Joel Ramos, a seven-year member of the SFMTA Board of Directors, was hired near the end of May to lead the agency’s new Community Response Team, which is aimed at reaching out to neighbors about new stop signs and other small-scale street changes.

“It’s effectively to try to better respond to the needs residents are clamoring for, or have, around engineering issues,” Ramos said. “What we call bread and butter issues.”

Passed into law in 1995, the Costa-Hawkins Act prohibits cities from applying rent caps to single family homes and new construction built after 1995, unless rent control laws were passed prior to that date. In San Francisco, the date is 1979.

It also allows landlords to hike rents to market rate once tenants vacate rent-controlled units.

Another vote tally will be announced Sunday at 4 p.m.

The victim, identified by the city’s medical examiner’s office as Vanessa Palma of South San Francisco, was allegedly killed by her husband, police said. He’s been identified by police as 43-year-old Robert Riley.

The latest count has Leno ahead of Breed by 144 votes, after 19,475 more ballots were counted since Thursday. There remain 64,900 more ballots to count.

In recent years, Veritas has emerged as one of the largest landlords in the City, with over 250 rent-controlled properties that it owns and operates using its property management and apartments leasing subsidiaries, Green Tree Property Management and Rent SF Now.

The company is now consolidating its three operating entities under one name, Veritas, in what spokesperson Ron Heckmann called “a conscious effort to ease some confusion, strengthen internal cohesion, promote more efficient resident communication and generally be more transparent as to who we are to all our residents and partners.”

In 2014, Gonzales marched into a West Portal real estate office with tenant rights advocates and claimed that her landlord, Jason Chan, had illegally converted the apartment building at 255 14th St. into condominiums. Local videographer Peter Menchini recorded the confrontation.

“Chan converted my unit in 2011, he still owns the unit, and he purposefully did not offer my family a lifetime lease,” Gonzales said. “My grandmother is 94. My mother is 66. He totally circumvented the law for his own purposes.”

A grand total of twelve companies — including scooter manufacturer Razor and ride-hail giants Uber and Lyft — have applied for The City’s e-scooter pilot program.

The shooting occurred around 3:20 p.m. in the 1400 block of Treat Avenue near Cesar Chavez, according to Officer Joseph Tomlinson.

Since election night, Leno has lead by more than 1,000 votes over Breed in ranked choice voting, but that lead decreased from 1,146 votes to 1,121 votes in ranked choice voting Wednesday.

On Thursday it shrunk further to 255 votes, after the department counted an additional 8,062 ballots.

The department has about 84,000 more ballots left to count.

A woman was shot in the 4500 block of Mission Street around 11:12 a.m. by a male suspect who then fled the scene, according to Officer Joseph Tomlinson.

Thursday's front page. Read more at www.sfexaminer.com

Lisa Gonzales, 47, is facing a murder charge after police found a plastic storage container filled with the dismembered remnants of her 61-year-old roommate and covered in maggots at their home at 255 14th St. on June 2. The body parts were stuffed into plastic bags that reeked of decay and had dark human fluids bubbling from their sides.

The Medical Examiner’s Office has yet to identify the victim but public records show Margaret Mamer, 61, lived at the address. A friend posted on Facebook Monday that Mamer had been reported missing to the San Francisco Police Department.

“This is a very concerning case for us,” District Attorney George Gascon told reporters at the Hall of Justice, where Gonzales was expected to be arraigned on Wednesday. “We’re very disturbed with the allegations.”

The death follows that of another woman who was found dead in a stairwell of the hospital’s power plant facility on Wednesday, May 30. That woman, Ruby Lee Andersen, was not a patient at the hospital but had been reported missing from a senior residential care facility on the hospital campus on May 20.

The incident has spurred health department officials to review its annual comprehensive security assessment to identify any other risks.