In What's New & What's Next, the Civic team offers a roundup of San Francisco news and a look at what's ahead on the city's calendar. The news: CPUC eliminates footnote that keeps ride-hailing safety data secret; SFUSD schools close for three weeks; non-essential gatherings of more than 100 banned. Coming up: City encourages remote civic engagement rather than in-person; Board of Supervisors plans special meeting on coronavirus response.

The California Public Utilities Commission, the body that regulates ride-hailing, has unanimously voted to reverse a policy that allowed safety reports filed by Uber and Lyft to be kept hidden from the public. The commission receives these reports, but due to an obscure footnote inserted into its rules in 2013, does not release them to the public or to local government agencies. Seth Rosenfeld, whose reporting brought this policy into the spotlight, explains what the vote does and doesn't mean for data transparency.

Nurses around the country gathered outside hospitals today, criticizing how the CDC and individual hospitals are handling the outbreak. The California Nurses Association, National Nurses Organizing Committee and National Nurses United issued a statement calling the CDC’s guidelines “weakened” and called employer responses “ineffective.” “Civic” spoke with one registered nurse at UCSF, outside the Parnassus campus, who said nurses felt left out of the conversation about responding to COVID-19.

Students at San Francisco State University are grappling with conflicting directions about student housing during the coronavirus outbreak. Students who live in dormitories received an email last night instructing them to leave campus housing due to the coronavirus outbreak. This morning, the school followed up with an email saying students would not be forced to leave their dorms, but left the decision up to students and asked anyone who chooses to stay in campus housing to notify the school by March 12.

Voters approved a measure in 2018 that guaranteed legal counsel to every tenant facing eviction in San Francisco. But six months after Proposition F was supposed to have been fully implemented, a third of tenants facing eviction have had access to only partial representation. In a hearing before the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Transportation Committee, legal aid attorneys, tenant advocates and city staff testified that tenant right to counsel is an effective protection from eviction but needs more funding, and more attorneys, to cover everyone.

In What's New & What's Next, the Civic team offers a roundup of San Francisco news and a look at what's ahead on the city's calendar. The news: City offers text alerts for coronavirus updates, homelessness department head shifts to new role, state criticizes police reform progress. Coming up: Mayor to address the Board of Supervisors on corruption, SFMTA open house, Planning Commission to learn about city's housing affordability strategy.