The Agreement Reached on
A New Municipal Transportation Agency

What's Changed from the Initiative on the Streets

We hope we will have the support for the new proposal of all those who have signed the petition, and all others frustrated with the performance of public transit in San Francisco. The new proposal is actually better than the proposal that is on the streets. This improvement has resulted from new information brought to light during discussions organized by the mayor's office over the last few weeks among the organizations listed above, the Controller, experts from the Department of Human Resources, and others. We would like to acknowledge the good faith of all parties to these discussions, which really had the tenor of a room full people of different perspectives genuinely interested in reforming the transit system, rather than the sort of horse-trading sessions usually described in the papers.

Here's an overview of what will change if the new proposal is approved, and some discussion about each point where there's a difference with the initiative. Note that there has been a lot of non-substantive re-organization (for instance, the level-of-service language has been removed from paragraph [a] of Section 8A.100 Municipal Transportation Policy, and moved to Section 8A.103 Service Standards and Accountability), which will not be mentioned here, but might lead someone doing a quick side-by-side comparison to be misled on the number of real changes.

A New Transportation Agency

The Municipal Railway will be combined with the Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) and the Parking Authority under a new entity called the Municipal Transportation Agency (the Agency), with the option of adding in the Taxi Commission at a later time. The reason for this reorganization is to allow transportation financing and planning to be done in a coordinated fashion that includes all transit modes.

• A Public Agency: The Agency will be within the city structure, not "privatized," as some opponents of the initiative have suggested. The director will still report to a commission appointed by the mayor, and the Board of Supervisors will still approve the agency's budget, but with significant changes in process noted below.
• Services of Other City Departments: The Agency will be able to contract with other city agencies for services, but must now include measurable standards for the quality, timeliness and cost of the services provided. This is different from current practice.
• Planning Time Incorporated into DPT Move: The principal difference between the initiative and the new proposal is in the timing of the incorporation of DPT, which in the initiative on the streets, would be incorporated immediately. It will now be incorporated over a two-year period, which will allow more time for planning and staff training. Given the potential complexity of the undertaking and the fact that DPT was completely reorganized without much time for planning only seven years ago, we agree that this is a better approach.

Governance and Duties

• Who Can Be Appointed to the Commission: For the first time, the appointed commissioners who set policy for the Agency are required to have some first-hand and professional knowledge of the transit system. Two directors must have significant knowledge of or professional experience in public transportation. The new proposal has added a further protection from appointments based solely on campaign contributions by adding that all directors are required to have knowledge or experience in the fields of government, finance, or labor relations. All directors will be required to ride the Municipal Railway system once a week on average, and at least four of them must be regular riders. The initiative on the streets requires all of them to be regular riders, but we now agree that this might unduly restrict the appointment pool, likely precluding anyone, for instance, who has to drive outside the city for his or her commute.
• Citizens Advisory Council: A new, 15-member Citizens' Advisory Council would be created, with 11 members selected by each Supervisor, respectively, and four members appointed by the mayor. The council may provide recommendations to the Agency with respect to any matter within its jurisdiction. Ten members must be regular riders of the Municipal Railway, at least two must be regular users of the paratransit system, and at least two must be people over 60 years of age. This differs slightly from the initiative, which requires 15 regular riders and two paratransit users, with no requirement for seniors. The changes reflect an acknowledgement that the combined agency will deal with more issues than public transit, and is improved by the addition of the point of view of older people.
• One Head of the Combined Agency: There will be one person in charge of the combined agency (who may or may not also be in charge of the Municipal Railway), who will be held accountable for strict service standards-checked by independent auditors-and given the financial incentive of a merit bonus for meeting those standards.
• Protection of Employees in Merger: It is explicitly stated that the reorganization will not adversely affect any civil service employee's status, position, compensation, or pension/retirement rights. This is also in the initiative.

Service Standards and Accountability

• Objective Standards: One of the most important and innovative sections of the charter requirements for the new agency is that it must meet specific standards of service to the public, including 85% on-time service and 98.5% delivery of scheduled service hours and number of scheduled vehicles. Other standards with respect to the Municipal Railway must be established by the commission and met by the Agency. They include safety and security of passengers and employees, neighborhood coverage, level of crowding, frequency and mitigation of accidents, travel time, vehicle cleanliness, customer service, employee satisfaction, public communication, effectiveness of preventive maintenance. Several suggestions from employee representatives at the mayor's meetings have expanded and improved the list of indicators that appears in the initiative. Progress towards all service standards must be publicly reported at least annually and audited by an independent, outside body every two years.
• Phase-In to Accomplish Some Standards: The wording of the initiative implies that the required levels of service must be met right away. However, everyone understands that with a system as we currently find Muni, and with the time it takes to finance and received delivery of new vehicles, meeting these standards will take several years. To explicitly acknowledge the reality of this situation, the new proposal requires adoption of milestones toward service that fully meets the 85% on-time, 98.5% scheduled service within four years of the reorganization.
• Performance Measures: The new proposal adopts a list of indicators as performance measures for the Municipal Railway, which measure system reliability and performance, staffing performance, customer service, employee satisfaction and verification. Added to the new proposal from the list in the initiative are longevity of employment, employee recognition, and training and educational opportunities. The initiative places all these measures in the city charter; the new proposal adopts them by ordinance.

Personnel and Merit System

• At-Pleasure Managers: In order to improve the accountability of those people in management positions under the director, the number of management positions exempt from Civil Service within the Agency will be expanded from the current 17 to that number plus an additional 1.5% of the employees of the agency, for a new total of about 60. These managers will also have a system of compensation that awards them for meeting objective performance levels. This mandatory merit pay for managers represents a strengthening from the initiative of the merit pay program.
• Who Bargains Solely with the Agency: Other employees in categories defined as "service critical" to public transit, including driving, dispatching or maintaining transit vehicles; providing information services to the public; and supervising or managing employees will now bargain directly with the Agency, instead of on city-wide contract as they do now. These employees will also be eligible for a merit bonus compensation scheme, based on achievement of performance standards, including attendance. The attendance incentive proposal is new, added to address the fact that service problems are created when people use up their accumulated sick time before retirement.

Unlike in the initiative, the new proposal has employees not in the "service critical" categories continuing to bargain for economic issues on city-wide contracts. This includes all current employees of DPT.

This was a complicated area that involved trying to balance the wish to give the Agency the most autonomy possible in managing relations and compensation with its own work-force with the fact that many of these job classifications (such as clerk-typists) are used across many city departments, with transfer rights between them.

• Human Resources Functions Brought In-House: The initiative creates both a new Human Resources function and a new Civil Service function within the agency. The new proposal requires that a range of appeals under the civil service merit system to continue to go to the existing Civil Service Commission (those that have to do largely with interpretation of the system's rules), and allows the Agency to send other disputes at its discretion. Functions of the Department of Human Resources would still be moved to the Agency, allowing it to set up a more efficient system. The Agency may contract with DHR for services it does not wish to duplicate, (for instance, it could contract with DHR for testing). These changes were made to optimize the balance between avoiding duplication of bureaucracy while protecting the rights of employees, giving optimum flexibility to management, and creating an efficient personnel management system.
• Salary Issues: The initiative on the street proposes doing away with the salary cap for Muni employees (passed by the voters a few years ago, it sets the maximum salary for operators at the average of the two highest-paying large transit systems in the country) in order to eliminate a focus on work-rule bargaining, and does away with overtime for time worked over eight hours a day, which is very expensive for transit agencies that have to cover morning and evening commute hours. Both of these have been dropped for the following reasons. The alternative to the salary cap proposed in the initiative was bargaining with what is known as "binding interest arbitration" to settle disputes. This is essentially a legal proceeding-very expensive, and often with an outcome that neither side is happy about. Compared with that, the salary formula presents fewer problems. Daily overtime was retained largely in response to concerns from several Rescue Muni members that this would inadvertently lead to pay cuts for some Municipal Railway employees, an outcome that none of us wanted.
• Specific Work Rules: Banning missing work without calling in remains in the new charter proposal. However, we have received assurance that other three work rule issues specified in the initiative relating to the proof-of-payment system, weekend/holiday work, and sequencing of vehicles will be handled by collective bargaining, and as a result we deleted them from the amendment.
• Public Disclosure of Results of Employment Contract Contents: The new proposal would for the first time require the public disclosure of any tentative agreement on new wages and conditions of work, with a detailed analysis, comparison between the current agreement and the prior agreement, and an analysis of costs. Agreements cannot be approved until the public has 30 days to review the disclosure. This will enable the public to keep track of how its money is spent, and create a disincentive for agreement on terms that the public would be unlikely to accept. The initiative on the street also requires disclosure of and hearings on opening offers and significant changes in bargaining positions, with the intent to provide as much public information as possible, but we have been convinced that these extra requirements would serve to harden the positions of both sides and encourage playing to the press, increasing the difficulty of reaching agreement.

Funding and Budget

• Separate Transit Fund: Muni is currently funded from outside sources and the city's general fund. Its allocation can be changed every year, depending on the incumbent mayor's priorities, and a major cause of its current poor level of service is the poor level of funding it received throughout the Agnos and Jordan administrations. Fluctuating funding is particularly difficult for transit agencies, which must plan out major capital expenditures far in advance. The new proposal, like the initiative, would create a separate transit fund, to be funded from the general fund at not less than this year's allocation (the highest in years), adjusted from year to year by the City Controller to reflect overall changes in City and County revenues.
• Parking-Related Revenues: Money now set aside from parking revenues and fines for other purposes, such as hospitals, would not be affected. With respect to money from any increase in parking fines and revenues, the new proposal splits the allocation 50% to transit, 50% the general fund for purposes decided upon in the mayor's annual budget. This is a change from the initiative, which allocated all new parking revenues to transit. It was felt that, since only a few years ago all the parking revenues went to the general fund, this would be too abrupt a defunding of a number of other city priorities, with no identified source of replacement revenue. The new proposal also requires that the city not build or expand new parking garages that would reduce transit funding from the off-street parking fund to less than that provided in this fiscal year.
• Budget Approval: In order to isolate the Agency from inappropriate fine-tuning from the mayor's office and the Board of Supervisors, the new proposal, like the initiative, sets out a somewhat autonomous path for the Agency's budget process, giving the new agency control in return for accountability for performance. The Agency's budget, with a bottom line set by formula, does not go to the mayor's office for approval. The Board of Supervisors, which will consider it along with the rest of the city budget, can reject the Agency's budget by a 2/3 vote, and must act on it as a whole (no line-item modifications). Required regular audits performed by an objective, outside party give the necessary level of oversight to ensure against some future "out of control" agency.
• Timing of Budget Submittals: There have been some changes in the timing of Agency budget submission to better reflect what happens in the city's budget approval process.

Quality Review

The Agency will be required to report annually on the extent to which it has met service standards and how effectively it is spending money. Every two years, it must hire a professional outside management or transportation consulting firm to do an independent review of the quality and efficiency of its operations. (The initiative on the street requires the outside audit every year, but the frequency was decreased due to the expense and long lead time required for the city to hire consultants-requirements for competitive bidding and the like.) Hearings will be held on the report by the Citizens' Advisory Council, the Agency, and the Board of Supervisors.

Fares and Route Abandonments

Both the new proposal and the initiative set specific criteria for any proposed change to fares, including the need to keep fares low to encourage maximum patronage. Fare increases may be blocked by a 2/3 vote of the Board of Supervisors, but-and this is new to the new proposal-in an effort to ensure that the Board take responsibility for its decision, consideration of a fare increase must be made as part of the budget process. This means that if they deny the Agency a fare increase, they must consider how to make up the money from other sources. Route abandonments may also be blocked by a 2/3 vote of the Board.

Transit-First Policy

The city's transit-first policy has been expanded and greatly strengthened. It newly emphasizes the importance of public transit, bicycles, and pedestrians; emphasizes the importance of having parking policies that encourage transit use in areas well served by transit, and acknowledges the importance of regional mass transit. The wording in the final proposal has been streamlined and clarified, hopefuly increasing its effectiveness.

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Last updated 6/14/99.