And i dont understand why would m. T. A. Take on a new project like fixing up pal street if theres really a question of revenue to support the full m. T. A. Programs. Thats my points. Herbert weiner, theres some issues i wish to bring up. Our bicycles and scooters on the sidewalk being cited. If so, how much revenue is being collect collected . I havent heard this statistic and i believe this is very important. Also, on towing, every time i see a tow truck, i think of the hangmans noose. Thank you. My name is anne stooldryer. I direct the financial district project in the office of the San Francisco treasurer. We worked in collaboration with the sfmta and Many Community groups to create the low income discounts for towing, booting, and payment plans. I really want to thank the m. T. A. Staff who are always open to being in dialog with us at the financial Justice Project and also Community Groups. I want to speak in support of the reduced towing fee for people struggling with homelessness. I think this is an important step in the right direction and we support it. Probably one of the most important starts of my job is listening to people in Community Groups and residents about how these various penalties are hitting them and i just would like to share some of what ive heard. Going from 236 to 100, having 15 days to put that money together, that will make a difference for folks. Theyll have a longer amount of time to come up with a smaller amount of money. And we hear that coming up with 100 might as well be like coming up with a million dollars. We have to realize that people dont have this money. Theyre going to be scraping it together probably from Community Groups, their support networks, et cetera. The other things that i want to pass on is people ask, can we please do what we can to get the word out about this. Too often we create these things and people dont know how to access them. Can we make it as easy as possible for people to access so they dont have to jump through hoops. We helped create this process with the department of homelessness to certify that people are eligible. And then just lastly, i think there is a lot of im sorry, your time is up. I want to thank the staff of m. T. A. For helping think through these processes and i want to comment in support of the plan to come back to this board with a more comprehensive plan around addressing fare evasion. I know that the passes and tickets make up a significant portion of sfmta revenue and youre thinking about how to make sure that muni is available for everyone. But as part of the Community Listening that anne was describing, we have been increasingly hearing about the impact of fare evasion tickets about people who are living in deep poverty, people whose income is below 15,000 a year in the city, and the impact these tickets have. The clients either take the bus because they cannot afford it or they ride without paying because they cannot pay the discounted rate of 40. Many of the clients survive on monthly benefits stipends of just hundreds of dollars a month. We had done an informal survey of 20 nonprofits to understand how their clients were accessing muni or not accessing muni and their payment history. They found that for the People Living in deep poverty, less than 15,000 a year, 83 indicated that sometimes their clients rode without paying because they could not afford to. We heard from individuals who got fare evasion citations on the way to doctors visits. We want to make sure that in this time of increasing income inhe callity across the city that everyone has access to the transportation that you worked hard to create. We want to ensure that were not penalizing those who simply cannot afford to pay. Thank you. My name is kate richardson. Im an attorney with a Nonprofit Organization called legal link. We work closely with many of the citys frontline providers at social Service Organizations who are working directly with homeless and lowincome families. So im here to talk about the tow reduction program, echoing from some of the comments that have been said regarding these poverty tows. I really want to highlight the problem that is the process here as well. So when were working with clients, weve trained over 500 providers and done direct consults with over 300 clients. This is a high legal need. What were finding is reduced fees to 100 is great, its a step in the right direction, but we want you to consider reduction all together of these poverty tows for many of the reasons youve heard. Even the processes that seem straightforward with a few steps, including certification for access to services, its an additional step and burden on someone who is already in crisis. I think the reality is many people arent able to access these programs that were designed to benefit them. I would take that into consideration as well and urge you to move in the right direction and consider elimination all together of the povertyrelated tows. Thank you. Hi, im chelsea crumpler. Im glad were having a discussion about mitigating this process. I 100 disagree that fare evasion citations and tow citations or towing in general are a deterrent because you dont have a choice when youre poor and you have to take your kid to the doctor or you have to go to school, i dont know how many citations ive got that i havent been able to pay. Sometimes through no fault of my own, because my worker messed up and didnt get my pass in on time, there also seems to be an ongoing problem of sfmta officers saying theres other resources, but not necessarily being able to give you the information on how to access them. So id like to see also there to be less red tape and bureaucracy like my son, you know, he gets a free meal at school. It would be really nice if we could think of a way to combine that so i could get a free m. T. A. Pass for him. We also dont want people who are living in their vehicles to get rid of the only stability that they have. 100 is a lot, its a lot to me. Sometimes if they can scrounge up 75, they want to use that to go to hotel. 100 is a lot. We need to rethink how were doing this. Next speaker, please. Im kelly cutler from the coalition of homelessness. Your tweets crack me up. Ive been coming here for years and all of us have been coming here for years when were looking at new restrictions on street streets. The reason is it leads to towing. Towing is a major issue where its someones home. Its such a huge hit. We get calls on a weekly basis, then we connect them with the lawyers and having to go through the process, which there isnt a great process now. Its great that were going in that direction of alleviating those fees. Still, the 100 thing was interesting. Im on the local coordinating board and they presented about that. That still leaves the 100 where the Homeless Department is looking for their Funding Source to figure these things out. Its still a huge obstacle. We still have a thousand people on the shelter wait list. We have the single parking, but its 26 spots and for the highneeds folks. The city is currently targeting people in vehicles that are living in their vehicles. The 72hour thing. Thats where people are getting citations so often. That leads to someone losing their home and it really is a heavy hit. Next speaker, please. Im armando garcia. I work closely with kelly. Im lucky to work with tory larson and her colleagues. We send people to them all the time. People walk through our doors anecdotally every week. We get people coming in asking what to do about towing issues or fare evasion citations. Im really glad to hear that theres a deeper effort and there is some interest at sfmta really deeply looking into this to see how we can look at the pressures were putting on People Living in poverty. So i want to share with you a little bit of what i see at my office anecdotally, just so you can understand a little bit of the process someone has to go through, specifically with the fare Evasion Program where you get Community Service instead of paying the fine. So we regularly get people walking in. At best, some of the people that come in are happy they can do Community Service and get it out of their hair, but most of the people that come in are confused about where they can get the fine waived or is it a matter of dismissing the citation. They come to our office interestingly because sfmta agents tell them that we somehow can get it dismissed for them or something. So they show up to us really confused. What ends up happening is we usually give them some kind of a verification because a lot of the Community Organizations already do a homeless verification so it doesnt have to be us to do it. We give them a letter. They go back to Customer Service and they come back with some paperwork on Community Service to us or some organization. Theres a runaround going back and forth thats a lot of extra burden on that person. It doesnt sound like its helping sfmta to put people in that position financially or otherwise. Thank you. Any other public speakers . Him maquisha willis. I wanted to come as a person who has suffered from car loss. Ive lost two cars from towing and one car from booting. And i am of course in low income. At one point i was living in one of those cars. And its like the tickets i couldnt afford and then i lost my registration. And then i couldnt register my car so im getting more tickets. And then i lost my job. Its like a downward spiralling effect. Just speaking for a lot of people in the community, it just doesnt help the towing on me. I agree with other speakers that you can collect in tax revenue because if you have to pay it in any way, just let us keep our property. Its a means of communication here. The congestion here is far beyond theres no doubt that our city is crowded. Were getting penalized for the fact that there is no parking here. You cant afford the garage. You might not have to stop that long. I might have to use the bathroom and come out and have a ticket i cant pay. I got a ticket from the m. T. A. While i was sitting in my vehicle. I was literally falling asleep in my vehicle and wanted to get off before the street cleaning comes. There are a lot of people who cant pay the 100. That would have gotten hard. I cant afford the towing here. 30 years in San Francisco and im still homeless. There are ways you can help people and eliminating towing is one of them. Hello, my name is paul bryly, a policy fellow with larson inlynn. A lot of these initiatives are framed as if they would help the communi communities. People in the lowincome interest, i find it hard to believe that the communities that i come from would support the expansion of metering and the spikes in the fees and all of that. With regards to the towing, i think there should be a payment plan implemented. A lot of people dont have all of that money all at once. If were really trying to assist lowincome communities. As a result gentrification, people are getting moved into their vehicles. If homeless is the priority, youre only exacerbating the position and youre going to push people to the streets more so if you continue to tow them. We heard from community members, they dont support them. I heard as a community interest, what community . Thats all i have to say. Good afternoon. My name is ben linshinger. A Program Manager at the tory foundation. The average client we have makes about 800 a month on some sort of a benefit. Even the 100 is extreme. I really appreciate the work that youre all doing to make it that because thats less extreme, but i just want to echo what everybodys saying, which is its a disaster to have your car towed and an unavoidable disaster if youre being targeted and have to go about the work in your life. The work that everyone does to survive when their homeless or low income is equivalent to a fulltime job. Thats been studied over and over again. When you have to go one place after another to make it work and maybe you have kids, youre going to get citations. The poverty line is 12,700. The average person in San Francisco if theyre individuals is making 85,000. As a deterrent you could lower it to 85 25. Making muni free is important to the ecosystem. It increases the sense of self worth people have when theyre making tough choices. Its a Better Society when we dont spend the millions of dollars to try to punish people when we cant make any money off of it, but were talking about a human rights issue. This one piece of good news, the way financial Justice Works is any effort towards financial justice is justice to any other groups. Thats the way money works. Thank you. If youd like to speak, youre definitely welcome to speak, but come up after the next two speakers. Im june whitehorse, and im a staff worker at the research project. I wanted to say 100 is still a lot for People Living in their vehicles and still unaffordable. When those fees can double if youre not able to afford it. Even if you are able to get that fee, technically there are still barriers to getting that fee. If you have to get a certificate or be able to get those get that certification which seems like a big barrier. These kind of fees impact lowincome and Homeless People in a case where people make a low income. If people can afford 8 an hour, they can afford 9 an hour for the people who are parking at the meters. There is not enough safe parking spots in the city. You are told there are places for you to go, but there are not. It sounds like your board is thinking about finding more places for people to park. I would encourage you to focus on that rather than raising the fees. I think the fees erased entirely for the people who are low income. Lastly, as far as muni goes, theres a lot of discussion nationally about free transit. I would really encourage you to look into that. There are a few cities who have made Public Transit free such as kansas city and others that are looking into it. I would encourage you to look into that as far as the fare evasion problem goes. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Brian edwards, coalition on homelessness. First of all, i just want to echo everyone elses concerns that it really is honorable that the financial Justice Project is ameliorating some of the financial hardships of the criminalization of poverty and homelessness, but it is ridiculously ineffective and expensive to do things that way and we need to move further upstream. I want to walk you through how the department of homelessness and housing seems to think this is going to work. A lot of people who live in their vehicles. Lets take a guy who lives in his van, he comes home from work at 6 00 and its not there. That man is never going to think to call the department of homelessness and Supportive Housing to get help. Hes not going to know about a discount. Hes going to look at the 311 app maybe, but theres nothing about a tow on there. There should be a button that says, help, you towed my home. But hes not going to go down and get a coordinated entry assessment at 7 00 at night. He has to figure out where hes staying tonight. He cant even go down to auto return to get my stuff out of it because he left his i. D. In the other pair of jeans that morning. There is an organization that does homeless verifications. There are several. The coalition on homelessness. People walk in and we take care of that every day. To force someone to go through an additional service, a coordinated entry requirement, they dont need to do that to be poor enough to live in their vehicle, theyre already poor enough. Thats where the city needs to intervene. Personally i believe there should be no charge. For h. S. H. To create another level of bureaucracy to lesson the impact of someone living in their vehicle, this is b. S. Thanks, guys. Any additional Public Comment on this comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. Directors. Ill start. Thank you. First, i just want to thank all of you who turned out to talk about financial justice. That was really, really impactful to hear all that and the fact that you devote your lives to helping people live in this city is appreciated. We do need to do something. We need to do something so people dont get their homes towed. Weve talked a lot about this over the years and this really brings this home. It makes me realize how hard it is for people. There was an article i read that read, are you good enough at paperwork to be poor . Most people arent. Thats really, really challenging. I dont know what the answer is here, but we definitely need to look at something to alleviate this situation. As people said, were forcing people onto sidewalks out of what are their homes. Thats really unforgiveable in this city. I dont know how we do it. I dont know how we make sure that the people who can afford to pay their parking tickets pay them and that the people who cant afford to pay them and ultimately will have their homes towed will have their homes towed and become sidewalk homeless. Its a challenge, but its a challenge that we need to step up and figure out. We cant keep doing this. So many other comments come to mind, but first i wanted to thank you all. That was really powerful. When we first started to do the lowincome tow fees, there was a lot of political pressure to address the tow fees. It makes me think maybe we should stop toeing for unpaid tickets. I dont know if youre going to know this, was it in the presentation what percentage of our tows are for unpaid tickets . Im just wondering if we just stop doing that what impact its going to have. I dont know then, what do we do with a car that maybe isnt working thats in the same spot on a block week after week after week. Sorry, i dont know the answer to that. I can try and come back with that information. Yeah, it will be a good one to look at. I do know that a lot of calls from neighborhoods are related to cars. Right. And i know. I see that in my own neighborhood. We have several r. V. S that go because we have r. P. P. In the area. Again, its one of those things that is it people call it a quality of life. Oh, i feel unfortunately with