Transcripts For SFGTV MTA Board Of Directors 20240712 : vima

SFGTV MTA Board Of Directors July 12, 2024

Supposed to deal with all of that . Thank you, mayor. I appreciate this, and again, this is such a challenging time, i would say the risks the downsides to the shelter in place and the slow reopening are very real and very concerning from a health standpoint and an economic standpoint. I think the Counter Point is no one has said, were going to go ahead and open quickly. As you see across the country, the Mental Health consequences of opening and having a surge, many people are struggling in San Francisco, but if we have a surge like we saw in new york or unfortunately like we saw in houston and parts of florida, we would have all of those concerns that youre talking about on top of the overwhelming the Hospital Systems due to covid19 plus the covid19 pandemic and everything that were dealing with and managing today. Unfortunately, theres downsides to where we are today, but theyre even worse. And we just want people to understand that these times are hard, but we have a pandemic in our city, and it could be much worse. Mayor, i have some numbers, and id like to give them. May i give them . The hon. London breed yes. So our warm number is 8558457415. And then, we also have mobile crisis, so for acute situations. Our number is 4159704000, and the last thing is if you see businesses that are violating the Health Orders around social distancing and good hygiene, please let us know. Please call 311. We will send inspectors out, and if people are violating those orders, we will take steps to aggressively make sure that they do. The hon. London breed and also, i want to push back a little bit. Outdoor activities are permissible in certain circumstances with guidelines, and i do think with regards to religious services, if people have the ability to have Outdoor Services or if there are ways that we can get creative with allowing other things to happen because i know your religion plays a role in things like this. I think its going to be important as we see changes in the number, we want to provide people with opportunities to deal with the challenges of what were facing over the next 12 to 18 months at least. Just think about whats going to happen with our kids and the schools and a number of other things. The fact that we have all of these playgrounds, and kids cant even play in playgrounds. It is heartbreaking for me that we cant even provide these opportunities, so i do want to think of these creative ways that we can support people. If youre one of these people that need help, mental help, testing, please call 311. We have a lot of city resources. Weve developed a lot of publicprivate partnerships to provide support you want. We know its not going to be everything that you want, but we do our best to support folks that are struggling in San Francisco. And the sad reality is its not just San Francisco, but its all over the country where we see this impacting our country, we see it impacting our economy, and the goal is to keep everybody safe, so this is our new normal. So thank you, dr. Colfax, and hopefully, well be able to have more conversations in the future. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at 311. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, mayor. Madam moderator, whats happening with the Public Comment . Operator you have one question remaining. Hi. Caller, please give us your name or Start Talking. This is Public Comment on the meeting from june 26th, 2020. Question can you hear me now . Yes. Question its david philpell. On item 16 last time, there was no opportunity for Public Comment on that item and perhaps the minutes should so reflect, thank you. Great. Should we include that amendment on the minutes . Directors, are there any additional callers at this time . Operator you have two questions remaining. So for members of the public on the line, this is an opportunity to comment on approval of the minutes from the june 16th regular meeting. If you would like to comment on the minutes, please state your name and we will start your two minutes. Hello . Operator sorry, hit the wrong button. Operator you have zero questions remaining. With that, well close Public Comment and directors, do i have a motion for the approval of the minutes from the 16th. Motion to approve. Second. All in favour. Do we have to do role call . Yes, madam chair. role call . The minutes are approved in a 40 vote. Item 5. As some of may know, we lost a member, art curtis, who passed away with a long battle with brain cancer. In his early union, he fulfilled his dream with sfmta driving trolley buses and conductor on the cable cars. He worked his way up the ranks through a Transit Service inspector and chief transit control inspector and retired in 1999 after 37 years of service. The management position he loved the most, chief transit director of muni, staff and assistant chief and transit inspectors for over 20 years. He was also muni special Events Coordinator to major and minor events in the city. A thirdgeneration person in San Francisco, a longtime member of the bay area Railroad Association and Founding Member of the western railway museum. He was also a me member of the board and Market Street railway. Curtis will be dearly missed. Its fitting that we will close our meeting today in his honor, but today, we also honored the top 20 of 2020, so we honor thed Service Members with the Longest Service and one of the operators today, dwayne allen, retire as of today after 41 years of service. So, it is very fitting that we close our meeting in honor of art curtis with the many people we were talking about honoring today. Secretary, i have to read the covid stuff. [ laughter ] still getting used to this covid announcement. So due to covid19, health emergency, this meeting is held virtually and all members of staff and all members and staff participating today are via teleconference. This will ensure the safety of the sfmta directors and public. In our published for this meeting, we asked the public to participate remotely. I do want to thank all people who have sent comments in advance. They were received and we do actually read and listen to them. We continue to urge the public to write the board at mtaboard sfmta. Com or call 415 6464470 in advance. While this Technology Allows us to hold these meetings via teleconference, it may not be as seamless as we would like it to be. There may be gaps and silence as staff is transitioning in the technology between different speakers. Please know were doing the best we can and ask four your understanding and patience if we lose the phone connection, well pause until the connection is reestablished and that did happen in the last meeting and if you do wait, we will come back. Lastly, i would thank all people and there are many people involved to make this meeting run smoothly and so i want to thank the dedicated staff at sfmta to make it possible. With that, ill turn it over to the board secretary to continue making announcements. [ laughter ] thank you, madam chair. So for members of the public, neating is being televised by sfgtv and for those watching the livestream, please be aware that there is a time lag between the actual meeting and what members are saying on sfgtv. If you are watching via sfgtv and wish to comment on an item, please call the telephone line when the call when i am calling the item. If you wish to make Public Comment on items on the agenda, the phone number to use is 888 8086929. The access code is 9961164. This information is published on our agenda and also on our web page. Please make sure that you are in a quiet location, that you turn off any tvs or radios, you turn down the sound on sfgtv and mute that sound and this will reduce any reverbation so the board can hear you. At the appropriate time, the chair will ask for the phone lines to be opened. At that time, if you wish to comment, you will be prompted to press 10. This will add you to the speaker line. The automatic prompt will say that callers are entering the question and answer time, but this is the Public Comment period. You will be queued up in the order in which you pressed 10 and there will be an automated voice that will tell you when it is your turn to speak. At that time, your microphone will be unmuted and you will hear us ask you to state your name or to begin talking and i will start your two minutes when you Start Talking. I will give you a 30second warning when you have 30 seconds remaining. When your time is up, you will be thanked and the chair will ask for the next caller. At that point, the moderator will put the speaker back on mute. I will repeat the instructions how to make Public Comment again as i am aware some members may join late and may not have heard this information. Madam chair, item 6, introduction of new or Unfinished Business by board member. Director brickman, i think you may have new or Unfinished Business. Thank you. I just wanted to bring up a couple of things i have heard the public talking about. The first one is what we are able to do and what we are going to continue to do in district 6 in terms of of either adding low streets or making more space for people to safely gather without being so close to one another. Specifically wonder why the smta doesnt weigh in publically. I saw from the last update, we are watching that one and my understanding is usually with these type of legislative things, the city sort of weighs in as a whole, so maybe you could just address how that works so people understand why we, the sfmta board is not putting forward an opinion. Thank you. Thank you, director eakin. Thank you so much. I just wanted to more specifically ask, i recall the slow street to rule out we got a fair number of comments why we didnt see more amenities in the tenderloin executiv and i recale was a larger tenderloin assessment ongoing and we wanted to be a part of that process. So i was just wondering if we could hear an update from staff on that larger process and when we might be able to address the desire tor more safe streets and open streets in the tenderloin. So director hemminger, do you have any Unfinished Business items . I had a couple of questions for jeff on his report. So ill wait until that. With that, madam chair, that section will get to item 7, the directors report. Director tumlin. Thank you. Can you all hear me . Yes. Good afternoon. As im sure you all know, our entire staff has been working hard for the last months and a lot of our work is now focused on the transportation recovery plan. In order to move forward really quickly on our transportation recovery plan, Building Trust with the public is important. Expand so i asked the data teamo push out in realtime the key dataanalytics for what munii linelines to bring back given te limited resources and managing our budget, which is the focus of most of todays meeting. If you could google covid19data analytics dashboard, the dashboard will come up and theyre updated at least every week. As soon as i get the data, were pushing the data to the public and i think this is really going to be a useful tool moving forward and well add additional dashboards as new data becomes available. And weve also been working really hard on slow streets. As most of o you know, weve installed 20 slow streets on 14 corridors covering all of the city at this point. Were on track to install two more corridors in the coming week on 20 proceeding avenue and ortega adding another 5. 5 miles to the network. Weve been learning a lot as we go along and sent out some criteria about what seems to make for a successful slow street and what doesnt. The characteristics of a successful slow street, first of all, Residential Land use. Typically no more than two lanes and best, one lane in each direction with so stopsign controls. The real drivers of slow street success are kids and heavily used by kids, including children learning to bike and skateboard and use scooters for the first time and relatively subtle differences attend to attract more people and when we have more people, more children, they get more heavily utilized and thats been one of the Critical Issues that weve been trying to face in some neighborhoods, trying to find streets level enough that will work. Other critical criteria, Emergency Response. Fire is a part of San Franciscos memory and we take Emergency Response seriously as an agency. And we dont want to slow down fire tracks. And finally Community Support, slow streets work best when well stewarted by the neighborhood. So Community Support is a key driver. A couple of updates, weve removed the slow streets. As we promised, these are experiments and meant to try them out and deciding, ok, that wasnt working and that included stockton street on the north slope of Telegraph Hill. It was too steep and not being utilized. So were now in our phase three planning, figuring out a new array of corridors, what might actually work and ill give you a heads up that were planning to come back to the sfmta board on july 21st for on update on the question of particularly given the corridors that are wildly successful. Is it possible to pull these slow streets together into a network and pull them together into a network that includes, for example, our protected bikeway networks and other key corridors like carfree Market Street, in order to give people in San Francisco in a covid era the opportunity to walk, bike or skateboard for essential trips or to get to work, particularly as muni will struggle for the next two years. Were looking forward to giving you strong updates there. And finally, i would add to the questions that were posed, were working very closely for weeks with the Health Public weeks street in the tenderloin. As ive repeatedly stated, the tendetenderloin is our highest concentration of vulnerable populations and violence in all of San Francisco. Its our first priority. But we are in support of the healthy streets Operation Center who has been dealing with a whole array of complex social issues in the tenderloin, which theyve made substantial progress on in the last week, helping to move people who had been sleeping on the sidewalks into Healthy Sleep sites and into hotels and that is giving us the ability to get in and do some additional work around creating Additional Space on some key sidewalks in the tenderloin, again, in close coordination with the San Francisco Fire Department who needs to be able to reach every single building with ladder trucks. Given the height of buildings in the tenderloin and overhead wires and the fact it is also the greatest concentration of Emergency Response calls in all of San Francisco, Emergency Services has been a Critical Design partner in the tenderloin and it is and one of the things that makes the neighborhood more complex to deal with. So im, fingers crossed, hopeful that in this week and early next week, we will be able to make substantial progress and we can come back at the next Board Meeting to give you a more thorough report. Couple other items, the essential Ride Home Program sponsored by the department of environmental, were partnering with them, has also been extremely useful for people in San Francisco who have been left behind by the severe muni service cuts we made in april. The Program Provides a deep discount for essential workers, covering up to ten taxi rides a month, up to 70 per ride. Weve received almost 400 applications and have been investing heavily in that program to make sure that our essential workers can get to work and get their essential trips done. Other big news items is as probably all of you know, we started issuing actual citations after two weeks of warnings for street sweeping because the streets were filthy and theyre finally getting clean again now that people in San Francisco are moving their car in order to allow the street sweepers to get to the curb. Evacuee also seen a substantial increase in commercial activity now that businesses have been allowed to open and were on a pause right now, but even as of last week, where we reverted back to, there is still substantial activity, given the success that weve had with the shared Spaces Program. And so were going to need to start enforcing meters. The rates will be substantially lower than they were in puerto pre covid area. Were trying to ensure on one or two spaces are available in every lot and every parking garage. Were expected to make rate changes july 6th and warnings on july 13th. We want to give folks warnings. There will be a lot of communication and that. Findly, i should update you on shared spaces which have been getting a lot of attention in the press. Weve been working very, very quickly to ge

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