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Editorial

A better option for trash

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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A better option for trash

EDITORIAL One of the biggest, most important municipal contracts in San Francisco is never put out to bid. It’s awarded to the same company, automatically, and has been since 1932. Recology Inc. (formerly known as Sunset Scavenger, Envirocal, and Norcal Solid Waste Systems) is the only outfit licensed to pick up trash in the city. It’s also the only company that has a monopoly guaranteed in the City Charter. Its residential rates are set every five years by an agency almost nobody’s ever heard of, the Refuse Collection and Disposal Rate Board, which consists of the city administrator, the controller, and the general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Commercial rates are set by Recology alone; there’s no appeal or oversight.

San Francisco is the only major city in the United States that contracts out solid waste collection to a private company. And it may be the only city of any size that does it without competitive bidding.

Now that city officials are discussing where the garbage should go — that is, what landfill should hold it — there’s a perfect opportunity to open up the 1932 deal, amend the charter, and fix this.

Sups. David Campos and Ross Mirkarimi are working on a measure that would mandate competitive bidding for the contract to pick up commercial and residential trash. “It’s not in the interest of the ratepayers to have a monopoly,” Campos told us.

It’s true that Recology has worked with the city on reducing the waste stream and developing a curbside compost and recycling plan. And Recology is an employee-owned company.

But that doesn’t mean the city or its residents and businesses are getting the best possible deal. Could another company do the same job better — and for less? Maybe. Would the prospect of a competitive bid drive Recology to improve service and cut rates? Absolutely. That why most municipal contracts are put out to bid on a regular basis.

But there’s a larger question here, one that the supervisors also should consider. Why does San Francisco have private garbage collection anyway? All over the country, cities handle that task as a part of the function of government.

There are several distinct advantages to evaluating a public option for refuse. For starters, the city is in desperate need of money — and Recology is making a nice profit off its local gig. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that the city could take over garbage collection, keep the rates at the same level, and bring in millions to the general fund. It’s also possible that city officials would decide to forego some of that income and cut rates to make life easier for residents and businesses.

Since the 1932 charter provision is getting a new look anyway, the supervisors at least ought to look at the possibility of ending private garbage collection. A fairly basic study should be able to establish how much revenue Recology takes in, what expenses are involved, and whether it’s worth pursuing municipalization.

Mayor Lee and Big Pharma

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Mayor Lee and Big Pharma

EDITORIAL A piece of simple, logical legislation that would protect San Francisco consumers, public safety, and the environment appears headed for the desk of Mayor Ed Lee — and his signature would be the first clear sign that he’s not going to let powerful lobbyists (or the legacy of Gavin Newsom) guide his decisions.

The bill, by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, would establish several secure places where people can drop off unused, unwanted, or expired pharmaceuticals for safe disposal. It seems so simple: every year, huge amounts of prescription meds are flushed down toilets or left around in medicine cabinets or drawers in the city. As much as one-third of all medicine purchased in the country is never used. The stuff that goes down the drain already has had a proven impact on aquatic life; the pills that never get thrown away are a hazard, particularly in households with small children.

But under current law, the only safe way to get rid of old meds is to return them to a pharmacy — and pay a fee. The cost of returning old drugs is enough of a deterrent that most consumers don’t bother.

If you have used motor oil in California, you can drop off and recycle it free. Many hardware stores recycle old batteries, light bulbs, and paint. Computer makers have to pay for recycling their products. Why can’t the city mandate the same rules for medication?

The easy answer: because it would cost about $200,000 a year to set up drop-off sites in drug stores and police stations — and the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want to pay.

It’s a trivial amount of money, a fraction of what the industry spends on lobbying. In fact, with Big Pharma lobbyists from Washington and Sacramento crawling all over City Hall to block the Mirkarimi bill, it’s possible that the drug companies have already spent more fighting the legislation than it would cost to implement it.

The bill would charge companies that sell pharmaceuticals in the city a very modest fee to pay for the drop-off program. Similar programs in other places (San Mateo County, Washington State) have been highly successful — but nobody yet has asked the companies that make billions of dollars selling these products to underwrite the cost. San Francisco would be the first.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has been fighting hard against the measure, claiming it would discourage biotech firms from investing in the city. That’s a huge stretch, but the chamber’s lobbying had an impact. When the measure came up at the end of 2010, four supervisors — Sean Elsbernd, Carmen Chu, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Bevan Dufty — voted with the Chamber and Big Pharma. So the bill would not have survived a Newsom veto.

But thanks to the oddities of scheduling, the legislation comes up for second reading Jan. 25, giving the new board a chance to weigh in. That will be a test for the new supervisors, but Mirkarimi is confident he’s got the six votes to give the measure final approval.

Then it goes to Lee. And if he can stand up to the chamber and the misinformation campaign from Big Pharma and sign the measure, he’ll not only help San Francisco take a national stand on an important consumer and environmental issue, he’ll also demonstrate that he’s not going to fall in line the way Newsom did every time downtown calls.

Lee should stop the recycling eviction

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Lee should stop the recycling eviction

EDITORIAL Mayor Ed Lee needs to demonstrate, as we noted last week, that he’s making a clean break from the politics and policies of the Newsom administration — and there are things he can do immediately to reassure San Franciscans that he’s going to offer more than another 11 months of a failed administration.

He can start by calling off the eviction of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Recycling Center.

The move by Newsom to evict the recycling center, on the edge of Golden Gate Park, was part of his administration’s war on the poor. It made no sense from a financial or environmental perspective. The center, which pays rent to the city, would be replaced by a community garden, which would pay nothing. The center creates green jobs that pay a living wage; all the workers would be laid off under Newsom’s plan. The center also operates a native plant nursery and provides a drop-off recycling site for local businesses.

A community garden makes only limited sense in a shady area that gets fog most of the year.

The only reason Newsom was determined to get rid of the place is that low-income people who collect bottles and cans around the city (an environmentally positive activity, by the way) come by the center to drop them off and pick up a little cash. Some of the wealthier residents of the Haight don’t like poor people wandering through their neighborhood. It’s class warfare, declared by the Newsom administration — and Lee, who got his start as a poverty lawyer, doesn’t have to tolerate it.

Lee should direct the Recreation and Parks Department to cease the eviction proceedings and negotiate a long-term lease for the Frederick Street site.

It seems like a small item in the long list of issues the new mayor will have to deal with — but the HANC recycling center has strong symbolic importance. Ending the eviction and allowing the center to stay would be a sign that Lee intends to be a mayor who is willing to work with the progressives and that he’s not going to try to solve all the city’s problems by blaming, harassing, and criminalizing people who are barely surviving in San Francisco.

The new mayor could take another simple step toward broad credibility by opening up his office — to the public and the press. Under Newsom, Room 200 was an unfriendly place to outsiders, and often the news media were treated as enemies. Lee should start holding regular press conferences — not just stage-managed events designed to showcase one issue, but broad-ranging, open sessions where reporters can ask questions about anything his administration is doing. And he ought to direct his press office to make compliance with the Sunshine Ordinance a priority.

For starters, he could release whatever proposed budget cuts Newsom left behind. It’s hard to believe the former mayor just turned them over to Lee without a list of things that were on the chopping block. The sooner the public sees where the previous administration was going, the sooner we can all determine what, if anything, Lee will do differently.

The agenda for Mayor Lee

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The agenda for Mayor Lee

EDITORIAL San Francisco has its first Chinese American mayor, and that’s a major, historic milestone. Let’s remember: Chinese immigrants were among the most abused and marginalized communities in the early days of San Francisco. In 1870, the city passed a series of laws limiting the rights of Chinese people to work and live in large parts of the city. Chinese workers built much of the Transcontinental Railroad — at slave wages and in desperately unsafe conditions that led to a large number of deaths. The United States didn’t even repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act (an anti-immigration law) until 1943, and for years, Chinatown was one of the poorest and most neglected city neighborhoods.

So there’s good reason for Asians to celebrate that the last door in San Francisco political power is now open. And Mayor Ed Lee comes from a civil rights background; he got his start in politics working as a poverty lawyer and tenant organizer.

Unfortunately, his path to Room 200 was badly marred by some ugly backroom dealing involving Willie Brown, the most corrupt mayor in modern San Francisco history. Even Lee’s supporters agree the process was a mess and that it undermines Lee’s credibility. So it’s important for Mayor Lee to immediately establish that he’s independent of Brown and his cronies, that his administration will not just be a Gavin Newsom rerun, and that progressives can and should support him.

He has a tough job ahead. We urge him to make a clean break with the past and set the city in a new direction. Here are a few ways to get started.

• Clear out the Newsom operatives and bring some new people with progressive credentials into the senior ranks. Newsom’s chief of staff, Steve Kawa, has been a shadow mayor for the past year while Newsom was on the campaign trail, and is the architect of much of what the outgoing administration has done to sow political division and cripple city government. Lee needs his own chief advisor.

• Show up for question time and work with the district-elected supervisors. Newsom was openly dismissive of the board and refused to take the supervisors seriously as partners in city government. Lee should appear once a month to answer questions from the board in public, should meet regularly with all the supervisors and appoint a liaison that the board can work with and trust. He needs to make his administration as transparent and open as possible and ensure that everyone at City Hall follows the letter and spirit of the Sunshine Ordinance.

• Make it clear that the next city budget includes substantial new revenue. Newsom offered nothing but Republican politics when it came to city finance; his only solutions to the massive structural deficit involved service cuts.

The deficit will be even worse than projected this year, since Gov. Jerry Brown wants to transfer much of the state’s responsibility for public safety and public health back to local government — and there won’t be enough state money attached to handle the new burden. Lee needs to publicly call on Brown and the Legislature to give cities more ability to raise taxes on the local levee. Then he should start planning for a June ballot package that will raise as much as $250 million in new revenue for the city.

A substantially higher vehicle license fee on expensive cars, a congestion management fee, a significant annual transit impact fee on downtown offices, a restructured business tax, and a progressive tax on income of more than $50,000 a year would more than eliminate the structural deficit.

There are plenty of other revenue ideas out there; not all can or would pass on a single ballot. But Lee needs to make it clear that revenue will be part of the solution — and that he will use all the political capital he can muster to convince the voters to go along.

•<\!s> Get serious about community choice aggregation. Newsom loved to talk about his environmental agenda, but when it came to challenging the hegemony of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and its dirty power portfolio, he ran for cover. His hand-picked Public Utilities Commission director, Ed Harrington, has been an obstacle to implementing the city’s CCA plan. Lee needs to get rid of Harrington or direct him to cooperate with the supervisors and get San Francisco on the path to clean public power.

•<\!s> Establish a real affordable housing program. The city plans to build housing for as many as 60,000 new residents in the southeast neighborhoods — but only a fraction of them will be affordable. This city is already well on its way to becoming a high-end bedroom community for Silicon Valley; only a clear policy that limits new market-rate condos until there’s a plan for adequate affordable housing will turn things around.

•<\!s> Support Sanctuary City and quit helping federal immigration authorities break up families. Newsom was just awful on this issue; Lee needs to work with Sup. David Campos to implement more humane laws.

•<\!s> End the demonization of homeless people and public employees. Newsom came to power attacking the homeless (with Care Not Cash) and went out attacking the homeless (with the sit-lie law). Lee ought to tell the Police Department not to aggressively enforce the ordinance.

•<\!s> Take on the sacred cows of the Police and Fire departments. The biggest salary and pension problems in the city are in the two public safety departments. The Fire Department budget has been bloated for years. If everyone else is taking cuts, so should the highest-paid cops and the overstaffed fire stations.

Some of Lee’s supporters insist he’s a solid progressive and that we shouldn’t hold the details of his selection — or the fact that he was chosen by people who are openly hostile to the progressive agenda — against him. We’re open to that — but the progressive community will judge him on his record. And he has to start right away.

How Brown can save California

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
How Brown can save California

EDITORIAL There are two things Gov. Jerry Brown has to do to get California back on track, and he needs to start right away. He has to restore at least a degree of public faith in state government — and he has to put a series of tax increases on the June ballot.

The first step ought to be right in the Brown playbook. The public is fed up with the secrecy, lies, machinations, and policy failures of the Schwarzenegger administration, and Brown can start off by telling people the truth. The budget situation is frightening; it can’t all be solved by cuts without destroying the state of California as we know it. But it also requires an understanding that the taxpayers don’t want to see their money wasted.

Brown has done the right thing by offering to cut his own staff by 25 percent and by denouncing the demands of the highest-paid University of California staffers who want even larger pensions. He might also take a look at some of the outmoded, expensive commissions in the state (do we really need a 21-member California Film Commission?) None of these are big money-savers, and none address the budget crisis in any meaningful way. But they’ll show that Brown’s cautious with a buck.

Then he needs to tell the voters that the state does, indeed, have a revenue problem, not just a spending problem. And he should start right away with a blue-ribbon panel of tax experts to look at what reforms ought to go on the June ballot.

It’s crazy to say that solving a $28 billion budget shortfall is easy, but a few basic changes could go a very long way to balancing the books. If the voters approve an oil severance tax (something every other oil-producing state in the nation has), an end to the commercial property loophole in Prop. 13, and the restoration of the vehicle license fee that Arnold Schwarzenegger abolished, the state would be about $10 billion richer. A modest increase in the income tax on the very richest Californians would add a few billion more. And suddenly the problem wouldn’t look so insurmountable.

Brown has an advantage: he’s taking over for a terribly unpopular governor. He will be able to work with a Legislature that now has the ability to pass a budget with a simple majority. And while his victory in November was hardly a landslide, it was substantial enough that he’s got a valid mandate for change.

He and the legislative leaders should adopt a budget that includes the expected revenue from a June tax package — and then offer an alternative budget that doesn’t. Give the voters a clear choice. Do they want to eliminate hundreds of public schools, raise elementary school class sizes to 40, shut down a couple of University of California campuses, shutter the state parks, and let 30,000 prisoners go free? Of do they want the oil companies and the richest Californians to pay a little bit more to keep the state functioning?

Brown can make history this spring. The passage of Prop. 13, during his last term as governor, set off a nationwide tax-cutting frenzy that’s damaged the entire country. By pushing back just a little bit, and demanding a little bit of tax fairness, he can demonstrate that California is still a leader in progressive public policy.

He’ll have to put his political capital, his credibility, and all the money he can raise behind the effort. If he doesn’t, his administration, and the state, will be a total failure.

Get out of the way, Mr. Mayor

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
Get out of the way, Mr. Mayor

EDITORIAL Let us begin with the obvious: Mayor Gavin Newsom has absolutely no business deciding who should replace him. His petulant statements suggesting that he will delay taking office as lieutenant governor until the supervisors pick a candidate he likes are an embarrassment to the city. If he actually refuses to take the oath of office Jan. 3, when his term in Sacramento begins, it will damage his reputation and political career.

Newsom knew when he decided to seek higher office that he’d be leaving the city early if he won. He knew that under the City Charter, the Board of Supervisors would choose a new mayor. He knew that a progressive majority on the board was likely to elect someone whose political views differ from his. If he didn’t want that to happen, he should have stayed in town and finished his term.

Instead, his ambition and ego drove him to Sacramento, and he needs to accept that he is now out of the process. He should publicly agree to follow the state Constitution and join Governor-elect Jerry Brown for a timely swearing-in ceremony. Meanwhile, the supervisors need to make it very clear that they won’t accept this sort of political blackmail and will choose the next mayor on their own terms.

There’s only one more regularly scheduled meeting of the current board, on Tuesday, Jan. 4, the day after Newsom’s term as lieutenant governor begins. It’s unfortunate that the progressive majority on the board hasn’t been able to find a consensus candidate, and it’s appearing more and more likely that the next mayor will be a short-termer, a caretaker who agrees to fill out Newsom’s term. We’ve consistently argued that Newsom’s successor ought to be someone who can run for a full term in November, but there’s certainly a case to be made for the right person to take on the job for just 11 months. A progressive caretaker could fire all the failed managers left over (at high salaries) from Newsom’s tenure and make cuts to sacred cows like the police and fire departments without worrying about reelection. We’d still rather see a candidate with the courage and skill to make the tough choices and run in November on that record. But if that’s not possible, it’s important that an interim mayor be chosen carefully.

It’s also important that the progressive supervisors consider the long-term implications of their choice: If the next mayor only serves out Newsom’s remaining time, who’s going to run in November — and what will the interim mayor do to promote the prospects of a progressive candidate?

A number of names are floating around as possible caretakers, and several would do at least an adequate and perhaps an exceptional job. Former Board President Aaron Peskin has brilliant political instincts and knows how to run the city; he’s let us down on a few votes, but would work well with the progressive board majority. Sheriff Mike Hennessey is popular with the voters and has good progressive credentials (other than the move to privatize jail health services, which makes him somewhat unpalatable to labor), but he’s never faced anything resembling the political nightmare of the city’s current fiscal crisis. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has a great legislative record and has hinted that he’d consider the job, but he still has two years to go as supervisor and would have to give up his seat and put his political career on hold. Former Mayor Art Agnos is the only one on the list who’s actually run the city at a time of crisis and would certainly be willing to make the tough decisions. If he could run an open office and listen to a diverse constituency, he might make up for the mistakes he made his first time in the job.

None of these candidates could do the job alone — and if they want to serve a short term as mayor, they need to start talking openly about it, explaining what their plans would be and give San Franciscans (and not just six supervisors) a reason to support them.

How many suspects did SF cops frame?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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How many suspects did SF cops frame?

EDITORIAL The job of a district attorney is bringing criminals to justice; everybody knows that. But it’s also the job of the city’s top law enforcement agent to make sure the innocent are protected — and that’s a part that many DAs ignore.

There’s considerable evidence that the San Francisco police have framed suspects, set up evidence, and illegally manipulated the legal system to put the wrong people behind bars. Repeatedly. That’s a crisis that requires active intervention from the District Attorney’s Office — and since Kamala Harris is on her way out the door, it has to be a top priority for her successor.

The latest example: Superior Court Judge Marla Miller ruled Dec. 14 that Caramad Conley was denied his constitutional rights and convicted of murder after San Francisco cops allowed a paid witness to lie on the stand.

Miller concluded that homicide inspector Earl Sanders, who later became police chief and is now retired on a nice pension, knew that witness Clifford Polk was lying and made no effort to correct it.

That’s not the first time Sanders has been tied to an improper conviction. John Tennyson and Antoine Goff were sentenced to 25 years to life in 1990 — and spent 13 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. They were convicted after Sanders, and his then-partner Napoleon Hendrix, failed to inform the defense about key evidence.

Tennison and Goff would still be behind bars — except that Tennison’s brother read a Guardian story about the case and put a copy on the windshield of every car in the parking lot where he worked. And some of the people who parked there were lawyers for the top-flight criminal defense firm of Keker & Van Nest LLP.

The lawyers helped Jeff Adachi, then a deputy public defender, convince a federal judge that Tennison and Goff were wrongly convicted, and the two left prison in 2003. The case has now cost the San Francisco taxpayers $7.5 million.

The evidence that may soon free Conley came to light during the Tennison/Goff case — and it looks an awful lot like there’s a pattern here. Sanders and Hendrix (who died of cancer in 2009) worked some 500 homicide cases — and it’s unlikely that these two are isolated instances.

Conley has a shot at leaving prison after 18 years only because lawyers working on another case stumbled on old files, some of them literally buried under debris in a police warehouse. We have to wonder: how many other innocent people are rotting away (at considerable cost to the state) because SF cops helped frame them? And how many killers are still wandering the streets because homicide inspectors and prosecutors took the easy way out and manufactured or suppressed evidence against the first obvious suspect — and sent away the wrong person?

When Harris leaves office next month, a new district attorney will take over responsibility for this mess. It’s not possible, given the limited resources of the department, to go back and review every single case that Sanders and Hendrix worked. But the Conley case involved a key witness who was paid by the cops — that is, an informant getting public money. It’s perfectly legal to pay informants — as long as defense lawyers know that a witness was on the tab at the time of trial. But that didn’t happen in Conley’s case — and there may be many others.

Harris’ successor will have to take on the problems of the crime lab mess and continue to review cases that may be tainted by bad forensic techniques. But he or she needs to assign someone to go back over all of the cases in which Sanders and Hendrix used paid informants and see if any of those convictions need to be reviewed.

In the meantime, Chief George Gascón ought to take the opportunity to review police policies for paying snitches who then take the stand in court. There’s abundant evidence that the current system has serious problems.

Local hiring — and purchasing

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Local hiring — and purchasing

EDITORIAL The local hire ordinance that the Board of Supervisors approved last week once again puts the city on the cutting edge of progressive policy. San Francisco’s law, sponsored by Sup. John Avalos, is the strongest in the country, and ultimately will mandate that 50 percent of all the people hired on public works projects live in the city.

The politics of the bill were tricky; the local building trades unions opposed it on the grounds that many of their members live out of town and that hiring decisions should be based on seniority, not on residence. But eight supervisors recognized that a local hire law not only benefits the large numbers of unemployed San Franciscans; it’s also good economic policy for the city.

Numerous studies have shown that money paid out to local residents gets spent in town, and circulates in town, and creates more economic activity. That translates into fewer social and economic costs for the city and increased tax revenue.

There are costs to the law. Someone has to monitor compliance, and that requires additional city spending. Training local workers for union jobs may raise the price of some projects. But in the end, the studies all show that keeping money in the community is worth the price.

Avalos deserves tremendous credit for negotiating with labor and other interested parties, accepting compromises that don’t damage the impact of the measure and lining up eight votes to pass it, so even if Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoes it, the board can override the veto.

Now the board ought to apply the same principle to a local purchase law.

One of the major complaints small businesses have in San Francisco is their inability to get city contracts. The qualifying process is complicated and expensive — and when big out of town corporations with plenty of resources to put together bids can also offer lower prices, locals get left out.

The city spends vast sums of money, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, buying goods and services. Every dollar that leaves town translates into far more than a dollar lost to the local economy.

In fact, a 2007 study by Civic Economics showed that 38 percent of the money spent on locally based retailers in Phoenix, Ariz., remained in town and recirculated in the local economy; only 11 percent of the money spent at chain stores stayed in town.

That’s a huge difference, and would translate into many millions of dollars for the San Francisco economy. (Over time, the impact of local hire and local purchasing laws would be much greater than the one-time burst of income expected from the America’s Cup race.)

There are complications with any local purchase law. Not everything the city needs can be bought locally. Nobody in San Francisco, for example, makes train cars or fire engines. But on everything from office supplies and cars to uniforms and consulting contracts, there are (or could be) local companies handling the city’s business.

As with the Avalos law, there would be costs. Some small local suppliers would be unable to match the price that big chains offer. But the overall economic benefits to the city would greatly exceed those price differentials.

San Francisco currently gives a modest preference in bidding to local firms. But if the supervisors applied the Avalos principle and mandated that, within five years, a certain percentage of everything the city buys would have to go to local firms, city officials would be forced to do what they ought to do anyway: look local first.

Every year during the holiday season, the mayor and business leaders urge residents to shop locally. When the new Board of Supervisors takes over in January, the members should start looking beyond rhetoric and start working on legislation that would keep the city’s money in the city.

The America’s Cup rip-off

Andrew Lam
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The America’s Cup rip-off

EDITORIAL Gigantic international sporting events tend to be great fun for the people who attend. They make great promotional videos for the host city. They can generate big revenue and profits for some private businesses.

But when the party’s over and the bills come due, these extravaganzas aren’t always a boon to the municipal treasury. And at a time when San Francisco can’t afford to pay for teachers and nurses and recreation directors, the supervisors ought to be giving much greater scrutiny to the deal that could bring the America’s Cup yacht races to the bay.

In 2009, as the city of Chicago was preparing an unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Olympics, the Chicago Tribune took a look at what the 1996 games had meant to another U.S. city, Atlanta. The Trib’s conclusion: lots of private outfits and big institutions did well — the Atlanta Braves got a new baseball stadium and the Georgia Institute of Techology got a new swimming and diving center — but the city itself didn’t get much money at all.

That’s exactly the way the deal that Mayor Gavin Newsom negotiated with Larry Ellison, the multibillionaire database mogul and yachtsman, is shaping up. A shadowy new corporation controlled by Ellison would get control of more than 30 acres of prime waterfront land worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The city could lose $42 million, and possibly as much as $128 million.

We don’t dispute the huge economic impact of holding an event that could attract more than 1 million visitors to the Bay Area. Those people will spend money in bars, restaurants, shops, and hotels. The waterfront improvements and increased tourism will create, according to economic reports, 8,840 jobs.

But as the Board of Supervisors budget analyst points out, those are not permanent, full-time jobs; much of the increased employment needs would be met by increased productivity (bartenders and waiters handling more customers than usual), overtime, and temporary jobs. And again: Most of the benefits will go to the private businesses in the tourist industry. The city’s increased tax revenue won’t be nearly enough to cover the expenses. Even if the America’s Cup group raises $32 million — and that’s not guaranteed in the deal — the city would still be down $10 million.

So in effect, San Francisco is preparing to spend $42 million of taxpayer money (and to forego as much as $86 million more by giving away waterfront land that could be developed) to benefit the sixth-richest person in the world, a new company he’s going to create and control, and the tourist-related businesses in town.

Oh, and to make it even juicier: the city is promising to seek state approval for Ellison to build condos or a hotel on the waterfront — something nobody else can legally do.

This doesn’t strike us as a terribly good deal.

It looks worse when you consider how the negotiations proceeded: The mayor and other city officials insisted they were scrambling to give Ellison everything he wanted to make sure that San Francisco beat out two other competitors. But as Rebecca Bowe reports on page 12, there were no other formal bids; Ellison’s team, based at the Golden Gate Yacht Club, was only negotiating with one city, San Francisco.

There are alternative proposals. The Telegraph Hill Dwellers Association wants to see the race complex moved from the Central Waterfront to the Northern Waterfront, and there may be ways of saving money. And Sup. Ross Mirkarimi points out that if Ellison wins the races in 2013 and comes back again the next time around, San Francisco could become what Newport, R.I., once was: a repeat host to an event that will bring more and more benefits as time goes on. That, however, involves a number of risks and variables that are far from certain at this point.

We’d like to know a lot more about what Ellison’s development plans are. We’d like to know who, exactly, will be running his new corporation that will get development rights for a couple of nice waterfront parcels.

But before the supervisors sign off on any deal, they need to set a bottom line: this can’t cost the city any net revenue. The San Francisco city treasury and local taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing an event created by and for the very wealthy.

 

The screwy rules for mayoral succession

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The screwy rules for mayoral succession

EDITORIAL The clerk of the Board of Supervisors, at the request of Board President David Chiu, has released a proposal for the selection process for a new mayor, and it’s about as complicated and confusing as everyone expected. That’s in part the result of the vagueness of the City Charter, which simply specifies that a vacancy in the office of mayor shall be filled by a San Francisco registered voter chosen by a majority of the supervisors but offers no procedural clues on how to get there. And the Political Reform Act sets very strict limits on conflicts of interest for elected officials in California; a supervisor, for example, can’t vote for himself or herself or do anything to promote his or her candidacy for an office that comes with a pay raise.

In the end, the proposal leaves limited room for public input — and makes it very difficult for any sitting supervisor, particularly one of the progressives, to wind up winning the job.

The way the rules are laid out, the board would accept nominations — but any sitting supervisor who accepted the nomination would have to leave the room at once, cease all communication with his or her colleagues, and play no role in further deliberations or voting. Since it’s entirely possible that several supervisors — and possibly several progressives — could be nominated, the process would cripple the final outcome since the only ones allowed to vote would be the remaining board members whose names aren’t in the mix.

That skews the outcome heavily toward one of two options: the supervisors appoint someone who isn’t on the board — or Chiu winds up as both acting mayor and board president because nobody else can muster six votes. The only other option: The progressives all stick together, line up in advance behind a candidate who’s currently on the board, and find one more vote for that person.

The whole thing is so screwy that the supervisors ought to make some changes before they adopt it and try, to the extent that it’s legal, to inject some sanity into the process.

For example: Instead of opening the nominations, collecting a long list of names, sending all of the sitting supervisors on that list out of the room and then voting, the board could take the names one at a time. A supervisor gets nominated, leaves the room, and the votes are tallied; if he or she has fewer than six, the process starts again. (The problem: who goes first — because the first person eliminated can’t be nominated again. To be fair, there would have to be some sort of random drawing of which supervisor could make the first nomination — which alone might add too much random chance to the outcome.)

Then there’s the question of when this all takes place. If the process starts now and an interim mayor is chosen, the board will have to reconfirm that person Jan. 4 when Gavin Newsom actually resigns to take over as lieutenant governor. There’s a chance something could go wrong in the meantime and the board would have to change its vote, and there’s a chance that state law would prevent a supervisor who won from acting in any way to influence the final vote. But those are better risks than the option of leaving everything to the last day. And if the board decides that it can’t or shouldn’t act until Jan. 4, special meetings ought to be calendared for Jan. 5, 6, and 7 to give the current board more than one day to make the final decision.

And before anything happens, the board needs to schedule at lest one open hearing to get input from the public on the qualifications for the next mayor and on potential candidates.

The bottom line: any candidate who wants to get progressive support needs to be willing to do more than sign legislation and manage the city. He or she needs to be willing to use political capital and the mayor’s bully pulpit to make the case for progressive change — on taxes, services, the budget, and an overall civic vision. And the six board members on the left need to stick together, or that won’t happen.

Questions for the next mayor

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
Questions for the next mayor

EDITORIAL The progressives on the Board of Supervisors are a long way from united on a possible mayoral candidate, and if they can’t come together, the person who finishes Gavin Newsom’s term will be a compromise candidate, either a short-term caretaker (not the greatest option) or someone who’s more in the moderate camp but a candidate the left can work with — for 2011 and possibly four years after that.

We’re glad to see the proposal by Sup. John Avalos to begin the mayoral selection process early. Picking a mayor in a mad scramble on the day Newsom steps down is a recipe for chaos — and potentially a bad outcome. And as the process begins, the last thing the city needs is a mayor chosen through a backroom deal.

But it’s entirely appropriate for progressive board members to set some standards and to ask the people who are angling for the job to make clear exactly what their positions would be on key policy issues.

In other words, anyone who wants to be the interim mayor — and possibly mayor for the next five years or longer — should have to answer, directly and without hedging, question like these:

How much new revenue does San Francisco need to solve its budget problems, and where, specifically, should it come from? This is the central issue facing the city, now and for the indefinite future. San Francisco’s budget has a structural deficit of at least $250 million, and it simply can’t be closed by cuts alone. What taxes will you pledge to support — and put political capital and fundraising clout behind when they go on the ballot?

What specific programs ought to be cut? Everyone likes to talk about the city living within its means, but that ends up leading to a series of death-by-1,000-cuts decisions that year after year devastate services to the poor. Don’t tell us you need to look at budget figures and work it out later; the big-ticket items are no secret. What’s on the chopping block — and what isn’t?

Will you work to promote public power? How will you expedite community choice aggregation, and will you support a ballot measure to replace Pacific Gas and Electric Co. with a full-scale municipal electric utility?

What are your law enforcement priorities? If money’s tight, should the San Francisco police be hassling nightclubs, or should more resources go into the homicide division? How important are foot patrols, and which neighborhoods should get them? Will the SFPD and juvenile authorities continue to turn young people over to federal immigration authorities?

Who should pay to fix Muni? Should the burden of paying for the transit system fall primarily on the riders (through fare increases and reduced services) or should big downtown businesses and retailers (the major beneficiaries of the system) pay more? Should car owners pay higher fees (including parking fees and congestion management fees) to subsidize transit? Which specific fees would you be willing to push for?

Who should the city build housing for? Right now, much of the new housing stock is aimed at the very rich — and San Francisco is turning into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Would you set housing policy to conform with the city’s General Plan assertion that more than half of all new housing should be below market rate? How would you make that balance happen? Should the city spend a significant amount of money for affordable housing, and who should pay for it?

Do you agree that public sector jobs are as important as private sector jobs in San Francisco? Would you support the tax plan proposed by Sup. David Chiu?

Do you support giving the supervisors appointments to all major commissions?

Do you think the city should be doing more to stop TICs and condo conversions and to preserve existing rental housing?

That’s just the beginning of a long list of questions — but the progressives on the board should make sure they have answers before agreeing to support anyone, as a caretaker or interim mayor.

How not to choose a mayor

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
How not to choose a mayor

EDITORIAL There are plenty of good arguments among progressives about who would be the best person to replace Gavin Newsom as mayor and how the Board of Supervisors should make that decision. It’s a complicated situation: The next mayor will face a horrible budget deficit, all sorts of tough decisions — and then face the voters in 10 months. And if the board appoints a progressive, that person will face a hostile daily newspaper and several well-funded opponents in the fall.

But we know there are some very bad scenarios, some things the board and the potential mayor contenders shouldn’t do — because in the end, the process needs to be free of any sort of backroom taint.

Here are some basic ground rules for the next two months.

Newsom shouldn’t try to mess around with the selection of his successor. The mayor decided to run for state office with the full knowledge that he would leave behind a vacancy that the supervisors would fill. He has no business playing political and legal games to skew the results. For example, some say Newsom is considering delaying his swearing in, now set for Jan 3, 2011, for a week to prevent the current supervisors from voting on an interim mayor. That would be a bad faith, manipulative move. He made his choice; now he needs to get out of the way and let the City Charter process work.

The current board should have a fair shot at electing Newsom’s replacement. The day after Newsom takes office as lieutenant governor, the current board will meet for one last time — and by law, they should and will have a chance to find a candidate who can get six votes to serve out Newsom’s term. Any parliamentary moves that serve only to delay the vote and push the decision to the new board would be inappropriate.

The idea of a “caretaker” mayor is fraught with problems — and Willie Brown shouldn’t even be on the list. Newsom is pushing the idea of a true interim mayor, someone who won’t run for the job in November and will simply keep the lights on for 11 months. That means ignoring the city’s serious structural problems. A caretaker would have no authority and little ability change things. And the notion that’s being floated around of former mayor Willie Brown stepping in is disgraceful. Brown was a terrible mayor, and a rerun of that nightmare — even of only 11 months — is the last thing San Francisco needs.

Kamala Harris shouldn’t be a player in this game. If Harris, the current district attorney, is elected state attorney general, her job will be open too — and it’s easy to see how Newsom could use that as a plum to get his way. If Harris resigns before Newsom is sworn in, Newsom would get to appoint her replacement — and if that appointee is currently on the Board of Supervisors, Newsom would get to fill a seat on the board too. Harris needs to stay out of that unseemly sort of deal.

All the rules and procedures need to be made public, now. The legalities of this transition are tricky. Could the current board appoint an interim mayor now, knowing that a vacancy will occur, or must they wait until Newsom has actually resigns? Could Newsom delay his swearing in? The supervisors need to get legal advice on every possible scenario — and make it public. The last thing anyone needs in this confusion period is secrecy.

Plenty of people will be unhappy with whatever plays out. But if the process is bad, the result will be a mayor with no legitimacy.

SF needs a local hire law

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
SF needs a local hire law

EDITORIAL A billion-dollar hospital project, built by a public agency using taxpayer dollars, just broke ground on the edge of District 10, the corner of the San Francisco with the highest unemployment rate and some of the city’s worst economic problems. That’s something job-hungry residents ought to be celebrating — more than 1,000 construction workers will be earning steady paychecks over the next few years.

And yet, when dignitaries including Rep. Nancy Pelosi showed up for the groundbreaking ceremony, they were met with protests. Bayview residents showed up to complain that very few of those jobs are going to the people who live in the project’s neighborhood. In fact, not that many jobs are likely to go to San Francisco residents. That’s because the University of California, San Francisco, which is building the hospital at Mission Bay, has no policy whatsoever requiring its contractors to hire local residents. As Sarah Phelan reports on page 11, San Francisco residents may turn out to make up fewer than 20 percent of the people who work on the project.

That’s a problem for a significant number of local construction projects financed and managed by government agencies. A recent study released by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Office of Economic and Workforce Development found that only 20 percent of the workers on public works job sites in the city were San Francisco residents.

Obviously, private construction companies can hire anyone they want — but when San Francisco tax dollars and San Francisco public land are involved, local residents ought to get a fair share of the work. That’s not just a political argument; it’s solid economics. Just as money spent at a locally owned independent business stays in town and does more for the local economy than money sent at big chains, local workers are more likely to spend their paychecks here in town.

Sup. John Avalos has introduced a bill that would set a 50 percent requirement for local hiring on projects paid for by the city. It’s a great idea, and needs strong support. There’s resistance from the building trade unions, which is no surprise — the unions want to keep the seniority system in place and give jobs to the members who have been unemployed the longest, no matter where they live. And a significant percentage of the membership of the building trade unions live out of town.

May of the residents of low-income areas like Bayview lack the specific skills for unionized trade jobs. But with so many longtime members out of work, the unions don’t want to add apprenticeship programs to train new workers for jobs that don’t exist.

But there has to be room for compromise here. The building trades leaders need to understand that San Francisco taxpayers have every right to demand that when they finance public works projects, some of that money will stay in town. And Avalos isn’t pushing for 100 percent local hire — nor is he trying to undermine the time-honored tradition of the union hiring hall.

The UC project is trickier. As a state agency, UC is exempt from local laws — and has a long history of defying San Francisco’s efforts to hold it accountable. The Bayview activists aren’t asking for 50 percent local hire — but they are demanding that the university adopt some sort of enforceable rules to ensure that some percentage of the jobs at the new hospital go to city residents. That’s more than reasonable.

San Francisco’s state legislative delegation ought to be in touch with the UCSF chancellor and send a clear message: This is a problem that needs to be resolved, now — and if it’s not, legislation setting local hire goals for all UC projects ought to be on next year’s agenda.

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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0
Editor’s notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

At a certain point, you have to stop trying to project what’s going to happen and just wait for the election results. Because what matters now isn’t the $140 million Meg Whitman has spent or Carly Fiorina’s record at Hewlett-Packard or which aide to Jerry Brown called Whitman a whore. It’s who shows up to vote.

If I were Meg Whitman’s campaign manager, I’d stop spending money. Go into hiding. Pretend there’s nothing going on here, no big deal next Tuesday morning — and then pray for rain. Because the way Whitman wins — possibly the only way she wins — is if huge numbers of Californians don’t bother to vote.

If the turnout is reasonable — that is, if enough Democrats realize the danger posed by of the GOP candidate and go to the polls — then Jerry Brown is in. And if that happens, chances are good that the rest of the Democratic ticket — including Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris — squeaks in, too. And then we can all start to have fun figuring out the future of San Francisco politics.

That, of course, depends on the same factor: Who’s going to show up to vote? Will all the tenants in District 8 — many of them unexcited about Jerry Brown — take the time to vote for Rafael Mandelman for supervisor? Will the progressive voters who have lived in District 6 for a while get to the polls in greater numbers than the conservative newcomers in the pricey condos? Will the next Board of Supervisors — which could be choosing the next mayor — be as progressive as the current board (which also might wind up choosing the next mayor?)

And who’s even on the mayoral short list?

At the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council forum Oct. 14, former Supervisor (and potential mayoral contender) Aaron Peskin noted that the person in Room 200 year “is going to have to take out the garbage.” The city’s going to face another awful budget deficit and a progressive interim mayor will have to make a lot of enemies. Who wants to face the voters in November 2011 after making more cuts and raising taxes?

Well, somebody needs to — because the “caretaker” mayor some people are pushing for won’t have the clout to make tough decisions. And frankly, a progressive with the power of incumbency might actually be able to win a full term, even up against a huge downtown war chest.

Fun stuff. Go out and vote.

 

Controlling big money campaigns

Andrew Lam
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0
Controlling big money campaigns

Big money moved into the district supervisorial races this fall. Downtown forces, working with landlords and a labor union that wants a giant new hospital on Van Ness Avenue, are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into races in Districts 6, 8, and 10, trying to alter the direction of the board by electing more conservative candidates. And while district races allow grassroots candidates without huge war chests a decent shot at winning, all this cash is going to have an impact — and might prove to be decisive in some races.

A lot of the money hasn’t been raised directly by candidates, either — it’s in the form of so-called independent expenditure committees, outside operations that, in theory, have no direct connection to any candidate. These committees can raise money without limits, spend it however they like, and ignore the limits that candidates face. And thanks to the U. S. Supreme Court, it’s almost impossible to regulate the committees. So the IEs, as they’re known, can put out attack ads, make scurrilous accusations, even lie outright — and have no accountability.

But San Francisco, which led the nation in using ranked-choice voting and has an impressive system for public financing of elections and disclosure, ought to be working to control this flood of sleaze. There are two major steps the supervisors should be looking at.

1. Respond to the money. San Francisco currently gives matching public funds to candidates who raise enough on their own to meet a threshold. That gives underfunded candidates at least a fighting chance to stay competitive. But it doesn’t address what happens when an outside group comes in and drops, say, $50,000 to promote or attack a candidate.

Unfortunately, federal law and court decisions limit the city’s ability to cap or restrict that spending. But the current system of matching public funds offers a potential alternative.

Suppose, for example, the city offered matching funds not just on the basis of what a candidate has raised — but also on the basis of what his or her opponents (including IEs) are spending. For example, if an IE spends $50,000 attacking a candidate, the city could give that candidate $50,000 (or, better, $100,000) to fight back.

That sounds like a lot of taxpayer dollars — but if the system is designed right, much of it will never be spent. Because the independent expenditure committees are only effective if the money is one-sided. Once these operators realize that all they’ve be doing by spending money against a candidate is increasing that candidate’s own resources, they’re far less likely to mount these campaigns.

The disclosure laws can be tightened too. Campaign ads and mailers have to say where the money’s coming from — but only in tiny type or in rushed voiceovers that few people notice. The federal government’s mandate that cigarette packages and ads have big, prominent statements about the health risks of smoking has been very effective. Requiring campaigns, particularly independent expenditure groups, to identify their major donors in large, visible type in prominent places on printed material and in clear language on radio or TV ads would help the voters understand the players — and the motivations — behind the campaign material.

2. Deal with the legal violations — promptly. A lot of these big-money campaigns have a tendency to skirt — or sometimes flagrantly violate — the city’s campaign law. And by the time the ethics Commission gets around to investigating (if that even happens) the election is over and it’s too late.

The supervisors ought to mandate that all credible allegations of election-law violations be investigated — and resolved if at all possible before Election Day. And if that means Ethics needs more staff, that’s a small price to pay for honest elections. 

 

The soul of the city

Andrew Lam
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23
The soul of the city

tredmond@sfbg.com

44th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL We all arrived in San Francisco broke: Paulo and me in the ’73 Capri, crawling over Donner Pass with a blown valve and three cylinders firing; Tracy and Craig in the back of a VW van, behind in the payments and on the run from the repo men; Tom and Sharon hitching across the Southwest after Tom, who could bullshit with the best, talked himself out a jail cell in New Orleans. Moak showed up in a rusty Datsun with the wheels falling off. Jane and Danny came on the old hippie bus, the Green Tortoise, $69 across the country.

But we all had a friend who knew a friend where you could crash for a little while. And in the early 1980s you got food stamps the first day and it only took a couple of weeks to get a job waiting tables or canvassing or selling trinkets on the Wharf. And once you’d scraped together a couple hundred dollars — maybe two weeks’ work — you could get a place to live. My first room in a flat in the Western Addition was $120 a month.

We did art and politics and writing and music. After a while, some of us went to law school, some of us became journalists, some of us went into government and education. A few of us fled, and Paulo died in the plague (dammit). But in the end, a lot of us were — and are — San Franciscans, part of a city that welcomed us and gave us a chance.

It was a very different time to be young in San Francisco.

I’m not here to get all nostalgic, really I’m not. There were serious problems in 1982 — raging gentrification was creating clashes in the Mission and the Haight and south of Market that were more violent than anything going on today. And frankly, broke as we were, most of my friends were from middle class homes and were college educated and had a leg up. We weren’t going to starve; we didn’t have to make really ugly choices to eat.

Most of the stories in this special anniversary issue are about marginalized youth — young people trying to survive and make their way against all odds in an increasingly hostile city and a bitter, harsh economy.

But there’s an important difference about San Francisco today, something earlier generations of immigrants didn’t face. The cost of housing, always high, has so outstripped the entry-level and nonprofit wage scale that it’s almost impossible for young people to survive in this town — much less have the time to add to its artistic and creative culture.

I met the 21-year-old daughter of a college friend the other day. She’s as idealistic as we all were. She wants to move to San Francisco for the same reasons we did and you did — except maybe she won’t. Because she felt as if she had to come visit first, to use her dad’s network, see if she could line up a job and figure out if her likely earnings would cover the cost of living. When I mentioned that I’d just up and left the East Coast and headed west, planning to figure it out when I got here, she gave me a look that was part amazement and part sadness. You just can’t do that anymore.

The odds are pretty good that San Francisco won’t get her — her talent and energy will go somewhere else, somewhere that’s not so harsh on young people. I wondered, as I do every once in a while when I’m feeling halfway between an angry political writer and an old curmudgeon: would I come to San Francisco today?

Would Harvey Milk? Would Jello Biafra? Would Dave Eggers? Would you?

If you were born here, would you stay?

Are we squandering this city’s greatest resource — its ability to attract and retain creative people?

The two people who started the Bay Guardian 44 years ago were young arrivals from the Midwest. Bruce Brugmann looked around the city room at the Milwaukee Journal, where he worked as a reporter, and realized there wasn’t any job he wanted there in 10 years. With two young kids and a dream of starting a weekly newspaper in one of the world’s most exciting cities, Bruce and his wife, Jean Dibble, settled in a $130-a-month flat. The Guardian’s first office was a desk in the printers shop. When they paper could finally afford its own space, Bruce and Jean moved the staff into a $60-a-month four-room place on Ninth and Bryant streets.

From the start, the paper was a “preservationist” publication — both in terms of environmental issues like saving the bay and in the larger political sense. The San Francisco Bay Guardian was out to save San Francisco.

The city was under assault — by the developers who were making fast money tossing high-rises into downtown; the speculators making fast money flipping property, ducking taxes, and driving up rents; the unscrupulous landlords who were letting their buildings fall apart while they charged ever higher rent. For the Guardian, fighting this urbicide meant protecting San Francisco values, preserving the best of the city from what Bruce liked to call “the radicals at the Chamber of Commerce.”

For the Guardian, progress wasn’t measured in the number of new buildings constructed, but in the ability of the city to remain a place where artists and writers and community organizers and hell-raisers — and the young people who were always bringing new life to the city — could survive. We supported rent control, and growth limits, and affordable housing policies, and limits on condo conversions, and minimum-wage and sanctuary city laws — and a long list of other things that together amounted to a progressive agenda.

And in 2010, the assault on the young, the poor, the nonconformists, the immigrants, is still on, at full force. The mayor and his allies are pushing a ballot measure that would make it illegal just to sit on the sidewalk. He’s also turning the local juvenile authorities into immigration cops, breaking up families in the process. He’s cut funding for youth services, and wants to make it easier for speculators to evict tenants, take affordable rental housing (especially the flats that young people share to save money) off the market, and create high-priced condos. Virtually all of the new housing he’s pushing is for rich people. He’s shutting down parties and arresting DJs and, in effect, declaring a War on Fun.

What he’s doing — and what the downtown forces want — is the transformation of San Francisco from a welcoming city where the weird is the normal, where the young and the crazy and the brilliant and the broke can be part of (or even drivers of) the culture, to one where profit and property values are all that matter. And that’s a recipe for urban doom.

Richard Florida’s 2004 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class shook up political thinking by pointing out that cities thrive with iconoclasts, not organization people. Everyone likes to talk about that now, even Mayor Gavin Newsom. But the missing piece, from a policy perspective, is that the creative class — particularly the young people who are going to be the next generation of the creative class — needs space to grow. And that means the most important thing a creative city can do is nurture the very people Newsom and his allies want to drive away.

If Prop. L, the “sit-lie” law, passes, if the rental flats in the Mission that have been home to several generations of young artists, writers, musicians and future civic leaders vanish in the name of condo conversions, if 85 percent of all the new housing in San Francisco is affordable only to millionaires, if the money that helps foster kids and runaways and at-risk youth dries up because this rich city won’t raise taxes, if nightlife becomes an annoyance to be stifled…then we’re in danger of losing San Francisco.

Our 44th Anniversary Issue also includes stories by Sarah Phelan on SF’s disadvantaged youth, Caitlin Donohue’s account of the Haight street kids, and Rebecca Bowe’s look at ageing out of the foster care system

Needed: a public health master plan

David Talbot
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0
Needed: a public health master plan

EDITORIAL More than 100 people showed up at the Planning Commission Sept. 23 to oppose California Pacific Medical Center’s plan to build a massive new regional hospital on Van Ness Avenue. Most were neighborhood residents who raised an excellent point: what, exactly, would the shiny new $2.5 billion hospital offer for low-income people in the Tenderloin?

And that’s just the starting point for discussion. The new project is a piece of a much larger plan: CPMC wants to shut down part of its Laurel Heights campus, reduce the number of beds and the scope of service at St. Luke’s, turn Ralph K. Davis into a specialty facility, and reshape the way health care is provided in San Francisco.

That’s a huge deal — but right now, the city is looking at the projects piecemeal. That’s poor public health policy and poor land-use planning. In fact, there’s no real way to evaluate the Van Ness hospital in its proper context — the Planning Commission, which will rule on the development issues, is hardly the best venue in which to discuss the future of health care in San Francisco.

So new legislation by Sup. David Campos is critical to injecting some sanity into this, and the larger, health facilities debate. The Campos legislation would mandate a citywide Health Care Services Master Plan and would require that all new hospital development, public or private, be consistent with that plan. It’s a pretty basic concept, and it’s hard to imagine that nobody’s suggested this before.

San Francisco has a large, complex network of facilities providing health care — a big public hospital, a university hospital system (University of California San Francisco), a series of public and nonprofit community clinics, half a dozen private hospitals run by two competing chains (CPMC and Catholic Healthcare West), and one health maintenance organization (Kaiser). Some provide unique services, some provide competitive services — and there are some critical services that are hard to find anywhere.

It’s hard to say whether the city needs what CPMC is proposing — a gigantic medical center that some have described as the Mayo Clinic of the West, designed to attract patients from all over the region — without any sort of overall plan. How would the new facility and the CPMC restructuring affect services at St. Luke’s, a critical part of the health care infrastructure in the Mission? Where would patients who rely on Davies for emergency and clinical care in the Castro district wind up? How about all the medical office buildings and doctors’ offices situated near hospitals that are about to change?

How will CPMC’s moves affect low-income-patient care? How does the project fit in with the new Obama health care policies and the city’s own Healthy San Francisco program? Will a new hospital on Van Ness increase access to primary and emergency care for residents of the Tenderloin — or will they be shuttled somewhere else while the high-end facility caters to better-off patients seeking expensive specialty procedures?

Those aren’t land-use decisions — and while some Cathedral Hill residents argue that the new hospital will cause traffic problems, the biggest issues go beyond the scope and expertise of the city Planning Department.

Under the Campos bill, the Public Health Department would develop a master plan (which public health director Mitch Katz says can be done with existing resources), the Health Commission would review that plan, hold public hearings, and sign off on it — and city planners and health officials would have to make sure that new health-related development met existing and future public needs.

The supervisors should pass the bill and get the process going as quickly as possible. And they should refuse to sign off on any final version of the hospital plan until there’s a city framework in place — or at the very least, until CPMC can demonstrate that its citywide infrastructure plans are designed to meet public health needs.

Subpoena PG&E’s maps

David Talbot
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0
Subpoena PG&E’s maps

EDITORIAL If you’re worried about the safety of the natural gas mains running below San Francisco — and you should be — you might take a look at a city on the Peninsula, one about 22 miles south of the site of the gas explosion in San Bruno. Since 1927, the city of Palo Alto has been running its own gas and electric utility — and instead of worrying about pipelines blowing up, the city recently won an award for safety.

Palo Alto workers inspected every inch of every gas pipe in 2009, and the steel pipes are replaced every 37 years — well ahead of the rated lifetime of the material. Oh, and by the way: gas and electricity are way cheaper in Palo Alto.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the private utility that operates most of the pipelines underneath northern California, has a different approach. In the past, the company has been nailed for diverting ratepayer money from public safety and maintenance into executive salaries and profits. And the backlog of deferred pipeline maintenance (despite the fact that the company has been given rate hikes to pay for replacing old pipes) suggests that the pattern may be continuing.

That’s yet another in the long line of reasons why San Francisco needs to replace the incompetent, bloated private company with a public utility system.

It’s also the reason the city needs to be moving on every front to find out exactly where all of PG&E’s hazardous infrastructure is.

PG&E, as we report in this issue, doesn’t want anyone to know where the dangerous, aging gas mains run. Even the San Francisco Fire Department doesn’t have the map. So if a fire breaks out a few feet away from a gas line that could explode at any minute, the first responders have no way to know. That’s just crazy.

We’ve managed to piece together, from existing public records, a pretty good approximation of the secret PG&E map (see page 12), and it shows that some of the gas mains run right below densely populated urban neighborhoods. The company acknowledges that more than 200 miles of pipes in the city are due for replacement — but won’t release the maintenance schedule or any information about when the various pipes are in line for upgrades.

That’s an issue of basic public safety — and city officials shouldn’t tolerate it for another moment.

PG&E says it’s concerned about threats to the pipelines — but the real threat is to the public. If the residents of San Bruno who had been smelling gas — and San Bruno police and firefighters — knew that there was a 50-year-old pipeline carrying gas at 200 pounds per square inch underneath the residential area, they might have ordered an evacuation. That would have saved lives.

The California Public Utilities Commission can probably order PG&E to release its maps of all of its gas mains in the state, but the CPUC has never been terrribly good at regulating the utility and can’t be counted on here. So the San Francisco mayor, Board of Supervisors, and city attorney need to act.

The board should, of course, pass Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s resolution calling on PG&E to cooperate with city officials on timely disclosure of the information. But the supervisors should be prepared to go further. They have the legal right to issue subpoenas, and if PG&E doesn’t at least give the relevant maps to the Fire Department, the board should demand that PG&E’s chief executive, Peter Darbee, show up at a public hearing and produce it. City Attorney Dennis Herrera also has the power, under limited circumstances, to issue subpoenas — and this certainly seems to qualify.

Meanwhile, the board should begin to hold hearings on the larger issue — could San Francisco run its own electric utility and a natural gas system too? Or should we just trust our safety to a company that can’t seem to find a gas leak that blew up an entire neighborhood?

PG&E’s deadly failures

David Talbot
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0
PG&E’s deadly failures

EDITORIAL In 1994, a fire raged through the tiny community of Rough and Ready in Nevada County. The inferno destroyed a dozen homes and caused $2 million in damage. The cause: tree limbs that Pacific Gas and Electric Co. should have trimmed brushed against high-voltage power lines.

A furious local district attorney filed criminal charges — and in a dramatic trial, evidence emerged that PG&E had intentionally taken $80 million in ratepayer money designated for tree trimming and diverted it into executive salaries and profits.

After a natural gas line that was installed in 1948 burst last week in San Bruno, killing five and devastating a community, local and state officials should be asking if the company is still taking money that should be spent upgrading and maintaining its system and spending it elsewhere.

There’s certainly evidence that the company’s safety record is shoddy. In 2003, a fire at a Mission District substation caused 100,000 people to lose power — and the CPUC chided PG&E for failing to follow its own rules and for general procedural laziness. In 2005, an underground explosion at Kearny and Post streets caused a fire that seriously injured a pedestrian on the sidewalk above. In June 2009, a fire at a PG&E vault at O’Farrell and Polk streets caused an explosion that roared up through a manhole and cut power to 8,600 customers.

In San Bruno, neighbors reported smelling gas in the days before the explosion. PG&E trucks had come to the scene and left without repairing the problem.

In the Rough and Ready fire, PG&E was found guilty of criminal negligence — and the San Mateo County D.A., James P. Fox, should immediately start looking into the possibility of filing charges against the company. In the meantime, San Francisco ought to be taking a long, hard look at the state of the private utility’s infrastructure in the city — and how much of it is vulnerable to deadly failure.

The mayor, the supervisors, and the city attorney should demand that PG&E produce a map of every gas line, power line, transformer, and substation in the city — with details about age, condition, and maintenance history. The city should hire an independent auditor to investigate how much of what PG&E has under and above the city streets is old, crumbing, poorly maintained, and likely to fail. The results should be made public — and the city should take whatever legal action is necessary to ensure that the company’s equipment doesn’t pose an imminent risk to local residents and businesses.

State Sen. Mark Leno is calling for a hearing, and PG&E officials should be forced to discuss, in public, how this disaster was allowed to happen. City officials, and the local Legislative delegation, should also be pushing the California Public Utilities Commission to investigate how PG&E has been spending the money it collects from ratepayers for maintenance and system upgrades. It’s clear that company profits were healthy enough for PG&E to spend $46 million on a failed ballot initiative that would have blocked public power in the state; why wasn’t that money used to replace the ancient natural gas pipes in San Bruno? Where else is the company skimping on facilities? How much of the company’s system needs immediate upgrades, and what’s PG&E’s budget and schedule for that work?

There’s a larger point here: none of the public power systems in Northern California have had this type of accident. None of the publicly run utilities have been found guilty of diverting maintenance money to executive salaries and profits. San Francisco’s first modest moves toward public power will come with the establishment of a community choice aggregation system — but that system will still rely on PG&E’s grid. The sooner the city can move to get rid of that private monopoly and build its own power system, block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood if necessary, the less likely it will be that a San Bruno-type catastrophe will happen here.

No smart meters in SF

David Talbot
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No smart meters in SF

EDITORIAL Smart meters are a dumb idea. That’s what The Utility Reform Network says, noting that the high tech devices are expensive (California utilities, including Pacific Gas and Electric Co., will be charging consumers $5.4 billion to install the meters), don’t save energy or money, and can lead to privacy risks. PG&E bills have soared unexpectedly in places where the meters have been installed in the past year, forcing an investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission, which concluded on Sept. 2 that the meters are okay, but PG&E’s customer service isn’t. Still, TURN and other experts say the report is inconclusive, and state Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter) wants legislative hearings before any more meters are installed.

San Francisco hasn’t faced the smart meter problem yet since the utility hasn’t been installing them here — but that will start soon enough, now that the CPUC (never known as a harsh critic of PG&E) has given the green light. TURN is urging customers to boycott the meters, so the San Francisco supervisors should tell PG&E that the city doesn’t want this flawed technology.

Smart meters are supposed to make it easier to save energy. The idea is that the devices will not only track how much electricity a customer is using, but give that customer the ability to monitor usage at different points in the day and cut back during peak periods.

But to take advantage of the gadgets, a customer would have to buy a bunch of expensive gear on the side — communications devices, thermostats, computer chips for energy-intensive appliances, etc. PG&E isn’t going to pay for that stuff.

Meanwhile, the "smart" part of the meter sends information about your energy usage through a wireless signal. Privacy advocates worry about that (as do people concerned with having yet another device in the house emitting low-frequency radiation).

And while PG&E denies that there are any problems with the accuracy of the meters, huge numbers of people in areas where they’ve been installed have reported huge — and otherwise inexplicable — hikes in their monthly bills.

So for most residents and small businesses, smart meters are just going to be a pain in the ass — a questionably accurate, potentially dangerous, and otherwise worthless device that PG&E is making money from by installing.

TURN has advice on its website (turn.org) for people who want to boycott the meters: to tell PG&E to leave the existing meters in place. If you put a sign on your meter saying you don’t want it changed — and if you tell the person coming to replace it that you don’t want a smart meter — you may stave off the new product for a while.

But San Francisco is in the process of creating a community choice aggregation (CCA) system that will put the city for the first time in the business of delivering retail electric power. That ought to give the city some authority over how local meters are going to operate — and at the very least, the city should tell PG&E to back off until CCA is in place and the city can do its own independent study.

The supervisors should ask City Attorney Dennis Herrera to investigate what authority the city has to block PG&E from installing smart meters, and to look at how the new CCA might avoid including the cost of the devices in the rates local customers pay for power. At the very least, the board can endorse the boycott and urge the CPUC to keep smart meters out of the city. Candidates for local office should oppose the smart meters. And if PG&E wants to force the issue, city officials just need to remind the utility that its local monopoly is illegal, that San Francisco has a federal mandate for public power, and that just three months ago, 68 percent of the city’s voters said they wanted to preserve a public power option.

School board race shouldn’t be personal

David Talbot
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School board race shouldn’t be personal

EDITORIAL There are plenty of issues to talk about in the San Francisco School Board race. The new student assignment process marks a dramatic shift in the way parents and kids get to choose schools. The district’s decision to pursue federal Race to the Top money was a mistake. There are too many charter schools, and not enough money for basic programs. The district has made great strides in closing the achievement gap, but there’s more to do. Many school facilities still need upgrades, meaning — potentially — more bond acts. The austerity budget has meant teacher layoffs. Overall, the district is in better shape than it was five years ago, but the goal of quality education for all kids is still a long way off.

This is what candidates and interest groups ought to be talking about. Instead, it seems as if the entire race is about one candidate: Margaret Brodkin.

Brodkin, the former director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth and former head of the Mayor’s Office of Children, Youth, and Families is by all accounts among the most experienced people ever to run for the office. She’s also strong-willed, forceful, and sometimes difficult. That’s what’s made her such a successful advocate. Over the past 30 years, she’s been involved in almost every progressive cause involving children and youth in the city, from the creation of the Children’s Fund to the battle against privatization in the public schools.

You think she’d at least be considered a serious candidate and that elected officials and political groups would give her the respect she deserves as someone who has devoted her life to activism on behalf of children.

But some incumbent board members have been engaged in a full-scale, anti-Brodkin campaign the likes of which we’ve rarely seen, even in the rough and sometimes brutal politics of this city. It’s mostly quiet, backroom stuff — and as far as we can tell, it’s not about issues. But they’ve approached just about everyone in local politics to badmouth Brodkin.

Let us stipulate: there are issues, real issues, progressives can disagree on with Brodkin. We’ve fought with her ourselves over some of the programs she implemented when she worked in the Newsom administration. Brodkin was far too supportive of former school superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who was secretive and imperious, for far too long. She’s also a close ally of board member Jill Wynns, who was wrong on a lot of issues over the past few years.

Brodkin has extensive proposals about education reform that she has discussed over and over; if you don’t like them, then don’t vote for her. If you think her proposals would be bad for the kids in the public schools — and in the end, that’s what this is all about — then work to elect somebody else. That’s how politics works.

But the misleading whisper campaign annoys us, and is often based on inaccurate information. Brodkin, we’ve been told, opposed voting rights for noncitizens back in 2004. Not true — she personally wrote a ballot argument in favor of the law. She told us, for the record, on tape, that she disagrees with Wynns and opposes JROTC in the public schools.

There’s also the line (and it’s somewhat reminiscent of some of things that were said about Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign) that she’s hard to get along with, that she won’t be collegial on the board. At her campaign kickoff, incumbent Hydra Mendoza praised the lack of conflict on the current board and said she wanted to preserve that — the implication being that Brodkin would bring disunity.

But unanimity and lack of conflict isn’t always good for a public board. Too much consensus leads to complacency — and that’s always a big problem, particularly when it comes to oversight.

We’ll issue our endorsements Oct. 6, when we’ve had a chance to talk to all the candidates — and right now we’re not ready to give the nod to Brodkin or anyone else. And we’d be the first to say that she has made mistakes and they ought to be taken into account in any endorsement process.

But we don’t like personal attacks, and we don’t like the politics of personal destruction. It’s not good for the schools, not good for democracy, not good for San Francisco. Argue issues, debate public problems — but this nasty whisper campaign has to stop.

Beyond Chief Gascon’s reforms

David Talbot
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0
Beyond Chief Gascon’s reforms

EDITORIAL You have to give San Francisco Police Chief George Gascón credit: he talks more about reform, and seems to take discipline more seriously, than anyone who has headed the department in at least 30 years. In the wake of the crime lab scandal, he did what the department should have done years ago: ordered a complete investigation of the background of every officer on the force to determine if anyone has skeletons that might affect his or her ability to testify in criminal cases.

But if the list of problem officers becomes nothing more than a closely guarded secret used only when the district attorney fears for the future of a criminal case, the exercise will have only limited value.

The fallout from the crime lab revealed a much deeper problem in San Francisco law enforcement: the police and the district attorney had not been properly informing defense lawyers when cops who were taking the stand for the prosecution had problems in their past. Hundreds of convictions could be overturned by that failure to abide by Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to turn over to the defense any material in an officer’s record that could relevant to the credibility of the cop as a witness.

Gascón didn’t create the problem, and he has moved expeditiously to come up with a plan to address it. But as Rebecca Bowe reports on page 8, there’s another gigantic issue here. There are cops at every level on the force who ought to be fired for misconduct — and the discipline process has been so slow that it’s utterly ineffective.

There’s plenty of blame to go around — the Police Officers Association balks at anything that could possibly help clear out bad cops. The Police Commission is abysmally slow at holding disciplinary hearings. And the culture of secrecy in the department — enhanced by some really terrible state laws — makes it impossible for the public to find out where the problems really lie.

But if Gascón is serious, he can make some dramatic changes. For starters, he ought to make the disciplinary process as open as possible. He probably can’t release the names of every cop on the Brady list; that would run afoul of state law. But he can certainly tell the public how many names there are and what offenses are included.

He’s been pushing to change the role of the Police Commission in disciplining cops, asking that that ability to fire an officer, now reserved for the commission, be shifted to the chief, leaving the civilian panel in the role of an appellate body. We agree that the chief ought to be able to fire a bad cop — but so should the commission. If Gascón adopts that stance and asks for more personal authority without eliminating the fundamental powers of the commission, he’d have the support of nearly every progressive in town.

The commission needs to change its own practices, too. Serious discipline cases drag on for years because the commissioners don’t put the time into holding hearings. Either the panel should set a weekly schedule for disciplinary hearings, outside of its regular meetings, or hire hearing officers to do that work. The backlog is insane and needs to be cleared up.

The next few months will demonstrate whether the chief is serious about changing the climate of bad behavior in the department. If he steps up, he’ll get immense public support.

New approach for the new U.S. attorney

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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New approach for the new U.S. attorney

EDITORIAL Joseph Russoniello, the U.S. attorney who terrorized immigrants, city employees, and medical marijuana growers, is finally out of office, replaced Aug. 13 by an Obama nominee screened by Sen. Barbara Boxer. Melinda Haag is the second female U.S. attorney in California history and the first since the 1920s. She’s taking over an office that pushed all the wrong priorities and served as an outpost of Bush administration values in Democratic Northern California, and she needs to turn that around, quickly and visibly.

President Obama has made it clear that he doesn’t want his Justice Department wasting valuable resources busting people who grow, sell, and use pot for medicine. And while the president has been slow and far too cautious on immigration reform, he has resisted the nativist movement and harsh attacks on undocumented immigrants. But a U.S. attorney has a tremendous amount of discretion on law enforcement priorities, and Haag could easily slide along, refusing to break with the policies of her predecessor.

That would be a serious mistake, one that would reflect poorly not only on the Obama administration but on Boxer, who under the traditions of Senatorial courtesy played a central role in choosing Haag.

The new U.S. attorney should:

• Disband the grand jury that’s been investigating whether city employees violated federal law by failing to turn suspected illegal immigrants over to immigration authorities. The grand jury started sending subpoenas to city agencies two years ago and raised the specter that some local juvenile justice workers might face charges. The move set off policy changes by Mayor Gavin Newsom that have led to more than 100 young people being torn from their families and sent to federal immigration detention centers.

The grand jury operates at the U.S. attorney’s discretion, and while its activities are secret, Haag could and should announce that the investigation is closed and no charges are pending.

• Inform City Attorney Dennis Herrera that no city employee will face federal criminal charges for complying with the city’s Sanctuary Ordinance. The threat of criminal charges has given Newsom cover for refusing to implement a sanctuary law that the supervisors passed over his veto. The law, sponsored by Sup. David Campos, directs city workers not to turn juveniles over to Immigration Control and Enforcement until they’ve been convicted of a felony. Herrera asked Russoniello for assurance that city employees could implement the law without fear of federal indictment, and the Republican appointee refused. Haag should give Herrera, and all city employees, written assurance that she won’t press charges over the sanctuary policy.

• Stop the pot busts — and don’t try to undermine Prop. 19. Even after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder made clear that he isn’t interested in harassing medical cannabis operations, local growers and outlets remain fearful of federal prosecution. And if the state’s voters legalize pot this fall, as appears likely, the weed will still be illegal under federal law. Haag needs to let the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration know that she’s not going to take any cases involving legitimate medical marijuana operations — and that she won’t use her office to undermine state law if Prop. 19 passes.

Of course, if the U.S. attorney’s office stops wasting time and money cracking down on pot growers and immigrants, the lawyers who work under Haag may have time to do some more relevant and worthwhile law enforcement. They could, for example, start looking into enforcing a federal law called the Raker Act, which requires San Francisco to operate a public power system.

Finally, some logic on same-sex marriage

David Talbot
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Finally, some logic on same-sex marriage

EDITORIAL Judge Vaughn Walker’s historic decision overturning Proposition 8 was remarkable not so much for its conclusion, but because it has taken so long for a federal court to conclude that same-sex marriage does no conceivable harm to anyone.

The legal scholars can debate whether this particular civil rights issue deserves strict scrutiny or must meet only a rational-basis test. And everyone knows the case will eventually wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court, where nine justices will decide whether official discrimination can be legal in the United States of America.

But what Walker did was crucial — he devoted the vast majority of his 138-page decision to discussing the facts of the case. As Bob Egelko notes in a nice San Francisco Chronicle piece Aug. 8, Walker provided a forum for the public debate that should have happened around the ballot measure but never did. Prop. 8 was decided after political consultants used carefully honed messages designed to play on people’s emotions; the real facts of the matter were hardly ever discussed on a statewide level.

The facts of the matter, as the record clearly shows and Walker eloquently related, are simple: there’s nothing wrong with same-sex marriage. The ability of same-sex couples to marry has no impact on the rights of opposite-sex couples. There is also no legal reason to believe that something rooted in an old tradition — from a time when gender roles were rigidly prescribed — has, in and of itself, any validity. "Tradition alone," Walker noted, citing a 1970 U.S. Supreme Court case, "cannot form a rational basis for a law." Furthermore, studies show that children brought up by same-sex couples fare just as well (and in some studies, better) than children raised in traditional households.

In fact, the judge concluded, the only real reason Prop. 8 supporters put the measure on the ballot is that they don’t like gay and lesbian people: "Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus toward gays and lesbians, or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate."

That record of factual evidence will make it harder for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals or Supreme Court to overturn Walker’s ruling. And the very essence of his decision — that no harm comes to anyone in society when same-sex couples are allowed to wed — is ample reason for him to deny any stay while the case is on appeal. A stay, which would leave Prop. 8 in effect for several more years while the case works its way through the system, would make sense only if some irreparable harm would come to some party. There’s no such harm — real or potential or imaginable — to anyone or anything except institutional and personal bigotry.

The decision demonstrates another crucial factor, one that politicians of both parties should pay attention to this fall. Courts tend to (slowly) reflect changing attitudes in society. And while the polls are still inconclusive, the demographics are not: Almost nobody under 30 opposes same-sex marriage, and every year that passes, California and the country come closer to the day when Prop. 8 will seem as silly as anti-miscegenation laws.

Both Attorney General Jerry Brown and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have asked Walker not to stay his ruling. Sen. Barbara Boxer has hailed the decision. But Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and Senate contender Carly Fiorina remain adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Brown and Boxer shouldn’t be afraid to make this part of their campaigns. There’s not a whole lot to bring young people to the ballot this fall, and making Prop. 8 an issue can only help the Democrats.

It’s also worth remembering that nearly every Democratic leader in the nation blanched when San Francisco, under Mayor Gavin Newsom did the right thing and legalized same-sex marriage in 2004. We warned then that Sens. Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Washington crew would wind up on the wrong side of history. And now that a judge who has never been known as a leftist (or even a liberal) has made the case that marriage is a civil right and discrimination is never legally acceptable, they ought to admit they were wrong.

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