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Politics Blog

Sorry, Nate, but you’re wrong

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It’s too bad that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s communications director Nathan Ballard doesn’t seem to understand due process. At least not from an immigrant’s perspective.

I don’t say this lightly.

Ballard’s biography states that he is a former deputy city attorney, with a law degree from the University of California, Hastings. Whereas I’m just a lowly immigrant, who is under the impression that, in the United States, folks are assumed innocent until proven guilty.

But then along comes Ballard and tells me, yesterday, that I’m “wrong” in claiming that referring juveniles to federal Immigration Custom and Enforcement (ICE)—which is happening in San Francisco to youths are merely suspected of committing a felony and of being undocumented—raises due process questions.

If you don’t believe me–and I don’t blame you if you don’t, because it is hard to believe that this is happening in San Francisco with its huge immigrant communities–read the transcript of our exchange, which took place following the DCCC’s March 25 passage of a resolution that commits San Francisco to due process for all.

Phelan: “Nathan, following up on last night’s DCCC resolution in support of a Sanctuary City ordinance: Does the policy direction that Newsom ordered in 2008 guarantee due process for all?”

Ballard: “Yes. It was thoroughly vetted by the city attorney.”

Phelan: “I know the policy was vetted by the city attorney. But, as I understand it, juveniles are being referred to ICE without a hearing of any kind, which means, does it not, that due process is being denied?”

Ballard: “You’re wrong. Referral to ICE alone does not give rise to due process issues.”

If that’s not enough, check out the Examiner’s Ken Garcia, whose only source appears to be Ballard, framing the DCCC’s resolution as “one that demonized Mayor Gavin Newsom” and the more watered-down version as “one that said legal protections should not extend to people who commit violent felonies.”

But—and this really is the crux of the matter, folks—the problem with Newsom’s current policy is that it does not target folks who have been proven of committing a felony.

Instead, it targets folks suspected of, or charged with a felony.

80 Chronicle workers apply for voluntary termination

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The California Media Workers Guild is reporting that more than 80 workers applied for voluntary termination at the San Francisco Chronicle. THe Guild is also warning that because if the large numbers of volunteers, 60-day notices of involuntary layoffs may not be triggered–meaning workers won’t get an extra two months of pay.

Newsom officials dodge budget questions

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By Melody Parker and Steven T. Jones

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee yesterday held a hearing on deep budget cuts proposed for city health and welfare programs and tried unsuccessfully to get straight answers to why the Newsom Administration isn’t planning to use federal stimulus money to offset those cuts.
Congress and President Barack Obama specifically offered economic stimulus money to prevent cuts in things like housing, homeless, and social services that are most needed during hard economic times. San Francisco’s share is more than $50 milllion. As Obama said, “This plan will also help ensure that you don’t need to make cuts to essential services Americans rely on now more than ever.”
But Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and David Campos expressed frustration that the Mayor’s Office has said it doesn’t want to use these one-time funding to cover ongoing expenses and that they’ve refused to engage in a dialogue about that stand. At a press conference before the hearing, Mirkarimi said dealing with the administration has been like pulling teeth: “The Board had received zero word from Mayor Newsom.”
So they pressed Newsom’s Public Health Director Mitch Katz at the hearing, but still made little progress on getting a straight answer. As a lawyer, Campos said he was “familiar with nuanced language” and told Katz that he didn’t feel the administration is being responsive.

SF pot raid clouds federal drug policies

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Story by Steven T. Jones, Photos by Neil Motteram

Yesterday’s federal raid on the locally permitted SoMa medical marijuana dispensary Emmalyn’s California Cannabis Clinic caused confusion about what local growers can expect from an Obama Administration that recently announced that it would no longer be conducting such raids.

Drug Enforcement Administration officials are saying little about the raid, which came on a Wednesday, the day Emmalyn’s gives out free marijuana to poor patients. But the DEA seemed to be trying to dance around the conflict with the public statement, “Based on our investigation, we believe there are not only violations of federal law, but state law as well.”

Assembly member Tom Ammiano, whose Assembly Bill 390 would decriminalize even recreational uses of marijuana, told the Guardian that the raid sends a troubling message and could indicate internal conflicts within the administration.

“It’s a little vigilante for me. They’re obviously try to flex their muscles, probably to have a showdown with the Obama Administration,” Ammiano said of the DEA. “The dispensaries are going to be in the crosshairs of this struggle.”
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T. Boone Pickens visits S.F.

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By Rebecca Bowe

T. Boone Pickens, 80, is a Republican billionaire living in Dallas whose spot-on predictions about the petroleum industry have earned him the nickname the “Oracle of Oil.” More recently, the founder and chairman of BP Capital Management has garnered media attention for reinventing himself as a proponent of clean energy. On March 25, hundreds of San Franciscans came out to the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins Hotel to listen to the former oilman discuss the Pickens Plan: a blueprint for curing America’s addiction to foreign oil.

Pickens launched his campaign last July with a slick Web site designed by one of the top brains behind Obama’s online presidential campaign. So far, some 2 million supporters have signed on, Pickens said. “I found out this,” he told a team of reporters shortly before his talk. “When I was a rich guy going to Washington trying to get something done, I got in to see everybody and they were all nice, but not much happened. Today, with 2 million people with me, I’m a hell of a lot more important when I go to Washington.”

A main component of his plan is the installation of thousands of wind turbines through the central corridor of the United States, harnessing what has been called the “Saudi Arabia of wind” to provide what Pickens estimates to be 20 percent of the nation’s electricity supply. To make it work, transmission lines must be constructed to move that power east and west. And according to his vision, domestic natural gas currently used to fire power plants can be utilized as a transportation fuel instead.

DCCC supports sanctuary & due process for all

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The Democratic County Central Committee voted last night by an overwhelming majority (20 ayes, 5 abstains, I no) to support Debra Walker’s strong resolution, recommitting “support of the Constitution and our city’s Sanctuary Ordinance for all,” and rejecting Scott Wiener’s watered-down version (19 noes, 3 abstained, 5 ayes).

Walker, who plans to run for District 6 supervisor, when incumbent Chris Daly is termed out next year, says DCCC’s vote made her, “ feel good about the party.”

“It’s been way too long that this has been happening and we have done nothing substantive, on the part of the party,” said Walker, noting that a companion resolution asking President Barack Obama to stop the ICE raids will be introduced next month.

Last night’s vote came after several dozen immigrant residents attended the DCCC hearing and testified about the impact of San Francisco’s new policies toward immigrants.

As Angela Chan, staff attorney for the Asian Law Caucus told the Guardian, “One teenage girl bravely stood before the DCCC and said that as a result of the change in climate in San Francisco toward immigrants, she lived in fear each day that she would come home to find that her parents had been taken away by ICE. Another immigrant resident said that if the DCCC takes a stand to support immigrants, he would raise his children to become proud Democrats. Another immigrant resident, who was a mother and a child care provider for many families in SF, said it is difficult to know that the image of criminality is being projected onto her and her community, when most members of the community are hardworking, law-abiding, and family-oriented people.”

Chan says she appreciated the supportive comments she heard from Sups. David Campos, Daly, Robert Haaland, Michael Bornstein, and resolution co-sponsors Walker and Peskin.

“They demonstrated a strong commitment to upholding immigrant rights and a deep understanding of the contributions of immigrant residents to San Francisco,” Chan said. “I hope Mayor Newsom will take the cue from his own party (and his own residents), and swiftly move to rescind his undocumented youth policy and work with the immigrant community to develop a more thought-out and balanced policy that respects the due process rights of youth and the goals to the juvenile justice system.”

That vote confirms that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to do an about face last summer on San Francisco’s long standing sanctuary city ordinance is coming back to haunt him, as the gubernatorial race heats up.

Asked if the policy direction that Newsom ordered in 2008 guarantees due process for all, Newsom’s communications director Nathan Ballard did a classic obfuscation, telling the Guardian, “Yes. It was thoroughly vetted by the city attorney.”

But according to the City Attorney’s office, the original ordinance never did assure due process, “ if an individual was arrested for felony crimes.”

As for the revised policy direction, it directs police officers to report any juvenile “suspected of being present in the United States in violation of immigration laws,” and “booked” for commission of a felony” to federal immigration authorities,

The language, which is contained in the juvenile probation department’s policies and procedures section, directs officers to take into consideration, amongst other things, prior criminal history and “presence of undocumented persons in the same area where arrested or involved in illegal activity.”

To Walker’s mind, such direction amounts to a, “slippery slope.”

“It puts a lot of discretion in the hands of the police on the streets, and can end up with juveniles being referred to ICE and taken back to their country of origin, without any representation,” Walker said.

Herrera names stimpack “legal compliance” taskforce

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City Attorney Dennis Herrera has announced a stimulus spending taskforce, which he says will aim, ” to coordinate legal compliance and guarantee maximum transparency, efficiency and accountability for city investments made possible by the federal government’s recently enacted $787 billion economic stimulus package.”

“Our paramount duty is to ensure that this unprecedented level of federal funding is invested honestly and in ways that deliver real value to our communities and our children — we will not tolerate waste, fraud or abuse,” Herrera said in a press release.

“When President Obama signed the recovery and stimulus package into law, he challenged all of us in public life to prove to the American people that their trust in government is not misplaced,” Herrera said.

Event fee policy threatens How Weird and other festivals

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The How Weird Street Faire has become a popular event, particularly with the Guardian staff, including (from left) Associate Art Director Ben Hopfer, Culture Editor Molly Freedenberg, City Editor Steven T. Jones, and Art Director Mirissa Neff.

By Steven T. Jones

The city’s budget crunch and stricter policies on making special events pay up front for all city services that they’re required to use are once again threatening the How Weird Street Faire, a popular dance festival now in its 10th year that seems to battle city bureaucracy every year. Now, the grassroots organizers are challenging policies that could leave San Francisco with only events sponsored by deep-pocketed corporations.

Organizers say they can’t come up with the almost $10,000 that the San Francisco Police Department is requiring them to pay up front, a tab needed to pay for cops that do little except stand around at an event that would rather be allowed to police itself. The May 10 event is scheduled to take place around Howard and 2nd streets after city officials made them move from their previous spot 10 blocks away.

“The SFPD is demanding we pay them nearly $10K up front for police services, which was not discussed at the ISCOTT [the city body that issues street closure permits] hearing and is twice the amount of 2007. We simply do not have the money for this and they are threatening now to not plan for our police services. I have a bad feeling they will not sign off on our ABC license [needed for beer sales],” lead organizer Brad Olsen recently wrote in an appeal to City Hall for help.

Guild corrects SFBG, invites freelancers to join union

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Carl Hall, the Chronicle’s California Media Workers Guild representative, just emailed me, regarding my article in today’s newspaper about the future of journalism

Hall wrote to point out that I had inaccurately reported that the Guild has “voted to accept 150 layoffs and accept seniority considerations” at the Chronicle.

But as Hall notes, “Our contract like most guild contracts does not contain any prohibition against layoffs, and there’s not been any requirement that the employer obtain our agreement before laying anyone off. We voted to lift seniority protection against layoff in exchange for severance – that’s the new part. We also voted a number of other changes to reduce costs one way or another.”

“One other detail you might not realize,” Hall continued, “is that the Guild contract already had a provision allowing the management to protect up to 25% of low-seniority employees in a layoff round, meaning they could keep those individuals because of their importance in the operation and lay off more senior employees instead.”

Hall said he was saying all this because he continues to see, “everybody claiming that we voted to accept layoffs, when in fact we did not.”

“The company told us they were prepared to implement layoffs of about 225 of our members, with no severance, or close the paper or sell it, in which case all 500 of us would risk being laid off, with no severance,” Hall explained. “Maybe we could have chosen some suicidal path of bluff-calling or whatever, but our members chose the path we are on — a selfless choice for the senior people who nearly all voted to open themselves up to more individual layoff risk for a mere one year’s pay.”

“As a union however we did not vote to accept 150 layoffs,” Hall stated. “ We expect that number will be laid off because of this management’s short-sighted, destructive business plan and failure to make the Chronicle thrive as a top-quality paper, in print and online. I don’t hold any particular ill will toward the Hearst Corp., and credit them for the patience they have shown over these past few years when they’ve tolerated purported losses far exceeding those being reported elsewhere.”

Hall ended by saying that he was, “encouraging our members and the entire community to focus on what truly matters — quality jobs and quality journalism, and yes we do see a quality connection between the jobs and the journalism. (i.e., no reliance on “volunteers” or low-paid exploited at-will news workers, such as may be the case at the anti-union outfits such as — cheap shot alert! — the SFBG.)

“In a word, here’s the plan,” Hall stated. ” Organize! If you want to start, we will show you how.”

The Guild is holding its first meeting of its newly formed freelancers unit at Noon, Friday April 3. Third-floor conference room, California Media Workers. 433 Natoma Street, San Francisco.

For more information, or to R.S.V.P., check out the Guild’s site here, where you can also watch the video of the Society of Professional Journalists’ March 17 “Conversation about the Chronicle<" in which 15 panelists brainstormed about the crisis currently affecting the newspaper industry,

Newsom’s chickens come home to roost

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It’s not easy being mayor. Especially, when you are running for governor.

In the past few years, Mayor Gavin Newsom appeared to have mastered the way to silence his critics: he avoided debating them.

He refused to show up to Board meetings. And when he finally did, it was to drop a shocking financial bomb, then run away before the supervisors could ask informed questions or participate in a collaborative solution to the City’s woes.

And since announcing his gubernatorial run, Newsom has been increasingly missing in action, even though the city is facing a massive economic crisis.

But now one of Newsom’s fiercest critics has found a way to get his attention.

The Nation of Islam’s Minister Christopher Muhammad has been showing up at town-hall meetings that Newsom is holding statewide as part of his gubernatorial campaign, complaining about unresolved issues around asbestos dust and other toxic materials at the Hunters Point Shipyard.

So far, Muhammad and his followers have showed up in Oakland, Napa and San Diego, and it’s likely they are not going to go away, any time soon.

As columnists Phil Matier and Andy Ross report in today’s Chronicle, after an item about assault rifles flowing in from Nevada, Newsom’s “handlers have a queasy feeling that they will be hearing more from the minister and his friends as the gubernatorial race heats up.”

It’s not clear the minister’s appearances make audiences sympathetic to his cause.

As one source reported, during Newsom’s March 12 town hall in Napa, which was held at the local fairgrounds, “it was standing room only and went fairly well until a group from Bayview/Hunter’s Pt. showed up and demanded to vent their spleen.”

“This really pissed off the over 55 crowd, thinning the herd somewhat,” said our source.

But, according to M&T, Newsom “even promised to sit down with the Nation’s leadership if only they would let the rest of the audience get some questions on.”

M&T claim that “no meeting, however, ever took place.”

But it makes you wonder what would happen, if other advocates who have been unable
to get Newsom’s ear, started to show up at his gubernatorial town-halls, too.

The “save newspapers… from endorsing politicians” act?

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U.S. Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD) has introduced legislation that would allow newspapers to become non-profits.

Cardin says the Newspaper Revitalization Act is intended to help the faltering newspaper industry survive.

But there’s a snag: under the act, newspapers would not be allowed to make political endorsements.

They would, however, be allowed to freely report on all issues, including political campaigns.

Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt and contributions to support coverage/operations could be tax deductible.

“The measure is targeted to preserve local newspapers serving communities and not large newspaper conglomerates,” states the press release posted at Cardin’s website.

Recoverysf.org still under construction

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I got voice mail from Ron Vinson, chief administrative officer of the SanFrancisco Department of Technology, today, advising me that the City’s website to track Obama’s stimpack dollars is still under construction.

When I checked the link, which is where I downloaded the piechart (shown above) yesterday, as part of my quest to find out just who is being stimulated in San Francisco by these anxiously anticipated federal dollars, sure enough I got that frustrating “the requested URL was not found on this server” message.

Calls to Vinson to find out just when the website might be functional have yet to be returned. So, stay tuned.

In the meantime, you could visit the WhiteHouse’s site, and amuse yourself by clicking on their map of the United States, which claims that 396,000 jobs will be created/saved in California the next two years. I wonder how many of those will be in San Francisco and just who will benefit?

Immigration battle at the DCCC

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By Tim Redmond
The issue before the Democratic
County Central Committee tonight is immigration, and delegates will face a pair of conflicting resolutions. In reality, though, the two resolutions are a referendum on the city’s — that is, mayor Newsom’s — shift in immigration policy.

The milder, watered-down measure is sponsored by Scott Wiener, one of the centrist leaders on the DCCC, and more-or-less endorses what Newsom has been doing. His consponsors are Connie O’Connor, Mary Jung, Arlo Hale Smith, and Matt Tuchow.

The competing measure takes not-so-subtle issue with City Hall’s position and urges greater respect and tolerance for immigrants of all legal status. It’s backed by Aaron Peskin, Debra Walker, David Campos, Robert Haaland, Rafael Mandelman, Chris Daly, Joe Julian, Michael Goldstein, Hene Kelly and Michael Bornstein.

You can read both resolutions and the politics of this after the jump.

“After hours” lighting ban

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Do you sometimes forget to flip the manual light switch when you leave the office? If so, Board President David Chiu hopes that the prospect of fines will help you break this environmentally unfriendly habit.

Chiu has introduced an ordinance that prohibits commercial buildings from lighting unoccupied interior spaces after business hours. The idea is to conserve electricity and use cost-effective lighting control technology that turn lights off automatically, when the last person leaves the office.

“Not only are lights typically left on in buildings when occupants leave an office during the middle of the day, but the night skylines of all U.S. cities are filled with lights from countless empty offices, and San Francisco is no exception,” states the “findings” section of Chiu’s ordinance, noting that almost half of the electricity in typical office buildings is used to keep lights on, and commercial establishments account for about half of the lighting energy used in the United States.

“No person may illuminate any unoccupied space in a commercial building after hours except for exit signs, path of travel lighting and utilization equipment lighting,” states Chiu’s ordinance.

If the ordinance passes, the Department of the Environment will be able to issue warnings to folks, a year after the ordinance becomes effective. If that doesn’t change folks’ behavior, DOE will be able to fine them $100 for a first violation, $200 for a second violation in the same year, and not more than $500 for each subsequent violation in the same year. Wow, that could add up. Pretty soon folks won’t be able to pay their electricity bill, which would be yet another way to turn the lights off.

Burning Man’s HQ is on the move

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Artists rendering for Burning Man’s current theme, “Evolution,” by Andrew Johnstone and Rod Garrett.

By Steven T. Jones

Burning Man is an annual event in the Nevada desert. But the organization that stages Burning Man, Black Rock City LLC, is a San Francisco-based company now being uprooted by UCSF’s rapid development of Mission Bay and actively looking for a new headquarters.

Company spokesperson Marian Goodell said she’s been working with the Mayor’s Office and the vast network of local burners to find what they need: a 20,000 square foot showcase space with room for its core staff and the ancillary organizations its has spawned, such as Black Rock Arts Foundation and Burners Without Borders. So far, they’ve come up empty, even as a May 1 deadline to vacate the current spot at 3rd and 16th streets rapidly approaches.

“We really need a home for the development of our culture,” Goodell tells the Guardian. “For us to have the right office building would give us a lot of credibility.”

A LAFCo “milestone” at today’s Board meeting

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By Rebecca Bowe

At meetings of the Local Agency Formation Commission, it’s all too common to hear concerns that the whole Community Choice Aggregation program endeavor is moving along at a snail pace. At today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, there will be vote on whether to approve two new LAFCo staff positions, which could jump start CCA. But is there enough support for eight votes, which would ensure that the decision could withstand a veto? And will Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who voted against it at the last meeting but for it at a committee meeting the day before, stick with her ‘no’ vote?

LAFCo plays an advisory role in the implementation of San Francisco’s CCA program, which would allow the city to combine electricity needs of residents and businesses into a citywide electricity buyers’ program. Administered by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the plan includes ambitious targets for clean and renewable-energy generation.

But the process of getting such a massive project off the ground has been fraught with delay, and it’s not uncommon for citizens to get up during the public comment session at LAFCo meetings to voice their anxiety that an environment threatened by climate change can’t afford to wait any longer.

Norman Yee and JROTC

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By Tim Redmond

Well, this is pretty fucked. I can’t reach school board member Norman Yee, but the Examiner says he supports bringing back JROTC.

That’s absolutely NOT what he told us when we endorsed him last fall.

Yee was the swing vote to end JROTC. The issue was phys ed credit, but the politics were clear: Voting to stop allowing kids to fulfill their gym requirement with JROTC would spell the end of the program. He did the right thing.

He later told us that if the issue were simply up or down on JROTC, he might have voted to save it, but it’s clear that the JROTC program fails to meet state standards for physical education.

But here’s the rub: Yee told us — told me, personally — that he wasn’t going to bring this issue back up again, that as far as he was concerned it was done. Technically, he hasn’t brought it up again — Jill Wynns and Rachel Norton did. (BTW, lots of people criticized us for not endorsing Norton. I hope you now see why we didn’t.) But if Yee votes to save the program, it will be a slap in the face to all the progressives who supported him.

JROTC, whatever its supporters say, is a military recruitment program. After our school board endorsements last fall, I got comments like this one:

No one’s forcing your kids to join the JROTC. But not having a JROTC forces other kids not to join. That’s wrong.

That’s what all the supposedly liberal people who say they support JROTC talk about: choice. Why not let the students who want to be recruited by the Army on a public high school campus have the right to do that?

And here’s what I — the parent of two public-school kids — have to say:

If I asked my kids if they’d rather have Pepsi or milk with their lunch, they’d say Pepsi in a second. My kids are still in elementary school, but most high school kids would say the same thing. The reason you take soda machines out of high schools is precisely so that kids DON’T have that choice. The reason you don’t let 15-year-olds buy alcohol is that society has decided they aren’t old enough to make that choice. Sometimes, you have to tell impressionable young people that certain things just aren’t good for them.

You can’t join the military until you’re 18. That’s because even the Pentagon has to accept that minors aren’t ready to make those sorts of life decisions. (If it were up to me, I’d raise the age to 25.) If military recruiters want to solicit young people and rope them into that culture before they have enough sense to think twice about what they’re signing on to, I sure as hell don’t want to make it easy. And I don’t want to let them do it in public schools.

Norman — This is madness. Don’t do it.

Follow the (green) federal stimpack money

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During yesterday’s Board committee hearing, which Sup. Eric Mar called, ” to obtain community input on the creation of jobs– particularly green collar jobs, in San Francisco, as the city is positioning itself for federal investment dollars”—Board President David Chiu made two requests of the city: a) please publish information about the status of all the city’s efforts in going after the stimpack dollars on the city’s website and b) let’s have a public hearing on the impact of these stimpack dollars on communities of color.

“Who is going to get jobs and be stimulated by these federal funds?” Chiu asked.

That’s when representatives from the city’s Department of Technology announced that the city iis constructing a website to track all the money coming from the $787 billion federal stimulus package and being sunk into San Francisco’s “shovel ready” projects.

So far, all the website shows is a photo of Gavin Newsom, assumedly saying, “Today we face extraordinary challenges,” and a pie chart that indicates that 70 percent of the funds are allocated to a category that is vaguely defined as “green”, with the remaining 30 percent split between “technology” and “education.”

The website is a good start in helping the public with what is usually an extraordinary challenge: trying to follow taxpayer dollars once they get into government coffers.

And as folks who attended yesterday’s hearing discovered, the first wave of federal funding–the formula funding that was calculated on the basis of census tract data–has already been allocated, mostly to shovel ready projects such as the Doyle Drive rebuild, Treasure Island and the Hunter’s Point Shipyard, with a second wave expected if the state uses some additional state formula funding, and a third wave of discretionary funding accessible, if San Francisco is successful at competing for it.

Folks at the hearing made some great suggestions as to how they’d like to see the money tracked: track it by district, by zip code, by jobs available, by training programs created, by energy efficiency block grants.

Let’s see how that plays out in the weeks and months to come.

Bike Plan is on track

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SFBC director Leah Shahum addressed the Land Use Committee today.

Photo and story by Joe Sciarrillo

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA) today quelled fears that its $120 million budget deficit might kill or delay implementation of the long-awaited Bicycle Plan and its 56 near-term projects, which have been stalled by a three-year court injunction.

Timothy Papandreou, assistant deputy director of Transportation Planning and Development at the SFMTA, told the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee that a new expanded bike network of paths, lanes, racks, and signage will likely get underway in July.

“July/August, we’ll physically start putting things on the street,” he said to a packed room of bicycle supporters, with neon green “Bike Plan Now!” stickers on their shirts and helmets, enthusiastically greeted the news.

We can’t trust the BART Board

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So the BART Board is looking at whether BART cops should carry handguns. Nice. They don’t do too well with shotguns, either.

Seriously, what that department needs, more than anything, is civilian oversight, and if this study is about deflecting that, then it’s a worthless idea.

Assembly member Tom Ammiano has a bill that would force the BART Board to create a San Francisco-style oversight agency.

Ideally, the state Legislature wouldn’t have to spend time on this issue; the BART Board would just do it. But the BART Board is made up largely of lame, lazy hacks who have ignored this issue for years. I called Tom Radulovich, one of the few decent members of that board, and he told me he’d support the bill, but wanted it amended. “It’s too prescriptive,” he said. “We all agree on what the elements should be, but I’m not sure locking a variety of the San Francisco Office of Citizen Complaints into state law is the best idea.”

Radulovich had some suggestions — audits, ways to measure how well the system is working, etc. — which all make sense. And I’m sure there are all sorts of ways that Ammiano’s bill can be improved. But here’s the bottom line:

The final measure that comes out of Sacramento MUST be prescriptive. It must outline in very clear detail exactly what the BART Board has to do. The very fact that Ammiano is pushing this issue, and that the BART Board hasn’t already established an effective oversight plan, is all the evidence you need that it simply won’t happen without a firm state mandate.

I like the OCC model; it’s as imperfect as any government system, and a weak or compromised director and a police chief who refuses to cooperate can undermine its effectiveness. But it does the right thing, which is to take all internal affairs-type civilian complaints out of the hands of the police.

I’m sure Ammiano would be more than open to amendments, but if the BART Board members try to argue that the state should simply set broad guidelines and let them handle the details themselves, the answer is simple:

You’ve had more than 20 years to do that, and you’ve failed, and at least three people who ought to be alive today are dead because of that. No way we’re trusting you to get it right this time.

Pics: Peace march marks six years of Iraq occupation

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Photos and text by Ariel Soto

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This weekend, March 21st, marked the sixth year of the US occupation of Iraq. Hundreds took to the street, despite the rain and cold winds, to sing, drum and dance for peace. Even though the new administration has picked a withdrawal date, many protesters believe it really isn’t soon enough if there is an honest effort to end the mass killings in Iraq. There was also a strong voice at the march against the violence in Gaza.

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SF protests target corporate greed

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Photo and story by Ben Terrall

Popular anger at obscene corporate bonuses being issued in the midst of economic collapse was directed at Wells Fargo’s offices in the SF Financial District yesterday.

Wells Fargo received a $25 billion bailout from the federal government. And while its CEO was paid $26.6 million last year, the bank’s tellers make a median wage of $10.20 per hour.

The San Francisco rally was part of a national day of action that included protests in 33 states. The crowd of around 60 people waved signs that included, “IT’S TIME FOR AN ECONOMY THAT WORKS FOR EVERYONE.”

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