Who Pays the Staff?

Phase 1 allocated $4.6 million to staff/project management, plus $800,000 for bond transaction costs.

Project management is necessary. The accountability question is not whether staffing should cost zero. It is how much bond capacity supports implementation, what work those employees would otherwise perform, and what happens to their salaries when the bond ends.

The Phase 2 matrix identified $7.1 million for Staffing/FESS, in addition to the $53.25 million project budget and $650,000 for art.

FESS is the T1 manual's budget code for Facility, Equipment, Services, and Supplies — the purchases needed to manage and administer the bond program. The manual has the T1 management analyst submit purchase orders against it, and the FESS budget is prepared for each phase and reviewed annually. So "Staffing/FESS" is broader than payroll: it combines staff costs with the administrative overhead of running the program.

Taken with the Phase 1 staff/project-management allocation, T1’s plans contemplated about $11.7 million in these two staffing/implementation categories across the two phases.

That is not proof of excess. But it is enough to raise a basic question: how much of that spending paid for temporary extra capacity created by T1, and how much paid for ordinary City work that would otherwise have been carried by another recurring City funding source?

Public Works explicitly described cost shifting 51 positions among funds. Planning and Development similarly described moving existing personnel costs from the General Fund to special funds.

This establishes that fund-based personnel cost shifting is part of Berkeley’s contemporary budget-balancing toolkit.

It does not prove that T1 was improperly charged. It makes the next question unavoidable: what would happen to the T1-funded staff costs if there were no successor bond?

Berkeley approved moving two T1-funded roles into Measure FF implementation. The staff report explicitly cited T1’s sunset and identified combined annual salary and benefit costs of approximately $468,824 for the two roles.

This demonstrates that bond- or measure-funded staffing can persist by migrating to another restricted funding source rather than disappearing with the original measure.

The City reports that T1 supports approximately five FTE-equivalents spread across multiple employees, and at least two T1-funded roles have already been moved to Measure FF. But the public materials reviewed here do not provide a complete T1 staffing unwind ledger showing, employee by employee, which costs disappear, move to another restricted fund, or return to the already strained General Fund.

For a city managing a structural deficit, that is not a thought exercise. It is part of the fiscal consequence of ending one financing program and starting another.

A bond may legitimately finance staff necessary to deliver its projects. But when the same City is balancing its General Fund partly by moving personnel costs among funds, voters should know the counterfactual.

Would the salary disappear without the bond, or merely land somewhere else? What responsibilities would the employee perform instead?

Without that information, a staffing allocation can simultaneously represent useful project capacity and hidden relief for another stressed fund.

The June 2026 framework identified approximately $40.5 million for staffing and implementation resources against $300 million of principal and projected interest earnings.

Again, this is not automatically excessive. It makes the missing staffing counterfactual materially larger.

Before voters authorize the next bond, they should be able to see which positions are incremental, which are existing, what work they will perform, and where those costs go if Measure U does not pass.