Advice

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MAY 17-23

ARIES

March 21-April 19

You’ve got a make a certain peace with your reality, Aries. And you should really step on it ’cause your work doesn’t end there, friend. After you come to acceptance, your next task is watch how your fears and emotions do or do not interplay.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Taurus, we’re not going to tell you lazy-assed, slow-as-frickin’-molasses people to put the brakes on something after you’ve spent however many years motivating yourself to act. We will suggest that maybe you check your pace. Don’t break out of the gate just to get winded and give up.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

Those things you see on your path, Gemini, are not welcome stations. They’re not street vendors offering you corn on a stick. They are impediments. Get a clear idea what they are, then take a look at your own boundaries. Progress will happen from being honest about what you can handle.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

This is truly a great time for you to do what Cancers do best: nurture. But we want you to nurture yourself perhaps not your specialty. And, get this, we want you to nurture yourself not only through your feelings of helplessness but also through the exciting feelings of beginning that you’re feeling alongside helplessness.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Leos, you people love to reinvent yourselves. Life gets so stagnant when you’re stuck in the same identity or phase of life for too long. Just look at Madonna, another Leo. Anyhoo, your current reinvention should focus on how to embody new ways of behaving that are more synched up with your lust for self-expression.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Your control-freakishness has placed you in an official astrological at-risk category, Virgo. If you don’t take responsibility for what you can realistically handle in a healthy way, then you’re going to be setting off on a path that is not sustainable. We know it makes you sad not to have superhuman abilities, but suck it up.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Libra, we’ll be real with you — we can’t make out half of what our notes say for you this week. Our typing sucks. One thing is clear, though: You’ve got to resist getting all wound up in the end result of your efforts. The end result is beyond your control, dude. Banish your fear and anxiety, and take control of your direction.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Scorpio, this is a good time to take a peek at how you take care of yourself. How you do or don’t take care of yourself, take yourself seriously, advocate for yourself. It’s the subtleties of self-care that we’re concerned with. Splurging on a trip to the spa is nice, but are you eating well and refraining from beating yourself up inside?

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

The time is now for looking around yourself and taking in some new perspectives, Sag. It’s getting pretty stale inside that one-track mind of yours; you need some new ways to view things. You also need to be willing to make some serious personal changes if you’re going to be able to salvage something good out of the crap you’re dealing with.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Astrological omens point to you having to rely on your feelings about things, Capricorn. And not surface ego-feelings but those deep hunches we call intuition. We know, you people hate intuition. You like things more tangible, more clear-cut. Too bad. Though we see some discomfort, if you get in the right mindset, you might even enjoy it.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Good thing you’re resilient, Aquarius. Any other sign would be knocked down by now. As for you people well, yeah, you’re sort of knocked down, but you’re getting back up so fast we barely noticed. During this wobbly week, please reach out to your pals for some much-needed perspective and even advice.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Pisces, you’ve got to love yourself enough to stay with yourself as you stare down your fears. It’ll do no good to maniacally charge your fears with a machete; it will also do no good to put on a tool belt and try to fix them, or to build a moat around your castle to keep them at bay. You’ve got to look the suckers in the eye.

Award-winning writer Michelle Tea and intuitive counselor Jessica Lanyadoo have been fraternizing with fate for the past lucky seven years. Call Lanyadoo for an astrology or tarot reading at (415) 336-8354. Write to Double Team at lovedoubleteam@hotmail.com.

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Apr. 26-May 2

Aries

March 21-April 19

Making decisions is strictly off-limits, Aries, unless you’re the rare ram that has a solid grip on your best-case scenario, or really, really, truly, deeply knows what you’re trying to get out of the deal. As for the rest of you common folk, make no selections, and filter the resulting frustration through love.

Taurus

April 20-May 20

Taurus, you’ve been dealt a bad hand. No doubt about it, pal — shit is rough for you people right now. The loss or change that has been cruelly foisted upon you is triggering some anxiety as you struggle to get past it. We hope you know that you’ve got a ton of support available to you, so don’t alienate yourself from the world.

Gemini

May 21-June 21

You better check yourself before you wreck yourself, Gemini. It’s a real messy week, and opportunities abound for you to fuck up. There’s a real need for you to approach your goals in proportion to the goals themselves. Is your ego a bit larger than the situation calls for?

Cancer

June 22-July 22

In the midst of a bunch of baloney, Cancer, you can have a fruitful, and even pleasant, week if you approach old problems in a new, exciting way. Though you are filled with fabulous inner strength and can-do optimism right now, we still advise taking baby steps toward fixing these lingering annoyances once and for all.

Leo

July 23-Aug. 22

Leo, it’s time to settle into the cubicle of your heart and fire up the love computer. Double-click on the folder marked "My Relationships" and get to work on that document titled "Communication." We expect the forthcoming report to detail the personal risks you’re willing to take to benefit the longevity of a connection.

Virgo

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

You’re out of balance, Virgo. And when a Virgo is out of balance, shit doesn’t get done. And when shit doesn’t get done, it throws a Virgo out of balance, Virgos being extremely productive types. Do you see the cycle of abuse here? Apply yourself in a way that balances your gains with your losses.

Libra

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Libra, what can we say? You’re bummed out. Nothing we do, no advice we dispense, will lessen the stark reality of your major bummed-out-ness. However, we would be remiss if we didn’t offer you something. This disappointment is an opportunity for you to move through your feelings with compassion for yourself.

Scorpio

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Sometimes, Scorpio, our families hurt our feelings. They let us down. Friggin’ bunch of jerks. And when we’re dealing with the families that brought us into this cruel world (rather than the excellent families we’ve found to go to movies and shit-talk with), sometimes we have to think in terms of harm reduction. That’s your week.

Sagittarius

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

When your head and your heart are divided, Sag, there’s no hope of reaching internal consensus. So unless you want to sit in an eternal, futile meeting with yourself, aim instead to make a decision that feels in alignment with your integrity. You won’t be totally happy with it, but you’ve got to make a choice.

Capricorn

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Capricorn, in the face of the impressive amount of anxiety you’re feeling, we urge you to not make any impulsive moves. You may think a sudden burst of spontaneity will shake your bad feelings away, but alas, it will only intensify them. Find a stable middle ground while this emotional storm passes.

Aquarius

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

It’s true, Aquarius: You’re officially “on fire.” Your work is paying off big time, you’re offering yourself to the world, and the world is flinging its panties at you like a slavering groupie. But at the end of the day, gentle Water Bearer, what really counts is how you feel, and you’re feeling funky.

Pisces

Feb. 19-March 20

Pisces, it’s time to move on. You want to move slowly, and you want to move steadily, but seriously: You want to move. Keep your heart open and take your time with it. And don’t worry about shit being perfect — perfection is hardly ever important. All that matters is significant movement. SFBG

ABCs and Rubies

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SONIC REDUCER A passionate music fan friend recently laid some curious medicine on me as we were hunkered down at Doc’s Clock, watching our inexplicably enraged lady bartender toss one of our half-full beverages: My friend’s musician ex had already written off his barely released singer-songwriter-ish album, because according to his veteran estimate, "people are only interested in bands these days."

Maybe that’s why Vancouver‘s indie-esque artist and sometime New Pornographer Dan Bejar rocks under the name Destroyer. Still, it’s hard to scan the music news these days and avoid single, solitary monikers like Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young, both breaking from their associations with bands and recording protest songs old and new. Bejar’s fellow Canadian Young just last week offered up the quickie, choir-backed Living with War, which includes a song titled "Let’s Impeach the President" and streams for free at www.neilyoung.com starting April 28 (leading one to wonder if the Peninsula’s Shakey is responding to the calls at his onstage SXSW interview for a new "Ohio"?). Perhaps in an instantly downloadable, superniched, and highly fragmented aural landscape, there remains a certain heroic power in creating and performing in the first person, under your own name, while reaching for a collective imagination, some elusive third person.

Chatting on the phone, over the border, Bejar might not easily parse as a part of the aforementioned crew, though he musically cross-references urban rock ’n’ rollers, stardusted glitter kids, and louche lounge cats, explicitly tweaking those "West Coast maximalists, exploring the blues, ignoring the news" on "Priest’s Knees," off his new full-length, Destroyer’s Rubies (Merge). Some might even venture that the late-night, loose lips and goosed hips, full-blown rock of the album, his sixth, marks it as his most indulgent to date.

And Bejar, 33 and a Libra, will readily fess up to his share of indulgences, in lieu of collecting juicy tour adventures. On tour he says, "I tend to go and then kind of hide backstage, get up onstage, try and play, get off, and continue to hide backstage.

"I’m not super into rock clubs," Bejar continues. "I just don’t feel a need to make a home of them."

Just back from the first part of his US journeys ("We played 12 or 14 of 16 dates. That’s hardly any. I think most bands would think that’s psychotic"), Bejar does feel quite at home in Vancouver and will reluctantly theorize about Canadian music. "I think there’s a certain outsider perspective that people might say comes with Canadian songwriters, like the states would never be able to produce a Leonard Cohen or a Joni Mitchell or a Neil Young just kind of idiosyncratic characters." But then he brakes and reverses. "But I don’t know if I believe that."

Bejar could be talking about his own amiable, idiosyncratic self. Most of his sentences end with a little, upward, questioning lilt, giving his responses a way-relaxed, studiedly casual, postgrad quality, clad as they are in contradictions, at times inspiring detailed analysis, but more often triggering mild arguments and arriving at good-humored dead ends. In other words, the man can talk complete paragraphs or monosyllables. Rubies‘ last track, "Sick Priest Learns to Last Forever," for example, has been kicking around for five years. "It’s kind of like the first song I tried doing, to break out a certain mold of Destroyer songs that I had unconsciously set up in the late ’90s," Bejar explains. "It was a style of song where the language was mostly based on political or economic rhetoric and social expression and the occasional personal aside. ‘Sick Priest’ is kind of an exercise in a more free-flowing, imagistic song, which I was dead against back in my younger days, and I’ve since completely embraced that style of writing."

Maybe it’s the sax, I venture. To these rust-belt-weaned ears, the new album sounds like urban East Coast rock of the ’70s à la not only Bowie but Springsteen and, say, the J. Geils Band.

"Wow, Peter Wolf," he sighs. "That’s cool. That’s funny. I mean, I kind of have a soft spot for, uh, that kind of sounding band, though I don’t have a soft spot for the songs that those people wrote. I like the ’70s bar-rock feel, especially the laid-back afternoon variety."

Yeah, like when you’re sitting at the bar, drinking cheap beer, watching the sun shoot through a vinyl padded door.

"Sure."

Bejar can go for that scenario: Despite the fact that he will be playing All Tomorrow’s Parties in England shortly after his SF date, you get the impression he can take or leave Destroyer and even the New Pornographers. (Since he moved away to his father’s homeland of Spain a few years ago, he says, "My involvement is pretty minimal. I don’t go to practices. I don’t tour.") Who knows, when he gets some time off after ATP and the Pitchfork music festival in Chicago, he might even take his own "bad advice," the kind that’s ingrained in Destroyer songs’ "little pep talks," and fall back on a career shelving books at the public library. "Something part-time, maybe, that doesn’t involve too much dealing with the public," he ponders playfully. "I’m good at alphabetizing stuff." SFBG

Destroyer

May 8, 9:30 p.m.

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

$10

(415) 861-5016

 

Family business

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Frank Edward Lembi has spent nearly six decades turning San Francisco’s hot housing market into his version of the American dream, in the process creating nightmares for many struggling renters.

The aging patriarch still resides at the top of the Lembi family’s colossal accumulation of capital, Skyline Realty, also known widely as CitiApartments, the second-largest owner of rental units in San Francisco, as the company describes itself.

Skyline owns somewhere between 130 and 150 apartment buildings, hotels, and commercial properties throughout the city. Over the past few years, the company has spent tens of millions of dollars buying new properties everywhere from the Tenderloin to Russian Hill, quietly making the already controversial Skyline an even more ubiquitous force in San Francisco’s housing market.

As the Guardian has reported over the past few weeks, some Skyline tenants claim the company has developed an aggressive business strategy intended to empty newly purchased buildings of unprofitable tenants with rent control by either offering onetime buyout deals or simply frightening and coercing them until they leave.

Records from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection also show violations of the city’s building and housing codes leading to complaints from tenants of roach and bedbug infestations and inoperable heating systems and elevators at some of the company’s properties. Such allegations have resulted in two lawsuits filed by the city and several more by tenants. Skyline also filed more eviction attempts in San Francisco Superior Court last year than any other single year during the past decade, according to a review of court records. Those cases have climbed fastest over the past four years and don’t reflect the true volume of notices to vacate that appear on tenants’ doors and are resolved before the matter appears in court.

From additional interviews and a review of publicly available records, corporate filings, and old press accounts emerges the portrait of a man, Frank Lembi, who has survived some of the darkest periods of the past few decades of American capitalism and retained his position as one of the city’s most powerful real estate moguls.

A San Francisco native, Lembi returned from serving in World War II and founded Skyline in 1947. Today he still lists the same Burlingame home address he had at least a decade ago when his longtime wife, Olga, passed away. The stark white and pea-green split-level is modest considering the wealth he’s accrued since Skyline began its ascension.

He and Olga had five children, two of whom would join Frank’s list of chief business allies. Yvonne Lembi-Detert is the president and CEO of a Skyline-affiliated company that owns a handful of posh boutique hotels. His son Walter joined the real estate business in 1969.

"I learned nepotism from my father," Frank told California Business in 1987. "He came to this country from Italy and started his children off pretty much the way I’ve started mine. It’s a way of life for us."

Frank and Walter eventually founded Continental Savings of America in 1977, a savings and loan association that propelled the family beyond the simple purchase and resale of small apartment buildings. At its peak, Continental maintained a staff of nearly 200 and more than half a billion dollars in assets. The company was making individual real estate loans of up to a million dollars by 1983.

During the ’80s and early ’90s, federal deregulation of the S&Ls encouraged a push for much more profitable, yet risky, high-interest loans and resulted in a race to the bottom. It was the era of financial scandal, and paying back federally insured depositors who had invested in failed S&Ls eventually cost taxpayers billions.

Continental began posting major losses in the ’90s as the company’s capital sank, and in 1995 the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) took it over, fearing insolvency. Not long beforehand, just before Continental went public, Frank stepped down as chair, owing to a conflict of interest tied to Skyline’s HomeOwners Finance Center. But Frank and Walter both remained major shareholders in the company.

It was a bad time for lenders, nonetheless, and Frank was apparently not happy. The feds had to file a restraining order against him after he allegedly threatened to plant security guards at Continental’s 250 Montgomery St. doors to "physically prevent" the confiscation of its office furniture, according to court records.

In the end, according to an OTS official we contacted, the cost to taxpayers amounted to about $22 million. But it clearly didn’t send the Lembis to the poorhouse: Since the Continental Savings collapse, Skyline Realty, along with CitiApartments, has grown to become a very lucrative focal point of the family’s enterprises.

Skyline Properties alone generated approximately $36 million in sales during the 2004 fiscal year, according to the Directory of Corporate Affiliations. But the company has founded more than 100 corporations and limited liability companies, each owning individual Skyline properties, and making it difficult to ascertain Skyline’s real annual revenue.

Its business model is not uncommon, but the complex web of affiliates has enabled the company to keep some legal liabilities aimed away from Skyline and Lembi and make sizable political contributions to various candidates and causes — nearly $40,000 since 1999 — all of it in small amounts stemming from several different entities. In one case, Skyline’s affiliates donated $20,000 on a single day to help defeat a 2002 ballot initiative designed to increase utility rates and improve the Hetch Hetchy water system.

The company has declined to answer further questions for this series, but Skyline manager David Raynal stated in response to a list of e-mail questions in early March that the company’s "plan is to restore apartment buildings to the highest standard." He wrote that Skyline supports the creation of special assessment districts that benefit those neighborhoods. "Every year we renovate many apartments, upgrade common areas, and improve neighborhoods."

Since we began publishing stories on Skyline, former employees have contacted us with tales about how the company conducts business. A onetime Skyline employee who requested anonymity said she was well aware of the company’s buyout offers to rent-controlled tenants and added that the company was "pretty heavy-handed." She also said she was encouraged to enter tenants’ units without prior notice.

"We were told we were making the community better, but we knew that was a bunch of bullshit," she said.

She added that Skyline had trouble retaining employees. High turnover rates are hardly uncommon in the real estate industry, but another former employee who also asked that his name not be revealed said Skyline’s group of hotels had similar issues.

"[Frank Lembi] is not the friendliest man in the world," he said. "Salespeople would get frustrated and move on."

Dean Preston, an attorney for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said he’s assisted at least 100 Skyline tenants with legal advice over the last five years.

"I deal with tenants, as well as landlords, all across the city," Preston said. "In my opinion, CitiApartments is the most abusive landlord that I deal with in my practice." *

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Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend has not been coming during vaginal sex. I finally asked him if we hadn’t given him enough recovery time between go-rounds and he said yes. Thing is, it happens when we haven’t had sex in a day or so. I want to let him be the expert on his own penis, but I also worry that he’s not telling me about a problem.

He initiates sex often, even when I think he’s probably still too soft from the last time and should wait. I’ll suggest fooling around more, etc., but it’s frustrating to be constantly saying "no" and "wait" and "how about a blow job first?" Up to this point it’s been fantastic, and though I gained a few pounds over the holidays, I am dieting and he claims to find me attractive.

Love,

Unwilling Expert

Dear Ex:

Of course he finds you attractive. However much of that horrible green bean and Campbell’s soup casserole you may have consumed back in December has nothing to do with it, or with anything, really.

I think letting him be "the expert on his own penis" is an excellent plan; why don’t you do that? If he tries to accomplish "intromission" (sex books don’t really use words like "intromission" anymore, do they?) and he’s not quite up to it, surely he has the good sense to wait a few moments without any advice from you? And if he does get it in there and can’t come, does he simply flail away until the morning alarm goes off, or does he give up after a while, allowing you to step in with a heroic blow job to save the day?

It’s not that I want you to be a passive recipient of whatever passes for sex chez you, far from it. It’s just that you’re overthinking this. If you really believe he might be concealing some secret shame or unnerving health problem then ask him about it, but not while he’s actually in the process of using the penis he’s supposed to be the expert on. Never works.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I can only orgasm from vaginal penetration and usually do so between one and five times. I rarely come during oral sex; I can probably count the times on both hands in the past 20 years. I feel like I’m disappointing my boyfriend — he says most women he’s been with come this way and thinks it’s a little odd that I can’t. Is this psychological in some way or is it just the way my body works? I don’t know if this matters or not, but I was sexually molested by an older female when I was eight. I’m way past it, but not sure if it may have something to do with it. I’d like to understand my own body and not feel like the odd woman out.

Love,

Backwards

Dear Back:

Nobody’s ever satisfied! It’s true, as far as it goes, that far more women can climax easily from oral sex than from intercourse. It is also essentially meaningless. Most of those women spend at least some small proportion of their free time bellyaching to girlfriends or sex advice columnists that they can’t come from intercourse, anyway.

If your long-ago abuser did do something oral sex–like to you then it is certainly possible that your body just doesn’t want any truck with it, and who could blame it? You could consult a therapist but do be careful — it sounds as though you have made your peace with the events of your childhood, and it may be best, in the long run, simply to leave that particular hornet’s nest alone.

There are reasons neither physiological nor directly related to the abuse that could explain why you don’t come from oral sex. The most common is probably the sort of stage fright to which many people, particularly women, are prone: Being the center of attention is so much more awkward than pleasing someone else, and, omigod, what if he wants to stop already and I still haven’t come, will he start to resent me? In a word, no, he won’t, but try to convince your shyest innermost teenager of that. Your particular partner isn’t helping matters much when he opines that it’s "odd" of you, either. Odd is as odd does, whatever that means. You have my permission to tell him that you understand that it’s unusual in his experience and so on but bringing it up again is not helping and he is welcome to shut up. Well, leave the last part off, if you like. That was just me.

Do keep in mind that not everybody likes everything and sometimes it’s just that simple. If that doesn’t satisfy and you want to know whether your body to can respond to oralish stimulation in the absence of stage fright, try a trickle of warm water in the bathtub or, if you’re up for more, a pulsing showerhead. Water is like a tongue, sort of, but it never says anything to make you feel bad.

Love,

Andrea

Sex on the brain? Interviews for San Francisco Sex Information’s spring training start this Saturday and they fill up fast. If you want your chance to be a know-it-all like me, sign up now at http://www.sfsi.org/training.

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

 

 

 

The political puppeteer

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By offering envelope-pushing legal and political advice at key moments in the fall campaign, attorney Jim Sutton was perhaps the single most influential individual behind the victories of Mayor Gavin Newsom and District Attorney Kamala Harris.
In the process, Sutton solidified his reputation as the dark prince of San Francisco elections, a hired gun who helps downtown interests and well-funded campaigns continue to dominate the electoral field even after voters passed reforms that restricted campaign giving and spending and required more official disclosure.
“He knows more election law than anyone, and he knows it better than anyone else,” local political consultant David Looman told the Bay Guardian. “He is the guy you call.”
New era, new player
Sutton, 40, stepped on the political stage just as voters were going to the polls in the fall of 1997 to demand more transparency in campaigns, a reaction to the leadership of Mayor Willie Brown and the dealings of powerhouse consultants like Jack Davis and Robert Barnes. At the time Sutton worked for Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller, and Naylor, a Mill Valley firm that specializes in election law.
Sutton took on mostly big-money campaigns backed by downtown interests — such as Brown’s 1999 reelection and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s successful, multimillion-­dollar bids to squelch the public power movement in 2001 and 2002. Highly versed in the minutia of campaign finance law, he became a major player in electoral politics in San Francisco — and across the state.
“He is one of a small handful of very influential political law attorneys who typically represent moneyed, influential candidates,” California Common Cause executive director Jim Knox told us. “And he seems to be on something of a crusade right now.”
A search of the San Francisco Ethics Commission’s online database shows that over the past six years, Sutton has acted as treasurer or in another legal capacity for at least 20 campaigns and counts such heavily funded political action committees as the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, and the San Francisco Association of Realtors among his permanent clients. For that work, which doesn’t include the fall election, he earned at least $750,000.
Many of the city’s progressive activists and leaders see him as a dark agent — a tool only well-heeled interests can hire to navigate regulatory loopholes in order to spend as much as possible, even it means pushing the limits of the law, to sway voters.
“He’s an opportunistic lawyer who works against populist issues,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said.
Moreover, activists and state campaign finance experts say, he exerts an extraordinary level of influence over the city’s campaign regulators, including the top staff at the Ethics Commission and the deputy city attorneys who work with that agency.
“He is a high-powered fixer who has relationships with people in power that let him deliver for his clients in a way that leaves the less-connected among us flabbergasted,” said Marc Solomon, a Green Party member who worked on Sup. Matt Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign.
For his part, Sutton says that’s nonsense.
“There’s absolutely no proof or evidence of that,” Sutton told us. “I’m a professional, and I don’t want special access. I don’t need it, because I have a knowledge of the law.”
Rising to the top
By the time Sutton left his old firm last May to create Sutton and Associates, he had sealed his reputation as a go-to guy and counted among his clients the man who would be mayor. Sutton was everywhere. Consider:
• Having lawyered Newsom through the embarrassing flap in early 2003 over the $1 million loan from mentor Gordon Getty that (whoops!) Newsom neglected to disclose on his economic interest statements, Sutton served as treasurer to the Marina District supervisor’s mayoral campaign.
• When district attorney candidate Harris’s consultants realized their client was facing disaster if they couldn’t get her out of a legally binding pledge she signed in January 2003 to abide by the spending limits set in that race, they summoned Sutton, who got her out of the jam. The Ethics Commission’s decision to lift the spending limit was one of the agency’s most egregious acts in years and was truly an extraordinary event, activists say. It allowed Harris to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get past Bill Fazio in the runoff and eventually beat incumbent Terence Hallinan.
• Sutton handled the regulatory filing procedures for the California Urban Issues Project, a nonprofit lobbying outfit that churned out campaign mailers slamming Hallinan and mayoral contender Gonzalez for, among other charges, an unwillingness to crack down on the activities of homeless people. Though the group’s status prevents it from taking positions on candidates, the mailers clearly favored one candidate over the other. However, since the pieces didn’t actually include a “vote for candidate X” command, they fell within the bounds of the law as recently interpreted by the appellate courts, Sutton told us.
“What I do is say, ‘I am the lawyer. It’s my job to say this is what the law says. This is what it does or doesn’t allow,’ ” Sutton said. “It’s not about any kind of ideology on my part.”
• Sutton also served as treasurer for the campaigns behind two successful measures funded by downtown interests: the clean-streets initiative (Proposition C) and the controversial anti-panhandling legislation sponsored by Newsom (Proposition M). Interestingly, Harris particularly benefited because of her support for Prop. M. San Francisco pollster David Binder told us in December that her position on Prop. M helped her win over much of Fazio’s base and was key to her victory.
• Sutton’s expertise helped Newsom and Harris raise money in larger chunks during the runoff than they might otherwise have done. That’s because Sutton is keenly aware of a detail in the city’s campaign finance law that says if a candidate carries “accrued expenses” from the general election to the runoff, that candidate can collect $500 (instead of $250) from contributors. He should be — the ruling came as a result of his suggestion to local regulators.
For practical purposes, it can become a matter of shuffling the books. Newsom and Harris had so much cash behind their candidacies that it’s tough to believe they had any real debt. And in the case of at least Newsom, the amount of “debt” certainly seemed to be a moving target.
Shortly after the general election, Newsom campaign manger Eric Jaye told us he thought Newsom bore roughly $30,000 in accrued expenses. But when the campaign filed the paperwork, Newsom showed $225,322 in unpaid bills (see “Tainted Dough,” 12/03/03).
Neither Hallinan’s nor Gonzalez’s campaign took advantage of this provision in the law, even though Gonzalez treasurer Randy Knox brought it to the candidate’s attention. Gonzalez told us at the time that he didn’t consider such a move ethical.
Learning the ropes
A self-described politics nerd who interned in his state assemblymember’s office in high school, Sutton credits the rigors of the tight-knit environment of Pomona College — more than his three years at Stanford University Law School — with influencing the way he works today.
“I learned early I wasn’t going to get away without doing my homework,” he told us.
After clerking for former California Supreme Court Justice Edward Panelli from 1988 to 1989, he searched for a way to combine his legal degree with his keen interest in politics and government. In 1990 he found his way to Nielsen, Merksamer, though he lived, as he still does, in San Francisco.
Since he knew the city, he evolved into the firm’s attorney who dealt with San Francisco matters, he told us, even though he’s a member of the Republican Party — a rare bird here. In fact, he even served a stint as general counsel for the California Republican Party.
His first work in the city was on behalf of large institutions — the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum’s early bond campaigns, for example. He also made a key alliance with consultant Barnes, who was on his way to building a hugely influential career here and becoming closely connected to former mayor Brown.
In spring 1998, Sutton acted as treasurer for Bay Beautiful, a PAC aimed at defeating Proposition K, which former state senator Quentin L. Kopp put on the ballot to restrict Brown’s control of the development of Treasure Island. (Though the measure passed, the Brown-controlled Board of Supervisors failed to implement it.)
In November 1999, Sutton played a role in the orchestrated independent expenditure campaign on behalf of Brown’s reelection efforts in his handling of the Willie Brown Leadership PAC. The PAC directed some $55,000 into Brown’s bid for a second term (see “The Soft Money Shuffle,” 2/16/00).
At the time, Sutton had gone public with his strong opposition to efforts to restrict spending in political campaigns, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, “Not only does a spending cap decrease the quantity and quality of the issues discussed in the campaigns, it also infringes on First Amendment rights.”
One year after Brown’s reelection, the Leadership PAC, together with the pro-downtown Committee on Jobs, pumped some $67,000 into an unsuccessful bid to defeat Proposition O, which reinstated limits on independent expenditures and provided public financing for campaigns. Sutton handled the legal work for No on O.
No surprise there, Sutton’s critics say. Where money seeks to influence politics, that’s where you’ll find him. Sutton, though, says the list of campaigns he’s served doesn’t reflect his ideology as much as it does his skill set. He told us the best-funded campaigns “tend to have the more complicated legal questions, since they’re going to do more stuff.”
Money and politics
Advocates of campaign finance reform say Sutton has taken his opposition to campaign spending limits on the road, seeking to erode local ordinances that restrict spending.
“Sutton is active all over the state in his opposition to campaign finance reform,” said Paul Ryan, political reform project director for the Los Angeles–based Center for Governmental Studies.
Most recently Sutton testified before the San Diego Ethics Commission at a Jan. 21 hearing on a proposal to strengthen local campaign finance law. Sutton argued the commission should repeal the local law and replace it with the state’s version, which happens to be weaker.
“When we wrote the Political Reform Act of 1974, we put in there that local laws could be stronger than the state law,” Center for Governmental Studies director Bob Stern said. “What we have now is about 100 cities and counties that have gone beyond the state law. What [Sutton] is doing is pushing local jurisdictions to follow the state law only. And that’s unfortunate, because each local jurisdiction needs to deal with its own problems.”
Sutton said he just wants a uniform standard, with the minimal local amendments.
“[Cities and counties] keep making more and more laws, which are making things more and more complicated and difficult for anyone who wants to run for election to figure out,” Sutton said. “It has a dampening effect.”
Ryan and others are concerned Sutton might succeed in discouraging officials in municipalities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco from sticking by their stronger local laws. Compounding their concerns is that Sutton appears to have a great deal of influence over regulatory officials — at least in San Francisco.
Charlie Marsteller, who formerly headed up a San Francisco chapter of California Common Cause, believes the Ethics Commission has for more than a year failed to act on a complaint he filed against Sutton in late 2002, because of Sutton’s influence on the agency. (The complaint was over Sutton’s failure to disclose some $800,000 in contributions from PG&E to a committee aimed at defeating Proposition D, another public power measure.)
“It seems to me they are waiting until after February, when a seat on the commission is up and they’ll be able to replace [Bob Planthold] with a Sutton-friendly commissioner,” Marsteller said. (Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng is expected to name Planthold’s replacement any day now.)
More recent examples activists point to include the Harris spending-cap matter and the latest: a charge made Jan. 16 by two Ethics Commission staffers that director Ginny Vida ordered the destruction of documents accidentally e-mailed to the agency by a secretary in Sutton’s office. Those documents, which were first reported on in the San Francisco Sentinel, strongly suggest that funds raised by the San Francisco Swearing-In Committee (without contribution limits) for Newsom’s inauguration were used to pay off a long list of consultants who worked on the campaign — a charge Sutton has vehemently denied.
On Jan. 28, Sutton filed paperwork for the committee reporting contributions but not expenditures. The total raised was $317,850 and included donations of $10,000 to $20,000 from such downtown players as Shorenstein Co., Gap founder Don Fisher, the San Francisco Association of Realtors, and Clear Channel.
Though Sutton insists he enjoys no undue influence on local regulators, even one of Harris’s consultants told us Sutton was hired for just that reason. “Jim Sutton has a certain amount of influence with Ginny Vida. He doesn’t think [spending limits] are constitutional,” Looman said. “And I believe that worries her too.”
Vida was on medical leave and couldn’t reached for comment, but her deputy, Mabel Ng, said neither she nor Vida give Sutton special treatment.
“I don’t think he has any more or any less influence than anyone else,” Ng said.
Dealing with Ethics
Sutton’s most impressive act in the Harris controversy was convincing Vida and Ng that Harris didn’t know she was bound to the pledge she signed in January 2003 to stay under the spending cap. Had ethics officials concluded that Harris knew her pledge was binding when she blew the cap sometime in September, they could have disqualified her from the race, according to the terms of the city’s campaign finance law.
Instead the Ethics Commission signed onto a settlement agreement stipulating that Harris’s had been an innocent mistake — though there was plenty of evidence that her campaign officials fully knew the pledge was binding (see Campaign Watch, 9/17/03 and 10/08/03). But in buying into Sutton’s version of events, the commission allowed Harris to continue spending money that helped her win the race.
“To facilitate the needs of Sutton’s clients, [Ethics] staffers gave in to Sutton the way he wanted,” Marsteller said. “The commissioners dropped the ball in that they needed to request an audit to check out the veracity of the statements being made by Harris…. They could hardly decide that the violations by the Harris committee were unintentional absent an audit. It’s one of the greatest demonstrations of incompetence I’ve seen, and Sutton led them into it.”
For his part, Sutton disagrees that Vida gave him an easy of time of it. “They fined [Harris] $34,000, and they made sure we printed flyers and ads telling the public of the mistake,” Sutton said.
That’s true. But Ryan and others view the matter as strong evidence of Sutton’s influence.
“It appears as though many of the arguments he makes personally are then likewise made by Ginny Vida and Mabel Ng,” Ryan said. “It appears as though Jim Sutton is influencing the public policy and San Francisco and the interpretation of the city’s finance laws.”

The political puppeteer

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By offering envelope-pushing legal and political advice at key moments in the fall campaign, attorney Jim Sutton was perhaps the single most influential individual behind the victories of Mayor Gavin Newsom and District Attorney Kamala Harris.
In the process, Sutton solidified his reputation as the dark prince of San Francisco elections, a hired gun who helps downtown interests and well-funded campaigns continue to dominate the electoral field even after voters passed reforms that restricted campaign giving and spending and required more official disclosure.
“He knows more election law than anyone, and he knows it better than anyone else,” local political consultant David Looman told the Bay Guardian. “He is the guy you call.”
New era, new player
Sutton, 40, stepped on the political stage just as voters were going to the polls in the fall of 1997 to demand more transparency in campaigns, a reaction to the leadership of Mayor Willie Brown and the dealings of powerhouse consultants like Jack Davis and Robert Barnes. At the time Sutton worked for Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller, and Naylor, a Mill Valley firm that specializes in election law.
Sutton took on mostly big-money campaigns backed by downtown interests — such as Brown’s 1999 reelection and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s successful, multimillion-­dollar bids to squelch the public power movement in 2001 and 2002. Highly versed in the minutia of campaign finance law, he became a major player in electoral politics in San Francisco — and across the state.
“He is one of a small handful of very influential political law attorneys who typically represent moneyed, influential candidates,” California Common Cause executive director Jim Knox told us. “And he seems to be on something of a crusade right now.”
A search of the San Francisco Ethics Commission’s online database shows that over the past six years, Sutton has acted as treasurer or in another legal capacity for at least 20 campaigns and counts such heavily funded political action committees as the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, and the San Francisco Association of Realtors among his permanent clients. For that work, which doesn’t include the fall election, he earned at least $750,000.
Many of the city’s progressive activists and leaders see him as a dark agent — a tool only well-heeled interests can hire to navigate regulatory loopholes in order to spend as much as possible, even it means pushing the limits of the law, to sway voters.
“He’s an opportunistic lawyer who works against populist issues,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said.
Moreover, activists and state campaign finance experts say, he exerts an extraordinary level of influence over the city’s campaign regulators, including the top staff at the Ethics Commission and the deputy city attorneys who work with that agency.
“He is a high-powered fixer who has relationships with people in power that let him deliver for his clients in a way that leaves the less-connected among us flabbergasted,” said Marc Solomon, a Green Party member who worked on Sup. Matt Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign.
For his part, Sutton says that’s nonsense.
“There’s absolutely no proof or evidence of that,” Sutton told us. “I’m a professional, and I don’t want special access. I don’t need it, because I have a knowledge of the law.”
Rising to the top
By the time Sutton left his old firm last May to create Sutton and Associates, he had sealed his reputation as a go-to guy and counted among his clients the man who would be mayor. Sutton was everywhere. Consider:
• Having lawyered Newsom through the embarrassing flap in early 2003 over the $1 million loan from mentor Gordon Getty that (whoops!) Newsom neglected to disclose on his economic interest statements, Sutton served as treasurer to the Marina District supervisor’s mayoral campaign.
• When district attorney candidate Harris’s consultants realized their client was facing disaster if they couldn’t get her out of a legally binding pledge she signed in January 2003 to abide by the spending limits set in that race, they summoned Sutton, who got her out of the jam. The Ethics Commission’s decision to lift the spending limit was one of the agency’s most egregious acts in years and was truly an extraordinary event, activists say. It allowed Harris to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get past Bill Fazio in the runoff and eventually beat incumbent Terence Hallinan.
• Sutton handled the regulatory filing procedures for the California Urban Issues Project, a nonprofit lobbying outfit that churned out campaign mailers slamming Hallinan and mayoral contender Gonzalez for, among other charges, an unwillingness to crack down on the activities of homeless people. Though the group’s status prevents it from taking positions on candidates, the mailers clearly favored one candidate over the other. However, since the pieces didn’t actually include a “vote for candidate X” command, they fell within the bounds of the law as recently interpreted by the appellate courts, Sutton told us.
“What I do is say, ‘I am the lawyer. It’s my job to say this is what the law says. This is what it does or doesn’t allow,’ ” Sutton said. “It’s not about any kind of ideology on my part.”
• Sutton also served as treasurer for the campaigns behind two successful measures funded by downtown interests: the clean-streets initiative (Proposition C) and the controversial anti-panhandling legislation sponsored by Newsom (Proposition M). Interestingly, Harris particularly benefited because of her support for Prop. M. San Francisco pollster David Binder told us in December that her position on Prop. M helped her win over much of Fazio’s base and was key to her victory.
• Sutton’s expertise helped Newsom and Harris raise money in larger chunks during the runoff than they might otherwise have done. That’s because Sutton is keenly aware of a detail in the city’s campaign finance law that says if a candidate carries “accrued expenses” from the general election to the runoff, that candidate can collect $500 (instead of $250) from contributors. He should be — the ruling came as a result of his suggestion to local regulators.
For practical purposes, it can become a matter of shuffling the books. Newsom and Harris had so much cash behind their candidacies that it’s tough to believe they had any real debt. And in the case of at least Newsom, the amount of “debt” certainly seemed to be a moving target.
Shortly after the general election, Newsom campaign manger Eric Jaye told us he thought Newsom bore roughly $30,000 in accrued expenses. But when the campaign filed the paperwork, Newsom showed $225,322 in unpaid bills (see “Tainted Dough,” 12/03/03).
Neither Hallinan’s nor Gonzalez’s campaign took advantage of this provision in the law, even though Gonzalez treasurer Randy Knox brought it to the candidate’s attention. Gonzalez told us at the time that he didn’t consider such a move ethical.
Learning the ropes
A self-described politics nerd who interned in his state assemblymember’s office in high school, Sutton credits the rigors of the tight-knit environment of Pomona College — more than his three years at Stanford University Law School — with influencing the way he works today.
“I learned early I wasn’t going to get away without doing my homework,” he told us.
After clerking for former California Supreme Court Justice Edward Panelli from 1988 to 1989, he searched for a way to combine his legal degree with his keen interest in politics and government. In 1990 he found his way to Nielsen, Merksamer, though he lived, as he still does, in San Francisco.
Since he knew the city, he evolved into the firm’s attorney who dealt with San Francisco matters, he told us, even though he’s a member of the Republican Party — a rare bird here. In fact, he even served a stint as general counsel for the California Republican Party.
His first work in the city was on behalf of large institutions — the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum’s early bond campaigns, for example. He also made a key alliance with consultant Barnes, who was on his way to building a hugely influential career here and becoming closely connected to former mayor Brown.
In spring 1998, Sutton acted as treasurer for Bay Beautiful, a PAC aimed at defeating Proposition K, which former state senator Quentin L. Kopp put on the ballot to restrict Brown’s control of the development of Treasure Island. (Though the measure passed, the Brown-controlled Board of Supervisors failed to implement it.)
In November 1999, Sutton played a role in the orchestrated independent expenditure campaign on behalf of Brown’s reelection efforts in his handling of the Willie Brown Leadership PAC. The PAC directed some $55,000 into Brown’s bid for a second term (see “The Soft Money Shuffle,” 2/16/00).
At the time, Sutton had gone public with his strong opposition to efforts to restrict spending in political campaigns, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, “Not only does a spending cap decrease the quantity and quality of the issues discussed in the campaigns, it also infringes on First Amendment rights.”
One year after Brown’s reelection, the Leadership PAC, together with the pro-downtown Committee on Jobs, pumped some $67,000 into an unsuccessful bid to defeat Proposition O, which reinstated limits on independent expenditures and provided public financing for campaigns. Sutton handled the legal work for No on O.
No surprise there, Sutton’s critics say. Where money seeks to influence politics, that’s where you’ll find him. Sutton, though, says the list of campaigns he’s served doesn’t reflect his ideology as much as it does his skill set. He told us the best-funded campaigns “tend to have the more complicated legal questions, since they’re going to do more stuff.”
Money and politics
Advocates of campaign finance reform say Sutton has taken his opposition to campaign spending limits on the road, seeking to erode local ordinances that restrict spending.
“Sutton is active all over the state in his opposition to campaign finance reform,” said Paul Ryan, political reform project director for the Los Angeles–based Center for Governmental Studies.
Most recently Sutton testified before the San Diego Ethics Commission at a Jan. 21 hearing on a proposal to strengthen local campaign finance law. Sutton argued the commission should repeal the local law and replace it with the state’s version, which happens to be weaker.
“When we wrote the Political Reform Act of 1974, we put in there that local laws could be stronger than the state law,” Center for Governmental Studies director Bob Stern said. “What we have now is about 100 cities and counties that have gone beyond the state law. What [Sutton] is doing is pushing local jurisdictions to follow the state law only. And that’s unfortunate, because each local jurisdiction needs to deal with its own problems.”
Sutton said he just wants a uniform standard, with the minimal local amendments.
“[Cities and counties] keep making more and more laws, which are making things more and more complicated and difficult for anyone who wants to run for election to figure out,” Sutton said. “It has a dampening effect.”
Ryan and others are concerned Sutton might succeed in discouraging officials in municipalities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco from sticking by their stronger local laws. Compounding their concerns is that Sutton appears to have a great deal of influence over regulatory officials — at least in San Francisco.
Charlie Marsteller, who formerly headed up a San Francisco chapter of California Common Cause, believes the Ethics Commission has for more than a year failed to act on a complaint he filed against Sutton in late 2002, because of Sutton’s influence on the agency. (The complaint was over Sutton’s failure to disclose some $800,000 in contributions from PG&E to a committee aimed at defeating Proposition D, another public power measure.)
“It seems to me they are waiting until after February, when a seat on the commission is up and they’ll be able to replace [Bob Planthold] with a Sutton-friendly commissioner,” Marsteller said. (Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng is expected to name Planthold’s replacement any day now.)
More recent examples activists point to include the Harris spending-cap matter and the latest: a charge made Jan. 16 by two Ethics Commission staffers that director Ginny Vida ordered the destruction of documents accidentally e-mailed to the agency by a secretary in Sutton’s office. Those documents, which were first reported on in the San Francisco Sentinel, strongly suggest that funds raised by the San Francisco Swearing-In Committee (without contribution limits) for Newsom’s inauguration were used to pay off a long list of consultants who worked on the campaign — a charge Sutton has vehemently denied.
On Jan. 28, Sutton filed paperwork for the committee reporting contributions but not expenditures. The total raised was $317,850 and included donations of $10,000 to $20,000 from such downtown players as Shorenstein Co., Gap founder Don Fisher, the San Francisco Association of Realtors, and Clear Channel.
Though Sutton insists he enjoys no undue influence on local regulators, even one of Harris’s consultants told us Sutton was hired for just that reason. “Jim Sutton has a certain amount of influence with Ginny Vida. He doesn’t think [spending limits] are constitutional,” Looman said. “And I believe that worries her too.”
Vida was on medical leave and couldn’t reached for comment, but her deputy, Mabel Ng, said neither she nor Vida give Sutton special treatment.
“I don’t think he has any more or any less influence than anyone else,” Ng said.
Dealing with Ethics
Sutton’s most impressive act in the Harris controversy was convincing Vida and Ng that Harris didn’t know she was bound to the pledge she signed in January 2003 to stay under the spending cap. Had ethics officials concluded that Harris knew her pledge was binding when she blew the cap sometime in September, they could have disqualified her from the race, according to the terms of the city’s campaign finance law.
Instead the Ethics Commission signed onto a settlement agreement stipulating that Harris’s had been an innocent mistake — though there was plenty of evidence that her campaign officials fully knew the pledge was binding (see Campaign Watch, 9/17/03 and 10/08/03). But in buying into Sutton’s version of events, the commission allowed Harris to continue spending money that helped her win the race.
“To facilitate the needs of Sutton’s clients, [Ethics] staffers gave in to Sutton the way he wanted,” Marsteller said. “The commissioners dropped the ball in that they needed to request an audit to check out the veracity of the statements being made by Harris…. They could hardly decide that the violations by the Harris committee were unintentional absent an audit. It’s one of the greatest demonstrations of incompetence I’ve seen, and Sutton led them into it.”
For his part, Sutton disagrees that Vida gave him an easy of time of it. “They fined [Harris] $34,000, and they made sure we printed flyers and ads telling the public of the mistake,” Sutton said.
That’s true. But Ryan and others view the matter as strong evidence of Sutton’s influence.
“It appears as though many of the arguments he makes personally are then likewise made by Ginny Vida and Mabel Ng,” Ryan said. “It appears as though Jim Sutton is influencing the public policy and San Francisco and the interpretation of the city’s finance laws.”