I’m talking to the amazing organizers at Causa Justa:: Just Cause (CJJC) about their work to protect homeowners from foreclosure by the big banks, about their long history of tenants’ rights work, and what they are up to right now. Blanca Solis says they’ve launched a new campaign for what they’re calling the “Hassle-Free Housing” ordinance. She’s a grassroots leader from CJJC, and she’s asking for our support. To protect tenants from unscrupulous landlords. To stop unfair evictions. To stop wringing our hands about gentrification and families leaving the city. She says we can do something very straightforward to keep working families in their homes.
On Tuesday July 31st, Solis will join other tenant leaders, advocates and supporters at city hall to call for an end to tenant harassment by landlords. The San Francisco Tenants Union will be there. Organizers at CJJC have learned from years of experience with Latino tenants struggling to make ends meet in the midst of this rapidly gentrifying city that “one of the quickest and cheapest ways to evict a tenant is by harassing them until the situation becomes unbearable and the tenant moves on their own. Whey they leave, the landlord has an empty unit that they can rent to new tenants at market-rate rent.”
Faced with a pattern of such blatantly unfair practices, tenant activists took the issue to the voters in 2008; when “Prop M” passed, it was an important victory for this still-majority-renter-city. But then, the landlord’s lawyers got hold of it, and sued to stop implementation.
No one seems to be denying that landlords do this, and that it’s wrong. But what can a family do to stop the harassment, hold on to their housing and get some relief? Here’s where the “Hassle-Free Housing” ordinance comes in. It builds on Prop M and addresses the landlords’ legal issue. It would “allow tenants to claim damages from their landlords for each incident of harassment in small claims court to collect statutory damages of up to $2,000 for each incident.”
Sounds good, let’s do it. City Hall – get on it.
All over San Francisco, probably every night, people are sitting around shaking their heads about how expensive the city has become. How families have been pushed and priced out. Folks shrug and say “But, what can you do?”
There is a long, proud, and painful history in San Francisco of everyday people organizing to put a stop to unfair evictions, developer-driven displacement, and the over-production of luxury housing. From the African American community’s fight to save the Fillmore from redevelopment’s “negro removal” in the 1960s, to the Filipino-led struggle to stop the eviction of elderly men at the I-Hotel in the 1970s, and to Mission activists’ campaigns to control land use during the intense gentrification of the 1990’s dot-com boom. (Just this week there’s a big celebration marking the 35th Anniversary of the I-Hotel struggle.)
These “housing justice” fights are ultimately about who has the power to shape the future of our city and who has the power to determine who can and cannot afford to live here. That’s where we all come in – all of us who are renters whose lives will be better with a “Hassle-Free Housing” ordinance; all of us whose housing is insecure – because we fear foreclosure or are a paycheck away from homelessness. This is an issue of people power, and you can do something now – attend the press conference at 10am tomorrow on the steps of City Hall, or go to CJJC’s website to sign up as a campaign supporter. Being right is good, but ultimately it’s people power that matters.
When Solis was asked why she joined the hassle-free housing campaign and why she’s coming to City Hall tomorrow, she said:
“Que los supervisores aseguren que los inquilinos estemos protegidos de los desalojos injustos por parte de los caseros y asi mismo vivamos en lugares dignos, seguros y libres de hostigamiento”
“So that the supervisors can ensure that we, tenants, are protected from illegal and unjust evictions by landlords and be able to live in homes that are dignified, safe and free of harassment”
Solis and the other incredible grassroots leaders at CJJC are full of courage and determination, and have not given up hope that there is a bright future for San Francisco. Let’s join them!
Board of Supervisors
Guardian Voices: Hassle-free housing
Why should a Republican dentist decide what gets built in San Francisco?
The Board of Supervisors is almost evenly divided on confirming Mayor Ed Lee’s appointment of Republican dentist Michael Antonini to his fourth four-year term on the city’s powerful Planning Commission. After delaying its decision at each of its last two board meetings, the board is expected to finally decide this Tuesday.
Sup. Malia Cohen appears to be the swing vote between the progressive-to-neoliberal bloc of supervisors that would rather see new blood that is more reflective of San Francisco’s values and priorities, and the board’s moderate-to-conservative bloc that wants to keep Antonini there as a sure vote for whatever developers want (a bloc that strangely includes progressive-turned-mayoral-shill Sup. Christina Olague, a former planning commissioner who said during the July 17 discussion that she doesn’t agree with Antonini’s politics and that more diversity was needed on the commission, but that she’s voting for him anyway while offering this hollow threat: “This may be the last time I’ll support this kind of move that doesn’t support a diverse body.”)
Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who led the charge for Antonini, fairly effectively picked apart some of the vague and misleading “diversity” arguments made by some supervisors who oppose the nomination, a discussion that Examiner columnist Melissa Griffin dramatized in yesterday’s paper. And everyone praised Antonini as a hard worker.
But almost the entire discussion skipped over what should be the main point: Why the hell is San Francisco even considering appointing a Republican dentist with no particular land use expertise to a fourth term on the Planning Commission?!?! Shouldn’t someone else – preferably not a rubber stamp for developers – be given a chance to serve the city? And why isn’t Mayor Lee – whose main political benefactor and economic adviser, venture capitalist Ron Conway, is also a longtime Republican – paying a political price for this ridiculous appointment?
While supportive supervisors praised Antonini as thoughtful and fair, I can’t gauge that for myself because this supposed public servant hasn’t returned my phone calls. But I’m not sure it would have mattered because his voting record shows he is a consistent vote for developers and their interests, as even Griffin acknowledged in an otherwise supportive column.
Board President David Chiu came the closest to telling it like it is when he said, “Every person who has reached out to me from the northeast neighborhoods has asked me to oppose this nominee.” And for good reasons: Antonini is a right-winger who votes against neighborhood interests every single time. Not just neighborhood interests, but city interests as well, as shown by the commission’s approval earlier this year of a CPMC project that was found to have fatal flaws that were then exposed by supervisors.
Elsbernd argued that the board should give deference to the appointing authority, noting that he’s often voted for nominees whose politics he doesn’t agree with, including Olague. And there certainly is some value to have different perspectives on appointed bodies. But when we grant a Republican dentist tenure in shaping what this embattled city will look like for generations, and pretend that his ideology is less important than his work ethic, we make a mockery of the political system that is supposed to reflect the values and interests of city residents.
There goes the SF Democratic Party
We all knew that the progressives didn’t win a majority on the Democratic County Central Committee, but for a while there it looked as if there might still be a chance to elect someone who isn’t one of the most conservative members of the panel as the chair. But no: Mary Jung, who works for PG&E, now controls the San Francisco Democratic Party.
Jung was elected unanimously July 27, which means the progs realized they didn’t have a candidate who could get a majority. Most of the other leadership roles are from the conservative side of the party. Yes, Alix Rosenthal is second vice-chair, but it’s clear who is going to be in charge of the party — and it’s not the folks who have run it for the past four years.
The slate-card committee, which has the key job of creating and delivering the powerful endorsement card, will be dominated by conservatives, Jung and Tom Hsieh, with only one progressive, Rafael Mandelman. It’s pretty much a train wreck all around.
Samson Wong (who is a good guy) says it’s a new era of civility, which is the same thing we used to say about City Hall (and I agree with him that it’s historic: The mayor, the president of the board and the chair of the party are now Asians). But when civility means you stop fighting (loudly, even if you lose) for things that matter in the name of keeping the peace, I’m against it.
In a press release, the DCCC’s new corresponding secretary, Matt Dorsey, notes that the local party’s priorities this fall are re-electing Barack Obama (who will win California even if the SF DCCC members all take a six-month nap) and restoring Democratic control of the House (which won’t be decided in the Bay Area). No mention of electing progressives to the Board of Supervisors — which is where the local party really matters.
The race to watch will be D1, where incumbent Eric Mar is part of the progressive bloc that lost the DCCC. We’ll see what happens.
Two calls to investigate SF restaurant surcharges as consumer fraud
The surcharges that many San Francisco restaurants charge their customers – ostensibly to help cover their employee health care obligations, although in practice it has often just padded their profits – should be investigated by the District Attorney’s Office as consumer fraud, according to Sup. David Campos and San Francisco’s Civil Grand Jury, which recently issued a scathing report scrutinizing the practice.
Campos raised the issue during Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, calling for a criminal investigation and City Hall hearing. He even questioned whether businesses that have been so hostile to city’s Health Care Security Ordinance – the landmark 2008 measure that created the Health San Francisco universal care program and required businesses to help pay for their employees’ health coverage – should benefit from the tax cuts it would receive under a business tax reform ballot measure the board also considered that day.
“In the restaurant industry, we have an issue that remains unresolved,” Campos said during the business tax debate, after earlier in the meeting calling for the DA “to begin an investigation for fraud against the people of San Francisco by businesses that use this surcharge.”
DA’s Office spokesperson Stephanie Ong Stillman confirmed that the office is looking at the issue: “The Grand Jury report was just released and we are in the process of evaluating the results.”
Mayor Ed Lee last year vetoed legislation by Campos that would have banned the practice and prevented businesses from simply pocketing money from Employer Health Reimbursement Accounts they create to comply with the mandate (federal law bars the city from dictating how businesses cover employee health care) at the end of each year. Lee later signed a watered down version sponsored by Board President David Chiu requiring employers to keep the money in the fund for two years, to let their employees know about the fund on a quarterly basis, and to dedicate surcharge revenue to employee health care.
Rob Black, executive director of Golden Gate Restaurant Association – which unsuccessfully sued the city over the employer mandate and appealed the case all the way to the US Supreme Court – criticized Campos and the Grand Jury, saying they were relying on data from last year and that the situation has improved since Chiu’s legislation went into effect (Chiu told us data collection from his legislation will allow the city to better assess what’s happening).
“Supervisor Campos know this information is based on data that was prior to the new ordinance,” Black told us, acknowledging that many restaurants profited from the surcharges “but that was before the law was changed.” Campos responded by saying the grand jury concluded that the Chiu legislation didn’t go far enough the prevent the abuses, which are tough to detect because they are based on self reporting by the businesses.
The Grand Jury looked at 38 restaurants, of which 25 used the surcharges and 22 use the reimbursement accounts rather than either health insurance or Healthy San Francisco, which health care experts uniformly say are better options for employees. It analyzed data submitted to the city by these 22 restaurants with a total of 1,562 employees, finding that of the more than $2 million earmarked for the health reimbursement funds, just $123,612 was paid to employees and $1.9 million was kept by the employers.
Black said the quarterly noticing requirement in the Chiu legislation is already helping with the low reimbursement rate: “My hope is, and my belief is, we’re going to see significant…improvements in utilization rates in people taking advantage of their benefits, and that’s great.”
The grand jury also looked specifically at the health care surcharges collected by 18 restaurants with almost $64 million in gross revenue. Despite collecting almost $2.2 million in the surcharges it placed on customers bills, they reimbursed their employees for $1.16 million medical expenses and kept the more than $1 million that remained as profits.
Black criticized the grand jury for selectively picking the restaurants in its study and for targetting private sector businesses rather than the public agencies it traditionally investigates. “They’re outside of what the government charter calls for,” he said.
But Mark Busse, the chair of the Grand Jury Health Committee that led the study, told the Guardian that while it’s unusual to look at the private sector, there was a legitimate public policy interest here and its work was approved and overseen by Presiding Judge Katherine Feinstein (who happens to be the daughter of US Sen. Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco’s former mayor).
He also denies hand-picking the restaurants, saying he asked jurors to simply keep the receipts from all restaurants they frequented. While that may not be representative of all restaurants, he said it was a large enough sample to draw some conclusions and that he was more surprised than anyone at their findings.
“I thought our results would be totally different. I didn’t think they would be that abusive, I really didn’t. I thought we would find we have some outstanding restaurants and entrepreneurs,” Busse said, adding that he was alarmed by their actual findings. “It turned our stomachs. It makes us sick. It is not a level playing field. There are legitimate businesses that accept the spirit of the law and are taking care of their employees, but a lot of them aren’t.”
Given that these employees handle the food of city residents, he said that they should get the health care to which they’re entitled. As Busse told us, “The intention of the jury was to make sure the workers are getting health care and the customers aren’t getting deceived.”
7/27 Update: We heard back from the Mayor’s Office, whose Chief Deputy Communications Director Francis Tsang wrote: “Mayor Lee is a strong supporter of the Healthcare Security Ordinance. The Civil Grand Jury surveyed only 38 restaurants and its report restates facts we already know – some businesses add a surcharge and in the past, it was not well regulated. Working with Supervisors, Mayor Lee strengthened practices effective January 2, 2012 to ensure employees could make better use of the program. We will know the results in 2013, when we collect and report on 2012 data informed by the new regulations.”
Best of the Bay 2012: Local Heroes
2012 Local Heroes
Alex Tom and Shaw San Liu
Alex Tom and Shaw San Liu — the executive director and lead organizer for the Chinese Progressive Association, which celebrates its 40th anniversary on Aug. 4 — have laid the groundwork for a progressive resurgence in San Francisco by organizing Chinese immigrants and actively building close and mutually supportive relationships with working-class allies throughout the city.
The two have been involved in just about every recent effort to counter the pro-corporate neoliberalism that has come to dominate City Hall these days. They have seized space with Occupy San Francisco and they have supported labor unions and helped to create the Progressive Workers Alliance. They have fought foreclosures and pushed for affordable housing reforms, and they have protected vulnerable immigrant workers from wage theft by unscrupulous employers.
“Shaw San and Alex are incredibly talented organizers and movement builders who are managing to do the nearly impossible,” said N’Tanya Lee, who worked closely with the pair as the director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. “They have built an authentic base of working-class Chinese immigrants who are interested in fighting for change in their community, and are creating a grassroots organization at the forefront of building multi-racial alliances to combat the divide-and-conquer strategies that are confronting us.”
Liu, who joined CPA six years ago, said she’s always inspired to see the old photographs on the walls of CPA’s office, and to read the history of CPA’s organizing and advocacy on behalf of working people. She said the organization has always understood the need to forge alliances with labor unions and other progressive interests.
“The organization itself has been, since its inception, playing a critical role in bridging the needs of Chinese interests with other communities,” Liu said. “I’ve always seen my role as bridge building.”
Today — with stagnant real wages, a deteriorating social safety net, and growing power by corporations that enjoy unprecedented political clout thanks to Citizens United and other court rulings — the need to organize people across cultural lines is more important than ever, even if that begins by addressing the individual needs of each community.
“Always at our core, it’s about empowering our folks to be able to voice their own struggles and visions,” Liu said.
Working to build that capacity within the Chinese immigrant community is hard and important work, Liu said, but it’s equally important to connect with the struggles of working class people from other communities, uniting to effectively counter the political dominance of employers and property owners.
Lui framed the struggle as: “How do we build unity and not have that be lip service?”
Tom and Liu have demonstrated that they know how to do just that, despite the diversity of sometimes-conflicting interests on the left and in a working class squeezed by recession and feelings of economic uncertainty.
“The issue that will unify people is good jobs that are accessible to everyone,” Liu said.
Yet she also said that working class organizing is needed to counter the simplistic “jobs” rhetoric coming from City Hall, which politicians are using to advocate for tax cuts to big corporations.
“More and more, it exposes itself as a total lie,” Liu said of the argument that the city should be facilitating private sector job creation with business tax cuts. “So much points to the fact that the US economic system doesn’t benefit everyone … When we talk about jobs, we talk about what kinds of jobs we want and for whom.”
2012 Local Heroes
Stardust and Ross Rhodes
Ross Rhodes and Stardust, like all of the people involved in Occupy Bernal, are neighbors. But until Stardust helped found the group — a local take on Occupy focused on stopping unjust foreclosures and evictions — they didn’t know each other.
Now they do, and if it wasn’t for Occupy Bernal, Rhodes is sure he would no longer have the house that his parents bought in 1964.
A former college football star, Rhodes injured his knees and back playing. He lives on disability payments, volunteering at the 100 Percent College Prep Club, and bringing home-cooked meals to seniors in his area. He also coached kids in the Junior 49ers program until it became too hard on his injuries.
Stardust, an ESL teacher and oboe player in the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony and the SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band, has been working for LGBT rights, women’s rights, and online civil rights for years. When Occupy took off, he gravitated toward the neighborhood fights against foreclosures.
Like people all over the US, Rhodes and his wife were fooled several years ago by a pick-a-payment loan plan. At the time, World Savings was peddling the deals through neighborhoods, promising potential borrowers that they could send their kids to college, buy a car, take vacations — and modify their loans after a year.
But when Rhodes started to apply for loan modifications, he was denied. He kept receiving letters asking for more information, often the same information he had already given — a common story that led to part of the Homeowners Bill of Rights that will guarantee a single point of contact from the bank. He was stumped when he was told he needed more income — the bank said it wouldn’t accept payments that were more than 30 percent of a borrower’s income, and Rhodes was getting a fixed disability check.
He found another income source as a homecare provider, but after all the time that the bank wouldn’t accept his payments, Rhodes was marked as someone who wasn’t making payments, and was tracked for foreclosure.
Meanwhile, Occupy Bernal was working on more than 100 similar cases in its neighborhood. The organizers hadn’t quite convinced Mayor Ed Lee to help at that point, but Rep. Pelosi’s staffers were on their side, getting banks to prioritize the cases of those working with Occupy Bernal. They worked with other community groups like Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) to do physical occupations of homes. But for those who had received a notice of default and a notice of sale — two steps in the foreclosure process that precede the auction of a property — Stardust was there with another tactic.
He spearheaded Occupy the Auctions. He shows up at City Hall at 1:30 every day and tries to disrupt foreclosure auctions. He’s been there continuously since April 27, 2012, and has stopped dozens of home sales. When fighting the eviction of a neighbor, he is sometimes backed by more than 100 people. But many days it’s just Stardust.
Now, Rhodes is in a loan modification process. Rather than conflicting and confusing machine-generated paper work, he gets regular calls about the status of his modification from a point person in Wells Fargo’s executive complaint office. He testified in Sacramento in favor of the Homeowners Bill of Rights, which passed July 2. He’s also become an Occupy Bernal organizer on top of his other volunteer pursuits.
Stardust battles mega-banks and the city’s wealthiest in his work. But he says the biggest challenge is helping people to get over the shame they feel when they realize they are facing foreclosure. “It’s not their fault,” he says. “It’s the system.”
Friends of Ethics
In the summer of 2011, at the behest of the Ethics Commission, the Board of Supervisors put on the ballot a measure that would have loosened some of the rules for campaign consultant reporting, and would have allowed further changes in the city’s landmark ethics laws without a vote of the people. It had unanimous support on the board — and frankly, technical changes in campaign laws are not the kind of sexy stuff that gets the public angry.
But a small group, led in part by five former ethics commissioners, took on the task of defeating the measure. The activists also took on the challenge of defeating Prop. E, which would have allowed the supervisors to amend future measures passed by the voters.
Despite being outspent by tens of thousands of dollars, Friends of Ethics — a small grassroots operation — prevailed. Both measures were defeated (32 percent to 67 percent in the case of Prop. E, the worst loss of all the local measures on the ballot).
The group is great at forming coalitions: in the case of the No on E and F campaign, Friends of Ethics reached out to some 30 organizations that formally joined in opposing the measures after hearing presentations.
The members of FOE are a fractious group of organizers and shit-disturbers who don’t always get along or agree on other issues. But they’ve come together to do something nobody else does: make protecting and expanding political reform laws a front-line priority.
And the battle goes on. Not long after the November 2011 election, Supervisor Scott Wiener introduced legislation that would have led to less disclosure of political contributions before an election, and would have made it easier to conceal who was making contributions and paying for campaign mailers. The Wiener bill would weaken campaign contribution limit, giving the wealthiest donors greater power in elections.
When the amendments were heard at a well-attended Rules Committee in June (with plenty of public comment from Friends of Ethics), the supervisors sent the amendments back to the Ethics Commission to be rewritten.
The next step for the Friends of Ethics is to work with interested supervisors to push for changes to the city’s campaign laws that will actually benefit the public, such as increased transparency in election contributions and expanded campaign restrictions for those receiving contracts and other benefits from the city.
In an era defined by the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United case and a nationwide assault on fair elections, it’s critical work.
Friends of Ethics can be reached at sfethicsfriend@gmail.com
2012 Local Heroes
The Occupy movement
When Adbusters magazine called for people to show up on September 17, 2011, in New York City to protest the way Wall Street was holding the country hostage, no one could have predicted what would emerge.
It was the start of a movement, and San Francisco heeded the call. About 100 people gathered in the city’s Financial District. They started camping. And the effort exploded.
In the first few weeks, camps sprung up across the country. In Chicago and Los Angeles, in Bethel, Alaska and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, people were drawn together. But, unlike most protests, they stayed together. Night after night.
Along the way, a certain prevailing narrative from outside observers never quite got it right. First the camps were dismissed as nothing but bratty college students and hippies. Then they were called dirty and filled with homeless people. (Occupy challenged the whole idea of a monolithic homeless population. Once they had a home in the Occupy tent cities, homeless people were just — shocker — people.)
By December, when most of the campers had been kicked out, the narrative shifted. Occupy was resting, hibernating, many declared. Some snickered at the fair-weather activists who would only come out in the sunshine.
But in the Bay Area, at least, that hibernation story was simply false. On December 12, Occupy Oakland brought out thousands for its second port shutdown, in solidarity with port workers. On January 20, downtown banks were forced to close for the day and people in the streets celebrated Occupy San Francisco’s shutdown of the financial district. A week later, 400 were arrested when thousands tried to turn a vacant Oakland building into a community center. This was no hibernation.
Actions in some way inspired or fueled by Occupy have continued into the spring and summer. On March 1, Occupy, with a focus on student debt and accessible education, formed the 99 Mile March. Dozens marched from the Bay Area to Sacramento to join thousands of students and supporters in calling for an end to cuts to education; hundreds then occupied the Capitol building. On April 22, Occupy, with a focus on food justice, formed the Gill Tract Occupy the Farm action. Hundreds took a UC Berkeley-stewarded tract of land slated for a baseball diamond and a Whole Foods and planted it, turning it into a farm with rows of crops, a kids space, and a permaculture garden. On June 15, Occupy formed the Lakeview sit-in and Peoples School for Public Education, which taught day camp to children and refused to leave a beloved Oakland elementary school, one of five slated for closure.
Police eventually won the many-months battle with most Occupy groups in the Bay Area. The camps are mostly gone, though a tenacious group keeps its 24-hour protest in front of the Federal Reserve.
But because of Occupy — and its accompanying burst in resistance, creativity, and the belief that we really can, and must, come together to do something — dozens of Bay Area residents remain in homes that were facing foreclosure. Hundreds of people who felt forgotten and abandoned have found community. Thousands have been inspired to start their own projects and work with others.
When Adbusters called Occupy Wall Street to action, it was under the banner of “democracy not corporatocracy.” That ain’t an easy project. But it has already made the world a better and more hopeful place.
Perspective and proportion
steve@sfbg.com
In the eyes of his critics, suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi may never be able to recover from the portrayal by prosecutors and Mayor Ed Lee that he abused his wife, intimidated her with threats to use his power to take custody of their young son if they divorced, and used her and his campaign manager to try to dissuade witnesses and thwart a police investigation.
The tearful video of his wife, Venezuelan actress Eliana Lopez, displaying the bruise on her arm, and the fact that Mirkarimi pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor false-imprisonment charge in connection with the incident are all these critics need to condemn him. Indeed, it was all that Lee relied on when he suspended Mirkarimi without pay and launched unprecedented official misconduct proceedings to remove him from office.
But now that the Ethics Commission has gotten through the substance of its inquiry — and past the tedious work of creating from scratch systems and standards for gathering evidence and evaluating whether it warrants an elected official’s removal by the mayor — the testimony has told a very different story of what really happened.
Accusations of witness dissuasion (which had been one of three original criminal charges Mirkarimi faced before agreeing to a lesser plea deal) and abusing his official position haven’t been supported by any direct evidence or testimony, and as the hearings wore on, Deputy City Attorneys Peter Keith and Sherri Kaiser were looking increasingly vindictive as they fruitlessly pursued those angles with witnesses who seemed credible.
There is also no direct evidence that the abuse was anything more than a moment of frustration and bad judgment at noontime on Dec. 31, when Mirkarimi grabbed Lopez’s arm as she tried to walk away from their heated argument about divorce child custody, and she yanked it away, eight days before his swearing in as sheriff.
Whether that incident and its aftermath meets the City Charter’s broad and untested definition of official misconduct — including “conduct that falls below the standard of decency, good faith and right action impliedly required of all public officials” — will be up to the interpretation of the Ethics Commission, which has now accepted all the evidence that it has deemed relevant and credible. All that remains is the fight over its “finding of fact” at an Aug. 16 hearing and its subsequent recommendation to the Board of Supervisors, which could begin considering the matter in September.
There won’t be an inquiry into whether Mayor Lee committed perjury on June 29, as outside witnesses said he did on two separate issues. The commission July 19 rejected the argument by Mirkarimi’s attorneys that Lee’s alleged lies under oath would cast doubt over his reasons for launching these unprecedented proceedings and the discretionary judgment he exercised. Commissioners decided that was a tangential issue.
In the final hour of the commission’s laborious work in whittling down the voluminous evidence that the city has presented in this case — which both sides and the commission openly acknowledge will likely be considered by the courts as well as the board — it also made deep cuts into the written testimony of attorney Nancy Lemon, a domestic violence expert who drew damning conclusions about Mirkarimi based on how “batterers” typically behave.
That’s been a big part of the city’s case, reducing Mirkarimi down to a two-dimensional batterer whose every action can be predicted by that distinction, from the manner in which he relinquished his weapons to police to the reasons why Lopez has resisted cooperating with efforts to charge her husband with crimes and remove him from office.
Lemon’s testimony was based almost solely on second-hand descriptions of life in the Mirkarimi household in a 22-page written declaration by neighbor Ivory Madison, who was also the only witness that Lee said he spoke to before removing Mirkarimi from office. But most of Madison’s incredible and fantastical narrative — which painted Mirkarimi as a monster who repeatedly abused Lopez and their son and controlled every aspect of their domestic life, right down to what and whether they ate — had already been discredited and disallowed by skeptical commissioners in June.
“I was disappointed by the content of Ivory Madison’s declaration. A first-year lawyer should know that much of it is inadmissible and it should not have been given to us,” Commissioner Paul Renne told Keith in June. Renne called the declaration “clearly hearsay, clearly having the intention of poisoning the well of this hearing.”
Keith apologized and offered little resistance to much of the declaration’s removal, but the city has nonetheless continued to rely on the second-hand accounts of Madison and another neighbor, Callie Williams, in its descriptions of Mirkarimi’s conduct and the questioning of witnesses.
But that hearsay evidence and speculation was countered on July 18 and 19 with the extended cross examination of two key witnesses in the case: Lopez and Mirkarimi campaign manager Linnette Peralta Haynes, a woman with domestic violence training who Lopez reached out to on that pivotal day of Jan. 4 when Madison called the police. Each woman spent more than three grueling hours each on the stand, questioned by city attorneys and commissioners — and they painted a very different portrait of the events than Lee and Madison had.
As for Madison — having had most of her testimony stricken from the record, and with Lopez testifying about Madison’s sudden zeal for going after Mirkarimi and involving his political opponents in that process — Mirkarimi’s team decided not to call her to the stand for live cross-examination. Attorney Shepherd Kopp told reporters, “I think the neighbor’s testimony is suspect at best.”
The go-between
Haynes was central to the city’s allegation that Mirkarimi dissuaded witnesses and sought to thwart a police investigation. Phone and electronic records revealed that she communicated with both Lopez and Mirkarimi many times on Jan. 4, the day Mirkarimi learned that his wife had been confiding with neighbors about the Dec. 31 incident and that Madison had broken that confidence and called the police.
The city’s apparent theory was that Haynes acted as Mirkarimi’s agent in trying to cover up the incident and do damage control, including coaching Lopez on what to say to Madison and Williams.
But the city has never had any evidence to support its theory, and this was its first chance to question Haynes, who had been at the end of a high-risk pregnancy and resisted cooperating with the investigation.
Yet despite Kaiser and commissioners grilling Haynes for more than three hours — twice as long as she had told the commission that she would need — no smoking gun emerged. Haynes seemed calm and consistent as she described giving Lopez emotional support and probing to ensure that she wasn’t in danger. Kaiser fumbled through technical difficulties and maintained an accusatory and belittling tone even as the answers she was receiving seemed to destroy her line of questioning.
“I think the house of cards that mayor has been trying to establish about witness dissuasion was demolished by Linnette Peralta Haynes, who was absolutely credible,” Mirkarimi attorney Shepherd Kopp told reporters after the hearing.
Haynes has a background in domestic violence, undergoing a 40-hour certification training in the mid-90s when she went to work for a domestic violence center in San Mateo for almost two years, then later helping develop and teach a domestic violence curriculum for the jail in San Francisco.
She’s familiar with the Power and Control Wheel — the basis for many of Lemon’s conclusions — which indicates how physical abuse can be connected to other forms of abuse, such as emotional, verbal, and sexual abuse. It was with this background and training that Haynes questioned Lopez about whether she was in danger and being abused when she got an unexpected call on the morning of Jan. 4.
“She let me know she had an argument with Ross and wanted to talk to me,” Haynes said, later answering another question by saying, “She told me she was really worried about custody issues and she was talking to a friend who was an attorney.”
That friend turned out to be Madison, who Lopez maintains had represented herself as an attorney who would keep their conversation and the video they made of her injuries confidential, to be used only in the event of a custody battle. The city has sought to cast doubt on that claim — which the court rejected in Mirkarimi’s criminal case when it admitted the video as evidence — implying that Madison was simply a concerned friend and the attorney argument was developed weeks later.
Haynes said she asked Lopez whether there had been any prior incidents of physical abuse, whether Lopez felt unsafe, and whether she had been subjected to other forms of abuse — defining each form for Lopez — and that she was told “no” to each question.
“I asked if she thought she was in danger and she said no,” Haynes said.
Later on Jan. 4, Lopez told Haynes she had made the video: “She told me a friend had helped me do a video just in case I needed it for custody issues…She did tell me that she really wanted to work on her marriage, that she wanted to make to make it work, but that just in case she wanted to make sure she got custody of Theo.”
Lopez later testified that one reason she sought out Haynes was because Madison had suddenly become aggressive in trying to convince her that she was a domestic violence victim and the incident needed to be reported to the police, and Lopez wanted to get the perspective of someone with a background in domestic violence.
“I said, I have a person telling me this, I want your opinion about it,” Lopez testified.
Around 12:30pm that day, when Madison informed Lopez that she had called the police and they were on the way, she frantically called Haynes from Madison’s house and suddenly put the two women on the phone together, which Madison and the city have characterized as a witness dissuasion effort.
Haynes said she was confused when Lopez suddenly handed the phone to Madison: “She said, ‘help me, help me, help me,’ and I’m on the phone wondering what’s going on.”
“[Madison] told me, ‘I’ve been talking to Eliana for several days and I just called the police,’” Haynes said.
Haynes said she asked Madison if she had called any domestic violence agencies or if she just called the police “and she got very agitated” — adopting a defensive tone of voice — and that reaction seemed “fishy” to Haynes.
Asked whether she tried to dissuade Madison from talking to the police, she responded, “I told her she should maybe talk to her friend about what she wants.” She said that she could hear Lopez telling Madison, “This is not what I want, this is not what I want.”
So Haynes said she tried to extricate herself from the situation: “I told her I really think you need to get off the phone, talk to Eliana, and respect her.” And the phone conversation ended with Lopez getting back on the line and telling Haynes to call Mirkarimi to let him know what was going on.
But Mirkarimi was busy and not answering his phone, prompting Haynes to text at one point that he needed to answer ‘so I can protect you.” What did she mean by that, Kaiser asked.
“My thinking was that something sounded fishy, something wasn’t right, and they need legal help,” Haynes said.
“Your focus had been on Eliana up until then?” Kaiser asked.
“My focus has always been Eliana,” Haynes responded.
Later, asked about the nature of her repeated phone conversations with Lopez, she denied helping her strategize ways to dealing with witnesses or police. “I was just providing support for her, emotional support,” Haynes said, later adding “I wanted to be present for her.”
The victim
Lopez testified that while the grabbing incident was unacceptable and serious — which she conveyed to Mirkarimi — she didn’t consider herself to be in an abusive environment or in need of outside help, except perhaps the marriage counseling she had been seeking and which Mirkarimi finally agreed to.
“An abusive environment is when those kinds of think happen every day or every week,” she said, maintaining — in the face of repeated questioning — that this was the first and only instance of physical abuse.
“At the end of the day on Dec. 31, I told him, that cannot happen, this is wrong, we need counseling,” she said. “He realized it was wrong and he took it very seriously.”
But she said that Madison went from being a supportive friend and counselor on Jan. 1 to suddenly becoming increasingly insistent that Lopez report the incident to police in the days that followed.
“She started trying to convince me to call the police in that email,” Lopez said, answering a question about a Jan. 2 message from Madison, “but that wasn’t our conversation on Jan. 1.”
Lopez said Madison’s approach got more aggressive. “She said, ‘screw him, I have a lot of friends willing to help you,’” Lopez said, noting that Madison offered her the vacant homes of rich friends and offered to bring in journalist Phil Bronstein, DA George Gascon, Attorney General Kamala Harris, and Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom to help her.
“It looked to me suspicious…She was calling Ross’ political enemies,” Lopez said.
When Lopez finally made it clear she didn’t want police involvement, Madison called the police.
“I didn’t expect that my lawyer could call the police on her own. I thought that was my decision,” Lopez said.
Keith tried to tie Lopez’s custody concerns to his status as sheriff, driving at that point with many questions. But Lopez said her concern was that California family courts would favor Mirkarimi simply because he’s an American and she’s from a country that has bad relations with the US.
“In this country, I think he’s in a better position than me,” she said. After he again tried to make it about his official position, she said, “As a sheriff, no; as an American, yes.”
She denied the claim by the city and Madison that it was Mirkarimi who sought to improperly use his position, a key element of removing him for official misconduct. Lopez said her conclusions about Mirkarimi’s advantages in a potential custody battle were the result of conversation that happened much earlier.
“That conversation happened in March 2011. He wasn’t even thinking about running for sheriff at that point,” she said, denying that Mirkarimi ever raised his official position in their custody conversations and claiming the concerns about his power were her own. “He never said that, that was my conclusion of our conversations. He never said, ‘I am a powerful man.'”
Throughout hearings, Mirkarimi’s side has enjoyed strong shows of public support, with many of his supporters wielding signs that read, “I believe Eliana” and “I support Eliana,” both in Spanish and English.
During a recess in the July 18 hearing, Mirkarimi said he appreciated the outpouring of support: “There are scores of people showing their support who think this has gone way too far.”
Guardian Voices: There’s something happening here
There are distinct signs of the rebirth of a grassroots balanced-growth movement in San Francisco, and some small indication that it’s even beginning to shift, ever so slightly, the politics of the Board of Supervisors. This is very good news for the vast majority of San Franciscans.
First, a little history.
Land use and the approval of major development projects lie at the very heart of San Francisco politics. Developers and their allies (the building trades, contractors, bankers, architects, land-use lawyers, consultants, and permit expeditors) are the primary source of political money for candidates for local office. Since the freeway and urban renewal fights of the 1960s, the very definition of progressive politics in San Francisco has been the attempt to build a political base of residents to resist that money. So-called moderates are simply the political extension of the pro-development lobby using its money to consolidate developer control of the public approval process.
In most cities, land-use issues — zoning, permits, urban design — is left to elites. Not so in San Francisco. Here, land use is talked about at neighborhood meetings and on street corners. The heart the reason is our compact size: 46.7 square miles, and the prohibition of filling in any more of the Bay to create new land. There is no vacant land in San Francisco. Any new major development almost always displaces something already there. Development is a zero sum game, with winner and losers. And the losers leave town.
Land-use politics is about staying here — and that creates real interest among San Francisco residents.
The funding for major development in San Francisco has dramatically changed in the 45 years since the freeway and anti-urban-renewal fights of the mid-1960s. Back then, it was public sector money that fueled development. Yet, with that money, due to the actions of progressive politicians like Phil and John Burton and George Moscone, came its own remedy: votes to not accept the public money for freeways (Moscone) and votes creating either laws that either prohibited displacement or funded legal assistance to the poor, empowering them to stop government agencies through litigation (the Burtons at both the state and federal level).
Since the money for freeways and urban renewal was from the government, the focus of the early balanced growth forces was on government itself, through massive lobbying campaigns to affect officials’ votes (the freeway fight), or the use of government-funded lawyers to protect poor people’s interests ( the WACO and TOOR lawsuits against redevelopment).
All of that changed starting in the 1970s, when Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan deregulated oversight of urban development by creating a system of block grants and ended funding for legal assistance for the poor. Large-scale development was effectively privatized, moving it from being designed, funded, and approved at public meetings by government officials following regulations to being designed and funded in private — and having a Kabuki-play-like public approval process with little real oversight. With the passage of Prop 13 in 1978, which limited the main source of local government revenue — property taxes — local governments became even more reliant on private developer money to create new revenue.
The popular response to this change in the development process in San Francisco was the emergence of a politics that relied on the old progressive-era reforms of the initiative, referendum, and recall. Through a series of initiatives, the community sought to impose regulations on the development process, culminating in the 1986 Proposition M, which actually limited the amount of high-rise office space developers could build, completely imposing the popular will over a supine set of local officials and politicians. Indeed, ten years earlier, again through the initiative processes, the very nature of the Board of Supervisors was changed from a developer-friendly at-large system to a district-election system. Hotly opposed by real estate and development interests, district elections in its brief three years of existence (repealed in the wake of the Moscone-Milk assassinations, even though they were both strong supporters of the system and their assassin opposed it…ironies abound in San Francisco politics) saw limits placed on condo conversions and the passage of rent control.
In each of these multi-year efforts, a citywide coalition was formed, including an ever-expanding set of communities and neighborhoods. Common interests were defined that cut across race, class, and geography and issues of community (neighborhood) control and funding for essential services like Muni, affordable housing, childcare, and employment training were placed on the table – and developers had to address them if they wanted projects approved.
The point is that balanced growth came from community-based political forces, not elected officials. Broad movements were built — in the end, encompassing elements of labor. These were victories won not by elected officials but by a popular movement.
In 2000, in the wake of the dot-com bust, another balanced-growth measure, Prop. L, aimed at cutting then-Mayor Willie Brown’s power over development, was paired with the new district election system — and a broad coalition of forces including labor, community and neighborhood organizations won a major progressive victory.
Every candidate for supervisor who supported the balanced-growth measure won. Every candidate who opposed it and supported Brown lost. While Prop L narrowly lost, its policies and objectives were passed as ordinances by the new Board of Supervisors (banning live-work lofts, closing loopholes in the planning code, requiring neighborhood-based plans for the Mission, SOMA, and Potrero Hill).
But as is so often the case, the victory of 2000 led to the slow dissolution of the coalition that created it. Folks had won. Our supervisors could handle all these issues; we no longer had to. By the end of the term of the supervisors elected as the class of 2000, very little of that citywide coalition existed any more.
With the Great Recession of 2008, advances were rolled back. Fees on local developers for affordable housing, childcare and transit were deferred in order to stimulate development. A new era of “moderation” was announced by elected officials, led by Mayor Gavin Newsom. Desires to “attract and retain” business saw new tax concessions in the name of “jobs” and a new willingness to use open space and public facilities for “private/public partnerships” was announced.
By 2012 any concept of balanced growth had been replaced with a new era of “cooperation” between city officials and developers.
Until recently, that is.
It should be clear to all that for the last four years, City Hall has been eager to approve any scheme presented by private developers — from the America’s Cup nonsense to highrise luxury condos on the waterfront. The siren song of the developers — more revenue if you approve our project — has been proven false again and again, as the revenue never really matches the real costs of these projects. The city’s essential services continue to shrink. Transit fees are too low to pay for the actual new costs of Muni. The affordable housing fees are too little to actually meet the affordable housing needs of the new, poorly-paid workers employed in the retail and service industry that is always a part of these projects.
More and more of our parks and public open spaces are made available to private users, while few if any new public parks or open spaces are being created. Indeed, the Department of Parks and Recreation often opposes new public parks — because it can’t maintain what it has.
So it is with fondness that these old eyes see the stirring of what appears to be the awakening political giant of a new controlled-growth movement.
Here’s how it’s happening: The formation of a multi-neighborhood coalition to oppose fee increases at the Arboretum leads to a bigger coalition to oppose artificial turf fields in western Golden Gate Park, which leads to an even-bigger coalition placing a policy statement against the privatization of Coit Tower on the ballot and winning.
These are important indications of a broad dissatisfaction with the endless private-public-partnership ( in which all the costs are public and all the profits are private) babble from Rec and Park.
The submission by a broad based coalition of more than 30,000 signatures to place the 8 Washington on the ballot — the first land-use referendum in decades — is an incredibly important achievement, and shows the popular sentiment against much of the City Hall happy talk about development on the waterfront.
But it was the unanimous ( yes, unanimous) vote by the Board of Supervisors last Tuesday to hold California Pacific Medical Center accountable for its constant shape shifting on its massive project at Geary and Van Ness that shows, perhaps, the outline of the potential future of the balanced-growth movement in San Francisco.
Six supervisors stated their willingness to turn down the environmental impact report on the project unless Sutter/CPMC committed to a project that addressed not only the promise to keep St. Luke’s open for at least 20 years but also hired more San Franciscans, corrected the traffic nightmare predicted for Geary and Van Ness, provided more affordable housing for its own low-income new workforce, and committed to cap the city’s health care costs as a result of CPMC’s market control the new project would create.
There is always the possibility that the two-week delay will go nowhere, but this kind of talk from this Board of Supervisors to a huge private developer simply has not occurred in the recent past. No one from Room 200 showed up to twist supervisors’ arms in favor of Sutter. Sutter was on its own and got rolled.
The coalition that fought Sutter to a standstill at the board, that defined the inadequacies of the project listed by the supervisors, was a multi-neighborhood, multi-issues organization composed of community, neighborhoods, and labor. Middle class “Baja” Pacific Heights residents and low income seniors from Bernal Heights, non-profit affordable housing advocates and trade unionists, tenant organizers from the Tenderloin and Sierra Club members from the Haight-Ashbury; single moms from the Bayview and Filipino youth from the South of Market.
It was a San Francisco coalition, one that has been working together for nearly three years, blending issues, making concessions to one another and staying together. A group like this with a set of demands such as these has not prevailed at City Hall for nearly a decade. It still may not, indeed the chances are slim that its full demands will be achieved.
But this group moved the Board of Supervisors in a way not seen in years. If the folks mobilized about our parks and the folks mobilized about our waterfront and the folks mobilized about CPMC get together, we have something very big happening. And it might be just in time to make a real difference.
It reminds me of an old saying: “ The people alone are the makers of world history.”
The future of St. Luke’s Hospital
The CPMC hospital-rebuild deal is on life support — and some say, to use the harsh medical code, it’s CTD. Stands for Circling the Drain.
IF the arrogant leadership at CPMC and Sutter Health comes back in two weeks with a radically improved plan, and IF community groups get behind it, and IF the supervisors can trust Sutter enought to even consider it, then there’s a chance this creature can be electroshocked back into the land of the living. But that’s a lot of ifs. It’s entirely possible at this point that the city and CPMC are so far away from agreement that the billion-dollar proposal for a fancy spankin new hospital on Van Ness will never happen.
We’re all hopeful. As Emily Lee, an organizer with the Chinese Progressive Association, put it, “we’re hearing a very different tone than they took before.” CPMC is in something of a bind: Its existing main hospital on California St. doesn’t meet state seismic standards, and has to be replaced or upgraded by 2015. And this isn’t a typical business that can just pack up and move out of the city — CPMC would lose far too many patients and too much money. So the crew there has to do business with San Francisco.
But it also has leverage over the city. Everyone in San Francisco agrees that St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission is a critical part of the city’s health-care infrastucture. Everyone agrees that it has to remain open as a full-service hospital with emergency and acute-care facilities. And everyone agrees that it also has to be rebuilt (at a cost of about $250 million) and that it loses money every year.
Oh, and CPMC owns it. And threatens to close it down if the city won’t move on the Van Ness palace.
So Sup. David Campos has authored a resolution calling on city officials to start looking into Plan B: What do we do to save St. Luke’s if CPMC won’t put up the money to rebuild and operate it?
It’s a tough question. CPMC, owned by Sutter Health, is a private nonprofit. The city could, in theory, seize the facility under eminent domain, and float a bond to pay for the rebuild and come up with $25 million a year in General Fund money to cover its operating loses, but that seems a stretch, particularly since the taxpayers have already approved a much bigger bond to rebuild SF General.
There are other health-care providers in the city, though — and some argue that St. Luke’s is only a money-loser because CPMC keeps shrinking its operations. “It’s become too small to survive without a subsidy,” Chuck Idelson, from the California Nurses Association, told me. And in theory, Dignity Health or even Kaiser could decide it was worth the investment to assume operations, particularly if the city joined in some sort of partnership to help. UCSF runs a big ol’ hospital on Parnassus Heights, and already helps staff SF General with attending physicians and residents; maybe St. Luke’s could be integrated into the university’s medical training program.
“We need to explore what it would be like if St. Luke’s was operated by someone who cared about the hospital for itself,” Lee said. Unlike CPMC, which seems to care about it largely as a bargaining chip.
Joanne Jung, also with CNA, told me that “there has to be a St. Luke’s. It’s just too important to the city.” And if CPMC doesn’t want to keep it going, “clearly there has to be another operator., someone who has some decency and respect for the community St. Luke’s serves.”
Of course, nobody can force CPMC to sell the hospital or give it to another (competing) provider (although I suspect CPMC would be glad to get rid of it) — and nobody can force Dignity or Kaiser to take it on.
The wildest idea I’ve heard is for the city to use bond money for the rebuild — then let the health-care unions run it. A hospital run by hospital workers. Hospitals used to be run by doctors. But Idelson says CNA doesn’t have anywhere near the kind of money that would be needed to upgrade and expand services — and managing a hospital is a huge undertaking.
Chinese Hospital has its own nonprofit; maybe one gets created for St. Luke’s.
But something has to happen, and we have to start thinking about it now. Otherwise, CPMC can continue to hold the city hostage.
High noon for CPMC
CPMC, the health-care giant owned by Sutter Health, has two weeks to convince some very reluctant city officials that its plan to build a flashy new hospital on Van Ness Avenue is at least marginally acceptable.
It might not be possible.
CPMC and Mayor Ed Lee had a deal back in June — a bad deal for the city, but one that the mayor was ready to push. Then internal documents showed that the hospital folks weren’t telling the truth and were looking for ways to shut down St. Luke’s, which provides care to the underserved population in the southeast part of the city.
The actual deal is in some kind of suspension now, since CPMC and the mayor aren’t anywhere near close to agreement — but the environmental impact report on the development came up on appeal to the supervisors, and it was clear that there weren’t enough votes to approve the document. Rejecting it would have set the project back at least 18 months, probably two years — and that would spell doom. CPMC is under a state mandate to upgrade the seismic safety of its facilities by 2015, and this Van Ness super-hospital is supposed to replace that aging California St. campus, which doesn’t meet state codes.
At the end of a seven-hour hearing, the supes agreed to continue the matter for two weeks after Michael Duncheon, Sutter’s general counsel, promised to maybe, sorta, kinda try to reopen talks with the city:
“In the intervening two weeks, CPMC commits to work with the mayor’s office and with you. … CPMC is ready to talk about a structure for future discussions as we all put our heads together.”
I other words, we’re ready to consider the shape of the bargaining table.
That doesn’t go very far, particularly since CEO Warren Browner has been a complete asshole throughout this process. He acts as if he’s entitled to do anything he wants with this project and he dismisses community benefits as nonsense. Oh, and guess what? He’s not even around right now. He’s on vacation.
Sup. Jane Kim made a good point in her remarks:
“The fundamental issue in certifying this EIR, in my humble opinion, is the elephant in the room, which is that there is no proposed project. The only sponsor of this project, has himself stated that there is currently no project without greater assurance and agreement to stronger language from project sponsor on a commitment to the operation of St. Luke’s.”
And she said that if the matter hadn’t been continued, she would have voted not to certify the EIR. Sup. David Campos told me that he agreed: “We sent a very clear message that we can kill this thing if we want to,” he said.
So now we wait two weeks to see if Browner and his crew will come to their senses. “There’s hope,” Campos said, “but who knows?” And if CPMC doesn’t come back very quickly with a much-better plan, it will be time to start thinking about other options for saving St. Luke’s.
Trust the police?
yael@sfbg.com
On July 16, 2011, Kenneth Harding Jr. lay bleeding on the ground. He was surrounded by San Francisco Police officers, who were in turn surrounded by neighbors and community members. The minutes ticked by and no ambulance arrived. After 28 minutes, Harding was dead at 19. The official story: after being stopped in a Muni fare check, Harding ran from police, drew a gun, and shot himself.
A year later, family members and community supporters maintain that the official story is a lie. A protest on his death’s anniversary this week shut down Muni service for an hour in his honor.
But protesters weren’t speaking of just Harding. Since he was killed by law enforcement officers, so were Charles Hill, Alan Blueford, and Derrick Gaines. All have led to varying degrees of protest that feed tensions between the cops and segments of the community.
Hill’s fatal shooting by a BART cop in San Francisco sparked last summer’s OpBART demonstrations, the energy from which flowed into early manifestations of the Bay Area’s Occupy movement, which was also marked by tense standoffs with cops that were followed by “fuck the police” marches throughout the Bay Area.
Despite such lingering tensions, Mayor Ed Lee recently suggested curbing gun violence by giving cops stop-and-frisk authority, a controversial idea that has been the subject of massive protest movements in New York City where what critics say is widespread racial profiling heightens tensions between police and communities of color.
Lee’s idea was widely criticized, triggering the Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution on July 10 criticizing the idea, urging Lee to abandon it, and saying it would destroy trust between the community and police.
There has always been tension in San Francisco between police and segments of the community, but a series of emotional, high-profile episodes and unsatisfying official responses over the last year has frayed that relationship even more than normal.
HARDING’S CASE
When Harding was killed, his mother Denika Chatman moved from Seattle to San Francisco. She wanted to convict the officers she believes murdered him. But the SFPD announced within weeks of the shooting that Harding had shot himself.
Now, Chatman and attorney John Burris have filed a federal lawsuit. “I know that it was murder,” she said. “I know his human rights had been violated.”
Chatman and other family members and friends maintain that when Harding was stopped while off-boarding the T train by SFPD officers and asked for proof of paying the $2 fair, he was unarmed. Harding ran, and those officers drew guns and shot him.
Police say that Harding had pulled out a gun as he ran and shot at police, prompting their return fire. They didn’t recover a gun at the scene, but after a weeklong “community effort,” police say a neighbor turned in a gun found at the scene.
The gun shot .38 caliber bullets, police reported—smaller than the .40 caliber bullets in a standard-issue SFPD weapon. The police crime lab then concluded Harding’s fatal wound was from a .38 caliber bullet, a finding confirmed later by the Office of the Medical Examiner.
A widely circulated video show’s Harding on the ground, bleeding to death, as police stand around him.
But as SFPD spokesperson Carlos Manfredi tells it, “The officers did not just stand around. Officers had just been involved in a violent confrontation, they were fearful for their lives…A hostile crowd began surrounding the officers.”
“It wasn’t until more officers arrived on scene to assist the primary officers and prevent them from being surrounded by a hostile crowd that could have potentially escalated the situation. Not to mention, the ambulance would not be able to enter a violent scene that could potentially put their lives at risk, until we feel it is safe,” he said. “Remember, the officers did not know if Harding was laying under the gun. Approaching an armed gunmen who was shooting at officers is extremely dangerous and life-threatening.”
But many say the police shouldn’t be afraid of the community it patrols. When Chatman moved to the Bay Area, she says, she found a community in Bayview-Hunters Point. She also found support in a movement against police violence, made up largely of grieving mothers.
When hundreds marched in San Francisco demanding that George Zimmerman be charged with murdering Trayvon Martin in Florida, Chatman joined other African American mothers in condemning police killings of their sons. Since Martin’s death, similar deaths have continued in the Bay Area.
Alan Blueford, 18, was killed May 6 in Oakland three weeks before he graduated high school. Derrrick Gaines was 15 when he was fatally shot June 5 in South San Francisco. Each case feeds anew the fears and resentments some communities feel toward the police.
POLICING THE COMMUNITY
Some Occupy reactions continued a tradition of a certain type of radical response to police: just get them out. For many, police are like foreign occupying forces in neighborhoods, afraid of locals they don’t understand and willing to shoot to kill in mildly threatening situations. Harding and Gaines were running away when they were shot; Blueford was allegedly wielding a screwdriver. In all these situations, shooting to wound likely would have sufficed for self-defense.
When asked how she would like to see police interact differently with Bayview-Hunters Point residents, Chatman didn’t see much potential. “Not at this point,” Chatman said. “There’s been too many murders. Things would have to change drastically. And the mayor trying to implement a stop and frisk? Kenny is a worst example of stop and frisk and racial profiling.”
Indeed, at the end of a tense year, Mayor Lee’s idea of adopting the stop-and-frisk tactics used in New York and Philadelphia has been met with intense dissent. Sup. Malia Cohen — whose District 10 includes Bayview-Hunters Point — and former Mayor Willie Brown, two of the mayor’s supporters, immediately came out against the idea.
“San Francisco should remain focused on community policing that values both law enforcement and building relationships with communities who live with gun violence. Anything less would undermine decades of hard work in building trust between local law enforcement and our neighborhoods,” she wrote in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed.
Even the SFPD is wary of the idea.
“We are not passing stop and frisk,” Manfredi told the Guardian. “It’s not even an option on the table for the department. We’re using the same method we’ve been using this whole time: probable cause and reasonable suspicion.”
A TROUBLING PATTERN
The anniversary of Harding’s death comes a week after the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement released a highly circulated report that concluded an African American is killed by a police officer or someone “deputized to act in their name” every 40 hours.
“We call [the killings] ‘extrajudicial’,” the report notes, “because they happen without trial or any due process, against all international law and human rights conventions.” The report notes that only nine people have been charged in the 110 killings it looks at, and none convicted.
On paper, San Francisco isn’t having a particulary bad year. Manfredi said there have been “two officer-involved shootings and at least one was a fatality” so far in 2012. That’s compared to eight officer-involved shootings with three fatalities in 2011 and 14 officer-involved shootings with three fatalities in 2010.
But community perceptions and unease can linger for a long time when incidents don’t seem properly investigated or atoned for.
“It’s very alarming. Especially the rate that it’s happening at. And anybody is paying attention, they’re starting use all the same stories for all these young black teenage males that they’re murdering,” Chatman said.
Alan Blueford, 18, was killed by Oakland Police on May 6. He was confronted by police on suspicion of hiding a gun and ran away. Police first said he had drawn a gun and shot an officer as he ran; an investigation later revealed that the officer who was injured shot himself in the foot. There has been no evidence uncovered that Blueford had a gun.
A month later, Derrick Gaines, 15, was confronted by South San Francisco police, again for looking suspicious. Police say he ran away and drew a gun, and that they needed to fire in self-defense. At a community speak-out July 13, Gaines’ mother, Rachel Guido Red, said she had just received the coroner’s report. It’s conclusion? “Derrick was shot in the back.”
She related what she believes happened: “He was running. He was scared. He was tripped by the officer, and he didn’t have a chance to pick himself up because this man played judge, jury, and executioner.”
Over and over, police investigations clear the cops of wrongdoing, as an investigation of Hill’s shooting on a San Francisco BART platform recently did. Chatman said lawsuits like the one she filed are often the only way to seek justice.
DEMANDS FOR CHANGE
Chatman wants to see shoot-to-kill policies changed. “I would like to see a bill passed making these people responsible for murder,” she said. “And then maybe they’ll start going back to original ways, of maybe wounding somebody, firing a warning shot, or doing something to injure the person, instead of shooting to kill. Because now they all come with their guns drawn. How come every police man there has to shoot? Why do they all have to shoot? Why can’t one officer shoot, and just shoot to wound?”
Manfredi said the policy isn’t shoot-to-kill, but it isn’t shoot-to-wound either. Instead, it’s to aim for “center mass” (the torso area) and shoot until there is no longer a threat. “We never, ever had a shoot to kill policy,” he said. “We shoot to stop the threat. And once we assess the threat and realize there’s no longer a threat, then we stop.”
Sharen Hewitt, founder of the Community Leadership Academy and Emergency Response Project (CLAER) is also indignant about Harding’s murder. “I don’t think that I should pay for Kenneth Harding to be shot down in my streets because he didn’t have two dollars,” she said.
In her decade of work with CLAER, Hewitt has overseen many projects that improved conditions for families whose children were killed by police, from funding funerals for families who can’t pay to bury their dead to counseling for family members other than biological parents of murdered kids. CLAER also sends emergency responders to sites of murders.
“We thought it was important to deal with the immediacy of the homicide and provide support so we could mitigate the possibility of retaliation,” Hewitt said.
Hewitt also has ideas for how to increase trust in police. “They need to understand the nuances, so they see Johnny with the hoodie on and know, he’s a star quarterback. I’d like to see my cops, paid by my tax dollars, not going to Sonoma County to spend them. One day the officer might be out running and he’ll have a hood on, and he’ll understand the nuances of what people are going through,” Hewitt said. She also advocates for housing set-aside for police in every neighborhood, insuring that officers live in neighborhoods they patrol.
We asked Manfredi about this idea. “I’m a big proponent of having officers live in the community where they work, because then they can engage with the community,” he agreed. But, he said, “one of the major issues about San Francisco, the cost of living is extremely high. To buy a home out here, we’re talking in the millions of dollars. That’s just too expensive.”
He said that to make the idea work, the city would need to “implement some type of program or plan where they offer discounts for public officials so they can afford to live in the city.” He explained that even in less expensive areas like Bayview and Sunnydale, the cost of housing would be too high for police officers to raise a family.
The current entry-level salary for SFPD officers is $88,842 to $112,164. By comparison, the median household income in San Francisco is about $71,000. According to city-data.com, the median household income in Bayview is $47,147. In Sunnydale, Hewitt’s neighborhood, that figure is $33,641. “I would say, the police are part of the community,” Hewitt said. “And they must be held to community standards. What I’d like to do is make it part of common thought that they are perceived as community members.” She said the African American community has differing ideas on how to address police-related problem, but the tension is widely felt. “It’s not like the black community is monolithic,” she said, “although we are bearing the collective brunt.”
Shutting down Sunshine
EDITORIAL The unwillingness of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to follow the City Charter’s rules on open government has reached a new level of absurdity: The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force voted July 11 to stop meeting, because the supervisors wouldn’t appoint the legally mandated members.
Technically, the fuss is over a provision in the law creating the Task Force that mandates one member must be a physically disabled person with a demonstrated interest in open-government issues. That was written into the law in part because access to meetings for people with disabilities is an ongoing area of concern.
But the supervisors refused to reappoint Bruce Wolfe, a longtime task force member who met that criterion — and who had the respect of independent and progressive leaders all over town. And none of the six people the board did appoint qualify as physically disabled.
So the City Attorney’s Office advised the task force that it would be violating the charter if it met and took any action — and although the chance that the courts would invalidate task force decisions might be slim, the members could face fines. So the panel did the prudent thing and quit meeting.
Now, for all practical purposes, there is no Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, and it will be in legal and political limbo until the supervisors appoint a disabled member.
That follows on the heels of the board refusing — for the first time since the creation of the task force in 1999 — to seat the nominees of the Society of Professional Journalists, New American Media, and the League of Women Voters. Those organizations were given the right to submit names for three seats as a way to ensure that some of the task force members were from outside City Hall and represented media and good-government groups.
So the agency that it supposed to protect the public’s right to access records and meetings has been stacked with City Hall-friendly appointees and now is unable even to hear complaints.
There’s no question that some supervisors are annoyed with the task force, in part because it’s issued some rulings that board members disagreed with. But the task force is supposed to come down on the side of public access whenever possible, and if the agency is doing its job, it’s going to piss off politicians. The response shouldn’t be to seek retribution by denying its ability to function.
The supervisors are demanding that SPJ, NAM and the League submit new lists of nominees, with multiple names, which is unprecedented and difficult: These grassroots groups are supposed to line up a group of volunteers for a difficult, time-consuming, unpaid job — then tell them that all but one of them will be rejected by the supervisors? Who’s going to want to be in that position?
The three organizations should hold their ground, resubmit their nominees and ask the supervisors to follow the City Charter. And the City Attorney’s Office needs to offer some clarity here: Can the supervisors, in a fit of pique, shut down a Charter mandated watchdog agency? Really?
Feeling the heat, Olague kills RCV repeal for now
After reviving a controversial effort to repeal the city’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system and paying a political price for her shifting stands on the issue, Sup. Christina Olague today made the motion to send all three competing reform proposals back to the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee, effectively killing efforts to place them on the November ballot.
“The public would benefit from more public discussion on the issue,” Olague said, adding that she doesn’t think the measures should be on the crowded fall ballot competing with other important priorities.
Olague had been torn between supporting the desires of Mayor Ed Lee (who appointed her to the seat) and downtown interests to repeal RCV and those of her longtime allies in the progressive community who sought to defend it from total repeal – and she hadn’t been returning calls or indicating where she now stood before today’s Board of Supervisors meeting.
But after hearing more than 30 minutes of impassioned public comments on both sides of the issue, she made the motion to end the controversy for now, which was unanimously approved by the board. Olague also addressed the heat she felt indirectly, saying RCV “should not be a litmus test for whether someone is progressive” and “sadly, the discussion had degenerated to be about personalities.”
Her colleagues seemed happy to be done with this fight for now as well. Sup. Mark Farrell, who sponsored the measure to repeal RCV for all citywide offices, said it would be a “huge mistake” to have competing voting system measures on the fall ballot. Olague had previously offered an alternative to repeal RCV for just the mayor’s race, like Farrell’s measure using a September primary election and November runoff. Board President David Chiu responded to the RCV repeal effort by proposing another alternative, that one using RCV in the November election but having a December runoff between the top two mayoral finishers.
Chiu said he was happy to delay his proposal, saying, “I have thought the system we have is working quite well.”
Black Young Democrats rally against stop and frisk
A group organized by the San Francisco Black Young Democrats rallied at City Hall today. Their message: no to stop and frisk.
Members of the group, as well as the ACLU and the Asian Law Caucus, said the policy would violate the civil rights of San Franciscans.
Supervisors Malia Cohen, along with Avalos, Campos, and Mar also attended the rally and expressed their support. They co-sponsored a non-binding resolution, introduced by Cohen, that condemned the idea of implementing stop and frisk in San Francisco.
Mayor Ed Lee said he was considering implementing the controversial policy a few weeks ago.
Under a stop and frisk policy, police have the leeway to stop and search people that they consider suspicious. On average, 85 percent of those stopped in New York City are young African American and Latino men.
Opponents say racial profiling is inevitably involved and that, for people who may be carrying minor contraband but no dangerous weapons, this racial profiling leads to selective enforcement of laws. About 87 percent of those stopped in New York were completely innocent, according to numbers compiled by the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Lee said he suggested the idea after a spike of gun violence in June. But it has generated a backlash, and at today’s rally about 75 showed up to present a petition signed by more than 2,000 asking the mayor not to implement the policy.
Joaquin Torres, director of that office, accepted it on Lee’s behalf.
Lee himself didn’t engage with the protesters, but he did issue a statement not an hour after they left City Hall “clarifying his position” on stop and frisk.
“I want to be clear that I have not considered implementing a policy in San Francisco that would violate anyone’s constitutional rights or that would result in racial profiling,” the statement reads.
Ellington said the statement was not enough. “We want Mayor Ed Lee to say that he will not implement stop and frisk in San Francisco, nor any policies that are like stop and frisk. No policies that infringe upon our civil liberties,” Ellington told the Guardian.
“These are predatory policing practices that we don’t want in our city,” he said.
Guest opinion: RCV is good for progressives
Since San Francisco began using ranked choice voting in 2004 and public financing of campaigns in 2002, the city has been a leader in the types of political reform badly needed at state and national levels. People of color today have an unprecedented degree of representation and progressives are a dominant presence in city government. Elections are being decided in November, when turnout usually is highest, and the combination of public financing and deciding races in one election minimizes the impact of independent expenditures and Super PACs .
Yet progressive stalwart Calvin Welch, whose work we have long admired, recently authored a Bay Guardian oped against RCV. His charges against RCV are as wrong today as they were when he first made them 10 years ago when he opposed RCV on the ballot. And given the horrible Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United, which has opened the floodgates on corporate campaign spending and did not exist when San Francisco last used separate runoff elections, returning to two elections is a direct threat to the future of San Francisco progressivism.
The most serious of his claims is that RCV favors “moderate to conservative candidates” because “left-liberals do very well in run-off elections” since “in low-turnout elections, left-liberals vote more heavily than do conservatives.” He cites the 2000 supervisorial races and 2001 city attorney race, in which “the more liberal candidate for City Attorney, Dennis Herrera” bested “Chamber of Commerce functionary Jim Lazarus.” He asserts “that’s a verifiable San Francisco political fact.”
But San Francisco State University professor Richard DeLeon, author of the acclaimed book of Left Coast City about San Francisco politics, debunked that claim with real election data in his 2002 paper, “Do December runoffs help or hurt progressives?”
He found that in the November 2001 city attorney election, for every 100 voters who turned out in progressive precincts, 107 turned out in conservative precincts. But in the December 2001 runoff, for every 100 voters who turned out in the progressive precincts, 126 turned out in the conservative precincts, an 18 percent increase. Wrote DeLeon, “This dramatic increase in the ratio of conservative to progressive voters occurred despite (or perhaps because of) the 44 percent drop in voter turnout citywide between November and December.”
He continued: “If San Francisco had used [ranked choice voting] in November, Herrera most likely would have won by an even greater margin. In November, the liberal/progressive candidates for city attorney won a combined 60 percent of the vote…In the December runoff, however, Herrera won with only 52 percent of the vote. Thus, due to the proportionally greater decline in progressive voter turnout, Herrera probably lost approximately 8 percent of his potential vote, making the election close.”
DeLeon also rebutted Welch’s citation of the supervisorial races in 2000 as ones that demonstrated a progressive advantage in low-turnout runoffs, writing:
“Progressive success that year was NOT due solely to a one-time surge in turnout among progressive voters…Many powerful forces converged in that election, not least the anti-Willie Brown backlash, the cresting of the dot-com invasion, and the return to district elections, which forced despised incumbents to stand trial before angry neighborhood electorates.”
DeLeon concluded: “Based on the evidence presented, I conclude that December runoffs have hurt progressive voters, candidates and causes in the past and (absent same-day runoffs) will continue to do so in the future, even under district elections.”The Bay Guardian cited Professor DeLeon’s study in March 2002 (see and scroll down to “A is OK”), and Mr. Welch is ignoring these results today just as he did then.
Certainly progressives haven’t won 100% of RCV elections — should any political perspective? — but they have done well nonetheless, electing Bay Guardian-endorsed candidates like John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, David Chiu and Ross Mirkarimi, despite those candidates not being incumbents. Other progressive incumbents first elected before RCV elections, like Aaron Peskin, Chris Daly, and others, were re-elected under RCV. And Mirkarimi was elected citywide in the sheriff’s race. On the flip side, progressive Eileen Hansen most certainly would have beaten moderate Bevan Dufty in a November RCV contest for D8 supervisor; instead she lost in December after finishing first in November.
What’s actually at stake here is how we define progressivism. Since we began using RCV in 2004, 8 of the eleven members of the Board of Supervisors come from communities of color, a DOUBLING from pre-RCV days. At the citywide level, all seven officials elected by RCV come from communities of color. So out of the 18 elected officials in San Francisco, a whopping 15 out of 18 come from communities of color, the highest percentage for a major city in the United States.
The proposed repeal amendment would launch low-turnout September elections in San Francisco. In fact, the December 2001 city attorney race in which Welch cites as exemplary had a turnout of 15 percent of registered voters, the lowest in San Francisco’s history. New York City’s last September mayoral primary had a turnout of 11.4 percent. In Charlotte NC (population 750,000, similar to San Francisco) its last mayoral primary had a turnout of only 4.3 percent. Cincinnati had a September turnout of 15 percent, and Boston and Baltimore had September mayoral primaries with turnout in the low 20s. Many cities in Minnesota have September primaries with extremely low turnout; the two largest cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, have switched to RCV largely to eliminate September primaries.
Research has demonstrated that voters in low turnout elections are disproportionately more conservative, whiter, older, and more affluent; those who don’t participate are people of color, young people, poor people — and progressives. So having a mayoral race in a low turnout September election has real consequences not only on voter turnout but on the demographics of the electorate.
While we share the priorities of Welch’s progressive economics, we believe progressivism must be more inclusive, especially if it wants to enjoy the support of these burgeoning demographics. While disappointed by the lack of progressive achievements of President Barack Obama, we still view the election of the first African American as president as a major progressive achievement.
Finally, we would assert that the ranked ballots used in RCV have been important for San Francisco democracy. Just look at the recent “top two” primary on June 5, and you can see the defects of the methods proposed to replace RCV. In many races across the state – including in the Marin County congressional race where progressive Democrat Norman Solomon lost by 0.2 percent — too many spoiler candidates split the field and candidates got into the top two with extremely low vote percentages, some as low as 15 percent of the vote. In one race where there was a Latino majority and a solid Democratic district, the Democrats ran so many candidates that the Democratic vote split and two white Republicans made the runoff with low vote percentages.
San Francisco risks such elections if we get rid of RCV. Think of the last mayoral election, and the choice for Asian voters if we used single-shot plurality voting instead of RCV. Which Asian candidate would they vote for with their single-shot vote — Lee, Chiu, Yee, Ting, Adachi? What kind of vote split might have occurred? And to avoid that, what kind of backroom dealing would have occurred BEFORE the election to keep that many candidates out of the race to prevent that vote-splitting? We saw such vote splitting in the 2003 mayoral election as well, with various progressive candidates running and splitting the progressive vote. Going back to plurality elections would be damaging for constituencies that often run multiple candidates, such as the Asian and progressive communities.
RCV has been good for San Francisco, and we should keep it. For those who would like to see a runoff in mayoral races, Board president David Chiu has proposed a compromise that, while increasing the costs of running for mayor, is far better than the repeal measure for September elections. Chiu’s proposal would keep RCV to elect the mayor, but with a December runoff if no mayoral candidate won a majority of first rankings in November. The 2011 mayoral election would have gone to a runoff, with John Avalos as Ed Lee’s opponent.
San Francisco progressives should embrace a view of progressivism that is inclusive, promotes higher turnout and is based on a politics that is looking forward instead of backward to some golden age that never existed. Ranked choice voting and public financing are two parts of the puzzle for ensuring a vibrant progressivism.
Steven Hill led the campaign for ranked choice voting in San Francisco, and Matt Gonzalez was President of the Board of Supervisors and legislative author of the RCV charter amendment. See www.SFBetterElections.org for more information
Gonzalez withdraws his endorsement of Olague
Matt Gonzalez – the attorney and former president of the Board of Supervisors whose 2003 run for mayor galvanized the city’s progressive movement – has withdrawn his endorsement of Sup. Christina Olague for his old District 5 supervisorial seat, citing her positions on the 8 Washington project and replacing ranked-choice (RCV) voting with a September mayoral primary election.
It is perhaps the biggest political blow that Olague has suffered since being appointed to her first elective office by Mayor Ed Lee in January, and a sign that she may be siding more solidly with Lee and his pro-development allies than with the progressive political community she has long identified with – and that could complicate her race in one of the city’s most progressive districts.
Gonzalez, who helped launch Olague’s political career by appointing her to the Planning Commission in 2004, confirmed his decision and the reasons for it, but he told the Guardian that he didn’t want to make a formal public statement yet. That could come later in the week, possibly coupled with a new endorsement in the race.
But he did say that he’s been frustrated with Olague’s actions on both 8 Washington – a housing project for the super-rich on the Embarcadero – and with her recent antics on RCV. In both cases, it wasn’t just the votes, but the way they were made that have raised doubts about Olague with Gonzalez and other progressives.
Olague and Sup. Jane Kim (another former Gonzalez protege who has disappointed many of her one-time progressive supporters on several high-profile issues) not only voted for the 8 Washington project, but also for a series of amendments that made the already lucrative project even more profitable for the developers and costly to the city.
On RCV, as I reported on Friday, Olague surprised progressives by giving new life to efforts by the most conservative supervisors to repeal the system, then has made a shifting series of statements and pledges on the issue, in the end supporting a system that will repeal RCV only for the mayor and create a September election.
The fear is that election would be extremely low turnout, and Lee could win it outright with at least 65 percent of the vote and avoid the normal November election, and Olague has been unwilling to fully explain her position or address concerns that she is simply doing Lee’s bidding. Olague hasn’t returned our calls on that issue or for her reaction to Gonzalez’s decision to withdraw his endorsement.
Guardian Voices: The case against RCV
“The Cure for the Ills of Democracy is More Democracy”
— old Progressive Party slogan
My friends here at the Guardian have elevated support for ranked choice voting to a defining requirement for being considered a progressive. This is not only historically incorrect, it is actually politically silly. There are many progressive reasons to oppose RCV — not the least of which is the undeniable fact that it overwhelmingly favors incumbents, has failed to deliver on the 2002 ballot promises, and now poses real threats to progressive political advancement in key supervisor districts.
First, a little history.
The two greatest national political victorys of the Progressive Era were the 1913 adoption of the 17th Amendment of the US Constitution, which required direct elections of US Senators, and, at the tail end of the era, the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Both expanded people power in elections, curing the ills of democracy by more democracy.
Historically, to be a Progressive is to favor MORE elections, MORE political opportunities for more people at the local level. How can it be that it is now progressive to favor FEWER elections at the local level?
In the March, 2002 Voters Handbook, ballot arguments against RCV were authored by several progressive activists (Sue Bierman, Jane Morrison, David Looman, Larry Griffin, David Spiro and me, to name a few). We argued then that replacing local elections with a mathematical formula that few understand and even fewer could explain was political foolishness. While were outvoted, I think we were right a decade ago.
Left-liberals do very well in run-off elections in San Francisco — from 1975, when Moscone beat Bargbagalata in a December run-off, to the run-off victory of the more liberal candidate for City Attorney, Dennis Herrera, over Chamber of Commerce functionary Jim Lazarus in 2001. The reason is that in low-turnout elections, left-liberals vote more heavily that do conservatives, and that’s a verifiable San Francisco political fact.
But it was the 2000 supervisors races that showed just how well left-liberal forces did in run-off elections at the district level: Jake McGoldrick, Aaron Peskin, Matt Gonzales, Chris Daly, Sophie Maxwell, and Gerardo Sandoval, the very heart of the progressive majority, were elected in December run-off elections.
In 2002, three arguments were made for RCV: first, that it would reduce negative campaigning; second, that it would increase turnout in local elections and third, it would reduce costs by eliminating the run off election. Of the three arguments only the last has been met, a dubious achievement in that even more such savings could be made by eliminating ALL elections.
Can anyone actually claim that last year’s mayoral election, the first contested one conducted under RCV, was anything but a negative free-for-all? Or, how about the 2010 D6 race between Debra Walker and Jane Kim, or the D8 race between Mandelman and Weiner? Or the 2002 D4 Ron Dudum – Ed Jew race? RCV did not end negative campaigns.
How about turnout? Last year’s mayoral race had the lowest turnout in a contested race for mayor in the modern history of San Francisco. Every supervisorial race in 2008 had a lower turnout than the citywide average. Turnout in 2010 was below citywide levels in the RCV supervisor races in D4, D6 and D10.
No, the record is clear RCV has not resulted in higher turnout, either.
RCV creates a political system in which candidates make deals with other candidates, behind closed doors, before the voters vote. Runoff elections result in a system in which voters make deals with candidates AFTER they vote in the polling booth. What’s wrong with giving voters two choices in two elections instead of three choices in one election? Oh, that’s right, we save money by giving voters fewer elections.
Left-liberals tend to field fewer candidates for races than do moderates and conservatives because, especially in San Francisco, left-liberals simply don’t know how to raise political money, while moderates and conservatives do. RCV elections reward multiple candidates of the same political persuasion as these candidate can agree to appeal to their similar voters to vote for them as a block. Thus, RCV will always favor, in an open contest in which there is no incumbent, moderate to conservative candidates because there are usually more of them running.
That’s what happened to Avalos in last years mayoral election: he picked up nothing as the moderate candidates’ second and third votes went to the moderate Lee. The same happened in D10 two years ago: moderates voted for multiple moderate candidates and the only real left-liberal in the race did not pick up any of these votes and lost — although he outpolled the eventual, moderate winner.
RCV favors incumbents, and that’s why at least two of the Class of 2000 progressive supervisors told me they voted for it. Lets see how well it works to defeat Sup. Scott Wiener, who is far to the right of the average voter in D8, or Supervisor Malia Cohen in D10 who was supported by less than 30 percent of the election day vote.
What seems to be going on here is an incredibly silly political association game. Because repealing RCV is supported by conservative supervisors and the Chamber of Commerce we should be opposed since they are for it. Haven’t we seen this year conservative Republicans make one self defeating political move after another? When your enemy is threatening to shoot himself in the heard why are we trying to pull the gun away? It time to pull the trigger on RCV.
Olague’s antics on RCV alarm her progressive supporters
As Sup. Christina Olague was being appointed to the District 5 seat on the Board of Supervisors by Mayor Ed Lee in January, we noted how difficult it might be to balance loyalty to the moderate mayor with her history as a progressive and someone running for office in one of the city’s most progressive districts.
By most indications, Olague doesn’t seem to be handling that balancing act — or the pressure that goes along with it — very well at all, to the increasing frustration of her longtime political allies. And that’s never been more clear than on the issue of repealing the city’s ranked choice voting (RCV) system.
As you may recall, earlier this year the board narrowly rejected an effort by its five most conservative, pro-downtown supervisors to place a measure repealing RCV on the June ballot. So chief sponsor Sup. Mark Farrell tried again in March with a ballot measure for November, this time just for citywide offices, and Olague surprised progressives by immediately co-sponsoring the measure, giving it the sixth vote it needed.
Since then, she’s offered shifting and evasive explanations for her actions, telling RCV supporters that she would withdraw her support then going back on her word. Sources close to Olague say that she’s been taking her marching orders on the issue directly from the Mayor’s Office, even as she tries to appease her progressive supporters.
Even trying to get a straight answer out of her is difficult. Two weeks ago, as the Farrell measure was coming to the board for a vote, I called her on her cell phone to ask whether she still supported the measure, and she angrily complained about why people care about this issue and said “you’re going to write what you want anyway” before abruptly hanging up on me.
I left her a message noting that it was her support for repealing RCV that had raised the issue again, that I was merely trying to find where she now stood, and that we expect accountability from elected officials. She called back an hour later to say she was still deciding and she denied hanging up on me, claiming that she had just run into someone that she needed to talk to.
At that week’s board meeting, she offered an amended version of Farrell’s proposal – which would replace RCV with a primary election in September and runoff in November for citywide offices – repealing RCV only for the mayor’s race. She has not directly addressed the question of why she supports a September election, which is expected to have even lower voter turnout than the old December runoff elections that RCV replaced.
So RCV supporters worked with Board President David Chiu to fashion an third option, this one maintaining the ranked-choice election for all offices in November, but having a December runoff between the top two mayoral finishers.
Going into this week’s board meeting on the issue, nobody was quite sure where Olague stood on that proposal or the overall issue, again because she’s been making different statements to different constituencies. And as the issue came up and various supervisors stated their positions, Olague stayed silent, as she has remained since then, refusing to return our calls or messages on the issue.
But because of technical changes to the three measures requested by the City Attorney’s Office – which Farrell made to Olague’s option, which he said he would support if his is defeated – consideration was delayed by a week to this coming Tuesday.
RCV supporters and Olague’s progressive allies didn’t want to speak on the record given that she is still the swing vote on the issue, but privately they’re fuming about Olague’s squirrely temperament, lack of integrity, and how she’s handling this issue (as well as her bad votes on the 8 Washington high-end housing project and her role in the Lee perjury scandal).
But rival supervisorial candidates like Julian Davis – who came to the hearing at City Hall Tuesday and proclaimed his unqualified support for RCV – are less reticent.
“Silence or avoidance are not acceptable, so we’re calling for her to explain why a low-turnout, plurality election in September is good for San Francisco. Help us understand,” he said, noting that such a election especially hurts minority groups and other progressive constituencies that don’t vote as reliably as conservatives. “Why should Christina Olague have anything to do with it? You and the rest of San Francisco deserve an answer.”
Meanwhile, Davis recently won the endorsement of local Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin, while fellow progressive candidate John Rizzo announced his endorsement by Assembly member Tom Ammiano. And there are rumors that some prominent progressives who have already endorsed Olague are considering withdrawing their endorsements because of her recent behavior.
All of which make for some interesting dramas going into Tuesday’s RCV vote.
We can stop 8 Washington
There’s a week left to stop the sale of San Francisco’s waterfront to the 1 percent.
The Board of Supervisors approved the 8 Washington project, and a coalition that (for various reasons) opposes this giant pile of housing for the very, very rich is trying to put the issue on the ballot. That takes a lot of signatures, and there’s only one week left to collect them.
I could tell you the story of why this project sucks, or you could just read it here. In my mind, it’s simple: If we are using public land to build housing for the richest people in the country, allowing a developer to clear a couple hundred million dollars while offering the city only $11 million for affordable housing — nowhere near enought to equalize the housing imbalance inherent in this deal — then we’re losing the city’s future.
But there’s still time. If you want to help, go here. Stop by 15 Columbus Ave or call 415-894-7008.
Hell, I’m willing to have a discussion this fall about the really, really dumb idea of tearing down the Hetch Hetchy dam. Let’s at least give the voters a chance to look at the future of the city’s housing policy.
The malling of San Francisco
steve@sfbg.com
Shopping malls filled with national chain stores and restaurants are in many respects the antithesis of San Francisco. They’re the bane of any metropolis that strives to be unique and authentic. And those just happen to be qualities that make tourism this city’s number one industry.
The logic of modern capitalism, and its relentless growth into new markets, has already placed a Target or a Walmart, and a Nordstrom, Macy’s, Ross, or a JCPenney — along with a bevy of Starbucks, Applebee’s, Jamba Juice, and McDonald’s and myriad other formulaic corporate eateries — in just about every town in the country.
Do people really need them here, too? And in a city renowned worldwide for its scenic beauty and temperate (albeit sometimes foggy) climate, do people want to shop in the enclosed, climate-controlled malls popularized in the small or suburban towns that many residents came here to escape?
For me, the answer is no. Frankly, malls have an aura of artificiality that gives me the creeps — but I freely acknowledge that not everyone feels that way. Some San Franciscans may like malls and chain stores while others don’t.
But it doesn’t really matter what any of us think. Left unchecked, it’s the market that matters — and the logic of the market gives chain stores a huge competitive advantage over the mom-and-pops. Their labor and supply costs are lower, their financial resources are more extensive and appealing to commercial landlords, and their business models are based on constantly opening new stores.
All cities have to do is just say yes. And San Francisco has been increasingly saying yes to malls and chain stores.
The economic desperation that set in since the financial crash of 2008 has overcome the trend of resistance to so-called “formula retail establishments” that had been building in San Francisco during the years before the recession.
So now, rather than dying from neglect, the Metreon mall has been brought back to life by a huge Target store set to open this fall, the second Target (the other one at Masonic and Geary) going into a city that had once eschewed such national mega-retailers.
Just down the street, in the heart of the city’s transit-rich commercial center, the CityPlace mall that had been abandoned by its previous owners after winning city approval two years ago is now being built by new owners and set to open next spring with “value-based” national chain stores like JCPenney.
Projects funded with public money aren’t immune either. The new Transbay Terminal transit center now under construction will have its own mini-mall, with 225,000 square feet of retail, much of it expected to house national chains. Even more retail will be built on the ground floor of the dozen other nearby residential and office buildings connected to the project.
And it isn’t just these new malls going in a stone’s throw from the Westerfield Mall, Crocker Galleria, San Francisco Center, and other central city malls. All over town, national chains like the Whole Foods and Fresh & Easy grocery stores are replacing Cala Foods and other homegrown markets, or going into other commercial shells like the S&C Ford building on Market near the Castro.
Just a few years ago, the approval of Home Depot on Bayshore Boulevard (since then sold and opened as Lowe’s, another national chain) was a hugely controversial project approved by the Board of Supervisors on a closely watched 6-5 vote. Now, Lennar is building an entire suburban-style complex of big box stores on Candlestick Point, hundreds of thousands of square feet — without much controversy at all.
Even Walmart — the dreaded poster child for huge corporations that use their market power to drive down wages or force local stores out of business — is reported to be actively looking to open “a couple” of stores in San Francisco (see “Walmart sets sights on San Francisco,” June 24, San Francisco Chronicle).
To Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich and others who have long encouraged San Francisco to embrace the kind of urbanism advocated by famed author and activist Jane Jacobs — which emphasizes unique, neighborhood-based development that enhances public spaces and street life — accepting the malls feels like giving up on more dynamic urban models.
“It’s sort of an admission of failure,” Radulovich said. “It’s the failure of urbanism in San Francisco.”
MID-MARKET SYMBOLISM
Mid-Market Street is a bellwether for the type of city San Francisco may become. Every mayor since at least Dianne Feinstein in the late 1970s has called for the redevelopment of Mid-Market into a more active and inviting commercial and social corridor, and few have done so more fervently than Mayor Ed Lee.
Several city studies have explored a wide variety of ways to accomplish that goal, from eliminating automobiles and transforming Market Street into a lively pedestrian promenade to using redevelopment money, tax breaks, and/or flashy lighted signs to encourage distinctive development projects unique to San Francisco.
“But the city failed, so the market filled the void,” Radulovich said.
It isn’t that all shopping malls or enclosed commercial areas are necessarily bad, Radulovich said, citing the influential work by writer Walter Benjamin on the roles the enclosed “arcades” of Paris played in public life. “They work when they are an extension of public spaces,” Radulovich said.
Yet that isn’t what he sees being built in San Francisco, where what gets approved and who occupies those spaces is largely being dictated by private developers who are more interested in their bottom lines than with the creation of a vibrant urban environment where people are valued as more than mere consumers or workers.
San Francisco isn’t alone in allowing national chains to increasingly dominate commercial spaces. In fact, Stacy Mitchell, a researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said that until recently San Francisco was one of the best big US cities in controlling the proliferation of chain stores.
But the city has lost ground since its anti-chain high water mark in 2007, when voters approved Proposition G, which expanded the controls on formula retail outlets — generally requiring them to get a conditional use permit and go through public hearings — that the Board of Supervisors had approved in 2004.
Those controls are only as good as the political will to reject a permit application, and that doesn’t happen very often. A memo prepared last July for the Planning Commission — entitled “Informational Presentation on the Status of Formula Retail Controls” — found that of the 31 formula retails applications the city received since 2007, just three were rejected by the commission, six were withdrawn, and 22 were approved.
It’s gotten even worse since then, as the two Targets and other chains have been courted and embraced by Mayor’s Lee’s administration, whose key representatives didn’t respond to Guardian interview requests by press time.
Mitchell said it’s not nearly as bad in San Francisco as it is in Chicago, New York City, New Orleans, and other iconic US cities whose commercial spaces have been flooded with chains since the recession began.
“It’s nothing compared to the no-holds-barred stuff going on in New York City right now,” Mitchell said. “Walking down Broadway now is like a repeating loop of the stores you just saw further up the street.”
It isn’t that these cities are actively courting the national chains in most cases. It’s just that in the absence of strong local controls, developers and large commercial landlords just prefer to deal with chains, for a variety of reasons.
“If you’re just going with the flow of what developers are doing,” she said, “you always end up with national chains.”
And that’s what San Francisco has started to do.
MALLS LIKE CHAINS
Stephen Cornell, the owner of Brownie’s Hardware and a board member of the nonprofit advocacy group Small Business California, said chains have a huge competitive advantage over local businesses even before either one opens their doors.
“In general, landlords tend to like chains more,” said Cornell, whose business has struggled against Lowe’s and other corporate competitors. “The landlord always worries: is this guy going to make it and do they have the funds to back it up?”
Big corporate chains have lawyers and accountants on staff, and professional systems established for everything from buying goods to opening new stores, whereas most local entrepreneurs are essentially figuring things out as they go along.
“They’re very good at selling themselves,” Cornell said. “They’re going to manipulate the system perfectly, whether it’s the city and its codes or dealing with neighborhood merchants.”
And for large malls, Cornell said the problem is even worse. Brokers that fill malls have standing relationships with the national chains — most of which are publicly traded corporations seeking to constantly expand and gain market share — and no incentive to seek out or take a chance on local entrepreneurs.
“Chains have a lot of advantages,” Cornell said.
Mitchell said there are two main ways in which malls favor national chains over local businesses. In addition to the relationship between mall brokers and national chains, malls are often built with financing from financial institutions that require certain repayment guarantees.
“What they want to see are credit-worthy clients signed onto those places, and that means national chains with a credit rating from Standard & Poors,” Mitchell said, noting how that “automatically locks out” most local businesses.
Cornell also noted that national chains have already figured out how to maximize their efficiency, which keeps their costs down even though that often comes in the form of fewer employees with lower pay — and less reliance on local suppliers, accountants, attorneys, and other professionals — which ends up hurting the local economy. In fact, big chains suck money out of the city and back to corporate headquarters.
“All those people are making money and spending money here, so you have to look at the full circle,” Cornell said.
Mitchell said there are often simple solutions to the problem. For example, she said that city officials in Austin, Texas recently required the developer of a large shopping mall to set aside a certain percentage of the units for locally owned businesses.
So rather than hiring a national broker to find tenants, the developer hired a local broker to contact successful independent businesses in the area who might be interested in expanding, and the project ended up greatly exceeding the city’s minimum requirements.
Mechanisms like that, or like the formula retail controls pioneered in San Francisco, give her some hope. But she said, “Whether the counter-trends will be enough to counter the dominant trend, I don’t know.”
PUBLIC SUBSIDIES
The increased malling of San Francisco isn’t simply the result of official neglect. Often, the city’s policies and resources are actively encouraging the influx of chain stores. A prime example is the massive redevelopment project on Hunters Point and Candlestick Point that city voters approved in 2008 after mega-developer Lennar and most San Francisco political officials pushed the project with a well-funded political campaign.
“If you’re selling the land to Lennar for a dollar, and then building all the automobile infrastructure for people to get there, then that’s a massive public subsidy,” Radulovich said of the big-box mall being built on what was city-owned land on Candlestick Point.
That public subsidy creates a cycle that makes San Francisco less intimate and livable. Creating commercial spaces on the city’s edge encourages more people to drive on congested regional roadways. These spaces are filled with national chain stores that have a direct negative impact on small, locally owned stores in neighborhood commercial districts all over the city, causing some of these businesses to fail, meaning local residents will need to travel further for the goods they once bought down the street.
“Those neighborhoods are going to be less walkable as a result,” Radulovich said, noting how the trend contradicts the lip service that just about every local politician gives to supporting local businesses in neighborhood corridors. “There’s a certain schizophrenia to San Francisco’s economic development strategy.”
Sup. Eric Mar has been working with Jobs with Justice San Francisco and other groups to tweak city policies that have allowed the chains to proliferate. Last year, Mar held high-profile hearings in City Hall on how national chains impact local businesses, which pointed to the need for additional protections (see “Battling big box,” Jan. 3).
This year, he’s working on rolling out a series of legislative initiatives designed to level the playing field between local interests and those of Wall Street and the national chains it champions.
Last month, the Board of Supervisors approved Mar’s legislation to add banks to the city’s formula retail controls, a reaction to Chase Bank and other national banks snapping up vacant stores in neighborhood commercial corridors such as Divisadero Street.
Now he’s working on legislation that would mandate minimum labor and community benefit standards for chain stores — including grocery outlets such as Fresh & Easy — and study how chains affect San Francisco’s overall economy.
“There should be good neighbor policies when they come into a neighborhood,” Mar said. “Some neighborhoods are so distressed they may want a big box grocery story coming in, but we need to try to mitigate its negative impacts.”
One of his partners in that effort is his brother, Gordon Mar of Jobs with Justice, who argues the city needs to have a clearer picture of how national chains impact local communities.
“We’ve definitely seen an increase in corporate chain stores coming into San Francisco in the last year, and nobody has really been tracking it,” he said.
While the Planning Department’s quarterly pipeline report shows that applications for retail outlets has held steady at about 3 million square feet on the way in recent years, it doesn’t break out how much of that is national chains — let alone how that impacts the city’s economy and small business sector.
The city’s Legislative Analyst is now studying the matter and scheduled to release a report later this summer, which Gordon Mar said will be helpful in countering the narrow “jobs” rhetoric that now dominates City Hall.
“They are exploiting the economic recession by saying they’re bringing much needed jobs into the city and serving low-income residents,” he said. “But when you bring out the facts about the impact of these low-road retail stores on neighborhoods and small businesses, there is a net loss of jobs and a lowering of labor standards.”
VALUING MALLS
Yet the fate of those controls is uncertain at best, particularly in a tough economic environment in which the city needs revenue, people are desperate for jobs, and many residents have seen their buying power stagnate, making the cheap goods offered by Target and Walmart more attractive.
“It’s complicated stuff,” Michael O’Connor, a local entrepreneur and former member of the Small Business Commission who favors formula retail controls, told us. “Stores like Target do appeal to lower income families…The progressive agenda needs to understand that working-class families need somewhere to shop.”
O’Connor acknowledges how small businesses like those he owns, including a clothing store, often can’t compete with national chains who buy cheap goods in bulk. So he said he favors protections in some neighborhoods while allowing chains in others, telling us, “I don’t have a problem with the Target going into the Metreon.”
That argument also held sway with city officials when they considered approving the CityPlace project two years ago, which was presented as a mall filled with “value-based” stores that would be affordable to median income San Franciscans.
“At the time, the decision was around whether a value-based retail operation made sense in that location, and the answer was an emphatic ‘yes,'” Barbary Coast Consulting founder Alex Clemens, who represented the project, told us.
On a national or global level, there are good arguments against reliance on national chains selling cheap imported goods, which has created a huge trade deficit between the US and countries such as China that costs American jobs — ironically, the very things that some use as arguments for approving chain stores.
“The recession has created a climate of desperation where cities are more easily swayed by the jobs argument,” Mitchell said, noting the falsity of those arguments by pointing to studies showing that the arrival of chain stores in cities usually creates a net loss in employment. Finally, supporters of chain stores say the cash-strapped city needs the property and sales tax revenue “Because they say they’ll produce a lot sales tax revenue, they’re going to get away with all kinds of shit,” Cornell said, arguing that shouldn’t justify city policies that favor big corporations, such as tax breaks and publicly financed infrastructure. “I certainly don’t think [city officials] should be giving them any advantages.” There are few simple solutions to the complex and interconnected problems that result from the malling of San Francisco and other cities. It’s really a question of balance — and the answer of whether San Francisco can regain its balance has yet to be answered. “Given the mayor’s approach to economic development, it’s inevitable that we’ll have more coming into the city,” Sup. Mar said. “But the ’50s car culture, and the model of malls that came in the ’60s, don’t build communities or strong neighborhoods.”
What if the mayor lied?
EDITORIAL The case Mayor Ed Lee is presenting to the Ethics Commission is no longer about whether Sheriff Ross Mirkarmi injured his wife, Eliana Lopez, or whether his actions were atrocious and unacceptable. Those facts are not in dispute — although Mirkarimi pled guilty to a less-serious misdemeanor, he has not denied that he grabbed Lopez’s arm and squeezed hard enough to leave a bruise. Even his strongest defenders aren’t condoning that or dismissing the seriousness of this incident of domestic violence.
Much of the evidence Lee has presented goes to different issues — for example, the allegation (so far, without any proof) that Mirkarimi sought to dissuade witnesses from coming forward .
And formally, the question Lee is raising is a larger one: Did Mirkarimi’s action rise to the level of official misconduct — or, in the words of Lee’s testimony, did his conduct “fall below the standard of decency, good faith, and right action that is impliedly required of all public officials?”
Now Lee is facing that same question. It’s something the commission needs to address — not only because it goes to the heart of this particular case but because the public has a right to know if the mayor of San Francisco lied under oath on the witness stand.
In fact, now that two credible witnesses — one a city commissioner, the other a former supervisor — have made public statements that indicate Lee was dishonest in his testimony, the District Attorney’s Office should open an investigation. Perjury is a felony crime — and while it’s hard to prove, there are critical facts that are missing. The only witnesses who have direct (non hearsay) corroboration have been unwilling to discuss the matter in detail, and only the DA and Ethics have the ability to issue subpoenas and ask them the key questions under oath.
Lee testified that he hadn’t discussed the case or his deliberations over filing charges with any member of the Board of Supervisors. But Building Inspection Commission member Debra Walker told reporters that her friend and ally, Sup. Christina Olague, had recounted having a conversation with the mayor on that topic right before the charges were filed. Olague denies that, but has declined further comment.
Then Lee testified that he never offered, or authorized anyone in his office to offer, a job to Mirkarimi in exchange for his resignation. Former Sup. Aaron Peskin says Lee ally Walter Wong approached him and asked him to convey exactly such an offer to the sheriff on behalf of the mayor. Peskin recalls the exact date, time and place of his meeting with Wong, and he mentioned the offer to Guardian reporters long before this trial began. Wong has declined to speak to reporters.
So at the very least, there are grounds for the commission members to allow Mirkarimi’s lawyers to question Olague and Wong — and if either of them contradicts the mayor’s sworn statement, it would raise serious doubts about Lee’s credibility. And that’s central to the official misconduct case: Mirkarimi’s lawyers argue that the sheriff was never given due process and that the mayor never tried to learn Mirkarimi’s side of the story. The mayor says Mirkarimi refused to tell that story. The commission vote could hinge on that dispute — and if Lee lied about other parts of his testimony, it would be fair to question everything he said. And if Lee can’t hold himself to the standards of decency and good faith, the voters need to know that.
And whatever the outcome, it’s clearly time for the supervisors to look at the City Charter section on official misconduct. Because the current law allows the mayor to suspend and charge any elected official in the city, entirely on his or her own discretion — but there’s no way (short of a recall election) to charge, impeach, suspend or remove the mayor. It’s an imbalance that gives the chief executive extraordinary powers with little accountability. That’s not good government.
Hearing could work out flaws in Lee’s housing trust fund proposal
Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed Housing Trust Fund charter amendment — which he proposed during his inaugural address in January — will be up for review before the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee tomorrow (Wed/11) in the hopes of making its way onto the November ballot. The meeting is at 1:30pm in City Hall Room 263.
The measure, which would guarantee money for affordable housing for the next 30 years, was drafted primarily by the Council of Community Housing Organization (CCHO) and the Mayor’s Office, but included input from housing developers, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), and some supervisors.
Supporters intend the housing trust fund to provide a consistent stream of funding that guarantees $1.2 billion over a 30-year period for affordable housing. Each year the fund would take in between $20 million and $50 million. In addition to building new housing, it would create a $15 million homebuyers assistance program, doubling the current funds, and a $15 million home stabilization fund to help homeowners facing foreclosure. But Lee hasn’t convinced his business community allies to adequately fund the measure and there are doubts about its revenue projections.
Sup. John Avalos is cosponsoring the measure and helped draft some content, but he isn’t ready to vote for it yet. He is concerned with some of the big concessions the measure grants to market-rate developers, which could end up actually hurting existing affordable housing programs.
“I am watching closely,” Avalos said, “to make sure we don’t give too much away.”
Here are the three concessions: 1) High-rise residential developers would be allowed to pay inclusionary housing fees for affordable housing after construction instead up upfront. 2) Low to mid-rise developers would have the percentage of onsite affordable housing unit requirements lowered from 15 percent to 12 percent. 3) Developers of small five-to-nine-unit buildings would no longer have the inclusionary housing fee or the onsite affordable housing requirement.
The housing trust gets its funding by trying recapture the disbanded Redevelopment Agency’s bond repayments and hotel tax funds, but Fernando Marti of CCHO doesn’t believe that would capture nearly as much as Lee hopes. Marti estimates that the money would eventually lead to $13 million a year, which is a far cry from the previous $50 million needed.
Marti said the rest of the funding he hopes will come from the two competing business tax reform measures developed by Lee and Avalos, although Avalos has make clear that the $40 million his measure would raise is intended for the General Fund to maintain city services that have been cut in recent years. Lee’s measure would generate $13 million that he would earmark for the housing trust fund.
Marti said if the housing trust is approved by voters but the business tax reform fails, Lee has inserted language into the measure that would allow him to unilaterally abolish the housing trust fund. Marti said the CCHO doesn’t want the money for the housing trust to come out of the cash-strapped general fund.
Avalos is skeptical of Lee’s approach, telling us, “That doesn’t sound like anything I’d vote for.”
If Mayor Lee lied
What’s going to happen to Mayor Ed Lee?
That’s the big question after a series of news reports have suggested that the mayor was less-than truthful under oath in his statements to the Ethics Commission. If he actually lied on the stand, that would be considered perjury, which is a felony.
But the reality is that the mayor’s not going to jail. First of all the District Attorney’s Office would have to investigate and file charges — and does anyone really think this DA, George Gascon, is going to subpoena Walter Wong and demand that he talk under oath about his interactions with Lee (who is a close friend)? I think Gascon ought to do it; there’s clear evidence that a crime may have been committed, and the public has a right to know about it, but I suspect that will never happen.
And even if the DA pushed, and Wong told the truth, and the truth contradicted the mayor, would a jury believe Wong over Lee?
It’s really hard to prove perjury. Maybe one of Lee’s staffers talked to Wong and the mayor wasn’t directly involved. Maybe the recollections of the two men have faded in the past few months. Maybe the mayor’s defense would be able to throw up enough chaff that nobody in the courtroom could figure it out.
So it’s not going to be about a criminal case against the mayor. But the revelations of what’s gone down here go far beyond any possible perjury indictment.
For starters, Ross Mirkarimi’s lawyers have every right and responsibility to demand that the Ethics Commission members hear from Debra Walker, Walter Wong, and — I would argue — every member of the Board of Supervisors. Here’s why:
The crux of Mirkarimi’s legal case at Ethics is that the mayor had no grounds to remove him from office — and that Lee never gave Mirkarimi due process or a chance to explain himself. The way the suspended sheriff tells it, the mayor never asked for an explanation of what happened that New Year’s Eve, never tried to talk to Eliana Lopez — never, in short, did any investigation into the incident before deciding the file misconduct charges (except for talking to Ivory Madison).
The way the mayor tells it, Mirkarimi refused to provide an explanation.
That distinction is critical, and the only basis for deciding what happened is for the judges — the commissioners — to use their best information and judgment about who’s telling the truth.
In other words, the mayor’s credibility is central to the entire case.
So if there’s any evidence that Lee lied about his discussions with Walter Wong or about whether he talked to any supervisors, then the commissioners would have the responsibility to consider that when evaluating the rest of his testimony. If you can’t believe everything he said, can you believe anything he said?
Some commissioners may argue that it’s not their business to determine if the mayor perjured himself, and on one level, that’s true — Ed Lee isn’t on trial here. But his credibility either makes or breaks the case. So the panel needs to hear from witnesses who can address that question.
Then there’s the much larger, more disturbing possibility that the mayor sought to influence (or might have been in a position to influence) members of the Board of Supervisors, who will be sitting as the final judges of Mirkarimi’s fate.
There’s a reason that the City Attorney’s Office has advised board members not to talk about the case. They’re sitting in a judicial role, and they can’t legally fulfill that obligation if there’s any indication they’ve already made up their minds. And if the mayor has talked to any of them — and there’s any indication at all that anything he said could be seen as seeking to influence their votes — well, in a courtroom you’d call that jury tampering. It’s a little different in a political forum, but still: Any supervisor who had a conversation with the mayor will be under pressure to recuse himself or herself — and every recusal helps Mirkarimi.
It doesn’t matter how many supervisors are in the room, in the country, recused or otherwise unable to vote — the mayor still needs nine to remove the sheriff. Three recusals and the whole thing collapses.
That’s why all of this is so fascinating and potentially explosive.
Oh,and by the way: When Lee set this process in motion, he should have known that he’d be testifying under oath and that anything he said or did might come out. You’d think he’d have been a little better prepared.
So what’s going to happen to Ed Lee? Legally, nothing. But he may have done serious damage to his own case.
Perjury allegations against Lee gain more support
San Francisco Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin has confirmed his role in extending a city job offer from Mayor Ed Lee to Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi if Mirkarimi had been willing to resign in March, bolstering allegations that Lee may have committed perjury when testifying under oath before the Ethics Commission on Friday.
But even as more media outlets report the possible perjury (a story we broke first here), which is further complicating the already complicated official misconduct proceedings that Lee brought against Mirkarimi, the Mayor’s Office and key Lee allies have refused to comment on the perjury allegations or the strange circumstances surrounding the alleged bomb threat that temporarily got Lee off the hot seat.
As we reported in this week’s Guardian, Building Inspection Commissioner Debra Walker said Lee was lying when he said that he hadn’t spoken with any members of the Board of Supervisors before charging Mirkarimi with official misconduct. Walker said Sup. Christina Olague told her she had spoken with Lee about the matter, which Olague now denies.
Lee also responded “absolutely not” when asked by Mirkarimi attorney Shephard Kopp whether he authorized Peskin or development consultant Walter Wong, a close Lee ally, “to convey to Sheriff Mirkarimi if he would stop down, you’d get him another job.”
At press time for this week’s article, Peskin was backpacking in the Sierras and couldn’t be reached, but he has now confirmed to the Guardian that he met with Wong at 11:30am on March 19 – just hours before Lee met with Mirkarimi to say he would be removed from office unless he resigned – at Cafe Trieste.
In that meeting, Peskin said Wong asked him to convey to Mirkarimi an offer from the mayor of a job with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission or the Airport Commission if Mirkarimi would voluntarily resign. Asked whether Wong indicated that he had discussed the offer with the mayor, Peskin told us, “He certainly left me with that impression.”
Mirkarimi refused to accept the offer, insisting on fighting to keep his job, which was one factor in Peskin’s subsequent public statement calling for Mirkarimi to resign. “There were a lot of things that factored into that,” Peskin said of his call for Mirkarimi to step down, although he wouldn’t discuss other factors on the record.
Efforts by both the Guardian and the Examiner to reach Wong have been unsuccessful, and messages to the Mayor’s Press Office on this and related issues also haven’t been answered. But just as Walker has offered to do, Peskin said he’s willing to testify under oath if asked.
“I am prepared, if subpoenaed, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” Peskin told us.
Lee hasn’t had any public events or made any public comments on the matter since the scandal broke on Friday. The other unanswered mystery is why Lee was whisked from the hearing room just 15 minutes into his testimony, shortly after making the statements that Walker alleges amounted to perjury.
As we reported, neither the SFPD nor the Sheriff’s Department ordered the room evacuated, meaning that decision must have been made by someone within the Mayor’s Office. Press Secretary Christine Falvey’s last statement to the Guardian, on July 2, said, “Again, the mayor’s office did not recess the meeting. I still have to refer you to the Police Department which maintains Mayor Lee’s security or the Ethics Commission about the decision to recess the meeting for (I believe) about 90 minutes.”
Yet neither body seems to know who made the call, and follow-up questions asking the Mayor’s Office to disclose any information they have about that decision have gone unanswered. District Attorney George Gascon — whose office would need to pursue the perjury allegations considering the city’s official misconduct rules don’t apply to the mayor — also didn’t return our call asking generally how allegations of this fashion should be handled.
The official misconduct proceeding continue in front of the Ethics Commission on July 18 and 19 when Mirkarimi’s wife, Eliana Lopez, is scheduled to testify. But that has also been complicated by the Mayor’s Office’s refusal to authorize payment for a plane ticket for Lopez to return from her native Venezuela to testify. Mirkarimi and his legal team say they can’t afford to pay for that plane ticket after Lee suspended Mirkarimi without pay.
RCV repeal effort gets tricky with three alternatives
The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote on July 10 whether to place a controversial charter amendment on November’s ballot that would largely repeal San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system, but the outcome of that effort has become murky with the introduction of two competing alternatives.
The original charter amendment, sponsored by Sup. Mark Farrell, would eliminate RCV for all citywide elected officials, instead holding a primary in September and runoff in November. The board rejected an earlier effort by Farrell to repeal RCV, but Farrell came back with a modified measure that was co-sponsored by Sup. Christina Olague, much to the dismay of her progressive supporters, particularly Steven Hill, the father of RCV in San Francisco.
Hill said runoff elections in September, a month notorious for having low-voter turnout, will invariably favor the conservatives who always vote in high numbers. He said that RCV is a fairer representation of what voters want and a November election allows for more voters to be heard.
After widespread criticism from her progressive constituents, Olague publicly turned away from the measure, telling Hill and board members she would remove her name from it. Yet instead of removing her name, in a surprise move she proposed her own amendment to the charter, which only angered progressives more.
“Progressives are pretty furious with Christina right now because she is working with conservatives and went back on her word,” Hill said.
Olague’s proposal would eliminate RCV for only mayoral elections, with the primary still in September, even though she previously told the Guardian that she opposes having an election in September. Olague didn’t respond to email inquiries from the Guardian, but she has maintained in previous interviews that she is only trying to create a compromise between opposing parties on the board.
It’s unclear whether Farrell and the other center-right sponsors of his measure might back Olague’s alternative, but her colleagues who support RCV have put forward an alternative of their own. Board President David Chiu introduced another proposal amending Farrell’s measure that keeps RCV intact—more or less.
Although Chiu told the Guardian he thought the current RCV method has worked well for the city so far and that most people seem to understand how to use the system, he offered the amendment to address certain issues which have arisen because of Farrell’s measure and Olague’s amendment.
“My amendment addresses the concerns that have been raised in an appropriately tailored way,” Chiu told us.
Chiu’s proposal incorporates run-off elections for the top mayor candidates, but only after rank choice voting has narrowed the field to two candidates. It supports elections in November with the mayoral runoff in December.
However, this still allows for a second election, which RCV advocates think is a costly and unnecessary alternative that RCV was designed to eliminate – an imperative they see as more important than ever given court rulings that now allow unlimited spending by wealthy individuals and corporations to influence elections.
Although Hill isn’t happy with any repeal of the current voting methods, he said he reluctantly supports Chiu’s amendment.
“These are poorly made proposals,” Hill said. “It’s like being at the factory and watching sausage getting made.”
Hill fears that if Olague’s co-sponsorship of Farrell’s charter amendment or her own proposed amendment are approved by the board and allowed on the ballot in November that conservative money and power would most likely influence the election enough to pass the RCV repeal.