquely positioned to host overnight and short-range business travelers who have clients up and down the Peninsula.
And anticipation of a BART extension already has had a yeasty effect on land values. Before Millbrae was part of he BART-to-the-airport package, the city acquired property along Millbrae Avenue for street improvements at $40 a square foot, Petty says. He estimates that owners of land near the future station would not consider taking less than $50 a square foot today -- which, if true, reflects a 25 percent jump.
But Petty is quick to point out that the project spoils aren't being hogged entirely by Democratic insiders from San Francisco.
Local property owners, led by a convalescent-home owner and a real estate agent, are striving to assemble small parcels adjacent to and in close proximity of the station, hoping to build movie theaters, a parking garage, and a hotel, Petty says.
"If BART gets funded, we are going to crank right along with them," Petty declares with civic pride.
