Here’s a good idea to further localize the effort to stop the war in Iraq. See how the states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont are organizing efforts to pressure their state legislatures to stop the deployment of the National Guards, from their state to Iraq, on the orders of President Bush.
“It is clear that the mission that Congress authorized no longer exists. The President has no current or permanent legal authority to keep Guard members in Iraq. The Governor as Commander-in-Chief of the Vermont National Guard should take necessary steps to bring them home.”
~ Rep. Michael Fisher, Vermont State House
Let’s get a movement going in California. Let’s start by asking rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House and our San Francisco representative, up for reelection this fall, if she would support the movement or lead the charge.
EDITORIAL Working with environmentalist cover, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. have moved aggressively to derail a move that would have given the city control over some local power generation. Instead, the mayor is now pushing to keep Mirant Corp. running the one electricity plant that still operates within city limits.
The politics of the deal are complicated, but the driving force is clear: PG&E didn’t want the city moving even a small step toward public power, and as usual, the big utility is getting its way.
The power plant deal proves exactly why Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin should move forward with a November charter amendment for public power.
As Amanda Witherell reports, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has been trying for years now to win approval for three city-owned combustion turbines that would generate electric power at a plant at the foot of Potrero Hill. The idea: the turbines, also known as "peakers," would generate enough power during peak-use periods to convince the state to shut down the dirtier Mirant Plant.
Many environmentalists opposed the proposal, saying that the city shouldn’t be building any new fossil-fuel plants. That’s a legitimate argument. But California’s Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the agency that controls the electric grid, insisted that renewable energy alone wouldn’t provide enough reliable power for San Francisco, and said the only way to shut down Mirant was to put in the peakers.
PG&E has been trying for months to derail the peakers — not, of course, out of any concern for the environment, but because the city would own the power plants. At first Newsom stuck by his PUC — but after seven PG&E lobbyists came into his office and gave him the facts of life (see "PG&E offers Newsom a blank check" at sfbg.com), he backed down. And now, after meeting with the CEOs of PG&E and Mirant, Newsom is pushing the worst possible alternative: he wants to retrofit the Mirant plant and let the private company operate its own peakers.
Same fossil fuel plants in the Bayview. Same type of air pollution. And the facility would be owned by a private company.
The supervisors need to reject this proposal with extreme prejudice — and the environmentalists who fought the city peakers ought to be just as loud in their opposition to Mirant’s retrofit.
The good news is that this ridiculous Newsom–PG&E deal ought to put the focus at City Hall back on public power, because that’s the only way to create a really green power profile in San Francisco.
Matthew Wald, who has coved energy policy for decades, wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times June 8 discussing why no private company wants to invest money in technology that would reduce carbon emissions from power plants. "Cutting carbon dioxide emissions is a fine idea, and a lot of companies would be proud to do it," Wald wrote. "But they would prefer to be second, if not third or fourth."
That’s because no private utility wants to take the risks and try something new that another company could then copy. In economic terms, carbon reduction is a public good — it’s something that benefits everyone, and nobody has the exclusive right to make money off of it. Private companies have been notoriously bad at investing in public goods.
But that’s not how public power agencies work. A San Francisco power agency would have every motivation to develop and use technology that saves consumers money or protects the environment. There’s no issue of profits to protect; in fact, one of the mandates of a city agency should be reducing carbon emissions and promoting renewable energy.
We have always been sympathetic to the concerns that the city-owned peakers would emit greenhouse gases. But if the city owned the plants, the city could shut them down anytime, whenever enough renewables were available. Mirant won’t shut down anything that is bringing in cash.
Mirkarimi and Peskin are working on the details of a public power measure, but the outlines ought to be clear: it should mandate that the SFPUC create and implement a plan to put the city in the retail power business, in compliance with the letter and spirit of the Raker Act — and get rid of PG&E and Mirant. The supervisors should put that on the November ballot.
The question may seem strange to voters who just gave Lennar the green light to redevelop the Shipyard and Candlestick Point by voting Yes on Proposition G.
But it sure looks like there’s a major financial problem at Lennar’s construction site on Parcel A of the Shipyard ( the first piece of land on the former naval base to be developed), judging from documents obtained from the City.
“Without the requested $25,021,079 Infill grant allocation, our infrastructure project faces a serious risk of being mothballed,” wrote Stephen Maduli-Williams, Deputy Executive Director of Community and Economic Development for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, on May 23, 2008. “The project would face increased costs from work stoppage, remobilization efforts and substantial change orders.”
Maduli-Williams was writing to Wanda Yepez, a grant program manager at the California Department of Housing and Community Development, to appeal a grant application that Yepez determined as ineligible a week earlier, on May 16, 2008.
In his May 23 appeal, Maduli Williams stated that, “In addition to setting national benchmarks in the percentage (in terms of total units developed) and affordability level of housing units created, this project sets benchmarks with its level of developer commitment/investment as well as other community benefits (Legacy Fund).”
It’s one of California’s oldest prisons still in operation if not the oldest. The San Quentin State Prison was first built in July of 1852 at Point Quentin in Marin County just north of here on more than 400 pristine acres of Northern California land.
It’s history is illustrious. Johnny Cash performed a live concert there in 1969, you might have heard. Metallica shot the video for “St. Anger” there as well in 2003, which would have been a lot cooler if it was 20 years before and the song was “Dyers Eve,” but whatever.
San Quentin’s also the place where the major news cable networks like to go when they want to do a two-hour reality special titled something like “Dudes Looking Murderous in Front of a Camera While a Voiceover Describes the Prison’s Simple Day-to-Day Operations, But No One’s Really Paying Attention to the Reporter Because They’re Engrossed by the Distant Prospect That the Guy With Tattoos on His Head Playing Cards Might at Any Moment Stab in the Throat the Guy Playing Bones Nearby.”
Larry King did one recently where he kept asking a group of pre-selected inmates to detail their stories of prison rape and clandestine drug use, but they mostly wanted to talk about rehabilitation and missing their kids.
Anyway, San Quentin also houses all of California’s male condemned inmates, the people scheduled to be executed for committing murder and/or littering in Marin County and/or not voting for Mark Leno. Pumping poison into condemned jail inmates is a costly business, more costly than simply jailing them for life, anti-death penalty advocates contend, if you factor in all of the appeals and the special housing requirements.
Marianne Moore takes you on a guided tour through the often confusing, always thrilling world of Bay Area alternative housing
We all know San Francisco housing is murder, with median rent for a one-bedroom apartment going for nearly $2200. So when I came home from college for my sweet but unpaid SF Bay Guardian internship, I knew I would have to be resourceful. I was prepared to live anywhere and do (almost) anything, as long as it was cheap. If you’re a local reading this via free wireless in your rent-controlled apartment (enjoy it while it lasts!), you may find this information irrelevant and stressful; or maybe you’ve been through it all. But if, like me, you can visit the beautiful Bay only for too-short summers, or you’re passing through or in transition, read on.
Home sweet hostel? Not if you’re local.
The USA hostel on Post, like most hostels, will sometimes let you work a certain number of hours per week in exchange for a free bed. You have to work at least 24 hours and the nightly rate is $25 for paying guests, so it comes out to about $7.50 an hour, well below minimum wage in San Francisco. When I tried to arrange things over the phone from New York, I was told by the bored-sounding receptionist that I would just have to show up for a couple nights so they could “see if they liked me.” That made me a little nervous, but since I’m not totally unlikable I still thought it was worth a try. When I checked in and presented my California driver’s license, I was told that I wouldn’t be allowed to stay unless I could show an out-of-state ID. Apparently the company has a policy against boarding California residents, a policy specifically designed (it seems to me) to keep out homeless people. This isn’t typical for hostels; places I’ve stayed in New York City are regularly used as stopgaps by people between apartments. I couldn’t help but think that the hostel shuts out native Californians to protect their guests (mostly drunk-ass Eurotrash on holiday) from the realities of life in SF, presenting a tourist experience in line with trips to Ghiradelli Square and Pier 39.That, plus the popularity contest application process, had me heading straight for the nearest internet café and the dizzying wilderness of options that is Craig’s List .
LOCAL ARTIST Tara Tucker TITLEDouble Trouble THE STORY “My work is about natural history and human psychology. All the animals in Double Trouble are from Africa. The secretary bird eats snakes. The snake in Double Trouble is a green mamba, a really dangerous part of the cobra family. The baboon is ‘me,’ and I’m hanging with my friend that is a bit of a user, but eats snakes.” BIO Tara Tucker lives in Berkeley and teaches at Creative Growth in Oakland. She has an MFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts and is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery, where she had a solo show in 2007. SHOW “Resisting Dominion: Nature and New Political Narratives,” Thurs/12 through August 16. Wed.–Sat., noon–5 p.m. Opening reception: Thurs/12, 6–8 p.m. San Francisco Arts Commission Art Gallery, 401 Van Ness, SF. (415) 554-6080. www.sfacgallery.org WEB SITE www.taratucker.blogspot.com
While PG&E is requesting the California Public Utilities Commission allow them a 6.5 percent electricity rate hike over the next six months, ostensibly to cover skyrocketing natural gas prices, they’re telling local citizens they’re expecting prices to drop.
In Marin County, our neighbors to the north have been listening to PG&E lobbyists criticize their county’s plan to provide 100 percent renewable energy to residents through Community Choice Aggregation. Their CCA plan, called Marin Clean Energy, will offer customers 25 percent renewable energy by 2009 twice what PG&E offers, and for the same rate. Customers who want to pay a little more can go 100 percent renewable right out of the gate. Ultimately, they’ll scale the 25 up to 51 percent by 2013, and 100 percent thereafter.
Marin argues that 100 percent renewable energy is a more fiscally responsible way to go – precisely because natural gas prices are volatile and will continue to rise. But PG&E says Marin’s plan is too risky and too costly. You can read PG&E’s critique of the plan, and Marin’s apt rebuttal, here.
But recent testimony from Dawn Weisz, MCE’s planner, sums it up pretty succinctly.
“Their [PG&E’s] main criticism is that we won’t be able to achieve the cost benefits,” Weisz told a May 23, 2008 meeting of San Francisco’s Local Agency Formation Commission, who had invited her to brief them on their CCA’s progress. Weisz said they had an independent third party analyze the CCA plan and PG&E’s critique.
The analyst found a key flaw in PG&E’s logic. “They’re using a gas forecast that assumes gas will be 14 percent cheaper in 12 years,” Weisz said.
At this, the entire LAFCO board broke out in laughter. Any sane person knows that isn’t going to happen. As Weisz pointed out, natural gas prices rose an average of 30 percent over the last five years, and as the San Francisco Chronicle reported today, they’re 63 percent higher than they were a year ago. Natural gas is a fossil fuel just like crude oil, and speculators are having their day with it, too.
But PG&E is using their estimate to contend their prices will be cheaper than MCE’s over the long run, so you best not switch services. And as we can see from the awkwardly placed chart to the left, PG&E”s rates have only and ever gone up.
As PG&E continues to cling to their fossil fuel infrastructure, and combats communities who attempt to prove viable, renewable alternatives are possible, we should expect to see PG&E pleading at the CPUC for more and more rate hikes.
GREEN CITY Mayor Gavin Newsom finally outlined what he calls a "more promising way forward than the current proposal" of building two publicly owned power plants in San Francisco.
The way forward: retrofit three existing diesel turbines at the Mirant-Potrero Power Plant, while simultaneously shutting down Mirant’s most polluting smokestack, Unit 3.
Newsom wrote a letter to the Board of Supervisors just before a June 3 hearing on the power plants, describing a May 23 meeting that he convened with SFPUC General Manager Ed Harrington, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, California Independent System Operator President Yakout Mansour, California Public Utilities Commission Chair Mike Peevey, Mirant CEO Ed Muller, and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. CEO Bill Morrow.
"In the meeting, we vetted the possibility of retrofitting the diesel turbines [currently owned and operated by Mirant] and asked each stakeholder to give us the necessary commitments to advance this alternative," Newsom wrote. The board then voted to shelve the power plant plan until July 15 so the retrofit option can be vetted.
Most significant, Newsom’s meeting with top dogs at energy companies, who stand to lose a lot from San Francisco owning its own power source — and the resulting correspondence — elicited a new response from Cal-ISO, the state’s power grid operator, about exactly how much electricity generation San Francisco needs.
For the first time, Cal-ISO said it will allow Mirant’s Unit 3 to close as early as 2010, when the 400-MW Transbay Cable comes online, saying that the city no longer needs to install a combustion turbine peaker plant at the airport.
Sup. Sophie Maxwell expressed frustration that the questions she, her staff, and other stakeholders have been asking for the past several years are suddenly getting different answers. "I think we’re seeing a big movement by Cal-ISO. This is huge. Before, we asked all these questions, [but] they weren’t saying what they’re saying now," she told the Guardian after the hearing.
When asked why she thought this was happening now, she simply pointed to PG&E. "Who stands to benefit from us not generating our own power? Who sent out all that stuff?" she asked, referring to the flyers depicting filthy power plants that PG&E has been mailing to residents in an effort to drum up public sentiment against the city’s plan to build peakers. "Have they been concerned about what’s clean, about our people?"
Some environmental activists are hailing the change as a triumph. "David has just moved Goliath, but we need to keep pushing," said Josh Arce of Brightline Defense, which sued to stop the city’s plan to build the two power plants. He said his organization’s goal is ultimately to have no fossil fuel plants in the city. But when asked about the retrofit alternative, he said, "We don’t support it; we don’t not support it."
Cal-ISO has insisted that San Francisco needs 150 MW of electricity to stave off blackouts. This grid reliability is currently provided by Mirant-Potrero, but the plant’s Unit 3 is the greatest stationary source of pollution in the city. Bayview residents, who have borne a disproportionate share of the city’s industrial pollution, have been agitating for more than seven years to close the plant. Much of the leadership has come from Maxwell, who represents the district and has championed the plan to replace the older Mirant units with four new ones owned and operated by the city.
That vision was integrated into San Francisco’s 2004 Energy Action Plan, which Cal-ISO has used as a guiding document for the city’s energy future. The plan outlines a way to close Mirant by installing four CTs and 200 MW of replacement power. "Cal-ISO has consistently said in writing, in verbal instructions, and at meetings, that the CTs are the only specific project that was sufficient to remove the RMR [reliability must-run contract] from Mirant," said SFPUC spokesperson Tony Winnicker.
As San Francisco’s energy plans have evolved over recent years, SFPUC staff have been instructed at numerous public hearings in front of the Board of Supervisors to ask Cal-ISO if all four CTs are still necessary. Letters obtained by the Guardian show Cal-ISO has never said the airport CT isn’t necessary until now. When asked why, Cal-ISO spokesperson Stephanie McCorkle said, "The questions are not the same. That’s why the answers are different."
When pushed for more details on what’s different, she said, "We feel the introduction of the Mirant retrofit fundamentally changes our approach to the fourth peaker. I think it’s the megawatts. It’s basically the retrofit that changes the picture."
Mirant’s peakers currently put out 156 MW, an amount that may be reduced by retrofitting. The city’s three peakers would produce 150 MW. Winnicker couldn’t explain why the story is changing, telling us, "We’re really deferring to the leadership of the mayor and the board because they’ve been able to get a really different view from Cal-ISO than we’ve been able to get."
"We’ve always said we’re open to alternatives," McCorkle said. "We can only evaluate what’s presented to us and the Mirant retrofit was only presented in mid-May." Opponents of the peaker plan say the new position indicates SFPUC officials haven’t been pushing Cal-ISO hard enough or asking the right questions.
"The city hasn’t done its due diligence insisting on different configurations of the peakers," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told us. "What we’re learning now we could have learned two years ago." He went on to add, "With the abundant paper trail, one can only surmise or conclude there may have been a presupposed bias on the part of the PUC to the answers expected from Cal-ISO."
The SFPUC has been instructed by the mayor’s office to determine if Mirant retrofit diesels would be as clean as the city’s CTs. Until that can be proved, some are withholding support.
"I haven’t seen any information that a Mirant retrofit is as clean as the peakers," City Attorney Dennis Herrera told the Guardian. "From my perspective, I want the most environmentally clean solution."
To that end, some would like to see a formal presentation to Cal-ISO of a "transmission-only" alternative, which would outline a number of line upgrades and efficiencies that would obviate the need for any in-city power plants. Sup. Maxwell introduced a resolution urging the SFPUC to put such a proposal before Cal-ISO and to enact strict criteria for any alternative to the city’s CTs.
"We need to remember that Mirant was a bad actor. Mirant is not to be trusted," Maxwell said. "We sued them and we won our suit," she added, citing litigation brought by the city against the private company for operating the power plants in excess of its permitted hours and for market manipulation during the 2001-02 energy crisis.
Maxwell’s legislation, cosigned by six other supervisors, lays those concerns out and cautions, "In view of this history, the city should be cautious and vigilant in taking any steps that expand the operation of Mirant’s facilities in San Francisco."
The legislation also reminds policymakers that San Francisco’s Electricity Resource Plan identifies eight specific goals — one of which is to "increase local control over energy resources." It goes on to say, "City ownership of electric generating supplies can reduce the risk of market power abuses and enable the city to mandate the use of cleaner fuels when feasible or to close down any such generation when it is no longer needed."
Maxwell’s resolution also outlines a series of conditions that any alternative to the city’s peakers would have to meet. The alternative would have to be as clean or cleaner than the city peakers, have the same comprehensive community benefits package that was attached to the city’s peaker plan, have no impact on the bay’s water, and only be run for reliability needs.
The City Attorney’s Office said these criteria are not set in stone — it’s a resolution and therefore requires some level of enforcement or action. Mirkarimi, who signed on to the resolution, is still uncomfortable with it as it stands, saying it should include discussion of the city’s new community choice aggregation (CCA) plan for creating renewable public power projects.
Some environmentalists cautioned that the transmission-only approach still leaves too much control in the hands of others. "We shouldn’t let PG&E be the ones to solve this problem," said Eric Brooks, a Green Party rep and founder of Community Choice Energy Alliance. He’s urging city officials to put all the city’s energy intentions — from the CCA plan for 51 percent renewables by 2017 to an exploration of city-funded transmission upgrades — into a presentation for Cal-ISO.
Brooks noted a conspicuous absence from the May 23 meeting with the mayor: "CCA and environmentalists weren’t at the table, as usual."
San Francisco politics shifted June 3 as successful new coalitions altered the electoral landscape heading into the high-stakes fall contests, when seven of the 11 seats on the Board of Supervisors are up for grabs.
Progressives had a good election night even as lefty shot-caller Sup. Chris Daly suffered a pair of bitter defeats. And Mayor Gavin Newsom scored a rare ballot box victory when the southeast development measure Proposition G passed by a wide margin, although voters repudiated Newsom’s meddling with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission by approving Prop. E.
But the big story wasn’t these two lame duck politicians, who have served as the two poles of local politics for the past few years. It was Mark Leno, who handed Sen. Carole Migden her first electoral defeat in 25 years by bringing together progressives and moderates and waging an engaged, effective ground campaign. In the process, he may have offered a portent of things to come.
The election night speech Leno gave just before midnight — much like his entire campaign — didn’t break along neat ideological lines. There were solidly progressive stands, like battling the religious right’s homophobia, pledging to pursue single-payer health care, and blasting Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for funding sleazy attack pieces against him, reaffirming his commitment to public power.
But he also thanked Newsom and other moderate supporters and heaped praise on his political consulting firm, BMWL, which has run some of downtown’s nastiest campaigns. "It was clean, it was smart, and it was effective," Leno said of his campaign.
The Migden campaign, which had the support of Daly and many prominent local progressives, often looked dirty by comparison, marred by past campaign finance violations that resulted in Migden getting slapped with the biggest fine in state history and by Daly’s unethical misuse of the Guardian logo on a mailer that made it appear as if we had endorsed Migden.
Old alliances seemed to crumble around this election, leaving open questions about how coalitions will form going into an important November election that’s expected to have a crowded ballot and huge turnout.
UNITY AND DIVISION
There are things that unite almost all San Franciscans, like support for public schools. In this election that support came in the form of Prop. A — a measure that will increase teacher salaries through a parcel tax of about $200 per property owner — which garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.
"These numbers show that people believe in public education. They believe in what we’re doing," school superintendent Carlos Garcia told a jubilant election night crowd inside the Great American Music Hall.
Also uniting the city’s Democrats was the news that Barack Obama sewed up the party’s presidential nomination June 3, ending a primary battle with Hillary Clinton that had created a political fissure here and in cities across the country.
"The winds of change are blowing tonight. Let me congratulate Barack Obama on his victory," Leno said on election night, triggering a chant of "Yes we can" from the crowd at the Upper Market bar/restaurant Lime.
Local Clinton supporters were already switching candidates on election night, even before Clinton dropped her campaign and announced her support for Obama four days later.
"As a strong Hillary person, I’m so excited to be working for Obama these next five months," DCCC District 13 member Laura Spanjian, who won reelection by placing fourth out of 12 slots, said on election night. "It’s my number one goal this fall."
Leno also sounded conciliatory themes. In his election night speech, Leno acknowledged the rift he created in the progressive and LGBT communities by challenging Migden: "I know that you upset the applecart when you challenge a sitting senator."
But he vowed to repair that damage, starting by leading the fight against the fall ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriage and overturn the recent California Supreme Court decision that legalized it. He told the crowd, "I invite you to join together to defeat the religious right."
A day later we asked Leno about whether his victory represented a new political center in San Francisco and he professed a desire to avoid the old political divisions: "Let’s focus on our commonalities rather than differences," he said, "because there is real strength in a big-tent coalition."
But this election was more about divisions than unity, splits whose repercussions will ripple into November in unknown ways. Shortly before the election, Daly publicly blasted "Big Labor" after the San Francisco Labor Council cut a deal with Lennar Corporation, agreeing to support Prop. G in exchange for the promise of more affordable housing and community benefits.
On election night, Newsom couldn’t resist gloating over besting Daly, whose affordable housing measure Prop. F lost big. "I couldn’t be more proud that the voters of San Francisco supported a principled proposal over the political proposal of a politician," Newsom told us on election night, adding, "Today was a validation of community investment and involvement over political games."
While Daly and some of his progressive allies have long warned that Leno is too close to Newsom to be trusted, one of the first points in Leno’s speech was the celebrate the passage of Prop. E, which gives the Board of Supervisors more power to reject the mayor’s appointees to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. "As an early supporter I was happy to see that," Leno said.
Susan Leal, the former SFPUC director who was ousted by Newsom earlier this year, said she felt some vindication from the vote on Prop. E, but mostly she was happy that people saw through the false campaign portrayals (which demonized the Board of Supervisors and erroneously said the measure gave it control over the SFPUC.)
"This is one of the few PUCs where people are appointed and doing the mayor’s bidding is the only qualification," Leal told us on election night.
Sup. Tom Ammiano, who will be headed to the Assembly next year, agreed: "It shows the beauty contest with the mayor is over and people are willing to hold him accountable."
ANALYZING THE RESULTS
On the day after the election, during a postmortem at the downtown office of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, political consultants Jim Stearns and David Latterman sized up the results.
Latterman called the Prop. E victory "the one surprise in the race." The No on E campaign sought to demonize the Board of Supervisors, a strategy that clearly didn’t work. Firing Leal, a lesbian, helped spur the city’s two major LGBT groups — the Harvey Milk and Alice B. Toklas Democratic clubs — to endorse the measure, which could have been a factor when combined with the high LGBT turnout.
"This may have ridden the coattails of the Leno-Migden race," Stearns said.
In that race, Stearns and Latterman agreed that Leno ran a good campaign and Migden didn’t, something that was as big a factor in the outcome as anything.
"Migden did too little too late. The numbers speak for themselves. Leno ran a really good race," Latterman said, noting how Leno beat Migden by a large margin in San Francisco and came within a few thousand votes of beating Joe Nation on his home turf of Marin County.
"It was a big deal for Leno to get so close to Nation in Marin," Stearns said.
Leno told us the polling his campaign did late last year and early this year showed he had a strong advantage in San Francisco, "so with that, I invested a lot of time and energy in Marin County."
Stearns attributed the big Prop. G win to its large base of influential supporters: "The coalition-building was what put this over the top." Daly chalked it up to the $4 million that Lennar spent, saying it had bought the election. But Stearns, who was a consultant for the campaign, didn’t agree: "I don’t think money alone ever wins or loses campaigns."
Yet he said the lack of money and an organized No on G/Yes on F campaign did make it difficult to stop the Lennar juggernaut. "You need to have enough money to get your message out," Stearns said, noting that "Nobody knew that the Sierra Club opposed [Prop. G]."
In the one contested judge’s race on the ballot, Gerardo Sandoval finished in a virtual dead heat with incumbent Judge Thomas Mellon. The two will face off again in a November runoff election because a third candidate, Mary Mallen, captured about 13 percent of the vote.
"How angry is Sandoval with Mallen now?" Latterman asked at the SPUR event. "If that 13 percent wasn’t there, Sandoval wins."
Both Latterman and Stearns agreed that this election was Sandoval’s best shot at unseating a sitting judge. "He’s going to face a tougher test in November," Stearns said.
The other big news was the lopsided defeat of Prop. 98, which would have abolished rent control and limits on condo conversions in addition to its main stated aim of restricting the use of eminent domain by local governments.
"It just lost bad," Latterman said of Prop. 98, the second extreme property rights measure to go down in recent years. "It just needs to go away now…. This was a resounding, ‘Just go away now, please.’<0x2009>"
LOOKING FORWARD
Aside from the Leno victory, this election was most significant in setting up future political battles. And progressives won a big advantage for the battles to come by picking up seats on the city’s two Democratic County Central Committees, a successful offensive engineered largely by Daly and Peskin, who were both elected to the eastside DCCC District 13.
"On the DCCC level, we took back the Democratic Party," said Robert Haaland, a progressive who was reelected to the DCCC District 13.
"The fight now is over the chair. The chair decides where the resources go and sets the priorities, so you can really do a lot," Haaland told us.
Many of the fall supervisorial contests feature races between two or three bona fide progressives, so those candidates are going to need to find issues or alliances that will broaden their bases.
In District 9, for example, the candidates include housing activist Eric Quezada (who lost his DCCC race), school board president Mark Sanchez, and Police Commission member David Campos — all solid progressives, all Latino, and all with good bases of support.
Campos finished first in his DCCC District 13 race just ahead of Peskin. Speaking on election night at the GAMH, Campos attributed his strong showing to walking lots of precincts and meeting voters, particularly in the Mission, an effort that will help him in the fall.
"A lot of Latino voters are really eager to be more involved [in politics]," Campos said. "Speaking the language and being an immigrant really connects with them."
Campos thinks public safety will be a big issue on voters’ minds this fall, an issue where he has strength and one that progressives have finally seized. "Until Ross Mirkarimi came along, progressives really weren’t talking about it," Campos said.
So, does Campos’ strong DCCC showing make him the front runner? When I asked that question during the SPUR event, Latterman said he didn’t think so. He noted that Sanchez has always had strong finishes on his school board races, citywide contests that includes the Portola area in District 9 but not in DCCC District 13. In fact, Latterman predicted lots of acrimony and close contests this November.
"If you like the anger of Leno vs. Migden, we’ll have more in the fall," Latterman said of the competitive supervisorial races.
Leno hasn’t been terribly active in local contests since heading to Sacramento, and he told us that his focus this fall will be on state ballot fights and the presidential race. He hasn’t made endorsements in many supervisorial races yet, but his two so far are both of progressives: Ross Mirkarimi in District 5, and David Chiu in District 3. And as he makes more supervisorial endorsements in the coming months, Leno told us, "I will be fighting for progressive voices."
Sup. Chris Daly wants an immediate hearing into the fiscal health of Lennar’s construction project at Hunters Point Shipyard, (you know, the one where they repeatedly messed up the asbestos dust monitoring).
Daly made his request at the June 10 Board of Supervisors meeting, following the discovery that the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency has applied for, but has so far been denied, a $25 million grant to subsidize infrastructure costs at the site.
The agency filed its grant application with the California Department of Housing and Community Development in April 2008. During that same period, Lennar spent an estimated $5 million to successfully persuade voters to support Proposition G, which will allow Lennar to develop luxury condos at Candlestick Point, as well as at the Shipyard.
(At the last minute, Lennar appeared to sweeten Prop.G’s terms, by negotiating a community benefits deal with the San Francisco Labor Council, including promises of 32 percent affordable housing and job creation investment. But tthe deal stretches the definition of “affordable” to way above what your average Bayview Hunters Point resident earns. And it only becomes legally binding, if, and when, something gets built at Candlestick/Hunters Point.)
Holding up a big fat binder, stufed with spreadsheets, financial data and grant applications, Daly read aloud to his fellow supervisors from documents that suggest that there is a serious financial shortfall at the Parcel A site, where Lennar graded an entire hillside in preparation for developing a 1,500 unit condominium complex.
“This raises questions about Parcel A and the mixed use project,” said Daly, citing from documnents that claim that the receipt of gap funding, “will restore the ability of the SFRA and the Developer to continue the development.g
As the agency’s own grant application states, “The Gap Funding in the amount of $25,021,079 provided by the infill infrastructure grant will enable the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the land master developer to continue the development of the Shipyard.”
“The infill infrastructure grant will be instrumental in moving forward the Capital Improvement Project in light of exisiting market conditions and increased construction costs.”
“Without the receipt of the grant, it will face delays in the timing of the completion of the infrastructure and creation of much needed parks.”
Hmm.
Daly’s cache of documents also reveal that the Shipyard Legacy Fund has shrunk from $30 million to $5 million. This raises serious doubts about the City’s ability to deliver on a list of promised community benefits at the Shipyard.
According to the SFRA’s own documents, “The Legacy fund is charged with reinvestment of the Agency’s proceeds from net land sales back into the BVHP community with an emphasis on employment, housing and financial/asset development, youth development, elder services, arts/culture & recreation and environment/safety.”
REVIEW We photograph stuff and immediately pass it on to everyone who has Internet access. We ingest news events recorded only moments ago — and expect information on the next event even before it has completely unfolded. Artist Suzanne Husky is also driven to document what is happening right now: from social concerns to what she witnesses in her community. But she doesn’t give it to us flat, like so much documentation via electronic media. Instead, Husky renders her vision in 3-D and makes them potentially huggable.
In her current show at Triple Base Gallery, Husky has sewn, stuffed, and collaged a miniature wonderland that merges her social network with ecological and pop-cultural concerns. The initial effect of the installation is like seeing a grade-schooler’s attempt to recreate a Christmas window at FAO Schwartz. But these toy-size dioramas were designed for adults to contemplate. That desire to immediately disseminate information, the urge to make real what is only flat onscreen, and seeing the big picture are some of the ideas that come to mind when viewing her work — after you’re done chuckling over details like the composting toilet (Humanure). Husky wants her viewers to become social anthropologists and make their own connections. Using photographs for doll faces so there is no mistaking who is represented, the artist gives us Kobe Bryant dunking a basketball, her friends at a gallery opening, and that ever-present naked guy doing yoga in Berkeley Hot Tub. The herd from the Highway 5 stockyards, Chinese factory workers, and an activist aloft in the University of California, Berkeley oak trees also are reproduced with sad and funny results.
YOU MAKE ME MAKE YOU Through June 29. Artists Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine discuss Husky’s work at a dinner lecture, June 27, 7 p.m.; e-mail triplebase@gmail.com for reservations. Thurs.–Sun., noon–5 p.m. Triple Base, 3041 24th St., SF. (303) 909-5481, www.basebasebase.com
Wouldn’t a martial-arts program be a better option?(Photo of Master Jung from Koreanmartialarts.com
Okay, I’m all for getting rid of JROTC in the public schools. But I also recognize that there are some kids — about 1,600 — who like the program and get something out of it.
So the School Board has been looking around for an alternative — and I’m sorry, but this is never going to work.
Ethnic studies is a great idea, and ought to be part of the SFUSD curriculum. But the kids and parents who support JROTC aren’t going to see it as a viable alternative. And it’s pretty clear why.
Ethnic studies sounds like a class. JROTC is popular in some circles because it’s not just classroom education. It’s physical activity, it’s fun, it’s leadership development and it has a community-building element. The most popular part of the program, I’m told, is the marching band.
You need something that offers the same sort of attractions, but isn’t a military recruitment tool. And it seems to me there are plenty of options.
School Board members have talked about trying to find a program that feeds into the San Francisco Fire Department or even the Police Department. I don’t love the police option, but hey: Better to get kids interested in law enforcement than in the Army (and it might actually help San Francisco recruit some local people with community roots to be police officers). And a junior firefighter-paramedic program would have all kinds of benefits. The district hasn’t been able to work anything out with those options, though, in part because there’s no existing infrastucture; you can’t send 14-year-olds to the Police Academy, and the city’s paramedic classes are limited to people 18 and older.
But there’s another solution, too — and it seems pretty obvious to me.
San Francisco already has at least 50 good martial-arts schools and clubs that teach kids. I’ve been involved in Tae Kwon Do for almost 20 years, and my son is now a student at the Korean Martial Arts Center , and I can tell you that these classes offer physical fitness, confidence building, leadership development, and create communities and team spirit. You get uniforms. You learn to respect yourself and others. Good programs, and there are plenty around, teach conflict resolution and nonviolence.
And it’s fun and really cool.
Best of all, the infrastructure already exists.
The SFUSD spends $800,000 a year on JROTC. Most martial arts clubs in San Francisco are financially modest operations, and most instructors aren’t in if for the money. Getting a group of local martial arts clubs to set up satellite programs in the schools would be cheap. (The schools already have facilities and insurance, and the uniforms and equipment are — by the standards of what we spend on JROTC — inexpensive.
The kids now get phys ed credit for JROTC — another big attraction — but that’s a stretch anyway, since the state now requires phys ed teachers to have a California teaching certificate and none of the JROTC instructors qualify. Figure out a way around that for martial-arts instructors and you’d have it made.
I called Jane Kim, a school board member who’s on the curriculum committee, and she told me she was a little startled by the Ethnic Studies proposal, too. “We’ve been pushing the district to create an Ethnic Studies plan for a long time now,” she said, “but I was surprised to see that they combined that with replacing JROTC.” She’s a little dubious about this plan, too.
“We’re going to keep the marching band, though,” she said. “That’s a given.”
It looks like the city of Fresno will be writing a big fat check to 225 homeless people who sued when city workers trashed their belongings in a series of raids on encampments in 2006.
Homeless people, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and the private firm of Heller Ehrman LLP, filed a class action lawsuit against the city of Fresno and the California Department of Transportation, claiming their possessions were seized and destroyed without their notice. Back in 2006, the city was barred from continuing the raids by a preliminary injunction. And today United States District Judge Oliver W. Wanger gave preliminary approval to a $2.35 million dollar settlement for what occurred during those raids.
“It’s completely unprecedented,” LCCR’s, Anayma de Frias, told us, adding that they’d been hoping to get something, but nothing as substantial as this.
Questions were raised in court yesterday about the ability of SF Weekly and their parent company, Village Voice Media, to pay the $15.6 million judgment that the Bay Guardian won in its predatory pricing lawsuit against the chain – or even to secure the bond needed to move forward with appeals.
Weekly attorney Rod Kerr argued the defendant’s motion for a stay of the judgment until 10 days after Judge Marla Miller rules on post-trial motions. Those motions are scheduled to be heard on July 8 and the judge has 10 days to rule, meaning the enforcement of the judgment could have been delayed until July 28.
Kerr argued that turmoil in the financial markets and the need for VVM to get approval from its lenders is making it difficult to secure the bond. “Without the post trial decisions, they’re not willing to release the collateral,” he said in court. “I think it’s a very reasonable request under the circumstances.”
Kerr said he believed there was a likelihood that the judgment amount would be substantially lowered during post-trial rulings, something that the company has also represented to its lenders. The difficulty in obtaining a bond for the full amount was also emphasized in a written declaration by SF Weekly’s chief financial officer, Jed Brunst.
Guardian attorney Ralph Alldredge, speaking to the court via telephone while his co-counsels Richard Hill and Craig Moody were present, reiterated a previous offer to stay enforcement until June 18, which is 30 days after the judgment was entered following the March jury verdict.
But Alldredge said the statements and briefs by the defendants raise serious concerns about whether they’re prepared to cover the full judgment, so the Guardian needs to be able to take steps to ensure that assets are being identified and secured to satisfy the judgment.
“They anticipate post trial motions will result in a reduction of the verdict, so apparently their lenders have been told that,” Alldredge said, adding, “The lenders need to be told the judgment is likely to be the final amount.”
The combination of problems securing a bond in the full amount and the defendant’s optimistic belief that they won’t have to pay the full $15.6 million raise concerns about whether the Guardian is going to get paid, he said.
“That’s a very shaky situation and it implies some risk that the bond may never be issued,” Alldredge said.
Hill also told the court that given the fact that Village Voice Media assets are spread across a number of states, it will be a long and difficult process for the Guardian to recover its judgment if VVM isn’t able to secure a bond and a long delay now would make that even more difficult.
Judge Miller agreed with the Guardian position, granting the stay only until June 18 but allowing the defendants to return to court to ask for more time if they can provide evidence showing how it will result in a bond being issued.
“I am concerned there is a risk that the bond may never be issued, based on the declaration of Mr. Brunst,” Miller said.
The judgment was based on the verdict that SF Weekly has been engaged in illegal predatory pricing going back to the mid 1990s when it was purchased by VVM, selling advertising below the costs needed to support the paper in an effort to drive the Guardian out of business. That’s illegal under California law.
VVM is appealing the verdict, but to do so must guarantee its ability to pay the verdict plus interest that began accruing when the judgment was entered last month. Kerr’s motion also sought to delay enforcement of an injunction Miller issued that bars further below cost pricing by SF Weekly, but that portion of the motion was denied.
Both sides are due in court July 8 at 9 a.m. to argue post trials motions, including one by the defendants to throw out the verdict and order a new trial.
LOCAL ARTIST Ryan Alexiev TITLE Postcard invite for “The Land of a Million Cereals” THE STORY Cereal is the most popular breakfast food, and the third most popular product in American supermarkets. Currently there are more than 400 cereals, primarily distinguished by their ad campaigns. The substance of cereal is, in this light, ideology. Through prints, sculpture, video, and drawings, “The Land of a Million Cereals” explores cereal’s history and importance as a paradigmatic consumer product. In the role of a Bulgarian peasant, Alexiev does battle with Frankenberry, who wields a powerful golden spoon — free in every box! BIO Ryan Alexiev was born in Los Angeles and raised in Alaska by Bulgarian immigrants. He received a BFA in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2007. He currently lives and works in San Francisco. SHOW “The Land of a Million Cereals,” Fri/6 through July 12. Wed.–Sat., 1–6 p.m. or by appointment. Opening reception Fri/6, 6–9 p.m. Mission 17, 2111 Mission (Suite 401), SF. (415) 861-3144, www.mission17.org. WEB SITE www.ryanalexiev.com
CHEAP EATS You thought you were done with this, I know, but I forgot to say that I did get a couple of correct answers to my months-ago riddle: what my mom said when I came home crying after the beating I took for peeing on my kindergarten teacher’s hot-car-melted poodle.
Two readers got it right, but only one accepted lunch on me, and that was my new friend B.B. Teaspoon, who earned her fried chicken salad by crafting her answer into a brilliant, Ogden Nashish, Shel Silversteiny — no, downright Dr. Seussian poem:
If the poodle made you piddle
And the puddle got you paddled
Cuz your teacher was so addled
When her poodle’s life skedaddled
Then …
Did your mother try to straddle
Moral lessons that a lad’ll
Never learn when he is rattled
Cuz he’s maybe too gonadal?
Even electronically, her hesitance to hit the send button was palpable, yet B.B. Teaspoon actually did send these exact words, line breaks intact, to me, Chicken Farmer. I publish it here, in spite of pronoun-induced discomfort, because it’s been too long since I printed a poem in Cheap Eats and I was about to lose my accreditation as a literary magazine. Plus what the hell, everybody knows I grew up boy. Or lad, if you will, for the sake of rhyming.
Not surprisingly, B.B. Teaspoon is a songmaker and a teacher of children. I told her about my new part-time job, nannying and cooking for a family of four: two musicians and two budding musicians. They have a dedicated music room full of entirely on-limits drums, pianos, toy pianos, a stand-up bass, and other stringed things. I tried to find a way to express, in words, the cacopho-symphonic potential of a 3-year-old boy, a 9-month-old girl, and me in this room while Mom and Dad are away at band practice.
Words didn’t work, so I tried interpretive dance, but that didn’t exactly come across either.
B.B. Teaspoon was telling me about a kids’ song she sings about a noose, and, in spite of my morbid curiosity, I suddenly realized I was as cold as I had ever been. First unofficial day of summer, sunny California. Could of been New Years Day, Canada.
We were sitting outside because that was the only place you could sit, at one of several ironing boards on the sidewalk. Maybe she said "moose." I happened to be wearing my beloved rabbit fur jacket, not because I’d guessed it was going to be Canadian out so much as to annoy vegetarians.
But not even that, and not even the many jalapeño slivers in the coleslaw, could melt my cold, cold …
Come to think of it, the other guy who correctly punch-lined my stupid joke was a musician too. We could have been a band! A really, really, really annoying band. Sike.
A lot of people love alliteration.
And I’m just going to let that line sit there, by itself, until it proves it’s ready to join the rest of the class and behave. A teacher! Of children! Other people are having kids, right now, even as we speak. Still others are adopting, or having sex real hard.
Me? I’m Dani the Tranny Nanny. As predicted.
I like to rhyme.
———————————————-
My new favorite restaurant is Bakesale Betty. Fried chicken sandwiches, fried chicken salads, sidewalk ironing boards that are probably pretty fun when it’s nice out. By salad they mean coleslaw, no mayo! Also famous for its strawberry shortcake and baked goods, this funky little Temescal district joint is not undiscovered (as in: lines). The good news: you might get a complimentary cookie out of your wait. We did, and we weren’t even in line — we were sitting there talking. It was buttery, cinnamony goodness.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera made San Francisco the first government entity in the nation to accuse two major players in the pharmaceutical drug industry of conspiring to illegally manipulate the price of prescription drugs when he filed a lawsuit May 20. Connecticut followed Herrera’s lead days later, and filed an almost identical suit making the same charges.
The cases could have far-reaching implications. If Raymond Hartman, an economist and visiting professor at Boalt Hall School of Law who testified in a related case filed by a group of East Coast labor unions two years ago is correct, then consumers, insurers, and Medicaid administrators nationwide have overpaid for prescription drugs by billions of dollars as a result of the price manipulation scheme (see “Big Pharma’s Shadow,” 12/20/06).
To explain the highly complex litigation, consider how goods are usually priced. Take the 99¢, three-ounce bags of chips that are reliably available at the corner store near your house. Cool Ranch Doritos. Chili Cheese Fritos. Sour Cream and Onion Ruffles. It wouldn’t be a true bodega if there wasn’t a rack of them situated near the front door or register.
For as long as anyone can remember, it seems, they’ve cost just 99¢, regardless of the local cost of living, from Richmond, Va. to San Francisco. That’s because the suggested retail price of 99¢ is printed ubiquitously by the manufacturer on the packaging.
So you’d notice if a sticker suddenly appeared, lazily affixed to your bag of Sun Chips, stating a new price: $1.99. The manufacturer didn’t place it there because behind the sticker you can still see the old printed price. And the counter clerk didn’t place it there, because he knows the true suggested retail price is still just 99¢ and the laws of supply and demand never called for a price increase.
Instead, a local company that buys chips from the manufacturer and distributes them to the bodega in your neighborhood put it there. The bodega owner didn’t complain because now it’s possible for him to earn an extra dollar for each bag. In fact, as a result of the new sticker, he’s more likely to take his business back to that particular distribution company over a competitor since that company is willing to artificially inflate the retail cost of a bag of chips on his behalf simply by putting a new price tag on the bag.
Now imagine that the product isn’t a cheap bag of chips but billions of dollars worth of pain-reducing or life-saving pharmaceuticals. And the distributor isn’t a local guy who drives a delivery truck full of boxes of chips but a multinational corporation, headquartered in San Francisco, that’s ranked 18th on the Fortune 500 list, with $93.6 billion in annual revenue and a CEO, John Hammergren, who received compensation in 2007 worth more than $22 million after presiding over the company’s record profits that year.
Imagine, too, that the distributor is powerful enough to slap new price stickers on cartons of drugs around the country, not just at your corner bodega, so you can’t simply elect to shop elsewhere to protest the new prices. Neither can you just stop consuming needed medicines the way you can snack chips.
Herrera’s federal civil suit probably has escaped media attention due to its esoteric nature (not to mention a potential conflict of interest at the San Francisco Chronicle, but we’ll get to that in a minute). It charges that McKesson Corp., along with a tiny drug data publisher based in San Bruno called First DataBank, conspired in an "elaborate scheme" to unfairly mark up the price on more than 400 name-brand prescription drugs. The conspiracy allegedly resulted in the San Francisco Health Plan being forced to make thousands or even millions of dollars in excess payments to cover the cost of such medications.
The SF Health Plan is not the same as Healthy San Francisco, the city’s historic 2006 bid to grant universal health care to the 82,000 adults here who live without insurance. The SF Health Plan extends mental, medical, and dental health coverage to about 50,000 people, including approximately 28,000 children in the city, and offers in-home support workers to the disabled and elderly. The plan is funded through a combination of federal and state dollars known in California as Medi-Cal and elsewhere as Medicaid.
The programs help low-income residents get health care, but its public subsidies are being endangered by a massive state budget deficit. So making sure the SF Health Plan is paying the appropriate price for prescription drugs, a $200 billion industry in the United States, is more important than ever.
McKesson and First DataBank, the lawsuit alleges, placed new stickers on drug packages so that everyone — from private insurers to Medi-Cal to consumers without insurance who simply walk up to a pharmacy window and cover their drug treatments with cash — paid far more than they should have, based on an industry calculation that’s similar to the suggested retail price printed on our analogy of a bag of chips. Herrera says he took on the suit because San Francisco is not alone in overpaying for pharmaceuticals and he saw a chance to force greater reforms in the system.
"We make our decisions based on the facts and the law, and we do our best to protect consumers, taxpayers, and businesses alike," Herrera told the Guardian. "This impacts a lot of things. It’s about protecting consumers from having high drug costs passed on to them. It’s about protecting taxpayer dollars since this is the San Francisco Health Plan, and it’s something that emanates out of a city program. But it’s also about protecting businesses, because a lot of businesses and health plans are the ones footing the bill for increased drug costs."
First DataBank is not listed as a defendant in Herrera’s suit but is described as "an unnamed co-conspirator." The company is a little-known subsidiary of the private, New York–based media conglomerate Hearst Corp., which owns dozens of major publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Esquire, and The Oprah Magazine. Spokespersons for McKesson and First DataBank refused to comment for this story.
As far as revenue is concerned, First DataBank is a bit player in the world of pharmaceuticals. Court records in a related 2006 suit describe its annual pretax income as just $19 million, barely enough to cover the McKesson CEO’s compensation last year.
But the company is nonetheless important to people who rely on prescription drugs. It’s one of the few major companies in the United States that maintains a sophisticated electronic database of information on tens of thousands of prescription drugs. Plus, First DataBank possesses a virtual monopoly on the market because the company merged with its only real competitor, Medi-Span, in 1998. Its database includes numbers, for instance, on what a drug manufacturer like Aventis might charge distributor McKesson for the allergy medicine Allegra, a figure known as the "wholesale acquisition cost."
Because it’s almost impossible to track every transaction between McKesson and retail chain pharmacies that McKesson distributes bulk drugs to, like Rite Aid and CVS Caremark McKesson, it’s First DataBank’s job to survey the distributors and come up with an "average wholesale price."
After you obtain a bottle of Allegra with a co-pay to take care of your stuffy nose, your insurance provider, say, Blue Cross or Kaiser Permanente or the SF Health Plan, refers to First DataBank’s massive catalog of drugs — for which they’ve paid a hefty subscription fee — to make sure the price they’re paying for your allergy medicine is the one properly set by the market.
First DataBank claimed for years that it was surveying multiple drug wholesalers like McKesson to come up with its average published prices and that it was increasing the number of surveys it conducted. But there aren’t that many wholesalers to actually survey because so many of them have merged with one another in recent years. Also, two out of the nation’s three top wholesalers apparently declined to participate in the surveys as a matter of policy.
Troy Kirkpatrick, a spokesperson for Cardinal Health, one of McKesson’s few competitors, said his company doesn’t give out proprietary information to anyone, let alone First DataBank.
"We have a long-standing policy of not providing confidential pricing information to external sources," Kirkpatrick said. "So if we get asked to share that type of information, we decline."
By 2001 it appeared that First Databank wasn’t really surveying several wholesalers or even the two major companies that compete directly with McKesson, according to court records. First DataBank allegedly conspired with McKesson to establish an artificial baseline markup on hundreds of drugs that didn’t accurately represent their true suggested retail price
.
But if the bodega, or in this case, the retail pharmacy, is benefiting from the new stickers, then what’s in it for McKesson?
Herrera’s suit contends that if pharmacies like CVS and Rite Aid saw McKesson pressing the scales for them, they’d return to McKesson with their business instead of its two other major American wholesale competitors, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen.
The three companies aggressively compete with one another for business just like they’re supposed to in good ol’ free-market America. But now it appears that McKesson has found a way to game the system and edge ahead of its two rivals. Indeed, McKesson is narrowly beating them in total revenue according to the Fortune 500 list.
Profit margins from drugstore chains were sagging at the time the alleged scheme between McKesson and First DataBank took off, and chain pharmacies had been pressing manufacturers to help them earn higher profit margins. According to the lawsuit, distributor McKesson came to the rescue.
So the final question, then, is whether the drug stores were enriched by all this.
Longs Drugs last year made more than $5 billion in revenue. About 20 percent of that, or $1 billion, came from the government-subsidized health care programs Medicare and Medicaid, according to company records.
In its most recent annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Longs admits that if insurers began using a different benchmark than the prices published by First DataBank, such as a pricing guide that more accurately reflected market prices, there could be a "material adverse effect on our financial performance."
EDITORIAL If you think the June ballot was busy, wait until November. San Francisco will be electing six district supervisors. The mayor and organized labor are going to be pushing the mother of all bond acts, roughly $1 billion to rebuild San Francisco General Hospital. There’s likely to be a public power charter amendment mandating that the city mount a real effort to take over the electric grid. There will probably be a major affordable-housing initiative that includes a set-aside for low-income housing and perhaps some affordable-housing bond money. It’s shaping up as an election that will change the city’s direction for years to come — but there’s still a crucial piece missing.
There’s no money.
Public power will, of course, generate vast amounts of new revenue, but not immediately: the process of setting up the system and fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in court could drag out for several years. That, of course, is all the more reason to get started — if the city had done this years ago, we wouldn’t have a budget crisis today.
But in the meantime, right now, San Francisco needs cash — and there needs to be a November ballot measure that brings in new revenue to pay for more affordable housing and to save the services Mayor Gavin Newsom is cutting.
It’s tough to pass new taxes in California. Most of the time, state law mandates a two-thirds majority vote by the people to enact any new form of taxation. But it’s a bit easier when the supervisors are up for election; on those ballots, the threshold is only 50 percent. And with at least four tightly contested supervisorial races bringing out voters, labor bringing out the troops for the General Hospital bond, and the Democratic Party pushing to get voters out for Barack Obama, the turnout should be excellent.
So if there’s ever a good time to try to pass a tax measure, November 2008 ought to fit the bill.
All sorts of tax proposals have floated around City Hall in recent years and some of them — for example, a higher real-estate transfer tax — were defeated at the ballot. Some groups will oppose any tax proposal, and it’s hard to find constituencies that want to work hard for higher taxes.
So the key to crafting a revenue measure is to ensure that it’s as progressive as possible, and that it takes into account the concerns of those small businesses and homeowners who aren’t rich and can’t afford huge new levies. We see two good options:
1.A city income tax. This hasn’t been seriously discussed since the 1980s, but it ought to be. California law bars cities from collecting traditional income taxes — that is, San Francisco can’t tax the incomes of everyone who lives here. But in 1978 the state Supreme Court ruled that cities can tax income earned from employment in the city. The upside is that a San Francisco employment income tax would hit commuters, a huge group who use city services and don’t pay for them. The downside is that people who live here but work, say, in Silicon Valley would escape the tax.
But overall, income taxes are the fairest method of collecting revenue, and a city tax could be set to hit hardest on the wealthiest. The city could exempt, say, the first $50,000 of earned income, levy a modest (say, 1 percent) tax on the next $50,000, then increase the marginal percentage so that people with enormous salaries pay as much as 2 or 3 percent.
The beauty of this: most of the people who paid the top-end income tax would simply write it off their federal income taxes — meaning this would be a direct shift of cash from Washington DC to San Francisco. And it would come primarily from people who have already received a huge tax windfall from the Bush administration.
Yes, some people would cheat. Some businesses would try to claim their employees all really worked out of a satellite office in another city. But New York City has a municipal income tax. So does Philadelphia. They manage to deal with the cheaters. The supervisors at least ought to consider the idea.
2.A new business tax. Almost everyone agrees that San Francisco’s business taxes are unfair. The city places a flat tax on businesses — a small merchant pays the same percentage as a giant corporation — and some partnerships, like law firms, get away with paying no city taxes at all. The best way to fix that may be to create a single, progressive business tax (probably on gross receipts), with no loopholes, that exempts the first $100,000 or so and actually lowers the levy on small businesses while significantly raising it on big ones. Most small businesses would get an actual tax cut while the big guys would pick up the tab.
Together, a tax package like this could bring in the $250 million a year or so the city needs — and some of the money could go to cutting, say, Muni fares or reducing the sales tax so working-class San Franciscans would pay less.
Almost everyone at City Hall knows the current tax system is unfair, regressive, and inadequate. We’ve been calling for the supervisors to do something about it for years now. November 2008 seems like an excellent time.
Since the crash of Tallula a few years ago, the Department of Innovative Indian Food has undergone some slight shrinkage. True, the overall standard of Indian cooking in the city has continued to rise, and we’ve been treated to spots that emphasize regional Indian cuisine, such as Dosa. But where oh where is the restaurant that will cook a well-spiced duck in the tandoor, then serve the meat in slices as part of a salad with arugula and bing cherries? Tallula was brilliant at this sort of cross-cultural flourish, and I was hopeful it would be the first of its profuse kind.
Perhaps, despite its too-short life, it was. The second of its kind could be Roti, in West Portal — a much better-looking restaurant than Tallula, though shyer about proclaiming its more distinctive dishes. (There is a sibling restaurant in Burlingame.) You could feast quite happily at Roti on the subcontinental foods that have become familiar and perhaps even beloved in certain quarters of blue-state America: tandoori chicken, lamb vindaloo, palak paneer, chana masala. But you might suspect you were missing something, your first clue being Roti’s appearance.
The phrase the restaurant applies to itself is "Indian bistro," and this means, first, no stainless-steel steam tables pushed against the back wall for all-you-can-eat buffets. It also means a Manhattanish look of glossy surfaces and striking lamps and light fixtures arrayed behind a barrel façade of window panes that arc inward toward the door. The effect is a little like that of the original Slanted Door, though with a curve instead of a slant. Certainly the intent of the two places seems similar: to do justice to an ancient cuisine while reconciling it with the reality of modern California.
Hence Roti’s splendid tandoori duck salad ($12), with meat dense, moist, and tender, almost like confit. Tallula’s menu was filled with these sorts of combinations; at Roti, there is a stronger sense of restraint regarding the ecstasies of Californication, along with heightened attention to some traditional Indian dishes that are less well-known in this country. If you think Indian cooks only use lentils to make dal, for instance, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by dal ki mathri ($8), a set of fritters made of several varieties of legumes, including chickpeas. The fritters could have been warmer (they seemed to toughen with cooling) but were complex in flavor and texture. Also, they were endearing in appearance — little golden footballs that could have been part of a Pop Warner awards presentation.
Calamari rings ($8) were given the "Bombay" treatment: a heavy dusting of curry-scented chickpea flour, then a turn in the deep-fryer for some golden crunch. The rings were presented with little dishes of chutney, tamarind and mint, but they were tasty enough to be eaten straight up. They were also tender, which suggested skillful handling, since calamari easily turns rubbery with overcooking. One of the blights of Indian restaurants is that so many of the appetizers and starters are deep-fried, and Roti’s are no exception. But if you must go deep-fried, calamari is at least somewhat less usual than pakoras or samosas.
Chicken tikka — boneless breast meat — turns up in a number of preparations. Among these are the lovable old warhorse, chicken tikka masala ($14), cubes of meat awash in a mild, creamy sauce; and a lunchtime salad ($12) in which the breast meat is rolled up, roulade-style, roasted, and served over mixed greens with naan. Considering the dryness of roasting and the paucity of fat on boneless, skinless, chicken breast meat, the chicken tikka here was remarkably juicy — a credit, maybe, to some ingenious marinade.
Lamb vindaloo ($15) arrived with the chicken tikka masala and in some ways resembled it: cubes of meat in a rich-looking sauce. But vindaloo is generally hotter and sharper than its sibling, and here it was markedly gingery, too. (Vindaloo comes from Goa, once a Portuguese colony, and, as the name implies, wine was a long-ago ingredient. In these postcolonial days, some kind of mild vinegar is generally used.)
As so often is the case in Indian restaurants, vegetarian offerings are strong and varied enough to banish any vagrant yearnings for meat. The only one of these dishes we found wanting was, surprisingly, the palak paneer ($11), lightly spiced spinach cooked with chunks of cheese. The spicing here consisted mostly of nutmeg, which really didn’t have the wattage to compete with chana masala ($9), chickpeas cooked in a spicy tomato-curry sauce. Somewhere between these two extremes lay the mattar kurchan ($10 at lunch, with a disk of poori), cubes of cheese cooked with green peas in a moderately athletic tomato sauce. The sauced cheese would have been excellent spooned over the poori to make a kind of pizza, but I didn’t think of that in time. And it would have been tricky to eat.
How about dessert after all that? We stuck to the ice creams and were well satisfied: two scoops of peach-colored lucuma ($5) and a plate of kulfi ($6), flavored with saffron, cardamom, pistachio, and rosewater, shaped into a sausage, frozen, and sliced like a banana.
As we were getting up to leave, the disputatious person seated to my right said, "It’s good, but not as good as Metro Kathmandu." I felt obliged — politely! — to dispute this diss. Roti is quite as good in its way as Metro Kathmandu, and that’s saying something. (It’s also indisputably better-looking, and that’s saying something else.) The death of Tallula was a real loss but, as Roti proves, not an unredeemed one.
I push off and head down a makeshift plywood runway, compressing as I roll over the edge and into the Technicolor graffiti of the drainage ditch. The transition between the banked wall and the flatbottom has an abrupt kink in it, enough to send you to your face if you’re caught sleeping. I take some weight off the front end and try to maintain my speed as I pump into the opposite corner and carve the far end of the ditch where there’s an over-45-degree wall that runs behind what my friends and I call the "death pit" — a gaping cutaway in the bottom of the culvert, five feet deep, filled with broken glass, and frequently used as a urinal. Since I’m at the apex of my backside carve, up a wall 10 feet above last week’s Miller Time, I’m jolted by the crackle of a loudspeaker:
"You are trespassing. Leave the area at once or you will be arrested."
My concentration shot by the sheriff’s announcement, I jump off my deck and over the chasm at the base of the bank, barely clearing the skater’s version of a Vietnam tiger pit, and land on the rough concrete beyond the edge. My board bullets straight in, though, so I’ve got to lower myself — gingerly — into the mostly dry detritus and rescue it before my friends and I jet out of the spot and into the manicured back nine of Pleasanton’s Castlewood golf course. We get to the car, throw the boards in the trunk — mine has a "Skateboarding Is Not a Crime" sticker on the bottom — and head to the next spot, a ditch called the Rat Trap.
The year is 1987. I’m 16, in high school, and living with my parents in Fremont. The scene plays out over and over in much the same way: a drainage ditch, a nicely painted curb or ledge at a shopping center, the occasional backyard pool, and night sessions at the Tar Banks, a set of embankments around a loading dock with curbs at the top. It’s an underground railroad of repurposed architecture, none of it designed with a skateboard in mind but all of it highly skateable.
Taking the $4.7mil Cunningham skatepark. Video by Jarrod Allen, www.jarrodallen.com
Every weekend my crew hits as many spots as we can, and the constants shape up like this: urethane, aluminum, Canadian hard rock maple, concrete, and asphalt. Maybe blood, maybe beer — we’re teenagers after all — but nearly always: cops.
Skateboarding may not be a crime, but it sure as hell feels like one.
Flash forward 20 years. I’m with a different crew as I pull onto a street in suburban Redwood City, and I’m no longer rollin’ in my mom’s Plymouth Sundance, but my own truck. The other thing that’s changed is the number of wheels per head. There are four heads to eight wheels, and we’re here to ride the Phil Shao Memorial Skatepark. On bikes.
The park does not disappoint. There are a million kids trying tech ollie flip tricks around the perimeter of the park, but the bowl is what I’m about. Big and shapely with almost burlesque hips poured into her concrete, I’m in love as soon as I roll in. There are a few local bikers who have the place dialed, nonchalantly airing a few feet out and throwing the bars before heading back down the tranny. The only two skaters riding the bowl are a tall skinny teenager and his little sister, who looks to be about 10, and they have it on lockdown: lipslides on the spine, grinds, rock and rolls — everything smooth and fast. "Yeah!" I yell as they take their runs, stoked on their skills.
I know the times have changed when I see the little girl come up out of the bowl in the $450,000 public piece of silky-smooth concrete perfection, walk over to her mother, who’s posted up on a ledge, get a cell phone and make a call. Not five minutes later there are seven (I counted) Redwood City police officers converging on the bench where my friends and I are sitting. They randomly collar my buddy Scott — though I was the last one to drop in — and write him a ticket for $100. I have to admit, I’m flabbergasted.
Guess what: skateboarding isn’t a crime anymore — it’s gone mainstream. Successful companies hire lobbyists to promote the sport, and communities spend big bucks building new facilities for skaters. And now some skaters, many of them kids who never had to live in the underground world that I did, are using their legitimacy to push out the new outlaws — people who ride BMX bikes.
It’s crazy — two cultures that share so much, fighting over how many wheels they ride.
"Is that your daughter’s bike?"
The question comes from one of my coworkers, and, believe it or not, it’s not intended to be snarky. I can’t ride in public without someone saying "cute little bike," while giggling to themselves — or laughing and pointing. Seeing a six-foot-tall, 200-pound, bald-headed, tattooed white dude on a "kid’s bike" is like being passed on the sidewalk by a bear on a unicycle. At one point reactions like these would’ve rubbed me the wrong way, but nowadays, I nod and smile. Sometimes, I try to explain what constitutes a "full grown" BMX bike. While it’s got small wheels — 20 inches in diameter — the top tube, from the seat to the stem, measures 21 inches, and the handlebars are considered pro-sized at eight inches high by 28 inches wide.
Bicycle motocross, or BMX, is purported to have started in 1963 when the Schwinn corporation of Chicago unveiled the Stingray, which was basically a downsized version of the company’s balloon-tired cruiser-type bikes. Kids pretended to be grown-ups by aping Roger DeCoster and other moto heroes — launching their bikes off jumps, racing in empty fields and abandoned lots, and cranking wheelies down the sidewalks of Anytown, USA.
"It all began the way most individual sports start," motorcycle customizer Jesse James says in a voiceover at the beginning of the 2005 BMX nativity story/documentary Joe Kid on a Stingray, "kids pretending to be grown-ups, but acting like big kids."
I have been riding since I was seven. After three decades, one truism remains, and I can’t candy-coat it. I’ve got to speak it like a true BMXer: BMX is rad. It is and always has been an entity unto itself, progressing from wheelies, skids, and bombing hills to encompass myriad styles and surfaces, from streets to pools to dirt jumps to ramps to the balletic grace of flatland freestyle.
This summer, big kids on little bikes will be jumping 30-foot gaps at as many miles per hour as BMX pays homage to its racing roots at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. On June 12 in New York’s Central Park, Kevin Robinson will try to break the legendary Mat Hoffman’s record for the highest quarter-pipe air on a bike — 26 feet, 6 inches.
It doesn’t take death-defying world records, the X Games, the Olympics, or the stupefaction of squares with cameras to make BMX legit. That feeling of overcoming fear and doubt by jumping a little farther, a little higher, the rush of nailing a trick, or carving a bowl, hasn’t changed in half a century. The legitimacy lies in that feeling, behind your breastbone, and it doesn’t change as you get older. Your wrists hurt, your ankles hurt, and your back hurts, but the feeling is the same. Kid’s bike? Hell yeah, it’s a kid’s bike.
It’s not as though I was blissfully unaware of a beef between bikers and skaters that day in Redwood City. Ask any BMXer to tell you a story of friction between the two and four-wheeled sets, and it’s not going to take them long to come up with something.
"When I was 12 years old, a skateboarder threw my bike out of the bowl at Ripon skatepark," says Jackson Ratima, now 19, a Daly City rider sponsored by Fit Bikes. "He was, like, 20 years old or something."
Tim "Wolfman" Harvey, 21, another up-and-coming pro, tells a similar story about a visit to the Bay Area from his native Massachusetts, when a local skater hassled him at the Novato skatepark. "I didn’t even know anything about California. It was my first time out bike riding, period. The guy was giving me all kinds of crap, yelling at me."
Ironically, Harvey, as friendly and easygoing a guy as you could hope to meet, almost turned pro for skateboarding before an ankle injury made it nearly impossible to ollie, an essential trick in street skating. He now lives in Petaluma and is a member of the painter’s union in San Francisco, where he’s a familiar face at street spots, but now on a bike. Back then, though, he "thought California was a scary place."
The Bay Area — and SF in particular — may be the worst place for bikers seeking a vibe-free session. "I’ve never experienced hostility like it is out here," Ratima says.
Smoldering after the Redwood City incident, I began to fixate on the "Skateboarding Is Not a Crime" slogan from my youth. Originally a bumper sticker made by Transworld Skateboarding magazine in the mid ’80s, Santa Cruz Skateboards currently makes a deck with that written on it, so the skate community has gotten a lot of mileage out of being oppressed.
"Skateboarding isn’t a crime?" I’d ask myself. You’re damned straight skateboarding isn’t a crime: it’s the law. BMX is a crime. There isn’t a biker alive who rides transition who hasn’t rolled into a taxpayer-funded park and had a knee-high grommet point to the sign and say, "Bikes aren’t allowed."
Not allowed, huh? Son, I skated my first pool when you were doing the backstroke in your papa’s ball bag.
Look: I love skateboarding and always will. Both skaters and bikers are doing the same thing, copping that same feeling rolling over the same terrain. The war makes no sense.
"We have religion and race and class dividing us. I refuse to be divided by what type of wheel size I have," says Jon Paul Bail, a local at Alameda’s Cityview skatepark.
Bail, 40, is the artist and pundit behind politicalgridlock.com. Through the Home Project, a program run through the Alameda Unified School District, Bail helped raise $150,000 to build the park, $8,000 of which came directly from his company’s coffers. He helped design the park, and he helped pour the concrete in the park, which opened in 1999. Mixed sessions of bikers and skaters were going down for six months with minor tensions but no major incidents when then–City Attorney Carol Korade advised City Hall that mixed use was too dangerous, and shut the bikers out.
My call to Corinne Centeno, Redwood City’s Director of Parks, Recreation, and Community Services, got off to a rough start: "I understand [the Phil Shao Skatepark] is not bike-legal, right?"
"Right. It was built as a skatepark," she replied, subtly italicizing the first syllable with her tone of voice.
"It wasn’t designed for bikes," she repeated, before adding, "but their having been prohibited from the start hasn’t necessarily kept people out." In an effort to do just that, the city is building a fence around the park, with bids currently ranging from $23,000 to $60,000.
The semantic argument — "it’s called a ‘skatepark,’ not a ‘bike park’<0x2009>" — is usually reserved for laypeople who don’t know enough about skateboarding or bike riding to see its inherent lack of logic.
Drainage ditches are not called a "skating ditches," nor were they designed for skating. Swimming pools are not called "skating pools." Yet, therein lie the roots of the modern skatepark, along with full pipes, which are based on industrial-size drainage systems also not intended for wheels. Every day skateboarders and bikers transcend these limits through creative repurposing.
Collision, and the fear of collision, is the main thing public officials cite when shutting bikers out of parks. "It’s unnerving," Vancouver pro skater Alex Chalmers wrote in a 2004 Thrasher manifesto, "BMX Jihad: Keep It in the Dirt."
"BMXers cover so much ground so quickly, especially when they’re pedaling frantically to blast a transfer, that it’s particularly hard to gauge these collisions," he wrote.
But the fact is that in any given park BMXers and skaters take different lines, and the best way to acclimate each group to the other is through exposure. If bike riders are banned, it increases the risk of collisions when a few bikers decide to chance the ticket or brave the vibe-out and ride anyway. A lot of bikers hit parks early in the morning because they don’t want to deal with hassles. During the overlap in "shifts," this leads to bewildered skaters who aren’t used to the lines a biker takes, and vice versa.
And the head-on menace is greatly overstated, largely disappearing when a park is integrated, if only unofficially. At Cityview, the police have displayed somewhat less zeal in ticketing bikers during the past few years. "They treat us like gays in the military," says Bail. "Don’t ask, don’t tell." And yet everyone manages to coexist.
At the new $850,000 skatepark in Benicia, which opened in October, integration isn’t a big deal. "From its conception, we designed it to be a skateboard park and also for bikes," says Mike Dotson, assistant director of parks and recreation. Technically, the park has designated bike hours, but since it’s largely unsupervised, there’s a mildly laissez-faire approach to enforcement. "In the very beginning there was a lot of concern about the use of both bikes and skateboards," Dotson says, stating that the park was packed the first few months. "Initially we had one or two calls on it. Since then I can say I haven’t had any calls on it — in relation to bikes and skateboards being in it at the same time or other complaints."
And there are mixed-use parks all over the world, as far away as Thailand and as nearby as Oregon: "You go to Oregon, and you can ride wherever you want," says a stunned Maurice Meyer, 41, lifelong San Francisco resident and founding member of legendary bike and skate trick team the Curb Dogs. Long Beach, Las Vegas, Phoenix, even Alex Chalmers’ hometown of Vancouver — all have parks where bikes and skates legally ride at the same time. What’s up with the Bay?
Lawyers, insurance underwriters, and city hall types may never understand how a park works. "It’s out of ignorance," Bail says. "To them it looks like chaos. To anyone who has skate etiquette — which is everyone — we all take turns."
Besides, let’s face facts: a skatepark is a dangerous place — to different degrees at different times, and for different reasons. "I swear to God, every time I go to the skatepark I see a hundred boards flying all over the place," Ratima says, "and I’ve never seen a bike go flying and land on a guy’s head." It’s not an inflatable jumpy house — it’s fun, but it’s not made out of cotton balls and your mother isn’t here. Usually.
Rose Dennis, press liaison for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, seemed baffled that someone would want to ride a bicycle inside the skatepark part of the new Potrero del Sol. Perhaps as a way of distracting me from my damn-fool idea, she kept hyping the park’s "other amenities."
I live three blocks from Golden Gate Park — if I want to play Frisbee, I’m not going to drive across town. I want to ride. When I brought up the possibility of scheduling bike-only sessions in the yet-to-be opened park, she suggested I draft a letter to general manager Yomi Agunbiade, before adding that "the facility wasn’t designed for that type of recreation."
When I (graciously, I thought) let her know that it would be not only possible to ride a bike there, but highly gratifying, she got a little heated: "At the end of the day, the buck stops with us. If one of you guys breaks your skull open and you’re bleeding all over the place, believe me, no one’s going to have any sympathy for Rec and Park if they make really nonjudicious decisions."
In other words, like a lot of city officials, she’s worried about getting sued.
But you know what? There’s actually less chance a BMXer will successfully sue the city. I give you California Government Code Section 831.7, which states the following: "Neither a public entity nor a public employee is liable to any person who participates in a hazardous recreational activity … who knew or reasonably should have known that the hazardous recreational activity created a substantial risk of injury to himself or herself and was voluntarily in the place of risk."
The law lists "bicycle racing or jumping" as being a "hazardous recreational activity." It’s on a fairly extensive list, along with diving boards, horseback riding, and the ever-popular rocketeering, skydiving, and spelunking, which, as I’m sure you’ve heard, are all the rage with the kids these days — much more popular than BMX.
But the words "skateboarding," "skateboarder," and "skateboard" are not listed anywhere in the text of the Hazardous Recreational Activities law, commonly called the HRA law. In fact, the International Association of Skateboard Companies has been lobbying to get the bill amended to specifically include "skateboarding" since 1995, when Assemblymember Bill Morrow (R-San Diego) took up the issue. Morrow’s bill was rejected by the state Senate Judiciary Committee in 1996. In 1997, Morrow and skateboard association lobbyist Jim Fitzpatrick gave up on amending the HRA and instead pushed Assembly Bill 1296, which added Provision 115800 to the state’s Health and Safety Code, which states, in part and in much less forceful language — without using the word "liable," for instance — that owners or operators of local skateparks that are not supervised must require skaters to wear helmets, elbow pads, and knee pads, and that they must post a sign stating said requirement.
It doesn’t say anything about "if one of you guys breaks your skull open and you’re bleeding all over the place" while wearing a helmet, then you can’t hold the operator liable.
When I asked San Francisco Deputy City Attorney Virginia Dario-Elizando how the law might apply to the city’s skateparks, she told me, "This question has never come up. I must tell you, I’ve never even seen the rules for the skateparks — no one’s ever asked me to look at them."
BMXers are willing to compromise if that’s what it takes. In May, San Jose opened the 68,000-square-foot Lake Cunningham skatepark, built by the same design firm (Wormhoudt) as the Benicia park at a price of $4.7 million, and the place has bike hours. Like any park, there are rules. Like some parks, there’s supervision, so the rules are enforced: separate bike sessions; helmet, elbow, and knee pads required at all times; brakes required on bikes; no smoking; no songs with swear words over the park soundsystem; no bikes in the three bowls with pool coping even though they only allow plastic pegs, which are undoubtedly softer on coping than metal skateboard trucks … it’s a long list of restrictions. It’s inconvenient for guys who don’t like pads or don’t run brakes, and there’s some griping, but we’ve got our eyes on the prize: the place is amazing, with a huge full pipe, massive vert bowls, and a decent street course.
I would like skaters to realize a couple of things: skating and BMX aren’t so different from each other, at least in the feeling each gives you, right there, behind your sternum, where your heart beats.
Bikers are going to ride no matter what, just like skaters are going to skate. Legal or not, we’re not going to go away. "I got arrested for riding there when I was 14," Ratima says of the Daly City skatepark. "They took my bike and threw it in the back of the car. I just kept going every day, and finally they just gave up."
"I’ve ridden bikes on vert," Thrasher editor Jake Phelps tells me during a phone conversation. "I can ride a bike in a pool, I can do that. I’m stoked when I ride a bike in a pool. Feels hella fun to me. Catching air on a bike is awesome, no doubt about that."
This, from the longtime editor of the bible of the "fuck BMX" set. It’s either baffling or heartening. I can’t decide which. "I don’t mind people that are just regular," he says. "If they’re skateboard people or they’re bike people too, I’ll respect anybody that respects me."
That’s what it comes down to: respect. I respect the fact that skateboarders did not come into this age of skateparks easily. I faded out when there was nothing, and I came back when they were in small towns across America, and I missed all the politicos and dreary meetings. It’s time for bikers to stop feeling like second-class citizens and demand a seat at the table. In the words of Black Flag, it’s time to rise above.
Oh my. For all you folks that have been following the controversy around building new power plants in San Francisco, it just got even better.
Mayor Gavin Newsom sent a letter to the Board of Supervisors today outlining a “more promising way forward than the current proposal” to build two natural gas-burning “peaking” power plants in the city.
The way forward: retrofit three existing diesel turbines at the Mirant-Potrero Power Plant, while at the same time shutting down Unit 3, the most polluting part of the power plant, as soon as the Transbay Cable comes online.
“On Friday, May 23, Ed Harrington [General Manager of the SFPUC], City Attorney Dennis Herrera and I met with president of Cal-ISO – Yakout Mansour, the chairman of the CPUC – Mike Peevey, the CEO of Mirant – Ed Muller, the CEO of PG&E – Bill Morrow, and our respective staffs. In this meeting we vetted the possibility of retrofitting the diesel turbines [currently owned and operated by Mirant] and asked each stakeholder to give us the necessary commitments to advance this alternative,” Newsom wrote to the Board.
For anyone who’s been closely following the nuances of this argument, this is a significant change in position from the California Independent System Operator [Cal-ISO], and it should be noted that it took — not just the Mayor sitting down at the table — but top dogs from PG&E and Mirant (who both stand to lose money by the city building its own power plants), as well as the CPUC’s Peevey, who’s never expressed a positive opinion about the true need for more power plants in the city.
Now, suddenly, Cal-ISO is departing significantly from all previously expressed demands that we build power plants.
The background: The state, through Cal-ISO, has for the last several years insisted that San Francisco needs 150 megawatts of peak electricity at the ready. We currently get this from Mirant-Potrero, but Unit 3 of that facility has a bad rep as the greatest single source of pollution in the city. People in the Bayview neighborhood, which have carried more of their fair share of pollution, have been waiting a long time for the plant to close. Stakeholders have been meeting for over seven years, working on ways to close the plant, and much of the leadership on the issue has come from Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the Bayview district.
Cal-ISO has insisted that the only way to close Unit 3 is to build new peakers, which would be owned and operated by the city, run cleaner and more efficiently, and still supply that 150 MW of peak power. Even when the 400 MW Transbay Cable was approved, Cal-ISO insisted San Francisco would still need the peakers.
But in a June 2 letter, Cal-ISO suddenly had a different response for the Mayor.
Tonight’s election results will demonstrate how much money matters in local politics, and whether megadeveloper Lennar is able to essentially buy exclusive development rights for southeast San Francisco. That’s because the $3.9 million and counting that Lennar has spent to approve Prop. G and kill Prop. F could be the most expensive local measure campaign in California history, according to former Common Cause of SF head Charles Marsteller.
To confirm that, I called Bob Stern at the Center for Governmental Studies — the guru of California electoral reform — who had a more qualified answer. Campaign finance records show PG&E spent almost $10 million last year to defeat a package of four public power measures in Yolo and Sacramento counties. PG&E also spent more than $3 million to defeat the Prop. D, the 2002 public power measure in San Francisco. And Stern was trying to get final figures for an expensive 2006 ballot fight in Sacramento over a new stadium. Yet he said Lennar is way up there, well beyond anything he’s seen in his native Southern California.
“It is clearly one of the most expensive,” Stern said. “It’s an enormous amount of money for a local race.”
Nobody is quite ready to anoint Cal product Brian Horwitz as the next Lou Gehrig. But last Sunday – on the 83rd anniversary of the start of the Yankee legend’s Herculean 2,130 consecutive game streak – the San Francisco rookie made the type of dramatic big league entrance the “Iron Horse” would have been proud of.
In his debut big league start, the 25-year-old outfielder drilled his first two major league hits and scored the tying run on Sunday in a thrilling 4-3 comeback win over visiting San Diego. The second knock, a solid 10th inning single off all-time-saves leader Trevor Hoffman, fueled the game winning rally.
Brian Horwitz, slugger
“I couldn’t have written it any better than today,” said Horwitz, who has scratched and clawed his way through the Giants minor league season since his ignominious beginnings in pro ball in 2004. “I know I can hit up here. I have the confidence in myself to get the job done.”
In this current season of Giants rebuilding, Horwitz – who is married, stands 6-foot-1, 187 pounds and has longish straight black hair that parts naturally in the middle – is the latest of a troop of farmhands the club has auditioned. By the end of September, San Francisco hopes to have separated the prospects from the suspects.
If Horwitz’s track record is any indication, when 2008 is done he should land in the former category.
Heading into this season Horwitz brought a sizzling .322 career minor league average.
It was on June 1, 1925 that the almost 23-year-old year-old Gehrig pinch-hit in a game for the Yankees. He started the next day, when, according to legend, regular New York first baseman Wally Pipp begged out of the lineup with a headache. Gehrig batted 3-for-5. It would be 13 seasons before Gehrig missed another game.
Horwitz’s consecutive game streak was not expected to last nearly as long. Talented left fielder Fred Lewis – the man Horwitz spelled on Sunday – stroked a very un-Pipp-like game tying pinch-hit, two-run triple to drive in Horwitz in the 10th inning Sunday
But the fact that Horwitz has managed to slip on a Giants jersey this season marks a significant accomplishment for the Southern California native.
It’s not like schools are their business – at all. But the $13 billion utility company is the big money behind recent television ads depicting Mark Leno as a foe of children and schools.
“San Francisco Assemblyman Mark Leno claims that he’s for better schools,” the ad informs, according to a transcript provided by the California Teacher’s Association. “Yet in 2004, it was Leno who joined Republicans, and with one vote to spare, cut $3.1 billion from California schools.”
Actually, said CTA in a news release, “It distorts Leno’s support for a state budget in 2004 that temporarily reduced some funding for schools. The budget was approved by the Legislature with bipartisan support in that financially difficult year for the state.”
CTA, which represents 90 percent of the state’s educators, endorsed Leno in the District 3 State Senate race, and held a rally today in Mill Valley to affirm their support and criticize PG&E.
“Why is PG&E behind this?” CTA’s Mike Myslinski wondered when we spoke to him. “Leno has a strong education record and parents and teachers are very disturbed by this ad.”
The ad was attributed to a political action committee called “Protect Our Kids,” which late independent expenditure filings [PDF] with the CA Secretary of State show is heavily funded by CALIFORNIANS FOR A CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE, A COALITION OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS, TAXPAYERS, AND PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC COMPANY. [PDF]
Looks like the San Francisco Police Officers Association, as well as a couple of out of state companies, also kicked in to cover the $100,000 in cash that’s been spent on anti-Leno propaganda that has nothing to do with energy – clean or otherwise. But, as CTA points out, “The PG&E-funded ad comes at a time when one of Leno’s opponents in the Senate race, Joe Nation, is being criticized for his huge financial support from business interests. PG&E is a supporter of Nation.”
