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.

Co-opting the MHA

When I joined the Medallion Holders Association, I assumed that, like most voluntary associations, it was more or less democratic. Of course the ideas of the president and the board members might carry more weight but no major decisions would be made without the full input of and a vote from the general membership. This impression was deepened by the presence of an e-mail forum that encouraged people to freely give their opinions on any and all subjects relating to cabs.

One troubling aspect of the group, however, were persistent and slanderous personal attacks launched over the forum by the treasurer of the MHA, Michael Spain.  Many members wondered why the president, Carl Macmurdo, didn't restrain Spain and Carl always claimed that it was a fee speech issue. Rumor had it that Spain had inherited his job when the former treasurer and head of the forum, Charles Rathbone, quit after a series of attacks on him by Spain.

Still, one loose canon wasn't reason enough for me to quit the group and I confess to taking guilty pleasure in verbally beating Spain up when he maligned people I respected. (One joy of dealing with bullies is that you don't feel that you have to play fair when you fight them.) I was hopeful that, by working though the MHA, I might be able to help give medallion holders a better voice.

The situation within the MHA changed quickly after Newsom make it clear that he intended to "reform" Prop. K (see Millionaire Mayor's Plan to Bail out ... 3/9/09).

• About half the drivers on the forum saw this as an opportunity to auction off their taxis.
• The other half wanted to hang on to Prop K at all costs and not put up the cabs for sale.
• Some members wanted to put the matter to a vote but no official ballot materialized.

Instead Spain started attacking all the people who wanted to keep Prop.K intact. One by one, they started dropping out of the forum. After a series of attacks on Barry Korengold (who was quite able to defend himself by the way), Barry realized the direction the MHA was heading in and formed the SFCDA, taking about 50 or so other MHA members with him.

Rather than easing up, Spain continued slamming anybody who had any idea that ran counter to Spain's view of the world. More and more people on the forum wrote wondering why a guy as nice as Carl didn't put a leash on Spain. The few times he replied on the subject, Carl again gave the free speech argument.

 But - what about the rights of the speaker? What happened to the freedom to express an idea without being libeled? If Carl ever supported or backed up anyone that Spain attacked, if he ever defended a person's right to talk without being trashed, I never read the post.

All of which leads me to believe that Carl and Spain have been playing a good cop/bad cop game: Carl has been using Spain as a pit bull to purge the MHA of heretics to their self-created orthodoxy. 

I called up Charles Rathbone and ran my idea by him. He strongly disagreed.    

    "That's a conspiracy theory, " he told me. "The board was just afraid to assert control."

He went on to say that he hadn't quit the MHA simply because of Spain's attacks on him. Spain of course had been verbally abusing other people as well and Charles thought that, as head of the forum, it was his duty to protect people from being smeared - so he put Spain on a "read only status." Rathbone quit because Carl and the Board failed to back him up.   

But Charles didn't know about the way Carl had explained Rathbone's exit to me. Carl told me that Rathbone had become a stooge for Luxor Cab, "so Spain did his thing."

Just because it's a theory, in other words, doesn't make an idea false. 

In my opinion, Spain and Carl's are ideological Siamese twins who have used Spain's malicious slurs, more or less systematically, to rid the MHA of all opposition. That accomplished, they and their coterie can show up at Town Hall Meetings claiming that they represent the medallion holders of San Francisco.

Paranoid conspiracy theory or not, the result is much the same. In the words of medallion holder Zachy Maher, "The MHA is hijacked ..."