UPDATED, OCTOBER 27
John Haley, Director of Transit for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (de facto equivalent to general manager of Muni), left the agency October 26, according to this story by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez in the San Francisco Examiner.
Haley had been in the position for eight years, a long tenure by transit industry standards. His departure was announced by SFMTA as a retirement, though the article states that he was under pressure to leave following a series of allegations detailed in the Examiner story.
These allegations include a lawsuit from a female employee of groping and sexual harassment, which was reported by the Examiner last month. In the wake of that article, other SFMTA employees came forward to claim ill treatment by Haley and by several other male employees of SFMTA. Mayor London Breed responded quickly, appointing a veteran human resources director to investigate such accusations.
Today’s Examiner article reports:
More than 60 women from across every division of the 6,000 employee agency banded together to deliver anonymously written testimony to SFMTA leadership on October 22, urging them to quickly and thoroughly address harassment allegations.
“We represent women from various divisions and job classifications throughout the agency” reads the introduction letter to the women’s testimonies. “Many of us are scared to speak up. We all want you to engage us. We all want change.”
Such acts of harassment, if true, are inexcusable and should not be tolerated in any environment. In our own interactions with Haley over the past eight years, we did not witness acts of sexual harassment or gender or racial discrimination by him. However, we did become aware, through repeated tips from a broad array of Muni employees, that Haley held strongly negative views of the historic streetcars and cable cars, as well as Market Street Railway as an organization and its leadership specifically.
We were told by numerous inside sources that Haley repeatedly bad-mouthed our organization and the streetcars in front of staff and in internal meetings. We believe this led to a climate of fear and poor morale among many staff members involved in maintaining the historic fleet.
We attribute the progress that has been made during this period, including the inauguration of the E-Embarcadero streetcar line and progress in streetcar restoration and service improvements, to the dedication of numerous SFMTA employees who did not echo Haley’s negativity. We also believe the progress that has been made can be attributed to the strong support for the streetcars and cable cars by SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin, with whom we have had a consistent and positive relationship, and to his Board of Directors, which have long supported Muni’s historic transit operation.
No interim replacement for Haley had been named at the time of this posting.
We will have more on this situation in the next issue of our member newsletter, Inside Track, due out in early December.
