Transcripts For SFGTV SFMTA Board Of Directors 20240713

Electric devices are prohibited and the chair may over the removal from the room of any person responsibility for one going off in the middle of the meeting. The minutes of february 18th, 2020 regular meeting. No members have turned in a public speaker card. Public comment is closed. We have the minutes ill entertain a motion. Move. Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed. Consider those approved. Clerk communications. Mr. Chair i have none for you today. Item 6, introduction of new or Unfinished Business by Board Members. Any new or Unfinished Business youd like to address . Very good. Clerk directors report. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. It is my pleasure to turn the mic over to director of transit, Julie Kirshbaum foray wards for her amazing crews who do the actual hard work of serving our public. I think the first photo is ready. Everyday our overhead line unit performs preventative maintenance and keeping our Service Running safely. Theyve also been one of the teams thats been pivotal in really taking advantage of the extended maintenance window and have replaced thousands of feet of overhead wire and i think removed over 30 slices from the system. But they also have a responsibility to respond to emergencies and addressed quickly as possible so we can get service that going. That means theyre working between trains, sometimes that means that theyre working on hours or under tremendous amount oof pressure. Most recently we had a situation. I woke up to the jay line is down, we had someone try onto the tracks. They hit a pole we have overhead wire down in both directions. But i was very, very late to the story because we had two overhead lines team and eric morris, within of our field managers and they had already been working well into the night restored. What they were able to do and it did take two was t crews was thy replaced a pole. It was a wooden pole in the area so we got a little bit lucky we had a replacement pole that they were able to secure it. They re adjusted the overhead lines in both directions and tested the trains. All before 8 00 a. M. They also were supported by our staff in the field led by eric morris as well as the Transportation Management center because it effected the jay train pulling out in the morning, it also meant the fline couldnt pull in that night. So, while we had half of the fline trains pulled in the other half were stuck on Church Street that we were able to get turned around and ready to go back no service the next day. This photo here. I dont know if we called sfgtv. We can see it. Ok. This is a little bit brighter. You see the pole they replaced and how the wire is secured on both sides. I would like to recognize our two overhead line crews. A lot of the crew is sleeping because they work graveyard and so well send them their awards. With us today to represent the entire team is louis giles and john devine. I also want to recognize rob are the ratoff, peter sangita, donald landry, donna silva, robert katelli and timmy. In addition to their overhead line inspectors, david chazinski and overhead morris. The overhead line crew request by name because he is one of very few poem that can speak language and as well as keep the Service Running an. Let us congratulate you for this recognition and all you are doing for the city. This is the work that goes unseen but certainly is felt by the riders on a daily basis so thank you for your actions that day and thank you for your actions everyday. If one of you would like to speak, wed love to hear from you. [laughter] i would like to thank our group when where ou we were oute scene. This is a surprise to me because i recommended them and in return they recommended me back. [laughter] i do appreciate the things that theyve been doing as with all our crews, our maintenance, our overhead lines crews. We learned so much through our chase center adventure. Being able to do things remotely and not just from a divisional standpoint as julie mentioned. We had a number of vehicles stuck outside and being able to get operators when they first report to work to those locations to take those vehicles and to provide some Similar Service we cant actual leggett past that damaged area was pretty good and we did that during the chase. Working with the overhead Line Department in terms of just voltage and what we are capable of doing now that we had practice it was good. It was brought vehicles around and i want to thank them formally and its extremely hot. Thank you guys. Thank you, very much. [applause] i couldnt have done it without my team. We had two crews and in total there was about 12 of us out there. We did it safely and that is the most important thing that safety is a top priority and before we engage in anien counter, the job is done safely and we a good safety and i was heading to do an inspection there and we have to keep a subway going and i got called off to 2 00 in the morning and i headed out there and it was a mess. We had wires down and there was a pole down. If you, when you get no an emergency situation like that, and you have a good tail board and you give everybody a task and everybody is assigned something to do, your sense of a safety heightened and its just a linear process of everybody working together. Typically a job to replace the pole and put the wire wishes ban the air could be 10 to 12 hours. We got it going at 3 00 and im not sure what time we restored power. When you have broken polls you dont know what you are getting into. We have downed power lines. If the pole if we couldnt have gotten the poll out in its original position because they snap at the base, we have to move stuff around and it could take the job 12 to 14 hours. Everything worked in our favor. We got it done. So it was successful. We actually enjoy that. We wish that stuff would happen more often. [laughter] you guys probably to do dont whoa like that stuff. You only get one plaque a year. [laughter] dont wish like that, ok. [laughter] its one of those once where the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Because you have to stay up all night doesnt mean tom lynn has to. If we can have more of that we would appreciate it. Although i dont think you would appreciate it. Job well done and we just want to acknowledge that you acknowledge us and we go out every day and every night and were 24 hours seven days a week 365 days a year and we are here to provide service and keep those trains and buses moving and thank you for your time. [applause] very good. All right. While they pose for the pap razzie its not only seen the Technical Skills and the teamwork and creative tee and safety orientation our crews have but the obvious pride they have in combining all those skills together in order to serve the public and the agency. I love working for these guys. So, on to other topics. Weve got an update on vision zero, on Human Resources, and a couple of other information items i want to pass along to you. Weve had two Rapid Responses in february. Both of which ended up being fatalities including this sundays recent fatality corner of taylor and gary in which an elderly woman was killed while in the crosswalk crossing on the green. We completed the Rapid Response for the first one which resulted in some daylighting in the south side at poll bein polk and werg on the one that happened on sunday. Weve got Good Progress on quick build related to safety and as many of you know, we hosted a public open house for our valencia street quick build many of the question from 19th street to cesar chavez from Market Street to 15th. Over 400 members of the public, members of the business community, congregation showed up and provided us detailed comments that were incorporating into design changes and some additional conversations for community. And well hopefully be able to move forward next month. The Opening Ceremony for the town send corridor quick build is scheduled for march 10th. If you can cue the photo up, we have this is the work wove done on division a bike destination and we did a transit Boring Island to handle it was challenging given the town that its an unaccepted street without real drainage or you know things like utility poles in the middle of the street so we did the best we could given the resources that were available. Were also working hard with the state of california so the state zero Traffic Fatality Task force released its report finally on a whole variety of topics including automated Speed Enforcement and other critical tools that municipalities need if were going to have any hope to make Real Progress on eliminating traffic fatalities. Our Government Relations team is working with Laura Freedman in order to draft legislative language for bills that will address the recommendations of this report and this is super important work that will make progress and looking at the data and the enforcement and on our High Injury Network that is high so back in 2017, in collaboration with the Police Department issued about 1800 speeding citations along a handful of high visibility corridors and resulted in some success about a reduck in speed that lasted for a week and demonstrated yes, enforcement is important but it has to be combined with. Chinese americans is the second racial group in San Francisco and the most common language other than english spoken at home is chinese and Chinese Americans including the fatalities of this last sunday make up a dis and so, we are doing a whole advertising and social Media Campaign aimed at chinesespeaking drivers including drivers who use we chat and other services that are less commonly used among the englishspeaking population and working with the World Journal for advertising and getting the word out to them. With that id like to bring up kim better will he on the progress were making on one of our biggest problems, the vacancy, space of hiring and ensuring that Human Resources is fully staffed to be able to allow us to achieve our goals. Thank you, director dom lynn. Good afternoon. I am really excited to be here to update you about our hiring trends and what we have been accomplishing over the past few months. And specifically the h. R. Team. The slide you have in front of you shows our transit operator hires by calender year. So, it shows from 2016 to 2019. Can we pull that slide up here. Sfbtv. Thank you. So as you can see from 20182019 we had a 65 increase in the number of operators that we hired so thats phenomenal work incustody owes to the h. R. Team for that. In february we have 2609 transit operators. For 2020, this table actually gives you a timeline of what 2020 looks like in terms of hiring our operators. And you can see on the left hand column, where it says 2020 recruitment timetable, there are four different recruitment slots. There are two week intervals and four different intervals where we accept Application Force operators. The first one closed on monday. Great news, we had 721 applications for that last year for our frame of reference, we have 561 so that is great news so were trending up in the numbers of applicants were getting so well have an examination ton march 31st and april the first and any of the, all of those applicants westbound called to test for those two days and then those who actually pass the test will then be referred to the city drive and tate for that is april the 17th. Great nus in terms of the city drive. We just signed another new contract with them which starts in april and through june of next year and i know you all heard through the reliability workgroup that were having issues getting our d. O. T. Physicals, et cetera, and weve really been able to successfully iron that out to the city drive program. Any candidate deferred to the city drive program will have it done through city drive so it froese up the lots that we have for our current employees as well as our new hires and other possessions and that is really a positive. When you had and then we generally have a 72 passing rate on the test. So if we lock at that for the numbers and the percentages well end up with 241 candidates and through that they still have to pass the d. O. T. The drug test and get their c. D. L. Last year we had six Training Classes so we increased it by three and were projection is well accommodate each class and well have 45 candidates in each class and we actually are in the process of filling classes through june 8th. So were on target and our goal for hires for this year is 396. That is for the operator. And i just wanted to also mention our miscellaneous position so this slide represents all of our new hires for january and february and we had 38 higher sustainability streets and so our total hires is 75. You can also see that we filled three h. R. Positions. We are continuing to diligently to in february we implement our recruitment policy and part of that is to make the process more efficient and reduce barriers to hiring and thank you for discussing our progress and i want to thank transit we really appreciate their appreciate. Wonderful. Director, in terms of outreach, is it state wide or regional bay area looking for candidates if. It depends on the position but we are doing both and were actually making sure that were reaching to other avs thats part of our policy wore making sure that depending on the position, whether its through other per odd cal transit related job postings, and other specific in terms of enhancing our diversity outreach as well so were making a concerted beyond the county and city of San Francisco. What other agency in the bay area you are competing with . Other Transit Systems definitely and also its one, telephone. And also you know, other city departments so wor were definiy trying to make sure our outreach efforts are broader, wider and more diversified. When those applications come in, what are they saying why they may not want to come here if the cost of housing or living . Board of directors. When we reach out to the applicants and meet the minimum qualifications and some of them, there was a 50 rate where theyll come in and test so one of the things we do is surveying that other 50 who dont show up to see what is the reason. Did they get another job . Was it the cost of living or housing. Its something that we want to implement. Thank you. Surement. Please. Thank you for showing us you hired three h. R. People. I know that you still have having savacancies. How many are left. 20. So three helps and you are still thats right. Thank you. So, my final question and we can move on first of all, thank you, kimberley, very much. When we had all of these vacancies to fill, there was a lot of intra specifics about the reason. Was there something unattractive about working at the agency . Was it a function of cost or a function of customer treatment and management . We looked at everything and i realized theres no simple answer but one of the overriding answers we heard was we just needed to expedite the process and free up the process to get people hired to fill these vacancies. I assume but i want to ask because i think its important that the public and everyone know what were doing and what the reasons are, i assume that this experience has taught you that analysis was correct and that when we free up and open the process, better, wore going to hire qualified people. Thats right. Thats right. So one of the things with our policy, were looking to make sure that were having a more efficient process and were reducing any barriers or impediments we may have to filling those positions so definitely. Right. So the conclusion, if i can can be a cheerleader is this is a wonderful place to work and were making it a better place to apply as well. Definitely. Very good. I have one question. I know we were training more trainers to actually have more operators go through the process, can you remind me where we are in that process. We are in the process of hiring more trainers and i believe we have a about another 30 days, i believe, where we expect to be staffed with that. As i consequence, how many classes will do it mont monthly . Yes, we have a class every five weeks and the expectations is we will put 45 employee 45 en each class. Even with the new trainers . I thought we would do more . It comes out to every five weeks. Ok. Yeah. All right. Your deposition is over. Well done. [laughter] and director tom lynn, i assume theres coordination with leo his staff because obviously we budgeted for all these positions but it wont upset our budget projections, it will make us happy from an operational stand point. Thats right. All of these oppositions were paid for. Very good. Ok. So two more quick items. One is sunday streets. This sunday marks the beginning of sunday streets season for this year. Were starting on valencia street which is closed to cars just for the day. From Market Street down to 26th. If you bring up the images online, as many of you know who have been to our sunday streets event, the streets are heavily programmed. We have some pictures available on the show sfgovtv. So the streets are heavily programmed with interesting activities for families and kids and people of all kinds. Next slide. And usually it turns out about 85 of the attend des are san franciscans who spend money in the neighborhood while theyre hangout. Were supporting a nonprofit called livable city which organizes it and were also partnered with the San Francisco department of publichealth. Wovweve got 10 events this yean the mission and we also have events in the excel seer, sunset golden gate park, soma the western edition for more information, you can go to sundaystreetssf. Com. And finally, and you can bring up the last image, i wanted to point out that on march 18th, transit driver appreciation day. Another one of our favorite days of the year honoring the day allegedly that the first horsedrawn omnibus debut in paris in 1662. Basically there to honor the extraordinary work our transit operators do every day getting the whole array of san franciscans to work and to their doctor appointments and also dough escalating conflict and providing directions and providing special assistance to those with special needs, our operators are our Customer Service face of our no entire agency and we love the work they do and people like me are in support of their work and thats all i have. Is there a Public Comment on the report . Yes, mr. Winier. An opportunity for members of the public to address topics raised by director tom lynn. Is there a comment under the report. Seeing none, mr. Winier will be our sole speaker. Herbert, welcome back. Herbert winier. One thing i commend the individuals that redress the problems of the wiring on the metro and i commend them for that but it also highlights the problems are largely internal with Service Deliver row with muni. Its a daily operation that are not examined and basically the transit effectiveness project now known as muni doesnt address any of it. I think Service Delivery is even worse. You have to address the internal problems of muni and this is something that has not really been examined. So, these are my comments on that. I commend those who are awarded for their meritorious service, however, we have to address the internal problems of muni with launched this whole failed transit effectiveness project and you are basically going to have the same problems no matter how many bus stops you remove and how many you alter the rest of it remains the same. Its the same old dance. Thank you. Thank you, very much. Ok, with Public Comment closed, directors are there any further questions or comments for director tomlin on his report. Thank you for the my mic on . Thank you for the town send street update. I ride that on bike shares a lot to get to cal train to do my cal train Board Member Service which the director is now taking over and not only do i ride it a lot and appreciate it a lot but i bring it all the a lot time at the cal train meetings as example of what cities up and down the call train line need to do to get more people to the stations without private automobiles. So it will be super helpful when we have data around that that we can really publicize it so the director can take it to the board and rewind all the other entries and up down the line what a big difference it makes to have safe infrastructure for bicycles and pedestrians going to the station. It carries so many people its fascinating to watch. Thank you for that. Its appreciated. Thats right. Our staff will collect data on ridership on safety and other metrics. This is a quick build so were required to evaluate its progress to make adjustments and also if its successful to celebrate its success. Very good. I just had two quick comments. One is we were all happy to see the numbers in the chronicle piece about the success on Market Street in terms of markets and transit acceleration and im seeing quite a few cars still on Market Street and i just do know if thats a matter dont know if their enforcement has fallen off or people are getting used to the enforcement and im not sure what it is but i want to share that youve seen the same as well but that somehow our messaging is not getting through to everybody. Despite our excited volunteer cyclists sit sen enforcer we want to back them up with smfta enforcement and the other request is we can schedule, when it works out on the calender, just schedule a deeper dive on vision zero that would be great. I remember last year we had one and we had someone from d. P. H. Present and just go deeper into what were learning from all of these incidents just this year and it seems like theres an observation that disproportionate number of elderly and that makes sense given everything youve shared in terms of the impacts of the just in terms of how we are continuing to evolve our approach based on what we continue to learn. It would be great. I just want to point out that sfmta does not do moving violation enforcement. Thats in partnership with sfpd, the San Francisco Police Department. Our parking control officers remain out there to help direct traffic. They can issue parking citations including for things lick blocking the box and San Francisco police at the present time has issued moving violations but one of the things we observed with motorists unless theres a officer posted at every single corner all day that motorists will decide that they are above the law and make the turn. I want to add to that and make a request. It happened on thursday night. There was a car slowing down the traffic on Market Street. I want to point out that one of the things i was talking to the operator. There were a lot more bicyclists and making sure we talked to the operators that theres a lot more bicycles who may or may not be vigilant in going around the bus and so i know that she felt a little bit of pause just because they werent expecting the increase in volume and i guess more of the free reign behavior so we can train our operators or reinforcing with operators that we are going downtown to be mindful of the psyche list. One of the challenge snow squalls not only we have a lot of new riders think a car free Market Street means its a vehicle fro Market Street and we will need to work with Community Partners to step up our education around safe and civil cycling behaviour being cautious around the buses. What is an unaccepted street . Theres a fine San Francisco tradition of a smattering of streets that were never upgraded to the public works standards. In the history of San Francisco, many of the streets were upgraded as adjacent development went through and there are bits and pieces of streets around the city that were never they never had that happen. Townshend is one of them where theres no proper sidewalk, drainage or road base. The city, like neither m. T. A. Nor public works has a fund set aside to do that work. This also includes a lot of the narrow lanes in neighborhoods like Myrtle Heights or the hills above the bayview where we have dirt stress tha streets. The city owns the rightofway but hasnt accepted responsibility for the maintenance of the infrastructure. Arent they carrying tort lie a lot if. Liability . As long as its not accepted its not their responsibility. How many of them are there . That is theres a map. If you google San Francisco unaccepted streets, it brings up the map. Theyre scattered all over the city and some are prominent. The most prominent being the stretch of towns send. It dates back 100 years. It seems to me, whether its accepted or not, a street that important, as director brinkman mentioned, especially pedestrian and bicycle in transit movement, we ought to figure out a way to improve the street. Well, a street like townshend is waiting are. It will dig up all of that part of townshend street so do we take our limited resources and focus on safety input or to completelcompletecompletely rebt for 100 million to have it attorney up when the downtown extension comes in. Yeah, but, i think the answer is yes because i think that extension will take a long time to build. The Current Location of the cal train station is in interim location itself, right . Its been interim for 100 some years. Any other questions . Are we going to hear in the not too distant in the transit upgrades. Yes, were wanting to let the conditions settle out to see where they stabilize and were also its important on Mission Street thats very good. The preliminary news is obviously encouraging and i will say from a personal experience one really unintended great thing is how quiet this street is and i will suggest that its not only pleasant but i would suggest that it enhance safety because when you can hear better, you probably know of dangers that are approaching better. On not topic, i got your caution that this is for within day and i think i know the answer to this. Because its a sunday, probably not really reflective day when we close down the street or is that something we can use for future planning . Its hard to to withinday accounts. Particularly given the fact that recent news has significantly impacted travel behaviour in San Francisco. Understood. So now it might be a good tim to collect data and show that theres no traffic but theres traffic is down threw out the city. Understood. Ok. Very good. Thank you, director tomlynn, wonderful report. Next item, please. Clerk mr. Chair, moving on to item 8. Mr. Chair, i to not see any member of the c. A. C. Here to report to you. Their next meeting is this coming thursday. Item 9, general Public Comment many of this is an opportunity for members of the public to residents a the board on matters that are within the jurisdiction but not on todays agenda. First speaker is joel followed by robert and then trinhich oliver. Im a School Parking guard. I spoke to you before and advocating our expanded program that i believe we helped the city save money by preventing accidents. I got this from the City Attorneys Office that said between march of 2018 through december of 2019, the city paid almost 5 million to settle 16 lawsuits involving buses, light rail vehicles, cityowned cars and non revenue vehicles such as maintenance trucks that have struck pedestrians between 2013 and 2017. That is a lot of money that could have been spent on more vital causes. And i know you discussed various issues in closed session so i imagine you might be aware of some other cases coming up where theres been a demand made for money from the city. Now, i know we cant prevent all of the accidents but every day, thousands of cars are interacting with thousands of distracted pedestrians who often make crazy runs against the red lights to catch muni so the odds of achieving our vision zero goal are extremely high. And mr. Tomeland you were quoted as speaking at the town hall meeting and i thought you made a very got point where you were reported as saying we should imagine that a San Francisco where we are not killing people on our streets. I grow wholeheartedly with you and hope an expanded crossing Guard Program will help you achieve that goal. Thank you very much. Thank you for your service to the city and its children. Robert, john hammil. Good morning or good afternoon. This is specifically actually addressed to the director. We are asking as the medallion association for the transfer of kate out of the taxi director or whatever you want to call her, it has got to the point that no one wants to come to meetings because they dont believe what she says. When we go to meetings such as the supervisors subcommittee or even here, the information that she gives out is not necessarily correct. Just lets put it like that in a very nice way. What im asking you as director to do is to investigate the complaint that i am making and transfer her somewhere or whatever you need to do because you have to realize the supervisors and the city want a taxi operation that works and this last eight or nine years that the m. T. A. Has been in charge of it, it has gone down the sink before we were run by the m. A. T. , one or two years before, i dont remember when, but San Francisco taxis were nominated as the best taxi operation in the united states. Thank you, your time is up. John hammil, raina jones. Welcome. Hi, im a little nervous. Dont be nervous. In my entire 12 years on this board, no one has bitten a speaker. [laughter] got it. Well, my name is Trinity Oliver and ive been working for bowers for five years. Ive been with the company for five years and also in the union for about two. During that time, bowers having to pay my medical it has been not paid for three months and i tried to go to the doctor and was told i needed to pay the bill in full. I went to the dentist and was stuck with a 3,000 bill. After doing everything to find out that my insurance was not paid. Good thing my dennist is my child dentist so he let me figure out how to take care of it. I pay out of my own pocket and out of my check my aflac. But that has not also been paid. I live in the city of San Francisco. Im not sure if everyone knows what bowers is. Its a transportation company. I have a bus driver and i drive the big coaches and the greyhound. I live in the city of San Francisco so the fact there are more multiple companies out here that do this takes cars off of the street and off the freeway, theres still traffic, its not as bad as could be. My bus holds 56. I love my job and my clients. At the end of the year they come together and give me a holiday hard and i have gotten up to 500. I dont want to cause problems, i just feel we deserve what we deserve and were not getting paid the same amount. Wore getting 7 to 8 less. I would like you to investigate the labor harmony. He is not following the smfta Community Program. Thank you, very much. Next speaker, please. John hammil followed by reena jones and joel. My name is john and im the business agent for the teamsters local 665. That does the Community Program in the city. I represent 84 members. Our contract ended with bowers on september 30th so were coming up on six months without a contract. We have been trying to negotiate in good faith. We continue to negotiate. We reached out to gary on several occasions to move the process forwardment as most of you know, bowers is not the only tech company that is in the city. And theyre also under a master agreement which falls under the whole labor harmony and making sure that its very fair and you know, across the board with competition. So thats all we requested was the economics of the master agreement and weve come to a stall. We did have a work stoppage three weeks ago. Our intent is to keep negotiating. We have offered our services any time of the day, woke, whatever it takes to get this. We have not gotten any responses of late from the bowers organization. So, basically, all im asking is the sfmta to look at labor harmony and force a negotiations because the last thing we want to do is any other type of work stoppage for all the people that use that great program. Its a great benefit and thats all we want to do is continue negotiations. Thank you very much. Thank you for being here today. Next speaker, please. Raina jones, joe matekle and cat carter much. Hello, good afternoon. My name is raina jones and i also work for bowers, ive been with the company for almost throw years now. Ive been with the union for almost a year. We just got union last year. And so im coming to you gis to let you guys know about what we have been dealing with as union drivers. So, as they have mentioned we have not out of contract, our contract ended for almost six months now and i at any time know that our insurance and 401k aflac was not being paid for until i started receiving mail from these cobra and aflac saying that our insurance and everything hasnt been paid. And that is when we started getting information from our union, john, because we had to actually ask someone else about it. We werent told at all by our company that that was happening. And, also, drivers were kind of just talking to each other about what was going on. So thats how we found out. So, weve been doing the same job as everyone else thats other sfmta and other companies are part of the commuter programs but we are paid less by 7 to 8 less. Our c. E. O. Is kind of refusing to negotiate. Or have a sitdown with our union as john also mentioned. We did have the work stoppage for one day. Just so we can negotiate things and you know what, we havent heard anything. Theres no progress. And he is also behind 18 months compared to other. Thank you, very much. Thank you for being here today. Next speaker, please. Joe, cat carter, herbert winier. Welcome. Thank you. Gentlemen with team of 665 here to pile on a little bit more on bauer transportation. So, ultimately were here to tell you today, that bowers transportation, does not have labor harmony and as is required with their permit. They refused to pay the same wages that other Transportation Companies with the same service to. They fallen behind with their health and welfare payments multiple times which leave our members and employees without healthcare their families as well. They are 100k behind on 401k payments for they retirement plans. We may have no choice but to request that the m. T. A. Pull their permits because theres not labor harmony. Thank you. Thank you, very much. Next speaker, please. Cat carter followed by herbert winier and then evan oraver welcome back. Thank you, go ahead afternoon. Cat carter with San Francisco transit riders. Im here to request a report on an update on the next muni 2point o contract particularly on where the Digital Signage design and procurement is and to be fair i emailed director about this yesterday and i did not expect a rereply that fast. We had 100 members email in about the importance of signage and we basically heard nothing since then except for the next muni will bring us better pro dictions which is important and were excited about that. We want to make sure we get good signage. As you maybe aware, sfmta doesnt have a great history of providing good User Experience and the most expensive is the seating on the lrv4s we do wanwantyou to make the same misd spend millions of dollars. Signage isnt an afterthought. Its crucial to plan your trip in the middle of it to know if you should speed up, slow down, how long it will take you. We need that kinds of information as accessible as possible. Its also important for accessibility so we advocated for twosided signs and from the outside of the bus shelter as well as the inside and again this is excess ability issues a use ability issues and it advertises the system to people that may not be as familiar to it or ready to use it. Thank you, very much. Herbert winier, evan oraver. Mary kate. Herbert winier. One thought i have about bauer transportation, i would call it bauer inequitable transportation not intelligence transportation. The second thing is that i wish to address the proposed elimination of the 29th and church bus stop. It works to the did he tell interestment odetriment toworke. Theyre the last priority of this board based on its history. The third thing is my concern about the coronavirus. There should be signs posted on every bus regarding prevention. You know, regarding coughing, sneeding and touching. It is in the service of the public and i believe this is very important right now. Basically, the virus can be prevented like the cold and the flu and you take pro cautions like washing your hands, touching, how you sneeze and cough. I believe a sign torchbearer posted on every bus, perhaps every bus stop in the service of the public. Thank you. Thank you, very much. Next speaker, please. Evan or river, mary kate, anthony corosco. Welcome. I am a member of the tenderloin pedestrian safe toe task force. Its a coalition of residents and organizations that are working with sfmta to make the streets of the tenderloin safer. Its highlighted by the fatality. Im here connect with the board to troy to engage them more at the Community Level with this process. I think the comment that director eakin made about a deeper dive no Division Zero could be assisted by communities that are working on vision zero projects like this. So, i would love to connect with different directors after the meeting and maybe set up a time to meet and maybe engage the task forced to continue this work. Thank you. Thank you, very much. Next speaker, please. Mary kate followed by anthony corosco and arnell justin. Hi, my name is mar row kate and im the policy director which operates down the road at 37 grove street as well as several other sites around the city. I wanted to elevate the issue of Pedestrian Safety as it pertains to homeless and low income families. We have a lot of homeless and low income families going to appointments and accessing services as well as schools and high traffic residential and commercial areas. I know of one example and the past six months where a young teenager who was housed in a Transitional Housing Program here in San Francisco, was struck by a car and broke her leg. As you can imagine that really compounds the stress of the entire family. Being homeless and then having to deal with this major injury on top of that. The young girl being a teenager and having to negotiate school. [please stand by] and effects of having the accessibility of crossing guards for children. It was not only a huge boon to safety among these children, but it was also a big supporter imperically of these children developing healthy and safe pedestrian behaviors, children understanding at an early age how to navigate public spaces and for the rest of their lives be less likely of engaging or being involved in a trafficrelated accident. So increasingly it is the case that our children are navigating the streets in order to get the services that they need. And the investment and their safety now is going to yield many, many dividends down the road for these children. So please consider that as you think about this item. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Arnold justin is the last person to turn in a card. Im arnelle justin. I want to start by saying that you heard the unfairness from my coworkers that the bus drivers have been going through. 1. 25 Million People can get killed on the road a year. So as drivers, we are risking our lives every day that we step onto that bus. For three months we found out we were not covered medically. That means for three months if i was to get hurt, nothing would happen for me. My family wouldnt be able to cover my funeral or anything. With that being said, we already did strike. Were not trying to strike again. Were trying to strike for what we are owed as drivers. That means that we are safe on the board every day and our medically covered and our families would be covered if something was to happen to us. Basically thats the most important thing to me. I also have asthma. There was a time i had an asthma attack. I didnt have an inhaler on me. I was not able to go to the emergency room and getten inhaler and get what i needed because i wasnt medically covered for three months. I went to my employer and tried to speak to him about it. He didnt give me an excuse. He told me he had to take out a loan to pay the insurance. He didnt give me an excuse of why my medical was not paid. That was a really big issue for me today. Thats why were all here today. Thank you very much. Is there anyone else who wishes to speak in Public Comment on items not on the agenda . Okay. Seeing none, well close Public Comment and move on to item 10. These items are considered to be routine unless a member of the board or a member of the public wishes to severe an item and consider it apparently somebody has severed all of the items. We do have a request for h, i, n, d, m, n, o, but someone severed all the items. Why dont we call for Public Comment on item 10. First speaker. How many public speaker cards do you have . We have three total for different items. Sir, the floor is yours. If you could let us know which item. Im from knowey valley. Three items concerning my neighborhood were discussed at a public meeting. Unfortunately, my wife and i were away from the state because of my niece being married. So i dont actually have an objection. I would like to raise some questions, and i realize maybe this is not the right venue for that. So if i could get a little help from one of the staff members, either after the meeting or on the side, i would be fine. Mostly it is because i think what remains with two of the original three items dont do anything except expend a little bit of time painting. So you told us where you live, but if you could tell us is there an issue on here that you want to address on this consent calendar . Well, specifically the two items h and i. Thank you, okay. Have to do with removing overheight vehicles. Part of the problem is that when you do that, the view of one of the streets, sanchez street, is significantly impaired. We have requested the addition of an overheight vehicle restriction extending 30 feet from the intersection in order to ameliorate that problem. And the second part of it, the red zone, were talking about corners that have handicap cuts, so theres no need to red zone it because theyre already no parking. Anyway, thank you very much. Could i maybe get somebody help me to find out im reading this in a different manner than you are. I think theres some confusion. Mr. Mcguire who is right there coughing into his hand with the card hes about to hand you, you might want to get a different card. That will take care of you. I think the confusion is were removing overheight restrictions because theres going to be a no parking restriction all together. Next speaker, please. Melody, who has severed a, d, m, n, o, and p. Very good. Melody, welcome back. Hi, my name is melody and ill try to make it quick. As you know, i live in an r. V. And the streets that you have severed for me really impact my life in a way that is too difficult to describe in two minutes. Were being asked by the police to move constantly. Were being given threeday notices constantly. Its to the point where i dont know where i am in time anymore because i cant keep track of when im supposed to move for street cleaning because it just keeps changing and changing and changing. When the police come to you, they say theres this r. V. Parking lot. It only has 30 spaces and theyre over a thousand recreational vehicles with People Living in them on the streets of San Francisco. So im asking you to please not do this again. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Kelly and she objected to 10. 1 in general, so all of them. I recommend that the m. T. A. Board does not restrict additional parking that will impact vehicularly housed folks until there are safe parking places for everyone. A couple of years ago the board put a hold on restricting parking restrictions of vehicular dwellings before other parking arrangements in this city could be made. Currently, as melody was talking about, there is a safe parking place by the bell bart station, but it only holds 30 vehicles and theres hundreds more vehicles that people live in in their city. Item 10 is full of parking restrictions for you to vote on, many of which do not really look like safety issues, but rather target vehicular dwellings. So please, no more parking restrictions. It causes people who have built a Stable Community to keep moving and to become disconnected from the people they trust. Homelessness is a top issue for the governor and our mayor. Together, everyone on this board has the power to support people who live in their vehicles, which are their homes, or to evict them, which means a lot of them go to the sidewalks because the fines are too expensive. This is truly a qualityoflife issue. Thank you very much for your time and your comments. Is there any further Public Comment on item number 10 . Seeing none, Public Comment on item number 10 is closed. Procedurally, can we move the entire consent calendar at once despite the severing . Yes, mr. Chairman. Can i ask for i cant remember your name. Tom mcguire, could you come forward and talk a little bit about those particular parking areas . I think this is also near a different area. There are a couple of different issues and i want to make sure we unpack them. At the end of that if you could talk about the current i know the parking policy is not ours, but if we could hear more about the plans. Im mindful of the direction that this board gave, which is no longer to bring to you the oversized, overheight restrictions that were targeted on the moving vehicles. The direction that you gave a year ago and none of the items on the agenda today are about that. There are three particular items here. I can go through them in some detail or i love over. There is a group of changes on gilman avenue you have to remember his name to get the detail. Thats the price. Youre going to get your moneys worth. There is a group of restrictions that have to do with making sure the developed area are passable for emergency vehicles. For that reason, we work with the Police Department and the Fire Department to find places that are passable. There is finally a location where there is an owl bus that makes a turnaround on a narrow street called hilton street that is not passable for the queue of vehicles. So were suggesting moving a few Parking Spaces out of the way, so that queue can continue to be there, but the operators can operate their vehicles through the terminal. And i think p was the last one. P is a temporary change well, temporary until 2029 at least im getting to the age where thats not temporary. In that instance were creating more parking capacity by introducing angle parking where its currently parallel parking. I know again the Safe Parking Program is not ours. It is actually the citys. I just wanted to know how that was going and if any words youve heard about expanding that. Yeah, Sean Mccormick and jeff kitski, we spoke to our local homeless coordinating board last week and were able to report that, as the speaker said, that center is full, Low Reservoir center is full and h. S. H. Is looking for other areas to do that elsewhere in the city. Were doing very little towing or aggressive enforcement and were not bringing new items to restrict oversized vehicles at this point. Okay. Thank you. This is not an oversized vehicle restriction. I do acknowledge that. Im obviously still concerned about this issue, but i dont think these items are meant to tackle that specific issue, so i will be fine with them. I wanted to say to our other leaders who are not here, that i would like to do more work around this. I think where the Farmers Market happens, maybe that could be a spot for overnight until it transitioned. They are going to be some work but not in the near future. I wanted to put this on the record when we asked you not to bring this, the idea was getting things moving forward more quickly. Its disappointing that its taking so long. This is just to say on the record that we need more action on this item right away. Any further questions or comments on this . Mr. Mcguire, just to give you the cover, i will say what youve described and how you and staff have been treating this issue is perfectly in line with the direction we gave you. With that, ill entertain a motion on the consent calendar. Is there a second . All in favour, please say aye. Anyone opposed . All those who are in favor, please say aye. Aye. I think thats everyone but director torres is a no. With that, well move on to item 11. Clerk item 11 amends the transportation Code Division ii to designate new transitonly lanes on powell street and approving various parking and traffic modifications along powell street between he will malice street and geary. My name is mark dreager, a transportation planner at sfmta. I want to give a brief presentation on the powell project. The project area is in the heart of union square, two blocks between geary and ellis streets. Sfmta has been working with other partners to make improvements to bring us to where we are today. First are the powell parklets which were established almost ten years ago on these two blocks of powell starting in 2011. These were designed with Community Partners and they widened the sidewalks using temporary materials and really were successful in expanding public space on this street. Theyre well past their useful lives at this point and theyre difficult to maintain. That leads us to the Streetscape Project today which would replace them with permanently winding sidewalks. The second Pilot Project on this stretch was the powell street and sidewalk safety project which tested turns along this street streets, which would limit traffic on the street. The pilot was successful. This board approved the legislation of those changes, which again leads us to where we are today. Thus, weve been working with the community during these pilot efforts and afterwards and continuing to think about what a new powell street could look like. So what it would look like to take the parklets away, but to build on these restrictions and build on what we learned. We went through a series of stakeholder design workshops, open house and other typical methods as well and general oneonone meetings with stakeholders and hotels and businesses. There are very important businesses and stakeholders along this stretch. The consensus is that we should develop a street which puts people walking and transit first. This is second maybe to Market Street and some areas of Fishermans Wharf see some of the highest pedestrian volumes in the city. Some of the key elements of the streetscape redesign would again replace these parklets with permanently winding sidewalks and build the pedestrian layout. We want this to be the front door to union square and an attractive environment. It should not look like a street that you should drive through on. We want to provide accesses for businesses, but we dont want it to look like any other street in San Francisco. Less traffic means less wear and tear on the cable. Were also looking to make some other improvements. To ofarrell and powell, and were also upgrading Traffic Signals along the corridor at the intersection of geary and powell, we would add a south bound leftturn phase. Its also a benefit for cable cars, gets the vehicles out of the way so they can keep moving down the street. So as i mentioned, this board approved of turn restrictions permanently in 2017. What does this legislation do . It does four things. It finalizes the restrictions we have on powell street. This is necessary to forward the Detailed Design that public works is currently in the midst of. Secondly, it makes that change to the 38 geary bus stop that i just mentioned. It would make powell street between ofarrell and ellis in the south bound direction only muni and taxi only. All four block phases have a blocked zone. We have worked with the Key Stakeholders on this block to make sure loading operations can happen around the corner. What this allows us to do is fully widen the walk which we think is a key benefit for Pedestrian Safety. Finally it makes a transitonly area for these two blocks, exempting passenger loading and leaving just muni and taxis. This is a crosssection view. We currently have 15foot sidewalks and weve widened the sidewalks about 33 , about 5 feet, depending on utilities that we have. This is a plan view that expresses the same thing, just overhead. You can see the load zones that would be established midblock. It is a rebuilding of the street from building phase to building phase. This is a perspective of what the street view could look like. What you dont see are the landscape treatment, the aboveground planters and seeding and various things were working on. We hope to have some Better Movement on that by summer of this year. I hope this is illustrative. In terms of our schedule, were through the planning and design phase. We have a Public Works Team on board who is doing great work with us. So were looking to bring the project through the design phase next year. We put it out for bidding and award and we would Start Construction in early 2022. Thank you. Im available for any questions. Ms. Boomer, do we have Public Comment on this item . Yes, cat carter. Shes the only one to turn in a speaker card on this topic. Good afternoon, again. Cat carter, San Francisco transit riders. I just it is i like this project. It has some common sense improvement for transit and transitonly areas, with pedestrian spaces that will improve that area greatly. Im excited about moving the geary stop and reducing wear and tear on the cables will save us money in the long run, so i support this project. Are there any questions or comments from Board Members . Yes, steve. Yeah, i had one. I may be a hammer looking for a nail here, but the schedule, its going to take us two years to get from today to the beginning of construction. That, on the surface of it, does not look like a really complicated project. Its two blocks. Which is literally on the surface of it only. So im wondering whether youve considered other delivery mechanisms . Look, as i said, this may be one where Something Like design build is not appropriate, but it seems like every meeting or so we have a report on a really good idea on a project thats going to take a couple of years to build. I would suspect that quite a bit that is we have met the enemy and we is us, just because of the nature of how we develop projects and the engagement and all the rest. Can you throw me any hope here that we can find a project, if not this one, that we can do faster than two years. The enemy in this case are the subsidewalk basements. Its very much a reconstruction of the entirety of the street. We have these very old subsidewalk basements, over 50 . Are they accepted . I think so. Dont answer that. So our Structural Team is looking into that issue and there could be some utility upgrades that come with the project. There is a holiday moratorium downtown for construction. Thats why were looking to start in january of 2022, so that we can start after that. Maybe instead of bringing this up every time there is a project in front of us, if i could ask you and your team, if we could get some sort of report, given the pipeline of projects we have, what are the candidates for a different way of delivering the project that might cut out some steps and move them along faster, whether thats different contracting methods or engagement methods or whatever the method may be. We just spoke about how to get approval for the things we discussed at the last meeting. So we will be developing a very aggressive schedule of targeting the hundred small things that we can do in order to improve speed and reliability and reliability on Customer Service through quick build which is very fast, while at the same time rather intentionally queueing up larger projects that would be eligible for federal funding. For example, doing something really amazing on the end juda line. That process by definition takes a lot longer. I think i will take your point looking at contract mechanisms, particularly if and when the economy settles down and we dont have the brutal bidding war that is out there. Thank you, mr. Drieger. Im looking forward to this one. I love the temporary parklets on powell street, but i think this is going to expand the space. The parklets are lovely, but they pop in and out of the flow of pedestrian traffic. This is going to expand the flow of pedestrian traffic. I want to highlight again what an impact that had on the cable car. Every time the cable car grips on and off the cable, it causes wear and tear. If there is less wear and tear, it gets damaged less often. Just to remind everybody i ran into mr. Drieger and remember we have vacancies in all of our departments. So i just want to acknowledge that i know how hard staff is working on all of these projects. I know how hard it is to keep all of these balls in the air. Here you are presenting on powell street and yesterday you were walking paige street. I acknowledge that i understand the stress that puts on all of staff to get these things going. With that, ill move to approve. Are there any further questions . Just a comment related to that. Its a biggerpicture comment related to scale and economies of scale. Thanks for the presentation. I understand all the outreach that went into this and the two years of delay that was referred to, i guess i just wonder as we think about mobilizing a project like this, are there other facilities in the area, could the whole area use a revisioning . Economy an awful lot of mobilization for what in the end is only going two blocks of impact. And addressing 120 miles on this network, are we ever going to reach our goal if we dont look to cover more project impact with the given planning process. Okay. Anything else, directors . I mean, i could reiterate what they just spoke about. We started the outreach meetings earlier, it does beg the question if we can do this faster. I will take this as direction that our design work is successful and for the projects that we have completed, the safety and traffic and economic and equity results are astonishingly good and that we just need more resources and youll direct us to identify Additional Resources for our budget so that we can do more faster. That was a crafty answer, director. I will say i dont want to leave the impression that its just any two blocks. I think as you presented, and its very important, these are the two blocks between union square and the cable car stop, the powell street stop. This is like you said, this is sort of a gateway to union square from a major transit hub and a place where not only san franciscans are walking a lot, but our visitors are walking a lot because thats how theyre getting from union to transit square. This is an important two blocks. All of the traffic restrictions that we are voting on will go in right away, correct, these are not waiting for two years for the plan or are these restrictions going to wait until you have the design and the street work done . We didnt call anything a quick build when they were implemented, but essentially they are. These restrictions, some of them are additional. Theres a south bound from a ofarrell. I would say just as a whole they make sense to come in the larger project. Im sorry for the sort of leftfield question. I realize part of the problem with the design is we have to deal with the sort of spaces and subbasements that are underneath the sidewalk that complicate this build. Is there a way we can accomplish temporarily the same goal with paint and striping and making sort of dedicated walking areas combined with the traffic restrictions, or is the fact that a level interface between pedestrians and taxis and cable cars not acceptable . I think the permanent sidewalks will look a bit nicer. I think the thing to keep in mind is this street has not been its probably been resurfaced and sidewalk repairs made, but it hasnt seen a wholescale rebuilding of the streets. There are the subsidewalk basements, but its also about cross slopes and accessibility. So a lot of things that need to be worked through from a hydrological and accessibility standpoint. Thats fair enough. What i see in the pictures and the vision here is more open and pedestrianaccessible than the parklet design currently there for the exact reasons that was said earlier. I guess my thought is if we could do that to switch to the open design while you guys figure how to handle the subterrain. I think the direction youre getting we understand the quandary that you have. These changes we want to see quicker and have it happen faster. All those in favor, please say aye. Anyone opposed . Thank you. That was a very welldone presentation. Clerk item 12, presentation and discussion regarding transit service. You need to say that with a little bit more enthusiasm. One again well have Julie Kirschbaum at the podium. While julie is loading that up, because part of this presentation is about the recommendations to the Muni Working Group, im happy to report that about 20 minutes ago the board of supervisors approved the security contract that was one of the key recommendations out of the muni reliability working group. That was the product of a huge amount of staff work over the last couple of months and a lot of coordination within the agency. So were making progress. Congratulations. Welcome. Good afternoon, Julie Kirschbaum. Thank you for the opportunity to give this monthly transit performance update. I wanted to focus today specifically on our most recent 90day plan which wrapped up in january and talk a little bit about how our actions have helped drive some of the key metrics that we have been tracking with you all over the past several months. The initiatives that we were focused on for this 90day plan were improving safety, service reliability, real maintenance, and really pursuing employeegenerated improvements. The way the 90day plan process works is based on the feedback that were hearing from the public, based on data trends, as well as feedback from the board, i identify initiatives and then my managers work with their staff to identify actions that speak to each initiative. We track those closely. We Work Together when things are getting stuck or getting slowed down. And its a way of taking a lot of big problems and creating the bitesized pieces that we need to tackle key issues. I had also hoped to work as part of this 90day plan on developing a twoyear plan for the subway. We did not get as much progress on it done as i would have liked, so that will roll over into the next process. But our goal with that is that create a twoyear timeline set of milestones so that you can see overall what were going to do to get from point a to point b to deliver better subway service. It will include a lot of the things i know the board is excited about, like running threecar trains in the subway and activating the west portal crossover, but it will also include some of the Building Blocks that we were working on, continuing the maintenance windows, hiring supervisors, et cetera. But getting it all in one place and looking at the timing and where we have gaps i think is going to be critical to our work and also to how we communicate the progress that were making in the subway. All of this is intended to be the shortterm fixes to complement the longerterm initiatives, which is the greater replacements and the train control replacements which are critical to get to the ultimate health of the subway. Im pleased that our performance targets show some real promise this month. We achieved most of our goals. The one exception is the headway adherence, where we had set a goal of 90 and we only hit 86 . I do want to point out that we are moving the goalpost. We continue to keep changing these metrics. As we achieve one milestone, we expand it. So initially, we were only tracking the headway adherence on the rapid network. When we added in the 22 fillmore and the 1 california, we introduced routes that dont have the same traffic protection, but still have the same service. As we increase our supervision and our focus in Transportation Management center, online management, i think well continue to see progress in this area. On the safety initiative, we had six actions that were focused on not only reducing collisions, but also reducing other kinds of safety issues. There are two unique ones that i wanted to share with the board. The first has to do with the back doors of the vehicles. This is an area where we have also had claims. Because our doors open in, we have had issues where people get their hands pinched. We have made a number of improvements on the details, including details on the floor, as well as audio announcements telling people not to stand in this area. But our Safety Department also recommended an additional hazard recommendation which was to put this candy cane striping. Usually yellow means dont hold here, but because we have so much yellow means it didnt translate. Equipping the doors with this candy cane striping was a major achievement. A second area we were focused on and we achieved three out of four locations had to do with the safety of our own staff. We had a location in the m. M. T. , where we do a lot of maintenance and we had intended to have this egress grate that allowed staff to safely walk across the area without having to go up and over the track which can be a tripping hazard. This had been broken for years. But as part of the maintenance window, your subway maintain unit was able to go in and make repairs. Theyre just waiting for one more set of parts and will make the final repair. So were looking at safety in a lot of different dimensions. We do continue to see a downward trajectory on preventable collisions. This is a fullagency effort. It has everything from how were tracking and analyzing collisions to focusing on key campaigns to also spending a lot of time with video review and inservice compliance. The next category that i wanted to talk about is service reliability. Some of our achievements include hiring trainers so we can start those fiveweek classes. We started a class february 24 and were going to start our next class march 30. We are doing it by stretching resources in the short term because as we hire the new trainers, it is going to take some time to get them on board and ready. [ indiscernible ] i hope its not something i said. Apparently they wanted worse service. Well, we can give you several departments to visit for that, ladies and gentlemen. We are doing interviews for 14 new trainers this week. We hope to have them on in a month. And then within the next two months, we will be hiring a second batch of trainers. The increased operator hiring has had a direct benefit on our customers. We have finally broken that 96 barrier. We have put specific focus on putting Service Delivery in our equity routes. You will hear at our next meeting how weve used the equity strategy to really infuse into all of our practices as we approach the service. Weve also seen a reduction in major subway delays. We had two issues in december and we actually had one issue in january. We also, since i produced this document, we had a fairly rough week last week. I wanted to just flag a couple of issues. On monday we did have an overhead line issue of power, where we saw some arcing in the subway. We were able to put in a slow zone and repair a kink in the overhead wire overnight. That incident followed very closely with a false alarm of a customer pulling the emergency handle, which also created further delays. Director tomlin i think was quick to close a gap that we had in our own communications about what was happening in this instance. We have worked hard to shore up some of our communications on whats happening, but also i think what was valued about his twitter communication is that he linked what was happening to the larger investments that were making in things like the maintenance window and the new trains where were seeing promise. The very next day we had about a 40minute delay which was a series of people intruding into the subway. Its an example of why its so exciting that the security contract passed. The security contract is not going to eliminate intruders in the subway, but it is going to significantly reduce them. In our capital program, when we bring it to you next month, youll also see some complementary security Capital Investments which will allow us to have things like intrusion detection in some of our areas of the subway that are vulnerable. And then finally on thursday we had a Major Medical emergency at the civic center station which caused almost an hour delay. While we hate to have any emergencies in the subway, i am appreciative that the staff i think did some interesting things with the service plan that we have not done in the past. In the past, weve been very focused when we had issues in the subway of using the castro crossover and just bringing trains to church. In this instance we brought trains to van ness using that crossover which we couldnt have done six months ago because it wasnt in operation. We had mutual aid with bart as well as shovels on the surface. It gave people who were involved in this disruption more choices than they would have had. As the incident cleared, we got the service back online and focused for the p. M. P. S. Im not going to go over everything that was addressed in the extended maintenance window, but i do want to just continue to thank the board for your leadership and support. The amount of work theyre getting done and the amount of partnership and positive energy that is happening around this program is incredible and is going to continue to help us keep major delays to a minimum. One of the fun things that we did with this shutdown is we did send the crews down there with our photographer so that we can start to tell the story of this work. So these are some of the photos of the staff in action. This next one here includes the overhead lines work that theyre doing to shut off the overhead. You can see the full suits, that gives you a sense of how dangerous and how safety critical this work is. We are very proud that we have done two of these now with no major Safety Incidents no Safety Incidents, and with no impact to the morning service. So not only are we getting a lot of work done, but were not affecting our commute. That being said, our most important metric, which is how much time people are spending in the subway, continues to be spelled out with the longest trip taking outbound in the peak when people are trying to get from downtown through the west portal area. This is part of why i think having that twoyear subway plan is so important. Its going to take a whole host of different improvements to drive these numbers down. We also over this 90day plan had some Great Success in terms of our vehicle availability. We will at the next meeting be bringing you the task order 7, which will allow us to implement the next phase of greater replacements. We continue to see more lrv4s in Service Every day. In fact, weve had a doubling of mileage over the last year. We had set a goal of 48 vehicles in service each day rather than 43. Were hitting that in the last two weeks of february. We didnt quite make this january goal, in part because we had more vehicles on hold to do things like the truck brake replacement, but also because we continued to have nine vehicles that are not in service which we can take a deeper dive on at our next meeting. Three of which have not been purchased and six of which have wheels that are too small and we have to completely replace the trucks. We will see more of those vehicles each month go into service. By summer we should be up in the mid50s in terms of Service Every day. Perhaps the most exciting is the lrv4 for performance. We exceeded 17,000 miles between breakdowns. Were looking at mechanical failures. We continue to track very closely with siemens commitment. And i remain optimistic that we will get to the performance target of 25,000 miles between failures. And then the last area that we focused on in this 90day plan was employeegenerated feedback. I was inspired to do this through roger morencos participation in the Muni Working Group, where he was talking a lot about lowhanging fruit that operators identifying places where we can make service work better, either small changes to the schedule, red curbs, things like that. We do a lot of changes on an ongoing basis to improve our service, but i dont think we do as good of a job to the feedback loop to operators about how their feedback is leading to improvements. So one very tangible thing that i think i shared with you at the meeting was we put a direct link on the operator portal so we could get very specific feedback on schedules. Every email is answered. If were able to make a change that is communicated and if were not able to make a change, that is explained as well. Weve also been providing and partnering with Human Resources to provide vacancy and overtime reports so that we can continue to track overtime, make sure that we are using it judiciously and also make sure that we are prioritizing our vacancies. The next 90day cycle is already upon us. We had our transit quarterly meeting about a week and a half ago, where we talked about whats working with these plans, where we want to make changes. I think that the teams that have really used these plans to narrow their focus are seeing the most success. I think the biggest example would be maintenance. When we did our first plan they had 12 actions and they didnt know which way to look in the most recent plans, they focused on one or two really strategic items like managing the extended maintenance window. We will be developing and finalizing the changes next week for the next plan moving forward. The initiatives that we will be focusing on have some of the same and some a little bit new. As i said, we will be developing a subway plan and continuing to focus on driving safety forward. Were adding a Strategic Initiative just on hiring and training because we are hitting a really critical piece in terms of both the new trainers as well as the new supervisors which are critical building pieces before we can do other key initiatives. And then continuing the work on employeegenerated improvements. One of the things im most excited about in this 90day plan is the director and i will be partnering with local 250 a going out to the divisions, doing roundtables and having some discussions with operators and making sure again that that work is actionable and that there is a feedback loop. Thank you. Very good. Is there any Public Comment on this item . Mr. Chair, yes, herbert weiner. Mr. Weiner. Herbert weiner. I appreciate the improvements that have been made, but on surface transportation there is a problem. It takes 25 minutes for the 2 clement bus to come to its destination and its printed on the schedule its supposed to be 20 minutes. Sometimes it can be as late as 35 minutes on the 2 clement. Now, we need to have equity in transportation. Im very glad about the employee relations, but you still have to focus on the bully culture that exists in m. T. A. Theres a problem of bullying. Employees are suffering under it. Now its come to public attention. So this also has to be addressed in the transportation directors report. So i really wish that there would be more focusing on the surface transportation because at 5 00 getting the 1 california at presidio in california street or getting the 2 clement at Market Street, its really a dice game. And i wait with bated breath for the 2 clement. Theres a lot of room for improvement, especially in surface transportation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any further Public Comment on item 11 . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. Directors, any questions or comments for ms. Julie kirschbaum. A quick comment on the focus for the next 90 days. Just not to agree with mr. Weiner, but i just wanted to ensure that the surface Transit System is getting its fair share of attention. It is my understanding that the bus system provides the lions share of the rides on our system. And i remember one of our earlier conversations, probably last year, i think you had isolated really there are two issues when it comes to providing Ontime Service and it is operator availability, which i feel we spent a great deal of time talking about and you spoke about congestion. Obviously weve heard the director provide excellent evidence where weve invested in the system and the hig highfrequency routes. I believe this is still a small minority of our routes that use that space allocation treatment. So whether it is a broader question about congestion and whether we address, i would love to make sure thats getting as much attention as the subway. Thank you. I think thats exciting about the Quick Build Program is the top 10 locations where were seeing bottlenecks are not necessarily on our highfrequency routes that have had the bulk of the moving forward attention. Theyre on more of our local routes, where a very small investment in a bottleneck continue to be of attention as we move forward. Any other directors with comments or questions . Okay. I have a few. Its nice to hear that the cross entoefs are working so well. You talked about timing. At the risk of sounding like a nag, i just want to confirm that were still on track for the west portal crossover to be operational in october of this year and subsequent to that Operational Plan for the j church plan to go into effect. Yes, we are still on track. Thank you. And thank you for using the crossovers to continue service. I think that will be helpful as you route around problems. Im thrilled to hear the news about the progress on hiring. I trust you are in contact with your friends in the Human Resources department, but if not, if you could let them know that their efforts are having an effect on the system and our ability to provide service in an equitable manner. Their work is having a direct impact on transit and fairness. Im very glad youve kept the median trip time for the subway service, please keep that. It shows you how glacial this process is going to be, but thats not a reason not to pursue it. At the end of the day, im very much encouraged by the large 20minute outages and encouraged by some of the other things. I think by bringing that trip down by 30 seconds or a minute is a massive change for the riders. Lets keep pursuing that. My final question is a little bit more government related than transit related. So i asked for these updates once a month, i dont know, six months, eight months ago, Something Like that. Every month youve come in and given us the reports and the details. My question now is to allow you to give a little feedback. If you want to think about it and do it another time, thats fine. As you know, i wont be here much longer, not by choice, but by term limit. Thank you for that feigned sorrow. No wonder people voted for you the way they did. How is this process working for you and your staff . Is there something we should do as a board to revise it that would get us better information . Is this something that is in your a waste of time . Is it something that could be revised to better motivate your staff . Or is it helpful because it forces metrics . How is this working for the agency . If you want to answer now, you can. If you want to answer at the next report, so we have some Institutional Knowledge to refine it, that would be welcome. Ill go back and think through if we want to make any enhancements, but in general i found it to be very effective in multiple directions. Its allowed me a regular opportunity to share concerns and build support in key areas. I dont think we would have been able to do Something Like the extended maintenance window if we werent having these dialogs and we didnt have the boards support to do Something Like that. I think its also, i think, been very helpful to my staff to hear directly from the board, even if its not always easy feedback because it helps them prioritize and its just one more opportunity to get into the customer head space, which i think is frankly an ongoing challenge that we face. So i ill go back and think if theres anything we want to do to optimize, but in general i found it to be constructive and productive. And i would also argue that in many ways our most important work is not the highvisibility work that results in our ribbon cutting, but its the hundred Small Projects that improve speed and reliability and address the deferred maintenance issues in the system. Having the opportunity to report on that gives us the ability to honor that very important work that is oftentimes unnoticed. That was certainly one of the goals because there are questions about what is going on and what are you doing . I think there was a sense in the city that there wasnt attention, that the agency accepted the status quo as good enough. I know thats not how you feel. I very much value that. Being able to do that and through the small progress were making is valuable to that as well. I will say, for me in the last six months, the service has been better than it was the six months before. That was after a rocky summer and that sort of thing. But for me, it does help a great deal to have these monthly updates. I will urge that the board continue them. That wont be my decision, but if there are things you can think of to enhance or make this better, bring that up next time. Next item, please. Ill have to step out in a moment. Clerk on 13, presentation and discussion regarding changes to various rates, fees, charges, and fines in the fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 202 sfmta operating budget. As youve known, we are taking a different approach to the budget than in previous years. Rather than developing a comprehensive budget where theres tons of detail buried in the spreadsheet and allowing you and the public take pot shots at that. What weve done is broken the budget up by topic and done a deep dive, letting you and the public understand some of the internal tensions within individual items in the budget and particularly across items, allowing us to focus on a value space conversation about specific items and then do an iterative process where we combine the work in one category with the work in another category to understand the inherent tradeoffs, and understanding how we can enhance equity while dealing with the Financial Reality of the budget. So this has been a little bit confusing for the public, but i think its been its given us an opportunity to be very transparent and to reveal some of those unintended consequences. So today were going to be focusing on fees and fines. Were based on the conversation here and conversations were having in the community, were coming to an open house on march 11, where were inviting the entire community to look at each of the different topics that youve had the opportunity to walk through and allow the public to dive deep into those individual topics or look at the higher tensions, like reducing fares versus improving service. This will be a core question that well start to engage with the public on on march 11. Were also doing weve invited over 100 Different Community organizations to engage in separate ways. Were this year putting a greater effort into including communities and putting the information out in 11 languages to allow folks to engage. With that, i would like to introduce leo levinson who is our director of finance and information technology. Thank you very much. Im very pleased to be here. As director tomlin said, today is not an action item. This is a third in our presentations of background on the budget starting with our board workshop and the last Board Meeting where we talked about fares. This time we will be talking about particularly fees and parking policy and citations and fines. Well be asking for some feedback from you as we do this because were going to use your feedback and the information we get back from those Public Events that we talked about to come back to you with a balanced Budget Proposal on march 17, which will also not be an action item on that day, it will be an opportunity for more feedback to put this into a balanced budget. We will come back on april 3 for a possible action item. There will be one more chance if we cant reach consensus on that day. So today there is the background board item, that is the large document, contains the entire run of these fines and citations. Many pages as youve seen. Were not going to go in detail on many of those. Many are just being tweaked, to go up with inflation or a state maximum or to go up to recover our costs as our costs have changed. Many of those are small changes. Were not going to talk about each one of those, but are happy to answer questions. What were going to talk about today is some of the larger changes that are being mentioned in here and considered and where we want to hear feedback and guidance. Those include what youve heard before, a change to parking meter hours, the potential for targeted and sunday and evening hours. Another program we are considering well get into at the end of the presentation. There will be a few programs we will highlight as theyre going up or down. Well highlight those. To kick us off for a real discussion on the Parking Program, i want to turn the discussion over to tom mcguire, director of streets. Thanks, leo. I am going to give just a little bit of context and outline a couple of the parking policy goals that underscore all of the potential budget items that may be coming your way through this cycle. First, a quick review of what were trying to do parking. We talked about this at the workshop, but as a review. We dont see parking as a business to maximum revenue or do we see it as something we want to encourage a whole lot of in the city. We put it in the context of reducing congestion and encouragi encouraging alternative modes of transportation. We want to create a positive Customer Experience because this is an important Revenue Service for the m. Ta. Some of the things that weve been doing and that you as a board have been doing over the last few years are relevant to this. The curb Management Strategy that you approved at your last meeting, the demand and pricing policy that you put into effect, and to show that were taking those principles and applying them to every street that we control in San Francisco. And some of the stuff at the bottom of the slide that you dont have that in touch visibility into, updating the revenue control systems in our garages. Next year we will be procuring new modern parking meters for every space in the city. Of course our ongoing efforts to hire up and train more parking control officers. Heres whats been going on with parking revenues over the last seven or eight fiscal years. What youll see here is that the red line which is the fines and fees from parking citations has gradually done up. That is largely a function of the fact that the value of those citations has gone up with inflation. Were not writing more tickets, but fewer tickets than we were in fiscal year 2013. The garages and meters, youll see those two revenue lines largely stable when you look at them in combination. We are gradually over time seeing more revenue coming out of the garages and less coming out of the meters. A lot of that reflects the policy approach we take, which is we would prefer in places Like Union Square and the financial district where we have on and off street parking, we would prefer to get people off the street and not circling around looking for chief parking on the street. Here are a couple of specific policy proposals, where as leo said were trying to air these out and get your feedback on. These are not an action item. The first is to look at the highestdemand onstreet Parking Spaces where we are charging the maximum rate of 8 an hour. We dont charge that rate thats not a choice. Those are the spaces that the demand responsive algorithm has raised consistently quarter after quarter and there is still very little parking availability in those spaces. One option would be just to continue the growth of the cap from 8 to 9 in fiscal year 2021 to see if we can break up the parking demand and get more availability in those spaces. Second is something we talked about with you at the workshop. We know that parking availability drops as soon as the parking meters turn off, either at 6 00 p. M. Or on sundays. When parking availability drops, that means two things happen. Number one, we see more of the negative impacts of circling and double parking. And number two, Small Businesses and Community Services cant get their customers to the curb in ways that can support their ongoing viability. So one option that we would like to consider in this budget cycle is exploring in a community and merchantdriven way expanding the meter shutoff how are you from 6 00 p. M. To 10 00 p. M. On commercial corridors where there is demand for this and where there would be support from the business community. To make sure that we have the right mix of traditional meters, white zones, and green zones so were not just doing this to raise revenue, but to meet the emerging business demands in what is increasingly a 24hour city. The same principle would apply to a sunday metering option. Again, were not coming in here with any precooked hours. We know its important that we work closely with not just the merchants, but also the residents where sunday metering would be affected. We do know from the data that this one a winwin for the business community, residents who want to see less double parking on their streets, and it would raise some needed revenue for the m. T. A. While we think about sunday and evening metering as this big leap forward, in fact, were doing it all over the city already. Many of the highest parking demand locations in the city, Fishermans Wharf, the areas around chase center, many of the metered surface lots we have, the meters already run on sundays and other parts of the cities in other cities run as late as 11 p. M. This is an area San Francisco could catch up with some of our peer cities. Another promising policy area is related to the way we set the rates in our parking garages. So right now the way we interpret the guidance you gave us in december 2017 when we shifted to responsive parking, we try to reduce the amount of traffic circulation and double parking. In places Like Union Square, we want to get the traffic off the streets as efficiently as possible. That means that our offstreet rates are lower than other areas. Were doing this intentionally to make sure in the parking supply that we control, we price that space the highest. There are some options for us to run the garages a little bit more like a business. I dont want to say that we would ever condone some of the pretty abusive practices we see in the private sector. But there are ways at peak time and say hours we might want to think about treating the offstreet parking product as a separate market from the onstreet market. We would be offering the best deal in town for parkers and would raise the revenue for the agency. Those are the ways our parking policy goals and ways to raise revenue interface and im very much looking forward to the feedback youll give us. Ill turn it back over to leo who will walk through the citation and boot and fee issues. So moving on to parking citations, im going to give an overview and then some of the major adjustments that were talking about, plus a reminder that we do have payment plans and Community Service programs available. So just in terms of context, so for scope well be looking at sidewalk and parking violations, traffic obstruction, and a mention of transit violations. Many of our citations are governed by state law and thats the california uniform bail code which establishes allowable fines under state law and, in many cases, sets maximum fines we cannot exceed. We also have our San Francisco transportation code which gives us the authority to set fines within the minimums and maximums established under state law. So this is just a few our safetyrelated adjustments. These where the goals are to make sure that were aligning the level of the citation with our values. We want to be setting fines sufficient for a deterrent effect on things that are very important, where theres safety issues in particular, and also to make it proportional to how serious the offense is. Some of the ones that are changing more substantially, blocking the box, we realize we could increase, that has a tremendous impact on congestion and pedestrians having to maneuver around cars in the crosswalks. That is a proposed raising of fees. Rising scooters on the sidewalks will be the same as the bikes, 112. Parking in the bike lane and parking in the fire lane and also to be at that level. You saw the adjustments. Really its just related to the size of them to harmonize the couple that weve noticed as we went through each and every one of these that seemed to be out of whack with each other. One is blocking wheelchair access ramps to raise them to the 400 level. There is already a 400 level for items related to access for disability. Blocking the blue zones is at a maximum of 866. Were proposing to harmonize it at the same 400 as the other ones. There is a huge impact when citations are at that level, it can have a tremendous impact on the individual. Were proposing to bring it down to harmonize it to be similar to other ones that are similar in impact. I want to mention fare variations because that is something where we recognize there is a great deal of Community Interest and policy interest as to how to manage your fare citation program. We have staff that are working on a thorough analysis of this program to think about how to do it better. We really want to look at other communities and think about how things are going and look at the demographics. We felt it was not ready to make a change in this. We recognize that quite likely a change should be here in the lev level. Right now there is no change being proposed to that. However, the kinds of the initiatives that we wanted to mention a couple of the kinds of things that were looking at. One is just to expand the in terms of expanding the free muni program for youth to make sure they are more its more accessible, so they wont just be evading fares, we are trying to talk with the School District about having that eligibility be much simpler through the school and through the free and reduced cost of lunch program. Thats still something that requires more work to see if we can operational it. Thats promising. The kinds of things we want to look at with citations is whether we can find a way that if clients are qualified for free muni or a lifeline pass that we use the citation process to get them into the compliant fare system and then dismiss the citation. Again, theres much more to come because theres much more to these measures. We want to make it clear were thinking about these kinds of things. Hold on one second. The last time we had this issue raised, we spent about 5 million to collect no, we spent 6 million to try and collect 5 million, but we only get 2 million. Is it worth it having a fare Evasion Program if were only getting a 2 million return . The purpose of the program is not to get citations. We dont measure it by the amount of citations we received. Im talking about revenue. I realize that. That citation revenue that you get from the citations. That doesnt even come close to dealing with the 6 million, the cost of the program to operate. The question is how much deterrence if were going to have a program that we expect people to comply by paying their fares, we want to make sure that theres deterrents for people just entering and not paying their fares. Thats why there is an Enforcement Program to start with. There will be much more discussion about this. [ indiscernible ] we will cover all those topics. Ill be back. Continue. The next slide, please. So for people who cannot pay their citations, i wanted to just this is really a reference slide of the history of, first, the citation payment plans. That allows for up to a thousand dollars in citations per year to be enrolled in a payment plan to try to make something that is affordable for our members of the public who want to participate in this. Were not proposing any changes in this budget. This does show the history of what happened back in fiscal year 2018, we increased the enrolment fee to make it more accessible. If you look at the snapshot of the program, we have 2,500 plans related to 1. 5 citations and standard plans. So these are definitely being used by the public. There is also the option for Community Service and here again were proposing a small change to this program, also to make it more accessible to people to consolidate fee tiers and lowering the fees to participate in this program, just to make it that much more accessible. You can see here the history of it. So there are a set of fees which are programs that we run for various purposes in the Transportation System where the fees are set to cover our costs. Under state law and these types of programs we cant charge more if its to provide a service. I want to go over a fee of those where we have staff do this particular budget cycle, we did a comprehensive analysis of these fees at a deeper level than has been done recently, just to make sure we werent accidentally subsidizing these programs. In some cases i did uncover that it took more staff than we thought or we werent fully including all the costs. For full transparency here, if we dont recover our costs, that means they are being subsidized by other Funding Sources. We wanted to show the results of that analysis and what that would mean in the Cost Recovery fees. Just as a reminder from 2018, that limits most fees of Municipal Services to the amount needed to cover costs. In general, we want to set our fees to cover our costs, unless theres a specific board decision to us to say, no, we want to create a subsidy for some other goal as an agency. The residential Parking Program is one of those that is set to cover our costs. So under our analysis, this would result in raising the permit fees by 5 in fiscal year 202122. So that would raise an auto permit from the current rate up to 160. I know theres been a lot of interest in the Residential Parking Permit Program in general. That is a policy area thats been under discussion. Its mentioned in here that theres ideas out there related to that and certainly they require more analysis and theyre not a part of this current Budget Proposal. Temporary exclusive use parking meters. These are for when construction firms need to stage their equipment and take a parking meter out of service. Were analyzing the revenue related to that and determining to get full Cost Recovery, it would be appropriate to raise this fee from 12 to 16 a day for this particular fee. Need or removal fees. This is something that has not kept pace with our technology. There was not a separate fee for this. We have a proposal to implement a new multispace use fee. And so have a single pole removal raised to 740 to cover our full costs related to that work. Vehicle boot program. This is a program where a vehicle is parked illegally and has multiple prior unpaid tickets, but is not blocking traffic, does not need to be towed right away in order to free up traffic. There are 3,450 boots per year. We have a lowincome rate for this program, at a 100 level. So we have about 1,700 regular boots a year. This total program cost is about 1 million. Primarily the labor of the parking control officers and dispatchers. The proposed standard boot fee really covers the cost of this program to raise from the current 515 to 541. We would not be proposing to change the lowincome boot fee. Im sorry, quick question. The lowincome, can you remind us, is that for just the first time a person is booted or is it each time . If somebody gets booted more than once over the course of their i want to confirm with that, but i believe its the first time, david or every time. My revenue manager is confirming its every time. Every time, okay. Thank you. So on the tow program, if i could have the next slide up, please. Thank you. This is one where we really want some feedback because our Cost Recovery analysis really found that we were this has a larger lack of fullCost Recovery than our other programs like this. We have over 35,000 tows a year, 35,300, of which only about 4,350, about 12 , are identified as low income and we have a special lowincome rate for that. Twothirds of them are firsttime tow customers. This is where the largest part, as youll see, of our insufficient Cost Recovery comes. Then 7,350, 11 , are repeat tows. It may indicate the program is working as a deterrent in the relatively small percentage of repeat tows. The cost per tow is really high. Theres no doubt about it. The average cost as a result of our Cost Recovery analysis, we found it was 540. That excludes some costs on some tows like a dolly fee or other storage costs. That is the cost of managing the program and the cost of towing the vehicle and the cost of the administration of the whole tow program where we have 24 7 staff who are handling people who need to pick up their vehicles. If you were to break out that money, about 300 is related to m. P. A. Labor and the Police Department labor. A little bit less than half, 275 per tow, for the toe management contractor, thats currently auto return. Storage fees are 250 a day, first four hours free. For the lowincome customers, its waived for four days. The current contract ends in 2021. This is another one we want to analyze the whole program, just like the fare Evasion Program. We want to be looking at the policies in general. Were not satisfied with the way this Program Works necessarily or we want to look at all options. Is there any way to make this program cost less so its not such high fees. We will be looking at that both in terms of preparing the solicitation for march 2021 and hopefully to get competition in that shrition so we can reduce costs in that way. Maybe related to that can you explain in what instance we tow or boot. Do we have a staff member who can speak more about the criteria . Tom, do you want to speak to this . It depends on a lot of circumstances. Obviously the only time youre getting booted or towed is if youre accumulated a particular number of citations. And im going to five or more . So five citations. So if you have five citations, you should not be getting either booted or towed. The exception to that is when i said it depends on circumstances. The exception is that is there are towaway zones around the city. You will see those posted for clearing the traffic. Also for blocking curb cuts or private driveways are also ways you can get towed without having accumulated citations. Thats the basic contours of it. Are there any other major distinctions we should know in terms of thinking about those numbers when we talk about them . One other policy that we have related to booted vehicles is if the value of the delinquent citations is over 2,000, so that would also be a case where the vehicle would be towed instead of booted. Apparently also, because i know from personal experience, using the spikup and dropoff zones on Market Streets and not being in a commercial vehicle will result in your vehicle being towed. Good. I think thats good for talking about it later. Moving to the next slide, please. So this is a snapshot of our current rates for the tow program. Again, this is just the basic admin in tow fees. There are additional fees that may be applied if you have storage or a dolly or flatbed fee. The current fee for a repeat tow is 537. For a firsttime tow it is 238. Again, at the level that i mentioned, the 574 average cost per tow, this gets to a total unrecovered amount of nearly 5 million under this analysis, 4. 7 million. You can see that the bulk in this is in the firsttime tow subsidy, the lowincome tow portion, 1. 5 million. Some of our context around thinking about this program, even before the budget, we were talking about this program of course, its been part of the major equity discussions at most the local level and the state level. The impact on our lowestincome public are vehicularly housed public. There was state legislation advanced that would remove the ability to tow in all cases, certainly for citations, that did not advance in that particular year, but thats still a discussion thats talked about. The difficulty there is this is one of the primary incentives to pay ones parking citations. If there was no tow whatsoever regardless of the ability to pay, there would be many people who probably wouldnt pay their parking citations under those circumstances. That said, still, our fees are among the highest in california already, except for some limited types in modesto. The department of homelessness and Supportive Housing offered to create a program that would certify people experiencing homelessness and part of this is to help get them into the Services Provided by that department so that if they were towed or if they perhaps said that they were homeless, we could direct them to this department to get that certification as to their circumstances, whatever help, and that we would create an especially low fee under those circumstances and the proposal here is the 100 fee under that circumstance. Then we also on the storage side, it often takes more than four days for our lowestincome customers to come up with the funds to recover their vehicles. We dont want to force it into a vehicle auction situation because of the storage fees. So there is an increase of the waiver to 15 days from four days. Is this a sliding low income based on your income or is it a flat number based on a certain income level or less . Is this the sorry, let me just doublecheck. This is the 200 of Poverty Level . Is this is at the 200 of Poverty Level. When were talking about low income, its the same number in every instance . Yes. Its a flat number and doesnt change. On household size. But in terms of the amount that they owe, though, that doesnt change . No. So we did want to for discussion purposes provide you with some options to consider for this program and get your feedback on whether we want to seek to reduce the shortfall in revenue associated with this program. A couple of options we want to put before you is to bring the repeat tow up to the full average Cost Recovery of 574 and reduce the shortfall on the firsttime tows by 700,000 for a total increased recovery of that would be in that option, the firsttime tows would be increased at a same rate, about a 7 rate increasing from the 450 to the 480 level. It would be a measure of indexing on the repeat and the firsttime tows. Were not proposing any change to the lowincome tows other than to create the new fee for people certified as experiencing homelessness at the 100 level. A second option if we were hoping to reduce this program by another Million Dollars in terms of under recovery would be to reduce the firsttime tow fee sorry, to reduce the subsidy further by another 40 dollars for those firsttime tows not designated low income. What does a Million Dollars mean for our department that was talked about before . Its hard to talk about these things without reference to the expenditure side of the equation. We are still very much working on the overall structural gap related to what we can afford in our budget. So each Million Dollars is equivalent, not including overhead, but to the direct costs, approximately nine transit operators or porge control officers. That is the kind of level we are talking about. We want a tow program that doesnt unduly punish people of limited means, not only do we ship their car off to brisbane, but we also charge them a lot of money. So that is intention with our goal of also reducing pressure on fares or extending additional discounts on fares, which is also intentioned with our strong desire to improve muni service. So its nine Bus Operators or a free or discount fare program or a discount on the tow program. Our task here is to make that hard choice. We have limited resources. How do we best allocate those resources for the public good and keeping equity in mind, since we cant choose all . And i know this is your secondtolast slide. Maybe you can put the last slide up and i can have directors go through questions. You covered a lot of content. Sure. The last slide is just a reminder of our budget status and next steps. Jeb just spoke to the first bullet point here about the tradeoffs that were forced to encounter that well be talking about at our town hall and well be talking about on march 17 with a balanced Budget Proposal. Currently we dont have enough revenues. The bottom line that were faced with here, which is the big lead to our town hall, is we dont have enough revenues to cover all of the things that we want to do, including all of the Muni Working Group proposals. We are looking at what we can afford and what it will take to get to where we want to be. To be specific, we dont have enough revenue to operate the service that were operating today. Directors, do you have specific questions . Im going to open up to Public Comment, but i would like to have clarifying questions answered because it might help the public be more informed before they ask their questions. Any clarifying questions that people had. On the metering changes that you were talking about, how long do you see the timeline from if we give you direction to move forward with those proposals, how long do you see that ti timeline . Good question. On what when i showed the slide, i talked about realizing potentially 3 million in fy 2021 and up to 4 million in 2022 and the gradual upstepping in the revenue would be because we would be expending more time and effort in 2021 and finding out where the time and desire would be. We dont flip a switch and suddenly tens of millions of dollars comes to the agency. We would do it over the entirety of this twoyear budget cycle. We would be trying to bring more neighborhoods into the program. Just two questions. You put out the 9 cap for our consideration. So i just want to understand, is that kind of like the lowest price that will ensure that there is availability in those places or is that 9 arbitrary in that its just a dollar more than the current fee . Well, its a dollar more than the current fee. We dont know. The beauty and the mystery is you dont really know where that magic number is until you hit it. So were suggesting allowing the cap to rise to 9 and lets see where we get to. But its something we potentially do as a board, i believe we do that midstream. If we decided we wanted to go higher, we could do that out of cycle at some point over the next two years. Okay, great. Weve talked extensively in these conversations about how much parking and bike lanes is a challenge. Youre proposing to raise that by 20. Im just wondering if that will act as a deterrent to people parking in bike lanes or if, as director tomlin mentioned earlier, what will serve as a deterrent is an increased presence in ticketing. We were just talking about revenue today. We want to make sure we fill the parking officer spaces we have. I think the way to expand the service is to make sure that people are much more able to see an officer out on the streets deterring them from that behavior. The last one, it was fascinating to hear you talk about the off and on street and the harmonization policies you had in the past to encourage people to use the off street spaces. Have we observed that to have been effective . So we can come back with some data about what we think particularly the union square area, the effectiveness of the on and off street and what that looks like. Those rates are working together, yes. Thank you. Director brinkman, do you have any questions . Director heminger. Just questions. Well do comments after Public Comment. I thought i could get away with that. The question i have, leo, is to you. You mentioned yourself that its hard to look at this without the cost picture. Are we going to have a workshop for this just like the cost equation, the existing scope of the agency as well as the new scope that we talked about at the workshop . Let me just say, ill slip a comment in there, i think it would be useful to all of us to have the same level of familiarity with the revenue and the cost side because the revenue side is there to support the cost side, but there may be some cost things that we dont want to raise the revenue for because the revenue is too hard. We try to do that in the eighthour workshop where we covered all of our different programs. We could go into more detail. I think what you did is covered your programs and what you want to request and thats what we talked about. There are alternatives to what you want to request and alternatives to the existing program. Im not suggesting some draconian, lets cut 50 out of here. But i think that topic deserves the same level of analysis here. Youre giving us options and analysis here. I think the same approach to cost would be useful. We may get to the answer that, hey, we want to support your cost proposal for new scope and therefore were going to raise all these fees and fines and Everything Else to pay for it. If we dont want to do that minus 10 or minus 5 , we dont have to raise these fees as much. Im trying to think of the programs that we discussed, we tried to cover all of the primary functions in the agency, including where we were proposing to make minor adjustments as i recall, you had a whole bunch of additional staff and h. R. Use that as an example. What if we funded half of that instead of all of it, what would that mean in terms of the slowness and the rapidity of hiring people . Thats the kind of tradeoff im looking for. I think part of the objective if you go to the schedule that is online on the last page of the presentation, we can switch up the presentation. There we are. These are the remaining key workshops that we have scheduled, including the big public town hall which will be on 1 south innes in the south atrium. We are trying to have a robust conversation here at this board on march 17. And then ideally come back april 7 here for adoption, reserving april 21 as an alternative if we need deeper conversation about the specific topics on april 7. Of course well also be reporting to our own Advisory Committee and to the board of supervisors in the meantime. We can add additional meetings if you would like, but really our objective was at the next workshop to present the whole thing, both revenue and expenditure, and really focus on those key tradeoffs, including core questions of how much should we raid our fund reserve in order to move forward on some of the Muni Working Group recommendations or do we cancel all of our Service Enhancement in order to be conservative and to focus instead on a future revenue measure that fulfills the 66 million structural deficit hole in our budget. Well, madam chair, i dont mean to belabor this, but i do think it would be useful to have and it may not be a separate workshop at a separate meeting, but i do think we need to see alternatives to cost because and i just remember this off the top of my head. Weve received letters about the fare idea and indexing on muni. One of the letters we got said i support the service expansion, but dont raise fares. Look, thats the question weve got to untie. Thats not an answer, unless some money falls out of the trees, that we can count on. Were assuming were going to need to scale back our service expansion. We also, if we are not able to bring in revenues from these fares and other services need to talk about service cuts. It sounds like what you almost want reminds me of an e. I. R. One is maybe less aggressive and one is more. One is the super equity plan if we do all the things that are super equitable that are amazing and what the tradeoffs would be on that and then the super aggressive plan that gives the most for the agency to fund all the things we want to do. It sounds like thats kind of what youre looking for. This may be part of your discussion that will to provide us with direction of how to construct the next steps. Do you have a question . I had a couple of questions. One is the 5 increase that you were talking about in some of the Cost Recovery programs, like residential parking and all the rest of that. Is that an arbitrary number or a number grounded in some sort of formula . I think in that particular case its related to our index, which is a combination of the cost of living and our labor costs, which resulted in that 5 figure. In most of the other cases, were actually looking at the particular costs of that program and confirming what they are and then proposing an increase to maintain Cost Recovery. And we fully allocate all the head count because i think sometimes when people do budgeting, they dont allocate i think we should do it as aggressive as we can. So the 5 , thats what i wanted to know about that. In terms of the when we look at parking fees, were talking about the congestion and parking pricing or decongestion, depending on how you perceive it. Do we look at private garages in that vicinity to determine what the pricing number might make sense or we just kind of test numbers and hope that it works out for us . Director of parking for m. T. A. For on street we use our sierra calculations to make those determinations and make quarterly rate changes based on percentage of occupancy. For off street a little bit. Primarily for our monthly rates, we will look at surrounding garages, but as a recommendation which isnt strongly put in there, perhaps one of the things more closely in line with is looking at the garages and determining if our rates are in there area. And then another question that i have i think thats it for now. I wanted to make sure where the 5 came from. Maybe someone can find the lower number came from. I think for us up here, hearing that and thinking about the fee, its hard to know what youre talking about. That would be great. That was the only other question i had. Im going to open it up to Public Comment. Clerk thank you, madam chair. This is an opportunity for members of the public to address the board on this topic. Good afternoon, im rebecca evanson. Im an attorney at bay area legal aid. I wanted to speak with you today about the towing, the towing practices and the towing fees. I would like to inform this body that our office does represent plaintiffs who are suing the m. T. A. For its practice of toeing vehicles for unpaid parking tickets. Our lawsuit alleges that the practice violates the Fourth Amendment and the 14th amendment, Due Process Rights and seizure without warrant. But the problem that is being presented today in this hearing is the question about whether its good public policy. Our case talks about it being illegal, but whats in front of the board today is whether its a good all together. There are proposals to reduce the fees that are charged for towing, but even with reduced fees, you still end up with the situation that the director was describing, where we are unduly pressuring lowincome people who cannot afford even those reduced fees and are losing their cars and sometimes their economic sustenance and many times their homes to this practice. As the prior presentation demonstrated, not only does this practice of towing cars for unpaid tickets hurt people, it also costs the department millions of dollars. The presentation demonstrated a loss of about 4. 3 million for towing cars in order to collect revenue. Its not working. Its costing money. If were looking for a way to both write our public policy, prevent harm, and save millions of dollars, i would urge this body to consider whether the practice itself ought to be discontinued. Thank you. Hi, i work for the Lawyers Committee for civil rights. I also would like to address the towing fees. As background, this board may know that if you look just at tows for unpaid tickets or unpaid tickets and registration, that the number of people who lose their cars after a tow for those reasons is between 50 and 60 . So its not just the tow, but a total loss for 50 of people. Thats for people being towed for blocking a driveway, being in a towaway lane, something more serious than owing money to the city. So the cost of you lose your car because you owe money, that is only a little bit related to having a bunch of parking tickets. You can get a lot of parking tickets and as long as you pay them, you dont face a tow. Its affecting those who cant afford to pay parking tickets the most. If you can imagine losing your car over not paying a parking ticket is a draconian punishment. That is more serious than the consequences that many people who face misdemeanors. Thats whats happening right now, a first wave of Debt Collection in the city of San Francisco for parking tickets. So there is a solution as the previous speaker was saying to the cost program which is to look at tows for unpaid parking tickets and how to severely reduce or eliminate the number of toes the city does for that reason. It costs a lot, the city is losing money, and people are losing their homes and their way to work. I appreciate the proposal on the table and the effort behind it and i think sometimes proposals like this are a red herring. Thank you. Am i done . My name is tory larson. I am a lawyer for the civil rights. I work directly with clients experiencing homelessness and living in their vehicles. While i appreciate that the city claims it has decreased enforcement of toes, thats simply not true. I get calls every single days from People Living in their vehicles and had their vehicles toes. The majority of these toes is for unpaid parking tickets. They have to start from square zero. Even getting their belongings out of the car is an administrative hassle they cannot handle. Reducing a fee to 100, that sounds great. I think that honestly that is a reasonable fee for those experiencing homelessness, but youre adding a step of going through an access going which is sensitive to People Living in their vehicles. You have an opportunity to alleviate the harm before its being done. Stopping these poverty tows dont alleviate these parking tickets. Only 60 of people who have their cars towed in San Francisco lose their vehicle. People who are towed for poverty tows, unpaid Parking Administration or registration, that is 50 . It is an unfair punishment. Weve been talking about deterrents today. Tows are not the only deterrent out there. Its clearly a system thats not functioning. I encourage you to consider this opportunity rather than creating another red herring policy but to alleviate harm for these communities. Next speaker, please. My name is melody and i just ask that you please stop towing us. Were struggling so much. If i get towed, i just think im going to lose my mind. Just please help us. Thank you so much. Im flo kelly from the coalition on homelessness. I just want to say any fees for towing or citations or anything long those lines that are slapped on very low income and folks who live in their vehicles adds to the instability of of their lives. I support the idea that people who have extreme low income should have all fees erased. I support the point about the cost of administering fare evasion, is it really worth it . And i dont understand why would m. T. A. Take on a new project like fixing up pal street if theres really a question of revenue to support the full m. T. A. Programs. Thats my points. Herbert weiner, theres some issues i wish to bring up. Our bicycles and scooters on the sidewalk being cited. If so, how much revenue is being collect collected . I havent heard this statistic and i believe this is very important. Also, on towing, every time i see a tow truck, i think of the hangmans noose. Thank you. My name is anne stooldryer. I direct the financial district project in the office of the San Francisco treasurer. We worked in collaboration with the sfmta and Many Community groups to create the low income discounts for towing, booting, and payment plans. I really want to thank the m. T. A. Staff who are always open to being in dialog with us at the financial Justice Project and also Community Groups. I want to speak in support of the reduced towing fee for people struggling with homelessness. I think this is an important step in the right direction and we support it. Probably one of the most important starts of my job is listening to people in Community Groups and residents about how these various penalties are hitting them and i just would like to share some of what ive heard. Going from 236 to 100, having 15 days to put that money together, that will make a difference for folks. Theyll have a longer amount of time to come up with a smaller amount of money. And we hear that coming up with 100 might as well be like coming up with a Million Dollars. We have to realize that people dont have this money. Theyre going to be scraping it together probably from Community Groups, their support networks, et cetera. The other things that i want to pass on is people ask, can we please do what we can to get the word out about this. Too often we create these things and people dont know how to access them. Can we make it as easy as possible for people to access so they dont have to jump through hoops. We helped create this process with the department of homelessness to certify that people are eligible. And then just lastly, i think there is a lot of im sorry, your time is up. I want to thank the staff of m. T. A. For helping think through these processes and i want to comment in support of the plan to come back to this board with a more comprehensive plan around addressing fare evasion. I know that the passes and tickets make up a significant portion of sfmta revenue and youre thinking about how to make sure that muni is available for everyone. But as part of the Community Listening that anne was describing, we have been increasingly hearing about the impact of fare evasion tickets about people who are living in deep poverty, people whose income is below 15,000 a year in the city, and the impact these tickets have. The clients either take the bus because they cannot afford it or they ride without paying because they cannot pay the discounted rate of 40. Many of the clients survive on monthly benefits stipends of just hundreds of dollars a month. We had done an informal survey of 20 nonprofits to understand how their clients were accessing muni or not accessing muni and their payment history. They found that for the People Living in deep poverty, less than 15,000 a year, 83 indicated that sometimes their clients rode without paying because they could not afford to. We heard from individuals who got fare evasion citations on the way to doctors visits. We want to make sure that in this time of increasing income inhe callity across the city that everyone has access to the transportation that you worked hard to create. We want to ensure that were not penalizing those who simply cannot afford to pay. Thank you. My name is kate richardson. Im an attorney with a Nonprofit Organization called legal link. We work closely with many of the citys frontline providers at social Service Organizations who are working directly with homeless and lowincome families. So im here to talk about the tow reduction program, echoing from some of the comments that have been said regarding these poverty tows. I really want to highlight the problem that is the process here as well. So when were working with clients, weve trained over 500 providers and done direct consults with over 300 clients. This is a high legal need. What were finding is reduced fees to 100 is great, its a step in the right direction, but we want you to consider reduction all together of these poverty tows for many of the reasons youve heard. Even the processes that seem straightforward with a few steps, including certification for access to services, its an additional step and burden on someone who is already in crisis. I think the reality is many people arent able to access these programs that were designed to benefit them. I would take that into consideration as well and urge you to move in the right direction and consider elimination all together of the povertyrelated tows. Thank you. Hi, im chelsea crumpler. Im glad were having a discussion about mitigating this process. I 100 disagree that fare evasion citations and tow citations or towing in general are a deterrent because you dont have a choice when youre poor and you have to take your kid to the doctor or you have to go to school, i dont know how many citations ive got that i havent been able to pay. Sometimes through no fault of my own, because my worker messed up and didnt get my pass in on time, there also seems to be an ongoing problem of sfmta officers saying theres other resources, but not necessarily being able to give you the information on how to access them. So id like to see also there to be less red tape and bureaucracy like my son, you know, he gets a free meal at school. It would be really nice if we could think of a way to combine that so i could get a free m. T. A. Pass for him. We also dont want people who are living in their vehicles to get rid of the only stability that they have. 100 is a lot, its a lot to me. Sometimes if they can scrounge up 75, they want to use that to go to hotel. 100 is a lot. We need to rethink how were doing this. Next speaker, please. Im kelly cutler from the coalition of homelessness. Your tweets crack me up. Ive been coming here for years and all of us have been coming here for years when were looking at new restrictions on street streets. The reason is it leads to towing. Towing is a major issue where its someones home. Its such a huge hit. We get calls on a weekly basis, then we connect them with the lawyers and having to go through the process, which there isnt a great process now. Its great that were going in that direction of alleviating those fees. Still, the 100 thing was interesting. Im on the local coordinating board and they presented about that. That still leaves the 100 where the Homeless Department is looking for their Funding Source to figure these things out. Its still a huge obstacle. We still have a thousand people on the shelter wait list. We have the single parking, but its 26 spots and for the highneeds folks. The city is currently targeting people in vehicles that are living in their vehicles. The 72hour thing. Thats where people are getting citations so often. That leads to someone losing their home and it really is a heavy hit. Next speaker, please. Im armando garcia. I work closely with kelly. Im lucky to work with tory larson and her colleagues. We send people to them all the time. People walk through our doors anecdotally every week. We get people coming in asking what to do about towing issues or fare evasion citations. Im really glad to hear that theres a deeper effort and there is some interest at sfmta really deeply looking into this to see how we can look at the pressures were putting on People Living in poverty. So i want to share with you a little bit of what i see at my office anecdotally, just so you can understand a little bit of the process someone has to go through, specifically with the fare Evasion Program where you get Community Service instead of paying the fine. So we regularly get people walking in. At best, some of the people that come in are happy they can do Community Service and get it out of their hair, but most of the people that come in are confused about where they can get the fine waived or is it a matter of dismissing the citation. They come to our office interestingly because sfmta agents tell them that we somehow can get it dismissed for them or something. So they show up to us really confused. What ends up happening is we usually give them some kind of a verification because a lot of the Community Organizations already do a homeless verification so it doesnt have to be us to do it. We give them a letter. They go back to Customer Service and they come back with some paperwork on Community Service to us or some organization. Theres a runaround going back and forth thats a lot of extra burden on that person. It doesnt sound like its helping sfmta to put people in that position financially or otherwise. Thank you. Any other public speakers . Him maquisha willis. I wanted to come as a person who has suffered from car loss. Ive lost two cars from towing and one car from booting. And i am of course in low income. At one point i was living in one of those cars. And its like the tickets i couldnt afford and then i lost my registration. And then i couldnt register my car so im getting more tickets. And then i lost my job. Its like a downward spiralling effect. Just speaking for a lot of people in the community, it just doesnt help the towing on me. I agree with other speakers that you can collect in tax revenue because if you have to pay it in any way, just let us keep our property. Its a means of communication here. The congestion here is far beyond theres no doubt that our city is crowded. Were getting penalized for the fact that there is no parking here. You cant afford the garage. You might not have to stop that long. I might have to use the bathroom and come out and have a ticket i cant pay. I got a ticket from the m. T. A. While i was sitting in my vehicle. I was literally falling asleep in my vehicle and wanted to get off before the street cleaning comes. There are a lot of people who cant pay the 100. That would have gotten hard. I cant afford the towing here. 30 years in San Francisco and im still homeless. There are ways you can help people and eliminating towing is one of them. Hello, my name is paul bryly, a policy fellow with larson inlynn. A lot of these initiatives are framed as if they would help the communi communities. People in the lowincome interest, i find it hard to believe that the communities that i come from would support the expansion of metering and the spikes in the fees and all of that. With regards to the towing, i think there should be a payment plan implemented. A lot of people dont have all of that money all at once. If were really trying to assist lowincome communities. As a result gentrification, people are getting moved into their vehicles. If homeless is the priority, youre only exacerbating the position and youre going to push people to the streets more so if you continue to tow them. We heard from community members, they dont support them. I heard as a Community Interest, what community . Thats all i have to say. Good afternoon. My name is ben linshinger. A Program Manager at the tory foundation. The average client we have makes about 800 a month on some sort of a benefit. Even the 100 is extreme. I really appreciate the work that youre all doing to make it that because thats less extreme, but i just want to echo what everybodys saying, which is its a disaster to have your car towed and an unavoidable disaster if youre being targeted and have to go about the work in your life. The work that everyone does to survive when their homeless or low income is equivalent to a fulltime job. Thats been studied over and over again. When you have to go one place after another to make it work and maybe you have kids, youre going to get citations. The poverty line is 12,700. The average person in San Francisco if theyre individuals is making 85,000. As a deterrent you could lower it to 85 25. Making muni free is important to the ecosystem. It increases the sense of self worth people have when theyre making tough choices. Its a Better Society when we dont spend the millions of dollars to try to punish people when we cant make any money off of it, but were talking about a human rights issue. This one piece of good news, the way financial Justice Works is any effort towards financial justice is justice to any other groups. Thats the way money works. Thank you. If youd like to speak, youre definitely welcome to speak, but come up after the next two speakers. Im june whitehorse, and im a staff worker at the research project. I wanted to say 100 is still a lot for People Living in their vehicles and still unaffordable. When those fees can double if youre not able to afford it. Even if you are able to get that fee, technically there are still barriers to getting that fee. If you have to get a certificate or be able to get those get that certification which seems like a big barrier. These kind of fees impact lowincome and Homeless People in a case where people make a low income. If people can afford 8 an hour, they can afford 9 an hour for the people who are parking at the meters. There is not enough safe parking spots in the city. You are told there are places for you to go, but there are not. It sounds like your board is thinking about finding more places for people to park. I would encourage you to focus on that rather than raising the fees. I think the fees erased entirely for the people who are low income. Lastly, as far as muni goes, theres a lot of discussion nationally about free transit. I would really encourage you to look into that. There are a few cities who have made Public Transit free such as kansas city and others that are looking into it. I would encourage you to look into that as far as the fare evasion problem goes. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Brian edwards, coalition on homelessness. First of all, i just want to echo everyone elses concerns that it really is honorable that the financial Justice Project is ameliorating some of the financial hardships of the criminalization of poverty and homelessness, but it is ridiculously ineffective and expensive to do things that way and we need to move further upstream. I want to walk you through how the department of homelessness and housing seems to think this is going to work. A lot of people who live in their vehicles. Lets take a guy who lives in his van, he comes home from work at 6 00 and its not there. That man is never going to think to call the department of homelessness and Supportive Housing to get help. Hes not going to know about a discount. Hes going to look at the 311 app maybe, but theres nothing about a tow on there. There should be a button that says, help, you towed my home. But hes not going to go down and get a coordinated entry assessment at 7 00 at night. He has to figure out where hes staying tonight. He cant even go down to auto return to get my stuff out of it because he left his i. D. In the other pair of jeans that morning. There is an organization that does homeless verifications. There are several. The coalition on homelessness. People walk in and we take care of that every day. To force someone to go through an additional service, a coordinated entry requirement, they dont need to do that to be poor enough to live in their vehicle, theyre already poor enough. Thats where the city needs to intervene. Personally i believe there should be no charge. For h. S. H. To create another level of bureaucracy to lesson the impact of someone living in their vehicle, this is b. S. Thanks, guys. Any additional Public Comment on this comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. Directors. Ill start. Thank you. First, i just want to thank all of you who turned out to talk about financial justice. That was really, really impactful to hear all that and the fact that you devote your lives to helping people live in this city is appreciated. We do need to do something. We need to do something so people dont get their homes towed. Weve talked a lot about this over the years and this really brings this home. It makes me realize how hard it is for people. There was an article i read that read, are you good enough at paperwork to be poor . Most people arent. Thats really, really challenging. I dont know what the answer is here, but we definitely need to look at something to alleviate this situation. As people said, were forcing people onto sidewalks out of what are their homes. Thats really unforgiveable in this city. I dont know how we do it. I dont know how we make sure that the people who can afford to pay their parking tickets pay them and that the people who cant afford to pay them and ultimately will have their homes towed will have their homes towed and become sidewalk homeless. Its a challenge, but its a challenge that we need to step up and figure out. We cant keep doing this. So many other comments come to mind, but first i wanted to thank you all. That was really powerful. When we first started to do the lowincome tow fees, there was a lot of political pressure to address the tow fees. It makes me think maybe we should stop toeing for unpaid tickets. I dont know if youre going to know this, was it in the presentation what percentage of our tows are for unpaid tickets . Im just wondering if we just stop doing that what impact its going to have. I dont know then, what do we do with a car that maybe isnt working thats in the same spot on a block week after week after week. Sorry, i dont know the answer to that. I can try and come back with that information. Yeah, it will be a good one to look at. I do know that a lot of calls from neighborhoods are related to cars. Right. And i know. I see that in my own neighborhood. We have several r. V. S that go because we have r. P. P. In the area. Again, its one of those things that is it people call it a quality of life. Oh, i feel unfortunately with an r. V. Parked on my block. Are you unsafe or is something bad going on . We have a few in our neighborhood and you know them by sight and names and you see them move around and you feel so much for them. I was starting to think before we got into the issue of financial justice, i wonder if its time to look at where we tow. Were losing so much money on the program. The rushhour lanes on pine and bush, do we really need them . Were creating more traffic lanes. Is it time to take a look at why we tow, when we tow, and which streets we tow. Or is that a way to separate out the people who can afford to be towed versus those who cant. Are the lowincome tows coming from the neighborhoods or the other streets . Thats going to be a data dive that maybe we dont have the information, but we definitely need to look into that a lot. Im going to back up from the towing and talk about the other parts of the presentation. Im supportive of the changes proposed for parking meters and garages, but again we need to look at it through an equity lens. Where is it that its okay to extend the parking meters and okay to charge more for parking meters and where does it make sense . I assume we can do that because where we would want to extend the evening metres are commercial corridors where people are driving and going to restaurants and clubs. The parking meter cap my initial note says 9 is enough. You said you could come back and ask that to go up. Again, in certain neighborhoods where people are driving into the city are wealthy people who can afford to go out for dinner and to clubs. Again, its that delicate balance, how do we make sure were charging the people who can afford it and help those who cant. The same thing about 10 00 p. M. , is that late enough for evening meters in certain corridors. Maybe certain corridors could go later. Im a little bit worried about the fine for blocking the disabled zone how thats going to look and sound. I would be interested to hear Public Feedback. Thats an exorbitant ticket, but its also a horrible, horrible violation and really impacts wheelchair users lives. I know its something were looking at for future use, the curb cut use fee. I want to say, fellow directors, dont let this one fade away. There was a great study done in the mission that basically for every curb cut, there was not a car or two cars in the garage, that curb cut was taking away the Living Spaces and people were using the garages for extra Living Spaces. If youre using the curb cut, you will be happy to pay. Those are most of my comments. Yeah. We still have obviously some work to do to present these all sort of in a side by side and to get the Public Feedback on this. Im going to be really interested to hear the Public Feedback on towing poverty towing and what we can do or continue to do or do further to address that. It is so hard. This city of super haves and have notes, how do we reach that balance to make sure that the super haves are paying their share and the super have notes are getting the attention and the empathy that they deserve. Thank you. I know that this is a lot of work and its not easy to bring that to us, but i think were narrowing into it. I think the public process and the input will help. And im also concerned that we get the input from the board of supervisors because i believe thats where the low income tow fee reduction started from, was a push from certain supervisors on the board and that was more than two years ago i guess. I dont know who it was. Thank you. I agree with most of what was said. I appreciate the publics comments. They were compelling and helpful to this discussion. So i would favor more information, but i would favor discontinuing towing when its just unpaid tickets. I would want to look at that and see a strong policy justification for continuing that process. One of the speakers mentioned going through the franchise board to collect payment and some other Debt Collection means. I would be interested in hearing the staffs perspective on those means. I know youre going to do a deeper dive on the whole program, but thats my feedback. And ditto what was said on the others. Thank you. I think the first thing i want to say is i really support this comprehensive equity review that youre talking about when it comes to the fare evasion item. I wonder if some of the items that have been raised today regarding the tow can be part of that comprehensive look as to raising revenue when there is an ability to pay. It sounds like were having two different issues, aligning our fares and fees with our policy goals, which we do have a policy goal. We have goals around equity. It feels like were talking about two Different Things and i want to make sure were not conflating those things. When it comes to the intentions that director tomlin talked about, i feel when were at an injunction, its important to fall back on goals. I dont know that our goals around subsidizing car ownership, i dont think we have any goals around that. Part of the challenge, quite honestly, thats getting in our way of achieving that ambitious modesharing goal is that we prioritize that not just in San Francisco, but all across the country to our policies. I would like to state an intention that sfmta not be subsidizing car ownership because i think it undermines our agreedupon and velveted goals. When youre talking about subsidizing the tow program, i dont want transit riders to be subsidizing car ownership. To me thats completely backwards and undermines our goals. I heard everything that the speakers said that 100 is overly burdensome for a lot of people. Thats a really fair point that needs to be addressed separately, but i dont think we should be subsidizing car ownership. Equity considerations aside, i dont think we should be subsidizing car ownership as an agency. You mean homeownership . Thats a separate conversation. I think thats a really, really good point and thats, i feel like, a separate conversation. But i dont think that transit riders should be crosssubsidizing vehicle ownership for those who are wealthier. A question about the firsttime tow subsidy which is, in fact, larger than the low income. I want to remind the board that if you want to make comments on that, we love your feedback on the value of that firsttime tow. If you want to cue up some of the visuals, that would be great. There is a lot to say on this subject. Im probably going to Say Something first that sounds like i disagree with the director, but i dont think we do. I think theres a lot of subsidies going back and forth. I have looked at the m. T. A. Program as a program that basically uses fees collected from motorists to subsidize muni. I think thats a solid public policy. Now, obviously there are other subsidies that come to motorist s. They generally dont come from muni, but other factors and policies that have been around for a long time. Thats the subject of a nice long drink at the bar. The tribunal with relying on fees and fines on motorists to subsidize muni is what happens when those fees and fines get so high that you get calls from people, i think justifiably, that this is too high and too much. Especially at an income scale, its having effects that really arent justified by the evidence. Our former governor famously hated traffic fines. He was constantly vetoing traffic bills to raise the maximums. Im sympathetic to that point of view. I think some of these fines have become really, really big. We need to find the money somewhere to run the muni. Thats the tension, as our director said a few minutes ago. Let me big in on just a few of the two major issues. One of them is the fines. If were going to entertain the question of should we eliminate towing of nonpayment of tickets, i think we need to answer the question with a pretty high level of certainty that thats not going to blow a hole in the muni budget if a lot of people now decide that since your car cant get towed, you dont have to pay your fines. I used to work at m. T. C. , as my colleagues know. We collected the tolls on the bridges. If you dont pay your toll, you get a ticket. If you dont pay your tickets, you cant reregister your vehicle. Thats how its done. Im not suggesting using that as a model here, but that is one way to deal with that problem of if you for i think a good reason decide you dont want to charge a Certain Group of motorists for the practice of nonpayment of fees, how do you prevent that from spreading and occurring. And, leo, i would be interested in your analysis of that question as well. If thats an option thats on the table, what potential revenue impact could that have. The other thing i looked at in that area, and i think, leo, you were trying to achieve this objective is do the fees and fines relate to each other in some kind of equitable way . And i think a couple that i saw that you didnt proposal, and im running the risk of getting in trouble with the scooter lobby, but to me someone riding a scooter on the sidewalk is sort of committing a comparable safety violation to someone who is parked in a fire lane or parked in a bike lane. Thats one, it seems to me, whether youre on a scooter or a bike, you shouldnt be on the sidewalk. You can seriously injure somebody by doing so, including yourself. So i would yourself you to look at that question as well. Now, on the garages and the meter rates, my understanding is that we used to have, like we do have today, for muni, an indexes policy that those rates would increase and that i think, and you can correct me if im wrong about this, that that policy sort of went by the wayside when we went to the demandbased pricing. I was surprised to read in the presentation that the demandbased pricing only applies to 2 of the meters in the city, though. Thats at least what the slide said. If thats true, theres a whole bunch of meters that are out there whose rates only change when we change them. Is that wrong . Yeah, thats just the number of that cap, that ceiling rate. It applies to 100 of all meters. So i guess then my question would be, is there any way to put those two ideas into the same Fee Structure so that you would have you could change the cap, but you would also have an indexing that would occur as the default and it would occur like it does on muni where you dont impose every nickel or dime. You wait until there is a quarter change or whatever it is. Thats the question. Sure. Its definitely a policy option the board can consider. However, when we took on the s. F. Park policy and pilot, we really found that the equity bands actually, we started off at 0. 25 per hour. Weve raised the floor to 0. 50 an hour and took the ratechanging policy from really driving revenues, but to get back to some of our goals of reducing circling, creating basically one space per block availability rather than just driving rates up for the point of [ indiscernible ] if we drive the rates up too high, then availability drops. We end up with [ indiscernible ] because [ overlapping speakers ] ive got a different idea on that one. That is if the question that director eichen asked, if were going from 8 to 9 because its another dollar, why do we have a cap at all . If youre going to have a demandbased system, let demand set the price. Im reminded of that story in virginia where they implemented one of these express lanes and the algorithm was all screwed up. The first day they charged people 60 to drive into washington on this freeflowing lane and a bunch of people paid it, even though it was a mistake. So i know this question in the environment of the express lanes on the highway has come up quite a bit. And a number of agencies have adopted caps and then they get to the cap in like the second week and then the service degrades and theres nothing they can do about it. My preference, and we get some criticism for it i suspect, if youre going to have a demandbased system, dont have the cap. And you could have the interfacing underneath it. For me the policy question is is it better to raise money from lawasiding behavior or from people who are breaking the law . In terms of revenue generation, its not good to count on a certain amount of people breaking the law, they might decide not to or to do it twice as much. I think in terms of this arrangement we have about the subsidy, its much better for the muni side of the house to be getting reliable revenue from motor vehicles, as opposed to whether it might be a higher number this year or a lower number next year or whether we get complaints from communities who say were suffering an undue burden here and we react to that and we have to scurry around to find the revenue to make up for that decision. So it seems to me on the garages and the meter rate side, i would prefer to see a way of raising additional revenue there, as opposed to the fines and penalties, because i do believe that weve reached a place with 400 or 500 fines per infraction that not only are we raising equity questions, but i think were also venturing into territory where its going to be really hard for us to estimate how much revenue thats going to raise because the numbers are so high. There comes a time in a society when you have to make moral choices. As a member of the Senate Judiciary committee, we had to confront that with three strikes and youre out. What did it produce . A lot of expense and a lot of people, almost 60 in our prison population because of drugs. Rather than put them into a rehab program, we put them into a prison, which costs more than producing children and student services. We are criminalizing poverty today. Its not only on this issue. Its on issues across the board. You have to come to the conclusion at some point where to stop because its starting to remind me of medieval england in terms of how we deal with poverty. This is not on your shoulders nor is it on ours, but it is ours collectively. We have to come up with a system whereby these towing issues are relegated to some kind of income test that basically evaporates the need to pay that towing fee because theyre never going to come up with it. What are we doing . Its not the usual process like in the 1970s or the 1980s because you have too many tickets or youre parked in the wrong area, youre being towed because thats where youre lig and thats the only place you can live. That to me is criminalization of a most horrible order. You can l. That to me is criminalization of a most horrible order. We have to come up with a much more thoughtful approach that deals with basic essence of how we address the criminalization of poverty. I know in the conversations ive had with the governor and other leade leaders, its clear people are at a crossroads of what to do with these issues of homelessness and poverty. Especially in this city when many of the directors said what an impasse we are at with the haves and the have notes, its more clear here in San Francisco than its been in any other city in the country. I think fare evasion doesnt work. New york has had a fare Evasion Program and that doesnt work, and they have 300 million theyre losing in fares and its still not working. We need to examine thoughtfully how we move forward and if at any point we get to the point were dealing with people in the automobiles not being towed if its their home. Thank you. So im going to be quick and go through all the Different Things. Pretty much everything thats been said up here i agree with. One the parking citation adjustment, im fine with those. I understand we want people to pay fares and feel safe on transit. Some people feel the fare inspectors provide some degree of safety. I also question the logic of fare evasion because when i see the people that are evading fares, a lot of them are youth who for whatever reason dont have a muni pass and sometimes they appear to be lowincome, homeless individuals. To enforce fare evasion on those folks doesnt make sense. I dont see why this would work. Going back to the question that was raised earlier, we are going to be consolidating the application for free muni for youth with the food and getting free lunches which is exciting. I personally stated i would prefer if we got rid of the application and if everyone who went to Public Schools got a muni card. I believe we wouldnt be hurting if we had more kids riding the system. The thing is we would get it into the hands of the people who need it without filling out forms. Im all for reducing forms. When it comes to Cost Recovery fees, just making sure that we are fully capturing that amount correctly, the increase to 5 indexing is the right index. I looked at the commerce and Industry Report for 2018 for San Francisco, and the shocking thing was the average income in San Francisco in 2018 was 128,000 and for a white collar working it was 178,000. I looked at that because i still work with a lot of restaurants and the incomes were not anywhere close to that. Its shocking the differential in the city of those who can afford to pay more advanced fares. I think we should look at getting rid of the caps on the meters. If you look at the lots close to the baseball games, the fares are getting higher. I think for people choosing to dri drive, still parking would be cheaper than taking the alternative. I wish that we could use augmented intelligence to really look at how to better understand the people who arent paying who can afford to pay and how we get to those people. I think if you register your car and you live in San Francisco and you have parking tickets, you cant register your car again unless you pay those tickets. There are better ways to figure out who can afford to pay. In lots of states there was reciprocity for speeding tickets. I remember i got a speeding ticket in 1996 and someone came after me from a small town and i paid it. The point was that other jurisdictions are figuring out how to capture lost revenue from people who can afford it. I think we should look at doing that. I think if we had some data around the people who were towing and booting, there are data sets and information that we can find to figure that out and target those people who can afford to pay to collect those funds as opposed to focusing on the people who cant pay. When it comes to low income in terms of towing. In 1999 i moved from the east coast and drove my car across the country. I got parking tickets. I had a friend who let me park at his house, but he got parking tickets and the car was towed. When i got the notice and at the time i was maybe 37,000. I made a choice to leave the car where it was. When i grew up, people who didnt have cars didnt have work. I was lucky that i could have my car towed, but it was expensive and i knew that i couldnt afford it. It would have been better if i could have sold that car and pocketed that money. It was really disappointing. I can only imagine what its like to have your home towed. If youre low income, to spend 100,000, that could be meals for a week, a hotel room for a night. Theres almost no dollar amount that you could affix thats not a hardship, especially the person living paycheck to paycheck. They dont have to have it be low income to be a hardship. If we have it set up that you cant reregister your car as a consequence of paying tickets, we dont need to tow peoples cars because they deal with it there. But we have to think about how to troubleshoot and deal with people. Maybe this is a. I. , if we see someone has repeated tickets and the car is not moving, how do we help people to get services and whatever they need because continuing to ticket them is silly. At the best case, they dont lose their car and their life, but at the worst case they do. I dont see the benefit in that regard. We have to figure it out specifically. Again, i think 100 i understood that was a really thoughtful approach, but if people have no money, 100 is a lot of money. I just dont see how 100 its not worth it to us for anything. People couldnt move their cars. Maybe they couldnt afford gas to move their car. Its the compounding thing. Weve heard this over and over again from People Living in their cars. If youre on the edge and you lose your home, thats when alcohol looks more attractive, drugs, all those things. If i were living on the streets, i would have a hard time coping. I would choose destructive behaviors. It seems to me we have to be better at that. In this budget process whats important is that we prioritize equity, equity to transit and getting around. If you want to talk about places and neighborhoods that we dont tow, i think theres a great idea of looking at neighborhoods we dont tow. If you want to talk about equity, lets talk about the distance to the major job center from your neighborhood, if youre over this time, then absolutely we dont toe you. A lot w a lot of the people whow a lot of the people who yow a lot of the people ww yow a lot of the people wuw a lot of the people who are working there will have cars. My point is thats how we can look at equity. I think its hard to look at they were saying the problem with trying to do equality is that you dont for the fact that the circumstances are different among different people. We have to look at doing a better job for that. If we know that certain neighborhoods have poor transit, we shouldnt be surprised that people have cars in those neighborhoods and we shouldnt be surprised that people work hours that its difficult for them to get to their jobs. How we can better utilize data and information and look at zip codes in terms of towing or getting rid of towing all together if we can look at the fees and see how we can help peop people. If we can really mean this a meaningful program. I remember one time a long time ago i got a parking ticket and i had paid the meter. I sent the information in to the m. T. A. And it was denied. First i appealed and did another appeal and got a denial. I went in person and it was erased because i was correct. We make it hard because we want people to pay their tickets, but we shouldnt make it hard and onerous for people. Most people would pay more to pay now rather than go through a process. Lets figure out how we dont make processes more onerous for people and make it easier for people who want to pay the fines and the fees more quickly by providing an enhancement. I think the final point i was going to make is in regards to the point that maybe we can have a look at a budget that kind of does what we were talking about, the e. I. R. Approach, where you have the lessaggressive plan or the equity all the equity things we wanted to do, right, what that would look like. Another budget is what we are and what were doing and something thats aggressive that only cares about costs and only cares about maximum nooising value. Then we can figure out a little bit more. I think its hard in the abstract because 2 million here, 5 million there, its hard to understand the tradeoffs and what they mean. If you can line it up and show what the tradeoffs mean in that way, it might be more meaningful. Because obviously in some areas if youre saying theres less revenue here, that pays for that. Does that mean fees have to go up or we have less staff so the fees do go up. Also how we can look at Technology Better to better do more predictive behavioral stuff around reaching out for fees and also understanding who are the people getting towed or booted. Is there a state law of towing for unpaid tickets . I dont know if anyone knows the answer. Its all by jurisdiction. Okay. Thats good to know. It sounds like what a lot of us are looking for is a nonregressive way of looking at this. I look at what a nonregressive way of basically charging car owners for their impact on the city, for people who cant afford to drive. And i know we do have legislative approval to do a vehicle license fee and i believe that fee is based on the value of the vehicle so people who own lowervalue vehicles arent going to pay as much. Im not sure why as a city we talked about it when we were first enabled to do it and it got dropped and never brought up again. To me it got dropped because Arnold Schwarzenegger ran on it and it i remember that. That seems like thats something to start looking at. If people can afford to drive super fancy vehicles, maybe they can give the city back more. Maybe that is a pathway to getting to free muni for people and not having to tow peoples homes. Again, a tall order, leo. Thank you. Thats all i have. Anybody else . Just going back to the point of putting these difficult decisions in the context of our goals, i guess i would just ask, other than incentivizing payments, are there other sfmta goals that we believe the practice of towing advances . There are special cases where it is a safety or a congestion matter, where a car is blocking traffic or blocking a safety access. So that definitely is one. There also is people mentioned vehicle registration. If someone has not paid their registration, the only consequence we really have is if ultimately the car can be towed for having an expired registration. Its also incentivizing the expiry of your license and registration. And im im trying to think im not aware of other well, i think theres if you ask people in neighborhoods, it gets back to that question of peoples sense of how they want their neighborhood to look. So the issue of a car overstaying its time where theres restrictions on the number of days one can be parked in one place. If there is a vehicle blocking the bus lane or something, i can understand that would be an intervention and that would enable us to do our job, but i am hearing some of the comments that if the primary purpose is paying citations and its not proving effective in achieving that primary purpose, should we look at are there other methods that could be effective at achieving that purpose. Just the only thing i wanted to say is i would love for us to look at solutions that are both innovative and achieve equity. Just one example of that in the context of the fare evasion conversation that was advanced earlier, as opposed to you paying us 125 if you dont pay your muni fare, i have heard there are programs that would help somebody who hasnt paid to purchase a monthly pass and maybe we would provide a payment plan for someone if they didnt have the 40 or the 80 or whatever it is. That is a solution that enables people to have more access to the Transit System rather than imposing a penalty. I would love to see other solutions out there to help advance equity. When i first moved to San Francisco, i lived in my