Chris Hayashi on the Amnesty Program

The SFMTA send shock waves though the medallion holder community with a letter that said it would be, "YOUR ONLY NOTICE AND OPPORTUNITY TO PARTICIPATE IN THE SFMTA'S MEDALLION AMNESTY PROGRAM."

This gentle message appeared a third of the way down the letter but it was the first thing that I read. Only later did I lean that the "amnesty" was being offered to drivers who were "under the age of 70" as of 12-31-2010 and had not fully met the full-time driving requirement of 156 shifts or 800 hours each year.

Under this amnesty, a medallion holder who had not followed the rules would still have to turn his or her medallion back into the city but would not have a pay a fine of $24,000 a year or $30 for each hour that is "short of satisfying the requirement" ... if the medallion is returned by April 2, 2010.

This follows in the wake of medallions that were turned in by four former members of Royal Cab who were made infamous by Dan Noyes for allegedly never working a single shift: Lauretta Tacchini (a police captain's wife), muli-millionaires Jack and Sylvia Dudum, and Martha Barrakah (a paralegal).

The incident and the letter raised a some questions that I was able to put to Director Hayashi after Mayor Newson's hybrid sound-bite yesterday. I forgot my tape recorder (amateur!), so what follows is a summary of the conversation.

1. Taxi Services is going after the medallions (which no previous director has done) in order to make the Pilot Program work. The permits are needed to move The List and give the SFMTA medallions to sell.
2. Although she would not tell me how many medallions the SFMTA is going after, Hayashi said, "30 revocations are already in the works and 30 more are on the front burner."
3. Director Hayashi is mainly going after "egregious offenders."
4. If the medallions are not turned in by April 2nd, Taxi Services will revoke the permits and hit the violators with the above fines.
5. Although the Dudums, Tacchini and Barrakah have turned in their medallions, the SFMTA still wants it's money, which could be as much as $240,000 each. A hearing is set on the matter for early April.
6. Minor violations (like being a little short of 800 hours) will be dealt with by fines, not revocation.
7. Hayashi wants to emphasize that although the companies must also keep records, the main responsibility for proving that they have met the driving requirement belongs to the drivers.

Jarvis Murray, Enforcement and Legal Affairs Manager for Taxi Services, added that his "main emphasis is to clean up this situation once and for all" so that by next year "we won't have the perpetual problem of medallion holders who don't follow the rules."

Hayashi finished by saying that the "goal and mission" of her department is to make San Francisco a place where people from all over the world praise the quality of the taxicab service. "That starts, " she said, "with having general compliance with enforceable laws."

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.

Chris Hayashi on Illegal Taxi's Etc

I called Director Chris Hayashi of  the MTA'S Taxis and Available Services to find out when her Town Hall Meetings would resume but she couldn't give me an answer. Her office is swamped with numerous problems such as moving personal from the Taxi Commission and re-checking the qualifications of almost every driver who ever had dealings with Officer Makaveckas. It'll be at least a few weeks before she'll be able to plan the meetings.

She did say that soon after June 19th her office will start issuing the thirty or forty medallions that have been backlogged by the Proposition A changeover to the MTA. Most of the medallions come from either the deceased or revocations and will be handed out to drivers on the list ala Proposition K. 

Hayashi's department is also gearing up for a crackdown on illegal limos and taxis. They'll start by going after the cabs which she says are, "on the front burner right now." "The "initial stages" of the operation are already in planning. This entails a a lot of administrative detail. "The best work requires the best preparation ...  the groundwork is being laid so that we know when we do hit the ground that we are effective. I don't want to just chase them (the illegal taxis) around."

These preparations sound incredibly complex and include:

• Putting the Traffic Division under the control of the MTA which "will get more responsiveness from traffic cops on MTA issues and taxis is now one of those issues."
• Coming up an enforcement plan. "The airport has one," Hayashi said, "so we're going to do our own for downtown ... we want that before we turn the police loose because ... we want to make sure that we have what we need for the district attorney to prosecute."
• "We want to talk to the District Attorney's Office first, give them a heads up that these cases are coming , let his office know how important it is to prosecute these and find out what they need in order to make sure they can prosecute effectively."
• And of course they need to identify and find the addresses of the illegal taxis.

Hayashi's team is compiling a list of illegal cab - including four that I gave her. Drivers can help in this effort by sending their photos of taxicabs that they think are illegal to:  sftaxi@sfmta.com or they can call 415.701.4400 for with other information. 

Some things you might look out for are:

• A fleet of taxis with a 333-3363 phone number pretending to be yellow cabs. If would be helpful if the MTA knew exactly how many bogus taxis are in this fleet. So if you see any of these cabs try to photograph them. 
• Any location where you see illegal taxis parked - especially if it looks like a base address.
• Try to get license numbers, vehicle numbers, color schemes, phone numbers and any thing else that might help to identify the fake cabs. It might also be useful to take down the cross streets where and the time when you saw them.
• For now, focus only on the taxis. The limos are a more complicated issue so the MTA is going after them later.

One thing drivers should avoid, however, is any kind confrontation, vigilante action or citizens arrest. I can attest to the wisdom of this.  One limo driver I photographed last year threw a punch at me and another one tried to run me off the road with his limo. While I personally found these events entertaining, I sensed that my customers didn't. As Hayahsi puts it, "avoiding fist-fights is a good thing."

She would also like all drivers to check their brakes before starting a shift. San Francisco's cable car fleet is small.

Hayashi thinks that she can get $5,000 for every illegal cab she catches. She's looking forward to this "because the city needs the money." 

Once director Hayashi has "all my stuff in order ... it'll just be a matter of going out and mopping up the floor. We'll swoop down and pick 'em off one by one."

A Breathe of Fresh Air

At a Taxi Town Hall meeting on 3/10/09, Chris Hayashi, the new Director of San Francisco's Taxis and Available Services showed herself to be a refreshing change from her predecessor on the Taxi Commission, Heidi Machen. Whereas Machen had treated the drivers with overbearing arrogance and privately referred to them as "either criminals or people who soon would be,"  Ms. Hayashi clearly regarded a room full of owners and drivers as respected equals.

She discussed and listened to their opinions concerning the various plans to change how the taxi industry operates in San Francisco.  After a general conversation about possible scenarios, she led an examination of  proposed taxicab rules in the San Francisco Transportation Code.

Ms. Hayashi either changed or eliminated several provisions that drivers objected to including an obscene "snitch" rule that would have taken away the medallion of any owner who had failed to turn in another owner whom he or she knew to have been arrested or convicted of a crime. Such rules have a long, inglorious history and have been used by people as diverse as the commie dictator Joseph Stalin, the anti-commie witch-hunter Joe McCarthy and the Christian Brothers of Cretin High as techniques to humiliate and destroy their enemies. Heidi would have loved it. 

However, the subject that aroused the most passion among the drivers, limousines, wasn't even supposed to be on the agenda. Ms. Hayashi kept telling drivers that it would be discussed at a future date but, they kept bringing the subject up, so she finally promised that the Taxi Detail was going to hunt down, punish and eliminate illegal limos in San Francisco. Among other ideas, she proposed impounding their cars for 30 days when limo drivers were caught violating a law. "That should put a stop to them," she said with a smile.

Hayashi's attitude and approach stands in such sharp contrast to the Mayor's arrogance and indifference toward cab drivers' fates that I can't help wondering what's really happening. 

Historically, Mayors like Diane Feinstein and Willie Brown have used commissions and hearings as way to rubber stamp their own plans while giving them the veneer of democratic processes.

This does not appear to be what is going on here. Or is it? No one I've met has a bad word to say about Chris Hayashi, but it's unclear as to how much power she actually has. It may be that she's an unwitting pawn in an elaborate good cop/bad cop scheme designed by Newsom.