David Campos

Up against ICE

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› sarah@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee, a newly formed coalition of more than 30 community groups, is asking Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors to sign a pledge supporting San Francisco’s immigrant community.

By signing the pledge, city officials would agree to uphold the city’s sanctuary ordinance, ensure that San Francisco police officers don’t act like immigration agents, and denounce racial profiling. They would also agree to denounce Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and ensure that immigrant youth get due process, that funding for immigrant communities continues, and that the city announce a specific date for implementing San Francisco’s municipal identification program.

The move could put Newsom in an awkward situation — the mayor doesn’t want to appear to be snubbing immigrant-rights leaders, but he also has moved in the past few months to distance himself from the city’s liberal sanctuary law.

So far the coalition has not heard back from Newsom, but some supervisors-elect and returning supervisors have already signed it, and the Mayor’s Office has signaled that the municipal identification program will kick in Jan. 15.

The move to get elected officials to sign a pledge comes at the end of a difficult year for the immigrant community. In May, the federal government challenged San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance after immigration agents stopped a city juvenile probation officer in Houston.

The officer, who was repatriating a group of Honduran youths who had been busted for selling crack, believed he was acting in accordance with city’s policy. The federal agents, who took the young people into custody, eventually released the officer.

And it wasn’t long before US Attorney Joseph Russoniello, a staunch opponent of the sanctuary ordinance, convened a grand jury to see whether the city used the sanctuary policy to harbor immigrant felons from federal prosecution.

The city countered this attack by hiring high-powered criminal defense lawyer Cris Arguedas. But by then the damage to the city’s sanctuary policy had already been done: in June, someone leaked the details of confidential juvenile court cases to the San Francisco Chronicle. One day after the story hit the newsstands, Newsom — who until then was a staunch sanctuary ordinance supporter — did an about-face, announcing that he would require city officials to refer youth suspected of being undocumented and of having committed a felony to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) even before they have a hearing.

Immigrant rights groups decried Newsom’s new direction, calling it an overly broad policy that had the potential to lead to deporting innocent people who may not have family or relatives in their county of origin.

As Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus pointed out, based on Juvenile Probation Department data, in 2006 there were 288 petitions filed against Latin American juveniles, but only 211 were sustained. Had Newsom’s policy been in place, 77 juveniles who weren’t actually found to have committed a felony in San Francisco could have been reported to ICE when they were booked and might have been wrongly deported.

While Newsom’s gubernatorial ambitions were blamed for his sudden change of heart, critics also pointed the finger at his criminal justice director, Kevin Ryan. A Republican loyalist, Ryan was the only US Attorney to be fired for cause during US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ infamous purge of the Justice Department in December 2006.

His December 2007 hiring by Newsom was seen as a calculated move to make the mayor-who-would-be-governor look tough on crime and immigrants — cards that play well among voters in more conservative parts of the state.

It didn’t help that Ryan’s hiring coincided with Russoniello’s second term as US Attorney for the Northern District of California.

Public records obtained by the Guardian show that as the Chronicle series unfolded, Ryan and Newsom’s communications director, Nathan Ballard, began to question whether the city should even fund programs or organizations that serve undocumented youth.

With ICE raids intensifying — May 2 at El Balazo Taqueria, Sept. 11 at a private residence — and the community accusing the police of racial profiling, the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee chose Dec. 18, International Migrants Day, to publicize its pledge.

As of press time, Newsom has refused to meet with the committee, and Chan from the Asian Law Caucus, told us that members are "feeling snubbed."

But Chan reports that SFPD Chief Heather Fong, who announced Dec. 20 that she will be retiring in April, 2009, did meet and listen to the coalition’s concerns. "She reiterated her position that the SFPD only collaborates when ICE is seeking a specific list of people," Chan said.

With Fong under attack from within her own department for her refusal to let officers collaborate with ICE, the community is now abuzz with rumors that a hardliner could now be handed the chief’s reins.

Meanwhile, Supervisor-elect John Avalos and Sups. David Campos and Chris Daly have signed the pledge, while Supervisor-elect Eric Mar and Sup. Bevan Dufty have signed modified versions. And at the Dec. 18 Migrants Day protest, Sups. Jake McGoldrick and Ross Mirkarimi and Supervisor-elect David Chiu (who noted that Sup. Carmen Chu, while absent from the rally, is an immigrant rights supporter) joined gay rights and labor and religious leaders in announcing support for the coalition’s platform, which seeks to make dignity, equality, and due process a reality for all San Franciscans, including immigrants.

As Eric Quezada, Dolores Street Community Services executive director, told the crowd, "We’re here to defend the fundamental human rights of all immigrants." *


P.S. The San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee is a growing alliance encompassing immigrant rights advocates, labor groups, faith leaders, and LGBT activists. The committee includes the ALDI, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Asian Law Caucus, Asian Youth Advocacy Network, Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, Central American Resource Center, Chinese for Affirmative Action, Communities United Against Violence, EBASE, Global Exchange, H.O.M.E.Y., Filipino Community Center, Instituto Familiar de la Raza, La Raza Centro Legal, La Voz Latina, Legal Services for Children, Mission Neighborhood Resource Centers, Movement for Unconditional Amnesty, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, PODER, POWER, Pride at Work, SF Immigrant Legal & Education Network, SF Labor Council, SF Organizing Project, St. Peter’s Housing, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and Young Workers United.

New board, old pain

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› sarah@sfbg.com

One of the first tasks awaiting the new Board of Supervisors in January 2009 is to make unprecedented cuts to the city budget as San Francisco seeks to balance a $125 million mid-year shortfall and address a projected $450 million deficit for the fiscal year that begins July 1, 2009.

"It’s hard to understand the magnitude of what lays at our doorstep," termed-out board president Aaron Peskin told the incoming supervisors when it became clear that he lacked the votes to enact a proposed package of cuts before his last day in office (see "Sharing the pain," 12/17/08).

"This is going to require a huge amount of selflessness, of sharing the pain among those who can share it the most and the least," warned Peskin, whose last day on the job is Jan. 6.

Newly sworn-in Sup. David Campos cited the magnitude of cuts as one of the reasons he voted not to move Peskin’s legislation out of a committee last week.

"I need more time to understand the proposal", said Campos, who took office in early December, only to find himself confronting "the worst crisis since the Depression," as Mayor Gavin Newsom called it during a visit to the board.

"And this way, the new board gets to weigh in," added Campos, who joins seven returning supervisors — Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, Chris Daly, Bevan Dufty, Sean Elsbernd, Sophie Maxwell, and Ross Mirkarimi — and three new supervisors: John Avalos, David Chiu, and Eric Mar.

The decision to delay budgetary cuts until 2009 also secured an extra month of grace for community service providers. Peskin and the Mayor’s Office agreed that cuts scheduled for mid-January won’t kick in until Feb. 20.

But, as Daly noted as he urged the board to kill Newsom’s million-dollar, Tenderloin-based Community Justice Court, the 409 pink slips that were recently issued predominantly to front-line city workers have not been rescinded.

"And folks will have to find many more millions to avert terrible community cuts," Daly observed. Peskin warned that the CJC could cost $2 million annually if the federal government isn’t willing to fund it next year.

Daly argued that defunding the CJC was a "no-brainer," citing the project’s lack of community support and the fact that the services it aims to divert people to — substance abuse, mental health, and homeless programs — are up for cuts.

But Daly failed to get a veto-proof super-majority after Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, who was elected to the Superior Court in November, recused himself, and Sup. Bevan Dufty, who has his eye on Room 200, voted in favor of the mayor’s project.

"I don’t see this as a new program, but one that tries to tie together what’s already in the community justice system," Dufty said.

With the bad fiscal news expected to snowball in 2009, Daly says he plans to call for hearings to examine the possibility of more cuts to upper-level city managers.

"It’s incumbent upon us to make sure there is not fat left in the city budget, especially when it comes to upper-level managers, as we are trimming the resources available to those who are more vulnerable," Daly explained.

Sharing the pain

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0

› sarah@sfbg.com

When Mayor Gavin Newsom walked across City Hall to the Board of Supervisors Chambers last week to announce that the city is facing a $576 million budget deficit, it looked as if he was putting political differences aside and genuinely inviting the board to "share the challenge" of bridging the 2008-09 budget chasm.

For years, voters and supervisors have urged Newsom to appear before the board for monthly policy discussions. And for as many years, Newsom has refused, claiming such invites were "political theater." Now that he’s finally made the trek, critics say the context makes the gesture more theatrical than substantive.

Within minutes of Newsom’s unannounced Dec. 9 visit to the board, City Hall insiders began to fear that the Newsom was only pretending to walk the unity talk: details of his $118 million in proposed mid-year solutions were not made available before the appearance, giving the two sides little to discuss and raising questions of due process.

"If the mayor was interested in real collaboration with the board, he would introduce his mid-year proposal to the board for our deliberation, just like the annual budget," Sup. Chris Daly told the Guardian. "But after we asked in three different ways, we found that he will be making over $70 million in cuts unilaterally — without the board’s approval. Now we have to figure out how to get the public a seat at the budget table."

Unlike during the normal budget process, the mayor has tremendous power to make cuts mid-year. But with details slow to emerge, the legislators weren’t the only ones left in the dark about the proposal, which includes slashing the Department of Public Health’s budget by 25 percent, cuts that DPH director Mitch Katz told the supervisors is going to require fundamentally changing how government runs.

Several City Hall workers told the Guardian how, in the days after Newsom made his budget deficit announcement, Controller Ben Rosenfield was seen running from department to department, trying to track down the program-level details.

Supervisor-elect John Avalos, who has a deep understanding of the budgetary process from his years as a legislative aide to former Budget Committee chair Daly, confirmed that the mayor’s $118 Million proposal "doesn’t tell you much."

"There is $47 million in increased revenue that has come in that offsets the shortfall, and there’s a higher-than-expected census at San Francisco General Hospital that allows us to recoup some money. But although there are all kinds of service/non-service cuts in Newsom’s proposal, we have no details to work with," Avalos told the Guardian.

Two days after his board appearance, Newsom penned an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle in which he again appeared to be holding out his hand to the board. But Avalos, a candidate for president of the board, observed that Newsom continues to protect his own pet projects, which include the 311 Call Center, the Community Justice Center, and the Small Business Assistance Center.

"The pain needs to be shared and minimized all round," Avalos warned. "The mayor needs to come forward and help us, not simply cut all the programs that the Republicans want to see cut. There is this huge backlash from folks saying, ‘Why do we spend $1 billion on our public health system? Maybe we don’t need public health.’ But our services are there for a reason."

Avalos said he worries that if we cut all these programs now, it will be very hard to get them back down the line. "When revenue is back, the focus will be on things that are important, but not on services that help the most vulnerable folks," Avalos predicted.

Within three days of Newsom’s appearance before the board, Peskin had figured out a mechanism whereby the public could weigh in on Newsom’s cuts: he introduced legislation that combines the mayor’s $118.5 million proposal with an alternative $8.5 million in cuts that Peskin has proposed.

"So, now there’s a de facto collaboration," Peskin told the Guardian. Peskin’s package of alternative cuts — which has since been pared back to $5.5 million because duplication with the mayor’s list was found — includes budget reductions in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Emergency Management Department, Fire Department, Police Department, Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, the 311 call center, and city grants to the opera, ballet, and symphony. Peskin is also proposed wage freezes that could save another $35 million.

Peskin’s counter-move allows the public to weigh in on the combined proposals. It requires department heads to publicly defend cuts to programs, services, and personnel — cuts that were developed, per Newsom’s request, behind closed doors. Or as Daly put it: "The mayor’s and the board’s proposals need to be deliberated not through a staff member to the mayor, but in full view of the public."

The board also wants to publicly discuss the layoffs, which Newsom said would total 399, a number that rose to 409 when the list was actually released. Peskin’s legislation also provides an avenue for fired workers or their representatives to publicly air discontent. A list of eliminated positions obtained by the Guardian shortly before press time shows that most of the positions were service providers making less than $70,000. Although union officials have complained that the ranks of highly paid managers has grown sharply since Newsom became mayor (visit sfbg.com for the complete list and more analysis).

SEIU’s Robert Haaland estimates that 75 percent of layoffs targeted line workers in service jobs. "As far as we can tell, the pain is all at the bottom," Haaland told the Guardian.

And while Haaland didn’t openly support Peskin’s counter-proposal — a citywide sliding scale of pay cuts in which the highest earners take a bigger hit and an across-the-board union wage freeze — he acknowledged that at least the proposal targets the powerful Police Officers Association and the Municipal Executives Association, and not just SEIU workers.

Haaland claims that under Newsom’s behind-closed-doors method, "the institutional bias of department heads tends to come into play" in making layoff decisions.

"It’s human nature. No one talks about it, and I don’t know that there’s a grand conspiracy," Haaland said, expressing his belief that it’s easier for managers to cut people they don’t work with than those around them or people at the top. "They also tend to target the union activists, the members who are a pain in the butt, and who they don’t like."

Newsom told the Chronicle in a Dec. 15 article that "labor is going to be a principal part of the solution." Tim Paulson, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council, told the Guardian that "the SFLC is listening to its affiliates to see if there are any collective strategies." But Haaland observed that the city is "contractually obligated to the unions," which may further complicate ongoing negotiations.

With Sup. Bevan Dufty advocating to restore more than $500,000 in HIV/AIDS funding cuts and Sup. Sophie Maxwell is trying to avoid cuts at the Small Business Center, newly sworn-in Sup. David Campos stressed the need for a meaningful vetting process.

"It’s important for us to have a process that sheds light on the human impacts of the proposed cuts so we have a better sense of what it means to citizens of San Francisco," Campos said at a Dec. 12 board committee hearing.

Campos also made it clear that he is not afraid to target the arts, arguing that deep-pocketed patrons can help ease their pain, even as advocates countered that attacking entertainment will further deplete the city’s coffers by potentially hurting tourism. "As much as we appreciate the need to support the arts, we’re going to have to look at other avenues some of those folks can turn to, to get the funding that is needed," Campos warned. "People who have the greatest needs don’t have those options. "

With repeated rounds of painful cuts predicted in the next six months, Peskin told a Dec. 12 Government Audits and Oversight Committee hearing that it’s critical for the board to express its priorities. "These include keeping Rec and Park facilities open, providing basic mental health services, and preserving public sector jobs," Peskin said. "It’s also important that everyone share the pain, but not necessary that everyone share the pain equally."

Outside the meeting, laid-off worker Allanda Turner described her pain and the devastation she feels at being let go in the midst of a recession. "I’m a parent. I just purchased a home. I’m feeling almost no hope at all," said Turner, who fears she will be applying for the medical services, unemployment, and food stamps that she refers clients to as part of her job with the city’s Human Services Agency.

"The mayor always says he advocates for the poor, but we are the most underpaid," she said. Meanwhile, while her colleagues claim that their department "gave Newsom what he wanted" by adding layoffs to an original list of cuts that included fewer jobs.

"These are unit clerks, employment specialists, eligibility workers, and line workers," said Sin Yee Poon, a DHS contract manager. "Eight of them are child-protection workers."

There will be one last meeting of the current Board of Supervisors in January, and both incoming and outgoing members are already specuutf8g that unless Peskin’s legislation passes with a veto-proof majority, the mayor will veto it and this period of symbolic unity will come to an abrupt end.

"We have the capacity, the ingenuity, and the spirit to solve this," Newsom told the board. "It’s going to take all of us working together. It’s in that spirit that I am here. The mid-year solution — difficult and painful as it is — it’s the easy part. The difficult part comes in the next four months."

But as legislators explore the possibility of adding to their budget tools in the future through charter amendments and special elections, one aide stressed the importance of taking an active role now.

"It’s important for the board to set the stage now for the budget discussions in the spring."

Newsom swears in Campos

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By Steven T. Jones

A day after appointing David Campos to fill the Board of Supervisors seat vacated by new Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (which Campos won in last month’s election), Mayor Gavin Newsom marveled at the huge and enthusiastic crowd that showed up at City Hall for Campos’s swearing in ceremony.

camposswearin1208.jpg

“Thanks for coming here on remarkably short notice,” Newsom said. “I’m impressed with his ability to raise a crowd, which is a cautious warning as well.”

Indeed, after an election in which progressives such as Campos consolidated their legislative power, Newsom does have something to fear if he continues with his autocratic attacks on progressive priorities, as we could see more of tomorrow when he is scheduled to announce a package of mid-year budget cuts.

But for today, they were just one big city family, a tone strongly set by Campos, who pledged to work well with Newsom, fellow supervisors, and those who supported other candidates in his race. And he singled out Ammiano for special praise, telling him, “I’m going to do my best to make you proud.”

Clean energy

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EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co., its political hacks, and to a great extent, the San Francisco Chronicle all seem to take the same line on the defeat of Proposition H: It’s done. The people have spoken. Public power has been on the ballot 11 times, and it’s never passed.

And — as is always the case with a losing campaign — supporters of the Clean Energy Act are discussing what went wrong, looking at how the measure was written, the details, the language, the scope to see if there was something that could have been done differently.

But that ignores the central reality of the campaign for Prop. H: PG&E spent nearly $10.3 million to kill it. And it’s very, very hard to fight that kind of money.

The truth is, there was nothing wrong with the language or scope of Prop. H. If it had passed, it would have given the city the tools to create a sustainable energy portfolio that would be the envy of the nation. In fact, there is little doubt that the Clean Energy Act was well ahead in the polls when it was first placed on the ballot.

But as we’ve seen with so many races over time (and as we saw with Proposition 8 this fall) when a ballot measure it becomes a citywide or statewide race, big money has a serious impact. And we’ve never seen this kind of money in a San Francisco initiative campaign. In the end, PG&E spent about $53 per vote. That’s an outrageous sum, dwarfing any political spending that’s ever happened in San Francisco

Yet despite the barrage, the Clean Energy Act got tremendous grassroots and political support. Clean Energy has a strong constituency in San Francisco, including from the Sierra Club, and the power of this campaign won’t go away. Despite the efforts of downtown and PG&E, progressives still control the Board of Supervisors. Three of the city’s four representatives in Sacramento — Senator-elect Mark Leno, Assembly Member Fiona Ma and Assembly Member-elect Tom Ammiano — supported the legislation and will continue to back efforts to replace PG&E’s dirty power with locally- owned renewable energy. PG&E has money but it’s running out of friends in this town — and its illegal monopoly is the very definition of unsustainable.

There’s now an organized constituency for clean energy and public power, seasoned by this campaign and ready to continue the battle. That’s what needs to happen. There are numerous fronts: the city needs to be moving forward quickly with community choice aggregation, which offers the potential for cheaper, cleaner power. (The downside to CCA is that it doesn’t allow the city to make money; PG&E would still own the transmission lines, and thus make all the profits in the system.) Potentially, however, a CCA agency could begin moving toward creating local generation facilities and eventually toward building a local transmission system. A CCA also could directly access the city’s own Hetch Hetchy power and begin delivering it to local customers (once San Francisco can get out of the contracts requiring it to send too much of that power out of town).

The supervisors need a strong Local Agency Formation Commission to keep monitoring and pushing this, and the new board president needs to be sure LAFCO members are committed to and energized about renewable energy and public power.

Several supervisors — Sean Elsbernd, for example — told us they saw no reason for Prop. H to be on the ballot since so much of what it called for could be done by the board. Fine: Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, one of the authors of Prop. H, should immediately introduce legislation to do everything in Prop. H that doesn’t require a city charter change. Let’s see if Elsbernd and the mayor are really just PG&E call-up votes or if they’re willing to support an energy options feasibility study and strong renewable-energy mandates for the city.

And there are still legal options that the board should look at. City Attorney Dennis Herrera never wanted to go to court to enforce the Raker Act, the federal law requiring San Francisco to operate a public power system, but that’s an area the board can push. David Campos, the apparent supervisor-elect in District 9, is a lawyer who has worked in the city attorney’s office and sued PG&E, so this is an area where he can show leadership.

The bottom line is that this battle isn’t over.

There were other disappointments on what was generally a progressive ballot. Proposition V — the phony measure calling on the school board to reinstate JROTC — passed, narrowly. It was mostly a wedge issue to hurt progressive candidates for supervisor, and has been a horribly divisive issue in the schools. The school board, which cut off JROTC last year, is now pushing for an excellent public service alternative and doesn’t need to go back and reexamine the issue. JROTC is a terrible idea for San Francisco, and the newly elected board members shouldn’t even bring this up again.

Of course we were deeply unhappy about the passage of Prop. 8. The repeal of same-sex marriage was such a blow to San Francisco that it dampened a lot of the enthusiasm over the Obama victory. But that one’s not over, either; it has just begun. Statistics show that voters under 30 overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage — and if the campaign is run differently, and the message is positive, it’s likely that Prop. 8 can be overturned. Marriage equality advocates should think seriously about preparing now for a major campaign in November 2010 to restore equal rights for same-sex couples in California.

Daly and Mirkarimi need to talk

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By Tim Redmond

The new board will have, if anything, a stronger progressive presence than the outgoing board. For the past four years, Tom Ammiano, Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi have held down the left flank, with Board President Aaron Peskin on the right side most of the time (and leading the way some of the time). Jake McGoldrick, from District One, wasn’t always there, and Gerardo Sandoval, from District 11, couldn’t always be counted on. On some issues, the more centrist Sophie Maxwell and Bevan Dufty joined the progressives to override the mayor’s vetos.

This time around, with Eric Mar, John Avalos and David Chiu replacing McGoldrick, Sandoval and Peskin, David Campos replacing Ammiano, Mirkarimi coming back for a second term and Daly in his final two years, the progressives ought to have a solid six-vote majority.

But they can’t start off with the two veterans, Mirkarimi and Daly, fighting.

Mirkarimi wants to be board president. Daly wants somebody — anybody — else. He told me he wouldn’t under any circumstances vote for Mirkarimi. The two agree on almost every important issue, and yet they’re squabbling over the board’s new leadership. (And Daly doesn’t even want the job.)

Look, Mirkarimi can’t claim the board presidency by right. He has to reach out, make alliances, and line up six votes. A board president needs the support and confidence of his colleagues. If Ross can’t count to four or five, even Daly’s support won’t get him across the line.

Still, this doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, a nasty fight that leaves the left divided and its leaders on the board bitter. Ross, Chris — you guys need to talk.

The old Chris Daly line again

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By Tim Redmond

The Chron’s piece on the upcoming battle for board of supervisors president was fairly accurate and well-balanced, as far as it went, except for this:

the presidency appears to be guaranteed to a bloc led by the board’s most controversial member, Supervisor Chris Daly.

Daly may or may not be the board’s “most controversial member,” but he clearly isn’t the leader of the progressive bloc. He has his allies — incoming Sup John Avalos used to work for him — but the other three newcomers have other alliances. David Campos ran with the support of Tom Ammiano; Daly backed Eric Quezada. David Chiu is way closer to current Board President Aaron Peskin than to Daly. Eric Mar, former School Board member, is friendly with Daly but also with others on the board and is far too independent to just do what Daly says. And of course, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi isn’t going to follow Daly’s lead.

Daly has made it clear that he shouldn’t and won’t be board president. And with Peskin and Ammiano leaving, there’s no clear “leader” of the “progressive bloc.” That’s why the race will be so interesting.

Clean energy: the next moves

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0

EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co., its political hacks, and to a great extent, the San Francisco Chronicle all seem to take the same line on the defeat of Proposition H: It’s done. The people have spoken. Public power has been on the ballot 11 times, and it’s never passed.

And — as is always the case with a losing campaign — supporters of the Clean Energy Act are discussing what went wrong, looking at how the measure was written, the details, the language, the scope to see if there was something that could have been done differently.

But that ignores the central reality of the campaign for Prop. H: PG&E spent nearly $10.3 million to kill it. And it’s very, very hard to fight that kind of money.

The truth is, there was nothing wrong with the language or scope of Prop. H. If it had passed, it would have given the city the tools to create a sustainable energy portfolio that would be the envy of the nation. In fact, there is little doubt that the Clean Energy Act was well ahead in the polls when it was first placed on the ballot.

But as we’ve seen with so many races over time (and as we saw with Proposition 8 this fall) when a ballot measure it becomes a citywide or statewide race, big money has a serious impact. And we’ve never seen this kind of money in a San Francisco initiative campaign. In the end, PG&E spent about $53 per vote. That’s an outrageous sum, dwarfing any political spending that’s ever happened in San Francisco

Yet despite the barrage, the Clean Energy Act got tremendous grassroots and political support. Clean Energy has a strong constituency in San Francisco, including from the Sierra Club, and the power of this campaign won’t go away. Despite the efforts of downtown and PG&E, progressives still control the Board of Supervisors. Three of the city’s four representatives in Sacramento — Senator-elect Mark Leno, Assembly Member Fiona Ma and Assembly Member-elect Tom Ammiano — supported the legislation and will continue to back efforts to replace PG&E’s dirty power with locally- owned renewable energy. PG&E has money but it’s running out of friends in this town — and its illegal monopoly is the very definition of unsustainable.

There’s now an organized constituency for clean energy and public power, seasoned by this campaign and ready to continue the battle. That’s what needs to happen. There are numerous fronts: the city needs to be moving forward quickly with community choice aggregation, which offers the potential for cheaper, cleaner power. (The downside to CCA is that it doesn’t allow the city to make money; PG&E would still own the transmission lines, and thus make all the profits in the system.) Potentially, however, a CCA agency could begin moving toward creating local generation facilities and eventually toward building a local transmission system. A CCA also could directly access the city’s own Hetch Hetchy power and begin delivering it to local customers (once San Francisco can get out of the contracts requiring it to send too much of that power out of town).

The supervisors need a strong Local Agency Formation Commission to keep monitoring and pushing this, and the new board president needs to be sure LAFCO members are committed to and energized about renewable energy and public power.

Several supervisors — Sean Elsbernd, for example — told us they saw no reason for Prop. H to be on the ballot since so much of what it called for could be done by the board. Fine: Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, one of the authors of Prop. H, should immediately introduce legislation to do everything in Prop. H that doesn’t require a city charter change. Let’s see if Elsbernd and the mayor are really just PG&E call-up votes or if they’re willing to support an energy options feasibility study and strong renewable-energy mandates for the city.

And there are still legal options that the board should look at. City Attorney Dennis Herrera never wanted to go to court to enforce the Raker Act, the federal law requiring San Francisco to operate a public power system, but that’s an area the board can push. David Campos, the apparent supervisor-elect in District 9, is a lawyer who has worked in the city attorney’s office and sued PG&E, so this is an area where he can show leadership.

The bottom line is that this battle isn’t over.

There were other disappointments on what was generally a progressive ballot. Proposition V — the phony measure calling on the school board to reinstate JROTC — passed, narrowly. It was mostly a wedge issue to hurt progressive candidates for supervisor, and has been a horribly divisive issue in the schools. The school board, which cut off JROTC last year, is now pushing for an excellent public service alternative and doesn’t need to go back and reexamine the issue. JROTC is a terrible idea for San Francisco, and the newly elected board members shouldn’t even bring this up again.

Of course we were deeply unhappy about the passage of Prop. 8. The repeal of same-sex marriage was such a blow to San Francisco that it dampened a lot of the enthusiasm over the Obama victory. But that one’s not over, either; it has just begun. Statistics show that voters under 30 overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage — and if the campaign is run differently, and the message is positive, it’s likely that Prop. 8 can be overturned. Marriage equality advocates should think seriously about preparing now for a major campaign in November 2010 to restore equal rights for same-sex couples in California.

The district supes — what happens now

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0

By Tim Redmond

It’s astonishing to me that in this modern age, San Francisco still can’t get the votes counted on election night. I understand that the Department of Elections was overwhelmed by absentee ballots, but if we’re becoming a vote-by-mail city — and it appears we are, since almost half the votes this time will be absentee — then we should be prepared for it. If that means extra DOE staff in the two weeks before Election Day to tally those votes and have them ready to go, then it’s worth doing.

Anyway, that’s not where we are; where we are is that 100,000 more votes still have to be counted, and DOE director John Arnst says that won’t be finished for a couple of weeks.

And then there’s the matter of ranked-choice voting. Arnst has decided not to even begin running the RCV program until Friday, so we won’t have even unofficial results until then.

But here’s how it looks right now:

In district one, Eric Mar has 42 percent of the vote, and his closest competitor, Sue Lee, is 10 points behind. Lee just narrowly edged Mar in the first round of absentees; she was ahead 33 percent to 32 percent. So even if there are 9000 absentees in this district, AND they split as pro-Lee as the early absentees did, Mar would still be far ahead. In order to make up the 1,700 vote margin, Lee would have to win about 60 percent of the remaining votes tha goe for her or Mar, which seems highly unlikely. And if Mar is above 40 percent and needs only 10 percent more from the second- and third-place votes, he’s in very good shape. I’d say this one is pretty darn close to over.

In district three, David Chiu has 39 percent of the vote and the next in line is Joe Alioto, with 23 percent. Chiu actually came in first in the absentees. No way Alioto makes that difference up. Same as D1 — this one’s pretty safe.

D4, Carmen Chu. Re-elected.
D5, Ross Mirkarimi. Re-elected
D7. Sean Elsbernd. Re-Elected.

In District 9, David Campos has 35 percent of the vote, Mark Sanchez 29 and Eric Quezada 21. The absentees won’t change much here; Campos won the early absentees, Sanchez was second. This will come down to the Quezada votes; if they break about even (a good guess) Campos takes it. They could break overwhelmingly for Sanchez, but that’s the only way this one changes, and I doubt it will happen.

District 11 is interesting. John Avalos has 30 percent, to 24 for Ahsha Safai. Avalos beat Safai in the absentees — but in that group of voters, Myrna Lim, now at 16 percent, came in second. That suggests a heavily Asian absentee vote, and if the trend holds, Lim could pick up some more votes (athough there’s no way she could come in first, which is a very good thing.) The question is how Lim’s second-place votes break, because this one is close enough that seconds and thirds could really matter. The Avalos supporters knew that going in, and worked hard to run an RCV campaign, to reach out to Lim backers and urge them to vote Avalos #2. If that worked, he’s in.

We’ll know a lot more on Friday, when the DOE runs its first pass at RCV. I don’t understand why we have to wait that long; the program is simple, and they could run it right now. But wait we will.

Obama wins, but no SF results yet

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by Amanda Witherell

TomAmmiano11.4.08.JPG
Soon to be Assemblymember Tom Ammiano greeted by supporters at Campos for Supervisor headquarters

Up and down Valencia Street you could hear cheers echoing from bars and balconies when Florida flipped for Barack Obama. We have a new president.

But here in San Francisco, the new slate of supervisors is still pending. Outgoing supervisor Tom Ammiano just stopped by the David Campos headquarters at 24th and Mission Streets. He said the word from City Hall is “There’s a long line at SFSU still waiting to vote and they’re not releasing any results until everyone has voted.” He’s predicting no results on local races until 9:45.

In the meantime, a crowd of Campos supporters just took in Sen. John McCain’s brief concession speech. “Good-bye,” several waved to the campaigner’s departing figure shown by projection on a blank wall in the back of the campaign office.

First results from City Hall

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Tim Redmond calls in:

The absentee votes are now in – and they show interesting trends in D1 Eric Mar and Sue Lee are in a virtual dead heat, with Lee about 1% ahead. Since the absentee voters tend to run conservative, this is good news for Mar.

In D3, David Chiu is well ahead beating Joseph Alioto, Jr., by 12 points.

In D9, David Campos is 7 points ahead of Mark Sanchez, with Eric Quezada a distant third.

In D11, John Avalos and Myrna Lim and Ahsha Safai are within 1 percentage point.

Prop 8 is going down 67 to 33 in SF.

On the ballot measures it’s a mixed bag:

Prop A is well ahead with 80 % of vote and will pass easily.

Prop B losing 55-45 anfd that will tighten up but be close.

Prop H has taken a beating from the $10mill PG&E campaign – it’s behind 67-33 …

The three revenue measurea — N, O, and Q — are all ahead and looking to pass.

It appears we will not be naming a sewage treatment plant after G.W. Bush: It’s down 70-30

If the trends hold as they usually do, with progressives picking up considerably on election day, this could turn out to be a very strong night for progressive candidates.

at this point it does not appear that downtown has successded in its efforts to buy the board.

Tom Ammiano and the Greens

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By Tim Redmond

I respect the Green Party. We’ve endorsed a lot of Greens, from Matt Gonzalez to Ross Mirkarimi to Medea Bejamin. We even endorsed Nader the first time around. In San Francisco, the Greens are doing the right thing — they’re running local candidates for local office and building a base that way before they get all agitated about statewide and national races.

And if the Green Party wants to take the position that it endorses only Greens and not Democrats in partisan races, that’s fine, too.

This fall, though, the Greens endorsed Mark Leno for state Senate, saying that

We are pleased that Mark Leno has represented our Key Values well in the State Assembly, and therefore we endorse him for a promotion to the State Senate.

Again, that’s fine — we endorsed Leno, too, and he’ll be a great state Senator and will do his best to promote the progressive values that the Greens and I share.

So why did the party decline to endorse Tom Ammiano for state Assembly?

I mean, with all due respect to Leno (and I mean that, sincerely), Ammiano has always been more a leftist than Leno, and closer to the Greens core values. Leno endorsed Gavin Newsom for mayor. He’s supported more moderate Democrats in a lot of races. That’s not to say he isn’t a good legislator and shouldn’t get the Green nod — but if he’s good enough for the Greens, then Ammiano sure ought to be.

The party’s take on Tom?

We are disappointed that Ammiano has not followed Supervisor Mirkarimi’s lead in pushing for a Green approach to improving law enforcement, particularly as Mission residents feel that City officials have overlooked growing concerns about crime and public safety. Ammiano has also taken an increasingly partisan tone in recent years, and may as a result be ineffective in passing progressive legislation in Sacramento.

Gimme a Green Fucking Break, folks. Ammiano has been right there with Mirkarimi on foot patrols, against the ICE crackdown on immigrants, for progressive approaches to crime — certainly as much as Leno has. And “too partisan?” I’ve never, ever heard the Greens argue that one before.

No, I think this is simple: Leno endorsed Mark Sanchez, a Green, for supervisor. Ammiano endorsed a Sanchez rival, David Campos. Both are qualified candidates for supervisor; it would be entirely appropriate and reasonable for any progressive to support either of them. Penalizing Ammiano for not supporting Sanchez makes no political sense.

It’s a silly thing to fight about because both Leno and Ammiano are going to win overwhelmingly anyway, and I have no right to tell the Greens what to do with their endorsements — but this just looks awful. It looks petty and yes, partisan, and frankly, drives a wedge between the Greens and the left wing of the local Democratic Party, which is the last thing we need.

Grow up, Greens.

The Clean Slate 2008

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>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR LIVE ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE!

NATIONAL AND STATE RACES
President: Barack Obama
Congress, District 6: Lynn Woolsey
Congress, District 7: George Miller
Congress, District 8: Cindy Sheehan
Congress, District 13: Pete Stark
Superior Court, Seat 12: Gerardo Sandoval
State Senate, District 3: Mark Leno
State Senate, District 9: Loni Hancock
State Assembly, District 12: Fiona Ma
State Assembly, District 13: Tom Ammiano
State Assembly, District 14: Nancy Skinner

STATE PROPOSITIONS
Proposition 1A: YES, YES, YES
Proposition 2: YES
Proposition 3: NO
Proposition 4: NO, NO, NO
Proposition 5: YES
Proposition 6: NO, NO, NO
Proposition 7: NO
Proposition 8: NO, NO, NO
Proposition 9: NO, NO, NO
Proposition 10: NO
Proposition 11: NO
Proposition 12: YES

SAN FRANCISCO BOARD OF SUPERVISORS
District 1: Eric Mar
District 3: 1. David Chiu; 2. Denise McCarthy; 3. Tony Gantner
District 4: Dave Ferguson
District 5: Ross Mirkarimi
District 7: Sean Elsbernd
District 9: 1. David Campos; 2. Eric Quezada; 3. Mark Sanchez
District 11: 1. John Avalos; 2. Randy Knox; 3. Julio Ramos

BOARD OF EDUCATION
Sandra Fewer, Norman Yee, Barbara Lopez, Kimberly Wicoff

COMMUNITY COLLEGE BOARD
Milton Marks, Chris Jackson, Bruce Wolfe

BART BOARD OF DIRECTORS
District 7: Lynette Sweet
District 9: Tom Radulovich

SAN FRANCISCO MEASURES
Proposition A: YES, YES, YES
Proposition B: YES, YES, YES
Proposition C: NO
Proposition D: YES
Proposition E: YES
Proposition F: YES
Proposition G: YES
Proposition H: YES, YES, YES
Proposition I: NO
Proposition J: YES
Proposition K: YES
Proposition L: NO
Proposition M: YES
Proposition N: YES, YES, YES
Proposition O: YES, YES, YES
Proposition P: NO, NO, NO
Proposition Q: YES, YES, YES
Proposition R: NO
Proposition S: NO
Proposition T: YES
Proposition U: YES
Proposition V: NO, NO, NO

EAST BAY RACES
Alameda County Superior Court Judge, seat 9: Dennis Hayashi
Berkelely Mayor: Tom Bates

BERKELEY CITY COUNCIL
District 2: Darryl Moore
District 3: Max Anderson
District 4: Jesse Arreguin
District 5: Sophie Hahn
District 6: Phoebe Ann Sorgen

BERKELEY SCHOOL BOARD
John Selawksy
Beatriz Levya-Cutler

AC TRANSIT BOARD OF DIRECTORS
At-large: Chris Peeples
Ward 2: Greg Harper

EAST BAY MUNICIPAL UTILITY DISTRICT
Director, Ward 5: Doug Linney
Director, Ward 6: Bob Feinbaum

EAST BAY REGIONAL PARKS DISTRICT
Director, Ward 1: Norman LaForce

EAST BAY MEASURES
Berkeley Measure FF: YES
Berkeley Measure GG: YES
Berkeley Measure HH: YES
Berkeley Measure II: YES
Berkeley Measure JJ: YES
Berkeley Measure KK: NO
Berkeley Measure LL: NO

Oakland City Council (At Large): Rebecca Kaplan
Oakland Measure N: YES
Oakland Measure OO: YES

ALAMEDA COUNTY MEASURES
Measure VV: YES
Measure WW: YES

>>CLICK HERE FOR PRINTOUT VERSION.

>>READ OUR COMPLETE 2008 ENDORSEMENTS HERE.

Endorsements 2008: San Francisco races

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SAN FRANCISCO RACES

Board of Supervisors

District 1

ERIC MAR


The incumbent District 1 supervisor, Jake McGoldrick, likes to joke that he holds his seat only because Eric Mar’s house burned down eight years ago. Back then Mar, who has had a stellar career on the school board, decided to wait before seeking higher office.

But now McGoldrick — overall a good supervisor who was wrong on a few key votes — is termed out, and progressive San Francisco is pretty much unanimous in supporting Mar as his successor.

Mar, a soft-spoken San Francisco State University teacher, was a strong critic of former school superintendent Arlene Ackerman and a leader in the battle to get the somewhat dictatorial and autocratic administrator out of the district. He’s been a key part of the progressive majority that’s made substantial progress in improving the San Francisco public schools.

He’s a perfect candidate for District 1. He has strong ties to the district and its heavily Asian population. He’s a sensible progressive with solid stands on the key issues and a proven ability to get things done. He supports the affordable housing measure, Proposition B; the Clean Energy Act, Proposition H; and the major new revenue measures. He’s sensitive to tenant issues, understands the need for a profound new approach to affordable housing, and wants to solve the city’s structural budget problems with new revenue, not just cuts.

His chief opponent, Sue Lee, who works for the Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t support Prop. H and won’t even commit to supporting district elections. She ducked a lot of our questions and was either intentionally vague or really has no idea what she would do as a supervisor. She’s no choice for the district, and we found no other credible candidates worthy of our endorsement. Vote for Eric Mar.

District 3

1. DAVID CHIU


2. DENISE MCCARTHY


3. TONY GANTNER


The danger in this district is Joe Alioto. He’s smooth, he’s slick, he’s well funded — and he would be a disaster for San Francisco. Make no mistake about it, Alioto is the candidate of downtown — and thanks to his famous name and wads of big-business cash, he’s a serious contender.

Two progressive candidates have a chance at winning this seat and keeping Alioto off the board. David Chiu is a member of the Small Business Commission (SBC) and the Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) and is a former civil rights lawyer who now manages a company that sells campaign software. Denise McCarthy ran the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center for 25 years and spent 7 years on the Port Commission.

Tony Gantner, a retired lawyer, is also in the race, although he is running well behind the others in the polls.

We have concerns about all the candidates. Chiu has a solid progressive record as a commissioner and committee member: He was one of only two SBC members who supported the living-wage ordinance and Sup. Tom Ammiano’s city health care plan. He backed Sup. Aaron Peskin, his political mentor, for chair of the DCCC. He backs Prop. H, supports the two revenue measures and the affordable-housing fund, and wants to give local small businesses a leg up in winning city contracts. He has some creative ideas about housing, including a community stabilization fee on new development.

He’s also a partner in a company that received $143,000 last year from PG&E and that has worked with Republicans and some nasty business interests.

Chiu says he doesn’t get to call all the shots at Grassroots Enterprises, which he cofounded. He describes the firm as a software-licensing operation, which isn’t exactly true — the company’s own Web site brags about its ability to offer broad-based political consulting and communication services.

But Chiu vowed to resign from the company if elected, and given his strong record on progressive issues, we’re willing to take a chance on him.

McCarthy has a long history in the neighborhood, and we like her community perspective. She supports Prop. H and the affordable-housing measure. She’s a little weak on key issues like the city budget — she told us she "hadn’t been fully briefed," although the budget is a public document and the debate over closing a massive structural deficit ought to be a central part of any supervisorial campaign. And while she said there "have to be some new taxes," she was very vague on where new revenue would come from and what specifically she would be willing to cut. She supported Gavin Newsom for mayor in 2003 and told us she doesn’t think that was a bad decision. It was. But she has by far the strongest community ties of any candidate in District 3. She’s accessible (even listing her home phone number in her campaign material), and after her years on the Port Commission, she understands land-use issues.

Gantner has been a supporter of the Clean Energy Act from the start and showed up for the early organizing meetings. He has the support of the Sierra Club and San Francisco Tomorrow and talks a lot about neighborhood beatification. But we’re a little nervous about his law-and-order positions, particularly his desire to crack down on fairs and festivals and his strong insistence that club promoters are responsible for all the problems on the streets.

But in the end, Chiu, McCarthy, and Gantner are all acceptable candidates, and Joe Alioto is not. Fill your slate with these three.

District 4

DAVE FERGUSON


What a mess.

We acknowledge that this is one of the more conservative districts in the city. But the incumbent, Carmen Chu, and her main opponent, Ron Dudum, are terrible disappointments.

It’s possible to be a principled conservative in San Francisco and still win progressive respect. We often disagreed over the years with Quentin Kopp, the former supervisor, state senator, and judge, but we never doubted his independence, sincerity, or political skills. Sean Elsbernd, who represents District 7, is wrong on most of the key issues, but he presents intelligent arguments, is willing to listen, and isn’t simply a blind loyalist of the mayor.

Chu has none of those redeeming qualities. She ducks questions, waffles on issues, and shows that she’s willing to do whatever the powerful interests want. When PG&E needed a front person to carry the torch against the Clean Energy Act, Chu was all too willing: she gave the corrupt utility permission to use her name and face on campaign flyers, signed on to a statement written by PG&E’s political flak, and permanently disgraced herself. She says that most of the problems in the city budget should be addressed with cuts, particularly cuts in public health and public works, but she was unable to offer any specifics. She refused to support the measure increasing the transfer tax on property sales of more than $5 million, saying that she didn’t want to create "a disincentive to those sales taking place." We asked her if she had ever disagreed with Newsom, who appointed her, and she could point to only two examples: she opposed his efforts to limit cigarette sales in pharmacies, and she opposed Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park. In other words, the only times she doesn’t march in lockstep with the mayor is when Newsom actually does something somewhat progressive. We can’t possibly endorse her.

Dudum, who ran a small business and tried for this office two years ago, continues to baffle us. He won’t take a position on anything. Actually, that’s not true — he’s opposed to the Clean Energy Act. Other than that, it’s impossible to figure out where he stands on anything or what he would do to address any of the city’s problems. (An example: When we asked him what to do about the illegal second units that have proliferated in the district, he said he’d solve the problem in two years. How? He couldn’t say.) We like Dudum’s small-business sentiments and his independence, but until he’s willing to take some stands and offer some solutions, we can’t support him.

Which leaves Dave Ferguson.

Ferguson is a public school teacher with little political experience. He’s a landlord, and not terribly good on tenant issues (he said he supported rent control when he was a renter, but now that he owns a four-unit building, he’s changed his mind). But he supports Prop. H, supports Prop. B, supports the revenue measures, and has a neighborhood sensibility. Ferguson is a long shot, but he’s the only candidate who made anything approaching a case for our endorsement.

District 5

ROSS MIRKARIMI


Mirkarimi won this seat four years ago after a heated race in a crowded field, and he’s quickly emerged as one of the city’s most promising progressive leaders. He understands that a district supervisor needs to take on tough citywide issues (he’s the lead author of the Clean Energy Act and won a surprisingly tough battle to ban plastic bags in big supermarkets) as well as dealing with neighborhood concerns. Mirkarimi helped soften a terrible plan for developing the old UC Extension site and fought hard to save John Swett School from closure.

But the area in which he’s most distinguished himself is preventing violent crime — something progressives have traditionally had trouble with. Four years ago, District 5 was plagued with terrible violence: murders took place with impunity, the police seemed unable to respond, and the African American community was both furious and terrified. Mirkarimi took the problem on with energy and creativity, demanding (and winning, despite mayoral vetoes) police foot patrols and community policing. Thanks to his leadership, violent crime is down significantly in the district — and the left in San Francisco has started to develop a progressive agenda for the crime problem.

He has no serious opposition, and richly deserves reelection.

District 7

SEAN ELSBERND


We rarely see eye to eye with the District 7 incumbent. He’s on the wrong side of most of the key votes on the board. He’s opposing the affordable housing measure, Prop. B. He’s opposed to the Clean Energy Act, Prop. H. It’s annoying to see someone who presents himself as a neighborhood supervisor siding with PG&E and downtown over and over again.

But Elsbernd is smart and consistent. He’s a fiscal conservative with enough integrity that he isn’t always a call-up vote for the mayor. He’s accessible to his constituents and willing to engage with people who disagree with him. The progressives on the board don’t like the way he votes — but they respect his intelligence and credibility.

Unlike many of the candidates this year, Elsbernd seems to understand the basic structural problem with the city budget, and he realizes that the deficit can’t be reduced just with spending cuts. He’s never going to be a progressive vote, but this conservative district could do worse.

District 9

1. DAVID CAMPOS


2. ERIC QUEZADA


3. MARK SANCHEZ


The race to succeed Tom Ammiano, who served this district with distinction and is now headed for the State Legislature, is a case study in the advantages of district elections and ranked-choice voting. Three strong progressive candidates are running, and the Mission–Bernal Heights area would be well served by any of them. So far, the candidates have behaved well, mostly talking about their own strengths and not trashing their opponents.

The choice was tough for us — we like David Campos, Eric Quezada, and Mark Sanchez, and we’d be pleased to see any of them in City Hall. It’s the kind of problem we wish other districts faced: District 9 will almost certainly wind up with one of these three stellar candidates. All three are Latinos with a strong commitment to immigrant rights. All three have strong ties to the neighborhoods. Two are openly gay, and one is a parent. All three have endorsements from strong progressive political leaders and groups. All three have significant political and policy experience and have proven themselves accessible and accountable.

And since it’s almost inconceivable that any of the three will collect more than half of the first-place votes, the second-place and third-place tallies will be critical.

Campos, a member of the Police Commission and former school district general counsel, arrived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant at 14. He made it to Stanford University and Harvard Law School and has worked as a deputy city attorney (who helped the city sue PG&E) and as a school district lawyer. He’s been a progressive on the Police Commission, pushing for better citizen oversight and professional police practices. To his credit, he’s stood up to (and often infuriated) the Police Officers’ Association, which is often a foe of reform.

Campos doesn’t have extensive background in land-use issues, but he has good instincts. He told us he’s convinced that developers can be forced to provide as much as 50 percent affordable housing, and he thinks the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan lacks adequate low-cost units. He supports the revenue measures on the ballot and wants to see big business paying a fair share of the tax burden. He argues persuasively that crime has to become a progressive issue, and focuses on root causes rather than punitive programs. Campos has shown political courage in key votes — he supported Theresa Sparks for Police Commission president, a move that caused Louise Renne, the other contender, to storm out of the room in a fit of cursing. He backed Aaron Peskin for Democratic Party chair despite immense pressure to go with his personal friend Scott Weiner. Ammiano argues that Campos has the right qualities to serve on the board — particularly the ability to get six votes for legislation — and we agree.

Eric Quezada has spent his entire adult life fighting gentrification and displacement in the Mission. He’s worked at nonprofit affordable-housing providers, currently runs a homeless program, and was a cofounder of the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. Although he’s never held public office, he has far more experience with the pivotal issues of housing and land use than the other two progressive candidates.

Quezada has the support of Sup. Chris Daly (although he doesn’t have Daly’s temper; he’s a soft-spoken person more prone to civil discussion than fiery rhetoric). If elected, he would carry on Daly’s tradition of using his office not just for legislation but also as an organizing center for progressive movements. He’s not as experienced in budget issues and was a little vague about how to solve the city’s structural deficit, but he would also make an excellent supervisor.

Mark Sanchez, the only Green Party member of the three, is a grade-school teacher who has done a tremendous job as president of the San Francisco school board. He’s helped turn that panel from a fractious and often paralyzed political mess into a strong, functioning operation that just hired a top-notch new superintendent. He vows to continue as an education advocate on the Board of Supervisors.

He told us he thinks he can be effective by building coalitions; he already has a good working relationship with Newsom. He’s managed a $500 million budget and has good ideas on both the revenue and the spending side — he thinks too much money goes to programs like golf courses, the symphony, and the opera, whose clients can afford to cover more of the cost themselves. He wants a downtown congestion fee and would turn Market Street into a pedestrian mall. Like Campos, he would need some education on land-use issues (and we’re distressed that he supports Newsom’s Community Justice Center), but he has all the right political instincts. He has the strong support of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. We would be pleased to see him on the Board of Supervisors.

We’ve ranked our choices in the order we think best reflects the needs of the district and the city. But we also recognize that the progressive community is split here (SEIU Local 1021 endorsed all three, with no ranking), and we have nothing bad to say about any of these three contenders. The important thing is that one of them win; vote for Campos, Quezada, and Sanchez — in that order, or in whatever order makes sense for you. Just vote for all three.

District 11

1. JOHN AVALOS


2. RANDY KNOX


3. JULIO RAMOS


This is one of those swing districts where either a progressive or a moderate could win. The incumbent, Gerardo Sandoval, who had good moments and not-so-good moments but was generally in the progressive camp, is termed out and running for judge.

The strongest and best candidate to succeed him is John Avalos. There are two other credible contenders, Randy Knox and Julio Ramos — and one serious disaster, Ahsha Safai.

Avalos has a long history of public-interest work. He’s worked for Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, for the Justice for Janitors campaign, and as an aide to Sup. Chris Daly. Since Daly has served on the Budget Committee, and at one point chaired it, Avalos has far more familiarity with the city budget than any of the other candidates. He understands that the city needs major structural reforms in how revenue is collected, and he’s full of new revenue ideas. Among other things, he suggests that the city work with San Mateo County to create a regional park district that could get state funds (and could turn McLaren Park into a destination spot).

He has a good perspective on crime (he supports community policing along with more police accountability) and wants to put resources into outreach for kids who are at risk for gang activity. He was the staff person who wrote Daly’s 2006 violence prevention plan. He wants to see more affordable housing and fewer luxury condos in the eastern neighborhoods and supports a congestion fee for downtown. With his experience both at City Hall and in community-based organizations, Avalos is the clear choice for this seat.

Randy Knox, a criminal defense lawyer and former member of the Board of Appeals, describes himself as "the other progressive candidate." He supports Prop. H and the affordable-housing fund. He links the crime problem to the fact that the police don’t have strong ties to the community, and wants to look for financial incentives to encourage cops to live in the city. He wants to roll back parking meter rates and reduce the cost of parking tickets in the neighborhoods, which is a populist stand — but that money goes to Muni, and he’s not sure how to replace it. He does support a downtown congestion fee.

Knox wasn’t exactly an anti-developer stalwart on the Board of Appeals, but we’ll endorse him in the second slot.

Julio Ramos has been one of the better members of a terrible community college board. He’s occasionally spoken up against corruption and has been mostly allied with the board’s progressive minority. He wants to build teacher and student housing on the reservoir adjacent to City College. He suggests that the city create mortgage assistance programs and help people who are facing foreclosure. He suggests raising the hotel tax to bring in more money. He supports public power and worked at the California Public Utilities Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates, where he tangled with PG&E.

We’re backing three candidates in this district in part because it’s critical that Safai, the candidate of Mayor Newsom, downtown, and the landlords, doesn’t get elected. Safai (who refused to meet with our editorial board) is cynically using JROTC as a wedge against the progressives, even though the Board of Supervisors does not have, and will never have, a role in deciding the future of that program. He needs to be defeated, and the best way to do that is to vote for Avalos, Knox, and Ramos.

Board of Education

SANDRA FEWER


NORMAN YEE


BARBARA LOPEZ


KIMBERLY WICOFF


Two of the stalwart progressive leaders on the San Francisco School Board — Mark Sanchez and Eric Mar — are stepping down to run for supervisor. That’s a huge loss, since Mar and Sanchez were instrumental in getting rid of the autocratic Arlene Ackerman, replacing her with a strong new leader and ending years of acrimony on the board. The schools are improving dramatically — this year, for the first time in ages, enrollment in kindergarten actually went up. It’s important that the progressive policies Mar and Sanchez promoted continue.

Sandra Fewer is almost everyone’s first choice for the board. A parent who sent three kids to the San Francisco public schools, she’s done an almost unbelievable amount of volunteer work, serving as a PTA president for 12 terms. She currently works as education policy director at Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. She knows the district, she knows the community, she’s full of energy and ideas, and she has the support of seven members of the Board of Supervisors and five of the seven current school board members.

Fewer supports the new superintendent and agrees that the public schools are getting better, but she’s not afraid to point out the problems and failures: She notes that other districts with less money are doing better. She wants to make the enrollment process more accessible to working parents and told us that race ought to be used as a factor in enrollment if that will help desegregate the schools and address the achievement gap. She’s against JROTC in the schools.

We’re a little concerned that Fewer talks about using district real estate as a revenue source — selling public property is always a bad idea. But she’s a great candidate and we’re happy to endorse her.

Norman Yee, the only incumbent we’re endorsing, has been something of a mediator and a calming influence on an often-contentious board. He helped push for the 2006 facilities bond and the parcel tax to improve teacher pay. He’s helped raise $1 million from foundations for prekindergarten programs. He suggests that the district take the radical (and probably necessary) step of suing the state to demand adequate funding for education. Although he was under considerable pressure to support JROTC, he stood with the progressives to end the military program. He deserves another term.

Barbara "Bobbi" Lopez got into the race late and has been playing catch-up. She’s missed some key endorsements and has problems with accessibility. But she impressed us with her energy and her work with low-income parents. A former legal support worker at La Raza Centro Legal, she’s now an organizer at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, working with immigrant parents. She’s fought to get subsidized Muni fares for SFUSD students. Her focus is on parent involvement — and while everyone talks about bringing parents, particularly low-income and immigrant parents, more directly into the education process, Lopez has direct experience in the area.

Kimberly Wicoff has a Stanford MBA, and you can tell — she talks in a sort of business-speak with lots of reference to "outcomes." She has no kids. But she’s currently working with a nonprofit that helps low-income families in Visitacion Valley and Hunters Point, and we liked her clearheaded approach to the achievement gap. Wicoff is a fan of what she calls community schools; she thinks a "great school in every neighborhood" can go a long way to solving the lingering issues around the enrollment process. That’s a bit of an ambitious goal, and we’re concerned about any move toward neighborhood schools that leads to resegregation. But Wicoff, who has the support of both Mark Sanchez and Mayor Newsom, brings a fresh problem-solving approach that we found appealing. And unlike Newsom, she’s against JROTC.

Jill Wynns, who has been on the board since 1992, has had a distinguished career, and we will never forget her leadership in the battle against privatizing public schools. But she was a supporter of former superintendent Ackerman even when Ackerman was trampling on open-government laws and intimidating students, parents, and staff critics, and she supports JROTC. It’s time for some new blood.

Rachel Norton, a parent and an advocate for special-education kids, has run an appealing campaign, but her support for the save-JROTC ballot measure disqualified her for our endorsement.

As a footnote: H. Brown, a blogger who can be a bit politically unhinged, has no business on the school board and we’re not really sure why he’s running. But he offered an interesting idea that has some merit: he suggests that the city offer free Muni passes and free parking to anyone who will volunteer to mentor an at-risk SFUSD student. Why not?

Community College Board

MILTON MARKS


CHRIS JACKSON


BRUCE WOLFE


There are four seats up for the seven-member panel that oversees the San Francisco Community College District, and we could only find three who merit endorsement. That’s a sad statement: City College is a local treasure, and it’s been badly run for years. The last chancellor, Phil Day, left under a cloud of corruption; under his administration, money was diverted from public coffers into a political campaign. The current board took bond money that the voters had earmarked for a performing arts center and shifted it to a gym — then found out that there wasn’t enough money in the operating budget to maintain the lavish facility. It’s a mess out there, and it needs to be cleaned up.

Fortunately, there are three strong candidates, and if they all win, the reformers will have a majority on the board.

Milton Marks is the only incumbent we’re supporting. He’s been one of the few board members willing to criticize the administration. He supports a sunshine policy for the district and believes the board needs to hold the chancellor accountable (that ought to be a basic principle of district governance, but at City College, it isn’t). He wants to push closer relations with the school board. He actually pays attention to the college budget and tries to make sure the money is spent the right way. He is pushing to reform the budget process to allow more openness and accountability.

Chris Jackson, a policy analyst at the San Francisco Labor Council, is full of energy and ideas. He wants to create an outreach center for City College at the public high schools. He also understands that the college district has done a terrible job working with neighborhoods and is calling for a comprehensive planning process. He understands the problems with the gym and the way the board shuffles money around, and he is committed to a more transparent budget process.

Jackson is also pushing to better use City College for workforce development, particularly in the biotech field, where a lot of the city’s new jobs will be created.

Jackson was president of the Associated Students at San Francisco State University, has been a member of the Youth Commission, and worked with Young Workers United on the city’s minimum-wage law. His experience, energy, and ideas make him an ideal candidate.

Bruce Wolfe attended City College after a workplace injury and served on the Associate Students Council. He knows both the good (City College has one of the best disability service programs in the state) and the bad (the school keeps issuing bonds to build facilities but doesn’t have the staff to keep them running). As a former member of the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, Wolfe is a strong advocate for open government, something desperately needed at the college district. He told us he thinks the college should agree to abide by the San Francisco Planning Code and is calling for a permanent inspector general to monitor administration practices and spending. He wants City College to start building housing for students. He has direct experience with the district and great ideas for improving it, and we’re happy to endorse him.

Incumbents Rodel Rodis and Natalie Berg are running for reelection; both have been a key part of the problem at City College, and we can’t endorse either of them. Steve Ngo, a civil rights lawyer, has the support of the Democratic Party, but we weren’t impressed by his candidacy. And he told us he opposes the Clean Energy Act.

Vote for Marks, Jackson, and Wolfe.

BART Board of Directors

With rising gasoline prices, congested roadways, and global warming, it’s now more important than ever to have an engaged and knowledgeable BART board that is willing to reform a system that effectively has San Francisco users subsidizing everyone else. That means developing a fare structure in which short trips within San Francisco or the East Bay urban centers are cheaper and longer trips are a bit more expensive. BART should also do away with free parking, which favors suburban drivers (who tend to be wealthier) over urban cyclists and pedestrians. San Francisco’s aging stations should then get the accessibility and amenity improvements they need—and at some point the board can even fund the late-night service that is long overdue. There are two candidates most capable of meeting these challenges:

District 7

LYNETTE SWEET


This district straddles San Francisco and the East Bay, and it’s crucial that San Francisco—which controls just three of the nine seats—retain its representative here. We would like to see Lynette Sweet more forcefully represent the interests of riders from San Francisco and support needed reforms such as civilian oversight of BART police. But she has a strong history of public service in San Francisco (having served on San Francisco’s taxi and redevelopment commissions before joining the BART board in 2003), and we’ll endorse her.

District 9

TOM RADULOVICH


Tom Radulovich is someone we’d love to clone and have run for every seat on the BART board, and perhaps every other transportation agency in the Bay Area. He’s smart and progressive, and he works hard to understand the complex problems facing our regional transportation system and then to develop and advocate for creative solutions. As executive director of the nonprofit Livable City, Radulovich is a leader of San Francisco’s alternative transportation brain trust, widely respected for walking the walk (and biking the bike—he doesn’t own a car) and setting an example for how to live and grow in the sustainable way this city and country needs.

>>More Guardian Endorsements 2008

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was walking down Ocean Avenue the other day, and I stopped for a second to chat with two volunteers who were handing out literature for John Avalos, the leading progressive candidate for supervisor in District 11. Since everyone wants to know about the Guardian endorsements, which don’t come out until next week, we got to talking about District 9, where three good candidates are contending to succeed Sup. Tom Ammiano, who is heading to Sacramento and the state Legislature.

One of the Avalos workers was supporting Eric Quezada. The other was supporting Mark Sanchez. "But we’re still friends," the Sanchez backer said.

The supervisorial races would be very different without ranked-choice voting.

There are people who like the relatively new system, which allows voters to choose three candidates in ranked order. There are people who think it’s too confusing, or leads to the wrong outcome. But I think I can say, as someone who lives in District 9 and is in the epicenter of that very heated campaign, that a race that offers voters a choice between Sanchez, Quezada, and David Campos — any of whom would make an excellent supervisor, and all of whom have different strengths to offer — wouldn’t be possible under a traditional electoral system.

Three progressive candidates in an old-fashioned election might very well split the left vote, and leave the door open for someone like Eva Royale — a much less appealing candidate who’s backed by the mayor. There would have been a huge power struggle early on, and some of the candidates would have been under immense pressure not to run, and their backers would be running around trying to cut the other folks off at the knees.

In this case, though, one of the three good guys is going to win — and it will probably be the one who gets the most second-place votes. So it’s in everyone’s interest not to go negative. If Sanchez, say, started to attack Quezada, the Quezada backers would get mad and leave Sanchez off their ballots — and that would hurt Sanchez when the second-place votes are counted.

So everyone has been pretty well behaved in D9; I’ve heard a few whispers here and there, and a few people have tossed off a few nasty comments, but overall the candidates and their supporters recognize that it’s better to stay positive.

So let me shift for a second to District 3.

There’s a real threat in Chinatown–North Beach, and his name is Joe Alioto. As the brother of Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, the nephew of former Sup. Angela Alioto, and the grandson of the late mayor Joe, Alioto has a legendary political name. He also has big downtown backing. And his politics are, if anything, to the right of his sister, who is one of the worst members of the current board.

Based on polls I’ve heard about, there are two candidates who have a chance to beat him — David Chiu and Denise McCarthy. Chiu, a member of the Small Business Commission, will almost certainly get hammered by downtown. McCarthy, who has run the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center for many years, may get hit, too. And this one, like D9, will come down to the second-place votes.

The last thing McCarthy and Chiu can afford is to attack each other. There’s been some of that going on, and it has to stop. If the progressives want to win District 3, Chiu and McCarthy have to realize that, like it or not, they are a team.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Chronicle has come up with a new name for the broad spectrum of political leaders and activists who make up the San Francisco left. We’re now "ultra-liberals."

The term first appeared in Heather Knight’s Aug. 15 article on the changes in the local Democratic County Central Committee. Her lead sentence was almost breathtaking in its drama: The party, she wrote, "has veered dramatically to the left, telling voters that on Nov. 4 they should elect a raft of ultra-liberal supervisorial candidates, decriminalize prostitution, boot JROTC from public schools, embrace public power, and reject Mayor Gavin Newsom’s special court in the Tenderloin."

There’s no question that the progressives made significant advances in winning control of the DCCC in June. And I think it’s entirely fair — and a good thing — that the party has veered to the left. It’s "dramatic," though, only because for so many years the Democratic Party in one of the world’s most liberal cities wasn’t particularly liberal at all: it was controlled by political machines and friendly to real estate developers and big business.

It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that San Francisco Democrats support public power and decriminalizing sex work and oppose military recruiting in the public schools. Those are pretty basic San Francisco values. What’s surprising is that it took a wholesale organizing effort and a huge battle to get the party to where it is today.

But I still cringe at the term "ultra-liberal."

David Campos, a Police Commission member (and generally a fairly even-minded guy) who is running for supervisor in District 9, called me this weekend to tell me he was laughing about the new tag: "It’s a badge of pride," he said. And of course, on one level, I agree with him.

But there’s something more to the story here. The way the Chron uses it, "ultra-liberal" is supposed to be a derogatory term, just a bit short of "radical" (or in another era, "commie." It suggests candidates who are out of touch with the mainstream, who don’t represent the majority, who can’t entirely be trusted.

I asked Knight what she meant by that term, and she had no comment. But here’s what I think is happening: Newsom’s political operatives are mad that the progressives have seized control of the term "progressive" — which is, in fact, an accurate and historically valuable term. They’d like to call Newsom a progressive mayor — which is inaccurate and historically invalid. But since they can’t get away with that, they’ve pushed the Chron to use another term for people like Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin, and the best the editors could come up with is "ultra-liberal."

Weak.

Speaking of progressive issues: the move to reinstate JROTC in the public schools is really a wedge campaign that will be funded by downtown interests and used against progressives like Eric Mar, who is running in a more moderate district. The issue itself is a no-brainer. Do we want military recruitment programs in the public schools? The progressive candidates for school board need to stand up on this one and make it clear that they aren’t going to back down — JROTC has to go.

DCCC endorses….

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The newly elected progressive block of the local Democratic Party flexed their muscles during tonight’s endorsements. It was a full house, with only Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s seat empty. She neglected (perhaps purposefully) to send a proxy.

Many of the supervisors’ measures passed — including the Affordable Housing measure and the Clean Energy Act. All of the items put on the ballot by Mayor Gavin Newsom failed, despite a small consistent cabal following his centrist party line. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s proxy cast steady abstentions on many local issues, with notable “no” votes against Affordable Housing, Clean Energy, and decriminalizing prostitution. She did, however, support Newsom’s Community Justice Center, which some pointed out had already been funded and should have been taken off the ballot.

All the progressive candidates handily won top seats, with David Campos beating out Eric Quezada in the hot district nine race. Nods went to incumbents Elsbernd and Chu. There was a lot of debate over whether to select second and third choices for ranked choice voting in the district supervisor races. Though there were attempts to get second and third seats filled, there was too much division among candidates and enough progressives stuck with “no endorsement” for those seats to keep solidarity behind the top seeded candidate. After some talk about the need to have at least one woman on the slate, Denise McCarthy, running in district three, was the only candidate to receive the second billing, getting votes from Debra Walker and Michael Goldstein, who stepped outside the progressive contingent that was urging a “no endorsement” vote to keep loyalty lined up behind Chiu.

The Clean Energy Act received a healthy majority of 22, with more choosing to abstain than cast a “no.” Tom Hsieh, Joe Julian, Megan Levitan, Mike Tuchow, Dianne Feinstein, and August Longo, voted against it while Laura Spanjian, Scott Wiener, Jackie Speier, Leland Yee, and Fiona Ma, abstained.

The complete rundown, after the jump:

Editor’s Notes

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I didn’t expect much from NBC’s prime-time Olympics coverage, but Jesus, it’s bad.

Forget the all-America, all the time, which is only to be expected. Forget the fact that only the sports that have prominent American contenders get much attention. It’s the reporting and commentary that’s making me sick.

I don’t watch the Olympics on TV to hear for the 12th time about Michael Phelps growing up with a single mother and a driven coach. I buy trashy magazines to learn that kind of stuff. I want to see the games. (I don’t watch football on TV to learn about Brett Favre’s emotional unretirement; I want to see him throw the ball. And if they interrupted the game to give me an "NFL moment" I’d stop watching altogether.)

There are hundreds of events going on, and with the tape delay, we could see all kinds of stuff. The network could be switching from swimming to gymnastics to boxing to swimming … but no: more than half the prime-time show is devoted to truly awful little video clips about the lives of the players, or the age of the Chinese gymnasts (now there’s a hot new story) or someone’s personal tragedy.

Folks: I don’t care. Like most of us, I want to watch sports. Save your trashy specials for 60 Minutes.

And the comments, overall, are just horrifying. Did you know that the Romanian women’s gymnastics team just isn’t the same now that they don’t brutally abuse the children? I mean, look at those errors, that sloppy attitude! The athletes were actually smiling and talking to each other before they took the balance beam, and when one woman fell, she still got a hug from her coach. Back in the days of Nadia Comaneci, that would never have happened. Tragedy what’s happened to that team.

(I’ll give Bob Costas a break — if you get an interview with the president of the United States, you break away from the gym to air it. And he actually asked some professional questions. But watching Bush there, grinning like some kind of nervous idiot with a caffeine twitch, was so creepy it was almost unbearable.)

IN OTHER NEWS: Police Commission member David Campos is making a big stink about Mayor Gavin Newsom’s willingness to violate the Sanctuary City law. His point: if immigrants won’t contact the police for fear of getting deported, the cops can’t do their jobs. That, by the way, was one of the reasons San Francisco became a sanctuary city. He’s asking for a special hearing on this, and I hope it leads the commission to stand up to the mayor and say that it’s more important for SF cops to be able to work with immigrant communities than for Newsom to look tough on immigrants in his campaign for governor.

The Democratic County Central Committee is preparing to endorse candidates for supervisor, but so far, there’s little indication the panel will adopt ranked-choice voting recommendations. In District 9, that seems a shame — there are three good candidates (Campos, Mark Sanchez and Eric Quezada), and two (Quezada and Campos) are Democrats. Voters can choose up to three candidates in ranked order; the DCCC ought to consider doing the same.

Breaking: Leno endorses Sanchez

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Just got word that state Assemblymember (and Senator-elect) Mark Leno is going to endorse School Board member Mark Sanchez for supervisor in District 9. “We’ve got his endorsement,” Sanchez just told me by phone. “We’re putting out the press release today.”

That makes two Green Party members the Democratic lawmaker is backing; he’s also endorsed Ross Mirkarimi in D5. Good for Leno not to let the irrational fear of Greens that so many Democrats harbor influence him; this is, after all, a nonpartisan race.

It’s a tough choice in D9 — Sanchez, Police Commission member David Campos and housing activist Eric Quezada are all good progressives and any of the three would be a great supervisor. Quezada, I think, never had much of a chance with Leno; he’s pretty close to Sup. Chris Daly, who was a strong backer of Carole Migden in the bitter Migden-Leno senate race. Campos is close to Sup. Tom Ammiano, who was neutral in the Leno-Migden brawl — but Campos, who is on the Democratic County Central Committee, voted for Aaron Peskin as chair. Leno’s candidate (and he was pusing him hard) was Scott Weiner, who narrowly lost.

Quezada also ran for DCCC, but didn’t win.

Sanchez, as a Green, was able to stay out of both the Migden-Leno fight and the Peskin-Weiner contest. Oddly enough, not being a Democrat may have helped him here.

Campos, by taking the stand he thought was right and voting for Peskin (despite immense pressure), may have scotched any chance of getting Leno’s endorsement. “That’s politics,” he told me. Yes, it is.

(UPDATE: Sanchez corrects me: He endorsed Leno for state Senate months before the election. So the Leno endorsement is even less of a surprise.)

Politics and sausage

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hungarian-sausage.jpg
Last night, I was reminded of the old joke that people who like sausage and appreciate politics shouldn’t watch either one being made.
Less than a week after winning a majority of the seats on the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, the progressive-minded “Hope Slate” candidates (all of which were endorsed by the Guardian) descended into bitter infighting over who to back for the powerful chair of the DCCC.
The acrimony began when Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, whose 23,049 DCCC votes was second only to David Campos (whose run for supervisor this fall would conflict with running the DCCC), resisted calls to run for the chair, much to the consternation of progressive stalwarts such as Chris Daly and Robert Haaland.
Some Hope Slate candidates, such as Laura Spanjian, were apparently supporting a play by Assembly member turned Senator-to-be Mark Leno to have moderate Scott Wiener continue as the DCCC chair, despite the fact that he wasn’t part of the winning slate and he finished in 10th place in the DCCC District 13 race.
And for awhile there, Peskin seemed to be going along the Leno’s play, arguing that progressives should adopt a conciliatory posture. So the candidates gathered together last night at the 500 Club to hash out their differences, and I had a front row seat for a discussion that turned nasty – with Daly shouting at Peskin and Spanjian and then storming out of the room.
But today, as cooler heads prevailed, Peskin has decided to run, telling me, “Yes, it is true, I am running.”

Election as prologue

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› steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco politics shifted June 3 as successful new coalitions altered the electoral landscape heading into the high-stakes fall contests, when seven of the 11 seats on the Board of Supervisors are up for grabs.
Progressives had a good election night even as lefty shot-caller Sup. Chris Daly suffered a pair of bitter defeats. And Mayor Gavin Newsom scored a rare ballot box victory when the southeast development measure Proposition G passed by a wide margin, although voters repudiated Newsom’s meddling with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission by approving Prop. E.

But the big story wasn’t these two lame duck politicians, who have served as the two poles of local politics for the past few years. It was Mark Leno, who handed Sen. Carole Migden her first electoral defeat in 25 years by bringing together progressives and moderates and waging an engaged, effective ground campaign. In the process, he may have offered a portent of things to come.

The election night speech Leno gave just before midnight — much like his entire campaign — didn’t break along neat ideological lines. There were solidly progressive stands, like battling the religious right’s homophobia, pledging to pursue single-payer health care, and blasting Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for funding sleazy attack pieces against him, reaffirming his commitment to public power.

But he also thanked Newsom and other moderate supporters and heaped praise on his political consulting firm, BMWL, which has run some of downtown’s nastiest campaigns. "It was clean, it was smart, and it was effective," Leno said of his campaign.

The Migden campaign, which had the support of Daly and many prominent local progressives, often looked dirty by comparison, marred by past campaign finance violations that resulted in Migden getting slapped with the biggest fine in state history and by Daly’s unethical misuse of the Guardian logo on a mailer that made it appear as if we had endorsed Migden.

Old alliances seemed to crumble around this election, leaving open questions about how coalitions will form going into an important November election that’s expected to have a crowded ballot and huge turnout.

UNITY AND DIVISION


There are things that unite almost all San Franciscans, like support for public schools. In this election that support came in the form of Prop. A — a measure that will increase teacher salaries through a parcel tax of about $200 per property owner — which garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.

"These numbers show that people believe in public education. They believe in what we’re doing," school superintendent Carlos Garcia told a jubilant election night crowd inside the Great American Music Hall.

Also uniting the city’s Democrats was the news that Barack Obama sewed up the party’s presidential nomination June 3, ending a primary battle with Hillary Clinton that had created a political fissure here and in cities across the country.

"The winds of change are blowing tonight. Let me congratulate Barack Obama on his victory," Leno said on election night, triggering a chant of "Yes we can" from the crowd at the Upper Market bar/restaurant Lime.

Local Clinton supporters were already switching candidates on election night, even before Clinton dropped her campaign and announced her support for Obama four days later.

"As a strong Hillary person, I’m so excited to be working for Obama these next five months," DCCC District 13 member Laura Spanjian, who won reelection by placing fourth out of 12 slots, said on election night. "It’s my number one goal this fall."

Leno also sounded conciliatory themes. In his election night speech, Leno acknowledged the rift he created in the progressive and LGBT communities by challenging Migden: "I know that you upset the applecart when you challenge a sitting senator."

But he vowed to repair that damage, starting by leading the fight against the fall ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriage and overturn the recent California Supreme Court decision that legalized it. He told the crowd, "I invite you to join together to defeat the religious right."

A day later we asked Leno about whether his victory represented a new political center in San Francisco and he professed a desire to avoid the old political divisions: "Let’s focus on our commonalities rather than differences," he said, "because there is real strength in a big-tent coalition."

But this election was more about divisions than unity, splits whose repercussions will ripple into November in unknown ways. Shortly before the election, Daly publicly blasted "Big Labor" after the San Francisco Labor Council cut a deal with Lennar Corporation, agreeing to support Prop. G in exchange for the promise of more affordable housing and community benefits.

On election night, Newsom couldn’t resist gloating over besting Daly, whose affordable housing measure Prop. F lost big. "I couldn’t be more proud that the voters of San Francisco supported a principled proposal over the political proposal of a politician," Newsom told us on election night, adding, "Today was a validation of community investment and involvement over political games."

While Daly and some of his progressive allies have long warned that Leno is too close to Newsom to be trusted, one of the first points in Leno’s speech was the celebrate the passage of Prop. E, which gives the Board of Supervisors more power to reject the mayor’s appointees to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. "As an early supporter I was happy to see that," Leno said.

Susan Leal, the former SFPUC director who was ousted by Newsom earlier this year, said she felt some vindication from the vote on Prop. E, but mostly she was happy that people saw through the false campaign portrayals (which demonized the Board of Supervisors and erroneously said the measure gave it control over the SFPUC.)

"This is one of the few PUCs where people are appointed and doing the mayor’s bidding is the only qualification," Leal told us on election night.
Sup. Tom Ammiano, who will be headed to the Assembly next year, agreed: "It shows the beauty contest with the mayor is over and people are willing to hold him accountable."

ANALYZING THE RESULTS


On the day after the election, during a postmortem at the downtown office of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, political consultants Jim Stearns and David Latterman sized up the results.

Latterman called the Prop. E victory "the one surprise in the race." The No on E campaign sought to demonize the Board of Supervisors, a strategy that clearly didn’t work. Firing Leal, a lesbian, helped spur the city’s two major LGBT groups — the Harvey Milk and Alice B. Toklas Democratic clubs — to endorse the measure, which could have been a factor when combined with the high LGBT turnout.

"This may have ridden the coattails of the Leno-Migden race," Stearns said.

In that race, Stearns and Latterman agreed that Leno ran a good campaign and Migden didn’t, something that was as big a factor in the outcome as anything.
"Migden did too little too late. The numbers speak for themselves. Leno ran a really good race," Latterman said, noting how Leno beat Migden by a large margin in San Francisco and came within a few thousand votes of beating Joe Nation on his home turf of Marin County.

"It was a big deal for Leno to get so close to Nation in Marin," Stearns said.

Leno told us the polling his campaign did late last year and early this year showed he had a strong advantage in San Francisco, "so with that, I invested a lot of time and energy in Marin County."

Stearns attributed the big Prop. G win to its large base of influential supporters: "The coalition-building was what put this over the top." Daly chalked it up to the $4 million that Lennar spent, saying it had bought the election. But Stearns, who was a consultant for the campaign, didn’t agree: "I don’t think money alone ever wins or loses campaigns."

Yet he said the lack of money and an organized No on G/Yes on F campaign did make it difficult to stop the Lennar juggernaut. "You need to have enough money to get your message out," Stearns said, noting that "Nobody knew that the Sierra Club opposed [Prop. G]."

In the one contested judge’s race on the ballot, Gerardo Sandoval finished in a virtual dead heat with incumbent Judge Thomas Mellon. The two will face off again in a November runoff election because a third candidate, Mary Mallen, captured about 13 percent of the vote.

"How angry is Sandoval with Mallen now?" Latterman asked at the SPUR event. "If that 13 percent wasn’t there, Sandoval wins."

Both Latterman and Stearns agreed that this election was Sandoval’s best shot at unseating a sitting judge. "He’s going to face a tougher test in November," Stearns said.

The other big news was the lopsided defeat of Prop. 98, which would have abolished rent control and limits on condo conversions in addition to its main stated aim of restricting the use of eminent domain by local governments.

"It just lost bad," Latterman said of Prop. 98, the second extreme property rights measure to go down in recent years. "It just needs to go away now…. This was a resounding, ‘Just go away now, please.’<0x2009>"

LOOKING FORWARD


Aside from the Leno victory, this election was most significant in setting up future political battles. And progressives won a big advantage for the battles to come by picking up seats on the city’s two Democratic County Central Committees, a successful offensive engineered largely by Daly and Peskin, who were both elected to the eastside DCCC District 13.

"On the DCCC level, we took back the Democratic Party," said Robert Haaland, a progressive who was reelected to the DCCC District 13.

"The fight now is over the chair. The chair decides where the resources go and sets the priorities, so you can really do a lot," Haaland told us.

Many of the fall supervisorial contests feature races between two or three bona fide progressives, so those candidates are going to need to find issues or alliances that will broaden their bases.

In District 9, for example, the candidates include housing activist Eric Quezada (who lost his DCCC race), school board president Mark Sanchez, and Police Commission member David Campos — all solid progressives, all Latino, and all with good bases of support.

Campos finished first in his DCCC District 13 race just ahead of Peskin. Speaking on election night at the GAMH, Campos attributed his strong showing to walking lots of precincts and meeting voters, particularly in the Mission, an effort that will help him in the fall.

"A lot of Latino voters are really eager to be more involved [in politics]," Campos said. "Speaking the language and being an immigrant really connects with them."

Campos thinks public safety will be a big issue on voters’ minds this fall, an issue where he has strength and one that progressives have finally seized. "Until Ross Mirkarimi came along, progressives really weren’t talking about it," Campos said.

So, does Campos’ strong DCCC showing make him the front runner? When I asked that question during the SPUR event, Latterman said he didn’t think so. He noted that Sanchez has always had strong finishes on his school board races, citywide contests that includes the Portola area in District 9 but not in DCCC District 13. In fact, Latterman predicted lots of acrimony and close contests this November.

"If you like the anger of Leno vs. Migden, we’ll have more in the fall," Latterman said of the competitive supervisorial races.

Leno hasn’t been terribly active in local contests since heading to Sacramento, and he told us that his focus this fall will be on state ballot fights and the presidential race. He hasn’t made endorsements in many supervisorial races yet, but his two so far are both of progressives: Ross Mirkarimi in District 5, and David Chiu in District 3. And as he makes more supervisorial endorsements in the coming months, Leno told us, "I will be fighting for progressive voices."

Sarah Phelan contributed to this story.

El Rio: No on Prop 98, Ammiano, Sandoval, Prop F progressive free-for-all

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Amanda Witherell calls in to report:

There’s about 200 hundred people milling about optimistically at El Rio, for a party that’s basically a catchall progressive fest for No on Prop 98, Yes on 99, Tom Ammiano, Gerardo Sandoval, Yes on F, No on G, and David Campos for DCCC.

Currently and unfortunately, 98 is failing swimmingly in SF but seems to be winning statewide (Ed Note — this looks to have changed since I got Amanda’s call). F is also failing in absentees. And despite the fact that Sandoval (running for judge) looks to be down right now against his opponent, Mellon, he’s in a chipper mood: “I’m fully expecting to win,” he says with a grin.

No balloons, but Ammiano’s working the floor with some trademark comedy schtick — he’s at 97 percent, but he ran unopposed. Campos is also doing quite well, and is exuberant.

The crowd is surprisingly and inspiringly young — many folks from the League of Pissed Off Voters. Legendary prankster/jester h. Brown has set up a table and is interviewing people, while a folk singer strums away in a corner.

City Hall: DCCC results

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Remember, these are early absentees, but here’s who’s winning at the DCCC right now in District 13:

Leslie Katz
David Chiu
David Campos
Laura Spanjian
Aaron Peskin
Scott Wiener
Robert Haaland
Rafael Mandelman
Holli Their
Debra Walker
Michael Goldstein
Joe Julian

So far, it’s most incumbents and the progressive “slate” isn’t exactly winning. Chris Daly, for example, hasn’t even made the cut. But the night is young and that will probably change.

Election night parties

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Here’s a roundup of the main local election night parties:
Yes on A – Great American Music Hall, O’Farrell and Polk streets

Yes on F, No on G – Grace Tabernacle Church, 1121 Oakdale

Yes on G, No on F – Javalencia Café, 3900 3rd Street

Mark Leno – Campaign HQ, 1344 Fourth Street (at “D” Street)
San Rafael, CA 94901 (he might also stop by Lime, 2247 Market Street, where some DCCC candidates – including Laura Spanjian and David Campos – are having a party)

Carole Migden – Campaign HQ, 121 9th St., near Minna

Joe Nation – Wipeout Bar and Grill, 302 BonAir Center, Greenbrae

Fiona Ma for Assembly – Soluna, 272 McAllister

No on 98/Yes on 99 – 1601 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland

League of Young Voters, Sandoval for Judge, progressive DCCC candidates and some Yes on F and No on Prop. 98 supporters – El Rio, 3158 Mission Street

And then there’s the Bay Guardian’s “Don’t Dodge the Drafts” election night party, 7-9 p.m. at Kilowatt, 3160 16th Street btw Valencia/Guerrero. Bring your voting stub for drink specials.

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