Damn my fucking laziness. I should have gone to the transpo wg mtg. My responses/opinion:

The SF Green Party believes that as a Transit First city, SF must limit the amount of new parking that we build in order to ensure smooth operation of public transit. Prop X would only allow an increase in private parking above current limits with a supermajority (9 of 11 members) of the Board of Supervisors. On the other hand, lowering the current limits would require only a simple majority of the Board. This provision of Prop X would supersede Prop Z (replace with letter of Gridlock For Neighborhoods proposition).

Yes.

We also support returning more control over the MTA budget to our elected representatives; Prop X lowers the current threshold of 8 members of the Board of Supervisors required to reject the budget to 7 members. We think this limit should be lowered to a simple majority, and include the power of line item veto.

Line item veto means the Board can determine how to deploy service, not Muni. That decision, then, will be made based upon the political power of the Board members. Considering that poor people in general are more poorly represented than the rich, and that progressive Board members are in the minority, guess where service will be preserved and cut: the rich will get good transit service and the poor will get screwed. A Green Party key value is democracy, so on principle an elected MTA might solve this problem. Giving the Board line item veto and more authority over the day-to-day operations of the MTA will screw the poor.

Prop X dedicates more city funds to the MTA. Although this would allow more stable funding for Muni, there is no new revenue source in this proposition; all new money would come from the General Fund.

I like this personally, but don't think the Green Party necessarily should. The Green Party should call for more taxes on the rich to pay for transit (I like that, too, of course.)

We have concerns that Prop X will continue the failed policies of a board consisting entirely of mayoral appointees, which has raised Muni fares twice in recent years rather than aggressively seeking other sources of funding. In a time of global warming and peak oil, SF needs radical rather than incremental improvement to our public transit system. Incremental tinkering with policy is NOT â*œTransit First.â*

I have that concern too, but the Board has the authority to confirm or reject Mayoral nominees with a simple majority vote, and the commissioners cannot be removed by the Mayor once approved by the Board. Fact: the MTA sought additional funding two years ago but the Board of Supervisors rejected the parking rate increases.

We also have concerns about greenwashing in Prop X, as there is much language urging environmental improvement by the MTA, but no proposed infrastructure or measures of accountability to ensure that these changes actually happen. Similarly, there is a lack of accountability for reaching Muni performance standards.

No argument here. Except that the report, which will surely show failure to meet the goals, can be used to illustrate the gap between rhetoric and reality.

We think the generous pay raises in Prop X for MTA employees should be linked to improvements in performance, in cases where the job duties of the employee have the potential to directly result in performance increases. Prop X also provides no incentive to improve MTA employee attendance.

Not true. It's precisely the pay increase that provides the incentive to improve MTA staff attendance, because it's the pay increase that gives management the leverage to change the work rules that hinder their ability to enforce attendance.

On balance, we support Prop X, and urge a YES vote. However, we hope that a stronger measure that addresses the deficiencies of this one will appear on a future ballt.

What the Green Party would want in a future measure, in my opinion, would be more funding from a new source that taxed the rich and environmentally or socially undesirable behavior (such as driving), and a democratically elected and even more independent MTA. Dave

Sue

marc <marc@cybre.net> wrote:

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007, John-Marc Chandonia wrote:

...

On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 12:01:10PM -0700, marc wrote:

...

The MUNI CA is weak and inoffensive enough absent the parking language to not oppose. Peskin's insertion of the parking language complicates mild MUNI reform. The outside deal that Peskin cut to allow massive garages in the Western SOMA SUD is the show stopped.

I'm out of the loop, but I thought the latter deal will be on the Feb ballot (which we'll presumably oppose). If we missed something in the Nov MUNI CA, we can oppose or be neutral on it.

I don't want to legitimate the deal that screws our neighborhood.

As denizens of SOMA, we should stand with the community against the deal.

The CA is part of the deal.

-marc

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