Transcripts For SFGTV SFCTA Full Authority Board 20240713

We have a quorum. Thank you. Can we have a motion to excuse for the durcration of this meeting commissioner marr requested an excused absence and commissioner safai ewill join us list. We will take that without objection and go to the chairs report. This month i was gratified to learn from our staff and this was actually in the press that the California Public utilitiesy commissioner has ruled to reverse the policy on the confidentiality of uber annalist data. As we know they are regulated by the state p. U. C. Aprequired to submit annual reports to that agency. Despite our advocacy and the City Attorneys Office calling for it as well as the airport this has not been made available to the public or to cities and counties such as ourself. Commissioners proposed decision on data confidentiality seeks to treat these as public by default as well they should be. This decision validates our views why the Public Record act mandates disclosure and cautions companies against making over broad claims and will finally open the door to making task filings public. As we saw in the Previous Research availability and accuracy of trip data is paramount to understand where they ok i pie. What safety impacts they have on the streets, particularly on high injury corridors in areas where new safety improvements are confusing to drivers unfamiliar with San Francisco roads. This is a preliminary decision, the commissioners decision is encouraging. We encourage adopting it as soon as possible. We are aware mayor breed announced she will join us in support for developing a Congestion Pricing Program to address the negative impacts of growing Traffic Congestion be particularly downtown and south of market. It must be based on fairness and equity by considering those least able to pay or with limited transportation and any revenue should be directed towards building our Transportation System. I have long been a proponent of congestion pricing dating back to my first time 20 years ago. My staff joined in research and study models around the world in moving this forward. Ultimately we need the right fit for the city and county of San Francisco and our communities and i look forward to partnering with all of you and the mayor in supporting our staff as they continue the downtown congestion management study. As various discussions take place on funding measures to improve our transportation around the bay area and in particular rail transit in the region i want to underscore the importance of movin move forwar. Our executive director tells me the partners have had ongoing fruitful discussions and that we can finally expect to see the six party m. O. U. For advancing the project on the agenda very soon, that is as we all know a result of the expert panels recommendations and getting this done timely is an essential step towards our ability to grow resources for rail . The region and delivering. I look forward to the m. O. U. Being signed if anybody is listening and that, colleagues concludes chairs remarks. We will go to executive directors report. Public comment on the chairs report . Seeing none, Public Comment on the chairs report is closed. Good morning, i begin with update at the federal level. As early as last month on the house sent Transportation Leaders released reauthorization bills. It is introduced at 489 billion to reauthorize the federal fast ability, would increase funding for active transportation. Priorities are reflected in both bills in both houses effect the focus on climate. We are optimistic that will eventually wind the way through both houses. However, given the upcoming election we do not anticipate approval of a new bill this year and expect extension until 2021. We continue to monitor that work and join the city trip to dc to advocate for the priorities. Turning to the regional level, area workshops were held with a bag earlier this month. We appreciate commissioner ronan an tenting. How we attending. How those are in pricing development and a host of other issues. The Commission Also spoke about planned bay area. The tomorrows Advisory Committee and next month they will update the regional transportation plan. They have requested staff to provide a draft fiscal constrained project list for San Francisco. We are working with partners to provide that based on priorities. We will send that to work with the different agai an agencies. We anticipate returning in june for early action and before the m. T. C. And a bag clearance. At the local level the multi agency staff from m. T. A. Planning and Mayors Office have seen strong interest in the public workshops. I appreciate the folks who came out on a sunny saturday a few weeks ago in the mission a few days after that to participate in these workshops to discuss what we want our Transportation System to look like in the next 30 to 40 years. The events were offered in english ago well as translation available and prior november workshops conducted these types of events in spanish, chinese and filipino aimed at southeast neighborhoods. Staff engaged in a host of q a and Group Activities to generate project concepts on the transit side and streets and freeway side. That work is moving along. We anticipate bringing that back in the next month or two. The input that we gathered, of course, will feed into our county wide plan update which will continue in the fall and into next year as part of connect sf. Our policy and programming staff have been busy conducting outreach on the prop d, last years prop d. Of course, the streets and safe streets portion of that funding will come to this body for programming. We continue to do outreach on the policy framework, whether we should invest that funding in various ways for larger projects as well as smaller projects. This month we presented to the bicycle Advisory Committee and will present to the Youth Commission and land use in early march. Look for that as an item on the next Vision Zero Committee meeting chaired by Vision Zero Committee chairman yee. The pedestrian improvements commenced instruction following years of planning by the community and city agencies. S. F. M. T. A. Is delivering the first phase of near term improvements on the lower great highway from lincoln way. There will be daylighting, painted safety zones, signs, refreshed striping and back in angle parking. Construction expected to take a few weeks to complete and the m. T. A. Plans to construct additional islands from 2021 from lincoln way to slope boulevard. On the management front i want to voice the Public Service and great leadership of john ram, who is winding up 12 years as planning director. John has been in tremendous colleague. We want to convey staff appreciation to him and the Planning Department under his tenure for a whole host of work, area plans, connect sf, even the Transportation System sustainability project, a policy initiative that moved our city forward in a pioneering way away from level of service to vmt, vehicle miles traveled standard. This is a very important Sustainable Transportation initiative completed under johns leadership. We wish him well. He has done a great job and we want to make sure he enjoys teaching and writings and can come back to contribute to the development of the great city here. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any questions for our executive director or Public Comment on this item . Public comment is closed. Mr. Clerk. Sorry, i missed you. You are fast on the gun. We are living in a time where we have to have a vision for the future. We dont seem to be too concerned of what is going on with the coronavirus and transportation in this city, San Francisco or regional wide. I say that because we speak in generalities that we are doing this, but it is real, mickey mousing in washington, d. C. , but california has always been a leader. Rarely do we say or rarely do we have a check list of what we have attained, what we have done. You dont need to be a Rocket Scientist when it comes to congestion we failed missably. We tried to do something years ago to reduce congestion. It is just getting worse because of the construction and other issues. On vanness, Market Street, harvard, down the financial district, on geary, wherever you go, congestion. I think this coronavirus should allow us to come up with models in place because it is going to affect our transportation, it is going to affect our institution, even city hall, and we shouldnt wait for the last moment. I know it not on the agenda item. It should be an agenda item. To be on the agenda item somebody like me should come here and suggest. Thank you very much. Thank you. Public comment is closed. Would you please read consent agenda. Items 5 to 11 were approved at the february 11th board meeting. They are routine. Staff will present if desired. If any members object did consent items will be removed and considered separately. Any comment on item 4 . Seeing none Public Comment is closed. Is there a motion moved . Moved by stefani and seconded by peskin. roll call . We have final approval. Please read items 12 and 13 today. 12 up date on the San Francisco municipal transportation a gene sees light rail vehicle. 13 independent management and oversight report on the light rail vehicle procurement. They are information items. Thank you, mr. Cordoba. Good morning, Deputy Director Capital Projects. Thank you for reading two items together. I want to do a quick introduction. Item 12 we have s. F. M. T. A. Director here, the director of transit to give a full update on the light rail vehicle procurement. We have been working in terms of oversight efforts item 13 in front of you. The independent management and oversight report. We retained the international about the summer of 2019. Bob is here, director of transit will give a full report in that regard. I will hands it over to julie right now. This is an ongoing set of hearings we have had around be this issue. Thank you for coming and presenting the current status of the procurement. The floor is yours. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the boards continued attention on this topic. I have been coming periodically to share with the board the progress that we are making with these new vehicles and also to be transparent about where we have challenges. I am here today because i do think we have Good Progress to report. Also, because we have getting ready to come back next month and ask for the funding item that was put on hold last april where i dont think any of us but particularly the board felt we were ready to move forward with the phase two vehicles. Over that time period we have learned a tremendous amount. We have had multiple fleet defects addressed and i think that we will be able to move forward. We are Holding Siemens to a High Standard of performance. The graph in front of usagraph that takes two things. It takes the number of breakdowns that we have that are mechanical and they are responsible. It divides by the mile in the system. It gives us how frequently the vehicles are breaking down for mechanical reasons. We did hit a major milestone in january where we saw the number increase from about 10,000 to 17,000 miles between breakdowns. The reason for that. Can i interrupt you . Does that include flat wheels . It does not. Thank you for the clarification. One of the things that i think i had done in previous meetings is equate this number to our greater number where we track mean distance between failures. This is actually a very narrow definition of failures and it is those that are mechanically related and need to be addressed in the vehicles. Something like flat wheels, Something Like the operator locking up a Circuit Board by pushing a series of buttons inappropriately wouldnt be something we would hold siemens accountable for. It is something we are tracking. We are going through all of the same data using the same method that we track for data to make sure we see the performance pull ahead of the performance which we are seeing now in both december and january. The reason that we are seeing the improvement in performance is primarily because we are addressing fleet defects on the vehicle. This is a number of breakdowns that we have had since we started our Reliability Program in august of 2018. Every mechanical failure is tracked and evaluated. By far the Biggest Issue is the hydraulic power unit which caused this real dip that we saw last summer in the mayjunejuly timeframe. Anytime i talk about brakes, i want to clarify this is not a safety issue. The issue is the brakes were locking up and we were unable to move the vehicle from stopped position. Since we put in the hardware and ultimately took the software fix as well, we have seen zero repeat instances. I am confident we have solved this issue. There are a couple outstanding issues. This is what is going to have to be addressed with any emerging issues to meet the contract requirements. The contract requires siemens to achieve 25,000 miles between failures and hold at that for six month period. They need to continue to invest in the vehicle until we reach that goal. We are currently withholding retention on the contract until they meet that goal, and we will continue to. I dont anticipate this issue is following us to phase two, but one of the things that we have discussed with the ta staff is to continue to hold that retention as well as to take even further step to not accept phase two vehicles were this not to be met. Perhaps the biggest improvement we have seen in addition to rely ability over the last year is doubling of mil mileage. The vehicles are more more relie and more quiet. There is a doubling of mileage since we began lookin looking as in january. We are still not quite at our vehicle target. We had set a goal of 48 vehicles in service in january. We are currently averaging about 45 to 46 each day. That is going to continue to improve. The reason it is going to improve is because we still have nine vehicles to get back out on the street. We have three vehicles we have not purchased yet. One of them is back on property and it is going through the acceptance Testing Process. The second 2003 will come to us next month. These were the original vehicles we did all of the Testing Program on. The second is a vehicle 2033, which is shown in this picture here. You can see that a lot of the parts have been removed and it looks like we went through it and borrowed heavily. We did. We did that in order to keep other vehicles up and running, but we also tracked closely all of the inventory removed. Everything will be restored on this car and will go through the same acceptance Testing Process as the rest of the fleet. Relative to the borrowing, is that a function of the fact that siemens did not have the Replacement Parts we needed for this particular vehicle . It was not knowing where we would have the fleet defects. As they emerged we were able to keep other vehicles in service. To the extent that i think in one sense you could call it parts. It is more related to newness of the vehicles and the issues we are experiencing. Each one of the pieces of Rolling Stock is expensive and we are trying to hit targets. Did we pay for this vehicle . How did that work . Did we accept this vehicle . It seems kind of strange that we are down one vehicle that we are borrowing parts from the we have already accepted it and paid for it. I appreciate that question. We have not bought this vehicle. This is a vehicle that siemens owns and they are using it to keep our vehicles in service. We will not pay for it until it has been fully restored and it has gone through the full acceptance Testing Program. We also have six vehicles that are on hold because they need new wheels. This is again an example of a parts challenge because we had no anticipation at the beginning of this process the flat wheels were such an issue on our system. The wheels have like a nine to 12 month lead time. It is a very long time to get the wheels in. We have wheels in now, and we are replacing them on the trains at the pace of one vehicle each month. The first vehicle has gone back into service, and we have new wheels going on a vehicle currently. When they go back to service, are they also outfitted with mushroom brakes . Yes. In this slide i say that we have added 51 vehicles have the new track brakes to prevent the flat wheels when we push the emergency button. We are up to 60 right now, includes the vehicle where the wheels were rebuilt. Yes, we want to make sure as we put the new vehicles in service we are protecting the wheels from further damage. The last mechanical issue that i think is worth focusing on with this group is the sheer pins. We have had two issues with the sheer pins. In april of last year, we had an issue where we had the sheer pins break in service. That revealed that there was a design problem with how the coupler was designed and the end stop which was pushing too much pressure on the sheer pins. We put the vehicles back in service, and about eight months later, we had an issue where again sheer pins failed in service. The sheer pins failing in service do not cause the trains to separate. There is multiple redundancies there as well as the fact the trains would stop, but the sheer pins breaking tell us the couplers are facing more force than they were designed to because the sheer pins are by design the weakest point on the system. What i mean by that is similar to the latest technology with a car where the front of the car is designed to crumble so that the passengers are protected inside, the sheer pins shown in red on the diagram are designed to break and absorb the force of collision so the couplers and customers inside are protected from the impact of the crash. S iemens has done two things. First, they addressed the service impact, which was preventing us for two weeks to couple trains by replacing all of the sheer pins and committing to replace them every 90 days moving forward until we have a design solution. They also instrumented two connected couplers with very sophisticated force technology, and that allowed them to identify the cause of the sheer pin issue. I think the best way to describe it is if you think about a train bending at an intersection while it is on a hill, with one train on the hill and one train on the flat, it is putting too much pressure on the couplers. It also, i think, is an interesting explanation. It explains why other cities with the same design are not experiencing this. Having steep grades and flat intersections is one of those design challenges that i have been talking about that are unique to San Francisco. A new light rail system would not design that or have the expectation that a train would travel through that. There is 10 times more force at those intersections than siemens anticipated when they designed the coupler. Now they know the problem and they can fix it. We have a tough design city is a fact. It is not an excuse because built into the contract was you have to design for all of the complexities of the San Francisco environment. I think this is an example where siemens underestimated of our bittenvironment. We are seeing the consequences. We are moving towards a solution to this issue. The last thing i wanted to remind this board, and i know we have talked about it. While overwhelmingly we received positive feedback on the trains. The public concerns have been based on the seat design. We are moving forward with a modified seat design. The existing trains plus the first 50 new trains will be designed with one row of seats like we have today and one row of forwardfacing seats. All of the seats except for the seats under the train box at the bottom left corner of the photo will be lowered two inches to match and we will have bucket seats in all of the trains. We have also are going to pursue increase in number of blue seats, which is feedback we have gotten from customers with disabilities. It will go from 12 blue seats per car to 20. Since i was here, we have also based on Public Feedback been able to redesign the back two forward facing seats shown on the top left of the diagram to face forward. That is part of the community feedback. We will also have about 100 cars that will have the double seats. While this does have lysyl space there is more seating capacity. The back seats are still facing backwards. With the double it is there was not enough room with the articulated joint. There is more forward facing seats with the double seats so it addresses the main concern. This will have the same approach to an increased number of blue seats for customers with disabilities. Moving forward, the next step is to come back in march with the request for the funding piece of this. We are also bringing modification to our board to make sure that everything that we have learned about phase two, phase one gets added to phase two. In addition semens will incorporate the warranty work so the phase two vehicles are built correctly upfront rather than needing modified. Redesign of the coupler is an outstanding issue they owe us. We will complete track brakes. They are an abstract topic. It is not purple, it is shown to explain the concept, but it is like a flintstone device to push down on the track and slow the vehicle. You can see by the very nature how it protects the wheels and reduces the pressure from being on the wheels. The last work ahead of us is to accept the remaining cars. In addition, i think we have made significant progress in addressing the feedback of operators. There is a lot of feedback from operators built into mod 7. Things like having the button that opens the ada door be blue and the red buttons is what we have gotten from operators. There is a couple issues with the operator cab that we are still working through as well as upgrading monitors. Local 250a Operators Union is critical to get to monitor with big visibility and is is reliab. We have tested one as proof of concept. We will run it in service next week. It wont be ready for mod 7. It will be available in shortsorder. I invited some of our operators to share feedback on our work together. Some of the big changes, as i said, between phase one and phase two vehicles are warranty issues covered by siemens. There are things we will pay for that are built into the funding plan. First and most important is to set up the offsite car shell so we can expedite. Seating changes come with significant price tag. The track brakes and that is an additional set of phase two changes. There is a whole host of changes that i included in the presentation powerpoint but i am not going through in detail today given our time, some of which have cost within the 5 million. There are some things that by identifying them there isnt a cost associated with it. We are age to change it because they can produce it differently from scratch the first time. With that i am available to answer any questions or to defer to bobs presentation and answer questions at the end. Maybe we can do this. At least one of my colleagues has a question. If i could ask and i think you for being here, roger, from the operators side local 250a of the local Transit Workers Union to come up. No pressure. Just in so far as you are the folks who are on the ground running this Rolling Stock and i think we have been very clear that we wanted s. F. M. T. A. Staff to work closely with you and early on we heard issues around not only the mushroom brake and flat wheels, we heard about mirrors, the console, and the size and reflections coming out of the tunnel. If you could touch on the presentation that you just heard, experience that you are having, how working wit with the team has been going, whether the modifications are helpful, that would be good for us to hear. Thank you, commissioner. I am president of transport Workers Union 250a. When this first came on the platform it was like dealing with the beast. Track brake issues, flat wheels, sheer pins. Now it is a beauty, hence the reference to beauty and the beast, one of my favorite movies, actually. After we started communicating with the m. T. A. , they started listening to all of these issues that were occurring. It is one thing being an engineer, having multiple degrees and figuring everything out on a computer and it looks good on the tv and computer when you play the simulations. It is another thing when you are an operator, the men and women driving these things, knowing and seeing and understanding the reality of the situation. I thank julie and the m. T. A. For allowing us to sort of step in to express our issues and voice our concerns in the name of health and safety. At the end of the day, you know, what we want is to provide safe reliable service, Clean Service for the passengers, residents of the city and county of San Francisco. The issues that julie was talking about have been addressed and who better to give you real Life Experiences than the actual men and women who operate these vehicles, not on simulators but on the streets of San Francisco . In the near future in terms of vehicle procurement and the Agency Purchasing different vehicles, i would like to make it some type of requirement, mandate, legislation, whatever the case may be that the agency deals directly with the union from the very beginning of the phasein terms of vehicle procurement so all of these issues can be hashed out at the beginning and not the end. A lot of these issues should have been addressed at the very beginning. That is in the past. We are in the future. Fast forward to february 2020. The beast has turned into a beauty, and i would like to turn it over to gary howard and lisa so we can hear directly from them since be they operate it for us. Thank you. That was music to our ears. Please come on forward. I am new at this. I am gary howard i have been driving for 13 years. I have been driving trains 10 of those 13 years. To echo what roger is saying and working with the team, they have been listening to us. I am one of the people they listened to. I made it my point to learn how to drive this new equipment. It is here. Thanks to lisa, who has been burning the train, i spent a lot of time withther to figure out things i didnt understand. I am nervous now. Just a half day working with her, i learned to operate this. Each day gets better and easier. To add to what roger is saying, they have been listening to us. I have been concerns about the track break and seating and mirrors. About a month ago, siemens came over to show new things they are doing and that they were listening to us. I am hopeful in the future it gets better and better. As i communicated with julie and everybody, moving forward, all i can say as long as you listen to the people that it is in the seat every day and hear our feedback, it is going to be a good thing. I will give it to lisa. Thank you very much for that testimony. Hello, my name is lisa. I have been an operator since 2001. I have operated for about 14 years at the metro green division. I have noticed, i have been involved in the lrv force they have done a tremendous job on the upgrades that they have. There is a process that if you take time to learn the lrv4s you can drive them much better. Every operator operates differently. Once you know how to drive them, they are really, really good. I have seen a big progress since they have done the track breaks and sensitive edges and since the other operators interested in learning the lrv4s and i believe that if they get the time to take the time to learn them, they would appreciate them. We have bradas. They with wonderful trains. We are moving ahead in time, and we have so many good things about the lrv4. In the brada you have to go to each cab to turn on the h vac. You have to go to each door to figure out what door is having a problem. With the lrv4s you can look at the train operating display and it tells you everything. It saves us time and it is a process the operators have to learn a little better. I am so glad the union is working with the management to actually work on a lot of these issues. I have no problem with them. I have been driving them so far. I havent broke down ever. I am hoping the operators that as we move forward learn to drive them better and if anyone has any questions you are more than welcome to ask because i have been one of the operators that has been there from the very beginning. Would anyone have any questions at all . Are there any questions for the folks from twu local 250a . I think you said it all. We have no questions. I really appreciate everything that you said. Thank you for doing that. There is no better sign of progress than hearing from the people who drive the vehicles day in and day out. Thank you for your work and your testimony. With that, commissioner fewer. I just have a question for you about the sheer pin. What i have clear fiction on is iseau clairefied is they were chair fee clarified they were gg to replace them every six months. Every 90 days. This cant continue, it is not sustainable we replace this every 90 days. How long is the process to replace the pin or coupler . I think the group that it is the least sustainable for is siemens. The sheer pins are expensive at their costs. I would be happy through staff to follow up with the exact time it takes to replace the pins. I dont know it myself. I think i want to know how long it takes, what is the process, does it take trains out of commission . Does it interrupt service at all . Every 90 days is frequently. How are we ensured this will be followed with fidelity . 90 days goes by quickly. We dont want to put people or equipment at risk. I think that in addition to whether or not how long it takes to replace these, the time to take the trains out is an interruption of service, will it affect service at all . Did you say we are going to do this every 90 days until when . It is problematic. This is a little ridiculous, quite frankly. It does not take a train out of service. It is a regular preventative maintenance. It is something we are tracking closely because of the safety consequences, and it is not something that i anticipate us doing for multiple cycles because now that they have defined the problem, i believe that it will be relatively straightforward for them to solve, but i am not them. Until we have a solution in place, until it has been retested with the same instrumentation they use to diagnose the problem we will wel continue to hold accountable and do the 90 day replacement. This is not something we want to say they are going to fix this and this is a problem they are going to fix. I think before we go into the contract we want to know this is going to be fixed and has been fixed. I think this is my hesitation. As you said you will bring this before this commission for final approval of the 60 million that we had postponed that vote on. I think for me i want to be transparent. These types of Little Things that it is a big thing that we want to ensure that it is fixed and before we actually do go into contract this is an assurance i want before i am able to cast a vote for 60 million to purchase these things. Thank you very much. Thank you. Colleagues, we have yet to hear from the independent management oversight overseer, mr. Sergeant. I know there are other people with questions on the screen. Do we want to hear from mr. Sergeant first on are would you like to ask a quick questions . Quick question. I want to follow up on the point around early involvement of operators. I am curious if there are planned changes to the policies to ensure that operators are involved earlier and when it comes to procurement of new vehicles and testing. I think it is excellent feedback and something that we will operationalize. There was operator input upfront, including some of the design issues as well as all of the testing, but not the deep dive that we are taking now. I think it is clear that the deep dive is warranted. Thank you. Will sergeant, come on up. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, members of the board. Bob sergeant. We were retained last summer after a number of issues cropped up to oversee what was happening with the repairs, the warranty issues. What were the causes, how were the repairs initiated and carried out. We made recommendations and worked closely with the staff as well as the s. F. C. T. A. Staff. We started out with a detailed review of the documents, the contracts, root cause analysis done on the various failures. We spent three days in the m. T. A. Yard going through the vehicles, talking with the mechanics, talking with the operators. We attended the Weekly Commission meetings where items were brought up, where we looked at those. We had an opportunity to meet with the operators and the union. We learned a lot and appreciated their input to identify if there were issues that hadnt come up yet. We hadnt. We appreciated some of the comments. Lisa made the commence there is a difference between driver and operator. She understands what is going on. It was a valuable help to us. We also sat in the vehicles. To get a better understanding how the operators, some of the issues going on, then put together our recommendations and summary of the issues and the causes for those into our report, which you have a copy of. I want to comment m. T. A. In checking off the issues. They resolved a number of items that have been affecting the reliability, the sensitive edges on the doors, the auxiliary power and hydraulic power units. Those are fixes that have been completed. Dont appear to have any residual impacts and are able to move forward. There are issues in progress. The wheel flats where the track brakes are making the significant difference, the number of flat wheels after the track brakes have been installed is minimal. The coupler issue, something when we looked at it before it appeared there was a resolution. I think everybody was surprised in december when it cropped up again. Much more detailed, much more in depth analysis instrumenting a train running it through the various tight curves, steep hills and siemens in their coupler supplier are preparing a Detailed Analysis that should be available this month, followed by redesign and start ever of start of the repairs in the june timeframe. Up talked about the cameras. And the monitors, very happy with the unions and operators participation in looking at the series of mockups and moving that forward to provide better operating environment for the operators. The seats is not a safety issue, but it is certainly a response to a customer concern. It really goes back to rely ability. How many trains are available to serve the riders in San Francisco . The availability is increasing, and that also leads to a better mean distance between failures. That is the metric that really defines are these cars reliability . Having more vehicles in service, putting more miles on them, helps in the calculation to increase the mean distance between failures, and making and checking off those repairs, you could see on the chart the dips and what not. Those are associated with very specific issues, and by checking those off, by completing those repairs, they were able to increase the reliability. It is still an aggressive goal, 25,000 Miles Holding at least to that for six months. It is aggressive. They are working very hard at it. There is a substantial amount of money that is held. It has siemenss attention and it needs to continue forward. Our recommendations i want to comment m. T. A. They are making Good Progress. They are focused on this. We need to make sure that the phase one issues are all resolved, that those keep going, those resolution repairs keep going forward. All vehicles have the additional set of track brakes put on. Those sorts of things that it continues forward quickly. The Lessons Learned in the design reviews, you have heard from m. T. A. And from the operators and the unions they are working together on that so that what we have heard to date is used so it is not repeated in the phase two acquisition. The distance between failures is important. It needs to continue to be tracked, continued to add pressure to get this done and accomplished. We talked about the existing retention, just under 13 million. But then continues to phase two there worry tension on those vehicle there would also be retention on those vehicles. The potential for the Transportation Authority to to withhold a portion of the funding until that metric is attained. The vehicles are falling apart and need replaced. You talked about accelerating that. Holding back vehicles may be a little bit of, you know, cutting off your notion nose your spite your face. You want those vehicles in service. Most importantly, for the ta too continue to monitor and assure repairs are done in a timely manner. I am open to questions. Thank you, mr. Sergeant. That was comforting news and good recommendations. Any questions or comments from members of this body . Seeing none. Why dont we open this up to Public Comment. I have one speaker card from ms. Please line up to my left and your right. Coalition for San Francisco neighborhoods here on my own behalf. When i was recently asking a senior m. T. A. Manager why the agency would continue purchasing lrvs with basic design flaws. The answer was come back in 30 years. Although this seems dismissive, it had a basic truth. The lifespan of buses is 12 to 14 years. With lrvs having double the lifespan of buses this suggests more rigorous review process than used for buses. Issues with the m. T. A. Rollout, st200 were similar to issues in calgary. An article herald shows otherwise. Ap24, april 14, 2019. The new stateoftheart trains dont suffer from the same door censor problems plaguing the other other city using them which is suspected of a woman dragged underneath the moving train. Despite the issues. [please stand by] and then what you do, supervisors, is hire a consultant. The first thing we, the taxpayers, want to know, is how much are you paying this consultant . And he hasnt even given us the real information. We got some real information three times and ive been coming for some of the meetings, not all of the meetings, but i follow it on the tv. We have been getting the real situation reports from the operators. And the m. T. A. Representative, when she gives a presentation before the [buzzer] before the m. T. A. Commission, that is quite different from what she gives over here. You board of supervisors must remember we taxpayers pay the money. And we need to get some real reports. Some Needs Assessment so that we get the service. Thank you very much. [buzzer] thank you. Are there any other members of the public who would like to testify on items 12 or 13 . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. Let me thank ms. Kershbalm for your honest and ongoing updates, and the improvement we have seen over the past many months, and well be seeing you again next month. With that, these are information items. Mr. Clerk, could you please read the next item. Item 14, the San Francisco meeting Reliability Working Group update. This is an information item. Colleagues, as you know, and this is in ms. Kershbalms wheel house, pun intended, as well. The mayor, supervisors mandelman, safai and the controllers office, thank you, ms. Stevenson, for being here today, and m. T. A. Staff, and experts from transit agencies around the country, to do a deep dive into muni reliability, which was a fascinating experience. Kind of like going back to college. And the work that staff did was really, i think, very helpful. We learned things across a host of different areas, ranging from things that we all knew about on the operator shortage side, to things that we did not know about, relative to capacity under Market Street and automatic automated train control systems socio. So i want to think particularly Gwyneth Borden and ed harington for cochairing the working group. Today we have ms. Stevenson and ms. Kershbalm, who can give you highlevel answers to questions that were posed and the information that was garnered during the course of a half year. So why dont we start with ms. Stevenson. Good morning, board members, my name is peg stevenson, and im in the controllers office. We were really pleased to have the opportunity to work on this working group and meet and work with sfmta staff and all of the members that joined. I concur with chair peskin, it was a little like going back to college. We learned about transit issues that id been out of for a couple of years. Maybe ill talk about the process and what the working group went through, and then probably ask julie come up and speak more to the findings and recommendations, since it is her technical bailiwick more than mine. The group ranged from people who were quite expert to those of us more lay people. This is just a broad statement of the goals that we tried to focus on to kind of coellesse or work. And there is the industrial environment and other challenges facing it. This is a group of working group members. We had a selection of people from some of the transit advocacy organizations, kat carter, and queena chen. And we had Terrence Hall and roger morenco, who attended almost all of the meetings. We had a couple of subject Matter Experts who had been general transit managers themselves and or worked at muni. Mike hersh had worked at muni. And one of the general marginmanagers, and kathleen pelly had been at muni, and so it really brought a lot of expertise there. Alicia john baptiste, she cochaired the working group on context and regional, which well show you some of their findings. I had originally thought we were going to support five working group meetings,but it broke itself into four subcommittee meetings, so we sponsored the larger working group and four subcommittees. And compliments both to supervisor peskin and supervisor mandelman who attended a lot of the meetings in pern a person as well. I should mention that tilly was there at all or most of our meetings, and we got a lot of Technical Support from the sfmta, and julie brought a number of staff. And Mickey Callahan brought her staff expertise. During the course of this working group, a new h. R. Director came on, kimberly ackerman, she was there. And director whats his last name . Derek kim, who does a lot of hiring, particularly in the craft of maintenance. Very, very helpful participation from them. I kind of went over this. We met five times between july and december, and the individual subcommittees met monthly in some cases, a little less frequently in other cases. This slide just kind of talks about how were going to organize the discussions, the Common Threads that run across the different working groups. We ask people all to touch on reliability generally, and the expertise groups to focus on congestion, depending on the intersections that intersected them. Julie, you get a lot of information here at the sfmta board, and i dont think any of the findings will be particularly new to you. But they were eye opening for a lot of us in the working groups. In worse force and hiring, we spent a fair amount of time looking at the challenges that the city faces in hiring enough transit operators and getting them trained and getting them fully qualified to be out on the street. And the amount of time that needs to pass before we can run enough classes and fit the gap of scheduled service right now. Across all of the working groups, i would say that the transit operator shortage was the single highest challenge to solve. Once you got those operators hired, you need them trained and supported and with field experience, so the same issue bumps up into the training capacity at muni. And i mention that they have to go to the department of public health. Right. And since supervisor peskin mentioned that, again, the working group did give us a chance to surface a number of places where sfmta can really use support from the rest of the city. The autonomy that it has, i think, has both a lot of strength in that it can run a lot of its process sees withoueswithout waiting for approval, but there is an element of isolation, where if you need help sometimes you dont call for it as soon as you might. And just getting the medical approvals done for the people coming in was a blockage, and we able to surface it and see it and help it get addressed to this working group. Maintenance classifications. The working group gave us a chance to look at the rate of vacancies that exist in almost every skilled craft and Maintenance Work classification. Very high rates. And look at the larger labor pool that these folks work in. This is across the bay area where people in Skilled Trades and crafts are needed in every industry. It is not just muni alone or the city alone. The low Unemployment Rate and the challenge of people coming into craft and trades, skilled work forces, are something that we really need to work on as a city and a region. And then security challenges. We looked at safety issues and what costumers are experiencing and drivers are experiencing across the system. And, again, at the time, there is a new safety and security plan being developed by muni that we were able to look at. This slide showed many, many times in our working groups, to impress upon people the effect that the operator shortage has on service and delivery. Committee meetings, this was mostly the people i mentioned that had been transit managers in their own right and or had worked at muni before. We had a number of meetings, and then a number came here for site meetings, spende spent a good amount of time walking through the yards with julie, and looking at the issues they faced there. I think they ratified a lot of what you heard about munis plans to address the Fleet Management issues, such as the presentation that ms. Kershbalm just gave. So they ratified a lot of the plans that muni already has in the works to address these things, and were able to give a number of strong recommendations that i think would help with some of those issues. They also looked a little bit at just what has been done under muni forward. Again, the installation of many miles of street design improvements, the transit lanes, the signal preferences, and ratified it in sfmtas approach of these. And the city needs to support transit first and bus lanes, and the types of things that show broadly the support for congestion eduction in the city. Reduction in the city. This slide im presses on people of what is going on in the subway. We talked broadly about what is going on in the built environment, the congestion spreaf expressed by our city and others. We want to reduce congestion, increase the speed of buses. We want to look at the regulatory design, engineering, public interactions, everything that can be done to help the buses move faster on the streets. We talked a fair amount about largescale capital plans, regional planning, and funding, and julie will touch on a couple of the recommendations there. But, again, viewing this as a regional problem, where the city cant act alone to try to help address its congestion and interconnections between the agencies. This last finding here i think is one of the most challenging. Were just trying to see where the city can, as we said, speak with one voice on regional issues. So both sort of make a claim for the fair share that San Francisco deserves in state and federal funding to build the facilities here, take the right role in the buildout of bart, and the funding of other regional projects and kind of have our members who attend things like m. T. C. , gold gate transit, and any other processes, train together, work together, and be a unified voice there. Governance and organizational community, we looked at how muni was situated, and the sort of types of control it has. We looked at its control over fares, budgeting, and funding, over street design and environment. We looked at the sort of unique nature of it in that it has parking and mobility management and Transit Management all under its same umbrella. It does its own Capital Development and the strengths of that. We looked at the sort of large proportion of other transit agencies around the country that are more regional governments and therefore have more autonomy over fares and budgeting. And there are some tradeoffs two be made there. And lastly, we looked at just how muni tries to bring customer thinking more broadly across the agency. It is sort of welldeveloped in parts of muni, but julie was a very strong voice for trying to see how customer centric thinking and customer design might be brought into other parts of the agencies. Pieces have been put together and pulled apart. And i will stop there and answer any questions about the finding or process and ask julie to speak to the recommendations. Chairman thank you. Are there any questions or comments for ms. Stevenson . This entire working Group Exercise was done with the notion that we were going to have a new executive director of the sfmta, and that we wanted to really highlight this roadmap as mr. Cumberlin was in the process of being hired. Commissioner safai. This is a lot of information, and i appreciate the hard work you all did and the working group and those who were involved in this. I think it would be great maybe not today, but ask the new executive director to come back and present his interpretation or his own reactions to this report. I think that would be an important thing. I think one of the things that jumps out to me the most is the lack of operators in terms of the vacancies, in terms of the maintenance, in terms of how often that affects service. I know myself, being in one of the outer neighborhoods of the city, were con constantly bec being impacted by crowding on the buses. I know it is a citywide phenomenon. I guess i would like to hear from sfmta on what their staffing plan is and how they plan to get operators hired in an accelerated fashion. And what the roadblock has been and why this has been such an ongoing problem in terms of vacancies and how it is impacting service. Is there someone here from the sfmta. I think julie can speak to almost all of those issues. That would be great. It was really eyeopening to look at the vacancies rates and the challenges muni had experienced both in operators and in crafts and Skilled Trades and maintenance. There are many, many things that the city can control and work on to some extent. We can do training. We can work with the unions on the issues that are within their control. But i mentioned, also, just the sort of larger context that muni operates in, and the competition for Skilled Labor and crafts and maintenance, and this is one of the areas where it really needs to be a larger plan. They have already started approaching city college and the other Community Colleges in the area to improve training and apprenticeship. It really was eyeopening to look at the vacancy rates and what we have to do to increase our through foot for recruiting and training in all of these classifications. That would be great. I would like to hear from the sfmta. Is julie here . Julie is here and she has a presentation of her own. Do you want to come up . Good morning. If you go through your presentation first, thats great. I can ask questions after. There is a wonderful synergy between the very first slide and the questions that you raised. I do want to, by way of of introduction, say how appreciative i was of the time everybody took, including both supervisor peskin and supervisor mandelman on this committee, as well as peg and her staff. When the idea was first floated, i was uncomfortable. It is not easy to be put under a microscope and to have the kind of internal challenges discussed in an external way. But i am incredibly great full because i think that the combination of San Francisco policymakers and experts combined with the external transit managers allowed us to tell an important story that needed to be told. And it really has given us our marching orders as we go into the twoyear budget process that is under way. So youre going to see very directly how sfmta is internalizing these recommendations bay theyre driving our entire budget process. And theyre requiring our board to address some very difficult challenges. How to pay for things like improving the existing service and really getting to the service that San Francisco deserves, as well as keeping up with the inevitable growth, and need to grow service, to address issues, like crowding. The first slide shares what the Muni Working Group recommended on staffing. And front and center is training enough new operators so that we are not only able to deliver 100 of our existing service, but that by the fall of 21we can also anticipate a potential service increase. This is not going to be an easy endeavor, but we are making Good Progress. In 2018, we only graduated 78 new operators. In 2019, we graduated 200. So thats more of a doubling. But thats really only allowed us to tread water. What this committee helped us articulate is what is the strategy that will actually help us close the gap. That meant not only going with the larger class sizes we already implemented, but also more frequent class sizes. As of monday, we started a new operator class every five weeks, instead of the eight weeks previously, and that will get us to over 500 operators in the next 18 months. It also means weve had to accelerate the hiring of trainers because this monumental effort requires more people to do the work. It also requires more ongoing training. M. T. A. Will be in the uncomfortable position of having more than 50 of our operators with five years or less of experience. Arguably, it takes five years to become an expert operator. And so making an investment in ongoing training is going to be critical to providing Excellent Service and maintaining safety. The second key thing that youll see as we go through our budget process is that based on the committee recommendations, there is a significant increase in Human Resources staff. The way director tom lirnlin has been describing it to our board, is, essentially, we need our h. R. Department to put on their airport safety mask before assisting others. What he means by that is, we cant possibly increase staffing if we dont have staff in our h. R. Department to process those. Part of why we have so many vacancies is we have Something Like over 100 vacancies over a single analyst who is trying to address that. Were in the process of hiring more h. R. Analysts now and then looking to the budget process to make that process more sustainable. So based on the staffing recommendations from the Muni Working Group, were essentially going to be dividing our open vacancies into three buckets. There are positions like our planner positions, where as long as we have an active list, we almost always have enough interest in the agency. There is making sure that we have the resources in place to keep those continuous so we can do continuous hiring. We have a second bucket, where we do want to take advantage of some of the agencys independence and look at things like dedicated m. T. A. Classifications. An example of that would be stationary engineer engineer. We went over 18 months not hiring these positions because another department was holding up the development of a list for this work. And then the third area that peg alluded to is, we do have some classifications where we are not even getting enough applicants when we produce a list. And that means with have a pipeline problem. And the pipeline problems are not going to be easy to fix. Theyre going to require innovative partnerships. In some cases theyre going to require new apprenticeship programs, as well as creating better pipelines into the work. Thats the hard work ahead of us on staffing, but it is absolutely our focus and critical to our success. The next set of recommendations are on reliability, and have to do with systems and vehicles. Here it includes not only getting the bradas replaced as quickly as possible, but they made recommendations on using the more reliable fleet in vulnerable places like the subway, which we will pursue. It also included long and shortterm improvements to the subway. The committee saw a similar presentation to what we shared with this board on the need to replace the train control system, and the working group absolutely gave a strong endorsement on the need to urgently replace the train patrol system. And the recommendations included also developing a twoyear plan, which is under way. And the last area under the system was to really increase the work weve been doing under the Muni Forward Program to create and protect more streets from traffic. The good news is that we know where we increase service and where we make investments in transit priority, we see a parallel increase in ridership. Our challenge now is to use techniques, like quick build, to get those it improvements on the ground more quickly. The group also talked about future service recommendations. We are looking for ways to incorporate this into our budget, although we do have a significant structural budget deficit we will have to close in order to do this. But only after we have stablelizestableized the existig service. It is important we dont add to our demand until we are able to fulfill all of the service we have on the ground today. Under the context and regional recommendations, as peg alluded to, the group spent a lot of time talking about the need to speak with one voice. I think that there was strong consensus that based on existing relationships and partnerships, for example, some of the coordination work that the city does with the Transportation Authority, that we are currently speaking with one voice, but it is not formalized, and we dont necessarily have the top two asks that everybody is bringing to their individual regional commissions and putting forward as a need. And then the last two areas have to do with communications, both our external communications and looking at how our Organizational Practices can create a Great Customer experience. And the second one came primarily from the Union Partners who participated in this process, roger morenco, and Terrence Hall. They said our operators are pointing out a lot of easy wins. How can we get those on the ground more quickly . And we did try to react to that feedback in realtime. The 90day plans that i work on, both the one were just including, as well as the up coming plan, there include more operatordriven improvements, things like removing parking at corners where it is tough to make a turn. Or schedule adjustments that operators recommend. We get the best feedback from the folks that are out in the system every day. And make insuring no making sure not only taking that feedback, but that were following up. So those are the recommendations that built on the findings. As i said, the hard work is under way to figure out how to fund some of these changes. Weve already had some nearterm wins. The m. T. A. Board adopted a transit quickbuild program at its meeting earlier this month, which will allow us to identify and address some of the biggest bottlenecks in the system, as well as making Good Progress on operator hiring. But we have a lot of tough challenges ahead, and we appreciate the continued partnership of this board to meet those challenges. Chairman thank you, ms. Kershbalm. Commissioner fewer. Thank you very much. And thank you, first, for also just saying that it was it is a little nervous having people take a hard look, as a critical friend, to any system. The Public Servants are working so hard to do their best, and it is hard to hear sometimes even friendly criticism. So i want to thank you for being open to that. Having said that, i would like then to add a little bit friendly criticism or not criticism, but actually some agreement with some of these recommendations. So i think that the first one that also, i want to say, stands out to me, is on page 12, the sfmta wants to need to improve its response to respond to costumers. We want to communicate to everyone who is using our public transportation, to use our public Transportation System. And the designs that sfmta has, or puts on to our streets, is it really serving people that are driving every day on these commute lines . I just heard an earful on saturday, quite frankly, and people want to put a Charter Amendment on that makes all sfmta commissioners voted by the general public. So i feel like what they what they were saying was also a result of not having really good communication with sfmta and really digging deep into what the issues are and the vehicles to which they can actually have a voice. And i also want to say even my own personal experience with sfmta, i know we hire engineers that are very smart and have studied this stuff for a long time. But when ive been in my district ive been in my district since 1959, and i think i understand how my district works and the flow of my district around change, and i have to say it is not sometimes when ive just been suggesting, it has not been embraced or follows, and then it blows up and we have to fix it again. I just want to say that i think that as a supervisor of district one, im happy to work with you on this issue of communication and getting feedback, but i also think that we shoulder some real, on the ground is information about how our district operates and how our constituents really affect change and how they respond to change. And then i want to just say about this, the operator shortage, on page six, the transit operator shortage has the single most critical effect on muni reliability. I couldnt agree more. As someone who waits for the 5 after work, and three buses i cant get on because it is so crowded. And theyre all super crowded, and i think the operator shortage is critical to actuate being a service. Have we done any surveys about our workforce, around Workforce Housing . Because we know when we said there is a teacher shortage, were dealing with teacher Workforce Housing. Is this something that would help to keep and retain this is page six. Also given the High Percentage of operators with less than five years of driving experience, we want people to be more experienced drivers, and stay with us longer. So im wondering, are we looking at Workforce Housing . Are we looking at Retirement Benefits . Are we looking at subsidies for housing . Are we looking at a bus driver next door program . Also, are we looking at paid internships in m. T. A. , or, as you said, a pipeline, and i couldnt agree with you more, i think we need a pipeline actually for these really for these city jobs that are imperative to make our city run, but also the good city jobs, and how do we make them better and more attractive and get the work out. So i believe in the budget process. Two years ago m. T. A or was it a year ago m. T. A. Hired new h. R. Positions. I just wanted to know what the status of those positions were, and warrant you were able to fill those positions. It was im pef imperative to have these positions because we needed to ramp up our workforce and our hiring. I would love to hear about that before our Budget Committee this year. I think were going to think outside the box. Being a bus driver in San Francisco an operator must be one of the hardest jobs in San Francisco. I know as i get off the 5, i always yell from the back door, thank you. Because it is really thank you for doing this job, and thank you for being a bus driver operator in San Francisco. So im happy, also i just want to say im happy to work on these issues with you. I think when we look at muni and how hard it is to hire, as youre saying, even your applicant pool, yes, i think we need to think outside the box. I think we need to look at a pipeline because we also are going to have a lot of people whos jobs are going to be replaced, who are drivers, and experienced drivers. And i get that it is so crazy that now young people arent learning to drive at all. When you were 16, it was sort of a right of passage, and everyone knew how to drive. And now nobody knows how to drive. And the Police Department is having the same problem with drivers. But i think there are a pool of drivers that actually we could be transition over to our city family as muni drivers. And i would like for us to explore that. I just want to say overall, i want to appreciate the openness that you have about this, about this process. And i think this is a democracy, and a democracy is super messy sometimes, but the product is way better. I want to thank m. T. A. And also thank my leadershi leadersp here, commissioner peskin and mandelman for bringing this forward and bringing so much effort into this. I find all of this information really interesting. So thank you very much. Chairman sheik for thank you for those comments. Does anyone want to respond . The one thing i want to talk about because it is in district one, but it has a citywide benefit, is we do have, i think, the start of a very interesting pipeline for some of our maintenance positions. Unfortunately, right now the only high school in San Francisco that teaches shop or Industrial Arts is washington high, and they have two very dedicated teachers there that work across the city to create a High School Intern program, a paid High School Intern program, where we bring on 15 to 20 students each summer. They work at m. T. A. And other departments. The mechanics have them do real work, so they get real handson experience. And not only does it create a pipeline into some of our preapprentice and apprenticeship programs, but it also gets people who maybe traditionally didnt see maintenance as a job path for them into it. So we have a lot of women girls, i guess that participate in the program, as well as students of color. And thats the kind of work that we are deeply committed to. Because maintenance jobs are going to continue well into the future to be highpaying, highskilled jobs. And were excited to be part of that pipeline. And i think that this report just shines a light on the need for even further investment in those types of work. Chairman thank you for those comments. And i apologize for not calling on commissioner mandelman, who attended many of the almost all of the meetings, and the subcommittee meetings. My apologies for not calling on you first. No apology needed. I just actually wanted to echo the thanks that have been thrown around here this morning. I was throughout this process, i was so impressed, of course by the controllers work, by ben and peg and everyone who was involved there, on the Transportation Authority side, tilly and your team were amazing. And at m. T. A. , both from m. T. A. Staff, leadership, and from the leadership of the union. I thought that this was a really man amazing coming together of folks, and im glad that you were able, julie, to overcome your discomfort, and im glad this was useful for you as well. And actually the process of having these folks with local expertise and then National Expertise all taking a look at the problem helped you think about what youre doing on a day to day. So i was im glad we did this. And i also just did want to note, though, that although we set intentionally an 18 to 24month timeframe for these recommendations and purposely didnt get too deep into the money issues, that an upgoing undercurrent of everything that we talked about was m. T. A. s need for additional resources, that the Capital Projects that we talked about as potential solutions, as Necessary Solutions over the next decades, are all going to cost huge amounts of money. And there will need to be some local contribution to t. And we have to think about how to get that done. And then, you know, just looking at even this hint on slide 18 that after Current Services stable liostablize,we need to the population is growing, and we need to pull people out of cars and getting them on to m. T. A. , and that requires more operating funds. I know that need has been identified through prior task forces,and i hope we can redouble our efforts. I think we need to be reebllreally need to be looking for local opportunities to get more resources to m. T. A. Thank you for those comments. I think the biggest challenge before our board builds on both what supervisor mandelman and supervisor fewer talked about, which is, in order to deliver extent service and keep up with growth, it is clear we need more resources. But we also have an increasing structural deficit because the cost of living in the bay area is increasing much, much faster than the cost of the revenues that we control. Like, there are fees and fines. So as were both asking for more to address these decadelong underinvestments, and were tackling the important work of paying our staff a living wage to deal with the challenges that everybody in the bay area faces, were giving the budget a kind of a onetwo punch. So thats the work in front of us, and well need a coalition of support to address it. Chairman commissioner walton . Thank you, chair peskin, and thank you ms. Kershback in just a moment kershbalm. I wanted to tt recruitment. There was a period of time in history where we had people who would just flock to become operators. Much like you put together the plan in terms of how many different trainings were going to have per year, and looking for resources so that we can have more trainers, i think we need to be just as aggressive in the outreach recruitment strategies, for bringing in more operators, pathway programs. I think we need to be more aggressive and more formal with a program, working with city college. I can remember a couple of years ago, there were Resources Available to try to develop apprenticeship programs with m. T. A. And tutor perrini, and i dont foe if those were fully recognized. We probably should see a similar outreach and recruitment plan that is written down, that is documented, so we know exactly what we can do to support that plan and how we can find ways to work on this body to be supportive. Because if we actually can see what the efforts are and see what were doing and be real aggressive about it, i think it will allow us all to be helpful in that recruitment because we know, again, there was a point in time where everybody wanted to work for muni. Things are changing, because there are so many different types of jobs available. So we have to be very aggressive and intentional. We will be supportive of that, but we should see some type of outreach and recruitment plan as documented so we can know how to support it. Wed be happy to share that. Thank you for that support. Chairman commissioner preston. Thank you, and thanks to chair peskin and commissioner mandelman for your work, and all of the folks who participated in the working group. I also want want to echo the thanks to operators and also a shout out to riders. Ive been riding muni a long time, and i want to express appreciation for those who ride in our transit first city, and put up with a lot of the same frustrations that the operators have to grapple with, particularly from congestion on the streets and lack of the full service that everyone deserves. I do want to second commissioner safais call for a deeper dive on this. I think it would be great to have director tomlin here at a future meeting and talk, as we drill down into some of the details here. I had a couple of comments and questions. One is just on the i understand the comment that the recommendations here are driving the budget process. I appreciate understanding ie goal or is there a commitment in the budget process to have the proposed budget reflect fully funding all of the shortfall in hiring that is needed by this target of summer of 2021 . Soor is that still up for discussion . Im wondering if there is an m. T. A. Commitment that the budget that is being developed now will reflect fully funding the gap identified in hiring by the working group . The sfmta board is deeply committed and focused on operator hiring and has strongly endorsed our plan to go to a class every five weeks. And is also supportive of my work to use existing vacancies to make sure were increasing the trainers in order to keep up with that. So were very much on track with full board support to address the operator shortage. Were right now the m. T. A. Board is in the process of rolling up their sleeves, looking at these proposals, looking at our structural deficit, looking at other feedback tha were gettint were gettinga number of different settings, to figure out hour well i dont want to speak for them midprocess, but they have had the same presentation that you have had, be the feedback that were getting is that the budget recommendations should reflect operationalizing the recommendations of the Muni Working Group. Thank you. I think we should start with fully funding these type of recommendations. Were a transit first city, and i think we need to be aggressively pursuing the revenue we need to do that and setting that bar as sort of an assumption. I understand it is a work in progress in terms of the budgeting process, but certainly would support efforts to be as bold on that front as possible. I also maybe this is related, but im concerned by i think your comment was we dont want to add to existing demand until we have the positions filled. Just looking at our transit first policy, im really concerned if our if we are actually adopting a goal of not having more people ride muni . I understand the challenges and limitations, believe me, im on these buses that are overcrowded every day, but maybe if you can just clarify im trying to understand if for the next, say, one to two years, it is the position it is m. T. A. s position that we are not trying to incentavise increased ridership or increased demand, or am i misinterpreting . W respectfully, i believe youve misinterpreted. We know that the best way to generate ridership is by delivering Excellent Service, by filling all of our runs, by having vehicles be less crowded, but having vehicles spending less time stuck in traffic. Where we have delivered on that, we have seen significant increases in ridership, and were going to continue to do that. What i was recommending is that we dont add to our operator shortage until we have solved the problem in front of us. As a city right now, we are facing a defacto 3 to 5 service cut because every day services are left open. And hundreds of scheduled trips are not being filled. So what were doing is the hard work to fill that service, which will not only help our existing riders, but will also attract new costumers to the system. So everything that we do aims to improve the customer experience, to grow ridership, and to meet our citys ambitious sustainability goals. And part of doing that is not just always looking at whats the next route or how do we increase frequency. Its by making the service that people rely on every day something that they can rely on every day. And thats the hard work in front of us. Chairman thank you. And i appreciate the clarification and i share the goals youve articulated, including growing ridership, and not viewing that necessarily as something that comes later, but that is an integral part of what were doing. I do want to just, as a final thought, weave in the fare increase discussion. I dont know what assumptions were made. I understand the working group was not directly analyzing fare stabilization, increases, decreases, or making proposals on that. But i think we need what im concerned about is that the potential for fare increases this summer will suppress ridership. So the data is quite clear for every study done on the topic, if you increase fares, with the indexing at 10 increase in fares, that will reduce ridership. I really want to make sure were not relying on fares to affectively decrease ridership as a strategy. Im not suggesting anyone is articulating this. My concern is with the silence on fares, which is understandable, its outside the scope of this, that as a practical matter, thats what we could be dealing with if were increasing fares. So i guess my only question on this, for you obviously im opposed to fare increases. Ive introduced a resolution on that. But im wondering if the projections about the need make any assumptions around fares . In other words, are we looking at the demand and the needs of the system, assuming any fare changes because o those have a direct impact on demand . I would strongly challenge that assumption. I know were going to have a longer dialogue about the budget process. But what we know about muni service is where we deliver Excellent Service, we see increases in ridership. And that our costumers are much more sensitive, when theyre making travel decisions, to things like reliability and frequency. And we are very deeply committed as an agency to subsidize fares to the people that need it the most and dont have other choices on how they get around. But a blanket subsidy for people who can afford to pay the most, at the cost of some of the Service Investments we do see that as a challenge. Built into our boards budget process right now is the fare indexing. And that is something that were getting feedback on, and it is something that the m. T. A. Board will be digesting, along with the feedback from this intoord. Board. But it was not something explicitly covered by this board, which was how to we deliver excellent muni service. Thank you. My final comment would be i think were in agreement that the service is the biggest driver of ridership, whether folks want to ride. But i dont believe it is either or. I believe we should be aggressively seeking the funding that we need, whether through the ballot on elsewhere, in order to fund the Service Improvements that we need, not trying to have riders pay more. But i think with equivalent service, there is no question in mind that raising fares does have some negative impact on ridership. I dont think it is a tradeoff of decreasing service. But im sure well discuss this more. And thank you for clarifying what the assumptions of the working group were. Thank you. Chairman commissioner safai. Thank you. I know there are a lot of people who want to weigh in on this topic. Ill just come back to some of the things ive said before. Im going to focus on the staffing portion. This is a theme that were really focusing on with a lot of different departments. I know were going to be spending time in the coming weeks working with the department of public health. There is a lot of recurring themes. One of the things were hearing is that your h. R. Department is not fully staffed or needs more staffing. That can help in the facilitation of the hiring. One thing i did not hear, and i think would be really important, and this is something similar were doing with d. P. H. , is to include the operators, or include the union in the conversations about the hiring of the operators. And coming up with that plan. So it says by 2021, you need to hire 525 operators. It would be really good, when youre new director tomlin comes back, so we can have a more thorough conversation about this point, but it would be really important to see what that hiring plan is, and to ensure that that hiring plan is achievable so that you can goa get to 525 operators by that time. That includes the staffing of your h. R. That includes including the operators in the conversation, that includes the training, all of the things that would be a part of actually achieving a number that you have not been able that you have not done so far because youre constantly increasing. Before it was a really small number, and now youve done a lot more in the last couple of years. So for me, the thing that is the thing that i want to spend my time talking about today is the hiring plan. How are you going to get the operators hired . How are you going to include the existing operators in the union in the conversation . How h. R. Needs to be staffed, and what that appropriate staffing level is . I know over the last few years, m. T. A. Has received some criticism about this. There have been a lot of hirings at the midtoupper management level, so the agency has become, in some peoples opinion, kind of topheavy. My first two years, whenever i would call a meeting, four or five people would show up for the same topic, and there are a lot of layers, and i understand that those layers are probably necessary, from your opinion. I just want to see the same level of focus, energy, and effort put into hiring the basic aspect of your agency, which is having operators on staff to drive the buses and the light rail vehicles so that people can get all over the city. I just think that that is a basic im glad that it came out in these recommendations, but it is a basic function of this agency that has not been done for so many years. That would be my ask, would be when we do have your director come back, that we really focus on what the hiring plan is, including operators in the conversation, and how many h. R. People need to be added to your staff, what that total number is. And then a timeline to achieve 2021, so that we can a second piece of that would be to create a Citywide Program to reduce the vacancies in maintenance, craft, and engineering. You talked a little about that today. I want to hear what your reaction would be. I understand you have your commission, and your commission is being briefed. But this r. T. A. Needs to be include in that particulaprocess. Im excited for that. Im excited for the appetite for these details. And we would be happy to come back. Also, both supervisor mandelman and peskin and tilly and the t. A. Staff participated in all of those deep dives. And all of that information is available on the controllers website, which we can share a link. But we will come back and share that feedback with the larger board because the more people that understand the details and understand the complexities, i think the more advocacy and support we can get when were making tough tradeoffs. So thank you. Absolutely. I know when were dealing with d. P. H. , there is a question of does h. R. Need to be in the room for every interview . So having Labor Management at the table to craft this hiring plan i think is a really crucial aspect of coming up with a successful plan. Because i know you have your c. B. A. , and youre collective bargaining agreement, but there may be some fa facilitating it in a faster manner. And now youre going to include the operators up froment, and front, and i thinks a big shift in philosophy, and i think it helped to avoid many of the problems that weve seen when we purchase vehicles, which are not equipped based on the training, and how the operators conduct their daily operations. So i would think the same approach would be needed for a really successful hiring plan. Thank you. I think the other reason for that, in addition, is that our operators are our best ambassadors for the work. And they can also help with some of the partnerships that supervisor walton was talking about in terms of really promoting this as a career path. Thank you. Thank you, chair. Chairman thank you, commissioner. Commissioner yee. Thank you, chair peskin. I just want to make two comments. One of them being that just that we need a lot of operators, and the bottleneck seems to be to be in h. R. Were not talking about our Human Resource department that is separate from m. T. A. You have your own h. R. Staff. And my understanding is even that, with the h. R. Staff of m. T. A. , youre short, which means you cant even have enough people in the h. R. To hire operators. And my suggestion for that piece is and its going to take time to even ramp up the h. R. Staffing that we look for organizations that actually provide h. R. Services and have a temporary contract with these type of organizations to help us actually start finding and posting and taking people through the process of being operators. In no way am i asking that this type of contract would replace permanent staffing for h. R. But if were doing what weve debate doing all these years, were never going to catch up. The second thing is m. T. A. Does have internships for our young people in San Francisco, but they get stuck after the internship, where there is no connection between the internship and getting a job as an operator. We have to look at how we close to gap. Whether there is something we can do as a legislative branch to help that alone. Please let us know because its really a pity that you have young people go for this internship and probably want to be operators, but there is really no advantage for them to go through the internship. So those are my comments. Thank you for that support. I think that it is it absolutely is critical we have not just a pipeline, but a continuous pipeline. And i do think we have some gaps right now we do need to close up. I wanted to offer one point of clarification. Our h. R. Resources right now are very focused on operator hiring. It is why we were able to more than double our operator hiring in 2019. It is through partnerships that theyve brought to the table, including city drive, which helps people get through the hurtle of getting a commercial permit. So we do see the operator issue as the most acute, which is why so much of the agencys resources are focused on it. But right behind that is a set of serious hiring and vacancy challenges that the working group helped us to articulate. I just wanted to add two more things that i thought about. This is another thing that we learned over at d. P. H. As well. One of the other things when director tomlin comes that would be important to know what is the average hiring time that it takes to get operators into your agency . One of the things that were confronted with at d. P. H. , it takes almost six months to get someone in the door. So during that time, if youre in an area that has a competitive market, people are going to leave. So one of the things weve heard from the operators is, people will come in, theyll get trained, and the wage rates and i know you went through a protd oprocess of negotiation last year, and i think it was an increase but if people are waiting for job offers, theyre going to take jobs other places. It would be important to know what the hiring time is. If that hiring time is extended, we need to think about a way to, again, working in the Labor Management and environment, that were getting into an accelerated fashion. Chairman thank you. So, we will continue to work with you over not just the 18 to 24 months, but for years to come. Im going to open this up to Public Comment, and please ask roger and folks from local 258 to add anything to this discussion. And thank you for your participation in the working group. I wanted to actually impart an interesting highlevel observation. One of the sub groups actually talked about governance, and remember in 1999 is when we created the sfmta with proposition e, and in 2007 i offered proposition a, which gave the sfmta and its commission extraordinary and pretty independent powers. It is the only other body that has legislative authority. And there has been a number of proposals over time, supervisor safai had one. And there was a Charter Amendment that was on the ballot a few years ago that failed that would have changed the Commission Appointment structure, but the higher level observation that i wanted to impart was that the entire city, whether it is the controllers office, the board of supervisors, the Human Resources department, the one that Mickey Callahan runs we are all highly invested in helping the sfmta, and particularly on the muni reliability side. So it is good, ms. Kershbalm, that you overcame your trepidation because really the city is here to help the agency succeed. And i think youve heard that from all of my colleagues todayment and i havtoday. And i have to say tht communication through mr. Ramos and others has gotten better through our respec respective bodies and agencies, but there is a wealth of expertise and knowledge in this building and other buildings that you should avail yourselves of without, of course, compromising your independence and budgetary author recall anauthority andall of the rest. With that, ill open it up to Public Comment. Thank you for being here on behalf of the Transportation Authority. Transit first, muni first, riders first. Oftentimes people forget operators and theyre left in the background. I oftentimes try to put operators first. It is not a physically demanding job in terms of being out there in the sun and crossexaminatioconstructionwor. But it is mentally challenging. Operators wear many different hats on a daily basis. Big brother, big sister, guidance counsellor, shrink, police officer, security guard, etc. This round of negotiations last year did indeed help with the operator shortage, in terms of wages and wage progression. One of the things i would also like toe highlight is the amount of assaults that are still ongoing. And that right there is scary for operators. Just last month, you know, we had a mom who is an operator, got assaulted. Black eye, sent to the hospital, and she will probably be out for several months. These are the ongoing issues that many of the general public just doesnt know about. I would like to highlight these issues to the point of which i dont know what can and should be done in terms of more prosecution, in terms of highlighting these acts of criminalism that occur. [buzzer] it is scary being a transit operator. Although we do have a plan to move forward. I do want to height these issues because when people get hired as a newlyhired operator, it is all good and fun and exciting, but then the reality hits, the reality strikes, and the reality is were servicing a different type of population. We service an aging population, an elderly population. We serve a mentallychallenged operation. Etc. And all of these challenges are not taught. It is all learned. It is geography, it is topography, everything that happens here. So i just wanted to say i would like to highlight the operators and the assaults that occur. You know what i mean . I oftentimes refer to it as if a male operator gets assaulted, you know, it is probably twice or three times, maybe four times as bad for a female operator because oftentimes women are much more afraid of reporting it, you know . Whether it is something that is it is a verbal assault. [please stand by]