SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Gavin, City College, Ocean Campus
Tell us about your look: “My shoes are from Hong Kong.”
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Gavin, City College, Ocean Campus
Tell us about your look: “My shoes are from Hong Kong.”
SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.
Today’s Look: Alanna, City College, Ocean Campus
Tell us about your look: This sweater is my grandma’s and it’s a really old Guess. The shoes are my mom’s.”
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. *
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. *
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.
By Steven T. Jones
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
› 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.
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.