more we have to cover. and then to get into a discussion. >> i can run through the entire presentation and we can come back to the topics that are of greatest interest to all of you. >> chair borden: perfect. why don't we do that. i think that makes sense. >> yeah. i understand the desire for that. i guess that maybe, chair, i don't want to put words in your mouth, but maybe for me at least, i guess, can you just architect for us, director, kind of what your full presentation looks like so that we know kind of -- like, what do you want the decision matrix and what was your vision for this, i guess? >> so the presentation is structured around the spreadsheet that we sent out. it's in three parts. one focuses on here's how values work and influence decisions one

way or another. and the next set reviews how you becomeally weighted projects and what the results of that was. and the final is on the exercise of how you spent the $100 to show what projects rose to the tops and which ones went to the bottom. throughout our more framing questions, should we do things more this way or that way. and the objective of this wohl e exercise is to get a sense from the board, for example, one of the things that i think that is becoming clear is you're interested in an acceleration of our work even at the expense of an additional engagement and inclusivity. similarly, you're very interested in safety and, for example, vision zero. even if there's a political risk in moving forward rapidly in such projects. so that is exactly the sort of feedback that we're trying to

synthesize as a staff and there's more kind of framing questions that we've got for you. >> with that in mind, it makes sense to just show the results of each section and then have a discussion afterwards about what that looks like. >> chair borden: sorry about that. okay, great. now we have comments from director lai. director lai. >> director lai: yes, thank you. before we keep going forward, i want to maybe make a little bit of a point about the values at least, because that's what justf started off with. and i appreciate you stating out there that these are just the first attempt, you know, thinking about what the values look like. and i actually really did find it a very interesting exercise to see the correlation between values versus the dollar assignment. that was certainly an interesting experience. i really struggled with this

exercise. i know that i have shared, but i want to make sure that the public understands that this is -- to me at least -- it was a hard challenge because i did take it seriously. i spent hours on it, actually, and modeled it numerous times to try to understand the behavior of the model. what kept tripping me up initially on the values is that i do think that the 10 that you have listed out overlap, but also are not equal size values. again, for the public, this is not the board stating that these are the values. but i want to just share that that did kind of make it difficult for me to proceed with the task, right, and then i'm told that these are the values. and under the projects there's also pre-determined scoring of the projects under each of these values. which, you know, so i basically had an issue of not quite being

aligned with the input or the assumptions and the model, and, therefore, i don't know how much i align with the outcome. and so, you know, i want to make clear that when had you had stated earlier, director tumlin, that the board has seemingly prioritized certain values over transparency or communication, i don't know that we can rely on this output, just to be clear. because i think that the weighted scores that was predetermined again within the model, kind of drives or skews some of the output. it sort of predestins some of these projects. i don't think that is a fact. i think that is as a result of this exercise that it came out of it, which has a lot of room

for us to continue to iterate on. having said that, you know, following up on yesterday's conversation, i'm probably one of the few in the minority, but probably some of the and/or -- not really and/or -- but this or that -- set up, is also somewhat challenging to me because i feel like a lot -- some of the options were quite clear and quite binary. but some of them is more so a question of range. like, in the scale of this or this option, how much are we ranging on this versus ranging on that. so i guess that i want to state before we continue the discussion, because i feel like it's going to continue to be an issue for me to, like, to really be clear about some of my answers. i don't know how my colleagues feel about this. i would love to hear other people's feelings and opinion about this exercise. thank you, chair. >> if i may, chair, so director

lai, your frustration is certainly understandable. all models are wrong. some models are interesting. this model, again, was not designed as a decision-making tool, but, rather, a decision framing tool. in order to help us to frame the hard choices that we're going to need to make. and your responses, in fact, were extremely useful to staff for those purposes. and there was another point that i was going to make and it's now gone and it will come back later. >> chair borden: no worry, director hinze has something to say. >> director hinze: really quickly, i wanted to second director lai's experience with the exercise. and say to the public that i also had trouble with just weighing it.

i thought that some of the -- based on how i personally arranged the values, i thought that some of the projects -- the weight side of things kind of surprised me. so i don't know how i spent the $100 would be in align with how i weight my values. because, again, i played with the model a lot and spent hours on it -- yeah. but i appreciate the thought. going forward with that's the rest of today's time, i would

say that perhaps we should lay out all of the questions that we have and then perhaps we could guide them to like the rest of the content of these presentations so that my colleagues and i have, like, a framing of the presentation with the questions that you want us to keep in mind, in mind, and then we can have a conversation. just a thought. >> chair borden: thank you, director hinze. i think that both you and director lai have expressed what is challenging is that as humans we're all kind of hypocrites, when it comes down to it. we have values that are one way and we behave in another way. and i think sometimes you would make a choice between the

different projects and your values might be one thing but the way that you rank the project would be another way. i have had this conversation with you, director tumlin. i'm not sure that our value ranking really tells you what our values are. i think that the choices we make ultimately with the money and the projects will say what our values are. i think that sometimes it's want an either/or and it's an and/but and that's the challenge, right. we want good public engagement and presentation and people to feel included in the process and not feel to be included, but we want to also move faster. so sometimes those are at conflict. and we need the public's permission to keep moving fast. and it's a cycle. but if you could go through all of the things that we're going to be considering and then we can come back to those things if we want to drill down on it, it might be easiest.

>> okay, ready to go? okay. go back to my screen. okay. so another core question as we try to bring transit back, do we bring transit back with parallel lines running every two blocks, or do we enhance transit frequency? do we hold on to the extraordinarily high level of frequency that we've had to invest in in our core corridors in order to maintain social distance in prioritizing transparency would have us to preserve as much of the network as possible, including routes that run on parallel streets a couple blocks apart. and prioritizing vitality, and

frequency, would have us to add more frequent service and new routes like the 29 rapid to connect communities quickly and to bridge gaps and to provide the kind of extra service to equity neighborhoods that we have provided during covid. director lai, to your point, the second comment that i had for you -- yes, none of these questions are not binary. it's not either/or, but, rather, on a scale of 1-10, to what degree do we focus on transit coverage or transit frequency. it's a tension. we cannot do both. we need to fall somewhere on that spectrum. and making a decision about that is a policy decision, not a technical decision. another core question that we will need to face as we look for new funding measures is -- do we explore free muni for everyone? it makes a great and powerful political slogan. or do we focus on targeting fare

discounts for those who struggle to pay? prioritizing transparency would have to explore simplifying the fare structure so all riders got free service, regardless of income, but resiliency would expand the discount services, and focusing instead on service improvements rather than providing free muni for affluent populations. this is going to be a really, really difficult tradeoff to deal with, given the political popularity of things that are free. and the difficulty of expressing the upside of free against the tradeoff of less service. so in your spreadsheets we had you to look at how to weight thinking about how the scoring of your values rltsed to the

scoring of individual projects and what degree did you want to have orientation around values and around cost and more importantly your orientation around cost benefit? and so we were curious to see, you know, which of these factors that you weighted the most. and unsurprisingly, the cost benefit received the highest average percentage around 40%. and note the cost score independently was the thing that you cared least about. you wanted to see what are you getting for the invested dollar. so this relates to other questions that we're struggling with, like, how quickly should we restore f line service and cable car? we know that we want to bring back f line and cable car, but when? and focusing on economic vitality would have us accelerate service restoration in advance of tourism's return, even at the expense of restoring

neighborhood services. because the cable car and f line are big drivers of san francisco's tourist economy and the sfmta has a responsibility to support the larger economy, even if the ridership isn't there yet in order to justify it. prioritizing either delivery or resilience would have us instead spend this time when tourism is low to invest in deferred maintenance work on our cable car tracks and rail lines. prioritizing equity would say push off f line and cable car service until after we have fully restored service in our neighborhoods and particularly our equity neighborhoods. so we have some ideas about how we're going to frame up when we restore f line and cable car service, but we'd also like advice from you about how we should frame that restoration in terms of our values. another example is around sunday

evening parking meter enforcement. do we expand sunday and evening parking meter enforcement with deep engagement with business associations, one district by the next? or do we simply inform businesses that we're just rolling out of this out city-wide without a lot of detailed engagement? again, prioritizing inclusivity and community and transparency would have us to do a lot of community and neighborhood district consultation and prioritizing the delivery and safety and livability would have us to move quickly. we know that the right answer is in between and we'd like, you know, some guidance on that. skip ahead a little bit. so the last section was about how do we prioritize resources. again, another question that we're struggling with is around projects delivery. particularly for major projects.

we have struggled. at least in the major projects that we started in the last decade. we struggled with delivering those projects on time and on budget. one way of improving deliverability is focused -- is shifting some of the risk to contractors for delivering those projects on time or on budget. but that would be at the expense of maintaining our ability to rescope those projects as they move along in order to achieve the specific community objectives like mitigating some of the negative impacts of construction work that were unanticipated. so, again, focusing on the delivery and vitality and transparency would have us to focus on more design build work, but focusing on the community and inclusivity would have us to do projects more like we've done them in the past. so, again, we had to allocate a

limited budget to projects. so first we ranked projects based upon your values and then we gave the opportunity to say this tool is a little crude, which project would you fund now that you see the big picture. and where would you ignore our funny little tool and allocate money differently in order to achieve a different objectives that were not reflected in the model. and, unsurprisingly, you know, the projects that rose to the top were some of our most productive projects, like the temporary transit only lanes, like congestion pricing, that solves problems and brings in revenue. permanent slow streets. our equity framework implementation. and, you know, some of the projects that went to the bottom are programs that are really expensive, like our red light cameras and illegal turn camera program.

but also at the same time, expanding muni service. you all prioritized making the current service resilient before committing to long-term program expenses. and you allocated your funding similarly focused on, you know, the things that you have told us about. the ways in which you recall indicated funding is pushing -- reallocated funding is pushing vision zero higher in the mathematical formula. and -- and you gave a little bit more money to things like e-bus transition and some of the deferred maintenance projects that scored for lower and our crude tool. again, others that we are struggling with do we really

push our partnerships at the san francisco police department to increase their enforcement of focus on the five traffic citations? or do we first study to what degree the focus on the five results in racial disparities. prioritizing safety says, you know, we need cops out there enforcing traffic violations. we're focusing on equity, and it says to put a pause on this and to collect the data in order to be able to deliver on traffic safety in a way that does not result in putting the burden of the citations on communities of color. similarly, do we continue to invest in the essential trip card? only if the additional outside funds are found? or as we restore muni service, do we maintain the essential trip card, even if that increases our costs?

so economic vitality and delivery would say, you know, don't fund it unless we can find non-sfmta sources. but inclusivity and community would say that we keep the program, even as we restore muni service. in addition, one of the questions that was raised in the newspapers today is should the m.t.a. subsidize expansion of micro-mobility? or continue to delegate it to the private sector? prioritizing livability would have us invest our limited resources in either subsidizing micro-mobility or taking it on as an agency. and prioritizing economic vitality and delivery would say that the private sector is going to be able to do this in a more cost-effective way. other questions are about red light camera coverage. do we expand that? or spend our limited money on

other visions or tools that are less costly? similarly, questions about expanding shared spaces. do we continue saying yes to as many shared spaces as possible? or do we look for tools in the more intensive neighborhood commercial districts in order to better manage conflicts between shared spaces and commercial parking. so, i mean, there's a long list of these and we don't have time to get into all of them. instead, let me just pause and to turn it back over to the board to seek your pleasure of how you would like to proceed. >> chair borden: i'm going to just say that one of the things that i am struggling with is that i don't know that sometimes the way that you define the value are the way that i would define the value. so i think that is harder to talk about. but i'll let the directors kind

of weigh in. i guess that, like, what i want to know from you given that we were supposed to stop at 5:00, and we have a limited amount of time and this is a beginning of a process that is to bititive, what are you looking from us today to take away from this session that would be most valuable? because, obviously, you posed a lot of different things with values and tradeoffs. values to various tradeoffs that we may not have realized or thought of as direct tradeoffs. so maybe you could tell us what is the best for you after today walking out the door, what you need from us? >> so ultimately what we need from you is as we make these decisions in the coming 18 months, to frame the decision rooted in tradeoffs around values. so i don't necessarily need you to make a decision today. what i do need is for all of you

as we're making these hard choices in the future to understand the tradeoffs and to give us guidance in the form of how do we -- where exactly on the spectrum do we strike that balancing point on some of these binary or trinary tradeoff questions. the other thing that i think that we need from you today is if you have guidance on some of the bigger questions, questions about risk, specifically how much should we accelerate restoration of service and programs, even at the risk of running into a financial cliff in 2022 or 2023, that is a really, really big one. similarly, how much should we accelerate programs and services that are controversial, even at

political risk? so, for example, city-wide transit only lanes or city-wide slow street -- awesome, bike, skateboard, scooter network. we can -- we can build that, but it comes at a huge political risk. and the same is true, for example, on the funding side. and i think that is related to a question of how much -- how much leadership do y'all want to take on as a board in helping to address some of those political risks. does that make sense? >> chair borden: i think that is a lot. but we'll do our best. starting with director heminger. >> director heminger: well, i guess that first of all we spent an awful lot of time talking about how we're going to talk about something. and maybe that was necessary. i found the spreadsheet pretty awkward myself as well.

you know, jeff, you've said several times that these aren't binary, but the presentation was binary. so i think that one good first step would be to put these things on a scale of one to 10 and let people pick, you know, two or a 7 instead of yes or no. and i hope that we don't let this go to waste because i think that there are a lot of meaty and juicy subjects in there. so, look, i'd be happy to participate in an exercise if you can convert all of the questions that you want to ask us to a one through 10 scale. and we could all fill it out and see how close we are to each other. >> i think that if we were -- most of the sort of facilitation and consensus building tools that we could have used together in person, we would have set that up. we got frustrated with the

limitations of doing this online and having the online contribution be publicly accessible, it became very frustrating to us. so we can develop some tools that i think that can bridge that and it may take us a bit of time but thank you. >> director heminger: and that raises one other thought, whether you might want to bring in a facilitator so you're not trying to run the thing as well as interact with us. i mean, we could force you to vote too. >> i'd be happy to. >> chair borden: director yekutiel, i know that you have to leave at 5:00 so i want to make sure that you have to say what you want to say. >> director yekutiel: thank you very much, chair borden. maybe i'm the only one who didn't hate the exercise on this board of directors. i thought that it was -- what i liked about it is that i thought that it modeled the very probable extremely uncomfortable

choices that the agency has to make. and showing that these -- maybe these are binary in a lot of ways and you're weighing a bunch of things to do. and i got a sense for how hot that hot seat is for these folks who are asked to do more with less. but i liked it, though i thought that the values part was probably the most awkward because it was -- i feel like that san franciscans can hold all values in our hearts and our hands. but i got the point of it. and i do have to leave at 5:00, so -- i apologize for that. i guess if you're looking for clear larger kind of sensibilities from folks based on these last two days, for me i just have -- i have three that were kind of encapsulated in this exercise that you made us

go in. one is easy wins. for me the equating cost versus cost value, versus values was the most illusttive for me, because for me it was cost value all the way. you can get a lot done very valuably right now in a situation that we're in, honey, go for it. like, that to me -- i was like let's prioritize that. because there's both a functional and also a psycho-spiritual component to all of this, which is our city is in deep distress. and so if we can get things done at a value -- and, by the way, we seem to have been able to model that excellently over the last 10 months, and then i say full steam ahead on those measures. the second i think that you have heard from this board a lot which is to give us large things that the public can rally around. you know, give us the opportunity to show once again that san francisco and san franciscans are willing to make hard choices around something

that is truly going to get them to be proud of their city. what does a full city-wide slow streets program look like? what does an entire city-wide protected bikes program look like? what does a completely new definition of how you get around the city, what would it look and feel like and how much would it cost? because i think that it's going to be hard to get those across the finish line is my guess. and the last is to protect the core. which was a lot of what jonathan, you know, his presentation was about earlier and really getting a sense of because we are a board in this particular time of both economic and of public health danger, like, what do we need to do to protect the very core functions of this agency? and how to make sure as a board that we're stewarding the agency to do just that? those are the three pieces. give us something that the public can rally around, protect the core, and what to do with

that. >> that's exactly the advice that we're looking for. so if all of you could frame things in those terms that gives the staff a really, really strong direction. including where you may have a different view. because we have established a very diverse board for specific reasons. so we expect you all to disagree sometimes. >> chair borden: thank you for that framework. that's great. director lai is next. you're on mute, director lai. >> director lai: unmuted. i did not unmute the other side. thank you, chair. i actually agree with a lot of what the director yekutiel already shared. i wanted to start by saying that i do find this exercise

illustruive, and i think that before we continue to provide feedback based on this framework we will have to work to make sure that we have a common understanding of these values and making sure that they are distinguishable. and i see that where we engage more broadly beyond just the seven of us. but, you know, i also understand that this is critical. we have to -- we're continuing to make decisions along the way very rapidly and i completely appreciate director tumlin your point that we have to ground our decisions on some sort of consistent value-based evaluation. which i would say that for me, it will evolve as we come out of

the current pandemic situation. in fact, it might be a situation where i'm going to realign my own values every three months or whatever it is to respond to the situation. maybe going along the lines of, like, just the very high 20,000-foot level feedback on the budget, i am at this point open to looking at leaning a little bit into our reserves if it means giving us a bit more flexibility in the next 16 months before we can get to some structural solutions. partly that consideration stems from the fact that i think if we continue at the pace of service that we currently have or perhaps even less so into fiscal year 2022, i don't know that we can have the confidence of the public to survive as an agency. and at that point i don't know how we can ask them to vote for more debt.

so, you know, having said that, the other piece of my consideration is that i don't think the current levels of service is going to suffice as we get out of hopefully what is a city-wide vaccination which right now sounds like the goal is this summer. which means by the fall when kids hopefully will have the schools reopen and people are perhaps to working, we're going to be in this really painful growth spot where we have still largely reduced service based on just a number of lines. but also we have less capacity within this, and even if we reach herd immunity, i am sure that people still want more space within the vehicles. so just considering that, i think that going to have to have to provide more service to keep up with the return to work.

and that goes to your values around economic vitality, which i had placed quite a bit of importance on. so i don't know if that's helpful or not, but that is maybe one of my -- the most important bits out of this exercise. i'll stop there and i look forward to hearing what the public has to say about this too. >> also very helpful. >> chair borden: director eaken. >> vice-chair eaken: okay, i didn't hate this at all. i thought that it was -- i recruited my family to participate in the meeting and my 12-year-old weighed in on some of the scoring. so i thought that it was really dynamic and i appreciate that the staff put this forward and sparked a discussion. i have to be honest, i wish that we were at 1:00 p.m. and you

had just finished your presentation and i wish that we had the four hours to discuss this because you have fascinating question, and maybe more important than anything else that we have covered. so i don't know if we need to set this agenda for our next board meeting or something. but there's so much more that we could discuss than we have time. i was trying to scribble down notes based on your slides and i would love to give you feedback on all of them. i think that director heminger's thought is really great, and to do another board poll and i would love to weigh in on a sliding bar and then to give i notes on why we made those marks in those areas. i think that you have put three specific prioritized questions forward for us just now verbally. so i want to be responsive to those really quick and say that on the risk -- how much are we risking financially right now, i err on the side of being more cautious right now, and doing that contingency planners if we

get a big bit from the federal government, and if we get half of that, then we'll do that, and look at the thoughtful contingency plans. but hearing how you ask the question, that you're thinking along the same lines. in terms of the transit lanes and how bold are we now -- i think that you're hearing from this board that we want you to be bold. that we want to you go big. and, especially seeing that some of the opportunities that are in front of us right now to make the system work more effectively and to save us money according to the financial mandate. so if there's one on only transit lanes i'd go with getting those on the ground now rather than going through the legislative process. which it feels that we can do later. that one seems really clear. and you asked about our leadership and how much we want to lead on helping to you address and to shoulder some of the political challenges that these are going to create. i for one would love to be more

engaged and involved and to help to support staff. so you're not all out there taking the arrows, that we can step in and take some of the arrows for you on the big bold moves. i imagine that my colleagues would be there as well. but i wanted to answer that question clearly as well. >> if i may respond. staff could create a sort of slider exercise around all of these questions, and have that ready for our next board workshop on february 16th. if that is something that you would like to have us do, please just do let us know. >> chair borden: i think something more on the lines of what director heminger described would be ideal. director brinkman. >> we will consider that as a direction. >> chair borden: thank you. >> director brinkman: it was not an easy exercise but it made you think when push came to shove, what did you want to find and

how much did you want to find? so i gave myself four values at the end to apportion that money and one for me was revenue generation. the things that will generate revenue for this agency really need to be prioritized to me. and the second was safety. and we talk about vision zero and safety. a person losing a life is priceless. that impact that it had has on the family is horrible. and number three is something that chair nolan used to talk about a lot, we need to serve those who need us most. so that is a really important thing that i bring to any of these decisions. fourth, for me, was efficient service, because that helps us to achieve all of those other things by allowing us to spend less money and to move more people and to do it more efficiently. when it comes to the risk -- yes. i know that we are a conservative agency. we've been pretty conservative the whole time that i've been on the board. we haven't gone in for a risky

board and a risky direction. it's easy for me to say that, i'm in my third and final term. i have two years left. so we have lost colleagues because they have taken risks. we have colleagues who did not get reappointed because people didn't agree with the direction that we were taking. so i'll just throw that out there as a caveat. i'm not going to pay for the risk that i'm encouraging all of us to take. but other people might. then also, i think that director lai said it, that this is an exercise that we would realign as our situation changes, as our financial situation changes or as our recovery from the pandemic changes. and i'm happy to go through this again at some other sort of level or questions. thank you, chair. >> chair borden: director hinze.

>> director hinze: i did enjoy the exercise but i wanted to state publicly that it was in sort of a bubble. we're all sort of human. so that was that, but i did enjoy it in terms of getting a sense of what it was like to sort of being on the hot seat and make those tradeoffs. i tend to agree with director brinkman and i'll be really quick on the values. my top value will still be anything that generates revenue for this agency at this time. when i think that it rises to the top if i'm being honest. and also easyw