Who Won and Who Lost In the MTA Budget Battle? David Chiu, Of Course.

Where deals are done

As you heard from us earlier, the standoff over the Municipal Transportation Agency's budget was defused today at City Hall. Board of Supervisors President David Chiu -- who had earlier introduced a motion to reject the agency's $784 million budget -- said he spent much of the day in last-minute negotiations with Supervisor Carmen Chu, mayoral chief of staff Steve Kawa, and, finally, Mayor Gavin Newsom himself hashing out a deal.

The final contours of that deal leave a lot to be desired from the standpoint of the leftist supervisors whom Chiu had previously recruited to fight the proposed MTA budget. The key concessions from the mayor's office are a $2.8 million reduction in "work orders" -- payments that transfer Muni's cash to other city agencies for services, such as the police department -- and a postponement of rate hikes for students, the disabled and senior citizens. A planned increase of cash fares from $1.50 to $2 this July remains in place, as does a substantial reduction in transit lines.

Supervisor David Campos fumed today over the fare increases, which he said will fall hard on his working-class constituents. "I understand that a lot of deals are cut in City Hall," he said. "While I recognize that this is a movement in the right direction, I have to say that I am utterly disappointed that we are where we are right now." Campos went so far as to suggest that the deal represented a selling out of the so-called "progressive" ideals that he and the other freshman liberal supes -- Chiu, John Avalos, and Eric Mar -- championed en route to office last fall.

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi seemed to echo this point. "Some lines do have to be drawn in the sand," he said. In the end, the board's far-left faction -- Mirkarimi, Chris Daly, Avalos, Mar, and Campos -- all voted against Chiu's successful motion to table the rejection of the MTA budget.

David Chiu

There are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, the avowedly pragmatic Chiu has made himself vulnerable to charges of spinelessness -- letting Newsom roll over his line in the sand with an Abrams tank. (As Online News Editor Joe Eskenazi noted in a previous post, it's possible that Newsom simply recruited swing supe Sophie Maxwell to his side, forcing Chiu to accept a raw deal.) And the board's lefties made clear today that they have no qualms about bucking the will of the board president when it suits them.

Then again, Chiu also made clear that he has no problem forging ahead with a tough but necessary compromise despite blowback from his political allies. A rejection of the MTA budget would have wreaked havoc in city accountants' spreadsheets just as the mayor and the supervisors attempt to cope with the worst fiscal crisis in recent San Francisco history. If Chiu had rode the horse over the cliff on this one, he would have come in for a lot of complaints from those inclined to take a view of city politics that favors pragmatism over ideology.

In other words, for a politician aspiring to citywide popularity, rather than the favor of the philosophically rigid extreme left, this deal was probably the right one. Not as though a pol of Chiu's intelligence and cunning needs us to tell him that.