A governance structure that gives a shit is apparently nowhere on the horizon but is what is most needed. If Brinkman is the best deal we’ve got going for us, along with vague promises from Newsom that he’ll honor the spirit of reform (newsom and honor in the same sentence, yuk yuk, I know) Muni is toast.

Even with locking down work rules through collective bargaining, nobody has explained to me how Muni will perform up to the Gold Standard of the DPW or what kind of savings to expect.

Like I said, we’re toast without structural governance reform.

-marc

Your point about Newsom’s work orders is spot on. However, you cannot let one problem (be it work rules, work orders, poor planning, or whatever) detract from the significance of the other problems. Just as with the work rules, if you don’t reform the interagency money sucking, throwing another $10/car at the MTA will do bupkis. The money will continue to cover lavish overtime and asinine work orders.

Hell, you want $5 mil for the MTA? Would you settle for $3? Maybe you should lobby to reinstate street cleaning! My guess is that you’d see even less resistance from the driving population than for the VLF increase. Street cleaning tickets are among the easiest for the MTA to issue and thus the single biggest source of ticket revenue. But, of course, DPW has more clout than the MTA so it’s better for the DPW to save a mil or so and eat about $4 out of the MTA’s budget.

But none of this means that you should ignore the other issues in play. Exceedingly generous overtime is just that: exceedingly generous. High levels of drivers on standby is wasteful. Throwing money at the problem *WILL NOT WORK*. Hell, look at Prop A. That threw a bunch of money at the MTA, and most of it got disbursed elsewhere.

Here’s a link that provides the number of registered vehicles in SF: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/about/profile/est_fees_pd_by_county.pdf

The city’s Transportation Fact Sheet is always a year behind with those numbers. And you have to subtract the number of trailers from the total. They’re registered by the DMV, but that number doesn’t tell you much about how many motor vehicles city residents own, though if the $10 fee is applied to trailers, too, including them in the vehicle total makes sense.

The latest numbers: 381,737 cars; 59,751 trucks; and 20,339 motorcycles/motorscooters, for a total of 461,827 motor vehicles registered in SF.

“I think that a VLF increase is fine and dandy. I won’t vote for it until the MTA undergoes significant reforms.”

That’s cool, I certainly understand that, MTA management is incompetent and needs a major overhaul.

Personally I plan to vote for it because it achieves 2 of my goals: increased costs for private auto ownership, and a very targeted & hard to abuse stream of revenue for infrastructure improvements that I believe will increase MUNI performance & pedestrian safety. I do understand that the pols will probably find a way to redirect some or all of the funds to the general fund by reducing existing general fund contributions, but I feel they would do that anyways, so it’s still a win in my opinion.

“No way am I going to vote for a tax to fund over the top pensions, ridiculous overtime rules, piss poor planning, and a complete unwillingness to engage…”

Definitely agree with that as well. That’s why I’m voting for Elsbernd’s prop as well, I believe it will correct a number of those issues, and also take the TWU excuse away from MTA management.

“That said, what the city budget is going to is extremely relevant. $8k a year is quite a bit of money if you’ve got a city that doesn’t have a lot of municipal services, or has a lot of services provided by the county. Likewise with the schooling. If San Francisco is expected to cover big budget items, $8,000 per resident may not be enough.”

I’m not opposed the the amount we spend, or that we spend at the top range per person. If we were providing top notch services I’d be fine, and if we were providing high quality services I’d be fine with increasing our spending, but on the other hand, we wouldn’t need to increase it, as we’d already be doing quite well.

From what I can see, most of the services we provide are done in a piss poor manner: MUNI sucks and is getting worse, our streets are crumbling and getting worse, our crime solve rate is poor and now we have the crime lab issue, we spend boat loads of money on homeless with almost no tangible improvements, our schools are not well regarded. Perhaps I’ve been mislead, but I haven’t seen much to say we are getting a whole lot for the money we spend.

But ultimately I definitely understand your opposition to giving any more money to the MTA until they get their act together.

Newsom has used the MTA as an ATM for his favored constituencies, and that has sucked well into nine figures out of the agency during newsom’s regime.

We’ve got to avoid this right wing ideology that there is some kind of tax exempt free lunch all day, every day and just grow up and pay for common systems equitably.

-marc

Until the SF MTA can get its costs (labor and otherwise) closer in line to other major cities, why should we throw more money at it? More money will just feed the horrible inefficiency beast without giving the residents of San Francisco anything to benefit from (e.x.: increased or more reliable service).

Given that California contributes so heavily to the federal budget, I’d say that lumping federal funds in with state and local is just fine. Likewise with SF contributing to the state’s general fund.

Most city pensions are not exorbitant. Some unions have sweet deals. At $26/hr TWU is neither highly paid nor on deck for prime pensions. Fringe benefit of gym membership seems reasonable to me.

-marc

That said, what the city budget is going to is extremely relevant. $8k a year is quite a bit of money if you’ve got a city that doesn’t have a lot of municipal services, or has a lot of services provided by the county. Likewise with the schooling. If San Francisco is expected to cover big budget items, $8,000 per resident may not be enough.

If memory serves, like 80% of the SF budget is locked in, only $1b +/- change, probably less by now, is discretionary. The sum total jumped by a chunk in the early 2000s when the capital budget was added to the operating budget. Longitudinal analysis is difficult.

The GR tax extends to fitms which have escaped contributing for various reasons. We are going to have a biz tax, so it should apply to all non-small biz fairly and equitably.

SF is a business magnet, every boom cycle sees spikes in prices for everythinhlg. If you want cheap, there’s always Houston.

There is no free lunch, SF is an expensive place to do business for reasons other than the fiscal regime. It is expensive for city workers to live here and raise families.

-marc
std iphone disclaimer here

I wasn’t comparing any particular cities, just pointing out that we are not in trouble revenue-wise, and at, or very near the top in per-capita budget.

I understand that some states / cities (SF & NY for example) are donors to federal income and other are donees, and I understand some cities provide more services than others. Of course there are differences between cities, NY is 5 counties, Chicago & NY have fully functioning heavy rail commuter and/or subways, but it’s not useful to point to specific differences, as SF will have it’s own as well. As far as Chicago goes, half of SF is quite a big difference, and I don’t think there’s anywhere near enough money spent on the SF County expenses to make up for the difference.

I don’t really care about that, or whether SF is the highest per capita or just in the top 5%, as it’s really irrelevant to my point. It still shows we have more than ample revenue.

And as I mentioned before, I’m not even against raising revenue or taxes in principle, just raising them for the general fund in SF as I believe that money is poorly managed. I mentioned I would be open minded if they were simpler, or more targeted, I also said I’d support a higher VLF.

So I don’t find it misleading to compare cities per capita budgets when the differences are so large.

Point being, it’s very misleading (or difficult) to make straight comparisons between cities like New York and San Francisco and cities like Phoenix or Chicago.

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=178265

SF Budget: $6.48b
SF Population: 808,977
Per person $8009.92

Or roughly 1% more than New York, so, no, not well over what New York is spending. Keep in mind, however, that San Francisco is both a city and county, and thus provides services that other large cities may not have to handle themselves.

I also don’t like overly complex legislation. What is the purpose? Is it to make taxes more progressive? Is it to help small business? Is to reduce payroll tax? Is it to more fairly tax the various businesses of the city? Or is it really just increasing revenue? The supporters claim is does all of the former, but I suspect the latter, since all of the other goals can be achieved in a revenue neutral manner.

We can argue the specifics of the taxes, but like I said, I’m pretty much opposed to any tax that goes into the general fund. The budget this year was $6.5 billion, that’s over $8,000 per person, which I believe is one of the highest per-capita budgets in the country, well over New York’s. We have plenty of revenue, it’s just very poorly managed, we should be getting a lot more for our money than we are.

If it were a tax that directed funds directly to transit, infrastructure, or education, I’d be more open minded.

The Traffic Calming program could tame 10 miles of roadway each year with $5 million. Currently installng a few speed humps is considered the best they can afford.

The entire Bike Plan is $14 million to build out. Right now, they aren’t too sure where that money is going to come from.

The point is dedicated funding is very, very good.

More broadly, it’s ridiculous that this city still has a payroll tax in the fist place. We’ve seen the amazing job creation in Mission Bay after the city created a payroll tax exclusion zone, and even Newsom is saying he understands the benefits of extending it citywide. How do you justify a city payroll tax with close to 10% unemployment? Chiu’s measure at least has the noble goal of reducing the burden it places on small businesses, but isn’t the more obvious step just to eliminate it for any and all businesses which are creating jobs?

Likewise the City Controller’s impact report released last week on Avalos’s measure tells you all you need to know about it: the estimated impact is an average gain of $35M city revenue, but at the expense of a average decrease in city GDP of $30M and average loss of 180 jobs. Additionally, increasing the top brackets on what is already the city’s most volatile and unreliable revenue source is only going to worsen the cycle of windfall and shortfall. Unless you really trust city hall to cut costs and seriously fund rainy day accounts rather than their pet projects during the next boom, this measure won’t help much.

The vehicle license fee increase and parking tax increase are much more the kind of revenue stream that’s needed: reliable, periodic income which doesn’t disincentivize anything other than private vehicle trips!

It largely replaces the payroll tax which discourages job creation and retention.

In the ecommerce world businesses expects local Infrastructure to appear out of nowhere as a gift provided by a grateful populace. The populace has other ideas.

US infrastructure was built under a regime of 70% marginal tax rates. Time to go back to the 1950s, fiscally.

Did they axe the MTA measure? If so, we’re toast.