• No categories

Editorial

No bus shelter secrecy

-
0

EDITORIAL Clear Channel Communications, the notorious national media conglomerate that has been monopolizing (and dumbing down) radio for years, is poised to take over the contract to rebuild the city’s bus shelters. The deal gives the company, which also dominates the local billboard market, the right to sell ads on the shelters for 15 years. It’s worth a lot of money — and it’s not at all clear that the city is getting its fair share. That’s because Clear Channel refuses to open its books and allow the public to see what sort of profits it expects to rake in through the program.

Keeping that information secret is probably illegal under the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. It’s certainly bad public policy. The supervisors should block this deal until the financial figures come to light.

The bus shelter program is a classic example of the city using a private partnership to provide a service that ought to be paid for with tax money. The deal requires the vendor to build and maintain shelters at more than 1,000 bus stops, something the city, which hasn’t been aggressive about raising new revenue, can’t afford to do. In exchange, the vendor gets to sell ads all over the shelters, turning Muni stops across the city into commercial marketing devices.

It’s too late to stop that train altogether (although Proposition K would slow it down a bit). Clear Channel has won, in a competitive bidding process, the right to negotiate a final contract with Muni. But the deal will have to go before the supervisors eventually, and when it does they should demand that Clear Channel release its financial projections.

That’s already the intent of city law. The Sunshine Ordinance, passed by the voters in 1999 as Proposition G, includes language specifically tailored to this kind of circumstance. Section 67.32 states, in part, "The city shall give no subsidy in money, tax abatements, land, or services to any private entity unless that entity agrees in writing to provide the city with financial projections (including profit and loss figures), and annual audited financial statements for the project thereafter, for the project upon which the subsidy is based and all such projections and financial statements shall be public records that must be disclosed."

It’s pretty hard to argue that allowing Clear Channel to build advertising structures on city land, as a part of the city’s bus system, with millions of captive customers who are city transit users, is anything but a subsidy within the meaning of Prop. G. City Attorney Dennis Herrera should look into that, and if necessary the supervisors should ask for a specific opinion on whether the city can legally do any business with Clear Channel on this deal before the company releases its finances. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force should hold a hearing on the deal and advise the mayor and supervisors on whether it complies with the Sunshine Ordinance.

But lawyers can wriggle around words like subsidy, and even if Herrera and the Clear Channel legal team come up with some strange argument allowing the contract to move forward, the supervisors should have none of it. If a giant media monolith wants an exclusive right to sell ads on city property, then the city ought to know how much money is involved so that city officials, in full view of the public, can determine if the contract is a good deal. Clear Channel argues that it’s a private company, and that’s true — but the contract is exclusive, so there are no competitive issues. And if Clear Channel doesn’t want to comply with the city’s sunshine requirements, Muni should put the contract back out to bid and find someone who does.

The billion-dollar rate hike

-
0

EDITORIAL Nobody wants to pay higher electric rates, but the real issue about Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s new rate hike is its impact not just on residents and small businesses, which will bear the brunt of it, but on the Northern California economy as a whole. And figures we have received from the California Public Utilities Commission show that the hit will be close to $1 billion.

The San Francisco supervisors need to demand a comprehensive study of how the city’s economy will directly suffer.

A little background: In 2002, Irwin Kellner, an economist at Hofstra University in New York, did an analysis of how public power on Long Island affected the region’s economy. His research showed that the Long Island Power Authority, which had replaced a private power company four years earlier, had reduced rates by 20 percent — and that had injected $2 billion into the Long Island economy. The lower rates "helped Long Island stave off the effects of a national recession and the terrible events of Sept. 11 [2001]," Kellner concluded (see "The $620 Million Shakedown," 9/4/02).

The reason is simple: when residents and small businesses have lower electric bills, they tend to spend that money locally — and since local spending tends to generate more local spending, every dollar that’s spent in a local economy has an impact of as much as $5.

On the flip side, if private utilities raise rates, they tend to suck money out of the local economy and ship it to out-of-town investors, subsidiaries, and projects.

We used Kellner’s model — with his consent and guidance — and concluded at the time that PG&E’s rate hikes had cost the San Francisco economy $620 million. The Board of Supervisors, at the request of Sup. Chris Daly, asked the city controller to pursue this issue, review our work, and release an official report on the impact of high PG&E rates on San Francisco.

No report was ever issued.

Fast-forward to 2007, when PG&E has announced that it’s raising rates on residents and small businesses. (Many big customers will get a rate reduction.) Figures we obtained from the CPUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates show that the rate hike will cost residents $121 million per year and small businesses $74 million per year. Together, that’s a $195 million annual hit. According to Kellner’s formula, which multiplies that annual cost by five, the total impact on the Northern California economy will be $975 million — almost $1 billion per year.

The State Legislature ought to commission a study on how this will affect employment, tax revenues, and other key economic indicators. San Francisco, a city that still hasn’t fulfilled its historic public power mandate, should do the same thing. The supervisors should ask the controller to explain why Daly’s request was never honored — and demand a full, detailed report on the economic impact of this damaging rate hike, with a deadline. And if the controller can’t do it, they should assign it to Budget Analyst Harvey Rose.

Stop the developers now

-
0

EDITORIAL Sup. Tom Ammiano is taking a key step toward ending the gold rush by local housing developers who want to get their projects approved under the wire before the city can put in place new zoning controls for the eastern neighborhoods. The supervisors ought to approve his resolution as quickly as possible.

The eastern neighborhoods planning process has been under way for years; at this point the Planning Department is projecting final language for a proposal sometime around the end of the year. Then it will go to the supervisors, who will be able to debate, hold hearings on, and amend the plan. All of this will take months — and in the meantime, the Planning Commission keeps approving projects.

According to a startling document that the Planning Department posted on its Web site last week, some 30,000 housing units are in the pipeline — projects that have permits pending, have been approved, or are under construction. Nearly 5,000 units are already under construction, and applications for 142 projects, with a total of 9,305 units, are now before the department. That’s a whole lot of new construction, a whole lot of market-rate condos that don’t fit in with the city’s General Plan. Every one of the developers would like to get permission to go forward before any further limits are placed on housing construction.

And the Planning Commission seems happy to oblige: market-rate projects on César Chávez and Valencia streets both won the nod in the past few weeks, infuriating neighborhood activists who wanted to see more affordable housing. And to make matters worse, as Ammiano noted in introducing temporary controls for new housing, the commission rejected a proposal to collect fees of $12 per square foot to fund community amenities and mitigation. "Why the commission chose not to impose conditions on projects in the pipeline is beyond reason," Ammiano said.

His measure would deny permits for any new development in the eastern neighborhoods for the next 18 months or until a full eastern neighborhoods plan is approved by the Board of Supervisors. That makes perfect sense — everyone who wants to build housing in San Francisco knows that there are new zoning rules coming; there’s no surprise here. And if the commission is allowed to keep green-lighting market-rate housing without adequate planning for building the necessary parks, transportation infrastructure, police and fire stations, etc., the city will be absorbing as many as 30,000 new housing units without adequate mitigation.

There’s a larger question here too: as we pointed out last week (see "Our Three-Point Plan to Save San Francisco," 9/19/07), the current proposals in the eastern neighborhoods draft plans don’t do anywhere near enough to provide housing for working-class and low-income San Franciscans. The housing that’s in the pipeline will do nothing to bring down costs and will instead attract world travelers, speculators, and young Silicon Valley workers, who can afford small, expensive condos. That sort of housing policy doesn’t help fight sprawl or global warming, since it forces people who now work in San Francisco to move farther and farther out of town to find affordable places to live.

So the supervisors may decide to do the sane thing when they get the eastern neighborhoods plan and strictly limit new market-rate housing until the deficit in affordable units is under control. And there may be a ballot initiative to completely transform the way housing policy is set in this city (see "A Prop. M for Housing," 9/19/07). Allowing tens of thousands more luxury condo units to be built before the city has the chance to decide how it wants to handle future housing policy is a terrible idea.

Putting on hold projects that are almost certainly not consistent with the direction this city should go until there’s a chance to finalize the eastern neighborhoods plan is a no-brainer. The board should approve Ammiano’s proposal — with no special exceptions for any developer or any project.

A Prop. M for housing

-
0

EDITORIAL Big buildings are all the rage in San Francisco these days, and even the environmentalists often go along.

As many as 23 new complexes of 250 units or more, soaring from five or six stories to more than 1,000 feet, are on the drawing board, working their way through the city planning system, and more are almost certainly on their way. And yet there’s very little of the sort of outcry that we saw in the 1980s, when skyscrapers were turning downtown San Francisco into a wall of glass and steel cut by deep, dark, crowded canyons of streets.

This time around the high-rises aren’t, for the most part, office buildings. They’re condominiums — housing. And if you ask many of the major urban environmental groups, what you’ll hear is that density — more housing packed into existing urban areas — is good. Density fights sprawl. Housing near workplaces encourages walking and biking. Housing along transit corridors encourages people to get out of their cars. Urban density is the future: tightly packed cities full of people who don’t commute in private cars are our only hope to fight sprawl, congestion, and global warming. It’s called the new urbanism, and in San Francisco it goes like this: the only way to handle the influx of jobs and population growth is to build another 60,000 or so housing units, on every bit of available land.

But there’s a fundamental flaw in that argument.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that San Francisco is already the second-densest city in the United States. Leave aside the fact that density will come back to haunt us unless San Francisco is capable of creating real neighborhoods, with parks and open spaces, schools, new bus lines, police stations, and all of the other public goods that provide safety and quality of life — and that there’s nothing in any current planning document that shows how the massive, massive price tag for that sort of infrastructure will ever be paid. In a state where property taxes are strictly limited and civic infrastructure is already way overwhelmed and drastically underfunded, it would take extraordinary development fees on every new housing unit just to catch up, much less move ahead.

But let’s just suppose we could eliminate that problem. Would this sort of density be a good thing? No — not if the housing that gets built is mostly sold at prices set by the open market.

The density argument has to go beyond environmental theory and planning policy — because the issue in San Francisco isn’t how tall the buildings are or whether they’re along transit corridors. It’s about who gets to live there. And programs that offer some so-called inclusionary units, which mandate that 15 percent of the new housing be a little cheaper than the rest, aren’t going to cut it.

The facts are clear: the new housing that’s been built in San Francisco over the past 10 years — the downtown-centered, environmentally sound, dense housing — hasn’t helped eliminate commutes or fight global warming. The exact opposite has been happening: the people moving into these expensive, mostly small (and therefore non-family-friendly) units are world travelers who want a perch in San Francisco, retired empty nesters who aren’t going to work anyway, or reverse commuters who work in the tech industry in Silicon Valley. In many cases these new condos are creating more car trips: people who work out of town are buying them — and people who work in San Francisco are so badly priced out of the market that they’re moving farther and farther away.

We showed this two years ago when we went door-to-door in the new buildings to see who lived there and where they worked. Marc Salomon, a green policy wonk, has done a persuasive study using voter registration data that comes to a similar conclusion (see "Our Three-Point Plan to Save San Francisco," page 16). People who work in this city have to leave town to find housing they can afford; a lot of people who are moving into new housing here don’t work in town. It’s environmental psychosis.

There’s only one way to change that — the environmentalists and the housing activists and the progressive policy makers have to acknowledge an incontrovertible fact: sound environmental policy in an urban setting like San Francisco has to start with sound social and economic policy, and in San Francisco that means abandoning developer-driven housing and starting over. It means testing all new projects not on the basis of how close they are to jobs or bus lines or how many cars they will allow underneath or what their density is, but on the basis of how much the housing will cost and who will be able to rent or buy it.

And by those standards, none of the new high-rise buildings in the planning pipeline is even close to a good idea.

In this week’s cover story we describe an alternative approach to housing policy. It’s a three-part program, and the first two elements — preserving existing rental housing and finding a new funding mechanism for affordable-housing construction — are either already on the progressive agenda or rapidly moving forward. The third element is something new — but it deserves serious discussion.

It’s the idea, first put forward by Salomon, of adopting a comprehensive, citywide housing policy that would resemble the 1986 ballot measure known as Proposition M. Prop. M was designed to limit the impact of runaway commercial office development, and it set specific priority policies for all new projects, including the preservation of neighborhood character. It also strictly limited the amount of new office space that could be built in any one year and mandated that developers compete for the right to build. The projects that best suited the city’s needs (not the developers’ needs) would get the go-ahead; the others wouldn’t make the cut.

Imagine how that would work for housing. Say the voters passed a measure that limited new for-profit, market-rate housing to 500 units per year. The developers who wanted to win that lottery would have to come to the table with good offers — plenty of affordable set-asides, green buildings, structures that weren’t out of synch with the area, money for parks, schools, and other neighborhood services…. What could possibly be wrong with that?

San Francisco needs a cap on new housing for the rich and a mandate that all housing meet community needs. A well-crafted Prop. M–<\d>style ballot measure might energize the neighborhoods, force elected officials to talk seriously about housing … and save San Francisco. That ought to be on everyone’s agenda.*

The rate hike hurts the economy

-
0

EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s latest rate increase simply ratifies what’s been going on for many years: the private electric utility screws residential users and small businesses. If the California Public Utilities Commission goes along with the new rate plan, renters and homeowners will see their power bills go up more than 4 percent; small merchants will face a hike of nearly 7 percent. Meanwhile, rates for some of the biggest users will actually fall, by as much as 3.7 percent.

That’s pretty shoddy environmental policy. For years activists have argued that the biggest users should pay higher rates, since that would give them the strongest incentive to conserve. Cutting rates for, say, big companies that leave their lights on all night or manufacturers that refuse to invest in the latest conservation technology will only lead to more waste — and thus to more energy use and more global warming.

But it’s also bad economic policy. High utility rates hit hardest among those least able to afford them — and just as tax increases on the poor and small businesses disproportionately harm the economy, this rate hike will have lasting damage that goes beyond individual users.

Since San Francisco has a mild climate and a lot of residents and small businesses already work hard to conserve power, the rate hike may not seem catastrophic: if your monthly electric bill is $50, the additional charge will be just $2. But when that’s multiplied by more than 300,000 San Francisco households (and close to one million in Northern California), we’re talking significant money.

As we’ve demonstrated (see "The $620 Million Shakedown," 9/4/02), high PG&E rates suck hundreds of millions of dollars a year out of San Francisco and many times that out of Northern California. This rate hike will bounce that number even higher. And remember: San Francisco is the only city in the United States with a legal mandate, through the Raker Act, to establish a public power system.

And that ought to spark a new organized effort to bring public power to the city.

The city is already moving forward on Community Choice Aggregation, which will translate into lower rates — but will leave PG&E controlling the local grid. It’s a good first step, but the second step — a full takeover of the grid and a city-run power agency — needs to be on the agenda as an action item. It’s not clear how best to proceed, but there are great ideas out there. Sups. Tom Ammiano and Chris Daly, for example, have talked about requiring contractors to allow the city to lay electric cables whenever the streets are torn up, which would allow public power to proceed one neighborhood at a time.

But the economic impact of this rate hike ought to be enough evidence of the need to get rid of PG&E that organizers can start putting together concrete plans for the future.

PS If city hall proposed a 7 percent tax hike for small businesses, most would be screaming bloody murder and complaining about the larger economic impact. But the small-business community has never been actively involved in public power efforts. The rate hike is in effect a tax on those least able to pay, and small-business leaders ought to join the public power fight.

PPS The city, especially the Small Business Commission, needs to be fighting this late hike. And the commission should designate an ombudsperson to compile complaints about PG&E.

Petraeus’s War

-
0

EDITORIAL Nine Americans soldiers died in Iraq on Sept. 10, a few more than average, but overall it was just another typical day in a war that has cost a fortune, claimed the lives of 3,774 US troops and perhaps 600,000 Iraqis — and accomplished nothing.

While those (mostly) young people died in the desert, Gen. David Petraeus was in Washington, D.C., wearing a starched uniform shirt with four stars and seven rows of medals, telling members of Congress that the mission in Iraq is coming along just fine.

The surge, he insisted, is working, and there are signs of progress. He held up chart after chart showing that casualties and sectarian killings are down, that parts of Baghdad are becoming more secure — and that he expects to be able to end the surge and bring back the additional 30,000 troops by next summer.

What that means, in essence, is that the top general in Iraq thinks the United States will still need 130,000 troops in that country a year from now. That’s unacceptable — and it’s up to the Democratic leadership, which has been all too deferential to the military brass, to stand up and say so.

For months now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco), who prematurely took impeachment off the table, has been telling her antiwar constituents that she wanted to wait until she heard from Petraeus before taking any action on the war. Now she’s heard. He’s said he doesn’t see any end to the occupation. He’s mouthing platitudes that clearly aren’t true (the violence now is still far worse than it was four years ago) and presenting an image of Iraq that is on its face false (a remarkable new poll by ABC News, the BBC, and Japanese broadcaster NHK concludes that 70 percent of Iraqis think the situation has gotten worse in the past six months and the surge is a failure). And he’s talking about al Qaeda and Iran in tones that suggest that the administration is looking for excuses to expand the conflict even further.

Pelosi should not be allowed any more excuses. She needs to begin moving for an immediate and dramatic troop reduction with an aggressive schedule for complete withdrawal. And if she has to, she should publicly state that the Democrats in Congress are prepared to cut off funding for the war.

This latest report should be a call to arms for the antiwar movement, which needs to be visible and active on every front — including reminding the Democratic presidential candidates that moderate, cautious statements about ending the war simply aren’t good enough. Anyone who wants the nomination for George W. Bush’s job ought to be willing to stand up and say what the clear majority of Americans think: it’s time to bring the troops home, now.

Slow down the land rush

-
0

EDITORIAL At around 11:30 p.m. on the evening of Aug. 30, the San Francisco Planning Commission, its members bleary-eyed and half asleep, approved an eight-unit housing development at 736 Valencia St., despite the anguished pleas of the neighbors. The project includes no affordable housing and is legally designated as condominiums, which means it doesn’t fit the stated goals of the eastern neighborhoods’ planning process, which is supposed to promote affordable housing.

But that planning process is still under way, the proposals so far are weak, and, in the meantime, every developer in town is trying to sneak under the wire and get a project approved before the new rules take effect. And the Planning Commission is allowing that to happen. The supervisors need to intervene now, before it’s too late.

The blueprint for zoning in the city’s eastern neighborhoods — some 2,200 acres that include the central waterfront, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Showplace Square and East SoMa — is critical to the city’s future. Those areas include many of the last industrial sites and blue-collar jobs in the city — and developers are eyeing the land for a massive influx of high-end housing.

If there are going to be decent-paying jobs that don’t require advanced academic degrees in San Francisco, and affordable housing for low-income and working-class people, it will require careful use of this land.

And so far, the signs aren’t good.

The project at 736 Valencia is a perfect example. The commissioners failed to account for the fact that this relatively small project is part of a much larger land grab in the neighborhood; at least six other projects are in the pipeline for a small stretch of that street, and together they’ll have a significant impact on the area. The last thing the Mission — desperate for family and affordable housing — needs is a long strip of new million-dollar condos, built with little in the way of community amenities and little regard for the needs of residents. And yet the commissioners have made it very clear that they aren’t going to slow anything down.

In effect, that means the entire eastern neighborhoods plan — and the hope for a significant increase in affordable housing in town — could be almost pointless. By the time the plan is in place — early next year at the earliest, and that may be an optimistic timeline — a lot of the land may already be spoken for, and a lot of nonconforming projects may already be under construction.

Remember: every market-rate housing project takes away land that could be used for affordable housing. And at this rate, there is no way the city can come close to meeting the goals set in the General Plan, which call for more than 60 percent of new housing in town to be available at below-market rate.

The supervisors need to step in, fast, and pass legislation barring any new development in the eastern neighborhoods until a final plan is in place. The land rush is on, and time is running out.<\!s>*

Newsom’s tin cup

-
0

EDITORIAL We’re glad that Mayor Gavin Newsom is angry at the conditions in the city’s public housing projects. Denouncing the head of the Housing Authority as well as the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development made for good press, and it’s possible that Newsom will actually follow up and try to improve some of the third world conditions at places like Sunnyvale and Hunters View.

But his notion that the way to solve the problem is to bring rich people on a tour and hope they will donate money is embarrassingly wrong. It’s the sort of idea that sounds like it came out of the darkest recesses of the Bush White House — the notion that the wealthy will just come to the aid of the poor, volunteering to do what’s right, as soon as they recognize the need.

Let’s us be clear here: public housing has been a horrible mess for years now. If Newsom is suddenly upset about the conditions, it’s only because he hasn’t been paying much attention. As we reported back in October 2005 (see "A Place Called Despair," 10/19/05), the city’s housing projects have been an unimaginable mess: raw sewage flowing through the yards, toilets backing up into kitchen sinks, toxic mold, people living in apartments that are legally and morally uninhabitable, terrifying violence … the list goes on and on. And we haven’t heard a whole lot out of the Mayor’s Office until this sudden burst of righteous anger.

Let us also be clear: a few donations from a few of the many, many multimillionaires in San Francisco aren’t going to solve the problem. It’s pathetic to see the mayor of one of the world’s great cities begging for alms from the same people who have helped create the economic conditions that make it so difficult for the city to provide for its residents’ basic human needs.

There are exceptions, but for the most part, the wealthy and powerful of San Francisco — with the acquiescence of Newsom — have put their considerable resources to bear over the years pushing for low taxes, cuts in city services, and reductions in the money that goes to the poorest residents of this town. Care Not Cash, Newsom’s signature policy measure, was a cruel attack on welfare recipients. His budgets have put hefty raises for police officers above the needs of public housing residents. And now he acts like a little charity, a few crumbs from the swells, will turn things around.

If Newsom really wants to take his rich pals on tours of the city’s public housing wasteland, we can suggest a different educational monologue. Rather than trying to summon up some patrician pity, Newsom ought to say:

This is what the antitax policies that have fattened all your wallets have created. This is what happens when the city lets market-rate developers determine housing policy. This, frankly, is what you get when you rely on the private sector to set public policy.

And if he really wants to address the public housing problem, he should tell the powerful interests who support him that he wants their backing for some serious new revenue measures — say, a hefty increase in the real estate transfer tax — to fund affordable housing in San Francisco.

Test the Lennar site

-
0

EDITORIAL A committee of the San Francisco school board is discussing some sort of voluntary program to test for toxic exposure kids who attend facilities near Lennar Corp.’s construction project at Hunters Point. That’s set off a modest fury in the Department of Public Health, which insists there’s no threat to the public and no reason to test anyone. And the school district almost certainly doesn’t have the money to conduct a testing program for hundreds of students.

But the city should never have allowed this situation to develop to this point. And if there is real concern in the community (which there is) and any credible evidence that asbestos might be present in the air (which there is), then the Department of Public Health ought to do the only prudent thing and order a series of air and ground tests in the immediate vicinity of the Lennar site.

Lennar, as we’ve reported (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07), is running a massive Redevelopment Agency construction project on part of the old Hunters Point Shipyard. The construction stirs up a lot of dust, and there’s naturally occurring asbestos in the rock below. There may be other forms of toxic material in the dirt too, left by the military, which was never terribly good about keeping its bases clean.

The company was supposed to do air monitoring near the site; state law requires stringent tests whenever construction that could stir up asbestos takes place near an area where children congregate, and there are schools and rec centers right near the Lennar project. But the subcontractor handling the tests bungled them, so for 13 months there was no data on air quality at all.

The Muhammad University of Islam, a private school that adjoins the site, has been demanding better monitoring and asking for students to be relocated if the site isn’t safe. Some of the tactics of school representatives have been questionable: Department of Public Health workers going door to door in the neighborhood report that school supporters followed and intimidated them. And since there’s naturally occurring asbestos in rock, and the substance is used in products like car brakes, it’s entirely possible that there’s some presence of the deadly fibers in the air anyway, unrelated to anything Lennar may have done wrong. The Department of Public Health wants to avoid a needless panic.

But that doesn’t change the basic point: if there’s toxic dust in the air, and kids are being exposed, the public needs to know about it.

There is no safe level for asbestos exposure. The stuff can linger in the ground for years, and if it’s even slightly stirred up, it gets into the air, and breathing it is directly linked to fatal lung disease. It wouldn’t be that hard for a city team to take a few samples from the soil around the construction site; if the stuff is pretty thick on the ground, then kids clearly shouldn’t be playing there, and if the levels are even minor, then parents ought to be aware.

The supervisors failed on a 6–<\d>5 vote to approve a measure that would have called on Lennar to shut down construction, but they can certainly direct the Department of Public Health to conduct some basic safety tests — and make the results public.<\!s>*

Harm reduction in the park

-
0

EDITORIAL Anyone with any sense knows that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s attempts to clear homeless people out of Golden Gate Park won’t work. It’s been tried before, under a series of mayors, and in the end, as long as there’s no suitable housing available, the park will have long-term residents. You can sweep them out one day and pack the park with cops the next, but eventually the extra attention will die down and the homeless will be back.

But in the meantime, as J.B. Powell reports in this issue, the backlash from the crackdown is hitting facilities like the needle-exchange service in the Haight. And that’s a big problem.

The mayor can play cat-and-mouse games with the homeless all he wants, but needle exchange is a crucial public health issue. Dirty needles spread AIDS, hepatitis, and other diseases; this is literally about life and death, and the medical evidence is clear that needle-exchange programs help. They also take a whole lot of dirty needles off the streets (and out of the park): drug users not only obtain clean syringes at the exchange, they also drop off their used ones.

Despite the best efforts of the needle-exchange programs, however, there are going to be users who simply inject, then look for a place to toss their rig. That’s why Newsom ought to tell the Recreation and Park Department to look seriously at putting safe, secure disposal facilities in or around Golden Gate Park.

This isn’t a radical idea — Santa Cruz, New York, Baltimore, Vancouver, and many other cities provide needle-disposal boxes in areas with high drug use. That keeps a lot of the needles from being discarded in areas where people and animals walk and play — another serious public health concern.

But Newsom and the folks at Rec and Park refuse to consider the idea — because they don’t think it would be politically popular. That’s a terrible way to approach a health crisis.

Yes, some park neighbors would complain about the presence of canisters designed to hold hazardous medical waste. And it’s possible, of course, that vandals could attack the sites and spread dangerous needles all over. But those downsides are relatively modest compared to what we’re facing right now: dirty needles are already being discarded in the park. And everyone, including city gardeners and maintenance workers, is at risk from an accidental needle stick.

The city has an official "harm-reduction" policy in place; since it’s not possible to stop all drug use, the city’s supposed to do whatever possible to prevent contagion and save lives. Secure needle-disposal facilities in and around Golden Gate Park won’t solve every drug-related social problem, but they could help save a few lives. And that makes the idea eminently worthy, whatever the political costs.<\!s>*

Supes should run redevelopment

-
0

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, scrambling to blunt community criticism of the Redevelopment Agency’s activities in Bayview–Hunters Point, has appointed a new agency director, Fred Blackwell. But the problem was not with the top of the agency (the outgoing director, Marcia Rosen, was neither corrupt nor incompetent) but rather with the entire direction that redevelopment has taken in San Francisco under several generations of mayors. It’s time to take seriously the suggestion of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — that the agency be taken out of the mayor’s control and given to the district-elected supervisors.

Redevelopment is a powerful tool that has been terribly misused all over the nation, and the scars in San Francisco are real and lasting. A rapacious Redevelopment Agency determined to wipe out low-income housing devastated huge swaths of the Western Addition and South of Market in the 1960s, and the communities still haven’t fully recovered. Some people argue that the entire program should be abolished — that redevelopment should be consigned to the dustbin of bad urban history.

But at a time when it’s terribly hard for cities like San Francisco to raise money for affordable housing, basic infrastructure (see accompanying editorial), and ambitious programs like public power, the legal advantages of redevelopment are too good to give up. A state-chartered redevelopment agency sells bonds and raises money with nothing to back up the bonds except the projected increase in property taxes expected from improving a blighted area. The city can’t do that on its own; if it could, then raising, say, a billion dollars for affordable housing would be relatively simple.

In theory, the redevelopment agency could also fund municipal wi-fi, public power, and all sorts of other major projects.

The problem, of course, is that a lot of people in low-income neighborhoods don’t trust redevelopment — and given the history, it’s hard to blame them. But part of the essential problem with the Redevelopment Agency in past years has been its utter lack of accountability; the Western Addition and SoMa plans were drawn up in secret and executed with little regard for community input.

As long as San Francisco supervisors are elected by district, they will be, by definition, more accountable, closer to the neighborhoods, and less corrupted by money than any citywide elected official. Giving the board control over redevelopment is a far better model.

Plenty of cities allow their legislature to run redevelopment. The city councils of both Oakland and Berkeley also function as the directors of those cities’ redevelopment agencies. It’s time to move San Francisco into that column. *

A vote on public broadband

-
0

EDITORIAL It’s annoying that San Francisco progressives and good-government voters will have to spend time and money this fall trying to defeat Mayor Gavin Newsom’s phony wi-fi initiative. It won’t be easy, either: the mayor is, in the words of one blogger, Sasha Magee, promising free ice cream. He’s telling San Franciscans that they can have wireless Internet access everywhere in town without paying a dime. Hard to get people to turn down that deal.

But the mayor isn’t telling the truth — and when this battle is over, the progressives need to offer a much better alternative.

For many people, the promise of Internet access in the mayor’s plan will prove to be entirely false. The wi-fi deal that Newsom has put together will probably work fine for people checking their e-mail on laptops from park benches downtown and outdoor tables at sidewalk cafés. But people who live or work deep inside buildings, far from windows and walls, won’t get any signal at all. And anyone who lives or works more than two stories up won’t get a signal either.

And of course, the free signal, when it works, won’t be fast enough to do much but (slowly) check your e-mail, if there are no attachments to download. You want real broadband, you’re going to have to pay a monthly fee.

That, as we have reported over and over, is because this is a private-sector deal: the network (if it’s actually built) will be owned by EarthLink and Google, and the two companies will be trying to make money off it. They’ll do that by selling premium service (that is, service at a rate most people would consider tolerable) and by targeting everyone on the network with ads.

Although the ballot measure is vague and legally meaningless, it will be the vote of confidence Newsom can use to push the Board of Supervisors to approve his EarthLink-Google deal — that is, unless, as has been widely suggested in the business media, EarthLink shifts direction and decides not to pursue any more municipal wi-fi deals and the city is left holding the bag. So advocates of a true universal broadband alternative need to start working now to present another, better option.

And the best way to do that is to begin drafting a comprehensive citywide broadband initiative for the June 2008 ballot.

Broadband access is and ought to be part of the city’s basic civil infrastructure — something that, like water (and, someday, electricity), is offered through a publicly owned and controlled system at the lowest possible rates. Low-cost broadband would be an immense advantage to local businesses and a huge convenience for local residents and (unlike Newsom’s joke of a deal) would actually do something to address the digital divide.

Wi-fi would be a part of the package, of course, but the plan should also include a citywide fiber-optic network that would bring reliable, fast, and technologically up-to-date Internet access to every address in the city. And while it would cost the city some money up front to build it, the system would almost certainly pay for itself in just a few years. And it could be paired with the construction of a citywide public power system.

Next June may not be a high-turnout election statewide, but in San Francisco, Democrats will be out in force with one of the most contested primaries in local history, pitting Assemblymember Mark Leno against Sen. Carole Migden for the Third District senate seat. Both candidates will be pushing voter turnout — and both can be pressured to support publicly owned municipal wi-fi as a campaign issue (and to back the growing antiprivatization agenda in San Francisco).

Defeating the mayor’s plan is just step one — and the time to start with step two is today.<\!s>*

PG&E’s latest lies

-
0

EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which has made a lucrative practice over the years of co-opting environmentalists, is launching one of its boldest and most disgraceful initiatives yet — a campaign seeking to convince the Potrero Hill and Bayview–Hunters Point communities to oppose the city’s new peaker power plants by arguing that they’ll add pollution to the air.

Remember: This is the company that for many years ran the single worst source of air pollution in the region, a foul power plant that was finally shut down a few years back after a long and bitter battle. This is the same company that operates a nuclear power plant on an earthquake fault. The same company that polluted the wells in Hinkley, as depicted in the movie Erin Brockovich. This is a company that’s been lying to communities like Bayview–Hunters Point and Potrero for decades. Nobody should trust PG&E today.

We explained the background last week (see "Peaker Plants and SF’s Energy Future," 8/8/07), but the summary is this: San Francisco wants to install three small-scale power plants at the foot of Potrero Hill. The city’s argument: unless the peakers, which would provide backup power at peak demand times, are in place, the state’s regulators won’t allow the shutdown of the dirty Mirant power plant in the same neighborhood.

Some environmentalists, including San Francisco Public Utilities Commission member Adam Werbach, say San Francisco doesn’t need the peakers or the Mirant plant, but the powerful Independent System Operator, which controls the state’s power grid, disagrees.

That means Mirant will continue to spew poison unless the peakers operate — and PG&E is trying to stir up opposition with the threat that the neighborhood will wind up with both the peakers and Mirant. PG&E, of course, won’t own the peakers; they’ll be run by a company called J-Power USA for 10 years, at which point (if they’re still even needed) they’ll revert to the city. So the private utility is trying to stop the new plants to avoid future competition.

It’s a cynical ploy, but it might be effective — and there’s an easy way the city can stop it. The supervisors, the mayor, and the city attorney should simply announce that the contract with J-Power will state that the peakers can’t operate, even for a second, until the Mirant plant is shut down for good. It’s a simple, clean solution; what is everyone waiting for? *

PS As Amanda Witherell reports in this issue, the public San Joaquin Valley Power Authority has taken legal action against PG&E, charging that the company is vioutf8g state law by interfering with the creation of a Community Choice Aggregation program. There’s some solid evidence that PG&E is doing the same thing in San Francisco, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera should immediately open an investigation into whether this city should file its own complaint against PG&E.

Oppose Don Fisher’s museum

-
0

EDITORIAL Not long after the US Army announced it no longer needed the Presidio for a military base, a group of powerful San Francisco business leaders began eyeing what would become the first privatized national park in America. Among the businesses aiming to grab a piece of the immensely valuable real estate were Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Transamerica Corp.; among the individuals was the founder of the Gap, a Republican named Don Fisher.

Fisher helped then–US representative Nancy Pelosi pull off an astonishing feat: she took more than 1,200 acres of land earmarked by federal law as a national park and handed it over to real estate developers (see "Stolen Base," 5/8/96). Fisher, who became one of the first members of the private board that manages the Presidio, was around to help George Lucas build a massive business park on the site — and pick up a $60 million tax break in the process.

Now Fisher, who along with his billions has amassed a pretty impressive collection of contemporary art, wants to build a gigantic private museum right in the heart of the park, at the site of the old post. His plan would drop a 100,000-square-foot Battlestar Galactica on the old parade grounds, wiping out a sizable amount of open space. The museum would be on public land, but he’d run it himself, in his own way, with no public oversight.

This is a terrible idea, and San Franciscans ought to be up in arms about it.

According to reports in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fisher has been looking for some time for a way to display his art collection, and he has talked to people at the existing big museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the de Young. But those talks broke down — in part, we’re told by sources, because Fisher didn’t want the professional curators and museum directors calling any shots. He wanted complete control over the art — control over where it was hung, when it was displayed, who got to see it, etc. The folks who run those cultural institutions are too polite to say so in public, but they don’t generally go for that sort of demand. So Fisher did what billionaires around the country are starting to do: he decided to build his own museum.

That’s his right, of course, and if he’d sought a spot, say, South of Market near SFMOMA, it might not be a bad thing. But the Presidio is entirely the wrong place for this sort of institution.

For starters, there’s no easy way to get there. Transit to the main post at the Presidio is very limited — one Muni line, which runs infrequently. No BART, no light rail — nothing of the sort of access you would want for a major public attraction. Car access is through the crowded Marina neighborhood, and the museum would no doubt build a huge parking garage, meaning the park and the surrounding areas would be inundated with cars. That alone would be a violation of the spirit of all the nation’s parks, which are trying desperately to reduce the number of car visits. There are no other cultural attractions around, so visitor traffic to Fisher’s museum would have no spillover benefits for any other museums.

And he’s talking about a whopper of a structure. There’s no way to gently insert a building that big into the park; it can’t blend in with the existing structures or the natural scenery. It’s just going to stick out like a bloated, gangrenous sore thumb, ruining the view and the historical nature of the area.

The private Presidio Trust has sole discretion over the proposal, but city officials can speak up, loudly. The Board of Supervisors should pass a resolution opposing the museum, the arts community should demand that it be relocated, and the public at large ought to tell the trust and Fisher that his personal memorial edifice isn’t welcome in the park.*

Peaker plants and SF’s energy future

-
0

EDITORIAL Over the next few weeks, the Board of Supervisors will be looking at two major electric-power programs that could add a lot of new generation capacity (and possibly new pollution) to southeast San Francisco and a new source of backup power from out of town. Both projects seem to have broad support at City Hall.

The main questions that city officials ought to be asking about plans for a new power plant in Potrero Hill and a new power cable to bring electricity across the bay are:

•Do we really need either?

•What is motivating the powerful but little-known state agency to demand that San Francisco — the only US city with a federal public power mandate — prepare for a future in which energy use continues to grow, conservation lags, the private sector controls the city’s power supply, and the city’s plans for cutting power use are a failure?

The California Independent System Operator, known as Cal-ISO, was created in the wake of the wretched energy deregulation plan that the State Legislature concocted in 1996. The outfit, run by a five-member board appointed by the governor, is supposed to ensure that every part of California has enough electricity — now and in the future.

But the board members are almost all former utility executives, including a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. official, and like most utility executives, they seem to believe that the only track for electricity use is upward.

So Cal-ISO has informed San Francisco that it doesn’t have enough power on hand to make it through 2010. That means the city needs to either find a new way to import more power (the only significant current pathway is a cable that runs up the Peninsula and is owned by PG&E) or build more power plants inside its limits.

The problem with building more plants, particularly the kind of plants Cal-ISO likes — fossil fuel burners that can run day and night without interruption — is that San Francisco residents are trying to get rid of the last big polluting plant, Mirant Corp.’s facility at the foot of Potrero Hill, not build more.

So the latest solution involves the installation of three natural gas–<\d>fired generators known as peakers, which would run only when demand is high and other sources (including the solar facility the city plans to build) aren’t operating. The mayor and the supervisors are referring to these plants as "city-owned generation," making this sound like a big step on the way to public power.

And on one level, it is: San Francisco won the turbines (which are essentially big jet engines) as part of a settlement with Williams Energy after the energy crisis, and they could be part of a municipal utility. But the current plans call for the Chicago subsidiary of a Tokyo company, J Power, to build the structures that would house the turbines and hook them up to the power lines, then operate the plants for 10 years. Only then would they revert to city ownership.

So already San Francisco is waffling on the public power issue. (Why, for example, can’t the city build the facilities itself and hire its own engineers to hook up the turbines and run them? Why do we even need a private, outside partner?)

Then there’s the environmental impact. In theory, if the peakers only ran a few hours a day, they would spew less junk into the air than the Mirant plant currently does. And Cal-ISO is only willing to allow the Mirant plant to shut down if San Francisco develops some other form of firm local generation. But there’s nothing in writing anywhere to guarantee that the foul exhaust from Mirant would cease when the peakers fired up; in fact, it’s possible that the southeast part of the city could wind up living with both.

The other project, called the Trans Bay Cable, would be a privately owned venture carrying power from Pittsburg across the bay and into San Francisco. The power plants that would feed the cable are largely nonrenewables, and although they’re outside town, this is hardly an environmental advance.

The big question, though, is why San Francisco has to go through this exercise.

Cal-ISO predicts that the city will run short of power in a few years — but that forecast is awfully suspect. For starters, the entire projected shortfall is five megawatts in 2010, growing by 10 MW per year after that. And the city’s projections for Community Choice Aggregation suggest that conservation measures can cheaply reduce demand, by 107 MW, over the same period. Conservation, also known as demand-side management, is by far the least expensive and most environmentally sound alternative.

In fact, with an aggressive conservation plan and an aggressive solar program, it’s possible that the city could handle the local load just fine without the Mirant plant or the peakers.

That, of course, would leave much of the power in the hands of PG&E — and make the city too heavily reliant on the one Peninsula cable. That’s what makes the giant extension cord from Pittsburg seem so appealing. But the city has also been talking about extending its power line from Hetch Hetchy, which now ends in Newark, across the bay — and that city-owned, city-run alternative would make far more sense. (The company that would own the Trans Bay Cable, Babcock and Brown, has offered San Francisco a handful of cash, a total of $75 million over 25 years, to make the deal sound sweeter. But that’s birdseed compared with the revenue the city would get by building its own line and moving to create a full public power system.)

Infrastructure decisions like these tie the city down for many years to come, and the supervisors need to be careful. They should, at a minimum:

•Conduct an independent study, outside the purview of Cal-ISO, to see what the city’s energy needs really will be in the future and how they can be met with renewables and conservation.

•Direct the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to prepare a plan to build the peaker facilities as a city project, with no private-sector partner getting control of the power for 10 years.

•Guarantee the people of Bayview and the other southeast neighborhoods that if the peakers are installed, they won’t be fired up until the Mirant plant is shut down.

But there’s a larger point here. San Francisco has never had a detailed energy-options study that looks at how the city overall should address its energy needs for the next 25 years. A study like that would consider everything from tidal and wind power to public power, infrastructure needs, and extending the Hetch Hetchy line across the bay to CCA.

Instead, at the bidding of an unaccountable state agency filled with people who think like private-utility executives, the city is making a bunch of piecemeal moves that will create a patchwork of programs that may not be the right ones, may not be properly connected, and may not even be needed.

The only outfit that’s demanding we move quickly here is Cal-ISO — and before city officials decide to let the governor’s people determine our energy future, City Attorney Dennis Herrera should prepare a memo on what legal authority, if any, Cal-ISO has over the city and how San Francisco can defy that agency and determine its own future.*

Fixing Muni — and traffic

-
0

EDITORIAL There is much to like and some things not to like in Sup. Aaron Peskin’s Muni reform measure, but the most important thing the measure does is demonstrate that Muni won’t get better unless the city also works on controlling car traffic in congested areas. It’s a critical policy issue that’s going to be the subject of a heated fall ballot campaign — and so far Mayor Gavin Newsom is planted squarely on the wrong side.

Nobody can dispute the motivation behind Peskin’s charter amendment: Muni is a train wreck right now, with service far below acceptable levels. Something has to change, and the way he’s proposed it, the system would get an additional $26 million in guaranteed city money, and Muni management would have some expanded ability to set performance standards and require the staff to meet them.

We would, of course, prefer that the dedicated Muni money come from some new revenue stream, not from the existing General Fund. And we’ve always believed that the supervisors and the mayor should have to sign off specifically on any Muni fare hike. But overall, a lot of what Peskin is proposing makes sense — and now that he has worked out the problems that labor initially had with the measure, it has a good chance of winning this fall.

The mayor thought so too and had endorsed the proposal — until Peskin took the critical step of adding in restrictions on downtown parking. That would undermine the plans of big developers and their allies, who want the right to add a lot more parking spaces and curb openings for their luxury condo projects downtown.

The developers, with the help of Gap founder and power broker Don Fisher, are trying to get their own ballot measure passed, one that would greatly expand downtown parking. That’s exactly the wrong direction in which San Francisco should move.

In fact, what the city needs is a policy directive aimed at reducing the number of cars downtown and keeping the total number in the city from rising. Current planning documents and projections are all based on the assumption that more cars will pour into the city over the next 10 years, and that may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it doesn’t need to be.

San Francisco is one of the most environmentally aware cities in the world. And as more residential development comes in downtown, there’s absolutely no reason why this city can’t stick to its transit-first policy and set a goal of reducing congestion in the urban core.

Others cities are doing it. London has had tremendous success with restrictions on driving in its central City (and a stiff price tag for doing it). New York is looking seriously at congestion pricing, and San Francisco ought to be pursuing Sup. Jake McGoldrick’s idea of bringing the concept here.

And the cold, hard fact is that fewer parking spaces means fewer cars. If the value of downtown high-rise condos is that they will encourage people to walk or take transit to work, why fill the basements with parking garages?

If San Franciscans want Muni buses to be able to negotiate rapidly and efficiently through the downtown area, why shouldn’t the city do everything possible to clear some of the car traffic out of the way?

Newsom was willing to support the Muni measure — and knew in advance, Peskin tells us, that parking limits were going to be part of it — but the minute his downtown backers started to yelp, he backed away. Now the mayor is in the position of opposing Muni reform — in the name of helping developers build more parking in a city that already has too many cars. That’s a terrible place to be for a mayor who tries to portray himself as an environmentalist. *

Say goodbye to Earthlink

-
0

EDITORIAL EarthLink, the big technology firm that has been negotiating with San Francisco to build a free wireless network for the city and its residents, just announced a change in corporate strategy. On July 26, CEO Rolla P. Huff told stock analysts that the company would no longer pursue the sort of deal that San Francisco wants; instead, Huff said, EarthLink wants each municipality to "step up" and become an "anchor tenant."

That would mean San Francisco forking over millions of dollars a year to guarantee EarthLink some baseline revenue. It’s highly unlikely that the Board of Supervisors would agree to that sort of deal.

There’s no immediate indication of what this means for San Francisco. Some analysts think that the side deal between EarthLink and Google will provide enough revenue (with Google as the anchor tenant) to satisfy Huff’s demands. That’s impossible to say, however: the deal between the two tech companies remains secret (as does too much of this contract).

But there’s a chance EarthLink will pull the plug on San Francisco — and if it doesn’t, the company has made clear that it doesn’t want this sort of contract and won’t put much in the way of resources into making it work.

The way the deal was supposed to go down, EarthLink would provide free, if slow, wireless service all over town — although it wouldn’t work above the second floor of most buildings and might be difficult to use inside a lot of houses. A faster version would be available for a fee. And Google would sell ads based on users’ search terms.

We never liked the plan anyway. It seems foolish for San Francisco to turn such an essential part of its future infrastructure over to a private company. And now that EarthLink may be walking away, the supervisors ought to immediately pursue plans for a municipal broadband network.

Wi-fi is, and ought to be, only a small part of that plan. Wi-fi has limited use and range and is hardly a perfect solution to the digital divide. Sups. Tom Ammiano and Chris Daly have proposed that the city put fiber-optic cables under the streets anytime anyone is tearing up the pavement for other utility work. There are already public cables linking some city offices, and while creating a total network of underground fiber that could reach the door of every home and business would be a big undertaking, it would more than pay for itself in the long term.

While Mayor Gavin Newsom will be looking to blame the board for demanding more concessions from EarthLink, the company has created its own problems. And the Mayor’s Office, by agreeing to terms that let EarthLink and Google keep far too much information confidential and by defying the requests of community activists for more information about the deal, just made things worse.

At this point, with the economic model that Newsom and EarthLink identified losing credibility, the supervisors should make it clear: No more private contractors. No more outsourcing infrastructure. San Francisco needs municipal broadband — with wi-fi and fiber-optic cables — and the time to get started is now. *

No waterfront highrises

-
0

EDITORIAL We’ve been concerned for decades about development along San Francisco’s waterfront, and with good reason: the Port of San Francisco has done a generally miserable job of managing one of the city’s most significant resources. In the 1960s and 1970s, the port effectively gave up on the shipping industry, losing container freight (and plenty of good blue-collar jobs) to Oakland. Development proposals for port property, particularly under then-mayor Willie Brown’s administration, were largely horrible.

And now the port wants the state to turn over development rights for some key seawall-protected properties, which could be turned into very-high-end housing with ground-floor retail. The port needs the money for historic preservation and is promising to build some waterfront parks, which is all well and good. But when it comes to building expensive housing along the waterfront, we’re dubious right off the bat — and even more dubious now that Port Director Monique Moyer is howling about the prospect of a 40-foot height limit.

Sen. Carole Migden has introduced legislation, Senate Bill 815, that would authorize the port to lease out for development lots that are now part of a state trust. But at the request of neighborhood groups, she wants height limits included in the deal as part of state law.

The port argues that 40 feet is too low for, say, three stories of housing above a storefront. Besides, port staffers say, zoning issues should be a local decision, and the state should hand over the lots and let the city decide on height, bulk, density, and appropriate use. In principle, we’d tend to agree with that — but the City Planning Department today is a disaster, with every key decision driven by developers, and the last thing this city needs is a string of high-rise condos on the waterfront.

If the port’s land is going to be developed, it has to be done with tremendous sensitivity, clear public benefits — and inflexible, mandated height limits. And if the money is going to go to parks, we’d like to see specifics, in advance: which projects will pay for which parks, and where — and what guarantees do we have that they’ll ever be completed?

This is the kind of decision that will affect the city for a century or more. Migden’s right: we should take it slowly and carefully. *

Ending the SFUSD’s gag order

-
0

EDITORIAL San Francisco’s new school superintendent officially started work last week, taking over a district with a long list of serious problems. Carlos Garcia knows exactly what he’s getting into: he was a high school principal in this city before moving on to the top jobs in Fresno and later Las Vegas. He announced that his top priority will be addressing the achievement gap — the glaring fact that black and Latino students don’t do nearly as well as white and Asian students at any level of the San Francisco Unified School District. And he insisted that he wants to listen to the concerns of the community.

There are plenty of tough assignments on his immediate agenda, including the fact that enrollment is declining and the district so far has addressed that by closing schools. There should be a coherent, effective central plan to try to raise enrollment instead. Closing schools is always an ugly process, and Garcia should try to avoid wading into it this year, until he’s been able to put together, with input from the community, a long-term enrollment and facilities-use plan.

It’s going to take months, even years, to begin to come to terms with and work on the district’s most serious problems, but there’s one simple step Garcia could take — today — that would demonstrate his willingness to work with the community, show his faith in the teachers and administrators, and set a new and very different direction from that of his predecessor.

Garcia should publicly revoke the district’s gag order.

Under former superintendent Arlene Ackerman, no SFUSD employee was allowed to talk to the media or make statements about the district in a public forum without clearing it, in advance, with the district’s public relations staff. That put a serious chill on open discussion within the district, left teachers, principals, and other staff fearful of pointing out problems to reporters, and left the distinct impression that Ackerman would not allow any negative information to leak out of district headquarters.

It also set a terrible standard for district communications and ensured that the public relations office, with a yearly budget of $250,000, was doing little more than buffing the superintendent’s image and hiding data from the media.

Garcia can turn things around in two minutes with a quick memo to all staff. It ought to say:

"While we would appreciate it if district staff didn’t make statements or comments on behalf of the administration unless they’re authorized to do so, any employee of the San Francisco Unified School District is free to express personal opinions, provide information that is in their purview, discuss issues they face in their workplace, and otherwise freely communicate with the press and public without prior notification or approval from district headquarters."

That’s not so hard, is it? *

Gutting campaign reform

-
0

EDITORIAL A bill that could gut many local campaign finance laws is zipping through the legislature with the support of both the Republican and Democratic parties — and only a few activists seem to be paying attention. We’ve written about the bill, AB 1430 by Assemblymember Martin Garrick (R–San Diego), on the politics blog at www.sfbg.com. It has already cleared the State Assembly, 77–0, and is headed to the State Senate floor, where only one member — Carole Migden of San Francisco — has come out in opposition.

The Republicans and the Democrats love this bill because it would allow their parties to use unlimited amounts of money to support local candidates. That’s become increasingly common in this state; when cities set strict limits on contributions to political candidates, the candidates simply ask their big-money backers to give the money to the state Republican or Democratic Party — which then funnels the laundered, uncontrolled, and often unreported cash into local campaigns.

In fact, the bill comes from the San Diego GOP, which is angry that the San Diego Ethics Commission tried to crack down on nearly a million dollars in unregulated money that went to local races last year.

The bill talks about "membership communications" — as if the parties were simple nonprofits that wanted to send newsletters to their members. That’s not what’s going on at all, and everyone with any sense knows it. Here’s the real story: while the federal and state governments have refused to do any real campaign finance reform, cities and counties all over California have tried to fill the gap. The San Francisco Ethics Commission — for all of its obviously failings (see "Whose Ethics?," 7/11/07) — has the authority and the mandate to regulate local campaigns far more tightly than the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission. So the big donors, working through the state parties, are trying to figure out ways to circumvent local rules.

The conservatives in the State Legislature love to talk about local control when it comes to workplace regulations, environmental protection, and schools — but when a bill like this comes along and threatens to eviscerate local control, they utter not a peep. Nor, for the most part, do the liberals, who are aligned with the Democratic Party and don’t want to defy its mandates.

The San Francisco Ethics Commission has asked Mayor Gavin Newsom and the supervisors to oppose this bill, but the board has taken no action, and the mayor says he actually supports the bill. That’s a disgrace: at the very least, the supervisors should pass a resolution opposing AB 1430 and force the mayor to veto it.

Migden, after talking to the folks at California Common Cause, the public interest campaign organization, took a bold stand against the measure, and she deserves tremendous credit for that. Now the rest of the senate — starting with Leland Yee of San Francisco and President Pro Tem Don Perata of Oakland — needs to go along and kill this monster. *

Billboard sleaze

-
0

EDITORIAL Clear Channel is one of the biggest media companies in the world, with more than 1,100 radio stations, more than 40 TV stations, and a massive outdoor advertising network with billboards in more than 20 countries. This conglomerate, much despised for undermining independent broadcasting in this country, does business with a lot of government agencies, including the city and county of San Francisco. Clear Channel maintains the city’s bus shelters and runs the city’s pedestal-mounted newsrack program, and sells ads on the shelters and the backs of news racks.

So when Clear Channel does a favor for a local politician, it ought to raise eyebrows immediately.

That’s what’s happened with Sen. Carole Migden. Just as she’s fighting to defend local campaign reform laws (see "Gutting Campaign Reform," this page) Migden has been the recipient of tends of thousands of dollars’ worth of free billboard ads from Clear Channel. The ads were facilitated by local company executive Michael Colbruno, a former Migden aide who remains close to the senator.

We’ve been concerned about the billboards since they went up. At first, as we reported on www.sfbg.com, Colbruno refused to say who had paid for the boards, insisting they were independent issue-advocacy ads supporting Migden’s stances on the war in Iraq and rebuilding the state’s infrastructure. Migden came clean a few days later and told us that Clear Channel had, in fact, provided the ad space free; she added that her campaign had paid for the printing, although her campaign manager, Richie Ross, now denies that.

At the very least it’s awfully close to a legal issue: donors who sponsor issue-advocacy ads that promote individual candidates can’t coordinate those efforts with the candidate’s campaign. Otherwise the expenditure isn’t independent at all and ought to be reported as a campaign contribution.

Of course Clear Channel can’t contribute tens of thousands of dollars to Migden; the maximum contribution under state law is $3,600, and the company has already given her $2,500. "Therefore, presuming that the value of several billboards throughout San Francisco exceeds $1,000 dollars, Clear Channel has made a contribution to Carole Migden in excess of legal limits," states a July 16 memo from Reed and Davidson, a Los Angeles law firm hired by Migden’s primary opponent, Assemblymember Mark Leno. (Read the entire memo at .

Migden may not be the only one involved in this Clear Channel scam; the company regularly sells or donates ads to local political candidates, and it’s entirely possible that others have gotten either discounts or partial gifts from the conglomerate.

For starters we’d prefer that Migden, and everyone else who’s running as a progressive in this town, eschew contributions from Clear Channel. But if such a powerful local operator is handing out favors, the details need to be made public, fully and immediately.

What was the actual value of what the company gave Migden? How closely was the deal coordinated with her campaign? What other local candidates have gotten free or cut-rate ads from this outfit?

The San Francisco Ethics Commission and the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission ought to investigate — and if it turns out that what Migden has done is legal, then the State Legislature needs to figure out a way to ban it. Meanwhile, the San Francisco supervisors, who are about to approve a new bus shelter contract, should demand that Clear Channel first release a full list of its billboard beneficiaries. *

Needed: a campaign against privatization

-
0

EDITORIAL Of all the cities in the United States, San Francisco ought to be most aware of the perils of privatization. Much of the city burned down in 1906 in part because the private Spring Valley Water Co. hadn’t kept up its lines and thus was unable to provide enough water for firefighting. A few years later, in one of the greatest privatization scandals in American history, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. stole what was supposed to be the city’s publicly owned electricity, costing the local coffers untold hundreds of millions over the past 80 years.

This is a city that votes 80 percent Democratic and has always opposed the Ronald Reagan–George H.W. Bush–George W. Bush agenda. A large part of the local economy depends on public employment (the city, the state, the federal government, and the University of California are by far the largest employers in town, dwarfing any of the biggest private-sector companies).

And yet Mayor Gavin Newsom, who likes to say he’s a progressive, is pushing an astonishing package of privatization measures that would shift public property, resources, and infrastructure into the hands of for-profit businesses. He’s talking about privatizing the golf courses, some city parks, and even Camp Mather. He’s promoting a tidal-energy deal that would give PG&E control of the power generated in a public waterway. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop the ongoing PG&E–Raker Act scandal. And he’s determined to hand over a key part of the city’s future infrastructure to Google and EarthLink (see Editor’s Notes, p. 1).

This nonsense has to stop.

It’s hard to fight privatization battle by battle. Every single effort is a tough campaign in itself; the companies that want to make money off San Francisco’s public assets typically have plenty of cash to throw around. They’re slick and sophisticated, hire good lobbyists, and generally get excellent press from the local dailies. And it works: even board president Aaron Peskin, who generally knows better, is now talking about accepting the private wi-fi deal.

So what this city needs is a unified, organized campaign against privatization.

When Reagan arrived in the White House in 1981, the single biggest item on the agenda of his political backers was an attack on the public sector. The way the right-wingers saw it, government took money from the rich and gave it to the less well-off. Government regulated business activity, costing major corporations a lot of money. Government — "the beast," they called it — had to be beaten back, demonized, and starved.

So the Reaganites used their top-rate public relations machine to make the public sector appear riddled with waste and fraud. They cut taxes, ran up record (for the time) deficits, and forced Congress to eliminate a lot of social programs. More and more of what the government once did was turned over to the private sector — the way the radical right liked it.

That political agenda still rules Washington, D.C., where even a fair amount of the war in Iraq has been privatized, turned over to contractors who are making huge profits while Iraqi and American kids die.

The attack on government has worked so well that even a very modest plan by Bill Clinton to create a national health care system was killed by the insurance industry.

But privatization doesn’t work. Private-sector companies and even nonprofits don’t have to comply with open-records laws and can spend money (including taxpayers’) with only limited accountability. Most private companies are about making money first and serving the public second; that means when private operators take over public services, the prices go up, worker pay goes down (and unions are often booted out), and the quality of the delivery tanks. Look at the real estate development nightmare that has become the privatized Presidio. Look at the disgrace and disaster that the privatized Edison School brought to the San Francisco Unified School District. Look at the glitzy café and the pricey parking lot that have replaced good animal care at the privatized San Francisco Zoo. Look at what has happened around the world when Bechtel Corp. has taken over public water systems — rates have gone up so high that some people can’t afford this basic life necessity.

Look what’s happened to the American health system. Look what’s happened in Iraq.

Government isn’t perfect, and the public sector has lot of management, efficiency, and accountability issues. But at least the public has some hope of correcting those problems. San Francisco ought to be a place where a major movement to take back the public sector is born and thrives.

Almost everyone in town ought to have an interest. Labor, obviously, opposes privatization. So should neighborhood advocates (who care about public parks and open space), environmentalists (because the entire notion of environmentalism depends on a healthy public sector), progressive community groups, and politicians. Even more conservative groups like the cops and firefighters ought to see the need to prevent their jobs from being outsourced to a private vendor.

A campaign against privatization could link wi-fi, PG&E, tidal power, and the golf courses. The campaign could force anyone running for office to address a no-privatization pledge. It could appear any time one of these rotten schemes pops up in town — and send a message that San Francisco doesn’t accept the economic agenda of the radical right.

Who’s going to call the first meeting? 2

The City College loophole

-
0

EDITORIAL The 2000 law that made it easier for schools and college districts to sell bonds for capital improvements requires every agency raising money this way to create a citizens’ oversight committee to monitor spending. It also mandates regular audits.

But it’s a bit unclear what the audit requirement actually means — and as G.W. Schulz reports on page 15, that’s allowed some outfits, including San Francisco’s Community College District, to get away with spending hundreds of millions of dollars without proper accountability.

Some lawyers argue that school districts need only undergo perfunctory financial audits. Others say the law mandates detailed performance audits. This sounds like a minor point, but it’s not: financial audits only look at what was spent. Performance audits look at how and why — and whether the money was spent in accordance with what the voters were promised.

The City College administration is only now, reluctantly, agreeing to a performance audit, something that should have been done five years ago. The school’s lawyers say bond money can be freely shuffled from project to project, at any time, and there’s no need for regular performance audits.

There’s a simple way to clear this up: Attorney General Jerry Brown needs to issue an opinion on the intent of the law. And if he won’t do that or comes down on the side of unaccountable government, then the state Legislature needs to pass a bill mandating performance audits and requiring that bond proceeds actually go where the voters were told they would.

Don’t privatize the golf courses

-
0

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom has been trying to sell off or privatize city assets for years, and his latest effort is aimed at San Francisco’s three public golf courses (see J.B. Powell’s story, page 16).

Harding, Lincoln, and Fleming aren’t in the greatest shape, and the city poured a bunch of money into spiffing up Harding a few years back and didn’t get much return. So the mayor — with the surprising support of progressive supervisors like Aaron Peskin — wants to hand the links over to private contractors.

That, of course, will mean higher fees at the few places where golfers who aren’t rich can still afford to whack a few balls. It will probably means cuts in unionized city staff. More important, it’s another giveaway of valuable public assets — on the grounds that city officials don’t seem to know how to manage them.

As Sup. Jake McGoldrick, a privatization foe, points out, the Golden Gate Yacht Club and St. Francis Yacht Club were once public assets, and they’re now elitist institutions run as private membership clubs. The golf courses would be the same.

Yes, the courses need some upgrades, which means some public money. But public golf courses around the country are crowded with players who can’t afford (or don’t qualify for) private clubs; there’s no reason the city of San Francisco can’t do just as well as a private contractor in making improvements, generating revenue, and managing the facilities.

If the city really wants to get out of the golf course business — which we think is a mistake — then the supervisors ought to consider the proposal that the Neighborhood Parks Council has put forward and turn some of the links into parks and open space. But this mad rush to privatization — selling off parks, golf courses, and other public assets — has got to end. The supervisors should go along with McGoldrick’s proposal to set up a task force to study the management of the city golf courses and reject the mayor’s privatization move. *

1...141516...21Page 15 of 21

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org