Breed criticizes transit leader over Muni delays
Mayor London Breed blasted the director of San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency on Monday over service delays related to its Twin Peaks Tunnel closure that she said the transit system’s managers should have anticipated.
In a sharply worded letter to San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency director Ed Reiskin, the mayor also chided the agency for insufficient vetting of construction contractors and a scooter permitting process that seems to blackball Uber and Lyft.
“In the weeks since I took the mayoral oath of office, a number of challenges have come to light related to the SFMTA and Muni service,” Breed wrote. She called for improvement in all 12 categories that the City Controller scores to evaluate San Francisco’s transportation systems.
As mayor, Breed wields substantial power over the SFMTA. She fills the empty seats on its board of directors — the body that sets the city’s transportation budget, determines its policy agenda and oversees department management. The board has the ability to fire Reiskin.
If that’s what Breed is angling for, it would be difficult for the board to resist, said political strategist Nathan Ballard, who worked closely with the three previous mayoral administrations.
“Mayors don’t technically have the power to remove department heads, but that’s purely a technicality,” Ballard said.
Reiskin is scheduled for a performance review from the SFMTA board Tuesday. He came to the job in 2011, replacing Nathaniel Ford, who left after a well-publicized bid to run the airport authority in Washington D.C. Former SFMTA board chair Tom Nolan described Ford’s resignation as a joint decision between the department chief and the board.
A devoted bicyclist and bus rider, Reiskin had experience running other embattled city departments. He was director of the 311 customer service center and head of Public Works before Mayor Ed Lee tapped him to fix the city’s beset transit agency. During his tenure, he has replaced aging light rail cars and steered a citywide effort to eliminate traffic fatalities.
“I think the city is incredibly fortunate to have him in that leadership position,” said Tom Nolan, the former chair of the SFMTA board and a fervent supporter of Reiskin.
“It’s a very tough job, and he’s an outstanding leader,” Nolan said. “He has many, many critics.”
The criticism escalated in recent months, with bicyclists slamming SFMTA for lagging on protected bike lanes, and Muni riders complaining about haphazard service. The public airing of Breed’s letter is not a good sign for Reiskin’s future, Ballard said.
“A healthy relationship between a mayor and a department head should include plenty of disagreements,” he noted. “But those disagreements should occur behind closed doors.”
Breed’s letter cited a string of shortcomings, beginning with SFMTA’s failure to notify riders and city officials when it siphoned drivers from popular Muni bus lines and redirected them to the shuttles that loop around the closed tunnel. That patchwork service plan caused delays throughout the system.
Muni’s top brass knew for at least a year that the agency would need to reassign buses and drivers to the shuttles that go around the tunnel, Breed said, noting that service reductions “should have been anticipated and mitigated.”
In a recent interview with The Chronicle, Reiskin acknowledged the delays but downplayed them. He said the Twin Peaks Tunnel closure had come at an inopportune time because Muni was training workers to drive a new set of rail cars and do other new jobs. The agency has long grappled with a shortage of drivers.
Breed also alluded to the recent death of a Twin Peaks Tunnel construction worker, saying she is “seriously concerned” about the lack of background checks on major construction contractors.
Shimmick Construction, the Oakland company in charge of repairing the tunnel, had been cited 39 times by Cal/OSHA for safety violations. The company did not mention those violations in pre-bidding documents filed with the SFMTA.
Breed had other admonitions as well. She said big projects like the Twin Peaks Tunnel retrofit and the long-delayed Central Subway need to be completed on time and within their allotted budgets, bicycle safety improvements need to be sped up and streetscape upgrades need to be coordinated with other public works projects.
A spotty public transit system creates severe ripple effects, Breed wrote in her letter, arguing that residents will revert to using private cars if they can’t depend on municipal bus and rail.
“This undermines our climate and sustainability goals and exacerbates our congestion issues,” she wrote.
Reiskin responded to the letter in a low-key statement that commended the mayor’s “attention and focus” to his department’s deficiencies. He promised to “move the needle” on SFMTA’s performance metrics and “improve Muni service so that our riders can feel the difference.”