San Francisco voters this November will get to decide if the mayor and the Board of Supervisors should split the responsibility of appointing SFMTA board members.
San Francisco voters this November will get to decide if the mayor and the Board of Supervisors should split the responsibility of making appointments onto the City’s transportation agency’s board.
Supervisors on Tuesday voted 6-5 to place the charter amendment onto the ballot, which would allow the mayor to appoint four members of the Municipal Transportation Agency’s Board of Directors while supervisors would get to appoint three members.
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Supervisors Scott Wiener, Katy Tang, Mark Farrell, Malia Cohen and London Breed voted against the charter amendment.
Currently, the mayor gets to appoint all seven members to the Board of Directors, but appointees still must go through the Board of Supervisor’s Rules Committee. If the committee moves the appointment forward, the full Board of Supervisors can decide whether or not to the confirm the appointment.
The last appointment confirmed by the Board of Supervisor was Lee Hsu who confirmed last month, with supervisors Cohen and Aaron Peskin voting against his appointment.
Supervisor David Campos, who supports the charter amendment, which Supervisor Norman Yee introduced, said he had attempted a similar charter amendment back in 2010, but it never made to the ballot.
This is was at a time when the SFMTA had cut 10 percent of Muni service due to budget constraints.
Former Board of Supervisors President David Chiu and then Mayor Gavin Newsom struck a deal to restore the service and the promise of reforms in return for Chiu to pull the charter amendment.
Campos said:
“I think if you ask the people of the City and County of San Francisco if those reforms have actually been real and become engrained in how this agency operates, I think the most San Franciscans would say that that reform hasn’t happened.”
He said this would give more Muni riders and residents affected by the decisions of the transit agency more say in how the SFMTA operates:
“It’s about making it more accountable, more transparent.”
Wiener said voters back in 1999 had approved Proposition E, which formed the SFMTA and also gave supervisors less control over Muni. He said going back before the SFMTA existed would not be good for The City:
“For many years, the Board of Supervisors had significant control over and meddled with what at the time was Muni and we saw the results of a deteriorating transit system and all sorts of problems.”
Weiner also said Prop. E specifically put in the seven-vote threshold to reject the transit agency’s budget so that supervisors would not interfere:
“This measure, in addition to splitting appointments, will make it much much easier and tempting for the Board of Supervisors to meddle in the MTA’s budget.”
Wiener added:
“I think we would quickly go back to the bad old days where the MTA is not basing transportation decisions on good transportation policy but rather not the political whims of the Board of Supervisors.”
Yee said it was the board’s job to meddle:
“We could use the word meddling as much as we want if you want to call it that. Our responsibility is to meddle and our fiduciary responsibility.”
Jerold serves as a reporter and San Francisco Bureau Chief for SFBay covering transportation and occasionally City Hall and the Mayor's Office in San Francisco. His work on transportation has been recognized by the San Francisco Press Club. Born and raised in San Francisco, he graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in journalism. Jerold previously wrote for the San Francisco Public Press, a nonprofit, noncommercial news organization. When not reporting, you can find Jerold taking Muni to check out new places to eat in the city.
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These guys are fiddling while SF burns, or I should say Berns. People are fed up with the bad Muni service and cutbacks in stops and seats.
Don’t know if anyone is reading this, but, this last week I think there were at least three major public transit breakdowns that caused major delays and pushed people to the edge of their wits. BART and the Muni were both at a standstill for an hour this morning. Nothing about this subway system is reliable. Only the independent motor vehicle that can change routes is useful in these circumstances. Now that the Federal government has declared war on California, we need to stop all unnecessary construction that impedes traffic flow and concentrate the money elsewhere. The best place to fight this is in the budget committees and meetings.
I have a much better idea. Place a measure on the ballot to disestablish the SFMTA entirely, putting parking enforcement back under SFPD and make Muni its own entity, which will be accountable directly to City Hall. The SFMTA is a hideously bloated, top-heavy bureaucracy with grossly overpaid management. The SFMTA needs to be put to a quick death.
Supervisor Scott Wiener has spent the last 4 years whining about Muni and now that he has a chance to do something about it he runs away and hides. The people are demanding change from the SFMTA because the city no longer functions.
San Francisco is now rated the third worst in the country for parking the second worst for driving and the city is ontinuing to GRIDLOCK traffic with “improvement” projects that increase our property taxes and rents. People are fed up with the “engineered” traffic congestion. A recent poll by the Bay Area Council reports that 34 percent of city residents are planning to move move away, citing high housing costs and GRIDLOCKED traffic as reasons. When the people leave, so will the businesses and all of the tax revenue that is needed to run a city.
Spot-on! The ‘engineered’ traffic congestion is part of the war on powered transportation. SFMTA should be disestablished, so a ballot initiative will be required for this.
Every year the SFMTA increases their budget and their salaries under the guise of improving transit and every
year transit deteriorates.
In November 2003 voters passed Prop K, a half-cent local sales tax for transportation. The sales tax was intended to fund everything from signals to streetcars, bicycles to boulevards, and pedestrian safety improvements to paving. Prop K was forecast to generate $2.35 billion (in year 2003 dollars) in revenue over 30 YEARS and to leverage or match close to $10 billion in federal, state, and other local funds to fully fund the projects
In 2014 The Mayor and Board of Sups conned the public into passing Prop A & B. Prop A incurs $1 billion in new debt (principal plus interest) with no legal commitment to Muni projects—cutting more buses in neighborhoods while raising our property taxes and rents. Prop B passed mandated an annual increase in funds for transportation and safer streets based on population growth. The $48 million increase to the SFMTA’s budget also includes $7.2 million from the agency’s share of the general fund, a result of greater tax revenue from a booming economy.
While SFMTA (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency) pleads lack of funds, cuts Muni service and raises fares/ fees/ fines, 490 of its employees make over $100,000 per year—eight over $200,000, including its
Director at $305,000. Twenty-five SFMTA managers earn more than the Governor of California.
Considering that San Francisco used to be the “City that knows How”, we certainly forgot how to manage the flow of traffic. Under the current regime of the SFMTA San Francisco went from the easiest to travel around in city to the 3rd worst traffic city in the US. We can do better. Thanks to the Supervisors who are giving us a chance to prove it.
SFMTA engineering/planning personnel are deliberately disrupting the flow of traffic in an effort to engineer socially.
no