It’s official: SF follows the stimpack money.

Pub date April 7, 2009
WriterSarah Phelan
SectionPolitics Blog

funding_graph.gif
A graph on the Mayor’s Office’s newly launched website seeks to break it all down.

Text by Sarah Phelan

So, finally, the Mayor’s Office has launched a website to track stimpack dollars that are coming to San Francisco based on census data (formula funding), or that can be competed for locally.

So far the newly launched website breaks down the dollars by the following categories: public safety, environment, education, housing, health and human services and transportation. It’s a good start.

What the site does not do is break down the dollars according to whether they are going to create green collar jobs. Such jobs been defined by Van Jones, Obama”s new Green Collar czar, as, ” a family-supporting, career-track job that directly contributes to preserving or enhancing environmental quality.”

I realize it’s early days and the city may truly not have a handle on this crucial date yet, and I’m trying to practice what Jones, who likes metaphors involving ships, (the Amistad, the Titanic, and Noah’s Ark all get invoked in Jones The Green Collar Economy,) calls “the Noah principles.

These five principles can be summed up thus: “fewer issues, more solutions; fewer demands, more goals; fewer targets, more partners; less accusation, more confession; and less cheap patriotism, more deep patriotism.”