I got a flyer the other day announcing a District 10 merchants meeting featuring Sup. Malia Cohen — no big deal, district supervisors do this stuff all the time, and they should. The invite (PDF) reads:
The Office of Supervisor Malia Cohen, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and local business and merchant associations are pleased to present the District 10 Neighborhood Business Summit. The event will bring merchants together with their Supervisor and other city officials to discuss local business concerns.
Okay, fine. But down at the bottom are the logos of the sponsors: AT&T, Recology and PG&E.
AT&T is trying to get city permission to build hundreds of cable boxes on city sidewalks and is contesting a ban on the delivery of phones books. Recology is in the middle of a huge, high-stakes fight over its $275 million no-bid garbage contract. PG&E is fighting the city over community choice aggregation.
In other words, all three companies have major deals, involving millions of dollars, coming up at the Board of Supervisors. Cohen will be voting in the next few weeks — that is, pretty much right now — on the garbage and cable boxes and phone books. Isn’t it a little unseemly to have these three corporations sponsoring her event?
I called to ask her and she agreed the timing was “unfortunate.” But since it’s a Chamber of Commerce event, she said, it’s not clear what she could do about it.
Um, supervisor: You’re the boss here. Meeting doesn’t happen without you. The Chamber folks should have told you that three companies that need your vote would be sponsoring the event, and if they didn’t, you ought to have a word with them. Either way, those sponsors have to go.