Stuart "Fare Hike" Sunshine Fails Upward, Lands in Mayor's Office
We don't have anything funny to say about this one -- we're simply at a loss. Rumor had it yesterday that Gavin picked Stuart Sunshine to be his new Deputy Chief of Staff, and now the mayor's Director of Communications Peter Ragone (not to be confused with houseguest John Nelson) has confirmed it. Stuart will be leaving the MTA and moving to the mayor's administration, where he'll be "focusing on infrastructure and transportation."
That's just terrible.
Stuart's one of those bosses who gets promoted to new and better jobs not because he's awesome, but in order to put him in the position where he can do the least amount of damage. Remember those fare hikes and service cuts that Muni went though a few years ago? That was under his stewardship. Throughout the last three mayoral administrations, he's waged a war against improving the Transbay Terminal. He had his hands in the patronage-rich SFO runway extension. He repeatedly derided Muni's legally-mandated but never-achieved goal of 85%-on-time. He worked to stop Caltrain from expanding into downtown.
Basically, think about everything that's awful about Bay Area transportation ... and that's the guy who'll be chieffing up the mayor's staff.
After the jump: we reminisce about the good old times, and also revisit that Octavia/Market intersection nobody can stop talking about these days.
We sifted through the archives of the Bay Area Transit News, looking for news articles about Stuart's time at Muni. Here's what we found.
In Feb of last year, the Central Subway project was bleeding money. "We're in the process of doing value engineering to do cost savings," he said. That "value engineering" meant scaling back the project with shorter platforms and humbler stations and cheaper routes. As a result, it'll be even harder for the insanely expensive 2-mile subway to carry enough people to ever be profitable.
In December of 2005, Ken Garcia wrote that Stuart "has done such a fine job of keeping the trains running on time." Anyone who was attempting to ride Muni back then can only interpret that statement as being wickedly sarcastic. In fact, we'd go so far as to say that you did a heckuva job, Shiney.
In an Chronicle article in November of 2005: "Stuart Sunshine ... said Muni could improve its on-time performance, but said the 85 percent standard set by voter initiative was unrealistic in that it failed to take into account such things as weather and roadwork... " Yes, fuck the voters. They don't understand how hard it is to predict the weather in San Francisco. Will it be foggy in the morning? Will there by a high of 55 degrees or 56? And as for roadwork: if that's the cause of late busses, it must mean that roadwork has been in progress on every route in the city for the last fifteen years.
The Muni union loved Stuart, though. Here's a quote from the 11/18/05 Examiner, a local advertising circular: "'I have been happy with the direction [Sunshine is] taking,' said union President William Sisk."
That love affair might have something to do with this tidbit from the 8/17/05 Examiner: "Sunshine vowed to 'work with the union to better monitor unscheduled absenteeism.'" Skipping off from work is just about the only thing Muni drivers do well. Did Stuart ever get around to monitoring absenteeism? Maybe. But he sure didn't curb it.
From a November 2005 article by KCBS radio comes this: "The busses may come much less often, but more people are riding them, said Sunshine, with fare box revenue up by 11 percent." This is approximately equivalent to throwing up in your mouth, then making out with someone, and then telling them that they enjoyed it.
A few brief promises in September of 2005: in the Examiner, he promised to do something about far evasion. In the Bay City News, he promised to implement the last phase of NextMuni. And in the Chronicle, he said that he'd consider allowing right turns onto freeway ramp at Octavia and Market. Yes, that's right, the freeway ramp that was designed specifically not to accept right-hand turns. The one where bicyclists keep getting flattened. On this topic, Stuart outdid even himself on being ahead of the disaster curve.
Regarding his fare hikes: In the August 5, 2005 Chron, he's quoted as saying, "I think the public generally understands that we had a deficit and we had to balance the budget in an across-the-board approach." And in the March 1, 2005 Contra Costa Times, he says, "even with a 25-cent increase, MUNI is still on the low end of the top 25 transit providers." We certainly agree with the middle third of that sentence.
But the best blurb comes, as always, from Matier and Ross. In their June 6, 2005 column, they share this anecdote:
Years ago it was Sunshine's luck as a mayoral aide to be standing next to Willie Brown when the mayor made his notorious pledge to "fix Muni in 100 days.""Mayor, how do you plan to do that?" a bewildered Sunshine asked Brown the next day.
"That's not the question, Mr. Sunshine," Brown replied. "The question is, how do you plan to do it?"
His answer wasn't pretty then. And it's not going to be pretty now.