City Hall

Redmond traded for Nevius in mid-season shocker

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Bay Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond has been traded to the San Francisco Chronicle for columnist C.W. Nevius and a right-wing associate editor to be named later, it was announced today.

As part of the deal, the Chronicle will pick up the remainder of Redmond’s $25.3 million contract. In addition to a future editor, the Chron will pay the Guardian an undisclosed amount of money “just to get Nevius the fuck out of here,” Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee said.

“We respect all that Chuck has done for us, but when we realized he couldn’t even get a hippie recycling center evicted by the deadline, we knew it was time to make a change. This is the big leagues, boyo.”

Former Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, one of the many die-hard Nevius fans who has become disillusioned of late, was more harsh. “Nobody pays any attention to his shit anymore,” she said.

Nevius, a former sportswriter, has been struggling lately with the transition to a political position. His Column Effectiveness Percentage has dropped to .212 and his embarrassing play on the Haight Asbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center and the Park Merced development have spurred calls for his removal.

Redmond has been struggling, too, and is widely considered to be grossly overpaid. His CEP fell below .300 for the first time this year, a problem he has blamed on age and brain damage. He recently cut his hair in an effort to clear some of the heat from his leftist political rhetoric, but his last four pieces on tax policy have been complete failures – not one politician has held a hearing, made a statement or done anything but quietly murmur that Redmond “has gone off the deep end.” He has refused repeated calls to open up his stance.

Redmond insists that none of his problems are his own fault, and suggested that his lack of effectiveness is due to some sort of shadowy “juice” at City Hall. “David Chiu and Jane Kim can’t possibly be throwing curve balls like that on their own,” he said.

Under the terms of the deal, Nevius will immediately take over Redmond’s job and Redmond will become the Chron’s Conservative Suburban Twit.

Redmond announced that he will be selling his house in Bernal Heights and moving to a gated community in the East Bay. “If I’m going to trash San Francisco every day, I need to be living in a place where there’s no music and the cops shoot homeless people on sight,” he said. “If I’m going to become a conservative, it’s important to eliminate any actual connection to the people I’m writing about.”

April Fool’s.

Appetite: 3 ways to eat and drink for a better world this month

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We are blessed with a city full of entrepreneurs and humanitarians who work to create a better world. It’s encouraging to know one can eat and drink well while also meeting a need. Here are three upcoming ways to make your food dollars stretch towards some crucial causes:

4/5 Umamimart’s The Gift of Food at Burritt Room for earthquake relief in Japan
Head to one our favorite cocktail bars, Burritt Room, for a fundraising party benefiting earthquake relief efforts in northern Japan. Many have contributed towards the cause, whether it’s Tommy Guerrero and DJ Toph One setting the mood with music or Peko Peko Japanese Catering and Sandbox Bakery serving bites. Plenty of booze has been donated ensuring fine sips throughout the evening: Yamazaki Whisky, Joto Sake, The Glenrothes Whisky, Brugal Rum, GlenGrant Scotch, Bulleit Bourbon + Rye. 100% of your ticket goes to Second Harvest Japan, the country’s first food bank.
Tuesday, 4/5, 8pm
$40
Burritt Room,
417 Stockton, SF. (at Sutter)
(415) 400-0500
umamimartjapanbenefit.eventbrite.com

4/7 22nd Annual Share Our Strength Taste of the Nation to fight childhood hunger
Taste of the Nation is annually one of our most meaningful events, fighting childhood hunger in America, where nearly 17 million children (almost one in four) face daily hunger. Every dollar donated buys $9 of groceries to feed children in need, while 100% of ticket sales go towards Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry in the Bay Area. Participating restaurants, chefs and mixologists all give of their time, talent and resources… the line-up is no less than stellar, including honorary chef co-chairs, Traci Des Jardins of Jardiniere and Incanto’s Chris Cosentino. Check out the impressive participator list here.
Thursday, 4/7, 6:30-9:30pm (VIP reception at 5:30pm)
The Bently Reserve, 301 Battery Street
1-877-26-TASTE
$95 for General Admission – This ticket will feed a child in need for 6 months
$165 for VIP Level access – This ticket will feed a child in need for 1 year
$500 for Executive Level access – This ticket will feed a child in need for 3 years
www.TasteOfTheNation.org

4/7 Toast of the Town at City Hall towards global poverty with San Francisco CARE
There’s a humble, little venue called City Hall (!) that will be overrun with food and wine on the night of April 7th for Wine Enthusiast’s annual Toast of the Town. Over 500 wines/65 wineries and food from more than 30 local restaurants (including Saison, Twenty Five Lusk, Bar Agricole, Alexander’s Steakhouse, Comstock Saloon), will keep you well satiated into the night in City Hall’s dramatic, elegant environs. A portion of the tickets goes towards San Francisco CARE, fighting global poverty with everything from education to economic development.
Thursday, April 7, 6pm (VIP), 7-10pm Grand Tasting
$109 Grand Tasting, $169 VIP
City Hall, 1 Dr Carlton B. Goodlett Place
http://www.toastofthetown.com

–Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot

5 Things: March 18, 2011

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>>ANTIQUING IN THE DAMP This rainy weekend may be the perfect time to check out Hayes Valley’s new curiousity shop, Reliquary, holding it’s grand opening party at 5 p.m. today. Toddle past after work (with your cutest brolly in tow, of course) to check out the shop’s handmade Afghani dresses and antique Zippo lighters. Bonus: the shop’s Tumblr tipped us off to amazing afterlife art: a photo series of the turquoise, pink, and cardinal mineral deposits that have grown off tins of cremated ashes found in the Oregon asylum where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed.

>>BIG ASS MOON Just when we finally found out what the back of that big pizza pie in the sky looked like, here it comes again to hit our eyes with it’s closest and biggest showing in two decades — this weekend’s full moon is set to be a huge stunner

Hate to see you go, love to watch you leave

>>THE WEIRDEST SHOW IN TOWN Afrikaaner hip-hop freakouts Die Antwoord star in this short film in which they play animal-suited, wheelchair-bound, societally belittled, balloon-loving murderers. Of course. 

Wheelchairs: the new fixies?

>>o-O It had to happen sooner or later — an entire drag show devoted to Oprah. AND it’s actually a full comedy-drama, with music, lighting, ironic spiritual uplift, and probably some BBQ to boot. Suppositori Spelling and her merry band of sketchy queens has relocated their Sunday night dragstravaganza, Cocktailgate, from butch bar Truck to new big dance club Rebel. In honor of the move, they present OPRAH: THE DRAGSICAL, a one-time-only bonanza of something. Hie thee to 1760 Market at 10pm on Sun/19 and bring a tissue (or win a trip to Australia?).

>>PAWS ON DECK We were at City Hall for some politickin’ the other dusk, but were momentarily derailed by this magnificent skateboarding bulldog in Civic Center Plaza. Sorry for the hootin’ and hollerin’ towards the end of the clip – completely unavoidable.

Yes, we started Youtube account just to post this.

Two East Bay rallies for clean energy

As a nuclear emergency continues to unfold in Japan, Bay Area grassroots organizations are trying to drum up support for incorporating clean energy into long-range local planning.

Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and other grassroots organizations have declared March 17 a “Green Day of Action,” and they’ll mark it with a rally before the City of Richmond’s Planning Commission meeting to call for a meaningful plan for reducing citywide greenhouse gas emissions.

Richmond’s Chevron oil refinery is one of the worst emitters of greenhouse gases statewide. The Richmond Planning Commission will hear public comment on a Draft Environmental Impact Report for the city’s General Plan, which includes a strategy to curb greenhouse gas emissions in coming years. Yet CBE’s Jessica Guadalupe Tovar noted that the city’s plan for a greener future doesn’t account for how it will limit industrial pollution.

According to a graph produced by CBE, industrial sources make up around 88 percent of the total annual greenhouse gas emissions generated in Richmond. The Chevron refinery is responsible for roughly 4.5 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, out of a citywide total of just under 7 million tons. 

“They can’t ignore the elephant in the room,” Tovar said.

“Richmond is already plagued with preventable illnesses and diseases and residents cannot afford for the General Plan to overlook these serious environmental health hazards,” said Richmond resident Tiana Drisker, a member of CBE.

Meanwhile, on March 18, another rally for clean energy is planned outside Oakland City Hall from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Activists from Movement Generation are planning an anti-nuclear rally “to call on PG&E to not extend its nuclear energy production from its Diablo Canyon reactor, and on Oakland to ramp up clean energy alternatives.”

The rally will follow a day-long conference organized by Bay Localize and the Local Clean Energy Alliance to highlight Bay Area clean-energy efforts.

“This nuclear devastation in Japan must never happen in California, or anywhere else,” said Al Weinrub, conference coordinator. “Energy conservation and renewables are the safest forms of energy by far.”

Unregistered lobbyist

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tredmond@sfbg.com

In 2007 and 2008, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. paid former Mayor Willie Brown a total of $480,000 for consulting work. Since Brown has never been utility lawyer, it’s almost certain that money has bought political advice and access.

Brown is also working for the owners of the Fairmont Hotel, which wants to tear down one of its towers and build as many as 180 luxury condos.

His public affairs institute shares office space with one of the most powerful lobbying firms in town. He meets with or talks regularly with the mayor and members of the Board of Supervisors.

Yet unlike dozens of others who seek to influence public policy for hire, Brown is not registered as a lobbyist at City Hall.

On the surface, it’s a fairly modest issue — all Brown would have to do to comply with the letter and spirit of the city’s law is to fill out a form, list his clients, and reveal which officials he’s been talking to. It would take him 10 minutes.

But the fact that someone who is widely acknowledged to be among the most influential power brokers in San Francisco refuses to disclose whom he’s working for leaves city officials and the public in the dark — and raises a long list of questions about the effectiveness of the city’s ethics laws.

There’s a reason city law requires people who seek to influence city officials for money to disclose what they’re up to. When elected officials, commissioners, or department heads meet with advocates, they need to know who’s paying the bills. If, for example, Sup. Jane Kim has breakfast with Brown (which Brown himself reported on in a recent column in the San Francisco Chronicle), she needs to know: Does he have a client with an agenda? If he asks her to meet with someone, is he just looking out for the interests of the city — or is he pushing a paid special interest?

When Brown has dinner with Mayor Ed Lee (as he did several weeks ago) the voters need to know: Is this dinner companion pushing the mayor to make policy decisions that might help a private interest?

 

THE RULES

The definition of “lobbyist” in city law is designed to avoid putting special requirements on advocates who push issues on their own or for purely political reasons. A neighborhood activist pushing for a stop sign or better police patrols doesn’t have to register. Neither does a restaurant owner looking for a permit to put tables on the street. The only people who have to register are those who represent a client who pays them more than $3,000 in any given three-month period.

Lawyers are exempt if they’re contacting city officials purely about specific pending litigation or claims. Labor leaders are exempt if they’re talking about wages or benefits for their union members.

The requirements aren’t onerous. Lobbyists simply disclose their clients, the issues they’re working on, the city officials they have contacted, and any campaign contributions they’ve made.

There’s no doubt Brown meets the financial threshold in at least one instance. Documents on file with the state Public Utilities Commission show that PG&E paid him $280,000 in 2007 and almost $200,000 in 2008. And although Brown is a lawyer, there’s no indication that he is representing PG&E in any litigation against the city.

On the other hand, PG&E is fighting hard to derail the city’s community choice aggregation program. Is Brown part of that effort? There’s no way to know.

It’s clear he talks to local officials regularly. Most members of the Board of Supervisors we contacted said they had talked to Brown at some point in the past year. “He called me to ask how he could help with the local hire legislation,” Sup. John Avalos told us. “I told him he could call (then-Sup.) Bevan Dufty. He said he would, but I don’t know if it ever happened.” Sup. Sean Elsbernd told us he speaks to Brown about “the state of local political dynamics,” but said he can’t remember being lobbied on any particular issue.

Insiders say that’s typical — Brown rarely lets anyone know exactly what his interests are. “The talent of Willie is his ability to create plausible deniability,” one city official, who asked not to be named, told us.

But when Brown is involved, things have a funny way of happening. Take the Fairmont Hotel.

 

FRONT OF THE LINE

The Fairmont’s owners, who include the Saudi royal family and a group of American investors, want to tear down one of the hotel’s towers, eliminate several hundred hotel rooms, and replace them with high-end condominiums. That requires a city permit — legislation by former Sup. Aaron Peskin limits the number of hotel rooms that can be converted to condos and requires applicants to submit to a lottery for the right to convert.

The Fairmont applied for a permit in 2009, and won tentative approval. But in October 2010, the Planning Commission refused to certify the project’s environmental impact report. With no valid EIR, the permits expired, meaning the hotel would have to go back and reenter the lottery, with no guarantee of success.

So the Fairmont owners are seeking special legislation that would allow them to submit a new EIR without going to the back of the line — in essence, an exemption from the lottery. So far there’s no champion on the Board of Supervisors, and the hotel workers union has been dubious about the project, fearing it will cost union jobs in the long run.

But early in March, Mayor Lee quietly submitted his own legislation to the board, offering the Fairmont everything the owners want.

Who’s working for the owners? Willie Brown.

Bill Oberndorf, part of the local ownership group, told us Brown was an “advisor” to the project. “Nobody in the city has more knowledge about how to get things done than Mayor Brown,” he said.

So did Brown talk to Lee before the mayor introduced his Fairmont bill? And isn’t that a valid question? At press time, Lee’s office hadn’t responded to my questions. But if Brown was a registered lobbyist, he’d have to report that information.

Who else are Brown’s clients? Since he doesn’t register, there’s no list. But there are some clues.

For example, the headquarters of the Willie Brown Institute is situated at One Market Plaza, Suite 2250. That’s the same address as Platinum Advisors, the high-powered lobbying firm founded by Darius Anderson. Among the firm’s clients: AECOM, the engineering and construction giant, which has a $147 million contract on the Chinatown subway project; PG&E; and Sutter Health, which wants to build a $1 billion hospital on Van Ness Avenue.

Others who lobby regularly at City Hall don’t always register. Rob Black, who works for the Chamber of Commerce, is a constant presence.

Black told us the chamber used to be considered a “registered lobby entity” that was required to report all contacts with public officials and the issue involved. But the Board of Supervisors changed that law last year, requiring lobbyist registration only from individuals who are paid at least $3,000 per quarter for lobbying. Furthermore, the definition of lobbying doesn’t include attending or speaking at public hearings or writing letters. So while the SF Chamber’s Black, Steve Falk, and Jim Lazarus all lobby city officials, Black said, none have exceeded that threshold. “If we hit the monetary threshold, we’ll start filing individually,” he said.

The fact that Brown is a lawyer doesn’t excuse him from registering, said Ethics Commission director John St. Croix “If someone is paid specifically to lobby government, they should register,” St. Croix said.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told us that the city needs to take a look at the lobbyist registration law to make sure that everyone who has private interests is properly registered.

Elsbernd said that others — particularly labor leaders and union staffers — also regularly lobby but don’t register. And while the law may allow them to skate underneath (like Black), there’s a huge difference between, say, Labor Council Executive Director Tim Paulson appearing at City Hall and Brown meeting with city officials.

When Paulson appears, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind whom he represents. The same could be said of Black. Although the chamber has many members, it’s clear that he’s pushing the interests of the big-business community.

On the other hand, Ken Cleaveland, public affairs director of the Building Owners and Managers Association, is duly registered with the Ethics Commission.

Brown — as is his typical practice — didn’t return my calls seeking comment. But by flouting the rules, he’s able to operate completely behind the scenes, influencing policy decisions in secrecy, with no accountability whatsoever. That’s a violation of the exact reason the lobbyist registration laws exist.

The lobbyist loophole

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EDITORIAL As the stories in this issue show, open government laws are critical to democracy. Without the city’s sunshine law, we wouldn’t know how the proposal to give Twitter a tax break ballooned into a major giveaway. Without the sunshine laws, Tim Crews, the embattled publisher of the Sacramento Valley Mirror, wouldn’t have been able to use his small paper to hold public officials accountable.

That’s why the laws on the books need to be enforced — and sometimes strengthened. One example in San Francisco is the lobbyist registration requirement.

Here’s the problem: Former Mayor Willie Brown, who now works for at least two major outfits with business before City Hall. As Tim Redmond reports on page 10, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. paid Brown some $480,000 in 2007 and 2008. And although Brown is a lawyer, nobody can honestly believe that was for legal work. He was clearly paid to give the embattled utility political advice and to pull political strings. And PG&E has major interests at City Hall — San Francisco is trying to set up a community choice aggregation system that PG&E opposes, and (of course) the utility has spent almost 90 years trying to block public power in this town. There are dozens of other city issues, from facility safety to the franchise fee, that affect PG&E’s bottom line.

Has Brown tried to influence city officials on behalf of the utility? The public has no way to know. By law, any individual who lobbies for a private client (and earns more than $3,000 a quarter doing so) has to register with the Ethics Commission, reveal his or her clients, and report on all contacts with city officials. Brown has never done that.

Brown also works for the owners of the Fairmont Hotel, who want the right to convert hotel rooms to condos. Mayor Ed Lee just submitted legislation giving the hoteliers what they want, and Brown is Lee’s political mentor. Connection?

The public has a right to know who’s trying to do what deals behind closed doors; that’s why the city has a lobbyist registration law. The voters have a right to know whether lobbyists are giving money to elected officials; that’s why the law requires registered lobbyists to itemize those contributions. But it’s not always honored — and as Brown shows, it can be openly defied. And nothing happens.

Part of the problem is that the Ethics Commission has been far too lax in pursuing enforcement of the laws. The agency lacks the resources to do serious investigations. As a result, its director John St. Croix told us, all the staff can do is respond to complaints. But even with the limited money it has, the commission can do a lot more. Public hearings on the failures of lobbyist registration and campaign contribution reporting would be a good first step. And how hard would it be to cross-check campaign filings with lobbyist filings to see which lobbyists don’t properly report their contributions? A simple computer program could do that in a few minutes.

The commission also needs to do a better job making its funding case to the supervisors. The utter lack of serious enforcement of laws involving powerful interests doesn’t instill confidence in the agency.

But the law is also vague in parts, and the supervisors need to fix it. A clearer definition of “lobbyist” is a clear mandate. And enforcement needs to be increased. Willful violation of the state’s Political Reform Act is a misdemeanor crime. Violating the city’s lobbyist law should be too.

Editorial: The Willie Brown loophole

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As the stories in this issue show, open government laws are critical to democracy. Without the city’s sunshine law, we wouldn’t know how the proposal to give Twitter a tax break ballooned into a major giveaway. Without the sunshine laws, Tim Crews, the embattled publisher of the Sacramento Valley Mirror, wouldn’t have been able to use his small paper to hold public officials accountable.

That’s why the laws on the books need to be enforced — and sometimes strengthened. One example in San Francisco is the lobbyist registration requirement.

Here’s the problem: Former Mayor Willie Brown, who now works for at least two major outfits with business before City Hall. As Tim Redmond reports on page 10, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. paid Brown some $480,000 in 2007 and 2008. And although Brown is a lawyer, nobody can honestly believe that was for legal work. He was clearly paid to give the embattled utility political advice and to pull political strings. And PG&E has major interests at City Hall — San Francisco is trying to set up a community choice aggregation system that PG&E opposes, and (of course) the utility has spent almost 90 years trying to block public power in this town. There are dozens of other city issues, from facility safety to the franchise fee, that affect PG&E’s bottom line.

Has Brown tried to influence city officials on behalf of the utility? The public has no way to know. By law, any individual who lobbies for a private client (and earns more than $3,000 a quarter doing so) has to register with the Ethics Commission, reveal his or her clients, and report on all contacts with city officials. Brown has never done that.

Brown also works for the owners of the Fairmont Hotel, who want the right to convert hotel rooms to condos. Mayor Ed Lee just submitted legislation giving the hoteliers what they want, and Brown is Lee’s political mentor. Connection?

The public has a right to know who’s trying to do what deals behind closed doors; that’s why the city has a lobbyist registration law. The voters have a right to know whether lobbyists are giving money to elected officials; that’s why the law requires registered lobbyists to itemize those contributions. But it’s not always honored — and as Brown shows, it can be openly defied. And nothing happens.

Part of the problem is that the Ethics Commission has been far too lax in pursuing enforcement of the laws. The agency lacks the resources to do serious investigations. As a result, its director John St. Croix told us, all the staff can do is respond to complaints. But even with the limited money it has, the commission can do a lot more. Public hearings on the failures of lobbyist registration and campaign contribution reporting would be a good first step. And how hard would it be to cross-check campaign filings with lobbyist filings to see which lobbyists don’t properly report their contributions? A simple computer program could do that in a few minutes.

The commission also needs to do a better job making its funding case to the supervisors. The utter lack of serious enforcement of laws involving powerful interests doesn’t instill confidence in the agency.

But the law is also vague in parts, and the supervisors need to fix it. A clearer definition of “lobbyist” is a clear mandate. And enforcement needs to be increased. Willful violation of the state’s Political Reform Act is a misdemeanor crime. Violating the city’s lobbyist law should be too.

 

A meeting of Mayor Lee and Bloomberg’s minds

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Mayor Ed Lee described New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as “a model of mine” as the two men exchanged gifts in the Mayor’s Office, and reporters unsuccessfully tried to figure out which of the two men is taller.

Bloomberg gave Lee a box of golf balls, Lee gave Bloomberg a trolley bell, organic hot dogs, a lifetime membership to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the two men had a meeting of the minds when it came to the need for big cities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Lee prefaced his gift giving by saying he intended to make Bloomberg an honorary citizen of San Francisco.

“Does that mean I’ll have to pay taxes?” Bloomberg quipped.
“If they go up, you’ll be the first to know,” Lee replied.

Bloomberg said it was “fun to talk” with Mayor Lee about energy conservation and environmental activism. “Things like the environment are things mayors have to deal with every day,” Bloomberg said, noting that cities account for 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

Bloomberg praised San Francisco for approving an ordinance that requires owners of non-residential buildings to make public how much energy each building consumes each year. The legislation is meant to improve energy efficiency in existing buildings, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lower energy costs and create green jobs. It also requires commercial buildings over 10,000 square feet to conduct energy-efficiency audits every five years.

“Each can profit from each other’s experiences,” Bloomberg said, noting that because NYC has a more carbon efficient mass transit than most U.S. cities, its buildings are responsible for creating 80 percent of NYC’s emissions. 

Asked about a lawsuit that his transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan reportedly triggered by installing a bike lane along the boundary of an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood, Bloomberg flashed a smile that didn’t suggest he thinks Sadik-Khan is now a PR liability for his administration.

“Change is difficult,” Bloomberg replied, acknowledging that there are “battles between those who drive cars and ride bikes.”

“Mass transit is the solution for every big city,” he continued. “And the bicycle is one of the answers, but they can be dangerous. Roads are not just for motor vehicles. They are also for bikes and pedestrians. The key is pedestrian safety.”

“Our transportation commissioner is very innovative,” Bloomberg continued, referring back to the reportedly embattled Sadik-Khan. “She therefore does come under criticism, but I should be the one taking the heat, not her!”

“Closing Times Square was one of the most successful things we’ve done,” he added, referring to another initiative that Sadik-Khan championed, in addition to installing bike lanes on crowded streets and proposing to shut part of NYC’s 34th Street to cars.

Asked for his impressions of San Francisco’s homeless problem, Bloomberg pointed out that he had just traveled straight from the airport to City Hall by BART, and therefore didn’t have a deep grasp of the issue locally. “I don’t know the specifics,” he said.

But he was happy to outline how New York set “a very aggressive goal” of reducing its homeless population that it then failed to meet it, in part because the economy tanked. “The numbers are down about 13 percent each year,” he said, noting that he hasn’t seen the 2010 statistics.  “But only a small number sleep on the streets,” he continued, noting that folks in NYC, “have to work to qualify for rental assistance.”

Asked to give Lee some mayoral advice, Bloomberg said, “The public wants elected officials who are genuine, who are doing things for what they think are the right reasons.

Asked to give Lee specific advice on how to stay out of trouble as the city’s top official, Bloomberg joked that Lee should move to New York until the end of the year, when his term as interim mayor expires. “But then he’d get into trouble for doing that,” he said. And then he and his coterie of security guards and photographers were out of the press conference and into the elevators, faster than a cabbie trying to beat a red light on a sweltering night in the Big Apple.

More than 80 percent of Americans want to tax the rich

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Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is calling for an emergency surtax on millionaires as a way to combat the deficit. Which, of course, is a great idea. His colleague Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is on the same page. And the polls show that most of the country agrees with the concept; in fact, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll says that a staggering 81 percent of Americans think it’s basically a good idea to increase taxes on incomes of more than $1 million a year.


I imagine that the population of San Francisco is somewhat more liberal on the issue of taxes than the nation as a whole, which leads me to believe that a very substantial percentage of the city’s residents (including some of the very rich ones) was support increased local taxes that would require the wealthy to pay more to preserve city services.


There are, I’m sure, plenty of creative ways to do that. But it doesn’t seem to be at the top of the budget discussion at City Hall.


I realize that it would require a two-thirds vote in November for any tax hikes — unless the supervisors declared a financial emergency. And it certainly seems as if we’re in a state of emergency — and if the governor can’t find a couple of Republicans to vote for his budget package, it’s going to get much worse, very quickly.


If we can’t do that, and we have to wait a year and do it next fall, we still ought to be starting now — and the supervisors ought to be telling every community that’s facing cuts that there won’t be any more reductions without at least a plan for new revenue.


Radio radio!

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arts@sfbg.com

Do you remember rock ‘n’ roll radio, as the Ramones once quizzed us, ever so long ago? If not that “Video Killed the Radio Star”-era iteration, a leather-clad punky nostalgia for Murray the K and Alan Freed, then do you remember college rock when it became the name of a musical genre in the early 1990s?

I’m trying to make out its faint strains now: a sound nominally dubbed rock, but as wildly eclectic and widely roaming as the winds blowing me over the Bay Bridge on this blustery, rain-streaked afternoon. I’m not imagining it. New, shaken-and-stirred PJ Harvey nudging family-band throwback the Cowsills. Nawlins jazzbos Kid Ory and Jimmy Noone rubbing sonic elbows with winsome Tim Hart and Maddy Prior. Brit electropoppers Fenech-Soler bursting beside Chilean melody-makers Lhasa. The ancient Popul Vuh tangling with the bright-eyed art-rock I Was a King. It’s an average playlist for KALX 90.7 FM, the last-standing free-form sound in San Francisco proper — though it hails from across the bay in Berkeley.

But what about SF’s own, KUSF? A former college radio DJ and assistant music director at the University of Hawaii’s KTUH and the University of Iowa’s KRUI, I’m one of those souls who’s searching for it far too late, even though I benefited from my time in college radio, garnering a major-league musical education simply flipping through the dog-eared LPs and listening to other jocks’ shows. Like so many music fans, I got lost — searching for the signal and repelled by commercial radio’s predictable computerized playlists, cheesy commercials, and blowhard DJs — and found NPR.

Today, I’m testing the signals within — the health of music on SF terra firma radio — by driving around the city, cruising City Hall, bumping through SoMa, and dodging bikes in the Mission. KALX’s signal is strong on the noncommercial side of the dial, alongside the lover’s rock streaming from long-standing KPOO 89.5 and the Strokes-y bounce bounding from San Jose modern rock upstart KSJO 92.3, whose tagline promises, “This is the alternative.” But KSJO’s distinct lack of a DJ voice and seamless emphasis on monochromatic Killers-and-Kings-of-Chemical-Romance tracks quickly bores, slotting it below its rival, Live 105.

Dang. I wind my way up Market to Twin Peaks. Waves of white noise begin to invade a Tim Hardin track. KALX’s signal fades as the billowing, smoky-looking fog rolls majestically down upscale Forest Hill to the middle-class Sunset. But I can hear it — with occasional static — on 19th Avenue, and later, in the Presidio and Richmond.

Throughout, KUSF’s old frequency, 90.3, comes through loud and clear — though now with the sound of KDFC’s light-classical and its penchant for swelling, feel-good woodwinds. The music is so innocuous that to rag on it feels as petty and mean as kicking a docile pup. But I get my share of instrumental wallpaper while fuming on corporate phone trees. It’s infuriating to realize that it supplanted KUSF, the last bastion of free-form radio in SF proper. Where is the free-form rock radio? This is the city that successfully birthed the format in the 1970s, with the freewheeling, bohemia-bred KSAN, and continued the upstart tradition with pirate stations such as SF Liberation Radio. Doesn’t San Francisco deserve its own WFMU or KCRW?

 

FEWER INDEPENDENTS, MORE CONSOLIDATION

Online radio — including forces like Emeryville’s Pandora and San Diego’s Slacker Radio — provides one alternative. This is true for listeners who use the TiVo-like Radio Shark tuner-recorder to rig their car (still the primo place to tune in) to listen to online stations all over the country. The just-launched cloud-based DVR Dar.fm also widens the online option.

Nevertheless, online access isn’t a substitute for free radio air waves. “We get the wrong impression that everyone is wired, and everyone’s online, and no one listens to terrestrial radio,” says radio activist and KFJC DJ Jennifer Waits. “Why then are these companies buying stations for millions of dollars?”

Waits and KALX general manager Sandra Wasson both point to the consolidation that’s overtaken commercial radio since deregulation with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — a trend that has now crept onto the noncommercial end of the dial.

As competition for limited bandwidth accelerates (in San Francisco, this situation is compounded by a hilly topography with limited low-power station coverage) and classical radio stations like KDFC are pushed off the commercial frequencies, universities are being approached by radio brokers. One such entity, Public Radio Capital, was part of the secretive $3.75 million deal to sell KUSF’s transmitter and frequency. Similar moves are occurring throughout the U.S., according to Waits. She cites the case of KTXT, the college radio station at Texas Tech, as akin to KUSF’s situation, while noting Rice and Vanderbilt universities are also exploring station sales.

“The noncommercial band is following in the footsteps of the commercial band in the way of consolidation,” Wasson says, from her paper-crammed but spartan office at KALX, after a tour of the station’s 90,000-strong record library. Wire, Ringo Death Starr, and Mountain emanate from the on-air DJ booth, as students prep the day’s newscast and a volunteer readies a public-affairs show. “Buying and selling noncommercial radio seems to me very much like what used to happen and still does in commercial radio: one company owns a lot stations in a lot of different markets and does different kinds of programming in different markets. Deregulation changed it so that 10-watt stations weren’t protected anymore. There were impacts on commercial and noncommercial sides.”

Lack of foresight leads cash-strapped schools to leap for the quick payout. “Once a school sells a station, it’s unlikely it will be able to buy one back,” says Waits. “Licenses don’t come up for sale and there are limited frequencies. They have an amazing resource and they’re making a decision that isn’t thought-through.”

 

DREAMING IN STEREO

There are still people willing to put imagination — and money — behind their radio dreams. But free-form has come to sound risky after the rise of KSAN and FM radio and the subsequent streamlining and mainstreaming of the format.

Author and journalist Ben Fong-Torres, who once oversaw a KUSF show devoted to KSAN jocks, cites the LGBT-friendly, dance-music-focused KNGY 92.7 as a recent example of investors willing to try out a “restricted” format. “They were a good solid city station that sounded quite loose,” he explains. “But even there they weren’t able to sell much advertising because they were limited to the demographic in San Francisco and they couldn’t make enough to pay their debts.”

Nonetheless, Fong-Torres continues to be approached by radio lovers eager to start a great music station. “I’ve told them what I’m telling you,” he says. “It’s really difficult to acquire a stick in these parts, to grab whatever best signals there are.” This is especially true with USC/KDFC rumored to be on a quest for frequencies south of SF.

“There are some dreamers out there who think about it,” muses Fong-Torres. “A single person who’s willing to bankroll a station just out of the goodness of his or her heart and let people spread good music — someone like Paul Allen, who did KEXP in Seattle.”

 

THE FIGHT TO SAVE KUSF

The University of San Francisco has touted the sale of KUSF’s frequency and the station’s proposed shift to online radio as a teaching opportunity. But the real lesson may be a reminder of the value of the city’s assets — and how easily they can be taken away. “We’re learning how unbelievably sacred bandwidth is on the FM dial,” says Irwin Swirnoff, who was a musical director at the station.

Swirnoff and the Save KUSF campaign hope USF will give the community an opportunity to buy the university’s transmitter, much as Southern Vermont College’s WBTN 1370 AM was purchased by a local nonprofit.

For Swirnoff and many others, listener-generated playlists can’t substitute for the human touch. “DJs get to tell a story through music,” he explains. “They’re able to reach a range of emotions and [speak to] the factors that are in the city at that moment, its nature and politics. Through music, they can create a moving dialogue and story.”

Swirnoff also points to the DJ’s personally selective role during a time of corporate media saturation and tremendous musical production. “In the digital age, the amount of music out in the world can be totally overwhelming,” he says. “A good station can take in all those releases and give you the best garage rock, the best Persian dance music, everything. One DJ can be a curator of 100 years of music and can find a way to bring the listener to a unique place.”

Local music and voices aren’t getting heard on computer-programmed, voice-tracked commercial stations despite inroads of satellite radio into local news. In a world where marketing seems to reign supreme, is there a stronger SF radio brand than the almost 50-year-old KUSF when it comes to sponsoring shows and breaking new bands for the discriminating SF music fan? “People in the San Francisco music community who are in bands and are club owners know college radio is still a vital piece in promoting bands and clubs,” says Waits. “There are small shows that are only getting promotion over college radio.”

“It was a great year for San Francisco music, and we [KUSF] got to blast it the most,” Swirnoff continued. “It’s really sad that right now you can’t turn on terrestrial radio and hear Grass Widow, Sic Alps, or Thee Oh Sees, when it’s some of the best music being made in the city right now.”

 

PIRATE CAT-ASTROPHE — AND THE DRIVE TO KEEP RADIO ALIVE

Aside from KUSF, the only place where you could hear, for instance, minimal Scandinavian electronics and sweater funk regularly on the radio was Pirate Cat. The pirate station was the latest in a long, unruly queue, from Radio Libre to KPBJ, that — as rhapsodized about in Sue Carpenter’s 2004 memoir, 40 Watts From Nowhere: A Journey into Pirate Radio — have taken to the air with low-power FM transmitters.

After being shut down by the FCC and fined $10,000 in 2009, Pirate Cat is in limbo, further adrift thanks to a dispute about who owns the station. Daniel “Monkey” Roberts’ sale of Pirate Cat Café in the Mission left loyal volunteers wondering who should even receive their $30-a-month contributions. Roberts shut down the Pirate Cat site and stream on Feb. 20. Since then, some Pirate Cat volunteers have been attempting to launch their own online stream under the moniker PCR Collective Radio.

“We would definitely start our own station,” says Aaron Lazenby, Pirate Cat’s skweee DJ and a Radio Free Santa Cruz vet. “The question now is how to resolve the use of Pirate Cat so we don’t lose momentum and lose our community. We all love it too much to let it fizzle out like that.”

Some people are even willing to take the ride into DIY low-power terrestrial radio. I stumbled over the Bay Area’s latest on a wet, windy Oakland evening at Clarke Commons’ craftsman-y abode. The door was flung open and a colorful, quilt-covered fort/listening station greeted me in the living room. In the dining space, a “magical handcrafted closet studio station” provided ground zero for the micro-micro K-Okay Radio — essentially a computer sporting cute kitchen-style curtains and playing digitized sounds.

A brown, blue, and russet petal-shingled installation looked down on K-Okay’s guests as they took their turn at the mic. And if you were in a several-block radius of the neat-as-a-pin house-under-construction and tuned your boombox to 88.1 FM, you could have caught some indescribably strange sounds and yarns concerning home and migration. I drove away warmed by the friendly mumble of sound art.

Who would have imagined radio as an art installation? Yet it’s just another positive use for a medium that has functioned in myriad helpful ways, whether as a life link for Haitians after the 2010 earthquake or (as on a recent Radio Valencia show) a rock gossip line concerning the Bruise Cruise Fest. As Waits puts it, radio is “about allowing yourself to be taken on a musical journey rather than doing the driving yourself online.” Today it sounds like we need the drive to keep that spirit alive.

Board to approve highly staged mayoral question time

8

When San Franciscans voted on two occasions to require the mayor to meet publicly with the Board of Supervisors to answer questions – most recently in November when voters approved a binding measure after Gavin Newsom ignored the preview measure – I don’t think they had in mind the sterile, staged process that the board is poised to approve today.

Sponsored by Sups. David Chiu and Eric Mar (an early endorser of Chiu for mayor) and rubber-stamped by the Chiu-stacked Rules Committee, the procedures are a far cry from England’s raucous question time, which supporters and critics have always compared the proposal to. And it seems to let board-appointed Mayor Ed Lee and his successor off very easy.

The rules call for the mayor to appear on the second regular board meeting of each month (meaning Lee’s first session will be five months after voters approved it) and for only supervisors from odd-numbered districts to be allowed to ask questions one month, followed by even-numbered supes the next.

Supervisors are then required to submit their questions in writing almost a week in advance – and even then a supermajority of eight supervisors can vote the question down, meaning the mayor won’t have to answer. Conversely, a supermajority can also approve questions after the deadline when they arise about pressing business.

That’s quite a neat and tidy little democratic exercise that the new powers-that-be at City Hall are trying to create.

UPDATE: Chris Daly, who authored the question time measure as a supervisor, told us that neither of its sponsors nor any Rules Committee members who asked him about the legislative intent of the measure or the language he wrote in it, which Daly said the board and the mayor are violating.

“The intent of the charter amendment was to increase the dialogue and discourse, but the rules seem to dampen the ability of that discourse to take the city somewhere,” Daly told us. He also said that the measure calls for the mayor to appear monthly before the board and it contained no provision suspending that requirement while the board and mayor spend months coming up with ground rules, so “the mayor has been in violation of the charter since then.”

Stage Listings

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THEATER

OPENING

Beauty and the Beast Young Performers Theatre, Fort Mason Theatre, Bldg C; 346-5550, www.ypt.org. $7-10. opens Sat/5, 1pm. Runs Sat, 1pm; Sun 1 and 3:30pm. Young Performers Theatre presents the classic fairy tale.

Geezer Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Previews Thurs, 8pm; Sat, 5pm; Sun, 3pm (through March 27). Opens March 31, 8pm. Runs Thurs, 8pm; Sat, 5pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 1. The Marsh presents a new solo show about aging and mortality by Geoff Hoyle.

James Bond: Lady Killer Dark Room Theater, 2263 Mission; 732-9592, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Opens Fri/4, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 26. Dark Room Theater presents an all-new James Bond adventure.

Regrets Only New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Previews Wed/2-Fri/4, 8pm. Opens Sat/5, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 3. New Conservatory Threatre presents a play by Paul Rudnick, directed by Andrew Nance.

Tenth Annual Bay One-Acts Festival Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma; 891-7235, www.bayoneacts.org. $20-32. Opens Wed/6, 8pm. Runs Wed-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 3 and 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through March 26. Three Wise Monkeys Theatre Company presents the tenth incarnation of the curated festival.

BAY AREA

Free Range Thinking Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Previews Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm (through March 12). Opens March 18, 8pm. Runs Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through April 9. The Marsh Berkeley presents a new comedic solo show by Robert Dubac.

ONGOING

Devil/Fish Brava Theater, 2781 24th St; www.criquenoveau.com. $26. Thurs/3-Sat/5, 7pm; Sun/6, 6pm. Cirque Noveau presents a contemporary circus that riffs off of the Faust legend.

*Farragut North NOHSpace, 2840 Mariposa; www.opentabproductions.com. $25. Thurs/3-Sat/5, 8pm. Former Howard Dean speechwriter Beau Willimon’s formulaic but solidly crafted 2008 play about backroom politics and the seamy side of what’s euphemistically called the American democratic process seems like it’d make a good George Clooney movie. George Clooney thought so too. He’s making it now under the title The Ides of March. You can see it sooner and without all those goddamn movie stars in this low-budget, high-octane staging by OpenTab Productions (Fishing). Stephen (Ben Euphrat) is a 25-year-old wiz of a press secretary for a “maverick” governor heading into a major primary battle on the road to the White House. But an unexpected phone call leads “idealistic” power-lover Stephen into temptation, even as it reveals the real dynamics of the electoral system he thought he’d mastered. A battle for career survival ensues with his former boss (Alex Plant), in which loyalty is a password and decency the first sandbag to drop. Opening night had one or two timing issues and some actors lost in shadow, but director Dave Sikula builds the action well and gets strong performances from an uneven but generally winning cast. Particularly nice work comes from a convincingly unraveling Euphant, a coolly compassionate Carla Pauli (as precocious intern–turned–unwitting pawn), and the formidable Nathan Tucker as Stephen’s slickly conniving counterpart and Mephistopheles of the moment.

40 Pounds in 12 Weeks: A Love Story The Marsh, 1062 Valencia; 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through March 26. A one-woman show about eating and weight loss, by Pidge Meade.

*Loveland Marsh, 1062 Valencia; 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through March 26. Ann Randolph’s one-woman show extends its run.

Out of Sight Marsh, 1062 Valencia; 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs and Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through March 27. Sara Felder’s one-woman show extends its run.

Party of 2 – The New Mating Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; 1-800-838-3006, www.partyof2themusical.com. $27-29. Sun, 3pm. Open-ended. A musical about relationships by Shopping! The Musical author Morris Bobrow.

*Pearls Over Shanghai Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 Tenth St; 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-69. Sat, 8pm. Through April 9. Thrillpeddlers’ acclaimed production of the Cockettes musical continues its successful run.

Sex and Death: A Night with Harold Pinter Phoenix Theatre, ste 601, 414 Mason; 1-800-838-3006, www.offbraodwaywest.org. $35. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through March 26. Off Broadway West Theatre Company presents two Pinter one-acts: The Dumb Waiter and The Lover.

What We’re Up Against Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, bldg D; 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org. Wed/2-Fri/4, 8pm; Sat/5, 2:30 and 8pm; Sun/6, 2:30pm. Following the popularity of Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius in 2009, Magic Theatre brings the New York playwright back for the world premiere of a decidedly flimsy comedy about sexual discrimination at a busy architecture firm. Eliza (Sarah Nealis) is the bright and brash new employee who finds herself shut out by an old boys network. Sodden boss Stu (Warren David Keith) resents her heartily for her competence and ambition, while ass-kissing power-jockey Weber (James Wagner) uses the leverage for all its worth. Gender solidarity with sole (but soulless) sister Janice (Pamela Gaye Walker) doesn’t get Eliza very far either. One guy at the firm, Ben (Rod Gnapp), alone knows better (among what amounts to an unbelievably inept staff). Eliza, meanwhile, crafts a form of revenge from her well-guarded solution to the otherwise stymieing “duct problem” in the plans for a new mall, a major account hitting the skids. Ben’s obsession with ducts is something of a key joke here, which ends up being characteristic of a play that stretches its not-very-new conceits thinly over two acts. The glass ceiling, ducts and all, is a bit too transparent in this bloodless production (helmed by artistic director Loretta Greco), leaving precious little to wonder or worry about. (Avila)

William Blake Sings the Blues Actors Theatre of SF, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.brownpapertickets.com. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/5. Actors Theatre of San Francisco presents the world premiere of a play by Keith Philips.

BAY AREA

Collapse Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $34-55. Wed/2-Sat/5, 8pm; Sun/6, 2 and 7pm. Aurora Theatre presents a comedy by Allison Moore.

Death of a Salesman Pear Avenue Theatre, Mtn View; (650) 254-1148, www.thepear.org. $15-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 20. Pear Avenue Theatre presents the Arthur Miller classic.

A Man’s Home…an Ode to Kafka’s Castle Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant; (510) 558-1381, www.centralworks.org. $14-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun 5pm (also Sat/5 and March 12, 5pm). Through March 13. Central Works

Romeo and Juliet La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through March 26. Impact Theatre presents a Russian mafia interpreation of the tragic romantic classic.

Ruined Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-73. Call for dates and times. Through April 10. Berkeley Rep presents Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning play about the lives of women in Africa.

World’s Funniest Bubble Show The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $8-11. Sun, 11am. Through April 3. The Amazing Bubble Man extends the bubble-making celebration.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Comedy Brains The Cabaret at the Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org. Sat/5, 8:30pm. $15-35. Scott Capurro and Piano Fight’s ForePlays are this week’s lineup.

Devotion ODC Theater, 3153 17th St; 863-9834, www.odctheater.org. Fri/4-Sun/6, 8pm. $15-18. Sarah Michelson and Richard Maxwell present a new dance work.

Halau o Keikiali’i City Hall; 920-9181, www.dancersgroup.org. Fri/4, noon. Free. The first installment in a monthly lunchtime dance series.

Hope Mohr Dance Z Space at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida; 1-800-838-3006, www.hopemohr.org. Thurs/3-Sat/5, 8pm; Sun/6, 2pm. The company presents its fourth home season with the world premiere of The Unsayable.

Miss Toolbox Pageant Club 93, 93 Ninth St; www.club93sf.com. Thurs/3, 11pm. Free. Witness performers of all genders and sexualities utilizing their style, talent, beauty, and star wattage.

Qcomedy Showcase Martuni’s, 4 Valencia; www.Qcomedy.com. Mon/7, 8pm. $5-16. Performers include Kat Evasco, Dana Cory, Cookie Dough, Maggie Dolan, and Nick Leonard.

Stephen Petronio Company Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission; 392-6449, www.sfperformances.org. Thurs/4-Fri/5, 8pm. $30-50. SF Performances presents Stephen Petronio Dance Company’s 25th anniversary work, I Drink the Air Before Me.

BAY AREA

Bale Folklorico Da Bahia Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus, Berk; (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org. Sun/6, 7pm; Mon/7, 11am. $5-52. The Brazilian troupe of dancers, musicians, and singers performs Sacred Heritage.

Body of Knowledge Western Sky Studio, Eighth St. and Dwight, Berk; www.bodyresearch.org. Thurs/4-Fri/5, 8pm. $12-20. Karl Frost/Body rearch presents a new work and a happening.

Marga’s Funny Mondays Cabaret at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston; 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org. Mon/28, 8pm. $10. Marga Gomez hosts a Monday night comedy series.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company Zellerbach hall, UC Berkeley campus, Berk; (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org. Thurs/3-Sat/5, 8pm. The legendary company makes its final Bay Area appearance.

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. For complete listings, see www.sfbg.com.

 

Chiu announces run for mayor

64

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu announced his candidacy for mayor today, becoming the eighth major candidate in a field that will likely continue shaking out in the coming months.

Chiu has been considering the move since at least the start of this year, when he played kingmaker as the swing vote to name Ed Lee as interim mayor, parting from his progressive colleagues to do so. With no strong progressive candidate yet in the mayor’s race, the question now is whether Chiu will try to win over the left and if he can be successful in doing so after making several more moderate moves in recent years.

Chiu’s initial political base will be allies of Chinatown Chamber of Commerce boss Rose Pak, who has pledged to block Sen. Leland Yee from becoming mayor, is close to Chiu, and has been courting someone to run. There have even been widespread rumors recently that Pak and ally Willie Brown have been trying to convince Lee to run, a possibility that those in Chiu’s camp dismiss.

Chiu will made his announcement at 11 am on the steps of City Hall. Sources say Chiu has spent weeks lining up support for his run, so it could be telling to see who shares the stage with Chiu beyond Sup. Jane Kim and others from his immediate political circle. Chiu and Kim are sponsoring the mid-Market tax break that the Mayor’s Office crafted to keep Twitter from leaving town, the most controversial legislation of the year, a proposal that has drawn opposition from many progressives. Some other mayoral campaigns have privately started to grumble about the deal, so it could become a mayoral campaign issue, particularly if the Office of Economic Analysis concludes it will be a drain on city coffers when that report is issued by week’s end.

For more on the implications of Chiu’s leap into the race, read this week’s Guardian.

Back to the streets

2

Coronel knew an old man in Granada who said

(who often said):

“I wish I were a foreigner, so that I

Could go home

— Zero Hour, Ernesto Cardenal

I first came into contact with the work of poet Roberto Vargas a couple of years ago, when I saw his face, projected several stories tall, on a wall just off Valencia Street.

I was riding my bike to the Day of the Dead procession when I came across filmmaker Veronica Majano screening historical footage of the old Mission District on the wall of Dog Eared Books. The footage of Vargas was from a movie called Back to the Streets, and it showed a Latino hippie fest in Precita Park circa-1970. Long-haired Chicanos smoked weed and danced and played bongos on the grass while Vargas read from a stage. On today’s Valencia Street, Vargas was a ghost returned from a long-lost Mission, now standing twenty feet tall on the bookstore’s wall, reading a powerful poem that angrily denounced the SFPD for the mysterious death of a Mission Latino youth in police custody.

The film of Vargas was a beautiful snapshot of Latino youth culture in the neighborhood before gang violence and gentrification, like a Mission High School yearbook scene from an exhilarating era of Latino self-determination. In 1970, the Free Los Siete movement was feeding the community at a free breakfast program out of St. Peter’s Church on Alabama Street and had started free clinics and legal aid programs in the Mission. In the years to follow, the neighborhood would see the founding of the Mission Cultural Center and Galeria de la Raza and the inception of many of the neighborhood’s now world-famous mural projects.

Looking at the groovy scene in the park, it was hard to imagine that just a few short years later, Vargas and other kids from the Mission would be fighting alongside the Sandinistas in the jungles and mountains of Nicaragua. Yet the utopian promise of the era’s poetry, art, and youth culture in many ways culminated in the guerrilla war in which Vargas and other poets from San Francisco would fight and ultimately — in 1979 — help defeat the forces of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.

On Feb. 24, the day of his 70th birthday, Roberto Vargas makes a rare return to San Francisco to perform in a poetry event at the Mission Cultural Center in honor of that Nicaraguan solidarity movement of the 1970s. A video will be shown of footage from that struggle — classic scenes of Vargas and others taking over the Nicaraguan consulate in San Francisco; of the famed nightly candlelight vigils at 24th and Mission BART Plaza in support of the Sandinistas — and Vargas will be reunited on stage to read with old poet friends like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Alejandro Murguía, and Vargas’ old compañero from San Francisco State University’s Third World Liberation Front, actor Danny Glover. The event is not open to the public. Invitations have been given out and the small MCC theater’s 150 seats have already been filled. Yet the event provides an opportunity to publicly honor Roberto Vargas’ contributions to the Mission, and to reflect on the hopes and dreams of Mission past.

 

POETRY AND REVOLUTIONARY VISION

Poetry was a part of Vargas’ world from the beginning. Vargas was born in Nicaragua, but came to the United States when he was a small child. In his 1980 collection of poems Nicaragua Te Canto Besos, Balas, y Sueños, he writes of “living in an offbeat alley called Natoma Street (where I always imagined a lost Mayan city existed beneath the factories).” By the late 1950s, Vargas may have been the first Mission District Latino Beat poet. “I graduated from Mission High School in 1958 and used to hang out in North Beach, going around to see all the poets,” he says. “I met Allen Ginsberg when I was just a 19-year-old kid running around in North Beach. Diane di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan — all the major poets knew me when I was in my teens.”

After a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps and an attempt at a boxing career that ended with a detached retina (an injury that also helped him avoid the Vietnam-era draft), Vargas went to SF State, where he was heavily active in the student strike of 1968-69. Students walked out of campus and battled riot police while standing on picket lines for five months to demand an ethnic studies program at the university.

In the spirit of the times, Vargas and other poets — including a young Mission Chicano named Alejandro Murguía — joined the Pocho-Che Collective to publish poetry by local Latino poets. The poets went to cut sugar cane in the Venceremos Brigade in Cuba. They put out small poetry chapbooks in the Mission, full of poems that linked Che Guevara’s call for Third World revolution with the experience of the Chicano barrios of the United States in a new vision tropical. In the era after the SF State strike, the city started funding community arts projects in the ghettos. Like all classic zines, the first copies of Pocho-Che were scammed, in this case late at night at Vargas’ new job in the Mission’s Neighborhood Arts Program. In the years to come, the group would eventually publish hardbound books by Vargas, Nina Serrano, and others.

Today, Murguía is a professor in the ethnic studies program at SF State that the strikers fought to originate. He is the author of the American Book Award-winning short story collection This War Called Love (2002) and the memoir The Medicine of Memory (2002). He remembers, “The poetry scene was incipient, very young, and the readings weren’t always very formal. Sometimes they were at community events or protest rallies. But we had contact with Latin America. We knew people who had been in Chile, like Dr. Fernando Alegría.”

Alegría was a poet who had been the cultural attaché to the U.S. under Allende in Washington. Vargas recalls, “Alegría had myself and some other young poets come to Chile and spend a month or two studying with [Pablo] Neruda. But, of course, our plans were canceled by the coup in Chile.”

Murguia remembers the September 1973 coup in Chile that overthrew the popularly elected Socialist democracy of Salvador Allende caused the young poets to organize rare formal readings at Glide Memorial Church in protest. “We had several big ones there,” he says. “There was a broad range of poets — Michael McClure, Fernando Alegría, Jack Hirschman, Bob Kaufman, Janice Mirikitami all read. There was a line going down the block to get in.”

In addition to their mentor, Alegría, Vargas, and Murguía also knew one of their heroes, the Nicaraguan Marxist poet and priest, Ernesto Cardenal. Cardenal lived under the Somoza dictatorship in a sort-of internal exile in a religious artist commune called Solentiname. Vargas wanted to bring Cardenal to read in the United States, but Somoza would not allow the poet, who was critical of the Nicaraguan dictator, to travel outside the country. Vargas went to his old pal Ginsberg for help.

“Because Allen knew me when I was a kid, he helped me with my organizing for Nicaragua,” says Vargas. “Allen was part of PEN, and in 1973 or ’74 he went to the State Department with other writers to put pressure on [Anastasio] Somoza. Eventually Somoza relented and we brought Cardenal to New York for a reading.”

The poetry of Cardenal was a north star to the young Mission poets. Cardenal’s epic 1957-60 masterwork Zero Hour is perhaps the literary foundation of revolution in Nicaragua. Influenced formally by Ezra Pound, Zero Hour weaves a sprawling history of Somozan oppression and U.S. intervention in Nicaragua together with lyrical imagery of Nicaragua’s natural beauty and wildlife. The poem creates a poignant sense that Nicaraguans, unable to enjoy and own these natural riches, had under Somoza become exiles within their own country.

Of particular interest to the young Mission poets, though, was Cardenal’s Homage to the American Indians (1969), a book-length meditation on the glory of Mayan and North American native civilizations. “For us, the work of Cardenal was very important,” says Murguía. “Homage to the American Indians is a continental vision of Native Americans — everything from the San Blas Indians of Panama to the Indians of Omaha to the Indians of Mexico City and Peru.”

In Homage, Cardenal evokes a lost Indian Utopia “so democratic that archaeologists know nothing about their rulers,” where “their pyramids were built with no forced labor, the peak of their civilization did not lead to an empire, and the word wall does not exist in their language.” He writes:

But how to write anew the hieroglyph,

How to paint the jaguar anew,

How to overthrow the tyrants?

How to build our tropical acropolis anew

Cardenal’s poems of this lost glorious past were to Vargas more pointedly a vision of a Latin American utopia that can also be regained in the future. In Cardenal’s work, says Vargas, “There is a longing for the simplicity of that civilization — the creativity, the innocence, the tribalism. Can we get it back after all the dictatorships, after all that capitalism has done? Cardenal showed us what we were, what we had, what we lost.”

Under Cardenal’s influence, the Mission poets turned seeing lost Mayan cities beneath the city’s factories into a literary movement. By 1975, members of Pocho-Che had started a magazine called El Tin Tan with Murguia as editor and Vargas as contributor. El Tin Tan presented a sweeping utopian vision of a borderless invisible Latino republic united culturally and politically under the sign of the palm tree. The poets situated the capital of this world right here in the Mission District.

“To tropicalize the Mission — to see it as a tropical pueblo — was a political act of defiance and self-determination,” says Murguía. “We were saying that we put this particular neighborhood — our pueblo, in a way — not in a context of North American history but in the context of Latin American history. The history of the eastern U.S. doesn’t affect California until 1848 when the first illegal immigrants came to California — not from the South, but from the East.

El Tin Tan,” Murguía continues, “was probably the first magazine that was intercontinental in scope, a combination of politics and literature and art and different trends from the Mission to Mexico City to Argentina and everywhere in between.” He proudly recalls that it ran the first North American essays on Salvadoran poetry, and translated and printed a short story by Nelson Marra, a writer imprisoned by the Uruguayan dictatorship.

Yet for all its international perspective, El Tin Tan remained firmly rooted in the Mission. Columns by Nuyorican poet Victor Hernández Cruz and news of the assassination of Salvadoran guerrilla poet Roque Dalton ran side by side with the first comics by future Galeria de la Raza founder Rene Yáñez, all folded between wildly colorful cover art by neighborhood favorites like the famed Chicano artist Rupert Garcia and the muralist Mike Rios.

“The magazines were colorful — tropical — on the outside, but very political on the inside,” says Murguía. “That was a metaphor for our own work.”

By this time, Vargas had become an Associate Director at the SF Arts Commission. From within City Hall, he started to pump city arts money into the Mission, helping to fund projects like Mike Rios’ mural of the people holding BART on their backs at 24th and Mission BART Plaza and the Balmy Alley Mural Project — art that can still be seen in public today.

Once, Vargas commissioned a Chuy Campesano mural for the Bank of America building at 22nd and Mission. “I read a poem called “Boa” and had the crowd dancing and chanting, Es la Boa, Es la Boa,” says Vargas. “We were trying to say, ‘You made your millions off our farmers, but now you are on our turf in the Mission here in occupied Mexico. So we’ll put hieroglyphics on the walls of your bank like we used to do!’ Someone from the bank tried to take the mic from me and cops came and escorted us out.”

Vargas’s story of the mural’s dedication ceremony captures the bravado of the era. “It was a beautiful time, all of us young and thinking we were going to change the world. We wanted to change the world through culture.”

The poets organized the community to demand a neighborhood’s arts center, too. In 1977, the dream was realized when the City, with pressure from Vargas from within City Hall in the Arts Commission, purchased an old, five-floor furniture store at 24th and Mission to be made into the Mission Cultural Center. Murguia became the center’s first director.

The Mission utopia was becoming a reality for Vargas. In Nicaragua Te Canto, he wrote:

We used to drive

Our lowered down Plymouths and Chevys

On top of the breast of a mountain to

Make love and drink wine… Never

Knowing what was going to happen after

Mission High School

The Mission is now an expression of real culture, a many-faceted being … both plus and minus with the soul of a human rainbow…My people watching slides of Sandino and Nica history … White children wearing guarachas and afros trippin’ down the streets to party. Young Salvadoran poets discussing the assassination of Roque Dalton … The Mission is now an implosion/explosion of human color, of walls being painted by muralistas. There is a collective feeling of compassion for each other Nicas Blacks Chicanos Chilenos Oppressed Indios. The sense of collective survival, histories full of Somozas, Wounded Knees written on the walls.

In Zero Hour, Cardenal wrote of Nicaragua’s trees and birds and lakes, and their call to revolution, as seen from its mountains:

What’s that light way off there? Is it a star?

Its Sandino’s light shining in the black mountain

 

Vargas, the excited Mission kid, echoed in his work:

 

Tonight I am sitting on a mountain called Bernal Hill

Tonight I see the flames of America Latina spreading from here …

 

STRUGGLE AND VICTORY — AND STRUGGLE

Perhaps inevitably, the Latin American Utopia Vargas and company created in poetry would seem so tantalizingly close to actualization that they would be forced to pick up the gun and fight for its existence.

When the enormous earthquake of 1972 left Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, in ruins, Nicaraguan refugees flocked to SF’s Mission District. Soon, San Francisco was home to more Nicaraguans than any place on Earth outside of Nicaragua. The family of Anastasio Somoza had controlled Nicaragua with brutal repression for generations. Somoza’s embezzling of relief funds for earthquake victims led to increased revolutionary activity against his rule. Taking their name from Augusto Sandino, a Nicaraguan revolutionary who led resistance against U.S. occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930s, La Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) — or the Sandinistas, as they were popularly known — began guerrilla activities in late 1974 by taking government officials and Somoza relatives hostage in a raid on the house of the minister of agriculture. They received a $2 million ransom and had their communiqué printed in the national newspaper. Thus was born the Sandinista revolution.

In the Mission, Vargas, Murguía, and others were in touch with La Frente, and began organizing Sandinista solidarity rallies to coordinate with La Frente’s actions in Nicaragua. Out of offices in the Mission Cultural Center, along with El Tin Tan, the poets published a newspaper called La Gaceta about the situation in Nicaragua. The paper had a circulation of 5000 copies and was available for free all over the district. The sight of pro-Sandinista rallies at 24th and BART Plaza became so common that the plaza was popularly nicknamed Plaza Sandino.

Vargas organized takeovers of the Nicaraguan consulate in San Francisco and traveled the US, speaking about Nicaragua. Yet, soon, this kind of support didn’t seem like enough. In Cardenal’s poetry, victory was inevitable. Cardenal had written that Indian time was circular, that “history became prophecy,” and that therefore the “empire will always fall.” He had also written, “The hero is reborn when he dies. And the green grass is reborn from the ashes.” In poetry, Vargas and Murguia found inspiration to go to war.

In 1976 and 1977, Mission District residents, in solidarity with the FSLN, began quietly leaving San Francisco to join up with La Frente and pick up the gun in the Sandinista Revolution. Among them were Roberto Vargas and Alejandro Murguía.

“It was very romantic,” says Murguía. “If you grew up in the time after Che’s death, when you had Che’s figure calling for “1,2,3, many Vietnams” and a lot of different armed struggles going on all over Latin America, then it would seem logical, I think, if you were kind of young and crazy, that you would want to participate in some of these situations besides just doing solidarity work or organizing rallies. Also, the coup in Chile crushed our generation’s hope for electoral change in Latin America.”

Today, Murguía tries to situate the poets’ embrace of armed struggle within the spirit of those long ago times, but one senses that Vargas would not hesitate to join a guerrilla war tomorrow morning. When I ask him how the young poets made the leap from verse to bullets, he is incredulous at the question.

“We had to fight! There was no other way!” Vargas says. “We had the historical perspective and as a people we were worthless if we let that situation stand. We had our own books out. But are we really revolutionary poets if we just sit back and collect our laurels?”

Murguía compares the Sandinista war with the Spanish Civil War, when there were many international brigades in which writers had been involved. He suggests the poets went to war because they were poets. “If you knew the situation intimately in Nicaragua and you were reading Cardenal’s poems,” he says, “it was easy to see the connection between poets and political necessity.”

Vargas began organizing small, tight-knit cadres for battle in Nicaragua, recruiting his Sandinista guerrillas right off of the streets of the Mission. “I was secretive and I found them one by one,” he explains. “We were very clandestine and very compartmentalized. We never had more than a dozen people in our committee at once.”

Men who were menial laborers in San Francisco would one day be among the most respected heroes of the Nicaraguan Revolution. “When I recruited Chombo [Walter Ferretti], he was a cook at the Hyatt Regency,” says Vargas. “Later, Chombo would become a head of national security in Nicaragua. Another recruit was a former pilot, so I went to talk to him where he pumped gas at 21st and South Van Ness. That was Commandante Raúl Venerio. After the triumph of 1979, he would become the Chief of the Nicaraguan Air Force.”

When in San Francisco, Venerio later served as the editor of La Gaceta. In Nicaragua, the former gas station attendant became a real hero. “They got an airplane and attacked the National Palace,” says Vargas, laughing. “They hit it and split, and got away — real Mission boys!”

Before heading off to join La Frente, Vargas’ recruits would undergo a regimen of training and political education, an informal boot camp largely hidden in plain sight in the Bay Area.

“It was primitive,” remembers Murguía. “We didn’t really have someone with a military background to train us. We got just guns at pawn shops on Mission Street and practiced shooting at the firing range in Sharp Park down in Pacifica. We worked out with a friend who was a black belt in karate.”

Murguía says the most difficult part of training was the daily pre-dawn run of five laps around Bernal Hill. “We would run up the hill counter-clockwise — because that way is more difficult,” he says, “and we would wear these combat boots we bought at Leed’s Shoes on Mission.”

Besides being a part of physical conditioning, the run was a litmus test of the recruits’ commitment. “Doing activity like that is almost impossible if you’re not really psychologically into it,” says Murguía. “Try running five times around Bernal Hill! You start wondering after your third lap, ‘Goddamn! Why am I doing this?‘ Especially when no one is forcing you to do it!”

When I ask if the daily jog of 10 or 12 Latino men in combat boots on the hill at sunrise did not attract any, uh, attention, Murguía shrugs. “There were less people on the hill in those days,” he says. He recalls that the Mission cadres trained in complete anonymity: “We got money to rent planes and we took turns learning to fly the planes around the Bay Area. Nobody suspected anything because nobody knew anything about Nicaragua then.”

When I try to imagine a phalanx of Sandinistas at dawn on today’s Bernal Hill, surrounded by a crowd of early morning dog walkers, I can’t help but laugh. But the cadre’s training was deadly serious, and Murguía says its value was far more than psychological. “What I discovered when I went to the Southern Front was that our San Francisco cadres were some of the most advanced in the war,” he explains. “We understood the political situation and the tactic of insurrection and we had a minimum of physical conditioning. But some of these other cats, man! They literally just walked in off the street!”

For a time, Murguía remained the director of the Mission Cultural Center, while making regular trips to fight in Nicaragua. In 1977, Vargas resigned from the Arts Commission and went to battle for six or seven months. He and Murguía would spend the next couple of years rotating back and forth from the war front in Nicaragua to their solidarity work in the Mission. Murguía describes his entry into Nicaragua, his stay in various guerrilla safe houses in Costa Rica, and his experiences in the war in his 1991 American Book Award-winning fictionalized memoir, Southern Front.

Though Murguía says the actual military war on the ground was largely a stalemate between the Sandinistas and the Somozas’ National Guard, the Sandinistas were at last able to triumph through international pressure, strategic military victories, and a general strike. Somoza fled in July of 1979, and the Sandinistas entered Managua victorious on July 19 of the same year. Cardenal’s poem “Lights” describes the city as seen from a plane that brought the elder poet into a Managua free from the Somoza family’s rule for the first time in 43 years. In Managua, street graffiti declared, El triunfo de la revolución el triunfo de la poesía.

Vargas and Murguía, however, did not enter Managua with the victorious army. The Southern Front did not go to Managua, and Vargas had recently been sent back to the U.S., to coordinate a simultaneous take over of the Nicaraguan consulates in major U.S. cities from coast to coast to coincide with the victory in Managua.

Vargas’ work for Nicaragua did not end with victory. The Mission High kid now found himself serving in the new revolutionary government as cultural attaché to the United States. “I was jailed in the takeover of the DC consulate,” Vargas says, laughing, “but then I came back several months later to serve there!”

The voluble poet grows uncharacteristically silent when I ask him what it felt like to actually win the war.

“To win?,” he asks, pronouncing the word as if he was hearing it for the very first time. “Well … it’s like taking off a huge load, man. Like taking mountains off your back.” He is silent for a bit and then adds, “But what do you win? You win the right to continue the struggle.”

“To win was to reach the objective of getting rid of the Somoza family once and for all,” Vargas says. “But it was not really a win/lose situation.” Indeed, the Sandinistas inherited a country in ruins and in debt, with an estimated 50,000 war dead, and 600,000 homeless. Nicaragua’s left-wing powers would become an obsession for the Reagan Administration, who for the next ten years offered heavy financial assistance and training to the Contras, a coalition of pro-Somoza and anti-Sandinista guerrillas who fought to overthrow the revolutionary government. The U.S. strangled Nicaragua’s economy with a trade embargo like it employed against Cuba. In reality, for the Sandinistas, the war literally never ended.

“Somoza bombed everything in Nicaragua before he left the country. Reagan was spending — what? — $100 million a year annually against us at that time?” says Vargas. “They spent so much for a decade to destroy our little country.”

Nonetheless, poetry remained in the forefront of the Nicaraguan revolution. Cardenal was named Ministry of Culture, and he instituted poetry workshops across Nicaragua as part of a highly successful literacy campaign that raised literacy from just 12 percent to over 50 percent in the first 6 months of the revolutionary government. Soon, poetry was being written and taught in the tiniest villages and in the fields.

“We tried,” Vargas says bluntly. “We were doing very important land reform, incredible stuff for the economy. But it was dangerous to be a good example. We had the potential, but we had to hold off this enormous power [of the U.S.] for decades. Ultimately, we had to step back so they would not destroy Nicaragua.”

In 1990, Nicaraguan voters, weary of war and economic misery, chose to elect FSLN President Daniel Ortega’s U.S.-backed opponent, Violetta Chamorro, in the presidential election. “We lost the elections,” says Vargas. “But we had to allow them to demonstrate that we were not like Cuba or other revolutions. We lost beautiful young men and women to get that liberty.”

I ask Vargas to consider the successes and failures of the Nicaraguan revolution. He pauses and then seemingly changes the subject, excitedly telling me of the time he brought Ginsberg to meet the Sandinista soldiers. “Ginsberg was fascinated by the Sandinistas,” says Vargas. “And he wanted to see what he had been supporting on my behalf all these years. So I took him to the fighting along the Honduras border in 1984, during the Contra war.”

When Ginsberg went to the war zone, he brought not a rifle but a concertina. “I took him to meet these young soldiers in a trench. They see Allen with the concertina and they were like, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ I told them he was a very famous poet. At once, they all started taking bits of paper out of their pockets that they had written poems on and started reading them to Allen. So there we are, with these soldiers in the trench with their rifles reading poetry, and Allen just wailing away on this concertina!”

I think of the strange road from Cardenal’s vision of lost Mayan cities to Vargas’ dreams of a Bernal Hill utopia to Ginsberg listening to soldiers’ poetry in a Nicaraguan trench, and I see that Vargas has answered my question with his own, the question asked by revolutionary poetry.

 

LOST CITIES, AND NEW ONES

The lost moment with Ginsberg in the trenches is like a missing chapter out of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. Indeed Vargas’ story in many ways embodies that of Bolaño’s exile poet generation, of which he wrote, “They dreamed of a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell.” Except for one crucial difference: Vargas is very much alive and still fighting.

Today, Vargas still puts in a tireless 50-hour work week as a labor organizer for the American Federation of Teachers in San Antonio, TX. During our conversation, he excitedly tells me of an action he is organizing for next month, a march of teachers on the Texas capital to protest budget cuts to education. “I camp out in the teacher’s lounge and talk to them when they are on break,” he says. “I signed up 50 new members last week!”

As he nears 70, the poet shows no signs of slowing down. “I can’t afford to!” he says. “My youngest son is only 17. When I get finished putting him through college, then maybe I can take a break.”

But work seems like more than necessity to Vargas; political struggle is the central theme of his life’s work. “Work, work, work, Erick,” he tells me. “That is what we have to do. I could go back and forth about what went wrong in Nicaragua, but there is more work to do and I have to stay positive. It is all part of the process.”

When Vargas comes back to the Mission Cultural Center this week, he will literally return, full circle, to a building he helped build. “We had no money to hire laborers, so we’d be there with our kids every weekend, building the place,” he remembers.

One of those kids was Vargas’ son, Mission poet Ariel Vargas, who will read in public with his father for the first time this week. “Cardenal baptized him when Ernesto came to bless the new Mission Cultural Center in 1977,” Vargas says. “He had offered to baptize any children who also might be there. In the end, there was a line of families around the block on 24th Street who had brought their children for Ernesto Cardenal to baptize. Ariel had already been there every weekend on his hands and knees sanding those huge gymnasium-like floors with us. The Mission Cultural Center is still there and that is our monument.” As he discusses the Mission, Vargas forgets the problems of the Nicaraguan revolution and begins talking nonstop again at last. He comes back to the stories that started our conversation. “You know, I lived at 110 Mullen on Bernal Hill,” he says, his excitement gathering. “Mike Rios was my neighbor. Rene Yáñez lived on the block. So it was all happening right there! Carlos Santana lived down the block at around 180 Mullen or something. We used to hear him and his band jamming all the time. The Arts Commission had a stage truck and I’d take it out to Precita Park and put the stage down for Carlos to play on.” I think of Cardenal’s vision of the repeating cycle of time, the promise that the empire will always fall and the hero will always be reborn. Much in the Mission has changed. But Vargas, the old poet, still looks out from Bernal Hill today and sees lost cities beneath the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Behind the Twitter tax break deal

36

There’s much political intrigue and anticipation swirling around the Central Market Payroll Tax Exclusion, aka the Twitter Tax Break, which the Board of Supervisors will consider next month. This has all the elements of a great story: backroom deals between political and corporate power brokers, the strange argument that Republican-style tax cuts will cure Mid-Market blight, the fact that Twitter executives have uttered nary a tweet about shaking down SF taxpayers, and the role that a pair of supposedly progressive supervisors have played in brokering the deal.

Following up on my Feb. 10 post about how the deal would help Twitter meet the high asking price of politically connected landlord Alvin Dworman for a new mid-Market headquarters, the Bay Citizen yesterday had a great story showing how Dworman gave then-Mayor Gavin Newsom discounted office space for his lieutenant governor bid just as Newsom proposed the tax break that would benefit Dworman and Twitter. The story also includes a nice tick-tock about how this unseemly deal unfolded.

We at the Guardian are currently awaiting a big package of documents from City Hall that we requested on the deal, and sources tell us they’re likely to include some interesting insights and tidbits. For example, are Twitter and Dworman the main beneficiaries of this legislation or are there other corporations (and the politicians they support) who were pushing this plan? Everyone is also waiting to see how the city’s Office of Economic Analysis rates the proposal, and Economic Ted Egan tells us that report should be out by the end of next week or beginning of the following week.

At this point, we have more questions than answers, but that should start changing by next week. Maybe we’ll gain a better understanding of why Sup. Jane Kim is pushing this deal (much to the consternation of some of her former top supporters) or why Randy Shaw, the taxpayer-subsidized blogger and Tenderloin don, strongly backed Kim’s candidacy and attacked her critics with such perplexing ferocity. Will Willie Brown’s name continue popping up? Perhaps we’ll be able to determine whether the Newsom-Dworman pact actually broke campaign finance laws. And we’ll certainly gain some insights into how the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development trades away taxpayer money to successful corporations that wield whines and threats of relocation.

If nothing else, we’ll get a peek into modern crony capitalism, San Francisco-style, dressed up in the guise of “saving” the Tenderloin. So, from a strictly journalistic perspective, this should be fun.

Who’s next?

39

steve@sfbg.com and tredmond@sfbg.com

The seven serious candidates who have announced plans to run for mayor extends from moderate to conservative at this point, but it’s an unusual field for San Francisco: there is no clear progressive standard-bearer, and no clear downtown candidate.

But it probably won’t stay that way. Sources say others are likely to join the lackluster race in the coming months, and there’s a strong likelihood that some progressive candidate will decide to the take plunge.

Also unlike the last few mayor’s races, there appears to be no clear frontrunner — either in fundraising or in having a clear constituency base — a new dynamic that creates an unpredictability that will be exacerbated because this is the first contested mayor’s race using the ranked-choice voting system and public financing of candidates.

There was a weak field of challengers to Gavin Newsom in 2007 and no one qualified for public financing or presented a strong threat. But this time City Attorney Dennis Herrera and former Sup. Bevan Dufty already have indicated they will take public financing, and others are expected to follow suit.

In addition to Herrera and Dufty, the field includes Sen. Leland Yee, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, venture capitalist Joanna Rees, and former Sups. Tony Hall and Michela Alioto-Pier. Those close to Board President David Chiu also say he is “seriously considering” jumping into the race and talking to friends and supporters about that possibility now.

But so far none come from the progressive political community that has controlled the Board of Supervisors for the past decade. Although Chiu is the only candidate in the field to self-identify as a progressive, he has adopted a more moderate governing style that has frustrated many progressive activists and supervisors. So that leaves voters on the left without a candidate right now.

“If a credible progressive candidate doesn’t get into the race, then we’ll see the top-tier candidates — which so far Leland Yee and Dennis Herrera — try to make friends with progressive San Francisco. And it would appear they have a lot of work to do,” Aaron Peskin, the former board president who chairs the San Francisco Democratic Party, told us.

Both Yee and Herrera have taken some progressive positions, and Yee has consistently endorsed more progressive candidates than anyone else in the mayoral field, but they have also taken many positions that have alienated them from progressives. And both have been taking in lots of campaign cash from interests hostile to the progressive base of renters, environmentalists, and advocates for social and economic justice.

“Nobody who has put their hats in the ring is really exciting anyone, so there is plenty of room for new entrants,” Peskin said, noting the progressives are actively discussing who should run. Peskin wouldn’t identify whom they’re courting, but some of the names being dropped are Sups. John Avalos, Ross Mirkarimi, and David Campos, as well as former Sup. Chris Daly and Peskin.

But Mirkarimi shifted some of that talk this week when he announced that he intends to run to replace the retiring Mike Hennessey as sheriff.

Political consultant Jim Stearns, who is representing Yee, also expects others to get into the race. “I don’t think the field is complete yet. Historically, the strong self-identified progressive candidate has come in late or surged late, like [Tom] Ammiano and [Matt] Gonzalez,” Stearns said.

Ammiano launched his write-in mayoral bid in September 1999 and Gonzalez jumped into the race just before the filing deadline in August 2003, so there’s plenty of time for progressive candidates to get in. “It’s never too late in San Francisco,” Stearns said. And unlike those two races when the upstarts were seriously outspent by the well-heeled frontrunners, Stearns said this year’s field will likely be on a fairly even financial footing.

“It’s likely every candidate will have $1.5 million to $2 million to spend,” he said. That means the keys to the race are likely to be name ID with voters and “which campaign can do the most with the least dollars,” Stearns said.

Already, some of the candidates who will be running to the center are looking for progressive support. Yee, for example, has given substantial amounts of money to progressive groups and candidates and has endorsed progressives for office.

Yee told us he’s positioning himself as “the candidate of the regular folks of San Francisco — the people who are trying to raise their families and live in this city.” He added: “To the extent that the progressive agenda fits that, we’ll be part of it.”

But he already has the endorsement of the Building Trades Council, which has often been at war with progressives, particularly over development issues.

Yee said he hasn’t yet weighed in on the local budget, but he agreed that new revenue “shouldn’t be off the table.” He said he thinks the current pension reform discussions at City Hall, involving Mayor Ed Lee, Sup. Sean Elsbernd, financier Warren Hellman, and union representatives are “the right way to go.”

Herrera said he’s going to run on his record — which includes a long list of progressive legal actions (along with his gang injunctions, which a lot of progressives question). He also told us that he’s involved in the pension reform discussions but thinks that new revenue absolutely ought to be a part of the budget debate.

Meet the new boss

3

news@sfbg.com

The Guardian hasn’t been invited into City Hall’s Room 200 for a long time. Former Mayor Gavin Newsom, who frequently criticized this newspaper in his public statements, had a tendency to freeze out his critics, adopting a supercilious and vinegary attitude toward any members of the press who questioned his policy decisions. So it was almost surreal when a smiling Mayor Ed Lee cordially welcomed two Guardian reporters into his stately office Feb. 15.

Lee says he plans to open his office to a broader cross-section of the community, a move he described as a way of including those who previously felt left out. Other changes have come, too. He’s replaced Newsom’s press secretary, Tony Winnicker, with Christine Falvey, former communications director at the Department of Public Works (DPW). He’s filled the Mayor’s Office with greenery, including giant tropical plants that exude a calming green aura, in stark contrast to Newsom — whose own Room 200 was sterile and self-aggrandizing, including a portrait of Robert Kennedy, in whose footsteps Newsom repeatedly claimed to walk.

When it comes to policy issues, however, some expect to see little more than business-as-usual in the Mayor’s Office. Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin, a progressive stalwart, said he sees no substantive changes between the new mayor and his predecessor. “It seems to me that the new administration is carrying forward the policies of the former administration,” Peskin said. “I see no demonstrable change. And that makes sense. Lee was Willie Brown and former Mayor Gavin Newsom’s handpicked successor. So he’s dancing with the guys that brought him in.”

Sup. David Campos, viewed as part of the city’s progressive camp along with Peskin, took a more diplomatic tack. “So far I’ve been very pleased with what I’ve seen,” Campos noted. “I really appreciate that he’s reached out to the community-based organizations and come out to my district and done merchant walks. I think we have to wait to see what he does on specific policy issues.”

But while Lee has already garnered a reputation for being stylistically worlds apart from Newsom, he still hews close to his predecessor’s policies in some key areas. In our interview, Lee expressed an unwillingness to consider tax-revenue measures for now, but said he was willing to take condo conversions into consideration as a way to bring in cash. He was unenthusiastic about community choice aggregation and dismissive of replacing Pacific Gas & Electric Co. with a public-power system. He hasn’t committed to overturning the pending eviction of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council’s recycling center, and he continued to argue for expanding Recology’s monopoly on the city’s $206 million annual trash stream, despite a recent Budget and Legislative Analyst’ report that recommended putting the issue to the voters.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who met Lee in 1980 through the Asian Law Caucus, said Lee would be facing steep challenges. “It’s a fascinating political karmic outcome that he is now our appointed mayor. He didn’t seek it out, as he says, but the opportunity he has now is to focus his efforts on fixing some of the problems that have gone unaddressed for decades, pension reform being one of them. I think he realizes he has a limited time to achieve things of value. The question I and others have is, can he do it?”

 

THE RELUCTANT MAYOR

Lee identified as a non-politician, patently rejecting the notion that he would enter the race for mayor. In meetings with members of the Board of Supervisors at the end of 2010, he said he didn’t want the job.

Yet while vacationing in Hong Kong, Lee became the subject of a full-court press. “When the lobbying and phone calls started … clearly they meant a lot to me,” Lee told us, adding that the choice “was very heavy on my mind.” He finally relented, accepting the city’s top post.

Although rumors had been circulating that Lee might seek a full term, he told the Guardian he’s serious about serving as a caretaker mayor. “If I’m going to thrust all my energy into this, I don’t need to have to deal with … a campaign to run for mayor.”

Adachi offered an interesting take on Lee as caretaker: “Somewhere along the way, [Lee] became known as the go-to guy in government who could take care of problems,” Adachi said, “like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction.”

Sounding rather unlike Harvey Keitel’s tough-talking character, Lee noted, “One of my goals is to rebuild the trust between the Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors. I think I can do that by being consistent with the promises I make.”

Lee’s vows to keep his promises, mend rifts with the board, and stay focused on the job could be interpreted as statements intended to set him apart from Newsom, who was frequently criticized for being disengaged during his runs for higher office, provoking skirmishes with the board, and going back on his word.

The new mayor also said he’d be willing to share his working calendar with the public, something Newsom resisted for years. Kimo Crossman, a sunshine advocate who was part of a group that began submitting requests for Newsom’s calendar in 2006, greeted this news with a wait-and-see attitude. “I’ve already put in a request,” Crossman said. “Politicians are always in support of sunshine — until they have to comply with it.”

 

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Pointing to the tropical elephant-ear plants adorning his office, Lee noted that elephants are considered lucky in Chinese culture. With the monstrous issues of pension reform and a gaping budget deficit hitting his mayoral term like twin tornadoes, it might not hurt to have some extra luck.

Pension reform is emerging as the issue du jour in City Hall. A round of talks on how to turn the tide on rising pension costs has brought labor representatives, Sup. Sean Elsbernd, billionaire Warren Hellman, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, labor leaders, and others to the table as part of a working group.

Gabriel Haaland, who works for SEIU Local 1021, sounded a positive note on Lee. “He’s an extraordinarily knowledgeable guy about government. He seems to have a very collaborative working style and approach to problem-solving, and he is respectful of differing opinions,” Haaland said. “Where is it going to take us? I don’t know yet.”

Lee emphasized his desire to bring many stakeholders together to facilitate agreement. “We’re talking about everything from limiting pensionable salaries, to fixing loopholes, to dealing with what kinds of plans we can afford in the health care arena,” he noted. Lee said the group had hashed out 15 proposals so far, which will be vetted by the Controller’s Office.

A central focus, Lee said, has been “whether we’ve come to a time to recognize that we have to cap pensions.” That could mean capping a pension itself, he said, or limiting how much of an employee’s salary can be counted toward his or her pension.

Since Lee plans to resume his post as city administrator once his mayoral term has ended, he added a personal note: “I want to go back to my old job, do that for five years, and have a pension that is respectable,” he said. “At the same time, I feel others who’ve worked with me deserve a pension. I don’t want it threatened by the instability we’re headed toward and the insolvency we’re headed toward.”

 

BRACING FOR THE BUDGET

If pension reform is shaping up to be the No. 1 challenge of Lee’s administration, tackling the city budget is a close second. When Newsom left office, he passed Lee a budget memo containing instructions for a 2.5 percent reduction in most city departments, part of an overarching plan to shave 10 percent from all departments plus another 10 percent in contingency cuts, making for a bruising 20 percent.

Lee said his budget strategy is to try to avert what Sup. David Chiu once characterized as “the typical Kabuki-style budget process” that has pitted progressives against the mayor in years past. That means sitting down with stakeholders early.

“I have opened the door of this office to a number of community groups that had expressed a lot of historical frustration in not being able to express to the mayor what they feel the priorities of their communities are,” Lee said. “I’ve done that in conjunction with members of the Board of Supervisors, who also felt that they weren’t involved from the beginning.”

Affordable-housing advocate Calvin Welch said Lee’s style is a dramatic change. “I think he’s probably equaled the total number of people he’s met in six weeks with the number that Newsom met in his seven years as mayor,” Welch said.

Sup. Carmen Chu, recently installed as chair of the Budget & Finance Committee, predicted that the budget will still be hard to balance. “We are still grappling with a $380 million deficit,” Chu told us, noting that there are some positive economic signs ahead, but no reason to expect a dramatic improvement. “We’re been told that there is $14 million in better news. But we still have the state budget to contend with, and who knows what that will look like.”

Sup. John Avalos, the former chair of the Board’s powerful Budget Committee, said he thinks the rubber hasn’t hit the road yet on painful budget decisions that seem inevitable this year — and the outcome, he said, could spell a crashing halt to Ed Lee’s current honeymoon as mayor.

“We are facing incredible challenges,” Avalos said, noting that he heard that labor does not intend to open up its contracts, which were approved in 2010 for a two-year period. And federal stimulus money has run out.

 

DID SOMEONE SAY “CONDO CONVERSIONS”?

Asked whether he supported new revenue measures as a way to fill the budget gap, Lee initially gave an answer that seemed to echo Newsom’s inflexible no-new-taxes stance. “I’m not ready to look at taxes yet,” he said.

He also invoked an idea that Newsom proposed during the last budget cycle, which progressives bitterly opposed. In a conversation with community-based organizations about “unpopular revenue-generating ideas,” Lee cautioned attendees that “within the category of unpopular revenue-generating ideas are also some that would be very unpopular to you as well.”

Asked to explain, Lee answered: “Could be condo conversion. Could be taxes. I’m not isolating any one of them, but they are in the category of very unpopular revenue-generating ideas, and they have to be carefully thought out before we determine that they would be that seriously weighed.”

Ted Gullicksen, who runs the San Francisco Tenants Union, said tenant advocates have scheduled a meeting with Lee to talk about condo conversions. Thanks to Prop. 26’s passage in November 2010, he said, any such proposal would have to be approved by two-thirds of the board or the voters. “It’s pretty clear that any such measure would not move forward without support from all sides,” Gullicksen said. “If anyone opposes it, it’s going to go nowhere.”

Gullicksen said he’d heard that Lee is willing to look at the possibility of significant concessions to renter groups in an effort to broker a condo conversion deal, such as a moratorium on future condo conversions. “If, for example, 1,000 TICs [tenants-in-common] became condos under the proposal, then we’d need a moratorium for five years to minimize and mitigate the damages,” Gullicksen explained.

More important, some structural reform of TIC conversions may be on the table, Gullicksen said. “And that would be more important than keeping existing TICs from becoming condos.”

Gullicksen acknowledged that Lee has the decency to talk to all the stakeholders. “Newsom never attempted to talk to tenants advocates,” he said.

 

GREEN, WITHIN LIMITS

Lee’s two children are in their early 20s, and the mayor said he takes seriously the goal of being proactive on environmental issues in order to leave them with a more sustainable San Francisco. He trumpeted the city’s green achievements, saying, “We’re now on the cutting edge of environmental goals for the city.”

Leading bicycle activist Leah Shahum of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition had praise for Lee on bike issues. “I’m really encouraged by his very public support of the new green separate bikeways on Market Street and his interest and commitment to creating more,” she said. “I believe Mayor Lee sees the value of connecting the city with cross town bicycle lanes, which serve a wide range of folks, including business people and families.”

Yet some proponents of green causes are feeling uncertain about whether their projects will advance under Lee’s watch.

On the issue of community choice aggregation (CCA), the ambitious green-energy program that would transfer Pacific Gas & Electric Co. customers to a city-run program with a cleaner energy mix, Lee — who helped determine rates as city administrator — seemed lukewarm. “I know Mr. [Ed] Harrington and his staff just want to make sure it’s done right,” he said, referring to the general manager of the city’s Public Utilities Commission, whose tepid attitude toward the program has frequently driven him to lock horns with the city’s chief CCA proponent, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi.

Lee noted that CCA program goals were recently scaled back. He also said pretty directly that he opposes public power: “We’re not in any day getting rid of PG&E at all. I don’t think that is the right approach.”

The controversial issue of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center’s pending eviction from Golden Gate Park still hangs in the balance. The Recreation and Park Commission, at Newsom’s behest, approved the eviction despite overwhelming community opposition.

Lee said he hadn’t looked at the issue closely. “I do know that there’s a lot of strong debate around the viability, what that operation attracts and doesn’t attract,” he said. “I had the owner of HANC here along with a good friend, Calvin Welch, who made a plea that I think about it a bit. I agreed that I would sit down and talk with what I believe to be the two experts involved in that decision: Melanie Nutter at the Department of the Environment and then Phil Ginsburg at the Rec and Park.” Nutter and Ginsburg supported HANC’s eviction.

Welch, who is on the board of HANC, noted that Lee could be swayed by his staff. “The bunch around Newsom had old and bad habits, and old and bad policies. In dealing with mayors over the years, I know how dependent they are on their staff. They’re in a bubble, and the only way out is through a good staff. Otherwise, Lee will come to the same conclusions as Newsom.”

HANC’s Jim Rhoads told the Guardian he isn’t feeling reassured. “He said he would keep asking people about it. Unfortunately, if he asked his own staff, it would be a problem because they’re leftovers from Newsom.”

Speaking of leftovers, Lee also weighed in on the debate about the city’s waste-management contract — and threw his support behind the existing private garbage monopoly. Campos is challenging a perpetual waste-hauling contract that Recology has had with the city since 1932, calling instead for a competitive-bidding process. When the Department of the Environment recommended awarding the city’s landfill disposal contract to Recology last year, it effectively endorsed a monopoly for the company over managing the city’s entire waste stream, at an estimated value of $206 million per year.

The final decision to award the contract was delayed for two months at a February Budget & Finance Committee hearing. Campos is contemplating putting the issue to the voters this fall, provided he can find six votes on the Board.

“I know that Sup. Campos had given his policy argument for why he wants that revisited,” Lee said. “I have let him know that the Recology company in its various forms has been our very dependable garbage-hauling company for many, many decades. … I feel that the company has justified its privilege to be the permit holder in San Francisco because of the things that it has been willing to do with us. Whether or not we want to use our time today to revisit the 1932 ordinance, for me that wouldn’t be a high priority.”

 

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

In the last week of 2010, Avalos pushed through groundbreaking local-hire legislation, without the support of then Mayor Gavin Newsom or his chief of staff, Steve Kawa, who wanted Avalos to back off and let Newsom takeover the task.

With Lee now in Room 200, things appear to be moving forward on local hire, in face of misleading attacks from Assemblymember Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo), who wants to make sure no state money is used on local-hire projects, presumably because the building trades are upset by it. And Kawa, whom Lee has retained as chief of staff, doesn’t really support the legislation. Indeed, Kawa’s presence in the Mayor’s Office has his detractors believing that the new boss in Room 200 is really the same as the old boss.

“I feel like things are moving forward in the right direction around local hire, though a little more quietly than I’d like,” Avalos told the Guardian. Avalos noted that he is going to hold a hearing in March on implementing the legislation that should kick in March 25.

Welch said he believes that if Lee starts replacing staff wholesale, it could indicate two things: he’s a savvy guy who understands the difficulties of relying on Newsom’s chief of staff Steve Kawa for a budget, and he’s not ruling out a run for mayor.

“If I was in his position, the first thing out of my mouth would be, ‘I’m not running.’ I think he’s very focused in the budget. And it’s going to make or break him. But if he starts overriding Kawa and picks staff who represent him … well, then I’d revisit the question of whether he’s contemplating a run for mayor, say, around June.”

Is Adachi’s pension reform a Tea Party initiative?

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With all eyes on Wisconsin, local labor leaders are suggesting that Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s proposed retirement/health plan reforms are really Tea Party initiatives, even as Adachi threatens to place another Measure B-like initiative on the fall ballot if city leaders can’t agree on a fix for the city’s fiscal problems

Last fall, Adachi started a war with the local labor movement when he placed Measure B on the November ballot. Measure B proposed increasing employee contributions for retirement benefits, decreasing employer contributions for heath benefits for employees, retirees and their dependents, and changing rules for arbitration proceedings about city collective bargaining agreements,

Measure B ultimately failed, but not after both sides spent a ton of cash. And now labor is refusing to have Adachi sit in on their pension reform talks with Mayor Ed Lee, former SEIU President Andy Stern is describing the fight in Wisconsin as a ’15 state GOP Power grab,” and SEIU Local 1021 leader Gabriel Haaland is pointing to Wisconsin as a reason for excluding Adachi from pension reform talks

“Adachi’s obviously scapegoating a group that’s part of a national agenda,” Haaland said, noting that in the states where Republicans gained statehouse control in 2010, there’s talk about eliminating collective bargaining, and ending defined benefit plans and paycheck protection.

“The problem is that pension reform has been blowing on the anti-public sector worker winds that are blowing in Wisconsin and other states, whether progressives want to acknowledge it or not,” Haaland continued. “There is a reason that Adachi got so much money last year, and the corporate interests behind him are part of this effort to bash public sector workers.”

Prop. B’s campaign finance records show the campaign raised $1.125 million in 2010, and that the lion’s share came from wealthy individuals.

Billionaire venture capitalist, former Google board member and Obama supporter Michael Moritz gave $245,000. Author Harrier Heyman, Moritz’ wife, donated $172,500. financial analyst Richard Beleson donated $110,000. George Hume of Basic American Foods donated $50,000. Gov. Schwarzenegger’s former economic policy advisor David Crane gave $37,500. Philanthropist Warren Hellman donated $50,000. Republican investor Howard Leach, who co-hosted a Prop. B fundraiser with former Mayor Willie L. Brown, gave $25,000. Investor Joseph Tobin gave $15,750. Maverick Capital partner David Singer gave $15,000. JGE Capital Partners donated  $15,000; Bechtel owner  Stephen Bechtel Jr gave $10,000: Matthew Cohler, a general partner of Benchmark Capital, donated $10,000; the California Chamber of Commerce donated $5,000 and philanthropist Dede Wilsey gave $1,000.

But records also show that Measure B opponents, which included San Francisco Firefighters, SF Police Officers Association, SF First Responders, the California Nurses Association, United Educators, San Francisco Gardeners, San Francisco Teachers, Library Workers, laguna Honda Workers, donated over $1 million in their successful bid to squash Adachi’s reform. And that just about every elected Democrat, including Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, then mayor Gavin Newsom, Sheriff Mike Hennessey, and Board President David Chiu, came out against Adachi’s original plan.
 
Haaland acknowledged that the argument could be made that the progressives’ version of the hotel tax didn’t pass and less attention was paid to the district elections last fall, because labor focused primarily on defeating Adachi’s Measure B.

“But at the end of the day, we did get the real estate transfer tax and we defeated Measure B,” Haaland observed. “So, we need to keep fighting anti-worker pressure. It’s challenging times, but I feel like the connections need to be made.”

Adachi was swift to refute Haaland’s claim that his Measure B pension reform is and was a Tea Party initiative.
“What’s not been reported is the fact that there are all these people supporting pension reform who are progressive Democrats,” Adachi said, pointing to Moritz, Crane and former Board President and Green Party member Matt Gonzalez, who all supported Measure B last fall.

“You are talking about saving basic services and that’s a progressive cause,” Adachi continued. “You might argue that pension reform isn’t a progressive solution. But then you are saying that the needs of one group of workers are subservient to the needs of other workers. And even if you raised every tax in the city, you’d not be able to keep up with pension and healthcare costs.”

“Even if we could raise parking tickets to $200 a pop, and tax folks who make more than $100,000 a year, that still wouldn’t solve the problem, because the problem is so huge,” Adachi added. “When you look at this crisis, you can’t simply redbait and say, you are a Republican, or Sarah Palin. Matt Gonzales has always spoken for progressive values, but because he supports pension reform, he’s suddenly a member of the Tea Party? At a certain point, it begins to become absurd.”

Haaland countered that he’s  “challenged by the notion that thousands show up in Wisconsin to fight some of the same people behind Measure B, but our discourse has lowered to whether or not Jeff Adachi is a good guy.”

And Adachi expressed doubt that Mayor Ed Lee can come up with a suitable pension reform plan.

“I’ve heard Lee say there has to be a solution involving pension reform and underfunded healthcare benefits that would save $300 million to $400 million in annual savings, and that corresponds with the solution he needs to come up with to close the budget deficit,” Adachi said.

Adachi said that he has met with Lee on his own to discuss pension reform, but the new mayor did not list specifics.
“He didn’t tell me what his plan was,” Adachi said, “The Prop. B supporters have a plan, but Lee did not ask what that was. But he said he sincerely wants to solve that problem, and that his preference would be one ballot initiative that everyone would agree on. And I fully support a solution that is going to truly solve the problem. I’ve always believed it’s important for the public to understand the gravity of the situation. For too long, it’s been the elephant in the room and there hasn’t been enough public information.”

Adachi said he had a beef with the idea of “groups of labor unions holding meetings at City Hall and deciding who can participate.”

“It’s also troubling that there is no information publicly available about what the ideas on the table are, no explanation of how they got there, and no documenting of the extent of the problem,” Adachi continued. “And that’s what got us here in the first place: a lack of transparency, and voters being asked to weigh in without the full information.”

Adachi said he has an upcoming meeting with Lee, the Department of Human Resources and Sup. Sean Elsbernd about pension reform that is separate from the working group that includes labor and philanthropist Warren Hellmann.

And Elsbernd told the Guardian he believes the pension reform process would go smoother if Adachi were at the table.
“I have no problem with Jeff at the table, it makes sense to have him there to avoid two ballot measures,” Elsbernd said.

Elsbernd added that it was too early to cite numbers when it comes to talk of capping pensions.
“It’s a mistake to pick a number right now because you don’t know what it’s worth,” he said, noting that the pension reform working group has sent a bunch of different scenarios to retirement actuaries to crunch the numbers to see how much they would save the city.

“I can see a case being made for asking the highest paid city workers to contribute higher amounts for healthcare benefits,” Elsbernd said. “But I’m not sure that’s equitable on retirement benefits, though I could see a situation where safety pays more, regardless, because they have better pensions.”