San Francisco voters approved a measure to tax Uber and Lyft to help fund Muni, but the measure got fewer votes than a larger business-tax measure, so it won’t take effect. That leaves Muni in a terrible financial bind, one so bad that the SFMTA is even talking about cutting cable-car lines, which are a key part of the tourist industry, which is only slowly starting to come back.
The issue is urgent; no time to wait for the next ballot. And with Donald Trump in the White House, the odds that federal money will be available to help is miniscule.
Edward Mason, who spends hours watching the giant tech shuttles come through his Noe Valley neighborhood, often parking illegally or lacking the proper permits, brought up a fascinating idea at the last SFMTA meeting:
There are at least 250 of the Google Buses running around the city these days. They are, in effect, giant taxicabs. A permit to operate a taxi in San Francisco costs $250,000.
The math is simple: Charge each of them for a cab permit, and there’s an instant $62.5 million to prop up Muni until the city can figure out a long-term plan.
I don’t think this would even require a vote of the people, or an act by the supes. The SFMTA could just vote to classify the buses as mega-taxis, charge them the medallion fees (or create a new fee system), and collect the money.
Maybe Google and Facebook and the other big tech giants would sue. That would be a nice look, no? The richest corporations in the world trying to shut down the cable cars?
Consumer alert: Huge water bills are starting to arrive in the mailboxes of San Francisco Public Utilities Commission customers. Former Sup. Tom Ammiano just got his, he notes on Facebook, and it was more than $1,700.
The problem: The SFPUC system had some kind of glitch, and for as long as ten months or more, some people didn’t get a water bill. Now the city wants to collect all that back debt.
If you get one of those huge bills, you can ask for a payment plan—but you still have to pay off the money. Which means you’ll be paying two water bills a month, one for your current use and one for the back debt (which exists because the city screwed up).
Most people pay their bills as they come in, and don’t track services that they aren’t billed for. So this isn’t the fault of the customers, some of whom are going to find this a serious financial hardship.
The bills also say that if people don’t pay on time, they will get an extra delinquency charge—which seems totally unfair.
“There should be an amnesty,” Ammiano told me.
Look for a hearing at the Board of Supes on this soon.
The Board of Supes Budget and Finance Committee heard testimony last week on Sup. Hillary Ronen’s measure that would create a fund for local workers who were stiffed by employers—and the stunning thing was how common wage theft is in San Francisco.
For more than an hour, people lined up, mostly speaking in Chinese and Spanish, to describe how employers had failed to pay wages, failed to pay overtime, failed to allow meal breaks—and then walked away, shut down, declared bankruptcy, and stole from their workers, who had to pay rent and buy food for their kids, thousands of dollars.
In the past three years, the Budget and Legislative Analyst concluded, the amount of money unscrupulous employers took from their workers is at least $2.3 million.
A tiny amount of the city’s budget—but a huge deal to people who are constantly struggling to survive in this city, people whose lives are uprooted if they lose one paycheck.
The Office of Labor Standards Enforcement and the budget analyst said this would cost the city some money, for new workers to administer the fund. In the short term, the penalties OSLE would get from crooked employers wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost. The net new price to the city: $1.3 to $1.7 million.
More aggressive enforcement might cut the number of workers who had wages stolen—and the $1.7 million is such a tiny, tiny fraction of the city’s budget that it hardly seems to be an issue. At the same committee meeting, the supes approved contracts worth more than $800 million to a series of private companies, providing plumbing supplies, baggage handling systems at the airport, Muni train control systems … all, I’m sure, things the city needs. Maybe all those bids were perfectly scrutinized, and there’s no waste at all in nearly a billion dollars worth of public money going to private companies.
But maybe there’s $1.7 million somewhere for some of the most vulnerable workers in the city, who are getting cheated every day.
Mayor London Breed will make what should be her final appearance for Question Time before the full board Tuesday/19, and nobody had any questions for her. She will be able to give what amounts to a farewell address. I doubt she will mention that many of her previous appearances have been contentious, sometimes hostile, as progressive supes sought to discuss policy issues and she tried to dismiss them.
That’s part of why she won’t be doing this anymore.
The Planning Commission will hear Thursday/21 a proposal by Breed and Sup. Matt Dorsey that’s designed to encourage conversion of office buildings to housing downtown. It would
exempt certain types of projects in the downtown area that replace non-residential uses with residential uses from development impact fees and requirements, including the Inclusionary Housing fee.
I get that it makes sense to turn downtown into a residential area, since the strategy the city has pursued for at least 50 years of relying on downtown office space for finance, insurance, real estate, corporate headquarters and tech has completely collapsed.
But let’s take a step back here: The idea of constructing new housing is that it will bring prices down. Maybe that’s not true downtown; maybe the city just wants to turn that area into a hub for very expensive apartment and condos (and it’s not cheap to turn offices into housing).
But if new housing is supposed to help address the affordability crisis—and if, as the Yimbys say, affordable housing is linked to new market-rate housing—why are we eliminating the entire inclusionary housing program for downtown buildings?
Also: Development impact fees exist for a reason. They aren’t just random taxes levied on developers: They help cover the cost of the impacts these projects have on, say, Muni. Take a vacant office building, turn it into housing for 500 people, and some of them will take the bus around town. That will add demand on Muni service.
The office projects already paid some modest transit impact fees, but will residential conversion add more impact to Muni? That’s why the city does nexus studies.
All of that would be bypassed by the Breed/Dorsey plan.
The Planning Commission meeting starts at noon.
The San Francisco Police Department has no clear general order for cops when they encounter people with limited English proficiency, the Department of Police Accountability reports.
The agency said a 17-year-old general order has expired, and the new version doesn’t include specific instructions for local cops.
That can create all sorts of problems, of course. Here’s one the Department of Justice cites:
A bystander witnessed four men carrying a rolled-up rug to a van and saw a leg fall out. She intervened when the men dragged a young girl toward the vehicle. Arriving police were confronted with a dead body at the bottom of staircase and witnesses that only spoke Telugu, a language of south-central India. Due to the emergency, officers used one of the involved men as an interpreter and he convinced the police they were trying to rush the girls to the hospital. The death was later ruled an accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. A month later, an anonymous letter about the death led to an investigation which revealed the interpreter conducted a 15-year human trafficking scheme and had forced almost 100 women into slavery.
The Police Commission will discuss the report and possible policy solutions Wednesday/20 at 5:30 pm.
