Volume 42 Number 10

December 5 – December 11, 2007

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City Hall’s budget myopia

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom goes before the TV cameras and announces, grimly, that the city faces a massive budget deficit ($229 million) and all departments will have to tighten their belts. There’s an immediate City Hall hiring freeze, and every agency has to prepare for budget reductions of as much as 13 percent. Things are bleak, the mayor insists, and everyone in the city should be prepared for service cuts.

If it feels like you’ve heard this song before, you have. It happens almost every year, and it’s been that way since the 1980s. And it’s not going to get any better until the city takes a hard look at how it brings in revenue and how that matches annual expenses. Before everyone starts lining up behind the mayor’s budget cuts, that’s what the supervisors need to do.

It’s still early in the budget cycle, and the shortfall numbers are still tentative. So the deficit is really a moving target, and it’s way too soon for anyone to start talking about specific numbers for specific cuts. It’s also entirely possible that the doom-and-gloom budget talk is aimed in part at derailing efforts by Sup. Chris Daly to put a charter amendment on the June 2008 ballot that would set aside $30 million per year for affordable housing.

But we’ll stipulate that the numbers aren’t good and that once again the city will have an unpleasant budget season with worthy causes, organizations, and agencies fighting one another over small bits of available money.

It’s also clear that Newsom’s first response to the problem is entirely wrong. "Although he wants to trim the fat," Newsom’s spokesperson, Nathan Ballard, told reporters, "the mayor made it abundantly clear he doesn’t want to see a reduction in people sweeping streets or police officers walking beats."

In other words, it’s fine if poor people can’t get treated at San Francisco General Hospital or mental health and substance abuse services get eliminated or funds for homeless housing disappear — but the streets will still be squeaky-clean. And for the record, the mayor resisted all efforts to get cops to walk beats and was only forced into approving it after the supervisors overrode his veto.

The hiring freeze is a gimmick: you can’t possibly run an operation the size and complexity of San Francisco city government with critical positions unfilled. What’s actually happened is that Newsom told department heads they can’t hire anyone without getting approval from his office first. So in effect, Newsom has given himself a direct veto over all personnel decisions at City Hall. He’ll simply make sure that the jobs he wants filled and the agencies he wants to continue operating properly will be spared, and others will get squeezed.

It’s a way to set policy without ever publicly discussing it, a way to shift money around without public hearings or input from the supervisors. It’s not a way to solve budget problems.

In fact, balancing San Francisco’s books — now and next year and the year after that and into the future — requires something that’s in short supply at the Mayor’s Office: direct and honest communication.

Here’s the problem: San Francisco, because it’s a city and a county, does a lot more than most other municipalities. And because it’s a city with active groups pushing for humane policies, it’s a city that tries to provide services that ought be paid for by the federal or state governments. In a rational system, San Francisco wouldn’t have to come up with $30 million per year for affordable housing; billions of dollars would be coming out of Washington DC to address poverty, homelessness, and the housing crunch in American cities. San Francisco shouldn’t be setting aside cash from the General Fund for the public schools; the state of California ought to be funding the schools at a level that would make local support unnecessary. And wealthy people in the United States (including in California and San Francisco) would be paying higher taxes to fund those things.

But that’s not the real world. Right now San Francisco has to find local money for pressing needs — and the city is both unable and unwilling to raise that revenue from its wealthiest residents and businesses. So the city budget is perpetually out of whack.

There are only two choices, really: the city can stop trying to do what the feds and state won’t, can back down on its commitment to something resembling a livable community and some form of social justice — or the folks at City Hall can start talking seriously about bringing in another $250 million per year in revenue.

It’s tough to raise taxes in a California city; state law sets high barriers. But it’s not impossible, and if the mayor and the supervisors came up with and campaigned for a comprehensive and progressive overhaul of the city’s tax system — with the goal of making the local rich people who have benefited from the George W. Bush tax cuts pay their fair share — San Francisco could get out of these constant and painful budget problems.

We’re getting sick of waiting.

Where’s Michela?

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Michela Alioto-Pier, carpetbagger.

That’s what her Democratic primary challenger called her in 1996, when Alioto-Pier ran for the House of Representatives from the 1st congressional district, which hugs the California coastline from the town of Napa to the Oregon border.

Alioto-Pier, a San Francisco native, had spent the previous two and a half years at the White House advising Al Gore on telecommunications issues. After returning to the West Coast, the ambitious 26-year-old packed up her belongings and moved to St. Helena in Napa County, buying a home there in November 1995 and registering to vote the following month.

Her opponent, Monica Marvin, promptly attacked with a commercial showing a moving van heading across the Golden Gate Bridge alongside a photo of Alioto-Pier and a voice-over condemning outside candidates.

"I think the perception was that someone who’d lived most of her life in the district had a more comprehensive grasp of the issues and the culture reflected by those constituents," Marvin told the Guardian recently.

Alioto-Pier nonetheless won the primary, but she narrowly lost the general election to a Republican incumbent named Frank Riggs. He too assailed her for moving to the district just before the race.

More than a decade later, District 2 supervisor Alioto-Pier hasn’t managed to escape accusations that she’s detached from her constituents, nor has she succeeded in clearly reestablishing residency here since beginning a new political career at San Francisco’s City Hall.

THE SECOND-HOME STORY


Alioto-Pier is registered to vote at a Vallejo Street condo that she bought in 2005 for $1.9 million, and she told us that she, husband Thomas Paul Pier, and their three children make it their primary residence.

"Depending on the time of year, we spend some weekends at our St. Helena house, which is on the same street as Congresswoman [Nancy] Pelosi’s St. Helena house," she said in a written response to our questions.

An Alioto-Pier office assistant, Gene Eplett, left a voice message with the Guardian insisting that second homes are commonplace. "You probably have one as well," Eplett said.

Not exactly. Particularly not one with a taxable value of $774,793.

And in some legal documents, Alioto-Pier lists the Napa County house as her residence.

In August the supervisor formed a limited liability company for the purpose of "wine production" with Pier, called Alioto-Pier Vineyards, according to state business registration records. Both listed their home address as the three-bedroom, two-bath St. Helena home on Zinfandel Lane. Alioto-Pier paid $590,000 for the place, which sits on 2.6 acres of world-famous Napa County soil.

Within days of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s appointing her to the Board of Supervisors in January 2004, she signed a deed of trust for a $100,000 equity line of credit, again listing the Zinfandel Lane property as her home address, according to Napa County records.

In early May 2003, not long before she joined the board, former mayor Willie Brown tapped her to sit on the powerful San Francisco Port Commission. That same week she reregistered another wine-making business in Napa County she’d founded years before called Alioto Cellars, a.k.a. Alioto Winery. In the area of the original form asking for a residence, she began to list the St. Helena property but thought better of it, crossing it out and replacing it with a San Francisco address on Jackson Street that she appears to have used for at least two years, according to Napa County records.

In response to questions regarding the business registration records for Alioto-Pier Vineyards, the supervisor said neither she nor her husband signed the form and that it was filled out by their attorney.

"Alioto-Pier Vineyards LLC is a small wine producing business (approximately 250 cases per year) whose business address is more suitable to where our vineyard (approximately one acre) is located — at our St. Helena property," she wrote.

The form asks for the addresses of the company’s managers separate from the location of the principal executive office. For both Alioto-Pier and her husband, Zinfandel Lane is given as the home address.

DISTRICT ISSUES


As a supervisor, Alioto-Pier has exhibited savvy on emergency preparedness, mothers in the workplace, energy use, and the threatened demise of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission, which treats primarily low-income patients.

Mick Suverkrubbe, president of the Marina Merchants Association, said the supervisor always has a presence at the group’s meetings.

"If she doesn’t show up, one of her aides shows up," Suverkrubbe said. "She’s always been real responsive when we’ve had questions."

But some critics say Alioto-Pier appears all too willing to take direction from the Mayor’s Office, well-financed business interests, and Democratic party functionaries rather than independently arriving at positions.

"She’s like the windup doll," said one City Hall insider who asked not to be named. "It’s fair to say every time I see Sean Elsbernd [her board ally] make a decision, I know that it’s coming from a policy perspective, not someone yanking his chain. It’s the exception, not the rule, that she comes up with her own policy perspective."

"She has three more years, and hopefully they’ll be better," Bill Barnes, an aide to Assemblymember Fiona Ma who formerly worked for Sup. Chris Daly, said of Alioto-Pier’s current board term. "The point of district elections is that supervisors respond to their neighborhood. The values and concerns in District 2 are going to be more moderate and conservative than some other areas, but you still have to provide that basic level of service."

ATTENDANCE PROBLEMS


Alioto-Pier’s attendance record has also caused her trouble and made her an easy target for political adversaries.

"I see her here on Tuesday afternoons," when the board meets, one City Hall staffer said. "She probably spends a full day here when she has a committee hearing with an item. Beyond that, her office is routinely shut on Fridays."

Alioto-Pier missed 17 of 160 board and committee meetings in 2004 and 2005 — that’s only about 10 percent. But throughout her tenure as a supervisor, she’s attended barely half of the meetings of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, where each of the supervisors automatically serves as a director, according to an analysis of the $100 payments the members receive for attending meetings.

"I missed Transportation Authority meetings related to the birth of my third child and the complications of that pregnancy," Alioto-Pier told us.

Alioto-Pier noted, as did others at City Hall, that she had health problems in 2006. She was pregnant with her third child, and there were complications. Further, she said, supervisors don’t get time off for maternity.

"All city employees with the exception of members of the Board of Supervisors are allowed to take a four-month maternity leave. I was the first member of the board in the history of San Francisco to give birth while in office. As such, there were no guidelines in place, and I had to place the health and safety of my newborn first," she said.

But for many months in 2004 and 2005, before that pregnancy, she missed all or almost all of the Transportation Authority meetings.

She also missed 16 of 20 scheduled meetings, including three public hearings, during the short time in 2004 that she spent as a director for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District.

Alioto-Pier left the district before her term was set to expire after serving only six months, complaining that she didn’t have enough time for the position. In her resignation letter, she acknowledged that the bridge was adjacent to her district and "given my ongoing commitment to improving waterfront security in San Francisco, I hope in the future I will once again be able to work with you and serve as a director." She never has, but four other supervisors have served on the district’s board for years.

And she’s apparently not too busy to be running a winery in St. Helena. It’s a modest operation, but it has to take some of her time.

WHERE DOES SHE VOTE?


Alioto-Pier’s voter registration history is confusing.

She doesn’t appear to have voted at all in the November 1999 election — at least not in Napa or San Francisco counties — but, curiously, she did vote in that year’s December runoff, when Willie Brown won a second term over Sup. Tom Ammiano.

She cast a ballot as an absentee in Napa County one year later, even though she was registered at that time to vote in San Francisco under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier, public records show. She voted here in November 1998 with the last name Alioto-Pier, but she didn’t marry her lawyer husband until May 2000, county records show.

In 2002 she voted in San Francisco during the primary and general elections under the name Michela Angelina Driscol Alioto, yet she was still registered concurrently under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier.

Alioto-Pier said that she and her husband returned to St. Helena in July 2000 but moved back here in early 2001, reregistering in both places. She added that San Francisco and Napa counties were at that time slow to remove "deadwood" registrations from their rolls.

"Clearly, once one reregisters, the county has the obligation to cancel all previous registrations for that person," she said. Alioto-Pier insisted that she voted in San Francisco’s November 1999 election, but an office attendant at the Department of Elections asserted that the system "says she was eligible but she did not vote."

Her 1996 Republican opponent, Riggs, also castigated her for failing to vote in 1994 and 1995. Alioto-Pier’s explanation, according to press accounts? Her permanent residency wasn’t clear.

"As best as I can recall from the events of a decade ago, I responded to Republican Frank Riggs by saying there was a mix-up with my absentee ballots," Alioto-Pier told us.

She’s listed a string of San Francisco addresses in public records over the past two decades in addition to her St. Helena dwelling. But in 2005 she finally bought the condo on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. She didn’t file for a homeowner’s exemption on the condo in 2006, but neither has she taken advantage of the tax break on her Zinfandel Lane home during any year since 1997, according to property records.

Alioto-Pier said she was unaware of qualifying for the homeowner’s tax exemption. "However, we declare as a deduction the mortgage interest from our Vallejo Street home on our federal tax returns," she said. Taxpayers are permitted to benefit from the deduction on a second residence.

Whispers at City Hall surrounding the time Alioto-Pier spends in St. Helena and away from her District 2 constituents have dogged her increasingly since she replaced Newsom.

But she’s never faced the punishing regimen of banner headlines endured by District 4’s onetime supervisor Ed Jew. He’s also been suspended by the mayor and faces civil charges that he lied to voters about living permanently in the district he was elected to represent.

Alioto-Pier offered a few telling words in a recent robocall to San Francisco voters opposing mandated appearances by the mayor before the Board of Supervisors: "We need to get our house in order before we invite any guests."

Now, which house would that be?

You’re getting warmer

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>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR SPECIAL GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT

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I remember so well the final morning hours of the Kyoto conference. The negotiations had gone on long past their scheduled evening close, and the convention center management was frantic — a trade show for children’s clothing was about to begin, and every corner of the vast hall was still littered with the carcasses of the sleeping diplomats who had gathered in Japan to draw up the first global treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But when word finally came that an agreement had been reached, people roused themselves with real enthusiasm — lots of backslapping and hugs.

A long decade after the first powerful warnings had sounded, it seemed that humans were finally rising to the greatest challenge we’d ever faced.

The only long face in the hall belonged to William O’Keefe, chairman of the Global Climate Coalition, otherwise known as the American coal, oil, and car lobby. He’d spent the week coordinating the resistance, working with Arab delegates and Russian industrialists to sabotage the emerging plan. And he’d failed. "It’s in free fall now," he said, stricken. But then he straightened his shoulders and said, "I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we can get things under control."

I thought he was whistling past the graveyard. In fact, he knew far better than the rest of us what the future would hold. He knew it would be at least another decade before anything changed.

TEN YEARS WARMER


The important physical-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that they included the warmest years on record. All of the warmest years on record.

In that span of time we’ve come to understand that not only is the globe warming but we’d also dramatically underestimated the speed and the amount of that warming. By now the data from the planet outstrips the scientific predictions on an almost daily basis. Earlier this fall, for instance, the seasonal Arctic sea ice melt beat the old record — by mid-August. Then the ice kept melting for six more weeks, losing an area the size of California every week.

"Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts," the headline in the New York Times reported. And the scientists were shaken by rapid changes in tundra permafrost systems, not to mention rainforest systems, temperate soil carbon-sequestration systems, and oceanic acidity systems.

Planetary climate change has gone from being a problem for our children to a problem for right about now, as evidenced by, oh, Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, and epic droughts in the Southeast and Southwest. And that’s just in the continental United States. Go to Australia sometime: it’s gotten so dry there that native Aussie Rupert Murdoch recently announced his News Corp. empire is going carbon neutral.

The important political-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that we haven’t done anything.

Oh, we’ve passed all kinds of interesting state and local laws, wonderful experiments that have begun to show just how much progress is possible. But in Washington DC, nothing. No laws at all. Until last year, when the GOP surrendered control of Congress, even the hearings were a joke, with "witnesses" like novelist Michael Crichton.

And as a result, our emissions have continued to increase. Worse, we’ve made not the slightest attempt to shift China and India away from using coal. Instead of making an all-out effort to provide the resources for them to go renewable, we’ve stood quietly by and watched from the sidelines as their energy trajectories shot out of control: these days the Chinese are opening a new coal-fired plant every week. History will regard even the horror in Iraq as just another predictable folly compared to this novel burst of irresponsibility.

A HINT OF A MOVEMENT


If you’re looking for good news, there is some.

For one thing, we understand the technologies and the changes in habit that can help. The past 10 years have seen the advent of hybrid cars and the widespread use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Wind power has been the fastest-growing source of electricity generation throughout the period. Japan and Germany have pioneered, with great success, a subsidy scheme required to put millions of solar panels on rooftops.

Even more important, a real movement has begun to emerge in this country. It began with Katrina, which opened eyes. Then Al Gore gave those eyes something to look at: his movie made millions realize just what a pickle we are in. Many of those millions, in turn, became political activists.

Earlier this year six college students and I launched stepitup07.org, which has organized almost 2,000 demonstrations in all 50 states. Last month the student climate movement drew 7,000 hardworking kids from campuses all over the country for a huge conference. We’ve launched a new grassroots coalition, 1sky.org, that will push Congress and the big Washington environmental groups.

All of this work has tilted public opinion — new polls have energy and climate change showing up high on the list of issues that voters care about, which in turn has made the candidates take notice. All of the Democrats are saying more or less the right things, though none of them, save John Edwards, is saying them with much volume.

THE RACE OF ALL TIME


Now it’s a numbers game. Can we turn that political energy into change fast enough to matter?

On the domestic front the numbers look like this: we’ve got to commit to reductions in carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2050, and we’ve got to get those cuts under way quickly and reduce emissions by 10 percent in the next few years. The marketplace will help — if we send it the message that carbon carries a cost. But only government can do that.

Two more numbers we’re pushing for: zero, which is how many new coal-fired power plants we can afford to open in the US, and five million, which is how many green jobs Congress needs to provide for the country’s low-skilled workers. All that insulation isn’t going to stuff itself inside our walls, and those solar panels won’t crawl up to the rooftops by themselves. We can’t send the work to China, and we can’t do it with the click of a mouse; this is the last big chance to build an economy that works for most of us.

Internationally, the task is even steeper. The Kyoto Accord, which we ignored, expires in a couple of years. Negotiations begin this month in Bali, Indonesia, to strike a new deal, and it’s likely to be the last bite at the apple we’ll get — if we miss this chance, the climate is likely to spiral out of control. We have a number here too: 450, as in parts per million of carbon dioxide. It’s the absolute upper limit on what we can pour into the atmosphere, and it will take a heroic effort to keep from exceeding it.

This is a big change — even 10 years ago, we thought the safe limit might be 550. But the data is clear: the Earth is far more finely balanced than we thought and our peril much greater. Our foremost climate scientist, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s James Hansen, testified under oath in a courtroom last year that if we don’t stop short of that 450 redline, we could see the sea level rise 20 feet before the century is out. That’s civilization challenging. That’s a carbon summer to match any nuclear winter anyone ever dreamed about.

It’s a test, a kind of final exam for our political, economic, and spiritual systems. And it’s a fair test — nothing vague or fuzzy about it. Chemistry and physics don’t bargain. They don’t compromise. They don’t meet us halfway. We’ll do it or we won’t. And 10 years from now we’ll know which path we chose.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is an author and environmentalist who frequently writes about global warming. McKibben’s essay was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Approximately 50 AAN member papers will be publishing the essay this week.

Ultimate Holiday Guide

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The holidays don’t only have to be about stress and shrinking wallets. How about making gifts that mean something? Donating time and money to worthy organizations? Attending events that embrace your playful (or wrathful) antagonism against this consumerist season? Check out the Guardian’s ultimate guide to these options, as well as green gifts, efficient neighborhood shopping, and more.

Happy challah-days
Take what you like, leave the rest

‘Tis the season for getting even
Create a celebration that makes your family as uncomfortable as theirs makes you

In the spirit
The Guardian’s guide to holiday giving

She’s crafty
DIY mini altars

Buy by Hand
Places to make and buy homemade gifts

Good things, small packages
Nifer Fahrion’s step-by-step guide to making your own tiny hat


Shopping for slackers

Neighborhood shortcuts for an efficient gift search

All I want for Christmas…
Locals talk about gifts that keep on giving and the ones they wish they could’ve given back

Fuck the holidays
Celebrating, ignoring, or just plain flipping the bird at Christmas

I’m dreaming of a green Christmas
A guide to ecofriendly gifts


Gluhwein by any other name

A miniguide to mulled wine

Nog on the noggin
Jon Beckhardt explores local producers of the holiday treat