[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