SF Transit Riders Union

A quick primer to the Charter Amendment proposed by four Supervisors last week.

This amendment was introduced by four Supervisors — David Campos, David Chiu, Eric Mar, and Ross Mirkarimi. Three of these had worked together on one version; David Chiu worked separately on his. The final version is a combination. Six Supervisors are required to put this Charter Amendment on the ballot. (The other way to put a charter amendment on the ballot is through signatures; that’s what Elsbernd is doing.)

Two previous charter amendments (Prop E in 1999 and Prop A in 2007) created and re-defined the Municipal Transportation Agency, giving it a guaranteed amount of money from the General Fund (a set-aside) and a degree of independence over transportation decisions. It is responsible not only for Muni, but for all transportation: transit, partransit, car traffic, parking, bicycling, walking, and taxis. This Charter Amendment focuses mostly on the transit-related functions of the MTA, giving the Board of Supervisors a little more control over its operations.

The amendment does seven things. The first five should be easy for progressives to support. I’ve arranged them in order of importance. The last two require some debate, for sure.

1. MTA Board Governance

This amendment changes the composition of the MTA Board, which now is composed of seven members appointed by the Mayor, confirmed by the Board of Supervisors, and serving for a specified term, i.e., they can’t be removed at will by the Mayor. This amendment splits the appointments, preserving three for the Mayor, giving three to the Board of Supervisors, and giving one to a candidate jointly nominated by the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors.

2-3. Increased power of Supervisors power to review MTA decisions

It reduces the number of votes necessary to reject the MTA budget from seven (of eleven) to a simple majority (six). In the current context this makes a big difference, as we have six votes to reject the budget now, but the seventh is hard to get. It also requires that the MTA respond to “findings” that the Supervisors may produce in rejecting the budget, giving more clarity to the currently murky understanding of what happens if the Board rejects the MTA budget.

It also expands the definition of “route abandonment” which requires Board of Supervisors approval. Currently, only if the MTA completely abandons a route must it get Board of Supervisors approval. Under this amendment, a decision to cut back service on a line by more than three hours/day or a decision to cut back total service by more than 5% would count as route abandonment, and trigger the requirement for Board approval. This requirement is clearly in response to the recent service cuts, which would have required Board approval if this amendment were law.

4. MTA required to hire an Inspector General

The MTA Board of Directors would appoint an MTA Inspector General reporting directly to the Board for a five year term.  The Inspector General would conduct audits and analyses, investigate complaints of and work to prevent fraud, waste or abuse of MTA resources. The Inspector General is one important way the MTA could be protected from work order abuse. Most agencies have such an office, reporting directly to the Board instead of to the Chief Executive. With a new Board (and not one beholden just to the Mayor), this is an important reform that progressives should agree on. (The only decent argument against it is that we already have an independent office of audits and this is a waste of money, but the independent that office obviously hasn’t worked to date.)

5. Incentive compensation is optional, not mandatory

This is a minor change that is good for the agency. Incentive pay is not always effective at improving productivity.

6. Increased set-aside for Muni

In addition to the base amount of general fund revenue, the MTA would receive an amount set aside from the annual property tax levy equivalent to two and one half cents for each one hundred dollars of assessed valuation. This amounts to about $40 million, and will fluctuate based on the total amount of property tax received. To put that in perspective, this is about 1.5 times as much as the $28 million that was saved by cutting transit service by 10%, and the $26 million increase in the general fund contribution from Prop A in 2007 (money which the MTA promptly lost when the Mayor ordered about $26 million in increases in the work orders the MTA pays to other departments).

This is definitely good for Muni, but it’s not new money. Increasing the set-aside from the general fund means there is less money available for other city services that do not have set-asides, such as health care and human services, the biggest expense in the city’s general fund budget. The police department has the biggest set-aside, but the MTA and the Fire Department also have big set-asides. Other substantial set-asides preserve money for homeless services, parks, public education, libraries, and children and their families.

There are good ways and bad ways to create set-asides in the charter. This amendment does it the good way: by specifying a percentage of a specific revenue source, so it can go up and down based on receipts from that source. The police and fire set-asides, on the other hand, are specific dollar amounts so that when the general fund goes down, police and fire departments get an even greater share of the total pie and the general fund suffers even worse.

7. Labor changes

This amendment eliminates the part of the charter that guarantees transit operators a minimum wage equal to the average of the two highest paid transit operators in the country. Right now, that base wage is about $60,000 per year for full-time workers, plus pensions and health benefits for them and their dependents. Transit operators are the only city employees whose minimum wages are set in the Charter. Nurses have maximum wages set in the charter (like transit operators did until 2007’s Prop A). Firefighter and police officer wages are set in the charter at the average of all wages for safety employees in California.

Base wages are not the only labor cost to the transit agency, though. The labor contract specifies how employees can get overtime and how work is distributed to the operators. Legislative Analyst Harvey Rose, in the audit requested by Supervisor Campos, made some suggestions for changes to the labor contract that would save the agency money without changing the base pay for any employee. For example, Muni has a higher percentage of its operators on standby (i.e. not driving) than most other agencies. (23% of paid time is standby time, compared to 15% in Washington, D.C. and from 4% to 11% at other comparable agencies). The audit also found that Muni relies on overtime pay more than most other agencies, who use more part-time operators. The report, and the MTA’s response, said these conditions at Muni were due to the rules in the collective bargaining agreement negotiated between the TWU and MTA management.

By eliminating the Charter-mandated minimum salary, the Supervisors who wrote this charter amendment think that management can negotiate new work rules that will reduce some standby time and overtime for transit operators but keep the same wage rate for operators. This amendment differs from Elsbernd’s amendment in one respect. It does not include Elsbernd’s language that the union has to prove that restrictions on the Agency regarding its ability to manage workers are justified and “outweigh the public’s interest in effective, efficient, and reliable transit service.”

For transit, this is probably a good thing as it will save the agency some money that it could use to increase service. For workers, the impacts depend upon the result of the negotiation between the union and management.

The Supervisors expect that most operators would see no change because they expect the agency to preserve the base wage rate but break up the runs with the most overtime and least driving time. Some of the veteran operators would see less overtime and standby time in this scenario. Most transit operators do not work much overtime and make less than the San Francisco median family income of $72,000, for a job that’s one of the hardest jobs in the city, and which causes stress-related diseases at one of the highest rates of any profession. A very small proportion of operators, about 3.5%, worked large amounts of overtime and earned more than $100,000 in total pay.