In another sign that Mayor Gavin Newsom is increasingly looking past San Francisco’s needs into his own political future as a candidate for governor, he has announced the resignation of chief of staff Phil Ginsburg, a competent manager and bureaucrat who appears to have been forced out for not having sharp enough political teeth. Replacing Ginsburg is Newsom’s longtime homeless policy point person, Trent Rhorer, a young political animal whose fierce loyalty to Newsom has often been at odds with his obligations as a public servant. As head of the Human Services Agency, Rhorer recently helped gut services to humans in favor of big executive salaries for partisans like himself. In covering eight California counties over my newspaper career, I’ve never encountered a more politicized and less diplomatic department head than Rhorer, who seems acutely aware that Newsom is his meal ticket. “He’s a Newsom sycophant,” Sup. Chris Daly said.
Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin also makes another salient point about Rhorer: “This will be the first time in the history of San Francisco that we’ll have a chief of staff who lives in Oakland.” In fact, Rhorer has often joined the chorus of other outsiders like the Chronicle’s CW Nevius in sounding the suburban perspective on the realities of urban life, an approach we’ll likely see more and more of out of Newsom, whose recent flip-flop on cooperating with the feds is just the beginning of the jilting of San Franciscans in favor of more conservative Californians.
I asked Newsom’s press office (which has also become more partisan in the last year or so) about all of the above via e-mail, and press secretary Nathan Ballard responded simply, “Smart remarks like that one cost Peskin his seat on the selection committee.”
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Newsom political loyalist to head staff
High speed rail moves forward
The California High Speed Rail Authority, during a meeting this morning in San Francisco, voted unanimously to set the Bay Area route through the Pacheco Pass and up the peninsula into the Transbay Terminal and to approve the related environmental documents. The action ends a three-year controversy over whether to bring the proposed high-speed rail line over Pacheco Pass, a cheaper and easier option favored by most Bay Area politicians and government agencies, or over the Altamont Pass, an option favored by groups such as the Planning and Conservation League and California Rail Foundation, which are threatening a lawsuit over today’s decision. The CHSRA board also voted unanimously today to pursue creation of a separate, regional rail line over Altamont that would connect into the high speed rail system.
Meanwhile, there are battles in Sacramento over Assembly Bill 3034, which would update the language and financial oversight provisions of Proposition 1, the $10 billion high speed rail bond measure on the November ballot, replacing current language that was written six years ago when the measure was first approved for the ballot before it was repeatedly pushed back by the Legislature. That bill, which needs a two-thirds vote of both legislative houses, is being heard tomorrow by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Once built, the high speed trains would travel at up to 220 mph and make the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles Union Station in about two and a half hours, mostly likely running entirely on renewable energy sources without the huge greenhouse gas output from either driving or flying. For a lengthy discussion of the project, its complicated politics, today’s vote, and the dramas surrounding AB 3034 and Senator Leland Yee, read next week’s Guardian.
Weekly tries to overturn verdict
Lawyers for the SF Weekly and its parent company tried July 8 to overturn the Bay Guardian’s $16 million predatory pricing verdict, rehashing several old arguments and trotting out a few new ones.
Judge Marla Miller took the case under submission and is expected to rule within ten days.
The Weekly and Village Voice Media asked the judge to throw out the jury verdict or order a new trial. The gist of their arguments: The evidence presented in court didn’t support the decision that a San Francisco jury reached after a five-week trial.
The arguments were at times highly technical, and hinged on the finer points of the definitions of words. In the same way the Bill Clinton once asked what the meaning of “is” is, James Wagstaffe, one of the VVM lawyers, tried to insist that the judge and jury had misinterpreted the term “agent” – and thus improperly concluded that the Phoenix-based chain was equally responsible for paying the damages.
The argument was aimed at severing VVM – a company with $190 million in sales and $11 million in profits – from the verdict. That way the only guilty party would be the Weekly – which VVM admits has no assets and would be unable to pay the Guardian anywhere near $16 million.
Evidence presented at the trial had shown that VVM executives were well aware of, and directly involved in, the SF Weekly’s long pattern of selling ads below cost in an effort to harm a locally owned competitor. In fact, two senior officers, CFO Jed Brunst and group publisher Scott Tobias, admitted on the stand that the SF Weekly would have gone out of business years ago if the chain hadn’t made a policy of shipping large sums of money from headquarters into the San Francisco operation to subsidize below-cost sales.
And yet, Wagstaffe claimed, the law required that VVM be acting as an “agent” for SF Weekly in order to be equally liable. “You have to act on behalf of someone else to be an agent,” he argued. “It is not enough to aid or assist.”
Since VVM was the parent company, Wagstaffe told Miller, nobody at that entity was taking orders from the local subsidiary. So VVM and its officers couldn’t have been SF Weekly’s “agents.”
He also said that Miller had screwed up and given the jury the wrong instructions about the presumption of intent. He said the instructions improperly allowed the jury to assume that VVM and the Weekly intended to harm the Guardian.
At the time those instructions were hammered out, later in the trial, “it was nine o’clock at night and we were all running around,” he told her with typical animation. “I was there with my usual energy but everyone else was tired.”
Guardian lawyer, Ralph Alldredge calmly asked Miller to look directly at the statute involved in the case. “The language is remarkable in its breadth,” he said, explaining that the state Legislature had clearly written the Unfair Practices Act to prevent big companies from hiding their assets by blaming subsidiaries for illegal acts. The law, he said, “refers to aiding and assisting, directly or indirectly, and says that the people who do that are equally responsible.”
He added: “What more aid and assistance could you possibly provide in a predatory pricing case than to fund it?”
As for the jury instructions, Alldredge pointed out that the issue of presumption is hardly new. “That court has already looked long and hard at this,” he said. “There were long discussions about jury instructions.”
Alldredge agued that the state law applied directly to the facts at trial, and that the jury properly applied that law. “This is exactly the sort of scenario that the law was written to cover,” he said. “A big company with operations in many markets was going after a smaller entity in one market.
“That statute,” he concluded, “was set up to presume that if you can prove below-cost sales and damages, intent shouldn’t be the sticking point.”
H. Sinclair Kerr, Wagstaffe’s partner and the lead Weekly lawyer during the trial, then rehashed the VVM argument from the trial that the Guardian profits over the seven year period of the complaint were not sufficient to justify the $6.3 million in damages that the jury awarded. (Miller later ruled that much of the damages should be trebled).
Alldredge countered that the Guardian financial expert, Clifford Kupperberg, had calculated the profit the Guardian could have made during that period without the Weekly’s below-cost pricing and the losses the Guardian experienced. The combination of the two would be around a million dollars a year, he said.
Although Kerr claimed the damages were “excessive,” Alldredge argued the Guardian had to shrink its business to survive the predatory onslaught and would have to make major investments to build the paper back up. “The Guardian must get back the profits and invest to rebuild the business,” he said. There was “nothing excessive about what the jury found,” he said.
At one point, as Kerr tried to bring back the VVM argument about the extent of the competition for the two alternatives Judge Miller interrupted and said, “Do you mean the poetry journal and the paper in Livermore?”
She was referring to the VVM argument during trial in which it cited a huge list of papers, from the Gilroy Dispatch to the Bodega Bay Navigator to a paper in Livermore, as competition. Alldredge made fun of the reference during trial. Miller’s remark stopped Kerr from continuing this line of reasoning.
The hearing lasted four and a half hours, and Miller allowed both sides considerable latitude in speaking and addressing the arguments. Both of the top executives of VVM, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, were on hand, as was Brunst and Andy Van De Voorde, who has been covering the trial for VVM.
Van De Voorde, whose reports have been long on rhetoric and personal attacks, posted an atypically short and non-bombastic story on the hearing.
The Guardian is represented by Alldredge, Hill and E. Craig Moody. The Weekly has brought Forrest Hainline onto its legal team after the trial, but he is no longer involved, so the case is in the hands of Kerr and Wagstaffe.
Click here to see the Guardian arguments as laid out in our opposition brief.
Who will boycott the HRC dinner?
The Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBT lobbying group, is holding its gala dinner in San Francisco July 26th, and the event is creating a political furor.
See, the HRC agreed to a deal last year that cut transgender workers out of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The HRC has been under fire ever since. Local queer activists, furious at the HRC sellout, are boycotting the dinner. And a long list of communithy leaders, including Carole Migden and Mark Leno, Tom Ammiano, Bevan Dufty and Mark Sanchez have signed on and announced they won’t attend.
Dennis Herrera, who was supposed to receive an award at the dinner for his work on same-sex marriage, just announced he won’t go. Good for him.
So who, exactly, WILL be attending this $350-a-plate dinner?
Well, I’m told Rep. Nancy Pelosi has been invited. She was, of course, part of the deal in the House that threw the trans people under the bus, but I don’t think she wants to be the only San Francisco elected official to defy the boycott. Then there’s Mayor Gavin Newsom; the HRC would love to celebrate same-sex marriage this year, since it diverts attention from the ENDA controversy, but will Newsom piss off a nearly unanimous queer community and attend?
Frankly, Pelosi and Newsom would be fools to go. If the HRC had any sense, the group would cancel the event; the group has lost so much credibility in San Francisco that the dinner’s going to be an embarassment.
All your YouTubes belong to Viacom
Happy Independence! This is one of those creepy techie developments that I wish our incredible Techsploitation columnist Annalee Newitz would sink her privacy-defending cyberteeth into, but alas, her column has ended this week.
Basically, as Machinist’s Farhad Manjoo reports (via Wired), in an ongoing copyright infringement case brought by Viacom against YouTube, a judge just yesterday ordered YouTube parent company Google to hand over “12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) [to Viacom] that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.”
Comedy Central knows you’ve watched Busty Heart crush a six-pack with her boobs!
Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple
Viacom, idiotically, still wants to bust YouTube for transmitting copyrighted clips posted by users. “Idiotically,” I say, because if stoner/slackers didn’t put down their combo bong-remotes long enough to post “John Stewart” snippets to YouTube, I’d have absolutely no idea who the heck he was, except someone badly in need of a hairdresser.
I love Web 2.0! We’re all victims of our own pleasure. Next: US Government busts scruffy earnest dudes from Florida who trash Madonna melodically.
The great crack-dealer escape
The Chronicle’s big front-page two-days-in-a-row expose on a handful of undocumented kids escaping from a group home has the mayor scrambling, the city attorney scrambling, the DA scrambling and the national media in a crazy-San-Francisco twitter.
In the end, the pressure’s going to be on to sidestep or undermine San Francisco’s sanctuary-city law, which forbids local authorities from cooperating with the feds in immigration cases.
There’s a good reason for that law: If undocumented immigrants fear the local government will turn them in to be deported, they won’t report crimes, won’t report extortion from employers, won’t seek medical care, etc. It’s also, frankly, a statement that San Francisco doesn’t support and won’t support the horrible anti-immigrant policies of the Bush Administration.
As usual when the Chron gets onto one of these crime stories, the whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. Here’s a little perspective::
When juveniles are arrested in San Francisco, they go into the juvenile justice system, and are placed in the Youth Guidance Center, better known as Juvenile Hall. When the kids in custody are here illegally, and have no parents or legal guardians in town, it’s a bit of a challenge; the sanctuary law (and common sense) say the young people shouldn’t be turned over to the feds, particularly given the horror stories these days about what happens to immigrants in custody.
The Washington Post has done a major report on this, and the tales from behind the concertina wire are horrifying.
No decent judge or prosecutor in San Francisco would want to send nonviolent offenders into that system, particularly minors.
And since they offenders aren’t citizens, they can’t be sent into traditional youth rehab centers.
So for a while, the city just put them on airplanes and sent them home to their families. That wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was better than most of the available options. The feds found out about it and cried foul.
So the city started sending nonviolent minors who lacked documentation to private rehab centers. Not perfect either, but no solution is perfect in this fucked up system. Not surprisingly, eight Hondurans, who were convicted of dealing crack, escaped recently – and that’s what really sent the Chron over the edge.
But remember: These were nonviolent offenders. Many, according to the Public Defender’s Office, are victims themselves, driven (or forced) into the drug trade. They haven’t killed anyone, or robbed anyone.
Of course, the whole thing now has Mayor Newsom ducking, the city attorney saying it wasn’t his fault, the courts pointing at the city – and ICE and the US attorney, along with the likes of Fox News, using this as an opportunity to attack the city’s sanctuary ordinance.
I send Jaxon Van Derbecken, the Chron’s chief reporter on this series, an email this morning asking what he thinks the city ought to do instead – turn the kids over to the feds? He hasn’t answered me yet. I’ll let you know when he does.
Nader questions Obama’s blackness
Photo from Rocky Mountain News
This is the kind of thing I feared when I criticized Matt Gonzalez for joining Ralph Nader’s latest run for president. I cringed when listening to Nader tell the Rocky Mountain News that Obama “talks white” and doesn’t express enough concern for life in “the ghettos,” using anachronistic and extremely paternalistic language to essentially hector Obama for not being black enough.
Progressives have a hard enough time convincing communities of color that we’re on their side without arrogant old white guys talking down to them and the nation’s first black presidential candidate. Nader says he sees no difference between Obama and the other Democrats he’s challenged and says Obama’s campaign is an appeal to “white guilt.”
The best part of the interview is when Nader levels this criticism at Obama: “He censors himself.” Guess what, Ralph? In civil society, we all censor ourselves from time to time, something that is particularly important for a presidential candidate. It’s advice this campaign would do well to adopt before Nader’s antiquated, quasi-racist rhetoric takes that desperate campaign down even further into infamy.
Lennar’s bombing range in Orlando
Explosive news from Orlando: unexploded bombs found on Lennar housing site
How did Lennar build homes on a former military base without the live ordnance first being cleared? That’s the subject of a CNN report about a neighborhood in Orlando that was built on the former Pinecastle Jeep Range.
And as questions swirl about who knew what and when, a bigger question is coming into focus: who will the homeowners be able to hold accountable, now that their homes have been built? Is it the Army Corps of Engineers, the developer?
The report notes that “multiple lawsuits have been filed, accusing builders of gross negligence and seeking unspecified monetary damage.”
NIMBY nightmare: top ten things you don’t want to find in your backyard.
So, is this “real estate fraud” as one commentator on the CNN online edition claims?
And is it true that the government would have to step in and help the banks if all these property owners refused to pay their mortgages, claiming that the contract to buy the property was fraudulent, due to non-disclosure?
Either way, here is an interesting comment that should give prospective home owners pause:
” The twisted thing about real estate is you owe the bank not the developer. The bank pays the developer, and the home-owner is left with 30 years of house payments on a piece of property not safe to live on and lower in value than they paid for it. “
MediaNews lays off toilet paper, pens
Denver-based MediaNews Group announced today that it plans to lay off all pens, note pads and toilet paper declaring that the cuts would enable the company to remain profitable while continuing to serve news to its readers.
The company, which owns several major daily newspapers in the Bay Area including the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times, also disclosed that its reporters will no longer gather in buildings leased or owned by MediaNews as the company will be shedding all of its commercial office space in order to save yet more money. Instead, they’ll meet in freely accessible public parks where they will use scattered twigs to etch their stories into the dirt relying on cans and rope to call their sources. Bloggers will then summarize the etchings by peering over their shoulders, but attribution won’t be necessary, because, well, you can’t link readers to sodden earth.
MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton asked company employees during a press conference in a Denver city park to refrain from throwing beer cans at him so the company can recycle them for pocket change to pay down his vast army of creditors, which is currently threatening mutiny.
Singleton has also reportedly done away with “beats” at his newspapers and his few remaining reporters will from now on cover “whatever they can gather with crude tools available on the ground,” according to the only reporter capable of actually documenting the conference with a pen and note pad, a bored-looking Entertainment Tonight producer who was apparently passing time in the park before Val Kilmer made a rare, rumored appearance in an opulent Denver restaurant around the corner.
“These are strange times,” Singleton said at the conference. “It may appear on the surface that the American people care about the Zimbabwean elections considering the recent demand for coverage there. But my nose for news tells me its anti-union editorials on the front page of the Denver Post that they really want and need.”
Patriotism ain’t black or white
Obama rocked people’s socks off in Oakland, 2007. He’s been doing it ever since, and today he did it, again.
Photo by Khalil Abusaba
Ever since I saw Sen. Barack Obama speaking in Oakland on St. Patrick’s Day, 2007, I’ve been confident that he’ll be able to roll with the punches on the presidential campaign trail, no matter what gets thrown at him.
Today, Obama did it again, turning the predictable attacks on his patriotism into an opportunity to make a great and uplifting speech.
“Patriotism starts as a gut instinct, a loyalty and love for country that’s rooted in some of my earliest memories,” Obama said in a speech that’s being widely reported on the Internet.
Obama said that as he grew up, his patriotism matured to something that “Would survive my growing awareness of our nation’s imperfections: its ongoing racial strife; the perversion of our political system that were laid bare during the Watergate hearings; the wrenching poverty of the Mississippi Delta and the hills of Appalachia.”
Obama said he learned that “What makes America great has never been its perfection, but the belief that it can be made better.”
Patriotism, he also said, must involve the willingness to sacrifice.
He then called attention to the service of John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate.
McCain’s campaign has been calling on Obama to condemn comments from retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who said this weekend that McCain’s service in Vietnam did not necessarily mean that he was qualified to serve as commander-in-chief.
Clark is a military adviser for Obama.
Obama did not directly address Clark’s comments, today, but after calling attention to McCain’s service, he said “no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters of both sides.”
Clean Energy Act excites supervisors
At today’s Rules Committee, Supervisors Bevan Dufty, Tom Ammiano, and Chris Daly, all expressed enthusiasm for San Francisco’s Clean Energy Act. Daly and Ammiano even broke into chants of “victory, victory” during discussion of approving the measure for November’s ballot.
“In 2002 I supported Prop D and I look forward to supporting this measure,” said Dufty during his comments on this new public power ballot initiative. “I think PG&E has not held the public trust in San Francisco well,” he added, citing the smear campaign PG&E launched against Mark Leno during his bid for State Senate.
The measure, known as the “San Francisco Clean Energy Act,” would amend the city charter to require that, within 120 days of passing the legislation, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission must “produce a comprehensive plan for providing clean, secure, cost effective electricity for city departments and residents and businesses.” This may include construction city-owned transmission lines, as well as procuring the resources to advance the Community Choice Aggregation plan of 51 percent renewables by 2017.
It actually goes one step farther and says if CCA falls through, the city must still get 51 percent of their energy from renewable and clean sources, 75 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2040. A green jobs workforce development must also be part of the plan, and if it’s determined that public ownership of the grid and resources is the way to go, any employees fired by PG&E, the private company that provides our power now, will be hired by the PUC.
Sup. Ross MIrkarimi, who introduced the measure, rattled off figures from Alameda, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, and Sacramento, all of whom have publicly-owned utilities and all of whom charge the average household rates far below PG&E.
His figures, for a 500 kilowatt hour household:
Friday Special: Feds cough up $2.8 million over anthrax
Anthrax: the bacteria that wormed its way into the consciousness of an entire nation, thanks to who?
I like to cruise the news on Fridays in search of breaking stories that someone hopes will be buried by the weekend and forgotten by Monday.
I bet the feds are hoping that Steven Hatfill will be one such case.
That’s because they have just agreed to pay the former bioweapons researcher $2.825 million and a $150,000 annuity.
Hatfill, who lost his job, but was never charged, sued the Justice Department in 2003 for violating his privacy , after he was designated a “person of interest” following the deadly anthrax attacks in October 2001.
Five people were killed, 17 became seriously ill–and an entire nation was traumatized, on top of the already traumatizing 9/11 attacks.
Two post office workers died in Washington. An employee of American Media died in Florida; an elderly woman died in Oxford, Connecticut, as did a hospital worker in New York.
At least 24 FBI agents undertook 900 interviews, but no one was ever charged.
It sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but at the news organization where I was working at the time, we were instructed to open the mail wearing gloves and mask, after anthrax-laced letters were sent to the offices of U.S. Sens. Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Veahy of Vermont and a TV news network.
I also remember local law enforcement turning out in full force, after white powder was found on the street outside my office. It turned out to be flour, scattered in a beer run, in which someone had gone jogging, marking the path from bar to bar with flour.
Asked if the perpetrators could be prosecuted, a local fireman told me , “Well, you could stretch it out to littering.”
Wish that we could prosecute whoever was responsible for littering an entire nation’s psyche with fear of anthrax.
But with the feds declaring the case “stone cold,” feel free to share your “anthrax memories” here, lest we forget how thoroughly terrorized we all were–and lest we ignore, at our own peril, how some will seek to reactivate those fears as the November election approaches.
The Chamber attacks public power
The SF Chamber of Commerce is getting itself all into a frothy lather over the prospect of a public-power campaign, and the email that the Chamber sent out today is full of insanely inaccurate iinformation.
Here’s the email and a few notes on its most bizarre claims:
This Friday, June 27 at 10:00am at City Hall, Room 263 the Rules Committee will consider a measure that would put the City in control of our power system. The cost of this measure will be billions of dollars, paid for with higher utility bills, especially for business.
The cost to buy the PG&E electric system in San Francisco in 2010 is presently expected to beat least $4.02 billion. This is only a preliminary estimate, the final figure could be substantially higher. When you include the interest payments on the bonds and the associated severance and financing costs, the ultimate cost for a takeover will be more than twice that amount.
WHAT? Where do you suppose that $4.02 billion came from? It clearly didn’t come from any realistic study. PG&E’s dilapidated, poorly maintained distribution system is probably worth less than $500 million — and even if the city had to pay twice that much, it would be more than worthwhile when you look at how much revenue would come in.
San Franciscans Will Pay to Replace the Lost Tax Revenue
Taking over PG&E means removing PG&E from the tax rolls. That will cost taxpayers over $25 million annually in lost franchise fees, payroll taxes, property taxes, and direct contributions from PG&E. Those taxes and payments will need to be replaced – or services will need to be cut. The City is now facing one of the most severe budget shortfalls ever. The power system takeover will make this budget gap at least $25 million worse. Again, there is no current plan to replace this lost revenue. The PG&E takeover means either service cuts and layoffs – or another massive tax increase.
HUH? The $25 million the city would lose would be more than replaced by the money — several hundred million at least — that the city would gain in extra revenue from running a municipal utility.
We’ll All Pay the Price of Putting City Hall in Charge of our Power System
Right now, PG&E is regulated by the State of California. But a city-run power system would be exempt from most state regulations, giving the Board of Supervisors the power to make some customers pay more so others can pay less, siphon away funds needed for the retrofit of the Hetch Hetchy water system and delay investments in the safety and reliability of our energy grid.
WELL, actually the supervisors could mandate renewable energy — which PG&E isn’t doing.
So the battle is already underway, and already, PG&E’s mouthpieces are putting out wildly misleading data.
Should be a great hearing tomorrow.
Lennar asks feds for help–Republican senator blocks bill
Are we worried, yet? With San Francisco having climbed deeper into bed with Lennar thanks to Prop. G’s passage, the bad news coming from Wall Street and beyond can’t exactly be music to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s ears.
As Lennar reported bigger-than-expected quarterly losses today, Lennar’s Chief Executive Officer Stuart Miller expressed hope that the federal government would soon belly up and help bail out the beleagured housing industry.
Miller cited increased foreclosures, higher unemployment rates and diminished consumer confidence as reasons why the Florida-based mega developer experienced a 61 percent loss in revenues this quarter.
“With the U.S. housing inventory growing in excess of absorption and limited credit available, the prospect of further deterioration in the homebuilding industry will likely become reality absent Federal government action,” said Miller, who is apparently hedging his political bets by making the maximum campaign contribution to both presidential candidates.
“To that end, we are hopeful that the Federal government will acknowledge the need for further reform and will institute programs designed to stabilize and facilitate the recovery of the housing market.”
But a government plan to address the nationwide foreclosure crisis hit a roadblock in the Senate yesterday in the shape of a Republican from Nevada, Sen. John Ensign.
Sen. John Ensign (Nevada) wants $7 billion for renewable energy tax credits before he’ll support foreclosure bill.
This isn’t the first time that Ensign has played the role of lone obstructionist.
In September 2007, the Senate discovered that Ensign was using the “secret hold” to obstruct a bill that requires senators to file fund-raising reports electronically, rather than bury the identity of their benefactors in paper filings.
And for a short period in March 2006, Ensign blocked the nomination of Vice Admiral Thad Allen (who replaced FEMA director Mike Brown in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) to become the next Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.
But now Ensign, who reportedly has been tasked with assembling a staff to win back the U.S. Senate for Republicans in November 2008, is blocking a foreclosure rescue plan that has broad bipartisan support until he gets a vote on his amendment to provide almost $7 billion in renewable energy tax credits.
As a result, passage of the housing bill to create a multi-billion fund to aid thousands of homeowners refinance costly mortgages into more affordable government-backed loans, will likely be delayed until after July 4.
“In an election year, very few things are actually going to make it into law,” Ensign told reporters, “So if you actually want to get something done, you need to be on that train that is basically going to be leaving the station.”
While Lennar spent $5 million to defeat a grassroots coalition that wanted 50 percent affordable housing in the Bayview, the City applied for $25 million in grants to bail out Lennar’s Shipyard development.
Here in San Francisco, Lennar Corp. has assured elected officials that there is no relationship between LandSource, a land and development company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday, June 8, and Lennar’s Bayview Hunter’s Point project.
In a June 9 letter to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Lennar Corporation’s Chief Investment Officer Emile Haddad wrote, “We anticipate that there may be some effort to link LandSource to other Lennar ventures, including Hunters Point Shipyard. Let me be clear: There is no relationship between the two entities. Hunters Point has its own capital structure and financial partners.”
Haddad does not however explicitly mention that LandSource, which owns properties in California, Arizona, Florida, Texas and New Jersey, does have a relationship with Lennar Mare Island, which also filed bankruptcy June 8, leaving city officials in the already bankrupt Vallejo doubly stressed.
And nowhere does Haddad guarantee San Francisco a smooth, obstacle-free redevelopment of Bayview Hunters Point, which apparently is already facing a potentially fatal $25 million funding gap, according to City officials.
“Lennar is committed to continuing to work closely with our community partners and the City and County of San Francisco to overcome any obstacles and to work toward a successful venture,” Haddad writes. “You have my personal reassurance that we will keep you fully informed of any and all significant developments that may impact the project.”
“Likewise, we will continue to utilize the development’s partnership experience and qualifications to leverage all state and federal funding sources to enhance the project and ensure its timely completion.”
As for Lennar’s CEO Stuart Miller, he told investors that “notwithstanding the bleak operating environment, Lennar made significant progress during our second quarter.”
This progress included reducing unsold completed inventory. “We now have on average less than one completed unsold home per community.”
Lennar also reduced selling, general and administrative expenses by 60 percent.
“Given our success with asset reduction, we have shifted our primary focus to the execution of an efficient homebuilding model through the repositioning of our product to meet today’s consumer demand and by aggressively reducing our construction costs.”
Sounds like a potential Triple Uh–oh.
‘we are very pleased to end our second quarter with approx $880 million in cash and no outstanding borrowings under our credit facility. We have reduced our maximum joint venture recourse debt by approximately $1 billion from its peak level in 2006, which reflects a decrease of over 50 percent.”
“We recognize that the remainder of 2008 will likely see further deterioration in overall market conditions; however, we are confident that we will remain well positioned with a strong balance sheet and properly scaled operations to navigate the current market downturn as a leaner and more efficient homebuilder.”
Meanwhile, following a posting of a video showing some community members less than positive take on Lennar, someone replied with a video about Lennar’s homebuilding operations in Texas.
Seems like some folks in the Bayview aren’t the only ones, er, frustrated with Lennar.
Clean Energy — tomorrow!
The Board of Supervisors Rules Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow (Friday) to discuss the new clean-energy charter amendment. It’s a long-overdue measure that would give San Francisco control of its own energy future and set aggressive mandates for sifting to renewable resources for electricity.
The measure is sponsored by Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin, and includes the following:
1. A mandate that 51% of the city’s electricity is generated from renewable resources by 2017, 75% by 2030, and 100% by 2040. This would be one of the few laws in the country that requires a city to move toward a 100 percent renewable portfolio. It also requires the Public Utilities Commission to issue a report every two years explaining how the city is meeting those goals. This would be a model for cities around the nation (and around the world), and would put San Francisco in the forefront of the movement to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change. Since state and federal governments are moving far too slowly on the most important environmental issue of our lives, cities are going to have to take the lead, and San Francisco – one of the most progressive communities in the nation — should be showing everyone else how to do to that.
2. A mandate that the city move toward acquiring its distribution system for the sale of electricity. Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which now supplies the residential and business customers in San Francisco, is spending a huge amount of money on a greenwashing campaign to convince residents that it’s moving away from fossil fuels. That’s a big lie: PG&E’s current power profile is 44 percent fossil fuels, 24 percent nuclear, 20 percent large hydro, and only 12 percent renewable – and the utility admits that it will not even make the state’s mandate of 20 percent renewable by 2010. . The only way this city is going to have a truly environmentally sound energy program is if we run it ourselves.
Of course, a publicly run utility has other big advantages. Public-power agencies all over the country have lower electric rates and many bring in huge amounts of revenue, which the city desperately needs. And public-power is good for the economy
3. Mandate green jobs and job training for San Franciscans. There’s a lot of money in renewable energy, and thousands and thousands of good jobs. The measure mandates that the PUC as part of creating a public power agency create job-training programs to help San Franciscans build careers in green energy.
The hearing is at 10 am. Be there and support this crucial legislation.
Weekly paper dies in Cleveland
Curious deal creates alternative weekly monopoly
By Tim Redmond
I’m a little late on this, but it’s taken me a while to figure out the back story.
The parent company of the SF Weekly, which a few months ago sold off the East Bay Express, is shedding another money-losing paper — in the process, ending alternative weekly competition in Cleveland.
Village Voice Media will sell the Cleveland Scene to Times Shamrock, a chain that owns five other alternative weeklies. Times Shamrock is also buying the Cleveland Free Times, and will merge the two papers under the Scene name.
“It’s a sad day,” David Eden, former Free Times editor, told me. “This is a strong voice that being silenced.”
It’s also a curious new chapter in a six-year-old saga involving the nation’s largest alternative weekly chain, the U.S. Department of Justice and a scheme to wipe out competition in two markets.
The Scene was losing gobs of money, more than $1 million last year alone, according to documents filed in court as part of the Guardian’s lawsuit against VVM. The Free Times, owned by The Times-News of Erie Pennsylvania, was also struggling, publisher Matt Fabyan told me, “although we were much closer to stable.”
Still, there’s been talk of shutting the Free Times for months now: Back in December, 2007, Justice Department lawyers contacted Eden and asked him if he thought the Cleveland market was big enough for two competing alternative papers. “I told them it was,” Eden said.
Among the proposals on the table: VVM was interested in buying the paper and merging it with the Scene. But federal regulators wouldn’t allow it.
The reason: Back in 2003, the Justice Department and the attorneys general of California and Ohio filed suit against New Times, then the owner of the Scene, and VVM, which owned the Free Times. The two chains, which have since merged, had entered into a shady – and, it turns out, illegal – arrangement to create alt-weekly monopolies in Cleveland and Los Angeles. VVM agreed to shut its paper in Cleveland, and in exchange, New Times shut a paper in Los Angeles that was competing with the VVM-owned LA Weekly.
Justice forced the chains to sell the Free Times to a group of investors who vowed to keep it open and continue competition. The consent decree the chains signed bared them from taking any further anticompetitive actions in Cleveland or L.A.
But although VVM couldn’t create a monopoly, another newspaper outfit apparently can.
Fabyan said he had been in contact with the Times Shamrock people for some time, and that “I told them you really want to buy both papers. I don’t think this is a market big enough for two alternative weeklies.”
Eden was willing to try to save the Free Times: He said that he’d raised enough money to make a “substantial offer” for the paper: “I’m told that VVM had offered $450,000 for the Free Times,” he said. “We were close to that figure.” But his bid was turned down.
Don Farley, who runs the alt-weekly group at Times Shamrock, said he couldn’t comment on the details of the negotiations except to say that “we’ve been back and forth looking at the Free Times, and Scene became available as well.”
That was clearly part of the appeal: Running a paper that has no competition is typically more lucrative. “We can serve the community better this way,” said Fayan, who will be publisher of the Scene.
Andy Van De Voorde, executive associate editor at VVM, told me that his company didn’t see this as a three-way deal. “We sold our paper to Times Shamrock, and that’s our only role,” he said.
But he also confirmed that VVM had wanted to buy the Free Times and merge the two papers, but had run afoul of the Justice Department. “I’ll leave it to you to speculate on why we couldn’t do this deal, but Times Shamrock could,” he said.
Well, for one thing, Times Shamrock isn’t a previous offender, under a consent decree to stop trying to monopolize markets. But I’m also curious why Justice is allowing this to happen.
I’ve been trying to get a comment out of the Justice Department since Friday. The PR people keep telling me they’ll get back to me. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.
Towards Carfree Cities: Wrapup
Bay Guardian City Editor Steven T. Jones covered Towards Carfree Cities, an international conference held last week in Portland (the first time it was in the U.S.), and wrote the following reports.
Video of Portland’s first Ciclovia-style street closure, Sunday Parkways, from www.streetfilms.org
What is carfree? — A look at the concept behind the conference
“We’re not doing enough” — A clarion call for U.S. cities to join an international movement
Everybody into the streets! — Portland created a carfree Ciclovia, just like San Francisco plans to do in August
From geeks to freaks, a look at Portland bicycle culture — The movement in motion
Depaving Day — Transforming urban spaces from asphalt to soil
San Franciscans in the house — Local thinkers played a big role at the conference
Treasure Island as case study — Could we build a model carfree project just off the San Francisco shoreline?
Spreading the word — Streetsblog and other media innovators make the carfree case
Aboard a Portland-bound train — Riding the rails with the San Francisco contingent
Towards Carfree Cities: Treasure Island as case study
Could Treasure Island go carfree? That was the intriguing question that Gus Yates, president of the Berkeley-based nonprofit Carfree City USA, posed during a thought-provoking presentation he gave last week at the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland.
The question goes to the heart of whether U.S. cities are prepared to take more than baby steps toward reducing automobile dependence. Treasure Island, which is being redesigned almost from scratch, is close to the urban core and faces significant challenges to accommodating thousands of new motorists. If not there, where?
The question wasn’t simply an abstract exercise, but a serious proposal that Yates formally presented last year to Kheay Loke, senior project manager with Wilson Meany Sullivan, the lead developer for Treasure Island, which is proposed to include about 6,000 new housing units.
The compelling arguments that Yates makes – and the reasons that Loke offered for turning Yates down – shows how, in the minds of current decision-makers, capitalist imperatives still trump the need to seriously wrestle with global warming, traffic congestion, declining public health, and other byproducts of automobile reliance.
The SF Democratic Party’s future
Lots of talk and some interesting action at the Harvey Milk LGBT Club meeting last night. Marc Salomon, Robert Haaland and I gave a presentation on the meaning of the June election, and what November’s going to be about, and I passed along my thoughts about the tremendous potential for a broad progressive coalition this fall.
But mostly, the discussion involved the Democratic County Central Committee.
See, in June, thanks to a well-organized slate effort, the progressives won enough seats to hold something close to a working majority on the DCCC. That matters – and this fall, it could matter a lot. Because the DCCC controls the endorsements and money for the local Democratic Party. And in some of the key local races, particularly the swing supervisorial districts, the party’s money and party support could make the difference.
And the first test for the progressive slate will be the vote in a few weeks for DCCC chair.
The problem with city planning
I’m always intrigued when civic-improvement types talk about the problems with city planning in San Francisco — and harp on the fact that it takes too long to get anything done and that the same old naysayers are too powerful. The latest is a piece by David Prowler, former planning commissioner, that appeared on BeyondChron.
Among the Prowlerisms:
Forget about consensus. We’re not going to get it, and too often the planners or the Board of Supervisors delay decision-making while waiting for it. But it gets farther away. We need leadership, not consensus.
TRANSLATION: Who cares what the community thinks; leave the big decisions to elected officials who the developers can effectively lobby.
Let’s be frank and clear about what land-use planning can and cannot do. It doesn’t by itself create buildings or good jobs. The City is trying to preserve blue-collar jobs by zoning to prevent housing (It’s been characterized as “zoning for gold mines and expecting gold”). But how about linking zoning with a strategy to create these jobs?
THE PROBLEM: No, land-use planning can’t always create good things, but it can sure as hell destroy things, and has done so for decades in San Francisco. Redevelopment didn’t create much in the Western Addition, but it destroyed a community. No, good zoning won’t create blue-collar jobs — but bad zoning will destroy them.
Reconsider CEQA. We discuss projects and plans within the framework of the California Environmental Quality Act, best known by the acronym CEQA, which mandates addressing only how much damage can a proposal do to the environment, not how can it help the city meet goals or help the regional environment by concentrating growth where there’s infrastructure. Here in San Francisco, we hold up even small-scale projects, such as the 17 residences and retail uses proposed at the empty lot at 19th and Valencia streets by the longtime residents and owners of a popular Mexican restaurant. Really, in a built-up city, along a transit street where just about every other spot is housing over stores, how much environmental damage could a project like this do?
TRANSLATION: Get those pesky project foes out of the way and take away any tool they have to preserve their neighbhorhoods.
This kind of stuff infuriates me. The problem with city planning is very simple, and I can phrase it in one sentence: Planning in San Francisco is driven almost entirely by private developers and exists to serve their interests and needs.
And of course, although it doesn’t say so in his piece, David Prowler is a developer.
PG&E lobbying doubletime
image courtesy of www.opensecrets.org
PG&E spent almost $2 million on lobbying during the first quarter of 2008, according to an Associated Press report today. Last year they spent just under $4 million, which means they’re pacing to spend double that this year.
As the industry tally for electric utilities on OpenSecrets.org shows, PG&E is third in the national field – outranked by Southern Company and the Edison Electric Institute (basically a gigantic energy lobbying group of which PG&E is also a member.)
Of course, that’s just taking care of national business. Closer to home, the $13 billion utility company has dropped $208,357.08 this year on lobbying – mostly wining and dining California Public Utilities Commissioners, influencing election outcomes, and paying the salaries of their employees who sit on public boards like the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.
And just an FYI for y’all — the spike in PG&E lobbying in 2006, as shown in the above graph, can be traced to the $11 million the corporation spent defeating a public power campaign in Yolo County. As a public power initiative for San Francisco heads to the November 2008 ballot, can we expect another banner year of spending from PG&E?
Towards Carfree Cities: Everybody into the streets!
Steven T. Jones covered the Towards Carfree Cities conference, which closed yesterday with the first Sunday Parkways, and brought back these photos and words.
Clear the streets of cars and they will fill with happy people riding their bikes, playing games or music, strolling with their families, communing with friends and strangers, teaching children to bike or skate, and generally building community across class, racial and regional lines.
That’s a lesson pioneered during the Sunday road closures known as Ciclovias in Bogota, Columbia and other foreign cities, events that made their U.S. debut yesterday in Portland, Oregon, drawing huge crowds and rave reviews. The city’s six-mile Sunday Parkways loop connected several North Portland parks and created a healthy, fun, communal atmosphere.
Next up are New York City, Baltimore, and San Francisco, which are all working on Ciclovias planned for later this year. SF’s version, dubbed Sunday Healthways, proposes to open up more than four miles of roadways from the Bayview Opera House to Portsmouth Square in Chinatown along the waterfront for three weekends starting in August (officials tell me more details are due for release after July 4 once current permitting discussions wrap up).
There’s bound to be a backlash among the cars-first set in San Francisco once the event is publicized and underway. But as Gil Peñalosa, who developed the concept as parks director in Bogota and now promotes it internationally, said at last week’s Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland, “The educational benefits are huge.”
Simply having a community discussion about carfree concepts – even if it means arguing about the details and scale of Ciclovias — helps people understand the environmental and social imperatives behind reallocating urban spaces, he said. In many U.S. cities, more than half of all land goes to circulating automobiles, but as Peñalosa said, “The roads are big enough for people to do many things.”
The punishment of baby jesus
Brock at sfist jokes that the San Bruno fire must be “baby Jesus totally punishing us for legalizing queer marriage.”
I’ve been thinking about this whole punishment thing. Isn’t it interesting that, while sodomous, sinful San Francisco was partying over same-sex nuptials, the nice, Christian midwest was getting a flood of Biblical proportions?
Of course, it could just be human-made climate change.
But it brings back that old ditty written by poet Charles Kellogg Field after the 1906 earthquake and fire:
‘If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling’s whiskey?'”
The Chron discovers what’s wrong with SF
It’s taken long enough, but the San Francisco Chronicle has finally figured out the biggest story in town, a story that’s been the single most important part of the city’s political and social landscape for more than a decade: Housing prices are “>driving the middle class out of town.
There’s lots of handwringing and comments from people like Roberta Achtenberg:
“It’s not very healthy for the city’s social fabric or the city’s economy,” said Roberta Achtenberg, an economic development consultant who focuses on workforce housing.
Gee — until recently, Achtenberg worked for the Chamber of Commerce, which has been a big part of the reason that the city drives out poor people and the middle class.
Nowhere in the story is there any mention of the reason official city policy is in large part to blame. You know why there’s no affordable housing? Because we only build housing for rich people.