After years of planning, San Francisco supervisors are to vote next week on a proposal to collect tolls on vehicles entering and leaving Treasure Island. If adopted, the toll wouldn’t kick in until mid-2024, but a vote of approval on Feb. 15 would constitute the final OK to charge motorists $5 during peak weekday traffic hours and $2.50 off-hours and weekends.
[UPDATE 2/10/22, 4:45pm: The meeting and vote have been canceled. There is no word yet when it might be rescheduled.]
The toll is just one piece of a transportation plan for the island, one of SF’s smallest and most underserved neighborhoods, where massive redevelopment will provide housing for 20,000 people — 10 times the number of current residents. The plan also includes ferry service to mainland San Francisco, slated to launch later this year, expanded Muni service to the city, and new bus service to Oakland.
Planners say the toll serves two purposes: It would fund the transport alternatives and discourage people from driving on an already congested Bay Bridge. Either way, the goal is to encourage “mode shift,” or getting people out of cars and onto transit.
Residents and business owners on TI, as islanders call it, have been fighting the plan almost as long as it has existed. Restaurant owner Linda Edson told The Frisc in 2019 that the toll would discourage vendors who deliver her ingredients, and scare off customers who could eat in mainland SF or Oakland toll-free.
At that time, District 6 Sup. Matt Haney told The Frisc that the toll idea was unfair. “There is no other neighborhood that is required to fund its own transportation infrastructure, over and above what people pay when they get on a bus or a train,” he said.
Even if residents and merchants get toll exemptions, Edson still has concerns about her vendors and customers being charged, and she expressed them in a Jan. 25 meeting of the Treasure Island Mobility Management Agency committee. At meeting’s end, the committee, which consists of Haney, Sup. Rafael Mandelman, and Sup. Hillary Ronen, voted in favor of the toll, leaving many islanders feeling betrayed.
Haney, who was not present at the Tuesday Board of Supervisors meeting for personal reasons, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
(UPDATE: Haney responded to The Frisc after this story was published. See his comments below.)
Legal hopes and FasTrak tech
Other islanders are opposed as well. Hope Williams has lived on Treasure Island for 13 years and got involved in advocacy work as soon as she arrived. When the pandemic hit, Williams founded a hub where families could get hot meals, school supplies, and even laptops for their children, as well as a free food program. (TI only has one grocery store.) She has also coordinated with the Department of Public Health to distribute COVID test kits and plan a wellness fair that’s set for April.
Between working, spearheading community initiatives, and caring for her three kids, Williams has also been speaking out against the toll. “I keep hearing the words ‘equity’ and ‘affordability,’” Williams said at the Jan. 25 meeting. “You have the opportunity to not move forward with putting this on the backs of the low-income, underserved community who can’t defend themselves.”
In an interview with The Frisc, Williams explained that in addition to being concerned for island restaurants, she was worried about community programs like hers that rely on volunteers who drive to the island.
Other islanders have raised legal issues. Representatives of the SF Boardsailing Association, a group that uses the Treasure Island shores for kiteboarding and related activities, say that charging recreational users violates a state law enforced by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). Ethan Lavine, shoreline development program manager for BCDC, wrote a letter to the SFCTA in November explaining that the Treasure Island mobility agency may need a BCDC permit or permit amendment for the tolls.
But the vote must come before TIMMA’s permit application, Lavine told The Frisc, adding that TIMMA has not violated the law BCDC enforces. If BCDC finds anything objectionable in the permit application, “it’s a matter of modifying the proposal,” he said, adding that TIMMA staff have been responsive to BCDC communications.
A statement from a committee of islanders said that Haney’s vote for the toll ‘in the face of unanimous opposition from the many folks who testified at the meeting was sad.’
Over the years, TIMMA has added exemptions to the plan for residents who moved to TI in 2019 or earlier, and for some low-income Bay Area residents. In September, the agency agreed to provide mobility subsidies for those who currently work on the island. Tolls will be charged using FasTrak transponders that have become mandatory on local bridges. But it’s not clear how the discounts will work.
Jim Mirowski, owner of Treasure Island Wines and founding member of the Treasure Island Organizing Committee (TIOC), said in the Jan. 25 meeting that income-based discounts via FasTrak exist “only as a pipe dream.”
He’s not entirely wrong. The transponders have that capability, “but here in the Bay Area, we haven’t actually put that theory into practice,” said John Goodwin, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. (MTC is working on a low-income discount program, however, that could debut this year on I-880 in Alameda County.)
The technology isn’t the big problem, said Goodwin. More difficult will be outreach to low-income residents, help for those without bank accounts, and verifying eligibility. He’s confident that a proof of concept will be ready by the proposed 2024 toll debut.
“Heartbroken and shocked”
By all accounts, the Board of Supervisors in its capacity as the TIMMA board is expected to approve the toll next week. But no matter how the board votes, Haney — who has been lauded as a champion of Treasure Island and opposed the toll for years — has already lost the confidence of some island constituents. A TIOC statement says “his reversal in the face of unanimous opposition from the many folks who testified at the [Jan. 25] meeting was sad.”
Hope Williams went further: “I’m heartbroken and I’m shocked.” She voted for Haney in the 2018 supervisorial election and continues to work with his staff, and she stressed that she’s grateful they continue to provide support for her community initiatives. However, Williams said, “I was sure he was on our side, and that he would stop [the tolls]. He promised us.”
Now Haney is running for state Assembly, and the day of the toll vote is also election day for what could be a tight Assembly race. Will Hope Williams support him as she did in 2018? She paused, then replied: “I can’t answer that.”
(Updated with Sup. Matt Haney’s comments.) Haney, who responded after our story was first posted, said the TI development agreement, signed years before he became supervisor, requires the toll and there’s nothing he can do to change that.
“I promised them I’d stop the toll for current residents. And we won,” the supervisor told The Frisc via text. “I never told anyone I would exempt high-income future residents or that I’d support doing that.”
Haney also said because of environmental and traffic benefits, he supports a toll on motorists that don’t qualify for residency or income-based discounts. This includes volunteers: “We want them to take the ferry or the bus … Somebody driving from Marin to volunteer in San Francisco doesn’t get a free pass to drive to the Tenderloin.”
He also noted that after the vote, TIMMA can introduce more exemptions and delay the toll if, for example, new public transit is not yet running by 2024.
Residents and merchants still said they feel betrayed. How would Haney respond to them? “In the future there will be a toll because it’s required by law … I’m sorry they feel that they wanted me to oppose the toll and eliminate it entirely. I think that would be bad for the future of Treasure Island.”
Max Harrison-Caldwell is a staff writer for The Frisc.