By Steven T. Jones
As the Board of Supervisors prepares to reject the Municipal Transportation Agency’s budget this Tuesday, word is the Mayor’s Office and MTA are threatening to play chicken and not try in good faith to develop a new budget before the current one expires at the end of the month (in which case, the city General Fund would pay for current Muni service levels, thus expanding the city’s budget deficit).
“We don’t have a course of action charted for if the Board of Supervisors rejects this budget,” MTA spokesperson Judson True said. When I asked whether the board would get together next week to try to develop a budget (its next meeting is May 19), he said, “Whether the MTA board convenes or not is up to the MTA board.”
And that board is made up entirely of mayoral appointees, which is how we got into this mess in the first place. The Mayor’s Office has not answered our inquiries, and MTA director Nat Ford hasn’t been available to supervisors or anyone else. He even cancelled a long-planned interview tonight on the City Desk News Hour, on which I’ll be discussing this issue tonight (7 p.m. on Comcast Channel 11).
It’s not as if the MTA and Newsom didn’t see this coming. More than a month ago, Board President David Chiu visited the MTA and said the Board of Supervisors would reject the budget if it relied too heavily on Muni service cuts and fare hikes and if it continued to subsidize other city agencies through ballooning work orders.