If you walk past San Francisco’s Civic Center today at 1:30 p.m., March 4th 2010, you may notice a crowd gathered there, demonstrating and visibly upset. Too often things like these happen but passerbys never know what they’re about. The shout-outs through loudspeakers just recycle labor chants from the 70’s, when these things had more weight. So I’m here to inform you on a few of the issues this crowd is upset about, because it’s nice to find these things out in polite, printed paragraphs.

The March 4th Strike & Day of Action was called in defense of public services and public education. “We’re being asked to share the pain, but Wall Street and the Banksters are making record profits,” read a pamphlet entitled “NO CUTS: Join The Movement.” These broad strokes of outrage point to a disturbing trend: as cities, counties and states struggle with budget deficits in a poor economy, public schools, public transportation and parks are the first to get cut.

The sad part is that it’s the most common people (the majority of us) that rely on these public services the most. We can’t afford private schools with room and board. We can’t afford BMWs and parking garages and we need parks because apartment buildings don’t have any.

So let us peruse through just a few of the issues at hand. This way, if you see the crowd in Civic Center today, you’ll know what they’re shouting about.

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

For a city as parking-challenged as San Francisco, it should behoove officials to keep a well-run and affordable public transit system. Instead, we have Muni. Back in the late ’70’s it cost a quarter to board the bus and $11 for a monthly pass. Predicatbly, rates climbed every year. In 2003, local papers interviewed a Shelley Quinn, a visitor Boston area, about the $1.25 fare she had to pony up. ”Look,” said Quinn, a bookkeeper, “this isn’t exactly a bargain town anyway. I just spent $3 for a pretzel. Another buck for a cable car won’t break the bank. For us, it’s a one-time thing.”

Well, that may fine for a tourist but the monthly pass has gone from $45 in 2003 to $70 this year. Where the hell am I supposed to find the extra $300 a year? In the end, I put that money into some new wheels and try to ride my bike everywhere.

The Municipal Transportation Agency (which runs Muni) has been brainstorming at length to find other ways to reduce its budget deficit. Most recently, the MTA floated the idea of charging Muni riders an extra charge to get a transfer, which allows them to change to another bus line limitlessly during an hour-and-a-half window. Over in the East Bay, AC Transit has started doing that and it feels like a terrible slap in the face when you board a bus. Luckily, at Tuesday’s public hearing, MTA was quickly discouraged, by those gathered, to follow that idea in The City.

Besides providing affordable transportation, buses should be relatively timely, wouldn’t you say? In 1999, San Francisco voters thoughts so and set a goal to get buses on time at least 85% of the time. How are we doing with that? Last year, Muni officials rejoiced when on-time rates reached an all-time high of 72.7%. Enough said.

PARKS

Last year, the Board of Supervisor allowed MTA to study the idea of putting parking meters in Golden Gate Park as means to raise more money. The assault on free and public spaces is a dangerous side effect of a poor economy. City Supervisor Sean Elsbernd understood that when he told SF.Street.Blog.com that he is worried that charging for parking could drive park users away. “We want to encourage people to go to parks, we don’t want to discourage,” Elsbernd said. “I wonder if meters are going to do that.”

At the same time, the lean times have pushed city officials to think outside the box. Mayor Gavin Newsom and his Greening Director Astrid Haryati have been in process of creating at least 10 plazas and “parklets” by converting former parking spots and inlets of public land. The first of these hugely popular spaces, at the crossroads of Market and Castro, cost only $7,000 to set up. Sprinkled across the city, the parklets revitalize drab pavement in a simple and cost-effective way. It’s more ideas like these that need to flourish to make the Bay Area a healthy place to live.

COMMUNITY COLLEGES

My friend Jason Ferretti is someone who outwardly leads a successful life (motorcycle, suede sectional sofa, big screen TV and an apartment on Van Ness Avenue). Even with a job at Farallon, one of The City’s best and priciest eatery, he’s not content. Steadfastedly, he’s been taking courses at City College of San Francisco. But his march toward a Business degree (his ticket out of the service industry) is in jeopardy because Summer courses at the community college were scraped in a cost-cutting move made to save the school $4 million but leaving about 2,000 students behind.

Ferretti was one course away from transferring–a course he was unable to take because too few sections had been offered this semester. Now, two semesters behind his academic plan, I wonder if he won’t eventually give up and end up one fewer bright bulb without the proper credentials to make a real difference.

PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES

There are two public university systems in California and together they serve around 600,000 students in 33 campuses. So when tuition is raised as drastically as they have in the last decade, it affects a lot of people. At the University of California’s campuses, tuition in 2000 was $3,429 a year (which does not count books, food or housing). UC regents area already looking to jack fees up to $10,302 for the 2011 school year, The Chronicle reported.

In other words, school used to cost the price of one 1997 Honda Civic a year. But a decade later, you could buy a 2004 Audi A4 for the amount of money it takes to go to school for a year at UC Berkeley.

It’s the same story at California State University campuses. Read this very good piece in the LA Times about Berenice Vite and Rafael Curiel, whose son Alonso is a sophomore at Cal State Long Beach. After his school raised tuitions by 32 percent this year, the Curiels missed three house payments to make the difference. It’s safe to say this is having a very serious impact on this family’s life.

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