Volume 42 Number 20

February 13 – February 19, 2008

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Cleaning up FERC’s mess

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OPINION In the late 1980s, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member Charles Trabant warned that "the only thing that we have to fear is FERC itself." He was speaking about his agency’s aggressive policy of preempting state regulatory powers — and undermining the rights of consumers — to encourage utility competition. This spring the Supreme Court will decide whether or not Trabant was right.

FERC’s response to the California energy crisis was too little too late.

At the height of the crisis FERC urged the state and many utilities — desperate to reduce the immediate cost impact of the crisis — to purchase long-term power supply contracts. Energy traders call this type of transaction "blend and extend" because the contract is a mix of short- and long-term prices. During this period, California and many utilities followed FERC’s advice and took advantage of this form of contract with the objective of extending the contracts long enough to keep short-term prices down. One utility, for example, tried to limit prices to a 35 percent rate increase. While the immediate effect was to reduce prices, sellers ended up gaining crisis-related scarcity profits over the longer term of the contract.

After the crisis abated FERC found that short-term prices — including those that had been used in many utilities’ blended contracts — were unjust and unreasonable and ordered sellers to refund revenues that exceeded an administratively determined just price. However, FERC denied the pleas of the state of California and others for adjustments to long-term contract prices. Ironically, it did so based on a "public interest standard," a financial test that considers the welfare of sellers but not that of customers. The public interest standard evolved to enable sellers to unilaterally raise a contract price that is below cost in order to avoid financial harm. Clearly, these were not the circumstances facing those who purchased power to temper customer costs. FERC just reckoned that the price would be passed on to customers.

The federal courts overturned the FERC decision. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that FERC’s oversight was "fatally flawed" and "offers no protection to purchasers victimized by the abuses of sellers or dysfunctional market conditions that FERC itself only notices in hindsight."

Electricity sellers, supported by FERC, have persuaded the Supreme Court to review the 9th Circuit’s ruling. Amicus briefs before the Supreme Court paint a dark picture of unwilling investors not providing the capital necessary to maintain reliable electric systems.

The merchant energy sector experienced a severe credit and liquidity crisis in 2002. According to Moody’s Investors Service, the crisis was not caused by regulators’ protecting customers but was due to energy trading having a flawed business model that lacked investment-grade characteristics. The market was taught an expensive lesson with the bankruptcies of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Enron, Mirant Corp., Calpine, and NRG. During this process, however, bankrupt power generators such as Mirant, the owner of the Potrero Hill power plant in San Francisco, used bankruptcy protection to modify contracts to generate value for their creditors.

Creditors have protection in the new competitive markets. Now it is time for the Supreme Court to protect customers too, by enforcing the Federal Power Act as it was written by Congress.

Carl Pechman

Carl Pechman is an economist and the founder of the energy consulting firm Power Economics in Santa Cruz.

Ecoerotic

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› molly@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY You may be the greenest, most permacultured locavore with a heart made of hemp. You tend your community garden on dates, travel only by biodiesel bus, and make your Christmas gifts from recycled materials rather than contribute to our culture’s overconsumption of resources. But chances are you haven’t thought about how your sex habits are affecting the planet — not to mention your partner. And what better time to think about it than the week of Valentine’s Day, the date when couples feel entitled to sex and singles are saddest about not having any? (Or is that the other way around?… But I digress.)

`Thing is, your favorite dildo may be releasing deadly toxins into the environment. Your discarded butt plug, so small and cute and seemingly innocent, may spend several centuries in a landfill before it degrades — if it ever does. Your vibrator could be the reason for someone else’s unnaturally tiny penis. Really.

The issue with sex toys — one of the more recent industries to be examined through a green lens — is twofold: disposal and toxicity.

The first is the easier, less contentious, and somewhat more obvious issue. Since we’re talking about a variety of objects often made of plastic, PVC, rubber, electronics, and other nonbiodegradable materials, it makes sense that concern has been raised about where sex toys end up and what happens to them when they get there. Just like water bottles and discarded train sets, sex toys made from these materials seem destined to last longer on the earth than any of us will — causing more pain in the long term than pleasure in the short term.

The second issue is whether sex toys are safe for humans, both those who use them and those who may be exposed to them through the environment. The concern here is phthalates, a variety of chemicals most commonly used to soften hard plastics but also found in cosmetics, food wraps, and a number of other ubiquitous consumer goods — and until recently, often used in plastic-based sex toys. There has been substantial research suggesting that phthalates — chemicals not naturally occurring in the human body — are present in 90 percent of Americans’ bodies. Furthermore, scientists believe phthalates can have a detrimental effect on male reproductive development.

"Severe interference can involve incomplete development of the penis, undescended testicles, decreased testosterone levels," Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California at San Francisco, told the Guardian. "There can be lifelong consequences."

Are there counterarguments to all of these worries? Sure. For starters, there’s always the issue of how green to go. Should you worry more about your rubber dildo — which you may keep for 10 years — than about your plastic shower curtain, which you’ll throw in the landfill in three months? Or is this just the latest ecofriendly phase our culture (and media) is going through? And as for phthalates, there are lots of different kinds — and no one is exactly sure what they do or how they do it.

But if you’re anything like Coyote Days, buyer for Good Vibrations, you’ll figure safe is better than sorry. Days said the major sex toy retailer has decided to phase out products containing phthalates, just in case it turns out the chemicals really are as bad as scientists suspect. In particular, Days suggested replacement with silicone varieties, if you can afford them.

And if you’re worried about how well a sex toy will biodegrade, you can always opt for a metal, wood, or glass variety.

In fact, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can check out the P Aqua from Love Piece, a dildo made from seaweed and water that, while solid at room temperature, can be boiled to oblivion for Earth-friendly disposal. (Though the company asks you to notify it if the dildo has a sour odor. Ew.)

As for Good Vibrations’ future inventory? Day said, "We’re not quite at the seaweed and water level yet." Me either. But I’m hoping for a sushi restaurant tie-in when this thing gets big. Buy one California roll-in-the-hay, get one seaweed sex toy free? I like it.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Super lessons

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› news@sfbg.com

The Super Fat Tuesday presidential primary election in San Francisco was marked by some portentous trends and factors that could have a big impact on who becomes the Democratic Party nominee — and whether that person will be accepted as the people’s legitimate choice.

Consider the scene the night before the election. A small army of young people made its way up Market Street carrying signs and pamphlets supporting their candidate, Barack Obama, taking up positions outside Muni and BART stations and on high-profile corners to spread the message of change.

Meanwhile, inside the Ferry Building, Mayor Gavin Newsom and former president Bill Clinton convened one of several "town hall meetings" held simultaneously around the country to promote the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who checked in on a satellite feed.

Among the many luminaries on hand was State Sen. Carole Migden, a superdelegate (one of 71 from California) who has not yet pledged her support to either Clinton or Obama and who could ultimately play a huge role in determining the nominee. Migden made a show of exchanging pleasantries with the former president, warmly embracing him in front of a crowd of about 250 people and more than a dozen news cameras before taking a seat nearby.

But Election Day was for the regular citizens, and once their votes were counted and analyzed, a couple of things became clear. Clinton won California with the absentee ballots that she had been banking for weeks thanks to her deeply rooted campaign organization. Her margin of victory among early voters was about 20 percentage points.

Yet a late surge of support for Obama caused him to win at the polls on Election Day, leading to his outright victory in San Francisco by a margin of about 15,000 votes, or almost 8 percentage points. It was a symbolic victory for progressives on the Board of Supervisors, who backed Obama while Newsom campaigned heavily for Clinton (see "Who Wants Change?," 1/30/08).

Obama and Clinton were close enough in California and the rest of the Super Fat Tuesday states that they almost evenly split the pledged delegates (those apportioned based on the popular vote). But if present trends continue, even after Obama’s sweep of four states that voted the weekend after California, neither he nor Clinton will have captured the 2,025 delegates they need to secure the nomination before August, when the Democratic National Convention convenes in Denver.

That means the nomination could be decided by superdelegates such as Migden, a group comprising congresspeople and longtime Democratic Party activists, from party chair Art Torres down to those with key family connections, such as Christine Pelosi and Norma Torres.

And that could be a nightmare scenario for a party that hopes to unify behind a campaign to heal the country’s divisions.

Political analyst David Latterman, president of Fall Line Analytics in San Francisco, said this election was marked by a higher than expected turnout and more people than usual voting on Election Day rather than earlier. In San Francisco turnout was more than 60 percent, including an astounding 88.4 percent among Democrats.

"In the last couple weeks there was a strong get-out-the-vote push by Obama’s people," Latterman said during a postelection wrap-up at the downtown office of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), which he delivered along with campaign consultant Jim Stearns.

Latterman said that Obama surge, which drew out voters who were generally more progressive than average, may have been the margin that pushed Proposition A, the $185 million parks bond, to victory. It trailed among absentee voters but ended up less than five points above the 66.6 percent threshold it needed to pass.

"I don’t know if this would have passed or not if it had not been for the Obama push at the end," Latterman said.

Stearns agreed, saying, "In some ways, we should name every park in the city Obama Park."

At the measure’s election-night party at Boudin Bakery on Fisherman’s Wharf (where some of the bond money will renovate Pier 43), Yes on A campaign consultant Patrick Hannan told us he was worried as the initial results came in.

"That is a high threshold to hit," he said of the two-thirds approval requirement for bond measures.

But as the crowd nibbled on crab balls and sourdough bread, the results moved toward the more comfortable level of around 72 percent support, prompting great joyful whoops of victory.

Recreation and Park Department executive director Yomi Agunbiade acknowledged that the decision to place the measure on the February ballot rather than June’s was a leap of faith made in the hopes that the presidential election would cause a high turnout of Democrats.

"We’re excited," Agunbiade said at the party. "This was a hard-fought race that involved getting a lot of people out in the field and letting folks know what this was about — and we’re definitely riding the wave of high voter turnout."

The strong turnout helped Obama win half of the Bay Area counties, Sacramento, and much of the coast, including both the liberal north coast and the more conservative Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

But Clinton’s advantages of socking away early absentee votes and her popularity with certain identity groups — notably Latino, Asian, and LGBT — helped her win California.

Yet Obama’s appeal reaches beyond Democratic Party voters. He got some late support from prominent local Green Party leaders, even though their party’s candidates include former Georgia congressional representative Cynthia McKinney and maybe Ralph Nader (see "Life of the Party," 1/16/08).

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a founder of the California Green Party who also worked on Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, announced his endorsement of Obama at the candidate’s Super Fat Tuesday event at the Fairmont San Francisco. Mirkarimi also noted the support of Greens Mark Sanchez, president of the San Francisco Board of Education, and Jane Kim, the highest vote getter in the school board’s last race.

"I registered Green because I felt their values were closer to mine," Kim, who left the Democratic Party in 2004, later told the Guardian. "But I’ve always endorsed whoever I thought was the best candidate for any office…. I saw Obama as a candidate taking politics in a different direction that I hadn’t seen a national candidate take things before."

If Obama’s campaign can continue to develop as a growing movement running against the status quo, he could roll all the way into the White House. But it’s equally possible to imagine the Clintons using their deep connections with party elders to muscle the superdelegates into making Hillary the nominee.

Stearns said this scenario could hurt the party and the country: "I can’t imagine a worse outcome for the Democratic Party than to have Obama go into the convention ahead on delegates he’s won and have Hillary Clinton win on superdelegates."

Amanda Witherell and David Carini contributed to this report.

Cleaning up the shelter mess

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EDITORIAL Shelters aren’t a solution to homelessness. Everybody knows that; everyone agrees. But in San Francisco the shelter system that was set up as a short-term patch to address the growing number of homeless people on the streets in 1982 has, over a quarter century, become a fixture of city life. And as long as the federal government continues to abandon cities and affordable housing and create poverty, this is not likely to change any time in the immediate future. Even the most ambitious local housing program — and there will be a fairly ambitious one on the November ballot — isn’t going to create an immediate and permanent place for all of the 8,000 or so people in this city who can’t afford a place to live.

So shelters are going to be with us for a while — and it’s inexcusable that the city continues to operate them under such horrible conditions.

As Amanda Witherell reports in this week’s cover story, the shelter network is a bureaucratic nightmare. Clients get bounced all over town, it’s almost impossible to reach any of the shelters by phone, and the directions you have to follow to get a bed are complicated and confusing. Although everyone knows that shelters are now more than temporary housing, it’s hard at some shelters to get a bed for more than one night; lots of homeless people spend four or five hours per day waiting in lines for a shot at a bed (and even after that, some wind up not getting a place to sleep). The shelters — mostly run by nonprofits under city contracts — have the feel of prisons; they are strictly regimented and often unsafe and lack even basic amenities like soap. Clients often have to ask for toilet paper.

In 2006 the city’s Shelter Monitoring Committee found that only 6 of the 19 San Francisco homeless facilities met even basic standards for hygiene and sanitation. Fifty-five percent of shelter clients who participated in a May 2007 survey by the Coalition on Homelessness reported some kind of physical, sexual, or verbal abuse. One-third had no access to information in their native language. Thirty-five percent had nothing to eat.

It’s no surprise that many homeless people would rather sleep in Golden Gate Park — and as long as the abysmal conditions persist, that problem will continue.

The city’s not in the position to create luxury hotels, but it can make the shelters a lot less degrading, dehumanizing, and unpleasant. Sup. Tom Ammiano has already vowed to introduce legislation that would mandate minimal standards of care, and the Board of Supervisors needs to pass a tough bill as soon as possible.

Among the things that need to be addressed:

• Basic public health The Department of Public Health is concerned that the shelters can be breeding grounds for disease, and that’s a serious problem: there have been some close calls with tuberculosis, and bedbugs are a chronic issue. Many of the shelters lack such basic supplies as hand sanitizer, soap, rubber gloves, and clean towels. For just $15,000, public health nurses from the city’s Tom Waddell Health Center, working on a pilot project, were able to make significant inroads in hygiene and sanitation in two shelters. They’re now moving on to attack bedbugs and scabies. That approach should immediately be expanded to every shelter in the city.

• Safety Some of the shelters, particularly the men’s shelters, are lacking in basic security measures. It would be nice to have full-time security staff in every facility, but that might be expensive. At the very least, the staffs need more security and violence-deescalation training, the centers need to have operating and functional locks, and the city needs to mandate that the places are safe enough that clients aren’t afraid to stay there.

• A ridiculous bureaucratic labyrinth and lack of coordination Nobody should have to stand in line for three hours per day just to get a reservation for a shelter bed. Nobody should have to trek across town (on foot or on Muni, without the bus vouchers that the shelters ought to be giving out) from one shelter or homeless service center to another just to find out where to stay. There ought to be a one-stop shop (or a series of them) where a person can check in anytime during the day, find a shelter, line up a bed, get a ticket, and be on his or her way. City officials don’t talk much about this, but many of the shelter residents have jobs; they go to work all day but still can’t afford a place to live in San Francisco. The hoops they have to jump through make the system brutally unfair.

• A lack of reality Mayor Gavin Newsom says he wants to get beyond the shelters, to use them only as entry points into a system that will find treatment, counseling, job training, and permanent housing for all homeless people. We want that too. So does just about everyone who cares about this issue.

But the mayor also talks about getting rid of aggressive panhandling, and he and his supporters complain about the people on the streets who hassle tourists. And nobody seems to want to admit that many of the folks who are typically lumped under the term homeless actually have homes.

The city has managed to lease, renovate, and otherwise make available hundreds of single-room-occupancy rooms, and quite a few formerly homeless people have found long-term residences there. But the mayor’s Care Not Cash policy ensures that most of the modest welfare payments these people get are seized by the city for their housing, leaving them with nowhere near enough to survive. So they panhandle — is anyone surprised?

It may sound radical, but if the city, state, and federal cash grants to people who for whatever reason can’t find work were increased to a level that would support a tolerable lifestyle in one of the world’s most expensive cities, a lot of the quality-of-life problems Newsom bemoans — and that the city spends millions trying to mitigate with law enforcement resources — might go away.

Meanwhile, the shelter residents who do have jobs or who are looking for jobs spend so much of their lives trying to navigate a Byzantine system that they have little in the way of waking hours to improve their economic prospects.

The disaster that is San Francisco’s shelter system is the legacy of many years of public policy that allowed the interests of developers, landlords, and speculators to trump the needs of the city as a whole. The housing crisis isn’t going away tomorrow — but the victims have a right to a basic level of human decency. The supervisors need to make that happen, with dispatch.

Editor’s Notes by Tim Redmond

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom is all hot and bothered about the report by the Board of Supervisors budget analyst saying Newsom has taken $1 million that is supposed to pay for homeless services and Muni and used it to pay his own staff. The mayor says it’s all just a personal attack on him by the supervisors. He also says other mayors have done the same thing. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Ginsberg, the mayor’s chief of staff, called the report "bullshit." (Actually, the Chronicle, in its infinite decorum, used the term "bull-," to avoid offending the tender values of its readers.)

OK, look: there are politics going on here. The supervisors and the mayor aren’t getting along, the mayor has unleashed a rather savage attack on board president Aaron Peskin, Peskin is going after some of the mayor’s commissioners, and maybe Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who asked for the report, had some sort of political motivation. Or perhaps McGoldrick, who doesn’t tend to like this sort of bullshit, just got mad that the mayor was doing something funky with the taxpayers’ money.

Whatever. Nobody is denying the factual accuracy of the report. And if Newsom wants to make an issue of it, he ought to get beyond the politics and the accusations and just tell us:

Does he really think this is a good way to spend city funds?

Should the Human Services Agency, which is responsible for the most needy and broke people in town, be spending $95,000 per year to pay for a mayoral press aide? Does that money really help the homeless? Is there a good argument that having a media flack in Newsom’s shop defending the mayor’s homeless policies helps save lives, provide housing, or get substance abusers into recovery?

Fine, Mr. Mayor: perhaps you can elucidate it.

Was Stuart Sunshine, until recently Newsom’s chief transportation aide, really worth $203,000 per year? Did paying him that salary out of Muni’s budget help improve bus service? I dunno, maybe it did. But I haven’t heard Newsom tell me how.

Is it fair — and is it a good idea — at a time when every city department is being asked to cut back, when crucial city programs are being reduced or eliminated, when it’s going to be an ugly year for the public sector in general and San Francisco in particular, for the mayor to be filling his staff jobs on someone else’s dime?

That’s the real issue here: if Newsom thinks his high-paid staffers in his newly renovated office are doing such a bang-up job that two underfunded city agencies ought to be writing their paychecks, then the public is welcome to listen to his pitch. But there is nothing political or personal about asking the questions; that’s exactly what the supervisors ought to be doing.

Newsom is the chief executive of San Francisco. He sets the policies; he hires the senior staff. He can be upset with the legislators who are the checks and balances of his power, and he can disagree with the conclusions of a report that the board’s budget analyst has produced. But to call it bullshit when he knows it’s true (and when he knows from his own experience that Harvey Rose, the budget analyst, is widely respected for his fairness) … well, that just sounds defensive. Bad place to be, Mr. Mayor.

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