EDITORIAL The sleaze in District 6 is utterly out of control. So far, five different organizations, all claiming to be independent of any candidate, have sent out expensive mailers blasting away at incumbent Chris Daly (and urging voters, either directly or indirectly, to support his main opponent, Rob Black).
The law says that these groups can spend all the money they want, without abiding by campaign contribution limits, as long as they aren’t coordinating with Black’s staff, but let’s not be naive here: this is a carefully planned and orchestrated campaign by a handful of wealthy, powerful interests that will spend whatever it takes to get rid of one of the board’s most reliable progressive leaders.
Daly’s a hard worker, has a solid record, and is popular in his district — but after a while, this much negative campaigning starts to take a toll. And for the sake of the progressive movement in San Francisco, Black and the downtown forces simply can’t be allowed to defeat Daly.
Daly is more than a good supervisor (although he certainly meets that qualification). He’s part of the class of 2000, one of a crew of activists who swept into power in the first district elections as a rebellion against the developer-driven politics of then-mayor Willie Brown. He has become one of the city’s most promising young leaders, someone who, with a bit more seasoning (and diplomacy), could and should have a bright future in local politics.
He’s also very much a district supervisor and a symbol of how district elections allowed the neighborhoods to take back the city. The attack on him is an attack on the entire progressive movement and all that’s been accomplished in this city in the past six years.
Daly needs help. He needs volunteers to walk precincts, distribute literature, and get out the vote. This has to be a top priority for independent neighborhood and progressive activists in San Francisco. There’s a campaign rally Oct. 28 at 10 a.m. at the northeast corner of 16th Street and Mission. Daly’s campaign headquarters are at 2973 16th St. The phone is (415) 431-3259. Show up, volunteer, give money … this one really, really matters. SFBG
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Editorial
Save Daly — and the city
Defeating Pombo
EDITORIAL One of the half-dozen worst members of the United States Congress represents a district less than 50 miles from San Francisco. Republican Richard Pombo of Tracy chairs the House Resources Committee and has used that post to attempt to eliminate the Endangered Species Act and gut a long list of environmental regulations. He’s been an ally of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff. He’s rabidly antichoice. And if the Republicans keep control of the House, he will become even more powerful.
A few months ago, his seat seemed fairly safe: Pete McCloskey, a liberal Republican, challenged him in the primary but didn’t even come close to defeating Pombo. His Democratic challenger, energy consultant Jerry McNerney, was way behind in fundraising and the national Democratic Party wasn’t exactly targeting this as a competitive seat.
But times change quickly, and right now some polls (although admittedly ones taken by McNerney and his allies) show the race close enough that an upset is entirely possible. The GOP is clearly worried and has poured half a million dollars into Pombo’s campaign. McNerney’s now on the national radar; retired general Wesley Clark came out to endorse him, and there’s Democratic Party money flowing in too. But he’s still behind Pombo, and resources may turn out to be a key factor in the final weeks.
McNerney isn’t a San Francisco liberal by any stretch (he’s even been a consultant to Pacific Gas and Electric Co., albeit on alternative energy). But he’s radically better than Pombo: he’s pro-choice and pro-labor, and as someone whose career is in the wind power business, he’s got a real understanding of energy and environmental issues.
We support McNerney, and we’re more than happy to endorse him, even though he’s outside the area for which we usually issue recommendations. But for San Francisco and central East Bay residents, whose Democratic congressional representatives face no real opposition, this may be a place to put some money and political energy: McNerney is holding an SF fundraiser, and his campaign is looking for volunteer help. Defeating Pombo would be a huge coup and might be one of the most effective ways for local folks to help Democrats take back the House. SFBG
McNerney’s fundraiser is Oct. 11 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Delancey Street, 600 Embarcadero, SF. Info: (925) 556-7077.
Same-sex marriage: On to the Supreme Court
EDITORIAL It’s hard to take the California Courts of Appeal decision on same-sex marriage seriously. It reads like some sort of joke, the product of a bad old mind-set that this country put behind it almost 40 years ago when the US Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage. It’s worse though: the court, by a 2–1 decision, seems to imply that gay and lesbian people don’t have the same fundamental legal rights as everyone else, that discrimination against them doesn’t need to be viewed with strict legal scrutiny.
Hiding behind the absurd notion that the court would be usurping the role of the legislature by finding that it’s unconstitutional to outlaw same-sex marriage, Justices William R. McGuiness and Joanne C. Parrilli overturned a landmark ruling by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer and set the stage for what has to be a full debate before the state Supreme Court.
On many, many levels, this is the defining civil rights issue of our era — and the state’s highest court must agree to take the case and overturn this embarrassingly misguided decision.
The court goes out of its way to try to sound sympathetic to gay and lesbian couples, acknowledging in its ruling that social standards are changing and that “gay and lesbian couples can — and do — form committed, lasting relationships that compare favorably with any traditional marriage.” But the two judges in the majority argue that the state legislature hasn’t legalized same-sex marriage, so there’s nothing the courts can do.
That, of course, is nonsense and flies in the face of centuries of American legal jurisprudence (and most recently, of the well-reasoned decision by Judge Kramer). The Virginia legislature had explicitly refused to legalize marriage between people of different races when the Loving case came before the US Supreme Court in 1967; the court ruled, quite properly, that the so-called antimiscegenation laws by their very nature deprived people of a fundamental constitutional right. The right to an abortion was never established by Congress; the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the constitutional right to privacy protected the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy. The list goes on and on: when courts find that state and federal legislators have acted in a way that undermines basic legal rights, they often wind up enshrining in law rules that were never put to a majority vote.
Besides, let’s remember: the state legislature did take up this issue and passed a bill — which the governor vetoed, saying he was leaving the issue to the courts.
Justice J. Anthony Kline, the lone dissenting voice, put it very nicely: “To say that the inalienable right to marry the person of one’s choice is not a fundamental constitutional right, and may therefore be restricted by the state without a showing of compelling need, is a terrible backward step…. Ignoring the qualities attached to marriage by the Supreme Court, and defining it instead by who it excludes, demeans the institution of marriage and diminishes the humanity of the gay men and lesbians who wish to marry a loved one of their choice.”
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera will, of course, appeal this decision to the state Supreme Court, where everyone has assumed it was heading anyway. But there’s a danger here: the high court could duck the entire issue, more or less, by simply declining to hear the case and letting the appeals court decision stand. That would be a tragedy. Everyone involved on all sides agrees that this is a huge issue, both legally and politically, and two appellate judges on a sharply divided three-judge panel simply can’t be allowed to hold the last word.
We urge the Supreme Court to take the case. So should every Democratic (and decent-minded Republican) politician running for office this fall, starting with Jerry Brown, the leading candidate for attorney general.
The ultimate outcome of the debate over same-sex marriage isn’t in doubt. A few years from now — 5, 10, 15, 20 — the bigots will have lost their hold on politics and same-sex marriage will be as widely accepted as interracial marriage is today. California can either be a national leader in this progressive cause — or suffer the shame and embarrassment of being a state where the highest court enshrined unconscionable and indefensible discrimination into its constitution. SFBG
The appeals court decision and Justice Kline’s dissent can be viewed at www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/A110449.DOC.
Tidal (public) power
EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, perhaps looking for a big issue to bring to a star-studded environmental meeting in New York City last week, suddenly discovered the value of tidal energy. There’s actually nothing new about the idea: although Newsom didn’t give anyone but himself credit, the plan was first floated by Matt Gonzalez in the 2003 mayor’s race. It was picked up by Supervisors Jake McGoldrick and Ross Mirkarimi and has been on the agenda at Mirkarimi’s Local Area Formation Committee (LAFCo) for more than a year.
But whatever — if the mayor’s on board, fine. There’s a tremendous amount of potential in the concept — huge amounts of renewable energy with little significant environmental impact (and no greenhouse gases). The technology appears to be available, and there’s every reason for the city to move forward rapidly — as long as the power generator is owned, operated, and totally controlled by the city. And that’s not at all guaranteed.
A pilot project would cost about $10 million — peanuts compared to the revenue potential but a chunk of change nonetheless. Newsom, who is looking for state money, is also considering the possibility of seeking private-sector partnerships. And one company that has its greedy eye on the potential energy in the ocean tides is Pacific Gas and Electric.
PG&E is trying desperately to buff up its tarnished image, spending millions on slick ads promoting itself as a green company. It’s crap: among other things, PG&E still operates a nightmare of a nuclear plant on an earthquake fault in San Luis Obispo and is trying to get the plant’s operating license extended. But environmentalism sells in California, and the state’s largest and most rapacious private utility has no shame.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported Sept. 19 that city officials were negotiating with “a number of companies that could help run the turbines and cover the costs” and added that “Pacific Gas and Electric Company is among them, said Jared Blumenfeld, director of the city’s Department of the Environment.” Blumenfeld told us he was misquoted and that officials are only discussing with PG&E the prospects for connecting to the PG&E-owned grid in the city.
But Blumenfeld explained that a private company called Golden Gate Energy already has a federal license to develop tidal energy in the San Francisco Bay — and PG&E has a stake in that venture. The Golden Gate Energy license expires in 2008, and it’s unlikely the company will be able to start work by then, Blumenfeld said. Given that nobody actually has a working model of a tidal generator of this scale, that’s probably true.
Still, it shows that PG&E isn’t going to give up easily on the idea of owning or running what could be a source of energy that could power a sizable percentage of San Francisco. The reason is obvious: if the city operates the tidal power plant, it will be a huge boost for public power. Between tides, $100 million worth of solar energy that’s in the pipeline, and the Hetch Hetchy dam, San Francisco would come pretty close to generating enough renewable energy to power the whole town — and PG&E could be tossed entirely out of the picture.
Of course, that assumes that the city is serious about creating a full-scale public power system, which involves taking over PG&E’s transmission grid. Newsom says he supports public power. So does Susan Leal, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. But while both are ready to cough up $150,000 for a study into the benefits of tidal power (and a possible $10 million for a pilot project), neither has ever been willing to spend a penny for a study into the costs and benefits of taking over the grid.
Mirkarimi told us that LAFCo will begin hearings on tidal power next month and get to the bottom of what the mayor has in mind. The supervisors should allow no shadow of doubt about the policy for pursing this energy source: it can only be done as part of a larger plan to bring public power to the city — and if PG&E or any other private energy company has even the tip of a finger anywhere near it, the deal is dead in the water. SFBG
Save KQED! Vote No!
EDITORIAL KQED, San Francisco’s venerable public radio and television outlet, is trying to summarily abandon internal democracy. The station’s management is sending out letters this week asking its 190,000 members to vote on a bylaws change that would eliminate direct election of board members and shift complete control of the station’s operations to a self-appointed board. The proposal would also strip members of the right to vote on future changes to the bylaws.
This is a horrible idea and KQED members should reject it.
The bylaws change, KQED spokesperson Yoon Lee told us, comes in the wake of a May merger between KQED and San Jose’s public station, KTEH, and is aimed at simplifying operations at the stations. Besides, she said, elections are expensive: KQED spends roughly $250,000 each time it chooses new board members.
Of course, the United States could save huge sums of money by canceling congressional elections and letting the House and Senate choose their own members, but that idea wouldn’t get too far. Neither should the idea of the people — who pay for the programming, pay for the staff, pay for the salaries of the station executives, and pay for the elections — being cut out of the process.
For half a century, KQED has had a tradition of membership participation. It’s been awkward and stilted at times (the board appoints its own slate of candidates, and it’s tough for outside candidates to get on the ballot and get elected). But critics of station management have won seats on the board now and then, and their input has been tremendously healthy for the organization.
KQED has always needed independent watchdogs. For years, the station has poured money into bad projects and wasted cash on overpaid executives — at the expense of its primary mission, which is (and ought to be) to provide quality local programming. There’s no KQED TV news show (although there used to be). Other than Michael Krasny on the radio, there’s precious little in the way of local public affairs shows.
That’s the kind of thing rebel board members like Henry Kroll and Sasha Futran used to bring up and force onto the agenda. They also made the case for letting the members — and the public — have access to the details of KQED’s finances.
Lee says that none of the other big stations in the Public Broadcasting Service system have elected boards, but this is San Francisco, a city that takes its publicly supported institutions seriously and demands accountability. And locally, the direction of member-sponsored broadcasting is just the opposite: KPFA has gone to great lengths to elect a community-based board.
This is the last chance members will ever have to halt the corporatization of KQED. Most members just throw their ballots out; this time, it’s worth taking a minute to vote no on the new bylaws. SFBG
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
So much going on this week: the cops and the San Francisco Police Commission are heading for a battle over secrecy, the cops and the supervisors are headed for a battle over foot patrols — and Mayor Gavin Newsom is heading for a battle with homeless advocates over a new round of sweeps at Golden Gate Park. The mayor and the local gendarmes can’t win any of this without community support and would do far better to stop trying to fight these battles.
Then there’s redevelopment and the city attorney … and we might as well get started:
•The state Supreme Court ruled a couple of weeks ago that all police disciplinary records have to be kept secret. It’s an awful decision, and San Francisco needs to find a way around it if at all possible. Some police commissioners, starting with David Campos, want to do that, but City Attorney Dennis Herrera is interpreting the law very conservatively and not offering the commission a lot of options.
Why not make public all the charges against cops with the individual officers’ names redacted? At least the community would know that some cops are improperly shooting people, giving liquor to minors, beating up people of color, beating up their spouses … and at least we’d all have a way to demand some policy changes. Or why not tell bad cops facing disciplinary hearings that they can plea bargain for a lenient sentence — and waive their rights to privacy — or take their chance in a full commission trial, where they will face termination if they lose? Let’s think here, people: this is too important to just give up. San Franciscans aren’t going to accept a secret police state.
•The mayor and the police chief are still fighting against Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s plan to put cops on foot in high-crime areas. That’s a loser, Mr. Mayor. Nobody thinks that your current plans are working.
•After visiting Central Park in New York City — which is run by and for a private group of rich people — Newsom has decided to clear all the homeless people out of Golden Gate Park. Let me offer a little reality here: people sleep in the park because they have no place else to go. You cut their welfare payments and let the price of housing skyrocket, this is what you get. Sweep them out and they won’t disappear: they’ll sleep on the streets in the Haight and the Sunset and the Richmond. There’s a great campaign issue.
Besides, Golden Gate Park, homeless and all, is generally a safe, pleasant place, with only minor crime problems. But kids are dying on the streets only a few hundred yards away in the Western Addition. We don’t have enough cops to walk the beat where they could save lives — but we have enough to roust the homeless?
•Herrera, who’s got his hands full of ugly messes this week, tossed a referendum on the Bayview Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan off the ballot because each of the petitions didn’t have the entire plan attached. For the record, the plan is 62 pages. If this is the standard — an entire plan has to be copied and printed with every single petition — then as a practical matter, nobody in California can ever do a referendum on a redevelopment project. I suspect that’s not what Hiram Johnson had mind. SFBG
District 6 sleaze
EDITORIAL The fall campaign season has only begun, and already the District 6 race is getting really ugly. A downtown-funded operation, hiding behind anonymous mailers and front groups, is spending gobs of money to smear Sup. Chris Daly, and thanks to the city’s campaign-spending laws, Daly’s ability to fight back is limited. The whole mess points to a real problem in the way so-called independent-expenditure committees are regulated, and the supervisors and the Ethics Commission should take up the issue immediately.
Daly, who’s represented the district for almost six years, has offended a lot of people — including some of the city’s richest and most powerful interest groups. They tried to unseat him four years ago with no success, but this time around they have more money and a slimy, secretive strategy that appears to expose a loophole in local law.
The first salvo landed a few weeks ago: a slick, 22-page mailer called “The Case Against Chris Daly” that attacks him on almost every front. The hit piece is unsigned, so the people who received it have no way of knowing exactly who’s behind the message. And there’s no requirement that the sponsors register with the city’s Ethics Commission and reveal their source of financing.
It’s pretty clear, though, who produced and paid for the piece. The money is going through a group called Citizens for Reform Leadership #1, which was set up by downtown elections lawyer Jim Sutton, organized by SFSOS, and funded in large part by Republican kingmaker and the Gap founder Don Fisher. (Sutton has also established Citizens for Reform Leadership committees two through six, indicating that there’s more of this to come.)
The way San Francisco’s campaign-spending limits work, no candidate for supervisor can spend more than $83,000 — unless one of the other candidates breaks that cap. Then all rules are off. But that cap doesn’t apply to whoever put out the 22-page hit piece — in part because we don’t even know legally who it was. That means the SFSOS-Fisher crew can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars hammering away at Daly — and he can’t spend more than $83,000 fighting back.
The candidate who benefits most from this sewer money is Rob Black, a former aide to Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier who has the backing of Mayor Gavin Newsom and is by any account Daly’s most serious challenger. Black told us he has no direct connection to the hit squad — but he stopped short of promising not to engage in negative campaigning himself. And he’s certainly not going around town denouncing the anti-Daly sleaze.
That should change now. If Black wants to be seen as anything other than a pawn of Fisher, he should put out a formal statement calling on SFSOS and its allies to back off, quit the anonymous name-calling, and either come clean or stay out of District 6. So should every other candidate in the race. (The hotly contested District 5 battle two years ago was remarkably clean, in part because all of the candidates agreed not to accept this sort of nonsense.)
The Ethics Commission should launch a full investigation of this anonymous campaigning with the aim of exposing the forces behind it — and if the city’s current law doesn’t allow a ban on secret hit pieces, the supervisors should amend it today. Meanwhile, the commission ought to lift the expenditure limit for District 6; it’s not optimal, but in this case it’s only fair. SFBG
A vote on Oak to Ninth
In just 30 days, the Oak to Ninth Referendum Committee collected the signatures of 25,068 Oakland residents who want a chance to vote on a massive development project that would bring 31,000 new homes to the Oakland waterfront. But the matter may never be on the ballot: on Sept. 6, Oakland City Attorney John Russo directed the city clerk to invalidate the petition because it didn’t conform to the requirements of state election law.
It’s likely that from a legal standpoint Russo’s determination is correct. Nevertheless, the decision exposes flaws in California’s election system that the state legislature should fix. In the shorter term, the Oakland City Council ought to recognize that there’s strong public sentiment for a referendum on the project and put Oak to Ninth before the voters.
It’s tough to force a referendum vote on an act of local government: you need to gather a significant number of signatures within 30 days of the passage of the bill — and there are no second chances. If the petition doesn’t meet every possible legal standard — and the standards are high, the rules complex — then the referendum is dead forever.
Erica Harrold, communications director for Russo’s office, told us she sympathized with the plight of Oak to Ninth foes and acknowledged that the current rules applying to referendum petitions are “draconian.” Russo, she said, is seeking reforms to the current system, including establishment of a new rule that would not start the 30-day period until the city provides a certified final version of an ordinance to petition sponsors. That was a key issue in this conflict: the Oak to Ninth Referendum Committee apparently had to rush to gather signatures to meet the deadline and for various reasons did not submit the version of the ordinance that Russo and the City Council consider the final draft (additionally, the committee did not include certain attachments to the ordinance that the City Attorney’s Office says were required).
The legislature should follow Russo’s suggestion and change the deadlines. It should also consider allowing petition sponsors to cure unintentional defects in their petitions.
State legislative reform can’t come quickly enough to remedy the current situation involving the Oak to Ninth petition. But the City Council can still act: it’s well within the authority of local officials to simply acknowledge the public interest in (and demand for) a citywide vote on a project that will change Oakland forever — and place the entire matter on next June’s ballot.
There’s no rush to break ground here — in fact, we’ve long argued that the project shouldn’t have final approval until the incoming mayor, Ron Dellums (who has expressed real concerns with the deal), takes office. Legal technicalities aside, the bottom line is simple: Oakland residents deserve a chance to be heard on Oak to Ninth. SFBG
PS Stop the presses: on Sept. 19, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera ruled that petitions demanding a vote on the redevelopment plan for Bayview–Hunters Point were invalid — on a legal technicality similar to the one that undermined the Oakland petitions. Again, Herrera may well be legally correct (and we’re under no illusions here — the referendum was financed in part by a private housing developer) — but when in doubt, the desire of the voters to weigh in on an issue should be paramount. The supervisors should determine whether it’s possible to put this plan on the ballot anyway.
California’s secret police
EDITORIAL If a doctor does something really terrible and is suspended from the practice of medicine, the record is public: anyone — a potential future patient, for example — can check with the medical licensing board and find out what happened. Same goes for lawyers — discipline cases are not only public, but the legal papers routinely publish the details of the charges and the state bar association’s decisions. Judges? Same deal. Even the Pentagon, which is not known for its interest in sunshine, makes public the charges against soldiers accused of vioutf8g the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
That’s the way it should be: people who have tremendous power over the lives of others ought to be held accountable to the public.
But last week, the California Supreme Court issued one of the most disturbing decisions in years, ruling 6–1 that police disciplinary records must be for the most part secret.
The impact is so far-reaching it’s hard to fathom. As G.W. Schulz reports on page 15, it’s entirely possible that under this new standard, key details in some of the most important police-abuse cases of the past decade — from the so-called riders in Oakland to the Ramparts scandal in Los Angeles and Fajitagate in San Francisco — would have been kept under wraps. Under the broadest possible interpretation, the public will never know the names of the cops who break the law under color of authority, the bad actors who beat people up, harass (and sometimes assault) women, steal, lie, forge reports, frame suspects, fire their weapons without case, and — all too often — kill people without cause.
State law already gives cops, deputy sheriffs, and prison guards rights that go far beyond what any other public employees enjoy but has never been interpreted to bar the public entirely from disciplinary cases.
But in 2003, the San Diego County Civil Service Commission closed a hearing on the appeal of the disciplinary case of a sheriff’s deputy, and the San Diego Union-Tribune went to court to get access to the records. The resulting case went all the way to the state’s high court and ended with one of the worst rulings for the press and public interest in this state in half a century or more. Tom Newton, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, told the Los Angeles Times that in the wake of the ruling “we have pretty much of a secret police force in this state.”
The state legislature needs to take this on immediately. Mark Leno, the San Francisco Democrat who chairs the Assembly Public Safety Committee (and who worked diligently and effectively to improve the Public Records Act this past session), would be a perfect person to work with sunshine advocates to draft a bill that would make the secrecy ruling moot.
In the meantime, it’s still not clear exactly how far local government will have to go to protect the rights of peace officers to abuse their public trust without any public oversight. Sunshine advocates say that San Francisco, which has always held open hearings on major police discipline cases, may not have to immediately halt the practice. The Police Commission, which is scheduled to hold a hearing on the issue Sept. 17, needs to carefully weigh the arguments of activists and media representatives before making any new policy — and must write any new rules to side as much as possible with openness. For starters, all hearings should be presumed public unless an accused officer objects — and a full hearing on that objection should precede any closure.
There’s another step city leaders can take: every year or two, the cops come along with a request for legislation that would even further sweeten their union contracts. If the San Francisco Police Officers Association is going to demand secrecy in every single disciplinary hearing, that should be the end to all progressive support for more pay, more benefits, and more goodies for an armed force that refuses to accept even basic public oversight. SFBG
Five years after
EDITORIAL Here’s the painful but undeniable truth: five years after a pair of airplanes flew into the Twin Towers in New York, killing almost 3,000 people, the world — and the United States — is a decidedly less secure place.
Sure, would-be terrorists can’t carry box cutters (or toothpaste) onto planes anymore. It’s harder to open cockpit doors. Some flights have fully armed undercover air marshals on board. Security screeners make passengers take off their shoes.
But the nation is bogged down in a deadly, pointless war, the Middle East is a powder keg — and all over the globe, the United States is increasingly seen as an enemy.
Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian of London on Sept. 11, described a fanciful interview with Osama bin Laden, in which he asked the secretive al-Qaeda leader how he was doing five years after the attacks. Fine, bin Laden says: the United States could have turned the attacks into a rallying point against terrorism but did exactly the opposite.
“Bin Laden need not have worried,” Jenkins wrote. “He would agree, as did the CIA’s al-Qaida analyst in Peter Taylor’s recent documentary, that the Americans have done his job for him. They panicked. They drove the Taliban back into the mountains, restoring the latter’s credibility in the Arab street and turning al-Qaida into heroes. They persecuted Muslims across America. They occupied Iraq and declared Iran a sworn enemy. They backed an Israeli war against Lebanon’s Shias. Soon every tinpot Muslim malcontent was citing al-Qaida as his inspiration. Bin Laden’s tiny organisation, which might have been starved of funds and friends in 2001, had become a worldwide jihadist phenomenon.
“I would ask Bin Laden whether he had something special up his sleeve for the fifth anniversary. Why waste money, he would reply. The western media were obligingly re-enacting the destruction and the screaming, turning the base metal of violence into the gold of terror. They would replay the tapes and rerun the footage ad nauseam, and thus remind the world of his awesome power…. As for European support for America’s world leadership, that has plummeted from 64% in 2002 to 37% this year.”
This will be the enduring historical legacy of the Bush administration: At last count, 2,996 dead or presumed dead at the World Trade Center. At last count, 2,668 US soldiers dead in Iraq. At least 41,650 civilian casualties of that war.
The goodwill of the world squandered. Endless enemies all around. And every Republican running for reelection to Congress will have to deal with that. SFBG
Veto the cable giveaway
Editor’s note: This editorial has been corrected. An earlier version mischaracterized the effect of the cable bill on municipal finances.
EDITORIAL A terrible bill masquerading as a proconsumer law cleared both houses of the state legislature last week and is now on the governor’s desk. It could cost cities and counties millions of dollars, potentially wipe out local control over cable TV franchises, and give a big boost to AT&T, which is best known these days for cooperating with the Bush administration on illegal wiretaps.
The bill, AB 2987, was introduced by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez (D–Los Angeles), but its real sponsor is AT&T. The bill would allow big telecommunications companies to apply to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for a statewide franchise to deliver cable and video services to California residents. The idea is to make it easier for these companies to offer telephone, Internet, and cable TV service all in one bundle. AT&T and the bill’s other backers say it will increase competition and lower rates. Lenny Goldberg, who runs the California Tax Reform Association and is one of the smartest analysts of economic policy in the state, says the bill will actually lead to increased rates.
But beyond that, there’s a huge problem with the measure. It would effectively take away from cities and counties the ability to regulate local cable TV providers. It would give AT&T or Verizon (or whoever might come along in the future) the ability to ignore local government, get a permit from the state, and deliver service to cities and counties — without having to negotiate a local franchise fee or accept local terms and conditions. Comcast, for example, pays San Francisco millions of dollars a year for the right to sell cable service under the city streets — and under the franchise agreement is required to provide public-access and government channels. A cable provider with a state franchise would never have to go beyond what an existing franchise pays.
Sen. Carole Migden (D–San Francisco), one of only four senators to oppose the bill, argued passionately against giving any favors to AT&T, which has a proven record of turning information on its customers over to the federal government. That’s another excellent reason to oppose the bill, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger should veto it.
Meanwhile, Assemblymember Mark Leno’s industrial hemp bill, AB 1147, is on the governor’s desk and should be signed into law. So should AB 2573, which Leno had to fight the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. for and will help San Francisco expand its solar power production. There’s also Leno’s public records reform bill — and perhaps most important, his bill that would allow San Francisco to impose its own motor-vehicle fee, bringing the city $70 million a year. SFBG
The cost of harassing the homeless
EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has always talked about treating homeless people with compassion, is allowing the cops to do just the opposite — and it’s costing the city millions. As Amanda Witherell reports on page 11, the San Francisco Police Department under the Newsom administration has issued 31,230 citations for so-called quality of life offenses like sleeping on the streets, sleeping in the parks, and panhandling. In a pioneering study, Religious Witness with Homeless People reports that issuing and prosecuting those citations cost taxpayers $5.7 million over the past two years.
This is a reminder of the failure of the Newsom administration’s housing policy — and a terrible waste of law enforcement resources. The mayor needs to put a stop to it now.
Think about it: most homeless people are living on the streets because they don’t have the money for housing in this famously expensive city. In the vast majority of the cases, giving someone who’s broke a ticket for $100 is a colossal waste: the offender isn’t going to be able to pay anyway, so the unpaid ticket turns into an arrest warrant. The next time around, the police can nab this person and put him or her in jail (costing the city $92.18 a day, according to the Sheriff’s Department). In the end, 80 percent of the citations are dismissed anyway — but not before the police, the courts, the district attorney, and the sheriff run up a huge tab.
In some cases, it’s just another hassle for homeless people. In other cases though, these seemingly minor tickets can rob someone of the last vestiges of a semitolerable life. The list of quotes from homeless people included with the study is, to say the least, depressing:
“They wake me up in the morning and threaten to arrest me if I don’t stand up and start walking. The drop-in centers are full, so I either walk or get ticketed. I can’t walk all day long.”
“They took my vehicle away because I slept in it in the mornings while waiting to get another construction job. Losing my truck was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I can’t get a job without my truck, so now I’m on the street.”
“Just one ticket for sleeping can violate my parole, and then I’ll be in [prison] with murderers.”
“I went to Project Homeless Connect, and they really helped me. Two days later, they arrested me for not paying my tickets.”
The city is facing a homicide epidemic. The police brass constantly complain that there aren’t enough uniformed officers to keep the streets safe. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is having to fight to get approval for a modest pilot program that would put exactly four officers on foot patrols in high-crime neighborhoods; that program could be funded for less than one-tenth what the city is spending harassing the homeless.
It makes absolutely no sense for the police to be wasting time issuing these sorts of citations. Sure, violent people who are a threat to the public need to be kept off the streets — but that’s only a very small number of the homeless in San Francisco. Letting people sleep in the parks or in their cars isn’t a solution to the homeless problem — but it’s hardly a massive threat to the city’s populace (and certainly not when compared to the growing murder rate).
Newsom, of course, could and should make a public commitment to spending that $5 million in a more useful and productive way. And the Police Commission should look into the Religious Witness study and direct the chief to order officers away from giving quality-of-life citations.
If none of that happens, the supervisors ought to look into this too. If the cops have the money to be chasing panhandlers and car sleepers, the budget committee should look at the department’s allocation and see if some of those resources can’t be better spent fighting actual crime. SFBG
Cutting taxes the right way
EDITORIAL Finally the Democratic Party in California is starting to talk seriously about tax policy. It’s an important change in the political winds, and if state treasurer Phil Angelides can get beyond the tepid-to-hostile press and use his promise of a middle-class tax cut to gain ground on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, it may signal the end of decades of regressive and deeply harmful economic policy.
Schwarzenegger, who knows he’s in a tough race, has been trying to smear Angelides by saying that the Democratic candidate is pushing for tax hikes. Yes, he is — tax hikes on the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger (and Phil Angelides), people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. For the record, these are people who have seen their taxes drop dramatically under the Bush administration and are the direct beneficiaries of an alarming national trend of wealth concentration among the richest Americans.
Angelides isn’t talking about radical tax hikes; all he wants to do is restore the top state income tax rate to the level it was under Republican governors like Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson. Still, raising taxes never plays well in the polls, so Angelides is now doing what he needed to do from the start of his campaign: he’s proposing to cut taxes on middle-class working families.
It’s a risky strategy: pundits on the right will accuse him of “class warfare,” and the details of his plans will get obscured by negative political ads and lousy media coverage. But it’s the right approach: he’s actually talking about shifting the tax burden upward, about changing the national trend in tax policy, about giving the majority of the voters tax breaks and paying for it by making a few wealthy people pay more.
But if it’s going to work, he needs to be a lot clearer on exactly how the dollars pencil out — and he needs to offer more than what seems like a relatively modest tax cut. Right now, his plan calls for $788 million in tax reductions for families earning less than $100,000 a year and $5 billion in tax hikes for the wealthy. He’s also offering to find $1 billion in state waste.
For a family living on $46,000 a year, the program would amount to $660 a year in tax relief.
We understand that the tax cuts have to be lower than the tax hikes — the state is deeply in debt, and there are all sorts of badly needed social programs that ought to be funded. But in the end, his plan sounds pretty mild: there’s a lot more than $1 billion in waste, corporate tax loopholes, and uncollected revenue out there, and a California family earning $46,000 a year, facing the insane housing market and rapidly rising energy costs, could use a lot more than $50 a month in extra cash.
Let’s remember: the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich (and especially the very rich) that’s taken place in the past two decades is unprecedented in the postwar era and quite possibly unprecedented in American history. A few bucks here and there aren’t really going to make that much difference. If Angelides is serious, he should revise his plan to at least double the tax cuts for the middle class, hike the tax credits for low-income families — and pay for it by creating another tax bracket altogether, for Californians who earn more than $1 million a year.
But this is an excellent start — and Angelides deserves tremendous credit for opening a discussion that should have taken place years ago. SFBG
Cops out of their cars
EDITORIAL The politics of crime can be tricky for the left: progressives are against far-reaching and punitive crackdowns, against police abuse, against the pervasive financial waste in law enforcement … and sometimes can’t come up with answers when neighborhoods like Hunters Point and the Western Addition ask what local government is going to do to stop waves of violence like the homicide epidemic plaguing San Francisco today.
So it’s encouraging to see Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a Green Party member representing District 5, taking the lead on demanding more beat cops for the highest-crime areas in town. Mirkarimi’s not pushing a traditional reactionary approach of suggesting that the city hire more police officers and lock more people in jail; he’s advocating a simple — and decidedly progressive — approach to the issue. He wants the cops out of their cars and on the streets. On foot.
The idea of beat cops and community policing isn’t new at all; in fact, it’s the modern approach of highly mobile officers in cars, dispatched by a central computer and radio system in response to emergency calls, that’s a relatively recent trend. Police brass love it — they can cover more ground with fewer troops — and a lot of patrol officers like it too. They have that big metal car to protect them from potentially hostile criminals, and they don’t have to interact every minute of every day with the people on the streets.
But cops walking the beat are a proven deterrent to crime — and that’s not merely because of their visible presence. Properly trained and motivated community police officers can forge ties with merchants, residents, and neighborhood leaders. They can figure out where problems are likely to happen. They can become an asset to the community — not an outside occupying force that residents neither trust nor respect.
It’s a crucial change: right now, one of the biggest problems the San Francisco Police Department faces in solving homicides is the unwillingness of witnesses to come forward, in part because of a general mistrust of police. When there’s a killing, homicide detectives appear as if out of nowhere, demanding answers; it’s little wonder nobody wants to talk to them.
We recognize that beat patrols won’t solve the homicide crisis by themselves. That’s a complex socioeconomic issue with roots in poverty and desperation, and a couple of folks in blue on the street corner can’t alleviate decades of political and economic neglect.
And we also realize that it can be expensive to put officers on foot — they can’t respond as fast, and it takes time to develop community ties. But Mirkarimi isn’t asking for a total overhaul of the SFPD’s operations. He’s asking for a modest pilot program, a one-year experiment that would put two foot patrols a day in the Western Addition, focusing on areas with the most violent crime. The ultimate goal, Mirkarimi says, is to create a citywide beat-patrol program.
It won’t be easy: the department seems to be pulling out all the stops to defeat Mirkarimi’s proposal, which will come before the Board of Supervisors on Sept. 19. The Police Commission needs to come out in support of Mirkarimi’s proposal and direct Chief Heather Fong and her senior staff to work to make it effective.
The supervisors, some of whom worry that beat patrols in high-crime districts will mean less police presence in other areas, should give this very limited program a chance. Nothing else is working. SFBG
Public power returns
EDITORIAL Just when it looked like the public power movement had stalled, along comes the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission with a surprise announcement that it will create a public power demonstration project in the most appropriate part of town and reinvigorate efforts to kick Pacific Gas and Electric out of the city.
The agency has tentatively cut a deal to provide power directly to the 1,600 housing units and businesses that Lennar Homes is about to start building on Parcel A of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard — bringing clean, green (it comes from city hydroelectric and solar projects), affordable public power to a part of town that has long been besieged with environmental injustices.
We commend director Susan Leal and the rest of the SFPUC for this project and their promise to do the same thing on Treasure Island, once that property is officially in San Francisco’s jurisdiction. SFPUC officials say they’ll be able to beat PG&E’s rates while delivering power that is more environmentally sustainable than what we’re getting from the company’s aging fossil fuel plants.
The agency is now finalizing details with Lennar and waiting for PG&E to sign an interconnection agreement to transfer city power to the site, something that federal law requires the company do for a “reasonable” fee. If all goes well, the contract will go to the Board of Supervisors for approval in a couple months, creating the first living example of how the city would be better off without PG&E.
As such, we fully expect the company to try to sabotage the deal, so we urge all city officials to help shepherd this one to completion. Mayor Gavin Newsom should help make sure Lennar doesn’t get cold feet, City Attorney Dennis Herrera should be ready to fight if need be, and the SFPUC should be on the lookout for more such projects. Good work! SFBG
Don’t call the feds
EDITORIAL It’s bad enough that the federal government is aggressively infringing on the rights of three Bay Area journalists, the sovereignty of California, and the freedom of San Franciscans to choose — through the elections of our district attorney, sheriff, and mayor — how laws should be enforced in this city. It’s even worse that the San Francisco Police Department has actively invited the feds in to abuse the city’s citizens.
Now is the time for Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief Heather Fong to strongly, clearly, and publicly spell out when the officers under their control are permitted to federalize investigations rather than turning them over to the District Attorney’s Office. Particularly during this dark period when the Bush administration has shown a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, those in positions of public trust within San Francisco must safeguard the rights and liberties that generations of Americans have fought hard to win.
Specifically, Newsom and Fong should join the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in calling for a federal shield law similar to the one enshrined in the California Constitution, which allows journalists to protect their sources and unpublished notes and other materials. Until that happens, it should be the policy of San Francisco to refuse to cooperate with federal prosecutions of journalists, an action that would be similar to existing police policies of refusing to take part in raids on marijuana dispensaries or in operations targeting those suspected of vioutf8g immigration laws.
Instead, in the case of videographer Josh Wolf — who has been jailed for refusing to turn over his work to a federal grand jury — it appears that the SFPD was the agency that used a dubious interpretation of the law to bring in the feds for this unconscionable witch hunt. This is a disgrace and an affront to local control and basic American values.
As Sarah Phelan reports in this issue (“The SFPD’s Punt,” page 10), the cowboys who run the SFPD have been so intent on nailing those responsible for injuring an officer during a protest last year that they have deceptively morphed the investigation into one involving a broken taillight on a police cruiser. The idea was to argue that because some federal funds helped purchase the cruiser, then it was legitimate to turn this case over to the feds — which was simply a ruse to get around the California shield law. Perhaps even scarier is that it was done under the guise of fighting terrorism, even though the cops knew they were talking about homegrown anarchists who have legitimate concerns about US trade policies.
Over and over — in openly defying local beliefs about drug and sex laws and the death penalty — SFPD officers have shown contempt for San Francisco values. Even Newsom and Fong said as much during last year’s police video scandal, when they chastised officers for making videos that mocked Bayview residents, the homeless, Asians, and transgender people.
Yet that incident wasn’t as obscene as the decision by the SFPD to turn the murder investigations of Bayview gangs over to the feds rather than allow them to be prosecuted by District Attorney Kamala Harris, with whom the SFPD has feuded. The still-high murder rate in this city is a problem that will only be solved when we come together to address it as a community, rather than simply calling in heavy-handed outsiders.
It’s no wonder that communities of color in this city don’t trust the SFPD, which bypasses the black woman we’ve elected as our district attorney in favor of the US Justice Department and its facilitator of empire, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Newsom has already demonstrated that he’s willing to stand up to unjust state and federal laws, as he did on same-sex marriage, pot clubs, and illegal wiretapping by the Bush administration. Now it’s time for him to say that we’re not going to invite unjust federal prosecutions into this proudly progressive city. SFBG
PS We also must strongly condemn the federal prosecution of Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada. They are facing jail time for refusing to reveal how they obtained grand jury information that indicated San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds knowingly took steroids. Journalists must be allowed to fully investigate important stories, particularly those involving public figures, without fearing they will be jailed for their work. Again, this case strongly begs for a federal shield law.
PPS Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition summed up the argument well in a commentary now posted on the Guardian’s Web site, www.sfbg.com, calling the prosecutions “a wholesale usurpation of state sovereignty. The Bush administration, which has been justly criticized for attempting to enhance executive power at the expense of Congress, is now eviscerating states’ rights in order to expand the power of the federal government. William Rehnquist, the conservative former chief justice of the US Supreme Court and intellectual champion of American ‘federalism,’ is no doubt turning over in his grave.”
Can Werbach reform Wal-Mart?
EDITORIAL Those with power rarely use it to help the powerless: workers, foreigners, or the planet. That’s why we’re fascinated by the green noises that we’re starting to hear from übercorporation Wal-Mart and with its decision to hire our hometown environmental heavy hitter Adam Werbach, a move that reporter Amanda Witherell explores in this week’s cover story (see “An Unbelievable Truth,” page 15).
We’re skeptical of Wal-Mart’s motives and commitment to putting the planet before profits, so we truly hope that Werbach hasn’t been co-opted into a greenwashing effort. But because of the positive potential in this arrangement, we’re willing to trust Werbach’s judgment. In turn, we urge him to remember his roots and expect him to document his experience inside Wal-Mart and blow the whistle if Wal-Mart isn’t honoring its promises.
Let’s take a minute to look at the timing and potential of this. Wal-Mart is on the ropes even though it’s the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. The activists and communities that oppose it are banding together like never before. And they’re getting bolder in that opposition, such as when the city of Hercules earlier this year used eminent domain to seize land from Wal-Mart rather than allow a store in its community.
Wal-Mart has also lost some political clout. First it lost its most supportive Democrat when fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton left the White House. The Republican Party it sponsors is also likely to lose ground in the midterm elections, just as the country’s trade deficit hits record levels.
People are also waking up to the fact that Wal-Mart’s poverty-level wages and lack of good health insurance end up being subsidized by taxpayers. And there very well could bubble up a backlash against the kinds of obscene wealth-hording being pushed by Wal-Mart’s Walton family and others, as reporter George Schulz also details in this issue (see “Shackling the Tax Man,” page 11).
Finally, consider two high-profile media moments from this summer that put more pressure on Wal-Mart. The Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth has succeeded in placing global warming near the top of people’s concerns. This pressing environmental problem is made much worse by Wal-Mart’s practice of importing and distributing goods all over the planet.
The other was a widely circulated essay in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Breaking the Chain,” which made a strong case for the federal government bringing an antitrust action against Wal-Mart and smashing the chain to pieces. The article focused not on the widely discussed environmental and labor arguments, but on how Wal-Mart’s market power and the way it wields it hurts the economy and other businesses because it can dictate terms to all of its suppliers, a concept known as monopsony power.
So we all have good reason to believe that Wal-Mart executives and their newfound concerns for the people and the planet aren’t just motivated by altruism. And this corporation has a long way to go before anyone should believe its executives intend to transform it into a force for good. We simply don’t trust Wal-Mart and don’t think anyone else should either.
Ah, but what if? That’s the question that will cause us to hold our fire for now and watch to see whether Wal-Mart’s actions follow its rhetoric. Given Wal-Mart’s monopsony power over suppliers and near monopoly power over consumers, this corporation has the power to force substantial changes in the wasteful and overly consumptive habits of the average American. The potential here is phenomenal.
Is Werbach the guy to help them realize that potential? Maybe. He’s been an inspiring and effective crusader for economic and social justice for most of his life, which is why we were thrilled when Sup. Chris Daly snuck him onto the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
But in that role, he hasn’t been the bold visionary that we’d hoped for. Community Choice Aggregation, that baby step toward public power, moved way too slowly and didn’t go far enough, largely because Werbach failed to lead. And the movement for real public power has long been stalled, even on a commission that should be focused on kicking Pacific Gas and Electric out of San Francisco, although we’re pleased by the latest sign of life: the SFPUC is trying to offer public power from renewable sources on the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard property (see “Public Power Play,” page 10).
Werbach needs to be a forceful and uncompromising advocate for Wal-Mart to radically change its business model, and if he hits serious roadblocks, he must be willing to quit and talk about his experience with the Guardian or another publication, no matter what the personal cost. SFBG
How to fix the sewers
EDITORIAL Every time it rains heavily in San Francisco, millions of gallons of barely treated sewage flow into the bay. The city’s ancient sewage system has only one set of pipes — the stuff that’s put down the toilets and drains and the stuff that comes out of the clouds use the same underground pathways — and when there’s too much precipitation, the old pipes and storage tanks get overwhelmed, and there’s no place for the putrid mix to go but into the local waterway.
The raw shit is obviously unhealthy for people and for aquatic life: the bay doesn’t flush well, which means our sewage sticks around awhile. Even in dry weather, the city’s sewage system frankly stinks. Residents who live near the antiquated sewage treatment plan in Hunters Point have to smell it every day. A full 80 percent of the city’s wastewater winds up in a treatment plant in Bayview that everyone agrees is a relic from the 1950s that at the very least needs to be upgraded substantially.
There’s really no way to get around it: the politics of sewage is the politics of poverty, power, and race. As Sarah Phelan reports (“It Flows Downhill,” page 15), the west side of town has a well-constructed treatment center that doesn’t issue any odors at all and handles only a fraction of the city’s sewage. The heavy shit, so to speak, gets dumped on an area that has way, way too much of the city’s nuisances already.
In the meantime, it’s entirely reasonable for San Franciscans to ask why this environmentally conscious city makes such an awful mess of the basic problem of disposing of stormwater and human waste.
So the planning process that’s now underway for overhauling and upgrading the city’s wastewater system is an opportunity to undo decades of environmental racism and take a totally different approach to handling the water that comes into and flows out of San Francisco.
The first step, as Alex Lantsberg points out in an op-ed (page 7), is to stop looking at all that water as a problem. Water is a resource, a valuable resource. This city has constructed an elaborate system to bring freshwater into town from the Tuolumne River, 200 miles away. And yet, the fresh, potable rainwater that falls on the city creates a crisis every winter. There’s a serious disconnect here.
Take a look at a satellite photo of the city and you see a lot of flat rooftops and concrete roadways that together make up a huge percentage of the topographic landmass of San Francisco. These are places that now simply allow rainwater to run off into the storm drains. There’s no reason that those roofs can’t collect that water into cisterns, which could turn that rain into sources of drinking water, water to wash with, water to irrigate plants … water that otherwise would have to be sucked out of a high Sierra watershed.
There are vast amounts of space in the city where concrete — street medians, building fronts, sidewalks, etc. — serve as nothing but conduits for sloshing rainwater. With a little creativity, some of that area could be filled with plants that could absorb some of the rain — increasing green space and making the city a better place to live in the process.
And with modern technology, there’s no reason that all of the streets have to be impermeable concrete. As city streets are torn up, there are ways to look at pavements that are less than watertight, allowing some of the rain to soak in.
There are, in other words, ways to make San Francisco a model city for handling wastewater in an environmentally sustainable way. That won’t be the cheapest way to get the system repaired, but in the long run, it’s the only reasonable approach.
There are also ways to end the injustice that comes from living in the southeast neighborhoods and getting the worst of everyone else’s crap. If the city is about to spend more than a billion dollars upgrading its sewers, a key part of the project must be eliminating both the fecal outflows and the noxious odors that come from the Hunters Point treatment plant. If the more recently built west-side plant can be odor-free and avoid releasing untreated waste, this one can too.
Fixing the sewer system — and rebuilding the Hunters Point treatment plant — isn’t going to be cheap. To its credit, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is pushing to levy new charges on developers whose buildings add to the sewage burden. But in the end, there will have to be some sort of citywide water and sewer rate hike.
There’s going to be a huge fuss when that’s proposed. It ought to be set up so that big commercial users pay more than small businesses and residents, but in the end, it has to raise enough money to do this right. Trying to fix the sewers on the cheap will just leave us with the same stinking mess that the southeast has suffered under for decades. SFBG
Public power: step one
EDITORIAL Finally, after years of talk and a fair amount of delay, San Francisco is prepared to move forward and take a significant step toward public power. The supervisors are on board, the mayor’s on board — even the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which has never been much of an advocate for public power, seems to be on board.
So the goal now ought to be approving the Community Choice Aggregation program, putting it into action, and using it as a springboard to a real public power system.
Community Choice Aggregation creates the equivalent of an energy co-op. The city can buy power in bulk, directly from generators, and resell it to residents and businesses at lower rates than the private monopoly Pacific Gas and Electric charges. It will, of course, save the ratepayers some cash — and with PG&E’s soaring rates sucking hundreds of millions of dollars out of the local economy and hammering small businesses, that’s a great thing.
But the overall point of this ought to be getting the city into the business of selling retail electricity — and getting the public used to the idea that running an electric utility is something local government tends to do well. Public power cities all over California have lower rates and more reliable service than cities that deal with PG&E. PG&E’s public relations crew and expensive political consultants try to obscure that fact every time a full-scale public power measure goes on the ballot.
The problem is that CCA doesn’t entirely get San Francisco out of PG&E’s control. The giant utility still owns the lines, polls, and meters, so the city will have to pay to deliver its power through that system. If the system breaks down, we’ll have to rely on PG&E to fix it. And if PG&E continues to handle the billing functions, most residents may never realize that there’s been a dramatic change in the local grid.
As a first step, the supervisors need to demand that the city handle the billing functions, so that ratepayers see a bill coming from the city of San Francisco, not PG&E. That will reinforce the fact that this is public power and that the city, not the private monopoly, is responsible for the rate decrease.
Then public power advocates need to set a target date for another electoral campaign to kick PG&E out of town altogether. SFBG
Newsom, it’s time to end the Sunshine wars
EDITORIAL For months now, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press office has been fighting with Sup. Chris Daly over a series of internal memos that Daly claims ought to be public record. The memos involve the mayor’s position on tenant legislation that would make some kinds of evictions more difficult.
Daly had to take the case to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, which held a hearing and deliberated for more than an hour before finding the Mayor’s Office in violation of the law. And still, Daly — an elected official — couldn’t get a copy of the memos.
Then on July 29, Guardian reporter Amanda Witherell confronted Newsom outside a town hall meeting in the Richmond District. The mayor said he wasn’t even aware of the details of the battle — then promptly ordered his press office to release the records (see “Sunburned,” page 15).
Good for Newsom — but why did it take this long? Why did Daly, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, and no doubt the City Attorney’s Office have to spend so much time on a fight that clearly made no sense?
Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of how the Mayor’s Office — and so many other city agencies — is handling public-records requests: it’s a struggle for anyone to get anything.
A handful of aggressive, single-minded activists like Kimo Crossman, who is trying to get records on the city’s wi-fi negotiations, have been driving the Mayor’s Office and City Attorney Dennis Herrera crazy with reams of document requests. Why? Because they’ve asked for some simple, basic stuff — and have been refused. Thousands of hours of city time have been wasted fighting battles that don’t need to be fought.
Newsom can put an end to a lot of this pretty quickly. He should announce that he’s told the press office to comply immediately with every public-records request unless there is a clear, serious reason to withhold the information — and he should make it clear that he wants to be personally informed any time a request is denied so that he can make the final determination.
Newsom should also direct every city department under his jurisdiction to follow the same policies and support reforms in the Sunshine Ordinance to end all of these delays. SFBG
The judge misses the point
EDITORIAL The federal judge who allowed the largest media merger in Northern California history to go forward unimpeded did what far too many judges do in cases like this: she ruled narrowly on the tightest definition of the law and missed the overall point entirely. Judge Susan Illston rejected a bid by San Francisco real estate investor Clint Reilly to block Denver billionaire Dean Singleton’s effort to buy virtually every daily newspaper in the Bay Area and set up an unprecedented media monopoly. Reilly had sought an injunction against the deal, arguing that once it’s approved there will be no way to halt the obvious damage. Illston noted that Reilly had raised “serious questions” and agreed that there’s “a need to examine the proposed sale to ensure that no long-term harm will come to Bay Area residents.” But she insisted in a 16-page opinion that the deal posed no “pressing and imminent danger.” Wait: no imminent danger? One person could soon control every single significant news media outlet in the entire Bay Area save for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle — which also has a financial partnership with Singleton. What does Illston expect? That a year or two down the road, when residents of the region find themselves without any credible local newspapers and advertisers find nothing but high monopoly rates, someone can reexamine this and find that it was a bad idea? That’s silly. The time to put the deal on hold and address Illston’s “serious questions” is now, before it’s too late. Nobody will be able to unscramble this egg. But Illston didn’t get that at all. Instead, she ruled that the real threat of great harm was to the defendants — the billionaire publisher and his business associates. Actually, they face no risk of harm at all — except for the threat to their ability to make obscene profits by gutting newsrooms, combining operations, and tearing the heart out of Bay Area journalism. This is how Singleton, known (for good reason) as “Lean Dean,” operates. He likes what he calls “clusters” of papers — groups of newspapers in adjoining geographic areas. He centralizes as many functions as possible, reduces staff to the minimum necessary, then sits back and watches the cash roll in. In the Bay Area, that will probably mean that the big, expensive newsrooms of papers like the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times will be pared down, perhaps merged into a single operating center. The various papers will share stories, so there won’t be much difference (or competition) between them. Old-fashioned concepts like investigative and enterprise reporting, which require time and resources, will disappear. None of this requires a law degree and a judicial robe to comprehend. It’s been happening all over the country; Singleton’s record is clear. Of course, it didn’t help that Reilly was all alone on this, a single local businessperson trying to block a massive media merger that the state and federal governments are apparently ready to approve with only cursory examination. The outcome might have been very different if Attorney General Bill Lockyer had appeared before Illston representing the state of California. But Lockyer is sitting on his hands — and the US Justice Department just announced that it won’t pursue the matter and is going to allow the merger to proceed (see www.sfbg.com). This doesn’t have to be the end of the case, by any means. Reilly can and should go forward with his suit as aggressively as possible. And Lockyer, who is running for state controller, and Jerry Brown, who is running for attorney general, need to stop ducking this issue and take a firm stand against the merger. SFBG PS All of the papers involved in the merger covered the ruling, but none of them quoted outside experts critical of Illston’s decision or critical of the merger itself. Bruce B. Brugmann, Guardian editor and publisher, posted some key questions for the publishers on his Bruce Blog at www.sfbg.com; here are some of them: Why, if Hearst and the publisher participants feel they can’t cover themselves, don’t they get quotes from journalism or law professors at nearby UC Berkeley, Cal State Hayward, Stanford, San Jose State, SF State, USF? Why don’t they check with other independent experts such as Ben Bagdikian of The Media Monopoly fame, who is living in Berkeley? Why don’t they quote union representatives at the Chronicle and Merc? Why don’t they quote the congressional delegation that called on the Department of Justice and the attorney general to carefully scrutinize the sale? Why don’t they call on Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who introduced a local resolution opposing the sale, or any of the other supervisors who approved it unanimously? Why is it left to the handful of remaining independent voices to raise these critical questions? PPS Now that the investigation is closed, we’ve asked the Justice Department to release its full investigative file. We hope all the local daily publishers, who love to talk about open government, will support our request. Read the Alioto Legal Documents: Complaint.pdf Gannett-Stephens_Opp_to_ TRO.pdf Hearst_Opp_to_TRO.pdf McClatchy_opp_to_TRO.pdf MediaNews-Calif_Newspaper_Partnership_Opp_to_TRO.pdf Memo-Supp_of_Mtn_for_TRO.pdf Order_denying_TRO.pdf Plaintiff’s_Reply_to_Mtn_for_TRO.pdf
Saving local industry
EDITORIAL It’s almost an axiom in San Francisco planning policy: High-end housing drives out industry. That’s only logical: When people buy million-dollar condos, they don’t expect to get woken up in the middle of the night by delivery trucks or deal with the smell of diesel fuel or look out their windows at barrels of chemicals. When the dot-com boom turned parts of South of Market into a housing mecca for the newly rich and hip, the problem became serious: Businesses (including some nightclubs) that had been around for years and were operating entirely within the law, conducting operations that were well within the existing zoning, found themselves under attack from an influx of residents who considered many of the traditional uses of the area to be nuisances.
As high-end housing creeps farther and farther into San Francisco’s industrial areas and the Planning Department continues to push for expensive housing in the southeast neighborhoods, the potential for even more clashes — which tend to end with an industrial business being forced either to leave or to spend a fortune revamping its operations — just grows.
The simple answer, of course, is to stop building pricey condos in industrial areas. But it’s unlikely that anyone at City Hall is going to put a total halt to housing construction in or near industrial areas, so at the very least there ought to be some protection for existing businesses. Sup. Sophie Maxwell has introduced legislation that would bar newcomers to an area from taking legal action to define existing legal industrial activities as public or private nuisances. That means people who move within 150 feet of a business that’s been around for two or more years and conforms to the local zoning laws would simply have to deal with the regular impacts of living next to industry. The law would also require that anyone selling a housing unit adjacent to an industrial area inform the buyers in clear language that there might be noise, odor, or visual issues. If that brings down the price of condos in the southeast, so much the better.
It’s a simple proposal that makes perfect sense. The supervisors ought to approve it. SFBG
No more dam discussion
EDITORIAL The state Department of Water Resources released a long-awaited study July 19 concluding that restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley would cost at least $3 billion and possibly as much as $10 billion.
Let us put this in perspective.
The state of California is facing extreme pressure on its electrical grid because of record high heat. If this is an early sign of rapid and dramatic climate change (and that’s a very possible scenario), then the problem is going to get worse before it gets better. Most electricity in this country is generated by burning fossil fuels, which contributes to global warming, which puts more pressure on the grid…. It’s getting so bad that some desperate environmentalists, flailing around for answers, are starting to argue that nuclear power might be an option.
Renewable energy? Gee, the experts say: It’s just not financially feasible right now.
And with some very scary problems looming, the state is actually talking about tearing down a hydroelectric dam that provides clean electricity for 200,000 homes — and spending $10 billion to do it.
This is insanity.
The O’Shaughnessey Dam, which holds back the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, flooded a spectacular Sierra valley, breaking the heart of conservationist John Muir. Even the San Francisco Chronicle, which supported the dam and attacked Muir about 100 years ago, now agrees that it was a mistake.
But there’s a lot more to the story. For starters, the compromise legislation that gave San Francisco the right to build the dam required the city to use it as the centerpiece of a public power system — a legal mandate that the city defies to this day. As long as the dam is generating power, it offers a huge opportunity for San Franciscans to get out from under the private power monopoly of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. And while hydroelectric dams have serious environmental problems, they don’t create greenhouse gases — and a dam that’s been around this long is actually a fairly ecologically sound way to generate power.
The price tag for wiping out the dam is staggering — and from a purely environmental perspective, spending that cash on this scheme would be a gigantic mistake. For $10 billion, California could undertake a huge crash program in developing renewable energy, spurring a lucrative industry that would create tens of thousands of jobs. With that kind of money behind it, solar power would not only be competitive, it would be cheaper than other forms of electricity. And the state would be leading the nation into a new era of safe, clean power.
Sure, in 50 years when solar, wind, and tidal power provide 90 percent of the state’s energy needs, and California has joined Nebraska in outlawing private electric utilities, and there’s money to burn … then restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley will be a fine idea. But for now it’s time to put this foolishness to rest. San Francisco — which, after all, owns the dam — should take the lead here. The supervisors should pass a resolution stating that the city will not consider any further proposals to tear down the dam — at least not until the city’s and nation’s energy policies have advanced a long way in a very different direction. SFBG