In 1987, Ward Allen was appointed to the Oakland Board of Port Commissioners by Oakland's 45th Mayor Lionel J. Wilson. In 1990, she was elected among board members to serve as president; making her the first African American female and the longest woman to achieve such stride with two one-year terms.[3] After having served six years in public office at the Port of Oakland, her tenure ended in 1993.
On December 15, 2005, the BART board of directors elected Ward Allen to serve as its president and Lynette Sweet as its vice president; making BART the first major transportation agency to be led by two African-American women in American history.[5]
Ward Allen retired from Peralta in 2005, but served as an adjunct professor until 2017. She taught students African American history and was a member of the ethnic studies department.
Much of her policy-making consisted of advancing women in small businesses and fortune 500 companies, improving military wives' circumstances, and fighting for women to return to their jobs after pregnancy. As commission chair, Ward Allen pushed for practical workplace policies that resulted in women receiving paid maternity leave; she worked closely on this workplace policy with then-AssemblywomanMaxine Waters who introduced a bill on this issue in 1984,[12] and she advocated for women to receive equal compensation for equal work. Ward Allen told The New York Times that women should be allowed to return to the workplace after having children and be afforded maternity leave under California law. She saw maternity leave as a vital right for women and thought the lack of a maternity law in California perpetuated a false choice for women, stating:
"In essence it says women have a choice: You can choose to work or you can have children. But you can't have both."[12]
Ward Allen led a wide range of port planning, port development, and port productivity projects working with port authorities across the world. While president of the board of port commissioners, she expanded maritime and aviation activities.[18]
On August 6, 1991, she hired Charles Roberts as chief executive officer of the port.[19] In addition, she was responsible for the controversial board authorization to award the City of Oakland $5.2 million to ease its fiscal crisis in 1991, whereby helping the city balance its budget.[20]
In addition, Ward Allen along with her board members advocated and secured funds to bring Oakland - Jack London Square (Amtrak station) to Oakland in the early 1990s after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.[22] This was the second time in history Amtrak had come to Oakland. The site of the Amtrak station officially re-opened in 1995 owned by the Port of Oakland. Ward Allen was involved in much of the contracting and legal work surrounding the Port of Oakland owning the facility where the Amtrak station was built when she headed the Port from 1990 to 1992, working with two different city mayors; Lionel J. Wilson and Elihu Harris.
Ward Allen was a critical proponent of the Jack London Square Re-Development project during the late 1980s and early 1990s.[23] In 1989, when Ward Allen was vice president of the Port of Oakland Board of Commissioners, the Port's headquarters relocated to Jack London Square and her name was engraved on the building.
Dredging projects
In July 1991, then-President Ward Allen of the Board of Port Commissioners, advocated for permits to be issued to allow dredging to take place at the port. She pushed for dredging at the port along with labor representatives and other agencies, stating that:
"Dredging is already needed . . . the port is the shallowest on the West Coast."[24]
Oakland Aviation High School
Ward Allen was an advocate for the creation of Oakland Aviation High School, which was adopted by the Oakland Unified School District with the Port of Oakland serving as a partner of the charter school.[25] While she was on the BART Board, she remained committed to serving as an advocate of this charter school since her days on the Board of Port Commissioners.
Oakland City Council campaigns
1998 election
Ward Allen was a District 6 Oakland City Councilcandidate in 1998[26] challenging then-city councilman Nathan Miley. She ran a strong campaign having received major endorsements from local elected officials that resulted in her earning 42% of the vote to Miley's 52%.[27] Ward Allen's first city council campaign was effective, but unsuccessful in unseating an incumbent.[28][29]
2001 special election
In 2001,[30] Ward Allen sought her second bid to become District 6 Oakland city councilperson. Her candidacy was endorsed by Oakland city councilmen Larry Reid and Dick Spees.[31] After having campaigned aggressively on the trail a second time, she lost to union leader Moses Mayne by 129 votes in a hotly contested special election.[32]
During Ward Allen's tenure she changed policies, procedures, operations, and reformed the BART Police with assistance from the California State Legislature and members of the general public under her watch.[35]
In addition, she advocated for the hiring of Dorothy Dugger as the first female to serve as general manager or CEO of the entire BART organization. Although, Ward Allen originally supported the hiring of an African American female, Beverly Scott of the Sacramento Regional Transit District to become general manager, she had to compromise.[36]
Ward Allen constantly reinforced transit oriented development policy-making, which resulted in affordable housing and livable communities for residents in the Fruitvale, Coliseum, and Lake Merritt districts.[37] She supported minority-and-women-owned businesses stay afloat economically, and generated employment opportunities for her constituents.[38]
"We urge our state legislators to take swift action so we can implement civilian oversight this year."[35]
Additionally, she served as vice president in 2005[42] and President in 2006[43] of the BART board of directors, managing a budget of $672 million for the transportation agency.[44]
Since 1998, Ward Allen fought vigorously for the creation of contracting opportunities for small minority-and-women-owned businesses.[45] Providing employment opportunities to Oakland and Alameda residents was her main source of motivation in elected office. Therefore, she often collaborated with the local unions to facilitate the creation of job opportunities to put people back to work and provide economic relief to citizens, especially in the wake of the Great Recession.[46] For example, the Oakland Airport Connector project generated approximately 2,500 to 5,200 direct and indirect jobs.[47][48] Ward Allen actively sponsored many of BART's historic measures such as its first Project Labor Agreement with zip-code-priority to disadvantaged communities in her district and formulated the first small business and bonding committee to help mitigate economic disparities disproportionately impacting minority-owned businesses.[49]
As chairwoman of the Oakland Airport Connector Committee, she has solicited the input from diverse communities (such as non-English speaking and low-income), in the aftermath of a civil rights complaint against the construction of the Coliseum–Oakland International Airport line.[52] She was the first BART director to demand that signage and documentation needed to be multi-lingual; to serve her communities, but to ensure diverse populations understand how to evacuate train stations in the circumstance of an emergency. This need was especially a priority to Oakland's Chinatown and Fruitvale districts given the predominantly Asian and Latino populations. Furthermore, she made sure there were live translators available for the first time in BART's history during community and townhall meetings in 2009.
California legislation to enforce civilian oversight
On July 15, 2010, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the historic BART Accountability Act AB 1586[53] into California law, which Ward Allen urged the California State Legislature to adopt during a Senate hearing on June 15, 2010.[54][55] She worked closely with Assemblyman Sandre Swanson, who authored the legislation, to enforce civilian oversight of the BART Police Department.[56] Ward Allen thanked the governor, the community, the entire BART organization and Assemblyman Swanson for their hard work on getting AB 1586 bill implemented in the aftermath of the shooting of Oscar Grant.[55] The law also created the Office of the Independent Auditor at BART, which would investigate matters brought to the BART Board by the civilian oversight committee.
In addition to changing California law, Ward Allen supported the family of Oscar Grant by being the only BART director who attended the Oscar Grant trial on the nine-member board in Los Angeles during the summer of 2010. Earlier, in the same year, she was one of the keynote speakers at the inaugural vigil; honoring the life of Oscar Grant and supporting his family at the Fruitvale station. In her speech, she apologized again on the behalf of BART for his tragic death, and gave Grant's uncle Cephus Johnson a bouquet of flowers for the family.[57] The events leading up to Grant's death were chronicled in the film Fruitvale Station, in which Michael B. Jordan starred as Grant.[58] The Fruitvale station was in Ward Allen's district.
In 2009, the hiring of two independent organizations reviewed BART's policies and procedures in the process of reforming the BART Police.[59] The two independent firms, included the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement and Myers Nave who were responsible for investigating the matters of BART Police Shooting of Oscar Grant and were charged with making recommendations to the board.[60][61] Ward Allen acknowledged that the BART Police Department needed to be reformed and restructured. She told the public at its first board meeting after the shooting that:
"We must learn from our mistakes and we must make sure [the killing of unarmed passenger] never happens again. I want to hear everything you have to say. You have every right to hold us accountable."[62]
Thereafter, Ward Allen formulated and chaired BART's first Police Department Review Committee, and as a result, BART made sweeping changes on many security measures, as well as corrected and implemented several policies and procedures.[63] BART Police Department Review Committee has led to the re-training of all officers on use of force, diversity re-training and other issues. Ward Allen hired Kenton Rainey, the person selected to lead BART's 296-member police force, to take command as Chief of Police.[64]
On May 25, 2005, then-Vice President Ward Allen of the BART board of directors joined Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, city councilman Larry Reid, CCJPA vice chair Forrest Williams, and Caltrans Division of Rail Chief Bill Bronte at the grand opening of the Oakland Coliseum Intercity Rail Station.[65] She was a proponent of the $6.6 million facility being built to provide other modes of public transportation to citizens of Oakland and the Bay Area. Ward Allen served on the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority board of directors for several years during the early 2000s.
Fruitvale and Coliseum Transit Villages
Ward Allen's efforts toward cultivating a more eco-friendly and green environment for BART resulted in the largest BART bicycle station being created as a part of the Fruitvale transit village. The Fruitvale transit village is a national model for transit oriented development, given Ward Allen and former BART director Margaret Pryor's leadership. The Fruitvale transit village was built in partnership with the Spanish Speaking Unity Council, and Phase I was completed in 2004. Phase I included 94 rental units, 92 of which were affordable households that were considered low income, and 2 market-rate units. This was a significant victory for BART's 4th district residents in the City of Oakland. On July 22, 2010, Ward Allen and the BART Board approved 3.4 acres of property that remained undeveloped for Phase II of the transit village.
In addition, she worked hard on the Coliseum transit village for more than a decade and approved its construction of single-family for-sale homes — with some set aside for low- and moderate-income residents — as well as shops and restaurants.[66] Ward Allen worked closely with Oakland city councilman Larry Reid to approve the third stage of the transit village project, which would explore building approximately 100 workforce housing units on what is now a 1.3-acre parking lot at Snell Street and 71st Avenue in their shared district.
Small/Minority/Women-Owned Business and Bonding Committee
In 2009, Ward Allen formulated BART's first Small/Minority/Women-Owned Business and Bonding Committee.[67] The committee sought to address the critical problems that are preventing minority-and-women-owned construction businesses from receiving adequate information in a timely fashion, making plan rooms available to low-income communities, expediting the response time of all allocations and qualifying for contracts. Ward Allen advocated that the BART Board should earmark a part of the capital budget to support disadvantagedbusiness enterprises, resulting in BART injecting up to $45 million between 2009 and 2014 into the local economy with much of that money going to minority- and women-owned businesses.[68]
The Conference of Minority Transportation Officials (COMTO) presented Ward Allen with the Lifetime Achievement Award at its annual awards ceremony in 2011 for her dedication to public service in the transportation industry, and recognizing her achievement of breaking ground on the Oakland Airport Connector, a landmark construction project legislated by Ward Allen.
In 2008, Laney College President Frank Chong recognized Ward Allen for her leadership in higher education with the President's Award.
^Ltd, Earl G. Graves (Oct 25, 1980). "Black Enterprise". Earl G. Graves, Ltd. Retrieved Jul 25, 2019 – via Google Books.
^Company, Johnson Publishing (Dec 19, 1983). "Jet". Johnson Publishing Company. Retrieved Jul 25, 2019 – via Google Books. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)
^Company, Johnson Publishing (Oct 29, 1990). "Jet". Johnson Publishing Company. Retrieved Jul 25, 2019 – via Google Books. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)