Mayor

Last call?

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Concerns about public drinking in North Beach and stifled public debate are conspiring to cripple a pair of popular outdoor festivals, possibly creating a troubling precedent for other events at the start of San Francisco’s festival and street fair season.

"We’ll have to cancel this year’s festival," Robbie Kowal, who runs the North Beach Jazz Festival, said of the possibility of not getting his alcohol permit. "Seventy-five percent of our funding comes from the sale of alcohol."

The Recreation and Park Commission’s Operations Committee is set to review the jazz festival’s permit May 3, and if sentiments among the three mayor-appointed commissioners haven’t changed, they might not allow Kowal and his partners, John Miles and Alistair Monroe, to set up bars and serve drinks to local jazz fans in Washington Square Park, as they’ve been doing without challenge for the past 12 years.

"We’ve never even had a hearing to get a permit before," Kowal said. "We’ve had no arrests and no [California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control] violations. We’re being punished when we haven’t done anything wrong. We’re caught up in this whole North Beach Festival situation."

Kowal was referring to a dispute involving the neighborhood’s other popular street fair, the North Beach Festival, a 52-year street fair that had its permission to sell alcohol in the park yanked this year. The festival is hosted by the North Beach Chamber of Commerce, whose director, Marsha Garland, is a political adversary of the area’s supervisor, Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin.

The problem started when parks general manager Yomi Agunbiade determined that a long-standing ban on alcohol in city parks should also apply during festivals. Two out of three members of the Rec and Park Commission’s Operations Committee agreed with that ruling during an April 5 meeting, and it became official policy.

Then, as the North Beach Festival permit went to the full commission for approval April 20, the words "permission to serve beer and wine" disappeared from the agenda item. Those words had appeared on an earlier version of the agenda, allowing the commission to grant what Garland had received with every permit for the last 20 years. The agenda change meant the commission couldn’t even discuss the alcohol issue, let allow issue a permit that allowed it.

Commissioner Jim Lazarus questioned a representative of the City Attorney’s Office about it and was told that the full commission couldn’t hear the policy if the general manager and Operations Committee were in agreement.

"I was taken aback by the fact that the full request of the applicant to serve beer and wine was not on the calendar," Lazarus told us. "I’ve been on the commission for three and a half years, and I’ve never seen that happen before for this kind of issue."

This story is still unfolding, but observers are openly wondering whether this is an isolated case of political sabotage or whether this battle over beer could hurt the summer festival season.

Wine and beer sales have always played a critical role in the financial viability of many of the city’s summer festivals. In a city that’s never been afraid of a liberal pour, many are beginning to wonder if the good times are over, and if so, why?

"The Rec and Park meeting was so disheartening, and if it’s used as a precedent in any way, it will harm other events. If the oldest street fair in this city can be chipped away at like that, who’s next?" said Lindsey Jones, executive director of SF Pride, the largest LGBT festival in the country.

Some North Beach residents think this Rec and Park procedural shell game is punishment for Garland and her organization’s opposition to Peskin, whom they blame for the change.

"Aaron Peskin would like to take Marsha Garland’s livelihood away," said Richard Hanlin, a landlord and 30-year resident of North Beach who filed a complaint over the incident with the Ethics Commission.

"They want to railroad Marsha," said Lynn Jefferson, president of the civic group North Beach Neighbors. "They want to see her out of business. If she doesn’t have those alcohol sales, she’ll personally go bankrupt."

At the heart of the Garland-Peskin beef is a 2003 battle over a lot at 701 Lombard St. known as "the Triangle," which the owner wanted to develop but which the Telegraph Hill Dwellers wanted for a park after they found a deed restriction indicating it should be considered for open space. Peskin agreed with the group he once led and had the city seize the land by eminent domain, drawing the wrath of Garland and others who saw it as an abuse of government power.

Peskin told the Guardian that it’s true he doesn’t care for Garland, but that he did nothing improper to influence the commission’s decision or agenda. However, he added that he’s made no secret of his opposition to fencing off much of the park to create a beer garden and that he’s made that point to Rec and Park every year since the festival’s beer garden started taking over the park in 2003.

“Just let the people use Washington Square Park. It’s the commons of North Beach,” Peskin said. “The park should be open to people of all ages 365 days a year. That’s just how I feel.”

Yet Peskin said that neither the North Beach Jazz Festival, which doesn’t segregate people by age, nor festivals that use less neighborhood-centered parks, like the Civic Center and Golden Gate Park, should be held to the same standard. In fact, he plans to speak out in favor of the jazz festival’s right to sell alcohol during the May 3 meeting.

Access became the buzzword this year, in response to last year’s decision by the San Francisco Police Department to gate two-thirds of the park off as a beer garden, effectively prohibiting many underage festivalgoers from actually entering a large part of the park. The section near the playground remained ungated, but many families were disillusioned by the penning of the party.

Enter the North Beach Merchants Association, a two-year-old rival of the Chamber of Commerce with stated concerns about booze. President Anthony Gantner learned that the park code banned alcohol from being served in any of the parks listed in Section 4.10, which includes Washington Square as well as nearly every other greenway in the city, unless by permission of the Recreation and Park Commission, which should only be granted as long as it "does not interfere with the public’s use and enjoyment of the park."

Gantner and Peskin both argue that the beer garden does interfere with the right of those under 21 to use the park. "The Chamber is basically doing a fair, and that’s it," Gantner said. "A lot of its members are bars, and they run a very large fair with beer gardens that result in incidents on the streets for merchants."

Though Garland contends that the festival is an economic stimulator, resulting in an 80 percent increase in sales for local businesses, Gantner claims that a number of businesses don’t benefit from the increased foot traffic. He associates alcohol with the congruent crime issues that crop up when the clubs let out on Broadway, and thinks that selling beer and wine in the park only accelerates problems in the streets after the festival ends at 6 p.m.

Gantner has the ear of local police, who are understaffed by 20 percent and looking for any way to lower costs by deploying fewer cops. "It used to be we could police these events with full staff and overtime, but now we’re trying to police them with less resources, and the events themselves are growing," Central Station Capt. James Dudley said.

He’s also concerned about the party after the party. The police average five alcohol-related arrests on a typical Friday night in North Beach, most after the bars close. But those numbers don’t change much during festival weekend, leading many to question the logic behind banning sales of alcohol in the park. Besides, if sales were banned, many festivalgoers would simply sneak it in. Even one police officer, who didn’t want to be named, told us, "If I went to sit in that park to listen to music and couldn’t buy beer, I’d probably try pretty hard to sneak some in."

At the April 20 Rec and Park meeting, Garland presented alternative solutions and site plans for selling beer and wine, which represents $66,000 worth of income the festival can’t afford to lose. Beyond her openness to negotiations, Rec and Park heard overwhelming support for the festival in the form of petitions and comments from 30 neighbors and business owners who spoke during the general public comment portion of the meeting.

Father John Malloy of the Saints Peter and Paul Church, which is adjacent to the park, spoke in support of Garland’s request. "I think I have the most weddings and the most funerals in the city," he said. "I’m praying that we don’t have a funeral for the North Beach Festival. If anyone should be against alcohol, it should be the priest of a church."

So who are the teetotalers? Testimony included 10 complaints from members of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, Friends of Washington Square, and the North Beach Merchants Association, as well as Gantner and neighborhood activist Mark Bruno, who came down from Peskin’s office, where he was watching the hearing, to testify.

Commissioner Megan Levitan said, "If anyone knows me, they know I like my wine," before going on to explain that she was born in North Beach and even used to serve beer at O’Reilly’s Beer and Oyster Festival. However, she said, she’s a mother now, and parks are important to her.

"It does change a park when alcohol is there," she said. "I do not believe we should serve alcohol in the park."

Will that still be her stance May 3 when the North Beach Jazz Festival requests its permit? The jazz fest has never had beer gardens, and the organizers don’t want them. Instead, they set up minibars throughout the park, which remains ungated, allowing complete access for all ages.

Although there is hired security and local police on hand, by and large people are responsible for themselves. The organizers say it’s just like going to a restaurant for a meal and a drink, except in this case it’s outside, with a stage and free live music.

Though Kowal remains optimistic, he’s rallying as much support as possible, even turning the May 3 meeting into an event itself on his Web site (www.sunsettickets.com). His partners, Monroe and Miles, were concerned enough to swing by City Hall to see Peskin, who agreed to testify and help the Jazz Festival retain the right to sell booze.

"The first person to write a check to start this festival was Mayor Willie Brown," Kowal said. "Peskin has always been a big supporter of the festival, which is why we think it will all work out."

The festival is a labor of love for the three organizers, who barely break even to put the event on; after expenses are covered, any additional profit from the sale of alcohol is donated to Conservation Value, a nonprofit organization that aids consumers in making smart purchases.

"We were the first fair to use Washington Square Park," Monroe, the founding father of the jazz festival, said. "We’re standing up for the right to access the park. It’s not about ‘he said, she said’ or who did what to whom. It’s about hearing free live music."

So now comes the moment when we find out whether this is about alcohol, parks, or simply politics, and whether future street fairs could feel the pinch of renewed temperance. If the jazz festival gets to sell booze, Garland’s supporters argue, that will represent a bias against the North Beach Festival.

The commission will hear Garland’s appeal at the end of May, just two weeks before the festival begins. With contracts already signed and schedules set, the stakes are high. Owing to lack of funds, Garland has already canceled the poetry, street chalk art, and family circus components of the fair. She did receive an e-mail from Levitan promising a personal donation to put toward the street chalk art competition. Even so, she’s preparing for a funeral.

And if alcohol is prohibited at the jazz festival, it could send out a ripple of concern among street fair promoters and lovers around the city. To be a part of the decision, stop by the meeting and have a say. SFBG

PS This weekend’s How Weird Street Faire, on May 7, centered at Howard and 12th Streets, will have beer gardens in addition to seven stages of music and performances. But organizers warn that it could be the last festival because the SFPD is now demanding $14,000, a 275 percent increase from the police fees organizers paid last year.

operations committee hearing

May 3, 2 p.m.

City Hall, Room 416

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF

(415) 831-2750

www.sfgov.org

A strong small-business agenda

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EDITORIAL You read the academic journals these days, or peruse economic-development Web sites, and everyone seems to be talking about sustainable urban economics. It’s as if the mantra that was first put forward by Jane Jacobs, David Morris, and a few others a quarter century ago is very much in the mainstream today: Cities function best with diverse economies dominated by locally owned businesses, with money circuutf8g within the community. Cutting-edge restaurants talk about serving locally grown food. Beverage savants want local beer and wine. Just about everyone — including the mayor and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce — wants to participate in a program called Shop Local.

It’s a wonderful, encouraging trend — but if it’s going to make any real difference in this city, it has to become a lot more than lip service. Consider: •Just as Mayor Newsom was proudly signing on to a Shop San Francisco program, the mayor and the supervisors were busy approving plans to allow Home Depot — an anticompetitive out-of-town corporation that destroys local small business and undermines the entire concept of a strong local economy — to build a giant store on Bayshore Boulevard.

 •It’s taken legal action by Sue Hestor and the neighborhood leaders to derail (for now) the mayor’s plans to build high-end condos all over the eastern neighborhoods — threatening hundreds of locally owned businesses.

•Downtown business leaders and the groups they fund still push for policies that hurt most of the businesses in the city — and too many small-business people still go along.

Here’s the reality: Supporting small businesses — and moving San Francisco toward a sustainable economy — requires a lot more than a slogan. The people who are behind the Shop Local movement know that. They’re promoting a wide range of national and local policies designed to change not only attitudes but the direction of public policy.

San Francisco, a progressive city known for its wonderful, lively, unique neighborhoods, ought to be a national leader in the battle. But others (Philadelphia, for example) are moving way ahead. This city is still stuck in an ancient (and regressive) economic mind-set.

There are a number of key things the city can do to turn that around and become a truly small-business–friendly place — and most of them go far beyond public-relations efforts and cutting through red tape. The basic approach to policy needs to change; here are a few ways to start:

 •Stop allowing big chains to come into town. That’s not exactly rocket science, and it isn’t so hard either: Hayes Valley and North Beach both have "formula retail" laws that restrict the chains, and there’s talk of doing the same in Potrero Hill. But why does this have to be fought block by block? Why not a citywide ordinance that protects every neighborhood commercial district — and, more important, keeps the life-sucking big-box giants away from the city altogether?

 •Make small, locally owned businesses part of the planning process. The city’s own (limited) studies have made clear that the type of development the mayor and the current city planning leadership has in mind would damage local businesses, particularly in the repair, distribution, and small manufacturing areas. That alone ought to be grounds to change directions. Why not a checklist for every new project that includes the question: Will this displace existing locally owned businesses? If the answer is yes, the project should be rejected.

•Take progressive business taxes seriously. There’s almost certainly going to be an effort this fall to change the city’s business-tax structure, with one of the goals being an increase in overall revenue. That’s great, and it ought to happen — but the tax rates have to be shifted too, so that a tiny local retail outlet doesn’t pay the same amount as the Gap. (Socking big-box outlets with a special tax or fee — possibly based on the fact that they are by nature car-driven operations — might be a nice way to bring in some cash.)

You can’t be friendly to small local businesses these days without taking sides in the national economic war — and that means coming out against the big chains. Until San Francisco does that, all the talk of supporting local merchants will amount to nothing. SFBG

20 questions for Fiona Ma

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Sup. Fiona Ma, who is running for state Assembly, last week decided to skip an endorsement interview that she scheduled with the Guardian – making herself unavailable to answer questions important to Guardian readers – so we’ve decided to put some of our questions out the publicly.

We encourage voters to press her for answers before the June primary, and if you have any luck, please let us know by e-mailing City Editor Steven T. Jones at steve@sfbg.com.

1.   What kind of health care system do you support for California? Ma’s opponent, Janet Reilly, has made single-payer health care her top campaign priority and issued a detailed plan for what that would entail. Health care is one of just five issues that Ma discusses on her website (the others being Housing, Education, Budget/Jobs, and Transportation), vaguely indicating she support universal coverage and stating, “I support state measures to provide incentives for business owners to cover their workers and other such efforts, but we need the political will on the national level to be successful.”  The first part sounds as if she’s advocating tax breaks to businesses that offer private insurance health plans to their employees. The caveat at the end sounds like she doesn’t intend to do much of anything until the feds do. But then, during the only debate that she’d agreed to have with Reilly, Ma said that she support a single-payer health care system, without offering any other details. This is arguably the most important issue the Legislature will face in the next few years and we have a right to know whose side Ma would be on.

2.   What will you do to protect renters and rental units in San Francisco? Again, it was the sole debate and its aftermath that yielded much confusion about where Ma stands regarding renters. She has made no secret of her strong support for increasing homeownership opportunities and her record is one of opposing local efforts to slow the number of Ellis Act evictions. But at the debate, she went further by declaring, “The Ellis Act is sometimes the only way for some people to become homeowners and I support it.” After being criticized for the statement, she defended herself in a piece on BeyondChron.org that only seemed to dig a deeper hole, arguing that she supports “ownership units [that] are affordable to San Franciscans of all income levels.” And how exactly is that going to happen?

3. What’s up with the $20 million?    In that same Beyondchron.org column, to defend her bad record on renters, Ma cited an effort that she made earlier this month to amend the city’s $20 million housing subsidy program to prioritize those who have been evicted under the Ellis Act. City officials said it would have had little practical effect and the gesture seemed to contradict you statements of support for Ellis Act evictions. Why should we see this as anything but a crass political deception?

4.      Why have you been unwilling to provide details about your policy positions – even on the five issues you raised on your website – so voters would know how you intend to vote?

5.      How do you intend to increase revenues coming into the state, which you will need for even the broad goals you cited in education, transportation, and business “incentives”? We’re particularly interested in this answer after watching Ma chair the city’s Revenue Advisory Panel two years ago. That body was charged by the mayor’s office with recommending new revenue sources, and ended up recommending none.

6. Are you just a pawn of downtown business?At luncheon speeches that she gave to SFSOS and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce over the last couple years, Ma you blasted and belittled her colleagues on the board while fawning over the business community. What is she willing to do to show her independence from downtown?

7.      Why do most of your colleagues on the Board of Supervisors support Janet Reilly —  and why shouldn’t voters see that as an indictment of your tenure as a supervisor?

8.      Is there anything new that you would require of the business community, such as improved labor or environmental standards, greater corporate accountability and transparency, regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, health care benefits for employees or their same sex partners?

9.      Your record is one of consistent opposition to requiring developers to pay more or offer more public benefits, such as open space or affordable housing. Why shouldn’t rich developers making obscene profits pay a little more? Has your position been influenced by the financial support of people like Oz Erickson, Joe Cassidy, Warren Hellman, Don Fisher, and Bob McCarthy?

10.     Why did you oppose legislation that would have limited the number of parking spaces that could be built in conjunction with the nearly 10,000 housing units slated for the downtown core, legislation that Planning Director Dean Macris called critical to good planning? Did your support from the downtown developers who opposed it have anything to do with your position?

11.     You supported a deal that extended Comcast’s cable contract without requiring any new public programming requirements, even though other comparable cities have better plans. Do you think that’s why Comcast is supporting your campaign?

12.     You’ve been a big advocate of tax breaks for corporations, including the biotech and film industries in San Francisco. How would you make up for these lost revenues and are you concerned that having cities compete with tax breaks creates a race to the bottom that starve public coffers? And on the biotech tax credit, given that such companies often lose money for years before reaping high windfall profits, how would be insure those companies eventually pay taxes to the city rather than just moving somewhere where they won’t be taxed?

13.     You were a longtime supporter of Julie Lee, continuing to support her even after it was revealed that she illegally laundered public funds into political campaigns. Why, and do you continue to support her?

14.     In a recent letter to supporters, you warned that Janet Reilly was trying to buy the campaign so people needed to give more. At the time, she had raised about $600,000 to your $700,000. How do you justify what appears to be a deceptive statement to your own supporters?

15.     We understand you support the death penalty, but many studies have shown that those on death row have been represented by inexperienced and ineffective lawyers, that they are disproportionately poor and minorities, and that based on detailed studies conducted in other states, it is likely that at least a few are not guilty of their crimes. Given all of that, are there any reforms that you’d like to see in how executions are carried out?
16.     In the debate, you said that the state is not required to balance its budget and that the federal government may simply print money to cover its budget deficits. Would you like to clarify or amend either statement?

 17.     What is your position on drug prohibition? Are there any current illegal drugs that you would decriminalize or are there any other changes you would make to the war on drugs?

18.     The statement you issued on your website dealing with “Transportation” – one of just five issues you addressed – is only 48 words long. Is there anything that you’d like to add? And are there any other issues facing the state that you think are important?

19.      The Reilly campaign has warned of a possibly illegal effort to attack her by a group called “Leaders for an Effective Government,” using money laundered by Comcast and your old boss, John Burton. Are you aware of this effort and have you taken any steps to stop or repudiate it?

20. Why do you think it’s okay to avoid tough questions from the press?

Saluting small business

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> bruce@sfbg.com

  Back in my hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa, a flat land of tall corn and homestead farms way out in northwest Iowa, my grandfather and father ran a small, family owned drug store for more than seven decades. Their slogan, known throughout the territory, was "Brugmann’s Drugs: Where drugs and gold are fairly sold, since l902."

   The town was then and still is about 2,800 in population, and we were miles away from the nearest cities of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Sioux City, Iowa. The merchants, and the farmers and townsfolk who patronized them, had to go it pretty much alone and depend on each other for economic sustenance.  The two Brugmann families bought shoes at Jensen’s and Hornseth’s shoe stores, purchased clothes that often didn’t quite fit at Bernstein’s department store, bought our groceries from Bob Bendinger and Tony Sieparda’s grocery stores, ate meals out at Jay’s and the Grill Café, banked at the Rock Rapids State Bank and later the Lyon County bank,  went to endless church suppers in town and in the country to support the local churches, hired Jim Wells to do our taxes, used both Doc Wubbena and Doc Cook, the town’s two doctors, and had our teeth done by Doc Lee and Doc Fisch.

   My dad, as the town pharmacist, would often get called at night, sometimes twice, to go down to the store and fill a prescription for one of the doctors tending a patient who needed emergency help. My wife’s father, who owned a lumberyard in Bennet, Nebraska, and later a hardware store in Le Mars, Iowa, followed the same routine. As did her grandfathers, one who founded banks in small towns in Nebraska and Kansas, another who ran a grocery store in Topeka, Kansas.

   I asked my grandfather and my dad why they went out of their way to do all these things in town and why I always got pulled along as Con Brugmann’s boy. "We want to keep our money working in town," they would reply. "That helps the store and that helps the town." I also asked why they put regular ads in the local Lyon County Reporter, run by Paul Smith as the fourth generation of the pioneering Smith family, when everybody already knew what the store offered in merchandise and service. "That’s the price of having a good local paper in town,” my dad would say.

   Significantly, Brugmann’s Drugs and our old store building have been transformed into the B and L café, a friendly oasis featuring yummy homemade pies and soups and a unique setting full of antique furniture. It is owned and operated by Beth and Lawrence Lupkes, a husband and wife team who work long and hard to keep the café going from dawn till dusk seven days a week. Their key to economic sustenance: they keep their “day” jobs, Beth as a dispatcher for the county’s emergency services, Lawrence as a rural mail carrier and mayor. Lawrence’s sister is the main cook and they press family members into service.

   When my wife Jean Dibble and I founded the Guardian in l966, we quickly found that the cooperative small business way of life that worked in little towns in Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas worked the same way in San Francisco with its tradition of neighborhoods and communities. Small business, we found, was not only the leading job generator and a key piece of the city’s urban fabric. Small business was critical to building sustainable local economies in San Francisco and most other cities. Jean and I like to think that the Brugmann and Dibble families have been continuously making small business contributions to our communities since l902.

   A long list of studies shows that small businesses keep more money circuutf8g in the local economy than big chains. The chain money is wired out of town every night—and chains are more likely to buy from other chains, in bulk, and thus rarely patronize other local businesses. So very little of the dollar you spend at a chain store stays in the community, which means its impact on the local economy is negligible. Money that stays in town creates more jobs, more business activity, a more stable economy and a larger tax base. Thankfully, no Wal-Mart came to the Rock Rapids area, but Wal-Mart came to several other Iowa communities with disastrous consequences to the downtowns and local tax bases of three towns and seven counties. Many other studies showed similar consequences in many other areas of the country.  (The Hometown Advantage, Big Box Economic Impact Studies from the Institute for Local Self Reliance. http://www.newrules.org/retail/econimpact)

    When academics and policy makers around the country are increasingly discussing ways that cities can be more self-reliant, work more with local resources and thus be both environmentally and economically stronger, they are talking about the value of small, locally owned, independent businesses.

    Economies are all subject to business cycles. If a city’s economy is dominated by a monocrop and or a few big companies, the entire economy suffers when they take a hit. Rock Rapids is tied to the farms and the weather.  Detroit’s fate is tied to the auto industry. If Microsoft and Boeing have blips, the impact is felt across Seattle. But a community with many different local businesses in many different niches is much more able to survive and even prosper in tough times.  After the l906 earthquake, it was the entrepreneurs and small businesses that lifted the city from the ashes. After the dot-com bust, it was again the small businesses and the entrepreneurs who are helping cushion the blow and leading the recovery.

    The bottom line is that the big chains see a community like San Francisco as a place to extract money from as quickly as possible, much like the strip miners in the Sierra. Small businesses see the city as a place to invest human capital to build real community—to join merchant groups, get involved in local politics, hire local kids, patronize other businesses, work to invigorate their neighborhoods, spread the gospel of shopping local. (See the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants’ Alliance at http://www.sfloma.org/whylocal.com)

    Jean and I and the Guardian staff are happy to salute the small business community with our second annual Small Business Awards. Our congratulations to the winners, all working in their own way to transform San Francisco into a sustainable local economy. And our congratulations to the thousands of small business people in San Francisco, and the merchant groups behind them, who daily struggle valiantly against daunting odds to keep their businesses going, their neighborhoods vibrant, and San Francisco an incomparably great city.

     This year, we give special recognition to Arthur Jackson, who for almost four decades helped thousands of people get jobs in small, independent, locally owned businesses through his employment agency, Jackson Personnel Agency. He died on April l0 at     age 58 after a courageous fight against a series of illnesses including a kidney transplant.  He lived his favorite quote: “Putting people to work is a passion for me, because the paycheck fully empowers our community.” Arthur, as we all called him, won our diversity in small business award last year and his name will live on at the Guardian in the form of our annual Arthur Jackson diversity in small business award.

In SF, health care for all

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OPINION The question before us as San Francisco voters, health care providers, activists, legislators, and consumers is: "Can our community provide access to health care for people who work?"

In a surprising, welcome, and wise political partnership, Sup. Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom have joined their hearts and minds in a two-pronged approach to improve health access. The scope of the problem is simple.

In San Francisco, 84 percent of workers are privately insured. Employees contribute through premiums and co-payments. But there are now 82,000 uninsured adults in San Francisco. They rarely use preventative or primary care health services and (because of cost) only pursue health services when acutely ill. The overwhelming majority find their way to the overburdened emergency department at San Francisco General Hospital, where the taxpayers pick up the cost, estimated at more than $29 million a year.

It’s difficult and prohibitively expensive for individuals to get private health coverage. So group insurance is the obvious solution — and right now, that means insurance from employers.

The first of two complementary endeavors, initiated in November 2005 by Supervisor Ammiano, is the Worker Health Care Security Ordinance. It would direct employers with 20 employees or more to provide health insurance or contribute financially toward paying the cost of health care services for uninsured employees who work at least 80 hours a month.

The second part of the initiative comes from Mayor Newsom, who appointed a 37-member Universal Health Care Council, which will submit recommendations by May 2006 for a "defined benefits plan" establishing a "medical home" for the uninsured. It will also clarify the scope and cost of defined services, such as prevention and primary care, including behavioral or mental health services, dental health services, and prescription drugs, all in a plan delivered by the Department of Public Health clinics and the nonprofit coalition of community clinics.

San Franciscans overwhelmingly support universal health care.

By May the Universal Health Care Council, led by Sandra Hernandez, who runs the San Francisco Foundation, and Lloyd Dean, CEO of Catholic Health Care West, will recommend the scope of a plan, and health care benefits and costs, for both uninsured employees and the unemployed. For uninsured employees, this defined benefit plan could be heard at the same time as the final hearings on the Worker Health Care Security Ordinance currently in the budget and finance committee.

The opportunity to legislate a defined health care benefit for 30,000 uninsured working people in San Francisco is a historic step forward in improving the health status of all San Franciscans. Let us join both Sup. Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom to make history by the summer of 2006 and expand health coverage to working San Franciscans. SFBG

Roma Guy is a member of the clinical faculty of the Health Education Department at San Francisco State University and a city health commissioner.

Dede Wilsey’s whoppers

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An aggressive and misleading campaign against Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park by the Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums — spearheaded by its board president, Dede Wilsey — appears to be backfiring as the proposal heads for almost certain approval by the Board of Supervisors.

Yet the Healthy Saturdays proposal by Sup. Jake McGoldrick — which would close from May 25 to Nov. 25 the same portion of JFK Drive now closed on Sundays, a six-month trial period to study its impacts — still needs the signature of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has not yet taken a position.

And there are rumblings that even if the measure is approved — either with Newsom’s signature or an override of his veto — Wilsey and her supporters intend to attempt a referendum that would effectively kill the project if they can gather 20,000-plus valid signatures within 30 days. City law requires the targets of referendums to be placed on hold until the vote, which would occur this November.

The proposal got its first hearing April 14, when the Land Use Committee unanimously recommended it be approved by the full board (which will consider the matter April 25). The long and emotional hearing showed sharp divisions between the environmentalists and recreational park users who support closure and the de Young Museum benefactors and park neighbors who oppose it.

It also unmasked the deceptive tactics being employed by Wilsey and museum director John D. Buchanan, who coauthored an April 7 letter to de Young Museum members and April 4 memos to museum trustees and staff urging opposition to Healthy Saturdays and implying the museum’s survival was at stake.

"Closure of JFK Drive on Saturday has twice been voted down by the electorate and has been shown to be unpopular in polls for the last decade. While Sunday closure is a reality, road closures severely compromise access to the museum, particularly for seniors, families, persons with disabilities, and anyone who cannot afford the cost of the parking garage," they wrote. This information was parroted by many who argued against the closure.

Yet the letters were grossly misleading — and at least 16 museum members wrote angry letters to the museum protesting the Wilsey-Buchanan position. The Guardian obtained the letters through a Sunshine Ordinance request. One writer called the museum campaign "self-serving and deceptive," while another wrote: "I take issue with undertaking a letter campaign using my donations."

Contrary to what the April 7 letter implies, people with disabilities are allowed to drive on the closed roads, and McGoldrick has now incorporated into the measure all recommendations of the Mayor’s Office of Disability. The letter also never indicates that the closure is temporary, that free parking is available a short walk from the museum, or that the public voted on the proposal just once, albeit on two competing measures that were each narrowly defeated, in November 2000.

At that time, with polls showing public support for the Saturday closure proposed in Measure F, museum patrons tried to scuttle the closure by qualifying a competing Measure G, which would have delayed the Saturday closure until after completion of the parking garage. In the ballot pamphlet, Wilsey, the California Academy of Sciences, and other opponents of Measure F wrote arguments for the ballot handbook promising to support Saturday closure once the garage was completed, as it was last summer.

"The Academy supports the closure of JFK Drive on Saturdays once the efforts of Saturday closure have been studied, alternative transportation measures are in place, and the voter-approved, privately funded parking facility is built under the Music Concourse," one statement read.

At the hearing, McGoldrick asked Wilsey why she is reneging on her promise. Wilsey said that she wrote her statement in 1998 while her husband and dog were still alive, before she had raised $202 million for the museum renovation, and back when "we were not in a war against terrorism. Almost nothing that was true in 1998 is true today."

Wilsey did not respond to our request to clarify her response or explain other aspects of what appears to be a calculated campaign of misinformation. For example, she and other museum spokespeople have been saying publicly that museum attendance on Saturdays is far higher than on Sundays because of the road closure.

When we spoke with museum spokesperson Barbara Traisman, she said the de Young receives 15 to 20 percent more visitors on Saturdays than on Sundays. Yet she refused our request to provide the attendance data to support her statement — just as museum officials have ignored requests by McGoldrick for that data for the last three weeks — telling us: "That’s too onerous to ask someone to do that."

So on April 13, the Guardian made an immediate disclosure request for those records under the Sunshine Ordinance. The next day, just as the hearing was getting under way, Wilsey turned those records over to McGoldrick.

The documents showed that on 10 of the 23 weekends that the de Young has been open, attendance on Sundays was actually higher than on Saturdays. By the end of the hearing, even committee chair Sup. Sophie Maxwell — who had voiced concerns about Saturday closure and was not considered a supporter — voted for Healthy Saturdays, joining the board’s progressive majority of six that has already signed on as cosponsors. SFBG

 

Noise Pop popped open

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It’s over! And we all feel like we didn’t quite see as much as we would have liked. Ain’t that always the case for we, the pop neurotic? We came. We drank. We rocked. We nodded our heads with our arms folded loosely about ourselves. We stumbled home. We got damp. We didn’t quite conquer, but when we managed to get into the club, we felt that strange, ineffable sense of accomplishment.

Popping open an internal reporter’s notebook, I threw together a few highlights from my not-quite-embedded week in Noise Pop’s world:

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The Lips have a lock on SF hearts.

Word has it that beaucoup bucks were being passed for Flaming Lips ticks on Noise Pop’s opening night at Bimbo’s. How nice to finally get inside, out of the drizzle — and to find the special edition silk-screened Lips poster also sold out. Stardeath and white dwarfs — including Lips frontperson Wayne Coyne’s nephew sporting a skin-tight, alluring green costume — opened with palate-tickling psych.

After a short set-up break, Coyne read the proclamation from the San Francisco Mayor’s Office, naming March 27 through April 2, 2006, Noise Pop Week. Then all hell, balloons, and costumed Santa’s helpers broke loose. Don’t you miss those cozy, not-so-quiet shows in parking lots?

I’d include a pic of Steven Drodz deep-throating a mic, but I should keep it clean for all those soccer moms out there.

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Balloons must be free.

Later, Coyne launched into an anti-Bush admin monologue. We’re with you, guy — I just got the slight, ever-so-slight impression that he uses those same lines on all the states, both red and blue. “We got to make it popular to be gay, smoke pot, and have abortions!” he shouted. Say it loud — say it proud.

The next night at Bimbo’s, Feist managed to gracefully skirt a PA outage, refusing to stop the show and singing a few tunes a cappella. Her drummer, however, threw a hissy fit and stomped off at one point. “We love you, Ringo,” yelled one onlooker. Hey, dude, the Beatles broke up years ago.

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Jason Collett resembles the dapper bastard son of Peter Wolf
and Willy DeVille, no?

Feist was name-checked by her Broken Social Scene bandmate Jason Collett, who rolled out some nice 4/4 rock songcraft Friday night at Cafe du Nord. He paid tribute to his bad-seed years hanging at the mall and even unleashed some goofy, little soft-shoe. Brroooo — I mean, Jaaaaaasss…

Saturday day: It warmed the cockles of my dark lil’ heart to see so many turn out for the lady-dominated Indie Night School panel on music journalism, or how to get your CD reviewed (well, we hope).

On Saturday night, we hunkered down at Bottom of the Hill for a full night of hard rock with headliners Wolfmother. Portland’s Danava impressed with their mix of ’70s-referencing hard prog and ’80s-tinged crazed keys. What decade are we in? We had to admit — it was original.

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A lotta Danava.

Wolfmother are good at what they do — rocking the house with a mix of Detroit rock, ala the Stooges and MC5, along with, natch, Sabbath. I just wish it they didn’t seem so studied — just a feeling you got watching the bassist go through his not-breaking-a-sweat moves.

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That’s no puppy — that’s my band mate! Brightblack Morning Light at Great American Music Hall.

Sunday night wound down with Vetiver, Brightblack Morning Light, Neil Halstead, and Peggy Honeywell at Great American Music Hall. This show was notable for the sheer number of indie folkies sitting on the floor. No standing room only, goddammit. If only we were all reclining — that would complete the cool-down vibe of the fest’s final night.

Halstead forgot the words to one of his songs but was lovely nonetheless. Mojave who? Brightblack was stirring –showing off some slow, swinging folk-jazz fusion chops.

One interesting trend, apparent also at the recent His Name Is Alive show at Cafe du Nord: minion-like band members who sit on the stage like pets. Maybe the sitting thing was simply spreading, like a virus. But does anyone realize that these people are pretty much invisible to most of the room? Additionally these mascot-like stage sitters are usually women, who tend to look shy, servile, and childlike down there. Aw, c’mon, raise ’em up to where they belong.

All photos by Kimberly Chun.

March of the ants

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MEXICO CITY (March 7th) — Civil War in Iraq! Riots across the Islamic World! Coups and killer mudslides! The Bush administration sinking daily in the quicksand of corruption and lies!

When played against the backdrop of incipient cataclysm that darkens the globe from east to west and south to north, “the Other Campaign” of the largely Mayan rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation seems more like a march of ants across the Mexican landscape than breaking news.

The Other Campaign is, indeed, a campaign of ants.

This March 1, La Otra Campana marked the start of its third month on the road since the Zapatistas’ charismatic mouthpiece, Subcomandante Marcos, now doing business as “Delegate Zero,” roared out of a jungle camp in the EZLN’s Chiapas sanctuary zone on a silver and black motorcycle January 1, the 12th anniversary of the Zapatistas’ 1994 rebellion. In the past 60 days, Delegate Zero has traveled thousands of miles through ten states, a third of the Mexican union. The jaunt now constitutes the longest road trip the rebels have taken in their 12 years on public display.

The ski-masked spokesperson plans to visit all 31 states in the Mexican union (he will be on the U.S. border in June) and the federal district (where he will take part in the May 1 International Workers Day march) before Election Day July 2, when Mexico selects a new president and congress. The Other Campaign is staunchly anti-electoral, arguing that the political parties and the electoral system are hopelessly corrupt and unrepresentative.

La Otra Campana contrasts sharply with the opulent campaigns of Mexico’s three major political parties — the right-wing National Action (PAN) Party of President Vicente Fox, the once-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the leftish Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and its front-running candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO.)

Traveling close to the ground in a muddy white van, Marcos whistle stops a Mexico rarely visited by the “presidenciales,” huddling with the most pissed-off and marginalized Mexicans in down-and-out rural communities and ragged “popular colonies” in provincial cities, “the ones no one else is listening to.” The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, which gave birth to the Other Campaign, instructs the Zapatistas to “walk and question” rather than deliver the answers.

The idea of the Other Campaign is to build a new Mexican left from the bottom, an anti-capitalist, anti-electoral alliance that does not depend upon the political parties to bring about social change. “I am not a candidate — I am an anti-candidate,” Marcos tells audiences after hearing out their frustrations. “I cannot change these things, but we can do this together, because together we have the power.”

Nonetheless, the anti-candidate seems to be working twice as hard as the candidates — the PAN’s Felipe Calderon, the PRI’s Roberto Madrazo, and AMLO — in getting the word out. In stump speech after stump speech, Delegate Zero lambastes the political parties and their candidates, with particular emphasis on Lopez Obrador, who seems destined to become Mexico’s first president from the left since Lazaro Cardenas, and Latin America’s latest leftist head of state come July 2. The Other Campaign is, after all, a battle for the hearts and minds of the Mexican Left.

Delegate Zero’s withering attack on AMLO has led to charges by the PRD that he is fomenting absenteeism and handing the election to the right. The Other Campaign ran into angry PRDistas during a recent pit stop in Juchitan Oaxaca, once a stronghold of EZLN sympathy. Scuffling during a visit to teachers’ union offices in Oaxaca City was also a sign of PRD resentment at the Zapatista spokesperson’s pronouncements.

Delegate Zero adamantly refutes allegations that he is telling constituents not to vote in July — “each person must make his own decision.” Marcos is an inviting target of PRD fury because AMLO’s campaign has not yet ignited much interest. Aside from a 100,000-plus drummed out in Mexico City, where he was a wildly popular mayor, Lopez Obrador, as well as the PRI’s Madrazo and the PAN’s Calderon, have thus far not generated much buzz. The registration of only 57,000 Mexicans living in the United States out of a potential expatriate electorate of 3.4 million is an ominous signal that the 2006 presidenciales have not triggered much enthusiasm amongst a citizenry that voted for change in 2000 and was bitterly disappointed by six years of Vicente Fox’s empty promises.

But the butt of Delegate Zero’s on-running rap is not always AMLO: The Subcommandante expends equal dollops of time roasting Mexico’s last three neo-liberal presidents, Carlos Salinas, Ernesto Zedillo, and Fox, often calling for their imprisonment. In this sense, the Other Campaign is a significant test of free speech in Mexico. Thus far, Delegate Zero has not been clapped in jail for attacking the powerful and preaching class war, although he has been allowed to enter prisons twice so far to visit political prisoners in Tabasco and on the Tehuantepec isthmus of Oaxaca.

Although the Fox government professes that it’s not listening to the Other Campaign, its plainclothes intelligence agents monitor every meeting. The events are often patrolled by machine-gun toting police, and local organizers have been harassed and jailed for such crimes as posting notice of the rebels’ arrival in town.

The Other Campaign moves cautiously in convoy on the road, cognizant of possible assassination attempts or “accidents” — in 1994, the Zapatistas’ candidate for Chiapas governor, the late Amado Avandano, was nearly killed in a highly suspicious head-on crash with a license-less 18 wheeler on a lonely coastal highway. Earlier that same year, the PRI presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was gunned down in Tijuana.

Marcos’s audiences are the “simple and humble” people that the Other Campaign seeks to recruit — “those who have never held a microphone in their hand,” writes John Gibler who is accompanying the odyssey for the San Francisco-based NGO Global Exchange. At such meetings, Delegate Zero takes copious notes as he listens intently to the outrage of the locals, always counseling the attendees that they themselves, in alliance with other “simple and humble” Mexicans, have the power to alter the equation between rich and poor, justice and injustice. The EZLN is proposing the writing of a new Mexican constitution to achieve this end.

This was the message Delegate Zero brought to a pink-doored Casa de Citas (house of prostitution) in the tiny Tlaxcala town of Apaxio. After three hours of conversing with the sexoservidoras (sex workers), the Sub called for the formation of a national union of sex workers (“not prostitutes — the prostitutes are the politicians who sell themselves to the highest bidder.”)

Other Other Campaign venues have found the quixotic rebel spokesperson tilting at windmills in La Ventosa Oaxaca, the site of a transnational wind farm that impacts local Zapotec Indians; in Oaxaca’s Juarez Sierra, talking the evils of transgenic corn with campesinos; speaking to a few thousand protestors at a new airport site in Hidalgo; hobnobbing with transvestites in Orizaba Veracruz; straddling a tricycle (poor peoples’ transportation in southern Mexico) with the Union of Triciclistas in Merida Yucatan; promising a thousand ex-braceros who have been cheated out of moneys due them by both the U.S. and Mexican governments that he will march with them May 1st; and encouraging Mayan artisans barred from selling their wares at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza to take matters into their own hands.

Humor is a Zapatista weapon, and Marcos has armed the Other Campaign with a satiric edge. He is accompanied on the tour by his pet beetle Don Durito of the Lacandon (representing “the autonomous municipality of Charlie Parker”) and in Merida, the Sup actually removed his mask to the gasp of hundreds of admirers. Of course, he had his summer mask on underneath.

The steady grind of the Other Campaign is gaining “traction” in the eyes of Narconews founder Al Giodorno, who has been accompanying the adventure as it wends its way through Mexico. Narconews is just one of dozens of alternative media that file daily reports on the Other Campaign. The EZLN has extended preference to alternative rather than corporate media — only two national newspapers, La Jornada and Milenio, cover the Otra, and international attention has been short-lived (although Al Jazeera headlined the campaign’s first days.)

In mid-February, hundreds of alternative journalists and writers from all over Mexico convened in Tlaxcala to pledge allegiance to “the other journalism,” which focuses on reporting social change from the bottom up.

The traction that Giodorno senses the Other Campaign is gaining comes at the expense of the PAN, PRI, and PRD. As their presidential candidates fail to stimulate enthusiasm and the opulence of their campaigns elicits the dismay of the nation’s 70 million poor, the Other Campaign wins adherents.

On a continent that has elected the left to high office in important numbers and where the citizenry has been frequently disenchanted by government’s failure to improve daily lives, the Zapatistas campaign to build change from down below is bound to have an echo.

Invited to attend new Bolivian president Evo Morales’s all-star inauguration January 22, in La Paz, the EZLN responded “it is not our way to meet with the great leaders.” Addressing a few hundred indigenous farmers in rural Campeche state, Delegate Zero explained “we have come instead to listen to you because no one ever does.”

Bolivia’s new president heard the Zapatistas’ message loud and clear, pledging to mandar obedeciendo — to serve by obeying the will of the Bolivian people, the EZLN’s leadership ethos.

John Ross is sleepless in Seattle. These dispatches will continue at 10-day intervals until he returns to Mexico in mid-March. His latest opus, Making Another World Possible — Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006, will be published this fall by Nationbooks (if he ever finishes it.)

 

28 years later

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If you live in or truly love San Francisco, you’ve seen The Times of Harvey Milk. Rob Epstein’s 1984 movie is one of the best nonfiction features ever made. It’s also one of the greatest movies about this city. Only time will tell whether Stanley Nelson’s new documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, is a work of similar importance, but the fact that I’m even mentioning it in the same context as Epstein’s movie says something about the reserved precision of its journalistic reasoning and the overwhelming emotional force of its finale.

Of course, there is another reason to connect Jonestown and The Times of Harvey Milk. The murder of Supervisor Milk and Mayor George Moscone by Dan White took place 10 days after the deaths of Jim Jones, Congressman Leo Ryan, and more than 900 members of Jones’s Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. One tragedy claimed the life of a man who was already a civil rights hero, while the other led mainstream media and true crime sources to portray a human being as a monster. Just as Epstein’s movie profoundly humanizes Milk, Nelson’s movie digs beneath stereotypes of pure evil to reveal a different Jones than the one used to sell quickie television and paperback biographies.

Twenty-eight years later, the tragedy in Guyana and the Milk-Moscone murders still have an effect on San Francisco politics: In very different ways, they represent the death of progressive, district-based local activism and its afterlife. (Garrett Scott, codirector of the superb documentaries Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story and Occupation: Dreamland, was in the early stages of making a movie about the two events and their relationship to SF politics when he died earlier this year.) It seemed appropriate to have New York native Nelson discuss his movie with a contemporary political figure whose knowledge of local history runs deep. On the eve of Jonestown’s screenings at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, former San Francisco mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez agreed to interview Nelson about the roads leading to the cataclysmic events of 1978 and the roads leading away from it.

MATT GONZALEZ I want to start by saying I had a typical impression of Jim Jones as a cult leader whose message was a hustle to get people into his church so he could take advantage of them when they were vulnerable. The thing that jumped out immediately to me in this film was that the fundamental part of his message throughout his ministry was this idea of racial integration and equality. The main component was there at the beginning, and in a place like Indiana, when Indianapolis was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. It made me rethink and see him as someone who exhibited a certain genuineness and courage at that time.

Did that surprise you about him?

STANLEY NELSON The depth of his commitment surprised me. During one of the anniversaries of the deaths in Guyana, I heard some Peoples Temple members talking about it on [the radio]. I started thinking, “This involved over 900 people — all these people weren’t crazy. So what was it that drove them to the church?”

Research made me realize that there was something much deeper going on and that this was a real political movement for a lot of the time the church was in existence.

MG Jones had been a member of a human rights commission out in Indiana. That also underscores a very self-conscious relationship between his church and what was happening in society.

SN Yes. [In the film] there’s that incredible audiotape when he’s giving his own history, where he talks about how his father didn’t want to let a black kid in his house. Jim Jones says, “I won’t come in either,” and he doesn’t see his father for years after that.

I don’t think it was a hustle at all, I think it was something he truly did believe in. Jim Jones was a very complicated individual. Everybody’s complicated — there are no simple people — but Jim Jones was much more complicated than most of us.

MG How hard was it to find folks in Indiana who knew Jones?

SN It was hard. But Lynn [Jones’s hometown] was very small, and we were able to find one person who could lead us to others. One thing that’s amazing when you do research is that you can go to high schools and grade schools, and they still have yearbooks. You find people’s names, use the phone book, and just start calling.

MG Over time, Peoples Temple gets a financial foundation because its members give their property to Jones. He’s then able to set up communal living arrangements. But when he’s in Indiana, if I’m to understand correctly, he’s selling monkeys door to door or something like that.

Was his message about communal living a part of the hustle, or do you think that was also a belief that he genuinely held?

SN I think he genuinely believed it. That component really came out of Ukiah, in Redwood Valley, where they [Peoples Temple] had this farm. People actually did travel with him from Indiana [in 1965], so how were they going to live when they’d sold their houses? They could live communally.

One thing that I found fascinating is that the older people who lived in these communal houses got better treatment than they ever could have gotten from the state or welfare or Social Security, because not only were they housed and fed, they were also loved. All of a sudden they had this family — the old people were revered in Peoples Temple.

MG Would you say those two components — racial integration and property held in common — were the cornerstone of his preaching?

SN I think they were a big part, but it was also more than just racial integration. There was a sense that “we have this power that none of us has as individuals.” This was a time when a lot of people were smoking dope and dropping out, but Peoples Temple members were active. They saw themselves as activists; they saw themselves changing the world with the church as a tool.

MG In 1971 Richard Hongisto was elected sheriff of San Francisco, and it was a very liberal campaign. [George] Moscone was elected mayor in ’75, and we know Peoples Temple played a part in that. Hongisto’s election was an early sign of growing liberal strength in San Francisco, enough so that you can look at the Moscone victory and not simply say, “Peoples Temple caused this to happen.” But there’s no question given how close the election was that they played a major role. How do you see their political impact then?

SN Peoples Temple was part of the mainstream politics of the Bay Area. I’m from New York. I had no idea that Jim Jones was head of the Housing Commission in San Francisco or that politicians came to Peoples Temple events and gave incredible speeches praising Jim Jones. That was something I discovered while making the film.

It’s part of the history of Peoples Temple, but it was also like a birthday cake–times-12 to the politicians. The politicians didn’t look too far behind this gift horse, because [Peoples Temple] was highly organized. People did what Jim Jones said. At one point they had 13 buses. They’d fill up the buses and —

MG — a politician could have an instant press conference.

SN Just one phone call and Jim Jones could come with buses. You’d have 500 people at your march.

MG Do you get a sense that what happened in Jonestown reverberates politically today? The players then aren’t necessarily in politics. Jackie Speier still is, but Moscone, Willie Brown, and others are not holding political office. Still, do you see any aftereffects?

SN I’m not sure on a local level, but one thing I think it did was help kill the idea of communes in this country [at a time] when there was a strong movement saying, “Let’s live together; let’s live on the land; let’s pool our resources.” All of a sudden that was associated with “look at what happened in Guyana.”

MG As I understand it, there are about five survivors who were there when the massacre took place.

SN There were about five people actually there [who survived], and of those, there are, to my knowledge, three left alive. Two of them are in the film.

MG People closely associated with Peoples Temple spoke to you and revealed some, I would think, very difficult, personal stories about sexual assault or the use of authority to express dominance. Was it difficult to get people to talk honestly?

SN It was surprisingly easy for us to get people to talk honestly. Time has passed. Partly because of a play [Berkeley Rep’s The People’s Temple] that was produced here in the Bay Area, I think people understood that maybe we were ready to hear a different version of the story that was much deeper.

MG In the film you see that Jones is abusing prescription drugs and probably has a mounting paranoia that’s associated with some mental condition. Is there a sense that he changed while he was in San Francisco, or was Peoples Temple headed toward this sort of cultlike finality from its inception?

SN We interviewed people who knew Jim Jones when he was a kid, and they talk about the fact that he was not normal even as a six- or seven-year-old boy. But I think that his behavior did get more extreme as time went on. He had this incredible power within the church, and he was this warped individual, and the combination affected his behavior. In the end, when they [Peoples Temple members] are isolated in the jungle, that’s [a reflection of] who he is.

MG Tell me about the wealth of material you have. There is film footage of a healing that is rather dramatic and recordings of his various sermons.

SN Going in, I had no idea that there was so much film footage. But we found a guy in LA who had shot in Peoples Temple over two days using three cameras and 16-millimeter film and had lit the whole church. His footage is just incredibly beautiful. The healing service, Jim Jones preaching, and the congregation singing and dancing are all part of that. He’d sold off bits and pieces to places like NBC, but we came along at a time when he felt that the film he wanted to make would never get made, so he agreed to sell us some footage.

We found members of Peoples Temple who had footage that had never been seen before. There are actually shots from the plane of them going down [to Guyana] — you can hear Jim Jones describing what he’s going to do — and shots of Jones cutting through the jungle with machetes.

Also, we were working very closely with the California Historical Society library, which has a Peoples Temple collection.

MG There was a recent book [Dear People: Remembering Jonestown] that compiled some of that material.

SN Also, Jim Jones recorded himself and his sermons at Peoples Temple. They actually audio-recorded the night of the suicides. As the people are dying, Jim Jones is encouraging them to drink the poison. There are audiotapes of the children and the women and men screaming and dying.

MG As a filmmaker going into a project like this, are you trying to present the truth? Are you trying to present an alternative reading of what happened? Are you trying to warn people?

SN I’m not trying to warn people or tell an alternative history, although obviously what we did turns out to be an alternative history. I was just trying to tell this incredible story and tell it with as much honesty as I can. Everybody in the film had a part to play in Peoples Temple. We really wanted it to be a film told in the voices of the people who lived through it.

MG In my notes I have a reference to the various CIA-related theories [about what happened in Guyana]. You don’t pick that up in the film, and I wonder if you might say something about that.

SN There are different theories that Jim Jones was a CIA agent and this was all a scary mind-control experiment. You know, we found nothing to back that up, and it just didn’t make sense for us to go down that road.

MG As I understand it, a lot of these theories stem from [the fact] that the government withheld documents related to Jonestown. I guess Congressman [Leo] Ryan had a bill pending, the Hughes-Ryan amendment, that would have required that CIA covert operations be disclosed to Congress before those operations could be engaged in. You didn’t find anything related to that?

SN No, we didn’t find any hard evidence. I’m trying to operate as a filmmaker and also as a journalist.

MG So you had access to material —

SN — and we just didn’t find it [evidence].

MG I’d be interested in seeing what the original accounts were like in the local press in San Francisco during the time of Guyana and the Milk-Moscone murders. There was probably a sense of how Moscone’s opponents might use his ties to the Peoples Temple for political purposes.

SN One reason for the article in [the magazine] New West that first exposed Jim Jones and called for an investigation of Peoples Temple was to discredit Moscone. Part of the media follow-up was that “here is someone that Moscone supported.” So that was already happening around a year before the deaths in Guyana.

MG There are folks who find objectionable the idea of referring to the deaths as mass suicides. Did you reach a conclusion about that?

SN The film has no narration, so we didn’t refer to that other than in a title card at the end that I think calls it the largest mass murder-suicide in history. It’s impossible to say exactly what went on that day, but it is very clear that the kids — something like 250 people who were under 18 — were all murdered.

It was something we struggled with: “What do we call it: suicide or murder?” I think by the end of the film you feel that it’s kind of both at the same time.

MG If Jim Jones had died in Guyana prior to Ryan’s visit, is your sense in talking to the survivors or those associated with the church that this is a project that would have sustained itself?

SN I just don’t know.

MG You don’t want to engage in a bit of speculative history?

SN I think they had a real problem in sustaining themselves. They were growing food, but they were bringing in food too. Financially there was a burden.

One fascinating thing about that day is that there weren’t a lot of people who left with Congressman Ryan — less than 20 people. It was more Jim Jones’s insanity, him thinking that 20 people leaving is devastating [that led to the massacre].

MG Other than the sermons, are there other records of his thoughts? Are there tracts and manifestos?

SN There are some things that he wrote. He didn’t write a definitive book of his philosophies, but there is a piece in which he picks apart fallacies in the Bible.

MG On the one hand, Jones could be critical of the contradictions in the Bible, and on the other, he could pick out the parts that were useful to him.

SN One thing that everybody said was that Jim Jones knew the Bible — he wasn’t just talking off of the top of his head. He was incredibly smart, prepared, and cunning.

MG What did you learn from making the film?

SN It’s a film I’m glad to be finished with. All films are hard to make, but it really took a lot out of me. We’ve only had two screenings, and both times afterward there was a kind of shocked silence. One was for the members of Peoples Temple and their friends to let them be the first to see it.

MG How it was received?

SN The Peoples Temple members loved the film. We screened the film in a small theater, and we had a reception outside. The Peoples Temple members who were there with their families just stayed in the theater for about 15 minutes talking among themselves. It made me a little nervous [laughs]. But when they came out they all said they loved the film and felt it was a powerful way of telling their story — a story that hadn’t been told that way at all.

JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLES TEMPLE

April 29, 6:15 p.m.; April 30, 7 p.m.; May 1, 7 p.m.; May 2, 4:30 p.m.

Part of the San Francisco International Film Festival

Various venues

Call (925) 866-9559 for tickets and (415) 561-5000 for more information.

www.sffs.org

San Francisco needs better candidates

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The last time we had a major Democratic primary race for state assembly in San Francisco, you didn’t see a lot of head-shaking. In 2002 you were for Mark Leno or you were for Harry Britt, and either way you had very few doubts. Two strong candidates, two people who were eminently qualified to represent San Francisco in Sacramento, two people who had the credentials to be Democratic party leaders.

But I’ve talked to a lot of people about the June 6, 2006, race to fill the spot of Assemblymember Leland Yee, who is trying to move on to the state senate, and what I’m getting is: Gee, well, yeah. Gotta vote for somebody.

The thing is, Sup. Fiona Ma, the front-running candidate, has been absolutely horrible in office, a terrible vote on everything I care about. Her lukewarm supporters say she’d be a good liberal compared to most of the state legislators, and that may be true, but it’s hardly a ringing endorsement. Her opponent, Janet Reilly, is taking some excellent stands on issues, running hard to the left of Ma — but she’s never held any elective office before, and, frankly, not that many people in San Francisco even know who she is. If she didn’t have a lot of money, she wouldn’t be much of a factor in this race.

Then you look slightly southward, at the race for state senate. The candidates: Yee, who has done almost nothing to distinguish himself in the state legislature, and Mike Nevin, a former San Francisco cop and San Mateo County supervisor. I don’t know a single person in the progressive San Francisco world who can get a bit excited about either of them.

San Francisco has got to start doing better.

Leno’s term will be up in two more years. I can think of a lot of great Democratic candidates (Tom Ammiano, Chris Daly, Robert Haaland), but we all ought to be thinking about it, now, the same way we need to be thinking about the next mayor of San Francisco and the next member of Congress. Otherwise we’ll have a lot of Fiona Mas and Bevan Duftys in our future.

Now this: Speaking of politicians who need to get out of the way, Leslie Katz, the chair of the local Democratic County Central Committee, recently pulled an act of world-class political sleaze. She opposes Sup. Chris Daly’s Proposition C, a measure that would force the mayor to serve on the Transbay Terminal board, but the committee wasn’t quite ready to take a stand. So March 22, shortly after noon, she filed an official no-on-Prop.–C ballot argument on behalf of the San Francisco Democratic Party.

In other words, she decided on her own to file a legal document to appear in the ballot handbook committing the party to a position it hadn’t taken.

In the end the party did vote — later — to oppose Prop. C. But Katz sent a clear signal that she had the committee wired and wasn’t even going to wait for the formality of an actual vote. Nasty business. It sends the exact wrong signal about the local party. She ought to resign in disgrace.<\!s><z5><h110>SFBG<h$><z$>

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So let’s get this straight:

The lieutenant governor is running for insurance commissioner. The insurance commissioner is running for lieutenant governor. The former governor is running for attorney general. The attorney general is running for treasurer.

Round and round and round we spin. Talk about a clusterfuck.

There was a time, and it wasn’t all that long ago, when every single constitutional office in California was held by a Democrat. And it’s entirely possible that this fall — with the Republican president and Republican governor in political free fall — the Democrats will actually lose some top jobs in Sacramento.

Let me humbly suggest one reason why: We have a bunch of people running for office who really ought to find something else to do with their lives.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. If you talk to people who think about the future of the California Democratic Party — people who might actually play a role in it, say, 10 years from now — what you hear is this: Why are the same old names bouncing around like petrified Ping-Pong balls?

John Garamendi has been running for some office or other (including unsuccessfully for governor) for the past 20 years. He’s been insurance commissioner twice. Now, since he clearly can’t get the top job, he’s angling for number two.

Cruz Bustamante has virtually disappeared since he dared run in the recall election that brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to power. Perhaps he can slip into Garamendi’s post for a while, while he figures out what else to do. Bill Lockyer thought about running for governor but realized he wasn’t going to win, and although he’s not a terrible attorney general, he’s decided to run for treasurer, which makes no sense unless he’s waiting around to try another office at some point.

Jerry Brown was governor once, and after a period of self-imposed exile, he decided to run for president (of the United States), then mayor of Oakland. By the way, he’s a lawyer, so now he wants to be attorney general.

None of these people is evil, and the state could do worse — way worse — than electing any of them. But is anyone else getting the distinct feeling that we’re the party of, well, yesterday?

Just thought I’d ask.

One of my favorite political movies is Robocop, the 1987 Paul Verhoeven sci-fi film that is not generally considered a great social statement about anything. But when you pay attention (and watch it with the right, um, mind-set), Robocop is actually a story about privatization: Detroit has turned over its police force to the Omni Consumer Products Corporation, which decides to save money (for the company’s bottom line) by cutting staff and squeezing pay — to the point where there’s inadequate backup when our hero gets into a firefight with the bad guys and almost gets shot to bits. They revive him as a cyborg, and he tries to be an honest cop — but deep in his electronic DNA is a rule that he can’t arrest or harm any officer of the Omni Consumer Products Corporation.

I thought about that when I heard that the patrol specials — a crew of private armed civilians who wear uniforms and badges and walk the streets under a 19th-century tradition — was asking for expanded authority in San Francisco (see page 5). The message that the group recently sent to the Police Commission: Privatization is the wave of the future in urban law enforcement.

Yikes. *

EDITOR’S NOTES

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It still boggles my mind: One of the most significant development issues in years came to a head last week at the City Planning Commission — and none of the news media seem to have noticed. G.W. Schulz describes the situation in depth on page 18, but here’s the short version: City planners have acknowledged they can’t allow any more market-rate housing in the eastern neighborhoods for the indefinite future.

At least they seem to have acknowledged that. The real test is still to come, when the next development comes along, but either way this is pretty big news — and I haven’t read a word about it in the Chron or the Ex.

I shouldn’t be surprised anymore.

Now this: The San Francisco Democratic Party is in a bit of a tizzy over something that ought to be basic common sense.

Sup. Chris Daly has put a measure on the June 6 ballot, Prop. C, that would make the Transbay Joint Powers Authority more directly accountable to voters. The TJPA is pretty important: It controls the Transbay Terminal project, which will determine the city’s transit future for many years to come. But right now, two of the city’s three representatives are basically bureaucrats (one from the Mayor’s Office, one from Muni) who answer (it often seems) to nobody.

Daly wants to make the mayor, the city’s representative to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (currently Sup. Tom Ammiano), and the supervisor from District 6 (Daly, who’s already on the TJPA) serve on the panel.

Sounds like alphabet soup and nothing to make a fuss over — except that the mayor would suddenly have to focus on this project because he’d be on the board. He might even have to go to a meeting or two. And everyone on that key panel would have to answer directly to the voters.

And for some reason (perhaps the thought of actually sitting through a TJPA meeting) this has Gavin Newsom up in arms. The Democratic County Central Committee, which makes policy for the local party, was set to endorse Prop. C last week until Newsom began twisting arms. Then a bunch of people (including state assemblymember Mark Leno and state senator Carole Migden) couldn’t be counted in the yes camp, so the whole thing was postponed until March 21, when Daly, the Sierra Club, and all of the city’s transit activists were set to square off against Newsom and the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR).

It will be a nice test: Can the County Committee stand up to the mayor? Will Migden and Leno?

And this: Caroline Grannan, a normally well-meaning and hardworking advocate for the public schools, is having a strange fit of indignation over our articles on school board expenses. The stories focused mostly on how former superintendent Arlene Ackerman pissed away public money on posh dining and accommodations, but Grannan is mad that we even mentioned board member Jill Wynns, who also spends district money on travel (but has run up nowhere near the sort of tab that Ackerman did).

Her complaint is on page 7, and I think she’s way overreacting here, but she makes one valid point: The school board members are essentially volunteers who earn all of $500 a month. That’s silly. A school board member ought to be a full-time job with full-time pay.

And board members’ salaries and expenses should be very much the public’s business. *

Enforcing a hidden anti-eviction law

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As the Board of Supervisors was in the process of approving a measure to require a public hearing before converting rental units into condominiums – a measure Mayor Gavin Newsom has shamefully pledged to veto – Sup. Chris Daly told his progressive colleagues they shouldn’t be cowed by accusations that they are against home-ownership opportunities.

He’s exactly right. The city’s building new condos at a rapid clip, with more than 9,000 for-sale units in the pipeline right now, while rental units are disappearing. It’s more fair to accuse Newsom and his allies of being hostile to renters than to somehow say progressives oppose home ownership.

In fact, as Daly pointed out Jan. 10, the city isn’t even using existing tools to help tenants.

Six months ago, the San Francisco Tenants Union and Sup. Aaron Peskin unearthed a 25-year-old city law that could prevent many future condo conversions. Section 1386 of the city’s subdivision code, approved in 1981, requires city planners to reject condo conversions in which evictions or steep rent hikes have been used to clear the building for sale.

The law is a bit outdated – it requires landlords to provide only a five-year history of building occupancy. The supervisors should amend it to allow city officials to consider how a building was cleared out of tenants, whenever that occurred, and if Newsom wants to be seen as anything more than a fan of evictions and a shill for speculators, he should direct planning officials to start aggressively enforcing the law’s provisions.

That’s just one step the supervisors can take to deal with a mayor who seems unwilling to take even modest steps to slow the flood of evictions and the loss of rental housing. Newsom insists smaller condo conversions – ones involving fewer than five units – shouldn’t even be subject to Planning Commission hearings because that august body needs to save its time and energy for larger land-use issues.

So tenant activists and Peskin are pursuing with the City Attorney’s Office the possibility of requiring public notice for all condo conversions, of any size, which would give tenant activists the ability to appeal those permits to the full Board of Supervisors. It’s a good idea: If the poor, overworked planners are too busy to protect rental housing, and the supervisors want to take on the job, it will be hard for Newsom to say no.

Bail out the schools – once

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The San Francisco school-closure process has been about as bad as it possibly could be. Information about the potential closings came late out of the district office. The criteria for inclusion on the closure list were hard to understand – and harder to comprehend. The district kept parents out of the process until the very end and then restricted community input to a few moments at a series of crammed hearings. In many instances, representatives from the endangered schools had only 10 minutes to make their cases at last-minute hearings attended by only a few of the school board members.

And in the end, all that came out was a short-term solution to a very long-term, pressing problem.

It’s no surprise that the proposed closure list has very real problems – and that community leaders in the Western Addition and Bayview-Hunters Point, which would be the hardest hit neighborhoods, are outraged. Now the board, which, on Jan. 12, decided to put off making the decision, is scrambling to find a way to restore some degree of fairness and credibility to the process.

It’s an impossible task: After the mess of the past month, there’s simply no way to make a fair decision about school closures right now. And the way things are going in the district these days, it’s likely the exact same ugly and poorly thought-out process will take place next fall, and the year after, and the year after that.

It’s time to put a halt to the madness, for good. Mayor Gavin Newsom should drop his opposition to bailing out the schools; the city needs to step in and give the district the cash to stave off most of the closures for a year. But there has to be a condition: The school board and administration must undertake a real, credible, effective long-term planning effort, starting now, to determine how to handle declining enrollment in a fair and comprehensive fashion.

.  .  .

Just about everyone agrees that some San Francisco public schools have to close. The district is losing roughly 1,000 students a year, and has been since the early 1980s. But schools aren’t just buildings; they’re communities, they’re part of their neighborhoods – and closing them down is by definition going to be traumatic.

So at the very least, there needs to be some overall logic and educational policy behind the decisions. And right now that’s badly lacking. The main criteria for closures – declining enrollment and low test scores – virtually guarantee that low-income neighborhoods will be the hardest hit. And the proposed mergers would bring together two small, low-performing schools to make one larger school that will still have the same (or worse) issues.

There are all sorts of other alternatives. Could some of the most popular schools, the ones with huge waiting lists and stellar test scores, be expanded to take over empty space in under-enrolled schools? Would mergers between top schools and low-performing schools give low-income kids a better chance?

More important, how many schools will San Francisco need in 10 years, and where should they be located? Is there a way to phase some schools out without shutting them down altogether? Is there a way to promise parents who want their children to stay in the public schools that their schools – their communities – won’t be destroyed next year, or the year after?

If – and only if – the district is willing to commit to a credible planning process, with parents, teachers, community leaders, and someone from City Hall (perhaps a member of the Board of Supervisors) involved from the start, to create a facilities plan for the next decade, the supervisors and the mayor should look for the $5 million it would take to stave off most closures for this year. And if the city won’t do that, the District should look into using reserve funds to cover the gap. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi had the right line when he testified at the Jan. 12 school board meeting: The city should help the schools out – as long as the district can promise that this utter disaster of a process will never happen again.

Does Mills make sense?

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It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

 When Virginia-based mall developer Mills Corp. used political pressure by then-mayor Willie Brown and a partnership with the YMCA to narrowly win Port of San Francisco approval, in 2001, for the exclusive right to build a shopping center and office park at Piers 27-31, the project was supposed to slide right through.

 The Board of Supervisors was effectively cut out. All that elected body – which includes some supervisors who have been critical of the Mills project – could really do was tinker with the environmental impact report, or maybe just refuse to certify it and risk getting sued.

 But that was before a little-noticed change in a fairly noncontroversial ordinance put the board in the driver’s seat.

 Now a clearly concerned Mills Corp. has launched an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign – including a series of full-page newspaper ads – urging the public to convince the board to certify that the project makes long-term financial sense when supervisors consider the matter next month. Otherwise, the project could be dead even before its EIR is complete, setting up the port to chose another developer when the Mills contract expires next year.

 Board president Aaron Peskin won approval last year for his Fiscal Responsibility and Feasibility Ordinance. "The whole notion of the ordinance is before you go headlong into these projects, let’s make sure the city has the resources to maintain it over time," Peskin told the Bay Guardian, noting how many projects in the city get built without solid plans for the long-term operating funds needed to maintain them.

 The ordinance covers projects that get over $1 million in public funds and other taxpayer-backed subsidies, and in July of this year, with the Mills project in mind, the board modified the measure to include in its definition of public funds the lucrative rent credits Mills is getting.

 "I think [Mills executives] are scared. They didn’t expect the board to be able to weigh in on this before the end," said Jon Golinger, who is leading the opposition to the project. "The board now gets to assess whether we can trust this company to do what they say they’re going to do."

 And trust seems to be a key issue in this case. Under state law and Prop. H, in which San Francisco voters required a recreation plan for the northern waterfront, Piers 27-31 are supposed to be geared toward offering recreational amenities to San Franciscans. Mills and port officials say the project’s YMCA and the "recreational retail" focus of its shops will meet that requirement.

 Critics in Golinger’s group say the project is little more than a glorified mall using the recreation label to pass legal muster, an accusation that Mills Corp.’s 2003 annual report does little to contest, calling the project "an attractive entertainment, dining, shopping and office center" and never once using the word "recreation" (a word added to the label in its 2004 report).

 An otherwise breathlessly laudatory economic study commissioned by the developers and released in July also indirectly raises the question of whether the 164,700 square feet of office space in the project will generate enough cash to pay for all the developer’s promises. Based on statements made by Mills executives, the report notes, "the project is unlikely to be built unless it can achieve minimum net rents of $35 per square foot which represents a major premium over current rents, that few if any existing tenants would be able or willing to pay."

 San Francisco has one of the highest office vacancy rates in the country, and rents average well below what these developers expect to receive. But Mills spokesman Dave D’Onofrio said the offices will be unlike any in the city, and "the market is clearly there" to support such high rents.

 In addition to these areas, Peskin said the board will consider Mills Corp.’s deal with the YMCA, which will be required to pay back the $30 million in capital costs fronted by the developer, on top of the ongoing operating costs needed to maintain this project as a recreational facility open to all.

 "They’re going to have to show how they’re going to fund the Y," Peskin said. He and others have noted that none of the financial documents released by the developer shed much light on that arrangement or other financial details of the project, although the port is currently preparing another financial document set for release to the board Sept. 28.

 Neither port nor YMCA officials returned our calls for comment, but D’Onofrio noted that the YMCA will pay just $1 per year in rent and that he is "utterly confident that the Y will be successful."

 Mills officials have publicly blamed opposition on businesses on Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf, who fear competition from the project. "But there’s no validity to that argument," said Chris Martin, whose family has owned The Cannery and has been involved in northern waterfront planning issues for more than 30 years. He said the northern waterfront is already a congested mess on weekends, and an intensive project like this will make things much worse.

 In response to our inquiries, Mills project manager John Spratley issued a written statement saying in part, "The Board of Supervisors will find that The Piers is financially strong and a tremendous economic benefit for San Francisco and the Port."

 Peskin said he has an open mind about the project but said it is incumbent upon the developers to provide more information showing how the open space, recreational amenities, and other public access aspects to this project will be maintained over the long run: "To them, I say that if your project is so great then it will be great in the future."

 E-mail Steven T. Jones at steve@sfbg.com.

Does Mills make sense?

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Does Mills make sense?

Peskin measure gives supervisors an early say over a controversial waterfront development
By Steven T. Jones

It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

When Virginia-based mall developer Mills Corp. used political pressure by then-mayor Willie Brown and a partnership with the YMCA to narrowly win Port of San Francisco approval, in 2001, for the exclusive right to build a shopping center and office park at Piers 27-31, the project was supposed to slide right through.

The Board of Supervisors was effectively cut out. All that elected body

Film: Critic’s Choice: ‘San Francisco’s Broken Promise’

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Thurs/29, Delancey Street Screening Room

WHEN A GROUP  of Modesto Junior College students began looking into what Bay Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann calls "the biggest scandal in American history involving a city," most of them knew nothing about Hetch Hetchy Valley, and none of them had ever heard of the Raker Act. But spurred by a series of Bay Guardian stories and led by their instructor, Carol Lancaster Mingus, a veteran public television producer, they spent 17 weeks researching the story, doing interviews, and putting together archival footage. The result, San Francisco’s Broken Promise, is a remarkably clear, cogent account of how Pacific Gas and Electric Co. kept public power out of San Francisco. In just half an hour, the documentary summarizes one of the great stories in the city’s history, hitting all the major points. It describes how the fight over the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley was the first major nationwide environmental battle, how the Sierra Club and John Muir fought to save the spectacular twin of Yosemite Valley twin, and how Congress agreed to let San Francisco build the dam, but only with a very specific condition: The dam had to generate electricity, and that cheap, public power had to be used to keep PG&E’s monopoly out of town. Obviously, the Bay Guardian (and its editor-publisher) play a key role in the doc. But the real star is Joe Neilands, the retired UC Berkeley biochemistry professor who first got onto the story in 1969. Neilands describes in his calm, soft-spoken way how the entire premise behind the Raker Act has been actively violated for more than 80 years. In the end, the film is a bit soft on the "restore Hetch Hetchy" movement, which wants to tear down the dam (a move that would be a deadly blow to public power in the city). And I would have loved to see some Michael Moore-style confrontations of PG&E executives and key public officials (like US senator, and former SF mayor, Dianne Feinstein, who figures prominently in the story but gets away with simply "declining comment." But Mingus and the student crew do a fine job of telling a complex tale without the use of a narrator, just splicing together a series of interviews. The film provides a wonderful public service: It gives a solid primer on the immensely complicated story of a scandal involving hundreds of millions of dollars – and does it in a way that’s entertaining, understandable, and wrapped up in a 30-minute package. Screening this week as part of the San Francisco World Film Festival, San Francisco’s Broken Promise ought to be aired on KQED, on local cable, and in classrooms and meeting rooms all over the city, and it ought be considered a mandatory part of any local activist’s basic political education. Thurs/29, 5 p.m., 600 Embarcadero, SF. $10. Festival runs Thurs/29-Sun/2; call (415) 725-0009 or go to www.sfworldfilmfestival.com/festival.html for a complete schedule. (Tim Redmond)

The political puppeteer

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By offering envelope-pushing legal and political advice at key moments in the fall campaign, attorney Jim Sutton was perhaps the single most influential individual behind the victories of Mayor Gavin Newsom and District Attorney Kamala Harris.
In the process, Sutton solidified his reputation as the dark prince of San Francisco elections, a hired gun who helps downtown interests and well-funded campaigns continue to dominate the electoral field even after voters passed reforms that restricted campaign giving and spending and required more official disclosure.
“He knows more election law than anyone, and he knows it better than anyone else,” local political consultant David Looman told the Bay Guardian. “He is the guy you call.”
New era, new player
Sutton, 40, stepped on the political stage just as voters were going to the polls in the fall of 1997 to demand more transparency in campaigns, a reaction to the leadership of Mayor Willie Brown and the dealings of powerhouse consultants like Jack Davis and Robert Barnes. At the time Sutton worked for Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller, and Naylor, a Mill Valley firm that specializes in election law.
Sutton took on mostly big-money campaigns backed by downtown interests — such as Brown’s 1999 reelection and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s successful, multimillion-­dollar bids to squelch the public power movement in 2001 and 2002. Highly versed in the minutia of campaign finance law, he became a major player in electoral politics in San Francisco — and across the state.
“He is one of a small handful of very influential political law attorneys who typically represent moneyed, influential candidates,” California Common Cause executive director Jim Knox told us. “And he seems to be on something of a crusade right now.”
A search of the San Francisco Ethics Commission’s online database shows that over the past six years, Sutton has acted as treasurer or in another legal capacity for at least 20 campaigns and counts such heavily funded political action committees as the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, and the San Francisco Association of Realtors among his permanent clients. For that work, which doesn’t include the fall election, he earned at least $750,000.
Many of the city’s progressive activists and leaders see him as a dark agent — a tool only well-heeled interests can hire to navigate regulatory loopholes in order to spend as much as possible, even it means pushing the limits of the law, to sway voters.
“He’s an opportunistic lawyer who works against populist issues,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said.
Moreover, activists and state campaign finance experts say, he exerts an extraordinary level of influence over the city’s campaign regulators, including the top staff at the Ethics Commission and the deputy city attorneys who work with that agency.
“He is a high-powered fixer who has relationships with people in power that let him deliver for his clients in a way that leaves the less-connected among us flabbergasted,” said Marc Solomon, a Green Party member who worked on Sup. Matt Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign.
For his part, Sutton says that’s nonsense.
“There’s absolutely no proof or evidence of that,” Sutton told us. “I’m a professional, and I don’t want special access. I don’t need it, because I have a knowledge of the law.”
Rising to the top
By the time Sutton left his old firm last May to create Sutton and Associates, he had sealed his reputation as a go-to guy and counted among his clients the man who would be mayor. Sutton was everywhere. Consider:
• Having lawyered Newsom through the embarrassing flap in early 2003 over the $1 million loan from mentor Gordon Getty that (whoops!) Newsom neglected to disclose on his economic interest statements, Sutton served as treasurer to the Marina District supervisor’s mayoral campaign.
• When district attorney candidate Harris’s consultants realized their client was facing disaster if they couldn’t get her out of a legally binding pledge she signed in January 2003 to abide by the spending limits set in that race, they summoned Sutton, who got her out of the jam. The Ethics Commission’s decision to lift the spending limit was one of the agency’s most egregious acts in years and was truly an extraordinary event, activists say. It allowed Harris to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get past Bill Fazio in the runoff and eventually beat incumbent Terence Hallinan.
• Sutton handled the regulatory filing procedures for the California Urban Issues Project, a nonprofit lobbying outfit that churned out campaign mailers slamming Hallinan and mayoral contender Gonzalez for, among other charges, an unwillingness to crack down on the activities of homeless people. Though the group’s status prevents it from taking positions on candidates, the mailers clearly favored one candidate over the other. However, since the pieces didn’t actually include a “vote for candidate X” command, they fell within the bounds of the law as recently interpreted by the appellate courts, Sutton told us.
“What I do is say, ‘I am the lawyer. It’s my job to say this is what the law says. This is what it does or doesn’t allow,’ ” Sutton said. “It’s not about any kind of ideology on my part.”
• Sutton also served as treasurer for the campaigns behind two successful measures funded by downtown interests: the clean-streets initiative (Proposition C) and the controversial anti-panhandling legislation sponsored by Newsom (Proposition M). Interestingly, Harris particularly benefited because of her support for Prop. M. San Francisco pollster David Binder told us in December that her position on Prop. M helped her win over much of Fazio’s base and was key to her victory.
• Sutton’s expertise helped Newsom and Harris raise money in larger chunks during the runoff than they might otherwise have done. That’s because Sutton is keenly aware of a detail in the city’s campaign finance law that says if a candidate carries “accrued expenses” from the general election to the runoff, that candidate can collect $500 (instead of $250) from contributors. He should be — the ruling came as a result of his suggestion to local regulators.
For practical purposes, it can become a matter of shuffling the books. Newsom and Harris had so much cash behind their candidacies that it’s tough to believe they had any real debt. And in the case of at least Newsom, the amount of “debt” certainly seemed to be a moving target.
Shortly after the general election, Newsom campaign manger Eric Jaye told us he thought Newsom bore roughly $30,000 in accrued expenses. But when the campaign filed the paperwork, Newsom showed $225,322 in unpaid bills (see “Tainted Dough,” 12/03/03).
Neither Hallinan’s nor Gonzalez’s campaign took advantage of this provision in the law, even though Gonzalez treasurer Randy Knox brought it to the candidate’s attention. Gonzalez told us at the time that he didn’t consider such a move ethical.
Learning the ropes
A self-described politics nerd who interned in his state assemblymember’s office in high school, Sutton credits the rigors of the tight-knit environment of Pomona College — more than his three years at Stanford University Law School — with influencing the way he works today.
“I learned early I wasn’t going to get away without doing my homework,” he told us.
After clerking for former California Supreme Court Justice Edward Panelli from 1988 to 1989, he searched for a way to combine his legal degree with his keen interest in politics and government. In 1990 he found his way to Nielsen, Merksamer, though he lived, as he still does, in San Francisco.
Since he knew the city, he evolved into the firm’s attorney who dealt with San Francisco matters, he told us, even though he’s a member of the Republican Party — a rare bird here. In fact, he even served a stint as general counsel for the California Republican Party.
His first work in the city was on behalf of large institutions — the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum’s early bond campaigns, for example. He also made a key alliance with consultant Barnes, who was on his way to building a hugely influential career here and becoming closely connected to former mayor Brown.
In spring 1998, Sutton acted as treasurer for Bay Beautiful, a PAC aimed at defeating Proposition K, which former state senator Quentin L. Kopp put on the ballot to restrict Brown’s control of the development of Treasure Island. (Though the measure passed, the Brown-controlled Board of Supervisors failed to implement it.)
In November 1999, Sutton played a role in the orchestrated independent expenditure campaign on behalf of Brown’s reelection efforts in his handling of the Willie Brown Leadership PAC. The PAC directed some $55,000 into Brown’s bid for a second term (see “The Soft Money Shuffle,” 2/16/00).
At the time, Sutton had gone public with his strong opposition to efforts to restrict spending in political campaigns, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, “Not only does a spending cap decrease the quantity and quality of the issues discussed in the campaigns, it also infringes on First Amendment rights.”
One year after Brown’s reelection, the Leadership PAC, together with the pro-downtown Committee on Jobs, pumped some $67,000 into an unsuccessful bid to defeat Proposition O, which reinstated limits on independent expenditures and provided public financing for campaigns. Sutton handled the legal work for No on O.
No surprise there, Sutton’s critics say. Where money seeks to influence politics, that’s where you’ll find him. Sutton, though, says the list of campaigns he’s served doesn’t reflect his ideology as much as it does his skill set. He told us the best-funded campaigns “tend to have the more complicated legal questions, since they’re going to do more stuff.”
Money and politics
Advocates of campaign finance reform say Sutton has taken his opposition to campaign spending limits on the road, seeking to erode local ordinances that restrict spending.
“Sutton is active all over the state in his opposition to campaign finance reform,” said Paul Ryan, political reform project director for the Los Angeles–based Center for Governmental Studies.
Most recently Sutton testified before the San Diego Ethics Commission at a Jan. 21 hearing on a proposal to strengthen local campaign finance law. Sutton argued the commission should repeal the local law and replace it with the state’s version, which happens to be weaker.
“When we wrote the Political Reform Act of 1974, we put in there that local laws could be stronger than the state law,” Center for Governmental Studies director Bob Stern said. “What we have now is about 100 cities and counties that have gone beyond the state law. What [Sutton] is doing is pushing local jurisdictions to follow the state law only. And that’s unfortunate, because each local jurisdiction needs to deal with its own problems.”
Sutton said he just wants a uniform standard, with the minimal local amendments.
“[Cities and counties] keep making more and more laws, which are making things more and more complicated and difficult for anyone who wants to run for election to figure out,” Sutton said. “It has a dampening effect.”
Ryan and others are concerned Sutton might succeed in discouraging officials in municipalities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco from sticking by their stronger local laws. Compounding their concerns is that Sutton appears to have a great deal of influence over regulatory officials — at least in San Francisco.
Charlie Marsteller, who formerly headed up a San Francisco chapter of California Common Cause, believes the Ethics Commission has for more than a year failed to act on a complaint he filed against Sutton in late 2002, because of Sutton’s influence on the agency. (The complaint was over Sutton’s failure to disclose some $800,000 in contributions from PG&E to a committee aimed at defeating Proposition D, another public power measure.)
“It seems to me they are waiting until after February, when a seat on the commission is up and they’ll be able to replace [Bob Planthold] with a Sutton-friendly commissioner,” Marsteller said. (Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng is expected to name Planthold’s replacement any day now.)
More recent examples activists point to include the Harris spending-cap matter and the latest: a charge made Jan. 16 by two Ethics Commission staffers that director Ginny Vida ordered the destruction of documents accidentally e-mailed to the agency by a secretary in Sutton’s office. Those documents, which were first reported on in the San Francisco Sentinel, strongly suggest that funds raised by the San Francisco Swearing-In Committee (without contribution limits) for Newsom’s inauguration were used to pay off a long list of consultants who worked on the campaign — a charge Sutton has vehemently denied.
On Jan. 28, Sutton filed paperwork for the committee reporting contributions but not expenditures. The total raised was $317,850 and included donations of $10,000 to $20,000 from such downtown players as Shorenstein Co., Gap founder Don Fisher, the San Francisco Association of Realtors, and Clear Channel.
Though Sutton insists he enjoys no undue influence on local regulators, even one of Harris’s consultants told us Sutton was hired for just that reason. “Jim Sutton has a certain amount of influence with Ginny Vida. He doesn’t think [spending limits] are constitutional,” Looman said. “And I believe that worries her too.”
Vida was on medical leave and couldn’t reached for comment, but her deputy, Mabel Ng, said neither she nor Vida give Sutton special treatment.
“I don’t think he has any more or any less influence than anyone else,” Ng said.
Dealing with Ethics
Sutton’s most impressive act in the Harris controversy was convincing Vida and Ng that Harris didn’t know she was bound to the pledge she signed in January 2003 to stay under the spending cap. Had ethics officials concluded that Harris knew her pledge was binding when she blew the cap sometime in September, they could have disqualified her from the race, according to the terms of the city’s campaign finance law.
Instead the Ethics Commission signed onto a settlement agreement stipulating that Harris’s had been an innocent mistake — though there was plenty of evidence that her campaign officials fully knew the pledge was binding (see Campaign Watch, 9/17/03 and 10/08/03). But in buying into Sutton’s version of events, the commission allowed Harris to continue spending money that helped her win the race.
“To facilitate the needs of Sutton’s clients, [Ethics] staffers gave in to Sutton the way he wanted,” Marsteller said. “The commissioners dropped the ball in that they needed to request an audit to check out the veracity of the statements being made by Harris…. They could hardly decide that the violations by the Harris committee were unintentional absent an audit. It’s one of the greatest demonstrations of incompetence I’ve seen, and Sutton led them into it.”
For his part, Sutton disagrees that Vida gave him an easy of time of it. “They fined [Harris] $34,000, and they made sure we printed flyers and ads telling the public of the mistake,” Sutton said.
That’s true. But Ryan and others view the matter as strong evidence of Sutton’s influence.
“It appears as though many of the arguments he makes personally are then likewise made by Ginny Vida and Mabel Ng,” Ryan said. “It appears as though Jim Sutton is influencing the public policy and San Francisco and the interpretation of the city’s finance laws.”

The political puppeteer

Staff
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By offering envelope-pushing legal and political advice at key moments in the fall campaign, attorney Jim Sutton was perhaps the single most influential individual behind the victories of Mayor Gavin Newsom and District Attorney Kamala Harris.
In the process, Sutton solidified his reputation as the dark prince of San Francisco elections, a hired gun who helps downtown interests and well-funded campaigns continue to dominate the electoral field even after voters passed reforms that restricted campaign giving and spending and required more official disclosure.
“He knows more election law than anyone, and he knows it better than anyone else,” local political consultant David Looman told the Bay Guardian. “He is the guy you call.”
New era, new player
Sutton, 40, stepped on the political stage just as voters were going to the polls in the fall of 1997 to demand more transparency in campaigns, a reaction to the leadership of Mayor Willie Brown and the dealings of powerhouse consultants like Jack Davis and Robert Barnes. At the time Sutton worked for Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller, and Naylor, a Mill Valley firm that specializes in election law.
Sutton took on mostly big-money campaigns backed by downtown interests — such as Brown’s 1999 reelection and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s successful, multimillion-­dollar bids to squelch the public power movement in 2001 and 2002. Highly versed in the minutia of campaign finance law, he became a major player in electoral politics in San Francisco — and across the state.
“He is one of a small handful of very influential political law attorneys who typically represent moneyed, influential candidates,” California Common Cause executive director Jim Knox told us. “And he seems to be on something of a crusade right now.”
A search of the San Francisco Ethics Commission’s online database shows that over the past six years, Sutton has acted as treasurer or in another legal capacity for at least 20 campaigns and counts such heavily funded political action committees as the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, and the San Francisco Association of Realtors among his permanent clients. For that work, which doesn’t include the fall election, he earned at least $750,000.
Many of the city’s progressive activists and leaders see him as a dark agent — a tool only well-heeled interests can hire to navigate regulatory loopholes in order to spend as much as possible, even it means pushing the limits of the law, to sway voters.
“He’s an opportunistic lawyer who works against populist issues,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said.
Moreover, activists and state campaign finance experts say, he exerts an extraordinary level of influence over the city’s campaign regulators, including the top staff at the Ethics Commission and the deputy city attorneys who work with that agency.
“He is a high-powered fixer who has relationships with people in power that let him deliver for his clients in a way that leaves the less-connected among us flabbergasted,” said Marc Solomon, a Green Party member who worked on Sup. Matt Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign.
For his part, Sutton says that’s nonsense.
“There’s absolutely no proof or evidence of that,” Sutton told us. “I’m a professional, and I don’t want special access. I don’t need it, because I have a knowledge of the law.”
Rising to the top
By the time Sutton left his old firm last May to create Sutton and Associates, he had sealed his reputation as a go-to guy and counted among his clients the man who would be mayor. Sutton was everywhere. Consider:
• Having lawyered Newsom through the embarrassing flap in early 2003 over the $1 million loan from mentor Gordon Getty that (whoops!) Newsom neglected to disclose on his economic interest statements, Sutton served as treasurer to the Marina District supervisor’s mayoral campaign.
• When district attorney candidate Harris’s consultants realized their client was facing disaster if they couldn’t get her out of a legally binding pledge she signed in January 2003 to abide by the spending limits set in that race, they summoned Sutton, who got her out of the jam. The Ethics Commission’s decision to lift the spending limit was one of the agency’s most egregious acts in years and was truly an extraordinary event, activists say. It allowed Harris to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get past Bill Fazio in the runoff and eventually beat incumbent Terence Hallinan.
• Sutton handled the regulatory filing procedures for the California Urban Issues Project, a nonprofit lobbying outfit that churned out campaign mailers slamming Hallinan and mayoral contender Gonzalez for, among other charges, an unwillingness to crack down on the activities of homeless people. Though the group’s status prevents it from taking positions on candidates, the mailers clearly favored one candidate over the other. However, since the pieces didn’t actually include a “vote for candidate X” command, they fell within the bounds of the law as recently interpreted by the appellate courts, Sutton told us.
“What I do is say, ‘I am the lawyer. It’s my job to say this is what the law says. This is what it does or doesn’t allow,’ ” Sutton said. “It’s not about any kind of ideology on my part.”
• Sutton also served as treasurer for the campaigns behind two successful measures funded by downtown interests: the clean-streets initiative (Proposition C) and the controversial anti-panhandling legislation sponsored by Newsom (Proposition M). Interestingly, Harris particularly benefited because of her support for Prop. M. San Francisco pollster David Binder told us in December that her position on Prop. M helped her win over much of Fazio’s base and was key to her victory.
• Sutton’s expertise helped Newsom and Harris raise money in larger chunks during the runoff than they might otherwise have done. That’s because Sutton is keenly aware of a detail in the city’s campaign finance law that says if a candidate carries “accrued expenses” from the general election to the runoff, that candidate can collect $500 (instead of $250) from contributors. He should be — the ruling came as a result of his suggestion to local regulators.
For practical purposes, it can become a matter of shuffling the books. Newsom and Harris had so much cash behind their candidacies that it’s tough to believe they had any real debt. And in the case of at least Newsom, the amount of “debt” certainly seemed to be a moving target.
Shortly after the general election, Newsom campaign manger Eric Jaye told us he thought Newsom bore roughly $30,000 in accrued expenses. But when the campaign filed the paperwork, Newsom showed $225,322 in unpaid bills (see “Tainted Dough,” 12/03/03).
Neither Hallinan’s nor Gonzalez’s campaign took advantage of this provision in the law, even though Gonzalez treasurer Randy Knox brought it to the candidate’s attention. Gonzalez told us at the time that he didn’t consider such a move ethical.
Learning the ropes
A self-described politics nerd who interned in his state assemblymember’s office in high school, Sutton credits the rigors of the tight-knit environment of Pomona College — more than his three years at Stanford University Law School — with influencing the way he works today.
“I learned early I wasn’t going to get away without doing my homework,” he told us.
After clerking for former California Supreme Court Justice Edward Panelli from 1988 to 1989, he searched for a way to combine his legal degree with his keen interest in politics and government. In 1990 he found his way to Nielsen, Merksamer, though he lived, as he still does, in San Francisco.
Since he knew the city, he evolved into the firm’s attorney who dealt with San Francisco matters, he told us, even though he’s a member of the Republican Party — a rare bird here. In fact, he even served a stint as general counsel for the California Republican Party.
His first work in the city was on behalf of large institutions — the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum’s early bond campaigns, for example. He also made a key alliance with consultant Barnes, who was on his way to building a hugely influential career here and becoming closely connected to former mayor Brown.
In spring 1998, Sutton acted as treasurer for Bay Beautiful, a PAC aimed at defeating Proposition K, which former state senator Quentin L. Kopp put on the ballot to restrict Brown’s control of the development of Treasure Island. (Though the measure passed, the Brown-controlled Board of Supervisors failed to implement it.)
In November 1999, Sutton played a role in the orchestrated independent expenditure campaign on behalf of Brown’s reelection efforts in his handling of the Willie Brown Leadership PAC. The PAC directed some $55,000 into Brown’s bid for a second term (see “The Soft Money Shuffle,” 2/16/00).
At the time, Sutton had gone public with his strong opposition to efforts to restrict spending in political campaigns, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, “Not only does a spending cap decrease the quantity and quality of the issues discussed in the campaigns, it also infringes on First Amendment rights.”
One year after Brown’s reelection, the Leadership PAC, together with the pro-downtown Committee on Jobs, pumped some $67,000 into an unsuccessful bid to defeat Proposition O, which reinstated limits on independent expenditures and provided public financing for campaigns. Sutton handled the legal work for No on O.
No surprise there, Sutton’s critics say. Where money seeks to influence politics, that’s where you’ll find him. Sutton, though, says the list of campaigns he’s served doesn’t reflect his ideology as much as it does his skill set. He told us the best-funded campaigns “tend to have the more complicated legal questions, since they’re going to do more stuff.”
Money and politics
Advocates of campaign finance reform say Sutton has taken his opposition to campaign spending limits on the road, seeking to erode local ordinances that restrict spending.
“Sutton is active all over the state in his opposition to campaign finance reform,” said Paul Ryan, political reform project director for the Los Angeles–based Center for Governmental Studies.
Most recently Sutton testified before the San Diego Ethics Commission at a Jan. 21 hearing on a proposal to strengthen local campaign finance law. Sutton argued the commission should repeal the local law and replace it with the state’s version, which happens to be weaker.
“When we wrote the Political Reform Act of 1974, we put in there that local laws could be stronger than the state law,” Center for Governmental Studies director Bob Stern said. “What we have now is about 100 cities and counties that have gone beyond the state law. What [Sutton] is doing is pushing local jurisdictions to follow the state law only. And that’s unfortunate, because each local jurisdiction needs to deal with its own problems.”
Sutton said he just wants a uniform standard, with the minimal local amendments.
“[Cities and counties] keep making more and more laws, which are making things more and more complicated and difficult for anyone who wants to run for election to figure out,” Sutton said. “It has a dampening effect.”
Ryan and others are concerned Sutton might succeed in discouraging officials in municipalities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco from sticking by their stronger local laws. Compounding their concerns is that Sutton appears to have a great deal of influence over regulatory officials — at least in San Francisco.
Charlie Marsteller, who formerly headed up a San Francisco chapter of California Common Cause, believes the Ethics Commission has for more than a year failed to act on a complaint he filed against Sutton in late 2002, because of Sutton’s influence on the agency. (The complaint was over Sutton’s failure to disclose some $800,000 in contributions from PG&E to a committee aimed at defeating Proposition D, another public power measure.)
“It seems to me they are waiting until after February, when a seat on the commission is up and they’ll be able to replace [Bob Planthold] with a Sutton-friendly commissioner,” Marsteller said. (Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng is expected to name Planthold’s replacement any day now.)
More recent examples activists point to include the Harris spending-cap matter and the latest: a charge made Jan. 16 by two Ethics Commission staffers that director Ginny Vida ordered the destruction of documents accidentally e-mailed to the agency by a secretary in Sutton’s office. Those documents, which were first reported on in the San Francisco Sentinel, strongly suggest that funds raised by the San Francisco Swearing-In Committee (without contribution limits) for Newsom’s inauguration were used to pay off a long list of consultants who worked on the campaign — a charge Sutton has vehemently denied.
On Jan. 28, Sutton filed paperwork for the committee reporting contributions but not expenditures. The total raised was $317,850 and included donations of $10,000 to $20,000 from such downtown players as Shorenstein Co., Gap founder Don Fisher, the San Francisco Association of Realtors, and Clear Channel.
Though Sutton insists he enjoys no undue influence on local regulators, even one of Harris’s consultants told us Sutton was hired for just that reason. “Jim Sutton has a certain amount of influence with Ginny Vida. He doesn’t think [spending limits] are constitutional,” Looman said. “And I believe that worries her too.”
Vida was on medical leave and couldn’t reached for comment, but her deputy, Mabel Ng, said neither she nor Vida give Sutton special treatment.
“I don’t think he has any more or any less influence than anyone else,” Ng said.
Dealing with Ethics
Sutton’s most impressive act in the Harris controversy was convincing Vida and Ng that Harris didn’t know she was bound to the pledge she signed in January 2003 to stay under the spending cap. Had ethics officials concluded that Harris knew her pledge was binding when she blew the cap sometime in September, they could have disqualified her from the race, according to the terms of the city’s campaign finance law.
Instead the Ethics Commission signed onto a settlement agreement stipulating that Harris’s had been an innocent mistake — though there was plenty of evidence that her campaign officials fully knew the pledge was binding (see Campaign Watch, 9/17/03 and 10/08/03). But in buying into Sutton’s version of events, the commission allowed Harris to continue spending money that helped her win the race.
“To facilitate the needs of Sutton’s clients, [Ethics] staffers gave in to Sutton the way he wanted,” Marsteller said. “The commissioners dropped the ball in that they needed to request an audit to check out the veracity of the statements being made by Harris…. They could hardly decide that the violations by the Harris committee were unintentional absent an audit. It’s one of the greatest demonstrations of incompetence I’ve seen, and Sutton led them into it.”
For his part, Sutton disagrees that Vida gave him an easy of time of it. “They fined [Harris] $34,000, and they made sure we printed flyers and ads telling the public of the mistake,” Sutton said.
That’s true. But Ryan and others view the matter as strong evidence of Sutton’s influence.
“It appears as though many of the arguments he makes personally are then likewise made by Ginny Vida and Mabel Ng,” Ryan said. “It appears as though Jim Sutton is influencing the public policy and San Francisco and the interpretation of the city’s finance laws.”

Concrete jungle

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THIS WINTER MAY kill Pokey. The HIV-positive 22-year-old lives in a tent in a city park. It’s not the best place for a man with a weakened immune system to dwell — especially not during the rainy season.

“I’ve basically given up,” says Pokey quietly, standing in the gutter of Haight Street near Stanyan.

About a year ago he had a little more hope. He had been clean and sober for six months and had graduated from a live-in drug program run by Walden House. He thought he had beaten his heroin addiction, and he began looking for an apartment. He’s lived on the streets since he was 12.

“I started looking the last three weeks I was [at Walden House],” Pokey says. Social workers and friends helped him look. “I tried day in and day out to get a place and a job. I couldn’t take it. I flipped out. From there I went all the way back down.” He is once again wrestling with heroin.

In his two years in San Francisco, Pokey estimates, he’s looked at between 30 and 40 apartments, with no success. Subsisting on $299 to $490 a month, depending on the whims of Supplemental Security Income administrators, he can’t even afford a room in a residential hotel. The smallest go for $400 to $500 a month, and there aren’t even many of those left; in the past five years the city has lost about 1,000 hotel rooms, most to demolition and renovation.

“How can I use my money on a hotel room when I’m not gonna have any money to eat?” Pokey says. “I’m supposed to eat three times a day, when I take my medicine.”

Less than 10 years ago, in 1989, the city put the number of people homeless on any given night at 6,000. Now that figure is estimated at between 11,000 and 14,000. Over the past decade homeless deaths have climbed from 16 in 1987 to 153 in 1996. A 1996 study by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty ranked San Francisco one of the five worst cities in which to be homeless; the report blamed harassing police practices.

About 3,000 shelter beds are available to San Francisco’s homeless population, including 600 in a giant warehouse on Mission Rock Road in China Basin. The Mission Rock shelter, which clients have dubbed “Prison Rock,” was opened last year in the wake of Mayor Willie Brown’s campaign to kick the homeless out of Golden Gate Park. The shelters are full or over-capacity nearly every night of the year.

“The city does nothing for families. It stands by as the affordable housing stock is destroyed,” says Sandra Stewart, project director of Families Rights and Dignity. Stewart, a mother of three who was once homeless, advocates for poor and homeless families. She says she’s seen a “mass exodus” of low-income families from San Francisco.

“Mabel Teng went on about this being the ‘year of the child’ — well, not for homeless children,” Stewart says. She’s angry that the city vetoed a $75,000 eviction-prevention program for families in a year when it had a $100 million budget surplus. According to Stewart, five years ago families could get emergency shelter on demand. Today the city’s 130 family-shelter beds are full, and the wait list stands at around 100 families. The average family on the list consists of a single parent and two children.

In the nation’s toughest housing market, the help offered by welfare programs isn’t much help at all. As of September 1997, 12,475 San Francisco families received subsidies from CalWORKS, the federally funded welfare program for families; a similar number of adults get General Assistance from the county. A family of three receives $565 a month from CalWORKS; G.A. recipients, including workfare workers, get $279 to $345. In the Bay Area $565 is barely enough to pay for a motel room — with almost nothing left for food and other necessities.

Many of those on the streets are there for want of an affordable apartment. Staffers at Youth Industry, a nonprofit that trains and employs homeless and formerly homeless young people, say that the lack of housing is the hardest problem to solve. The agency provides paid internships to 24 teens and twentysomethings, many of whom put in 40 hours a week only to sleep on the streets. According to Youth Industry managers, “very few” of the young interns have permanent housing.

“More and more of our youth are very — how do I say this? — high functioning,” says Vida Merwin, a youth service coordinator with the nonprofit. “They don’t have drug problems. They can hold a job — they’re proving it here. They have academic aspirations. But they’re forced to rely on [social] services.”

Youth Industry intern Jamie Allsup, 22, has spent most of the last three years on the streets of San Francisco. During his first three months on the job he slept in front of the Youth Industry office, using the arrival of his coworkers as an alarm clock. Since then Allsup has spent half his $800 monthly income on a residential hotel room, sharing a bathroom with 40 other residents. At the end of the month, after he’s paid his shelter, food, and old hospital bills, Allsup has $15 left — not much to put toward a deposit on an apartment. Since the hotel has no cooking facilities, he wastes money eating out every meal. As a single-room-occupancy tenant, Allsup has few guarantees that he’ll retain his room from one month to the next.

Cheeto, a mohawked 21-year-old, works at Pedal Revolution, the Youth Industry bike shop. He’s getting paid to learn to repair cycles, enthusiastically working six days a week and bedding down in parks and parking lots at night. Cheeto refuses to stay in hotels; he’s hoping to save money for an apartment in another city — maybe Oakland. Figures provided by the Department of Human Services show that the vast majority of those who get off the streets do so by leaving San Francisco.

Even in a cheaper market, Cheeto is going to have problems. He has no rental history or landlord references. He jokes about his credit record: “They could go down the street and ask everyone I know if I pay back the money I borrow.

“I don’t have any delusions about living in San Francisco unless I’m living like I am now,” he says. “This place is a playground for the rich.” 

Street fairs and fall festivals

Staff
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IF YOU’VE been wondering where all the headline acts and theater companies go in that long gloomy stretch before the fall season, take a look at some of the entertainment featured in the following fairs and harvest festivals. Not only do Bay Area late-summer and autumn celebrations provide space for artists, craftpeople and nonprofit organizations to peddle their wares, many feature performers like Maxine Howard, Modern Jazz Quartet, the Asian American Dance Collective and many, many more. In part two of our third annual guide to Bay Area street fairs, we’ve listed TK celebrations from the beginning of August through October. Unless otherwise noted, the fairs — and the entertainment — are free. For more information, or in case you’d like to participate, call the telephone number listed at the end of each festival description.

August 1-2

Nihonmachi Street Fair The streets of Japantown come to life with live entertainment, food booths, arts and crafts and games. Headliners on Saturday include the top-40 group Desire, while Sunday features jazz recording artist Deems Tsutakawa. On both days, Spirit of Polynesia, the Asian American Dance Collective and the Chinatown Lion Dance Collective perform ethnic dances. The event also features Children’s World, with activities and arts and crafts designed especially for two-to 12-year-olds. 11 am-5 pm in Japantown, Post and Buchanan, SF. 922-8700.

Aug 7-???

Festiva Latino ALL FURTHER INFORMATION TO COME ON MONDAY BECAUSE I LOST THE FOLDER THAT HAD ALL THE STUFF IN IT. I DON’T KNOW HOW I LOST IT BUT WE NEED AT LEAST TO MENTION ALL THE STARS THAT WILL APPEAR. PHONE NUMBER: 543-3030.

August 7-9

ACC Craft Fair From custom-made saddles and porcelain lamps to cedarwood desks and ornamental jewelry, this fair highlights the distinctive work of 300 artists from across the nation, including 75 from Northern California. All of the artists are chosen on the basis of integrity of design and excellence of execution, and the show’s organizers say they hope to elevate crafts into a major industry and an important art form. Adults, $4; children under 12 free. Fri., 11 am-8 pm; Sat., 11 am-6 pm; Sun., 11 am-5 pm. Fort Mason Center, Piers 2 and 3, Bay and Laguna, SF. 526-5073.

August 15

Reggae Explosion, ’87 Presented in the style and tradition of Jamaica’s famous annual Sun Splash concert, this event features Haitian art, Caribbean crafts and Jamaican cuisine, as well as dance, poetry, raffles and prizes. Musical artists include the internationally known Don Carlos and his Freedom Fighters Band, Strictly Roots and the sweet steel drums of Val Serrant. $8 in advance; $10 at the door. 1-11 pm, Fort Mason Center, Pier 3. Sponsored by the Western Addition Cultural Center. 921-7976.

August 22-23

Palo Alto Celebrates the Arts Festival Wine tasting and dancing in the streets will bring even more sunshine to Palo Alto’s University Avenue. Wares include high-quality ceramics and pottery ranging from dinnerware and stoneware as well as paintings, prints and one-of-a-kind furniture to decorate and distinguish the home. 10 am-6 pm, University Ave., Palo Alto. Sponsored by the Downtown Palo Alto Arts Fair Committee. 346-4446.

August 22-September 27

The Renaissance Pleasure Fairs A large grove of live oaks provides the setting for spirited pageants and merry parades that attempt to recreate a 16th-century Elizabethan country village. The Northern California Renaissance Fair is an autumn harvest festival, with music and dancing, hearty foods and rare hand-made crafts. Queen Elizabeth and her court are among the more than 1,000 costumed entertainers. Visitors are encouraged to arrive in period dress and join the fun. Adults, $10.50; seniors, $8.50; children under 12 free. Weekends and Labor Day, 10 am-6 pm. Located at the Blackpoint Forest in Novato, Hwy 37 to the Blackpoint exit. Sponsored by the Living History Center. 620-0433.

August 27-30

San Francisco Fair and International Exposition This year’s fair has an international flavor with its theme “San Francisco: Gateway to the Pacific.” San Francisco’s sister cities of Manila, Osaka, Shanghai, Sydney, Taipei and Hong Kong each have their own pavilion, to exhibit the individuality and heritage of each city and country, and highlight San Francisco’s thriving relationship with her sister cities. The fair also features a wine pavilion, a San Francisco history exhibit and, of course, the famous contest program, featuring such past favorites as the “Financial District Strut,” the “Impossible Parking Space Race,” the winners of the Bay Guardian Cartoon Contest and new additions including the “SF Safe Sex Button,” and “Freeways to Nowhere.” Adults, $5; seniors, $3; youth aged 5-15, $2; children under 5, free. Aug. 27th is “Youth Day” (all youth 15 and under admitted free); Aug. 28th is “Senior Day” (seniors admitted for $1.50). 11 am-9 pm, Civic Auditorium, Brooks Hall, Civic Center Plaza, SF. 557-8758.

September 4-6

122nd Annual Scottish Gathering and Games Come join 40,000 Scots for three days of music, dancing, food and contests. Highlights include the Highland Dancing Championships and the Caber Tossing Championship (a caber is a log the size of a telephone pole tossed end-over-end for accuracy). More than 50 clans are expected to set up tents and display their family tartans and coats of arms. Tickets for the Friday night Musical Pageant and Twilight Tattoo are $5 grandstand; $6 box seat, 8 pm, at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. Sat. and Sun., adults, $11 one day, $16 both days; youth 11-16, $6 each day; seniors, $5 each day; children under 11, free. Sponsored by the Caledonian Club of San Francisco. 897-4442.

September 5-6

A la Carte, a la Park Here’s your chance to picnic with more than 60 top Bay Area restaurants — De Paula’s, Firehouse Bar-B-Q, Vanessi’s Nob Hill and Hunan, among others — presenting their specialties at special prices to benefit the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s Free-Shakespeare-In-The-Park program. Sample the great cuisines of the world while enjoying a series of classical and jazz performances and samplings from the drama of William Shakespeare. $2.50 voluntary donations encouraged. 11 am-6 pm, in Golden Gate Park’s Sharon Meadow on JFK Drive across from McClaren Lodge, SF. 441-4422.

September 5-7

Concord Fall Fest This fourth annual Labor Day weekend festival, held in Todos Santos Park, features grape stomps, chili cook-offs and a 10K run. Less energetic fairgoers can enjoy an open-air marketplace of arts and crafts, food booths and live music. 10 am-6 pm, Concord (take Willow Pass Road exit from 689). Sponsored by the Concord Chamber of Commerce. 346-4446.

September 5-7

Sausalito Art Festival One of Northern California’s largest outdoor fine arts exhibitions, the 35th annual art festival is held along the beautiful Sausalito waterfront. More than 100 artists and craftsmen from around the world exhibit a total of 4,000 works of art. A variety of non-stop entertainment will be provided, along with 26 international food booths. Festivities begin Friday night, Sept. 4th, with fireworks and a black-tie party. The Breakers to Bay run begins along the Pacific at Fort Cronkhite in Marin at 8:30 am (register by August 18th). Adults, $3; children 6-12, $2; under 6, free. 10 am-6 pm, Bridgeway and Litho, Sausalito. Sponsored by the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce. 332-0505.

September 7

Arts Explosion This Labor Day festival celebrates the end of summer with a bang (fireworks) and launches the fall arts season. Complementing the showcase of outstanding Bay Area musicians and dance companies will be original performance works; “art by the yard” and a sculpture “glue booth” for children of all ages; an “Arts Row” with a variety of opportunities to interact with local arts organizations. Children under 12 free; adults, $1. 11 am-9 pm, Estuary Park on Embarcadero West, Oakl. Sponsored by the Oakland Festival of the Arts. 444-5588.

September 12-13

Russian River Jazz Festival Bring your suntan lotion, beach chairs, blankets and swimsuits, and swing to the sounds of the legendary Nancy Wilson, Maynard Ferguson and High Voltage, the Wayne Shorter Quintet and a host of others. This year, the festival features two stages set at the river’s edge, with a spectacular backdrop of redwood-covered mountains. Food and crafts will also be available. $23 single day; $42 for both days. Located at Midway Beach near Guerneville. (707) 887-1502.

September 12-13

15th Annual San Francisco Blues Festival The oldest ongoing blues festival in the U.S. offers two days of performances by blues greats from around the country, an unmatched view of the Bay and a superb array of New Orleans and Louisiana cuisine. Saturday’s music lineup includes Johnny Winter, Lonnie Brooks and Oakland’s own Maxine Howard, and on Sunday Roomful of Blues, Albert Collins and Memphis Slim play. $10 in advance; $12 at the door; $16 for a special two-day ticket available in advance only. Noon-6 pm at the Great Meadow, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF. 826-6837.

September 13

24th Street Merchants’ Cultural Festival The 24th Street Fair celebrates Latin American Independence as well as creating a community gathering for artists, residents and merchants. Visitors can enjoy Latin American food and arts and crafts with a Latin theme. A plethora of information booths provides literature on community activities and five stages continuous entertainment by local groups. 11 am-6 pm, 24th St. from South Van Ness to Potrero, SF. Sponsored by the Mission Economic and Cultural Association. 826-1401.

September 18-20

30th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival Monterey Jazz Festival swings again, this year featuring more than 25 superstars, including Ray Charles, The Modern Jazz Quartet, B.B. King, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Etta James and Bobby McFerrin. The event also features food and merchandise booths, and the sponsor, MCI Communications, offers visitors the opportunity to call anywhere in the U.S. free of charge. Although the main stage events are sold out, grounds admissions tickets are still available and allow the bearer access to the outdoor Garden Stage and the indoor Nightclub, which host many of the headliners. $15 a day. Fri., 5 pm-midnight; Sat., noon-midnight; Sun., noon-10 pm. 775-2021.

September 19-20

Mill Valley Festival More than 100 artists, selected by a jury, exhibit their wares at this arts-and-crafts fair set in a beautiful redwood grove. Food, continuous on-stage entertainment and activities for children make this one of the premiere fine arts festivals in the country. Voluntary donations requested. 10 am-6 pm, Old Mill Park, Throckmorton and Old Mill, Mill Valley. 381-0525.

September 19-20

Pan-Pacific Exposition Art and Wine Festival This city-wide festival is held on the site of the 1915 World’s Fair. Horse-drawn carriages and vintage cars transport visitors to the glories of bygone days as the festival celebrates the highlights of San Francisco history. Enjoy ragtime music, a historic fashion show and pennyfarthing bicycle races. Several wine gardens offer premium wines from select California vineyards. 10 am-6 pm, Marina Green, Lyon and Marina, across from the Palace of Fine Arts, SF. Sponsored by the San Francisco Council of District Merchants. 346-4446.

September 20

Folsom: Dimension IV! Now in its fourth year, this fair has established itself as the “End of Summer” celebration. Staged on the equinox of 1987, the fair again features the mascot “Megahood,” who breathes fire and smoke over the crowds. Entertainment includes the Folsom All Stars, the Zasu Pitts Memorial Orchestra and Viola Wills. Expect high-energy performances and technological innovations and one of the most diverse display of local artistry and crafts. The fair is a benefit for the San Francisco Aids Emergency fund and the South of Market Community Association. 11 am-7 pm, Folsom between 7th and 12th St., SF. Sponsored by Budweiser Corporation. 863-8579.

September 26-27

The Pacific Coast Fog Fest Visitors to the Pacific coastline are treated to historical and humorous displays at the Fog Fest. Diners may feast on seafood and of course fogcutters are the featured cocktails. Vintage cars, arts, crafts, continuous entertainment and fog-calling contests make this a welcome new Bay Area event. 10 am-6 pm. Located on Palmetto Ave., between Shoreview and Santa Rosa in Pacifica, Hwy 1 to Paloma exit. Sponsored by the City of Pacifica. 346-4446.

October 2-4

Fiesta Italiana A weekend family event, this year’s fair promises to be the “Besta Festa.” The celebration of Italian-American culture features Italian cooking demonstrations, wine tasting and grape stomping. Mayor Dianne Feinstein is scheduled to cut the pasta ribbon to open the ceremonies, Sergio Franchi will headline with two shows a day and the Italian design Ford Concept Car is on display. Fireworks are scheduled for the end of each day. Adults $8; children $1.50; Seniors and disabled $5 (free from noon-6 pm on the 2nd). Noon-midnight, noon-10 pm on Sun. Pier 45, Fisherman’s Wharf, Shed A and C, SF. Sponsors include Pepsi, Ford Motor Co., Budweiser, Sony, Lucky Stores, EFS Savings and the Port of San Francisco. 673-3782.

October 4th

Castro Street Fair Started in the back room of Harvey Milk’s camera store in 1974, this neighborhood fair has become a city-wide event. Musicians, bellydancers and jugglers appear with prom queens, urban cowboys, visitors from outer space and the Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps. A variety of music, comedy acts and more than 200 arts and crafts displays are also scheduled. Castro between Market and 19th, SF. Sponsored by the Castro Street Fair. 346-2640.

October 9-25

Harvest Festival For three weekends, the nation’s largest touring festival of handmade crafts, fine art, music, theater and cooking transforms Brooks Hall into a colorful 19th-century village. The event features bluegrass and country bands, continuous stage entertainment, jugglers, acrobats and wandering minstrels, as well as the hundreds of unique shops that line the walkways. Center Stage headliners include Riders in the Sky, and the famed musical comedians the Brass Band, winners of the top prize at the Edinburgh, Scotland Performing Arts Festival. Adults $5; children 6-11, $2.50; children under 6, free. Fri., noon-10 pm; Sat., 10 am-10 pm; Sun., 10 am-7 pm, Brooks Hall, Civic Center. 974-4000.

October 10-11

Art and All That Jazz on Fillmore A second-year revival in remembrance of Fillmore Street’s heyday of music, known in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s for its hot jazz and blues clubs. Two days to celebrate San Francisco’s jazz roots with fine arts, fine food and fine wine in outdoor cafes. 10 am-6 pm, Fillmore between Post and Clay, SF. Sponsored by the Fillmore Street Merchants’ Association, the Pacific Heights Homeowners’ and Merchants’ Association. 346-4446.

October 11

Montclair Village Fair The winding streets of Montclair Village provide a charming locale for this neighborhood fair, where 50 artisans sell crafts and local schools, business and nonprofit organizations sell food. This year’s fair has a circus theme, with strolling flutists and meandering mimes helping to create a carefree atmosphere. A pancake breakfast kicks things off and is followed by hayrides in Montclair park. 11 am-5 pm, LaSalle at Mountain, Oakl. Sponsored by the Montclair Business Association. 339-1000.

October 17-18

Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival Artists and craftspeople from across the United States display wares in more than 250 booths and all-day entertainment features blue grass to rock-and-roll at this “something for everyone” festival. As you might expect, pumpkin goodies abound and the fair kicks off with two pie-eating contests. Other events include a Pumpkin Festival Run and a pumpkin-carving contest. 10 am-5 pm, Main Street in Downtown Half Moon Bay. Sponsored by the Coastside Chamber of Commerce. 726-5202. *

The I-Hotel interviews

Staff
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Many lives ago, I remember standing in the back hallway of the International Hotel trying to fathom why it was that this funny, run-down place with these very sad, old, alone men had become the focal point of an enormous array of the concerted power of the state, city and business interests from across the world. And it was not easy then, and it is not easy now, because we were looking at the problem of progress, in some strange sense, and the sadness of one generation, the evils of one generation, seeking redress in another generation. Most of the residents of the I-Hotel were Filipino men who had come to work in the fields of the Central Valley, and had been refused the opportunity to bring over wives or sweethearts, had stayed perhaps too long and had lost their families, lost their wives, lost their sweethearts, lost anything except their companionship with each other, and their attachment to this funny place that they called home, that was not much of a home, but it was all that they had. And so the landowners that owned that prime piece of real estate in downtown San Francisco were being chided for taking away a precious place, which they looked upon as a rundown flophouse, from people who had been cheated of their lives by other landowners, hundreds of miles away. And if there’s any lessons to be learned, it’s the lesson that we are all connected, each to the other, and that everything we do has consequences, not only for ourselves and our immediate family and friends, the people who live in our immediate neighborhood or our city or our state, but across the world, across the century.

Richard Hongisto
Member, San Francisco Board of Supervisor; former San Francisco sheriff

I think that a larger population of voters in San Francisco have begun to see — in part from the I-Hotel — that we can’t continue to Manhattanize the city without destroying our quality of life. And I think that is in part responsible for the passing of Proposition M and other efforts to control density in our city.

We just have to keep pursuing the legislative remedies to prevent the destruction of existing housing stock and replacing it with higher-density construction, and to prevent the conversion of existing low-cost housing into high-profit commercial space and so on. We’ve done some of that already, but I think we can continue to do more. One of the things we need to do is get the right person in the mayor’s office, to get the right Planning Commission in there, which is one reason I’m supporting Art Agnos, because he’s the only person in the race who supported Proposition M.

I wouldn’t let my photograph be taken knocking down a door [if I had to do it over again], because the photograph was completely misunderstood. I was knocking the door panels out of the doors, so the minimum amount of damage was done to the doors, because we were hoping we could get the tenants back in. When we started to do the eviction, the deputies from my department started to smash in the whole door and the door frame, and ruin it. And what I did was I took the sledgehammer and said no, do it like this — just knock out one door panel, and that way if the tenants can get back in, they can take one little piece of plywood and screw or nail it in over the missing door panel. So I showed them how to do it and I got photographed in the act. The photograph has been attributed that I was running around smashing down the doors in hot pursuit of the tenants, when in fact the opposite was the truth.

I think that as a result of the fact that I refused to do the eviction immediately, and then getting sent to jail and sued — I had to spend about $40,000 in 1978 out of my own pocket to defend the suit — I think we made a real effort to forestall the eviction and give the city a chance to take it over by eminent domain and save the building for the tenants. It did not work out in the end, but I’m glad that we gave it the best shot.

Brad Paul
Executive director, North of Markert Planning Association

Well, let me just start by saying that I was there the night that it happened. It was pretty horrifying to watch people, basically, that I was paying — because I’m a taxpayer and they were police officers, paid by the city — to beat people up around me, and I saw people right in front of me have their skulls split open at taxpayers’ expense, so that this crazy person from Thailand, Supasit Mahaguna, could throw all these people out of their homes.

In retrospect, we’ve learned about the important role that nonprofit corporations can play in owning houses and there was a thing called a buy-back plan, which people thought was a scam. Today, you would think of something like a buy-back plan as just a normal way of buying residential property protection. I can’t think of any residential development ten years ago owned or operated by a nonprofit corporation. Today there are lots.

The eviction — I think people paid a very dear price for that. A number of those people are dead now, and I’m sure that the threat of that eviction didn’t help. A more recent case is 1000 Montgomery. The eviction of those people, I think, led to the death of one of the older tenants there. I think that’s one of the sad losses of things like the I-Hotel and 1000 Montgomery and all of them. I don’t think government officials pay enough attention to that when they make decisions on whether or not to let somebody do these things.

But for myself, I’d have to say that there were a number of things that I was involved in ten and 12 years ago that made me decide to do the kind of work I’m doing now. And I’d say one of the single things that had the biggest effect on me was being there that night and watching that, and saying we shouldn’t allow this to happen — that we need to all see that it never comes to this again.

Quentin Kopp
State senator, third district; former member, San Francisco Board of Supervisors

To me it was an unusual episode, and I’m not sure that it was a lesson of any kind. I don’t think it’s been repeated, has it? You know, I’m a believer in property rights, so it’s a difficult issue. On the other hand, I became convinced that there was genuine justification for maintaining the hotel for those who lived there and had an attachment to it. It was a collision of property rights versus feeling sorry for people who would lose their lodgings, lodgings to which they had become accustomed and attached. If I were the property owner, I would be indignant about the way the city treated me …

the tactics that were used, and the litigation — the litigation was horrendous.

Now, the broader social issue I would characterize as preservation, obviously, of low-income housing for a minority group, the Filipinos. [But] if the city had such a robust concern, sincere concern, then the proper act for the city was to condemn the property — to take it and preserve it …

for the people who lived there. But the city was not forthright, the city did not set out to do that — the city tried to strangulate the owner into doing that, by reason of, it’s what I consider a bit cutesy a legislative move — a political move.

So what have we learned? Well, I don’t think that anything has been learned, and not simply because this is sui generis (which is the Latin term for one of a kind that lawyers often employ), but because the city doesn’t have a consistent policy for preserving this kind of living space.

Richard Cerbatos
Former member, San Francisco School Board, San Francisco Board of Permit Appeals

Speaking as a Filipino American, I saw an attempt to destroy a cultural link within the Filipino-American community. It was clear there was an established community living there. The use of the hotel in that general community formed a network and a lifestyle that was identifiable for older Filipino men. The access to the cheaper restaurants in Chinatown, the ability to hang out and speak their language in pool halls — this was all proposed to be destroyed in one big demolition permit. They were in a community where some of their cultural values were intact, and the only thing that kept them intact was the fact that they were close to one another.

I think those sensitivities now are clearer to the general community. I still think there are areas of Chinatown where they’re still going to have to fight this battle….

We’re seeing this: That we can’t allow people to be displaced purely in the name of bigger and better developments, and namely, bigger and better profits. With Prop. M, we’re seeing some attempts at this, and I think the first evolution of this was the I-Hotel.

As far as my sensitivites go, my thing is, through just having lived through it, this was the first time that anyone took on the developers the way they did. There have been later battles, but that was the first one that became known to everyone city-wide. If we are going to put some control on growth, we can use these lessons.

Ed Illumin
Member, I-Hotel Tenants Association

The first eviction notice was posted in December of 1968, so we’re talking about an almost 19-year battle, here. Actually, a 19-year war, because there were little battles in between. But it comes down to the city and various segments of the Chinatown community and the developer, Four Seas, arriving at an agreement on the development for that lot that would include some replacement housing — affordable, low-income replacement housing. I mean really affordable and priority for those apartments going to former tenants of the I-Hotel, and those elderly and disabled. A number of [tenants] have died since that time, so really we’re talking about maybe a dozen or 16 people who are still around to taste the benefits of this long, long war. Some justice, even though it’s late, has arrived and I would say that we finally won the war. It was a long struggle, 19 years, but people will get a chance, if they live long enough, to move in on the 20th year, which is 1988, when the construction should be completed.

It certainly wasn’t positive for the Filipino neighborhood. There are remnants of Manilatown, but to a large extent that neighborhood was destroyed. There was a lot going on there, and the I-Hotel was the heart of the community in that area. The positive thing about it was that it kept the Financial District from encroaching into Chinatown. The Filipinos and the Chinese have had a long history of living together, co-existing, and I think it was pretty much a sacrifice of the Filipino community there to make sure that Chinatown was preserved.

Chester Hartman
Fellow in urban planning, Institute for Policy Studies; lawyer for I-Hotel Tenants Association

In a sense, I think the International Hotel, the tremendous interest and support that the eviction attempt generated over so many years, was a kind of a coalescing and symbolizing of resistance to changes in San Francisco — changes being obviously the downtown corporate world taking over the neighborhoods. I think the fact that so many people came to the aid of the hotel residents, even though they weren’t successful in preventing the eviction, was pretty much a strong building block in developing what has become an extremely strong housing movement in San Francisco, one that really has become very effective in influencing candidates and people in public office, and in getting some laws passed.

So that’s one important lesson — that sometimes victories take a while, and take different forms, but all these struggles are connected. Another, I guess, is really how long it takes to get any results — the absurdity of having a totally vacant lot there for ten years, at a time when people need housing so badly. The fact that a private developer like Four Seas is able in essence to hold on and do nothing with its land when there’s so much need for housing in the Chinatown-Manilatown area says a great deal about … the relationship of city government to private developers.

Curtis Choy
Producer, “The Fall of the I-Hotel”

About the eviction night itself — and I just have a dim recollection now — I remember being very numb, and the fact that I was hiding behind a camera made it easier, because I had something between me and the event. I think I’ve spent a lot of time getting it behind me and if I haven’t seen my own film for, say, half a year it scares the hell out of me to look at the eviction again. I feel hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

What can I say about lessons? It was almost, I shouldn’t say, it was almost worth that eviction, but I mean, that’s the only thing you can get out of something like that — I mean, basically, they killed half those guys by throwing them out.

The potential for revolution in the country was still in the back of our minds in the early ’70s. And here we were trying to use the system, trying to play ball with the system, and it sort of set us up for yuppiedom. It was sort of our last hope to get something together, and we had invested 12 years or so in the struggle. There was kind of a little mass depression that stuck, and that same kind of high energy has never come back.

Sue Hestor
Attorney, San Franciscans for Reasonable Growth

In retrospect, one of the issues that we should have raised and litigated was the lack of an adequate environmental review of the project. We’ve learned a lot since then, and I don’t want to say that people that were involved at that point made a wrong decision, but in 1987 that would be one of the first issues that would be raised.

Secondarily, I think what we learned is how the physical destruction of a building makes it very hard to keep the issue alive — after a while, the hole in the ground becomes something that has to be filled, and the focus of attention drifts away. It’s really striking how when you lose the building, it’s more than just a symbol — it’s the motivating factor in people’s lives.

Allison Brennan
Organizer, San Francisco Tenants Union

They [the city] could’ve taken the building by eminent domain and they didn’t do that — they didn’t want to do that. I mean, the issue is not so much what they could do to prevent it, but why they didn’t prevent it in the first place. And that is basically because San Francisco has very little interest in preserving low-income housing. Its interest, and the interest of most of the people from San Francisco, are in getting rid of low-income housing, “cleaning up” poor neighborhoods, and turning them into nice middle-class neighborhoods, and that’s the stated goal of most city legislation — poor people aren’t what we want.

I think that probably the most important thing that came out of [the I-Hotel struggle] was that, while we don’t have a real good situation for tenants in San Francisco, I think consciousness was raised, among at least a lot of tenants about the situation which tenants are in. And I think that to a certain extent, on a national level, the elderly are getting somewhat better consideration than they did previously.

Gordon Chin
Director, Chinatown Neighborhood Improvement Resource Center

I guess the lessons of the I-Hotel have to go back to 15 and 20 years, to the genesis of the issue. I personally think the I-Hotel symbolized a lot of very key development issues — housing issues, tenant empowerment issues — that gained a national reputation back starting in the 1960s. In some respects, it highlighted many of the particular facets of the housing problem very early on: the need to maintain and preserve existing housing; the threat of commercial and downtown developments; the encroachment into the neighborhoods; the issue of foreign investment and the role that can play in development encroachment; the critical importance of tenant organizing and tenant organization with a support base in the larger community; the need for diverse ethnic, racial, sexual, lifestyle communities to work together on an issue of mutual concern — in this case, Chinese, Filipino, white, all different kinds of people supporting the I-Hotel tenants and getting involved in the issues as they evolved over the last 15 years.The I-Hotel experience has had a positive effect on these issues in San Francisco, and probably across the country. ….

It was a very critical time for the city, and this is going back to the early ’60s, with the previous United Filipino Association, the International Tenants’ Association, the whole bit. You had a lot of environmental movement activity….

I think that’s the I-Hotel’s importance, not just what happened back then. It was the whole evolution of the issue, even after the demolition, when the focus then became — well, we’ve lost the building, but the fight must continue in terms of making sure whatever is built on the site becomes new, affordable housing — not just housing but affordable housing. And it’s culminated in the most recent development plan for the project, which has gained pretty wide-spread support. I guess part of the whole recollection, reflecting back on the ’60s in general, [is that] the I-Hotel was very symbolic of the whole movement — Vietnam, everything.*

Interviews for this story were conducted by: Nicholas Anderson, Heather Bloch, Eileen Ecklund, Mark Hedin, Craig McLaughlin, Tim Redmond and Erica Spaberg.

It may not be sexy, but it’s important

Staff
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The problem with reading comprehensive analyses of the state of anything — the union, the art or the economy — is that you often have to wade through a whole lot of facts and figures before you get to the good stuff. Most of us zone out when we see too many numbers in front of our eyes. No matter how interesting or important we find the topic, if a report contains more than one statistic per paragraph, we never make it to the end.

For The Bay Guardian, that has always been a dilemma. Unlike a lot of news outlets, we don’t ask you to believe our stories on faith alone; we give you the facts to back them up. Sometimes, with complicated stories, we give you so many that you can’t be bothered reading them all.

Bruce Brugmann, the editor and publisher, is fond of telling us that the headline on every story has to summarize everything important in the story. Most people, he says, won’t read anything else. If we want to make sure they get the point, we have to put it in 96-point Tempo Bold.

Which makes sense. But when the story is about the state of San Francisco’s economy and how the next mayor should guide it, the point doesn’t lend itself to a few short, bold words on the top of a page. It’s too complicated for headlines.

It’s also too complicated for short campaign slogans, or for 30-second radio and TV ads. That may be one reason why the mayoral candidates have, by and large, ignored the issue. It just isn’t sexy. It takes too long to explain. Too many numbers. The voters will go to sleep.

Unfortunately, the issue is also crucial. The economic policies of the next mayor will affect the lives of everybody living or working in San Francisco. It’s something the candidates should be talking about.

We aren’t running for public office, so we don’t need to hustle for votes. But we are concerned about the future of the city — and no matter how much work we put into a story, it does no good if people don’t read it. This week’s main news story, by reporter Tim Redmond, is full of numbers and statistics, and I’ll be the first to admit it’s

the kind of story that would normally scare me away. But the story is important, and the proposals that form the final section should be required reading for anyone interested in a serious debate over the city’s future. Give it a shot — then call your favorite candidate and ask him or her what they think of our ideas and why they aren’t discussing these issues as part of the campaign.

What are city officials and the Chamber of Commerce planning behind closed doors?

Staff
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San Francisco public officials and the Chamber of Commerce have launched a new Economic Development Corporation with the stated goal of charting and guiding the city’s economic future. But although the decisions the group might make would have dramatic impacts on all of San Francisco, the agency thus far has refused to conduct its business in public.

Although several city officials serve on the EDC’s board of directors in an official capacity and the corporation will be partially funded by the city, the agency’s first meeting, July 16th, was held behind closed doors at the Chamber’s California Street headquarters. A Bay Guardian reporter was told he could not attend the meeting, and no official minutes have been published. The meeting appears to violate the Ralph M. Brown Public Meetings Act.

Paul Wright, deputy executive director of the Chamber of Commerce and acting executive director of the EDC, insisted the meeting did not fall under Brown Act guidelines.

The EDC’s board of directors, however, includes Bill Witte, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Economic Development, Rudy Nothenberg, the city’s chief administrative officer and Nancy Walker, president of the Board of Supervisors. The Brown Act defines “legislative body” as “any board, commission, committee, or other body on which officers of of a local agency serve in their official capacity as members.”

Furthermore, the new EDC receives its funding in part from the Chamber and in part from MOHED. Presently, that funding is limited to “in kind” services such as preparing presentations and clerical services. Under the Brown Act definition, a legislative body must be “supported in whole or part by funds provided by such a public agency.”

The EDC was formed jointly by the Chamber and MOHED and will be incorporated as a nonprofit in the fall of this year. According to the agenda from the July 16th planning meeting, the corporation is designed to “help retain employers in San Francisco and attract appropriate new businesses to the City” and to maintain “a close working relationship between the public and private sectors in the economic development activity of the City.”

Terry Francke, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association and an expert on the Brown Act, told the Bay Guardian that the new EDC qualifies as a “legislative body” as defined under Government Code Section 54950 and therefore any meetings the EDC holds are subject to Brown Act requirements. “If the meeting is official enough to have public officials in attendance then it’s official enough to be open.”

Supervisor Walker was invited to the meeting but could not attend due to a previous commitment, according to staff aide Jean Mariani. Mariani said Walker’s office was seeking a city attorney’s opinion on the status of the EDC and told the Bay Guardian, “Supervisor Walker is concerned with this issue. We will have the situation resolved before the next meeting.” That meeting is scheduled for September 11th.

City Attorney Louise Renne told the Bay Guardian her staff was looking into the matter.*

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