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Editorial

Stop the McGoldrick recall

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EDITORIAL Jake McGoldrick isn’t perfect, but he’s been a pretty good supervisor most of the time, and the recall effort launched against him by a Geary Boulevard merchant is baseless and inappropriate.

The recall is a potent weapon, part of the Progressive Era reforms that gave California the initiative and the referendum. But it can also be easily abused to threaten an incumbent who has done nothing wrong except show political courage on tough issues.

And that’s exactly what’s happening here: McGoldrick, who represents a relatively moderate district, is taking the lead on two key attempts to challenge the city’s car-driven transportation culture. He’s the author of a measure that would close Golden Gate Park to cars on Saturdays, at least for a six-month trial — something the trustees of the de Young Museum have been fighting bitterly. And he’s the chief backer of a plan to add bus-only lanes to Geary Boulevard, which would create a relatively cheap, efficient rapid transit system along one of the city’s main commute arteries.

Those positions have angered a small group of people, led by David Heller, who owns a beauty supply store on Geary and is adamantly opposed to anything that would reduce car traffic or parking on the street. Heller — who ran unsuccessfully against McGoldrick in 2004 — now wants to recall the supervisor, who has less than two years left in office anyway. Heller insists that McGoldrick is defying the will of the voters, because a majority of District 1 voted against Saturday road closures in 2000 and because McGoldrick hasn’t adequately addressed the concerns of some merchants who fear the loss of parking spaces under the transit plan.

Let’s get a couple things straight: the 2000 ballot had a pair of competing road-closure measures that left a lot of voters confused — and the museum people ran a misleading campaign that helped muddy the waters even more. The vote that year was hardly an accurate reflection of how San Franciscans or people in the Richmond view weekend road closures.

In fact, the car-free Sunday in the park is one of the city’s most popular regular events — and a study commissioned by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is not a fan of road closures, showed that the traffic and parking impacts on the neighborhoods are almost nonexistent. McGoldrick has been willing to stand up to the mayor and the powerful museum board on this, and that’s a good thing.

The Geary transit corridor is tough: any solution that improves transit on the road — and that’s a priority for the city — will leave less room for cars. But that’s the direction the city has to go in. Public transit will only be effective in this city if it can operate quickly and reliably on routes such as Geary — and that can’t happen without some disruption to car travel. The proposal McGoldrick supports would close one lane to cars (possibly by eliminating street parking) and dedicate it to buses only; the buses would have the ability to control traffic lights and would thus in theory be able to operate almost like underground or elevated trains, avoiding the delays caused by car traffic. Digging a subway below Geary would cost several billion dollars and take years; giving buses one exclusive lane in each direction is cheaper and can be done fairly quickly.

No, it won’t be painless, and it’s not perfect — ideally, there probably ought to be a light-rail line on Geary — but in an era of global warming, with all the costs associated with the use of private cars, it’s imperative that San Francisco move aggressively toward improving transit. McGoldrick is absolutely right to be looking for ways to encourage people to get out of their cars — and punishing him for it by forcing a recall campaign is a serious mistake.

Heller needs about 3,000 signatures to move forward. Don’t sign the petition. *

Truth about the eastern neighborhoods

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EDITORIAL The next battle for San Francisco’s future will be fought in significant part in what the Planning Department calls the eastern neighborhoods — South of Market, the central waterfront, the Mission District, Potrero Hill, and Showplace Square. That’s where planners want to see some 29,000 new housing units built, along with offices and laboratories for the emerging biotech industry that’s projected to grow on the outskirts of the UCSF Mission Bay campus.

On March 28 the Planning Department released the final draft of a socioeconomic impact study of the area, which, with 1,500 acres of potentially developable land, is one of San Francisco’s last frontiers.

For a $50,000 report, the study doesn’t really say much. It puts an overall rosy glow on a zoning plan that will lead to widespread displacement of blue-collar jobs and dramatically increased gentrification. And it fails to answer what ought to be the fundamental questions of anything calling itself a socioeconomic study.

But within the 197-page document are some stunning facts that ought to give neighborhood activists (and the San Francisco supervisors) reason to doubt the entire rezoning package.

On one level it’s hard to blame Linda Hausrath, the Oakland economist who did the study: the premise was flawed from the start. The study considers only two possibilities — either the eastern neighborhoods will be left with no new zoning at all or the Planning Department’s zoning proposal will be implemented. Her conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the official city plan offers a lot of benefits. That’s hard to argue: the current zoning for the area is a mess, and much of the most desirable land is wide open for all sorts of undesirable uses.

But there are many, many ways to look at the future of the eastern neighborhoods beyond what the Planning Department has offered. Neighborhood activists in Potrero Hill have their own alternatives; so do the folks in the Mission and South of Market. There are a lot of ways to conceive of this giant piece of urban land — and many of them start and end with different priorities than those of the Planning Department.

Two key issues dominate the report — housing and employment in what’s known as production, distribution, and repair, or PDR, facilities. PDR jobs are among the final remaining types of employment in San Francisco that pay a decent wage and don’t require a college degree. The city had 95,000 of these as of 2000 (the most recent data that the study looks at), and 32,000 of them were in the eastern neighborhoods.

Almost everyone agrees that PDR jobs are a crucial part of the city’s economic mix and that without them a significant segment of the city’s population will be displaced. "There are two ways to drive people out of San Francisco," housing activist Calvin Welch says. "You can eliminate their housing or eliminate their jobs."

The city’s rezoning plan seeks to protect some PDR uses in a few parts of the eastern neighborhoods. But many of the areas where the warehouses, light industrial outfits, and similar businesses operate will be zoned to allow market-rate housing — and that will be the end of the blue-collar jobs.

When you build market-rate housing in industrial areas, the industry is forced out. That’s already been proved in San Francisco; just remember what happened in South of Market during the dot-com and live-work boom. When wealthy people move into homes near PDR businesses, they immediately start to complain: those businesses are often loud; trucks arrive at all hours of the day and night. City officials get pestered by angry new homeowners — and at the same time, the price of real estate goes up. The PDR businesses are shut down or bought out — and replaced with more luxury condos.

Thousands of PDR jobs have disappeared since the 2000 census, the result of the dot-com boom. And even the Hausrath report acknowledges that 4,000 more PDR jobs will be lost from the eastern neighborhoods under the city’s plan. That’s more than would be lost without any rezoning at all.

The vast majority — more than 70 percent, the report shows — of people who work in PDR jobs in San Francisco also live in San Francisco. Many are immigrants and people of color. A significant percentage live in Bayview–Hunters Point, where the unemployment rate among African Americans is a civic disgrace. What will happen to those workers? What will happen to their families? Where will they go when the jobs disappear? There’s nothing in the report that addresses these questions — although they reflect one of the most important socioeconomic impacts of the looming changes in the region.

Then there’s affordable housing.

According to the city’s reports and projections, two-thirds of all the new housing that is built in the city ought to be available below the market rate. That’s because none of the people who are now being driven from San Francisco by high housing costs — families, small-business people working-class renters, people on fixed incomes — can possibly afford market-rate units. In fact, as we reported last week ("The Big Housing Lie," 3/28/07), the new housing that’s being built in San Francisco does very little to help current residents, which is why more than 65 percent of the people who are buying those units are coming here from out of town.

San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, but it isn’t very big — 49 square miles — and most of the land is already developed. The 1,500 developable acres in the eastern neighborhoods are among the last bits of land that can be used for affordable housing. And in fact, that’s where 60 percent of the below-market housing built in the city in the past few years has been located.

But every market-rate project that’s built — and there are a lot of them on the drawing board — takes away a potential affordable housing site and thus makes it less possible for the city to come close to meeting its goals. The Hausrath report completely ignores that fact.

Overall, the report — which reflects the sensibilities of the Planning Department — accepts the premise that the best use of much of the eastern neighborhoods is for high-end condos. Building that housing, the report notes, "would provide a relief valve" to offset pressures on the market for existing housing.

But that’s directly at odds with the available facts. The San Francisco housing market has never fit in with a traditional supply-and-demand model, and today it’s totally out of whack. Market-rate housing in this city has come to resemble freeways and prisons: the more you build, the more demand it creates — and the construction boom does nothing to alleviate the original problem.

The new condos in San Francisco are being snapped up by real estate speculators, wealthy empty nesters, very rich people (and companies) who want local pieds-à-terre, and highly paid tech workers who have jobs on the Peninsula. Meanwhile, families are fleeing the city in droves. The African American community is being decimated. Artists, writers, musicians, unconventional thinkers — the people who are the heart of San Francisco life and culture — can’t stay in a town that offers no place for them to live. Is this really how we want to use the 1,500 precious acres of the eastern neighborhoods?

The Hausrath study was largely a waste of money, which is too bad, because the issue facing the planning commissioners, the mayor, and the supervisors is profound. The city planners need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a rezoning plan that makes affordable housing and the retention of PDR jobs a priority, gives million-dollar condos a very limited role, and prevents the power of a truly perverse market from further destroying some of the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. *

The big housing lie

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EDITORIAL San Francisco’s official housing policy is pretty clear: the city is supposed to encourage the construction of new homes for local families who are getting priced out of the local market, for the local workforce, and for people who live here but are homeless or in marginal housing situations. And a full 64 percent of the new housing built in the city is supposed to be below market rate.

Nowhere in any policy document or political pronouncement by any city official is there a claim that San Francisco needs to build more housing that will attract very wealthy people who live somewhere else.

Yet that is exactly what our current policy is doing, new evidence collected by activist Marc Salomon suggests.

Salomon did something that city planners should have done a long time ago: he performed a detailed analysis, based on public records, of every new residential construction project during the past 10 years in District 6 (where most of the new high-end housing has gone). He cross-checked all the addresses with the Department of Elections’ voter files to see how many of the residents of those pricey condos had lived in San Francisco previously. His data is posted on www.sfbg.com; it shows that of 2,390 registered voters who were in 3,675 new units in 2006, 790 had been registered in San Francisco as of March 2002 and 1,590 had not.

That means that a full two-thirds — 66.81 percent — of those residents came here from somewhere else. Put another way, only one-third of the new housing that was built in District 6 went to San Franciscans.

"These numbers," Salomon writes, "indicate that the city is pursuing the exact opposite priorities and policies of what the Housing Element of the General Plan calls for in planning for new residential construction."

Or as housing activist Rene Cazenave told us, "Not only are we failing to meet the requirement that 64 percent of new housing be affordable, we’re not even helping existing San Franciscans."

Yes, there have always been and will always be new arrivals to San Francisco; this is a town of immigrants, and those people need places to live. But only a tiny fraction of the people who have moved here during the past half century could ever afford this sort of luxury housing. It’s a different population the developers are attracting — and this deserves a serious policy debate.

San Francisco is losing some of its most valuable population by the day. Families are fleeing in droves; first-time home buyers who want to settle here for the long term are driven away. San Francisco’s workforce — service-industry employees, public-sector workers, small-business people, and the vast majority of wage earners whose incomes are inadequate to buy a million-dollar condo — is finding it impossible to live here.

That’s a major civic problem. And the housing that’s getting built is doing little to solve it.

Salomon freely admits his figures aren’t perfect and may be off by a few points. But even if he’s off by 25 percent or more, the results are still alarming. And the city needs to follow this up right away.

The city Planning Department needs to immediately undertake a comprehensive study of who is buying the new housing built in San Francisco — a study that looks at demographics, migration patterns, and employment. That can be compared to the well-documented housing needs in the city. And not another market-rate condo project should be approved until that study is complete.

In fact, if the city drags its feet here, housing activists should start talking about a ballot initiative that would bar the construction of any new housing that doesn’t meet the criteria and needs established by current city planning policy. San Francisco doesn’t need to give up valuable land to create high-rise havens for rich retirees, speculators, and the owners of corporate pieds-à-terre. *

Reilly’s right to sue

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EDITORIAL One of the more effective ways the courts have kept activists out in the legal cold over the years is to deny them what’s known as "standing" — the right to sue. You want to fight the government in court over the destruction of a wilderness area? First you have to prove that you’ll be damaged by the logging or mining or development — and until relatively recently, unless you personally owned land or a business in the immediate vicinity, you were out of luck. You want to sue to force San Francisco to abide by federal law and create a public power system? No can do: individual citizens have no standing to sue over violations of the Raker Act. Only the secretary of the interior or the city attorney can do that — and neither one has been willing to do so in half a century.

Some of the most important advances in public-interest law have been expansions of the right of standing — the right of individuals to sue over major political issues when the government agencies that are supposed to be watchdogs have failed to do their jobs. But now the two big newspaper chains that dominate the Bay Area want to deny that right to real estate investor Clint Reilly.

In filings March 16, the Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group sought to get Reilly’s suit against the monopolization of the local newspaper market thrown out of court. The grounds? Reilly is, well, just a citizen. Just a reader of the papers and someone who buys ads in them. Just someone who will suffer the untold damage of losing diversity in media voices in the community. Someone who, the monopolist lawyers say, has no standing to sue.

The problem, of course, is that the government agencies that clearly have standing to try to block two publishing barons from conspiring to end newspaper competition in the Bay Area — the attorneys general of the United States and California — have refused to do anything except smile and look the other way while Hearst and MediaNews go about their diabolical business. So if an individual like Reilly has no right to go to court, then there will be no legal obstacle to the barons’ plans.

The obvious legal answer, of course, is that the judge in the case, Susan Illston, must toss out this specious argument, allow the suit to continue, and get to the serious legal issues at stake.

The case is obvious: the people who will be injured most by the elimination of newspaper competition are the readers, the citizens, the political activists … the public. And if a member of the public can’t sue to stop it, there’s not a lot of hope for justice.

In fact, as Joe Alioto, the attorney for Reilly, points out, the Sherman and Clayton antitrust laws were specifically written to allow individuals to sue over monopolistic practices, "because the authors of those laws didn’t trust the government to control monopolies."

But the real message here is that the new California AG, Jerry Brown, can’t simply follow in his predecessor’s lead and ignore the clear antitrust implications of the MediaNews and Hearst deals. Is Reilly the only one who will stand up against the publishing barons? Where are you, Jerry? *


PS Where is the US attorney’s office, which was so quick to put Josh Wolf in jail, when the real lawbreakers in the publishing business are making millions by eliminating competition?

PPS The San Francisco Chronicle‘s story on the filing, by Bob Egelko, didn’t quote Reilly or Alioto in response. And Reilly’s legal response is under court seal — thanks to Hearst and MediaNews, which have demanded that all documents remain secret. If the media barons don’t justify that secrecy to the court by March 28, the records will be opened. If not, we will continue our so-far-successful court battle to open the records.

Cut off war funding

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EDITORIAL On Jan. 12, a couple months shy of the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and put to rest any question of whether the conflict in that country can be declared a civil war:

"We face, in essence, four different wars," he said. "The war of Shia on Shia, principally in the south; sectarian conflict, principally in Baghdad and the environs of Baghdad; third, a Baathist insurgency; and fourth, al-Qaeda."

The Pentagon made it official March 14, when a report declared that "in some ways" Iraq is in the throes of a civil war. The report also noted that October through December 2006 was the most violent three-month period since 2003.

The carnage is horrible: more than 3,000 US troops have been killed. The United Nations, according to Reuters, says some 34,500 civilians were killed in 2006 alone. About 2 million Iraqis have fled abroad, and another 1.7 million have moved elsewhere in Iraq to escape violence and sectarian cleansing.

The cost is spectacular and almost unfathomably tragic: more than $400 billion so far. The money that San Francisco alone has spent on the war could have paid for 12,000 affordable housing units, the National Priorities Project estimates. All of that money has come in special supplemental budget requests, so it hasn’t been a part of any rational budget discussion.

And yet while the Democrats have offered an alternative plan to withdraw from Iraq, party leaders are still refusing to do what Congress has every right to do: demand that no more money be spent on combat operations in Iraq, set a timetable for pulling out the last troops — and specify that not a single dollar will be spent on anything except safely removing US personnel.

Hillary Clinton, by many accounts the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, even said last week that she thinks the United States will have a military presence in Iraq for years to come.

The opposition party has to do better than that.

Seventy percent of Americans oppose the war. The allies are getting ready to bail: Prime Minister Tony Blair just announced the British have set a timetable for withdrawing troops. The protests in the streets during the past few days should be a signal to Rep. Nancy Pelosi: Congress can’t pass nonbinding resolutions and come up with plans that the president can simply veto. George W. Bush has no intention of listening to what the public wants. In a March 19 speech he proclaimed that "the fight is difficult, but it can be won." Translation: the war will continue as long as Bush is in office — unless Congress forces him to stop it. And the only way to do that is to cut off funding.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma) has introduced legislation that would block further war spending but fully fund a deliberate withdrawal aimed at pulling the last US troops out by the end of this year. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) is a cosponsor. Pelosi needs to sign on and put the power of the new Democratic majority behind the only feasible plan to end what the New York Times is calling an "unnecessary, horribly botched and now unwinnable" war. *

The giant extension-cord plan

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EDITORIAL It’s only because of a dark moment in San Francisco’s history that city officials are trying to figure out what to do about an underwater electricity cable that’s slated to run from Pittsburg onto port property and provide additional power for the tip of the Peninsula.

San Francisco was supposed to have its own power cable, carrying its own power over the bay from the hydroelectric dam at Hetch Hetchy. In fact, in the 1920s the city built 99 miles of cable, from the high Sierra to the South Bay … and mysteriously ran out of copper wire a few yards from a new Pacific Gas and Electric Co. substation in Newark.

That was a key moment in the Raker Act scandal, the ongoing violation of federal law that has allowed PG&E to operate a monopoly private power agency in a city that’s supposed to have public power.

But now PG&E controls all the power coming into town — and the California Independent System Operator, which is responsible for the state grid, says the supply coming into San Francisco is too limited and not sufficiently reliable.

As JB Powell reports in "Power Play" on page TK, Babcock and Brown, an international financial firm based in Australia, has put up $300 million for a Trans Bay Cable that would link the city to the East Bay. Ironically, a public power agency — in Pittsburg — would wind up making money off the project by selling power in San Francisco. Other than rent at the port, this city will get nothing out of the deal.

There are some basic conceptual problems with the project. Most of the power shipped along the 57-mile, 400-megawatt line would be produced by fossil fuel plants. That’s contrary to the direction the city is trying to go: San Francisco is in the process of building solar projects and is looking into using tidal energy. The Hetch Hetchy project, of course, is hydropower. And critics say that the new line would flood San Francisco with an oversupply of electricity, discouraging the environmentally sound approach of conservation.

But there’s a larger problem here: a private venture firm will own the cable — and could sell it to another entity, perhaps PG&E. So the city’s energy future under this scenario will still be tied to unaccountable private interests.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, whose Local Agency Formation Commission held a hearing on the cable plan in January, asked San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) staffers why the city doesn’t have its own line. The agency, staffer Barbara Hale said, has been looking into that — but any project would be years away.

Still, this line, if the city goes along with the deal, will be with us for decades — and the Board of Supervisors shouldn’t just approve it without looking at its role in a long-term municipal energy program. San Francisco is moving inexorably toward public power — too slowly, but inexorably. How, exactly, does this cable fit into a municipal power system? Does San Francisco even need it? Is a publicly owned transbay power line something that ought to be on the agenda? Why would the city want to go along with this private venture if there is (or ought to be) a city project in the wings?

Nobody has answered those questions, because the city still lacks a detailed public power plan. Before the supervisors approve this cable, the SFPUC needs to look at all the energy options, prepare a long-term plan, and evaluate whether this giant extension cord fits into it. *

Ending the road-closure stalemate

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EDITORIAL There’s really only one way to look at Mayor Gavin Newsom’s response to Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park: the fix has been in from the start. The mayor is willing to discard his own evidence, break his word, ignore the obvious facts, and damage his environmental credentials — but he won’t risk offending the rich society swells who run the de Young museum.

It’s been 40 years since the city began shutting down a stretch of JFK Drive to cars on Sundays, and by any account it’s one of the most popular regular programs in the city. On nice days the park is packed with bikers, joggers, skaters, walkers, families. There are free swing dance lessons. It’s one of the few opportunities for young kids to learn to ride bikes in a safe environment.

But the trustees of the museum, such as socialite Dede Wilsey, are adamantly opposed to expanding the road closures to Saturday. Their arguments make little sense: since there’s now an underground parking garage, there really isn’t any problem finding a place to park or getting access to the museum.

Yet under pressure from the de Young folks, the mayor vetoed legislation last year to expand the road-closure program to Saturdays, saying he didn’t have enough information on how the program would impact traffic and parking in surrounding neighborhoods. He asked for a study; the study was done. As Steven T. Jones reported ("Unhealthy Politics," 3/7/07), the evidence clearly shows that road closures have minimal negative impacts on anyone.

Newsom’s response: nothing has changed. He’s still opposed to Saturday closures.

So either he was lying last year when he said he wanted more data or he’s ducking today when he says the study hasn’t changed his mind — or he’s just afraid that going against the will of the almighty de Young board will tarnish his political star with the movers and shakers in town. In the end, it doesn’t matter: the mayor apparently can’t be moved on this, and the only way Saturday road closures will happen is if eight supervisors — enough to override a mayoral veto — support Sup. Jake McGoldrick’s road-closure bill, which has been reintroduced and will be heard in committee soon.

The measure got seven votes last time, and since it’s highly unlikely Sups. Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier, or Ed Jew will defy the mayor, the swing vote is Sup. Bevan Dufty.

Last time around he voted to uphold Newsom’s veto, but now he says he’s keeping an open mind. Dufty has a strong tendency to support neighborhood programs and services, and it’s clear that most of the neighborhood people are behind road closures — and now that the city’s own study shows there are no associated parking or traffic problems, this ought to be an obvious one for him. Dufty should announce that he’ll support McGoldrick’s bill — and end this stalemate for good. *

A downtown tax for free buses

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EDITORIAL Free Muni is a great idea. It’s an even better — and more realistic — idea if the mayor is willing to support a tax on downtown office buildings to pay for it.

That’s what Mayor Gavin Newsom needs to be talking about — and if he doesn’t, the supervisors need to push the idea.

We’ve been calling for free Muni since at least 1993, when we ran a cover story explaining how the idea would work. It’s always made sense for San Francisco: eliminating bus fares would encourage more people to get out of their cars, which would eliminate traffic congestion, pollution, and safety problems and set a standard for fighting global warming. Without having to worry about fare collection, drivers could move the buses along faster (and pay more attention to driving). And the city would save a lot of money that’s currently spent collecting and counting fares and monitoring fare cheats.

Besides, as we pointed out back then, it’s a great economic boost for the city: if all the people who currently pay $45 a month for a fast pass could hold on to that money, millions of dollars in consumer spending would likely be pumped into local business.

But here’s the rub: Muni collects about $138 million in fares every year — and the system needs more money, not less. Free Muni will inevitably spur more ridership — that, after all, is the whole point — so the cost of operating the system will rise even further. The city doesn’t exactly have $138 million in extra General Fund cash to throw around. So there has to be a new source of revenue to fund this plan.

So far Newsom hasn’t said a word about that — which is all too typical. The mayor loves to advance all sorts of ideas without explaining how the city’s going to pay for them. And then, not surprisingly, a lot of his plans never go anywhere.

But in this case there’s an excellent way to make the numbers add up. For more than 30 years, San Francisco activists have been promoting the idea of a special tax district downtown, with revenue going directly to Muni. It’s got political and economic logic: a significant amount of Muni’s operational budget goes to ferrying workers to office buildings in the Financial District, and since those buildings tend to be vastly undertaxed (thanks to Proposition 13), the city ought to levy a special fee every year to help underwrite transportation.

San Francisco has about 80 million square feet of commercial office space in the central downtown core. An annual tax of as little as $2 per square foot would provide more than enough money to cover the cost of free bus service citywide. The money would come from those most able to pay — building owners and the (typically) large, wealthy businesses that rent downtown. The benefits would go to the (typically) less-wealthy people who ride the buses every day.

It’s green, it’s fair, it’s creative, it’s economically sound — all the things Mayor Newsom likes to talk about. All he has to do is announce a proposal to pay for free Muni with a downtown tax district, and his plan might actually have a chance of working. Since that’s unlikely, we urge the supervisors to take up the initiative: yes, let’s have free Muni — and let’s make downtown pay for it. *

Sunshine battles on three fronts

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EDITORIAL It’s been, to put it mildly, a terrible year for open government. The climate of secrecy in Washington, DC, has only increased: from clandestine spying on antiwar protesters to secretive immigration raids to a huge growth in document classification, the nation’s capital has shifted squarely into the dark ages. As G.W. Schulz reports ("100 Years of Secrets," page 22), there’s even an attempt in Congress to create a new official secrets act, with stiff criminal penalties for people who disclose information the government doesn’t want the public to know.

In California the governor has vetoed a public-records bill backed by all 120 legislators, and the State Supreme Court issued one of the worst rulings in its history, ensuring that virtually all police disciplinary records will forever be hidden from public view.

San Francisco has its problems too. The Sunshine Ordinance still has some significant loopholes — and as Amanda Witherell reports ("The Sunshine Posse," page 20), a cadre of sunshine activists is working overtime to try to force the city to comply with its own rules and to demand that electronic documents get the same treatment as paper records.

So there’s a lot of work to do. But the good news is that there are legislative and grassroots efforts on many fronts to turn the tide back. Some of the key points:

In Washington: The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, along with other sunshine advocates, is pushing a bill by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. John Cornyn (R-Texas) that would greatly strengthen the federal Freedom of Information Act. The bill would require federal agencies to expedite FOIA requests and allow requesters to seek attorney’s fees if the government forces them to go to court. The GOP-led Congress blocked it last year, and the Bush administration has always opposed it, but with the Democrats in control, it’s likely to get through both houses this spring.

Meanwhile, Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) tried last month to push a bill that would impose criminal penalties for unauthorized leaking of government information. He’s backed off somewhat, but that threat remains. It’s crucial that San Franciscans contact Sen. Dianne Feinstein (who sits on the Judiciary Committee) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi to demand that the FOIA bill pass and that Kyl’s proposal die.

In Sacramento: Assemblymember Mark Leno has introduced a bill that would override the devastating Supreme Court decision on police records. The measure, AB 1648, would once again allow public access to information about the extent of police officer discipline and would permit agencies such as the San Francisco Police Commission to hold some disciplinary hearings in public. It’s a crucial bill; cloaking all discussion of problematic cops in a veil of secrecy undermines public trust in law enforcement, perpetuates poor management, and protects abusive officers. The legislature needs to pass it quickly. Leno has also reintroduced his Public Records Act reform bill, AB 1393, with a few amendments to address technical problems that the Governor’s Office claimed to have with last year’s bill. This time Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has no excuse not to sign it.

In San Francisco: It’s still far too hard for members of the public to get basic information from city departments. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force needs to have the authority to mandate that agencies follow its decisions; an attempt to make that happen three years ago failed when the supervisors balked at empowering the sunshine panel. The task force lacks the full-time staffer mandated in the ordinance.

The task force should bring its proposals back to the board, and one of the supervisors needs to step up as an open-government advocate and bring that proposal back. If the task force had any teeth or if the Ethics Commission or district attorney would enforce the existing law, these battles wouldn’t be necessary. *

The latest Presidio disgrace

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EDITORIAL Here’s yet another reason why the Presidio national park is a national disgrace:

Way back in 1995, when Rep. Nancy Pelosi was in the process of turning the Presidio over to private interests, we and some other critics asked what the rush was. Sure, money for the new park was tight under a Republican Congress, but that didn’t justify privatizing a national park.

Pelosi’s response: if we don’t let the private sector control the park’s future, the Republicans will just sell it off to the highest bidder.

That struck us as unlikely at the time, particularly since the president, who would have to sign any bill to sell the park, was a Democrat named Bill Clinton. But in retrospect, even if Pelosi’s worst fears had come true, at least the private developers who’d bought it would have had to abide by city zoning rules and state laws.

Instead Pelosi has created the worst of both worlds. As Amanda Witherell reported last week, the Presidio’s special status as a federal enclave means the dozens of private businesses operating there don’t have to abide by California labor laws. And we already knew they didn’t have to follow city or state land-use or environmental laws. In effect, Pelosi has created a private-sector libertarian Wild West in progressive San Francisco, a place where big operators such as George Lucas can avoid taxes and, if they choose, skirt California labor laws, San Francisco’s minimum-wage and health-insurance requirements, and a long list of other workplace protections.

The Presidio isn’t the only national park to face this problem; legal battles over, for example, the right to sell untaxed booze at Yosemite have created a precedent that federal law rules on federal land. But it’s not much of an issue in the rest of the country, because most national parks aren’t business parks and have only modest, if any, private commercial activity going on. Most of the people who work on that federal land are federal employees, who have union contracts that protect them.

And most national parks aren’t right in the middle of crowded urban areas, where businesses right across the street have to obey rules, pay taxes, and act like part of a community.

This isn’t what the late Rep. Phil Burton, whose seat Pelosi now holds, had in mind when he passed a bill requiring that the Pentagon turn the Presidio over to the National Park Service when its days as a military base were done.

There is, of course, a simple fix, and organized labor ought to join the growing chorus of environmentalists putting pressure on Pelosi to get with the program. She needs to repeal the bill that privatized the Presidio, eliminate the requirement that the park pay for itself through commercial ventures, and let it be run like every other national park in the nation.

At the very least, she needs to put through an amendment that requires Presidio businesses — and the Presidio Trust itself — to abide by state and local laws and regulations. *

Fix early warning for cops

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Police Commission has finally approved a long-overdue plan to monitor problem cops — but the Police Officers Association managed to get it watered down to the point where it won’t be terribly effective. The whole sorry episode was an example of how the POA has been running roughshod over the Police Department and undermining even basic disciplinary procedures.

The commission has been talking about this for four years now, ever since the American Civil Liberties Union and the Controller’s Office released scathing reports outlining the city’s failure to monitor problem officers and identify cops who were prone to violent behavior.

The idea is simple (and it’s worked successfully in plenty of other cities): there are well-established patterns of behavior and performance signals that tend to be associated with police officers likely to get into trouble. The San Francisco system will track uses of force, citizen complaints, police-abuse lawsuits, officer-involved shootings, on-duty accidents, and vehicle pursuits and allow the department to do early intervention with any officer who seems to be developing violent or reckless behavior.

But that ignores two other key indicators — cases in which criminal charges are dismissed because of officer misconduct and cases in which the cops charge citizens with resisting arrest. If an officer is involved in an unusually large number of these sorts of cases, it’s a clear sign of potential trouble, Samuel Walker, a criminologist who’s a national expert on early-intervention systems, told the commission.

The POA, however, helped write the plan — and refused to allow those criteria to be included. The union also made sure that the tracking system can’t be used in considering whether an officer is promoted, disciplined, or allowed to train other cops. In other words, the Police Department can’t use its own data for what would seem to be standard management practices. In fact, POA officials threatened to sue the city if the commission made any effort to tighten the tracking program.

The system is hardly punitive to the cops. The first two times it triggers a red flag, the officer’s supervisor can use the information for closer monitoring — or can simply review the findings and determine there isn’t a real problem. Only after a third warning sign does the officer have to undergo counseling.

A good early-warning system can prevent police violence and abuse, and by weeding out problem officers before they do something that leads to a major lawsuit, it can save the city a lot of money. But the real point here is that the commission and the chief — not the police union — should be making decisions about management policy.

This program won’t go into effect until the end of the year; there’s still plenty of time for the commission to send it back for amendments without buckling to the demands of a rogue police union that has already done tremendous damage to the department’s reputation. Commissioner David Campos, to his credit, was the lone vote against it; the other members of the panel should follow his lead.*

Newsom needs to come clean

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EDITORIAL It’s no surprise that Mayor Gavin Newsom doesn’t want to answer any more questions about his affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk. The polls suggest that most of the voters have either forgiven him or never really cared in the first place, so it’s in his interest to move on and try to keep this from becoming a campaign issue.

And if it were just about sex, that would be fine with us too.

But from the start this sordid episode had some bad elements that are every bit a matter of public interest. Rippey-Tourk wasn’t just the wife of one of Newsom’s friends; she was an employee of the city, and in a not so indirect way, Newsom was her boss. And with the evidence that has surfaced that Rippey-Tourk was paid $21,755 for work she didn’t do, including paid leave for the time she was in rehab (something other city employees don’t get), there are real questions that the mayor needs to answer.

Let’s run down the situation, as far as we can establish it:

• Rippey-Tourk and Newsom had an affair in 2005. That year she had 7 1/2 weeks of unpaid leave — a benefit that is not part of the standard package offered to city employees and not in any union contract.

• In May 2006, Rippey-Tourk went into substance abuse rehab and was out of work until July. She was still listed on the city payroll until Sept. 1, when she was cut a check for $10,155. Ultimately, she was paid for 13 1/2 weeks (or 67 1/2 days) of unpaid leave. She was entitled to 10 vacation days and 13 sick days. That leaves 44 1/2 days that she didn’t work and technically shouldn’t have been paid for.

• The Mayor’s Office says other city employees donated their unused vacation and sick time to her. It’s perfectly legal under city policy for employees to donate their paid time to a colleague who has to take a leave for a catastrophic, life-threatening illness. But alcohol and drug rehab don’t typically fall into that category.

• The law says the Department of Public Health must certify that a city employee faces an actual life-threatening illness before the catastrophic leave policy comes into play. And the employee’s supervisor has to sign off on the decision.

So somebody at the DPH must have approved a leave for a worker who almost certainly didn’t qualify, and Rippey-Tourk’s immediate supervisor at the time, then–chief of staff Steve Kava, had to have gone along.

It doesn’t take much speculation to figure out what likely went on here: Newsom had his chief of staff give an employee who had slept with the mayor a benefit that other city employees don’t get, and the director of public health, who (more or less) reports to the mayor, went along with it. And a bunch of city money was involved.

So far nobody at City Hall will answer questions about how this happened, saying that it’s a matter of employee privacy. We agree that Rippey-Tourk (the real victim in all this) has been through plenty, and the public has no business examining her medical records. But the mayor has made a nasty mess of the situation, and he can’t be allowed to just skate away without explaining whether his office in effect paid hush money out of the public till to someone he had treated shabbily — and who had strong legal grounds to sue the city and deeply embarrass the mayor in an election year.

If Newsom would show up at a Board of Supervisors meeting, the way he’s supposed to, and answer questions, the public might glean a bit more information. But he’s refusing — and while the City Attorney’s Office is conducting a confidential investigation, that’s not good enough.

The supervisors should launch their own investigation — and they need to demand to see the key documents, talk to the key players (starting with Newsom, Kava, and Public Health Director Mitch Katz), and determine if the mayor violated city law and then tried to cover it up. The budget analyst, Harvey Rose, should be directed to investigate the use of city money here — and whether this practice is going on anywhere else in the city. It won’t be easy — but the supervisors have the legal authority to issue subpoenas, and while that power is rarely used, this might be an occasion that justifies it.

The cover-up is almost always worse than the crime — and if Newsom and his senior aides won’t tell the truth about what happened, there is going to be serious fallout. *

The next mad rush to the sky

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EDITORIAL For much of the history of this newspaper, the battle to keep San Francisco from turning into another Manhattan was a defining element in local politics. It had all the makings of urban drama: shifty-eyed developers looking to make a fast buck, sleazy politicians willing to bend over in any direction for campaign cash, a corporate power structure devoted to greasing the path for unlimited growth, citizen activists revolting over the block-by-block destruction of their neighborhoods … all played out on the stage of one of the world’s greatest cities.

We watched while Joe Alioto moved forward with redevelopment south of Market and office buildings downtown in the early 1970s. We joined anti-high-rise activists twice in ballot measure campaigns to slow the building boom, without success. We saw Dianne Feinstein push through in just a few short years more new office space than in all of downtown Boston, an entire new city of glass and steel towers — and we helped promote the campaign to slow down with Proposition M in 1986.

We exposed the fundamental lies behind the developers’ arguments by demonstrating that intensive office development cost the city more in services than it provided in revenue, reporting on how the boom would drive up rents, choke the streets with traffic, overwhelm Muni, and create ugly canyons where there were once human-scale business districts.

Then we showed that all those new buildings weren’t even creating jobs.

In the 1990s we spoke out against the economic cleansing that came with the dot-com boom.

But of late, the development battles have shifted a bit. Progressives, who were once united against downtown growth, are a bit more slippery around the latest construction boom, because this time the massive skyscrapers are set to be filled not with corporate offices but with housing. And in San Francisco today, it seems difficult for almost anyone to be against new housing.

But it’s time to take a hard look at the new rush to the sky.

When the folks at the Planning Department talk about the new urban area that’s being discussed for South of Market, they use words such as "slender, graceful towers." The idea: high-rises aren’t that bad if they’re less bulky; that way, they don’t interfere with view corridors and don’t block out the sun. In fact, the way some planners are talking about these new buildings is almost rapturous — tall condo complexes, they say, will stop suburban sprawl, prevent global warming, create exciting new neighborhoods and public spaces, and give new definition to the city skyline.

But let’s look at what they’re really talking about here.

There are, at the moment, at least 11 new buildings either proposed, under construction, or in the planning pipeline in South of Market that would bust the city’s current height limits. (And those limits are hardly skimpy — in most areas they range from about 350 to 500 feet.) And that’s just the start: the Planning Department is moving quietly to substantially raise height limits in a broad swath of San Francisco, making way for the biggest high-rise rush since the 1980s.

If the move succeeds, the skyline will develop what the Planning Department calls a new "mound" south of downtown, anchored by at least one building 1,000 feet high (almost a third taller than the Transamerica Pyramid). A single slender tower is one thing; when you put more than a dozen (and they aren’t all slender) in a cluster, you get a wall — a wall that cuts the city off from the bay, shatters the natural topography of the area, and frankly, makes the city feel less like a community and more like a concrete jungle.

Just look at the picture on this page, part of a graphic presentation the city planning staff has put together. That hardly appears to be a few shapely structures. It’s a huge new conglomeration of New York–style high-rises, and they don’t fit in San Francisco.

And what’s the point of all this? The way the developers and their allies would have us think, this is all about solving the city’s housing crisis and creating vibrant new neighborhoods. But take a look at what sort of housing is being proposed here.

All the new high-rises the Planning Department is reviewing will contain what’s known as market-rate housing. That translates to condos selling for prices far beyond the reach of most San Franciscans. So far, not one developer has agreed to put a single unit of affordable housing in the new towers; all of them plan to meet the city’s demands for below-market units by building cheaper apartments somewhere else. The new neighborhoods are going to be nothing but very wealthy enclaves, the equivalent of vertical gated communities. Families who are being driven out of San Francisco by high housing costs won’t find refuge here; the housing is designed for singles, childless couples, retired people — and world travelers who want a nice San Francisco pied-à-terre.

Is this really the kind of new neighborhood the city ought to be creating?

Then there are the economics of this madness. Providing the infrastructure for all these new residents (and we’re talking more than 10,000 new residents in this one part of town alone) will be expensive — and if anyone really thinks that development fees will cover those costs, they haven’t paid attention to four decades of San Francisco budgets.

Environmentalists and urban planners these days love to talk about density, about building more residential spaces in urban cores. That’s the best alternative to suburban sprawl: Dense neighborhoods encourage transit use and walking. Housing near workplaces translates to less driving, less pollution, less congestion.

All of which is fine and actually makes sense. But density doesn’t have to mean 80-story buildings. North Beach, for example, is a very dense neighborhood, one of the densest urban areas in the United States. It’s also a wonderful neighborhood, with open space, friendly streets, and a human-scale feel.

And it’s a diverse neighborhood: everyone in North Beach isn’t young, single, and rich. There’s a mix of rental and owner-occupied housing and, despite years of brutal gentrification, still something of a demographic mix. It’s a place that feels like a neighborhood. This new conglomeration of high-rises won’t be.

If, indeed, San Francisco wants to add 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 new residents, they don’t have to live 1,000 feet above the ground. There are ways to do density — on perhaps a slightly less massive scale — that don’t impact on the views, skyline, and economics of the rest of the city.

But city officials need to ask some tough questions first. Why are we doing this? Are we rezoning South of Market to meet the needs of developers and high-profile architects, or is there a real urban plan here?

The answer seems alarmingly simple right now. Dean Macris, who led the Planning Department in those awful high-rise boom years under Feinstein, is at the helm again, and although he’s supposed to be an acting director, he shows no sign of leaving. The department is in full developer-support mode — and that has to end. The Planning Commission needs to hire a new director soon, someone who understands what a neighborhood-based planning vision is about.

Meanwhile, most of this new rezoning will have to come before the supervisors, and they need to start holding hearings now. This is a transformation that will be felt for decades; it’s sliding forward way too fast, with way too little oversight. And it needs to stop. *

Too many big buildings

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Housing is now being stuffed into downtown blocks, more than 7,000 units in the stretch running from Market Street to the Bay Bridge. This means less driving, less subdivision sprawl and fewer car-dependent office parks in the outer ‘burbs, all worries that older high-rise foes had.

"A Skyscraper Story," by Marshall Kilduff, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/29/07

EDITORIAL Actually, no.

There are indeed a lot of new housing towers under way in San Francisco, some of them soaring to heights that will block the sun and sky and wall off parts of the city from its waterfront. But there’s not a lot of evidence that they’re doing much to cut down driving and office parks.

In fact, when we went and visited a few of these spanking new buildings a year ago, we found that few of the residents actually worked in downtown San Francisco. They were mostly young Silicon Valley commuters who slept in their posh condos at night but got up in the morning and drove their cars (or in some cases, rode vanpools) to jobs at office parks or car-dependent corporate campuses 20 to 30 miles south.

There were a few former suburbanites around — but again, they weren’t San Francisco workers. They were retired people with plenty of cash who wanted to move back to town after the kids left home.

As Sue Hestor reports in "San Francisco’s Erupting Skyline" on page 7, the Planning Department is quietly but aggressively moving to raise the height limits around the edges of downtown, particularly in the South of Market area. There’s been little protest, in part because so many of the new towers are largely for housing, not offices.

Some of the giant new buildings are very much the same sort of projects we — and much of progressive San Francisco — have been fighting against for 30 years. The Transbay Terminal will be anchored by a 1,000-foot-high commercial building that will soar far above the Transamerica Pyramid. But somehow activists seem willing to accept high-rise housing in a way they would never tolerate offices — if it’s presented as a cure to sprawl.

But that requires a big leap of faith: you have to accept that San Franciscans who will walk or take transit to work are going to wind up living in those buildings. And since much of the housing is going to consist of very high-end condos — in the million-dollar range — that almost certainly won’t be true.

The new wave of development has tremendous problems and needs far more careful scrutiny than it’s getting. The Planning Commission ought to demand a demographic study to determine whether this housing actually meets the city’s needs — and put a halt to it if it doesn’t. *

Bush’s big favor to PG&E

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EDITORIAL If there were ever any doubt about the political forces arrayed behind the move to demolish San Francisco’s Hetch Hetchy dam, this should put it to rest: President George W. Bush, who has done nothing but attack, undermine, and cut funding for public parks and environmental initiatives since the day he took office, suddenly wants to spend $7 million to study restoring the valley behind the dam.

That’s right. Tucked into the Bush administration’s Department of the Interior budget is a special allocation that just happens to match exactly what the state of California said it would cost for the next step in pursing dam removal in Yosemite National Park.

Initial signs are that the plan isn’t going anywhere: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate subcommittee that funds Interior, says she’ll never let the money go through. Even Republican Rep. George Radanovich, who represents the Yosemite area in Congress, says he opposes the idea and has no idea why the administration is pushing it.

Well, we have a clue.

Bush isn’t much of an environmentalist, and it’s hard to believe he really cares about creating a new wilderness area in California. But he’s a hell of a privatizer and supports almost anything that shifts public resources into the hands of profit-making companies. And blasting the city’s water and hydropower dam to dust would be a huge favor to one of the nation’s largest private electric companies — and a huge blow to public power efforts in San Francisco.

Feinstein points out — correctly — that the dam provides fresh water to almost three million people in the Bay Area. But it also provides electric power — not enough to light all of San Francisco, but enough to provide a nice solid base for a municipally owned electricity system. In fact, the dam itself is the biggest argument for kicking Pacific Gas and Electric Co. out of town: the act of Congress that allowed San Francisco to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley for water also mandated that the dam generate electricity and that this cheap power be sold to the residents and businesses of the city as a public alternative to the PG&E monopoly.

PG&E is terrified by the prospect of losing a single customer to public power and for good reason: electricity controlled by public agencies is consistently cheaper and, these days, more environmentally sound than the stuff you buy from PG&E. Up in Yolo County, businesses recently realized they were paying more money for power than their colleagues (and competitors) a few miles away in Sacramento, so they moved to join the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. PG&E spent more than $10 million on a campaign to defeat the proposal — and that area involved only 77,000 customers. Imagine what the company would be willing to do to halt the growing calls for public power in San Francisco, a market roughly five times that size.

It’s no coincidence the company is pouring cash into a public-relations campaign aimed at burnishing its environmental image. And as we report in "PG&E’s Poll" on page 10, pollsters apparently working for PG&E have been market-testing several ballot initiatives that would directly attack the city’s ability to go into the power business.

But tearing down the dam would be a far more effective assault. Without the dam the federal mandate for public power would vanish, as would a free (we paid for it long ago), reliable, copious source of renewable electricity that uses no fossil fuels.

Sure, there’s an environmental argument for tearing down the dam — as soon as those 400 megawatts of electricity can be replaced by city-owned solar, wind, or tidal power. But that’s years off. For now the alternative to hydro is largely fossil fuels, which makes the green case for removing the dam shaky at best.

So let’s be serious here: This is not about environmental restoration. It’s about keeping San Francisco out of the power business and preserving PG&E’s private monopoly. That’s so perfectly in line with the Bush administration’s political philosophy that we’d be stunned if PG&E and its allies weren’t the ones who got that $7 million allocation snuck into the Bush budget.

All of which is, of course, an excellent reason for Congress to scrap this budget item, and it appears that will happen. But it’s also reason for public power advocates to go on full alert: PG&E isn’t sitting back and waiting for the next municipalization campaign. The company is making its own plans to cut public power off at the knees — and that means the progressives need to be mobilizing for a full-court press on the issue. Now. *

Brown must fight the media monopoly

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EDITORIAL The evidence is now clear and compelling: the two biggest newspaper chains in the Bay Area have been plotting for years to eliminate local competition. The details that have come out of the Clint Reilly lawsuit point to almost textbook antitrust violations, the exact sort of behavior that state and federal laws prohibit. (See "What We Know Now," page 13.)

The public had no knowledge of how MediaNews Group and the Hearst Corp. were conspiring to join ad sales and distribution deals. But the federal and state regulators knew all about it; the records show that Hearst executives laid out the entire plan back in early 2006.

And yet the deal that allowed MediaNews to buy up every major daily in the region except the San Francisco Chronicle won approval from both the California and the US attorneys general — in part on the grounds that Hearst’s Chronicle would remain as a serious competitor in the market.

Which leads to some pretty obvious questions: What were the investigators and lawyers in Sacramento and Washington, DC, doing? And now that this is all out in public, will California’s new attorney general, Jerry Brown, put a stop to it?

When the McClatchy company sold the Contra Costa Times and the San Jose Mercury News to Dean Singleton, who already owned the Oakland Tribune and the Marin Independent Journal, critics immediately began to cry foul. Singleton’s strategy has always been to buy up adjoining media properties, combine as many of their assets as possible, share reporters and stories, and improve the bottom line through deep cuts. Suddenly, instead of four reporters covering events in the Bay Area, there would be just one, with one perspective and one story running in all four papers.

The same would go for advertising — instead of having several options in the region, businesses could wind up having to deal with one centralized agency that sets prices and sells ads for all four big dailies (and a bunch of smaller ones that Singleton also owns).

Still, the federal and state regulators declined to challenge or block the deal. If Reilly hadn’t sued to stop it, the machinery would already be in motion for what could be a single company, or a partnership that operates like a single company, controlling all of the daily newspapers from San Jose to Marin County, from San Francisco to Contra Costa County.

But now this is all open and visible. We don’t have much faith in the Bush Justice Department, but the new California attorney general has a history (at some moments) of showing the willingness to stand up to powerful interests and take strong political stands. This is his first and perhaps most important test. Brown needs to go into court immediately and file to block the entire deal. *

More than the affair

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EDITORIAL OK: let’s put this all in perspective.

Gavin Newsom did something almost unbelievably, incalculably stupid. He’s in a lot of political and possibly legal trouble.

He has just admitted to having a drinking problem and is going to seek "treatment" — although it’s not clear at all what that means, except that he won’t be entering a residential center.

The heart of the scandal was just an affair — yes, an affair with a subordinate, which is a real problem (and something most of corporate America put an end to 20 years ago) — but nobody’s dead, he hasn’t started a war, the city isn’t about to collapse, and the world will keep turning. It seemed silly to us to call on Newsom to resign over that, just as it was silly for the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton over an Oval Office blow job.

But there’s a much bigger problem here.

For months, long before this tawdry story made the front pages, it’s been clear that the mayor of San Francisco isn’t focused on the job. For whatever reason (and there may be many), Newsom has been checked out for quite some time now. As we reported in "Mayor Chicken" (1/10/07), he never attends public events that haven’t been carefully scripted. His relations with the Board of Supervisors are damaged beyond repair. He’s offering absolutely nothing in the way of leadership on the murder epidemic, the housing crisis, Muni’s meltdown, or much of anything else. He’s had plenty of time for glamour and glitz, movie stars, rides on the Google corporate jet, and the glitterati at Davos, Switzerland — but not much energy for the gritty reality on the streets of his city.

He is, we noted in our Jan. 10 cover story, "the imperious press release mayor, smiling for the cameras, quick with his sound bites, and utterly unwilling to engage in any public discussion whose outcome isn’t established in advance."

And whether we like it or not, this latest "lapse in judgment" — and Newsom’s embarrassing failure to deal with it properly — is only going to make things worse.

To be blunt, for a lot of reasons that have little to do with this tabloid sensation, we don’t see how Newsom can effectively run San Francisco for another four years. The mayor’s latest mess isn’t a scandal as much as a symptom of his shaky grip on the frighteningly tricky world of high-stakes politics. He’s acting like a dizzy kid at a rock star party who doesn’t have the maturity to handle what’s coming at him. Even his close allies have warned us that the wheels are coming off his administration. It’s not even clear that he wants to be mayor.

We wish Newsom well in his battle with alcoholism. But for the good of the city (and the causes he claims to care about), he’d be better off announcing he isn’t going to run for reelection now.

That wouldn’t be the end of his political career — plenty of people (John Burton comes to mind) have taken some time off from politics to deal with their personal lives and come back much stronger. It might be the best thing Newsom could do for himself.

Newsom says right now that he’s staying in the race, but he’s clearly wounded; that air of political invulnerability has taken a hit. When a local politician is looking bloodied, the sharks typically start to circle. That hasn’t happened yet; if anything, over the past few days, the highest-profile potential contenders have been pretty quiet about taking Newsom on.

But somebody has to do it. That’s never been clearer.

Running for mayor is serious business, and if there’s going to be a strong candidate challenging Newsom on the issues, the left needs to think about who it ought to be. Who has the experience and skills to take on the campaign? Who can appeal to a wide enough group of voters to win? Who has the sort of record and platform that progressives can support and unite around?

Those discussions need to start soon. But they need to be deliberate and thoughtful. Newsom’s political (and yes, personal) failures have given progressives an opening. There’s a chance to elect a mayor who really represents San Francisco values in deeds as well as words. Let’s take it seriously. *

More than the affair

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OK: Let’s all stop and take a deep breath.

Gavin Newsom did something almost unbelievably, incalculably stupid. He’s in a lot of political and possibly legal trouble. But in the end, it was just an affair – yes, an affair with a subordinate, which is a real problem, but nobody’s dead, he hasn’t started a war, the city isn’t about to collapse and the world will keep turning. It’s silly to talk about Newsom resigning over this, the same was it was silly for the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton over an Oval Office blow job.

Besides, there’s a much bigger problem here.

————————————————

For months, long before this tawdry story made the front pages, it’s been clear that the mayor of San Francisco wasn’t focused on the job. For whatever reason (and there may be many reasons) Newsom has been checked out for quite some time now. As we reported Jan 10, he never does public events that haven’t been carefully scripted. His relations with the Board of Supervisors are damaged beyond repair. He’s offering absolutely nothing in the way of leadership on the murder epidemic, the housing crisis, Muni’s meltdown, or much of anything else. He’s had plenty of time for glamour and glitz, for movie stars, rides on the Google corporate jet and the glitterati at Davos – but not much energy for the gritty reality on the streets of his city.

He is, we noted in our cover story, “the imperious press release mayor, smiling for the cameras, quick with his sound bites and utterly unwilling to engage in any public discussion whose outcome isn’t determined in advance.”

And whether we like it or not, this latest “lapse in judgment” – and Newsom’s embarrassing failure to deal with it properly – is only going to make things worse.

To be blunt, for a lot of reasons that have little to do with this week’s tabloid sensation, we don’t see how Gavin Newsom can effectively run San Francisco for another four years. This latest mess isn’t a scandal as much as it’s a symptom of Newsom’s shaky grip on the frighteningly tricky world of high-stakes politics. He’s acting like a dizzy kid at a rock-star party who doesn’t have the maturity to handle what’s coming at him. Even his close allies have warned us that the wheels are coming off his administration. It’s not even clear that he wants to be mayor.

For the good of the city (and the causes he claims to care about) he’d be better off announcing now that he isn’t going to run for re-election.

That wouldn’t be the end of his political career – plenty of people (John Burton comes to mind) have taken some time off from politics to deal with their personal lives, and come back much stronger. It might be the best thing Newsom could do for himself.

——————————————————

If Newsom stays in the race, he will quickly (and for perhaps all the wrong reasons) be seen as deeply politically vulnerable. And when a local politician is looking bloodied, the sharks start to circle. The potential for a feeding frenzy – with half a dozen or more politicians who suddenly see City Hall Room 200 beckoning starting to jockey for support and stab each other in the back – is all too real. That’s a bad way for progressives to proceed.

Running for mayor is serious business, and if there’s going to be a strong candidate challenging Newsom on the issues, the left needs to think about who it ought to be. Who has the experience and skills to take on the campaign? Who can appeal to a wide enough group of voters to win? Who as the sort of record and platform that progressives can support and unite around?

Those discussions need to start soon. But they need to be deliberate and thoughtful. Newsom’s political (and yes, personal) failures have given progressives an opening. There’s a chance to elect a mayor who really represents San Francisco values, in deeds as well as words. Let’s take it seriously.

Investigate the Presidio’s money

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EDITORIAL National parks are places where wildlife is preserved, saved, encouraged. The trend in parks these days is to expand the ecological mix; the National Park Service is actually trying to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone. But as Amanda Witherell reported Jan. 17 ("Where Are the Chicks?"), that’s not the case in San Francisco’s Presidio National Park. At the Presidio a native species that was thriving not long ago — the California quail — is almost entirely gone. That’s a sign that the ecological management of the park is a mess — which is no surprise. The park is run by a semiprivate trust that’s driven by real estate development and moneymaking. If new condos conflict with quail habitat, guess who has to go?

Then there’s the Presidio’s balance sheet. As we reported Jan. 24 ("The Presidio Trust’s Mystery Millions"), the park is sitting on $105 million — a huge chunk of cash — yet has asked Congress for a $20 million loan. What’s all that money for? The trust won’t tell us — it’s a secret.

This is exactly what we feared would happen when Rep. Nancy Pelosi created the first privatized national park 10 years ago: environmental damage, financial unaccountability, and intolerable secrecy. The trust board (appointed by President George W. Bush) meets in public only once a year. Its press office is openly hostile to reporters and makes it exceptionally difficult for the public to get even basic information about park activities.

This is Pelosi’s pet project, and she’s now the most powerful person in Congress, but that doesn’t mean the Presidio should be able to continue operating in this fashion. The House Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Rep. Nick Rahall (D–W.Va.), ought to hold hearings on the Presidio and examine how the trust is operating, whether it’s fulfilling its mission, and how its enabling legislation should be changed. A growing number of environmentalists are now calling for Pelosi to repeal the original bill and turn the Presidio over to the National Park Service, which runs parks as public treasures, not as potential real estate developments.

At the very least, Congress should refuse to provide any more loans to the Presidio Trust until an outside auditor conducts a public review of the books — and explains why a national park is holding $105 million in taxpayer money in the bank for secret projects, then demanding even more public money. *

Advancing public power

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EDITORIAL A few months ago Pacific Gas and Electric Co. spent more than $10 million trying to keep the public Sacramento Municipal Utility District from annexing a part of Yolo County, which would have cost PG&E 77,000 customers. It was a stunning amount of campaign cash — and as is often the case, it worked: PG&E narrowly won the day, public power suffered a setback, and the people who wanted to get out from the private utility’s high rates and save big money by buying electricity from a public power agency had their hope shot down.

We’re used to this in San Francisco, where PG&E money and power have carried the day for more than 80 years and prevented the city from complying with the Raker Act, the federal law that requires public power. But the outcome of the Yolo County battle is a reminder of how high the stakes are for the beleaguered private utility — and how creative public power advocates are going to have to be in PG&E’s hometown.

It’s likely that there will be another ballot measure in the next year or two to authorize the city to sell bonds and take over PG&E’s local distribution system. The evidence is clear: public power is cheaper, public power is more environmentally sound (remember — for all its green hype, PG&E still runs a nuclear power plant), and public power is San Francisco’s legal mandate. Just about everyone in City Hall claims to be a public power supporter these days.

But in the meantime, the supervisors need to start looking at immediate alternatives that don’t involve an expensive ballot battle. There may well be ways to bring public power to San Francisco without having to confront a $10 million (or $20 million or $30 million) PG&E political blitzkrieg.

The most obvious approach is to continue the small steps the city is currently taking and leverage them into a much bigger program. There is, of course, community choice aggregation, which should continue to move forward. Beyond that, San Francisco just won the right to provide electricity at the Hunters Point Shipyard Redevelopment Project; the city is trying to do the same for Treasure Island. Why not start with the shipyard and build a public power system outward, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood?

PG&E has no legal right to be the exclusive provider of retail power in the city. There’s no legal reason why San Francisco can’t start running wires out of the shipyard — underground, safely, with modern equipment — buy up a bunch of meters, and start offering the residents of Bayview–Hunters Point cheap electricity. The revenue from the first, say, 50-square-block project could fund the next one. The seed money could come as a loan from the General Fund.

The first thing the city’s Public Utilities Commission needs to do is conduct a study of the cost of implementing public power on a small scale in one part of town — and the likely revenue it would bring in. A larger study should look at how the city could build its own distribution system (with state-of-the-art equipment) one step at a time over, say, five or 10 years.

At the same time, of course, while the city is running electric wires, it can run fiber-optic and (if necessary) coaxial lines, with the goal of creating a city-run broadband and cable TV service.

The ideal place to start discussing this is the Local Agency Formation Commission, which should hold hearings as soon as possible, prod the SFPUC to move — and fund the study if nobody else will.

In the meantime, the City Attorney’s Office should look into another (admittedly slightly unconventional) idea: could the Redevelopment Agency, which already has the authority to issue bonds, simply seize all of PG&E’s wires, poles, and meters for a public power system?

We don’t trust the Redevelopment Agency, and it’s risky to even raise this idea. But there’s a larger issue here: in many cities and counties the council or board of supervisors runs the Redevelopment Agency. We’ve long thought that the district-elected board would be more accountable and better suited to handle the immense (and dangerous) power of this agency than a commission appointed by the mayor.

Think about it: The supervisors take over redevelopment. Redevelopment buys out PG&E’s system. A new city agency, under the supervisors, starts selling retail power at cheap rates citywide and builds new solar, wind, and tidal facilities to make San Francisco a true national model of environmentally sound energy policy.

If it’s legal — and the city attorney needs to issue an opinion on that — all it would take is political will. *

Leave pretrial diversion alone

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project is one of the most successful programs in the city’s criminal justice system. The project works with first-time misdemeanor offenders — people who have committed fairly minor crimes — and gives them the chance to enter a treatment program, avoid jail time, and ultimately clear their records. Over the past three years almost 94 percent of the program’s graduates have stayed out of the criminal justice system — a phenomenal track record.

And yet District Attorney Kamala Harris, who by state law has ultimate control over the program, wants to eliminate the option for a significant number of people. Under her plan first-time battery offenders will no longer be eligible (and remember, battery in this case doesn’t mean aggravated assault; misdemeanor battery is any kind of unwanted touching). Neither will people accused of child endangerment, criminal threats, or indecent exposure.

It’s not that these crimes are always trivial, but a lot of them don’t merit jail time. Jeff Adachi, the city’s public defender, has a real-life example: a middle-aged woman with no prior criminal history left her five-year-old foster child in the car while she ran into a hospital to pick up a medical prescription. Then she passed out in the hospital. When she regained consciousness, she was charged with child endangerment. She would have automatically lost her child if convicted of the crime. Instead, she was able to participate in diversion, avoiding a criminal conviction and its devastating consequences.

The program also saves the city money — potentially big money. More than 500 cases a year go to diversion, and taking any one of those cases to trial could cost the public as much as $100,000. Adachi estimates that the number of offenders eligible for diversion might fall by as much as 25 percent, meaning 125 more needless cases clogging the courts, using up public time and resources — and quite possibly adding to the county jail population.

Harris argues that some violent offenders are getting diversion, but the program has been operating under the same rules for the past 20 years, and its successes have vastly overshadowed any problems.

More important, at a time when even the Republican governor of California seems to realize that the system of locking people away for ever-longer sentences isn’t working, this is a bad statement for a San Francisco district attorney to make. Harris ought to back down and leave the diversion program the way it is. *

A new direction for City College

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EDITORIAL It’s time — way past time — for new leadership on the San Francisco community college board. The panel has devolved over the past few years into a patronage-and-sleaze cesspool allowing an out-of-control chancellor to play games with public money, piss off neighborhoods with ill-conceived development projects, and damage the programs and reputation of the school.

The incumbents who have controlled the board for years — Lawrence Wong, Natalie Berg, Rodel Rodis, and Johnnie Carter — have been active participants in all the problems, and we’ve argued repeatedly that all of them need to go.

In this past fall’s election, a challenger, John Rizzo, defeated Carter, giving the board a very different political character. There are now three solid reform votes on the board — Rizzo, Milton Marks III, and Julio Ramos — and one, Anita Grier, who can be cajoled and convinced to join the right side most of the time.

The board will be meeting Jan. 25 to choose a new president, and by most accounts none of the three top reformers can win the job — but Grier probably can, and she’s a decent choice. At the very least, she won’t play the sort of role that Berg has played in the past as a nonresponsive, unaccountable call-up vote for the chancellor. The vice presidential slot is trickier; there’s a move afoot to award that job to Wong just to preserve some political balance. That would be a huge mistake.

Just look at the recent record: several years ago City College took millions of dollars in bond money that was earmarked for a performing arts center and shifted it to pay for a new gym with a swimming pool that will be rented to a private school across the street. Now the college has approved a $122 million budget for a new 17-story high-rise in North Beach that has the neighbors up in arms — and school officials say they aren’t required to abide by the city’s zoning laws.

The board needs a dramatic turnaround, and the only way to make that happen is to ensure that none of the old guard are in any positions of power. Since Rizzo is new to the board, the best candidate for vice president is Marks, who should have been president last time around but was aced out by Berg and her allies.

It’s been an unwritten tradition on the college board that the person who gets the most votes becomes president; in 2004 that was Marks, who came in with more than 160,000 votes. This time it’s Grier.

Based on their respective popularity with voters, the choice between Marks and Wong for vice president is a no-brainer. Wong was reelected with just 88,000 votes — half as many as Marks.

But that’s not the biggest issue. The real point here is that Wong has no business serving as an officer of the community college board, and Marks does.

Electing Grier and Marks won’t solve all the problems at City College — but it will be a big step in the right direction. *

The new Vietnam

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EDITORIAL And now, President George W. Bush wants to commit another 20,000 troops.

Twenty thousand more US kids, going to fight a war that can’t be won. Twenty thousand more lives in potential danger for no imaginable purpose. This isn’t the "surge" Bush has invoked; it’s an escalation, one reminiscent of the worst days of the Vietnam War, when Presidents Lyndon Johnston and then Richard Nixon sent more and more troops into a quagmire from which there was no good exit. If anything, Iraq is worse: when the United States fled Vietnam, there was at least a stable government to take over.

Bush has given the Democrats a huge opportunity here, a chance to create the sort of political sea change that only comes once or twice a decade. Watergate set the Republicans back for much of the 1970s. The energy crisis and the Iran hostage situation knocked the Democrats out of power in the 1980s, and Bill Clinton’s health care fiasco gave the GOP control of Congress in the 1990s. The Iraq War gave the House and Senate back to the Democrats last fall — and the Bush escalation could give them back the White House in 2008.

This is the end of the Bush presidency. Iraq will poison any Republican who sides with the president and supports the escalation. And it will be political gold for Democratic candidates and leaders — if they are willing to seize the opportunity.

That’s not by any means certain. Bush still has an ace in the perception hole: his spin team will insist that opposing funds for the increased military action will amount to a failure to support the troops. Democrats in Congress have refused to confront that line in the past — and with the party’s fear of being seen as soft on national security, it’s entirely possible that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be outspoken in their criticism of the policy but cautious when it comes to cutting off funds.

That would be a serious mistake on every level.

Remember: the odds are very good that many of those 20,000 soldiers will never make it home and that many, many more will come home mutilated and maimed. The odds that this surge will succeed in controlling violence in Baghdad are next to zero. And since Bush is acting unilaterally, without congressional assent, the only way to stop this madness is to cut off funding.

Pelosi has been devoting most of her energy and political capital to the rather modest advances of the "100 hours" strategy. But frankly, nothing on her agenda is as important as ending the war. The House and Senate leadership need to move immediately to eliminate funding for any troop escalation. *

The governor’s wimpy health plan

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EDITORIAL The good news — and it’s very good news indeed — is that the governor of California has followed the lead of the city of San Francisco and is talking seriously about a universal health care plan. This is the first time since the early days of the Clinton administration — before the insurance companies destroyed even a modest hope of national reform — that we can sense real momentum toward the creation of a new policy to address one of the most pressing issues in the country.

But let’s be clear: the governor’s proposal falls far short of real reform. It has a few attractive features, but overall it’s underfunded, at points dysfunctional — and ducks the most basic problems with the state’s health insurance system.

Like Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger starts with a failed premise — that private insurance, linked to employment, can somehow solve the problem. The evidence against that is so clear it’s frustrating even to have to make the argument. Private health insurance is expensive and inefficient; the amount of money that’s wasted on overhead and profits is staggering (as much as 30 cents out of every health care dollar never makes it to any hospital or clinic). The incentive to bilk consumers, avoid covering the sickest of patients, and reward suffering is disgracefully high. The fact that the United States is the only Western industrialized country without a functioning national health care program is a direct result of the fact that private insurers run the show.

Employer-based health insurance is a failed system too, an amalgam that grew out of the federal government’s failure to recognize the need for a national health system in the postwar era and the demands of unionized workers for better benefits. Workplaces offer insurance companies what they want — large pools of people among whom to share the risk. But linking insurance to employment is obviously a bad idea at a time when more and more people are working part-time jobs, contract jobs, or a series of different jobs for different companies — and when small businesses (which create most of the jobs in the country) are getting hammered by double-digit annual increases in health insurance premiums.

So any plan that accepts the private-sector hegemony over health insurance is doomed to fail in the long term.

The Schwarzenegger plan has another dangerous component: the proposal would require everyone in the state to buy health insurance (at the risk of criminal penalties for noncompliance). That, of course, is an insurance industry dream — it makes the entire population a captive customer base. And while the governor promises to offer lower-cost plans and subsidies for the poor, there’s nowhere near enough money in his proposal to make private insurance affordable to all. Low-income people would be driven to buy high-deductible plans, which undermine the entire idea of universal health care. And middle-class people who don’t have employer-based plans may be devastated: in San Francisco, for example, a family of four living on $60,000 a year would have to put as much as $10,000 of that into health insurance or risk steep fines.

The overall financing is shaky — the governor is counting on federal funding to help put an additional 630,000 people on the Medi-Cal rolls, but Congress has a long list of spending priorities, and there’s no guarantee this one will make the final cut.

There are things to like about the plan, particularly the goal of covering all children in the state, including the kids of undocumented immigrants. And the very fact that the ambitious governor of the nation’s largest state is willing to stake so much on health care reform is encouraging.

But the legislature is under no obligation to start the discussion with the governor’s plan. There’s already an excellent bill out there: SB 840, by Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D–Santa Monica). Her suggestion: get the insurance industry out of the game altogether and create a statewide fund, with premiums paid by employers and individuals, that would cover all Californians. It would save businesses in the state a fortune (and thus give the economy a jolt), cut down on waste and fraud, allow people to move from job to job without fear of losing health care, and give the government a strong incentive to push for lower drug costs.

That’s where the debate ought to begin. *

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