City College

Street Threads: Look of the Day

-
0

SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.

Today’s Look: Gavin, City College, Ocean Campus

Gavin0909.jpg

Tell us about your look: “My shoes are from Hong Kong.”

Street Threads: Look of the Day

-
0

SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.

Today’s Look: Alanna, City College, Ocean Campus

Alanna0909.jpg

Tell us about your look: This sweater is my grandma’s and it’s a really old Guess. The shoes are my mom’s.”

Editor’s Notes

-
0

tredmond@sfbg.com

An angry reader called me years ago to complain about one of my columns, and before she hung up she informed me that "all you radical hippies want is free drugs, free love, and free lunch."

I couldn’t possibly have put it better. Especially the free lunch.

But it’s funny: As a society, Americans these days are almost afraid of things that are free. If it doesn’t cost money, it must be a scam. Or crappy. Or illegal. Nobody just gives anything away any more.

In fact, Douglas Rushkoff has written an entire book about the problem, called Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How We Can Take it Back (2009, Random House). In an interview with Cecile Lepage in this special issue (which provides dozens of great tips on things you can do and get for free), Rushkoff describes the problem:

"People prefer hiring a person to babysit for their child rather than accepting a favor from the old lady down the street — because if you accept, what social obligation have you incurred? What if she wants to join you at your next barbecue? What if she now wants to be your friend? So now we all have to work more to get money to buy things that we used to just exchange freely with each other."

Of course, if we all gave more away free, we wouldn’t need anywhere near as much money, which would change the whole way our consumer-driven society functions. People could work less and have more free time (say, to volunteer, or help babysit the neighbor’s kid). The financial institutions that so dominate our society (and that so seriously fucked up the world economy) would have less of a role in how people live their lives.

I know, I know: Ain’t no free lunch. Not in America, not in 2009. But it’s a thought.

So everyone in town was talking last week about the City College indictments. As one local wag put it to me, only partly in jest: "These folks must be guilty as sin if Kamala Harris actually indicted them." We don’t know much about their guilt or innocence before trial, but we do know that (a) our district attorney is mighty careful about filing charges in political corruption cases, so this isn’t just a set of allegations that will quickly disappear, and (b) there has been an awful lot of corruption in the local community college for a long time, and this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

I wouldn’t be surprised, when all is said and done, if the reign of former chancellor Phil Day starts to look like that of former school superintendent Bill Rojas — a cesspool of sleaze that could take years to clean up.

And yet, college trustee Lawrence Wong was quoted in the Chronicle praising Day and calling him "probably the best chancellor we’ve had." Amazing, but not surprising. In fact, Wong and two of his colleagues — Trustee Natalie Berg and former trustee Rodel Rodis — backed up Day over and over again when he played funny with money, pissed off community groups, and acted disdainful of any criticism.

Rodis lost his re-election bid last fall, although Berg somehow survived. Wong is up in 2010. The reformers are slowly gaining control of the board, and the indictments show just how badly that was needed. *

The Ethics Commission fiasco

-
0

EDITORIAL The San Francisco Ethics Commission is a serious mess, and if Director John St. Croix can’t turn things around — quickly — he needs to resign and make room for someone who can.

Ethics has badly damaged its reputation in recent years by hounding small-time violators from grassroots campaigns and ignoring the major players who cheat and game the system as a matter of practice. A couple of festering examples:

In 2004, then-Ethics Director Ginny Vida and Deputy Director Mabel Ng ordered the staff to destroy public records that pointed to malfeasance on the part of the Newsom for Mayor campaign. The records — which the Newsom campaign sent to the commission by mistake — suggested that the newly-elected mayor was illegally diverting money from his inaugural committee to pay off his campaign debt.

St. Croix admits that the agency knew back in 2005 that public money was being laundered and improperly used in a City College bond campaign — but did absolutely nothing. Now, four years later, District Attorney Kamala Harris has indicted three college officials in that case.

In fact, Oliver Luby, an investigator with Ethics, says he brought the problem to St. Croix’s attention back when that bond campaign was still underway — and was told, in essence, to shut up. "He instructed me not to speak of my report," Luby wrote in a Nov. 4, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece.

But the well-paid operatives working for City College and Newsom never felt the sting of an Ethics investigation. Instead, the commission spent thousands of dollars hounding Carolyn Knee, the treasurer of a public-power campaign, threatening the volunteer who lives on a modest fixed income with more that $20,000 in fines. (The case wound up being resolved with a fine of $267.)

And now Luby — who was honored for his courage as a whistleblower by the Society of Professional Journalists — has been demoted, received a formal reprimand from Ng (for doing something other staffers have done routinely) and is under investigation on the basis of an anonymous complaint.

Luby’s technical violation: writing a letter from his Ethics e-mail account during work hours commenting on new regulations proposed by the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission. Ng, writing as Luby’s supervisor, claims in a reprimand letter that no employee has the right to speak for the agency, and that someone in Sacramento might have misjudged his personal comments as official Ethics Commission policy. (Nobody has suggested that his comments were anything but useful or that anything he said would damage the city’s reputation. And others in the agency comment on this sort of thing all the time, with no punitive repercussions.)

Now there’s an anonymous complaint against him raising the same issue, suggesting that he was using city resources for his own personal political causes. (Never mind that his job is working on the exact same issues as the FPPC rules cover and that he has absolutely no political or personal stake in the outcome.)

This city desperately needs aggressive enforcement of the political reform laws — and people like Oliver Luby ought to be getting praise and support from management and ought to be put in charge of ferreting out corruption. Instead, St. Croix and Ng are trying to hound him from his job.

The commission members need to tell St. Croix and Eng to drop the complaints against Luby, change the agency’s priorities and start going after the real scofflaws. The Board of Supervisors also needs to convene hearings on the problems at Ethics, something that Sups. David Campos and John Avalos have indicated a willingness to do.

P.S. : Since Ethics has refused to follow-up on the City College mess, the D.A.’s Office needs to pursue the case as broadly as possible, looking not just at the chancellor and his two aides but at anyone else who might have knowledge of the alleged criminal activity. And the Community College Board needs to move immediately to launch a fully public internal investigation and start complying with the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. *

No ethics in Ethics Commission

-
5

By Steven T. Jones

The San Francisco Ethics Commission has long been accused of corruption, selective enforcement, and gross incompetence – charges supported by knowledgeable activists, whistleblowing employees, and Guardian investigations – but a pair of recent developments shows just what a public liability this agency has become.

When the District Attorney’s Office this week brought felony charges against three City College officials for laundering public funds into a slush fund and campaign account, the very thing that Ethics is supposed to regulate, it highlighted just how incompetent the agency is. After all, as the Guardian reported two years ago, Ethics Commission Executive Director John St. Croix admitted that he knew about the violations way back in 2005 – even before the Chronicle broke the story — and he did nothing.

Yet St. Croix (who has not returned our call for comment) and Deputy Director Mabel Ng – who should have been fired back in 2004 for illegally ordering the destruction of public documents that revealed another money laundering scheme, this one involving Gavin Newsom’s first mayoral campaign – have been actively trying to get rid of the agency’s most public spirited employee, Oliver Luby (the guy who first discovered the City College shenanigans), in the process opening the city up to legal liability by retaliating against a whistleblower.

Top City College officials charged with felonies

-
5

By Steven T. Jones
Day.jpg
Former City College Chancellor Phillip Day

Former City College of San Francisco Chancellor Phillip Day and two other top administrators were today charged with several felony counts of misappropriating public funds and steering them into political campaigns and a secret slush fund controlled by Day, who faces nine years in prison.
The indictment by the District Attorney’s Office was reported by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Lance Williams, who originally broke the story about City College officials laundering payments to the college into a bond campaign. Guardian reporter G.W. Schulz later furthered the story by uncovering the role the City College Foundation played in the money-laundering scheme and how the San Francisco Ethics Commission ignored gross violations of campaign finance law.
But the indictment – fueled by subpoenaed testimony and a raid in May – goes even further, uncovering a Day-controlled slush fund that he used “to pay for alcohol for parties he hosted, parking tickets run up by wealthy alumni and for his membership at the City Club of San Francisco in the Financial District,” according to Chronicle reports on the indictment.
While the report says elected trustees didn’t know about the slush fund and none were charged with crimes, the Guardian has long criticized veteran board members such as Natalie Berg with colluding with Day to misuse bond money, avoid public accountability, and cover up for a corrupt administration.
Now that District Attorney Kamala Harris has confirmed that the shenanigans that have long marred City College were criminal in nature, that’s just the beginning of the house cleaning that needs to take place within this important institution.

Classes for sale

-
1

By Tim Redmond

So City College is going to start selling naming rights to its classes. From the Chronicle story, it looks as if the chancellor, Don Griffin, has the whole thing planned out — he told the paper where to send checks for $6,000 and exactly how to make sure your name gets in the books.

There’s a minor problem, though: He never mentioned any of this to the Community College Board.

“When I read about it in the paper, that was the first I’d heard of it,” board member John Rizzo told me.

It’s not as simple a fundraising scheme as it seems. Besides the tacky factor (which doesn’t trump the desperate need for money) there’s the potential for conflicts, both real and imagined.

“What if PG&E wants to buy a class — or maybe ten of them?” asked Rizzo. What if big pharma companies want to sponsor chemistry classes? What if big agricultural congomerates want to sponsor nutrition classes? This could get ugly fast.

“I have a lot of serious concerns about it, and it’s certainly a new policy,” Rizzo noted. “I’m amazed that the chancellor never even mentioned this to the board.”

Renegade Rockers Hold Down 26 Years of SF Breakdancing

-
0

By Michael Krimper


Renegade Rockers in action.

When a breakdance battle erupts — whether in a club or gym, or on the block or Youtube — heads heed and take note. In a swirling cypher, b-boys and b-girls display their skills on the floor in a back and forth rhythm, showcasing commando techniques and more daring, original styles to the appraisal of the crowd and their fellow crew members, and of course for themselves.

The electric dance style has come a long way since its formative years in the boroughs of 1970’s New York. The West Coast, and in particular the San Francisco Bay Area, has been at the center of many of the innovations contributing to the dynamic evolution of breakdancing. One of the legendary local crews still active, the Renegade Rockers, have been breaking boundaries since their founding at SF City College in 1983.

That longstanding history informs Renegades’ consistent dedication to the culture. In their upcoming 26th anniversary event, the crew plans to showcase the skills which keep them competitive with the top players of the worldwide breakdance community. “Organizing the Renegade Rockers anniversary events encourages the dance scene to keep pushing the limits and inspires new generations to come,” team captain Wicket tells me. Beyond the high energy battle competitions, the crew plans to spread the love by hosting a series of panel discussions on the history of street dance and workshops covering the basics, from foundational breaking to popping, locking, and rocking.

City College raid moves us closer to accountability

-
4

By Steven T. Jones

News that prosecutors have raided the administrative offices at City College of San Francisco seeking documents associated with a scheme to launder public funds into campaign contributions (a story that Chron investigative reporter Lance Williams broke in 2007, and which the Guardian has furthered a couple times) is a big deal and a long time in coming.

As the Guardian has written repeatedly over the years, City College administrators from former Chancellor Phil Day on down have always played fast and loose with the people’s money and need to be held accountable.

The DA’s investigation should cast a wide net in learning who knew about this money laundering scheme, including looking at longtime board members who enabled Day and held back the reformers. Luckily, that board now has some public spirited members, including Milton Marks, John Rizzo, and Chris Jackson (who just joined the board last year), but they’re still in the minority. Nonetheless, they need to push this board to work hard to restore the public’s confidence in this important institution.

Law vs. Justice

-
0

steve@sfbg.com

City Attorney Dennis Herrera relishes his reputation as a crusading reformer. For several years, his official Web site prominently displayed the phrase "Activism defines SF City Attorney’s Office," linked to a laudatory 2004 Los Angeles Times article with that headline.

"Doing what we can do to ensure civil rights for everyone is not something we are going to back away from," was the quote from that piece Herrera chose to highlight on his homepage, referring to his work on marriage equality. The article also praises the City Attorney’s Office practice of proactively filing cases to protect public health and the environment and to expand consumer rights.

But more recently the City Attorney’s Office also has aggressively pushed cases that create troubling precedents for civil rights and prevent law enforcement officials from being held accountable for false arrests, abusive behavior, mistreatment of detainees, and even allegedly framing innocent people for murder.

Three particular cases, which have been the subject of past stories by the Guardian, reveal unacceptable official conduct — yet each was aggressively challenged using the virtually unlimited resources of the City Attorney’s Office. In fact, Herrera’s team pushed these cases to the point of potentially establishing troubling precedents that could apply throughout the country.

Attorney Peter Keane, who teaches ethics at Golden Gate University School of Law and used to evaluate police conduct cases as a member of the Police Commission, said city attorneys sometimes find themselves trapped between their dual obligations to promote the public good and vigorously defend their clients. "Therein lies the problem, and it’s a problem that can’t be easily reconciled," he told us.

"A lawyer’s obligation is to give total loyalty to a client within ethical limits," Keane said, noting his respect for Herrera. But in police misconduct cases, Keane said, "it is desirable public policy to have police engage in ethical conduct and not do anything to abuse citizens."

RODEL RODIS VS. SF


Attorney Rodel Rodis is a prominent Filipino activist, newspaper columnist, and until this year was a longtime elected member of the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees. So it never made much sense that he would knowingly try to pass a counterfeit $100 bill at his neighborhood Walgreens in 2003 (see "Real money, false arrest," 7/9/08).

Nonetheless, the store clerk was unfamiliar with an older bill Rodis used to pay for a purchase and called police, who immediately placed Rodis in handcuffs. When police couldn’t conclusively determine whether the bill was real, they dragged Rodis out of the store, placed him in a patrol car out front, and took him in for questioning while they tested the bill.

There was no need to arrest him, as subsequent San Francisco Police Department orders clarified. They could simply have taken his name and the bill and allowed him to retrieve it later. After all, mere possession of a counterfeit bill doesn’t indicate criminal intent.

The police finally determined that the bill was real and released Rodis from his handcuffs and police custody. Rodis was outraged by his treatment, and sued. He insisted that the case was about the civil rights principle and not the money — indeed, he says he offered to settle with the city for a mere $15,000.

"I told my lawyer that I didn’t want a precedent that would hurt civil liberties," Rodis told the Guardian.

To his surprise, however, the City Attorney’s Office aggressively appealed rulings in Rodis’ favor all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that the officers enjoyed immunity and ordered reconsideration by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Last month the Ninth Circuit ruled in the city’s favor, thus expanding protections for police officers.

Rodis can now name cases from around the country, all with egregious police misconduct, that cite his case as support. "Even with that kind of abuse, people can no longer sue because of my case," Rodis said.

Herrera disputes the precedent-setting nature of the case, saying the facts of each case are different. "We’re defending them in accordance with the state of the law as it stands today," Herrera said, arguing that officers in the Rodis case acted reasonably, even if they got it wrong. "We look at each case on its facts and its merits."

Herrera said he agrees with Keane that it’s often a difficult balancing act to promote policies that protect San Francisco citizens from abuse while defending city officials accused of that abuse. But ultimately, he said, "I have the ethical obligation to defend the interests of the City and County of San Francisco."

While it may be easy to criticize those who bring lawsuits seeking public funds, Rodis says it is these very cases that set the limits on police behavior and accountability. As he observed, "The difference between police in a democracy and a dictatorship is not the potential for abuse, but the liability for abuse."

MARY BULL VS. SF


In the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, there were months of antiwar protests resulting in thousands of arrests in San Francisco. Activist Mary Bull was arrested in November 2002. Bull said she was forcibly and illegally strip-searched and left naked in a cold cell for 14 hours.

San Francisco’s policy at the time — which called for strip-searching almost all inmates — was already a shaky legal ground. Years earlier Bull had won a sizable settlement against Sacramento County because she and other activists were strip-searched after being arrested for protesting a logging plan, a legal outcome that led most California counties to change their strip-search policies.

So Bull filed a lawsuit against San Francisco in 2003. The San Francisco Chronicle ran front page story in September 2003 highlighting Bull’s ordeal and another case of a woman arrested on minor charges being strip-searched, prompting all the major mayoral candidates at the time, including Gavin Newsom, to call for reform. Sheriff Michael Hennessey later modified jail policies on strip searches, conforming it to existing case law.

But the City Attorney’s Office has continued to fight Bull’s case, appealing two rulings in favor of Bull, pushing the case to the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (from which a ruling is expected soon) and threatening to appeal an unfavorable ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"It’s pretty outrageous and humiliating to strip-search someone brought to jail on minor charges," Bull’s attorney Mark Merin told the Guardian. "If they win, they establish a bad precedent."

Herrera said the case is about inmate safety and that his office must follow case law and pursue reasonable settlements (neither side would say how much money Bull is seeking). "We do it well and we do it with a sense of justice at its core," Herrera said.

Yet Merin said the city’s actions fly in the face of established law: "In the Bull case, he’s trying to get 25 years of precedent reversed."

Merlin noted that "the problem is not with the city, it’s with the U.S. Supreme Court." In other words, by pushing cases to a right-leaning court, the city could be driving legal precedents that directly contradict its own stated policies.

"It would be nice if this city was in a different league, but they look at it like any defense firm: take it to the mat, yield no quarter" he added.

JOHN TENNISON VS. SF


For the Guardian, and for all the attorneys involved, this was a once-in-a-lifetime case. In 1990, Hunters Point residents John J. Tennison and Antoine Goff were convicted of the 1989 gang-related murder of Roderick Shannon and later given sentences of 25 years to life.

Jeff Adachi, Tennison’s attorney and now the city’s elected public defender, was shocked by a verdict that was based almost solely on the constantly mutating testimony of two young girls, ages 12 and 14, who were joyriding in a stolen car, so he continued to gather evidence.

Eventually Adachi discovered that police inspectors Earl Sanders and Napoleon Hendrix and prosecutor George Butterworth had withheld key exculpatory evidence in the case, including damaging polygraph tests on the key witnesses, other eyewitness testimony fingering a man named Lovinsky Ricard, and even a taped confession in which Ricard admitted to the murder.

After writer A.C. Thompson and the Guardian published a cover story on the case (see "The Hardest Time," 1/17/01), it was picked up pro bono by attorneys Ethan Balogh and Elliot Peters of the high-powered firm Keker & Van Nest LLP, who unearthed even more evidence that the men had been framed, including a sworn statement by one of the two key prosecution witnesses recanting her testimony and saying city officials had coached her to lie.

In 2003, federal Judge Claudia Wilken agreed to hear Tennison’s case and ruled that the prosecution team had illegally buried five different pieces of exculpatory evidence, any one of which "could have caused the result of Tennison’s new trial motion and of his trial to have been different."

She ordered Tennison immediately freed after 13 years in prison. The district attorney at the time, Terrence Hallinan, not only agreed and decided not to retry Tennison, he proactively sought the release of Goff, who was freed a few weeks later.

"The only case you can make is that this was an intentional suppression of evidence that led to the conviction of any innocent man," Adachi told the Guardian in 2003 (see "Innocent!" 9/3/03). In the article, Hallinan said "I don’t just believe this was an improper conviction; I believe Tennison is an innocent man."

But the pair has had a harder time winning compensation for their lost years. State judges denied their request, relying on the initial jury verdict, so they sued San Francisco in 2003, alleging that the prosecution team intentionally deprived them of their basic rights.

"What happened to these guys was a horrible miscarriage of justice," Balogh said.

The City Attorney’s Office has aggressively fought the case, arguing that the prosecution team enjoys blanket immunity. The courts haven’t agreed with that contention at any level, although the city spent the last two years taking it all the way to the Ninth Circuit, which largely exonerated Butterworth. The case is now set for a full trial in federal district court in September.

"They are unwilling to admit they made a mistake," Elliot said. "They are doing everything not to face up to their responsibility to these two guys."

The lawyers said both Herrera and District Attorney Kamala Harris had an obligation to look into what happened in these cases, to punish official wrongdoing, and to try to bring the actual murderer to justice. Instead the case is still open, and the man who confessed has never been seriously pursued.

Harris spokesperson Erica Derryck said the Ninth Circuit and an internal investigation cleared Butterworth "of any wrongdoing," although she didn’t address Guardian questions about what Harris has done to close the case or address its shortcomings.

In fact, the lawyers say they’re surprised that the city is so aggressively pushing a case that could ultimately go very badly for the city, particularly given the mounting lawyers’ fees.

"When we filed the case, we never thought we’d be here today," Balogh said. "They had a bad hand and instead of folding it and trying to pursue justice in this case, they doubled down."

Herrera doesn’t see it that way, instead making a lawyerly argument about what the prosecution team knew and when. "Our belief is there is no evidence that Sanders and Hendrix had information early on that they suppressed," Herrera said. "Based on the facts, I don’t think they, Hendrix and Sanders, violated the law. But that’s a totally different issue than whether they were innocent…. It’s not our role to retry the innocence or guilt of Tennison and Goff."

Herrera said he’s limited by the specific facts of this case and the relevant laws. "If the Board of Supervisors wants to do a grant of public funds [to Tennison and Goff], someone can legislate that. But that’s not my job," Herrera said.

As far as settling the case in the interests of justice or avoiding a precedent that protects police even when they frame someone for murder, he also said it isn’t that simple. Keane also agreed it wouldn’t be ethical to settle a case to avoid bad precedents.

"I’m always willing to talk settlement," Herrera said. "This is not an office that makes rash decisions about the cases it chooses to try or settle."

Deputy City Attorney Scott Wiener is the point person on most police misconduct cases, including the Rodis and Tennison cases, as well as another current case in which Officer Sean Frost hit a subdued suspect, Chen Ming, in the face with his baton, breaking his jaw and knocking out 10 teeth.

Wiener, who is running for the District 8 seat on the Board of Supervisors and is expected to get backing from the San Francisco Police Officers Association, recently told the Chronicle that Frost "did not do anything wrong." Contacted by the Guardian, Wiener stood by that statement and his record on police cases, but said, "I consider myself to be fair-minded." He also denied having a strong pro-police bias.

Yet those involved with these cases say they go far beyond the zeal of one deputy or the need to safeguard the public treasury. They say that a city like San Francisco needs to put its resources into the service of its values.

"It raises the broader question of what is the city attorney’s mandate? Is it fiscal limitation regardless of the truth?" Balogh said. "Dennis Herrera has had a very aggressive policy in defending police officers."

Herrera says he is proud of his record as the city attorney, and before that, as president of the Police Commission. "I believe in police accountability and have made that a big part of what I’ve done throughout my career."

Local Artist of the Week: Andrew Li

-
0

229-localart.jpg

LOCAL ARTIST Andrew Li

TITLE Untitled

BIO Andrew Li was born in San Francisco in 1965. He has been making art at Creativity Explored since 1990 and is currently a student at SF City College.

STORY Li’s loose, sketchy drawings reflect his rapid artmaking process. Cityscapes, figures, and machines are his most frequent subject matter. He typically sketches from life, incorporating what he observes in SF and during his travels into artwork with precise perspective and an attention to detail.

SHOW "Andrew Li," through March 21. Jack Fischer Gallery, 49 Geary, suite 440, SF. Call for hours. (415) 956-1178, www.jackfischergallery.com

WEB www.creativityexplored.org

Erin Mei-Ling Stuart

-
0

When Erin Mei-Ling Stuart packed her bags to leave her hometown of Fresno in 1992, she included her viola — because she had won a scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Here, however, she played so much that she developed tendinitis and had to take a break. That’s when dance kicked in. Big time.

The viola went into the closet, and Stuart started to study modern dance — she had dabbled in ballet as a child — first at City College and then in just about every studio she could find. She turned herself into a liquid, sensuously vulnerable performer who learned to work with anybody who piqued her interest. Some were choreographers who sought direct input from their dancers — Erika Chong Shuch, Jesselito Bie, Stephen Pelton, and Chris Black — while others, like Nancy Karp, Jennie McAllister, and Deborah Slater, created along more traditional, formal lines.

Stuart learned from both approaches and expresses no preference. "There is such freedom when you can make up movement, but also it’s wonderful when you can just show up and dance," she explains.

Along the way, Stuart started to choreograph, often creating vignettes with casual looks that belie the attention to detail behind their making. These sketches and miniatures are frequently funny, evoking not a guffaw but a chuckle. They bring to life characters we probably have known or whose experiences we have shared. And Stuart does so without a word — she works purely through movement. Remember your prissy elementary school teacher and the know-it-all class brat? Stuart did in Continuing Education (2006). Have you ever been in an elevator with one other person so different from yourself that you felt creeped out? Stuart has, in Between Floors (2002). Do you walk in a neighborhood of lost souls who nonetheless furtively relate to each other? You’ll recognize its inhabitants in Songs for You (2004). And do you live with roommates? She does in her most recent work Keyhole Dances.

Stuart freely confesses that her commitment to create formally cogent dances "rubs up against a desire to examine often overlooked aspects of everyday life," and that she likes to work with "the shared intimacy of daily experience." She knows that she is old-fashioned that way. "I can’t help it," she says. "I like to make dances about relationships."

What she sees — on the bus, on the street corner, in the coffee shop — is us, more or less bungling our way through the day-to-day grind. That’s where she gets her material. If there is a political component to her work — and I happen to think that there is — it is an implied criticism of the social institutions to which we commit ourselves or by which we let ourselves be trapped.

Stuart does skewer, but does so gently, focusing on the mess humans manage to create for themselves. For her recent excursion into a mess — Sara Shelton Mann’s My Hot Lobotomy, which looks at the difficulty of staying sane given our environmental policies — the dancer took her viola out of the closet.

www.emspacedance.org

My kingdom for a dumpling

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

As kingdoms go, Kingdom of Dumpling is a rather Lilliputian affair — a runt, actually, if that word can be used in conjunction with "kingdom." Dumplings are small objects, of course, even the Bavarian ones made from potatoes, also known as knödel, and they seem even smaller when described in the singular. Kingdom of Dumpling? Is there only one kind of dumpling, or only one permitted per customer, or (our worst-case scenario) only one of one kind permitted per customer? The answers are No, No, and No — but I leap ahead.

The Kingdom (an adjunct of Kingdom of Chinese Dumpling, on Noriega) opened last spring, in the snug Sunset space once occupied by the excellent David’s Kitchen. That restaurant was a culinary multilinguist, fluent in the major idioms of east and southeast Asian cuisines; it was like a miniature Straits Cafe. The new place has retained much of that spirit, right down to the Magic Marker board that hangs above one corner of the dining room proclaiming the day’s specials, such as duck curry. David’s Kitchen offered a similar dish, if I remember rightly.

What is different is the massive infusion of dumplings, steamed buns, and general dim-summery. If you’re a haunter of noodle bars, this is an alternate universe. It’s as if some restaurant geneticist created a hybrid by mixing the DNA of a pan-Asian place and a dim sum house — and did so in a space that would feel crowded with a dozen people inside. But the space is still an attractive shade of creamy yellow, the tables and chairs are comfortable, and the food is excellent.

The truly fresh, handmade Chinese dumpling is a revelation, when you actually find one and bite into it. KoD’s are warm and juicy inside their soft pouches of dough; eating one is like biting into a piece of perfectly fresh fruit that’s been warmed by the sun, except the flavors aren’t fruity but (in the main) meaty, with generous tweakings of ginger and garlic. I liked the pork dumpling with napa cabbage ($5.95) slightly better than the chicken dumpling with corn ($6.45), mainly because the chicken didn’t assert itself with quite the same quiet sensuousness as the pork, and the peak-of-the-season corn was a little too sweet. But either way, you get a dozen for about six bucks, and the individual dumplings aren’t small.

The appeal of warm food is primal — does the heat sound an ancient echo of fresh kill? — but cold dishes have their own charms, especially when they’re as tasty as KoD’s. Marinated seaweed salad ($3.95) is a treat I associate with Japanese restaurants, but KoD’s is just as good, if in a quite different way. The seaweed itself, for starters, isn’t a mass of green, crinkled threads but a bowlful of what look like julienne poblano peppers, or perhaps tiny eels that have only just stopped writhing. And while Japanese seaweed salads are typically dressed with some form of ponzu sauce, KoD’s carries another charge, more savory and with less citrus-tart balance.

A salad of bean stick ($4.95) consisted of flaps of bean curd — corrugated, like Ruffles potato chips — and tossed with plenty of chopped cilantro. With some minced garlic and grated ginger, this simple ensemble became addictive, and the fact that was served cold — not cold, really, more on the low end of room temperature — faded from one’s consciousness, bite by bite.

More minced garlic was assigned to enliven crispy lotus root ($5.95), an enormous platter of cream-colored disks punctuated by vacuole-like interior spaces. I had the brief sense of examining a cross-section of bacteria under a microscope. The root sections themselves were indeed tender-crispy, as if they’d been briefly stir-fried, steamed, or otherwise tenderly handled; lotus root is really a starchy rhizome, and while some authorities compare it to potato, it reminded me of a cross between jicama and daikon. The root is rich in various vitamins and minerals as well as dietary fiber and is widely enjoyed throughout east Asia.

XO sauce, as browsers at Asian markets may know, is an irresistible, if pricey, confection — a lumpy paste — of dried seafood (including shrimp and scallop) along with various seasonings and degrees of chili heat. It’s quite good right out of the jar, as I am embarrassed to say I know from personal (though not recent) experience. How much better, though, to use the precious XO to flavor a dish like beef chow fun ($6.95), a Cantonese festival of wide noodles, strips of tender meat, and bean sprouts. The color palette here was a little too thoroughly earthen to be ideal, but the glistening of the noodles and beef did bring a bit of joy to the eye.

It’s not surprising that a restaurant serving food this tasty, interesting, and carefully prepared at such modest prices should attract young people, nor that — given the restaurant’s location deep in the Sunset District — so many of those young people should appear to be of Asian ancestry. Their presence suggests that some kind of college or university campus must lie nearby, but we couldn’t think of one. City College? Not too close. San Francisco State? Closer, though hardly at hand. The Sunset might be a neighborhood not a kingdom, but it’s a pretty good-sized neighborhood that shows signs of reinvention and renewal — and now it has a place where you can eat like a king, for a lot less than the king’s ransom.


KINGDOM OF DUMPLING

Daily, 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1713 Taraval, SF

(415) 566-6143

www.kingofchinesedumpling.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Bearable noise

Wheelchair accessible

Endorsements 2008: San Francisco races

-
0

SAN FRANCISCO RACES

Board of Supervisors

District 1

ERIC MAR


The incumbent District 1 supervisor, Jake McGoldrick, likes to joke that he holds his seat only because Eric Mar’s house burned down eight years ago. Back then Mar, who has had a stellar career on the school board, decided to wait before seeking higher office.

But now McGoldrick — overall a good supervisor who was wrong on a few key votes — is termed out, and progressive San Francisco is pretty much unanimous in supporting Mar as his successor.

Mar, a soft-spoken San Francisco State University teacher, was a strong critic of former school superintendent Arlene Ackerman and a leader in the battle to get the somewhat dictatorial and autocratic administrator out of the district. He’s been a key part of the progressive majority that’s made substantial progress in improving the San Francisco public schools.

He’s a perfect candidate for District 1. He has strong ties to the district and its heavily Asian population. He’s a sensible progressive with solid stands on the key issues and a proven ability to get things done. He supports the affordable housing measure, Proposition B; the Clean Energy Act, Proposition H; and the major new revenue measures. He’s sensitive to tenant issues, understands the need for a profound new approach to affordable housing, and wants to solve the city’s structural budget problems with new revenue, not just cuts.

His chief opponent, Sue Lee, who works for the Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t support Prop. H and won’t even commit to supporting district elections. She ducked a lot of our questions and was either intentionally vague or really has no idea what she would do as a supervisor. She’s no choice for the district, and we found no other credible candidates worthy of our endorsement. Vote for Eric Mar.

District 3

1. DAVID CHIU


2. DENISE MCCARTHY


3. TONY GANTNER


The danger in this district is Joe Alioto. He’s smooth, he’s slick, he’s well funded — and he would be a disaster for San Francisco. Make no mistake about it, Alioto is the candidate of downtown — and thanks to his famous name and wads of big-business cash, he’s a serious contender.

Two progressive candidates have a chance at winning this seat and keeping Alioto off the board. David Chiu is a member of the Small Business Commission (SBC) and the Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) and is a former civil rights lawyer who now manages a company that sells campaign software. Denise McCarthy ran the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center for 25 years and spent 7 years on the Port Commission.

Tony Gantner, a retired lawyer, is also in the race, although he is running well behind the others in the polls.

We have concerns about all the candidates. Chiu has a solid progressive record as a commissioner and committee member: He was one of only two SBC members who supported the living-wage ordinance and Sup. Tom Ammiano’s city health care plan. He backed Sup. Aaron Peskin, his political mentor, for chair of the DCCC. He backs Prop. H, supports the two revenue measures and the affordable-housing fund, and wants to give local small businesses a leg up in winning city contracts. He has some creative ideas about housing, including a community stabilization fee on new development.

He’s also a partner in a company that received $143,000 last year from PG&E and that has worked with Republicans and some nasty business interests.

Chiu says he doesn’t get to call all the shots at Grassroots Enterprises, which he cofounded. He describes the firm as a software-licensing operation, which isn’t exactly true — the company’s own Web site brags about its ability to offer broad-based political consulting and communication services.

But Chiu vowed to resign from the company if elected, and given his strong record on progressive issues, we’re willing to take a chance on him.

McCarthy has a long history in the neighborhood, and we like her community perspective. She supports Prop. H and the affordable-housing measure. She’s a little weak on key issues like the city budget — she told us she "hadn’t been fully briefed," although the budget is a public document and the debate over closing a massive structural deficit ought to be a central part of any supervisorial campaign. And while she said there "have to be some new taxes," she was very vague on where new revenue would come from and what specifically she would be willing to cut. She supported Gavin Newsom for mayor in 2003 and told us she doesn’t think that was a bad decision. It was. But she has by far the strongest community ties of any candidate in District 3. She’s accessible (even listing her home phone number in her campaign material), and after her years on the Port Commission, she understands land-use issues.

Gantner has been a supporter of the Clean Energy Act from the start and showed up for the early organizing meetings. He has the support of the Sierra Club and San Francisco Tomorrow and talks a lot about neighborhood beatification. But we’re a little nervous about his law-and-order positions, particularly his desire to crack down on fairs and festivals and his strong insistence that club promoters are responsible for all the problems on the streets.

But in the end, Chiu, McCarthy, and Gantner are all acceptable candidates, and Joe Alioto is not. Fill your slate with these three.

District 4

DAVE FERGUSON


What a mess.

We acknowledge that this is one of the more conservative districts in the city. But the incumbent, Carmen Chu, and her main opponent, Ron Dudum, are terrible disappointments.

It’s possible to be a principled conservative in San Francisco and still win progressive respect. We often disagreed over the years with Quentin Kopp, the former supervisor, state senator, and judge, but we never doubted his independence, sincerity, or political skills. Sean Elsbernd, who represents District 7, is wrong on most of the key issues, but he presents intelligent arguments, is willing to listen, and isn’t simply a blind loyalist of the mayor.

Chu has none of those redeeming qualities. She ducks questions, waffles on issues, and shows that she’s willing to do whatever the powerful interests want. When PG&E needed a front person to carry the torch against the Clean Energy Act, Chu was all too willing: she gave the corrupt utility permission to use her name and face on campaign flyers, signed on to a statement written by PG&E’s political flak, and permanently disgraced herself. She says that most of the problems in the city budget should be addressed with cuts, particularly cuts in public health and public works, but she was unable to offer any specifics. She refused to support the measure increasing the transfer tax on property sales of more than $5 million, saying that she didn’t want to create "a disincentive to those sales taking place." We asked her if she had ever disagreed with Newsom, who appointed her, and she could point to only two examples: she opposed his efforts to limit cigarette sales in pharmacies, and she opposed Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park. In other words, the only times she doesn’t march in lockstep with the mayor is when Newsom actually does something somewhat progressive. We can’t possibly endorse her.

Dudum, who ran a small business and tried for this office two years ago, continues to baffle us. He won’t take a position on anything. Actually, that’s not true — he’s opposed to the Clean Energy Act. Other than that, it’s impossible to figure out where he stands on anything or what he would do to address any of the city’s problems. (An example: When we asked him what to do about the illegal second units that have proliferated in the district, he said he’d solve the problem in two years. How? He couldn’t say.) We like Dudum’s small-business sentiments and his independence, but until he’s willing to take some stands and offer some solutions, we can’t support him.

Which leaves Dave Ferguson.

Ferguson is a public school teacher with little political experience. He’s a landlord, and not terribly good on tenant issues (he said he supported rent control when he was a renter, but now that he owns a four-unit building, he’s changed his mind). But he supports Prop. H, supports Prop. B, supports the revenue measures, and has a neighborhood sensibility. Ferguson is a long shot, but he’s the only candidate who made anything approaching a case for our endorsement.

District 5

ROSS MIRKARIMI


Mirkarimi won this seat four years ago after a heated race in a crowded field, and he’s quickly emerged as one of the city’s most promising progressive leaders. He understands that a district supervisor needs to take on tough citywide issues (he’s the lead author of the Clean Energy Act and won a surprisingly tough battle to ban plastic bags in big supermarkets) as well as dealing with neighborhood concerns. Mirkarimi helped soften a terrible plan for developing the old UC Extension site and fought hard to save John Swett School from closure.

But the area in which he’s most distinguished himself is preventing violent crime — something progressives have traditionally had trouble with. Four years ago, District 5 was plagued with terrible violence: murders took place with impunity, the police seemed unable to respond, and the African American community was both furious and terrified. Mirkarimi took the problem on with energy and creativity, demanding (and winning, despite mayoral vetoes) police foot patrols and community policing. Thanks to his leadership, violent crime is down significantly in the district — and the left in San Francisco has started to develop a progressive agenda for the crime problem.

He has no serious opposition, and richly deserves reelection.

District 7

SEAN ELSBERND


We rarely see eye to eye with the District 7 incumbent. He’s on the wrong side of most of the key votes on the board. He’s opposing the affordable housing measure, Prop. B. He’s opposed to the Clean Energy Act, Prop. H. It’s annoying to see someone who presents himself as a neighborhood supervisor siding with PG&E and downtown over and over again.

But Elsbernd is smart and consistent. He’s a fiscal conservative with enough integrity that he isn’t always a call-up vote for the mayor. He’s accessible to his constituents and willing to engage with people who disagree with him. The progressives on the board don’t like the way he votes — but they respect his intelligence and credibility.

Unlike many of the candidates this year, Elsbernd seems to understand the basic structural problem with the city budget, and he realizes that the deficit can’t be reduced just with spending cuts. He’s never going to be a progressive vote, but this conservative district could do worse.

District 9

1. DAVID CAMPOS


2. ERIC QUEZADA


3. MARK SANCHEZ


The race to succeed Tom Ammiano, who served this district with distinction and is now headed for the State Legislature, is a case study in the advantages of district elections and ranked-choice voting. Three strong progressive candidates are running, and the Mission–Bernal Heights area would be well served by any of them. So far, the candidates have behaved well, mostly talking about their own strengths and not trashing their opponents.

The choice was tough for us — we like David Campos, Eric Quezada, and Mark Sanchez, and we’d be pleased to see any of them in City Hall. It’s the kind of problem we wish other districts faced: District 9 will almost certainly wind up with one of these three stellar candidates. All three are Latinos with a strong commitment to immigrant rights. All three have strong ties to the neighborhoods. Two are openly gay, and one is a parent. All three have endorsements from strong progressive political leaders and groups. All three have significant political and policy experience and have proven themselves accessible and accountable.

And since it’s almost inconceivable that any of the three will collect more than half of the first-place votes, the second-place and third-place tallies will be critical.

Campos, a member of the Police Commission and former school district general counsel, arrived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant at 14. He made it to Stanford University and Harvard Law School and has worked as a deputy city attorney (who helped the city sue PG&E) and as a school district lawyer. He’s been a progressive on the Police Commission, pushing for better citizen oversight and professional police practices. To his credit, he’s stood up to (and often infuriated) the Police Officers’ Association, which is often a foe of reform.

Campos doesn’t have extensive background in land-use issues, but he has good instincts. He told us he’s convinced that developers can be forced to provide as much as 50 percent affordable housing, and he thinks the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan lacks adequate low-cost units. He supports the revenue measures on the ballot and wants to see big business paying a fair share of the tax burden. He argues persuasively that crime has to become a progressive issue, and focuses on root causes rather than punitive programs. Campos has shown political courage in key votes — he supported Theresa Sparks for Police Commission president, a move that caused Louise Renne, the other contender, to storm out of the room in a fit of cursing. He backed Aaron Peskin for Democratic Party chair despite immense pressure to go with his personal friend Scott Weiner. Ammiano argues that Campos has the right qualities to serve on the board — particularly the ability to get six votes for legislation — and we agree.

Eric Quezada has spent his entire adult life fighting gentrification and displacement in the Mission. He’s worked at nonprofit affordable-housing providers, currently runs a homeless program, and was a cofounder of the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. Although he’s never held public office, he has far more experience with the pivotal issues of housing and land use than the other two progressive candidates.

Quezada has the support of Sup. Chris Daly (although he doesn’t have Daly’s temper; he’s a soft-spoken person more prone to civil discussion than fiery rhetoric). If elected, he would carry on Daly’s tradition of using his office not just for legislation but also as an organizing center for progressive movements. He’s not as experienced in budget issues and was a little vague about how to solve the city’s structural deficit, but he would also make an excellent supervisor.

Mark Sanchez, the only Green Party member of the three, is a grade-school teacher who has done a tremendous job as president of the San Francisco school board. He’s helped turn that panel from a fractious and often paralyzed political mess into a strong, functioning operation that just hired a top-notch new superintendent. He vows to continue as an education advocate on the Board of Supervisors.

He told us he thinks he can be effective by building coalitions; he already has a good working relationship with Newsom. He’s managed a $500 million budget and has good ideas on both the revenue and the spending side — he thinks too much money goes to programs like golf courses, the symphony, and the opera, whose clients can afford to cover more of the cost themselves. He wants a downtown congestion fee and would turn Market Street into a pedestrian mall. Like Campos, he would need some education on land-use issues (and we’re distressed that he supports Newsom’s Community Justice Center), but he has all the right political instincts. He has the strong support of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. We would be pleased to see him on the Board of Supervisors.

We’ve ranked our choices in the order we think best reflects the needs of the district and the city. But we also recognize that the progressive community is split here (SEIU Local 1021 endorsed all three, with no ranking), and we have nothing bad to say about any of these three contenders. The important thing is that one of them win; vote for Campos, Quezada, and Sanchez — in that order, or in whatever order makes sense for you. Just vote for all three.

District 11

1. JOHN AVALOS


2. RANDY KNOX


3. JULIO RAMOS


This is one of those swing districts where either a progressive or a moderate could win. The incumbent, Gerardo Sandoval, who had good moments and not-so-good moments but was generally in the progressive camp, is termed out and running for judge.

The strongest and best candidate to succeed him is John Avalos. There are two other credible contenders, Randy Knox and Julio Ramos — and one serious disaster, Ahsha Safai.

Avalos has a long history of public-interest work. He’s worked for Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, for the Justice for Janitors campaign, and as an aide to Sup. Chris Daly. Since Daly has served on the Budget Committee, and at one point chaired it, Avalos has far more familiarity with the city budget than any of the other candidates. He understands that the city needs major structural reforms in how revenue is collected, and he’s full of new revenue ideas. Among other things, he suggests that the city work with San Mateo County to create a regional park district that could get state funds (and could turn McLaren Park into a destination spot).

He has a good perspective on crime (he supports community policing along with more police accountability) and wants to put resources into outreach for kids who are at risk for gang activity. He was the staff person who wrote Daly’s 2006 violence prevention plan. He wants to see more affordable housing and fewer luxury condos in the eastern neighborhoods and supports a congestion fee for downtown. With his experience both at City Hall and in community-based organizations, Avalos is the clear choice for this seat.

Randy Knox, a criminal defense lawyer and former member of the Board of Appeals, describes himself as "the other progressive candidate." He supports Prop. H and the affordable-housing fund. He links the crime problem to the fact that the police don’t have strong ties to the community, and wants to look for financial incentives to encourage cops to live in the city. He wants to roll back parking meter rates and reduce the cost of parking tickets in the neighborhoods, which is a populist stand — but that money goes to Muni, and he’s not sure how to replace it. He does support a downtown congestion fee.

Knox wasn’t exactly an anti-developer stalwart on the Board of Appeals, but we’ll endorse him in the second slot.

Julio Ramos has been one of the better members of a terrible community college board. He’s occasionally spoken up against corruption and has been mostly allied with the board’s progressive minority. He wants to build teacher and student housing on the reservoir adjacent to City College. He suggests that the city create mortgage assistance programs and help people who are facing foreclosure. He suggests raising the hotel tax to bring in more money. He supports public power and worked at the California Public Utilities Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates, where he tangled with PG&E.

We’re backing three candidates in this district in part because it’s critical that Safai, the candidate of Mayor Newsom, downtown, and the landlords, doesn’t get elected. Safai (who refused to meet with our editorial board) is cynically using JROTC as a wedge against the progressives, even though the Board of Supervisors does not have, and will never have, a role in deciding the future of that program. He needs to be defeated, and the best way to do that is to vote for Avalos, Knox, and Ramos.

Board of Education

SANDRA FEWER


NORMAN YEE


BARBARA LOPEZ


KIMBERLY WICOFF


Two of the stalwart progressive leaders on the San Francisco School Board — Mark Sanchez and Eric Mar — are stepping down to run for supervisor. That’s a huge loss, since Mar and Sanchez were instrumental in getting rid of the autocratic Arlene Ackerman, replacing her with a strong new leader and ending years of acrimony on the board. The schools are improving dramatically — this year, for the first time in ages, enrollment in kindergarten actually went up. It’s important that the progressive policies Mar and Sanchez promoted continue.

Sandra Fewer is almost everyone’s first choice for the board. A parent who sent three kids to the San Francisco public schools, she’s done an almost unbelievable amount of volunteer work, serving as a PTA president for 12 terms. She currently works as education policy director at Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. She knows the district, she knows the community, she’s full of energy and ideas, and she has the support of seven members of the Board of Supervisors and five of the seven current school board members.

Fewer supports the new superintendent and agrees that the public schools are getting better, but she’s not afraid to point out the problems and failures: She notes that other districts with less money are doing better. She wants to make the enrollment process more accessible to working parents and told us that race ought to be used as a factor in enrollment if that will help desegregate the schools and address the achievement gap. She’s against JROTC in the schools.

We’re a little concerned that Fewer talks about using district real estate as a revenue source — selling public property is always a bad idea. But she’s a great candidate and we’re happy to endorse her.

Norman Yee, the only incumbent we’re endorsing, has been something of a mediator and a calming influence on an often-contentious board. He helped push for the 2006 facilities bond and the parcel tax to improve teacher pay. He’s helped raise $1 million from foundations for prekindergarten programs. He suggests that the district take the radical (and probably necessary) step of suing the state to demand adequate funding for education. Although he was under considerable pressure to support JROTC, he stood with the progressives to end the military program. He deserves another term.

Barbara "Bobbi" Lopez got into the race late and has been playing catch-up. She’s missed some key endorsements and has problems with accessibility. But she impressed us with her energy and her work with low-income parents. A former legal support worker at La Raza Centro Legal, she’s now an organizer at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, working with immigrant parents. She’s fought to get subsidized Muni fares for SFUSD students. Her focus is on parent involvement — and while everyone talks about bringing parents, particularly low-income and immigrant parents, more directly into the education process, Lopez has direct experience in the area.

Kimberly Wicoff has a Stanford MBA, and you can tell — she talks in a sort of business-speak with lots of reference to "outcomes." She has no kids. But she’s currently working with a nonprofit that helps low-income families in Visitacion Valley and Hunters Point, and we liked her clearheaded approach to the achievement gap. Wicoff is a fan of what she calls community schools; she thinks a "great school in every neighborhood" can go a long way to solving the lingering issues around the enrollment process. That’s a bit of an ambitious goal, and we’re concerned about any move toward neighborhood schools that leads to resegregation. But Wicoff, who has the support of both Mark Sanchez and Mayor Newsom, brings a fresh problem-solving approach that we found appealing. And unlike Newsom, she’s against JROTC.

Jill Wynns, who has been on the board since 1992, has had a distinguished career, and we will never forget her leadership in the battle against privatizing public schools. But she was a supporter of former superintendent Ackerman even when Ackerman was trampling on open-government laws and intimidating students, parents, and staff critics, and she supports JROTC. It’s time for some new blood.

Rachel Norton, a parent and an advocate for special-education kids, has run an appealing campaign, but her support for the save-JROTC ballot measure disqualified her for our endorsement.

As a footnote: H. Brown, a blogger who can be a bit politically unhinged, has no business on the school board and we’re not really sure why he’s running. But he offered an interesting idea that has some merit: he suggests that the city offer free Muni passes and free parking to anyone who will volunteer to mentor an at-risk SFUSD student. Why not?

Community College Board

MILTON MARKS


CHRIS JACKSON


BRUCE WOLFE


There are four seats up for the seven-member panel that oversees the San Francisco Community College District, and we could only find three who merit endorsement. That’s a sad statement: City College is a local treasure, and it’s been badly run for years. The last chancellor, Phil Day, left under a cloud of corruption; under his administration, money was diverted from public coffers into a political campaign. The current board took bond money that the voters had earmarked for a performing arts center and shifted it to a gym — then found out that there wasn’t enough money in the operating budget to maintain the lavish facility. It’s a mess out there, and it needs to be cleaned up.

Fortunately, there are three strong candidates, and if they all win, the reformers will have a majority on the board.

Milton Marks is the only incumbent we’re supporting. He’s been one of the few board members willing to criticize the administration. He supports a sunshine policy for the district and believes the board needs to hold the chancellor accountable (that ought to be a basic principle of district governance, but at City College, it isn’t). He wants to push closer relations with the school board. He actually pays attention to the college budget and tries to make sure the money is spent the right way. He is pushing to reform the budget process to allow more openness and accountability.

Chris Jackson, a policy analyst at the San Francisco Labor Council, is full of energy and ideas. He wants to create an outreach center for City College at the public high schools. He also understands that the college district has done a terrible job working with neighborhoods and is calling for a comprehensive planning process. He understands the problems with the gym and the way the board shuffles money around, and he is committed to a more transparent budget process.

Jackson is also pushing to better use City College for workforce development, particularly in the biotech field, where a lot of the city’s new jobs will be created.

Jackson was president of the Associated Students at San Francisco State University, has been a member of the Youth Commission, and worked with Young Workers United on the city’s minimum-wage law. His experience, energy, and ideas make him an ideal candidate.

Bruce Wolfe attended City College after a workplace injury and served on the Associate Students Council. He knows both the good (City College has one of the best disability service programs in the state) and the bad (the school keeps issuing bonds to build facilities but doesn’t have the staff to keep them running). As a former member of the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, Wolfe is a strong advocate for open government, something desperately needed at the college district. He told us he thinks the college should agree to abide by the San Francisco Planning Code and is calling for a permanent inspector general to monitor administration practices and spending. He wants City College to start building housing for students. He has direct experience with the district and great ideas for improving it, and we’re happy to endorse him.

Incumbents Rodel Rodis and Natalie Berg are running for reelection; both have been a key part of the problem at City College, and we can’t endorse either of them. Steve Ngo, a civil rights lawyer, has the support of the Democratic Party, but we weren’t impressed by his candidacy. And he told us he opposes the Clean Energy Act.

Vote for Marks, Jackson, and Wolfe.

BART Board of Directors

With rising gasoline prices, congested roadways, and global warming, it’s now more important than ever to have an engaged and knowledgeable BART board that is willing to reform a system that effectively has San Francisco users subsidizing everyone else. That means developing a fare structure in which short trips within San Francisco or the East Bay urban centers are cheaper and longer trips are a bit more expensive. BART should also do away with free parking, which favors suburban drivers (who tend to be wealthier) over urban cyclists and pedestrians. San Francisco’s aging stations should then get the accessibility and amenity improvements they need—and at some point the board can even fund the late-night service that is long overdue. There are two candidates most capable of meeting these challenges:

District 7

LYNETTE SWEET


This district straddles San Francisco and the East Bay, and it’s crucial that San Francisco—which controls just three of the nine seats—retain its representative here. We would like to see Lynette Sweet more forcefully represent the interests of riders from San Francisco and support needed reforms such as civilian oversight of BART police. But she has a strong history of public service in San Francisco (having served on San Francisco’s taxi and redevelopment commissions before joining the BART board in 2003), and we’ll endorse her.

District 9

TOM RADULOVICH


Tom Radulovich is someone we’d love to clone and have run for every seat on the BART board, and perhaps every other transportation agency in the Bay Area. He’s smart and progressive, and he works hard to understand the complex problems facing our regional transportation system and then to develop and advocate for creative solutions. As executive director of the nonprofit Livable City, Radulovich is a leader of San Francisco’s alternative transportation brain trust, widely respected for walking the walk (and biking the bike—he doesn’t own a car) and setting an example for how to live and grow in the sustainable way this city and country needs.

>>More Guardian Endorsements 2008

Changing buses

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

It seems as though whatever changes to the Muni system the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency adopts, some people on the buses are bound to be upset. That decision could come as soon as next month, when the agency will consider acting on recommendations from its Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP) studies.

The proposed changes were presented to the SFMTA board of directors Sept. 16, when many riders weighed in with criticisms that their routes were being cut or changed as part of the first major overhaul of Muni since its inception more than 25 years ago.

Depending on whether the recommendations are approved in October or the decision is delayed, the changes to a system that has about 700,000 daily riders won’t happen until summer or fall of next year. At the end of the Sept. 16 hearing, board chair James McCray Jr. requested that a subcommittee be formed to integrate the concerns of the 107 people who made public comments into the final plan.

The stated goal of the TEP is to revamp Muni into a "faster, more reliable, and more efficient public transit system for San Francisco." But with a finite pool of money, improving some lines means taking resources from others, and that means controversy.

"If only 1 percent of our ridership shows up to make a comment, that’s 7,000 people," Julie Kirschbaum, TEP program manager, told us.

One was Evelyn Landahl, a 90-year-old resident of Laguna Honda who was upset about changes to the 36 line. "I know there are students who use this bus to get to City College and San Francisco State as well," Landahl said. "As we older people leave this world, those kids will run out of gas some day. They’ll need buses and services."

Mark Christensen, vice president of the Merced Extension Triangle Neighborhood Association, told the agency that "residents have not had a true voice in determining what is best for our community." He criticized the TEP’s public outreach efforts, saying that the agency didn’t do enough in certain areas, particularly his Merced Heights neighborhood, which would see disrupted service with changes to the M and J lines.

Jim Kirk, who lives in Noe Valley and travels by a combination of car and Muni, decided to attend the Sept. 16 hearing to express support for changes to the 48 line that would eliminate sections of the route. "There are too many buses, at least in my neighborhood," he said. "To me that’s overkill." As a taxpayer, he said, he is concerned about reducing Muni costs.

The proposed modifications to the 36 line have triggered major debate. Some hearing attendees said there is no reason why a bus with such a low ridership should travel an already congested street. They claimed that there are as few as six and no more than nine riders on the 36 at any given time.

Additional route adjustments that have generated concern among riders, residents, and other stakeholders involve the 66 Quintara, the 38 Geary, the 3 Jackson, the 48 Quintara, the 17 Park Merced, the 18 46th Ave., the 26 Valencia, the 27 Bryant, and the 39 Coit.

Kirschbaum said that Proposition A, which voters passed last November, will be the main source of funding for improvements to the Muni system.

Nuclear fallout

-
0

› sarah@sfbg.com

As the US Navy prepares to deal with its radioactive past at the Hunters Point Shipyard (HPS) — inviting folks to submit comments by July 28 on its proposed cleanup plan for Parcel B — community members are struggling to understand the threat and its implications.

Bayview–Hunters Point residents and environmental and public health advocates gathered July 8 at City College’s Southeast Community Facility to hear from and question Navy officials, but few came away satisfied. Most expressed doubts about the Navy’s credibility, or confusion about the exact risks to human health and the environment from the plan to clean up radiological, soil, and water contamination.

For the past 25 years, this 59-acre property has housed a colony of artists in the site’s Building 103, in studios rented through the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. In September the artists will be ejected, either to portables and buildings on the shipyard or to an offsite location, so the Navy can excavate the building’s storm drains and sewers where low levels of radiological contamination have been found.

HPS Base Realignment and Conversion Environmental Coordinator Keith Forman explained at the meeting that when the Navy first presented a cleanup plan for Parcel B in 1997, it had not surveyed for radionuclides, remnants of the shipyard’s military past.

That 2001 survey revealed that there are 14 sites on Parcel B that may have been exposed to radiation, including Building 103. The Navy’s 2004 Historical Radiological Assessment reveals that while Building 103 began as a non-nuclear submarine barracks, Operation Crossroad personnel subsequently used it as a decontamination center after an atomic test went awry in July 1946 in the South Pacific.

In that test, the Navy detonated two bombs the size used on Nagasaki in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll. One bomb, the HRA notes, was an underwater burst called Shot Baker, which "caused a tremendous bubble of water and steam that broke the ocean’s surface."

"Then a huge wave, over 90 feet high … rolled over target and support vessels as well as the islands of the atoll," the HRA records. "Vast quantities of radioactive debris rained down on the target and support ships, islands and lagoon."

Seventy-nine ships were sent to the Navy’s radiological center at Hunters Point Shipyard for decontamination, a site chosen in part because University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University were nearby to support the radiation studies.

The following year, from April through August 1947, the Navy burned 610,000 gallons of radioactively contaminated ship fuel at HPS. Also, workers sandblasting contamination at the shipyard’s dry docks showered in Parcel B’s Building 103, raising the current concern that cesium-137, cobalt-60, plutonium-239, radium-226 (from radioactive decay of uranium-238) and strontium-90 could be present in underground drains and sewers.

The 2004 HRA also identified two plots on Parcel B, IR07 and IR18, as having been used as dumps for radioluminescent devices and possibly more sandblast debris. It also listed a discharge channel between a pump house and Drydock 3 as radiologically impacted.

Currently the Navy is proposing to excavate soil from IR-07 and IR-18, including known mercury and methane spots, and ship it to dumps in Idaho and Utah; fill and seal the suspect discharge channel; cover potentially radiologically impacted soil; and stipulate that these two areas be used as open space in future plans for the base.

The cost of the Navy’s proposed radiological cleanup is $29.6 million. The Navy also proposes spending $13 million on amended soil and sediment cleanup, and $2.7 million on amended groundwater remediation.

Forman told the crowd that the Navy’s old soil remedy was a "bad fit." Excavations were larger than expected, Forman said, and showed no pattern of release. "There was no end in sight for the Navy," Forman said. "It didn’t look as if we were doing what we were meant to do: namely, find Navy-caused spills."

Forman also criticized the Navy’s old groundwater remedy as being "very passive." He proposed a remedy that includes more monitoring along the shoreline and using contaminant-eating bacteria to cleanup groundwater contaminants.

"The old remedy did not consider risks to wildlife and aquatic organisms at the shoreline, whereas the amended remedy will," Forman noted. "It was silent on this issue, yet we know the area has a shoreline."

Ultimately, amending the Navy’s cleanup plan is "about protecting human health and the environment," Forman said.

Green Action’s Marie Harrison was critical of the Navy’s failure to explain the risks in simple terms. "You talked about risk assessment, but you never told us what the risks were," Harrison said. "What is the risk to human life? How is capping going to stop it going into the bay? I’m not a scientist. I don’t have a PhD. I was hoping you were going to give me some kind of knowledge."

Harrison also worried that the Navy was not factoring in the cumulative risks for people living and working in the surrounding community who visit the shoreline to relax. Told that manganese, nickel, and arsenic are present in risky quantities, Harrison was referred to online information at www.bracpmo.navy.mil and to documents housed at the San Francisco’s Main and Third Street libraries.

Other community members criticized the Navy for not doing enough outreach to the Samoans, Latinos, and Asians in the community, and for having taken too long to acknowledge radiological impacts.

"Do you really want us to believe that no one was aware of nuclear waste and spills, given this was a Superfund site?" said Espanola Jackson, a BVHP resident since 1948.

"What I expect you to believe," Forman replied, "is that until 2002, no one who had technical and scientific expertise had looked at the evidence, sifted through history, and done an analysis to put together a radiological assessment."

Jackson also accused the Navy of "fast-tracking the cleanup in order for Lennar to build houses," referring to the efforts of Mayor Gavin Newsom, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and others to hasten the shipyard’s cleanup and early turnover to the city so the area can be turned into a massive development project pursuant to the voter-approved Prop. G.

"We are not going to accept anything less than total cleanup," Jackson said. "If you have to move that dirty dirt, do it. We need $10 billion. You said $60 million. You can’t even scrape the surface with that amount."

Melanie Kito, the Navy’s lead remedial project manager, replied that the Navy is "chartered to clean up releases of spills from Navy activities. Whatever remedy we put forth, we have to demonstrate that we are protecting human health and the environment."

Kristine Enea, a member of the community-based Restoration Advisory Board, told the Guardian that she felt that the Navy did not do a great job of explaining the risks of contaminants in, say, a major earthquake.

"If there’s an earthquake, would the risk be like getting 10 x-rays at once, or having a three-headed baby?" Enea said.

Pamela Calvert, deputy director of Literacy for Environmental Justice, told the Guardian she’s worried about shipping the contamination elsewhere.

"I’m really concerned that we don’t solve problems in Bayview by creating ones for another community," Calvert said. "It’s best to deal with it here. There is no such thing as ‘away.’ It’s someone else’s backyard."

Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, which does contract work for the Redevelopment Agency, said that Calvert’s concerns strengthen the argument for simply capping Parcel B so that the contamination can’t escape rather than removing the material.

Bloom said he blames the Navy’s "incompetence" for the city losing the opportunity to transfer Parcel B early and speed development. "If we’d got rid of Parcel B in 2004, we would have been part of the housing boom, not the housing bust," Bloom said.

He believes the Navy’s proposed plan is acceptable, feasible, and protective, but that "whether it’s the best use given the needs of the BVHP is another debate."

While some residents are arguing for a total excavation of the site down to the sea floor, Bloom disagrees: "I think the covering strategy is a protective solution." He criticized the Navy for only having scheduled 11 days between its July 28 public comment deadline and its final draft, due out August 8.

"I’m concerned about the length of time they’ve allotted for the question that comes up and that no one has the answer to," Bloom said. "I don’t think it is adequate or seemly from a ‘we take your comment seriously’ point of view."

Shipyard artist Rebecca Haseltine, who has rented at Building 103 for 18 years, says that she has consistently trusted Arc Ecology’s advice on the shipyard cleanup. "But I also feel that we still don’t know the half of what happened on the shipyard. The Navy denied that any radioactive material had been used at the base, until a reporter with the SF Weekly published a story about it in 2001."

Real money, false arrest

-
0

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

The false arrest of an elected official in San Francisco for using a $100 bill that police wrongly thought was counterfeit has evolved into a potentially precedent-setting legal struggle over police accountability.

The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office is seeking to appeal the case all the way to the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court, an expensive fight that could overturn what would seem a welcome ruling in liberal San Francisco. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last August affirmed in the case that citizens have the right to sue police officers after being unreasonably arrested for a crime they didn’t commit.

After a federal district judge refused to grant qualified immunity to the officers and throw out the lawsuit, City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office insisted on repeated appeals argued by deputy city attorney Scott Wiener, rather than settling for a few thousand dollars and accepting that the cops simply screwed up.

"There are some people who would say ‘Why don’t you just pay a little money to settle it?’<0x2009>" Wiener told the Guardian. "But we have to take a broader institutional perspective, because if you start settling cases that don’t have merit, you’re going to wind up with a lot more cases like that than you would have otherwise."

At the center of the story is attorney Rodel Rodis, a Filipino activist and elected trustee of City College of San Francisco, who was arrested in the spring of 2003 and dragged to a police station for supposedly trying to buy a handful of items from a Walgreens with a counterfeit $100 bill. The bill turned out to be real.

But by the time the officers came to that conclusion, Rodis had suffered what he regarded as the terrible embarrassment of being shoved into a squad car with his hands behind his back in front of neighbors and constituents. It also occurred just around the corner from his longtime law practice and the main campus of City College, where he’s been an elected trustee since 1991.

Rodis promptly filed a $250,000 claim against the city, former Police Chief Alex Fagan Sr., and two officers at the scene alleging false arrest, excessive force, and the negligent infliction of emotional stress, among other things. He later offered to settle the suit for $15,000, but the City Attorney’s Office refused to accept the deal.

Five years and innumerable legal bills later, the case just keeps getting worse for the city — even before it lands in front of a jury to determine if indeed the police should compensate Rodis.

"Part of my mind was saying … ‘I’m not going to argue. I’m not going to resist,’<0x2009>" Rodis said of the arrest. "I put my hands behind my back but I’m thinking ‘This has got to be a mistake. Somebody here has to have some sense.’<0x2009>"

Rodis was suffering from minor allergy symptoms on Feb. 17, 2003, when he headed to a Walgreens on Ocean Avenue he’d been going to for 20 years. It was located near his Ingleside home and a law office he’s had in the neighborhood since 1992.

He picked up some cough syrup, Claritin, toothpaste, and a few other things. The total came to $42 and change, so he tried to pay with a $100 bill.

"I just happened to have it in my wallet," Rodis said.

The drugstore clerk used a counterfeit detection pen to be sure the bill was legit. It was, according to the marking, but the bill was printed in the 1980s before watermarks and magnetic strips were used to help stop counterfeiting.

The young clerk was unfamiliar with the bill’s design and called a manager to be sure. He, too, used a counterfeit pen to confirm that it was real. But the manager told Rodis he was still going to call the police, fearing it was fake. That’s when things turned surreal. Two officers showed up and almost immediately placed Rodis in handcuffs before trying to ascertain if he’d actually attempted to defraud Walgreens.

"They made no effort to determine what the situation was … they just assumed," Rodis said. "When she said ‘Put your hands behind your back,’ I thought I was in some Twilight Zone moment."

A third ranking officer on the scene, Sgt. Jeff Barry, had known Rodis for years as a local lawyer and City College trustee. Their sons were classmates. But Barry allegedly failed to step in and question whether Rodis was likely to be a fraud artist.

Another officer, Michelle Liddicoet, told Rodis she knew who he was and that he "should be ashamed of himself," according to the suit.

Feeling humiliated as other Filipinos he knew looked on, Rodis was put into the back of a patrol car and taken to Taraval Station, where he was handcuffed to a bench. There he waited another 30 minutes or so until the police officers were able to reach the Secret Service, which investigates currency for the US Treasury Department. A federal agent confirmed that the bill was likely genuine. The whole ordeal lasted about a couple of hours and Rodis was driven back to the drug store.

"This wasn’t a situation where Mr. Rodis was held in jail overnight or for a week or had to post some large amount in bail," Wiener said.

Fagan sent out a department memo shortly afterward stating that suspects have to know the currency they’re using is counterfeit before being arrested, and in any event, if they insist it’s real, the officer can book the bill as evidence for later examination and give them a receipt without arresting anyone.

But by then the damage was done and the hasty reaction of police would lie at the heart of the case that Rodis subsequently filed.

Rodis is an unlikely champion of police accountability. Known for his cantankerous personality, he all but accused the secretary of the San Francisco Veterans Equity Center last month in his regular column for the Philippine News of supporting a band of communist guerillas in the Philippines known as the New People’s Army, a charge the man angrily denied.

He bitterly responded with a string of e-mails last year when the Guardian reported he was several months late in sending legally required campaign disclosure forms from his 2004 reelection to the Ethics Commission (see "At the crossroads," 07/17/07).

But the city’s police academy also has invited Rodis to lecture recruits about San Francisco’s Filipino community as part of the department’s sensitivity training. A week after the incident involving Rodis, an elderly Filipino man who sold the San Francisco Chronicle downtown was savagely beaten and robbed of $400. He never found a police officer while walking to his Tenderloin home, where he died. The two incidents, one following on the heels of the other, enraged the city’s Filipino population of 36,000, and Rodis believes it proves the police department continues to have trouble with discrimination.

"The fact that it happened to me meant that I was in a position to do something about it," Rodis said of his dust-up. "For many [Filipino immigrants] … they wouldn’t have had the resources or the knowledge of the procedures to fight back. Even up to now, five years later, I still bump into people who appreciate the fact that I filed the action."

The case was assigned to Wiener, who is coincidentally the elected chair of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee and a longtime party activist in a city that’s famously wary of any perceived threat to civil liberties.

In his capacity as a lawyer for the city, though, Wiener tried to have Rodis’ suit tossed using a common courtroom maneuver known as summary judgment. Civil defendants request them from a court by arguing that a claim is so lacking in merit that they shouldn’t have to endure a costly, time-consuming jury trial.

He also made the standard claim that city employees — in this case police officers — are shielded by what’s known as qualified immunity, a legal argument designed to allow them room to make honest mistakes without facing an endless barrage of expensive litigation.

In March 2005, federal district judge Maxine Chesney granted the request in part, throwing out Rodis’ claim of liability against the city and county. But she allowed the part of the suit involving the two officers to move forward, arguing the arrest was illegal because they didn’t have probable cause that Rodis intended to defraud the store.

So Herrera’s office turned to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and in a move that surprised Wiener, the panel ruled 2-1 that public employees are entitled to qualified immunity, but not when they fail to act on their considerable law enforcement powers in a reasonable way and take into account all factors present at the scene.

To put it bluntly, cops sometimes make an error in judgment but they still have to use their brains for establishing probable cause. The panel also argued that even if the bill was counterfeit, Rodis did nothing wrong if he wasn’t aware of it.

"Even without knowledge of Rodis’ identity and local ties," the majority wrote, "based on the totality of the other relevant facts, no reasonable or prudent officer could have concluded that Rodis intentionally and knowingly used a counterfeit bill."

Now Herrera had on his hands published legal precedent that his staff believed imposed a new requirement on police officers to not only conclude that perpetrators passed counterfeit currency but also that they intended to defraud their victims. The decision, city officials claim in their pleading to the Supreme Court, could hamstring local and federal law enforcement investigating counterfeit currency and some other types of fraud.

"They said it was clearly established that probable cause is a fluid concept," Wiener said of the ruling. "Well, that’s a meaningless statement. Of course probable cause is a fluid concept. But the point of qualified immunity is that officers are entitled to rely on the current state of law about what the requirements are and shouldn’t have to predict what a judge is going to do down the road."

Lawrence Fasano, a lawyer for Rodis, counters that Fagan’s memo to the department reinforced the court’s opinion. Considering that the police and people in the neighborhood had known Rodis for years, the officers on the scene should have concluded that it was out-of-character for him to pass a counterfeit bill.

"All the evidence that was looked at by the police officers at the time indicated that he did not intend to pass counterfeit currency, including the fact that he had other $100 bills in his pocket that were genuine," Fasano said.

Fasano argued, too, that case law in California made clear the issue of intent cannot just be set aside by police.

Other cities and counties in California so fear the case’s impact that two interest groups representing them, the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties, filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief after the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, arguing that digital counterfeiting was a "threat to the nation’s fiscal health" that could grow in the future, and if allowed to stand, "the panel majority’s decision would eviscerate the doctrine of qualified immunity to the detriment of the public."

Wiener filed the Supreme Court petition in May after a larger panel of Ninth Circuit judges rejected a request for rehearing earlier this year. While the Supreme Court accepts only a fraction of the thousands of cases it receives annually, Wiener believes there’s a chance it will be accepted because of another such case it’s examining from the Tenth Circuit. The city won’t know for sure until the fall.

He adds that it’s extraordinarily dangerous for police to be forced to consider a citizen’s status as an elected official before concluding that probable cause exists for an arrest. The City Attorney’s Office won’t disclose how much has been spent on the case until it’s resolved, but Rodis estimates he’s spent more than $50,000.
The US dollar may be losing value internationally, but a $100 bill from the 1980s could cost San Francisco big bucks.

Bad grades

-
0

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

A much-anticipated audit of City College of San Francisco’s spending of bond money finds that school officials promised voters more than they could possibly deliver and then didn’t allow proper oversight of hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds.

A minority faction on City College’s Board of Trustees has for years sought a performance audit of the school’s bond projects, which includes $441.3 million authorized by voters during elections in 2001 and 2005. The audit by Sacramento-based MGT of America was released June 4.

The faction, led in large part by longtime trustee Milton Marks, often publicly quarreled with former Chancellor Phil Day over the matter, arguing that Prop. 39, a state ballot measure that passed in 2000 and made it easier for school districts to get voter approval for bond financing, legally required full annual performance audits of its capital spending on new classrooms, laboratories, a gymnasium, and a performing arts center.

But school administrators denied they were necessary or claimed that the cursory, more limited financial audits done each year met the legal mandate. Pressure on Day’s administration finally became insurmountable last year as San Francisco’s District 12 state Assembly Member Fiona Ma began threatening to have the state conduct its own audit, offering deeper scrutiny and wider disclosure than City College officials were perhaps prepared to stomach.

"My overall feeling is that we appreciate their efforts, accept their findings, and will implement all of the recommendations," a conciliatory Vice Chancellor Peter Goldstein told the Guardian in response to the report.

While mostly mild in its language, the audit shows that the school may have violated state law by granting several small contracts to the same construction companies so City College could avoid the headache of competitive bidding.

The state’s Public Contract Code requires that projects costing more than $15,000 go to the lowest responsible bidder through a competitive process, a provision designed to save money for taxpayers. But between 2005 and 2006, the community college entered into seven separate no-bid contracts with one construction firm totaling $83,545 for work at its Cloud Hall facility on Ocean Avenue.

"It’s unfortunate that two of the project managers were not aware or did not appreciate the importance of that rule," Goldstein said. "They’ve been counseled and we don’t expect to have any more occurrences of that type."

The auditors found "similar multiple contracts" — totaling less than $100,000, Goldstein said — where the work should have been combined into one larger contract and approved by the school’s independently elected Board of Trustees.

The audit reserved special criticism for a bond oversight committee required by Prop. 39 to watchdog the school’s capital spending. The Guardian reported last year that such committees in other districts, for example, West Contra Costa County routinely received full performance audits and met more often than City College’s oversight committee (See "Who’s following the money?", 07/10/07).

But the group of citizens here, which includes San Francisco Treasurer José Cisneros and former San Francisco Chronicle publisher Steve Falk, who’s now head of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, has done far less than what the law asks it to do.

The report says that one oversight committee member, who goes unnamed, told the auditors that it wasn’t the committee’s responsibility to determine how City College actually spends the funds. The auditors also watched former Chancellor Day tell the committee at a January meeting that its reach was limited solely to ensuring that City College complied with certain provisions of the state’s Constitution.

That turned out to be totally untrue. "The intent of this law is to provide a broad oversight role for the committees, thereby encouraging cost-effective use of bond funds," the report states.

"Many of these things that are in the report are things that people on the board have been saying all along," Trustee Marks said. "We really shouldn’t have had to spend $250,000 for someone on the outside to tell us this."

The original estimate for all of City College’s ambitious bond projects amounted to about $539.7 million, and the school has offset many of those costs by securing tens of millions of dollars in matching funds from the state. But as of January, the total cost has ballooned to $968 million. Last year the Guardian reported that the school gutted several projects promised to voters by "reallocating" roughly $130 million from their budgets to save other projects suffering from skyrocketing cost overruns (See "The City College shell game," 07/03/07).

Trustee John Rizzo, who joined Marks in asking for an audit, said he wished the report had done more to explain why many of the projects were poorly planned, leading to millions of dollars in higher costs. He cited as examples the new Mission Campus and a health and wellness center for athletes.

Rizzo told us, "Just from what contractors say and what staff has been reporting, that still needs to be looked at."

A heart once nourished

-
0

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Community court, every second Thursday at 10 a.m. Narcotics Anonymous on Wednesday. Apprenticeships for construction workers, Monday, bright and early.

The ancient letter board just inside the entrance of the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center tells much of the story of this neighborhood institution. Since 1981 it’s been a crucial hub for the Western Addition, a mostly level stretch of terrain west of downtown that rivals the Mission District and Bayview–Hunters Point as the source of the most despair from senseless gun violence.

For decades Ella Hill was a safe haven, a place where kids and seniors felt comfortable, where people could learn and teach and talk and work together, a little oasis in the world of urban hurt.

A placard affixed to one wall of the entryway honors Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first African American US Supreme Court justice. In a small office nearby, a tutor assists a young girl with the multiplication table. Elsewhere, a list of rules forbids profanity, play-fighting, and put-downs.

There’s also a poster of Ella Hill Hutch, the first black woman elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, where she served from 1978-81.

But in 2006, a man was murdered during daylight hours in the center’s gymnasium before dozens of witnesses. That slaying was one of at least five brutal incidents that took place in the shadow of Ella Hill between 2006 and 2007; three more murders occurred within blocks. Many remain open cases today.

And now the center is having serious problems — troubles that reflect those of the city’s African American population, which has been plagued by violence and socioeconomic changes that are closing opportunities and forcing longtime residents out the city.

Several census tracts in the neighborhood that at one time contained between 3,000 and 6,000 black residents are down to 1,000 or far less, according to a San Francisco State University study commissioned by the city last year. The report showed that between 1995 and 2000 San Francisco lost more of its black population than 18 other major US cities.

Ironically, the city is now preparing to close the final dark chapter on 50 years of federally subsidized redevelopment in the Western Addition. But the displacement that the bulldozers set off half a century ago continues today, unabated.

That exodus has compounded structural problems at the center just when its remaining clients need it most. The nonprofit late last year underwent an organizational shake up and brief takeover by the Mayor’s Office to save it from imminent financial collapse. The center’s executive director of two years, George Smith III, was fired with little public explanation last year, and a permanent head was named only recently.

As with many aspects of this troubled community, it was unaddressed violence that fed the fire. Simply subsisting in the heart of a violent neighborhood was strain enough for Ella Hill. But suffering an attack from within seemed too much to bear for an institution some call "San Francisco’s Black City Hall."

The 2006 killing took one man’s life, but Ella Hill itself — still facing an uncertain financial future — felt the searing rounds too. Now some wonder if the nonprofit can survive the very violence and poverty it was created to help end in a neighborhood that’s changing forever.

In Ella Hill’s noisy gymnasium at the building’s east end, two teams of middle schoolers practice basketball.

"My job is to be in the best position to box him out for a rebound," their coach says as they crowd around the free throw line.

The kids are radiant and attentive now. But from this same basketball court on April 27, 2006, the Western Addition briefly edged ahead of the rest of the city in extreme bloodshed.

Donte White, 22, was working part-time at the center. As he supervised a basketball game, two unidentified males entered Ella Hill. One brandished a firearm and shot White at least eight times in the face, neck, and chest as several kids looked on in utter horror. Among them was White’s young daughter.

Police arrested 25-year-old Esau Ferdinand for the attack five months after White’s murder. But within two weeks prosecutors decided they could no longer hold him and declined to press charges when a key witness disappeared on the eve of grand jury proceedings.

Even with other witnesses filling the gym, police gathered few additional leads, an all-too-common story in a neighborhood where residents often prefer to avoid both law enforcement and vengeful criminal suspects.

The center installed cameras and an alarm. A buzzer was placed on the front door. But the new security measures cut against Ella Hill’s image as a demilitarized zone, and the center remains shaken by White’s murder. Some parents began barring their children from going there.

"Can you imagine something like that, someone coming into a rec center in the middle of the day with a firearm and shooting and killing a guy?" asks Deven Richardson, who resigned from Ella Hill’s board in 2007 to focus on his real estate business. "That really set us back big time in terms of morale. It really was a dark moment for the center."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, whose district includes Ella Hill, says that after he took office in 2004, he learned that the police weren’t stationed at the center during prime hours and had never created a strategy for attaching themselves to the center the way they had at other safe-haven institutions in the city, like schools. He told us he’s had to "really work" to get the nearby Northern Station more integrated into Ella Hill.

"Before the murder of Donte White, there had also been a series of incidences inside Ella Hill Hutch," Mirkarimi said over drinks at a Hayes Valley bar. "Nothing that resulted in anybody getting killed, but certainly enough indicators that really should have been taken more seriously by the mayor."

In June 2006, shortly after White’s shooting, the San Francisco Police Commission and the Board of Supervisors held a tense public meeting at the center. Residents, enraged over the wave of violence that summer in the Western Addition, shouted down public officials, including Chief Heather Fong, who was forced to cut short a presentation on the city’s crime rate.

That same month, the supervisors put a measure on the ballot to allocate $30 million over three years for violence-prevention efforts like ex-offender services and witness relocation. But Mayor Gavin Newsom, following a policy of fortifying law enforcement over community-based alternatives, opposed the measure because it excluded the police department. Prop. A, designed to finance groups like Ella Hill with connections to the neighborhood that the police will never have, lost by less than a single percentage point.

Meanwhile, four homicides in the neighborhood that year joined frequent anarchic shootouts in the Western Addition, including many that never made headlines because no one was killed. The fatalities led to promises by City Hall that the area would be saturated with improved security, including additional security cameras that have mostly proved useless in helping the police solve violent crimes.

On June 3, 2006, 19-year-old Antoine Green was standing on McAllister Street near Ella Hill early in the morning when he was shot to death in the head and back. On Aug. 16, 38-year-old Johnny Jackson’s chest was filled with bullets as he sat in the front seat of a Honda Passport on Turk Street not far behind Ella Hill. A woman next to him in the car suffered a critical gunshot wound to the head.

Two more killings occurred further east at Larch Way, a popular location for murder in the neighborhood.

Burnett "Booski" Raven, a 32-year-old alleged member of the Eddy Rock street gang, was found bleeding at 618 Larch Way early Oct. 7, his body laying halfway in the street and containing at least 10 gunshot wounds. On July 22, police found 23-year-old John Brown, another purported Eddy Rock member, wedged under a Chevy pickup truck, dead from up to seven gunshots.

Brown had reportedly survived two prior shootings, but the Western Addition’s cultural condemnation of "snitching" to police has so infected the neighborhood that he allegedly told police not to bother investigating either of the attacks.

Loïc Wacquant, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says neighborhoods like the Western Addition that once contained stable black institutions — schools, churches, and community centers that glued residents together — have been overwhelmed by the rise of a white-collar, service-based economy, the decline of unions, and the withdrawal of meaningful social safety nets.

Cities have responded to the resulting marginalization with more police officers, more courts, and more prisons. But the failure of those institutions to cure rising violence "serves as the justification for [their] continued expansion," Wacquant quoted Michel Foucault, the famous late UC Berkeley sociologist, in the academic journal Thesis Eleven earlier this year.

The roots of the Western Addition’s tragedy go back to the early post-World War II era. In 1949, Congress enacted laws giving cities extraordinary powers to clear out land defined as "blighted." In San Francisco, that meant neighborhoods where low income people of color lived.

The Western Addition was devastated. Huge blocks of houses were bulldozed. Clubs, stores, restaurants — the heart of the black neighborhood — were wiped out. Many residents were forced out of the neighborhood and sometimes the city forever; others lost their property and their livelihoods (see "A half-century of lies," 3/21/2007).

By the 1970s, neighborhood activists were hoping that at the very least the Redevelopment Agency would pay for a recreation facility for kids. But city officials wouldn’t put up the money, recalls the Rev. Arnold Townsend, a longtime political fixture in the city and associate pastor of the Rhema Word Christian Fellowship.

Townsend said activist Mary Rogers — whom he calls "the greatest champion kids ever had in this community" and a famous critic of redevelopment — gave up on City Hall and went to Washington DC, where she sat in at a meeting that happened to include Patricia Harris, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Jimmy Carter. Rogers, joined by a group of colleagues from San Francisco, bumped into Harris afterward.

"[Harris] shook Mary’s hand like politicians do, and Mary wouldn’t let her hand go until she had a meeting," Townsend said. "They were having a tug-of-war over her hand."

Rogers’ determination paid off, and enough political channels opened up that money for the center became available. Then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein cut the ribbon for the $2.3 million Ella Hill Hutch Community Center four months after the supervisor’s death, complete with outdoor seating for seniors, a gymnasium, tennis courts, and child-care facilities.

A young counselor named Leonard "Lefty" Gordon who worked at the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, one of the city’s oldest black institutions — it was founded in 1919 on Presidio Avenue, where it remains today — was named executive director of Ella Hill three years later and led the center to wide acclaim for 17 years.

A recreation coordinator at Ella Hill started a reading program for young athletes after discovering that a local high school football star wasn’t aware he’d been named the city’s player of the year: the teenaged boy couldn’t read the newspaper to find out. Other programs for tutoring and job training targeting young and old residents were likewise started under Gordon.

Many of the people we interviewed recalled the "kitchen cabinet" meetings convened by Lefty Gordon at Ella Hill as among their fondest memories. Everyone from the "gangbangers to police" attended Gordon’s meetings, Townsend said, and made them a repository of complaints about what was happening in the neighborhood.

Alphonso Pines, a former Ella Hill board member and organizer for the Unite Here! Local 2 union, eagerly showed up at the meetings for months after attending 1995’s Million Man March in Washington.

"I hate to see brothers die, regardless of whether it’s at Ella Hill," Pines said of Donte White’s 2006 killing. "But that was personal for me, because that was the place where I had sat on the board for years. That was real shocking."

Lefty’s son, Greg Gordon, said that his legendary father — who died of a heart attack in May of 2000 — worked so hard for the center that he allowed his own health to deteriorate.

Most beneficiaries of Ella Hill’s social services now live in the southeast section of the 94115 ZIP code, roughly bordered by McAllister and Geary streets to the south and north, and Divisadero and Laguna streets to the west and east.

The majority of Ella Hill’s approximately $1.4 million annual budget comes from government sources, either through grants or nonprofit contracts.

Newsom, through his community development and housing offices, has given $860,000 over the past three years to Ella Hill to help job-ready applicants obtain construction work and other general employment in the neighborhood. The center launched its JOBZ program in 2006, targeting formerly incarcerated young adults and others with a "hard-to-employ" status.

Caseworkers must convince some participants to leave gangs, deal with outstanding warrants, pay back child support, expunge criminal records, or eliminate new offenses, all of which can exacerbate a desire to give up. Sometimes the center has to buy people alarm clocks.

"None of these other programs that are being funded in this community want to deal with the kinds of kids or people who come to Ella Hill…. [It] is the last stop for everybody," said London Breed, head of the African American Art and Culture Complex on Fulton Street and a Western Addition native. "That’s where people go who have no place else to go, which is why it’s so important."

Most nonprofits working for the city must regularly report their operational costs or show how program funds are being spent on graduation ceremonies and trips to university campuses. The required forms are mind-numbingly bureaucratic and reveal little about what a place like Ella Hill might face on a practical level each day. But last year, former executive director George Smith betrayed a crack in Ella Hill’s veneer.

"Once again violence has impacted the community with three incidents in close proximity to the complex this month alone," he wrote to the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, which supports the center with college preparation grants. "One of the victims was a young man scheduled to graduate from high school in June."

On May 25, 2007, 19-year-old Jamar Lake was leaving a store on Laguna and Eddy streets, northeast of Ella Hill, when a teen suspect opened fire on him. Paramedics were so worried about security in the neighborhood that they fled before attempting resuscitation, according to a report from the San Francisco Medical Examiner. Lake died at General Hospital that day.

Weeks later, a manic 12-hour long feud erupted between several gunmen on McAllister Street. Seven people were wounded during two daytime shootings that took place in the Friendship Village Apartments, across the street from Ella Hill.

Then in July, a suspect randomly and fatally stabbed 54-year-old Kenneth Taylor in the neck as he sat on a park bench near sundown at Turk and Fillmore streets, within easy view of the SFPD’s Northern Station. Police didn’t respond until Taylor stumbled to the sidewalk and collapsed; a witness had to flag down a patrol car.

Following the Lake shooting, the mayor and police department promised, as they had the year before, that foot patrols would be increased in the 193-unit Plaza East Housing Development and other public housing projects in the Western Addition.

But the city’s most visible response has bypassed Ella Hill — which has some street credibility — altogether. Instead, City Attorney Dennis Herrera went to court to get injunctions against street gangs in June 2007.

Herrera’s initial filing came days after the wild shootout on McAllister Street, but the timing was coincidental. The city attorney also had been preparing injunctions against gangs in the Mission and Bayview-Hunter’s Point for months. For the Western Addition, the city attorney noted a "recent rise in violent crimes perpetrated by the defendants," and asked that the members of three gangs be banned from associating with one another inside two "safety zones" marked along the contours of their respective territories, a 14-square-block area that straddles Fillmore Street and rests just north of Ella Hill.

"The conditions within the two safety zones have become particularly intolerable in 2007 as the deadly rivalry between the Uptown alliance and defendant Eddy Rock has intensified," Herrera’s office told the court. "In 2007 alone, this rivalry is the suspected cause of at least three homicides and numerous shootings within the two safety zones."

Some critics viewed barring people from congregating with one another a civil rights violation. And worse, they feared it would merely shove more African Americans and Latinos out of the Western Addition, which would benefit the city’s wealthiest white residents.

"All of this stuff about gang injunctions is a bunch of malarkey," said Franzo King, archbishop of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church on Fillmore Street. "You don’t really have gangs here…. [In San Francisco] they’re a big club."

Herrera nonetheless convinced a Superior Court judge to issue the injunctions after filing 1,200 pages of evidence arguing that the three "clubs," which include only about 65 people named by the city, are endless public nuisances and force organizations like Ella Hill to battle with them for the affections of Western Addition youth.

Police admit that the injunctions since last year have, in fact, led people to simply leave the neighborhood. Still, they insist the injunctions have reduced trouble in the Western Addition. The Knock Out Posse, for instance, is evaporating, they say.

Paris Moffett, a 30-year-old alleged Eddy Rock leader, told the Guardian in a separate story on the gang injunctions last November that he and others were organizing to quell violence in the neighborhood and would do so in defiance of the gang injunctions (see "Defying the injunction," 11/28/07).

But on the day that story ran, Moffett hampered his new cause when, according to a March 27 federal indictment, police arrested him in Novato for possessing a large quantity of crack and MDMA, as well as a Colt .45 semiautomatic.

After Lefty Gordon died, the center went through a couple of directors in relatively short order. Robert Hector, a second-in-command to Lefty Gordon, helmed the center briefly; he was replaced with George Smith III, who left in 2007.

Meanwhile, problems at Ella Hill grew.

"The seniors just stopped their participation," Anita Grier, a former Ella Hill board member who first ran for the San Francisco City College Board of Trustees in 1998 at Gordon’s encouragement, told us. "Things were never excellent, but they just got much worse once [Gordon] was no longer director."

The center, a standalone nonprofit, had long struggled financially in part because it relied so much on contracts and grants from the city rather than pursuing funds from private donors. Mirkarimi says Ella Hill’s structure is unlike any other community center in the city. Many other centers are directly maintained by the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department.

Contract revenue from one Ella Hill program, such as providing emergency shelter to the homeless, was often diverted to keep another on life support or to simply cover the center’s utility bills.

By early 2007, the center faced a financial catastrophe. Donald Frazier joined Ella Hill’s board as president in January 2007 and embarked on a reform effort to turn the center around. He commissioned what came to be a blistering audit that revealed the nonprofit owed over $200,000 in state and federal payroll taxes. As a result, the center faced $63,000 more in penalties and accrued interest.

Mirkarimi blames community leaders in his district for refusing to acknowledge a crisis at the center and for not turning to City Hall for help when Ella Hill appeared to be slowly rotting from the inside out.

The mayor’s staff, he adds, wanted to believe Ella Hill was working on its own and should’ve continued to do so because, despite its financial reliance on the city, it was technically an independent nonprofit. In reality, Mirkarimi said, "They were afraid to piss off black people, is what it comes down to. They were afraid to tell it like it is — that things weren’t working."

Sending delinquent invoices to the city, failing to institute reasonable accounting standards, and falling far behind on its payroll taxes all threatened the government contracts and grants that kept San Francisco’s Black City Hall afloat. By extension, the audit concluded, that meant Western Addition residents who relied on Ella Hill were "victimized" by the center’s improper use of its limited resources.

Aside from the audit, which Ella Hill instigated itself, there’s no indication in the records of agencies funding the center that any problems were occurring, which implies the city wasn’t paying attention.

"As far as I’m concerned," Mirkarimi said, "we had a renegade institution, and the only reason it wasn’t renegade in an illegal sense was because the lease allowed them to have a parallel governance structure. But it was renegade in the sense that the city neglected to supervise properly."

In November 2007, just after residents hijacked a chaotic board meeting with an extended public comment period, Frazier told the directors in closed session that the Redevelopment Agency was planning to restrict future funding for the center due to its management problems.

One month later, the mayor dispatched an aide, Dwayne Jones, along with redevelopment agency director Fred Blackwell, to a meeting at Ella Hill with an ultimatum. Jones told the assembled that new interim appointees would be taking over the center’s bank books, recreating its bylaws, and electing a new board and executive director. The old board would essentially be dissolved. According to observers at the meeting, Jones told them that if they resisted the plan, funds received by Ella Hill from various city agencies would be jeopardized, as would its low-cost lease of city property.

Two defiant board members viewed the move as a "hostile takeover" of a private nonprofit organization by the mayor and voted against it, but the rest of the board agreed to the restructuring. Mirkarimi says there was simply no alternative.

"Right now it needs to be shrunk to what it can do really well, instead of doing what they had to do in the last five years, an incremental sloppy way of programming," he said.

The interim board in April named a former Ella Hill employee and Park and Rec administrator, Howard Smith — unrelated to George Smith — to be the center’s new executive director. But after all the changes Ella Hill made to fix its leadership problems, there are no assurances the city won’t leave Ella Hill without the money it needs to keep the doors open next year.

It’s noon on a recent Friday and Ella Hill’s new executive director is scrambling to keep things together. An employee wants him to glance at a form. Another man wants to come in and play basketball. Smith has a board meeting minutes from now, but he’s scheduled an interview with the Guardian at the same time.

Smith’s a well-built man dressed in a pressed suit, polished shoes, and a sharply-knotted tie. He’d mostly avoided our calls for weeks. Word spread in the neighborhood that the Guardian was planning some sort of hit piece on Ella Hill.

But it won’t be a newspaper that capsizes the center.

A significant portion of the center’s funding will be threatened over the next year. The redevelopment agency is scheduled to end its 45-year reign in the Western Addition by then, a blessing of sorts since so many people in the neighborhood feel it’s done nothing but upend the lives of black residents. But the end of the agency means that redevelopment funds for Ella Hill’s job placement programs, about $400,000 annually, will disappear.

In addition, about $300,000 more a year will dry up since the San Francisco Human Services Agency hasn’t renewed an emergency homeless shelter contract with the center. Mirkarimi believes the mayor, too, will try to stop providing Ella Hill with funding through his community development office next year.

If Newsom does back away, Mirkarimi warns, there will be "a very loud showdown."

"What I’m worried about is that the Newsom administration is basically cutting and running on this, and I’m not going to allow that to happen, at least not without a fight," he said.

The alternative is for Rec and Park to take over managing Ella Hill’s facilities with DCYF continuing to fund youth programs there while the Redevelopment Agency commits community benefits dollars from a legacy fund to the center — the least it can do after a half-century of transforming the neighborhood, locals be damned.

An interagency council made up of the center’s primary funders could collectively watchdog its performance, Mirkarimi says. Once Ella Hill’s leaders prove that the center has fully returned to its original mission, it can consider expanding to serve other populations in the neighborhood, or even seek a plan to detach further from the city.

The mayor’s spokesperson, Nathan Ballard, did not respond to an e-mail containing detailed questions, and his aide, Dwayne Jones, did not return several phone calls. But Smith said during a later lunch interview at the Fillmore Café that he agrees with Mirkarimi’s idea.

"There are so many programs out there that say they’re doing something on paper, but they’re really not doing it," Smith said. "They’re running ghost programs. So what I’ve been saying at Ella Hill since I got there is, ‘We will do exactly what we said we were going to do.’<0x2009>"

In the meantime, Smith is determined to prove that Ella Hill’s history has only just begun. The mural of Lefty Gordon outside the center received a fresh coat of paint recently, and the color pops. The sidewalk is being repaved and new handrails installed. The walls inside are clear of the aging posters and letter board that hung there a few months ago.

Before heading off to his board meeting, Smith teasingly asks an adolescent boy meandering in the center’s entryway for 75 cents. The boy’s always hitting him up for pocket change.

"I don’t got any," the boy responds.

"You don’t have any," Smith corrects.

Smith suddenly realizes what time it is.

"Hey, why isn’t this guy in school?" he wonders aloud.

At that moment, only the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center was asking the question. *

More funny money at City College

-
0

EDITORIAL The chancellor and the board of the San Francisco Community College District have tried hard to act as if the diversion of $30,000 in public funds for political purposes was just an isolated error, easily fixed. But as G.W. Schulz reports on page 14, an audit has found at least one other diversion, this time of at least $28,670 — and it’s starting to look as if there’s a pattern here.

The college administration, possibly with the knowledge of some of the trustees, has been spending public money on political campaigns. Money earmarked for public education has gone to promote bond acts that bring in money for the district — and that’s not only sleazy and unethical, it’s clearly a violation of law.

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris is reportedly looking at the second diversion — but she needs to expand the probe immediately. If the administration of the outgoing Chancellor Philip Day shuttled public cash to bond campaigns twice, there’s a good chance it happened a few more times. And at a certain point, this rises to the level of serious criminal charges.

The first diversion, first reported in the Chronicle, involved a $30,000 payment from a motorcycle school that was using college parking lots for its classes. That rent money never made it into the public coffers; instead, it wound up helping to pay for the campaign for the latest round of City College bonds.

The latest revelation is just as smelly: the Foundation of the City College of San Francisco, a nonprofit that takes in donations for the school, gave $35,000 on November 6, 2006, to a political group that supports statewide college bond elections. A day later, on Nov. 7, the college itself handed $38,670 (the school’s $28,670 and another $10,000 in private money) to the foundation. That’s odd in and of itself — the foundation usually gives money to the school, not the other way around. And the timing is highly suspect; given the history of questionable financial moves at City College, the idea that some administrator would use the foundation to launder a cash contribution to a political group is not at all beyond the imagination.

The college board needs to hire its own special counsel to check every contribution to local college bond acts to see if there’s any more evidence of improper diversion of public funds. But an internal audit isn’t enough; Harris needs to look into this and make public her findings.

City College is a valuable public institution, and for years, the people running it have undermined public confidence in its financial integrity. That’s a crime itself — and if someone broke the law along the way, the district attorney has to make clear that it won’t be tolerated.

On shaky ground

-
0

› gwschultz@sfbg.com

The violations were purported to be accidental. Top administrators broke the law in two separate incidents in 2005 when they diverted a total of $30,000 belonging to City College of San Francisco to a local bond campaign committee, although they said it was an innocent mistake.

Now new documents obtained by the Guardian show an apparent pattern to this misuse of public funds. A special audit indicates that on Nov. 7, 2006, administrators from the school district transferred $38,670 to a bank account controlled by the Foundation of the City College of San Francisco, a nonprofit that seeks donations for the school and funds scholarships.

Just one day before, on Nov. 6, 2006, the foundation made a $35,000 cash contribution to the Community College Facility Coalition Issues Committee, which lobbies for and promotes statewide bonds to benefit schools like City College. State law bars City College from using public funds for such political purposes.

When asked about the money transfers, Vice Chancellor Peter Goldstein conceded to the Guardian that $28,670 of the newly uncovered funds were improperly moved to the foundation to replenish the Nov. 6, 2006 contribution, but he referred questions regarding who made that decision to outgoing chancellor Phil Day, who did not return a call.

The firm that conducted the audit, Louie & Wong, based in San Francisco, could find no evidence that the foundation’s board approved the contribution, and a lawyer hired by the foundation says the directors were not aware of the transfer of district funds into the foundation bank account at that time.

Although some of the board members later recalled authorizing the contribution, it wasn’t reflected in meeting minutes, and the directors say they never intended to launder public funds into a political contribution.

These revelations further damage the credibility of City College administrators, who for several months have undergone an investigation by the District Attorney’s Office into political fundraising efforts by the school. Spending public funds to support or oppose a ballot measure or candidate is against California law.

Two school trustees, Rodel Rodis and Julio Ramos, confirmed for the Guardian that the district attorney in recent weeks requested documents related to the transactions and will be interviewing senior administrators at the school soon, presumably including Day, who is leaving for a new job in Washington, DC, as this story goes to press. Both say the trustees only learned about the audit’s conclusions this month, although it was completed last summer.

"The way it’s always been presented to me is the foundation is supposed to give the district money in order for the district to fulfill its function of educating students," Ramos told us, "not vice versa."

The District Attorney’s Office will neither confirm nor deny the existence of such probes, but its investigation has been confirmed by sources and reported in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Guardian (see "Day’s Dilemma," 8/8/07).

Day characterized the earlier diversions from the 2005 bond campaign as a simple misunderstanding when they were publicized last year. His administration wasn’t trying to do anything illegal, he wrote in a public statement at the time, and a resulting internal investigation called for by City College’s board of trustees seemed to confirm his claim.

"The 2005 campaign was compressed into little more than three months, and as a result of this rush, we made some mistakes," Day wrote in response to the report when it was released in January. "As the chancellor and CEO of this college, I take responsibility for these missteps."

But despite the breadth of the internal investigation, which filled 232 pages and detailed the history of the hastily organized 2005 bond election, its scope never reached the foundation’s political activities.

Now it appears that after the Chronicle published stories last April exposing the misdirected funds from 2005, the foundation’s board of directors asked for a special audit to ensure that all its financial transactions between 2005 and 2007 were free from any association with public funds the board wasn’t aware of.

The foundation at that time hired a lawyer, Peter Bagatelos, who told the Guardian that the board didn’t know $38,670 was transferred to the foundation’s bank account on the day of the November 2006 statewide election, when voters were asked for $10.4 billion in bond money to support California’s public schools.

"It was never done with their consent or knowledge or participation," Bagatelos said.

During the same two-year period covered by the audit, the foundation made cash donations to other political action committees (PACs) totaling $110,000, including $75,000 that went toward City College’s $246.3 million local bond election in 2005.

Those transactions appear to be legal because the foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that technically operates separately from the school and can promote political causes that benefit community colleges within certain parameters, according to a coalition lobbyist. Each of those contributions were approved and properly documented by the foundation’s board, unlike the transactions from early November 2006.

Goldstein also said that the foundation’s board was not happy about the discovery and that the directors returned the money last April, just as the Chronicle‘s stories were breaking. He said the remaining $10,000 was legally acquired from yet another nonprofit controlled by the college and through a private vendor, but the foundation’s board elected to return that money as well on the advice of legal counsel "to avoid any appearance of impropriety."

"Any funds that the college is entitled to cannot and should not be transferred to the foundation," Goldstein told us. "The particular item that you’re asking about was absolutely a mistake. It should not have been transferred. It was found internally, corrected, and the funds were distributed to a variety of student organizations."

The Community College Facility Coalition, which received the $35,000 donation, was formed by a small group of school presidents in the spring of 1993 and today includes 52 districts across California. Its "issues committee" was created expressly for financing statewide bond campaigns.

The political action committee’s state election filings show that the foundation’s contribution was actually made on the same day City College transferred the $38,670 to the foundation’s bank account, rather than a day earlier as the audit states.

City College has aggressively sought such state money — nearly $200 million since 1998 — to match funds raised through local bonds from San Francisco taxpayers to help with its ongoing capital projects like a new gymnasium, a performing arts center, and campuses in the Mission and Chinatown.

The $35,000 contribution was among the largest made to the coalition’s PAC leading up to the election, and Paul Holmes, a lobbyist for the coalition, said only 10 to 12 schools use their foundations to support ballot measures each year. Rarely does it receive a donation of more than $20,000, he said. Holmes added that many colleges use their supporters for donations.

Judy Iannaccone, a spokesperson for the Rancho Santiago Community College District in Orange County, which helped raise $13,600 for the 2006 election, said they did so by forwarding the names of potential donors to the coalition, which allowed the school to remain impartial.

"The money was absolutely not from the general fund," Iannaccone told us.

Colleges and universities commonly form nonprofit foundations to raise money on their behalf from alumni and other supporters, like the behemoth $1.1 billion endowment of the UCSF Foundation, which encourages and administers private giving to the medical school and health-related research of the University of California-San Francisco.

City College’s foundation is considerably smaller. It had $22 million in net assets at the end of the 2007 fiscal year, according to district documents, and describes itself in an audit as a discrete component of the school. The foundation gives out hundreds of relatively small scholarships to students every year, some worth up to $3,000, but most for smaller amounts of between $250 and $500.

The foundation also maintains a separate board of directors that, like many higher-education foundations, contains top officials from the school itself, like Chancellor Day and Vice Chancellor Goldstein.

Most of the foundation’s other directors, however, are simply civic leaders who support City College’s mission but don’t work for the district and aren’t affiliated directly with Day’s administration.

The two entities are still close enough that the district handles bookkeeping for the foundation and shares its employees. For instance, the audit shows that the foundation’s finances — including its political contributions — were often prepared by City College’s chief administrative services officer, the title carried by Stephen Herman, who was implicated in the first round of illegal diversions made public last year.

"People literally thought that the college was obligated to make a contribution to this statewide campaign and that meant funds that would otherwise be under the college’s control could be eligible for a donation," Vice Chancellor Goldstein told us. "But, of course, that’s incorrect."

Building green in SF

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Wind turbines and solar panels may soon sprout on San Francisco rooftops as the city considers rival plans to implement mandatory green design standards for new residential and commercial buildings.

One ordinance proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Green Building Task Force would require new commercial construction of more than 5,000 square feet, residential buildings above 75 feet, and renovations to buildings of more than 25,000 square feet to be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certified by 2012, the second-highest designation.

The U.S. Green Building Council developed the point-based LEED system based on numerous green factors. The lowest green standard is LEED Certified, followed by Silver, Gold, and Putf8um. The new Academy of Sciences building, with the country’s largest living roof, is LEED Putf8um.

Newsom’s legislation would start off by mandating requiring only the lowest standard, LEED Certified, which requires 26 points, and gradually move to LEED Gold by 2012. But Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin has introduced an ordinance that would require the same buildings to immediately earn LEED Gold certification.

According to the LEED system, most existing buildings already have between 18 to 22 points, so Newsom’s proposed goal should be fairly easily attainable. A bike rack outside a building qualifies for 1 point. Proximity to mass transit gains another point, and Muni runs within two blocks of 90 percent of all San Francisco residences, according to the Municipal Transportation Agency.

At a green building standards workshop Feb. 20 at the San Francisco Green Party’s office, about 20 people voiced their concerns with the ordinances in front of three city commissioners.

"We need to correct the language to include all buildings," said panelist Patricia Gerber, a member of the city’s Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force. The San Francisco Office of Economic Analysis last year concluded both proposed ordinances would impact only 38 percent of the construction industry. "We should look to Europe for inspiration," Gerber recommended. "They have much stricter standards."

Some European nations started mandatory green construction in the mid-’90s, but critics say the United States has lagged.

"There are no minimum requirements on windows, insulation, and leaks," Gerber told the Guardian, describing the proposed ordinances. "LEED is a joke."

But Mark Westlund, spokesman for the Department of the Environment, defended Newsom’s longer LEED certification timeline. "We want to develop a green building plan that business can work with," he told us.

The Green Building Task Force claims that businesses need time to adjust to the higher costs associated with green materials, such as EnergyStar windows, can reduce heating costs by 30 to 40 percent. "They’re expensive because they’re used on a small scale. The minute they require it, it will become cheaper," John Rizzo, Green Party member and City College Trustee, told the audience. "It would be great if this could be done on a statewide level."

Panelists noted that green buildings save money in energy costs over the long run. Another criticism raised at the workshop was the Newsom plan’s loopholes. "Even if a project is approved green, it might not end up green," Gerber told us. If a construction company runs out of money for example, it can ask the planning director to waive LEED certification.

In addition, the event attendees questioned the credibility of the mayor’s Green Building Task Force, which does not include any environmentalists. Rather, it is composed of developers, financiers, architects, and engineers.

"We feel it represents a good variety of industry people, and so far we haven’t received any negative responses on the ordinance," Mark Palmer, San Francisco’s green building coordinator, told us.

Smaller residential buildings in San Francisco will not require LEED certification, but could be required to follow a GreenPoint scorecard developed by Berkeley nonprofit Build It Green.

Newsom’s ordinance will be presented March 19 at the Building Inspection Commission, which has already forwarded Peskin’s measure to he Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee. According to Peskin’s office, the two ordinances will likely be combined once supervisors decide which standard to seek.

The next chancellor

-
0

EDITORIAL In a few weeks, City College of San Francisco chancellor Philip Day will be gone, headed to Washington DC to head a nonprofit that works on college financial aid issues. He will leave behind a unionized staff that’s relatively happy (Day worked hard to get raises for the faculty), a board that’s bitterly divided, a long list of financial problems — and a legacy of bad feelings in the community. As G.W. Schultz reports on page 14, he’s also leaving behind a scandal involving the diversion of college money to a political campaign.

Three of the board incumbents will be up for reelection this fall, and the seven-member panel desperately needs more new blood. But the current board will be choosing the next chancellor, the person who will have to dig one of the city’s most important institutions out of a deep fiscal and public relations crevice. Running City College isn’t an easy job in the best of circumstances, and Day hasn’t made it easy for his successor. The board will have to weigh a long list of qualifications — but one ought to be at the top.

The next chancellor needs to be someone who respects open government and is willing to work with — not fight against — the neighborhoods, the Board of Supervisors, and other interest groups in the city. Day’s successor needs to understand that San Franciscans don’t like to be pushed around by big institutions, don’t like to be lied to, and don’t like imperious officials who think secrecy is an appropriate response to criticism.

The Community College District has a long history of making it difficult for the public to monitor what the administration is doing. After at least five years of battles, the agency still won’t adopt the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance. Day has been recalcitrant when it comes to making documents public, and with the support of a narrow board majority he has been conducting all sorts of business behind closed doors. The administration several years ago quietly shifted millions in bond money that was earmarked for a performing arts center into building a new gym and pool, then signed an exclusive lease allowing a private school to use the pool in the afternoons. One of Day’s senior aides apparently diverted school money into a political campaign — and Day, who makes more than $400,000 per year in compensation, said the district couldn’t afford an internal auditor to keep track of that sort of money.

In Chinatown and North Beach, neighbors have been battling the college over a new campus building — and while the issues (over historic preservation, light and shadow, and appropriate height limits) are ones that could have been resolved amicably, Day’s administration has bullied the neighbors, refused to talk in good faith, and infuriated people who ought to be the strongest allies of a new campus in an underserved part of town.

If the board members want to turn the troubled district around, they need to make sure the new chancellor is willing to embrace the city’s open-government laws, do business in public, and accept that fact that in this city an agency with the powers of the state of California won’t get away will telling communities their concerns don’t matter.

Chancellor Bling-Bling

-
0

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Outgoing City College of San Francisco chancellor Phil Day presided over major institutional changes during his decade-long tenure, although he leaves under a cloud of financial scandals involving the misuse of public funds. Now a Guardian review of public records shows the decision to reward Day handsomely and neglect recommended internal auditing controls set the scene for the problems to come.

Day’s high-end compensation and accompanying expense account allowed him to live well. His total compensation last year eclipsed that of the heads of 18 other two-year colleges across California surveyed by The Chronicle of Higher Education, which included community colleges for the first time in its 2007 analysis.

Day’s earnings totaled $403,441 for the fiscal year ending in 2007 and included $25,448 in retirement pay plus $31,975 in deferred compensation. He received $12,000 to cover housing expenses — one of only two chancellors who were awarded the benefit — and the state paid $7,200 more for a car.

No one else surveyed from California came close. The runner-up, at Rancho Santiago Community College, made $80,000 less than Day and received nothing for a home or a car. Chui L. Tsang, head of a two-year college in Santa Monica, where the median home value is higher than in San Francisco, received about $30,000 toward housing and automobile expenses but earned a whopping $140,000 less than Day in total compensation.

Darroch Young, former chancellor of the community college district in Los Angeles, which has more students than any other in the country, earned almost $100,000 less than Day, who first joined City College in 1998. Day even made more money than the chancellors at six University of California campuses, including San Diego, Irvine, Davis, and Santa Cruz.

"Raw politics" was how trustee Julio Ramos described it to the Guardian. "The chancellor has had the majority on the Board of Trustees at City College," Ramos said. "Like with any majority, he can dictate the terms of his compensation package."

Trustee Milton Marks, who along with Ramos represents a frequently critical minority on the school’s independently elected board, added that the terms of Day’s contract were crafted before Marks and others ran for open seats on a reform slate.

As long as the board extended Day’s contract each year, it was difficult to slow his salary increases without convincing a majority to start from scratch and reevaluate his performance to determine if his compensation was reasonable. But it’s too late for that now. Day is leaving the school March 1 for a new job on the East Coast, but Marks wants the next chancellor to receive increases "that are not so rigidly tied to a formula."

Day’s compensation is a small fraction of the school’s $375 million budget. But it reflects the district’s priorities, and a recently unveiled 232-page internal probe of campaign law violations at the college stemming from a 2005 bond election offers a telling look at how the school has been operated under Day’s leadership.

To conduct the investigation, the school hired Steven Churchwell of the multinational law firm DLA Piper, the same group that examined steroids in major-league baseball for former senator George Mitchell. One of first things Churchwell did when he arrived at the school was to search for City College’s internal auditor. He soon discovered, however, that the college doesn’t have an internal auditor or an audit committee.

"It’s very common to have an internal auditor at an entity of this size," Churchwell told the school at a Jan. 24 meeting.

Outside auditors inspect the school’s books annually as required by law to make sure it’s following the rules of basic money management, a limited review compared to what an internal auditor, working full-time for the district, might check.

The Guardian reviewed the school’s annual outside audits going back several years and discovered that each of the reports between 1998 and 2003 advised the school to hire someone to do the job year-round internally.

"Regular internal audits enable timely detection of accounting inconsistencies and deviations from established policies and procedures," the reports state year after year. But each year the inspectors found anew that their recommendations were "not implemented."

Regarding the headline-grabbing mess that began when two school bureaucrats in separate instances illegally diverted public funds to a campaign committee, Churchwell said its causes were mistakes due more to ignorance than knowing attempts to break the law.

"It’s almost like lightning striking twice," Churchwell told the school.

But now it appears the storm might have been averted if Day and others in his administration had listened to the school’s outside auditors 10 years ago. Churchwell concluded that an internal auditor might have immediately caught election law violations but without one "no one person has a firm grasp on all the accounts that are open, what they are used for, or who can deposit checks into them," leading to a "glaring lack of oversight of the college’s involvement in fundraising from college contractors."

Day didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did trustees Lawrence Wong or Anita Grier. But vice chancellor Peter Goldstein argued that the school would set the agenda for an internal auditor, so such a person might focus on how the district reports student attendance or manages financial aid, not necessarily on accounts receivable.

"My response would be that this is a very large and complicated institution from several different perspectives, including the financial one," Goldstein told the Guardian. "While no single person may have a complete understanding of every single account, I believe that we have enough professional staff at the right level with the right background over all the accounts."

It could be that like many bureaucrats, Day is threatened by the possibility of an efficiency expert roaming the school’s halls and compromising the administration’s control over its bank accounts. But Day complained at the Jan. 24 meeting that City College just didn’t have the resources to hire an internal auditor, even though auditors often find enough ways to reduce wasteful spending that they cover their own expense and much more.

Not to mention that if Day had earned as much in compensation as his equivalent in Los Angeles, City College would have had about $100,000 left over for an internal auditor. A district report from 2000 even concluded that an internal auditor at that time would have cost about $105,000.

Two vice chancellors implicated in the election law violations, James Blomquist and Stephen Herman, earned about $200,000 and $170,000 respectively during the 2007 calendar year, compensation figures obtained by the Guardian through a records request.

Blomquist worked as a regular consultant to the school before earning $175,000 his first full year as a City College administrator in 2005. His firm, Blomquist Consultancy, made $401,074 from the college between April 2002 and May 2004, records show.

As for Day, his largest pay increase came after the 2005 bond election, when he was given an 18 percent raise for the 2006 calendar year. He received a 17 percent raise during the year of the 2001 bond election, when the school asked voters for $195 million.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed points out that compensation for community college presidents lags behind what the heads of four-year institutions tend to earn, despite their growing responsibilities, like courting major donors and lobbying legislators. The extreme exception, however, is Day, who last year ranked third nationally in earnings among 68 other community college heads.

"Do I feel guilty at all about being one of the highest-paid college presidents in the country?" Day asked the education rag’s surveyors in November 2007. "Absolutely not."

His supporters argue that Day has attracted millions of new dollars from Sacramento to the district, and along with the school’s trustees, he helped promote a February ballot initiative designed to ensure that a greater portion of the state’s General Fund go toward community colleges. The current formula used by the state for financing two-year schools hinges on how much money is set aside for California’s K–12 system.

Day also took over a school with crumbling buildings, some constructed in the early 20th century. When Day inherited the more than 90-year-old John Adams Campus in the Haight, its bricks were "falling off the side of the building," he said in a glossy 12-page advertorial the college ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Dec. 19, 2007.

The school floated two bond measures totaling about $458 million in 2001 and 2005 to complete projects citywide, but the latter was badly rushed. Poor planning and rising construction costs have forced the school to cancel projects promised to voters.

Diana Muñoz-Villanueva, a student representative on the Board of Trustees, said she lives on about $600 per month, "so I know there are ways to survive on less" than what the chancellor makes. But based on his duties, she said, "I think it’s fair. I hope to make that much money someday."

Day could nonetheless be taking a substantial pay cut for his new job in Washington DC, at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. According to its tax forms, the organization’s last president, Dallas Martin, who led the nonprofit for more than 30 years, earned about $250,000 during 2006 in pay and benefits.


—————————–

DAY FLIPS FROM THE FRYING PAN TO THE FIRE

Chancellor Phil Day’s departure from City College of San Francisco is not an indication that he’s easing into retirement. Instead, he’s crossing the country to join a controversy potentially hotter than anything he faced in politically rancorous San Francisco.

Day announced at the end of 2007 that he will be leaving the college in early March to accept the top job at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, one of the nation’s most powerful lobbying groups on issues related to higher education.

But the Washington DC nonprofit has spent the past year mired in a nationwide scandal over how student loan administrators at individual colleges promote certain bank lenders to students in exchange for kickbacks.

Six student loan administrators were fired or resigned and dozens of schools ceased entering into revenue-sharing agreements with lenders following an extensive investigation by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo.

Several schools agreed to reimburse borrowers — i.e., college students — millions of dollars as part of a series of settlements with Cuomo’s office, which is still investigating how major lenders market their products to needy students.

The organization Day is poised to take over has been suffering embarrassing waves of unwanted attention as a result. Officials from Cuomo’s office physically monitored the group’s annual convention last July to ensure that corporate sponsors from banking institutions didn’t ply student loan administrators with lobster dinners, iPods, DVD players, nighttime parties, or trips to vacation resorts, all types of incentives offered to attendees in the past.

In other cases, school employees in charge of handling student loans simultaneously held thousands of shares of stock in lending companies, earned tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from them, and served on their advisory boards.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has followed the investigations closely and quoted a lobbyist in mid-January describing the NASFAA as "radioactive" on Capitol Hill due to the widening tumult. A congressional inquiry led by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) revealed last September that a University of Southern California official accepted Rose Bowl tickets from Citibank, a major national player in student lending.

Aid officials at the University of Texas "were treated to ice cream, lasagna, barbecue, candy bars, popcorn, happy hours, birthday cakes, cookies, and other personal benefits," according to the report.

A spokesperson for the NASFAA refused to comment beyond a statement released following Day’s appointment. But Day told the group’s members in a recent e-mail that national headlines regarding the kickbacks "have diminished the significance of our contributions," and he hopes to ease the criticism by holding "listening sessions" around the country.

"We need to develop a public relations/marketing and communications offensive that paints a more complete and compelling picture of the difference we can make in students’ lives," Day wrote.

The scandal erupted around what are known as preferred lenders lists, which colleges and universities distribute to students struggling to navigate the complex world of school loans, where private banks compete aggressively with direct lending offered by the federal government.

Most students rely on their school’s list of preferred lenders to make a decision, so banking institutions do whatever it takes to get their name on those lists (or their logos on school paraphernalia), from showering student-loan bureaucrats with lucrative gifts to exclusively sponsoring athletic departments and alumni associations.

Schools and lenders have promised to abide by a new list of ethics rules, drafted by Cuomo’s office in addition to other settlement terms, to regulate their conduct, and to restore faith in financial aid administrators.

1...12131415Page 13 of 15

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org