SF Chronicle

Heroes who did their jobs on 9/11

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By Dick Meister

You know those public employees who are under seemingly constant attack? Who are being blamed for all sorts of governmental problems, financial and otherwise? Well, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center is a good time to make clear how very important to the nation those unfairly maligned public employees have been for a long, long time.

I should think it would be very hard to argue against the pay and pensions negotiated by firefighters and police, for instance, given their often heroic and usually helpful acts in behalf of the people they serve.

Yes, they make demands for pay and benefit increases and better working conditions– and they should.  Just as they should be able to bargain collectively through their unions to try to realize their demands. That’s called workplace democracy, and it should be their absolute right.

But anti-labor political leaders are looking for someone else to blame for the poor state of the economy that’s at least in part due to their own ineptness. And who do they blame? Public employees, who are characterized as greedy, overpaid and underworked members of much too economically and politically powerful unions.   The employees are the cause of it all.  Certainly it’s not the failed leadership and poor bargaining skills of the political leaders that’s at fault. Or their refusal to adequately tax the wealthy. Of course not.

We should know better. And the anniversary of the 911 attacks should remind us of the essential and sometimes courageous work done by the public employees who are so frequently used as political scapegoats.  Don’t blame us, say too many politicians. Blame the firefighters, police, teachers and others who do so much of the actual work of government.

Consider what public employees did after that horrific day of September 11, 2001 in New York City when a hijacked plane crashed into the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center.  More than 135,000 of the truly heroic firefighters, police and others who rushed to the crash scene were injured, some quite seriously. They rescued as many victims as they could find and cleared as much of the debris as they could at Ground Zero. Some had rushed to the scene from as far away as California and Oregon.

They were exposed to an extremely toxic mix of chemicals, jet fuel, asbestos, lead, glass fragments and other debris that caused a wide range of respiratory, intestinal and mental health problems, including lung diseases, rare cancers and other ailments.

An AFL-CIO report at the time focused on Vito Friscia, a Brooklyn homicide detective who was only a block away when the second of the Twin Towers fell. He rushed to the site through a dense cloud of toxins to seek – and to rescue – survivors.  Friscia spent a week helping with the rescue and cleanup efforts, coming away with chronic sinus problems, shortness of breath and other lasting ailments.

“But I’m no hero,” Friscia insisted. “I was just doing my job.” Many others said pretty much the same thing – that they were just doing their jobs as police officers, firefighters or as other public service employees. Thousands of them are still suffering from their exposure at Ground Zero.  Some are permanently disabled.

As one of those treating them noted, “Our patients are sick, and they will need ongoing care for the rest of their lives.”

More than 10,000 of those injured won settlements from New York and its contractors after filing lawsuits against the city.  But most of the settlements were far short of providing adequate compensation to the injured, and came long after their injuries.

Sufficient federal aid has been a long time coming, in large part because of Republican opposition to the cost.  It took nine years for Congress to finally pass an aid bill over the strong opposition of GOP House members. The measure, signed by President Obama just last January, will provide $7.4 billion in aid over the next 10 years. In a compromise that satisfied the GOP, it will be financed by a fee on foreign companies awarded procurement contracts from the federal government.

What we need now is a bill designating September 11, not only as a day to recall the horrors of 9/11 and its great impact on our lives, but also as a day to express our gratitude to the public employees who risked their lives to help victims of the terrorist attack and whose day-to-day work benefits us all in so many important ways.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Dick Meister: Football breeds violence, Bart breeds cell phone abuse

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By Dick Meister

The media are missing some important factors in the coverage of recent football fan violence and the protests over BART shutting off cell phone service to head off protest demonstrations.

Could the violent nature of football itself possibly have something to do with the violent stadium behavior of 49er and Raider fans, at least unconsciously?

You’ve certainly heard the cheerleader chant for players to “hit ’em again, hit ’em again, harder, harder!” That’s what blockers and tacklers do. Theirs is a violent sport surpassed only by boxing, in which the combatants aim to knock their opponents senseless.

Football fans are easily stirred up by the successful violence of their team against the other team’s violence. Once those violent juices are flowing, who knows what might happen off the field, in grandstands, parking lots and anywhere else opposing fans mix?

What kind of a sport is it, anyway, that relies so heavily on violence? Yes, nicely thrown passes, nifty catches, and exciting open field running are important aspects of football. But violence overshadows the non-violent aspects of the game – violence committed mainly by large men who rely heavily on brute strength.

Fan violence erupted again at the pre-season 49er-Raiders game in Candlestick Park Aug. 20. Two fans were shot, another fan beaten unconscious. Twelve fans were arrested and dozens ejected from the stadium.

The 49er management and San Francisco police have planned steps that they hope will head off future fan violence, among them halting preseason 49er-Raiders games, cutting the hours that the Candlestick parking lot is open for tailgating parties that invariably include lots of drinking and rowdy conduct, and assigning more police to Candlestick duty.

Those and other steps might ease the fan violence, but they will not alter the basic nature of football. You may think it a stretch to blame unsanctioned off-field violence at least in part on the on-field violence that is sanctioned. But though there’s no solid evidence that I’m right, neither is there any that shows I’m wrong.

Violence is much less an issue in the BART situation, although those protesting BART’s cell phone shutoff as well as BART police officers use of deadly force have sometimes gotten violent, pushing and shoving passengers as they picket BART stations and otherwise demonstrate their anger over BART in effect limiting free speech.

That’s a good cause, of course. Who but a tyrant would oppose the right of free speech? BART’s no enemy of free speech, no matter what the protestors from the group “Anonymous” vociferously claim. It is true, though, that BART cut off cell phone service in order to keep protestors from contacting each other and bringing more protestors into BART stations.

But as BART says, its main concern is – and must be – the safety and convenience of its riders, who may or may not agree with the protestors who have been in effect trying to force their views on people who are merely trying to get from one place to another in the fastest, safest way.

Many of those BART riders have been kept from doing that by the protestors, who at one point forced BART to close four of its downtown San Francisco stations during the evening rush hour, stranding thousands of commuters who were trying to get home.

However, despite its concern for the convenience of riders, BART fails to note that merely allowing the use of cell phones on its trains greatly inconveniences at least some riders – and I’m one of them.

To me, one of the most disturbing things about riding on BART is having to listen to fellow passengers loudly jabbering away on cell phones, rudely sharing their mundane personal conversations with all of us. The prospect of that alone has made me and probably others think twice before boarding BART.

So, media, how about some words about the cell phone abusers? And BART – shut off the damn phones!

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.)

Dick Meister: Labor Day began in San Francisco

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By Dick Meister

By some reckoning, this is the 117th Labor Day, since it was first observed as a national holiday in 1894. But the observation actually began a quarter-century earlier in San Francisco.

It was on Feb. 21, 1868. Brass bands blared, flags, banners and torch lights waved high as more than 3000 union members marched proudly through the city’s downtown streets, led by shipyard workers and carpenters and men from dozens of other construction trades.

“A jollification,” the marchers called their parade – the climax of a three-year campaign of strikes and other pressures that had culminated in the establishment of the eight-hour workday as a legal right in California.

New York unionists staged a similar parade in 1882 that is often erroneously cited as the first Labor Day parade, even though it occurred 14 years after the march in San Francisco.

Honors for holding the first official Labor Day are usually granted the state of Oregon, which proclaimed a Labor Day holiday in 1887 – seven years before the Federal Government got around to proclaiming the holiday that is now observed nationwide.

But Oregon’s move came nearly a year after Gov. George Stoneman of California issued a proclamation setting aside May 11, 1886, as a legal holiday to honor a new organization of California unions – the year-old Iron Trades Council.

That, said renowned labor historian Ira. B. Cross of the University of California, was “the first legalized Labor Day in the United States.,

San Francisco also played a major role in that celebration of 1886. The city was the scene of the chief event – a march down Market Street by more than 10,000 men and women from some 40 unions, led by the uniformed rank-and-file of the Coast Seamen’s Union. Gov. Stoneman and is entire staff marched right along with them.

The process was seven miles long, took more than two hours to pass any given point and generated enthusiasm that the San Francisco Examiner said was “entirely unprecedented – even in political campaigns.”

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

The America’s cup confusion

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If the sponsors (and city officials) are right, the America’s Cup is going to be a huge event, attracting hundreds of thousands of spectators, many of whom will want to be on the San Francisco waterfront to watch. But it’s never been clear to me exactly how that’s going to work — how are all those (rich) people who are used to getting around in limos going to travel from their downtown hotels to the viewing areas? If the city wanted to do this right, we should close down the Embarcadero and some of the feeder streets to all vehicles (except ambulances — always needed when rich old people get excited) and force everyone to travel by pedicab. Buy up a fleet of several hundred of the human-powered vehicles and let all the unemployed teenagers get a shot at driving them. Job creation for youth; environmentally sound transportation; potentially fun bumper-car action with well-heeled patrons screaming in fear.


Remember: The f-line, even with improvements, can’t possibly handle the necessary traffic. And the AC types aren’t going to ride the train anyway. No way private cars can all fit without massive gridlock.


So: Pedicabs. My suggestion.


In the meantime, there’s this little problem of 8 Washington.


See, the developer of what would be the city’s most expensive condos ever is planning on excavating 110,000 cubic yards of soil for a massive underground parking garage — right along the Embarcadero, and right during the America’s Cup events. The Draft Environmental Impact Report for 8 Washington indicates that the dump trucks (about 20 big trucks per day, and possibly a lot more) would be using that roadway to get to 101 or 280.


Actually, if activist Brad Paul is correct, there’s no way the developer can excavate that much dirt in the time frame that it’s supposed to happen unless the number of trucks is closer to 300 a day. Imagine all of that happening while 100,000 people are trying to get to the waterfront to watch the show. Oh, and according to the DEIR for the America’s Cup, the Embarcadero will be CLOSED during that period.


The fact is, the 8 Washington project is not only a terrible idea (just what the city needs — more condos for mega-millionaires) but would directly screw up the whole America’s Cup effort. And the amazing thing is that the AC people and the Mayor’s Office don’t seem to be paying attention.


Paul has put together a lengthy critique of the whole mess that makes great reading if you’re into this sort of thing. So I thought I’d just post it all here. Warning: It’s long. Enjoy.


August 15, 2011                                                                                                         


Bill Wycko
Environmental Review Officer
San Francisco Planning Department
1650 Mission Street, Suite 400
San Francisco, CA  94103


Re: COMMENTS ON DRAFT EIR FOR 8 WASHINGTON STREET/
SEAWALL LOT 351 PROJECT    
Case No. 2007.0030E


Dear Mr. Wycko:


I am writing to my provide my comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Report (“DEIR”) for this project, a document that is incomplete, inadequate and in places quite misleading. I’ve organized my comments in sections beginning with a detailed discussion of how the project’s construction schedule has been greatly underestimated. This is followed by discussions of the DEIR’s failure to address key Housing and Population issues, misstatements regarding historic obligations related to Golden Gateway, comments on recreation issues, and more.  In general, I believe the DEIR fails to present objective information and analysis, it omits a number of relevant issues that are critical to the ability of public officials to make objective and informed decisions about the project and it is filled with judgments and assertions that are not supported by facts.


The DEIR is incomplete and inadequate in the following areas:


I. THE DEIR CONSTRUCTION SCHEDULE FOR 8 WASHINGTON IS BOTH INACCURATE AND MISLEADING.


The DEIR construction schedule is based on overly optimistic assumptions that are totally unrealistic; the ramifications of these erroneous assumptions need to be carefully considered as they will cascade throughout the project requiring major revisions to the DEIR before it can be considered accurate and complete.


At the bottom of page II.19 it states:
 
      Project construction, including demolitions, site and foundation work,
      construction of the parking garage, and construction of the buildings,
      would take 27-29 months. Assuming that construction would begin in 2012,   
      the buildings would be ready for occupancy in 2014. The first phase of the
      construction would take about 16 months and would include demolition       
     (2 months), excavation and shoring (7 months), and foundation and below
      grade construction work (7 months).


While the DEIR unequivocally states the project will take 27-29 months to construct, from 2012 to 2014, facts provided elsewhere in the DEIR together with current city policies,  the City’s America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement and basic math indicate that this schedule is not tenable. The remainder of this section provides the data and analysis that lead to the conclusion that construction of 8 Washington will take much longer than 27-29 months, almost TWICE AS LONG, with excavation taking 2.5 to 3 TIMES longer.  


 


Table 1: Requested Changes to the overall DEIR construction schedule


          ACTIVITY             MINIMUM           MAXIMUM


    DEIR’s construction schedule: 27 months    to    29 months  


    Actual excavation schedule:  18 months           22 months
    — DEIR estimate for excavation – 7 months            – 7 months
    + Increased excavation time  11 months      to       15 months 
    + Archeology delays                .5 months      to         2 months
    +  America’s Cup delays                  2.5 months       to         5 months
    +  Weather delays                        .25 months      to         1 months


   ACTUAL CONSTRUCTION TIME 41 months       to      52 months



 
To refute the numbers in Table 1, project sponsors must present additional, verifiable data supporting their unrealistic assumptions, beginning with the claim that the first phase of construction takes 16 months with a mere seven months allocated for excavation/shoring.


A. The DEIR fails to accurately ascertain and analyze the excavation/shoring schedule.


The DEIR states on page II.20 that “approximately 110,000 cubic yards of soil” will be excavated from the site for an underground garage (approximately 90,000 cubic yards) and other foundation work during the seven (7) month “excavation” portion of the projected timeline. It later states excavation will take place 6.5 hours per day with an average of 20 truck trips per day (pg.IV.D.31). Assuming the average dump truck holds 12 cubic yards of dirt (typical payload for a dump truck), that would mean:


      · 110,000 cu. yards/12 cubic yards per truck = 9,166 truck trips


      · 20 trucks/day X 12 cubic yards/trip = an average of 240 cu. yards/day


      · 110,000 cu. yards/240 cu. yards per day = 458 working days for this task


Could this task be completed in seven (7) months as claimed in the DEIR?  NO.


     ·5 working days per week X 52 weeks = 260 working days per year
             – 11 holidays per year
                   249  total working days/year
   


     ·458 days to finish task/249 working days per year = 22 months  (not 7)
     
For this to take 7 months as the DEIR asserts, the following would have to be true:


   · 20 trucks/day X 7 months (145 working days ) = 2,900 total truck trips


   · 110,000 cu. yards/2,900 trucks = each truck must average 38 cubic yards/trip
Empirical evidence exists, however, proving the DEIR’s claim that the excavation portion of the schedule will take seven months is inaccurate and misleading:



             
        CASE STUDY #1: San Francisco General Hospital Rebuild Project


A recent SF General Hospital (SFGH) Newsletter reports the hospital’s contractor just finished hauling 120,000 cu. yards of dirt from the 45’ deep hole that was dug to build two basement levels and the foundation for a new hospital building. This is as close as anyone is likely to get to replicating what 8 Washington proposes, a three level 40’ deep underground garage accounting for most of the 110,000 cubic yards of dirt that must be removed from the site. 


A call to the SFGH Rebuild office revealed their excavation process took seven (7) months with an average truck load of 13 cu. yards per trip. How was that possible?


“The average truck load was 13 cubic yards. Some days we had
over 300 truck loads hauled in one day. This volume was possible
through use of a paved drive that allowed trucks to enter the side, be
loaded up then tires washed to prevent dirt on road causing storm-            
water pollution and dust.”


The SF General site is just a few blocks from U.S. 101 with direct access via Potrero Ave., thus minimizing potential traffic conflicts. The 8 Washington site will require driving long distances on city streets including “The Embarcadero, Harrison Street, and King Street… likely the primary haul and access routes to and from I-80, U.S. 101, and I-280 (pg. IV.D.31).” Imagine 300 trips a day on one of these streets.


 


        
               CASE STUDY #2: SF PUC’s New Hetch Hetchy Reservoir Tunnel


A recent Oakland Tribune story (4/8/11) describes construction of a new 3.5-mile tunnel designed to protect the water supply from SF’s Hetch Hetchy reservoir from major earthquakes by boring a 2nd, state-of-the-art tunnel from Sunol to Fremont alongside the existing 81-year-old Irvington Tunnel. The article states:


      “By the time the New Irvington Tunnel is completed in 2014, crews will have
        excavated about 734,000 cubic yards of material—the equivalent of 61,000
        dump-truck trips, said officials with the SF Public Utilities Commission.”


Dividing 734,000 cubic yards of soil by the 61,000 dump truck trips that the PUC says are necessary equals 12 cubic yards per truck trip. Given this job’s overall size and $227 million budget, it would seem to confirm the fact that the most efficient excavation equipment for the 8 Washington site will be 12 cubic yard dump trucks.



In light of these facts and the analysis provided above, the only way 8 Washington could meet its proposed seven (7) month excavation schedule would be to:


a) schedule up to 300 TRUCK TRIPS A DAY, over 10 TIMES the average number of trips per day (20) stated in the DEIR and 3 TIMES the absolute maximum of 100 truck trips per day (pg. IV.D.31)  along the Northeast Embarcadero during a period of time that directly overlaps with the major America’s Cup events and activities, something specifically prohibited by the City’s America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement ,        


         OR


b) average 38 cubic yards of dirt per truck trip, 3 TIMES the average truck payload of both the PUC’s Irvington Tunnel project and SF General Hospital’s 120,000 cubic yard excavation project—assuming that 38 cubic yard trucks:  a) exist in sufficient quantity in   the Bay Area, b) would be available during that period of time described and c) would be allowed on The Embarcadero, Harrison St., King St., Washington St. and Drumm St. by     the City. [see photo comparison of 12 cubic yard vs. 30 cubic yard trucks below]


Unless the project sponsor can demonstrate that one of these two highly unlikely scenarios is possible, then the EIR must reanalyze a number of impacts (e.g. Land Use, Air Quality, Greenhouse Gases) based on a revised excavation schedule, one that takes 2.5 to 3 TIMES as long as the one described in DEIR to complete excavation work, and this 22 month timeline assumes NO archeological remains are found on site and the City imposes NO stop work orders related to America’s Cup (see below).


This 15-month difference between the excavation period analyzed in the DEIR and the ACTUAL time it will take to complete the excavation (22 months vs. 7 months) is a major deficiency in the DEIR with profound impacts.  For instance, some of the most significant unavoidable negative impacts described in the DEIR involve degraded air quality both during and after construction. Adjusting the environmental analysis to reflect how long excavation will actually take means significant air quality impacts related to excavation (with the greatest detrimental effect on seniors, children and people exercising) will persist for 2.5 to 3 TIMES LONGER than described in the DEIR.  This flaw also requires significant revisions to other sections of the DEIR.


In light of this new information, the next draft of the EIR must contain an analysis of    this longer overall construction period—two months for demolition; a range of 18 to 22 months for excavation (not seven months); a built-in range of time for the shutting down of the site when archeological artifacts are uncovered, documented and extracted (something the DEIR’s archeology consultant states is “likely” ); and the building construction period. Finally, given these overly aggressive excavation schedule estimates, all other estimates for later construction phases must now to be cross checked for accuracy by independent contractors (e.g. not working for 8 Washington developer    or the source of the prior DEIR excavation estimate).


B. The actual construction timeline for 8 Washington will be 41-52 MONTHS. 
If the project sponsors disagree with this assessment, they must provide the Planning Department with much more detailed information on how they expect to achieve a shorter construction period given the restrictions described in the DEIR itself as well as mathematical analysis described above. For instance,


– Did the developers err when they reported that the average number of truck
   trips per day would be 20 as analyzed in the DEIR?  If so, what number do they 
   choose to use now and how does that impact various aspects of the DEIR analysis
   such as air quality, conflicts with pedestrians, MUNI and America’s Cup, etc.. 


– Does the developer plan to raise the limit of truck trips per day from 100 (as
   per the DEIR) to 300 truck trips per day? If so, how often will this happen and 
   how will these changes impact various aspects of the previous EIR analysis (e.g. air
   quality, traffic/transit/pedestrian conflicts, America’s Cup)?


– Does the developer plan to lengthen the average workday or work six days a
   week? If so, how often and how would this impact the previous DEIR analysis?
   NOTE: The DEIR construction schedule (27-29 months) was not predicated on the
   trucks operating 6 days a week EVERY WEEK. But even if the developer ran dump  
   trucks 6 days a week for the ENTIRE excavation period it would still take TWICE AS
   LONG as the DEIR states to remove 110,000 cubic yards of dirt .


– Where is the project sponsor planning to route 100 to 300 trucks a day as they
   leave the site, particularly during the various America’s Cup trials (2012) and
   finals (2013) when vehicular traffic will be severely limited or prohibited?
   Washington Street? The Embarcadero? Drumm Street? Clay Street?, where exactly?


– Have the developers located a source of 30+ cubic yard trucks and secured
   city permission to use them on the specific streets described in the DEIR?
   It seems fair to assume the SF General Hospital’s excavation contractor would have
   done this if it were possible (and the SF PUC’s Irvington Tunnel contractor). See the  
   three photos below to get a sense of the size difference between a typical 12 cubic yard
   dump truck and the type of tractor-trailer rig required to carry 30 cubic yards or more.



As the questions and examples (SF General Hospital) above demonstrate, the DEIR’s claim that 110,000 cubic yards can be excavated in seven months defies the laws of physics and math, not to mention the America’s Cup Host & Venue Agreement between the City and Larry Ellison’s Oracle BMW Racing Team 


 A thorough reading of the DEIR’s Archeology section and the America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement indicate that additional time must be built into the construction schedule for predictable work stoppages related to both issues.


KNOWN ARCHEOLOGICAL RESOURCES IDENTIFIED ON THIS SITE IN THE DEIR


On page IV.C.12, the DEIR’s archeology consultant, Archeo-Tec, identifies the Gold Rush ship Bethel as located under a portion of the site and states that “If discovered, the Bethel would be the oldest known (and perhaps most intact) archeological example of an early Canadian built ship (Pg. IV.C.3)”. On page IV.C.11, the archeology consultant states “Significant archeological resources are likely to exist at this site”.  The DEIR, goes on to state the proposed project will destroy a portion of city’s original Seawall causing “the largest disturbance of the Old Seawall to date”.


As a result of these DEIR findings, the archeology consultant should now be asked for an estimate of the time required to mitigate the discovery of the Bethel and other likely finds (e.g. original Seawall, other Gold Rush ships, original Chinatown). This “likely” work delay should be built into the construction schedule and stated as a range. For purposes of the matrix below (Table 1) we chose a time of two weeks to two months based on anecdotal information from other similar sites. Archeo-Tec, the archeology consultant, should be able to come up with a more precise estimate.


KNOWN AMERICA’S CUP SCHEDULING CONFLICTS


Based on recent MTA staff presentations on protocols for the America’s Cup, it seems clear that traffic, particularly construction dump trucks, will be banned from Washington Street, Drumm Street and The Embarcadero during major America’s Cup events that include, at a minimum, the America’s Cup World Series warm-up races (July/Sept. 2012), the penultimate Louis Vuitton Cup Series (July/August 2013) and the America’s Cup finals (Sept. 2013).  


This represents a minimum of 2.5 months that must be added to the construction schedule, something the DEIR authors should have included if they had read the America’s Cup DEIR which states there are 9+ weeks of races associated with this event in 2012/2013. The extra few weeks added to the low end range in Table 1 (below) are there to accommodate last minute weather delays and various large non-racing events held along the waterfront that will require closure of The Embarcadero, Washington Street, Drumm Street, etc.


Table 1 below lays out a more credible and realistic construction schedule based on the factors described at length above, taken directly from the DEIR or readily available from the city (e.g. America’s Cup DEIR) and the America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement.


 
Table 1: Requested Changes to the overall DEIR construction schedule


          ACTIVITY             MINIMUM           MAXIMUM 


    DEIR’s construction schedule: 27 months    to    29 months  


    Actual excavation schedule:  18 months           22 months
    — DEIR estimate for excavation – 7 months            – 7 months
    + Increased excavation time  11 months      to       15 months 
    + Archeology delays                .5 months      to         2 months
    + America’s Cup delays                   2.5 months        to         5 months
    + Weather delays                        .25 months      to         1 months


   ACTUAL CONSTRUCTION TIME 41 months       to      52 months


To refute these numbers, the project sponsors must not only present a verifiable and detailed plan to remove 110,000 cubic yards (9,167 truck trips) in seven months that the City has signed off on but also produce a letter from the City and Oracle BMW Racing granting a waiver from Section 10.4 of the America’s Cup Host and Venue Agreement that would allow 20 to 300 trucks a day to drive along The Embarcadero, Washington Street   or Drumm Street during major America’s Cup events in 2012 and 2013.


D. Significant Transportation and Energy issues that were not addressed in DEIR.


More specific information related to the construction process needs to be provided and analyzed in the EIR, particularly regarding the far reaching impacts of those 9,166 dump truck trips, impacts that go beyond the immediate Northeast Waterfront.


The DEIR states “While the exact routes that construction trucks would use would depend on the location of the available disposal sites, The Embarcadero, Harrison Street, and King Street would likely be the primary haul and access routes to and from I-80, U.S. 101, and I-280”. At a minimum, The EIR needs to include information on where the two or three most likely disposal sites are located, based on recent experience (SF General Hospital excavation) so that one can analyze the extent of potential conflicts on the Bay Bridge or 101 South where other trucks will be transporting dirt to and/or from the Transbay Terminal project, Hunters Point Shipyard, Mission Bay, Treasure Island, etc. Without this information, the City could find itself creating significant traffic conflicts on the Bay Bridge or highway 101 that greatly increase air quality, traffic and transit problems without having analyzed these potential impacts in a flawed EIR.


Simply saying “While the exact routes that construction trucks would use would depend on the location of the available disposal sites” isn’t adequate or acceptable. Assumptions must be made regarding most likely disposal sites and routes to those sites and what additional cumulative impacts these routes (and 9,166 trucks) will create. The EIR must provide a MAP of the route to be used for hauling soil, all the way from the departure point at 8 Washington to the final destination(s) with an explanation of where trucks will drive and what restrictions there are on hours, size of payload, safety, etc. for the various streets, highways and bridges they will travel on. If the options include trucking the soil to San Francisco’s southern waterfront to transfer it to barges, then this needs to be disclosed and analyzed, including the potential routes and destinations of those barges.
In addition, to accurately compare the environmental impacts of the project sponsor’s ‘Preferred Project’ to the “No Project” alternative (energy consumption, traffic impacts, air quality degradation, etc.), one needs to know not only the destination of the approximately 9,166 dump truck trips but also the average miles per gallon of a typical dump truck. For instance, if the final destination for the soil was 100 miles away and a typical dump truck averages 8 miles per gallon of diesel fuel, then:



      9,166 truck trips X 200 miles per round trip = 1,833,200 miles for all dump trucks;


      1,833,200 gallons/8 MPG = 229,150 gallons of diesel fuel that would be burned. 


    
In other words, the city’s choices would be:



     229,150 gallons of diesel fuel used to transfer 110,000 cubic yards 1,833,200 miles


VS.


    ZERO (O) gallons of diesel fuel used if the NO PROJECT alternative were approved.


 


E. Importance of accurate, detailed information re: the construction process.


Given the above discussion, it is clear that the construction schedule set forth in the DEIR is inaccurate at best and has led, in many cases, to the significant understating of major negative impacts associated with this project. The lack of a detailed discussion of some of the key aspects of the construction process, e.g. the route and destination of 9,166 dump trucks, is also highly problematic.


Without a complete and thorough analysis of the impacts of a of an overall construction schedule that is TWICE AS LONG as the one analyzed in this DEIR, city officials will be missing much of the critical information they need to determine whether or not the developer’s ‘Preferred Project’ is necessary, desirable or feasible. A complete and factual analysis of this issue must be included in the next draft of the EIR which, given this and  other major inaccuracies and omissions (see below), should be recirculated in draft form.


 



II. THE DEIR FAILS TO DISCUSS OR ANALYZE ANY CRITICAL HOUSING ISSUES RELEVANT TO 8 WASHINGTON OR UNIQUE ENVIRONMENTAL AND ENERGY IMPACTS THOSE HOUSING ISSUES CREATE. 


A. Impacts of the project on the City’s Housing Needs were Not Analyzed in DEIR.  The DEIR states that potentially significant impacts to Population and Housing will not be discussed because the 2007 NOP/Initial Study found that the proposed project would not adversely affect them. Unfortunately the DEIR lacks the basic information needed to reach such a conclusion and, as we will demonstrate, an objective review of relevant 2008-2011 housing data contradicts this conclusion.


The world, particularly regarding housing, has changed radically since 2007. Relying   on housing and population information from 2007 ignores the financial and housing meltdown of 2008 and is simply indefensible. In addition, back in 2007, the EIR consultants were relying on stale, seven-year-old census data while today they have access to a multitude of fresh 2010 census data. No one can dispute that the housing environment today could not be more unlike the housing environment in 2007.
By relying solely on pre-2008 housing data from the 2007 NOP/Initial Study, this DEIR    lacks any of the basic information needed to conclude that this project would not have adverse effects on Population and Housing and must now revisit and thoroughly analyze these issues.


B. The DEIR fails to analyze how the type and price of housing proposed for
8 Washington determines whether or not it meets the city’s housing needs.


One of the project objectives (Pg II.14) is to “help meet projected City housing
needs.” How is that possible, given the fact that the developer has publicly stated
that these will be “the most expensive condominiums in the history of SF” ? With a
$345,000,000 project cost , 8 Washington’s 165 units will cost $2.0 million a unit
just to build . To secure financing and a ‘reasonable’ profit, each unit will have to
sell for $2.5-$5 million with penthouses selling for $8-$10 million.


Nowhere in the DEIR is ANY of this discussed. There is no analysis of how these
very high sales prices will determine who lives at 8 Washington (e.g. how many San
Francisco families could afford these prices?) and how the incomes of these new
residents ($250,000 to over $1 million/year) will dramatically change a number of
the environmental impacts of the project, with major implications for sustainability
and energy use, among other things.


The final EIR must state the average cost to build each unit and the range of
sales prices expected so that public officials can assess for themselves whether
the proposed condos will or will not  “help meet projected City housing needs.” 


The 2009 Housing Element, signed into law by Mayor Ed Lee on June 29, 2011, states that 61% of the housing need in San Francisco is for below-market-rate housing—serving families making 30-120% of Area Median Income (AMI), and only 39% of the city’s housing need is for market rate housing (120% to 500+% AMI).


As Planning staff and Commissioners know from their Housing Element discussions, the luxury condos proposed for this project are so expensive they will not help the city meet its current unmet housing needs. If this project objective (Pg II.14) is left in the final EIR, it should include a note explaining that the project, as proposed, is unlikely to meet this objective for the following reasons:


Condominiums selling for $2.5 million and more fall into the one segment of the city’s housing market that is currently overbuilt and has historically been over represented in relation to the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) goals that underpin the updated 2009 Housing Element of the city’s General Plan. An ABAG report on housing needs vs. housing production in SF (1999-2006) that came out in 2007—a report that should have informed the 2007 NOP/Initial Study for 8 Washington—states RHNA Allocations (Goal), Permits Issued (Permitted) and % of Allocation Permitted (% of RHNA Goal) by income category as follows:



Table 2: SF Housing Production (1999-2006)*


Housing Type  Very Low    Low              Moderate       Market Rate 
by Income    Income Income  Income           Housing
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
  % of AMI:    21-50%  51-80%  81-120%         120-500+%
  Annual income: [21-50K] [57-81K] [85-123K]   [123K-$1million+]
———————————————————————————————————-
·RHNA Goal (units)   5,244       2,126   5,639                7,363


·Permitted    4,203       1,101      661                        11,474


·% of RHNA Goal     80%      52%       12%             156%


        * from a 2007 ABAG report entitled: A Place to Call Home



A chart like this, showing housing goals by income group (based on RHNA numbers from the State Office of Housing and Community Development), must be included in the DEIR so public officials can analyze what portion of the city’s unmet affordable and middle income housing needs, if any, the proposed project would meet. It illustrates something local housing experts have long known, that the city consistently comes in well above its RHNA goals for market rate condos, and has historically fallen short of its goals in all other categories for affordable housing, the housing that serves the 61% of San Franciscans that cannot afford ‘market rate’ housing.
C. Dramatic changes to the San Francisco housing market since the 2007 NOP/ Initial Study were not acknowledged and analyzed in the DEIR. All the traditional (pre-2007) sources of funding for the city’s affordable housing programs have dried up since the 2008 housing crash. Redevelopment tax increment funds will either be significantly reduced to pay the state to avoid closure of the SF Redevelopment Agency, or they will be eliminated altogether. Proceeds from the state’s $2.8 billion Affordable Housing Bond (Prop. 1C) are all spent. The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, a major source of funding for affordable housing, is under attack by House and Senate Republicans and may not survive.


This indicates that San Francisco won’t come close to meeting its pre-2007 affordable housing production levels  until we find a new permanent local source of funding for affordable housing. How long will that take? The DEIR must address this issue.


Another chart that must be included in the DEIR shows the city’s RHNA goals by income category combined with a summary of a recent SF Business Times (6/24/2011) chart showing all San Francisco residential projects under construction, permitted or  in the planning pipeline . Such a chart would look something like Table 3 below:


Table 3: Where does the city need help in meeting its RHNA goals?


          Extremely Low       Very Low            Low             Moderate          Market Rate   
                 Income          Income           Income            Income               Housing
         Below 30% AMI          31-50%            51-80%           81-120%              120-500+% 
      [21K-30K]         [35K-50]        [57K-81K]      [85K-120K]        [120K-$1M+]
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________


RHNA      439/yr.                   439/yr.           738/yr.            901/yr.                    1,632/yr.
Goals:      10.5%        +          10.5%      +      18%        +     22%  =  61%           39%
# of units                    of total        of total
% of goal
                             All Affordable Categories Combined            Market Rate_


Underway:          470 units                 1,557 units


Approved:                  8,751 units             30,878 units


In Pipeline:                   780 units                     4,184 units 
________________________________________________________________________
                          10,000 units             36,619 units 
            or                     or
          21.5% of all units                 78.5% of all units


                        56% of RHNA goals                                300% of RHNA goal
                in all affordable categories                        in market rate category
Some version of Table 3 must be included in the revised DEIR to help public officials determine whether the significant negative environmental impacts this project creates are outweighed by the ‘need’ for the type of housing that 8 Washington provides given the priorities set forth in the Housing Element of the General Plan and what the above-mentioned SF Business Times chart tells us about likely housing production for each segment of the city’s housing needs (from 2011-2014). 


Table 3 demonstrates that in a few years, if nothing changes, the city will have approved and built out 300% of its RHNA goal for Market Rate projects (such as 8 Washington) but only 56% of its RHNA goals for all other housing that serves San Franciscans making 30% AMI to 120% AMI. But given what we now know about the current lack of funding for affordable housing, the exact opposite of what was true in 2007 (when the city had significant amounts of Redevelopment tax increment and other affordable housing funds), many of the affordable housing projects listed by the Business Times are now on hold and unlikely to come on line by 2014. This means the mismatch between market rate (39% of need but 300% of production) and all categories of affordable will be even greater than Table 3 indicates.


To be fair, one could argue that some of the market rate housing on the Business Times chart may not be built soon either given that banks have been reluctant to lend money lately. However, a recent article in the SF Chronicle (8/11/11) entitled “Rents Go Through Roof” indicates that the city’s housing market is roaring back; Dennis Robal, property manager with Chandler Properties, reports “Noe Valley apartments that were $2,000 a month a year ago are now going for $2,400”. These kinds of increases, driven by new renters from the tech sector, are prompting major increases in investments by financial institutions in new rental housing.


Regarding the condo market, the one group of potential condominium buyers that
have not suffered financially from the economic meltdown are the very people who
caused it, the Wall Street investors, derivatives specialists, hedge fund managers,
etc. who are now making record salaries and bonuses. These are some of the people
8 Washington will be marketing to because they have the cash to spend $2.5-$10
million on a second, third or fourth home in San Francisco.


NONE of this housing analysis appears in the DEIR yet including it in the DEIR is
critical to the ability of public officials to make informed, rational decisions on this
project, particularly claims by the developer that this project will “help meet
projected City housing needs”. The information and analysis described above is
necessary to allow city officials and all readers to determine accurately and
objectively what portion of San Francisco’s unmet affordable and middle income
housing needs, if any, 8 Washington would meet.


Each year, as the City assesses how well it is meeting its RHNA (state) housing goals, the one area that has consistently over produced is high-end market rate housing affordable to people making $250,000 to $1 million+ a year.
How does building second, third and fourth homes for this demographic “help the city meet its housing needs?”


The unmet housing needs in San Francisco are for people making from 30%-50% of median income all the way up to 100-120%, not people making $250,000 to $1,000,000+ a year (200-500% or more of area median income). The DEIR needs to discuss the following questions to be considered complete, adequate and accurate, questions such as:


How does this project relate to the objectives, policies and goals of San Francisco’s recently enacted 2009 Housing Element of the General Plan?


What portion of San Francisco’s affordable and middle-income housing needs will this proposed project actually meet?


How many other projects under construction, approved or in the pipeline (see June 24,
2011 SF Business Times chart) will meet the needs of San Franciscans who can afford market rate housing vs. those that meet the needs of  the 61% of SF residents needing below market housing?


What percentage of “residents” of these condos will be using this housing as their primary residence vs. as second, third and fourth vacation homes?


Given that numerous studies show transit use goes down as income goes up,
how likely is it that these new owners will use public transit?


Again, the answer to each of these questions provides critical information that public
officials need to assess for themselves whether the proposed condos will or will
not “help meet the projected City housing needs.” 


Everything that’s happened since the 2008 economic/housing meltdown has made our housing problems worse, something the DEIR doesn’t attempt to analyze, arguing instead that a 2007 NOP/Initial Study—competed a year before the housing bubble burst—absolves it of all such responsibility, an argument that is factually absurd.


D. The DEIR fails to acknowledge, measure or analyze the unique environmental impacts generated by owners who can pay $2.5 to $10 million for luxury condos.


Building housing for this demographic has measurable impacts on transit and energy use that were not included in the DEIR. We know from national studies that low-and middle- income residents are far greater consumers of public transit than people with higher incomes. Imagine how much different public transit use will be when this inverse relationship includes people who can afford $2.5-10 million condos that come with             1-for-1 parking (costing almost $100,000 a space to build).


But a far greater environmental impact than driving private cars was not addressed in this DEIR, an impact resulting from lifestyle differences one can anticipate with some members of this highest of high-end demographics: owning and/or using private jets.


It’s reasonable to assume that five of the 165 condo buyers at 8 Washington (just 3% of   all buyers) are Wall Street hedge fund managers, derivatives traders or venture capitalists using these condos as second, third or fourth homes. It’s also reasonable to assume that these five buyers will use their condos 1.5 times a month on average and commute to and from SF aboard private business jets, a perfectly rational assumption for Wall Street executives making tens of millions in salary and bonuses each year. Why would they fly private jets rather than take Southwest…because they can. The fact that a handful of  people that are this wealthy will buy units at 8 Washington must be factored into any environmental analysis of a project that will explicitly market to this high-end demographic. That analysis must include, among others, the following:


 
                           Table 4: The Jet Fuel Burn Rate for Luxury Condominiums
___________________________________________________________________________
Mid to large size business jets used to fly cross country (e.g. Hawker 800XP, Gulfstream G2/G3, Bombardier Global Express) average 400 gallons of jet fuel per hour and take six hours to fly New York to SF and five hours to fly back for an 11 hour round trip  :


     · 11 hours X 400 gallons per hour = 4,400 gallons of jet fuel per trip
          a typical family car burns 1,200 gallons of gas per year so one flight from
          NYC to SF equals almost four years of driving a typical family car.
               ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
       
        ·  1.5 trips/mo. = 6,600 gallons/mo. X 12 mo. = 79,200 gallons of jet fuel/year


        ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Using our example of 5 residents, the numbers over one year and 20 years are:


        ·  5 X 79,200 gallons/per year = 396,000 GALLONS OF JET FUEL A YEAR or
         equivalent to driving a family car 330 years, A THIRD OF A MILENNIUM, per year.


        ·  396,000 gallons/year X 20 years = 7,920,000 GALLONS of jet fuel in 20 years
         equivalent to driving family car 6,600 years, OVER 6 MILLENIUM, in 20 years.



Given these condos cost $2+ million to build and will sell for $2.5 to $8 million or more,    it seems quite reasonable to assume a mere 3% of these buyers—just five (5) buyers out of 165 —will be part-time residents wealthy enough to commute to San Francisco by business jet. If this is a reasonable assumption , then the DEIR must include the mathematical calculations above to show the true energy costs of this project. In fact, it would also be reasonable to assume a few other buyers will use private business jets to commute from LA, San Diego, Denver, etc. The only way to prevent this, forbidding buyers to own or use corporate jets, is of course impossible.
This is just one example of how housing prices—and who lives in that housing—greatly changes environmental impacts and why this analysis must be included in the DEIR for    8 Washington. As condo prices reach $2.5-10 million, it’s reasonable to assume a number of buyers will use them as a second, third or fourth homes and that some of those buyers will travel here by jet, not car or public transit. On the other hand, if units at 8 Washington were affordable or market rate rental or affordable-by-design condos (80%-150% AMI), it’s very unlikely any of its residents would own or use business jets. Price does matter with regard to energy consumption and transit use.


Given these facts, the 8 Washington DEIR must analyze such questions as:


How many solar panels do you need to make up for 396,000 gallons of jet fuel per year?


How many low flow toilets make up for 396,000 gallons of jet fuel per year?


How many double pane windows make up for 396,000 gallons of jet fuel per year?


How many on-demand hot water heaters make up for 396,000 gallons of jet fuel per year?


Looking at the longer term impacts of this excessive consumption of energy resources:


How many solar panels compensate for 7,920,000  gallons of jet fuel over 20 years?


How many low flow toilets make up for 7,920,000 gallons of jet fuel over 20 years?


How many double pane windows make up for 7,920,000 gallons of jet fuel over 20 years?


How many on demand water heaters make up for 7,920,000 gallons of jet fuel over 20 years?


Having this information in the DEIR is necessary for the Planning Commissioners or Board of Supervisors to make informed decisions about 8 Washington, especially when the project sponsor keeps touting it as state-of-the-art, sustainable, LEED certified (at Gold or Platinum level), etc. When added to the project sponsor’s insistence on building a 420-car underground (below sea level) garage, one has to question how one can call this a model of sustainable development or let the DEIR include sustainability as a project objective.


Unless the DEIR seriously and objectively addresses questions of how the price of housing and who lives in that housing impacts environmental sustainability, we risk creating a backlash against things like LEED certification and terms like “sustainability”. They could easily become just another example of slick marketing and “greenwashing”. Everyone agrees that building 10,000 s.f. McMansions in the Sierra Foothills on 2-acre lots—even if they’re LEED certified at the highest level—is NOT sustainable development. Why is it any less absurd to use “green” and “sustainable” to describe $2.5-$10 million condos built as second and third homes for extremely wealthy part-time residents, some of whom commute from their primary residence by private jet?


The DEIR must provide public officials with the data and information they need to analyze all the significant impacts that units this expensive have on the environment. With this information, decision makers might choose to require a much smaller garage or no garage at all (insisting on more efficient use of nearby existing garages). They might also choose to support a much smaller project or no project at all, based on the lack of demonstrable need for this housing type and all the other negative impacts described above. But they cannot make any of these decisions in a rational and objective manner without all the facts, many of which are missing from this DEIR.


E. The DEIR confuses project “objectives” with city mandated requirements with regard to Inclusionary Housing, then fails to discuss any of the relevant issues around this city policy.


The project objective (Pg II.14) that talks about the project’s ability “to help meet
projected City housing needs” reads in full:


 “To develop a high-quality, sustainable and economically feasible
   high-density, primarily residential, project within the existing
   density designation for the site, in order to help meet projected
   City housing needs and satisfy the City’s inclusionary affordable
         housing requirement;” 


Satisfying the city’s inclusionary affordable housing requirement, for this or any market  rate housing development, IS NOT an Objective, and stating it as such is misleading. It is,  in fact, legally mandated by city ordinance. The developer doesn’t have a choice in the matter and it should be stricken from this Objective. However, this reference to inclusionary housing leads one to ask several questions that are never addressed in the DEIR but should be. An Inclusionary Housing section must be added that answers questions such as:


What are the specific requirements for including permanent below market rate (BMR) units in all market rate projects and how many would be required on-site for this one?


Did the developer ever consider building on-site BMR units and if not, why not?


If the developer did consider and reject on-site BMR units, why?


If the developer has decided to pay the in-lieu affordable housing fee, what would it be and how and where (e.g. within a 1-mile radius of the project) would it be spent?


Given that the in-lieu fee charged developers to buy out of providing BMR units on-site is based on construction costs and sales prices for “average” condos, how will the extraordinarily high construction costs and sales prices for these condos impact the in-lieu fee? If it doesn’t impact the fee, would an appropriate mitigation measure be amending the Inclusionary Housing policy so that it does?


Mentioning the inclusionary requirement as part of an objective stating that the project seeks to “help meet projected City housing needs” is misleading and inaccurate. It tries to infer that the funding for 30 affordable units provided by the developer’s inclusionary requirement is helping to meet this objective when, in fact, relying on inclusionary payments to advance the city’s affordable housing goals will only drive the city further   out of compliance with its state mandated RHNA goals. The following example clearly demonstrates the validity of this claim:


TNDC’s proposed affordable family apartment project at Eddy and Taylor Streets is typical of the projects now stalled in the city’s affordable housing pipeline due to the lack of affordable housing funding from traditional sources. But the Eddy and Taylor project is a 150 unit development, not 30 units. For it to go forward, you would need the inclusionary housing funds from FIVE market rate projects like 8 Washington. What would that do to San Francisco’s RHNA goals:


         If:  165 market rate units are needed to fund 30 affordable units,
  Then:   825 market units (5X) are needed to fund 150 affordable units (975 total units).
      
         If:  out of a every 975 new housing units, 825 are market rate & 150 are affordable,
   Then:  for each new 975 units built in SF: 85% are market rate, 15% affordable.


But the 2009 Housing Element of San Francisco’s General Plan (based on the state RHNA goals) calls for 39% OF NEW HOUSING TO BE MARKET RATE (NOT 85%). Relying on Inclusionary Housing off-site payments to fund affordable housing clearly runs counter to the housing production goals set forth in the 2009 Housing Element in the General Plan as well as the RHNA goals for San Francisco established by the state of California. Furthermore, as SB375 Sustainable Development funding criteria begins influencing state funding decisions, by driving our RHNA numbers toward 85% market rate, projects like 8 Washington could jeopardize San Francisco’s ability to apply for and receive state and federal infrastructure and transit funding.


The only way to bring San Francisco’s housing production numbers back into line with the goals in the Housing Element (and RHNA numbers) is to create a new local permanent and dedicated source of funding for affordable housing. These relevant facts regarding the impacts of inclusionary housing must be included in the DEIR.



III. THE DEIR IGNORES THE GENTRIFICATION/DISPLACEMENT IMPACTS OF THIS PROJECT THAT WILL RESULT IN THE LOSS OF HUNDREDS OF RENT CONTROLLED UNITS IN THE GOLDEN GATEWAY BY ENCOURAGING THE FURTHER HOTELIZATION OF ITS 1,200 RENTAL APARTMENTS


The other ‘partner’ in this project is Timothy Foo, who bought Golden Gateway from Perini Corp. about 20 years ago. Only 20% of the 8 Washington site is on Port land, while 80% of the site is on land owned by Mr. Foo and currently occupied by Golden Gateway’s community recreation center. However, Mr. Foo’s only mention in the DEIR is in a footnote to the first sentence of the Introduction which states: “On January 3, 2007, an environmental evaluation application (EE application) was filed by San Francisco Waterfront Partners II (the “project sponsor”) on behalf of the Golden Gateway Center*”. That footnote says “*Golden Gateway Center, Authorization Letter from Timothy Foo, December 27, 2006”).


In addition to violating the original Golden Gateway development agreement that required Perini (and future owners) to preserve the recreation center in exchange for deep discounts in land prices charged by Redevelopment, for some time now Mr. Foo has also been converting rent controlled apartments in the Golden Gateway to short term rental use (e.g. on one floor of a high-rise tower, a third of the units are rented this way). These conversions have been documented by the Golden Gateway Tenants Association, the Affordable Housing Alliance and the San Francisco Tenants Union. While such conversions are not unique to the Golden Gateway Center (see attached Bay Citizen article), they are illegal and violate city zoning, rent control and apartment conversion ordinances.


The DEIR must address this issue by posing the following questions to Mr. Foo and incorporating his answers into the DEIR. He must provide this information because as the owner of 80% of the underlying land that comprises the 8 Washington site, he has had and continues to have a direct financial stake in this project. He must be asked the following questions:


How many of Golden Gateway’s 1,200 rental apartments are currently being used as hotel rooms and/or short-term rentals and/or rented to persons other than those using them as primary residences or directly related to the person residing there (e.g. corporations, business organizations, apartment brokers).


Has Mr. Foo consulted with either the Rent Board or the Planning Department as to the legality of his use of apartments in Golden Gateway as hotel rooms or short-term rentals under applicable city zoning codes, the San Francisco Rent Control ordinance or the city’s Apartment Conversion Ordinance?


Upon receiving and analyzing this information from Mr. Foo, the DEIR must then answer the following questions:


Is the ‘hotelization’ of Golden Gateway and other large apartment complexes likely to increase with the approval of 8 Washington, a development that:


a) builds 165 high-end luxury condos ($2.5 – $10 million each)
 on Mr. Foo’s property—creating a much more upscale
environment adjacent to his Golden Gateway apartments;


b) provides Mr. Foo with $10-15 million (what he’s likely to
be paid for his 80% of the site) that can be used to upgrade
his rent controlled apartments at Golden Gateway in order                             to attract even more higher paying hotel users; and


c) if no mention of these conversions is made in the DEIR, after                     these written comments have been submitted, will send a clear
message to Mr. Foo and others that the City has no intention of
enforcing its own zoning, rent control and apartment conversion
ordinances, thereby encouraging even more conversions.


If conversions like those at Golden Gateway are not stopped soon, the city is at risk of losing thousands of residential apartments in its downtown neighborhoods.


What kind of mitigations would prevent the further hotelization of the Golden Gateway’s 1,200 rent controlled apartments?


With larger apartment complexes such as Golden Gateway, Parkmerced and Fox Plaza, owners get around the current prohibition on renting residential apartments for less than 30 days as hotel rooms (an action that is legally prohibited by the San Francisco Apartment Conversion Ordinance) by leasing them for more than 30 days to third parties (e.g. corporations, apartment brokers). These intermediaries then rent the apartments for anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks to a month or two.


A simple amendment to the Apartment Conversion Ordinance that changes “you cannot rent an apartment for less than 30 days” to “you cannot rent or occupy an apartment for less than 30 days” would prevent Golden Gateway and others from renting apartments for anywhere from a few days to up to four weeks. Preventing 30-60 day rentals would be a more complicated matter.


The DEIR must address how constructing 8 Washington could encourage, help fund and accelerate Mr. Foo’s conversion of the 1,200 units at Golden Gateway from rent controlled apartments to hotel use as well as the impacts this would have on the city’s housing goals as set forth in the San Francisco’s 2009 Housing Element and its RHNA goals. For instance, if we’re converting housing to non-housing (hotel) uses as fast or faster than we are creating new housing units, we will never dig ourselves out of our current housing crisis and that outcome would have catastrophic impacts on the environmental and economic sustainability of San Francisco as a city.


The DEIR must also describe, in detail, the kind of mitigations (see above) that, if enacted, could mitigate the potential impact of losing more that 165 rent controlled apartments at the Golden Gateway, erasing the gain, on paper, of 165 luxury condos.



IV. FREQUENT USE OF THE WORD “PRIVATE” AS A MODIFIER OF THE GOLDEN GATEWAY RECREATION FACILITIES THROUGHOUT THE DEIR  IS BOTH MISLEADING AND INNACCURATE IN LIGHT OF THE RECENT PRIVITIZATION AND FEE STRUCTURES IMPOSED ON THE CITY’S “PUBLIC’ RECREATION FACILITIES AND SWIMMING POOLS.


The current fee structure for public recreation facilities in San Francisco results in situations where the cost of attending ‘public’ pools can often exceed fees charged by    the “private” Golden Gate Tennis & Swim Center (GGTSC).


The use of the term “private” in this context throughout the DEIR appears to be an attempt to justify the loss of GGTSC facilities for the 3-4 years that it would be shut down if the “preferred project” were approved (see section I.A for actual construction schedule) as well as the permanent loss of five of nine tennis courts, the basketball court and the current, family-friendly ground level swimming pools, Jacuzzi and open space.


In the past, the city’s public recreation facilities, including its swimming pools, were  “public” in every sense of the word—open long-hours, open 6-7 days a week and “free” to residents. In recent years, however, the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department has increased resident user fees, reduced hours and increased the privatization of its facilities in response to ongoing budget deficits. Today, both the ‘private’ Golden Gateway facility and ‘public’ pools are open to anyone, anyone who is willing to pay   the fees that they charge. Neither is free.


A. The DEIR fails to discuss the privatization of the City’s  recreation centers: According to a 7/9/11 SF Chronicle article, the city is now leasing 23 of its 47 recreation centers to outside interests (e.g. nursery schools, private classes) with the city staffing only a dozen (12) of the 47 former “public” recreation centers. Seven (7) of the remaining recreation centers are under renovation and five (5) are vacant, unavailable for any kind of use “because no one has leased them and there is no money for city workers to run them”. Out of a total of 47 city recreation centers, only 12 are staffed by city workers who run programs for residents, many of them for a fee, during reduced days and hours.


The City also runs nine “public” swimming pools in neighborhoods such as North Beach, the Mission, Bayview, Visitacion Valley, etc. These pools used to be open five or six days a week and were free for residents. Today, residents pay $5 for each swim and $7 for adult swim lessons/water exercise. Children under 17 pay $1 per swim and $2 for swim lessons/water exercise ($3 for a swim & a class together).


Active Recreation Facilities: Public vs. Private… is there a difference anymore?


Each time a family of two adults goes to a city pool it costs $10 per visit to swim and up to $14 per visit if they participate in swim lessons or water exercise. If that family went three times a week, it would cost them $120-$168 per month depending upon how many times they took a swim vs. participated in swim lessons/water exercise. That comes to at least $1,440 dollars per year. Additional swim lessons/water exercise classes drive costs of using a “public” pool even higher.


Now imagine a family of two adults living at the Golden Gateway who currently       swim every day at the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Center. At the city’s North Beach (public) pool, it would cost them $200 a month ($10/swim X 20 days) to swim Tuesday through Saturday (the pool is closed Sunday/Monday) and their schedules would have to match specific windows each day when the pool is available for adult lap swimming. Compare that to the two pools at the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Center—one just for swimming laps; one for kids, families and seniors that are open seven days a week for longer hours.


B. Comparative Costs. Because our hypothetical couple live at the Golden Gateway Apartments they automatically receive a discounted membership of about $170  per month ($85 each) to use the two pools, full gym across the street and have the ability to reserve tennis courts at $20 per use. Since the Golden Gateway was built (1960’s), residents have always received discounted membership at this facility, one of two community benefits Redevelopment required, along with Sidney Walton Square, in exchange for entitlements to build both the Golden Gateway (1,150 rental units) and the adjacent Gateway Commons (condominiums). Redevelopment felt both amenities were needed to meet the open space and active recreation needs of what was to become one of the densest residential communities in San Francisco and discounted the land for the GGTSC and Gateway Commons in exchange for the owner maintaining an active recreation facility at the GGTSC in perpetuity.


Even for those who don’t get the Golden Gateway resident discount, memberships to the Tennis and Swim Center that don’t include automatic access to the tennis courts cost about $220 a month to swim 30 days a month, the same price two adults would pay to swim only 20 days a month at the North Beach pool, a facility with no gym and only   one pool and therefore greater restrictions on when they could swim laps. It should also be noted that over 300 “guests” are admitted free to the Golden Gateway recreation facility each month, a total of 3,000 to 4,000 guests each year. We are not familiar with   a similar policy for free guests at the North Beach pool (or any other city pools).


Clearly, the recent privatization and escalating fee structures at the city’s “public” recreation centers/swimming pools have erased any real distinctions between public facilities and private facilities as viewed by local families and residents. But one of          8 Washington’s main justifications for closing the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Center for 3-4 years during construction—and downsizing the replacement facility—
is that it is a “private” club maintained for the selfish interests of the few.


Putting aside the fact that 8 Washington’s condos will cost $2 million each to build  and will sell for $2.5 to $5 million each and up (for upper floors), making them unaffordable to 97% of all San Franciscans (talk about catering to “the few”), the issue of who uses the current recreation facilities on this site is an important one that the DEIR must address. The similarities outlined above between today’s Golden Gateway recreation facilities and the City’s current “public” recreation centers/swimming pools contradicts the impression created by the DEIR in its current form with so many derogatory references to GGTSC as a ‘private’ club.


It is imperative that public officials have the information outlined above regarding the current costs of “public” recreation in front of them so they can decide for themselves what distinctions, if any, exist in today’s world between this ‘private’ club and so called “public” alternatives. This information is precisely what an EIR is suppose to provide to officials charged with making these kinds of decisions.


For these reasons, we must insist that you provide—in the Comments and Responses document—a clear, complete explanation of this issue, with a chart (see attached for potential template) that compares the facilities, hours, programs and costs to San Francisco residents of the city’s nine (9) “public” swimming pools with the current Golden Gateway recreation facility fee structure. Without such an analysis critical information will be lacking, information that Planning Commissioners, Park and Recreation Commissioners, Port Commissioners and the Board of Supervisors will clearly need as they assess the validity of the developer’s claims about who is served by the current facilities (and what environmental impacts they have) versus those who’ll be served by the proposed project (and its environmental impacts).


Without this information, it will be difficult for these public bodies to make informed decisions as to whether to grant or not grant the conditional use authorizations, upzonings and dozens of separate approvals and permits needed for this complicated and controversial project to proceed.


V. THE DEIR FAILS TO ADDRESS OR ANALYZE ANY OF THE MAJOR ECONOMIC ISSUES RELATED TO THIS PROJECT, ISSUES THAT HAVE SIGNIFICANT ENVIRONMENTAL AND FINANCIAL IMPACTS ON THE NEIGHBORHOOD AND THE CITY.


Several of the project sponsor’s and the Port’s objectives for this project speak to the “economic” benefits of the project for the developers, the Port and the City. The DEIR and other Port documents talk about the need to develop SWL 351 in order to generate revenue for badly needed Port infrastructure work. But the Port’s financial term sheet for this project is unrealistic, misleading and relies on depriving the city of $32 million in general fund dollars as part of a proposed Infrastructure Financing District.


This section addresses the DEIR’s lack of analysis or scrutiny regarding the ‘alleged’ financial benefits of the project as described in the Port’s Term Sheet for Seawall Lot 351 with San Francisco Waterfront Partners (“Term Sheet”) and how that Term Sheet, if executed, would have very real environmental impacts with regard to transit, open space, recreation, housing and population.  An examination of the Term Sheet demonstrates that the stream of income on which the term sheet’s finances rely cannot be achieved.  An objective analysis of “payments” described in this Term Sheet leads one to a much more pessimistic set of income projections than those presented in the September 23, 2010 Director’s Recommendation to the Port Commission. That report describes three payment sources as follows:


(1)  a land lease with annual payments of $120,000 per year;
(2)  future payments triggered by resale of condos created by the Project;
(3)  a to-be-established Infrastructure Financing District (IFD) that allows
              a portion of growth in property taxes to be reinvested in public facilities;  
 
That third source of funding is particularly troubling since it requires a sizeable appropriation of City General Fund revenues ($32 million) by the Port for its own purposes. We will now examine each of these proposed “payment” schemes to determine how realistic they are as well as the potential environmental and economic consequences they create for San Francisco’s residents and taxpayers:
1.  Lease Payments. It is easy to refute the likelihood of the $120,000/year lease payment for parcels to be used as open space with related facilities.  The second paragraph of Director’s Recommendation (page 5) states: “If engineering and cost analyses deem additional funding is needed to finance agreed upon public improve- ments, the Port agrees to designate some or all of the $120,000 per year park rent to augment financing of these public improvements.”  If the developer produces “engineering and cost analyses” showing “additional funding is needed to finance agreed upon public improvements,” the Port will “designate some or all of the $120,000/year in park rent to finance public improvements,” improvements that the developer is responsible for.  Suddenly this $120,000 of alleged “rent” could become no rent. Is that likely to happen? You be the judge:



A Little Recent History


The developer of 8 Washington is San Francisco Waterfront Partners, a partnership between Pacific Waterfront Partners and CALSTRS, the same partnership that  developed Piers 1½, 3 and 5 across the street. According to the Port’s rent rolls, San Francisco Waterfront Partners makes rent payments for Piers 1½, 3  and 5 of  $41,666.67 per month or $500,000 annually. But 90% of this is wiped out by a rent credit of a $450,000 annual rent credit ($37,500.00 per month). This means that the actual rent for Piers 1½, 3 and 5 paid by San Francisco Waterfront Partners isn’t $500,000/year, but $50,000/year or 1/10 of the original rent. Knowing this, it seems highly likely that the Port will grant a similar rent credit to 8 Washington, a credit that it has already offered in the Term Sheet approved last year.



The DEIR needs to discuss this and ask the following questions to help establish for public officials whether or not 8 Washington has the possibility of generating resources to fix up the Port’s historic infrastructure.


Was the $450,000 rent rebate given Piers 1½, 3 and 5 given for “public improvements” in the same way the 8 Washington Term Sheet proposes to give      8 Washington an up-to-$120,000/year (100%) rebate for “public improvements?


How much of this $120,000/year lease payment to the Port is guaranteed?


Based on recent history with this developer (see above box), it would appear that claiming a $120,000 per year lease payment is, at best, a gross overestimate.


2.  Future payments triggered by resale of condos (aka increased transfer tax). The second source of payments (around $25 MILLION over life of the lease) involves the developer recording covenants “committing all owners to transfer payments to the Port of ½ percent of sale value for all sales of the residential condominiums and all re-sales of commercial condominiums” (from Director’s Report, Page 4), in other words, a ‘voluntary’ increase in the transfer tax.  


This idea of obligating future owners to a special transfer “fee” was already tried, unsuccessfully, several years ago by then Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office as a way to provide ‘stimulus’ for large condo developers with approved projects who were trying to get financing. In exchange for agreeing to binding future condo owners to ‘voluntarily’ pay a 1% increase in the real estate transfer tax (but not calling it a “tax”), the Mayor’s Office proposed relieving the developers of 1/3 of their affordable housing requirement. That idea failed to get off the ground for both legal and political reasons. Regarding this proposal:


How does the Port plan to argue this increase in the real estate transfer TAX is not really a tax and do so in a way that convinces the Pacific Legal Foundation, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and SF Board of Realtors not to sue?
Mayor Newsom’s failed proposal did trigger an multi-stakeholder discussion of a broader, legally defensible strategy, going to the voters for a permanent, across the board increase in the transfer tax on ALL real estate transactions (above the median home price) generating tens of millions of dollars a year for affordable housing. A portion of this new money would fund traditional affordable housing built by non- profit housing development corporations, but a portion would also be available to for-profit housing developers to buy down their affordable housing obligations. All sides agreed to this compromise and to place it on the November 2010 ballot, because it HAD to go to the voters, just as the ½% transfer tax increase proposed     in this Term Sheet would need voter approval.


NOTE: The reason that this proposal was not on the ballot that November, as reported in the New York Times, was because Mayor Newsom refused to support it or ANY tax increase, no matter how much support it had, for fear of giving his Republican opponent in the Lt. Governor’s race an issue to use against him in the 2010 election.


If the best legal and political minds in the city couldn’t figure out a way to “voluntarily” increase the real estate transfer tax without going to the voters then, how does the Port propose to do the same thing for 8 Washington now?


3.  New IFD Funding Mechanism. The third weak link in this financing plan is the as yet “to-be-established Infrastructure Financing District (IFD) that will allow a portion of growth in property taxes to be reinvested in public facilities.”  Port Director’s Recommendation, page 2.   While the concept is an interesting one, it is in its infancy in San Francisco. The Board of Supervisors is in the process of setting up a pilot IFD with seven or eight property owners on Rincon Hill to test this model.


To date, citywide discussions about the use of tax increment financing tools, such as the IFD, have linked their use to funding a larger set of neighborhood infrastructure needs and public benefits previously identified through adopted Area Plans such as Eastern Neighborhoods, Market Octavia and Rincon Hill and not for the specific needs of individual projects or developers (e.g. 8 Washington).


Looking ahead, it isn’t hard to imagine the kind of criteria the Board of Supervisors might adopt to determine what developments could avail themselves of IFDs. Those with significant legal, political and financial challenges, such as 8 Washington, would not score well.  Nor would projects that dramatically reduce and eliminate active recreation facilities serving middle-income families and seniors for over 45 years.  Finally, projects that undo decades old community benefits agreements, provided as part of a Redevelopment plan (e.g. Golden Gateway’s permanent active recreation center), probably wouldn’t pass muster .


Assuming the city eventually creates IFDs in certain circumstances, how does the Port make the case for THIS project, given the growing political and legal opposition to it, the long standing community resource that it destroys and the fact that the Board of Supervisors won’t give up $32 million for it (see below).


 4. Diversion of property taxes from the General Fund to the Port. The majority of the 8 Washington/SWL 351 site is NOT Port property, but under the jurisdiction of the City and County of San Francisco. Exhibit A of the Term Sheet shows the boundary of the 0.64 acre under Port control (SWL 351) and the 2.51 acres portion currently privately owned by Golden Gateway on AB168, 171, 291 (80% of the site). SWL 351 (the Port land) is only 20% of the total development site.


While these blocks were under the jurisdiction of the Redevelopment Agency, the property tax increment was diverted from the City’s General Fund to that Agency.  Following termination of the Redevelopment project area several years ago, however, ALL property tax revenue from this land flows to the General Fund.  The Port now proposes to divert the property tax increment from the portion of this site NOT UNDER PORT JURISDICTION away from the General Fund and to the Port.


The Port Director’s Term Sheet Recommendation on page 6 proposes “a new Port IFD” covering both SWL 351 and the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club (WHICH IS NOW ENTIRELY UNDER THE CITY’S JURISDICTION AND TAXING AUTHORITY).  Under the “new Port IFD” all the property tax increment from development on non-Port property would be diverted FROM the General Fund TO the Port.  Toward the end of the Term Sheet recommendation the Port Director does state that the Board of Supervisors would have to agree to this arrangement, which prompts several questions that should have been asked and answered in the DEIR:


Who from the city, not the Port, agreed to including these IFD financial terms in the Term Sheet?


Which members of the Board of Supervisors were consulted regarding this planned appropriation of property tax revenue from the city’s general fund?


What would lead the Port to think ANY current or future Board of Supervisors would  ‘voluntarily’ turn over $32 million in General Fund dollars to the Port, providing a $32 MILLION CITY SUBSIDY FOR LUXURY CONDOS when the Board is struggling with massive budget deficits, layoffs and cuts to vital city programs?


The DEIR must address whether or not this project is financially viable because if it is not, then the public facilities and infrastructure the project has promised to provide cannot be built. The DEIR must also assess the likelihood of the Board of Supervisors turning over $32 million in General Fund monies as a subsidy to the Port for this and other Port projects and analyze what environmental impacts this loss of $32 million to the city would create over time: what parks wouldn’t be maintained, which parks and recreation centers closed, what transit lines discontinued or run less frequently, etc.; actions that would not have been necessary had the city kept that $32 million. Specifically, the DEIR must answer the following questions:


Can 8 Washington’s public facilities (e. g. Jackson Commons, other open space) ever  be built with IFD funding, given that:


a) the IFD is predicated on the Port capturing 100% of the tax increment generated by 8 Washington even though the Port only owns 20% of the site, and


b) according to recent testimony before the Planning Commission by Michael Yarne (OEWD), under state law IFD’s are prohibited on land that “is currently,  or was previously part of a redevelopment area”?
 
Under what circumstances does the Port anticipate that the current (or a future) 
Board of Supervisors would voluntarily give up its 80% of this tax increment
($32 million out of $40 projected by the Port) to fund public improvements for   
LUXURY CONDOS at 8 Washington or other Port projects?


Has the Port had any discussions with the Board of Supervisors regarding this?


If so, what was the Board’s reaction?
    
Has the Port or project sponsor had state legislation passed (or introduced) that
provides the necessary waivers from the current state prohibition against
setting up IFD’s in former redevelopment areas?


Again, this is information that public officials must have to make informed, objective
decisions about the impacts of this project.


 


 


 


VI. THE DEIR FAILS TO DISCLOSE THAT 8 WASHINGTON IS THE FOURTH ATTEMPT TO CONVERT THE GOLDEN GATEWAY TENNIS & SWIM CLUB FROM CITY MANDATED ACTIVE RECREATION USE TO CONDOMINIUMS. IT PRESENTS VERY BRIEF AND MISLEADING INFORMATION REGARDING THE HISTORIC RECORD SUPPORTING THE REQUIREMENT TO PRESERVE THE CURRENT ACTIVE RECREATION FACILITIES ON SITE IN PERPETUITY.


The DEIR addresses this issue very briefly in a footnote on page II.3 that states:


2 The original development agreement governing the Golden Gateway Center Lots required the developer to provide non-profit community facilities as part of the overall development with the Golden Gateway Center. In Section 4 (a) of the Agreement for Disposition of Land for Private Development (“Agreement”) between Perini-San Francisco Associates (the “Developer’) and the Redevelopment Agency, dated August 27, 1962, the Developer agreed to maintain “community facilities of  a permanent nature… designed primarily for use on a nonprofit basis” (page 25 of the Agreement). Subsequent to the Agreement, the Agency and Golden Gateway Center (the successor to the Developer) entered into a Second Supplement and Amendment to the Agreement (“Second Supplement”) on March 14, 1976. Section 1(d) of the Second Supplement deleted Section 4(a) of the agreement (page 12 of Second Supplement) and thereby removed the requirement to maintain community facilities on the property in exchange for the dedication of Sydney Walton Park for perpetual use as a public park.


This interpretation of those documents contradicts evidence previously by individuals with intimate, first hand knowledge of those Golden Gateway redevelopment agreements. Those comments are attached as:


Exhibit A: A May 9, 1984 letter from then Mayor Dianne Feinstein that begins:“As a supervisor and as mayor, I have a long history with the redevelopment plan and agree with those who maintain that this site has always been considered set aside for recreation and open space.”


Exhibit B: An August 8, 1990 letter from Robert Rumsey to then redevelopment director Ed Helfeld that states:


  “I happened to be Deputy Director of Redevelopment in the late 1950’s and early  
    1960’s when the Golden Gateway redevelopment plan was adopted by the city and
    when Perini Corp. was subsequently selected as the developer of the Golden Gateway
    over eight other competitors… I feel it is important to place on the record the view of  
    the staff and commissioners of the agency at the time of selection: The provision of that
    open space and recreational space was a significant factor in the selection of the
    Perini proposal. And clearly, the space was presumed to be kept that way in
    perpetuity” (underlining Mr. Rumsey’s).


 


Exhibit C: A January 24, 2003 letter from Senator Dianne Feinstein reiterating that: 
  
   “I have a long history with the redevelopment area at Washington and Drumm Streets     
    and concur with those who believe this space was intended for recreation and open
    space. Please oppose further development of the Golden Gateway Tennis & Swim Club.”


These letters came in reaction to THREE previous unsuccessful attempts to develop the Golden Gateway Recreation Center as condominiums. Those attempts included:


1. Perini Corp. (early 80’s). The original developer of the Golden Gateway project proposed replacing the Golden Gate Tennis & Swim Club (GGT&SC) with a 9-story condominium project, in violation of its original approvals for the larger project that called for the GGTSC to serve as one of two major community benefits (along with Sidney Walton Sq.) in perpetuity. NOTE: This took place after the Second Supplement and Amendment to the Agreement referenced in Footnote 2 (above) was executed. Clearly, then Mayor Feinstein, had a very different interpretation of the Second Supplement than that of the author of Footnote 2 when she says in her letter that  “I agree with those who maintain that this site has always been considered set aside for recreation and open space.”


2. Perini Corp. (early 90’s). Again the owners of the Golden Gateway proposed replacing the project’s active recreation center with a condo project. This time, a letter from former Redevelopment Director Robert Rumsey date 8/8/90 provides extensive evidence that the interpretation of events contained in Footnote 2 is neither complete nor accurate. His detailed first hand description of that transaction which took place in the 1970’s is quite instructive. In addition to his comment that:


     “I feel it is important to place on the record the view of the staff and commissioners  
      of the agency at the time of selection: The provision of that open space and
      recreational space was a significant factor in the selection of the Perini proposal.
      And clearly, the space was presumed to be kept that way in perpetuity”


his letter states that “if it is now proposed that there is a loophole permitting that space to be invaded by condominiums, I would consider that to be most unfortunate for the city” and describes the land use negotiations that allowed Perini to substitute 155 low-rise condos for the four remaining high-rise rental towers that were suppose to be built as Phase III of the redevelopment plan. According to Rumsey, the agency finally, “albeit reluctantly” agreed to let Perini make this change “because some seven years had elapsed since completion of Phase II and there was otherwise no prospect for building on those long-barren blocks”.


Rumsey then states that the Agency’s October 28, 1975 minutes show the debate over what the Agency should charge Perini for the land that made up Phase III (now Gateway Commons condominiums) focused on “whether it should be $8.45 a square foot, the price established 15 years earlier, or a more realistic 1975 price of $15-$20 a square foot”. He then states:


      “My new successor, Arthur F. Evans, said he might agree with the higher number if
      the land was offered without restrictions, such as requirements of open space. And
      he added: Amenities such as Sidney Walton Square and the Golden Gateway tennis
      courts were on land that was not income producing, and since no one could build
      highrise buildings on this area, its value could be considered zero.”


As a result of this discussion, according to Rumsey, “Evans and the commission agreed to hold the land sales price to the original $8.45 a square foot, as the agency continued to view the open and recreation space to be in perpetuity.”


Based on Rumsey’s letter and substantial community opposition, this second attempt to replace the GGT&SC was defeated.


3. John Hamilton, developer (2003-04). In the mid-90’s Perini sold Golden Gateway to Timothy Foo and a group of investors. In 2003, developer John Hamilton proposed another condo tower on the site. Senator Feinstein’s January 24, 2003 letter was responding to that proposal. After reiterating her conclusion that “this space was intended for recreation and open space”,  she goes on to say, “increasing the height of the Club would drastically change the picturesque panorama of the Bay and would create shadow effects on the newly constructed Embarcadero. Further, development of more residential units would increase traffic noise and pollution, and disregard the original understanding between City officials and area residents that open space and recreational amenities should be preserved.”


4. Current 8 Washington Street/SWL 351 proposal is the 4th Attempt (2006-present) to develop condos on this site and demolish the Golden Gateway’s active recreation center, a facility that’s successfully fulfilled its intended purpose for almost 50 years.


In his written comments on 8 Washington’s DEIR dated August 11, 2010, Mr. Edward Helfeld, Director of the Redevelopment during the second attempt to demolish the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club speaks to the original purpose of the facility, how it has successfully served San Francisco’s recreation needs for over four decades and how relatively inexpensive it is compared to other tennis facilities in the city. He also writes that “As Executive Director (1987-1994) I was in total support of retaining Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club”.


Any public official or member of the general public reading the current DEIR would have no knowledge of these three previous attempts to build on this site, their outcome and the role former city officials have played in confirming that the Golden Gateway active recreation center was meant to be preserved as an active recreation center in perpetuity. The Comments and Responses to the 8 Washington Street/SWL 351 DEIR must include this historic information in order to be considered accurate, complete and objective.


 


 



VII. ADDITIONAL COMMENTS ON THE 8 WASHINGTON DEIR


A.  The DEIR’s Introduction presents confusing and conflicting information regarding how, when and by whom environmental review for this project was initiated. The first two paragraphs of the DEIR’s Introduction (pg. Intro.1) raise some troubling questions about how environmental review for 8 Washington was carried out that need to be addressed more completely and forthrightly. The timeline for environmental review is described as follows (quoting from the DEIR):


1. “On January 3, 2007, an environmental evaluation application (EE application) was filed by San Francisco Waterfront Partners II (the “project sponsor”) on behalf of the Golden Gateway Center for a project at 8 Washington Street and the adjacent Seawall Lot 351, which is owned by the Port….(the Port is not a co-sponsor of the proposed project, but has authorized San Francisco Waterfront Partners II to submit an EE application that includes Seawall Lot 351).”


2. “On August 15, 2008, the Port issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the development of Seawall Lot 351. Two parties submitted timely proposals: SF Waterfront Partners II and a development group led by Dhaval Panchal (which later withdrew its proposal).”


3. “On November 10, 2008, the Port reissued the RFP for this project.”


4. “On February 24, 2009, the Port Commission authorized Port staff to enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement with SF Waterfront Partners II, finding that the proposal submitted by SF Waterfront Partners II meets the requirements of the RFP and meets the Port’s objectives for Seawall Lot 351.”


It appears from this timeline that the ‘project sponsor’, SF Waterfront Partners, was selected to carry out the 8 Washington project on January 3, 2007 when they were “authorized” (by the Port) to submit an Environmental Evaluation (EE) application officially beginning environmental review. However, there’s no explanation in the DEIR as to why, 18 months later (August 2008), the Port decided to issue an official RFP to select a developer for Seawall Lot 351.


This makes no sense given that Seawall Lot 351 was included in the January 3rd EE application submitted by SF Waterfront Partners (if not as designated developer, then in what capacity?). Then three months later (November 2008), we’re told the Port reissued the RFP with no explanation as to why. Finally, on Feb. 24, 2009, twenty five months after SF Waterfront Partners filed the EE application and began the environmental review process, the Port Commission authorizes staff to enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement with SF Waterfront Partners (SFWP) to develop  SWL 351. This raises troubling questions that need to be addressed in the DEIR to give public officials (and the general public) a clearer sense of the appropriateness, completeness and legality of the current environmental review process.


The DEIR must explain:


1. Is this how environmental review is normally sequenced? Is it routine for a developer that has not yet been selected by the Port to undertake a specific project, let alone negotiated an Exclusive Negotiating Agreement (ENA) with the Port for said project, to submit an EE application to Planning for this project that they haven’t yet been selected to develop and then for the Port, eighteen months later, to issue the first RFP to select a developer for the project and have a developer other than the one who submitted the EE respond to the RFP—then drop out (with     no explanation why in the DEIR), then have the RFP reissued six months later and then finally,
25 months after the current developer of 8 Washington submitted the EE, the Port finally selects said developer (SFWP) as the official developer of 8 Washington and begins negotiating an ENA? Is this NORMAL procedure?


2. How could the Port authorize SFWP’s EE application without a written agreement designating SFWP as the approved developer of SWL351? Is this standard procedure in these matters?


3. If this EE process was, in fact, legal prior to August 2008, why did the Port reverse course on August 15, 2008 and issue an RFP for SWL 351 (a site already included in the EE application filed 18 months earlier)? Doesn’t the initial applicant in the EE process have to be either the property owner or his designated developer and be able to demonstrate site control? How would that have been possible back in January 3, 2007 for SWL 351?


4. What role did SFWP play in drafting the RFP (and Port’s objectives for SWL351)?



5. What reasons did the second respondent to RFP give for “withdrawing his proposal?”



6. Why was the RFP reissued on November 10, 2008?



7. When on January 3, 2007, the Planning Department accepted an environmental evaluation application (EE) “filed by San Francisco Waterfront Partners II (the “project sponsor”) on behalf of Golden Gateway Center for a project at 8 Washington Street and the adjacent Seawall Lot 351”, was Planning aware that San Francisco Waterfront Partners had not been and could not be legally designated as “project sponsor” for SWL 351 at that time?


8. Why didn’t the fact that SFWP had no legal basis to claim that it was the “project sponsor” for SWL 351 invalidate the EE application? The DEIR states that the Port “authorized San Francisco Waterfront Partners II to submit an EE application that includes Seawall Lot 351” but wouldn’t that imply SFWP would eventually be selected as the developer and discourage other developers from submitting responses to the Port’s August 15, 2008 RFP given that SFWP had been working with Planning staff on the environmental evaluation for 18 months already?


9. Is what happened in January 2007 legal? If not, when did the Planning Department become aware of this problem and what did it do about it?


10. Having now publicly described this chronology in the DEIR, what legal impact does this have today on the environmental and project review process?


11. Would any other developer be allowed to begin the environmental review process on a project for which they had neither been designated developer nor had site control?



These questions MUST be answered in the DEIR given the bizarre and confusing chronology that now appears in it regarding how environmental review was initiated for this project.


 


B. In other Port documents related to 8 Washington, San Francisco Waterfront Partners II is described as a partnership between Pacific Waterfront Partners (PWP) and California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS). However, the involvement of CalSTRS in this project appears nowhere in the DEIR. Given that CalSTRS has already spent over $23 million dollars in predevelopment funds for 8 Washington, the DEIR must contain some mention of CalSTRS as a member of this partnership and the fact that the same partnership (PWP and CalSTRS) developed Piers 1½, 3 and 5 across The Embarcadero from this site.


Finally, the first sentence of the Introduction to the DEIR refers to the fact that “on January 3, 2007 an environmental evaluation application (EE) was filed by SF Waterfront Partners on behalf of the Golden Gateway Center   for a project at 8 Washington”. That footnote references “Golden Gateway Center, Authorization Letter from Timothy Foo dated Dec. 27, 2006.”


For this DEIR to be complete and accurate it must address several key questions including:


1. Who is developing this project? Pacific Waterfront Partners?  CalSTRS? Golden Gateway Center (Timothy Foo)? What are their relationships to each other and the proposed project?


2. What precisely is the relationship between these three entities and the Port?


3. What was the understanding between SFWP, Timothy Foo and the Port when SFWP submitted its EE application on behalf of Golden Gateway Center? All three are mentioned in the relevant discussion in the DEIR.


C. The DEIR is inadequate and incomplete due to its failure to include A Community Vision for San Francisco’s Northeast Waterfront. The DEIR is inadequate and biased in discussing the Planning Department’s Northeast Embarcadero Study (NES), while failing to include an equally detailed discussion of the background and recommendations of the study prepared by Asian Neighborhood Design entitled A Community Vision for San Francisco’s Northeast Waterfront, dated February 2011, which was presented to the Planning Commission on July 7, 2011. 


The second sentence in the third paragraph of the Introduction states that the purpose of the Northeast Embarcadero Study (NES) was “to foster consensus on the future of Seawall Lot 351 and at other seawall lot properties on the northern waterfront” and leaves the reader with the impression that it succeeded in this goal by stating how many public workshops were held (five) and “on July 8, 2010, the San Francisco Planning Commission adopted a resolution that it ‘recognizes the design principles and recommendations of the Study’ and urges the Port of San Francisco to consider the recommendations of the NES when considering proposals for new development in this area”.


To be accurate and truthful, the DEIR should mention the level of anger and frustration expressed by the majority of the public that attended these five workshops who felt the Port, who was paying for the NES, was dictating its conclusions in order to facilitate the approval of the
8 Washington. For example, when 30-40 people at a workshop opposed the notion advanced by Planning staff that The Embarcadero needed a “hard edge” and that “higher heights” were appropriate for the 8 Washington site and only 6-8 people expressed support for these ideas, the notes from that meeting would later say that opinion was divided on these matters. To its credit, the Planning Department states clearly in the final draft of the NES that they failed in their goal   of achieving consensus on the future of SWL 351.


The DEIR needs to include this information to provide a more accurate representation of the outcome of the NES process.


People were so upset by what they perceived as a transparent attempt to ‘justify’ 8 Washington, that they began their own community-based planning process to address the larger issues of reconnecting Chinatown, North Beach, Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill to the Waterfront; healing the wounds left by the ramps to the Embarcadero Freeway by making Broadway, Washington and Clay Streets more pedestrian, bicycle and transit friendly; and fostering consensus on the future of Seawall Lot 351 and at other seawall lot properties on the northern waterfront.


Four major community organizations representing thousands of local residents, small businesses        and property owners became the primary sponsors/organizers of this “Community Vision for the Northeast Waterfront” and hired Asian Neighborhood Design to assist them in developing it.    These organizations included: Friends of Golden Gateway; Golden Gateway Tenants Association; Telegraph Hill Dwellers and Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association. Stakeholders from Chinatown, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf and other neighborhoods also participated.


On July 7, 2010, when the Planning Department staff presented the NES to the Planning Commission, AND and the four sponsors of the “Community Vision for the Northeast Waterfront” were invited to present a summary of their planning work to date.


The DEIR fails to make any mention of the alternative plan created by these four community groups with AND’s help. It needs to describe this study, how it differs from Planning’s NES and include it in the final EIR so public officials can evaluate the merits of both studies for themselves.
 
The DEIR must describe the reasons why this alternative community planning process was undertaken and include a detailed discussion how the proposed project would or would not conform to each of the recommendations contained in A Community Vision for San Francisco’s Northeast Waterfront?


I am attaching a copy of the AND Study: A Community Vision for San Francisco’s Northeast Waterfront to these comments and ask that it be included in the EIR so that readers and public officials can gauge for themselves if it was more successful in “fostering consensus on the future of Seawall Lot 351 and at other seawall lot properties on the northern waterfront” than the Planning Department’s Northeast Embarcadero Study (NES).


D. The DEIR tries, unsuccessfully, to minimize the loss of iconic views of Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill from in front of the Ferry Building with its argument about ‘episodic’ views and a new claim that “trees” already obscure the views of Coit Tower from in front of the Ferry Building, views enjoyed by millions of tourists, residents and office workers each year.  As demonstrated in Figure IV.B-3: View B (page IV.B.7), the height and mass of the proposed project would completely obstruct views of Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill currently seen from the Embarcadero Promenade at the northern end of the Ferry Building. This significant adverse effect on the visual quality and scenic vistas enjoyed by the public puts the project in direct conflict with a number of city and Port planning policies. The DEIR’s conclusion that this would not create a substantial adverse effect on a scenic vista because “Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill would continue to be visible from numerous vantage pointes in the vicinity of the Project site and the City” is a biased and subjective judgment that is not based on fact. This ‘episodic’ argument could be used to claim that NO building ever blocks an important view because if you walk far enough past the offending structure, you might get the view back.
The comment about trees blocking the view of Coit Tower from in front of the Ferry Building must be stricken from the document. I just came from standing at the main entrance of the Ferry Building and I could clearly see Coit Tower and most of Telegraph Hill. While several trees in front of the F-line stop across the street did impede the view around the edges, these trees could easily be pruned to eliminate the problem.



E. The DEIR’s Traffic and Transit Data is Seriously Out of Date.


The traffic data relied upon by the DEIR in reaching its conclusions is incredibly stale, having been based on surveys done in 2006-2007 and with 2000 census data (page IV.D.5 of the DEIR).  These studies must be updated.  For example, the assumptions made in the DEIR that the existing conditions at the Embarcadero/Broadway and Embarcadero/Washington intersections are “satisfactory” (at LOS D) defy logic.  Anyone familiar with the real time conditions at these intersections knows that this assessment could not be based on a factual analysis of current conditions at peak periods which, by the way, often occur on weekends (not studied in DEIR).


Also out of date is the transit information relied upon by the DEIR in reaching its conclusion that the project would not result in significant transportation impacts to transit systems (Impact TR-2), having been based upon data on capacity and utilization of individual MUNI lines from 2007 (page IV.D.9 of the DEIR).  This data should also be updated. For example, whoever was responsible for the assumption in the DEIR that the F-Line is not at capacity during peak periods has never ridden the F-line at peak periods. The America’s Cup will only make this worse.



F. The DIER belittles Pedestrian Safety Issues. The DEIR states that: “Conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles could occur at the project garage driveway, which could cause the potential inbound vehicles to queue onto Washington Street. Outbound vehicles would queue inside the garage and would not affect street traffic. Conflicts between outbound vehicles and pedestrians could still occur, but their effect on pedestrians would be reduced because pedestrians on the sidewalk have the right-of-way.” (page IV.D.25). I’m sure the fact that pedestrians have the right-of-way is of great comfort to families of children and seniors who’ve been struck and killed by cars. This statement is insulting and MUST be stricken from the DEIR. It’s also not true.


In the very next paragraph the DEIR makes the following statement about these potential vehicular and pedestrian conflicts at the garage driveway:


“The number of vehicles and pedestrians per minute are relatively small (about one vehicle and three pedestrians every 30 seconds on average) and it is therefore not anticipated that the proposed project would cause any major conflict or interfere with pedestrian movements in the area.” (page IV.D.25)


These numbers translate to 2 cars and 6 pedestrians every minute or 120 cars and 360 pedestrians an hour (or approximately 1,440 cars and 4,320 pedestrians coming into potential conflict in any given 7 am to 7 pm period).  The DEIR’s conclusion that such conflict between vehicles and pedestrian movement would be “less than significant” makes no logical sense and is simply not supported by the facts presented in the DEIR. 


G. The DEIR must include a new fence around the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club in its NO PROJECT Alternative. Finally, the comments often heard about the “ugly green fence” around the GGTSC reminds us that the DEIR must let the reader know that it is the owner of the property, Mr. Timothy Foo, who is responsible for the ugly “green fence”. First, he has put the GGTSC operator on a month-to-month lease making it difficult for them to make a substantial investment in a nicer fence. Second, Mr. Foo himself stands to gain financially if 8 Washington is approved, so he has no incentive to fix the fence since its unsightliness is being used as an argument for demolishing the current facility. This simplest way to correct this bias would be to:


Include a rendering of the site with a new, attractive fence in the NO PROJECT alternative .


For the reasons stated in this letter, I believe this DEIR is seriously incomplete and inadequate to address the potentially significant impacts of this project.  I urge you to revise the document and re-circulate it in draft form.


Sincerely,


 


Brad Paul


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

Dick Meister: Busting the union busters, a labor day lament

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By Dick Meister

This is not a very happy Labor Day for labor, considering the continued heavy attacks on public employee unions, which have become the vanguard of organized labor. More than one-third of public employees are now in unions, while only about 7 percent of private sector workers are unionized.

Probably nothing could be more damaging to the labor movement in general than the attempts by anti-union forces to weaken unions at all levels of government by trying to limit– if not withdraw – their collective bargaining rights and right to strike, in addition to unilaterally cutting the pay and pensions, health care and other benefits their unions have won in bargaining.

Although that’s all been done in the name of budget balancing, it’s more accurately described as union busting, spurred on by the steady increase in public employee union members, even as the number of private sector unionists has been declining.

It hasn’t helped unions, either, that President Obama has turned out to be far less friendly to labor than he’d promised while securing lots of union money and lots of union supporters to help him win the presidency. Ironically, the key role unions played in Obama’s election has led to moves by anti-union forces to try to also weaken unions’ political rights.

The best example of the heavy pressures public employees and their unions are feeling is in Wisconsin, where the movement to strip public employees of their union rights began, under notoriously anti-labor Gov. Scott Walker.

Republican Walker is not only seeking to deny unionization to most state, county and municipal employees. He’s also been pushing measures that would increase the employees’ contributions to pension and health care funds by up to 50 percent, require their contracts to be re-negotiated yearly, and no longer allow unions to deduct dues from employee paychecks. It’s hard to imagine a union surviving under such restraints. Certainly Gov. Walker and his political friends don’t imagine it.

Wisconsin is but one of at least 18 states, including several once considered union friendly, where public employees are under heavy attack. On the federal level, supposedly labor-friendly Obama has imposed a federal pay freeze.

Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, is trying to outdo Walker. He’s proposing, among other anti-union measures, to eliminate the bargaining rights of more than 35,000 of Ohio’s public employees, to outlaw teacher strikes, prevent child care and home care workers from unionizing and repeal a rule that requires paying union wages to non-union workers on public construction projects.

Gov. Walker, however, remains the poster boy for anti-labor stalwarts. His most outrageous act has been to back a new state law that requires about two-thirds of Wisconsin’s school districts to use employee handbooks to replace collective bargaining agreements that for decades outlined the teachers’ pay and duties.

Substituting the handbooks for negotiated contracts gives school administrators the authority to dictate broad changes in the teachers’ working conditions without so much as consulting the teachers. In some school districts, even the administrators were not consulted before the handbooks with their stringent new conditions were issued.

Teachers are probably our most important public employees. Yet despite their great importance – or maybe because of it – Gov. Walker is eagerly supporting, not only a withdrawal of teachers’ collective bargaining rights, but also an end to teacher tenure, which protects them from unwarranted attacks by union foes such as Walker.

Walker also wants a substantial increase in the already high contributions to their health insurance by teachers and teacher retirees and changes that curtail the teachers’ basic rights and security by allowing them to be hired on a year-to-year basis. The new rules also mandate that in times of financial constraint, seniority can no longer be a basis for deciding which teachers to lay off.

Some Wisconsin school districts are even trying to reduce the number of sick days allowed teachers, however unwise it may seem to have teachers with possible communicative illnesses remain in the classroom because they can’t afford to take days off.

Other districts are doing away with at least some paid holidays or changing extra days used for professional development into workdays and cutting paid lesson preparation periods in half. The Wisconsin Journal Sentinel’s Erin Richards quotes one of Wisconsin’s major teacher union leaders as noting that teachers across the state have been most concerned with losing prep time, which can have a direct effect on the quality of lessons and student performance.

Gov. Walker and other leading Republicans don’t seem to be much concerned about that. What’s more important to them is cutting Wisconsin’s education budget, the influence of teachers on education policy and, of course, all but eliminating the union rights of teachers and all other public employees.

But Walker may very well have gone too far. The negative reaction has been strong and growing in Wisconsin and elsewhere. It’s widely realized that if the public employee union busters are successful, private sector unions throughout the country will feel even stronger opposition. And it’s clear that if anti-union forces can weaken the public employee unions that are the strongest segments of today’s labor movement, it’s more than likely that private sector unions will be the next target.

The good news is that recently, Wisconsin voters easily turned back a GOP attempt to recall two strong pro-worker state senators who had helped lead the fight against Walker’s anti-worker legislation. The fight began in the spring when Republicans targeted eight Democratic senators for recall – and lost. There have been nine recall elections since then and labor has won five of them.

Labor and the Democrats had hoped to wrest control of the State Senate from the GOP. But though failing to do so, they did narrow the Republicans Senate majority to a razor-thin 17-16.

Democrats and union leaders are rightly celebrating the pro-labor election victories as a possible opening shot against anti-labor extremism nationwide, which could in turn lead to an attempt to recall Gov. Walker or at least force him to back off.

Actually, Walker has done his labor enemies a great favor by provoking public outrage that has brought important new strength and solidarity to the cause of working people and their unions everywhere.

So it may be a happy Labor Day after all, thanks to a labor opponent.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Dick Meister: What Charlie wanted, Charlie got

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By Dick Meister

(Part five of a five part daily series on the farmworkers)

As SF Chronicle labor editor, I had been among the first to report on the campaign to win union rights for farm workers that had been launched under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, after I determined that he and his followers were dead serious about what so many others had tried and failed to do.

I devoted much of my time to covering what turned out to be a major worldwide story. But, as I soon found out, Chronicle management thought I was spending too much time on the story. Publisher Charles de Young Thieriot was angered about my stories on the poor state of farm workers and the emerging United Farm Workers union.

The miserable conditions of farm workers didn’t seem to trouble Thieriot. He was concerned above all with the interests of his fellow Burlingame Country Club members, and they included some of the state’s wealthiest agribusiness interests – the UFW’s chief targets. No one, including the publisher, accused me of slanting my stories in favor of the UFW. They were simply concerned that my stories, pro or con, called attention to Chavez and the union.

As the secretary of Chronicle Executive Editor Scott Newhall told me, Theriot often stormed into the editor’s office and slammed on his desk the morning’s paper which carried my UFW coverage. “We’ve got to Forget Chavez!”said Theriot. “Ignore him! He’s nothing but a damned agitator!”

Soon, my suggestions for stories on the farm workers – or anything else– were being ignored and labor coverage generally was reduced drastically. I was told by my immediate supervisor, City Editor Abe Mellinkoff, to quit complaining about it – or else.

The end came after I got word that the UFW was about to make peace with the state’s grape growers after five years of highly visible strikes and boycotts. Since I had already done a story on the generally undisclosed terms of the union contracts the UFW and growers were about to sign, Mellinkoff agreed I should do a color story from Delano, covering the feelings of the growers and farm workers as well as the general atmosphere.

I wrote such a story and dictated it by phone. But unknown to me, Mellinkoff turned immediately to a reporter at the Chronicle and had my story rewritten so it became little more than a reiteration of the contract terms I had disclosed the day before.

Mellinkoff apparently was not happy that my story from Delano had noted at some length the poor treatment of farm workers by the publisher’s grower friends that had led to the strikes and boycotts and eventually to contracts guaranteeing them decent treatment.

It was just one of many examples of how the Chronicle was abandoning balanced and thorough coverage of labor-management affairs in favor of coverage that downgraded, distorted or ignored labor’s side of the story. That’s how Charlie Theriot wanted it, and that’s how it was going to be.

I was left with no other choice. I quit.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Dolores Huerta: “Don’t be a marshmallow! Stop being vegetables! Work for justice!”

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By Dick Meister

(Part four of a five part daily series on the Farmworkers)

“When I think of Dolores Huerta,” playwright and filmmaker Luis Valdez once said, “I think of earth. Powerful, beautiful, fecund, challenging, conscious, yet so incredibly delicate.”

She’s been all of that in a remarkable career that has spanned more than a half-century. Huerta, now 80, is probably best known for her work with Cesar Chavez in the founding and operations of the United Farm Workers. But that’s just been a part of her lifelong and extraordinarily successful and courageous fight for economic and social justice.

Huerta, five-foot-two, 110 pounds, hardly looks the part. What’s more, she’s had 11 children to raise along the way, much of the time as a single mother.

She’s traveled the country, speaking out and joining demonstrations in behalf of a wide variety of causes. She’s lobbied legislators to win gains for Latino immigrants and others. She was a key leader in the worldwide grape boycott that forced growers to agree in 1970 to some of the country’s very first farm union contracts – which she negotiated despite her utter lack of experience in union negotiating. She remains a leading Latina, feminist, labor and anti-war activist and a role model for women everywhere.

Huerta started out as an elementary school teacher in Stockton in 1955, but quickly tired of “seeing little children come to school hungry and without shoes.” That and her anger “at the injustices that happened to farm workers” in the area, led Huerta to quit teaching and join the Community Services Organization (CSO) which helped local Chicanos wage voter registration drives and take other actions to win a strong political and economic voice.

Chavez, who was general director of the 22-chapter CSO, stressed “grass roots organizing with vengeance” above all. Huerta agreed and generally agreed as well on tactics – including an unwavering commitment to non-violence. But where Chavez was shy, she was bold and outspoken. She had to be if she was to assume the leadership to which her commitment had drawn her. Mexican American men did not easily grant leadership to women, most certainly not to diminutive, attractive women like Huerta.

She was assigned to the State Capitol as the CSO’s full-time lobbyist. It was an unfamiliar task, but during two years in Sacramento, Huerta pushed through an impressive array of legislation, including bills that extended social insurance coverage to farm workers and immigrants and liberalized welfare benefits. I worked in the capitol as an Associated Press reporter and counted Huerta as one of the best – and certainly most principled – lobbyists in Sacramento.

Huerta soon realized, however, that legislation “could not solve the real problems” of the poor that she represented. What they needed was not government aid passed down from above to try to ease their poverty, but some way to escape the poverty. The way out, Huerta concluded, was farm labor organizing.

Chavez agreed, and in 1962, when the other CSO leaders and members rejected his plans for organizing farm workers, he quit to start organizing on his own, Huerta followed, helping create the organizations that eventually evolved into the UFW, with Chavez as president and Huerta as vice president and chief negotiator, later as secretary-treasurer. Like Chavez, she was paid but $5 a week plus essential expenses.

Huerta has paid a heavy physical price for her militancy. She nearly died in 1988 after being clubbed by a policeman while demonstrating with about 1,000 others outside a fund raiser in San Francisco for then Vice President George H.W, Bush, who had ridiculed the UFW and its grape boycott. Huerta’s spleen was ruptured and had to be removed, leading to a near-fatal loss of blood.

She was operated on for other serious problems in 2000. Huerta, long an active Democrat, stepped down as a UFW officer that year to join Democrat Al Gore’s presidential campaign, but remained active in Democratic Party affairs. She continued to lobby for immigrant rights, helping train a new generation of organizers and joining campaigns to improve the lot of janitors, nursing home employees and other highly exploited workers.

Dolores Huerta has shown us, beyond doubt, that injustice can be overcome if we confront it forcefully, if we heed the demand she has been known to shout in urging passers-by to join UFW picket lines:

“Don’t be a marshmallow! Stop being vegetables! Work for justice!”

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

 

 

Dick Meister: VIVA EL BOICOTTEO!

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By Dick Meister

(Third part of a five part daily series)

Although the United Farm Workers initially relied solely on strikes in its drive to win union contracts for California’s farm workers, it soon switched to the much more effective weapon of the boycott.

Growers could easily replace strikers, and often did. But they couldn’t do much about customers – individuals and institutions – who heeded the UFW’s call to not buy any grapes, lettuce or wine from growers who continued to rebuff the UFW demands for union recognition.

The boycotts helped forge a potent coalition of clergymen, industrial unionists, young activists and civil rights advocates, liberal Democratic politicians, socially conscious shoppers and others. They also waved crimson banners, sang the farm workers’ songs, chanted their slogans and espoused non-violence, on city streets, outside supermarkets, in meeting halls, wherever they could. There were an estimated 17 million of them worldwide between 1968 and 1975, including 10 to 12 percent of all U.S. adults. Later boycotts drew less support but were nevertheless effective in winning new contracts.

John Giumarra Jr., a young lawyer who spoke for the grape growers who signed the first UFW contracts, declared that boycott pressures had been threatening to “destroy a number of farmers.” Lionel Steinberg, a major Coachella Valley grape grower who was the first to agree to a UFW contract, urged others to quickly reach an agreement, lest they continue losing millions of dollars in sales.

Steinberg told his fellow growers, “It is costing us more to produce and sell our grapes than we are getting paid for them. We are losing maybe 20 percent of our market. The boycott is illegal and immoral, but it also is a fact.”

The signing of the union contracts with grape growers in Delano signaled the inevitable. California’s farm workers were going to be organized, and the next target would be those in the nearby Salinas and Santa Maria valleys, which produced 70 percent of the nation’s iceberg lettuce and much of its other vegetables. It was called “America’s Salad Bowl,” a flat, fertile place where morning fog hung heavy over land carpeted green for miles.

Men and women hovered over the land, gripping hoes so short their handles scarcely protruded above their fast-moving hands as they stooped and cut, stooped and cut. Most worked under the supervision of men with the broad accents of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas who had wielded hoes for small independent growers before giant corporations bought up the land and hired them to manage their new holdings. These men were among the Dust Bowl Refugees of the 1930s who had made their own violently opposed demands for better working lives during the Great Depression.

Many of the former Dust Bowl Refugees were lured into urban employment when the depression ended, but those who remained as managers joined the farm corporations to oppose the demands of the Chicano and Filipino American farm workers who replaced the at the bottom of the economic totem pole.

The demands were for union recognition elections in which the UFW seemed a certain winner. But if they didn’t agree to elections, the growers faced the certain prospect of a boycott like that which had been so costly to grape growers.

There was, however, an alternative that the growers had overlooked until the inevitability of unionization arrived with the UFW demands. They might arrange to bypass elections and sign with another union that would demand less than the aggressive, unorthodox UFW and at the same time ease the sting of a boycott by enabling by enabling growers to point out that their workers were unionized.

The growers found their alternative in the Teamsters Union, which feared that UFW strikes and boycotts would endanger the flow of produce handled by truck drivers, cannery workers and other Teamster members. What’s more, Teamster officials were eager for representation rights that would allow them to control the field workers. The potential was immense: more than 30,000 farm workers in the two valleys alone. That would bring a lot of new money into the dues and pension funds used by leaders of the corruption-ridden Teamsters to gain power, influence and fat salaries for themselves.

Virtually all the 170 growers in the two valleys soon announced they had signed Teamster contracts, even though the Teamsters had no farm worker members. The growers and Teamsters hadn’t even agreed on specific contract terms. They were in so great a rush to head off the UFW, they merely signed agreements that the terms would be filled in later. The terms, however, would not be decided in consultation with the workers or their union. Terms were left solely to grower and Teamster representatives.

The workers were not even allowed to ratify the contracts, although they would be required to join the Teamsters and have union dues deducted from their paychecks. If they didn’t join the Teamsters, they’d be fired. Most workers got basic pay raises of 10 to 50 cents an hour in return for forced membership in the Teamsters and some minimal health and welfare benefits – but that was all.

Teamster recognition was a very small price for growers to pay in exchange for maintaining their ability to make decisions on pay and working conditions in isolation from the direct collective demands of their employees. Since the Teamsters’ main interest lay elsewhere, in transportation and food processing, growers also could expect that even the minimal terms of the contracts would not be fully enforced and that strikes and boycotts were hardly a possibility. But on the slim chance that the growers might still feel insecure, the contracts were written to stand for five years.

Chavez was outraged at the Teamsters’ “act of treason against the legitimate aspirations of farm workers.” He declared “all-out war against the Teamsters and the bosses ” and marched into Salinas with several hundred farm workers and an AFL-CIO contingent headed by Organizing Director Bill Kircher. Pickets went immediately to a farm where 250 workers had been fired for not joining the Teamsters. Hundreds of workers struck at other farms and the UFW began preparing for legal action and a nationwide lettuce boycott.

Growers got a court order against what was ruled an illegal jurisdictional dispute, but the pickets and boycotters kept marching nevertheless and Chavez began “a penitential fast against injustice.”

In less than two weeks, the Teamsters were asking for a treaty with the UFW. It was quickly reached. The Teamsters agreed to reallocate jurisdiction over field workers to the UFW and agreed that growers who had signed with the Teamsters could switch to the UFW without penalty.

But there was a catch. Growers who had signed Teamster contracts would not give them up. Finally, UFW members voted to strike. It was, at the start, the largest and most effective farm strike since the mid-1930s. More than 5000 workers left their jobs at nearly 150 farms, and produce shipments were cut from 200 carloads a day to 75 or less. Growers were losing an average of $500,000 a day.

Unlike the vineyard strike, this dispute was violent, with beatings suffered by UFW and Teamster partisans alike. Some of the turmoil was caused by officials of a Teamster cannery workers local who were charged with using $25,000 in union funds to hire some of the local’s burly members to “guard” fields from UFW organizers.

A judge ruled there could only be one informational picket at 22 of the Salinas Valley farms that made up the strikers’ main targets, none at the eight others. Nor would the UFW be allowed to call a boycott against any of the 170 growers who held Teamster contracts. The union nevertheless called a boycott. Officially, the strike continued, but the major effort was at food markets in 64 cities across the country, where UFW members and supporters urged shoppers to bypass lettuce from the struck growers.

A judge ordered Chavez arrested. He went to jail accompanied by more than 2000 UFW members and supporters, including Coretta King and Ethel Kennedy. They cheered Chavez’ parting advice to “boycott the hell out of them!” and then began a series of prayer vigils and other highly publicized demonstrations. After three weeks, Chavez was released, pending the outcome of a UFW appeal.

The boycott continued at an intensified pace throughout the early months of 1971 until a committee of Catholic bishops mediated a settlement between national Teamster and AFL-CIO leaders. But growers still refused to give up their Teamster contracts. They held them for a half-dozen years more, until the Teamsters, beaten badly in a series of union representation elections under California’s new farm worker bargaining law, finally abandoned as futile the fierce fight they had waged against the UFW for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, the boycott continued, as the UFW expanded its organizing efforts to Florida and Arizona. The UFW’s victory in California was truly spectacular. Imagine, one of the youngest and smallest unions in the country, representing the most oppressed of American workers, decisively beating the country’s largest and most powerful union.

It was the UFW’s incredible use of the boycott that did it,  the major non-violent weapon available to all who would seek justice from an oppressor.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: si se puede!

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By Dick Meister

(The second part of a daily five part series)

For me, it all began on a hot summer night in 1965 in the little Kern County town of Delano. I’d been told repeatedly by people whose judgment I respected that, as the SF Chronicle’s labor editor, I should talk with some guy named Chavez who was pitting together an honest-to-God farm workers’ union in Delano.

I scoffed, but I went. Chavez, shining black hair trailing over the edge of a face brushed with traces of Indian ancestry, wearing a green plaid shirt that had become almost a uniform, sat behind a makeshift desk topped with bright red Formica.

“Si se puede!” he said repeatedly to me as we talked into the early morning hours there in the cluttered shack that served as headquarters for Chavez and the others who were trying to create an effective farm workers union.

“Si se puede – it can be done!

But I would not be swayed. Too many others, over too many years, had tried and failed to win for farm workers the union rights they had to have if they were to escape the severe economic and social deprivation inflicted on them by their grower employers.

The Industrial Workers of the World who stormed across western fields early in the last century, the Communists who followed, the socialists, the AFL and CIO organizers – all their efforts had collapsed under the relentless pressure of growers and their powerful political allies.

I was certain this effort would be no different. I was dead wrong. I had not accounted for the tactical brilliance of Cesar Chavez, a sad-eyed, disarmingly soft-spoken man who talked of militancy in calm, measured tones; a devout Roman Catholic; a gentle and incredibly patient man who hid great strategic talent behind shy smiles and an attitude of utter candor.

Chavez grasped the essential fact that farm workers had to organize themselves. Outside organizers, however well-intentioned, could not do it. Chavez, a farm worker himself, carefully put together a grass-roots organization that enabled the workers to form their own union, the United Farm Workers, which then sought out – and won – widespread support from influential outsiders, including major labor, religious and political figures.

The key weapon of the newly formed UFW was the boycott. The union’s boycotts against grape and lettuce growers and wineries in the late 1960s won the UFW union contracts that had been denied farm workers for more than a century.

That led ultimately to enactment of the California law that requires growers to bargain collectively with workers who vote for unionization, despite the workers exclusion from the federal law that grants most non-farm workers the legal right of collective bargaining. And with that came substantial improvements in the pay, benefits, working conditions and general status of the state’s farm workers.

The struggle was extremely difficult for the impoverished workers, and Chavez risked his health – if not his life – to provide them extreme examples of the sacrifices necessary for victory. Most notably, he engaged in lengthy, highly publicized fasts that helped rally the public to the farm workers cause and that may very well have contributed to his untimely death in 1993 at age 66.

Fasts, boycotts. It’s no coincidence that those were among the principal tools of Mohandas Gandhi, for Chavez drew much of his inspiration from the Indian leader. Like Gandhi and another of his models, Martin Luther King Jr., Chavez believed fervently in the tactics of non-violence. Like them, he showed the world how profoundly effective they can be in seeking justice from even the most powerful of opponents.

What the UFW accomplished, and how the union accomplished it, will never be forgotten – not by the millions of social activists who have been inspired and energized by the farm workers’ struggle, nor by the workers themselves.

The struggle continues, for despite the UFW’s successes, most farm workers are still mired in poverty. But because of the union, they have a genuine hope of bettering their condition.

The UFW won important legal rights for them. But more than union contracts, and more than laws, farm workers now have what Cesar Chavez insisted was needed above all else. That, as he told me so many years ago, “is to have the workers truly believe and understand and know that they are free, that they are free men and women, that they can stand up and say how they feel.”

Freedom. No leader has ever left a greater legacy.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: the farmworkers are marching to Sacramento

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By Dick Meister

(Part one of a five part daily series on the farmworkers)

It’s hot, very hot, in the Central Valley, but still they march on toward Sacramento, thousands of members and supporters of the United Farm Workers union. They’ve been at it since August 22nd, when the 13-day, 200-mile trek began. The UFW has done it before, and for good reason. Like the others in the past, this march has drawn public attention to the union’s cause, energized its members and current supporters and doubtless added to its many supporters worldwide.

But will the march accomplish its immediate goal? That’s to win passage of the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act that would overcome serious obstacles to farm worker unionization, and another bill that would grant farm workers the right to be paid overtime after eight hours a day, 40 hours a week like non-agricultural workers.

That is largely up to Gov. Jerry Brown, who in June vetoed the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act for being “too drastic,” despite direct pressure from more than 1000 workers during the 12 days he deliberated before acting on the bill. They fasted, held vigils outside his office and rallies on the capitol grounds, complaining loudly about the desperate need for firm union rights to improve their miserable pay and working conditions, including the great need to protect them from the severe – sometimes deadly – heat in which they must work.

As a Kern County vineyard worker, Eva Orozco, explained:

“The pay is very low, they pressure us heavily to produce, they don’t respect us and we have to run and drink water quickly and use the bathroom quickly because if we take long we could be fired. Sometimes I’m afraid to show up for work for fear that that I will not work fast enough and I will be fired.”

The marchers will bring their complaints and demands directly to Brown when their march ends Sept. 4 outside Brown’s office. Like his father, former Gov. Pat Brown, Jerry Brown once was one of the UFW’s closest allies. In his earlier term as governor, Jerry Brown pushed through the Legislature the pioneering bill that granted California farm workers the union rights denied them elsewhere.

Ironically, the first of the UFW’s marches to Sacramento, in 1966, was aimed at pressuring Gov. Pat Brown to sponsor a bill that would grant union rights to farm workers. He refused, despite the urgings of more than 8,000 UFW members and supporters who gathered outside the Capitol at the end of the 25-day march.

Farm workers did not get those rights until his son won passage of the bill – the Agricultural Labor Relations Act or ALRA – that granted the rights nine years later after a week long march from San Francisco to the Modesto headquarters of the huge Gallo winery, which had rebuffed vineyard workers’ demands for a union representation election.

More than 15,000 people marched into Modesto, convincing Jerry Brown and state legislators that the UFW retained a sizable and influential constituency and great organizational ability. That had very much to do with passage of the ALRA and the consequent success of the UFW in winning union contracts, The law, however, was barely enforced by Democrat Brown’s successors as governor, Republicans George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson and Democrat Gray Davis.

The latest march could very well convince Jerry Brown to come to the aid of some of the state’s neediest, yet most broadly supported workers. He did it before and he can do it again.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Central Subway gravy train shows how City Hall works

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Despite its skyrocketing cost, inefficient design, and a growing chorus of criticism – ranging from a Wall Street Journal editorial today to an op-ed in the SF Chronicle last week – the Central Subway project continues to move forward for one simple reason: rich and powerful people want it to happen, whether it makes sense or not, because it benefits them directly.

“The subway is a case study in government incompetence and wasted taxpayer money,” the Wall Street Journal wrote in a “Review & Outlook” piece today (full text below), but it was only partially correct. The Central Subway is actually a case study in how things get done at City Hall, and how connected contractors and their political patrons make off with that taxpayer money.

“San Francisco is embarking on a Big Dig of the West, and unless our local leadership applies the brakes soon, the damage to our transit systems will be all but guaranteed. I urge local and national leaders to recognize what is obvious and stop this train to nowhere,” former San Francisco Transportation Agency Chair Jake McGoldrick wrote in his Aug. 18 op-ed.

But that isn’t likely to happen, given the political dynamics that have taken root at City Hall this year. Remember, this project was the result of a mutually beneficial deal that then-Mayor Willie Brown cut with Chinatown power broker Rose Pak back in 2003 (when the project was estimated at $648 million, before it ballooned to its current price tag of $1.6 billion).

This was the same duo that engineered the appointment of Ed Lee as interim mayor earlier this year and then pushed him to break his word and run to retain control of Room 200, as well as pressuring David Chiu into being the swing vote to give Lee that job and secretly backing Jane Kim’s run for the Board of Supervisors. All are big supporters of the Central Subway project, despite all the experts calling it an wasteful boondoggle that will be the most expensive 1.7-mile piece of track ever built in this country.

But the opinion of fiscal and transportation policy experts matters little in a town that is once again being governed by shameless power brokers. Hell, Brown even uses his weekly column in the Chronicle to confirm his weekly breakfast date (every Monday at the St. Regis Hotel) with his “friend” and client Jack Baylis, a top executive at AECOM, the main contractor for the Central Subway, as well as the America’s Cup, Transbay Terminal, the rebuild of the city’s sewer system, and all the other most lucrative city contracts.

In turn, AECOM kicks down contracts and payouts to a network of political supporters that will ensure that the project gets built, such as Chinatown Community Development Center, which signed an $810,000 contract in December to support the Central Subway in unspecified ways right before CCDC and its director Gordon Chin provided crucial support for getting Lee into the Mayor’s Office, where he can ensure the Central Subway project remains on track.

Yes, it’s just that crass and obvious. And it isn’t even about politics. Hell, Baylis is a Republican from Los Angeles, despite his meddling in San Francisco’s political affairs by sponsoring the Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth and other groups that will be doing independent expenditures on behalf of Lee this fall, trying to tell us that “it’s all about civility.”

No, it’s about money and it’s about power, straight up. The Central Subway is really more of a gravy train than a sensible transit project, but that’s just how business is being done at City Hall these days.

One of the people who has long criticized the project – noting how Chinatown would be served far better with surface transit options, at a fraction of the cost – is Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and an elected BART board member. He was heartened to see so many more voices – from the editorials to a recent Civil Grand Jury report to internal audits in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which will lose money operating the new system – echoing his concerns.

“There are more people who seem to be sharing my thoughts,” Radulovich said. “It would be good to have a civic debate on this.”

But he’s not confident that will happen, despite the fresh wave of concerns. “There’s a lot of stuff that looks like planning that has gone into justifying this,” he said. “When the political culture of City Hall and the planning culture come together, this is what you get.”

 

Full text of WSJ article:

Off the San Francisco Rails

Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but the politicians who contrived the city’s Chinatown subway project must have left their brains somewhere else. The subway is a case study in government incompetence and wasted taxpayer money.

P.S. The Obama Administration is all for it.

Former Mayor Willie Brown sold a half-cent sales tax hike to voters in 2003 to pay for the 1.7-mile line on the pretext that the subway would ease congestion on Chinatown’s crowded buses, but he was more interested in obtaining the political support of Chinatown’s power brokers. In 2003, the city estimated the line would cost $647 million, but the latest prediction is $1.6 billion, or nearly $100 million for each tenth of a mile.

Transportation experts say the subway’s design is seriously flawed and that improving the existing bus and light-rail service would make more sense. The subway misses connections with 25 of the 30 light-rail and bus lines that it crosses, and there’s no direct connection to the 104-mile Bay Area Rapid Transit line or to the ferry.

Commuters will have to travel eight stories underground to catch the train and walk nearly a quarter of a mile to connect to the Market Street light-rail lines—after riding the subway for only a half mile. Tom Rubin, the former treasurer-controller of Southern California Rapid Transit District, calculates that taking the bus would be five to 10 minutes faster along every segment.

The city’s metro system, which is already running $150 million operating deficits, isn’t likely to have the money to keep the subway running in any case. Last month the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury, a watchdog group, warned that the subway’s costs “could stretch the existing maintenance environment [of the metro system] to the breaking point” and will defer the purchase of a new communications system.

Alas, San Francisco will likely drag national taxpayer money into the bay too. The city has applied for a multiyear $942 million “full funding grant agreement” from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to cover 60% of its capital costs. In 1964 Congress created a back-door earmark program called “New Starts” to subsidize local transportation projects. The FTA rates and recommends projects for grants, and Congress usually rubber-stamps its recommendations.

In January 2010, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood modified the grant criteria by adding environmental and communal benefits and minimizing cost-effectiveness. The change effectively means that any project can get federal funding as long as its sponsors claim they’re moving cars off the road.

“Measuring only cost and how fast a project can move the most people the greatest distance simply misses the boat,” Mr. LaHood wrote in January 2010 on his Fast Lane blog. “Look, everywhere I go, people tell me they want better transportation in their communities. They want the opportunity to leave their cars behind . . . And to enjoy clean, green neighborhoods. The old way of doing things just doesn’t value what people want.” We’re told Mr. LaHood is smarter than he sounds.

The FTA has given the Chinatown subway one of its highest project ratings, which virtually assures a full funding grant agreement. Once the city receives such an agreement, the feds are obligated to provide whatever funds they promise. The FTA won’t approve the agreements until the fall, so there’s still hope that someone wises up and nixes the project. Oh, and if Congress is looking for discretionary programs to cut, New Starts would be a good start.

Dick Meister: Labor’s unhappy anniversary

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By Dick Meister

It was 30 years ago this month that Ronald Reagan struck the blow that sent the American labor movement tumbling into a decline it’s still struggling to reverse.

Reagan, one of the most anti-labor presidents in history, set the decline in motion by firing 11,500 of the overworked and underpaid air traffic controllers whose work was essential to the operation of the world’s most complex aviation system.

Reagan fired them because they dared respond to his administration’s refusal to bargain fairly on a new contract by striking in violation of the law prohibiting strikes by federal employees. What’s more, he virtually destroyed their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO).

Public and private employers everywhere treated Reagan’s 1981 action as a signal to take an uncompromising stand against the unions that they had accepted and bargained with, however reluctantly, as the legitimate representatives of their workers.

At that time, one-fourth of the U.S. workforce was represented by unions. Today, largely because of employer actions since then – often openly illegal actions – the percentage of workers with union bargaining rights is less than half that.

Ironically, PATCO had broken with other AFL-CIO affiliates to endorse Reagan’s successful run for president in 1980. The union did so because Reagan had promised to “take whatever steps are necessary” to improve working conditions and otherwise “bring about a spirit of cooperation between the president and the air traffic controllers.”

Yet PATCO negotiators were rebuffed a year later when they asked for a reduction in working hours, lowering of the retirement age and other steps to ease the controllers’ extraordinary stress, plus a substantial pay raise and updated equipment.

PATCO was faced with either abandoning its demands or striking to try to enforce them. And when the union struck, Reagan, certain of broad public support because of his great popularity, issued an ultimatum to the strikers: Return to work within 48 hours or be fired and replaced permanently by non-union workers.

Faced with millions of dollars in fines for violating Reagan’s order and the anti-strike injunctions that his administration and airlines had sought, and stripped of its right to represent the controllers, PATCO declared bankruptcy and went out of business.

Reagan’s ban on re-hiring strikers was later lifted by Bill Clinton, and three unions, including a revived PATCO, now represent controllers, among them hundreds of those who had been fired. But safety experts say the air traffic control system remains understaffed and the controllers still under far too much stress.

Part of the blame for that rests with Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, who was as anti-labor as Reagan. The Bush administration, in fact, imposed an onerous new contract on the controllers that cut their pay and pensions.

It’s not likely that other employers will soon abandon the crippling anti-labor practices that were inspired and furthered by Reagan. Hiring and permanently replacing strikers, previously a rare occurrence, has become a relatively common employer tactic. And strikes – an indispensable weapon for workers in collective bargaining – have become relatively rare post-Reagan.

It isn’t just strikers who face penalties for exercising their legal rights. Some employers also have taken to firing or otherwise penalizing workers who seek union recognition, despite the law that promises them the right to freely choose to unionize. Many employers have also hired “management consultants” who specialize in Reagan-style union busting.

It’s no coincidence that, as union ranks have shrunk under the relentless anti-labor pressures first applied to air traffic controllers three decades ago by Ronald Reagan, the ranks of the middle class also have shrunk –– as has the ordinary American’s share of the country’s wealth.

The situation for air traffic controllers has stayed much the same. They’re still demanding longer rest periods during working hours and between shifts and other improved working conditions that are clearly necessary for their well-being and that of those they serve. And they’re still being rebuffed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Republican leaders in Congress have made it even more difficult for the controllers and many others by insisting that a measure making it more difficult for workers to unionize be attached to the current bill that would continue the FAA’s funding for another year. A congressional stalemate over that was the principal reason for the recent partial shutdown of the FAA, which cost the government millions of dollars in lost airline taxes, threw several thousand airport construction workers and FAA employees out of work, and forced airline safety inspectors to work without pay throughout the two-week stalemate.

Although air traffic controllers and other FAA employees are back on the job, that could be only a temporary respite. The stalemate could very well resume when Congress returns from its current recess on September16th and again takes up FAA funding.

The attempt by congressional Republicans to weaken FAA employees’ basic union rights – and their willingness to shut down the air traffic system in order to further that goal ­– is yet another aspect of the legacy of Ronald Reagan, one of the most damaging and successful union-busters of all time.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Workers gaining in fight for union rights

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This year marks the 76th anniversary of the National Labor Relations Act, the Depression-era law that was essential in building an American middle class – and which remains essential to the well-being of all working Americans. 

But you know what? Powerful corporate interests and their Republican buddies in Congress are nevertheless trying mightily to cripple what has so long been one of the most important U.S. laws of any kind.

Their main target currently is the National Labor Relations Board – the NLRB –which administers the National Labor Relations Act and takes seriously the act’s stated purpose of encouraging collective bargaining between workers and their employers.

The five-member labor board did very little to carry out its task of encouraging unionization during the notoriously anti-union Bush administration. But under President Obama, the NLRB has been doing its job – or has been trying to do its job — in the face of stiff Republican opposition.

The Republican opponents claim – what else? – that under Obama, the NLRB has become a tool of organized labor, Big Labor, as they like to call it.

It’s impossible to take those charges seriously. The labor board obviously has not been acting as an agent of unions, big or small. It’s merely been enforcing the law. But that, of course, means anti-labor forces no longer have the firm cooperation of the NLRB in their attempts to weaken unions as much as possible. They no longer have an ally in the White House. Bush is gone.

Imagine that. The National Labor Relations Board is actually doing what the law says it should do. And unions are actually getting a more or less even break vis-à-vis the corporate interests with whom they collectively bargain – or with whom they try to bargain.

What’s really got the anti-labor crowd sputtering lately is a ruling by the NLRB’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon,  against the Boeing Aircraft Company. Boeing was charged with breaking the labor law by moving a major assembly line from a unionized plant in Washington State to South Carolina, a notably anti-union state, in response to a machinist strike at the Washington plant. 

Moving the assembly line was done in violation of a provision in the National Labor Relations Act that bans companies from punishing striking unions by withholding or transferring jobs. Thus, said the NLRB’s Solomon, the assembly line should be moved back to Washington State.

Oh, boy, those union-hating Republicans in Congress didn’t like that at all. They threatened to defund the NLRB if it doesn’t withdraw its order to Boeing, trotting out their usual tired response to just about anything done in favor of unions these days. You’ve undoubtedly heard it – thousands of  times, maybe. Yes, that’s right. A ruling in favor of labor and labor law would be . . . Ah, yes, a job killer. Sure.

GOP House members have actually introduced something called – really – “The Protecting Jobs From Government Interference  Act.” that would void the NLRB order against Boeing  and prohibit future such orders. The proposed law undoubtedly has the approval of the union-hating U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has led the right-wing charge against the NLRB. It complains that the labor board is “out of control.”

Actually, the NLRB is out of control  – out of control of the right-wingers who had  their way throughout Bush’s two terms and are miffed that, unlike Bush, Obama doesn’t think their way is the only way to handle labor-management relations.

Much to the chagrin of the right-wingers, the labor board has come back strong under Obama. One of the board’s most important steps has been to develop rules to streamline the workplace elections that are held to determine if workers want to unionize. 

The board has cut short the pre-election periods that employers have used to harass workers into voting against unionization, approaching them individually and in mass meetings, frequently threatening to fire or otherwise penalize workers who vote for union representation. Obama’s NLRB also has cut back the time for management to appeal the outcome of a vote for unionization.

The changes, as one union attorney noted, are “common sense changes that drag labor law into the 21st century.” 

Common sense often doesn’t mean much to anti-labor Republicans. Sensible or not, they plunge onward on the anti-labor path that’s always been theirs. According to a count by Politico.com’s Joseph Williams, House Republicans have convened oversight hearings on the NLRB or summoned board members to Capitol Hill 14 times since the midterm elections to answer harassing questions and have threatened to severely cut the NLRB’s budget to “bring the board to heel.”

So, it’s still not easy for unions and workers who want to join unions, despite the progressive change in the NLRB’s attitude and operations. 

But the situation is looking much better since the change has come, since the law that promises American workers the right of unionization – and the important benefits that come from it – -is now being enforced by people who believe that their mission is not to hamper unions, but to encourage their growth for the benefit of all Americans.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: New hope for domestic workers

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With a lot of luck, we may finally take decisive action to guarantee decent treatment for the world’s highly exploited housekeepers, maids, nannies and other domestic workers. There are an estimated 100 million of them, working in more than 180 countries.

Their pay is generally at the poverty level, and very few have fringe benefits such as pensions and employer-paid health care. Few have the protection of unions or labor laws, and they’re often at the mercy of unscrupulous labor contractors.  Almost half of them are not entitled to even one day off per week. About a third of the female workers are denied maternity leave.

The hope for improving the domestics’ slavery-like conditions has arisen from action taken in Geneva this month at the annual meeting of the United Nation’s International Labor Organization – the ILO.

Delegates representing unions, employers and governments voted 396 to 16  for what’s called a “Convention on Domestic Workers.” The non-binding convention spells out how domestics should be treated in UN member countries – most importantly in the pace-setting United States.

In the U.S., as in most other countries, an estimated 80 percent of the domestics are women of color, subject to racial discrimination and physical and sexual abuse.  In the United States, most of them are immigrants as well . They’re easy targets for exploitation, especially since, as elsewhere, domestics mainly work in private unregulated households, usually alone.

What’s more, U.S. domestics lack most of the protections of state and federal labor laws that are granted most U.S. workers outside of agriculture . Most other non-agricultural workers at least have the right to unionize. But domestics don’t even have that basic right.

The National Labor Relations Act specifically denies union rights to anyone “in the domestic service of any family or person.” That’s right. The Depression-era law that was designed to pull poverty-stricken workers out of poverty and build a middle class does indeed prohibit an entire group of exceptionally needy workers  from taking a major step to improve their extremely poor working conditions. The word for that is “un-American.” 

That outrageous legal prohibition has its roots in racism. Pressures from southern states, which objected to granting union rights to the mainly black domestics, was the main reason domestics were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act.

 Some domestics have nevertheless formed union-like organizations to seek better treatment. But they need the force of law behind them.

The ILO convention calls for guaranteeing domestic workers in the United States and everywhere else some of the key rights that unionized workers invariably have, among them, regular working hours, vacations, maternity leaves and Social Security benefits.

Domestics would be promised what amount to contracts with employers that would make clear just what they would be expected to do, for how long, and for how much pay.  Their working conditions would have to include time off of at least 24 hours a week.

Migrant workers would have to be provided with a written job offer of employment or a contract before crossing  the border into another country to work.

It took several years for ILO representatives to adopt the domestic workers convention. It was finally adopted as a direct result of campaigning here and aboard by groups of activists from unions and other organizations. They will  be working for the next few years to get as many nations as possible to implement the ILO convention with their help.

The effort in this country is being led by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, with major support from the AFL-CIO, which has arranged to have some domestic workers represent themselves in ILO meetings and voting.

Among other things, proponents hope to make it clear that “domestic workers are real workers, NOT powerless individuals who are expected to remain in quiet servitude and endure long hours without overtime pay, along with hazardous working conditions without access to health and safety protections.”

Proponents also hope to end the “cultural relativity excuse that sleeping on a mattress in an unheated garage is better than he or she would get in their home country, or that the poor treatment of domestics is a tradition.”  The ILO convention says otherwise and workers in the United States and other countries where it is adopted  “will be armed with the knowledge that there is an international standard that protects them.”

Domestics already are granted labor rights in New York State, and California legislators are considering a proposal to bring them under that state’s labor laws. But winning basic rights for the badly exploited domestic workers elsewhere will be very difficult. But so was convincing ILO representatives to take on the task, the long needed task of granting domestic workers union rights and, with them, the decent wages, hours and working conditions that come with unionization.

Yes, winning the union rights for domestics worldwide will be very difficult. But we know it can be done.  And certainly we know that it should be done. 


Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century.  He can be reached through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Deep court cuts favor landlords over tenants

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When I read about the latest manifestation of California’s voluntary descent toward Third World status – in this case, the defunding of San Francisco’s civil court system thanks to the deep state budget cuts caused by Republicans – in this morning’s SF Chronicle, I tried to fight through my despair and search for a silver lining.

“With a few exceptions, only criminal cases will go to trial,” the article said, listing those exceptions as mostly family law cases, such as child abuse and neglect and domestic violence.

Hmmm, I thought, is there a way for the average San Franciscan to somehow benefit from this virtual shutdown of our justice system? Then, we at the Guardian had an idea: in a city where two-thirds of residents are renters, perhaps a civil court system that will now take years to get a hearing would be a boon to those contesting eviction proceedings.

Yay, we thought, free rent! And given that it’s mostly the property-owning class that has caused this decimation of basic government services, people who have benefited mightily by having Prop. 13 keep their property taxes artificially low but still block other efforts to increase tax revenues, there seemed to be a certain poetic justice in the possibility that the courts would stop helping them evict their tenants.

So I called San Francisco Tenants Union Director Ted Gullicksen to run our idea past him and find out if we were onto something, but he doused the idea with a bucket of ice-cold reality. It turns out that evictions will continue to move rapidly through the otherwise gutted civil court system (as I would have learned from the Bay Citizen article on the issue).

“Unfortunately, tenants and criminals are being fast tracked,” he told us. And it gets even worse than that because while landlords will still be able to demand action on their evictions within five days, tenants will find years-long delays when they seek justice from landlords acting illegally or unfairly. “While they will move quickly on evictions, they will move slowly on wrongful eviction lawsuits,” Gullicksen said.

Ann Donlan, spokesperson for the San Francisco Superior Court, told us that eviction proceedings will still move quickly because “it’s a statutory requirement.” But, I asked her, as a matter of fairness and equity, why the courts will still delay wrongful eviction suits for years, even though they often deal with the same set of facts as the eviction cases? Doesn’t that bias the courts toward landlords? She told me to please submit my question in writing and she’ll try to get me an answer.

But there really aren’t any good answers to the gross inequities that these deep cuts will cause in the court system, with a 40 percent overall cut being disproportionately focused on the civil side of the equation.

“This is pretty heavy duty,” attorney Stephen Sommers, who handles wrongful termination, civil rights, and other cases on behalf of the little guy. He said many businesses in San Francisco already wantonly disregard their employees’ rights. “They feel like they can get away with murder and now they’ll be highly incentivized to continue that.”

Attorneys facing five-year waits for a trial will be less likely to handle cases on contingent for poor plaintiffs, he said, and people in positions of power of all kind will be more likely to abuse their authority in myriad ways, knowing that their victims will have far less recourse in the courts.

“It’s going to be the wild west out there,” he said. “I wonder, if people can’t turn to the courts, whether they’ll take matters into their own hands and the crime rate will go up.”

But if there is any silver lining for the powerless at all, Gullicksen said the powerful will also find less recourse in an overwhelmed court system. So he suggested, “It might be a good time for a citywide rent strike because they don’t have many resources in the court system anymore.”

Dick Meister: Paid sick leave is good for us all

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The latest figures show that some 44 million workers in private employment  – more than 40 percent of the private sector workforce – do not have paid sick days that they could use to recover from illnesses, including contagious illnesses such as the flu, or worse.

It should be of particular concern that those occupations which are currently least likely to provide paid sick days include occupations most likely to have regular contact with the public – most importantly and most disturbingly, food service and food preparation.

That raises serious health problems – especially in these tight economic times, when workers need to stay on the job as much as they can, no matter how ill they are, to earn as much money as they can. Which, of course, endangers the health of those who come in contact with them, as well as delaying their recovery from their illness.

Public health experts note that the fewer the number of workers who are able to stay at home when sick, the more likely it is that diseases will spread. In addition to the increased suffering of the public and other workers which that causes, it also causes significant economic losses.

Laws have been proposed in several states and in Congress that would require employers to grant paid sick leaves to their employees, but it seems unlikely that the measures, however much they are needed, will pass any time soon – if at all.

But there has at least been a start, however slight, toward what’s broadly needed. That’s a paid sick leave law that was adopted by the city of San Francisco five years ago – the first citywide such law in the country. If nothing else, the San Francisco ordinance proves that such laws are quite feasible, and not the “job killers” that anti-labor forces contend they would be.

San Francisco business groups fought fiercely against adoption of the ordinance and thankfully lost big time. The ordinance was approved by 61 percent of the voters in a citywide election in 2006.

Under the ordinance, workers in businesses with fewer than 10 workers can earn up to five paid sick days a year, while workers in larger businesses can earn up to nine paid sick days.  Workers accrue one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours they work. They may use the sick time to recover from their own illnesses, care for a sick family member, or seek routine medical care.

A recent independent survey of nearly 1,200 San Francisco workers and nearly 700 employers by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research came up with findings that the city ordinance was, in the words of the California AFL-CIO, “overwhelmingly positive for workers, businesses and the public.”

The labor federation called the study “further evidence policies that help working families meet their responsibilities at work and at home are good for everyone.”

The study shows, in short, that the San Francisco ordinance has had a great impact on workers’ lives but little or no impact on the city’s businesses.  They overwhelmingly report that the law has not cut into their profits. Two-thirds of them reported no problems implementing the law.

It seems likely that the reason for the slight impact on businesses business can be attributed to the fact that most workers take sick leave days only when they need them.  Even though the law allows workers five to nine sick days a year, San Francisco workers used a median of just three days a year. And one-quarter of the workers didn’t take a single sick day.

Even the major opponent of the law prior to its passage, the local, politically powerful restaurant association that led the political fight against the city ordinance, now concedes it hasn’t led to employee abuses or hurt restaurants or other business.

Most important, as the state AFL-CIO noted, the survey proved that having paid sick days makes a substantial difference for working families.  More than half the workers surveyed said they’ve benefitted from the law. Among other important things, the law has given workers who need paid sick days the most, including parent and workers with chronic health conditions, the time they need to care for their health and that of their children.

The labor federation reports that it hears regularly “the stories of parents who are forced to choose between their children’s health and the financial well-being of their family . . . who have put off visits to the doctor and sacrifice their health to avoid losing their jobs.

Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee have followed San Francisco’s lead and adopted ordinances providing paid sick leave for workers.  And some states, California, New Jersey and Connecticut among them, have adopted similar though less extensive laws.

But what’s most needed is a federal law – a law that, if properly enforced, would grant sick leave pay to all workers, helping them, their families and anyone else who might be exposed to their illness.

It’s obviously the sensible thing to do.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Can a woman beat Hoffa?

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A woman as president of the macho Teamsters Union that was once headed by supermacho Jimmy Hoffa? It could happen. 

Sandy Pope thinks so, and she’s going to try as hard as she can to make it happen – going to try as hard as she can to succeed Hoffa’s lawyer son, Jimmy junior, as head of one of the country’s largest and most powerful unions.

If a majority of delegates at the Teamster convention that opened today in Las Vegas vote for Pope to unseat Hoffa, who was first elected a dozen years ago, she’ll be only the third woman to ever head an international union.

Randi Weingarten, the highly regarded president of the American Federation of Teachers, who took office in 2008, is one of the others. The third is Mary Kay Henry, who just recently succeeded the controversial Andy Stern as president of the country’s largest union, the 1.3 million-member Service Employees International Union, the SEIU.

The Teamsters comes in at number two, with 1.2 million members. Hoffa’s supporters argue that Sandy Pope is not up to handling such a huge and diverse union. Her record, however, seems to indicate otherwise.

For 33 years, the 54-year-old Pope has held her own in the union’s macho culture, as a driver of big long haul freight trucks and as a warehouse worker.  For seven years she’s been president of a New York Teamster local of drivers and warehouse workers, one of only 16 of the Teamster’s 407 locals nationwide to be headed by a woman.

Before that, Pope was an international union representative in the Teamster’s warehouse division. She’s been a longtime leader of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which has exposed much of the corruption that’s been common in the union since the days of Hoffa senior as president.

The TDU’s work has led to some important corrections in union operations, but much remains to be done, and it’s unlikely that Hoffa junior would do much about it.  As the incumbent, he’s running a status quo campaign. Some local level Teamster officials fear retaliation from Hoffa and his allies if they campaign for Pope.

But Pope certainly isn’t backing off one bit. She’s promising to halt or at least slow the concessions that Teamster negotiators have granted employers in recent years.  Under her, she says, the union” will close the concessions stand.”

It also would push the union’s officers off the gravy train. In one Minnesota Teamsters local closely allied with Hoffa, for instance, the principal officer is paid $200,000 a year. Hoffa himself is paid $363,000.  And that’s going on at the same time that many rank-and-file Teamsters are taking pay and benefit cuts and otherwise feeling the effects of a declining economy.

It’s what the pro-labor magazine “Labor Notes” quite accurately calls “the union leadership’s back-scratching, pocket-lining culture.”

Generally speaking, Pope’s promising to return to the basics of union operations – to build public support, mobilize the union’s current members and wage a major organizing drive to recruit new members. Pope also promises that some 20,000 of the union’s members whose jobs have been downgraded to part-time can expect a drive to make those jobs full-time.

It’s clear that, like many dissident Teamsters, Sandy Pope is “sick of having a lawyer with a big name hijack our union.”

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: The battle of our generation

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President Bob King of the United Auto Workers union is proving again that he’s one of our most astute labor leaders, a worthy occupant of the position once held by the legendary Walter Reuther.

King’s latest column in Solidarity, the UAW’s official magazine, certainly proves that. King writes about the severe weakening of the union rights that are supposedly guaranteed all working people – the right to organize. King calls that “the first amendment for workers.”

That basic and essential right was granted U.S. workers by the National Labor Relations Act – the NLRA – that was enacted in 1935 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures that were designed in part to pull the country out of the Great Depression.

But now, says UAW President King, the NLRA’s basic process for determining whether workers want to organize – having them vote for or against unionization – is “fatally flawed.” King says the National Labor Relations Board ­–­ the NLRB – which is charged with enforcing the NLRA, does not do that – “does not protect workers’ right to organize.”

Workers’ lack of adequate legal protection is not a new development, as King notes. It’s been a serious problem for several decades. Since the 1970s, employers have been allowed to hire anti-union consultants “to design sophisticated ways to intimidate workers trying to organize.”

Boy, have they. Supervisors are trained to put pressure on individual workers to vote against unionizing. Workers are forced to attend meetings where they are warned of the dire consequences they’ll face if they vote for unionizing. Employers threaten to close down if their employees vote for a union. Union supporters are commonly disciplined, sometimes fired. And employer lawyers “find thousands of excuses for delaying elections. “

King needn’t look beyond his own union for examples of the NLRB’s ineffectiveness against the dictatorial actions of employers against unions. He could cite hundreds of cases involving the UAW.

For instance, last August, six years after the UAW lost a union election by just three votes at a facility in North Carolina, the NLRB finally ordered a new election “because the employer violated the law in more than a dozen ways.” The violations included threatening to do away with the jobs held by union supporters, spying on workers’ meetings and interrogating workers about union activity.

By now, however, all 25 members of the union’s organizing committee have left for other jobs, most union supporters have been fired, laid off or quit. And the new election still hasn’t been scheduled.

Another example involves a California facility. Seventy percent of the workers there signed union membership cards, but were so intimidated by management that only 19 workers out of 161 dared vote for UAW representation.

King says the union is “returning to its roots of direct action on behalf of workers rights.” Which is no small matter, given the UAW’s influential position within the labor movement.

The union is demanding that “all corporations, whether American or foreign-owned, allow their workers to freely decide whether to organize.”

King calls that “the battle of our generation,” as it surely is. He says “the battle for the First Amendment right to organize will determine the survival of the labor movement. It is the mission of our generation of trade unionists to secure these rights for future generations. We must win this fight for our children and grandchildren.”

King and other UAW officers are going to “call upon each and every member to give some time – perhaps two hours a week – to participate in public demonstrations for the First Amendment.”

The union also will be seeking the support of workers and their unions in other countries, since the UAW is dealing with companies whose owners are in Japan, Korea and Germany and whose products are sold worldwide. The UAW will in turn support the struggles of foreign workers for union rights in their countries, as part of “the global fight to force corporations to respect workers’ right to organize.”

It’s important to remember the UAW’s crucial role in helping establish a true middle class in this country through its organizing of the auto industry. That led workers in other industries to also demand – and get – decent wages, benefits and working conditions.

UAW President King thinks his union can lead the way again, this time to reforms that will protect and expand the union rights that the autoworkers and others won seven decades ago. Those are the rights that had so much to do with the rise of a true middle class, whose standing is now endangered by the anti-union onslaughts of employers and their government allies.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Unions save lives

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A miner’s life is like a sailor’s

‘Board a ship to cross the waves

Every day his life’s in danger

Still he ventures being brave

—Traditional labor song

A new study shows that unionization is a sure way to dramatically lessen the many deaths and serious injuries that have been all too common in the nation’s coal mines.

That ‘s the unequivocal conclusion of the independent study of coal mining between 1993 and 2008 conducted by Stanford law professor Allson Morantz and funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

There’s no doubting it: Workers in unionized mines are far less likely to be killed or seriously injured than are workers in non-union mines.

The study indicates that the number of fatalities in individual non-union mines can decline by one-third up to nearly three-fourths and serious injuries decline by as much as one-third if the mines unionize.

It’s no coincidence, notes President Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers Union, that several major mine disasters recently were at non-union mines. That includes the explosion at Massey Energies’ Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29 miners last year, the Crandell Canyon, Utah, blast that killed nine miners in 2007 and the Sago explosion in West Virginia in 2006 that killed 12.

“The simple truth,” Roberts concludes, “is that union mines are safer mines, and this study proves that.”

He gets ready agreement for that obvious truth from union leaders and members at all levels of the labor movement, right up to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. He was a coal miner himself, as were his father and grandfather.

Trumka says he learned firsthand “the vital importance of workers having a voice on the job through their union.”

Spreading unionization throughout the coal mining industry is a key mission of the United Mine Workers. But though that doubtlessly would lead to greater coal mine safety, the union’s Democratic Party allies must meanwhile continue pressing for stronger mine safety laws – and stronger enforcement of the laws.

Those steps and the labor-management cooperation in collective bargaining and otherwise that the steps would require would guarantee that coal mine job safety would continue to improve – perhaps at even a faster rate than shown by Professor Morantz’ study.

Labor, management and government would be in a far better position to do much more of what’s needed to continue lowering the still high number of mine worker fatalities.

That’s not just a daydream. Listen to the AFL-CIO’s Mike Hall. He knows. Says Hall: “With all we know today, and all the avenues of protection available, there is simply no need for even one life to be lost on the job.”

One of Congress’ most outspoken and effective safety advocates, veteran Democratic Rep. George Miller of California, sees the study as unassailable evidence that unionization leads to greater safety.

Miller, ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, is certain that “when workers have a voice in the mine through their union, they are safer. In union mines, workers are empowered to point out dangerous conditions to inspectors without fear of retaliation from management.”

It clearly demonstrates that “by giving miners the support they need to speak out, unions can save miners lives.”  So can the United Mine Workers’ stepped-up campaign to bring more workers under the direct protection of the union and the union’s expanding safety training programs for miners everywhere.

Saving lives. No union could have a greater purpose.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: The minimum wage is a poverty wage

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Imagine trying to live on pay of $7.25 an hour. Even if you managed to work full eight-hour days, you’d be making only about  $58 a day, $290 a week, or a measly $15,000 a year.  And out of that would come taxes and other deductions.

According to the standards of the federal government, you’d be living in poverty. Yet $7.25 an hour is the federal minimum wage set by Congress. State legislatures can and do set state minimums higher than the federal rate, but never lower, much as some would like to.

Far too many workers have no choice but to take minimum wage jobs, no choice that is, but to live in poverty. New research out of Columbia University’s law school lays out the sorry details of the minimum wage workers’ very serious situation, one that should never be tolerated in a country with such riches as ours.

In many states, the minimum wage laws are but barely enforced, in part because there’s little or no money budgeted for enforcement. But it’s also because the government agencies charged with enforcing the laws are clearly not much interested in carrying out their mandate.

Equally at fault are the governors and state legislators who’ve done virtually nothing to try to help their state’s neediest workers earn a decent living. They have to be aware that no one can make a decent living at the current minimum wage rates.

The government officials who have been ignoring the problems could at least try to make sure that employers pay workers the legal minimum, however inadequate it might be.  And the government officials could apply effective pressure to raise the minimum. They could, but given their record in such matters, that’s most doubtful.

Congress could raise the federal minimum, but having just recently raised it, that’s extremely unlikely, even though it should be obvious to everyone that a higher rate is needed to effectively help the many working people who badly need help.

It may be hard to believe, but despite the great need of workers and despite the widespread violations of the minimum wage laws, five states – Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi – have no agency assigned to enforce the minimum wage laws and other laws designed to protect workers rights.

The researchers also found that a majority of states do not fine or penalize employers who violate the minimum wage laws and other wage and hour laws. Which means that employers “have little or no incentive to obey wage and hour laws if the only repercussion for violating them is to have to pay wages owed in the first place.”

The report warns that “without meaningful enforcement by state regulators, some employers will simply disregard their legal obligation if doing so allows them to save time, money or effort, putting the majority who wish t abide by the law at a significant competitive disadvantage, This creates a regulatory race to the bottom by states as they seek to compete to attract businesses.”

Most important, it denies workers the basic rights and protections the law promises them but often fails to deliver.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than half-century. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

 

 

Dick Meister: A Memorial Day Massacre

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It’s a dramatic, shocking and violent film. Some 200 uniformed policemen armed with billy clubs, revolvers and tear gas angrily charge an unarmed crowd of several hundred striking steelworkers and their wives and children who are desperately running away. The police club those they can reach, shoving them to the ground and ignoring their pleas as they batter them with further blows. They stand above the fallen to fire at the backs of those who’ve outraced them.

Police drag the injured along the ground and into patrol wagons, where they are jammed in with dozens of others who were also arrested. Four are already dead from police bullets, six others are to die shortly. Eighty are wounded, two-dozen others so badly beaten that they, too, must be hospitalized.

The close-ups are particularly brutal. As one newspaper reviewer noted, “In several instances from two to four policemen are seen beating one man. One strikes him horizontally across the face, using his club as he would a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on top of his head and still another is whipping him across the back.”

The film ends with a sweaty, fatigued policeman looking into the camera, grinning, and motioning as if dusting off his hands.

The film was made in 1937. It was not, however, one of those popular cops and robbers features of the thirties. It was not fictional. It was an on-the-scene report of what historians call “The Memorial Day Massacre,” a newsreel segment filmed by Paramount Pictures as it was happening on the south side of Chicago on May 30, 1937.

We’re accustomed these days to the use of videotaped evidence to show wrongdoing by abusive law enforcement officers. Video technology was unknown in 1937, of course, and though film was available, it had rarely – if ever – been used for that purpose. The 1937 film, in fact, was initially kept from the general public by Paramount’s executives. Fearful of “inciting riots,” they refused to include it in any of their newsreels that were shown regularly in movie theaters nationwide.

But the film was shown to a closed session of a Senate investigating committee chaired by Robert LaFollette Jr. of Wisconsin. The committee, concerned primarily with civil liberties, was outraged – particularly since the Chicago police had acted in violation of the two-year-old federal law that guaranteed workers the right to strike and engage in other peaceful union activities.

The committee found that strikers and their families, while noisily demanding collective bargaining rights as they massed in front of the South Chicago plant operated by Republic Steel, had indeed been generally peaceful.

But that was beside the point to the police in Chicago and other cities with plants operated by Republic and two other members of the “Little Steel” alliance that also were struck.  For, as the committee concluded, the police had been “loosed … to shoot down citizens on the streets and highways” at the companies’ behest. The companies even supplied them with weapons and ammunition from their own stockpiles.

The committee said the companies had spent more than $40,000 on machine guns, rifles, shotguns, revolvers, tear gas canisters and launchers and 10,000 rounds of ammunition to use against strikers. Republic alone had more supplies than any law enforcement agency in the entire country.

The companies were prepared to go to any extreme to remain non-union. Two closed their plants temporarily, anticipating that most of the 85,000 strikers would soon be forced to return to work because they had little – if any – savings. But though Republic Steel closed most of its plants, it continued to operate the Chicago plant and a few others.

Republic fired union members at the plants that remained open and, with police help, cleared out union sympathizers and brought in strikebreakers to replace them. The strikebreakers, guarded by police day and night, ate and slept in the plants to avoid confronting the pickets outside.

Municipal police, company police and National Guardsmen harassed and often arrested pickets for doing little more than lawfully picketing. Six strikers were killed outside Republic’s Ohio plants in Cleveland, Youngstown, Canton and Massillon.

The killings and other violence, the steadily increasing financial pressures on strikers, unceasing anti-union propaganda – all that and more combined to end the strike in mid-July, two months after it had begun.

But the steelworkers didn’t give up.  Determined to not have made such great sacrifices in vain, they turned to the labor-friendly administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for help. They got it in 1941, when heavy pressures from the administration finally forced the steel companies to recognize their employees’ legal right to unionization and the many benefits, financial and otherwise, that it brought them and the many other industrial union members who followed their lead.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Child Labor-Back to the 19th Century?

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Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.

Even the most casual students of American labor history undoubtedly have come across the appalling accounts of child labor, accompanied by photos of exhausted, grime-covered teen and pre-teen children staring sad-eyed into the camera.

The children stand outside the mines, mills, farms and other often highly dangerous places where they worked 10, 12, 15 hours a day, sometimes even more. They worked at home as well, in their impoverished families’ dilapidated tenement flats, rolling cigars, stitching garments and doing other work for long, miserably paid hours.

It began with the New England colonists, who brought the practice of child labor with them from England. Use of child labor regardless of the age or frailty of the child was common throughout the colonies, and remained common after independence – including in the southern U.S., where the black slaves’ children were ordered to work along with their captive parents.

Finally, in the 1840s, reform groups managed to pressure several state legislatures in New England to ban the labor of minors under 15 for more than 10 hours a day without their parents’ written consent. Yes, that’s how bad it was – so bad that allowing kids under 15 to work more than 10 hours a day was OK. All they needed was the agreement of their economically desperate parents.

The ten-hour, six-day workweek became standard for minors in most states. Again, that was considered a major reform. Most states also adopted reforms that prohibited children from working in hazardous industries. That was ignored, however, in the particularly dangerous coal mines of Pennsylvania and Appalachia.

In 1914, the federal government stepped in to levy a 10 percent excise tax on employers who hired 14-year-olds. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed a law prohibiting some employers from hiring anyone under 16. But, believe it or not, the Supreme Court voided both laws.

Child advocates couldn’t even get congressional approval for a law empowering the government to regulate the labor of minors under 18, mainly because of a business campaign that called that idea “socialism.” Sound familiar? Then, as now, that could be enough to defeat progressive measures.

But finally, with the coming of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms in the 1930s, decisive steps were taken to regulate the use of child labor. They came mainly with passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. The law, which covers workers under 18, limits the hours they can work, depending on their age and occupation.  They must be paid at least as much as the legal minimum wage, and they must be covered by the protective laws that apply to adult workers.

The idea was not only to protect children from the harmful exploitation they commonly suffered but specifically to give them the time and opportunity to get a decent education, to get enough rest and time for study.

Passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act obviously did not end the misuse of child labor. Yet it did set a standard for protecting young workers that’s been followed by states that have enacted their own versions of the act, some more liberal than the federal law.

But now come business trade associations, employer groups, reactionary Republican politicians and Tea Party activists to urge severe weakening of the state laws, and, ultimately, of the federal law. They agree with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that the child labor laws are unconstitutional for a variety of obscure legal reasons. They’ve begun their legal attacks on state laws with the laws in Maine and Missouri.

In Maine, which was among the first states to enact child labor laws, they’ve been pushing a bill that would allow employers to pay anyone under 20 a six-month “training wage” that would be more than $2 an hour below the minimum wage. They’d also eliminate rules setting a maximum number of hours kids 16 and older can work during school days and allow those under 16 to work up to four hours on school days and up to 11 p.m.

The Missouri bill is even worse. It would lift provisions in the current state law that bar children under 14 from employment, They’d be allowed to work all hours of the day and no longer need work permits from their schools. What’s more, businesses that employ children would no longer be subject to inspections by the federal agency that enforces the child labor laws.

By the time you read this, the proposed laws in Maine and Missouri may have been passed – or, hopefully, rejected. But that’s almost beside the point. What’s worse is that 11 years into the 21st century, people are actually taking seriously proposals that would send us back into the 19th century.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Hey, Nike — Pay up!

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Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.

OK, Nike, pay up! You owe me big. Exactly how much, I can’t say, since I don’t know the going rate for athletes and others who act as human billboards for you. You know, those whose team uniforms, workout gear and other garments display your swoosh brand symbol prominently.

I assume the swoosh-marked college athletes are not paid openly, lest they lose their amateur status, although their colleges, while profiting from the athletes’ play and display of the swoosh and other brand symbols, of course face no penalties for doing so.

My days as an athlete are long gone and, sad to say, there were no swoosh contracts back in those days. But now, I think, it’s time for me to collect a little.  You see, I was recently quite ill, and on leaving the hospital was under strict orders to go easy and, among other things, to wear light, loose fitting clothing.  No tight jeans and such.

But sweatpants, they’d be perfect. So I popped into by favorite clothing establishment and grabbed a pair of sweatpants off the rack without bothering to check anything but the size. Didn’t even try them on.

Oh, but when I got the pants home. The shock, the shock. There it was on the side of the left leg, the dreaded swoosh for all the world to see on my daily doctor-prescribed walks and other sweatpants-clad forays into the community. I had become a walking billboard for Nike.

So where’s my endorsement money, Nike? My pay. I’m working for you, after all. Do I have to bring in a union to get me what I ‘m owed? I’m not asking for much, just whatever you’re paying other human billboards. I’m not exactly a celebrity, but I am known rather well . . . and highly regarded, I like to believe, in some parts of my community. Seeing me wearing the swoosh might influence some of my neighbors to rush out and buy their own Nike gear. Naturally.

But realistically, I must tell you it’s not likely I’ll get paid for my valuable work on behalf of Nike. Big time athletes are paid, and paid well for wearing and endorsing the swoosh. But not us plain folks who wear the Nike brand.  We need a union to demand decent pay . . . to demand decent treatment.

That’s it, a union to demand decent treatment for all who wear the Nike brand . . . plus the money they should be owed by Nike for doing so. There are, of course, unions of professional athletes. But their concern, as I guess it should be, is for their members. We need to form a union of our own to also get the big bucks for wearing the swoosh.

And while we’re at it, we could use the leverage of our union to effectively demand much better treatment for the workers in Nike sweatshops in poor countries who produce most of the swoosh brand stuff.  Nor should we forget the celebrity athletes whose huge pay for endorsement of Nike products drives up the price we ordinary folks have to pay for sweatpants and other gear that the celebrities endorse only because they are paid to endorse them.

It’s highly doubtful that any of our spoiled, hugely paid athletes would readily agree to share their endorsement money with lesser-paid citizens. But with a union, who knows? Professional athletes have their own powerful unions, so why don’t their unions take up the cause of unpaid Nike endorsers?

That’s one of the basic principles of unionism, unions seeing that their members get a fair share and helping members of other unions get their fair share. You know, solidarity and all that.

So, swoosh wearers, unite! Unionize! We have nothing to lose but our swooshes!


Dick Meister,  former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com which includes more than 300 of his columns.

Dick Meister: The Real May Day

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Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.

May Day. A day to herald the coming of Spring with song and dance, a day for children with flowers in their hair to skip around beribboned maypoles, a time to crown May Day queens.

But it also is a day for demonstrations heralding the causes of working people and their unions such as are being held on Sunday that were crucial in winning important rights for working people. The first May Day demonstrations, in 1886,  won the  most important of tthe rights rever won by working people – the right demanded above all others by the labor activists of a century ago:

“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”

Winning the eight-hour workday took years of hard struggle, beginning in the mid-1800s. By 1867, the federal government, six states and several cities had passed laws limiting their employees’ hours to eight per day. The laws were not effectively enforced and in some cases were overturned by courts, but they set an important precedent that finally led to a powerful popular movement.

The movement was launched in 1886 by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, then one of the country’s major labor organizations. The federation called for workers to negotiate with their employers for an eight-hour workday and, if that failed, to strike on May 1 in support of the demand.

Some negotiated, some marched and otherwise demonstrated.  More than 300,000 struck. And all won strong support, in dozens of cities – Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Boston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Denver, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Washington, Newark, Brooklyn, St. Paul and others.

More than 30,000 workers had won the eight-hour day by April. On May Day, another 350,000 workers walked off their jobs at nearly 12,000 establishments, more than 185,000 of them eventually winning their demand. Most of the others won at least some reduction in working hours that had ranged up to 16 a day.

Additionally, many employers cut Saturday operations to a half-day, and the practice of working on Sundays, also relatively common, was all but abandoned by major industries.

“Hurray for Shorter Time,” declared a headline in the New York Sun over a story describing a torchlight procession of 25,000 workers that highlighted the eight-hour-day activities in New York. Never before had the city experienced so large a demonstration.

Not all newspapers were as supportive, however. The strikes and demonstrations, one paper complained, amounted to “communism, lurid and rampant.” The eight-hour day, another said, would encourage “loafing and gambling, rioting, debauchery, and drunkenness.”

The greatest opposition came in response to the demonstrations led by anarchist and socialist groups in Chicago, the heart of the eight-hour day movement. Four demonstrators were killed and more than 200 wounded by police who waded into their ranks, but what the demonstrators’ opponents seized on were the events two days later at a protest rally in Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police who had surrounded the square, killing seven and wounding 59.

The bomb thrower was never discovered, but eight labor, socialist and anarchist leaders – branded as violent, dangerous radicals by press and police alike – were arrested on the clearly trumped up charge that they had conspired to commit murder.  Four of them were hanged, one committed suicide while in jail, and three were pardoned six years later by Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld.

Employers responded to the so-called Haymarket Riot by mounting a counter-offensive that seriously eroded the eight-hour day movement’s gains. But the movement was an extremely effective organizing tool for the country’s unions, and in 1890 President Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor was able to call for “an International Labor Day” in favor of the eight-hour workday. Similar proclamations were made by socialist and union leaders in other nations where, to this day, May Day is celebrated as Labor Day.

Workers in the United States and 13 other countries demonstrated on that May Day of 1890 – including 30,000 of them in Chicago. The New York World hailed it as “Labor’s Emancipation Day.” It was. For it marked the start of an irreversible drive that finally established the eight-hour day as the standard for millions of working people.


Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.