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Google Bus sewers

Michael Redmond
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131
Google Bus sewers

STREET FIGHT With most city officials supporting the accommodation of private transit in some form, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is now vetting where tech workers should board and egress the private corporate commuter buses that ply the 101 and I-280 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley suburbs. A list of proposed bus stops was circulated in June, and the first round of bus stop proposals is set for approval in August.

Short of a proper environmental study, which is the subject of ongoing litigation, the list deserves more scrutiny and deliberation because certain areas of the city — such as Hayes Street in the Western Addition and 18th Street in the Mission — might be effectively made into Google Bus sewers.

I hope SFMTA is open to reconsidering some of these proposed bus stops.

Rather than jamming oversized interstate highway-scale coaches on human-scaled, walkable, and bikeable streets with important Muni routes, SFMTA ought to steer them where they are more appropriate: on the wider, car-oriented streets that bifurcate the city.

For example, the current proposal for private commuter buses in the Western Addition is to have these mammoth and incongruent buses running on Hayes Street using Muni stops at Clayton, Steiner, Laguna, and Buchanan.

This is bad news for passengers on the 21-Hayes, a key neighborhood-serving electric trolley bus that has gotten short shrift in the city planning process. With 12,500 boardings daily, the 21-Hayes is often at capacity every morning before it crosses Van Ness.

Just last week, I was on a packed 21 that was blocked (illegally) by a huge corporate bus on Hayes. With an already dense and slow traffic situation, this added at least 30 seconds to the trip before the 21 could access its stop. Repeat that multiple times in the morning and afternoon and you can see that this will be a mess. It’s not worth the dollar the SFMTA collects for such stops, that’s for sure.

Concentrating the private buses on the 21 line (or the 33 in the Mission) will block Muni where Muni is already slow, unreliable, and overcrowded. It will also diminish walkability and bicycle safety on Hayes and other streets identified in the current list (including the commercial corridors on Divisadero and 18th Street in the Mission.)

Rather than streets such as Hayes, SFTMA should redirect the private buses to the multilane, one-way couplet on Fell and Oak streets, only one block south. Along the corridor, SFMTA could collaborate with the private systems to establish new bus stops (red paint) at Clayton, Masonic, Divisadaro, Fillmore, and near Octavia. This scheme would limit clunky turn movements onto neighborhood streets by oversized buses and contribute to traffic calming.

In the mornings, the buses would pick up passengers on Oak Street, starting along the Panhandle, then travel towards Octavia Boulevard before swinging onto the freeway southbound. In the evenings the buses would exit the freeway at Octavia, and stop at drop-off hubs on Fell, between Octavia and Laguna, and then stop incrementally toward Golden Gate Park.

Additionally, the city needs to consider a space for the underpaid, nonunionized drivers to pull over and rest before and after long segments of freeway driving. We want these buses to be safe.

Similar arrangements should be made to spare 18th Street in the Mission from reverting to a Google bus sewer, with emphasis on private corporate bus stops on South Van Ness or Guerrero-San Jose. Surely there are other examples in other parts of the city.

The urgent affordable housing crisis aside, this could be a win-win from a transportation perspective. Tech workers would no longer get blamed for blocking Muni and they can know that while waiting for their bus, they are contributing to calming erstwhile hazardous streets.

There’s a lot of opportunity to combine these new bus stops with traffic calming at dangerous intersections such as Fell and Masonic or Oak and Octavia, all without mucking up Muni or diminishing the walkable human scale of nearby neighborhood commercial streets. And hey, since this is all a “pilot program,” no pesky and expensive EIR is needed — right?

Thinking long-term, this scheme could be a template to jumpstart making this ridiculous private transit system into a regional public bus system modeled on AC transit or Golden Gate Transit, a service open to all. Our car-centric streets are ripe for express bus service and this would help relieve parallel lines like the N-Judah, while enabling the city to attain its aspiration of 30 percent mode share on transit.

And for Mayor Ed Lee and pro-tech-bus members of the Board of Supervisors, it helps with their “vision zero” rhetoric of increasing pedestrian safety because placing the buses on car-centric one-way couplets can help calm traffic.

With a little cajoling by the mayor, he could get his tech sponsors to underwrite streetscape and beautification at the bus stops along these kinds of streets.

After all, Mayor Lee needs to find the money, because last month he betrayed pedestrian and bicycle safety and Muni when he abandoned support for increasing the Vehicle License Fee locally this fall, all the while misleading the public about the important role of Sunday metering. Perhaps it’s time for a tax or license fee on the ad hoc private transit system?

SLOWING DOWN

Speaking of vision zero, Sup. Eric Mar deserves hearty thanks for proposing to reduce speed limits citywide. This is one of the most effective ideas to come from the progressive wing of the Board of Supervisors in a long time and should be implemented yesterday. Higher speeds maim and kill, and the faster cars go the more voracious the appetite for both fuel and urban space.

With reduced speed, the motorist would still be able to drive, just more slowly, perhaps with less convenience than now. But over time the options of cycling, of walkable shopping, and improved public transit would synchronize more seamlessly as car space is ceded to separated cycletracks and transit lanes.

My suggestion is to make the city navigable by car at no greater than 15 miles per hour, a speed deemed not only to be comfortable on calmed pedestrian streets, but also to minimize injury and fatalities when there are collisions. Ultimately, our efforts to curb global warming, reduce injury and death from automobility, and make the city more livable obliges us to slow down, so looking at speeds is a step forward.

Street Fight is a monthly column by Jason Henderson, a geography professor at San Francisco State University and the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco.

Solving the housing crisis takes all San Franciscans, even big tech

Michael Redmond
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56

 

By Joseph Tobener

 

OPINION This week, San Franciscans learned that they will not be able to rely on Sacramento to fix the housing crisis. State lawmakers voted down Senate Bill 1439, which would have stopped speculators from using the Ellis Act to evict and convert buildings to upscale offices and TICs. One Assembly Democrat said that San Franciscans were “exaggerating the problem.” That same day, my office received Ellis Act eviction notices for 21 tenants from an artist building at 16th and Mission streets. The building has a new buyer, and it will soon be a high-end commercial space.

I was a tenant rights attorney during the first dot-com boom, and without question, this new housing crisis is much worse. The gentrification is more widespread and permanent. This time around, the evicted teachers, musicians, and artists are not simply moving down the street to smaller units, they are being priced out of San Francisco altogether.

We need to decide now, as San Franciscans, what we want our city to feel like in a decade. Here are five things I believe we need to do now to address the crisis:

1. Collaborate with tech leaders, rather than vilify them. I have been as guilty as the next person in blaming and berating big tech, ignoring the fact that many of my neighbors, clients, and friends are long-time San Franciscans who work in the tech industry. Enough blaming. We need to somehow bring tech to the table to help create large-scale solutions to the housing crisis. It may not be easy to do.

Earlier this year, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, criticized tech companies for being “stingy” in giving to their communities, and I have heard nonprofit fundraisers echo this. If true, we need to find out why. On the other side, our healthy anti-corporate, ‘us and them’ mindset, which is deeply rooted in San Francisco’s political tradition, is not serving us in collaboratively addressing the housing crisis.

While there are a handful of high-profile examples of tech workers wrongfully displacing tenants, tech workers are not the real problem. It is true that tech money drives up prices, but the real villains are the predatory speculators who are profiting from our shared crisis. The bottom line is, like it or not, tech is here to stay, and tech leaders have the resources to fund the arts, help our schools, and yes, help us address the housing crisis.

2. Stop illegal mergers of multi-unit buildings into single-family mansions. It is not enough to have regulations in place to prevent mergers. Real estate speculators are merging units surreptitiously, without permits. The Department of Building Inspection needs to actively police projects. And all San Francisco residents need to share in the responsibility of ensuring that speculators are not doing major construction without permits in our neighborhoods.

3. Support legislation to stop landlords from renting their units as hotel rooms. It is estimated that more than a 1,000 units in San Francisco are being rented out full-time for short-term corporate or tourist use. We need a law to get these units back into the permanent housing stock.  

4. Donate to the Community Land Trust and the Community Arts Stabilization Trust. Community land trusts are buying property to permanently preserve residential housing and art space. We need to do more to support these organizations. Other cities do a much better job than San Francisco in partnering with corporations to preserve culture.  

5. Support an anti-speculation tax. Tenant activists have introduced an anti-speculation tax designed to stop real estate flipping. Our office sees the same LLCs flip properties time and time again.

Ultimately it is up to all San Franciscans to embrace this cause if we hope to preserve the diverse and complex character of our city. One thing is sure: We cannot wait to add our voices, or it will be too late.

Joseph Tobener is a tenant rights attorney.

Guardian Intelligence: July 2 – 8, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

GUARDIAN ON THE MOVE

There were a couple of big changes for the Bay Guardian this week. We and our sister newspapers within San Francisco Media Company — San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly — moved into the Westfield Mall. Yes, the mall, but in the fifth floor business offices formerly occupied by the San Francisco State University School of Business extension program. The company, owned by Black Press in Canada and Oahu Publications in Hawaii, also named Glenn Zuehls as the new publisher and Cliff Chandler, who worked for the Examiner for years, as the senior vice president of advertising. Zuehls, who comes from Oahu Publications, replaces Todd Vogt as the head of SFMC. Zuehls and Chandler told the staff of all three papers that their primary goal is to grow the company’s revenues.

QUEER SPIRIT ROILS PRIDE

Even as an awareness of the ever-growing commercialization of SF Pride dawned on younger participants, a spirit of activism also took flight. Community grand marshal Tommi Avicolli Mecca led a fiery parade contingent (above) of housing activists in Sunday’s parade, protesting skyrocketing evictions in San Francisco. The anti-eviction brigade staged a die-in in front of the official parade observation area. Friday’s Trans March was the biggest so far, and Saturday’s Dyke March featured a huge contingent marching under the banner “Dykes Against Landlords.” Meanwhile, hundreds of protestors targeted a Kink.com prison-themed party, saying it glorified a prison-industrial complex, which “destroys the lives of millions of people.” Seven of the protestors were arrested, and charges of police brutality are being investigated.

LESBIANS BASHED AT PRIDE

While there were some disturbing anecdotal reports of homophobic slurs and queer bashing at Pride this year (including one of a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence and her husband being attacked at Pink Saturday), San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Albie Esparza said police are only investigating one incident so far as an actual hate crime. It occurred on June 28 around 5:30pm near the intersection of Mission and Ninth streets when two young lesbians were subjected to homophobic taunts and then severely beaten by five young male suspects, all of whom remain at large. They’re described at 16 to 20 years old, two black, three Hispanic. Esparza said hate crimes are defined as attacks based solely on being a protected classes, so that doesn’t include robbery or assaults in which racism or homophobic slurs are used, if that doesn’t seem to be the motivation for the attacks.

LIFE’S A STAGE

Hark! It must be summer, because all the companies dedicated to outdoor theater are opening new productions in parks across the Bay Area. Aside from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Ripple Effect (see feature in this issue; www.sfmt.org), Marin Shakespeare is presenting As You Like It in San Rafael (pictured), with Romeo and Juliet opening later in July (www.marinshakespeare.org); Free Shakespeare in the Park brings The Taming of the Shrew to Pleasanton and beyond (www.sfshakes.org); and Actors Ensemble of Berkeley goes stone-cold Austen with Pride and Prejudice in John Hinkel Park (www.aeofberkeley). AS YOU LIKE IT PHOTO BY STEVEN UNDERWOOD

TEN YEAR GRIND

Kids and pro skaters from One Love boards tore up “the island” — between the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero — with flips, kick tricks and plants June 29, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the much loved skate spot. Local Hunters Point pro skater Larry Redmon sat watching the new generation of skaters and offering pointers. Sure downtown has more grind blockers then it did a decade ago, but as Redmon says, “We out here.” PHOTO BY PAUL INGRAM

THE WILLIE CONNECTION

Muni’s workers and the SFMTA reached a final labor deal over the final weekend of June, but Mayor Ed Lee is telling news outlets the real dealmaker was former mayor Willie Brown. “He’s someone who understands the city, understands labor, the underlying interests,” SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin told various news outlets. Reports say Brown went unpaid by the city for the deed. That’s hard to believe: Anyone who knows Slick Willie knows he seldom does anything for free.

WAXING NOSTALGIC

The new Madame Tussauds wax museum attraction opened June 26 at Fisherman’s wharf — and includes SF-specific figure replicas like Mark Zuckerberg, Harvey Milk, and, of course, our real mayor, Nicolas Cage (pictured). See the Pixel Vision blog at SFBG.com for more creepy-ish pics and a review.

SHARON SELLS OUT (THE INDEPENDENT)

Despite her catalog full of confessional songs about nasty breakups and other dark subject matter, Sharon Van Etten was all smiles during two sold-out shows at the Independent June 29 and June 30. Leaning heavily on songs from her new album, Are We There, Van Etten and her four-piece band even led the adoring crowd in a cheerful sing-along at one point. On her next pass through town, we expect to be seeing her on a much bigger stage.

UNION PROUD

If BBQ and black-market fireworks aren’t your idea of showing civic pride, make your way over to the Mission’s Redstone Building (2940 16th St. at Capp) for a street fair Sat/5 with local musicians, poets, visual artists, and more, to mark the 100th anniversary of the SF Labor Temple and call attention to current labor issues like the fight for a $15 minimum wage. Built by the city’s Labor Council in 1914, the building formerly housed SF’s biggest labor unions and was the planning center for the famous 1934 General Strike. This celebration is part of Labor Fest, now in its 20th year, which runs throughout July around the Bay Area — for more: www.laborfest.net

 

Pumping up awareness

Michael Redmond
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7
Pumping up awareness

Warning! This is just a friendly reminder that your petroleum habit is hurting us all.

Berkeley’s Community Environmental Advisory Commission recently approved the concept of stickers to be placed on gas pump handles that warn drivers that greenhouse gases such as those emitted from automobile tailpipes contribute to global warming. If it makes sense to warn that cigarette smoking increases the likelihood of developing lung cancer, then hey, why not remind drivers that by using fossil fuels, they’re increasing the planet’s temperature and volatility.

The campaign is led by 350 Bay Area, a grassroots environmental organization affiliated with 350.org, a global climate movement. The name reflects its main goal: follow scientists’ warnings to reduce the amount of C02 in the atmosphere from its current level of 392 parts per million to below 350 ppm, a crucial threshold of climate instability.

While Berkeley has gained the most political traction for 350 Bay Area’s “Beyond the Pump” campaign, 350 Bay Area is also working on getting San Francisco to adopt the gas pump stickers and other planet-saving tactics.

Since last year, advocates with 350 Bay Area worked in collaboration with Sup. John Avalos on a 10-Point Climate Action Work Plan that was officially adopted in April. This plan commits the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2050. The group has also been in contact with Avalos and his legislative aide Jeremy Pollack about sponsoring an ordinance to place the warning stickers on gas pumps in San Francisco.

“I think it’s great. We need reminders about the impact of fossil fuels on an individual basis,” Avalos told the Guardian. “We have choices, and this is a great way to build awareness of those choices.”

Avalos said that his office has already started looking into the idea of putting stickers on gas pumps. Right now, he’s still waiting on enough research to ensure the stickers can pass legal muster against any challenges by the petroleum industry.

“Hopefully it will work out. The City Attorney is looking into it, and we’re waiting to see what happens with Berkeley,” Pollack told the Guardian. “We tried something similar with warnings about cell phone radiations, but the court struck it down.”

He’s referring to the nearly three years of legal battles with the mobile phone industry group CTIA over a San Francisco law passed in 2011 that had required every store selling cell phones in the city to display the specific absorption rate of radiation expected from each phone model.

CTIA took San Francisco all the way to the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, saying the law interfered with their free speech rights. And, it won. Finally, last May, San Francisco gave in and killed the warning law. Those legal battles are not something San Francisco is likely to forget, no matter what environment-happy warning labels come along.

Yet the San Francisco public might not mind a gentle push. According to a recent poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 77 percent of San Franciscans think that residents should be doing more to address climate change. The stickers could serve as a gentle push in that direction, and though Avalos is confident his city will get stickers eventually, it looks like Berkeley residents will get their warnings first.

“We’re not going to stop at Berkeley,” Jack Lucero Fleck, 350 Bay Area Steering Committee member, told us. “Right now, there’s no clues in gas stations that fossil fuels might be a problem. But advertising works. That’s why corporations spend billions on it. The human mind can’t ignore it.”

The campaign — the only one in the country with political fraction — is parallel to a Toronto campaign called Our Horizon. But unlike the stark, graphic warnings in Canada, 350 Bay Area takes heed from failed attempts by the US Food and Drug Administration to pursue graphic cigarette warning labels.

Right now, thanks to tobacco advocates who’ve aggressively protected their free speech rights, warnings on US cigarette packaging are tame. But if you go to Canada for a smoke, you’ll find packaging that reads, “This is what dying of lung cancer looks like,” followed by the image of an emancipated, corpse-like body. The least graphic image is of a gentle crib, but even that’s followed by information about the connection between smoking and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Berkeley could opt for similar, hardcore carbon emission warning graphics (picture it now: baby polar bears balancing on ice, fish washed up on shores, massive dust clouds about to drown villages), but 350 Bay Area is more mindful of the legal fallout that would likely follow.

Instead, the Berkeley warning sticker samplers are downright peppy. In hot pink, the sticker shouts, “Global warming alert!” followed by a pastel blue that informs drivers, with the gentle nudge of a concerned parent, “Burning gasoline emits C02. The City of Berkeley cares about global warming.” Then there’s a picture of a cute little car emitting a cloud of murky C02.

“We wanted the language to be careful and the facts noncontroversial,” 350 Bay Area Campaign Manager Jamie Brooks told us. “We have to be as gentle as possible. It’s tough love.”

One sticker sampler reads, “The State of California has determined that global warming caused by C02 emissions poses a serious threat to the economic well-being, public health, natural resources, and the environment of California.”

You can’t really argue with that, it’s even enshrined in California law. Plus, the stickers aren’t anywhere near the gruesome Canadian samples that show famine in deserts and unhappy kids suffering from smog-induced asthma.

Berkeley City Council member Kriss Worthington, who sponsored the council item in support of the stickers, said, “We made sure we had language that wasn’t questionable and that it wasn’t pre-emptive to state or federal law. The language in the stickers is language already law in the state of California.”

Sure enough, the California Global Warming Solutions Act, adopted in 2006 as Assembly Bill 32, already states that emissions are harmful to humans and the environment.

Yet Western States Petroleum Association’s President Catherine H. Reheis-Boyd isn’t pleased. She issued what Brooks called a “love letter” to the advisory committee. Just as tobacco lobbyists argued that cigarette warnings are forced — and therefore not free — speech, Rheis-Boyd ignores the global warming debate and instead focuses on the US Constitution.

“Far less restrictive means exist to disseminate this information to the general public without imposing onerous restrictions on businesses and forcing unwanted speech in violation of the First Amendment,” she wrote.

Reheis-Boyd goes on to appeal to Berkeley’s history in the Free Speech Movement: “Perhaps no city in our nation has as rich a tradition in the exercise of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech as the City of Berkeley.” She also accuses 350 Bay Area of advancing messages that are not “purely factual” but a “policy determination by the State of California.”

This is true; the stickers do reflect policy determination from AB 32, which mandates the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that’s why they’re likely to stick.

Besides, the stickers will likely only appeal to global warning believers; they’re meant to remind drivers that there are ways to curb their appetite for gas, such as by choosing public transit or other alternatives modes of transportation. The campaign’s technical advisor, Dr. Kirk R. Smith, said, “The cigarette analogy isn’t perfect, because gas is only one factor in climate change. But individual decisions are important.”

The question is whether or not such peppy stickers can get drivers thinking about the implications of their transportation choices.

The campaign in Berkeley isn’t done yet. After the Energy Commission votes in July, the sticker proposal will head to the Berkeley City Council in September. And from there, 350 Bay Area will see if those in San Francisco might like some friendly warning stickers on their gas pumps.

Don’t weaken protections against chain stores

Michael Redmond
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5

EDITORIAL As we reported two weeks ago (“Breaking the chains,” June 17), the San Francisco Planning Commission will soon consider rival measures to modify the city’s decade-old policies regulating chain stores (aka formula retail businesses) and giving neighborhoods the ability to reject them. This should be viewed as a chance to strengthen protections, not to weaken them at a time when small businesses need all the help they can get.

There are a number of important reforms in both the formula retail proposal by Sup. Eric Mar and the one developed by the Planning Department in coordination with the Mayor’s Office. Both expand on the types of businesses covered by the regulations, they close key loopholes, and they require more detailed economic studies to give the public and policymakers more information on how chain stores impact neighborhood commercial districts.

But in exchange for those protections, the Planning Department measure also makes concessions that are unacceptable and inconsistent with the formula retail standards that voters adopted through Prop. G in 2006. Specifically, planners are making the dubious claim that they have the authority to increase the threshold of what’s considered a chain from 11 stores now up to 20 stores, unilaterally rejecting a compromise number negotiated at the time between progressive leaders and the business community.

The logic offered for that change is equally questionable. The planners and backers of the change in the Mayor’s Office and business community say local businesses that grow beyond 11 outlets — such as Philz Coffee, Lee’s Deli, and San Francisco Soup Company — shouldn’t be “punished for their success” by enduring a lengthy and expensive conditional use permit process.

But gathering information and letting the community have a voice isn’t punishment. Larger businesses have more resources to go through the approval process, and the city rarely rejects formula retail applications anyway. Planners argue that the conditional use process is onerous and can take six months or more — but that’s an argument for reforming the process, not bypassing it. The Mayor’s Office should devote more resources to hiring more Planning Department staff to speed up this process, raising the fees on applicants to do so if necessary.

The Planning Department proposal also makes no effort to determine who owns the business that want to open here, allowing corporations to create endless subsidiaries and spinoffs to bypass the formula retail controls, something the city already has seen with the controversial Jack Spade application in the Mission District and other projects.

Corporations can be wily and predatory as the seek to endlessly expand into new markets, and if San Francisco’s nationally recognized controls are to have any relevance, they’ll need to adapt to changing circumstances. That means we need to strengthen and not weaken them.

It’s a trap

Michael Redmond
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10
It’s a trap

joe@sfbg.com

As City College of San Francisco struggles to loosen the noose around its neck, this week its accreditors are slated to offer the college a new way out. But some skeptics are sounding the alarm: it’s a trap.

The Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges is scheduled to vote on and announce a newly revised version of its “restoration policy,” which some journalists have called City College’s salvation.

“Huge CCSF Win: College Won’t Close,” one San Francisco Chronicle headline read. Bay Area TV stations and others echoed the jubilant headline, saying City College was saved. Chancellor Art Tyler told the Chronicle he would “absolutely” apply for restoration status. But many are calling the restoration policy a poor choice for the college’s future.

“Rumors of City College being saved are premature,” Alisa Messer, political director for the American Federation of Teachers Local 2121, told us.

The college’s faculty union isn’t the only one worried. A report released this month by the California State Auditor shows ACCJC has operated against its own bylaws and without full transparency in threatening CCSF’s accreditation.

“To allow community colleges flexibility in choosing an accreditor,” the state auditor’s report wrote, “the chancellor’s office should remove language from its regulations naming the commission as the sole accreditor of California community colleges while maintaining the requirement that community colleges be accredited.”

In the staid and stuffy bureaucratic language, the auditor essentially wrote the accreditor group was so dysfunctional it should be closed. The 75-plus page report scathingly tears down ACCJC staff, board selection, decisions, and policies. There are few areas in which they did not find fault.

“The report draws conclusions about accreditation without the necessary context and facts related to institutional evaluations,” ACCJC President Barbara Beno told the Guardian via email. “ACCJC is reviewed and approved by the United States Department of Education and its recognition was renewed in January 2014. That is the appropriate body to review the ACCJC’s practices.”

The DOE found many faults with the accreditors as well, but the scope of its review was limited to complaints made by the unions. The auditor viewed the accreditors in a fuller context, alleging the ACCJC decided to terminate CCSF’s accreditation “after allowing only one year to come into compliance,” while simultaneously allowing 15 other colleges two years and another six institutions to up to five years to reach compliance.

Such accusations of bias are also alleged in City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s lawsuit against ACCJC, charging CCSF was targeted with harsher penalties due to its political views.

Meanwhile, a closer look at restoration status shows it’s less like a lifeline and more like a tightrope suspended over flames.

The policy would give CCSF two years to come into compliance with all of the so-called “defects” ACCJC identified. If the college addresses these issues in two years, the commission would rescind the notice to terminate the college’s accreditation.

But buried in the legalese is a frightening clause noting that if CCSF isn’t found to comply with everything, “the termination implementation will be reactivated and the effective date will be immediate,” with “no further right to request a review or appeal in this matter.”

Beno said she heard the college community’s concerns around these clauses, during a two-week public comment period regarding the proposed policy that ended June 25.

“The Commission received a good deal of feedback,” she wrote, saying a revised “final version” of the restoration policy has been sent to the commissioners, who will vote remotely over the next week. “If it is approved, the ACCJC will post the final policy on its web page, the policy will be effective immediately.”

But the auditor found Beno hasn’t followed existing bylaws. This has long been an open secret in the community college world that’s referenced to in a 2010 public letter from the former California Community College Chancellor Jack Scott to the Department of Education. His immediate successor, Brice Harris (who also served on the ACCJC as a commissioner for seven years), did not heed this knowledge. He trusted Beno.

He met her for coffee, he talked to her on the phone. These interactions led him to believe replacing the college’s leadership would appease Beno, he said in his declaration (under penalty of perjury) in Herrera’s lawsuit against the ACCJC.

So on July 3, 2013, Harris released a video announcing he stripped the college’s elected Board of Trustees of all of its powers and promoted Special Trustee Bob Agrella to take its place. The college community was in an uproar, but Harris maintained publicly it was the right thing to do.

Privately, he received an email from Beno. “Dear Brice, Beautiful job,” she wrote to him, about his decision to whack the board. “The college may survive, with the right leadership.”

Harris wrote in his declaration: “Based on this email, which was consistent with all my prior interactions with Dr. Beno, I believed that City College could maintain its accreditation… if City College took extraordinary steps to comply with the ACCJC’s recommendations.”

But the accreditors did just the opposite. Just this month, it denied CCSF’s accreditation appeal, telling the college they it not review any evidence of progress it made after they voted to terminate its accreditation. This took Harris by surprise.

“If I had known on July 8, 2013, that the rules of the commission were later going to be interpreted to preclude any progress made by City College after June 2013,” he wrote in his declaration, “I would not have asked the Board of Governors to take the extraordinary step of setting aside the locally elected Board of Trustees.”

Harris was burned by the ACCJC. Now City College faces the choice to trust Beno and the accreditors again.

 

Above, California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice Harris explains why he pushed state entities to remove the City College’s Board of Trustees and replace them with Special Trustee Bob Agrella. Should City College of San Francisco trust the ACCJC?

Painting with more colors

Michael Redmond
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6
Painting with more colors

joe@sfbg.com

Not many plays feature an all-Latino cast, let alone all El Salvadoran. But Paul Flores’ Placas placed brown actors and a brown experience center stage. The 2012 production explored a father and ex-gang member’s struggle, leading his son out of a hard life of drugs, violence, and perhaps death.

The play garnered favorable but mixed reviews from critics, but among Salvadorans, it was a huge hit.

“You had older generations coming to see the play right alongside their grandkids,” Flores told the Guardian. The play’s premiere venue packed its 500-seat capacity, and sold out seven out of its eight nights in San Francisco. “We tapped a community thirsty to hear its stories told.”

Placas is the kind of creative work not being funded often enough by the city’s largest arts grant organization, critics are saying. At a contentious San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee hearing on June 20, artists told supervisors that programs serving diverse communities were severely underfunded, and alleged the city’s major arts funder, Grants for the Arts, awards money disproportionately to art forms favored by white audiences.

Spurred by public outcry and city studies, Sups. Eric Mar and London Breed recommended the transfer of $400,000 in unused funding from GFTA to another city arts funder, the Cultural Equity Grants (which funded Placas), to direct arts money to people of color.

The transfer won’t be approved until it goes before the full Board of Supervisors next month. But as San Francisco studio and housing rents soar, Mar said this was vital to keeping diverse artists in the city.

“I think the crisis for arts groups now is many of them are being displaced,” he told the Guardian. “How can the city subsidize groups with low rent or free rent, and how could we support small groups [to prevent them from] being displaced?”

"Arts inequity": San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst Report by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

Above is a PDF of the Budget Legislative Analyst’s report, as it breaks down lack of funding to diverse programs. The report has relevant sections highlighted.

The Guardian reached out to City Administrator Naomi Kelly for comment (her office ultimately directs arts grants funding). She was unavailable for an interview before we went to press, but her spokesperson Bill Barnes told us, “I don’t think we should be in a position of having governments regulate artistic content.”

But in a way, the government already does. The GFTA funding is made up of city dollars, and for decades its funding priorities have scarcely changed, favoring many of the largest mainstream organizations.

GFTA funds many arts organizations, but a recent report by the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office found it awarded about 70 percent of grants to organizations with mostly white artists who mostly cater to white audiences. The San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera, City Arts, the Exploratorium, the Museum of Modern Art, and the American Conservatory Theater received over one-third of GFTA funding over the past five years, the report found.

“The Bay [Area] will soon be 70 percent people of color,” Andrew Wood, director of the SF International Arts Festival, told the Guardian. “Why invest so heavily in organizations that are such a minority of the population?”

Taken on its face, the findings show a stark divide between funding for smaller, struggling minority arts groups and large, independently funded arts groups with predominantly white patrons. The report divided the diversity of GFTA arts funding into three categories: people of color (Asians, African Americans, and Latinos), ethnic minorities (Arab/Middle Eastern/Jewish), and LGBT organizations. The funding for these categories remained steady at about 20, 2, and 5 percent of arts funding, respectively, since 1989.

The lack of funding is one thing, but critics say the pattern indicates an outright dismissal of the broader community. In a mass email entitled “The State of the Arts in San Francisco” sent to the arts community from a group calling itself Arts Town Hall Organizing Committee said the outcry against critiques of GFTA’s diversity funding was “advanced by fringe members of the arts community.”

Realizing it called Black, Asian, and Latino artists a “fringe community,” the San Francisco Arts Alliance (a signatory to the email comprised of San Francisco’s symphony, opera, and other GFTA funded organizations) quickly backpedaled. It said the email was sent on their behalf by the public relations firm Barnes Mosher Whitehurst Lauter & Partners, a group that often runs astroturf campaigns for mainstream organizations.

One reason for GFTA’s inability to fund diverse arts groups may be a lack of trying: The BLA found the GFTA “does not have a definition or criteria for granting funds to people of color organizations.”

This color blindness is a problem, Wood told us. “[The money] the city invests in the War Memorial Opera House compared to the Bayview Opera House, also city owned, is completely out of whack,” he said. The Bayview Opera House was one among six “cultural institutions” to receive a portion of a $400,000 GFTA award, according to the organization’s 2013/14 annual report. Conversely, GFTA awarded the San Francisco Opera $653,000 the same year.

“They’re two different universes,” Wood said.

Allocating more funding for the Cultural Equity Grants was an oft-mentioned method for better supporting disadvantaged artists, the report found, even though GFTA and CEG share many of the same grantees.

Some say the report’s numbers don’t add up. San Francisco Arts Commission Director of Cultural Affairs Tom DeCaigny, a longtime local artist, disagreed with how the BLA defined which groups were white, ethnic, or otherwise.

“The methodology in the report assigns people an identity, and I know some of our grantees were referred to as white when they’re not,” DeCaigny told the Guardian. “We would want to see organizations self identify.”

Those faults undermine the value of the BLA’s findings, although he said, “I’m hesitant to comment on the value of that report.”

But some in the arts community felt DeCaigny’s opinion aligns suspiciously closely to the mayor’s priorities: funding the preferred arts organizations of his wealthy donors (like the symphony). We reached out to the San Francisco Symphony for comment but its representatives told us it would be unable to respond before our deadline.

DeCaigny defended the symphony, noting its annual Lunar New Year and Day of the Dead concerts serve diverse audiences. For the economically disadvantaged, he said, the symphony offers free concerts open to the public in Dolores Park, and that the symphony’s “artists are very diverse.”

DeCaigny pointed out the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s youth programs (shown above) are notably very diverse.

The donors are mostly white, he said, “but that’s true in other sectors as well. It has more to do with how wealth is distributed in our society.”

But Flores, Placas’ director, explained the need for ethnically diverse art was not just about who consumes it, but what message the art is sending to the audience. Nothing revealed this more, he said, then when he took Placas on tour across the United States. While in New York City, he conducted an informal poll.

“I asked ‘when I say San Francisco, what do you think of?’ They said the 49ers, the San Francisco Giants, the Golden Gate Bridge. They didn’t think gangs, pupusa, cumbia,” he said. That’s why Placas, which told the story of gang life among San Francisco Salvadorans, had such impact in the city and even beyond its borders.

“I love telling stories about San Francisco,” Flores told us. “The symphony doesn’t do that, the opera doesn’t do that. What does that? Locally generated art.”

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance committee is tentatively slated to hold a hearing on allegations made in the BLA report on July 16.  

Jasper Scherer contributed to this report.

Proud of the whistleblowers

Michael Redmond
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3
Proud of the whistleblowers

rebecca@sfbg.com

A lot has happened since June 2013, when famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, then 82, donned a pink feather boa to lead an energized San Francisco Pride Parade contingent on behalf of US Army private Bradley Manning, who couldn’t attend due to being held in federal custody.

Manning, a whistleblower who stood accused of leaking classified US documents, was celebrated as a queer hero by the more than 1,000 parade participants. They hailed the young private’s courageous decision to share US military secrets with WikiLeaks in a bid to expose human rights atrocities committed during the Iraq War.

The Bradley Manning Contingent had been ignited by the drama following Manning’s nomination as a grand marshal for Pride, then crowned grand marshal in an erroneous public statement, an announcement that was then emphatically revoked by the San Francisco Pride Board of Directors.

The messy, embarrassing incident made international headlines and sent a torrent of criticism raining down upon Pride. Progressives sharply condemned the board as spineless for being afraid to stand with a celebrated queer whistleblower whose act of self-sacrifice could alter the course of history.

In late August 2013, Manning announced that she identified as female and would be known as Chelsea Manning from that day forward. The announcement was concurrent with her sentencing to 35 years in prison for leaking classified US government documents.

The whistleblower’s name and gender identity aren’t the only things to change since last year: Chelsea Manning has been named an honorary grand marshal for the 2014 Pride celebration.

“The 2013 SF Pride Board’s controversial decision to revoke her status as Grand Marshal fueled an international controversy and created intense strife within the local LGBT and progressive communities,” a statement on Pride’s website explains. “In January, in the spirit of community healing, and at the behest of SF Pride’s membership, the newly elected SF Pride Board of Directors reinstated Manning’s status as an honorary Grand Marshal for the 2014 Celebration and Parade.”

The other game-changing subplot of this continuing whistleblower saga, of course, began to unfold just weeks before the 2013 Pride celebration, when former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden came forward to explain that he’d leaked secret NSA documents to expose a sweeping dragnet surveillance program intercepting millions of Americans’ digital communications, because he believed it posed a threat to democracy and personal freedom.

Snowden first unmasked himself as an NSA whistleblower in a statement filmed in a hotel room in Hong Kong; he’s now in Russia, where he’s been temporarily granted asylum. Ellsberg recently joined an advisory board to the newly formed, Berlin-based Courage Foundation, which has set up a legal defense fund for Snowden. Manning continues to serve out her prison sentence, while Julian Assange, founder and publisher of WikiLeaks (which exposed Manning’s leaks to a global audience) marked his second anniversary of being confined within the walls of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London on June 19.

Meanwhile Glenn Greenwald, whom Snowden selected as the recipient of his revelatory NSA files, has just embarked on a US book tour.

“The last year has been a bit intense,” Greenwald told a sold-out audience at San Francisco’s Nourse Theater on June 18, shortly after his arrival onstage was greeted with a standing ovation. His newly released book, No Place To Hide, provides an overview of what’s transpired in the movement against government surveillance since Snowden first approached him with leaked NSA documents.

“The surveillance state is aimed not at terrorists,” Greenwald said, “but at entire citizenries, without any shred of evidence of wrongdoing. The debate that has been triggered is about more than just surveillance,” he added, spurring dialogue on several overarching issues, “including the value of privacy.”

Greenwald named two troubling outcomes to emerge from the exposure of government secrets: First, the whistleblowers had been tarnished in the press as freakish or crazy as a way to diminish the gravity of the information they’ve revealed; secondly, the government’s practice of conducting massive electronic surveillance raises questions about how far press freedom can possibly extend in the digital age.

The author and constitutional lawyer then engaged in some myth-busting against the narratives that had been put forward concerning Snowden — claims that the security analyst is “a fame-seeking narcissist” or a spy.

“When I asked him over and over again why [he did it] … He told me it was the pain of having to live the rest of his life knowing he’d done nothing about this,” Greenwald said.

He added that he found the actions of those who sought to condemn Snowden to be very telling. “It is not simply a bunch of hacks or loyalists. The people who have decided that there must be some hidden secret motive … are doing that because they really can’t believe that a person can take an action … out of political conviction,” he said. “There’s a belief by the people who are soulless and have no convictions that everyone else is playing by the same rules.”

Nor was this treatment of being raked over the coals unique to Snowden. Manning was maligned in the press as suffering from a “gender disorder,” Greenwald pointed out, rather than being accepted as a transgender person.

And in the case of Assange, Greenwald shared an illuminating anecdote: “The Iraq War logs showed extreme atrocities,” he pointed out, but The New York Times granted this story just as prominent front-page treatment as “a profile of the quirky personality attributes of Julian Assange.” This article painted the WikiLeaks founder as bizarre and freakish, Greenwald explained, containing the “shocking revelation that Julian Assange’s socks were actually dirty.”

Meanwhile, on the morning of Greenwald’s San Francisco speech, Assange made a virtual public appearance in his own right. In a conference call with the Bay Guardian and other media outlets held from within the walls of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the WikiLeaks publisher discussed his bizarre situation and took questions from the press.

Assange has been granted asylum in Ecuador and is staying in an apartment inside the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, but if he sets foot outside the building, he will be immediately taken into custody by British security forces. More than $10 million has reportedly been spent on having officers stand guard outside the embassy, where they harass his guests as they come and go — but the British security apparatus is only one of several complicated problems facing Assange. His other adversaries include the governments of Sweden and the United States, both of which want to put him on trial.

In Sweden, prosecutors are waiting to try him on allegations of sexual misconduct — but “If he goes to Sweden, it will more than likely mean a one-way ticket to the United States,” his attorney Michael Ratner made plain in the press call.

In the US, WikiLeaks continues to be the subject of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department, which Assange described as the longest ever directed against a publisher.

“It is against the stated principles of the US, and I believe the values of its people, to have a four-year criminal investigation against a publisher,” Assange said. He added that the government’s targeting of WikiLeaks for publishing classified documents could have ramifications for any members of the press who seek to dig deeper than just reporting “the contents of a press conference,” as he put it. And with the rise of digital media, “All publishers will shortly be Internet-based publishers,” he added.

Journalists peppered Assange with questions, and evidently some couldn’t resist the temptation of infotainment. Had he been tuning into the World Cup? One wanted to know.

“I have been watching the World Cup,” Assange replied, “although the reception in this building is quite difficult.”

And who, pray tell, is he rooting for? “Ecuador undoubtedly deserves to win,” Assange said. “But I think there’s such prestige riding on the issue for Brazil that they are the most likely victors.”

Spotlight on transgender issues

Michael Redmond
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0
Spotlight on transgender issues

Trans March, SF’s largest transgender pride event, is happening Fri/27, starting in Dolores Park. This year’s march will kick off with a Youth and Elder Brunch starting at noon and a stage show 3-6pm before beginning the march. It will conclude at the 100 block of Turk Street, where a San Francisco street will finally be named after a trans: pioneering drag performer and trans woman Vicki Marlane. The afterparty will benefit the Transgender Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project.

To celebrate Trans March’s success in its 11th year, we spoke with SF Trans March Co-Chair Jamie Rafaela Wolfe to find out how Trans March, trans issues, and trans rights have changed since the march began in 2004.

Although the Trans March website states that it originated from an anonymous email regarding the murder and trial of Gwen Araujo, Wolfe informed us that the march mostly started when a group of activists decided they needed to be heard. That first march was only a few hundred people. This year, they’re expecting around 7,000.

Just as the march has grown, awareness of trans issues has also grown. Wolfe told us that “11 years ago, you never heard the word ‘transgender,'” and when one did, it was often used in discriminatory ways. But now, trans people have more opportunities and discrimination has subsided. As proof of the changing views toward trans issues and people, Miss Major — the SF Pride Grand Marshal — is a well-known author and Orange is the New Black’s trans actress Laverne Cox was featured on the cover of the June 9 issue of Time magazine next to the headline: “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier.”

Although a lot has changed for the better in the last 11 years, there’s always more that can be done. Wolfe suggests that the most important thing to work on now is workforce development. “We need people to get jobs. We need people to get education.” As a part of education, Wolfe stresses working with trans youth to get them in safe environments where they can be their “authentic selves.”

Pride and prejudice

Michael Redmond
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7
Pride and prejudice

joe@sfbg.com

As Pride celebrations across the country unfurl their rainbow flags this month, teacher tenure in California suffered a stunning blow from a Los Angeles Superior Court, undermining protections that have shielded the LGBT community from discrimination.

Although the decision will likely be appealed, Judge Rolf M. Treu’s ruling galvanized teachers unions and evoked memories of conservative attacks on gay teachers in the 1970s, including the unsuccessful Briggs Initiative that was a rallying point for then-Sup. Harvey Milk and a new generation of LGBT political leaders.

“To jeopardize any of the protections we have now, it’s a thinly veiled attempt to demoralize teachers, and it’s an attack on public education,” Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, the San Francisco Democrat who began his political career as an openly gay teacher campaigning against the Briggs Initiative, told the Guardian.

LGBT rights and teacher tenure may seem to have little in common, but a peek at the movers and shakers in the LGBT and teachers’ rights movements show an interconnected relationship of protections and the players who fight for them. Loss of tenure can threaten the protection of minority groups, academic freedom, and unpopular political speech, despite employment rights gained in recent years.

“We’ve beaten back that thinking,” Ammiano said, “but it’s still lurking.”

In California, K-12 teachers are shielded by legal protections often referred to commonly as tenure. Permanent status is the backbone of these protections, offering an arbitration process for teachers who administrators intend to fire. Also struck down by the judge was the First In, First Out law, which protects veteran teachers from layoffs by letting go of recent hires first.

In his ruling, Treu said these policies created an environment where students were burdened by ineffective teachers who were difficult to fire, disproportionately detracting from minority students’ education quality in the most troubled schools.

“The evidence is compelling,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “indeed, it shocks the conscience.”

Many education advocates vehemently disagreed with that ruling, and the veracity of the evidence will be further weighed in upcoming appeals. But along the way to pursuing equality for students, the equality of teachers may find itself eroded by an unlikely new hero of the LGBT movement: A conservative attorney who fought against marriage discrimination, but also litigated against the legacy of an LGBT legend.

 

HERO OF MARRIAGE EQUALITY

The morning last year when the US Supreme Court ruled to overturn California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, San Franciscans gathered inside City Hall by the grand staircase. Men held men, women held women, and families held the their children tight.

When the court’s decision finally hit the news, the outcry of happiness and surprise at City Hall was deafening. The expressions on the faces of those there was that of joy with many understandably streaked by tears. Attorney Theodore Olson helped litigate against Prop. 8 and won, and as he fought for gay rights, his face was often streaked with tears as well, LGBT rights activist Cleve Jones told us.

“There was a part of that trial when the plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier described their love for each other,” Jones said. “I was sitting with their family in [US District Court Judge] Vaughn Walker’s court. When we broke, Ted Olson went to embrace them and there were tears on his face.”

But Olson is not a poster child for most politics considered the realm of liberals and Democrats. Olson and fellow Prop. 8 litigator Attorney David Boies were on opposing sides of the Bush v. Gore case that Olson won, handing George W. Bush the presidency in 2000. Olson was then appointed solicitor general of the United States, often leading conservative causes.

 

Olson and Boies will talk about their new book Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality at the LGBT center on June 25 (joined by Supervisor Scott Wiener), but Olson gave us a glimmer of those motivations.

Olson, a Los Altos native who attended UC Berkeley School of Law, told the Guardian in a phone interview that his stand on gay rights was based on conservative principles: “I think of conservatives as including people who are libertarians and respect individual liberty.”

 

A trailer for “The Case Against 8,” which features Ted Olson heavily.

He said the right to marry the person of one’s choosing should be an individual right that government has no business banning. That belief in individual liberty is at the core of his political principles. “It affects me in absolutely the deepest personal way,” he told us.

Whatever his ideological motivations, Olson became a hero in the LGBT community. But this year, he was one of the attorneys who convinced Judge Treu of the evils of teacher tenure. In the trial, Olson claimed one Oakland teacher was harming elementary students’ educational outcomes: “The principal couldn’t remove that teacher. These stories are so awful, sometimes you feel people are exaggerating.”

Yet the problems afflicting Oakland schools and its children, the unions argued, are not due to teacher tenure. In a city with high violence rates, students’ broken homes, low teacher pay, and difficult working conditions, critics say Olson oversimplified and misrepresented a complex problem.

“We all know there are problems in our schools,” Jones, who works with unions, told us. “But there’s never of course discussion about poverty, or students growing up in single families, or class sizes.”

These were all arguments the union made against Olson, unsuccessfully. The decision to remove protections for teachers may send ripples into other states and spur increased attacks on teacher protections.

And unlike California, which has strong anti-discrimination protections, that campaign may allow teachers of other states to be fired or dismissed for coming out of the closet, an issue that helped elevate Harvey Milk into such an iconic leader.

 

ECHOES OF BRIGGS

Jones and Ammiano fought alongside Milk against Proposition 6 in 1978, known as the Briggs Initiative, which would have made it illegal for openly gay people to teach. Then-Sen. John Briggs and his allies associated gay teachers with child molesters and frequently said they may influence children to become gay.

“I was born of heterosexual parents, taught by heterosexual teachers in a fiercely heterosexual society,” Milk said in a speech at the time. “Then why am I homosexual if I’m affected by role models? I should’ve been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers are going to affect you as role models, there’d be a lot of nuns running around the streets today.”

This fight may be history, but Ammiano said such biases are still with us today, such as with how some see the transgender community. “We’re holding people at bay around LGB issues, but the T part now is the crossroads for the right wing [activists] who are rolling back protections,” he said.

Only 30 US states offer employment protections for sexual orientation, and some of those only cover government employees, according to a study by Center for American Progress. Only 23 states protect against firing for gender identity.

Vulnerable teachers lacking protections granted by tenure or equal employment laws are still being fired in California and across the country. In April, a transgender Texas substitute teacher was fired for making children “uncomfortable,” according to news reports. In Glendora, California, a teacher was fired from a religious private school after a photo of he and his husband kissing on their wedding day made the local newspaper.

This month, President Barack Obama announced an Executive Order mandating federal contractors enact policies protecting workers from dismissal due to sexual orientation or gender identity. Many speculate this was announced to press Congress to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would protect private employees from discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation.

briggs

“This is only round one,” stated Senator John Briggs to the press about the defeat of Proposition 6, Nov. 7, 1978, at a Costa Mesa hotel. Proposition 6, called the Briggs Initiative, prohibits gay teachers from working in California public schools. AP file photo by Doug Pizac

But ENDA has stalled for years, despite the best efforts of advocacy groups nationwide. And as the country awaits equality, many teachers’ last hope against unlawful dismissal is tenure. In fact, tenure laws were first drafted after the Red Scare and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt for communists, California Federation of Teachers spokesperson Fred Glass told us.

Yet Olson recoils at linking LGBT rights to teacher protections. “I support wholly protections for people for who they are, for heaven’s sakes,” he told us, mentioning that Milk “was very much an inspiration and very important to us.”

And Jones still thinks of Olson as a hero, saying that life and politics are complex.

“Irony abounds,” Jones said. “I don’t square it. You can’t square it. It’s there. But my respect for Ted Olson is based on his very genuine support for our community on the issue of marriage. For LGBT people to win equalit,y it’s important there’s a national consensus, it can’t just be from the left. Ted Olson was incredibly important with that effort and will be remembered generations for now. You don’t have to like everything about Ted Olson or President Obama to acknowledge they had a profound effect.”

Alerts: June 25 – July 1, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

THURSDAY 26

 

Climate Forum: Confronting Oil, Coal and Gas, Direct Action Movements at the Point of Extraction

The Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics, 518 Valencia, SF. tinyurl.com/oilcoalforum. 6:45pm, donation requested. The oil and natural gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) has become one of the most pressing issues in the Bay Area and California. It is a major cause of water and air pollution and is highly resource-intensive. Nevertheless there is low awareness about its harmful effects, and state policies still allow its proliferation. This panel will discuss fracking and other hazardous resource extraction processes in the U.S. and educate participants in the first steps for taking action.

 

Plastic Paradise: Film and discussion

Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo, Berk. (510) 548-2220, tinyurl.com/plasticfreejuly. 7-9pm, free. Plastic Paradise is a new documentary about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This event helps prepare for Plastic-Free July—an annual event originating in Australia—that aims to educate the public about how much plastic we use, and explains how we can eliminate as much as possible from our lives. The film screening will be followed with a discussion led by Beth Terry, author of Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too. Sponsored by Green Sangha, the City of Berkley, and My Plastic-Free Life.

FRIDAY 27

 

Trans March youth and elder brunch

Dolores Park, 19th and Dolores, SF. tinyurl.com/transmarchbrunch. 12-3pm, free. Right before the Trans March, this brunch gives LGBTQ youth and elders the opportunity to learn from each other. There will be food, games, icebreakers, an art station, face painting and more. The sober event is designed for self-identified LGBTQ people, ages 24 and under. Hosted by LYRIC, OpenHouse and Trans March.

Sunday 29

 

Meeting: Syria — Eyewitness Report

Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave, Oakl. http://tinyurl.com/pjkvv5f 10:30-12:30pm, free. Rick Sterling, a founding member of the Syria Solidarity Movement, spent two weeks in Syria as part of a peace and reconciliation delegation, and he returns to discuss the conflict there and why it matters to progressives in the United States. For a firsthand account of the hostilities in the region—at no cost—be sure to stop by the Niebyl-Proctor library early to ensure you get a seat.

 

Trying to have hope

Michael Redmond
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44

OPINION I get it, as Harvey Milk famously said: “You gotta give them hope.” But how do you do that when the LGBT community you love so much is being priced and evicted out of the city?

When immigrants, people of color, artists, the poor and working-class, people with AIDS, seniors, persons with disabilities, and so many others are being pushed out — like you, Harvey, were forced out of your camera store and apartment on Castro Street when your rent was tripled. Just before an assassin’s bullet took you from us, you were preparing an anti-speculation tax to deal with the rising rents and displacement caused by speculators and real estate investors.

We tried to curb their dirty work via a state bill limiting use of the Ellis Act, but Democrats buckled in to pressure from the real estate industry that owns them. Shame on Democratic House Speaker Toni Atkins from San Diego, an out lesbian, whose inaction on the bill helped kill it.

Our only hope is the anti-speculation tax on the November ballot. Brian Basinger of the AIDS Housing Alliance is calling it the Harvey Milk Anti-Speculation Tax.

The stakes are high right now. Our housing crisis is destroying our community. According to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, which tracks displacement throughout the city, District 8 (which includes the Castro) has the highest rate of Ellis Act and Owner Move-In evictions, almost 2,000 units emptied since 1997. That doesn’t include buyouts and threats of evictions, de facto evictions that have pushed out many more, most of them tenants with AIDS. Far too many people with AIDS are homeless in a city that used to be called the “model of caring.”

The motive for these evictions is obvious. A two-bedroom across the street from my Castro apartment rents for $4,200. An apartment above the new Whole Foods at Sanchez and Market can cost you as much as $8,000. A month! I don’t want to upset you, Harvey, so I won’t tell you how high commercial rents are, and how poorly neighborhood businesses are faring these days.

The economic disparity has never been greater. Two Williams Institute studies show that our community is as poor as, and in some instances poorer than, other communities. In our city’s latest homeless count, 29 percent of respondents identified as LGBT and an additional 3 percent as transgender. Other reports say that 40 percent of the city’s homeless youth are queer.

Forget Altoona, that homeless queer kid in the Haight or Castro needs a sense of hope. We have a sit/lie law similar to the one you opposed that prevents these kids from getting subsidized housing if they have an unpaid citation. They sleep in the park because they’re not safe in the shelters. Sadly, Human Rights Campaign and Equality California have never made them — or the poor — a priority.

Cranes and rainbow flags may be all the rage in Upper Market these days, but what’s being built will not be affordable to homeless, poor, or working class (even some middle-class) people. The Castro has only one affordable housing project in the pipeline: 110 units for LGBT seniors at 55 Laguna. Our D8 supervisor and City Hall have let us down big time.

Harvey, I want to think that 10 years from now, our community will still have the Castro as a refuge. I want to believe that poverty, homelessness, and hunger will be greatly reduced. That we can stop the evictions. That we can give young people a piece of the dream. That we can provide seniors a secure place to spend their final days. That we can have elected officials who truly represent us, as you did.

I really want to have hope.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a longtime queer and housing rights activist (and an organizer of the first Philadelphia Pride march in 1972), is a grand marshal of this year’s Pride Parade.

Sex behind bars

Michael Redmond
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7
Sex behind bars

Kink.com’s pre-Pride party “Pride at the Armory: Prison of Love” on Sat/28 promises to create the “world’s largest megaclub prison yard” as a backdrop for the festivities. However, this party is doing more than raising the roof — it’s raising concerns about incarceration rates and prison assaults of LGBTQ peoples. Critics argue that the party fetishizes sexual assault in prisons.

The argument is that the Prison of Love theme is turning sexual assault in prisons into a commodity. With tickets ranging from $50 to $175, there’s definitely something being sold. Since the party can be seen as selling BDSM and prison fantasies, critics worry that it condones prison rape and makes it seem sexy. That’s causing an uproar in the LGBTQ community, especially since statistics show that being LGBTQ is a main risk factor of prison rape.

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, transgender adult inmates are sexually abused 13 times more often than other inmates and nearly 1 in 6 transgender people have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. The US Department of Justice reports that juvenile LGBTQ prisoners report sexual assault 12 times more often than straight youths. And that’s just what’s reported.

The BoycottSFPride letter posted on Tumblr criticizes the party’s theme and states that one of the main issues with the party is the way it’s marketed. The letter argues that “the party…fetishizes prison sexual assault, a form of violence that primarily affects low-income people of color, particularly LGBTQ people.” But what about sexual fetishes and preferences on a personal level? “While it is certainly appropriate for individuals to participate in scenes, or even larger events that explore prison fetishes, throwing a major event billed as the city’s largest Pride party is inappropriate.”

The Transgender Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project also posted an open letter in response to the event. The letter is, most notably, signed by this year’s SF Pride Grand Marshal, Miss Major. The letter states that it’s not the kinkiness of the party that’s an issue — it’s the theme. “It’s not that we don’t love sex, sex parties, sex workers, and kink. It’s that we love it as much as we love justice, and are appalled by the casual use of the Prison Industrial Complex.”

(A protest march to the Armory during the party is planned by Gay Shame and others, Sat/28, 10pm, starting from the 16th St. BART station. More details at www.gayshamesf.org.)

Kink.com CEO Peter Acworth told the Guardian that his company tries to draw the line between reality and fantasy, sexual justice issues and sexual fantasies. He points out the structural differences between fantasy and reality and, in our interview, pointed out that BDSM has parameters to ensure that it’s consensual: “The notion of consent is central in BDSM—that is, no one is held against their will, everything must be negotiated, there are safe words. None of that exists in actual prison.”

In regards to the marketing issue, Acworth said that Kink is contractually bound to the theme and it’s too late to order new costumes, sets, and props. The closest Acworth gets to saying whether or not the theme is appropriate is this statement: “Had I thought that a prison fantasy party would detract from the very serious issue of the prison industrial complex in this country, I would have insisted on another theme.”

Acworth said that he was particularly chagrined by the protest because “the LGBTQ communities are strongly represented and cherished at the core of Kink.com.” That point was echoed by Andrew Harvill, the main coordinator of the party. Not only does Harvill identify with the LGBTQ community, he worked with prisoners and Death Row inmates as a missionary in Georgia. When asked about his feelings on the theme, Harvill described the prison as a backdrop to the party, as scenery that’s no different from that of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black or gay bars such as Cell Block in Pennsylvania. Harvill also stressed that there are two parts to the theme: “Our detractors skip over the whole love part of the theme. Everyone just wants to talk about one part of a two-part theme.”

We talked to Courtney Trouble, a local indie pornographer, about sexual fantasies involving transgressive realms such as rape, which she said can be useful and enjoyable. Trouble points out that “millions of people in this world are survivors of abuse, and those of them with kinks or fetishes may find solace in their BDSM practice.”

She said an abuse survivor could queer something that happened to them in order to gain control of the situation, but sexual fantasies aren’t limited to victims. “It may be that the person is attracted to the edge, pushing their own boundaries into unsafe space in order to disconnect from the real world and heighten their focus on sexual pleasure.”

So how can the issues with the theme be fixed? Acworth promises that Kink is changing the invitation to add links to highlight the political issue and remove words like “incarceration” and “arrested.” Regarding the economic aspects of the event, Acworth says that Kink is “happy to talk with any groups about ways we can help support them.” Trouble suggests creating a space that allows attendees to define the surroundings themselves. “That way, those queers with prison fantasies could play out their desires in a safe space, while also making space for people who may actually be quite triggered by sexual prison fantasy, but still want to participate in a kinky pride play space. “

Although the party’s theme is controversial, it’s at least opening the discussion around the incarceration rate and prison-related violence toward LGBTQ people. The BoycottSFPride letter provides great facts about sexual assault in prisons and the party invitation will soon help educate as well. Harvill stated that “the point of the party is to have fun, more than it is intended to raise consciousness of a political issue.”

Now, maybe it will do both.

Alerts: June 18 – 24, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

WEDNESDAY 18

 

Glenn Greenwald: Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State

The Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes, SF. (773) 583-7884 tinyurl.com/glengreenwald. 7-9pm, $6. Greenwald, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service along with his UK Guardian colleagues, will recount his Hong Kong meeting with Edward Snowden, discuss new information on the National Security Agency’s abuse of power and examine the bigger picture implications of the NSA’s surveillance. Greenwald will also be signing his new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Center for Economic Research and Social Change, Metropolitan Books, The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and KPFA.

 

Film and Discussion: DamNation

The David Brower Center, 2150 Allston, Berk. (510) 809-0900 tinyurl.com/damfilm. 7pm, $10 advance, $12 at door. Award-winning film DamNation explores America’s pride in large dams and the ways that we rely on rivers. The film looks at the effects of dams on fish and landscapes, as well as the values that come along with dams. Guests include Matt Stoecker, DamNation Producer/Underwater Photographer, Jason Rainey, Executive Director of International Rivers, and Steve Rothert, California Regional Director of American Rivers.

THURSDAY 19

 

Labor in the Food System

120 Kearny No. 3100, SF. (510) 654-4400 tinyurl.com/foodsys. 6-8:45, free. This panel will explore all levels of food production, from farm to government, and will have speakers from the various levels. They will discuss wages, food distribution, food processing and more. The panel is put on by Food First, which aims to end hunger-inducing injustices. Speakers include James Cochran, Gail Wadsworth, Margaret Reeves and Paul Ramirez.

 

Do Good Lab’s International Development Trivia Night

Soda Popinski’s, 1548 California, SF. tinyurl.com/oslg7d5 6-9pm, $15 per individual or $60 per team. Trivia is fun, but doing it for a cause with five other friends is even better. On Thursday, Do Good Lab will hold its International Development Trivia Night in collaboration with FUNDAESPRO, a women’s empowerment organization based in Guatemala City. For $60—$10 per person—teams can compete to raise money for the organization, which provides childcare for working mothers and literacy education to women. Better yet, all tips to the bar (staffed by with special guest bartenders) will go toward FUNDAESPRO’s childcare and education centers.

Dangerous delays

Michael Redmond
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1
Dangerous delays

rebecca@sfbg.com

Since we at the Bay Guardian published a story flagging Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s odd behavior of stonewalling a developer who had basic questions about a high-pressure gas pipeline running beneath his Bernal Heights building lot (see “Bernal blows up,” May 20), we’ve heard from others concerned about the company’s practices regarding safety.

PG&E has undertaken a massive pipeline improvement project to correct the underlying problems that led to a disastrous 2010 natural gas explosion in San Bruno, which destroyed a neighborhood, killed eight people, and injured 58 others.

But the repairs have been complicated by a number of factors, including inaccuracies in records that provide a foundation for the whole undertaking. Meanwhile, a fascinating document obtained by the Bay Guardian raises troubling questions about whether state regulators are taking seriously PG&E’s shortcomings in this endeavor.

Established in 1905, PG&E is California’s largest utility company. It wields tremendous political influence, particularly in San Francisco, where it’s headquartered. But the utility giant has been in hot water lately. It was indicted by federal authorities on charges of criminal negligence earlier this year in connection with the San Bruno explosion, and may soon face additional charges in a superseding indictment, the company noted in a recent regulatory filing.

PG&E’s safety upgrade project, known as the Pipeline Safety Enhancement Plan, was launched to address the underlying problems that led to the unanticipated pipeline rupture and explosion in San Bruno. That disaster brought the powerful utility under intense scrutiny, exposing a deeper pattern of negligence and sloppy record-keeping. The PSEP was rolled out as a corrective measure, in response to regulatory demands.

 

SHIFTING TARGETS

The detailed PSEP outlined how the utility would go about strength testing, replacing, and retrofitting its vast network of natural gas transmission pipelines, which comprise 6,750 miles traversing the utility’s Northern California service territory. The hefty document was submitted for CPUC approval in 2011.

However, things haven’t gone exactly as planned. Phase I of this plan was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2014 — but that’s now behind schedule, and some of the original targets have been revised.

The Bay Guardian attempted to contact both PG&E and the CPUC for this story, but did not receive responses. However, regulatory filings reveal quite a lot about the company’s progress.

A comparison of the work PG&E proposed to complete in 2011, versus what it reported having completed as of March 31, 2014, demonstrates how the massive safety upgrade project has shifted over time.

In a document submitted to the CPUC on May 22, PG&E reported that it had completed 541 miles of strength testing, as compared with 780 miles of strength testing originally proposed to be completed by the end of 2014. PG&E said it had replaced 105 miles of pipeline, as compared with the 186 miles of pipeline replacement it initially said would be done by the end of the year. It also reported installing 141 automated valves — but in 2011, PG&E told regulators that by the end of Phase I, “228 gas shut-off valves will be replaced, automated, and upgraded to enable PG&E to remotely or automatically shut off the flow of gas in the event of a pipe rupture.”

In hefty technical documents, PG&E provides reasons for why some of the targets have shifted, often the result of new information coming to light. In a June 6 CPUC filing, PG&E noted that nine scheduled pipeline replacement projects included in Phase I likely would not be completed by the end of the year, as originally planned.

This formal acknowledgement of a delay seems to substantiate the account of a Guardian source familiar with the pipeline safety upgrade work, who asked not to be identified. Work crews hired by PG&E contractors and subcontractors to perform the safety upgrades have found themselves in a holding pattern of waiting to be called out to job sites, our source said, despite the extensive planned work.

The utility typically sends work crews out to perform maintenance work during spring and summer months, so it can be wrapped up in time for winter, when there’s higher demand for gas heating.

The cost of these upgrades is shared between PG&E shareholders and revenues collected from utility customers.

 

PROBLEMS REVEALED

A major obstacle to the goal of improving safety has yet to be resolved: PG&E’s pipeline records still aren’t in order, despite a major push to iron out data in the wake of San Bruno.

Since these records are the foundation for making safety upgrade decisions, these informational gaps threaten to undermine the project. The implications of this glaring problem are outlined in a CPUC document obtained by the Bay Guardian which was circulated on an internal “service list,” but not made publicly available.

First, some background: In October 2013, PG&E submitted an update to its PSEP plan to the CPUC, which included reporting on its effort to collect and analyze pipeline records. The regulatory agency’s Safety and Enforcement Division conducted an audit of this reported progress.

The audit, which made headlines when it was released in April, commended PG&E for its work but also noted, “PG&E does not have traceable, verifiable, and complete records for every pipeline component in its transmission system.” The audit also found errors in the work papers submitted by the company to back up its claims. Nevertheless, the Safety and Enforcement Division concluded, “no imminent safety concerns arose” from the findings.

But this proclamation isn’t the final word on the matter. The Office of Ratepayer Advocates is a small division within the CPUC, which functions as a watchdog looking out for the interests of utility customers. Its comments on the audit tell quite a different story, raising questions about why the enforcement division didn’t seem to place much weight on its own findings.

In its comments, reflected in the document that was circulated internally, the ORA sharply questioned the Safety and Enforcement Division’s overarching conclusion. It should “reflect the actual findings of the audit,” the ORA wrote, recommending that the Safety Division “define what is meant by … ‘no imminent safety concerns.’

“In common language,” the ORA went on, “this would be interpreted to mean there is no situation that puts the public in immediate risk of death or serious physical harm. If that is the meaning, please confirm. If not, please clarify the meaning.”

The ORA goes on to note that such a statement is “contradicted by findings within the body of the report,” and that “it is difficult to understand how the SED Report could reach this conclusion.”

The Safety Division’s audit “documents errors that ORA would define as safety risks,” the ORA notes, such as the discovery of a pipeline that has a maximum operating pressure nearly 20 percent higher than it should be, based on the pipeline feature data, or the discovery that PG&E had been “inappropriately operating a pipeline with a reduced margin of safety.”

PG&E responded to the Safety Division’s audit, and “they view their report as final,” noted ORA spokesperson Nathaniel Skinner. As far as addressing the problems uncovered in the audit, “It’s unclear to us what the next step is for the Safety and Enforcement Division.”

Tenants can fight evictions and win

Michael Redmond
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4

 

By Tyler Macmillan


OPINION Every year, around 3,500 formal eviction lawsuits are filed against residential tenants in San Francisco Superior Court. Contrary to popular belief, the eviction lawsuit — known as an “unlawful detainer” — is one of the fastest moving cases in the entire civil system. While we’ve all heard anecdotes about how it can take years to remove San Francisco tenants from their homes, tenants sued for eviction experience civil litigation at warp speed.

More than a third of those sued for eviction miss the five-day window the law provides to file a response with the court. In 2013, 1,294 of the tenant households that were sued for eviction in the city missed that deadline to respond. The strong tenant protections found in San Francisco’s Rent Ordinance and California law don’t mean much to those who miss their five-day deadline: Sheriff’s deputies clear the property just a few weeks after the case is filed if you don’t respond. So much for due process.

Securing tenants due process rights in San Francisco has been our job at the Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC) since 1996. At our drop-in legal clinic, our team of attorneys and volunteers assist over 94 percent of all tenants who respond to their eviction lawsuit in San Francisco each year. Although our office is open Monday through Friday to help tenants respond to the lawsuit on time, nine out of 10 tenants sued for eviction represent themselves for the duration of their case. Over 90 percent of landlords can afford to hire expert, aggressive attorneys to evict their tenants — very few tenants can afford to hire a private attorney to defend their homes.

Unsurprisingly, tenants agree to move out in most eviction lawsuits — around four out of five tenants sued for eviction will settle the case with an agreement to leave their homes. And who could blame them? The choice of conducting a jury trial against a licensed attorney is not an appealing — or realistic — choice for a self-represented tenant. Without an attorney to stand up and fight for your rights at trial, those rights remain the empty, meaningless promises of the pay-to-play American legal system.

Of course, tenants who get represented by attorneys can win eviction cases — exactly the reason we started our Trial Project at EDC last year. Since the Trial Project launched, EDC staff attorneys have represented a small percentage of tenants facing the prospect of a jury trial on their own. Through the hard work of EDC staff attorneys (who on average earn less than $50,000 a year), the Trial Project enjoyed another jury trial victory in May. While very few eviction cases reach a verdict, this was EDC’s third trial victory in the past year.

This particular jury verdict saved the home of a Spanish-speaking couple who has lived in the Mission District for the past 19 years. They have young children who attend the local public schools and attend church in the neighborhood. This family has limited income and would certainly have had to leave of San Francisco if it was evicted, uprooting the children and leaving behind its community.

The landlord had accused the family of not paying the rent — even though the family had repeatedly tried to pay. The jury agreed with the tenant, finding that the conditions on the property were so bad that the landlord wasn’t entitled to the rent being demanded. The jury actually followed the law, and reduced the tenants’ rent.

The heroes in this case are the tenants — their courage in standing up for their home and their civil rights is inspiring, and should be a lesson to tenants across the city. We need tenants in San Francisco to push back against this current wave of displacement and we’re here to help.

Tyler Macmillan is a tenants’ rights attorney and the executive director of the Eviction Defense Collaborative, a nonprofit legal services clinic in the Tenderloin. Any tenant sued for eviction can drop into EDC at 995 Market St., #1200 (at Sixth Street) Mon-Fri, 9:30-11:30am and 1-3pm.

Justice delayed is justice denied

Michael Redmond
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1

EDITORIAL Members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who try to identify with both the progressive movement and business-oriented Mayor Ed Lee — most notably, Sups. David Chiu and Jane Kim — engaged in a strange bit of self-congratulations during their June 10 meeting, patting themselves on the back for a trio of “progressive” reforms.

Yet in each case, the measures are weaker than they should be and too long overdue — and they have their full implementation delayed for years, while the needs of the people they aim to serve are immediate. What Kim and Chiu presented as a demonstration of political effectiveness on behalf of needy constituents is actually just the opposite. It is political cowardice and not political courage.

The best of the trio of approvals was a measure by Sup. David Campos that finally closes the loophole that allows employers to satisfy their employee healthcare mandate by creating healthcare savings accounts, which they make difficult to use and then pocket the money that remains.

This should have been enacted three years ago when Campos first won approval for it, only to see Lee veto it and Chiu sponsor a watered-down alternative that didn’t address the problem. Even now, in order to win over Sups. Mark Farrell and London Breed to attain a veto-proof majority, Campos had to delay full implementation until 2017.

“I also want to commend Sup. Campos for finding compromise,” Chiu said before joining the inevitable majority, a snide dig at his Assembly race opponent that only served to reinforce Campos’ campaign trail points that Chiu’s compromises are often just sellouts to downtown interests. This watered-down version, albeit better than the last watered-down version, also won unanimous approval.

Another kumbaya moment came with the introduction of a consensus ballot measure for increasing the minimum wage in San Francisco, with the Mayor’s Office and business community finally agreeing with the campaign by labor and progressive groups to increase the minimum wage to $15 — but delaying that implementation to 2018. How much displacement and economic hardship will San Franciscans experience between now than then?

Chiu and Kim also sang the praises of Lee for finally agreeing to finally keep his word and support a local increase in the vehicle license fee to fund safer and smoother streets and more money for Muni. But rather than this year as promised, that measure will be on the November 2016 ballot, pushing it back from prosperous to uncertain times.

At the June 12 Guardian community forum, Sup. Scott Wiener said he may still move forward with his proposed charter amendment to give Muni more general fund money until the local VLF is approved, and we strongly urge him to so do.

“Justice delayed is justice denied” is a legal maxim that this board full of lawyers is certainly familiar with. Their delays of crucial reforms are disgraceful and damaging to the city, and for them to congratulate themselves for doing so is insulting.

Breaking the chains

Michael Redmond
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96
Breaking the chains

steve@sfbg.com

San Franciscans have always been wary of chain stores, more so than residents of any other major US city, none of which have taken on the ever-expanding national corporations and their homogenizing impact on local communities as strongly as San Francisco.

In the decade since San Francisco first adopted trail-blazing controls on what it calls “formula retail” businesses, those restrictions have only gotten tighter for various commercial districts around the city as elected supervisors seek to prevent big companies from taking over key storefronts from local shopkeepers.

But now, as the Planning Department and Mayor’s Office push a new set of formula retail regulations that they say standardizes and expands the analysis and controls for chain stores throughout the city, neighborhood groups and small business advocates are decrying aspects of the proposal that actually weaken those controls.

Most controversial is the proposal to almost double the number of outlets that a company can have before it is considered a formula retail business, going from up to 11 stores now up to 20 under the proposal, which was approved by the Small Business Commission last week and heads to the Planning Commission next month.

Opposition is particularly strong in North Beach, one of two neighborhood commercial districts that have an outright ban on formula retail business (Hayes Valley is the other) and where residents are organizing to fight the proposal at the Board of Supervisors and at the ballot if necessary.

“The Planning Department proposal to redefine what a chain store is flies in the face of the voters’ will and 10 years of successful chain store policy,” Aaron Peskin, the former Board of Supervisors president from North Beach who sponsored the ordinance banning chains there, told the Guardian.

The citywide voters he refers to are those who approved Prop. G by a wide margin in 2006, defining formula retail business as having 11 or more outlets with common branding and merchandise and requiring that they obtain a conditional use permit before opening in most neighborhood commercial districts, thus giving local residents a vehicle to stop those projects.

Although Prop. G allows the city to update its standards and definitions regarding formula retail, Peskin and others said throwing out the negotiated number of 11 outlets undercuts “the fundamental underpinning of the formula retail controls.”

The Planning Department proposal also does nothing to prevent big national chains from creating spin-offs to circumvent the controls, a growing trend that raised controversy in the last few years, including when Gap subsidiary Athleta opened a store on Fillmore Street and when Liz Claiborne owner Fifth & Pacific Companies tried to open a Jack Spade store in the Mission District.

Those two controversial provisions in the Planning Department proposal aren’t in rival legislation by Sup. Eric Mar, who has long been a champion of expanding controls on chain stores. Both the Mar and Planning Department legislation will go before the Planning Commission on July 17, and they could be either merged or move forward as rival proposals.

“We’re hoping this legislation moves forward as quickly as we can,” Mar told us. “We’re losing neighborhood character in many areas.”

 

WEAK LINKS

For all the indignant opposition to the Planning Department proposal expressed at the June 9 Small Business Commission meeting, where mayoral appointees led that body’s 4-2 vote approving the measure, the planners who developed it say they’re actually trying to expand the controls on chain stores.

Senior Policy Advisor AnMarie Rodgers and Project Manager Kanishka Burns sat down with the Guardian to go through details of the proposal and a May study it was based on, “San Francisco Formula Retail Economic Analysis,” by Strategic Economics, as well as an earlier study by the Controller’s Office.

“Our department is super committed to encouraging the diversity of neighborhood commercial districts,” Rodgers told us, acknowledging that small businesses often need protection from deep-pocketed corporations that can pay higher rents and enjoy other competitive advantages over mom-and-pop stores.

Rodgers cited studies showing that local small businesses circulate more of their revenues in the city than big chains, boosting the local economy. That’s one reason why the Planning Department proposal expands formula retail controls to include the categories business and professional services (including Kinko’s and H&R Block), limited financial services (including street front ATMs and small banking outlets), and fringe financial (such as check-cashing and payday loan outlets).

The new controls would also count a company’s outlets in other countries and locations that have been leased but not yet opened, it would expand some of the neighborhoods subject to formula retail controls, and it would require formula retail businesses to minimize their signage on the street, improve their pedestrian access, and fund more detailed analysis on their impacts on the local economy. Big box stores, in particular, would be required to submit to even more detailed economic impact studies.

Many of these same provisions are included in the Mar legislation, which also goes further in including gyms, gas stations, smoke shops, strip clubs, massage establishments, and various automotive businesses under the formula retail controls. Like the Planning Department measure, Mar’s also requires more data for formula retail applicants.

“We want to make chains fund economic impact statements before they go into the neighborhoods,” Mar said, noting how those studies will allow city officials to make better decisions about whether to approve formula retail applications.

Stacy Mitchell is the senior researcher for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an organization that has been working with San Francisco on its formula retail controls since their inception. She applauds the city’s current efforts to create more comprehensive guidelines and to require more economic analysis.

“San Francisco doesn’t have a good mechanism for fully evaluating the economic impact of these proposals,” Mitchell told us, calling the Planning Department and Mar efforts “a really good place to start the conversation.”

But Mitchell said that she doesn’t want to weigh in on what specific number of outlets may be right, saying city officials just need to decide, “What is the right balance and mix and how do we want to handle it?”

Rodgers told us the Planning Department legislation will expand the number of businesses that fall under formula retail controls, even as the threshold is raised to 20 outlets, although she couldn’t quantify exactly how much.

But critics are focusing on aspects of the proposal that loosen current restrictions, noting how that cuts against the trend in recent years of supervisors seeking to tighten restrictions in their districts, creating a hodgepodge of legislation that the Planning Department was trying to overcome with comprehensive new legislation.

 

WHAT’S A CHAIN?

The Planning Department’s new threshold and the arguments being made to support it rely heavily on making the case that three specific homegrown companies should be excluded from formula retail protections: Philz Coffee (with 14 stores), Lee’s Deli (13 outlets), and San Francisco Soup Company (16 locations).

“Right now, we would treat Philz the same way we treat Starbucks,” Burns said, noting that Starbucks has more than 20,000 outlets.

“Can’t you cut a break to the businesses that started here?” was a question that Rodgers says helped shape development on the regulations. The Strategic study found that about 5 percent of the retail establishments in the city had 11 to 20 outlets, while another 4 percent had 21-50 outlets. “We’re just trying to find the sweet spot.”

Yet Peskin said the change doesn’t make sense, and it’s just a way to give special treatment to a handful of local companies with political connections, and which have more resources to go through the conditional use process than a true small business.

“They’re basically finding another way to satisfy San Francisco Soup Company, a stalwart member of the Chamber of Commerce,” Peskin said.

Asked how she can seemingly circumvent the will of the voters, Rodgers told us, “It was a voter initiative, but it says the Planning Commission will establish further details.” In fact, Prop. G simply relies on the formula retail definitions that had already been adopted by ordinance started with a measure by then-President Matt Gonzalez in 2004.

But Peskin said the proposal to increase the threshold to 20 is an affront to popular local controls on chain stores, one that has little chance of becoming law.

“I don’t think the Board of Supervisors is crazy enough to go and undo one of the most successful pieces of legislation from the early part of this century. And if they do, then the voters won’t stand for it,” Peskin said, pledging to personally work on the campaign to protect existing formula retail controls.

Mar also said he will defend the current threshold. “The 11 that was written into the legislation was the result of a compromise,” Mar said, noting that Gonzalez initially placed the threshold at four stores and compromised with the business community on 11. “We’re going to do our best to work with our coalition to hold it to 11.”

 

CORPORATE CONTROL

Mar was also critical of the Planning Department proposal for not looking at corporate ownership of subsidiaries, something that his legislation does, stating that companies with a 50 percent or more ownership stake in an outlet get included in the formula retail designation.

“Our proposal has been attacked by people who think we’re over-regulating and those who think we’re under-regulating,” Rodgers told us.

Yet as the June 9 Small Business Commission hearing made clear, supporters of the proposal predictably came from the same business groups that have opposed formula retail controls from the very beginning: San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, San Francisco Association of Realtors, and San Francisco Building Owners and Managers Association.

Representatives from each of those three groups were the only people who spoke in favor of the proposal, each of them declaring it a “balanced” and “data-driven” compromise that they support, even as they argued for loosening the restrictions even more. But the vast majority of speakers were neighborhood activists critical of the proposal.

“Going from 11 to 20 makes no sense at all. Who picked out this number?” Susan Landry, owner of Animal Connection in the Marina District, told the commission. “Please have a conscience and vote for independent businesses.”

But Small Business Commissioner Kathleen Dooley said the vote was just the latest example of a commission stacked with mayoral appointees (including two bankers) doing the bidding of downtown rather than advocating for small business interests.

“Nine supervisors have tightened up the restrictions in their districts, but the Planning Department has gone the opposite way,” Dooley told us. “The irony was it all started with the protests [of chain applicants skirting local controls], but the Planning Department turned it on its head to loosen the restrictions.”

Yet the planners involved on the proposal call that a simplistic view that discounts the comprehensive nature of the new policy, which they say could serve as a model for other cities.

“I think they’ll all catch up to us,” Rodgers said of the other big US cities that have become to explore formula retail controls as local small businesses struggle against competition from chain stores. “We are a national leader on this and we want to get it right.”

Mitchell agreed: “There are lots of conversations going on around the country about how to meet this challenge, and people are watching what San Francisco does.”

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