Sonali Bose, SFMTA’s director of finance and information technology, will retire on Friday. A digital timer on her desk is counting down the seconds to that day. It’s nestled among vases of blue and yellow daisies, prints of Monet paintings and a placard with a slogan that sums up Bose’s no-nonsense attitude: “Because I said so.”
Some call her a political fixer: the rare transit bureaucrat who urged her allies to chair commissions and lined up votes for the policies she wanted. Others deem her a truth-teller: the woman in a blazer and a cotton dress who gamely criticized mayors and department heads when she thought they made bad decisions. Most people praise her for fixing the budget of a $1 billion agency that was in disarray before she arrived.
“When I walked in, I went, ‘Whoa,’” Bose, 60, said. “It was 2006, and the agency was starved of talent and resources. The budget was about half what it is today.”
Over the next 12 years, she raised the SFMTA’s credit rating to be the highest of any transit agency in the country. She oversaw a new parking program that adjusts rates at meters and garages to match demand. She helped fund the biggest increase in Muni bus and rail service that San Francisco has ever seen and increased the revenue from the agency’s advertising contracts from $400,000 to $30 million.
“Folks didn’t want to do advertising,” she said, referring to resistance she met from the Board of Supervisors, which approved bus shelter ads in a narrow 6-5 vote in 2007. “I told them, ‘Look, either you have ads on buses, or you have no bus at all. What do you want?’”
As much as Bose’s story is marked by accomplishment and principled stands, it’s also marked by one tense confrontation after another.
“She wasn’t just a CFO — she was this tireless, in-your-face advocate for the SFMTA,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, chair of the Transportation Authority, the body that makes decisions on sales tax spending and some projects.
“She was the kind of person who would text me in the middle of a Transportation Authority meeting, either berating me or provoking new thoughts,” Peskin said. “She did not allow her behavior to be boxed in politically or financially.”
He and others called Bose a “guiding force” who fought relentlessly to improve the financial situation at the SFMTA, and who saw results. Over the years, politicians grumbled about Muni’s turbulent management and unreliable rail service, but no supervisor is holding oversight hearings about its finances.
Born in Kolkata, India, Bose moved all over the world with her engineer father and travel-loving mother. She spent her childhood riding rickshaws in India, buses in Cameroon and Ghana — where passengers would place their valuables on the roofs and hang onto the sides — and the underground rail in London. She learned to drive in Mexico City but generally eschews automobiles, preferring to take the bus instead.
“I’m a horrible driver,” she said. “I’ve always been reliant on transit.”
An unpleasant experience with Muni inspired her to join the SFMTA. In 2003, Bose was waiting for the 5 Fulton on McAllister Street, trying to get to her job at a downtown pension fund in the middle of a downpour. Three buses passed by. Two were jam-packed, and one just didn’t stop.
“So I said to myself, ‘OK, I’ve had it,’” Bose said, remembering the day with a dry smile. “ ‘I’ve got to get into that agency and figure out what the hell is going on.’”
Three years later Bose walked into a storm of a different nature, when former SFMTA director Nat Ford hired her to bring San Francisco’s transit system out of a financial crisis.
At that time, Muni was still chafing from an infamous meltdown in the summer of 1998 that left trains stuck in tunnels and corroded public trust in the agency. By 2006, SFMTA was surviving on a threadbare $580 million budget. Officials didn’t have enough funding to buy parts or hire mechanics to repair the aging fleets. Buses were sitting in the yard, broken.
“Cars were breaking down all the time, and we couldn’t fix them,” said Tom Nolan, former chair of the SFMTA Board of Directors.
In the years that followed, Bose helped beef up Muni service by 10 percent, replaced the buses and light-rail vehicles, boosted the workforce from 4,000 to 6,000 employees, doubled the budget, and amassed enough money for colossal infrastructure projects like the Central Subway.
She departs at a time when public confidence in the SFMTA is unraveling once again. Muni Director John Haley retired last month, shortly after his former assistant filed a lawsuit alleging he sexually harassed and belittled her. His exit happened weeks after Mayor London Breed appointed an ombudsman to evaluate complaints of discrimination within the department.
Bose said those problems didn’t touch her.
On Tuesday afternoon, transit chief Ed Reiskin announced Bose’s successor: Leo Levenson, CFO of the city’s Department of Technology. Before the new hire became public, Reiskin signaled that he wanted someone to fulfill the number-crunching duties of the job but that he wasn’t necessarily seeking another outsized personality who knows how to play politics.
At the same time, he’s chipping away at what some saw as a culture of bullying and intimidation, by promoting more women to visible leadership positions. Among them is Haley’s interim replacement, Julie Kirschbaum.
As those changes take shape, “we’ll definitely feel the loss of Sonali,” Reiskin said. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s irreplaceable.”
San Francisco Chronicle 2018
