Economy

ChevWrong

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news@sfbg.com

When Chevron Corp. holds its annual shareholders meeting at its San Ramon headquarters May 27, its top executives are expected to give investors a glowing report on how this global enterprise came to rake in a profit of $23.9 billion last year — a staggering 28.1 percent increase over the past year.

As Chevron CEO Dave O’Reilly put it in the company’s annual report, 2008 was "a momentous year." Apparently O’Reilly will also claim that his company’s activities are improving people’s lot worldwide. "Energy," he writes, "is not a luxury — it’s the foundation for economic growth. By investing in the future, we’re creating value not only for our stakeholders, but we’re also building economic prosperity around the globe."

But O’Reilly’s high opinion of his company is not shared by a growing coalition of groups who believe that Chevron’s fifth consecutive year of record profits was earned, once again, at the cost of degrading the environment and its poorest communities, both here in Richmond and further afield, from the Amazon and Nigeria to Iraq and Kazakhastan.

Critics, who include what they describe as "a coalition of those directly affected by Chevron’s operations, political control, consumer abuse, and false promises," planned to hold a May 26 press conference to release The True Cost of Chevron, an alternative annual report that seeks to provide Chevron shareholders "with the most comprehensive exposé of Chevron’s operations — and the communities in struggle against them — ever compiled," according to the report’s authors.

The study includes reports from Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, the Gulf Coast, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Utah, Washington, D.C, and Wyoming as well as Angola, Burma, Canada, Chad, Cameroon, Ecuador, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.

The next day, people carrying shareholder proxies intend to enter Chevron’s annual meeting to discuss the report with shareholders while a protest is held at Chevron’s front gates.

"Chevron’s 2008 annual report is a glossy celebration of the company’s most profitable year in its history, and one in which CEO David O’Reilly became the 15th highest paid U.S. chief executive, with nearly $50 million in total 2008 compensation," the authors state. "What Chevron’s annual report does not tell its shareholders is the true cost paid for those financial returns or the global movement gaining voice and strength against Chevron’s abuses."

The 44-page report details numerous lawsuits against the company, nationally and around the world — cases, the report’s authors claim, that have "potential liabilities in excess of Chevron’s total revenue from 2008, posing a material threat to shareholder value and the company’s bottom line."

As they wrote: "When a company operates in blatant disregard for the health, security, livelihood, safety, and environment of communities within which it operates, there can be real financial repercussions."

The report concludes with six specific obligations demanded of Chevron and leaves shareholders with the following message: "Chevron is right. The world will continue to use oil as it transitions to a sustainable green renewable energy economy. Whether Chevron will be in business as we make the transition depends upon what sort of company it chooses to be and whether the public is willing to support it."

The report also includes a series of large "ChevWrong Inhumane Energy ads" that spoof Chevron’s Human Energy ad campaign — images that popped up all across San Francisco last week after a group of renegade Chevron critics gathered at an secret location, mixed batches of wheat paste, and grabbed armfuls of the freely downloadable posters and set off into the night to bomb the city streets with the series of subvertisements.

Claiming that Chevron’s Human Energy campaign, which depicts smiling people alongside phrases like "I will try to leave the car at home more" is an attempt to greenwash the petro-giant’s activities, this group of mostly youthful critics pointed to the ongoing pollution, human rights abuses, and wars in regions where the oil company is stationed as they set off on bicycles, skateboards, and foot, armed with glue rollers and stacks of "ChevWrong" images. Some stashed their tools in Banana Republic shopping bags, which gave them an almost comical air of being disoriented tourists as they lurked and lingered on city street corners searching for suitable spots to paste their alternative ad campaign.

Soon newspaper racks on Market Street, pillars outside the Ferry Building, buildings in the Richmond District, and walls in North Beach bore the fruits of their work — along with the glass office door of public relations consultant Sam Singer, who represented Chevron in criticizing two renowned Ecuadorian environmental activists who were in town to receive the Goldman Prize.

"I will not complain about my asthma," states one such subversive ad, which depicts a beautiful but non-smiling young black man beside the claim that "Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, Calif. poisons the community." The ad is accompanied by a retooled logo that says "ChevWrong."

"I will try not to get cancer," states another that hot glue artists had affixed to Sandra Bullocks’ buttocks — or at least a life-sized depiction of the actress featured on a Market Street billboard promoting The Proposal.

"I will suffer in silence" states another, alongside the claim that Chevron props up Burma’s military dictatorship.

An ad reading "I will give my baby contaminated water" portrayed a smiling Nigerian woman alongside the claim that Chevron refuses to clean up its mess in Nigeria.

One activist told the Guardian she got involved "because Chevron is poisoning communities and cutting corners across the world, and is even shameless enough to do that here in Richmond."

Another said he was inspired to take this action because of a billion-dollar lawsuit Chevron is fighting in Ecuador, and because of its activities in Nigeria.

Others said they decided to drop the subvertisements all over the city after they heard that CBS Outdoor refused May 14 to sell the group space for the images on billboards citywide.

As they noted, the images are all freely downloadable from truecostofchevron.com, a site supported by Amazon Watch, Crude Accountability, Global Exchange, Justice in Nigeria Now, Rainforest Action Network, CorpWatch, Filipino-American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity, Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, Trustees for Alaska, Communities for a Better Environment, Mpalabanda, Richmond Progressive Alliance, and EarthRights International.

Mitch Anderson, corporate accountability campaigner with Amazon Watch, confirmed that members of the truecostofchevron coalition approached CBS Outdoor but were told that CBS has a policy not to run negative or attack ads — a claim Anderson found laughable. "What about all the attack ads we see posted during election season?"

A CBS Outdoor spokesperson confirmed that CBS had refused to accept the proposed ad campaign, and that it is the company’s policy not to run negative or attack ads.

Calls to Rachel Sutton, Chevron PR person at its corporate headquarters in San Ramon, seeking comments about truecostofchevron’s charges remained unanswered as of press time.

But at Amazon Watch, Anderson said he thought it was "great that the Bay Area community took to the streets this week to tell Chevron that our hearts and minds are not for sale.

"Chevron is trying to paper-over its widespread human rights and environmental problems across the world by spending millions to propagate insulting lies," he continued. "From its disaster in Ecuador to its hiring of global warming deniers as lobbyists, this company has shown complete disregard for the environment, human rights, and yes, wisdom. Chevron is on the wrong side of history. Just as there can be no social justice on a dead planet, Chevron should know that you can’t profit off a dead planet either."

In a final swipe at Chevron’s Human Energy campaign, critics are distributing posters that ask "Will you join us?" and show a woman smiling alongside the promise "I will protest Chevron."

Racial justice: A to G spells victory

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OPINION On Tuesday, May 19, poor and working-class families of color packed the San Francisco School Board with a powerful message of hope, opportunity, and justice: we want the right to a secure future in our own city. To get a good job here, we know we need a high quality education that prepares us for college, career, or union trade — not poverty or prison.

After a year of research, organizing, and talking to thousands of families, collecting 3,000 postcards, and mobilizing hundreds of parents and youth, our proposal — that every San Francisco student have access to the so-called A–G classes — was approved, setting the stage for a systemic change in our public schools that could dramatically improve the lives of tens of thousands of students of color over the next few years.

A–G describes the high school coursework that state colleges require for admission. Setting A-G as part of the graduation requirement will finally give low-income black and Latino students access to high expectations and our state college system.

We will have to stay on top of the district and monitoring will be intense and long-term, but we have parent and student leaders ready for the task, because their own lives are at stake.

Our experience is that thousands of parents and students get the issues, but that so many San Franciscans, even progressive ones, just don’t. In San Francisco, 75 percent of children are black, Latino, Asian, or Pacific Islander, and more than 80 percent of those families are low income. A full 90 percent of the students in public schools are students of color. This means kids’ issues in San Francisco are issues of racial and economic justice.

Our issues are often not the ones that make front page news. Education outcomes for black children — right here in San Francisco — are the worst of the state’s urban districts. But this gets lost in the inside baseball reporting about City Hall politics, the flinging about of political self-righteousness, and frankly, issues like JROTC.

We believe that organizing families for racial equity in our public school system is core to a progressive agenda in the 21st century. Consider the following.

•<\!s> Young people’s future in the 21st century San Francisco economy now requires a college education. More than 50,000 blue-collar jobs that paid a living wage without requiring a degree have disappeared from SF over the last generation.

•<\!s> Only one in three students from SF schools graduated from high school prepared for a four-year university in 2008. Without access to college and career-ready A-G classes, most graduating students weren’t even eligible for either the U.C. or California state universities or prepared for a union apprenticeship exam.

•<\!s> Most black, Latino and Pacific Islander students do not have access the A-G college, career, and union trade path in San Francisco. In fact, five out of six Latino students and 9 out of 10 African American students graduated without the A-G classes required to even be eligible for a U.C. or state university.

This new school board policy might be one of the most important steps toward racial equity in a generation. Join our work to make San Francisco public schools a vehicle of economic opportunity, racial justice and democracy. *

N’Tanya Lee is executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth.

Feldstein: Has the US Recovery Begun?

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Martin Feldstein, a professor of economics at Harvard, was formerly Chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors and President of the National Bureau for Economic Research. Feldstein is a contributing writer for Project Syndicate.

Has the US Recovery Begun?

By Martin Feldstein

CAMBRIDGE – Although the American economy is continuing to decline, it is no longer falling as fast as it was at the beginning of the year or in the weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. In that sense, it is reasonable to say that the worst of the downturn is now probably behind us.

But my reading of the evidence does not agree with that of those who claim that the economy is actually improving, and that a sustained cyclical recovery is likely to begin within the next few months. Although the stimulus package of tax cuts and increased government outlays enacted earlier this year will give a temporary boost to growth, we are unlikely to see the start of a sustained upturn until next year at the earliest.

Presenting Guardian Small Business Winners

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Scroll down for Paula Connelly’s photos of the 2009 Guardian small business award winners

For years, small business leaders have criticized City Hall for spending only a fraction of its hundreds of millions of dollars of public purchasing money with local businesses.

Wednesday night (5/20/01) at the Guardian’s annual Small Business Awards Ceremony, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu and the new executive director of the Small Business Commission Regina Dick-Endrezzi acknowledged the wrongway policy and pledged to work to change it and put millions of dollars of city money into local businesses and the local economy instead of spending it for good and services out of town.

Chiu, a former small businessman and former president of the SBC, said he had campaigned on this issue and would do all in his power as board president to fire up a “Shop Local, City Hall” campaign.
Dick-Endrezzi said the SBC would make it a central issue on the commission agenda. She also said she wanted to promote a Shop Local campaign for the 55 per cent of the city’s work force who lived outside the city.

Both Chiu and Dick-Endrezzi pointed out that the city was dependent on small businesses as the backbone and economic engine of the city. Yet, they could not get much of the public money that the city spent each year for goods and services.

Chiu said the issue was not new with him and waved to Steve Cornell and Scott Hauge, battle-scared veterans sitting in the audience, and said they had been at it for “l0 or l5 years.” He asked Hauge how long. “Twenty years,” Hauge said. Cornell and Hauge were both pleased with the statements and said they were awaiting the action.

Chiu spoke as keynoter for the ceremony and handed out the award certificates. Dick-Endrezzi spoke as an award winner for small business advocate. She was making her first public remarks as the new SBC head and, in outlining the issues for small business and the SBC, gave every indication she was the right choice by Mayor Gavin Newsom for this critical City Hall position. Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond served as master of ceremonies, which were held in the bar area of the Teatro Zinzanni theater.

Photos of the winners:

To read about our 2009 Small Business Award winners, click here. Read Tim Redmond’s article, Shop local, City Hall!, here.

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Employee-Owned Business Award: Church Street Flowers. From left Stephanie Foster, Rachel Shinfeld, Brianna Foehr. Redmond on the left, Chiu on the right.

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Small Business Advocate Award: Regina Dick-Endrezzi with Supervisor Ross MIrkarimi Guardian Publisher Bruce B. Brugmann on the left, Chiu on the right. Dick-Endrezzi is a forrmer aide to Mirkarimi.

Examiner denies climate change

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By Steven T. Jones

I’ve learned to have low expectations of editorials in the San Francisco Examiner, which endorsed John McCain for president and seems to always reflect the right-wing extremism of the paper’s Denver-based owner Phil Anschutz. But today’s editorial, which questions whether climate change is happening, is a new low.

In “Cap-and-trade scheme will wreck economy,” the paper refers to how some people believe burning fossil fuels is “allegedly” causing global warming and writes, “The problem for such advocates, however, is that Earth average temperatures have been declining for the last decade, and a fast-growing number of climate and other scientists now question the root idea of a global warming crisis.”

That statement is a lie. It is the opposite of truth, and not simply a matter of opinion or perspective, but a ridiculous and calculated effort to fool readers (I’m waiting for a response from Executive Editor Jim Pimentel and Managing Editor Deirdre Hussey and will add it to comments if I hear back from them).

Global temperatures in the last decade are some of the hottest on record, which is why the polar ice caps are melting. And the scientific community – real scientists, not those who work for industry or right-wing think tanks – is united (as much as scientists ever are about anything) in its belief in climate change and its connection to excessive carbon output.

It’s so clear that even George W. Bush and most Republicans believe it. Even the oil companies, the biggest single cause of global warming and the industry that will be hit hardest as we combat it, run ads acknowledging that it’s happening. But the Examiner appears to be the last holdout. Wow.

From the shadows

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

The cheapest special effect in the world is having one actor fire a cap gun as another cries, "Ow, ya got me!" Ergo crime did pay, in spades, for Hollywood’s "Poverty Row" studios in the disillusioned years between World War II and Eisenhower-era prosperity. Subsequently dubbed "film noir," this period’s myriad violent melodramas were cranked out fast, exhibited briefly, then forgotten.

Yet recent years have left very few stones unturned in the quest for buried gems. Back when he was programming at the Roxie Theater, Elliot Lavine did much to foster their cult with retrospectives showcasing both the genre’s acknowledged classics and dustiest obscurities. When he left in 2003, noir fans wore mourning black — though were consoled by the start of SF’s annual Noir City festival that same year.

Still, watching lurid old B-flicks at the funky Roxie had an extra frisson lacking amid the Castro Theater’s grandiose respectability. Very good news, then, that Lavine is bringing bad guys (and duplicitous dames) back to Valencia Street with "I Wake Up Dreaming: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir." Its two weeks emphasize noir’s lesser-sung efforts from the cinematic sweatshops of Monogram, PRC, Eagle Lion, and other economy-class companies where production values were low and the hard-boiled sleaze factor was often cranked high to compensate. Many of the 29 features haven’t been seen theatrically for decades, and few are available on DVD.

On Poverty Row, young talent proved itself; mainstream luminaries landed there once their box-office clout had expired. Thus velvet-voiced 1930s glamazon Kay Francis briefly descended to Monogram after Warner Bros. dumped her. In Allotment Wives (1946) she’s a socialite coolly fronting a polygamy racket targeting returned GI’s, while enduring Mildred Pierce-like torments from an ingrate daughter whose every action screams "Mother, slap sense into me." (Oh yes she will.)

Another WB castoff, ingénue Joan Leslie, starred in that year’s unique Repeat Performance. She’s an actress-turned-murderess who gets her wish to live the last fateful year over again — only to watch as the same deadly events unfold, only worse. Having outgrown a famous-juvenile heyday, Bonita Granville was ready to play twins — one good, one a "cheap little chiseler" — embroiled in a murder mystery in The Guilty (1947). (And to think just months earlier she’d been crushing on Andy Hardy at MGM.)

These programmer factories promoted personalities who only rated bit parts at the majors. Where else could sneering, square-faced Lawrence Tierney’s bullying malevolence float entire movies like The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) and The Hoodlum (1951)? Some noirs risked having no familiar faces at all. The docudrama-style Canon City (1948) uses real locations and (some) real inmates to recreate a Colorado prison break — one thwarted, in part, by a gutsy, home-invaded gramma-with-hammer.

While most titles here are known only to the most fanatical buffs, two come with minor cult status already attached. The craziest among fabled screenwriter Ben Hecht’s odd few directorial efforts, Specter of the Rose (1946) is an amour very-fou tale set in the ballet world, its prima ballerina imperiled by a dancing partner-spouse who experiences homicidal ideations when not husking heavy mush stuff: "Hug me with your eyes." "I am." "Harder!"

Likewise linguistically challenged in the best possible way is 1955’s Shack Out on 101, in which a young Lee Marvin unforgettably limns "Slob," bus boy extraordinaire forever pawing unaroused waitress Terry Moore. Meanwhile, lurking Commies plot to overthrow the American Way of Life, off-ramp greasy spoons included. With its hilariously pissed-off dialogue no obstacle to red-blooded patriotic display, Shack is a Cold War trash classic so plutonium-hot it smokes.

I WAKE UP DREAMING: THE HAUNTED WORLD OF THE B FILM NOIR

May 14–28, $10

Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF

(415)-863-1087, www.roxie.com

Stiglitz: The Spring of the Zombies

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Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.

It’s time for Plan B in bank restructuring and another dose of Keynsian medicine

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

New York – As spring comes to America, optimists are seeing “green sprouts” of recovery from the financial crisis and recession. The world is far different from what it was last spring, when the Bush administration was once again claiming to see “light at the end of the tunnel.” The metaphors and the administrations have changed, but not, it seems, the optimism.

The good news is that we may be at the end of a free fall. The rate of economic decline has slowed. The bottom may be near – perhaps by the end of the year. But that does not mean that the global economy is set for a robust recovery any time soon. Hitting bottom is no reason to abandon the strong measures that have been taken to revive the global economy.

Shop local, City Hall!

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news@sfbg.com

On Dec. 3, 2008, just before noon, Mayor Gavin Newsom arrived at a press conference in Noe Valley to remind city residents why it’s important to shop locally. The mayor climbed out of his shiny new hybrid SUV, walked into the Ark Toy Company, showed charts and graphs, and talked about how money spent in town helps the local economy. Joined by Steve Falk, president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Newsom urged holiday shoppers to look first in San Francisco before buying something on the Internet or in some suburban mall.

The mayor’s shop-local press conference was a clear sign that the debate over the role of small business in the San Francisco economy is over. Everyone from the mayor’s business advisors to the Chamber of Commerce to small business advocates and progressive economists now agrees that small local businesses provide the vast majority of the jobs, keep their money in town, and generate more tax dollars, more wealth, and more prosperity for this city than the big out-of-town chains.

It was a picture-perfect scene, until KPIX-TV reporter Hank Plante asked the mayor an embarrassing question: Why, he wanted to know, did the Mayor’s Office buy Newsom’s new car in Colma?

Newsom said he didn’t have a clue.

Actually, the reason was pretty simple: the dealership in Colma submitted the lowest bid. But San Francisco lost out on the sales tax, a local Chevy dealer that was going out of business lost a local sale, San Francisco workers lost a commission — and in the end, the city almost certainly lost more on the deal than it saved with the Colma discount.

That’s the untold story behind the mayor’s promotion. San Francisco, as a buyer of goods and services worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, does a terrible job at shopping local. Indeed, for years small business advocates have been trying to get city officials to make it easier for local merchants to get city contracts — and they’ve made very little progress.

"I’ve worked so hard on this, year after year, and nothing ever happens," Scott Hauge, a small business activist and organizer, told us. "After a while, I just threw in the towel."

Hauge is devoting his energy these days to statewide issues. But on the local level, there’s a growing sense that the city needs to do more to help small local businesses get their share of the massive public spending pie.

"The Small Business Commission has made it clear that this will be a priority over the next year," Regina Dick-Endrizzi, the commission’s acting director, told us.

Nobody knows exactly what percentage of city contracts for goods and services go to local businesses. Hauge said the Mayor’s Office did a limited survey about a year ago, but the data wasn’t very good. And while Newsom signed an executive order in 2005 directing departments to look for ways to patronize local businesses, there’s not much to show for it.

"I think probably less than 10 percent [of city spending] goes to local businesses," Hauge said.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, a former small business commissioner, agrees. "I think it’s accurate to say that at least 70 to 90 percent of all city contracts go to out-of-town businesses," he told us.

As Dick-Endrizzi pointed out, city purchasing has strict rules — and for good reason. "In most cases, you have to put out a request for proposals and take the lowest bid," she said. "If you didn’t have that, you’d have a big problem with favoritism."

But when the lowest bid is the only criterion, San Francisco businesses are at a distinct disadvantage.

"Say a city agency wants to buy five hammers," said Steven Cornell, owner of Brownie’s Hardware. "I have the hammers for $6, but somebody in Nowhere, Miss., can sell them for $5.99.

"Well, the shop in Mississippi doesn’t have to pay San Francisco’s minimum wage, doesn’t have to pay for sick days, doesn’t have to pay for health care … We’ve asked businesses to contribute to all these good social policies, then those businesses get penalized because someone else can sell something cheaper."

Cornell — who says he agrees that local businesses should pay well and give their workers benefits — is frustrated that when it comes to purchasing, the city doesn’t give anything back. "We lost S&C Ford, we lost Ellis Brooks Chevrolet," he said. "Those were all union jobs, with good benefits. And how many cars did the city buy from them?"

When Cornell was on the Small Business Commission, he remembered some small locally owned cabinet-making shops came to complain about a $4 million city contract for woodwork. "They told us that they lost the contract to a Canadian firm," he said. "The costs of operating in San Francisco were higher than in Canada, so they couldn’t compete."

"We do not as a city reflect the fact that we ask employers to do good things for their workers," Chiu added. "When we spend perhaps $1 billion a year in city contracts, those employers don’t have a level playing field."

Sure, on the surface and in the short term, the city gets a better deal when it awards contracts based entirely on price. But San Francisco has, as a matter of public policy, already decided there are good reasons to give minority-owned contractors some advantage in bidding, and that public contractors should pay prevailing union wages and offer benefits to domestic partners. Local enterprises get a modest advantage in some bids, but nowhere near enough to make up for the cost difference of operating in San Francisco.

And as Newsom himself has made clear, spending money locally has a long-term economic benefit that almost certainly outweighs the price differential in most bids. "When Newsom bought his car in Colma, the city lost the sales taxes, and lost the multiplier effect of the money being spent in town," Cornell noted.

In fact, a 2007 study by Civic Economics, sponsored by the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance, showed that if city residents shifted just 10 percent of their purchasing from national chains to locally-owned businesses, the city would gain 1,300 new jobs and $200 million in economic activity every year.

Imagine the activity — the positive benefits to the local economy — that would come with the city shifting, say, 25 percent of its spending to local businesses.

Obviously the city can’t buy everything in town. "Nobody in San Francisco makes Muni trains," Cornell noted. But a lot of what city departments buy, from hammers and paper to cars and trucks, is available from local suppliers — or could be. "If the city made it known it was looking to buy something locally, some entrepreneur would come along and figure out a way to supply it," Cornell said.

So how could this work on a policy level? It’s not that complicated. The city controller, or the Human Rights Commission, which oversees contracting policy, could devise a formula showing how much the cost of complying with city laws like the minimum wage, health care, and sick days (laws that most of us, and many small businesses, fully support) drives up the cost of doing business in San Francisco. Then give local merchants an equivalent advantage in the bidding process.

In other words, if the hammers at Brownie’s Hardware cost 25 cents more than the hammers in Nowhere, Miss., because Cornell pays for his workers’ health insurance, he should only have to come within 25 cents of the cut-rate suppliers’ price to get the city’s business. And if the taxpayers have to fork over a few cents more to buy local hammers, the money will come back, and more, from the demonstrated benefits of shopping locally.

Chiu thinks that’s a good idea, and he’s already taken the first steps to forcing the city to shop local. Chiu introduced legislation in April requiring the city to set aside a portion of all contracts for locally-wned businesses and to increase the financial advantage local firms get in bidding.

And at Chiu’s request, the HRC will appear before the supervisors Land Use Committee May 11 to present the latest data on how much city spending goes to local businesses. "I’ve been asking for this for two years," Chiu said.

"It is unwise for our city not to take $1 of public money and give it to a local business that will pass that dollar onto its local employee, who will then spend it at another local business," he added. "The multiplier effect of this is that money spent locally is better for the economy, and for the taxpayers."

Our 2009 Small Business Awards

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>>More on SFBG.com
Why can’t City Hall shop local?

EMPLOYEE-OWNED BUSINESS AWARD

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Photo by Pat Mazzera

CHURCH STREET FLOWERS

"It was really all about trust," says Stephanie Foster of Church Street Flowers, when asked about the benefits and perils of transferring ownership of the delightful bouquet boutique — and perennial Guardian Best of the Bay winner — near the Castro to the employees. Foster, along with Rachel Shinfeld and Brianna Foehr, took over in December 2008 from previous owners Michael Ritz and Thomas Teel, who’d run the shop for a decade. "The three of us had worked here for a while and we knew our stuff, so Michael and Tom knew they could rely on us to preserve the legacy. And the outpouring of support from our neighbors and regular customers has been overwhelming."

The ownership change of the cozy shop, bursting with vibrant blooms and friendly energy, went off without a hitch. "We were part of the lucky few who received a small business loan before the economic collapse," Shinfeld says. "But our business plan was smart, and the bank saw that we knew what we were doing." And, even in the current climate, business is thriving. "Our arrangements aren’t your standard cookie-cutter stuff," Foster says. "People nowadays want personalized, reasonably priced, green-minded, and locally sourced. We fit into all that — most of our flowers are from the downtown flower market and we keep an eye out for organic. Plus we strive to create a real connection with our customers, so we can give them exactly what they want."

"Sure, there have been some adjustments," Shinfeld adds. "There’s a lot of paperwork — and the first thing we needed to tackle was a Web site redesign. But our experience working here helped us through, and I think we’re just beginning to blossom in our new roles." (Marke B.)

CHURCH STREET FLOWERS

212 Church, SF

(415) 553-7762

www.churchstreetflowers.com

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GOLDEN SURVIVOR AWARD

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Photo by Charles Russo

GREEN APPLE BOOKS

What is the special ingredient that transforms a business from just another store into a place that makes people feel inspired and connected? After 42 years as a San Francisco independent bookseller, Green Apple Books and Music seems to have found it. Located on Clement Street in a building that predates the 1906 quake, it’s a "big, sprawling, dusty and funky new and used bookstore," as co-owner Pete Mulvihill describes it, creating an atmosphere for interactions that might seem impossible in a big-box store. Several weeks ago, for instance, a customer approached the store clerks, presented a CD, and requested that they play it. He also asked them to clear out the philosophy room. "I want it to myself for just a minute," he explained. The staff complied, the music started, and the man whisked his girlfriend into the philosophy room and proposed to her.

"To me, that’s an honor that somebody loves the place so much that they would propose to their girlfriend here," says Mulvihill, one of three owners and an employee for more than 15 years. A founding member of the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance, he has been at the forefront of a push to identify and promote the city’s small, independent businesses. "Locally-owned businesses recirculate more money in the local economy than national chains," the SFLOMA Web site points out.

"Frankly, we’re invested in the community," Mulvihill explains. "[We] love San Francisco, and we don’t want to go anywhere." (Rebecca Bowe)

GREEN APPLE BOOKS

506 Clement, SF

(415) 387-2272

www.greenapplebooks.com

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CHAIN ALTERNATIVE AWARD

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Photo by Charles Russo

HUT LANDON

Hut Landon is responsible the past few years for helping direct millions of dollars into small business in San Francisco and beyond, and millions more into the local economy.

He does it through his energetic and creative leadership of two key organizations that promote the interests of locally-owned small business. Landon has been the executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA), which promotes the interests of 200 independent bookstores in the region. He is also executive director of the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance (SFLOMA).

Under Landon’s stewardship, the two groups commissioned a pioneering 2007 study that quantified the value of locally-owned businesses in the city. Their stunning finding: if consumers redirected l0 percent of their retail purchases from chains to locally-owned merchants, the result would generate about $200 million for the economy, l,295 jobs, and $72 million new income for workers.

Landon’s timing could not have been better. As the economy tanked, local merchants and neighborhood business organizations used the l0 percent consumer shift as a mantra. The study also pointed out that the local economy could get another big boost if the city would shop locally with the tens of millions it now spends outside the city for goods and services.

Landon likes to use the example of two brothers who live together. One works on Potrero Hill and eats lunch at one of the many locally-owned restaurants. The other works at Stonestown shopping center and eats at a chain restaurant because that’s all there is out there. The Potrero Hill money, he points out, stays in the community. The chain store money is sent back to headquarters. (Bruce Brugmann)

HUT LANDON

Northern California Independent Booksellers Association

1007 General Kennedy, SF

(415) 561-7686

www.nciba.com

———–

SMALL BUSINESS ADVOCATE

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Photo by Abi Kelly

REGINA DICK-ENDRIZZI

Small business owners often feel as if they don’t have many advocates at City Hall. But they do have Regina Dick-Endrizzi.

Dick-Endrizzi, acting director of the Small Business Commission, has been moving rapidly on ways to help small businesses feel more comfortable dealing with the city — and to help them thrive in a tough economic environment. She helped establish the Small Business Assistance Center, which guides local merchants and prospective entrepreneurs through the thicket of city regulations. "It’s a tremendous asset," she told us. "When people walk through the door, we can take the time to help them develop a roadmap to doing business here." And she’s a driving force behind the Shop Local campaign, which will launch this month with bus shelter and bus-side ads designed to encourage San Franciscans to keep their money in town (co-sponsored by the Guardian).

Known in political circles as a former aide to Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, Dick-Endrizzi has a solid background in business. She moved to San Francisco in 1986 to open the Haight Street Buffalo Exchange store, and worked with that company for 13 years. "We bought our inventory from local people, and I had to have a close relationship with local small businesses," she said. "I have an intimate understanding of what it takes to run a business."

After several years in Mirkarimi’s office, she learned of the opening at the Small Business Commission, and plans to stay there for a while. "I truly believe in what this department offers to small business," she said. "There’s such a tremendous need." (Tim Redmond)

REGINA DICK-ENDRIZZI OFFICE OF SMALL BUSINESS

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, SF

(415) 554-6134

www.sfgov.org

————

GOOD NEIGHBOR AWARD

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URBAN SOLUTIONS

Urban Solutions has its roots in the South of Market Foundation, an economic development corporation formed in 1992 in response to what SoMa merchants, residents, and community-based organizations felt was a lack of accountability in their neighborhood’s development.

A decade later, the organization changed its name and Urban Solutions was born. Two years after that, the burgeoning nonprofit opened a second office, this time in the Western Addition, becoming an important source of service in both neighborhoods.

Urban Solution’s executive director Jenny McNulty says she is currently excited about her organization’s Green Business initiative, which helps educate small business on how to conserve resources and reduce their carbon footprints — and save money in the process.

McNulty is also amped about Urban Solution’s effort — undertaken with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency — to revitalize Sixth Street’s commercial corridor.

"We’re expanding our Green Business Initiative program, which offers free consulting to help small businesses go green by implementing cost-saving practices to increase the sustainability of their business operations," McNulty said.

Urban Solutions’ Sixth Street revitalization effort includes beautifying the area and helping businesses, in conjunction with Redevelopment Agency grants, by improving their facades, installing new awnings, repainting buildings, and replacing windows, storefronts, and entrance ways.

"Our focus is low-income businesses," McNulty said. (Sarah Phelan)

URBAN SOLUTIONS

1083 Mission, SF

(415) 553-4433

www.urbansolutionssf.org

————

GOOD NEIGHBOR AWARD

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Photo by Abi Kelly

JENS-PETER JUNGCLAUSSEN

Jens-Peter Jungclaussen had a dream: Buy a gutted, camouflage-painted school bus on eBay, convert it to biodiesel, and put it to use as a mobile classroom by day and a party on wheels by night, a rollicking omnibus of education, culture, and sustainability. With a few flicks of his wrist, Jungclaussen, a former German windsurfing pro and biology and PE teacher, transforms the bus to suit the need at hand — pulling down a movie screen from the roof; unpacking a buffet table, wet bar, or set of turntables from beneath the seats; or simply switching on the "party lights." Dubbed das Frachtgut ("the good freight"), the bus has hosted dinner parties on Twin Peaks, ecology classes in Muir Woods, sunrise raves on undisclosed beaches, and screenings of The Big Lebowski (complete with bowling and White Russians). It also serves as a mobile billboard for its various local, eco-friendly sponsors and can be rented for field trips and corporate events.

The ever-enthusiastic and tireless Jungclaussen recently turned his attentions to youth education, this year offering for the first time a "mobile summer camp." Teaming up with fellow teachers Michael Murnane, Gretchen Nelson, Justin Ancheta, and Leah Greenberg, he’ll present three, 11-day sessions on wheels that will introduce young people to a variety of Bay Area natural, artistic, and historical treasures. But don’t worry, the parties will still keep rolling. As Jungclaussen promises of the bus, "What you want it to be, it will become." (Marke B.)

JENS-PETER JUNGCLAUSSEN

(415) 424-1058

www.teacherbus.com

————

ARTHUR JACKSON DIVERSITY IN SMALL BUSINESS AWARD

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IRENE HERNANDEZ-FEIKS

It’s easy to assume that the purpose of Chillin’, the brainchild of Mexico City native Irene Hernandez-Feiks, is simply to have a good time. But the multimedia parties Hernandez-Feiks has been throwing for 11 years are much more than entertainment. Their actual purpose is to stimulate the economy and support one of the most difficult small businesses to sustain: the business of art.

A former designer herself, Hernandez-Feiks started out organizing weekly happy hours at 111 Minna where she would feature up to five independent Bay Area designers. Her philosophy? Charge the designers nothing for the opportunity and take no commission. The formula worked so well that Chillin’ eventually grew from weeknight happy hours to Saturday night events, complete with DJs. Now Chillin’ is a full-fledged happening — indeed, the June 13 anniversary show at Mezzanine features 180 photographers and artists, 40 filmmakers, 80 fashion designers, and 12 DJs.

But watching Chillin’ grow — and seeing participating artists transform themselves from local to international names — isn’t enough for Hernandez-Feiks. She also devotes much of her time to charity work, including involvement with Gen Art, the Mexican Consulate Cultural Affairs division, the United Nations and Natural World Museum, and the Art Seed Apprenticeship Program benefiting Bayview- Hunters Point youth.

"Because of Chillin’, I have relationships with so many artists," she says. "I want to use those connections to help everybody out." (Molly Freedenberg)

IRENE HERNANDEZ-FEIKS

Chillin Productions

(415) 285-1998

www.chillinproductions.com

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

The first time the Guardian made an issue of the role small businesses play in the local economy, official San Francisco freaked out.

It was 1985, and only a handful of people were talking about sustainable local economies, about the connection between environmentalism and community-based economics, about how malls and chains stores were ruining America, and how spending money locally would create more jobs, with less waste of energy, than shopping at Wal-Mart or Home Depot.

The Guardian hired MIT economist David Birch to produce a study on job generation in San Francisco. His conclusion: small, locally-owned, independent businesses generated the vast majority of jobs in San Francisco. That directly contradicted the fundamental thesis driving city planning at the time; the planners and the mayor (Dianne Feinstein) argued that high-rise office development was the city’s prime source of new jobs.

The day the study came out, the city planning director (Dean Macris) called in his senior staff and directed them to work all weekend poring over our study and trying to figure out how to discredit it. Feinstein ignored us. The supervisors continued to allow high-rises to sprout, damaging small business and the local economy. The Chamber of Commerce was so disdainful of small business that a group of Fisherman’s Wharf merchants quit in disgust.

Today that battle is over. Done. The argument isn’t even an argument anymore. Everyone, from Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Chamber on down, agrees that locally-owned businesses are the lifeblood of the San Francisco economy. The mayor goes around urging people to "shop local."

But as we suggest in this special issue on San Francisco small business, the city itself isn’t doing such a great job at that. In fact, the public sector in general has been trained for so long to do business with the lowest bidder that the role a major institution like the city and county of San Francisco can play in boosting the local economy has gotten lost.

A 2007 study sponsored by the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance shows that if local residents shifted just 10 percent of their purchases from big chains to local businesses, the city’s economy would pick up $200 million and 1,300 new jobs a year. Imagine if City Hall, BART, state agencies, the school district — every public sector agency in this city — did the same. *

Prison report: Health care, the Rolling Stones and Oscar Wilde

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Editor’s note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His reports from the inside appear Mondays and Thursdays. He will respond to questions and comments, but since communications out of the state prison system are often difficult, it may take a little while.

By Just A Guy

Last week’s blog didn’t get as much response as I had hoped, but got what I expected. It is obvious that even the left is less concerned with the general living condition of prisoners than with the impact on the economy and society in general, but I think it is being overlooked that the way we are treated often results in de-sensitized individuals being released into to a world they now view as more agressive and unfair. I will use this to seque into medical and mental health care as this is a portrait of how we’re treated, too.

To say there is inadequate mental health care would be a gross understatement, this has been verified (by Elaina Jannell in previous posts) with respect to California State Prison-Solano. Keep in mind that Solano is supposed to be a pilot program prison, a place where they bring the politicians and tour groups to show what a great job the California Deparment of Corrections and Rehabilition is doing and how all your tax money is being spent.

Well, that’s Solano, not here or the other thirty-two prisons. If the mental health care is inadequate at a pilot program, imagine what it’s like somewhere that isn’t under the microscope!

I am one of those people that is supposed to be getting mental health care, but I have not seen anyone from the mental health staff in well over a year. While I feel I am well adjusted and, quite frankly, don’t hold the services in high regard (for obvious reasons) there are people around me who have blatantly obvious mental/psychological disorders that DO NOT receive care. The CDCR answer seems to be paint.

Betchya wonder what the hell I’m talking about.

What’s all the fuss about Articles 10 & 11?

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By Rebecca Bowe

The San Francisco Building & Construction Trades Council is planning a “Rally for Jobs” on May 5 at Civic Center Plaza to oppose “a measure on historic preservation that would kill much of our work,” according to an announcement on the council’s Web site. “Work is hard to find now. Don’t let it go away forever,” the announcement declares. At issue is the rewrite of Articles 10 and 11 of the city’s planning code, which deal with historic preservation and are integrally linked with the newly created Historic Preservation Commission.

There’s no question that the effects of an unstable economy and the downward slide of the housing market have led to a shortage in construction jobs, and it’s clear that the workers in this industry are hurting. At the Democratic party luncheon picket last week, I spoke with a number of masons, electricians and others who were struggling to make ends meet while they were out of work. Some 400 workers in the bricklayers union alone have lost their jobs, one union member told me, and times are tough.

But is the Historic Preservation Commission to blame? Would the pending revisions of Articles 10 and 11 really be the last nail in the coffin for development in San Francisco, obliterating the last remaining construction jobs in the city? I called the city Planning Department to find out what this rewrite will mean for the city and was directed to Tara Sullivan, who works in legislative affairs and has been deeply involved in the process. “There’s some speculation that this will halt development around the city,” Sullivan told me. “But it’s not an anti-development tool at all. And it’s not citywide.”

Dining on dimes

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Dining on dimes

It’s a hard time to be a foodie in San Francisco. It seems as though there have never been more places to eat delicious, creative, innovative food in the Bay Area — nor less money in my wallet to spend at such places. But I’m determined not to let the bad economy ruin all my fun. Or yours. It’s simply that tighter budgets require more careful choices about where and how to indulge. Which is why we’ve put together this season’s FEAST with an eye on getting the most bang for your buck.

Turn the page for ideas about how to stretch one chicken into three fabulous meals, as well as how to splurge at a restaurant without blowing your monetary wad. If you’re going to spend some cash, consider our suggestions for date spots, sandwiches, and sustainably-minded seafood restaurants worth the money. We’ve also compiled a list of our favorite juice stops, New Orlean’s style cocktail pourers, eco-friendly caterers, and sweet shops so you never have to waste a penny at a place that doesn’t match your tastes or your values. And who knows? By the time summer comes along, perhaps the economy will turn around. But if not, there’s nothing to raise your spirits faster than a responsibly-farmed oyster and a cheap happy hour beer.

SF Weekly’s anti-porn prude

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By Tim Redmond

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The New York Post — whoops, it was actually the SF Weekly — was shocked and horrified by the concept that a state-funded training program might help video tech folks who work at kink.com. Here’s the lead:

California taxpayers have paid $46,791 so that employees of the San Francisco pornographer Kink.com might produce more perfect web-based depictions of motorized dildo impalements …

I don’t need to go on.

The thing here is, so what? Kink.com is a legitimate, legal San Francisco business that employs 100 people, treats them and pays them well, has transformed a wasteland of an empty building into a going concern … and I think it’s great that the people who work there (who also happen to be part of the film and media industry in San Francisco) got to use a state job-training program.

This is good for the local economy. “We are training San Francisco’s workforce for the film and televison industry,” said Kink’s Ilana Rothman. “People who have worked for us are winning awards at film festivals.”

The story is remarkable in its prudishness, and it takes the insulting tack of implying that the models who work at Kink are somehow forced into their jobs. “We couldn’t be more explicit about how safe and consensual our work is,” Rothman told me. And every indication I’ve gotten from every Guardian staffer who’s visited Kink and talked to the workers agrees.

The real scandal here is that Matt Smith personally busted Kink and cost a good employer its training money.

Splurge and save

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We often find ourselves at a crossroads between what we want to eat and what we can afford to eat. I want champagne and caviar, but I settle for beer and a tuna sandwich. I want stuffed quail, but I buy a rotisserie chicken. Given the economy, there is something about splurging on food that seems almost inappropriate. These are uncertain times, when everyone is trying to save money and even the most extravagant are keeping an eye on the size of their wallets. In the hierarchy of oxymorons, "cost-effective splurge" ranks up there with Microsoft Works, compassionate conservative, and Gov. Schwarzenegger.

We live in a city where the average meal cost is $38.70, according to the most recent Zagat survey, and the price of a splurge can land well into the three digits. Even so, treating yourself to good food doesn’t necessarily mean an orgy of excessive expenditure. And if you spend your money wisely, you’ll find that even in a city as expensive as ours, great dining deals can be found — even if your cravings are more Niman Ranch and your budget more Oscar Meyer. The following are some tips on how to get the most out of your money when you treat yourself to a gourmet meal on the town.

1. BYOB. The cardinal rule of smart splurging is to bring your own alcohol. Alcohol has a notoriously exorbitant mark-up at restaurants, but some restaurants allow you to BYOB for a small corkage fee or, even better, for free. Anchor Oyster Bar (579 Castro, SF. 415-431-3990, www.anchoroysterbar.com), Indigo (687 McAllister, SF. 415-673-9353, www.indigorestaurant.com), and PlumpJack Cafe (3127 Fillmore, SF. 415-563-4755, www.plumpjack.com) never charge corkage. Some restaurants will comp corkage one or more nights of the week. Laiola (2031 Chestnut, SF. 415-346-5641, www.laiola.com) has free corkage on Mondays, Zazie (941 Cole, SF. 415-564-5332, www.zaziesf.com) on Tuesdays, and Alamo Square Seafood Grill (803 Fillmore, SF. 415-440-2828, www.alamosquareseafoodgrill.com) on Wednesdays.

2. Parlay happy hour. Bars and restaurants regularly offer great deals in that dead-zone between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., a time I fondly refer to as "lunchtime." At Andalu (3198 16th St., SF. 415-621-2211), Tuesday happy hour means $1 ahi tuna tacos. At Olive, (743 Larkin, SF. 415-776-9814, www.olive-sf.com) drink a perfectly mixed, classic martini for $5 on weekdays, followed by a $7 pizza large enough to split with friends. And don’t forget the tastiest of all happy hours: oysters! Happy hour oysters are $1 each at Woodhouse Fish Company (2073 Market, SF. 415-437-2722, www.woodhousefish.com) on Tuesdays, at Hog Island Oyster Company (1 Ferry Bldg, SF. 415-391-7117, www.hogislandoysters.com) on Mondays and Thursdays, and at Waterbar (399 The Embarcadero, SF. 415-284-9922, www.waterbarsf.com) on weekdays before 6pm.

3. Explore specials. Restaurants are feeling the economic downturn just as much as we are, and to usher in customers, many been offering tempting and reasonable "recession specials". Case in point: on Sunday through Thursday nights, Luna Park (694 Valencia, SF. 415-553-8584, www.lunaparksf.com) currently offers a rotating "blue plate special" priced from $10 to $12, with accompanying drink specials for $5.

4. Decide ahead. Most restaurants have online menus, and if you choose what you want before you get to the restaurant, you’ll prevent yourself from making impulse orders at the last minute.

5. Go prix fixe. At many restaurants, you can eat a delicious three-course meal for under $25 if you order off the prix fixe menu. Baker Street Bistro (2953 Baker, SF. 415-931-1475, www.bakerstbistro.com) offers a popular three course prix fixe dinner menu that includes soup, chef’s choice of an entree, and any dessert for $14.50. At Pisces (3414 Judah, SF. 415-564-2233, www.greenopia.com), start off with an organic green salad, followed by Muscovy duck leg with pear compote, and end with a crème brulée, all for $23.

6. Try lunch. According to Zagat’s San Francisco Dining Deals Guide, lunch items are generally 25 percent to 30 percent less expensive than dinner items, even if both menus are exactly the same.

7. Take a class. Give a man a fish taco and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to sauté a whitefish and make his own fish taco with mango salsa, and he’ll eat well for the rest of his life, plus impress his friends. Emily Dellas (www.emilydellas.com) at First Class Cooking, teaches three-course cooking classes out of her beautiful SoMa studio for $55, which covers all the ingredients. Post-cooking, you’ll sit down and eat the gourmet goodies you learned to make.

8. Go ethnic. Dining at ethnic restaurants is a great way to eat sumptuously without spending every penny in your pocket, since hole-in-the-wall places are almost always better than the expensive versions. Shalimar (532 Jones, SF. 415-776-4642, www.shalimarsf.com) is easily one of the best Indian restaurants in San Francisco, and most entrees on the menu are under $5 (BYOB). With prices like that, you can justify heading up the street afterward to The Hidden Vine (620 Post, SF. 415-674-3567, www.thehiddenvine.com) for some chocolate truffles and a glass of wine.

One chicken. Two people. Three gourmet meals.

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culture@sfbg.com

It’s hard enough to eat well when the economy’s good, when time and commitments and plain old laziness getting in the way. But when there’s hardly enough money in your wallet for Cup O’ Noodle and a Coors Light, cooking gourmet food can seem damn near impossible. But fear not, Bay Area penny-pinchers. With only one chicken, a few additional simple ingredients, and some time, you can make three whole meals for two people.

But how? That’s exactly what I asked three Bay Area star chefs — Alice Waters, Gary Danko, and Traci Des Jardins. I challenged each of these SF heavy-hitters to come up with one mouthwatering, gourmet meal for two people using only one-third of a chicken plus a few low-cost ingredients.

And oh, how they delivered! Alice Waters offered a recipe for chicken breasts, Gary Danko turned in a chicken leg recipe, and Traci Des Jardin thought up a delicious soup, made from the previous the leftover chicken bones of the two previous meals.

Below are their simple, savory recipes. (But first, some advice from Danko: When you’re planning to make a few meals out of a whole chicken, always eat the breast first. The longer the breast is refrigerated, the more it will dry out. The legs, on the other hand, will retain their moisture and flavor even after refrigeration and reheating.)

ALICE WATERS’ CHICKEN BREASTS ESCOFFIER


1 whole large chicken breast, about 3/4 pound

salt and pepper to taste

12 tablespoons clarified unsalted butter

1 cup fine fresh bread crumbs

1/2 box cherry tomatoes

Skin and bone the chicken breast, and cut it in half. Remove the tendons and any fat from the two single breasts. Salt and pepper the breasts and fold the tenderloins to the side of each breast so the meat is evenly thick.

Dip the breasts in a flat dish with 6 tablespoons of the clarified butter to coat both sides. Pat the breasts in the bread crumbs to form a crust. Let the breasts stand for 10 minutes.

Heat 3 tablespoons clarified butter in a heavy cast-iron pan over medium heat. When the butter is hot, put the breasts in the pan, season with salt and pepper, and reduce the heat to medium-low. Sauté gently for 5 minutes, turn, and sauté on the other side for 5 minutes. The crust should be a rich golden brown.

Heat 2 or 3 tablespoons clarified butter in a small saucepan. Put the chicken breast on two warm serving places and pour some of the butter over each chicken breast. Serve with briefly sautéed cherry tomatoes.

GARY DANKO’S BAKED MUSTARD CHICKEN LEGS


2 chicken legs, thigh and drumstick attached (depending on the size of the chicken, you may need two more)

1/2 cup dried breadcrumbs or panko

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1 tablespoon chopped parsley

salt and pepper to taste

3 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1/2 teaspoon chopped tarragon, optional

(you may substitute 1/4 cup of breadcrumbs with 1/4 cups chopped nuts of choice)

Trim excess skin from thigh end of chicken. On parchment paper, combine breadcrumbs, garlic, parsley, tarragon, and salt and pepper. Mix well. Using a pastry brush, lightly paint the mustard on chicken legs. Coat legs with the breadcrumb mixture. Place single layer on a sheet pan or in a roasting pan and bake in a 350 degree oven for 45 to 50 minutes until completely cooked.

This dish may be served hot or cold.

TRACI DES JARDINS’ CHICKEN STOCK AND CHICKEN VEGETABLE SOUP


Chicken Stock

leftover chicken bones

1/2 cup each chopped carrot, onion, celery

1 sprig thyme

Pick off and set aside any remaining morsels of meat from the bones, place the bones and skin into a pot, and barely cover with water. Add carrot, celery, onion, thyme, and cook at a simmer for about 3 hours. Keep adding small amounts of water as necessary to keep the level just above the bones. Strain the stock.

(Although most people discard the remainders, Gary Danko remembers that his grandfather "loved to eat the remainders of the stock pot. Being an old Hungarian, he called it ‘a Hungarian picnic.’")

Chicken Vegetable Soup

6 cups chicken stock

1 cup each diced onion, carrot, and celery

2 cups cabbage, roughly chopped

2 cups potato, cubed

2 cups cooked rice or beans

chicken from carcass, shredded and seasoned to taste

1/2 cup pork product, cubed*

Curry, saffron, bay, pimento, or a pinch of Esplette pepper

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Juice of one lemon (add at the very end)

(Use either the chicken pieces that have been picked from the bone, or use a bit of bacon or other cured pork product. Render it or not — your choice, but include it nonetheless. The flavor will keep you coming back for more, and the fat — yes, there will be fat — helps our bodies realize we are really having a great meal.)

Sauté the onion, carrot, and celery in oil for five minutes, or until soft.

Then add spice seasonings and the pork product if you are including pork. Stir and cook for five minutes, then add in the stock and bring to simmer. Let it simmer slowly for 15 minutes, then add the rice, potato, or beans (or all three) and let simmer another 15 minutes. Season to taste. Makes about 6 quarts. Freeze all but two, no matter what the yield. Finally, when you heat up a meal’s worth of soup, add a raw egg to the pot. Turn the heat down very low and cover. In three minutes, dish it up. Add a dash of sriracha sauce and a teaspoon of good extra-virgin olive oil. Serve with a slice of good bread on the side.

CLARIFIED BUTTER, CLARIFIED

Clarifying butter removes the milk solids and water from the part of the butter you want for sautéing — the translucent, bright yellow butterfat that can be brought to high temperatures without burning. (The smoking point of clarified butter — also known as ghee, the beloved cooking fat of India — is 485 degrees. By contrast, whole butter smokes at 350 degrees and virgin olive oil smokes at 375 degrees.)

For the Chicken Breasts Escoffier, you’ll need two sticks of unsalted butter to begin with. Cut the butter into one-inch cubes, and heat it in a heavy-bottomed pot over a low flame. As the butter melts, it will separate into three layers — a thin foamy top layer, a middle layer of clarified butterfat, and a bottom layer of white milk fat. Skim off and discard the foam, and ladle the bright yellow butterfat into a heat-proof container. Discard the milk fat. You may need to continue skimming bits of foam off the top until your mixture is pure. You will keep around 80 percent of the butter you started with.


TIPS FOR LOW-COST COOKING FROM GARY DANKO
Meal planning is a great way to cut your grocery bill. If you go to the store less frequently, there’s less impulse buying. It also keeps you from running to the store next door, where you’ll pay more for your food.
•The cost of meat has been going up. The best way to cut back on the amount of meat you use is by substituting a healthy filler, like tofu, in your meatloaf recipe. Try to stretch a pound of meat into two recipes instead of one or substitute meat with less expensive ingredients like beans.
•Risotto is a great, inexpensive way of getting a lot of bang for your buck and it can be used as a base for endless flavor profiles using leftovers.
•Take a doggie bag if you have steak or chicken leftover from your restaurant visit. Just last night I had some steak and a double cut pork chop left over from a restaurant dinner. For lunch, I took a can of Amy’s vegetarian chili, a can of rinsed kidney beans, and a cup of store-bought salsa, combined them with the chopped meats, doctored them with spices, and simmered the mixture for 10 minutes. I had rice I made two days before, a dollop of sour cream, and a spoonful of salsa. It fed four people a hearty lunch.



For a special bonus recipe from Gary Danko, check out our

Don’t drill here

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY When U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar looked out at a sea of faces during a San Francisco public hearing April 16, a band of activists dressed as polar bears, sea turtles, and other marine creatures stood out from the rest. Their message, also articulated by a host of federal and state-elected officials, was unequivocally clear: no new oil and gas drilling off the California coast.

Waving a thick document in the air, Salazar explained that he’d inherited a five-year plan from the Bush administration to award new leases for oil and gas drilling in the federally controlled outer continental shelf, which comprises some 1.7 billion underwater acres off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska.

Rather than move the policy as planned, Salazar extended public comment for six months, met with stakeholders in each region, and placed greater emphasis on developing offshore renewable energy. The San Francisco public hearing was the last in a series of four that Salazar attended.

"One of the significant issues that is so important to President Obama is that we move forward with a new energy frontier," Salazar said. He advocated embracing offshore wind and other renewable alternatives as part of a "comprehensive energy plan going forward." Yet Salazar also indicated that future plans for the nation’s energy mix were "not to the exclusion of oil and gas," and mentioned that opportunities for "clean coal" technology should also be considered.

Under the five-year plan, three new leases are proposed off California’s coast — two in the south, and one in the Point Arena Basin, an underwater swath near Fort Bragg. Elected officials unanimously opposed any new offshore petroleum development. "Our state clearly is saying to you today, no," declared Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "Instead of putting our California coast and economy in jeopardy, we need to look at … green technology which will bring us new jobs."

Lt. Gov. John Garamendi sounded a similar note, saying the billions that would be invested in offshore oil could be put toward advancing clean energy. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma) highlighted the risk of oil spills around the Point Arena Basin. "It could be turned from a wellspring of life into a death plume," she said. "This shimmering band of coast must be protected."

While nearly every testimony blasted new offshore oil development, the conversation brightened when Salazar asked for comments on renewable energy. According to estimates by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, offshore wind in shallow areas could provide some 20 percent of the electricity needs of coastal states nationwide. Wave energy, while still under study, might one day generate enough electricity to power some 197 million homes per year, according to Department of the Interior estimates.

Most of the oil that could be extracted from the outer continental shelf would come from the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, with some 10 billion barrels potentially available off the Pacific coast. Joe Sporano of the Western States Petroleum Association said offshore drilling could create jobs and limit dependence on foreign oil. Yet Boxer pointed out that, based on Energy Information Administration figures, drilling for oil across all areas would yield just 1 percent of the nation’s total oil consumption by 2030 — and it’s not believed to make a real difference in gas prices.

Richard Charter, government relations consultant with Defenders of Wildlife, seemed confident that California’s coast would be protected. "You have a new interior secretary for an administration that received California electoral votes … in a state that is pretty much single-minded in its position in terms of saving the coast," he said.

Charter’s optimism was helped by a recent federal appeals court ruling against the previous administration’s plan to award new offshore-drilling leases in the Arctic.

So now, "whatever Secretary Salazar does will have his own stamp on it," Charter said. "In each of these hearings, it’s become apparent that the Obama administration may be coming around to a new approach."

Public comment for the offshore leasing plan ends in late September. Salazar told reporters that he expects a decision by the end of the year.

Uncivil unions

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steve@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLUMBERS VS. PROGRESSIVES


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE STATE OF LABOR


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the Mazzola fight was one that neither side relished.

TO THE BRINK


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shades of green

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sarah@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

In 1984, journalists Milton Moskowitz and Robert Levering published a landmark book called The 100 Best Places to Work for in America. I didn’t want to work for any of them. The list is updated every year through the San Francisco-based Great Places to Work Institute, and it runs in Fortune.

The institute looks at things like pay, benefits, and perks, as well as at trust and culture: Does management accept input freely? Are workers in involved in key decisions? Do people feel part of a team? All of these are important factors in a workplace.

But the selection process doesn’t look at what the company actually does.

For example, Texas Instruments is on the list. It’s also a defense contractor that makes precision-guided weapons systems. You know, bombs. Starbucks — the voracious chain that drives out small local coffee shops — is on the list. So is Whole Foods and Microsoft and Goldman Sachs.

I’m not saying that Levering, who runs the institute, isn’t doing good work. But when you talk about great places to work these days, I think you also should be talking about places that have a positive impact on the environment.

The world is facing two cataclysmic crises these days. The planet is melting down. So is the economy. The only way we’re going to fix both is to look at economic development that is also environmental development. And a lot of it is going to happen in cities.

Real sustainable development includes green jobs (Bay Area activist Van Jones is bringing that agenda to the White House) — and a commitment to preserving locally-owned, independent businesses and a diverse community.

Those aren’t conflicting goals, they’re complimentary. But looking only at one piece of the puzzle — how many jobs we create, or how nice they are — isn’t going to get us where we need to go. *

Gavin Newsom’s Earth Day

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EDITORIAL Here’s a snapshot of the state of green San Francisco, as we approach Earth Day 2009:

• San Francisco ought to be getting $18 million a year for energy-efficiency programs, but the money instead goes to Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which is wasting half of it.

•Mayor Gavin Newsom went to Washington, D.C. to participate in a Newsweek panel on the environment and called for a transformation of the American automotive industry just a few days after the city’s transportation agency decided to cut $56 million out of Muni, increase transit fares by $30 million — and hike fees for car parking by just $11 million.

•The city stands to get millions in federal stimulus money for green jobs — but nobody knows how many jobs the money will create, where they will come from, or who will get them.

This doesn’t seem the best way for one of the most liberal cities in America to respond to the environmental and economic crisis.

As Rebecca Bowe reports on page 10, PG&E is managing part of a multibillion dollar program aimed at cutting electricity demand. It’s a laudable goal — in fact, the cheapest way to reduce the use of fossil fuels and dirty power is to use less in the first place.

But the private utilities are a bad fit for any program that seeks to cut demand. Every year PG&E tells Wall Street how it expects to grow — and since the company’s product is electricity and natural gas, that means PG&E has no incentive at all to shrink its market. Not surprisingly, the giant utility has done a crappy job of running the program, failing to meet even its modest goals.

But state law allows cities to apply to run the local programs themselves — and data from across California show that public sector, non-utility programs do a far better job of lowering electricity use. So why isn’t San Francisco applying for that money? Because the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission thinks it’s "premature."

That’s crazy — the money could create local green jobs, reduce energy demand, and cut PG&E waste. It’s an obvious choice, and the supervisors should pass a resolution directing the PUC to take on this program.

The supervisors no longer have control over Muni fare hikes, but when they examine the city budget, they should take a hard look at what Newsom’s transit planners are doing. Cutting bus service during a recession, when low-cost transportation is needed more than ever, is generally a bad idea. So is raising Muni fares. Why are the car drivers, who are generally richer (and many of whom are commuters from wealthier suburbs) getting off so cheap?

The supervisors also need to be monitoring closely the federal stimulus money and the creation of green jobs. The single most important thing San Francisco can be doing right now is creating jobs in the green economy. In fact, there ought to be a city loan fund just for local green-collar startups. Instead, while Newsom is prancing around the country running for governor, his staff seems flummoxed by the whole process. The city needs a goal — say, 5,000 new green-collar jobs for unemployed San Franciscans in the next five years — a plan to create them, and a program to use the available federal money.

Newsom seems to have plenty of ideas for Detroit. We’d love to see him start to focus on San Francisco. *

What’s in the Republicans’ tea?

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By Steven T. Jones
alice_party.jpg
As overhyped and ridiculous as tomorrow’s Republican Tea Party events are, I find them a fascinating manifestation of the perplexing posture of victimhood that the US ruling class and its right-wing shills seem to revel in. So I might just have to pop down to Civic Center Plaza from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. tomorrow to see San Francisco’s festivities.

The US has one of the lowest rates of taxation in the industrialized world. Fiscal conservatives have been calling the political shots in this country since 1980, resulting in an extraordinary consolidation of wealth, a threadbare social safety net, and an economic system collapsing because we refused to regulate greed and corruption.

“Yet on this Tax Day, all taxpaying Americans should be concerned that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats’ runaway tax hikes will be the death of America’s economy as they extend the ‘Pelosi Recession,’” warned National Republican Congressional Committee director Guy Harrison in an alarming mass e-mail. “This week, thousands of patriotic Americans will gather to protest oppressive government taxation, and stand as one for fiscal sanity at tea parties across the nation.”

Really? We should all be alarmed that Congress and President Barack Obama are considering increasing the upper income tax bracket by a couple of percentage points? Frankly, I’m pissed that they’re being too timid in getting our money back from the rich motherfuckers who stole it. And I certainly feel that our corporate-sponsored political system is essentially taxation without representation from those of us who can’t afford a campaign contribution.

So maybe we’re all a little indignant.

Stiglitz: Developing Countries and the Global Crisis

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Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.

Developing Countries and the Global Crisis

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

NEW YORK – This year is likely to be the worst for the global economy since World War II, with the World Bank estimating a decline of up to 2%. Even developing countries that did everything right – and had far better macroeconomic and regulatory policies than the United States did – are feeling the impact. Largely as a result of a precipitous fall in exports, China is likely to continue to grow, but at a much slower pace than the 11-12% annual growth of recent years. Unless something is done, the crisis will throw as many as 200 million additional people into poverty.

This global crisis requires a global response, but, unfortunately, responsibility for responding remains at the national level. Each country will try to design its stimulus package to maximize the impact on its own citizens – not the global impact. In assessing the size of the stimulus, countries will balance the cost to their own budgets with the benefits in terms of increased growth and employment for their own economies. Since some of the benefit (much of it in the case of small, open economies) will accrue to others, stimulus packages are likely to be smaller and more poorly designed than they otherwise would be, which is why a globally coordinated stimulus package is needed.

SF to allow Big Wheel event after all

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By Steven T. Jones

Under pressure from the community, the Mayor’s Office, and Sup. Sophie Maxwell, organizers of this Sunday’s Bring Your Own Big Wheel event say the San Francisco Police Department has reversed its position and will allow the event to happen as long as organizers promise to apply for permits next year, which they have agreed to do.

“This could be the start of something really cool,” said Tom Price, who has been lobbying City Hall on behalf of the event, whose organizers have reached out to neighbors, rented porta-potties, stressed responsibility, and promised a vigorous cleanup effort.

As we reported yesterday, the SFPD had taken a hard line on this increasingly popular annual event. Capt. John Loftus told organizers, “We will barricade the street and you won’t be able to go two feet anywhere on that block. If downtown wants to come up with another solution, fine.”

But downtown apparently intervened. Earlier in the day, I spoke with top mayoral adviser Mike Farrah, who had been working with Price to reach a resolution. “These events are important to San Francisco. I think they are vital to the foundation of our economy, not to mention, they’re fun,” Farrah, who has become something of a City Hall liaison to the Burning Man community, told me. “And I think there’s been an effort to try to be responsible.”

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