The supervisors will hear a recommendation from the Rules Committee Jan. 25th to appoint Richard Johns to a seat on the Historic Preservation Commission. These things typically aren’t that controversial — but there will probably be a fight over this one. And it’s significant because of what it says about the new board committees appointed by board President David Chiu.
Background: The Historic Preservation Commission was created by the voters with the passage of Prop. J in 2008. Then-Sup. Aaron Peskin authored the ballot measure, which gave the panel real teeth, the ability to prevent the destruction of important pieces of local history — and mandated professional qualifications for six of the seven members. The goal: Prevent a mayor who cared nothing about preservation from appointing hacks and cronies to the board.
Seat number 4, for example, is set aside for a professional historian, someone with exensive academic background in California and Bay Area history. As Mike Buhler, director of the San Francisco Architectural Heritage foundation, noted in a Jan. 3, 2010 letter to the Rules Committee:
The minimum professional qualifications in history are a graduate degree in history or closely related field; or a bachelor’s degree in history or closely related field plus one of the following:
1. At least two years of full-time experience in research, writing, teaching, interpretation, or other demonstrable professional activity with an academic institution, historic organization or agency, museum, or other professional institution; or
2. Substantial contribution through research and publication to the body of scholarly knowledge in the field of history.
Just before leaving office, Newsom nominated Richard Johns, a lawyer, to that seat. Johns has been active in the movement to restore the Old Mint and create a San Francisco History Museum, and he clearly has more than a passing interest in local history — but he doesn’t even remotely meet the qualifications for this seat.
He also happens to be married to Eleanor Johns, who was chief of staff to Mayor Willie Brown.
Johns has done some good volunteer work, but according to Peskin, he’s a perfect case study in what Prop. J was supposed to prevent. “We wrote the measure to ensure high professional standards and qualifications for each seat,” Peskin told me. “If they can get away with this, the voters got bamboozled.”
Or, as Robert Cherny, an eminent professor and historian at San Francisco state, noted in a Jan. 17 letter to the commitee:
I am concerned that this nomination will set a precedent that the professional qualifications established by the charter can be ignored if a mayor wishes to do so.
The other problem with Johns became clear in his Jan. 20 testimony to the committee, when he talked about the important of the need for change and growth in San Francisco — key words that anyone who has followed local politics knows are the mantra of developers who want to get rid of historic landmarks.
I asked Sup. David Campos, who was on the previous Rules Committee, about Johns’ qualifications, and he told me that you could make a strictly legal argument either way; the charter language could be interpreted by a court to allow Johns to slide in. But he also said he didn’t support the nomination. “I had to ask,” he told me, “is this the best we can do?”
Good point — this is a city full of professional historians. Is Richard Johns the best we can do?
The current Rules Committee — with two conservatives (Mark Farrell and Sean Elsbernd) and one progressive (the chair, Jane Kim), apparently thought so. His nomination was approved unanimously.
It’s only one seat on one commission, but the precedent is important: You can’t set professional standards for commissions then let the mayor ignore them an appoint his political allies. And historic preservation is under attack in the city: Sup. Scott Wiener just announced that he’s calling for a hearing on how the city’s “prioritization of historic preservation is impacting, and possibly undermining, other key policy objectives.” In a press statement, he complained about too many things having to go through the Historic Preservation Commission.
Most nominations that get approval at Rules slide right through the full board. That’s the problem with a Rules Committe stacked with conservative, pro-development supervisors.
In this case, though, we can expect a bit of a fuss. I know the progressives on the board won’t be unanimous in approving Richard Johns.