Good Morning, San Francisco

Gray skies, 61 degrees, and the kind of overcast that makes you wonder if summer filed for a permit it never got approved. High of 62, so dress like it's October. One line to set the tone: a civil grand jury just looked at a $12.75 billion transit project and basically said nobody is driving this bus — and we're about to be asked to pay for more of it.

VTA Was Warned Seven Years Ago. It's Still Not Listening — and Now Wants $5 Billion of Your Money Anyway.

A Santa Clara County civil grand jury dropped a report on June 17 that should make every Bay Area taxpayer sit up: the Valley Transportation Authority has no credible plan to manage the financial risks on its nearly $13 billion BART extension to San Jose. Not a thin plan. Not a plan with gaps. No credible plan — for a project whose cost has nearly tripled since approval, that's still carrying a funding gap somewhere between $700 million and $1.2 billion, and that the agency apparently can't be bothered to close before it submits its final ask for $5.1 billion in federal money.

Here's the part that should really get you: the grand jury says VTA has been ignoring these exact same institutional warnings for at least seven years. This isn't a surprise. People inside the system have been raising their hands since 2019, and the agency drove right past them. When a project triples in cost and the response to "you have no risk plan" is to keep accelerating toward the federal funding window, that's not optimism — that's an agency that has decided accountability is somebody else's job.

And the timing is almost too on-the-nose. VTA is rushing its federal application while the region is being teed up to vote on a new regional transit sales tax in November. So the pitch, stripped of the press-release gloss, is roughly: trust us with billions more, right after an independent civil grand jury told you we can't manage the billions we already have. The math here isn't subtle. A funding gap doesn't vanish because you ignored it for seven years — it just waits for a taxpayer to land on.

We're not anti-transit. A working BART line to San Jose would be genuinely good for the region. But "the goal is good" has never been a reason to hand a blank check to an agency that won't show its work. Voters in November deserve a VTA that has actually closed its gap and answered the grand jury — not one betting that "the project is too big to question" still works.

The Rundown

City Hall & Politics

The OpenGov contract that refuses to die. San Francisco's Civil Service Commission voted 4-1 Thursday to keep Mayor Lurie's $28.5 million no-bid permitting software deal alive — even after union reps testified the software runs on a framework so outdated it puts residents' personal data at risk. Quick recap of who's flagged problems: the city's own Budget and Legislative Analyst, and now a divided commission. The deal survives every check anyway. A vendor whose founders donated to the mayor's nonprofit, a contract city staff objected to, and a security warning waved through — it now heads to the Board of Supervisors, who should remember that "everyone raised concerns and it passed anyway" is how cities end up explaining a data breach later.

Public Safety

A Castro neighbor looked out his window and refused to look away. DA Brooke Jenkins filed felony hate crime charges against Hans Herman Haken, who allegedly spray-painted homophobic slurs on the flower shop Chartreuse by Rojé on May 16 and then punched a resident who tried to stop him. The charges landed one week before Pride — and they exist in no small part because one man decided a stranger with a spray can wasn't going to get a pass. That's not vigilantism. That's the kind of street-level civic courage that makes a neighborhood actually safe, and the system, for once, backed him up.

Tech & Startups

Midjourney wants to put you in a tank now. The AI image company announced "Midjourney Medical," complete with a full-body ultrasound scanner it claims rivals an MRI, debuting at a 23,000-square-foot Union Square spa that won't open until late 2027. What wasn't announced: the price, FDA clearance, or what happens to your biometric data. So: no approval, no listed cost, no disclosed data policy — but submersion tanks and cold plunges, ready to go. We love a Union Square lease getting signed. We'd love it more if the company collecting your full biometric profile could answer three basic questions first.

Housing & Transit

Bay Area road money is about to fall off two cliffs at once. A new TRIP report finds deficient roads and congestion already cost the average Bay Area driver more than $4,600 a year — and the two revenue streams that fix the roads are both drying up. The federal infrastructure law expires at the end of September, and gas-tax receipts keep shrinking as drivers go electric. Translation: you'll pay either way — through your axles or through a new tax — and the honest debate Sacramento keeps dodging is which one actually fixes the pavement instead of just funding the agency.

Culture & Food

The World Cup turned San Pedro Square into a 30,000-person block party — and after Thursday's crowd, San Jose smartly surged 50-plus SJPD officers and 40-50 private guards for the Türkiye-Paraguay watch party. This is the public-safety playbook done right: scale the response to the crowd, keep it family-friendly, don't wait for something to go wrong. Türkiye, sadly, got eliminated after conceding 64 seconds in to fans who'd flown in from four continents. Meanwhile the USMNT locked up Group D and plays its Round of 32 match in Santa Clara on July 1 — secondary tickets starting at a cool $3,000, so maybe find a watch party.

The Bay Area Black Expo packed Bay Street Emeryville for Juneteenth with 100-plus Black-owned businesses and a live fashion show — exactly the kind of grassroots commerce that needs no city subsidy to thrive. And the Alameda County Fair is open in Pleasanton through July 12 (Wednesdays-Sundays, $19.80 adults, BART-accessible) if you want corn dogs with your June.

One More Thing

North Oakland's Longfellow neighborhood is running its annual yard sale today — 50 households, 10 to 2, including a section where everything is genuinely free. No app, no wristband, no entry fee. In a week full of billion-dollar gaps and no-bid contracts, there's something almost radical about a price tag that just says take it.