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News and Politics | San Francisco Bay Guardian

Tap dreams

December 10, 2008

› amanda@sfbg.com

On Dec. 2 two water conferences were held in San Francisco, attended by very different groups of people.

Downtown, in a room deep within the Hyatt Regency hotel, executives from PepsiCo, Dean Foods, GE, ConAgra, and other major companies gathered for the Corporate Water Footprinting Conference. The agenda that the conference made public included a presentation by Nestlé on assessing water-related risks in communities, Coca-Cola’s aggressive environmental water-neutrality goal, and MillerCoors plan to use less water to make more beer.

But what these giant corporations, which are seeking to control more and more of the world’s water, really discussed the public will never know. Only four media representatives were permitted to attend — all from obscure trade journals not trafficked by the typical reader — and both the Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle were denied media passes.

The event was sponsored by IBM, and tickets were $1,500 — out of reach for many citizens and environmentalists who might have liked to attend.

And why might people take such a keen interest in the kind of corporate conference that probably occurs routinely in cities throughout the world?

Because there’s almost universal agreement that the world is in a water crisis — and that big businesses see a huge opportunity in the privatization of water.

Only one half of 1 percent of all the water in the world is freshwater. Of that, about half is already polluted. Although water is a $425 billion industry worldwide — ranking just behind electricity and oil — one in six people still don’t have access to a clean, safe glass of it. If the pace of use and abuse remains, the 1.2 billion people living in water-stressed areas will balloon to more than 3 billion by 2030.

That includes California. On June 4, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought after two lackluster seasons of Sierra snowfall. Scientists are predicting the same this winter. You can see how the state is mishandling the issue by looking at some recent legislation. Schwarzenegger and Sen. Dianne Feinstein have proposed a $9.3 billion bond to build more dams, canals, and infrastructure. At the same time, the governor vetoed a bill that would have required bottled water companies to report how much water they’re actually drawing out of the ground.

In that context, while the big privatizers were hobnobbing at the Hyatt, activists were attending a very different event, the "Anti-Corporate Water Conference," held at the Mission Cultural Center. It was free and open to the public and the media. More than 100 people gathered to hear a cadre of international organizations share information on how to keep this basic human right — water — in the hands of people.

Speakers included Wenonah Hauter, director of Washington, DC-based Food and Water Watch; Amit Srivastava of Global Resistance, a group that works to expose international injustices by Coca-Cola; Mark Franco, head of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, which lives among water bottling plants near Mount Shasta; and Mateo Nube, a native of La Paz, Bolivia, and the director of Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project.

Nube spoke about water as a commons, requiring stewardship, justice, and democracy. "We’re literally running out of water. Unless we change the way we manage, distribute, and consume water, we’re going to have a real crisis on our hands," he said. Nube’s remarks tied together the tensions of control and revolt, democracy and privatization, ecological balance and human need — all enormous issues, all related to water and water scarcity, which the Worldwatch Institute has called "the most under-appreciated global environmental challenge of our time."

BASIC NEED, INFINITE MARKET

Water is a basic human need, perhaps even more important than clean air, food, and shelter. People will never strike against water and stop drinking.

And that means, from a capitalistic point of view, it’s a perfect, nearly infinite market. "As water analysts note, water is hot not only because of the growing need for clean water but because demand is never affected by inflation, recession, interest rates or changing tastes," wrote Maude Barlow in her 2007 book Blue Covenant.

If scarcity drives price, anyone with a stake in the water industry stands to gain from an increasingly water-stressed world. As Barlow also reported, "In 1990, about 51 million people got their water from private companies, according to water analysts. That figure is now more than 300 million." By controlling the resource and choosing when and if they engage with the public it allows some of the biggest water abusers to set the terms of a critical ongoing debate.

The fact that humans need water raises important questions: should water be classified as a basic human right available to everyone? Is water part of the commons? If so, should corporations be allowed to control the taps or bottle it, mark up the price, and sell it for profit?

Not much polling has been done on people’s opinions of water, but during 35 informal on-the-street interviews conducted by the Guardian, 31 people said it is a basic human right. The other four said it was subject to the laws of supply and demand.

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and Barlow, who has been appointed special advisor on water to the UN, will be addressing the General Assembly on the fact that water is still missing from the original 30 Articles.

"The reason that water was not included in the original 30 Articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is that no one at that time could conceive there would be a problem with water," Barlow told the Guardian. "It’s only in the last 10 years that the concept of water as a human right has come to the fore."

The problem has its roots in the inherent conflict between conservation and profit. Saving water is relatively cheap, but there’s no money to be made by eliminating waste. Developing expensive new water sources, though, is a potential private gold mine.

As Barlow points out in her book, technology is becoming an integrated part of the solution to the water crisis. Desalination plants, water recycling facilities, and nanotechnology are all being thrown at the problem — in some cases before a full assessment of use and abuse has occurred.

While technological solutions may be warranted in some places, Barlow worries that relying on them bypasses any true attempts at efficiency and conservation. "I’m not going to say there’s no place for water cleanup," she told the Guardian. "What I’m concerned about is we’re going to put all the eggs in the cleanup basket and not nearly enough in the conservation and source protection basket. What I’m concerned about is the idea that technology will fix it. Meanwhile, don’t stop polluting, don’t stop the over-extraction, allow the commercial abuse of water, allow the agricultural abuse of water because what the heck, there’s tons of money to be made cleaning it up. I think that’s the wrong way of coming at it."

The technological fix is one way the state’s water crisis may slowly seep into private sector control, and a couple of examples show what can happen when private companies don’t play nice with the public, how citizens constantly battle with state agencies to enforce regulations, and how the public process could and should be honored.

GET THE SALT OUT

In theory, California has plenty of water — its 700 miles of coastline border the giant reservoir known as the Pacific Ocean. But humans can’t drink salt water — and some companies see a nice industrial niche in that dilemma. Build a plant that takes out the salt, and suddenly there’s plenty for all.

Several small desalination facilities already exist throughout the state, mostly cleaning water reservoirs brined by agriculture. But another 30 desalination plants have been proposed for the coast as a way to deal with future water shortages.

One is in Carlsbad, near San Diego, where Poseidon Resources is constructing the only large-scale desalination plant that the state has permitted to date. It’s a 10-year-old project that, so far, doesn’t even have a pipe in the ground.

Despite Poseidon’s ability to grease the wheels with local officials, the facility is controversial. It sits next to a fossil-fuel burning peaker power plant, and will be desalinating the power plant’s discharge water, thus shielding its negative environmental impacts by claiming its the power plant that’s sucking up seawater and damaging marine life — the desalination plant is just making use of the wasted water.

That argument doesn’t sit well with Joe Geever of the Surfrider Foundation, who pointed out that part of the power plant is scheduled for a retrofit to air-cooling, and talk is of a potential state ban on using water for this type of cooling system. There are other more environmentally benign seawater extractions, he said, like drilling and capturing subsurface sources, that the desalination plant could have used.

Mostly, he contends, the plant subverts conservation. "Per capita consumption of water in San Diego is much higher than other places," he said. "In southern California we waste an enormous amount of water on growing grass. There’s a lot to be saved."

Poseidon, a private company, is footing the bill for the plant’s construction, but the financing scheme is predicated on a future increase in the cost of water. As Poseidon’s Scott Maloni explained to the Guardian, the contract with the San Diego Water Authority states that the cost of desalinated water can never be more than the cost of imported water. It can, however, walk in lock-step with it — and by all accounts the price to pipe water to sunny southern California is going to increase. Maloni said his company was taking an initial loss but would start paying itself back as imported water costs increase. Eventually rates will be set halfway between the real cost of desalinated water and the higher cost of imported water.

What kinds of guarantees are there that this will happen? Nobody knows. "They’ll say anything, but when it comes to showing you a contract, we’ve never seen anything," said Adam Scow of Food and Water Watch. "There’s a lack of regulation with a private company controlling the water."

The plant now has no less than three lawsuits hanging over it, all filed with state agencies in charge of permitting and oversight — the Coastal Commission, the State Lands Commission, and the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. All basically contend that the state didn’t do enough to require Poseidon to implement the most environmentally sound technology that’s least harmful to marine organisms, as required by state law.

Geever stresses that desalination is an energy-intensive way to get water. "Every gallon of water you conserve is energy conserved," he said. "Not only could San Diego do more conservation, but they don’t recycle any wastewater to potable water standards. That’s much less energy intensive."

Poseidon counters by saying that it invested $60 million in energy efficiency measures for the plant and will be installing solar panels on the roof. Perhaps most telling is that the company sees itself as vending reliability. "It’s not the current cost of water the San Diego Water Authority is concerned about, but the future cost for an acre-foot," Maloni said. "There’s a dollar figure you can put on reliability. Public agencies are willing to pay us a little more for that."

Which gets back to a comment Barlow made about capitalizing on crisis. "We are frightened half to death and everyone who looks at it, right-wing or left-wing, sees that. … They use the crisis to say we have no alternative except to go into massive desalination plants."

And, as Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute pointed out, San Diego wasn’t calling for proposals to bring it more water. "Poseidon wanted to build a desalination plant and it came to San Diego. That’s one way to do it. The other way is for a municipality to say we want a desalination plant, we’re opening it up to bids, let’s have a competition. That didn’t happen, and instead we have one contractor."

Geever added, "Poseidon has been really successful at lobbying politicians and convincing regulators to give them permits."

Which points to one of the chronic ills of managing water systems, particularly in California where water has always been political. "In the 20th century decisions about water were made by white males in back rooms," said Gleick. "It solved a lot of problems, but it led to a lot of environmental problems. The days when water decisions made in back rooms should be over. And they aren’t over, and that’s part of the problem."

DELTA BLUES

Nowhere is that more obvious than the delta, where the state’s two most prominent rivers — the Sacramento and the San Joaquin — meet the Pacific Ocean just north of San Francisco. It’s ground zero for one of the most charged political fights in the state.

Two-thirds of California’s water comes from the delta. About 80 percent of it goes to cropland, watering about half of the state’s $35 billion agricultural industry, much of it through historic water rights that have been granted to a small lobby of powerful growers who sell their surplus rights for profit. Another 18 percent goes to urban water needs, and — in spite of the fact that this is the largest estuary on the west coast of North and South America — only 2 percent of the water remains for natural environmental flows.

Delta issues are legion and begin at the headwaters of the Sacramento River, near Mount Shasta, a land Mark Franco describes as an Eden. "The deer, salmon, and acorns that we eat — everything that we need is there," Franco told the Guardian. "It’s such a beautiful place. Now they’re drying it, that Eden."

Franco is head of the Winnemem Wintu, or "little water people" tribe, and is fighting the first phase of water diversions from the Sacramento River, 200 miles north of the capitol where companies like Coca-Cola, Crystal Geyser, and now, potentially, Nestlé, pump millions of gallons a year into small plastic bottles and ship it around the country to sell in groceries and convenience stores.

"Here in the US, people have become soft. They’ve become so used to just having things directly handed to them that they no longer understand where their water comes from," he said at the anti-corporate water conference. "Realize this: those springs on Mount Shasta are not an infinite supply of water."

After the Sacramento feeds the bottled-water companies, what remains wends its way south, with more diverted directly to farmers and into the State Water Project, which pipes it to drier southern regions. What’s left empties into the delta.

A lack of fresh water, flagging environmental preservation, increasing agricultural needs, and leveed island communities that are seismically unsafe and sinking, all mean the delta is failing as an ecosystem, and has been for some time. Chinook salmon and delta smelt populations are collapsing to such an extent that court orders have halted a percentage of water diversions and salmon fisherman were forced to dock their boats this year. Levees are crumbling, causing islands to flood and raising ire among landowners. Farmers with historic water rights are fiercely protective of them, while environmentalists are lobbying them to use more conservation and efficiency.

Nearly all stakeholders agree that the status quo won’t hold.

The challenge is finding a solution. Ending exports seems impossible, limiting them means massive investments in other resources. No one agrees on what will really save the endangered salmon and smelt or improve conditions for the 700 other native plants and animals.

In 2006, the governor convened a seven-member Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force, which released a strategic plan in October calling for balancing co-equal goals of ecological restoration and water reliability.

The plan also specifically recommended a dual conveyance system similar to what was proposed in a study by the Public Policy Institute of California. It combines some through-delta pumping with a peripheral canal around the delta. PPIC crunched the numbers and determined that the canal was economically better than any of the four options they had weighed.

The peripheral canal idea isn’t new, but it’s been controversial since it was first proposed almost three decades ago. The plan was ushered by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, but defeated by voters in 1982 after a major organizing effort by environmentalists. (Whether voters will cast ballots on it this time remains to be seen, though the Attorney General’s Office, now headed by Brown, has counseled the Department of Water Resources, which is charged with implementing whatever plan is decided upon, that a vote of the people isn’t required.)

Shortly after its release in July, the PPIC report was criticized by five elected Congressional Democrats — Reps. George Miller, Ellen Tauscher, Doris Matsui, Mike Thompson, and Jerry McNerney. "The PPIC report should not be used to ignore the many things that can be done today to restore Delta health, including providing necessary fish flows, undertaking critical ecosystem restoration projects, and making major investments in water recycling and improved conservation measures," Miller said.

Numbers used by the PPIC report have also been criticized by Jeffrey Michael, a business professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. In an analysis of PPIC’s work, Michael said the group had used inflated population figures, as well as high costs for desalinated and recycled water, therefore resulting in a report that made it look like it was too expensive to end delta exports altogether and replace them with other water sources.

The PPIC said the state’s population would be 65 million by 2050, that desalinated water costs $2,072 per acre-foot, and recycled water goes for $1,480 per acre-foot — numbers that were scaled to 2008 dollars from 1995 figures. Michael contends that if the numbers were adjusted to reflect actual costs, the peripheral canal wouldn’t look like such a sweet deal.

Maloni, of Poseidon Resources, said the desalinated water cost would be $950 per acre-foot for San Diego, including a $250 subsidy. A similar plant the company is hoping to construct in Huntington Beach will be about $50 more per acre foot.

When asked if $2,100 per acre-foot was a reasonable figure for desalinated water in California, Maloni said, "That’s nuts."

What does all this illustrate? That even among a small cast of purported experts there’s little consensus on several fundamental issues.

Adding more fuel to the fires of public skepticism is that a third of the funding for the PPIC report came from Stephen D. Bechtel Jr. — heir to the Bechtel Corp., which has come under tremendous criticism for its moves to privatize water around the world.

"That is very upsetting to us. They would stand to gain a lot with a contract to build a peripheral canal," said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla of Restore the Delta.

PPIC’s Ellen Hanak said the funding didn’t affect their findings. "It’s really much more linked to the fact that the foundation is really interested in the environment and water is a part of that."

Linda Strean, the PPIC’s public affairs officer, told the Guardian that it was Bechtel himself who wrote the check, not the foundation. It’s the first time Bechtel has given to PPIC.

But considering Bechtel’s past performance managing water, it doesn’t inspire much confidence.

BECHTEL’S BIG ADVENTURES

In April, Cesar Cardenas Ramirez and César Augusto Parada, traveled from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to San Francisco. The two men were on a fact-finding mission: they wanted to know more about the company that owns Interagua, the company that is supposed to deliver the drinking water that only occasionally comes out of the taps in their homes.

One of the first things they discovered is that 50 Beale St. doesn’t necessarily advertise itself as the home of Bechtel — one of the world’s largest private corporations, with global construction and infrastructure contracts amounting to billions of dollars annually.

In Guayaquil, water service has been problematic for decades. During the 1990s the country received a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank to improve basic infrastructure. The money was given directly to the government, but like many World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans granted throughout Latin America at the time, it was predicated on an eventual privatization of the water service contract.

The money helped — water conditions improved, and the city seemed to be on track to bring service to outlying areas. But in 2000, the city, abiding by the loan conditions, requested bids to run the water and sewage systems. No bids were received. Leaders scaled back provisions that kept some control in the hands of the government, and they got one response. In 2001, Interagua, a company owned by Bechtel, took over water service.

"Since the contract, nobody has been able to drink the tap water," Cardenas, who represents the Citizen’s Observatory for Public Services, a watchdog group formed in Guayaquil to monitor the water contract between the government and Interagua, told the Guardian. "Prior to the contract you could drink the tap water, although there were some sections of the city where the plumbing was old and inadequate."

Even though Interagua is managing a public service, because it’s a private company, information about its exact responsibilities have been elusive. The Observatory does know that Interagua pays nothing for the water it draws from the local river, is guaranteed a 17 percent rate of return, and that it has a minimum mandate to expand service. What’s also known is its citizens’ experience — during the first six months of the contract, some rates were increased 180 percent.

Bechtel’s SF office refused to meet with the two men or answer their phone calls, e-mails, and letters, which highlights the inherent problem with corporate control of water — a lack of accountability. Bechtel didn’t answer any of the Guardian‘s detailed questions regarding the Interagua contract, and only provided a three-page letter originally drafted to the World Bank in December 2007, that paints a rosy scene of productivity and accomplishment in Guayaquil.

"At present, over 2.1 million residents of Guayaquil (84 percent of the population) are connected to the municipal potable water system, and more than 90 percent of the customers have 24-hour per day, uninterrupted service." The letter goes on to state that coverage is expanding with new connections, water quality meets public health standards, prices have decreased, and procedures are in place to help customers who have higher than average bills.

"There are things that have improved, yes," said Emily Joiner, who spent last summer in Ecuador and is author of the book Murky Waters, a history of water issues in Guayaquil published by the Observatory in 2007. But the bottom line is that citizens pay for the service, but they can’t drink the water.

"You still don’t drink the water anywhere in the city at any time," said Joiner. People buy bottled water or boil it. "Bottled water is expensive, as a percentage of income," she said.

Whereas water service was previously priced more like a progressive income tax, with the lowest consumers paying the lowest rates, Interagua has flattened out the rate structure and now big water consuming businesses are paying the same as residents. "It’s pricing some families out of the market," Joiner said. "It’s great for business. It’s not great for people who don’t have enough water to bathe or wash their clothes."

The Observatory would like the water system turned back over to the government. The local authority, which once ran the water service and is now charged with overseeing Interagua, fined the company $1.5 million for not meeting goals for expanding service. According to Joiner, there’s been no follow-up on whether the company is meeting those goals now.

The Observatory also filed complaints with the World Bank, which attempted a settlement, but, according to Joiner, representatives from Interagua refused to sit down at the same table as Cardenas. "The process stalled," Joiner said. "Interagua said the issue had become too politicized. César [Cardenas] has a reputation for rabble-rousing, and at the time he was lobbying for constitutional amendments outlawing privatization. Interagua considered it negotiating with a hostile party."

A new constitution was passed in September that does, in fact, outlaw privatization, but still allows existing contracts to be honored if they pass a government audit.

In the meantime, the local rumor is that Bechtel is arranging to sell Interagua to another company. Bechtel wouldn’t confirm this, and no one could say more beyond what was reported in speculative articles in Guayaquil’s local newspapers.

It wouldn’t be the first time Bechtel bailed on an international water contract. In what was part of a massive privatization of a variety of Bolivia’s national services, in 1996 the World Bank granted the city of Cochabamba a $14 million loan to improve water service for its 600,000 citizens. Like Ecuador, there were strings attached: a future privatization of the city’s water service. It was sold to Aguas del Tunari, the sole bidder — also a subsidiary of Bechtel. Almost immediately rates increased by nearly 200 percent for some families. In January 2000, people stopped paying, started rallying, and the water war began.

Led by La Coordinadora for the Defense of Water and Life, organizers shut down the city, physically blockading roads and demanding the regional governor review the contract. The battle went on into February, resulting in injuries to 175 people and the death of one. Originally the government announced a rate rollback for six months, but the Bechtel contract remained. "The [Bechtel] contract was very hard to get a hold of," Omar Fernandez of the Coordinadora told Jim Schulz of the Democracy Center. "It was like a state secret." Once they did examine a copy of it, Bechtel’s sweetheart deal for a guaranteed 16 percent profit was exposed and people demanded a full repeal.

Eventually, the residents got it, and though decent water service in Cochabamba is still elusive, the water war has become the poster child for successful grassroots activism.

"One of the most inspiring struggles around community control of water happened in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the year 2000, when international corporation Bechtel — based here in San Francisco — privatized the municipal water system and hiked the water rates for citizens by 30 to 40 percent. Thankfully, there was a popular upsurge. It was a very bitter struggle and people succeeded in turning control back to public hands.

"This success changed the public debate in Bolivia," said Mateo Nube, a native of La Paz, Bolivia, who spoke at the anti-corporate water conference. "People said ‘enough’ to privatization, enough to corporate control. We need to seize control of our government."

You don’t have to go to Bolivia to find water-privatization battles. In 2002, catching wind that the city of Stockton was on the brink of privatizing its water services, the Concerned Citizens Coalition rallied signatures for a ballot measure against the idea. Weeks before the vote, the Stockton City Council narrowly approved one of the west’s largest water privatization deals — a 20-year, $600 million contract with OMI-Thames. The ballot measure still received 60 percent approval, and activists took the issue to court arguing there hadn’t been a proper CEQA process. In January 2004, according to the Concerned Citizens Coalition Web site, "San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Bob McNatt ruled in our favor — we won on all points. The judge ruled that privatizing, in and of itself, needed environmental review." The city appealed, but eventually dropped the suit and OMI walked away in March 2008.

PUBLIC AGENCY, PUBLIC PROCESS

Bechtel also failed to hold on to a more local contract, a $45 million deal with the SFPUC to manage the first phase of its multibillion dollar Water System Improvement Project. After a 2001 story by the Guardian exposed Bechtel’s exorbitant billing for services that resulted in few gains (see "Bechtel’s $45 million screw job," 9/12/01), the contract was revoked by the Board of Supervisors and granted to Parsons, which runs it now.

Years later, in 2007, when the SFPUC released a draft of the Environmental Impact Report for the $4.4 billion project, massive public outcry arose against it. The plan outlined major seismic upgrades for miles of aging water infrastructure between San Francisco and Yosemite National Park, where the headwaters of the Tuolumne River are captured by a giant dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley and gravity-fed to the city. While the EIR projected little additional water use for San Franciscans, it called for diverting an additional 25 million gallons of water per day from the Tuolumne to meet the needs of 23 wholesale customers in San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Alameda counties.

The Pacific Institute and Tuolumne River Trust collaborated on a study showing that 100 percent of the anticipated water increases were for those wholesale customers — most of it for outdoor water use. The SFPUC hadn’t factored in any increased conservation, efficiency, or recycling measures, nor had it independently questioned the growth numbers.

The EIR received upwards of 1,000 public comments, more than any other document ever generated by the SFPUC. Environmental groups rallied, writing editorials, flooding public meetings, and asserting a different vision of the Bay Area’s water future and stewardship of its primary, pristine water resource.

And it worked. "We got about 95 percent of everything we wanted out of the WSIP process," said Jessie Raeder of the Tuolumne River Trust. "We do consider the WSIP a huge win for the environmental community … because we were able to organize and get a seat at the table and discuss this with the PUC." She said the Bay Area Water Stewards, a coalition of environmental groups, met with the PUC nearly every month and slowly the initial additional river diversions were pared down to a possible 2 million gallons. Also, a cap has been placed on any diversions until 2018, which gives agencies time to implement conservation and efficiency measures.

The SFPUC feels positive about it, too. "We are really thrilled that the program EIR was approved by the Planning Commission, approved by the PUC, and not appealed," said spokesperson Tony Winnicker. He said there were really controversial elements and the trick was balancing the competing interests of wholesale customers and environmental groups. "It took a really hard-nosed look at our demand projections and what we could really do for conservation." He concedes there are still controversies, in particular over the Calaveras Dam, which the Alameda Creek Alliance opposes. "It would be hubris for us to say it’s been a complete success."

"This is a process that would only occur through a public agency," Winnicker added.

"What we saw with the WSIP was a solution where everything was fully transparent," Raider added. "It was all a public process, and there was plenty of opportunity for public input."

Which is really what a public water utility should be doing. "When you’re talking about public water, it isn’t them, it’s us," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Food and Water Watch. "A public water system is only as good as the people involved with it."

DRINK LOCALLY

"This conference isn’t a public event," organizer Andrew Slavin told the Guardian when we tried to gain admittance to the Corporate Water Footprinting Conference. While water activists rallied outside deriding the corporations inside for greenwashing their images, Slavin said that the fact that the conference wasn’t open to the public proved that the corporations weren’t trying to do environmental PR. "If they’re trying to do greenwashing this isn’t the place to do it. The aim is to try to share information."

Slavin pointed to representatives speaking from the Environmental Protection Agency, the SFPUC, and NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund. From an environmental perspective, if these companies are going to be using water, isn’t it worth working with them to reduce their impacts?

"There are companies I call water hunters," explained Maude Barlow. "They destroy water to make their products and profit. Unfortunately, some of the companies that are leading this conference are bottled water companies. I don’t know how you can become ‘water neutral’ if your life’s work is draining aquifers."

Many water activists consider bottled water the low-hanging fruit as far as getting people to change behaviors. San Francisco banned the use of tax dollars to buy it, and the SFPUC has been promoting its pristine Hetch Hetchy tap water, gravity-fed from Yosemite National Park. "Bottled water companies are basically engaged in a multiyear campaign. Their marketing approach is you can’t trust the tap, your public water isn’t safe," Winnicker said.

Slavin said he thought it was weird to protest the conference, because the corporations are genuinely trying to avoid conflicts. He pointed to a company called Future 500 that has created a business out of mediating between corporations and communities. "It’s hard for companies to speak to people so they use other companies to do it," Slavin said.

In fact, representatives from Future 500 appeared to be the only conference attendees who stepped outside to watch the protest.

"I think it’s great," Erik Wohlgemuth of Future 500, said of the protest. "I think press should have been there. I think more of these voices should have been there. My personal view is they need to come up with some sort of reduced rate to allow these nonprofits to attend these kinds of conferences."

Jeremy Shute, a representative from global infrastructure company AECOM who was standing with Wohlgemuth, said, "There’s a tremendous amount of research and thought going into these questions and it would be great if that knowledge could be shared."

But is that going to happen when private companies cite "proprietary interest" as a reason for not sharing more information about their businesses? Or when they don’t have to abide by public records laws, leaving their contracts shielded from public scrutiny? Or when they refuse to answer calls from their constituencies and the media? In which case, should those advocates be in the same room as some of the biggest water users in the world? When pressed with the question, Slavin seemed stumped. "Why didn’t we invite them?" he asked. Then, after a long, thoughtful pause, he said, "I don’t know."

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WATER, BY THE NUMBERS

One-half of 1 percent of the world’s water is fresh. [1]

Of that .5 percent, about 50 percent is polluted. [2]

One in 6 people don’t have access to clean, safe water. [3]

Five food and beverage giants — Nestlé, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Anheuser Busch, and Groupe Danone — consume almost 575 billion liters of water per year, enough to satisfy the daily water needs of every person on the planet. [4]

The average human needs about 13 gallons of water each day for drinking, cooking, and sanitation. [5]

An average North American uses about 150 gallons of water each day. [6]

An average African: 1.5 gallons. [7]

An average San Franciscan: 72 gallons. [8]

The average Los Angeles resident: 122 gallons. [9]

About half the water used by a typical home goes for lawns, gardens, and pools. [10]

50 percent of US water comes from non-renewable groundwater. [11]

86 percent of Americans get their water from public water systems. [12]

80 percent of California’s homes get water from public systems. [13]

The 20 percent of CA households receiving water from privately-owned systems pay an average of 20 percent more for it. [14]

Of the 4.5 billion people with access to clean drinking water worldwide, 15 percent are buying it from private water companies. [15]

It takes 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water. [16]

Tests of 1,000 bottles of water spanning 103 brands revealed that about one-third contained some level of contamination. [17]

The bottled water industry is worth $60 billion a year. [18]

Water is the third biggest industry in the world, worth $425 billion, ranking just behind electricity and oil. [19]

About 70 percent of CA’s water lies north of Sacramento, but 80 percent of the demand is from the southern two-thirds of the state. [20]

[1] www.gwb.com.au/gwb/news/mai/water12.htm

[2] Maude Barlow, interview with SFBG

[3] foodandwaterwatch.org/world/utf8-america/water-privatization/ecuador/bechtel-in-guayaquil-ecuador

[4] The Economist magazine

[5] www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2002/2002-03-22-01.asp

[6] www.canadians.org/water/publications/water%20commons/section4.html; environment.about.com/od/greenlivinginyourhome/a/laundry_soaps.htm

[7] montessori-amman-imman-project.blogspot.com/2008/01/in-news-interview-with-ariane-kirtley.html; answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080304195801AAnrv4Y

[8] sfwater.org/mto_main.cfm/MC_ID/13/MSC_ID/168/MTO_ID/355

[9] www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?articleId=928&issueId=68

[10] American Water Works Association

[11] www.canadians.org/integratethis/water/2008/May-28.html

[12] www.foodandwaterwatch.org/water/private-vs-public

[13] California Public Utilities Commission

[14] Black and Veatch’s 2006 California Water Rate Survey

[15] www.canadians.org/water/publications/water%20commons/section2.html

[16] www.pacinst.org/topics/water_and_sustainability/bottled_water/bottled_water_and_energy.html

[17] Natural Resources Defense Council study, "Pure water or pure hype?" (1999)

[18] www.bottlemania.net/excerpt.html

[19] www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/article4086457.ece; thegreenblog.leedphilly.com

[20] www.energy.ca.gov/2005publications/CEC-700-2005-011/CEC-700-2005-011-SF.PDF

Ricky Angel and Katie Baker assisted with research.

Sensational trans-bashing at SF Weekly

December 3, 2008

OPINION SF Weekly published an article Nov. 26 with the headline "Border Crossers." The subhead explained the thesis: "Long rap sheet? No problem. Transgender Latina hookers in SF are successfully fighting deportation by asking for asylum."

The title successfully encapsulates the Jerry Springer-like journalism masquerading as a feature article in an alternative weekly in San Francisco. While I would normally just dismiss this as another example of how SF Weekly is turning into the National Enquirer, the article is important in that it reveals the intense discrimination transgender immigrant women who do sex work face in San Francisco — and unfortunately, quite possibly jeopardizes an incredibly essential legal protection.

The writer, Lauren Smiley, apparently believes she has unearthed a shocking secret: that transgender women may receive asylum in the United States based on intense discrimination in their home countries. So trans immigrants can avoid deportation even when they have been arrested for prostitution and have rap sheets.

As Smiley notes, immigration judges and asylum officers have the discretion to grant asylum when a transgender woman presents a showing of a well-founded fear of persecution based on gender identity. Even Smiley admits that transgender women face violence and intense discrimination in their home countries; however, what Smiley finds the most egregious is that some small subset of the asylum-seeking women have been prosecuted for sex work.

What Smiley single-mindedly ignores is the astonishing statistics that show an unemployment rate of more than 50 percent for transgender women of color, and perhaps even higher statistics for undocumented women in San Francisco. Instead of pointing to the well-documented obstacles transgender women face in employment, Smiley interviews one transgender woman who was able to get a job as evidence that transgender women really do not have to be "hookers" to survive. (Yes, she really did use the word "hookers".)

Without any context or analysis, Smiley quoted Dan Stein, president of the "Federation for American Immigration Reform" (FAIR) as a credible critic of the practice of granting asylum to immigrant transgender women. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently officially designated FAIR as a hate group, but nowhere in her article does Smiley mention that the organization is considered one of the least trustworthy, if not laughable, sources for information on immigration.

What concerns me most is not the cheapness of the shot, but rather that — like so much sensationalist journalism — a piece like this gives fuel to right-wing activists like FAIR. Even Smiley notes that the Republican Party has included in its platform an end to the practice that has literally saved many lives.

What is even more astounding is that last year, Smiley received an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for an article about how doctors were using a new treatment for transgender children so that they wouldn’t develop into their biological sex until after puberty — which would give those kids the choice to transition later.

Yet in the Nov. 26 piece, when describing the landmark case of Geovanni Hernandez-Montiel, who was the first to get asylum based on gender identity, this award-winning writer frequently refers to Giovanni using the male pronoun "he." While I would not expect most journalists to give a nuanced perspective on Giovanni’s gender identity, I do expect a journalist who has received an award from an LGBT media watchdog group to allow for a more fluid understanding of Giovanni’s gender. I called Smiley and she acknowledged that she should have better described FAIR. When I asked her about the other problems, she simply said I should write a letter to SF Weekly.

In San Francisco, can’t we expect and demand better?

Robert Haaland is co-chair of SF Pride at Work, a LGBT labor organization. Alexandra Byerly is program coordinator, EL-LA Program Para Trans-Latinas. Nikki Calma is a member of the Commission of the Status of Women. Cecilia Chung is chair of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission

Transforming traffic analysis

December 3, 2008

› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY A court injunction against new bicycle projects in San Francisco (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07) could get lifted next year, thanks to environmental studies released Nov. 26 and headed to the Board of Supervisors next month. But it’s a subtle, technical change in how city officials analyze traffic impacts that could have a more far-reaching implications.

It’s called Level of Service Reform and it would change the triggering mechanism for when projects need to conduct full-blown environmental impact reports, an expensive and time-consuming requirement that led to the three-year bike project injunction. And LOS reform has been rattling around the city bureaucracy long before the Guardian wrote about it two-and-a-half years ago ("The slow lane," 5/17/06).

"It’s either wonderful that I started working on this in 2002, or it’s embarrassing," Rachel Hiatt of the San Francisco Transportation Authority told a Nov. 19 meeting of TransForm (formerly the Transportation and Land Use Coalition) on the subject.

The California Environmental Quality Act of 1970 requires EIRs for projects with potentially significant environmental impacts, as is the case when the level of service (LOS) at an intersection could be changed. LOS is measured by the amount of time it takes a car to pass through a given area. The time consumed by the car is often referred to as control delay. Measured by grades A through F, control delay per motor vehicle times of up to 30 seconds (E grade) are acceptable in San Francisco.

Designating sections of certain busy streets to accommodate a bike lane would affect the control delay, thereby earning the area a lower LOS grade. Since cars now essentially have priority over alternative forms of transportation, many potential bike lanes have been stranded by the LOS standard.

City officials are working to replace the LOS measure with a new one based on auto trips generated (ATG), using 1 ATG as the threshold for an EIR. Projects that generate no car trips will not be seen as having any environmental impact, thereby moving through the approval process quicker and cheaper.

"LOS needs to be taken out of the picture," Hiatt said.

The argument for LOS replacement is not solely about the need to accommodate other transit modes, but about lowering costs and making government more efficient. Hiatt outlined other problems with the current measure as the failure to accurately gauge environmental impact, failure to reflect the city’s "transit-first" policy priorities, and an inefficient CEQA review process.

Development advisor Mike Yarne of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development said that if the city wants to topple LOS, the Transit Authority has a case to make. "What the TA needs to show is that ATG is a more effective proxy to calculate environmental harm," Yarne said.

The city is also considering instituting a mitigation fee to be paid by project sponsors to compensate for environmental impact. Proceeds from the fee will be used to enhance all existing modes of transit, pedestrian safety, and could even include planting trees.

"The fee will go toward making people move faster," Yarne said.

Yarne admits that it could be a little difficult to make both changes at once. San Francisco will be the first city in California to create a mitigation fee, so other cities are taking notes.

"It would be quite an accomplishment if we could make it happen. It’s never been done," explained Yarne, noting that most cities have come to recognize that CEQA does not work well in urban areas. "The irony of ironies is the stopping of the bike plan."

Last week the TA released a Draft Environmental Impact Report for the San Francisco Bicycle Plan. With almost 900 days since the last new bike lane was constructed, the new bike plan will allow a roughly 75 percent increase to the current network..

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum expressed hope in the potential of the new EIR, slated to be approved this spring, after which the plan will be finalized and the city can go back to court to try to get the injunction lifted.

"The draft EIR is definitely a big step toward completion, but more needs to be done," she said. "The ridiculous exercise of slowing the bike plan down is a great case for why we need environmental review reform."

Stop PG&E’s corporate welfare

December 3, 2008

EDITORIAL Just in time for the holiday season — and the colder weather — Pacific Gas and Electric Co. wants to shift millions of dollars in fees off big industrial customers and force residential consumers to pay more for natural gas.

The move would set a terrible precedent, and San Francisco officials should join the consumer groups that are calling on the California Public Utilities Commission to reject the plan.

At issue is California Alternative Rates for Energy (CARE), a state-mandated program that helps low-income consumers pay for basic gas service — enough to heat their homes and cook their food. CARE costs PG&E nothing; the entire subsidy system is paid for by modest surcharges on every utility bill in the state. But now the biggest gas users — giant corporations like Exxon Mobil and Chevron — want to stop paying the surcharge, and PG&E, along with San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison, is taking up their cause. The three giant utilities have asked the CPUC to reduce their subsidy contribution by $90 million. Residential customers would pick up the slack. Why? Jeff Smith, a PG&E spokesman, told Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus that "We’ve got to try to help make it more attractive for businesses to do business in California."

But Chevron and Exxon Mobil aren’t suffering from a hostile business climate in this state. Both have reported record profits in the past year. The CEO of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson, was paid $16.7 million; Chevron’s CEO, David O’Reilly, made $15.74 million. The fee shift wouldn’t help small businesses much; it’s based on how much energy a customer uses, so the big energy-intensive industries pay the most.

The best way to boost the business climate in this recession era is to promote consumer spending — which means putting more money in the pockets of residents. Raising the gas bills of people who are already hurting will have the opposite effect.

"It’s an absolute outrage that the biggest companies would be given a discount on the backs of ratepayers," Mindy Spatt, media advocacy director at The Utility Reform Network (TURN), told us. "Everyone’s so worried about making the climate good for businesses, but what about the climate for people?"

A CPUC administrative law judge ruled against the utilities in November, but the case will go to the full commission, possibly as soon as Dec. 18. (Details are online at the Bruce Blog at sfbg.com.)

San Francisco has an interest in the outcome, since the city’s economy will take another hit if PG&E gets away with this. And, of course, it’s ironic that the utility would take this step just after it spent $10 million to defeat a local public-power measure (which would have lowered electric rates and helped both small and large businesses, as well as consumers).

The supervisors ought to pass a resolution opposing the plan and City Attorney Dennis Herrera should file a formal statement of opposition on behalf of the city.

In another front on another battleground, state assemblymember Tom Ammiano and state senator Mark Leno are introducing a joint resolution that would put the Legislature on record as supporting the legal challenge to the same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 8, and as raising concerns that the measure violates the equal protection and separation of powers safeguarded in the state constitution (see "Tyranny of the majority," 11/26/08).

Leno told us that the intent isn’t to put pressure on the California Supreme Court, which will begin considering the case in January, but to make clear the Legislature’s intent that substantial changes to the constitution such as this should go through the more cumbersome revision process.

Joining Leno and Ammiano in sponsoring the bill are Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Assemblymember John Perez, and state senate president Darrell Steinberg and state senator Christine Kehoe. Leno said he expects others to sign on as well. It’s a solid idea, and the Legislature should approve it.

Editor’s Notes

December 3, 2008

› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was out of town the day Tom Ammiano appeared at his final meeting as a San Francisco supervisor. Too bad; I would have gone, no matter how busy I was, just to be a part of history.

I know that sounds silly. The Barack Obama inauguration will be part of history. The election of Harvey Milk was part of history. Ammiano’s last day? Hey, the guy’s moving on to Sacramento. Take a bow, everyone says thanks, and another local politician takes another political job. History?

Well, yeah, actually. Because when the history of progressive politics is written in this town (and I hope some other poor sucker takes on that job so I don’t have to) Tom Ammiano will go down as a central figure in the movement that turned San Francisco around.

It’s worth noting that the movie Milk, celebrating the life of the gay pioneer, opened around the same time Ammiano was clearing out his City Hall office. The connection goes deeper than the fact that they were both queer men fighting for basic human rights and dignity at a time when that was a huge uphill struggle.

Milk was part of an urban movement that came out of the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s that sought to wrest control of San Francisco from a cadre of military and big business leaders who had been running it since World War II. The agenda of the crew that we collectively refer to as "downtown" was turning the sleepy port city of the 1930s into the financial headquarters for Pacific Rim trade. They wanted San Francisco to be another Manhattan; they laid plans, they put the machinery in place — and they never asked the people who lived here whether that was the future we wanted.

Because all that downtown development meant higher rents, more evictions, gentrification, budget deficits, too many cars, the death of small businesses … and by the mid-1970s, the activists had figured out how to fight back. It started with electing supervisors by district so that big money didn’t always carry the day.

Milk was elected supervisor as part of the progressive push that put George Moscone in the Mayor’s Office. And if Moscone and Milk had lived, it’s possible that the tide could have turned right then. But the assassinations derailed district elections, turned the city back over to downtown, and sentenced the San Francisco left to more than 20 years of tough political dark ages.

Ammiano got elected in that era, when the developers called all the shots, when tenants and environmentalists and neighborhood people were lucky to get two or three votes on the Board of Supervisors. His pro-tenant and anti-development proposals never even reached the desks of mayors who would have vetoed them anyway.

But he didn’t give up, and in 1999, in the bleak days of the dot-com boom, he took on a long-shot campaign for mayor that, in one six-week period, reenergized the San Francisco left. With his help, district elections came back; and with his leadership, a decidedly progressive board took office in 2001. Living wage, sick pay, universal health care, bike plans, real estate transfer taxes, tenant protections … these are all products of that change.

Ammiano was an odd sort of leader, someone with a sense of humor who didn’t take himself anywhere near seriously enough. He would be the first to credit the movement, not the man — and he’d be right. But when we needed him, he was there.

Decongest me

December 3, 2008

› sarah@sfbg.com

San Francisco could raise $35 million to $65 million for public transit improvements annually by charging drivers $3 to cross specific downtown zones during peak travel hours, according to a San Francisco County Transportation Authority congestion pricing study.

The aim of those fees, SFCTA staffers say, is to reduce congestion, making trips faster and more reliable, neighborhoods cleaner, and vehicle emissions lower, all while raising money to improve local and regional public transit and make the city more livable and walkable — improvements they hope will get even more folks out of their cars.

London, Rome, and Stockholm already have congestion pricing schemes, but plans to charge congestion fees in New York got shelved this July, reportedly in large part because of New Jersey officials’ fears that low-income suburban commuters would end up carrying a disproportionate burden of these fees.

As a result of New York’s unanticipated pressing of the pause button, San Francisco now stands poised to become the first city in the United States to introduce congestion pricing. But the plan requires approval from both local officials as well and the state legislature.

As SFCTA executive director Jose Luis Moscovich told the Guardian last week, "The state has control over passage of goods and people. Therefore, if we want to restrict that in any way, e.g. charging a congestion fee, [we] have to get the state’s permission."

If a congestion pricing plan is to go forward, it will need the support of Mayor Gavin Newsom. Wade Crowfoot, the mayor’s climate change advisor, told us, "It’s obvious that the mayor embraces the concept, as he laid out in his 2008 inaugural address."

But Newsom isn’t signing the dotted line just yet. "The mayor wants to make sure that there are no negative impacts that would make people not want to come to San Francisco, or would harm low-income people who live in areas that are not served by public transit and have no other choice but to drive," Crowfoot said.

"We are encouraging the [Transportation Authority] to do vigorous public outreach so that no one feels blindsided," Crowfoot added.

But as SFCTA executive director Jose Luis Moscovich explained Nov. 25 to the supervisors, who also constitute the transportation authority board, even if San Francisco gets the legislative green light, it could take two to three years to implement a congestion pricing plan.

"We’re not making a proposal," Moscovich said. "We’re just showing the initial results of our analysis."

That said, it’s clear Moscovich believes congestion pricing is feasible and would contribute to local, regional, and statewide transit goals.

TOO MANY PEOPLE

With San Francisco planning to accommodate 150,000 new residents and 230,000 new jobs over the next 25 years, Moscovich’s principal transportation planner, Zabe Bent, outlined four scenarios last week that would mitigate impacts in already congested areas.

These scenarios involve a small downtown cordon, a gateway fee with increased parking pricing downtown, a double ring that combines gateway crossings with additional fees downtown, and a cordon that imposes fees on crossings into the city’s northeast corner. (See www.sfmobility.org for details, including maps of the four possible zone scenarios.)

It seems likely the SFCTA will pursue the double ring or northeast cordon option.

As Bent told the board, "If the zone is too small, people will drive around it. And drivers within the zone could end up driving more, thereby eroding anticipated congestion benefits."

But all four scenarios aim to alleviate an additional 382,000 daily trips and 30 percent extra time lost to traffic congestion that would otherwise occur by 2030, according to SFCTA studies.

"We won’t reach environmental goals through clean technology alone," Bent explained. "Even if everyone converted to a Prius, the roads would still be congested."

Observing that it already costs at least $4 to get into the city by car — on top of $2 per gallon for gas and high parking fees — Bent argued that congestion, which cost the city $2 billion in 2005, reduces San Francisco’s competitiveness and quality of life.

Stockholm raised $50 million a year and reduced congestion by 22 percent with congestion fees, while London raised $200 million a year and reduced congestion by 30 percent.

In San Francisco, the SFCTA used computer models to determine that by charging $3 per trip at peak hours, the region would get maximum benefits and minimum impacts.

Discounts would be available for commercial fleets, rentals, car shares, and zone residents, Bent said, with toll payers getting a $1 "fee-bate" and taxis completely exempt.

As Moscovich noted, "Taxis are viewed as an extension of the public transit system."

BIG BUSINESS GRUMBLES

With concerted public outreach scheduled for the next two months, and business groups already grumbling about even talking about any increases to the cost of shopping and commuting with the economy in meltdown, Moscovich warned the supervisors not to wait until after the next economic boom hits, before planning to deal with congestion.

"Now is the right time to study it, but not implement it yet," Moscovich said.

Kathryn Phillips of the Sacramento-based Environmental Defense Fund told the Board that in Stockholm, public support grew to 67 percent once a congestion fee was in place.

"People saw that it reduced congestion, provided more public transit services, and made the city more livable and walkable," Phillips said.

BART director and Livable City executive director Tom Radulovich believes that free downtown transit would make the fees more palatable. "Fares could be collected when you get off the train if you travel outside of the zone," Radulovich said.

Noting that BART is approaching its limits, Muni Metro needs investments, and parking fees are an effective tool for managing congestion, Radulovich added. "Congestion pricing’s main criteria should not be to make traffic move faster. I don’t want to create more dangerous streets, but generally speaking, I think that plan is on the right track."

As for fears that San Francisco’s plans could tank at the state level because of concerns about working-class drivers being unfairly burdened, Radulovich noted that SFCTA studies at Doyle Drive determined that only 6 percent of peak hour drivers are low-income.

"The vast majority are earning more than $50,000 a year," Radulovich said. "And since the number of low-income drivers is very small, they could be given discounts. The real environmental justice issue here is what current congestion levels are doing to people living downtown, who are mostly low-income. They put up with inhumane levels of traffic and congestion, which affects the health and livability of their neighborhoods."

Dave Synder, transportation policy director for SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association), said he believes the regressive tax argument is a misleading attack.

"The truth is, that without the revenues this program will bring, the MTA will have to cut service for poor people, not increase service to meet increased demand for people who can no longer afford to drive," Synder told us.

But several local business groups are claiming that San Francisco doesn’t have a congestion problem compared to European cities.

Ken Cleveland of San Francisco’s Building Owners and Managers Association, said he believes that reports of congestion in San Francisco "are more hype than reality.

"We have no problem compared to London, Rome, and Stockholm," Cleveland said. "Congestion fees may work when you have a huge city with millions of people crammed in, like in London, Manhattan, Rome, but not in San Francisco."

Cleveland urged a hard look at what this increase means for people who drive now. " Fees of $160 a month would be "a real hit" on the middle and working classes, he said.

Jim Lazarus of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce said he opposed a local cordon, but supports a regional congestion pricing program. "Look out the window at 10.45 a.m., and you’ll see that there is no congestion on Montgomery and Pine," Lazarus told us, noting that unlike London, which covers 600 square miles, San Francisco only has a 49-square-mile footprint.

"If you decide not to go into downtown London, the odds are your taxes, jobs, and revenues will still go into London’s coffers," he said. "That’s not the case in San Francisco. So from a small business point of view, it doesn’t make sense."

Bent says the SFCTA’s study provides numbers that are irrefutable, in terms of showing how travel times are impacted by congestion, during peak hours. "We’re talking about modest improvements in speed, but significant improvements in travel time," Bent said.

The proposed fees won’t affect shoppers, museum-goers, or those going out at night, but would benefit all users of the public transit system, Moscovich said.

"We’re not designing for London, we’re designing for San Francisco," Moscovich told the Guardian. "And this is not an anti-automobile program. This is an effort to achieve a balanced transportation system."

With the congestion fee revenue reinvested in transportation infrastructure, Moscovich adds, public transit will be less crowded, and provide more frequent, faster service.

"It all makes perfect internal sense: folks with the least resources are likely to benefit the most," said Moscovich, who predicts that San Francisco will agree on some form of congestion pricing.

"The mayor wants to be seen as a leader in initiating climate change commitment, and transportation is one of the first ways to achieve this," he said. "Especially since 50 percent of San Francisco’s greenhouse emissions occur during peak hour travel."

"We’re trying to change behavior, not just engineering. We don’t want people in cars. … For every pollution-free Prius, you have diesel buses and older cars sitting in traffic idling, essentially eroding any benefits. The best way to optimize results is to get some cars out of the peak hour."

Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who is president of the SFCTA board and has supported the congestion fee-pricing system since it was implemented in London, said that "business will have to step up [and] make a willing suspension of disbelief to see that enhanced mobility will enhance business opportunities.

"There will be no need to get mauled at the mall," McGoldrick predicts. "San Francisco has wonderful things to offer, not just a sterile, homogenous, single-purpose environment. You can’t match museums and cultural amenities out at the malls. San Francisco is a cultural center, not just a strip mall."

McGoldrick, who is termed out in January, said that the new Board "will lean very positively toward doing this." He added that state representatives, including Sens. Leland Yee and Mark Leno and Assembly Members Fiona Ma and Tom Ammiano "will see the benefits.

"They should be willing to carry the banner because of the long term benefits for their grandchildren," McGoldrick said.

(The Board will consider the congestion pricing scenarios and impacts Dec. 16. See www.sfmobility.org for details of public workshops and meetings.)

Cue the clowns

December 3, 2008

› steve@sfbg.com

The circus doesn’t come to San Francisco, but its performers do, sexy and talented dreamers who bring a creative energy that has transformed the city’s nightlife and counterculture. Spinning aerialists and dancing clowns now proliferate at clubs and parties, and their number has more than doubled in recent years.

They come from towns across the country — often via Burning Man, where they discover their inner performers, dying to burst out, and other kindred spirits — to a city with a rich circus tradition, which they tweak and twist into something new, a hybrid of the arts and punk sideshow weirdness. It’s the ever-evolving world of Indie Circus.

One of the biggest banners these performers now dance and play under is Bohemian Carnival, which draws together some of the city’s best indie circus acts, including Vau de Vire Society, the clown band Gooferman, and Fou Fou Ha, acts that fluidly mix with one another and the audience.

Last Saturday, as families across the country shopped and shared Thanksgiving leftovers, this extended family of performers rehearsed for that night’s Bohemian Carnival. Fou Fou Ha was in the Garage, a SoMa performance space, working on a new number celebrating beer with founder/choreographer Maya Culbertson, a.k.a. MamaFou, pushing for eight-count precision.

"Do it again," she tells her eight high-energy charges, who look alternatively sexy and zany even without the colorful and slightly grotesque clown costumes they don for shows. I watch from the wings as they drill through the number again and again, struck by how the improvised comedy at the song’s end changes every time, someone’s new shtick catching my eye and making me smile.

"That’s what we love the most, the improv element to it," Culbertson tells me. "We see how far you can take it and not break character."

As Fou Fou Ha wrapped up and headed home to get ready for the show, Gooferman and Vau de Vire were just starting to rehearse and set up over at the party venue, DNA Lounge. Reggie Ballard was up a tall ladder setting the rigging, the dancers stretched, Vau de Vire co-founder Mike Gaines attended to a multitude of details, and Gooferman frontmen Vegas and Boenobo the Klown played the fools.

"I feel like I’m on acid," Vegas said evenly, his long Mohawk standing tall.

"Are you?" Boenobo said, perhaps a little jealous.

"No, I wish," Vegas replied. "But that’s why it’s weird."

"Huh," Boenobo deadpanned. "Weird."

Fucking clowns. I decide to chat up a dancer, Rachel Strickland, the newest member of Vau de Vire, who stretched and unabashedly changed into her rehearsal clothes as she told me about why she moved here from North Carolina in July 2007.

"I waited a long time for this. I always knew I wanted to come to San Francisco and work on the stage, doing something in the line of Moulin Rouge, with the costumes and that kind of decadence and debauchery," Strickland said, oozing passion for her craft and the life she’s chosen, one she said has met her expectations. "I danced as much as I could my whole life and I have an overactive imagination, so it’s hard to shock me."

Not that Vau de Vire hasn’t tried. Shocking people out of their workaday selves is what the performers try to do, whether through vaudeville acts, dance routines, feats of skill, or just sheer sensual outlandishness. Vau de Vire choreographer Shannon Gaines (Mike’s wife of 19 years) also teaches at the local indie circus school Acrosports and, with beatboxer and performance artist Tim Barsky, directs its City Circus youth program, which combines hip hop and other urban art forms with circus.

Gaines has been a gymnast and dancer all her life, skills that she’s honed into circus performances she does through five different agencies, often doing corporate events "that involve wearing a few more clothes" and other more conventional performances.

"The other seems like work to me. But this," she said, a wry smile coming to her lips, "is like dessert. This is what excites me."

She’s not the only one. With their growing popularity, San Francisco’s indie circus freaks are juggling an increasingly busy schedule and developing even bigger plans for the new year, including a national tour and an extravaganza called Metropolus that would reinforce San Francisco’s reputation as the best Big Top in the country.

As Boenobo told me, "It’s a moment in time when there’s something big developing in San Francisco."

MIMES AND PICKLES

The circus arts are ancient, but San Francisco’s unique role in morphing and perpetuating them trace back to the 1970s when Make-a-Circus arrived here from Europe — where circus traditions are strong — and the local, organic Pickle Family Circus was born.

Wendy Parkman, now a board member at San Francisco Circus Center, the circus school she helped develop in conjunction with the Pickles and legendary performer Judy Finelli, worked for both circuses and described how they derived from San Francisco’s vibrant arts scene and its history of grassroots activism.

"It was just a wonderful, spontaneous bubble, a renaissance of circus activity," Parkman told the Guardian. "It was an outgrowth of the fabulous ’60s and the involvement of people with community and politics and art."

Parkman and many others trace the local lineage of a renaissance that came to be known as New Circus back to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which in 1959 started doing political theater that incorporated comedy (or more specifically, Commedia dell’Arte), music, farce, melodrama, and other aspects of clowning.

"It really started with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and it flourishes here because of the rich arts culture that we’ve always had here," Jeff Raz, a longtime performer with both original SF troupes who started the San Francisco Clown Conservatory and recently had the title role in Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo, told the Guardian.

"San Francisco felt like a place where things could happen that were socially and politically relevant," Parkman said. "Circus has always been a people’s art form. It’s a great way of getting a lot of people involved because it takes a lot of people to put on a show."

Perhaps even more relevant to the current indie circus resurgence, both Make-a-Circus and the Pickle Family Circus reached out to working class neighborhoods in San Francisco, where they would do parades and other events to entertain the people and generate interest in the circus.

"It was happy, healthy, and accessible to people of all ages, classes, and backgrounds," said Parkman said, who noted that things began to change in the 1980s as funding for the arts dried up and Pickle hit hard times.

"The Pickle Family Circus was a grassroots circus that was part of a real renaissance. Unfortunately, it didn’t go very far," Dominique Jando, a noted circus historian who has written five books on the circus and whose wife teaches trapeze at the Circus Center, told the Guardian.

Still, the Pickle legacy lives on in the Circus Center and Acrosports, making San Francisco and Montreal (birthplace of Cirque du Soleil, whose influence has also propelled the indie circus movement) the two major hubs of circus in North America. Unlike Europe, Russia, and China, where circus training is deeply rooted and often a family affair passed from generation to generation, Jando said, Americans don’t have a strong circus tradition.

"We are really the poor children of the circus world. There is not the same tradition of circus here that there is in Europe," said Jando, a native to France who now lives in San Francisco. "Learning circus is like ballet, and it’s not really in the American psyche to work and train for seven years for a job that offers modest pay."

Homegrown spectacles like Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus commercialized the circus and transformed it into the three-ring form that sacrificed intimacy and the emphasis on artistry and narrative flow. Traditionally in Europe, the clowns and music structured a circus performance, with the punctuation and interludes provided by the acrobats and other performers of the circus arts.

"It’s the superhuman and the supremely human, who are the clowns," is how Raz defines circus. "Clowns are becoming more central to the circus, the supremely human part, and that has a lot to do with our times."

Raz, Jando, and Parkman all pointed to the sterile excesses of the televised, digitized, Twittering, 24/7 world we live in as feeding the resurgence of circus. "It points to a demand by the audience to see something more down to earth and real," Jando said. "There is a need to go back to basics."

"It’s a response to the overly technological world we’re living in. People want to go back to what the human body can do and be in the same place as the performers," Parkman said. "One of the concepts of the Pickles was that it was drawing on the European model. I’d say what’s going on now in San Francisco is an offshoot of what the Pickles did."

Raz said the rise of Indie Circus and its influence on the local arts scene is consistent with his own experiences as an actor and clown. He used to keep two resumes, but performers today are often expected to be steeped in both disciplines, letting one inform the other and opening up new forms of creative expression.

"That melding that you’re looking at, from the club scene to Burning Man, is seeping into a lot of the world," Raz said. "Circus is very much a living art form."

Somehow," Jando said, "it has become a sort of counterculture on the West Coast."

INDIE, THE NEW NEW CIRCUS

Boenobo and Vegas haven’t done any real training to become clowns. They’re performers who use the clown shtick to build a fun and fantastical world off their solid musical base.

"There has to be whimsy. People take themselves so seriously," Boenobo said, noting that it was in response to the serious-minded Winter Music Conference in 2001 where he had the idea of having the members of his new band, Gooferman, dress as clowns. It was a lark, but it was fun and it stuck, and they’ve been clowns ever since.

"The clown thing floats my boat. It is a persona I really dig. And the band kicks ass. We’re all just super tight. The Bohemian Carnival is just a bunch of friends, like a family ejected out of different wombs," he said.

The band does kick ass. Setting aside the clown thing, their tunes are original and fun, evoking Oingo Boingo at its early best, particularly since the summer, when Boenobo and Vegas brought in a strong new rhythm section. But it’s the collaboration with Vau de Vire and the other groups that round out Bohemian Carnival and really bring it to life.

"People say it just blew my mind, and that is the immortality of it," Boenobo said. "It’s super-fucking gratifying, really. It’s just stupid."

They performed last month at the Hillbilly Hoedown inside a giant maze made of hay bales in Half Moon Bay, with the clowns and circus performers creating a fantastical new world for the partygoers. As Gooferman played, Shannon broke the rules and danced atop a hay bale wall behind the band, conveying pure danger and backwoods sex appeal.

"The Gooferman character is called Bruiser or Shenanigans," Shannon said of her performer alter egos. "She does the things that you’d get kicked out of a party for, but I can get away with it."

She considers herself more of a "fluffer" than a dancer, and while Gooferman plays, she gets the band and crowd charged up by pushing the limits of silliness and composure herself and seeing if they’ll follow. "So they’re thinking, wow, if she can do that, I can do all kinds of things."

Their world not only includes practitioners of circus arts (contortionists, aerialists, trapeze artists, clowns, and the like), but also the fashion scene (including outlandish local designers such as Anastasia), painters, sculptors, dancers, actors, fire artists, and DJs like Smoove who bring a certain zany flair to the dance parties.

"It’s hybridized. So it’s not just circus arts with some musical backing," Boenobo said. Instead, it creates a fun and whimsical scene that makes attendees feel like they’re part of something unusual, fun, and liberating. "Immersion is very important."

That’s why the Bohemian Carnival and its many offshoots try to break down the wall between the performers and the audience, who often show up in circus or Burning Man styles, further blurring the borders.

"When you break down that big third wall, there’s no pretense," Mike Gaines said. "It’s really about the party and the community."

Clowns circulate in the crowd, interacting with the audience while aerialists suddenly start performing on ropes or rings suspended over the dance floor. It draws the audience in, opens them up, makes them feel like they’re part of something.

"All of the sudden, people get to realize the dream of running away with the circus, but they get to leave it at the end of the night," Boenobo said with a wink, "which they generally like."

"The line of where circus starts and ends has been blurred," said kSea Flux (a.k.a. Kasey Porter), an indie circus performer who earlier this year started Big Top Magazine (www.bigtopmagazine.com) to chronicle the growing culture. "I love the old-school circus, but as with everything, it needs to be able to evolve to continue to grow."

When he joined the indie circus movement five years ago, performing with the Dresden Dolls, Flux said it transformed his life. He quit his corporate job and started developing his art and trying to make a living in the circus arts, including promoting the culture through the magazine.

"I found the circus and was completely filled with a new life," Flux said, noting that it was through his long involvement with Burning Man that he was exposed to the circus scene. "I think Burning Man gives a platform for it. People get stuck in their jobs and there’s this great week when you can let go and be what you want to be."

That’s also how the talented aerialist and hooper who calls herself Shredder got into this world, which she’s now explored in both the traditional circus and the indie variety, preferring the latter.

"I didn’t even know it was possible, but I just love it," said Shredder, who worked as a firefighter, EMT, and environmental educator before getting into performing through Burning Man, where Boenobo set up the Red Nose District in 2006 for all the many offshoots of the indie circus world that attend the event.

Shredder developed hula hoop and aerial routines, training hard to improve her skills and eventually was hired by the Cole Brothers Circus in 2006 to do aerial acrobatics and hooping. Founded in 1882, Cole is a full-blown circus in the Ringling Bros. tradition, with a ringleader, animals, and trained acrobats. Shredder toured 92 cities in 10 months until she felt the creativity and joy being snuffed out by the rote repetition of the performances.

"We did the exact same show everyday. It was like Groundhog Day but worse; same show, different parking lot," said Shredder, who later that Saturday night did a performance with more than a dozen hula hoops at once. "Then I heard about Vau de Vire through some fellow performers and I just heard they were doing really well and I wanted to be with a group like that … I was just so happy that they were willing to help me design my vision as an artist."

COMING TOGETHER

The Bohemian Carnival name and concept was actually an import from Fort Collins, Colo., where Mike and Shannon Gaines created the Vau de Vire Society as part of the performance and party space they operated there in a 100-year-old church that they purchased.

Mike’s background was in film; Shannon was a dancer; and the world they created for themselves was decidedly counterculture. So was their space, the Rose Window Experimental Theater and Art House, which they operated from 1997 to 2001 and lived in with 20 of their bohemian friends.

"It allowed us to really get to know ourselves. We had all day to just rig up any kind of performance we could imagine," she said. "If you had a crazy idea, you could just come on over at 3 a.m. and do it."

Their signature events were themed parties that would open with performances of about 30 minutes, usually combining music, dance, and performance art, followed by a dance party that was essentially an all-night rave. Initially the performances just drew off of the creativity of their friends, including those Shannon danced with. The themes were often risqué and sometimes included nudity.

The performances evolved over time, bringing in talent such as Angelo Moore of the band Fishbone, who is still a regular part of their crew. They were all attracted to the freaky side of performance art, which drew them toward sideshow, vaudeville, and circus themes and expanding what was technically possible. "We ended up getting a rigger in and just flying around the theater," Mike said.

In 2000, they did their first Bohemian Carnival event. "That’s when we started dabbling in the circus," Mike said.

While the events gained regional acclaim in newspapers and were supported by notables figures, including the town’s mayor, there was a backlash among local conservatives, including some who objected to how a traditional church was being used for raves by these bohemian freaks.

In 2001 they decided to search for a new home. "We looked around for the place that would be most accepting of what we were doing," Mike said.

San Francisco was known to be accepting of their kind, and there were groups here that were edging toward similar kinds of parties, including Infinite Kaos and Xeno (and its predecessor, Awd), as well as the band Idiot Flesh, not to mention the more serious circus being done at the Circus Center and Teatro Zinzanni.

"San Francisco, in this country, is a real hotbed for circus. So we were like, ‘Now we can bring in legitimate circus performers," Mike said. Shannon got a job teaching at Acrosports, allowing her to be immersed full-time in her art and to help grow her community.

Serendipitously, in August 2001, indie rocker Boenobo of the band Chub — a funky ska outfit whose members would wear different costumes to each of their performances — formed Gooferman, which wasn’t originally the clown band it is today: "The idea was you had to be in a costume and you had to be stoned." They morphed into a full-blown clown band, and began collaborating with circus performers.

"But it never coalesced until recently," Boenobo says.

That process probably began around Halloween 2004 at the Vegoose Festival in Las Vegas, when Vau de Vire Society was asked to fill eight hours’ worth of programming and turned to their San Francisco brethren for help, Mike said. They drove or flew about 100 people to the event.

It was also the year Boenobo staged the GoofBall in San Francisco, drawing together a variety of entertainment that helped change the nature of the traditional dance party. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the year that reviled President George W. Bush won a second term and when longtime Burning Man artists staged their ill-fated revolt against the event (see "State of the art," 12/10/04).

"When people get too serious, they need this shit even more," Boenobo said of the increasingly irreverent, naughty, and participatory parties he was throwing.

Meanwhile Fou Fou Ha was developing its act. Culbertson and Raymond Meyer were waiting tables at Rose Pistola in 2000 and decided to put their big personalities to work for them, bringing in other performers such as Slim Avocado and setting up routines to perform at CellSpace and other venues.

"We’re sort of like the children of Cirque du Soleil in a way, but we wanted to give it an edge," Culbertson said. "It’s sort of like the second wave vaudeville … now with more of a rock edge."

Fou Fou Ha’s shows play off the dark and surreal kind of performance that is more European than American, a style Culbertson was exposed to while studying choreography during her Fulbright scholarship in Holland in the late 1990s. When she returned to the United States in 2000, "I wanted to form a [dance] company." But she wanted it to be fun. "People really like the idea of serious dance combined with comedy, where you can fall out of your pirouette," she said.

"We’re kind of like guerilla circus," Slim, a trained ballerina, said. "It’s a whole new movement. It’s like ’30s cabaret, but edgier."

Boenobo started the Red Nose District on the playa at Burning Man in 2006, drawing together his Bohemian Carnival friends, a local group of stilt- walkers known as Enhightned Beings of Leisure, installation artist Michael Christian’s crew from the East Bay, the Cirque Berserk folks from Los Angeles, and others from the growing circus world.

"It’s a safe environment to be and do what you want," Gaines said of Burning Man, noting how those breakthroughs on the playa then come back home to the city. And that ethos carries into Vau de Vire, which is truly a collective of like-minded friends, one that eschews hiring outside performers for their shows. "They’re all just part of it," he said.

What they’re all part of — Vau de Vire, Gooferman, Fou Fou Ha, and the rest of the Indie Circus folk — has begun to make a strong imprint on San Francisco nightlife and counterculture. From a performer’s perspective, Boenobo said, it feels good. "Our local family is super comfortable with one another," he said, something he’s never felt before after 25 years as a indie rocker. "It’s rare to not have a lot of ego to deal with, and it’s super rare with this kind of high-quality performance."

But they want more. As Flux said, "We want to take over the world."

WHAT’S NEXT

Slowly, the circus collective members are moving toward becoming full-time freaks. Already, Mike Gaines said most of the 12 to 15 regular Vau de Vire performers practice their art full-time, subsidizing their performances by being instructors in dance or the circus arts.

That’s not to say the parties, with their large number of performers, are lucrative. "With circus, you get a million more people on your guest list, so circus is complicated from a promoter’s perspective," Joegh Bullock of Anon Salon, which incorporates circus acts into its parties, including the upcoming Sea of Dream party New Year’s Eve. "But we love it and wouldn’t do a show without it."

To pay the bills, "we also do a lot of corporate gigs," Gaines says, not proudly. Fou Fou Ha does as well, including performing at the Westfield San Francisco Centre this holiday season. They’re all dying to take their show on the road, but that, too, takes money. "Sponsorship is the key if we’re going to tour with 60 people," said Mike, who’s been working hard on a deal and said he feels close.

Boenobo’s latest plan is Metropolus, a circus-style extravaganza he’s planning (along with Bullogh and Gaines) for next Halloween, hoping to ferry guests (using buses or perhaps even art cars from Burning Man) among several venues in town (such as Mighty, 1015, Temple, and DNA Lounge) and a huge circus tent he wants to erect in Golden Gate Park.

In addition to circus-style entertainment drawn from across the country, he wants to precede the Saturday night finale with three days and nights of workshops and smaller-scale performances. His goal is for Metropolus to because a signature event for San Francisco and the indie circus scene, the equivalent of the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas; the Winter Music Festival in Miami; or the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The time seems right, with the current financial meltdown creating opportunities even as it makes funding their world domination plans difficult. "Each time you have a crisis like we’re having now, it’s a ripe time for circus," Jando said, noting that circus boomed during the Great Depression and after each of the two World Wars.

And after going through years of pure absurdity in Washington, DC, and on Wall Street, Raz said the clowns of the world — from Stephen Colbert’s conservative television character (who Raz says employs clown techniques in his comedy) to a singer named Boenobo — now have a special resonance with people. As he said, "One of the things clowns do is they live the folly large."

———–

CLOWN’S EYE VIEW

I’ve been following Indie Circus for years, intending to add it to the profiles of various Burning Man subcultures (see www.steventjones.com/burningman.html) that I’ve written for the Guardian, but my reporting on this story began in May. And at the suggestion of Gooferman frontman Boenobo the Klown, I decided to start from the inside and let him turn me into a clown.

As makeup artist Sharon Rose transformed me into a happy clown backstage at DNA Lounge, I asked Boenobo what I should do (besides interview people). We just needed to clown around, keep the drunks from crowding the performers, help clear the stage between acts — whatever needed doing. "We’re the scrubs," he told me, clown-to-clown.

As we spoke, the acrobats stretched, a corpse bride goofed off as she prepared for her aria, members of the Extra Action Marching Band started to slink in, clowns applied their makeup, and female performers occasionally came back from the stage and whipped off their tops.

When Gooferman went on, I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, so I stood next to the stage, watched, and awkwardly tried to be a little goofy in my dancing. A tall, beautiful blond woman stood next to me, catching my eye. She was apparently alone, so after a couple songs, during a lull, I asked her, "So, do you like clowns?"

"I am a clown," she said with a grin.

"Really?" I said. "You don’t look like a clown."

"But I am," she said. "I even do clown porn."

She turned out to be 27-year-old porn star Hollie Stevens, who told me she "grew up as a clown" in the Midwest before moving to California and getting into porn seven years ago. She even starred in the film Clown Porn and still sometimes dons the red nose and face paint for her public appearances, usually just for her own amusement. Stevens once appeared on the Jerry Springer Show as a clown, even getting into the requisite fight on stage with a friend.

"Clowns, you either love them or you hate them," she said, and she loves them.

I asked why she was there and she said that she’d come to see Boenobo. They had talked but never met, and shared a sort of mutual admiration. It was a clown thing. Clowns … they get all the hot chicks.

While we talked, an acrobat worked the pole on the stage, followed by an aerialist performing above the dance floor, one scene woven seamlessly into the other. The clowns of Gooferman puttered around the stage, removing equipment to get ready for the next act, flirting with the girls, trying to scam more drink tickets, or simply entertaining others and themselves.

The life of a clown is rarely dull.

————

UPCOMING INDIE CIRCUS EVENTS

DEC. 5–6

Acrosports Winter Cabaret

639 Frederick, SF

8 p.m., $5–$15

www.citycircus.org

DEC. 12

Auditions for Acrosports’ City Circus

Call (415) 665-2276, ext. 103 for appointment

DEC. 12-14

Frolic: CircusDragBurlesque Festival

Featuring Fou Fou Ha, Anna Conda, and more

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

8 p.m., $100

www.counterpulse.org

1-800-838-3006

DEC. 20

Open House and Holiday Carnival

San Francisco Circus Center

755 Frederick, SF

10 a.m.–4 p.m., free

Pratfalls and Rising Stars

7 p.m., $12 adults, $8 children

San Francisco Circus Center

Tickets and info at www.circuscenter.org

DEC. 20

Storytime Festival, featuring Vau de Vire Society

4–7 p.m., "Tales of Enchantment," (G-rated show) 8–11 p.m., "Storytime for the Inner Child," (R-rated show)

$30–$50

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

www.storytimefestival.org

————

>>More: Read Marke B.’s club review of Bohemian Carnival

In every dream home …

November 25, 2008

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’ve been with my husband for 10 years, and we are still pretty young. He has become infatuated with a woman at work. It started as a ride-share and friendship, and recently developed (to their surprise) to an intense infatuation. He started staying out late nights drinking with the work crew so he could spend more time with her. They have not kissed or had sex, but the touchy-feeliness is there. After I discovered the relationship, he vowed to end it and to try to build stronger bonds with me. But ending it was a lot harder than he thought. It took me finding several communications between them for him to agree to go to therapy and finally tell her they could have no more contact outside of work. Now I’m having trouble trusting him. I break down a lot and he feels so guilty he thinks I’d be better off without him. We are starting couple’s therapy soon and he’s not in a position to leave his job. I can’t compete with this infatuation. We had a short infatuation, but things moved so fast that it dwindled more quickly than I think it should have. He told me that she makes him feel dizzy and that he’s never felt like that for anyone before. Am I going to lose him?

Love,

Tearfully Fearful

Dear Tears for Fears:

I’m a little worried, due to the finding of a few last (we hope) e-mails before he agreed to therapy, and frankly, due to your snooping (I assume you were snooping). Both are bad for both of you.

Given that he has apparently given up the stolen moments with Object of Affection (No more late nights drinking, right? And let’s assume his schedule doesn’t allow for Don Draper-style unexplained absences from the office, starting at lunch and ending when he damn well feels like ending them?), I can be cautiously optimistic, if a bit concerned about the you-not-trusting-him (understandable!) and him-feeling-like-skulking-off-because-it’s-all-ruined-now-anyway parts. Not only will he have to get over her for this to work, you will both have to get over yourselves. The latter may be harder.

Infatuations of the sort your husband had usually require some kind of fuel to keep burning, and if they have stopped seeing each other in any but the most unavoidable and quotidian "Hey, did you get that TPS report?" fashion, it has a good chance of dying down.

The truth is, 10 years in, something like this is to be expected. You could even consider patting yourselves on the back that it took 10 years, rather than the more expected seven (some researchers postulate that humans are programmed to move on after seven years, the time it takes to rear a man-cub to independence) or the alarming four, a figure that shows up in recent research on divorce in Western industrialized countries. Small consolation, I know, but 10 good years is worth a lot!

So what does he say now about the dizziness? Is he still dizzy when he thinks of her, or is it now mostly retroactive dizziness, dizzy with some distance? We’ve talked about those dizzy spells before in the column. They are a sure sign of "limerence," the crazy part of love, which I described here: "I make a distinction between loving a whole lot and limerence (which differs from infatuation in both duration and intensity), which is not so much a feeling as it is a form of madness, and like other forms of madness is turning out to have a biochemical basis. ‘When I think of you my serotonin plummets, my darling! O, how my dopamine soars! My heart pounds with norepinephrine …’"

Limerence produces sensations not only of lightheadedness but of physical pain or "heartache." It is tremendously exciting, and we tend to assume that anything so compelling must be both real and important. But if you remember that a really great book or a roller-coaster ride can create similar sensations, you realize that it needn’t be anything of the kind. The rush can be addictive, though, so let’s hope that your husband can give the rush its due and then steer clear. He will need some help, from both you and the therapist. Any sign that he is just nodding and saying whatever will get him out of there the fastest, and I’d start worrying again.

Interestingly, there are 12-step groups not just for the more obvious "sex addicts" but also for "love addicts." They are meant for those who use "love" as a drug to lend meaning to an empty life or excitement to a dull one, not to the ordinary person who, glimpsing something shiny, follows it through the faerie wood and then, realizing he’s been briefly enchanted, returns, chastened. Still, understanding that "love" (these are not quite scare quotes, but certainly sneer quotes; I don’t think what these seekers are finding deserves the name) can be so powerful a drug may help both of you to forgive him.

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Still fighting

November 25, 2008

› news@sfbg.com

The workers at the Woodfin Suites Hotel in Emeryville have had to fight hard for their rights against an intractable employer — one with a history of harassment and denying them proper pay — but the workers could be on the verge of yet another small victory.

The Emeryville City Council could decide Monday, Dec. 1 whether to award about $200,000 in back wages owed to the workers, thus potentially touching off yet another chapter in a long legal battle pitting local workers and voters against a conservative, out-of-town hotel owner.

This case stems from Measure C, a living wage ordinance passed by city voters in November 2005 that was aimed at hotel housecleaners. The measure requires that hotels pay all employees a minimum wage of $9 per hour and overtime pay for workers who clean more than 5,000 square feet of floor space.

Brooke Anderson, executive director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), said the measure came about after talking to housekeepers who complained about the long hours and stressful workloads. EBASE, an Oakland community-organizing nonprofit, ran the campaign to pass Measure C along with UNITE-HERE Local 2850 and the Alameda Central Labor Council.

Rosa, a Woodfin employee who asked not to be identified, has cleaned the hotel’s luxurious suites for three years. She said that prior to Measure C’s implementation, she struggled to complete her daily workload. "It was an excessive amount of work. If we didn’t finish, we had to clock out and work without pay."

Through communication with the workers after the measure went into effect Dec. 5, 2005, EBASE found that Woodfin and the Marriott Courtyard Hotel were not in compliance. "We had workers start taking journals down saying, ‘I cleaned this many rooms today, what I should have been paid was X, what I did get paid was Y’," Anderson said.

By fall 2006, Woodfin and Marriott workers went public with their complaints, "essentially blowing the whistle on their hotels’ not complying with the law," Anderson said.

Both groups of workers testified before the City Council. Marriot quickly came into compliance, raising wages across the board and paying back wages for the year spent out of compliance. Woodfin slowly came into compliance, dropping the room load from about 17 to around 9 over the next three months.

Yet in June 2007, city officials found that Woodfin owed about $250,000 in back wages. The hotel appealed the ruling, arguing that Measure C was unconstitutional. In April, the Alameda Superior Court ruled that the law is constitutional and that the city of Emeryville has the right to demand back wages, but it took issue with the methodology used to calculate the owed amount. The judge ordered the city to revise its back wage order and hold another hearing.

The city reissued its order in August, calling for around $200,000 in back wages. Woodfin appealed the ruling; a first hearing was held Nov. 17, and a final decision is expected Dec. 1.

Woodfin’s argument this round, according to spokesperson Tim Rosales, is that Emeryville did not clarify its requirements until 2007 so the company cannot be held accountable for regulations it believed it was complying with. Rosales said the city passed "implementing regulations" in 2007 and "tried to retroactively apply those 2007 rules to 2006."

"It would be as if the IRS applied this year’s tax increases to last year’s taxes and asked you to pay the difference," he said. Additionally, Woodfin cleans each large suite with a team of housekeepers, making it difficult to calculate individual square footage.

EBASE counters that Woodfin purposely ignored Measure C’s regulations, which it vehemently opposed during the election. Anderson also said the hotel has a long history of using intimidation tactics throughout the two-year struggle.

The Guardian broke the story last year ("Calling in the feds," 6/13/07) that the owner of Woodfin Suites, Sam Hardage, used connections with US Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-San Diego) to have the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials audit his own hotel, which he then used as a pretext for trying to fire some of his workers.

"The real question," Emeryville City Council Member John Fricke told the Guardian, "is why has the Woodfin hotel chosen to invest so much money fighting Measure C.

"It’s pretty clear that the Woodfin has spent many times the back wage it owes and paid that to lawyers," he said.

Rosales said that the hotel was battling on a matter of principle. "One could argue that were going to be doing business in Emeryville for a very long time," he said. "We want to find some clarity on the issue so the city can’t adopt measures and apply them retroactively."

Both sides hope for a favorable outcome Dec. 1, but remain entrenched and ready to defend their positions.

"We are confident that a favorable decision will be made and we hope that the hotel will pay," Rosa said. "[The dispute] has made me stronger both as a person, and as a member of the working class."

Woodfin is confident but prepared to continue fighting.

"Really what we want to do is find some good resolution between ourselves and the city," Rosales said. If they don’t, he said, "I think we could find ourselves back in court." *

After the bubble

November 25, 2008

› amanda@sfbg.com

Speculators will be able to sit on tracts of San Francisco land until the market improves. Development impact fees will be set too low to cover the costs of neighborhood improvements like parks, streets, and transit. Affordable housing development is intimately tied to a busted market rate-housing boom.

This is the future of the eastern South of Market, Potrero Hill, Central Waterfront, and Mission District neighborhoods as laid out in the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, a community rezoning effort that began in 2001 that now fills a binder thicker than a weightlifter’s bicep.

After more than 30 public hearings, the plan is approaching final approval by the Board of Supervisors. While some are lauding all the heavy lifting that’s been done to get it to this stage, there are still some noticeable shortcomings.

"The plan itself is despicably deficient in terms of affordable housing," housing activist Calvin Welch told the Guardian. That sentiment was echoed by spokespeople from the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition and the South of Market Community Action Network, who may join together in a legal challenge of the plan’s Environmental Impact Report for failing to properly consider socioeconomic impacts.

"There will be environmental impacts in terms of displacement, increased amounts of traffic and cars, increased levels of noise," said April Veneracion, SOMCAN’s organization director. "The Board of Supervisors could have addressed these inadequacies in the EIR with amendments."

Some last minute amendments were added that would audit the financing of projects and reduce land speculation — but due to a tricky legislative maneuver, even these concessions could be axed by a veto from Mayor Gavin Newsom.

The bulk of the plan rezones vast tracts of industrial land on the eastern flank of the city for housing, mixed urban use (including retail and commercial sites), and a light industrial category called "production, distribution, and repair" (PDR) that protects many of the working-class jobs remaining in San Francisco.

Building height limits will increase in some areas and remain at 40 feet in others. Between 7,000 and 10,000 new units of housing are anticipated, with affordable housing rates between 15 to 25 percent, depending on the location and project.

However, the one method of financing affordable housing — known as inclusionary housing, which requires market-rate developers to include a certain percentage of affordable units — is entirely linked to a now-waning economic boom. "Events have rendered it meaningless," said Welch. "The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan is a plan predicated on a red-hot real estate market. Planning has no ability to shift with the market and the market, since mid-September, has changed radically."

The Controller’s Office recently readjusted the city’s revenue projections, suggesting a $90 to $125 million budget shortfall in the current fiscal year, with 40 to 49 percent of that directly connected to flagging real estate transactions.

Yet housing in the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan remains primarily composed of market-rate units, fetching upward of $700,000 apiece, with "middle-income" units discounted to half that, and below-market-rate apartments still costing over $200,000 each. Development impact fees are set for $10 per square foot of construction — not enough to cover the proposed improvements that would make these industrial areas pleasant and safe for everyday residential living and working.

"In order to support the population that’s expected to move in, you need transit improvements, park improvements, street improvements," said Tony Kelly of the Potrero Boosters, a neighborhood group. "Less than half [of these] have been funded by the project."

He characterized the approved parts of the plan as "pretty weak." "They’re rezoning 500 acres of industrial land for housing — predominantly market-rate — right at a time when no one’s building market-rate housing," Kelly said. He also said the plan lacked many creative financing ideas. "When the area plans were presented to our neighborhood back in 2006, the Planning Department outlined all the things a neighborhood needs. There was a chart with 18 different ways to pay for it. How many are now in the plan? One."

Ways to ensure that developer fees are used well and land doesn’t sit fallow were introduced at the last minute. Amendments to the plan, made by Sup. Aaron Peskin, require audits of the neighborhood improvement fees and forcing developers to actually build rather than speculate — but they received a potentially fatal last-minute blow.

The Board’s first vote on the plan occurred during the Nov. 18 meeting and the bulk of the plan received unanimous support (minus Sup. Chris Daly, who is recused from voting because he owns property in the plan area).

But late in the game, a standoff arose between Peskin and Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who opposed blindly rubberstamping the last-minute amendments offered by Peskin during the previous night’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee hearing.

"We saw the actual language of this if you looked in your e-mail in the last two hours," Elsbernd said during the heat of the Board hearing. "I’d like a week to read the changes made by you last night."

The Board voted to continue the matter for a week, but then, at the end of that day’s business, Peskin rescinded the vote and forced the issue. As promised, Elsbernd severed the four Peskin amendments — a legislative tactic that allows one supervisor to slice out parts of legislation and place them into individual files for separate votes.

Peskin countered by severing another amendment, added by Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, which would have allowed special height increases for two lots on Mission Street, where the New Mission Theatre and the Giant Value store currently sit. Gus Murad, who owns the properties as well as the adjacent restaurant Medjool, has been lobbying to convert the properties to commercial and residential space.

The supervisors shot down the "spot zoning" amendment that would let future buildings on the two sites to be built higher than what’s currently allowed on Mission Street. MAC spokesperson Nick Pagoulatos later applauded the move: "It would have been a ridiculous exception to make and one that clearly favored one developer."

Despite Elsbernd’s move to sever the amendments, all four passed, but didn’t receive enough votes to block a veto from Newsom. Supervisors Carmen Chu and Michela Alioto-Pier voted with Elsbernd.

The mayor’s ability to line-item veto some key protections sought by neighborhood activists was at the heart of the move. "That’s absolutely right," Elsbernd told the Guardian, who added that although he hadn’t spoken with Newsom and didn’t know his intentions, "These are issues that absolutely concern me."

The amendments add "metering" and "use it or lose it" provisions to the plan. Metering is essentially an audit performed by the board every five years to ensure that collected developer impact fees are used properly. Peskin said that while they couldn’t meet all the requests of neighborhood groups and housing rights activists, "this was something that we could do that made good public policy sense."

Elsbernd told the Guardian he didn’t object to the concept of metering but would like oversight by the Controller’s Office. "Metering gives the Board of Supervisors full power and takes the executive out of the mix," he said of the plan as it stands now, adding that it should be viewed as a long-term protection. "This is not about Mayor Gavin Newsom. It’s about Mayor Mirkarimi or Mayor Peskin."

The "use it or lose it" requirements are designed to reduce speculation by mandating that a developer with a project that has received a green light from the Planning Department must procure a building permit within three years, after which they have one year to break ground. Currently, there’s no limit to the amount of time a developer can sit on a property, which becomes more valuable after receiving city approval.

Elsbernd said, "Three years is just not fair," but again, he said he thought there was a middle ground and would like to see project developers given opportunities to make cases for extensions. However, if the developer has one of those grandfathered projects that doesn’t have to meet the new, stricter inclusionary housing regulations or pay public benefits charges, they should "have to pay full fare, full affordability, full fees," said Elsbernd.

A second vote on the plan and its amendments is scheduled for the Nov. 25 Board meeting, after Guardian press deadline, but Elsbernd expressed optimism about a compromise as part of last-minute dealmaking. "I would say there’s a possibility, as colleagues realize the potential mayoral veto."

Still, Welch pointed out that resistance to a "use it or lose it" protection is proof that San Francisco’s real estate market is in no way immune to the economic crisis afflicting the rest of the country. "The assumption built into the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan was this robust growing market for condo development and I think the bubble has burst," said Welch. "If that isn’t the case, then why would developers care about a requirement that says you have to build in three years? The Mayor’s Office told me the phones were melting after Monday night’s amendments passed."

But Welch said one of the great ironies of a market-rate housing crash is that it makes nonprofit housing development even more competitive. "That’s why we pushed so hard for ‘use it or lose it.’ It forces developers to say to the city ‘we’ll do it,’ or ‘would you like to buy the site?’<0x2009>" He said the city should be poised to buy those sites in order to build affordable housing and suggested the city lobby Barack Obama’s administration for the funds to do it as part of the large infrastructure improvements planned by the president-elect.

"I think the way housing is financed is going to be totally transformed and the federal government is going to play a bigger role," said Welch. *

San Francisco needs a New Deal

November 25, 2008

By Christopher D. Cook and Eric Quezada

OPINION On the night the voters spoke, word began filtering through Palm Pilots and iPhones about sweeping budget cuts likely to carve a hole in vital city programs. It’s ugly: massive cuts to the Department of Public Health and numerous social service programs. As usual, programs helping those most in need are getting cut the most. Why aren’t we instead raising revenue from those who have the most?

In this year of "change," we need a fundamental shift in our city’s taxing and spending priorities — a bold New Deal for San Francisco that enlarges the public pie that everyone’s scuffling over, and that creates green jobs and new housing opportunities targeting poor neighborhoods and districts.

It’s time to get serious about taxing and redistributing wealth to stimulate new economic opportunities. The passage of Propositions N and Q — expanding real estate transfer and payroll taxes — is a good start. We need to tax wealth in new ways that replenish the local economy, creating green living-wage jobs with health care and opportunities for small businesses and community-serving groups.

City leaders can make San Francisco a model of good sense by demanding that our wealthiest citizens and corporations help fund a program that creates jobs and economic opportunity for the rest of us. Particularly in the city’s eastern neighborhoods, Districts 9, 10, and 11 (and parts of 6), poverty and economic stress are rampant and families are pressed to their limits — unable to afford health care, working multiple jobs, living in overcrowded apartments, and often in shamefully dilapidated housing conditions.

With home prices declining but rents and foreclosures skyrocketing, the city needs to help thousands of working-class residents who provide vital services — teachers, service-industry workers, and cash-poor immigrants — to remain in San Francisco. Now is the time to prioritize production, public infrastructure, education, and cooperation for the common good; our economy needs a stimulus based on solidarity and collective good.

We’re being presented with false scarcity and false choices — do we cut housing or health care to meet the budget? Few are asking the key question: why don’t we have more money to work with, in this vastly wealthy region?

In an earlier New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed a 90 percent tax on upper income brackets — making it virtually illegal for people to earn so much more than others. Locally, city leaders should explore a gross receipts tax on large firms; new taxes on luxury and high-priced items, such as SUVs, second homes, yachts, and other extravagances; perhaps revive the push for a downtown business tax levied on large firms in the financial district; and a truly progressive income tax harnessing revenues from high-income folks.

People can argue over where the money should go. But it’s brutally clear we are in an age of deepening inequality, widening economic stress, and environmental limits. There’s no room for huge disparities — no room to continue allowing extra-wealthy individuals and corporations to consolidate their gains at the expense of the rest of us. We must renew the fight for public wealth — now. *

Journalist and author Christopher D. Cook is a former Guardian city editor, and a local activist. Contact him at www.christopherdcook.com. Eric Quezada is executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, and was recently a candidate for District 9 supervisor.

The coal question

November 25, 2008

> news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Over the past few years, a growing number of environmentalists have called for greatly curtailing the burning of coal, a practice that threatens the health of people and the planet. On Nov. 14-15, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) held protests in San Francisco and more than 50 other cities against Bank of America and Citibank, two of the largest financial backers of coal projects.

RAN cites data showing that coal is responsible for nearly 40 percent of US global warming emissions, and claims in a press release that Citibank has provided financial support to "45 companies that have proposed new coal power plants."

According to RAN, Bank of America is "involved with eight of the US’s top mountain top removal coal-mining operators, which collectively produce more than 250 million tons of coal each year."

Mountain top removal is a process in which explosives are used to gain access to underlying coal, devastating ecosystems and polluting watersheds to extract an energy source that emits far more climate-altering carbon than even other fossil fuels. RAN’s Joshua Kahn Russell cited Bank of America’s $175 million financing of Massey Energy, a coal producer that was sued in 2006 by the US Environmental Protection Agency for more than 4,500 violations of the Clean Water Act. Early this year, Massey agreed to a $20 million settlement rather than pay potential fines of $2.4 billion.

RAN has named Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis the "Fossil Fool of the Year" for his company’s role in coal. But on the bank’s Web site, Lewis disputes the characterization, citing the company’s promotion of hybrid vehicles and its other efforts to combat global warming, which won an award this year from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"Our environment initiatives reflect our commitment to addressing climate change, conserving natural resources and building a sustainable economy — for today, and generations to come," Lewis says on the Web site. Similarly, Citibank officials tout what they say is a $50 billion initiative over the next 10 years to promote renewable energy sources.

As the US limps toward an energy policy that relies less on fossil fuels, coal is the big target for environmentalists. But getting off of it won’t be easy, considering it supplies about a quarter of the nation’s energy and helps fuel the faltering economy.

President-elect Barack Obama has made mixed statements about coal. In an election-season interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, he favored a cap-and-trade program that would limit the use of coal and charge new plants "a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted."

Yet he has also repeatedly voiced support for a so-called clean coal technology known as carbon capturing and sequestration (CCS) that could theoretically prevent coal emissions from entering the atmosphere but that many environmentalists believe to be a myth.

Russell said CCS, which involves capturing carbon emissions from the air and placing them deep underground, is still theoretical and may not be as cost-efficient as switching to cleaner energies. If CCS is a viable alternative, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that coal plants with CCS could reduce carbon emissions by 80-90 percent.

RAN organizer Scott Parkin pointed out that even if clean-coal technology works, the "coal still has to come from somewhere," and the process of extracting it has inherent environmental problems. But coal advocates say we need to be realistic about meeting the nation’s energy needs.

Bank of America spokesperson Britney Sheehan told us, "As a nation, 50 percent of electricity comes from coal." Even in California, 32 percent of electricity is derived from coal, according to the California Independent System Operator. Sheehan said the bank is actively funding renewable energy initiatives to help make the transition to cleaner burning fuels and it is making strides to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet many say such incrementalism belies the seriousness of the climate change threat. Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, was quoted by RAN as saying, "The science is clear: a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, and phase-out of existing coal plants, is essential if we want to preserve creation, the life on our planet, for young people and future generations." 2

Editor’s Notes

November 25, 2008

› tredmond@sfbg.com

The Board of Supervisors passed the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan last week, in what seemed to be an awful rush. If it had been my call, I’d have left the transformative rezoning to the next board, which will have to deal with the impacts of it. But that wasn’t to be. The meeting was marked by Board President Aaron Peskin pushing a series of crucial amendments that Sup. Sean Elsbernd wanted to delay — and that Mayor Gavin Newsom may veto. That will force an override vote, and it will be close.

So one of the most important land use decisions in the history of San Francisco is going to be coming down during the holiday season, during the last few weeks that the outgoing board is in place, and possibly after Sup. Tom Ammiano — a solid progressive vote — has left for Sacramento.

This is not good.

The plan itself is a bit out of date — it was designed for a time when developers were champing at the bit to build market-rate housing in southeastern San Francisco. And while housing demand in this city is still strong, the market has dropped a bit, and the notion that fees on high-end condos will be paying for affordable housing and infrastructure is a lot more shaky these days.

I was never that thrilled with the rezoning anyway — it allows way too much expensive housing, nowhere near enough affordable housing, and the fees that developers will pay are utterly inadequate to fund the level of transportation, parks, schools, water and sewer pipes, and other facilities the area needs.

But at least the amendments add some sanity to the plan. One of Peskin’s proposals would mandate that developers who get a conditional use permit for their projects actually start building within three years — or lose their right to special zoning. That not only makes sense, it’s an anti-speculation measure — you can’t just buy up land, get special permission for additional height and density, and then sit on it until you can flip the property for more cash.

Of course, the Mayor’s Office is getting flooded with calls from developers who think this is just an outrage. The builders are also unhappy with another amendment, which requires the city to monitor the payment of building fees to make sure they’re coming in on time and going to the right places.

So if the mayor holds true to form, he’s going to veto those parts of the plan, and right now, progressives don’t have eight votes to override him. If that’s how it goes down, then the new board needs to take up the issue again in January. And while the new supes are at it, maybe they can try to raise the development fees.

The good news is that the lower the housing market goes, the more competitive nonprofit developers can be. And if the Obama administration comes through with some federal affordable housing money, the community-based organizations could be the ones driving the new wave of construction.

It sucks that Prop. B didn’t pass, because this is a rare opportunity for the public sector and the nonprofits to grab building sites. The supervisors can still allocate money for affordable housing in the next budget. And if there’s federal money to match it, Newsom, who refused to spend the last allocation, should be hammered by every part of the city if he screws up this sort of chance.

Fueling change

November 25, 2008

EDITORIAL As a lame duck Board of Supervisors winds down, and the economic crisis and bloody budget cuts absorb most of the political focus at City Hall, there’s a major environmental issue creeping toward a January deadline — and city officials need to present a united front.

At issue is the Mirant power plant in Potrero Hill, an aging fossil fuel dinosaur that has been belching pollution into the southeastern part of the city for years. It’s been hard to shut down — the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the regulatory agency that controls the electric grid, wants some sort of generating facility inside the city lines. Sup. Aaron Peskin, backed originally by Mayor Gavin Newsom, sought to replace the Mirant plant with city-owned combustion turbines — so-called peakers — that would run only when needed. But Pacific Gas and Electric Co., fearing city ownership of power production, fought that proposal, and some environmentalists, arguing that the city should build no new fossil fuel plants at all, also opposed the plan.

On May 5, seven PG&E lobbyists descended on the Mayor’s Office and gave Newsom his marching orders: drop the peakers proposal or we’ll spend whatever is necessary to kill it. Newsom suddenly decided he didn’t like the peakers after all, and started pushing a PG&E-backed alternative: the Mirant plant, which runs on diesel and natural gas, could be converted to run entirely on natural gas, thereby reducing emissions.

The emissions numbers are pretty complicated. If the city ran the natural-gas-fired peakers for only a limited amount of time, they would emit less pollution than the Mirant plant. Obviously neither option is pollution-free; neither is sustainable; and neither is perfect.

Still, the worst of all possible alternatives would be allowing Mirant to continue to operate a private plant. At least the peakers would be city-owned and city-run. The city would have some control over how often they were fired up and could shut them down when more renewable technology becomes available. The Mirant plant — even after a retrofit — would continue burning fossil fuels; the private company would continue to profit; and the city would have no control at all.

Besides, it’s not clear that the plant even can be retrofitted for natural gas. The project that Newsom, PG&E, and Mirant are proposing has never been done before. Mirant may not be able to get the financing; the technology may not exist.

Which means that it’s entirely possible nothing will change. If all goes the way PG&E wants, the city will abandons the peakers, the dirty Mirant plant will continue to run without a retrofit, and the people of southeast San Francisco will continue to suffer.

But there’s a problem facing Mirant, and it could potentially change the whole picture. The plant sucks 200 million gallons of water out of the bay every day for cooling — and its Regional Water Quality Control Board permit expires at the end of this year. The board has said it’s not inclined to renew the permit, since the plant can’t meet modern water-quality standards. So as of January, Mirant could be forced to shut the plant anyway — unless the company, and Cal-ISO, find a way to force the water board to back down.

That’s where the city comes in. The mayor, the supervisors, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera should publicly inform both the water board and Cal- ISO that San Francisco does not want the permit renewed for the current Mirant plant. Even if Newsom thinks the facility can be upgraded, it’s hard to argue that the existing plant is anything but a disaster. And unless and until there’s a credible, peer-reviewed retrofit plan, Newsom has no business siding with Mirant and PG&E.

The water board could force the issue. If the Mirant plant has to close, the city either needs to come back with a peaker plan that environmentalists can accept or find a way to meet Cal-ISO’s mandates without new fossil fuel generation. That sounds like an excellent outcome to us. *

Clean energy

November 25, 2008

EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co., its political hacks, and to a great extent, the San Francisco Chronicle all seem to take the same line on the defeat of Proposition H: It’s done. The people have spoken. Public power has been on the ballot 11 times, and it’s never passed.

And — as is always the case with a losing campaign — supporters of the Clean Energy Act are discussing what went wrong, looking at how the measure was written, the details, the language, the scope to see if there was something that could have been done differently.

But that ignores the central reality of the campaign for Prop. H: PG&E spent nearly $10.3 million to kill it. And it’s very, very hard to fight that kind of money.

The truth is, there was nothing wrong with the language or scope of Prop. H. If it had passed, it would have given the city the tools to create a sustainable energy portfolio that would be the envy of the nation. In fact, there is little doubt that the Clean Energy Act was well ahead in the polls when it was first placed on the ballot.

But as we’ve seen with so many races over time (and as we saw with Proposition 8 this fall) when a ballot measure it becomes a citywide or statewide race, big money has a serious impact. And we’ve never seen this kind of money in a San Francisco initiative campaign. In the end, PG&E spent about $53 per vote. That’s an outrageous sum, dwarfing any political spending that’s ever happened in San Francisco

Yet despite the barrage, the Clean Energy Act got tremendous grassroots and political support. Clean Energy has a strong constituency in San Francisco, including from the Sierra Club, and the power of this campaign won’t go away. Despite the efforts of downtown and PG&E, progressives still control the Board of Supervisors. Three of the city’s four representatives in Sacramento — Senator-elect Mark Leno, Assembly Member Fiona Ma and Assembly Member-elect Tom Ammiano — supported the legislation and will continue to back efforts to replace PG&E’s dirty power with locally- owned renewable energy. PG&E has money but it’s running out of friends in this town — and its illegal monopoly is the very definition of unsustainable.

There’s now an organized constituency for clean energy and public power, seasoned by this campaign and ready to continue the battle. That’s what needs to happen. There are numerous fronts: the city needs to be moving forward quickly with community choice aggregation, which offers the potential for cheaper, cleaner power. (The downside to CCA is that it doesn’t allow the city to make money; PG&E would still own the transmission lines, and thus make all the profits in the system.) Potentially, however, a CCA agency could begin moving toward creating local generation facilities and eventually toward building a local transmission system. A CCA also could directly access the city’s own Hetch Hetchy power and begin delivering it to local customers (once San Francisco can get out of the contracts requiring it to send too much of that power out of town).

The supervisors need a strong Local Agency Formation Commission to keep monitoring and pushing this, and the new board president needs to be sure LAFCO members are committed to and energized about renewable energy and public power.

Several supervisors — Sean Elsbernd, for example — told us they saw no reason for Prop. H to be on the ballot since so much of what it called for could be done by the board. Fine: Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, one of the authors of Prop. H, should immediately introduce legislation to do everything in Prop. H that doesn’t require a city charter change. Let’s see if Elsbernd and the mayor are really just PG&E call-up votes or if they’re willing to support an energy options feasibility study and strong renewable-energy mandates for the city.

And there are still legal options that the board should look at. City Attorney Dennis Herrera never wanted to go to court to enforce the Raker Act, the federal law requiring San Francisco to operate a public power system, but that’s an area the board can push. David Campos, the apparent supervisor-elect in District 9, is a lawyer who has worked in the city attorney’s office and sued PG&E, so this is an area where he can show leadership.

The bottom line is that this battle isn’t over.

There were other disappointments on what was generally a progressive ballot. Proposition V — the phony measure calling on the school board to reinstate JROTC — passed, narrowly. It was mostly a wedge issue to hurt progressive candidates for supervisor, and has been a horribly divisive issue in the schools. The school board, which cut off JROTC last year, is now pushing for an excellent public service alternative and doesn’t need to go back and reexamine the issue. JROTC is a terrible idea for San Francisco, and the newly elected board members shouldn’t even bring this up again.

Of course we were deeply unhappy about the passage of Prop. 8. The repeal of same-sex marriage was such a blow to San Francisco that it dampened a lot of the enthusiasm over the Obama victory. But that one’s not over, either; it has just begun. Statistics show that voters under 30 overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage — and if the campaign is run differently, and the message is positive, it’s likely that Prop. 8 can be overturned. Marriage equality advocates should think seriously about preparing now for a major campaign in November 2010 to restore equal rights for same-sex couples in California.

Tyranny of the majority

November 25, 2008

› steve@sfbg.com

When the California Supreme Court agreed last week to decide the legality of Proposition 8 — which a slim majority of Californians passed Nov. 4, taking from same-sex couples the marriage rights that the court had established in May — the debate shifted to a concept far older than that of gay rights.

Essentially, it will decide whether this is a case of the "tyranny of the majority," a phrase Alexis de Tocqueville coined in his classic 1835 book Democracy in America, drawing on a concept from the ancient Greeks that was the philosophical underpinning of the US Bill of Rights and the central paradigm of constitutional democracy.

The founding principle is that basic rights — such as the freedoms of speech, religion, and association — are not subject to majority approval and can’t be taken away by a simple popular vote. So the question now before the judges is whether the right to marry, which the court ruled had been unconstitutionally withheld from same-sex couples, is among those core rights.

"The whole notion of equal protection is to protect minority interests from the periodic discriminatory impulse of the majority," Robert Rubin, legal director for the Bay Area chapter of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told the Guardian. "And [upholding Prop. 8] would turn that on its head."

‘CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS’

Even before the votes were counted election night, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and its counterparts in Santa Clara County and the city of Los Angeles were developing their challenge to the legality of Prop. 8, which they filed Nov. 5.

Both Prop. 8 proponents and the California Attorney General’s Office agreed that the high court should immediately take the case rather than let it rattle around the lower courts for months or years. "Review by this Court is necessary to ensure uniformity of decision, finality and certainty for the citizens of California," Attorney General Jerry Brown wrote to the court.

Brown had previously ruled that the roughly 18,000 marriages performed since May were legal and that Prop. 8 is not retroactive, something proponents of the measure dispute and which the Supreme Court also has agreed to decide in this case. But two of the three "issues to be briefed and argued," as the high court ruled Nov. 19, were more fundamental: "1) Is Proposition 8 invalid because it constitutes a revision of, rather than an amendment to, the California Constitution? (see Cal. Const., art. XVIII, 1-4) 2) Does Proposition 8 violate the separation of powers doctrine under the California Constitution?"

Narrowly framed, the first question asks whether the process of banning same-sex marriage in the constitution should have gone through the more cumbersome revision process, which involves winning a two-thirds vote in the California Legislature before submitting the measure to voters. And the second concerns whether the legislative branch of government (in this case, through a direct vote of the people) can legally override this decision by the judicial branch.

But more broadly framed, both questions go to the same basic issue: can a simple majority of voters take away rights from a protected minority group, one the judicial branch has already ruled is entitled to the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples? The implications of that answer are so profound that City Attorney Dennis Herrera, in a City Hall press conference after the court announced its decision, cast the matter as no less than a "constitutional crisis."

"The cases before the Supreme Court today are no simple rematch. To be candid, the principles implicated here are of far greater consequence than marriage alone," Herrera said. "In short, this case has gone beyond the simple issue of marriage equality. And no matter what your view of same-sex marriage is, it’s important to understand that the passage of Proposition 8 has pushed California to the brink of a constitutional crisis."

He then explained why.

"This measure sought to do something that no other constitutional amendment has ever done here in the state of California, and that is to strip a fundamental right from a protected class of citizens and in doing so, it did not merely undo a narrowly disfavored Supreme Court ruling. Its legal effect is nowhere [near that] simple or elegant. Rather, it upended a separation of powers doctrine deeply rooted in our system of governance. It trounced upon the independence of the state’s judicial branch and it eviscerated the most fundamental principle of our state’s constitution. And if allowed to stand, Proposition 8 so devastates the principle of equal protection that it would endanger fundamental rights of any potential electoral minority, even for protected classes based on gender, race, or religion. And it would mean a bare majority of voters could enshrine any manner of discrimination against any unpopular group, and our state constitution would be powerless to disallow it," Herrera said.

That’s why he said 12 cities and counties have joined this suit — including Los Angeles and Alameda counties, which were not part of the original same-sex marriage case — along with supporting roles being played by the NAACP, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, the Asia Pacific American Legal Center, and California Council of Churches.

There is some irony to the Council of Churches’ involvement given that religious groups, particularly the Catholics and Mormons, provided the backbone of financial and volunteer support for the Yes on 8 campaign. Yet the council argues that Prop. 8 is an attack on religious freedom.

"It is kind of ironic, and I don’t they they’re paying attention to the big picture, to be honest with you," Eric Isaacson, attorney for the Council of Churches, told the Guardian. "But history tells us that religious groups are often the victims of such persecution."

He cited laws that have taken rights from Jews in many countries and instances of majorities in the United States going after Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons, a group driven from state to state by discriminatory mobs until they finally settled in Utah to enjoy religious freedom.

Beyond the historical and precedent-setting nature of the case, the council’s executive director Rick Schlosser told the Guardian that Prop. 8 discriminates against Episcopal, Unitarian, and other churches that believe all people have the right to marry.

"We work on a lot of religious freedom issues and there’s a huge number of churches that support the right of people to marry," Schlosser said. "There are a lot of churches that think it’s their religious duty to perform same-sex marriages."

CONFLICTING TRADITIONS

Frank Schubert, who managed the Yes on 8 campaign, scoffs at attempts to frame this debate around larger constitutional issues: "This is simply about marriage and what the definition of marriage will be."

He called the chances of overturning the measure "minuscule," and said, "the constitution belongs to the people." Rather than an initiative upsetting constitutional traditions, Schubert blamed the Supreme Court for reinterpreting marriage: "It’s the first time in California that rights that did not exist were granted on a narrow court decision and the people corrected that."

Yet the traditional gender structure of marriage is now in conflict with traditions of equal protection and separation of powers, something same-sex marriage advocates say needs to be the subject of a concerted public education campaign.

"There is a major civics education to be undertaken," Rubin said, recalling how he was also criticized publicly in 1994 for his role in winning a restraining order against Proposition 187, which sought to withhold government services from undocumented immigrants. "Yet the notion that protecting minority interests is not subject to popular will is not that hard to understand."

Maybe, but some constitutional law scholars say the formulation is not quite that simple. "The notion that a majority can’t take away a minority group’s rights, that just isn’t true," said UC Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law professor Jesse Choper. He takes a less philosophical view of the case, noting that California law explicitly allows the constitution to be amended, essentially however the people see fit, a process far easier than the one to change the federal constitution.

Choper said the specific question before the court is whether voters can remove same-sex marriage rights from the constitution. "And the answer is yes, if they do it properly," he said. That determination will come down to whether the judges believe this change is a mere amendment, or a more serious revision. Choper said the case law on that question isn’t well-established, but his reading of it is that plaintiffs face a real challenge in arguing that a simple change to the constitution — albeit a weighty one — requires the revision process. "It’s uphill," he said. "They’ll have to cut a new cloth."

But Herrera and his fellow plaintiffs don’t agree. While he characterized the coming legal battle as difficult and complicated, he expressed confidence in their ability to show that Prop. 8 changes core constitutional principles.

"That’s why I think this is a revision rather than amendment, because it would so radically change the balance of power and responsibility between our branches of government," Herrera said.

Santa Clara County Attorney Ann Ravel, who joined Herrera’s press conference, agreed, stepping up the podium to say, "Let me just add something to that. If this is not a case of revision, it’s hard to imagine any case that the court might find there to have been a revision, and there have been some."

While Choper may not agree with the plaintiffs on how the court will decide the equal protection questions, he does agree that the outcome could have serious implications for minority rights and the ability of voters to target disfavored groups. "If they can do it to this minority, they can do it to other minorities," Choper said.

Rubin said the religious groups pushing Prop. 8 are being short-sighted: "What they may like today when they have 51 percent of the vote, tomorrow they may be on the 49 percent side and may not like that basic rights come down to majority rule."

And that’s why the issue gets elevated to the larger question of whether this is a case of tyranny of the majority, something that could become an issue for the federal courts, which is likely to see cases challenging whether lax California standards on precedent-setting initiatives might run afoul of bedrock principles in the US Constitution.

"Yes of course you could challenge it in the federal court," Choper said. "If Prop. 8 stands, someone will bring a case about whether discrimination against gay marriages violates the equal protection clause of the federal constitution."

Herrera said he doesn’t want to go there yet, but he left that door open in response to a question from the Guardian: "Are there potential federal issues down the road that could be raised or discussed? It’s no secret that’s potentially there, but at this point, I don’t think that’s something that we’re going to focus on."

THE LONG VIEW

While the judges and lawyers in this case may focus on narrow legal concepts and definitions, Herrera is seeking to present the case in a far grander context.

"Equal protection under the law is what separates constitutional democracy from mob rule tyranny and it is a principle that reaches back eight centuries to the Magna Carta and it has guided the founding of our nation and our state," he said. "So I understand that on same-sex marriage, the emotions on both sides run high, but it’s important to understand the legal stakes are even higher. The cases before the high court today are no longer about marriage rights alone. They are about the foundations of our constitution. And as citizens we share the blessing of a common jurisprudence, and I refuse to accept that it is beyond us to find common ground in its enduring and deeply American principles: equality under the law, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary."

Ravel reinforced Herrera’s perspective, telling reporters, "The Supreme Court is going to decide, as Dennis said, a question that goes to the very foundation of our democracy and that will also impact every city and county in the state. The court has held, previously, that all couples have to be treated equally when it comes to the important institution of marriage. A majority of voters can’t undercut the court’s role in protecting minorities in our society."

Essentially, this is no longer a case about same-sex marriage.

"The merits of the case are different than they were back in May. The fact of the matter is the California Supreme Court found there was a fundamental right to marry and that LGBT couples are entitled to that right. The issue here is should Prop. 8 be struck down because it was an improper amendment versus a revision," Herrera said. "So I think everybody is focused on the right issues." *

Taxi merger

November 19, 2008

› amanda@sfbg.com

A plan to merge the Taxi Commission with the Municipal Transportation Agency will be heard by the Board of Supervisors on Nov. 25. Most city officials and taxi industry bigwigs support the change, but some drivers fear it could signal the end of the semi-autonomous medallion system that has been in place for 30 years.

The merger legislation by Sup. Aaron Peskin is brief, simply transferring duties from the Taxi Commission to the MTA beginning March 1, 2009. But Peskin also helped write another key piece of legislation — last year’s sweeping MTA reform measure Proposition A — that contains a provision allowing the MTA to wipe out all prior taxi regulations.

Skeptics fear that the real target of the merger is Prop. K, the 1978 law that created the current driver permitting system, which requires taxi medallions that are owned by the city to be in every car. With the MTA in control, the door could be open to privatizing taxi medallions. These permits are currently leased by the city for a fee — $658 a year for most cabs — to longtime drivers, but a scheme to sell or transfer them could mean huge profits for the select group of drivers who now hold medallions, with a potentially high transfer fee kicked back to the city.

Reguutf8g San Francisco’s taxi industry involves ensuring cabs are being properly operated, with medallions held by legitimate drivers, and investigating various complaints. But the Taxi Commission barely has enough money to meet its mandate. Proponents of the merger say the MTA can bring more resources and professional attention to the industry. Mayor Gavin Newsom, who as a supervisor in 1998 pushed for formation of the Taxi Commission, has long supported the merger as a way to have all transportation housed in one agency.

“The benefit of merging is the MTA already regulates all surface transportation,” said Jordanna Thigpen, acting director of the Taxi Commission, who was appointed by Newsom after the Taxi Commission ousted Heidi Machen in 2006. “Most cities in the country do incorporate taxis into the common transportation agency.”

Currently, cab companies, medallion holders, and rank and file drivers essentially function as a feudal system, with the serfs driving San Franciscans around in vehicles usually owned by the lording cab companies and permitted by older drivers who hold the coveted medallions. There are only 1,500 of these permits, which are literally tin medallions that correspond to the numbers printed on the sides of cabs. They are owned and regulated by the city, and leased for life to drivers who wait years to move up the list.

Medallion holders make about $20,000 to $50,000 per year leasing their medallions to cab companies, which then charge drivers daily “gate fees” that are set by the city. Drivers pay an average of $96.50 per day to use a cab, but are allowed to pocket all their fares. Drivers usually clear about $150 a day, but that’s before paying gas, tolls, and tickets, and before even sometimes allegedly slipping bribes to dispatchers to get the best assignments. Drivers have no health insurance and are essentially treated as independent contractors.

Drivers have criticized the newly formed Taxi Advisory Group, which has made recommendations to the MTA and is likely to be expanded after the merger into a 15-member council, which would have only three drivers, but seven medallion holders and cab company representatives. Five members of the public would also be seated and their unanimous support would be required for a driver-led initiative or idea to trump the medallion and cab company bloc.

“We want a much greater and fairer representation on this Taxi Advisory Council,” said driver and United Taxicab Workers chair Bud Hazelkorn. “Without that, all the issues that we bring will not be heard.” Those issues include providing health care for drivers and creating a centralized dispatch system so fares are allocated more equitably. He pointed out that drivers are the only people in the system making all their income directly from fares. Everyone else in the industry gets slices from other pies.

And the existing provisions outlined by Prop. K may soon be a thing of the past.

Prop. A included language that allowed for the Taxi Commission merger and stated that once the MTA was in control, “Agency regulations shall thereafter supersede all previously adopted ordinances governing motor vehicles for hire that conflict with or duplicate such regulations.”

During the 2007 election season, this was interpreted by the UTW and Judge Quentin Kopp, a former supervisor who authored Prop. K, as possibly undermining the current medallion system. “The taxicabs CEOs have tried EIGHT times to undo Prop. K, failing each time as voters upheld this good government measure,” Kopp wrote in a paid ballot argument at the time. “Now encouraged by City Hall, Prop. A slips in a deceptive clause undoing 30 years of voter policy.”

Back in 2007, when seeking the Guardian‘s endorsement for Prop. A, Peskin told us, “I have met with the mayor. The mayor has no desire, as do I, to undermine Prop. K, and what we would do if we ever were to transfer the Taxi Commission to MTA, we would transfer upon the condition that they adhere to and embrace by regulation all of the previously voter approved ordinances, such as Prop. K. So I think we have it handled.”

Peskin said he reaffirmed that commitment in a letter, cosigned by Newsom, but neither office could locate a copy of that letter as of Guardian press time.

But at a Nov. 17 Government Audit and Oversight Committee meeting, Peskin asked MTA executive director Nathaniel Ford if it was his understanding that this merger was not to undermine Prop. K. “That is my understanding,” said Ford. “I think it is important to all stakeholders.”

Yet the interpretation is still correct. “The MTA will now have the authority to enact provisions that supersede Prop. K,” City Attorney’s Office spokesperson Matt Dorsey told the Guardian.

This past summer, the Taxi Commission established a Charter Reform Workgroup with a primary goal of reviewing Prop. K. The group is expected to meet for about six months with any recommendations subject to a citywide vote.

Although the workgroup has yet to release any specific statements regarding Prop. K, chairman Malcolm Heinecke believes it’s already making strides simply by opening up public discourse among citizens, companies, medallion holders, and drivers.

“One of the problems with the taxi industry and discussions of reform is that they are very insular,” said Heinecke, who is also an MTA board member. “I believe we have a balanced group of voices [in the group].”

Heinecke said he thinks varied stakeholders are essential because of broad dissatisfaction with Prop. K. “You hear everyone — both inside and outside the industry — bemoaning some aspect of Prop. K. It’s a system we’ve had in place for 30 years; rather than just say it’s bad and not do anything, [the goal of the workgroup] is to look at where we are and revise.”

While it may be true that no one is satisfied, that hardly means members of the factional workgroup agree on how exactly Prop. K should be changed. For some, the problem begins with issues of representation. Not everyone agrees with Heinecke that this is a “balanced group.” Of 12 members, there are just three drivers and three members of the public, with the rest representatives from the upper echelons of the industry.

Driver and UTW member Thomas George Williams pointed out that “companies and medallion holders often have the same interests — most companies are owned by medallion holders.”

Furthermore, Mark Gruberg, a UTW member, told us, “Everyone would say some things can and possibly should be done to improve provisions of Prop. K. But it’s one thing to work around the edges to reform a law and another thing to throw it out the window.”

He pointed out that one proposal before the workgroup would allow medallions to be sold for profit, something he said “would be a complete reversal of Prop. K.” If other cities are an example, medallions could fetch as much as $500,000 apiece, enough for the holder to retire handsomely. “People that have them would clean up at the expense of the next generation of cab drivers,” Gruberg said. “It would be a completely indefensible windfall.”

“This is public property, these medallions,” Hazelkorn said. “They could be misused as a pension, but that’s not a pension that applies to everyone.”

When questioned, Heinecke was vague about concrete changes the workgroup might instigate. “This is a delicate position for me because the whole purpose of the task force is to hear the views of all the stakeholders,” he said.

Taxi drivers, the serfs of the industry, do not have high hopes about the merger. “If the merger happens, the MTA [officials] will be able to do whatever they please,” Williams said. “Everyone knows MTA is always in need of money … they don’t care about drivers or improving industry, only their budget.”

Williams worries that, under the MTA, the commission will lease medallions to companies instead of individual drivers, which would “totally ruin the concept of Prop. K.” Gruberg agreed. He pointed out that some proposals mention levying a tax on the medallion transfers, a potential revenue source the MTA could be eyeing. “It’s a whole new ball game with MTA and if they’re so desperate for cash and they see the taxi industry as a cash cow, they might go for any scheme.”

MTA spokesperson Judson True told us, “We have no intention of looking to taxi revenue to supplement existing Muni operations.”

Judge Kopp said, “By itself that does not disturb Prop. K, but if that’s a fig leaf for some recommendation from this ersatz Charter Reform Workgroup, then it becomes ominous.” He said dressing the changes in a group with a pithy name like Charter Reform “is not reform, it’s subterfuge.”

And, he added, Prop. K doesn’t need reform as much as it needs enforcement. “They’ve been at this for 30 years. Their revisions are always to start to restore the pre-1978 conditions and enable them to treat these permits as personal possessions for sale.”

Peskin, with the approval of other members of the committee, calendared the full board hearing on the merger for a date after the MTA announces the result, expected sometime this week, of its national search for a director of taxi and accessible services. Solid leadership has been elusive: two years ago the Taxi Commission fired executive director Heidi Machen, reportedly for being too tough on cab companies. Machen was replaced by another Newsom appointee, Jordanna Thigpen, who said she has applied to stay on the job but doesn’t know if she’ll be selected.

When asked if the merger would unnecessarily stretch the MTA’s resources, Thigpen said, “On the one hand you could look at it that way. On the other hand, we’re so chronically understaffed. Trying to add staff is so complicated because we’re funded by the taxi industry.”

The taxi industry brings about $1.6 million in revenue to the city, mostly from fees paid by 1,500 medallion holders and about 7,000 drivers. However, “Fees do not currently meet the city’s cost recovery needs,” according to a Taxi Commission merger report. “Both Taxi Commission and Taxi Detail are understaffed and additional enforcement personnel are needed.”

MTA’s True said, “We expect some cost savings or at least increased efficiencies,” when asked how the merger will affect the MTA’s budget. “When it comes to changing Prop. K, raising fees, or adjusting how medallions are allocated,” True said, “I can’t say that it’s not on the table … In the last several months the focus has been on procedural issues. I think that policy questions will largely come post-merger.”

What will your role be?

November 19, 2008

› news@sfbg.com

OPINION Many of us in the Bay Area worked hard to elect Barack Obama. We made phone calls, knocked on doors, made donations — $5, $10, $200. We monitored the polls, gathered and loaded data, and/or otherwise spread the word to friends, relatives, and colleagues. And of course, we all voted.

The good news is we succeeded. We can now believe again in the power of ordinary people to do extraordinary things in this country. That change has come.

But have we done what we really set out to do?

Have we remade our economy so that it is based on a strong core of working Americans who get their fair share of the fruits of economic growth, and not on house-of-cards accounting subterfuge that tends to benefit only those with the most? Have we achieved equal opportunity for everyone, so that CEO’s and other super-wealthy Americans aren’t hoarding tens of millions of dollars they don’t need while the working Americans who generated that income can barely make ends meet? Do we encourage workers to organize so that there’s a more level playing field in negotiations with employers, and real dignity and respect in every workplace?

Do we have affordable health care? Do we have energy independence? Sustainability? A responsible conclusion to a pointless and wasteful war? Enduring peace and diplomacy? Compassion for one another and personal responsibility for our actions?

Needless to say, the answer to all these questions is a resounding no. Not even close. Not yet.

Although he may be our symbol of a change for the better and an inspiration to bring it, Barack Obama is not the change we seek. We are the change we seek.

Which means that if we don’t continue to act and make sacrifices, enduring change will not come.

So what will your role be in bringing about real change in this country?

For what it’s worth, I’ve started making some changes and sacrifices. I left my high-paying job as a big-law attorney protecting the corporate status quo in this country and have committed myself to a different course of serving public and community interests.

I’ll be selling my condo that I love so much because my commitment to public service on the one hand, and the size of my mortgage payment on the other, are inconsistent propositions at this point.

I am doing everything in my power to make sure the Employee Free Choice Act is finally made into law, because my grandfather, who worked on the assembly line at Chevrolet in the 1940s when the Taft-Hartley Act passed over President Truman’s veto, would have wanted it, and would be proud of me for doing it.

What will you change about yourself, your routines, your "comfort zone," so that real change comes to this country for you, your children, and grandchildren? What sacrifice will you make for a cause greater than yourself? Only you can answer these questions. *

Aaron Knapp is a lawyer, writer, and organizer living in San Francisco. He is the founder of the The Post Partisan. He can be reached at aarontknapp@gmail.com.

Green and black

November 19, 2008

news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The 2008 San Francisco Green Festival, held Nov. 14-16 at the Concourse Exhibition Center, is a well-established environmentalist event that featured more 1,000 vendors and was overseen by 1,600 volunteers, all united in promoting a greener future.

Yet the event’s keynote speaker, Cornel West, along with Van Jones of the Oakland-based Green Jobs for All and San Francisco-based Muslim minister the Rev. Christopher Muhammad, all conveyed an expanded definition of environmentalism that emphasized social justice and concerns specific to African American communities.

The idea behind this fusion of black and green is that our traditional view of environmentalism, with its focus on the health of ecosystems, needs to be expanded to social systems as well. In that context, Muhammad’s long fight against Lennar Corp.’s reckless approach to developing Bayview-Hunters Point (see "Question of intent," 11/28/07), in which his Muhammad University of Islam was exposed to toxic asbestos dust, takes on new dimensions.

As the first speaker of the day Nov. 15, Muhammad’s speech was geared toward local issues of concern. Muhammad continued to shed light on the "environmental racism" taking place in the Bay Area communities of Bayview-Hunters Point, North Richmond, and West Oakland, referring to the injustice as San Francisco’s "dirty little secret." Environmental racism ranges from citing polluting industries in poor communities of color to inequities in who has access to healthy food and preventive medical care.

Muhammed brought to light the issue of San Francisco’s declining middle class and minority populations, citing rising crime rates and housing costs as culprits. He also commended the Green Festival for bringing people together to hear about an expanded scope for environmentalism. "It’s a place where people can come and be informed about issues that impact them that have historically been left out in terms of this whole [green] movement," Muhammed said.

The last scheduled speaker of the day was prominent social critic and Princeton professor Cornel West, author of the new book Hope on a Tightrope (Hay House). Muhammad has worked with West in the past and praised him as a fellow advocate for social justice: "I’ve met with him on a number of occasions and worked with him on various projects. He’s an ally."

West stressed the importance of addressing social justice by saying, "There’s a need to target [environmental racism]. You need a coalition in order to bring hard pressure to bear, so it can become more of a national issue."

In many ways, the people are showing signs of resistance to change, as with the passage of Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage in California, a result he calls "catastrophic." Still, he said, now, after a historic presidential election, is the moment to begin the transition. "It’s the end of an era. Thirty years of a country sleepwalking is over," West proclaimed to the cheering crowd.

He warned everyone not to believe that change will come overnight, reminding the crowd that it is ultimately up to us to push the change that we so desperately crave. "It’s not just about one messianic figure on his way to the White House," West said.

Green energy is the future of this country, West said, and one of the many ways we can foster positive change. The potential to lift up communities of color as part of the transition to new energy sources has been a big focus for Van Jones of Oakland’s Green for All, who spoke Nov. 16 about his new book, The Green Collar Economy (HarperCollins). He said we must "invent and invest our way" out of our current "gray economy" and into the new "green economy."

West also said the American people are still coming to understand the nature of the problems we face. "America has grown old, we’ve grown wealthy, but we have yet to grow up." But he ended his speech on an upbeat note, saying this age of conservation and greater awareness will create what Sly Stone called the "age of everyday people."

This year’s Green Festival exposed attendees to nontraditional environmental problems that pollute our social environment. The take-away from this new focus was that "going green" involves more than just driving a hybrid car and shifting to compact fluorescent lights — it means truly transforming our communities.

Editor’s Notes

November 19, 2008

› tredmond@sfbg.com

Is anyone else appalled that the Obamas are not even considering sending their kids to public schools? Seriously. This may not seem like the most important issue on the president’s agenda, but I think it’s a big deal.

According to The New York Times, Michelle Obama has toured Sidwell Friends, the pricey private school where Chelsea Clinton was educated. She’s also looking at Maret School and Georgetown Day, two institutions that cater to the children of the rich and powerful. There are no public schools on the list.

Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, DC has urged the Obamas to consider the schools that most DC kids attend, but he has little moral suasion: Mayor Fenty’s twin sons go to private school.

I’m a public school parent, and this really bothers me. What the Obamas are saying, in essence, is that there is no public school anywhere in the district good enough for their kids. They’re saying that if you’ve got the money, you should flee for the safety of private academies. Those lowly public places are just for the peasants.

That sort of statement matters. It matters when you think about the new president’s priorities. It matters when you think about the role he wants to play not just as a chief executive but as an agent of change and a moral compass for the nation and the world. In a way, it’s his first test, and he’s flunked it.

I’m sorry: the children of the president should go to public schools. The children of mayors, and city council members, and county supervisors, and city attorneys should go the same schools as the kids of the majority of their constituents. And if those schools aren’t as good as they’d like, well then, join the team. The rest of us are working like hell to make the under-funded, over-stressed public schools better. You can, too.

And by the way, Mr. President-elect, my public school in San Francisco is giving my son and daughter a great education. And they’re growing up with kids who aren’t just like them. That’s worth way more than your fancy $21,000 private school can ever offer.

* * * *

The election of Sup. Ed Jew two years ago gave ranked-choice voting a bad rep. This year, however, I think we saw how the system can work.

I understand the critics who say that old-fashioned runoffs — second-round elections held a few weeks after the general — are more fair and allow for excitement, like Tom Ammiano vs. Willie Brown in 1999 and Matt Gonzalez vs. Gavin Newsom in 2003. But they also create a problem, particularly when one side has a lot more money than the other.

Downtown had almost endless resources to try to defeat Eric Mar, David Chiu, and John Avalos. The Democratic Party, thanks to the progressive takeover this summer, was supporting the three progressives, as was labor, the Sierra Club, and the Tenants Union. And while party chair Aaron Peskin raised a sizeable sum for slate cards and labor spent cash on organizing efforts, that was dwarfed by the landlords and developers.

Mar, Chiu, and Avalos had the advantage of a high-turnout election. If they’d been forced to run again three weeks later, downtown would have again dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the races — and at some point, the good guys would run out of money. Plus, RCV gave the candidates an incentive to make alliances.

Not a perfect system, but better, I think, than the obvious alternative.

Behind “the Twinkie Defense”

November 19, 2008

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, who wanted to decriminalize marijuana, and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay individual to be elected to public office in America. November also marks the release of a film about the case titled Milk. Although a former policeman, homophobic Dan White, had confessed to the murders, he pleaded not guilty. I covered his trial for the Bay Guardian.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I said “Thank you” to the sheriff’s deputy who frisked me before I could enter the courtroom. However, this was a superfluous ritual, since any journalist who wanted to shoot White was prevented from doing so by wall-to-wall bulletproof glass.

Defense attorney Douglas Schmidt did not want any pro-gay sentiment polluting the verdict, but he wasn’t allowed to ask potential jurors if they were gay, so instead he would ask if they had ever supported controversial causes–“like homosexual rights, for instance.” One juror came from a family of cops — ordinarily, Schmidt would have craved for him to be on this jury — but the man mentioned, “I live with a roommate and lover.”

Schmidt phrased his next question: “Where does he or she work?”

The answer began, “He”–and the ball game was already over–“works at Holiday Inn.”

Through it all, White simply sat there as though he had been mainlining epoxy glue. He just stared directly ahead, his eyes focused on the crack between two adjacent boxes on the clerk’s desk, Olde English type identifiying them as “Deft” and “Pltff” for defendant and plaintiff. He did not testify. Rather, he told his story to several psychiatrists hired by the defense, and they repeated those details in court.

At a press conference, Berkeley psychiatrist Lee Coleman denounced the practice of psychiatric testimony, labeling it as “a disguised form of hearsay.”

* * *

J. I. Rodale, health food and publishing magnate, once claimed in an editorial in his magazine, Prevention, that Lee Harvey Oswald had been seen holding a Coca-Cola bottle only minutes after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He concluded that Oswald was not responsible for the killing because his brain was confused. He was a “sugar drunkard.” Rodale, who died of a heart attack during a taping of The Dick Cavett Show — in the midst of explaining how good nutrition guarantees a long life — called for a full-scale investigation of crimes caused by sugar consumption.

In a surprise move, Dan White’s defense team presented a similar bio-chemical explanation of his behavior, blaming it on compulsive gobbling down of sugar-filled junk-food snacks. This was a purely accidental attack. Dale Metcalf, a former member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters who had become a lawyer, told me how he happened to be playing chess with Steven Scheer, an associate of Dan White’s attorney.

Metcalf had just read Orthomolecular Nutrition by Abram Hoffer. He questioned Scherr about White’s diet and learned that, while under stress, White would consume candy bars and soft drinka. Metcalf recommended the book to Scherr, suggesting the author as an expert witness. In his book, Hoffer revealed a personal vendetta against doughnuts, and White had once eaten five doughnuts in a row.

During the trial, one psychiatrist stated that, on the night before the murders, while White was “getting depressed about the fact he would not be reappointed [as supervisor], he just sat there in front of the TV set, bingeing on Twinkies.” In my notebook, I immediately scribbled “the Twinkie defense,” and wrote about it in my next report.

This was the first time that phrase had been used, and it was picked up by the mainstream media.

In court, White just sat there in a state of complete control bordering on catatonia, as he listened to an assembly line of psychiatrists tell the jury how out of control he had been. One even testified that, “If not for the aggravating fact of junk food, the homicides might not have taken place.”

* * *

The Twinkie was invented in 1930 by James Dewar, who described it as “the best darn-tootin’ idea I ever had.” He got the idea of injecting little cakes with sugary cream-like filling and came up with the name while on a business trip, where he saw a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes. “I shortened it to make it a little zippier for the kids,” he said.

In the wake of the Twinkie defense, a representative of the ITT-owned Continental Baking Company asserted that the notion that overdosing on the cream-filled goodies could lead to murderous behavior was “poppycock” and “crap” — apparently two of the artificial ingredients in Twinkies, along with sodium pyrophosphate and yellow dye — while another spokesperson for ITT couldn’t believe “that a rational jury paid serious attention to that issue.”

Nevertheless, some jurors did. One remarked after the trial that “It sounded like Dan White had hypoglycemia.”

Doug Schmidt’s closing argument became almost an apologetic parody of his own defense. He told the jury that White did not have to be “slobbering at the mouth” to be subject to diminished capacity. Nor, he said, was this simply a case of “Eat a Twinkie and go crazy.”

When Superior Court Judge Walter Calcagno presented the jury with his instructions, he assured them access to the evidence, except that they would not be allowed to have possession of White’s .38 special and his ammunition at the same time. After all, these deliberations can get pretty heated. The judge was acting like a concerned schoolteacher offering Twinkies to students but witholding the cream-fillng to avoid any possible mess.

Each juror originally had to swear devotion to the criminal justice system. It was that very system that had allowed for a shrewd defense attorney’s transmutation of a double political execution into the mere White Sugar Murders. On the walls of the city, graffiti cautioned, “Eat a Twinkie — Kill a Cop!”

* * *

On the 50th anniversary of the Twinkie, inventor Dewar said, “Some people say Twinkies are the quintessential junk food, but I believe in the things. I fed them to my four kids, and they feed them to my 15 grandchildren. Twinkies never hurt them.” A year later, the world’s largest Twinkie was unveiled in Boston. It was 10 feet long, 3 feet 6 inches high, 3 feet 8 inches wide, and weighed more than a ton.

In January 1984, Dan White was released from prison. He had served a little more than five years. The estimated shelf life of a Twinkie was seven years. That’s two years longer than White spent behind bars. When he was released, that Twinkie in his cupboard was still edible. But perhaps, instead of eating it, he would have it bronzed.

In October 1985, he committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He taped a note to the windshield of his car, reading, “I’m sorry for all the pain and trouble I’ve caused.”

I accepted his apology. I had gotten caught in the post-verdict riot and was beaten by a couple of cops. My gait was affected, and ultimately, as a result I now walk with a cane. At the airport, I have to put the cane on the conveyor belt along with my overnight bag and my shoes, but then I’m handed another cane to go through the metal detector. You just never know what could be hidden inside a cane.

Paul Krassner is the author of Who’s to Say What’s Obscene: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today, to be published by City Lights Books in July 2009.

Click here to read Krassner’s original coverage of the Dan White Trial from the Guardian in 1979.

>>Back to the Milk Issue

Holiday Guide 2008: Think global, shop local

November 19, 2008

Think global, shop local

It’s so easy to shop online. And it’s easy to go to a big chain store and pick up all your bargains in one place. And in the end, what does it get you?
Not that much.

San Francisco is full of neighborhoods that are full of locally-owned, independent businesses. They’re part of the flavor of the city, part of the reason we all live here. Their taxes pay for libraries and parks and schools. Their owners are active in the community, hiring local people and keeping the streets alive. And they exist only because people shop there.

When you shop locally, you get a lot more. "When you shop online, your money could be going across the Earth," explained Marc Caposino, managing partner of Fresh Public, a marketing firm that has a city contract to promote local shopping. "The character of our neighborhoods is based on local shopping, and if we don’t pay attention to that, we’ll lose it."

You also do a lot to help the economy in this deepening recession. Every dollar you spend in a locally-owned business circulates through the local economy; the local bookstore owner takes the money and spends it at the local shoe store, where the owner spends it at a local restaurant — and all that helps the recovery. If you spend the same dollar at a chain store or shopping online, the profits are whisked out of town instantly.

The numbers are pretty dramatic. Based on an analysis provided by the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, using a formula created by the consulting firm Civic Economics, if every one of the Guardian‘s 593,000 readers spends $100 of their holiday money shopping at a local business, that would inject $99 million into the San Francisco economy. That’s nearly $15 million more dollars than we would see if that money was spent in chain stores.

The Guardian is part of a national shop-local campaign, coordinated through the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. The city of San Francisco has a shop-local effort too, as does Oakland. Many other cities are picking up the theme.

And it’s not as if you have to give up anything. I learned long ago that most local bookstores can offer the same service as Amazon.com. If you want a book your local independent store doesn’t carry, the folks there can order it for you and get it just as fast as Amazon can — and you won’t even pay shipping charges. "If you’re looking for something specific, you can probably get it somewhere in San Francisco," Caposino said. It’s worth a few minutes to look.

Tell us how and where you shopped this year and enter to win hundreds of dollars in gift certificates from local businesses! Send email to molly@sfbg.com with subject head SHOP LOCAL STORY CONTEST.

More Holiday Guide 2008.

Where’s Harry?

November 18, 2008

History is written by the winners, the survivors — and sometimes the people who try the hardest. And while Milk hews pretty closely to reality, some of the people who lived through the story say a few key pieces are missing.

On the night Sup. Harvey Milk was assassinated, for example, a crowd gathered in the Castro for a march to City Hall. In the movie, the key protagonists — Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg — pull the spontaneous event together. Sup. Tom Ammiano, who was there, remembers it a bit differently.

"The whole thing started at Harry Britt’s house," Ammiano told us.

Britt, who was appointed as Milk’s successor on the board, "lived at 16th and Castro, and we were all gathered there on his steps" Ammiano said. "I asked what I could do, and he told me to run out and get some black ribbons. So I went to Cliff’s Hardware and bought out every black ribbon in the place.

"Harry was the focal point. It all started with him."

But Britt — one of Milk’s confidants and by any standard one of the most important gay politicians in the city’s history — isn’t mentioned in the movie.

There are, of course, plenty of events and people left out of what could only be, at best, a snapshot of history. Milk isn’t a documentary; it’s a feature film. Jones, who served as a script consultant, told us that "the hardest decision was what to cut…. There were a lot of people close to Harvey who didn’t make it."

It’s no secret that Jones and Britt are not close, and that the former supervisor has been out of the political limelight for years. He told me this week that he doesn’t want to talk about the film. ("I had the privilege to know Harvey myself, and I don’t want to see him through someone else’s eyes," he said.) But still, the absence of Britt, who picked up and carried Milk’s torch for many long years, is striking.

Ammiano, who loved the movie overall, agreed that it was odd not to see Britt depicted in any of the key scenes. "It’s funny when you live through history, when you were there, and then to see how it’s reported," he said. "History is written by he or she who tells it."

And while, to a certain extent, the movie feels like the Cleve Jones Show (and Jones happily told me he feels like he’s becoming "the most famous homosexual you know"), Ammiano credited Jones with pushing to make the film happen.

"Cleve wanted the story told, and for 15 years he’s been pushing it," Ammiano said. "It’s a huge personal accomplishment for him, and this is his reward."

The apathy and the ecstacy

November 18, 2008

› marke@sfbg.com

“OMG! Marriage is the new AIDS!” a friend screeched to me through her cell phone after witnessing West Hollywood’s cop-clashing response to the passage of Proposition 8. She meant, of course, the unexpected, exhilarating, and somewhat clumsy reemergence of queer protest energy that has overtaken many a civic center and public park since the November election and its attendant LGBT letdown.

Folks are dusting off their framed ACT-UP poster collections, those old-time “When do we want it? Now!” chants are filling gay air space, and former Queer Nation, Gran Fury, and Boy with Arms Akimbo enthusiasts like myself are feeling nostalgic sensations in their radical nether regions that have suddenly freed us, however temporarily, from the tyranny of approaching middle age. The spirit is back! Let’s tear some shit up.

Much has been made of this “Great Gay Awakening” in the homoblogosphere. Is it heading toward long-overdue political organization or a White Night Riots reprise? How can it be effectively harnessed? What the heck should one wear? And some interesting things have already resulted from it. Gay issues have once again taken the national stage, and everyone’s looking for leadership. The “great national conversation on race” has exploded in the gay community, with some prominent hotheads blaming the African American community for Proposition 8’s win, and many queers of color finding their own voice in response.

But let’s hit the snooze on the “awakening” for quick drag minute and consider one of the thorniest questions floating around. Where was all that energy when it could have done some freaking good? “I felt totally apathetic about gay marriage until it was taken away,” another friend said. And at a recent rally I overheard “Why did it take losing something to get us out on the streets? Haven’t we learned anything from the past?”

In terms of past-learning, it’s not as if Harvey Milk and the Milk movie haven’t been the omnipresent topic on everyone’s cocktail-pickled lips all year. Were we too busy ogling Milk actor James Franco’s hip knit neckwear to co-opt Harvey’s winning strategy of inclusivity, outreach, and preemptive rallying against the infamous Briggs Initiative? People have pointed fingers until they’re blue in the wrist at the various perceived missteps of the No on 8 campaign. But a campaign is only as good as its participants — if the queer community can organize a 300-city mass protest around a viral e-mail, as we did Nov. 15, then why didn’t Harvey’s lessons on how to effect political change sink in earlier?

Of course I have a theory. I think we’re obsessed with Harvey’s martyrdom, paralyzing him in the glistening amber of legend rather than the actively engaging him in the now. His tragic mortification makes a great story, an epic drama for us eager drama queens. It sells screenplays in Hollywood. Milk, for all the good that may come of its release, would never have been green-lighted without Dan White. Harvey Milk the haloed icon — the beatified victim whose presence can only be summoned in times of gay grief — has been elevated in queer culture above Harvey Milk the canny tactician, the voluble freak, the erring human with restless hands and solid instincts.

Reflecting on Harvey’s sacrifice is important. “Saint Harvey: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Gay Martyr” was the title of an extremely moving 2004 display at the GLBT Historical Society, one that presented the supervisor’s personal effects in various reliquaries, the bullet-riddled suit in which he was murdered suspended as if from a crucifix. Inspired by “Saint Harvey,” artist Leo Herrera displayed graphic, impressionistic photographs of the suit in 2007 as part of his “San Francisco: Sex & Icons” series, recontemporizing Harvey the martyr for San Francisco’s young alternaqueer population.

Both those shows were beautiful — and helped keep Harvey’s story in play. Milk, however hagiographic, will probably do the same. That’s great, and if it inspires the community to finally fund the Historical Society enough to establish a queer history museum here — a sickening absence in San Francisco, of all places — we may be able to at last live and learn from the past rather than just light a candle to it.

For most queers now, though, the thought of Harvey Milk brings only grave tears and intimations of tragedy. Maybe the current emergency will finally break the glass around St. Harvey and inspire us to take the practical examples he left us seriously.

>>Read an interview with artist Leo Herrera and view images of Harvey as icon

>>Back to the Milk Issue

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