Rescue Muni

At our last general membership meeting, Rescue Muni members voted for the following endorsements for the November election:

Mayor - Gavin Newsom

Proposition A (Muni Reform) - Yes

Proposition C (Public Hearings on Ballot Measures) - Yes

Proposition H (Parking for Downtown) - No

Thanks to everyone who participated, and thanks to Mayor Newsom for attending the meeting and staying longer than scheduled to answer member questions.

If you can help out the Yes on A/No on H campaign in any way—either by volunteering to phone bank or by contributing to the campaign—please click here and sign up to do so. Passing Prop A and defeating Prop H is critical to Muni’s future. The campaign needs your help right now. Please consider donating time, money, or both to this vital cause.

The Yes on A / No on H campaign needs your help to promote Muni Reform to voters this fall. Sign up now on the Yes on A website!

This measure will increase funding to Muni and also improve accountability for Muni managers. For more on Prop A, see the summary on Prop A’s site, or review our Muni Reform category.

Update: The No on H campaign has also been launched. Both can be reached via the Transit not Traffic page.

The Transit Not Traffic campaign, led by SPUR and many other community groups supporting better public transit, has launched. This campaign supports Proposition A (Muni Re-Reform), which would dedicate additional funding to Muni and improve many work rules that today make it very difficult to improve service reliability, and opposes Proposition H, the so-called “Parking For Neighborhoods” initiative that would dramatically increase parking downtown and allow new parking spaces and garages to block Muni lines and remove street trees citywide. If you agree that better transit should be SF’s priority and not huge increases in auto traffic, get involved! (Comment here or sign up at SPUR’s page.)

The Examiner reports today a compromise between the campaign for the so-called “Parking for Neighborhoods” initiative and Supervisor Aaron Peskin, sponsor of the Muni re-reform measure that recently was approved for the November ballot. In exchange for the anti-transit, anti-rider parking campaign suspending work now, the supervisors will put a new “Sensible Parking Initiative” on the ballot in February. We’ll see how bad it is for riders, but it’s good news anyway that there will not be a six-figure campaign against Muni reform this fall.

Meanwhile, Matt Smith of the SF Weekly wonders why Mayor Newsom didn’t take a stand for transit riders against the downtown interests (notably Gap founder Don Fisher) who sponsored the anti-rider Parking for Neighborhoods plan. And the Bay Guardian has a comment as well.

The Examiner profiled the so-called “Parking for Neighborhoods” initiative today. The initiative, opposed by Rescue Muni and many others, is “a veritable minefield of unintended consequences. … Incredibly, the initiative specifies that new residential driveways have priority over lesser civic niceties such as bus stops or trees. Bus riders could be forced to walk farther and trees could be cut down to accommodate a private driveway. … Since virtually every passenger car and truck sold in America as of 2008 will qualify as low emission, this means there essentially would be no limits on how big new garages could be.”

The Muni Reform amendment passed by the Supervisors will override this initiative if passed, so voters should support it. But the Examiner is only the latest editorial page to point out that the parking measure will be a disaster on the merits.

(See also Marisa Lagos’ blog entry at the Chronicle. Also the Planning Department has a report on likely impacts.)