OT: SFBC Elections

[Bruce Garretson]

Obviously too much time on my hands recovering from my bike crash. Is it possible to get some insight into what is going on at SFBC without this thread becoming perceived as a personal attack on anybody? I am not a big fan of some of the SFBC initiatives but am passionate about the yield law. Caltrain issues is extremely relevant to me but have also been told that there was a perception by Caltrain that the tactics were too aggressive and not constructive. I am willing to be politically active for this cause but do not understand the current situation.

[Shirley Johnson]

Hey Bruce,

 

Seeing that no one has responded, please permit me to offer some comments. First, so sorry to hear about your bike crash. Hope you’re recovering quickly. Thanks for your interest in learning more about the SFBC situation and becoming more engaged.

 

The SFBC is at a pivotal point. The question at hand is whether members should continue to elect the board of directors or whether the board should self-select the board. This is an important governance question and will have a huge impact on the organization going forward.

 

There are two opposing slates running for the board of directors now. These can be viewed as the reform slate (Save SF Bike) and the establishment slate (LoveSFBC). Save SF Bike wants to retain member voting rights to keep the board accountable to members, while LoveSFBC wants to abolish member voting rights, taking away members’ voice in the board election. Each slate has seven candidates for the 15-member board (half the seats come up for election each year).

 

In addition to retaining member voting rights, Save SF Bike would like to see more support of member advocates. Full disclosure, I’m running for the board on the Save SF Bike slate. You can learn more about us at savesfbike.org.

 

Regarding Caltrain, as leader of the now defunct BIKES ONboard project, I can offer insight into the situation. It’s not surprising that Caltrain’s perception is that we were aggressive, because staff was extremely resistant to increasing onboard bike capacity. In the end, we were successful in getting Caltrain to increase bike capacity over 50% since 2009, as well as a commitment to add a third bike car to Bombardier trains by 2016, as well as a commitment to increase bike capacity on electrified trains in 2020. When we started the BIKES ONboard project in 2008, some trains carried only 16 bikes. Today most trains carry 80 bikes.  I’d suggest it’s hard to argue against this degree of success.

 

We adjusted our style to fit the situation. When Caltrain was recalcitrant early on, we pushed hard. When Caltrain came around and added bike capacity, we became supportive and complimentary. This cycle repeated a few times over the years. And again, it was successful. :-)

 

Shirley

[Bruce Garretson]

Shirley,

I appreciate you taking the time to give me a well reasoned answer. Just signed up for SFBC and will vote.

Bruce

[Christine Windsor]

I believe you can only vote if your membership was current as of the start of the election on Nov 15. You may need to look into that. 

--
-- follow: http://twitter.com/sf2g | terms: http://sf2g.com/terms.html | bike prep: http://sf2g.com/bike-prep.html | unsub: http://groups.google.com/group/sf2g
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SF2G" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sf2g+uns...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Shirley Johnson]

You're welcome, Bruce. Happy to respond.

Christine is correct. You had to be an SFBC member by November 15 to be eligible to vote in the board election. But thanks for joining!

[Zack Stender]

Here is a good, fairly unbiased article about the SFBC board election that was published recently by Streetsblog SF. Being a board member myself (not up for re-election this year), and a supporter of the Love SFBC slate I have my obvious biases. Still, I highly encourage anyone who is an SFBC member to VOTE, and I must suggest favoring the Love SFBC slate. 

The overarching question here is whether to support the SFBCs staff and current board in continuing their current trajectory of professionalism and high level work (Love SFBC), or support a group (Save SFBike) who want to reform the SFBC and bring it back to it's activist roots. 

It is true that the SFBC has moved towards a more professional organization as it has grown. And along this path the SFBC has made leaps and bounds in it's work with the City. They now have a seat at the table with MTA. Where they used to have to picket outside of important city planning meetings, the SFBC is now asked to attend these meetings and their input is hugely impactful. This is the level the SFBC has aspired to reach throughout it's existence. This high level, high impact SFBC works more closely with more groups in the city than it ever has. And other than a drop in membership back when Rainbow Grocery stopped offering member discounts (not a shocker) the SFBC has maintained likely the largest membership of any member based non-profit in the city!

The Save SFBike slate is of the opinion that the SFBC needs fixing. In my opinion this is a bit like saying the Golden State Warriors need fixing. They have claimed that the SFBC is trying to take power from members, or that they are trying to get rid of membership all together. This is really just an inflammatory statement that also could not be further from the truth. The SFBCs power is in it's huge membership. Both in their memberships sheer numbers, and in their ability to call upon armies of volunteers to do thousands of hours of work, to speak at dozens of hearings, and to advocate at hundreds of events every year.

Their is unfortunately much misinformation floating around and most of it is rabble rousing. Stoking a fire that really should not exist in the first place. Really we all want the streets to be safer and more pleasant to bike on, and the city's policies to favor cycling equally to any other mode of transportation. 

If anyone is interested in more information I am happy to chat off line or here on this thread. 

Cheers,

Zack 

On Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 1:20:03 PM UTC-8, Bruce Garretson wrote:

[Matthew Blain]

The Streetsblog article is a good high level overview of the situation.

What i haven't seen anywhere yet is an overview of the different candidates. There's the high level slates (which is largely "insiders" vs "outsiders"). But I have a favorable impression of several of the insiders and several of the rabble rousers, and know almost nothing about most of them. Is there an in-depth overview out there of all the candidates? (E.g. I can point to a variety of guides of various quality for any SF election.) For example, I assume the main thing the new board does now is find a new ED; what do the board candidates have to offer for process?

There's also no question that SFBC has accomplished many things and is effective. But also has had terrible member communication over the past year. From the bylaw change which was sold as one thing but was really another, to things like significant funding and personnel changes which were mostly just kept silent. I have no idea of the source of this--staff, board, some of each? 

Some journalism would be great here, but I don't know if anyone has the interest or funding to go into that depth on this sort of thing.

[Maxence Nachury]

On Dec 4, 2015, at 10:24 AM, Matthew Blain <matthe...@gmail.com> wrote:

There's also no question that SFBC has accomplished many things and is effective. But also has had terrible member communication over the past year.

amen to that. The shutdown of BIKES  Onboard is another Orwellian case. See this past thread http://bit.ly/1QkVLtf.

And below is the last email from the thread promising a response to the SF2G list back in August. Neither Noah nor Janice ever replied either to me directly or to the thread.

From: Janice Li <jan...@sfbike.org>

Date: August 4, 2015 at 8:20:49 PM PDT

To: SF2G <sf...@googlegroups.com>

Cc: jan...@sfbike.org

Subject: Re: SF Bicycle Coalition's Caltrain work is not ending

Hi all,

I deeply apologize for my delayed response. I was on vacation for a few days and then came back to a pile of things. I promise to get back to your very real concerns asap this week, although I suspect most of your questions will likely need to be answered by Noah directly.

Best,

Janice

[Elliot Schwartz]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2015 at 10:24 AM, Matthew Blain <matthe...@gmail.com> wrote:

The Streetsblog article is a good high level overview of the situation.

What i haven't seen anywhere yet is an overview of the different candidates.

There are candidate statements over here:

  http://www.sfbike.org/news/2015-board-voting/

But perhaps you were hoping for something not self-authored?

--

[Brian Wiedenmeier]

Hi All,

SF Bicycle Coalition members are invited to attend our annual Member Meeting next week, which this year will feature a candidate forum. Because of the large number of candidates, each will be given three minutes to make a statement and there will be time to mix and follow-up with questions individually after. I have heard that others may be trying to organize a more debate-style event, and if it comes together we'd be happy to promote it. Hope to see many SF2Gers there. Thanks to all for being members!

Brian Wiedenmeier

Development Director 

SF Bicycle Coalition

br...@sfbike.org

[Matthew Blain]

I can't make it to the Thursday meeting.

I encourage folks to write up what they have to say about the candidates, from previous interactions or from current ones such as this meeting. Maybe put a note here, or send to me privately--I'll compile stuff if that happens.

[Bruce Garretson]

Shirley,

Even if I not able to support your slate. You did motivate me to become active in SFBC.

[djconnel]

No need to support slates. Board members aren't party drones like most members of Congress. I personally did not vote a complete slate because there was one person I particularly trust.

[Daniel Chao]

Bumping Brian's reminder that the SFBC All Member meeting is tonight. Details here. Hope people can join to engage with candidates and cast vote.

--endorsement below--

Also, wanted to personally endorse Jessica Hyman. After riding for years with SF2G, a job switch to SF allowed me the good fortune to join SFCC and and meet Jess in Jan 2014. Jess leads the club's community outreach efforts where she has been tireless is organizing our club's involvement in providing bikes for kids at Mission High, teaching and mentoring SF teens on how to build and ride bikes.

Her community efforts carried through to her day job where was up until recently the leading global operations at Business for Social Responsibility. Now Jess is Chief of Staff at Atlassian and working with their foundation to stay connected to the community.

Jess is a religious bike commuter and i can assure you that she will stand strongly in favor of bikes on BART and Caltrain.

FWIW, Jess is endorsed by the existing board and LoveSFBC.

In case you can't make the meeting, Jess' personal statement for tonight's meeting is pasted below:

I’m running for the SFBC board because I want to help support the organization’s impact. As a commuter and cyclist, I am passionate about improving San Francisco’s infrastructure and community. I moved to SF almost exactly 7 years ago. I took the 5 buss to work every day and it was awful. I was almost in tears by the time I first got the guts up to buy a commuter bike to get to work. I remember feeling terrified the first time I put my arms over the dropped down handle bars and missed the comfort of my beach cruiser. But that bike changed my life. I loved commuting to work. And then I got doored on Market St and almost lost a finger. Instead of going back to the buss I joined the SFBC. I wanted to make the city safer for commuters. 

Flash forward 6 years and I’m interviewing for the executive director position for the SFBC. I didn’t get the job but that didn’t stop my engagement. I’ve volunteered at Bike to Work Day and worked hard to bridge the gap between the SFBC and the cycling community. For the past two years I’ve engaged my cycling club members to attend Winter Fest and the Golden Wheel awards. And now I’m running for the board so that I can support the SFBC team in making San Francisco a better city for commuters and cyclists. 

My love for biking has gone beyond commuting and now launched me into the world of cycling. As Community Engagement lead for the San Francisco Cycling Club I’ve launched volunteering programs that connect club members with Mission High School to help get students in the city riding. I’ve also focused on engaging women in the membership by actively recruiting women, ensuring we have tailored programs for women and ensuring that they feel included in events normal dominated by men like racing. The women in our club are actively engaged and doing amazing things together. 

Outside of cycling I’m also involved with Girls on the Run, a local non profit that engages elementary school girls in a running program that focuses on self esteem, leadership and team work. I’ve worked in under served neighborhoods like Hunters Point to coach Girls on the Run teams and served as the Girls on the Run Associate Board president for 2 years. Currently I’m helping to lead You Can Run which is a half marathon training program designed to engage women in the program and help fundraise. 

When I’m not running and cycling I’m working at Atlassian as Chief of Staff. This is a big week at Atlasssian which is why I’m still there tonight while you guys are having fun talking about making SF a better city! Previous to Atlasssian I spent 6 years at Business for Social Responsibility where I focused on leading global operations and led consulting work for companies like Gap and Unilever in their sustainability strategies. 

I just want to help the SFBC team and the membership realize their dream of making SF a world class city for commuters and cyclists. It’s something that I think about every day on my ride to work and every weekend when I’m riding across the bridge to Marin or doing laps at the polo fields. I believe in this organizing and want to do everything I can to help it realize it’s potential. 

[Bryan Davis]

+1 for Jess!!

[Matthew Blain]

Did anyone go to the meeting and have a summary to report?

Also, even more OT, the Sierra Club regional elections for the SF clubs close tomorrow at 2PM. The 'green sf with color' slate is pro recreational access.  Some of you may know that the local Sierra Club chapters are inexplicably one of the main opponents of opening the SF watershed roads to recreational use beyond the 'guided tours' some of you have done. Perhaps changing the composition of the board will help towards that cause, and they have other good things to contribute too.

[djconnel]

Reminder the deadline is approaching (Thursday).

Dan

[djconnel]

Correction: apparently the deadline is today (30 Dec):

Voting form is here:

https://www.tfaforms.com/398008

Dan