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Last month, Bay Area Rapid Transit’s (BART) board finalized plans to use much of a $4.5 million budget surplus to improve the agency’s police and emergency facilities, boost rainy-day reserves and improve customer service. After paying all of its bills for the previous budget year, the agency has an additional $4 million left over for the budget year that began July 1.

How come BART has a surplus when many other transit agencies have what Board President James Fang termed, in a prepared statement, “the opposite problem”?

“We saw this bad economy coming two to three years ago, and we had to make some tough decisions,” he said.

Those decisions: raise fares while cutting costs. BART instituted “a selective hiring freeze” and worked with its union partners during a “challenging labor negotiation period” and ultimately saved $100 million in labor expenses without a single layoff,  Fang said.

“Yes, we took a lot of negative hits in the press for making those tough decisions, but in the end, this $8.5 million positive result shows we did something good,” he added.

Yesterday, BART’s board declined to vote on a temporary fare rollback associated with the budget surplus and decided to consider postponing a fare increase scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2012, until July 1, 2012. The board will revisit the issue at its Aug. 26 meeting.