MTA Boss Nathaniel Ford Will Never Get It. So Why Do We Pay him $300,000 per Year?

There’s really not much worth saying in response to Nathaniel Ford’s “letter” to the SF Weekly this week in response to our cover story that my esteemed colleague Joe Eskenazi hasn’t already said, but I simply wanted to add a few comments.
One, it’s clear that Mr. Ford is either too stubborn or too clueless to understand the fundamental concept that we are not “customers” consuming a product, we are the owners of Muni for whom he and the MTA operate said service on behalf of. Instead, he’s just a Wall Street CEO working on behalf of a handful of people in Room 200 at City Hall. It’s time for him to go.
It’s especially clear with the clueless cuts he’s made that will ensure a slower, less reliable Muni – one he was paid very very very well to maintain and improve. This is Wall Street bonus logic on Main Street – pay people bonuses for being a f*ck up.
Finally, I’ll say this – it’s alleged we never mentioned the massive state cuts by the Governor and the Democratic Legislature to transit that I’ve talked about ad infinitium for years. So, for fun , I thought I’d quote the section where it’s mentioned just so Mr. Ford can have someone read it to him . No, it wasn’t a 10,000 word section of the story – but we also would never have been able to print a 15,000 word story on Muni, either.

“Over the past three years, the state has reneged on providing $179 million to Muni; even the $36 million so-called “windfall” it recently gave the agency was only a fraction of the transit funding originally approved by voters, after the state government filched the rest

.”
And, for laughs, here’s a link to every single blog post that mentions said raids in Sacramento by the Governor, the Legislature, etc.
Mr. Ford can make all the excuses he wants – the fact is once the raids started it was incumbent upon him, the MTA board and “Mayor” Newsom to find a suitable replacement for said money since it was gone for good. Issuing bogus parking tickets and a few extensions to parking meter hours are not stable sources of revenue. And all the “stable sources of revenue” don’t mean squat if the Mayor’s just going to shove more phony “work orders” down Muni’s collective throat to satisfy the short term demands of his vanity bid for Lt. Governor. That said, it was what he was paid so well to do – and he failed. And for his failure he is rewarded with lots of money and perks.
Such is the San Francisco Way these days – pay people a lot of money to do a very poor job. No wonder we have a bazillion dollar deficit.

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