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The future of the DCCC

Zelda Bronstein
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The future of the DCCC

Now that Aaron Peskin is retiring as chair of the Democratic County Central Committee, and is not even seeking re-election, the future of a realtively obscure but political important agency is very much up in the air.

Peskin had his share of critics, and he would be the fist to say it was time for him to move on, but he orchestrated the progressive takeover of the DCCC four years ago and turned it into an operation that helped get progressives elected to local office. He raised money for the party and kept the often (ahem) fractious progressive committee members going in the same direction. He was a leader — and without him, the left wing of the local Democratic Party is struggling.

Nobody has been able at this point to take Peskin’s place — and in the meantime, the moderate-to-conservative folks are moving agressively to take the DCCC back.

It’s going to be a fascinating race — Gov. Jerry Brown just signed a bill that changes the makeup of the committee, giving the east side of town more members. That’s because more than 60 percent of the Democrats in the city live in what is now Tom Ammiano’s Assembly district. (The east side district of Fiona Ma now includes more of the Peninsula.)

So 14 of the members will be elected from Ammiano’s district, and only 10 from Ma’s (more conservative) district.

But Peskin won’t be on the ballot, and incumbent Debra Walker has stepped down and won’t run (she’s been replaced by Police Commission member Petra DeJesus).

Meanwhile, among the more centrist people who have filed to run: Former Supervisor Bevan Dufty. Sup. Malia Cohen, School Board Member Hydra Mendoza, and former Redevelopment Commission member London Breed. Sup. Scott Wiener, a longtime incumbent, is running for re-election.

The left starts with a vote deficit, since all of the statewide and federal elected officials who are Democrats and live in or represent part of SF are automatically members. That means Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jackie Speier, Attorney General Kamala Harris, state Sen. Leland Yee, State Sen. Mark Leno, Ma and Ammiano all have votes — and while they never show up, the elected officials send proxies, and other than Ammiano and sometimes Yee and Leno, they can’t be counted on to support progressive candidates and causes.

So progressives need to win more than a simple majority of the contested 24 seats, and while that’s entirely possible, it’s hard to see a full slate in both districts. At best, most progressive groups will probably endorse 12 candidates on the east side and eight on the west — and since the most conservative incumbents will likely win, as will Dufty, probably Cohen and quite possibly Breed, it’s entirely possible that the moderate wing will regain control.

There’s been some tension among progressives in the past few weeks, some arguments about who would best replace Peskin as chair. Animosity over those discussions was one reason Walker resiged. And while there are legit questions about which of the progressives would best run the committee, I fear the candidates were getting ahead of themselves. Because you can’t fight over leadership until you have a majority. And that’s going to be a bigger struggle than it’s been in quite a while.

Olague explains her support for RCV repeal measure

Sasha Cuttler
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Olague explains her support for RCV repeal measure

  Sup. Christina Olague has drawn ire from progressive circles over her pivotal co-sponsorship of a proposed charter amendment that aims to eliminate Ranked Choice Voting in all citywide races. It takes six members of the Board of Supervisors to place the repeal measure on the November ballot and she is the sixth co-sponsor.

Olague has long ties to the progressive community and was appointed by Mayor Ed Lee to the District 5 seat, one of the city’s most progressive, in January after Ross Mirkarimi was elected Sheriff. This week, she joined Sean Elsbernd, Carmen Chu, Scott Wiener, and Malia Cohen – all considered moderate/conservative supervisors – in supporting Sup. Mark Farrell’s proposal to replace RCV with runoff elections for the mayor’s race and other citywide offices.

“To me, this isn’t a progressive or moderate issue. This is a democratic one here in San Francisco,” Farrell said during Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, where he introduced the measure, which will have a hearing next month. “Ranked Choice Voting has continued to confuse and disenfranchise voters here for over a decade and, in my opinion, it’s time to restore our voting system to the one person, one vote rule.”

Farrell’s sentiments mirror a similar line trumpeted by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, a supporter of runoff elections and longtime opponent of RCV. A recent poll commissioned by the Chamber, which claims 58 percent of respondents prefer runoff elections, has been discounted as biased and based on misleading statements. Farrell, who was elected to the District 2 seat in November using RCV, said he would have prefers to eliminate RCV altogether in San Francisco but said, “This is a significant step in the right direction.” A proposed ballot measure by Farrell and Elsbernd to eliminate RCV was rejected by the Board of Supervisors last month.

Steven Hill, who helped crafted the city’s voter-approved RCV system, criticized the move to repeal it: “Critics of RCV have long maintained that voters are confused and even disenfranchised and yet they have offered no credible evidence to support these claims. In fact, the evidence shows just the opposite, that voters understand what they have to do with RCV, which is to rank their ballots, 1, 2, 3, and they are using their ranked ballots effectively.”

In an interview conducted as she was departing the Westbay Community Center on Thursday, Olague initially rebuffed our request to discuss her support for Farrell’s amendment (just as she had an earlier request by the Guardian), but she ultimately relented.

Here’s what she had to say:

Olague: “What it is is that it begins a conversation.  There was talk of eliminating RCV altogether, which I certainly don’t support.  There was talk from a lot of different corners, not just moderate circles, but progressive circles as well, that maybe we need to examine it and see how has it or has it not really been – has it really helped us reach our goals in the way that we had originally intended that it would.”

SFBG: What were those goals?

Olague: “I think it was to try to make sure that more progressives were elected… and make it easier for people who had lesser means to prevail… So I think maybe it is time to reflect on that a little bit.”

SFBG: What parts of RCV don’t you like or don’t support?

Olague: “Well, I think it’s just time to have a conversation about it.  I’m not even sure that I’m against it, per se. When I signed on to it, I believed it was looking at keeping some of the citywide races, where there are fewer numbers of candidates engaged, to reverting back to a runoff, and keeping the races where we have a diversity of candidates and numerous candidates, which are the district races, as they are – which is ranked choice voting.”

“Now there’s some people who say what we need to do is, well, maybe revisit that and maybe just, rather than have it apply to all citywide races, maybe it should just apply to the mayor’s race.”

“So I think there needs to be a conversation and there needs to be a reflection on its effectiveness.  I think that’s what [Sup. John] Avalos and even [Sup. David] Campos were thinking that there needs to be more education – and I do think there needs to be more education as it relates to RCV.”

SFBG: Voters don’t seem to be confused about filling out an RCV ballot, but maybe there’s confusion about how votes are tallied and candidates are eliminated.  It would appear that there’s a myth being spread that voters are confused about filling in a RCV ballot, but that doesn’t appear to be the case…

Olague: “Do you know that?  I think when you talk to people out there on either side of spectrum, politically, I think there’s still a lot of – I don’t think that people have necessarily concluded that this is the most effective way of achieving certain goals.  But, you know, I think it starts a conversation and it may end up that the voters decide, you know, let’s just leave it the way it is, we’re happy with it.”

SFBG: And how would you feel if RCV is completely eliminated?

Olague: “Well it’s not going to be eliminated because there’s nothing in the charter amendment asking that RCV be eliminated.  What I was concerned about was that there was a push to eliminate it altogether, which I don’t support.  What this does, I figured I’ll meet them halfway because I can’t support a complete repeal of RCV and currently the way this charter amendment is drafted, what is does is it keeps RCV in the District elections.  That stays the same, and the citywide elections would be reverting back to a runoff, so it goes to a more citywide for a runoff, ranked choice voting for District [elections]. There is an argument to be made for why that should be the case.”

SFBG: Wouldn’t this eliminate a diversity of candidates if there were a repeal of RCV in citywide races?

Olague: “So let’s have the debate and people may decide, you know, if it’s not a good idea. People may decide they want to push to amend the charter amendment as it is before us.  Some people are thinking it should just apply to the mayor’s race and not other citywide races like public defender and others. So maybe there’ll be amendments to the charter amendment before it even hits the ballot.”

SFBG: Why do you think some people are up in arms over your support on this?

Olague: “I guess, you know, I mean – I just think that everyone is going to sit around and wait for something, right?  They’re, sort of, laying in wait, right? So it’s just what it is, you know – it’s like people are going to agree with me sometimes, they’re not going to agree with me other times.  There are some things that I am doing that is progressive, there are some things people will perceive as not being progressive.”

SFBG: Did you come to this decision by yourself, or was there any influence or pressure from others to vote the way you did on this?

Olague: “No.  I just think it’s funny because it’s like I don’t really succumb to pressure.  I’m willing to start the conversation at some kind of a compromise.  To me, this is as close to a compromise as we’re going to get and then it can start the conversation. So I think the conversation will start and people can assume all kinds of things, and they will.”

SFBG: So you voted in good conscience?  You didn’t have any doubts about your vote?

Olague: “I vote in good conscience, but sometimes you have to go with a compromise.  It’s not completely what you want and it might not be completely what you don’t want, but the alternative might be something that is completely unacceptable, which could be the complete elimination of RCV.”

 

A version of this story also appears on Fog City Journal, which is run by Luke Thomas.

Sisters unite: Hyatt workers picket on International Women’s Day

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About 80 protesters from a coalition of women workers yesterday staged a peaceful protest demanding that Hyatt reinstate two workers, Martha and Lorena Reyes, who were fired in October. 

The Reyes sisters claim they were fired after Martha tore down photoshopped images of the sisters’ heads tacked onto the cartoon images of women’s bodies in bikinis. These images were displayed in their workplace, the Hyatt Santa Clara, along with similar images of 70 fellow housekeepers. Hyatt has denied that tearing down the picture was the cause for the Reyes’ sisters’ termination. 

The protest, planned for International Women’s Day, was also meant to draw attention to what the demonstrators see as widespread disregard for the health and safety of women workers at Hyatt, as well as an ongoing contract dispute between UNITE HERE and Hyatt hotels.

“Underpaid, Underrated”

Demonstrators formed a picket line outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel at Union Square, chanting “women united will never be defeated.” The protest was accompanied by a creative project; a “clothesline” displaying more than 50 garments on which workers and allies had painted solidarity slogans. 

“Women: 51 percent of world’s population, 70 percent of world’s poor, 66 percent of world’s workers, produce 50 percent of food, earn 10 percent of the income. Underpaid, underrated” read one puff-painted t-shirt.

“We are taking out the dirty laundry and talking about the injustices that Hyatt has done,” Martha Reyes told the Guardian.

Groups such as Mujeres Unidas y Activas, the Day Labor Program, the Chinese Progressive Association, and Gabriela USA (an coalition advocating for the rights of Filipino women workers), and the Progressive Jewish Alliance represented at the rally. 

Sup. John Avalos also marched in the picket line supporting the workers.

“I’m here to support the workers on International Women’s Day,” said Avalos. He decried the bikini pictures, which he said “create a hostile work environment,” and remarked that hostile work environments for women are all too common.

Inspired by the large turn-out, which Labor Council representative Conny Ford called “a multi-generational, multi-ethnic group of community and labor,” UNITE HERE Local 2 decided to enter the Grand Hyatt in an attempt to meet with General Manager David Nadelman. He conceded, and spoke with a delegation of about 30 women.

In a polite and non-confrontational meeting, Nadelman listened as each woman in the delegation took a minute to tell her story. 

Nadelman, who has managed 16 different Hyatt locations, gave a supportive response. 

“I appreciate and respect each and every one of you, and I want you to know your words will not go unheard. I will share the message, because that’s the least I can do,” Nadelman told the group.

Ford, who helped facilitate the meeting, responded that “the proof will be in the pudding.”

In a debrief about the meeting that closed the rally, the group expressed uncertainty that Nadelman’s promise to help would be fruitful. Some suggested ramping up tactics in the future, and potentially demanding that Nadelman call the Hyatt Santa Clara and ask them to reinstate the Reyes’s. 

The rally closed with chants of “we’ll be back.”

When asked to clarify his positions, Nadelman reiterated to the Guardian that “the message will be brought back to the folks I report to and beyond.”

He also expressed frustration with UNITE HERE Local 2, who was been locked in a contract battle with several Bay Area Hyatt locations since 2009.

Conflicted history

In an ongoing contract negotiation, the Hyatt wants to remove a part of the hotel workers’ contract that allows workers to vote on whether or not new hotels built in San Francisco or San Mateo will be unionized, on their terms. 

“Workers did 53-day lockout to win that language in 2005,” said Wong. “They’re not going to give it up.”

UNITE HERE is requesting a “solidarity clause,” which would allow workers to protest if they feel any Hyatt in the US or Canada is mistreating its workers. Currently, the contract contains a clause prohibiting workers from striking, boycotting or picketing while the contract is in place. 

Neither party seems likely to give up their demand. Since 2009, UNITE HERE and other supporters have spread a boycott of Hyatt hotels throughout the country, which they claim has cost Hyatt $25 million worth of business. 

Hyatt has made strides to counter UNITE HERE in their contract campaign as well as claims that Hyatt mistreats workers. They created a website, devoted largely to countering claims made by UNITE HERE. 

Hyatt representatives have also issues statement alleging that a 2010 peer-reviewed, UNITE HERE-funded study entitled Occupational Injury Disparities in the US Hotel Industry  “distorted data to achieve a result that was negative to the hotel industry.”

The report compared injuries of workers at 50 hotel properties owned by five companies, and found that Hyatt housekeepers had the highest rate of injury.

Workers report being injured while lifting heavy mattresses that often exceed 100 pounds in order to change the sheets and cleaning slippery bathrooms. According to Wong, these issues could be addressed in part if housekeepers were given proper tools. Fitted sheets, for example, would halve the work involved in bed-making, but housekeepers are provided only with flat sheets, according to Wong.

“When the Hyatt bought their location in Santa Clara, they took away the long-handled mops and replaced them with kneepads,” she says. 

The Hyatt Santa Clara has since provided long-handled mops to its housekeepers.

But Nenita Ibe, 70, is still angry that she was made to clean the bathroom on her hands and knees.

“I would always bump my head on the sink,” Ibe told the Guardian. “It’s completely wrong.”

Ibe has also lost full use of her left arm due to the repetitive motion involved in making beds.

A similar protest at the Hyatt Santa Clara the morning of March 8 brought more than 150 supporters. A delegation also successfully met with that location’s general manager, Dania Duke. 

After meeting with the delegation, Nadelman expressed frustration to the Guardian.

“It would make a lot of sense for both Hyatt and Local 2 to sit down at the table and negotiate a new, fair contract,” he said.

“We keep asking them for dates to do this, and have yet to be given one.”

But according to Wong, UNITE HERE is willing to negotiate, but not to concede some aspects of the agreement.

“As far as this contract, they know what we are demanding and they know how to get in touch with us. We’re just going to keep fighting until that happens,” said Wong.

Sisters in struggle

UNITE HERE’s campaign against the Hyatt covers working conditions and contracts all over the country. Now, they’re also hoping to get Martha and Lorena Reyes they’re jobs back, and the campaign has galvanized support. 

The sisters filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission in November. 

Jan. 7, they met Gloria Steinem at a conference at Stanford on the future of feminism and told her their story; she signed on to the nationwide Hyatt boycott. 

The women, who worked in the hotel for decades, say they will continue to fight until they are rehired.

“We want to have respect at work and to be treated fairly and equally. WE want to also put pressure on Hyatt for us to be able to return to work.  And we want to be able to make sure that Hyatt respects women and gives them safe working conditions and job protection, not get fired like we were,” said Martha Reyes.

SFPD-FBI spying restrictions could face mayoral veto

Sasha Cuttler
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SFPD-FBI spying restrictions could face mayoral veto

If the San Francisco Police Department isn’t working with the FBI to secretly spy on law-abiding local residents – as a secret document released last year indicated they had the authority to do – then why are Police Chief Greg Suhr, Mayor Ed Lee, and others opposing legislation that would ban such surveillance?

That’s the question that longtime police policy expert John Crew of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is asking as he tries to get two more members of the Board of Supervisors to join the six current co-sponsors of the legislation, which the board will consider on Tuesday, in anticipation of having to override a mayoral veto.

“What’s the harm?” Crew told us. “There’s something that doesn’t add up here.”

As we reported at the time, the ACLU last year obtained a 2007 memorandum-of-understanding between the SFPD and the FBI establishing procedures for the Joint Terrorism Task Force, in which SFPD personnel would be under the command of the FBI, circumventing local and state restrictions on domestic surveillance of people who haven’t committed any crimes.

After the ensuring controversy and under pressure from members of the Police Commission, Police Chief Greg Suhr issued Bureau Order #2011-07 to clarify that SFPD personnel are bound by local and state privacy protections. “With this Bureau Order, the language of the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding no longer applies and SFPD personnel are bound by the provisions of the 2011 Order,” SFPD Public Information Officer Albie Esparza told us last month.

Suhr and Lee have each made public statements indicating that the new legislation – developed by the ACLU and carried by Sup. Jane Kim with five progressive supervisors as co-sponsors – is redundant and unnecessary. But Crew and the ACLU made a Sunshine Ordinance request for any modifications to the MOU or communications with the FBI indicating that SFPD’s contractual obligations no longer apply, and there were no such documents.

“When you talk about civil rights, you put it in writing,” Crew said. “This really doesn’t add up. We’re getting conflicting explanations. And the bottom line is this problem has been solved in Portland.”

When a similar issue arose in Portland, Oregon, civil libertarians pressured the city to withdraw from its MOU with the FBI and create a new one that includes restrictions on the surveillance of people who were not suspected of any crimes, but who may have been subjected to FBI attention because they were Muslims or because of their political beliefs. And Crew said it didn’t harm the relationship of the two policing agencies.

At an emotional hearing last week before the Public Safety Committee, a long string of representatives from groups that have been singled out for FBI surveillance that violated protections under the California Constitution – Muslims, anarchists, anti-war activists, Occupy demonstrators, immigrant groups, environmentalists, animal rights activists, etc. – urged supervisors to stand up for them. The legislation has a long and diverse list of organizational supporters.

Sup. Scott Wiener – one of two supervisors that Crew is hoping to win over – told us, “I agree that local surveillance rules should govern. But I’m not convinced that we need this legislation.”

Wiener said he still hasn’t made up his mind, and he plans to speak with Portland’s mayor before Tuesday’s hearing.

So why wouldn’t he support legislation that simply made his position official city policy? Wiener said he’s wary of telling SFPD how to do law enforcement and with “reducing the ability of the department to be flexible in the future.”

Crew said representatives of the Mayor’s Office, which did not respond to our calls for comment, have told him that Lee would defer to the SFPD’s determination of whether to sign the legislation. “That’s a pretty stunning claim,” Crew said, “which does not bode well in terms of reasonable civilian control of the SFPD for the next few years. I sure hope they back off that.”

Kim, who has a good relationship with the Mayor’s Office, also did not return calls for comment. But Crew was incredulous about why anyone who believes in civil liberties would oppose this legislation, telling us, “This is not a radical stand here.”

Families leaving SF: It’s housing costs, stupid

Zelda Bronstein
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Families leaving SF: It’s housing costs, stupid

City officials continue to wring their hands over why families are leaving the city, and I’m sure there are a number of factors, but I can tell you that from the people I know — families who live in the city or want to live in the city — it’s all about the cost of housing.C

Critics of the SFUSD like to say that families are leaving for better schools, but those families haven’t been paying attention to the tremendous strides the district has made in recent years. Yes, middle schools are still a challenge in some areas, and yes, not all the public schools are great, but overall, most families that make the effort to find a quality school for their kids can do it.

The folks I know who work in the city hate the idea of living in the burbs. Nobody wants to commute across that bridge or through the BART tunnels every day; more important, nobody wants to be on the other side of the Bay from their house and their kids when the Big Earthquake hits. The problem is the money.

You want to keep families in San Francisco? Building housing for multimillionaires isn’t going to do it. If it were up to me, I’d float about a $5 billion revenue bond, buy up all the housing on the private market, put it all in a land trust and resell it — with the provision that the buyers had every right of ownership except the right to sell for a profit. That’s not likely to happen — but the city has to get serious about both building new affordable housing and (even more important) preserving what’s already there.

Yes, a lot of families want to buy a house, but a lot of families would be happy with a decent, affordable place to rent. Particularly if they knew that they wouldn’t be evicted so a richer person can buy or rent the place. What most families want is stability — they want to know where they’re going to live not just this year but when their kids are older. So many renters in this town live in such fear of eviction that it’s a huge incentive to move somewhere else.

You can talk about parks and playgrounds and youth programs, but San Francisco’s never going to be as family-friendly as we’d all like unless we can do something about housing costs and rental stability.

 

The struggle for housing money at City Hall

Zelda Bronstein
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The struggle for housing money at City Hall

It’s barely March, and the next election isn’t until June and that’s just primaries and the Democratic County Central Committee, but we just started getting political mail anyway. It’s a piece from the Board of Realtors, denouncing plans for an increase in the real-estate transfer tax “to provide subsidized housing to people who want to live in San Francisco but don’t have the means to do so.” Mayor Ed Lee, the flier says, is backing this “outrageous” plan.

What, exactly, is going on here?

Well, for starters, the mayor is distinctly NOT pushing for an increase in the transfer tax, not right now, anyway. What he is doing is meeting with housing advocates and legislators and trying to come up with a stable source of funding for affordable housing — yes, for families and low-income people, many of them longtime residents who are being forced out by Ellis Act evictions, others of them people who work in the city and would rather live here than commute from Pinole, which everyone with any sense agrees is a good idea.

The problem: For years, San Francisco used Redevelopment Agency tax-increment money for affordable housing. Now that money’s gone, since the governor abolished redevelopment agencies. Actually, the money’s not gone, technically — the increased tax revenue from redevelopment project areas still exists. It’s just that the state is now taking a bunch of it, and other taxing entities like BART and the school district get some of it, and now it’s impossible to send bonds and borrow money against it. So what was once tens of millions for affordable housing is now a few million.

“We might have $20 million a year in the general fund,” said housing activist Peter Cohen. “But that’s compared to the $40 million or $50 million we had in the past, and it still leaves housing short.”

Lee has promised repeatedly to fix that problem, to find a way to make sure that there’s enough money that the nonprofits who build housing can plan and develop for the long term. Right now, it’s being called a Housing Trust Fund, but nobody knows exactly how it will actually work.

Remember: The city’s own General Plan states that 60 percent of all new housing should be available at below market rate. All of the regional growth projections say that San Francisco needs to build more housing — for its own workforce, not just for the rich. (And the local workforce, for all the tech jobs the mayor keeps hyping, is still mostly public-sector workers and service employees, most of whom can’t possibly afford the soaring rents and housing prices in this city.)

A lot of the existing affordable housing money comes from the city’s inclusionary housing law, which mandates that market-rate developers set aside a percentage of their new units (usually 20 percent) for lower-income people. Most developers eschew allowing poor people into their condo enclaves, so they pay a fee into a city fund instead.
But if we’re aiming for 60 percent, and we’re getting (at most) 20 percent, we’re a long ways off. Oh, and the developers are starting to argue that the 20 percent rule is too onerous and they can’t build enough condos for the rich if they have to throw scraps to the poor and middle-class, too.

And some supervisors are squawking about building more housing for the middle class, and right now in a zero-sum game, that means less for low-income people.
This all adds up to a mess for the mayor, and it’s no wonder some advocates are talking about raising the transfer tax — which, after all, is paid by the seller of a residential or commercial building, and while there are absolutely some houses underwater in San Francisco (and there should probably be an exemption in the tax for that situation), overall home prices are rising again, and many, probably most home sales these days involve substantial profit. It’s not a perfect tax, but it’s a tax on a class that is (generally) better off to support a class that is typically not so well off.

Here’s the problem: If the mayor supports a transfer tax, and that’s part of the final package, the realtors and the commericial building owners will no doubt put huge amounts of money into defeating it. That would mean Lee would have to raise a bucket of money and campaign really hard to pass it. But Lee’s demonstrated that he’s not the fighting type; he wants something that nobody serious will oppose. Which is why my sources at City Hall say that he wants the transfer tax off the table.

That could mean that the Housing Trust Fund will be a basic set-aside, a budgetary mandate that a certain amount of money go into a reliable fund for housing. That’s one of the city’s most pressing needs (really, if this becomes a city of just the rich, even those of us who own houses or have rent-controlled apartments won’t want to live here any more. Mayor Larry Ellison? Eeew.) So I’m okay with that. I’m not a big fan of set-asides, but this is the whole future of San Francisco we’re talking about.

So the realtors can take a chill pill — the mayor doesn’t want to get in a fight with you. Sigh.

SF allows bikes indoors, but its cycling goal is elusive

Sasha Cuttler
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SF allows bikes indoors, but its cycling goal is elusive

When the Board of Supervisors this week voted 9-2 to require commercial building owners to allow employees to bring their bicycles indoors while they work, ordinance sponsor Sup. John Avalos hailed the legislation as an important step toward meeting the city goal of having 20 percent of all vehicle trips in the city be by bike by the year 2020.

“We are removing a barrier to people getting around the city by bicycle,” Avalos said at the March 6 hearing, noting that the measure addresses cyclists’ concern about bike theft and helps keep sidewalks uncluttered and racks and poles free for other cyclists to use.

While it’s true this may help make cycling a bit more attractive, San Francisco would have to take far bolder actions to get anywhere near meeting its 20 percent by 2020 goal, a target it set in 2010 with legislation sponsored by Board President David Chiu and one regularly touted in speeches by Mayor Ed Lee.

Just last month, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency released its latest bike count survey, which showed that about 3.5 percent of vehicle trips in the city are taken by bike, a 71 percent increase in the last five years, gains the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition lauded as “impressive.” Yet to reach the city’s goal would require a 571 percent increase in the next seven years – one that would seem unattainable at this pace.

“It’s a very ambitious but realistic goal,” SFBC director Leah Shahum told us, although she acknowledged it would require a drastic change in the city’s approach. “I’ve been impressed by how much Mayor Lee has touted the 20 percent by 2020 goal, but our city agencies need to step up their sense of urgency and commitment to meet that goal.”

The SFMTA is now finalizing a report on how to hit that 2020 target, which is scheduled for release next month. But agency spokesperson Paul Rose acknowledged the difficulty in meeting that goal: “It would take funding resources which at this point we don’t have.” He can’t yet say would it would take to meet the goal, which the report will outline, but he said, “We’re exploring what can be achieved with our available funding.”

Shahum said all studies by SFBC and other groups show concerns about safety is the biggest barrier to substantially increasing cycling in the city, and that most people need bike lanes – particularly paths physically separated from cars, known as cycle tracks – to feel safe. She praised the SFMTA for installing 20 miles of new bike lanes in the last two years, its fastest pace ever, “but that pace needs to double or triple to meet that goal.”

Instead, Mayor Lee has backed off a pledge he made last year to fast-track a short segment of bike lanes on dangerous sections of Oak and Fell streets that would connect two popular east-west bikeways: the Panhandle and the Wiggle. That project was delayed by a year for more meetings and work after motorists objected to the loss of street parking spots.

“We’re talking about three blocks. It’s relatively small in scope but huge in impacts,” Shahum said of the project. “If the pace of change on these three blocks is replicated through the city, it’ll take hundreds of years to meet the goal.”

In his run for mayor last year, Chiu regularly touted the 20 percent goal he set in 2010 after returning from a fact-finding trip to the Netherlands – where about 38 percent of vehicle trips are by bike – that he took with SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin, SFBC members, and officials from other cities. Chiu says that San Francisco might be further along than the SFMTA figures show, citing an SFBC poll showing that 5 percent of San Franciscans say they ride a bike daily and another 12 percent ride more than once a week.

“Whatever the current percentage is, we have a long way to go. We have to be bolder about specific projects and strategies,” Chiu told us. He said there is a growing recognition that promoting cycling is an important way to address traffic congestion and greenhouse gas reduction and that “segregated bikes lanes are the most efficient way to move the most people through areas of urban density.”

Chiu also said that San Francisco could be poised for rapid progress on the creation of new bikes lanes, citing early opposition to replacing parking spaces with parklets and the car-free Sunday Streets (which kicks off its new season this Sunday along the Embarcadero) events, with the business community and many neighborhood groups fearing that restrictions on motorists would hurt businesses.

“The experience has turned out to be exactly the opposite,” Chiu said, noting the explosion in demand for parklets and new Sunday Streets events in the last couple years, saying that a widening embrace of more cycle tracks and other biking infrastructure could be next.

Mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey told us, “The mayor is very much committed to the aggressive goals set to get to 20 percent by 2020 and the city is moving in the right direction. He has also always supported the Oak Fell project and we’re seeing progress. It will be complete in 2013 and he has been talking to the SFMTA about the project to keep up to date. San Francisco is on its way to becoming the most bicycle friendly city in the U.S. and in this era of limited public funding, the mayor is working with the SFMTA to explore what ways we can increase trips taken by bicycle with available funding and increased public awareness.”

She cited the Avalos legislation and the current installation of cycle tracks on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park as examples of the city’s commitment to “move us toward the goal of 20 percent,” but many in the cycling community consider these efforts to be low-hanging fruit – easy, cheap, and non-controversial improvements – that won’t get the city anywhere near its stated goal.

Bike activist Marc Salomon is critical of the incremental approaches taken by SFBC and the city, saying that to make significant progress the city needs to address enforcement and the culture on the roadways, protecting cyclists from aggressive or impatient motorists and recognizing that many traffic laws don’t make sense for cyclists.

“We need to change the culture of the cops to make sure every street is a safe street,” he said. Shahum said that’s an issue SFBC is trying to address: “We are talking to them about how police could better enforce dangerous behaviors.”

Yet any efforts to promote cycling will likely be met with a backlash by motorists who resent losing space to cyclists and the fact that many cyclists routinely run stop signs and lights. Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu voted against the Avalos legislation, with Chu objecting to city staff evaluating businesses that seek waivers based on limited space or other factors, calling it a waste of precious resources.

But Avalos noted that his ordinance – which will be up for final approval on its second reading this Tuesday – has no enforcement mechanisms and “overall, this is a cost effective way to promote bicycling in the city. The costs are minimal.”

He also thanked the conservative Building Owners and Managers Association for supporting the legislation. Shahum said BOMA strongly opposed similar legislation almost 10 years ago and its embrace of it now shows how attitudes toward cyclists have changed. “There are so many more people biking now and the business community recognizes the benefits of having more of their employees biking,” she said.

Even politically moderate supervisors have been supportive of promoting cycling, with Sup. Scott Wiener saying at this week’s hearing, “It’s very important to make it as easy as possible to bike, and bike theft is a big issue in this city as well.”

D5 candidates and constituents scrutinize Olague

Sasha Cuttler
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D5 candidates and constituents scrutinize Olague

San Francisco’s political lines are in the process of being redrawn. That’s true literally, with the current reconstitution of legislative districts based on the latest census, but it’s also true figuratively: old alliances based on identity and ideology are being replaced with uncertain new political dynamics. And nowhere is that more true than in District 5.

In a recent Guardian, we explored the implications of Sup. Christina Olague’s dual (and potentially dueling) loyalties between Mayor Ed Lee, who appointed her to the job, and the progressive political community with which Olague has long identified. Those seemed to play out yesterday when Olague bucked progressives to be the sixth co-sponsor of Sup. Mark Farrell’s proposed charter amendment to repeal ranked-choice voting for citywide offices.

Already, many of her progressive constituents – even those who have strongly supported her – have been privately grumbling that Olague hasn’t been accessible and expressing doubts about her ability to lead one of the city’s most progressive districts. Olague, who initially returned our calls immediately but said she’d have to get back to us about supporting Farrell’s legislation (I’ll add an update if/when she calls back), adamantly denied that she’s had a slow start.

“We’ve been working with constituents constantly,” she said, rattling off a list of nightly meetings. “I’m in the community all the time, getting coffee with folks…We’re working on multiple issues here.”

Michael O’Connor – who owns The Independent and other businesses and who ran in D5 in 2004 and may run again this year – supports Olague but questions the conventional wisdom that her progressive roots and mayoral support make her a lock for reelection this year.

“Olague is an awesome person and she would be a great supervisor in District 9,” O’Connor said, citing her strong ties to the Mission District and work with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. “But she’s very beatable in D5 because she doesn’t have the deep connections to the community.”

That’s a belief that is shared by others, including London Breed – the executive director of the African American Art & Cultural Center for the last 10 years – who jumped into the race last week and threatened to cut into Olague’s support among Mayor Lee’s supporters.

With Attorney General Kamala Harris and other Lee supporters by her side, Breed cast herself as a more authentic and grassroots representative for the district where she was raised. Or as Harris said, “London understands the challenges and strengths of the district. She is, bar none, the best voice for District 5.”

Left unsaid was the split that her candidacy created among supporters of Lee, whose ascension to Room 200 was engineered largely by former mayor Willie Brown and Chinatown power broker Rose Pak. Brown (along with some of the city’s most influential African American ministers) strongly backed Breed for the D5 appointment, while Pak wanted her ally Malcolm Yeung, although she reportedly got behind Olague in the end.

Breed told us that she was supportive of Olague and that “I’ve been adamant about people giving her a chance and working with her.” But she said that it’s already become “clear that she just doesn’t have what it takes and was probably not going to get there,” based on “the feedback and phone calls I got with the experience people had in meeting her.”

“She’s familiar with planning, but not necessarily with the neighborhood and all its community groups,” Breed said. As for crossing Mayor Lee with her decision to run, Breed told us, “This was a hard decision for me to make because I work with many of these people and have good relationship with him.”

Progressive D5 candidates, such as City College Board President John Rizzo, are waiting to take advantage of votes on which Olague breaks with the progressives to carry water for the mayor. As he told us, “The mayor doesn’t get to make this decision, it’s the voters of this district that will decide.”

Like Breed, Rizzo also emphasized his long ties to the district. “I respect Christina and like Christina, but my connections are very deep,” he said, citing his 26 years of living and working as an environmental activist in the district. “I have a record of going out and taking the initiative and making things happen.”

Thea Selby, president of the Lower Haight Merchants and Neighbors Association, has also been running an active campaign for the D5 job, including highlighting Olague’s split loyalties. “She literally switched camps to help chair the Run Ed Run committee,” she told us. Julian Davis, who ran for D5 supervisor in 2004 and has been rumored to be mulling another run, said that it’s disconcerting just how many elected officials in San Francisco started off with the advantage of being appointed to the office: “It’s not participatory democracy the way we envision it.”

Selby and others will be closely watching how Olague votes this year, and trying to differentiate when those votes are significant (such as being the swing vote to place the challenge to RCV on the ballot) or not (including Olague’s early vote to override Lee’s veto, which fell two votes short of the eight needed). “We need to look and see how she votes on things – and when it matters and when it doesn’t,” Selby said.

Yet already, even before the really big and controversial votes like the upcoming 8 Washington and CPMC projects, Olague is feeling the polar tugs on issues such as bicycling. Many bike advocates are mad that Lee has delayed promised bike lanes on Oak Street and with a rash of tickets that cyclists on the Wiggle have received.

“I’ve long been an advocate of biking, but I know there are issues related to parking in the neighborhood,” Olague told us, straddling the issue. “Parking for some reason is a very controversial issue in the city.”

And where does she come down on the stepped up enforcement of bikes rolling stop signs on the Wiggle? “I want to sit down with the Bike Coalition and see what they think,” Olague said.

Meanwhile, Breed – who is widely considered a political moderate, which could cause her problems winning in D5 – is also trying to position herself as more independent than Olague. “I’m about being progressive,” she told us, citing her recent hiring of a case worker at the AAACC to help young African Americans work through barriers to success. “To me, that’s what being progressive is.”

Breed readily acknowledged her early political support from Brown, who appointed her to the Redevelopment Commission when he was mayor, but said that she would still take a tough stand against Lennar and other developers to ensure the needs of current San Franciscans are being met by new projects.

“I’ve told people, this does not mean you have my support,” Breed said of her political contributors and her support of Lennar’s massive redevelopment of the southeast part of the city. “As my grandmother used to say, all money ain’t good money.”

On Breed’s entrance into the race, Olague told us, “It was expected, so I’m not surprised.” Olague said that she’s begun to set up her election campaign, but that most of her focus has been on getting up to speed at City Hall and in D5: “I’m just trying to focus on the work of the district.”

Jerry Brown says everyone on death row is guilty

Zelda Bronstein
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7
Jerry Brown says everyone on death row is guilty

I’m glad the governor is so confident that there are no innocent people on death row.

On one level, I don’t care — I’m against the death penalty period, and I don’t care how horribly guilty the folks who face execution are. Of course, many of them, probably most, were severely mentally ill at the time of the crimes, but that doens’t seem to matter to the gov either.

It’s hard to believe, though, that he really knows much about any of these cases, because innocent people have been put on death row, and some have been executed, all over the country. Jerry’s California is so special that our legal system never makes mistakes? (Notice that he didn’t say no innocent people have been executed; he went way beyond that to say that they’re all guilty. Amazing.)

Paperwork snafu delays big condo project

Zelda Bronstein
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Paperwork snafu delays big condo project

The developers of the 8 Washington project, who have already spent a sizable sum of money on legal, lobbying and prep work, have run into another setback: The March 8 hearing on the project’s shadow impacts has been postponed because of a missing public notice.

The hearing notice and the agenda for the joint meeting of the Planning Commission and the Recreation and Parks Commission wasn’t posted on the Rec-Park website, as required by state law, Linda Avery, the Planning Commission secretary, told us.

The joint meeting was set to consider the impact of shadows the project would cast on nearby Sue Bierman Park and to consider allowing increased shading. That approval is necessary before the project can move forward.

The problems with the public notice were brought to light by Zane Gresham, a lawyer with Morrison and Foerster who often represents developers. In a March 5 letter (PDF) to the two commission presidents, Gresham pointed out that the hearing notice describes the lot on Washington Street, where the project will be constructed, but never mentions the location of the park that will be shadowed.

“The notice misleads the public as to what lots would be affected by the proposed action and fails to disclose to the public the subject of the action to be considered,” the letter stated. “Because the instant hearing notice does not meet minimum legal standards, we respectfully request that no action be taken.”

Avery said that letter sparked a review of the entire notice, and city staffers discovered that it wasn’t properly posted. It also apparently fails to describe fully the action that the two commissions would take: they would to amend the acceptable shadow levels for the park, and then vote to apply those amendments to the 8 Washington development. Only the first type of action is mentioned in the paperwork.

It’s not clear who made the mistakes with the notices — but for a project of this magnitude, critics say it’s remarkable that the city and the developers can’t get the little details of posting a notice correct. “This is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” former supervisor Aaron Peskin told me.

The other mystery: Who hired Gresham to review the notice? His letter makes no mention of any specific client, and none of the leading public foes of 8 Washington have retained him. He hadn’t returned my calls and emails by press time.

AH, BUT HERE’S THE UPDATE: Chuck Finnie, who works for the lobbying firm BMWL, just called to tell me that Gresham represents Equity Office Properties, which runs the Ferry Building. EOP, a major national real-estate development firm, is unhappy because the 8 Washington project will wipe out a parking lot used by patrons of the Ferry Building’s businesses. “When EOP took on the job of restoring that building, part of the deal was that parking would be available,” Finnie said. “The Port is ignoring that responsibility.”

Gee, this condo enclave gets more and more unpopular by the day.
 

Hyatt bikini pictures and hotel workers rights

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“When I got to work that day, I heard a lot of laughter and jokes, including a manager that was around. When I got up close to look at what they were laughing at, what I saw were a bunch of pictures that were extremely humiliating and shameful. And I just felt so ashamed and humiliated as a woman that I got extremely upset and took down my picture and that of my sister.”

On Oct. 14, two weeks after Martha Reyes tore down the pictures, she and Lorena Reyes were fired from their positions as housekeepers at the Hyatt Santa Clara. Both have worked in hotels for more than two decades.

The pictures that started it all? Cartoon images of skinny white women wearing bikinis, with the faces of the hotel’s housekeepers tacked on.

“The pictures were pictures of women in bikinis with our faces pasted on. To be honest, for me as a woman it was—imagine, I’m a mom of five kids and nine grandkids. To be put in that kind of picture is extremely uncomfortable,” Martha told the Guardian.

When they were fired, the sisters were told that they were wasting company time by combining their ten-minute and lunch breaks. But the sisters believe that they were targeted after Martha tore down the pictures—and later, when confronted by a superior who demanded the images back, refused to return them.

As for the too-long lunch break claim: “We haven’t come across anyone else who’s been fired for it,” said Adam Zapala, an attorney with the firm Davis, Cowell, and Bowe, who is representing the sisters. “So it raises the suspicion in our mind.”

As we reported in November, the sisters have filed complaints against the hotel with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They are asking for their jobs back and for back pay, saying they were wrongly terminated.

The complaints are specific to the Reyes’s case. On March 8, UNITE HERE Local 2, which represents Hyatt workers in several Bay Area hotels, will push back at Hyatt on a different level.

The group is planning an International Women’s Day protest at the Grand Hyatt in Union Square.

“On March 8, 1911, garment workers, all women, took to the streets demanding a 10 hr work day and an end to child labor. It was after that year that people started to celebrate March 8 as International Working Women’s Day. This action comes out of that tradition,” explains Julia Wong, an organizer with UNITE HERE.

International Women’s Day no longer specifically honors workers. But the bikini pictures bring up an issue that affects all women; sexual objectificaion.

“It’s making fun of what women’s bodies look like, sexualizing them, in an industry where its not safe to be sexualizing housekeepers,” said Wong, referring to widespread sexual harassment of hotel housekeepers. The extent of this issue was revealed to a degree last year in the aftermath of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal.

“It’s really a fight for women’s rights in the workplace,” said Wong.

Mayor Lee makes demands on SFUSD

Zelda Bronstein
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Mayor Lee makes demands on SFUSD

“You thought you felt an earthquake Sunday night. Actually, that was me.”

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano was on the phone, talking to me about Mayor Ed Lee’s plan to demand some changes in the way the San Francisco Unified School District manages its property — and to hold up the $6 million the city owes the district until that happens. The mayor says there will be “strings attached” to the rainy-day fund money that would normally go to help SFUSD avoid teacher layoffs — and while it’s not exactly clear what those strings are, except that the mayor wants surplus property to be developed or sold, it’s not what Ammiano had in mind when he created the fund as a supervisor.

“The mayor is trying to hold the school district hostage,” Ammiano said. “And it’s not well advised.”

It’s also really odd: For one thing, as School Superintendent Carlos Garcia told me in a phone interview, any money the district got from selling off surplus property would be earmarked for use in facilities development and couldn’t go to pay teachers or prevent program cuts. “He wants to see how we’re using the property, and that’s fine, I’m happy to share that with him,” Garcia said. “But selling property doesn’t help. Even if we sold everything, we’d still need the money from the Rainy Day Fund.”

The district is constantly looking at ways to use its surplus property, and does a study on the topic every two years. But it’s not simple — for one thing, enrollment is growing, and it’s entirely possible that some sites that are now surplus will be needed in the next few years. And Garcia is properly cautious about getting rid of public property without a very good reason.

He’s a little curious, too, about what the mayor has in mind. “This did come a little bit out of the blue,” he told me.

The whole situation creates another disturbing conflict, one I’ve been worried about for years. The mayor’s education advisor, Hydra Mendoza, also sits on the School Board. What happens when the guy who pays her salary at her day job — Mayor Lee — takes a position that’s directly at odds with the interests of the job the voters gave her, as a board member? I see that happening right now, and I don’t know how it’s going to play out.

With any luck, the mayor will come to his senses, cut the check and stop trying to tell the school district how to manage its property. If not, his education advisor is going to be in a bit of a pickle.

Mendoza told me she doesn’t see it that way — in fact, she said she doesn’t think the mayor will really hold up the $6 million. “It’s part of an ongoing conversation,” she told me. “People keep telling the mayor that the school district has all this surplus property and needs to sell it before they get any city money. The mayor is just responding to that, saying ‘is there another source of revenue?’ Because the rainy day fund is going to dry up.

“How that got portrayed as ‘strings’ I don’t know.”

She did say, however, that the mayor “has been very clear that he wants to look at other revenue streams” and wants to see a plan in place to use the surplus property. Even though, of course, it’s not that simple and Mendoza was quick to agree that you can’t just put a tech company in a building that’s part of a school site.

She also insisted that there’s no conflict here. “It works well for me and the district,” she said. “If I wasn’t here, the perception of the district at City Hall would be different.”

But still: We’re very close to a situation where the mayor is on one side of an issue and the school district is on the other, and there’s critical money involved, and Mendoza is in the middle. “We haven’t come to those crossroads,” she said. “I haven’t been put in that situation. We’ve had a lot of civil conversations.”

But it’s out there, and it’s a potential problem.

 

Food-truck battle at the board of supes

Zelda Bronstein
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Food-truck battle at the board of supes

The supervisors are weighing in on a state bill that would ban food truck from parking within 1500 feet of schools — and it’s really tricky.

Let’s start with a bit of reality: My kids go to public schools, my son’s in middle school, he rides Muni home — and there’s ample opportunity for him to buy some really nasty stuff. There’s a 7-Eleven a couple of blocks from his school, and kids walk over there all the time and buy those disgusting 32-ounce sugar bombs. If a truck selling chips and soda and greasy tacos showed up at 3:30 p.m., the kids would be lined up to spend the money their parents though was going for a nice healthy lunch.

And the trucks would go there, if they could, the same way the ice cream trucks used to cruise through my suburban neighborhood in the 1960s (yeah, I’m old, old, old) in the late afternoon, when they could guarantee America’s children would be hungry and ready to spoil their supper.

But they can’t, see, because San Francisco already bans food trucks from within 1,500 feet of a public middle school or high school — which is a pretty broad zone.

Now Assemblymember Bill Monning has introduced a bill that would make that ban statewide — and would include middle schools and private schools. Sounds good, and some healthy-food advocates love it. But San Francisco’s a little different than, say, Hayward or Fresno — this is such a dense city that there are schools almost everywhere. If you ban food trucks from within 1,500 feet of all schools, then you ban them from about 80 percent of the city. Burrito Justice has a great set of maps that give you the picture (burritohibition!)

The maps also suggest the problems with banning anything from within 1,500 feet of a school in San Francisco. Pot clubs, liquor stores, sex clubs … there are all sorts of places where you really don’t want your kids hanging out, but if you make those broad exclusions, you force them all into a very few small areas (including northern Soma, the waterfront and Bayview) and that’s not exactly fair, either. Should all the food trucks in the city be congregated in those crowded places that fit the 1,500 foot rule?

My 10-year-old daughter walks through the heart of the Castro, which is probably within 1,500 feet of her school, and there’s some stuff in the storefronts that isn’t exactly age appropriate, and we deal. She asked me once why people were walking around naked, and I said “because they like to,” and she shrugged and that was that.My 12-year-old son knows that people smoke pot and that it’s legal for adults to use as medicine; I don’t think the notion of him walking past a well-regulated dispensary is going to make him any more (or less, god help me) likely to try some for himself some day.

So I’m kind of with Sup. Scott Wiener, who wants the city to oppose the Monning bill — not because I want trucks selling Doritos out in front of Aptos in the afternoon, but because I think San Francisco already prevents that, and 1,500 feet is way too much for a city this size. Maybe amend the bill to allow cities to make their own rules, but have the state rules apply if they don’t. Maybe allow cities beyond a certain density to change the distance to 500 feet.

Maybe think a little more about what it really means to ban things because they’re close to schools. It doesn’t always make sense.

PS: Actually, I’m thinking maybe we should ban all multimillion-dollar condos from anywhere within 5,000 feet of a school. Exposing the impressionable minds of small children to such graphic, disgusting, ostentatious displays of wealth has to be bad for them. Worse than seeing a sex club, anyway.

 

Cannabis’ unlikely new crusader: Pat Robertson?

Andrew Lam
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File this one under #OKsure: Televangelist and all-around dubious individual Pat Robertson has come out in support of the decriminalization of marijuana.

Of course, it’s all the liberals’ fault. Robertson made the following comments on the March 1 episode of the 700 Club. (Many thanks to Tom Angell of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition for providing us with the link fest, lookit this hilarious retraction his network posted when Robertson made similar comments in December!)

Even though these prisoners may have been sentenced by some court for some offense, should they be behind bars? Here’s the thing, we have over 3,000 – the number must be much higher than that, but over 3,000 federal crimes.

And every time the liberals pass a bill, I don’t care what it involves! They stick criminal sanctions on it. They don’t feel that there’s any way that people are going to keep a wall unless they can put them in jail. And so we have the jails that are filled with people who are white collar criminals and I’ve became sort of a hero of the hippie culture I guess when I said I think we ought to decriminalize the possession of marijuana.

I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of controlled substance. I mean, the whole thing is crazy! And we’ve said, we’re conservatives, we’re tough on crime – that’s baloney! It’s costing us billions and billions of dollars.

Look at California. California is spending more money on prisons than it spends on schools! I mean there’s something wrong about the equation, there’s something wrong. 

Here’s the video itself (start at 20:40 and go until 29:25) — the comments precede a pretty interesting segment on how the NAACP, the Tea Party, and a group called Prison Fellowship, a faith-based counseling group for prisoners and families founded by a Watergate ex-con and one-time Nixon aide.

Despite his classist assertion that white collar criminals shouldn’t get jail time, we’re with ya, homeslice. Hero of the hippie culture, yes you are. 

And so, our nominally-progressive president now has a less tenable position on the War on Drugs than one of our country’s head crazies (who — let us not forget despite his newfound stoner ways — was the one who announced that Haiti was hit by those earthquakes in 2010 because it was “cursed” by a “pact to the devil.”)

Holler back, President Obama? Personally, we’d be happy if his attorneys would just stop shutting down our local dispensaries. 

 

The failure of Lee’s business tax plan

Zelda Bronstein
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The failure of Lee’s business tax plan

The Mayor’s Office and city finance officials are circulating drafts of a new business tax plan that would largely abolish the payroll tax and replace it with a levy on gross receipts.

Ben Rosenfield, the city controller, and Ted Egan, the chief economist, have been meeting with business groups and presenting what’s described in the documents they’re circulating as “one possible idea.” And there’s some very positive news about the proposal: It would greatly broaden the tax base (only about 10 percent of the city’s businesses are hit by the payroll tax) and it’s designed to be somewhat progressive: Businesses with higher gross receipts would pay a higher percentage tax.

The plan is complicated — since some types of industries (retailers, for example) have high gross receipts compared to payroll, and some (financial services) have high payrolls compared to gross receipts, the levies are broken down into four schedules. At the lowest end, companies with comparatively large gross reciepts would pay between 0.05 percent and 0.125 percent. At the highest end, the tax would go from 0.220 to 0.535.
But there’s one central — and simple — element of the proposal: At this point, it’s entirely revenue neutral. In fact, finance officials say, over time the total tax burden paid by local businesses would go down, since payroll tends to rise slightly faster than gross receipts.

That, sources say, is something the mayor has made clear he doesn’t want to budge on. He’s not willing to accept a plan that raises the total amount of money the city gets from business taxes.

Which puts him in synch with what some business groups want: “The business community thinks this should be revenue-neutral,” Scott Hauge, who runs Small Business California, told me.

But in a city that faces a large structural budget deficit, some supervisors have other ideas. “I want to look at new revenue possibilities,” Sup. John Avalos said.

And even the current proposals would let banks, which are exempt from local business taxes, escape without paying anything.
In reality, the proposals are less then revenue-neutral. Rosenfield and Egan project that the new tax system would lead to the creation of 2,500 jobs a year — mostly because businesses over time would be paying lower taxes.

Hague told me that he’s not sure exactly how business leaders feel about this. “We don’t know yet how it will affect people,” he noted. But some political leaders have been clamoring for years for the elimination of the payroll tax, which, by taxing employment, appears to be a damper on job growth.

That’s actually a myth. The payroll tax is so minor that it can’t possibly influence any individual hiring decision. It’s true that if city business taxes in general are reduced, companies will have more money — and some might spend that on new hiring. But San Francisco, like most major cities, has to have some kind of business tax — and I can already hear some downtown types complaining that a gross receipts tax “punishes growth and success.”

This proposal is a long way from what Sup. David Chiu suggested a year ago. His plan would have included a commercial rent tax — ensuring that financial institutions that get away with paying nothing would have to contribute like other businesses. Like most local taxes, it wasn’t perfect — state law bars cities from imposing corporate income taxes and limits what else municipalities can do — but together with a reworked gross receipts tax, it was projected to bring $28 million more dollars into the city treasury — without any job loss.

But the Chamber of Commerce and crew fought bitterly against that idea, and Chiu withdrew it.

At this point, Chiu said, he’s working with the mayor and trying to get the business community to accept the idea of a change in the tax structure. But this is a rare opportunity to do two things — to make the local tax system more fair, and to raise taxes on the biggest companies to bring additional revenue into the city.

The plan will probably have to go to the ballot anyway, so why not do it right?

Herbwise: Shambhala Healing Center next on the federal chopping block

Andrew Lam
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When Al Shawa, founder of Shambhala Healing Center, was asked about what he was going to do now that the federal government is trying to shut down his business, he was (understandably) irresolute. 

“I have no idea. Who comes first, the chicken or the egg? Do I blame the federal government or the city? Somebody did me wrong.”

Shawa opened his medical cannabis dispensary one short year ago on Mission Street. He knew he was close to Jose Coronado Playground, but that’s why he underwent an 18-month permitting process with the city, which assured him that the playground’s clubhouse was not being used. In late February, his landlord received a letter from US attorney Melinda Haag that asserted illegal trafficking of drugs were taking place near a children’s playground. His landlord, Haag informed, risked criminal prosecution, imprisonment, fines, and civil forfeiture if Shawa’s business wasn’t out of the space in 40 days. Similar letters were sent out to roughly 12 dispensaries last autumn. Those dispensaries are now closed.

But on Saturday morning, Shawa seemed confused, and not entirely hopeless that his small business could be saved. He sat in his back office, a man trimming weed one room over. “I would hope the city would stand firm and protect these entities,” he said from behind his desk, next to a bank of security cameras. “I don’t understand where it stands on this – it should be taking a leading role.”

Posted: these signs now greet patients at the Shambhala Healing Center. Guardian photos by Caitlin Donohue

Though the SF Board of Supervisors passed a resolution in support of cannabis dispensaries’ right to operate without federal persecution last October, Mayor Ed Lee has yet to speak out on the federally-compelled closures, besides to comment that he’ll kow-tow to the authorities on the matter of marijuana’s medicinal efficacy. We asked Lee’s office for comment when the Department of Justice requested Department of Public Health records for 12 Bay Area dispensaries in February (a move that preceded the previous round of letters from Haag), to no avail. 

Shawa had previously operated a clothing store named Privilege at the address, but opened up Shambala when a fire damaged his inventory. Since opening, he said he’s become attached to many of the regular patients. “You feel like your responsible for their wellbeing,” he said, before talking about how his dispensary passed out 200 turkeys to the community on Thanksgiving, and gave the nearby Folsom Street firehouse $5,000 worth of toys to distribute during the holiday season. 

Throughout the recent travails of the medical cannabis industry, one of the more frustrating issues has been the seemingly random way businesses have been targeted by federal agencies. Shawa’s is a case in point. While he grapples with the notion of shutting his doors, the owner of a restaurant across the street, Gus Murad of Medjool Restaurant and Lounge, is applying for a permit to open a new dispensary on the same block (as reported by Mission Local). 

Lupe Ruiz, who has been floor manager at Shambala since the dispensary opened, seemed likewise shaken and frustrated with the city’s lack of response in the matter. 

“I’m kind of devastated,” she told me in between helping patients. “How do you allow someone to open and then when things get hot you don’t say anything about it?” She recalled a picnic in Dolores Park Shambala recently organized for its patients at which people played ball games and got to meet each other.

The dispensary does seem to be a gathering place of sorts – on the morning I interviewed Ruiz and Shawa, patients consulted budtenders about the right strain of cannabis for them, joking and friendly-like. Shawa says that more than one patient has teared up when he told them that the dispensary’s future was uncertain. 

“Who listens to these stories?” Ruiz concludes sadly, with a sentiment that the rest of the medical marijuana community can surely sympathize with. “People are not being heard.”

SF Chamber poll distorts the facts…again

Sasha Cuttler
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SF Chamber poll distorts the facts…again

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce this week released its annual City Beat poll – promoting its results at the top of its website and feeding it to media outlets such as the San Francisco Examiner, which faithfully reported its finding, apparently without seeking underlying data – and once again the poll was marred by distortions and hidden agendas.

For example, the Chamber claims that 58 percent of the poll’s 500 respondents prefer runoff elections (up from 52 percent in 2011) and 31 percent prefer ranked-choice voting (down from 42 percent last year), with the balance refusing to answer or saying they don’t know. But what the Chamber doesn’t say is that voters were read a series of arguments for each system first, and the anti-RCV statement contained a flat-out inaccuracy.

“Critics of ranked choice voting say that it is a confusing system that results in lower voter turnout – as the last Mayoral election had the lowest overall voter turnout in more than 35 years. They say candidates are getting elected with extremely low number of votes which doesn’t represent the true will of the voters. Instead of ranked choice voting, they propose having run-off elections so that voters have a clear choice on something as important as Mayor,” the statement read.

Yet it’s simply not true that November’s 42.47 percent turnout was the lowest in 35 years (as you can see here). Off-year elections have far lower turnouts, as did the last mayoral election in 2007, which had a turnout of 35.6 percent. Even the hotly contested, pre-RCV November mayoral election of 2003 had a turnout of 45.67 percent, just a few percentage points higher that the low turnout that the question implies that RCV causes.

But Jim Lazarus, the Chamber’s vice president of public policy, won’t concede the error, telling the Guardian that respondents understand the statement to apply to only closely contested mayoral elections. “We believe the average voter realizes a competitive race is what we’re talking about,” Lazarus said, dismissing the 2007 mayor’s race as uncompetitive.

Yet Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, which supports RCV, said the poll was deceptive and seems designed to achieve results that are consistent with public policy stands that the Chamber has taken. “I think they do a better job of making their arguments than the RCV arguments,” he said.

“Supporters of ranked choice voting say it gives voters more choices and does not force voters to vote twice in just five weeks on the same contest. They say it has resulted in more diverse representatives for the city. They also say that it encourages campaigns to find common ground and ways to work together because they must win supporters of other candidates,” reads the polling statement.

Richie concedes that supporters of RCV have made these statements, but he said they aren’t the strongest arguments or the ones they generally tend to lead with, such as how big spending by well-funded independent expenditure groups tend to dominate the low-turnout runoff elections, which more conservative candidates win every time in San Francisco.

But Lazarus claims the Chamber was trying to honestly gauge public opinion, not influence it in favor of Chamber positions. “We didn’t skew it, we’re trying to get honest answers,” he told us. “It doesn’t do us any good to fake the outcomes. We aren’t doing this for PR reasons or press releases.”

Yet many of the issues the poll dealt with are active campaigns in which the Chamber is trying to influence the decisions made at City Hall, such as its longstanding crusade to repeal the city’s payroll tax. In the poll results, 57 percent of respondents said the supported a “payroll tax decrease from 1.5 percent to 1 percent, making up the difference with other revenues.” In the Examiner story, the paper even deleted that last crucial clause.

Yet what neither the Chamber nor the Examiner told readers was that the question was set up with this statement: “It has also been suggested that reforming the city’s payroll tax system could spur job growth. I would like to read you some potential tax reforms that have been suggested to help spur job growth.”

But even with that repetition of “spur job growth” as a prompt, only 25 percent of respondents agree with the crusade of the Chamber and its allies in City Hall to “Eliminate the payroll tax all together, replacing lost revenue with higher license fees and taxes on businesses.”

On the half-dozen tax measures the poll asked about, none of which received majority support, the questions were set up with this statement, “Some members of the Board of Supervisors have suggested a vote on new taxes may be necessary to help solve this budget deficit,” referring to the oft-demonized legislative body that enjoyed 45 percent in this poll, rather than Mayor Ed Lee, who has made similar suggestions and enjoys 68 percent support.

The poll was conducted by David Binder Research, and Binder was out-of-town and unavailable to answer questions. Lazarus said the language in the questions was jointly developed by Binder and the Chamber.

Teachers, students demand funding for education

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Teachers, students demand funding for education

People across the Bay Area joined in the National Day of Action to Defend Public Education March 1, with rallies at Berkeley City Hall, UC Berkeley, Oakland City Hall, SF State, and at the State Building on Golden Gate Ave.  Demonstrators at UC Santa Cruz shut down the campus for the day demanding well-funded and quality public education.

At the State building, about 100 engaged in civil disobedience, entering the building’s large lobby for a teach-in on the importance of public education. Speakers included teachers and students from several local schools, including City College of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and Mission High School.

Around 4 p.m, most left the building to go two blocks down the street to Civic Center Plaza, where about 400 converged to share stories of hardship in affording education and voice demands.

Students from local elementary schools express their concerns at the Civic Center rally to defend public education. Video by Carol Harvey

The day of action was supported and shaped in part by Occupy groups throughout the country, including, here in the city, Occupy SF, Occupy SF State and Occupy CCSF. But unlike most occupy-affiliated demonstrations, speakers March. 1 urged the crowd to support specific policies; initiatives that may go to the ballot in November.

Specifically, the group expressed support for the Millionaire’s Tax measure. If the measure passes, California residents earning $1 million per year would pay an additional three percent in income taxes; those making $2 million or make per year would add five percent. 60 percent of funds raised would go towards education.

There are several competing ballot initiatives to fund education, including one proposed by Governor Jerry Brown. According to a recent Field Poll, the Millionaire’s Tax polls the highest, with 63 percent support.

Some protesters also expressed support for the Tax Oil to Fund Education Initiative.

Support for both measures was one of the demands on a demand letter distributed throughout the events. Activists began the protest with lobbying at the offices of state legislators, and convinced four aides to fax the demand letter to their representatives, including Leland Yee, Mark Leno, Fiona Ma, and Tom Ammiano.

However, some protesters at the State Building teach-in emphasized that legislation would not solve the whole problem.

“This issue is bigger than just taxes. The same power structure that is causing the destruction of our educational system is also destroying the face of the planet that we live on. It’s destroying our personal relationships with one another and all of our brothers and sisters around the world,” said Ivy Anderson, a 2011 SF State graduate and organizer with the environmental group Deep Green Resistance.

The event was peaceful and lasted only a few hours. When the state building closed at 6 p.m., 14 remained inside, continuing to “occupy.” Police issued a dispersal order shortly after six o’ clock, and by 6:40, 13 had been cited on-site and released, according to SF occupier Joshua.

At that point, several raced to board buses down the block, joining about 100 others who began a march to Sacramento. Known as the “99 Mile March for Education,” protesters plan to walk about 20 miles a day until arriving in Sacramento March 5 to take their demands for accessible education to the governor.

According to Joshua, the conflict-free day was a success.

“We had a great rally, and I thought it was an excellent lead-up to Sacramento,” said Joshua.

“But the capitol is obviously going to be a bigger fish.”

Mayor Lee praises the importance of nightlife to SF

Sasha Cuttler
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Mayor Lee praises the importance of nightlife to SF

Addressing a gathering of nightlife advocates at a California Music and Culture Association event last night, Mayor Ed Lee praised the economic and cultural role that the entertainment industry plays in San Francisco, announced plans to add a “nightlife unit” in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and even hinted that Halloween in the Castro might be returning after being shut down during the city’s so-called “war on fun.”

“If I’m going to be about jobs,” he said, referring to his near-constant emphasis on economic development, “it should be both for the day and for the night…I do recognize this as a business, as a serious contributor to the economic engine of city.”

Lee referenced the new Controller’s Office report that was requested by Sup. Scott Wiener, which concludes that the nightlife industry generates about $4.2 billion in annual economic activity in the city (that report will be the subject of a rally and hearing on Monday at City Hall starting on the steps at noon). And he said that the benefits of a vibrant nightlife scene also help make San Francisco an appealing city for other businesses, an indirect economic benefit.

“You’re all part of a great part of the city that keeps everyone refreshed,” Lee said, later adding, “I think we can do more at night. The young people who work gobs of hours need to have an entertaining evening.”

As he announced plans to add a nightlife unit to OEWD, the office that works with private companies looking to locate or expand here, he said, “We, as government, need to fast-track things that are successful.” Yet he also said that public safety is still a challenge and called for the industry to work closely with police to keep everyone safe.

Yet Lee spoke positively about Halloween in the Castro, a once-popular event that was canceled because Mayor Gavin Newsom and then-Sup. Bevan Dufty (who Lee recently hired as his new homeless czar) feared the city couldn’t control it, and Lee alluded to plans being developed to revive it in some form. “I hate to see any event that brought so many people to the city gone,” he said.

The event was held at The Grand, a club owned by CMAC board member and new Entertainment Commissioner Steven Lee. CMAC was formed two years ago in response to crackdowns on SF nightlife by city and state officials.

Bayview man who filmed cops convicted

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Bayview man who filmed cops convicted

In a case that has gained notoriety in San Francsico, Debray Carpenter, also known as Fly Benzo, was convicted Feb. 22 of two misdemeanors.

Benzo was filming the police with his cell phone camera at the time of his arrest. Videos of his arrest are available online.

Video evidence

Benzo was arrested at an Oct. 18 rally. During that incident, police officers John Norment and Joshua Fry of the Bayview precinct apparently unplugged a boombox that they said was not authorized in a street outlet. Then, when officers began videotaping Benzo, he took out his camera phone and began videotaping them as well. Witnesses report that police told Benzo to get the camera “out of my face.”

According to transcripts of three videos of the incident, police told Benzo “back up” and “don’t put your hand in my face.” Benzo claimed his right to stand “where I want to stand” and to film the police. Other individuals near him at the time objected to police orders for Benzo to “stand back,” saying, “he didn’t even touch you though” and asserting that Benzo had done nothing wrong.

After a minute or so of back and forth, Officer Fry stated “Don’t put your hand – You know what? Put your hands behind your back.” At that point, the video shows four officers converging to detain Benzo and knocking him to the ground.

The assault in question occured after Benzo was detained.

“[Benzo] was moving himself from side to side. He didn’t want to get knocked to the ground. During that incident, Officer Fry scraped his elbow and that’s the alleged assault,” said Severa Keith, Benzo’s attorney.

The jury convicted Benzo of misdemeanor assault rather than felony, citing insuffient evidence that Officer Norment had suffered a concussion after the incident.

Trial by jury

Benzo’s trial concluded Feb. 22. The jury found Benzo not guilty of felony assault of a police officer, but did convict him of three misdemeanors. Benzo was convicted of “resisting, obstructing or delaying a peace officer in his or her lawful duties” (California Penal Code Section 148 A1) and misdemeanor assault committed against a peace officer (Section 241 C).

Assistand District Attorney Omid Talai emphasized that  “Benzo was convicted by a jury of his peers.” The jury spent four days deliberating the case.

“The jury obviously took this very seriously and went through each element of the defense. They said they’d watched the videos numerous times,” said Talai.

But some supporters have raised doubts about the jury, partly because there were no African American jurors.

“He did not get indicted by a group of his peers,” said Tracey, a comrade of Benzo’s from the Black Star Liner Coalition. The Coalition is a CCSF student club aimed at improving the relationship between the college and its surrounding community.

Benzo has said that he was consistently harassed by police, including Norment and Fry, for several months prior to the incident.

Keith says she had several witnesses ready to testify to this harassment at the trial.

“These officers would sometimes flip him off, there were a couple of officers who would go by him and hold up the black power fist in a mocking way. There was testimony of how these officers had threatened him,” said Keith.

However, prosecutors successfully exluded all evidence concerning previous incidents between Benzo, Norment and Fry with a pre-trial motion

According to Keith, “We had a really good and very thoughtful jury. But they were not given the chance to understand all the aspects of what happened that day.”

She added that jurors were permitted to write questions to ask witnesses, and several jurors used this tool to attempt to ask about previous incidents between the officers and the defendent in order to better understand the motives of all parties. These questions were not answered due to the pre-trial motion.

“A lot of middle class people hear stories about the way that people in poor black neighborhoods experience the police, even on a day to day basis when nothing out of the ordinary had occured, and they don’t believe it because it’s so different form their experiences. Or they don’t want to believe it because they don’t want to believe that people get treated that way, or that police act that way,” said Kieth.

Troubled history
Benzo is known for speaking out against issues of police harassment in the Bayview, including the killing of Kenneth Harding. Harding, 19, was shot by police in August 2011. Harding was leaving a T train when police asked to see his transfer, a two-dollar value. Harding presumably panicked and ran away from the police. Officers shot at him as he ran. Police have claimed that Harding produced a gun and, while running, shot behind himself at police, and that it was his own bullet that killed him.

Police then approached and surrounded the fallen Harding and prevented others from approaching him. After 30 minutes, the young man had bled to death. A video of his death has since circulated widely on youtube.

Harding’s death sparked an upsurge in the continued outrage over police violence and racist disparities in law enforcement tactics.

Many of Benzo’s supporters feel that his convictions impinge on first amendment rights, and feel that the convictions are unjust.

But Benzo, a CCSF student and musician, is also trying to spend time taking care of his life responsibilities.

“[Benzo] is a college student. He’s doing what he needs to do, and going to school,” explained Tracey.

Benzo is scheduled for sentencing April 20, to be decided by Judge Jerome Benson. Each misdemeanor could carry a year in county jail.

Kieth is considering appealing the verdict.

Death penalty could go before California voters in November

Sasha Cuttler
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Death penalty could go before California voters in November

It appears that California voters will get a chance to abolish the death penalty this November, and that supporters of the proposed ballot measure will use mostly fiscal and public safety arguments to pick away at the majority of state residents that polls have shown still support capital punishment.

The group SAFE (which stands for Savings, Accountability, Full Enforcement) California this morning held press conferences in San Francisco and three other cities to announce that it is turning in more than 800,000 voter signatures (504,764 are needed) to qualify a measure that would make life in prison without the possibility of parole the maxiumum sentence in California. It would also spare the 720 inmates now on death row in San Quentin Prison, converting their sentences to life in prison.

“We make history today. This is the first time that voters in California will have the opportunity to replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole,” LaDoris Cordell, a retired Santa Clara County Superior Court judge, said at San Francisco City Hall.

She was flanked by Sups. Scott Wiener and Christina Olague and other supporters of the measure, as well to two visuals showing a county-by-county breakdown of the unsolved homicides and rapes in California. San Francisco ranks near the top in both categories, with 58 percent of murders (450) and 70 percent of reported rapes (1,236) going unsolved between 2000 and 2009.

“The money to catch these murderers and rapists is not there because it is on death row,” Cordell said, noting that the state wastes an estimated $184 million per year on capital punishment, a figure that represents the roughly $100,000 more per year it costs to house someone on death row versus in the normal prison population and the cost of lifetime legal representation and appeals to which condemned prisoners are entitled.

They argue that in a cash-strapped state, that money could be put to better use solving crimes and supplementing police budgets, with Wiener calling for state residents “to be rational in our approach to public safety and end the death penalty in California.”

Most studies on capital punishment have shown that it does not act as a crime deterrent and that it does not save money, so most arguments supporting it have been emotional ones offered by grieving families or law enforcement officials describing the heinous details of crimes. 

SAFE California seemed to be trying to preempt those appeals with speeches in San Francisco by three other supporters of the measure: Jeanne Woodford, the former San Quentin warden who now runs Death Penalty Focus; Obie Anthony, who was wrongfully accused of murder and exonerated last year after serving 17 years in prison; and Deldelp Medina, whose aunt was murdered by her cousin during a psychotic breakdown and faced capital punishment.

Woodford oversaw four executions at San Quentin and said she and other corrections workers were plagued by the questions of whether the person they were executing was innocent and whether state-sanctioned killing was really making the world safer: “No public employee should ever carry that burden, because I can tell you the system is flawed.”

Many studies have shown the criminal justice system is often biased against African Americans like Anthony. “At the age of 19, I was charged and faced with a murder I did not commit,” said Anthony, who was convicted based on eyewitness testimony of a pimp who later admitted that he was lying to get leniency in his own criminal charges, a deal with police that jurors never learned about.

“I’m living proof that terrible mistakes can happen and there is no perfect system,” Anthony said.

Medina told another story common to California’s flawed justice system, that of overzealous prosecutors seeking to appear tough, often for political reasons, being matched against overburdened public defenders who often lack the resources to properly defend poor people accused of serious crimes.

She noted how the death penalty gets “trotted out as a show pony in every election cycle” by politicians using the families of crime victims. But the reality is that vengeance isn’t a healthy emotion, and she said that capital punishment does little to heal a family’s pain: “The death penalty is an empty promise to the families of victims.”

Cordell said that capital punishment, which often takes 25 years to occur once all the appeals are exhausted, simply prolongs the survivors’ pain. “A quarter of a century is not justice for these families,” she said. And with the high cost of capital punishment exacerbating government funding shortfalls and inherent flaws in the court system, she said, “Justice in our criminal justice system is in grave peril.”   

Key redistricting meeting March 7

Zelda Bronstein
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Key redistricting meeting March 7

The Redistricting Task Force, which is drawing new lines for the Board of Supervisors, meets March 7 at City Hall, and supporters of the Community Unity Plan map will be presenting the proposal and making the case for a set of lines that dozens of community-based organizations have spent months putting together. The idea is to look not just at any one district but a the city as a whole — and to ensure that the downtown types, who would like to corral all the progressive voters into a handful of districts, don’t get their way.

The meeting’s at 6 pm in Room 406. If you want to check out the latest version of the Community Unity Map, it’s here. If you click on it, you can expand it and see where all the street boundaries are. The current districts are oulined in dark black lines; the proposed districts are in color.

The 8 Washington disaster goes to Planning

Zelda Bronstein
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The 8 Washington disaster goes to Planning

The urban planning disaster that is 8 Washington goes before the San Francisco City Planning Commission March 8 amid a long list of questions — including Mayor Lee’s position on the project and how it could screw up the America’s Cup.

Developer Simon Snellgrove wants to build the most expensive condos in San Francisco history on the waterfront, 145 units that will be far out of reach to anyone who makes less than half a million dollars a year. And many of the units will require income far higher than that. It’s not just housing for the 1 percent; it’s housing for the top half of the 1 percent.

There’s no need for this kind of housing in SF; the very rich have no problem finding places to live. And the spot zoning violates every standard of good waterfront planning practice.

The project will benefit the Port of San Francisco, which stands to take a cut of the money since some of the project is on Port land. But more than half of the land is owned by Golden Gateway and is a former redevelopment area, so the supervisors and the Port are going to have to fight over who gets the property tax increments and how that’s all financed.

More interesting, 8 Washington will be a boon to Golden Gateway, which as the landowner is a partner in the deal. And Golden Gateway is one of those big properties that are paying far too little in city taxes. When the complex changed hands several years ago, the owners used a stock-swap deal to transfer it, avoiding the Prop. 13 reassessment that could have substantially raised its taxes. So the city’s losing millions of dollars — and now Timothy Foo, who is the principal owner of Golden Gateway, will be getting a nice favor from the city he’s been screwing.

Oh, and by the way — a lot of Golden Gateway units are being advertised as short-term (that is, hotel) rentals — something that violates at least the spirit of city law. This is an outfit that deserves special zoning treatement from San Francisco?

Then there’s the fact that this could be a serious problem for the big America’s Cup party. Project critic Brad Paul has been analyzing the impacts of the development, and noticed some new language in the comments and responses to the Environmental Impact Report suggesting that excavation could lead to something like 200 dump-truck trips a day along the Embarcadero — roughly one trip every two minutes. In an email to Paul, Paul Matltzer in the Planning Department confirmed that the likely construction process could, indeed, involve that many dump trucks, rumbling along the Embarcadero during the peak construction period, which will also be the peak period for America’s Cup tourism.

Dump trucks, Paul (who used to drive one) notes, start slowly and brake slowly. The Embarcadero is already crowded — and will be far more crowded during the Cup races, so much so that city officials are thinking of closing traffic lanes to all but bicyles and transit. How, exactly, will that work out with 200 trucks a day fighting for room?

I’ve called and emailed the America’s Cup people, but they haven’t gotten back to me. I’ll keep you posted.

Lee’s office hasn’t gotten back to me, either, but I’m hearing that the mayor is telling people he hasn’t made up his mind — on a project that’s a week away from the Planning Commission and that one of his close allies, Rose Pak, is strongly promoting.

 

The right to a civil lawyer

Zelda Bronstein
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The right to a civil lawyer

I like Sup. David Chiu’s idea of giving indigent plaintiffs in civil cases the right to a lawyer. It’s one of those legal and political issues that’s been hanging around for decades: Everyone accused of a crime has the Constitutional right to counsel, but if you’re sued and have no money, you could very well be  SOL.

Now, there are a few places that some people can get help — nonprofit legal groups that help seniors, tenants, and others, but there aren’t enough of those lawyers to meet the need, and some people don’t qualify for any of the available help. Under the law, a poor person who gets sued has no guaranteed right to any assistance at all, and can wind up representing him- or herself in court, even if he or she has no legal background or experience.

That’s one reason landlords tend to win eviction cases against low-income people: If the tenant can’t find free legal help, it’s high-priced landlord lawyer who knows all the tricks against poor tenant who has no idea how to respond to a summons and complaint.

The supervisors have approved Chiu’s resolution, which asserts than San Francisco is a “right to civil counsel” city, but there’s not a whole lot of money around to fund it. He’s asking for a modest pilot program costing no more than $100,000 and focusing on eviction defense, which is a great place to start. His idea is to get the big law firms in the city to help out — to devote some of their time and money to pro bono work in the city’s indigent civil defense program.

And some of them will, and that’s great. But what we really need is a funding source for this — and it seems to me that the lawyers of the city are a logical place to start.

Yes, there are unemployed lawyers and lawyers who barely make rent. But as a whole, the class of people licensed to practice law in San Francisco is better off than most of the rest of us. The state bar hits every lawyer up for about $400 a year to fund bar operations, and the interest that lawyers earn on client trust funds has to go to indigent legal defense.

So why not set up a San Francisco lawyer’s fee — say, $50 a year for everyone practicing in the city — to fund the city’s civil legal defense program? I don’t know exactly how many lawyers we have, and I can’t find anyone at the state bar who can answer that, but I’ve seen published reports in the past suggesting that the city has more lawyers per-capita than anywhere else except Washington, D.C. One story that ran years ago in the Examiner put it at one per 70 residents — which would mean more than 10,000 lawyers in the city. So a $50 fee would bring in half a million dollars –plenty to set up an office and hire a couple of lawyers and have a director who could spend time running down pro bono counsel to help.

I have no idea if the city can legally do that; I checked with the folks in the City Attorney’s Office, and they have no simple answer. So Chiu would have to request a legal opinion on the question.

But if it’s possible, it’s a great idea, and I suspect even most lawyers in the city would support it. 

 

UPDATE: The state bar folks pointed me to the right place on the bar website, and it turns out there are 17,000 lawyers in SF. That’s $850,000 a year.

 

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