There's a money room in the basement of 1 South Van Ness, where the Municipal Transportation Agency, which operates Muni, is headquartered. Workers literally count by hand bags of cash and coins taken in as fares from passengers throughout the day.
When Muni recently needed to pull some of those unionized bean counters away from the money room to staff kiosks around the city where transit passes are sold, its managers hoped to replace them with workers from a private contracting outfit.
The plan unsettled the Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which persuaded Muni against the idea and instead encouraged it to create 10 new full-time city positions to cover the work that was needed. But the MTA's immediate turn to the private sector is telling.
Powerful local unions would no doubt fight it, but public-transit consultants working with the city have insisted that the outright privatization of San Francisco's municipal transit system is worth consideration. Advisors to the Transit Effectiveness Project, first unveiled by Mayor Gavin Newsom during a 2006 speech, insist nothing is too controversial for debate.
"There's nothing we've been told to take off the table," a consultant hired by the city told the San Francisco Chronicle late last year.
The Transit Effectiveness Project's final recommendations are expected next year, when it's likely Newsom will be starting his second and final term. Big segments of Muni have already been privatized over the years. In fact, Controller's Office records show the MTA has privatized far more formerly public services over the past two decades than any other city department by far.
In 1983 voters passed Proposition J, authorizing the city to contract out services performed by city workers who'd passed civil service exams to prove their skills as long as the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution certifying a cost savings. The MTA issued $46.5 million worth of private contracts last year covering 689 positions, according to figures maintained by the Controller's Office.
Muni has used private security guards since 1975, and 400 private workers handle paratransit services, which aid the disabled. Towing, janitorial, meter-collection, and citation-information services have all been privatized. In total, the MTA's purported cost saving is as much as $20 million per year.
But that's a sliver of MTA's $680 million budget, and there are perennial fears of more privatization pushes. This fall's Muni reform measure, Proposition A, nearly went to the ballot with language that could have allowed millions of dollars in new privatized work at Muni without review from civil service commissioners, but it was removed at the insistence of labor leaders.
San Diego privatized many of its transit services in the '80s, gradually contracting out services as public employees retired. By last year about half of San Diego's bus routes were managed by three private contractors, including Violia, an Illinois company that also runs Muni's paratransit services. Labor leaders say service in San Diego suffered under privatization, and they oppose similar changes here.
"Whenever you contract out a department, whenever you let go of control, then you don't have control of the product," ...
If that happened, the union wouldn't be happy. But how would the Muni-experience change for the hundreds of thousands of riders?
Or, more accurately: how do the indications that service would improve compare to the indications that it would decline?
In the article, it says that Muni saves $20,000,000 by using private contractors. That sounds like a privatization success story. Doesn't that $20 million savings equal better service? If they used more private contractors, would they save even more money?
But the result -- at least in Tulsa -- was poorly trained jail guards who never lasted and were likelier to become allies with inmates due to their displeasure over compensation and/or fractured relations with administrators and company executives.
The sheriff's department eventually retook control of the county jail in Tulsa due to outcry over the private outfit's performance.
Since many of the sheriff's deputies were career-driven, there's been much less of a concern about turnover, and plenty of them were still around from before Tulsa experimented with a private-jail contract, so they already knew much more about running the jail correctly. The contract bidding process did force the sheriff to commit to serious performance measures, however.
In addition, the controller's report on private contracts here doesn't quantify the savings at Muni, i.e. analyze the performance of private vendors.
The unions haven't managed to stop some level of privatization from occurring at Muni, obviously, and if it occurs further and it works, fine. But it seems like perceived monetary savings can't be the only gauge for determining success.
That's my outlook at least.
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