>> april 2, 2024 regular meeting of the municipal transportation agency parking. please call the roll. [roll call] director henderson is not expected today. director hensy is attending remotely. she must appear on camera throughout the meeting and in order to speak or vote on items. placing on item 3. ringing use of cell phones and similar sound producing devices are prohibited. the chair may order removal from the meeting room any person responsibility for ringing or use of cell

phone or similar sound producing electronic device. approval of minutes, march 19, regular meeting. i want to share that her burt winer requesting clarification to public comment on page 7, item 12 in that he proposed management salaries over a hundred thousand be frozen not just employee salaries. if you feel inclined for that correction, it will be appreciated mpt >> thank you. any change other then mr. winer's to march 19 minutes? hearing no changes, we'll open public comment for item 4 minutes approval. seeing none, close public comment. motion please. >> i move the minutes. >> second? >> second. >> thank you. please call the roll. >> on the motion to approve as amended- [roll call]

thank you. the minutes are approved. >> thank you, please call the next item. >> item 5, communication, i have none. item 6, introduction of new or unfinished business by board members. >> colleagues, any new or unfinished business today? okay. waiting for any. okay, seeing none-director hensy, checking with you? nothing from you? >> no. >> i just wanted to offer a few comments colleagues. one, just for my colleagues and larger sfmta community. i want to draw everyone attention to the mayor transportation vision released last week and director tumlin i apologize if you are going to speak to it as well but we can all speak to it. it was released last thursday and far reaching and bold and visionary and i want to make sure everyone

takes a look at that and use that as a touch stone and keep coming back to that vision she released. one most-important thing i saw was a sense of transparency and clear and strong communication and no one shed be surprised what we are doing and think we are working really hard to keep sharing information and keep collaborating and cocreating our projects and work. that is a really strong value, a value the board expressed clearly in the blog and happy to see that in the mayor piece. second, i want to note that last year was the-last week remarked a 10 year an versery of adoption of vision zero. that is event at city hall mayor spoke and director tumlin spoke and community and elected leaders spoke and i waty leaders and elected leaders spoke and i was very pleased that we marked that milestone. we use this as an opportunity to reflect on the challenges and also we i believe

in that event, we elevated our vision and ambition beyond maybe what it's been for the last ten years and that we pledged together to work together to co-create the strategy for the next ten years. so that was a very meaningful milestone for our city. and then the last thing i just wanted to note is the next day after that, director tomlin and i joined several community leaders along with the giants mascot, lucille, and other giants leaders to mark the opening of the third street quick build bike lane project, which i have to say, this board approved on march 5th and the ribbon was cut on march 29th of the same year. so i just want to really underscore how well. our teams are working to put the quick and quick build. and it was really thrilling ceremony, even though it was pouring rain, and i was so glad to be able to mark that ribbon cutting and close a key gap in the bike network to encourage people to

use a safe and efficient and clean mode of transportation to get to the giants games. those are a couple updates i wanted to offer, and not seeing any others from my colleagues, i will open it up to public comment on item six. okay, close public comment and move on to the director's report. places. un item number seven, the director's report. great thank you, chair aitken, for acknowledging last week's anniversary of ten years since we made a commitment to vision zero, as well as the press event that you helped open for the mayor, as you all know, we have been working to accelerate our efforts to advance vision zero, and some of that. effort has been successful. san francisco is a national outlier in a country where traffic violence and traffic deaths have rapidly increased over the last five years. it is as if we are damning ourselves with faint praise, to say that we have kept some crash rates constant and

made some progress, particularly on bicycle and pedestrian related related crashes. it is also, i think, damning with faint praise to say that we now have the lowest number of bicycle fatalities per bicycle commuter in the united states, and the second lowest rate of pedestrian crashes, because clearly we have far more more work to be done. as i told the advocates at the press event last week, san franciscans are right to be enraged by the violence on our streets and by our slow pace in addressing that work. i'm also very proud that the mayor has come out unequivocally in favor of the work that we have been trying to advance, including speeding up some of the work that we've done in the past, which includes 50 miles of quick build safety improvements in 34 projects, 700 traffic calming devices, 32 miles of slow streets, seven

miles of recreational streets, 41 miles of separated bikeways. and yet we still again have so much additional work to do. staff right now are working on a ten year retrospective, and we'll look forward to presenting that detail at the board, which will include our action plan for what is next. but in preview, we will absolutely be working immediately to complete the remaining 17 quick build projects on the remaining 50 miles of the high injury network, including intersection treatments at all 900 intersections along the high injury network day lighting every intersection along the high injury network, eliminating right turns on red in pedestrian high pedestrian use areas, and in particular continuing to have a very clear focus on our most vulnerable high injury communities like the tenderloin

and the western addition. in addition, we are going to be working on accelerating our work to legalize basic safety tools at the state and federal levels. it took us 413 years of hard work in sacramento to legalize 33 speed safety cameras. we are accelerating the work to implement those as fast as is allowable in the legislation. there is no reason we shouldn't have 3000 speed safety cameras on san francisco streets. we're also collaborating with the federal government in their nascent effort to finally take a safe distance approach for the automotive sector learning. i think, from the successes and more recent small failures in the aviation industry, but i think we can all conclude that even in our lack of achieving the goal, the goal of eliminating traffic fatalities is the right goal. it is a moral

goal. and as chair ekin has repeatedly told us, it's not just the goal, it's the floor. it is the absolute minimum that we should be working to accomplish that in order to make san francisco the city that it should be, everyone, anywhere in the transportation system should feel safe and comfortable at all hours of night or day. and in every mode of transportation, particularly in the more vulnerable modes of walking, biking, rolling, using mobility assistant devices. so our task is to figure out how do we make every street safe and comfortable, even joyful? how do we take advantage of what it is to be in a great city, which starts with the basic comfort and joy of walking around or using a wheelchair in this amazing place? we also spoke at the conference to acknowledge the staff who do this hard work,

and the emotional burden that they bear, they were of course, the first witnesses to the tragedy that happened in west portal. every single time there is a severe injury or fatality in san francisco, it is our crews who are out there immediately in the rain, in the dark, on the scene, as part of the rapid response work and as part of the investigation of having to watch the video. it is our staff who are sometimes in my office in tears, pushing us to do more and carrying that emotional burden stoically in public meetings while they are yelled at. so i, i simply just want to acknowledge that hard, hard work and my responsibility to continue to clear a path for our staff to do their amazing work, next up we have a slide. to highlight a very different topic, perhaps one of my

favorite things that i get to do in this job is next week, and i hope some of you will join me. i will be out at 700 pennsylvania avenue at 730 in the morning, when all of our maintenance crews come together in our big barn to talk about what they accomplished during fixit week. this quarter's fixit week was absolutely extraordinary. crews worked all night long for eight nights in a row. a total of over 2000 work hours that accomplished 100 different amazing things in the subway every single team was out. the signal team, the track team, mechanical systems, overhead lines, motive power, the paint shop, everyone working together, understanding. how do we take a rail system that is facing over five decades of deferred maintenance and keep it performing well? and indeed, the results that we're now seeing

are far better than any of us had expected possible. the latest data shows that we've been able to achieve an astonishing 93% drop in moderate delays in the subway, and an 84% drop in major delays. i don't need to remind you, for those of you who took the subway before covid, like how crazy it was just being stuck and never really quite being able to make it into venice station, again, i can't be prouder of our crews, including the work that they will be doing tomorrow to describe what they accomplished, what they want to do next quarter, and very importantly, what they learned, what they broke and how they recovered from things that went awry. the crews are getting to be the most sophisticated in the agency about strategic risk taking and collaboration and collaborative learning. next up, i want to

highlight a project. we can pass these out of our accessible services team. we have a new paratransit writer's guide that has been translated into nine languages. it covers everything that folks with disabilities need to know about paratransit, about accessible taxis, about our access van service and our group van services, and a whole lot of other services that are designed to make sure that the people with the absolute fewest mobility choices can access their doctors, their friends, groceries, whatever it is that they need in order to be able to continue to live full and engaged lives here in san francisco, next up and next slide, please, thank you again, chair ekin, for joining us at the third street. quick build, ribbon cutting last friday. it was an absolutely delightful event in the rain. and it also demonstrated what our crews can

do when obstacles are removed from our work. so the third street project is more than just three blocks of two way protected bikeway. the third street project closes a critical gap in some of the most remarkable bikeway investments that we've made in san francisco . so as the mission rock project is completed, there is an emerging astonishing two way protected bikeway along the central waterfront, to the third street bridge. we have been working on the embarcadero. we've been working on townsend street and division street, and are hoping to connect division all the way to valencia and this project connects all of those investments together, unlocking opportunity for cyclists of all ages and abilities. as chair ekin already pointed out, this project went from conception to completion in six months and from board approval to ribbon cutting in three weeks, and a lot of that is very much thanks to strong support from district

six supervisor dorsey, as well as incredibly strong support from the san francisco giants, who know that they run an urban ballpark and that their strength is that visitors can get to the ballpark by boat, by car, by bike, by train, by bus, by any mode of transportation. and this makes their ballpark even more accessible without taking away opportunities for people in other modes. next up, i just want to let you know that for our shared powered scooter program, we are opening up the application process and this process that our taxi and accessible services division delivers shows how san francisco is a leader in working with mobility technology companies in order to advance the public good. since the beginning of this program, san francisco has

led the nation in pushing scooter providers to address concerns that folks have had around equity, safety and accessibility, including requiring now sidewalk detection technology on every scooter to get shared scooter riders off of the sidewalk, where they create safety problems for pedestrians. so every time we go through this process, we ratchet up the requirements just a bit to make sure that all companies can incrementally improve while rewarding the best performers, next up for the next slide. another fun thing that happened at our other, sports arena, we had the fortune of having, the boss come play chase arena at the end of march. so we installed a sign honoring bruce springsteen, bruce springsteen's legendary e street band, and installed a commemorative e street signs around the chase

center. really proud that in between all of their other work that darryl robinson and the sign shop were able to partner with the chase center on this fun event, speaking of the chase center, next slide please. we've been having a really delightful partnership. next slide with the warriors, who recently honored our cable car grips at three different games in their new city edition jerseys. i think. i think we have a next slide as well, don't we? maybe not. maybe not, an event. they also invited , three of our cable car grips cedric armstrong, willa johnson and luis montano to ring the cable car bell, on the court, fantastic way of promoting the giants and muni, and finally, even though it is now april, i did want to point out a very special blog, project that

melissa culross did for women's history month, featuring ten women in the trades and in engineering at the sfmta. the blog blog post is titled celebrating women in the trades at muni and how, how they learned to work in their fields. they highlight women in almost all of the maintenance and trade and engineering divisions, including track workers and electric electricians, signal workers throughout, muni. and you can read that at sfmta.com/blog. that is my report. thank you, director tomlin, for that wonderful report. colleagues, are there questions or comments on the director's report? i just want to make sure we acknowledge that there's a celebrity on the cover of our pamphlet here. and i'm not sure that you can see this, fiona, but, you're memorialized, okay. if there are no comments

points, from the board, i'm going to welcome. there we go. there she is, okay, then i'm going to open it to public comment on the director's report. i have one speaker card for richard rothman. cheers. my name is richard rothman. i live in the outer richmond, and i can't, subscribe to mr. tomlin's report about vision zero. vision zero is a failure, and it's not going to happen. work until either the culture or there's new leadership in the street. division 37th and fulton. there was a senior before the pandemic who was hit by a car and went to

the emergency room. the er, a few years later, the same accident or the same type of accident. a senior citizen died in the crosswalk on 30 cross and fulton street at 37th. and what did the vision zero, the street division do about the intersection? in nothing? we asked them, supervisor asked them to put in a speed hump. they put in a speed hump. it's too far back. cars still speed along that intersection. i won't cross that street. it's a dangerous intersection. we also at the last vision zero meeting, staff said that it takes seniors longer to cross the street on fulton. we asked them to change the lights and they said no. they gave some email that i didn't even read the study. they need to listen to the people. either they have to change the culture or there has to be new leadership in the street division. so they listen to the

people and then make the streets safe and same with fulton street. it's been two years and in fulton street's most impacted by the close of the of the jfk, and nothing has been done to slow the street to stroll the traffic signals they put in speed radar signs. one of them doesn't work because it doesn't store electricity. so when it's foggy out there, the sign doesn't work. so there needs to be changes. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. good afternoon, directors. tom radulovich with livable city, yeah. i appreciated the mayor's press event and particularly chair and what you said about the, safety being a flaw. right. if you talk about a walkable city, jeff speck has a great, definition

where he says you know, walking needs to be safe. absolutely. that's that's part of the flaw and necessary precondition. it also needs to be comfortable needs to be useful, needs to get you from point a to point b. and it should be interesting, there's many places where i think, all right, well, i'm going to die today biking or walking through the city. then there's other times where i'm like, okay, i may not die, but statistically, statistically speaking, but it's also really uncomfortable being here or moving through the city in this way. so thinking about walkability, think about bikeability like with all those dimensions i think is really, really important. and that's not to say, you know, take your eye off of safety. absolutely. safety i also got thinking about who was and wasn't there, on thursday, the department of public works wasn't there. but a lot of the people who have been killed by cars, the four people who were killed and actually somebody injured on fulton street the next week were injured on the sidewalk. and, you know, in our weird, you know, transportation, you know, alphabet soup here, that's a different department. you know,

sidewalks is public works, but where is public works? and i think about this, too, in terms of complete streets. and they need to be a partner. you know, when we're looking at your budget, when we're looking at public works budget, i guess we're all supposed to match this up, right? figure out where's the safety? where is the transformation of streets among all these different departments? puc as well. i've been thinking it would be really important and a good exercise for you to do, to have a streets budget so that when a street is undergoing major rehab that, you know, we understand that you see it coming a few years from now, all of the relevant departments, you know, whether would work on the needs, whether that street lighting or safety or moving curbs, whatever. but as advocates like, we can't tell which budget the, you know, the complete street is in. so please think about that. thank you, thank you, thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. good afternoon, directors jody medeiros, walk san francisco last week. we did stand together on the steps of city hall and what i think was very clear was that people do want safe

streets. and i'm happy to hear from you, director tomlin, that vision zero is the right goal. we did hear that from the mayor as well. what was very difficult for all of us was the recognition that we're not there yet. and there's still tons to be done. but what i also am encouraged by is our city. we're determined to not give up, and we are determined to have vision zero be realized and to end the unnecessary deaths and injuries from traffic violence. there is a lot of great work being done by this agency, and what we want to acknowledge is that there's so many learnings that need to be applied right away. as the city is doing, it's 900 intersections. we are looking for all of those other learnings, the pedestrian safety zones, the other pieces that can be applied at the same time are also incorporated into those 900 intersections that we're going to be watching to get done. and i want to just reiterate that we're here to work with you. we're here to work together.

we're cheering you on to accomplish the work. and we're also excited about co-creating the next plan, along with the vision zero coalition. thank you. thank you for your comment. are there any more speakers for the director's report? please go ahead and approach the podium. thank you. i apologize i didn't hear the name. thanks to director tomlin for meeting with us. us is the advocacy group for frida kahlo way. quick build at city college and i want to distinguish his presence from a warning that i got from the normal staff who come to those community meetings. and i was told to act my age by one of

your employees, two of them. when i raised the question in a month like this that honors women, why the woman on the team could come to three meetings and not be added to the agenda to speak to us, to give her perspective, as the gentleman said, to come with a cultural understanding of interacting with diverse communities. city college is one of the most diverse institutions, proudly so in san francisco and it and it takes people with different perspectives to look at a project. it's not just the mechanics. i'm a city planner by training. i have trained city planners. i have helped to recruit women, women of color, and men of all backgrounds in some who could hardly speak english to do what this gentleman said and bring a cultural dynamic to some of the

planning. i think i sent to you some some, some links. one of them is called what is white male and five feet wide bike lanes. and it talks about the gentrification of neighborhoods with by putting speedways for bicycles. i love my bike, okay. but i also understand the impact we can have when freeways are built. many of us formed groups in the planning community nationally to stop the freeways from encroaching on folks of color. i'll stop there, but i especially want to thank you for coming. and the three words that he said were, i hear you, okay? and we will be continuing to try to work together on creating a cultural atmosphere that can help the planning process. thank you so much. thank you. thank you for your comment. any other speakers wishing to address the director's report? item seven.

hi board members, thanks, director tomlin for your report, luke bornheimer, first and foremost, i just want to acknowledge that the vision zero goal, was originally and is still for zero roadway fatalities and severe injuries. so over the years, we've kind of glossed over like, erased the severe injuries. part of that that is part of the goal as well. and those severe injuries are around 500 per year. so those are also entirely too high, at a high level for, vision zero has objectively failed. we have around 30 people killed on our streets per year about 3000 people injured on our streets, so i think i think it's really important that we just acknowledge that we objectively failed on this. and that we need to do something drastically different to transform our streets and take immediate action to make our streets safer, and so what i would encourage you and, and the mayor

and other folks in the city is to do is to take immediate action to make our streets safer by, for example, approving a citywide no turn on red policy and installing self enforcing infrastructure in daylighting zones to increase safety and visibility at intersections, but, you know, we can also we can and should also do other things that would help transform our streets, specifically, we can help people shift trips away from cars to bikes, scooters and public transportation by, for example, creating a connected network of protected bike lanes and installing transit lanes, transit only lanes throughout the city. i think i think it's really critical that we start to think about mode, shift, as a critical piece for roadway safety, rather than just kind of band-aid over the gushing wounds of our city, where the where the fatalities injuries happen, i think we can be far more proactive and helping people shift trips away from cars, which ultimately are the things that are killing people in our cities due to our dangerously

designed streets. thank you so much. thank you for your comment. are there any other speakers for the director's report? i do have one accommodation request. go ahead. speaker you've been unmuted. yeah, this is herbert weiner. first of all, i want to express my gratitude for paratransit. it's a fine service overall, and i greatly appreciate it that the real improvement over muni, which has been drastically uncomfortable for me to ride. now, as far as vision zero goes, i think that we should also concentrate on safety on the sidewalk bikes, you know, bicycles, ride on the sidewalk. it's against the law and there's been no, measures taken against cyclists to do this and referred

to scooters riding on the sidewalk as a violation, any of the vehicle on the sidewalk is a violation. and this is zero. should concentrate on this. also vision zero should collaborate with the police department. i think that they have a lot of things to contribute and, i think that this is very important. so these are my suggestions, my comments, and thank you for listening. thank you. no additional speakers. thank you. thank you so much. okay, i just wanted to acknowledge, as we saw at the at the ten year anniversary and heard again today, there's just a, a lot of interest in vision zero, and people want to be a part of it and are bringing forth even today, novel ideas

that could be part of the next strategy. so just wanted to maybe give you a moment, director tilman, to remind people how they can best plug in and make sure that they're aware of our efforts to plan for the next ten years. yeah, thank you for that, for every single sfmta project, there is a project web page. in the upper right of that page, there is a link that you can click to sign up for updates. this is the best way to be kept informed for anything that we do. so if you go to sfmta.com/vision zero, that will connect right to the project page. you can also sign up for projects, announcements by neighborhood or theme. if you search for sfmta, contact us. it goes to a engagement page where you can sign up for any number of various things that we are working on. and of course, you can also come in person or join online. the vision zero board subcommittee that chair ekin chairs and you can search for

sfmta board vision zero subcommittee. and that will come straight up. thank you for that. all right. we'll close public comment. we can call the next item please. places you on item number eight, the citizen's advisory council report. there's no report. 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, and not on today's calendar. i have one speaker card for richard rothman. now, richard rothman again, you know about maybe mta should, take over the public works of, of their street, of their street repair, because why have two bureaucracies, doing, you know, they have to initiate with mta. so why does an mta just finish the project and let mta take

over the public works section of the whoever does the street repair? maybe that would speed it up. but what i came up here to talk about is blue zones, the commission here approved a blue change of a new blue zone on, mcallister and, frank lynn. and it's been a couple of months, and it still hasn't been put in. and who do i need to talk to? why hasn't it. it was taken away and. no, no replacement was put in when it was taken away. it should be a policy that no blue zone should be taken away without another one going in place at the same time. they did this also when they took away the blue zones for the farmers markets. they didn't replace them right away. i don't think this is fair to the people in the disability community. and why do we have to wait so long to replace the blue zone on on

mcallister street? i really think this is really unfair. and who do we need to talk to get this put in? thank you. thank you for your comment. the next speaker, please. good afternoon, directors. tom radulovich with livable city, i've been thinking about a firm that's kind of, it gets thrown around a lot this time of year, which is enterprise department, so i looked in the charter and i'm like, is there a definition of enterprise department? and there actually isn't one. mta is not called an enterprise department, in the charter or in the mta and specifically in the mta specific portions of the charter. so it's a story you tell about the department by a story. i don't mean it's fake. i just mean that's it's a story that you tell. and i was wondering, well, you know, why do we tell the story? what purpose or what value does it have? why would you want to, you know, raise enterprise revenues? one would be just historical accident. you know, we as a society, you know, give elementary school away for

free. and we've charged for transit. right? so you just say, all right, well, we're just kind of pushing this along, right? we're not really thinking about what we charge for and what we don't in terms of social good. it's just past practice, you know, transit. i have to pay to ride transit on sunday, but i can park for free. i have to pay to ride transit after 6 p.m, but i can park for free. so what's that about, right? might be historical accident. another way to think about it is they don't give you enough money to do all of the things you'd like to do. so you have to charge people for things, and maybe that's something we should try and fix, right? rather than, again, pushing it along. the third thing would be, you know, maybe it actually makes sense to charge people for certain things, and that's the whole theory behind shizhoupian parking management, right? it is revenue for the city. but if you charge the appropriate amount, you do things like you're able to manage congestion, or you might encourage people to use sustainable trips. so i think there's a lot of reason. number one, right at this agency right now, i'd like to see you do more of the reason number three, which is really align what you charge for with your values.

what are our goals around equity? what are our goals around sustainability and does what we charge have a relationship to that? i see a lot of pushing, a lot of doubling down on the fare structure that exists right now. there's you're saying, okay, well, we have these discount pass programs for transit, huge number of people eligible, very few people using them. we need to push people into those charge for transit. but maybe if you did it the other way around, charge more for parking with an equity program, kept parking or kept transit cheap, that's actually a lot more sustainable solution. thank you. thank you. next speaker, please. my name is marcello fonseca. i have been a full time cab driver for more than 30 years, and i have been a medallion holder since early 2009 until april of last year, medallion holders had the due process rights to appeal adverse decisions to the san francisco board of appeals. after losing several cases, their director

tomlin and the taxi division. after several tries, they got enough votes from this board to terminate that right. we had that right for what, 91 years in a clear violation of ada laws, the taxi division is going after disabled medallion holders who can no longer drive one of those medallion holders who drove his cab for 43 years until he became a permanent wheelchair user, was never left alone. he went through eight hearings until the taxi division was finally able to revoke his medallion. unless we come up with thousands of dollars to fight those cases in court, we are at the mercy of a hearing process that is anything but neutral. and how could it be when the hearing officers are

appointed by the mta? i urge you, all of you, to learn more about the taxi industry and not rubber stamp everything that's brought to you from the taxi division. i urge you to use your plenary power over the taxi industry to improve it, not to destroy it. i urge you to use your plenary power to implement policies that will consider all members of the taxi industry, not to strip them of their money, pride and dignity. thank you. thank you for your comment. i'll ask everyone to just make sure your cell phones are on silent, please. next speaker, please. hi. good afternoon. barnett brzezinski, district two, it's great to talk with chair eken yesterday, an office hour and hear perspectives from others in the community. i just highly recommend anyone who hasn't gone there to please do, two things recently that came up that i think would be good

policies for the board to consider. one is a minimum mode share requirement across the corridor when considering quick build or other project selection. so recently on both franklin and beech street, near where i live, bikes have been excluded from the solution because they're just not part of the current status quo. street configuration. but we know, especially given the mayor's comments on thursday, that the status quo is not acceptable. neither street meets minimum standards for pedestrians per the general plan. franklin has a nine foot sidewalk general plan, says 15. neither has any bike lanes, and there are no protected bike lanes across either corridor either, having this requirement when you're making these selections across a corridor would ensure that there is no fallback to an existing bad option, and we always choose something that advances the goals forward, the second issue is that staff outreach is currently functioning, frankly, as a pocket veto for pro car feedback, most recently on beach, the bike lanes were removed because of behind the scenes commentary from people who were concerned about parking

removal, and only after the fact was this revealed to people that that was actually what the solution that staff was now pursuing. and this is after the opening project plan considered bike infrastructure a minimum standard for the project. so it was another sort of backtracking moment, in both cases, both for franklin and then for beach advocates have had to scramble to try to gather supporters after the fact, a hundred such supporters and more for franklin, 25 plus for beach on franklin. we still failed to make the street safer. and for beach, we don't know what the next step is. so so we need to make sure that our community outreach processes are representative and equitable, and they don't rely too much on individual supervisors, support or certain other influential people's sway. and we need to make sure that every action that the mta takes advances all of its goals. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. i'm carl mcmurdo. i

began driving taxi in 1976 and stopped 40 years later due to health concerns, while remaining politically active in taxi matters. in 2012, your board decided to establish a permanent medallion sales program. hundreds of mostly immigrant taxi drivers took out loans to buy a medallion at the set price of $250,000. simultaneously however, the city helped destroy medallion value by favoring new competitors uber and lyft, who utilize massive venture capital subsidies to sell rides below cost, violating antitrust laws. at the time and rendering medallion purchasers unable to repay their loans. mayor ed lee even declared july 13th, 2013 as lift day in san francisco, handing out plaques and certificates, even though every lyft pickup at the time actually was a criminal misdemeanor, the

right thing for the city to do now is to return all or most of the money to the medallion buyers. the wrong approach is continuing down the path of adopted eight years ago to reduce the number of taxis and service in an ill advised effort to. to exclusively direct income towards the medallion buyer subset at the expense and needs of all other stakeholders, including taxi drivers, other medallion holder groups, taxi companies, san francisco citizens and tourists, and conventioneers. anecdotally i just want to say that when a big convention comes to town, i've heard the people wait on the sideline for hours because of the airport policy. this board approved five years ago that only half the cabs of purchase, once the drivers of those can pick up the fares. and so the drivers have to the customers have to wait for the drivers to deadhead back to pick them up. so i want to echo what marcello said about being a hands on and due diligence. when taxi brings

you division brings you proposals. thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hi. board members luke bornheimer, first i just want to touch briefly on no turn on red, to thank staff for their work on a proposal that was approved just this week to expand. no turn on red to nearly 200 intersections downtown, this work, as you know, will make streets safer for will make people feel more comfortable crossing the street using a bike, using a scooter. it also will make it safer for people driving cars, i will also say that staff should not be spending a bunch of time and agency resources to individually evaluate every single intersection in the city for no turn on red. in a time where we need to be using our money and our staff time as best as possible, it would be far more

effective to implement a and improve a citywide policy, that would make no turn on red. much more intuitive for drivers, as well as make it safer to walk, bike and drive around the city everywhere. not just where we decide to put no turn on red signs, so again, we just urge you to approve a citywide no turn on red policy and avoid a bunch of long drawn out process to do individual intersections one at a time, separately, i just want to talk about the area around west portal station, to note that nearly a thousand people have signed a petition, urging you and mayor breed to close that area to car traffic and install transit only lanes on west portal avenue and uloa street, this would increase safety for all people while simultaneously increasing speed and reliability for muni and the approximately 80,000 people who use muni through that area. every day, this can be done in a way that uses quick build materials and ensures access for local businesses, deliveries, and people who need to drive, and so i urge you to work with

staff to pilot this improvement as soon as possible to avoid another tragedy while also making the safe area safe, equitable and sustainable. thank you. thank you. any other speakers? item nine general public comment. okay. hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. i believe i have three minutes, two minutes. oh boy. well, i believe the, this commission is participating in unlawful and unconstitutional business practices. as i'll try to read from a statement, i don't know if i can get it in in two minutes. i, i never received a first. this may not make sense out of context, but i never received the first mailed citation of any muni violation as required by by the citation protest form that i've already filed with the office on one south van ness. the only notice i ever received from sf mta arrived on or about march 20th,

2024 with a mail date of march 8th, 2024. again, these are attachments that are in the file at the office. if an if an smf, sfmta enforcement personnel officer believes a muni passenger is traveling without a valid muni ticket, the usual practice is for that enforcement officer to issue a written notice to the passenger at the time of the alleged violation, i never received any such original and first notice of violation or ticket alleging that i committed any violation. the only notice of transit violation i ever received was the attached invalid one. since i never received a first notice of violation, the attached notice of violation is invalid since it is only permitted to be mailed after a first notice of violation is mailed, which never occurred on or about february 5th, 2024, when i showed sfmta personnel my id at a muni

station, the officer did not cite me for any muni violation, nor did the officer issue me a citation for violation of sfmta rules and regulations. i was, and still am shocked to receive the attached notice of violation with penalties when no original on the spot notice of violation was issued to me. i request that you dismiss this ticket. you'll find the filing in the office at , one south van ness. the citation number is 1046751 60. okay i hope you'll resolve this issue before we have to go to court. okay. that is your time. thank you for your comment. any other speakers under general public comment item nine okay. seeing none, i do have one accommodation request. go ahead. you've been unmuted. this is herbert weiner. i have some comments to make. for one thing is that i believe that motorists

should have fair representation before the board, the drivers need to use their vehicles and at the same time, we have to strike a balance between the interests of cyclists and passengers. i think that's very important that they be represented. also, i think the vehicles of the fleet of the muni fleet have to be expanded. this is to accommodate the growing population in the city and also a growing need. there are too many crowded vehicles, and when you do make alternate lanes and bus runs, you never expand. and the amount of vehicles that are available, there's no net addition of, vehicles on the l taraval line, for example. all you've done is

simply eliminate the stop to the inconvenience of seniors and the disabled without making an improvement in the number of vehicles that are desperately needed by the public. thank you, thank you. no additional callers . okay. with that, we'll close, item nine and please call the next item. places you on item ten, your consent calendar. these items are considered to be routine and will be acted upon by a single vote, unless a member of the board or public wishes to consider an item separately for all speakers providing public comment, please identify which item number you are speaking to. i did receive a request to sever item 10.5, and we'll take that item separately on your consent calendar item 10.1 approving various routine parking and traffic modifications and making environmental review findings for items a through f on the in the agenda item 10.2 authorize the director of transportation

to execute the second amendment to the agreement between the sfmta and the friends of the cable car museum. well, i appreciate that. and i just it's pardon, for management and operation of the cable car museum for an additional five year terms, effective july 1st, 2020, for item 10.3, authorizing the director of transportation to execute contract number 202407 fta, a task order agreement between the city and county of san francisco and trapeze software group for scheduling software and related professional services to procure as needed proprietary scheduling system software and related services for a total contract amount not to exceed $9 million for a time of nine years, and authorizing the director to approve task orders under the agreement for an amount not to exceed $1 million per task order item 10.4 authorizing the director of transportation to accept approximately $11 million from the university of california, san francisco. ucsf

as the initial disbursement of its contribution to fund the n-judah or other muni line improvements, services or facilities serving the campus community. the transportation contribution, as agreed in the 2021 memorandum of understanding between ucsf and the city and county of san francisco for the comprehensive parnassus heights plan, and authorizing the director to accept disbursements of the transportation contribution going forward. that concludes your consent. calendar okay. thank you. so, colleagues, just to reiterate, we're going to sever item 10.5. that's the resolution on the waterfront that we had such great discussion on. so for a little bit further discussion, so are there any board member questions or comments on items 10.1 through 10.4? if there are none, i'm going to open for public comment on 10.1 through 10.4 or consent calendar items. okay. seeing none will close. public comment could i have a motion please on just those items of consent calendar? so moved.

second thank you. please call the roll on the motion to approve the consent calendar item 10.5 severed. director heminger heminger i. director hinsey i kinsey i director. so i so i director tarlov i tarlov i director kikina i katina i chair ekin i ekin i thank you the consent calendar is approved. brings you back up to item 10.5. adopting a resolution summarizing the sfmta board of directors feedback, including comments by the public and transmitting the resolution to the united states army corps of engineers and the port of san francisco on the san francisco waterfront. coastal flood study draft integrated feasibility, feasibility report, and environmental impact statement. okay. thank you. staff, would you like to start off? would you like me to start off on a 10.5? okay. so colleagues, i'll just share with you. i had a i had a phone call yesterday with the staff and just saw this resolution as an immediate

opportunity to start to incorporate some of the language from the mayor's vision into this, into this resolution. so i've just added in a couple of recommended phrases around that safe and comfortable network for people of all ages and abilities to travel, and then also just acknowledging, which feels really important to note that much of that waterfront transportation network is currently on our high injury network, which is sort of antithetical to the idea of a safe and comfortable place for people to walk, bike and use mobility devices. so just to acknowledge that and then set the intention clearly that we have the vision of the safe and comfortable network as, as so eloquently articulated in the mayor's vision. so i don't know if we want to. i think we have copies of the resolution to show the track changes language. it's just pretty simple language, that i'm proposing we amend into the resolution. and i think, did we want to show it on the overhead for everyone as well? yes, i can do that. great. tim,

do you want to speak to the specifics? yeah and i also have a very brief presentation just to provide a quick recap, if that would be helpful for the board members. okay. that'd be great. great. good afternoon, board members, i'm tim doherty. i'm in the planning group at sfmta. and as you may recall, i was here with members of the port staff on february 20th presenting an informational item on the us army corps of engineers draft plan. and i'm here today. and at that meeting, you provided a lot of very thoughtful feedback,

waterfront and areas where we have very critical transportation infrastructure, including clays creek, mission bay and portions of the embarcadero. the draft plan itself informs stages of funding and design towards targeted construction projects. the. the current estimated cost is approximately $13.5 billion, and if a recap on what is actually proposed across the

four reaches of the city's waterfront. in the northern area near fisherman's wharf, which is reach one. the proposal calls for flood proofing around some of the existing piers and buildings elias creek. all of tt would need to be paired with significant improvements in the citywide stormwater management system that moves our sewer and

our our stormwater, which is also an important investment mud some of mbta's critical transportation assets or corridors or infrastructure. all of that will come much later. so just wanted to provide a little bit of that context. just so i'm going to now pivot to, remind you of some of the feedback let,

because as you may recall, the comment window for this item was a march. so we have already been able to take all of that really thoughtful feedback that you gave us in february and start to advocate and negotiate and elevate the priorities that you brought in front of us on february 20th. so it's already been very helpful. so i am very grateful, to all of you for that feedback. but i'll just walk through just to, robust and inclusive community

engagement. engage youth complex information accessible to all members of the public. integrate environmental and racial justice considerations into the planning process. reduce impacts on local businesses. leverage partnerships. integrate and address climate and seismic risk into internal mta projects and plans and processes. clarify the role of mta in helping to fund the local cost share and elevate the importance of improving stormwater management and integrating green infrastructure and ecological restoration

bridge over mission creek as well as the illinois street creek, the illinois street bridge over elias creek. we also advocated to place bay fill along the shoreline near rincon park to avoid impacting underground transportation infrastructure and shoreline transportation infrastructure. we also advocate for funding a comprehensive transportation disruption mitigation program and upgrading the city's combined sewer and stormwater system. all of those, i can say, have been we have moved to integrate those points into citywide comment letters. the

other parts of your thoughtful feedback in february, we have created a second bin, and we're calling those value setting. and in a way, we hope that we can use those resolution elements to guide just internal processes and internal planning that we advance that use redundant and well connected elements. and lastly, leverage partners with local, regional, state and federal agencies to help fund improvements along our waterfront. integrate and integrate climate risk and green infrastructure principles into agency wide projects, and advocate for the development of a citywide flood resilience policy. that concludes my

presentation. i'm happy to take questions at this time. okay. thank you so much for that recap , and colleagues would all just do is just walk you through these two sections of track changes. there's one. whereas on page two that's just maybe we can get up on the screen. that's just simply referencing that these waterfront streets are currently largely on the high injury network, and that we adopted the goal in 2020, 2014 to achieve by 2024. just as background and then the second piece is a few pages further on, just including that, we want to see dedicated infrastructure for people of all ages and abilities to take transit, walk, bike and use mobility devices safely and comfortably to the earlier conversation without fear of harm. those are my only two proposed changes. are there any questions on those or anything that mr. doherty has presented related to this item? director

kahina, thank you so much for your presentation. and i just want to appreciate all the work that you have done to incorporate all our feedback into the this actual plan, because i know it's super high level, but it really does reflect a lot of the feedback that each and every board member gave you. and so i just really want to acknowledge that. and and show my appreciation for that, i did have, i am in agreement with, the amendments that, chair egan has made. and so i think it tracks with a lot of what our discussions have been and how we're prioritizing, really thinking strategically and comprehensively about all the different projects that we're touching to try to advance a lot of our city wide goals. and so this is a perfect project that touches on that. specifically. it's a very specific geography. and yet we can use it to really advance some of our key goals for the city. so i think it's great that we're doing that, a friendly amendment that i would just make, to the resolve section. and this is bullet point three

where it talks about conduct inclusive and comprehensive outreach, the only community i would like to showcase here is the latino community as well, we have an increasingly, the latinx population in the bayview and specifically has been growing, and i just want to make sure that this is something that we're also highlighting in this. but that's the only friendly amendment that i would make to, chair eakins, already very thoughtful language that she's included in this. great. thank you. director, do you want to just repeat the language so we can all take it down? yes, ma'am, so i'd say it would read, conduct inclusive and comprehensive outreach with local communities and cultural districts, specifically the bayview chinatown, soma. filipinas, sorry. so soma pilipinas and fisherman's wharf business community stakeholders prioritizing conversations with black communities, chinese american, latinx or latino, american indian and other communities of color that have experienced government harm, exclusion from decision making and past disinvestment. great. thank you so much. i'm supportive of that change. are there any other questions or

comments from other colleagues? okay. if no, we need to take public comment. i believe now on item 10.5. so we'll open it up for public comment, on just 10.5, any speakers? okay. seeing none, we can close public comment. may i have a motion from one of my colleagues in a second. so move second. second. we'll take that as so moved including director cardenas modification, which i see no issue from the city attorney with. right. okay. great. please call the roll. okay, on that motion to both amend the resolution and i'm going to specify to amend that, i believe 13th whereas clause and the first and third bullets of the second resolve clause as read into the record and approve as amended. director hemminger i hemminger i director hinsey. i director so i so i director tarlov. i tarlov i director

kahina i kahina i and chair ekin i ekin i thank you. that item is approved. okay. thank you staff for all your thoughtful work, incorporating the board feedback. it's much appreciated, let's call the next item item 11, please. places you on item number 11, presentation and discussion on the fiscal year 2024, 2025 and fiscal year 2025 2026. operating and capital budget, including the muni 2024 network title six service equity analysis. welcome cfo horta. thank you .

colleagues, while we're waiting, i'll just ask if you have any strong preferences. if we move through both presentations first operating and capital, and then discussion. or pause after the first and discuss any preferences. sing to sing. support from director. so for getting through both first okay that works. did you have any preference okay okay. good afternoon. my name is brima horta. i'm the cfo of the mta and we this is the public hearing on the budget. we've been slogged away for three months and here we are, one meeting away from potentially approving the budget. so today we'll be giving you an overview of the balanced budget. so you'll be seeing the budget in its entirety for the first time. we'll also give you an overview of what we've heard from the community, as per your request, at the last meeting, we'll be doing a deep dive into how we

are making muni safe, and the director of safety, kim burris, is here to answer any of your detailed questions as well. and we'll also talk to you, about our revised recommendations to balance to raise revenue and balance the budget, taking into account all of the feedback that we got at the last meeting. and lastly, we'll talk about the title six analysis of our proposed of our current service. so as a reminder, the context that we're building this budget in is that revenue continues to be lower than pre-pandemic and that low revenue compounds a structural deficit that existed before the pandemic through some very painful belt tightening measures. we've been able to keep our deficit. we've been able to close the budget in year one, and in year two, we have a small remaining deficit of $12.7 million, and we've spent lots of time talking about lots of

different policy options for closing that budget, as a reminder, when we started this process, we had a 240 million plus deficit in year three. and so i'll talk a little bit also about how this two year budget impacts that year three deficit, because one of our goals in this budget process was not only to balance these two years, but to set us up for year three. so as a reminder, revenue is uncertain. we still have revenue proposals that are not yet approved, and the general fund released. it's not, nine month or five year financial plan. update on friday. that information is not yet incorporated into this information, because we had already closed the powerpoint, but it does result in a $10 million loss from the general fund across all baselines. so we'll need to do some additional balancing before we see you again, on april 16th and again,

even with that sad news, we may not be done yet, the governor's may budget revise may result in a clawback of some of the state relief that we got, last year and on which we are very dependent, and as another reminder, labor is 63% of our overall budget. and we do have labor negotiations that are still ongoing. and final labor agreements have not yet been, have not yet been reached. and when 63% of your $1.4 billion budget is labor, even a 1% increase can be very impactful. so, as i said, at the top, when we began this process, we had a balanced budget in year one, a small deficit in year two. and in year three, we were looking at starting at 240 plus, increasing over time. once the federal and state relief goes away and expenditure continues

to increase by the cost of doing business. so walk into the budget cycle knowing that that was the year three picture we were looking at. we made a lot of hard choices and we committed to only cost neutral service changes. and we consolidated a lot of agency functions, which resulted in some savings. we put key positions. we made sure that we focused our hiring on key positions, putting over $50 million of hiring on budget hold and then reducing our non-labor expenditure by $33 million in year one and $25 million in year two. so our strategy in this budget cycle was again to focus on revenues that are available july 1st, control expenditure. and part of that was those putting positions on budget hold as well as the non-labor budget decreases. and those, putting the constraint that we have on the expenditure allows us to stretch our one time resources from federal and state relief

all the way out through the two year period. and throughout the cycle, we were looking at what kind of decisions are we making in this budget cycle and how are they going to impact year three. so our proposed in our proposed budget, you can see there's actually a very small increase over the current year budget. the proposed budget grows only by cola and cpi and all of our investments are made with our existing envelope. and while that doesn't seem like a huge success, i will say, having this small of an increase only 2% in year one and 2% in year two is actually a huge success because that means we were able to absorb all of the proposed wage increases while still having only 2% growth. so what that means is we cut really, really deep, and then some of that hole got filled back in by the negotiated increases. so had we

not done that really hard work, the hole would have been even deeper. and i think that's, it's hard to celebrate the null set. you know what didn't happen? but we did a lot of hard work to put ourselves in this position. and we've already really done a lot of really painful budget cuts. and what that means is all of our flexibility, all of the expenditure choices that we could have made have already been made for us because what we're left with is essentially what it costs to provide the level of service that we're providing now. plus cola and cpi. and you can see that

because our projected it i know that 18 million does not seem like a lot out of a $244 million deficit. but again, that $18 million is on top of absorbing all of the negotiated wage increases and cpi. and in addition, it's absorbing revenue that moved against us during the budget cycle. during the budget cycle, our current revenue projections are now 33, $33 million less than i thought that they would be when we started. and most of that is coming from

reductions in the general fund and that which is connected to the larger economy. so we do have a balanced budget. but i do want to be clear that while the budget is balanced, it by no means meets the needs that we have. we had to make a lot of really difficult choices in order to balance the budget and put a lot of things, we weren't able to do a lot of the things that we really need to do to keep the system running. for example, there's a match for a transit and intercity rail capital program for transit infrastructure that we did not fund, and we're going to be looking for ways to do that over the next two years. there was an upgrade to the radio system, which is used to communicate with the transit operators. that system is so old that it's no longer supported by the vendor. and if that system goes down, all of the busses for more than 20 minutes, all of the busses will be recalled to the depot. so service will stop, and we also did not upgrade the computer aided dispatch and automated vehicle location system that facilitates on time arrivals and i say this because these are obviously really, really critical things that we desperately want to do. but there were other things that were more critical that we had to prioritize instead. so on the revenue side, as you can see

from these pie charts that the general distribution of our revenue sources remains the same over the two years. general fund continues to be general fund parking revenue, and federal and state relief continue to be our largest sources. tragically, federal and state relief will go away before the next time i see you two years from now. and that is the problem that we are struggling with in year three, on the revenue side, operating increases in operating grants and state and federal relief are offset by decreases in parking and transit revenue, you can see that our parking and transit revenue are down 12 and 23% off of budget. and so these are really challenging numbers that we have to deal with. i think also in year one you can see there's a really large increase on other revenue. that other revenue is our fund balance. so when you look at this chart, what this chart is telling you is that we needed to use the entirety of our $6 million fund balance to close and so that is

an additional problem that adds to the year three problem. if we don't generate fund balance over the next two years, then that's that one time solution that we're using will no longer be available to us. so we're really dependent on two one time solutions to close this budget. one, the $60 million fund balance and then two, about 400 million, over the two years, about four, four, 5 million, $500 million in federal and state relief on the expenditure side, consistent with prior years labor will be our largest expense for both of the next two fiscal years. and as you can see in this table, most of the growth is coming from increases in materials and supplies. and that is largely due to the cost of inflation and the need to replace aging parts, particularly in the transit system. and, also you can see in

other there was a decrease that looks large from a percentage perspective, but is actually somewhat small in an absolute value dollar amount. and that reflects one time investments in equipment and other and equipment, including non-revenue vehicles, it is a little known fact, but we actually have a very large fleet that includes things other than our revenue vehicles, which are busses and lrvs, but we also have non-revenue vehicles that house the maintenance staff that need to move around the city to do maintenance, as well as the pco. the gophers that the pco, the parking control officers drive. those vehicles have been neglected for many years. in fact, we have some vehicles that are from the 80s. and so this, reflects a significant investment in keeping our fleet, our non-revenue fleet up to date , as well as transitioning to more carbon to either hybrid or other non gas vehicles, or

either hybrid or electric vehicles to meet our climate change goals, on looking at our expenditure according to service, as you can see, transit continues to be our largest cost center, they make up over half of our budget. so they are sort of the elephant in the room when it becomes when it comes to our expenditure by division. over time, you can see that the most growth is actually happening in the streets division. that is driven largely by the addition of the transit fare inspectors for to improve fare compliance. and there is a decrease in taxi and mobility. but to clarify, it's not as frightening as it looks, that is the reduction of a professional services contract for paratransit that had been over budgeted and was not utilized to its full capacity. so we've rightsize that budget

and brought it down to, what we believe will actually be utilized for the next two years. and that was one of the ways that we balanced the budget, agency wide is a little bit of an odd terme. agency wide includes agency wide work orders, as well as our retiree pension and health care costs, and had previously been a little bit of a mish mash of places that things that had no home kind of ended up in agency wide. and in an effort to make our budget more transparent, we went through the agency wide budget with a fine tooth comb and allocated things out to their appropriate division. and so this negative number that you see in year one is really more reflection of that reallocation than it is a reduction in expenditure, everyone likes to know about ftes and, and where they land. and you can see that our budget does have a very small fte growth. that growth is

primarily due to new transit fare inspectors. those are the staff who ride the system and ensure that we have fare compliance, help people sign up for discount programs as they are. jane jacobs eyes on the street making sure that people feel safe and can get answers to their questions and the system. we are also in an effort to improve, to both consolidate functions and, improve our response to, eeo or sorry, equal employment opportunity, investigate stations. we are bringing that function in-house from dr. and then we are also adjusting for to reflect the number of transit operators that we have been able to true up the budget to be consistent with the number of transit operators that we have actually been able to hire over the next two years, due to the really hard work of the transit and the hr team to create a really nice kind of

flywheel of hiring for our transit operators, which is really resulted in a lot of increased reliability in the system. on the service side, you can see that generally most departments, most divisions are staying very consistent with their total amount of ftes, the again, the, the most of the growth was occurring in streets primarily because of the increase of the fees. and there is a very small amount of growth in taxi and mobility, 5.4, i think, kind of belies the size of the increase, because it's actually only two staff moving from 33 to 35. and the increase in administrative support is due to, a consolidation of contracting functions from other divisions to be more efficient, as well as the addition of those staff from dr. to augment our eeo capacity. so those are the

numbers there probably only interesting to me, but so i will tell you what the commute, what kind of response we have been getting from the community, we have had a really extensive social media campaign that was multilingual. we had a 473 impressions, 56% in a language other than english. we did 35 presentations with community and neighborhood organizations. we did two citywide events. one was virtual and 107 people attended. one was in person, and we had 37 attendees. we posted 1400 info cards on all vehicles, busses and lrvs, and we placed advertisements in 14 citywide and neighborhood papers. and we got email and text message notifications sent out to almost 300,000 registered users. so we tried really, really hard to reach out to the community and have everyone understand what our budget is, what our budget is all about, and educate them

about the challenges that we were facing, diving a little deeper into language access, we offered language assistance throughout the outreach process, ranging from chinese and spanish all the way to american sign language, which i can say from having done a number of community presentations. it was really cool to watch the simultaneous translation from asl at all of those outreach events. the things we heard most about were transit fares. we got a lot of feedback as i have gotten a lot of feedback from board members on revenue sources and scenarios, and also a lot of feedback about muni service. so our top three areas of community interest were fares, revenue and muni service, and we tried really hard, not just to listen, but to respond to our community feedback. i think what falls into the fare category is not just how much we pay, but fare

compliance and to making sure that everyone is paying and that we talked about with you at january 30th at the board workshop, and that was what drove us to add the 35 additional transit fare inspectors to the system, we are at a level of, transit fare inspectors in the system that is below where we were in 1819. so these 35 transit fare inspectors will bring us back to where we were pre-pandemic, when our when we last did our transit fare compliance study. and we believe that that will really significantly change the way that people behave in the system over time, we also heard a lot of interest in our discount fare programs and we did a deep dive on to present to you how we plan to work harder this year to reach out to, to cooperate with nonprofit organizations, to go to them where they are, help people sign up to dedicate a full staff person to creating a strategy for plugging mta into

existing touch points within the city to make sure that people who are already in the system have an opportunity to know about and sign up for our discount programs, and we additionally have already scheduled a hearing that where we'll lay out our detailed plans for increasing the uptake of our discount fare programs, and then last we heard, as is similar from the board, a lot of interest about muni safety and security. and so we'll do a deep dive there. so the good news is that crime is down 48% on muni since 2018. but that and the other good news is that of all of the crime that occurs in san francisco, only 1.3% of that occurs on muni. but of course, the lived experience, you know, the numbers are one thing and the lived experience is something else. and so even though we're proud of these numbers, we also know that you what what we need people to feel

is safe and secure on muni. because regardless of what the statistics are, if you don't feel safe, you're less likely to ride, but before we move into how we are going to continue to improve safety and security on muni, i do want to point out that relative to other metropolitan transit systems, muni does have the lowest percentage of reported violent crime, at 4, and that the majority of crime that we do experience in the system is petty theft and larceny, and that violent crime is actually a very small percentage of the crime that is experienced. and i also want to point out that that decrease in crime happened in a really difficult time, that we've seen in the city, where mental health challenges are ever more present. so the fact that we have been able to decrease our crime statistics during particularly challenging times for safety and security, i think is a real credit to the work of kimber's and her team,

so we are committed to keeping our workers safe. operator assaults actually make up 89% of our total employee assaults. so we know it's really important to make our operators feel safe. and thankfully, over the last two years, operator assaults have flattened with a really exciting 18.5 decrease in the first quarter of this year, and we've been working with the biden administration and the new infrastructure bill to leverage the capacity of that bill to provide more support for our transit workers and to really take advantage of all of the new provisions that help us prevent operator assaults, by taking part in increased reporting and increased collaboration opportunities, we do a lot of collaboration with our city partners. we coordinate regularly with sfpd and the da to share information. there are at least 11 cameras on every

muni bus and train that are continue recording video and audio. we have hired a number of transit ambassadors to increase staff presence on muni, and that just makes it a more friendly place. those ambassadors are able to assist customers. they're able to diffuse conflicts, they prevent vandalism and in general, provide support to the transit operators, we've trained our vehicle operators on customer service and de-escalation techniques and we have worked on a lot of collaboration between the operators, the transit fare inspectors, the muni ambassadors, the station agents and the security staff to prevent and deter crime before it happens. we've also worked really hard to communicate these, messages out to our riders. we make over 600 announcements on muni busses and trains daily, we survey muni riders to gather data and we prepare lots of psa's. and in

fact, this little, little sign, i don't know, image that you see on the right is, was part of a big push that we made to reduce gender based harassment, and it's kind of one of our signature safety and security programs, and we've tried to be really innovative with the work that we are doing. we held our first ever muni safe day out, where staff proposed, posted information and talked to customers on muni seven busiest lines, we've been partnering with some of the big events in the city to make sure that people know that they can get to those events, on muni safely. and we have done multiple tabling events in critical communities in chinatown, tenderloin and the excelsior, and we have been working on our partnership with community organizations to spread the information. so, when we last met, we had we were looking at,

i believe it was seven different revenue proposals at the time, and they ranged from where we started at the beginning of the cycle with what we were calling beyond indexing, where we were trying to take an approach that pushed just a little bit beyond indexing to raise enough money to close the budget deficit and restart that muscle memory that the that as the cost of goods and services goes up, the cost of our goods and services goes up. and really trying to have a principle of sharing the burden of increased revenue across the system, and then we iterated with you a number of different options, that ultimately we the board expressed a lot of interest in what we were calling indexing plus, which was to index all of the fares and exclude single ride cash fares. but in order to, afford that,

because indexing generates less money and continues an inequitable fare structure with the clipper discount, we had to push parking fines to their maximum of 10, and we also had to reinforce state permitting fees for taxis, including drivers. so based on some of the feedback that we have been hearing, we wanted to offer an additional revenue option, which is the staff recommended option where we try to take the to try to take the policy direction of the board to make sure that we return to indexing to, to make sure that there is a connection between the cost of transit and how we, price the monthly pass to make sure that we continue to support ridership up, and meet agency priorities of making the

fare structure more equitable by bringing the cost of the clipper fare and the cash fare closer together. and the agency priority of keeping the cash fare the same, that that packet of options is slightly less expensive than the indexing option. so in that option we're able to increase, we're able to keep the parking fine increase at only 8% in ten instead of 10. and we are able to exclude the taxi drivers from paying for permit fees. so, all of this, i think all of our fare discussions kind of focused around these few key themes. the clipper card discount indexing, ridership, equity, parking fines and parking fees. and this option that we're presenting to you right now is the option that we believe not only touches all of those themes at least a little bit, you know, not as

much as many times we would want, but also kind of keeps that balance between all of the different members of our system because we know that we three years from now, when we go to the ballot, we want everyone to be supporting muni and feeling like everyone is sharing the burden equally, i do, because it's a little bit of a complex concept. i want to pause and explain the concept of reducing the multiplier. we price our monthly pass based on an assumption of a certain number of rides, and we all know post-pandemic people are riding less. that's why our transit revenue is down. and so we want to acknowledge that and say we know that you're riding less, but we and we want the monthly pass to continue to be a good deal for you. so in this option in year one, we reduce the multiplier from 32 to 31, meaning we assume that you ride 31 times instead of 32 times. and in year two, we reduce the multiplier from 31 to 30. and

that is just to continue to encourage ridership. and also, you know, keep the, try to offset the impact of reducing the clipper discount and critically, when we keep the price of the monthly pass lower, we keep the price of the lifeline monthly pass low, because the lifeline monthly pass is, is priced at 50% of the monthly pass. and so again, that points back to our efforts around equity. and i do, want to point out that, the so where this would land us in the revised staff recommendation is that the single ride fare for clipper and mobile would rise to 2.75 in year one and 285 in year two. the adult monthly pass would rise to 85 in year one and 86 in year two, and the lifeline pass would be 43 over both years. and if you look at, this

revised recommendation and compare it to the recommendation we came to you with at the workshop, prices in all three categories have come down. so i think that that really demonstrates the hard work that the board has put in to keep transit fares low for our riders , on the parking side, in the original recommendation, you can see the cost of the three most frequently issued parking citations. and then the revised recommendation. and you can see that in the revised recommendation, parking citations do cost more than they did when we had the staff recommendation at the workshop. and that's in order to raise the money to go farther on transit fares and hot off the presses, i want to show you overall what that does to the relationship between green, transit fares and parking fines. upside down. so

now. yeah, there we go. yeah. okay, so in this, the option that staff is proposing today. thank you. in the option that staff is proposing today, transit fares rise from anywhere from 0. if you are a cash fare rider to 14% if you are a if you are a clipper or muni mobile user and parking, parking citations rise between 20 and 35. and that's if you look at the change from 1920 to 2526. and that is because parking citations have gone up every

year since 1920. and the cost of transit has not gone up at all since 1920. so if you pull back the lens and look at the larger historical picture, you can see that as many members of the public have expressed, a desire for parking does pay a greater share of the burden in in the larger historical picture. also, if you look at who if you if you make a comparison on about our average rider and let's call an average rider someone who buys 12 monthly passes. if you buy 12 monthly passes over the course of two years, you'll pay an additional $108 under option seven, if you are what we're calling a typical driver, a typical driver is someone who would have an rpp permit and get two parking tickets in a year. then the total impact to you would be $109. so again, that goes back to our goal of having,

multiple modes share the burden equally. to put us in position for a strong push for regional revenue measure in year three. so, as you know, we need to do an analysis of title six to make sure that we are not just discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any of our federally funded programs and services. so we have done an analysis of our service network and, in order to understand this, we need to take a step back and think back to the service changes that were proposed in the fiscal year 21. note 22 2320 2223 2324 budget, due to the financial constraints

of revenue, not bouncing back the way that we had anticipated as we were coming to the close of the pandemic, we did. as i mentioned, at the top, have to put a number of positions on budget hold. as a result of putting those positions on budget hold, we weren't able to fully roll out all of the service changes that we had originally anticipated and in the two year budget cycle that we are now in and we had to stop implementing some of those changes. and the majority of those changes that we were not able to implement center around headways on specific lines. we were not able to reduce headways as much as we had originally planned due to the lack of resources. however however, we wanted to even though we didn't fully implement all of the service changes that were associated with the budget going into this year's budget cycle, we wanted to make sure that all of our our t's were crossed and our eyes were dotted. and so we did an equity analysis of the existing service that we are now

providing on the streets, which would be the level of service consistent with what we anticipate providing in the budget. and we found that we passed. so that's good news. there are no disparate impacts on the service that's associated with the with the level of service that will be provided in the next two year budget. and at our next meeting on april 16th, that service equity analysis will be on the consent calendar, and we will be asking you to vote on that as part of the overall budget package. and the next budget hearing is the would be your first opportunity to vote on the budget and your second opportunity to vote on the budget, will be april 23rd. if you decide to have more discussion when we get together on april 16th. and did you again want to pause for board comment or just power right through

torn? but i think we should just go ahead and get through the second one and then have the board discussion. thank you. okay. moving on to our capital budget, as a reminder, the operating budget pays for all the things we do every day to move people around the city. whereas the capital budget is about the things that we build in order to facilitate that movement around the city. our draft two year capital budget, as we discussed when we last met , is a little over $1 billion, but and it's really the first two years of the five year cip. when you look at our discretionary funds and we talked a lot at the last meeting

about which of our funds are discretionary and what percentage of our funds are discretionary, we see that the allocation of our discretionary funds is 75% to transit and 25% to streets. and that is because prop b is our largest discretionary fund and prop b by a will, a vote of the will of the people, must be allocated 75% to transit and 25 to streets , and also, as we discussed at the last meeting, as a reminder, our cip is actually kind of a subset of our larger 20 year capital plan. and many of our projects are set in motion, sometimes even a decade before our and our, our multi million or multi tens of million, multi hundreds of million projects are often a really complex funding structure that looks a lot like jenga, where we're piling up different funding sources according to our cash flow needs

to make everything pencil. and so when we change a discretionary allocation, it can have a ripple effect. and, if you look at our discretionary allocations 49% of the time, we if we change discretionary allocation will be pausing an active project. and pausing an active project means that there are already staff hired working on that contract, and there have already been contracts signed and executed paying for either material, supplies or professional services to support that contract, 40% of the time we would lose other funding, meaning that that those discretionary funds are being used as a local match to leverage, to give us access to funding provided by grants by either the region, the state or the federal government, and 11% of the time, we would be

canceling a project that we had committed to, but had not yet either hired staff or entered into contract for. so in in my mind, really only the only discretion that we have is the 11% of the discretionary funding that is not allocated already allocated somewhere else. and the discretionary portion of our budget is very, very small portion of our budget. so i do want to take a moment in this one week after the, ten year anniversary of vision zero, and considering all of the, accidents and that have been happening in the street and how much they're touching the community, i think it's important to pause for a minute and talk about vision zero and not just vision zero, but street safety in particular. i think

that it's important to note, i think because one of the capital improvement programs is called streets, it's easy to think that all of our street safety programs happen in streets, but they actually happen, across all of our capital programs, whenever we're in the street, we're thinking about how to make it safer for pedestrians, bikers , and other modes of transportation. and in particular, there are three capital projects that have a really big impact on street safety. one is transit optimization. streets, obviously, and signals because, signalization helps slow traffic . so if you look at those three projects, you see that 22% of our overall cip expenditure actually goes towards street safety. and 37% of our discretionary funds support street safety. so that kind of goes back to that idea of 25% of the discretionary funds being allocated to street, but 37% of the cip discretionary funds support street safety, meaning that there are other programs outside the street cip that support, additional safety in our streets. so, i'll first focus on the transit optimization cip, the transit

optimization. cip invests almost $300 million in 38 projects. sometimes we refer to the transit optimization program as muni forward, muni forward. our project that improve transit, travel time, pedestrian safety, service reliability, and reduce operating costs and i think it's critical to note that the muni forward projects are, the muni forward network. if you overlay it with a high injury network, there's a strong correlation between those two networks and that any time that we're doing mode share mode, shift from away from cars and towards transit, we're making our streets safer because we're reducing driving. so this image shows you the overlap between the muni forward corridors and the city's high injury network. and even though when we think of muni forward, we think a lot about transit efficiency. we are also doing safety things like installing

sidewalk bulbs, doing intersection, daylighting, implementing turn restrictions, reducing the capacity on roads, making sure transit boarding islands are safe and building safe bike lanes, and we've had really, really good impact, because of these programs on mission street, we've seen a 33% reduction in pedestrian industry collisions. on taraval. we've seen a 60% reduction in due to a quick build on haight. we've seen a 64% reduction in pedestrian industry injury collisions. and in geary, we've seen a 70 to 80% reduction in vehicles traveling over 40mph. and that's in a that's in a program where transit is in the name of the program. so i think you can really see that correlation between making transit move efficiently and making our streets safer, coming in the next in this cip, we will be making similar improvements in all throughout the city. as

you can see from this list, particularly on the west side in geary and ocean and sunset, our street cip, where we classically think of our streets projects, is a $211 million program investing in 55 projects that make our streets safer. the street cip funds transformative street safety projects to make walking, biking, and rolling a safe and enjoyable experience for all. and we in this program, we particularly make use of quick builds to implement things and bring about change on the ground quickly. and then we also have larger multi-million dollar streetscape overhauls like you're seeing on howard. and these are programs that are mostly funded by grants. so of our vision zero work, we still need to, apply quick build treatments to the remaining high injury network, which includes about 13 corridor projects and

over 900 intersection spot improvements, we need to complete the installation of 100 traffic calming devices annually , install high visibility crosswalks on all high injury network intersections, install signals that are retimed for slower walking speeds on the high injury network, install left turn traffic calming at 35 new locations and expand red light camera the red light camera program to eight new locations. additionally, we plan to implement 20mph streets along business activity corridors and safety corridors, pursuant to ab 43, were particularly proud of the program in the western addition that will be implementing with a safe streets and roads for all grant, we will be expanding the no turn on red to over 200 plus intersections, particularly in the downtown core and will be also implementing the speed safety camera pilot program that was enabled by the recently passed

ab 645. and then lastly signals. signals is a smaller cip. it's $31 million and funds 18 projects, and mostly the signal cip installs safety improvements that make it easier to see the signals like larger signal heads and mast arms and make it easier for pedestrians to use those signals, and make them more accessible and make sure critically, that the signals that we do have are maintained in a state of good repair and the signal cip is really important because it makes sure that pedestrians can cross major streets safely, which decreases our conflict with other modes and reduces red light running and ultimately decreases the conflict between drivers and other modes of transportation, like walking and biking, we have some major projects coming

forward in the next cip. we'll be doing $9 million worth of traffic signal modifications, will be upgrading lots of signals in the tenderloin in an area of really high pedestrian usage. we will be rolling out the first phase of automatic speed enforcement, and then will be installing new traffic signals throughout the city, in particular the western addition traffic signal upgrade project is going to install, we're going to install a number of countdown signals, push buttons, radar speed signs. it's a $30 million project. that's funded by both state, federal and local sources, we are in construction for phase one, and we will begin designing phase two soon. and as a reminder, the western addition is an equity priority community that has 21 locations on the vision zero high injury network. so we anticipate that this will be a really impactful project in terms of vision zero, i think

importantly to remember, our program, as i mentioned, is has a lot of restricted sources and even our discretionary sources are highly restricted. our highest discretion source prop b is restricted to 75% transit and 25% streets. so if we care about doing more, we really need to increase the size of a pie of the pie. if you remember back to previous presentations, we have fully spent through or have allocated for expenditure all of our geo bonds. the same for our revenue bonds, and we had no operating dollars because of our operating constraints to contribute to the capital program this year. so that means that three sources geo bonds, revenue bonds and operating dollars that used to be really significant contributors to the cip upwards of $100 million are

zero in the current cip. and so if you see less expenditure in the cip, it's not from a lack of will, it's from a lack of money. and we really need more money to do more, so on for both of our budgets. as a reminder, we do have to submit a balanced budget to the mayor on may 1st, and the mile stones between us. and thaf

they take an action, it would be rejected in its entirety and i will see you all here in july, and that is the end we've had. f

board. april 16th or april 23rd okay. great. that's so helpful. okay, colleagues, i know you all

want to jump in with questions, but i think i'm inclined to go to public comment first so we can hear the themes coming up, and then we can have our board discussion. so i will open it up to public comment at this time. i do have some speaker cards. marcelo fonseca, carl mcmurdo, mark gruber. for the record, i'm marcelo fonseca. i've been driving a cab full time for more than 30 years, and kia medallion holder since early 2009. i'm not sure if i heard it clearly, but did i hear that taxi fees are not

going to be reinstated? i know you can't answer questions, but that's what i'm here for. i urge you, the taxi industry is broken. we have a broken medallion system. cab drivers are broke. medallion holders are broke. this is not the time to reinstate fees on a struggling industry. i'm very thankful that you've given us a break for the past three years. and in one of your, well, your previous presentations, it stated that it assumes that we have recovered, recovered from the pandemic impact and the impact of unfair competition such as uber and

lyft. we haven't. that is kind of insulting anyway. what it is, is i sent in an email attachment to you a couple of days ago. it's a digest from the ballot simplification committee for prop a at year 2007. it has a very unusual clause. you're probably very aware of it, but i just want to make sure your ceo, cfo and, board members were aware of the clause which says mta could issue revenue bonds and other debt upon approval of the board of supervisors without

further voter approval. so it's been in that for 17 years, and i assume you know about it. there are other conditions that are very hard for me to understand. describing the actual text when you pull out prop a of 2007 itself, so i want, you know, i know aaron peskin deliberately wrote that in, in the voters approved it. and, i just want to make sure about that. and i thank you. if you're waiving the fees, the effect of the medallion renewal fee would have been 600 to $1200 to cause scores of elderly medallion

holders to forfeit their medallions and would have taken maybe hundreds of cabs off the street. that would further make the problem really bad. and you know, other cities, new orleans, las vegas that are attractive to having an adequate number of cabs encourages people to go because they don't have to walk through dangerous areas due to shortage of taxis, and, thanks for everything. bye. thank you. next speaker, please. thank you,

chair egan up conditions, highly unfavorable, to us. and we have been dealing with the consequences ever since. and then we had the pandemic, and we are far from out of the woods. and until our system is fixed, we will be in those woods. so so, we're asking you not to impose any fees on the industry, but particularly fees on medallion holders, because this is counter productive, you put a

fee on a medallion holder who is earning little or no income from that medallion. and that person is likely to walk away from the industry, and then that medallion is going to sit in a drawer until the fix. the system is fixed and it will not be available to serve the public. so you're shooting yourself in the foot if you do it. and i would urge you strongly not to thank you. thank you for your comment. next speaker, please. hello, i'm a member of, sf transit riders, and yeah, i'm

urging the board to go back to option six. i think obviously big picture wise, i think we need to be a transit first city. i don't think the options really included the best ways to emphasize transit over, you know, use of cars. but option six was better. it had a lower increase. the clipper fares, and a higher increasing parking fines to 10% each year, if you look at the presentation we just saw on the operating budget and the quote unquote average or typical driver or transit rider in the end, the increases are pretty much equal at like 108 or $109, and that whole framework, i think is biased and wrong. and if we're trying to encourage people to use transit, we shouldn't be equally increasing the use of cars and then to the use of, you know, your typical transit rider, we should putting more burden or more of the cost on cars. and especially this also ties into vision zero. obviously. with, you know, if we have fewer cars on the road, generally things would be safer, and i know taxi companies are struggling, but, i still think we need to be transit first. and

you know, private vehicles, if they're even if they're taxis are not part of this vision, and so, yeah, i'm just advocating for riders and any, any more increase or any increase to clipper cost will reduce, the use of muni and, there's a big risk that people stop using it because it gets more expensive and it's a spiraling, crisis. thank you, thank you. next speaker, please. afternoon board. cyrus hall, sustainable transportation advocate. here in the city, i'm happy to hear that we're focusing on equity between drivers and riders, and i'm looking forward to the plan to have free fares after 10 p.m. every night and no fares every sunday, because that would bring us to equity with parking in the city where there are no charges after 10 p.m. and there are no parking fees on sundays. but we're not talking about that. we're avoiding that issue. parking tickets are being presented as a cost of doing business as a driver. that's not what they are. you don't pay your two parking tickets every year as a cost of driving. you pay your parking tickets because you messed up and you parked when you couldn't park someplace during a street sweeping, or you parked too long, or you didn't pay your parking fee. that's why you pay a parking ticket. it's not part of the cost of driving.

it's what happens when you don't park correctly. so also an interesting comparison. i was here today to call to go back to option six. i thought option six was the fair and equitable option, i don't know where we are anymore because if i understood the presentation correctly, we have a $10 million additional hole somewhere in the budget. part of it will be in operating. some of it might be in capital. and so i'm not really sure what to push for today, but, just every option isn't on the table. we know that there are options out there that would significantly shrink the operating deficit. we're not pursuing them because they are not seen as politically viable right now. let's not instead put that on writers. writers provide 8% of the budget. you cannot get a substantial amount of money out of that. the yeah, i'll leave it at that. thank you very much. thank you. next speaker, please. hi. directors dillon

faber, san francisco transit riders, from the start of this budget process, we see our position on the budget has been pretty clear. no fare increases except as a last result to prevent service cuts, we believe that in order to make real progress on so many of our shared goals, from vision zero to climate, to transit equity, we need to make muni as affordable as possible. so we were glad to see the proposals by chair ekin at the last board meeting, which more clearly support sfmta's stated goals around transit mode, shift and safety, the option proposed by staff here today feels like a half step backwards towards the idea that all modes need to share the burden of the budget equally, a framing which goes against all of the goals i just mentioned and seems unnecessary given the board's strong support of the options proposed at the last meeting. sfmta should be passing a budget that really reflects its values, and while i can accept that modest fare indexing might be necessary to address the upcoming deficit, we

can't accept a 10% fare increase in year one. while the only increase to drivers is an 8% parking fine increase. instead i would suggest the board go back to chair eakins option number six, which limits fare increases to clipper indexing while increasing parking fines by 10% each year to ensure equity. taxi drivers should also be excluded from those fee increases, and that still leaves a net $1.5 million surplus, which can be used to lower the monthly pass multiplier. maybe with a prop b fund shift to cover any remaining balance, ultimately,

though, this is not a transit first budget to truly support our transit system equitably, we need more. we clear in my position in terms of fare increases. again, do need to share the burden across the board, including parking. i keep repeating that, because if we're only focusing on fines, i'm disturbed by the article got upe

tenderloin demographics in our neighborhood, about 40.42% of households make less than $25,000 a year in a neighborhood that's 30,000 people, at least half of that. they should be able to, apply for lifeline. and we need to make that a whole lot easier, if we're going to focus on increasing fares a lot of fot maybe we should also get rid of,

like, free muni passes for y'all, for the cac, for the executives, like, as a symbolic gesture, if we're going to increase fares, thank you so much for your time. thank you. next speaker, please. good afternoon, tom radulovich with liverpool city. yeah. i just wanted to to drive and park, on friday nights and on sundays you

get a lot of congestion. as a result, you get a lot of people cruising for parking in residential neighborhoods. this creates danger for people on bikes. this creates danger for people walking. this delays muni . so it's good parking management shizhoupian parking management, right. . but on the budget, do

we have any requests for accommodation? secretary silva we do have one speaker. you've been unmuted . speaker you've

been unmuted unmuted . one last time. speaker. you've been unmuted to provide your comment on item number 11. the

budget. thank you to the staff and cfo. malhotra and her team for coming up with all these options and trying to. i know you're trying to sort of, accommodate, accommodate all of us, it's your first budget cycle, so i, appreciate that. i i also was, at last meeting, excited to support option six with, as little impact to single

buyers as we could. get and also maintain, get back to get back to, the, our policy of indexing, however, absent that, i do think that these meetings. yeah, i, ii

but i would also be inclined to, go back to option six is my colleague. if a majority of my colleagues would be would be amenable to that. but i'm also prepared, depending on how, discussion goes, to support option seven. as, as i do that, i think you've tried to balance very, very difficult a very difficult thing here, with regard to, safety and security appreciated the sort of deep dive, deep dive on it. an overview of the work, and maybe i missed it, but are there, like, specific additional

investments that, that we're making in this budget around safety and security? maybe i missed that. so because of our expenditure constraints, ants, we are doing, we are we are making we aren't adding any additional dollars or any additional positions to safety and security beyond the transit fare inspectors that are in thee going to be doing, particularly around, some of the new installation, around safety and

security that has been passed. and so if you wouldn't mind, kim, if you could fill in director henry. so i just want to say much of what we've been working on to this point is, is those things that can't necessarily be seen by the human eye, on the we did not have that data, but because of the work that we've done together, we now

have that data. we can start analyzing that data and figure out what's the next move in in terms of policy and we review, not only the police reported crime data, our non-reported crime data as well. so we have a total picture of what's happening on the system, and that allows us to identify trends and patterns and then use that information to drive our policy and response, through our staff, we built the network of safety support. and so what that looks like is the more

information that we have been able to put out to the multiple staffing groups, the more information they give us back, and for example, we back in february, we had a vulnerable youth that was missing, and that youth was believed to be traveling on our system, that information was sent to us by pd. we sent that information out to all of our network, and based on them receiving that information, that youth was located, through the transit, one of our transit inspectors on our system and was able to be safely put back with their family. and so that is the network that we've built. all of our, units get all of the information on, whether it be a missing person, whether it be an operator assault or just a crime trend that we're seeing overall. we filter, we push that information out, we work closely with our city partners. we of course, share our great evidence and our videos, and the one thing that i do want to amplify is the work that transit operations does, they're not often looked at as a security support, but we work very closely with our transit

management center. they have been able to quickly, notify us when they see growing trends instantly, but what one of the great things that they're able to do is through their flexible service maneuvers, is to prevent ongoing safety and security issues from continuing to happen. an example i'll give of that is we had a couple of weeks ago, incidents where youth were behaving mischievously on our m line, riding the couplers and breaking into our, empty operator cabins. and they were actually, transit was actually able to partner with the police department. and through that partnership, transit and their maneuvering, with our service took the, m line out of service just momentarily to stop the behavior and entered, put our busses on the system so it didn't disrupt service altogether, but that disabled

the youth from or disallowed the youth from continuing. and what we consider safety, behavior as well as security related issues. and so that that's some of the things that we're working on. i appreciate all of those, great examples. and then i have sort of a three part question. if i could for this. first one is how many additional tf new tf eyes are in your budget? what would the what would that bring your total to? and then what do you consider yourself as fully staffed? how many eyes would fully staffed be deployed for you so requested in the. budget

is a total over the next two years of 35 additional tf eyes that will bring us close to about 80 tf eyes total and what we plan to do is with that increase in staffing, continue to analyze and monitor revenue increases to determine the additional hiring we need to do to be fully complemented. okay, so you don't have a full you don't have a full staffing, no number that you're targeting yet at this moment. really not yet. okay and that's the 35 over two years. so you're going to hire 35 over the two year budget cycle? yes 35. all right. the last thing i'll say, madam chair. and thank you, miss burress, is that regardless of what option we go with, the fare increase is an option 6 or 7. i do agree with the one of our commenters who cited specifically the, the discount programs. i think that what what ever fare increase we have, i

think the key is, is identifying the people who are, eligible for this program, because we do have quite, a quite a lot of them and making sure that they are enrolled have the opportunity to enroll in those, because i think that's one of our, greatest inequities is that we have all these programs that people either don't know about them or not. enrolled in them. and i think that would that would be a core piece of, staff work and our work, as as we move forward, in this new budget. so thank you, madam chair. thank you. director hensey. director hemminger, please. thank you, madam chair, bree, i'd like to go to the fund balance. and i

think this is the first meeting where you've put a number to the fund balance that would be required to balance the budget. so and it's 60 million, right, and just so i understand the math, you need to put 60 million from the fund balance into the budget in order to generate the $13 million shortfall. correct. so it's on top of it. so if the fund balance were not there, it would be a 90 plus million dollar shortfall. and just for everybody's benefit, would you define the fund balance? sure for the fund balance, just like a small business, every year we bring in revenue and then every year we expend and if we bring in more revenue than we spend and there's a little bit left over that goes to the fund balance. and over time, those little bits can add up to something quite large. but i will say i was looking at the

history of our fund balance over the last decade, and this is the lowest our fund balance has been in probably the last ten years. there were moments where the fund balance was over $100 million, and we are very, very far away from that. and i think what makes me nervous is that this $60 million fund balance was built up over a very long time period, and in a time where, we revenue is low and we have continued pressure on expenditure, the likelihood that we will continue to generate fund balance is extremely low. additional only. i think one thing that the team worked very hard on in this year's budget cycle was to right size. the budget with our ability to spend. so next year i expect to see our actuals being very close to budget as opposed to actuals being lower than budget, and so i think that that will also

reduce salary savings, which is something that mta has depended on in the past to fund unbudgeted costs, so we have significantly less maneuverability than we did in the past. and i would also point out that budgeted revenue is budgeted revenue, it's not revenue till it's in your hot little hands. and what i've experienced since i in the 18 months that i've been here is cfo. is that revenue has been consistently under budget, which is why i really brought down our revenue projections over the next two years, because what you don't want to do is commit to a level of expenditure that if you hire people as soon as they hit payroll, they stay on payroll. and if the revenue doesn't come in to support that, then you're in a position that no cfo ever wants to be in. so by definition, fund balance is not something you can count on every year. correct. and you have no

idea what the number is going to be until you close the books and move on. correct. it's $60 million in fund balance based on my current year projections of where we are. we're in april. there's two months to go. so does that 60 wipe it out, or is there still a residual fund balance? the remaining fund balance would be the $140 million, 10% fund balance. that is the operating budget reserve. yeah, i was going to ask that next because i would characterize that more as a reserve. correct. which is why i didn't talk about a policy about percentage of budget. and that is fully funded, correct? correct so back to the fund balance though, is there any residual fund balance beyond the fund balance you're using in this instance? and the reserves we are projecting to use our fund balance. but of course, as you said, we're not i won't

actually know until we get to the end of the year. but i, i do feel confident that we will have $60 million to spend. okay look, an obvious question is, could you find another 13 and call it a day? right well, that would require stopping the current level of expenditure, which would mean i would either have to lay people off or stop buying things, or stop or tell people to stop using contracted services. the fund balance is generated because i look at the amount of revenue that we've generated to this point in the fiscal year across all the different sources, and then project out what i think is going to happen for the next two months, based on what's happened in the last ten months. and then i do the same for expenditure. i say, okay, based on, you know, payroll is this much every we every pay period attrition is this much we hire this much. so this is what i think the labor projections are going to be, and then i do the same on our work

order expenditure, our professional services expenditure and our materials and supplies and our equipment. and so you've used fund balance here to try to reduce but not eliminate the deficit, we've done that in the past. i the strategy i believe we've heard from jeff for the reserve, i'll call it is that you really want to try to keep your mitts off of that in the current two years? because in year three, you might need it all and then some, correct? correct. okay so i just wanted to establish that as a baseline, for going next to what you want from us, which is some sense of which one of these options or a combination thereof we can settle on. can you by any chance get slide 35 back up on the screen? sure because i think that's the best short summary of the options we've got. and i have to say, i'm a little fearful that we're arguing

ourselves out of a good deal. and i thought we were sort of lurching toward a consensus of some kind at our last meeting, and now you've you've come in with some tweaks and changes. so i was one of the ones, i think, who expressed some support for what you're calling indexing plus, which was option six. right correct. and i guess the first question is what's wrong with option six? well, why do we need option seven? so in option six we would include fees on taxi drivers. and option seven we would exclude fees on taxi drivers. so i'm just going to point out we were we were 2.4 million. yes. over on option six. so we don't need to include fees on taxi drivers. correct. and those are about how much is that worth a million. okay in in

in options five or whatever. right. okay. plus in option six we have to increase parking citations by 10, which would push them all of our top issued citations to 10. and it would be , you know, a 20% increase on top of significant year over year increases in history. and i do want to point out that parking citations are not, while they are always the result of not of not following the rules, they are not un they're not completely unsympathetic. many people who park at meters are. and this is some of the feedback that we got around sunday and, and extended meter parking was that many people who park at meters do shift work after hours when there is no transit, and they work the kinds of jobs

where you're not allowed to leave to go feed a meter or move your car. and so parking at a meter and over extending your stay can, can be the cost of driving, it can be the cost of getting to work. and i think that in public, i know, you know, one of my jobs is the division head of fit is i supervise the administrative hearing section, which is the section that listens when people get a parking citation. they have the chance to request an administrative, a written administrative review. they also have the chance to have an in-person hearing with a hearing officer. and we hear a lot of, we hear a lot of people who protest their citations. and i would remind everyone that you have to pay your citations in order to reregister your vehicle , and we i have had my hearing officers here, hearings where people are telling us that they

are going to lose their vehicle because they have so many citations they can't pay. and they're afraid of losing their ability to get to work. and that that could kick off a string of actions that would be really economically detrimental to them. and i know that many of those people have been at the podium at these hearings asking for relief. well, i don't hear that speech, usually from a cfo. i didn't say we gave the relief. i just said we asked. yeah it was asked for slide back up. what happened to it, at the same time, though, bree, what what if you just look. oh, sorry. the other differences, i would say, the on the transit side, we still, i really appreciate the board's desire to move back to indexing, because that is board policy. and i do see the value

in indexing, you know, in returning to board policy. however, i also really heard the board's feedback around the and also the public's feedback around the link between price and ridership. and so option seven is the option where we look at the multiplier and reduce the multiplier so that the cost of the monthly pass assumes fewer rides, which brings down the cost and brings down the cost of the low income monthly pass. and then also, i think we probably disagree from a policy perspective here. but you know, the clipper discount was intended to move riders from cash. really looks like you're gunning for it. i have to say, because it's gone. and then it comes back and it's gone and it comes back and you know, bottom line on these last two items, the last two options six and seven, is essentially the trade

off is that with seven seven you increase transit fares higher than option six. in order to give a 2% break to people who break the law. right? i would say that we are trying to spread and have everyone share, so it doesn't look like we're targeting a particular population and so that we can generate support for a regional revenue measure in 2026. it's 8% versus 10. i mean, you could cut cut the difference and make it nine, but they're all close to each other, right? i would say optics matter. yeah, they do, but that's that's another conversation because we're back to spending as much time as we are on a $13 million shortfall. so, madam chair, just in terms of my own view of this, i again, don't see what's so wrong with

with option six, i could live with versions of it. we've got to get this behind us, and move on to the bigger fish, which is waiting with year three. so if i may add to this. so obviously the sfmta board is the primary approval authority for our budget, but it does require the consent of the board of supervisors. far more importantly, the strategy here is to stop arguing about tiny or slices of a shrinking pie, but instead expand the pie. what is clear from the conversations that we've had over the last several months with the board of supervisors, as well as with, political factions all over the city, is we need to try to get on the november 24th ballot for funding, and we have to be on the november 26th, ballot for funding. and we've got to win at both in order to not have all of

this fall apart, and to win requires a two thirds vote. and that is a really, really hard stretch. so with this budget, what we are trying to do is to build the citywide consensus in order to get a two thirds vote to grow the pie, and that that is our challenge. and that is one of the reasons why we keep coming back to an option seven, because it seems like that is the one that, generates the least organized opposition to the idea of actually being able to fund our work. okay, can i just stick on this for one moment? because we're not really comparing apples to. i'm hearing like a converging consensus around 6 or 7. like that's where we're going with the conversation. we're narrowing, which is progress. they're not quite apples to apples because one actually raises more revenue . you said, i'll take that 2.4

and run with it. maybe we'll want to stay there, but i'd actually be interested. cd six goes further than we need to in terms of it exceeds our budget target, so that 10, maybe people are reacting to that 10. i don't know that we need to go as far as the 10% to close the budget gap. do we go some version of option six, which is a single digit and not two? and look, i get it, that two digits are more noticeable than one. i mean, just so we're not over solving the problem is, i think i think you understand where i'm going with that. i mean, i think we would also want direction on what you would like to because option six does include taxi, fees for taxi drivers is not medallion holders, but for drivers. and option seven includes, no fees for either medallion holders or drivers. so

i think we came we kind of landed that do the math for us out loud. so if we wanted to take the taxi drivers off the table and we wanted to go to 9% instead of 10 or 8, i don't know that i can 2.4 i mostly use excel. my math skills in the brain are, i would probably need to go to a computer, but i'm sure i could do it for you. okay well, look, it's going to get you microscopically close. if it doesn't quite get you there, and i think that would be a pretty good day's work. i think we were pretty much in consensus last meeting that we wanted to match, excluding the drivers, as we did with all the others in option six. and then i'd just be interested to know, i think we had. yeah i think the option six originally generated 10.3 million from the parking fines. this one's what, 7.8 or something anyway, maybe you can run and do the math. yeah. while

we have the conversation. sure can run it. okay. that's helpful. director hemminger, anything else from you? i would also say, though, that i think one on one policy option that that staff really appreciated about seven was the ability to reduce the multiplier as well. to bring down the monthly to bring the monthly pass more into alignment with the level of ridership that, the level of ridership that, you know, more consistent movement sort of recognize the change in ridership post pandemic. sorry, ken, i'm just going to take a facilitator's prerogative here because to stay on this theme, this was pointed out, this is just like a really fair observation, given the moment we're in right now, which is less, as you've told us so compellingly, director tomlin, less five days a week commuting downtown, more one to 2 to 3 days a week commuting how does

that shift in just where we are in the world right now, manifesting, and whether people are choosing to make that upfront purchase of the monthly pass right now, or they are more tapping as they go, because maybe you're only going to go two days a week to the office, is that we do see a shift toward a little bit. we do see a shift toward single rides over monthly pass. but i think a nuance that's important to understand is, there are companies downtown who continue to buy monthly passes for their employees as one of their benefits. and so that is a really stable source of income for us. we also have some partnerships with some universities where monthly passes are incorporated into the cost of their tuition, and they get them as part of their package of being a student. so there are while there are fewer monthly pass holders than in the past, they are certainly not

insignificant. and we really appreciate that that stable source of income. helpful. thank you. anything else? director hemminger. okay. director tarlow , please. thank you, madam chair. so the way i, i see this conversation is that it's happening in the context of increasing economic disparity within our all over our country. and, both the, the options of increasing fares and increasing fees and fines, disproportionately or, more. yeah, disproportionately impacts the people who can least afford to pay it, there are there are a lot of people in our city who for whom $120 ticket is just not that meaningful. and there are a lot of people in our city for whom a $3 transit fare is not.

is not that meaningful. but there are many, many, many people who, don't qualify for a, a program like the lifeline pass or, or who, you know, just aren't don't have the time or the bandwidth to go and protest a citation or apply for, payment over time and, and cfo moderna your comments about shift workers is something that i can concur with. you know, my business in glen park, employed about 100 people. and, and i would say that 20 to 25 of those folks commuted by car and this neighborhood is a two hour parking zone. neighborhood, there was, i would say fairly consistent enforcement of the

two hour, you know, time limits. but there was a bit of russian roulette with that. and, and i would say a very strong proportion of the people who drove were people who are, you know, quite common in our city. they're they're people with, strong skills like cooks and bakers. and who, in order to achieve a closer to middle class lifestyle, work two full time jobs and so they have a car, because they work very hard to, to get and maintain a car, but but they, you know, they have families. they have two jobs they need to get around in a

car, i don't think the transit system, could ever be robust enough to support that sort of person. you know, our workers, many of them arrived at 2 or 3 in the morning, four in the morning, the transit options at that time are much more limited, and another thing that's really on my mind is i was looking yesterday to see what the current statistics are of, people in, in the united states who live paycheck to paycheck. and i saw statistics varying from 60% to well over 70% of people. and so i think it's a little, it's not a very good comparison to talk about, the cost over the course of a ■year of several parking tickets versus the ongoing cost of a,

you know, an increased transit fare because one you can you know, about and you can plan for it. and the other is just going to happen. and if it happens in a month when you also have a, you know, a car repair that you have to perform or an unforeseen medical expense or, or you have to move because you're, you're landlord decided to do a move in eviction, which happened on the on a very regular basis to our employees is, you know, it's a real hardship. so i don't want to lose sight of, of that. when we talk about increasing ng, fines and fees over a 20% over two years, i think that that is a very significant amount. and if there are ways for us to reduce that, we should be looking at them seriously, that being said, i, i, you know,

we've looked at a number of options that keep the fare for, beyond going over 25, $0.25 over the two years increase. and it seems like there it's very hard to get there, without sacrificing, the multiplier. i really do like the multiplier, reduction, that's in option seven, but i, you know, i recognize that, that more, riders who are paying for their own passes are, are just going single single ride and, and, so maybe i'm thinking about this wrong, but if that isn't included and the, and that, are

we concerned that we need to reduce the multiplier in order to retain the that source of income from universities and corporations? i would say that it was more, in response to public comment as well as board interest in making sure that the increase in because the monthly pass is based on the number of rides assuming clipper because the monthly pass comes on clipper, that there was concern that it, decreasing the clipper discount would increase the monthly pass in a way that was overly burdensome, and so we responded to that by reducing the multiplier to offset the negative impacts of decreasing the clipper discount. right. and then also the lifeline is tied to the monthly pass. correct so that also helps. it was another it was an additional way for us to recharter and do more with

equity. right. so you know, i, i am very supportive of the city's transit first, goals. and i and i think that that, helping people move away from using cars, relying on cars is, is always going to be a combination of carrots and sticks and, fines. definitely fall into the stick category. and and, and i and i and i'm sympathetic to, director tomlin's point and about about our position in terms of, you know, the overall favorability of, of mta with voters as we head into some pretty significant, asks, of

the, of the voters and the two thirds majority is a very large hurdle. and i believe the last time we fell short of it by, you know, not that much. and, and i'll just share that i was, was, at the time that that happened, i was chairing a legislative committee, for a business organization. and our, our committee recommended a no vote on that, on that measure. and the. sympathies or the reasoning was, you know, we and i don't share this view any longer, but i went along with the majority at the time, that mta, you know, doesn't listen to us and needs to be taught a lesson. and you're not there. they're not,

stewarding the funds that they have, responsibly enough. and those narratives are so easy to, to exploit, and so that's those are the things that are on my mind. and of course, if, if my, you know, if the rest of the directors are in favor of, you know, a 10% increase, you know, in year one and year two, you know, i'm i'm not going to have any hard feelings about it, but i, but that's that's my primary concern. and i wish we could get there without without going over the $0.25. that's if i could wave a magic wand. that's what i would do. so thank you. thank you. director tarlov, director. so please. thank you, thank you for the presentation on, i am

looking at, like, the whole evolution of option one, two, three, and then four, five, and then there's six, and now i'm like seven. i'm so. seriously. because what happened is that i think that we really need to read the temperature of the city. we have to really work with every districts. and this is what our team gets back to tell us. like, this is what an option that will be most likely to be able to get through the next few stages of what we need to get through. and we also need

to put two things on our voters ballot this hopefully end of this year and then in two years. so so, i'm very sympathetic of people that actually have two jobs and they have family of five generations that they have to take care of. they don't have fancy bikes, fancy scooter. they scrape to buy a $3,000 third hand used car if they got a ticket. and we're raising them to 10, it losses their entire day of income. i mean, this is

the kind of people that we need to bend over backwards to actually understand what kind of life that they've been living in. and i don't want to say that's kind and our communities that actually still try to stay in the city and not move to canada because they can't afford anywhere else here. so i am actually quite happy to see that the parking fine is only increased by 8. i actually love that. i think 10% is just

really an extortion, and i also like the reduced multiplier because i actually had conversation with, the hotel councils. they runs, you know, a lot of massive amount of union workers, and they would love to be on a monthly clipper program as part of the incentive to actually attract workers to actually choose to work in san francisco. so not in alameda, not in marin or, other friendly, nice we actually help to boost the confidence of the city

, to get on the bus, to get on the bus, and also wait for the bus and even even just safe to park in our garages. and i really hope that, we're charting to the right direction to eventually, hopefully we can fund the full time staff in the full amount that our security team is requested, because they really do. they're really we only have a few really. like comparatively, they're they're like the i don't know, what do you call them. that certification. they can

just come in in because we can internally help to, to, facilitate that process. so, i actually, my fellow board member, i love you all. and i love all your perspective. i really respect that. but just reading the temperature of the city and where we need to go from now to like the next ten months and then the next two years, i would say this is actually the most, achievable one that will will, will, will

get, will get to where we i have out there talking to. her fees

are proposed to be eliminated, and i believe that's in proposal seven. does that is that clear? i'm sorry. i'm trying to be a the taxi driver fees. are eliminated in option seven, but we do in option six there. there is still a fee incorporated into that proposal. that's right. and there's been some conversation about keeping six and excluding the driver fee. so that's up to the board. but that has been discussed as well. and for members of the public, what is a taxi driver fee like. what does that mean. so if i'm a taxi driver yeah. so there, so there's, a fee for new drivers. so when you apply again, if this were to be reinstated, that would be the fee type for new

drivers who apply and then there would be, if reinstated, a driver renewal fee. so when they renew their permit a year later there is a renewal fee. so it's the cost. it's a cost recovery program. so those fees help support the administration of the taxi services program. but so specifically for driver fees. again, there's a driver application fee for new drivers and a renewal fee for returning drivers fees. and for an option. six how many? and it's okay if you don't want to give a ballpark, but how many drivers would be affected by this more or less? or what percentage of the drivers would. i just wonder if we could just move beyond this piece because i think we've decided that we would not want to include drivers in option six. got it. okay, that was sort of. you weren't here at the last meeting. oh, sorry. sorry. i'm

sorry to just translate that. and everyone sort of agreed. let's not do that. let's just make those two aspects exactly the same across option six and seven. i'll let her finish her sentence. so if you could give me. oh and i'm happy to email you. so it if they were to be reinstated the new driver it would touch about 200 new driver applicants and for renewals it's about 2500. got it. okay. thank you so much, kate, and so i, i do want to, you know, i appreciate everyone's comments on both members of the public and also my fellow board members . and i will say i was particularly touched by, you know, director, tarlov and director. so and their examples, i worked in the nonprofit sector for many years, and i was a direct service worker, in the nonprofit sector for, a few years as well, working with families that were, i was managing really critical cases for a lot of different families,

and our nonprofit at the time was located on valencia, between 25th and 26th. and a lot of my coworkers, even at that time, lived outside of san francisco because they were displaced and could not afford to live in san francisco. so many times, we would have this parking really race that we would do and tag one another in and out if we're meeting with a client, and we couldn't step away from our desk because we were trying to help somebody manage a really challenging, difficult situation, and we would message one another, hey, can you grab my keys and move my car, and that was part of our cost of doing business. and that was something that was part of our day to day, and it it was challenging and sometimes we wouldn't make it in time. sometimes we would get tickets and sometimes, you know, and it was really challenging for folks that are making, you know, like 50 k, 70 k, a year. that's,

that's not great, and so i do think about, you know, from that perspective, all our direct service workers for nonprofits and, san francisco is a nonprofit, rich city. and so we have the benefit of having all these amazing institutions. but a lot of those folks that work in those respective institutions cannot afford to live in san francisco. and we saw this at the board, at our board retreat as well, that we are seeing a lot of an increasing number of folks move away to regions that are further away that may not have robust transit networks, that may not have that infrastructure that we have here in the city, and they are reliant on their vehicles to get to san francisco, to be able to, to provide those services for folks. and i say this mostly just to add context to where my thinking is at right now, i am

very much committed to being a transit first city. it's a priority that i, i have of, even though i own a vehicle, i rarely use it. i elect to use transit, and we have an increasing number of folks that are also transit dependent. and so these are all the different folks that use our networks that we're balancing out. right what i do see, you know, something else that that also moved me was considering the disparate outcomes finds may have on communities of color, and that is something that for me, i'm quite sensitive about. and that's something that i'm. if i can be in a position to, to support managing that, that risk, that's something that i want to make sure that i'm doing in this seat of privilege and power that i have here in this seat. i do believe that both proposals six and eight, inches closer to becoming transit for

at first it doesn't, you know, make us it doesn't get us there. i don't i don't think it'll take many years for us to be there. unfortunately it does seem that, you know, even in in the best solution, we're still trying to make cost neutral changes to our system. and there is no real plan outside of absorbing an incredible amount of, you know, budget through a ballot measure or through other measures that we don't have the revenue right now to, like, have the robust system that we wish we had, and so that affects neighborhoods, especially our equity neighborhoods, in a very meaningful way, and there are a lot of folks who work multiple jobs, a lot of folks that don't have the service they need to get around the city because we just can't provide it right now. and we're not in a place where we can financially afford to provide that right now. and so i'm wrestling with all these different factors as like i'm trying to figure out where am i landing on these two different options, i don't have an answer for you today, so i'm not going

to get you there. i know you're like, i get to it, stephanie. it's not going to be there, but i will say that, you know, i am also factoring the winds that either proposal, have for us. you know, we still are retaining free muni for youth, which is amazing, we're still retaining free muni for eligible seniors. that is also an amazing resource. and, you know, as we're talking and i'm so glad that my fellow colleagues have consensus around this, i do see taxis as an extension of our transportation network, especially as it relates to our paratransit, for paratransit needs. and so i appreciate how how both proposals factor that in, and the piece around the multiplier is also something that's quite compelling to me as well. so so, although i haven't decided which one i'm leaning towards, i think if i were to say today, like which one? i'm inching closer to it is option seven, but it's, it's really because, like, i'm really thinking about those folks that

cannot reliably where transit is not reliable for them at this moment. and we can't we're not in a place where we can say, hey, in either scenario, oh, our transit network is going to become way more reliant in year 2 or 3 or, you know, we're not there yet. and so until we can actually promise that to folks, i think this is this is the best that we can do right now. thank you. further, director cadena. no. that's it. okay great, colleagues, director henderson is not here today with us. she's in dc, but i did speak to her yesterday, and just took some very clear notes on where she's at. so i want to just read that into the conversation, she said things like that. she preferred to see indexing only for the fares, not in support of removing the clipper discount, she said. and this i love, she said, this is exactly the message we want to send. we hear you, public. we want you to get on the train and on the bus. we are supportive of keeping the clipper discount. this is the policy message that we want to

send. we want you to ride transit and thank you for getting on the bus. so just want to bring her voice into the conversation in her words. so specifically, can we pull up slide 25 because i thought this was really helpful to see from you, bri, what you have heard out there when you've been doing conversations with the public, and i just have to note, because it's sort of the essence of what we're discussing right now, that the number one source of comments you got from the public was on transit fares, and that way down next to the number of people who said nice things about mta, kudos was the number of people talking about parking fines. so i just want to ask you to reflect on that in light of this conversation and sort of bring some of the color of what you heard, so that we are indeed being responsive to the comments that you heard through your outreach. i actually as i put together this slide, i was thinking that i wish that we had had the foresight to know what category, you know, when we were

taking down all the comments, you know, we had categories and actually the thing i heard the most about with transit fares actually related to transit fare compliance, not the fare itself, pretty almost everywhere i went in every jurisdiction with every group, in every neighborhood, there was a lot of perception that people don't pay and a worry that if people if others observe people not paying, that they'll feel like, well, why should i pay? and, you know, acknowledging that, that like, youth don't have to pay, but when they don't get, when they don't tag, it just it just creates this perception that can be damaging overall. so i would actually say that the comments on transit fares were really more around compliance. as okay, okay. that's really helpful. thank you, then can we go to the

slide that talks about the current option? i can't remember which slide it is. the current recommended option 37. thank you . okay. great. and i just wanted to also acknowledge that we're not doing apples to apples comparison here. so i feel really focused on don't raise parking fines by 10. but the eliminating clipper discount and transit fares is raising transit fares by 10% in the first year. so maybe if we're going to real focus on percentage numbers, i'd love to just make sure we're elevating those numbers so we can just compare those numbers across the board. so that's a 10% raise of transit fares in year one. and then what is it in year two, well, i would slightly disagree with that in the sense that cash i just do want to point out that cash fare would remain the same. and 30% of riders do, would experience no increase at all, so if you

really wanted to do apples to apples, you'd probably have to do a weighted average. that's right by population. and i think that we should also compare over the last five years, rather than simply in this one year. and i would also just say, i, i have heard members of the public say that it's disingenuous to not call a reduction of the clipper discount a fare increase, but it it truly is a discount. it was a discount. put in place to incentivize a certain behavior. and it was an incentive. it was a discount that was put in place with the intent that it be temporary. and it's proved to be quite sticky because it's here a decade later and i believe the board already approved by policy the removal of the clipper discount. we have just not taken that action. and i would say that the reduction in the clipper discount is $0.25, whereas indexing is 10 to $0.12.

so the financial impact between the two is quite real. and to just return to the original argument, which was that the majority, you know, that we are incentivizing a behavior change that has largely already happened and that the riders who are paying for that change, or the riders who are continuing to pay for that subsidy, are low income riders. and it is true that there are low income riders who ride with clipper 100, which is why we wanted to reduce the multiplier to offset that impact. but when we look at our data, the majority of our low income and bipoc riders pay cash and they are paying more every single ride than someone who pays clipper with clipper. yes. ten years later. yes. okay, so let's just make sure that we are able to compare apples to apples, because we are talking

about a 10% increase in year one of those fares, we're not trying to land this plane today. we're not trying to come to consensus today, we've gotten a lot of feedback from the board. that's your delightful job to reconcile before april 16th, i will just state clearly where i am, which is a strong preference for option six, to continue with the modification of excluding the drivers and looking at how we bring those two options into apples to apples comparison, which is let's just balance the budget with both of them and don't raise fines further than we need. so i think that's some maybe math you can do in between, i look forward to seeing what you come up with next for the revenue piece. i would like to talk. i would like to shift off of this $13 million challenge and talk about some of the other pieces, if that's okay. of course, because i do feel we've put a lot of time and energy into this piece, and it's been sort of like a training wheels exercise for the $240 million exercise wise. we'll have at the end of a couple more

years from now. i would love to come and talk about, talk about how the budget, the operating budget in particular is responsive to the board priorities. i had a conversation with director tumlin, yesterday, and he said, we have, in fact, shaped the budget around the board priorities that we laid out january 30th, so i just wondered if you could just sort of specifically respond to that, feels like there's sort of an infinite number of strategic decisions about expenditures on this budget that you all have made, that this board has not had a lot of discretion to make trade offs, that we've not really had a chance to weigh. should we invest in transit fare inspectors or potentially something else? you've made all those decisions. so i just wanted you to sort of walk us through how this budget is indeed responsive to those six board priorities. we all articulated on january 30th,

that are so important to us. so i think this, draws my mind back to march fifth, perhaps, where where i think there is often a perception that in order to respond to a priority, you have to spend more on something, whereas sometimes it can be a change in the direction of energy and what you prioritize within your own in, you know, within your work plan and we really, dove deeply into all of those work plans across transit and streets and, taxi and then the administrative program arms and, i think that that demonstrated our, you know, something that we talked about

at the workshop, fair compliance was a large was a large piece of the conversation. and we did make, you know, the most significant investment we are making in the budget this year, is those transit fare inspectors who also play a role in safety and security. we heard from the board that you're very interested in discount programs, and we talked about how we'd be dedicating a mayoral fellow, and we've scheduled a hearing to talk about how we plan to roll out increased energy around discount program uptake, today kim talked about that. you know, all of the work that she's doing with her existing resources to make muni safer, and make people on board feel safe. when we did that deep dive into each division's work plan, julie talked a lot about the transit equity strategy and how we make sure that our services are

equitable and we're providing equity in the proper, you know, that we're paying attention to where we're providing services and neighborhood equity, where when we did the deep dive into the fit or sorry, i guess all of the administrative work plans, we talked a lot about what diana's group is doing around language access and, and, our upgrading our technology to be able to support broader language access with all of our communications, so i think that we have tried to share the ways that we are, are, doing the best that we can with our existing resources to have the eye on 2026, which is a which was a priority, communicate with the public and build trust, make sure that our services are equitable. so i, i think that

that's how we've tried to respond to that feedback. helpful, and maybe what i'll just share, sort of like a little bit of reflection on on my time on the board is that i think some of the most successful conversations we've had, staff and board, are where you all really bring us some meaningful trade offs, and you really ask for the board to make the tough decisions with you around. we can do this or we can do this. we can't do both. remember, we've had budget conversations like this. remember director kirschbaum leading a really sophisticated, thoughtful conversation during one of our board? i think all virtual board workshops where you teed up some really thoughtful trails, like, we can't do all these things, this or this, and i just don't feel this board has had a chance to evaluate any trade offs on the expenditure side of this budget through this process. and there are meaningful policy considerations and priorities that you all have made that this

board has not had a chance to have insight into or weigh in on that are legitimately policy decisions that this board is here to make. so just as an example, we have 35 transit fare inspectors. we're proposing to add another 35 transit fare inspectors. was that balanced against any other options. what were those balancing conversations? how do we decide that rose to the very top as opposed to anything else? and i think i guess i'll just express that i had assumed that we would be having a bit more of those sort of policy trade off conversations in the context of this budget exercise. we spent a lot of time on the $12 million revenue problem solving, which is important. but, in my view, sort of to the detriment of the board's attention being on the expenditure side of the, of the ledger. so i guess i just wanted to share that sort of feedback. well, i would say that and i think that the divisions would agree, the instructions that were given in at the beginning

of the budget cycle was no new expenditure. we can't afford it. so there, you know, the there were because the primary objective when you walk into a budget with a deficit, you're not and i'm not talking about the $13 million deficit, i'm talking about the $240 million deficit in year three, when i know that three years from now, i'm going to have unless we find another revenue solution, i'm going to have to cut $200 million out of $220 million out of the existing budget, which again, is larger than the entire administrative function of the agency. and larger than the entire streets division. there there, the primary focus was on how do we provide the best possible service that we can

within our existing envelope. and many of the choices that, have been made in the budget have been made because even though we have an annual budget, we don't start fresh and new like a newborn baby on july 1st. right? people who were employed on june 30th are still employed on july 1st. so if my payroll is $900 million on june 30th, it's still $900 million on july 1st. and so in a $1.4 billion budget you are correct. $900 million of choice has already been made because those people are there. in addition, $30 million of choice has already been made because that is the cost of my debt service. and i have made that 30 year commitment to bondholders to pay them interest on the money i have borrowed from them. i also have, i believe the number is $50 million in commitments for

retiree pension and health care, which i am legally obligated to pay, additionally, we have contracts that we have multiyear contracts for services that we have already entered into, that we will be an abrogation of an executed contract if we do not pay. and our five biggest contracts are for, paratransit, the, the computer system that manages all of our parking citations is our toe contract, and two more that off the top of my head that i am not remembering. but these are services that we have to provide . and in the cases of, you know, we are legally required to provide paratransit service. if i do not have a parking citation, so software, it will be very difficult for me to make any money off of parking citations, fines and to maintain , you know, to meet our legal obligations, we have to have the ability to tow. so there are you

are right that many of the choices that we have made have already been made because they are they are because we are not a fresh newborn baby every july 1st, and i think, you know, when we started this conversation, when we were $240 million in the hole and then when we, we, we cut our expenditure over $100 million. and so that was that was the policy space. that was the place to make decisions and choices and investments. but that policy space was absorbed by a loss, a loss of $30 million in revenue, an increase of a lot in on the tentative wage agreement that, you know, those two things together are another 100 million, another $100

million, essentially free, if i may. let me i want to try to answer the chair's question back on the on the six policy point that were brought up in the budget retreat. so let me see if i can actually bring this back to what we're doing with this budget. so first of all, i think one of the things that you got really spot on is we have no ability to add anything. all we're doing is rearranging and rearranging at the margin. that said, we have had a laser like focus on every single one of the key points that you brought up at the workshop and wrote in your blog. so first up was muni. as you note, we have rearranged the muni forward team with a laser focus on making muni fast, frequent, and reliable. that work has been widely successful. it is like printing cash to the extent that we're making any muni improvements, is because we're making the system faster, similarly, as we look at our polling results, muni was the

only government service last year that rose in voter esteem largely because of our reliability improvements. so one of the things that we knew is that we needed to keep a laser focus on maintenance, and we are so incredibly proud of the innovation in our maintenance team that is allowing us with the same number of resources to make the service so much more reliable. the second theme that you all hit on was street safety . we have been focused focusing every single one of our teams on street safety. so in addition to retooling the vision zero team and taking vacant positions in the streets team to focus on the key things both on the shop side and on the engineering side that we need for vision zero. we've taken the entirety of muni forward and focused every single one of those projects on vision zero. all of our muni forward projects are also vision zero projects. the entirety of our traffic signals budget is now focused on street safety, the

third topic was personal security. this is one of the few areas where we've been able to get an expansion in staffing, because the analysis that julie presented to you was able to demonstrate that we are not yet at the optimal number of transit fare inspectors. when you look at the revenue that they generate on the transit fare compliance side. so we're able to add significantly to transit fare inspectors, which not only help us bring in transit revenue, but also have a strong safety and personal security presence in our system. obviously the you know, the other thing that you talked about was innovation and efficiency. we have been demonstrate again and again some of the most innovative crews in our industry, especially on the maintenance side and also increasingly on the it side, the fifth theme that you brought up was communications. this is an area like we can't be adding a whole bunch of new communications, people, but we

can be smarter about making sure that the comms people that we are bringing in have the language and local cultural skills necessary in order to have authentic engagement rather than just, you know, hearing from people and then, you know, doing what we're ever going to do. and then finally, you know, a focus on the looming budget deficit. and this has also been an area where we've retooled everything in order to actually be able to have not only an analytical team that is capable of doing the work, but also a campaign team focused on figuring out how how on earth do we get at the november 24th and november 26th budget or elections? and more importantly, how do we win? because there's no point in having any of these conversations unless we can grow the pie and deal with the catastrophe that we are facing two years from now. so i would say we listened very carefully to the advice that you provided us at the end of january and structured our entire budget

around it. no, we're not adding lots of staff positions because we can't do that. but we've been really smart at retooling every single available vacancy in order to achieve all six of those goals. i have one more procedural question, maybe for, you or i don't know, for susan cleveland-knowles, and this is just trying to think creatively, is there any precedent for the board to approve a sort of option, a budget that is sort of with a contingency fee? so we would approve something that would be an ideal scenario, but if there was a greater need, then option b could kick in based on based on need. is there any precedent for that kind of thing? what generally we think about approval authority as an envelope. and so, you approve an

expenditure envelope within which all expenditure must fit. right? so you, you you can't, you can't have a budget of one, and then money comes in, you go up to 1.5, right? you have to have a budget of 1.5. and if the money doesn't come in, then you have to write during the year, manage to actuals and, i would say that when, when we do a budget, we actually load a budget into the system and that, when we spend throughout the year, expenditure is going against budget check. so you can't have optional you know, there is only one option in the system. and when we send the board the budget to the board of supervisors, we are sending them a single balanced budget that,

that being said, there is the concept of a budget reserve that the city uses, where certain items are put on budget reserve and contingent upon other, you know, there's a lot different things, a variety of different things, one reserve is the controller's reserve. and so that is often used if there's an uncertain amount of revenue. and so the revenue is included in the expenditures put on controllers, reserve and only the controller can release it and only the controller can release it when the revenue appears. and so like that's kind of what we did. that's what we do when, there's revenue that's maybe under litigation and we're connected, we collect the revenue and put it in an account and it's on controllers reserve and can't be spent. and you know, until the conditions of

the legislation that supported the budget are, are met. i'm just trying to think about how much uncertainty from so many different sources you're managing and the sort of contingency as a potential way to solve for that. okay. just in addition to what bree mentioned, your budget resolution has traditionally included a sort of delegation to the director and his staff to make changes as things arise. and the director and his directors report and items that he brings to you will make adjustments throughout the two years as needed. you know, at a 10% threshold discretion. that's helpful. okay okay. thank you. i don't have any further questions on the budget. and this is not an action item. so we can close this item up and please go on. although although i just want to make sure that you all know that we have to get a vote in two weeks. so i'm not

clear. it's not clear. i don't know if staff heard anything approaching consensus. this is your last opportunity to actually be able to ask questions or provide direction to us, because because we've got to vote in two weeks. you can i add so and bree, please, please feel free to weigh in, but you have two meetings left in this month to vote finally on the budget. but in order for staff and myself actually to prepare the legislation that supports your budget, we need direction to do that. i heard a not exactly sure where it was, but option six and seven, i don't know which got the majority, but so that does sound like you will not be voting on the 16th, and that will give us only one week to prepare the actual document for you to vote on. so you will

be you would need to tell us which option you want at your next meeting. if you don't tell us today. so i think the plan was that we would get that information today. if i read, please feel free to. yeah. i would also note that, while while the policy discussion is incredibly important, there is also a vast amount of technical work that has to be done. by by staff who have to make, make we call it loading, you know, putting into the system what the budget is. it has to be we then every change we make have to reconcile to make sure that budget and revenue match the documents. in fact, for april 16th, are are supposed to be completed by friday so that they can go through legal review and all of the, all of, you know,

like the necessary review. so there are a lot of technical steps. it's like, i think you guys vote and then you're like, done. and then i run back to the office. so there's, you know, a lot of work behind that happens after you guys make your decisions. i heard from the board conversation a request for a little bit more information in terms of some additional math on option six, so that that's sort of i didn't hear us land. i heard sort of an additional request for information. so and let me make sure that i understand that request. i think that request was, do you want me to restate it? that would be helpful. yes. so rerun the numbers with matching the taxi treatment of option six and seven. so that's eliminated as a factor. that's the same. and then we given that we still had a surplus of option six lower for the parking funds as much as you can. and see in order to balance the budget and just see where that gets us. yeah. so can

we bring that and option seven back on the 16th for the final decision? sure. okay thank you. and then bree does that. i am very worried about running out of time and overburdening staff. if we are, then bringing another option back in two weeks. therefore, we cannot have an affirmative vote in two weeks. therefore, when do we actually take a vote on the budget that we can pass? and does that actually give us enough time to do all the additional steps that we need to do? and we would take a vote on the 23rd, which would give us seven days. but if we're still if we're providing multiple options on the 23rd, can we actually take. oh, no, no, we would provide multiple these multiple options would be on the 16th, which would allow one more option from the 23rd. i will say that, technically i'm

closed out of the system as of friday, but, i will have to ask the comptroller to reopen the system for me to enter the board's final decisions. it will it it will be very tight and staff will be working very hard. can i can i say something? i just really don't want to overburden what am i gone? okay can we just move forward with option seven? that's the only option we can move forward with. i can see creating more studying and analysis will not give us a happy option. eight we will be. we're still going to need to be option seven. and we will run out of time. the reason i prefer to wait is for director henderson to be back in the room. i shared some quotes from her from our conversation

yesterday, but i don't want to represent where she is in this conversation right now because it's a dynamic conversation, so i'd prefer to wait for her to be back with us on the 16th for the full board to make the decision. did she ask for an extra calculations of the whole team to go spend two more weeks of, just i don't know how many full time staff hours are we going to burn again? well, through the chair, i wonder if we might take a recess. and brie, how long would it take you to run? or could we could we do the closed item? yeah. why don't we? and then cover that. why don't we? yeah can we do that and then come back? yeah, i just need to. i'm looking for a staff person, but i hopefully they're in the back. we did bring our laptops for reasons, so i just have to track down that person. okay. that's okay with you, deputy city attorney okay. so let's go on to item 12 and do our closed session. and then we can come back if we have some numbers available. thank you. item 12

discussion and vote pursuant to admin code six 767 .10 d. yes s as to whether to invoke the attorney client privilege and conduct a closed session conference with legal counsel. we do need to vote. we do need to vote. we will. we do need to vote. yes. we need to open public comment for our decision to go into closed session, not seeing anyone running to the podium for that, we can close public comment. may i have a motion and a second? please go into closed session. second, roll on the motion to go into closed session. director heminger heminger i director hinsey i director. so i so i director tarlov i tarlov i director kahina i kahina i can, i can

jerry. can do you want to do items 13 and 14 and then come back to 11? yes let's go ahead and take item 13. announcement of closed session. thank you. all right. item 13. the board met in closed session to discuss item three and closed and voted to settle the matter. item 14 motion to disclose or not disclose the information discussed in closed session. motion not to disclose. is there a second? second? great. please

call the roll on the motion not to disclose. director heminger a heminger i director hinsey i kinsey i director so i so i director tarloff i tarloff i director kikina i kikina i chair i can i can i thank you that motion passes bringing you back to item 11. a seafoam water i think we have we have some additional analysis to share the, i do have it on the. there we go. okay. so in a world where we apply indexing only, but we exclude the cash fare so that there is no impact to cash fares, the clipper discount would remain $0.50. the multiplier would remain 32, we would continue to do the rpm cost neutral ppe, which has been

in the same and all the options and we and exclude fees for taxi drivers. we could then bring parking fines down by 9, 9% instead of ten, and we would have $100,000 deficit. so we're almost there, but not quite. i'm sorry. oh that's actually a there we go. okay. thanks. what's the increment? every percent of parking fines equals how much dollars. oh, you know. having a real moment with the networking.

about 2 million bucks. and. yeah, about 2 million bucks. chair, man. yeah please. go ahead, go ahead. i'm just looking for a number. yeah go ahead. so just back to my initially poorly worded. and i will word it more carefully this time. what happens if in year one the fare goes to 2.75. and in the in year two it goes it's

2.75. do we get the i mean we would not get the reduction in the multiplier back. correct. as i recall it was 0.2 to the bad. but i have to i think it was, it was 500,000 to the bad. i have it here. i have printouts in the back. oh yeah. you sent that to me, didn't you? i did, it was 0.5. it fell 0.5 to the bad. yeah, yeah, yeah. so that doesn't would that make up the 100,000, i. oh your, i need the .

question. oh, sorry. your question is, if we reduce the clipper discount. to i believe that that would make up the point. one. yes yes. and i just also observe that in the other scenario is including the staff report, the taxi fees is listed as 1.2 million. but in this what's on the screen now it's listed as 1.1 million. because the 1 million it's the $1 million reduction due to not include adding taxi, i'll just restate it's exactly the same

wording, but what's in the staff report yields 1.2 million. and what's on the screen now yields 1.1 million. because in the well in the original option off of option six, it was we were asked to do, in that is the option where we indexed everything and we include that the i believe option six was director. oh, wait a minute of, in the option where the concept was equality, where everyone pays and everyone pays exactly the same, that was indexing and including the taxi driver fees. and when we include the taxi driver fees, it was one two and it was, oh, no, it was two two, and now it's 111 and it was $1 million. so maybe it should have been one two. maybe it should have been one, two. and we're exactly, exactly

balancing. that could be the case. let me see. kahina i just oh, sorry. director tarlow, did you want to speak to this now? sorry, i just, it will just. i have a just a math question. when we're talking about percentage increases year over year is when we're talking about a 18% difference over two years to the fees and fines versus a 16% difference, the is the is the percentage, tagged to the original fee. in other words, it goes up 8. and then there's an additional 8. that was it's not going up 8% of the over the year

over year. so it's year two minus year one divided by year one or year three minus year two divided by year two. right. because it would be more if it was correct. okay. thank you, let me go back to this one. my own idea. director kahina, do you want to offer your comments? just a procedural question, just, if we decide to have an alternative proposal. so what i understand in terms of the sequence of events that have happened that have landed us here, at least, is that we did have a robust conversation with not just, different board members, but also with members from the board of supervisors

and also the mayor's office, just to get input and feedback on our different proposals, will we have to do another session of feedback with, with folks if we decide, like i see us landing on like an option eight here, maybe , i just wanted to understand, like, what are the implications of that, in terms of the timeline around building consensus with our other partners, all the members of the board as well? got it, with the idea that we would vote in two weeks, perhaps on something with the idea that we may vote in two weeks, for the proposal, we give you direction around. got it. question. did you want to speak to that as well? director tomlin? okay okay. and then. oh, yeah. director. so hop in. god

sorry. okay. i was trying to wait for everyone to speak, and that i can say i am still thinking that we should just go with option seven with after appreciating everything that we've done, going to reverse another round of repatterning will only make us even more vulnerable. right and i really think that with the time the calendar doesn't stop. we're just going to keep spinning, keep moving on us. so we i'm holding firm with option seven. and thank you for the scenario study any of this, yeah. that's just if you got my vote, i'm going to vote for option seven. i really appreciate the purity of going through this, but the temperature here is telling us we need to be seven. we need to go. we just need to go. yeah.

this is nothing about me. i'm just looking at, like, everything else happening. and, vice chair, you actually ask a really good question, so i just kind of that kind of illumined me to share some of my personal perspectives. yeah, i think i'm, i'm pretty comfortable with staff taking the conversation today, taking all the other feedback you've received through all of your other meetings, and then coming back to the board with a recommendation and that would that would include being able to, brief director henderson as well, who's not here today and take that feedback into account. and coming back either on the 16th or the 23rd, whatever is logistically feasible for you and coming back with the recommended option, does that is that a workable path forward, let me answer your original question, which was, yes, there was a typo, taxis without drivers is 1.2. so at 9% you exactly balance with inflation

indexing no change to the clipper discount, no change to multiplier, exclude cash. fair okay okay. now that i have that out, ask me your question. one more time and i'll just i just want to say thank you so much for how hard you're working. and i know this is like very, very stressful to do this all right now. and i don't think it's ideal. so i just want to acknowledge that it's very, very challenging and it's very stressful. so thank you. and i apologize that our inquiries are causing you stress. it is the job okay. director henry, but could you just repeat what you were asking for about i was just saying that we've had a discussion today. we've had inputs. some folks are. i'm hearing some people prefer option six. some people prefer option seven. we have some new information here. you know, do we need to make this decision right now in the heat of this moment, can we take a breath? it feels like we can take a breath. you all can go back and thoughtfully consider everything you've heard today. talk to director henderson. consider the

other feedback, and bring back your recommended option in two weeks. i'm comfortable with that path forward. i will say there are six of you and from what it appears to me, is there isn't exactly 5050 split. so so therefore i do not feel like i have guidance from the board. and let me also be clear, we have a strong staff recommendation in based upon everything that we've heard and that is for option seven. so legally it is possible for us to go back and develop multiple options, come back to you again and then come to a third meeting on the 23rd. that would fulfill the requirements of the law. it will break staff up. so our expectation for this meeting was that we would arrive at a consensus option that would give staff the opportunity to do the staff work necessary to develop the legislation in detail at the budget, come back for a formal approval next week. i, i mean,

not following that path opens us up to, well, it will require our staff working all night long for multiple nights. yes, and opens us up to significant error because it requires that everything wait until the last minute. right. so what i'm hearing from you, you don't want to do it on the 23rd, and that's fine. that's consistent with what i was just offering, which is that you take this feedback from today. you have a conversation with director henderson, and you bring back your recommendation on the 16th for us to vote on. well, but if i mean what we're hoping, what the expectation was for this meeting is that there would emerge, if not a consensus, then at least four votes so that we could do the staff work. otherwise we're doing we're still carrying multiple options forward and taking a tremendous risk. if we don't have four votes at the next board meeting like this, this is the time ideally to converge, right? like

the information that we've heard today does not change the staff recommendation. if i understand properly, it sounds like, if we don't give clear direction today, or the clear, the, the point of giving clear direction today is for staff and the city attorney's office to create a resolution for us, and that takes an abundant amount of time. just to even do that. i have, wednesday. thursday. i mean, staff are sitting in the office right now waiting to be told, waiting for me to give direction. and i would point out that we are a may 1st department. we are in the city's budget system. the city's budget system is controlled by the comptroller, and they control our access in and out of the system and the city balances

around us because we're a component unit of the city. and work orders have to balance and what we do, you know, the choices that we make impact other departments. so every ripple it's like you throw a rock and the ripples just kind of go right. so it seems like just based on the timeline, that it's important for you to have direction, assuming let's say that we want to toss out a different proposal that also takes time to build consensus around. and so even if that were the case, if we did go down that path, we would still have to deliberate on and discuss that that new proposal on the 16th, and, and my worry is that it goes off the rails on the 16th and then we're pushing it till the 23rd, i would also say that there, is a long list of items

that we need to do to just close the budget. like, you know, we're still making entries into the system to, to get it to, to do the work that we're doing now. because you know, another department will do something that impacts us, right? so i still have to deal with the $10 million news that i got friday afternoon at five as well. right? this is unfortunately, this is not the only variable i'm dealing with. this is one of the variables i'm dealing with. and it tends to impact all of the other variables. and we are at the time of the budget where, i refer to it as pencils down, like even if the numbers change, even if somebody comes to me tomorrow and is like, you know, i want an f ten, not a sedan, i'm like, well, too bad you chose a sedan. that's what you get. choose better next time. so you know, we are we are getting to pencils down. we are, we are

at pencils down right. i don't know if i should be speaking in this kind of capacity, but i really hope that we all really need to read the temperature of san francisco. i got to say that one more time because, if we're going to go back, we run out of time for sure. technically, we really run out of time. but then also it's going to send us to another very vulnerable spot that we will we don't know how where it's going to end, where it's going to land. we might because, you know, i'm just saying i just really want us to really move forward and actually take care of the bigger picture of things instead of, i mean, i'm kind of happy we have a little spare change. i like to see the whole option that actually doesn't look red. you know, there's not nothing bleeding with this one. we're bleeding a little bit. you know,

and then we're going to be extremely vulnerable going back. so that's what i'm trying to say. i probably shouldn't really say it, yeah. yeah, i guess i don't see the need for us to come to consensus. this is a tough decision. and i'm okay if the board is not all in agreement on this. this needs to pass with four votes. so i heard i guess that that is why i'm comfortable with you moving forward. i think i heard three people say yes to seven, and one person say they'd be open to seven. so i heard, well if i may. so i think that works as long as i get four next time. what happens if i come on the 16th and i present something and i do not get four, then what do i do? yeah, well, that doesn't leave a lot of, that leaves me to do a lot of work in four, well, items are due the friday before this is tuesday, so it would leave me wednesday and

thursday to retool the entire the budget to be prepared to post with 72 hours notice. and i think the challenge here is that, we load our revenue by account, each different revenue type is in a different account. and so even though this is transit fares, there are actually ten different transit accounts because single ride fare, monthly passes, passports, cable car tickets, discount passes, they're all tracked in a different account and a, indexing each one of i index each one of those separately and load the revenue separately for each account. and then on the parking fines and parking fines are in one one account, but they are in the streets fund and the transit fares are in the transit fund. and each fund has to be balanced at the fund level. so when you're moving, when the proportionality between whether transit and streets is paying for it changes, i then have to rebalance at the fund level,

which requires a whole nother series of entries transferring money between funds. and i cannot submit a budget that does not balance at the fund level. oh, did you want to speak? director tarloff again? sorry, she was in the queue so. well, i just one thing that hasn't really been, talked about is, is the preponderance of our of our budget is labor, and these are jobs and these are san francisco jobs, and these are middle class jobs, many of them, and i and i'm typically in favor of, of protecting jobs. and, you know, voting to increase our revenue so that jobs will be, continuing is not is a very good thing that i'm in favor of, i'm, i'm with,

director. so and just sticking with option seven, i think that there's been a lot of, really very good, back and forth between the board and the staff and the staff. clearly, feels strongly that this is a good path forward. i, i in the new option that we were just looking at, i'm really missing that. reduction in the multipliers. i think that that's something that is, is, you know, potentially really meaningful, and, and i just cannot get away from the idea that i think we're in the position that we're in because we weren't able to pass. the last measure we would is that is that accurate? and so, i just

i'm really i'm very concerned about that. and, and, you know, i know that we don't hear that advocacy from those constituents so much in, in the board meetings unless there's something like, you know, extension of meter hours. you know, i, i didn't come to those meetings, but i can imagine they were a little spicy, and, and, and, you know, and anyway, i don't want to belabor the point, but the only other thing that i wanted to say is that, to kind of echo, what was said earlier, people are asking why about fare compliance, you know, and a lot. and it was very interesting to understand that, you know, a lot of the fares is, feedback was

about compliance. that's what i'm experiencing as i, as i meet with different groups that people are really concerned about, that it doesn't feel fair, to pay, you know, pay and then see people just walking on the bus, so, that's really all i , all i wanted to say thank you. thank you. director hemminger. thank you, madam chair. look i'm trying to better understand the difference, between the two respective positions. i think we're down to two. i'm going to ask for the slide again, bri. sure. which one up? eight. oh, the one that we just did in the back room. that's eight. okay, christine, we don't use the phrase back room. that's that's not a good one. or whatever. the staff room, the area in the back. so one difference is the

parking fines is 9% instead of 8, right. or 9% and ten instead of 10. comparing seven and eight now. so in seven it's 8. and in option eight it's 9, right? so 1. that's the difference. and then with respect to clipper, the clipper discount is. unaffected by corruption. eight correct. but with option seven it's 25 correct. sense right. correct. okay. and that stays through the budget period. correct. now now the thing that makes my hair hurt is the multiple layers. so can someone walk me through. sure what the difference is between option seven and eight on multipliers. sure. so the multiplier, the

cost of the monthly pass is the cost of the clipper, the fare times, an assumed number of rides. to make numbers easy. let's pretend the fare is $2, and it's. let's pretend it's ten rides. so in that world, a monthly pass would be $20. if we change the multiplier from 10 to 9, we, instead of doing two times ten, we would do two times nine, which would be 18. so the monthly pass would be $2 less. so in option seven where we reduce the multiplier. yeah, the monthly pass is cheaper than option eight. and the low income monthly pass is also cheaper because the low income monthly pass, the lifeline pass is half of the monthly pass. and the same would be true actually, for all of our discount passes,

disabled riders, seniors, life director tarlov you were you like that right? that's that's what you're looking for. yeah, i'm looking for that. and i'm also just as we look into the future, i'm looking for more programs that reach people who can't afford the, you know, lifeline pass. but our, you know. right. there's just a huge swath that right now what about for option eight? what happens to the multipliers? nothing. nothing. they're they're unchanged. correct okay. so what if we were to try to copy surmise on the nine or the 8% for parking fines is seven is the compromise. that's the cop. yeah yours. is the compromise correct. sometimes the compromise or has to compromise. well you then you would go into the negative because option

eight right now is exactly balanced. and so if we reduce the cost of the monthly pass you will be pushing yourself into the negative. well or you'll be pushing park or you'll be pushing parking fines back, i would have to. i mean, again, the i, i'm very frustrated and i'm going to talk about it for a second because i am very frustrated that we have been put in this position where we are arguing over scraps in a huge budget that faces an enormous challenge in three years. we know it's coming. we can see the train coming right at us. and at this point, we don't have a plan to get off the tracks, so i think it's far more important for us to be having a policy discussion about policy and not about rounding errors in this budget of ours. but that's where

we are. so look, i, i would like to try to find consensus if it can be found. i don't think it's the end of the world if we just have to vote, but look, if we need a two thirds vote for the next ballot measure we pass, it would probably be good to have a two thirds consensus on this board. so i think we've got to learn that trick, so i'm wondering again whether or not brea, your compromise, would work, abs isn't, well, you tell me why. why does 9% versus 8% what's what's magical there, why do we. i don't think i rise to eight. oh, because i was. why isn't it six? because i was looking at the number, the balanced, the budget. so basically i my approach was to take all of the policy feedback

that i heard from the board. right. i heard that some people, you know, i heard the desire to return to indexing. i heard the desire to do something with the multiplier. we have our kind of foundational principle of wanting to, close the distance between cash fare and clipper for equity reasons. and so that was kind of where i started. and then taxi and ad rep, those haven't really changed much since the workshop. so essentially, however much we spend on transit has to be made up by parking. so when we choose transit, a package of transit options that is more expensive, the amount that parking citation does go up, goes up, has to balance and the amount that if we choose a less expensive package of transit options, then parking citations can come down because there's less. now look, i share one of jeff's concerns and that's the time crunch, and

what i'm what i'm wondering is, let's say you come up with a staff recommendation and you present it to us, and we want to amend it, are we certainly got to be allowed to do that. otherwise, you're not much of a policy body. if you can never do anything but vote yes or no, but what's what's your answer to that question? council thank you for that question. it depends on two things. one is the noticing sort of the legal side and one is the operational side. so if the amendments were very complicated, for example, i think that would be a problem. i'll let bree talk to that. on the technical side, from a noticing perspective, i think we would need to notice the staff proposal, but then also notice, whatever the highest potential

fees would be as a, as an option, we couldn't notice seven and eight and pick it. the legislation that we are drafting is setting all of the fees at a particular amount at a minimum. it's a lot of work just to do. yeah yeah, i think it's not out side of the realm of possibility for sure. just how the discussion would play out would and could lead to, needing to come back to you for either. i think i can solve probably i can solve for the legal problem. i'm just not sure that we can have because this staff report and all of the budget is so large, it's not as if we could have two side by side, documents. i don't

think i would say my hope in this budget process was to start the discussion in the end of january, and to take your feedback as we went and incorporate it as we went. and i do think the fact that we've iterated eight options from one does demonstrate that there's been a lot of back and forth over the last three months, and i would actually argue that this has been a profoundly robust policy discussion. not at all a rounding error, because what we are precisely doing is, is looking at the policy options between transit, parking, taxi, like we this was a classic public policy exercise of iterating options and selecting one. i'm not sure we agree about that, but even if we did, my point is the purpose of a policy exercise is not to get to 0.000. if you're a little negative and you've got to go nip and tuck

some other department, that that's something you do. it is. but you want to avoid a crazy policy result, because you're driving in a number. so again, it seems to me we've narrowed the gap considerably, and look, i'm willing to go either way, candidly, just to move, ahead, there are things i like more about eight, there are things i could live with in seven. so for the good of the order, madam chair, if that's a path you'd like to trod, i also am, mindful that one of our colleagues isn't here. and i do feel badly about that. this is not an action item, though. you're just looking for. it's not an action item. better crystallized direction, right, director henzi, do you want to weigh in? and maybe i'll just pause and

say, i would love to wrap this conversation up very quickly. it's been long enough. so let's just maybe have a couple more brief comments. as i, i guess as i've said before, i think you've gotten some clear direction. i trust you all to go back, incorporate the direction and come back, i do, i do not feel that you need to be worried about getting a critical mass of support votes when you bring this back. no one is interested in torpedo torpedoing your budget deadline. okay, director hinsey, yeah, i think i'm in the same boat as as, director hemminger that there are, there are things i like about option eight. there are also things i like about options seven, so with that said, i think there's enough that i, i find compelling about, having to deal with the,

to, to deal with the, to feel okay about what we're doing with the what we're doing with the corporate account, i think there's enough supplemental that that have come up with, particularly around the lifeline path that i feel comfortable enough going forward with option seven, i, i also feel like the path forward to, to increase the enrollment, of folks in our discount program that i think we should try to have regular report backs from staff to see what that number is, so that that will help us. maybe come to grips with the fact that we are

doing fare increases in either option. so, but candidly, like driving home here, i could go either way, but but i, i am sort of to drag ourselves point sensitive to the fact that you've been getting other inputs , from folks that might not necessarily come to our meetings . and i think you come up with an option that has, that has balanced those fairly well with some of the incorporating the board feedback, also with the lifelong path and the, monthly pass, but i am wolf. i'm also sensitive to the fact that director henderson's not here,

and so i would like to give her an option, an opportunity to weigh in somehow other than through director and director, the staff, so, but, madam chair, i i'm i'm comfortable with option seven, and i'm also very sensitive to the fact that, i don't if there is consensus around option seven at the moment, i or i really am sensitive to staff working as hard as they're going to have to produce two options alongside each other for us to consider. yeah, yeah. okay. thank you. director henry. director would you like the final word? sure. this is not easy. and i know

that there's been a lot of advocacy, from different community members, and different folks that, different city partners to and folks in the city family that have weighed in on all these different options and choices, and so i share the frustration of my fellow board members that nobody wants to be in this situation. this is not ideal for anybody. in a perfect world, we would have robust transit services. we would have you know, like, i honestly would not like to charge anybody for transit. you know, i think there's a lot of different things that i would love to see in the future for our, our agency, but we're just not there right now. and we have these constraints right now, i am really, i feel very, it's frustrating that we lost that bond measure, a few years ago. and that two thirds vote is something that's still, like, high up in my mind right now. like how do we reach that? and if option seven is a way for us

to maybe not guarantee that, but get us in a position where we're better situated to reach that goal. that is something that i'm keenly interested in, because i do think that we need to figure out how to sustain this organization, how to sustain this agency in a way that is that is that helps the stream, that helps us think about interesting projects to do in the future. and we're just not there right now because of battles that we've lost in the past. and i don't want to be in that situation two years from now. i don't. and so i see the winds that option seven has. we have the multiplier. we have again, we have free muni for youth, which is huge. we have free muni for seniors that are eligible. we have, you know, all these different, i do believe that there is, you know, a deep in support now to amplify enrollment into our fare subsidy programs. and that is also a huge win from my perspective as well. and from a policy perspective, i am thinking about

how to create a more sustainable agency and revenue source for this agency. we have been asked time and time again, find new revenue sources and this is a way to do this. this is a pathway to do that. and so i know i appreciate all the incredible amount of work that staff has put in trying to negotiate every single percentage in every single dollar to arrive at some, some point that has general consensus , not just from this body but from the city family as well. that is hard work. that is very hard work to do. and so i, i feel compelled to say like then i would support, option seven. for all those reasons, i do feel that it's still we still have a lot of winds. is it the most ideal? no. can we do more? ideally, yes. but we also have to have the revenue sources to do more. and without that, we can only dream so much and we can only do so much, and we can

only achieve so much. so i'm really, you know, that is my north star right now. thinking about the greater future of this agency and really positioning ourselves to, to, you know, as, as director so keeps saying read the rest of san francisco. let's understand where the temperature is right now, because it is so critical for us to get a two thirds vote in any future ballot measure, and this is what's going to get us there. i know this is frustrating. it is not ideal. i just want to say that for the record, this is not an ideal option. it is not. but it's the best that we can do right now. and that's where that's where i'm at with this. okay. thank you so much. i think you've heard our direction. and just please do make sure to check in with director anderson and make sure she has a chance to weigh in. and we look forward to the 16th. all right, everyone, we are adjourned. thank you.

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>> good morning everyone. welcome. i'm katie lamont and with me isroxany huey and together we are leading tndc as interim co ceo. so pleased to have you with us this beautiful day to celebrate the reopening of ambassador and ritz hotel. exactly! this day has been a long time coming, and it is so wonderful to share with all you who help make it happen. as many know, tndc experienced a tragic loss with the sudden passing of our ceo. it is meaningful our first ribbon cutting without him is on the pavilion of this historic building. the bricks of the ambassador have witnessed pain,