Transcripts For SFGTV MTA Board Of Directors 20240712 : vima

SFGTV MTA Board Of Directors July 12, 2024

Can you please call the roll . [ roll call ] clerk you have a quorum. Announcement of prohibition of sound producing devices during the meeting. Approval of the minutes from the october 6 regular meeting. Can we open up the line for Public Comment on the minutes from the october 6 meeting. You have zero questions remaining. Well pause 20 seconds. If no one comes on the line, well move along. Clerk if members of the public wish to address the board on the meeting, please dial 10 to join the queue. And the number is available on the screen, should anyone want to join. You have zero questions remaining. Then well close Public Comment. Directors, are there any additions or amendments to the minutes . If not, may i hear a motion. Motion. Is there a second . A second. Please call the roll. [ roll call ] clerk 50. Item 5, communications. Due to the covid19 emergency, this meeting is being held virtually and all members of the public and staff are participating via video conference. This will ensure the health and safety of the members of the board and staff and the public. We ask the public to participate remotely by writing to the board or by leaving a voicemail message. We have received comments in advance of today and we appreciate them. Thank you for honoring our request. We continue to encourage the public to write to us and to call in, in advance of the meeting day. What time the Technology Allows us to hold these meetings via teleconference, it may not be as seamless as possible. If we lose the connection during the meeting, we will pause until the connection has been reestablished. If you werent able to call in or reach us or see a number on an item previously heard on the agenda, we will allow you to address it later. We thank each and every one of the people who allow this meeting to be run smoothly. Clerk for members of the public, this meeting is being televised by s. F. Gov tv. If you are watching via online, please call the phone line when the number is called. For the members of the public, if you want to make comments on items on the agenda, you can call the number on the screen and use the access code. Make sure you turn off any tvs or radios or if you live stream that you mute the sound. If theres any microphone reverberation, we will hear you. At the appropriate time when the item is called, the chair will ask the phone lines to be opened. If you wish to comment on a particular item, you will be prompted to dial 10 in order to be added to the speaker line. The automatic prompt will say that callers are entering the q a time. You will be queued up in the order in which you press 10. You will hear an automated voice that will tell you when its your turn to speak. At that moment when your microphone has been unmuted, please state your name and begin your comment. We will start the twominute time limit when you begin talking. You will get a 30second warning and when your time is up you will be put back on mute. Madam chair, i will repeat the instructions if some members of the public joined late and did not hear this information. Moving on to item 6, introduction of new or Unfinished Business. Directors, do we have any items of Unfinished Business . Seeing none, i will say that a member of the Disability Community pointed out some issues with changes of access to disability of paratransit on Market Street. I have forwarded that email on and i would like to know of any changes on Market Street. I will be covering that in my directors report. Are there any items of Unfinished Business . Seeing none, we can move on clerk directors report. Jeff tomlin, general manager of the sfmta. Im going to be covering a couple of items. Twin peaks boulevard and park. Were going to be covering the twin peaks subway as well. On vision zero we had two fatalities in San Francisco in the last seven days. Both still under investigation, but the Rapid Response teams have looked into both. Im happy to fill you in on the details. The second topic is Market Street which is moving forward into its next phase. We will be going in to bid in early 2021 from Market Street from fifth to eighth street and that work is expected to begin construction in mid2021. As all of you know, back in january, we completed the quick build phase and learned a lot then. It turned out better than expected delivering improvements for muni and also delivering in january, in the middle of winter, recordbreaking bicycle ridership along Market Street. Weve been learning a lot from that prepandemic. We received for the next phase of work, a 15 billion federal build grant that we have to encumber quickly and get moving on in terms of construction. That said, as you now know, all of our projects are facing deep hits as a result of the financial impacts of covid. We have to not only significantly cut our operating budget as well as our Capital Budget. While we have to move forward on the federal build grant, we dont have the resources to do the entire street which is involving digging up everything from building face to building face on Market Street, the streets, the sidewalks, building poles, utilities, all of that. Not only do we not have the resources to do that, were also deeply concerned about the amount of construction and all that would entail. Working with our sister agencies, what were recommending is moving forward with the inside portion of the street that includes rebuilding the muni islands to make them longer and wider and accessible for the first time in order to capitalize upon the reliability and improvements of muni and allow us to build on that and expand the capacity of the boarding islands to serve even more islands. What we recommend is putting off the rebuilding of the sidewalks, including the critical question of whether and how we could provide separated levels of cycle tracks. If we built those now, those cycle tracks would build overcapacity. The design no longer accommodates the volume of cyclists that we would see once the pandemic restores a somewhat normal level of traffic to downtown. We know that a lot of effort went into the better Market Street design. So were starting a Community Engagement process, including a virtual public open house series and four meetings that will start later this month and run into midnovember to share details and get comments for phase one. Depending on the results of that, we will bring back revised longterm legislation to all in december. Another interesting topic is twin peaks boulevard and twin peaks park. As many of you know within back in the early days of the pandemic, the San Francisco Police Department closed the gates to twin peaks boulevard in order to close the parking lot at the top of twin peaks to help reduce the amount of crowding that occurs at the top of twin peaks. As a result of the closure of the street, twin peaks parks has seen an unprecedented amount of use by hikers and joggers and skateboarders. While the use of the park has received a lot of support, weve also heard a lot of community complaints, including complaints from near neighbors. Weve also heard a lot of complaints from those of us whose most memorable experience arriving in San Francisco was driving up to the top of twin peaks, whether at daytime or at nighttime. Weve heard from people who are just not ready to hike all the way up to the top of twin peaks. We at sfmta are taking our lead from other city departments in order to run an accelerated Community Engagement process starting later this week, in order to help us see if there are ways in which we can design and manage twin peaks park to retain the extraordinary increase in park users by maintaining a safe, continuous path for those on bicycles and on foot to restore access to the viewpoint for everyone, particularly those with disabilities, to reduce the negative impacts of park users on neighbors, and also to support the mobility of the park users, including the use of the parking lot at the top of the hill. We will likely be coming forward back to you once the Community Engagement process is done with some recommendations for some changes. Were hopeful we can accommodate all of those goals by being creating about how we manage the streets and design the trail system. The next topic is our internal training practical. We just began last week a new Training Program called pact. This is an internal design Training Program that is focused on not only improving Customer Service through deescalation training, but also training our frontline workforce to be more confident, to feel more supported, to be less stressed, and therefore being better in productive engagement with the public, while recognizing being a Frontline Worker at the pl sfmta dealing with the public which can be challenging. This training will cover all of our people who interact with the public [indiscernible] a total of 3,500 [indiscernible] were not quite sure where thats coming from, but i will continue. Then finally, i do want to talk with you about following up on the work that weve been doing on the twin peaks subway. As you will recall, back in august we had an issue with splices that were not manufactured according to speck and that caused us to shut down our rail system three days after starting. Its given us an opportunity to replace the splices and being able to look at what else we can do to deal with deferred maintenance and other issues in the entire Market Street and twin peaks tunnels. In order to get to the bottom of that and to begin the work of changing the culture of how sfmta deals with major projects, i asked colleagues to form a task force that is interdisciplinary and interdivision. It includes people from the Capital Projects division, from maintenance, operations, engineers who know about all the different aspects of our systems. Weve asked them to look at everything, to pick up every rock. Well be learning more about rocks later. See whats underneath it and if theres another rock underneath a rock and whats underneath that. To approach the maintenance and infrastructure problems that we have at the agency with a sense of curiosity and with the mission to predict problems before they arise, to get ahead of those problems, and to make appropriate investments. I have said there has never been a better time in our agencys history to keep the subway shut down to catch up on the work needed there. I asked them to come up with what is the optimal amount of sets in the subway that will benefit us for years to come, taking advantage of this current crisis. With that, i would like to turn the report over to the transit director julie kershbaum. Hi, everyone. At the next meeting im going to come and talk about the subway as a whole as a program and really talk about how much good work were able to get done during the shutdown and how that becomes a down payment on a much larger effort to rehabilitate the subway, including addressing tough problems like the train control system that weve been talking about for the last year [indiscernible] to listen to your message, listen or rerecord. Technology is not with us today. If youre satisfied with the message, please one. Can you folks still hear me . [indiscernible] as we stage the work that we would like to get done over the next few months, one of the things we wanted to draw your attention to because it is time sensitive is some work that we need to go back and do and address issues that weve had since this track work was done in the twin peaks tunnel in 2018. In 2018 when we started the twin peaks project and the contractors first began their work, they identified that we had more class one materials than we had anticipated, which is essentially heavy metals materials that are more costly to handle and more costly to dispose of. As a result and in an effort to keep the project on time and on budget, the decision was made to reuse rather than replace the ballast. That is the rock that stabilizes the track and ties in the subway. You dont see it in the street. In the street it is a different design, actually encased in concrete. But in the subway its rocks secured with that secure the ties and the track. This year is an example of new ballasts. You see that its a lot of big rocks that intricately fit together to create a very stable structure, but to still allow enough space for water to drain through, which is key in our subway because our subway is a big part of the citys drainage system. Because of the reused ballasts not being cleaned properly and not having the small particles washed away, the ballasts that we have in the twin peaks tunnel looks more like this. You can see that theres some rocks, but its really more dirt and wet mud than rocks. I want to be really clear that this is not creating a safety issue, that the decision would never have been made to remove the ballasts if it was creating an imminent safety issue. But it does have longterm safety implications because as that mud and dirt washes away and there isnt good rock there to stabilize the track, over time the track can become less stable. Its also a very big maintenance load because our maintenance folks have a subway that doesnt have proper drainage and needs to be constantly monitored for those potential stability issues. We are currently having an expert on subway ballasts and theyve gone in and taken dozens of samples in the subway on very clear stratas so we know what the quality of the ballasts is and where and where we need to replace it. Where we know its going to erode first based on the visual inspections and what weve seen over the last two years is around the eureka curve which is between forest hill and castro and is the low point of the subway. It already has the highest demands on it in terms of drainage. The subway group that has been working together has a strong recommendation that we replace the ballasts at the eureka curve while the subway is closed. That allows us to address this issue without having further impacts to our customers. Theyre working on the final timeline now, but it would mean the subway being closed through january. It allows us in this quiet time of covid to not only get this work done, but a lot of other work done that well ton more comprehensively at our next meeting. With that, before we open it up to questions, i would like to also hand it off to tom, who can talk more generally how were taking ownership of this issue, what we can do to prevent these kinds of problems in the future. Thanks, julie. Good afternoon, directors. So as julie works through the technical issues and we get the ballasts fixed in the eureka curve, jeff was asking to take a harder look at the practices in the Construction Program and see how does this happen and what are the fundamental things not working when we do Construction Projects and what areas can change. Three areas were taking a hard look at is the way we communicate along the Different Division divisions. We can improve the way the engine engineers manage the projects. This is when poor ballasts quality comes up. The second is the procurement processes which are pretty fundamental. They might not be good for the twin peaks tunnel or the central subway tunnel. These are projects we have to get right the first time. We have to get quality work. We have very little tolerance for a lowbid contractor coming in and doing work that doesnt meet our satisfaction and having to go back in and do what were doing now, which is to disrupt the Transportation System with this costly fix. There is a cultural issue in our agency. Were not alone. Many transit capitals have this problem. We need to instill on staff that when things dont meet our standards, these are the last lines of defense for the riders and people of San Francisco. Sometimes you hear the term, the owners rep. Were the owners and the contractors working in the field are our representatives and all of San Franciscos representative. Communications, procurement, and culture are three areas working with jeff and julie. I know we just gave you a lot of information organizationally and technical. Im happy to answer any questions or take any feedback that you may have. Director heminger. Thank you, madam chair. Tom laid out some broad areas that were going to take a look at, but i wanted to ask in particular how were going to go about investigating this specific problem and the fact that were redoing a lot of expensive work only a couple of years after it was completed. How is that going to take place in terms of determining responsibility and accountability . Tom do you want that or do you want me to take it . Ill start. Were working with the City Attorney to go through the records and figure out how we can hold the contractor accountable for work. An accountable contractor should be able to do work like this right. This is basic Rail Construction and we need to hold them accountable. Does that sufficiently answer your question, director . This will play out over a period of how many days, weeks, months . I think its going to take longer to settle that issue than it is going to fix the ballasts in the subway. Thats a matter of weeks. For the section that we believe needs an imminent repair. There will be other places where the ballasts need to be addressed and we will work to couple that with other subway closures to really minimize the public impacts of the issue. Director brinkman, you have a question . Yes. Im going to leave my camera off because i have bandwidth issues. Mr. Mcguire, what are the robeds in our way in awarding the funding when it comes to state and federal funding . Because we have such a diverse set of sources of funding, we get someone for the fixed guideway capital programs. The rules are different depending on whos funding the

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