julie lives here.

The infamous hybrid Tahoe with driver parked outside of City Hall last night.

Around 6pm yesterday evening I was standing on the steps of City Hall, freezing my behind off and wrangling the last of the Cheetos out of the package. I was supposed to be meeting my friend Amber to attend the SFMTA’s Town Hall meeting to listen about the budget cuts to Muni services. Now, granted, I was standing in the wrong place (the meeting was held a few blocks away and not at City Hall. I’m not always so good at reading the fine print).

But was I standing in the wrong place at the right time?

As I waited, wondering where everyone was, I looked at the shiny black hybrid Tahoe, patiently parked outside in the prime location. A young man had been standing by the car, then got in the driver’s seat. Sat, waiting. Then it dawned on me as I licked the last of the Cheetos fluorescent cheese off my fingertips: This is GAVIN’s Tahoe. This is his DRIVER. It has to be. And then: Apparently Gavin’s not going to the Muni Town Hall meeting either. I fantasized about Gavin striding down the stairs, headed for his lift home, me wiping my hands on my jeans in case I was looking too scruffy. What would I say to him? Where would I even begin?

Luckily for both of us, I never got the chance. Amber buzzed me (where ARE you?!) and so I headed over to the correct location, where the room was already filled with anxious citizens and Muni riders who were waiting to hear bad news and then have their 90 seconds of fame, the allotted amount of time each commenter had to speak their piece.

I won’t recap the entire meeting as you’ll I’m sure you’ll read more informative accounts on rescuemuni.org and transbay. What I can give you is something more philosophical because I kept flashing back to this damn Tahoe.

The room was filled, all chairs filled and then the overflow standing against the walls. Elderly people, people in wheelchairs, people coming to this meeting after a full day at work, regular people. There was a short presentation by Judson True and his colleague Julie Kirschbaum. I did not envy them standing up there, explaining the requisite pie charts and bar graphs and telling the people in the room who both love and depend on Muni how difficult these changes would be, and how much the people at Muni were between a rock and a hard place. People shifted in their seats. Some grumbled and some shush-ed each other.

And then the waves of citizen comments started. People lined up in groups of five to approach the podium and give their comments in 90 seconds. That’s when the mood of the room started to build: sadness, solidarity, humor, anger. The anguish of the disabled riders, who physically can’t stand due to disabilitity for an extra ten minutes because there will be less bus service, where there are no seats, no bus shelters to protect them from the weather. The rage and despair of the elderly who are barely getting by on SSI, whose checks have already been cut due to the state’s economic difficulties, talking about how they would have to choose between food and transportation. In many private worlds in this city, $10 is a tremendous amount of money. The elderly Chinese woman who said that many seniors won’t be able to leave their apartments and run basic errands and the toll that will take on their emotional well-being, the isolation caused by being too poor to take public transportation.

The Spanish translator’s voice for the man at the podium: how even though he’s poor, disabled, and trying to go to school, he realizes he needs to pay his fare because he knows Muni needs the money. He won’t go in the back door, he’ll go in the front door and pay his fare because there are people who are even more worse off than he is.

The people born and raised in San Francisco who have been taking Muni all their lives, trying to commute and how unpleasant and difficult these increasingly crowded trains and buses are becoming. How people who can afford to purchase fast passes will be driving more due to these conditions and that Muni will only lose money from the loss of these fares. How the disruption to the late night OWL service is feared because of personal safety concerns: people waiting all alone, late at night, for up to an hour on lonely and possibly dangerous streets. Someone made the point about Muni using divisive tactics, pitting one group against the other in blame to distract from the matter at hand. It’s the seniors. It’s the commuters in their cars. It’s the fare evaders.

Some people had suggestions. Good ideas. Get businesses that use the city’s infrastructure to help support Muni. Use buses with back doors that only let people out, not in, to squelch the fare evaders. Fix the broken fare boxes so drivers can collect fares.

And then the tenor shifted: Salaries. They’re too high. Muni management gets paid too much money. Where is Nate Ford?!

Yes, indeed. Where IS Nate Ford? Someone made the laughable and most memorable quote of the evening: “U.S. senators only make about $170,000 a year. Nate Ford makes over $300,000. Both are equally as ineffective.” (Or something like that.) The room erupted in hoots, laughs and vigorous applause.

I kept thinking about that black Tahoe, parked conspicuously outside City Hall. Gavin making the getaway home to his place in Ashbury Heights while the people who pay his salary wonder how they’ll survive. I remembered back to that “Where’s Gavin?” website and how the mayor’s people were so quick to describe how often our city’s leader rides around on public transportation. I’m not sure if he was ever sighted (even though I thought I had seen him once), but I’m sure he’s not anywhere Muni at this point. He’s moved on to saving us all from cell phone radiation.

One man spoke up: All of us need to come together. The seniors, the disabled, the youth, the commuters, the MUNI drivers… protest together against the city, against the bad management at the top who doesn’t care. I wondered what it would take to make that happen. A scapegoat or a symbol is needed. I’m not sure if we can collectively assemble in force to make our voices matter. We would need a Marie Antionette of MUNI, laughing from a balcony and waving expensive Muni fast passes at the rabble below. I’m not even sure that Nate Ford is that person.

The take-home lesson I got was this: We’re in a situation to where there are no easy answers. The people who will suffer most are the people who can least afford to: our seniors and people with disabilities and people on fixed incomes. What kind of city are we becoming where the disenfranchised only become more so? San Francisco talks a good game… but in reality, what does San Francisco really stand for?