Muni uses feds' funds for cameras it doesn't use

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Muni has been awarded more than $37 million in federal homeland security and other grants over the past five years for cameras to safeguard its buses, rail stations and maintenance yards - but it turns out the transit agency has installed fewer than 50 of them.

An additional 514 are still sitting in warehouses - 300 of those were not installed because cash-strapped Muni diverted the $5 million needed to pay for that work to track repairs.

"The funds were diverted to high-priority areas," said Municipal Railway spokesman Paul Rose. Like it or not, he added, "we did have to make the call to do it."

Like many public agencies, Muni rushed for federal dollars to bolster security after 9/11. Soon the money was rolling in from Washington.

To date, however, Muni has spent only about $9 million of the $37.5 million it collected. Most of it paid for 557 digital video recorders, plus an assortment of lenses, fiber-optic cable line and other equipment.

By our math, that works out to more than $16,000 per camera.

Muni was to have installed 257 of the cameras at bus yards and garages as older equipment wore out.

So far, however, only 43 have been hooked up -largely because the old ones are still working, Muni says.

So why buy the new cameras at all? Muni officials say the federal grant that paid for the bulk purchase wouldn't have been available forever - and passing it up would have meant time-consuming individual purchases each and every time an old camera broke.

In the case of the 300 still-unopened station cameras - which were purchased in February and were supposed to be up and running by now - the installation money went into track and signal upgrades at busy St. Francis Circle and the Church and Duboce intersection.

Muni says the feds signed off on the money transfer.

At the same time, there's a lot more camera work to come. Muni plans to install 10,000 cameras on trains and buses over the next two years, which officials say will cost an additional $10 million - on top of the remaining $28.5 million that Muni has collected from the feds.

According to Rose, Muni has identified funding sources for all the camera installations and is getting ready to hire an outside firm for the job. Once again, however, it will need federal approval to dip into different pots of grant money.

Muni General Manager Ed Reiskin, the former city public works chief who took over at the transit agency last summer, says he's focused on "looking forward" and hopes to get the cameras up and running as they were intended.

"I see lots of areas where projects start and money gets pulled for priorities, and the projects stall," Reiskin said. "Some of it is probably legitimate, but sometimes you need to make your project plan, get your funding and get it implemented."

As for how effective all these cameras are?

Just last month, a 62-year-old man in a wheelchair at the Civic Center Station was struck and killed by a train. Investigators trying to find out how it happened checked the station's surveillance camera for answers - only to discover it hadn't worked for about four days.

Muni says it has since assigned crews to check the cameras regularly.

So is Muni safer than it was after 9/11?

"The vast majority of cameras in the system are fully operational," Rose said, "and agency staff continues to go through training to help ensure the security and safety of our passengers."

Service disruption: The Oakland City Council voted the other day not to reappoint outspoken attorney and Occupy movement supporter Michael Siegel to the Civil Service Commission - a move his backers immediately branded as retaliation.

Siegel is the son of the equally outspoken Dan Siegel, who was Mayor Jean Quan's criminal justice adviser until they had a falling out over the city's handling of the Occupy demonstrations.

The younger Siegel, who works in his dad's law office, also led the legal charge against the city's antigang injunctions - costing Oakland a small fortune in legal fees in the process. From what we're told, the gang fight is just one of the reasons the council opted not to re-up his term.

"I don't trust his ability to subordinate his passion to the city's fiduciary interests," said Councilwoman Libby Schaaf.

Michael Siegel called the vote an act of "vengeance, perhaps wanting to teach a lesson to the folks who might challenge the status quo."

Spell check: A veteran English teacher at Lowell High School, apparently upset over being denied a choice teaching assignment next fall, let everyone know how she felt on a campus blog - and boy, was it instructive. Here's her post:

"My passion has always been Lit. and Psyc, Lit an Philosophy, Sci Fic, and 10th grade one," she wrote. "I declare that I am being discriminated for inspiring students to enjoy learning. Feeling inspired, and loving my classes by members of my dept. who have no knowledge of what goes on within my classes."

Or maybe they do.

EXTRA! Catch our blog at www.sfgate.com/matierandross.