Text and photos by Sarah Phelan
For several years, Minister Christopher Muhammad (at lectern) has been trying to get Mayor Gavin Newsom to temporarily stop work at the Hunters Point shipyard, until the children at Muhammad’s school and members of the surrounding Bayview community get asbestos dust-related health tests.
The city’s health department claims there is no health problem related to the dust and that there are no tests available, other than autopsies.
But thanks to Lennar’s failure to properly install and maintain air monitors, there is no data available to prove exactly what levels of dust the community was exposed to, when the developer’s massive grading project began at the shipyard in 2006.
Since then, air monitors at the site have repeatedly recorded exceedances that, the city claims, have triggered protective shutdowns, though often these shutdowns did not occur as fast as the community would like. And the ongoing exceedances have raised additional questions about the cumulative risk to public health and safety of all these dust clouds, where exactly the dust is coming from, and what exactly it contains.
Under new EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, the community’s request for additional assessments of the dust situation is reportedly being reviewed. But meanwhile, Muhammad’s refusal to shut up about the dust, has clearly angered Mayor Gavin Newsom, who recently said, via his spokesperson Nathan Ballard, that he supported a lawsuit that was filed against Muhammad and his group’s school, via the San Francisco Housing Authority, allegedly to recover unpaid back rent.
It was Chronicle columnists Phil Matier and Andy Ross who first asked whether the lawsuit that the San Francisco Housing Authority recently filed against Muhammad and the Nation of Islam’s Center for Self-Improvement, which operates the K-12 school next to the shipyard’s Parcel A in the Bayview, was “pay up or pay back”.
“You decide” the duo wrote on April 1, when they broke the news that the San Francisco Housing Authority had filed a lawsuit against Muhammad, alleging irregularities at the school, shortly after Muhammad and other activists showed up at Newsom’s gubernatorial town halls, asking loud and embarrassing questions about asbestos dust at the shipyard.
But the M&R column has remained deafeningly silent about the outcome of that lawsuit, even though Ross phoned the Nation of Islam’s lawyer Richard Drury minutes after the judge threw out not just one, but all three lawsuits that the SFHA had filed against Muhammad. That was over a week ago, on June 16.
So, does this mean the Chronicle only wants to write about stuff that they can spin to make Newsom look good and Muhammad bad? You decide.
It also turns out that it cost the city very little to file what appears to have been a series of frivolous lawsuits as payback for the Minister’s ongoing questions about asbestos dust: the city used in-house counsel at the Housing Authority, and the City is exempt from filing fees.
Reached by phone, Muhammad’s attorney Drury said he felt all three the lawsuits were “payback” against Muhammad for his attempts to try and get help from Newsom around ongoing issues with dust and asbestos at the shipyard.
“When the Minister didn’t get Newsom’s help, he attended a town hall meeting—and shortly afterwards, the San Francisco Housing Authority sued the Minister for breach of contract, payment of rent and unlawful detained,” Drury said. “In other words, the San Francisco Housing Authority is trying to evict a K-12 school, where 70 percent of the kids were failing in the public school system, and where 80 percent of the center’s graduates go to college.”