Good afternoon, everyone.

Uh, welcome to uh the February 24th, 2025 regular meeting of the land use and transportation committee of the Board of Supervisors.

I'm Supervisor Mirna Melgar, chair of the committee, joined by Vice Chair Supervisor Cheyenne Chen and Supervisor Bilal Mahmud.

The committee clerk today is Mr.

John Carroll.

Um I would also like to acknowledge Kalina Mendoza at SFGup TV for helping us broadcast this meeting and bring it to people's homes.

Uh Mr.

Clerk, do you have any announcements?

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair.

Please ensure that you've silenced your cell phones and other electronic devices you've brought with you into the chamber today.

If you have any documents to be included as part of any of today's files, you can submit them to me.

Public comment will be taken on each item on today's agenda.

When your item of interest comes up and public comment is called, please sign up to speak along your right hand side of the room.

Alternatively, you may submit public comment in writing in either of the following ways.

First, you may email your comments to me at J-O-H-N, period C A R R O L L at SFGOV.org.

Or you may send your written comments via U.S.

Postal Service to our office in City Hall.

The address is one Dr.

Carlton B.

Goodlit Place, Room 244, San Francisco, California 94102.

If you submit public comment in writing, I will forward your comment to the members of this panel and also include your comments as part of the official file on which you are speaking.

And Madam Chair, items acted upon today are expected to appear on the Board of Supervisors agenda of March 4th, 2025, unless otherwise stated.

Thank you so much.

Please call item number one.

Agenda item number one is a resolution supporting the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's joint development program goals and policy to set a citywide policy on the joint development of transit and housing projects, address the SFMTA's budget deficit and advance San Francisco's housing and equity goals.

Thank you very much, Mr.

Clerk.

I just want to acknowledge that we have just been joined by our colleague from District 10, Supervisor Shimon Walton.

Thank you for joining us today, Supervisor Walton.

Colleagues, I introduce this resolution and I will have uh Wade White Graff from the SFMTA come up and um give a presentation about what the MTA passed.

Uh but first I wanted to explain what this is and why I thought we should weigh in on this issue.

Um the MTA, as we all know, as has been widely publicized in the press is uh in trouble right now.

We are facing a deficit for the next couple years that's significant and may lead to uh service reductions.

Um and then we're facing a structural deficit after that that is significant, and we must do something different to address that crack from getting wider.

Uh, I am really grateful that the MTA board has uh taken this on uh in a serious way, and that staff has been working through all the different possibilities.

Part of it is gonna have to be um what we do with our neighbors at a regional level and how we move people around the region.

Part of it is gonna have to be how we approach our own taxation, maybe sales tax, maybe parcel tax.

We're still exploring all those possibilities.

What we know is that we must do something, or we may lose the world-class system that we have today.

And this is important for a lot of reasons.

You know, for youth, uh, you know, the earlier board uh approve the free muni for youth program because for youth, Muni means freedom.

It means opportunity, access to educational opportunities, access to all of the rich experiences of the city for seniors.

It means living a life of dignity without isolation for low-income folks.

It means access to work and education.

It means lots of different things for people.

The MTA has underinvested in its capital for you know a couple generations now, and we need to rectify that in order to meet our climate goals and our uh goals of connecting all communities, including those that are farther from downtown, um, and not just serving you know the downtown core.

Um so everything that we do in terms of supporting our educational institutions like City College, San Francisco State in my district, or um lower income neighborhoods, neighborhoods that have traditionally been isolated, like those in Supervisor Walton's neighborhoods, um, or um you know, providing access for the entire region to institutions like uh uh City College and San Francisco State are predicated on having a functioning accessible and affordable uh public transportation system.

So we have to act.

The MTA owns a lot of land uh around San Francisco.

And recognizing that different communities have different needs for that land, you know, um the the neighborhoods around the Balois reservoir have very different needs in the community of the marina, for example.

Um we need to look at that land in different ways.

But one of the ways that I think we must uh address is that whatever development happy happens in that land, um, it must be for the financial health of the MTA.

Uh the MTA is an enterprise department, just like the port, the airport, and the PUC.

Um, all of those agencies generate income from their land through rents.

They've done commercial development, they rent out their land to the airlines to all, you know, other entities, and generate significant income for those agencies and for the city.

But the MTA doesn't have that roadmap.

We've never had, you know, like a development plan or a set of principles for that development.

And I'm glad we're starting that discussion, but I wanted to put in writing that this needed to be.

So my resolution, and I've worked with at Supervisor Chen.

Uh, thank you so much for your collaboration in coming up with some language that acknowledges that that there are other priorities and that we should uh you know look at what we are getting, what we're giving up with those priorities, that being affordable housing, community benefits, you know, all of those things, but that the goal should be uh the financial health of the MTA, that we want to keep a system that is accessible, affordable, connected, and equitable, and that that should be our main priority for development.