blah blah blah MUNI blah blah PESKIN blah MCGOLDRICK

When he's not busy getting impeached or whatever for indecent exposure, Aaron Peskin's trying to fix Muni. And SPUR, the urban-planny folks, are grateful: they're encouraging everyone to give Aaron's amendments a thumbs-up. You can read it in loathsome .doc format here, or as a Google Document here -- but honestly, you don't want to read either, since it's about a billion pages long.

Here's a condensed version of what the amendment would do: give Muni more money (it's currently underfunded by millions and simply can't afford to meet its service requirements), make it easier to fire awful employees and reward awesome ones, and institute some clean-air planning. Predictably, it's the labor issues that have some folks riled up: although nobody would be kicked out of a union, it would allow Muni to hire more folks "at will" -- that's the way that most people are hired, and it means that you can be fired if you're grossly negligent. Sounds fair enough. It would also let Muni offer more merit-based raises, which sounds even better.

Jake McG's floating a Muni amendment of his own, which would give the Supes more control over Muni (which always works out well). Beyond Chron seems to have taken a shining to it, as Paul Hogarth has doubts about Aaron's labor reforms: "I doubt it's appropriate to scapegoat the system's problem on people who work for Muni." Quite right! When a company fails, it's never the fault of the people who work there. If anyone should be scapegoated, it's the riders. Lazy bums.