When irish eyes are smiling when irish eyes are smiling, they can steal your heart away when irish eyes are smiling, it is like a morn in spring it is the tilt of irish laughter you can hear the angels sing when irish hearts are happy, all the world seems bright and gay when irish eyes are smiling, they will steal your heart away applause thank you, celtic voices. I cant help myself. The beautiful young woman with the red hair is my goddaughter. Go job. Since they just arrived, San Francisco has a great history of a number of Department Heads of Irish American descent. I would like to recognize mickey callahan, department of human resources, and bill scott from the San Francisco police department, and his assistant chief mike redman over there. Thank you for being here, gentlemen. It is now my privilege to recognize the Council General of ireland Robert O Driscoll who has a tremendous connection to San Francisco because his son was born in San Francisco. No matthe matter where his cares him, San Francisco will always be his sons home. Thank you very much. I think he is here today. This is his first st. Patricks day event. I am excited. If you see a green ball, that is mine. Distinguished guests, mayor breed, and supervisors and Department Heads and everybody, very happy t to be here today. Looking back for this event wondering what to say. It is 169 years since the first st. Patricks day parade. 170 years since the first mayor got appointed. How in the fliers year of a mayor was there not a st. Patricks day parade . The first mayor was appointed in may 1850. In january it would have been a parade that year, too. I have been reflected on my thoughts about the parade and first parade, and what were they doing . They were celebrating irish heritage. These are people who left under huge duress, typically in famine times and reached the east coast and no overly welcome home. California offered the promise of prosperity and good life for them and their family. They were celebrating they would never go back to ireland but never forget ireland. There is a grave yard from 1854. All of those had the names of people there and names from ireland but what county in ireland is listed. I thought that was in the last days when they were thinking how to be remembered. It wasnt enough to be from ireland. They had to be from cork and dublin. That connection to home was still as strong at the end of life as it was when they left. I am proud of that. I think the other thing they were doing that day, they were looking forward to what they would achieve because they had achieved a lot to get that far but they had a lot of work to do. The theme of this parade this year serving our communities, i think probably reflects the greatest achiev achievement of t community. That is what we do. That is the irish story in the city. The police in the city administration, politics, in the Fire Department, in the schools. Marry mckeever is here, principal of saint phillips, or all of the people who take leading roles. Our community serve. We should celebrate that for the next week over the course of the parade. Particularly they are so reflective of that. They are all some part of the story of service. As grand marshall you reflect the sense of community, that ethos. Look at the story. It is not just service to the community but the Irish American community through youth gaa. When we look back at your legacy, and i said this at the grand marshalls dinner in your honor. What a legacy for our culture to be passed to the next generation. It is very special. You have had a huge role in that. Everyone in the community here wants to celebrate on your special day. Please give him a huge round of applause. I want to thank shawn. I am scared of shawn with asia e shillelagh. Happy st. Patricks day. Thank you, Council General. I dont know if you saw what happened over there while he was speaking. The president of the Residential Builders was yelling that i hadnt introduced him. Shawn over there. Welcome. Glad you are here, shawn. I cant help. We also vointroduce supervisor matt haney. He has a great connection he studied at the university of galway, and he is the supervision or mar is the landlord of the center. He is the landlord of the krb. Supervisor haney on the mission street. We cant have a flag raising without dancing. It is a privilege to introduce the dancers from murphy school. Welcome. [applause]. I just want to introduce one of the dancers. This is mary who just this week received her irish citizenship. Congratulations. Welldone, murphy dancers. Thank you. All events celebrating st. Patricks day we could not do without the United Irish Society. They are doing all of the work. The president is not here today, but i would like to bring up john lynch, the Vice President to address everyone. Come on up, john. I hope i am half as exciting as the last performance. Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the 169th st. Patricks day season serving our communities. I am the Vice President of the United Irish Society of San Francisco and member of carpenters 22. Thank you to the mayor for hosting us today for hosting us. Welcome to the general of ireland and vice council. Thank you for coming today. I would like to thank the San Francisco irish pipers, murphies school of dance and the Dance Academy and the beautiful sounds of the voices. Thank you for your continued effort working with the mayor in coordinating this event. Thank you to the supervisors for hosting the post reception event, i think. A tremendous amount of work goes into the st. Patricks day season. Thank you to the United Irish Society board and volunteers and sponsors that make this all happen. Thank you. Also, thank you to the city agencies supporting the many events. The San Francisco parks and recreation, San FranciscoFire Department and paramedics, San Francisco police department, San Francisco sheriffs department, the San Francisco public works, and the San Francisco m. T. A. A round of applause for those agencies. Thank you. I would like to thank and congratulate our 2020 st. Patricks day grand marshall, mr. Con lions. Thank you, con. Also, the families of our honorrary grand marshalls. applause it is a tremendous honor to be selected as the grand marshall, as well as a lot of work. Based on his track record he is up to the task at hand. Thank you, con. The st. Patricks day season consists of visits to friends throughout San Francisco as well as civic events commemorating the contributions of father peter york and kate kennedy. In conclusion, we are not new york, boston, chicago, or atlanta. We are San Francisco, and we put on one heck of a st. Patricks day celebration. Embrace this and go out aptry ty to have some fun. Thank you. At this time i would like to present the certificate of honor to con lions, our grand marshall 2020. [applause] our honorary grand Marshall William bill. Certificate of honor to john cassserly. She said it was a great honor. It absolutely is. Thank you. Certificate of honor to joseph teenrjosephine. Certificate of honor to the family of agnes monaghan. Thank you. It is good to see the valley represented up here. Thank you, john. I see spying over the side of my left corner the former District Attorney susie loftus standing over there. The mayor said she wanted to see a woman irish mayor of San Francisco. We dont have that yet. We do have a woman chair of the Irish Sister City Committee with cork, noreen, thank you for being here. You know charlotte has not been as successful without being diplomatic. You cannot have just the murphy dancers performing without having the wee land dancers. I would like to invite them up to do a little dance for us. [applause] applause thank you very much. One last announcement if you get a chance to drive by city hall tonight, the mayor instructed the building be lit up in green. That is tonight and i believe the mayor is saying green, white and orange. Okay, mayor, whatever you say. Also on st. Patricks day as well. Thank you, mayor breed. I would like to ask the dancers to come up to receive their certificates of honor for coming today to perform for us. Make sure you coun count to fivr 10 minutes. Go over to the office to continue the celebration. Thank you everyone for coming. Welcome to the sfmta online budget open house top to ask a question about the key transportation decisions to be made for fiscal years 2021, 2022. Call 415 6462222 [speaking foreign language] good evening im Jeffrey TumlinSan Francisco director of transportation. Welcome to the sfmta Budget Online open house. I know that this is very difficult time for all of us as the coronavirus situation unfolds. Were all thinking about how we keep ourselves and family safe, how we deal with our children at home and how to prepare for the financial consequences unfolding all around the world. Im grateful that you joined us at this time. We understand the challenge of having budget conversation given Everything Else that is going on. Yet, in order for Government Services to continue, Government Agencies need to have a budget. Were mandated by the San Francisco charter to submit a budget to the mayor of San Francisco and the board of supervisors by may 1st. A budget that is rooted in this agencys value. We understand that even if the mayor decides to use the Emergency Declaration to extend the deadline of our budget, we still need an adopted budget as a Reference Point for making the Necessary Service and financial cuts that will have to happen as the Global Financial disaster unfolds. We need a starting place for this conversation and that starting place needs to be rooted in our values. On the one hand, the details of our budget may seem unimportant. But at the same time, Public Transit is continuing to play an essential role and will so for months. It is on public transport that our essential workers get to work, that our residents get access to essential services. Its also our Parking Systems and bike way system and other programs that allow essential work to continue even as we deal with this significant Public Health and financial crises. Tonight, what were trying to do is to take our Public Engagement process online so that we can hear from you, understand your concern and your questions. Over the last three months, we completed hundreds of Community Engagements and we still know that we need additional engagement in order to finalize our budget even though Public Comments so far has resulted in significant changes to our original proposals. I like to continue that dialogue. First i want to introduce my colleague, victoria wise who will help me facilitate this meeting. You want to go over some of the details we established to help people engage online . Thank you. Good evening everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. This open house is being broadcast on our website. You can find it on our twitter page on our Facebook Page as well as our Youtube Channel and you can also watch it on channel 26 and sfgov tv as well. The links to all these social Media Channels can be found on sfmtas website, sfmta. Com budget. Also just to share with everybody, the recording of this hour and a half will be available on our website. If you werent able to join us, you will be able to view the video later and can continue to submit your comments. Just to show with you, the way were going to do this is for the next 13 minutes, were going to share with you a rerecorded video jeffrey recorded custom days ago, share with you the challenges the agency is facing and dive into couple of details that ewith heard a lot about as it relates to fares. Well play the video. Once you have an overview, well come back live and work through some of the comments and questions that well be getting from you on various social media channel. While youre watching the video, please share your thoughts with us. You can leave us a voice mail at 6462222. You can tweet us sfmta underscore muni. You can email us. Sfmtabucket . Com. You can leave a comment on our Facebook Page. Lots of different venues for us to engage. We appreciate you bearing with us as we try something totally different in terms of public participation. Other thing i want to share, please feel free to share your comments in chinese and or spanish. We have translators standing by. They translate your comments or questions. We unfortunately cant answer in chinese or spanish, staff will be getting back to you via email or voice and the language that you leave the question in with specific answers. Lets watch the video. [video] im jeff tumlin San Francisco director of transportation. Our agency is working on our next twoyear budget. Ultimate reflection of our agencys value. [inaudible]. Tric[technical difficulties] one question that i have for the crew, is it possible to show any of the slides that were embedded in the video . Theres huge amount of data. For those listening at home, the entire content of this Powerpoint Presentation in were going to show you, those details are all available at www. Sfmta. Com budget. If you go and look at the materials there, somebody can tell me where to look, all of the material that were referencing including the details around our different proposals for fares as well as detailed proposals for cuts as well as detailed proposals for new services. Can be found there. I will try to walk you through some of the highlights of this program. Please bear with me. This is live tv and we were not prepared to do this. One of the first things that i want to say, the most powerful statement of any agencys value is its budget. The budget is a reflection of how we spend our money. Its about making decisions about what gets funded and what does not get funded. The budget must contend with incredibly difficult tradeoffs. One of the things we tried to do in creating this budget is to be very clear about what our agencys values in order to help us address those inevitable tradeoffs. The most difficult tradeoff were facing given our serious financial constraints, is tradeoff between do we reduce or keep fares constant or do we improve service. Or phrased different way, do we cut fares or do we cut service . Do we keep the fares the same or cut Service Given the reality of our budget. I want to talk about our values. One of the things we value a great deal is system safety. Here in San Francisco, there are about 30 people who are killed result of traffic violence of ey year and 3000 are injured. We want to focus more on social equity. This means something very different than providing equal service to all sa san franciscas it means prioritizing better choices for people who have the fewest cloyses. Many ways for us this means prioritizing the delivery of Public Transit service particularly to the neighborhoods where people either face poor access to employment or inadequate access to schools or other critical services. This particularly means prioritizing access to neighborhoods that have been historically underserved. Like neighborhoods in districts 10 and 11. Particularly districts where we see high levels of residents of people of colour and also People Living in poverty. Another core value of ours is decarbonation of the transportation of the economy. Transportation is well over half of the citys carbon dioxide. Many you know as the economy has improved up until last month, the congestion and vehicle miles traveled as well as the rate of driving have increased. All of that has resulted in an increase in Greenhouse Gas emissions. Another core factor that were contending with in our budget, as congestion rises and as the rate of driving rises, as more people drive, our streets move fewer and fewer people in a given year. Its not that im necessarily a better person when i ride my bike or take the bus. I do take up one tenth of a space when i drive a car or ride in the back of lyft. In order to accommodate San Franciscos significantly growing population and job space, its very important that we manage our streets for the movement of people rather than the movement of vehicles. This means prioritizing the most Space Efficient forms of transportation which incidentally are forms of transportation that are most used by low income people and most environmentally friendly. Another key factor that we face, if you can go to the next slide, is the reality of our structural deficit. In San Francisco, like in almost all municipalities in california, our expense rise with the cost of living but our revenue rises basically with inflation. In an up economy, the sfmta faces a widening structural deficit. There are many complex reasons in the tax code about why this is true. Its the reality of our agency. We faced a 66 million structural deficit as of a month ago. A deficit that is significantly widening in the face of the current economic crises. In order to be able to deliver the existing service that we provide, we need more revenue in order to deal with our financial reality, we either need to find a means bringing in new revenue or we face service cuts. If you can go to the next slide, you can see how our revenues are tracking year over year for different sources of revenue. As a result, partly of uber and lyft are parking fee and fine revenues have been declining over the years, as parking demand declines. Similarly as weve expanded our free and discount fare programs for muni, our fare revenue is in slight decline. All of this is meant that San Francisco mta is dependent upon general fund revenue. Which is very susceptible to changes in the economy. The general fund is very susceptible to changes in the sales tax rate and for revenues like the hotel tax, all of which are rapidly declining in these economic times. All of this is covered. These core issues were covered by group of san franciscans and experts in transit from all over the country. That convened over the last six months, called the Muni Reliability Working Group. This group gave a rather brutal audit of the muni service. Gave us very specific recommendations about how to improve the efficiency of the system and put the agency on a stable financial footing in order to allow us to deliver on the Transit Service that San Francisco needs as it continues to grow in its economy and its population. These recommendations are more important than ever given the current economic and Public Health situation. However, our budget does not include any of the recommendations for expanding service. Instead, despite the financial catastrophe that is upon us, we do want to implement the recommendations thats the Muni Reliability Working Group, around stabilizing service and improving on the reliability, allowing us to become more efficient. The Muni Reliability Working Group recommendations were bold and specific and targeted improvements around the transit lines that needed it the most. Many of which in the outer neighborhoods of south africa, n francisco. Which serves over 17 schools and other educational institutions. It is a workhorse route of the southern and western neighborhoods. Our representation was to invest in rapid improvements on this line in order to meet the increasing demand for service and all those neighborhoods. We will not be able to move forward with any of the Service Improvement or equity recommendations even in our original state of a budget without a new source of revenue. Which we require of the public. We also know that where we have invested in Better Safety improvements, weve seen significant positive outcomes. Where weve invested in muni reliability improvements. Weve invested in safety improvements like the platforms on turk street and other corridors. Weve seen dramatic reductions in crashes including the complete elimination of injury related crashes on places where weve made improvements on terra ball streets. We are capable of making dramatic improvements in the quality of service that all san franciscans experience in the Transportation System. Our budget included a 5year Capital Program. That focused on hundred, really thousand small improvements or many higher ridership muni lines. For more detail on all of those projects, you can google muni sfmta for great deal of information. Or see the detailed Capital Budget program at sfmta. Com bucket of budget. Youll see the details of our vision zero and major streetscape projects. Cars versus pedestrian fatalities continue to be the highest cause of fatalities transportation related fatalities in San Francisco. It requires significant investment in order to improve the reliability of the system including ongoing upgrades in the subway tunnel. Finally, our Capital Program includes significant improvements to our light rail system, completing the purchase of new light rail vehicles that would expand the reliability of our subway system and continue advancing the major improvements that weve made in speed, reliability and comfort on the bus system. We have even in this current financial crises, we will likely continue to have access to a significant amount of capital funding. We are not able to use this money for Transit Service operations. We can use it to advance our core priorities like social equity and safety. Were targeting those investments to the neighborhoods that have been most neglected. Includes advancing our vision zero network, focusing the prop d tax on uber and lyft to advance Quick Build Program that focuses on safety outcomes, along with advancing Educational Campaign to improve safety outcomes. The most controversial topic that we have to contend with in in budget is our bus fares. Muni fares. As many of you know, the sfmta has a policy called indexing. What this means is that every year, we raise fares by a specific percentage. That percentage is basically the average of the cost of living and inflation. So that our fares rise with the cost of delivering service. If we didnt increase fares with the cost delivering service, we would need to cut service in order to accommodate fares being the same. We would end up in a service and financial crises that we would require us to periodically implement a huge increase in fares that would be very painful for all customers. In order to avoid both the service crises as well as the every 5year huge increase in fares, weve decided instead to impose relatively modest increases in fares each year. Weve heard a lot on this topic. Including many calls for free muni for everyone or free muni for certain classes of people or to cap all our fares given the reality of the financial crises that all our riders are facing. There are some challenges, however, to stopping a fare increase. That it impacts our ability to deliver service. One of the things that is quite clear about the San Francisco system is that even though theres what we call a price elasticity of demand for fare. Ridership declines as we increase fares. The elasticity demand is far greater. If we cut service in order to keep fares the same, that the impact on ridership loss will be greater. Ridership loss will be primarily for higher income people who would simply flee to uber and lyft. Lower income will be burdened by less frequent and more crowded service. In listening carefully to the public, weve proposed some different approaches. One of the things that weve discovered is that the demographics of who rides muni varies a lot depending on what fare product they use. [please stand by] o it attracts young people in San Francisco. It also means that kids who forget their card no longer have to contend with fare inspectors. There are a lot of good reasons to extend free muni to youth. This doesnt cost us all that much money. Similarly we are recommending that individuals who experience homelessness also get access to free muni. We expect that these people need to get to their appointments and social services and they require Public Transit in order to get there. This is a program that we feel very confident that we can afford. Were also proposing that for that fare median that our lowestincome people use the most, the singleride fare, that we cap it at 3 for both the next year and the following year. Weve heard fairly loudly from our customers that that is important. That is our recommendation in the green as well as the pink column. In order to pay for that capping, we have two choices. We can either in the green column raise the clipper pass rate slightly. Or in the pink column, we can narrow the discount that discount clipper users get to pay their fare. As you can see below the monthly pass would rise to 81 and similarly the 2. 75 individual clipper fare would rise to 2. 80 instead. We think this is a much more efficient way of allowing us to get the revenue we need in order to retain service, while at the same time being very conscious of our neediest customers. Well look forward to additional feedback from all of you on that proposal. Next slide, please. Were also making a lot of adjustments in our fine policies. Hearing from, again, a lot of people on this topic. We know that our fine policies should be guided by our desire to get compliance in our rules to make the systems fair and efficient. It should not be guided by punitive objectives and should also be equitable across modes of transportation. Were constrained in how we manage our fines, but what we are trying to do is increase fines that are rooted in safety and decrease fines that are rooted in getting compliance particularly for people who are suffering from financial distress. We also want to be aware that, for example, the fine for riding transit and taking up 3 square feet of space should be less than the fine for not paying at your parking meter for taking up 200 square meters of space on a San Francisco street. You can find all of the detail in our budget proposal, but were trying to maximize the possible fine given state restrictions for issues like parking in a bike lane or riding a scooter on the sidewalk, while reducing fines for things like not paying your muni fair, to the extent that that is allowable according to the state law. That is on the next slide as well. Another area that is included in our budget is rethinking our approach to parking meters. As many of you know, in San Francisco the reason we charge for parking is to make sure motorists can find an available parking space, creating availability of one or two Parking Spaces on any block or in any garage or parking lot. We are trying to find the lowest rate that achieves that outcome. If we charge too high a rate, merchants would complain and customers and we would get less revenue. If we charge a rate that is too low, all the spots would be fill, merchants would complain, motorists would have to circle around the block, and we would get less revenue. We want our policy to be about customer availability and Small Business success. The reality is we bring in revenue from our parking meters. So as a result were proposing two significant changes. One is extending the hours of enforcement in neighborhood commercial districts, particularly those where there is a lot of restaurant and entertainment uses, we want to extend the hours to the extent that spaces are full. In order for people to drive to go to a restaurant in a neighborhood commercial district. This would apply only to places that demand is high. The second thing we want to do is look at sunday meter enforcement, at least on sunday afternoons. As many of you know, our sunday meter restrictions are rooted in an era where businesses were closed on sunday. Now businesses are all open on sunday and we want to make sure were supporting those businesses, while at the same time being very aware of the needs of the community. Were proposing to partner with neighborhood commercial districts and faith communities in order to roll that out in a way that is conscious of everyones needs. With that, i think we should probably are we ready to go to questions now . Were ready to roll. Thank you for accommodating our onthefly response to our technology difficulties. Were happy now to take questions. Once again, i would like to remind all of you that there is a tremendous amount of detail that is available at www. Sfmta. Com budget. Just thinking about whats going on with the coronavirus right now, jeff, our economic Prospect Team and obviously the citys budget and sfmta budget is going to be significantly affected. Could you talk to us how we are handling the situation in this asylum of uncertainty. Were working on a budget and we dont know how our budget is going to be affected. How are we dealing with that. This is the craziest time to be developing a twoyear budget, given the massive oment of economic uncertainty. The only certainty we have is that our economic budget is uncertain. That is reason we are moving forward with the budget. We need a Reference Point for making decisions about what needs to be cut. We know significant budget and service cuts are coming and we need to be prepared for that. Thats why we started this conversation about the budget with our values. It is only by having clarity about this agencys values that we will need to be able to make solid decisions about how to make cuts in a way that minimizes damage to the agency and minimizes the effects on the san franciscans we serve and those most vulnerable. I am not pretending that we are going to implement this budget on july 1. We will not have the resources to do so. All of the improvements that were planning in here, none of them are we going to be able to simply fund on july 1. What we need is the starting place for making the decisions about what we fund and dont fund and, particularly, how we make those cuts. This is a very challenging time for all of us, including the budget and policy things in every Government Agency. All of whom need to have a budget set of balances. Very good. Thank you. One of the things you talked about in this slide is the fact that this agency has a structural deficit. What i often hear from different sources is that sfmta has a deficit. Can you break it down. I have spent my entire career in the private sector. I understand how private Companies Operate and ive served a lot of public agencies. So i understand the how budgets work, particularly budgets that are oriented around providing the greatest amount of service at the least cost. One of the things that ive found is that with a few very specific exceptions, sfmta is a remarkably efficient agency. I have not found waste. To the extent that there is waste and we found some, about 5 million worth and this budget includes cuts to those waste categories, thats about it. My predecessors weathered the last storms. It takes a lot of people to run an agency of this side, particularly people like bus operators. They are our biggest single class of personnel and they cost a lot of money in part because we have to pay them a living wage. Most of the greatest service challenges that weve experienced at the sfmta are rooted in our thousand vacancies, to the extent that we have any Financial Flexibility here at the sfmta is because of the vacancies. Vacancies that exist because we have not been as competitive with the private sector at being able to attract and retain talent as we need to be. We have to provide our workforce a living wage, and thats also something i know from the private sector. Delivering any serviceoriented organization is about attracting and retaining talent. So our costs are driven by wages. That also means that our Cost Increases are driven by wages. In order to attract and retain talent, we have to increase wages with the cost of living in this region. All of you know what it is like to live in this region and face rising rents. We have to pay our workforce a living wage, which is not an exorbitant wage. At the same time, our revenues do not increase with cost of living. Our revenues increase with inflation. So in a boom economic cycle, that gap between inflation and cost of living rises, exacerbating our structural deficit. This is a problem that basically every Government Agency in california faces and its one of the things that we are absolutely going to have to be contending with, given the likely Financial Impact of global pandemic. A third factor also is that we need to contend with growth. Even though weve had were in an economic crisis right now. Over the last decade, San Francisco has added about 30,000 Housing Units and about 220,000 jobs. Those 220,000 jobs and 30,000 Housing Units have increased the need for us to deliver transportation services. And because our streets are of a fixed dimension, as the city grows, our cost per person actually increases because the work that we have to do is about making the Transportation System more efficient. We cant just make the Transportation System wider. I know all of this is rather complicated, but its really clear to me coming from the private sector that there is not a lot of waste in this pie. It is a pretty efficient pie and that we need to find a way of growing the pie in order to deliver the service that particularly our neediest san franciscans need. Very good. Thank you. Now that weve covered the basics of structural deficit and why we have it. At the end of the day, our agency needs to have a balanced budget. So you and i know that in order to have that balanced budget, we are going to need to use some of our fund balance. Can you explain what fund balance is and really talk a little bit about whether its appropriate to use the funds right now in this particular economic circumstance that we find ourselves in. Yeah. So public agencies basically have a savings account. Its our rainy day fund. Its a pot of money that we use when were dependant on Revenue Sources that go up and down. Its the thing that allows us to flatten out our budget so we dont have to do layoffs if one of our services is delayed or experiences a downturn. We have fund balance that is there to deal with cost overruns on our Capital Projects and to get us through rainy days. Guess what, it is not just raining, but hailing and storming outside. So now is the time to actually use our fund balance. Weve got to get through not just the next couple of months, but what is likely the next couple of years, depending on how the pandemic impacts the Global Economy and all of the sources of revenue that we rely on. One of the challenges were facing using the fund balance is how much do we spread that out just to keep treading water or to slow down the pace by which we need to make Major Service cuts. Do we do that or do we accelerate spending in our fund balance in order to generate trust with the electorate in order to go after a new funding source. Something that becomes particularly challenging, depending on the overall state of the San Francisco economy. Thats one of the core questions were going to be facing over the next couple of months, what should our rate of draw down be on our fund balance, knowing that our total fund balance is about two months of payroll. Thank you. Now i want to dive into the questions that we are getting online and through email. We have an email asking that we prioritize new lrv4 in our budget. Can you share what were going to do about that and share with folks if we will continue to be sliding in the chair. Thanks to the board of supervisors last week, we now have approval to move forward with purchasing the next round of lrv4s, the new red siemens cars. Were getting 63 of them to replace the breda cars that have the problems with the doors getting stuck and delaying the subway system. Shifting to the new light rail vehicles will be a significant benefit of resolving some of the delays that all of us face practically every morning, given the poor reliability from our older cars. Weve heard a great deal of feedback from our cars. Were changing a couple of the passenger details on those cars, including adding butt divets in the perimeter seating. Those of us who ride the j church when theres significant grade on the train, we get to know each other much more than we should and thats particularly problematic. I shouldnt joke about this, but given social distancing. Having little scoops in the seats will allow people to have great greater distancing. With people with spinal difficulties, having a few forward. Facing and rearfacing seats allows them to have a ride with significantly less spine or bone or muscle or neck pain. So weve done some of those changes as well as some changes to the handle bars and the grips in order to be able to accommodate a whole variety of requests. Were lowering the seats by 2 inches to help some of our shorter riders. Weve gotten some complaints from our taller riders so we will retain some of the higher seats over the wheel wells. I think what were going to do is to maximize happiness, knowing that its not possible to make all of our customers happy. One other comment that weve also heard is complaints about the perimeter seating in general. One of the reasons why weve switched to perimeter seating, like most urban operators around the world is it allows us to fit more people on the trains and allows better circulation on the trains so that standees or people sitting allows people to get out to the doors. This makes more room for people and maneuverability. One of the biggest problems that muni currently faces and likely will for some time is crowding on our buses and trains. As the economy changes, we expect crowding will continue. Very good. Part of this budget i know that we are doing just a tiny bit, but a tiny bit of service cuts. We are eliminating the 83x express bus. And sunny jolly emailed us opposing this change. She felt that the riders need this change and that the 47 would have a hard time picking up the slack and that the commute times would be longer. Can you talk to us about the rationale of eliminating the 83x. If you have no idea what that is, this was in the press a couple of years ago called the twitter express from the cal train station over to basically the twitter building in midmarket back and forth. Its a short line. It runs at peak only and gets about 300 riders a day. I dont know if its the lowest ridership lines, but one of the lowest. Among the ridership lines it has Redundant Service on the 47 as well as other lines, the t and the n lines. People can take the train and the subway. This is an opportunity that we have to get rid of a line that is low ridership and serving primarily an affluent clientele and a line that has abundant other choices, including taking advantage of the new protected bike lanes that we have installed on townsend street, 5th, market, as well as the scooter lanes. There are abundant other alternatives available for the 83x. Excellent. So we talked a lot about fares during your presentation. I have to say that we heard from so many organizations, Transit Riders Union about fares and we listened and addressed some of their concerns. Now i do want to spend a little bit of time talking about fees. So we have an email asking what changes are being proposed to the towing fees. This writer is wondering how are we addressing the challenges around towing folks during these hard times. We talked about towing quite a bit with the public already. So if you can share some of the changes were making as a result of that feedback. Thats right. Weve got hundreds of letters and emails on the topic of towing and weve heard some very passionate testimony at our board and many of the Community Workshops that we did before the coronavirus started. Towing is a difficult topic, particularly for people who are most vulnerable, and especially people who are forced to live in their cars and who have no other place to live. So we took a really close look at our overall towing program, all of the reasons we tow, as well as what are the costs and revenues that we get from the program. To my surprised, we lose money on the towing program. Our tow fees are very high and on every tow, we lose a huge amount of money. One of the things were looking at is to the extent practicable, where its not needed for safety or accessibility reasons, simply reducing the amount of towing were doing. On streets like pine and bush where the parking lane is towaway at peak, do we really need that, particularly with traffic levels so low, given that that is going to continue for some time. Why dont we just eliminate that and save some money. Similarly, for people who are living in their cars, certainly for the time being, we are eliminating towing for people who are housed in their vehicles during the Current Health crisis. And for our proposed budget, once were out of the Health Crisis and into a better economy. We still need a mechanism to get rid of abandoned vehicles or for dealing with people who are creating actual social problems on the street as a result of car encampments. That said, we want to be compassionate to people and identify locations where they can avoid having to live on the street, by instead making do in their vehicles. So were proposing a couple of changes. One of those is creating a new onetime zerodollar fee for people who are homeless who have had their vehicles towed. This is important frankly because were not making any money off this program. There may be times we inadvertently tow somebodys car who is living in that car. We dont need to punish them more. They dont have the resources to pay. We might as well make that free. We have had a program for a discount tow fee for people who are low income. The current fee is 238. We want to reduce that to 100. We want there to still be we dont want people to block driveways or curb cuts. We want there to be a disincentive, but we want that to be merely a disincentive and not a way to make money, reducing it from 238 to 100. Were reducing the lowincome boot fee from 100 to 75. Similarly, were proposing for other folks to make some slight adjustments to the firsttime tow fee to 524. And raising the repeat tow fee to 524. Treating typical income people the same but putting in a reduction for lowincome people. And at the same time trying to reduce towing across the board except for reasons related to health and access to property. Very good. I want to stay with the topic of fees a little bit longer and make sure that we cover and talk about taxis. Theres lots of things going on with taxis. Folks are struggling with the industry. A couple of people have written to us. One person asks, why are there no funds indeed the fiscal year 202122 budget for taxiing. Another person says what are we doing to support the taxi drivers generally and particularly right now in particular given the coronavirus. Yeah, this is, as many of you know, a very, very difficult for our taxi operators. I feel strongly that San Francisco needs to maintain a strong, publicly regulated taxi industry that is positioned to compete well against ride Hail Companies like uber and lift. We have to recognize the challenges moving forward and setting it up for longterm Financial Success and for a whole host of reasons. One is for how much our taxi drivers have invested in the program but how dependant they are for their livelihood. We are really dedicated to doing what we can in order to ensure their success and reasonable livelihood for the operators. Our budget as it currently stands contains a couple of items related to taxis. In the fiveyear improvement item, there is a small bit around taxis that includes 30,000 each year for advertising. Were in coordination for the advocates for taxi operators are looking at using their remaining funds to support advertising, to promote the use of taxis in as a more laborfriendly way of getting around the city. Certainly theres something that i choose when i need a rise is our taxi service. So right now the funds that we have are nearly depleted within but weve got about 300,000 remaining in that fund and trying to find out a way of funding if we spread it out too thinly, but which could support advertising if our board approves. In the short run, we are making sure that we are eliminating driver renewal fees for the extent of the health emergency. Drivers can continue working out on the street without paying their renewal fees while were in this health emergency. Its the least that we can do in order to support our operators. Were also thinking about if we can waive the taxi fees for the next two fiscal years, given the huge impacts being felt by our taxi operators. Those are things under discussion outside of our budget but which we would likely do. Im going to shift my bicycle gear and move on and talk a little bit about the Golden State Warriors. During this last fiscal year the chase arena was open and we were successful in that opening because this agency partnered with the Golden State Warriors and provided excellent transit and Parking Management and curb management. One of the most innovative and really exciting things that we did was that the muni ticket is included in ticket of your event or Golden State Warrior game. Thats an Exciting Development and i think it has facilitated folks riding transit to the events or to the basketball games. So how do you envasing maybe expanding that program . In particular, are you envisioning partnering with the giants to do something similar . I think the m. T. A. Should be so proud of the work that you did. All that happened before i arrived, i had nothing to do with it. I sat back and watched and was braced for a disaster and instead it was a phenomenal success. You should be proud of that success. Sfmta charges 1. 50 on services on those nights and makes it possible for the arena to function with people coming in and out and without a lot of gridlock. This is an amazing success. So i would love to expand on the success of that program. If anyone from the San Francisco giants is listening, call me. Were ready to expand the success of a program like that. Similarly, if and when our Convention Center is open again for business, and it will be, i would love to have every conventioneer badge be a muni fast pass. I would love all the hotels plastic card keys to be a muni fast pass. For all major employers in San Francisco to chip in to help us deliver the Transit System that we need, particularly given the economic crisis, while at the same time having us deliver free transit to their employees. As an agency, were really eager to make some savvy deals in order to be able to maintain service in these times. And its going to require really, really active participation from the private sector in order to allow us to do that. Very good. One question that we get from time to time is about our crossing guard program. In particular one person asked can we increase the number of hours that crossing guards work. For example, the way it is today, we have crossing guards in the morning for an hour and a half making sure our kids get to School Safely and a shift in the afternoon when everyone is leaving school. Its not a long day. A person or two are curious can we give the crossing guards more hours. What do you think about that . I love our crossing guards. They help me cross the street at harvey milk school. They provide a phenomenal amount of service and keep our kids safe. In our budget, he had a choice to make about whether we expand the program to more schools or expand the hours to individual crossing guards. If we add more hours, we serve fewer schools. If we add for guards, we can serve more schools and enhance safety. We have chosen the latter and have allocated additional budget to hire 20 new crossing guards, but not expanded their hours. In fact, in talking to many of the guards, including the ones i have seen, most of them live in the community. Many of them are older adults. All of them are interested not so much in more hours, but are happy to get out in the Community Every day. We feel more safety for more schools is going to serve San Francisco better than more hours for fewer guards. Very good. Live from twitter, what is the planned schedule for sfmta to hire more supervisors in 2020 . Yes, this is a hugely important question and one of the questions that comes straight out of the Muni Reliability Working Group recommendation. If you want a lot of detail on that topic, search for Muni Reliability Working Group and also look into the detail of our budget. So in order to so back in the last recession, back in 2008, in order to hold onto our core service, the Previous Administration widely chose to slash line supervision, the people who are in charge of making sure that buses are evenly spaced out, that operators leave their terminals on time, when there is a problem there are many places in the system that we have recurring problems. That there is a supervisor there with operational experience that knows how to sort out those problems. In order to improve reliability and to have steadier service, we need to staff up with those supervisors. Those supervisors can also take advantage of the investments that weve made in technology. Years ago people thought that all of the Global Positioning satellite trackers on the buses would allow us to automate supervisor. In reality, what we find is that that data requires a detailed understanding of whats happening out on the street and what buses can and cannot actually do. So what were finding is that having a new array of supervisors allows them to get the data that were getting, which basically is a force multiplier on the supervisors and where were applying the supervisors, were getting huge increase in reliability as well as headway maintenance. This is a question of whether we will actually be able to hire the new supervisors. Im getting a question. Any Job Opportunities offered to recent College Graduates at the sfmta. Ill pipe in and say that we of course have an Internship Program that is amazing at sfmta, truly a trainingground. Many people who have gone through our Internship Program end up working at sfmta. And really people should be looking on our linkedin website and the city website. We post a diverse range of positions. Its important to retain and attract talent. If you google jobs with the sfmta, the jobs portal will come up. Another position that just opened up just today is our transit ambassador program, which is a really fascinating job. Its for entrylevel people, particularly san franciscans, who live in the southeastern neighborhoods to ride our School Tripper services in order to help ensure that muni is civil. Its our alternative to having a police force ride muni. Instead we train people in the community who understand the kids in their neighborhoods and can engage with riders in order to support civil behavior and that we all need to get to what we are getting to. There are 13 of those that were advertising today. Another person from twitter says why is the fine for fare evasion in some cases more expensive than a parking violation ticket . Can sfmta look into the aggressive action that requires payment for fare. This is important to me. It was one that would take too long for our budget conversations, but we are going to take a longer program that may require advocacy at the state level that restrict our ability to manage fares. It is very important to me that we look at our fare Evasion Program not as a way of making revenue off citations, but as a way of encouraging people to pay their fair share. Rather than charging people fines, i would so much rather people who havent paid their fare, instead be required to buy a clipper card that would be the value of that fine, but instead gets them into the business of actually of paying their fare. Or instead of asking them to pay a fine, that it allows them to contribute their time to a Community Service function. The thing that irritates me is the fine for not paying your 3 bus fare for taking up 3 feet on the bus is greater than paying your parking fine for 300 square meters on the street. We need to equalize the fares for the impact they have on the system. There is too much complexity or resolving all of that in this particular budget, but that is something we are absolutely committed to coming back to and revisiting in several phases over the coming year, particularly relative to the legislative effort we want to have at the state with the equity question as well. Very good. Staying with fares, we have a question, do parking permits go up by the same amount as the muni fares. Why is parking so much cheaper than a muni pass if we are transit first . Speaking of things that drive me nuts and require legislative change. Our residential parking fees are currently 144 a year. Were raising them by some tiny amount. A residential parking permit is basically 0. 30 a day to store your car on public property in our neighborhood or at least have a license to do so. The reason it is only 144 a year is that it is illegal for us to charge more for the residential parking permit than it costs us to administer that parking program. So this is really frustrating. Unlike parking meters, which we have a great deal of flexibility in terms of how we set the rate, the Residential Parking Permit Program is fundamentally broken. A result of that is in our urban communities, it is a hunting license. It is not a tool for making sure that residents coming home at night can find a parking space near their homes. Changing that requires significant changes to state law as well as changes to a Court Decision called richardson v. Arlington. We need to figure out whats the optimal way for managing parking in our residential neighborhoods that provides some reasonable assurance that our residents can find a Parking Spaces near their home, at night, in the rain, makes it difficult for commuters to the financial district to park their car in the neighborhood to avoid paying in the garage and at the same time make it is it possible for the employees in our neighborhood commercial districts to find a place that they need to park thats not just in front of the business across the street. Its part of the complete madness of the rules governing that looked only at a single mode at a time. We want to think comprehensively across all modes of transportation and have the tools to manage the entire right of way in San Francisco for the public good. Again, would love to take care of that in this budget, but we really cant. I should add as well, on the parking meter side, again, it is our policy that the parking meter rates achieve a good rate in the communities. If we doubled the parking meter rates, we dont double revenue. Our rates for parking have a much greater impact on the demand for parking than our muni fares. So were trying to have a parking meter rate that optimizes revenue and accessibility to the commercial districts at the same time. These are some of the many things we struggle with as were trying to put together this budget that brings together the budget that we need and that does so in an equitable way for those who travel to San Francisco, whether by foot or bus or skateboard. Moving on to an email. What lowcost measures will muni undertake to improve service. For example, providing Faster Service to make the service cheaper to provide. Is muni willing to give more priority to buses through signal priority as an option or to eliminate bus stops that are spaced too closely together, i would add to that maybe doing transitonly lanes, and so on. This is a program that im so excited to move forward with. Most of that was developed before i arrived, but that we have new tools to move forward really quickly. This is called the Muni Forward Program. You can google that on our website. But just last month, our m. T. A. Board of directors gave us authority to implement our Muni Forward Program so much faster than before. As some of you will know, we have this thing called the Quick Build Program. We applied it to bike lanes where we go in and engage with a community in the corridor and do some pilot implementation with some cheap and easily reversible materials with paint and plastic posts. Youve seen it and some of it looks ugly and slash dash in part because we wanted it to that way. We wanted to get data and make adjustments as we go along. In the corridors where weve made these bike lanes, weve seen huge increases in bike ridership. Weve also been able to generate trust with the businesses and residents in those corridors. Weve also been able to make adjustments in realtime based on the data. We then make a report and decide to make the changes permanent. Then there will be a separate project that uses concrete and trees and nice materials. We want to take all of that success and apply it to muni. Weve already seen the muni forward projects, where we did a thousand small projects, including implementing the five rapid. The result of that was a 60 increase of ridership and a 40 decrease in collisions on the street. This was a success for a relatively lowcost project. That project took us a couple of years to implement. We can now do many of these projects more quickly. Weve been experiments with that on the nine. We want to move faster than in the past. The Muni Forward Program and the new projects that were just approved by the m. T. A. Board on tuesday allow us to move forward. If we have any capital money and can maintain our current staffing levels, we are ready to move forward with dramatic improvements on the muni lines that our riders use the most. I have a specific question asking us when will the fare increases start. So if we get approval in april for the fare changes, those would be in effect on july 1 im sorry, im being corrected. If we get approval in our budget in april, the fare changes would go into effect on september 1. This is going to give us time to actually understand what are the implications of the Financial Impacts of the global pandemic. So again, i want to emphasize why were wanting to approve this budget now. We need a budget that is clear about its values and we need a Reference Point for making changes. Our current budget is not very rooted in values. Its pretty strict and rooted in values. One very important question thats not related to the budget that were getting, but its absolutely critical is from a youtube user asking are we cleaning our buses. Yes. This is definitely a question weve been getting almost every day. Were doing a couple of things. Every night when the buses and trains go to sleep at night, they are thoroughly cleaned and scrubbed and completed desanitized. Were fortunate, given all the guidance from Disease Control and global authorities is that the virus itself is fairly delicate. Its easy to kill the virus with straightforward materials. Were making sure were doing a thorough cleaning and similarly were doing a wipe down using simple chemicals four times a day. As the epidemic has gone on, were also gone on to activate what are Disaster Service workers. All of us who work for the city, one of the things we signed is that in the event of an emergency, we can become endeared to serve essential functions. One of those functions is increasing the sterilization of our vehicles during the middle of the day when operators are taking a break. I am doing my car cleaner trainer duty this friday morning. We feel sorry. We feel very strongly that all of us here at the sfmta are in the service of the public and that were not just going to ask our maintenance crews to step it up even more than they have. In fact, the thing that is making me most proud of serving this agency right now is the way our but operators, maintenance crews, communication teams, station agents, they are all here at basically a 100 level. They understand that they are in service to the public. It is my job and the job of the professionals to serve our operators and other frontline workers, which means we need to step it up to protect our operators and protect our riding public. So i will be serving my shift on cleaning down the vehicles in the coming vehicles and im expecting the same from my other managers. This is the time this agency has to come together and to remind our Service Mission to the public and to our frontline workers. Excellent. As you can see, i feel a little strongly about that. Yes, and im glad that you do. We will be working together and we will get through this very challenging time. Once we do and looking a little bit into the future, i want to talk to you about and bring you back to the budget. We talked about the structural budget and the fact that its going to grow over time. In the long term, were going to need to think about ongoing new Revenue Sources. Can you talk about what work has been done to identify new Revenue Sources, what they look like, and what are your thoughts on that. It was about a year ago, the 2045 work, its not like our structural deficit is a new problem, but an ongoing problem that all transportation agencies in california face. This program investigated all of the various ways that sfmta could either temporarily or, better yet, permanently create a Revenue Program that would close the gap and deliver the service that san franciscans need. There is a long list of those measures. San francisco now has the authority to create a special vehicle license fee that would go to transportation. That is a possibility that has not polled well. Here in california the things that tend to poll the best are sales tax measures for transportation. We could consider doing a special election at any time to put a sales tax measure on the ballot. It is too late for the november 2020 election. Putting something on the ballot requires a huge amount of work and will compete with other priorities. We could go to the voters for a general Obligation Bond that would be particularly useful for capital money, but could also for a certain degree be used for operating support. One mechanism were particularly interested in is a Community Benefits district. This is a district where individual Property Owners vote to tax themselves on their Property Value in exchange for specific Community Benefits programs which could include a expansion of the Transit Service. It is one of the easier taxes to talk about administratively that doesnt have to be tied to a major election. Were not going to be having a major election for a while after november 2020. Another thing that has been talked about as well is changes to the ridehailing tax. Voters approved last november which is bringing in a fair amount of money, but not a lot given our needs. There are different ways of taxes ride hail. This is a fee on using ride hail. So it doesnt tax the way in which ride hail operators drive around empty, which is a significant portion of their time. Another really, really important revenue measure that is currently under study and is arguably, if it is done appropriately, the most equitable and Sustainable Way of closing our revenue gap, is congestion pricing. This is similar to what milan and london and singapore and stockholm have done, which is to say that for every commodity in our society, we use price to balance supply and demand. In mobility we use time to balance supply and demand. So congestion is simply what happens when the demand for mobility equals the supply. And rather than using price to balance supply and demand, we asked people to queue and this reduces the amount of people our Transportation System can serve. It is a huge problem. In 2013, the San Francisco transportation authority, which is our sister authority, did a downtown congestion study that looked at how much revenue could be raised by charging a fee to drive in and out of downtown San Francisco during the peak time. It was focused on revenue and it resulted in many concerns by people who said that this is just a way of taxing the poor in order to allow rich people to drive more easily downtown. That was not implemented. This time around were asking a different question, which is how can we use systematic mobility pricing in order to advance mobility and to allow our streets to move more people. What if we looked more holistically about this pricing and looked at it as rent. I charge 3 on the bus, but its free to drive down the boulevard to get downtown if your office gives you free parking. Why am i charging someone to use our roadways efficiently and making it free for the most inefficient use of our mobility space . Similarly, for example, for a shift worker who works in a restaurant downtown who starts their shift at 5 00 p. M. And has to drive downtown at 5 00 p. M. Because when they get off work at 2 30 in the morning theres no Transit Service. Its cheaper for me to subsidize their drive trip or uber or lyft trip than to invest in better Transit Service at 2 30 in the morning. How can we think about advancing the he could by basically stealing from the rich and giving it to the poor, rather than stealing from everyone to advance the poor. These are complicated questions and i would encourage all of you to follow the sfmta downtown congestion study and get involved in that, particularly as Economic Conditions are changing, to make sure as we think about mobility pricing that were using it in a way that advances equity and makes it easier for everyone to move around San Francisco and that values peoples time, including lowincome people who have the greatest time burdens. Lowincome people are more likely to work multiple and shift jobs. Im not fired when im late for a meeting. Shift workers are fired if theyre 10 minutes late too often for their jobs. This is a way longer answer than you wanted, but its a question thats super important to me. We are at time, but i wanted to wrap up. I went over time. These are important topics, but i wanted to thank everyone for joining us and appreciate the time that you were taking to write and to engage with us. These are important questions so were grateful for everyones engagement. Do you want to offer any Closing Remarks . The engagement that were doing is substantive. Weve got thousands of emails, comment cards, letters, all kind of contributions. I want you to know that we take these comments seriously. Our staff have read every single one of those comments, and i have read most of them themselves, including all of the comments i get on the twitter feed, which is hundreds and hundreds. Im sorry i dont respond personally. Again, i want to emphasize that there is no greater statement of an agencys values than our budget, and thats why were trying to build values into this budget, while being aware that we are in very, very economic times, our balance must balance, and we have deal with tradeoffs, these tradeoffs of fares versus service. We have hard choices to make as i know all of you do. I wish you all the best in these difficult times and that you stay safe and your family stays safe. Thank you so much for listening. [ ] speaking are requested but not required to state their names. Completion of a speaker card will help ensure proper spelling of the speakers names in the written record of the of the meet. Place speaker cards to the right of the lectern. There is a speaker st. pete at the front table. S. F. Gov tv, please show the office of Small Business slide. 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