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tv   Municipal Transportation Agency  SFGTV  March 29, 2024 12:00am-5:01am PDT

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the meeting of the municipal transportation agency. board of directors and parking authority. commission to order. call the roll. item two. director hemminger. here. hemminger. president. director. henderson here. henderson. present. director. hinsey. present hinsey. present. director. so. here. so. present director. tarloff. here to present. chair eken. here. eken. present. director is not expected today. 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 and 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. any person responsible for the ringing or use of a cell phone or other similar sound producing producing electronic device
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places you on item number four. approval of minutes for the march 5th regular meeting. secretary, i'd like to make some opening remarks, if that's all right, before we get into minutes, i wanted to just thank everyone for being here today, and i just feel that i need to open up this meeting with an acknowledgment of the tragic events that occurred at west portal station over the weekend. i'm imagining, but i don't know. but i'm imagining that many people are feeling anger, rage, a sense of powerlessness, hopelessness. i know that i've cycled through these feelings myself over the past 72 hours, and this happens whenever i hear of any fatalities or serious injuries on our streets. it shouldn't happen in our city or anywhere, and our hearts are with the family. i also know that when these kinds of things happen, there is a natural tendency to want to make sense of the situation very quickly by finding a villain to blame,
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pointing a finger and demanding action and i understand that. i think that's a natural human tendency. i think that maybe that sense of action often can, can create a sense that we won't have to experience these types of feelings in the future. and i just want to i want to say that as a community of people here on this board and a community of people who participate regularly in sfmta work, all of whom are committed to a safe, sustainable and equitable transportation system. i just really want to urge us all to be mindful, to be kind and gentle with one another, and to make sure that we are working with all of the facts before we jump to conclusions. these kinds of situations are particularly challenging for sfmta because there are rules. there are protocols. there are practices about what information can be released, at what time. and sometimes we're not able to share all of the facts that any person would need to be able to make sense of a situation. so i
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just want us all to remember these kinds of events are traumatic for all of us. i would say, most especially the staff who come to work every single day trying to make our streets safer. i just want to remind us all that we are all human beings processing these tragedies together. and i hope you have an impression that vice chair kahina and i are trying very, very hard as well as this whole board and the staff, to embrace transparency as a value and that we will share information with you as we are able to do so. and if you don't have that impression, i really urge you to attend my office hours, which are every monday at 4:00 before our board meetings, and we can have a conversation. i had several people join yesterday, and we had a robust and productive dialog. i also just want to affirm that our commitment to vision zero is unwavering and firm, and that our approach to vision zero is based on data, and it's an approach that we have co-created with many people. some of them
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here in the audience today, many of you and that we are prioritizing improvements to the high injury network, because that is where the great majority of the crashes occur. and as we develop the strategy for the next ten years of this work, and that is something that is ongoing, right now, i do think there is a real opportunity to step back and look at the policy and regulatory changes at the state and federal level that will need to happen in order for us to reach zero. and that's part of why i created the vision zero subcommittee is to give us a space to have those conversations together. if any of you weren't at that meeting, the last meeting, staff laid out a very helpful and clear pathway for how we are going to work together to create that next ten year strategy. they are going to be doing community and partnership meetings over the next several months. return to the vision zero subcommittee at the quarter three meeting with a draft of a sense of what that next ten year strategy might look like, and then hopefully that's something that will come to the board to be adopted soon
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thereafter. so i really want to thank everyone for your firm here and listening and in this city for your very firm commitment to vision zero and affirm your commitment and for helping us to become the kind of city that we want to be. thank you. now, directors are there any changes to the march 5th meeting? minutes okay. if not, we'll open public comment on item four. comments on the minutes. this is for the minutes of the last meeting. morning. afternoon it's on. what you said . it goes back a long way. i know this vision zero thing is at the same. no it's not the same. we're talking about the minutes from the last meeting, march fifth meeting minutes. so we'll have general public comment if you'd like to make a general public comment. coming soon. okay. i'll go back to the vision zero. okay? okay. thank you, march 5th minutes. any public comments? if not, we'll
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close public comment. and please can i have a motion on the minutes as motion to approve move second. thank you. please call the roll on the motion to approve the minutes. director hemminger. yeah i hemminger i director henderson a henderson i director hinsey i hinsey i director so i so i director tarloff i tarloff i chair egan i egan i thank you. the minutes are approved places you on item number five communications as i have none. moving on to item number six introduction of new or unfinished business by board members. director. so. thank you for acknowledging an incident and i have grappled with it for my past couple of days. and thank you for saying what you have to say. and then street safety is really my number one priority as well, i like to share a totally different topic right now, so i hope that, it's
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not even the same, but i had the fortunate to attend this event of the ida international interior design association award, and i am really pleased and thrilled to share with everyone that our central subway station, the rose park station, received the top award in the category of craft and served from this really internationally recognized association in the interior design world. and it happened last thursday at the masonic auditorium, and it honored the design excellence. and i wanted to bring that up, because i want to make sure that in light of also our appreciation day for our fleet and maintenance, and i wanted to give a shout out to everyone who has spent 20 years of their life dedicated to this historical opening of this station, the honor awards aims to recognize new ideas and techniques in the
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design and furnishing of interior spaces. the design category recognizes projects that serve the public, and the collaboration between the design team and crafts and fabrication people. the jury noted the beautiful custom artwork in the chinatown subway station and the personal story to each piece, so that is a very unique, opportunity that, we are one of our stations have been, receiving this amazing award that is highly, reputable. and i want to take this moment to specifically call out a few of the key engineers and managers that have spent two decades of their life in this project. jane wang, our chief engineer, albert hall, program manager, chris david oks engineer, garland wong, resident engineer henry
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liang, ox engineer jamie chow, administration jane wan again engineering manager. lang hui, mechanical engineer paul osburn, resident engineer sanford pong, electrical engineer terry farr, activation manager tim lee, mechanical engineer. wyethia tsang, electrical engineer. and thank you for all the other everyone else that i have not got. hold of knowing your name. i think that is, the list is longer than the whole street of stockton, so i just really want to give this moment of congratulating everyone with all the dedication and hard work. it truly takes. not just a village, but the whole city, to deliver such a, instrumental and historical subway for us. and that's all i wanted to share with everyone. thank you for that recognition, director. so are there any other items of new
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or unfinished business? okay. if none, we'll open public comment for item six. any comments on director seau's comments? okay. seeing none from the public, we'll close. item six, please call item seven. item seven, the director's report. thank you, chair ekin, so much for your kind words and details on the west portal incident. and, i will, i am glad that you were able to cover that so i can move on to the next item in my report, earlier this week, senator, was wiener, and wahab introduced new language for a joint bill, sb 1031, that would allow for a up to nine county transit measure to be placed on the november 2026 ballot. as you know from our frequent conversations with cfo brian porter, two years from now, the sfmta faces an annual budget
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deficit of $250 million. unless we can find new funding to close that deficit, that's the equivalent of a quarter of muni and our entire livable streets program. so it is essential that we find ways of closing that gap, senator wiener and wahhab's measure would authorize a menu of funding options from sales tax to payroll tax to a square footage based parcel tax and or a regional vehicle registration fee. the regional measure could include any number of bay area counties up until nine, and it would provide at least $750 million a year in operating assistance for transit that not only would save muni, but also bart, which faces a far worse budget situation than we do as we all know, none of our goals, whether it is equity or climate or economic recovery, can be
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achieved without saving bart, muni and other regional transit operators, an interesting element of the of the measure is that it would require and fund rapid advancement of all of the transit integration work that we are already doing, everything from fare integration on to eliminating transfer penalties to time transfers among agencies to closing key gaps in between transit agency boundaries, it would deliver the seamless regional transit system that we all want it by creating the tools and the funding necessary for all of the transit operators to be able to work together for the good of the passengers and for the good of the region, another, item of good news around funding is that the president's fiscal year 2025 budget request now includes $500 million for the transbay
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downtown rail extension project, also known as the portal, this grant would cover about 12% of the total capital investment grant request. this is a significant show of support for the, project, and we are grateful to speaker emerita nancy pelosi for always supporting transportation investments in the bay area, also in good project news, on march 12th, the san francisco board of supervisors unanimously approved a measure co-sponsored by supervisors ronen and walton in order to make amendments to the general plan planning code and zoning map in order to allow the potrero yard project to move forward, also just this morning, also in good funding news, i joined a press event with supervisor mandelman along with staff and leadership from the san francisco department of the environment, in order to welcome
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funding for a study that will help us advance curbside electric vehicle charging, as you know, here in san francisco, the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions come from transport. and of that, 70% comes from private vehicles. here at the sfmta, we know that in order to decarbonize the transport sector, our first step is to make muni fast, frequent, reliable, clean, safe and to make sure that walking, biking and rolling are safe and joyful everywhere in san francisco. for those people who need to drive, particularly folks who don't have their own garage, it is also essential that we make sure that every, every fossil fuel powered vehicle in san francisco can be electrified and it will be essential to eliminate obstacles to allowing people to charge at the curb. and this study will help us there, next up, i did want to note that yesterday was transit employee
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appreciation day. we are always, every single day grateful to our dedicated and hard working transit employees for serving the city day and night, sun and rain, and through all kinds of challenges, including the tragedy that our teams witnessed in west portal on saturday, the creativity, collaboration, commitment of muni staff to bring that they bring to their work moves hundreds of thousands of people every day, connecting us all to work, school, doctor's appointments, communities and culture, and finally, i wanted to note that, for those of you who did not come to see the mayor's state of the city address, please do click on the link that was forwarded to all of you for the youtube copy of the address, it was a very powerful speech about san francisco's pattern of recovery in tough times. there is a reason the phoenix is featured in the flag of san francisco, and she gave many shout outs to
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the sfmta, noting that muni ridership is equal to the sum of every other transit rider agency combined throughout the bay area , she she gave a shout out to the hard working transit operators and many other city employees who kept the city moving during the pandemic, and was clear that it. she has a more comprehensive strategy to bringing new life and new people to the downtown, like bringing in 30,000 students and pointing out that tearing up bike lanes on market street will not move us forward. and that is the end of my director's report. thank you, director tomlin. colleagues, are there questions or comments on the director's report? okay. seeing none. you didn't exactly talk about fix it week, but you talked about transit operators. so i'm going to go ahead and assume that means i can just say a word
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about fix it week, which is that, the privilege of joining and thank you for staying up so late. director, tarloff and director. so on a tour of the tunnel around embarcadero station last tuesday night, which went quite late, getting a sense of all of the work that our crews are doing during fixit week to help the system run smoothly and deliver numbers like the 89% reduction in short delays that we were so happy to see. and i found that. so education cool and so inspiring to see the crews so hard at work, making sure that we can deliver the high quality service you spoke about. so i want to thank you, recognize you, director, tarloff and director. so for taking the time out and taking your naps before the 11 p.m. start of that tour and thank the team and charles drain, in particular, for putting that together, and on that topic, i would like to, through christine, invite you all to the post-fix at week get together that all the maintenance crews do at a much more reasonable hour of the
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morning. this is one of my favorite things to do throughout the agency. all of the crews who are involved in fix it week, every trade, the janitorial staff, all of them, are required to do powerpoint in front of each other over chairs and breakfast burritos, where they talk about what their work program was, what they achieved, what they want to do next, fix it week, and very importantly, what they broke and how they recovered from any mistakes that they made so that others can learn from mistakes. because that is how agency grows and a culture is strengthened. a culture around creativity and complete ownership of the ancient systems that keep our our transit system running every day. so we'll we'll send you an invitation. it'll be about three weeks from now. okay. seeing no other director comments, i'll open it for public comment on item seven. the director's report. sir geoffrey. we're
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going to remote accommodation first, i'm going to mute that since we have someone standing here right now. and then we'll come back to our remote comment. okay. makes sense. this is not because whoever way back pushed this agenda. of, for example, electric vehicles that you have to comply with it. not understanding that i'm here to inform you that the future for san francisco, because i've been ordered to work on san francisco, specifically is not electrical vehicles. vehicles will work with water. one reason for this is because contrary to what you have been pushed to believe and to apply, electrical
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vehicles are very dangerous. in the case of an accident, it's just an explosion and there will be some. so vision zero excuse me, is zero vision because that's it. it's very in actual fact, polluting because there is all the concept of recycling these batteries and extremely costly to fix, because in order to start working on an electrical vehicle, which is, you know, as a problem, you have to dismantle the all electronics, which is takes forever. that's why the future is with water. yeah, it's going to be difficult. and because where are you? okay. so you can't fight this. it's coming. it's going to be part of the new system of education. so start getting the concept in your mind, please, because you won't be able to avoid it. okay. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. good afternoon,
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director tom radulovich with livable city, yeah, it was great to hear the news about the sort of joint development and also sort of that, that the agency's thinking about the sorts of investments that you'll need to make your climate commitments. and i've actually been thinking a lot about this agency and its climate commitments. the science of investments that i really hope that i'll see in your budgets and in your programs and which ones we don't. and, one of the things i've been thinking about is actually the parking structures, bree mentioned at the hearing that, you know, these are badly depreciated assets, right? they've run down and they need a lot of reinvestment. i was i've been thinking, well, are these depreciated assets meaning they're rundown or are they stranded assets? right are they the sort of assets that if we are serious about our climate commitments and chiefly as a city, our climate commitment means mode shift, right? that 80% goal of mode shift. so if you have half as many automobile trips in this city by 2030, which is our climate commitment,
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do you need all these parking structures? right. because they do generate revenue for the district. but they also generate automobile traffic like each is a little traffic factor and it just churns out traffic all day long. so that does a few things. one is it causes delayed immune and you don't see muni delay delayed immune from traffic as a budget in your line item. but a line item in your budget. but if you did, it would be much larger than any revenue that you get from these things, and of course , you know, it discourages people from driving or it discourages people from using transit, right? encourages them to drive, causes bicycle and pedestrian safety dangers, etc. so i mean, are these all these garages, especially the downtown ones? i mean, are they part of the future that we all want, right? or are they depreciated assets? are they the same as a coal burning power plant and embree said, oh, we got these coal burning power plants and they're worn out. you wouldn't say, well, fix them up, right? you'd say, we're going to replace them with the green thing, the thing that's part of a credible future. i'd say you need to really look at all of
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your assets through that same lens. are they taking us to the future that we want? and that's going to be survivable and drivable. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. hey there, directors. good afternoon, cyrus hall. i just want to riff on ev curbside curbside charging. just very briefly, i love everything tom said, but inevitably we're going to have some cars in the city going into the next couple of decades, and we would like those cars to be electric if possible. and some of the people driving those cars are not going to have a garage in which to charge them, and they will need to charge them somewhere and so curbside ev charging is going to be part of that picture. but as we look and study what ev curbside curbside charging looks like, let's please think about how difficult it is to remove parking every single time. we need to speed up a transit, line every single time we want to put in a bike lane, every single time we do anything with the street surface, we run into
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opposition because we're messing with parking. and if that parking is ev charging, parking, that opposition will be all the more difficult to overcome because it will be recently installed infrastructure that the city will have invested in. so as we study this, let's be very careful to make sure that we're planning for a future in which we still have a flexible street scape that we can shape as we need to meet our, sustainable transportation goals. thank you very much. thank you. next speaker, please. hi. board members luke bornheimer, thanks to director tumlin for his thorough report, first, i want to thank director tomlin and the agency for their support of the regional ballot measure to more properly fund public transportation and create a seamless, world class transportation system that will help more people shift trips away from cars to public transportation bikes and scooters, this measure is critical for our city and the region both to take climate
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action. but also to reduce car trips and address our roadway safety crisis, second, i want to encourage the agency to avoid exploring and investing in curbside electric vehicle charging, installing electric vehicle charging along the curb will sink costs into private cars and car infrastructure, which will make it more, which will make it more difficult and costly to transform our streets into safe, equitable and sustainable public spaces for all. in order to help more people shift trips away from cars, we need to invest in protected bike infrastructure, transit only lanes and other sustainable transportation efforts rather than more private car infrastructure. thank you. thank you. any other speakers for the director's report? okay we can call the next item. thank you. we do have one accommodation request. okay. go ahead. yeah, this is herbert weiner, commenting on item seven. now i notice that, mayor breed and director tomlin are concentrating on downtown down.
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what about the neighborhoods needing good transportation systems? they need a revitalization, and they've been spectacularly neglected. and we have to give, equal, opportunity for the neighborhoods. and, this should be really focused on the neighborhoods are the heart and soul of the city. thank you. thank you. no additional callers . okay. we close public comment and move on to the next item. places u on item number eight, the citizens advisory council report. we have chair aaron liefer joining us remotely. good afternoon. directors. can you hear me? we can. okay, great, i wanted to start off by echoing director tomlin's remarks about, transit employee recognition,
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the transit employees have been the backbone of muni's recovery, and we are very, very grateful for all they do every day for the riders in the city of san francisco, we had the pleasure of, spending our last two meetings largely focused on the budget, we had presentations from our cfo and her team. and as a result, the cac has adopted the following, resolution on the budget. it's a little it's a little long, so bear with me, the cac appreciates the outreach that staff has performed over the last two months to the cac and to the public on the 20 2425 budget. we appreciate and applaud the agency's focus on data driven insights and prioritizing a state of good repair, we recognize that the agency is still in a serious structural budget crisis as one time state and federal funds wind down and the city's general
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fund appears to be under threat. we see that the continued global climate emergency demands a transit policy that reduces a dependance on fossil fuels in transportation, the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and we so be it resolved that we recommend that while this is not an exhaustive list, the sfmta budget reflect the following priorities and values a deliver safe, reliable service to increase transit ridership one. continue to adjust muni service at net zero cost that delivers service for riders need it most. two promote a state of good repair of vehicles and infrastructure as the backbone of service reliability. three fully explore programs that will increase ridership, such as clipper bay pass business, commuter benefits programs and other ridership incentives and marketing initiatives. four implement a
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fare policy that includes fare fare capping, and five prioritize delivering service equitably, especially for communities of concern. b drive a business model that ensures long terme reliability and sustainability one. reduce the agency's dependency on one time cash infusions and transform to a more self-sustaining revenue model, including additional tax revenue. two prioritize one time relief funds towards shrinking the maintenance backlog and moving towards a fully realized state of good repair. three accelerate delivery of the replacement train control system. four continue to issue the previous practice of deferring maintenance in order to deliver service. five promote transportation mode shifting and safer streets in recognition of our changing local traffic patterns and global climate emergency. six implement a fee and fine structure that provides
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revenue to the agency and cost recovery for services provided, while scaling to and considering ability to pay. seven boost public trust by demonstrating and publicizing elimination of all but the most essential of expenditures and operational efficiencies implemented to reduce costs. eight provide employee compensation that will attract and retain a high quality workforce. and finally, c continue. move, continue to move towards vision zero by taking steps to promote bicyclist and pedestrian safety. thank you. that concludes the report. thank you, chair leifer. and if i could, if you're still there with us, if i could ask you a question because this board is going to consider today four different, transit fare revenue options that staff are going to bring forward. if i could ask if the cac considers those options, if you have any feedback for us, that would be most helpful, specifically which options? sorry it's on the item
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12, which is our budget item. later today there was the staff recommended option. then there was an indexing only option. then there was an option to reduce impact on ridership and an option to reduce impact on clipper, i think we weren't we couldn't come to a uniform agreement on a motion we could pass that include changes to fare increases, i know that, brea presented the notion of reducing the, i guess you could call it the clipper benefit, i think most of us were relatively okay with it, considering that seemed considering most folks who struggle to pay are paying cash fares not using clipper, but that was that wasn't a uniform feeling amongst the cac. okay. any other input you want to share to inform that conversation? we'll have a bit later today on the budget revenue options in front of us,
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no, other than we know you have a we've got a really tough you've got a really tough job ahead of you. okay, okay. thanks for sharing your update with us. i appreciate your service. any other questions for chair leifer from this board? okay. if there are none, i'll open it up to public comment now on the citizens advisory council report . agenda item. so i speak, even though the concepts understand this quantity destroys quality no matter what. sir do you understand what you are reading? it looks like you don't. it's a script you are reading. i think you should understand what you read to have the full picture of how it's going to affect yourself and everybody here. so it's not allowed. so pay attention. no matter how much money you get for it, it's not a good idea. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. good afternoon, director tomlin,
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chair egan and other directors. my name is jody medeiros. i'm the executive director of walk san francisco. like you and the rest of our community, i'm heartbroken and also devastated about the young family we lost this weekend in west portal. what's evident is that people inside the vehicles are safer than ever, and those of us outside of vehicles are more at risk than ever. cars trucks, suvs can become deadly weapons in an instant, and this needs to be a call to action to this agency in our entire city. leadership on the anniversary of vision zero is this month, and i think that it's important to recognize that there's a lot that we've been doing to make it safe to move about our streets. everything from car free jfk to using quick builds on over 100 miles of streets, to being the first city in california to implement 33 speed cameras and lower speed limits on over 44 miles of streets. san francisco is a leader in many ways.
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however, what has happened this weekend needs to be elevated. our street safety. and as the city begins to look at its second decade of vision zero and the commitments that it's making across the board and policies, decisions, projects and funding, the priority must be on our most vulnerable. those of us outside of cars walk san francisco families for safe streets and our supporters will be looking to you. our city's leaders, in the next weeks, to hear what vision zero commitments you'll be making in the near tum and the long terme, and this life saving strategy going forward. we're here to support you. we're here to help. thank you. thank you so much, i'll just remind us we're on item eight, which is just the citizens advisory council report. cac did address vision zero, so jodi's comment was apt. but if there are other general public comments, we'll
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just wait till we get to item nine. unless you're reflecting specifically on chair lifers report. okay. do we have any do we have any remote requests? okay. please move on to the next item. places you on item number nine. general public comment. members of the public may address the board of directors on matters that are within the board's jurisdiction, but not on today's calendar. for no apology i can give you. it's a mission i'm on. i can't stop it. nobody can without. basically nothing can without basically committing suicide. i'm serious. i've been saying that several times, as long as you keep repeating, like parrots. a very bad mumbling from san francisco. the concept of vision zero. it will show that you have zero vision for a very simple fact, zero doesn't
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exist. that's why it's called zero. or it can be is all. you see, it's a whole zero. that's why it's like this. so can believe it. there is no vision. zero means zero. vision means you up. you hit a wall. so you have to redefine this. stop promoting this unintelligence. honestly wow. very deep. i'll be here to help. but please remember, you're going to have to pay for. keep repeating this incredible and intelligence. thank you. next speaker, please. good afternoon. thank you, director and board. my name is chris ward klein, and i'm a ceo of a local nonprofit with national ties, i'm just looking through an fbi report that was
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filed, and there's a couple portions that apply to this board, the first part is sfmta uses systems, which everybody knows, and there is an access control issue and acceptable uses policy, for example, there is one bus stop located next to the city hall at mcallister and venice, in which the system states that it's configuring continuously with the time being one hour off of the correct time. this has been an ongoing issue for the last 18 to 24 months. this is a prime location for a third party hacker or others with credentials to gain access to the sfmta and to bounce signals to city hall or passing pedestrians or motorists to impact san francisco in a negative manner. at any time. the other part is, there's an issue, not just with sfmta, but other agencies within san francisco that have access control issues and acceptable usage. and one of the issues that was reported to the fbi,
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internet crime and referral department is retiring public officials who want to maintain utilization, utilization of systems outside the scope of acceptable usage, i'm confident that, the board here will look into this before the fbi has to get involved in the department of justice, but it's a serious issue that you have third parties that can gain access to your systems. and it's a very easy fix. you just pull up a report, see who has access and who doesn't, and just delete the people that shouldn't have access. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. and i'm going to use the overhead if possible, afternoon. directors. cyrus hall. i wanted to talk
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about this for a long time. i just haven't had time. but after the tragic incident at west portal, i wanted to bring it up. as we try to encourage mode shift in the city. one of the most important things we can do is keep riders safe and. and there's been a number of tragic incidents over the last really decade, but two years that i've noted fourth and king is an example of a very busy pedestrian corridor as riders transfer between agencies and routes ninth and irving two years ago, where a man lost his legs when a car crashed into a bus stop, 16th and portrero last year when a vehicle killed a man who was waiting at a bus stop. and of course, this past weekend . and the stop i use all the time is forest hills station and particular the opposite side of forest hill station. what you're seeing on the screen here is a google street map. view of the bus. pull out far side from the station and what happens incessantly at this stop. what
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happens incessantly at this stop is that cars do not stop at the red light. instead they pull into the bus, pull out, sometimes very rapidly, and pull through as if this magically makes them not be violating the law because they're not going through the stoplight. they also just rip through the stoplight, honestly. and you know, the 60s of video that's playing right now is thanks to another writer who also uses it, who gave me permission to use this video. i mostly ride in the evening when it's dark. this is much worse after sundown. riders or not, riders. drivers seem to feel like gives them permission to do this. i would love to see a retractable bullard at the entrance of the bus pull over, but fundamentally see this red light is not being, people aren't stopping and it's deeply unsafe to pedestrians and riders as they cross. thank you very much. thank you. next speaker,
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please. just one second. hi my name is kate blumberg. i live in potrero hill, and i'm here to talk to you about the urgent need and opportunity for protected bike lanes on illinois street in dogpatch. you may be thinking, we know about illinois . after all, it's been on the biking and rolling acp map as a future protected bikeway. it was the only specific bike priority from the bayview community based transportation plan as part of the blue greenway, my neighbors hosted an april 2021 ride with chair ekin and supervisor walton . we've been talking to sfmta staff for years, but there's a new development that makes it urgent in 2.5 years, it's not that urgent, but very urgent. dpw will close the third street
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bridge over icu's creek for a two year makeover, rerouting much of the truck and bus traffic to illinois street and likely causing big delays for cars and commuters from bayview and hunters point. the need is to protect the existing bike traffic. we already share the road with a huge number of large trucks. i counted 150 large trucks in one hour and how scary it would it be with two or more times that the opportunity is to provide a safe and fast alternative mode for many commuters looking to avoid traffic delays, and also to reduce those delays by making it safe for some people to get out of their cars. you can help us avoid this crisis before it arrives, but the sfmta has to launch an illinois project now. now, not next year, 2.5 years is an ambitious timeline, but it's doable, especially with the head
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start that we in the community are giving you, because we've already done lots of outreach. i'm going to leave you all a small version of our poster and it has safe-illinois.com, our website. we encourage you to look at all of our supporters and our plan. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. i'm hoping to use the overhead. all right, board directors, i'm dave alexander from richmond family, san francisco, and i was at last night's vigil, along with many of you here, a lot of part of, san francisco brass was there as well, which was great, quote unquote, to have folks there to, to witness just the tragedy we're seeing on our streets, this was about two weeks ago at six and cabrillo,
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half a block from frank mccoppin elementary school. you could hear the car crash, from the school site, and this could have been another tragedy, and just really wanting this board to prioritize the movement of people, i know most of you are on board, but there's a lot of powers, ingrained powers in this city, institutional powers in the city that are stopping this from happening. we can't keep on seeing these traffic fatalities on our streets. this, could have been my kid. could have been my partner could have been my friend in the richmond. and so we were just at the memorial or vigil for, pedestrian who was killed on january 31st on fulton. so every month i'm attending these and it's getting it's getting sick, actually. and it's getting old. so i just want to implore this board to keep on acting. and thank you so much. thank you. next speaker, please.
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good afternoon, director tom radulovich, speaking as a citizen resident of the mission dolores neighborhood. yeah, i wanted to point out two issues. one is actually an urgent safety issue, and it is the dots on dolores street at cumberland and at 20th street. you you probably heard about this from aaron breit war. but you know, there's the hill bombing. so skateboarders come down the hill. so the solution to the hill bombing was to glue a bunch of those little reflective dots, right, that you use in center medians. they glued phalanxes of these across the road, at those two intersection lanes to stop skateboarders. now all the correspondence on this is a matter of the public record. your traffic engineers, to their credit, said this is not one. skateboarding and cycling is not illegal. right so you're actually trying to prevent illegal activity on the street. two, this is not a approved traffic control device. these devices have no business being on a city street. and in fact, the last time these these dots
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have appeared and disappeared before the last time they were there, somebody on a bicycle slipped and wiped out. they're really treacherous on a bicycle and fell under the wheels of a car and was killed. those dots are still there. i had a conversation with tom mcguire about this. he's like, well, it's kind of political, but yeah, we want to remove them. that was a year ago, so i know, you know, we're stuck on vision zero, we're stuck on ecp, this is actually a non-approved traffic control device that was installed by this agency under political pressure. you need to uninstall it. my supervisor has heard from me on this, but ultimately, this is your call, and you need to remove those dots. they're dangerous for anybody cycling down the hill. there's actually a bay wheel station up at 20th and dolores. and so the perverse thing is, of course, you can get an e-bike there and come down the hill and wipe out and die under the wheels of a car, which isn't something that this agency should be doing. you should be making our streets safer, not more dangerous for people skateboarding and cycling. thank you, thank you. any other
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comments for general public comment? hi. board members, luke bornheimer, a family of four, including a toddler and an infant, did exactly what our city wants and needs people to do in order to address our roadway safety crisis and the climate crisis. they sold their car and they were taking public transportation to get around. they were living up to the policies and goals that the city mayor, breed and this agency claim to prioritize transit, first vision zero and climate action. and they were killed as a result, marking our eighth, ninth, and 10th roadway fatalities of 2024. because the city and its supposed leadership failed to protect them by not doing more to help people shift trips away from cars. if this isn't a sign that the system is broken and lacking leadership and vision, i don't know what is. about an hour ago, i watched a driver nearly hit a person in a crosswalk, turning at 25mph. the only reason that person isn't in the hospital or dead is
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because they saw the driver and abruptly stopped. while these three tragic and preventable killings with these three tragic and preventable killings, our city is on pace for 48 fatalities by the end of 2024, which would be the most since the city started collecting this data in 2005 and ten years after then supervisor breed signed the vision zero goal. the city as of mta and you as its governing body, must take immediate and bold action to transform our streets to help more people shift trips away from cars and help address our roadway safety crisis and the climate crisis that includes, but is not limited to, closing the intersection or area around west portal station to car traffic and installing transit only lanes on uloa street between 15th and west portal avenues, as well as on west portal avenue between 15th avenue and uloa street. measures that may have prevented this tragedy, and would likely prevent a future tragedy in the area. we need leadership and vision now more than ever. please take immediate action to make this area safer for all people while improving muni speed and reliability by
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closing the area to car traffic and installing transit only lanes. then prioritize and fast track efforts to transform our streets into safe, equitable, and sustainable public spaces for all. a connected network of protected bike lanes i hope this tragedy is what finally motivates the city to make sustainable mode shift road safety, roadway safety and climate action. top priorities. thank you. thank you. we'll go ahead and close. we have on we have one accommodation request. go ahead. okay, can i speak now? yes. go ahead. okay. this is herbert weiner. i have, some concerns. one is when are the rats going to be, reestablished to the pre-covid levels of muni service? i think this is very important to do. i would like to see, i would also, i'm wondering
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about the consultation of vision zero with the police department. some of our vision zero has not been successful in preventing traffic deaths. and i think the traffic division of the police department would be very valuable in their consultation. so these are my concerns that i wish to convey to the public. also, i'm 85 years of age. i don't put myself on a road. i have given up my vehicle. but i do believe that the needs of tourists have to be addressed and they have not been addressed to the priority given bicyclists, moderna, human beings have, and we have a need to prevent congestion. thank you. thank you. no additional callers. close. item nine and please call the next item. places you on item ten, your
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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. item 10.1 requesting the controller to allocate funds and to draw warrants against such funds available, or will be available in payment to the listed claims against the sfmta. items a and b in the agenda item 10.2 approving various routine parking and traffic modifications as listed under items a through e, item 10.3 approving various roadway shared spaces, street closures. harlan place between grant avenue and mark lane. saturday, may 25th, 2024 through sunday, may 25th, 2020 5:02 p.m. to 11 p.m. sunday through monday and 2 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. tuesday through saturday. mark lane between bush street and harlan place. saturday, april 1st, 2024
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through sunday, march 31st, 20 20 5:11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily leidersdorff street between sacramento and commercial streets. saturday, may 25th, 2024 through sunday, may 25th, 2025 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. each sunday through thursday and 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. each friday and saturday, and making environmental review findings. item 10.4 delegating to the director of transportation authority to request the board of supervisors approval of sfmta surveillance technology policies required under admin code section 19 b2 and to submit to the board of supervisors the annual surveillance reports required annually thereafter under admin code section 19.6, and amending the sfmta contract approval, delegation and requirements policy to include these authorizations. that concludes your consent calendar. thank you. i'm going to open it up for public comment on the consent calendar items. are there any comments? okay. any remote? okay. seeing none, is
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there a motion on the consent calendar? moved to approve the items second. thank you. please call the roll on the motion to approve. director heminger heminger i, director henderson henderson i director hinsey i hinsey i director. so i so i director tarloff i tarlov i director chair. ekin i ekin i thank you. the consent calendar is approved. please call the next item. moving on to item number 11. approving a roadway, shared spaces. closure of via bufano from columbus avenue to 75ft northerly. friday, march 22nd, 2024 through saturday, march 22nd, 2020 5:04 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. each tuesday through thursday, 4 p.m. to midnight each friday, 1 p.m. to midnight each saturday, 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. each sunday, and making environmental review findings.
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good afternoon, chair ekin board of directors. my name is monica munoz and i am the program manager of shared spaces here, prepared to present this application for this shared space roadway closure to you all. today i'm prepared a few slides and to provide some context on the location and the closure, and then i'll be happy to answer any questions. so, bodega, the business on the corner here at on columbus at the corner of the alley of view bufano has had an alley roadway, shared space closure during the pandemic, allowing them to close this alley has enabled their business to serve, outdoors during during the pandemic. and up until recently, and they're looking to continue in the post pandemic program, this alley off of columbus is just part of the alley that they currently close between columbus and a driveway.
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so the specifics of the application are listed here, the applicant is requested to close the alley fridays through saturday starting march 22nd. it would be a one year permit. is what they're seeking to have. and the specific hours to address sort of unique needs and constraints of the street are from 4 p.m. to 11:30 p.m, tuesday through thursday, 4 p.m. to midnight each friday, 1 p.m. to midnight each saturday, and 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. each sunday. so this reflects what was brought to scott and is with the applicant, as part of their application, has requested. a little bit of background on the use of this space. so as i mentioned, bodega had a shared space, alley closure during the pandemic, early on in july 2020, very popular. all the way through the end of 2022, their permit expired and there was a lapse in the middle, during
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their renewal where they were operating without a permit, in 2023. they then applied for a new permit and the application went to scott first in december. and there were some public comments and concerns. so it was brought back to scott, again. then just last month, in february, and this is one of the roadway closures, due to the hours, exceeds the thresholds and does need to be brought to the board for adoption. and due to some of the concerns, this is not in consent, this is obviously a regular consent agenda item. so we can have a little bit more robust discussion and share what we've learned through, the escort meetings, which is that, the first is scott hearing we received 16 objection letters really around items and concerns on emergency access, good neighbor policy, like loud music, noise, broken glass, rude staff, and per after this
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meeting is scott wanted them the applicant to send some additional engagement, which they did in january 24th, and it again went to scott again in february, with another ten objection letters, and ultimately recommended to proceed to scott, sorry to mta board for consider action. so a little bit about sort of what has unfolded in the last couple of months as this went through. scott, the applicant really has worked diligently with staff, with our team to address concerns heard through that hearing process. they, for example, made changes to their hours, their operational hours to accommodate the greenwich, street closure and farmers market. and that occurs on that street so that there is no sort of conflict that prevents vehicles and residents on that street to access one via bufano is activated from the closure.
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so those hours have been modified to address those concerns for access and lastly, they did make changes to their site plan. the applicant, to address concerns primarily by fire department, for example, they have now shown a 20 foot setback from the intersection to accommodate visibility and remove some propane and planters to address those concerns. so in summary, that concludes my pretty brief presentation. and here to answer any questions you have about this application for the shared space alley closure. thank you for your leadership on this issue. i'm going to open for director questions and then we'll go to public comment. director henderson, please. thank you. i just had a quick clarification. the request is for a year long, street closure. but there's some language in there about a long terme, what did it say? a long terme closure that you want us to consider. is
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that is that just the year long portion or there's additional time? just the year long. okay, all right. thank you. no problem. thank you. director hemminger. this requires this application requires our approval. it does correct. it exceeds the four hours a ten hours a day, four days a week established in the code, really? do you think that makes sense? it was a long deliberated. does it make sense that the policy and the code. well that we're hearing an individual permit application. well, typically that's not what we do in 10.2. those three were applications for shared spaces. so there are many that do end up at the board. if that's your question. just majority of them are consent items, not regular agenda items. if that's what you're asking about. well, you know, we've we've had this discussion, i think, across several fields about whether we
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should be up here hearing project business or setting a policy and letting the staff apply it to projects. and i think the conversation has generally run along the lines of, we ought to be setting policy, not doing things individually, so that's why i'm asking the question. monica, perhaps you can explain why this item is not on consent, including the community and supervisorial opposition to this applicant? sure yeah. yeah, that two things i think council may be able to better articulate than i can, but i think there's thresholds sequa thresholds to sort of allow for something that has is not more permanent, has more significant impacts than when it's not in that body and form can kind of do within their authority. so i think that is the reasoning for some, the thresholds and sort of how things that are more impactful
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move to mtab, but to, to, to the other point, right, there was community objection as and supervisor peskin did reach out and sort of has been clear, at least at the staff level, not publicly, that they oppose the closure. and so we wanted to have it as a regular agenda item so that we could speak to those nuances. and some of the challenge changes historically with the closure and sort of present a fuller picture of what we've worked with the applicant to get to this point. okay. well, maybe in the future, madam chair, we could have a more formalized discussion of this question of policy versus project, i think we haven't quite drawn the line at the best place yet. thank you. so i'm hearing from you, director hemminger, quite a bit of comfort delegating approval of these shared spaces permits to staff. is that is that clear? well especially when they're controversial. okay okay. perfect. okay. that's helpful,
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director. so please. thank you for bringing up to us today. and, in light of some recent experience that i have, that that's related to the shared space closure that we have in some of our communities. i would like to ask you this really? genuine question of have our team reach out to the appropriate folks, everyone. i mean, like, not the not the very loud one that carved out their whole day. show up at your office, but everyone that actually is will be at stake in this shared space closure. have we actually talked to everyone and also informed the protocol
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that we hold a responsible to do , which is the mayor's office and then the supervisor district office? i really wanted to make sure that this is a public space, and our agency is to responsibility to my best of my understanding is to make sure that we provide, health, safety and welfare for the public. right. so i do want to make sure that our streets are safe for all types of use. and the expectation that comes with it. so, i'm not giving any comment about i'm approving it or not approving it. i just want to know, have we done the best we can to reach out to the communities that are the stakeholders here? merchants the residents and everyone, everyone that has something to do with those streets because the next thing i would like to know is
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like, what should we be doing better to improve our communication channels, to make sure that our staff run this type of, permit evaluation processes that are empowered by what the community really wants collectively, really wants. so then you guys can do a better, more efficient job. and with the confidence that this is actually benefiting that particular community. so have we are you confident that you had spoken to everybody and host, meetings that actually encourage urge to reach out to the folks that might actually otherwise might feel intimidated to show up because they might be the lesser, they might outnumber. you know, it's just like, really want to make sure that we're
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culturally appropriate. we reach out to every folks, especially the one that has less of a voice . sure. yeah. thank you, director. so it's a great question and thought, i wish we could do more in terms of engagement. i think if scott and roadway closures in general, the engagement process is primarily restricted to the scott hearing and this hearing as being the public process and the place to voice comment, obviously, that could be done by written or people can join in person or virtually. is scott solely virtual, in this case, as i mentioned, there was some additional engagement mostly that we wanted the applicant themselves to do, which was the letters and sort of like really put them in a position to sort of who they're managing the space to sort of bring their neighbors along. but that is the extent of the engagement that this program for roadway closures has. and we don't do project level outreach in the
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same way we might for i don't want to use beyonce as an example, but another like bikeway or transit project, these are applications that come to us. people can come to a hearing and voice their concerns , and that has been mostly the space that we do that engagement . thank you. thank you, director tarloff. please thank you, chair ekin. so thank you very much for your presentation. and thank you for the briefing that i received yesterday on this, process. i might be unique. up here and having gone through the scott process, to apply for a street closure permit for a neighborhood festival that we produced just this last year, and, and one thing that, i think you might have wanted to mention is that, the applicant is required to do a very prominent posting of the hearing of the
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scott hearing for the street closure, so that, you know, anyone who, engages with that street, you know, know that there is going to be a hearing and they're able to participate in all the ways you mentioned. so, my question about the presentation is about, actually, just i'd like to hear more about the transition from the farmers market to the commencement of service at the at the restaurant, specifically, i'd like to know you mentioned that they they adjusted their hours based on the farmers market. and i noticed that saturday and sunday are the same start time at 1 p.m. and am 1 p.m. is when the farmers market, ends. so i, i think there's a, you know, just something i want to make sure that we have buttoned up,
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before we move forward with this , which is that, you know, there's the strike of the, you know, the takedown of the farmers market and the access for the neighbors on, on via bufano to their garages, from the greenwich street side, is there, any anticipation of interruption, even if it's just temporary? as a result of the hours? no thank you for asking that question, director tarlov. i might ask jarrett hornbostel, our engineer, to who's been working on this to address the question, but i, i do know at a staff level, we decided not to change the hours from the application for the intention of the agenda, that this sort of reflects the, the bigger envelope, but as conditions of the permit, we will specifically be very clear about when the, when it can start. so it may actually be 2 or 3. actually it's an evolving conversation. i
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think the market just reached out to us about changing their hours. and so that can be done at the staff level administratively as part of the condition without the need to like, change the permit hours here. but alternatively, we could change the hours. that's an option you guys could undertake if that would be cleaner between the market and this closure. but jarrett did. i misspeak? i'll bring them to this. no, i think you i think you've got it. okay, great. i'm wearing my engineer hat. that was only my only question. thank you. thank you, i just had one. oh, sorry. director hennessy. thank you. go ahead. thank you, madam chair. i'll be quick. i just had one question to see if, were folks that were at the ascot hearing for folks that weren't at the ascot hearing, did any any, other ascot committee members representing other departments? you know, the entertainment commission, the fire department, did they have
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specific objections to the to the approval? i mean, i'm assuming that because it's a consent model. well, they each have a vote and this passed, but do they have any specific objectives? jared hornbostel staff, the ascot committee, and the members of that committee didn't have any other objections, and they voted unanimously to move this forward to the mta board to consider here. okay. thank you, madam chair. okay. thank you, so my comment on just reviewing this staff report was, there were some concerns about noise, rude staff, things like that. i just wonder what, what's been done to address those concerns. yeah, obviously, we reinforce good neighbor policy. this is a condition of the permit and
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ultimately can be grounds to revoke, they want to be good neighbors and be part of the community, i will say entertainment commission. they do have to have a permit to operate loud music and, if there are noise complaints, there's that sort of body and permitting mechanism in place to manage that. so i think we're hopeful sort of between entertainment commission's role to kind of keep on top of them and any permits they may need, and any sort of inspections and, and reminders of the applicant. we'll hopefully encourage them to continue being a good neighbor. if there are no further questions, i'm going to open to public comment on item 11. anyone in the room want to address item 11? the shared spaces road closure? hi, i'm nate carroll, i'm a legislative aide for board president aaron peskin, i just ran up here to join this, the last minute, so
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thank you for having me. i just wanted to also raise the community concerns that we had heard about it sounds like you've asked the exact question that i was just going to ask. which is what has changed? or, you know, what kind of, you know, what what are what are you planning to do about them? basically, people accessing, their own, units and other kinds of quality of life concerns. so, just interested in what what could what could be done differently. thanks thanks for being here next speaker, please. hi, stacy. randecker. i'm troubled that if scott even exists and, like, director hemminger, why you are hearing about a street closure for people to enjoy space in our city, in an alley. the only
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reason you would ask people there permission for this is to maintain car dominance over our streets. in korea, they have an app. if you want to rent the space in front of your home, in front of your business, you pull it up. you go on here, you fill out the terms. it's going on the time, it be you pay the permit and you have, you're done. as long as you've checked all the boxes and made all the requirements. and what i would ask for anyone holding an event or taking up space in our streets is that we be civil. if someone needs something, if someone needs assistance, let them in. if you can, you know, if it's not going to be disruptive, do do what you can to accommodate. but we should be making space for people. we should make it so people can walk, bike, play, get everywhere they are going without a car. we should not be hearing about
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taking up space for cars, defending space for cars. who is defending us? our streets are a reflection of our city policies. when you put street charging in, you're saying cars belong here? i don't see trans at first. i don't see a climate emergency. and i sure as hell don't see vision zero reflected in our streets. make this city for people. make us safe. cars will always find a way. thank you, thank you. are there any other speakers on item 11? okay i'll just go ahead and sort of second, director hemingers sort of general comment, which is just to continue to reexamine along our principles of efficiency, one of our top six principles for this year. we know it takes a lot of time to
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bring items to this board. it can be a bottleneck. so if it's suitable to the director of transportation to delegate, i think that's something we could think about. i don't know if we have to vote on that or how we make that change, but but i certainly trust staff to handle these kinds of shared space closures. i don't i don't feel that these need to come to the board either. okay, with that, i'll take a motion to approve in a second. so moved. is there a second? okay, great. please call the roll on the motion to approve. wait a second, i actually abstain. i don't want to vote for this. i'm not i don't i don't want to vote yes on this. okay? so she has to vote. is that right? you do are required to vote. have to be away all together. no, you can vote no. well, i mean, i just felt like, you know, there's. i don't think there's appropriate outreach to the community. and i am not going to vote for this, that is just on my principle manner because of my recent experience that i have to, you
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know, represent our agency for chinatown to settle on some of the situation that we're still working on, so this one, i would say that, rely on the permit applicant to do its own outreach. it's a beginning of another spiral, and i don't think that we're. well, first, i also actually agree with my fellow board directors, chair egan and director hemminger that this should be more like a administrative staff level, but it does escalate to this extent. i can only imagine there's some more, falls into the story, and i really want to make sure that working with the supervisor's office and the rest of the team that is involved, there needs to there there needs to be more homework to be done here. so i don't think it's ready to for us. well it should not need it
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to vote on on the board. and if i have to vote, i will have to vote no. okay okay. but she's not allowed to abstain. is that correct? okay, okay. yes. for the vote. no. okay okay. please continue to call the roll on the motion to approve director hemminger by director henderson i. henderson i director hinsey i, i or so. no. so no. director tarloff. i tarlov i egan i can i thank you. the item is approved. okay. thank you. please call the next item. item 12 presentation and discussion on the fiscal year 2024 2025 and fiscal year 2025 2026. operating and capital budgets. okay. is our cfo here to talk budget? yes present. did
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you want to speak? okay. sure. you want to just. okay. great. sure. that's fine. yep. okay. okay. good afternoon. members of the board. my name is bremer horta. i'm here for another update on the budget, particularly to respond to your questions about revenue and
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questions and suggestions about revenue options, based on our our meeting two weeks ago. so today i want to talk a little bit more about the expenditure reductions that we've already made. because one thing i really heard from you last meeting was, knowing that we have a year three problem of 240 million, you know, just urging us to do more towards that area. and so i think i want to spend a little bit of time walking you through the impact that our expenditure reductions have already had on closing that budget deficit. i also want to talk you through the additional revenue options proposed and requested by the members of the board, talk about i heard a lot of concern from the members of the board about how in the face of fare increases, we ask, we get more people to participate in our discount programs. and so i want
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to spend some time on that, as well as our ongoing work on fare compliance, and then give you an update on the capital budget as well, with particular attention to the values that drive the allocation of our resources, as well as how we allocate our discretionary discretionary revenues and some additional clarification about the level of discretion that is truly available in our discretionary revenues. i think in an attempt to, achieve clarity about the difference between a restricted and a discretionary revenue, i may have given the impression that these revenues are fully discretionary. and in fact, they are not. it's just that instead of having rules like at a level ten, they're rules like at a level five. so we still have some restriction in our in our discretion. so let's start with the operating budget. as you all know, we have a 2.12 point $7 million deficit in 2526 and 240
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plus million dollars in year three and beyond, i do want to point out that today's march 5th. no, it's not. it's march. what day is it? i don't know, possibly 16th to 19th. it's been a long two weeks, it's march 19th, the mayor's budget, update for the nine month joint report is not yet out. the may state revise may hold some bad news. if the governor decides to claw back some of the state relief or stay or tda revenues go down because of what's happening with the state finances and labor, which accounts for our for 63% of our budget. those negotiations are still in process. so don't get too, too attached to these numbers because unfortunately for me, they move almost every day. so this is just a snapshot in time showing you where we are right now, so just to refresh your memory back to the beginning, when we started this conversation in december, based on where we closed fiscal year
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2223, we had a $240 million plus annual deficit beginning in 26, 27. and the graph looked like this expenditure was growing. we were balanced in 24, 25, out of balance in 2526, and then starting in 2526, expenditure continues to go slowly up and then the bottom drops out of revenue because we spend through our state and federal relief and the goal obviously is to pinch expenditure and revenue together and make the gap between those two things smaller, as i mentioned, in march 5th, we engaged in a really serious round of expenditure reductions before we even got into the budget cycle, and we had some values that we used to make these decisions. one was protect filled positions. so focus on vacant positions, meet your existing contractual requirements. if you've signed a
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contract, you have to continue to pay for it. protect service delivery for the public, and try to achieve savings through efficiency. so as i mentioned on march 5th, we had made some significant reductions in our budget budgeted positions about 52 over $50 million. and that's ongoing. and then 33.7 in 24, 25 for materials and supplies and 25 and 25.5 for materials and supplies. and professional services. non-labor costs in 2526. so what did that do to that three year budget, as you can see, there was a significant decrease. we moved the needle from 244 million to 214 million. so that's a 12% decrease. so through expenditure reductions alone, we brought we brought down that gap between expenditure and revenue in 2627
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to a 12% decrease. so and that was really a lot of hard work and thoughtful thinking by staff , and i want to note for you that i think what is particularly painful to my little cfo heart is that had unfortunately, we at that same time, revenue moved against me, meaning, we reduced what we plan to spend. but i also had to downgrade the projections of the revenue that i anticipated bringing in. and unfortunately, we i had to reduce revenue to such a great degree that it ate up a lot of the gains that we would have made on that year. three deficit by reducing expenditure. so had revenue stayed where it was, we would have actually we reduced the budget. the budget deficit would have been reduced to 144 million
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or $100 million or 59. so there was really significant work done on the year three deficit. but unfortunately, revenue moved against me. and we ended up in this place where we're still far off the mark. and so what this looks like, if you're a visual person, is that the top graph that shows the solid line shows us where we were at the end of last year. we had a 200. we were looking at a $244 million deficit, and then on it, if you, if you, if you reduce both expenditure and revenue, the shape moves down. so now the deficit is lower and the difference between expenditure and revenue is lower. it's now 214 instead of 244. so the work that we're doing is making progress. we're just not all the way there either, and this of course assumes that we close this year's deficit and don't add to it by, by, by either
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adding cost or, or or failing to close the, the budget deficit in year two. so let's go. let's turn back to revenue, i think one thing that's made this discussion a little bit challenging is that the base budget assumed indexing, because that is board policy. our policy is to assume that everything indexes. if we assume that all fares, fees and fines are indexed, then we generate an additional $14.6 million of revenue from indexing. but walking into the budget cycle, knowing the expenditure, knowing what i knew about where we had dropped expenditures and having increased it, knowing what i knew about dropping expenditures , doing the push, pushing as much as we possibly could on expenditures was indexing everything. that is what left us with the $12.7 million deficit. so the that's why i knew we had to go beyond indexing, because i
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knew that having cut everything we could possibly cut without impacting service and pulling every single revenue, i could possibly pull just slightly beyond our normal board policy of indexing, i still had a $12.7 million deficit, so i had to do more in order to close the deficit. so that's kind of where my approach was and why staff is recommend came with the original recommendation that we presented to you, so and something that i want to highlight when we were talking about the question of equity and why is it equitable to increase to decrease the clipper fare, which is a net increase for those riding clipper and increase parking citations? only 5? i want to remind you that during the pandemic. so for the last two budget cycles, the last four years, parking citations went up every year, transit stayed exactly the same. so if you look
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at the year, the change not just between last cycle and this cycle, but a change back to the last time, the entire portfolio affairs was increased, you can see that we've already experienced significant increases in all of our major citations. street cleaning went up 8% rrp, overtime went up 7, and downtown meters went up 10% and transit went up 0. so there is a perspective to say that decreasing the clipper discount is now catching up. transit fares. and because of the economy, because we respect riders, because we want people to ride transit, we held off on those indexing for, for, for four years, but now it's a return to regular order. and, and we're, we're, we're catching up. and i think this is sort of precisely the point of indexing, right? when you fail to index
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and you have to catch up, it hurts because it's a lot. at one time, just like last summer, the price of eggs doubled in the course of a week, rather than going up slowly over time. that that's what it feels like when you don't index. so and i think sometimes the thought is that indexing is not meaningful. and you can just paper over it like, oh, you know, just get rid of some expense or expenditure. surely it's fine. i want to point out that the cumulative impact of not indexing for the last four years was $18 million, and the impact of taking no action on fares will be $51 million by the end of the six year budget cycle. and that that's real. that's significant money. okay, so as a reminder, the our principles for additional revenue were revenue has to be available starting july 1st, revenue must be within sfmta's administrative control and it should be distributed
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across multiple transportation types so that everyone shares the burden. and we should increase equity and protect those with the least resources. so on the subject of equity, we had some questions about the demographics by fare product. and this chart. this table shows us the percentage of, riders who are bipoc or low income by fare media type and, and you can see that cash fare rider. it is certainly true that there are bipoc and low income riders on clipper. however you can see that there is quite a dramatic difference between the two. 65% of our bipoc riders pay cash versus 49 who are paying with clipper or muni mobile. and 50% of our low income riders are paying cash, versus 31% who are paying clipper via clipper or muni mobile. so, let's let's with all of this information now
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in your head, let's return back to our revenue options. the, there's been a lot of water under the bridge, so i'll remind us where we where we began at the workshop, after. well, we actually began with four options at the workshop, and staff recommended this option, but, this option, the staff recommended option at the workshop was to eliminate the transit. the clipper 50 cent clipper discount over two years for clipper for riders paying with clipper and muni mobile, and to have no change to cash fare to protect our lowest income riders. to increase parking fines by 5, to increase the cost of rbp to reflect both indexing and make sure that we fully cost recover the and to reinstate taxi fees with the exception of drivers for reasons of equity and to imply to apply indexing and when we did that, we ended up with a net $300,000
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surplus, at our last meeting, the board requested three additional options. one option was indexing only one option was an option to in acknowledgment that we do have riders who are bipoc and low income on clipper to see if there was a way that we could reduce the impact on those riders, and then an option to consider the impact of transit fare pricing on ridership and see if there was a way that we could protect, sort of mitigate the impact of fare increases on ridership. and so i'll walk you through each of those options now. so we're calling the indexing only option very eloquently indexing only. and as you can see, what that would do for transit fares and parking fines is it would have no impact, because that was the impact that was assumed that was already assumed in the base. what the additional revenue that
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would be generated would be the $2.9 million in rrp from fully cost recovering and $2.1 million from reinstating taxing fees and this time including drivers. so really the main difference, and that is a difference of 1.2 for taxi driver, for taxi fees, without the drivers, 2.1 with the drivers. so net net. that brings us to $5 million above the base netted against the $12.7 million deficit. that leaves us with 7.7 additional million dollars in expenditure. that needs to be cut. for your reference, muni route is about a million, is about a million bucks. i know, i'm sorry. this is the equivalent of one muni line, and a quick build is about the equivalent of 1 million bucks. just for your reference, to understand what $7.7 million means. option three. that was the idea that we reduce the impact on clipper riders. and to
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do this, we reduce the clipper discount by $0.25 rather than $0.50, and continued to protect cash fare riders from increases because one of our core values was to increase equity. and what you can see here is off the base. this results in a 2.2 million decrease. so i'm actually starting the game with less money than i began with because the $0.25 a ride is a significant amount. in order to make up that deficit, we have to increase parking fines to the maximum possible allowed, which is 10. and i say that that's the maximum possible allowed because that would bring the majority of our parking citations to $108 a year and $108 a year is the is the same as what is charged for a criminal citation governed by the california vehicle code,
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which is essentially a moving violation. so from a policy perspective, we don't want to be in a place where you pay more for a parking violation like street sweeping, than you would for a moving violation that would be cited by a police officer. that's actually a misdemeanor. then we have taxi fees, which are the same as the staff recommended proposal. we reinstate taxi fees but exclude drivers. all of these things together generate $12.2 million. but when netted against the deficit, we have, $500,000 in additional cuts that we would have to make on top of the over $100 million in cuts that we have already made revenue option for that was the option for reduced ridership impact. in this option, we continue to reduce the clipper discount. so
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we reduce it the full $0.50. but in addition, we start to play with the cost of the monthly pass. currently we the monthly pass is set by an assumed number of rides that was based on pre-pandemic travel. patterns are. the current multiplier is 32 rides per pass, which is pretty much based on the assumption that you commute downtown back and forth ten times a week and maybe go somewhere on the weekend. so when we reduce that multiplier from 30 to 30 2 to 26, the price of the monthly pass goes down. because we are now multiplying the clipper fare times a fewer number of rides, and the lifeline pass will go down because the cost of the lifeline pass is set at 50% of a monthly pass. we in order to offset the revenue loss there, we have to increase parking by 8. and we
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continue to do the same things with rpp fees fully cost recovering and with taxis we reinstate taxi fees and exclude drivers, apply indexing. so that's essentially the same as the option proposed by staff. and this leaves us with a $0.9 million deficit. so we would have to take almost $1 million more in cuts on top of the over $100 million that we have already done. so that's a lot to think about. so we put all of the options and compared them to the current price of the single ride cash fare. the single ride clipper and mobile fare, as well as the adult monthly pass and the lifeline pass. and i think here it's easy to see how each of these options impact the constituent groups. so for example, the single in the single ride cash fare category. single ride cash fare payers would continue to pay $3 in every re option except for the
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indexing only option where they would pay 310 in year one and 325 in year two, in the option where the impact for single ride clipper riders, you can see that across the board things go up slightly, the smallest amount being in the option where we choose to reduce the impact to clipper. for the adult monthly pass, the biggest, indexing only and reducing the impact to clipper are sort of the medium range options. and the most significant impact to this pass is makes sense. the reduced impact or ridership option, where we play with the multiplier and similarly that has the biggest impact to the cost of the lifeline pass. because the lifeline pass is set at 50% of the adult monthly pass . but we also need to look at
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what the impact is to parking citations in the option for on. let's look at street cleaning, because that is our most frequently issued citation. that citation is now $90 in the original staff proposal, where we indexed by 5% the cost of a street cleaning ticket would go from 90 to 95. in year one and 99 in year two. so $10 over the two years. if we indexed only makes sense, we'd be indexing it at the cost of cola and cpi only. so that's the place where citations would go up the least, and the citation would go from 90 to 93. in year one and 93 to 97, a $7 increase over the two years. and then when we look at the options that required a bigger impact to citation fines in order to make up the revenue lost by transit fares. so that same street sweeping citation
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goes from 90 to 99. in year one and 90 to 108 in year two, reaching the maximum that we would like to charge for an administrative parking citation in. and so what that means is there would be no further increases in the future, and our ability to generate more revenue by we're sort of bringing all of the future increases that we would take over time and pulling them into the current year. and then in the option where we reduce impact to ridership because, that is the, the, the option where we increase parking citations by 8% very clearly, the street cleaning, street sweeping citation ends up priced between the 5% beyond indexing proposal, which puts it at 95, and the reduced impact at clipper, which required a 10% increase and brings the citation to 9997, falls neatly between
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those two because parking citations would be increased by 8, so again, that's still a lot. so we summarized it one more time, the only option that fully closes the budget deficit without additional cuts is the option originally presented by staff. and that leaves us with a $300,000, $300,000 to the good. if we if the board decides to go with the indexing, only option, we would need to identify 7.7 additional million dollars in cuts if the board decides to go with the option to reduce the impact to clipper, we would need an additional half $1 million in cuts. and if the board decides to go with the option to reduce the impact of ridership, we would have to go with an additional $0.9 million in cuts, i think this is quite the dense slide, but we wanted to talk to you about the impact of each of these different options across,
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the, the different modes transit, parking, fines and taxi . and i think what it's what's clear in this very dense slide is that it's, it is it is a very i think i'm going to write a case study on this for my public policy school on an iterative policy options and how they impact different groups, because it's quite clearly shown, that each different option impacts different groups in different ways. and so truly, you know, it is it is a policy choice about what things are most important to you, so i know that the board expressed a lot of interest in understanding our discount program, participate in. and so i want to spend some time there as a reminder, we have three major programs. our lifeline program, which is for low income riders. the clipper start program, which is clippers low
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income program. and then the access pass, which is where homeless riders ride for free. and if you look at our website, the participation rate is calculated at 45, 47. but that calculation is based on the number of active passes against the eligible population, meaning the population that meets the income thresholds. but when we look at census data, we know that not everyone writes transit census data shows that 17% of san franciscans ride transit. so if you incorporate the percentage of transit riders into the population to understand what are our estimated users, and then you compare that with our active users per month. so people who are actually tagging, then we have an adjusted participation rate. and what i think is a more accurate reflect of our participation rate of 64, which is good, but we also know that we could do better, and i'll
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talk a little bit more about how the things that we've done to do better and how we plan to do even better in the future, this slide is a summary of all of our citations or our discount programs. the lifeline monthly pass, which i already mentioned, is for people who fall below 200% of the federal poverty line. and you get your adult pass for 50% off youth who are 18 and under, ride for free, there is free muni for people who are seniors and people with disabilities. if they are 100% below the bay area median income and the access pass is for people experiencing homeless, and then the clipper start program is a 50% single ride fare discount for people at or below the 200% federal poverty line. so there's an option both if you use a monthly pass, as well as if you are writing a single fare. and when you look at the administrative costs to
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implement these programs, as well as the foregone revenue all in, that's $24 million. and so i think to me, that's a number that we can be really proud of, that we're providing $24 million worth of free and reduced service to the communities who need it most. but of course we always want to do more. so over the last couple years, particularly during covid, covid provided us a lot of opportunities to make things easier for people to sign up, prior to covid, we required an in-person photo to get access to these discounts. but we've entered the modern age and we now allow for just online and mail submission of applications. we've partnered with the human service agency to allow sfmta a staff to confirm eligibility through their enrollment with other city programs, we're working directly with nonprofit agencies to auto enroll customers who receive service.
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we use our transit fare inspectors as kind of mta gateways. if someone has not paid because they cannot afford to pay the fees, have done a great job of helping people sign up for our discount programs, we have retro in a in an example of cross divisional cooperation, we took a retired paratransit van and retro fitted it to go to a community events and farmers markets to hand out information on programs for people with low incomes. and we implemented a waiver for fare evasion citations. when you enroll in a discount program. and again, that's to help rather than citing people who can't pay to try to help move them into a discount program so they can continue to ride, but ride legally, but we know we can do more. and so we would like to designate one of our city hall fellows, which are these really
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great, vibrant, recent college grads who are really committed to public service. they compete citywide to become a city hall fellow, and then they're assigned to departments based on , on, a match between interest and the, the, the, the service that the department needs and we would like to ask our city fellow to help us develop a strategy as well as assess the need for ongoing resources to increase the participation in our discount programs. and that could look like ongoing partnerships with community based organizations or family resource centers to go to the location and help people sign up in person. it could mean looking at all of the other city departments who already have touch points with, people who need additional services due to their income level and help use that as a way to get access to
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people who need those services and try to get them to enroll in our program when they're enrolling in other programs, a deeper partnership with our own office of racial equity, understanding how we can use our equity strategy to target sfmta efforts, recognizing that we don't have the resources to be everywhere all at once, how can we be most strategic with the way we deploy our resources? and then i think, most significantly, for me, is evaluate each of these efforts, as well as all of the other things that we've been doing to understand what is the most impactful and what actions actually drive people towards greater participation in our discount programs. so we can do more of those things and less of the things that are less effective, also the i think our partnership with clipper, particularly as we move towards clipper 2.0 this summer, is going to further enhance our ability to, service our our customers who need to be part of
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our discounted programs. when two clipper 2.0 is implemented, they will be able to purchase their lifeline pass on clipper, which is really exciting because currently there are less than ten in-person locations or muni mobile. so if you're someone who isn't ready to do muni mobile but has trouble getting one of those ten locations, i think moving having lifeline be available on clipper is going to be really helpful, mtc is leading a regional evaluation of expanded income eligibility so that we can all, perhaps all move together towards recognizing that the bay area is a really expensive place to live, and that perhaps 200% of poverty level is not the appropriate definition of low income in this very expensive region. and we'll also have the ability to do fare capping, which is where you where riders can ride a single ride until they ride enough rides that they then pay for a monthly pass, and
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then they automatically convert to a monthly pass. all of that is coming with clipper 2.0, which should be available later in 2024, and of course, as we've consistently said, we would never talk about raising fares unless we were also talking about increasing our fare compliance and when i present to you the full draft budget, in two weeks, you will see a plan to make a strategic investment to increase our transit fare inspectors presence in the system back to 1819 levels, which is the last time, that we had a fare compliance level that that we thought was appropriate, so also i want to do a little update on the capital budget. and, you know, as a reminder, the capital budget is sort of the ending point of what is a constantly evolving and updating process where it's the process itself is multi year because we have so many long projects that are implemented, sometimes over
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decades. and so we start with the capital, the 20 year capital plan, which looks at all of the capital needs over the next 20 years, by project, by cip program looks at the scope of the project, the cost and the timeline then. but that is a fiscally unconstrained plan. and if i remember correctly, the number for the capital plan is $20 billion, which is obviously fiscally unconstrained. when we get to the five year capital improvement plan, then we have to be more serious about the amount of revenues we actually have and we have to match our capital needs up against the revenues we actually have, and then we become even smaller when we look at our two year capital budget, because those are the revenues that we're most certain of. the revenues in year three, four and five are highly speculative because i mean, think about it this way. four years ago we hadn't even heard of covid, right? so a lot a lot
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changes in four years. so the first two years of the capital budget are the first two years of the five year capital plan, as i mentioned, the capital plan is our financially unconstrained need, and you may not know, but the we as part of the capital plan, we score each project against criteria that reflect sfmta's values. and i'm going to talk about those in a minute, and the mta board does weigh in on the capital capital plan quite regularly. the last capital plan was approved november 16th, 2021, and then it was updated by staff and reviewed with this board on november 12th, 2023. so when we i think it's always really important in any exercise that allocates dollars to return to what are the values that drove that allocation. and on the capital plan side, we score all of our projects by four, values that really reflect what we've
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heard from the board equity, economic vitality, environmental stewardship and trust. then we move down that funnel to the five year cip, and we then start within on a specific capital program like fleet or streets or signals or communications. in it, we score the individual programs, the individual projects in that program by another set of criteria. and these criteria are are a little bit more practical. is this an active project that's already under contract? is it tied to a dedicated funding source? does it improve safety and security for public employees? does it improve system reliability or resilience in the face of climate change? is it aligned with regional goals and policies and plans that promote transportation? does it improve the customer experience? does it increase revenue or reduce costs? does it contribute to our environmental stewardship and equity? and what is the impact to other projects? then we get
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to the point where we've allocated all of our revenues. we've scored all of our projects, the projects that score the highest rise to the top. we match those with our revenues, and then we end up with a lot of holes. and that's where our discretionary revenues come in as a just to kind of table set, our discretionary revenues are 16% of our total revenue sources. and i want to talk a little bit about those revenues particularly i want to talk about proposition b. proposition b is all. so our discretionary revenues are general obligation bonds as of this year, of which we have zero revenue bonds which are bonds issued by the sfmta. given our operating budget place, i don't think i don't see us having the ability to take on additional debt for quite some time. so this is a source that is going to decrease over time. we are
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down to our last $20.6 million, block grants, which are actually , the how they have to be spent is identified by the funder. and then we try to identify a project that matches with what the funder would like to fund. so i would call all three of these kind of medium discretion. when we have discretion in the sense that at the time the bond documents are written and the board votes on the enabling legislation at that time, we have discretion because we identify how we'll spend the dollars. but once the bonds are issued, we have to spend within the envelope the particular buckets that have been identified by the board and then later approved by the board of supervisors, and in the case of the general obligation bonds, have been approved by the voters , then we have what i'm calling micro miscellanea funds, which are often like really small bits of this. and that, and their requirements are various, but we
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have zero of those in the current cip, so i won't spend too much time. so then we get to prop b, which is actually, as you can see from this chart, the elephant in the room, it is 343 million out of $557 million. it is our most significant discretionary capital source. and by legislation passed by the voters, 75% of that has to go to transit, and 25% of that has to go to streets, tnc tax, which is the 2% tax on ride share. that is 100% dedicated to streets, prop a, which is a fee that we get for vehicle registrations. 25% is dedicated to transit, 50% is dedicated to street repair, 25% is, is for pedestrian safety. and i would call these quite low levels of restriction or low levels of discretion because we have, within the bucket, we can identify
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different projects, but we can't cross buckets. we have to stay within those large groups, identify and, by the restriction and then we have low carbon fuel sales, which is a the state program for selling carbon offset. those projects must reduce emissions and increase mobility in disadvantaged communities. and commuter shuttles must fund pedestrian safety on shuttle routes. so i would again put those at medium because that's a those are that's a pretty small bucket. it's a pretty small amount of space to move within. and then sadly, the one source that has no restrictions at all is when we use operating dollars to fund capital. and as you can see, that is zero in this cip. so the biggest loss of discretionary money is because the operating fund is not contributing like it used to the capital fund. in the last cip, the operating fund
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contributed $46.4 million. this time it's contributing zero. so the capital budget, like the operating budget, is falling victim to low post covid revenues. so when you look at the overall allocation of our discretionary funds, you can see that 75% of our discretionary spends funds support transit projects and 25% support streets. and because math will, math and prop b is the largest funding source, that makes sense because prop b is dedicated 75 cent to transit and 25% to streets, that being said, with our discretionary revenues, we do also have things that we take into consideration. of course, the funding restriction, first and foremost is the project active because an active project has existing labor and existing contract expenses, and stopping that project would mean laying off staff and would mean,
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violating executed contract. we really strongly prioritize matching access to additional capital revenue, meaning if the federal government offers us $100 million for a $20 million local match, that seems like a pretty good use of local funds. we have a regulatory commitment to spend $250 million on state of good repair. so we use our local dollar, our discretionary dollars to make sure we meet that commitment. we look at project readiness because project readiness is a way to make sure that we win grants. if we use our discretionary funds to get projects shovel ready and make them look bright and shiny for grant applications, that's how we win grants. and in the last couple of years, we've been quite successful in our grant program. last fiscal year, we won $100 million. in the year before that, we use $200 million. we won $200 million. so making sure that our projects that we're using our local dollars to make projects shovel
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ready, get them eligible for grants and then leverage that to get hundreds of million dollars is a really important use of our discretionary money. and then after we've done all of those things, we also look at community, sfmta board of directors and agency priorities, to kind of put this all in context at the, the three biggest categories of, impacts that would happen if we changed the discretionary allocation in the current cip, 49% of the time, we would be pausing an active project. 40% of the time we would be taking away a local match that would end up with us losing federal, losing additional funding, and 11% of the time we would be canceling a project. so what happens next, i need to incorporate updated
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revenue projections into the budget, now that we are almost nine months through the year of the budget, through nine months through the current year, i need to look at, what parking revenues this year and transit revenues this year are telling me about what revenues will be like next year. unfortunately we what parking revenues are telling me is that they are going down, which is a bummer because they are our biggest enterprise revenue. happily, transit revenues are going up, but because transit revenues are a smaller portion of our budget, they don't offset the decrease in parking revenue. so that's a net decrease. and this is part of that where i was talking at the top about revenue moving against me, i need to update the budget with centrally calculated costs, which are costs like pension and retiree health that are calculated by the city. and then i just get a number and i just have to pay for it, and then our labor negotiation projections and then i have to
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balance the budget and then i need to present to you all a draft budget on april 2nd, we've had such packed meetings. there's a couple topics we still haven't covered, i so we are going to do a deep dive on safety and security and muni because i know that's important to you. we are going to give you a proactive schedule for how we are going to increase our participation in discount programs by september 1st, because we start on july 1st. once we have a budget, we begin the work of notifying the community and doing all of the programing and all of the internal work that has to happen to increase fares. but fares don't actually go up until september. so that does give us a few months to work really hard to get more people into those discounted programs. and then also, we similar to how we need to communicate increases in transit fares, we need to increase, we need to communicate increases in rpp citations as well, because no one likes to
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get a surprise, especially surprise that cost more. you always like to know in advance. so we're going to be talking about our communications plan for informing the community of that change as well, so i've done a lot of talking. now it's your turn. so what i would really love to hear is what is your preferred revenue option? because we've now moved into the part of the budget cycle where i need to balance the budget and to balance the budget, i need to know what revenue number i'm balancing around. do i need to identify an additional $7.7 million of cuts or not, i think there was a valid question that the board asked if we is decreasing the clipper discount by $0.50. is that a reflection of a different policy or is it a reflection often of we're doing something different this time, but we'll return to indexing in
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the next cycle or something interesting i learned about the clipper discount. is that the clipper discount came about because, when clipper was first started many years ago, the board decided to index cash fares, but to not index clipper fares, which resulted in cash fares rising in relation to clipper fares, which is where we have now gotten to the point that cash fare riders pay $0.50 more than clipper riders. so is taking away the 50% clipper discount. in fact, a return to indexing and essentially indexing the clipper fare all at once, taking ten years of indexing at one time instead of taking it slowly over time. so i think that these are these are valid policy questions to be asking, and then lastly, we have three more meetings. is april 2nd and then two where we'll i'll be presenting the draft operating budget in its entirety
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for the first time. and then that leaves us with two additional meetings to vote before we have to submit a balanced budget to the mayor on may 1st. so april second is the best opportunity for me to tell you all the other things you need to know in order to make a decision about the budget in one of the last two meetings in april. so what else do you need to know from me in order to make your decisions, and that long last i am done. okay. thank you so much. cfo mcwhorter, i hope you have a very nice vacation planned. once the budget is adopted, you go forget about all this. i know how hard you're working to land this plane. and i really want to thank you for your transparency and the way that you are, like, really lifting up the hood on everything that you are managing in terms of constraints and intricacies as you do your job. and we're getting about this much of i think of the detail that you navigate every day. so it is it is very much appreciated, so, colleagues, i
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know this is a lot of detail. i just want to remind us i'm going to take a break after this item. so we'll get through this and we'll have a little bit of a break. we're going to have no vote today. this is info only, but i think cfo mcwhorter would like to kind of get a sense of this board in terms of where we're leaning, in terms of the revenue option, and then any other questions that you'll need to then sort of plan to answer when you bring to us on april 2nd, even though, as i understand, the second will also not be a voting that's correct action that will continue to be info, but more complete info and then hopefully the vote on the 16th, okay, so i think that's what we're trying to do today. i am inclined to go to public comment first if it's okay, and then have our discussion unless there's any immediate concerns. okay. so let's open public comment on the budget item, please. particularly interested in hearing from the public. we have four revenue options in front of us. i'm interested in hearing your take your sense of those revenue options. of
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course, you're welcome to comment on anything you like, but that's a decision we have to work towards making. so it would be helpful to hear any input on those four options before us. i have just one speaker card. stacy randecker. oh, i don't see her in the room. we can take any person, queued up. i have some comments by remote. yes, we will come, chair egan, do you want to take that one comment now or after in person? let's go ahead with the people in person. in person first. okay. thank you, yeah. i would like to say i know there are four options, but it seems there's a fifth option that's just being ignored, which is, why we can't at all raise parking fees, you know, parking fees are completely or parking is completely free on sunday, which is an incentive to anyone
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who owns a car in san francisco to not take public transit and just use their car. and they can park anywhere in the city for free, this proposal increased fares affects 80. almost 80% of riders, while obviously it's very hard to balance the budget if we're just looking at fares or, you know, fines and but we could i think we could easily balance the budget if we just had parking fees on sundays and also indexed, parking to inflation, the minimum parking fees are not indexed, even though it seems we're trying to sort of bring back this norm of indexing, ridership, while obviously the budget benefits riders, the fewer people that ride the bus, the worse it is for drivers. and if there's sort of a lot more, you know, expensive to ride. fewer people are going to use sfmta more and more people, will consider getting a car and traffic will
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just get worse. and worse for everyone, and i think by just ignoring the cost of, parking or this opportunity to increase the budget, we're really putting the whole sort of sfmta public transit system at risk. thank you. thanks for your comment. next speaker, please. hi. kate bloomberg again, i would also like to just sort of the idea of sfmta as an enterprise agency, when we hear, oh, the parking revenue is going down. and that's a problem because that's the largest source. well, that's great. that's what we want. we want less cars. right? so i agree with the previous speaker. we should be increasing the parking fees. we should be increasing, parking meters, fees. i think the idea that many residents have that i'm, you know, parking is free. and that means it's a good that is owed to me. you know, it's something
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that's free and available, and they feel like that's that's a big problem. so increasing meters and making that easier for the agency to do i think is a is important. increasing those fees, but also, you know, taking away the i mean, i know you can't do this in this budget cycle, but why is sfmta and enterprise agency at all? you know, we provide you provide an incredibly critical service for this this city and we don't it's police are not an enterprise agency. fire departments not you guys shouldn't be either, so i mean, i don't have a problem personally with increasing the clipper fares. i do think that the idea again, of clipper being something that we wanted people to move over to, so there was a discount. that makes sense. but at this point, it feels like, cash is there's a penalty on
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paying cash, which doesn't seem fair either, but i would agree that parking, parking, parking should be the highest revenue source. thank you, thank you. next speaker, please. good afternoon, directors. tahmidullah with livable city, yeah, there seems to be kind of a fundamental confusion going on here. you know, on the one hand, we're told, you know, values drive this budget, equity, sustainability, etc, right? we have got a climate crisis. we've got equity commitments. that's the driver. then we hear this catching up with the regular order, shared burden right. so we're just going to index inequity for inflation. right. and if you keep indexing inequity for inflation you know what. by the end it's still inequitable right. so unless you're really committed to saying, hey, you know, cars had a good run, right? for a century we treated them as a public, you know let them allowed streets and roads as a public good. asked very little for people who
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drive in park in terms of paying for their fair share of, supporting the infrastructure. we treated transit as an enterprise. right. so then we we've heard, oh, there was this weird anomaly during the pandemic where parking fines went up and transit fares didn't. that's weird. let's get back to normal. don't go back to normal. go with your values. right. and the reason your staff are confused is because you're the policy makers and you're not telling them what your values are, and you're not telling them that we need a budget that goes with values. so a few. which of these do we like? i don't like any of them yet, but some combination of three and four. but let me give you two revenue sources and a principle. one is it's better to get money from fees than from fines, right? fees are fair. if you use a thing, you pay for it, right? and there's a lot of time, for example, evenings and weekends. ads. these are times when you know there's demand for parking. we don't ask people to pay for them. if you do. and that's board adopted policy. so go with that. you're assuming $0 from evening and weekend policy, week
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evening and weekend parking over two years. that's weird. it's your actual policy. you can assume you know the july 1st date is artificial. you can assume that you get revenue from that. relax. time limits allow people to buy more parking or more time. ask your staff about it. doesn't there still turnover ? the merchants get the turnover, but you get more revenue. thank you. thanks for your comment. next speaker, please. yeah. can i speak now? we're going to get through the folks in person first. good afternoon, directors. i want a plus one. everything said about parking, but i'm actually not going to talk about parking. i want to propose an alternative way to close the budget gap, to hold cash fares steady at $3 across both years, reduce the clipper discount by $0.25 in year one and shift upwards of 1.6 million of prop b funds in year two to close the gap that would be created by not decrease the discount by the additional $0.25. agency data indicates that such a small shift 1.6
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million maximally would not pause, cancel or cancel any capital programs while it would reduce the fare increase for the 79% of riders that use clipper from 20% to 10. now, that being said, i support any proposal that puts riders first in the budget and encourages ridership by moderating fare increases every time we talk about parking and changing, i guess i'm going to talk about parking. every time we talk about changing parking prices, we talk about the impact to demand. why don't we talk about the impact of demand when we change fares? so to just give some really quick numbers, 25 to 30 trips a month is about would expect to spend 145 to $180 more a year in fiscal year 26 under the baseline proposal. that's as much as a single ramp permit for the entire year. that's for one person. now imagine a family of three who all take transit. they're spending an extra $500 a
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year if they're using clipper, taking a reasonable number of rides a month on the baseline scenario, the rbp family 45 bucks for one car that serves the entire family. the budget needs to reflect our values, and those values are transit first, vision zero, and environmental sustainability. yet drivers are still largely getting a pass. with all the previous comments. a 10% fare increase is still unfortunate, but it's more in line with what the average driver will experience. a slight bump in the one ticket they get every year, or the rpp pass. they pay for. thank you very much. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. thank you. directors. dylan fabris, san francisco transit riders, yeah. it's great to see a more robust set of options presented today, but still, none of them go far enough to put riders first and prioritize growing muni ridership. even the option that's touted as the reduced ridership impact option. in that option. i do like the
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proposal to bring down the monthly pass multiplier, which would bring the monthly pass more in line with what people's post-covid travel patterns are like. but the option still maintains the 20% fare increase, which is perhaps the single most harmful suggestion included in any of the options when it comes to the, increasing ridership numbers, none of these proposals considered the loss of ridership that comes with raising fares and i think that's missing from from all of the options, it was also it was it was great to see the breakdown of demographics by fare medium, but it doesn't change the fact that about 25% of all muni riders are low income. clipper users who would be hit the hardest by any increase in the clipper fare, also missing from this deck is the demographic breakdown of people who would pay any of the other revenue options, like people paying parking fines. what is the demographic info
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there, and how does that compare to the folks riding the bus and paying, fares, i assume, and i hope that the majority of parking fines are not being paid by bipoc or low income folks, but it would be great to see that data and better understand the difference between taxing drivers and taxing riders. i suspect one of those might be more equitable than the others, also related to parking, if we're going to raise parking fines, we should just do it by 10% or maybe even more. maybe the cost of a moving violation should be higher, i don't understand, given all the talk about prioritizing transit, how this agency could so easily suggest a 20% fare increase while still seemingly digging its heels on any sort of parking fee or fare increase. so i hope before approving any fare increase, you seriously revisit the parking issues, including parking fines, fees and parking meter hours that you can pull. thank you, thank you. next speaker, please. hi, i'm leanne
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chang. this is a budget comment, though. it's going to take me a moment to get there. so when i was looking at the data on vision zero across the us, i was really struck by the fact that the american cities with the fewest traffic deaths and the ones that have made the most improvement on that, are the cities where the smallest share of trips are taken by private car. and so and because many, many more people ride transit generally than bike or foot, you know, we'll get there. but but for the time being, increasing transit ridership is really essential to reducing traffic violence. so even while you're working really hard and i thank you for it on all of the quickest ways to reduce traffic violence, the speed safety cameras, quick builds, you know, lowering speed limits and all of that. i ask you, when you're thinking about the budget to keep your eye on this long time prize of mode shift. so anything you can do to move san francisco away from having among the highest fares in the country is really helpful. so i encourage you to consider the presented option to hold cash fares flat and reduce the clipper discount by half rather than eliminating it entirely, and charge for parking on evenings and weekends. thank you, thank you.
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next speaker, please. my name is maya chafee. i want to thank sfmta staff and the board for putting together the multiple options for changes to fill in the gaps while the current changes would affect up to 80% of riders, of the clipper riders, you have to remember that a significant portion of those are still low income. and while the improvements to the low and reduced fare programs are important, you're never going to get all those people on the program. they're still going to be people who are just above that poverty line, who aren't going to be able to afford those fares. i know multiple people have brought it up, but parking shouldn't be free on sundays unless you want to make my transit free on sundays. i would be happy with that. you should do that. but if that's not going to happen, then why do car drivers get to drive into the city and park for free? we need
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to be a transit first city and we have to induce more ridership . that's the only way that we can even start to fight back against climate change. and keeping fares low is the only way to do that. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. chair, you can board members, director tomlin, it's great seeing you all, i'm not a finance expert by any means, but the options are fairly frustrating to see that these are the limited options, when it comes to the levers that bri can pull on these things, you know, they seem to be fairly limited by the policy that you all propose. and like many of the advocates have said before me on this round of public comments, and there have been prior public comments to this where they've said the same
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things, the kinds of policy that you push should be based on those values and what you want to see. the future of san francisco look like, especially when it comes to transportation and infrastructure, you know, bringing up director hemingers point from earlier like that is the policy is what you should be doing, and the goals of the administration should be what you're doing, focusing on small things. it doesn't make sense for what the board is, is, is here to do. you should be implementing creative policy, you know, making sure that what we have set right now, allows bri to balance the budget in a way that gets us to where we want to go anyways, i want to one up everything that has been said before me, everything that, you know, they have said is really important and especially the creative policy ideas. and i want you to be able to implement
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those kinds of things. and it doesn't make sense that those things haven't been implemented yet, anyways, thanks. thank you. next speaker, please. oh. good afternoon, my name is jaime, organizer in the tenderloin, first off, thank you for the presentation, i really like a lot of details, so it'll take me a while to really absorb a lot of this. i'll take me a minute to engage with our residents, i echo what everybody has said, let's put parking fees and, you know, even eliminating, free parking on sundays on the table so that everybody knows what can be done and we can share the burden in ensuring our transit is funded, i would really rather spend figuring out how we solve that 300 million over this. 12.7 million, that being said, if we are really pushing for increasing fares, we should really do a whole lot better at getting those discount fares to people that needs it, i just
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looked at the lifeline, adoption percent, and it's less than 50. all the other programs from free muni for youth, free muni, like they're up there, and i'm also thinking about, the low income community or homeless folks that don't pay cash, don't pay clipper card because they don't have money. so maybe the data is showing that, yeah, low income people are paying cash, but people who don't have money at all are probably not paying, so if we're pushing again for fare enforcement, those folks will be hurt the most, and then finally out of all those options again, i'm they're not the best, but was it 4 or 3? i forgot i'm looking at my spreadsheet and. okay. yeah, so there's four, but i came up with another fifth one over here, where? no like, we keep the clipper discount, increased fines to 10, the fully cost recovery, the same thing. and then reinstate and index fees, including drivers for taxis, that would give you a
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deficit of 2.6, so that's a little bit somewhere in the middle, but again, let's put parking, on the table as well. thank you so much for your time. oh, and one more thing. if we're talking about safety, let's think about the safety around the muni station with pedestrian safety as well. thank you. of course. next speaker, please. thank you. hi. board members, luke bornheimer, i will echo everything that everyone already said and try and repeat what they have already said. i specifically just want to talk about, private vehicle storage on our street and the fact that we subsidize it and the fact that that's a huge missed opportunity for the agency. definitely want to echo the desire for saturday, sunday, you know, meter parking as well as, you know, permit parking. we, we allow people to just store their private vehicles on the street on saturdays and sundays in most parts of the city, also most of the city is unregulated in terms of parking space. so people quite literally dump their car
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out in the sunset when they go up to, say, tahoe or they take a trip somewhere, they just store their private property out there because they're like, oh yeah, you can leave it there for weeks. that's a huge problem. we should probably address that, especially if we want to address roadway safety, and sustainable mode shift and climate action. i will also just note that the cities that have done the best job addressing roadway safety, climate action, sustainable mode shift have have mixed you know, carrots and sticks and we as a city traditionally have always gone with carrots where we, we quote unquote never want to punish drivers. we always want to, quote unquote, encourage people to take transit, but study after study has shown that a mixture of carrots and sticks is actually what's most effective. we can start to do a better job of that. and it's pretty clear what the thing that needs a stick applied to it, it's private automobiles. and so one thing that i'd love to see discussed here and shared more transparently, publicly is, is
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for staff and you to dive into the whole concept that the rfp program has to be priced at just the recovery of the services or whatever that legal definition is. it's oftentimes vaguely referred to, just throw out two ideas. one, the agency could bundle, an annual muni pass with every rp, instantly make the price of an rpp $1,000 more, and instantly fund mta a lot better, it could also factor in every cost, including roadway maintenance and roadway fatalities, into the into the price of rp. thank you so much. thank you. okay. any other speakers in the room please go ahead. yes. thank you. good afternoon and thank you for all of your hard work, i'm going to speak later on a different matter, but the i agree with a lot of what has been said. and i was a i was a sort of awed by what was presented earlier as the budget, but i know that you're thinking about the merchants and who complain when you have, in fact, presented the
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idea of having, fees, parking fees on sunday and so forth and so on. but i like that that thought about the carrots and the sticks and the bench, but but i have i have a question, actually about paratransit. i'm a member of transit justice as part of sda. and i was wondering if you're involved if you if you considered paratransit in your budget or whether that's not in your purview, because i am concerned about people getting to their spots when they take muni. and that's one thing that i don't know whether that's considered in the budget and also the paratransit taxis. that's another concern, man. thank you. thank you for your comment. any other speakers in the room seeing none. let's go to the speaker on the phone please. we do have one accommodation request. you've been unmuted. this is herbert weiner, i have some concerns about, i don't think have been seen by anyone in the room on the panel. now, the public is
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expected to make certain by using the public to make sacrifices. what about muni management? i believe that salaries over 100,000 a year should be from the also maskless , you know, should make sacrifices to it, should have licenses, they should pay parking fees. now used to be that different discouraged black ppe whereas raising the fares of her ridership would discourage ridership as well. and i believe everyone should be making the sacrifices. and this does not exclude men. and i consider the wasteful projects of a lot of new managers has resulted in contributing to this deficit out. so let's have everyone step up to the plate. no one should
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be excluded from making sacrifices. thank you, thank you. no additional callers. okay. thank you all for your thoughtful and specific public comments. it's very helpful, so, colleagues, i do want to take a moment now to discuss these revenue options ahead of us and again, hear from you what additional questions you have on both the operating and capital side in order to feel comfortable working to approve the budget on the 16th? i do want to, at the start of our conversation, possibly toss out a fifth option to consider. and this is a little bit, in light of my own, deep reflection on the challenges in front of us. and also reflecting on the public comment that we heard at the last meeting, and also today. so i'm here, the themes i'm hearing, i'm hearing a lot of appetite to charge more for parking. i'm hearing a plea to us, please don't raise raise transit fares. i'm hearing please don't discourage transit
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ridership. i've also heard director hemminger say something loud and clear that i happen to agree with, which is if we once again suspend indexing this time, we might as well do away with a policy entirely. and so a sense of wanting to stick to that policy of indexing and operationalize that policy, this time around. so i'm going to put forward an option just to lay out an option for you on the table for you to consider. option five, so one, in terms of transit fares for this option we would index the transit fares. so transit fares would go to 260 for the single clipper ride. first year, 275 the second year. the monthly pass would go from the current 81 to the 83 and 88. in in the following year. so we will be raising transit fares that meets our criteria of wanting to have everybody pay. but not as much as the 20% that we've heard some concerned about . we would leave the cash fare at $3 because to me, there's
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just some some elegance and some simplicity to leaving a cash fare at $3 rather than asking people to wrestle for change, and then we would pull from option three, the parking fines increase to 10, keeping in mind that parking fines are trying to discourage a bad behavior rather than transit fares, we want people to take transit. that's a good behavior. so we raising parking funds more than raising fares for transit feels right to me. and then we would have the ppe look the same and the taxi look the same as in the other options. and mr. porter, can you share with everyone what the numbers you've run show that that option would yield. just make sure that sfcv can you pick . there we go. right. so option five, as you mentioned, would
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add apply inflation across the board. and, with the exception of the cash fare and then would reduce the monthly pass multiplier rather than taking all the way down to 26, would, would implement it, over a two year period and go not quite as far to lessen the revenue impact. so we would change the multiplier from 32 to 30. in year one and then 30 to 28 in year two, and to the decrease in the monthly pass. no net and the decrease from not reducing the clipper discount is off set. no, actually that's not true because indexing was in the base. sorry. so that together those two things would reduce transit fares by $3.5 million, meaning that net net, i would still have to identify an additional $1
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million in expenditure cuts. okay. and if we simply although i love the idea of reducing the multiplier, i think that's really creative thinking. if we simply set aside reducing the multiplier for now, then we could take this 3.5 and just make that -0, -0.2. so that would actually be the it's quite impactful to change the multiplier. that would actually put us 2.4 to the good okay. so this is there's no change in the multiplier. the monthly fares would be the 81 going to 83 and 88. just as you presented originally. okay. and then this okay. so this is an option that actually surpasses our goal slightly i will i will take that $2.4 million okay okay. sorry. could you just help us understand why that point two. because i think what i was trying to do with that inflation indexing is just exactly what is in the base budget. is it just the cash? is it just the cash
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piece? i believe it is. but i'm going to defer to staff on this one, one thing that is different is that it would index the cable car fare, which in our previous proposals did not, it where there was no indexing, the cable car cash fare does also not increase. so that's why there's, less. you're asking why there's less of an impact on that. why it's 0.2. i think what i was trying to do is just pull inflation indexing option from the index only option. and so you get that zero there. yeah. apologies i'm getting confused with all the options i know, so that is just attributed to the not indexing the cable car or i'm sorry, the cash fare not indexing cash, which we want to leave at $3. yes. okay. okay. so i'll just put this option for your consideration, colleagues. and i'll please open it up to any comments you have on this or any other questions and
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comments. director. so please. so the option that you just added on is option five or option six because the slide said option six. let's do six because that's the one that actually solves the budget challenge. the other one doesn't quite get us there. you show us two slide i guess that's what it was. so director ekin had started with an option five and that was to apply indexing and reduce use the multiplier to keep the monthly fare, the monthly. the cost of the monthly pass low? no, but that was quite expensive. and so we still ended up with $1 million in additional expenditure needed. so then iterating on option five, there's a new option six, which is to just index transit fares. but whole but protect the cash
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fare and leave that at $3 and do nothing to the multiplier. what is the number of your multiplier ? the multiplier is, yes, the cost of the monthly pass is based on an assumption that you that you pay the clipper cash fare and you ride 32 times a month. so it's the clipper cash fare times 32. so if we adjust the multiplier down, it would be the cost of the clipper fare times 30 or 20 8 or 26. it reducing the cost of the monthly pass between option five and six. there's one change on the cable car fare, and there's the other one that is unchanged. no, that was sorry that we misspoke. it was the reason that the point two it's a it's still a negative point two even though we're indexing is because we are holding apart the cash fare.
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okay. so cable car has nothing to do with cable car. yeah. sorry. that was a all right. thank you. a lot of options on the a lot of options on the table. but you can tell we're not sleeping you know. so we're paying attentions i do have a fundamental questions of one of your slide when you go through your really, comprehensive presentation options, slide number 38. it's about the discretionary discretionary sources. yes. for the cip revenue source. right. going back to the original presentation, coming up in just one second. yeah. well you might know what it is because you in that slide, you have a table chart of what is restricted category, what is discretionary. so can you explain to me how to our operating funds. that is one of the discretionary category of revenue is 0. oh that's a great question. so our in in the days
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of yore when, muni had more funding, it's always been a priority for us to invest in our capital resources, because that's what helps keep operating costs low and it helps with our reliability, and so in the past, i believe the contribution was in fact this contribution of 46 million, it was low relative to prior years, but this year we're contributing zero because i have a 12.7. i just balanced the budget in 2425. so if i contributed to capital, then i'd be creating a hole that i had to fill and operating. and in 2526, i have a $12.7 million hole. so if i give additional money to capital, then i'm going to have a bigger hole in the operating budget. so the concept is essentially because i just have enough to pay for our daily operating costs. i don't have
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any additional money to contribute to capital, so i'm contributing nothing. and we're only using our dedicated capital resources. okay. thank you for the explanation. so would you say, the relationship of, our transit fare is directly related to the contribution to the operating funds? yeah, in a way. i mean, i would say every dollar. that's if there were a world where where suddenly, you know, my operating operating revenues went up by $20 million. we could either use we could choose to use that money in the operating budget, hiring more bus drivers or curb painters or buying, you know, whatever, or, you know, doing more on the operating budget. or we could choose to invest that money in the capital budget, but i think from, a financial perspective, i start with the concept that we
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have to pay for our daily operating runs, and only once we've paid for our daily operations can i begin to use our operating cash to fund our capital budget. okay. so i'm going to ask you the other way around. just make sure i'm understanding the cost and consequences here, when we have no muni fares that we get as a revenue, then therefore the there's no discretionary funding that could fund the operating funds. yeah. it's a it's a little it is a bit of a vicious cycle. right. because then if we disinvest in capital and muni becomes less reliable, so people ride it less, so we lose cash fares. it can be a bit of a negative cycle, but, you know, similar to how, you know, if you're a homeowner, you have to pay your mortgage before you replace your roof. it doesn't mean that your roof doesn't need to be replaced. it just means
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you have to pay your mortgage first because there's no point in in replacing the roof on a house that just got repossessed. right? so, so we pay for our operating costs first. well, thank you for the explanation. so, there's another thing that i wanted to bring up that is pretty important to my priorities. when we had our, our board, workshop session, it is the public safety and, and i say safety, safety, safety. i have to say my first three priorities. so what i'm looking at, it is actually, in light of one of your slide that mentioned some of these really high criteria of our agency, what do we want to achieve on the principle policy standpoint? i see two things. it's like safety for our operating employees and also our customer experience. so i see these these are my criteria of like moving forward is like when we make sure people are feeling safe to work, show up at work and ride our busses and monitor our parking garages,
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and people feel safe to ride our busses and parking their garages. and we have revenues, so this all ties into improving our security and really making sure that our security team is robust. so, i wanted to make put it in on a public record that i would like to see your your team and with collaboration with your other team and the security team to cover the, a little more detail level on the budget and resources for security team, for example, like, what how are how many numbers of, fte allowed that you have put in your budget plan for this upcoming two years fiscal cycle, i want to know what that number is, that was requested and what you had budgeted and i also want to i believe that, the security team had prepared to bring the newly hire on board as soon as
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possible by implementing some improvements to provide the access to take the required test and bring them really able to get on our bus and our fleet pretty quickly. so i'd like to get that more information to make sure that we share to the public and everyone know about it. and, also want to make sure that we don't cut out the resources that we have the staff to collaborate with our fellow sfpd to make sure that our reporting in our, our information technology system is continuing to improve. so then we can account for the incidents that happen specifically on our fleet. so that's kind of a i went a little off the tension about answering the question of your option 5 or 6, but, i wanted to maximize my air time. and that's i'm done with my, my air time. yeah. thank you. did i hear you to say that we will be
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doing a deeper dive on security, and we are going to do a deeper dive into security and transit, or. i'm sorry, safety and security on april 2nd. and, i would say that, you know, one of the things that we want to do next year is spend $375,000 to rekey a lot, a lot of our locations to or in some cases, rekey, but in some cases we have facilities that are just open and they need to be locked and badged, but that $375 is one of the things that would get cut if we don't have if i have to identify things to, to cut that, you know, that is one of the items that is, is on the list of something that we would have to do. okay. thank you. thank you for tying that very specific example to these options that we're looking at today. this is really helpful. thank you. thank
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you for reminding us your priorities. doctor. director. so director hemminger, please. thank you, madam chair. and i would like to i guess thank you again, for putting forth, this option and can we get it back on the screen option six. you are really testing my technology wherewithal here. well, why not? i can't do it. that's okay. oh, you know why? because i unplugged this to put the other one in. okay. you can't see it, but i have a piece of paper. you have a piece of paper. you can put it on that overhead, can't you? oh, is it? hey, tech support here. which which option ? just like i, i forgot that, i
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do windows two. you know, colleagues, as i've said, i think a couple times before, the financial stakes in this budget exercise could hardly be lower because it's less than 1% of the total budget. i think the policy stakes are considerably higher. and the fear i had that i think you've gone a long way toward, resolving is that if we were to suspend the indexing for muni fares for another two years, it would be six years total. and i think at some point you're you're going to lose it entirely , and there is never a good time to raise fares, which is why we have the indexing policy in the first place, because because who
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wants to vote for higher cost, and what we are confronting is a extremely manageable shortfall that could be covered by each of the cells of this chart. and they're all people, all of those people paying a little bit more for a service that i think we all value to a considerable degree. so, if we can resolve this, budget through, retention of these indexing mechanisms, apply them across the board of our portfolio, i still think that's the fairest thing to do. it's not perfect because obviously, if lower income riders are, try to use a fare media, it's going to affect them differently than higher income users, but again, i think having
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something that applies to all, is a rough order of fairness that i think we should be able to live with, one question i had for you, bri, is the parking fine revenue estimate. and given the fact that all of your estimates and all of our revenues have whipsawed all over the place coming out of the pandemic, how confident are you that you've got a good estimate here? how worried are you that you might not. parking citations. i feel, are are they they have whipsawed less than transit fares and parking revenue from garages and meters. i think those have been more directly impacted by changes in transportation patterns and just looking down through these categories. what about parking,
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parking fares, parking fees? i guess we would call them. is there no change the. so parking fees are essentially permits fees. so and those are limited to cost recovery because they are a service. we provide and we can only charge for services is what it costs us to provide that service. because we're a government entity, not a money making operation, the only change to fees would be in the rpp permit, and that is or as some have testified, if we were to move on the sunday idea, that would be a new source of revenue, right? that would be a new source of revenue, in. year one. meaning what about year two, we still need to consider
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that. and we're hopeful about hearing more from the controller. oh, you just mean in terms of the general economy, in 24, 25, we have a not we have not assumed any revenue from sunday and evening meter from extended meter parking. and for year two, i mentioned that i have to do some parking updates. and there is not an assumption yet around year two, right, because we have not yet gotten any data from the controller, well, look, let me leave it at that. i think we've advanced the ball today. and i can i can support what you're suggesting. thank you, director tarloff. please. thank you. chair ekin, so returning to slides 21 and 22, the comparative impacts. i just want to be clear on slide
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22, since it's just a nomenclature for, issue, which of these, options is a 10% increase to parking fees? i think it's reduce impact to the clipper reducing impact to clipper would be a 10% increase, as would both of chair eakins. option five and six, reduce impact to ridership would be an 8% increase. yes. indexing only would be cola and cpi and beyond indexing would be 5. okay thank you. and so i'd like to hear more from you about the wisdom around hitting the ceiling. so 108 is as high as it can go currently is that is that just a ceiling that never move or, how
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you know what what wisdom in there? is there in like, not having any runway left? yes. okay so, let me get into the wayback time machine for a moment in the wayback time machine, both both moving violations and parking violations were set by the california vehicle code sometime in the wayback time machine. the state, decided to devolve parking citations to the localities, and it became up to the localities to set the amount. the state retained the right to set prices for moving violations, and council, please correct me if i am mis misspeaking and the state legislature has not acted to
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increase these fees in umpteen years, and so they have remained at $100 for the citation and $8 in administration fees. and these are for misdemeanors. so if you commit a moving violation that is a misdemeanor, you will you will be cited by the police and you will pay $108 if you, commit an administrative violation, like a parking violation, your vehicle will be cited. site by a pco and you will pay the price that is cited or that is determined by the locality. and there is something , we have set the ceiling at 108 because there is something kind of from a policy perspective, odd about paying more for an administrative error than a criminal misdemeanor error. right. and so, there's that policy perspective. i think
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there's additionally a jurisdictional comparative aspect. we have among some of the highest parking citations in the state, if not the highest. and so, so going above 108 would, would move us even farther apart from our peers, and then with the i think there's also a question of impact to the public and the point of indexing, as director henninger mentioned, is to make parking increases regular and increase increasing or not make make cost increases regular over time. so just increase them a small amount of time as people's incomes go up. which is why indexing is tied to cpi and cola. if we increase to the 10, it's basically the equivalent of what happened in the larger economy last summer with eggs rather than a carton of eggs going up $0.10 a year till it hit six bucks over you know, a
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decade. eggs went up to six bucks overnight. and it was really harmful and painful for people. and so just i think small, small, normal increase are just easier to absorb for the public, all, all at once, which is the basis of the indexing policy. and so that the egg can, analogy is, is really talking about, our subsidizing as was kind of talked about in public comment. so that's, that's very helpful. thank you. and so, i just before i go on, i have a just a couple more questions, but, i would i think i, i heard in public comment, a fair amount of, kind of acceptance around a 25 cent increase, to, the, clipper card
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fare, i mean, it was it was a non-zero number of people who mentioned $0.25. and, and i, i think that i wonder if, i mean, we are talking about there's 51 there's, you know, potentially $51 million that is added to our, you know, accumulative deficit as a result of continuing indexing. so i, you know, i just think it would be absolutely irresponsible to continue, forgoing indexing. and there is a there is a catch up factor. so i just one other thought is instead of, just straight up indexing, starting from, you know, as if we were back in 2020, do a catch up and just go straight to 275, in year
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one. so that's just one thought, and i'd be curious how that impacts, like, how many versions are you going to have to do here? but, so i just wanted to go on the record about that. and then, just a couple of more questions. can we just understand your your concept there, though? director tarloff, would you be saying go to 275 for year one and keep it at 275 or then index after 275 to get to the second year number? i would say i would say start at 275, stay at 275 and begin indexing after that. so year one is a catch up. so it's your, your indexing starting in 24, but you're, you're having a it's beyond indexing in year one. and then year two is when you catch up and you know, and you begin indexing from 275 in year two, after year after year two. okay,
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okay. thank you, and i just think that's maybe a little simpler messaging. so just to go back to the including taxi drivers, may i ask one question, director, just to make sure i understand you are. do you mean because you asked the question about the 25% 25 cent clipper discount? do you mean indexing the clipper fare to catch up? you know, the where i mentioned at the beginning that the way the clipper discount had started was that we indexed cash fares, but did not index clipper fares. are you saying that you would index the clipper fare to 275 in year one and leave the cash fare alone? yes. and then in year two, everyone goes up or the or the or the clipper continues to
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index until it meets the cash fare, and we just hold the cash fare at three until clipper catches up. and then we're at parity again. no i'm saying, in year one, go to the year two indexing figure and, and then the indexing catches up with itself on clipper alone in year two. and then year three, year four, we returned to indexing and cash the cash fare, you know, going beyond $3 or any of the i don't i it depends a lot on what other municipalities are doing in indexing and all of that. but i will say one thing about comparing us with other municipalities is, i, i noted at the at the last meeting that, our transit system is the seventh largest in the nation,
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and we're only 18th largest city in the nation in by population. and so i, i just and i'm, you know, and i think that fares need to be, need to be affordable, particularly for the most vulnerable members of our population. i believe very, very strongly in that. and that's why i'm very, proud of the discount programs, which i believe are, somewhat unique, but, you know, in terms of comparisons, i feel like what the value that people receive in san francisco is arguably, superior, if we are the seventh most robust with the 18th largest population. so but anyway, was i did i clarify your question? i think so, okay,
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we'll leave it at that, because i am i do not have your financial chops. so, my next question is about taxi, drivers being included in one of the scenarios, and that, netted 1.1 million, i believe. how many, drivers or what is the fee that we're talking about? how many drivers is does that 1.10, heavens, that's in the that's in the march 30th. that's in the january 30th presentation. but here's kate. thank goodness. okay. good hi, directors. kate torin, director of taxis access and mobility services. and thanks for asking the question. and, so there are two fees that we're talking about that pertain just to drivers. there's a new
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driver application fee and the proposed fee would be $322 for the first year and then 334 for the second year. and we get about 200 drivers on average. a new drivers applying in a year. and then there's also a driver permit renewal fee. and we have about 2500 drivers renewing annually. and the proposed fee for the first year would be $154. and for the second year it would be $160. and, are any of these fees currently active? excuse me? are any of the fees you just enumerated? are they currently active or are. no, they've been waived, in particularly in the past few
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budget cycles, all taxi fees were waived. okay. so 2500 drivers, with just the permit renewal, they haven't had to pay for the last few years. and, and then the new driver application fee. right. and those the new driver fee hasn't been charged for many years, as we talked about at the board workshop. i think going back to fiscal year, i think it was 2016 around that time period, and that was because of the stiff competition with the under-regulated taxis. so, in order to help, streamline taxi driver onboarding and make it more appealing, the mta board at that time waived that new driver fee to attract more taxi drivers. yeah. and i yeah. and i the i would i would say i'm i'm reluctant to go for any option that does include these these
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fees. given the just the, the dramatic change in that industry, and the other issues that have been going on for the industry would appreciate that comment. and i notice that there's a little bit of overage in, option six. and so i think it's i think it's a little bit less than a million that, that these driver fees would generate . so it seems affordable if that's a policy choice, the board would like to make lobbying no fair lobbying. i said if the board would like to make that policy decision. okay. thank you very much. thank you. thank you. kate, and then so just to clarify, you are comfortable with reinstating taxi. taxi fees, the 1.2 million just you want to exclude the drivers, correct? okay. thank you. yes and that and the taxi fees are paid by the taxi companies. i think that i'll
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leave it at that. thank you very much. thank you. director tarloff. director henderson, please. thank you. chair. thank you. chair. i i, just want to say i appreciate the option six. i'm impressed that there were not a higher number of iterations before we got to something that was, you know, a little bit more than, red. and, you and i talked last week, and i told you that i really was inclined to support the staff's recommendation because initially, because, it felt like it was it's an undesirable circumstance that we're in, and it helps spread out the impact of that. undesirability to all of us. but i think option six really does capture the, those priorities and those sort of
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values and the vision that that this agency has had for a really long time, and also at least solves for the problem today. and so i would be i would be changing my, my thoughts about what's been proposed, because i think that the really what what's something you said struck me earlier, something you said early in your presentation. you said if the board decides to take no action when it was around fares and i would argue that this board has taken action or really given some direction and said, fares keeping fares at a reasonable rate is important to us. and and so we find other ways to come up with the revenue to, to make sure that we keep fares at a, at a place where we are not disincentivizing people to get on, to get on the bus and i think it's interesting because we've talked so much about
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ridership increasing. and so i would argue that part of that increase is related to the fact that the fares have been at a level that has been stable and affordable for me. sounds like 17% of the city. and so i, i, i, i'm, i don't want to, you know, like you said like director hemminger said who wants to vote for increased costs and, and charges to the public? definitely i don't, but i also think that this option to index, only is a nice meat in the middle and something that i would support. i think, director tarlov, you brought up the taxis and i also, i, am inclined to remove the drivers out of that. i think that that industry we. is one that is still necessary,
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but, has such high competition stakes that that without our support, it won't be able to meet long terme. and so i would, i would support removing the driver fee, from the, from the fee increase. but i just wanted to, to offer that, that i do think that we have taken some action and, and set some direction for how much we want to double down on the riders of our system and how much we want to support the neighborhood growth and figure out a way to get downtown, back, you know, past recovery and into a thriving downtown like it once was a couple years ago. i think that that that this option six helps us get there. so that i would be supporting that. and if there are other, it sounds like there might be maybe an option
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six and a half if we include, director tarlov suggestion. so i, you know, i want to reserve the right to change my mind again, but that's that's where i am for now, very much. director henderson. that's very helpful. director henry, please. thank you, madam chair. read. just a couple questions, before i sort of give my thoughts, we received a couple of different letters that suggested that maybe, bringing some portion of property funds into operating. did you? i think maybe director still ask this question, but i just wanted to throw that out. did you want to. did you want to speak to that, at all? sure, so because prop b is, mandated to,
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to be 25% streets and 75% transit, we would have to take the reduction in out of transit capital funds. so that means either procuring fewer busses. not maintaining our fixed guideway, which is, you know, like the, the tracks and the wires that the vehicles operate on or it would mean, not making significant investments in our transit optimization, cip, which is the program that changes the that makes muni, more efficient and more reliable. and given the results that we've seen in our surveys that, transit riders are
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are really pleased with how much more reliable we've become in the last two years. i would be, you know, these these three places of investment, right, are exactly what makes muni reliable. when things break, vehicles don't show up. bunching happens, headways get longer, people miss their bus, and it's been a minute since i got my urban planning degree, but i do recall that in my transportation engineering class that the single most impactful, thing that drives ridership is not price, but reliability and headway. and so my worry is that by prioritizing price, we would be deprioritizing reliability, which is what happened for so many years and what made us unreliable and what director,
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kirschbaum has worked so hard to reverse that long time trend. i think i'm additionally concerned because in the transit side of the house, most of the money is used as a local match. so giving back $7 million of operating to make the operating budget whole could potentially mean leaving tens of millions of dollars of capital improvements on the table. and i wonder if that is, the right way to best leverage the dollars that we have. okay, that that i think that that's the, explanation that is that is accurate to me. but i did just want to explore that to that was brought up as a policy choice by, several members of the
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public. and then can you remind me what the clipper fare would be under this option? six that we're proposing? sorry, i can't see the slide. when we went beyond four options, i lost the ability to hold it all in my head. it's. i've learned. i've learned my mental limits. it's the index only option, director henry. so it'll be 260 the first year. 275. the second year, $83 for the monthly first year, $88 for the monthly second year. thank you. yes. i, i will say that i, you know, i am sort of director henderson and i are, independently in the same boat, brie knows that i also met with
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her last week, and i also express this, the same, initial support for staff's initial recommendation, because because i thought that, that was, at the time, the most equitable way to deal with our our, fare increase at the time. but, with this option six, the fare would still be less than $3, for cash fare, which still incentivizes still incentivizes the club clubrooms, which i think as we move, as we move to clipper, 2.0 i think is just want folks, paying for their fare bike clipper where
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possible. i do, so that's where i'm at with the options. i do just want to note that, i one of the reasons i was supportive of option one in the first place was i do really think that if we're going to index fares or raise fares at all, like he really is, to, make sure that everyone who is eligible knows about the fare discount programs and enrolled in them. so i would be supportive of between now and i think when you and i met, you said september, i when the fares go up, really doing a push. i know that you have you have,
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hopefully plans for a hopeful fellow in the fall, or next year rather, but, really doing a push to, to, get people enrolled into those fare discount programs because i think that's one of the greatest inequities we have here, where we have so many, discount programs, where as director tarlov cysts said, is really great value than a lot of people don't know about. so really pushing that what i think make us know no one wants to vote for increased cost as we all said. but i think that would make us more comfortable sort of knowing that we've done all that we can to enroll these folks who are eligible into these discount programs. so i think, madam
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chair, i'll leave it. i'll leave it there. and i again, want to appreciate you for as many people have, for proposing this option. yeah thank you, director henry. very helpful, okay, we're on the last thing between us and a break, so i'll be very quick, i just want to note at a high level that we have spent a lot of time on revenue, and that's important because it's a hard decision and we should make the right decision. we've spent almost no time talking about the $1.4 billion expenditure side of this operating budget and evaluating options similar. lee and i will just say, very top of mind for me, spending time at that vigil last night, thinking about all the fatalities and all the injuries is how are we demonstrating through this investment, that vision zero is a very, very top priority for us . and i will just sort of channel and reflect a lot of things. i've heard, which is many people do not feel that we
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are moving quickly enough. on vision zero. many people ask for things that we have to say, sorry, we can't do that because we're doing this on vision zero. there's more demand. i'll just put it this way. there's more demand than there seems to be supply and ability to deliver on vision zero right now. and so i would just love in the context of these budget conversations, to be able to have a meaningful dialog about what would be options to increase our capacity to deliver vision zero projects more quickly, because it seems like we are just getting a lot of interest, and i know there are real constraints, but i just threw out one option that gets us a $2.4 million surplus, which maybe could translate to another couple of vision zero staff. and so i just i'm, i'm just wondering i felt a lot of resistance from you all on this. you know, we can't talk about expenditures, but i do feel like it's fair for us to ask, you know, we are. it feels like we are going all in on transit and we are making. and the results are amazing. the results are something we should be so proud
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of. and i just wonder, is there an opening to think about? but 25% increase in our vision zero staff capacity, a 50% increase? whatever you think is reasonable that just i feel like it's just sort of my job here to ask this question on behalf of many people who are grieving and hurting right now. well i would say that in the streets capital program, we are spending $35 million on on vision zero, which is the second highest allocation in the streets program, second only to howard, which is grant funded, and so 16% of our vision, $0 or 16% of our streets capital dollars, are going to vision zero, 16% is going to active communities and then the
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remainder of it is going to howard. and then the other items are, basically restricted by the funder and if i may, there's other answers to this as well. i mean, i think obviously our biggest obstacle is funding, and that obstacle came well before covid, where our revenues were shrinking relative to the cost of delivering programs. covid accelerated that. so i just want to urge all of us to be conscious that our number one priority needs to be how do we increase the size of the pie? rather than argue about slices of a shrinking pie? and that means making sure that we are all focused on getting back on the ballot, either in 24 or in 26. for capital, it means being all on board for the regional revenue measure for the november 26th ballot, and in order to do
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that, it means continuing to build trust with the electorate because all of those things will require a two thirds vote. and it is clear from all of the community surveys that we've done what the voter priorities are, and we just need to stay laser focused on that. the second set of things are removing obstacles. as we've removed a lot of obstacles so far, we've worked really hard to remove sequa as an obstacle to our good work. we had a tremendous success this year with ab 645 to legalize speed safety cameras, senator wiener now has a bill that he has proposed to require speed governors on cars sold in california starting in 2027, where, you know, today we design cars that can go 50 miles an hour faster than the posted speed limit, even on cars that now know what the speed limit is . so senator wiener's bill would physically restrict cars from being able to go faster than ten miles an hour above the speed limit. we're also working on a
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lot of staff efficiencies. you've noticed we have doubled the production of vision zero quick build projects, despite the fact that our staff shrunk and our resources went away, we were working harder on getting better and smarter about communication and engagement process improvements in order to be able to deliver more with fewer people and fewer resources . because we're working on trying to do engagement at a bigger scale with the active communities plan in order to reduce the time investment for individual projects. we're working very closely with the san francisco fire department around the conflict between emergency response time and street safety, using their data in smarter ways and experimenting with approaches that benefit emergency response and street safety at the same time. and we're continuing to work with all of our policy makers, all of you, the members of the board of supervisors, as the mayor and community based organizations, so that we are in alignment because, as you've
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noticed, there is misalignment sometimes. so i'm just hearing you to say, director tumlin, that the real constraint you perceive on vision zero is capital funding, and you're asking for support from everyone here to be part of finding funding to allow more capital to deploy those vision zero projects, as opposed to an operating budget, pertained constraint around staff capacity. so, yes, and in order to do this work, we need to expand the capital pie and expand the operating pie. right. so previously we have dealt with our budget deficit by gutting muni maintenance. and that was a disaster for public trust. we've shown how investing in maintenance can build public trust. what we want to do again is not not, is not making possible trade offs, but instead to focus on building the public trust necessary to build the pie
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. and that's both operating and capital. okay, well, since we're not voting on april 2nd, i would love if we could make a little more space for these kinds of conversations about the expenditure side. and i know you did an excellent job last time bringing forward members of the team to talk about these are our priorities. but it's not giving us an opportunity in these conversations to consider trade offs in terms of potentially you mentioned strategic areas of investment, and you mentioned that sort of security might be a strategic area of investment. i think i would still love to see what a strategic area of investment related to vision zero would look like, and whether we think that there is an opportunity to consider that as a even if it's a small amount of money to give more, to align our budget with our values, which vision zero is such. and safety, safety, safety is such a
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clear value. okay, with that i will close up this item. thank you so much for your diligence and all your hard work. and let's take a ten minute recess and come back forovtvf. govtvf.g i know to take item 13 now on automated speed enforcement first, and then take our sorry item 14 first. flip around the items and take fees and fines a little bit later. so i'll welcome shannon hague to the mic to present on this item. thank you. let me just read the item into the record. item 14 authorizing the sfmta to use a design, build, operate, maintain d bomb delivery method for the implementation of the automated speed enforcement project and authorizing the director of transportation to seek approval from the board of supervisors for a project specific ordinance to implement the d bomb delivery method in a manner that is most efficient for the project. thank you so much. good afternoon, chair ekin and directors. i'm
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shannon hake, the speed safety camera program manager here, i am here today to present an update on the program, including how we've identified potential camera locations and to seek your approval in advancing project legislation that will help us implement speed cameras more quickly. so, as you know, the passage of assembly bill 645 in the state legislature, which went into effect january 1st of this year, was a long awaited achievement. this law allows six california cities to participate in a five year pilot program to evaluate speed cameras. speed is the number one factor in severe and fatal crashes on our streets, and speed cameras are proven technology that reduces speeding. we've been waiting for this opportunity for over a decade. ab 645 sets out the ground rules for speed enforcement so that all six cities are using the same metrics. this pilot is intended
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to reduce high end, egregious speeding that is, vehicles traveling more than 11mph over a posted speed limit. the resulting violations would be civil penalties rather than moving violations issued to the register owner of the vehicle, and fees start at $50. the law also lays out requirements for camera locations. first, speed cameras can only be used on city owned streets that are safety corridors, school zones or areas with documented speed racing. we use the high injury network. the 12% of city streets that account for more than 68% of our serious injuries and fatalities to guide our vision zero work, and as such, we chose to place all of our speed cameras on that network as well. the law also states that cameras can't be clustered in one part of the city, and we want to locate our cameras in a wide variety of locations across the city. final
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to keep a camera in place after 18 months, the law states that we have to prove that it's working to reduce speeds, so we want to put cameras in locations that have high rates of this high end, egregious speeding. we created even more specifications to locate cameras to advance our policy goals, because we know that speed cameras will save lives. we want them to be located on the san francisco streets, where they will have the greatest impact. we all see speeding vehicles every day, and each of us have our own biases about where we think the worst speeding in the city is happening, but we wanted to use data to drive the selection process for these speed cameras, prioritizing them on the streets with the highest number of speeding vehicles located in the communities with the most at risk, san franciscans. and now i have a few maps to show how we identified camera locations, as we want to be transparent about this entire process. first, we started with the high injury
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network. then we removed sections of the high injury network that are owned by the state, like lombard street or 19th avenue, as they're not eligible for the pilot program. we then started focusing on locations where the most vulnerable roadway users are. some of the highest instances of egregious speeding occur in front of schools or senior centers or parks, and these are also the locations where roadway users need to be the most protected. we want to use speed camera technology to make sure that children, seniors, people with disabilities, people walking, people on bikes, those that are most vulnerable in a high speed collision are most protected from speed from speeding vehicles. we then looked at where the most speed related collisions were happening. the most dense concentrations of speed related collisions shown in yellow and red on this map, are mostly located downtown and on major city streets. this helped us
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zero in on locations where we knew there was dangerous speeding, but we couldn't cluster all of the cameras in the downtown core. we want to try out this technology in all corners of the city, so we considered locations on a district by district basis to identify where those factors overlapped. we ended up with a short list of about 80 locations across the city that met the original criteria for speed cameras. those street segments are shown on this map in blue. over the past few months, we've gathered very detailed vehicle speed and volume data at each of these segments to see exactly what speeding is like on a typical day, because we want to focus cameras at the locations where we'll see the greatest change in behavior. and because we can only directly affect the behavior of the worst speeders who are going 11 miles an hour or more over the posted speed limit. through this program, we specifically wanted to measure
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the speed of every vehicle that passed by a point over a two day period. at these locations, we collected a lot of data for each of these blue lines on this map, and it's all posted for a review on our program web page. sfmta comm slash speed cameras. so we called the list from those 80 short list locations to the 33 red dots that you see here, which are our proposed locations for speed cameras. each of these street segments was chosen because of a combination of speed related collisions, concentrations of vulnerable roadway users, and documented outlier speeding the addresses of these 33 dots are also posted on our website for review, and will be coming back to the sfmta board in april for approval on these locations. one note i did want to mention is that our 33 camera locations don't perfectly correspond to where we want to put them, and that's because there are a number of real world
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factors that exclude corridors for this pilot program. for example, to speed up implementation, we're planning to connect our cameras to existing city owned streetlight poles that already have electrical power that means that on some streets, our options are extremely limited because of the existing infrastructure. other factors that could shift or eliminate locations for speed cameras include roadway geometry or sight distance limitations and signal spacing constraints. in the end, we found 33 proposed camera locations that meet the state's required points and advance sfmta's policy goals. these proposed speed cameras would enforce slower speeds outside of eight school sites, 12 parks and playgrounds, 11 social service sites, and in 12 neighborhood commercial districts. what's more, the proposed camera locations represent the broad diversity of
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the neighborhoods of san francisco. we looked at the quarter mile around each of these proposed camera locations to better understand the nearby neighborhood context and as a whole, the average of these 33 camera locations are comparable to the overall citywide socioeconomic factors. however, no two of these neighborhoods are the same, and we're excited to try out this technology in a very wide variety of locations across the city. shifting gears somewhat, we have completed initial program level outreach with specific stakeholder groups . the law requires that we work with stakeholders representing racial equity, privacy protection, and economic justice to craft the policies that guide our program. we've reached out to over 40 organizations to meet and discuss how we can equitably implement this program and address their concerns. much of the feedback we've heard has been constructive with
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organizations sharing their expertise on topics like ensuring that fines are not punitive, that program data is kept secure and internal to our agency, and broadening the safety impacts of speed cameras on our streets. this outreach was conducted on a citywide level to inform the overall program policies. and now that we have proposed camera locations, we'll continue those conversations at a neighborhood scale. all right, so we are at the beginning of a series of eight legislative approvals shown here in the blue boxes. while today's action is the first item related to speed cameras before you for action, there will be two more approvals coming through the mta board in the coming months. next month, we'll be back here for formal approval on the system use policy and impact report, which includes approving the proposed locations. and that's the last hurdle we need to complete before we can issue an rfp to hire a vendor. and we're still on track to turn cameras on in
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early 2025. and finally, that brings us to the board action we're seeking on the program today. we're seeking approval to use a design, build, operate, maintain, or de bomb delivery method for this project. we want to use this delivery method to speed up project implementation by hiring one contractor. now to manage all phases of the pilot program for the five year period . thank you for your time and i'm happy to take any questions. okay. thank you very much. colleagues. let's, let's see. i think i think if there are some quick questions, we can do those now, but otherwise i'd like to go to public comment and recognition of how long this meeting is running. is that okay with you? okay let's go to public comment, for the moment and then we can come to our discussion questions. i do have some speaker cards, but, bettina cohen, robert levitt, paul
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albert, jay goffman, good afternoon. director tumlin chair, ekin and directors. my name is bettina cohen. i live in district six and i serve for one terms as the district six representative on the pedestrian safety advisory committee. i support all of these speed camera locations and appreciate your support. moving these forward asap. i live near the king street location, and while i agree that placing one inbound from i to 80 might deter inbound motorists from speeding while they're on our city streets, please consider adding another camera on king street in the opposite direction, east of the safeway, at the earliest possible opportunity to deter outbound motorists from speeding through the busy fourth and king intersection. i refer to fourth and king as the intersection of safeway, caltrain, the n-judah stop and a central subway stop.
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neighbors need to cross king street to buy groceries at safeway. some of us are elderly, some in wheelchairs, and some are pushing children in strollers. then there are your transit riders. they need to cross between those local transit stops and caltrain. let's not have another fatality at fourth and king, this time from a speeding motorist racing to get through the light. so they can get onto the freeway. they speed so fast through this intersection that when standing in front of safeway and caltrain to cross king, you feel the wind from their high speeds. you might be aware that the regional county transport authority has proposed a carpool lane for inbound king off i-280. doesn't a carpool lane encourage speeding? yes to a speed camera
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to deter inbound speeding at this location? and please add one in the outbound direction. please take additional actions to amplify speed cameras to slow our streets. thank you, thank you. next speaker, please. good afternoon. my name is robin leavitt. i live in hayes valley in district five, and i'm very supportive of this, the speed cameras i the sfpd has given up on, on enforcing traffic regulations, and we need to do something. it's just the wild west out there just riding my bike over here. earlier today, i almost got hit by a driver speeding down, o'farrell at hyde, trying to make the light. so we actually, i'd like to see speed cameras at every traffic signal in the city, but since we're since we only have 33 of them, i'm all for it. and i
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think i hope that the program expands, i, i just want to i'm a little concerned because, like i said, i live in district five. i see only two speed cameras proposed for district five, but i know living in hayes valley, we are at the center of the apex of a lot of major arterials. so we have a lot of speeding problems in that neighborhood, particularly on octavia boulevard and the side streets. there gough, franklin, oak street, particularly west, excuse me, east of octavia, if you're familiar with that, between those two blocks, between franklin and octavia, that runs through the international school, there's a tremendous amount of speeding that occurs there, the tenderloin is part of district five, and i don't see see any cameras in the tenderloin, which is, you know, a lot of, one way high speed traffic there, there.
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so, i'm, i'm all for this, this program, and i'm, i'm happy to see that there's going to be 33 cameras, but i hope that it expands and it's successful. and i appreciate all the work that the staff has done, the data collection and so on and so forth. but i'm very supportive of this program. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. thank you. thank you for your your your presence, your attention, your your penetrating questions in the earlier parts, i'm paul albert, i'm here. i live at the sequoias, which is a senior residence on on geary at laguna. and i'm here with other residents. yes, we from we first heard about this program in sacramento. we were very concerned about getting a camera for geary. we've had several residents hit there, actually,
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and we went one of our members went to sacramento to testify during the legislative process to get the, the, the matter approved. geary, as you know, is was built geary between a masonic and franklin is designed as a as a freeway almost i mean i think there are eight lanes, six eight lanes. there's a near where it comes to us at laguna. there's an underpass to make the cars even go faster, and, one of the residents told me this morning that he, he had another a near miss with a car. and then the. we also have a problem. this is for another day, but we work with walk san francisco about post and laguna where residents have been hit. but that's you know here we are very grateful that that geary near laguna is on your your tentative list. you know really hope that that stays there that we get
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this this, this, speed camera. and i guess there would be a sign warning drivers that it's there that'll in, you know, make them slow down and pay attention, so anyway, thank you. thank you very much for your work and, and thank you for making, having us be at least on the, the list for, for this life saving measure, which is so important to all you know. and one final comment. we are a resident of 300, but there are three other. there are three senior residences in that neighborhood. time. right. thank you so much. next speaker, please. for giving us the chance to speak. my name is richard zeeman. my son andrew was killed
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on franklin. i've been talking about it all day, and i didn't choke up, but by a speeding car, actually, a parent from the elementary school up the street doing about 40, he was on the sidewalk. he wasn't in the intersection. it should have just been where it was a school zone, 5 to 8. it should have just been a if an accident, just a regular one that he would have told us about. but he ended up being killed against the wall, against the building, the sad part is, is, is the speeding driver. he wasn't doing that much faster than everyone else. the speed on that street, is such that all those things you should be aware of in a school zone, kids running out, parents chasing a kid. no. no chance to stop. if that had been a kid running out, they would have splatter that kid all over the intersection. and the other upsetting thing is, nobody was surprised. no one. every
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interview on the street, every politician, it's over. stephanie, it's franklin street. you know, i think even the mta has released, a couple statements, which you have 38 collisions down that street culminating in andrew and now we're going to do something. and i'm glad they're putting a camera there. but i hope you understand that this is just one thing. you know, i was surprised the other day to see a protest. i had no idea who they were. people were holding andrew's signs up because their claim is the mta. you guys are not doing what you said you would do to slow that traffic down. you know, franklin's not not a freeway. you know, there's no standard that says we must have fast speed down there. and i can remember as a kid, if you went speeding, you went from red light to red light. that got changed over the years. and i'm just going to end with this. what we saw in west portal, as horrible as that was. and while all the facts aren't out, it told us one thing speeding is
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deadly. those people had no chance to a speeding suv and these cameras are great. i'm not going to tell you all the city streets you need to go on. you probably know that better than i do, but that's not all that needs to be done. thank you. thank you, thank you for being here. a few more speaker cards. tina martin, john lowell, marta lindsay, dan connolly. hello, my name is jose dominguez, and i'm a resident in the tenderloin district, and i fully support the cameras. as someone who has lived abroad in spain, taiwan, china and england, we in san francisco are far behind. other places have the cameras and they're saving lives. in the tenderloin, 3500 children live, and they deserve to inherit a city that prioritizes their safety. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hi, board members, i'm
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here in a personal capacity this is something that i really care about, the a big supporter of this project. you know, huge supporter of having speed cameras. it's really important. the one thing that i really want to get across, and i'll keep this quick because it has been a long meeting for us and for you, is the most effective character of a deterrent policy is consistency, making sure that once this pilot program is done and approved and we can start expanding this, that there are very little bottlenecks and restrictions into implementing this into every single, intersection in the city, you know, making sure that when drivers come up to an intersection, they know that if they're speeding, they're going to get caught in the same way that like, you know, red light cameras should be at every intersection. and all of these other deterrents towards, bad driving and lake street safety should be at every intersection. i want to make sure that this is something that isn't put into a bottleneck or caught up in
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regulatory problems. i just making sure this is expanded as quickly as possible is really important. thank you, thank you. next speaker, please. good afternoon. board members, i'm carol brownson i get around san francisco on my little mobility scooter and on muni. i just returned from england from a trip from my birthday, where i met up with some old friends and a community in northeast london named walthamstow, and they have managed a complete redesign of their streets in that area. so we met up at a park and we went to a pub and crossed areas where the cars were making it through walkers, kids on scooters, jumping over real bollards and
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over to the side. there was a cat sleeping on a bench and that was a community street. now returning here, i came down on my scooter to hear about 25 minute trip, and i lost track of the number of traffic violations i saw, we can do better and we have now the opportunity to start doing better. it's a small step. it's not walthamstow yet, but we can get there. let's do this. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. good afternoon, director tomlin. chair egan and directors . thank you. richard zeeman, for speaking today. my name is marta lindsay. i'm with walk san francisco, and i know we're all grieving what happened on saturday. and i think many san franciscans are feeling our shared heartbreak, humanity and
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fragility. i want to recognize how much harder sfmta's vision zero work is when so many more drivers are pushing the limits, driving an incredibly aggressive, reckless, antisocial ways. and in vehicles that are bigger, heavier and more powerful, that is real. the threat is bigger. and like richard just said, that means we have to do more. we need you to do more. every tool possible is needed on our streets to protect us. not just some, but all the tools. finally, san francisco has speed cameras as one of those needed tools. it's a start. like we're saying, 33 cameras walk. san francisco's deeply grateful to how sfmta has pushed hard with us for speed camera legislation. director tomlin, chair ekin going and walking the halls of the state capitol. the sfmta staff are clearly working their butts off to get cameras on the ground. as soon as possible, and we thank you. we strongly support the database approach that sfmta is taking with placing the cameras, and we just urge full speed
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ahead and implementation. and i'm sure when your list came up, the list came out last week, your staff have gotten some of the emails i have gotten with people disappointed that they didn't get a speed camera, i think this speaks to how much san francisco is feeling the threat of dangerous speed. that's why we really urge the sfmta to not just launch these 33 cameras, but to take key actions to max out their potential. the speed cameras are an opportunity for a broader reset of driver norms. if they are paired with key actions that include lowering speed limits everywhere possible, putting an end to any of these 35 mile per hour plus streets, left turn calming on every eligible high injury street, a strategic, proactive speed hump and speed table program. more traffic lights, time to keep drivers in check, speed, radar signs, signage savvy social marketing these are all on our list. thank you. that's your time. i'm out
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of time. i ran out. nothing matters more than speed with vision zero. that's all. thank thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hi, i'm kate bloomberg again. i walk and bike everywhere. i'm very strongly supportive of the speed cameras, and i did have, you know, my own particular places that i wanted to see them. so when i heard about all of this data that you're using to place them, i was very pleased to hear that. but i would i would urge you to use that data to do more, more than speed cameras. we know schools are vulnerable locations. we know bus stops are vulnerable locations. let's put in other kinds of infrastructure that can save lives. at the same time, we heard in the budget discussion, we don't want to use these kinds of things as, you know, a part of our budget like these kinds of, sticks because we want them to go down. we want less speeding. let's be building to create less speed conditions
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all over the city, as we're doing this and use that data that exceptional analysis that's been done, so, yeah, full speed ahead, i also would say, yes, bring down speed limits, especially, in front of schools in certain in these vulnerable locations where you're seeing high speeds and high amounts of pedestrians, that's the right place to bring down speed limits, because the speed cameras are not going to save lives. if people are are still going 40 miles an hour. so thanks for your comment. next speaker, please. good afternoon, director tomlin. chair eagan and fellow directors of the board of sfmta. my name is john lowell. i live in district five. 23 years ago, as of this coming saturday,
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a speeding car in san francisco that had ran a red light hit me. and in that, i sustained my disability, which is traumatic brain injury. i will not show it to you by taking off my hat, but my skull looks like curvature of my fingers here. of all the scars in formations i have, i come to you with an idea for you to consider other forms of traffic safety on roads that are also state highways. you and this body approved it after there was a fatality of a high school student at a public school, lowell high school, walking across forest drive on sloat, which is also highway 35. it prompted the city and the state to agree with, i'm sure,
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lobbying from the school district to install a pedestrian request signal there. when a pedestrian on either side requests it, the light turns yellow, then red, and it reminds drivers. but of course, they didn't remind the driver, who was drunk and driving westward, who led to the fatality of a student. but a decision from you today can address safety on franklin, goth, oakville, lombard and venice. please improve traffic safety beyond the speed cameras which i fully support. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. good afternoon directors. my name is rachel clyde. i'm a community organizer with the san francisco bicycle coalition, and i'm here representing thousands of our members in support of automated speed enforcement and the legislation that is presented
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today, to implement it, we applaud the city's effort to install the pilot as quickly as possible. and thank you to the dedicated staff at sfmta for working on this. as shared during the presentation, the camera locations chosen for the pilot are data based and outreach backed. the state law required sfmta staff to use collision data to determine the locations and to work closely with community based organizations to seek their feedback. these cameras are being placed geographically and socioeconomically diverse locations as required by the legislation, and there's also many provisions included to protect privacy and promote equity in the implementation. so this project is robust and there is no need to delay it, automated speed enforcement is an effective technology that has been shown to substantially slow speeding vehicles in other cities, and this project has the potential to shift driver behavior for the better with additional traffic calming measures. it could help us finally achieve vision zero, so the san francisco bicycle coalition urges the board to
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approve this legislation today. and thank you. comment. next speaker, please. good afternoon. board of directors. my name is claire mobley, and i'm the director of advocacy at the san francisco bicycle coalition. i'm here to express our organizational support for automated speed enforcement and to ask that the board approve the item before you. today, i was born and raised in downtown san francisco. i'm currently a resident of the excelsior. when i started working in this space almost eight years ago, i worked for a very small nonprofit in the south of market whose top pedestrian safety priority was to lower speeds around the schools, and i am so excited to see recommendations for seven of these cameras strategically placed around those schools. for over a decade, we have known speeding is the number one cause of traffic fatalities on our streets, and we have so many tools to address this issue. automated speed enforcement is one of these tools and has shown to significantly improve safety
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and slow people driving in other cities, this past weekend we experienced one of the most horrific pedestrian fatalities in our city. one of the most horrific fatalities i've ever seen. in the last eight years of me doing this work. and no one should have to risk their lives waiting for the bus. and people should not be driving at speeds where their car can jump sidewalk curbs and kill people. automated speed enforcement has the potential to save people's lives if implemented alongside other life saving interventions like quick builds, daylighting at all intersections and no turn on red. that's why we have advocated for automated speed enforcement for many years, and are proud of the work that went into the bill, including privacy protection and centering equity in the implementation of the pilot. the bill requires sfmta to work closely with community based organizations to seek their feedback, and we encourage staff to circle back with these stakeholders to get their support as this pilot moves
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through the corresponding legislative hoops. and for all of those reasons, we encourage the board to approve this item today. thank you, thank you. next speaker, please. good afternoon, directors, i'm dan conley. i live in noe valley. thank you for your attention and your excellent analysis. used to place these cameras, but i think it's important to look at what the effect of this trial is going to be. speed cameras using a back of the envelope calculation, or about every 25 miles or so, the you the threshold for enforcement is 11 miles an hour over the speed limit. so what the effect of these cameras is going to be is to require, drivers to tap their brakes every 25 miles, the violation is $50. no points on your license, no id of the driver. so this is really an excellent test, but it's not a solution in itself. right and we all know this this is a trial, but to really get a reduction
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improvements in safety, we need to increase the number of cameras from 33 up to, for example, every 800, which would be on the order of one one per mile, or preferably far more than that, safety. the to reduce speed, we need more action. we need to reduce. and these have been described by earlier speakers for example reducing speed limits down to a 25 mile an hour maximum and more traffic calming measures, but i'm glad that we're taking at least this first step towards testing, testing this approach, which is well proven across the world. thank you very much. thank you for your comment. any other speakers on this item? thank you. yes i want to thank director tomlin, chair ekin and the other members of the board of trustees. i'm from city college for the board here. for all that you did to get the legislation passed, to help us get the legislation passed, and also for the implementation and all that you're doing there. i hope that these 33 cameras will
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expand and be go beyond that. some people today have said full speed ahead. i want that only to be for you and your good work. not in the case of the drivers. i don't know if you remember the song or even if you ever heard the song. this by simon and garfunkel. slow down. you move too fast. but i think that's something that comes to my mind, and it certainly came to my mind. i don't think i introduced myself. my name is tina martin and i'm a member of transit justice, which is part of senior and disability action. i live in the west portal area, and of course i was at the vigil last night and we don't know the details of the person who was driving. maybe there was a seizure, you know, maybe it was a mechanical error. i hope that it wasn't because she was reaching for something and speeding. but i did have an incident on 19th and vicente that i want to tell you about, i, a woman, was starting to go with a pedestrian crossing with her child in a stroller, and a car sped through a red light and
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the woman went like this. and so did i went like that. and the man gave us the finger. so i hope that we can teach drivers to be more respectful. thank you. thank you for your comment. any other speakers in the room? okay. any remote. all right. we'll close public comment and we'll start with you. director henderson. thank you. chair, i just had a couple of questions just to clarify, because i heard eight, approvals before you actually get to launch. and so i'm, i want to be clear, today is a request for a procurement action. you just want us to authorize the procurement process or initiate the procurement process, right? yeah. okay. yep okay. and then the next time you come, will, what will that approval be for? the next approval would be april 16th, we're tentatively scheduled. that would be the approval of the system use policy. and the system impact
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report. both of those are required by assembly bill 645 to be implemented and or, sorry to be approved before we start the contracting process. got it. okay. and then, i have a couple of questions around the legislative part. yeah. so i understand that you had to remove the state highway or the basically the state owned property. that's correct. and so i'm curious, though, because they are essentially highways are is there any sort of activity at the state level to lower speeds on those streets or to do something about those streets? because i, we saw a couple of the public comments and then also, i think it just makes sense to us that there there are no different than the streets on the interior or the streets that the city owns. and so i'm just curious if the state has entertained any or if you've had any conversation with, with members of the state or legislators about doing
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something about the speeds on on the state owned property. i haven't had those conversations, but i bet our policy director could could come back and provide an update on that. maybe on the 16th. yeah. okay. great. and then thank you. and then i wanted to also just be clear, this this pilot does not consider or doesn't include reducing the speeds on any of the streets. it'll just be the implementation of the cameras. right. that's partially true. although to make sure that we're we're enforcing the correct speeds that a lot of these locations, we will conduct a speed study at each of these locations and use what is authorized in the california vehicle code to make sure that we're enforcing the appropriate speed. okay and okay, that's that's good to know. i think that, the concern is that if you have to go 11 miles faster than fast, then it will not necessarily create the safety
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impacts that we are hoping to see. so i think that that study is great. and then, i wanted to know for the monitoring of the cameras, is that done by a human being or is this automatic, or is there some sort of ai that's going to say this car was going fast? and so we'll cite them. it's actually kind of an old, old fashioned technology, it's a the camera uses either lidar or radar within the camera, unit. and as soon as it detects a vehicle moving at that speed, it takes an image of the rear license plate. so they're not continuously monitoring. it's not like there's somebody who is who could be monitoring all the feeds at once. we can't pull historic data from from any of these, they have to be triggered by a speeding event. so essentially there's, the radar is used to enable the camera to take the photo of the rear license plate. got it. okay. all
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right. and then maybe coming up on my last couple of questions, in terms of the funding. so, so i understand that this is a pilot. it's a five year pilot. it comes with money to implement the cameras. no. so just the authorization to use the technology. that's great? okay, so after the five years, then, or there will be some evaluation of this pilot, and then at the state level, we'll have to rely on the state to say this can continue on for the foreseeable future. that's right. okay. all right. i look forward to hearing your presentation on the 16th. thank you, thank you. chair thank you, director henderson, director. so please, thank you, thank you, so i really appreciate everyone. come here today and share all your, personal stories. and that's really heartfelt. and a few
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times i felt like i needed a tissue under my desk. so thank you for sharing all your stories. and pedestrian safety is really high in my priority. i can't say any more further. and so with that, i, i'm going to leave it to my colleagues, but i wanted to say please go ahead and expedite the contracting, for the, bundling with rfq and rfi. rfi together and using a best value, not best, not the lowest price, but best value of what we can get, i would also trust that because you have to follow the county and city contracting rules, you are, having a ll.b. chapter 14 b component criteria. okay. that's great. that is for, minority small businesses participating. so with that, i am all in support of that, and i look forward to your continued presentation and, very impactful
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. hurry up. progress. thank you very much. thank you. director. so, director hemminger, please. thank you, madam chair. i'll be quick, you know, several people mentioned the state routes that we have in our city, which are pretty important streets in addition to being state routes. and there is a legal process you can go through called relinquishment, where the state relinquishes the road to the local government where it's located. now, obviously, that means you take on its tort liability. and it's i've talked to several of jeff's predecessors, and i've never made a sale on this, but maybe i could work him over and see because that that's one way to deal with that issue directly, there may be others, but i, i just leave that in the inbox, secondly, i asked this question back when we were talking about
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a bill that was changing, and now we've got a law. so let me ask the question again, is there any way to take the 30 or so cameras and put them in 60 locations and move them around? so we could, sort of double the bang for the buck here? that is. would the law permit it? the law permits it after the initial 18 months, the first 18 months of this program, the cameras have to be in fixed locations. we cannot move them after that point. we need to be able to prove that each of the 33 cameras is making a difference and is meeting certain metrics to keep it at that location. if it's not, or if it's not performing in the way we would want it to, and we're not seeing the behavior change that we're really driving. that's when we could start moving around. cameras we could potentially use mobile cameras at that point. okay, that's a better answer
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than i thought i'd get. so good, third question is you had a chart in there that showed a whole bunch of criteria and how you ended up with the camera locations. you did, and i know it's a convenience to use supervisorial districts to talk about geographic spread, but are are any of the camera locations only there because they're in a supervisorial district that you needed to have a chicken in that pot? no there aren't any that were were only put there because we needed something in that location. but i will say that of the 33 locations, seven of them are in district six. and that's because the speeds that we saw at a at a citywide scale, the worst ones are in district six. so that's why we really focused a lot of the camera locations on
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those streets, because they were by far the highest of all, all the locations in the city. but that's good to hear, though, that you basically come through a needs based process here, and i think that is important, finally, on the d bomb, it's a great idea. we're using that on the, the, the train control system, and we've used it. have you used it before, jeff? before that. my question is, can we get general authority to use d bombs instead of going to the board of supervisors each and every time? that is something that we have talked with members of the board of supervisors about. i don't want to screw this one up, but. right. maybe the next one. so the board of supervisors, like the mayor are are interested in ways that we can make san francisco government more effective. and not slow us down with process. and that is one of a long list of items we've been
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talking with our policymaker friends about. great. thank you, madam chair. thank you, director henry. please thank you, madam chair. i think i'll be i'll be fairly quick. one is, shannon, i know this is like your third job at the agency. i've been on the board, so kudos to you for taking this on, and you also know, with me are a couple of weeks ago when we chatted about, mostly the speed camera locations in the tenderloin and what you tested there, and i, i was struck by some of that because some of the speeding you tested and what yielded some surprising results, that a good way, and we are or i need to question somehow, and we're
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doing a lot of other investments in the tenderloin. and so i'm curious because several other folks brought up doing this in tandem with other speed movements. so i was i was curious, i don't know, staff thoughts on other safety improvements that we can do to maximize the effectiveness of these cameras at other locations to. that's a that's a great suggestion. i will say that one of the things that we've gotten when we've been reaching out to the community is one of the major points of feedback is that there is a concern that if a street gets a speed camera, that's all it's getting, and i want to i want to reiterate that that is absolutely not the case, speed cameras are, one of the tools in our toolbox. all of these streets are on our high injury network. all of these streets will be getting, all of
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the tools that are appropriate on those streets. and speed cameras are kind of like an extra bonus on top of that, but i just do want to reiterate that just because a street is getting a speed camera doesn't mean that nothing else will be happening on the streets. and we believe that this is an important side of the enforcement, part of vision zero. but the engineering and the street redesign is also a critical part of that as well. okay. thank you for stating that publicly. and i know you, you you know that. and he knows that too. so and then i think i saw a nod, in her answer to director question, but i did just want to confirm it. i know there are a sort of a finite number of vendors in this space that we can pick from. so are we still going to be able to fulfill the ll.b. and sb requirements, or
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are we're not waiving those two? are we? that's correct. we are not waiving those. okay so we will we will somehow be able to do ll.b. and sb compliance here. correct. all right. thank you, madam chair. i'm happy to make a motion on the floor after we're done with, discussion to the item. okay. thank you. that's great. director hennessy, director tarlov, please, i'll be quick. thank you. chair, i, i just, firstly, just wanted to say thank you so much for the people who came to, to testify before us today, particularly mr. zeman and mr. lowell, your your direct, experience is really important for everyone to hear. and i wish you didn't have it to share, and, one of the
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commenters really, really struck me, and i and i agree that consistency of enforcement is such an important, component in the effectiveness of, you know, changing behavior and, and i just want to note, that these cameras, which i'm absolutely in favor of, don't replace, you know, enforcement through sfpd. i read perhaps it was in your report that 95, there's a 95% reduction in, in, traffic stops, but that doesn't that's, you know, it's a shifting environment. so, it will be interesting to see how that, currently inconsistent,
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enforcement action has, you know , how it impacts the work of the speed cameras, but, i don't know exactly where i'm going with that except to say that, it'll be very interesting to see how it plays out. and i really want to thank the staff that's been working on this, to get the legislation passed at the state level so that we could be first in line to, to do this. i understood from my briefing with you yesterday that, speed cameras are not legal in california. and so this pilot program is so, so important, that, that we're able to get in on the ground floor with that, especially since it has been proven in other states to be such an effective tool. so i'm very, very appreciative. so thank you. thank you, thank you.
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director tarlov, okay. i just have i have one sort of very basic uninformed question, which is just are the cameras, do the cameras capture traffic in two directions or just one? it's a great question. two directions where possible, except where otherwise noted, so on one way streets, for example, we'd just be enforcing one, one lane of traffic. and then we had made the strategic decision to enforce, king street only in the inbound, because the outbound is essentially just going onto a 280. okay, great. and then just a question about signage. i've been kind of obsessed with the topic of signage recently, just because it's so important. and, you know, we put up all the no left turns on valencia, right? like, i just so often see drivers not obeying the signs. and i wonder, are they blowing it off intentionally or can they like is there just too much information to take in or the
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signs a little too small and so, and the signage here, someone made this comment like, we hope it will be very apparent because we want that behavior shift. can you just speak about that a little bit? absolutely. so there are two different types of signage that we will implement as part of this program. the first is location specific signage, which would be at these 33 locations within 500ft of the speed camera in both directions of traffic. we would have a sign that reinforces the existing speed limit and has a warning that it is photo enforced. so we are intending for these signs to we don't want to hide where any of these speed cameras are. it's they're not meant to be traps. we want to broadcast loud and clear where they are, because we really want to see the behavior change, so the location specific signage would be both directions of travel within 500ft of the location, there's another type of signage that we're also looking at, and that's to really , broaden the impact of the cameras. and that's at major
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city entrances, so the idea being that at these key city entrance points, there's a in a note that california's participate or that san francisco is participating in california's speed enforcement program and that, speeds will be monitored and violations sent to the registered address of the vehicle. and that's really intended to broaden the impact just beyond these 33 street segments, and potentially change behavior while driving in the city. overall right, and then i just wanted to uplift something i heard in public comment because i thought it was really thoughtful. is what you've done here is in some ways you've like, honed in further on the high injury network with all this additional data collection. so you're sort of proposed segments are like the extra, extra dangerous sections of the high injury network. and that's really useful data that you've unearthed and uncovered. and we're not going to be able to address all of them with the
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speed cameras and so just hearing you reflect on what and this is beyond probably your purview, but what additional sort of measures are we anticipating on the segments that are candidates but are not getting a camera and is that influencing our vision zero strategy more broadly to like even further use data to strengthen our vision zero approach? if you have you had any conversations you can share with us? yeah, i think one thing i want to mention is that while 33 locations are making the cut, 47 of them almost made the cut and didn't, and i think what you're getting at is like, they deserve something as well. and i think that the, the overall, policy that we're following is that just because speed cameras are happening on a street doesn't mean that it should or should not receive additional improvements. and one of the things that we want to do, one of the main reasons that this
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pilot program exists is to gather data about how speed cameras work in these six pilot cities. so we've worked with our data analysts at sfmta to essentially design a long terme study of how we can isolate the impacts of speed cameras. so essentially, we started with a population of 80 street segments that met all of these criteria. 47 of them are essentially the control group where street changes will be happening. there will be updates, design changes on those streets, but they won't be getting speed cameras. the 33 street changes will be happening, but they do get speed cameras. and essentially by comparing those two populations long terme, we can really start to isolate the impact of speed cameras themselves, which i think is like the one of the overall goals of this, this legislation. so i would say that while speed cameras don't necessarily affect what engineering changes are happening on a street, we
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understand that all of these streets will change. they all need to change because they're all, streets where we're speeding is happening. yeah. okay great. and i, you know, i'm inclined to trust your robust analysis and not try to monkey with the locations, and there are some just sort of some of those one way couplet streets that we all just know in our hearts are speeding streets like we heard in public comment fell in oak, and we have it on franklin. but i don't see goff. and what is it pine and bush. you just expect and have experienced speeding in those places. and so are those sort of among those 47 that like qualify. but we just don't have enough to spread around. that's right. and the data we collected for all of the 80 shortlist segments is up and live on our website and a web based map, so folks can go and see exactly what data was collected and some of the speeds that were happening on those streets. okay. thank you. so much for this presentation. i don't have any further comments. and,
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director hennessy, i think you're going to make a motion. yes. move to approve the item. is there a second, second. go ahead and call the roll on the motion to approve. director heminger heminger. director henderson, i henderson i director kinsey i. kinsey i director tarlov i tarlov. i chair egan i egan i thank you. the item is approved. thank you. i can go back to item 13 places you on item 13, amending transportation code division two, articles 309 hundred to establish base fees and fines as those in effect, that's right. march 19th, 2024 automatically increase designated fees and fines annually based on an index calculated using the bay area consumer price index for all urban consumers and the san francisco controllers operating budget. labor costs change consolidate sections authorizing the sfmta to recover costs for various services based on a time and materials basis, and repealing specific time and materials cost recovery sections
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delete obsolete provisions and make technical corrections. good evening, members of the board, miss hammonds, for your flexibility with the agenda. shift again, i follow something a little more exciting than this, but hopefully, this will be quick. i know it's late, so this item that we're bringing before you is really sort of our ongoing focus on trying to create more efficient and effective processes, as part of our, of your board item budget approval, every year you receive a what amounts to about a 40 page transportation code amendment, so getting all of our fees and fines for the next two fiscal years, and, and based on your indexing policy from 2009, all of these for the most part,
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these fees and fines are just routine. they're regularly just indexed. they're part of this larger item that can sometimes run 150 or 60 pages. and as we looked at these fees and fines, most of them are, you know, they're adopted by state or local law. we have parking and transit tax and mobility service . and then our fees that are associated to recover the costs associated with providing the services, we do conduct every year or every two years for the budget cycle, a effort with the project managers to go through all of our cost recovery programs and to make sure that there's no changes that would impact that, the additional cost associated with the program for instance, we brought to you the rrp fees. that was a result of our work with the streets division and my team on assessing what costs were going into it and what needed to
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increase, so again, we have environmental review processes, towing costs, parking permits. we also have some things like relocations of signs and meters, which we actually have in the transportation code. in terms of the charges for that, so again, there's about 375 of these. the majority of them are taxi fees, parking fines through either the transportation code or vehicle code, and, and as i mentioned, these are generally adopted through your, through your budget process, but most importantly, it doesn't i don't know if it shows very well in the presentation. this is an example of one page of the 40 page transportation code amendment that the city attorney's office prepares for this. it's very time consuming. it is prone to errors and those errors, when they are made, require us to bring it back to the board of directors for,
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correct. an see, so what we're proposing is something similar to what some other city departments do, where we are proposing to amend the transportation code to adopt the base fares as of march 19th, as of today, it authorizes the escalation through iterative process based on our index policy each year, and it also authorizes the charges for actual costs associated associated with some of these things, like meter, relocation for private it maybe construction projects, things like that. instead of having it set in stone. so actual charges for labor costs and materials, so as, as part of this change, it really is administrative, we will continue to review all of our fees and fines and bring those to you that require changes above indexing, and also other recommendations that may
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include for furtherance of policy goals. we have in the past, brought to you changes in specific parking violations, fines to further a policy goal, you know, for instance, it, increasing the parking, i'm sorry, the fine for sidewalk parking. so again, we as staff, we review these fees and fines and we bring forward to you as part of the budget, not only the indexed, fees and fines, which are the majority, but also ones that serve policy goals. and important to note, again, that any rates that would be proposed above indexing would still be required to come to you as part of the budget, also, one benefit to this is it really serves to highlight these things, again, as part of a 140, 50 page document, some of these things may get sort of, not they're not highlighted as much. and so we really want to bring those, those policy changes to the forefront, and important to note
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that all this does not include transit fares. those are required by the charter to be approved as part of the budget and then also forwarded to the board of supervisors, and that is all i have. thank you so much, miss hammonds, colleagues, are there questions on this item ? director hemminger, please. thank you, madam chair. just one quick question, i like the basic idea of sinking up these various approvals with the budget, but what about the second year of the budget, which is sort of off cycle? is there a way for because the indexing happens annually, right. so what about the guy who shows up in the middle of the second budget year and wants to yell about the fee increase? so right now we approve them two years at a time , and again, it would be setting forth this policy of indexing it, in terms of there being an
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approval process for that or it being daylighted, we would be required to post it on our website so there'd be an opportunity for that. and of course, someone can can provide that feedback to the board. but again, these would be routine changes that have occurred for years, particularly with parking fines. we have have not ever, kind of, gone outside of the process. is that for very few handful of fines, this also allows us to sync up more closely by reviewing on an annual basis, the actual basis for our cpi indexing formula right now, we sort of have to project out a couple of years, so this annual review will be allowed, will allow us to, to really have that be more close to actual. that's good. thank you. thank you, director tarlov, thank you very much for the presentation. and i, i am very interested in this topic, maybe,
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maybe, surprisingly, but i just i just think that, fees and fines have such an impact on the, on the public that, i, i think i just have a question about, beyond just kind of, automatic indexing and things like that. is there ever a time when the entirety of the, the inventory of fees and fines is looked at as a whole and examined for, you know, duplications or, you know, maybe there's an opportunity for a fee to go down and for us to realize a, a higher, you know, say, if it's something like, like a temporary street, parking permit, like, if you need a moving van to come in, you know,
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maybe we would have a higher adoption rate of that program and realize greater revenues or, if it was more affordable and more easy to obtain for the for the people who need it, you know, i would just like to say that you know, there's i have i have no issue with what's being presented to us today, but i just would like to, explore more that maybe at a future meeting because i, i, you know, as, as someone who has received many fees and fines, you know, sometimes they just seem like they don't make that much sense. and if and if we further, you know, you know, automate it, i, i, i, i wouldn't want to lose sight of just like, hey, does this really makes make sense? so that's all i had to say, and i, i do agree with you. and these
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are conversations that we have regularly, and this change allows us to more easily bring things to you. there is a phase two that we're looking at for further cleanup, this i think this is a perfect example. i mean, this is really these lists have been in your board packet or i'm sorry, not, but but in the board packet for the budget for years. and there's never been really any discussion about most of them because they are routine, but certainly we, some of these discussions you bring up are very specific item. those are things that we constantly will be, you know, we are looking at and we look to you as well, if you ever have any of these, ideas that you want us to look more closely at. yeah. i'll just i'll just basically second, director tarlos request for it at some point, once we get all the other urgent business handled and taken care of, and we're just sitting around
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wondering what to do, to do a little inventory of all, of all of these fees because there are policy implications of these fees. and i think i saw, like a transit, a youth transit fare violation fee in there. it's like we don't have that anymore. we give transit for free to you so that it seems like it could use some updating, but i'm in support. yes. could you please make a motion item all second? could you please have the roll on the motion to approve? director heminger heminger i, director henderson i henderson i director hinsey i nci director tarloff i tarloff i chair eagan i eagan i thank you. that item is approved. thank you. the next item on item 15 been. i'm sorry. let me just go back. i don't know if you said public comment, but if you could just open and close for the record, that would be helpful. i'm sorry. yes. maybe it's because i didn't see any public left, right? yes, okay. yes. did we have any public comment on the item 13?
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open and closed. very good. thank you. okay. item 15, discussion and vote pursuant to government code section 54957.6 and admin code, section 67. 10e as to whether to invoke the attorney client privilege and conduct a closed session conference with designated representatives today, julie kirschbaum and shayna dines. is there any public comment on our decision to go into closed session? seeing none may i have a motion, please? so moved. okay let's call the roll on the motion to go into closed session. director heminger i heminger i director henderson i henderson i director hinsey i director tarlov i tarlov i chair eakin i eagan i thank you >> we are back in open session.
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sorry. >> thank you julie. we are returning on item 16, announcement of closed session. the board met in closed session for itedtime 3. we had representatives and took no actions and places on 17. motion to disclose or not disclose the information discussed in closed session. >> motion not to disclose. >> thank you. >> we don't need to take public comment? >> no. >> great. please call the roll. >> on the motion not to disclose- [roll call] thank you, the motion passes and concludes the business before you today. >> okay, thank you. we are adjourned. [meeting adjourned]
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>> you are watching san francisco rising. today's special guest is jeff tomlin. >> hi. you are watching san francisco rising. to show that is focused on restarting, rebuilding, and reimagining our city. our guest today is the director transportation of the sfmta and he's with us to talk about the
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agency's 23-24 budget with the muni equity strategy and new projects across the city. welcome to the show. >> thank you it is good to be here. >> i see the sfmta's budget for 2023 and 2024 has been approved. how will it help provide a strong recovery during the next few years for our riders, operators and staff? >> it has been a challenging couple of years. covid wiped out the basic finances. our agency is funded primarily from transit fares, parking fees and a fixed set aside for a general fund and covid has meant we have lost more than half of our parking and transit for revenue. we are not expected to recover them until 2027. this budget takes a one-time federal release funding and spreads that out between now and 2025. and our task is to rebuild trust with the voters that sfmta can
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actually deliver on their goals and that includes things like making muni faster, more frequent, and more reliable. includes making our streets safer and making everyone feel safe riding the bus. it means taking advantage of the amount of change we're going to experience in order to advance equity so that we invents -- invest the most amount of money in communities that need our services the most. it also means supporting san francisco in its larger economic recovery. basically two years between now and 2024 in order to build trust with the voters and figure out how are we going to find muni moving forward because it is in 2024 and 2025 when the one-time federal release fund went out. >> are you planning on starting up? >> as a result of covid, we have 1,000 vacancies in the
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organization. that is why muni service is not fully recovered. this budget allows us to fully staff through 2024, which means we can restore muni service, invest in safety, and invest in other programs in order to make the transportation system work better for everyone. >> can you talk about the mooney service equity strategies? as you move out of the pandemic, how has that plan been updated? i have heard there are elevator upgrades in progress. >> we have been working a lot on equity during muni's recovery. we have been basing our work on the muni equity strategy. this is the plan we update every two years that looks at the changing demographics of san francisco and helps us direct our transit resources where people need it the most. that means people with low income, people of color, seniors, people with disability, children, all the folks who have the fewest choices.
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during covid, when we had to strip back the transit system, 13 quarters of the workforce were in quarantine, we directed all of the agency's resources to the equity neighborhoods. places like the bayview, chinatown, the mission, the valley, and even through our recovery, we have continued to deliver the best muni service's so -- to the neighborhoods that need it the most. right now we are still operating more frequent service in core lines in equity neighborhoods than we did precovid. and the result of that is extraordinarily high ridership. we are finding, for example, by investing in the frequency and reliability on lines like the 22 fillmore, that we are getting 133% of precovid ridership, even when the overall system is only at about half of the ridership
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recovery. that is 133%. that is on weekends. we are at about 96% of precovid ridership on our main equity lines on weekdays. we're also investing a whole variety of infrastructure projects aimed at making transit work better, particularly for people with disabilities. on the market street corridor, our elevators to the subway station date back to the 1970s and need significant renovation. right now we are busy working on renovating the elevators at the station. we have completed the elevator upgrade for the eastbound platform. we are now working on the westbound platform. that will modernize the elevators and make them a lot more reliable, and make sure that we can continue to prioritize people with the fewest mobility choices. >> that's great. changing topics slightly, i understand the improvement project is halfway completed. have shared spaces made the
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product -- project more complicated? >> yes. lots of things have made the terminal project more complicated, including things like covid and supply chain issues. we learned a lot on the first phase of the terra vale project, which rebuilt the street from sunset boulevard to the zoo, including rebuilding all the infrastructure of the streets, the underground utilities, to modernize all that infrastructure and make it more resilient, and make sure that we do not have to rebuild the street, hopefully in any of our lifetimes. we also learned about the importance of collaborating, particularly with neighborhood businesses and residents. we want to make sure that we are constructing the city's infrastructure in a time that the city is suffering and we are not adding to suffering. we're doing things like partnering with the mayor's office of economic workforce development to support neighborhood businesses through programming during this time. we are also making sure that
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businesses that create shared spaces in the parking lane, some of those need to be moved out of the way while the utility work is done underneath them. we are making sure that we will either move those platforms and outdoor eating areas back as they were, or help local merchants rebuild them so that we are not adding to the burden of local businesses and that we help everyone recover in this challenging time. >> quite right. finally, many of the sfmta vision zero quick build projects have been well received. can you talk about the evans street project? >> one of the things we did during covid was dramatically expand the rate of what we call quick build projects, which are fast-moving projects using simple and cheap materials in order to redesign streets and test out new ideas and see how they work, as well as get a lot
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of feedback from community before moving into a larger capital project that converts all of that plastic stuff into concrete and trees and, you know, curb extensions. what we have been finding is that our quick build safety projects are able to cut severe injury and fatalities between 25 and 75%, depending upon the location on the techniques that we use. so we are targeting streets that have the highest rate of traffic crashes, particularly injury crashes and fatalities. we focused on evans, which is really important connector for all modes of transportation between the bayview and the central neighborhoods of san francisco. also a street with a terrible track record of severe crashes. on evans, what we are doing, again using paint and plastic posts for the time being, is taking the lanes that are out there right now, and converting
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them to one lane in each direction plus turn pockets. what we found on streets like valencia or south bend this, or -- south van nass, is a street with one lane in each direction plus a term pocket can move just as much traffic as a street with two lanes in each direction. left turning vehicles mean the two lanes of traffic are never really available for through traffic. these road diets that we do have been tremendously effective for improving safety outcomes for all road users, without exacerbating traffic. they do make all cars slow down to the speed of the most prudent driver. this week we are getting started in partnership with the department of public works on work to restripe all of evans between third and cesar chavez,
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and as part of this work will be collecting a lot of data, talking to industrial users in the industrial district and talking to folks in the bayview commercial district and in the mission about how it is working. we will make some adjustments along the way and if it is successful, then we will start another project that is more capital-intensive to make it permanent. if it is not successful, we will turn it back the way that it was, having spent very little money. >> thank you so much. i really appreciate you coming on the show. thank you for the time you have given us today. >> it has been great being here. thank you so much. >> that is it for this episode. we will be back shortly. you have been watching san francisco rising. thank you for watching. [♪♪♪] >> making to may grandkids a program all about pop ups,
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artists, non profits small business in into vacant downtown throughout the area for a three to 6 months engagement. >> i think san francisco is really bright and i wanted to be a part of it revitalization. >> i'm hillary, the owner of [indiscernible] pizza. vacant and vibrant got into safe downtown we never could have gotten into pre-pandemic. we thought about opening downtown but couldn't afford it and a landlord [indiscernible] this was a awesome opportunity for us to get our foot in here. >> the agency is the marriage between a conventional art gallery and fine art agency.
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i'm victor gonzalez the founder of gcs agency. thes program is especially important for small business because it extended huge life line of resources, but also expertise from the people that have gathered around the vacant to vibrant program. it is allowed small businesses to pop up in spaces that have previously been fully unaccessible or just out of budget. vacant to vibrant was funded by a grant from the office of economic workforce development that was part of the mayor's economic recovery budget last year so we funded our non profit partners new deal who managed the process getting folks into these spaces. >> [indiscernible] have been tireless for all of us down here and it has been incredible.
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certainly never seen the kind of assistance from the city that vacant to vibrant has given us, for sure. >> vacant to ibvooerant is a important program because it just has the opportunity to build excitement what downtown could be. it is change the narrative talking about ground floor vacancy and office vacancy to talking about the amazing network of small scale entrepreneur, [indiscernible] >> this is a huge opportunity that is really happy about because it has given me space to showcase all the work i have been doing over the past few years, to have a space i can call my own for a extended period of time has been, i mean, it is incredible. >> big reason why i do this is specific to empower artist. there are a lot of people in san francisco that have really great ideas that have the work
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ethics, they just don't have those opportunities presented, so this has been huge lifeline i think for entrepreneurs and small businesses. >> this was a great program for us. it has [indiscernible] opening the site. we benefited from it and i think because there is diverse and different [indiscernible] able to be down here that everybody kind of benefits from it.
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>> i don't want to be involved in the process after it happens. i want to be there at the front end to help people with something in my mind from a very early age. our community is the important way to look at things, even now. george floyd was huge. it opened up wounds and a discussion on something festering for a long time. before rodney king. you can look at all the instances where there are calls for change. i think we are involved in change right now in this moment that is going to be long lasting. it is very challenging. i was the victim of a crime when i was in middle school. some kids at recess came around at pe class and came to the
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locker room and tried to steal my watch and physically assaulted me. the officer that helped afterwards went out of his way to check the time to see how i was. that is the kind of work, the kind of perspective i like to have in our sheriff's office regardless of circumstance. that influenced me a lot. some of the storefronts have changed. what is mys is that i still see some things that trigger memories. the barbershop and the shoe store is another one that i remember buying shoestrings and getting my dad's old army boots fixed. we would see movies after the first run. my brother and i would go there. it is nice. if you keep walking down sacramento. the nice think about the city it takes you to japan town. that is where my grandparents
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were brought up. that is the traditional foods or movies. they were able to celebrate the culture in that community. my family also had a dry-cleaning business. very hard work. the family grew up with apartments above the business. we have a built-in work force. 19 had 1 as -- 1941 as soon as that happened the entire community was fixed. >> determined to do the job as democracy should with real consideration for the people involved. >> the decision to take every one of japan niece american o japanese from their homes. my family went to the mountains
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and experienced winter and summer and springs. they tried to make their home a home. the community came together to share. they tried to infuse each home are little things. they created things. i remember my grand mother saying they were very scared. they were worried. they also felt the great sense of pride. >> japanese americans. >> my granduncle joined the 442nd. when the opportunity came when the time that was not right. they were in the campaign in italy. they were there every step of the way. >> president truman pays
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tribute. >> that was the most decorated unit in the history of the united states army. commitment and loyal to to the country despite that their families were in the camp at that time. they chose to come back to san francisco even after all of that. my father was a civil servant as well and served the state of california workers' compensation attorney and judge and appellate board. my parents influenced me to look at civil service s.i applied to police, and sheriff's department at the same time. the sheriff's department grabbed me first. it was unique. it was not just me in that moment it was everyone. it wasn't me looking at the crowd. it was all of us being together. i was standing there alone. i felt everyone standing next to
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me. the only way to describe it. it is not about me. it is from my father. my father couldn't be there. he was sick. the first person i saw was him. i still sometimes am surprised by the fact i see my name as the sheriff. i am happy to be in the position i am in to honor their memory doing what i am doing now to help the larger comment. when i say that we want to be especially focused on marginalized communities that have been wronged. coming from my background and my family experienced what they did. that didn't happen in a vacuum. it was a decision made by the government. nobody raised their voice. now, i think we are in a better
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place as country and community. when we see something wrong we have change agents step up to help the community affected. that is a important thing to continue to do. you talk about change and being a leader in change and not knowing whether you have successes or results. the fact of the matter is by choosing to push for change you have already changed things. through inspiration for others, take up the matter or whether it is through actual functional change as a result of your voice being heard. i think you have already started on a path to change by choosing that path. in doing that in april of itself creates change. i continue in that type of service for my family. something i hope to see in my children. i have a pretty good chance with five children one will go into
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some sort of civil service. i hope that happens to continue that legacy. >> i am paul, sheriff of san francisco. [ music ] television.
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>> welcome, everybody to our newest department of human resources base we're really happy to see all of you here. um, thank you to are not on today's agenda. >> and vice chair mandelman and city administrator carmen chu in the audience and all of our coworkers from around the city our job seeks and community members are here we're thrilled to have you here and hope to see a lot more of you in that open space. >> for the department of human resource