District 5

Words and deeds

4

steve@sfbg.com

When Mayor Ed Lee appointed engineer and pro-development activist Rodrigo Santos to fill a vacant seat on the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees, both men talked about the urgent need to save this troubled but vitally important institution.

“Our economic future is directly tied to the success of City College,” Lee said at a press conference, touting the school’s critical job-training role.

But when you cut through all the politics and hyperbole, the school’s biggest single problem is a lack of money — and the mayor and his new trustee aren’t doing much to help.

Neither Lee nor Santos have yet endorsed or publicly supported Proposition A, the $79-per-parcel tax that would stave off deep cuts to a district whose accreditation has been threatened over its anemic cash reserves and reluctance to scale back its course offerings (see “City College fights back,” July 17).

Nor have they appealed for support from their deep-pocketed allies in the business community, which City College supporters say should be doing more to support the district.

And while some say Lee is finally getting ready to endorse Prop. A, he’s done nothing to help the campaign.

“It’s a shame because [the mayor] has pledged to support City College,” John Rizzo, president of the Board of Trustees and a supervisorial candidate from District 5.

Lee also refused a request the trustees made last year to ease the more than $2.5 million in rent and fees that the district pays annually to the city. That’s a stark contrast to the city’s generous support of the San Francisco Unified School District, which gets an annual subsidy from the city of around $25 million, thanks to a ballot measure pushed by city officials of various ideological stripes.

“K-12 is important, but when we try to get help from the city, it falls on deaf ears and I don’t know why. Maybe little kids are cuter,” Rizzo told us.

Sup. Eric Mar said that dichotomy is a real problem, particularly given City College’s current challenges and the important role it plays in providing low-cost training to local workers. Mar has called for a hearing this month before the Joint City and School District Select Committee, which oversees SFUSD’s relationship with the city.

“I support stronger city support for City College,” Mar told us.

Asked about Lee’s unwillingness to help with City College’s fiscal situation, mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey said Lee has offered logistical support from city officials to help City College overcome the threats to its accreditation and has been carefully monitoring the situation, but she didn’t directly address why he has withheld financial support or endorsed Prop. A.

“The mayor has not taken a position on the parcel tax and is focusing his efforts on supporting the college’s need for serious fiscal and management changes and protecting its accreditation,” she told us by email Sept. 7. “The mayor knows it is more important than ever that the City support City College to make sure they get back on their feet for the sake of current and future City College students and for all San Francisco residents.”

But City College officials aren’t buying it. “Talk and nice words don’t mean anything anymore,” Rizzo said.

Other Prop. A supporters agree.

“The mayor needs to step up and support this,” Trustee Chris Jackson told the Guardian, arguing that most of the district’s problems stem from steadily declining financial support from the state. “We have a revenue problem.”

“It is the workforce training vehicle for the city,” said Rafael Mandelman, a candidate for trustee who has been actively supporting Prop. A. “Maybe now is the time when the city shouldn’t say no to that.”

Falvey responded by saying, “The City supports all of our public education institutions in some capacity. Each public education institution also pays the city for some of the required services it is provided.”

Other Prop. A supporters say they are hopeful that Lee may still come around. Alisa Messer, president of American Federation of Teachers Local 2121, which represents City College faculty, told us, “The mayor says he supports City College and we’re hoping he will support the measure soon.”

Gabriel Haaland, who has been working on the measure for SEIU Local 1021, also told us as we were going to press on Sept. 10, that Lee seems to be coming around: “From what I understand, the mayor is about to endorse it.”

 

 

PROMISE OF SUPPORT

When Lee appointed Santos — who has raised an unprecedented amount of money for his race, $113,153 as for July 1, mostly from the real estate and development interests he represents as president of Coalition for Responsible Growth — some argued that it would bring needed financial support for the district and the Prop. A campaign.

“He is expected to bring his allies in these fields into the fight to save City College, which faces a critical 2/3 vote on a parcel tax this November,” Tenderloin Housing Clinic Director Randy Shaw wrote on his Beyond Chron blog on Aug. 22, a day after telling the Guardian how the parcel tax was essential to City College’s future and Santos was uniquely positioned to support it.

But Santos, whose campaign didn’t return Guardian calls on the issue, hasn’t appeared at any Yes on A campaign events or offered any discernible support for the measure, whose supporters had only raised a little over $20,000 as of July 1. While there is little organized opposition to Prop. A, the fact that it needs approval by two-thirds of voters is a challenge that requires strong support.

Rizzo said Shaw’s argument doesn’t hold up. “It’s a nice theory,” he said, “but I haven’t seen evidence of that, and I haven’t seen Rodrigo at any Prop. A events.”

Santos hadn’t been involved with City College or educational issues before deciding to run for trustee, and he’s widely perceived as an ambitious politico setting himself up to run for the Board of Supervisors. At his press conference, Santos pledged to aggressively fight for City College.

“I join an institution that must be saved, and I’m absolutely committed to that goal,” Santos said.

Lee assembled a variety of representatives from “the city family” at his press conference, including trustees Natalie Berg and Anita Grier, Interim Chancellor Pamila Fisher, representatives from the Controller’s Office, Board of Education, Department of Children Youth and their Families, and the Mayor’s Budget Office.

“They, after all, need our help, need our support and they will not be able to accomplish it all by themselves,” said Lee, who pointedly didn’t say anything about the parcel tax at the event, even though he sang the praises of the district. “It empowers those economic sectors that we consider most valuable to our future, especially in the area of health care, hospitality, biotech, and now technology in general. We have become dependent on City College for their ability to prepare future workforces.”

Lee also sounded a tough love theme, saying “any improvement means a change from the status quo” and praising Santos as “someone who shares my vision of reform and will support the tough decisions ahead.”

Indeed, the board members face a number of tough decisions in the coming weeks, from whether to abdicate some of their authority to a special trustee empowered to make unilateral decisions about what programs to cut or campuses to close. The college is responding to a threat from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges to live within its means or lose its accreditation.

Santos didn’t mention Prop. A during the press conference that followed his swearing in, instead offering vague platitudes and promises that he’s willing to work hard and make tough decisions, while also making some puzzling statements about the district’s current situation.

“We must support the interim chancellor, Pamila Fisher,” he said. “Our primary duty is to ensure she enjoys the support and tools needed to implement difficult reforms. At the same time, we will hold her accountable, we will help her, we will challenge her.”

He appeared unaware that Fisher’s tenure ends in just a few weeks, well before any reforms could possibly be approved or implemented.

Some Prop. A supporters are hoping Santos will also challenge his allies in the business community to open their wallets and support both Prop. A and ongoing operations at City College.

“It would be great for the businesses to step up in a big way because they are really benefiting from our workforce training programs,” Messer said. “It’s clear to me the business community understands how important City College is to this city.”

Now, City College’s biggest supporters say it’s time for the city and the business community to put their money where their mouths are.

“City College certainly gives back to the people of San Francisco,” Rizzo said, “and it’s time for the city to give back to City College.”

Endorsement interviews: London Breed for D5 supervisor

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District 5 candidate London Breed has an amazing life story. She grew up in the Western Addition projects, living with her grandmother at a time when many of the people around her were killed or wound up in prison. She survived, went through public schools and UC Davis and now runs the African American Art and Culture Complex. She’s served on the Redevelopment Commission, where she voted in favor of the Lennar project, and is now on the Fire Commission. “I am here as the result of progressive politics in this city,” she said. She also talked about fiscal responsibility, and how it’s good to have someone at City Hall “who knows the value of a dollar.”

Listen to the full interview after the jump.

Endorsement interviews: Julian Davis for D. 5 supervisor

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Julian Davis, a candidate in District Five, has lined up some impressive endorsements. He’s running to the left of the incumbent, Christina Olague, and talked about “why ordinary people can’t live in this city any more.” He told us that in the 1990s, the city of Chicago poured billions of dollars into affordable housing, and “San Francisco needs to think in the billions.” He also called for a “comprehensive and aggressive revenue strategyl.” You can listen to the entire interview after the jump.

D5, Mirkarimi, and 8 Washington

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Everybody knows that the timing of the Board of Supervisors vote on ousting the sheriff for official misconduct is bad for Ross Mirkarimi. We’re talking about a huge, high-profile decision just weeks before some of the key board members are up for re-election, two of them in hotly contested races. For Sups. Eric Mar and Christina Olague, it’s going to particularly difficult: Mar’s in a moderate district, and he’ll be attacked from the more conservative David Lee if he supports Mirkarimi. Olague’s in a progressive district where Mirkarimi was a popular supervisor, so no matter what she does, she’ll take heat.

But I was a little surprised by Randy Shaw’s analysis, which suggests that Olague will be motivated entirely by political spite:

D5 Supervisor Christina Olague once faced a tough decision on Ross, but since Mirkarimi allies have attacked her on a number of issues it would be very unlikely for her to support him.

That’s pretty insulting. Shaw, who has supported her in the past, is saying that Olague won’t make up her own mind based on the actual issue and case in front of her. She was pretty clear when I called her: “I will vote on the merits of this issue,” she said. “If I was motivated to vote based on who had pissed me off I’d have a hard time voting on anything.”

I’ve disagreed with Olague quite a few times, and one could easily argue that she’ll be under immense pressure from the mayor. (“The mayor doesn’t want a lot from Christina, but he does want this,” one insider told me.) But is it impossible for Shaw to imagine that, in one of the toughest matters she will ever have to handle, the supervisor might actually listen to the testimony, consider the merits of the case, and vote to do what she thinks is right?

Meanwhile, Joe Eskenazi at the Weekly has already announced the Guardian’s endorsement in D5 — which is interesting, since we’re barely started interviewing the candidates. Eskenazi calls Julian Davis “the Guardian’s fair-haired boy” (which, speaking of insults, is not a terribly appropriate way to refer to an African American man), indicating that he’s already our candidate.

For the record: We have not made an endorsement in District Five. We plan to endorse a slate of three candidates for the ranked-choice ballot, and we’ll publish that endorsement the last week in September or the first week in October.

 

 

Endorsement interviews: John Rizzo (D5 supervisor)

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We’re underway with our endorsement interviews for the November election, and I’ll be posting the full sound file of all the interviews as we finish them (and as I have time to upload them). First up: Community College Board member John Rizzo, who is running for supervisor in District 5.

Rizzo told us he has the political experience to take on the district’s, and the city’s, tough problems. Among other things, he wants to eliminate the fund that developer pay into for affordable housing and require market-rate builders to construct affordable units on site. He discussed a “scientific approach” to managing Muni and wants a closer audit of the $600 million the city gives to nonprofits providing public services every year.

You can listen after the jump.

Why?

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steve@sfbg.com

Just a couple years ago, it seemed like the golden age of marijuana in San Francisco, the birthplace of the movement to legalize medical pot and a national leader in creating an effective regulatory framework to govern an industry that had become a legitimate, respected member of the business community.

More than two dozen patient cooperatives jumped through a variety of bureaucratic hoops to become licensed dispensaries, most of them opening storefront businesses that were often the most attractive, clean, and secure retail outlets on their blocks, sometimes in gritty stretches of SoMa, the Tenderloin, or the Mission.

“Pretty much everyone involved agrees that San Francisco’s system for distributing marijuana to those with a doctor’s recommendation for it is working well: the patients, growers, dispensary operators, doctors, politicians, police, and regulators with the planning and public health departments,” I wrote in “Marijuana goes mainstream” (1/28/10).

Since then, San Francisco’s medical marijuana industry has only become more established and professional, complying with new city regulations (such as changing how edibles are packaged to avoid tempting children), paying taxes and fees — and making very few waves. According to city officials, there have been almost no complaints from anyone about the dispensaries — and in San Francisco, people complain about everything.

But in the last six months, the full force of the federal government has brought the hammer down hard on this budding business sector, forcing the closure of eight brick-and-mortar dispensaries and instilling paranoia and insecurity in those that remain.

In just the past few weeks, two of the city’s oldest and most respected dispensaries –- HopeNet and the Vapor Room -– were forced to close their doors.

There’s been little rhyme or reason to which clubs get those dreaded letters warning operators and landlords to shut it down or be subject to asset forfeiture and prison time — and the officials involved have refused to explain their actions, except with moralistic anti-drug statements or unsupported accusations.

“These are people who played by the rules and paid their taxes, and now they’re being punished for it,” said Assembly member Tom Ammiano, a leader in creating a state regulatory framework to govern the distribution of medical marijuana, which California voters legalized in 1996. “This is pure thuggery. They are ignoring due process out of blind prejudice and ambition.”

Ammiano met with Melinda Haag, the US Attorney for the Northern District of California, who has coordinated the local crackdown from her 11th floor office in the Federal Building near City Hall, shortly after she announced her intentions to go after medical marijuana. He said she was like a throwback to a less enlightened era.

“In talking to Haag, not only is she a bit of a bully, but she’s totally uneducated about the issue,” Ammiano told us. When she told him that her office has received many complaints about the dispensaries, he asked to see them -– even making a formal Freedom of Information Act document request –- but she has yet to produce them. “Her duplicity is very moralistic, it’s like going back 100 years.”

Neither Haag nor anyone from the White House or Justice Department would grant an interview to the Guardian to discuss the reasons for and implications of the crackdown, or to answer the list of written questions her office asked us to submit. Instead, Haag gave the Guardian this statement and refused to respond to our follow-up questions:

“Although all marijuana stores are illegal under federal law, I decided to use our limited resources to address those that are in close proximity to schools, parks and playgrounds and operations so large that they constitute marijuana superstores. I hope that those who believe marijuana stores should be left to operate without restriction can step back for a moment and understand that not everyone shares their point of view, and that my office has received many phone calls, letters and emails from people who are deeply troubled by the tremendous growth of the marijuana industry in California and its influence on their communities.”

But in San Francisco, where more than 80 percent of residents consistently support medical marijuana in polls and at the ballot box, most people don’t share Haag’s point of view. And city officials contest many of her claims, from saying the dispensaries are “left to operate without restriction” to her implication that they promote crime or endanger children to the haphazard way she has targeted dispensaries to the characterization that many people are “deeply troubled by the tremendous growth of the marijuana industry.”

In fact, to talk to city officials, virtually nothing Haag says is true.

“We’re not getting nuisance complaints [about the dispensaries],” Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, the city’s medical director who oversees regulation of the dispensaries by the Department of Public Health, told the Guardian. “We’ve had very few complaints over the years and good cooperation with the storefront part of the regulations.”

Almost across the board, city officials and club operators praise one another and the cooperative relationship they’ve established over the last four years. Some of San Francisco’s biggest dispensaries have somehow avoided Haag’s wrath, but their once-open operators are now afraid to speak publicly, warily checking the mailbox each day. A thriving industry eager to pay its taxes and submit to regulation is being driven back underground, with all the uncertainty and hazards that creates.

“The question everyone is asking: Why here, why now, why these businesses? Nobody knows the answer,” Bhatia said. “We’re left to speculate and guess about motives.”

MULTI-AGENCY ATTACK

The federal crackdown has been stunning in both its speed and breadth, with various federal agencies coordinating their attacks. The IRS is auditing the biggest clubs and denying write-offs for routine business expenses, the DEA is threatening asset forfeiture efforts, and Haag and the DOJ are threatening prison time and court injunctions.

Underlying all of that is President Barack Obama, who pledged not to use federal resources to go after those in compliance with state law in the 17 states where medical marijuana is legal. Then, last year, Attorney General Eric Holder suddenly announced a new policy: “It will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana, but we will not tolerate drug traffickers who hide behind claims of compliance with state law to mask activities that are clearly illegal.”

When we sought an explanation and clarification from the White House Communications Office about why well-established medical marijuana collectives carefully operating under California law were suddenly deemed “drug traffickers” that wouldn’t be tolerated, they refused to answer and referred us to a statement Obama made to Rolling Stone magazine.

“What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana -— and the reason is, because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law,” Obama told the magazine.

That simplistic explanation – which conveniently ignores how people are supposed to get this medicine – has infuriated local growers and patients. It’s particularly galling for those who supported Obama and took him at his word in the last election, and who don’t understand why he is suddenly escalating the federal war on drugs, ignoring local laws and values, and re-criminalizing their communities.

FUNERAL PROCESSION

Hundreds of medical marijuana supporters gathered on Aug. 1 for a New Orleans-style funeral procession at the Lower Haight intersection near where Vapor Room had operated -– without incident and with praise as a model business from three successive district supervisors –- from 2004 until the previous day.

The mood was festive and defiant on that sunny afternoon, where advocates from both sides of the bay gathered to express solidarity with the closed clubs and resolve to battle through the recent setbacks.

“I’m feeling the fight,” Steve DeAngelo, star of the reality television show Weed Wars and head of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, which received Haag’s shut-down-or-else letter last month, told the Guardian. “I don’t think we can allow taking a few hits to break our spirit….We started this struggle to win it and we’re not going to stop until we do.”

Local politicians and business leaders also came to offer their support.

“As president of the Lower Haight Merchants Association, I’m upset that Vapor Room had to shut down,” Thea Selby, who is also running for the District 5 supervisorial seat, told us. “The Vapor Room did a lot of good for this neighborhood and was a great business.”

Marchers, most clad in black, carried “Cannabis is Medicine: Let States Regulate” and other signs -– as well as a makeshift coffin and massive puppet depicting a scowling Haag -– and danced down the middle of the street as Brass Mafia horns belted out lively jazz tunes. By the time the procession reached Haag’s office at the Federal Building, a chill fog had darkened the skies and the mood.

DeAngelo took the bullhorn first and called out Obama directly: “Either you were lying, sir, or your employees are out of step with your policies.” Steph Sherer, executive director of the DC-based Americans for Safe Access, told the crowd, “We need to tell Obama to lose Haag or lose California.”

Ammiano and the other mostly Democratic Party politicians who spoke tried to avoid putting Obama directly into the crosshairs of the angry activists, although he did say those executing this crackdown “are harming Obama’s chances of winning.” He also urged activists to put the pressure on politicians in Sacramento and Washington DC: “We need to be a voice in reshaping what’s happened in these last few months.”

Ammiano said the crackdown “empowers the cartels and the people who use violence,” contrasting that with San Francisco’s civilized approach to regulating marijuana.

“We in San Francisco have been a model for how to regulate this industry and we have been successful. We are not going to let the federal government interfere with our rights in this city,” Sup. David Campos told the crowd.

Cathy Smith, the founder of HopeNet, who was still reeling from watching her club gutted and shuttered the day before, also sounded an angry and defiant tone, urging supporters to make their voices heard by Haag and others.

“Everybody that’s here needs to go up to this evil woman’s office tomorrow and tell them what we think,” Smith said.

The general feeling was that if the feds can target model clubs like HopeNet and Vapor Room –- which had deep community roots and generous compassionate care programs for low-income patients -– then all clubs are in danger.

“I’m very upset that we’re losing two great medical marijuana dispensaries where patients could medicate on site,” said David Goldman, a local ASA activist and member of the city’s Medical Cannabis Task Force, noting how important that is for patients who live in apartments that ban smoking.

HopeNet and Vapor Room were some of the only dispensaries in town where smoking was allowed on site, because they were more than 1,000 feet from schools, playgrounds, or day care facilities, the city’s standard. Bhatia said that’s a very strict standard in a city as dense as San Francisco, which is why only four clubs ever met it.

Yet the feds saw things differently, ostensibly targeting HopeNet because a small private school opened two blocks away last year, and the Vapor Room because the feds didn’t use the city’s standard of being more than 1,000 feet from the playground at Duboce Park, instead deciding the dispensary was a community menace because it was a little under 1,000 feet from that dog-friendly park’s nearest patch of grass.

LAST DAYS

Vapor Room founder Martin Olive was a bundle of complicated emotions on the club’s last day in business (it will still operates as delivery-only, just like HopeNet, Medithrive, and a few other shuttered clubs have done). Initially, he didn’t want to talk to us: “I’m trying to keep a lower profile because it’s scary out there now.”

But he slowly opened up and tried to describe the feeling of watching his proudest accomplishment so rapidly undone by the one-two punch of a letter from the merchant services company cutting off credit card access (just like every dispensary in the city, returning pot sales to a cash-only status) followed days later by Haag’s shut-down letter.

“It’s complicated emotions that I’m feeling -– let down, confused. At the end of the day, I don’t understand why this is happening,” Olive said. “It’s a community tragedy, it really is.”

Vapor Room was a welcoming gathering place for its members and a supporter of a variety of community events and causes.

“I’ve always treated this as if it were just a nice coffee house. I’m not an outlaw,” Olive said. “I almost forgot I was breaking federal law. It was so normal, so legitimate.”

In fact, some club owners say their establishments helped clean up rough streets. “We took care of the entire block. Before us, it was all dealers, so there’s a safety issue,” HopeNet’s Smith told me as the once-welcoming club on 9th Street near Howard was reduced to bare walls.

Patients were also feeling the pain, including a 48-year-old ex-con who said he was paroled two years ago after serving 25 years in prison for attempted murder. “I have anger issues, big time. The only thing that keeps me calm and quiet and not blowing up is medical marijuana,” he told us, seething, before praising HopeNet’s “homelike environment” and supportive community. “It’s important to sit and relax in an environment that is comfortable and safe. All this is doing is pushing us into the streets.”

DRIVEN UNDERGROUND

Before going through his latest official misconduct battles and fighting to return to his job as the elected sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi was the District 5 supervisor who sponsored the creation of the city’s medical marijuana regulatory system, the product of a long and arduous legislative process.

“We developed the system out of stark necessity because neither local government nor state government gave a roadmap to the dispensaries,” Mirkarimi said. “Prop. 215 legalized medical marijuana, but there were no rules around it.”

After an intensely collaborative process that lasted more than a year, the city in 2005 adopted a process for licensing dispensaries that balanced the needs of this nascent industry with concerns by police, patients, disability rights activists, neighborhood groups, and health officials. Mirkarimi said that maybe it’s time for city officials to consider an idea he floated a few years ago of having the city itself directly distribute medical marijuana through General Hospital.

“I still think that’s a good idea, particularly if the feds are going to force medical marijuana dispensaries back into the dark ages.” For all his praise of the city’s dispensaries, Dr. Bhatia will admit that the industry still needed better oversight -– dealing with issues such as standards for growing and transporting cannabis, fiscal transparency, and potency and dosage standards –- but the federal crackdown has scuttled his efforts to expand the city’s regulatory system.

“This DEA action stops us from making progress on the regulation of clubs that we need to make,” Bhatia said. “There are lots of issues, but we had just finished getting the clubs into their housing.” Now the industry is being driven back underground.

Ironically, Haag and other federal officials have accused dispensary operators of profiteering, which they’ll certainly be more free to do now that local officials have lost their leverage to begin regulating the finances of the supposedly nonprofit patient collectives that officially operate each dispensary.

“That was one of the areas that we never developed the tools or capacity to look at,” said Bhatia, who proposed more transparent record-keeping by dispensaries last year, only to have the operators express concern about how the feds might use that information, which turned out to be an understandable fear.

Davis snags a trio of top progressive endorsements

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District 5 supervisorial candidate Julian Davis is emerging as the progressive standard-bearer in that competitive race after today receiving the endorsements of a trio of top progressive politicians: Sups. John Avalos and David Campos and attorney Matt Gonzalez, the former board president, mayoral candidate, and D5 supervisor.

Gonzalez had endorsed appointed incumbent Sup. Christina Olague – who he appointed to the Planning Commission in 2004 – but he withdrew that endorsement last month after being frustrated by a series of actions in which she sided with Mayor Ed Lee, moderates, and developers over her longtime progressive colleagues and constituents.

Avalos and Gonzalez are endorsing just Davis, at least for now, while Campos added to his early endorsement of Olague by today endorsing Davis and John Rizzo, who had earlier snagged the other prized progressive endorsement by winning the support of Assembly member Tom Ammiano.

Davis, who was already endorsed by former supervisor and local Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin, said he’s thrilled with today’s triple endorsement. While some have questioned his anemic fundraising so far, raising less than $10,000 as of June 30, Davis notes that he had been in the race for less than a month before that deadline and that he expects to have more than $150,000 to get his message out.

“What these endorsements signal is a confidence from San Francisco’s progressive leaders, not only in the vision of this campaign, but in our capacity to win,” Davis told us.

Avalos said that he has confidence in Davis’ values, experience, and his ability to run a strong race that will help to reinvigorate the progressive movement.

“Julian is a solid candidate who has been around for years on a number of progressive causes. Running for mayor, I was impressed with his connection to neighborhood issues ranging from small business development to urban cycling and youth and worker rights. His campaign has a good buzz about it, one that I expect will resonate with District 5 residents,” Avalos told us.

Olague faces her challengers during first D5 debate

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Tonight’s inaugural District 5 supervisorial debate will be a key test for Sup. Christina Olague – who has fallen from favor with many progressives after a series of bad votes and prickly or evasive interactions with one-time allies – and a test for the rival candidates who are seeking to become the main progressive champion in one of the city’s most leftist districts.

The elected incumbents on the Board of Supervisors have ended up with surprisingly easy paths to reelection [8/9 UPDATE: with the exception of Eric Mar in D1], leaving D5 – as well as conservative District 7, where FX Crowley, Norman Yee, and Michael Garcia are part of a competitive field seeking to replace termed out Sup. Sean Elsbernd – as the race to watch this year.

Olague has been trying to execute a tough balancing act between the progressive community that she’s long identified with and the moderates she began courting last year with her early support for Mayor Ed Lee, who returned the favor and appointed her to serve the final year of Ross Mirkarimi’s D5 term. But by most accounts, she hasn’t executed the feat well, usually siding with Lee on key votes, but doing so in a waffling way that has frustrated both sides.

Progressive candidates such as Julian Davis and John Rizzo will have plenty of fodder with which to attack Olague as a turncoat, including her votes on the 8 Washington project and Michael Antonini, her strange antics on repealing ranked-choice voting, and her close ties to power brokers such as Rose Pak, who hosted a fundraiser that provided more than half of the $81,333 Olague has raised this year, much of it from developers and other interests outside of D5.

Matt Gonzalez – the former D5 supervisor, board president (from where he appointed Olague to the Planning Commission), and mayoral candidate – was so frustrated with Olague that he withdrew his endorsement of her last month, a decision that her other progressive endorsers are also said to be mulling.

With Mirkarimi tarnished by his ongoing official misconduct probe, the endorsement of Gonzalez could be the most significant in this race, and he told us that he plans to make a decision by Friday, the deadline for submission of ballot statements and a point at which we may hear about other changed or dual endorsements from prominent progressives. Other key nods in the race so far have been Aaron Peskin endorsing Davis and Tom Ammiano endorsing Rizzo, two candidates each vying to become the favorite of the left, with Thea Selby, Hope Johnson, and Andrew Resignato also courting support from the left.

Yet so far, the strongest challenge of Olague seems to be coming from her right, with moderate London Breed leading the fundraising battle with $85,461 as of late June 30, including the maximum $500 donation from venture capitalist Ron Conway – the main fundraiser behind Lee’s election last year – which may be a sign that Olague’s support among moderates is also soft.

Olague may be trying to get back in good with the progressives, last week introducing pro-tenant legislation sought by the San Francisco Tenants Union. But impressions have formed and the pressure is now on, and so far Olague – who didn’t answer our calls seeking comment, another troubling trend – hasn’t performed well in public appearances, mangling organizations’ names and generally not winning over her audiences.

Will Olague step up now that the campaign in entering its public phase? Will another candidate catch fire with progressives? Find out tonight from 6-7:30pm at the Park Branch Library, 1833 Page Street. It’s sponsored by the District 5 Democratic Club, the D5 Neighborhood Action Committee and the Wigg Party.

Or if you miss it, catch the next one on Tuesday, sponsored by the Harvey Milk Democratic Club, starting at 7pm in the Eric Quezada Center, 518 Valencia Street.

Alerts

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WEDNESDAY 8

Speak up: stop and frisk Southeast Community Complex, 1800 Oakdale, SF; Stop and frisk — the controversial, pretty much definitely Fourth Amendment-violating policy that police in New York cling to despite protest and that Mayor Ed Lee recently proposed implementing in San Francisco — just won’t go away, despite opposition from pretty much everyone. This panel discussion and opportunity to debate issues relating to the proposed stop and frisk policy. The event is presented by the Osiris Coalition and filmmaker Kevin Epps.

First District 5 debate of the season Park Branch Library, 1833 Page, SF; District 5 is in the center of San Francisco, and much of the excitement of November’s city elections will center on its race for supervisor. A wide range of candidates will vie for the coveted spot that Ross Mirkarimi left to become sheriff. All of the candidates have promised to show up to this first debate in the hotly contested race. The debate is presented by District 5 Democratic Club, the District 5 Neighborhood Action Committee, and the Wigg Party.

THURSDAY 9

Occupy the Bay Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists’ Hall, 1924 Cedar, Berk; www.bfuu.org. 7pm, $5-10 suggested donation. Filmmakers Name Name and Namey Namey have been documenting Occupy in the Bay Area since the fall. Come reminisce, learn, and be inspired by their film at its premier. You made this history happen, celebrate it, baby!

SATURDAY 11

Black Riders Liberation Party La Peña Cultural Center, 10pm, $5-10. The Black Riders Liberation Party considers itself the new generation of the Black Panther Party, organizing similar programs to stop police violence and gang violence and feed communities. This Saturday, the Party parties. Come celebrate the Black Riders and meet organizers, bring a canned food donation for a discount.

Pistahan Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission and Third St., SF; www.pistahan.net. 11am, free. This giant annual Filipino celebration goes all weekend. Start off the weekend with a parade from Beale and Market streets to Yerba Buena Gardens, where the festival of music, food, performance and education begins.

Foreclosure victory block party 376 Bradford, SF; www.occupybernal.org. 10am, free. Shortly after we named Ross Rhodes a Local Hero (Best of the Bay 2012) for his work protecting his home and those of his Bernal Heights neighbors from unjust foreclosure, he received a loan modification agreement. Come celebrate with Ross and others from Occupy Bernal with a block party at his house. There will be educational presentations about banks’ predatory role in the foreclosure crisis and efforts to fight back in the morning, followed by general partying.

SUNDAY 12

Lessons from Vermont Eric Quezada Center, 518 Valenica, SF; www.collectiveliberation.org. 3-5pm, free. Yes, we have the Affordable Care Act, but it leaves much to be desired, unless you’re in Vermont. There, Governor Peter Shumlin signed universal healthcare into law in May 2011. But of course, Shumlin didn’t do this alone. Come hear a presentation from some of the organizers who won this victory, all the way from the Vermont Workers’ Center.

MONDAY 13

Undocumented and unafraid Asian Law Caucus, 55 Columbus, SF; www.asianlawcaucus.org. 12-1:30pm, free. The Asian Pacific Islander undocumented student group ASPIRE will lead this talk on the immigration rights struggle. The last talk in the Asian Law Caucus-led summer brown bag series is especially timely as undocumented youth work on figuring out if and how they might benefit from President Obama’s policy directive giving limited amnesty to undocumented college students, and what it means for family and friends, especially those already in ICE custody. This talk on the issues youth without legal status face and how to keep building towards the DREAM Act, which would offer broader protections that Obama’s policy.

TUESDAY 14

Milk Club District 5 debate Eric Quezada Center, 518 Valencia, SF; www.milkclub.org. 7-8:30 p.m., free. A District 5 supervisors race debate hosted by the Harvey Milk Democratic Club. Milk Club President Glendon Hyde, aka Anna Conda, says candidates will cover drug policy, public space, sex worker rights, the housing crisis, queer seniors’ issues, and much more. As an extra special bonus, the debate will be hosted by transgender performer Ben McCoy and the Guardian Managing Editor Marke Bieschke.

Antonini, quarterback for development interests, wins the game

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If there was any doubt about the loyalty to developers of Planning Commissioner Michael Antonini, he put them to rest yesterday shortly after finally winning reappointment to a fourth, four-year on a 6-5 vote by the Board of Supervisors. Afterward, in comments to Examiner reporter Joshua Sabatini, Antonini likened his role on the commission to that of a successful football team’s quarterback.

“You want to knock out the quarterback for the other team,” Antonini said. “It’s a tribute in a way – backhanded.”

The five supervisors who opposed Antonini – Sups. David Chiu, John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, and Jane Kim, the board’s most progressive members – seemed to understand that Antonini saw himself playing for the developers and big corporations that see San Francisco mostly as a place to make money, even at the expense of eastern neighborhoods and the city’s long-term interests.

The voting record of this Republican dentist – an elected member of the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee who advocates for right-wing causes (such as crackdowns on the homeless) and candidates – makes clear which team Antonini plays for, and it isn’t the same team as the vast majority of people in San Francisco, where Republicans constitute less than 10 percent of the electorate.

It says a great deal about the corporatist politics of Mayor Ed Lee for re-appointing him, as well as the politics and integrity of the swing votes, Sups. Malia Cohen and Christina Olague, the Lee appointee now running for election in District 5, one of the city’s most progressive districts.

Both supervisors mouthed meaningless platitudes and justifications for their votes, but in reinstating the developers’ quarterback just as the progressives were about to remove him from the game, one wonders what team they’re playing for – or whether they even understand the dimensions of the game they have unexpectedly found themselves playing.

But Antonini clearly understands. And despite the ridiculous statements that Cohen and Olague made about holding him “accountable,” Antonini now has four more years to continue leading a team that is rapidly gentrifying San Francisco, making it more inviting to the Google-busers and Twitterati and their landlords, but less so for the average teacher, clerk, and social worker.

Gonzalez withdraws his endorsement of Olague

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Matt Gonzalez – the attorney and former president of the Board of Supervisors whose 2003 run for mayor galvanized the city’s progressive movement – has withdrawn his endorsement of Sup. Christina Olague for his old District 5 supervisorial seat, citing her positions on the 8 Washington project and replacing ranked-choice (RCV) voting with a September mayoral primary election.

It is perhaps the biggest political blow that Olague has suffered since being appointed to her first elective office by Mayor Ed Lee in January, and a sign that she may be siding more solidly with Lee and his pro-development allies than with the progressive political community she has long identified with – and that could complicate her race in one of the city’s most progressive districts.

Gonzalez, who helped launch Olague’s political career by appointing her to the Planning Commission in 2004, confirmed his decision and the reasons for it, but he told the Guardian that he didn’t want to make a formal public statement yet. That could come later in the week, possibly coupled with a new endorsement in the race.

But he did say that he’s been frustrated with Olague’s actions on both 8 Washington – a housing project for the super-rich on the Embarcadero – and with her recent antics on RCV. In both cases, it wasn’t just the votes, but the way they were made that have raised doubts about Olague with Gonzalez and other progressives.

Olague and Sup. Jane Kim (another former Gonzalez protege who has disappointed many of her one-time progressive supporters on several high-profile issues) not only voted for the 8 Washington project, but also for a series of amendments that made the already lucrative project even more profitable for the developers and costly to the city.

On RCV, as I reported on Friday, Olague surprised progressives by giving new life to efforts by the most conservative supervisors to repeal the system, then has made a shifting series of statements and pledges on the issue, in the end supporting a system that will repeal RCV only for the mayor and create a September election.

The fear is that election would be extremely low turnout, and Lee could win it outright with at least 65 percent of the vote and avoid the normal November election, and Olague has been unwilling to fully explain her position or address concerns that she is simply doing Lee’s bidding. Olague hasn’t returned our calls on that issue or for her reaction to Gonzalez’s decision to withdraw his endorsement.

Olague’s antics on RCV alarm her progressive supporters

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As Sup. Christina Olague was being appointed to the District 5 seat on the Board of Supervisors by Mayor Ed Lee in January, we noted how difficult it might be to balance loyalty to the moderate mayor with her history as a progressive and someone running for office in one of the city’s most progressive districts.

By most indications, Olague doesn’t seem to be handling that balancing act — or the pressure that goes along with it — very well at all, to the increasing frustration of her longtime political allies. And that’s never been more clear than on the issue of repealing the city’s ranked choice voting (RCV) system.

As you may recall, earlier this year the board narrowly rejected an effort by its five most conservative, pro-downtown supervisors to place a measure repealing RCV on the June ballot. So chief sponsor Sup. Mark Farrell tried again in March with a ballot measure for November, this time just for citywide offices, and Olague surprised progressives by immediately co-sponsoring the measure, giving it the sixth vote it needed.

Since then, she’s offered shifting and evasive explanations for her actions, telling RCV supporters that she would withdraw her support then going back on her word. Sources close to Olague say that she’s been taking her marching orders on the issue directly from the Mayor’s Office, even as she tries to appease her progressive supporters.

Even trying to get a straight answer out of her is difficult. Two weeks ago, as the Farrell measure was coming to the board for a vote, I called her on her cell phone to ask whether she still supported the measure, and she angrily complained about why people care about this issue and said “you’re going to write what you want anyway” before abruptly hanging up on me.

I left her a message noting that it was her support for repealing RCV that had raised the issue again, that I was merely trying to find where she now stood, and that we expect accountability from elected officials. She called back an hour later to say she was still deciding and she denied hanging up on me, claiming that she had just run into someone that she needed to talk to.

At that week’s board meeting, she offered an amended version of Farrell’s proposal – which would replace RCV with a primary election in September and runoff in November for citywide offices – repealing RCV only for the mayor’s race. She has not directly addressed the question of why she supports a September election, which is expected to have even lower voter turnout than the old December runoff elections that RCV replaced.

So RCV supporters worked with Board President David Chiu to fashion an third option, this one maintaining the ranked-choice election for all offices in November, but having a December runoff between the top two mayoral finishers.

Going into this week’s board meeting on the issue, nobody was quite sure where Olague stood on that proposal or the overall issue, again because she’s been making different statements to different constituencies. And as the issue came up and various supervisors stated their positions, Olague stayed silent, as she has remained since then, refusing to return our calls or messages on the issue.

But because of technical changes to the three measures requested by the City Attorney’s Office – which Farrell made to Olague’s option, which he said he would support if his is defeated – consideration was delayed by a week to this coming Tuesday.

RCV supporters and Olague’s progressive allies didn’t want to speak on the record given that she is still the swing vote on the issue, but privately they’re fuming about Olague’s squirrely temperament, lack of integrity, and how she’s handling this issue (as well as her bad votes on the 8 Washington high-end housing project and her role in the Lee perjury scandal).

But rival supervisorial candidates like Julian Davis – who came to the hearing at City Hall Tuesday and proclaimed his unqualified support for RCV – are less reticent.

“Silence or avoidance are not acceptable, so we’re calling for her to explain why a low-turnout, plurality election in September is good for San Francisco. Help us understand,” he said, noting that such a election especially hurts minority groups and other progressive constituencies that don’t vote as reliably as conservatives. “Why should Christina Olague have anything to do with it? You and the rest of San Francisco deserve an answer.”

Meanwhile, Davis recently won the endorsement of local Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin, while fellow progressive candidate John Rizzo announced his endorsement by Assembly member Tom Ammiano. And there are rumors that some prominent progressives who have already endorsed Olague are considering withdrawing their endorsements because of her recent behavior.

All of which make for some interesting dramas going into Tuesday’s RCV vote.

Davis launches D5 campaign with fortuitous timing

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When progressive activist Julian Davis formally launched his District 5 supervisorial campaign late last week with a well-attended kickoff party at the Peacock Lounge in Lower Haight, timing and circumstances seemed to be on his side.

Days earlier, Quintin Mecke – a rival for the progressive vote in this staunchly leftist district – announced to supporters that he needed to care for his ailing mother and wouldn’t be running after all. At the same time, appointed incumbent Christina Olague seemed to be rapidly falling from favor with many progressives.

First came the viral video of Olague gushing over all the support she’s received from Chinatown power broker Rose Pak during a fundraiser where she raised nearly $50,000, then her squirrely role in helping the moderates repeal ranked-choice voting, and finally the bizarre episode of clashing with a close progressive ally and friend to defend Mayor Ed Lee from perjury allegations.

Davis has sought to capitalize on the rapidly unfolding developments, today sending out a press release blasting Olague for having “joined the conservatives on the Board of Supervisors to repeal ranked choice voting for mayoral elections,” and telling the Guardian that Mecke’s exit will help clarify the choice D5 voters face.

“The fact that he’s out allows us to consolidate the progressive base,” Davis said, not mentioning that candidates John Rizzo and Thea Shelby will also be vying for the progressive vote.

At his kickoff party, Davis also demonstrated that he has substantial support from another significant D5 voting block – African Americans – for which he’ll be competing with political moderate London Breed, director of the African American Arts & Cultural Complex.

Davis said that with Olague’s support by Mayor Ed Lee and the city’s economic and political establishment, he’ll need to run a strong grassroots campaign based on “people power and shoe leather,” an approach that he’s also displaying with regular street corner campaigning.

“We’re at an economic, social, and political crossroads in San Francisco,” he said at his launch party. “Rogue developers are corrupting City Hall with a vision of luxury condos, corporate tax breaks, chain stores, and parking garages. It’s a vision of San Francisco that doesn’t include us. Everyday, progressive reforms are being dismantled and progressive values are being abandoned.”

Davis is hoping that Olague’s ties to Lee will drag her down in a district that voted almost 2-1 in favor of progressive John Avalos (whose campaign Davis actively worked on) over Lee in last year’s mayor’s race.

“Look what’s happening on the waterfront where Olague voted to approve the 8 Washington development. These are condos for the Kardashians, vacation homes for the ultra rich and the 1 percent. That’s not keeping it real for San Francisco,” he said at the kickoff. “So we’ve got to ask ourselves: how do they get away with it? The only way they can. By choosing your leaders for you. Over the past two years in San Francisco, we’ve had an appointed mayor, an appointed district attorney, an appointed sheriff, and an appointed District 5 supervisor. Does that sound like participatory democracy to you? Does that sound like your vote counts?”

And as Avalos also tried to do in his mayoral campaign, Davis says he wants to use his campaign to help restart the city’s progressive movement, which has been in tatters since being divided and nearly conquered by the politicians and political operatives who helped elevate Lee into Room 200 18 months ago.

As he told supporters, “We can re-launch the progressive movement in San Francisco from this district. We can take back City Hall. We will win this election with people power, street by street, block by block, neighbor to neighbor, shop by shop.”

Under oath

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steve@sfbg.com

Mayor Ed Lee and suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi each took some lumps on June 29 as they were cross-examined by opposing attorneys in front the Ethics Commission, which is conducting the official misconduct case that Lee brought against Mirkarimi over a Dec. 31 domestic violence incident. But the hearings proved unexpectedly dramatic when the room was suddenly cleared for an undisclosed security threat — following testimony by Lee that a city commissioner alleges included perjury.

The incident raises a number of issues that officials hadn’t yet answered by Guardian press time. Was the security threat real? If so, why wasn’t the room or the rest of City Hall properly secured after the mayor was whisked away? If not, who ordered the room cleared and why?

Undersheriff Paul Miyamoto, who ran against Mirkarimi last year, told the Guardian that the San Francisco Police Department notified his office that a caller claimed to have planted bombs outside of City Hall and on the Golden Gate Bridge. Deputies conducted a search and found nothing, and his office didn’t order the recess of the hearing. “We did not evacuate anyone,” he told us.

Speculation about the incident was heightened during the break when Debra Walker, a Mirkarimi supporter and longtime member of the city’s Building Inspection Commission, told the Guardian that Lee committed perjury when he denied speaking with any members of the Board of Supervisors before filing official misconduct charges. Lee was responding to a direct and pointed question from Mirkarimi attorney Shepherd Kopp — one that that Lee’s attorneys had unsuccessfully objected to.

Specifically, Walker said that her longtime friend and political ally Sup. Christina Olague — who Lee appointed to serve the last year of Mirkarimi’s term for the District 5 seat — had told her repeatedly that Lee had asked her advice before filing the charges against Mirkarimi, and that Olague’s advice was that Lee should ask for Mirkarimi’s resignation but drop the matter if he refused.

That allegation, which was first reported on the Guardian’s Politics blog shortly after the commission went into recess (Olague had not yet returned a call from the Guardian asking whether she had spoken to Lee about Mirkarimi), prompted reporters to confront Olague in the hallway outside her supervisorial office, where she tersely denied the allegation and then took refuge behind closed doors.

When the reporters lingered and persisted, waiting for a more complete answer, Olague finally emerged, reiterated her denial, refused to speculate about why her friend Walker would make that claim, and said, “We’re not allowed to discuss this matter with anyone before it comes to the board…I may have to recuse myself from voting on this.”

It was unclear why she thought recusal might be necessary, but if she does disqualify herself from voting on Mirkarimi’s removal later this summer after Ethics completes its investigation and makes its recommendations to the board, that would hurt Lee’s effort to get the nine votes needed to remove Mirkarimi.

When the Ethics Commission hearing resumed after a couple hours, Lee was again placed in a position of denying specific factual allegations that others have made, again raising the possibility that he committed perjury in his sworn testimony, which could expose him to felony criminal charges while undercutting his moral authority to remove Mirkarimi over the single misdemeanor count of false imprisonment that he pleaded guilty to in March.

The second instance was when Kopp asked Lee, “Did you ever extend any offer through third parties that you would find him another job if he resigned?”

“I don’t recall offering Sheriff Mirkarimi any job,” Lee replied.

Kopp specifically asked whether that job offer had been extended on Lee’s behalf by permit expediter Walter Wong or by San Francisco Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin, to which Lee replied, “Absolutely not.”

Mirkarimi supporters have told the Guardian that Peskin had made that offer, which Mirkarimi refused, shortly before the party chair publicly called for Mirkarimi’s resignation. The outgoing message on Peskin’s cell phone said he was unavailable and wouldn’t be checking his messages until July 5. Mirkarimi’s attorneys said they’re still figuring out how to respond to the developments and had no comment, but Walker said she’s willing to testify under oath.

But the dramas underscore the treacherous grounds opened up by these unprecedented proceedings, the first involving the Ethics Commission and the broadened definition of official misconduct placed into the City Charter in 1996. As baseball great Barry Bonds and former President Bill Clinton learned, being forced to testify under oath about sensitive topics can be a tough trap to negotiate.

 

MIRKARIMI TESTIMONY

Deputy City Attorney Peter Keith also seemed to be trying to spring that perjury trap on Mirkarimi as he took the stand on the morning of June 29 following an hour on the stand at the previous night’s hearing. Keith reminded Mirkarimi that he was advised not to discuss his testimony with anyone and asked, “Who have you spoken to since last night?”

“My attorneys,” Mirkarimi answered.

“What did you say to them?” Keith asked, drawing objections about attorney-client privilege that Commission Chair Benedict Hur sustained.

“Did you stop for coffee?” Keith then asked, seemingly concerned that Mirkarimi may have discussed his testimony with someone at the coffee shop that morning, which Mirkarimi denied. Keith let the allegation go but maintained an accusatory, hectoring tone throughout the next three hours that he had Mirkarimi on the stand, two more hours than he had told the commission he would need.

Much of the time was spent trying to establish support for the allegation that Mirkarimi had dissuaded witnesses and sought to thwart the police investigation, which was triggered by a call from Ivory Madison, a neighbor to whom Mirkarimi’s wife, Eliana Lopez, had confided. But the testimony yielded little more than the city’s unsupported inference that Mirkarimi must have directed Lopez and his campaign manager, Linnette Peralta Haynes, to contact Madison after she had called the police and urged her to stop cooperating with them.

Mirkarimi has maintained that he did nothing to dissuade Madison or anyone from talking to police, and that he wasn’t aware of the investigation or that Madison had made a videotape of Lopez showing a bruise on her arm until hours after the police were involved. He even sent a text to Lopez saying there was nothing he could do, as he noted.

“It was after 4pm on January 4 when I first learned of any of this,” Mirkarimi testified, later adding, “I was very clear to her in saying you can’t unring the bell, we have to follow through with this.”

Yet Lee and the deputy city attorneys who are representing him also maintain that they needn’t prove witness dissuasion or other allegations they have made, and that the Dec. 31 incident and Mirkarimi’s guilty plea to a single misdemeanor count of false imprisonment are enough to constitute official misconduct and warrant his removal, an interpretation that Mirkarimi’s attorneys dispute.

Keith sought to hammer home how Mirkarimi should have admitted to and publicly atoned for his crime right away rather than telling reporters it was a “private family matters” (which Mirkarimi admitted was a mistake) or fighting the charges by trying to discredit Madison publicly, an allegation he denies.

After unsuccessfully trying to get Mirkarimi to admit to directing efforts to question Madison’s credibility in local media accounts, Keith asked, “Did you ever direct anyone not to attack Ivory Madison?”

“I never directed anyone to attack or not attack,” Mirkarimi replied.

Keith also clarified that Mirkarimi denies the allegation Madison made that the physical abuse on Dec. 31 went beyond grabbing Lopez’s arm once in the car, as the couple has maintained. “It’s your testimony there was no punching, pulling, or grabbing in the house?” Keith asked, which Mirkarimi confirmed.

Yet Keith said that given the totality of what happened, Mirkarimi should have known he couldn’t continue on as sheriff. “Under those circumstances, wouldn’t resigning be the honorable thing to do?” Keith said, to which Mirkarimi replied that it’s a hard question and that he’s doing what he thinks is right.

Faced with friendlier questions from his own attorney, David Waggoner, Mirkarimi apologized for his actions, saying “I feel horrible and ashamed,” but that he was “sad and scared” to have his family torn apart against their will. He also said that he believes he can still be effective as sheriff because “what makes San Francisco special is our forward-thinking approach to criminal justice.”

Longtime Sheriff Michael Hennessey — who endorsed Mirkarimi and continues to support him — established a variety of programs emphasizing redemption and rehabilitation, hiring former convicts into top jobs in the department to emphasize a belief in restorative justice that Mirkarimi ran a campaign promising to continue.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be an example of what this redemption process looks like,” Mirkarimi said, choking back tears.

But Keith had the last word before Mirkarimi left the stand, belittling the idea that Mirkarimi offers an example to follow by noting how much probation time and court-ordered counseling he still has to undergo and asking, “The process of redemption doesn’t happen overnight, right?”

 

LEE ON THE STAND

Under questioning by Kopp, Mayor Lee admitted that he doesn’t have a written policy on what constitutes official misconduct, that his decisions are made on “a case by case basis,” and that he’s not sure whether conviction of a crime would always constitute official misconduct “because I’ve never confronted this before.”

“Were you aware that many members of the Sheriff Department have criminal convictions?” Kopp asked. Lee said he was not aware. Asked whether he was aware that Sheriff Hennessey had hired a convicted murderer into a top command staff position (see “The unlikely sheriff,” 12/21/11), Lee said he wasn’t.

Lee’s insistence that Mirkarimi’s crime makes him unable to deal effectively with other officials was also attacked by Kopp, who asked, “Isn’t it true that people get elected who have disagreements with other city officials?” He pointed out that City Attorney Dennis Herrera had nasty conflicts with Lee when they ran against each other for mayor last year, but that they’re working well together now.

Kopp also drilled into Lee about his decision to bring official misconduct charges before conducting an investigation or speaking with any witnesses besides Madison — an answer Lee blurted out just as city attorneys objected to the question. Much of Madison’s written testimony has been rejected by the commission as prejudicial hearsay evidence (see “Mayor vs. Mirkarimi,” July 27).

But the public’s perception of this case, if not it’s outcome, could turn on whether Lee is holding Mirkarimi to standards that he himself — as someone appointed mayor on a later-broken promise not to run for a full term — couldn’t meet. It was what Kopp seemed to be driving at before the bomb scare.

“You have asserted in your written charges that Sheriff Mirkarimi’s conduct fell below the standard of decency, good faith, and right action that is impliedly required of all public officials, correct?” Kopp asked.

“Yes,” Lee replied.

“We expect certain things of our elected officials, right?” Kopp asked.

After a long pause, in which Lee appeared to be thinking through his answer, he replied, “That’s generally true, yes.”

“And when the charter speaks of official misconduct, it doesn’t say we expect a certain standard for the sheriff, a different standard for the mayor, a different standard for the DA, a separate standard for the assessor, it just speaks in general terms about official misconduct for public officials, right?” Kopp asked.

Kaiser objected to the question on three counts, sustained on the grounds that it calls for a legal conclusion.

“Do you yourself believe there’s a separate standard for sheriff than for other elected officials?” Kopp asked, and this time the city’s objection was overruled and Lee replied, “It should be the same standard.”

“And would you agree with me that one of the things that is expected of elected officials is for them to be honest and forthright when dealing not only with their constituents, but with other elected officials?” Kopp asked, his final question before Chair Benedict Hur announced that the hearing would be suspended and the room would need to be cleared.

After the hearing reconvened, Kopp drew parallels to other city officials who remained on job after scandals, including former Mayor Gavin Newsom (who had an affair with a subordinate who was married to his campaign manager), former Sheriff Dick Hongisto (who was jailed for refusing to carry out a court’s eviction order), and current Fire Chief Joanne Hayes White (whose husband reported that she hit him in the head with a pint glass).

Asked about the latter case, Lee responded, “I don’t know all the circumstances around that and I don’t believe I was mayor at the time.”

 

Mecke joins crowded District 5 supervisorial race

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Progressive activist Quintin Mecke jumped into the District 5 supervisorial race today, echoing gentrification concerns raised this week by the Guardian and The New York Times and promising to be an independent representative of one of the city’s most progressive districts, a subtle dig at Sup. Christina Olague’s appointment by Mayor Ed Lee.

“The City is at an economic crossroads. As a 15 year resident of District 5, I cannot sit idly by while our City’s policies force out our residents and small businesses, recklessly pursuing profits for big business at whatever cost,” he began a letter to supporters announcing his candidacy, going on to cite the NYT article on the new tech boom that I wrote about earlier this week.

“What we do next will define the future of San Francisco; the city is always changing but what is important is how we choose to manage the change. One path leads to exponential rent increases, national corporate chain store proliferation, and conversion of rent-controlled housing. The other path leads to controlled and equitable growth, where the fruits of economic development are shared to promote and preserve what is great about this City and our district,” Mecke wrote.

Mecke came in second to Gavin Newsom in the 2007 mayor’s race and then served as the press secretary to Assembly member Tom Ammiano before leaving that post last week to run for office. Mecke joins Julian Davis and John Rizzo in challenging Olague from her left, while London Breed and Thea Selby are the leading moderates in a race that has 10 candidates so far, the largest field in the fall races.

Although he never mentioned Olague by name, Mecke closed his message by repeatedly noting his integrity and independence, a theme that is likely to be a strong one in this race as Olague balances her progressive history and her alliance with the fiscally conservative mayor who appointed her.

“Politics is nothing without principles; and it’s time now to put my own principles into action in this race,” Mecke wrote. “District 5 needs a strong, independent Supervisor. I am entering this race to fight for the values that I believe in and to fight to preserve what is great about District 5 and the city. I have brought principled independence to every issue I’ve worked on and that’s what I’ll continue to bring to City Hall.”

In an interview with the Guardian, Mecke said he sees the campaign as a “five-month organizing project” to reach both regular voters and residents of the district who haven’t been politically engaged, including those in the tech sector. He’d like to see the perspective of workers represented in discussions about technology, not simply the narrow view of venture capitalist Ron Conway that Mayor Lee has been relying on.

“Local politics needs new blood,” Mecke said, “it needs to hear from these people.”

Julian Davis announces for supervisor in the key battleground district for progressives (5)

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Julian Davis, a widely known progressive activist and organizer in San Francisco since 2002, declared Tuesday  his intention to run for supervisor in District 5, the city’s most liberal district and a battleground district for progressives seeking to regain control of the Board of Supervisors.

He joins eight other challengers to Sup. Christina Olague, appointed by Mayor Ed Lee to replace former Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. He was considered by many to be  the board’s most reliable progressive. He succeeded Matt Gonzales, a strong progressive.  The battle will center on which candidate will be the most reliable progressive vote–Olague,  whose votes are being carefully watched by progressives, or by one of her challengers.

Davis, a Bay Area native,  is a graduate of Brown University and UC Hastings College of the Law, where he graduated magna cum laude. He has worked in government and non-profit and legal sectors on community development, civil rights, social justice, public power, and environmental causes. He has worked on several candidate and ballot measure campaigns including John Avalos for mayor (20ll), Jane Kim for supervisor (2010), Prop H (2008), Clean Energy Act.) He also led a succeesful campaign in 2007 to free journalist Josh Wolf from federal prison for refusing to reveal sources in a demonstration he was covering.

“I was drawn to San Francisco by the creative energy and culture of the city–by what makes this place so special,” Davis said. “Over the past l0 years, I’ve devoted myself to developing healthy communities. I’m running for supervisor to keep the city a vibrant home for the every day people that make San Francisco real.”  b3

 

 

 

 

The battle of 8 Washington

tredmond@sfbg.com

More than 100 people showed up May 15 to testify on a condominium development that involves only 134 units, but has become a symbol of the failure of San Francisco’s housing policy.

I didn’t count every single speaker, but it’s fair to say sentiment was about 2-1 against the 8 Washington project. Seniors, tenant advocates, and neighbors spoke of the excessive size and bulk of the complex, the precedent of upzoning the waterfront for the first time in half a century, the loss of the Golden Gateway Swim and Tennis Club — and, more important, the principle of using public land to build the most expensive condos in San Francisco history.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, calls it housing for the 1 percent, but it’s worse than that — it’s actually housing for the top half of the top half of the 1 percent, for the ultra-rich.

It is, even supervisors who voted in favor agreed, housing the city doesn’t need, catering to a population that doesn’t lack housing opportunities — and a project that puts the city even further out of compliance with its own affordable-housing goals.

And in the end, after more than seven hours of testimony, the board voted 8-3 in favor of the developer.

It was a defeat for progressive housing advocates and for Board President David Chiu — and it showed a schism on the board’s left flank that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. And it could also have significant implications for the fall supervisorial elections.

Sup. Jane Kim, usually an ally of Chiu, voted in favor of the project. Sup. Eric Mar, who almost always votes with the board’s left flank, supported it, too, as did Sup. Christina Olague, who is running for re-election in one of the city’s most progressive districts.

At the end of the night, only Sups. David Campos and John Avalos joined Chiu in attempting to derail 8 Washington.

The battle of 8 Washington isn’t over — the vote last week was to approve the environmental impact report and the conditional use permit, but the actual development agreement and rezoning of the site still requires board approval next month.

Both Mar and Olague said they were going to work with the developer to try to get the height and bulk of the 134-unit building reduced.

But a vote against the EIR or the CU would have killed the project, and the thumbs-up is a signal that opponents will have an upward struggle to change the minds of Olague, Kim, and Mar.

 

DEFINING VOTES

The 8 Washington project is one of a handful of defining votes that will happen over the next few months. The mayor’s proposal for a business tax reform that raises no new revenue, the budget, and the massive California Pacific Medical Center hospital project will force board members to take sides on controversial issues with heavy lobbying on both sides.

In fact, by some accounts, 8 Washington was a beneficiary of the much larger, more complicated — and frankly, more significant — CPMC development.

The building trades unions pushed furiously for 8 Washington, which isn’t surprising — the building trades tend to support almost anything that means jobs for their members and have often been in conflict with progressives over development. But the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union joined the building trades and lined up the San Francisco Labor Council behind the deal.

And for progressive supervisors who are up for re-election and need union support — Olague and Mar, for example — defying the Labor Council on this one was tough. “Labor came out strong for this, and I respect that,” Olague told me. “That was a huge factor for me.”

She also said she’s not thrilled with the deal — “nobody’s jumping up and down. This was a hard one” — but she thinks she can get the developer to pay more fees, particularly for parking.

Kim isn’t facing re-election for another two years, and she told me her vote was all about the $11 million in affordable housing money that the developer will provide to the city. “I looked at the alternatives and I didn’t see anything that would provide any housing money at all,” she said. The money is enough to build perhaps 25 units of low- and moderate-income housing, and that’s a larger percentage than any other developer has offered, she said.

Which is true — although the available figures suggest that Simon Snellgrove, the lead project sponsor, could pay a lot more and still make a whopping profit. And the Council of Community Housing Organizations, which represents the city’s nonprofit affordable housing developers, didn’t support the deal and expressed serious reservations about it.

Several sources close to the lobbying effort told me that the message for the swing-vote supervisors was that labor wanted them to approve at least one of the two construction-job-creating developments. Opposing both CPMC and 8 Washington would have infuriated the unions, but by signing off on this one, the vulnerable supervisors might get a pass on turning down CMPC.

That’s an odd deal for labor, since CPMC is 10 times the size of 8 Washington and will involve far more jobs. But the nurses and operating engineers have been fighting with the health-care giant and there’s little chance that labor will close ranks behind the current hospital deal.

Labor excepted, the hearing was a classic of grassroots against astroturf. Some of the people who showed up and sat in the front row with pro-8 Washington stickers on later told us they had been paid $100 each to attend. Members of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, to which Snellgrove has donated substantial amounts of money in the past, showed up to promote the project.

 

BEHIND THE SCENES

But the real action was behind the scenes.

Among those pushing hard for the project were Chinese Chamber of Commerce consultant Rose Pak and community organizer David Ho.

Pak’s support comes after Snellgrove spent years courting the increasingly powerful Chinatown activist, who played a leading role in the effort that got Ed Lee into the Mayor’s Office. Snellgrove has traveled to China with her — and will no doubt be coughing up some money for Pak’s efforts to rebuild Chinese Hospital.

Ho was all over City Hall and was taking the point on the lobbying efforts. Right around midnight, when the final vote was approaching, he entered the board chamber and followed one of Kim’s aides, Matthias Mormino, to the rail where Mormino delivered some documents to the supervisor. Several people who observed the incident told us Ho appeared to be talking Kim in an animated fashion.

Kim told me she didn’t actually speak to Ho at that point, although she’d talked to him at other times about the project, and that “nothing he could have said would have changed anything I did at that point anyway.” Matier and Ross in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Ho was heard outside afterward saying “don’t worry, she’s fine.”

Matier and Ross have twice mentioned that the project will benefit “Chinatown nonprofits,” but there’s nothing in any public development document to support that assertion.

Chiu told me that no Chinese community leaders called him to urge support for 8 Washington. The money that goes into the affordable housing fund could go to the Chinatown Community Development Corp., where Ho works, but it’s hardly automatic — that money will go into a city fund and can’t be earmarked for any neighborhood or organization.

CCDC director Norman Fong confirmed to me that CCDC wasn’t supporting the project. In fact, Cindy Wu, a CCDC staffer who serves on the city Planning Commission, voted against 8 Washington.

I couldn’t reach Ho to ask why he was working so hard on this deal. But one longtime political insider had a suggestion: “Sometimes it’s not about money, it’s about power. And if you want to have power, you need to win and prove you can win.”

Snellgrove will be sitting pretty if 8 Washington breaks ground. Since it’s a private deal (albeit in part on Port of San Francisco land) there’s no public record of how much money the developer stands to make. But Chiu pointed out during the meeting, and confirmed to me later by phone, that “there are only two data points we know.” One is that Snellgrow informed the Port that he expects to gross $470 million in revenue from selling the condos. The other is that construction costs are expected to come in at about $177 million. Even assuming $25 million in legal and other soft costs, that’s a huge profit margin.

And it suggests the he can well afford either to lower the heights — or, more important, to give the city a much sweeter benefits package. The affordable housing component could be tripled or quadrupled and Snellgrove’s development group would still realize far more return that even the most aggressive lenders demand.

Chiu said he’s disappointed but will continue working to improve the project. “While I was disappointed in the votes,” he said, “many of my colleagues expressed concerns about height, parking, and affordable housing fees that they can address in the upcoming project approvals.”

So what does this mean for the fall elections? It may not be a huge deal — the symbolism of 8 Washington is powerful, but if it’s built, it won’t, by itself, directly change the lives of people in Olague’s District 5 or Mar’s District 1. Certainly the vote on CPMC will have a larger, more lasting impact on the city. Labor’s support for Mar could be a huge factor, and his willingness to break with other progressives to give the building trades a favor could help him with money and organizing efforts. On the other hand, some of Olague’s opponents will use this to differentiate themselves from the incumbent. John Rizzo, who has been running in D5 for almost a year now, told me he strongly opposed 8 Washington. “It’s a clear-cut issue for me, the wrong project and a bad deal for the city.” London Breed, a challenger who is more conservative, told us: “I would not have supported this project,” she said, arguing that the zoning changes set a bad precedent for the waterfront. “There are so many reasons why it shouldn’t have happened,” she said. And while Mar is in a more centrist district, support from the left was critical in his last grassroots campaign. This won’t cost him votes against a more conservative opponent — but if it costs him enthusiasm, that could be just as bad.

Olague explains her support for RCV repeal measure

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  Sup. Christina Olague has drawn ire from progressive circles over her pivotal co-sponsorship of a proposed charter amendment that aims to eliminate Ranked Choice Voting in all citywide races. It takes six members of the Board of Supervisors to place the repeal measure on the November ballot and she is the sixth co-sponsor.

Olague has long ties to the progressive community and was appointed by Mayor Ed Lee to the District 5 seat, one of the city’s most progressive, in January after Ross Mirkarimi was elected Sheriff. This week, she joined Sean Elsbernd, Carmen Chu, Scott Wiener, and Malia Cohen – all considered moderate/conservative supervisors – in supporting Sup. Mark Farrell’s proposal to replace RCV with runoff elections for the mayor’s race and other citywide offices.

“To me, this isn’t a progressive or moderate issue. This is a democratic one here in San Francisco,” Farrell said during Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, where he introduced the measure, which will have a hearing next month. “Ranked Choice Voting has continued to confuse and disenfranchise voters here for over a decade and, in my opinion, it’s time to restore our voting system to the one person, one vote rule.”

Farrell’s sentiments mirror a similar line trumpeted by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, a supporter of runoff elections and longtime opponent of RCV. A recent poll commissioned by the Chamber, which claims 58 percent of respondents prefer runoff elections, has been discounted as biased and based on misleading statements. Farrell, who was elected to the District 2 seat in November using RCV, said he would have prefers to eliminate RCV altogether in San Francisco but said, “This is a significant step in the right direction.” A proposed ballot measure by Farrell and Elsbernd to eliminate RCV was rejected by the Board of Supervisors last month.

Steven Hill, who helped crafted the city’s voter-approved RCV system, criticized the move to repeal it: “Critics of RCV have long maintained that voters are confused and even disenfranchised and yet they have offered no credible evidence to support these claims. In fact, the evidence shows just the opposite, that voters understand what they have to do with RCV, which is to rank their ballots, 1, 2, 3, and they are using their ranked ballots effectively.”

In an interview conducted as she was departing the Westbay Community Center on Thursday, Olague initially rebuffed our request to discuss her support for Farrell’s amendment (just as she had an earlier request by the Guardian), but she ultimately relented.

Here’s what she had to say:

Olague: “What it is is that it begins a conversation.  There was talk of eliminating RCV altogether, which I certainly don’t support.  There was talk from a lot of different corners, not just moderate circles, but progressive circles as well, that maybe we need to examine it and see how has it or has it not really been – has it really helped us reach our goals in the way that we had originally intended that it would.”

SFBG: What were those goals?

Olague: “I think it was to try to make sure that more progressives were elected… and make it easier for people who had lesser means to prevail… So I think maybe it is time to reflect on that a little bit.”

SFBG: What parts of RCV don’t you like or don’t support?

Olague: “Well, I think it’s just time to have a conversation about it.  I’m not even sure that I’m against it, per se. When I signed on to it, I believed it was looking at keeping some of the citywide races, where there are fewer numbers of candidates engaged, to reverting back to a runoff, and keeping the races where we have a diversity of candidates and numerous candidates, which are the district races, as they are – which is ranked choice voting.”

“Now there’s some people who say what we need to do is, well, maybe revisit that and maybe just, rather than have it apply to all citywide races, maybe it should just apply to the mayor’s race.”

“So I think there needs to be a conversation and there needs to be a reflection on its effectiveness.  I think that’s what [Sup. John] Avalos and even [Sup. David] Campos were thinking that there needs to be more education – and I do think there needs to be more education as it relates to RCV.”

SFBG: Voters don’t seem to be confused about filling out an RCV ballot, but maybe there’s confusion about how votes are tallied and candidates are eliminated.  It would appear that there’s a myth being spread that voters are confused about filling in a RCV ballot, but that doesn’t appear to be the case…

Olague: “Do you know that?  I think when you talk to people out there on either side of spectrum, politically, I think there’s still a lot of – I don’t think that people have necessarily concluded that this is the most effective way of achieving certain goals.  But, you know, I think it starts a conversation and it may end up that the voters decide, you know, let’s just leave it the way it is, we’re happy with it.”

SFBG: And how would you feel if RCV is completely eliminated?

Olague: “Well it’s not going to be eliminated because there’s nothing in the charter amendment asking that RCV be eliminated.  What I was concerned about was that there was a push to eliminate it altogether, which I don’t support.  What this does, I figured I’ll meet them halfway because I can’t support a complete repeal of RCV and currently the way this charter amendment is drafted, what is does is it keeps RCV in the District elections.  That stays the same, and the citywide elections would be reverting back to a runoff, so it goes to a more citywide for a runoff, ranked choice voting for District [elections]. There is an argument to be made for why that should be the case.”

SFBG: Wouldn’t this eliminate a diversity of candidates if there were a repeal of RCV in citywide races?

Olague: “So let’s have the debate and people may decide, you know, if it’s not a good idea. People may decide they want to push to amend the charter amendment as it is before us.  Some people are thinking it should just apply to the mayor’s race and not other citywide races like public defender and others. So maybe there’ll be amendments to the charter amendment before it even hits the ballot.”

SFBG: Why do you think some people are up in arms over your support on this?

Olague: “I guess, you know, I mean – I just think that everyone is going to sit around and wait for something, right?  They’re, sort of, laying in wait, right? So it’s just what it is, you know – it’s like people are going to agree with me sometimes, they’re not going to agree with me other times.  There are some things that I am doing that is progressive, there are some things people will perceive as not being progressive.”

SFBG: Did you come to this decision by yourself, or was there any influence or pressure from others to vote the way you did on this?

Olague: “No.  I just think it’s funny because it’s like I don’t really succumb to pressure.  I’m willing to start the conversation at some kind of a compromise.  To me, this is as close to a compromise as we’re going to get and then it can start the conversation. So I think the conversation will start and people can assume all kinds of things, and they will.”

SFBG: So you voted in good conscience?  You didn’t have any doubts about your vote?

Olague: “I vote in good conscience, but sometimes you have to go with a compromise.  It’s not completely what you want and it might not be completely what you don’t want, but the alternative might be something that is completely unacceptable, which could be the complete elimination of RCV.”

 

A version of this story also appears on Fog City Journal, which is run by Luke Thomas.

D5 candidates and constituents scrutinize Olague

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San Francisco’s political lines are in the process of being redrawn. That’s true literally, with the current reconstitution of legislative districts based on the latest census, but it’s also true figuratively: old alliances based on identity and ideology are being replaced with uncertain new political dynamics. And nowhere is that more true than in District 5.

In a recent Guardian, we explored the implications of Sup. Christina Olague’s dual (and potentially dueling) loyalties between Mayor Ed Lee, who appointed her to the job, and the progressive political community with which Olague has long identified. Those seemed to play out yesterday when Olague bucked progressives to be the sixth co-sponsor of Sup. Mark Farrell’s proposed charter amendment to repeal ranked-choice voting for citywide offices.

Already, many of her progressive constituents – even those who have strongly supported her – have been privately grumbling that Olague hasn’t been accessible and expressing doubts about her ability to lead one of the city’s most progressive districts. Olague, who initially returned our calls immediately but said she’d have to get back to us about supporting Farrell’s legislation (I’ll add an update if/when she calls back), adamantly denied that she’s had a slow start.

“We’ve been working with constituents constantly,” she said, rattling off a list of nightly meetings. “I’m in the community all the time, getting coffee with folks…We’re working on multiple issues here.”

Michael O’Connor – who owns The Independent and other businesses and who ran in D5 in 2004 and may run again this year – supports Olague but questions the conventional wisdom that her progressive roots and mayoral support make her a lock for reelection this year.

“Olague is an awesome person and she would be a great supervisor in District 9,” O’Connor said, citing her strong ties to the Mission District and work with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. “But she’s very beatable in D5 because she doesn’t have the deep connections to the community.”

That’s a belief that is shared by others, including London Breed – the executive director of the African American Art & Cultural Center for the last 10 years – who jumped into the race last week and threatened to cut into Olague’s support among Mayor Lee’s supporters.

With Attorney General Kamala Harris and other Lee supporters by her side, Breed cast herself as a more authentic and grassroots representative for the district where she was raised. Or as Harris said, “London understands the challenges and strengths of the district. She is, bar none, the best voice for District 5.”

Left unsaid was the split that her candidacy created among supporters of Lee, whose ascension to Room 200 was engineered largely by former mayor Willie Brown and Chinatown power broker Rose Pak. Brown (along with some of the city’s most influential African American ministers) strongly backed Breed for the D5 appointment, while Pak wanted her ally Malcolm Yeung, although she reportedly got behind Olague in the end.

Breed told us that she was supportive of Olague and that “I’ve been adamant about people giving her a chance and working with her.” But she said that it’s already become “clear that she just doesn’t have what it takes and was probably not going to get there,” based on “the feedback and phone calls I got with the experience people had in meeting her.”

“She’s familiar with planning, but not necessarily with the neighborhood and all its community groups,” Breed said. As for crossing Mayor Lee with her decision to run, Breed told us, “This was a hard decision for me to make because I work with many of these people and have good relationship with him.”

Progressive D5 candidates, such as City College Board President John Rizzo, are waiting to take advantage of votes on which Olague breaks with the progressives to carry water for the mayor. As he told us, “The mayor doesn’t get to make this decision, it’s the voters of this district that will decide.”

Like Breed, Rizzo also emphasized his long ties to the district. “I respect Christina and like Christina, but my connections are very deep,” he said, citing his 26 years of living and working as an environmental activist in the district. “I have a record of going out and taking the initiative and making things happen.”

Thea Selby, president of the Lower Haight Merchants and Neighbors Association, has also been running an active campaign for the D5 job, including highlighting Olague’s split loyalties. “She literally switched camps to help chair the Run Ed Run committee,” she told us. Julian Davis, who ran for D5 supervisor in 2004 and has been rumored to be mulling another run, said that it’s disconcerting just how many elected officials in San Francisco started off with the advantage of being appointed to the office: “It’s not participatory democracy the way we envision it.”

Selby and others will be closely watching how Olague votes this year, and trying to differentiate when those votes are significant (such as being the swing vote to place the challenge to RCV on the ballot) or not (including Olague’s early vote to override Lee’s veto, which fell two votes short of the eight needed). “We need to look and see how she votes on things – and when it matters and when it doesn’t,” Selby said.

Yet already, even before the really big and controversial votes like the upcoming 8 Washington and CPMC projects, Olague is feeling the polar tugs on issues such as bicycling. Many bike advocates are mad that Lee has delayed promised bike lanes on Oak Street and with a rash of tickets that cyclists on the Wiggle have received.

“I’ve long been an advocate of biking, but I know there are issues related to parking in the neighborhood,” Olague told us, straddling the issue. “Parking for some reason is a very controversial issue in the city.”

And where does she come down on the stepped up enforcement of bikes rolling stop signs on the Wiggle? “I want to sit down with the Bike Coalition and see what they think,” Olague said.

Meanwhile, Breed – who is widely considered a political moderate, which could cause her problems winning in D5 – is also trying to position herself as more independent than Olague. “I’m about being progressive,” she told us, citing her recent hiring of a case worker at the AAACC to help young African Americans work through barriers to success. “To me, that’s what being progressive is.”

Breed readily acknowledged her early political support from Brown, who appointed her to the Redevelopment Commission when he was mayor, but said that she would still take a tough stand against Lennar and other developers to ensure the needs of current San Franciscans are being met by new projects.

“I’ve told people, this does not mean you have my support,” Breed said of her political contributors and her support of Lennar’s massive redevelopment of the southeast part of the city. “As my grandmother used to say, all money ain’t good money.”

On Breed’s entrance into the race, Olague told us, “It was expected, so I’m not surprised.” Olague said that she’s begun to set up her election campaign, but that most of her focus has been on getting up to speed at City Hall and in D5: “I’m just trying to focus on the work of the district.”

The case against 8 Washington

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tredmond@sfbg.com

In city planning terms, it’s a fairly modest project: 134 condos, no buildings more than 12 stories tall, on a 27,000-square-foot site. It’s projected to meet the highest environmental building standards and offers new open space and pedestrian walkways. It’s near Muni, BART, and ferry lines. And the city will collect millions of dollars in new taxes from it.

But the 8 Washington project, which will come before the Planning Commission March 8, has become a flashpoint in city politics, one of the defining battles of Mayor Ed Lee’s administration — and a symbol of how the city’s housing policy has failed to keep pace with the needs of the local workforce.

Put simply, it will create the most expensive condos in city history, housing for the richest of the 1 percent on the edge of the waterfront — and will further push San Francisco toward becoming a city that caters almost entirely to the very wealthy.

So in a city where the growing divide between the 1 percent and the rest of us has become a central issue and where the lack of affordable housing is one of the top civic concerns, 8 Washington is an important test. By any rational standard, this sort of development is the last thing San Francisco needs.

But some of the best-connected lobbyists in the city are pushing it. One of the mayor’s closest allies, Chinatown powerbroker Rose Pak, is a leading advocate — and the final outcome will say a lot about city politics in the Lee administration.

There are all sorts of half-truths and misleading statements by supporters of 8 Washington. Here are the five main reasons the project shouldn’t be approved.

1. It fills no housing need. San Francisco has no shortage of housing for the very rich; the dramatic need, outlined in both regional planning documents and the city’s own General Plan, is for low- and moderate-income housing for the people who actually work in this city (see “Dollars or sense?” 9/28/10). While San Francisco is getting richer by the day, the core workforce — public employees, workers in the hotel and restaurant industry, service workers, construction and trade workers, and a majority of the people in the lower levels of the finance and tech sector — are being priced out of the city. That means more people working here and living far out of town, often commuting by car, in what everyone agrees is an unsustainable situation. Meanwhile, more and more high-paid workers from Silicon Valley are living in San Francisco — again, commuting to distant jobs, either by car or by corporate bus.

The city’s General Plan states that some 60 percent of all new housing built in the city should be below market rate. San Francisco desperately needs housing for its workforce. This type of project simply puts the city deeper in the hole and further from its housing goals.

2. It’s a reward for bad actors. The main developer of this project is Simon Snellgrove, but one of his partners is, by necessity, Golden Gateway, which owns a significant part of the land — and which has been flouting at least the spirit if not the letter of city and state law and costing San Francisco tens of millions of dollars.

As project opponent Brad Paul has noted in written testimony, when Timothy Foo, the current owner, bought the complex from Perini Corp. about 20 years ago, he used a loophole in state law that allowed him to avoid a formal transfer of ownership. That means the property wasn’t re-assessed, costing the city about $1.5 million a year. According to the Assessor’s Office, the deal wasn’t illegal (and these tricks to avoid reassessment are relatively common) but still: He’s costing the city millions by using a loophole not available to most people.

Golden Gateway, which was built in a redevelopment area as middle-class housing, is now renting out apartments as short-term tourist or corporate rentals. There are dozens of examples right now on Craigslist. City law bars the owners of rental housing from converting it to hotel rooms, but a loophole in that law makes what Foo’s outfit is doing technically legal. But he’s clearly violating the spirit of the city ordinance that seeks to protect rental housing from hotel conversions.

One of the main aesthetic complaints about the area — something Snellgrove’s lobbyists have tried to use to support the project — is the ugly fence that now surrounds the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club. But who do you suppose put that fence there?

Do we as a city want to be giving special zoning benefits to companies that try to circumvent tax and housing laws?

3. It’s an environmental disaster. Snellgrove and his architects, Skidmore Owning and Merrill, are seeking LEED platinum certification for the project, saying that its energy-efficiency, water use, and green building materials will make it one of the most sustainable structures in San Francisco. It is, the project website notes, close to all types of public transit.

But LEED doesn’t take into account what the building is used for (see “Is LEED really green,” 7/5/11) — and in this case, the use makes a huge amount of difference.

People who buy multi-million-dollar condos don’t tend to take Muni or BART when they go places. That’s not conjecture, it’s a proven fact. A 2008 study by the American Public Transportation Association notes, bluntly, that wealthier people are more likely to drive cars. When you move into the stratospheric regions of the ultra-rich, that’s even more true. A 2011 report on the Charting Transport website notes: “The very rich tend to shun public transport.”

The current zoning in the area allows for one parking space for every four residential units. Snellgrove is asking for one space per unit — in other words, he figures every single buyer will have a car.

Many of the people who buy these condos won’t be working or even living most of the time in San Francisco. These are condos for world travelers, second and third homes for people who want to spend a few weeks a year in San Francisco. “They aren’t going to be living here all year,” Christina Olague, a former Planning Commission member who is now the District 5 supervisor, told us last July.

If five of the 165 residents of 8 Washington fly in a private or corporate jet from, say, New York to their SF pad once a month, the project will cause the use of jet fuel equivalent to what a normal family would use driving a car for 330 years, Paul noted.

“How many solar panels are needed compensate for burning 396,000 gallons of jet fuel a year?” he asked.

Then there’s the construction issue. If the developer’s projections are correct, as many as 20,000 dump truck runs will be trundling along the Embarcadero for several months, one every two minutes — and it could be happening right as the traffic nightmare called the America’s Cup is hitting the waterfront.

It also goes against some 40 years of waterfront planning policy, all of which as focused on downzoning and creating open space. This would be the first upzoning of San Francisco waterfront property in decades.

4. It will wipe out what is mostly a middle-class recreation facility. The Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club will be closed for three years, then (possibly) reopened later as a smaller facility. The club — with two outdoor pools and six tennis courts — sounds like something for the elite, and it’s managed by the upscale Bay Club, but a lot of the users are longtime Golden Gateway residents and seniors. “I would say 30 or 35 percent of the users are seniors,” Lee Radner, chair of Friends of Golden Gateway, told me. Most, he said, are middle-class people, and the expense isn’t that high. “My wife and I pay $3 a day to use the pool,” he said. “I swim every day, and it would cost more than that to use the public pools in the city.” He added: “There are some wealthier people, of course, but many of us are retired and on fixed incomes.”

We’re talking about 90,000 total square feet of outdoor recreation space — which dwarfs the 20,000 square feet of open space the developer promised to provide.

5. The city doesn’t get much out of the deal. In exchange for upzoning the waterfront, creating a big all of buildings and screwing up the city’s housing balance, what does the San Francisco general fund get? Not a lot. The estimates for new tax revenue run about $1.5 million a year of the next 60 years — and when you translate that to what economist call “net present value,” the cash equivalent today of that revenue stream, it’s about $30 million. The Port of San Francisco is talking about creating a special infrastructure financing district — sort of the equivalent of a redevelopment area — to pull that money out in advance, which may not even be legal (since part of the land is a former redevelopment area, the state law that allows these special finance districts may not apply). But even so, a Jan. 14 Port memo suggests that the agency has plans to spend all that money on its own infrastructure — setting up a potential battle between the supervisors and the Port Commission over where the money, if it actually can be collected up front, will go.

Like any developer, Snellgrove will pay into the city’s affordable housing fund — in this case, about $9 million to pay for the equivalent of 27 units. No affordable units will be on site, of course; that would detract from the uber-wealthy ambience of the place. And it’s not clear when those units would be built. “Nobody builds 27-unit buildings any more,” Paul, a former deputy mayor for housing, said. “We’ll have to wait until there’s enough money for a bigger project, somewhere, sometime down the road. That’s what we’re getting here.”

Either way, it’s not a huge benefit for allowing this disaster of a project — and it’s a terrible statement for San Francisco to make. At a time when the mayor has cleared the Occupy protesters — who are talking about how little the rich pay in taxes — off the waterfront, the city is preparing to move in the exceptionally rich, who aren’t paying anywhere near their fair share in tax revenue to local government.

(Nobody knows for sure whether the costs of servicing high-end residential exceed the revenue the city gets from property taxes. In 1971, the Guardian put together the first-ever cost-benefit study for highrise office development, which showed that commercial buildings cost the city more than they paid; that’s been confirmed and demonstrated over the years to the point where it’s hardly even an argument any more. The supervisors ought to ask the city economist or the budget analyst to do the same sort of analysis for luxury condos.)

There’s another element here: Mayor Lee made a point during his campaign to say over and over again that he was an independent thinker, that powerful and influential allies like Rose Pak would not be calling the shots at City Hall. This will be his first major test: Pak and lobbyist Marcia Smolens are working hard to promote 8 Washington. And we’re already getting some disturbing signals out of the mayor’s office.

Lee told us that he has “no thoughts” about the project and hasn’t been paying any attention to it. That’s an odd stance, considering that his own Port Commission is pushing it and staffers in his office are working with the developer. This is a big priority for Pak, and the notion that she has never mentioned it to the mayor defies reason. Board President David Chiu, who talks to the mayor regularly, opposes the project, which is in Chiu’s district.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone who pays attention to local politics could be missing what will be one of the landmark votes this spring on the Planning Commission — which will take up the project March 8 — and the Board of Supervisors.

The mayor, may, indeed, be ignoring everything that supporters and opponents of 8 Washington have said and may be waiting until the Planning Commission vote to take a position. But if he’s just ducking questions because he’s planning to support it, he’s making a big mistake.

This is a chance for San Francisco to go beyond the platitudes about building housing, go beyond the hype about “green” buildings, see through the fraud about community benefits and consider what this really is: A special favor for a developer who wants to cater to the top 1 percent of the 1 percent and move San Francisco even closer to being a city of, by, and for the elite. The only reasonable vote on 8 Washington is No.

Editorial: The case against the 8 Washington tower

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Editorial note: In 1971, at the height of the Alvin Duskin anti-highrise battle, the Guardian did a special first ever cost benefit study for high rise office development.

We found that highrises cost the city  more in services than they produce in revenue.  This meant that the commercial high rise boom could be fought on economic grounds, not just aesthietic and environmental grrounds, and the Chamber of Commerce/Big development gang could never adequately refute our findings.  In fact, they are now taken for  granted. So, as the 8 Washington battle is poised to open the floodgates even further for a forest of market rate residential  buildings, it’s time for the city to do its own study to determine the economics of high end  residential buildings.  Does the cost of servicing luxury residential buildings exceed the taxes they pay? We and many others in the neighborhoods are certain that market rate housing doesn’t pay for itself. But the facts are needed and so we urge the supervisors to direct the budget analyst or the city economist to do a similar analysis  for luxury condos.  Below is Executive Editor Tim Redmond’s powerful argument against 8 Washington.

By Tim Redmond

tredmond@sfbg.com

In city planning terms, it’s a fairly modest project: 134 condos, no buildings more than 12 stories tall, on a 27,000-square-foot site. It’s projected to meet the highest environmental building standards and offers new open space and pedestrian walkways. It’s near Muni, BART, and ferry lines. And the city will collect millions of dollars in new taxes from it.

But the 8 Washington project, which will come before the Planning Commission March 8, has become a flashpoint in city politics, one of the defining battles of Mayor Ed Lee’s administration — and a symbol of how the city’s housing policy has failed to keep pace with the needs of the local workforce.

Put simply, it will create the most expensive condos in city history, housing for the richest of the 1 percent on the edge of the waterfront — and will further push San Francisco toward becoming a city that caters almost entirely to the very wealthy.

So in a city where the growing divide between the 1 percent and the rest of us has become a central issue and where the lack of affordable housing is one of the top civic concerns, 8 Washington is an important test. By any rational standard, this sort of development is the last thing San Francisco needs.

But some of the best-connected lobbyists in the city are pushing it. One of the mayor’s closest allies, Chinatown powerbroker Rose Pak, is a leading advocate — and the final outcome will say a lot about city politics in the Lee administration.

There are all sorts of half-truths and misleading statements by supporters of 8 Washington. Here are the five main reasons the project shouldn’t be approved.

1. It fills no housing need. San Francisco has no shortage of housing for the very rich; the dramatic need, outlined in both regional planning documents and the city’s own General Plan, is for low- and moderate-income housing for the people who actually work in this city (see “Dollars or sense?” 9/28/10). While San Francisco is getting richer by the day, the core workforce — public employees, workers in the hotel and restaurant industry, service workers, construction and trade workers, and a majority of the people in the lower levels of the finance and tech sector — are being priced out of the city. That means more people working here and living far out of town, often commuting by car, in what everyone agrees is an unsustainable situation. Meanwhile, more and more high-paid workers from Silicon Valley are living in San Francisco — again, commuting to distant jobs, either by car or by corporate bus.

The city’s General Plan states that some 60 percent of all new housing built in the city should be below market rate. San Francisco desperately needs housing for its workforce. This type of project simply puts the city deeper in the hole and further from its housing goals.

2. It’s a reward for bad actors. The main developer of this project is Simon Snellgrove, but one of his partners is, by necessity, Golden Gateway, which owns a significant part of the land — and which has been flouting at least the spirit if not the letter of city and state law and costing San Francisco tens of millions of dollars.

As project opponent Brad Paul has noted in written testimony, when Timothy Foo, the current owner, bought the complex from Perini Corp. about 20 years ago, he used a loophole in state law that allowed him to avoid a formal transfer of ownership. That means the property wasn’t re-assessed, costing the city about $1.5 million a year. According to the Assessor’s Office, the deal wasn’t illegal (and these tricks to avoid reassessment are relatively common) but still: He’s costing the city millions by using a loophole not available to most people.

Golden Gateway, which was built in a redevelopment area as middle-class housing, is now renting out apartments as short-term tourist or corporate rentals. There are dozens of examples right now on Craigslist. City law bars the owners of rental housing from converting it to hotel rooms, but a loophole in that law makes what Foo’s outfit is doing technically legal. But he’s clearly violating the spirit of the city ordinance that seeks to protect rental housing from hotel conversions.

One of the main aesthetic complaints about the area — something Snellgrove’s lobbyists have tried to use to support the project — is the ugly fence that now surrounds the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club. But who do you suppose put that fence there?

Do we as a city want to be giving special zoning benefits to companies that try to circumvent tax and housing laws?

3. It’s an environmental disaster. Snellgrove and his architects, Skidmore Owning and Merrill, are seeking LEED platinum certification for the project, saying that its energy-efficiency, water use, and green building materials will make it one of the most sustainable structures in San Francisco. It is, the project website notes, close to all types of public transit.

But LEED doesn’t take into account what the building is used for (see “Is LEED really green,” 7/5/11) — and in this case, the use makes a huge amount of difference.

People who buy multi-million-dollar condos don’t tend to take Muni or BART when they go places. That’s not conjecture, it’s a proven fact. A 2008 study by the American Public Transportation Association notes, bluntly, that wealthier people are more likely to drive cars. When you move into the stratospheric regions of the ultra-rich, that’s even more true. A 2011 report on the Charting Transport website notes: “The very rich tend to shun public transport.”

The current zoning in the area allows for one parking space for every four residential units. Snellgrove is asking for one space per unit — in other words, he figures every single buyer will have a car.

Many of the people who buy these condos won’t be working or even living most of the time in San Francisco. These are condos for world travelers, second and third homes for people who want to spend a few weeks a year in San Francisco. “They aren’t going to be living here all year,” Christina Olague, a former Planning Commission member who is now the District 5 supervisor, told us last July.

If five of the 165 residents of 8 Washington fly in a private or corporate jet from, say, New York to their SF pad once a month, the project will cause the use of jet fuel equivalent to what a normal family would use driving a car for 330 years, Paul noted.

“How many solar panels are needed compensate for burning 396,000 gallons of jet fuel a year?” he asked.

Then there’s the construction issue. If the developer’s projections are correct, as many as 20,000 dump truck runs will be trundling along the Embarcadero for several months, one every two minutes — and it could be happening right as the traffic nightmare called the America’s Cup is hitting the waterfront.

It also goes against some 40 years of waterfront planning policy, all of which as focused on downzoning and creating open space. This would be the first upzoning of San Francisco waterfront property in decades.

4. It will wipe out what is mostly a middle-class recreation facility. The Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club will be closed for three years, then (possibly) reopened later as a smaller facility. The club — with two outdoor pools and six tennis courts — sounds like something for the elite, and it’s managed by the upscale Bay Club, but a lot of the users are longtime Golden Gateway residents and seniors. “I would say 30 or 35 percent of the users are seniors,” Lee Radner, chair of Friends of Golden Gateway, told me. Most, he said, are middle-class people, and the expense isn’t that high. “My wife and I pay $3 a day to use the pool,” he said. “I swim every day, and it would cost more than that to use the public pools in the city.” He added: “There are some wealthier people, of course, but many of us are retired and on fixed incomes.”

We’re talking about 90,000 total square feet of outdoor recreation space — which dwarfs the 20,000 square feet of open space the developer promised to provide.

5. The city doesn’t get much out of the deal. In exchange for upzoning the waterfront, creating a big all of buildings and screwing up the city’s housing balance, what does the San Francisco general fund get? Not a lot. The estimates for new tax revenue run about $1.5 million a year of the next 60 years — and when you translate that to what economist call “net present value,” the cash equivalent today of that revenue stream, it’s about $30 million. The Port of San Francisco is talking about creating a special infrastructure financing district — sort of the equivalent of a redevelopment area — to pull that money out in advance, which may not even be legal (since part of the land is a former redevelopment area, the state law that allows these special finance districts may not apply). But even so, a Jan. 14 Port memo suggests that the agency has plans to spend all that money on its own infrastructure — setting up a potential battle between the supervisors and the Port Commission over where the money, if it actually can be collected up front, will go.

Like any developer, Snellgrove will pay into the city’s affordable housing fund — in this case, about $9 million to pay for the equivalent of 27 units. No affordable units will be on site, of course; that would detract from the uber-wealthy ambience of the place. And it’s not clear when those units would be built. “Nobody builds 27-unit buildings any more,” Paul, a former deputy mayor for housing, said. “We’ll have to wait until there’s enough money for a bigger project, somewhere, sometime down the road. That’s what we’re getting here.”

Either way, it’s not a huge benefit for allowing this disaster of a project — and it’s a terrible statement for San Francisco to make. At a time when the mayor has cleared the Occupy protesters — who are talking about how little the rich pay in taxes — off the waterfront, the city is preparing to move in the exceptionally rich, who aren’t paying anywhere near their fair share in tax revenue to local government.

(Nobody knows for sure whether the costs of servicing high-end residential exceed the revenue the city gets from property taxes. In 1971, the Guardian put together the first-ever cost-benefit study for highrise office development, which showed that commercial buildings cost the city more than they paid; that’s been confirmed and demonstrated over the years to the point where it’s hardly even an argument any more. The supervisors ought to ask the city economist or the budget analyst to do the same sort of analysis for luxury condos.)

There’s another element here: Mayor Lee made a point during his campaign to say over and over again that he was an independent thinker, that powerful and influential allies like Rose Pak would not be calling the shots at City Hall. This will be his first major test: Pak and lobbyist Marcia Smolens are working hard to promote 8 Washington. And we’re already getting some disturbing signals out of the mayor’s office.

Lee told us that he has “no thoughts” about the project and hasn’t been paying any attention to it. That’s an odd stance, considering that his own Port Commission is pushing it and staffers in his office are working with the developer. This is a big priority for Pak, and the notion that she has never mentioned it to the mayor defies reason. Board President David Chiu, who talks to the mayor regularly, opposes the project, which is in Chiu’s district.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone who pays attention to local politics could be missing what will be one of the landmark votes this spring on the Planning Commission — which will take up the project March 8 — and the Board of Supervisors.

The mayor, may, indeed, be ignoring everything that supporters and opponents of 8 Washington have said and may be waiting until the Planning Commission vote to take a position. But if he’s just ducking questions because he’s planning to support it, he’s making a big mistake.

This is a chance for San Francisco to go beyond the platitudes about building housing, go beyond the hype about “green” buildings, see through the fraud about community benefits and consider what this really is: A special favor for a developer who wants to cater to the top 1 percent of the 1 percent and move San Francisco even closer to being a city of, by, and for the elite. The only reasonable vote on 8 Washington is No.

Meet the new supervisor

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Christina Olague, the newest member of the Board of Supervisors, faces a difficult balancing act. She was appointed by Mayor Ed Lee, whom she supported as co-chair of the controversial “Run Ed Run” campaign, to fill the vacancy in District 5, an ultra-progressive district whose voters rejected Lee in favor of John Avalos by a 2-1 margin.

So now Olague faces the challenge of keeping her district happy while staying on good terms with the Mayor’s Office, all while running in her first campaign for elected office against what could be a large field of challengers scrutinizing her every vote and statement.

Olague has strong progressive activist credentials, from working with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition to protect low-income renters during the last dot-com boom to her more recent community organizing for the Senior Action Network. She co-chaired the 2003 campaign that established the city’s minimum wage and has been actively involved in such progressive organizations as the Milk Club, Transit Riders Union, and the short-lived San Francisco People’s Organization.

“One of the reasons many of us are so supportive of Christina is she is grounded in the issues of low-income San Franciscans,” said Gabriel Haaland, who works with SEIU Local 1021 and accompanied Olague to a recent interview at the Guardian office.

She also served two terms on the Planning Commission — appointed by Board of Supervisors then-President Matt Gonzalez in 2004 and reappointed by then-President Aaron Peskin in 2008 — where she was known for doing her homework on complicated land use issues and usually landing on the progressive side of divided votes.

“Coming from the Planning Commission, she can do a lot of good,” said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a supporter who has worked with Olague for 15 years. “We lost a lot of collective memory on land use issues,” he said, citing the expertise of Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin. “We do need that on the board. There is so much at stake in land use.”

Olague disappointed many progressives by co-chairing Progress for All, which was created by Chinatown power broker Rose Pak to push the deceptive “Run Ed Run” campaign that was widely criticized for its secrecy and other ethical violations. At the time, Olague told us she appreciated how Lee was willing to consider community input and she thought it was important for progressives to support him to maintain that open door policy.

In announcing his appointment of Olague, Lee said, “This is not about counting votes, it’s about what’s best for San Francisco and her district.” Olague also sounded that post-partisan theme, telling the crowd at her swearing-in, “I think this is an incredible time for our city and a time when we are coming together and moving past old political pigeonholes.”

With some big projects coming to the board and the working class being rapidly driven out of the city, progressives are hoping Olague will be a committed ally. There’s some concern, though, about her connections to Progress For All campaign’s secretive political consultant, Enrique Pearce.

Pearce has become a bit of a pariah in progressive circles for his shady campaign tactics on behalf of powerful players. In 2010, his Left Coast Communications got caught running an independent expenditure campaign partly funded by Willie Brown out of Pearce’s office, even though Sup. Jane Kim was both its beneficiary and his client — and that level of coordination is illegal. Last year, Pearce was hired by Pak to create the “Run Ed Run” campaign and write the hagiographic book, The Ed Lee Story, which also seemed to have some connections with Lee’s campaign. The Ethics Commission hasn’t fined Pearce for either incident, and he didn’t return a Guardian call for comment.

Olague told us not to worry. “He’s a friend…and I think it’s an exaggerated concern,” she said, confirming but minimizing his role so far. Yet she hired one of Pearce’s former employees, Jen Low, as one of her board aide. Olague’s other aides are Chris Durazo from South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN) and Dominica Henderson, formerly of the SF Housing Authority.

Debra Walker, a progressive activist who served on the Building Inspection Commission and has worked with Olague for decades, said she’s a reliable ally: “She’s from the progressive community and I have no equivocation about that.”

Olague makes no apologies for her alliances, saying that she is both independent and progressive and that she should be judged by her actions as a supervisor. “People will have to decide who I am based on how I vote,” she said, later adding, “I support the mayor and I’m not going to apologize for that.”

 

OLAGUE’S PRIORITIES

Olague was born in Merced in 1961 to a Mexican immigrant father who fixed farming equipment and a stay-at-home mother. She went to high school in Fresno and moved to the Bay Area in 1982. She attended San Francisco State University but had to drop out to help support her family, working at various stock brokerage firms in the Financial District. She later got a degree in liberal studies from California Institute of Integral Studies.

In 1992, Olague’s mother was in serious car accident that left her a quadriplegic, so Olague spent the next seven years caring for her. After her mother died, Olague left the financial services industry and became a community organizer for the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, battling the forces of gentrification and then-Mayor Brown and becoming an active player in the ascendant progressive movement.

But Olague never abided progressive orthodoxy. She backed Mark Leno over the more progressive Harry Britt in their 2002 Assembly race and backed Leno again in 2007 when he ran for state Senate against Carole Migden. She also voted for the Home Depot project on Bayshore Boulevard despite a progressive campaign against the project.

Olague worked with then-Sup. Chris Daly to win more community benefits and other concessions from developers of the Trinity Plaza and Rincon Tower projects, but now she is critical of Daly’s confrontational tactics. “Daly’s style isn’t what I agree with anymore,” Olague said, criticizing the deals that were cut on those projects to approve them with larger than required community benefits packages. “I think we romanticized what we got.”

So how does Olague plan to approach big development proposals, and is she willing to practice the brinksmanship that many progressives believe is necessary to win concessions? While she says her approach will be more conciliatory than Daly’s, she says the answer is still yes. “You push back, you make demands, and if you don’t think it’s going to benefit the city holistically, you just fucking say no,” Olague said.

Walker said Olague has proven she can stand up to pressure. “I think she’ll do as well as she did on the Planning Commission. She served as president and there is an enormous amount of pressure that is applied behind the scenes,” Walker said. “She’s already stood up to mayoral pressure on some issues.”

Yet even some of Olague’s strongest supporters say her dual — and perhaps dueling — loyalties to the Mayor’s Office and her progressive district are likely to be tested this year.

“It’ll be challenging for her to navigate,” Radulovich said. “The Mayor’s Office is going to say I want you to do X and Y, and it won’t always be progressive stuff, so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.”

But he said Olague’s land use expertise and progressive background will likely count for more than any bitter pills that she’s asked to swallow. “Sometimes, as a policy maker, you have to push the envelope and say we can get more,” he said. “It helps if you’re willing to say no to things and set boundaries.”

When we asked Olague to lay out her philosophy on dealing with land-use issues, she said that her approach will vary: “I have a very gray approach, project by project and neighborhood by neighborhood.”

Only a couple weeks into her new role, Olague said that she’s still getting a lay of the land: “I’m in information gathering mode, meeting with neighborhood groups to try to figure out what their issues are.”

But Olague said she understands that part of her job is making decisions that will disappoint some groups. For example, after Mayor Lee pledged to install bike lanes on Fell and Oak streets to connect the Panhandle to The Wiggle and lessen the danger to bicyclists, he recently stalled the project after motorists opposed the idea.

“I’m a transit-first person, for sure. I don’t even drive,” Olague said of her approach to that issue, which she has now begun to work on. “We’ll try to craft a solution, but then at some point you have to fall on one side or the other.”

 

THE “JOBS” FOCUS

One issue on which Olague’s core loyalities are likely to be tested is on the so-called “jobs” issue, which both Lee and Olague call their top priority. “Jobs and economic revitalization are very important,” she told us.

Progressives have begun to push back on Lee for valuing private sector job creation over all other priorities, such as workers’ rights, environmental safeguards, and public services. That came to a head on Jan. 26 at the Rules Committee hearing on Lee’s proposed charter amendment to delay legislation that might cost private sector jobs and require extra hearings before the Small Business Commission. Progressives and labor leaders slammed the proposal as unfair, divisive, unnecessary, and reminiscent of right-wing political tactics.

But when we interviewed Olague the next day, she was reluctant to criticize the measure on the record, even though it seemed so dead-on-arrival at the Board of Supervisors that Mayor Lee voluntarily withdrew it the next week.

Olague told us job creation is important, but she said it can’t squeeze out other priorities, such as protecting affordable rental housing.

“We always have to look at how the community will benefit from things. So if we want to incentivize for businesses, how do we also make it work for neighborhoods and for people so that we don’t end up with where we were in the Mission District in the ’90s?” she said.

Olague also said that she didn’t share Lee’s focus on jobs in the technology sector. “There’s a lot of talk of technology, and that’s fine and I’m not against that, and we can see how it works in the city. But at the same time, I’m concerned about folks who aren’t interested necessarily in working in technology. We need other types of jobs, so I think we shouldn’t let go of the small scale manufacturing idea.”