This morning (Fri/11) kicked off with yet another Google bus blockade in San Francisco’s Mission District, only this time housing activists said a Google employee is directly to blame for displacing residents.
The blockade, which took place at 18th and Dolores streets, was short-lived but featured speeches by tenants facing eviction, as well as a giant cardboard cut-out depicting 812 Guerrero, a seven-unit building where tenants are facing eviction under the Ellis Act.
The property owner is Jack Halprin, a lawyer who is the head of eDiscovery, Enterprise for Google. He moved into one of the units after purchasing the building two years ago and served eviction notices on Feb. 26, according to tenant Claudia Triado, a third grade teacher at Fairmount Elementary in San Francisco who lives there with her two-year-old son.
The Bay Guardian left a voice message for Halprin requesting comment. We will update this post if he returns the call.
After the bus blockade, activists proceeded to 812 Guerrero and staged a short rally on the front steps.
Evan Wolkenstein, who teaches Jewish literature at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay, said he’s lived at 812 Guerrero for eight years. Other tenants facing eviction from the property include an artist and a disabled person, he added.
During the Google bus blockade, minutes before police officers arrived to clear a path for the bus by urging protesters onto the sidewalk, Wolkenstein gave a speech about the overall impact the tech sector is having on San Francisco.
This evening, Eviction Free San Francisco will continue its protest activities with a march to the homes of teachers who are facing eviction, beginning at 20th and Dolores streets at 5pm.
Who is Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow? In the 137-page federal complaint detailing charges that led to the high-profile arrest of Sen. Leland Yee, Chow, and 24 others two weeks ago, Chow is described as the powerful “Dragonhead” of an ancient Chinese organized crime syndicate, “overseeing a vast criminal enterprise involved in drugs, guns, prostitution, protection rackets, moving stolen booze and cigarettes, and money laundering,” as we reported at the time.
Not so, famed defense attorney Tony Serra told a crowd of reporters at Pier 5 Law Offices in San Francisco’s North Beach district, where he and fellow attorneys were joined by supporters wearing red tees bearing the slogan “Free Shrimp Boy.”
Attorneys Serra and Curtis Briggs described a five-year federal operation to target Chow and ensnare him in wrongdoing, insisting he had wanted no part in criminal activity. Serra said agents had “stuffed money into his pocket” despite his protests, and noted that his legal team was representing Chow pro bono because he has no money.
Here are a few words from Serra, followed by Briggs.
Eli Crawford, a longtime friend of Chow’s who said he’d worked as an orderly at a Dublin prison when Chow was held in solitary confinement there years ago, described Chow as a spiritual person who had taken a vow to disengage from wrongdoing in the wake of his criminal past.
Chow was initially appointed a federal public defender, but the team of lawyers has stepped in to take over his defense. Serra said he believed they would enter pleas of not guilty on all counts on Tuesday, when a court hearing is scheduled before a federal magistrate. A court date tomorrow (Fri/11) will deal primarily with discovery, he said. In May, the defense attorneys plan to bring a motion for bail.
Asked about Chow’s link to Yee, Serra said he believed there was “no nexus, no relationship whatsoever.” Serra said he doubted if all defendants named in the complaint would proceed to trial, guessing that some would cooperate or take plea deals.
“If we are really going to trial with Yee,” Serra said, he’d have to think carefully about whether to move for a separate trial.
“Sometimes the strategy is, no, I want to be with him – mainly because, one, there’s no nexus, and two, he’s going to go down,” Serra said. “And that gives the jury, maybe a satisfied appetite, you know, for justice.”
“They’re totally unfair competition,” said cab driver Jonathan Khin, a 20-year cabbie who came to San Francisco decades ago from Burma. “They don’t have to pay regulations and fees that we do.”
The drivers complaints over the rideshares, known legally as Transportation Network Companies, were many: the TNCs don’t provide adequate insurance for drivers, don’t have the number of cars regulated (like cabs are), and don’t have to pay regulatory fees that cabs currently pay. This all leads to an uneven playing field, and the taxi cab industry is getting creamed.
“I have 50 percent less daily riders,” than he used to, said Myo Winn, a 10-year driver for companies like Yellow Cab and DeSoto.
Cabbie Jonathan Khin holds up his SFMTA issued taxi ID, one of the many regulatory elements of the taxi industry that rideshares, or TNCs, do not provide.
But the taxi industry has its own cross to bear. It’s no secret that finding a taxi in San Francisco can be nigh-impossible at some hours, and even in some neighborhoods. Carl Macmurdo, the president of the Medallion Holders Association, didn’t mince words about it: “There’s been bad, poor service over the years from our industry.”
That bad service left the taxi companies wide open for “disruption,” as the tech companies call it. But that disruption came at a cost — the still-young TNC industry has struggled to provide adequate insurance to its drivers, even suggesting that drivers personal insurance policies would protect them while ferrying customers. As we’ve written about before, this has left passengers, drivers, and even pedestrians left with huge bills for collisions that taxi companies have a history of paying out with less hand-wringing.
If the TNCs provided insurance like taxis did, would the taxi industry still have a problem with them?
“Yes,” Macmurdo told the Guardian, as the horns from nearby cabs continued to honk. “Seattle deregulated taxis and let medallions be open, and it was chaos. Government [regulations] balance the need between available cab service and the ability of drivers to make a decent living. There are thousands of the TNCs on the road and it’s destroyed the industry. There are too many vehicles on the road competing.”
“Our role is not to play favorites,” she told the Guardian, standing in the courtyard of the CPUC building just after the protest ended. “We made the [TNC industry] safe, and let the free market do its job.”
Other regulatory bodies have gone the opposite way. Seattle City Council last month voted to limit TNC vehicles to 150 in the city at any one time, and the protest came on the heels of the California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones issuing a public letter to the CPUC calling for TNCs to carry the burden of insurance.
Uber and Lyft have made progress in expanding their insurance coverage, he said, but the gap still exists, putting drivers, passengers, and pedestrians at risk.
“Our investigative hearing revealed serious insurance gaps in the current business model of Transportation Network Companies such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar,” Jones wrote in a statement to the press. “As long as TNCs are encouraging non-professional drivers to use their personal vehicles to drive passengers for a profit, a risk which personal automobile insurance simply does not cover, TNCs should bear the burden of making sure that insurance is provided. Our recommendations will ensure there is insurance protection for passengers, drivers and pedestrians.”
The report from the insurance commissioner asserted a long standing complaint of taxi drivers. Personal auto insurers, the report wrote, are not planning to offer coverage of TNC drivers “in the near future, if ever.”
Now it’s up to the CPUC to create new, stricter regulations to protect the public. Those regulations may come as soon as September, Zafar said.
A key provision in the JOBS Act, a legislative package signed into law by President Obama in April of 2012, was hailed as a huge victory for the ever-growing real estate industry, removing many of the bothersome impediments that keep it exclusively in the realm of the upper echelon.
The vast majority of real-estate deals are controlled by private equity firms and “accredited” investors whose individual net worth is $1 million or more. But the JOBS Act opens up new territory by allowing for “crowdsourcing” investment funds, introducing the option of pooling financial resources with up to 500 other “non-accredited” investors, meaning anyone making $100,000 or less a year for an individual, or $300,000 for couples.
This potentially opens the floodgates to a much larger portion of the population — but it could have positive or disastrous implications for San Francisco’s housing affordability crisis, depending on how it’s used.
Walk down nearly any street in San Francisco, and you can virtually watch the city change by the moment. With reports of mass displacement and staggering income inequality, the city is desperate for a way to stem the tide of evictions and curb the loss of affordable housing.
This idea of using crowdfunding has drawn some interest as a possible tool for restoring balance. At the same time, at least one company has seized on it to do just the opposite, making it easier for real-estate investors to flip properties and escalate displacement, the only difference being that one need not be a member of the exclusive upper crust to get in the game.
The recent campaign to save the historic black owned bookstore, Marcus Books, led by the San Francisco Community Land Trust, sought to take advantage of crowdfunding as a way to preserve an iconic cultural location and housing for long-term residents.
Fundrise, a D.C. based real-estate startup, helped the Land Trust set up a fundraising campaign in an effort to raise $1 million. Although it failed to hit the target, the organization “was able to raise $750,000,” according to Tracy Parent, SFCLT’s Organizational Director. (Marcus Books is hosting a town hall meeting on Sat/12 at 1pm to discuss plans for the future.)
Yet a different picture emerged when we talked to Aaron McDaniel, CEO of San Francisco real estate startup Tycoon Real Estate.
McDaniel says the JOBS Act provision “can be used as a tool to get into the industry” for those who want to break into the business of flipping houses, a sentiment echoed in a Business Insider article by Nicholas Carlson earlier this year that asked the question: “How can I get into San Francisco’s house-flipping, rent-gouging market?” To wit:
“It used to be that if an investor wanted in the San Francisco real estate market, that investor would have to have at least a few hundred thousand dollars around for a down payment. Not anymore. Thanks to the JOBS Act and a new Kickstarter-like website called Tycoon Real Estate, people with a few thousand dollars in savings can now invest in flipping houses the way only millionaires used to be able to.”
In other words, anyone looking for a get-rich-quick scheme can cash in on the city’s red-hot real-estate market. As the Business Insider observed:
“If [Tycoon Real-Estate] gets big and starts funneling even more capital into the San Francisco real estate market, all those people throwing rocks at Google buses and whining about rents are certainly going to come after the startup, accusing it of fueling an already dangerous bubble.”
Therein lies the danger that could actually speed up displacement in the city. And with San Francisco housing prices at an all-time high, there’s strong incentive for any random person with a thousand dollars or so lying around to give it a go.
As Parent noted, to her knowledge, no other organizations looking to combat displacement have sought to create crowdfunding campaigns of their own for the purpose of preserving rent-controlled housing, rather than flipping it. But Parent is holding out some hope. Even though “we were not successful” in raising the $1 million needed to save Marcus Books, she said, “we will use Fundrise again.”
San Francisco 49ers star quarterback Colin Kaepernick, player Quinton Patton and Seahawks receiver Ricardo Lockette are being investigated for sexual assault by Miami police, according to reports earlier today by TMZ sports (and other media outlets).
The name of the woman at the center of the allegations was redacted from the report, which was obtained by sports site Deadspin. The only descriptor available is that she is African American.
Tuesday night, April 1, she went to visit Lockette’s apartment, she told officers. Kaepernick and Patton were there as well, and she mixed them drinks and the players all drank shots. The players told her in order to take a shot she needed to take a hit of a bong “filled with marijuana,” according to the report.
From the report:
“They sat down, talked, and watched the basketball game. She started to feel light headed and went to a bedroom to lie down. [Redacted name] took off her jacket and jewlery. Mr. Kaepernick came behind her into the bedroom and started kissing her. She advised they were kissing [mouth] and Mr. Kaepernick started to undressed [sic] her. She got completely naked. Mr. Kaepernick told her that he was going to be right back and left the bedroom. They did not have sex. [Name redacted] advised that she was in bed naked and Mr. Patton and Mr. Lockette opened the door and “peeked” inside. She told them ‘what are you doing? Where is Colin? Get out!’ They closed the door and left. She cannot remember anything after that.'”
Next, the woman alleged, things took a turn for the worse.
“[Name redacted] woke up in a hospital bed and doesn’t remember how she got there or who transported her to the hospital. [Name redacted] advised that she has had a sexual relationship with Mr. Kaepernick in the past.”
49ers General Manager Trent Baalke told TMZ reports that the team is “gathering the pertinent facts.” The full text of the incident report is below.
In the opening of its new Terms of Service, Airbnb wrote (in all caps): “IN PARTICULAR, HOSTS SHOULD UNDERSTAND HOW THE LAWS WORK IN THEIR RESPECTIVE CITIES. SOME CITIES HAVE LAWS THAT RESTRICT THEIR ABILITY TO HOST PAYING GUESTS FOR SHORT PERIODS. THESE LAWS ARE OFTEN PART OF A CITY’S ZONING OR ADMINISTRATIVE CODES. IN MANY CITIES, HOSTS MUST REGISTER, GET A PERMIT, OR OBTAIN A LICENSE BEFORE LISTING A PROPERTY OR ACCEPTING GUESTS. CERTAIN TYPES OF SHORT-TERM BOOKINGS MAY BE PROHIBITED ALTOGETHER. LOCAL GOVERNMENTS VARY GREATLY IN HOW THEY ENFORCE THESE LAWS. PENALTIES MAY INCLUDE FINES OR OTHER ENFORCEMENT. HOSTS SHOULD REVIEW LOCAL LAWS BEFORE LISTING A SPACE ON AIRBNB.”
The fatal shooting of Alejandro Nieto, a man who possessed a Taser that was mistaken for a firearm who was killed in Bernal Heights Park, produced a backlash of community anger toward the San Francisco Police Department. It was the first thing Sup. John Avalos mentioned when he called for a hearing on equipping officers with body-mounted video cameras at the April 8 Board of Supervisors meeting.
Avalos knew Nieto, and the incident struck close to home. He mentioned another recent incident of police violence at City College of San Francisco in which officers targeted student protesters; video footage from a bystander shows an officer releasing his nightstick, making a fist, and throwing a punch at someone already being restrained.
“These incidents show that there’s a great deal of work we need to do … to build trust between members of the community and the police department,” Avalos said. “These incidents involved people I knew and it almost makes me feel how widespread the problem can be.”
Police body-mounted cameras have been tried in New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans and other places as a way to shore up police accountability and provide a record of officer interactions with targeted suspects, Avalos said, and there is support for the technology both among law enforcement communities and civil liberties watchdog organizations.
“Many police support these cameras because they can help protect police officers against false accusations,” Avalos noted. “Watchdog groups support police body-mounted cameras because they can help reduce incidents of police misconduct. The [American Civil Liberties Union] supports the cameras because they allow the public to monitor the government, instead of the other way around.”
Avalos’ request called for a review of the feasibility of equipping police officers with body cams, taking concerns about cost and privacy into consideration, plus a cost-benefit analysis to show how the cost of the cameras would compare with potential savings from reductions in citizen complaints and use-of-force lawsuits.
SFPD spokesperson Sgt. Danielle Newman noted that the SFPD is already in contract negotiations for a pilot program that would equip 50 plainclothes sergeants with body-mounted cameras. The program would be funded through a federal grant, Newman said, and the department has not yet received the cameras or hashed out policies spelling out how long data would be stored, how often they would be used, or whether officers would be able to switch them on and off at will.
Newman said the pilot program grew out of allegations that undercover officers had stolen property and violated the civil rights of SRO residents during searches of their units, incidents that were initially brought to light by the San Francisco Public Defender and more recently became the subject of a federal indictment.
“When Chief Suhr took over, he was looking at ways to ensure that those things don’t happen again,” Newman explained. The department was under the leadership of former Police Chief George Gascon when the officers now facing charges were caught on film by SRO surveillance cameras.
Despite the planned pilot, Newman said Suhr was less certain about the idea of equipping 1,500 to 2,000 officers with body cameras, as Avalos’ request is geared toward.
“The concern with the chief is that with San Francisco, we haven’t been able to get crime cams put up,” she said, let alone having all officers record all police contact with the public. “That’s something that would need to be ironed out.”
Newman added that there were cost and logistical concerns associated with storage of bulk data generated by the cameras.
Oakland police officers are equipped with personal digital recording devices, she noted, but in the incident the left Olsen permanently injured, “there were 11 police officers with less-lethal weapons who were supposed to have PDRDs on – but didn’t.”
Lederman said that based on her experience, the footage that is captured on body cams is kept under lock and key by police, and remains hidden to all but doggedly persistent criminal attorneys. In practice, “journalists and affected people can’t get it without a lawyer,” she said, because police departments tend to withhold the footage with the excuse that it pertains to ongoing investigations.
In order to serve as an effective tool for holding law enforcement accountable, Lederman said, body-cam videos “have to be produced under the Public Records Act.”
Lederman added that the video quality tends to be low, officers can turn them on and off at will, and “they try to use them as evidence against people they are arresting.”
Still, a study in Rialto, California that was undertaken by a group of Cambridge University researchers determined that police use-of-force and complaints against police officers declined dramatically after officers were outfitted with the recording devices.
“The findings suggest more than a 50 percent reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times more citizens’ complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment,” the authors concluded.
Lederman believes those findings are somewhat misleading, however. “Rialto has 66 police officers,” she pointed out. “It’s not really comparable to San Francisco or Oakland.”
Rideshare companies must provide their drivers with insurance. That was the gist of a public letter released today from the California Insurance Commission, addressed to the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates transportation network companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar.
“While smart phone technology is bringing new business opportunities to the marketplace and new transportation choices for consumers, our investigative hearing revealed serious insurance gaps in the current business model of Transportation Network Companies such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar,” Insurance Commissioner David Jones wrote in a statement to press. “As long as TNCs are encouraging non-professional drivers to use their personal vehicles to drive passengers for a profit, a risk which personal automobile insurance simply does not cover, TNCs should bear the burden of making sure that insurance is provided. Our recommendations will ensure there is insurance protection for passengers, drivers and pedestrians.”
Whether the TNCs should provide insurance has been the subject of intense debate in state and local governments over the past year. The recommendations to the CPUC come specifically out of a hearing on TNC insurance that Dave Jones, the insurance commissioner, held March 21. The Guardian also wrote an editorial, “Sharing economy should share its wealth,” calling for rideshares to provide insurance, not only because it’s unfair competition (insurance costs money to provide, a burden taxi companies carry but not TNCs), but because people and TNC drivers in accidents were left for broke, lacking inadequate insurance.
A taxi driver-led protest calling for the CPUC to require TNC companies to provide insurance is starting at noon, today. Below we’ll embed the insurance commissioner’s letter to the CPUC.
[Update 4/10: Visit our story on the taxi driver-led protest, here.]
Gentrification is a word so oft-used in conversations about San Francisco that it’s easy to forget what it means.
A report released yesterday by the advocacy group Causa Justa/Just Cause titled “Development Without Displacement” breaks down gentrification into a set of digestible, understandable policy decisions, while identifying which communities even now are still at risk of displacement.
“This report shows that there are many reasonable policies at the local and regional levels that can help hold back the tide of gentrification and modify the worst effects of urban transformation,” said one of its authors, UC Berkeley Geography Professor Richard Walker, in a statement on its site.
The report provides many solutions, but is largely a 100-plus page tale of 20 years of the destruction of brown and black communities in San Francisco, beginning in 1990, and the ripple effects of that displacement on the people of Oakland.
The “Stage of Gentrification” map in particular details San Francisco and Oakland Neighborhoods as being in early, middle, late and ongoing stages of gentrification. Each of these classifications is determined by the population — are they susceptible to displacement? — as well as the housing market prices in the neighborhood. Not surprisingly, the Mission and the panhandle are labeled as ongoing gentrification zones, with the southern neighborhoods of San Francisco are labeled as in early stages of gentrification marked by a rise in property value.
Robbie Clark, 33, the housing rights campaign lead organizer at Causa Justa, said the map details the challenges facing the Latino and African American communities today, a challenge she’s also facing herself.
“For me, I’m born and raised in Oakland, and it’s been a challenge as an adult to find stable affordable housing,” she told the Guardian. She has a huge family that used to live in Oakland right near one another. The displacement broke them up. “Everyone is spread out throughout the greater Bay Area and beyond. It used to be very normal for every weekend to have family dinners, and now that happens much less.”
In recent years she’s moved seven times as rents in both cities skyrocketed, and she was even in the process of moving again while we interviewed her. The need for the report, she said, was stark.
The findings put specific numbers to a story of loss we all know well. Between 1990 and 2011, over 1,400 Latinos left the Mission district. In the same time, white households increased by 2,900 in the Mission. In the same period, Oakland’s black population declined from 43 percent of the city to 26 percent. Many in San Francisco argue that increased affluence helps beautify neighborhoods and makes them safer, but that misses the point: the neighborhoods may be safer for newcomers, but the old residents get kicked out in the process.
The report states that outright: “While gentrification may bring much-needed investment to urban neighborhoods,” it states, “displacement prevents these changes from benefitting residents who may need them the most.”
And the responsibility of these injustices should be laid squarely at the feet of neoliberal policies, the report states, including reduced public funding, privatization of public programs, relying too much on the private sector to drive economic growth, and a political system susceptible to hugely influential private corporations.
But ultimately, Causa Justa concludes, there is still hope.
“Gentrification can be stopped!” the report states. To right the wrongs done to communities, “We also recommend policies that regulate government, landlord and developer activity to promote equitable investment, affordability and stability, and maximum benefits for existing residents.”
Sen. Mark Leno’s Senate Bill 1439 — which would protect rent-controlled housing in San Francisco by amending the Ellis Act, including making property owners wait at least five years after buying a property to evict tenants under the act — cleared its first legislative hurdle today.
The Senate Transportation and Housing Committee passed the measure on a 6-4 vote, and it heads to the Senate Judiciary Committee next. The bill has strong support in San Francisco, from progressive constituencies through Mayor Ed Lee to support by leaders in the business community and tech world.
Yet the measure faces a tough road in Sacramento, where the landlord lobby and other conservative interests oppose it. “A bill that could strip San Francisco landlords of their freedom to leave the rental housing business heads to a key Senate committee next month,” the California Apartment Association wrote last month in an alert to its members.
But as Tenants Together demonstrated in a recent study of how the Ellis Act has been used in San Francisco since its passage in 1985, a legislative reaction to a California Supreme Court case upholding rent control laws, the legislation has larger been a tool used by real estate speculators to clear rent-controlled buildings of tenants. The study found that 51 percent of Ellis Act evictions took place within a year of the property being purchased, 68 percent within the first five years, and 30 percent of Ellis Act evictions were from serial evictors, often by businesses specializing in flipping properties for profit.
“California’s Ellis Act was specifically designed to allow legitimate landlords a way out of the rental business, but in San Francisco this state law is being abused by speculators who never intend to be landlords,” Leno said today in a prepared statement. “As a result, longtime tenants, many of them seniors, disabled people, and low-income families, are being uprooted from their homes and communities. The five-year holding period in my bill would prevent these devastating evictions from forever changing the face of our diverse city.”
Today [Fri/4] at 11am, the SF Bay Coalition for Immigrant Justice held a protest and rally to urge President Obama to halt all deportations and keep his promise of comprehensive immigration reform.The protest included a group of 23 people, some of which are undocumented immigrants, which took part in a peaceful act of civil disobedience.
All 23 protesters — 15 women and eight men — were arrested; cited for failure to diperse, failure to obey a traffic officer, and blocking an intersection; and booked at the police substation in the Tenderloin before being release, according to the San Francisco Police Department.
More than 30 SFPD officers flanked the march after activists, clergy, and community organizers gathered at One Post St. and made the short but spirited walk to 120 Montgomery St., a building that houses the San Francisco Immigration Court.
Video of two of the arrests.
Rev. Debra Lee, a United Church of Christ pastor working with Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights, said, “We are here… because everyday we see people in our congregations who come to us because their family has been thrown into crisis by the federal government.”
Other clergy members who were arrested include Rev. Richard Smith of St. John Evangelist Episcopal Church, and Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice. “We work with with people of other faiths because part of the power of the coalition [is that] although we have different faiths, we come together around a common belief that the migrant should be treated with dignity.” Lee told the Guardian.
The protesters march downtown. Photo by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez.
Rothbaum delivered a powerful address standing atop a parked pickup truck. Rothbaum held up a black-and-white photo of members of his family being sworn in as US citizens. In the image was his aunt, a Polish Jew. “I would like to remind President Obama that his father was a wandering man from Kenya,” he said. “That my aunt and his father are no different from the people being held in this building.”
All three clergy members were arrested for taking part in the act of civil disobedience. Others arrested include Akiko Aspillaga, a native born Filipina who came to the US at the age of 10 with a visa. But because of a mix of complications with the employment of her mother and misinformation, Aspillaga and her parents lost their visas. Nevertheless, Aspillaga is now a graduate student at San Francisco State University’s school of nursing. However, because she is undocumented, she cannot receive federal grants or loans and depends on scholarships, and her mother to pay for tuition.
Another was Reyna Maldonado, a City College of San Francisco student born in Mexico. “We are here to demand President Obama to stop deportations. There has already been 2 million deportations.” Maldonado had a picture of Alex Aldana, who is currently being held in a San Diego ICE detention center: “He is one of the people we are fighting for [in addition] to stopping separations of families.”
Even if both women are undocumented, face arrest, and a risk of being turned over to US immigration authorities, they felt the risks were worth it. “I feel like the moral imperative right now, with families being torn apart and all the pain our community… Everything is worth it,” Akiko told the Guardian, “There is a possibility of me being deported but we’re standing up for something we believe in.”
After all the speakers addressed the crowd of about 300 people, the group of 23 sat in a tight circle on a banner that read, “Deporter in Chief.” And parodied President Obama’s “Hope” campaign poster with a pair of handcuffed hands replacing the president’s picture.
Once the group of 23 blocked traffic on the intersection of Sutter and Montgomery, SFPD officers began moving people off the street and onto the sidewalks. Then, one by one, each member of the group had their hands zip-tied behind their back and loaded into one of three SFPD vans.
This protest was part of a national day of action in favor of immigration, and it precedes an even bigger mobilization tomorrow in San Jose.
A federal grand jury has indicted Sen. Leland Yee and 28 others on charges similar to those issued in the bombshell criminal complaint by the FBI last week, the Sacramento Bee is reporting. The indictment named three additional defendants who weren’t in the original complaint: Barry Blackwell House (aka Barry Black), Zhanghao Wu, and Ton Zao Zhang.
Yee, political consultant Keith Jackson, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, and the rest of the gang face most of the same charges that they do in the complaint, with the Bee reporting that Yee faces a sentence of 125 years in prison and $1.75 million in fines.
US Attorney Melinda Haag issued a statement casting the indictment as strengthening the case against the defendants, but when the Guardian called with questions about why authorities chose to go with a criminal complaint followed by an indictment, an unusual move, a spokesperson told us, “Our office will not be making any comments on this case.”
The contentious tax breaks given to tech companies in San Francisco are under fire once again, as emergency dispatchers protested crippling budget shortages yesterday (Wed/2) in front of the Department of Emergency Management.
With sweeping budget cuts across all public sectors over the past few years, everyone is clamoring for more money wherever they can get it. But these protesters, organized by SEIU Local 1021, made some pretty compelling arguments for being prioritized.
“When you call 911, there should be enough people working to pick up the phone,” said Ron Davis, who has been an emergency dispatcher in San Francisco for 13 years. “It’s upsetting when you or someone you love is in a life-threatening emergency and you’re put on hold for 30 seconds, 45 seconds, or even a minute and longer.”
The department receives, on average, nearly 3,000 phone calls per day, and the workers who spoke at the rally described long hours and inadequate coverage for the volume of calls that they receive. California law mandates that 90 percent of 911 calls be answered in ten seconds or less, but in San Francisco that number often drops to 60 percent or lower. Davis said that on particularly busy nights, such as New Year’s Eve, there can be up to 20 calls in the queue waiting for an available dispatcher.
“I don’t even go out on holidays,” Davis said. “I’m too afraid that if something happens to me or someone in my family, we won’t get through to 911.”
Protesters directed much of their frustration at the tech companies, especially those which received massive tax breaks as an incentive to remain in San Francisco. The estimated tax break for Twitter alone, estimated to be $56 million, is greater than the entire annual budget for the DEM.
The rally is a part of “Worker Wednesdays,” a series of events created by SEIU Local 1021 in response to Mayor Ed Lee’s Tech Tuesday meetings with local technology leaders. The goal is to draw Lee out to meet with and prioritize city workers. Since the mayor did not attend the rally himself, the protesters chanted and yelled at a seven-foot cardboard cutout of a smiling Lee.
The emergency dispatchers are just a part of the union’s contract negotiations with the city, as SEIU Local 1021 represents over 13,000 employees in San Francisco. Larry Bradshaw, vice president for the San Francisco region of the union, said that so far they had made no progress in their bargaining with city leaders. The contract is set to be written by May 2. After that, union members will decide whether or not they accept the terms.
Workers were willing to make sacrifices during the recession, Bradshaw said. But now that the economy has turned around, “we just want to recoup our losses and make up for lost ground.”
A concurrent meeting of the Budget and Finance Committee at City Hall brought up many of the same points. A report from the City Controller, Ben Rosenfield, confirmed that the economic growth in San Francisco has been among the fastest in the nation and that he expects the progress to continue.
Sup. London Breed specifically asked how emergency services play into this recent boom, and a representative from the Mayor’s Budget Office said that the DEM is currently working with the mayor’s office on a revised budget, which should be released later this month or early May.
The whole point of Healthy San Francisco, the city’s universal healthcare program, is to help people who can’t afford health insurance get medical care when they need it. Despite the intentions of expanding access to healthcare under the Affordable Care Act, that goal won’t necessarily be realized now that federal reform is underway.
Lately, we’ve gotten reports of San Franciscans hoping to enroll in Covered California, the state-run health insurance marketplace created under the ACA, leaving meetings with enrollment counselors in tears of frustration. Even though these would-be enrollees are technically eligible for Covered California – which makes them ineligible to stay in Healthy San Francisco – the insurance cost is nevertheless too high to be a realistic option.
“The most authoritative study says 40 percent of San Franciscans who are eligible for Covered California still will not be able to afford it,” Sup. David Campos noted in a recent phone interview. At the tail end of a long Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, Campos introduced legislation that would create “Covered San Francisco,” a health care option designed to remedy this coverage gap. “In high cost-of-living cities like SF, many will simply not be able to afford it,” Campos said when he introduced the legislation.
The legislation is co-sponsored by Sups. John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Jane Kim. Drafted along with a team that included experts in healthcare and representatives from the city’s Department of Public Health and City Attorney’s Office, the proposal essentially does three things.
First, it seeks to close a loophole that incentivizes employers to comply with the city’s health care law in a way that makes it harder for employees to access medical care.
Under the Health Care Security Ordinance, the law that created Healthy San Francisco, employers must contribute toward their workers’ healthcare costs based on hours worked. In the past, they could comply by setting up standalone accounts, called healthcare reimbursement accounts (HRAs). If employees never tapped those accounts for healthcare needs, the businesses could take back the money they put in.
Under Obamacare, those standalone HRAs are now illegal. But some employers have discovered that they can still set up a different kind of HRA, called an “excepted benefits HRA,” which can only be used toward ancillary care like vision or dental needs.
For employees who are sick and need some kind of medical coverage, these “excepted benefit HRAs” can result in a bind, because under the new federal law, workers are expressly prohibited from using them to obtain insurance through Covered California. And, if employees don’t spend what’s in these accounts, employers can still take the money back – making this option very attractive to employers looking to reduce spending.
Therefore, Campos’ legislation seeks to make all spending to satisfy the local health care law irrevocable, meaning the employers cannot take it back.
“While individuals will face a federal mandate for the first time to purchase health insurance, they will not be able to use these accounts in these excepted benefit HRAs to actually meet that mandate,” Campos pointed out, saying the legislation seeks to do away with “this perverse incentive” for employers to set up HRAs instead of going with an option that would aid employees in seeing a doctor when needed.
This change would leave employers with the choice of keeping ever-expanding HRAs on their books – which is a liability – or looking for a different way to comply with the city’s healthcare law. Other options include providing insurance for their employees, or paying into a locally administered health-care program known as the “city option.”
Many employers already use this city option, and Campos’ proposal would change how it works. First, workers would sit down with city health officials for a consultation. From there, if workers were eligible for Covered California, they’d be enrolled, and they would get additional subsidies to make it more affordable. This system would be known as Covered San Francisco.
Workers not eligible for Covered California, such as undocumented residents, would be enrolled into Healthy San Francisco. And healthcare accounts would be set up for those who didn’t fall into one of the other two categories.
The third thing the law would do is require the city’s health department to extend Healthy San Francisco coverage to include anyone not already covered by the ACA, either due to economic hardship or because they lack an affordable health insurance option.
Already, the newly introduced legislation has some detractors in the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, a business entity that sued the city several years ago to challenge employer requirements under Health Care Security Ordinance.
Gwyneth Borden, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association — which brought and unsuccessful legal challenge to HCSO when the city adopted it — said her group takes issue with the idea of making HRA spending irrevocable. “The irrevocability does limit the choices – the city is trying to force the hand of the employer, to choose the city option,” she said. “The city’s making it more restrictive.”
She also said the GGRA was concerned about transparency. “What they’re saying is that … that entire cost wouldn’t have to sit in an account for an employee; it would fund the system,” in the event that an employer selected the city option, Borden said. “If they’re arguing that the employer has to spend every cent of the dollar on health care for the employee, then the city should have to do that as well.”
But Borden said GGRA had litigated on this issue before, and therefore would not be able to bring their opposition to the courts again. Borden also added that GGRA wanted to make one thing clear: “We applaud Sup. Campos’ efforts to broaden the city option,” she said, “and get more people health care.”
A federal grand jury in San Francisco yesterday issued a criminal indictment against Pacific Gas & Electric for negligence in the 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people and destroyed an entire neighborhood. That’s significant and serious, but it also falls far short of what this rapacious company and its conniving executives — none of whom face personal criminal charges — should be facing.
The indictment and media reports on it omit key details of what happened leading up this tragic and entirely preventable explosion, buying into the fiction that there is a meaningful difference between PG&E Co., the regulated utility, and PG&E Corp., the wealthy and powerful Wall Street corporation. This is a stark example of how corporations are given all the rights of individuals, but accept few of the responsibilities, with the complicity of the political and economic systems.
The 12-count indictment focused on violation of the Pipeline Safety Act, which requires companies to maintain their potentially dangerous pipelines, including keeping detailed records and doing safety inspections that would detect flaws like the faulty weld that caused the San Bruno explosion on Sept. 9, 2010 – work the company negligently failed to perform.
But PG&E’s wanton disregard for public safety, combined with the greed and shameless self-interest of then-CEO Peter Darbee and other executives, goes far deeper than that. A report by the California Public Utilities Commission released in January 2012 found that $100 million in ratepayer funds that had been earmarked for pipeline maintenance and replacement, including this section in San Bruno, was instead diverted to executive bonuses and shareholder profits.
“PG&E chose to use the surplus revenues for general corporate purposes,” the audit said, noting that the company was flush with cash at the time and there was no good reason to neglect this required maintenance.
PG&E maintains the explosion was just an accident.
“San Bruno was a tragic accident. We’ve taken accountability and are deeply sorry. We have worked hard to do the right thing for victims, their families and the community, and we will continue to do so,” PG&E CEO Tony Early, who was hired after the explosion, said in a prepared statement. “We want all of our customers and their families to know that nothing will distract us from our mission of transforming this 100-plus-year-old system into the safest and most reliable natural gas system in the country.”
But this “tragic accident” was foreseeable and preventable, particularly if PG&E was spending our ratepayer money on the system maintenance it was allocated for, instead of trying to fool us with a deceptive and myopic political campaign. Those were decisions made by real people, including Darbee and others, decisions that killed innocent people – and they should be held accountable. Neither this indictment nor a previous civil settlement go far enough.
PG&E’s employee union, IBEW Local 1245, continues to act as an apologist for the company executives, issuing a statement that in part says, “The federal indictment filed April 1st against the company says that PG&E willfully failed to identify and evaluate threats to its transmission pipelines. We know of nothing that would rise to the level of willful. It is possible there are things we don’t know. But based on what we do know, the company failures that led to the San Bruno explosion were not willful.”
Meanwhile, even some PG&E shareholders are siding with the company’s federal prosecution while bringing a shareholder lawsuit seeking to recover some of the diverted funds. Their high-powered attorney, Joe Cotchett, issued a statement today that said, “We welcome yesterday’s indictment by the federal grand jury of PG&E on criminal charges that it violated federal pipeline regulations. It is clear the federal government agrees with us that PG&E chose profits over safety. The indictment comes as no surprise, as it closely mirrors the detailed complaint we filed months ago against PG&E’s officers and directors, after our own extensive investigation. The indictment states that PG&E ignored and failed to properly identify potential threats to gas pipelines, failed to gather relevant data, maintained flawed records, and as a result, was unable to accurately assess the dangers related to its lines that could have prevented the explosion. On behalf of the shareholders of PG&E, we intend to amend our complaint to add some additional facts stated in the indictment.”
“Our complaint alleges that PG&E’s executives dropped the ball and failed to implement safety measures despite numerous red flags raised by Company insiders with risk management responsibilities. We allege PG&E has already incurred charges of about $1.83 billion related to the San Bruno accident and natural gas matters. In its annual report, PG&E admitted that this criminal investigation could expose the Company to even greater losses. Our complaint also alleges that PG&E’s Board sponsored reviews of its risk management practices revealing that PG&E was in ‘crisis’ mode prior to the accident, and that, in 2007, PG&E’s newly-hired Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations determined that the Company’s Enterprise Risk Management program ‘seems unactionable because almost everything is broken.’”
This is the company that Mayor Lee praises as a “great company that gets it,” supporting its continued monopoly control of San Francisco’s energy system and subverting a city proposal to provide renewable energy to city residents, even as the threats posed by global warming increase, as this week’s report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns.
Yesterday at City Hall there was a seven hour long hearing on the validity of the tech buses, known colloquially as Google buses. Do they cause displacement? Are they too heavy (and break the pavement)? Are they merely a symbol of gentrification, or do they cause gentrification?
All of those questions were thoughtfully, pointedly argued, left and right. But the world of news spins fast, and now the latest tech bus news is less thought-provoking and more ick-provoking: a protester allegedly puked all over the front of a Yahoo bus, supposedly in protest of the bus, not his or her lunch.
Erin McElroy, one of the lead organizers of the colorful San Francisco Google bus protest yesterday, said that though the methods used by the Oaklanders may be different than her group, it’s all part of one cause.
“I support a diversity of tactics,” she told us in a phone interview today. “It’s helpful that our tactics are different than theirs.”
Local news site Indybay reported over 50 protesters blockaded an Apple, Google and Yahoo bus this morning. From the photos they posted, you can see one protester standing on the roof of the bus. Perhaps the perfect angle for a barf barrage?
An appeal of the Google bus pilot program’s exemption from environmental review was denied at a contentious Board of Supervisors hearing Tuesday night that went on for six and a half hours straight. The vote was 8-2 to move forward with the 18-month pilot program without environmental review, with only Supervisors David Campos and John Avalos voting nay.
“You can’t say that you support the shuttles but don’t support their ability to pick people up and drop people off,” Sup. Scott Wiener said at the end of the hearing. “I disagree with the appellants.”
Sup. David Campos, who voted in favor of the environmental review, criticized the lack of public input in shaping the flawed program and said the city would likely lose in a future lawsuit on the issue: “If this is denied, there may be a legal victory for the appellants in court.”
The decision followed a heated, hours long public hearing on the environmental impacts of the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency’s commuter shuttle pilot program at City Hall, called for after an environmental appeal was filed in February by the SEIU Local 1021, The League of Pissed Off Voters, and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. The pilot program will measure the impact of regional commuter shuttles at 200 bus stops around San Francisco, paid for by charging the shuttles $1 per stop, which the SFMTA said is the cost of administering the program.
The appellants had one goal: to call on the city of San Francisco to study how regional commuter shuttles affect San Franciscans.
“These are pirate shuttles, they are illegal,” Richard Drury, the attorney for the appellants filing the CEQA review, told the supervisors. “We’re bussing wealthy, predominantly white adults into low-income neighborhoods, where they in turn displace low-income people. This is the reverse of affirmative action.”
Importantly, a distinction was made between intra-city shuttles, like those for hospitals and colleges, and intra-city or regional shuttles, which are largely run by tech companies located outside San Francisco.
Those present were there to discuss the impact of the regional shuttles, whose larger size (measured in tons) more greatly impacts road wear and tear, uses diesel fuel in lieu of gasoline, and, the appellants say, displaces communities wherever they regularly stop.
Pictured above, a journalist tweets an artist rendering of the pirate shuttles.
An Anti-Eviction Mapping Project study found 69 percent of no-fault evictions occurred within a four-block radius of the shuttle stops. CEQA recognizes displacement of people as an environmental impact, and the debate that night centered around whether or not to study if shuttle stops caused displacement of middle to low income residents. Some of the supervisors defended the tech companies to the nines, especially Wiener.
Wiener most ardently argued against the CEQA review, and he stuck it to the appellants’ attorney, Drury.
“It’s not a CEQA issue,” Wiener said. “There’s a certain set of assumptions that technology workers are not real San Franciscans. That they’re part of some invading force that is not part of the city, and aren’t one of us. Isn’t it part of your contention that people on these shuttles aren’t San Franciscans? That’s how [the environmental appeal] reads.”
Drury said it’s not about hating tech workers, or some sort of cultural rift. What this is about, he said, is tech companies paying for the impact they have on communities.
“Let me clarify: CEQA doesn’t mean stop the project,” Drury told Wiener. “It means study the project before you take action, and when you take action impose mitigation measures with eyes wide open.”
Sup. Jane Kim said the SFMTA could have used the pilot program as an opportunity to ask for smaller shuttles, use of white zones (as opposed to Muni stops), or any number of changes to the shuttle program. “There’s a lot more,” she said, “that the pilot could have done.”
Video of a Google protest the morning before the hearing shot by Guardian News Editor Rebecca Bowe.
Alysabeth Alexander of the SEIU 1021 said that overlooking the displacement the buses are causing in San Francisco is downright insulting.
“A handful of wealthy companies should not be able to come into our city and make a private infrastructure and ask San Franciscans to step aside,” she told the room.
Activists, city workers, and San Franciscans of all stripes aired their concern for skyrocketing rents in the areas immediately around regional commuter shuttle stops — the stops of the tech buses.
The supervisors also used the hearing as an opportunity to stick it to the concept that the buses would only cost $1 per stop.
Ultimately some 50 or so supporters of the environmental review came out, who all had gripes about the Google buses, as they’ve come to be called. Later in the night past about 8pm the tech workers finally got to have their say.
There weren’t many of them, but those who spoke were impassioned.
Andrew Textor, a tech worker who did not want his employer named, said “I’ve lived in the city for 10 years, I’ve been riding the shuttles four and a half. Please let this program go forward. I’m not a new arrival, i don’t like being called ‘techie.’ I’m still a San Franciscan.”
But Textor was one of only a few tech workers in attendance by the time the counter argument to the review was heard (hours later), most remaining were paid public relations persons. Sup. Malia Cohen called out the tech companies for not showing up to the meeting and participating in their community.
“I think it’s worth pointing out how absent the tech companies are,” she said, differentiating this hearing from when Twitter was seeking tax breaks three years ago. “The tech executives were swarming City Hall when they wanted something.”
— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) April 2, 2014
When asked why the SFMTA did not ticket commuter shuttles when in red zones in violation of state law, SFMTA Diretor Ed Reiskin said “I don’t know.”
That’s a point that tech worker Martin MacKerel touched on while speaking during public comment earlier.
“I’m here to talk to my fellow tech workers here, I’m asking you to reconsider this,” he said, speaking of opposing an environmental review. “We’ve got to consider that we’re displacing people into Antioch, San Pablo, the East Bay. If they have to drive in to San Francisco, we need to know that. We need a real study.”
But that’s not the way the night went. The supervisors voted against the environmental review. Campos’ remarks before the vote sounded like a eulogy.
“This is about a small group of people going to the city behind closed doors,” Campos said. “As long as we keep doing that, we’re only going to exacerbate the tension that’s out there. Working with the tech industry does not mean you roll over and give them everything they ask for.”
The 18-month pilot program will move forward and launch July 1, barring intervention by the courts.
Tweets from the night, some from the Bay Guardian, some not:
No matter what dog and pony show is going on at SF City Hall tonight. The money Google is putting up for #googlebus is a CHEAP price to pay.
So now that Airbnb has agreed to start collecting and paying the transient occupany tax in San Francisco sometime this summer — finally acknowledging that’s the only workable way to meet the tax obligation it shares with its hosts — that leaves open the question of whether this $10 billion corporation intends to pay the tax debt it has accumulated for years while trying to duck its responsibility to the city.
In early 2012, the San Francisco Tax Collector’s Office held public hearings to clarify whether the TOT applies to the short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb and similar companies, ruling in April 2012 that the TOT does apply to those stays and that it is a “joint and several liability” shared by the hosts and Airbnb, which conducts the transaction and takes a cut.
As we also later reported, despite heavily lobbying during the hearing and being acutely aware of the outcome and its resulting tax obligation, Airbnb simply refused to comply and tack the 15 percent surcharge onto its transactions, as similar companies such as Roomorama were doing.
So if Airbnb was really being the good corporate citizen that it’s now claiming to be, it would not only start charging the 15 percent fee and sharing that money with the city, it would also cut San Francisco a check for around $4 million, or whatever the tax would be on what this growing business has collected from its guests since April 2012.
That’s at the very minimum, giving the company the benefit of the doubt that there really might have been an honest difference in opinions on whether the clear language of the tax code really applied to its transactions. But if we really wanted to be sticklers about this, Airbnb would actually owe the city millions of dollars more than that, going all the way back to its founding in 2008.
“The April 2012 regulation did not change the tax. It provided more information about the definition of room and the merchant of record in a transaction. We have always expected for operators to collect and remit the applicable transient occupancy tax,” Greg Kato, the policy director for the San Francisco Tax Collector’s Office, tells the Guardian, later adding that short-term stays “have always been taxable,” even in apartments.
Airbnb continues to duck questions from the Guardian, including our latest on whether it intends to pay its back tax obligation, and the Chronicle didn’t raise the issue with Airbnb. But a statement that Airbnb’s David Hantman put out on the company’s website yesterday does offer some clues about its change of heart.
After announcing plans to collect and remit the TOT in Portland last week, Hantman said he held a question-and-answer session with its hosts in San Francisco “and announced that we’ll soon be collecting and remitting taxes on behalf of our hosts in San Francisco as well.”
Note the legalistic language that continues to avoid accepting that the company is also responsible for that tax debt, not just its hosts. But it appears the company finally realized it can’t just pass the buck to its hosts.
“We have repeatedly said that we believe our community in San Francisco should pay its fair share of taxes. We know from countless discussions with our hosts that they want to pay taxes, but some of these rules are arcane and difficult to follow. Some hosts have even tried to pay taxes in San Francisco and been turned away,” he wrote.
But that statement is a deceptive one, avoiding the fact that short-term stays are actually illegal in San Francisco, violating Administrative Code Section 41A, as well as a variety of planning and zone codes that prevent tourist hotels from being located in residential areas.
That’s why Airbnb hosts have had a hard time paying their taxes, as the Guardian has repeatedly reported, not because “these rules are arcane and difficult to follow.” It’s because Airbnb’s business model isn’t legal, something that Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has been trying to create legislation to address, although negotiations have now dragged on for more than a year.
“We want to help solve this problem. We’re still working on some operational details, but our goal is to launch this program for San Francisco hosts this summer,” Hantman wrote, making the company sound helpful and oh-so-public spirited.
Given that any decent coder could probably figure out how to add a 15 percent surcharge onto Airbnb’s San Francisco transactions in less than an hour, I’m a little skeptical about the “operational details” that will drag its tax compliance out for several more months. My guess is it is trying to retain some political leverage in negotiations over the Chiu legislation.
“We are a growing company in a new economy. We are taking this action—and initiating our entire Shared City program—as we strive to help make cities stronger, safer, more financially stable. And we’re excited to continue this pilot program in San Francisco. This city is our home and we look forward to continuing to work with everyone here to make it an even better place to live, work and visit,” was how Hantman closed his post.
Hopefully that means San Francisco can expect a $4 million check from Airbnb any day now.
“We’ve been told that there’s a great oil boom on the immediate horizon,” billionaire investor and Pac Heights resident Tom Steyer noted at the start of a March 27 talk in Sacramento.
But Steyer (who has pledged to spend $100 million on ad campaigns for the 2014 election to promote action on climate change) wasn’t there to trumpet the oil industry’s high expectations. Instead, he introduced panelists who dismissed the buzz on drilling the Monterey Shale as pie-in-the-sky hype.
Dr. David Hughes, a geoscientist with the Post Carbon Institute, and researcher Robert Collier had been invited to speak by Next Generation, a policy group focused on climate change that was co-founded by Steyer.
Last year, researchers from the University of Southern California released a study that wound up being cited time and again as the basis for the oil industry’s arguments in the context of a statewide debate on fracking ignited by environmentalists.
Partially funded by the Western States Petroleum Association, oil industry lobbyists, the USC report outlined a rosy economic outlook stemming from oil extraction in the Monterey Shale, a vast geologic formation touted as “a new, economy-spurring natural resource.”
The Monterey Shale spans 1,750 square miles, running beneath much of the San Joaquin Valley and into Southern California. Authors of a private-sector report produced by INTEK, referenced by the USC report, estimated that 15.4 billion barrels of oil could be extracted from the shale formation – mostly through nontraditional methods such as fracking or acidizing, a process that involves pumping acid underground.
But Hughes, the geoscientist, characterized this estimate as unrealistic. “The Monterey Shale certainly will produce more oil and gas, but likely only a very small fraction of what’s been reported in the INTEK report,” he said. “Projections are highly unlikely to be realized.” The Post Carbon Institute and Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy published their own report, Drilling California: A Reality Check on the Monterey Shale.
Also unlikely to be realized are the optimistic figures on job creation and economic activity, Collier noted.
California is the nation’s fourth largest oil producer, but its production has been on a steady decline for the past two decades. “So the hopes for the Monterey Shale come in the context of a gradual decline, and the hopes that California will echo the big boom of North Dakota and Texas,” he said.
The USC report contained sensational projections, predicting that 2.8 million net new jobs would be created statewide in sectors indirectly or directly associated with oil. The most optimistic scenario predicted 4.4 million net new jobs. The report also predicted that opening up the Monterey Shale for drilling would result in a 14 percent increase in per capita GDP, as well as $24 billion in state and local tax revenues.
And as the debate about regulating fracking raged on, the findings in this study were “echoed by politicians of both parties,” Collier noted.
But prominent economists, tapped by Next Generation to analyze the study, said they could find no basis for certain claims.
Next Generation researchers turned to University of California economists Jerry Nickelsburg of UCLA, Jesse Rothstein of UC Berkeley and Olivier Deschênes of UC Santa Barbara. “They said: ‘We cannot see any justification for these incredible numbers,” Collier reported. “They seem too big to be believable.”
Instead, the economists believed the potential job creation was closer to 100,000 in total direct and indirect employment, he added. More information is presented in Next Generation’s report.
So arguments that the oil industry has been using in favor of opening up the Monterey Shale might be based on flimsy math.
Steyer, at the close of the talk, put in a plug for focusing on clean-energy sector growth instead.
“When we sit here and talk about jobs, let’s remember that the clean energy jobs are most likely to solve our employment problems,” he said. “If we want a boom in energy production, then we have a boom in energy production. I think it’s clear, our future is in advanced energy.”
Activist “Judith Hart,” clad in corporate attire and donning thick glasses without lenses, called into a microphone as she stood on the sidewalk next to a stationary Google bus. She was there as part of a tech bus blockade staged near 24th and Valencia streets this morning (Tue/1), around 9am.
“GMuni!” The crowd chanted.
“GMuni!” Hart repeated.
“GMuni!!!” Came the enthusiastic response.
Some acrobats stood in the street nearby, blocking the bus with dance-like motions. Occasionally leaning on the front of the bus for support, they lifted yoga balls high into the air while the Google shuttle remained parked with passengers aboard, awaiting departure.
The April Fools Day bus blockade – staged by Heart of the City, a group that has blocked corporate tech shuttles several times now – was more absurdist street theatre than protest.
The prank was to hand out “GMuni” bus passes to anyone wishing to board the Google bus. Hart posed as a Google executive launching a new program to provide free transit to all. But when one of the activists tried to climb aboard, waving the pass issued by the activists, the bus driver blocked him from entering, saying it was a private bus and nobody had informed him of this new program.
Eventually, a police officer arrived and asked activists to move to the sidewalk. They complied, but when the bus drove off, it had some signs affixed to the front that activists had placed there.
The street theatre protest was meant to draw attention to today’s scheduled Board of Supervisors vote to determine whether to approve an appeal of a Metropolitan Transportation Agency pilot program to allow private shuttles to stop in Muni bus zones for a fee of $1 per stop.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky announced last week that it would start doing so in New York City, Portland, Ore. and other cities that take part in its vaguely defined Shared City program. That prompted us to send Chesky and other Airbnb executives an email on March 27 asking, “I’m wondering why you’re willing to collect and remit taxes in Portland, but you’ve been unwilling to do so in San Francisco, the city where you’re headquartered and where the city ruled more than two years ago that you should be doing so?”
They never responded to that inquiry, which is part of the company tactic of stonewalling the Guardian on an issue that we were the first to report over a year ago when we discovered the company was simply refusing to pay a tax bill that our reporting found amounted to nearly $2 million annually in late 2012, and probably significantly more now.
The San Francisco Tax Collector’s Office ruled in April 2012 that Airbnb should be paying the TOT on the thousands of local stays that it facilitates, and that the company and its individual hosts were jointly liable for that tax obligation. But because Airbnb’s business model violates local laws against short-term rentals, it was difficult for individual hosts to get the license they needed to collect and pay the tax.
What prompted Airbnb’s sudden change of heart? Were they feeling the pressure? The Chronicle article doesn’t really make that clear, but we’ll let you know what we hear.
The $1/stop SFMTA deal to allow Google Buses to use city bus stops is being appealed to the Board of Supervisors, to be heard on tomorrow [Tues/1]. The $1/stop deal replaced the “handshake agreement” where the tech buses could do whatever they wanted while the SFMTA gazed vacantly into space, which is its forte.
The appeal is a technical invocation of the California Environmental Quality Act, aka CEQA, aka Chief CEQA, aka CEQABACCA. (Full disclosure: I am a consultant for SEIU Local 1021, one of the appellants, on something unrelated to this.) The appeal argues that in Mayor Ed Lee’s heroic pre-emptive capitulation to the $1/stop deal (for the price of a third of a cup of single-origin estate-grown coffee on Valencia!), the Planning Department should have analyzed potential environmental impacts of the Google Buses, and considered alternatives and mitigations. The relevant authorities probably did not want to know the results of a review because data-driven analysis is not outside-the-box disruptive thinking that makes Frisco the World Capital of Innovation.**
Notably, nothing in the deliberations of the MTA or CEQA asked if there should be a bus program at all. Determining whether something is good or bad for the City is apparently beyond the scope of government. I don’t understand it, but I’m not a lawyer. The big criticism of the buses is less the environmental one than the displacement and gentrification they cause. Round peg, meet square hole.
Fortunately, there are legitimate CEQA questions. The full Board of Supervisors will hear the appeal, and for the duration of public comment will transmogrify from a legislative body into a quasi-judicial body to decide the environmental claims. And the supervisors are totally qualified to rule on particulate levels caused by idling buses. Expect them to seek a compromise with science about how many people will get cancer because of the buses.
Since the appeal legally has to link any objections to the buses to environmental impacts, I have some suggestions of new CEQA arguments. The Supervisors should consider significant cumulative unmitigated impacts such as:
Influx of toxic concentrations of assholes into affected neighborhoods.
Pollution from all the new tinted window factories required to supply the buses.
Soaring rates of testicular cancer related to all the Google Bus-related cases of the medical condition known as “Hot Laptop Nuts.”
Property destruction during riots in the streets after the last taqueria closes and is replaced by an adorable farm-to-table small plates restaurant.
Urban blight and decay in Sunnyvale as tech people abandon Silicon Valley entirely, causing Sunnyvale to lose its coveted title “All-America City.”
I also have two elegant project alternatives to $1/stop: The buses cause displacement on their routes because people riding them make a lot of money. Clearly, the solution is to cut their pay. We just need a maximum wage for tech people. Any income over the maximum would go directly to fund public goods like schools, transit, and healthcare. The program could be called “Wealthy San Francisco.”
Alternatively, the City could use the buses as a positive tool, and move bus routes to areas that need and could support more economic development, like the Outer Sunset, Visitacion Valley, and Stockton.
Finally, I have a pilot program of my own to propose, in which we “accidentally” swap a Google Bus with an Immigration & Customs Enforcement Deportation Bus, delivering undocumented migrants to take charge of Silicon Valley and programmers to Northern Mexico. They can hackathon some apps for the Zetas Cartel.
Gentrification solved. Consensus built. You’re welcome, San Francisco.
*“Google Bus” becoming the generic term for tech colonist commuter shuttles must be an epic migraine for the beleaguered lawyers in the Google Intellectual Property Legal Department. Talk about brand dilution.
**Admittedly, innovation involving a short list of things. Amazing innovation at inventing technology to enhance our capacity to spend money and/or waste time. Innovative ways to house the houseless or feed the hungry—not so much.
Nato Green is a San Francisco-based standup comedian. His podcast is called The Nato Sessions and he can be seen with The Business every Wednesday at the Dark Room Theatre.
Tomorrow’s (Tue/1) San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting will feature a hearing on the environmental impact of commuter shuttles, including Google buses. In what promises to be a telling moment in a polarizing controversy that started in late 2013, supervisors will be forced to pick a side.
This past January, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) voted to approve a pilot program that would allow private shuttle operators, including a host of tech companies, to stop in designated Muni bus areas for a fee of $1 per stop, per day.
The narrative is by now well-worn, with the well-connected, deep-pocketed tech industry on one side and seasoned local activists concerned about gentrification and private use of public bus stops on the other.
While tomorrow’s hearing comes amid a larger debate about the tech sector’s role in fueling displacement through rising housing prices, it will focus on whether or not to sanction an appeal of the pilot program under the California Environmental Quality Act.
The proponents of the shuttles — Google, Genentech, Apple and others — maintain they take cars off the road. Many workers commuting to the South Bay, for instance, would drive were it not for the existence of the shuttles.
The CEQA appeal was filed by the SEIU 1021, the League of Pissed Off Voters, and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. The groups contend that the private shuttle system is helping to push long-time residents out of the city. Studies show that in areas around the shuttle stops, rents fly high and displacement is rampant.
A key argument in favor of conducting an environmental review is that those displaced workers then have to drive into SF to get to work from places like the East Bay, negating any environmental benefits. By calling for a CEQA study, appellants hope to city will study how shuttles are linked to displacement and its associated environmental impacts.
Tomorrow, the Board must decide whether to allow the 18-month pilot program to move ahead, or to delay it until after an Environmental Impact Review has been completed.
In preparation for tomorrow’s hearing, both sides are drumming up support from their ranks.
SF.citi, an alliance of San Francisco tech companies, sent out an email blast (and web post) that reads like a call to arms: “Divisive shuttle opponents are now suing the City to challenge this pilot program before it has the chance to get off the ground. We need YOU to tell the Board of Supervisors in person that you want them reject this lawsuit and let the pilot program go forward.”
The activists’ call to action takes a similar tone, with liberal use of caps lock: “PLEASE JOIN US TO SUPPORT THE APPEAL AND TO TELL THE CITY TO HOLD BIG TECH ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE ACTUAL IMPACT THEY HAVE ON OUR COMMUNITIES AND NEIGHBORHOODS!
“We can not do this without a thorough review, which includes robust research and study of what the actual broad impact is. Without it, we can not be assured that tech is paying the fair price for their use of our streets and our transit infrastructure.”
Editor’s Note: This report, which appears in today’s Oakland Tribune, is part of the continuing efforts of the Chauncey Bailey Project, a joint investigation by various media outlets (including the Bay Guardian) into the 2007 murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery.
By Thomas Peele and Matt O’Brien, Bay Area News Group
OAKLAND — Admitting they nearly entered into a deal with a questionable security company now under investigation, Port of Oakland commissioners on yesterday [Thu/27] Thursday vowed to revamp their contracting process.
“We came very close to approving a bad contract,” Commissioner Michael Colbruno said. “The whole procurement process” should be reviewed.
The commissioners voted 6-0 to back out of a contract with BMT International Security Services, which had submitted bogus references and credentials to win a $450,000 deal to patrol two shoreline parks.
The port has extended its existing contract with ABC Security to guard a 42-acre shoreline through the end of the year. Colbruno added that the port needs to have a better screening process.
Commission President Cestra Butner agreed.
“This commission will take our lumps if we did anything wrong,” he said. “We want to make sure we get things right. … I don’t want anything slipped under the rug.”
BMT, which is linked to Oakland’s defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery, had been in final negotiations with the port when this newspaper reported that its proposal contained references to work at other government agencies that had no record of ever doing business with it. The firm also appears to have inflated the credentials of its managers.
The company is now being investigated by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and the state Department of Consumer Affairs. A former Oakland police officer also said in court papers that he believes the company stole a security company license number from him that he let lapse in 2008 when he retired.
BMT told the port that it had worked for BART, the San Joaquin County Housing Authority and the Riverside Transit Agency, but those agencies had no record of hiring the company. The firm also lost contracts with Alameda County and the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles when staff at those agencies discovered the Oakland company submitted apparently false insurance certification.
At least one Bay Area government noticed before awarding a contract that something appeared wrong with BMT’s credentials.
In 2011, the Vallejo City Council rejected a BMT proposal after city staff reported that the listed references were not calling back and one claimed to not know the company. BMT unsuccessfully appealed and some of its employees spoke out at a public meeting.
BMT sought another Vallejo contract in 2012 but again failed to win it. BMT owner Rory Parker sued the North Bay city in December, claiming she and her company experienced disparate treatment “because of their race, which is Black, and because of their religion, which is of the Islamic faith.”
The firm is run out of a Black Muslim temple in West Oakland whose minister, Dahood Sharieff Bey, was an associate of Your Black Muslim Bakery and a disciple of its founder, Yusuf Bey. Yusuf Bey touted his business enterprise as empowering African Americans, but prosecutors have described it as a wide-ranging criminal organization involved in violent crimes, real estate fraud and identity theft.
The bakery collapsed in 2007 when its members, led by Yusuf Bey IV, killed three men, including Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey. Bey IV is now serving a life prison term without parole. Prosecutors and police have linked five unsolved homicides to the bakery.
Dahood Bey, the minister who identified himself at a recent Oakland council meeting as “Mr. Pasha,” was tried for torture in 2010 but pleaded guilty to lesser charges when the jury could not reach a verdict. His co-defendant in that case, Basheer Fard Muhammad, has been the public face of BMT at port and other government meetings, urging officials to give it contracts.
BMT owner Rory Parker is Dahood Bey’s mother. The company also claimed in its port proposal to have a retired, Harvard-educated FBI agent serving as its chief financial officer and that its guards include former Secret Service agents.
Law enforcement records show San Francisco police officers arrested Muhammad in Oakland on Feb. 25 on suspicion of receiving stolen property, which was described as a “refrigerated sandwich table.” He was jailed for two days and released after the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute him. San Francisco police spokesman Sgt. Eric O’Neal has refused to release details about the case despite repeated requests.
BMT is also seeking a contract to work for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but transit officials there would not disclose any information about the bid until they finish evaluating all the proposals in May.
– See more at: http://www.chaunceybaileyproject.org/2014/03/28/port-of-oakland-unanimously-rejects-black-muslim-security-firms-bid-to-guard-shoreline-parks/#sthash.u7PagzEY.dpuf
