Clean Power

The battle for BART board

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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The battle for BART board

The race for BART board of directors in the upcoming November election has been highly contested this year. As we previously reported, incumbent James Fang faces a challenge from investor and former solar company entrepreneur Nicholas Josefowitz, a Harvard graduate in his early 30s.

Here’s your opportunity to listen in on the Bay Guardian endorsement interviews with candidates running for BART board. Alongside our colleagues from down the hall at the San Francisco Examiner (check out the Examiner’s endorsements here – they’re rather similar to ours), we spent a couple weeks interviewing candidates running for office in local and statewide races.

Here’s our interview with James Fang.

And here’s our interview with Nick Josefowitz.

As we explain in our Endorsements issue, which hit newsstands yesterday, we decided to go with Josefowitz. It was a surprisingly tough choice, given how long we’ve been wanting someone to make a strong and well-funded challenge to Fang, San Francisco’s only Republican elected office holder and the longest serving director at an agency that has been hostile to worker safety reforms and meaningful oversight of the BART Police Department.

We got our wish when Josefowitz entered the race, did well in fundraising, and got lots of progressive political support. But SEIU Local 1021 strongly supported Fang, who walked the picket lines with striking BART workers last year. They and other Fang allies also highlighted Josefowitz’s opposition to CleanPowerSF and Prop. G, raising questions about his progressive credentials and political naïveté.

Fang deserves credit for supporting BART workers last year and with advocating for a BART extension to Ocean Beach. But the BART board needs new blood, and we believe Josefowitz has the energy, ideas, and perspective to move the district in a more sustainable, accountable, and innovative direction.

Changing the climate in SF

Michael Redmond
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Changing the climate in SF

EDITORIAL As hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of New York City and other cities around the world for a Global Climate Convergence on Sept. 21, demanding that our political and business leaders finally get serious about global warming (see “Flooding the streets“), there was no such gathering in San Francisco.

Sure, there were a few thousand Bay Area activists who gathered for the climate change event along Lake Merritt in Oakland, which included many groups and individuals from San Francisco. But we found it telling symbolism that San Francisco, as a city, was absent from this important political moment.

A city that was once a trailblazing leader on environmental issues such as solid waste reduction, transit-first policies, and adopting the precautionary principle — which calls on city officials to avoid policies and purchases that have the potential to cause environmental harm — has instead become a city guided by the logic and imperatives of capitalism, eager to grow and consume at any cost.

Speaker after speaker in New York City, Oakland, and other cities called for humanity to wake up to the realities of global climate change, slow down the wasteful economic churn and rapid depletion of important natural resources, and pursue fundamental changes to the system.

But in San Francisco, we appear to be headed in the opposite direction. The Mayor’s Office unceremoniously killed CleanPowerSF, the city’s only plan for offering more renewable energy to city residents. And it has pandered to motorists in ways that have taken millions of dollars away from public transit (see “Money for Muni“), encouraging more driving in the process even though we know that adds to global warming.

It isn’t just the neoliberals in City Hall, but the entire institutional structure of the city. Even SEIU Local 1021, long a stalwart supporter of progressive causes, has strangely endorsed the pro-automobile Prop. L and is aggressively supporting BART Board member James Fang, a Republican who supports costly extensions of the system rather than projects that promote more intensive transit uses in the urban core.

Finally, there’s this city’s monomaniacal promotion of the energy-intensive technology industry. Americans emit more greenhouse gases per capita than anyone, and recent reports show that reality is compounded by massive increases in China’s greenhouse gas emissions — which is partly because Bay Area companies produce their tech gadgets and other toys in China, which we then consume here.

San Franciscans need to stop being such voracious consumers and strive to be true innovators who accept our responsibilities and work to disrupt the rapid descent into a dangerously warming world.

 

Exposing PG&E’s other “cozy relationship,” with Mayor Ed Lee

Erica Hanna
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32
Exposing PG&E’s other “cozy relationship,” with Mayor Ed Lee

News outlets from Sacramento to Los Angeles are crowing about Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s alleged “cozy relationship” with the utlity that oversees it, the California Public Utilities Commission.

At least 41 emails obtained by the city of San Bruno reveal an intimate, friendly arrangement between the monopolistic power company and the regulators that are supposed to keep them in line. Where the public would expect a separation as hard and fast as church and state, the emails reveal a buddy-buddy relationship.

This is of no surprise to long-time Guardianistas, who may remember Rebecca Bowe’s cover story three years ago “The secret life of Michael Peevey, [5/11]” chronicling the CPUC president’s extravagant trips to Madrid, Spain and Germany with top energy officials, as well as other activities that may seem strange for an official who’s supposed to be a watchdog against PG&E malfeasance.

But if world-trekking trips to pricey hotels aren’t enough to raise eyebrows about the relationship between PG&E and its regulators, now we have suspicious emails to add to the pile.

As the San Jose Mercury News revealed:

In an April 2013 email, Carol Brown, chief of staff for Commissioner Peevey, wrote to PG&E executive [Laura] Doll and offered advice about how to handle one of the proceedings related to the San Bruno explosion. In the email, Brown said she had talked to one of the PUC administrative law judges about the matter.

“Send back a sweet note” to the PUC about the matter “and then wait for them to throw a fit” was part of Brown’s advice. Brown also said she was “happy to chat” about the matter with PG&E to help guide company officials through the PUC process.

Doll replied to Brown, “Love you. Thanks.”

Even Peevey himself emailed PG&E, offering them public relations advice. It’s like an umpire sneaking around between innings to coach a first-baseman — unseemly, and totally strange.

All of this should ring alarm bells in The City. The city of San Bruno obtained the emails through settlement of a lawsuit, which are now revealing potential corruption at top levels of the CPUC. But here in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee flouts public records laws and, as we revealed, drafted a policy allowing him to delete his own emails.

There’s no way we can check what Lee is saying to PG&E in emails, making exposing any alleged “cozy relationship” much more difficult than PG&E’s alleged romance with the CPUC.

And the consequences for The City are very real, as well as potentially fatal. As we’ve covered before, there are PG&E pipelines aplenty in San Francisco (including one right along Bernal Hill). When San Bruno’s pipeline exploded, eight lives were lost and many more homes destroyed.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported last month (and as we’ve said for years), Lee already has suspiciously close ties with PG&E.

From the Chronicle:

However, multiple city officials say that Lee’s administration has consistently, and quietly, raised objections about legislation and policies that PG&E opposes. They also point to the utility’s charitable giving to the city and some of Lee’s pet projects as an example of how PG&E tries to exert its influence.

…

Critics of Lee’s relationship with PG&E extend from the political left to at least five current and former high-level city officials. In some cases, several of the sources said, that relationship appeared to be inappropriate. PG&E officials regularly went to the mayor’s office when they were unhappy with city staff members, said the sources, who requested anonymity because of their relationship with the mayor.

“They were in his office all the time, meeting with either the mayor or his staff, and seemed to directly intervene in city decisions,” said one official. “It isn’t normal for most businesses in the city to always have meetings with the mayor.”

Lee, in several interviews, dismissed the idea that he was doing PG&E’s bidding as “a little off base.”

“I look at PG&E like any other company in the city,” Lee said. “I don’t think I have any special relationship with them.”

But in the case of the mayor, we may never know how close he is with the utility, as long as his off-kilter public record laws allow him to delete any paper trail. The CPUC is discovering what Lee long ago learned from former-Mayor Willie Brown: The “E” in e-mail stands for “evidence.”

tearing up emails

Clean energy and better infrastructure: a great combination

Michael Redmond
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9

OPINION Achieving a more sustainable San Francisco means a city running on clean power. It also means maintaining our infrastructure to keep San Francisco functioning.

Right now, our city can do better on both fronts, and legislation we are sponsoring will help move us in the right direction by increasing our use of clean, hydroelectric power while generating more revenue for infrastructure investment in our streetlight and power systems.

San Francisco’s Hetch Hetchy power system produces a massive amount of clean, hydroelectric power, yet our city uses very little of this energy despite our stated goal of moving toward 100 percent clean power by 2030. Moreover, the operator of this power system, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC), has massive unmet infrastructure needs. Our streetlights, most of which are owned by the PUC, are badly in need of upgrade, and PUC’s power delivery system has almost a billion dollars in deferred maintenance.

To address these challenges, we are authoring legislation to bring more revenue-generating, clean power to San Francisco.

For over 100 years, the PUC has provided 100 percent clean, hydroelectric power to municipal agencies, including Muni, the San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco General Hospital, police and fire stations, libraries, and our public schools. Using this clean public power saves taxpayers millions versus what we would pay if we were to purchase PG&E power. Hetch Hetchy generates 1.43 million megawatt hours of clean power a year and is 100 percent greenhouse-gas free. This is a tremendous asset, but it has been underutilized.

Any excess public power that the PUC generates and doesn’t use for governmental customers is now sold on the wholesale market at a significantly reduced rate. Retail rates are around four times higher than wholesale rates. This means that with every megawatt sold at wholesale rates, the PUC is losing out on significant revenue to address its aging infrastructure needs.

If the PUC obtains more customers paying retail rates, we can generate more revenue to upgrade and improve our failing streetlight system and address the power system’s massive deferred capital needs. The PUC estimates that for every 10 megawatts sold to new retail customers — rather than selling that power on the wholesale market — we will see a net revenue increase of $4 million per year.

That is why we are sponsoring legislation to bring the PUC more retail customers and hence more infrastructure investment. The legislation provides the PUC with the right of first refusal to be the power provider for new development projects in San Francisco, including large private projects. This will allow the PUC to determine if it feasibly can serve as the power provider for these new developments, and in doing so expand the agency’s retail customer base.

Allowing the PUC the flexibility to add retail customers will move us toward a more financially sustainable public power system, while providing 100 percent greenhouse-gas free power to our city and generating significant resources for infrastructure investment, including for our streetlight system.

Some have raised questions about what this legislation means for the future of CleanPowerSF, our previously approved clean energy program that has been stalled by the PUC Commission’s refusal to set rates. These two public power measures are not in any way mutually exclusive, and both can move forward. We are both supporters of CleanPowerSF, and we want it to succeed.

We know the PUC can provide reliable, greenhouse-gas-free power that works for its customers. Anyone who disagrees can just look at San Francisco International Airport. If the PUC can reliably provide power to serve one of the most significant airports in the world, powering new housing and commercial developments won’t be a problem.

A sustainable, clean energy future requires a broad range of solutions. This proposal is one that will deliver our city more clean power and make our power enterprise stronger by redirecting energy revenues back into the system. Let’s put our clean power to work for San Francisco.

Scott Wiener and London Breed are members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Will proposal to sell Hetch Hetchy power overshadow CleanPowerSF?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Will proposal to sell Hetch Hetchy power overshadow CleanPowerSF?

Supervisors Scott Wiener and London Breed have proposed an ordinance to allow the San Francisco Public Utilities Power Commission’s Power Enterprise to sell hydroelectric energy from the Hetch Hetchy dam to retail customers — particularly large real estate developments. Sup. Wiener and Breed say the ordinance would both generate revenue for the PUC and further the city’s overall goal of achieving a 100 percent greenhouse-gas free power mix. 

But how well does it fit into the city’s other clean energy goals? Some advocates of an existing citywide green energy plan worry that this new effort could cause a far more ambitious program to fall by the wayside.

For more than a decade, city government has been working toward implementing a clean energy plan through CleanPower SF, which aims to meet the city’s goal of 100 percent clean energy by allowing all San Francisco residents the choice of switching to a green power mix through the city-administered program, instead of remaining with PG&E. But CleanPower SF hangs in limbo, largely due to opposition from the SFPUC board, appointed by Mayor Ed Lee–whose regular meetings with PG&E officials have raised eyebrows.

The legislation proposing to broaden the sale of SFPUC’s hydroelectric power supply seeks to tackle some of the problems CleanPower SF might have addressed had it not been stalled. A press statement from Wiener noted that it aims to help build a large enough customer base for the SFPUC to generate sufficient revenues to maintain city infrastructure, as well as meeting the city’s overall target of 100 percent clean energy by 2030.

“My concern is that the Mayor’s office will say it’s something that will supplement CPSF [CleanPowerSF] and say that’s enough,” said Jason Fried, Executive Officer of the Local Agency Formation Commission. “I want to make it clear that it [proposed ordinance] is really meant to compliment CleanPower SF.”

But just exactly how—and how much—the proposal would complement CleanPower SF is still up for debate. Fried said Wiener’s new proposal complements CleanPower SF because it ultimately gives people more choices. “I don’t know how you can argue with giving people more choices,” he said.

But the legislation is targeted at large, private developments, rather than renewable energy options for community members. Which is why Fried emphasized that proposed ordinance shouldn’t been seen as a replacement to the city’s existing Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) program, CleanPower SF.

Eric Brooks, a long-time advocate of CleanPower SF, insists the legislation would complement CleanPowerSF only if, “CleanPowerSF was given first right to purchase Hetch Hetchy power from the PUC.” This would allow the ordinance to focus on community members rather than just large, private developments, he said.

“Being able to balance different types of power like solar, wind and hydro, and being able to furnish consistent hydro power during high usage together would also help keep rates lower so that the CleanPowerSF can deliver power at lower prices,” he added.

Officials from the Sierra Club echoed Brooks, saying that the Sierra Club “supports the legislation in concept,” but requests that the legislation incorporate the ability for CleanPower SF to purchase Hetch Hetchy power from the PUC Power Enterprise.  “You have to look at it as peeling customers away from PG&E,” said John Rizzo, Sierra Club’s political chair. “The more you do that, the greener we can become.”

Although Brooks said he plans to meet with Sup. Wiener regarding how the ordinance could work in tandem with CleanPower SF, officials from Sup. Wiener’s office indicated that the ordinance is inherently separate from CleanPower SF. “[The ordinance] doesn’t further or hinder CPSF [Clean Power SF],” said Andres Power, Wiener’s legislative aide, who was involved in drafting the legislation. “It’s neutral from that perspective.”

Responding to questions about the legislation’s relationship with Clean Power SF (and whether or not collaboration might be a good strategy), Jeff Cretan, another of Sup. Wiener’s legislative aides, said, “Innovative solutions can come from multiple directions.” He further explained that, if passed, the legislation “could prove how other clean power initiatives can be successful.”

Progressives challenge mayor’s abuse of authority

Erica Hanna
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EDITORIAL Mayor Ed Lee has repeatedly overstepped his authority on behalf of the entrenched political and economic interests who put him into office, and we’re happy to see Sup. John Avalos and his progressive allies on the Board of Supervisors starting to push back and restore a more honest and equitable balance of power at City Hall.

There was no excuse for Lee and his political appointees on the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to sabotage a decade of work creating the CleanPowerSF program, the only mechanism the city has for creating the renewable energy projects we need to meet our climate change goals.

This was a program created by a veto-proof majority on the Board of Supervisors, the body that the City Charter gives the authority to create such programs on behalf of the people who elect them, then the SFPUC used a vote that should have been a procedural formality to block it (see “Power struggle,” 9/17/13).

Lee refused to work with the supervisors to address his stated concerns — most of which have already been addressed by now anyway, from the program’s cost to the involvement of Shell Energy North America, which is now out — draining the CleanPowerSF funding and providing more evidence that this ruse was really all about protecting PG&E from competition.

So Avalos and other progressives of the Budget & Finance Committee last week rejected the SFPUC budget, forcing Lee and allies to now bargain in good faith. That’s the kind of realpolitik in service of progressive values that we’ve been missing at City Hall in recent years, the willingness to get tough with the grinning mayor who disingenuously talks about civility while his operatives stab their opponents in the back.

Avalos is also sponsoring a fall ballot measure that would let voters fill vacancies on the Board of Supervisors, rather than letting the mayor, who heads the executive branch, stack the legislative branch of government in his favor. We should have done that a decade ago after Gavin Newsom executed his infamous “triple play” to gain another ally on the board, and it’s especially relevant now that two supervisors are running against either other for the Assembly.

Avalos isn’t stressing the balance of powers argument for his Let’s Elect our Elected Officials Act of 2014, which would call a special election to fill vacancies in all the locally elected positions if the next election was more than year away (both the Board of Education and City College Board of Trustees would appoint interim members). It even gives up the supervisors’ power to appoint a new mayor (with the board president serving the interim, as is now the law). San Francisco isn’t a dictatorship, as much as that might please Lee’s business community allies. The people and our district-elected supervisors need to have a stronger voice in how this city is being run, so we at the Bay Guardian are happy to see a few new green shoots of democracy springing up at City Hall.

Supes won’t let mayor raid CleanPowerSF without a fight

Erica Hanna
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Supes won’t let mayor raid CleanPowerSF without a fight

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee today voted to reject the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission budget, an effort by Sup. John Avalos and others to force Mayor Ed Lee to the bargaining table over the city’s neglected sustainable energy infrastructure needs.

“I wanted to get the mayor’s attention and to find a practical way to let the mayor know the Power Enterprise infrastructure needs help, as well as CleanPowerSF,” Avalos told the Guardian. CleanPowerSF would provide electricity derived from renewable sources to enrollees in the municipal program.

After CleanPowerSF was approved by a veto-proof majority on the Board of Supervisors last year, Lee’s appointees to the SFPUC blocked implementation of the program during what should have been a routine vote to set a maximum rate. Then Lee this year raided those funds and transferred them to his GoSolar program.

“Because he raided our funds, I worked with [fellow Budget Committee members Sups.] Eric Mar and London Breed to kill his budget,” Avalos told us, noting that he alerted Lee on Sunday of his intention to do so and never got a response. “It was remarkable that he thought he could just bring this to committee and thought everything was hunky-dory.”

Christine Falvey, the mayor’s spokesperson, said the mayor hadn’t had time yet to develop his next step but “the mayor is committed to funding GoSolar, a program that can start immediately, help us reach our agressive environmental goals and employ San Francisco residents.”

The tendrils of the mayor’s power could be felt even in the SFPUC’s Citizens’ Advisory Committee meeting last night. The committee makes recommendations to the PUC with no authority for mandate, but rather for long-term strategic, financial and capital improvement plans.

As the committee considered a vote to recommend the PUC move forward with CleanPowerSF, the tussle between the mayor and the supervisors reverberated through their frank discussions.

“The problem is the mayor is violently against this program,” said Walt Farrell, a committee member from Supervisor Norman Yee’s District 7. He added, “How will you convince them?”

Director of Policy and Administration at Power Enterprise Kim Malcolm was slated to be the Director of CleanPowerSF, but she deflected, saying it wasn’t up to her.

“We view our job as, we do what the policy makers tell us to do,” she said.

Jason Fried, executive director of the Local Agency Formation Commission, told the CAC most of the mayor’s concerns regarding CleanPowerSF have since been addressed. 

The mayor critiqued the program for relying on Shell for energy, Fried said, but now Shell is out of the picture.

cacsfpuc

Kim Malcolm presents information on CleanPowerSF to the SFPUC Citizens’ Advisory Committee.

He said the program could also possibly provide extra money for Power Enterprise, the city’s Hetch Hetchy powered hydroelectric system. 

Highlighting all the benefits of CleanPowerSF, Jess Derbin-Ackerman, a conservation organizer speaking on behalf of the Sierra Club, urged action.

“This program was in the works for ten years,” she said, and “it’s largely been fought because of political attachments to PG&E.”

She noted more than four other counties in Northern California are now shifting to clean power, and San Francisco lags behind.

“Get with it,” she said, “the rest of the Bay Area is.” 

Ultimately the CAC opted to push the vote backing CleanPowerSF until its next meeting, due to absent members. The CAC’s chair, Wendolyn Aragon, supported the supervisors stalling the PUC budget.

“CleanPowerSF has been proven time and time again as a viable source of clean energy,” she told the Guardian. “But if Mayor Lee and the SFPUC Commissioners (whom he appoints) want to keep denying that … it’s time to draw a line in the sand.”

Now that the PUC’s budget has been formally rejected, the agency has $20 million in reserves that it can spend until it comes up with a budget that meets the approval of the Board of Supervisors, as the City Charter requires. In the meantime, Avalos called on Lee to negotiate in good faith with the board.

“The path forward is to negotiate,” Avalos told us. “The mayor has overstepped his bounds on this issue. He is not taking the leadership to convene us together to find a solution.”

Lawsuits target Airbnb rentals

Michael Redmond
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Lawsuits target Airbnb rentals

LAWSUITS TARGET AIRBNB RENTALS

The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office last week filed a pair of lawsuits against local landlords who illegally rent out apartments on a short-term basis, units that had been cleared of tenants using the Ellis Act. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Tenants Unions has hired attorney Joseph Tobener to file more such lawsuits, and he is preparing to file at least seven lawsuits involving 20 units.

The lawsuits are the latest actions in a fast-moving crackdown on Airbnb and other online companies that facilitate short-term apartment rentals that violate city laws against converting apartments into de facto hotel rooms, including VRBO.com and Homeaway.com.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu recently introduced legalization that would legalize, limit, and regulate such rentals, a measure that will be considered this summer. That legislation comes on the heels of Airbnb’s decision to stop stonewalling the city (and us at the Guardian, which has been raising these issues for the last two years) by agreeing to start paying the transient occupancy taxes it owes to the city for its transactions and creating new terms of service that acknowledge its business model may violate local laws in San Francisco and elsewhere (see “Into thin air,” 6/6/13).

As we’ve reported, City Attorney Dennis Herrera has been working with tenant groups and others on a legal action aimed at curtailing the growing practice of landlords using online rental services to skirt rent control laws and other tenant protection, removing units from the permanent housing market while still renting them out at a profit.

“In the midst of a housing crisis of historic proportions, illegal short-term rental conversions of our scarce residential housing stock risks becoming a major contributing factor,” Herrera said in a public statement. “The cases I’ve filed today target two egregious offenders. These defendants didn’t just flout state and local law to conduct their illegal businesses, they evicted disabled tenants in order to do so. Today’s cases are the first among several housing-related matters under investigation by my office, and we intend to crack down hard on unlawful conduct that’s exacerbating—and in many cases profiting from—San Francisco’s alarming lack of affordable housing.”

Tobener tells the Guardian that the San Francisco Tenants Union hired him to discourage local landlords from removing units from the market. “The San Francisco Tenants Union is just fed up with the loss of affordable housing,” Tobener told us. “It’s not about the money, it’s about getting these units back on the market.” (Steven T. Jones)

 

SF LOOKS TO MARIN FOR RENEWABLES

Just in time for Earth Day, a renewed effort to reduce the city’s carbon emissions was introduced at the April 22 Board of Supervisors yesterday. Sup. John Avalos introduced a resolution calling for a study of San Francisco joining Marin Clean Energy, which provides renewable energy to that county’s residents.

The move is seen largely as an effort to circumvent Mayor Ed Lee’s opposition to implementing a controversial renewable energy plan called CleanPowerSF (see “Revisionist future,” April 15).

“Mayor Lee and the Public Utilities Commission objected to CleanPowerSF, but they have offered no other solution to provide San Franciscans with 100 percent renewable electricity,” Avalos said in a public statement. “With this ordinance, we can either join Marin or we can implement our own program, but we can no longer afford to do nothing.”

The resolution is the latest effort in the long saga to implement CleanPowerSF, San Francisco’s proposed renewable energy alternative to PG&E, whose current energy mix is only 19 percent renewable. Much of PG&E’s current mix is dirty and directly contributes to half of San Francisco’s carbon footprint, according to the city’s own recent Climate Action Strategy.

Joining Marin under a Joint Powers Authority would provide a vehicle for San Francisco to enact CleanPowerSF’s goals, long blocked by the mayor. San Francisco’s renewable energy effort may have lingered in legal limbo for years, but Marin made the switch to renewables in 2010.

“It’s something people want, and it also reduces greenhouse gas emissions,” Marin Clean Energy Executive Officer Dawn Weisz told the Guardian. Much of Northern California, she noted, has little choice but to use PG&E for their electricity.

“The people never chose to have a monopoly in place,” she said. “People like having choices.” (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

BEACH FIRES CONTAINED

The National Parks Service is once again moving to limit and maybe even ban fires on Ocean Beach, replaying an episode from 2007 that was temporarily solved by volunteers and artistic new fire rings placed by the group Burners Without Borders, despite a lack of follow-through by NPS’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Citing complaints about burning toxic materials, leaving messes, and people drinking on the beach (gasp!), the GGNRA this week announced a summer pilot program that would include moving the curfew up from 10pm to 9pm, installing a dozen new fire rings, and improved public outreach and monitoring of the conditions on the beach.

“We [have] over the years seen a rising problem over safety and general breaking of park rules like broken bottles. And with incidents of assault and underage drinking, mostly occurring during the night, GGNRA Area Director Howard Levitt told the Guardian.

But Tom Price, who helped create the 2007 compromise, said GGNRA never kept its end of the bargain — such as installing more rings to supplement the half-dozen created by artists, or creating visible signage so visitors would know what the rules area — and now it’s acting in a rapid, unilateral, and unreasonable way to ban beach fires.

“They never did the outreach or education or put out more fire rings,” Price said, urging people to let GGNRA know they support allowing fires on Ocean Beach, one of just two spots within GGNRA jurisdiction where they’re allowed (Muir Beach is the other). “The Parks Service has to be reasonable, and banning fires after 9pm in not reasonable.” (Steven T. Jones and Bryan Augustus)

TAX WEALTH, PIKETTY SAYS

French economist Thomas Piketty got a warm welcome in San Francisco last week when nearly 200 people turned out to hear him discuss what is fast-becoming the defining book of this new Gilded Era of escalating disparities in wealth: Capital in the 21st Century.

“The book has been so popular that Harvard University Press has run out,” The Green Arcade owner Patrick Marks said in introducing Piketty at a the April 22 event held across Market Street from the bookstore, in the McRoskey Mattress Company, in order to accommodate the large crowd.

Indeed, Capital has recently been lauded by a string of influential publications, ranging from The Nation through The New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, all acknowledging this as perhaps the most exhaustive study on wealth data ever collected — and a clear-eyed warning that capitalism isn’t the self-correcting system that its biggest boosters claim it is.

Piketty’s work shows how when the return on capital is greater than the annual growth rate of the overall economy, which is usually the case (except when interrupted temporarily by the major wars of the 20th Century, or the 90 percent tax rate on the highest US incomes after World War II), that dynamic consolidates wealth in ever-fewer hands, which is bad for the health of the economic system. The only real cure, Piketty concludes, is a progressive global tax on wealth. Yet Piketty tries to avoid being too prescriptive, choosing to let his research speak for itself. “All I’m trying to do is present this book so everyone can make up his own mind,” Piketty told the gathering. In fact, he thinks the cure he outlines at the end of his book is less important than what comes before it: “You can disagree with everything in Part IV and still find interest in Parts I, II, and III.” (Steven T. Jones)

SF may go through Marin County to bypass CleanPowerSF subversion

Sasha Cuttler
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106
SF may go through Marin County to bypass CleanPowerSF subversion

Just in time for Earth Day, a renewed effort to reduce the city’s carbon emissions was introduced at the Board of Supervisors yesterday [Tues/22]. Sup. John Avalos introduced a resolution calling for a study of San Francisco joining Marin Clean Energy, which provides renewable energy to that county’s residents.

The move is seen largely as an effort to circumvent Mayor Ed Lee’s opposition to implementing a controversial renewable energy plan called CleanPowerSF.

“Mayor Lee and the Public Utilities Commission objected to CleanPowerSF, but they have offered no other solution to provide San Franciscans with 100 percent renewable electricity,” Avalos said in a public statement. “With this ordinance, we can either join Marin or we can implement our own program, but we can no longer afford to do nothing.”

The resolution is the latest effort in the long saga to implement CleanPowerSF, San Francisco’s proposed renewable energy alternative to PG&E, whose current energy mix is only 19 percent renewable. Much of PG&E’s current mix is dirty and directly contributes to half of San Francisco’s carbon footprint, according to the city’s own recent Climate Action Strategy.

Joining Marin under a Joint Powers Authority would provide a vehicle for San Francisco to enact CleanPowerSF’s goals, long blocked by the mayor. San Francisco’s renewable energy effort may have lingered in legal limbo for years, but Marin made the switch to renewables in 2010.

“It’s something people want, and it also reduces greenhouse gas emissions,” Marin Clean Energy Executive Officer Dawn Weisz told the Guardian. Much of Northern California, she noted, has little choice but to use PG&E for their electricity.

“The people never chose to have a monopoly in place,” she said. “People like having choices.”

Marin chose to switch to renewable energy in 2010, and MCE offers two energy mix options: A 100 percent renewable energy option, and a less expensive 50 percent renewable option. MCE officials told the Guardian they have a 75 percent customer adoption rate, meaning most of Marin County is running on clean, renewable energy.

Using an energy bill calculator on MCE’s website, the average homeowner pays about $80 a month for their renewable energy in the summer, just $2 more than their dirty PG&E power. The program has been so successful for MCE’s approximately 125,000 customers that other cities have joined with Marin under what is called a Joint Powers Authority, allowing those cities to access MCE’s grid.

The City of Richmond joined into a Joint Powers Authority with Marin County in 2012, and Napa County also expressed interest in providing renewable energy through MCE.  That large adoption rate may be what has PG&E running scared.

“We faced very strong opposition from the incumbent utility during our launch,” Weisz told the Guardian, referring to PG&E. “Fortunately, we have a much better relationship with them now, and they serve as a good partner.”

The renewable energy is distributed along PG&E’s existing infrastructure, so the utility still has a role to play in providing electricity to Marin. But the utility certainly has worries when it comes to generating electricity, as Marin is building new sources of renewable energy up and down California.

“We have 24 different power supply contracts,” Weisz told us. This includes new solar facilities in San Rafael and the Central Valley, and renewable energy sources in Roseville and and Placer County.

Though other cities have signed on to receive energy through Marin County’s MCE program, San Francisco joining would be another ballgame entirely, Weisz said.

MCE has a policy of incremental expansion, she told us, and defines potential affiliate cities and counties as having fewer than 30,000 customers who are less than 30 miles away. Though San Francisco is a stone’s throw from Marin County, the potential customer base is huge: San Francisco has a population of over 800,000 people.

“It would require some analysis,” Wisz said dryly.

MCE’s analysis to include Napa County in its energy mix took 60 days, she said. Notably, San Francisco may produce its own power and use its own mix, and simply use MCE’s billing setup. Basically, San Francisco would provide energy through CleanPowerSF, but MCE would be a contractor that administers San Francisco’s program.

But joining into Marin’s renewable energy program has more hurdles than just figuring out the mix. Clean Power SF is a Community Choice Aggregation program, defined by state law as exactly that — part of the community. Jumping over to Marin may create a legal mess for San Francisco, but there is hope.

Assembly Bill 2159, introduced by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, would allow a county’s Board of Supervisors to approve joining a Joint Powers Authority with another municipality, in this case, allowing San Francisco to join up with Marin, while still creating its own CCA program.

The bill just cleared the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee yesterday, and has a ways to go.

If that sounds like a legal headache, it is. But advocates say its necessary because Mayor Ed Lee has “stacked the deck” at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, hiring people friendly to blocking CleanPowerSF on his behalf.

“The main purpose of passing it is to get through the mayor’s log jam,” clean power advocate Eric Brooks told the Guardian. “We want San Francisco to go faster and make more green jobs.”

And, of course, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Avalos’ office estimates that in the time the mayor has stalled Clean Power SF, San Francisco has generated 80 million pounds of CO2.

Revisionist future

Michael Redmond
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6
Revisionist future

news@sfbg.com

Acidified oceans. Dirty air. Superstorms. Food shortages. Mass migration. War. The International Panel on Climate Change last week released the final installment of its latest authoritative report on the catastrophic effects of global climate change.

In no uncertain terms, the report states, it is urgent that steps be taken to mitigate the worst impacts. The world’s cities are the most at risk — yet hold the greatest potential for turning the tide, IPCC scientists noted. Making cities greener is one of the most effective ways to minimize climate change.

But as experts turn to cities in hopes of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, newly released documents suggest that officials in San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s office ordered the most effective strategies for achieving clean energy goals to be removed from the city’s plan for combating climate change.

 

CHANGE OF PLANS

The city’s Climate Action Strategy sets out the overarching goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a yardstick consistent with state and regional goals. For 10 years, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission worked on a program that would have given city residents and businesses more access to renewable energy sources to help meet that emissions reduction target.

CleanPowerSF, a municipal power program that would replace Pacific Gas & Electric power for San Francisco customers, would provide electricity from 100 percent, California-certified renewable sources such as solar, wind, small hydro, and other green energy sources.

The Climate Action Strategy calls creation of a renewable energy portfolio a critical strategy for meeting the goal — and that’s precisely what CleanPowerSF set out to achieve. Over the course of a decade, millions of dollars were invested and untold staff hours devoted to creating the program.

Yet at the direction of Roger Kim, the mayor’s senior advisor on the environment, the city’s Department of the Environment removed the Climate Action Strategy’s reference to CleanPowerSF before the document was released to the public. The Department of the Environment was also directed to remove reference to PG&E’s 100 percent Green Power Option, a program floated as an alternative to CleanPowerSF.

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In a Sept. 30 memo to Kim, obtained via a public records request, former Department of Environment Director Melanie Nutter wrote, “At the request of the Mayor’s Office, mention of PG&E’s 100% Green Power Option and SFPUC’s CleanPowerSF program were removed from the Energy Chapter and replaced with the overarching goal of 100% renewable electricity (pgs 16,17).”

Nutter recently stepped down as the director of the agency.

The timing of Nutter’s memo is significant. Just weeks earlier, the SFPUC — whose five-member governing board is appointed by the mayor — refused to approve a not-to-exceed rate that would have allowed CleanPowerSF to move forward as planned. Instead of expressing opposition to the rate itself, commissioners expressed their overall opposition to CleanPowerSF before voting it down.

Lee had criticized the cost and mechanisms of CleanPowerSF, without proposing an alternative (see “Power struggle,” 9/17/13). His real motivations for deleting these two strategies from the city’s Climate Action Strategy report remain unclear, but Lee has long supported PG&E, which stands to lose customers if CleanPowerSF is successful.

 

NO REAL ANSWER

Both CleanPowerSF and PG&E’s green option were held up as pathways toward a greener future in the Climate Action Strategy until the Mayor’s Office intervened, leaving no city mechanisms for most San Franciscans to choose renewable energy sources.

“PG&E’s proposed green option and CleanPowerSF could operate in parallel,” Nutter wrote in a memo drafted a couple years ago. “CleanPowerSF is likely to have a much greater environmental benefit due to the size of the customer base that would be served, the program’s objective to create a market for local renewable power, and the amount of greenhouse gas reductions achieved.”

So why then were both of these efforts eliminated from the report at the last minute, after being incorporated by experts in the field? Lee Communications Director Christine Falvey did not provide an answer to this specific Guardian question about the removal decision despite being asked several times.

When the Guardian asked Mayor Lee in March why CleanPowerSF was removed from the report, Lee responded, “I don’t think I have a real answer for that.”

Also unanswered is the question of how the city will meet its greenhouse gas emission reductions target. A quarter of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions derive from residential and commercial electricity, according to the Climate Action Strategy. 

pgE 

Electricity provided by PG&E is only 50 percent emission-free, with nuclear energy as the company’s most significant carbon-free power source. SFPUC projections have shown that CleanPowerSF could reduce citywide greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2030.

Another quarter of our emissions come from natural gas usage, and 40 percent of total emissions are belched into the air by automobiles. Lee wants to encourage more electric vehicles, but that won’t help much if they’re powered by a dirty power portfolio.

Whereas CleanPowerSF represented a carefully crafted plan for hitting these long-term targets, Lee’s most recent comments on how these important goals will be reached seem vague at best.

“I think we take all our deliberations on climate action seriously,” Lee told the Guardian in March, “and I do think that our focus now has been on energy efficiencies. We are also trying now to beef up the GoSolar program to be sure to catch whatever the state is willing to do, because Governor [Jerry] Brown has been trying to tap where there can be more examples of that.”

“The Mayor is open to exploring all avenues that might be available to achieve our energy goals,” Falvey told us. “In fact, it will take a variety of strategies working in concert to achieve them, including increasing the energy efficiency of buildings to reduce the total power load, developing in-city renewables, and options for increasing the provision of renewable power at a utility-scale.”

Those last two goals are precisely what CleanPowerSF would have done. Critics have decried Lee’s move as harmful and politically motivated. “What Mayor Lee has succeeded in doing is to rip the guts out of the new Climate Action Strategy,” John Rizzo wrote in a recent Sierra Club newsletter, “rendering it as meaningless as the missed greenhouse-gas reduction targets from 2012.”

 

LOOKING AHEAD

At the Board of Supervisors’ mayor question time in March, Sup. John Avalos asked Lee to direct the Department of Environment to return CleanPowerSF to the Climate Action Strategy and commit to launching the program in 2014.

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Lee answered that he could not, saying the program was too problematic and the SFPUC has too many infrastructure repair needs. The SFPUC has pulled its staff from the project to redirect that work into energy infrastructure improvements.

Some are still holding out hope that CleanPowerSF could move forward. San Francisco’s Local Agency Formation Commission is set to begin researching what CleanPowerSF “would look like and to address other concerns that the Mayor and SFPUC Commissioners have raised,” LAFCo’s Senior Program Officer Jason Fried said.

Proponents are also investigating ways to launch the program independently of the mayor and the SFPUC, by partnering with Marin County’s version of the program.

“There is talk about joining the Marin Joint Powers Authority,” Fried said, “but we will exhaust every option to run our own program. We want the PUC and mayor on board.”

While the mayor and the commissioners charged with overseeing the SFPUC seem content to let CleanPowerSF fade into memory, Avalos is not willing to let it go without a fight.

“We’re facing the greatest crisis for this city, and our government pulls back on how to achieve this,” Avalos said at a March 31 Board of Supervisors committee hearing on the Climate Action Strategy. “If we want to be a great city, it’s up to us to generate the political will to implement these strategies.”

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.

Federal criminal indictment of PG&E doesn’t go far enough

Sasha Cuttler
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83
Federal criminal indictment of PG&E doesn’t go far enough

  A federal grand jury in San Francisco yesterday issued a criminal indictment against Pacific Gas & Electric for negligence in the 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people and destroyed an entire neighborhood. That’s significant and serious, but it also falls far short of what this rapacious company and its conniving executives — none of whom face personal criminal charges — should be facing.

The indictment and media reports on it omit key details of what happened leading up this tragic and entirely preventable explosion, buying into the fiction that there is a meaningful difference between PG&E Co., the regulated utility, and PG&E Corp., the wealthy and powerful Wall Street corporation. This is a stark example of how corporations are given all the rights of individuals, but accept few of the responsibilities, with the complicity of the political and economic systems.

The 12-count indictment focused on violation of the Pipeline Safety Act, which requires companies to maintain their potentially dangerous pipelines, including keeping detailed records and doing safety inspections that would detect flaws like the faulty weld that caused the San Bruno explosion on Sept. 9, 2010 – work the company negligently failed to perform.

But PG&E’s wanton disregard for public safety, combined with the greed and shameless self-interest of then-CEO Peter Darbee and other executives, goes far deeper than that. A report by the California Public Utilities Commission released in January 2012 found that $100 million in ratepayer funds that had been earmarked for pipeline maintenance and replacement, including this section in San Bruno, was instead diverted to executive bonuses and shareholder profits.

“PG&E chose to use the surplus revenues for general corporate purposes,” the audit said, noting that the company was flush with cash at the time and there was no good reason to neglect this required maintenance.

And in 2010, those questionable corporate purposes included spending more than $45 million to write and promote Prop. 16, a June 2010 ballot measure that would have required approval by two-thirds of voters whenever cities wanted to start community choice aggregation programs such as San Francisco’s proposed CleanPowerSF. California voters rejected that outrageous ruse by more than a 2-1 margin – so Mayor Ed Lee and his appointees were forced to kill CleanPowerSF on their own last year.

PG&E maintains the explosion was just an accident.

“San Bruno was a tragic accident. We’ve taken accountability and are deeply sorry. We have worked hard to do the right thing for victims, their families and the community, and we will continue to do so,” PG&E CEO Tony Early, who was hired after the explosion, said in a prepared statement. “We want all of our customers and their families to know that nothing will distract us from our mission of transforming this 100-plus-year-old system into the safest and most reliable natural gas system in the country.”

But this “tragic accident” was foreseeable and preventable, particularly if PG&E was spending our ratepayer money on the system maintenance it was allocated for, instead of trying to fool us with a deceptive and myopic political campaign. Those were decisions made by real people, including Darbee and others, decisions that killed innocent people – and they should be held accountable. Neither this indictment nor a previous civil settlement go far enough.

PG&E’s employee union, IBEW Local 1245, continues to act as an apologist for the company executives, issuing a statement that in part says, “The federal indictment filed April 1st against the company says that PG&E willfully failed to identify and evaluate threats to its transmission pipelines. We know of nothing that would rise to the level of willful. It is possible there are things we don’t know. But based on what we do know, the company failures that led to the San Bruno explosion were not willful.”

Meanwhile, even some PG&E shareholders are siding with the company’s federal prosecution while bringing a shareholder lawsuit seeking to recover some of the diverted funds. Their high-powered attorney, Joe Cotchett, issued a statement today that said, “We welcome yesterday’s indictment by the federal grand jury of PG&E on criminal charges that it violated federal pipeline regulations. It is clear the federal government agrees with us that PG&E chose profits over safety. The indictment comes as no surprise, as it closely mirrors the detailed complaint we filed months ago against PG&E’s officers and directors, after our own extensive investigation.  The indictment states that PG&E ignored and failed to properly identify potential threats to gas pipelines, failed to gather relevant data, maintained flawed records, and as a result, was unable to accurately assess the dangers related to its lines that could have prevented the explosion. On behalf of the shareholders of PG&E, we intend to amend our complaint to add some additional facts stated in the indictment.”

“Our complaint alleges that PG&E’s executives dropped the ball and failed to implement safety measures despite numerous red flags raised by Company insiders with risk management responsibilities. We allege PG&E has already incurred charges of about $1.83 billion related to the San Bruno accident and natural gas matters. In its annual report, PG&E admitted that this criminal investigation could expose the Company to even greater losses. Our complaint also alleges that PG&E’s Board sponsored reviews of its risk management practices revealing that PG&E was in ‘crisis’ mode prior to the accident, and that, in 2007, PG&E’s newly-hired Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations determined that the Company’s Enterprise Risk Management program ‘seems unactionable because almost everything is broken.’”

This is the company that Mayor Lee praises as a “great company that gets it,” supporting its continued monopoly control of San Francisco’s energy system and subverting a city proposal to provide renewable energy to city residents, even as the threats posed by global warming increase, as this week’s report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns.

This is a sick system, and something needs to change.

SF’s culture of corruption

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12

EDITORIAL The extent of the charges in the criminal complaint against Sen. Leland Yee, political consultant Keith Jackson, and others are shocking and sensational: international arms trafficking, drug dealing, money laundering, cavorting with organized crime figures, murder for hire. But the basic allegation that Yee and Jackson practiced a corrupt, transactional kind of politics wasn’t surprising to anyone who knew how they operated.

What’s worse, they were simply a more extreme — and now, thanks to FBI wiretaps and undercover agents, a better documented — example of the political corruption that is endemic to San Francisco and some other high-stakes American cities. The city of St. Francis gets sold out to the highest bidders everyday, by politicians who value wealthy constituents over the vast majority of us who are just trying to get by — and over the interests of city finances and governance.

Part of the problem is inherent in our money-driven political system, in which politicians are constantly hustling for cash from people who want things from them. Politicians deny they take actions with political contributions in mind, but well-heeled capital and labor interests don’t spend millions of dollars on contributions out of the goodness of their hearts. These are business transactions.

We wholeheartedly support the call Senate President Darrell Steinberg made for fundamental political reform during the March 28 vote to suspend Yee and two of his allegedly corrupt colleagues. These cases aren’t aberrations, they are indicative of how power get wielded when it’s based on wealth. That’s the reality that has gotten even uglier since the Citizens United decision equated money with political speech and upped the ante for would-be public servants.

But much of the problem is particular to San Francisco, where cozy relationships between politicians and corporate interests are often feted in plain view. Former Mayor Willie Brown — a lawyer and unregistered lobbyist who won’t reveal his huge corporate client list despite having an influential weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle — helped install his longtime City Hall functionary Ed Lee into Room 200 to guard against anyone asking too much of the rich and powerful. Yee and Lee represented rival Chinatown economic factions, both wanting to use the power of the Mayor’s Office for their interests.

In his March 22 column, Brown once again repeated a joke he’s used before, that the “e” in email stands for “evidence,” which is really only funny in a sick political culture that celebrates slick rule-breakers. And it was from Brown that Lee learned it was acceptable to brazenly give tax breaks and regulatory passes to the tech companies that his top fundraiser, venture capitalist Ron Conway, are invested in.

Megadeveloper Lennar Urban used its wealth and political connections to take control of San Francisco’s biggest tracts of undeveloped and underdeveloped land, including Hunters and Candlestick points and Treasure Island, paying off community groups and hiring Jackson and other political henchmen to get the job done.

In fact, the FBI complaint says Jackson was working on behalf of that project when he approached accused Chinatown gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow for support, leading to their alleged involvement in a string of wild criminal conspiracies. Meanwhile, Chow was getting public commendations from San Francisco-based politicians including Lee, Yee, Gavin Newsom, Dianne Feinstein, Fiona Ma, and even Tom Ammiano. Chow courted political legitimacy the same way politicians seek cash, and mainstream media outlets were happy to play along.

Throughout his political career, Yee has carried water for Pacific Gas & Electric, perhaps the most corrupting contributor to political campaigns in the city’s history. PG&E’s influence at City Hall had thankfully waned in recent years as a result of overreach and deadly criminal negligence, until Lee and his appointees last year killed CleanPowerSF (see “Challenge Mayor Lee and his lies,” 9/17/13) on a pretext so thin it could only be gift to PG&E.

In many ways, San Francisco hasn’t changed. It’s still the old Barbary Coast, ruled by capitalist thugs and corrupt politicians, only with glossy modern spin created by armies of well-paid political consultants. But we all deserve better.

Yee and Jackson should go to prison if there’s even a slice of truth to the allegations against them. And maybe they’ll cut deals and take other political figures down with them, giving us more of a peek behind the curtain of political power. But it’s up to all of us to break the close ties between economic and political power and begin to restore the democratic power of everyday people.

The miraculous and mysterious, disappearing, reappearing Clean Power SF data

Erica Hanna
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38
The miraculous and mysterious, disappearing, reappearing Clean Power SF data

The fight for clean power in San Francisco just got a whole lot dirtier.

In an update to the City’s Climate Action Strategy report, a prominent section discussing goals to use renewable energy featured CleanPowerSF — and then suddenly it didn’t.

For those not in the know, CleanPowerSF is a renewable energy initiative meant to give San Franciscans 100 percent renewable energy, while making us a hell of a lot less reliant on the local monopoly: PG&E. The initiative, pushed by Supervisors John Avalos, David Campos and other progressive allies, faced long-time blowback from Mayor Ed Lee.

As the Guardian has reported before, it’s a central city policy to reduce emissions by 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2017, and 80 percent below those levels by 2050.

To reach those goals many feel we need CleanPowerSF, but the mayor seems to have scrubbed it out of his environmental report without so much as a how-you-do.

The change was made apparent by a prominent blank white space on page 17 of the Climate Action Strategy report, and was discovered by Supervisor John Avalos’ office. When you highlight the blank space with your cursor, copy the section, then paste it into a document, you can see the goals of CleanPowerSF laid out plain as day.

CleanPowerSF by the Residential

and Commercial Sectors

Sector               2012   2017   2020   2025   2030

Commercial   0%       5%       10%     45%     80%

Residential     0%       16%     19%     60%     100%

The scrubbed information shows CleanPowerSF helping the city reach its renewable energy goals. The numbers are hidden in the Climate Action Strategy report, like a message in a bottle, or a painted egg hidden under a bush on Easter. 

It’s as if someone didn’t want to delete the CleanPowerSF entry entirely, and instead turned the text white in order to signal that the text used to be there. Perhaps the preparer of this report was foiled by the technological wonder known as cut-and-paste. Or more intriguingly, perhaps this was the first-ever case of activist report writing (in which case: Dear subversive report writer, please send us documents through BayLeaks).

Whether the information was left in accidentally or on purpose, it’s now clear that the mayor is dead set on scrubbing CleanPowerSF from city records, even at the expense of the city’s environmental goals. 

Above is the report. Check it out for yourself, page 17 (in the report’s numbering, not the digital numbering).

At the mayor’s Question Time today, where supervisors ask pre-planned and pre-announced questions of the mayor, Supervisor Avalos pinned Mayor Lee down on the document scrub-out.

“In your letter of introduction to the 2013 CAS you wrote the need for action has never been more evident,” Avalos said. “The Climate Action Strategy goes on to state that moving onto 100 percent renewable energy is the biggest single step the city can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And yet there was an attempt to scrub CleanPowerSF… from the Climate Action Strategy.”

The version of the Climate Action Strategy included a whited out table on CleanPower SF… that table was unceremoniously removed in a new version posted two days later,” he said.

The mayor’s answer was filled with some equivocations and some fabrications. 

“We should not move forward with a program that contracts with a fossil fuel company in Texas, it doesn’t produce enough local jobs or environmental benefits,” he said. “Supervisor, I’m glad you mentioned the Climate Action Strategy.” 

Retired San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Executive Director Ed Harrington told  Guardian Editor Steven T. Jones exactly why CleanPowerSF was needed, in a story of his back in 2012: “This program before you has the only chance of reaching those goals. There’s nothing else.” 

Asking Mayor Ed Lee to explain the disappearance of the information from the report.

After question time, this reporter and a few others questioned the mayor as he walked back to his office.

What was behind the scrubbing of the CleanPowerSF data? Why did it suddenly vanish from the report?

“I don’t think I have a real answer for that,” the mayor said.

State of the City: spin over substance

Michael Redmond
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5

It was maddening to watch Mayor Ed Lee deliver his annual State of the City address on Jan. 17. This was pure politics, from the staged backdrop of housing construction at Hunters Point Shipyard to the use of “regular people” props to the slate of vague and contradictory promises he made.

“This place, the shipyard, links our proud past to an even more promising future,” was how Lee began his hour-plus, invite-only address.

Later, he touted the housing construction being done there by Lennar Urban as emblematic of both his promise to bring 30,000 new housing units online by 2020 — the cornerstone to what he called his “affordability agenda” — and the opposition to unfettered development that he is pledging to overcome.

“A great example is the place we’re standing right now. This took us too long,” Lee said after decrying the “easy slogans and scapegoating” by progressive activists who place demands on developers.

But that implication was bullshit. As we’ve reported, progressive and community activists have long encouraged Lennar Urban (which has a close relationship to Lee) to speed up development on this public land that it was given almost a decade ago, particularly the long-promised affordable housing, rather than waiting for the real estate market to heat up.

That was just one of many examples of misleading and unsupported claims in a speech that might have sounded good to the uninformed listener, but which greatly misrepresented the current realities and challenges in San Francisco.

For example, Lee called for greater investments in the public transit system while acknowledging that his proposal to ask voters this November to increase the vehicle license fee isn’t polling well. And yet even before that vote takes place, Lee wants to extend free Muni for youth and repeal the policy of charging for parking meters on Sundays without explaining how he’ll pay for that $10 million per year proposal.

Lee also glossed over the fact that he hasn’t provided funding for the SFMTA’s severely underfunded bicycle or pedestrian safety programs, yet he still said, “I support the goals of Vision Zero to eliminate traffic deaths in our city.”

Again, nice sentiment, but one disconnected from how he’s choosing to spend taxpayer money and use city resources. And if Lee can somehow achieve his huge new housing development push, Muni and other critical infrastructure will only be pushed to the breaking point faster.

Even with his call to increase the city’s minimum wage — something that “will lift thousands of people out of poverty” — he shied away from his previous suggestion that $15 per hour would be appropriate and said that he needed to consult with the business community first: “We’ll seek consensus around a significant minimum wage increase.”

But Mayor Lee wants you to focus on his words more than his actions, including his identification with renters who “worry that speculators looking to make a buck in a hot market will force them out.”

Yet there’s little in his agenda to protect those vulnerable renters, except for his vague promise to try to do so, and to go lobby in Sacramento for reforms to the Ellis Act.

Lee also noted the “bone dry winter” we’re having and how, “It reminds us that the threat of climate change is real.” Yet none of the programs he mentions for addressing that challenge would be as effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions as the CleanPowerSF program that Lee and his appointees are blocking, while offering no other plan for building renewable energy capacity.

Far from trying to beef up local public sector resources that vulnerable populations increasingly need, Lee said, “Affordability is also about having a city government taxpayers can afford.”

State of the City speech filled with unsupported promises

Sasha Cuttler
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178
State of the City speech filled with unsupported promises

It was maddening to watch Mayor Ed Lee deliver his annual State of the City address this morning. This was pure politics, from the staged backdrop of housing construction at Hunters Point Shipyard to the use of “regular people” props to the slate of vague and contradictory promises he made.

“This place, the shipyard, links our proud past to an even more promising future,” was how Lee began his hour-plus, invite-only address.

Later, he touted the housing construction being done there by Lennar Urban as emblematic of both his promise to bring 30,000 new housing units online by 2020 — the cornerstone to what he called his “affordability agenda” — and the opposition to unfettered development that he is pledging to overcome.

“A great example is the place we’re standing right now. This took us too long,” Lee said after decrying the “easy slogans and scapegoating” by progressive activists who place demands on developers.

But that implication was complete bullshit. As we and others have reported, progressive and community activists have long encouraged Lennar Urban (which has a close relationship to Lee) to speed up development on this public land that it was given almost a decade ago, particularly the long-promised affordable housing, rather than waiting for the real estate market to heat up.

That was just one of many examples of misleading and unsupported claims in a speech that might have sounded good to the uninformed listener, but which greatly misrepresented the current realities and challenges in San Francisco.

For example, Lee called for greater investments in the public transit system while acknowledging that his proposal to ask voters this November to increase the vehicle license fee isn’t polling well. And yet even before that vote takes place, Lee wants to extend free Muni for youth and repeal the policy of charging for parking meters on Sundays without explaining how he’ll pay for that $10 million per year proposal.

“Nobody likes it, not parents, not our neighborhood businesses, not me,” Lee said of Sunday meters, ignoring a study last month by the San Francisco Muncipal Transportation Agency showing the program was working well and accomplishing its goals of increasing parking turnover near businesses and bringing in needed revenue.

Lee also glossed over the fact that he hasn’t provided funding for the SFMTA’s severely underfunded bicycle or pedestrian safety programs, yet he still said, “I support the goals of Vision Zero to eliminate traffic deaths in our city.”

Again, nice sentiment, but one that is totally disconnected from how he’s choosing to spend taxpayer money and use city resources. And if Lee can somehow achieve his huge new housing development push, Muni and other critical infrastructure will only be pushed to the breaking point faster.  

Lee acknowledges that many people are being left out of this city’s economic recovery and are being displaced. “Jobs and confidence are back, but our economic recovery has still left thousands behind,” he said, pledging that, “We must confront these challenges directly in the San Francisco way.”

And that “way” appears to be by making wishful statements without substantial support and then letting developers and venture capitalists — such as Ron Conway, the tech and mayoral funder seated in the second row — continue calling the shots.

Even with his call to increase the city’s minimum wage — something that “will lift thousands of people out of poverty” — he shied away from his previous suggestion that $15 per hour would be appropriate and said that he needed to consult with the business community first.

“We’ll seek consensus around a significant minimum wage increase,” he said, comparing it to the 2012 ballot measures that reformed the business tax and created an Affordable Housing Fund (the tradeoff for which was to actually reduce the on-site affordable housing requirements for developers).

But Mayor Lee wants you to focus on his words more than his actions, including his identication with renters who “worry that speculators looking to make a buck in a hot market will force them out.”

Yet there’s little in his agenda to protect those vulnerable renters, except for his vague promise to try to do so, and to go lobby in Sacramento for reforms to the Ellis Act. While in Sacramento, he says he’ll also somehow get help for City College of San Francisco, whose takeover by the state and usurpation of local control he supported.   

“City College is on the mend and already on the path to full recovery,” Lee said, an astoundingly out-of-touch statement that belies the school’s plummeting enrollment and the efforts by City Attorney Dennis Herrera and others to push back on the revocation of its accreditation.

Lee also had the audacity to note the “bone dry winter” we’re having and how, “It reminds us that the threat of climate change is real.” Yet none of the programs he mentions for addressing that challenge — green building standards, more electric vehicle infrastructure, the GoSolar program — would be as effective at reducing greenhouse gas emmisions as the CleanPowerSF program that Lee and his appointees are blocking, while offering no other plan for building renewable energy capacity.

Far from trying to beef up local public sector resources that vulnerable city residents increasingly need, or with doing environmental protection, Lee instead seemed to pledge more of the tax cutting that he’s used to subsidize the overheating local economy.

“Affordability is also about having a city government taxpayers can afford,” Lee said. “We must be sure we’re only investing in staffing and services we can afford over the long term.”

How that squares with his pledges to put more resources into public transit, affordable housing development, addressing climate change, and other urgent needs that Lee gives lip service to addressing is anybody’s guess.  

Start the mayor’s race now

Michael Redmond
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4

EDITORIAL

We hope you enjoyed last week’s cover package, “The Rise of Candidate X,” a parable about politics and the media in San Francisco. While it was clearly a fantastical tale, it also had a serious underlying message that we would like to discuss more directly here. Bold actions are needed to save San Francisco. It will take a broad-based coalition to keep the city open to all, and that movement can and should morph into a progressive campaign for the Mayor’s Office, starting now.

While 22 months seems like an eternity in electoral politics, and it is, any serious campaign to unseat Mayor Ed Lee — with all the institutional and financial support lined up behind him — will need to begin soon. Maybe that doesn’t even need to involve the candidate yet, but the constellation of progressive constituencies needs to coordinate their efforts to create a comprehensive vision for the city, one radical enough to really challenge the status quo, and a roadmap for getting there.

It’s exciting to see the resurgence of progressive politics in the city over the last six months, with effective organizing and actions by tenant, immigrant rights, affordable housing, anti-corporate, labor, economic justice, LGBT, environmental, transit, and other progressive groups.

Already, they’ve started to coordinate their actions and messaging, as we saw with the coalition that made housing rights a centerpiece of the annual Milk-Moscone Memorial March. Next, we’d like to see progressive transportation and affordable housing activists bridge their differences, stop fighting each other for funding within the current zero-sum game of city budgets, and fully support a broad progressive agenda that seeks new resources for those urgent needs and others.

Yet City Hall is out of touch with the growing populist outrage over trends and policies that favor wealthy corporations and individuals, at the expense of this city’s diversity, health, and real economic vitality (which comes from promoting and protecting small businesses, not using local corporate welfare to subsidize Wall Street). The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce recently gave this Board of Supervisors its highest-ever ranking on its annual “Paychecks and Pink Slips” ratings, which is surely a sign that City Hall is becoming more sympathetic to the interests of business elites than that of the average city resident.

This has to change, and it won’t be enough to focus on citizens’ initiatives or this year’s supervisorial races, which provide few opportunities to really change the political dynamics under the dome. We need to support and strengthen the resurgent progressive movement in this city and set its sights on Room 200, with enough time to develop and promote an inclusive agenda.

San Francisco has a strong-mayor form of government, a power that has been effectively and repeatedly wielded on behalf of already-powerful constituents by Mayor Ed Lee and his pro-downtown predecessors. Lee has used it to veto Board of Supervisors’ actions protecting tenants, workers, and immigrants; and the commissions he controls have rubber-stamped development projects without adequate public benefits and blocked the CleanPowerSF program, despite its approval by a veto-proof board majority.

Maybe Mayor Lee will rediscover his roots as a tenant lawyer, or he will heed the prevailing political winds now blowing through the city. Or maybe he’ll never cross the powerful economic interests who put him in office. But we do know that the only way to get the Mayor’s Office to pursue real progressive reforms is for a strong progressive movement to seek that office.

New York City, which faces socioeconomic challenges similar to San Francisco’s, has exciting potential right now because of the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who waged a long and difficult campaign based on progressive ideals and issues. By contrast, San Francisco seems stuck in the anachronistic view that catering to capitalists will somehow serve the masses.

The Mayor’s Office has been a potent force for blocking progressive reforms over the last 20 years. Now is the time to place that office in service of the people.

 

Clean Power SF still moving forward

Erica Hanna
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10
Clean Power SF still moving forward

news@sfbg.com 

Dec. 19 marked the 100th anniversary of the Raker Act, federal legislation that specifically called for San Francisco to directly distribute the water and electricity generated by the O’Shaughnessy Dam to its residents and for their benefit. The city does so with the water, through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, but Pacific Gas & Electric used its power and connections to take control of the electricity and keep it, corrupting the political system for nearly a century in the process.

“The result: San Francisco has paid through the nose to PG&E for its power and the city loses about $30 million a year in profits it would get from a public system,” journalist J.B. Neilands wrote in the March 27, 1969 issue of the Bay Guardian, the first of dozens of stories we’ve written on the topic, spanning many unsuccessful public power campaigns, each one dominated by millions of dollars in PG&E spending.

Meanwhile, San Francisco’s longstanding effort to develop a municipal renewable energy program has been stymied by politics, but certain aspects of the plan are advancing nevertheless.

At a Dec. 13 meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo), a committee comprised of members of the Board of Supervisors that has been working to develop CleanPowerSF for years, Sup. London Breed called for putting out a Request for Proposals to develop a concrete plan for building out local renewable energy infrastructure. LAFCo adopted the motion.

With plans for solar panel arrays or wind power facilities that would generate hundreds of megawatts of electricity for the municipal energy program, the build-out is a key aspect of the plan that could lead to job creation and stable electricity rates in the long term.

Earlier this year, members of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, a body composed of mayoral appointees, refused to approve a not-to-exceed rate for the program, effectively obstructing any forward progress.

“This does not get around the political problem we have,” said Eric Brooks, a longtime advocate of CleanPowerSF. “On Aug. 13, from [the SFPUC’s] standpoint, they put the program on hold.” Nevertheless, “the idea is to work on all the other things, and get those things done.”

Project proponents plan to bring on a consultant to hash out more tangible goals with regard to job creation, and then use those shovel-ready plans to bring trade unions on board.

The political pressure against CleanPowerSF, fueled by groups associated with PG&E in political alignment with Mayor Ed Lee, is formidable. Yet Breed and others remain undeterred. “We want labor to be a partner on this,” Breed told the Bay Guardian. “We want to make sure that it’s clear, and more importantly, we want it to be a strong proposal. … My goal is to make it difficult for them to oppose it.”

A century after the Raker Act, San Franciscans are still illegally denied public power

Sasha Cuttler
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27

The San Francisco Examiner has a good story on today’s 100th anniversary of the signing of the Raker Act, federal legislation that allowed San Francisco to build a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley, a campaign championed most fervently at the time by the Examiner’s then-Publisher William Randolph Hearst.

The article was a good roundup of issues related to the Raker Act, and it included ongoing efforts by the group Restore Hetch Hetchy to try to tear down the dam, but there was a key aspect of the Raker Act that the Examiner left out, one that has been championed by the Bay Guardian over the years.

The Raker Act specifically called for San Francisco to directly distribute the water and electricity generated by the O’Shaughnessy Dam to its residents and for their benefit. The city does so with the water, through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, but Pacific Gas & Electric used its power and connections to take control of the electricity and keep it, corrupting the political system for nearly a century in the process.

“The result: San Francisco has paid through the nose to PG&E for its power and the city loses about $30 million a year in profits it would get from a public system,” journalist J.B. Neilands wrote in the March 27, 1969 issue of the Bay Guardian, the first of dozens of stories we’ve written on the topic, spanning many unsuccessful public power campaigns, each one dominated by millions of dollars in PG&E spending.

Section 6 of the Raker Act says that the city “is prohibited from ever selling or letting to any corporation or individual, except a municipality or municipal water district or irrigation district, the right to sell or sublet the water or the electric energy” generated by the dam.

That long-standing violation could become an issue that threatens San Francisco’s control over its main source of clean water and power if Save  Hetch Hetchy gains traction in the courts with a lawsuit that it is pledging to file.

While PG&E doesn’t wield the same strong influence that it once did at City Hall, thanks partly to years of aggressive overreach that soured many local officials on the powerful utility, it does still retain close ties to former Mayor Willie Brown (an attorney who has been on retainer with PG&E for years) and current Mayor Ed Lee, who has sabotaged the latest half-step toward public power, CleanPowerSF.    

Plans for SF clean energy program still underway, despite political opposition

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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27

San Francisco’s longstanding effort to develop a municipal renewable energy program has been stymied by politics, but Sup. London Breed has taken up the cause of advancing aspects of the plan that haven’t been obstructed.

At a Dec. 13 meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo), a committee comprised of members of the Board of Supervisors that has been working to develop CleanPowerSF for years, Breed called for putting out a Request for Proposals to develop a concrete plan for building out local renewable energy infrastructure. LAFCo adopted the motion. 

With plans for solar panel arrays or wind power facilities that would generate hundreds of megawatts of electricity for the municipal energy program, the build-out is a key aspect of the plan that could lead to job creation and stable electricity rates in the long term.

“Part of what I think is important in developing a plan is to make sure that if there are people who oppose it, that we have answers,” Breed said. “And we have clear answers, so that we’re communicating what the real, true accurate message is: There is real possibility for local jobs.”

Earlier this year, members of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, a body composed of mayoral appointees, refused to approve a not-to-exceed rate, effectively obstructing any forward progress on the green municipal power program. But some advocates who are thinking long-term have merely taken the setback as an opportunity to put some time and energy into crafting a well thought out plan that serves the interests of job seekers and environmentalists alike, which would ulimately be politically difficult to oppose.

The rate approval was a necessary step toward inking a contract with Shell Energy North America, the contractor selected by the SFPUC to procure renewable energy on the open market until a build-out gets off the ground.

Just before the commissioners made their decision, opponents of the plan who are affiliated with Pacific Gas & Electric Company – the utility giant that stands to lose customers if CleanPowerSF goes forward – plastered San Francisco residences with flyers denouncing the program and Shell’s involvement. The mailers were paid for by IBEW 1245, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union that represents PG&E employees.

Breed reflected on that messaging as an unfortunate setback. “It created, I think, the challenges that we’re facing getting this program moving forward,” she said. “We need a clear communication strategy. We need a clear understanding of the build-out.”

Eric Brooks, a longtime advocate of CleanPowerSF who has attended hundreds of meetings to help shape the plan on behalf of his nonprofit, Our City, said he was pleased with the latest direction LAFCo talks had taken. He recently penned an editorial for the Bay Guardian calling on LAFCo to take control of the program.

“This does not get around the political problem we have,” he said. “Politically, the program isn’t moving forward. On Aug. 13, from [the SFPUC’s] standpoint, they put the program on hold.” Nevertheless, “the idea is to work on all the other things, and get those things done.” Once there is a practical plan spelling out how the city will move forward with building out green renewable energy infrastructure, he said, it could serve to “show the building trade unions what’s possible.”

From what Brooks said and what was voiced at the meeting, it seems the political strategy of project proponents will be to bring on a consultant to hash out more tangible goals with regard to job creation, and then use those shovel-ready plans to bring trade unions on board. From there, Brooks hopes there may be more leverage to push for approval – or perhaps to pursue an alternative management structure that gets around the SFPUC, such as joining with another municipality to form a Joint Powers Authority that would oversee the program.

Sup. David Campos, who has been a key supporter of CleanPowerSF along with Sup. John Avalos, did voice some reservations about moving forward with the RFP. “We are here,” halted from moving forward, “even though we have a program that has been approved by the Board of Supervisors,” he pointed out. “How do we avoid going down the path of doing additional work, only to find ourselves in the same predicament?”

The political pressure against CleanPowerSF, fueled by groups associated with PG&E in political alignment with Mayor Ed Lee, is formidable. Nevertheless, advocates from environmental organizations such as 350.org, the Sierra Club and others have kept pushing for the program out of a conviction that it represents an opportunity to curb greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change at the local level.

“This is a very important move,” said June Brashares, a steering committee member of the Local Clean Energy Alliance. “A key piece of work that has not yet been done is the selection of actual sites all over the city for the installation of hundreds of megawatts of local clean energy projects that will make up CleanPowerSF.”

UPDATE: After we posted this, Breed returned a phone call from earlier in the day. She shared some thoughts about the program:

“I just think we’re overdue, to do it. The fact that we have five commissioners appointed, not necessarily elected, [blocking the program] disturbs me,” she said.

Asked why she’s supportive of CleanPowerSF, Breed said, “It’s not just about the choice. It’s also about the environment, and the future. There’s a lot of money in energy in general, and part of that money should go back to the local economy through those jobs.”

When we asked her about the strategy for advancing the program, she responded, “We want labor to be a partner on this. We want to make sure that it’s clear, and more importantly, we want it to be a strong proposal … My goal is to make it difficult for them to oppose it.”

Finally, questioned on whether she was worried about the political opposition, Breed responded, “I can’t do my job in fear that someone may oppose it. I have to do it based on what I think is truly right for the city of San Francisco.”

How San Francisco should really be helping the Philippines

Sasha Cuttler
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49
How San Francisco should really be helping the Philippines

There were a couple good stories in today’s San Francisco Chronicle related to concerns the Guardian and its readers have sounded in recent months: Mayoral appointees blocking CleanPowerSF against the will of the elected Board of Supervisors, and the massive scale of the proposed Warriors Arena, which is now getting slightly downsized.

It was getting a little lonely beating the drum over the anti-democratic actions of the Mayor Ed Lee and his minions to undermine the only plan San Francisco has to substantially decrease its greenhouse gas emissions and meet its own ambitious goals for addressing climate change. Glad to see the Chronicle turn up the heat, at least in its news section (unlike the neocon neanderthals that write the paper’s editorials).

While the mainstream media sometimes does good work, it usually fails to connect the dots, which is an important journalistic function. So if I would find fault with the otherwise solid and long overdue story by reporters Marisa Lagos and David R. Baker, it would be with its failure to note that CleanPowerSF is really the only plan for seriously addressing climate change, which is one of the biggest and most impactful challenges we face.

This morning on KQED’s Forum, while discussing the devastating typhoon that struck the Philippines — one of the strongest ever recorded — they did connect the dots between the severity of that storm and the warming oceans of the world, albeit in fairly detached and non-urgent way.

So please allow me to connect another dot.

“Our hearts go out to all of those who have suffered in the Philippines from possibly the world’s strongest storm. The people of the Philippines are in our thoughts and prayers today, and we will continue to support them in the days and months ahead as we learn the true impact caused by Typhoon Haiyan,” Mayor Lee said Friday in a prepared statement sent to the media. “San Francisco stands ready to aid in the rebuilding and recovery efforts. The work of rebuilding communities begins immediately, and San Francisco understands how important a sustained, vigorous recovery effort is. Our City stands ready with the Bay Area Filipino-American community to assist today and into the future to help in the rebuilding efforts in the Philippines.”

What he didn’t mention was climate change. While it’s great that San Franciscans stand ready to address the effects of this and other natural disasters — which all the global warming models show will become stronger and more frequent — why aren’t we willing to show more leadership in addressing the root cause of this problem?

Instead of collaborating with developers on ever more ambitious schemes to build expensive buildings on a waterfront that will already be challenged by rising seas, the Mayor’s Office should be channeling its energies into making San Francisco a role model for other 21st century cities to follow.

The real challenges that we and other cities around the world face now are how to address poverty, the energy and transportation needs of a growing population, and a planet in peril; instead, this Mayor’s Office is focused on poaching Oakland’s basketball team and building more housing for the 1 percent.

If Mayor Lee is serious about the sympathies he’s expressing for vulnerable populations in the developing world, then he and allies should do more than send care packages when they are devastated by the byproducts of the wasteful and overly consumptive economic policies that they are promoting.  

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