Joyce Roy: Senate Public Hearing on Regional Governance in SF this Thursday

This guest post was written by Joyce Roy. As a retired architect, Joyce has raised her sights (or sites?) to the whole city of Oakland and so has been active in advocating for better transit, the right development in the right place and the reuse of existing structures.  She is an active member of ULTRA.

This is for those of you who were disturbed by the recent decision of MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission) to leave the headquarters they share with ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) and use Bridge toll funds for real estate speculation by purchasing a too-big warehouse in a transit-challenged location. It was not just in itself an unwise, and possibly, illegal action, but a loud and clear symptom of the Bay Area’s transportation/land-use disconnect due to the difficulty of comprehensive planning without regional governance which would combine the functions of MTC, ABAG, the Air District and BCDC.

Here is your chance to have your concerns heard by our State Senate:

Senate Transportation & Housing Informational Hearing-
SUBJECT: Regional Governance and Bay Area Economic Development

December 8, 2011
10:00 am – 1:00 pm in the Legislative Chamber of San Francisco City Hall, Room 250

You can be assured that your comments will be given serious attention because the Chair of the Senate Transportation & Housing Committee, Mark DeSaulnier, has served on MTC, ABAG, and the Air District so he understands the dysfunctional separation of those regional agencies.

MTC poised to purchase San Francisco building, but Senator DeSaulnier not backing down

Two weeks ago the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) voted to move their headquarters to San Francisco, despite an ongoing state audit initiated by Senate Transportation Committee Chair Mark DeSaulnier. At the time, one bit of hope was that MTC might be outbid by another entity because staff claimed that there was now competition for the building and that if the MTC didn’t move quickly, they might lose out on the opportunity to buy it.

Who knows if others were bidding on it, but it now seems as if MTC is close to making the purchase. This Wednesday they will meet in closed session to negotiate the purchase, and then in open session to discuss the deal and financing.

In my last blog post on this issue, I mentioned that Senator Mark DeSaulnier is not so pleased that MTC is moving forward with the building purchase and questionable use of toll funds. He said at the time that he would hold hearings and introduce a bill to drastically overhaul MTC. Since writing that, I saw another article where he explained in a bit more detail what he plans to do:

MTC approves move to San Francisco, triggering Senator DeSaulnier to commit to drastically overhaul the agency

Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) voted yesterday to approve the purchase of 390 Main Street in San Francisco for their new headquarters. I attempted to listen to the audio of the meeting while it was happening yesterday, but once again the MTC’s audio feed was faulty (the same thing happened during their last meeting about the move) so I was unable to.

I was able to follow the meeting yesterday on Twitter, thanks to San Francisco Chronicle reporter Michael Cabanatuan @ctuan. (If you’re not following him on Twitter, you should.)

And thankfully, Joyce Roy attended the meeting and wrote this report: