Good riddance to transportation czar for the Bay Area
Steve Heminger, the executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, announced Wednesday that he will end an 18-year reign by retiring early next year. It can’t come soon enough. The region’s freeways are gridlocked. Public transit systems are in disarray. Commute times continue to increase. Heminger touts his agency as “action- oriented and project-based,” but that has translated into piecemeal construction, pathetic planning and a lack of long-range vision. The agency merely hands out money for one politically popular project after another with little sense of where it will all lead.
Meanwhile, Heminger flew around the world on toppriced airline tickets at public expense; deceived the public and flouted the law to use bridge toll money to fund his badly overbudget quarter-billion- dollar regional government building on prime downtown San Francisco real estate; and masterminded his agency’s hostile takeover of the staff of the Association of Bay Area Governments.
The Bay Area deserves better in what is arguably the most important job shaping the region’s transportation and housing. The time for a road project here, a rail extension there and tax increases wherever they can be found is over.
We should stop building on far-flung open land regardless of whether there’s public transportation to service it. We can’t keep counting on new freeway improvements to get the rapidly growing workforce to and from its jobs.
We must be smarter. We need a leader with vision, supported by empirical data, to ensure workers can afford to live in the Bay Area and get to their jobs in a reasonable time.
MTC board members will ultimately select Heminger’s replacement. But, under the terms of the hostile takeover two years ago, the members of ABAG will have advisory input.
The person picked should be able to facilitate the still-to-be-completed merger of the transportation and housing-focused agencies and lead them toward a critical, symbiotic working relationship. For we can’t solve the region’s transportation problem without adequate, smartly located housing. And, conversely, smart housing depends on strong public transit.
The person selected should bring the experience and skills to unify residents and businesses behind a sustainable plan for the Bay Area’s transportation and housing for decades to come.
That person should be recruited nationally, and bring a fresh, outside perspective. Heminger was an inside hire, promoted after his boss, Lawrence Dahms, retired in 2000. Between them, they have run MTC since 1977.
Which helps explain why Heminger treats the agency like his fiefdom. While he officially reports to the commission board, the roles are often flipped. The 18 voting board members, mostly city or county elected officials, worry first about securing money for their locales. That means remaining in Heminger’s good graces.
He’s leaving now. It’s time for the commissioners to step up, to show leadership — to make one of the Bay Area’s most critical government hires. For the sake of Bay Area residents and the region’s economy, they need to get it right.