Streetsblog San Francisco

Nearly a month after a San Francisco federal judge ruled against a discrimination lawsuit against the MTC on behalf of AC Transit riders of color, attorneys representing a broad coalition of riders, labor and environmental justice advocates have appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals. 

"We're not done fighting," said plaintiff and AC Transit rider Sylvia Darensburg of East Oakland.

As we noted in our original post, the lawsuit claims the MTC has a long history of channeling funding to mostly white riders on Caltrain and BART at the expense of AC Transit bus riders of color. It named as the plaintiffs Darensburg, Vivian Hain of Berkeley and Virginia Martinez of Richmond, along with Communities for a Better Environment and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192.

In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Laporte said she sympathizes with the plaintiffs but "the MTC has met its burden of showing a substantial legitimate justification for the challenged funding practices." Even though she sided with the MTC, advocates point out it's significant that she noted the "disparate impact" MTC's funding practices have had on AC Transit riders of color. 

From the press release:

While vindicating minority bus riders’ claims in some respects, the judge accepted MTC’s excuse that the discriminatory impact of its decisions was outweighed by other goals.

Plaintiffs intend to argue on appeal that the Court applied the wrong legal standard in concluding that MTC had adequately justified the discriminatory impacts of its decisions.

“The trial court held MTC to too low a standard,” said Adrienne Bloch of Communities for a Better Environment (CBE). “Civil rights laws require that when otherwise lawful actions have a discriminatory impact on racial minorities, they must meet a much stricter standard of justification; there must be a ‘necessity’.”

Randy Rentschler, a spokesperson for the MTC, said in response to the appeal: "This action was expected and we’ll deal with it as we must as a public agency."

In 2005, with frustration and anger mounting over service cuts and fare hikes for AC Transit riders, who are mostly people of color, a coalition of riders, labor and environmental justice advocates filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), accusing the agency of racial discrimination in the way it doles out transit funding. It claimed the MTC has a long history of channeling funding to mostly white riders on Caltrain and BART at the expense of AC Transit bus riders of color.

Although a San Francisco federal judge sided with the MTC last week, advocates point out that the ruling (PDF) noted the "disparate impact" AC Transit riders have endured because of the MTC's strategic long-range plan for transit expansion projects, or Resolution 3434:

MTC allocates more funding to rail projects than to bus projects, resulting in bus projects proposed by AC Transit being excluded from projects listed in Resolution 3434.  Although Plaintiffs’ challenge to MTC’s initial decisions on which projects to include under Resolution 3434 appear to be barred by the statute of limitations, those decisions constitute relevant context for MTC’s further reductions in 2006 of the scope of the few AC Transit bus projects that had initially been included. 

“The court acknowledged that our lawsuit may have already pressured MTC to channel more funds to AC Transit," said Guillermo Mayer, staff attorney at Public Advocates. “We're confident that momentum is building in the fight for transit fairness and equality.”

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