the board of directors and parking authority commission. good afternoon directors, staff and members of the public. we thank you for joining us. this meeting is being held in hybrid format, occurring in person at city hall, room 400 broadcast live on sf govtv and by phone the phone number to use today is (415) 655-0001 access. code 26611010021. when the item is called dial star three to enter the queue, commenters will have up to two minutes to provide comment unless otherwise noted by the chair. a time limit of ten minutes of remote public comment on each action or discussion item has been set and notice for this meeting. please speak clearly and sure. you're in a quiet location and turn off any tvs or computers around you. we thank you for your cooperation and places you on item two. roll call director hemminger. here are present director henderson here henderson present director hinsey present hinsey present. director so here. so present.

director. kahina here kahina present chair. ekin here. ekin present. for the record, i note that director hinsey is attending this meeting remotely. director hinsey is reminded that she must appear on camera throughout the meeting and in order to speak or vote on any items places you on. item number three the ringing use of cell phones and similar sound producing electronic devices are prohibited at this meeting. the chair may order the removal from the meeting room of any person responsible for the ringing or use of a cell phone or other similar sound producing electronic device places you on. item number four approval of minutes for the november 21st regular meeting. thank you directors. are there any changes to the november 20th one minutes? yes seeing none, we'll open public comment for anyone in the room on the november 20th one minutes. seeing none, please open a remote at this time. we'll move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue. each speaker will have two minutes. no speakers as well as public comment. please

call the roll or is there a motion? so moved move approval. thank you. please call the roll on the motion to approve the minutes. director hemminger hemminger. director henderson henderson. director. hinsey i director. so i. so i director kahina kahina i chair egan. i ekin. i thank you. the minutes are approved. places you on item number five communications. i have none. uh, moving on. item number six introduction of new or unfinished business by board members. colleagues is there any new or unfinished business today ? director henderson, please. hi good evening. or good? what is it? afternoon, colleagues and everybody. i just wanted to report out that i had the great opportunity to attend the conference of minority transit officials annual gala of northern california annual gala. this weekend. it was a really great time. i was able to meet a number of transportation

officials and other industry partners, and i also was super excited to be able to present the curtis green award to the scholarship recipient, adriana reyes. she's a student at san jose state studying civil engineering. she already has a job, which i was really impressed by and she's graduating in in in a couple of months. and so i really appreciate kim walton and the rest of the sf mta team that was there and, you know, sort of hosted me and made sure that i got to the places i needed to be. and i was really excited to just be introduced to a new industry group that has so many young up and coming professionals. there was a lot of just, you know, really intellectual power in the room. and i'm super excited to work with them and to hopefully attend events with them in the future. so i just wanted to share with you my, my fun trip on friday night and hope that you all will be able to support

some of the other events and initiatives that the that the northern california chapter has going forward. thank you, chair. thank you. and thank you for representing us. any other speakers on new or unfinished? all. right. well, i'll just let my colleagues know on the board that last tuesday we had the inaugural meeting of the vision zero subcommittee. i want to thank directors heminger and hensey for their service on that subcommittee. it was a three hour meeting at one south venice. the purpose of the meeting was really to get everyone on the same page with respect to the challenges we face, some of the constraints we face and then create a space that was really about solutions and treating city workers with respect and everyone coming together and trying to problem solve together. and i personally thought it was a really, really productive meeting. grateful to director tomlin for being there for the entire time. city engineer ricardo olalia vision zero staff livable street staff that it was a really, really

productive meeting and i was grateful to the members of the public who showed up with solutions with a solutions orientation and attempted to really understand the challenges that we face. i don't know if director hemminger or hensey want to say anything else about that, but i'm pleased we were able to create that problem solving space. okay, if nothing further, we can open up public comment for anyone in the room on the new or unfinished business items of board members. general public comment. no this is on the new or unfinished business items. the board members just spoke about that will be item nine general public comment and a few items. seeing no one else in the room, we can open a remote, please. at this time we'll move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue. each speaker will have two minutes. no speakers. okay. close public comment.

please call the next item places you on. item number seven the director's report. tomlin thank you. we're going to spend the bulk of the director's report honoring two amazing crews and let me bring up director of transit julie kirschbaum to announce our recognize rick those who are being recognized. yeah, you learned it need we need to have that word right you heard it here first. um i am under believably happy and also so unbelievably sad to be up here recognizing young louis guzzo who is our chief mechanical officer here. louis is responsible for all of the personnel that work on our fleet busses, trains, historics, cable car. um. he is beloved by

everyone, but he is especially beloved by me and. and i wanted to make sure that you all who have been kind of quiet champions of louis had a chance to really mark his departure because so much of what the vehicle maintenance teams are doing is about what we want the whole agency to be doing, to really be in bracing collaboration and creativity, preventative maintenance and calculated risk taking. so i, i wanted to just share with you a few of the highlights of, of louis tremendous career. he started at sfmta 22 years ago. he was an electrical mechanic at green division prior to that, he had worked in an auto

dealership. right. so so he, he really started at the very beginning of this industry and now has has risen to this tremendous position. when he became assistant supervisor of the graveyard at presidio yard in 2008 and a maintenance superintendent of our biggest bus division, woods, in 2013, when and then has been holding both ak ing and permanent management roles since then. um, culminating. in 2022 when he was appointed to his current position. louis is a champion of his staff. there are very few people in this agency that are so, so deeply trusted and respected by the people who work for them. and i think it's because louis, while he is fully

steeped in in deep into the administrative functions of his role, he he still reads like a mechanic to the people that he that work for him. he walks the floor. he knows knows the people that work for him. and he he let's he creates an environment where they can solve the problem . he's not trying to solve the problems. he's trying to create an environment of problem solving which which i am so grateful for. he's been instrumental in transforming our bus fleet from the oldest and probably most unreliable in the country to really be a showcase, transformative state of good repair for investment. and that will be very important at the end of your day when you hear about some of our state of good repair needs. the bus program really is the model that we're

trying to get all of our infrastructure programs to. he also so just as a partner for me, he's just been incredibly be generous. stepping into the maintenance role of this work was i think, the biggest stretch for me professionally. when i started in 2018 and louis was a tremendous partner because because he he was always able to break down key issues in a way that i could understand them, but almost never dumbs things down or talks down to me. and the way he communicates about me to his staff creates respect and

trust, which i couldn't do this job without. so with that, i want to honor louis, give him this award. and give him an opportunity to address you. thank you. thank you, julie. thank you, julie. jeff directors , i'd like to thank you for this. acknowledge moment. it's been a great career. i'd also like to thank the staff that i support and oversee me because without their dedication to the agency and to their duties, i wouldn't be as successful as i am. so i really appreciate all my staff and again, thank you. that's all i got. thank you.

thank you. um, are our next appreciation is less bittersweet because it's really celebrating an army of staff. really that contributed to making apex such a success. i am. i'm so excited that the agency really shines. and during that we supported the city in this tremendous undertaking that brought national and international attention and i think will have a lot of really

positive of reverberations in terms of tourism and economic recovery. we are also incredibly grateful that it is over because it was such a complex event and there was truly no part of the agency that didn't contribute what we planned for months with the city family and the secret service to anticipate not just the planned activities, but so many of the protests and civil engagement movement that was unpredictable. and we needed to be able to react to spearheading our work is tony henderson, who i'd like to introduce. he is going to talk you through just all of the different parts of the agency that really needed to come together to do our work. but i want to in particular

express my gratitude to tony, who when tom and i were sort of realizing that this was such a complicated endeavor that it couldn't just be in one area. we needed someone who could track all of the issues and really bring people together who was an excellent communicator and really, he came from a place first and foremost of safety. tony was the first person that came to mind and his work by his regular day job is to work on our safety implementation and to really bridge the transit and streets team. so he was a perfect person to carry on this work. so with that gratitude, i'm going to call up tony to talk you through everything that we accomplished. thank you,

julie, and thank you directors for this really ignition as i speak, a slide show will be running in the background highlighting some of the great work our colleagues did throughout apec. apec was a massive team effort involving the coordination of countless people throughout the agency starting with those developing the plans to everyone who implemented those plans leading up to and through apec. this took hundreds, if not thousands of our colleagues working together to make it all possible . i want to give a specific pacific shout out to five people who worked closely with me every step of the way, acting as subject matter experts in their areas and collaborating with our city state and federal partners to make apec as successful as it was. leslie bienenfeld oversaw a small but mighty special events team who made sure that transit was able to run smoothly during

apec, which included making several reroute plans as situations evolved quickly throughout the week. sean mccormack and scott edwards lead our parking enforcement and traffic team who worked on massive changes to enforcement and parking and just general traffic management throughout the city, especially in the selma knob hill and embarcadero areas, and were integral to the coordination with the secret service. jarrett hornbostel is on our transportation engineering group and he dove into the nitty gritty of all of the traffic requests, the fencing, to make sure that traffic could flow around the city and we could handle all the impacts of the security zones while also at the same time finding a solution to every random last minute request that the department of state or secret service could think of. that was needed to support the event. and nehama rogozin oversaw communications and public outreach for the sfmta to

make sure that residents knew what to expect and worked closely with city partners and the secret service to minimize the effects on residents and businesses wherever possible. noma served as a strong advocate for making sure that residents were well informed and information was readily available to everyone as we were experiencing massive changes on our streets. these are just some of the hundreds of staff who were involved with apec, some of the staff started working months ahead of time, coordinating with different city agencies, the state department and the secret service. in addition to planning for the event itself, the team completed exercises to prepare for the unpredictable demonstrations as weather security issues. anything else that could come up? this was we knew this was going to be a very dynamic situation. during the event, they also served in operations centers throughout

the city. this include the emergency operations center, the joint information center, the transportation coordinating center, the multi-agency coordination center, all coordinating with our internal operations centers. it quickly became an alphabet soup of acronyms and agencies and coordination centers. some of these teams included communications, special events, special operations, transit planning, transit operations, technology facilities, street division shops, security maintenance of way transit maintenance, taxi access and mobility services. as these teams did advance work like process permits, developed reroutes and continued nc plans completed quick build projects in the area, refreshed transit stops and stations as uploaded, new schedule information to provide transit predictions and accurate digital information to our customers ensured paratransit access to secured

site was available to all and addressed other challenges. challenging accessibility issues for seniors and persons with disabilities. complete infrastructure preparation like shutting down overhead wires in event areas and sealing utility covers was requested by the secret service installed thousands of temporary signs. to give a sense of scale of this work, it was over 3000 temporary transit wayfind and parking signs that were posted, then reposted throughout and i wouldn't be surprised if that's an undercount. it was a massive effort focused on vehicle and facility cleaning in advance of welcoming thousands of visitors and informed the public about how to prepare for apec and the transportation changes with special outreach to the areas with the most direct impacts knob hill, soma and the chinatown communities. and this was on top of outreach just to

the entire city and regional community as well throughout thousands of frontline staff then worked hard to implement these plans and keep san francisco moving during apec transit operators, inspectors, dispatchers, station agents, fare inspectors, mta and the tmc help people move throughout the city and implemented reroutes as needed. many of these folks served as the face of the agency for visitors and residents during apec parking control officers not only helped manage traffic around the closure areas, but they also supported motorcade movements. some of them voluntarily working 16 hour shifts to make apex successful as additionally hundreds of staff from non operational roles served during apec as ambassadors to guide both residents and visitors through the event areas in events like this are inherently disruptive and unpredictable. the sfmta staff were flexible and professional as they worked

through bad weather equipment, set up breakdown and demonstrations as i would now like to take a moment and recognize a key group of people who came together to make apec possible, many of whom are in the audience today, advance to the last one, which is going to be the one a little bit quicker than the slide show here. so to keep the meeting moving, i ask that people who are present, please stand as i call your name . we have certificates for all of you that will be delivered to your work locations. so the list is up on the screen and i'll start off going through it. let's see. bienenfeld. nick chapman, jasmine charles. scott edwards. brian hausmann. lenora haynes and myself on the list. jarrett hornbostel, lupita ibarra, lisa icing. jonathan kibrick, helen kwan. scarlett lam, michael macario. mariana

mcguire. rob maloney. kate mccarthy. sean mccormick. aaron mcmillan. norma rogozin. david rosales. greg rude and chris spain. and hundreds more with so many people who helped make apec successful impossible, it is hard to truly recognize everyone . and this is just a representative list of the entire team that worked so hard to make this possible. thank you . thank you. thank you. on behalf of the board, i want to just thank mr. guzzo for your service and congratulations on your remarkable impacts. also, thank the full team working on apec. i also wanted to do a very brief shout out to enrique aguilar, who put together that great video show that captured so many of the different types of staff contributions. if anybody hasn't seen it, i encourage you to take a look. i

think that told the story really nicely of the full team effort that apec involved. so thank you all again. and thank you, julie and jeff for the making these moments for recognition of staff . all right. thank you so much. before we move on to the next director's report items, i do want to comment on both of these teams because we've been talking a lot about culture change within the agency over the last year. and these are two teams that exemplify some of the most successful efforts. i give so much credit to louis guzzo in terms of changing the performance and attitudes of our entire maintenance team. last month, his team hosted a luncheon out at the giant woods garage. they cleared out all the busses and hundreds of people from every maintenance division in the agency came together. there was some speechifying and i've never seen so many big guys cry than talking about the ways

in which louis changed the culture over at the maintenance divisions, both emphasizing the fact that all of our maintenance crews are directly in service of the public. as you know, muni is more reliable than it has been in 30 years, and part of that has to do with the work that our maintenance crews do to make sure that our busses keep running every single day and are kept in as best as possible condition one and part of that requires making sure that we take advantage of the talent of our entire workforce, that every everyone in our workforce feels respected, that they have career paths, that they feel like they're supported by their teams. so, louis, thank you. and we're glad that you're leaving a very strong team of leadership behind you to continue in that tradition. and i also want to thank the apec team. i think tony and julie said plenty. but one of the things that i observed, having spent i took a lot of my meetings during apec out in the field so that i could

watch what was going on and in addition to all the extraordinary prep work and all of the every single team within the organization coming together to work collaboratively, the other thing that amazed me was the amount of fema decisions that were made there was no way, as we were trying to manage the city in real time with dozens of first amendment activities with motorcades, not happening on schedule or happening in a different corridor every everyone there from the parking control officers to the transit inspectors to all of our volunteer ambassadors was everyone on the team were responding to each other and working collaboratively to make last minute field decisions because that was what was necessary and because it meant making a better decision. so i'm really, really proud of all of this work, and i think it exemplifies what the agency is capable of doing, given the right support. all right. moving

on to the rest of the director's report, i've just got two items. one is the federal transit administration triennial review. the sfmta gets money from many, many different sources. and that makes us the most audited entity in all of city government. everyone looks through our books to make sure that we are spending money as wisely as we possibly can. the biggest federal, biggest audit that we get is the triennial review conducted by the federal transit administration. as you might imagine, every three years it examines is all of our work comprehensively across 20 practice areas to ensure that when federal government gives us money, that we are spending that well. and according to voluminous fta rules and regulations and i'm really proud to say that out of the 21 practice areas reviewed, we were determined to have only one deficiency. and this is almost

an unpressed dented result nationally. given our size and complexity and also given everything that we've been through over the last four years. the. the ten month review process involved close to 100 staff throughout the agency who were being transparent, showing all of our files and not only did we get five stars in 20 of the different categories, but we were also cited as a national best practice, and that includes in really, really critical areas, including title six, equal employment opportunity, disadvantaged business enterprises, americans with disabilities act, transit maintenance, drug and alcohol programs and procurement and safety. these are some of the hardest areas to get really good scores on, and it's really a tribute to folks throughout the agency as well as the hard work of kathleen saecularis, who leads our regulatory affairs

team who is here today. so i wanted to state that. and then finally, we it is mid december now. and so it is time to announce our usual 24th consecutive year of free muni rides on new year's eve. so starting at 8 p.m. on saturday, december 31st and running through 5 a.m. on sunday, january first, muni will be free to everyone because it is the safest way to come and have fun in san francisco. celebrate the end of 2023 and what we can still maybe maintain some hope for in a better or at least less worse. 2024 of course, this is a core part of our efforts to reduce traffic fatalities in san francisco. so we do to encourage everyone to come celebrate in san francisco. it will be a

great time and a reminder, you do not need to tap your clipper card. just get on muni from 8 p.m. on new year's eve to 5 a.m. new year's day. and that is my report. great. thank you. directors, are there any clarifying questions on items covered by director tomlin? director hemminger, please. thank you, madam chair. jeff, i wanted to go back to apec and ask about what i think was one of the strategies i wasn't following it as closely, obviously, as you and others were. did we close a lane on the bay bridge at any point? so the california highway patrol closed one lane in each direction on the bay bridge as for, you know, anything potential that might happen, what's what's that mean? that was that was that was a secret service at work. so it wasn't like a congestion management strategy or anything like that. it was just, you

know, they needed the room. it did have the impact of dramatically reducing congestion in san francisco. so as a result, because no one could get there. right, exactly. i see. well look, that's the predicate for my real question. but given the answer, i'll leave it at that. thank you. thank you. any other directors have questions? okay seeing none, can we please go to public comment for anyone in the room on items covered during the director's report. hello. good afternoon. hi. my viloria organizer near tenderloin and co-chair, tenderloin traffic safety task force. i'm glad that you guys are talking about apec because i do want to show my appreciation to mta, at least from my own personal experience, since everything seemed to have run smoothly. taking part in those demonstrations and mta personnel were the most pation and didn't give us a lot of hard time. so props to mta for doing that. again, another indication if we

have an mta that's fully funded that we can run the city pretty well. but that doesn't also mean that we won't hold you accountable. that's why we're here right now. um, the only other thing is, is i think the information of like the transit when it's going to end or where people can get their stops, especially in soma, that wasn't a lot of our folks in the neighborhood, especially seniors, didn't get that information in time. i do understand that, you know, based on secret service. but at least when i have expressed online on social media about the updates on it, whoever was running the social media thing, props to that person because they did provide it that same night. even after others shamed them or gave him a hard time. but anyways, i just want to say i appreciate that. i think again, we have a fully funded mta, we have a good mta. thank you. thank you for your comment. any other speakers in the room for the director's report? okay. seeing none, please go to remote at this

time. we'll move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue each speaker will have two minutes. moderator first speaker, i. hi, this is stacy randecker and in response to what director hemminger noted , i think that it shows that we should have a bay bridge, bus, rapid transit and a bay bridge bike lane put on the bay bridge, not hanging off the edge of it, not some enormous capital expenditure, but we should have those things coming into our city instead of all the cars on the our streets cannot handle its geometry. we cannot handle all the cars coming into our city. the other thing is actually the previous there was

a vision zero subcommittee meeting that was open to the public, which i'm so glad it was , but it wasn't noticed at all. i i am on the vision zero task force. i have or subcommittee or whatever it is that the public is invited to. i have been going to meetings for nearly four years. they have a mailing list of people that go to these meetings. i'm sure everyone in that room would have liked to have known about this meeting. in addition, i been to practically every sfmta board meeting for months and it was never mentioned that the meeting was happening, that it was going forward. i'm so glad you're doing it, but could you not somehow put it together with the vision zero work that is already going on with the public? it's very upsetting. yeah. i hope to see the recording, hopefully that will be made public. thank

you. thank you. next speaker. good afternoon. this is barry toronto. i want to say that the vision zero meeting was productive and it was enlightening and it was very good to hear from these experts. and the meeting was very well noticed on the website that it was on the calendar and the links to participate were clear. however, regarding apec, what was not clear was the communication between the committee overseeing the opec operations and the taxi mobility and access division. i the taxi drivers were the last to find out or didn't find out about a lot of the changes that went on in traffic patterns and access to certain streets. they blocked us from transit lanes in the union square area and particularly at night. and they didn't keep taxi stands clear.

he cab stands clear. they let private vehicles park in the cab stands and didn't do anything to either site or tow them. so there was a lot of harm done to the taxi industry and access to paratransit as well. so i want to let you know that that not everybody was satisfied or was given proper communication about what was going on. in fact, some staff again reiterating some the staff of the of the taxi access and mobility division were not given all the information in in proper timing to share with the taxi industry. however the articles that you did share from your communication, your communication department were very well done and very well written and informative. but but a lot. but not all that information was useful to the taxi industry. thank you very much for your time. ability to comment on this. thank you. next

speaker. good afternoon. board members. my name is courtney wilson. i'm the director of policy at larkin street. i was calling in today to strongly urge the board to delay the parking restrictions on winston drive and buckingham way. many of our families that are living in those rvs, they're working families with children. the parking restrictions are slated to begin on december 15th, which is right before the holidays. this would be very disruptive and destabilize housing for these families. and a delay will allow sfmta and more time to establish a safe parking site and permanent housing so that our families living in those vehicles have a safer place to go. there with the restrictions. if they have their rvs towed, they are facing up to fines around on average, $600. this is

extremely destabilizing and these are poverty toes. they would not easily be able to access those funds to get their rvs out of the tow yard. so thank you again for your consideration and happy holidays. thank you. and just to clarify for everyone, we're still in the director's report. so items that were covered during director tomlin's report were not yet on general public comment. so we heard that last comment. but let's try to keep these remote comments to items covered under director tom's report. please thank you. next speaker. are no more speakers. okay, we'll close public comment, please call the next item places you on. item number eight, the citizens advisory council report. we don't have any report places you on item nine, general public comment. members of the public may address the sfmta board of directors on matters that are within the board's jurisdiction,

own and are not on today's calendar. we did receive several requests for language services today for spanish, brazilian, portuguese and cantonese. a late request for cantonese. we will take comments in groups for this item. we will begin with spanish and then go to portuguese. and then we may need to go also to cantonese via language line for spanish. can i please have the spanish interpreter come up and make an announcement to request any spanish services members of the public? go ahead. yes si. alguien necesita interpretation in espanol inglés aqui estoy para servir los habla espanol primero. yo estoy aqui. so he's saying don't be ashamed, don't be embarrassed. if you're worried or have embarrassment. don't worry. okay sure. okay

thank. you. know i just want to thank the board for all their efforts and in their heart of hearts, we know that a lot of you guys have san francisco's best interests at heart. i myself was born in san francisco , so i have a bumper sticker that says native san franciscan. so i know at the end of the day, we all want what's best for san francisco. so i know that i'm here specifically to address the bike lane on valencia street. and i know that the initial intent was to try and make it a better situation. but what happened is the circumstances being that valencia corridor happens to have the largest concentration of independent business people. it doesn't necessarily work well with the way it's drawn out. you know, a city, if you don't mind. the parallel is vibrancy is determined, much like a circulatory system in your body. so if you have blood flowing through your body freely, you're going to be fine. but if something starts to clog up all of a sudden for you, you know it. you could drop dead of a heart attack just like that. well, guess what? the mission bike lane has created a scenario much like that where it's impeded the flow of vibrancy, traffic and people coming to our

area and the mission we pride ourselves in being open and receptive. that's why, you know, during some of the gentrification, most recently with the high tech sector, they came to the mission because we're very open and friendly and warm people. we love having people, we love visitors, we love to just have the company. and that's what makes the mission so unique. and that's why it's such a unique district. and that's why i hate to see what's happening to it. and it's not by design or not by mal intent, you know, and i know that, you know, i'm here in my heart of hearts what i'd like to see. i know this pilot program at valencia street is supposed to run until august, but honestly, it's not sustainable in any way, shape or form, particularly for the small and local merchants, which happens to comprise a lot of us. i myself have been there since 1967, so i've seen a lot in san francisco during the summer of love. i've seen san francisco during the occupation of alcatraz. you know, if you want some real heavy situations. that was it during the filming of dirty harry, we remember some of the streets being blocked off. point is, we love san francisco. we want to see what's best for san francisco. i myself have participated in 3 or 4 california tourism board ads for

san francisco and have been on a number of foreign programs for san francisco, german television, al jazeera television. and so i really love san francisco and i want, you know, again, that is your time. thank you so much. if you could just reconsider and maybe eliminate the next speaker, please. thank you. thank you very much. and thank you for your time. thank you. next speaker, please otra persona necesita interpretation in espanol. okay. después de cuatro con rodrigo lopez. my name is rodrigo lopez. yo soy en las personas. viven una es facil para nosotros. i'm a person that lives at a street end and it's not easy for us. dew point winston e cada dia es un dia pasado. i live on winston. every day is a very heavy day. para nosotros sido una gran problema nos tenemos camaraderie. it's

been a big problem for us since we were told we had to move from there. no in la ciudad del estado pasando demasiadas cosas it's not only that, but lots of things have been happening in the city. desafortunadamente los tenemos menos los somos mas los pobres vulnerables. and so unfortunately the people that have like us less educate ation were the most unfortunate vulnerables. es un poquito mas tiempo. the only thing i'm asking is please give us a little bit more time. there is no ofrecer un ayuda if not, can you offer us some help? vamos nada ni exigimos nada simplemente demanding anything or or demanding anything. the only thing we're asking is un lugar, donde nosotros, podemos, decir vivimos a place where we can say that we live at consideran una prolongacion.

we're asking you to take into consider nation prolonging time. more time ya. realmente es la transit because that place is the only place where there is transit movement. muni en la esta es el muni algunos otros carros pero no es una muy transit nada. it's a street that's not very with a lot of traffic. the only thing that's trafficking through there is muni. very few movement car movement. th. gracias. that's i. thank you. otra persona. like the boss again. okay okay. i'm a nervous. go ahead. vasily buenas tardes. mi nombre. leonor de leon perdon soy un poco

nervioso. good afternoon. my name is leonor de leon. excuse me. i'm a real nervous winston. vivo en una tengo dos ninas. i live on winston and i have two daughters. una una says one is ten years old and the other one is six years old. know de diciembre. they're telling us that they're going to move us on the 19th of december. estoy aqui ahora para por mi por todos. me vecinos i'm here advocating for me and all of my neighbors. porque de siempre bueno de siempre es una tenemos mucho especiales y justamente cuando a mover because in december that's when we have lots of festive days and that's just the time that they're going to be moving us. yes es muy triste vivir en la calle con hijos me esposo it really sad to have to live in the street with my neighbors and my husband and my family. como para ahora me seja de navidad

nos sabemos donde vamos a estar? you know what the illusion of christmas for my children. you know what? i don't know where we're going to be going. estamos pidiendo mas tiempo. we're begging for more time. seguro para poder vivir en nuestra familia and a safe place where i can live with my family. si pudieran darnos mas tiempo un lugar donde vivir mucho mejor. listen, it would be way better if you could give us a better place to live or a place to live if you have to move us, that would be way better. gracias thank you. if we could please limit any disrupt sessions, that would be helpful. thank you. next speaker. aqui estoy si

después necesitan. i just said i'm here if you need me later. thank you. if we could now, then move to our brazilian portuguese interpreter. could you please announce as well? thank you again. algun pedido falando portuguese interpreter de portuguese. por exemplo. o le boa tarde. good afternoon, leandro. my name is leandro motorhome winston. i live in motorhome and winston winston. we winston with. bergman. i think your voice is, you know, i forgot the name of the street. i see. vivemos ali or have you

been there for about a year and a few months? yeah seguros pela facilidade de locomotion. if there we feel secure. because also there's this ability to move back and forth. de otra vez, as i said the last time we live, we live in early in the morning and we come back in the night as familia lado. i suppose the families is separate because the wife goes to one side and the husband goes to another side . venmo aqui i came here dos companeros in the name of the friends who live in that same place, you know dementia ajuda humbly ask you for your help. if implement in in for not for them to kick us out of their plakas

placing signs and giving fines and fines. this is very humiliating for us. so much pessoas the saints. we are decent people, hard workers in apartments. we like to live in apartment in in a house. but we're there because we have no other condition. that's useful movement that's humbly ask you for your help. your so i appreciate your attention. okay okay. miss. daisy any daisy? any. my name is daisy den. i have a two daughters. two years old. and

six. for a year and a half. i have been living there. conditions we have no conditions to pay for an apartment. no apartment. we had. we would be in an apartment. a trabalhando mio esposo, the only one working. my husband is not as well. preciso de ajuda. sometime i need help as is legal meu filho tenho conditions as vezes de comprar somebody give me the diapers for my kids because i'm not. i have no conditions to buy pra gente. no, just to live in the place. we have no place to go with my kids. they have no place to go. muita coisa aqui. i don't know any place. and also afraid for my kids. so that's

it. thank you. thank you. okay, miss. okay thank you. thank you. we did also receive a late request for cantonese translation. do we have any members of the public that might need that service as okay, moving on. i do have a stack of speaker cards. i may have some of these speakers may have already gone, so you can pass through that. but i do have flow . kelly chris, gotcha. iliad, etoile. nick dueled. one question. secretary silva is the cantonese translator here. it is done through a language line. we were unable to get an interpreter since it was a bit late in the request. okay. could we have the person make the request? if anyone needs translation support in cantonese

? yes. i can arrange for that. thank you. hello. is it 1 minute or 2 minutes? can i start? hello. hello, directors. chris cash here. thank you for hearing my comment. i wanted to speak in favor of more infrastructure for people traveling outside of a car. recently we've been talking about the valencia bike lane and some folks arguing that it's bad for business. but i just want to point out that i think this bike lane makes it harder for bikers to reach businesses. so anything we learn from it should be an example of what it means when we reduce access of bikers to business. in fact, i live in nopa and i bike to work in east michigan every day, and when i started biking to work, one thing that i didn't expect was how much dramatically more i began enjoying and supporting the local business years back when i drove to work, i would go straight home every day after work to that parking spot. but when i bike to work, oh, the driving. it felt like i was

teleporting through the city. but when i bike to work, it feels like i'm moving through the city and experiencing every day and absolutely every time i see a tasty pastry or a cool pair of jeans, i pull over to enjoy those and support those all the time. i think we everyone, we might all agree that sf is at capacity for cars and as we add more housing, we need to encourage people to travel outside of cars. the only way to do that is to make it safe, comfortable and convenient. and especially safety should not be negotiable. each person who travels outside of a car makes the city safer, quieter, greener, more social, and more productive. they also reduce carbon congestion and save parking spots for people who need to drive. we should roll out a red carpet for these people, otherwise everyone will drive and nobody can park. good active infrastructure also gives independent and dignity to disabled folks and senior citizens who can use their mobility, who can use good mobility lanes with electric wheelchairs and mobility scooters. it has the same benefit for people who can't afford a car or are too young

for a license. so thank you for the work you've been doing over the past few years with active transit, and i just wanted to encourage you to keep going in that direction. thank you. thank you. i'll call the next speaker. i know. putting us to shame on the christmas sweater game. hello. i'm flo kelly from the coalition on homelessness and the stop poverty toes coalition as well. we are asking that you please delay implementation of that four hour restriction on winston. and i hope that the signage doesn't go up until the enforcement is really going to start because that would be confusing for the people who park there and very confusing for the parking control officers . man homelessness is really a

visible manifestation of a society that is lacking in justice. i'm going to say that again. homelessness is a visible manifesto ation of a society that is lacking in justice, as i wasn't planning to talk about apec, but i was reminded at this meeting, okay, during apec, san francisco worked really hard to make sure that our homelessness was not so visible, but our unhoused neighbors were still here during apec and are still here now. people who live in their vehicles, cars are often just one step away from living on the sidewalk like sfmta has the ability to do something about the issue of the folks who are on winston and other folks who are never quite sure if

there's going to be more parking restrictions where they are parked right now. so thank you for listening. thanks for your comment. thank you. chair egan, we do have the cantonese translator on the phone. okay. we're going to put them on speaker. yeah. oh great. great. if i could please have our cantonese interpreter to announce for any members of the public that need or requesting cantonese translation if they could please come to the podium and provide their comment. i'm going to. go. to a higher thank you. okay seeing none, we will continue with public comment.

i'll read a few words, a few more names. thank you. edward dora. sean, kim von mario smith. gould. muse. hello, board and thank you for your time. i'm mario smith. i'm with the poverty coalition and coalition on homelessness. i'm here to give to make the voice of those living on winston that much more louder as we're coming up on christmas time. or we come from different creeds and backgrounds, but we're coming up on the holiday times. please do. don't make these people homeless or please don't evict these people for the upcoming holidays or any time in the near future. i know right now people are working on a better spot for them to go and live, so please

can we give that a bit more time before we start moving them out? i'm simply here to make that voice much more louder. thank you guys for your time and take care for your comment. next speaker. good afternoon. this is sean kim from richmond district. thank you for service. i'm come here. two things. first of all, i want to support the valencia merchant. their suffering from santa running bike lane and then they lose over 40 to 50. their revenues, they cannot survive. and then this is really hard time winter and then we just come out of the pandemic. so if some the business and neighbors suffering from the transportation, then maybe this is a time to reconsider or support them. the second thing is, gary bit, you know, you

know, we from i thank you for the project team mta they did a really good job to form the working group, but any ideas and then we are available 25 k while mta hire a consulting company for 75 k so we got support consulting company who get paid 75 k but we have only the 25 k available so we feel like it's not fair and then it's not big enough. it's really small amount of money. and then my business already experiencing revenue drop from the bill. so without help we suffering. same thing went over time. i can explain a lot of business. maybe hard time, maybe some of them close. so we cannot contribute tax to funding through the prop to transportation. so i orderly request increase the marketing fund. that's the way help the

businesses and then to help the transportation. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. greetings board members. my name is gulamhusein with episcopal community services. i'm returning back with the anti-poverty coalition urging you to alleviate the hardship faced by the community on winston drive by postponing the implementation of parking restrictions until we secure a safe site for this community. as is echoed by my colleagues and residents. displacing families should never be a should never be considered as a viable option. let compassion and understanding guide your decision and safeguarding the well-being of our community members. thank you. thank you. did you read any more names? secretary silva? yes javier bremond. sheba bandeira. mark rennie. eliana binder. ian james .

good afternoon. board members. my name is javier berman and i'm with the coalition on homelessness and the stop poverty coalition. i, like many people who are here today, am urging the sfmta to consider the delay of the parking restrictions on winston. as you know, it's been multiple meetings that we've had the families and the folks who live out on winston in the rvs come out and you know, really pour their soul into the story and, you know, kind of lay bare what the situation is. so i just want to thank them for being consistent and like really advocating for themselves and trying to avert this crisis that we're about two weeks away from from hitting. so you know, it's going to get cold. it's going to get rainy. the holidays are coming up. it's the new year. and so the last thing that we

want to do to anybody in this city, but especially especially with the situation like the folks on winston are experiencing, if it's actually avoidable, well, then we should be doing everything we can as a city to make sure that folks can enjoy the holidays and beyond that, live a dignified life. and so i really urge the delay of these parking restrictions on winston until we get a safe parking site. and, you know, hopefully get everybody housed in that community. so thank you very much. have a good afternoon . thank you. next speaker, please. hello, directors. my name is sheba bendib. i'm a policy associate at glide and a member of the end poverty coalition. an i'm here in strong support of the families living on winston. i'm sorry, living in rvs on winston drive to urge you all to

consider the possibility of a delay in enforcement if inflammation implementation still moves forward. i did want to start by thanking the chair and the vice chair for meeting with our coalition, along with leadership, to discuss ways that we can all partner together to make sure that these families are fully supported. a delay, a delay in implementation will not only provide agency with the time that they need to locate and contract a safe parking site, but it is also an opportunity for them to continue moving families into housing that meets their needs during outreach last night we came across a mother with three children, all living in an rv with no power, no light. they left their door open so that they could get some light from their street lamp outside their rv. they deserve the city's collaborative support, not their neglect. a reminder that over the years, sfmta has been working to make transit equity and justice issues at the forefront of your work. yet

these parking restrictions to be undercutting that goal. we hear from you all and the city leadership that your goal with public safety efforts is not to displace weakly housed individuals and families. so i'm asking you all if that commitment still stands with these parking restrictions won't only impact the livelihood of this already vulnerable community, but also other bipoc low income communities, including some sf state students who reside in this area who cannot afford the fines and fees and the toes of their vehicles as community advocates, we're asking for more time to continue working with the city leaders to create a collaborative solution that supports the needs of these families. and we invite you all to work with us, and we welcome the ideas. sorry, any ideas to a collective solution, not displacement. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. madam president. commissioners, my name is mark rennie and i'm here

to comment on the ill-conceived volence to bike lane projects based weekly. it's time to hit the reset button and remove this middle lane. i think this bike lane was there should be there, but this middle bike lane is opposed by all the first responders in san francisco and it's killing the small businesses. you've already lost a mottos you've lost mission subs, you've lost west of pecos and bereni. the bereni house is also closed. this was one of these supposed these so-called quick build pilot projects. it is failed. you know, you're going to see television all the time today. i mean, there were four television cameras out there today. people are not happy and they're falling like flies. valencia street, you know, go back about seven years. valencia street was one of the most vibrant commercial corridors, not just in san

francisco, but in in the united states. we had the tech boom going. you had the billionaire class dropping their black american express cards on restaurants on on that corridor. obviously, covid sort of killed it. but this one will really kill it. and one thing today, blondie's has been open every day except christmas and new year's. for 33 years. we've heard we heard from blondie's earlier for the first time ever, they had a night shift where not one person showed up. it's dead over there. so please, the project is failed. time to remove it. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. hello my name is ian james. i'm the community engagement manager at glide foundation and i am here calling on a delay to the for our parking restrictions until a

safe parking site and housing or housing are offered to everybody on winston and buckingham. so they have somewhere else to go. it's i'm just like confused why we're still here and why these families have to keep coming down here and taking that time out of their day. this board, as far as i understand, has control over the parking restrictions. and i don't think that anybody here wants any of these families and communities to be displaced out. so i don't understand why we would not delay these parking restrictions until the families and the community have somewhere else to go. and so i encourage the board to do that. and i also want to acknowledge the strengths of the community here. plenty of families came down last meeting to educate you all about the harms of this ban and from what i know about these

these people, they'll continue to come down here as long as they need to and as long as they have this kind of threat looming over their own heads. so thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. a few more names. arlen's aristegui's charlotte molina, young angela tickler. good afternoon, directors. my name is eliana binder. i'm the policy manager for glide. i wanted to thank you for meeting with us and try to collaborate on this important issue. um since this board voted on september 19th to approve for our parking limits on winston drive and buckingham way, we have redoubled our efforts. we've been working tirelessly to partner with to secure housing and a safe parking site for this community, which includes dozens of family, his students and seniors who can just simply not afford the bay area's high rents and are living in rvs in this

area. as you heard earlier, some some of these folks have young children and they just simply cannot afford an apartment, even though they would like to do so. this community has been anxious about these parking restrictions and it has been difficult to not be able to give them a timeline of any possible delays. and so we wanted that security to offer them and we continue to work with you all and with and with supervisor melgar's office to try to have this delay, have a delay in implementing action and so that we can all have time to work on a safe parking site and housing for all these folks. um, we just know that there's already a lot of families in san francisco experiencing homelessness as there are waitlists on for family shelters. there is waitlists for family housing. and so it does not make sense to displace these families, potentially destabilize them, pushing them deeper into homelessness and just adding on to those wait

lists. they are a community. they deserve to be treated like a community with dignity and respect. and we are trying to do that. we are trying to simply give them more time to relocate to a safe parking site or housing and we look forward to continuing to work with you about this important issue. but we're also hoping to not be back here because we have no sustainable solutions. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. good afternoon, sfmta. i barely have a voice, but i'm going to make it heard anyway. my name is charlotte wooster and i'm here to stress the immediate need to scrap the bike lane and other transit and parking changes that were made along the valencia business corridor where it's had a very negative impact to the livelihood of the streets. small business owners and the general function of the street. put it back the way it was decades past. it worked. it was nice. i grew up here. i

remember i loved it. other business quarters like ocean ave, taraval, geary, hayes valley area. they've also been badly affected by transit plans and implementation, deeply impacting the businesses there. so going forward, san francisco would really like you, director tomlin and the board and to make small business first in any plans put forward that occur along business corridors, especially family owned businesses. it's what makes our city so sweet. we love it that way, don't we? can't lose them. we really can't afford to lose them. listen to them, respect them, honor them with real action, not platitudes, nor empty promises, nor delays. and i'm asking this just as a resident of san francisco, but i have a stake to as for the rv dwellers that i just heard about today, wow. sf mta sure did choose a heartless date to force them to leave. wow. you could do

better or push that date back to a few weeks after the new year. while seeking a more just and humane solution. i know you can do it. thank you. bye. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. please. no disruptions. thank you. hi, my name is mina young. i've been a 40 year resident in san francisco and my in-laws 50 years, they have been normally pretty well. i mean, moving around on their own, but because of all these obstacles courses is on the streets. they are afraid to drive, so they will rely on us. so every time they go somewhere, they need us to take time off to take them around, which they never did have three years ago. so please stop creating all these obstacle courses for our seniors and residents as you are creating

for messing up their life that they have used. they're so used to and the businesses are closing left and right. my you know what? greens close so we have to drive more than a mile to go to another one. so you need to work together to make the community function better and not create problems and drive out the businesses and drive out the residents. because my friends don't want to visit san francisco anymore. they just don't want to deal with the headache of the traffic from coming out of arguello exit for studio to geary told me ten minutes. usually it just a few blocks, so that doesn't make sense because the streets, lake streets closed and it's so crowded and so you need to open up the street and make it flow. thank you. thank you. other speakers in the room. a few more

speaker cards. hope camera. pete wilson. kevin ortiz. any of those names can go or any member of the public ready to speak. you can make your way to the podium. hi, good afternoon. hope camera public policy director compass family services. i don't have anything to offer that hasn't been powerfully said by the parents in the chamber. with us today, but i will share that as the chair of the hespe family subcommittee, i'm here to represent the family homeless safety net providers in the city . as a coalition, we support the thousands of homeless families in our city, many of whom are living in rvs right now because there is no permanent housing solution available to them. has has continued urgent concern about locating a safe parking site for the families living in rvs and winston and buckingham. we urge you to work with your partners at and in district seven to find a safe solution where we do not needlessly destabilize the lives of the

children and families living on that street. thank you for your continued attention to this issue. thank you. good afternoon. my name is pete wilson. i'm executive vice president for local 258. thank you for all that you do. chair and was happy to see your name on the list of people who are coming december 18th to the new operator graduation. so jeffrey will tell you where that well, it's in the neighborhood. it's actually in district two across the street from target. they're at presidio. hope to see you there, director tomlin. it i was going to say, i was thinking about saying this in the last couple of weeks, but then i saw you on friday. i was going to say, i miss you. we do see each other, but yes, i know we do see each other. but under editor raskin, we used to have biweekly meetings. and then when you came in, we continued to have biweekly meetings. and then, of course, covid hit and then they

were online local 258, and now we haven't had them in maybe nine months, a year, just you, me, our president, julie, whoever, a few of us and we really think that it could help take care of a lot of issues that have come up. so just to make sure that, you know, we would love to have those again. and of course, have those in person. we had a meeting this morning, anthony, our president and i had a meeting this morning. and unfortunately, the sfmta is continuing with their change to the sign up for the 9163 for vacation, not allowing even our most senior operators to have over a four weeks vacation signed up. and we're talking about people who've been here 25, 30 years and have a lot of vacation accrued. can't use them even though the contract does say you can use them, you can use your accrued time off. we understand that some other groups that had issues being able to use all their times but our union has not and so we're going to have to go to perb with

that as well. here in my hand, i have a grievance. we have an operator who had a two hour unpaid split and he was forced to travel a half an hour in each direction for a 15 minute meeting. he was paid for a 15 minute meeting, but he that means my time is up. sorry, this is a little loud. he was paid for his 15 minutes, but he was not paid on his unpaid split to travel. thank you. thank you. next speaker. afternoon. directors my name is cyrus hall. i rely on public transit and cycling to move around the city. i want to talk a bit about valencia today because i think valencia can and should be a great place for everyone, including cyclists, pedestrians and businesses. as i'm on valencia multiple times a month. i was just down there last week at manny's getting a coffee and i go to cafes, i go to bookstores, i go to other businesses that sell chocolate because who can resist chocolate , right? and i use the bike lane about twice a month right now. i regularly don't feel safe as a

writer in that lane. drivers regularly drive down the lane. people make u-turns across it. they make cutting turns. there's confusion, getting in and out of it, but that being said, safety for pedestrians and cyclists is not only compatible with vibrant spaces where businesses can succeed, it's critical. and we know from clement street, where the best day of the week is when it's closed for the farmers market. we know from hayes, where our merchants have advocated for more closure. we know from international studies and other experiences throughout the united states that car light and car free streets can be amazing and great for business. and we need to figure out how to get there together. the businesses, cyclists, pedestrians, because we can make valencia that great street here in the city. valencia will thrive if it's a public space and the only acceptable path

forward is one which respects all street users. safety for bikes and pedestrians is non negotiable. as we figure out how to move forward. i also want to encourage you to listen to the voices from winston drive today. it's heartbreaking to hear them and this is something that we can figure out together as a city how to move forward. so thank you for listening to all of those as well. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. hey there. i'm here today as a valencia street, small business owner of 33 years, the center running bike lane has been detrimental to mom and pop businesses in our corridor. it's impacted not only the merchants on valencia, but also the mission and 16th street surrounding areas. it's impacted the residents of the neighborhood. i find it incredibly arrogant and narrow minded that you can cut off the

accessibility to our neighborhood and kill the very fabric that weaves this community, this lane is a mere bike highway. i see it every day. they're going north to south and south to north. nobody's stopping. they're just using it as a freeway. i saw an uptick in the folsom and harrison cycling because i take my kid to school every day and i see a lot of people cycling. they're not on valencia. we rely on tourism and locals to continue to serve our community. it's a privilege to be able to ride a bike and not everybody has that privilege. the current center bike lane is both dangerous and is killing a once vibrant corridor. it needs to be taken out immediately. we need a pragmatic approach to find a better solution. i propose moving the center bike lane to a residential area such as south venice, harrison, folsom all incredibly perfect for a protected bike lane. lastly to

mitigate the double parkers, why don't you get the meter maids out there too full and full force like you did for ticketing the yellow zones and the white zones. as soon as they're double, as soon as the double parkers are ticketed, they'll stop double parking. it's easy as far as i can tell. lastly if you legislate to only allow uber and lyft drivers who live in san francisco, that would also be kind of an organic solution to eliminate limiting all the cars that come in with the gig. loss of words. anyways, i hope that we can fix this, this situation and you listen to the community. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hi my name is iyad al-tawil. i own yasmin restaurant and my wife owns rossi restaurant. we've been in business for four years. my uncle was there for 34 years. we are struggling. this bike lane has killed our

business. this is ridiculous. i've been working. 140 hours a week. my wife works in another 140 hours a week. we have three kids. they think this is a joke. it's not a joke. okay, i got $2,700 worth of ticket. i'm late on registration. eight month. okay. i can't pay it. there's no way they come over there. they ticket us, they abuse us. they go to manny. they make a deal with manny. then they make this bike lane, which is ridiculous. absolutely ridiculous. they should be ashamed of yourself. many of my business friends around the area have went out of business already. medianoche is gone. last month, my neighbor, pasta and pizza, his wife got cancer. he have to be there 14 hours a day. she's dying, but he cannot be on her side because he got to survive his business. my chicken time. my friend. he's going out of business. there's

so many fellow going out of business. this is ridiculous. whoever came up with this idea, he's. he's getting paid. there's no doubt there's a lot of corruption here. somebody getting paid. there's no way that there's nobody getting paid. so we have to find out who's getting paid and why. is it okay? would you guys for these people to pay these people? it's not right. you can't just pay somebody to buy them a house and destroy other businesses. okay thank you. thank you. other speakers in the room. good afternoon. i'm alan braddell. you know, commissioners, are you listening to some of these comments? these are hardworking people. they had a hard enough time with the pandemic and now this has been a death nail. this valencia street project for them. and, you know, i'm listening. in order to get

buy in for this valencia street project, it's a pilot project. you promised. it's a report that was going to be due today. and but we're told now that it's not coming until april. i'll put the bike lanes on van ness. we just heard that. that's a great idea. put them on harrison, but put them on those residential streets and away from this merchant corridor. now the second thing i came about today was this resolution. and you voted on it on november seventh, and it was for the permit holder at hayes valley and for closing hayes street. and this this resolution added on a requirement that the sfmta staff, the shared space program manager, monica, i forgot her last name for them to do a study , a study to evaluate the closing of hayes street. what gives anybody the idea that

that's something that anybody wanted to explore, that shared space program manager together with marianne thompson from the office of small business, did a lot of interviews in the months leading up to the approval of this permit and people were not asking to have that block closed down yet. you make this part of a resolution and the mayor just announced a $75 million budget cut. who's going to pay for that research? what are the parameters for doing this research to find out if anybody wants this thing closed? we already found out. nobody wants it closed. they want one day a week to have a, you know, the shared space program. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hi. hi my name is richard johnson. i actually spoke to you at the november 7th meeting about the issue that was

just discussed about the hayes street closure and what we're concerned about is, are you overstepping your boundaries is and asking for a study to permanently close hayes street. i put this up because as i have lived in the neighborhood for 33 years, i follow all your quick build projects. i can tell you about what happened on van ness and its interesting, i'd have to say to you, director tomlin, and also you as commissioners, that it's consistent with all these quick builds, that they've actually put a nail through the small business communities, be it the geary corridor, be it the taraval corridor, or you can talk to small businesses. and as someone who's a pedestrian on the valencia bike lane is a disaster just the way that it's done. it does not fit with vision zero. and the fact of it

puts a pedestrian at great risk because you're making cars do really extreme turns like left turns, u-turns. so not only endangers bicycles, but it also endangers pedestrians and the other thing too, is like what i think you're not looking at is of someone who lives in the hayes valley area and who has seen the differences between when the freeway was there and when the freeway is there now is the amount when you close streets, you really cause a lot of chaos to the side streets that go there. you come up my street at buchanan street, valencia street, others and in that you're causing additional pollution to our neighborhood, which we have probably one of the if you look at the public health ours is a high risk area for air pollution. so what you're doing is you're causing drivers. you're not through your policy is creating better transit to move people and

encourage people to walk to the neighborhood. and i think that's what you should be looking at, sir, are there other speakers in the room? i do have a few more speaker cards. aditya zach lipton, robin. pam. bianca gutierrez. two minutes. two minutes. okay. my name is emma bridgewater. i teach elementary and middle school aged children to skateboard for transportation. i'm an advocate for small wheeled accessibility. i'd like to recognize that it's the end of the year. some civil servants who have been incredibly helpful in this effort. andy thornley, sf chris kidd, christy osorio from the active communities plan. commissioner neuhaus segal with department of public works. carla short, director of public works to jada durden, deputy director of public works. kevin ortiz with the cta community advisory council. felix whittington at rec and park. janelle caywood at the department of police accountability, commissioner deborah walker at the sf police commission. none of these people , except for kevin ortiz and chris kidd, asked for my input and yet have welcomed it. offered support, both verbal and material and helping to connect

me with others who can address my concerns and implement novel solutions. ions for non-automotive transportation developed through a lifetime spent skateboarding for transportation. the only person who did ask for input is jeff tumlin 2020. in a tweet specifically when he announced the implementation of the botts dots on dolores, he said, quote, i hate doing this california vehicle code states that cities can set their own laws for skateboarding. san francisco vehicle code has skateboards protected under the class of non-motorized user propelled vehicles. we are allowed to skate in the roadway, and yet those replaced. in 2020, somebody died in the middle of the night in 2021 when they rode a bike over them and they were expanded in 2023 and advanced the dolores hill bomb. jeffrey tumlin is responsible for the injury of the death of this person and for the potential injury of anybody who rides over this. it is illegal for you to impede the mobility of people who are legally allowed to be in the street. and the city is

likely to be sued. they need to be removed as soon as possible. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. hi, good afternoon. zach lipton. i want to say clearly that pedestrian safety for pedestrians and cyclists on valencia is non-negotiable. and that's not just my opinion. it's city law and it's sf mta policy. we can't go back to the previous design. there was a constant dangerous and illegal driving behavior, double parking. it certainly did not work for anyone. we've long averaged more than one pedestrian or bicycle involved crash on valencia every ten days. the majority with serious injuries and people keep dying. but i do hope to offer a positive vision here. it really is possible to create a valencia street that's simultaneously safe for people and great for business. we can make valencia a unique regional destination that shoppers and diners flock to because of vibrant new people. first, public space that attracts visitors with tables,

seating, art, green space and programs thing. and we can still do that while facilitating everyone's access and loading needs, no matter how they travel . it has worked all over the world. we see it working here with hayes street merchants lining up in this room to praise and mta program and with the success of packed night markets with decades on streets like belden place and maiden lane and i'll just add that what doesn't work is scaring your customers away by rushing to the press to discourage people from trying to come to your neighborhood. but but let's be honest. the practical result is that center running bike lane was chosen because it was the design that had the least impact on parking. and yet now we have all of the anger and still don't have a safe all ages and abilities bikeway to show for it. the truth is that any future design for valencia that prioritizes safety and public space will inevitably represent a bolder and an uncomfortable change to the street than we're used to. and that's frightening in this climate. but the response to calls to change must not be a retreat that compromises on safety, but rather a step

forward towards a safe and thriving valencia street for everybody. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. hello i'm aditya. i live in the haight. i don't own a car. i spend a lot of my time and money in the mission. i used to be my bike commute to work when i lived in bernal heights. all of us in the city care about our small businesses. they gave the city so much vitality. it's clear the situation on valencia isn't working for them. the business community, however, has had many unclear and mixed demands. many oppose the 2019 proposal for side riding bike lanes and push for the center running lanes instead. the point of government is to collect data and public opinion and then to lead. sfmta knows that 70% of people shopping on valencia come by foot, bike or transit, and those people spend more than people coming by car. we should configure the street to reflect this reality. there are pedestrian corridors all over the world that are bustling and active, and we see the success of weekend pedestrian blocks in valencia, the clement farmers market, night markets making

those permanent will let us make the street even better with through permanent infrastructure rather than temporary. we can still have commercial loading zones in these places like in europe or asia, shibuya in japan is one of the densest pedestrian zones in the world. they have loading zones with with trucks going through pedestrians. stroget in copenhagen, we have all these places and trying to compromise with everybody. the sfmta has backed itself into a corner. it's clear half asking things doesn't work and makes everybody unhappy. we should try lasting things for once. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. hello everyone. my name is robin. pam and i have two topics for you today. the first on valencia. i just want to echo the prior two comments that valencia was on the high injury network in the past. so safety is not negotiable for people walking and biking who make up nearly 50% of trips that happen on valencia. there's clearly a lot more work that needs to be

done to support the small business community while also keeping people who walk and bike safe. i think there are solutions and we should work toward them together and not against one another. we just can't go back to the way it was before. the second topic i have is unrelated to valencia. it's slow streets. it's been a year since this board made the slow streets program permanent. you all set a visionary target for nation leading program last year to keep slow streets safe. you said 15 miles an hour speeds and a thousand vehicles a day. over the past year at kidsafe, san francisco, an advocacy organization that i'm a part of, we set up a network of traffic sensors on our slow streets to track compliance with the program. and the goals on those streets. what we're now seeing is that a number of the streets are not meeting those targets. and sfmta hasn't yet intervened to bring them into compliance with the program on vehicle volumes, lake street and occasionally page street are seeing more than 1000 vehicles

per day on speed. we see that hearst and cayuga are clear outliers with observed speeds often exceeding 25mph. when the program was made permanent, the board empowered staff to use the slow streets design toolkit to calm traffic on slow streets. the intent of this action was to allow the staff to iteratively iteratively achieve the outcomes of slower people friendly streets without coming back to the board for every single treatment we advocated for this and still support it. however, in the interim, we haven't seen improvements to address the dangerous and persistent speeding on some of these slow streets. how can we continue to call them slow if drivers are persistently abusing the spirit of the designation, leaving the program to wither in its current state will continue to undermine trust in the community? who supports these streets and also engender more opposition from those who see them as an inconvenience. so please, i ask you to continue to invest in this program and to support your staff with the resources they

need to make the necessary improvements to these streets to keep them safe. your staff is doing a great job. i think they just need more support and more cover from you on this board and from our leadership to achieve these targets. thank you. thank you. other speakers in the room today. hello, my name is bianca gutierrez. i don't have anything prepared, but i will be speaking from my heart. i am a mission long term resident, born and raised. i live on valencia and 20th. i am, um. i raised my kids there. i've seen valencia go through so many changes, so many stores are gone. and i'm at a point where i am in the process of opening up a business on valencia that has been taking almost three and a half years due to the nature of the business and the licensing for it. and i'm finally have my date where i'm going to get to that point. and i have seen valencia

deteriorate month after month and i'm just so sad for what has singularly like mta has singularly handed ruined valencia street, and maybe you guys should have took note on mission street when all of the changes were happening on there because it completely shut a lot of businesses down and people are still suffering with the with the with the bus, with the bus lane and no left turns. now we're at valencia to a place where it used to be the city in san francisco, the block in san francisco. nobody wants to come. it's hard to park. everybody would rather just not deal with valencia street. and it's really , really sad for the small businesses that are a lot of them are my friends and a lot of them have been there for decades upon decades. and it's just very unfortunate. i hope that you guys see that the small businesses are suffering and clearly valencia street has been taken over the last few years by i i'm not sure what's been going

on behind the scenes, but i've been here long enough to know what's happening. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. good afternoon, commissioners. my name is kevin ortiz. i'm the co-president of the san francisco latinx democratic club, also one of the co-founders of mission destino. we're here today because of the cataclysmic failure that is the valencia center running bike lane. but i want to mention a separate issue for a moment. rodrigo lopez, who spoke first, is being pushed out of winston avenue while being a street vendor unable to vend on mission street. he's getting hammered from two different city policies against poor people. and i want you to resonate that because i want you to think about rodrigo when you're thinking about winston avenue. i wish some of the self-appointed sustainable transportation advocates would speak up for them and for other interests, like our small businesses in that same vein, sfmta has created a disaster on valencia. the valencia merchants did a survey amongst the corridor. 85% of merchants want

the bike lane removed due to the confusing, confusing loading zones and no left turns and further congestion to the neighborhood. this quick build project promised to have metrics by december. it is unacceptable that these metrics have been pushed to 2024. this pilot program needs to be scrapped, reverted back and no projects done in the mission until there is a comprehensive, community based transportation plan. we cannot be dealing with mission street. valencia to the cul de sacs on capp street. it's a mess and we're suffering as the residents and the businesses as a result of it. and this is also worse. it's endemic of a much larger issue at hand. the systemic failure of the sfmta response being responsive to the community. this is happening citywide in every neighborhood. lack of respect and proper community. buy in, leading and leading the process and furthering the distrust between the community. quick builds have no accountability, but so does the sfmta. there is zero accountability. if this bike lane is not removed, we will organize the small businesses

and other interests to form an exploratory committee to reform the sfmta to make your positions elected or having split appointments between the board of supervisors and the mayor's office. thank you for your time. thank you for your comments. are there any other speakers in the room today? okay. this board routinely ignores the concerns of neighborhood residents, struggling small businesses and even the recommendations of your own staff. in the case of street closure and other similar contentious business corridor changes, the alarming lack of responsiveness from you on the valencia street debacle is tone deaf. you pursue such lofty goals as shaving three minutes off a round trip to downtown on the 38 geary, but refuse to close a center bike lane proven to be dangerous to both businesses and cyclists alike. you eliminate parking and snarl traffic. you're tearing up

taraval for the third time and there may not be any businesses left by the time you're done there. you need to read the room. there are 492,000 vehicles registered in san francisco, so and tens of thousands more who commute in for rideshare and other work and tens of thousands of small businesses for far more than there are cyclists and upright device riders. your charter requires this board and sfmta to be more balanced it. or you may find yourselves reorganized by fed up voters as thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. secretary silva, can i present some. thank you. hi board members. luke bornheimer urge you to direct staff to create a complete design for curbside protected bike lanes for valencia street between 15th and 19th streets and update the design from 2020 for between

19th and cesar chavez streets, then immediately install that design on valencia in order to make valencia better for business and safer for people. i understand the concerns of merchants who want more business and revenue and want to see valencia be a more vibrant destination. the center bikeway is a counterintuitive and dangerous design that sandwiches people between two lanes of driving cars and trucks and makes it more difficult for people on bikes and scooters to stop at businesses as curbside protected bike lanes like those installed on valencia between market and 15th streets are proven to be better for business use after the installation of curbside protected bike lanes on various streets in new york city, there was a 49% increase in retail sales and 49% fewer commercial vacancies. curbside protected bike lanes are better for business. curbside protected bike lanes also increase safety for people, eliminate ■parking and bike lanes, as well as close calls and make loading easier, safer and more predictable, including on valencia. between market and 15th streets. as

shown by sfmta's own evaluation on valencia, merchants are hurting and need your help to increase revenue and make valencia more vibrant place to visit. you can address their concerns and make valencia a better place for all people who visit or use the street. we cannot and should not delay taking action while other designs like pedestrianization are studied and designed. i urge you to direct staff to create a complete design for curbside protected bike lanes for valencia street between 15th and 19th streets and updated the design from 2020 for between 19th and cesar chavez streets. then immediately install that design on valencia in order to make valencia better for business and safer for people. thank you. thank you. any other speakers in the room? okay. seeing none, please go to remote. secretary silva at this time. we'll move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three

to enter the queue each speaker will have two minutes. moderator first speaker hi, this is stacy randecker. i want to echo what so many speakers have said about valencia street. it has been a disaster for everyone. it does serve as a bike highway. it is complicated for drivers and that complexity is part of the problem. you know what is easy for drivers to understand? concrete and bollards is this everyone is miserable. compromise solution is emblematic of why we cannot attain vision zero here and how our city, state and country are some of the worst offenders when it comes to the climate emergency this nation produced and consumed 20 billion barrels of oil every day last year. we are responsible for one fifth of the world's emissions, even though we are just 4% of the people. we must reduce the

number of cars and the spaces that they can drive upon. we must increase the streets accessible only by bikes walking and transit. we need to make our places more inviting. we need to build more housing so these people have places to live instead of in cars and things that move with motors and oil. we've got to move away from this. how can you not see it? valencia is a gem. it is one of the most vibrant places that we have. we need our businesses to succeed. we need our people to be safe. it is so blindingly obvious what needs to be done. why won't you take the steps to do it? when will you act? what will it take? please do it. lead. thank you. thank you. next speaker. this is herbert weiner. as far as valencia street goes, it goes from best to worst.

first you eliminated the 26 valencia buffs, which is a very important bus and people needed it for access to small businesses on valencia street, especially seniors and disabled. it is very difficult to walk from mission street or guerrero street to valencia street. secondly then you start putting bike lanes in and that and that's dangerous to some seniors and disabled because some of the bicyclists go through the red light then you inconvenience the bicyclists by putting in a center lane and small businesses crumble along this corridor. we desperately need valencia street as a source of commerce to the city. we needed 26 valencia street run and all this planning

for closing off streets to drivers is creating congestion in and the whole thing is a mess and to the tune of billions of dollars at a cost to the taxpayer. so instead of increasing the amount of busses and drivers and which would discourage the use of automobiles, you're taking an unrealistic course. in fact, a crash collision course. and if it continues, public transportation option in the city will go smash, whether it's by car or by bicycle, whatever. so this this destructive course is being considered ordered while managers get paid six digit salaries from lunatic circus and at some point this has to be stopped. i'm in

assisted living, so i had nothing to lose. that's one benefit of being in assisted living 30s muni. any. thank you. thank you. next speaker. so go ahead. this is barry toronto. this is barry toronto. good afternoon again. um, i first want to say that valencia, it's really sad that you were wanting to all these small businesses to go away by, by aeruginascens of dealing. what's happened with the bike lane there and inability to make left turns. i requested the taxi division to actually give us a couple more left turns off of, of mission street so that we could be able to easily serve the west part of that part of town. um, i think that moving that lane to south venice would be a perfect opportunity. consider that it's

already been destroyed by eliminating a lane of traffic in each lane and the wide center lane is already there and exists and there aren't that many businesses on that street. next is when you close the street. the left turn lane westbound at hayes is clogged and it's forcing people to run the light the arrow light. so it'd be great if you added maybe another 5 to 7 seconds even that would help alleviate the backup and that left turn lane because nobody is using the right lane when the street is closed up ahead. so it doesn't make sense why you are keeping that left turn light for only about 7 or 8 seconds. it's not right. and last but not least, again, the focus so much on the on scooter enforcement, you're not having the taxi investigators and others try and keep the cab

stands clear, particularly during this christmas time. we need a pco. they're checking the taxi zones around around some of the stores, particularly macy's. we have asked numerous times and we're not getting any help the response time when i do work has been better at night to do enforcement, but they need to actually start towing the vehicles. thank you very much. next speaker. oh thank you, mary. eliza here speaking for the coalition for san francisco neighborhoods. and my answer to many other city neighborhood groups that cannot be here to speak today. if your plan was to kill businesses by removing traffic and parking from commercial streets and replace them with higher use properties, you succeeded in the first step,

the 2nd may be a long time coming. investors have lost interest in san francisco for the time being. it is time to protect what is left of the neighborhood businesses that are propping up the economy. here there is not one commercial street that has not complained about losing business after the sfmta brought in their idea of improvements for businesses, it is time to listen to the merchants and residents and return the streets to them and allow them to function by removing all the obstacles in their way. you killed off enough businesses on valencia already. if the mayor wants to encourage artists and entertain owners, she should know that they need private vehicles to transport their goods and equipment. so she's killing them off by removing those options. you will see a lot of people on all sides

of other issues agree on this one. they oppose the bicycle lane on the lunch at the center lane does not work for many reasons. you are hearing today merchants from all over the city are here to ask you to remove the valencia center bike lane. thank you. thank you. next speaker. hi, my name is michael holly. as you may have heard there was a protest today on valencia at 16 where someone was killed by a driver earlier this year and two blocks away from where another pedestrian was killed by a driver at 18th and valencia earlier this year. the protest wasn't about pedestrian safety. it was about parking. one of the ringleaders of this protest joined vigils for these pedestrians. they don't care about people, care about cars and after their protest was done, they all got in their cars and drove away. if these

merchants are so concerned about parking, maybe they should leave their own cars at home and experience what life getting around the city is like for the 70% of their customers, according to mta data, who walk, bike and take transit. and while they're doing that, they can ask themselves how their businesses did during the weekend open. valencia blocks. they can wonder how some merchants did during the night market or clement street merchants do during farmers market days when the streets are packed full of people instead of cars. i'm under no illusion that the current arrangement on valencia street is the answer. i think the bike lanes don't work for a variety of reasons, but safety for vulnerable road users is not negotiable. and whatever happens next, we cannot go back. was on safety for our people. valencia can be a vibrant corridor for everybody if we work together, but we can't go backwards and throw people under the wheels of merchant cars just because they don't like seeing us out there. thank you. thank you. chair and

that does take you to your ten minute limit. okay thank you. thank you very much. um, i am just going to say thank you all for being here and sharing your perspectives with us, especially those of you who were a little bit nervous to comment today. it's meaningful that you share your perspective because i want to assure you that this board is listening, that we hear you. we feel the frustration that you are expressing to us viscerally. i can feel the frustration and tension in this room. so please know that we are listening to you. and please know that this board is deeply committed to finding challenges to the solutions that you raise. i do want to uplift one comment that i heard from one of the first speakers, which is that i do believe in earnest, that we all want what is best for san francisco. and i do believe that this board and the staff are in earnest genuinely trying to make decisions, ones that are aligned

with the goal of what is best for san francisco. i also want to say that that we are limited in what we can talk about today because we have rules we did not notice when senator valencia on today's agenda, so much as we would like to respond and engage with you, the city attorney will shut us up if we try to have an engagement with you. so we're not allowed to do that today. but please know that we care very much about these issues as we are solutions oriented. we do want to address these challenges . we have heard a lot about, obviously valencia and winston, i do want to remind people that you can sign up for updates about valencia street at sfmta .com/ valencia or if you want to be in touch with the project manager if you want to have the latest. that is a source that is a resource for you all. and then finally, i do just want to ask director tomlin to briefly, in line with what the city attorney will allow. now speak to anything you want on valencia and winston, particularly. maybe

a reminder why we're doing this pilot in the first place and what are some of the changes that have been made recently to be responsive to the concerns that we've heard? okay. so deputy city attorney stephanie stewart will check me if i go too far, but i believe i can restate some of the facts that we have previously stated in this format. so again, to stay up to date on the background as well as what is moving forward, please do go to sfmta.com/valencia and click sign up for updates and if you'd like to be engaged with the project manager, their email addresses are at the bottom of the page. we've been taking thousands of comments and making lots of adjustments as we move along. a couple of other reminders. this is a one year pilot. it is designed lined with cheap, easily removable materials. we are striving in this project to achieve two primary goals. the first is safety before the pilot. this

stretch of valencia, particularly between 15th and 21st, was one of the roads in in san francisco with by far the highest rate of severe injuries and fatalities that is something we are required to address as a city. and this was our best effort using the available resources to not only meet the safety goal, but also to support small businesses, all of the other options that we considered result in far more significant parking removal in order to achieve the goal. so our two goals are simultaneously alley safety and small business success. we also know that there are a thousand details that need adjustment, and that's why we've been spending this period of time doing a lot of listening and making continual adjustments. the to all of the businesses on valencia take their loading from the front. and so we added a lot of commercial loading zones along the street to make sure that the

businesses could take their loading. and we heard from merchants that it was too much. so we've been making significant adjustments to those loading zones, both shrinking the total number and changing the hours in order to dramatically increase the number of customer parking spaces that are available. all that detail you can find on our website and all of the continual evaluation and changes that we've been doing are why we are just over a month late with the evaluation rather than focusing on the formal quarterly evaluation, staff has been focused on listening to merchants and making adjustments as we go along so that evaluate session is now scheduled for february and we'll be doing four formal evaluations each quarter over the course of the one year pilot and making adjustments as we go along. again for more detail, please do sign up for alerts. thank you. thank you, director tomlin. let's close that item and please call the next item. secretary silva very good. director is that places you on item ten, your consent

calendar. these items are considered to be routine and will be acted upon by a single vote unless a member of the board or public wishes to consider an item separately for all speakers providing public comment, please identify which item number you are speaking to. additionally. item 10.2 is being removed at this time and will be heard at a future meeting to your consent calendar. just one item. item 10.1 approving various routine parking and traffic modifications listed under items. a through p in the agenda. that concludes your consent calendar. thank you, colleagues. are there any questions on the consent calendar? if not, we'll open public comment on the consent calendar for anybody in the room . i don't believe i'm seeing any speakers. please open a remote at this time. we'll move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue

each speaker will have two minutes. moderate the first speaker. oh, good afternoon, commissioners. i want to talk about item 10.1. this is richard rothman about removing the blue zone as i'm concerned that the street division engineering section is removing blue zones without replacing them at the same time. and i think this is a very disservice for the people who need to who need to use the blue zones. they were taken away and they still haven't been replaced yet. this has been about a month because the color code committee is not meeting until two weeks. and there was another blue zone across the street at market and at barnes and mcallister that the same

committee took away. and the color code committee didn't even know about it until i told them. so i think there needs to be more coordination. maybe the access committee needs to approve these and i think you need this shows a lack of not caring about the disabled community. you know, you need to care more and staff should be more aware of these needs. and i read the staff report about mcallister and van and he was completely wrong on his evaluation of the report and didn't even mention that is a use for people who go to city hall. thank you for your comment . thank you for my comments. thank you. next speaker. patricia roy. i represent 22 neighborhood and merchants associations. i'm very upset

about the process of the sfmta in general and the blue zones is one of them. is shoes. i feel that at times reports that come to you from the department or record reports made according to instruction instead of made according to study. and i have seen engineers fired illegally for disagreeing with you on projects and i think that you need to reevaluate how your department is being run on these changes. i i'm giving you a report in about 2 or 3 weeks and on what's happening in 2 or 3 neighborhoods and i'm very, very, very upset about the process. and one of the one of the ones that i can point out right right ahead of the system is 205 five chestnut. we object

to a ten wheeler being able to back out on lombard street, a major highway for our project and was signed off by the department and members of the engineering department disagreed and still got pushed through and signed through because the department wanted it. i think you better look at what your priorities are, how to protect the small businesses, how to protect the seniors, what you've done in what you've done on chestnut street has been a disaster. and we are going to be we are going to be coming full force on what you have done and to arbitrarily and capriciously change meters for what you think is right instead of what's right for the businesses is insulting. and this is just another way of insulting and chasing out small businesses. so that's my

statement. your time is up, dragon. that did sound like you're a general public comment and not an item on the consent calendar. it does look like we have maybe one more caller. okay yes. hi my this is stacy randecker. and my issue is with the residential parking permits. for ten .1. b on haight street. um, tends up also letter e on hayes street and letter f on valencia street. those are part of merchant corridors. and i don't believe that they should be eligible for residential parking permit parking. they should. residents should be able to get a permit and they should be able to park in the neighborhood, but not out on that street. um, i don't we shouldn't have residential, we

shouldn't have streets that should be for people oil or loading should be used for residential parking. thank you. thank you. next speaker. moderator next speaker. no more speakers. thank you. we'll close public comment. colleagues, may i have a motion, please? on the consent calendar? move the items. thank you. is there a second? i can second. thank you. please call the roll on the motion to approve the consent calendar. item 10.1. director heminger heminger i director henderson. henderson. i director hinsey i director. so i. so i director kahina. i kahina. i chair egan. i ekin. i thank you.

the consent calendar is approved . thank you, colleagues. i like to take a brief five minute recess. we've had a very substance tive discussion so far today. please return in a few moments and we can continue with rising. the director of transportation to execute contract number sfmta 202420 with mtc institute to conduct the 2024 muni on board survey required by the federal transit administration on in order to comply with title six of the civil rights act of 1964. in the amount of approximately $1.8 million for a two year term. good afternoon. soon julie kirschbaum the transit director, les waterworks for this one i am here today to request contract approval for a large passenger survey as was just stated, the survey is a federal requirement and it really helps us understand and the demographics

of our riders, not just at a citywide scale, but really by route and neighborhood and for all times of day. i am grateful to our agency partners that are helping to make this survey a reality. this survey will be funded by the comptroller's office. so we're very grateful for that. and we are getting quite a bit of contracting support as well as some survey guidance, so that our survey is comparable across the bay area from our partners at mtc, we typically do this survey every five years, but, but we last did the survey in 2017 and the reason we didn't rush right out in 2022 to do this survey is the ridership was still very much transitioning and we are now, i

believe we've at a stable point in in the sort of post pandemic reality. i am excited that ridership continues to grow, but the patterns i believe, have established themselves allowing, i think us to get some really valuable information at this time. this survey information is an important piece of our equity work. it will tell us, for example, all how the demographics of different routes compare to the system as a whole and also to the city as a whole. but it is not the end all, be all of our muni equity approach. it is a piece of information in, but that information is complemented with a much broader set of work around the muni equity strategy, which looks deeply at performance data ridership, community needs in

the neighborhood goods that most rely on on muni service. so this s provides us in an important picture of our ridership. it helps us, i think, success really talk about why the investing in muni is really important for our citywide and our regional equity goals. but it complements this much broader work that we are going to be talking about in the coming months as the next equity strategy is developed to inform our budget process. the. the most complex part of this survey is the scale. so we are not trying to get something that is just statistically significant and can draw patterns at the citywide level. we're actually

looking at the individual route level and also by time of day. so in order to really understand what are the demographics of our our ridership or the ridership during school times or or just the ridership on the 54 route, for example, we need to survey up to 25,000 passengers was. so we really need a firm that knows how to administer an onboard survey that can be statistically significant agent on all of the different ways that we're going to want to cross tabulate this data. this survey is primarily done geographic data. so it is not going to give us a deep understanding of customer perceptions around things like safety or or accessibility. it asks for fact based questions

what languages do you speak at home? what is your race and ethnicity? how do you identify y in terms of gender? and then where are you coming and going? because it is giving us good origin and destination information, but it complements other surveys that we do that provide a deeper understanding of customer perceptions. is the there are some requirements on on how we ask questions that are outlined in by the federal transit administration. but within some of those boundaries, we've been able to work as a region to come up with questions that are kind of more current in terms of how we would talk about and understand demographic information. so i'm pleased that

we'll have a little bit of flexibility there while also making sure that our surveying technique is consistent with ac transit samtrans bart et cetera. we are requesting to award the contract with with mtc etr tsi conducted the survey in 26 2017. they have a strong track record for being able to collect data in large, diverse urban areas is one of the things that i think is most important is how they use a random sampling process to make sure that the implicit bias is of the surveyors don't factor in. so for example, the surveyors have a card that show them specifically what locations on the bus they should survey

people. so there isn't the tendency to just want to survey the people that look the friendly ist or the people that look the most like me. they also because they're going to do a pre survey to look at origin destination data, they may have processes to make sure that they're not oversampling people on the outer end of the line. just because they're on the bus. the longest, which could be a challenge as well. and they also have some strong techniques that i think reflect the cultural competency goals of this board and the survey itself will be conducted on an ipad. it'll be translated into eight languages, as much as possible. they are going to be hiring locally. we ideally as much as possible. all bilingual speak speakers, but

they also have access to a 24 hour call center. so because just because somebody can speak a language doesn't necessarily mean they can read a language. and so the three way call center is an attempt to bridge that. they will also have a take away text option as well as a paper survey with a mail back for people who they really can't navigate, completing the survey on board. and there is an incentive program that also helps a little bit with the survey. the biggest incentive for the survey is that it's short and it can be completed on the bus where you kind of have nothing else to do, too. but we also if you complete the full survey and provide us your contact information, we do enter you into a raffle. there'll be five drawings over the course of the survey for $500 each. so

there is an attempt to incentivize people to participate at mtc will be partnering with with oneok inc. they will have at least 20, but we anticipate more like 25% of the contract that they are a minority women owned business. they do intend to hire locally, but they are an la based business and they do have a lot of experience with the survey challenges that really go beyond language. so things like i'm not comfortable talking to somebody who's putting a survey in front of me have been issues that we've confronted in the past and they have in 2017, for example, mtc was observing saying that they were not seeing as much

response forgiveness from monolingual chinese speaking seniors, for example. so they reached out to partners in chinatown to really look at how they were approaching people with the survey and they made adjustments, which then helped increase those counts. this time they'll have a new technique which is a real time dashboard of the sampling they're getting so that we can also track how they're surveying in real time. the survey contract, we as i indicated up front, we are partnering with mtc. we are using their selection process because mtc also supports other bay area transit agencies in doing these kind of required demographic work. the solicitation process included a notice to over 4500 individuals

and firms. the mtc staff hosted a pre-proposal conference that was attended by 23 individuals representing 16 firms. they ultimately got five proposals. they interviewed all five and then approved a three person, three team bench. the screening process did include some of these cultural competency questions that that i have shared and our own evan knapp, who is here to answer. hopefully some of your harder questions participate stated on the review panel. so we are are we're very appreciative of having the efficiency from mtc, but we are using them because we believe in their process, not just to save contracting time. this is i'm

not going to go into everything that we learned from 2017 because i'm going to come back in the fall and really share the data. but i did want to give an example of how we use this data. this is a graph that shows varying both census and on board data. as you can see from 2016 to 2022. bipoc residents in san francisco, based on the american community survey, has increased from 54 to 61. and what we know from the 2016 survey is that the muni ridership was more by poc than than than even the city. so we are anticipating to see probably an even more significant change. but right now we're really almost have to

rely on the american community survey because we know the data that we have that is specific to our system is really outdated at this point because of all of the not just citywide changes, but also all of the changes our muni ridership has experienced. and this program will also give us information about our customers was from low income households and let us make comparisons again, one of our citywide ridership, our city, our ridership compared to the citywide demographics. i am really appreciative of two people in the audience that i'm going to invite up in a moment. kathleen sakellarios, who is our regulatory affairs manager, and evan konop, who is on our performance team from the beginning of thinking about this survey to thinking about how do

we pay for it, to thinking about how do we bring on a contractor that can do this work? and they've been integral in fuzing the process with creating equity and accountability. so i'm really grateful. our timing, we are if approved today, we would would initiate the contract fact. ideally before the end of the year. that will allow us to both develop the survey and do some pilot work in january. our goal is to do the bulk of the data collection in march and april. that is very typical ridership time for us because because school is still in session and people are not traveling. they don't have their summer vacation hats on. if we are able to get to the 25,000, the 5% sample that we need that

will allow us to spend the summer processing and analyzing the data. but it is a two year contract because we needed the flexibility to go into the fall. do depending on how the data collection goes. so with that, i'm happy to answer any questions that you have. thank you. directors, are there any clarifying questions for director kirschbaum victor kahina um, well, thank you so much, julie. to you and kathleen and evan for the briefing on this topic. and so i just want to first really appreciate all the work that was done to get us here to this point in selecting folks and trying to figure out how do we actually execute on on this commitment that we have right. and so i appreciate you also walking us through the methodology. i had a lot of questions around that. while we were getting briefed around how are we going to ensure that

folks, especially our monolingual community members, is will be surveyed? what are some incentives? what are some ways that we are truly engaging folks? um, one of the things that that i still want to see and what ends up being the final contract is a little bit more accountability measures or structures around ensuring that we're hitting certain demographic goals of the study. and so you mentioned a little bit how in 2017 there was a sense that a e.t.c wasn't serving enough folks from the from the chinese community, right? and so they had to make some adjustments. would love for us to get ahead of that and to establish that early on in the agreement that we are. you know, we have certain demographic goals that we're trying to hit. um, our transit community, the folks that ride our ridership tends to be incredibly diverse, far more diverse than our city. and so it's so important for us to really utilize this resource.

and, you know, and the staff capacity is going to add to us to really get as much information as we can from those folks. right? and so origin destination studies are it's so valuable to understand that piece of it. and if we have a resource that is helping us really understand that point, let's really utilize it at its maximum. and so what i would like to see and this is just you don't we don't have to, you know , table this item or we don't have to continue this item. it's really just guidance that we create some accountability measures within the agreement to ensure that that's really what we're targeting here. so i really will defer to kathleen and to evan and to you and the team to really understand what those those, i guess, goals should be. so i, you know, your expertise is valuable. there but that's something that i would really want to see from this. it's a two year project. it's a lot of it's a big investment. and i just want to make sure

that we're using it to its full potential. okay thank you. that's very helpful guidance. i don't think as a control it is currently framed that it it has the kind of teeth or accountability measures. but i do know that etsy knows how important cultural competence is to san francisco and is to our work. so i am confident that we can work with them before we finalize the contract to make sure we're able to incorporate that input if possible. i would love for us to schedule a briefing. once you are at this moment where you feel at a better place with the agreement, just to get a sense of where you all landed in the conversation on as you finalize, you know, the key process here of closing up the agreements with them. but

it is my strong direction that we make sure we have some accountability measures. again, it's a once in a lifetime. like every five years we get this resource. so it's important for us to make sure we're using it as best we can. thank you, director. so. this is a really exciting time too. i like data and i really appreciate vice chair catena's point is to make sure that we have utilize the resource that we have. to get the data that actually will be useful for us. so adding accountability and also making sure that we are asking the right question to the right people appropriately is really going to be helpful for us as an agency to implement some of the strategies that we will be continue to create in the next

half decade of the year, half decades. my my, my understanding of this is that thank you for the briefing to get me on the speed with everything is that the i would like to see if we can formulate and customize our survey questions to go deeper beyond the census guidelines and identify being very culturally diverse community. so that will get us a much more culturally attuned to different communities that we really need to reach out for. for example, there's aapi, but then also there's aa and hpi . i don't think that the census guidelines actually identify the different demographics and also latinx is not identified in

their. so that's one thing. and then the other thing that i would like to do as appreciate the in-depth expertise in in terms of the contract procurement and finding the vendor with. with the knowledge that people had in the mtc to get to the our prime contractor and also our subcontract sector. but because they're industry expertise and there's only a few of them in this country and i would love to see if we have we can create a guidelines. to retain a subcontractor that our bay area firm um, because my understanding is right now the sub contractor is based in la and then the prime is based in kansas city, which i think that there's a reason why they're

being selected because they are the best of the best in this country and the most appropriate and well positioned to do well positioned to do what we need them to do. but i also see if we can create a guidelines to bring a local bay area regional company to learn what is to learn from the best of the best to uplift our local knowledge and also to create a much more diverse and competitive market in this landscape. like say, for example, five years later, we need to do that again and we will have some more options to look for if that will be possible. thank you, chair. madam thank, thank you for that feedback. i do think we have some flexibility, particularly because so much of the hire of the surveyors is going to

happen. local so i will i will take the guidance that we want e.t.c. to bring on a local partner. and if we run into roadblocks on that, we will come back. thank you, director henderson, please. julie thank you. i just have a quick question about the hiring. if the hiring is happening locally, how does that work? do you all connect the vendor with local employment developers or how does the hiring process work for the actual staff that will be conducting the survey? kathleen and evan can i have you come up and the question is. who does the hiring and how do they partner with kind of local nonprofits to reach such a diverse group? hi good afternoon. kathleen séculaires regulatory affairs manager. so

e.t.c is partnering there sub as julie mentioned, is an international. they're based in la, but they will be working with local organizations, ions and all of the hiring will be local partners. so annick is the one that will take the lead on hiring the workforce. that will be the survey takers in san francisco and using preexisting connections with organizations and local businesses. preexist and connections from seven years ago. so it's my understanding that this is so ctc does most of the major bay area transit agencies. they do their onboard surveys, so they've used them in the past specifically for this purpose. that's exclusively who they partner with in order to find the survey takers and recruiting internally. it seems just from looking online, doing using indeed.com and different ways to try and get people recruited to serve these in these positions. okay i think that in line with the vice

chairs direct asian for strong accountability measures, i think it's important for it to be very clear, especially for. for you know, individuals who are working with, like you said, the local nonprofits or, you know, this might be a very low hanging fruit for introducing people to this industry. and in a different way than we typically might see through operations. and so i think it it would be wise for you all to make sure that built into the contract is the connection that i'm sure some other city agency, whether it's ewg or some other city agency that can ensure that there's workforce development opportunities that are front and center and then made clear to the different communities that the survey will be conducted and

especially those equity communities that that may go underrepresented or may be difficult to sort of get to respond. i think it just is something that would be best to include as a requirement so that we know that the community groups or organizations will will be able to be that voice and that, you know, the sort of reach for this activity so that we can make sure we get the 25,000 responses as successfully . i think that's a really interesting approach. and we can make sure that ethnic and e.t.c. work with our human resource recruiters so that folks that are doing this surveying also have information about pathways into sf mta jobs. since we have a lot of jobs at. and i like the

idea of looking at this as a non traditional way to bring people into the into the industry. we. a if there are no further board member comments. we can open it up for public comment for anyone in the room on this item 11. hey everyone. hi. may organized a tenderloin as one of those equity communities. that can be really difficult to outreach to. so i do appreciate all the comments in terms of trying to reach out to our community. again, utilize our groups as well. i'm the traffic safety task force as an example, all but also i wonder if part of that that 5% of the ridership goal is also more like maybe like a minimum amount where you need to reach this many people

who are seniors or this minimum amount. how many people are basically focusing on the most transit dependent groups because that 25,000 could probably be end up being in other communities that might have other options. so i think in terms of like determining who to reach out to, i think we should look into that as well. all right. thank you for your time. thank you for your comment. any other speakers on this item? okay. none. please open remote at this time. we'll move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue. each speaker will have two minutes. we have one speaker. moderator first speaker. for this in favor? weiner one of my concerns is that i think the city should be served equitably. we, their seniors and the disabled and every part of the city, and they shouldn't be shortchanged, changed on the basis of where they live now.

now, ideally, the service this is a public service. it should be available to everybody. and i believe there are sufficient resources to do in the to expand the fleet and make it available to all. that's a public transportation is about you cannot favor one group over another. you should treat all groups equally. instead of selectively. please reach out to every area of the city and serve everyone as they are needed. thank you. thank you. thank you. know, speakers. okay, we'll close public comment, but i also just want to thank my colleagues for raising both some of the workforce issues as well as making sure that the survey is as truly representative of the diversity of the city as possible. and i want to thank

staff for the creative thinking and cost considerations and efficiencies around using an existing procurement process. with that, i will entertain a motion. i'll move the item. is there a second? second. thank you. please call the roll on the motion to approve director heminger heminger. director henderson i. henderson i director hinsey i kinsey i director. so i. so i director kahina kahina i chair eagan i eagan i thank you. the item is approved places you on item number 12 presentation and discussion on the fiscal year 2022 2023 financial update. welcome cfo marauder. good afternoon, board members. my name is rima horta. i'm the cfo of the sfmta. i'm meeting some of you for the first time, so nice to meet you from the podium as you know, we are about to embark upon our two year budget process process where we'll be

setting the budget for 24, 25 and 25, 26 as you will consider the budget in april for presentation to the mayor's office in may. i'm sure from reading the paper and being aware of what's going on in the city, you know that san francisco is facing some challenging times with regard to the budget and we the mta, like the city, faces a lot of challenges and trade offs before us. and so what we wanted to do in this budget cycle was give you a series of presentations to help you understand the context of the budget decisions that will be asking you to make so that you can come into the process. well educated and understanding all of the context. so what i'd like to do today is talk about what happened in fiscal year 2223, which is the year that closed in june 30th, 2023, and how that information is making me think about what our strategy should

be going into the next budget cycle. and obviously, at the end we'll have time for you to ask questions and let me know what this information is making you think about so that i can channel that knowledge and make sure that you're getting the information that you need. need to make thoughtful budget decisions and get prepared for the workshop that we're having at the end of january. so with that, we are going to start by getting back in the wayback time machine and looking at just transportation funding in general. i think we all know that the cost of providing services goes up over time as the cost east of labor because of cola and the cost of services because of cpi goes up. and this is a long standing trend that the mta and many other agencies have been facing over the years.

however, in the case of mta, because of systemic transportation changes in the transportation system like ride hailing services, our revenue has been going down over time. similarly, our revenue is impact by price grams that are well deserving that that support income. the communities who are challenged from an income perspective. but they also reduce the mta's income, particularly when we approached covid this this downward trend of revenue was particularly stark as people stopped moving around were no longer taking transit and were no longer driving their cars and needing to pay for parking, had it not been for federal support, which significantly replaced the revenue that we lost during covid, we would have had to dramatically cut services. and thankfully, because of federal support we've been able to provide over 80% of transit of pre-covid transit service. how however, that federal relief is

a one time source. we currently anticipate that one time source to be fully expended by 25, by 25, 26. and so the question then becomes, what will we do to replace that revenue once federal revenue has been fully expended currently, one of the strategies that we're looking at is a regional revenue measure. in november of 2026. but that we don't anticipate the revenue from that expenditure that measure to begin to flow until 2728. so that leaves the question what will we do not only to get ourselves to november of 2026, but what will we do to bridge the gap between our expenditure now and our revenue now, now and what we anticipate generating through regional revenue measure two years from now? so with all that in mind, let's take a closer look at what happened in 2223. so to provide some perspective, the operating revenue for 2223,

this pie chart shows you the breakdown of where our revenue comes from. and as you can see from this pie chart, we as an agency are extremely dependent on on operating grants, which are provided through through generally through the mtc and other regional transit agencies that support our operating revenues and are largely dictated by the health of the regional economy. similarly, we're very highly dependent on the general fund, which is very largely dependent on the, the health of our local economy in particular in 22, 23, we were very dependent on 13% of our budget came from federal covid relief. so what that means is when this revenue runs out, 13 million, 13% of the money that we have today will no longer be there. and we need to find a way to fill that gap. and i want you

to remember the significance of the size of the pie of the federal relief as we go through the slide deck and look more closely at the data. so here you can see each of our transit, our revenue categories and how we fared relative to the budget. as you can see from the chart, we under recovered in both transit and parking revenue, but we over recovered in operating grants and general fund support. what that means is that the weakness is that we found in transit fares and in parking revenues was replaced just by strength in the local and the regional economy that that bolstered our revenues with operating and general fund grants. so what that means is that our budget structurally is very dependent on regional and local sources. and because last year we were particularly depend on those regional and local sources to bolster the weakness that we had in our own transit and parking revenues, we're even more so

doubly dependent on the health of the regional and local economy. and if you are reading the paper and looking at what's happening around in the city and with the general fund, you'll understand that that puts us in a quite a risky position with regard to our future revenue sources on the there is one piece of good news with regard to revenue and that was that we were able to, because of the amount of spending that we had, we underspent what we had budgeted, which meant that we needed to use less federal revenue to pay for our expenses. so on a positive note, what that means is we were able to, rather than spend money, federal funds last year, we were able to roll those funds forward into the future and extend our runway and give our ourselves more time to identify new revenue sources is to make sure that we're spending every dollar in the best possible way and get ourselves that much closer to the regional

revenue measure in november 2026. so we had intent. we thought that we would spend $172 million in federal relief, but we ultimately spent only $138 million rolling. 430 rolling forward. 34 million and ultimately what that meant is that we ended the year very close to being with our revenue and expenditure year, very closely matched because we were so closely managing our federal funds and making sure we were drawing down only what we needed to close the gap between revenue and expenditure. on the expenditure side, you can see that our largest expense as an agency is salary and fringe benefits, and that's because our most important resource is our people and our people are the people that drive the busses clean, the busses, fuel the busses, fix the busses, fix the streets, paint the curbs, do all of the direct services that we all value so much. and i think

the mta is a particularly interesting organization because as the vast majority of our positions is directly provide service to the public, over 97% of our positions are those positions that are directly providing service. only less than 3% of our positions are managerial positions. so when you look at that large piece of the pie, what you're really looking at is the day to day laborers who are working every day to put service out on the street. so when you look at our expenditure, you can see that we spent about $50 million less than we had budgeted. and that was through a combination an of under expenditure on the salary side because cause hiring, as you know has been really challenging not only for the mta but for every department throughout the city and in addition professional service spending was less than we had anticipated in the budget. so when you look at these two numbers together, the mta were

called an enterprise department, which means that we need to pay for our own expenses with our own revenues and our expenditure cannot exceed our revenue. so we operate a lot like a small business or i guess not so small since we have $1 billion budget or, or we i often think about our budget just the same. like i think about our, my family budget. i can't spend more than i bring in. and when we look at revenue for expenditure for fiscal year 22, 23, there's two ideas that we need to hold in our head. the first idea is that when we look at revenue and expenditure matched together, including federal relief, if we did a really good job managing our budget all in our revenue, our actual revenue versus our actual expenditure, we ended up the year $13 million to the positive, which means that we covered all of our expenditure without adding too much to our fund balance, which is a very healthy place to be. however when you look at our revenue and

expenditure and you take out federal relief and you assume that we would have to pay for all of this expenditure with our normal budget sources, transit fares, park revenue, the general fund operating grants, you can see that without that federal support, 124, we would not have been able to afford $124 million of the service that we put out on the street last year. and that's not budget to actuals. that's not budget, that's actuals. that's the amount of cash that went out the door and the amount of cash that came in the door. when you look at our actuals, we spent $124 million more revenue than we brought in. and to me, that's the fundamental problem with our financial situation to help you put that in context, $124.7 million is 19 muni lines. so lo ridout leasing expenditure to the level that we could afford is something that would require significant cuts. s that the

public will feel. so this is a serious problem that we need to take seriously. we so, so i'm sure you all have heard a lot about the recent $300 million that we received through the state budget allocation, and that was recently approved by the mtc. and i've gotten a lot of questions. what does that $300 million mean in an and from staff? i've gotten a lot of questions is what does that $300 mean? can i take positions off budget hold? and the answer is unfortunately no because that $300 million is backfilling the whole of the federal government relief as it is fully expended. so it doesn't add anything to our coffers. it merely fills the hole that would that is going to be left by federal relief and continues to extend the runway, getting us closer and closer to the regional revenue measure. for however, that's assuming a

lot of things right. and we're in a place of great uncertainty. we are labor negotiations are our labor contracts are ending in the end of june and we're in the process of renegotiating those as you noted from the pie chart, if 65% of our budget is labor, you can imagine that even a small increase because of cola is very impactful to our bottom line. this assumes that revenue assumptions that we've made in the base budget like fair indexing take place and that our continued belt tightening, like keeping positions on budget hold that those those things continue to go forward. so assuming those three things, the state budget deal does have a very big short term impact when i came before you at the nine month, our five year financial picture looked like this. we were balanced in 23, 24, but beginning in 24, 25, we showed a very large difference between expenditure and revenue, where expenditure

exceeded revenue post state budget relief. the new five year picture looks like this. the short term has been pinched out so that short so that in the short term revenue and expenditure are now largely balanced except for the remainder of 2526. we do still have some more work to do. there and i'll talk to you about that at the workshop. our ideas for closing that gap. but as you can see in the long term, once state relief runs out, now we're looking again at a pretty sizable gap between expenditure and revenue. and that's where our eyes are in the long term and looking at in november 2026, regional revenue measure. so in the long term, so i guess the big picture story is that for the next two year budget cycle, we have some work to do. we need to identify, we need to maintain fiscal discipline and we need to identify some new revenue

sources to close that small gap in 25, 26. but in the big picture, we are looking at quite a large financial gap in 26, 27, we're looking at deficits that start at $240 million a year and grow from there. $240 million is a lot of money. it's an amount of money that's almost too big to conceptualize. so just to put it into context for you, $240 million is more than the entire streets, division and so what that means is that in 26, 27, when there is an entire division of mta that we could no longer afford, or you could take all of the other divisions in the mta all of the support visions that do all the hiring, the fit division that does all the finance work, and even all of those divisions put together do not equal the gap that we have in 26, 27 and it would be very difficult to run the agency with no air or finance staff. so you can imagine that that is not

really a cut that we can contemplate. so i share this not because we're thinking about cutting the streets division, but because i just want you to understand how big the problem is and what we're really looking at in 26, 27. so in summary, we spent $124 million more last year than we brought in, which means that in the long term, once state and federal relief go away, in the absence of new revenue sources, we cannot afford to continue to provide the level of service that we are now providing in the short term, assuming that belt tightening continues, assuming that the revenue measures that were proposing in the budget are passed out and pending the outcome of labor negotiations, we are looking at a balanced budget in 2425, but there's some work to be done to close the gap in 2526 from a larger perspective, state and federal funds are helping us close that gap in the short term. but in the long term, we need to keep our eye on the prize of identifying new revenues and

making sure that we control our expenditures for such that our expenditure doesn't grow at a pace that it puts our overall level of expenditure outside of a place where that can be reasonably closed by a regional revenue measure. we don't want our expenditure to grow. so much that we're then unable to close the gap with all of the hard work that we're doing. so i think the theme that we're going into and what i'm thinking about as we go into the budget cycle is what can we do now to identify a new and ongoing sources of revenue that are going to not only get us to november 20th, 26 in the ballot measure, but keep us financially sustainable, all for the long term. and i will be back in january for another informational item that will present to you the overall strategy that we're using going into the budget and then in

january 30th, we'll all meet in a more informal setting at the workshop to talk about what some of those revenue options are and get board direction on which of those options are appealing to you and which we should consider continue to pursue and if you have any ideas that you'd like us to explore in march, we are going to try to separate out some of the decision making in the budget process to give you more time to fully consider your options. in march, we'll be bringing specific revenue proposals to you for your approval and then in april we'll be presenting a consolider updated operating and capital budget for your consideration and approval for fy. and then for final submission to the mayor on may 1st. so with that, i'm happy to answer any questions. thank you so much. it's a very helpful context setting and overview and thanks also for reviewing sort of the trajectory of what the board can expect over the next several months. director hemminger,

please. thank you, madam chair. bree, i actually have quite a few questions and it might help if you could scroll through the slides with me on a few of them. the first one on slide ten. all right, the numbers are very tiny. yes, they are. okay, the page numbers are very small. got you. got better eyes. yes. so so. oh, that's just me. that's not helpful. the non personnel services, that 20% chunk. what is all that? that's a variety of things. it's any time that we use a contractor to provide services in general, that tends to be a short term work that is needed for either a specialized set of skills that staff do not have, have, or it can be for a specific project, or it can be

for a specific set of work like i'll give you an example in the fit division, when we contracted out this year because we are, as part of my tenure as a new cfo, is i'm diving into the chart of accounts and trying to make sure that everything is really clean and transparent. and so we needed to do a large number of grant closures and because the existing accounting staff are occupied with the day to day work, that makes the agency go, we needed additional resources to do a focused push to close these grants. so we contracted with an outside provider to do that one time push to get all of our grants closed and in order so that then the ongoing staff could continue to maintain closing grants in a timely manner. and that's sort of how contracted services are used throughout the agency. got it. well all and obviously that has an advantage for you and that

you're not committing to that resource for multi years. there would still be trade offs involved, but it's not like regular staff where you're hoping they stick around. so this would clearly be a place you'd look when we start talking about belt tightening right? correct. okay on the same slide, the other services to other departments, is that the famous work orders? yes and so this is like a source object, right? did we make any progress? yes. in the current budget, are we hoping to make any progress in the next budget or just say, thank you, sir? may i have another? this is something that we were beginning to make progress on. but then news around the city general fund has been disrupting that said, we are making good progress on making sure that we are not paying for services that we're not receiving well, that would

be a good start. i would also add that some of the services, in fact, some of our most costly services are from the public utilities commission, but those are for energy. so they are so are our work orders with other departments are not always huge resources. sometimes they're also the provision of goods like energy and fuel. and look, i know there are times from time to time when we're asked to do somebody a favor and it'd be nice to get some of this back in a favor coming our way. so look, i encourage you to do what you're doing. jeff and if you can get away with more, it'd be a good thing in my book. slide 11. next one. yes the inter fund transfer, which was not budgeted

and ended up with 53 million bucks. what? what happened there? so there's a couple things going on there. that was actually largely the result of long term strategic planning. so for example, we have a number of reserves like our excess liability reserve and our debt financing reserve that that were were not even though our debt service reserve must go up because of our debt covenants. that was an un budgeted cost. so i took advantage of the fact that we had under expended some and salary and fringe and professional services to make our mandatory contribution to our debt service reserve. in addition, we have an excess liability reserve of which because we do not have a general liability policy and we are self insured each year we put aside money to pay a claim should that claim ever happen. and i also

created a capital fund reserve to help us with the increasing cost of project delivery. we found instances where projects cost more than we had anticipated, and so i wanted to take advantage of the fact that we had under expended in salaries and benefits in professional services to put some money in that capital reserve to plan for a rainy day. you've got a slide on this in the appendix, which often is more revealing than what you didn't put in the appendix. sometimes but what you're saying is, did you have discretion not to make these transfers into those funds? some yes and some no. the debt service is a mandatory contribution that i have to make the contract to the general liability policy or general liability reserve is a long standing contribution that was made, i believe, maybe five

years ago. the board decided to do our own policy. so, yes, the policy in the case of the excess liability, yes, in the case of debt, no, that's part of our debt covenants. i know all about debt and then the other one was the capital reserve, which again, we created ourselves. so correct, we can decide to pay it one year and the next year, not pay it. that is correct. okay getting to the state and regional funds the 300 million and on behalf of my old pals at mtc, i'll just say you're welcome. it's a large sum of money. yes, it is. half of it is mtc funds. it's not all state money that that gets us through fy 26, which is the next budget cycle. is that correct? all the federal money we still have, plus this money gets us through 26. we think almost gets us through 24, 25 and through most

of 25, 26. there is a small gap that we still need to close. i count that as a yes. thank you. i think there are conditions on receiving the funds. the only ones i'm aware of are bart and muni, although those are the two agencies that got the lion's share of the money. what are those conditions ones? and do we expect to be able to comply with them? yes. so the conditions are basically around regional accountability to our work in terms of bringing the region together and making it appear like all the transit services are one integrated system, which we are working on and making really good progress on. and the second is, is improving fare compliance at muni, which is something we are absolutely working on and committed to. so we feel fine with the conditions in fact, we support the conditions of the money because it helps us with work that we wanted to do anyways. so i thought i heard that bart's

bart's focus is likewise on fares but relates to their project to implement new gates right, that are less porous. i only i only know what we signed up for and i'm ready in your case, it's more a question of how we deploy the enforcement officers. that's right. so it's basically committing to implement the plans that chief of security kimberly burris, has already developed. and we intend to do so. so it sounds like keep doing what you're doing is the condition. well, a bad condition. it is, is it's more than that. it is substantial work. it is work that we wanted to do, too. but in the juggling of our day to day priorities, this allows us to ensure that we actually meet the requirements and the schedule that are being imposed upon us from mtc right next slide. thank you. jeff. is 18, which i think is your

summary slide and i'm going to make a point that might sound like nitpicking, but i think it's important at the very bottom you say we need to act now to identify a new ongoing revenue sources or new ways of doing business. yes. and it seems to me that or ought to be an and the substantive question behind that is at our workshop, are we going to be seeing not just revenue options, but also expenditure reductions? we will be our goal is to continue to provide the service that we are now providing. and so we're the primary focus is on identifying the revenue sources that will allow us to do that. that being said, director tumlin is very focused on making sure that we are operating in the most efficient way, and we do have an ongoing project within the agency where the executive team

is. i identifying efficiencies within our divisions and how we can perform our functions better. and i think you've heard many times from director kirschbaum about her focus on efficiency around operator scheduling and headway has yielded great results. so i think even if we aren't presenting expenditure packages that particular highlight more for efficiency, i think we are still doing those things. we just don't feel that we need to hire more people to identify ways to become more efficient that we can do with existing staff, say we're at the bargaining table right now. and so that that presents another opportune city to try to make some headway on this subject. right. i think it's, you know, bargaining is part we are part of the city bargaining team. and so the overall cola for most positions, particularly those

positions in the citywide classes, is negotiated by da. but happily, i think the city and the mta are in alignment there in that we, you know, we want about like, you know, muni specific, mta specific. we do have. yes we don't let the city do that for us. we negotiate those directly, right? we negotiate our own work rules and direct our agreement or chief people, officer kim ackerman and i have been working together to prepare the bargaining team to cost out all of the work rule changes that will be presented to us and make sure that those the cost of those changes is within target as well as savings as maybe madam chair, we could schedule some kind of closed session on the subject of how things are going there at the appropriate time. we will we will be working on that. so one of the other fun things that we get to do over the next six months, in addition to budget is

labor negotiations. so we'll be working with you on that last one for me is slide 28, which is buried back there in the appendix. you you got it. yes. well one thing that struck me, just the thing at the bottom, reserve funds cannot fund ongoing budget expenses. you don't mean that to be a legal statement. you're just saying it's a bad idea, right? i mean, the debt service operating reserve we have of 140 million. correct. this board decided we could spend some of that on ongoing operations with the exception of the debt service reserve. you to. yeah. which you are legally prohibited from spending. i would take the debt service reserve off the chart because unless you just want a lot of lawsuits from your investors, just don't even bother thinking about it. but the other three on this page, as

we discussed earlier, are are there policies of discretion? yes. and in terms of runway, which we keep focusing on runway to land the plane, these could buy you more runway on the on the operating reserve. have we spent any of that through this whole pandemic and recession? we have not spent the operating reserve of during the pandemic, which i regard as a mark of good financial management. i think when i. yeah but this is a rainy day fund, right? and it's been raining pretty hard around here. well, it's this is this is a this is not just a rainy day. this is a multi year monsoon. and so what we have been very clear about is that the real emergency has not even come close to hitting us yet. and we have to keep these reserves in place so that we don't end up with the reserve is going to

gobble these up in a hurry. right. but but we also know, thanks to the additional money that's come from mtc in the state, that that lengthens our runway. right. and make attains a path for shrinking through attrition rather than through layoffs. in order to balance our budget. yeah. look, don't get me wrong. i think you in particular, the two of you have have managed your way through this pretty well to this point. and i know there is a fiscal cliff coming. you keep warning us, although this is the longest run up to a fiscal cliff i've ever seen. it's a very slow moving train on six years of money from uncle sam and now we've got the tail end of money from the state and from the region. and we still haven't hit e on the gas tank. so i think we're as probably as well positioned as we can be. but i just wanted to make the point that and look, i've made the

point before, so i don't want to sound like a broken record, but i think sometimes the rhetoric gets a little too alarmist. right? and when you've been bailed out six years in a row, that's a long time to be crying wolf. now, i think we've run out of governmental agencies to bail us out because we've done federal we've done state, and now we've done regional and the hope is that we can do regional again with the revenue measure. but the reason i say i think you've done well in managing how much we've come through is the fact that i think, frankly, the chances of that regional measure passing and i think the polling backs this up are not great. and so i think we need to be prepared for the fact that it may not pass or it may not pass the first time. that's right. and what do we do then? now? are we covering that in the workshop

to. it's going to be a long workshop? well, the certainly the idea of it, and that's one of the reasons why we have been very cautious to not spend the reserve of the wolf is real. the wolf is really big. and the thing that has happened with us is somebody moved us a little bit farther away from the wolf, but the wolf is still coming at us. so this money is for when the wolf, if and when the wolf catches up with and also, we will be needing to have conversations. i mean, you know, bri has talked about the number of muni lines that will need to eliminate in order to balance the budget without additional either relief or additional sources of revenue. and that that is our path, right? i mean, that's ultimately that's where we end up if we fail at achieving among other sources of revenue, the if there's any upside to all of this, it's that

other regional transit operators are in worse shape than we are. like bart. and so we have realized that it needs to be part of our strategy, making sure that all of the operators have a viable path forward because it's one thing if muni survives, but if bart doesn't make it, there's no downtown economic recovery for san francisco and that then drags right that that then drags down the mta correct, right. and so our more prudent fiscal management plus the ridership demographic patterns that are more favorable to muni allow us to link arms with bart in order to create date a compelling story as well as viable politics . birx to figure out what our next move is. well, i and i. well let me ask if you agree. the 300 million that we scored from the state and region and

bart, i think got a similar amount. a higher amount. yes. the two of us got, what, 80, 90% of the money? yeah, that's more in line with what you would probably call classically the need that the two were facing because they were shorted in bart's case on fare revenue. and in our case, not so much fare revenue is the bottom dropped out of downtown and there went the tax base. that's exactly right. and this is really the first time where both the state and the regional governments truly allocated money based upon need, particularly for our riders who had the fewest alternative choices. so typically we do a little bit of need and a little bit of population because it's democracy and you need to distribute the money evenly where the people are in this case, the money was distributed based upon where well and i

think we ought to try to ride that horse because it's a good lesson to learn from what we've been through. it's probably the case that some operators owe the region a refund for the earlier allocations because there it was a lot more spread. the peanut butter and everybody got something. and in this case, they've settled on a strategy where for the truly neediest get the money madam chair. thank you. thank you. i'm going to go to director henzi next, please. thank you. and i'll be i'll be shorter because my colleague over here asked a lot of the technical questions, but what i would say, de is moving forward. this was kind of just an update. big picture presentation. and what i would say is when, um, in the future for when staff or you

specifically come back to us maybe with some packages or options for how to, um, either or this our budget or, or, or some, some, some budget that shifts maybe some of our resources is to, to, i know, for example, that the vision zero subcommittee spoke about about perhaps using the budget to perhaps shift some more resources as to vision zero and doing something on the streets, not necessarily that we're going to do that, but just to sort of put together a package that would say what that would look like, but also kind of look at the have us kind of look at the tradeoffs for what we what we what we would lose if we were to

do something like that. so we can really think about as board members, the tradeoffs that we're going to have to make in this process, because if things stay the way they are, then we are going to have to make some difficult tradeoffs, i think. so to have this cop car conversations, i think would be helpful. but, um, and i think some of that work will start at the workshop. uh, my, my actual question is, you, you sort of laid out the process for us, but in terms of public engagement, i know in our last budget cycle we had town halls and a bunch of public outreach. so what are the other opportunities that the public is going to have to sort of weigh in on our budget priorities and yeah, that are other than other than coming to give public comment at these meetings. great question. director hinsey, we are planning

on following a public outreach process that's very similar to the process that we did for our last budget cycle, and that is in fact one of the areas of focus focus for the workshop. so we will be presenting you and giving you an opportunity to comment on that at the workshop. all right. thank you, madam chair. dr. henderson, please. thank you, chair. and. hi, brea. i have a couple of questions since i'm just trying to figure out where things sit. so it's really just to help me better understand how the budget is built. so for the salaries section, that 63% that includes retirees benefits. yes. it payments into the. okay. so then when you have some positions that are not filled, those vacancies, the i guess i'm trying to understand and how the vacancies are the only thing

that are adding to that that gap or is there some are there any things that are related to the retire fees that are in that number? so the cost of an employee is the wages that the employee takes home, the cost of their benefits, their the benefits that they receive today , which is mostly health care. the cost of their payroll taxes and the cost of their retiree health and our retiree pension benefits. okay. and so when we look at the cost of a position, we incorporate the full cost of the position and the costs across those line items will come down proportionately. and most of those costs are proportional to the salary. so those costs will come down. proportional to the salary. i see. okay. and so when you say some of the positions are on budget hold, that just means that have they been vacant for a

certain period of time? and so now you don't intend to fill them for this next budget year? or how what does what triggers the budget hold so prior to you joining the board, we did a financial review at the six month and we identified the fact that the agency had projected $60 million of revenue to be coming in. that was we did not anticipate coming in during the year and that was primarily tied to the fact that i think i remember during sitting at home in my house and everyone was talking about like hot, like the hot post covid summer and how it was going to be like the roaring 20s and it was just going to be amazing. when we all came out of our chrysalises and then we all came out of our chrysalis and it was like, so that $60 million that we thought was going to show up because everyone was going to be on transit again and driving again and parking again and moving around again. that

didn't happen. and so to adjust for that, we went through a process where we asked all of the division directors to take a step back and look at all of their positions holistically and prioritize which their most important positions were, were and put those at the front of the line for hiring and then put their least priority positions at the back of the line. and then everyone was given every division was given a target to hit and said, here, here's the amount of money you have. you can go shopping with this money, start filling your positions from top to bottom and once you run out of money, all the remaining positions are going to go on budget. hold so it was actually a much more where we tried to take a policy driven approach to putting positions on budget hold rather than just saying this position has been vacant for x number of months. it goes on budget hold because positions can be vacant for a

variety of reasons is because of the challenges of hiring in the city. maybe the list is aged and there's been no list for two years, so you're desperate to hire the position, but you can't because you don't have an active list. so we wanted to really incorporate all that nuance and target it using our limited dollars to hire the positions that we care about the most. got it. okay. that's that's really helpful. thank you. and so then moving on, i think these might be quick questions as uh, so apec happened and we also got some federal money and so was all of the federal money. covid or sort of pandemic related or was any of it related to apec? so the federal relief that i talked about in this presentation was part of the covid relief package that came during pre my tenure. so i think in 2020 and 2021, the money related to apec was actually a small grant. i think it was $2.3 million that was specific related to service to providing

services for apec. okay and so but i imagine that all of what we heard about happened cost more than what that grant brought in. so does that get backed out of the gap, that $124 million gap, you know, like there are many things that money does to contribute to the local economy and the downtown recovery that we're not directly compensated for that are just part of our contribution as a city department like special event. you know, certain special events, um, like outside lands do pay day in order to compensate for the additional services. but other services are not directly compensated, like hardly strictly bluegrass or halloween. you know, these are part of our daily operations as transit operator. so it's just the cost of basically we it's a cost of doing business. okay. um

okay. i think that's it. thank you. thank you. director henderson. director kahina, please. thank you so much for your presentation and for me. this is super helpful. just to get context and get us up for a wonderful board workshop. we're going to have a lot of discussions, it seems. um i just wanted to drill down a little bit on the data for parking revenue by category and also the transit revenue by category. it seems like on the parking revenue side that we are catching up to pre-pandemic levels and wanting to just get a sense of this, this i guess this analysis indicates how we performed last fiscal year. do we have a sense of how we're trending this fiscal year? yes, in fact, we do so in a dramatic twist of fate, this year, transit revenues are actually we

have we're seeing a very small uptick in transit revenues year over year at this same point in the year. so at this same point as last fiscal year, the end of september, we generated 2 million more dollars in transit fares this year than we did last year, 2 million and change and that's consistent with some of the modest ridership recovery that we're seeing. conversely, we're seeing. about a 5% were were off where we were last year in parking revenue by about 4 to 5. and unfortunately, 5% of parking revenue exceeds the $2 million. we got in transit revenue. but i would say i always hesitate to talk about numbers after the first quarter because the data set is quite small and the way city expenditure works, you don't because of encumbrances and work

order billing and lots of boring things, you don't really see the numbers start to really hit the books until december. so i hesitate to take too much out of the first three months, but i would say on par if you take the 15,000 foot picture is we're about where we were last year overall, all our expenditure levels are about the same. we're spending a little bit more in labor year than we did last year, which is thanks to the good work of the human resources team. we're spending a little bit less in professional services. but those those two things kind of net each other out and parking and revenue are kind of netting each other out so big picture is, is it's a lot more of the same. and i'm curious about this because, you know, as we're looking at the fiscal cliff and potential trade offs that we're going to have to make, i'm reflecting on slide 13, where we're looking at, you know, without the federal

relief, that's equivalent to 19 muni lines. we have to do our utmost to protect our muni lines and to protect transit as much as possible. and so as we're i think as we gear up for the board workshop, it would be great to understand the menu of options that we have for trade offs. i don't want the narrative to be out there that transit will be the first one that we cut or, you know, to have that sort of to talk about our issues and with that perspective, because it does seem like there are many different areas where we could potentially cut and we really have to be protective of that service in particular. and so, um, i'm curious to see if by the time we get to the board workshop, we could have some sort of projection ins on how transit fares are bouncing back or how those are performing ing um, parking is such a big piece of the pie though, so i understand what you mean in

terms of, you know, going down 5% there, going up in transit is not, you know, it's not um, balancing out the impacts. but i am curious to understand and i know this, this team will be very interested in understanding what are those trade offs. and i for one, i'm very protective of transit. and so i want to make sure that we are protecting our transit lines as much as possible. we are a transit agency. that's what we do. so i definitely want to do our utmost to mitigate any impacts there. um, i did have some questions around thinking about alternative revenue sources as and understanding how employer incentive programs like those that well, i guess unemployed incentive program. but it is an incentive program that we had with like the warriors for instance, or chase center right where we had folks who had tickets that were also doubled up as muni passes, right. um, understanding the efficacy of

those and understanding the success rate with those sorts of incentive programs and thinking outside the box in terms of how we start generating revenue. do you have a sense of was that successful? was that not successful? was that is that something we should expand on? is that something, you know, just really wasn't worth investing more time in? just wanted to get your pick your brain on that piece and maybe jeff too. i don't know. so i'm a huge fan of building the cost of muni into the cost of programs so that everyone gets a free muni pass whether they want one or not. if they're going to any event at chase arena or going to outside lands or going to a convention or, you know, are an employee of a san francisco based institution, then for each of these programs, we typically try to make them just a little bit better than revenue neutral. they do have an impact, though, in generating a lot of

ridership. so depending upon who the audience is, where they're coming from, they're generally very successful because people like free and so, so long as they cover our costs, it's, i think, good for the agency and something we would love to see more of at the regional level. there is currently a pilot going on for bay pass. there are a number of colleges throughout the region, including including san francisco state, where many students are getting free access to all transit operators in the nine county bay area, whether they want it or not. and the region is studying how that is impacting travel behavior for the next phase of the bay pass program is going to extend that to employ years. building on the success of caltrain's go pass program and vta's eco pass program, this would be a paid program using the basically pegged at the marginal cost of providing that service to those employers and that starts to become very interesting for san

francisco. so it is the sort of thing where we have long thought that both our local transport demand management requirements, as well as the bay area air quality management districts, require armaments for mode shift to achieve either pollution or greenhouse gas emissions reduction. is that dramatically expanding an employer based bypass program could be a win win for transit, as well as for employers who are trying to convince their workforce to come back to the office. so this is this is i'm glad you mentioned it because it is top of mind for me in our larger conversations with the region about what are our options for addressing the fiscal cliff in a way that is win win. and how does you know, if we look at the bay pass like just so myself and i guess members of the public as well, for them to understand how does the revenue end up coming into our coffers if we participate in

something like that that is a regional initiative. how does it benefit us in the long run? how does what are the mechanics of it coming to our bank? and yeah, you know, so this has been one of the interesting side effects of covid. it has forced all of the regional transit operators to come together. where we have met at every single monday morning at 9 a.m. since the beginning of covid. and we're continuing to do that to figure out how to coordinate efforts and address problems. that has also led to the regional transit transformation task force that has started to produce results in a whole long list of categories, including fare integration, the bay pass program, clipper 2.0 and so on. it has also resulted in the hiring for the first time of a regional transit network coordinator here at mtc, who is now leading matrixed staff, both in mtc and across all of our operators. so you may know liz

bryson on who worked on the geary rapid. liz is one of the key people who we've basically partly seconded to work on regional issues as and so the now that this regional work is starting aft, we're able to quickly come to agreement for example on how do we manage the transaction of distributing funding from bay pass to the operators and more importantly, how do we take risks with innovative programs with a guarantee me that mtc can make any operator whole that loses money unexpectedly. so this this is the fact that we're organizing together and working collaboratively is allowing finally some real progress to be made at integrating the region's transit operators. from a user perspective, it's good, really good stuff. yeah. no, and i'm so excited that you mentioned innovation and i think this was this is something i mentioned as

we were getting briefed on on the board workshop is that i really do hope that, you know, as we craft a budget, we are crafting one that really helps us push the envelope on what you know, how we can lead the nation and the world in our transit system. we are, you know, a world class transit system. and so we need to sustain that reputation and grow that. and so i do hope that, you know, as we're looking at ways to cut and how to balance things and all those things that we are prioritize doing that as well because we have to create systems that will outlast outlive all of us and make sure that we're always, you know, doing our best for the city as a whole. thank you, director kahina um, colleagues, i just want to make 1 or 2 comments now and then go to public comment. one is that cfo muhurta and i had a chance to speak in advance of this meeting and i think we and director tomlin share a goal that this entire budget process is very collaborative. it's iterative. we're sharing

information back and forth, both staff sharing transparently challenges with us, board as early in the process as possible, sharing our priorities so those don't come in too late in the process to be impactful. board not feeling like we're put in a position where the decisions, the substantive decisions have already been made. so even in i'm just asking you one question, even in a very difficult budget year such as this, i believe we still need to have strategic growth areas and strategic priority areas. as an institution. given all these trade offs, what is the best way for the board to signal to you now early in the process, guess what might be sort of some of our strategic priorities or desired areas? and how can we just continue this goal of a collaborative, iterative process? thank you for that question. i would say yes, too early because the sooner i know, the more time i have to think

thoughtfully and give thoughtful responses and then i would also say the more specific, the better. so, for example, saying we want options is not that helpful because i could cut the budget an infinite number of ways, but i found director hintze's comment. we would like to invest more in vision zero. now, that is something that i could that's something i can work with. what would be even better would be we want to do one additional one more quick build than you had originally planned or we care a lot about. vision. zero encompasses a lot of things right? so the more narrow and specific that you can get, the better. i am able to come up with options is because because then it becomes sort of a problem solving exercise for me where i know what your goal is and i'm coming up with options for you to help meet

that goal. i think what's more challenging for me is just sort of like the broad direction of we want more, like how much more? and more of what is what's really helpful for me to understand. and i think for me, um, because because of where we are in the overall financial picture, unfortunately, i think that we are in a place of trade offs as opposed to adding ing new expenditure. and so i think it would be helpful for me to have this information if we could come out of the workshop with a set of things that you would like me to identify options for you to have more of that would be very helpful and i would just add one more thing, which is, um, my staff will tell you i, i have like a couple mantras and one of them is when everything is a priority and nothing is a priority and, and i

think that sometimes we feel like in order to do something, we have to hire another person to do it. but that's not always the case, right? sometimes it's just one even into to the way that you do things. so like, for example, in a very boring way, i am extremely interested in clean account, clean accounting transactions that are done the same way every time because it makes financial reporting easier to and i'm not i'm not hiring a consultant or a person to come in and create a new structure. i'm just articulating that priority to staff. and so as they are going through their daily work, i'm telling them this is how i want to see the transaction is. and then i run reports and look to make sure that they're complying right. and so i've just sort of woven in that into part of my daily job and their daily job. and so i think there are opportunities

to focus where we put our attention to make sure that we're meeting your priorities within our existing resources. okay and let me actually just add, as well, because you talked about trade offs. so in addition to suggesting things that we should be doing more of, i also want to make sure that you're also thinking about things that we should be doing less of, right? what are services that it's time to let go of or processes that take too long and consume too much staff time that we should be accelerating as well as what are new revenue sources that we should be chasing in the short run in order to match something that we want to do more of? because ultimate it, it is a zero sum game though there is some flexibility and a key thing that i really i think we all need advice from all of you on is how do we determine the right and optimal amount of engagement with community because doing really authentic, strong community engagement is so

important, but it's also consumes a lot of staff time to do it skillfully. so how do we make decisions about when we just got to get it done and when we really need to sit down with community and hear and practice and negotiate through and then and then test and come back and the stuff that we like to do, but that we, we don't have the staff to do always great and just again to set board expectations looking at your slides 19 which is the overview timeline chart, are we really hearing from you that sort of specific actionable board feedback at the january 16th and january 30th are really like the most prime opportunities to inform the options that you're going to be bringing us later. so maybe we can have work together on january 16th to sort of tee up the world of potential ideas and then board members can come prepared to that january 30th workshop to give you that specific feedback. sure. okay.

thank you. i'm going to open it up to public comment for anyone in the room on this item. the financial update. i am not going to be overly structured here. i apologize. that was an incredible amount of material and information. but i do want to try to slightly maybe reframe and i want to bring up a word we haven't used for a while, which is structural deficit bit. so prior to the pandemic, there was a fair amount of discussion of sfmta's structural deficit, structural operating deficit at where every year it was mostly labor cost was outstripping the increase in revenue and while the pandemic made all of that much worse and we have this very real cliff sitting in front of us, unfortunately, real fundamentally, there needs to be a larger realignment in the city and in the region on how we fund

transportation, because otherwise we're just going to keep coming up against this where our costs are outgrowing revenue. so i just want to put that out there that simply looking at this as being caused by the pandemic isn't quite right. this is a continuation. and an explosion of a preexisting structural problem, too. i want to say that as a writer, it pains me a little bit to hear that we put excess operational money this year into a capital fund. i understand that the capital budget is hurting a lot and that we need emergency funds there. i hope we can find different places to find those funds in the future other than the operating budget, because right now we know our out years look really bad and that we may need that money in those out years in order to run service. so finally, i just have a question because i'm missing something, which is we know we spent 124 million actual this year and that we're only getting

99 million from mtc next year. so what's closing that remaining deficit? are we getting money early from mtc or is it just further belt tightening? like where's the other 20 to 30 million coming from in the operational budget next year? thank you for all you do. thank you for your comments. anyone else in the room? okay. seeing none, please open a remote at this time. we'll move to remote public comment not to exceed a total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue. each speaker will have two minutes. no speakers. okay okay. uh, with that we will close unless director so you have any comments or questions? okay, we'll close item 12 and please call the next item places you on. item number 13, the transportation 2050 program initiatives and capital needs and required. it's split into three items a, b and c. good afternoon, chair egan. board members jonathan rogers chief strategy officer it's late in

the afternoon, so i'm going to try to make this a little more fun. we get to be a little bit visionary this afternoon, so this is an update on transportation 2050. so again, i want you and the public to take context. we do all of this planning and all of these visions. as for our transportation system, you'll see that list there in transportation 2050 is a question that you've been talking about today and that members of the public, how do we get there? how do we achieve that vision? so right now, one of our biggest issues is our structural funding gap. so that's one of the issues we want to deal with. but how do we achieve vision zero? how do we continuously improve the transit system for san franciscans? these are the questions that we want to deal with. so in february of this last year at your board workshop, we started talking about what are some of these initiatives that we could move forward with. so we talked about key trends, and there are three categories of initiatives policy, operational and capital initiatives. so i will give an update on those today and then in may, we provided you with an

update on the 2023 community survey. so again, to give the board information on what is san franciscans think about transportation? what are their priorities is what are what do they think about the sfmta and our performance in providing those services. so again, trying to give the board information an it needs to be well informed and make decisions today. what we're going to be talking about is two elements around capital. so our 20 year capital plan here at the sfmta where we take all of those ideas on the physical infrastructure for the system, state of good repair, enhancing or expanding that system. and what are those what will those cost in a 20 year window? we'll also be looking at our annual state of good repair report that tells you and the public what the current condition of the transportation system is. so again, we want to add on these chapters of information that we will share with you in the public. be transparent about it so people can understand our priorities and the programs that we're moving forward with. so again, real quick, the state of good repair report out. so jason chan will be presenting that to

you today. darryl yip from our planning subdivide in the streets division will be presenting our 20 year capital plan and then i will give you an update on those various policies and initiatives. so this is part of that conversation the board chair just mentioned. so today starts that conversation we're going to give you information. it gives you and the public a sense of where we stand with the infrastructure. we'll give you an update again on those policies and initiatives that you agreed to in a list that we had during the board workshop. and we can continue that process to iterate around that list and initiatives. so to start off a key component of that board workshop was, is trust with the community and how to do that. and two elements to do that are being empathetic. so hearing what the public is saying and the information we're getting and taking that in when we consider our decisions and actions as an organization and then being transparent, how well are we doing again with the community survey, how are we addressing the public priorities and what is our performance in that area through sharing data through sfmta comm and other

elements that we have within the organization for the board. this report and what we've been trying to do over the past 12 months is to give you longitudinal data. so very often we want to make decisions around single events. they're single events and projects, acts that occur here at the mta board. but the mta delivers hundreds of projects to the public every year. we provide hundreds of thousands of hours of transit service that again through our community survey, our riders, like the service we provide very often the riders love the service we provide. it's the non riders who have the biggest concerns about muni, something that we often don't very much talk about. so again, in providing you this information, this gives you the opportunity to discuss trade offs and priorities. and again, we just want to add chapters to that book for you so you have everything you need to make some good decisions and consider the tradeoffs. so just really quickly, because again, there are new board members. i do just want to do a quick update on the community survey since we did that in march. so again, this is

a statistical survey. so it is it considers the general population of san francisco and we ask their opinions on various questions. this again, is for us to stay in touch again over time of what san franciscans think about their priorities and the priorities that they have for this organization. and then we want to balance those results again, because we can we can't do everything as bree just said, right? if we try to do everything for everyone, we won't do everything very well, right? so again, we want to prioritize these and what we attempt to do. just a summary for the board again. so the view of the mta remains steady in that community survey. so two thirds of people really like the work that we're doing. we are a vital part of the community. it is very clear there are fewer trips downtown and the data just shows us that, as bree noted and director tumlin, that impacts our revenues. and then in turn, the services that we can provide to the city again, in across all our across all the surveys that are done, more than 60% view our service positive. and again, that's our investment. as

director, tumlin noted in quality, safety, cleanliness and improved and reliable service. and then we are a key component of san francisco. people care about transportation, they care about muni, they care about the safety of our streets. it does not matter what survey, those continue to remain key priorities. so again, i'm going to go through this quick because we have a lot of information, 88% always in the 80 to 90% see that? what we do here at the sfmta is a key component of san francisco. we are a key component of san francisco. so amongst all the priorities and again, to put this in your mind, investing equitably, fast and convenient transit, more repairs and maintenance and improving safety and access, it's what this board deals with in every meeting. and this is ■consistent with what the public wants us to do. and i want to stress that over and over. so again, when we look at more repairs and maintenance, these slides have been updated since the prior version, 84% want us to focus on fixing the system. so when we talk about gutting maintenance,

when we talk about the train control system, when we talk about our facilities, this is consistent with what san franciscans want. this organization to focus on the backlog of maintenance. two thirds of san francisco want us to focus on that and our conversation about the stability of our rail system. fix it week. all of the initiatives we have to continue to invest in the state of good repair of our rail system, the subway reliability program. all those are key elements. and 73% of san franciscans think we need to focus on the subway and make it work. when it comes to fast and convenient transit, 80% plus always focus on both delays and reliability. 80% of san franciscans want us to focus on reliability and we have continued to do that 49. and that was a significant drop from 2021. want us to focus on crowding and i give the transit division and julie kirschbaum and her team a ton of credit. as you'll recall, in the last service update that the transit

division provided you a key focus was on how do we deal with crowding for the ridership, right? and we've made service adjustments to deal with that. so this is the lowest number in 15 years at the mta that i've ever seen, where the public isn't as focused on crowding. and i think that that's that shows we're providing some high quality service for people when it comes to safety and access. as the board will remember, we did not ask about crime in the prior community survey in 2021. it was an issue that emerged during the budget outreach. we did ask in 2023 and still 81% of san franciscans think that we need to focus as an organization on this issue. both both on inclusive service and making our streets safer for san francisco ins, that is always at two thirds or better. that stayed absolutely consistent and has been consistent over the past four years. so so i'm giving you this information to give you a sense. this is where san franciscans are. and a lot of what we do in this organization is dealing directly with what we're hearing from san franciscans. so now we'll move

on to the condition of that said system. and jason is going to come up and present to you the 2022 state of good repair report . good afternoon, directors. my name is jason chan, lead asset management analyst. i'm here today to present at the 2022 state of good repair report. so state of good repair report aims to track the progress of the state of good repair investments and asset management practice and compared directly with previous reporting periods. it also outlines the sfmta's priorities prioritization, planning and delivery practices related to maintaining a state of good repair and institutionalizing the practice of asset management. so in other words, it acts as a guiding tool for future investments. so you have to remember it's a snapshot in time of our condition and asset value. this slide is

really just to give you a foundational concept of the different terms that i'm explaining today. so we categorize our assets into ten different categories. some of those asset classes include facilities, light rail vehicles, motor busses, trolley busses, etcetera. when we talk about capital asset, it's any facility or equipment that has a useful life of one year or more and a value of $5,000 or more. we further categorize our assets into. for fta purposes, into transit critical services and non transit critical services. so some of those transit critical services include like track and overhead lines. when we talk about replacement value, it's the amount that we would have to pay to replace the value of that asset at present time. and then useful life is the

expected life of that asset. this slide contains detail on the asset replacement value for sfmta in total, 20 in 2022, our total replacement value estimated at 16.9 billion. it helps us by knowing the asset value of all assets. it kind of helps advocate for our funding for future grants and other such funding sources as the replacement values are updated year to year on inflation, on inflation, as well as a further refinements from subject matter experts. this year it increased 6% from last year and that has to do with us using a 2.5% inflation as well as we updated replacement values for our light rail vehicles, motorcoach and non-revenue fleet to account for a lot of that. the future electrification of our fleet.

asset backlog details. so this slide. details our backlog for 2022. so it's currently at 3.64 billion, which on a pure asset count, it represents 29.5% that are past its useful life from a total value perspective, it represents 21.5. so as you can see from compared to last year, actually decreased overall 10. but that had to do a lot with our heavy investments on our traffic signals in the past three years. so hence you can see that the orange line, it would reduce from 69 to 65. however for our transit critical services still increased from. 31 to 35% so this slide is further details on how we

categorize our asset backlog by asset class. so as you can see, three of the four asset classes is with the highest backlog is in the other category repair section. that's because with the heavy focus in the past on transit critical, our other state of repair, our assets are falling behind. so parking and traffic backlog reduced 41% from the prior year due to updates to over half the signals due to emphasis on signal replacement in the cip. yeah overhead backlog is third highest agency wide, but the highest on transit service criticality pointing to a need to invest in our overhead lines stations. backlog is our fourth highest agency wide, but risks may be higher because we there are over 50 years old and we don't know a whole lot about the condition pointing to a need to a condition assessment which we hope to advertise in early 2024.

this slide represents the asset backlog by asset class oops condition source excuse me. so overall, our percentage of assets in the poor condition is 10% lower than 2021. overall our condition score did improve 1% from 3.01 to 3.05. that had heavily to do with the changes, as i've mentioned to our traffic signal data and operating restroom data and some other asset classes that i kind of focused on for transit critical asset assets. the percentage in poor condition is 3% higher than 2021 from 3% to 6. that's largely due to the fact that i didn't include mid-life overhaul data and updates to our useful life, to our paratransit vehicles, which heavily changed the which led to the uptick in

the poor condition. but it did change a lot because of that. the change in useful life, other state of good repair assets, the percentage of assets in poor condition is 14% lower from 33% to 19% and that's due to the updates to our parking and traffic data. in total, 20% of our total assets are in the 1 to 2 poor range, while 22% of our total assets are in in 2 to 3 marginal range parking and traffic has the highest percentage of poor of assets in poor condition at 17% track station overhead or top three earth assets in in marginal range at 72 to 37 and 19% respectively. so depending on how you look at prior to or prior authorization, you would think that parking and traffic would be the asset class to focus on. but i do want to pay attention to the to the asset

classes in the future that will eventually lead to the poor range such as stations track and overhead. so something to think about. so without action, those assets will eventually fall into poor range. so this is the slide that kind of scares a lot of people is our 20 year and five year investment need projection. the graphic represents the level of investment that is needed to keep sfmta assets in a state of good repair. so it would need to average at least 810 million a year over the next 20 years just to address to eliminate our backlog and to address our current replacement and rehab cycles in the next five years. i project we need at least 320 million just to keep ourselves afloat, but a total of 6.4 billion if you we want to eliminate our backlog. so some key takeaways, current expenditures only keeps the

agency afloat as we are currently averaging just above the fta requirement at $250 million a year. i mean, although we made some headway this year and reducing our backlog, it it takes a monumental effort to address any kind of deferred maintenance. current condition score is only average. and as costs increases, the backlog continues to grow and get more expensive over time. i mean, one prime example is us looking at a condition or the condition of our our traffic signals through our traffic signal assessment, which we plan to implement the data into next year's state of good repair report. but it gave us key data on where we need to focus our our dollars in improving our signals across the city, keeping the transportation system in a state of good repair makes the system more reliable for all events, such as replacing track and replacing

our our light rail vehicles is what keeps san francisco moving. i know. state of good repair is not the most glamorous thing, but it's a very necessary thing. thank you. and we have darryl. yep. next on the 20 year capital plan. thank you. hello. board high chair egan, vice chair shaheen and directors. i'm darryl yip. i'm a planner in the planning section and state of good repair is one aspect of our future needs. now i'm going to combine what you just saw with our capital needs, like additional assets to enhance and expand the system. so before we invest in bike lanes, upgrade our transit fleet or make accessibility improvements, there's a process that goes through a comprehensive capital planning process. we start with the potential investments first by how they support the agency's strategic plan values, and then we prioritize those investments. and that process starts with this capital plan. and this year

we've made some exciting updates based on recent plans from the last couple of years. so the capital plan is a financially unconstrained summary and assessment of the sfmta's potential capital needs over the next 20 years. it's one piece of an iterative process from strategic plan, goals and values to public benefit every project starts with how we achieve those goals. to solve problems, we develop ideas, work with the community, develop plans, studies and strategies that are gathered in this capital plan. and then the next step is we identify specific projects and the necessary funding through the cip and our capital budget. that process culminates with delivering the project to enjoy its benefits. and throughout this process we engage in public outreach. decisions include decisions from elected and appointed officials who set policy direction, community organizations and members of staff via looking at data and

the strategic goals and also via legislate lation and regulations among other ways. and the purpose of the capital plan is to allow us to forecast our long range capital investments holistically so that we can make more data driven, coordinated and effective capital planning decisions. so it helps us first identify long range capital needs to provide a pathway to meet our strategic goals. it it we use it as an advocacy tool for our long range strategic capital needs with local, regional and statewide partners. we summarize and forecast our long range capital needs in one place to help coordinate our our mta plans, programs and strategies. as fourth, we provide a comprehensive list so we can inform the development of the five year cip, which is our funding constrained list of capital needs in the next five years and transportation 2050, which you'll see next. and then we'll also communicate. our long

range capital needs comprehensive to create accountability and build trust with different stakeholders and all of our investments for foot should first be rooted in our values as defined in the strategic plan seen here, including equity, economic vitality, environmental stewardship and trust. and then those values help define our vision, for example, seamlessly connecting diverse and vibrant neighborhoods, safe and reliable and affordable for all, among other on the screen. and we use the capital plan to help coordinate the implementation of our plans, programs and strategies by looking at all the capital investments holistically on the left, the capital plan coordinates the implementation of existing sfmta and city plans. so, for example, we have connect sf our vision zero action plan, zero emission bus rollout plan, the muni service

equity strategy and the state of good repair report, and then we compile it into the capital plan, into funding constraint plans and programs touching upon capital projects, county and regional plans, potential funding revenue measures and the citywide capital plan. and without this capital plan, we'd have to develop our capital needs for each plan individually. this kind of lets us look at all of our needs holistically so that we can make more and better decisions. so as i mentioned, the capital plan helps us convert our 20 year capital needs into our five year capital projects. it has a 20 year horizon. it's financially unconstrained, meaning it's not identified and thus inclusion does not guarantee funding or approval. it has broadly defined investments called capital needs, which each have a description, time frame and cost estimate. and then we use this as an opportunity into our capital improvement program,

which has a five year horizon, is financially constrained with at least 90% of funding identified and includes specific projects with a specific scope, schedule and budget. and in order for a project to be included in the cap, it must have at least one corresponding capital need. in the 20 year capital plan. and all this process, we consider values like political regular resourcing fund ing and community support. we also use the capital plan to inform our long range funding forecast. transportation 2050 transportation 2050 presents multiple paths to fund our capital needs under different scenarios. it has a 25 year horizon and funding is forecasted. but not identified as primarily primarily to look at the big picture funding needs . and it presents many possible futures for how we fund them. now, i'm going to go through the process for how we updated our

capital needs. so first we looked at our ten capital programs as seen here. all ten of these programs incorporate accessibility and they support things like replacing our fleet, upgrading our facilities, renewing our subway and enhancing and expanding our bike network to update our capital needs for each of the capital programs, we accounted for completed projects. so for example, the columns it and parking and curb management programs completed several needs. we also added and revised needs to reflect previously unidentified needs from long range strategies and plans and responses to regulations and new policies. so for example, the streets program, we incorporated, the slow streets program, which was recently incorporated, and then we also revised our cost estimate estimates using data from the sfmta capital asset inventory based on recent projects and procurement sites to better reflect those costs. so, for

example, our fleet program, we reworked them based on rehabilitation, replacement and expansion needs to better reflect those costs from the fleet program and we updated our assessment of capital needs to support our strategic plan values. so over the last two years, we've had lots of long range planning. you've seen presentations on connect sf and the climate action plan, and we've expanded our visionary approach. so for example, we've incorporated the state of good repair, state of good repair report, which you just saw a presentation on the visitacion valley and portola, community based transportation plan, which you recently approved, including bicycle and pedestrian needs and transit stop improvements connect sf, which was a joint agency effort across the city, which includes major capital expansions. the climate action

plan, which was released by the mayor about two years ago, includes adding ev charging expansion and parking reform as well as easier transfers between transit operators and then this new to this year's capital plan. we also included our non sf mta capital expenses. we have a bart joint maintenance agreement in a non mta other agencies category that the sfmta is responsible for but doesn't necessarily manage. and besides what i'm about to show you, the mta could also work with regional partners to support an additional 23.4 billion in regional needs, which the mta may or may not work with regional partners. these things include geary, 19th avenue, subway and bayview, caltrain station, bart and muni station transfers, as well as the portal downtown rail extension. and

again, these are not included in the numbers ahead of you, but and they won't be owned or operated by the mta. they likely won't be owned or operated by the sfmta. we break down our our capital needs into three investment types intended to inform critical needs to restore the system and enhance the existing enhance our visionary needs intended to expand the transportation system through restore enhance and expand. restore includes things like expanding our fleet, enhance, includes or sorry, replacing our fleet. misspoke enhance includes things like upgrading our facilities, renewing the subway or enhancing our existing bike network, and expand things like expanding our transit and bike network and most of sfmta's capital needs are to restore or

enhance our existing assets. so we have 17.5 billion in restore needs over the next 20 years, 10.5 billion in enhanced needs and 4.3 billion in expand needs. and one note is that unlike the state of good repair report, which only looks at hard capital costs in the capital plan, we also have include soft costs and a higher escalation rate based on staff expertise. so now i'm going to go into more detail about what these numbers entail. so as i mentioned, as the sfmta and the city have completed long range planning efforts, and as costs have escalated, our capital needs have grown for our restore needs, such as replacing our existing fleet. these are primarily based on unit costs derived from recent projects. it increased. from 11.7 billion to

17.4 billion, which is primarily an increase in the backlog and new information from our asset inventory, our enhanced needs, which include enhancing our facilities and accommodating battery electric busses, change. from 9 billion to 10.5 billion, primarily due to cost escalation . and then we have our expand needs, which tend to be larger in scope and scale, and they have a less defined scope change from 2.1 billion to 4.3 billion, which primarily represents cost escalations and recommendations from connect staff like central subway extension and the majority of the capital needs are in restoring and enhancing our fleet facilities, streets, transit, fixed guideway and transit optimization and expansion in, for example, the fleet program is focused on replacing what we have and the streets program enhances our existing streets and together

these programs kind of show how our capital investments help us meet our strategic goals over time. um, the sfmta has revised the capital plan to incorporate the latest information available. so there's inflation. an updating cost estimates identify buying previously unidentified needs and responding to regulations. for example, from 2013 to 2015, we revised our cost estimates on state of good repair and the facility and transit fixed guideway parking and curb management and transit optimization programs from. um 2017 to 2019. there was a jump because we had more accurate estimates and expanded scope in response to state regulations. and then in this capital plan from 2021 to 2023, it's primarily due to the inclusion of long range plans, cost escalation and refined cost estimates. as we continue to

advance on our capital needs. and then beyond 2023, we might be looking at potentially adding recommendations from our currently in development waterfront resiliency transportation assessment, our active communities plan and parking facilities assessment among others. and here is a list of our capital needs by capital program. most of the details about each one of the programs can be found in the report. lastly, we use this as an opportunity to inform stakeholders on how plans become projects. so we presented to the youth transportation advisory board and informed other advisory committees, including cac, the multi modal accessibility advisory committee and the ta's. cac via accompanying memo and slides.

and then this 20 year capital plan feeds into the five year cap and two year capital budget. that approval allows us to advance our process so that we can begin outreach early next year. and then we also use the capital plan for t 2050, which you'll see next. and here's jonathan on. i feel like this is the tonight show and i just got introduced, so it's late. i'm trying to be a little funny for people. so when we talked about a year ago at the board workshop, we presented a series of kind of policy priorities and initiatives to allow us to be resilient and adaptive, to try to move towards meeting a lot of the priorities. you saw. but we often get asked, what's the price of the vision, the price of the capital vision is $32 billion. so we broke those things up into three policy initiatives operate initiatives. so again, that's the

efficiencies that i think some of you discussed today and kind of strategic capital investment. but again, with the overall goal that quality service builds trust, investing in our workforce builds efficiencies and results in reducing cost, and then focusing on those strategic capital investments that benefit the public and again, reduce costs for the agency. so this got a little weird, but when we costed everything out both operationally and capital wise to the year 2050, the cost of that is approximately $113 million. we can fund based on the sources that we regularly count on and know about 61% of that. so simply put, we have a lot of priorities. we have big visions and dreams, but we can afford 60% of them, which leads to what director tumlin says at every meeting. it's a trade off and it's a priority conversation . when we can price everything we know what we want to do.

we've done extensive planning and community outreach, but again, we're trying to focus on those things that the priority that the public is telling us are the highest priorities. so when you take that capital number four, you start seeing gaps and the average gap is roughly $1.1 billion per year over that same period, it gets to about 19,000,000,010 years from now. eventually it gets to $36 billion and everybody asks like, why does it swoosh like that towards the end and come up? the reason being is, as you saw in jason's report, an asset gets so old and broken you just have to replace it, right? so then it shows that we hit an ultimate bottom and we must replace assets. so you kind of see that cost get reduced in those outer years, but we never want to hit that bottom, hopefully so to give you an update and the policy initiatives and those initiatives that were at your board workshop are attached to. but overall, to give you some updates on some of the things that you asked today, over a

year we were successful at getting a general obligation bond scheduled currently for november 20th, 26. but we know we need the capital funds sooner, so we're working with the city and the capital. the city's capital plan will be taking a look at in the spring. but we did it. we got a geo bond on the ballot, as noted today through advocacy, like a lot of work with kate breen and the government affairs team, transit and finance team, we were able to advocate and get $300 million from the state for our operating requirements. so that took a year of advocacy and work with us focusing in that area. the next steps are as bree presented to you, taking a look at the board workshop at some things that we can do, some of the options and choices you'll have around fare indexing, clipper and parking. we will continue to work with the state legislature so there's interest in looking at tax increment for our properties and letting us keep some of those property taxes as we develop our own facilities. so that will be an opportunity.

see, there's an opportunity this year to get the legislation necessary to authorize us to put a regional measure on the ballot. so we will be doing a lot of work with mtc and our regional partners on that this year. and then we will be working with mtc directly on the nature of the regional transit measure. i've been in at least three meetings on that this week alone, so we are actively working on that and those are the critical path. next steps to try to get to some of those gaps. so some of you asked like what are the things we're going to do? that's the critical path both on the operational side, which is largely focused on how do we reduce costs in the agency and where can we find opportunities. so overall, one of the things was grow transit ridership. and as barry noted, as we grow transit ridership, we bump up on that fare revenue as director tumlin noted, we also have to look at our people complying with our fare policy. we are also looking at that. but we did increase ridership 35% year over year. so we were successful, again, focusing on clean and reliable transit and

making the system more efficient . when it comes to transit shelters, one of my favorite subjects, we have increased the cleaning in may of 2023, we hit our lisa icings back there behind me. we hit our 50% increase in maintenance across all of our transit shelters. so with the same amount of money and the same people, we increased maintenance, we doubled it. so that's that's a pretty big and we now track the cleanings month over month. so that's pretty good, pretty efficient. and lastly, we are looking at at fare recovery and our fare programs. so we will we will take a look at that and we'll be sharing information with the board around that. so we will talk about fare recovery at the board workshop upcoming. and we also want to focus on payments and i say it in this way so that's one. how do we reduce the administrative burden in eternally one second? imagine a world where we have parking and we can provide discount programs to people the same way we do it with trans it. imagine that when people need a car that

we can price parking around their requirements, what they can afford and what they need, that we can really price parking around mobility requirements, but also continuing our policy of managing parking around congestion and making parking available for those who need to drive. so let me stress that that is always been our policy. we want parking to be available for those who need to drive and we will price it accordingly. and so we do want to talk about, though, on the technology side, how can we make improvements in that area, which hopefully will lead to some changes in state legislation, which then give this board a lot more options around what we can do in that area, but not pass on some of the burdens that we often hear about to business or families when we make these policy changes on the strategic capital . a lot of exciting news. so jason said we did a full condition assessment of our traffic signals this year, which was pretty exciting. it was one of the areas of weakness with regard to our assets. so now we have real time information around that. so that was completed this year. we did

reduce the backlog. so this board made an investment in safety and state of good repair. again, prioritization and with that you actually so the data shows we got a little bit a little bit better, but we did better in that very critical asset area. the train control system continues to be a high priority. this board took action on that rfp a couple of weeks ago and that project continues to move generally on schedule. and then for this board, the board of supervisors, we did have introduced today the special use district entitlement and sequa approval at the board of supervisors. so that occurred during this meeting today. so that's going to be a huge milestone if we can get that through the board of supervisors in february. we're going to continue to work on presidio yard, which is an opportunity for this agency to build revenue through private development on our properties. so we're moving forward with that. that was funded at the transportation authority today that also occurred today. the funding to advance that planning. i talked about potrero, we will do as

noted, jason noted, we're doing rotating condition assessments. so the next one is going to be on stations. so we can get that information that we don't have now. and again, as we make these investments, we want to see the cost of maintenance go down, the long term cost of maintenance, and then we will continue planning on the overall muni modernization program, the subway renewal program. julie kirschbaum promises me if she's here, that you're going to get an exciting report early in 2024. she's always on the verge. she's almost there and it's exciting news for all of you. so with that, what i want to make clear is we should just be transparent about all of this. we can afford 60% of the vision that we have for the city. it means we do need to make choices. we do need to consider our priorities, and we need to consider areas to raise revenue. and we are doing those things. there are things we do well which are reflected in the community survey like we saw crowding, we saw numbers change in that area, but we continue to need to focus on safety. we need to continue to focus on the

investment in our infrastructure and we need to continue to our investments in the reliability of the system. it is very clear and it's what this agency was built to do. so when we're responsive, when we're transparent about the data, i think that moves us towards the trust that we talk about wanting to have with our customer here in the city and county of san francisco and those who visit this city. so that was a lot of information. all of us are here to answer questions. happy to take whatever you have. thank you so much. team colleagues. i might be inclined to go to public comment first, if that's okay with you, and then we can have our discussion. okay. anyone in the room like to comment on this item. unfortunately we so some of you know, i am the head of the san francisco transit riders local funding working group and so i could talk about funding for a very long time. and i'm afraid we don't have that time. um, and

i know this was mostly about capital, but i want to talk about fares because in the appendix there are slides looking at the priorities for funding. as we go into this funding discussion. and there were four items on the operations policy. slide two of them talked about parking, but i'm afraid that parking is probably off the table for the next year after what we just went through. i'm not feeling a lot of optimism there and the other two are about fares. one was about going back to the automatic fare indexing policy. i think we've all seen this coming. it's in all the projections in terms of expected revenue. the other one was a little more unexpected to me, and that was to kill the clipper discount. and i assume the muni modal discount too. that's $0.50. and you put those two together and you're looking at a 75% single fare increase, which is 30% on the current rate. and we know from both agency statistics well, all from agency statistics that the use of single fares has exploded post pandemic, where the use of fare

cards has not returned to historic norms. so we're looking at a 30% fare increase if we implement both of those policy proposals, as that is not acceptable from a rider perspective. i also want to mention if the remaining 30s that that the lifeline pass still has extremely low penetration on the lifeline pass is the 200, the pass that goes to people who make 200% of the federal i forget the name right now. it's only about 46% penetration. the agency is goal is only 40. so we're at goal. but our goal is really bad and i would love to see changes to things like fare enforcement where the first thing that happens in fare enforcement is you get an application to the program rather than $130 fine. i'm out of time. thank you very much. thank you for your comments. are there is anyone else in the room like to comment on this item? okay. seeing none, please open a remote at this time. we'll move to remote public comment. not to exceed a

total time of ten minutes. members of the public wishing to comment should dial star three to enter the queue. each speaker will have two minutes. moderator first speaker. hello. i'm also a member of the cif transit riders and gabe kaufman and i want to agree with cyrus and say that increase the obviously very bad. i do think if you look how many people depend on transit and how public transit is also not a benefit to them, it's actually a benefit to all the people who have the luxury of riding an uber and lyft. and in cars because there's much less traffic. but so many of us either depend or only use public transit. and so i think it's pretty unjust and anti-progressive to just budget for operating revenue coming from predominantly lower income people or people who have no other option. while we you just

sort of set aside because of pressure from wealthier people, frankly, to not do any kind of fare increase or parking fare increases and with free sunday parking, the city is de facto subsidizing parking and encouraging residents not to consider even using public transit because it's cheaper. you own a car to drive and park, and it would be to take a bus. so i really think for operating revenue, we should continue car owners should subsidize sfmta because the riders are subsidizing them by taking vehicles off the streets. and the board really should look into finding a way for car owners to pay their fair share, both through parking and maybe other other fees. 30s yeah, that's so yeah. i also think this fare increase, you know, could could really hurt ridership when we need it to increase more. thank you. thank

you. next speaker. this is herbert weiner. my concern is, is with this budget, there should be a net addition of vehicles to the fleet to reflect the growing population. the density of the city, and to date the this needs have been neglected. where you actually do not expand. and the net addition of vehicles to the fleet. we need more more cars. i mean, excuse me, you need more busses. we need more trains in the underground and also in respect of parking, one thing you should do is stop eliminating parking spaces, busses. that's one of the sources of the problem. mta systematic eliminates parking

spaces is making it more inconvenient to park and you should stop doing that. and that would be a benefit to the motorist. now you're supposed to represent everybody. i realize that there's going to be a 40% shortfall in your funding, but some groups always wind up in the 40% of the losers, and that includes seniors and disabled. and you've got to stop doing that. and you have to address their needs. and eventually, uh, the ada is 30s on your case. so these are the suggestions or suggestions i have. and please take that into consideration when you do this budget. thank you. thank you. no additional callers. okay. thank you. we'll close public comment. colleagues, what questions or

comments do you have on this item. dr. hemminger or jonathan? we'll get to think that we don't love him anymore. i guess i'll make this my annual request just for some kind of comprehensive inventory of all of our assets. muni and parking and how we could better monetize them to be revenue generate eaters as well as performing their underlying function and to generate more revenue for transit, thereby. now that we're out of the pandemic, any chance of getting that piece of work done. yes you can have it next. well, good for

you. we still love you. dr. kahana, please. uh, well, first off, thank you so much for this thorough presentation. i just thoroughly impressed by how many things you all are tracking, and we have a lot of assets. we have a lot of things that we need to monitor. and so i just appreciate just the amount of work that goes into creating, just like even just like 23, it's a lot of information condensed in one one slide and it's a lot of rich information for us to consider as well. um especially as we're looking at how to prioritize, you know, the budget for this upcoming year. i'm i'm curious about our age based condition score and how we're scoring are different assets and how the electrification of our vehicles factors into this um are we

looking are we just assessing our, our different assets based on age or is it also just relevance? and you know, if the technology has changed, you know, things that we have to swap out, just want to understand that piece of it. it's actually both. so we're doing yearly or replacement cycles as well as we're we know what's going to be happening in the future that we're trying to get ahead of the curve for as far as like because our current procurement is for electric electrified busses as well as we're looking into at least as far as the non-revenue fleet is concerned, we are looking into how we can purchase s electrical vehicle and how we can provide the infrastructure should we have to go that route in the future. so as we're for slide 23 in particular, i'm looking at the track column there and seeing that that 72 is a big number there. yeah. and i appreciate you circling that.

how close are we to getting that to the pink? like is it, you know, a couple years or is it like what's it is it a couple of years but it's some some years. it is something to keep a track like i mean, as far as the reliability of data is not i don't find i don't have high confidence but it's something to start looking into. and it is an asset class that i want to dive more into to because of what the data showing me, right? so, um, and so if that goes in the pink, what are some of the repercussions that i'm sure we're trying our utmost to avoid those, but what does that mean for our system? so i think it's actually a good time to talk about the experience of boston and the mbta. so boston is our primary cautionary tale there. a system quite similar to muni. it's sort of like muni and bart together in terms of both scale and ridership and kind of

demographic characteristics. six right now, the mbta has 179 slow zones in their system. we started off not that long ago in effectively the same state of deferred maintenance and boston put off their for maintenance for a little bit longer and didn't do much during covid. and we were all actually rather shocked at just how quickly deferred maintenance catches up with you and the impact that it has on the usability of the system. um, that is a fate we are trying really hard to avoid given our vulnerability around ridership right now. arguably the most dangerous thing that we could do is back off on maintenance because it would destroy all of our gains in in reliability and service quality and actually make things vastly worse than they were pre-covid. so track is one of the

categories where we are most concerned. and we're actually very fortunate that that our maintenance team on that side of the muni house led by charles drain, is very much on top of this. this problem. um, and has made dramatic progress during covid despite really being given very little in terms of resources. so we are looking forward to exploring those issues in much detail and making sure that we stay ahead of the problem. obviously, projects like the taraval project are a component of correcting for some of those flaws as we now i think have a good handle on the state of the market. street subway, taraval will be taking care of the m ocean view and the k line next. how often do we assess the condition of our assets? yes. so we try to do it on a semi yearly basis. so i did want to mention before anything because the our age based condition stores are basically it doesn't capture like real life data because

we're always making incremental rehab changes to the track, especially for track. but unless i get that data, i can't enter into my model to project it. so there are gaps in the data and that's the gaps that i do want to try to solve. oh, i see. yeah. okay. so let me give a specific example. so in the case of track, this was the 2022 report. so so as jeff and many have noted say, we're working on the l. taraval now. so when we receive that all as a new asset, then as jason said, that'll go in and you'll see that pop in. so that should kind of smooth that overall. so, so that's one component that we'll have. but then second, this is why there's the operational component, which is why we've been doing these condition assessments. so the first one was facilities. the second one was traffic signals. the next one is going to be our stations and that's because we can have a piece of track like we can have a piece of track, like the pieces of track and the subway where we've got almost

every line going over it that's used a lot more than each piece of track on each individual line. so what jason is telling you is we look at all pieces of track the same based on how long they should last, but through condition assessments, then we know this piece is used more often than another and then we can update our models accordingly. so we've been doing that systematically since 2014, and it's how every year when we update this report for the board, you're getting more and more accurate data. and so for taraval in particular. so if we're looking at that one and drilling down on that piece, this is the goal, the condition there would then be excellent. so like i'm assuming some of it will come in brand new. yep. you'll see the dark blue pop in at the top. yep. got it. um, very grateful for this information and so glad that you're tracking this. i did have a question about our transit shelters, so impressed that we're cleaning them more often. and i so appreciate that work. my gosh, we needed that so bad. so so i am so appreciative of

that work. just want to, you know, make sure you get your flowers, but also get give you an opportunity to show off some of the work that you've been doing to make sure that, you know, we how did we reach that 50% goal and how are we still we rode we started monitoring clear channel pretty heavily and so we could see all their maintenance in real time. so as soon as the mops came in, we could see how quickly they were turning them around. and then, you know, we took a little bit of a deeper dive in the contract. some of the stuff that hadn't been looked at a lot, for instance, like the lighting was pretty much out on the t line. so third street was terrible. so i wrote, i told clear channel, hey, it's in your contract. they needed to fix the lighting. we had some electrical problems. so it wasn't just changing the bulbs. we literally had to crawl under the platforms, do a bunch of work, get up there. we and currently, so we've 80% of the lighting is now working on the t line we had it was it was less than maybe 10 or 20. some of the

platforms were completely dark and scary, you know, i mean, it's scary to be out there at night in the rain and it's dark. yes. so we did that. and then we've also painted all of the platforms from sunnydale to a past marin, i think we're about at 20th street. so we've made some remarkable improvements on on the t line and we're moving down the e line now down the embarcadero. so we've got the ferry plaza done that was dark. so all the lights, that's i think that was 56 lights that we fixed down there. and we had no we didn't know where the power was coming from that was crazy. but we fixed all that. and so, yeah, we've been we've been making some, some pretty good progress on overall. and who are you? oh i'm sorry. i'm. i'm lisa ising. i'm the superintendent of bus shelters and platforms, so. so i'm the one. if you've got a problem with the bus, shelter or platform, no matter what they look like, i'm your huckleberry. so uh, so, yeah, and we

actually. indeed we had a pretty good we did a lot of work for apex, so we, i went to work nights and went around with the secret service, saw al gore and tipper and. yeah. and we had that was very interesting with the secret service. i'll tell you, i never felt so safe in my life because it was amazing. i mean, they were doing stuff. i'm not sure what it was, but there was guys with backpacks with like a geiger counter, i think i'm not sure what was going on. i was there with them when they were sealing the manholes. everything was thoroughly. yeah, the zone was very safe. so and i think apec went pretty well. you know, i think the city was there was moments when it was sparkling. i was sending people pictures like, look at how great powell looks. so yeah, it was it was really nice to have the city super clean. yeah. so we were pretty happy with our improvements and, and clear channels. we're working on some new shelter prototypes which would ease our problem with some

of our unhoused residents to make it a little more passenger friendly. and so those prototypes, when are they going to come before us or. yeah, we'll share them once we've got them figured out. yeah, i'm excited for that. but honestly, just congratulations on the work. thank you very much. incredibly impressed. and this was an ask from i don't know how many months ago. i don't think it's been a year that we asked to see some changes there on the transit shelters. and we're at this this this spot now because of the work that you've done. so a lot of credit goes to clear channel, too. so. oh, and i also want to say track and overhead lines were extremely supportive. track was out there washing the roofs on the t line because clear channel couldn't do it because of the overhead lines. so we've got had a tremendous support group out of our own department and our own painters track department overhead lines. they were fabulous. so yeah, it was, it was a nice project that we all did together. this is why contract reform is so important. that's right. that's right. you

got to write good contracts. yeah read your contracts. yeah. yeah thank you so much. thank you. thank you. director henderson, i got a quick question on i think it was slide 23, that 72. so with the track portion on, i know we had our meeting about the train control upgrade and so i'm just wondering when all of that's done and whatever it was, ten years, then it brings that blue, it turns blue in that track area, or is it in a different category that one is actually in train control and communications . so i'm sorry, would you say train control and communications? and the last. oh, got it. okay. got it. and then and when you're doing your assessment or your models, do you incorporate a physical inspection in addition to the sort of long range like sort of trending and. yeah, so the baseline line is we own the asset and we know it should last, you know, 15 to 30 years.

and then at the end of that 30 years there's a replacement. but then when we do the actual condition assessment it yes, there's a visual performance review of the condition of that asset. and then we will refer mesh kind of what the condition is. so we did that for all of our buildings. we just completed that for the traffic signal. so that will be a big update in the upcoming cycle. how what is the typical timeline for that? is that within the five years, so before 2014, we rarely, if ever did it. and so we you know, i give a lot of credit to like one of our prior administrators of the fta that really instilled a state of good repair program and maybe somebody who ran mtc at the time that it should be a core function, including kind of good asset management practice as director tumlin is noted, we kind of set the standard in the nation on this level of data constantly refreshing it year over year, doing an annual report, and it's really been helping us again target those limited capital resources to the things that will be most effective for the system. so we

try to do a condition assessment every 2 to 3 years based on the data from this report. so again, the next thing, as jason showed with with regard to backlog with stations, which is why that's the next condition assessment. and hopefully we will have a contract out going to rfp sometime in the in the spring on that. okay, great. and then i think my last question is i might have lost my last question. so that was my last question. i can't remember. thank you. sure. thank you. i'm going to say director, so please, thank you. um we really appreciate all those presentations. and i have a overall question is like all these information that you're presenting to us is preparing us to go deeper into the workshop or this is definitely components we want to give you. what's the condition of the system? what will the vision cost? so when we have those conversations, you

know, how much of it can we actually afford those are all components to help you start thinking through at the board workshop, what do we want to prioritize? what are the potential trade offs? what would have the biggest impact investment wise? these are all elements that we want to give you and the earlier report from the community survey in march was also what does the public think we should be focusing on and where are we doing well and where do we need to make some improvements? so yes, it's all it's a big encyclopedia to give you what you need to have a great conversation at the board workshop. okay. so i will defer some of my ideas as during the workshops. i think that will be the better use of our time than we can have a more productive dialog. um, i think just one burning recommendation is that i can see to alleviate some of these frustrations on our white or yellow curve side loading zone. would be nice too. offer

some of the parking permit for business owners. small business owners. so then because a lot of them i don't think they are even big enough to be able to buy these commercial vehicle trucks that they can actually because there's a small businesses, right? so i don't know how much that will cost. well, actually, i would assume i hope that will have. well, there's definitely a need for it. and whether it's financially helpful to make us some revenue coming in. so it's actually happy ending for both sides of the coin. that might be nice. the other thing that i also wanted to say in the workshop, i will be really interested to get to know more about our potential increase in our joint transit oriented development projects and also streamlining these interdepartmental department

agency processes. as so some of the things that i was looking forward to will be some lesson learned specifically from you. jonathan sure. thank you. director henzi, please. i think like directors, so i think i'll i'll save most of my comments and thoughts, um, till our january meetings. but i appreciate the context that this always gives. this is always one of our most information rich items that we have. one, i guess maybe a suggestion, if you could call it that is maybe, um, when we see this again, this playing some of the different possible funding sources for, for some of the these. so we know like what

like funding is available because i know for some for some of these asset classes like there are like there are many fewer funding options than than others. um so no, like knowing the picture of what funding sources are available out there for some, some of these things might help us prioritize, prioritize these some of the funding and some of the dollars we have when we think about the budget. but i think that's my only kind of suggestion between now and when we see you again. again in january for our for this meeting and for the workshop. but thank you for the team for putting together all this information. can do. thank you. director henzi i just have a few questions slide 39 i was curious what you meant. the sfmta could work with regional

partners to support $23 million in regional needs. and what does that mean? and specifically, are the geary 19th avenue subway and these other bullet points in this 112 billion capital assessment going to take that one. the first part is we presented earlier, well, a couple of years ago now, so it was slightly different board on on connect esf, which includes added around 20 plus billion dollars in capital needs that would be administered at a regional level with sfmta providing some support like in terms of upgrades to the streetscapes and regional connections. so let me put it this way. so let's take an example of the geary 19th street corridor. so that is part of a larger regional planning process with bart and others. link 21 where they're looking at many different alternatives of system

connections through san francisco. that's one of the alternatives based on land use. the housing element approved by the board of supervisors. there's some logic in the future that we will need a transportation service of that type along that corridor. that is where we will participate. does it mean that our capital dollars will fund that capital improvement? does it mean we will be the ones leading the advocacy on that project? probably not. or maybe as a partner, this is no different than like true trans bay and the portal that we have here in san francisco that's clearly a city priority. we're a part of that process, but we are not actively funding it and it is not a prioritization conversation that we need to have here at the board. but definitely as a matter of policy and priority, you definitely can state your preference or how much staff time we would put into programs such as that. unless just when we say we have 112 billion, this is slide 51, 112 is the need of

our vision, which i want to maybe push back that we have one our vision and then we have 61% of the funding available. what number is included in the 112 zero? so that doesn't include anything for geary or 19. it does not include includes some of the planning elements or as weked about, supportive elements on the street that we would have. we've had the same thing with tjpa and other major projects. okay jonathan and i had a chance to talk about this earlier, but i just want to say for the public, you know, this piece of what is the vision you keep saying to fund our vision? i mean, i think this is really, really important. i don't know if sean is still here, but sean kennedy last time did a great presentation on moving forward the vision piece was very clear and compelling. network of five minute busses that only stop at the stop. it's like, that's so clear and compelling. there are other elements of the vision of where we are going as a city that i think maybe some people hold and others like firmly, firmly reject. and i want to

understand and you know, we've talked about with acp, a network of streets that are safe for all ages and abilities. and when i see that i do not see class two painted bike lanes, i do not see class three sharrows. i see class four and i see like safe low traffic streets. is that part of our vision and is that world class network priced in here? yes, i believe that is priced. so as an example, all daryl, you and i were talking about it earlier. so to go to class four across the majority of our bike network, i think we've priced in the capital plan at around $804 million. so that is in there and it is included in the number, although it's just a placeholder for now because active communities hasn't been finished and we're still doing outreach. yeah, the because we update the capital plan every two years. excuse me. and so active communities would likely be included in the next iteration once active communities is approved. so it

could be more. okay. and then on vision zero, back to that other conversation. what are the assumptions in here about the type of dramatic street changes needed to actually reach zero in this city? yeah yeah. so one of the things that we did in the last capital plan, i didn't present it in, in this presentation is we kind of gave packages based on our strategic goals. so one of them is, is how do we make our streets safer? so when we add up all of the capital needs in this year's 20 year capital plan, that whose where there's a primary focus on making our streets safer, it added up to about 7 billion. that 7 billion is kind of a ballpark number because there are other capital needs that do help make our streets safer. but those 7 billion are capital needs that like bike lanes and traffic signal improvements to help facilitate bike and pedestrian access. so that's in

here. that's separate from the 5.4 billion. that's for streets in here. that's reflected. yeah, yeah. because our our capital programs kind of matrix with our with our strategic goals and so the streets program. yes. is a huge portion of that. but you know the transit programs also support safety traffic signals traffic signals. okay thank you so much for this context setting. i think that concludes this item. thank you both. thank you all. secretary silva is approaching her microphone to call the next item, please. yeah, there's a training from city attorney. very good places. you on your last item? yes. please call the last time. all right. presentation and discussion on the legal responsibilities of the sfmta board of directors. i know. i

think you can't read it. that one. just. just highlight over it. do you know which one it is? i'm going to click on it. no yeah. okay. okay. and then ctrl l to get them control. do you want me to advance your slides for you? sure. probably just push. it's a pdf, so it's probably just the page down. okay uh, good evening. mta board of directors deputy city attorney susan cleveland-knowles . i'm here tonight with stephanie stewart bethune, who, you know to give annual training, as you know, or some of you know, the charter requires that you receive training from both the controller on financial matters and from the city attorney on legal matters. so we usually appear in front of you at least once a year, sometimes more, depending on the circumstances.

so we're happy to be here tonight. as you may or may not know, we have a team of seven attorneys, uh, to legal secretaries and one paralegal that work almost exclusively exclusively for the mta preparing contracts, legislature action and other items. and while you see stephanie and i mostly here at the board, we also help coordinate our entire office with services for the agency, including our labor team, our litigators, who you often see are workers comp and our claims. so we intersect with the mta in many, many ways. as i'll go to our first slide. so just to start off and to give some background for you, the sfmta has a very interesting organized legal history, a very long history tree. it was first part of the public utilities commission and then by charter amendment became the public

transportation commission in later in 1999. and then in 2007, there were two very important charter amendments that were passed by the voters of san francisco that incrementally and very significantly expanded the authority and the powers of the sfmta and created what you have now, which is this very unique organization that combines both your transit function and your streets function. and that's very rare. i think probably the director can confirm unprecedented with other transit agencies. so prop e combined the public transportation committee and the parking and traffic functions and officially merged into mta in 2002. and then prop a took another step and gave even more autonomy to the agency, including the authority to issue bonds, adopt the

parking and traffic legislation that you see on your calendar. very often and provided a larger allocation of general fund revenue to the agency and then that under that measure, also in 2009, the mta started regulating taxis, which had formerly been done by the taxi commission. next slide. yeah so this is kind of a list of some of the things that the sfmta has exclusive authority over. i think you're pretty familiar with these, but over your property leasing and purchasing fares, fines and fees . et cetera. so you can see the list here. we can go to the next slide. i think one of the things that we were talking about at the last at the last meeting that i was at is some of the you have very broad exclusive jurisdiction. but then there are counterweights to that usually vis a vis the board of supervisors. so one thing under the charter is the agency does need to comply with ordinances

of general application. so one example of that is the surveillance technology ordinance, which requires the mta to get approval for using various types of surveillance technology by the board of supervisors. secondly, the board of supervisors has the ability to review certain limited and sfmta final decisions. so often you'll see on your calendar something has an asterisk on it as a final sfmta decision, those items are reviewable by the board of supervisors. so some of the things that that includes are installing or removing stop signs, creating or eliminating preferential parking zones or adopting time limits on the period for which vehicles can be parked. interestingly that ordinance established ing those specific items, as among other things, was adopted i think about four years ago now. and there has not been one item to

date that has been reviewed by the board of supervisors was under that provision. but it is there. the next one is a big one, charter section 9.118. i think director hemminger asked about that at our last meeting. that is a general rule for all city departments that large contracts go to the board of supervisors for approval. and when prop eight was adopted, that specifically put those limitations on the mta as well. and then last, which was very popular for a time, but we haven't seen recently, are sequa appeals. so any item that is marked on your agenda as an approval, all action is subject to appeal by the under sequa to the board of supervisors. just a couple issues on the role of the sfmta board providing policy

direction, appointing and removing the director, approving settlements, fares, fines and fees. a big one is the budget, which i'll talk about a little bit more in a second. approving contracts and then a big upcoming long discussion will be your collective bargaining agreements, which we will come to you in january for a presentation about that. and then you have this kind of broad power of inquiry into the matters that are under the agency's jurisdiction in one of the limits on the mta board's authority is this provision that is also included for other boards and commissions in the city, which is the prohibition against administrative interference. and that is often a question that comes up and we're happy to answer individual questions offline at any time. but prior, eerily, that doctrine says that you are you primarily

work through the director in your inter actions with the agency. the director has designee dated all of the division directors as people that you can also work through. so that's julie kirschbaum, ted graf, our streets. et cetera. but lower than that, you really should contact jeff. or the division director before you reach out directly to staff. so just a few examples is so for example, you can working through jeff or the division director meet with staff to get your answer questions or have a briefing on a particular project or a matter. but what you should not do in one of those meetings is the direct to direct the staff member to prepare a different alternative or to change their recommendation motion or to do additional

public outreach. that is something that if you have suggestions or concerns, you should raise them with either the division director or jeff. so it's a little can be a little tricky because obviously you're all very involved in in these issues. you have strong opinions and feelings about them. but it is important that as the board and you're working through through the director and his designees, as i think same thing if you're out on a walk through a project, looked again, asking questions, getting information from staff are all fine, but suggesting, oh, this should be here or that should be. there is something that you need to work through. the division director or jeff or raise at a public hearing. when you're all together as a decision making body and then on the slide that administrative interference or direction suggests an or

interference by a board member in the administrative affairs as can be deemed official misconduct. i mentioned this earlier, you do have the power of hearing an inquiry. so another option, if you are not getting the answers that you think you should be, is to hold a hearing and to you are permitted to bring staff members or members of the agency in front of you to ask questions about a particular topic. um, as we briefly talked about and kind of as as the cfo has already talked to you about today, you have your upcoming budget, the mta has the most extensive authority over its budget in the city of san francisco. so vis a vis other city departments. so. you have a two year budget and

the most important aspect of it is that after you have adopted it, which you need to do by the end of april, it goes directly to the mayor and the board. but the mayor does not have any authority to change the budget and presents it directly to the board of supervisors and then the board of supervisors can only reject it, not modify it, and they need seven out of 11 votes. so more more than a regular majority. um, another. so that's for your budget. if you are within in the regular budget process, if you're asking for general fund money that is over the general fund set aside that is kind of reserved for mta, then that would go through the normal budget process and the board can get more involved and can adopt or reject it by a

regular majority. the other aspect of your work that must be included in the budget and the board of supervisors has this opportunity to reject is any change in your fares? so it's kind of an unusual part of the fare process. so you can set fares, but they must go into either a budget or a budget amendment. and then the board of supervisors can again reject that change. it doesn't have to be an increase by a 7/11 vote. and as you are aware, there was a recent proposal, charter amendment that would have added parking meter, maximum rates and days and hours of operation and made that a similar item, that charter amendment was withdrawn. um, again, i think i already mentioned this. the mta board sets policy for the agency that

can include your budget, can include the reset on vision zero, kind of all of these items that you are regularly see getting updates on. you also have delegates to the director through you. a policy, a number of different items that the director can do under his own authority. that includes contracts of a certain amount. so, for example, those are generally up to $1 million. certain grant agreements, media licenses and other other kind of smaller agreements that delegation policy does require for. and you do get quarterly reports of all the items that the director has done under this policy. and i think we're hoping to bring kind of a slight update on the policy forward to you early next year. lastly, before

i turn it over to stephanie to talk about public meeting and public records issues, i just wanted to explain, as you as you may have noticed, your agendas are the sfmta board of directors and the parking authority commission. so the parking authority is a little bit of an antiquated creature. it was created in 1949. it's a state agency under state law. it's not a city department. and it's not required to follow the rules of the san francisco charter for basically. we can go to the next slide. it was created to finance parking garages. what. it was created to finance parking garages and to support the downtown commercial core. it was originally appointed by the board of supervisors and it originally included downtown

merchants and then under proposition e, which i mentioned earlier, the sfmta board generally became the parking authority. a couple of years ago . two of the parking authority garages were transferred out of the jurisdiction of the parking authority. that was the performing arts garage and the moscone garage. and the significance of that, you had you had six parking authority properties. and when own two of them were transferred out, that the parking authority state law requires that the entire structure be used for parking and only very limited incidental incidental uses. so a sundry shop or a something supportive of the parking use when the garage is transferred out of the parking authority jurisdiction, then you have a much broader

authority to do other things with the garage. so both both moscone and parking i'm sorry, the performing arts garage were transferred by the board of supervisors out of the parking authority commissions jurisdiction and are now under the sfmta's juris diction and what that would allow is a greater development potential or flexibility in the use case. so it would also be possible. so there are still four i've got them listed here on the last slide. north beach poke poke bush general hospital and lombard street garage and that through board of supervisors action, i believe it's over a majority. i think it's seven votes. again could be transferred out of the parking authority. jurisdic ation as well. so that is the. that concludes my half of this presentation. i am going to turn it over to stephanie stewart bethune to talk about public records and public meetings. thank you. good evening.

directors stephanie stewart bethune, deputy city attorney. i will do my best to be efficient with our time. given the hour for as susan mentioned, this part of the presentation often relates to public meetings, sunshine and public records requirements and something to keep in mind is that there are three major laws that promote open government in san francisco . that's the brown act, which is a state law that governs pardon me, that governs public meetings such as this one, an and the way that you conduct such meetings. in addition, there's the california public records act, which is a state law that governs governs the public's access to records of the agency and the city at large and other state and local agencies. and then finally there is the sunshine ordinance, which imposes additional requirements on city government. that is impacts both the public's access

to records and also the conduct of meetings of boards and commissions as we can go to the next slide. and so for public meetings, there are a number of key points that i think given your role here as board members you were all aware of. but they bear pointing out for the purposes of this training and the first being that all meetings and subcommittee subcommittee meetings are subject to the brown act. and so that includes notice and the right of the public to attend and make public comment at those types of meetings. you are only allowed to take action at public or regularly scheduled and noticed meetings and it's permissible to meet outside of the parameters of the brown act and some of the ways that that can happen are when a majority of the board discusses an item that's within your jurisdiction,

outside of a public meeting. this can happen over email or text. so those are two pitfalls that we like to advise you all to be aware of is that, you know, an innocent text that gets sent to a majority of the board could end up in in an unofficial or excuse me, an impermissible meeting unintentionally and so we advise generally against those sorts of communications or to make those communications with caution and same with email . the other type of impermissible meeting is what we call a seriatim meeting. and this occurs when a majority of the members that aren't present in one place for a notice meeting, share or exchange information. so again, this can happen via email where an email is sent to the entire board and

a majority of you reply all with your thoughts. this concerns comments about the subject of the particular email or text message correspondence. and so again, these are the types of activity that we'd like to avoid because they constitute an impermissible meeting and again, they're occurring outside of the purview of the public and we want to avoid that because that is principally what the brown act is there to protect against. so in this next slide, we've got just a couple of points about the board acting collectively versus is this idea of india individual action, the power conferred to you by the charter is conferred to you as as a as a body. the entire board and not to you as individuals. and that means that you're not authorized to act on behalf of or otherwise

bind the board as an individual. however, an individual board member, while you lack the authority to exercise the power of the entire board as an individual, you may as an individual designate a particular board member to perform design tasks or duties such as monitoring the progress of a particular project that the agency is working on. and then that individual board member could report back to the entire board about the status of that particular project. and then related to this, i also want to advise some caution about using social media. the brown act prohibition on communications between board members of a policy body that happened outside of a public meeting extends to your use of social media. in fact, in 2020, the brown act was amended to be to

clarify the types of communication options that members of a policy body such as yourselves may have on social media without violating the brown act. when you use social media in your capacity as an mta board member, you may communicate on social media platforms in order to answer questions and provide information to the public or solicit information from the public regarding a matter that's within the mta's jurisdiction. however, when social using social media, you may not use the social media platform to discuss business that is within the mta's jurisdiction, nor can you respond directly to any community action on a social media platform on a subject that's within the mta's jurisdiction. and that's if the post or information or communication on the platform is either made, posted or shared by any other member of the

legislative body. thus, if you post something on social media, social media platform that's within the mta's jurisdiction, you should avoid engaging with other members of the body about that particular issue and any sort of online discussion related to the post. and i think more importantly and maybe a point that might not be as obvious, you should also refrain from responding to liking a post or sharing a post of another board member because those actions could be seen as communication of board members outside the context of the meeting and thus violative of the brown act. okay we can go to the next slide. so our next slides are about the public records laws and really the purpose of public records laws. and as i mentioned before, they include the california public

records act along with the san francisco sunshine ordinance and open meeting and public records laws are really rooted in the notion that the right of the people to know what their government and those acting on behalf of their government are doing is fundamental to democracy. we can go to the next slide. so i think a lot of you this is familiar to and not necessarily new content or concepts, but just to refresh everyone who's memory and recollection about what constitutes a public record, the term public record includes any writing that contains information related to the conduct of the public's business that is prepared, owned, used or retained by any state or local agency. fauci importantly, the physical form of this community station doesn't matter, so it can be and we can go to the next slide. the term writing is

really broadly construed under the law, and so that includes handwriting. i mean, typewriting is a bit archaic at this point, but photographs use a photocopy. it also includes email attachments. it it can include other types of media, such as video or audio clips and also includes text messages. and as we just mentioned, a couple of slides before social media posts or or even, you know, your likes or responses to a particular social media post. so please keep in mind, especially with respect to things such as text message, where it might be easy to engage in less formal communication than perhaps when we are using email that, you know, text messages and the subject of your text messages are also subject to the public records act. so if they are if you have text messages that are

responsive to a public records request, we they are required to be disclosed in response to a public records request moving on to personal electronic devices so similar to what we talked about with respect to text messages, when you use your personal account to communicate about the conduct of your business, here is an mta board member. all of those writings, regardless of the device that they're contained on, may constitute a public record. um, but it's important to keep in mind like if you, you conduct your business as an mta board member on your own personal mail gmail account, you know, certainly we're not making any claim that all of the contents of your gmail account is subject to disclosure under the public records act. but you should keep in mind that that email or

correspondence or communications that's related to your role as an mta board member is subject to disclosure. and there are instances where you may be asked to search your personal devices and personal accounts for records or communications that relate to your role as an mta board member and. one last thing to note and keep in mind is that the agency has got an existing record retention policies policy , and the policies contained in that document apply. to communications that are made using personal electronic devices. but you may transfer those public records to records to a government owned device or email account. that is one way to minimize the administrative effort in involved in searching your own personal devices or accounts is by having a habit of

regularly moving those sorts of communications over to a city issued device or account. and so we've talked a lot about kind of the extent of the public records act and that a lot of what you do when it relates to your conduct of business as directors of the mta board may be considered a public record and subject to disclosure, but there are also a number of exemptions. create by both state and local law with respect to access the broad access to public records. and those include some of the items that are up here on this slide, such as attorney client communications, attorney, work product, some aspects of the competitive procurement process, information that constitutes trade secrets, information related to pending litigation.

and there are a number of other exemptions that we could always help you with. if you ever had any questions about whether or not information in in your possession might be be either subject to disclosure or under the public records act, or whether or not there is a particular exemption that should apply. next slide is just a couple of suggestions about practicing good email etiquette and document etiquette, especially in light of what we've talked about with respect to public records. and so we think it's advisable in your communications to be succinct and clear, certainly be professional. so although we have no doubt about it, that that particular the suggestion that it's advisable to only communicate about city business from designated accounts, again, that makes it easier if there's

ever a need to search the records for official public records, you don't have 5 or 6 different email accounts that you're having to search in order to determine whether or not you've got response of documents. we advise against mixing work related purposes in in or excuse me, non work related purposes and work related emails or texts as. one that i think is easy to overlook, but is nevertheless really important is not continuing to forward really long chains of email. it can be so easy to do. we've got lots of information that we are sharing among you know, lots of different people and we want to make sure that the conversation is fulsome and everyone kind of knows the context of what's going on. but it does just create the opportunity party for

probl isms and challenges, especially going back to our earlier discussion on about seriatim meetings. if you've got a long email chain but you and you haven't looked all the way down at the bottom to recognize that you know there were several other of your fellow board members that were included on the email chain. so your innocent reply all with your comments in response to a question then could turn into a seriatim meeting without without you intending for that to be the case. and so one way to avoid that potential misstep is just to try and limit the amount of kind of forwarding or passing along of really long email chains in your email practice. s and finally, and probably most importantly, please refrain from replying all when communicating with other directors for that very reason. we want to avoid avoid kind of the inadvertent

opportunity to have a seriatim meeting when really all you were trying to do was show for your response or thoughts to a particular question. a couple of final points about just practicing good email and document etiquette is that some of the pitfalls or are that if we don't practice good email and document etiquette responses to public records requests and litigation discovery can be voluminous and sometimes damaging to city interests. i know that there are at least a couple of you that may have had some relatively recent experience in the last couple of years having to search your files in response to litigation discovery. and so we all we just generally ask that you are mindful and employ some of these techniques. we're getting close to the end just to reiterate kind of the point of being

careful about what you include in your correspondence, because it can be a public record before you hit send on an email or a text message or any manner of communication, a social media post. keep in mind that, you know, or maybe ask stop and ask yourself whether or not that's something that you'd be willing to see splashed across the front page of the chronicle. and if not, maybe that's an opportunity to take a step back, maybe pause and rethink whether or not we really want to send that tweet, that email, that text message, and some of the consequences of poor document management or etiquette email etiquette are that there's a lot of staff and attorney time that can and has been spent responding to both sunshine and discovery requests. s there's risk of negative implications in litigation and

we also just want to be mindful that your, your practice should correspond to the agency's retention policy. and finally, last slide, just a couple of things to remember in 2023. remember that your work in the city government is subject to public meeting laws which think you are all aware of sunshine and the public records act. again, think about pausing before you hit, send or reply. all and we want to ask you to practice good email and document management etiquette and certainly please feel free to call our office if you've got any questions at all. and with that, we're happy to entertain any questions you all might have. thank you. i have a few questions, but colleagues, what questions do you have? director goheen i just wanted to clarify any sort of advice or guidance

that you may have on how different board members should engage? the chair like oftentimes i have seen different legislative bodies see kind of like as the chair, as like the conduit between folks, but knowing that we have all these different, you know, we don't want to have to have meetings or anything like that, you know, just trying to be careful about that. i just want to clarify that for especially the newer folks on the team. sure. thank you for that question. i think really it's the responsibility of the chair to make sure that she is not corresponding on a certain topic with more than a quorum of you. so if you approach the chair and somebody else approaches the chair on a certain topic, then that's three people that she's talked to. so when the fourth person comes to the chair and says, i'm concerned about that same topic, the chair and this actually goes

for any of you, but i do think you're correct that the chair is in a more unique kind of hub role. she should say, i'm sorry, but i've already spoken to two of your colleagues. so that's three of you. i can't really talk to you about this. so but, you know, you can talk at a regular meeting, so each of you really needs to make sure that you are keeping track of who who you kind of want to maybe be. the two board members that you can talk to about certain topics. so and then kind of regularly you can you can talk to them. there's no problem with that. but the two of you or the three of you should make sure you're not talking to other board members. so i think it's common for people to say, you know, will you be my sounding board on vision zero or maybe something smaller because vision zero, so such a large topic. but

on some particular project. and then you can kind of bounce ideas off of each other without worrying about violating the brown act. is that helpful? yes, it is. thank you so much. one question i have is around subcommittee bodies. i think we're experimenting with more and more work getting done in board subcommittees. and can you explain to us what it would take to formally delegate authority to vote on issues to subcommittees, or is that spoken to in the charter? it's not exactly spoken to in the charter, but i don't think that because it's not a subcommittee is not a charter body, then it doesn't have any authority under the charter except to make recommendations to you. you could have a committee of a quorum, in which case you would need to know. notice every one of those meetings as a meeting

of the sfmta board of directors. but with the expectation that only four of you would be using your time in that way. and then because it's an if the other board members were comfortable with that, it would be very unusual. but it would be you could actually make decisions. and there are many boards and commissions out there where there is simply a practice of agreeing amongst yourselves to accept the recommendation of your subcommittees without a lot of discussion. and then there are bodies where that simply doesn't work. so it would be about all of you kind of figuring out the path that makes sense for you. all yeah, i think that's a great point. so you could have a section on your consent calendar, for example, that subcommittee acts has recommended these three items to you to the full board, and you routinely, like you do with many consent calendar items, just don't have a full board discussion on those. so you are

on your you're trusting to the subcommittee. so we could have a provision for a subcommittee to actually take a vote on a policy matter. it wouldn't have the force of the full board, but it would be a vote of a recommendation to the full board that this board could choose to accept or reject or modify. yeah, yeah. it would look like any other consent calendar item. so if one of you did not want to know more about the item, wanted a full presentation or had questions of the subcommittee, you'd take it off consent. that's really helpful. um. okay you made a point about government owned devices. i don't i've never been made aware that a government owned device is a is a possibility for this board. so i don't know if that was just a generic comment or you meant to make a specific comment about that. but if that's something that should that's something we should consider, then the board members should be notified about that option. it wasn't intended as a recommendation that you should have a government owned device, but for instance, there are mta

staff members that have my understanding is that they've got mta issued phones, for instance. and so that would be a government owned device. and if there were ever an occasion where the mta decided as a policy matter, they wanted you as board members to have agency owned devices that you use for your work as a board member, they would fall into that category. but it wasn't intended to suggest that that currently exists or that that's the way that you should conduct your business. just that it's a possibility that's not a current board practice, to be clear. correct that's my understanding. okay, great. any other questions from board members? sorry, just a small addition to that. is um, commissions do have official city email addresses or you can kind of create your own. i don't know what the status of that is right now. we have those. you have them? yeah. so you didn't used to. so this advice might be a little bit less relevant in years past, i think actually. director egan, when you joined

the board, it was very common for board members to use their personal or professional emails for board business. and then that creates it just makes it very difficult when you have to go back and search your email to respond. but if you're using one account, whether it's an official mta account or or not, it will just be helpful for you in the future. okay if there's no other questions from board members, don't think we have any public commenters in the room. so i'll go ahead and open it up to remote public comment. we also have no attendees called in. okay thank you for the training. that concludes our business today. we're officially adjourned. thank you for the year. thank you all.

watching. >> pay by mraft parking meter pay for parking in san francisco and the video/show you how to do that the first one is no traditionally parking instead of the pay by played has instructions and options to activate the screen press any bottom or press the language bottom and enter the license plate or the last 5 numbers of identification and press the great check about how many

audible convicted is to be using to adjust the time and press the marx bottom to select the ma'am, time allowed and after you select the parking duration asked to pay pay users coins or smart phone or debt or credit card tap that on the reader or insert to the magnetic strip and if you're paying by smart phone with apple enter k once you pay the meter will send out a receipt and alert any control officer i have paid an ordinance to make a phone call cotton 866490 and enter the 10 digit forbes or press the star and enter the pin and at last four

digits of the credit card and the number of the minutes and at the end of the call audible hear he payment successful. and finally, there are no refunds if you return to our car hsa and that's it you're all set the license plate will only be saved for the duration of our parking time check for the area and show you're parked legally and they're an easy way to pay for parking. >> we hope this video has been helpful thanks for

[music] >> welcome to the 2022 sfmta bus roadeo. today what we will see is competitions of different levels. we will see transit operators through a obstacle course. also see the office rfs maneuver the g4 cars through a course. (inaudible) [beeping] then also have a element of (inaudible) who are doing inspections and repairs and some of the equipment related to our buses. [applause] >> i enjoy coming to the event because of the camaraderie with the staff and seeing the departments and everybody meeting arfbd so the more we can do these things the better we'll be and it helps the agency grow.

>> the winner of the local bus roadeo the person goes to the national (inaudible) one additional item we add to the event and call it a fun event where managers at the senior level get to test their skills operating a bus. (inaudible) transfer officers (inaudible) basically maneuver the course and they (inaudible) >> interesting to see some of the main managers run the course out there. they haven't had as much experience but they did pretty well. i'll submit the bus damage for the bumps they did to the body shop for estimates. [applause] >> behind us we have vintage buses that were brought out for folks to see. some of these vintage buses are sfmta, part

of the historical fleet. two others belong to the pacific bus museum and a personal bus of a individual that owns it. we take great pride in the historical buses we have and try to keep it up to date. >> it is a way to bring employees together, work together as a team. a great morale booster something the employees have been asking for a year and it is great today because you can see how happy they were to once again do something they really enjoy. [cheering] >> first place (inaudible) [applause] third place goes to monica collins. (inaudible) >> this is my last roadeo. i'm throwing in the towel.

you're watching san francisco rising with chris manors. today's special guest is jeff tumlin. >> hi, i'm chris manors and you're watching san francisco rising. the show on starting, rebuilding, and reimagining our city. our guest is jeff tumlin and he's with us to talk about our transportation recovery plan and some exciting projects across the city. mr. tumlin welcome to the show. >> thank you for having me. >> i know the pandemic was particularly challenging for the m.t.a. having to balance between keeping central transportation routes open, but things have improved. how are we doing with our

transportation recovery plan? >> so we just got good news this week. we're getting an extra $115 million from the american rescue plan and this is basically the exact amount of money we finally needed in order to close the gap between now and november of 2024 when we'll have to find some additional revenue sources in order to sustain the agency. in the meantime, i finally have the confidence to be able to rapidly hire, to restore services and to make sure muni is there for san francisco's larger economic recovery because downtown san francisco doesn't work without muni. >> quite right. i guess the other impact of the pandemic was that some projects like the valencia bike improvements had to be put on hold. are we starting to gear up on those again? >> yes, so it's an interesting

case study. of right before covid hit, we were about ready to invest in quick build bike lanes. arguably the most important bike order in san francisco. that got stopped with lockdown and then as you'll recall, during covid, we invented all kinds of other new programs like shared spaces in order to support our small businesses as well as sunday street light events for neighborhood commercial streets where streets were closed off to cars and turned over to commercial activity. those successes now that they've been made permanent actually interrupt the draft design we had put together. so we've gone back to the drawing board and we are looking forward to having some additional community conversations about other design ideas for valencia. we're committed to completing a quick build project on this calendar year. >> that's such good news. valencia is a really great street for biking.

so there are two huge and exciting projects that are about to be or have just been completed. let's talk about the bus rapid transit project on van ness avenue. how extensive have the improvements been? >> what's called the van ness transit rapid project is in fact more about complete reconstruction of the street and most importantly, the 100-year-old utilities underneath the street. so all of the water, sewer, telecommunications, gas lines under the street were basically rebuilt from market street all the way to lumbard. the part on the surface which provides dedicated bus lanes for golden gate transit and muni, that was relatively straight forward and we're so excited we're going to start revenue service for muni on april 1st. >> that's fantastic. i understand there were some sidewalk improvements too.

>> there were sidewalk improvements. we planted 374 trees. there is new storm water treatment including infiltration in the sidewalk, there's a bunch of art. there's all kinds of things. we put in new street lights for the entire corridor. >> finally, the other big news is about the central subway. can you briefly describe the project and give us an update. >> yes, so the central t-line project, another stop at union square that connects directly into powell station and a final stop in the heart of chinatown at stockton and washington. that project has also run into challenges. it's 120' under muni, under bart, 120' down and out under

chinatown in some unexpectedly challenging soils. but that project is nearly complete. it's at about 98% completion right now which means we're testing trains, we're testing the elevators and escalators and the final electronics and we're still on track to open that in october presuming all of the testing continues to go well. so fingers crossed on in a one. we're really looking forward to allowing people to have a subway ride from the heart of chinatown all the way to the convention center to the caltrans station and all the way down to bayview and visitation valley. >> it's great to see all these projects coming to completion. we're all grateful for your team's hard work and i really appreciate you coming on the show, mr. tumlin. thank you for the time you've given us today. >> my pleasure. thanks for having me.

>> and that's it for this episode. for sfgov tv i'm chris manors. thanks for watching.

>> there is a lot of unique characteristics about visitation valley. it is a unique part of the city. >> we are off in a corner of the city against the san francisco county line 101 on one side. vis station valley is still one of the last blue color neighborhoods in san francisco. a lot of working class families out here. it is unusual. not a lot of apartment buildings. a lot of single family homes. >> great business corridor. so much traffic coming through here and stopping off to grab coffee or sandwich or pick up food before going home. >> a lot of customers are from the neighborhood. they are painters or mechanics. they are like blue color workers, a lot of them.

>> the community is lovely. multi-racial and hopefully we can look out for each other. >> there is a variety of businesses on the block. you think of buffalo kitchen, chinese food, pork buns, sandwich. library, bank of america with a parking lot. the market where you can grab anything. amazing food choices, nail salons. basically everything you need is here. >> a lot of these businesses up and down leland are family owned. people running them are family. when you come here and you have an uncle and nephew and go across the street and have the guy and his dad. lisa and her daughter in the dog parlor and pam. it is very cool. >> is small businesses make the neighborhood unique. >> new businesses coming.

in mission blue, gourmet chocolate manufacturing. the corridor has changed and is continuing to change. we hope to see more businesses coming in the near future. >> this is what is needed. first, stay home. unless it is absoluteliness scary. social distancing is the most important step right now to limit spread of virus. cancel all nonessential gather everythings. >> when the pandemic litly land avenue suffered like other corridors. a few nail salons couldn't operate. they shut down. restaurants that had to adapt to more of a take out model.

they haven't totally brought back indoor seating. >> it is heartbreaking to see the businesses that have closed down and shut because of the pandemic. >> when the pandemic first hit it got really slow. we had to change our hours. we never had to close, which is a blessing. thank god. we stayed open the whole time. >> we were kind of nervous and anxious to see what was going to come next hoping we will not have to close down. >> during covid we would go outside and look on both sides of the street. it looked like old western town. nobody on the street. no cars. >> it was a hard eight or nine months. when they opened up half the people couldn't afford a haircut. >> during that time we kept saying the coffee shop was the living room of the valley. people would come to make sure they were okay.

>> we checked on each other and patronized each other. i would get a cup of coffee, shirt, they would get a haircut. >> this is a generous and kind community. people would be like i am getting the toffee for the guy behind me and some days it went on and on. it was amazing to watch. we saw a perfect picture of community. we are all in this together. >> since we began to reopen one year later, we will emerge stronger. we will emerge better as a city because we are still here and we stand in solidarity with one another. >> when we opened up august 1st. i will not say it was all good. we are still struggling due to covid. it affected a lot of people. >> we are still in the pandemic right now.

things are opening up a little bit. it is great to have space to come together. i did a three painting series of visitation valley and the businesses on leland. it felt good to drop off the paintings and hung them. >> my business is picking up. the city is opening up. we have mask requirements. i check temperatures. i ask for vaccination card and/or recent test. the older folks they want to feel safe here. >> i feel like there is a sense of unity happening. >> what got us through the pandemic was our customers. their dogs needed groomed, we have to cut their nails so they don't over grow. >> this is only going to push us forward. i sense a spirit of community and just belief in one another. >> we are trying to see if we can help all small businesses

around here. there is a cannabis club lounge next to the dog parlor to bring foot traffic. my business is not going to work if the business across the street is not getting help. >> in hit us hard. i see a bright future to get the storefronts full. >> once people come here i think they really like it. >> if you are from san francisco visit visitation valley to see how this side of the city is the same but different. shop and dine in the 49 promotes local businesses and challenges residents to do their shopping and dining within the 49 square miles of san francisco. by supporting local services within our neighborhoods, we help san francisco remain unique, successful, and vibrant.

so where will you shop and dine in the 49? >> my name is ray behr. i am the owner of chief plus. it's a destination specialty foods store, and it's also a corner grocery store, as well. we call it cheese plus because there's a lot of additions in addition to cheese here. from fresh flowers, to wine, past a, chocolate, our dining area and espresso bar. you can have a casual meeting if you want to. it's a real community gathering place. what makes little polk unique, i think, first of all, it's a great pedestrian street. there's people out and about all day, meeting this neighbor and coming out and supporting the businesses. the businesses here are almost all exclusively independent owned small businesses.

it harkens back to supporting local. polk street doesn't look like anywhere u.s.a. it has its own businesses and personality. we have clothing stores to gallerys, to personal service stores, where you can get your hsus repaired, luggage repaired. there's a music studio across the street. it's raily a diverse and unique offering on this really great street. i think san franciscans should shop local as much as they can because they can discover things that they may not be familiar with. again, the marketplace is changing, and, you know, you look at a screen, and you click a mouse, and you order something, and it shows up, but to have a tangible experience, to be able to come in to taste things, to see things, to smell things, all those things, it's very important that you do so.

>> once i got the hang of it a little bit, you know, like the first time, i never left the court. i just fell in love with it and any opportunity i had to get out there, you know, they didn't have to ask twice. you can always find me on the court. [♪♪♪] >> we have been able to participate in 12 athletics wheelchairs. they provide what is an expensive tool to facilitate basketball specifically. behind me are the amazing golden

state road warriors, which are one of the most competitive adaptive basketball teams in the state led by its captain, chuck hill, who was a national paralympic and, and is now an assistant coach on the national big team. >> it is great to have this opportunity here in san francisco. we are the main hub of the bay area, which, you know, we should definitely have resources here. now that that is happening, you know, i i'm looking forward to that growing and spreading and helping spread the word that needs -- that these people are here for everyone. i think it is important for people with disabilities, as well as able-bodied, to be able to see and to try different sports, and to appreciate trying different things. >> people can come and check out this chairs and use them. but then also friday evening, from 6:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.,

it will be wheelchair basketball we will make sure it is available, and that way people can no that people will be coming to play at the same time. >> we offer a wide variety of adaptive and inclusion programming, but this is the first time we have had our own equipment. [♪♪♪]

>> bob morts, global german and chief executive officer of pwc. >> good morning everyone. thank you to be the early birds. sitting here, fighting all the possibilities so that we guarantee a great conversation and my name is kim way, the moderator for this panel. the gobel economy and state of the world. i am