Town Hall Meetings: Final Speeches

With Matt Gonzales (standing in front of Mike Spain) making a surprise Monday appearance as a sub for Hansu Kim, the presentation of reform plans came to a close on Wednesday December 9, 2009.

Gonzales, Spain and Giuseppe Carvelli all spoke in favor of auctioning off taxicabs - though Gonzales said that he could accept fixed price sales. Their ideas are basically similar so I'll just mention a few points. Arguments in favor of auctioning cabs claim that auctions will:

• Allow older drivers to exit the business.
• Move the List or allow for a faster turnover of medallions.
• Allow drivers to build up equity.
• Allow for the possibility of making a profit off their investment.
• Give medallion holders the freedom to sell at any time.
• Raise revenue for the city.

In Spain's version, revenue would also be raised for a drivers fund.

There were two other ideas in their presentations that I found new and interesting.

Gonzales said there was no real reason why a loan for buying a medallion had to be for 15 years. It could just as easily be for 30 years like the mortgage on a home. In that way, the new medallion holders would have more money to spend on themselves than show up in some other projections. In other words if a loan only cost them $1,000 a month, they could live much better than they could if loan costed $1,800.

Spain, saying that he'd borrowed the idea from Hansu Kim, proposed a voucher system for drivers that could be used toward the purchase of a medallion at an auction. For instance if someone had been a working driver for 20 years he or she would get a voucher for $250,000. If a medallion sold for $400,000, the person would only have to come up $150,000 of his or her own money to compete.

Driver Peter Kirby, who is on the list, had a similar idea saying that drivers should be given credit or money for the time that they had spent on the list in event of an auction.

Driver Athan Rebelos introduced a plan that would create two classes of medallions: fleet medallions that would be prohibited from picking up at SFO and would be used primary for answering radio calls; and individual medallions that would operate much like medallions do now. Both classes could or would be auctioned off under various restricted conditions. The money raised from the auctions would go for taxicab regulation and enforcement, a general city fund and a medical and disability fund for cab drivers.

A great deal of thought and work went into preparation and presentation of all the various plans. I haven't had the space or time to do them justice here. You should be able to find copies of them from the Town Hall meetings archive at:

http://www.sfmta.com/cms/ctaxitownhall/ArchiveofMarchandApril2009TaxiTownHallmeetings.htm

or by contacting:

• Director of Taxis & Accessible Services
  One South Van Ness Avenue, Seventh Floor
  San Francisco, CA, 94103.
• Phone: 415.701.4400.

A Short History of San Francisco's Taxi Crisis: Bigoty & Cabbies, Part 1

An African American customer of mine was waxing sympathetic.

"I don't know how you do this job," he said, "I mean they're rude, they abuse you, they demean you ... it's almost like being black."

"Except," I said, "I don't have to drive the cab home."

But he had a point. The stereotype is almost exactly the same. Cab drivers supposedly are dumb, dishonest, lazy, dirty and smell bad. Although they're stupid, you have to watch them because they're clever and they'll cheat you if they can.

The cliché is also fed by the fact that many cab drivers are immigrants and minorities of various kind. Snobs who are way too PC to utter a racial or ethnic slur can still get their jollies by slandering "cabbies."

Of course labeling a class of people as inferior leads to more than mere insults. Inferior people are treated differently. If you want to complain about a bus driver, you call your local MTA. If you want to complain about about a cab driver, in most cities you call the police.

Far too many people would probably agree with the former Director of the San Francisco Taxi Commission, Heidi Machen, who wrote, "All of the ex-cons and alternative types who can't make it in another profession ... eventually wind up driving ... taxis."

At best, we're seen as a collection of foreigners and lowlifes.

Certainly San Francisco's "liberal" mayor, Gavin Newsom, was not thinking of cab drivers in February 2009 when he wrote, "Our job (during the recession) is ... to save San Franciscan's from losing their homes, losing their jobs and losing their small businesses."

On the contrary, Mayor Newsom intended to help fight San Francisco's budget deficit by taking the taxis away from San Francisco's cab drivers, selling them at auctions and keeping "most of the money..."

Newsom never mentioned the fact that his plan would cause most of San Francisco's 1,200 taxicab owners to lose their small businesses, their jobs and no doubt their homes.

"This city asset (taxis) has been underutilized and the (taxi) industry has underperformed," said the mayor who ran for election on a platform of balancing the budget. The city was $600 million in debt at the time he spoke.

And he talks about us underperforming?

That's the nice thing about spouting stereotypes. You don't have to worry about facts. If by "underutilized" the mayor means the taxi industry isn't paying its fair share, this is nonsense. The cab business actually pays millions of dollars per year in fees and taxes. Medallion holders alone pay $1.5 million per year in licensing fees.

If the mayor means (as he seems to imply) that he can solve San Francisco's deficit problems by selling cabs, he's dreaming. If he auctioned off all of the fleet's 1,500 taxis for $400,000 a piece, it would indeed cover his deficit. But (legal issues aside) who would buy the taxis in such a scenario?

Can you imagine the outcry that would take place if Newsom tried to pull a stunt like this in another industry? What if he decided to take over the city's trucking businesses? Or beauty salons? Or even massage parlors?

He would be condemned by the unions on one hand and civil libertarians on the other.

But cab drivers? Who cares? They're "underperfoming".

Mayor Newsom fought against a 1.395% business tax that could have raised millions of dollars for the people but would have hit his friends and himself.

Gavin Newsom apparently thinks that somebody has to sacrifice themselves for the good of the city but it's not going to be him or his cronies.

Let it be the cabbies.

Players & Plans: Carl Macmurdo & the Matt Gonzales Committee

When I saw MHA President Carl Macmurdo at the Board of Supervisor's meeting last week he said that he and his group hadn't come up with a plan yet. For a moment I thought that he might want to pick the brains of the members but it turned out that he won't meet with the general membership until October.

Carl appears to be a true believer in experts and their expertise (forgetting that it was just such people that sank the economy) so he and few board members intend to work up a plan with Matt Gonzales and Hansu Kim. I can't see how this could be too much different than the plan Macmurdo worked out with the same Gonzales Committee four years ago. Therefore I'm going to morph Carl's March 2008 proposal with that of the Gonzales Committe and take peek at some highlights. What the MHA would like to see would be:

• An end to Proposition K
• Transferability of medallions though a sealed bit auction system.
• A "grandfathering" of medallions to the top 150 to 300 people on the list.
• The auctions would only be open to working drivers but there would be no preference given to years of service and the list would be abolished. There would be only one owner per medallion.
• A driving requirement would be kept in force for the new owners subject to allowances for short term disability and other emergency needs
• A fee of around 20% would be changed to transfer the Proposition K medallions. A fee of 5% to 10% would be changed to re-sell them.
• Convenience and necessity hearing would be required before the City could issue new medallions but, if the need arose for new permits, the City would keep 100% of the money.
• 50% of the money earned by the City from auctions would toward promoting the health and welfare of all drivers

Since I belong to the MHA, I would like to like this plan but there are several things that I disagree with:

• Solving the problem of fairness to List drivers by "grandfathering" medallions. Taxis should not be put on the street unless they are needed.
• Convenience and necessity hearing aside, the plan seems to encourage the City to sell medallions as a source of revenue. Such hearing would have to have much stricter standards than they do now.
• I don't see why a driving requirement should continue once the medallions are sold. The cost of such mickey-mouse record keeping is considerable not to mention annoying and pointless.
• Any auction system will necessarily favor drivers able to raise money over drivers with skill and will easily open itself up to corruption - as it does in other cities like New York.
• "Grandfathered" or not, many drivers who had committed themselves to driving because of Proposition K would be screwed.

On the other hand, transferability fees may be only realistic way to raise enough money to pay for driver's medical and retirement benefits.

I think what I dislike the most is the logic behind this plan as well as the behavior that has resulted from this logic: like the MHA's protesting of neither the $15 million MTA fee nor the plan for the City to arbitrarily put 100 cabs on the street.

Actually I don't like the logic and reasoning behind most of the plans submitted to Ms Hayashi. Many of the justifications are exaggerated, distorted or false. I'll be dealing with them in a future post.