Facing continuing catastrophic revenue losses amid the COVID-19 pandemic, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency officials say that more than 1,200 of the department’s nearly 6,000 employees may face layoffs.
Among the likely impacts of the projected layoffs: Significant further cuts to Muni’s already much-reduced service.
News of the projected layoffs was included in an all-staff presentation that senior SFMTA officials delivered in an online call Monday morning. A nearly identical presentation, to be discussed at Tuesday’s meeting of the agency board, was later made public on the SFMTA website.
“Like our peer agencies, the city at large and families throughout our community, the pandemic has resulted in losses at the SFMTA,” agency spokeswoman Kristen Holland said in an emailed statement. “We do not expect our revenues to fully return for years to come. Our finances are eroding and require a rapid and immediate response.”
The agency’s budget scenario forecasts a budget deficit of $68 million in the current fiscal year, which ends next June 30. The situation is projected to be far worse in the 12 months starting next July 1, with a shortfall projected at $168 million.
The document outlines the SFMTA’s struggle to continue to operate service and balance its budget as fare receipts and other key sources of revenue, such as parking fees and fines plunge.
“Revenue losses now make it impossible to not assume service reduction and layoffs,” the presentation said. “Too many risk scenarios point to deficits that cannot be closed without a workforce reduction.”
The agency says hundreds of jobs could be on the line during the remaining seven months of this fiscal year, with much more drastic cuts possible in the 2021-22 fiscal period.
While emphasizing that the agency faces significant financial uncertainties, the SFMTA presentation said layoffs could range from 989 to 1,226 full-time workers in fiscal 2021-22, or about 18% to 22% of the agency workforce.
The agency added that the cuts are certain to affect operations, which besides the Muni transit service include running the city’s parking program, overseeing the city’s taxi industry and rental bicycle and scooter programs, transportation planning and street safety initiatives.
Exactly what programs would be cut and how many employees would be affected in each part of the agency isn’t yet known. The SFMTA has already slashed Muni service and currently operates about one-third of the routes it was running at the outset of the pandemic. The agency’s current service plan has offset some of those cuts by increasing the number of runs on heavily used lines such as the 14-Mission and 38-Geary.
‘Dire and Gloomy and Scary’
Roger Marenco, president of Transit Workers Union Local 215-A, which represents about 2,000 Muni operators, said Monday he hoped to work with agency management to reduce the scope of the cuts.
“The situation looks and sounds dire and gloomy and scary,” Marenco said. He said Local 215-A is formulating a plan “that involves 10 or 12 steps so as to avoid layoffs or deter layoffs to a later date.”
Those steps would include hiring no new bus operators “for the next six, eight, 10, 12 months,” a measure designed to keep current drivers employed.
“That’s No. 1,” Marenco said. “No. 2 would be beefing up parking citations. … We all hate parking citations, that’s a fact. But on the flip side it is one of the larger sources of funding for the agency.”
Parking fees and fines made up about 28% of the SFMTA’s projected revenue for the 2019-20 fiscal year. But that cash stream dried up as the agency stopped enforcing parking meters and residential parking zones after shelter-at-home orders were imposed last March. The SFMTA now estimates that parking revenue will fall $220 million below budgeted levels for the period from July 1, 2019, through June 30, 2022.
Marenco said a renewed emphasis on collecting transit fares would also be crucial to increasing SFMTA revenue and heading off layoffs. The agency’s latest projections estimate that it will collect about $250 million less in fares during the fiscal 2019-2022 than had been budgeted â a shortfall due to a ridership decline that peaked at 74% in the spring and remains at about 65%.
SFMTA chief Jeffrey Tumlin said earlier this month that Muni would resume fare enforcement beginning Dec. 1, an announcement that brought immediate pushback from transit activists who argued that such a move will impose an additional burden on riders who are themselves struggling financially because of the pandemic.
Muni and the SFMTA, like virtually all large transit operators across the county, has managed to stave off draconian budget cuts so far only because of federal emergency aid. The CARES Act approved in March provided $1.3 billion to Bay Area public transit systems.
Muni’s share of that funding was $374 million, and Monday’s presentation made it clear that without that aid, the system would have been forced to make deep cuts far earlier than those being discussed now.
Transit agencies nationwide have appealed for another round of operating aid, and as much as $32 billion would be provided in already-approved House legislation. But that aid, like all other pandemic relief, has been stalled by major disagreements between House and Senate leadership on the size of a new relief package.
Muni is only the latest in a growing list of Bay Area transit agencies forced to contemplate â or go ahead with â worker layoffs.
Earlier this month, the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District voted to lay off 146 employees, virtually all of them in the agency’s bus and ferry operations.
BART, which is staring at a budget deficit of $177 million in fiscal 2021-22, has launched an early retirement incentive program to see how far it can shrink its 3,600-member workforce without resorting to layoffs. Exactly how many employees take advantage of the initiative won’t be known until later this month.
KQED’s Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.
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