Board of Supervisors

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

Gray Davis was a pretty poor governor. He ran as a moderate who could manage the state, but utterly failed to deal with the energy crisis of 2000-01, leaving rolling blackouts and skyrocketing electricity bills as his legacy. He cost the state billions. He presided over a legislative budget stalemate. He was a captive of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. He gave the Democratic Party a bad name.

And for all that, nothing he did was close to what his replacement, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Republicans in Sacramento are doing today.

Under Gov. Davis, California reduced the size of public school classes, mandating that K-4 teachers have no more than 20 students. That has made a huge difference in the classrooms, and the results show it. But it’s going to be almost impossible for most school districts to stick to that target now, because the schools are getting huge budget cuts.

So are all the other state services, and aid to counties, which means more layoffs and cuts at the local level. And still, the state is $8 billion more in the hole.

Democrats in the Legislature have tried everything they could think of. They negotiated with the Republicans, who have a veto over the budget because of the crazy two-thirds rule. They came up with a plan that fit what Schwarzenegger had been asking for, and he still refused to accept it. And now the Democratic leadership is forced to try to sell a series of state propositions that nobody likes, that will put California in worst financial straights, and that will have as bad a long-term impact on the state as Proposition 13.

Propositions 1A-1F are a terrible deal, the result of GOP blackmail and extortion — and they won’t even solve the problem. This governor is going to leave the state in the worse shape it’s been since the Great Depression. Almost makes you long for the days of Gray Davis.

In 1967, at the height of the antiwar movement, when American cities were in political chaos, a young tenant organizer named John Ross ran for San Francisco supervisor as a radical out of the Mission advocating rent control and an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, among other things. But one of his opponents discovered that Ross was a convicted felon who served two years and six months in federal prison for refusing the draft, so they took his name off the ballot.

Now, 42 years later, Ross — the writer, poet, unrepentant radical, and longtime Guardian correspondent, may be getting some recognition from the city. Sup. John Avalos is going to introduce a resolution honoring Ross for his extensive literary and political contributions to San Francisco. The May 12 ceremony, at 3:30 in the Board of Supervisors chambers, will be followed by "poems under the dome" — a poetry reading at City Hall at 5:30. If you want to help out (or donate money — please) contact Diamond Dave Whitaker at 240-0286 or Avalos’ office at 554-6975. *

Send the solar project back to committee

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By Tim Redmond

We’re all in favor of buidling a solar-energy generating station on the Sunset reservoir. But the plan that’s coming before the Board of Supervisors today is deeply flawed. At best, it ought to be amended to ensure that the city winds up with the power plant after seven years at an affordable rate; at worst, it ought to be scrapped and the city should start over again, with the idea that this is and ought to be a public-power project, built and run by the city.

“I don’t understand how we can keep talking about public power while we give these resources over to private businesses,” Sup. David Campos told me. He’s right.

He and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi are trying to slow this thing down. Sup. John Avalos voted for it in the Budget Committee, but told me he’d consider sending it back for more discussion. I hope he does that; this thing isn’t ready for approval at this point, and the progressives on the board ought to stick together and make sure it’s a better contract.

Otherwise we’ll wind up with a private company controlling local energy resources, and Gavin Newsom trumpeting it as his latest environmental triumph.

Uncivil unions

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steve@sfbg.com

Who really cares about an appointment to the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District Board of Directors? There isn’t a delicate balance of power on the board or any major initiative at stake in this fairly obscure district. San Francisco certainly has more pressing issues and concerns.

Yet the Board of Supervisors’ April 14 vote to reject Larry Mazzola Jr. and select Dave Snyder for that board says more about San Francisco’s political dynamics, the state of the American labor movement, the psychological impact of the recession, how the city will grow, and the possibilities and pitfalls facing the board’s new progressive majority than any in recent memory.

It was a vote that meant nothing and everything at the same time, a complex and telling story of brinksmanship in which both sides of the progressive movement arguably lost. And it was a vote that came at a time when they need each other more than ever.

"It was a win for the Newsom-oriented elements of labor," Sup. Chris Daly, who helped spark the conflict, told the Guardian.

The bloc of six progressive supervisors who shot down Mazzola — who helps run the powerful plumbers union and was the San Francisco Labor Council’s unwavering choice for an appointment that has traditionally been labor’s seat on the bridge board — is the same bloc the unions helped elected last year. It is also the same bloc that has been fighting the hardest to minimize budget-related layoffs.

The vote says a tremendous amount about the crucial alliance between progressives and labor, how that delicate partnership formed, and what the future holds.

PLUMBERS VS. PROGRESSIVES


The Mazzola name carries a lot of weight in San Francisco labor circles. The Web site for the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry Local 38 (UA 38) features a photo of U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis standing between Larry Mazzola Sr. and Larry Mazzola Jr., the father and son team that runs the union.

But the Mazzolas and their union are also controversial. As the Guardian has reported ("Plumbers gone wild," 2/1/06), the union owns a large share of the Konocti Harbor Resort (which a lawsuit by the Department of Labor said was a misuse of the union’s pension funds) and owns the Civic Center Hotel, which tenants and city officials say has been willfully neglected by a union suspected of wanting to bulldoze and develop the site. The plumbers and other members of the building trades have also fought with progressives over development issues and generally back moderate-to-conservative candidates.

Sup. Chris Daly and several progressive groups locked horns with the union over the hotel a few years ago, and Mazzola Sr. responded by opposing Daly’s 2006 reelection campaign, targeting him with nasty mailers and donating office space to Daly’s opponent, Rob Black. Yet more progressive unions like Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which represents city employees, convinced the Labor Council to back Daly and union support helped Daly win.

So when Mazzola Jr. came before Daly’s Rules Committee last month, the supervisor unloaded on him, and Mazzola gave as good as he got, telling Daly he didn’t want his support and defiantly telling the committee he didn’t know much about the bridge district, or its issues, but he expected the job anyway. Those on all sides of the issue agree it was a disaster.

"He was just patently unqualified for the position," Daly told the Guardian. Mazzola tells us his experience with labor contracts would be an asset for the position, but he admits the committee meeting didn’t go well. "I was caught off-guard and put in a defensive mode that altered my planned presentation," Mazzola told us.

Whatever the case, Sup. David Campos joined Daly in keeping the Mazzola nomination stuck in committee while the progressive supervisors privately asked labor leaders to offer another choice. "We said, ‘Give us anyone else as long as they can intelligently talk about transportation issues and the bridge district," Daly said.

But labor dug in. "It seemed as though the board was trying to dictate to labor what labor should do," Michael Theriault, who heads the San Francisco Building and Construction Trade Council. And the other unions decided to back the trades, for a number of complicated reasons.

"The reason we supported Larry Mazzola is because this was important to the plumbers union," said Mike Casey, president of the Labor Council and head of Unite Here (which includes the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union). "To the extent we can support the trades, we want to."

So when the four most conservative members of the Board of Supervisors used a parliamentary trick to call the Mazzola nomination up to the full board on April 14, the stage was set for the standoff.

THE STATE OF LABOR


Labor is truly a house divided, despite its universal interest in minimizing recession-related layoffs and taking advantage of a new Congress and White House that is generally supportive of labor’s holy grail: the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it far easier to form unions.

The April 25 founding convention of National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) in San Francisco caps a years-long battle between Sal Rosselli’s United Healthcare Workers (UHW) and their SEIU masters (see "Union showdown," 1/28/09). Rosselli and many others say SEIU under Andy Stern has become undemocratic and has climbed in bed with corporate America, while SEIU says getting bigger has made the union better able to advocate for workers. Both accuse the other of being power-hungry and not fighting fair.

"Inside SEIU, we’ve been struggling for four years basically on a difference of ideology and vision of what the labor movement is," Rosselli told us. David Regan, who SEIU named as a UHW trustee after ousting Rosselli, told us the union divisions have been overstated by the media. "Everyone is together in pushing the Employee Free Choice Act," he said, glossing over the fact that the legislation is in trouble and recently lost the support of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Nationally, SEIU has been at war with all of the most progressive unions. The union recently made peace with the California Nurses Association after a particularly nasty struggle that involves many of the same dynamics as SEIU vs. NUHW, including accusations by CNA that SEIU was a barrier to achieving single-payer healthcare and was illegally meddling in its internal affairs.

SEIU is also accused of breaking up Unite Here, which fought the most high-profile labor battle here since Newsom became mayor in its contract fight with the big hotel chains. Last month, a large faction from the old Unite affiliated with SEIU, whose officials say they were just helping out after the end of what all knew was a bad marriage. "This is an example of a merger that didn’t take," SEIU spokesperson Michelle Ringuette told us. But the building trades have backed Unite Here in its fight against Sterns’ SEIU. As Casey told us, "We’re in a major fight over our right to exist. There’s no other way to characterize it."

Yet in San Francisco, SEIU plays a different role. Local 1021 is the advocate for the little guy, representing front-line city workers who deliver social and public health services. It is the union facing the deepest layoffs in the coming city budget fight and is still negotiating contract givebacks with the Mayor’s Office. The union’s biggest allies in City Hall are the exact same six supervisors who voted against Mazzola.

So why this standoff? SEIU, Unite Here, and other progressive unions share the Labor Council with the building trades, which are traditionally more conservative and friendly with downtown and, these days, starting to really get desperate for work. "We have thousands of guys on the verge of losing their homes and families," Theriault said. "We are desperate."

That was one reason the San Francisco Labor Council last year cut a deal with Lennar Corporation to back Proposition G, which lets Lennar develop more than 10,000 homes in the southeast sector of the city. Daly, who wanted firmer guarantees of more affordable housing, was livid over the deal and has been at odds with the council ever since. But Daly said labor’s undercutting of progressives goes back even further and includes the early reelection endorsement Rosselli’s UHW gave Newsom in 2007, which helped keep big-name local progressives out of the race.

Tenants groups, affordable housing advocates, and alternative transportation supporters form the backbone of progressive politics, but on development projects, they often clash with the trade unionists who just want work. And labor expects support from the progressive supervisors. As Mazzola pointed out, "It was labor that got most of those guys elected."

But labor has its own fights on the horizon. SEIU fears deep city job cuts if the Mayor’s Office can’t be persuaded to start supporting new revenue measures. NUHW is getting challenged by SEIU for every member the try to sign up. And Unite Here’s hotel contracts start expiring in six months, reopening its battle with downtown hotel managers.

"We’re going to be in a real war with some of those employers," Casey said. Yet he said its actually good time for the otherwise distracting fights with SEIU over how nice to play with big corporations. "I embrace this fight because I think this is exactly the struggle we need to have in the labor movement."

But the Mazzola fight was one that neither side relished.

TO THE BRINK


The Board of Supervisors chambers was filled with union members flying their colors on April 14, but the progressive supervisors were just as unified, voting 6-5 to reject Mazzola. All that was left was the political posturing, the decision of what to do next, and the fallout.

"I am disappointed and surprised by the board’s action," Sup. Sean Elsbernd (who voted for Mazzola and publicly called it "a sin" to deny him) told us, refusing to confirm the private joy over the outcome that many sources say he has expressed. "What shocked me is a majority of the board turned their back on labor."

Daly admits that the standoff hurt progressives. "I’m not sure who came up with it, but it’s certainly true that the Sean Elsbernds of the world were able to take full advantage of the situation to drive a wedge between unions and progressives," Daly said.

Yet Daly noted how ridiculous is was for Sups. Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier to be publicly professing such fealty to labor while opposing revenue measures that would minimize layoffs. "At the same time the plumbers were attacking me, I was sponsoring paid sick days," Daly said. "It’s the six members of the board that are the most pro-labor who voted against Larry Mazzola."

Politically, Elsbernd says the progressives misplaced their hand. "I think the easy middle ground for them was to reject Mazzola and send it back to committee," Elsbernd said. Others echoed that point. Instead, supervisors appointed Synder, a widely acclaimed transportation expert who created the modern San Francisco Bicycle Coalition then started Transportation for a Livable City (now Livable City) before becoming the first transportation policy director for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR).

"I don’t like how that went down, and I’m not happy with the inability of the board and labor to come to an agreement," Snyder told us. "I was stuck in the middle. I wish they had sent someone the board could have agreed to."

After the vote, Snyder went back to the SPUR office and resigned. SPUR director Gabriel Metcalf admits that labor leaders lobbied him to pressure Snyder to withdraw his name, and that he asked Snyder to do so. But Metcalf said he didn’t want to lose Snyder, whose vast knowledge of transportation issues as been a real asset to SPUR. "It was his choice and not my preference."

"This issue is not why I left SPUR, but it was the precipitating event," said Snyder, whose progressive values have occasionally differed from SPUR’s stands. "My sense of social justice has more to do with class issues than I was able to pursue at SPUR."

In fact, the clashes between progressives and developers (who are often backed by the trade unions) often revolve around how much affordable housing and community benefits will be required with each project approval. Snyder said the defining question is, "How do we accommodate development in San Francisco and maintain progressive values in a capitalist economy?"

He didn’t answer that question, but it is one the building trades also understand. Theriault said he supports holding developers to high standards, even when progressives have block certain projects to get them. "I’m okay with that as long as I see the endgame," Theriault said.

He expects the progressive board to listen to labor more than Daly or Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin, who Theriault said helped shore up the progressive opposition to Mazzola (which Peskin denies). "With the exception of Daly, the relationships are reparable. But they have to show some independence from Daly and Peskin," Theriault said. "The real fear for me is what comes next."

Theriault was referring to things like new historic preservation standards that supervisors will soon consider, as well as the string of big development projects coming forward this year. And for progressives, they hope their efforts to save city jobs will be followed by labor support for progressive candidates for the Board of Supervisors (such as Debra Walker and Rafael Mandelman) in next year’s election.

"The one thing I know about labor is, we’ve been screwed by politicians on the left and the right," Casey said. "Are we angry about this and disappointed? Yes. But does that mean the alliance between labor and progressives is dead? No. We’re going to work through this stuff, talk, take deep breaths, and move forward."

NUHW’s founding convention takes place April 25 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Everett Middle School, 450 Church St., San Francisco.

Behind the Democratic Party lunch picket

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Chris Daly amid the picketers. Photo: Luke Thomas, Fog City Journal
By Rebecca Bowe

Imagine it’s a sweltering day, and you’re on a crowded sidewalk in a dark suit surrounded by about 200 tough, angry men who are booing you in unison, clamoring for your resignation, and yelling inches away from your face as you pass by. Do you try to dodge the swarm and duck into the building you’re headed to? Not if you’re Supervisor Chris Daly.

This afternoon, when Daly showed up downtown for the San Francisco Democratic Party Unity Luncheon at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, a crowd of building-trades union members greeted him with shouts and jeers. With cameramen shadowing his every move, Daly paraded up and down the line, seeming almost as if he enjoyed soaking in all the negative attention, getting into heated exchanges with some of the protesters and shaking hands with others. At one point, when the tradesmen started chanting, “What do we want? Jobs! When do we want them? Now!” Daly simply joined in with the chorus, punching his fist into the air for emphasis. Once people caught on, they stopped chanting and booed him all over again.

According to San Francisco Building and Construction Trade Council head Michael Theriault, the protest was over proposed changes to the city’s planning code that would strengthen historic preservation standards, which he said he feared would “freeze the entire city as a historic preservation district” and put a drain on already-scarce construction jobs. Much anger was directed toward the Historic Preservation Commission, a city body created by Prop J — a ballot measure authored by San Francisco Democratic Party chair and former Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, placed on the ballot by an 11-0 vote of the supervisors, and approved by nearly 60 percent of the voters last November.

But the underlying issue was the Board of Supervisors’ 6-5 vote on April 14 that rejected Larry Mazzola Jr. as board director of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District. Mazzola, who helps run the plumbers’ union, was the San Francisco Labor Council’s choice for the seat, but his appointment was blocked by the board’s six progressive members, who were more inclined to go with Dave Snyder — a transportation expert who was deemed more qualified. “The majority of the Board of Supervisors has taken up a war against labor, and they disrespect labor. It’s all about us losing our jobs and our health coverage,” Mazzola told the Guardian just before he turned and started chanting, “Daly, resign!” about three inches away from Daly’s face.
But in an interview for a Guardian story that will hit stands tomorrow, Daly said, “at the same time the plumbers were attacking me, I was sponsoring paid sick days. It’s the six members of the board that are the most pro-labor who voted against Larry Mazzola.”

Shades of green

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sarah@sfbg.com

When President Barack Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in mid-February, folks across the country were hopeful that the $787 billion stimulus package would help preserve and create decent jobs in their communities.

And in mid-March, when the Obama administration announced that Bay Area social justice activist Van Jones was joining the White House Council on Environmental Quality, advocates for green jobs took it as a sign that Obama shares Jones’ belief that we can fix our nation’s two biggest problems — excessive greenhouse gas production and not enough good jobs for the working class — by creating a green-collar economy.

Jones cofounded Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which opposes police abuse and promotes alternatives to incarceration, and founded Oakland’s Green for All, which aims to create green-collar jobs in low-income communities. He defines a green-collar job as "a family-supporting, career-track job that directly contributes to preserving or enhancing environmental quality."

"Think of them as the 2.0 version of old-fashioned blue-collar jobs, upgraded to respect the Earth and meet the environmental challenges of today," Jones wrote in his New York Times bestseller The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (HarperOne, 2008).

But is Jones’ definition codified into Obama’s Recovery Act? And in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom speaks incessantly about green jobs and regularly praises Jones, will the jobs we create be for the people who need them most? And how will that play out in a city where blacks, Latinos and Asians experience higher unemployment, poverty, and incarceration rates than whites, and building construction has stalled, pitting skilled union workers against training program graduates?

Last month, an alliance of community and worker organizations from San Francisco’s working class neighborhoods sent a letter to Newsom outlining concerns about the Recovery Act’s equity, job quality, and transparency requirements.

Antonio Diaz of PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights), Alex Tom of the Chinese Progressive Association, Steve Williams of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), and Terry Valen of the Filipino Community Center asked Newsom to ensure that ARRA funds would be used to create "green jobs and opportunities primarily for low-income people and people of color" and "high quality jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits, safe and healthy working conditions, and career ladders."

"We ask for your commitment to greater transparency and community input in shaping and monitoring the infusion of ARRA funds for San Francisco’s developing green collar economy," they wrote.

Two weeks later Newsom announced the launching of www.recoverysf.org, a Web site that seeks to track stimpack funds coming to San Francisco. Although the Web site shows that $150 million of the first quarter-billion of formula funding is headed toward infrastructure projects, it does not include estimates of the numbers of green jobs created.

Wade Crowfoot of the Mayor’s Office told the Guardian that the city is focused on ensuring that green jobs are created with these funds and that the City Attorney’s Office is figuring out what is "allowable" under Recovery Act’s guidelines.

On April 3, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget issued a 172-page memo outlining the Recovery Act’s policy goals. The goals included ensuring compliance with equal opportunity laws and principles, promoting local hiring, providing maximum practicable opportunities for small business and equal opportunities for disadvantaged business, encouraging sound labor practices, and engaging with community-based organizations.

"But will all cities include achievable, measurable requirements?" Crowfoot said. "I don’t think so, without federal guidelines."

This lack of specifics, Crowfoot says, has the City Attorney figuring out if San Francisco can include "first source" hiring requirements, in which hiring halls agree to interview graduates from local training programs first. If so, Crowfoot says, the city will seek to leverage existing funding for energy efficiency programs and conduct hire-locally campaigns in low-income communities.

But as Crowfoot notes, although we know that $1.5 million in ARRA funding is coming to San Francisco for weatherizing homes — helping to decrease the energy costs of low-income residents, reduce the city’s energy demands, and increase the number of people hired from the local community to do energy audits and retrofits — we still don’t know how many jobs will be created per project, which is the basic goal of economic stimulation.

"If we spend the dollars, say, on boiler replacement, that’s more equipment and less labor," Crowfoot said. "But the more you hire locally, the more those folks get experience, the more they’ll be well positioned to get jobs in the non-subsidized sector once the stimulus funds are gone."

Acknowledging the tension between laid-off union workers and graduates of apprentice training programs, Crowfoot said, "We are trying to figure out a balance, whereby the community is not shut out, but the unions’ needs are addressed. We want to be careful about how many jobs we say are going to be created. We don’t want to build hope in populations who already have a lot of mistrust in the government."

Michael Theriault, secretary and treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, told us that 25 percent of the region’s 16,000 building trades workers are out of work, compared to nearly full employment last year.

In the past, the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council provided CityBuild with instructors and took the lion’s share of the program graduates, Theriault explains. But under present conditions, the Council isn’t keen on another CityBuild cycle.

"I think they should work to sponsor another cycle, but the ball is also in the city’s court," Theriault said, noting that the ARRA-funded weatherization program could soon be offering prevailing union wages ($20 an hour for roofers, $40 to $50 for plumbers and electricians) that could help ease the tension. And then there’s the inconvenient truth that some union members view non-unionized solar panel installers as "scabs," creating another barrier to using green jobs to lift the underemployed.

Mayor Newsom has until June to secure and implement stimpack funding as part of upcoming local budget proposals, a timetable that has Green for All issuing a call for action to ensure that Recovery Act implementation creates green-collar jobs, ensures transparency and accountability, and supports pathways out of poverty.

"This may be the most important opportunity you’ll ever have to bring green-collar jobs to your community," Green For All wrote in a public statement. "But the planning process will be over in the blink of an eye, and your community could miss out. That’s why we’re calling on you to take action now."

Green for All field organizer Julian Mocine-McQueen is scheduled to sit down with Crowfoot this week in an effort to get Newsom to sign his group’s pledge. He said there’s been an expansion of the city’s lighting and refrigeration cooling retrofitting program, starting with small business owners who speak English as a second language. "It’s good," McQueen said. "But it’s not enough."

He believes green job success will depend, in part, on including hiring parameters. "A job in the city’s southeast sector may not pay $70,000 a year, but it would be a huge step toward creating a family-sustaining job," McQueen said, noting that the Obama administration has "to a certain extent" adopted Jones’ definition of green-collar jobs. "I’m not sure that they have codified it," McQueen said. "They have recommendations."

Asked to define green jobs during a recent media roundtable on projected budget deficits, Newsom talked about weatherization and sustainability and plans to expand the city’s training academies before handing the floor to the Office of Economic and Workforce Development’s Kyri McClellan, whom he described as his "green czarina."

McClellan, who describes herself as "the lead cat-herder" of Recovery Act funds, told reporters that San Francisco is expected to receive a quarter of a billion dollars in formula funds in the coming fiscal year, 95 percent of which have been allocated to "shovel-ready" projects that were already queued up under the city’s 10-year capital plan.

During a subsequent board committee hearing, McClellan shared job estimates — 30 jobs from the $11 million Department of Public Works street paving allocation and 250 jobs from the $18 million Housing Authority retrofitting allocation — that raised eyebrows.

McClellan said that OEWD is "moving as quickly as possible to take the dollars we’ve been allocated, get approval from the Board of Supervisors, and get programs up and running."

Observing that the city also has parallel funding for training programs such as CityBuild and a Green Academy, McClellan added that "no one is working harder than Rhonda Simmons." Reached by phone, OEWD’s Simmons said she has been working with San Francisco State University professor Raquel Pinderhughes to identify five job sectors that have "the capacity to grow the greatest number of green jobs."

These include solar installation, energy efficiency, landscaping/public greening, recycling, and green building. "In an economy like this, you have to be competitive," Simmons said. "And almost all the programs that come out of my shop are geared toward low-income to moderate-income folks."

Observing that OEWD is using a $238,000 federal earmark to seed a Green Academy and that will expand the GoSolarSF workforce incentive, compete for a $500,000 EPA brownfield cleanup training grant, and coordinate with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to develop "workforce incentive language" for biodiesel reuse program and energy efficiency projects, Simmons notes that it was the unions that helped create CityBuild in the first place, and the city is working to ease current concerns.

"It is our intent as OEWD designs the academy that any training programs must demonstrate that they train individuals for occupations with opportunity for upward mobility," Simmons said, after emerging from a meeting cochaired by Crowfoot and Pinderhughes to help community-based organizations understand green jobs and figure out how to link with the Green Jobs Corps that Pinderhughes set up in Oakland.

Eric Smith runs the Bayview-based Green Depot, a nonprofit that promotes biodiesel use in neighborhoods facing environmental justice issues and ran a $9,000-per intern pilot program with Global Exchange. He worries that administrative costs will chew up much of the stimulus money, citing SFPUC figures that the cost ratio for trainers to interns is about 3:1.

"There is a lot of concern in the Bayview that the money will end up going to consultants and administrators when we have people who are hungry and desperate to work," Smith said.

After two green jobs hearings, Sup. Eric Mar says that he and Sups. Sophie Maxwell and David Chiu have concluded "that unless the board takes action and gives clear guidelines and expectations, green collar job creation will be miniscule."
Noting that Oakland’s Green Job Corps and Richmond’s solar program seem years ahead of San Francisco’s efforts, Mar said his next step will be to talk with labor, environmental groups, businesses, and nonprofits to get a sense of an appropriate structure to prioritize the low-income communities as the main beneficiaries of green-collar job creation. "It’s pretty clear that the [Newsom] administration’s commitment to the numbers of jobs created is pretty small," Mar said. "The community is going to have to push for more."

No balance in two-year budget

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OPINION There’s no more important decision made by the Board of Supervisors than that of the city’s annual budget. Every year the board sets the city’s priorities by appropriating more than $6 billion. In good economic times, the board uses the budget process to set new policy directions for San Francisco. In bad times, the annual budget is the board’s only real chance to save vital services by making targeted appropriations while strategically reducing other parts of the budget.

That’s why a charter amendment to have only biannual budgeting is a bad idea.

The fact that a two-year budget is being pushed by the Newsom administration and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce should give progressives pause. Unfortunately, downtown forces have successfully used the worst budget year ever to woo some progressive budget stakeholders.

Their argument sounds good on its face. A multiyear budget would help smooth out the highs and lows, requiring City Hall to deal with pending fiscal emergencies sooner. It would also mean every other year off from having to spend all that energy turning people out to endless budget meetings and lobbying to save the programs we care about.

But the way a two-year budget would actually play out would mean that progressive budget stakeholders would have only half the opportunities for budget input through the generally more responsive Board of Supervisors. Meanwhile, the Mayor’s Office would be able to centralize more power without having to get annual approvals from the board. In other words, a two-year budget would make the Office of Mayor even more insulated from the public and members of the board on the decisions that affect us the most.

Additionally, two-year budgets would be unwieldy and inaccurate. Over the past nine years of out-year projections by the Controller’s Office, the average difference between the projected and actual surplus or deficit was nearly $250 million. For example, last year the controller estimated our 2009-10 budget deficit would be about $46 million. This year it’s pegged at $438 million. Of course, as our real revenue data comes in, this number will surely change again. Unfortunately, we won’t know how much revenue we received for this upcoming budget year until we are a month or two into the following fiscal year.

There are serious flaws with our annual budget process. In difficult years, the mayor has too much unchecked power to make mid-year budget changes. Earlier this year, Mayor Gavin Newsom enacted a $118 million budget package that included tens of millions in health and human service cuts and more than 400 layoffs without approval of the Board of Supervisors. Meanwhile, when a majority of board members voted to cut pork from the mayor’s budget, he was able to avert that cut with his veto pen.

Leaving the decision about millions of dollars’ worth of service cuts in the middle of the year turns the democratic budget process — with checks and balances between the mayor and board — on its head. Correcting this problem with the current budget process would surely be a worthwhile effort.

Meanwhile, we must stay focused on this year’s budget process to preserve as many of the vital services as we can. *

Sup. Chris Daly represents District 6. Ed Kinchley is a labor activist.

 

Law vs. Justice

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steve@sfbg.com

City Attorney Dennis Herrera relishes his reputation as a crusading reformer. For several years, his official Web site prominently displayed the phrase "Activism defines SF City Attorney’s Office," linked to a laudatory 2004 Los Angeles Times article with that headline.

"Doing what we can do to ensure civil rights for everyone is not something we are going to back away from," was the quote from that piece Herrera chose to highlight on his homepage, referring to his work on marriage equality. The article also praises the City Attorney’s Office practice of proactively filing cases to protect public health and the environment and to expand consumer rights.

But more recently the City Attorney’s Office also has aggressively pushed cases that create troubling precedents for civil rights and prevent law enforcement officials from being held accountable for false arrests, abusive behavior, mistreatment of detainees, and even allegedly framing innocent people for murder.

Three particular cases, which have been the subject of past stories by the Guardian, reveal unacceptable official conduct — yet each was aggressively challenged using the virtually unlimited resources of the City Attorney’s Office. In fact, Herrera’s team pushed these cases to the point of potentially establishing troubling precedents that could apply throughout the country.

Attorney Peter Keane, who teaches ethics at Golden Gate University School of Law and used to evaluate police conduct cases as a member of the Police Commission, said city attorneys sometimes find themselves trapped between their dual obligations to promote the public good and vigorously defend their clients. "Therein lies the problem, and it’s a problem that can’t be easily reconciled," he told us.

"A lawyer’s obligation is to give total loyalty to a client within ethical limits," Keane said, noting his respect for Herrera. But in police misconduct cases, Keane said, "it is desirable public policy to have police engage in ethical conduct and not do anything to abuse citizens."

RODEL RODIS VS. SF


Attorney Rodel Rodis is a prominent Filipino activist, newspaper columnist, and until this year was a longtime elected member of the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees. So it never made much sense that he would knowingly try to pass a counterfeit $100 bill at his neighborhood Walgreens in 2003 (see "Real money, false arrest," 7/9/08).

Nonetheless, the store clerk was unfamiliar with an older bill Rodis used to pay for a purchase and called police, who immediately placed Rodis in handcuffs. When police couldn’t conclusively determine whether the bill was real, they dragged Rodis out of the store, placed him in a patrol car out front, and took him in for questioning while they tested the bill.

There was no need to arrest him, as subsequent San Francisco Police Department orders clarified. They could simply have taken his name and the bill and allowed him to retrieve it later. After all, mere possession of a counterfeit bill doesn’t indicate criminal intent.

The police finally determined that the bill was real and released Rodis from his handcuffs and police custody. Rodis was outraged by his treatment, and sued. He insisted that the case was about the civil rights principle and not the money — indeed, he says he offered to settle with the city for a mere $15,000.

"I told my lawyer that I didn’t want a precedent that would hurt civil liberties," Rodis told the Guardian.

To his surprise, however, the City Attorney’s Office aggressively appealed rulings in Rodis’ favor all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that the officers enjoyed immunity and ordered reconsideration by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Last month the Ninth Circuit ruled in the city’s favor, thus expanding protections for police officers.

Rodis can now name cases from around the country, all with egregious police misconduct, that cite his case as support. "Even with that kind of abuse, people can no longer sue because of my case," Rodis said.

Herrera disputes the precedent-setting nature of the case, saying the facts of each case are different. "We’re defending them in accordance with the state of the law as it stands today," Herrera said, arguing that officers in the Rodis case acted reasonably, even if they got it wrong. "We look at each case on its facts and its merits."

Herrera said he agrees with Keane that it’s often a difficult balancing act to promote policies that protect San Francisco citizens from abuse while defending city officials accused of that abuse. But ultimately, he said, "I have the ethical obligation to defend the interests of the City and County of San Francisco."

While it may be easy to criticize those who bring lawsuits seeking public funds, Rodis says it is these very cases that set the limits on police behavior and accountability. As he observed, "The difference between police in a democracy and a dictatorship is not the potential for abuse, but the liability for abuse."

MARY BULL VS. SF


In the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, there were months of antiwar protests resulting in thousands of arrests in San Francisco. Activist Mary Bull was arrested in November 2002. Bull said she was forcibly and illegally strip-searched and left naked in a cold cell for 14 hours.

San Francisco’s policy at the time — which called for strip-searching almost all inmates — was already a shaky legal ground. Years earlier Bull had won a sizable settlement against Sacramento County because she and other activists were strip-searched after being arrested for protesting a logging plan, a legal outcome that led most California counties to change their strip-search policies.

So Bull filed a lawsuit against San Francisco in 2003. The San Francisco Chronicle ran front page story in September 2003 highlighting Bull’s ordeal and another case of a woman arrested on minor charges being strip-searched, prompting all the major mayoral candidates at the time, including Gavin Newsom, to call for reform. Sheriff Michael Hennessey later modified jail policies on strip searches, conforming it to existing case law.

But the City Attorney’s Office has continued to fight Bull’s case, appealing two rulings in favor of Bull, pushing the case to the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (from which a ruling is expected soon) and threatening to appeal an unfavorable ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"It’s pretty outrageous and humiliating to strip-search someone brought to jail on minor charges," Bull’s attorney Mark Merin told the Guardian. "If they win, they establish a bad precedent."

Herrera said the case is about inmate safety and that his office must follow case law and pursue reasonable settlements (neither side would say how much money Bull is seeking). "We do it well and we do it with a sense of justice at its core," Herrera said.

Yet Merin said the city’s actions fly in the face of established law: "In the Bull case, he’s trying to get 25 years of precedent reversed."

Merlin noted that "the problem is not with the city, it’s with the U.S. Supreme Court." In other words, by pushing cases to a right-leaning court, the city could be driving legal precedents that directly contradict its own stated policies.

"It would be nice if this city was in a different league, but they look at it like any defense firm: take it to the mat, yield no quarter" he added.

JOHN TENNISON VS. SF


For the Guardian, and for all the attorneys involved, this was a once-in-a-lifetime case. In 1990, Hunters Point residents John J. Tennison and Antoine Goff were convicted of the 1989 gang-related murder of Roderick Shannon and later given sentences of 25 years to life.

Jeff Adachi, Tennison’s attorney and now the city’s elected public defender, was shocked by a verdict that was based almost solely on the constantly mutating testimony of two young girls, ages 12 and 14, who were joyriding in a stolen car, so he continued to gather evidence.

Eventually Adachi discovered that police inspectors Earl Sanders and Napoleon Hendrix and prosecutor George Butterworth had withheld key exculpatory evidence in the case, including damaging polygraph tests on the key witnesses, other eyewitness testimony fingering a man named Lovinsky Ricard, and even a taped confession in which Ricard admitted to the murder.

After writer A.C. Thompson and the Guardian published a cover story on the case (see "The Hardest Time," 1/17/01), it was picked up pro bono by attorneys Ethan Balogh and Elliot Peters of the high-powered firm Keker & Van Nest LLP, who unearthed even more evidence that the men had been framed, including a sworn statement by one of the two key prosecution witnesses recanting her testimony and saying city officials had coached her to lie.

In 2003, federal Judge Claudia Wilken agreed to hear Tennison’s case and ruled that the prosecution team had illegally buried five different pieces of exculpatory evidence, any one of which "could have caused the result of Tennison’s new trial motion and of his trial to have been different."

She ordered Tennison immediately freed after 13 years in prison. The district attorney at the time, Terrence Hallinan, not only agreed and decided not to retry Tennison, he proactively sought the release of Goff, who was freed a few weeks later.

"The only case you can make is that this was an intentional suppression of evidence that led to the conviction of any innocent man," Adachi told the Guardian in 2003 (see "Innocent!" 9/3/03). In the article, Hallinan said "I don’t just believe this was an improper conviction; I believe Tennison is an innocent man."

But the pair has had a harder time winning compensation for their lost years. State judges denied their request, relying on the initial jury verdict, so they sued San Francisco in 2003, alleging that the prosecution team intentionally deprived them of their basic rights.

"What happened to these guys was a horrible miscarriage of justice," Balogh said.

The City Attorney’s Office has aggressively fought the case, arguing that the prosecution team enjoys blanket immunity. The courts haven’t agreed with that contention at any level, although the city spent the last two years taking it all the way to the Ninth Circuit, which largely exonerated Butterworth. The case is now set for a full trial in federal district court in September.

"They are unwilling to admit they made a mistake," Elliot said. "They are doing everything not to face up to their responsibility to these two guys."

The lawyers said both Herrera and District Attorney Kamala Harris had an obligation to look into what happened in these cases, to punish official wrongdoing, and to try to bring the actual murderer to justice. Instead the case is still open, and the man who confessed has never been seriously pursued.

Harris spokesperson Erica Derryck said the Ninth Circuit and an internal investigation cleared Butterworth "of any wrongdoing," although she didn’t address Guardian questions about what Harris has done to close the case or address its shortcomings.

In fact, the lawyers say they’re surprised that the city is so aggressively pushing a case that could ultimately go very badly for the city, particularly given the mounting lawyers’ fees.

"When we filed the case, we never thought we’d be here today," Balogh said. "They had a bad hand and instead of folding it and trying to pursue justice in this case, they doubled down."

Herrera doesn’t see it that way, instead making a lawyerly argument about what the prosecution team knew and when. "Our belief is there is no evidence that Sanders and Hendrix had information early on that they suppressed," Herrera said. "Based on the facts, I don’t think they, Hendrix and Sanders, violated the law. But that’s a totally different issue than whether they were innocent…. It’s not our role to retry the innocence or guilt of Tennison and Goff."

Herrera said he’s limited by the specific facts of this case and the relevant laws. "If the Board of Supervisors wants to do a grant of public funds [to Tennison and Goff], someone can legislate that. But that’s not my job," Herrera said.

As far as settling the case in the interests of justice or avoiding a precedent that protects police even when they frame someone for murder, he also said it isn’t that simple. Keane also agreed it wouldn’t be ethical to settle a case to avoid bad precedents.

"I’m always willing to talk settlement," Herrera said. "This is not an office that makes rash decisions about the cases it chooses to try or settle."

Deputy City Attorney Scott Wiener is the point person on most police misconduct cases, including the Rodis and Tennison cases, as well as another current case in which Officer Sean Frost hit a subdued suspect, Chen Ming, in the face with his baton, breaking his jaw and knocking out 10 teeth.

Wiener, who is running for the District 8 seat on the Board of Supervisors and is expected to get backing from the San Francisco Police Officers Association, recently told the Chronicle that Frost "did not do anything wrong." Contacted by the Guardian, Wiener stood by that statement and his record on police cases, but said, "I consider myself to be fair-minded." He also denied having a strong pro-police bias.

Yet those involved with these cases say they go far beyond the zeal of one deputy or the need to safeguard the public treasury. They say that a city like San Francisco needs to put its resources into the service of its values.

"It raises the broader question of what is the city attorney’s mandate? Is it fiscal limitation regardless of the truth?" Balogh said. "Dennis Herrera has had a very aggressive policy in defending police officers."

Herrera says he is proud of his record as the city attorney, and before that, as president of the Police Commission. "I believe in police accountability and have made that a big part of what I’ve done throughout my career."

The budget mysteries

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sarah@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s top budget advisors are predicting that dollars from President Obama’s stimulus package will help reinvigorate the economy over the next three years. But they also warn that the recovery will be slow, and that deficits will be part of political life for some time to come.

The findings are contained in a three-year budget projection report jointly compiled by the Mayor’s Office, the Controller’s Office, and the Budget Analyst’s Office and released to the news media at a hastily announced March 31 roundtable.

During the roundtable, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that the city faces a "staggering" $438 million budget shortfall in fiscal year 2009-10 — a deficit, financial experts warn, that could balloon to $750 million by fiscal year 2011-12 if cuts and wage concessions aren’t made and structural reform and revenue creating measures aren’t undertaken.

Those future numbers are scary — and a bit apocryphal. Nobody seriously thinks the city will simply ignore this year’s problems and put them off until next year, which means future deficits should be smaller.

But the decisions that will have to be made to keep the red ink under control have been the subject of intense speculation since December, when Newsom announced that the city was facing a deficit equal to cutting every other dollar in the city’s discretionary general fund.

REFORMS? WHAT REFORMS?


In January newly elected Board of Supervisors President David Chiu sought to address the anxiety crashing over the city’s business and labor leaders by inviting stakeholders, including Newsom, to budget meetings at City Hall. But Newsom only agreed to get involved once the youthful board president’s other bright idea — a special election that combined cuts, revenue generating measures, and structural reforms to save as many jobs, programs, and services — was off the table.

And with only two months to go until he submits his 2009-10 budget proposal, Newsom still has not clarified what budgetary reforms he will support this fall, even as the labor unions are being asked to give back $90 million in promised benefits, and the Board of Supervisors gets ready to prepare an annual appropriations ordinance by the end of July.

Newsom did announce last week that he will be is asking some, but not all, departments for 25 percent cuts in the coming fiscal year. Human Services Director Micki Callahan confirmed that 730 pink slips have been sent out since July 2008.

Yet the actual cuts remain a mystery. "I will not be accepting 25 percent cuts from some departments, but from others, I will," Newsom said. "I don’t believe in across-the-board cuts."

Asked which departments he would accept 25 percent cuts from, Newsom told reporters: "You’ll find out when you read my budget."

Within days of Newsom’s statement came news of a deal between the Mayor’s Office and Service Employees International Union Local 1021, the largest city-workers union.

"The goal of this tentative agreement is to protect vital services for San Franciscans, minimize layoffs to employees, preserve the integrity of the collective bargaining agreement, and assist the city with its economic recovery," read a joint public statement.

As of press time, SEIU’s 1021’s Robert Haaland told the Guardian that the two sides are still in negotiations, but confirmed that the union is discussing giving up about $40 million over 16 months, including furloughs and other benefits.

"At the end of the day, our members recognize that they need to share the pain," Haaland said. "The idea is to save jobs and programs."

These givebacks from SEIU are part of the $90 million in concessions the city hopes to get from unions, including those that represent police, firefighters and nurses.

THE PERILS OF TWO-YEAR BUDGETING


As it becomes clear that givebacks and cuts won’t be enough to solve the city’s fiscal crisis, there is talk that the mayor wants to switch to a two-year budget process. Critics say that could represent a massive transfer of power to the Mayor’s Office, unless the Board of Supervisors also gets the power to approve the mayor’s midyear cuts.

"As it is right now, we have power through the Board of Supervisors for one month of the year," said one community organizer, who asked to remain anonymous. "The rest of the time Newsom moves his own agenda through his midyear cuts."

A summary of a March 16 Controller’s Office "budget improvement project" recommends that "the board’s add-back process should require that program restorations and enhancements be reviewed and analyzed by department staff and the board’s budget analyst;" that the "mayor and board should outreach to the general public regarding budget priorities;" and that the "city should adopt a two year budget process consistent with the city’s financial plan."

Sup. Chris Daly said he thinks this year’s grim three-year budget projections make a strong argument against a two-year budget process. "Projections are never right," said Daly, who used to chair the powerful budget committee. "Two years ago we weren’t projecting how bad it was going to be. We can’t do budgets for years out past the current fiscal year. It just doesn’t work."

Sup. David Campos, who sits on the current budget committee, said he wants to see the increased Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) funding being provided to the city’s public health and human services departments used to restore proposed cuts, jobs, and services.

Much of the federal money will be earmarked for non-General Fund infrastructre projects at the Municipal Transporation Agency, Housing Authority, airport, and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

"We’re saying that if FMAP is coming in so that revenue cuts are not made in the public health area, then why not use these monies to fill gaps, replace cuts, restore funds, preserve programs?" Campos asked.

Campos also wants the mayor and the board to sit down and talk about the November ballot. "I don’t think the budget hole is going to be closed on backs of labor alone," Campos told us. "We’re focused on cuts, elimination of programs, layoffs … But why aren’t we talking about what revenue measures we are putting on the November ballot?

Chiu said he thinks Newsom is committed to some form of tax-based revenue measure. "Just as we can’t solve our budget deficit by taxing our way out of it, so we can’t solve it by cutting our way out of it either," Chiu said. "None of our tax or revenue-generating options would come close to filling 25 percent of that gap."

Noting that business is "more open to taxes that share the burden of who pays," Chiu observed that "it’s important to balance the cuts so it’s not just social services and the health department taking the burden."

Reject the Fisher Museum

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OPINION The Presidio Trust Board and the National Park Service in December rejected Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher’s proposed art museum in the Presidio. They complete their review of his second offer next month. They should reject the second offer as well, and the game will be over.

Fisher and his family should stop trying to convince the Park Service to bend its rules. They should set aside their pride and their own preferences in deference to those of the Park Service and the city of San Francisco. They should announce their decision to move forward with the city to find a location in the city proper.

Most of us in the Presidio’s neighborhood communities do not agree with the seven trust board members that developing a cultural theme park in the Presidio is a good idea. It was introduced by the board only in response to the unsolicited proposal by the Fishers in April 2007. These board members, Fisher’s former colleagues — who are mostly real estate developers — were appointed by former President Bush. President Obama will have his own appointees on the board by June, in time to make the final decision on the Fisher museum.

We don’t want an extravagant $50 million new gathering place in front of the Fisher museum — something the Fishers have offered to help pay for in exchange for permission to build where they want.

We cannot bear the thought of the series of traffic signals inside the park, near the Spanish El Presidio and the 160-year-old U.S. Army Post. The trust says those traffic signals, along with garages in the Presidio, would be needed to manage the daily visitors added by the Fishers’ museum. No national park in America has traffic signals.

Nor do we want the lineup of traffic and signal lights required outside the park, at entrances and on nearby residential streets, that the trust says would be required. The city would, I expect, refuse the federal trust’s request to change city traffic controls to support a museum — one that city officials want to see downtown.

The public will pay another million to respond to the Fishers continued effort. It will end in defeat, if the federal government follows its own review processes — or in a glaring corruption of those processes if it succeeds.

I urge the individual appointed members of the Federal Presidio Trust Corporation and National Park Service officials to reject the Fisher offer next month. Two years and $2 million is enough of our treasure to spend in responding to the unsolicited proposal.

I urge the public to attend the trust hearing April 16, 6:30 p.m. at the Presidio Golden Gate Club. Support the Fisher museum outside the park, and oppose it in the park. *
Donald S. Green is former executive director of the Yosemite Restoration Trust and vice chair of the Presidio Neighborhood Work Group of the SF Board of Supervisors.

Clean Power SF will take center stage at joint meeting

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By Rebecca Bowe

Last Friday, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi declared 2009 the “make-or-break year” for San Francisco’s ambitious Community Choice Aggregation program. Also known as Clean Power SF, the program would establish the city and county as an electricity purchaser for residents and businesses currently served by PG&E, and put S.F. on track for achieving 50 percent renewable power generation. At an April 3 LAFCo (Local Agency Formation Commission) meeting, it was announced that the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has agreed to sit down with LAFCo for a meeting about CCA for the first time ever — a sign that things could actually start moving forward.

The process of getting Clean Power SF off the ground has been fraught with delay, in part because the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission — which is tasked with implementing the program — dropped the ball on a series of deadlines. During the last couple monthly meetings, LAFCo, which is charged with overseeing CCA implementation, has vented frustration about the feet dragging at the PUC and questioned the agency’s commitment to the effort. However, the tone shifted some at the April 3 meeting.

CCA director Michael Campbell, who was hired by the SFPUC, noted that the city agency is getting back on schedule — and announced the launch of a new Web site. Two new LAFCo staff positions were approved recently by the Board of Supervisors, providing further momentum.

Board tells Newsom to support due process for all youth

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The SF Examiner and the Chronicle continue to beat the anti-immigrant drum, when it comes to mocking, downplaying or distorting the unconstitutional impact on children of San Francisco’s sanctuary policy.

So it may come as a surprise to learn that under the new policy direction that Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered last summer, just as he was announcing his gubernatorial run, San Francisco does nothing to accord due process to undocumented children that are charged with felonies by local law enforcement officials.

Now, if you ask the Mayor’s Office, if the sanctuary policy accords due process to juvenile youth, you’ll get, “Yes, the City Attorney vetted it.”
That is not an answer. It’s the giant sucking sound of mayoral advisers passing the buck.

Now, as Sup. David Campos points out, the City Attorney provides legal advice—what the law is, its parameters, its implications—not policy calls.

Campos reiterated that point this week, when he and seven other members of Board of Supervisors voted to pass a resolution urging the board to adopt the United Nations convention on the rights of the child, which supports due process for youth. (You can watch the video of that meeting here. Look for item 17.)

Out with the old

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› rebeccab@sfbg.com

It may seem odd that the loss of a two-story vacant building would ruffle so many feathers, spur multiple phone calls to the police, and inspire a push from Board of Supervisors president David Chiu to make changes to San Francisco’s building code. But the March 16 demolition of the Little House, a 148-year-old Russian Hill cottage on Lombard Street, struck a nerve and raised a slew of questions — many of which continue to go unanswered.

Controversy may have started swirling because a property that has stood since Abraham Lincoln’s presidency was razed with scarcely a week’s notice on a swiftly issued emergency-demolition permit. It might also have been because the co-owners of the property, Michael Cassidy and James Nunemacher, represent the high-profile Residential Builders Association and the real estate firm Vanguard Properties, respectively — both politically well-connected entities that have been behind projects in the past that drew criticism from various citizens groups.

The Little House, which previously stood at 1268 Lombard St., was by some accounts one of the 10 oldest homes in San Francisco. Under the California Environmental Quality Act, a building of that age would normally require an environmental impact report before the Planning Department can issue a demolition permit. According to Department of Building Inspections spokesman William Strawn, the emergency demolition permit was issued after a structural engineer who had inspected the property on behalf of the owners sent a letter expressing concern that it was in danger of collapse. DBI staffers, including department manager Ed Sweeney, inspected it, and Strawn said the permit process started once they concluded that it presented a safety hazard.

Word that the cottage would be razed sparked an outcry from a group of concerned neighbors and historic preservationists, including architect F. Joseph Butler, who says he discovered it 15 years ago when he learned that it was one of the few structures on Russian Hill to escape the 1906 earthquake and ensuing fires. Butler says he doubts the building was in danger of collapse, and says he tried in vain to convince DBI to allow him to bring in a third party who could offer a second opinion. When asked about that possibility, Strawn said, "The building department would not rely on a third-party source."

The building was torn down March 16, with tensions simmering in the days leading up to it. When a demolition crew showed up March 9 ready to go to work, several days before the emergency permit had actually been issued, a neighbor who was trying to save the cottage phoned the police to halt the demolition. Police reports show that a few days later when the crew arrived on the property and were greeted by a small group of protesters, the cops were called twice more — by both sides. Joe Cassidy, Michael Cassidy’s brother and a prominent member of the Residential Builders Association, is the president of the demolition company.

Protesters charged that the building was neglected on purpose to hasten its demise, so the owners could skirt the regulatory EIR process. "It appears the property owner has exceeded the scope of their permit to replace dry rot by structurally damaging the building and claiming it is in imminent danger of falling down," Cynthia Servetnick, an architect with the SF Preservation Consortium, wrote in an e-mail to the City Attorney’s Office not long before the demolition. Building Commissioner Debra Walker, who also inspected it, noted that "the windows were out, and the doors were out in the back. It looked to me like people had just left it open."

Megan Allison Wade, who blogged about the demolition of the Lombard Street house, wrote in an e-mail to zoning administrator Larry Badiner that she perceived "a very clear case of willful neglect in an attempt to degrade the property into demolish-able condition."

Badiner responded: "This emergency demolition permit supersedes historic preservation and housing preservation procedures. … Without commenting on whether this is willful neglect, public safety would trump any concerns regarding how the building became unsafe."

An article published by the San Francisco Chronicle noted that Nunemacher denied that he and Cassidy had neglected the property. When we called Nunemacher to ask him directly, the conversation didn’t go so well. He said he was busy, and told us to read the other news reports. When asked if this meant he didn’t want to comment, he said, "You are putting words into my mouth. I don’t like what you are doing." Then he threatened to call the police.

Whether or not the property was in fact neglected on purpose is a question that may never be answered conclusively. City Attorney’s Office spokesperson Matt Dorsey told us he was not at liberty to say whether an investigation is underway, but it’s clear that any investigation would have to go forward without a crucial element — the house.

Attorney Arthur Levy made a last-ditch effort to try to save the Little House just before it came down, sending a letter transcribed on his office’s letterhead to a list of city department heads. "What makes San Francisco different is our built environment," Levy says. "It seems to me that when a property owner willfully neglects a building, and that results in demolition … there ought to be some consequences."

For some of those engaged in the fight over the cottage, the incident brings to mind past controversies involving the same players and others close to them. When an historic Victorian shipwrights’ cottage at 900 Innes Ave. — which the city designated as a historic landmark last year — was under the ownership of developer Joe Cassidy, he had plans to demolish it and build condos, retail space, and a kayak center. In that 2005 battle between the RBA developer and preservationists, the preservationists won.

Another project that involved both Joe Cassidy and Nunemacher was a residential development at Fourth and Freelon streets. At the time that project was being permitted, one of the top-selling agents at Vanguard Properties, Jean-Paul Samaha, worked as a liaison between the Board of Supervisors and the Planning Department. In 2005, architect Kepa Ashkenasy lodged an Ethics Commission complaint against Samaha alleging he had failed to disclose a $100,000 loan from Nunemacher, who had been his romantic partner at the time, even when he was in a position of testifying before the Planning Commission in his professional capacity about the Fourth and Freelon development, Ethics records show.

The complaint was dismissed after Samaha lodged a counter-complaint against Ashkenasy with the Human Rights Commission, noting that loans from spouses and domestic partners are exempt from financial disclosure rules, and charging that her allegation was motivated by a kind of homophobia, a HRC document shows. Ashkenasy told the Guardian that she only sought to illuminate a conflict of interest — and added that she is a lesbian.

Servetnick said the case of the Little House highlights a broader issue of vacant historic properties throughout the city that are allowed to go to waste because it’s more profitable to knock them down and build new. Draft legislation introduced by Board President David Chiu seeks to address this concern by requiring owners of vacant properties to register their empty buildings with the city so that inspectors can play a more proactive role in detecting problems before it’s too late.

At a March 26 Planning Commission meeting, Charles Marsteller, former head of government watchdog group Common Cause, told commissioners he had attended the demolition of the Lombard Street cottage. When it came down, he says, he realized how unique it was and earnestly told planning commissioners that he thinks the Little House should be reconstructed, and the lot turned into a park.

As for the demolition, "It was just a put-on by some insiders in City Hall working the network that they normally work," Marsteller says. "And it shouldn’t have happened."

Ask Nate

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The Guardian introduces a new weekly advice column from Nathan Ballard, press secretary to Mayor Gavin Newsom. We hope you enjoy his insights as much as we always have.

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Dear Nate:

Times are tough in San Francisco for a lot of people, but my life seems to be bottoming out these days. My good city job just got eliminated, the after school program my kids love was cut, my elderly grandmother just lost her home health nurse, and the police still have no idea who murdered my husband last year. He was even shot right in front of one of those crime cameras. What should I do?

Desperate for Help

Dear Dessie:

I reject the premise of your question. Things are going great in San Francisco, particularly under this mayor’s strong leadership. But we feel your pain, which seems to stem from the Board of Supervisors refusing to give the Police Department more money or the authority to constantly monitor those cameras. Sup. Aaron Peskin is the reason your husband’s killer hasn’t been caught. He may actually be the murderer.

Nate

Dear Nate:

I was thinking about going into politics. Do you have any advice for someone considering running for office?

Budding Candidate

Dear Bud:

As my boss has repeatedly said, being mayor is the toughest and most thankless job in the world. He’s constantly dealing with uppity supervisors and complaining constituents, at least when he’s in town. And if you’re one of those spineless, whiny so-called progressives, my advice is to just do something else. Get a real job, something in the private sector. But if you share Mayor Newsom’s belief in building a better San Francisco with more public-private partnerships — and you’ve got a lot of rich friends — I say go for it. But make sure you hire the best advisers by calling Storefront Political Media and Earned Media. We — , er, uh, I mean they really know what they’re doing.

Nate

Dear Nate:

I’m new to San Francisco and trying to understand the political dynamics here. Is the central struggle really between progressives and moderates? Those are the two labels I hear the most, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. What about liberal vs. conservative?

Political Science Student

Dear Poli-Sci:

I reject the label progressive, and so does the San Francisco Chronicle now that we convinced them to. So actually the central struggle in this town is between the radical and unrealistic ultra-liberals and moderates like Gavin Newsom. The mayor can be a fiscal conservative when he needs to be, and he’s liberal on social issues, which makes him a moderate and therefore the voice of reason. He could even be a progressive on some issues, if there were such a thing as a progressive, which there’s not. But he’s never ultra-anything, because that would make him crazy, which he also isn’t. Is that clear?

Nate

Newsom officials dodge budget questions

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By Melody Parker and Steven T. Jones

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee yesterday held a hearing on deep budget cuts proposed for city health and welfare programs and tried unsuccessfully to get straight answers to why the Newsom Administration isn’t planning to use federal stimulus money to offset those cuts.
Congress and President Barack Obama specifically offered economic stimulus money to prevent cuts in things like housing, homeless, and social services that are most needed during hard economic times. San Francisco’s share is more than $50 milllion. As Obama said, “This plan will also help ensure that you don’t need to make cuts to essential services Americans rely on now more than ever.”
But Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and David Campos expressed frustration that the Mayor’s Office has said it doesn’t want to use these one-time funding to cover ongoing expenses and that they’ve refused to engage in a dialogue about that stand. At a press conference before the hearing, Mirkarimi said dealing with the administration has been like pulling teeth: “The Board had received zero word from Mayor Newsom.”
So they pressed Newsom’s Public Health Director Mitch Katz at the hearing, but still made little progress on getting a straight answer. As a lawyer, Campos said he was “familiar with nuanced language” and told Katz that he didn’t feel the administration is being responsive.

A LAFCo “milestone” at today’s Board meeting

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By Rebecca Bowe

At meetings of the Local Agency Formation Commission, it’s all too common to hear concerns that the whole Community Choice Aggregation program endeavor is moving along at a snail pace. At today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, there will be vote on whether to approve two new LAFCo staff positions, which could jump start CCA. But is there enough support for eight votes, which would ensure that the decision could withstand a veto? And will Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who voted against it at the last meeting but for it at a committee meeting the day before, stick with her ‘no’ vote?

LAFCo plays an advisory role in the implementation of San Francisco’s CCA program, which would allow the city to combine electricity needs of residents and businesses into a citywide electricity buyers’ program. Administered by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the plan includes ambitious targets for clean and renewable-energy generation.

But the process of getting such a massive project off the ground has been fraught with delay, and it’s not uncommon for citizens to get up during the public comment session at LAFCo meetings to voice their anxiety that an environment threatened by climate change can’t afford to wait any longer.

Bike Plan is on track

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SFBC director Leah Shahum addressed the Land Use Committee today.

Photo and story by Joe Sciarrillo

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA) today quelled fears that its $120 million budget deficit might kill or delay implementation of the long-awaited Bicycle Plan and its 56 near-term projects, which have been stalled by a three-year court injunction.

Timothy Papandreou, assistant deputy director of Transportation Planning and Development at the SFMTA, told the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee that a new expanded bike network of paths, lanes, racks, and signage will likely get underway in July.

“July/August, we’ll physically start putting things on the street,” he said to a packed room of bicycle supporters, with neon green “Bike Plan Now!” stickers on their shirts and helmets, enthusiastically greeted the news.

Board asks Obama to oust Russoniello.

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It’s too bad the SF Examiner doesn’t appear to get why six members of the Board of Supervisors voted this week to ask Obama and Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein to appoint a new US Attorney for Northern California.

No, it wasn’t just because “current U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello has made some anti-Hispanic remarks that have angered numerous minority groups,” as the Examiner implies.

The Board’s vote came about after the year-long pushing of an anti-immigration agenda that included intensified ICE raids, the undermining of San Francisco’s long-standing sanctuary city ordinance, and a Grand Jury investigation of the city’s Juvenile Probation Department–moves that collectively angered immigrant rights advocates nationwide.

And no, it isn’t just the case that these supervisors, who just spent four days in Washington, “can just pick up the phone and make this change happen,” as the Examiner implies.

If you want to connect the dots and understand why the Board members voted the way they did, and who appears to be directing San Francisco’s public safety policy, read this or this or this or this or this.

Real set-aside reform

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Whenever conservative elements within San Francisco’s political mix put forth measures that carry the moniker "good government," liberals, progressives, and those of us concerned that good government serve the people rather than the corporations should take notice.

Last year, one so-called good government measure usurped the right of four members of the Board of Supervisors to check a mayoral veto by putting a measure on the ballot at the last minute. The reform imposed a requirement that hearings be held before the supervisors put any legislation on the ballot.

Never mind that empirical evidence shows no correlation between the route to the ballot and the quality of measures; good as well as crap has made it onto the ballot and into law from all origins. Never mind that there were other ways to ensure that voter-initiated ordinances were amendable and flexible. Downtown wanted to crimp the power of the Board of Supervisors and our neighborhoods and, with the help of some progressives, succeeded.

They’re back at it again, as government grapples with revenue shortfalls caused by the second Great Depression, a depression caused by the economic policies championed by our local conservative/moderate coalition. We are seeing another effort at good government that would only benefit those who wish to destroy popular public services, to enable Reaganism, and to wipe away much of the public sector.

In order to secure a dedicated, reliable stream of funding, activists have run campaigns to create set-asides for various public programs. The earliest funded the San Francisco Symphony during the first Great Depression. Since then, programs that carry great public appeal, from the Children’s Fund to the Open Space Fund to Muni have been given set-asides by the votes.

The proposal on the table now would change the way the city handles budget set-asides, ostensibly to allow greater flexibility during tough times. It would allow the Board of Supervisors, under certain budgetary shortfall conditions, to dip into funds earmarked for particular purposes. But the result would be dangerous to the ongoing essential function of government. And the proposal would prevent the voters from solving a problem created by our City Charter — the inability to do multiyear budgeting.

What this city needs is a way for voters to express their long-term funding priorities and to hold the feet of elected officials to the fire in funding those priorities — but in a manner that accounts for the vicissitudes of the economy.

The reason the city can’t do multiyear budgeting without a Charter set aside is that any regular ordinance passed by the board and the mayor can override any other ordinance. One way to approach the problem: amend the charter to create a new class of ordinance, one that would allow for multiyear budgeting. This class of ordinance would need to be classified as a multiyear budget ordinance when proposed, and would require either a vote of the people or a super majority at the Board of Supervisors and a mayoral signature to enact.

The multiyear budgeting ordinances would govern subsequent years’ budgets and could be overridden only with a super-majority vote, and only under conditions of economic hardship. In normal times, the city could set longer-term spending priorities for projects and priorities that last longer than one budget year, as well as those areas that are important to San Franciscans year in and year out. *

Marc Salomon is a neighborhood activist in San Francisco.

Supervisorial candidate excuses police abuse

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By Steven T. Jones

Scott Wiener seems to have a real zeal for his job as a deputy city attorney defending San Francisco against police abuse lawsuits, but his attitude and public statements raise serious concerns about his goal of being elected to the District 8 seat on the Board of Supervisors next year.
Take this story, for example, in which Wiener is defending the city in an excessive force case in which Officer Sean Frost and other SFPD officers chased down Chen Ming after being called to a loud argument in SoMa. After they caught him and held him down, Frost hit Ming in the face with his billyclub, breaking Chen’s jaw and knocking out 10 of his teeth.
“The officer did not do anything wrong,” Wiener told the Chronicle, a statement he repeated to me the other day, although he wouldn’t say more about how he arrived at that conclusion (such as whether it was supported by an internal affairs investigation), claiming he could not discuss the facts of the case.
Yet excusing such obviously excessive force — including use of a billyclub in a way that goes against officer training and SFPD general orders, and using extreme violence against a suspect who was down and not threatening anyone — is commenting on the facts of this case.
Wiener could have simply denied the city’s culpability in a general way, but he chose to go further, excusing inexcusable police conduct and sending a scary message to the general public.

Weirdness at the Washbag

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By Steven T. Jones

There was a surreal air to last night’s celebration of the Board of Supervisors’ Class of 2000 at the Washington Bar and Grill in North Beach. That weird vibe was created mostly by the fact that the event was sponsored by Platinum Advisors and the Residential Builders Association, two groups that didn’t always see eye-to-eye with that progressive-dominated class.
That class – which included progressive firebrands Matt Gonzalez and Chris Daly, liberals Aaron Peskin and Jake McGoldrick, and independent conservative Tony Hall – were swept into office largely as a backlash against the top-down rule of then-Mayor Willie Brown, who shares both an office and a corporatist ideology with Platinum.
All those guys were in attendance and the mood was buoyant, helped by the free booze and food. Hall called the supervisors elected in 2000 “the original class of rebels,” while Peskin told the crowd, “Thank you for keeping the progressive spirit of San Francisco alive.”
But it was Brown who had the quote of the night in his not-so-subtle dig at the prickly current Mayor Gavin Newsom (who was rumored to be upset about the gathering): “My guess is if that class was still in place today, they would want me as their mayor.”

Spin vs. substance

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› rebeccab@sfbg.com

Hollywood paparazzi crews are beginning to follow high-profile politicians, such as Mayor Gavin Newsom, the same way they track the likes of Britney Spears, the San Francisco Chronicle reported recently. And when a celebrity gossip photographer surreptitiously aims the lens at a political leader, the picture that emerges isn’t always flattering.

Likewise, the documents that can be extracted through public records laws — including the federal Freedom of Information Act, California Public Records Act, and San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance — don’t always paint political figures in the most favorable light.

Both end products leave the same impression of a glimpse behind the curtain — consumers feel they’re privy to the raw, unpackaged truth. But while photos may show politicians looking silly or meeting with controversial power brokers, documents show how the people’s business is being conducted. So the willingness of officials to promptly comply with requests for documents and information says a great deal about whether their public statements match their private deeds.

Nathan Ballard, Newsom’s press secretary, characterizes (through e-mail, the medium through which he insists on dealing with the Guardian) the mayor’s commitment to open government as being "as strong or stronger than any public official in this country."

But to hear some proponents of open government tell it — and in our experience here at the Guardian — the Newsom administration keeps much of the mayor’s business under wraps, leaving many info-seekers in the dark or reliant on Ballard’s spin. Responses to requests for public records tend to be delayed and incomplete, and queries directed to the mayor’s office of communications are often returned with terse, one-line e-mails that obscure more than illuminate.

Rick Knee, a longtime member of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force — the city body charged with upholding the open-government rule — says Newsom has been in violation of the Sunshine Ordinance on several occasions. "Mayor Newsom’s actual practices regarding Sunshine have been, shall we say, less than what one would desire of him," Knee says. Despite those violations, he adds, the mayor "continues to refuse to provide what remedies the task force calls for on his part."

Under Proposition 59, a state constitutional amendment that won overwhelming voter approval in 2004, the records kept by public officials are considered to be "the people’s business." In practice, however, it doesn’t always pan out that way.

For example, a group of citizens informally known as the Sunshine Posse who have made it a personal quest to improve government transparency by peppering city departments with Sunshine requests, have sounded alarm bells over the mayor’s refusal to release a more detailed daily calendar. One Sunshine Posse member began seeking more fleshed-out mayoral itineraries back in 2006, according to group member Christian Holmer, to gain an understanding of whom the mayor had met with and what had been discussed.

But he quickly ran into a slew of difficulties. "The Mayor’s Office ignored our simple request for 255 days," Holmer told the Guardian. "We sent weekly reminders to most of his staff and key members of the city attorney’s executive and government teams for months and months." After bringing the matter to the attention of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, Holmer says, a new set of problems cropped up. "For the Mayor’s Office, it was an ongoing tale of crashed hard drives, changing office personnel, lost documents, overt/covert confusion, and best intentions."

Nearly three years later, the scrutinizing crew remains frustrated with the results, saying the Mayor’s Office has only come forth with a watered-down schedule, called the Prop. G calendar ("scrubbed" and "virtually useless," in Holmer’s opinion), rather than the more descriptive document known as the working calendar. Many days, Newsom’s Prop. G calendar is blank, and seldom is there more than a few hours worth of activities, each one usually described in just a few words.

The Prop. G calendar seeks to comply with the minimum standards for calendars set forth in the city’s 1999 sunshine law: "The mayor … shall keep or cause to be kept a daily calendar wherein is recorded the time and place of each meeting or event attended by that official…. For meetings not otherwise publicly recorded, the calendar shall include a general statement of issues discussed."

The working calendar is a confidential document, the Mayor’s Office held in a letter responding to the Sunshine Posse’s complaint that the mayor was withholding public information. "The Mayor’s Office prepares a working calendar that is extremely detailed and accounts for his time from departure from home until his return in the evening," the letter states. "The working calendar contains not only the mayor’s meeting schedule, but also confidential information such as the officers assigned to protect him, security contact numbers, the mayor’s private schedule, details of his travel [etc.]. As with past administrations, the mayor’s staff keeps the working calendar and its contents confidential…. The computer system automatically deletes the working calendar after five days."

Despite this defense, the task force determined that the working calendar is in fact a public document that should be provided to the citizens. Doug Comstock was task force chair when the issue was heard. "We made it very clear that they have to turn over those documents," he says. "If there’s a document that’s being created using public monies and public funds, that is a more specific calendar, that’s the document that needs to be provided." Comstock also noted that it is possible for the Mayor’s Office to redact sensitive information that could pose a security risk. Nonetheless, he says, three years have passed and "the real calendar remains hidden from view."

When asked about the complaints regarding the calendar, Ballard responded, "Their criticism is baseless. We exceed far [sic] the requirements of the Sunshine Ordinance with the level of disclosure that we provide."

Erica Craven, an attorney who sits on the task force, believes there’s room for improvement on the mayor’s practices regarding sunshine. "My instinct is that there are a lot of people who work in the Mayor’s Office who are committed to open government," she says. "But there are some troubling things we’ve seen as well, such as complaints where the Mayor’s Office hasn’t sent a representative to respond to allegations. I would like to see a little bit more commitment and leadership on open government from the Mayor’s Office — I think it would set a good tone in City Hall."

In recent weeks, interest in the mayor’s schedule has intensified once again in light of the city’s financial predicament. In the face of a looming budget deficit of unprecedented size and with the economy in shambles and jobs at stake, journalists and affected citizens are seeking details about how the conundrum is being dealt with inside City Hall.

Last month, the Guardian filed a request under the Sunshine Ordinance for details on the mayor’s meetings about the budget, asking for "a list of all the labor and business leaders and supervisors that he’s met with about the budget, the dates of those meetings and how long they lasted, all documents associated with those meetings (including any agendas, communications to set up those meetings and follow-up communications after the meetings), and summaries of what was discussed at those meetings, including any outcomes or agreements."

Under the Sunshine Ordinance, such "immediate disclosure" requests are supposed be honored in two days’ time, but it took five days and a Guardian reminder for the Mayor’s Office to respond via e-mail, saying: "As you know, the Sunshine Ordinance does not require us to create documents. If you can point to a specific document that you’re seeking, I’d be happy to try and locate it for you."

Three days later, the Mayor’s Office forwarded the Prop. G calendar, which revealed that the mayor booked 7.5 hours of meetings about the budget crisis over the course of 17 days, none with labor representatives (whom Ballard said Newsom had met with). It included one-line entries disclosing whom he met with and when, but no information concerning the substance of the discussion. When the Guardian pressed for more information, the Mayor’s Office said there were no other documents associated with those meetings or any other information they were willing to provide.

Similarly, just last week, the Guardian tried to find out what the Mayor’s Office was doing about reports that Caltrain and the California High-Speed Rail Authority were balking at using the Transbay Terminal, citing technical concerns. On March 6, we asked who was working on the issue, what communications there had been with these agencies, and other basic information.

Ballard would say only that "The mayor is fully engaged in finding a comprehensive regional solution that ensures that high speed rail will come to the Transbay Terminal," and denied further requests for more substantive information.

Ballard acknowledges that the Mayor’s Office has "occasionally" been found to be in violation of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. However, he noted, "I can’t remember a time when the Ethics Commission did not overturn a task force decision against our office. In other words, most if not all task force decisions against us have, upon review, been found to be without merit."

Actually, the chronically under-funded Ethics Commission isn’t charged with judging whether SOTF findings have merit. The SOTF is the arbiter of whether the Sunshine Ordinance was violated, but it has no enforcement authority and therefore must rely on Ethics to pursue violations — if it has the will and resources to do so.

This touches on a trend that Knee says is a fundamental challenge to upholding the Sunshine Ordinance. "If the [task force] finds that there has been a willful violation … we can refer our findings to any or all of four entities: Ethics, the Board of Supervisors, the District Attorney, and the California Attorney General," Knee explains. "At one time or another we have made referrals to any or all of those organizations. And every single time, those entities have thrown out our findings. Not one complaint we have submitted has been upheld."

To remedy this, he says, a package of proposed reforms is in the works. "We want to give the task force some teeth," he says. "We want enforcement power of our own."

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

Newsom’s state secrets

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EDITORIAL On January 21st, his second day in office, President Barack Obama announced that he was dramatically changing the rules on federal government secrecy. His statement directly reversed, and repudiated, the paranoia and backroom dealings of the Bush administration.

"The Freedom of Information Act," the new president declared, "should be administered with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public."

The following day, Jan. 22, we sent an e-mail to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press secretary, Nathan Ballard. "Now that President Obama has made a dramatic change in federal FOI policy," we asked, "would Mayor Newsom would be willing to issue a similar executive order in San Francisco?"

Ballard’s response:

"We wholeheartedly agree with the President on this issue. The mayor has charged my office with handling sunshine requests for the executive branch of city government, and he has directed us to cooperate swiftly and comprehensively to all sunshine requests, and to err on the side of openness."

That, to put it politely, is horsepucky.

As we report in this issue, it’s difficult, and at times insanely difficult, to get even basic public information out of Newsom’s office. Take his calendar: by law, the mayor is required to make public his appointments calendar. Other public officials manage to do that — in fact, the president of the United States, who has a tad more national and personal security issues than the mayor of San Francisco, lets the press know what he’s doing almost every minute of every day.

Most days, though, what we get from Newsom’s office is a statement like, "The mayor has no public events scheduled today." Or, "The mayor is holding meetings at City Hall." Meetings with whom? What private events is he attending? What’s he do all day? What lobbyists, activists, public officials, or campaign donors is he talking to in his City Hall office? Why is that some huge state secret?

Or take the city’s terrifying budget problems. When Board of Supervisors President David Chiu began holding meetings with key stakeholders to look for a solution, Newsom refused to show up, saying there was no need. The mayor claimed he was holding his own meetings with everyone who needed to be involved.

That was news to many of the people in Chiu’s sessions. So who was the mayor talking to? The mayor’s office won’t tell us — and the limited calendar information he releases doesn’t shed any light, either.

The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force has repeatedly found Newsom directly in violation of the Sunshine Ordinance. Legions of reporters have run across the slammed door, the ducking, the non-responsiveness, and the general hostility of the mayor’s press office. As the White House comes out of the dark ages and starts to set new standards for open and honest government, San Francisco is not only lagging behind — this city’s chief executive is actively resisting.

We’re getting tired of this. The city attorney, district attorney, and Ethics Commission all have the mandate and ability to enforce the Sunshine Ordinance, but none have made that a priority. At this point, the only way the executive branch is going to comply is if the supervisors give the Sunshine Task Force the authority and resources to do its own enforcement.

In the meantime, somebody on the board ought to introduce Obama’s exact policy statement, replacing "Freedom of Information Act" with "San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance." And the Sunshine task force should begin an investigation into how the mayor’s press office is defying, on a regular basis, both the letter and the spirit of the city’s open-government law. *

Fisher’s Folly threatens the Presidio

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EDITORIAL The latest proposal for developing the Main Post at the Presidio national park shows exactly what’s wrong with the privatized, developer-driven planning that has plagued the 1,400-acre site since Rep. Nancy Pelosi took control of it away from the National Park System.

The centerpiece of the new plan, released last week, is the same old monument to the greed and ego of Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher. The octogenarian billionaire still gets his art museum, a three-building, 200,000-square-foot development that has no place at the Presidio. Oh, it’s not quite as ugly and intrusive the original design: most of the main gallery will be underground, and the roof will be green. How lovely.

The essential problem with the museum remains, and will continue to plague this development plan. The park is making room for a museum, which was never part of anyone’s vision for the new national park when the Army abandoned the post, purely and simply because a billionaire with powerful political connections wants a place to show off his personal art collection. Fisher’s desires are driving the shape of what ought to be a crown jewel of an urban park. The folks who once upon a time thought the Presidio could be a center for sustainable ecology never had a chance.

And a museum of contemporary art is a total mismatch for the Presidio’s main post. A museum is, by its nature, designed to attract large number of visitors — and since there’s only limited transit capacity in the Presidio, most of them will come by car. The center of the park will be overwhelmed with traffic — and so will the surrounding neighborhoods and the streets that serve as the chokepoints for the Presidio’s limited number of entrances and exits. Those cars will compete for space with the growing number of hikers and bicyclists trying to carve out a space in what is, by definition, a park.

The Main Post proposal also includes a large hotel (described as a "lodge," to conjure up images of rustic accommodations) that will feature a high-end restaurant and bar.

This commercialization of the Presidio stands as the legacy of the speaker of the house, who back in 1994 bowed to Republican demands and decided to take the new park away from the people who run every other national park in America and turn it over to a developer-run Presidio Trust. The trust was saddled with a mandate something no other park has ever faced — it has to develop enough real estate to become self-sufficient. And with Fisher as one of the early trust members, the Presidio has become part office park (with a big George Lucas complex that won the moviemaker a $60 million tax break), part shopping center — and now part museum and hotel complex.

This plan — and the overall dreadful direction the park is taking — can still be changed. The seven-member trust board is appointed by the president, and the Obama administration will soon have a chance to fill three of the slots. By tradition the local Congress member (Pelosi) would have a major say in those appointments — but Pelosi is close to Fisher and has set the Presidio on the wrong course. Obama ought to appoint credible environmentalists and preservationists who are wiling to question and oppose Fisher’s grand scheme.

Some well-meaning local museum foes think the best answer is to encourage Fisher to build his personal edifice somewhere else — say, in downtown San Francisco, where other museums are and where there’s adequate transit infrastructure. The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 to encourage Fisher to follow that path.

We wish he was willing to donate his contemporary art to SFMOMA which is perfectly suited to handle and display it. But Fisher wants total control, and no professional curator would ever accept that. So we’re willing to consider a new Fisher museum downtown. But the city shouldn’t roll out the red carpet for it. If the Republican who made a fortune selling clothes sewn by children in third world sweat shops wants to buy some land and apply for a building permit, the city should treat him like any other developer. But Don Fisher, who has done almost nothing but damage to this city, deserves no special favors.

Daly introduces rule changes to aid struggling tenants

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By Rebecca Bowe

As the economic downturn deepens, millions in state and federal funds have been allocated to struggling homeowners who are falling behind on mortgage payments. Today, Supervisor Chris Daly will ask the Board of Supervisors to extend a life raft to another group of people who are worried about losing the roofs over their heads: tenants.

“Homeowners aren’t the only ones struggling with the financial crisis. Most San Franciscans are renters,” Daly points out. “It’s about time we do something to help tenants who are losing their homes. In this crisis, it is not appropriate for landlords to be raising rents that tenants can’t afford.”

Toward that end, Daly will introduce a “renters economic relief package” at today’s board meeting, which proposes several amendments to the city’s rent-control law. The three changes are designed to ease some of the pain for San Francisco renters, who face the pressure of rising rents even as the economy continues to slide. In 2009, the Board of Realtors projects a 7 percent rent increase for vacant units, a measure that’s looked to as a barometer for how the rental market is behaving, according to Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union.

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