supervisor mirkarimi: good morning. welcome to the san francisco county transportation authority meeting to i am ross mirkarimi, a chair. i want to thank sfgtv for their ongoing excellence. madam clerk, would you please read the roll call? >> >> supervisor avalos? present. >> supervisor campos?

present. >> supervisor chiu? present. >> supervisor chu? present. >> supervisor cohen? present. >> supervisor elsbernd? present. >> supervisor farrell? present. >> supervisor kim? absent. >> supervisor mar? absent. >> supervisor mirkarimi? present. >> supervisor wiener? present. we have a quorum. supervisor mirkarimi: very good. item number two, please. >> approval of minutes of the november 15, 2011 meeting. this is an action item. supervisor mirkarimi: any discussion? any public comment? seeing none, public comment is closed. roll call, please. >> item number two. >> supervisor avalos? >> supervisor campos? >> supervisor chiu? >> supervisor chu? >> supervisor cohen? >> supervisor elsbernd? >> supervisor farrell? >> supervisor kim? >> supervisor mar? absent. >> supervisor mirkarimi? >> supervisor wiener?

item passes. supervisor mirkarimi: all right. please read items number three four. >> 3 commenters report. four, executive director's report. these are information items. supervisor mirkarimi: colleagues, this is my last meeting as chair of the transportation authority. i want to thank you all for allowing me to serve you for two years. as i look back over the last year, but in particular the last two years, i think it is important that we can all take pride in some major milestones that we were able to achieve together, such as the completion of the environmental impact report for the van ness bus a rapid transit line. i project this is poised to move into implementation, and one that i believe will change for the better, the way people see public transportation in san francisco. on high-speed rail, we spent a very productive year forging a unified san francisco position

in the face of rapid change them in the policy environment both in washington, d.c., and in san francisco. i believe we will see caltrain electrification in high-speed rail kunduz san francisco at center than most people predict. we only realize the dream, the downtown high-speed rail terminal, but we're also known to show the way for the rest of the state. our coalition building worked in this area, and it will be a major legacy. i am proud of the work we have done on the presidio parkway. we're poised to open the first phase to traffic in early february, and our work on the public-private partnership has said legal challenges all the way back to the state supreme court. again, we are blazing new trails in project delivery. they will benefit not just the city but the entire state. we have made significant progress in presenting a unified front in the region on san francisco's infrastructure needs

related to the proposed sustainable community strategy, scs, and raising their readiness for pungent housing policies that can provide governments to make the right decisions to enable us as the region to make the most of our investments in transportation and infrastructure and do our part in addressing climate change. aside from the passage of prop k, that when the first general it -- revenue-generating measures in 2003, weaver also successful in putting forward the first ballot measure to transportation authority, and that was proposition aa, which passed last year. thank you, colleagues, for pursuing that it also, the transportation authority in providing the dollars to conduct one of the first shared audits of the mta, as the ta has been tapped in helping address some of the larger chronic problems certainly experienced by a

sister agency, the municipal transportation authority. i believe that many of these are big topics in the legacy, and the progress we have made will be measured are the next several that it did not want to thank supervisor campos and supervisor mar and all of you for the focused energy and clarity have brought to the discussion of the many important policy issues that we have faced at the transportation authority over the past 12 months and previous 12 months peter i am grateful for the opportunity to work closely with the authority's executive director and staff. i greatly appreciative of the due diligence and excellence that ta staff have provided a there is plenty yet to be accomplished, but i leave with a clear sense that we have moved the agenda forward. it has been in awarding experience. thank you for the trust you have invested in me and for the opportunity to serve as the authorities chair.

i look forward to seeing the operatives work from the fourth floor and promise to keep in touch. thank you. mr. executive director -- >> mr. chairman, commissioners, a good morning. i am the executive director. my report is on your chair. many take a moment here to bank and acknowledge the outgoing chair for his distinguished role as the steward of the jurisdictional authority over the last year. we have worked very closely with him and have never been disappointed in his ability to find the true policy content out of all the discussions we have had with him. and, as he said earlier, there are many issues that are legacy issues. there are others that he did not

mention in his remarks that i think will continue to occupy us. the one that comes to mind right now is the new measure that will replace level of services, our measure of performance of the transportation system, which is something that he pioneered several years ago, actually, and we have been working with them ever since, and getting to the point where we will be blazing a new trail not just for san francisco but for california in terms of how the ceqa transportation impacts fincher is looked at from here into the future. and i, i am fund of making predictions, predict that the work alone, one adopted by local community groups, will have a larger impact than sc375 in setting us on the right course to sustainable development. thank you, mr. chair. on behalf of the staff of the

transportation authority and myself, we wish you the very best of luck in your new capacity. supervisor mirkarimi: thank you. >> i do have a few items i would like to highlight. we cannot have a report without an update on what is happening in washington, d.c., on the reauthorization of the six-year service transportation act. you all heard about this at some length at the last meeting. the house, under the leadership of chairman micah, had worked to put together what looked like was going to be a five-year bill. we are, however, again back at the point of discussing what their revenue is going to be. there was some sense of an agreement just a month ago about using royalties from extended oil and gas exploration to pay for the revenue gap, but that

has fallen apart as republican members of the house have backed away from that. then we had the valiant efforts going on in the senate, led by senator barbara boxer, to try to put together a two-year bill there, and the gap there is smaller. it is still $1 billion, but it is still a gap that appears at this point to be almost insurmountable as far as the political will in congress to find the revenue source for it. it has not helped that this task as a sort of collided with the goal of at the supercommittee on deficit-reduction, which of course has a much bigger mountain to climb. and i think it all boils down to confirming my prediction of about a year ago that we were unlikely to see reauthorization, certainly not a multi-year reauthorization, before the

presidential elections. what we do have is an extension that brings the current bill, is essentially, to march 2012, and i will predict today that we will have another extension that will bring it beyond the november election next year. the other rather alarming aspect of the lack of action that the federal level is that until expiration of the $230 per month federal transit commuter tax benefit allowance, which expires at the end of this month. we have not yet seen the willpower to extend it. it could bring as to the point where the commuter tax benefit for transit users is reduced to $125 per month, while the parking benefit for people driving goes up to $240, which really is the absolute opposite of the kind of policy we should have are in this country, considering climate change and everything else. so we are actively trying to

work in the coalition's to get congress to recognize the importance of passing this bill i am and i give the new and evaluation of the chances of this at this point, because the climate in congress is very strange, but i am and hoping for the best. i will keep posted about this and report back in january. and like to thank supervisor campos and supervisor wiener further testimony on december 8 in front of the senate committee on transportation and housing, the state senate committee headed by the senator, which took up the issue of ab57, which is the bill that proposes to change the voting composition at ntc. unfortunately i was out of the country that day. i was not able to attend, but in this then they were there, as well as one of our assemblymen,

and there was a very interesting and in-depth discussion of the possibilities for regional consensus on a bill that would address whatever fairness issues may have been raised by other counties in the region. i understand that mtc will be voting on its legislative agenda for the year 2012 later this month and that ab57 will be a big part of the discussion, and i am looking forward to supporting our mtc commissioners in that endeavor. the regional transportation plan has continued to move forward as well, and now we have the issuance last week of mtc's and abag's results of the five alternative scenarios and their performance towards reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and

other performance targets. and we see something that i think we all expected, which is that the performance of these scenarios falls short. in some cases, 50% short of the targets that the region should be observing. this is serious stuff. it is coming at a time when the world is talking about moving away from the kyoto treaty and the durban treaty is in question as well, and it shows the importance of the region's taking concerted approach to meeting these goals, is 15% reduction goal is not unattainable, but as we have said before a number of times, it will require measures that they're a little bit more grave than we have on the table today, including potentially some pricing-related alternatives, in my opinion, going beyond parking

and repricing to get to solutions. the other thing i wanted to highlight is the really untenable set of results that we are seeing related to affordable housing and related to the percentage of income, of household income, that is predicted to become necessary in order for people to afford living in the bay area. those percentages are very, very high. for households earning less than $30,000 a year, we go from 77% to 87% to 89% in 2014. people will be paying for housing at the expense of food and transportation. that obviously has to change. it echoes supervisor campos' comments about really any need to address the affordable housing issue in the mix. we will have to focus on that as we move forward and continue to

press for communities that are doing something about affordable housing to get credit on the infrastructure investment side. because if we're doing our share and more than our share, we should be getting more money for infrastructure. that is nothing new, but it is a message that i think is worth delivering again. as you know, i spend a couple of weeks seemingly on vacation, but i was teaching a course in argentina on strategic planning for transportation investments. i came back with an invitation from the chancellor of the university there in rosario, my hometown, to try to open up an exchange program, and i will be pursuing those ideas a little bit further and will give you more of a report next month. it is very exciting to the topics are familiar to us, high- speed rail, parking pricing, bicycle lanes, how to deal with the density, all of the same issues we deal with here.

i think it is an opportunity from all -- for all of us to learn. i spent a day on the way back from argentina in washington, d.c. our deputy of projects joined me there to have meetings with the federal highway administrator to try to sort out the final stages of the federal funding byrd is a vision for the second phase of the presidio parkway project. which, as the chair mentioned earlier, is nearing completion on the first phase, which will be open to traffic on -- in february, but we need to make sure we do not have a gap on the start of the second phase in the private-public partnership. i anticipate that we will need further work with the mtc commissioners on this issue. there are some complex issues related to the funding plan . i will keep close to, but i am hopeful we will resolve one of our issues in time for the financial close of march 2012.

the van ness windy environmental impact statement and report, the draft, as you know, is circulating. i want to remind people that the close of public comment is in december 19, just next monday, and that the public can obtain information about the project in the eir at our website. i encourage everybody to heed that comment deaine. we have reached out to over 20 state groups in the last month since the eir draft was published. i anticipate that we will have the final ready for you to adopt in the fall. we have also been working diligently on the update of the countywide plan. i will not say a lot about that, but we're now at the stage where we have developed a framework

for evaluation of projects and have over 100 projects submitted by the public and public agencies over the past couple of months. and we're now beginning to go through the evaluation of those projects for performance. the public is invited to go to our website on the transportation plan, which is www.movesmartsf.com, to look at the details on what we're doing on that. i am very pleased to report that the jfk bikeway project is moving forward, that it obtained the approvals that it needed from the concourse authority and the recreation and park commission. you may recall that the authority allocated over4 over10 -- over $400,000 for prop k in september. the funding is in there,

including approvals, so we expect the installation of the bikeway will start in january 2012. this is to not miss a the holiday season in the park. but january 2012, we can look forward to biking along jfk on this brand new bikeway, paid for with prop k money. i think that is a very good news. there has also been in progress on the progressbikeway improvements project, but i will not go into detail there. you may recall that you also allocated $165,000 a prop k to that project. finally, two items. the central freeway, this is ancient history now, but the central freeway opened in 2006 -- i am is sorry, octavia boulevard, replacement of central freeway. at the time, we had an agreement with the city that when some of

those parcels of land sold, we would do the ancillary projects that had been promised to the neighbors in the areas around the new boulevard. well, finally, the real estate in that area is beginning to sell, and now the city is in a condition to start implementing those ancillary projects that were promised as part of the octavia boulevard plan, and you'll see some action in that plan starting very, very soon, i enginery 2012. that is already beginning to implement projects around the area as, including some of these small streets were the closure of the local streets to accommodate the landing at the new central freeway at market street generated some problems. so we're looking forward to seeing that happen. the final thing i have is a thank you to cynthia fong who is

not here today because of a health issue, for giving us a seventh year of clean audits. they are in the packet for you to approve today. it is really a testament to her very good work in the work of her staff. the last thing, and i will say it now so i do not say it later, i wish you all a very, very happy holiday season and a well- deserved rest until january. thank you two concludes my report. supervisor mirkarimi: thank you, mr. executive director. any public comment, please come forward. >> as you know, item number three and four are just informational items, but it is an opportunity on behalf of the

concerns of san francisco to thank you, the chair, for doing excellent work. as no, you can do that because long before you became a supervisor, you're an advocate. i would encourage the next chair to address quality of life issues. having said that, i listened to the long speech given by the director of the san francisco county transportation authority, where he touched on many topics, some local, national, and others international. i would like to ask the san francisco county transportation authority to address the heavy congestion on some of our avenues and streets, like market