OPINION If your sofa was purchased in California after 1975, chances are its interior foam and cushions contain either brominated or chlorinated fire retardants. These toxic chemicals have been shown to cause cancer, reproductive problems, learning disabilities, and thyroid disease in laboratory animals and house cats. At the same time, these chemicals are climbing the food chain in increasing concentrations and are found in fish, harbor seals in San Francisco Bay, polar bears, bird eggs, and the animal at the very top of the food chain — breast-fed human babies.
A little-known California regulation known as Technical Bulletin 117 requires that the polyurethane foam in furniture withstand an open flame for 12 seconds without catching fire. This 30-year-old regulation is well intended, and upholstered furniture fires are a serious concern. However, since 1975 no other jurisdiction in the world has followed California’s lead, and other states have achieved similar or greater reductions in fire-related deaths without this standard.
Because brominated and chlorinated fire retardants don’t react chemically with foam, their molecules have a tendency to attach to dust particles in furniture. Each time someone sits on a sofa cushion, the dust particles escape into the air and can be inhaled or settle on the floor, where toddlers and house cats live and play.
These fire-retardant molecules mimic thyroid hormone, which in pregnant women regulates the sex and brain development of the unborn child. This mimicking is called endocrine disruption, and brominated and chlorinated fire retardants in even infinitesimal amounts can cause harm to human and animal health through this process.
Many national furniture manufacturers distribute only California-compliant furniture, which means that up to 10 percent by weight of foam cushions are composed of toxic chemicals. California’s standard is poisoning the whole nation, one sofa at a time.
The good news is that there are safer chemical and construction-based alternatives already in the marketplace that can provide an equivalent level of fire safety without the use of brominated and chlorinated fire retardants. The institutional-furniture industry and the mattress industry already comply with tough fire standards and do so without the use of these toxic chemicals.
Residential-furniture manufacturers could do so as well, except that state law and TB 117 prevent it. That’s why I have authored Assembly Bill 706, which would modify our outdated foam test. A modern residential-furniture standard, such as the one developed in California for mattresses, should address how the various components of furniture can together achieve equal or better fire safety without using the most toxic fire retardants.
AB 706 would establish a comprehensive process for weighing the issues of fire safety and chemical exposures. It would rightly rest the responsibility for assessing toxicity with state toxicologists, require the fire-retardant industry to prove that its products are safe, and leave the final decision on whether to prohibit a particular chemical to the state’s fire-safety scientists.
Soon the decision of whether California will continue to poison our kids and the rest of the nation will be made by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Thus far, state agencies have been directed from the top to oppose AB 706. The question for Gov. Schwarzenegger is, how loudly must our babies cry before toxic, cancer-causing, endocrine-disrupting chemicals are removed from our furniture?<\!s>*
Mark Leno
Mark Leno represents San Francisco in the State Assembly.
Sup. Chris Daly, who was talking over the past few days about a campaign for mayor, has decided against it. He sent a statement tonight; I’ll post the whole thing:
Progressive Allies and Friends,
For the past 6.5 years, we have enjoyed strong
progressive politics in San Francisco. Progressive
San Francisco has delivered a new era of worker’s
rights with the nation’s highest minimum wage,
universal health coverage, and paid sick days.
Requiring significant amounts of affordable housing
and other public benefits, we’ve made development work
for communities. We’ve set the agenda on workers’
rights, housing, health care, city services,
transportation, and the environment. Our political
opponents, even holding the office of Mayor, have been
on the defensive.
Despite our political strength and its marquis
standing in local political races, it’s clear that
we’ve had difficulty engaging in this year’s Mayor’s
race. Progressives share a principled critique of the
personality-driven politics practiced by our
opponents. We elevate the issues important to
everyday people above our own political advancement
and personal self-interest. We are right to do so.
Unfortunately, this does not always translate well
into the mainstream and corporate-controlled media.
For the better part of a year, I felt a great deal of
responsibility to find a strong progressive candidate
for Mayor, all the while acknowledging that I was not
our best possible candidate. There were discussions,
caucuses, lunches, and even a Progressive Convention
aimed at compelling a progressive entry into the race.
With news last week of the final potential candidate
forgoing the race, I decided to take another look at
making a run.
This past week Progressive San Francisco produced a
flurry of activity about that possibility. I was
heartened and inspired that so many were willing to
step up in the face of significant odds. Dozens of
you dropped what you were doing to spend hours on end
with me this week. Hundreds pledged your support.
The outpouring gave me hope that we do have what it
takes to take back Room 200 and deliver social and
economic justice to San Francisco.
However, I have decided not to file a candidacy for
the Office of Mayor.
Given the negative, million-dollar campaign against me
last year, there was never a question that this
Mayor’s race would be brutal. The incumbent promised
as much in a meeting this week. Our ideas are better,
and I was committed to running a campaign about our
issues. But most of us had reservations about whether
we’d ever be able to achieve resonance on the issues
against the tide of hits, personal attacks, and media
hype of the Newsom vs. Daly personality clash.
Sarah and I arrived at last night’s meeting with the
intention of announcing my entry into the race and
were moved by everyone’s willingness to act on faith.
When I called on progressives for support for a
Mayoral run, progressives responded. But I also
sensed that the reservations in the room were real.
Progressives are certainly ready to vie for the
Mayor’s seat, but, unfortunately, I am not the right
candidate.
There is some good news. Progressives are much
stronger than we were the last time we didn’t field a
challenger for Mayor. Back in ’83, the progressive
movement had not recovered from the Milk/Moscone
assassinations and the subsequent repeal of district
elections. Dianne Feinstein enjoyed great popularity
after soundly squashing a recall effort. She went on
to easily win reelection later that year.
Four years later it appeared as if downtown’s reign
would continue with the front-running candidacy of
John Molinari. His bid, however, was upset when Art
Agnos united San Francisco’s left with a disciplined,
sustained, and effective campaign.
We all know that electoral work is just a part of the
overall effort we need to put forth. There is no
substitute for the basics of organizing and serving
our people so they can live with dignity. I will
always remain committed to the struggle and to
building progressive politics and people power in San
Francisco for the years to come.
Solidarity,
Chris Daly
It would have been a hell of a race, but I respect his decision. Now it’s time to focus on the Board of Supervisors races in 2008.
One investigation by the District Attorney’s Office is enough of a headache for City College of San Francisco. But two?
The Guardian learned that just days before the November 2005 election, in which City College asked voters for $246.3 million in bond money to continue a series of capital works projects, the office of Vice Chancellor Peter Goldstein received a letter from investigators requesting detailed information about a land transaction that took place in Chinatown earlier that year.
At least three of the school’s elected trustees don’t recall being informed by Chancellor Phil Day about the probe, setting off new concerns after we alerted officials about the letter, which the Guardian obtained. The DA’s Office is also investigating potential laundering of public funds into campaign donations by college officials in connection with that bond campaign.
"It puts a further cloud on the college," trustee Julio Ramos told us. "Presumably the statute of limitations has not run on the transaction, so what’s going on here? I’m concerned because no one ever informed us."
Two other trustees, Milton Marks and board president Anita Grier, told us they don’t remember being told of the inquest.
"We do have to give them some leeway to operate the college without informing us of everything," Marks said. "But when the district attorney is asking questions about something that’s coming from a board action, why wouldn’t we have to know about it as early as possible? It’s kind of indefensible."
But Day fervently insisted that the board was informed of the letter during a closed-session meeting the same month the letter was received and that Ramos and Marks simply weren’t there. Day had no explanation for why Grier couldn’t recall it, but trustees Rodel Rodis, Natalie Berg, and Lawrence Wong and former trustee Johnnie Carter all confirmed they’d been told about it. Day also said the school had never heard back from the DA’s office after it produced all of the requested documents.
"I had even forgot about the fact that we had this initial inquiry back then," Day told us. "I had totally removed it from my brain and forgotten about it completely."
Either way, this is the first the public has heard of the DA’s interest in City College’s land deals. Debbie Mesloh, a spokesperson for District Attorney Kamala Harris, told us she could neither confirm nor deny that any such investigation was taking place, although the letter confirms that an investigation was opened.
The DA this year began an inquiry into City College after the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that the school had used a $10,000 lease payment from a business tenant to help bankroll a campaign committee formed for the purpose of promoting the 2005 bond election, City College’s third since 1997.
But we now know that the DA began snooping around the college’s land purchases in October 2005, when Goldstein was asked for escrow documents, property appraisals, memos, and board minutes concerning the school’s purchase of two lots in Chinatown at the corner of Kearny and Washington streets for a long-planned (and now vastly over budget) campus.
The Guardian has also obtained a pile of documents detailing months of real estate negotiations between the college and politically connected Chinatown businessman Pius Lee, who owned one of the lots and had an option to buy a neighboring and much larger tract.
The construction of the new Chinatown–<\d>North Beach campus hasn’t gone smoothly for the college or voters. The school originally used $5.8 million to buy property in the neighborhood using bond money that voters authorized in 1997. Voters were then asked for $45 million in 2001 to build the campus, with construction expected to begin in 2003.
But Day’s ambitions led to clashes with Chinatown residents after the original plan — slated for an area facing Columbus Avenue on the other side of the block from where City College now hopes to build — called for demolishing a historic building and low-income apartments housing elderly tenants.
The school entered a legal settlement promising to preserve the Columbo Building and relocate the nearby Fong Building’s tenants. In 2005, however, it hastily decided incorporating that work would be "infeasible" and turned to Lee for help in finding a new location.
Lee (who did not return our calls) told the college he’d give up a sliver of land he owned on the other side of the block and also help it secure the much larger lot nearby owned by a Taiwanese company, Fantec Development Corp., with which Lee had a long business relationship.
The school paid Lee $1.9 million for a strip of parking lot 18 feet wide, even though an appraisal that City College received placed its market value at $1.1 million, records show. (San Francisco County assessed it at $267,000 in 2004 for tax purposes. The neighboring, much larger piece of land, also a parking lot, was assessed at $1.5 million.) During early negotiations, records show, the college offered $785,000 for Lee’s property and $4.5 million for Fantec’s, but in the end it wound up paying much more — a total of $8.7 million in bond money for both.
Yet it’s not clear precisely what investigators were looking into, what they found, or whether the investigation is still open.
"The properties were not available for anything less than the price we paid for them," Goldstein told us. "That’s what the sellers demanded in order to sell their properties…. Pius drove a very hard deal and demanded what I would consider to be the maximum possible price for his property that we could defend."
Ground still hasn’t been broken on the school’s Chinatown dream, and in the interim, as we’ve reported recently, the estimated costs have ballooned from $75 million to $122 million, an increase of 62 percent. As a result, the school has chosen to gut some projects authorized by voters to keep this and other favored proposals alive (see "The City College Shell Game," 7/4/07).
The Board of Trustees is slated to vote next month on whether to certify the campus’s environmental documents and whether the project should be exempt from building height limits in the neighborhood.<\!s>*
ZEITGEIST This year just may go down as the one when nerds finally ruled the school, scattering HP calculators, parentally purchased button-downs, and World of Warcraft guild master credentials as they tripped on their own shoelaces on their way into WonderCon or the Lick Observatory. The infestation of all screens big and small hasn’t been quite so intense since the Ronald Reagan–era ’80s, when nerds were regularly toasted on TV’s Happy Days, then found fame in the cineplex’s Revenge of the Nerds (1984). Freaks, geeks, grinds, dorks, and losers have come a long way from Andy Kaufman cohort Fred Blassie’s 1976 novelty tune, "Pencil Neck Geek," and even further along from George Jones’s 1993 track "High-Tech Redneck" and the emergence of Pharrell Williams’s NERD production squad. Freaks and Geeks, Ugly Betty, and Steve Urkel of Family Matters have laid the foundation for fall’s TV invasion, including Aliens in America, in which an Asian exchange student meets geek with his nerd host; The IT Crowd, otherwise known as "Dances with Dudes Who Keep Late Hours Serving Your Server"; and Chuck, whose title character oversees a so-called Nerd Herd at the local Best Buy–esque big-box retailer and dabbles in international espionage. Shoring up the projected sales for Benjamin Nugent’s book, American Nerd: The Story of My People, due out in 2008, are silver-screen nerd workouts like Rocket Science, which painfully, wittily details the trials of a stuttering, would-be school debater trying to beat the odds with lots of baggage. The hot nerd sport of table tennis will be sent up in the forthcoming Balls of Fury, and the awkward raunch of nerd-focused teen sex comedy returns with next week’s gut-busting Superbad, buttressed by costar Michael "Baby Beck" Cera, who pushes the nerdiness of his übergeek character George Michael in Arrested Development to new heights in this and on his online TV series, Clark and Michael. Despite the fact that Underdog may be truly speaking for downtrodden puppies everywhere, Superbad probably represents the apogee of nerdocity, being coproduced by current comedy master of the universe Judd Apatow, who has played not a small part in the hip-to-be-uncool movement with the aforementioned Freaks and The 40 Year-Old Virgin.
So nerds rock, but why? Chalk it up to a once firmly bitch-slapped and now somewhat resuscitated tech sector — or an infusion of energy and capital in Silicon Valley? Is nerd valorization part of a backlash against the hippie hotties of the early ’00s — and a back-to-the-future glance at Reagan social conservatism? Or is this simply where all our heads are these days, as a logical extension of a perpetually wired culture? Nerdiness has seeped so deeply into everyday life that everyone, even the brawny bullies who spindled pocket protectors in the past, must to pay due respect when faced with a blank monitor. (Kimberly Chun)
Oaxaca, Mexico — Those of us who report from the front lines of the social-justice movement in Latin America share an understanding that there’s always a bullet out there with our name on it. Brad Will traveled 2,500 miles, from New York to this violence-torn Mexican town, to find his.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2006, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca was on fire. Death squads, the pistoleros of a despised governor, rolled through the cobblestoned streets of this colonial capital, peppering with automatic weapon fire the flimsy barricades erected by masked rebels. Hundreds were killed, wounded, or imprisoned.
Will, a New York Indymedia videojournalist, felt he had to be there. Xenophobia was palpable on the ground when Will touched down. Foreign journalists were attacked as terrorists by the governor’s sycophants in the media: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" the radio chattered — if you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!
For much of the afternoon of Oct. 27, Will had been filming armed confrontations on the barricades just outside the city. He was trapped in the middle of a narrow street while gunshots boomed all around him, but he kept filming, looking for the money shot.
And he found it: on his final bits of tape, two clearly identifiable killers are perfectly framed, their guns firing. You hear the fatal shot and experience Brad’s shudder of dismay as the camera finally tumbles from his hands and bounces along the sidewalk.
By all visible evidence, Brad Will filmed his own murder. But this is Mexico, where justice is spelled impunity — and Will’s apparent killers continue to ride the streets of Oaxaca, free and, it seems, untouchable.
Curiously, this egregious murder of a US reporter in Mexico has drawn minimal response from US Ambassador Tony Garza, an old crony of President George W. Bush. Why this lack of interest? Can it be that Washington has another agenda that conflicts with justice for Will — the impending privatization of Mexican oil?
HEADING SOUTH
Will was once a fire-breathing urban legend on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Whether perched atop the Fifth Street squat where he had lived for years and waving his long arms like Big Bird as the wrecking ball swung in, or being dragged out of City Hall dressed as a sunflower while trying to rescue the neighborhood’s community gardens, this child of privilege from Chicago’s wealthy North Shore was a legitimate street hero in the years before the World Trade Center towers collapsed and the social-change movement in New York City went into deep freeze.
Will hosted an incendiary weekly show on the New York pirate station Steal This Radio and was an early part of Indymedia, the Web publishing experiment born during the "Battle of Seattle," the World Trade Organization protests that rocked that city in 1999.
With his long hair neatly tied back and parted down the middle, with his granny glasses and fringe beard, and with his fierce commitment to building community, Will seemed to have emerged whole from a more utopian time in America.
He was an independent journalist, one of the growing number of people, such as Josh Wolf in San Francisco, who use the Internet and their video cameras to track and report on social moments and injustice. He wore no credential from any major news organization. But using outlets like Indymedia, he — like Wolf, who spent seven months in prison to avoid giving the police a copy of his video outtakes — represented part of the future of journalism.
Will’s journey to the land where he would die began right after Sept. 11, 2001. Dyan Neary, then a neophyte journalist, met Will in a South Street skyscraper elevator coming down from the WBAI studios from which Amy Goodman broadcast soon after the terrorist attacks.
"We walked down the piles. They were still smoking," Neary remembered in a phone call from Humboldt County. "We were both really scared. We thought this was not going to be resolved soon. Maybe never. So we thought we should go to Latin America, where people were still fighting."
Will and Neary spent most of 2002 and 2003 roaming the bubbling social landscape of Latin America. In Fortaleza, Brazil, they confronted the director of the Inter-American Development Bank during riotous street protests. They journeyed to Bolivia too and interviewed Evo Morales, not yet the president. They traveled in the Chapare rainforest province with members of the coca growers’ federation. They hung out in Cochabamba with Oscar Olivera, the hero of the battle to keep Bechtel Corp. from taking over that city’s water system. Everywhere they went, they sought out pirate radio projects and offered their support.
In February 2005, Will was in Brazil, in the thick of social upheaval, filming the resistance of 12,000 squatters at a camp near the city of Goiânia in Pernambuco state, when the military police swept in, killing two and jailing hundreds. On his videos, you can hear the shots zinging all around him as he captured the carnage. Will was savagely beaten and held by the police. Only his US passport saved him.
Undaunted by his close call, Will picked up his camera and soldiered back through Peru and Bolivia, and when the money ran out, he flew back to New York to figure out how to raise enough for the next trip south. He was hooked. In early 2006, drawn like a moth to flame, he was back, tracking Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign through the Mayan villages on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
In the spring of 2006, Will was back in New York as he tracked the Other Campaign and the incipient rebellion in Oaxaca on the Internet from his room in Williamsburg. (The rent gougers had forced him out of the Lower East Side.) He was poised to jump south again, friends say, but was worried that he would just be one more white guy getting in the way.
In the end, the lure of the action in Oaxaca pulled him in. He bought a 30-day ticket, caught the airport shuttle from Brooklyn to John F. Kennedy International Airport, and flew south Sept. 29. His return was set for Oct. 28. He never made that flight.
THE COMMUNE OF OAXACA
A mountainous southern Mexican state traversed by seven serious sierras, Oaxaca is at the top of most of the nation’s poverty indicators — infant mortality, malnutrition, unemployment, and illiteracy. Human rights violations are rife. It’s also Mexico’s most indigenous state, with 17 distinct Indian cultures, each with a rich tradition of resistance to the dominant white and mestizo overclass. Oaxaca vibrates with class and race tensions that cyclically erupt into uprising and repression.
The Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI, ruled Mexico from 1928 to 2000, the longest-running political dynasty in the world. The corrupt organization was dethroned by the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and its picaresque presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, former president of Coca Cola México.
But in Oaxaca, the PRI never lost power. While voters were throwing off the PRI yoke all over the rest of the country, in Oaxaca one PRI governor had followed another for 75 years. The latest, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, a protégé of party strongman and future presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, won a fraud-marred election over a right-left coalition in 2004.
In the first 16 months of his regime, Ruiz proved spectacularly unresponsive to the demands of the popular movements for social justice. When, on May 15, 2006, National Teachers Day, a maverick, militant local of the National Education Workers Union known as Section 22 presented its contract demands, Ruiz turned a deaf ear. Then, on May 22, tens of thousands of teachers took the plaza and 52 surrounding blocks and set up a ragtag tent city. Each morning the maestros would march out of their camp and block highways and government buildings, which were soon smeared with anti-Ruiz slogans.
Ruiz retaliated before dawn June 14, sending 1,000 heavily armed police officers into the plaza to evict the teachers. Low-flying helicopters sprayed pepper gas on the throng below. Ruiz’s police took up positions in the colonial hotels that surround the plaza and tossed down concussion grenades from the balconies. Radio Plantón, the maestros’ pirate radio station, was demolished and the tent city set afire. A pall of black smoke hung over the city.
Four hours later a spontaneous outburst by Oaxaca’s very active community, combined with the force of the striking teachers and armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, overran the plaza and sent Ruiz’s cops packing. No uniformed officers would be seen on the streets of Oaxaca for many months. And on June 16, two days after the monumental battle, 200,000 Oaxacans marched through the city to repudiate the governor’s "hard hand." The megamarch was said to extend 10 kilometers.
John Gibler, who closely covered the Oaxaca uprising as a human-rights fellow for Global Exchange, wrote that the surge of the rebels June 14 soon transformed itself into a popular assembly. The Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly, or APPO, was formally constituted June 21. The APPO had no leaders but many spokespeople, and all decisions had to be made in assemblies.
A CITY PARALYZED
For the next weeks, the actions of the APPO and Section 22 paralyzed Oaxaca — but the rest of Mexico took little notice. Instead, the nation was hypnotized by the fraud-marred July 2 presidential election in which a right-wing PAN-ista, Felipe Calderón, had been awarded a narrow victory over leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of a coalition headed by the Party of the Democratic Revolution. López Obrador was quick to cry fraud, pulling millions into the streets in the most massive political demonstrations in Mexican history. Oaxaca still seemed like small potatoes.
But Oaxaca is an international tourist destination, and the APPO and Section 22 protests had closed down the tourist infrastructure, blocking the airport and forcing five-star hotels to shutter their doors. On July 17, Ruiz was forced to announce the cancellation of the Guelaguetza, an indigenous dance festival that has become Oaxaca’s premiere tourist attraction, after roaming bands of rebels destroyed the scenery and blockaded access to the city.
Ruiz began to fight back. By the first weeks of August, the governor launched what came to be known as the Caravan of Death — a train of 30 or 40 private and government vehicles rolling nightly, firing on the protesters. Ruiz’s gunmen were drawn from the ranks of the city police and the state ministerial police.
To keep the Caravan of Death from moving freely through Oaxaca, the APPO and the union threw up barricades; 1,000 were built in the working-class colonies throughout the city and its suburbs. The rebels piled up dead trees, old tires, and burned-out cars and buses to create the barricades, which soon took on a life of their own; murals were painted using the ashes of the bonfires that burned all night on the barriers. Indeed, the barricades gave the Oaxaca struggle the romantic aura of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 and attracted droves of dreadlocked anarchists to the city.
An uneasy lull in the action gripped Oaxaca on Oct. 1, when Will arrived at the bus terminal, then found himself a cheap room for the night. The break wouldn’t last long.
ON THE BARRICADES
Like most non-Mexicans who style themselves as independent reporters, Will had no Mexican media credential and therefore was in the country illegally, working on a tourist visa and susceptible to deportation. To have some credential other than his Indymedia press card to hang around his neck, he got himself accredited with Section 22 and wore the rebel ID assiduously.
On Oct. 14, APPO militant Alejandro García Hernández was cut down at a barricade near Símbolos Patrios, a downtown plaza. Will joined an angry procession to the Red Cross hospital where the dead man had been taken.
In the last dispatch he filed from Oaxaca, on Oct. 16, Will caught this very Mexican whiff of death: "Now [García Hernández lies] waiting for November when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song … one more death — one more martyr in a dirty war — one more time to cry and hurt — one more time to know power and its ugly head — one more bullet cracks the night."
The dynamic in Oaxaca had gotten "sketchy," Will wrote to Neary. Section 22 leader Enrique Rueda Pacheco had cut a deal with the outgoing Fox government and forced a back-to-work vote Oct. 21 that narrowly carried amid charges of sellout and payoffs. If the teachers went back to work, the APPO would be alone on the barricades and even more vulnerable to Ruiz’s gunmen. But backing down was not in the assembly’s dictionary, and the APPO voted to ratchet up the lucha (struggle) and make Oaxaca really ungovernable.
Mobile brigades were formed — young toughs armed with lead pipes and nail-studded boards who hijacked buses still running in the city, forced the passengers off, and rode around looking for action. Later the buses would be set afire. Charred hulks blossomed on the streets of the old colonial city. The barricades were reinforced to shut down the capital beginning Oct. 27.
The escalation proved to be a terrible miscalculation. In Mexico City the postelectoral turmoil had finally subsided, and PAN was ready to deal with the PRI; bailing out the governor of Oaxaca was the PRI’s price of admission.
It wasn’t a good time for inexperienced foreigners. Ruiz’s people were checking the guest lists at the hostels for "inconvenient" internationals. Immigration authorities threatened extranjeros with deportation if they joined the protests. The local US consul, Mark Leyes, warned Americans that he would not be able to help them if they got caught up in the maelstrom.
Adding to this malevolent ambiance, a new pirate station popped up Oct. 26. Radio Ciudadana (Citizens’ radio) announced it was broadcasting "to bring peace to Oaxaca" and to celebrate the honor of "our macho, very macho governor." The announcers seemed to have Mexico City accents. Wherever they had been sent from, they let loose with a torrent of vitriolic shit — stuff like "We have to kill the mugrosos [dirty ones] on the barricades." The extranjeros, the radio said, were stirring up all the trouble: "They pretend to be journalists, but they have come to teach terrorism classes."
More frightening was this admonition: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" — "If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!"
This poison spewed out of local radios all day Oct. 26 and 27, but whether Will heard the warnings — and if he did, whether knew what they meant — is unclear. He didn’t speak much Spanish.
SHOT IN THE CHEST
On Oct. 27, Will went out to do interviews on the barricade at Santa María Coyotepec, about 20 kilometers from the city. The three barricades at Coyotepec, Cal y Canto, and La Experimental were crucial to closing down Oaxaca the next day. The broad Railroad Avenue where the barricade was stacked was empty. Nothing was moving. Will walked on to the next barricade at La Experimental to check out the action.
Soon after the Indymedia reporter left, all hell broke loose at Cal y Canto. A mob of about 150 Ruiz supporters stormed down Railroad Avenue, led by what witnesses thought was a Chevy Blazer. The vehicle was moving very fast. "We thought it would try and crash through the barricade," Miguel Cruz, an activist and witness, recalled. But the SUV stopped short, and several men jumped out with guns blazing. The APPO people hunkered down behind the makeshift barrier and moved the women and kids who were with them into a nearby house. Then they went on the counterattack with Molotov cocktails, homemade bazookas that fired bottle rockets, and slingshots. Most of the mob had melted away, and with the gunmen retreating, the rebels torched their vehicle.
Will heard about the gunfire and hurried back to Cal y Canto with a handful of other reporters. They arrived a little after 3 p.m.
Will climbed under a parked trailer to film the shooters. He focused on a man in a white shirt. When an APPO activist (who is not seen on the videotape) came running by, Will indicated the shooter — "Camisa blanca." While all this was going on, the camera captured a bicyclist peddling dreamily through the intersection. Soon after, a large dump truck appeared on the scene, and the group on the barricade used it as a mobile shield as they chased the gunmen down the avenue.
Suddenly, the pistoleros veered down a narrow side street, Benito Juárez, and took refuge in a windowless, one-story building on the second block. The only access to the building was through a large metal garage door, and the reporters followed the APPO militants, many of whom were masked, as they tried to force their way in. Will stood to one side of the door for a minute, poised for the money shot. Then the compas tried unsuccessfully to bust down the big door by ramming the dump truck into it.
In the midst of this frenzy, five men in civilian dress — two in red shirts (the governor’s color) and the others in white — appeared at the head of Benito Juárez, about 30 meters away, and began shooting at the rebels.
Two of the gunmen were later identified by Mexican news media as Pedro Carmona, a cop and local PRI political fixer, and police commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello. One of those in the white shirts, crouched behind Carmona, was Abel Santiago Zárate, a.k.a. El Chino. Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were reported to be the personal bodyguards of municipal president Manuel Martínez Feria of the PRI. The other two would later be fingered as Juan Carlos Soriano, a.k.a. El Chapulín (the grasshopper), and Juan Sumano, both Santa Lucía del Camino police officers. All five are eminently identifiable in the film Will shot just moments before the bullets hit him.
When the shooting erupted, Will took cover on the opposite side of the narrow street from the rest of the media. He was crouched against a lime green wall when the first bullet came. On the video soundtrack, you can hear both the shot and Will’s cries of dismay as it tore through his Indymedia T-shirt and smashed into his heart. A second shot caught him in the right side and destroyed his innards. There was little blood spilled, the first slug having stopped his heart.
In footage that witness Gustavo Vilchis and others filmed, the entrance wound of the first shot looks like a deep bruise. The second shot was not recorded on the soundtrack and may have been fired simultaneously with the first.
Others were shot in the pandemonium. Oswaldo Ramírez, filming for the daily Milenio, was grazed. Lucio David Cruz, described as a bystander, was hit in the neck and died four months later.
As Will slid down the wall into a sitting position, Vilchis and activist Leonardo Ortiz ran to him. Will’s Section 22 credential had flown off, and no one there knew his name. With bullets whizzing by, the compas picked Will up and dragged him out of the line of fire and around the corner to Árboles Street, about 35 paces away. Along the way, his pants fell off.
"Ambulance! We need an ambulance! They’ve shot a journalist!" Vilchis, a tall young man with a face like an Italian comic actor’s, shouted desperately. Gualberto Francisco, another activist, had parked his vochito (Volkswagen Bug) on Árboles and pulled up alongside Will, who was laid out on the pavement in his black bikini underwear.
Ortiz and Vilchis loaded the dying Will into the back seat. They thought he was still breathing, and Vilchis applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. "You’re going to make it … you’re all right," they kept telling him. But Will’s eyes had already turned up — he was perdido (lost), as they say in Mexico.
The vochito ran out of gas, and while the frantic young men ferrying Will were stuck in the middle of the Cinco Señores crossroad, it began to rain hard. They tried to stop a taxi to take them to the Red Cross, but the driver supported the government and wanted to argue. Finally, they flagged down a pickup truck and laid Will out in the bed. He was dead when he arrived at the hospital, according to the report by the coroner, Dr. Luis Mendoza.
THE OUTRAGE BEGINS
Oct. 27 was the bloodiest day of the Oaxaca uprising. Four people were killed besides Will: Emilio Alonso Fabián, Esteban Ruiz, Esteban López Zurita, and Audacia Olivera Díaz.
Unlike their murders, Will’s death triggered international outrage. Because he was so connected — and because much of the episode was recorded on film —the shot of the mortally wounded Indymedia reporter lying in the middle of a Oaxaca street went worldwide on the Web in a matter of minutes.
There were instant vigils on both coasts of the United States. On Oct. 30, 11 of Will’s friends were busted trying to lock down at the Mexican consulate off Manhattan’s Park Avenue, where graffiti still read "Avenge Brad!" in December. Anarchists splattered the San Francisco consulate with red paint. Subcomandante Marcos sent his condolences and called for international protests. Goodman did an hour-long memorial.
On March 16, 2007, at its midyear meeting in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, the Inter-American Press Association, an organization devoted to freedom of speech and the press in the Americas, passed a resolution calling for action on the Will case.
"The investigation into the killing has been plagued by irregularities and inconsistencies, and no arrests have been made," the group said in a statement. IAPA called for the federal attorney general to take over the investigation, "in view of the lack of confidence in state authorities and the lack of progress in the case, so that it may apprehend the culprits, who, according to one theory of the investigation, may be indirectly linked to state authorities."
The official reaction to Will’s death was more cautious. "It is unfortunate when peaceful demonstrations get out of hand and result in violence," a US spokesperson told the media, seeming to blame the APPO for Will’s killing. After once again warning Americans that they traveled to Oaxaca "at their own risk," Ambassador Garza commented on the "senseless death of Brad Will" and how it "underscores the need for a return to the rule of law and order."
"For months," he said, "violence and disorder in Oaxaca have worsened. Teachers, students, and other groups have been involved in increasingly violent demonstrations."
Garza’s statement sent Fox the signal he had been waiting for. Now that a gringo had been killed, it was time to act. The next morning, Oct. 28, 4,500 officers from the Federal Preventative Police, an elite force drawn from the military, were sent into Oaxaca — not to return the state to a place where human rights, dignity, and a free media are respected but to break the back of the people’s rebellion and keep Ruiz in power.
On Oct. 29 the troops pushed their way into the plaza despite massive but passive resistance by activists, tore down the barricades, and drove the commune of Oaxaca back into the shadows.
In Mexico the dead are buried quickly. After the obligatory autopsy, Brad’s body was crated up for shipment to his parents, who now live south of Milwaukee. After a private viewing, the family had him cremated.
SHAM ACCOUNTABILITY
Killing a gringo reporter in plain view of the cameras (one of which was his own) requires a little sham accountability. On Oct. 29 the state prosecutor, Lizbeth Caña Cadeza, announced that arrest warrants were being sworn out for Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello, two of the five cops caught on film gunning Will down, and they were subsequently taken into custody.
The scam lost currency two weeks later when, on Nov. 15, Caña Cadeza dropped a bombshell at an evening news conference: the cops hadn’t killed Will, she said; he was shot by the rebels.
Will’s death, she insisted, had been "a deceitful confabulation to internationalize the conflict" and was, in fact, "the product of a concerted premeditated action." The mortal shot had been fired from less than two and a half meters away, Caña Cadeza said — although there is nothing in the coroner’s report to indicate this. The real killers, she said, were "the same group [Will] was accompanying."
In the state prosecutor’s scenario, the order of the shots was reversed: first Will had been shot in the side on the street, then rematado (finished off) with a slug to the heart on the way to the hospital in Francisco’s vochito.
The prosecutor’s plot was immediately challenged by the APPO. "The killers are those who are shown in the film," Florentino López, the assembly’s main spokesperson, asserted at a meeting that night.
And in fact our detailed investigation shows that there is very little evidence to support Caña Cadeza’s theory. Photos from the scene, some published in the Mexican media, show Will’s body with a bloody hole in his chest on the street near where he fell — indicating that his fatal heart wound occurred well before he was dragged into the car where he was supposedly shot.
There’s another problem with the prosecutor’s suggestion: nobody on the scene saw any APPO members, or anyone except the authorities, carrying guns. This reporter has talked to numerous eyewitnesses, and all told the same tale: the rebels at the barricade that day had no firearms with which they could have shot Will.
Miguel Cruz, who spent much of Oct. 27 with Will, first at the Council of Indigenous People of Oaxaca, of which he is a member, and then on the barricade at Cal y Canto and on Juárez Street, is a soft-spoken young Zapotec Indian, but he pounded vehemently on the kitchen table when he addressed Caña Cadeza’s allegations.
"The compañeros had no guns. What gun is she talking about? They had slingshots and Molotovs but no guns. The PRI-istas and the cops had their .38s, and they were shooting at us," he said. "We were trying to save Brad Will’s life, not to kill him."
And if Caña Cadeza had any proof of her allegations, she likely would have filed charges. But none of the protesters or Will’s companions has been formally charged with the killing. Prosecutors have never publicly presented the alleged murder weapon.
But by the time Caña Cadeza told her story, of course, the only way to determine for sure the order of the bullets and the distance from which they had been fired would have been to exhume Will’s body. And there was no body; he had been cremated the week before.
On Nov. 28, Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were released from custody by Judge Victoriano Barroso because of "insufficient evidence," with the stipulation that they could not be rearrested without the presentation of new evidence.
Caña Cadeza, who is now running as a PRI candidate for the state legislature, collaborated closely on the case with Oaxaca secretary of citizen protection Lino Celaya. Both reported to Ruiz’s secretary of government, Heliodoro Díaz, who in turn reported directly to the governor. There seems little doubt that the prosecutor’s accusations of murder against Will’s comrades — and the determination of innocence for the apparent killers — came straight from the top.
ON THE EVIDENCE TRAIL
Dr. Mendoza was occupied when I stopped by the Oaxaca city morgue to ask for a copy of the autopsy report on which the state has based its allegations.
"Will died eight months ago," Mendoza complained testily. "Do you know how many others have died since? How many autopsies I’ve performed?" He gestured to a morgue room where cadavers were piled up.
The coroner was scrunched over his desk, filling out the paperwork for one of the dead. He didn’t have any time to look for the autopsy report. I was not the first reporter to ask him about the document. "What paper are you from anyway?" he asked suspiciously, and when I showed him my media card, he told me that it didn’t sound like a real newspaper to him. "I know what I’m doing. I worked as a coroner in your country," he snapped defensively and waved me out of the office.
But Mendoza might not be quite as cocksure as he sounded. A senior agent for the US government in Oaxaca, who asked not to be named in this article, told me later that Mendoza confided to him that he was no ballistics expert, nor could he determine from how far away the bullets were fired.
I walked into the police commissary under the first-floor stairs of the Santa Lucía del Camino Municipal Palace. The small room was crowded with cops and cigarette smoke. Three of the officers were in full battle gear, and the rest were plainclothes. I had been warned not to ask for Carmona, the most prominent red shirt on Will’s film. Carmona is described as a prepotente — i.e., a thug with an attitude who is always packing.
Instead, I asked the desk clerk if I could get a few minutes with Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello. For all I knew, the two were sitting in the room behind me. The desk clerk studied my card. "Qué lástima!" he exclaimed — what a shame. Santiago Zárate had just left and wouldn’t be back until after six. Aguilar Coello was off that day. When I called back after six, Santiago Zárate was still not available. Nor were he and Aguilar Coello ever available the dozen or so times I called back.
This sort of stonewalling is not terribly unusual for Mexico, where killer cops often sell their services to local caciques (political bosses) and go back to work as if nothing had happened. Those who direct this sort of mayhem from their desks in the statehouses and municipal palaces — the "intellectual assassins," as they are called — are never held accountable for their crimes.
A VISIT FROM HOME
In March, Brad’s parents, Kathy and Howard Will, and his older brother and sister paid a sad, inconclusive visit to Oaxaca. They had hired Miguel Ángel de los Santos Cruz, a crackerjack human rights lawyer who has often defended Zapatista communities in Chiapas. Gibler, the Global Exchange human-rights fellow, was the translator.
The Wills, upper-middle-class Americans, had little experience with the kind of evil that lurks inside the Mexican justice system; the trip was a traumatic, eye-opening experience.
The federal Attorney General’s Office had taken over the case from the state in December, but rather than investigating police complicity and culpability, it was pursuing Caña Cadeza’s dubious allegation blaming Will’s companions for his killing.
Gustavo Vilchis, Gualberto Francisco, Leonardo Ortiz, and Miguel Cruz were summoned to give testimony, with the Wills in attendance. Testifying was a risky venture, as the witnesses could have been charged with the murder at any moment, but out of respect for the family, the compas agreed to tell their story to the federal investigators. During the hearing they were repeatedly questioned about and asked to identify not the cops who appear on Will’s film but their own compañeros, some masked, who appeared on tape shot by Televisa, the Mexican TV giant. They refused.
When Los Santos accompanied the Wills to a meeting with Caña Cadeza, she touted her investigation and promised them a copy of its results. But she refused to allow the family to view Will’s Indymedia T-shirt and the two bullets taken from his body. They were, she explained, under the control of Barroso — the judge who had cut loose the cops.
THE POLITICS OF OIL
There are larger geopolitics at work here.
The US Department of State has a certain conflict of interest in trying to push first-year Mexican president Calderón to collar Will’s killers. The crackdown in Oaxaca was all about a political deal between Calderón’s PAN and Ruiz’s PRI: if PAN saved the governor’s ass, the PRI would support the president’s legislative package.
Indeed, the PRI’s 100 votes in the lower house of the Mexican Congress guarantee Calderón the two-thirds majority he needs to alter the constitution and effect the change that’s at the top of his legislative agenda — opening up Petróleos Mexicanos, or PEMEX, the nationalized petroleum corporation and a symbol of Mexico’s national revolution, to private investment, a gambit that requires a constitutional amendment.
Since then-president Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated Mexico’s petroleum industry from Anglo and American owners and nationalized it in 1938, the United States has been trying to take it back. "Transnational pressure to reprivatize PEMEX has been brutal," observed John Saxe Fernandez, a professor of strategic resource studies at Mexico’s autonomous university, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
During the run-up to the hotly contested 2006 presidential elections, candidates Calderón and López Obrador debated the privatization of Mexico’s national oil corporation before the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City; former US ambassador Jeffrey Davidow moderated the debate. When the leftist López Obrador insisted that he would never privatize what belonged to all Mexicans, the business leaders stared in stony silence. The conservative Calderón’s pledge to open PEMEX to private investment drew wild applause. Calderón was, of course, Washington’s horse in the fraud-marred election.
In order to accommodate Washington, Calderón needs a two-thirds majority in the congress — and the PRI’s votes in the lower house are crucial to guaranteeing passage of a constitutional amendment. "Without the PRI’s votes, PEMEX will not be privatized. That is why Calderón has granted Ruiz impunity," Saxe Fernandez concluded.
Washington is eager to see PEMEX privatized, which would create an opportunity for Exxon Mobil Corp. and Halliburton (now PEMEX’s largest subcontractor) to walk off with a big chunk of the world’s eighth-largest oil company. Pushing Calderón too hard to do justice for Will could disaffect the PRI and put a kibosh on the deal.
It is not easy to imagine Brad Will as a pawn in anyone’s power game, but as the months tick by and his killing and killers sink into the morass of memory, that is exactly what he is becoming. 2
John Ross is the Guardian‘s Mexico City correspondent. This story was comissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and is running in about 20 alternative papers this week.
Perhaps the best thing my parents ever did for me was to raise me as a Persian in America. I hated this at the time, not understanding why I needed to learn how to perform Persian dances, eat Persian food, or speak Farsi if we weren’t actually in Iran. I now realize I was lucky not only to find a cultural identity but also to experience living in two cultures — and with two languages — at once.
Not all children have a built-in culture base at home, though. But they can have the next best thing if they’re enrolled in language immersion programs, particularly if they start early.
"Language is a natural phenomenon within us, and the earlier we open it, the better," says David Fierberg, the events and communications manager of the French American International School. "It’s an important tool in a child’s development and opens up new pathways of thought, creating a stronger cultural awareness."
That’s why schools around the Bay Area are increasingly embracing this method of schooling. Some are already established in the city, such as the FAIS, which was founded in 1962. Others are just getting started, such as Starr King Elementary School, where a Mandarin immersion program for kindergarten students just finished its first year.
And such programs are available at all levels. The Scandinavian School, for example, is a preschool that uses the educational techniques of its eponymous region, while the FAIS has extensive prekindergarten–to–eighth grade and high school programs. In most cases the experience isn’t just about teaching a particular language or culture but also about presenting a different kind of education.
PARLEZ-VOUS ALGEBRA?
At the FAIS the demand for a rigorous education starts young, and admission is competitive. Those accepted are sent straight on the full-immersion pathway, with a curriculum developed by the French Ministry of Education. Grades K to three are taught 80 percent in French and 20 percent in English, while third grade through middle school is split 50-50. From then on French is a large part of the high school student’s education, with certain classes taught only in French or only in English.
"There is sort of a natural flow," Fierberg says. "The students learn both French and English history and culture, government. Drama is taught in French, as is sports, while music classes are held in English. And French and English math is taught."
French and English math? But isn’t math a universal language?
Yes, Fierberg says. But the methodologies are different. In France, math is more process oriented, focusing on formulas and word problems. American math is more answer oriented. In other subjects the FAIS places a French-method emphasis on oral presentation, memorization of poetry, and dictées, wherein teachers read a paragraph and students write what they hear.
HÄR OCH NÅ
Though the Scandinavian School only teaches preschool students, its educational methods are still clearly different from American — and French — traditions. In fact, director and teacher Mimmi Skoglund finds the Scandinavian method often challenges the expectations of her students’ American parents, who ask questions like "Why doesn’t my child come home with things done at school every day?"
"We try to clarify that it is not the product that is important, it’s the process," Skoglund explains. "That, I think, is very Scandinavian. I have never had that question in Sweden. Another question that always comes up is discipline. [We] try to solve problems, figure out what happened, and come up with a solution — and most of the time, the children are involved. Never do we use time-outs."
Another big difference, Skoglund says, is the emphasis Americans place on preparing kids for the next step in life, whereas Scandinavian education focuses on the here and now.
"It is important to just be and enjoy whatever you have. We try to create a place where children can be children," she says. "We believe we are academic, but through play and the children’s own interests."
AND THEN?
The practical implications of this type of schooling are varied, but most people agree that a bilingual education is an asset in the global economy. Furthermore, Bay Area immersion programs seek not to divide children from their American culture but to broaden their understanding of it.
"FAIS adheres to an educational methodology that has been around since the mid-1800s," Fierberg says. "Students are receiving a broad range of education that isn’t held hostage to politics and societal conventions. But it is held in the US, so it does incorporate what is going on around the kids into the English curriculum so that they have an idea of the changes in society."
It’s also important to note that the FAIS is accredited by the California Association of Independent Schools, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and the French Ministry of Education, allowing students to transition uninterrupted to other schools in the United States and in France.
But one of the greatest goals of the program is to help participants enhance a sense of self as they learn about fellow students, their teachers, and the families they meet during homestays in Normandy in their fifth-grade year.
While all this makes immersion education sound idyllic, it can also be overwhelming for young students. FAIS alumni profiles are open, candid, and complex, revealing such a program’s potential drawbacks. Some drawbacks are merely annoying, as shown in 1974 FAIS alumna Karen Heisler’s memory of adults incessantly asking her to "say something in French" when she was too shy even to say something in English. Others are more serious.
"I remember the solitary struggle with a curriculum that none of my ‘at home’ friends shared and the lonely uniqueness of going to a school nobody had heard of," she says.
Francis Tapon, a 1988 alumnus, agrees, adding that it was often hard to relate to other people. "We were in a cocoon, sheltered from the real world, where people are proud if they can say, ‘Una cerveza, por favor.’<\!q>"
And for many, the value of bilingual education didn’t sink in until much later, just one of the trade-offs parents and students are forced to make. The others? It can be frustrating for students new to a language to be in a class with those who are already fluent. Parents often have the extra job of carrying on language immersion through home activities. And teachers say building interest in a culture completely outside themselves is difficult with children, who are the center of their own worlds. But inherent in a commitment to an immersion program is the expectation of roadblocks and challenges.
And Fierberg says it’s worth the result, the creation of well-rounded adults who understand their roles in a changing world, whether they use French in an international career or simply to order a bottle of wine at a restaurant. "We’d like for them to see difference as something that’s attractive," he says.*
ATSDR’s Region 9 office covers a lot of ground, including San Francisco’s Hunters Point Shipyard.
Susan Muza works at the Region 9 office of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. That’s the agency that agreed on July 17 to do a public health assessment of Lennar’s development at Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard where fear runs high that the community may have been exposed to toxic asbestos dust.
As it happens, ATSDR has experience with such assessments in California, thanks to Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado County, where naturally occurring asbestos was identified in surrounding rocks and where a vein of asbestos was disturbed during construction of a soccer field at the school.
Muza told me that at Oak Ridge High, ATSDR sampled and tested soil from baseball and soccer fields, parking lots, as well as dust collected from a school classroom that had potentially been affected by a leaf blower.
What ATSDR found, says Muza, was that “sports coaches, outdoor maintenance staff and student athletes had the potential to be exposed at levels higher than previously thought.”
In the case of Lennar’s Parcel A development, the classrooms and basketball courts of the Muhammed University of Islam sit on the other side of a chain link fence, where massive amounts of asbestos-laden rock were moved in the last year, but where air monitors weren’t operating for three months, and watering was inadequate for six months.
“At Oak Ridge High, we recommended that people try to limit any further exposure and that those most highly exposed inform their physicians that they had potentially been exposed to asbestos, that they should monitor for signs of disease, related to that exposure, and that they should participate in very good preventative care, such as flu shots, to make sure their respiratory health stays healthy,” Muza said.
ATSDR is also monitoring cancer registers in the EL Dorado area.
As Muza notes, “one big problem with asbestos is it has a long lag time. The period between exposure happening and disease manifesting can be 10-40 years.”
Although the San Francisco Department of Public Health has claimed that workers were wearing CAL OSHA authorized asbestos monitors at the Hunters Point shipyard site and that CAL OSHA did not report any exposure exceedances, Muza told me that ATSDR does not support using worker asbestos limits in evaluating community members’ exposures, other than as a reference point.
As ATSDR’s website explains, “worker limits are based on risk levels that would be considered unacceptable in nonworker populations.”
The reasoning behind disqualifying worker limits as a valid assessment tool is that community members may be children who are lower to ground, more active and have higher metabolisms. Or they may be seniors, or residents who live near the site, 24/7.
“No exposure to asbestos is good,” says Muza. “We are all exposed to it, thanks to brake linings, amongst other things, but we want to keep our exposure as minimal as we can.”
In the case of Oak Ridge High, ATSDR recommended some removal activities, because material from the vein of asbestos that got broken when the soccer field was built, got spread around the school.
“And we recommended paving and landscaping activities to reduce people’s ability to being exposed,” adds Muza, noting that ATSDR did not recommend that Oak Ridge High be closed or relocated.
In San Francisco, ATSDR plans to evaluate the asbestos dust mitigation plan that Lennar agreed to when it got the green light to begin development on Parcel A in 2005. ATSDR will also evaluate how Lennar actually implemented that plan, along with results from air monitors, and any other data that they can ascertain will be helpful.
“We also plan to gather community concerns, be very transparent and talk to everyone,” says Muza who has sent out a letter to stakeholders, including the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Bayview Hunters Point Project Area Committee, the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee, The San Francisco Chapter of the NAACP, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, and, of course, the Muhammed University of Islam.
Says Muza, “We will summarize the concerns we hear, sort out what we can address from what we can’t and come to the community with a plan.”
EDITORIAL There is much to like and some things not to like in Sup. Aaron Peskin’s Muni reform measure, but the most important thing the measure does is demonstrate that Muni won’t get better unless the city also works on controlling car traffic in congested areas. It’s a critical policy issue that’s going to be the subject of a heated fall ballot campaign — and so far Mayor Gavin Newsom is planted squarely on the wrong side.
Nobody can dispute the motivation behind Peskin’s charter amendment: Muni is a train wreck right now, with service far below acceptable levels. Something has to change, and the way he’s proposed it, the system would get an additional $26 million in guaranteed city money, and Muni management would have some expanded ability to set performance standards and require the staff to meet them.
We would, of course, prefer that the dedicated Muni money come from some new revenue stream, not from the existing General Fund. And we’ve always believed that the supervisors and the mayor should have to sign off specifically on any Muni fare hike. But overall, a lot of what Peskin is proposing makes sense — and now that he has worked out the problems that labor initially had with the measure, it has a good chance of winning this fall.
The mayor thought so too and had endorsed the proposal — until Peskin took the critical step of adding in restrictions on downtown parking. That would undermine the plans of big developers and their allies, who want the right to add a lot more parking spaces and curb openings for their luxury condo projects downtown.
The developers, with the help of Gap founder and power broker Don Fisher, are trying to get their own ballot measure passed, one that would greatly expand downtown parking. That’s exactly the wrong direction in which San Francisco should move.
In fact, what the city needs is a policy directive aimed at reducing the number of cars downtown and keeping the total number in the city from rising. Current planning documents and projections are all based on the assumption that more cars will pour into the city over the next 10 years, and that may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it doesn’t need to be.
San Francisco is one of the most environmentally aware cities in the world. And as more residential development comes in downtown, there’s absolutely no reason why this city can’t stick to its transit-first policy and set a goal of reducing congestion in the urban core.
Others cities are doing it. London has had tremendous success with restrictions on driving in its central City (and a stiff price tag for doing it). New York is looking seriously at congestion pricing, and San Francisco ought to be pursuing Sup. Jake McGoldrick’s idea of bringing the concept here.
And the cold, hard fact is that fewer parking spaces means fewer cars. If the value of downtown high-rise condos is that they will encourage people to walk or take transit to work, why fill the basements with parking garages?
If San Franciscans want Muni buses to be able to negotiate rapidly and efficiently through the downtown area, why shouldn’t the city do everything possible to clear some of the car traffic out of the way?
Newsom was willing to support the Muni measure — and knew in advance, Peskin tells us, that parking limits were going to be part of it — but the minute his downtown backers started to yelp, he backed away. Now the mayor is in the position of opposing Muni reform — in the name of helping developers build more parking in a city that already has too many cars. That’s a terrible place to be for a mayor who tries to portray himself as an environmentalist. *
A year has passed since Lennar Corp. officials admitted that subcontractor CH2M Hill failed to install batteries in dust-monitoring equipment at Parcel A, a construction site in Hunters Point Shipyard where an asbestos-laden hilltop was graded to build 1,600 condominiums (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07).
The admission sparked a steadily growing political firestorm in Bayview–Hunters Point, further fueled by evidence that Gordon Ball, another Lennar subcontractor, for six months failed to adequately water the site to control dust and by a racially charged lawsuit in which three African American employees of Lennar allege they were subjected to discrimination and retaliation after they refused to remain silent about the dust issue. The lawsuit, set for a case management hearing Aug. 17, also claims that Ball committed fraud involving the Redevelopment Agency’s minority-hiring requirements.
Bayview–Hunters Point residents angry about the situation have found an ally in Sup. Chris Daly, who has called for a halt to construction at the site until an independent health assessment is conducted to the satisfaction of the community, including the Muhammad University of Islam School, which is adjacent to the Parcel A site and has been exposed to dust. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to consider Daly’s resolution Jul. 31, after the Guardian‘s press time.
"This issue is of such a high level of importance," Daly told us. "There’s now a mandate for progressives in San Francisco to talk about environmental justice and to take action."
Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes the shipyard, told us that she understands the concerns of Daly and the community. "But when you get down it … the dust is inconvenient, but it is not harmful in the long term," she said.
Maxwell believes the city’s Department of Public Health should have done more outreach and updates, "but it has brought the situation under control." That sentiment was echoed by the city’s environmental health director, Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, who told us, "This is the first time we have implemented dust control, and this is an industry that had never been regulated. And in the end, things got better. We did our job in pushing a regulated community that grudgingly complied with our regulations."
In June, after residents complained that the dust was causing nosebleeds, headaches, and asthma, the DPH released a fact sheet that stated, "You may have heard there are reasons to worry about your health because of the construction dust generated by the redevelopment of Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard. That is not true."
A July 5 informational DPH memo claims that when workers tried to do dust training and outreach at the end of June, their efforts "were significantly hindered by representatives of the Muhammad University of Islam," who allegedly disrupted training sessions, followed DPH workers, and told residents not to listen to the DPH workers.
On July 9, DPH director Mitch Katz testified at a hearing of the supervisors’ Land Use Committee that the city had imposed the highest standards possible to control dust. Katz also claimed that exposure to the dust was not toxic and that there is no proof that health problems were caused by the dust.
But at the same hearing, Nation of Islam minister Christopher Muhammad demanded testing "by people the community can trust," and he accused the city of "environmental racism." Noting that asbestos-related diseases often don’t manifest themselves for at least 20 years, Muhammad claimed, "The problem that we’re seeing in Bayview–Hunters Point is dust related."
After the DPH abandoned plans to do door-to-door outreach in favor of a series of health fairs, a coalition of activists calling itself POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), some wearing masks and hazmat suits, closed down a July 17 homeownership seminar at Lennar’s shipyard trailer.
"Some folks did a picket outside, while inside, folks who own homes or live in public housing in the area were asking a lot of questions," POWER’s Alicia Schwartz told us. "We are for development that prioritizes the needs of low-income communities of color who have long been absent from the decision-making process, not development that puts the health and safety of families and the elderly at risk."
Two days later Marcia Rosen resigned as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. SFRA board member London Breed told us that the resignation was "a long time coming" and said she wished Rosen had taken a stronger stand on Lennar and Ball in the winter of 2006.
Breed says the agency "will always be a bad word to African Americans because of what happened in the Western Addition…. But we have a great opportunity in Bayview–Hunters Point to make it into something wonderful for the community."
Maxwell, whose grandson attended the Muhammad school’s Third Street campus, wonders why the minister refuses to move his students back to Third Street. "Lennar understands that this has become a PR nightmare and they are going to have to get contractors who are supportive of and understand the rules and regulations," said Maxwell, who is about to introduce legislation that she hopes will better control construction dust citywide.
Meanwhile, Dr. Arelious Walker of the True Hope Church of God in Christ told us that he and a group of like-minded pastors have formed the African American Revitalization Consortium, "a highly vocal and visible group in strong opposition to the shutting down of the shipyard without scientific proof."
"We support 100 percent the notion that the dust from Parcel A does not cause any long-term health risks. The project must continue because of its economic impacts. One little group does not speak for us all," said Walker, who met with Mayor Gavin Newsom, Maxwell, and Katz on July 23.
Acknowledging that the outcry over Parcel A has raised awareness of the dust issue, Walker said, "For years in the urban community, the environment was not the issue, but now we’ve woken up." Walker and his fellow ministers rallied about 200 people at City Hall on July 24 to express support for Lennar’s development and confidence in city officials.
Yet Daly said that faith may be misplaced: "It’s going to be a struggle to deal with the construction-related impacts of Lennar’s development at the shipyard, but the issue is much bigger, and it points to the need for an alliance between progressives, the African American community, and the southeast neighborhoods." *
EDITORIAL We’ve been concerned for decades about development along San Francisco’s waterfront, and with good reason: the Port of San Francisco has done a generally miserable job of managing one of the city’s most significant resources. In the 1960s and 1970s, the port effectively gave up on the shipping industry, losing container freight (and plenty of good blue-collar jobs) to Oakland. Development proposals for port property, particularly under then-mayor Willie Brown’s administration, were largely horrible.
And now the port wants the state to turn over development rights for some key seawall-protected properties, which could be turned into very-high-end housing with ground-floor retail. The port needs the money for historic preservation and is promising to build some waterfront parks, which is all well and good. But when it comes to building expensive housing along the waterfront, we’re dubious right off the bat — and even more dubious now that Port Director Monique Moyer is howling about the prospect of a 40-foot height limit.
Sen. Carole Migden has introduced legislation, Senate Bill 815, that would authorize the port to lease out for development lots that are now part of a state trust. But at the request of neighborhood groups, she wants height limits included in the deal as part of state law.
The port argues that 40 feet is too low for, say, three stories of housing above a storefront. Besides, port staffers say, zoning issues should be a local decision, and the state should hand over the lots and let the city decide on height, bulk, density, and appropriate use. In principle, we’d tend to agree with that — but the City Planning Department today is a disaster, with every key decision driven by developers, and the last thing this city needs is a string of high-rise condos on the waterfront.
If the port’s land is going to be developed, it has to be done with tremendous sensitivity, clear public benefits — and inflexible, mandated height limits. And if the money is going to go to parks, we’d like to see specifics, in advance: which projects will pay for which parks, and where — and what guarantees do we have that they’ll ever be completed?
This is the kind of decision that will affect the city for a century or more. Migden’s right: we should take it slowly and carefully. *
With the furor over her erratic driving incident still lingering and a primary challenge from Assemblymember Mark Leno starting to get nasty, state senator Carole Migden is now wading into another potentially pungent political pool.
This time around, the battle involves the state’s laws governing coastal land use, the Port of San Francisco’s revenue needs, and the competing interests of folks who live along, work near, or simply like to relax and recreate along the city’s bayside waterfront.
Migden’s Senate Bill 815 would make three major changes to the ancient and arcane laws that govern the use of the state’s tidelands. It would allow the port to rent out 11 seawall-protected properties, currently used for surface parking lots, for development over 75 years, after which they would return to the public trust.
It would also permit the port to sell off "paper streets" — lots that serve as view corridors, public rights-of-way, and connections between the city and its waterfront, including portions of Texas, Custer, Ingalls, and Davidson streets developed with warehouses, as well as the recently closed Hunters Point Power Plant.
Last, Migden’s bill would allow the transfer of the 36-acre, federally owned Jobs Corps parcel on Treasure Island to local control as part of an exchange of public trust and nontrust lands on Treasure and Yerba Buena islands.
Port special project manager Brad Benson told the Guardian that the local agency worked with the California State Lands Commission for two years on ways to help increase the port’s revenue-generating capabilities, and this bill was the result.
"We cc’d the neighborhood organizations on the amendments that we sent to Migden’s office on June 12, and we invited further discussion," Benson said of the proposal, which is intended to help cover the port’s estimated $1.4 billion cost for seismic retrofits and restorations, hazardous-material remediation, storm-water management, and improved waterfront access by relaxing the land-use restriction of the 1969 Burton Act.
The Burton Act gave the port control of San Francisco’s waterfront from Fisherman’s Wharf to Candlestick Point, including 39 historic finger piers between Fisherman’s Wharf and China Basin. But it also limited the port to leasing seawall lots for street purposes such as surface parking while giving it the financial responsibility of maintaining and restoring the historical waterfront.
Today just about everybody agrees that surface parking is a horrible use of the seawall lots — with the possible exception of the Giants, who want to retain 2,000 spaces on the 14-acre lot they lease next to Mission Creek. But in recent weeks disagreement has broken out over last-minute amendments that were added to Migden’s bill June 20 to impose height limits on four seawall lots in the Northeastern Waterfront Historic District and remove a fifth lot entirely.
Those amendments were added following input from neighborhood groups like the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association, and the Friends of the Golden Gate, a 1,400-member nonprofit whose stated goal is "to preserve open recreational space for the citizens of San Francisco."
In a June 20 letter to Migden, Telegraph Hill Dwellers president Vedica Puri argued for height limits on the basis of a "visual and historic connection between the waterfront and Telegraph Hill" created by "higher structures closer to the base of Telegraph Hill and lower buildings near the Embarcadero." Noting that three of the disputed lots are currently zoned for heights of 40 feet, with the fourth lot, closer to Telegraph Hill, zoned for 65 feet, Puri argued for respecting local height limits in place as of January.
Meanwhile, the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association, the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, and the Friends of the Golden Gate asked that lot 351, which abuts the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club, be excluded from the deal.
"There is an ongoing struggle in the Barbary Coast neighborhood over an outsize condominium project usually known as the 8 Washington Project," Jonathan Middlebrook of the association’s Waterfront Action Group warned.
Friends of the Golden Gate chair Lee Radner, in a June 29 letter to Loni Hancock, chair of the Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee, argued for keeping lot 351 under the public trust because it "abuts the open recreational space, along the Embarcadero, Washington, and Drumm streets."
"Lot 351, if removed from the public trust," Radner wrote, "will give a developer the option to build high-rise, exclusive, and costly condominiums that would spill over into the recreational space and change the open view corridors to Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower forever, limit the light and views of many neighbors, and impact the traffic on an already congested Embarcadero."
But two local planning and land-use groups argue that Migden’s amended legislation would wrest control of height restrictions from the local planning process and benefit a well-heeled few at the expense of everyone else.
Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, said he believes height limits and urban design should be decided at the local level. "The problem with stipuutf8g a 40-foot height limit is that you end up getting squashed retail space, creating a pokey, unpleasant atmosphere," said Radulovich, who’d rather see the lots taken out of the bill than included with those provisions. "To my mind the question is: how do builders create a great street? And what building controls help achieve that goal? We wanted to make these lots more walkable, bikeable, and accessible to contribute to the overall public good with the maximum opportunity for local control. The latest amendments tip the balance towards state interference, and that’s inappropriate."
Tim Colen of the Housing Action Coalition accuses the neighborhood associations of "not wanting any height increases or other uses to the extent that it might threaten their view." Colen said developer Simon Snellgrove of Pacific Waterfront Partners is interested in lot 351, which lies across from the Ferry Building, to create high-end condos, mixed-use residential units, and 34 below-market-rate units.
He acknowledges that the Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club would lose three tennis courts under the legislation. "But this is a chance for 34 families to get housing and be able to stay in San Francisco," Colen said. "The Golden Gate Tennis and Swim Club is a really sweet facility, but it ain’t public recreation. Migden’s bill benefits some very well-heeled people when the interests of many are at stake."
Migden’s bill, which cleared the Senate but must return for final approval because of the amendments, is set to work its way through the Assembly by August. Benson said continued negotiations would be a good thing. "We appreciate Senator Migden’s work, but we believe height limits are a locals-only matter to be decided by the Board of Supervisors and the mayor."
But the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association’s Diana Taylor said her group "spent hours getting the community informed, telling the port what we wanted, until eventually we came up with a bottom line, what our compromises were…. That’s where senator Carole Migden developed amendments, and this was the first time that we came to a coordinated agreement. But now we find out that the port isn’t happy with some of the amendments. What we’d like to see is a more clear-cut strategy to bring the port and the communities together. We’re adversaries right now, but we shouldn’t be."
With the port set to have a public discussion July 31 about lot 337 (the Giants’ parking lot next to Mission Creek), Jennifer Clary of San Francisco Tomorrow notes that Mission Creek is home to 60 species of birds. As she said, "Isn’t habitat preservation and restoration part of urban development? Is it really a choice between people and birds? Is that the decision?"<\!s>*
GREEN CITY Atop Bernal Heights, winds speed at 25 mph, enough to prematurely slam doors, disperse heat, and power Todd Pelman’s Roscoe Street house with 100 watts of electricity at any given moment.
The 34-year-old engineer has pioneered the city’s first permitted micro–wind project, a six-foot-tall cylindrical turbine that currently sits on his roof and sends juice into the energy grid, offsetting some of his dependence on Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Now his company, Blue Green Pacific, is working to put the turbines on the market in the next year.
"It’s aesthetically not going to be disruptive in an urban environment," Pelman told the Guardian, referring to the generator, which resembles the double helix of a DNA strand when it spins.
It is microprojects like this that could help support the Community Choice Aggregation program passed by the Board of Supervisors last month, which aims to have the city partner with its residents to generate a greener power portfolio over the next 10 years.
Bernal Heights Sup. Tom Ammiano, who codrafted a plan for CCA with Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, considers Pelman’s project a grassroots step away from PG&E, which he regards as a "wolf in sheep’s clothing."
"When people see how fruitful and utilitarian this is, we’ll wind up calling the shots," Ammiano told us. He amended the planning code for Bernal Heights to permit structures to reach more than 30 feet high, thus allowing the current and future use of wind turbines in his district.
Pelman’s turbine will generate between 300 and 600 kilowatt hours of energy per year, or about 10 percent of a typical home’s energy needs, he told us. His vertical-axis turbine is a natural propeller system that spins on its axis — a contrast from the windmill-style horizontal-axis turbines characteristic of rural areas. It’s made of steel, aluminum, and plastic and contains no sharp blades that might endanger birds.
Urban wind, though plentiful, has not been widely used, mostly due to aesthetics and the space constraints of turbines, according to Johanna Partin, the Renewable Energy Program manager of the San Francisco Department of the Environment.
"The micro– and small urban wind market is still in the early stages of development," Partin said, pointing out that Chicago, the notorious Windy City, only recently started a residential permitting process.
Pelman’s turbine became the first in the city to receive a residential permit for use last Oct. 5 after numerous bureaucratic back-and-forths with the Planning Department.
His rooftop turbine captures wind energy coming from the coast and going east and sends it to an inverter in his garage that converts it to usable energy, which then travels into an electrical panel.
"Think of the turbine as the heart of the system and the inverter as the brain of the system," Pelman said.
While Pelman’s turbine may catch people’s eyes, he claims it does not do the same to birds. "It coexists very peacefully with the pigeons and the hawks," he said, mentioning a couple of Bernal Heights’ bird species.
He is working with the Audubon Society to make sure he can live up to his assertion. Due to the turbine’s opaque appearance, no birds have attempted to fly through and meet their doom — a problem frequently noted with the large, horizontal-axis turbines at the Altamont Pass Wind Farm.
A one-turbine system will cost around $5,000, though Pelman estimates that rebates will reduce the price by $1,500. It’s an "emotional purchase," he said, that will at least partially satisfy a green conscience.
Chris Beaudoin, one of Pelman’s first customers, decided to make wind energy his green cause. His Castro home of 20 years — located on what he calls "consistently windy" Kite Hill — is one of the 10 sites where Blue Green Pacific will initiate beta testing in the next six to 12 months.
As a flight attendant whose job has opened his eyes to locations where governments are stepping up to the plate in renewable-resource use, Beaudoin realized that "we can either bitch about [the lack of renewable resources] or politically agitate for it."
Beaudoin takes the ominous signs of global warming as a reason to act fast in every plausible way that he can. As he told us, "I think the main motivation is that we have to be ready for what’s going on down the road." *
Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.
EDITORIAL Of all the cities in the United States, San Francisco ought to be most aware of the perils of privatization. Much of the city burned down in 1906 in part because the private Spring Valley Water Co. hadn’t kept up its lines and thus was unable to provide enough water for firefighting. A few years later, in one of the greatest privatization scandals in American history, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. stole what was supposed to be the city’s publicly owned electricity, costing the local coffers untold hundreds of millions over the past 80 years.
This is a city that votes 80 percent Democratic and has always opposed the Ronald Reagan–George H.W. Bush–George W. Bush agenda. A large part of the local economy depends on public employment (the city, the state, the federal government, and the University of California are by far the largest employers in town, dwarfing any of the biggest private-sector companies).
And yet Mayor Gavin Newsom, who likes to say he’s a progressive, is pushing an astonishing package of privatization measures that would shift public property, resources, and infrastructure into the hands of for-profit businesses. He’s talking about privatizing the golf courses, some city parks, and even Camp Mather. He’s promoting a tidal-energy deal that would give PG&E control of the power generated in a public waterway. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop the ongoing PG&E–Raker Act scandal. And he’s determined to hand over a key part of the city’s future infrastructure to Google and EarthLink (see Editor’s Notes, p. 1).
This nonsense has to stop.
It’s hard to fight privatization battle by battle. Every single effort is a tough campaign in itself; the companies that want to make money off San Francisco’s public assets typically have plenty of cash to throw around. They’re slick and sophisticated, hire good lobbyists, and generally get excellent press from the local dailies. And it works: even board president Aaron Peskin, who generally knows better, is now talking about accepting the private wi-fi deal.
So what this city needs is a unified, organized campaign against privatization.
When Reagan arrived in the White House in 1981, the single biggest item on the agenda of his political backers was an attack on the public sector. The way the right-wingers saw it, government took money from the rich and gave it to the less well-off. Government regulated business activity, costing major corporations a lot of money. Government — "the beast," they called it — had to be beaten back, demonized, and starved.
So the Reaganites used their top-rate public relations machine to make the public sector appear riddled with waste and fraud. They cut taxes, ran up record (for the time) deficits, and forced Congress to eliminate a lot of social programs. More and more of what the government once did was turned over to the private sector — the way the radical right liked it.
That political agenda still rules Washington, D.C., where even a fair amount of the war in Iraq has been privatized, turned over to contractors who are making huge profits while Iraqi and American kids die.
The attack on government has worked so well that even a very modest plan by Bill Clinton to create a national health care system was killed by the insurance industry.
But privatization doesn’t work. Private-sector companies and even nonprofits don’t have to comply with open-records laws and can spend money (including taxpayers’) with only limited accountability. Most private companies are about making money first and serving the public second; that means when private operators take over public services, the prices go up, worker pay goes down (and unions are often booted out), and the quality of the delivery tanks. Look at the real estate development nightmare that has become the privatized Presidio. Look at the disgrace and disaster that the privatized Edison School brought to the San Francisco Unified School District. Look at the glitzy café and the pricey parking lot that have replaced good animal care at the privatized San Francisco Zoo. Look at what has happened around the world when Bechtel Corp. has taken over public water systems — rates have gone up so high that some people can’t afford this basic life necessity.
Look what’s happened to the American health system. Look what’s happened in Iraq.
Government isn’t perfect, and the public sector has lot of management, efficiency, and accountability issues. But at least the public has some hope of correcting those problems. San Francisco ought to be a place where a major movement to take back the public sector is born and thrives.
Almost everyone in town ought to have an interest. Labor, obviously, opposes privatization. So should neighborhood advocates (who care about public parks and open space), environmentalists (because the entire notion of environmentalism depends on a healthy public sector), progressive community groups, and politicians. Even more conservative groups like the cops and firefighters ought to see the need to prevent their jobs from being outsourced to a private vendor.
A campaign against privatization could link wi-fi, PG&E, tidal power, and the golf courses. The campaign could force anyone running for office to address a no-privatization pledge. It could appear any time one of these rotten schemes pops up in town — and send a message that San Francisco doesn’t accept the economic agenda of the radical right.
I don’t think anyone except Gavin Newsom’s inner circle and the folks who run Google and EarthLink really likes the mayor’s wi-fi contract, but it now appears at least possible that the Board of Supervisors will approve some version of it.
Board president Aaron Peskin wants the service improved a bit and is demanding some written guarantees that it will actually work the way it’s supposed to. Some opponents of the deal are arguing that it ought to be treated as a franchise, not a simple contract, and they want more legal hurdles. The serious techies say it’s the wrong technology anyway and will be outmoded and worthless in just a few years.
But there’s something bigger going on here.
A high-speed broadband system for San Francisco isn’t a hot dog stand and boat-rental shop in Golden Gate Park. It isn’t a restaurant lease on port property. It isn’t the naming rights for Candlestick Park or a permit to operate a taxicab or deliver cable TV.
Those are contracts and franchises. This is a piece of municipal infrastructure; it’s more like the roads that cars and Muni buses use to carry people around town or the pipes that bring water to our houses or the public schools that educate our kids or the emergency communications system that takes the call when we dial 911.
This is part of the city’s future, part of its economic development, part of how its citizens will participate in the political debate, part of how we will all learn and think and talk to each other. This is the new public square, the new commons.
Why in the world would we want to give it to a private company?
I don’t care if EarthLink and Google are offering 300 kilobauds per second of download time or 500 or 1,000. I don’t care if they promise to give free laptops to anyone who can stand on their head and shout "search engine." I don’t care if they promise to paint every light pole in the city green. They are private outfits set up to make a profit for investors. They have no business owning what will soon be the city’s primary communication system.
San Francisco has kept private operators from controlling its drinking water. This water is considered a basic part of life, and it’s available at low cost: San Franciscans pay less than one one-thousandth the price of bottled water for the stuff that comes out of the tap, and it’s almost certainly better. Same with roads and bridges, police and fire protection, and basic education (although that’s still a struggle).
I don’t get why broadband is any different.
I don’t think this would ever have been an issue 50 years ago. The generation that survived the Depression (with massive public-sector investment and ownership) and World War II (with huge excess-profits taxes on big corporations) and built things like the interstate highway system and the University of California didn’t see government as evil and inherently dysfunctional. The public paid to invest in public services.
It was Ronald Reagan and his ilk who took a generation disillusioned by Vietnam and Watergate and turned it against the public sector (see "Needed: A Campaign Against Privatization," page 5). Now we’ve even got a privatized war (and look how well that’s going).
The supervisors should get beyond the wi-fi deal’s little details and think about what it really means. This is San Francisco. We know better.<\!s>*
David Duer is proud of the volunteer work he’s done with the West Contra Costa Unified School District. He graduated from the area’s school system, as did his kids.
So despite what was sure to be a burdensome responsibility with no pay, Duer, a development director for the UC Berkeley Library, accepted the chance to serve on a committee formed under a state mandate to monitor how the district spent $850 million in bond money authorized by voters in three elections since 2000.
"There are schools all over the district that have been renovated," Duer beams today.
The committee initially proposed meeting every quarter but soon realized that wouldn’t be nearly enough to do the job right and chose to meet monthly instead. Since 2003 it has received full-blown management audits of the school system’s performance every year, with biannual updates from independent professionals not beholden to district bureaucrats.
The story of San Francisco’s Community College District could not be more different.
The oversight committee that’s charged with monitoring $560 million in bond spending has never seen an expansive performance audit, just basic financial reports that show community college officials here seem to be obeying their most fundamental fiduciary duties. The panel meets three times a year for more than an hour and a half each time, and for three years it didn’t even report to the public on City College’s handling of the money, which it’s required to do annually by the state’s Education Code.
The community college committee is hardly made of Rotary volunteers and bored retirees: the list includes San Francisco treasurer José Cisneros and former San Francisco Chronicle publisher Steve Falk, now head of the local Chamber of Commerce.
But even members say the panel has fallen down on the job — and that City College officials are freely shifting around the taxpayers’ cash with little or no accountability.
The mostly decipherable performance reports that West Contra Costa citizens receive, though lengthy, track all of that district’s bond expenditures and give the area’s oversight committee of taxpayers a vivid portrait of how well the school system and its administrators are managing hundreds of millions of dollars in building improvements. Any wonkish jargon in the reports that might mystify the committee is translated in "frank" terms by the outside inspectors, Duer says, without interference from school officials.
If a contractor were to double-bill the district or demand too much in change orders after promising completion within a set price range, Duer and his colleagues would know about it, and they could make suggestions on how to fix it. If the district was doing a stellar job, that would be clear too.
"I don’t see these performance audits as punitive," Duer said. "I see them as a confirmation that the process and systems in place are working."
MORE MONEY PROBLEMS
The Guardian reported last week ("The City College Shell Game," 7/4/07) that City College’s bond projects are running an astounding $225 million over budget. As a result, school officials have returned to the Board of Trustees five times in recent years to request that a total of $130 million be reallocated from one project to another to cover the overruns, leaving some projects promised to voters with little or no funding at all. We reported on a number of examples last week, but there are plenty more:
•<\!s> The construction of a new Mission campus was supposed to begin in 2002 but didn’t get under way until well into 2005. The project is now $30 million over budget, an increase of 50 percent, and the school recently requested another $6 million diversion from other bond projects. City College originally planned to build the campus where a shuttered theater currently stands on Mission Street but later moved the site to avoid a showdown with preservationists.
•<\!s> Since 1997, City College has asked voters for a total of $61 million to renovate and remodel existing buildings and meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements. In November 2005 it asked voters for $35 million to perform such work, but just weeks after the election, $20 million of the money was reallocated to a planned Chinatown–<\d>North Beach campus that’s now running $50 million over budget, an increase of 60 percent. That project’s ever-changing design has been heatedly challenged by everyone from the Chronicle‘s editorial board to Sup. Aaron Peskin to state senator Leland Yee.
•<\!s> Two projects for which voters authorized a combined $71 million won’t see the light of day unless the college returns to the ballot a fourth time, which school officials have discussed. The projects — a biotech learning center and a one-stop administrative shop for new students — have been drained of $42 million to save the Mission campus and an overdue Performing Arts Center, which will cost $75 million more than expected, an increase of 152 percent.
HUNTING AND PECKING
All of this irks Mara Kopp, who was appointed to City College’s oversight committee in late 2005 as a representative of the San Francisco Taxpayers Association. She’s complained openly that the school long ago should have hired auditors for the kind of far-reaching work West Contra Costa gets.
"If we received ongoing management reports, then we’d have something of substance," Kopp said. "We wouldn’t have to hunt and peck in a kind of naive, elementary way."
She is all but alone in her criticism, however, save for a small group of allies including former committee member John Rizzo and Milton Marks, one of the few voices on the independently elected Board of Trustees willing to apply tough scrutiny to Chancellor Phil Day’s office at board meetings. Green Party pol Rizzo recently became a trustee after closely beating longtime incumbent Johnnie Carter in the November 2006 board race.
Day has long argued that the school’s attorneys don’t believe such audits are required under Proposition 39, a 2000 state ballot measure that lowered the threshold for passing local school bonds. Prop. 39 required the formation of local citizens’ bond oversight committees.
Marks has questioned the strength of City College’s oversight committee and the lack of performance audits since at least 2005, but not until earlier this year were he and Rizzo able to force a resolution demanding the inspections, and now Day claims to welcome a management review. The school will bid out its first audit soon.
"The bottom line is, a performance audit as opposed to a financial audit would determine whether or not funds are being expended in the most efficient, effective, and economical manner instead of just adding up these funds and saying, ‘Here’s how much we expended and for what,’<\!s>" said Harvey Rose, a respected local auditor who’s reviewed city agencies and analyzed San Francisco’s annual budget for 35 years.
West Contra Costa concluded that Prop. 39 does require extensive managements audits. The committee even decided to include a $150 million bond election in 2000 in the scope of its work, although that wasn’t required, to ensure all the money was still being spent efficiently.
Duer said it doesn’t matter to him what the letter of the law requires. "It was always assumed with our work that this is something we had to have," he said.
The Los Angeles Community College District made the same assumption. Other districts statewide, however, appear to have interpreted Prop. 39 the same way City College has. And the Attorney General’s Office has never issued an opinion clarifying the matter.
Meanwhile, City College officials blame the millions of dollars in outsize project costs on inflation, a globally increased demand for steel and concrete, and slow-moving state regulators who must approve architectural designs.
"I understand both the college as well as the community would like to see us complete every single project we’ve proposed," Vice Chancellor Peter Goldstein told us recently. "We absolutely share that desire. The reality of cost increases has forced us to go back and look at our resources and reallocate in order to keep major projects going forward."
But Kopp and company argue that much earlier performance inspections would have revealed to the oversight committee and trustees where the increase in expenses came from with absolute certainty. That way, no one would have to rely exclusively on the glitzy project presentations made by Day and Goldstein that are often little more than slide shows with quotes from prominent business journals decrying the rising cost of construction materials. Trustee Marks has moaned repeatedly at board meetings that he doesn’t feel informed enough to vote on major reallocations, and his constant questions haven’t always made him popular.
"I think there’s this feeling that the board should not be adversarial," Marks said. "But I think by the nature of how things are set up, we have to be…. We have to look out for the best interests of the public at large."
Not everything’s rosy in West Contra Costa, of course. Anton Jungherr, a former San Francisco Unified School District official, sat on the West Contra Costa oversight committee for four years and fumed in an interview that the district didn’t take seriously the committee’s regular recommendations. He wants to form a statewide association of oversight committees to arm citizens with the information they need to track bond expenditures.
"There are legitimate reasons for change orders, but you have to analyze them and understand what the reasons are and then take the appropriate oversight action," Jungherr said.
But cost overruns in West Contra Costa still pale when compared with those at City College. Jungherr said that district has experienced about $100 million in unexpected costs on $850 million in projects undertaken since 2000, substantially less than what City College faces despite hundreds of millions of dollars more in bond projects.
Kopp still hopes City College’s oversight committee will build more muscle.
"If they were to show us documents they used themselves in monitoring all these things, that could substitute as long as the information was relevant and honest," Kopp said. "But it’s really been quite shallow all along."<\!s>*
By Steven T. Jones
Years in development and 600 pages thick, the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan Draft Environmental Impact Report is a policy wonk’s wet dream, but perhaps a tad inaccessible for most people. That’s too bad because this is the plan that could determine whether there will still be jobs and homes for the working class 20 years from now, or whether policymakers will let the free market continue to gentrify the city. The plan (available here along with important info on upcoming hearing and a series of workshops that start on Monday) looks at three development options, ranging from maximum conversion of industrial lands to housing to maximum preservation of job-producing properties. Either way, the plan will almost double the housing entitlements in the city and create a potential developer feeding frenzy that could have irreversible results. But the plan also calls for proactive policies for creating more affordable housing, exacting more public benefits from development projects, and creating development models that take public health into consideration, all firsts for the city’s area plans. So check it out, get involved, and keep reading the Guardian for updates.
PREVIEW Until stumbling on The Wishing Bone Cycle some years back, I hadn’t wondered why owls die with wings outspread or how a man wearing antlers on his head can be tricked into thinking that real moose are after him. Yet Howard Norman’s eye-opening transcription-translations of Swampy Cree narrative poems are so arresting that I still find new questions in my life just to bring them to the stories. The tales invariably answer with bigger inquiries of their own. In the transformations they detail, animals — moose, lynx, frogs, bears — are adept shape-shifters, this being their key to survival, while humans change forms clumsily, afraid to be themselves.
When Theatre of Yugen presents The Cycle Plays in a daylong, one-time-only performance on 7/7/07, those present for the free event will be entranced by the resonant questing onstage. Our minds might even grow new antlers and roots at the same time. The Cycle Plays, connected to The Wishing Bone Cycle only in my head, was written by the hugely imaginative local playwright Erik Ehn, dean of theater at the California Institute of the Arts and an artistic associate with Yugen.
The Cycle Plays‘ five plays and opening dance have been in collaborative development for more than two years. They are an offering on a large scale, channeling the smaller, focused gestures of cleansing and growing closer that make up the company’s rich repertoire of movement. "Like many of Erik’s ideas, we just couldn’t bear to see a world without it," explained Lluis Valls, one of the three co–<\d>artistic directors who received the torch from founder Yuriko Doi in 2001.
A ritual dance play created with Doi, 10,000, opens the cycle. It features Doi, who is now in her 60s, alongside two of the company’s founding members, Brenda Wong Aoki and Helen Morgenrath. Based around a pulsating triangulation of three older women, it is an adaptation of the traditional Okina opening form. The plays that follow, interspersed with performances by guest comedy artists, represent the five traditional categories of Noh plays: Deity, Warrior, Woman, Madness, and Demon. They include Winterland, in which two teenage girls venture to see the Sex Pistols at the title club in San Francisco, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, a refiguring of Eugene O’Neill’s intense masterpiece. The company describes its Long Day’s Journey as "a ghost within a ghost within a variation of O’Neill’s fourth act."
Theatre of Yugen thrives on discipline and openness. Founded in 1978, the devoted troupe combines classical Japanese forms such as Noh theater and Kyogen comedy with cross-genre soundscapes and a willingness to reach into the heart of stories. Penetrating the psychology at the root of human actions, actors play ghosts and demons who are the embodiment of destructive attachments. The resulting unrest of the haunted characters stems from their not knowing whether they or the illusions are meant to disappear.
Lead composers and musicians Allen Whitman and Suki O’Kane help manifest this sense of being on the edge of great loss. Joined by the Yugen Orchestra on common and obscure instruments, they make music that is by turns postmodern and incantatory and harmonizes well with co–<\d>artistic director Jubilith Moore’s stunning performance in Winterland. Moore plays a leper, a beekeeper, and a milkman, all the ghosts of John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten), who appears to the overwhelmed girls as they try to reach the concert that turned out to be the Sex Pistols’ final show. Who hasn’t had a night like that in San Francisco? And who doesn’t replay it endlessly, searching for the point of no return?<\!s>*
THE CYCLE PLAYS
Sat/7, first sitting 9 a.m., free (reservations are full; call to be put on waiting list)
TECHSPLOITATION If someone were to hold a knife to your throat and ask what the aesthetic sensibilities of the computer age are, you’d probably babble something about the iPod and its curvy, candy-colored precursor, the iMac. You’d think of the typical PC laptop, dumb and square and black, and you’d wonder whether this question about aesthetics was actually a trick. Because there are no computer age aesthetics.
Of course I’m exaggerating. There are a million interesting designs for consumer electronics and computers, but most don’t call attention to themselves. Computer aesthetics say "I am functional" — even the iPod Shuffle’s, whose colorful clip-on version kids attach to the gold chains around their necks as techno-bling.
But your Gateway computer, with its stalwart rectangular tower, is not the last word in how technology can look. Think of the crazy dial phones from the 1920s, with their curlicues and shiny brass and polished wood handsets. Or recall early radios, with their curving wooden exteriors meant to look like fancy furniture. And if you really want to see some seriously decorated machines, just check out pictures of devices from the 19th century, when everything from radiators to dynamos was covered in filigree and iron flowers and stamped, embossed shiny crap. For the record, I fucking love embossed shiny crap.
I think the search for an over-the-top tech aesthetic is driving the current craze for steampunk, a design and fashion style that combines Victorian sensibilities with contemporary gizmos. The ideal steampunk device would probably be a coal-powered cyborg, such as the creatures found in the novels of British fantasist China Miéville. In the real world, one of the most popular steampunk tinkerers is Jake von Slatt, who recently rebuilt his desktop computer as a vision in brass, marble, and old typewriter parts. He even offers a step-by-step guide to making your own functioning steampunk computer on his Web site, the Steampunk Workshop. Whenever von Slatt produces a new creation — a telegraph sounder that taps out RSS feeds, for example — pictures of it are always wildly popular on social news site Digg and elsewhere on the Web. Geeks who might not know what the word aesthetic means are instinctively drawn to the way von Slatt has made artifice from functionality. I expect to see cheap, knockoff steampunk computers for sale any day now.
As steampunkish critic John Brownlee has pointed out in several articles on the topic, steampunk designers tend to reverse-engineer ordinary electronics — say, a computer keyboard — and enhance them with parts that look antique. The idea is not just to create machines whose beauty goes beyond functionality. It’s also, Brownlee contends, to recall an era when amateurs could contribute meaningfully to the development of science and technology. We live in a time when no single human being can fully comprehend the Windows operating system. No wonder we’re nostalgic for the days when beachcombers could be naturalists and tinkerers could invent the telephone.
I think the popularity of steampunk also expresses our collective yearning for an era when information technology was in its infancy and could have gone anywhere. In 1880 we hadn’t yet laid the cables for a telephone network, and computer programming was just an idea in Ada Lovelace’s head. Nineteenth-century technology was often operated by factory laborers, and it meant backbreaking work and the ruination of healthy bodies. Information technology, to the 19th-century mind, would be something that set us free from brutal assembly lines.
One hundred years later, I wish it were so. Information technology has its own brutal assembly lines, mind-numbing data work that cripples our fingers with repetitive strain injuries and mangles our backs with the hunched postures required to work at a computer all day long. Seen from this perspective, steampunk is an aesthetic that tells the truth about us. We are no better off than our Victorian ancestors, bumbling into the future with crude technologies whose implications we barely understand. But let’s make our devices pretty, at least. Let’s remember the days when the machines that now cage us promised liberation. *
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose flat is full of servers and anaglypta.
OPINION Just as in war, in 2007 San Francisco budget politics, truth is the first casualty.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the assertions by Gavin Newsom’s campaign minions that the mayor’s current budget proposal contains a $217.5 million city investment in affordable housing.
The purpose of these claims is to imply that Newsom has voluntarily allocated local tax dollars for this critical need — and that no more should be spent on affordable housing, especially some $10 million for lower-income rental housing production for families with children proposed by Supervisor Chris Daly and the Board of Supervisors.
The facts tell a different story.
First, the impression that this $217.5 million is all local tax money the mayor has voluntarily invested in affordable housing is false. Some $20 million is federal and state money that can be spent only on affordable housing. Another $25 million comes from local sources and also must be used for affordable housing. And $48 million comes from tax-increment funds mandated by a 2005 supervisors policy to go solely toward affordable-housing development.
So about 40 percent ($93 million) of the affordable-housing funding that the Mayor’s Office talks about was money that by law had to go to affordable housing. It wasn’t Newsom’s choice.
Nearly a third of the mayor’s budget for creating affordable housing — some $60 million — is in fact allocated to fund his Care Not Cash program, which was supposed to pay for itself. Indeed, more than twice as much money, $31 million, is earmarked to pay for privately owned, leased residential hotel rooms for temporary housing of the homeless (not producing one new affordable home) as is budgeted for the production of new, permanently affordable lower-income family rental housing ($15 million). The fact is, the 2007–08 Newsom budget cuts $24 million in funds earmarked for new affordable-housing production for families and seniors.
What is most distressing about the half-truths and nontruths in the affordable-housing budget battle of recent days is that the unity between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors — crucial to the expansion of affordable-housing opportunities for San Franciscans and which has characterized the city since the George Moscone administration (some 25,000 permanently affordable homes have been produced in the past 20 years, a figure unmatched in any other mayor American city) — has been placed in peril for short-term political advantage.
But cooler heads have prevailed inside and outside City Hall. Sometimes it is better to shut up and do what needs doing and let the credit fall where it may.
Which is why, when the dust settled last week, no one shouted about the $10 million that was quietly added back into the budget for permanently affordable family-housing production.
But we should all be clear: if we want San Francisco to be as economically diverse as we all claim, then we have only just begun to find the funds needed for more affordable housing. While it may or may not be true that you can never be too rich or too thin, it is most certainly true that San Francisco never allocates enough for affordable housing. *
Calvin Welch is an affordable-housing advocate who lives in San Francisco.
The motto of San Francisco’s community college is "The truth will set you free."
For taxpayers, that’s a painful irony. Since 1997, the district has moved around $130 million in bond money in a fiscal shell game, taking funds that the voters were told would go to one set of projects and spending the money on others.
The half-billion-dollar bond program is now at least $225 million over budget, in part because of what the school admits was shoddy planning, and City College is considering asking voters to approve yet another set of bonds to catch up.
And all of this happened without a detailed performance audit.
Among the transfers and overruns we’ve discovered in a review of the bond program:
•<\!s>City College made up for a planned gym’s mammoth budget shortfalls by transferring more than $53 million from other projects, like the new Performing Arts Center, improvements to the Balboa Reservoir (that massive, sunken eyesore of a parking lot west of the Ocean Avenue Campus), and an academic partnership with San Francisco State University.
•<\!s>Construction on the Performing Arts Center was supposed to begin in 2004, but it’s gone nowhere. According to the school’s most recent estimates, the center now will cost $125.8 million, an increase of 152 percent from the original $50 million.
•<\!s>Two new campuses planned for the Mission and Chinatown neighborhoods are now running a combined $78 million over budget. School administrators this May requested an additional $6 million to complete the Mission campus. Plans for the Chinatown facilities were originally unveiled in 1997 to voters, who were later told construction would begin in 2006. Today the designs are mired in a political battle with neighborhood residents, and City College hasn’t broken ground on the project.
In at least one case, the school has acknowledged that a $1.3 million reallocation took place without prior authorization from its independently elected overseers, the Board of Trustees. Administrators later asked the board to consent to the transfer retroactively.
"We’re always asked to take this money and move it from here to here," complained trustee Milton Marks III, one of the few consistent critics on the board who in the past voted against such reallocations. "It may be justified…. But when I ask if there are programmatic changes, nobody can answer me."
The school calls the transfers "reallocations," and as of May the administration and the board had agreed to shift the bond money five times.
In one case, administrators asked for $70 million in transfers mere weeks after the 2005 election in which voters authorized the school to sell $246.3 million in bonds.
That January 2006 reallocation strongly suggests the office of Chancellor Phil Day knew the school wouldn’t be able to complete the projects described to voters but never corrected the ballot handbook or told the media and the public the truth.
Day agreed to a Guardian interview, then canceled it, citing a schedule conflict. But in board meetings he and his staff have insisted that the transfers were perfectly legal.
The school’s lawyers say reallocations are acceptable under Proposition 39, a state ballot measure passed by voters in 2000 that lowered the threshold in California for passing school and community college bonds.
Other districts have also relied on reallocations as the cost of construction materials has increased globally in recent years due to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing expansion of China’s economy.
But the San Francisco school has argued the logical extreme — that it can transform voter-approved projects in virtually any way it deems necessary.
"What obligation do we have in our reallocation considerations about making sure that those things get delivered — all of those projects we listed in both [the 2001 and 2005] bond measures?" former trustee Johnnie Carter asked during a meeting Jan. 12, 2006.
"You have no obligation to complete any of those projects," Mona Patel, a bond advisor for the school, responded. "You can complete one of those projects. You can complete all of those projects or anything in between…. It’s solely within the board’s discretion."
Despite that explanation, City College’s woefully short budget projections mean the school might have to return to voters a fourth time to secure funding for two projects already promised the last time City College went to the ballot, in November 2005.
One of those planned facilities was supposed to house a stem-cell-technology training program lauded by Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2005 as a way to help locals compete for jobs in the Bay Area’s growing biotech and life-sciences research industries. The school stripped $25 million authorized by voters from that project and directed it mostly to two other projects running a combined $105 million over budget.
Marks and new board member John Rizzo have urged an expansive performance audit of the bond money, which they say is required under Prop. 39 but had never been completed.
Rizzo and Marks both told us that if unforeseen construction costs, a low number of project bidders, and the lethargy of state regulators are all problems contributing to unpredicted costs, school administrators need to come up with a plan to fix the situation. But the performance audit proposed by Rizzo and Marks would first identify which problems are most severe. Not having it, Rizzo said, "is like flying blindly. We’re just writing checks."
Peter Goldstein, vice chancellor for finance and administration, insisted to us that state law, as interpreted by the school, doesn’t require the type of audit called for by Rizzo and Marks. It simply requires that the school prove it isn’t spending money on projects not presented first to voters. He added that the reallocations weren’t simple but said he couldn’t answer from memory specific questions about the 2005 bond election, including why the school chose to pursue tens of millions of dollars in reallocations so soon afterward, in January 2006.
"They’ve been very difficult decisions for both the administration and the board," Goldstein said. "[This has] not been some kind of snap judgment. We’ve really had to search and try to make sure there wasn’t some way to contain costs otherwise."
The trustees often seem just as confused as the voters may be about the cost overruns. The trail is laid out in thousands of pages of bond proposals and ever-changing explanatory documents, all complete with glossy schematics and computer-generated students looking gleeful as they head off to class at one or another of the new facilities.
The section of City College’s Web site dedicated to its bond projects is difficult to follow. A brief summary of the projects appears in voter guides, but the full bond proposals are filed with the San Francisco Department of Elections, and you’d have to go there to copy or read the tomes, which contain a lot of qualifying paragraphs that look like this one, which refers to an academic building planned in conjunction with San Francisco State University:
"The college will aggressively pursue state and federal funding to support the ‘joint-use’ concept with San Francisco State University. If funds are not forthcoming, the ‘local’ funds will be utilized to support the construction of the new Child Care Center and the new Student Health Service Center."
Such fine-print disclaimers enabled Chancellor Day and Vice Chancellor Goldstein to later depict multimillion-dollar transfers away from academic construction as entirely legal, even though the Child Care Center and health clinic never appeared as official stand-alone projects in bond proposals presented to voters.
Between 2001 and 2005 the school asked for a total of $40 million to construct in tandem with SFSU the joint-use facility, which was slated to include new classrooms and laboratories where students could work toward bachelor’s degrees in education, health care, and child development. The project is now $26 million over budget and remains in the design phase. Since 2003 about $20 million that voters were told was going to the project has been reallocated to other projects facing increased costs.
A facilities manager at San Jose–Evergreen Community College District, Robert Dias, was incredulous when we presented our findings to him. He said he’d heard of cost overruns statewide but "not to this extent."
"We have experienced rising costs, but we planned for it," Dias said. "Construction costs were going through the roof, but we did creative things to manage it."
On the other hand, Fred Harris, vice chancellor of the California Community College System, based in Sacramento, said the figures didn’t necessarily surprise him and that the state as a result has adjusted its guidelines for what individual school districts can claim as costs.*
OPINION On April 19 the San Francisco Planning Department approved a market-rate condo development with a 24-hour Walgreens store at the northwest corner of César Chávez and Mission. The project features 60 expensive ownership units and 67 residential parking spaces. To support the Walgreens, the developer is also including 24 customer parking spaces, 12 spaces for employees, and one car-share space.
The development as proposed is not in compliance with the city’s General Plan, the recent Eastern Neighborhoods planning requirements, or the January Board of Supervisors resolution calling for 64 percent of all new housing to be available at below-market rates — and there’s an alternative that offers true low-income family housing and community space. If the supervisors are serious about preserving affordable housing, they’ll reject this ill-conceived plan.
The developer, Seven Hills Properties, told the Planning Commission that families would be able to afford these simple, unadorned condos through the first-time home buyers services offered by the Down Payment Assistance Loan Program in the Mayor’s Office of Housing. The truth is that the developer is offering only nine below-market units affordable to working- and middle-class families. All of the other units will be priced at close to $550,000 for a studio and as much as $700,000 for a three-bedroom unit.
Think about those prices. A person or family making as much as $63,850 a year could qualify for the down-payment assistance. Such a person or family would have to come up with a $27,500 share of the down payment and would be paying about $3,000 a month for a mortgage — 55 percent of their income.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Back in December 2006, Seven Hills told the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition that it would be interested in selling the development rights at the site to MAC if MAC could come up with a development proposal. MAC then worked with us at the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, and together we created a viable offer — which Seven Hills dismissed as unrealistic.
Our proposal was to develop between 60 and 70 units of affordable housing, with community-service space below. Across the street, in 2001, the BHNC opened its Bernal Gateway development, 55 affordable family units with on-site community services that subsequently won two highly coveted national awards, with a financing strategy similar to the one we suggested for the Seven Hills property.
MAC has appealed to the Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to hear its appeal July 17. This is a neighborhood issue that has citywide implications.
The arguments couldn’t be more clear or compelling: The project doesn’t comply with the Planning Department’s own guidelines. It brings pricey housing and a chain store to a neighborhood that needs neither. And there’s a credible alternative that ought to be given a chance. *
Joseph Smooke
Joseph Smooke is the executive director of the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center. If you are interested in this issue, please contact Jane Martin, BHNC community organizer, at jmartin@bhnc.org.
GREEN CITY Turning the tides that flow through the Golden Gate into a source of clean, renewable energy was contemplated long before Mayor Gavin Newsom partnered up with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to announce the latest study (see "Turning the Tides," page 11), even before Matt Gonzalez proposed the idea in his 2003 race against Newsom. Tidal power is an old concept now getting a new push, thanks to the climate change threat and the unique dynamics of San Francisco.
An independent study by the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute was conducted last year to assess the feasibility of tidal energy in North America and concluded that the Golden Gate is "the second largest tidal in stream energy resource" on the continent. A combination of the Golden Gate’s powerful currents and its proximity to existing power infrastructure makes San Francisco the most promising site for a tidal energy pilot project in the lower 48 states.
However, the EPRI’s analysis revealed the Golden Gate’s tidal power potential to be far less than the 1,000 megawatts first mentioned by Gonzalez, which would have more than covered the city’s annual energy needs. The EPRI estimates that the 440 billion gallons of water in the Golden Gate’s tidal stream hold a total of 237 megawatts of energy. The study also suggests that a tidal program in San Francisco could only safely extract 35 megawatts of that available energy without negatively affecting the surrounding environment.
At 35 megawatts, tidal power would meet roughly 4 percent of the city’s energy demands. Internal San Francisco Public Utilities Commission documents obtained by the Guardian revealed that SFPUC officials lack confidence in those numbers and place the estimate at only 1 percent of the city’s energy needs.
Regardless of the potential output, the major challenge is still establishing the proper technology to safely harness the power of the tides.
Tidal power, much like hydropower, harnesses the energy of water currents to create electricity. In the case of tidal power, the force of the ocean currents generated by the rise and fall of the tides spins turbines placed underwater.
La Rance Tidal Power Plant in France, operating since 1966, is the oldest such system in the world. It generates 240 megawatts of power a day, which is enough to cover 90 percent of Brittany’s demand. At 3.7 cents per kilowatt hour, the electricity generated by La Rance is among the most affordable in France, which relies heavily on nuclear power.
However, La Rance — like Canada’s Annapolis Royal Generating Station, built in 1984 — is essentially a hydroelectric dam that spans a river, capturing and releasing the tides, so it’s not a viable design for San Francisco. A tidal power project at the Golden Gate would have to be largely submerged to leave vital shipping lanes unobstructed. So far, there is no existing tidal power program similar to the one being proposed for San Francisco. There are many tidal technology projects under development around the world that use partial and completely submerged systems that could be compatible with the Golden Gate. None has a model that’s seen commercial use, except Verdant Power, which has a single test turbine submersed in New York City’s East River that powers a nearby parking garage and supermarket.
The EPRI study evaluated eight possible turbine designs for San Francisco. Among these designs, the maximum output per turbine is two megawatts. The installation and maintenance of a project using several of these turbines would not only be inherently expensive but also require the heavy lifting of barges, cranes, drills, and derricks as well as ongoing activity that likely would affect what went on above and below the surface of the sea.
Many of these turbine designs involve spinning blades, which can threaten marine life. The tides are also essential for transportation and the distribution of silt. A pilot project would address these challenges, perhaps demonstrating whether the planet’s natural flows can offer another key to slowing its warming trend.*
Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.
People’s Budget Coalition member Esther Morales says she’s angry that the media obsessed over Sup. Chris Daly’s June 19 comments about whether Mayor Gavin Newsom has honestly addressed allegations that he’s used cocaine yet ignored hours of testimony that hundreds of San Franciscans gave at the very same meeting, a state-mandated hearing on the impact of Newsom’s proposed spending cuts on the city’s neediest populations, including those with drug and alcohol problems.
"There’s been so much press about that hearing, but it’s all been about what’s happening between Sup. Chris Daly and the mayor," Morales said, accurately observing that there has been no coverage by the mainstream media of the addicts who waited for hours that night but only got to talk for two minutes each about how they would have died had it not been for the substance abuse programs that Newsom plans to cut.
Nor has much been written about the folks who pleaded for Buster’s Place, the city’s only all-night homeless shelter, which was to close at the end of June unless the Board of Supervisors saved it from Newsom’s $1.6 million cut. Nor has much mention been made of the organizers from the city’s four single-room occupancy hotel collaboratives that showed up at City Hall a few days earlier to decry Newsom’s proposed $233,000 cut in their combined budgets.
As David Ho of the Chinatown Community Development Center told the Guardian, "These are programs for the poor and for public health, and they are always on the chopping block. The mayor talks about the need to preserve working-class families in the city, and here we are being left out of the budget."
Muna Landers of the Coalition on Homelessness said SRO hotel rooms were originally meant to be single dwellings, but now more than 450 families — 85 percent of whom are immigrants — live in such rooms without bathrooms or kitchens. "When one family moves out, three families move in," Landers said.
Meanwhile, in light of Newsom’s proposal to restore only 50 percent of a $9 million federal cut in San Francisco’s HIV/AIDS programs, San Francisco AIDS Housing Alliance director Brian Basinger accused the mayor of "playing bullshit games."
As Morales told us this week, "What’s really behind these fights between Chris and the mayor is the fact that Chris spearheaded the board’s $28 million affordable-housing supplement…. Without Daly’s footwork the $28 million supplemental would not have passed by an 8–3 majority, and the mayor only refused to sign it because it was Chris’s measure."
Morales works with 60 community-based groups as the organizer of the Family Budget Committee, one of seven committees of the People’s Budget Coalition, which unveiled its annual report June 21 on the steps of City Hall. The group values services for those struggling to get by.
"But this mayor’s budget is a law-and-order, streets-and-potholes, increasingly right-wing conservative budget that is not reflective of what San Francisco is about, and it will drive even more families out of town," Morales told us.
Months ago the Family Budget Committee met with the mayor’s staff to ask for a $30 million package of services, part of the People’s Budget Coalition’s $78 million request from the mayor’s record $6.1 billion budget.
"The mayor’s staff talked to us about how dismal the budget year looked, how the firefighters’, the police[‘s], and the nurses’ contracts are up for negotiations, and so they didn’t know how much money they would end up with," Morales recalled.
So the Family Budget Committee whittled down its needs, first to $20 million, then $10 million, and sent those priorities to the Mayor’s Office for consideration. Ultimately, it said, the mayor found just $1.5 million for its priorities, so it turned its attention to the Board of Supervisors.
Since board president Aaron Peskin removed Daly as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee on June 15 and took the reins himself, the body has restored $4 million in HIV/AIDS funding, and much more is on the way. Peskin told us that he intends to significantly change the mayor’s budget, promising more so-called add backs than the board has ever approved.
"It’s all about priorities," Peskin told us. He said Daly "never intended to actually cut" any of the mayor’s top-priority projects when he introduced his motion to slash $37 million from Newsom’s funding plans. It was simply a negotiating tactic that "backfired majorly" when the targeted constituencies rallied against Daly.
Yet board progressives haven’t been derailed by Daly’s actions, as many pundits predicted. At the same meeting at which Daly mentioned cocaine while making a point about substance abuse program cuts, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi led a challenge of Newsom’s proposed San Francisco Police Department contract on the grounds that it would grant cops a 25 percent pay increase but give the city little in return. And there are still eight supervisors who supported Daly’s affordable-housing plan.
Peskin told us, "I’m hopeful that by the end of the week you’ll be able to write that Peskin took the baton that Newsom handed him, and while it may not have been as pretty as we might have liked, I’m hopeful that after reversing cuts to health care and [making the additions requested by] the Family Budget Committee, we’ll even be able to dump money back into low-income, affordable, family, and rental housing." *
Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly have been engaged in a high-profile clash over city budget priorities in recent weeks. Newsom appeared to win the latest battle when he galvanized an unlikely coalition and Daly clashed with some of his progressive allies, prompting Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin to remove Daly on June 15 as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee.
"This is not about personality, and it shouldn’t be about the mayor’s race. It should be about making sure we have a good budget," Peskin told the Guardian shortly before announcing that he would be taking over as Budget and Finance chair just as the committee was beginning work on approving a budget by July 1.
Yet this latest budget battle was more about personalities and tactical errors than it was about the larger war over the city’s values and spending, areas in which it’s far too early for the Newsom camp to declare victory. The reality is that Newsom’s "back-to-basics budget" — which would increase spending for police and cityscape improvements and cut health services and affordable-housing programs — is still likely to be significantly altered by the progressives-dominated Board of Supervisors.
In fact, while the recent showdown between Newsom and Daly may have been diffused by Daly’s removal as Budget and Finance chair, it’s conceivable that a clash between Newsom and the supervisors is still on the horizon. After all, eight supervisors voted for a $28 million affordable-housing supplemental that Newsom refused to sign, and the mayor could yet be forced to decide whether to sign a budget that lies somewhere between his vision and Daly’s.
Stepping back from recent events and the supercharged rhetoric behind them, a Guardian analysis of the coming budget fight shows that there are difficult and highly political choices to be made that could have profound effects on what kind of city San Francisco becomes.
If Daly wanted to spark a productive dialogue on whether the mayor’s budget priorities are in the best interests of the city, he probably didn’t go about it in the right way. But the approach seemed to be born of frustration that the mayor was refusing to implement a duly approved program for an important public need.
Daly has argued that when he introduced his $28 million affordable-housing supplemental in March, he thought it would be "noncontroversial." Last year the board approved and Newsom signed a $54 million supplemental budget, including $20 million in affordable-housing funds. Daly wrote on his blog that he hoped his latest $28 million request would help "stem the tide of families leaving San Francisco, decrease the number of people forced to live on the streets, and help elders live out their days with some dignity."
But Newsom objected, first criticizing Daly in the media for submitting it too late, then refusing to spend money that had been approved by a veto-proof majority, with only his supervisorial allies Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Ed Jew opposed. Daly pushed back against what he loudly labeled the mayor’s "backdoor veto," which he considered illegal.
"You may not believe the question of affordable housing and affordability is more important than redesigning the city’s Web site or perhaps installing cameras in police cars or fixing a pothole, but to say that the money does not exist is a lie," Daly said at a board meeting.
So when Newsom submitted his final budget June 1, Daly proposed restoring the funding and taking away $37 million from what he called the mayor’s "pet projects." His suggestion triggered a political firestorm, since his targets included a wide array of programs, including $700,000 for a Community Justice Center, $3 million for one police academy class, $10.6 million for street repairs and street trees, $2.1 million to expand the Corridors street cleaning program, and $500,000 for a small-business-assistance center. In their place, Daly argued, the city would be able to restore funds cut from affordable housing, inpatient psychiatric beds, and services for people with AIDS.
In addition to uniting against him those constituencies whose funding he targeted, Daly’s proposed cuts in law enforcement — and his brash, unilateral approach to the issue — threatened to cost him the support of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive with public safety credentials who represents the crime-plagued Western Addition. So it was a precarious situation that became a full-blown meltdown once the Newsom reelection campaign started phone banks and e-mail blasts accusing Daly of endangering public safety and subverting the normal budget process.
Pretty soon, with Daly’s enemies smelling blood in the water, it became a sort of feeding frenzy, and various groups urged their members to mobilize for a noon rally before the June 13 Budget and Finance Committee meeting. "We are a sleeping giant that has awakened," small-business advocate Scott Hauge claimed as he e-mailed other concerned stakeholders, who happened to include Friends of the Urban Forest and public housing activists, thanks to Daly’s call for a $5 million cut in Newsom’s Hope SF plan, which would rebuild public housing projects by allowing developers to also build market-rate condos at the sites.
"Mirkarimi seems to feel strongly about having cops and infrastructure, which are typically the priorities of conservatives," Daly told the Guardian as he announced plans to cancel the June 13 budget hearing, which he did after accusing Newsom of engaging in illegal electioneering.
Daly also accused Newsom of abusing his power by securing the City Hall steps for a budget rally at the same time, date, and place that Daly believed his team had secured — a mess-up city administrator Rohan Lane explained to us as "an unfortunate procedural thing."
But while Daly told us he "needed to hear from progressives who enjoy diversity, because if we don’t get more affordable housing dollars, San Francisco is going to become increasingly white, wealthy, and more conservative," all anyone could hear the next day was a pro-Newsom crowd chanting, "No, Supervisor Daly, no!" outside City Hall.
Newsom spoke at the rally and claimed that Daly’s proposal to cut $5 million from Hope SF would eliminate "$95 million in local money to help rebuild San Francisco’s most distressed public housing," a figure that includes the bond issue Newsom is proposing. With the 700 to 900 market-rate units included in the program, Newsom claims the cuts will cost the city $700 million in housing.
"Stop the balkanization of San Francisco!" Rev. Al Townsend roared, while Housing Authority Commissioner Millard Larkin said, "People are living in housing not fit for animals. Protect policies that give people a decent place to live."
"This is about your priorities," Newsom said as he made the case that fixing potholes, sweeping streets, and putting more cops on the beat are now San Francisco’s top concerns.
"I’ve never seen this type of disrespect to the public process," Newsom said, addressing a crowd that included a couple of Daly supporters holding "Homelessness is not a crime" signs alongside people dressed as trees, a dozen people in orange "Newsom ’07" shirts, Newsom campaign operative Peter Ragone, and former Newsom-backed supervisor candidates Doug Chan and Rob Black (the latter of whom who lost to Daly and now works for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce).
"Gavin Newsom’s budget reflects that he has been listening to you. It’s not something he has dreamed up is his ivory tower," Townsend said, while Kelly Quirke, executive director of Friends of the Urban Forest, pointed out that Daly’s proposal would mean the 1,500 trees that the Department of Public Works planted this year "would not be watered," and Police Commissioner Yvonne Lee said the proposal would "eliminate 50 new officers that could be on streets, plus a $400,000 system to identify the source of gunfire."
What Newsom’s supporters didn’t mention was that his proposed budget, which would add $33 million for the Police Department to help get more officers on the streets and pay existing officers more, also would drastically shift the city’s housing policies by transferring about $50 million from existing affordable-housing and rental-support programs into spending on home ownership and development of market-rate units. And that comes as the city is losing ground on meeting a goal in the General Plan’s Housing Element of making more than 60 percent of new housing affordable for low-income residents.
Daly doesn’t think people fully understand the implications of Hope SF and said public hearings are needed so they "can understand it better." Yet the Newsom rally still touted the mayor’s concern for those in public housing projects.
"We’re not interested in rebuilding unless the tenants are supportive," Doug Shoemaker of the Mayor’s Office of Housing told the Guardian, promising that existing public housing units will be replaced "on a one-to-one basis" and noting that 85 affordable rentals, along with 40 to 50 units for first-time home buyers at a below-market rate (for a household of two with an income of about $58,000 annually) and hundreds of market-rate condos, will be built.
"The market-rate condos will cross-subsidize the rebuilding of public housing," said Shoemaker, who claims that the "lumpiness of the mayor’s budget" — in which home-ownership funding increases by $51 million, while programs benefiting the homeless and senior and families renters appear to have been cut by $48 million — "is best understood over the long term" and is related to the redevelopment projects in Bayview–Hunters Point and Mission Bay.
"The hardest thing about explaining these figures is that it sounds like a game of three-card rummy, but we need to fuel whatever is coming down the pipeline," he said.
The confusing fight over affordable housing has even split its advocates. Coleman Advocates for Children and Their Families publicly urged Daly not to hold Hope SF funds hostage to his housing supplemental, while the Family Budget Coalition urged Newsom and the supervisors to "work together to find at least $60 million during the add-back process to prioritize affordable housing."
But with Daly gone from the Budget and Finance Committee, how will his proposals and priorities fare? Sources say Peskin was irritated with Daly’s budget fight and his recent Progressive Convention — both actions not made in consultation with colleagues — as well as his increasingly public spat with Mirkarimi. Yet Peskin publicly has nothing but praise for Daly and supports many of his priorities.
"We are working with the same schedule that Daly’s office laid out," Peskin said, noting that a lot of the decisions about funding will depend on "what ends up coming from the state." San Francisco could still lose money from the state or federal budget. During a June 18 budget hearing, Sup. Bevan Dufty introduced a motion to amend the mayor’s interim budget by appropriating $4 million for HIV/AIDS services, to be funded by General Fund reserves, for use by the Department of Public Health.
This was one of Daly’s top priorities, and as the hearing proceeded, it became clear that there was a method in the former chair’s apparent budget-dance madness. Newsom’s budget would restore $3.8 million of the $9 million in AIDS grants lost from federal sources, with Newsom asking Congress to backfill the remaining reductions to the Ryan White Care grant. Sup. Sean Elsbernd questioned the wisdom of appropriating $4 million now, when the feds may yet cough up, and Mirkarimi questioned whether doing so would send Washington the message that it doesn’t need to help us.
"It’s a discussion we have every year," Controller Ed Harrington said. He recommended appropriating $4 million now and sending the following message: "Yes, we think this is important, we’ll try and figure out how to fix it, but this shows it isn’t easy. It’s a political call rather than a technical one."
In the end, the Budget and Finance Committee voted 3–1, with Sup. Tom Ammiano (the only supervisor to publicly support Daly’s alternative budget) absent and Elsbernd dissenting, to appropriate $4 million, on the condition that if additional federal and state funds are granted to backfill the Ryan White Care grant, the controller will transfer the $4 million augmentation back to the General Fund.
The same kind of balancing act is expected on Daly’s other suggestions to restore funding for affordable housing and public health departments, so it’s still too early to tell whether his priorities might ultimately win the war after losing the battle.*
Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.
For more details on the city budget process and a schedule of Budget and Finance Committee meetings, visit www.tiny.cc/BJRSN.
