Streetsblog San Francisco

For the last 16 years, Jon Rubin has served as the Mayor’s appointee on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area’s regional transportation planning and funding body, originally appointed by Frank Jordan in 1995. Last week, Rubin was forced to resign and turn over the seat to Supervisor Scott Wiener, whose four-year term begins May 1.

While it’s true the Mayor was looking to strike a compromise because the Board of Supervisors was deadlocked over its appointment between Wiener and Supervisor David Campos, as reported by the Chronicle, sources told Streetsblog that a behind-the-scenes effort has been underway for some time to get Rubin replaced. Some advocates and City Hall insiders who didn’t want to be identified said they were disappointed with Rubin’s record on the commission, and felt he hasn’t been aggressive enough on San Francisco’s behalf.

Rubin, the president and CEO of the Peninsula Coalition, did not respond to requests from Streetsblog for an interview.

In a letter [pdf] to the MTC dated April 13, Mayor Ed Lee said he was appointing Wiener for “his special familiarity with the problems and issues in the field of transportation.” Wiener currently sits on the plans and programs committee of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority Board, and is a regular Muni rider. As we’ve written, he holds great promise on sustainable transportation issues, and hired transit advocate Gillian Gillett as one of his staffers.

Wiener told Streetsblog that he wants to make sure San Francisco “is getting the funding and priority we deserve for transit projects that don’t just benefit the city, but the entire region, whether it’s Transbay, or Caltrain, which we depend on.”

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Fearing a potential defeat by voters on a crowded November ballot, and saying he wants to see faster reform at the SFMTA, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu announced a compromise with Mayor Gavin Newsom late Tuesday night before casting the swing vote against a Muni charter amendment he had originally co-sponsored with three of his colleagues.

Supervisor David Campos will find himself front and center this month in a multiple-front struggle to answer an age-old conundrum: Why doesn’t Muni work better and how can we fix it?

Campos has inserted himself into the debate by leading the charge on a charter amendment to change how the MTA Board is appointed. He has also requested an audit of the MTA's management practices. Results should be ready in time to inform the supervisors' vote in May on the MTA's budget for the next two years.

On the unplanned side, Campos will be leading the confirmation process for two MTA Board members this month. He's the chair of the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee, the first stop for Mayor Newsom's MTA Board nominations before they reach the full Board of Supervisors.

There's uncertainty on all three fronts at the moment. Details of the audit and the charter amendment measure are still being hammered out, and Mayor Newsom hasn't said whom he'll appoint to fill two MTA Board seats that will open on March 1.

After a press event for the Central Subway yesterday, the Mayor said he's still figuring out his appointments to many of the city's commissions, including the MTA. "I have about 45 appointments that we'll be making in the next few weeks," he said.

With any shot at broader reforms still half a year away, Campos said the Board of Supervisors will be making the most of its confirmation power over mayoral appointees to the MTA Board. "If we put a measure on the ballot, it wouldn't go on the ballot until November," he said. "In the meantime, we want to make sure that, within the current governing structure, Muni is in the best hands possible."

Like many of his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, Campos said the keyword for directors is independence.

"What I look for is someone who is truly independent of not just the Mayor but also the Board, and who's going to ask the right questions, who's going to be engaged, who understands what it's like to ride Muni, who is responsive to the needs of the ridership, who holds Muni accountable. That kind of independence, in my humble opinion, has not been demonstrated by some members of this MTA Board."

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On March 1, the terms of the MTA Board's two longest-serving directors will end, and a convergence of factors could make their reappointment or replacement more closely scrutinized than any in the agency's ten-year history. Adding to the uncertainty, one or both of the directors - Shirley Breyer Black and Rev. Dr. James McCray, Jr. - may actually be termed out of their seats, depending on how the City Attorney's office interprets the City Charter.

With the MTA facing massive budget shortfalls in the coming years on top of a mid-year budget crisis, a progressive majority controlling the Board of Supervisors, and a Mayor in his final two years in office, transit advocates and many supervisors are looking for appointees who will be independent-minded and engaged members of the MTA Board.

"In general, I think that the MTA commission has not been examining all options available to the MTA in the context of our budget crisis," said Board of Supervisors President David Chiu. "I think it's fair to say a majority of the Board of Supervisors believes we need commissioners who are independent enough to consider all options on the table."

For her part, Black is happy to continue serving, but hasn't heard what the Mayor is planning. "No one has told me anything," she said last week.

That may in part be because the Mayor is waiting to hear from the City Attorney's office on whether Black and McCray are eligible to serve additional terms. Proposition E, which created the MTA in 1999, set director term limits at three, but it's not clear whether Black and McCray's first terms counted, since both were shorter than the regular four years. Black was a member of the original MTA Board, which had staggered term lengths. Her first term, beginning in March 2000, was only two years long. McCray's first term, which began in 2002, was barely a month long, since he filled in the end of another director's term.

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The Board of Supervisors doesn't get to vote on Muni service cuts or worker layoffs, but today Supervisor David Campos exercised one of the options the supervisors do have for influencing Muni by calling for an audit of some of the MTA's practices.

Campos' call for an audit came during a special hearing before a Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee on the Muni budget situation. After the supervisors questioned MTA spokesperson Judson True on the layoffs, most of which are effective Friday, Campos said he wasn't certain the MTA had fully considered concerns brought up by representatives of SEIU, the union hit hardest by the cuts.

"What troubles me about where we are with respect to what SEIU has proposed is that, with all due respect, I'm not fully convinced that enough consideration was given to many of these points before you came to the MTA Board or to this Board to talk about some of the very drastic things that we're talking about," Campos told True.

In a press conference before the hearing and during the hearing's public comment period, members of SEIU questioned whether laying off parking control officers (PCOs) was economical, and expressed concerns about public health impacts that could result from laying off 10 car cleaners. During the meeting, Supervisor Chris Daly screened a video of the insides of Muni buses covered in graffiti and strewn with vomit and needles to emphasize the importance of the car cleaners' work.

SEIU organizer Robert Haaland pointed to the MTA's plan to spend $6 million on budget consultants as an example of the agency's mismanagement. "Last month at the Civil Service Commission, MTA asked for $6 million to hire a firm to help them with budgeting," Haaland told the supervisors. "[If the MTA] can't plan their own budget, maybe we should be laying off managers who do the planning around the budget and just hire this other firm."

As the MTA has previously maintained, True said the agency had actually seen a decline in parking citation revenue even as more PCOs were hired in recent years, prompting the agency to cut 24 positions and bank on higher citation rates from the remaining PCOs. The agency recently implemented a 30-day moratorium on the PCO layoffs to take a harder look at PCO deployment strategies.

Not fully satisfied with the MTA's responses, Campos asked the Board of Supervisors' budget analyst, Harvey Rose, when the MTA had last been audited. Aside from a Proof of Payment audit requested by Supervisor Bevan Dufty last year, Rose said the MTA had never been audited. The last comprehensive audit of Muni was in 1996, before the MTA existed.

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In a vote that signaled both San Francisco's new direction on parking policy and the severity of current budget shortfalls, the Board of Supervisors yesterday approved an ordinance giving the MTA authority to study installing parking meters in the eastern portion of Golden Gate Park.

By a unanimous vote, the Board indicated its support for the ordinance, though the supervisors reasons differed. The vote only authorizes creating a parking plan for Golden Gate Park, not its implementation, which the MTA will need to seek later.

The Recreation and Park Department, the MTA, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and Supervisors John Avalos and David Campos have expressed strong support for the measure in the past, since it will generate funds for the MTA and the Rec and Park Department, and is consistent with the city's Transit First policy.

After yesterday's vote, Supervisor Sean Elsbernd said he still has "major reservations" about installing meters in Golden Gate Park, including the meters' aesthetic impact on the park. Elsbernd also expressed concern about whether the meters would "create residual parking problems" in surrounding neighborhoods, such as the Inner Sunset, the Richmond, and Haight-Ashbury.

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The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee showed unanimous support today for a pair of proposals that will both have major impacts on people walking, biking, using transit and driving in the city.

The first is a measure to begin charging for on-street parking in the eastern half of Golden Gate Park, where many of the park's most popular attractions are located. The plan will turn over responsibility for on-street parking in Golden Gate Park from the Recreation and Park Department to the MTA, which will install meters and charge for some street parking in the park for the first time.

The Rec and Park department, the MTA, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and Supervisors John Avalos and David Campos expressed support for the measure on public policy grounds, since charging for parking may lead to reduced driving and increased walking and biking in the park, and is consistent with the city's transit first policy.

Given the impact on transit riders of recent Muni fair hikes, Campos said drivers should "share the pain" of balancing the budget.

The meters will be a financial boon for the MTA and the park department, with the MTA collecting citation revenue and the park department collecting meter fare revenue. Once the meters are installed, as early as next April, they're projected to bring in $500,000 in the fiscal year ending June 30 and $1.4 million in the second year for the park department. The MTA will bring in a net profit of about $379,000 per year.

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The Board of Supervisors, for the second time this month, voted 6-5 this afternoon against a motion to reject the MTA's $778 million budget. BOS Prez David Chiu and Sophie Maxwell were among those not supporting a rejection. The vote came despite Supervisor John Avalos' announcement that he had a commitment from MTA Chair Tom Nolan to come up with a different budget if supervisors rejected it.

Transit advocates, frustrated over the decision, said they are planning to rally behind Avalos' proposed charter amendment to reform the MTA Board, which is appointed by the Mayor. They felt a rejection of the budget was the only way to force a better plan, which they say is unfairly balanced, with riders taking a bigger hit than drivers. 

But Chiu, who pointed out that he rides Muni more than any other supervisor and is the only member of the Board who doesn't own a car, said "we have come quite a ways" since the first MTA budget was proposed. He said the upcoming debate over the city budget is going to "make this debate look like child's play."

"In fact, as I've done the math, we've come about 30 million dollars from where the original budget was," said Chiu, who proposed the original rejection motion. "It is time for us to move forward."

Chiu's office said the $30 million he was referring to is a $15 million reduction in work orders, the $10.3 million worked out in a compromise, and $5 million in anticipated parking revenues, assuming the MTA moves forward with stronger parking enforcement. 

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, in an interview after the vote, said he believed it was still possible to get the MTA to make more concessions because "a strong message has been sent," but said he is going to back Avalos' charter amendment, which could appear before voters as soon as November, assuming there are six votes on the Board to place it on the ballot. The amendment would see three members of the MTA Board appointed by the Board of Supervisors, three by the Mayor and one elected.

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Supervisor John Avalos, leading the charge for a Muni budget that is more equitably balanced between drivers and transit riders, was joined Monday by a broad coalition of advocates, including groups representing seniors and youth, in a rally designed to pressure the MTA into restoring about $15 million in revenue measures carved out of the original plan. It preceded a march to the MTA where Avalos and advocates demanded and got a meeting with MTA Chief Nat Ford (hear the audio below) on the eve of a Board of Supervisors meeting to consider another rejection motion.

It remained uncertain, though, whether Avalos had the seven required votes to reject the MTA's budget, and advocates were urging citizens to put the heat on Board President David Chiu and Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, considered a swing, by calling and emailing them.

Avalos spoke to a large crowd on the steps of City Hall, calling for a balanced Muni budget that doesn't fall on the backs of riders: "When it's budget season we don't come with our hat in our hand but our fists raised to win a better budget."

Also in attendance were Supervisors David Campos and Ross Mirkarimi, both of whom voted last week with Avalos on the Budget and Finance Committee to reject the MTA budget a second time, a move all three hoped would get the MTA to budge.

"In a city like ours that professes to be green, well, almost green, and professes to be aggressive in tackling global warming, this could be one of the most counter intuitive actions we could take in terms of trying to get people out of their cars and riding Muni," Mirkarimi said of the current MTA budget.

Campos said the "Transit Justice Package" proposed by Avalos represents an effort on the part of the progressive members of the Board to work with the MTA.

"I think that anyone who cares about making the city true to the principal of Transit First would jump at the opportunity of supporting something that simply gives 15 million dollars back to the system. That is not a radical proposal at all," said Campos. "It recognizes that we should not be balancing the MTA's budget on the backs of the poor."

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