Election

The Zoo Blues

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This story was first published May 19, 1999

IN EARLY 1997, the San Francisco Zoo had a serious public-relations problem. The zoo wanted San Francisco voters to approve a $48 million bond measure to overhaul the facilities. But the Asian elephant exhibit was making the zoo look bad.

Tinkerbelle the elephant had been living alone since April 1995, when her longtime companion, Pennie, was put to sleep. Animal activists had been complaining that, for an animal that herds and has complex social interactions in the wild, life alone was cruel and unacceptable. According to the minutes from a board meeting of the San Francisco Zoological Society, the private group that manages the zoo, executive director David Anderson decided it was time to find a friend for Tinkerbelle. He thought he found her in Calle.

Calle was about 30 years old and on exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo. She had put in her time entertaining humans, working shows in Las Vegas and giving rides to kids at the San Diego Zoo. Animal advocates in Los Angeles were trying to get her to a sanctuary in Tennessee. But Anderson decided he wanted her in San Francisco.
Animal rights advocates hated the idea. Gretchen Wyler, executive director of Endocino-<\h>based Arc Trust came to San Francisco to check out the zoo’s facilities. “I was devastated when I saw how small and barren it was,” Wyler told the Bay Guardian.

S.F. Zoo curator David Robinett denies that the decision to move Calle to San Francisco had anything to do with the timing of the bond campaign. “We were anxious to move ahead and get a companion for Tinkerbelle,” he told us.
Either way, the zoo was in a hurry — and it wound up with a huge problem on its hands. Before leaving Los Angeles, Calle was tested for tuberculosis. According to Susanne Barthell, who ran the Council for Excellence in Zoo Animal Management until her death last fall, the elephant population at the L.A. Zoo was known to have problems with T.B., a claim Robinett denies. But S.F. Zoo officials did not wait for the test results to come back before they brought Calle north on March 19, 1997.

The tests came back positive. The zoo had just bought a tuberculous elephant.

As soon as she arrived, Calle had to be quarantined from her new companion. And the financially troubled zoo got hit with elephantine medical bills. Calle’s treatment would run from $60,000 to $65,000 a year, curator Robinett told the city’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare in July.

It got worse. In separating the elephants, zoo workers put Calle in the cushier exhibit quarters, which at least had some vegetation and a watering hole. Tinkerbelle was moved to neighboring quarters, without vegetation or water. She had to poke her trunk through a hole in the wall to refresh herself. (Only this month was the electrified barrier between the two areas removed permanently. Calle is cured, and the two elephants can now interact.)

The elephant debacle is all too typical. San Francisco’s zoo has never been one of the country’s best — but six years after it was placed in private hands, it’s in worse shape than ever. Privatization was supposed to save the zoo; instead it has failed it. A Bay Guardian investigation based on interviews and documents shows:

* Dozens of animals live in squalid, substandard conditions: primates have died because of disease-<\h>ridden cages, orangutans are cooped up in tiny cement boxes, rare rainforest mammals are losing hair.

* The number of zoo employees charged with taking care of the animals has plummeted — while the number of other employees has doubled.

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture is so frustrated with the S.F. Zoo’s animal mistreatment, it is threatening to fine the zoo thousands of dollars — and one foundation that had given hundreds of thousands to the zoo has withdrawn its funding.

* Thanks to a string of expensive bond issues, the public is still paying for the zoo, but zoo executive director David Anderson has seen his own salary substantially boosted.

* Marketing expenses have skyrocketed, and the zoo is heavily dependent on amusement park–<\d>type rides and other non-educational attractions to break even.

* City officials have become so skeptical of the zoo society’s ability to manage itself that Board of Supervisors president Tom Ammiano called for an audit last spring. Stanton W. Jones, an auditor who works for budget analyst Harvey Rose, is expected to release the audit late this summer.

In fact, the zoo is a case study of everything that is wrong with privatization.

A bad place to live


The push to privatize the zoo got rolling in 1990, when David Anderson was brought in from New Orleans’s Audubon Park and Zoological Garden. The zoo’s infrastructure was crumbling, and its finances were in bad shape. Sources in the Recreation and Park Department say Anderson enthusiastically advocated privatization as a solution.
Without accepting bids from other organizations, Rec and Park handed over control of the zoo to the private San Francisco Zoological Society, which had been raising money for the zoo since 1954. In the summer of 1993 the society agreed to lease the premises and take over management of the zoo, promising to balance its budget by June 30, 1998 (see “Sold!,” 10/19/94).

Anderson has made out handsomely from the deal. In 1994 the society paid him $81,443; by 1997 his total compensation had gone up to $148,500, including a $25,000 bonus — in a year when the zoo was still losing money.

The animals have fared much worse.

Within the past two months the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which governs animal care in zoos, has issued the society a warning. According to the USDA, inspectors have repeatedly notified zoo administrators about problems. If those problems aren’t corrected, the agency is now threatening to fine the zoo.

“We made it clear that they are not doing a good job on maintenance,” Wensley Koch, supervisory animal care specialist with the USDA’s western sector office, told the Bay Guardian. “Basically there’s a management problem.”
Records of inspection reports dating back to 1990 reveal problems throughout the zoo facilities — from the big cats’ lairs to the monkeys’ quarters. Wood is rotting; fences are rusting. Rats get into food areas and leave droppings.
Many of the problems are associated with the primate center, which has been a trouble spot since it was built in 1985. The colobus monkeys’ metal climbing bars were grooved. Since keepers couldn’t clean them of feces, the monkeys got sick from contact with their own excrement. The colobus population was decimated. According to Sandra Keller of Citizens for a Better Zoo, which was watch<\h>dogging the zoo at the time, 53 of the 85 primates in the center died.

“Once they opened it, the animals started dying,” Keller told the Bay Guardian. “They didn’t quarantine the new animals sufficiently when they were brought in. They basically wiped out the whole primate collection. It was heartbreaking.”

But turning the zoo over to the private society didn’t help. If anything, conditions are worse. A September 1996 USDA inspection found feces all over outdoor structures in the primate center. And in April 1997 an inspector noted that rat feces were found in the gorillas’ indoor housing area and that weeds and bushes grew out of control in the outside exhibit.

Inspectors frequently found that problems they had repeatedly brought to the society’s attention had not been addressed. For example, rotting wooden structures in the primate center went unrepaired for years between inspections; wire mesh fences keeping the colobus monkeys from escaping the exhibit continued to rust for a year after the USDA-imposed deadline to fix them.

Indeed, records from the past three years show that the zoo was regularly blowing its USDA-imposed deadlines on fixing facilities.

“When you’ve been writing ‘rust up’ for 10 years, most people get the message,” Koch told the Bay Guardian. “We’re at the point where, if the zoo doesn’t shape up, we might be forced to take an action against them. We can fine them up to $2,500 per violation.”

“If we’re looking at a monkey enclosure and we explain that a rusty enclosure is a problem and we note they also have rust at the zebra site, then the next time we come out, we don’t want to see a rusty elephant enclosure,” she said. “What becomes obvious is that either they don’t care about complying or they have decided not to. When they’re doing that, they’re using us as a quality control agency. The impression is that they have no quality control themselves.”

A 1993 incident involving an orangutan named Chewbacca sheds light on how zoo officials have tended to respond to agency involvement. Responding to an anonymous complaint, the USDA found that zoo officials had been planning to keep the 150-pound Chewbacca confined to a four-by-six-foot converted entryway for more than a year while they used his quarters to breed chimpanzees.

“From my perspective it appears that the project with the chimpanzees has been ill conceived,” William DeHaven, a sector supervisor with the USDA, noted on Oct. 12 of that year. “If you do not have sufficient space to conduct a breeding program properly, we feel it should not be conducted at all.”

USDA veterinary medical officer Richard Spira found Robinett to be uncooperative in dealing with the situation. “Incredibly, David Robinett took exception to my observation that the temporary night quarters were cramped at best,” Spira wrote to Koch. “This … is to give you a little taste of the double<\h>speak I’m getting at the zoo.”

The zoo has been no quicker to respond to problems brought to its attention by private citizens. On January 23, 1997, Barthell complained to both the zoo and the USDA. Barthell, an outspoken critic of the zoo, reported that she had seen a herd of six blackbuck standing in a driving rainstorm with no shelter, not even a tree. She also noted that 12 kangaroo were soaked and huddling against a wall for protection, their shelters too small to protect them.
Robinett responded to her concerns in writing. “This is not atypical of antelope,” he wrote. “In fact, many species react to inclement weather by seeking open space rather than cover.” He also said the kangaroo shelters were fine.

The USDA didn’t see it that way. The agency informed the zoo in February 1997 that shelter provided for both the blackbuck and the kangaroos was inadequate.

Robinett denied that the zoo has a cavalier attitude toward facilities problems.

“A lot of it is the age of the enclosures,” Robinett told us. “It is also a problem of limited resources. When you’re patching the patch of a patch — that’s when there are problems.”

He said that the zoo had to choose carefully how to spend its funds and that it gave the highest priority to the ones that officials there felt posed the greatest hazard to animals. And Wayne Reading, the society’s chief financial officer, says the infrastructure improvements are well underway, funded by donations and bond revenues.

Private zoo, public funds

When the society assumed control of the zoo in 1993, it was on the verge of collapse. City officials had neglected at least $10 million in facility maintenance; the number of paying visitors was in decline.

According to the zoo society’s lease, the city agreed to keep paying the zoo $4 million a year (to help cover the cost of civil service employees). In exchange, the society was supposed to take over the zoo and make it financially viable.

The society was not able to pull the zoo out of the red. In the spring of 1997, after four years of losing money, zoo officials admitted to acting parks director Joel Robinson that they were paying operating expenses with a loan of roughly $2.5 million from Wells Fargo as well as with money raised before the zoo went private. And in November of that year, Reading told the Rec and Park Commission that the marketing expenses for that fiscal quarter were over budget by $47,000. The society raised admissions prices in spring 1998 to cover an immediate $250,000 shortfall.

The society had already started going after an infusion of public funds. The minutes of society meetings show that for more than a year, the group devoted almost all its energy to getting a $48 million bond issue passed. According to the lease, the city agreed to sell at least $25 million in bonds to improve crumbling facilities. The society was supposed to raise $25 million from private funders by the time the bonds were sold. (To date, the society has raised $17 million.)

In June 1997, voters passed the $48 million bond issue. The zoo expected the bonds to start selling in late fall 1998, but they were delayed by a lawsuit seeking to overturn voter approval of the 49ers stadium bonds, which passed in the same election. That litigation was thrown out of court; the zoo bonds are expected to be sold this summer. The society has also taken $26 million from bonds issued for rebuilding after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The city’s Recreation and Park Department responded to the zoo’s financial troubles by looking the other way. Rather than conduct an audit of the zoo or monitor the operation more closely, the department announced that it would no longer scrutinize the zoo’s budgets at all (see “The Secret Zoo,” 11/26/97, and “Don’t Feed the Zoo Society,” 12/10/97).

Rec and Park’s former finance director Ernie Prindle, who had been checking the zoo’s budgets until 1997, told the Bay Guardian that Anderson seemed to want the zoo to have the advantages of being run by a private organization while still being covered by a public one. When the zoo admitted in the fall of 1997 it was further in debt than it should have been, Anderson asked why the department could not just take care of the deficit and make the numbers work as it had done in the days when it was part of the city system, Prindle said.

“We had to tell him it does not work that way anymore, now that the zoo is a private contractor,” Prindle said.

Carnival or classroom?

By the end of October 1998 the zoo was in the black for the first time since the society took it over. But with that success has come controversy. Instead of investing in the animals, the society has capitalized on theme rides, such as the merry-go-round, the Puffer Train, and the Tiger Express ride.

Amusement-park attractions and a pricey marketing campaign — costing the zoo almost $3 million from 1995 to 1998 — have brought more visitors to the zoo. That plus higher ticket prices means more money. And Anderson is certain that with this increased revenue, the zoo will ultimately be able to shed its carnival atmosphere and focus on its true mission: education to foster environmental activism among visitors.

But if environmental activism is Anderson’s goal, he has a strange way of showing it. For example, when the zoo brought in a lorikeet exhibit in April 1998, it allowed its sponsors to place a display — a shiny Ford sports utility vehicle — near the site.

“If you’re setting yourself out as an educator, then you’ve got to have a source of funds,” Anderson told the Bay Guardian.

Some of Anderson’s more straightforward forays into environmental education have had trouble. One of his pet conservation projects is the Madagascar Fauna Group, head<\h>quartered at the San Francisco Zoo. Among other things, the group supports the protection of Madasgascar’s Betampona National Reserve and hopes to re-introduce zoo-bred lemurs and other endangered primates, such as aye-ayes, to the island nation’s wilds.

Since 1994, when the society assumed control of the zoo, it has spent $785,222 on its Madagascar projects.
In August 1997 Anderson brought two aye-ayes from Duke University’s primate center to San Francisco. Merlin and Calaban are the only male-female aye-aye pair in any zoo in the United States. Zoo officials hope to breed them.
Anderson speaks proudly of the work the zoo has done to educate people in Madagascar about protecting aye-ayes. But he hasn’t done such a great job protecting the ones in his care.

In Madagascar, aye-ayes spend time more than 60 feet high in the rainforest canopy, where they pull bugs from trees with their long fingers. In San Francisco, they live in an eight-foot-tall glass case.

Male aye-aye Merlin has had an ongoing problem with hair loss on his hind legs. As a result the zoo’s vet put him on steroids periodically from 1997 to 1998. Zoo officials blame the hair loss on two factors: premature separation from his mother, which took place while Merlin was at Duke, and the stress of being introduced to a new female.
Anderson told the Bay Guardian the hair loss wasn’t a big deal; some activists feel differently.

“That’s a shame,” Shirley McGreal, director of the International Primate Protection League, located in South Carolina, told the Bay Guardian. “Those guys cover a good distance of territory in the wild.”

But the aye-ayes haven’t been a huge success with zoogoers either. Aye-ayes are nocturnal creatures and extremely timid; Merlin and his mate, Calaban, rarely leave the shelter of leafy branches. The best chance you’ll get to see an aye-aye at the zoo is in the gift shop, on a sweatshirt or a postcard.

Paying the price

Luckily for the society, hardly any of its donors know about how the zoo animals live; it’s hard to woo grants with rusty fences, feces-filled cages, and cramped cement cells. But one funder did find out.

In September 1994, the zoo announced the opening of its $2 million Feline Conservation Center. Keepers had already raised questions about the new facility; some thought it was unsafe for the keepers because the animals could reach through the fence to the service area with their paws and claws.

When zoo administrators brought in Denver Zoo curator John Wortman, he had the same concerns. In his final evaluation to the Zoo Society, written in October 1994, Wortman stated, “I hate to sound like a broken record, but the old safety issue rises again. The repairs should have been made prior to the felines moving unto the enclosures. Fortunately, enough of the lock system functioned and no person or creature was hurt during the shake-down period.”

The keeper at the time, Terry Moyles, was fired by the zoo March 1995. Barthell and other animal advocates suspected he was dismissed because he was outspoken about the inadequacy of the facility; Robinett denied the charge.

In a Jan. 30, 1995, letter to the charitable foundation that was funding the center, Wortman described the Feline Conservation Center as “a poor design and dangerous exhibit for both the animals and the zoo keepers.”
The center’s problems got its funders’ attention. In a Feb. 19, 1999, letter to city auditor Jones, executives from the Redmond, Wash.–based Leonard X. Bosack and Betty M. Kruger Charitable Foundation blasted the zoo.

After the foundation made initial grants of more than $200,000 for the center, the letter states, “the Foundation Board also pledged two payments of $162,000 to be made in 1994 and 1995 contingent on continued progress reports. The Foundation rescinded the pledge of $325,000 in 1995 after years of unsatisfactory response from the Zoo Executive Director and the Board of Directors.”

The letter goes on to lay out how the zoo hired a contracting firm with no experience in building wildlife care facilities, how it wasted funds, and how it ignored the recommendations of its consultant.

“As John Wortman noted, the `major problem was the inability of the S.F. staff to design a modern animal facility,’” the letter stated.

Robinett denies that the zoo staff is to blame. “To say this was a screwup in design — I think that is incorrect,” Robinett told the Bay Guardian. “We have had success [with the center], especially with breeding. It’s been a very good exhibit.”

It is that attitude that makes some people worry about making animals pay the costs of privatization.
Privatization “has not helped animal care,” Ron Lippert, a longtime animal health technician and former member of the city’s Commission on Animal Control and Welfare, told the Bay Guardian. “What privatization has done is allowed the society to do more things on their agenda — without the public scrutiny they had before. It seems like this is [Anderson and the society’s] kingdom and palace, and they want to see how much they can show it off.

“But the bottom line is that with the cold, windy, and wet climate at the zoo, it’s the wrong city. It’s the wrong location. Animals who aren’t used to handling ocean climate have to handle it day in and day out. Maybe we just shouldn’t have a zoo here. The zoo society was supposed to do all this great stuff. But as far as zoos go, this one still sucks.”

Bob Porterfield contributed to this story.

Obama’s House Tonight

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First of all, I”m still undecided. This is in no way an endorsement of my views or the Guardian’s regarding the upcoming presidential election. That said, this evening after toiling away in the Guardian batcave I walked up the hill to Bloom’s Saloon on 18th Street where the Potrero Hill Obama contingent gathered to watch the results eek in from New Hampshire.

It was something of a mad house. The bar was more packed than I’ve ever seen it. The music was off and CNN was turned up loud. Silence fell as we listened intently to Obama’s speech, with the people standing around me clapping with the crowd on tv. (Which always strikes me…they can’t hear you. It’s purely cheering for the sake of cheering.) They listened carefully to Hillary Clinton’s speech as well, and as soon as she was done the room was thick with insightful criticism of her words and sentiment.

There were two distinct things I noticed from the experience this evening:

1. The crowd was truly a mixed bag. Young, old, black, white, Asian, Latino. You couldn’t pigeonhole this group, which is completely unlike a recent rally I attended for Dennis Kucinich where the crowd was distinctly white and old, and it felt strangely disconcerting to realize I was one of a small handful under the age of thirty in the gathering of 200 people. The group at Bloom’s really seemed more representative of America.

2. People were talking to each other. A LOT. And randomly – turning toward each other during commercial breaks, chatting about work and life or intently discussing the election. People caught wind that I grew up in New Hampshire and were seeking me out for inside information on which towns and counties were more liberal than others. It felt more like a very engaging mixer where everyone’s horny, and despite the second place results for Obama, there was a lot of excitement and momentum in the room.

I’m not sure what else to say about this, but I’ll add that the invite to Bloom’s showed up in my Guardian email and I got nothing from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, or any of the other contenders for the White House. There’s definitely a movement here.

Media to Voters: It’s Over

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

The media organization called FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) makes a timely point on the day of the New Hampshire primary: the media is declaring the presidential race is all but over, preempting some 98 per cent of the voters who will have no say in who becomes the two presidential nominees.

FAIR notes that the Washington Post’s David Broder, the dean of political reporters, wrote on Jan. 4 that “New Hampshire is poised to close down the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.”

Broder, as I like to recall, popped up on a Sunday morning news show shortly after the Iraq invasion and said, almost proudly, it looks as if the President has won himself a war.

FAIR concludes its piece with the admonition that “history would suggest that, at a very minimum, campaign reporters refrain from handicapping the outcome of the nominating process in early January. After all, it’s voters, not the news media, who are supposed to elect the new president.” There must be a better way. B3

fair.gif

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=146

Media Advisory

Media to Voters: It’s Over

Pundits rushing to end primaries and preempt voter choices

1/8/08

As the results of the Republican and Democratic primaries in New Hampshire are reported tonight, it’s a good bet that many prominent pundits and journalists will declare the race for the White House all but over–long before 98 percent of voters have had any say in the matter.

The Washington Post’s David Broder wrote on January 4 that “New Hampshire is poised to close down the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.” Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter (1/3/08) likewise declared Obama to be the new inevitable after he won the Iowa caucus:

With his victory tonight, Barack Obama is now the strong favorite to be the Democratic nominee for president. The only one who can stop Obama from making history is Obama…. Unless he makes a terrible mistake in this weekend’s WMUR debate in New Hampshire, Obama will be the strong favorite to win in the Granite State…. Should the Illinois senator win New Hampshire and South Carolina, it will be next to impossible to prevent him from becoming the nominee on February 5, Super Tuesday.

Actually, it’s easy to imagine at least three Democratic candidates still having substantial support on February 5, meaning that Super Tuesday could produce no clear winner. The Republican race has much the same dynamic; though it hasn’t happened in decades, one or both of the major parties could go into their conventions not knowing who their nominee is.

By any reasonable standard, then, the race for either major party’s presidential nomination is far from settled. But Broder nonetheless argued that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s campaign was virtually finished: “A second Romney loss would effectively end the former Massachusetts governor’s candidacy.”

NBC anchor Tim Russert sounded a similar alarm (1/4/08): “Bottom line, Brian, only McCain or Romney can come out of New Hampshire to fight for another day in South Carolina, only one. One stays behind. It is make or break for McCain or Romney in New Hampshire.”

Why are the media rushing to end the primary season just as it’s begun? It’s sometimes difficult to follow the logic. Consider a USA Today report from January 7:

The Democratic contest is a two-person race, dominated by Clinton and Obama. That leaves Edwards, a former North Carolina senator who is a close third, and Richardson, New Mexico’s governor who is a distant fourth, waiting for a stumble or a political earthquake to create an opening for them.

How are four candidates participating in a “two-person race”–especially given that one of the lesser candidates–John Edwards–finished ahead of Hillary Clinton? Similarly, the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney (1/5/08) argued that “the results in Iowa…suggested that the Democratic and Republican contests were to a considerable extent two-way races: Mrs. Clinton and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois for the Democrats, and Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney for the Republicans.” How Mike Huckabee coming in first in his race and Edwards coming in second “suggested” that their candidacies should be dismissed, Nagourney didn’t explain.

The press has been more harshly critical of Edwards’ campaign, so it could be the case that many in the media would be happy to see him out of the picture. (See Action Alert, 12/21/07.) Indeed, much of the conventional wisdom after Edwards’ second-place finish in Iowa suggested that his campaign for the White House was all but over. As New York Times columnist David Brooks (New York Times, 1/4/08) boldly pronounced, “Edwards’s political career is probably over.” David Gergen agreed (CNN, 1/3/08): “John Edwards I think has nowhere to go now…even with a second-place win, because he has no money.”

In an interview with Edwards, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann (1/4/08) expressed bewilderment:

I didn’t understand the conventional wisdom last night…. If you finish second in Iowa with more support from the previous national front-runner, who dropped from first to third, many of the pundits, many of the so-called experts, are describing you as being in trouble, rather than Senator Clinton. Do you know why that is?

It’d be nice if more in the media asked such questions about what passes for conventional wisdom in their election coverage. Indeed, some articles have noted that winning early primaries isn’t necessary to winning the nomination; in 1992, Bill Clinton lost the first five contests, but somehow managed to win the White House nonetheless. This very recent history would suggest that, at a very minimum, campaign reporters refrain from handicapping the outcome of the nominating process in early January. After all, it’s voters, not the news media, who are supposed to elect the next president.

Click here to subscribe!

by Noam Chomsky

Open Media Series: City Lights Books, 232 pages

Interventions collects Chomsky’s essays and writings for the New York Times Syndicate, works published all around the globe, but rarely in major U.S. media, and certainly not in the New York Times. Chomsky, America’s foremost political intellectual and dissident, tackles the Bush administration, the Iraq War and more. Foreword written by FAIR’s Peter Hart.

Best of CounterSpin, 2007 (1/4/08-1/10/08)

Feel free to respond to FAIR ( fair@fair.org ). We can’t reply to everything, but we will look at each message. We especially appreciate documented examples of media bias or censorship. And please send copies of your correspondence with media outlets, including any responses, to fair@fair.org.

George McGovern: Impeach Bush & Cheney!

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B3 note: Good for George McGovern. Good for the Washington Post for running this important timely commentary
in its Sunday edition. Question: how many other papers will run it?

The McGovern piece reminds me of a major political point: that a big reason the Pelosi Democrats in
Washington have so cravenly caved in to the Bush initiatives, on the war and much else, is because Pelosi wrongheadly pulled the impeachment issue off the table before the last election. This meant, among other things, that the Democrats at the first bugle lost their most important bit of muscle and leverage. The result has been disastrous and the war is now surging.

It’s good that Cindy Sheehan is running against Pelosi and will force these issues into the public arena. Maybe, just maybe, Pelosi will be forced to debate Sheehan and will be forced in the November election to conduct a real campaign for the first time in her home territory to keep her Speaker of the House post.

Personal note about McGovern: he comes from South Dakota, a state so conservative that it has outlawed abortions. Its eastern border is l7 miles or so from my northwestern Iowa hometown of Rock Rapids. I have followed him closely through the years. I still marvel that a liberal of his force and eloquence could represent South Dakota for so many years in Congress. Imagine if he were the Speaker of the House.

Why I Believe Bush Must Go

By George McGovern

The Washington Post
Sunday 06 January 2008

Nixon was bad. These guys are worse.

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have
belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is
to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach
President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign.

I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an
expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment.

The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial
partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and
statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the
chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses.

They have repeatedly violated the Constitution.

They have transgressed national and international law.

They have lied to the American people time after time.

Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country
to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world.

These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional
standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team’s assumption of power was the
product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially
challenged – perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed
throughout the Bush-Cheney regime.

The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous,
illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq.

That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many
times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an
estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from
the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their
country.

The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is
expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed
from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9
trillion – by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that
the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in
violation of international law.

This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional
law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic
torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon
administration.

But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the
case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election.

The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon
presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national
history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of
killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived
Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had
nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an “imminent
threat” to the United States.

The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in
the 9/11 attacks – another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I
have recalled Jefferson’s observation: “Indeed I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just.”

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of
fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the
invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the
illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents.

The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative
members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and
Muslim world – more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off
the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries
without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August
that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to
the country and the world.

This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the
Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran.

I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush
invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S.
influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of
their administration, their policies – especially the war in Iraq – have
increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States.

Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush
and those of his son.

When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George
H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United
Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel
Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost.

Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration
established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international
arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions.

Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten
others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military
occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil
strife.

It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James
A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all
opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral
responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the
Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.

The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: “I
have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this
situation in New Orleans.”

Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the
collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst
natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course.

But we must still urge Congress to act.

Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution
to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land.

It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some
of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to
support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray.

This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the
Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, “it wasn’t until the
most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of
hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) – and argued that, as Commander in
Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override
our country’s laws – that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as
I did during Watergate…

A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law – and
repeatedly violates the law – thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors.”

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in
the opening decade of the 21st century.

This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a
series of rational presidents and Congresses.

At age 85, I won’t be around to witness the completion of the difficult
rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I’d like to hold on long
enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have
sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as
the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II.

We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic
blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010608C.shtml

An Obama stunner

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Actually, not such a stunner — we all knew Obama had a hell of a political team in Iowa and was swimming in momentum. But this is a big deal — a state that’s about 90 percent white voted for a black candidate. A voice for change (that’s how he sells himself, anyway) won by ten points, suggesting that people in the nation’s heartland are impatient with the state of American politics. Obama will get a major bounce from this, which is a bit unfair because Iowa is such an unrepresentative state and the number of voters who go to the caucuses so small, but: The youth vote was huge, and that, as Kos points out, bodes well for the general election.

And while I’m still not ready to jump on the Obama bandwagon (I’m waiting for him to say something about taxing the rich and I’m not all that enthused with this theme of togetherness in America), this is an exciting moment.

And Hillary finished third. Rock on.

Will money win tonight in Iowa?

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B3 note: This is an important and timely “follow the money” report from the Center For Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. It makes a significant point: that even though there are 2,000 or so journalists covering the campaign in Iowa, and even though there is almost saturation media coverage, nobody can really follow the money.

As the report notes in section 3 below, “If money raised in Iowa is any indicator of popular support, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton will win their respective caucuses tonight. And in New Hampshire, it’ll be Romney and Barrack Obama. But remember that these figures represent fundraising thruogh Sept. 30 only. The fundraising and spending reports for October-December aren’t due to the Federal Election Commission until after the caucuses on Jan. 3l.” The best you can do to follow the money, as we learned to do from Deep Throat in the movie “All the President’s Men,” is to read this report and follow its advice on how to go further. Alas, that’s not good enough.
Congratulations to the Center for doing the best that can be done under current election reporting law. B3

CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS
MONEY-IN-POLITICS NEWS
January 3, 2008
tel: 202-857-0044, fax: 202-857-7809
editor@capitaleye.org
www.OpenSecrets.org
www.CapitalEye.org

WILL MONEY WIN TONIGHT IN IOWA?
Winning the Iowa caucuses takes organization and money, certainly, but the biggest spenders haven’t always won there. Howard Dean, Steve Forbes and Pat Robertson are just a few of the candidates who dumped money into the Hawkeye State with little to show for it. How much have the ’08 candidates spent to campaign in Iowa? Well, it’s hard to know. Using campaign finance reports, the best you can do is look at vendors’ addresses. But the biggest expenses, like for advertising, staff and travel, are often paid out to companies and individuals outside the state. In the first nine months of this campaign, the candidates reported spending more than $13 million with Iowa-based vendors. If the true cost of the Iowa effort were known, a single top-tier campaign might have spent that much alone — or more — in the state. As it is, Barack Obama’s reports detail about $2.6 million in Iowa expenditures from January through September, followed by Mitt Romney with about $2.4 million. By comparison, during the entire ’04 presidential election cycle, including the general election, the field of mostly Democratic candidates reported spending about $8.5 million in Iowa. Leading up to the caucuses that year, the field reported spending just $5.2 million, or 40 percent of this election’s reported spending.

*2008 presidential expenditures

IOWA: Our down to the wire report

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This down to the wire report was filed at 9:58 p.m. on Wednesday by Carolyn Schmidt, our ace citizen journalist in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, an election hot spot.

By Carolyn Schmidt

Cedar Rapids, Iowa–Obama is leading in the Register poll by a slight margin, but Huckabee and Romney are tied. It’s going to be down to the wire. Weather’s supposed to be calm–no more snow–with highs in the 20s, but people shouldn’t have any problems getting to the caucuses. Crowding and parking might be problems, but people will figure it out.

We had two campaign volunteers knock on our door New Years Day in the near-zero cold–supporters for Ron Paul and for Barak Obama. The Obama volunteer was a Coe student back early (classes don’t start for another week). Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Dodd, Romney, McCain, and Richardson all had rallies today in the Cedar Rapids area.

Although many of the candidates have had out-of-state volunteers come in for this final week or two, Hillary’s campaign seems to have amassed the largest number. According to yesterday’s Register, an army of Clinton volunteers–many of whom have flown in from Washington–logged 10,000 house calls and 8,500 phone conversations on Saturday alone.

Acting pleasant

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

George Bernard Shaw once titled a bound collection of his dramas Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, thus inadvertently summing up any year in any theater scene anywhere. But this is a happy time, so we can concentrate on the former.

The pool of local acting talent, in particular, spoils us in the Bay Area. While it’s not hard to find a strong performance from last year, finding room to list them all is another story, and a much longer one. But there’s space enough to list a few especially deft turns from 2007, including feats of physical and verbal dexterity, like the trio of weirdly gesticuutf8g women in Crowded Fire’s wowing production of Lisa D’Amour’s word-struck trailer-park gothic, Anna Bella Eema. Cassie Beck, Julie Kurtz, and Danielle Levin never left their chairs, but watching them — under the superb direction of Rebecca Novick (who stepped down as CF’s artistic director this year) — you didn’t want to leave yours either.

Then there was Alias‘s Carl Lumbly, skipping rope like a welterweight throughout his opening monologue in Jesus Hopped the "A" Train. A world-class actor with an East Bay address, Lumbly crossed the bridge this spring to appear in SF Playhouse’s excellent local premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s raucous drama. As in many Playhouse productions, the cast (astutely directed by the ensemble’s Bill English) was strong as a whole, but the moments when Lumbly’s upbeat, ever-hopeful death-row sociopath played unlikely mentor to a young neophyte out of his depth (a solid Daveed Diggs) were truly prime time.

The physically and comically nimble cast of writer-director Mark Jackson’s notable premiere, American Suicide — a smart, lively, and very funny adaptation of Soviet Russian Nikolai Erdman’s scathing 1928 comedy that had its lock-solid debut at the Thick House in February — also merit special mention for their fine fleshing out of the play’s arch, cartoonlike histrionics. Headed by the pitch-perfect pair of Jud Williford and Beth Wilmurt in what would have been a suicide mission in lesser hands, they managed the mishmash of zany caricature, a certain 1930s allusiveness, and macabre social satire with engrossing panache. The Coen brothers might have attempted something similar in The Hudsucker Proxy, but remember: they had special effects and coffee breaks. These actors work without a net — though the show’s madcap pace put them at risk of ending up in one.

Although not necessarily as athletic as the title might lead you to expect, Sex (at the Aurora Theatre) threatened to be hard enough, given that the play, while an interesting theatrical relic, has little in its lippy melodrama to shock audiences 80 years after its scandalous Broadway opening. Furthermore, stepping into Mae West’s shoes is a fine-line idea that had better be managed with grace and attitude. Fortunately, Delia MacDougall (in the attention-grabbing role West wrote for herself) proved a dazzling tightrope walker in pumps, creating a West-worthy impression in no way reducible to a mere impersonation (which is still fine at parties). (MacDougall, incidentally, was a hilarious part of Jackson’s American Suicide cast.) Costume designer Cassandra Carpenter decked out MacDougall and the rest of the company beautifully in pristine period threads indicative of the unexpected degree of life director Tom Ross and his thoroughly fine cast found in the play.

And as memorable costumes go, I wonder who among us present for Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway (at the American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater in July) could forget that frilly-legged chiffon number (by designer Marc Happel) on Justin Bond as the singing, slinging half of those two lounge legends? Needless to say, in the brilliant haute tastelessness of the Kiki and Herb aesthetic, this was genius swathing genius.

But back to casts (and premieres): the Custom Made Theatre Company scored a real coup, if not a coup d’état, with the Bay Area premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. The small black box company assembled a terrific cast and offered a smart production design in no way lessened by its clearly low-budget proportions. Artistic director Brian Katz’s agile execution, if that’s the right word, of Sondheim’s musical-drama rumination on the men and women who tried to assassinate various American presidents was one of the year’s little big surprises and, heading into election year 2008, left us on a feel-good note.

Iowa: young and old are caucusing with the stars

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B3: Here is the Christmas Eve report from Carolyn Schmidt, our citizen journalist in Cedar Falls, Iowa. She will be reporting regularly up through and after the Thursday election. The key question remains: Will Iowans pick the president this time around?

By Carolyn Schmidt

Cedar Rapids, Iowa–The papers are so full of good stuff, I’ll give you some choices. It’s way more than you probably want to know.

Candidates are bringing in special guests to campaign with them these last few days. “West Wing” star Richard Schiff has been stumping with Joe Biden since Friday, and Martin Sheen, from the same show, is appearing with Bill Richardson. Hillary had the governor of Ohio with her for a few days.

Although his attack ads against Huckabee and McCain are still running on television, Romney has let up on his criticism of the other GOP candidates in person. Reminiscent of Howard Dean, for years ago, he’s saying, “I’m going to fight in Missouri, and Michigan, and South Carolina, and Florida, and California. I’m going to be all around the country making sure that if I get this nomination I’m not just a one-hit wonder.” Huckabee, on the other hand, is now hitting back at Romney, saying Romney is dishonest in his depiction of Huckabee and his policies. “If you get a job by being dishonest…how can you be trusted once you’re in that job?” Huckabee asks. (His audiences evidently haven’t reminded him that it’s been done before:)

Iowa: snow storm tests candidates and voters

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B3: Here’s a dispatch filed Satuday afternoon by Carolyn Schmidt, our citizen journalist, operating out of Cedar Rapids, Falls, Iowa, an election hot spot

As always, Iowans take the snow, Pakistan assassination, and all in stride

By Carolyn Schmidt

Cedar Rapids, Iowa–We had a 4-5 inch snow fall Friday on top of what’s already on the ground (19 inches for the month of December). Richardson cancelled his appearances, but the others soldiered on–evidently not expecting much of a turnout for their rallies. Iowans take this all in stride, of course, so when Obama noted that the 900 people who showed up to hear him at Northwest Junior High School in Coralville (a growing city just outside of Iowa City) was “an unbelievable crowd,” one woman said, “I went to see him in Cedar Rapids in an ice storm that was 10 times worse than this.”

More than 200 people turned out to hear John Edwards at a restaurant in the smaller town of Independence, and Edwards admitted he’d anticipated about 50.

Year in Film: Western promises

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Though it’s been pronounced dead so often and for so many years, the western lived again in 2007, sprouting like a gnarly weed through a cracked desert shelf. These new-millennium westerns, however, are a little tougher, a little wiser, and more prone to fits of sadness and moments of darkness.

It is said that most, if not all, American presidents since 1952 have screened High Noon (1952), one of the old model westerns, at the White House, and some have claimed it as their favorite movie. Our current cowboy president probably loves it more than all of his predecessors did, and it’s as likely as not that he watched it at least once during the past 12 months. No doubt he, like the other commanders in chief, saw himself in the movie, alone and standing strong against terrible odds with no help at all from cowards and city-bred folk.

Fifty years ago Delmer Daves directed the original 3:10 to Yuma very much in the mode of High Noon, with a single-minded hero, Dan Evans, standing up for a purpose against all reason and despite everyone urging him to quit. He will, come hell or high water, transport the bandit Ben Wade to the title train on time. James Mangold’s new remake sticks close to the original but also departs in significant ways. This time a third character figures prominently in the action, Ben Wade’s right-hand man Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), a pale, small fellow with a sadistic swagger and a penchant for exploding into wildly inappropriate violence.

It’s fairly easy to read Charlie’s devotion to his boss (Russell Crowe) as a kind of desperate man love. It’s Charlie who makes the film’s ending something quite different from the original’s hopeful turn. Mangold’s skillful storytelling means it’s possible to enjoy the film purely on the level of a bread-and-butter western, but he also quietly suggests the United States’ headfirst march into the quagmire of Iraq.

Similarly, Jesse James has graced all kinds of classic westerns, but never quite like in Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This James is no longer a hero of the people fighting greedy railroad men but now merely a lost celebrity both fascinated by the limelight and weary of its glare. The film deliberately turns up its nose at gunplay and action and instead focuses on the rotting final months of the legend’s life, when the cancerous Ford (a perfectly sniveling Casey Affleck) enters. It plays out like a long, slow chess game, easing through its 160 minutes with a kind of watchful caution.

A typical scene has James (Brad Pitt) sizing up his colleagues from across a table, reading their fears and desires through their eyes and twitches. When the title moment comes, it plays like a transfer of fates, with James deliberately passing on the mantle to his young admirer. But the mantle quickly strangles, and Ford spends the rest of his days forever attached to and defined by that one moment, hated and hounded. This is a western that arrives in David Lynch–ian territory after having passed through Terrence Malick land, and the cowboy’s heroism and self-reliance have dried up along the way.

If Yuma and Jesse James are more comfortable for being based in the past, then No Country for Old Men is something a good deal darker: it’s a modern-day western masterpiece, set in the 1980s, with horses and cowboy hats. It pries open the end of the West and finds despair. The hunter (Josh Brolin) and the killer (Javier Bardem) are both cynical products of the Vietnam War, relentless in their thinking and planning and unable to trust or rest. The sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) is the linchpin, the old man whose country no longer belongs to him and who can’t comprehend what happened to it. It’s because of westerns like these, which examine the genre like grim ghosts presiding over their own autopsies, that so many have pronounced the genre dead over the years.

Even if the cowboy president didn’t fit into this new strain of western in 2007, he did appear — either directly or as a kind of offscreen presence — in a far different kind of film. One could make a case for these as mutant westerns, featuring a bunch of Dan Evanses trying to bring their Ben Wades to the train against all odds and reason: Sicko, No End in Sight, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, The Kingdom, Rendition, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Grace Is Gone. If you look hard enough, you can even see him in the margins of Paul Thomas Anderson’s bizarre, oil-soaked quasi western, There Will Be Blood.

It’s doubtful that any of these movies will be screened at the White House soon. No, the year’s most likely cowboy to push through those swinging doors is none other than Sam Elliot in The Golden Compass, a traditional cowpoke in an unfamiliar setting, complete with "howdy"s and "I reckon"s, uttered among a swirling sea of CGI. More than the other cowboys, the current president could recognize and identify with him: conventional, simple, and perhaps a bit lost. *

JEFFREY M. ANDERSON’S TOP 10

1. Inland Empire (David Lynch, France/Poland/US)

2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

3. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

4. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet, US)

5. Offside (Jafar Panahi, Iran)

6. Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, France/Italy)

7. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

8. The Host (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)

9. Bug (William Friedkin, US)

10. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US)

Runners up: 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania), Into Great Silence (Philip Gröning, France/Switzerland/Germany), Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, UK/France), Death Proof (extended version) (Quentin Tarantino, US), Triad Election and Exiled (Johnny To, Hong Kong)

The Ron Paul phenomenon

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› news@sfbg.com

San Franciscans rarely get excited about Republican presidential candidates, and it’s rarer still to see GOP campaign signs in Mission District windows, beat-up old cars, or crowds of enthusiastic supporters flooding the city’s streets. But that’s what Ron Paul has been inspiring.

"I would give my entire net worth to see Ron Paul elected president," a man holding a "Ron Paul ’08" sign on the corner of Powell and Geary on Dec. 16 said. "I’ve never contributed to a candidate’s campaign in my life, but in the past months I’ve given about $600 or $700."

Paul’s frank assessment of the United States as an overreaching empire got his campaign rolling, and it has gathered serious momentum in the past couple of months, as evidenced by an increasing online presence and record-breaking fundraising for November and December. Paul’s essentially libertarian platform is attracting support from a surprisingly diverse range of people, from lifelong members of the National Rifle Association to medical marijuana activists to disenchanted college students.

Perhaps even more surprising, this Republican from Texas is generating significant support among Bay Area voters. "Ron Paul" signs are now visible at antiwar protests, on lawns, and in apartment windows. People who have never been politically active or have never felt excited by a candidate before are spending their free time tabling at weekend farmers markets and walking precincts after work in support of the candidate.

A recent recruit of the San Francisco Ron Paul meetup.com group, which is attracting new members daily, captured the fervor of Paul supporters with this posting: "I can’t believe my new hero is a politician. Never in my life have I encountered any political leader who actually represented me. This country needs Ron Paul desperately."

Despite their demographic diversity, one unifying theme among all Paul supporters is their absolute belief in their candidate’s integrity. He is perceived as a man who says what he thinks and takes action according to what he says; he is seen as a rare breed among politicians, especially those who, like Paul, have served several terms in Washington DC. "My gut tells me Ron Paul is different," said John Harvan, one of about 60 radiant Paul supporters gathered amid Union Square holiday shoppers Dec. 16.

Bay Area supporters — organized through online meet-up groups — were congregated on the chilly Sunday in solidarity with a national Paul fundraising push, or what the campaign dubbed "a moneybomb." Staged to coincide with the anniversary of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, the Ron Paul Tea Party was, as one Web site put it, "a symbolic dumping of these tyrannical systems that thwart our true destiny of Freedom & Liberty!"

The Dec. 16 fundraising push was an unquestionable success, raising more than $6 million in a 24-hour period. Paul’s campaign had already received national attention when it received $4.2 million in donations Nov. 5, which precipitated his much-needed boost in the polls. But $6 million broke the record for funds raised in one day, a record previously held by the John Kerry campaign for raising $5.7 million in 2004.

Most of the donations to the Paul campaign are small contributions from committed individuals. Proving the grassroots nature of Paul’s support, the average size of each donation is consistently around $100.

Yet there is no political mystery to Paul; he has been articuutf8g the same message — one of limited constitutional government, low taxes (if any), and free markets — since he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 from his home state of Texas. And his dependability is starting to gain traction with libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

"A real mix of people are brought together by Ron Paul’s message because we sense the danger in the country," Gerald Cullen of San Francisco told the Guardian. "I think the [George W.] Bush administration has just about destroyed the country. Nothing in the Constitution provides for a president to attack another country that hasn’t attacked us."

Paul is a self-proclaimed noninterventionist and has opposed the war in Iraq from the start. He is by no means liberal or progressive; he’s more a classic conservative who opposes government regulation. "A lot of people are frustrated by the different regulations and infringements on our liberty day in and day out," said Ralph Crowder, who lives in Berkeley. "Ron Paul’s not trying to sell you on himself; he’s just selling you the message of freedom."

And while there are varying definitions of freedom, Paul’s fundamental noninterventionist belief translates into a variety of positions that appeal to voters on both ends of the political spectrum. He sees the USA PATRIOT Act as a breech of civil liberties; wants to stop US involvement in the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other free trade agreements; and supports bringing American troops home from Iraq posthaste.

Appealing to the opposite end of the spectrum, he is also staunchly antichoice, introduced legislation in 2004 to repeal bans on assault weapons, and wants to beef up the US’s borders.

Adrian Bankhead, who also lives in Berkeley, wants Paul to be the Republican nominee but disagrees with his social policies too heartily to vote for him in the general election. "His social views against immigration, abortion, affirmative action, and women make me nervous," Bankhead told the Guardian. But Bankhead respects what he sees as Paul’s fundamental honesty: "He is the only Republican nominee who would not steal the election in November."

However, Bankhead’s position is a minority one among Paul supporters. Crowder and Cullen, for instance, agree with almost everything Paul says. "There’s not much difference between where he stands and where I stand," Crowder said. And Cullen, who worked for Paul during his 1988 bid for the presidency as a Libertarian candidate, sees the candidate’s principles as "very much in line with the old Republican Party principles … before the madness took over the country."

Stephanie Burns, one of the main organizers of online Bay Area meet-up groups, says she agrees with Paul "all the time."

There are more than 80,000 Ron Paul online meet-up members around the country — 452 in the San Francisco group as of the writing of this article — and most of them find themselves in complete agreement with Paul’s perspectives.

Scott Loughmiller sees the Paul campaign as being in a prime position to steal the nomination, with his polling numbers rising, his momentum building, and plenty of money in the coffers. "We’re right where Kerry was in 2004 going into the primaries, when [Howard] Dean had already been crowned winner by the media," Loughmiller said.

The case for Kucinich

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OPINION At a recent Potrero Hill Democratic Club presidential forum, when the representatives of Hilary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama spoke more about how the candidates made them feel than about their positions on the issues, it first struck me as strange. Eventually, though, their approach made sense — I realized these people weren’t necessarily all that hot about their candidates’ actual policies.

In defending their health care programs, for instance, the Clinton and Obama reps tacitly acknowledged that a single-payer plan was superior to their candidates’ offerings, while the Edwards spokesperson cautioned the audience against seeking a candidate who believed everything they believed.

Maybe it’s the lack of distinct seasons in San Francisco or something, but these people seemed confused about the difference between voting in a primary and in a final election. November is the month when you vote for what you have to vote for; in February you can vote for what you believe in. In November the halfhearted health plan of one of these candidates, which would continue siphoning scarce public funds away from health services and into the coffers of the private health insurance industry, will likely be superior to whatever scheme the Republican nominee offers up. But in the February primary you can actually vote for Dennis Kucinich’s single-payer plan.

Logically, we might ask why any of these front-running candidates who won’t pledge to have all American troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term should expect much support in San Francisco, arguably the nation’s most antiwar city. Why would anyone who opposes this war not back a candidate like Kucinich, who calls for complete troop withdrawal within three months? Or why, for that matter, would voters who support gay marriage not also back Kucinich, a gay-marriage supporter himself?

Well, when I appear as a Kucinich representative at election forums, people answer those questions for me all the time in postmeeting conversations. They and their friends believe in what Kucinich says, they often tell me, but "he can’t win," so they’ll vote for someone who they think can.

Now let’s be honest here and admit that those of us who get worked up about peace and justice issues are prone to complain a lot. We are ever bemoaning the influence of money in politics and the poor job the news media do in covering the real issues. But when we get to the point where a candidate is raising the important issues and we know we agree with him and we still won’t vote for him, then the next time we start complaining, it may just be time to look in the mirror.

Casting a vote against the war in Iraq is a lot easier than marching against it or even writing a letter. But if antiwar voters won’t vote for antiwar candidates, you have to ask why those candidates should go to the trouble of running and why the big-money candidates should pay any attention to the supposed antiwar vote.

Whatever else happens in this election, one thing is certain: if you don’t vote in February for what you believe in, you won’t get to vote for it in November. And then there will be no one else to blame. *

Tom Gallagher, a former Massachusetts state representative, is a San Francisco activist.

Homes for whom?

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› sarah@sfbg.com

After years of letting the free market dictate San Francisco’s housing mix — as a result steadily losing ground on the city’s affordable housing goals — the Board of Supervisors appears primed to place an ambitious bond measure on the fall 2008 ballot to address the housing imbalance.

Winning the necessary support from two-thirds of voters won’t be easy, coming on a ballot with the majority of supervisorial seats up for grabs, the presidential election, and a likely bond measure for rebuilding General Hospital. But Sup. Chris Daly, author of the affordable-housing bond measure, believes it’s a good time to have progressives focus on this most important of problems facing the city.

Last summer affordable-housing funds became a political football in a budget showdown between Daly and Mayor Gavin Newsom, a fight Newsom won, leading to a budget that prioritizes clean streets and a beefed-up Police Department over affordable housing. Newsom’s reelection campaign, which was just gearing up at the time, successfully cast Daly as the villain after the occasionally hotheaded supervisor threatened to bolster housing funds by cutting Newsom’s "pet projects," as Daly called them, which included a community justice center, a Police Academy class, street trees, and the Small Business Assistance Center.

Daly clearly lost that duel when he was savaged by the media and removed from his chair on the Budget Committee by board president Aaron Peskin. But now Daly has bounced back on the issue and secured solid support for his measure, which progressives and affordable-housing activists are already gearing up to fight for next year.

"Just because Newsom had a significant political operation this year does not mean that the affordable-housing issue went away," Daly told the Guardian after securing support for the amendment from six of his colleagues and a broad coalition of housing activists.

The measure would set aside $2.7 billion in city funds for affordable housing over 15 years. It is cosponsored by Sups. Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, Ross Mirkarimi, Gerardo Sandoval, Sophie Maxwell, Bevan Dufty, and Peskin and backed by Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth (which has made affordable family housing its top priority), the San Francisco Organizing Project, and the Housing Justice Coalition.

The measure would give affordable housing the same baseline of funding that the city already allocates to the Recreation and Park Department fund and the Library Preservation Fund — and less than what it sets aside for the Children, Youth and Families fund, the police fund, and the fire station maintenance fund.

"If we don’t have affordable housing, who is going to use the parks and the libraries?" housing activist Calvin Welch asked.

The amendment would also require the Mayor’s Office of Housing to prepare an affordable-housing plan every three years, present an annual affordable-housing budget, and complete these steps before the rest of the mayor’s budget proposals are finalized.

"I hope these provisions will bring some much-needed transparency and clarity to the affordable-housing process so we can avoid the train wreck of last year," Welch said.

In a June 8 editorial still posted at Newsom’s www.actlocally.org reelection Web site, the San Francisco Chronicle appears to have bought the mayor’s spin that Daly’s request to prioritize housing was all just political theater.

"There was nothing wise or efficient about Supervisor Chris Daly’s bald political ploy to strip $37 million from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s budget priorities and shift most of it into affordable housing," the Chronicle claimed. "Now let’s be clear. We know that San Francisco does need housing. Newsom’s budget also acknowledges the shortage, pumping $217 million into housing programs."

But, according to Welch, "the lie was that Newsom allocated $217 million when he really only allocated $78 million and the board added a further $10 million to the pot…. Newsom was taking credit for more than he was actually allocating and using those other funds to imply that he’d already used a massive amount of the General Fund when he was, in fact, allocating less than the year before. So he was actually talking about a cut."

Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard told the Guardian that the total affordable-housing budget for fiscal year 2007–08 was $226 million — and of that total budget, "just approximately $90 million is General Fund dollars.

"The balance of funding (the difference between $226 million and $90 million) is a whole variety of other funding sources," he added, listing inclusionary housing in-lieu fees, redevelopment funds, jobs housing linkage fees levied on private development, federal and state sources, and other funds, many of which accumulate over many years, further distorting the budget picture.

But Welch said the housing situation is grim. As he told us, "The truth is that 92 percent of the city’s population can’t afford housing."

Daly’s affordable-housing amendment awaits a Jan. 8 board vote, following a request by Maxwell to allow for affordable housing to be built on sites used under the San Francisco Housing Authority — the so-called Hope SF program — a request Daly supports.

"My issue with Hope SF is [with] any proposal to build a large number of market-rate units on public housing sites," Daly explained, referring to a central tenet of the Newsom-created program.

Meanwhile, a June 2008 ballot measure being pushed by Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and a host of other prominent local power brokers threatens to drain what little money the city does have for affordable housing in order to subsidize a massive push by Lennar Corp. to build 8,000 to 10,000 new houses in Candlestick Point, Hunters Point, and the Bayview.

Other than committing to replace low-income Alice Griffith public housing units at a one-to-one ratio, the Bayview Jobs, Parks and Housing Measure does not specify what percentage of the Lennar-built homes will be considered affordable or sold below market rates. Publicly, backers of the measure are presenting the efforts as focused on building a new stadium for the San Francisco 49ers, even though the team has said it would rather move to Santa Clara. Yet the campaign is also keenly aware of the public support for more affordable housing, at least if its ground-level pitches are any indication.

A paid signature gatherer who was recently working the 24th Street BART station (and who also told a Guardian source he was getting the unusually high sum of $2.50 per signature) presented the proposal to passersby as "an affordable housing measure."

Latterman’s analysis, Newsom’s “trying times,” Leal’s demise

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“He remained popular with voters (if not insiders) throughout the whole of his first term (after gay marriage), even through some trying personal times. Effectively, with an absence of challenge, his high poll numbers transferred directly to the ballot—rare in American politics.” David Latterman on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s 2007 reelection.
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Photo from sfgov.org’s Mayoral homepage.

“Trying personal times!” Don’t you just love how Fall Line Analytics President David Latterman tiptoes round the eggshells scattered on Newsom’s reelection path in Spring ‘07, following the news that Newsom had had an affair with the wife of his campaign manager, Alex Tourk?

And you’ve got to give it up to Latterman when it comes to analyzing quantitative and graphical political data, as he has just done for the November 2007 election. Plus, his scatter graphs look mighty festive

Latterman’s “trying times” comment also reminds me why I missed the initial media frenzy that news of Newsom’s affair broke. I was attending a day-long, ground breaking climate change conference, convened by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
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I remember it well, because that was the day that SFPUC General Manager Susan Leal kicked off the conference by announcing that we’d be drinking from decanted water that day, since bottled water was bad for the environment–and we have all that great clean water coming from Hetch Hetchy.

Then Newsom made a few comments, before scampering back to the City Hall, where, as it later turned out, all hell was about to break loose, although it took Newsom 24 hours to talk about it.

Who would have thought back then, on January 31, 2007, that by year’s endr, we would see Newsom handily reelected—and Leal, who has worked hard to bring San Francisco’s water and power policies into the 21st Century, with her head on the chopping block?

Now, there’s an explanatory scatter graph I’d like to see, showing Leal’s popularity with the Mayor decreasing, I guess, as her efforts to make San Francisco’s utilities truly public increased, and as the Mayor, I suppose, increasingly took the credit for many of the initiatives that Leal has led the way on? Sweet. Now there’s justice.
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The Road to Newsom’s rise and Leal’s demise is as winding as the City’s map of how water gets to San Francisco.

Year in Music: Long walk home

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Years ago I ended up at a San Francisco Water Department dinner with my father and an old neighborhood friend, eating in the back hall of a half-century-old Italian restaurant in the Excelsior. The room spilled over with thick-armed men who were union, white, and not bad-off and from whom I learned a thing or two about old San Francisco family names and accents that tell you if someone is from the Richmond, the old Castro, or Balboa. It was a return to the blue-collar ‘Frisco that I was raised in: a posthippie, pre-dot-com city with a ubiquitous — and at one time iconic — KFOG, 104.5 FM, playlist composed of harder rockers by the Stones, Creedence, and the Beatles. My earliest memories of the city are tied to those songs, moaning from tiny car speakers, rattling empty cans of Bud, and wafting over garages that smelled of grease.

Yet there was one member of this blue-collar pantheon I could never get too close to. He was too bombastic. His character was too huge. Even before ingesting punk rock ideology via Maximumrocknroll and Epicenter, I felt in opposition to the stadium and the spectacle. Somehow I had internalized a belief that the Boss was my enemy.

Yet this year I found myself buying Magic (Sony), Bruce Springsteen’s latest album, literally on sight. My teenage self would have been horrified to know that at 30 I would be purchasing a Springsteen record not in spite of the E Street Band but because of it, and that after listening to it again and again, my greatest criticism would be that it has too few Clarence Clemons sax solos. The truth is that I’ve moved well past being appreciative of the man and into the realm of the fan — the kind who marks his Slingshot planner with the date and time tickets go on sale for Springsteen’s latest tour.

As with many young men with elitist tastes, it was Nebraska (Sony, 1982) that broke me. With its high-contrast cover, four-track production, and the slap-back reverb echoing of Suicide, the album suggested an almost punk quality, and it subverted all of my assumptions about Springsteen’s gross theatrics. Here was a serious songwriter with compassion for working people, concern for their dignity, and a subtle hint of darkness. Suddenly, I was listening, and, as I began to discover, so were my friends.

What surprised me most was the nonlinearity and consistency of his politics. Springsteen isn’t partisan, pro-union, antiwar, or above it all. He’s for ordinary people and their battles with life, injustice, and the institutions that seem set on killing their dreams, if not destroying the dreamers. It turns out that "Born in the U.S.A." isn’t a nationalist anthem but an indictment. He takes on police, poverty, and racism with "American Skin (41 Shots)," whose title pointedly refers to the slaying of Amadou Diallo by the New York Police Department. Springsteen is a humanist who never wanted to choose sides in the process of choosing between right and wrong. Perhaps for good reason — it’s hard not to wonder whether Clear Channel radio stations’ boycott of Magic isn’t linked to his fateful decision to openly oppose George W. Bush during the 2004 election.

My slow-burning appreciation for Springsteen’s moral and political iconoclasm wasn’t what really set my obsession with him into high gear. It was the unexpected but inevitable emotional connection that grew. Before I knew it, I was sitting in the dark listening to The River (Sony, 1980) and crying to its titular masterpiece. Conversion is strange, and when a person goes from being outside the church pews to singing in the choir it’s a hard thing to explain to anyone. I can listen to "Atlantic City," "The Promised Land," or even Magic‘s "Long Walk Home" and feel the agony of every person who’s ever loved or lost. I realize I’m willing to give up being aesthetically correct, intellectually above it all, and emotionally safe just to have something I can share with people who seem to live such different lives. Certainly it’s worth it to be transported back home, which makes Magic less like a throwback and more like a time machine. *

TOP 5 MUSIC TOPPERS


1. Top return to shitty form: Siltbreeze

After many years languishing in the land of the giant question marks, Philly scuzz-and-fuzz merchants Siltbreeze not only have begun releasing new records but also happen to be releasing some of the best records in the American (and Australian?!) underground. Harry Pussy, Charlambides, and the Dead C meet US Girls, Ex-Cocaine, and xNoBBQx.

2. Top new band from my new hometown, Portland, Ore.: Eat Skull

What we’ve got is ear-bleeding garage punk that makes up for a lack of speed with a heavy hand on the treble knob. Presented by members of the Hospitals, Gang Wizard, and Hale Zukas, this is the kind of pop violence that hasn’t hurt this good since Henry’s Dress.

3. Top new band from my old hometown, Oakland: Zeroth

Just when I thought I couldn’t be surprised by anything anymore. A trio of smarter than average weirdos, they’ve produced the kind of strangeness that lends itself to nonsense descriptors like "electric ovarian space prog." My butt shook.

4. Top trend: pop noise albums

Though this is really a trend that started a few years ago with records like Burning Star Core’s The Very Heart of the World (Thin Wrist, 2005) and Prurient’s Black Vase (Load, 2005), 2007 saw some of America’s noise heavyweights releasing major statements with actual production values. Mouthus, John Wiese, and Religious Knives all brought great records, but perhaps most startling were the sweet clarity and depth of Sighting’s Through the Panama (Load/Ecstatic Peace).

5. Top label A&R: Southern Lord

They’ve made a pretty clean sweep of the best of left-field cult metal: OM, Wolves in the Throne Room, Velvet Cacoon, Abruptum, and Striborg. My only question is, where’s WOLD?

For more from Saloman, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Hey Gavin, stop calling me!

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Most people agree it’s irritating and invasive to get our dinners interrupted by calls from telemarketers. That’s why our elected officials finally created the National Do Not Call Registry. But is it any less irksome when the disembodied robo-voice of Gavin Newsom or Bill Clinton disturbs our peace? Or when some chirpy young political volunteer wants to know who we plan to vote for in the upcoming election? After all, aren’t they also invading your space to try to sell you something that you may not want?
That’s why the nonprofit group Citizens for Civil Discourse have created the National Political Do Not Call Registry, which is signing up people who don’t want political calls and working with candidates and political parties to respect their wishes.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

OK: a 26-year-old German exchange student was stabbed in the Outer Sunset two weeks ago by a man who appeared to be homeless. It was a terrible incident, an awful crime; we’ll all stipulate that. And although C.W. Nevius, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, splashed it all over the front page of the Sunday paper Dec. 2, it really shouldn’t have anything to do with how the city sets homeless policy.

But it’s got me thinking.

Nevius is apparently shocked that there’s been a sudden increase in the number of homeless people living in the Sunset. I could have told him and the mayor and the police department a month ago that this was going to happen.

See, thanks to a series of Nevius columns about homeless encampments in Golden Gate Park, Mayor Gavin Newsom got election-year tough this fall and created special teams to go into the park and roust the residents. The mayor, of course, said that all he wanted was to get people into shelters, to get them treatment, to provide them the support that he insists his administration is delivering.

But the fact is, there aren’t enough decent places for all of these people to live. Some day, I still believe, the people in San Francisco (and the people who run the country and the state) will come to their senses and realize that it’s entirely possible to end urban poverty, but that it will take big chunks of money, multiple billions of dollars, and that the wealthy people who like to complain about the folks on the streets will have to pay higher taxes to make it happen. We live in a rich city and a rich country; we can afford to build housing and create jobs and fund welfare programs. We just don’t want to — because we’re Americans and we’ve been told for a couple of generations now that we don’t have to sacrifice for social progress.

In the meantime, no law-enforcement crackdown or Care Not Cash program or shelter system is going to end homelessness in San Francisco. There are going to be people living on the streets because they can’t afford to pay rent on even a nasty single room and they don’t want to deal with the rules and structure of the shelter system.

And I have to wonder:

Weren’t we all better off when we let them sleep in the park?

I know that’s not a terribly satisfying approach to public policy; I know there were and are problems (dirty needles, human waste, befouling of valuable and rare public space) associated with the camps. I know that in theory nobody should be camping in Golden Gate Park; as one city resident reminded me at a neighborhood forum not long ago, the park isn’t a wilderness — it’s a garden.

But nobody should be sleeping in doorways or on sidewalks or in makeshift shelters in industrial areas either. I refer you to paragraph five above.

I ask you (and Newsom and Nevius): where are these people supposed to sleep? No, the park isn’t a home, but a camp hidden in a rarely used corner is more of a home than a bed in a nasty, crowded shelter where you have no rights at all, not even the right to come and go when you want. I know where I’d rather sleep.

Maybe, in the spirit of harm reduction, we should just leave the park campers alone.

Where’s Michela?

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› news@sfbg.com

Michela Alioto-Pier, carpetbagger.

That’s what her Democratic primary challenger called her in 1996, when Alioto-Pier ran for the House of Representatives from the 1st congressional district, which hugs the California coastline from the town of Napa to the Oregon border.

Alioto-Pier, a San Francisco native, had spent the previous two and a half years at the White House advising Al Gore on telecommunications issues. After returning to the West Coast, the ambitious 26-year-old packed up her belongings and moved to St. Helena in Napa County, buying a home there in November 1995 and registering to vote the following month.

Her opponent, Monica Marvin, promptly attacked with a commercial showing a moving van heading across the Golden Gate Bridge alongside a photo of Alioto-Pier and a voice-over condemning outside candidates.

"I think the perception was that someone who’d lived most of her life in the district had a more comprehensive grasp of the issues and the culture reflected by those constituents," Marvin told the Guardian recently.

Alioto-Pier nonetheless won the primary, but she narrowly lost the general election to a Republican incumbent named Frank Riggs. He too assailed her for moving to the district just before the race.

More than a decade later, District 2 supervisor Alioto-Pier hasn’t managed to escape accusations that she’s detached from her constituents, nor has she succeeded in clearly reestablishing residency here since beginning a new political career at San Francisco’s City Hall.

THE SECOND-HOME STORY


Alioto-Pier is registered to vote at a Vallejo Street condo that she bought in 2005 for $1.9 million, and she told us that she, husband Thomas Paul Pier, and their three children make it their primary residence.

"Depending on the time of year, we spend some weekends at our St. Helena house, which is on the same street as Congresswoman [Nancy] Pelosi’s St. Helena house," she said in a written response to our questions.

An Alioto-Pier office assistant, Gene Eplett, left a voice message with the Guardian insisting that second homes are commonplace. "You probably have one as well," Eplett said.

Not exactly. Particularly not one with a taxable value of $774,793.

And in some legal documents, Alioto-Pier lists the Napa County house as her residence.

In August the supervisor formed a limited liability company for the purpose of "wine production" with Pier, called Alioto-Pier Vineyards, according to state business registration records. Both listed their home address as the three-bedroom, two-bath St. Helena home on Zinfandel Lane. Alioto-Pier paid $590,000 for the place, which sits on 2.6 acres of world-famous Napa County soil.

Within days of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s appointing her to the Board of Supervisors in January 2004, she signed a deed of trust for a $100,000 equity line of credit, again listing the Zinfandel Lane property as her home address, according to Napa County records.

In early May 2003, not long before she joined the board, former mayor Willie Brown tapped her to sit on the powerful San Francisco Port Commission. That same week she reregistered another wine-making business in Napa County she’d founded years before called Alioto Cellars, a.k.a. Alioto Winery. In the area of the original form asking for a residence, she began to list the St. Helena property but thought better of it, crossing it out and replacing it with a San Francisco address on Jackson Street that she appears to have used for at least two years, according to Napa County records.

In response to questions regarding the business registration records for Alioto-Pier Vineyards, the supervisor said neither she nor her husband signed the form and that it was filled out by their attorney.

"Alioto-Pier Vineyards LLC is a small wine producing business (approximately 250 cases per year) whose business address is more suitable to where our vineyard (approximately one acre) is located — at our St. Helena property," she wrote.

The form asks for the addresses of the company’s managers separate from the location of the principal executive office. For both Alioto-Pier and her husband, Zinfandel Lane is given as the home address.

DISTRICT ISSUES


As a supervisor, Alioto-Pier has exhibited savvy on emergency preparedness, mothers in the workplace, energy use, and the threatened demise of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission, which treats primarily low-income patients.

Mick Suverkrubbe, president of the Marina Merchants Association, said the supervisor always has a presence at the group’s meetings.

"If she doesn’t show up, one of her aides shows up," Suverkrubbe said. "She’s always been real responsive when we’ve had questions."

But some critics say Alioto-Pier appears all too willing to take direction from the Mayor’s Office, well-financed business interests, and Democratic party functionaries rather than independently arriving at positions.

"She’s like the windup doll," said one City Hall insider who asked not to be named. "It’s fair to say every time I see Sean Elsbernd [her board ally] make a decision, I know that it’s coming from a policy perspective, not someone yanking his chain. It’s the exception, not the rule, that she comes up with her own policy perspective."

"She has three more years, and hopefully they’ll be better," Bill Barnes, an aide to Assemblymember Fiona Ma who formerly worked for Sup. Chris Daly, said of Alioto-Pier’s current board term. "The point of district elections is that supervisors respond to their neighborhood. The values and concerns in District 2 are going to be more moderate and conservative than some other areas, but you still have to provide that basic level of service."

ATTENDANCE PROBLEMS


Alioto-Pier’s attendance record has also caused her trouble and made her an easy target for political adversaries.

"I see her here on Tuesday afternoons," when the board meets, one City Hall staffer said. "She probably spends a full day here when she has a committee hearing with an item. Beyond that, her office is routinely shut on Fridays."

Alioto-Pier missed 17 of 160 board and committee meetings in 2004 and 2005 — that’s only about 10 percent. But throughout her tenure as a supervisor, she’s attended barely half of the meetings of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, where each of the supervisors automatically serves as a director, according to an analysis of the $100 payments the members receive for attending meetings.

"I missed Transportation Authority meetings related to the birth of my third child and the complications of that pregnancy," Alioto-Pier told us.

Alioto-Pier noted, as did others at City Hall, that she had health problems in 2006. She was pregnant with her third child, and there were complications. Further, she said, supervisors don’t get time off for maternity.

"All city employees with the exception of members of the Board of Supervisors are allowed to take a four-month maternity leave. I was the first member of the board in the history of San Francisco to give birth while in office. As such, there were no guidelines in place, and I had to place the health and safety of my newborn first," she said.

But for many months in 2004 and 2005, before that pregnancy, she missed all or almost all of the Transportation Authority meetings.

She also missed 16 of 20 scheduled meetings, including three public hearings, during the short time in 2004 that she spent as a director for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District.

Alioto-Pier left the district before her term was set to expire after serving only six months, complaining that she didn’t have enough time for the position. In her resignation letter, she acknowledged that the bridge was adjacent to her district and "given my ongoing commitment to improving waterfront security in San Francisco, I hope in the future I will once again be able to work with you and serve as a director." She never has, but four other supervisors have served on the district’s board for years.

And she’s apparently not too busy to be running a winery in St. Helena. It’s a modest operation, but it has to take some of her time.

WHERE DOES SHE VOTE?


Alioto-Pier’s voter registration history is confusing.

She doesn’t appear to have voted at all in the November 1999 election — at least not in Napa or San Francisco counties — but, curiously, she did vote in that year’s December runoff, when Willie Brown won a second term over Sup. Tom Ammiano.

She cast a ballot as an absentee in Napa County one year later, even though she was registered at that time to vote in San Francisco under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier, public records show. She voted here in November 1998 with the last name Alioto-Pier, but she didn’t marry her lawyer husband until May 2000, county records show.

In 2002 she voted in San Francisco during the primary and general elections under the name Michela Angelina Driscol Alioto, yet she was still registered concurrently under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier.

Alioto-Pier said that she and her husband returned to St. Helena in July 2000 but moved back here in early 2001, reregistering in both places. She added that San Francisco and Napa counties were at that time slow to remove "deadwood" registrations from their rolls.

"Clearly, once one reregisters, the county has the obligation to cancel all previous registrations for that person," she said. Alioto-Pier insisted that she voted in San Francisco’s November 1999 election, but an office attendant at the Department of Elections asserted that the system "says she was eligible but she did not vote."

Her 1996 Republican opponent, Riggs, also castigated her for failing to vote in 1994 and 1995. Alioto-Pier’s explanation, according to press accounts? Her permanent residency wasn’t clear.

"As best as I can recall from the events of a decade ago, I responded to Republican Frank Riggs by saying there was a mix-up with my absentee ballots," Alioto-Pier told us.

She’s listed a string of San Francisco addresses in public records over the past two decades in addition to her St. Helena dwelling. But in 2005 she finally bought the condo on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. She didn’t file for a homeowner’s exemption on the condo in 2006, but neither has she taken advantage of the tax break on her Zinfandel Lane home during any year since 1997, according to property records.

Alioto-Pier said she was unaware of qualifying for the homeowner’s tax exemption. "However, we declare as a deduction the mortgage interest from our Vallejo Street home on our federal tax returns," she said. Taxpayers are permitted to benefit from the deduction on a second residence.

Whispers at City Hall surrounding the time Alioto-Pier spends in St. Helena and away from her District 2 constituents have dogged her increasingly since she replaced Newsom.

But she’s never faced the punishing regimen of banner headlines endured by District 4’s onetime supervisor Ed Jew. He’s also been suspended by the mayor and faces civil charges that he lied to voters about living permanently in the district he was elected to represent.

Alioto-Pier offered a few telling words in a recent robocall to San Francisco voters opposing mandated appearances by the mayor before the Board of Supervisors: "We need to get our house in order before we invite any guests."

Now, which house would that be?

The Alcatraz Conversion Experience…

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….is one helluva trippy trip, one of those moments that makes me truly thankful to be covering politics in San Francisco.

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It’s not just the bejeweled image of a converted Alcatraz by night, or the the image of a white-domed daytime Alcatraz ‘Peace Center” Island that got me tripping.

No, to get the full impact of the trippy conversion experience, scroll down the Global Peace Foundation’s website to their YouTube video clip. It’s an election prelude quite unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Question of intent

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, former mayor Willie Brown, Sup. Sophie Maxwell, and Mayor Gavin Newsom in recent weeks have come out in support of a proposed ballot measure that would allow Lennar Corp. to develop thousands of new homes at Candlestick Point, create 350 acres of parks, and possibly build a new 49ers stadium at Hunters Point Shipyard.

The campaign for the Bayview Jobs, Parks and Housing Initiative just launched its signature drive, but the measure should qualify relatively easily for the June 2008 election, given new low signature thresholds and the campaign’s powerful backers.

The measure would give Lennar, which is also involved in Treasure Island and much of the Bayview–Hunters Point redevelopment area, even more control over San Francisco’s biggest chunks of developable land.

But should San Franciscans really reward Lennar with more land and responsibilities when the financially troubled Florida developer has a track record in San Francisco and elsewhere of failing to live up to its promises, exposing vulnerable citizens to asbestos dust, and using deceptive public relations campaigns to gloss over its misdeeds?

As the Guardian has been reporting since early this year (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07), Lennar failed to monitor and control the dust from naturally occurring asbestos while grading a hilltop in preparation for building condominiums on Parcel A of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

Last month the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s Board of Directors asked staff to pursue the maximum fines possible for Lennar’s violations, which could run into millions of dollars, particularly if they are found to be the result of willful or negligent behavior.

"It’s clear to everyone in the agency that this case needs to be handled well," BAAQMD spokesperson Karen Schkolnick told the Guardian. "It’s in everyone’s interest, certainly the community’s, to get resolution."

The air district gives parties to whom it issues a warning three years to settle the matter before it goes to court. Lennar officials have publicly blamed subcontractors for failing to control dust and leaving air-monitoring equipment with dead batteries for months on end, but the BAAQMD is treating Lennar as the responsible party.

"It’s air district policy to deal with the primary contractor, which in this case is Lennar, although additional parties may be held liable," Schkolnick said.

Accusations of willful negligence also lie at the heart of a Proposition 65 lawsuit that was filed against Lennar for alleged failures to warn the community of exposure to asbestos, a known carcinogen (see Green City, 8/29/07).

Filed by the Center for Self Improvement, the nonprofit that runs the Muhammad University of Islam, which is next to Parcel A, the suit alleges that the construction activities of Lennar and subcontractor Gordon N. Ball "caused thousands of Californians to be involuntarily and unwittingly exposed to asbestos on a daily basis without the defendants first providing the adjacent community and persons working at the site with the toxic health hazard warnings."

Now fresh evidence from another whistle-blower lawsuit filed by three Lennar employees (see "Dust Still Settling," 3/28/07) shows that higher-ups within Lennar reprimanded and reassigned a subordinate who told subcontractors to comply with mandated plans or face an immediate suspension of construction activities at the Parcel A site.

In an April 21, 2006, BlackBerry message that was copied to Lennar Urban senior vice president Paul Menaker and other top Lennar executives, Lennar Urban’s regional vice president Kofi Bonner wrote to Gary McIntyre, Lennar/BVHP’s Hunters Point Shipyard Project manager, "Gary why do you insist on sending threatening emails to the contractor. If you can no longer communicate directly without the threat of a shutdown … perhaps we should find another area of responsibility for you to oversee. Such emails should only be sent as documentation of [a] conversation."

McIntyre says he was just trying to do his job, which involved ensuring that subcontractors abided by the long list of special health and safety criteria that were developed for this particularly hazardous work site, located in an area long plagued by environmental injustice.

The shipyard is a Superfund site filled with toxic chemicals, and although the 63-acre Parcel A had been cleaned up enough to be certified for residential development, it sits atop a serpentine hill full of naturally occurring asbestos, a potent carcinogen. So the Department of Public Health and the BAAQMD both insisted on a strict plan for controlling dust, which Lennar used to sell the community on the project’s safety.

Yet when McIntyre began insisting in writing that Lennar and its subcontractors adhere carefully to those rules, he was removed from his job. In a work evaluation signed Oct. 17, 2006, Menaker described McIntyre as "a good company spokesperson as it relates to Hunters Point Shipyard" but claimed that he required major improvement in his leadership and communication skills.

"As a manager, he needs to focus on achieving his ultimate mission, rather than focusing on details. Poor communication skills have led to incomplete and often incorrect information being disseminated," Menaker wrote.

The ultimate mission for Lennar — which has seen its stock tank this year as it’s been roiled by a crisis in the housing market — was to get Parcel A built with a minimum of problems and delays. And as concerns about its behavior arose, its communication strategy seemed to be more concerned with positive spin and tapping testimony from financial partners than with putting out a complete and correct view of what was happening.

Whether or not McIntyre was a good Lennar employee, he was at least trying to do right by the community, as records obtained through the lawsuit’s discovery process show. As McIntyre wrote in a three-page response to Menaker’s evaluation, "Our BVHP Naval Shipyard project has unique environmental requirements and compliance therewith is mandatory."

But the record is clear that Lennar didn’t comply with its promises, raising serious questions about a company that wants to take over development of the rest of this toxic yet politically, socially, and economically important site.

BUYING ALLIES


So who is really behind the Bayview Jobs, Parks and Housing Initiative, which does not even have the support of the 49ers, who say they’d rather be in Santa Clara?

The measure was submitted by the African American Community Revitalization Consortium, which describes itself as "a group of area churches, organizations, residents and local merchants, working to improve Bayview Hunters Point." Yet this group is backed by Lennar and draws its members from among those with a personal financial stake in the company’s San Francisco projects.

AACRC founders Rev. Arelious Walker of the True Hope Church of God in Christ in Hunters Point and Rev. J. Edgar Boyd of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church of San Francisco are both members of Tabernacle Affiliated Developers, one of four Bayview–Hunters Point community builders who entered into a joint venture with Lennar/BVHP to build 30 percent of Lennar’s for-sale units at Parcel A. TAD is building the affordable units while Lennar develops the market-rate homes.

Neither Walker nor Boyd disclosed this conflict of interest at a July 31 Board of Supervisors hearing where they and the busloads of people Lennar helped ferry to City Hall created the illusion that the community was more concerned about keeping work going on Parcel A than temporarily shutting down the site while the health concerns of people in the Bayview were addressed.

Referring to reports from the city’s Department of Public Health, which claimed that there is no evidence that asbestos dust generated by the grading poses a threat to human health, Walker and Boyd warned that even a temporary shutdown of Lennar’s Parcel A site would adversely affect an already economically disadvantaged community. There is no way to test for whether someone has inhaled asbestos that could pose long-term risks, and Lennar supporters have used that void to claim all is well.

But even if community benefits such as home-building contracts, better parks, and job training opportunities do trickle down to Bayview–Hunters Point residents, will those opportunities outweigh the risk of doing business with a company that has endangered public health, has created deep divisions within an already stressed community, and is struggling financially?

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Minister Christopher Muhammad, whose Nation of Islam–affiliated nonprofit filed the Prop. 65 suit "individually and on behalf of the general public," described Lennar as "a rogue company that can’t be trusted."

"I’m concerned about the health of the community, as well as the other schools that border the shipyard," Muhammad said. "Our contention is that Lennar purposefully turned the monitors off. If you read the air district’s asbestos-dust mitigation plan, it appears that there was a way to do this grading safely. And the community went along with it. The problem was that Lennar was looking at their bottom line and violated every agreement. They threw the precautionary principle to the wind, literally. And the city looked the other way."

And even if Rev. Walker truly believes the June 2008 Bayview ballot measure is "a chance for all of us to move forward together," does it make financial sense, against the backdrop of a nationwide mortgage meltdown, to give Lennar permission to build thousands of homes at Candlestick Point when this measure doesn’t even specify what percentage of the 8,000 to 10,000 proposed new units would be rented or sold at below-market rates?

Lennar/BVHP has already reneged on promises to build rental units at its Parcel A site, and on Aug. 31, Lennar Corp., which is headquartered in Miami Beach, Fla., reported a third-quarter net loss of $513.9 million, compared to third-quarter net earnings of $206.7 million in 2006. Its stock continues to tumble, hitting a 52-week low of $14.50 per share on Nov. 26, down from a 52-week high of $56.54.

On Nov. 2, Reuters reported that Standard and Poor’s had cut Lennar’s debt rating to a junk-bond level "BB-plus" because of Lennar’s "exposure to oversupplied housing markets in California and Florida." And on Nov. 16 the Orange County Register reported that Lennar is shelving a condominium-retail complex in Long Beach and keeping high-rise condos it built in Anaheim vacant until the housing market bounces back.

Redevelopment Agency executive director Fred Blackwell, who was hired Aug. 30, told us his agency’s deposition and development agreement with Lennar wouldn’t let the company indefinitely mothball its housing units: "The DDA gives Lennar and the vertical developers the option to lease the for-sale units for one year, prior to their sale."

While the agency has been criticized for failing to do anything about Lennar’s problems on Parcel A and letting the company out of its obligation to build rental units, Blackwell said it is able to hold Lennar accountable.

"I feel like the DDA gives us all the tools we need," Blackwell told us. "We have opportunities to ‘cure’ whatever the contractor’s default is, but we can’t just arbitrarily shut things down."

But many in the community aren’t convinced. With the grim housing picture and the 49ers saying they’d rather be in Santa Clara, the only certain outcome from passage of this ballot measure would seem to be a mandate for the city to turn over valuable public lands and devote millions of dollars in scarce affording-housing funds to subsidize the ambitions of a corporation with a dubious track record that is actively resisting public accountability.

True, Lennar has promised to rebuild the Alice B. Griffith public housing project without dislocating any residents, and the measure also allows for the creation of 350 acres of parks and open spaces, 700,000 square feet of retail stores, two million square feet of office space, and improved transit routes and shoreline trails.

But although the rest of the shipyard is contaminated with a long list of human-made toxins, would passage of the initiative mean an early transfer of the shipyard from the Navy to the city and Lennar? And with that shift, the requirement that we put even more faith in this corporation’s ability to safely manage the project?

In October, Newsom, who was running for reelection at the time, told the Guardian he was worried about Lennar’s ability to follow through on "prescriptive goals and honor their commitments."

"We have to hold them accountable," Newsom told us. "They need to do what they say they’re going to do. We need to hold them to these commitments."

But how exactly is the mayor holding Lennar accountable?

In March, when the Guardian asked Newsom’s office if he intended, in light of Lennar’s Parcel A failures, to push ahead with plans to make Lennar the master developer for the 49ers stadium and Candlestick Point, the Mayor’s Office of Communications replied by referring us to Sam Singer, who has been on Lennar’s PR payroll for years.

On Nov. 18 the Chronicle reported that Singer was on the campaign team for the Bayview ballot initiative, along with former 49ers executive Carmen Policy, Newsom’s campaign manager and chief political consultant Eric Jaye, Newsom’s former campaign manager Alex Tourk, political consultant Jim Stearns, and political advertising firm Terris, Barnes and Walters, which worked on the 1997 49ers stadium bond and the 1996 measure for the Giants’ ballpark, both approved by voters.

In recent months Lennar has asked the Guardian to send questions to its latest PR flack, Lance Ignon, rather than Singer. In reply to our latest round of queries, about lawsuits and air district violations, Ignon forwarded us the following statement: "The record is abundantly clear that at each and every stage of the redevelopment process, Lennar has been guided by a commitment to protecting the health and safety of the Bayview–Hunters Point community. Lennar has fully cooperated with all relevant regulatory agencies and public health professionals to determine whether grading operations at the Shipyard pose a health threat to local residents. After months of exhaustive analysis, numerous different health experts — including [the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry] — concluded that the naturally occurring asbestos did not present a serious long-term health risk. Lennar will continue to work with the San Francisco Department of Public Health and other regulatory agencies to ensure the health of the community remains safeguarded."

Actually, the ATSDR report wasn’t quite that conclusive. It took issue with the faulty dust monitoring equipment at Parcel A and noted that exposure-level thresholds for the project were derived from industrial standards for workers who wear protective gear and don’t have all-day exposure. "However, there are studies in the scientific literature in which long term lower level/non-occupational exposures (from take home exposures and other areas of the world where naturally occurring asbestos occur) caused a low but epidemiologically detectable excess risk of mesothelioma," the ATSDR-DPH report observes.

It’s not surprising to see Lennar gloss over issues of liability, but it’s curious that Newsom and other top officials are so eager to push a proposal that would give Lennar control of Candlestick Point and perhaps result in a 49ers stadium on a federal Superfund site — without first demanding a full and public investigation of how the developers could have so miserably failed to enforce mandatory plans at Parcel A.

This fall the Newsom administration was peeved when the San Francisco Board of Education, which includes Newsom’s education advisor Hydra Mendoza, and the Youth Commission unanimously called for a temporary shutdown of Lennar’s Parcel A site until community health issues are addressed.

These demands were largely symbolic, since major grading at the site is complete, but the Mayor’s Office shot back with a Nov. 2 memo including the request that city department heads and commissions follow the example of the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee and the Bayview Project Area Committee, which have said they won’t hear further testimony on the dust issue "unless and until credible scientific evidence is presented to contradict the conclusions of the DPH, CDPH, UCSF and others that the construction dust at the Shipyard had not created a long-term or serious health risk."

Such complex points and counterpoints have been like dust in the air, preventing the public from getting a clear picture of what’s important or what’s happened at the site. But a careful review of the public record shows that, at the very least, Lennar has failed to live up to its promises.

PAPER TRAIL


As records obtained through a whistle-blower lawsuit’s discovery process show, Lennar employee McIntyre was reprimanded for e-mailing a group of Lennar subcontractors including Gordon N. Ball, Luster National, and Ghirardelli Associates and demanding that their traffic-control plan implementation be in place before Gordon Ball/Yerba Buena Engineering Joint Venture "begin using (oversize construction equipment) scrapers or articuutf8g trucks on Crisp Road."

In court depositions, Menaker, who became McIntyre’s supervisor in April 2006, claimed he "never told McIntyre that he should not raise issues related to what he perceived to be deficiencies in Gordon Ball’s dust control measures.

"Rather, I repeatedly advised him that management by e-mail would not accomplish the goal of improving Gordon Ball’s performance and that he needed to communicate with Gordon Ball and others on the project in a more effective fashion. As a result of my observations of his job performance and the feedback from others … on Aug. 1, 2006, we brought in other professionals to assist with duties initially assigned to McIntyre."

But public records reveal that things continued to go awry at the site, long after the bulk of McIntyre’s construction field-management duties were transferred to David Wilkins, an employee of Lennar subcontractor Luster National.

According to a report filed by the city’s Department of Health, on July 7, 2006, the DPH’s Amy Brownell drove to the Lennar trailers and informed McIntye that Lennar was in violation of Article 31, the city’s construction-dust ordinance, after she observed numerous trucks generating "a significant amount of dust that was then carried by the wind across the property line." She even observed a water truck on the haul road doing the same thing as it watered the road.

On Aug. 9 — eight days after McIntyre was relieved of his field-construction management duties and seven days after Lennar declared it could not verify any of its air district–mandated asbestos-monitoring data — Brownell drove to the Lennar trailers and spoke with McIntyre’s successor, Wilkins, about dust problems generated by hillside grading, haul trucks, and an excavator loading soil into articulated trucks.

"Every time [the excavator] dumped the soil into the trucks, it created a small cloud of visible dust that crossed the project site boundary. There was no attempt to control the generation of dust," Brownell observed in her Aug. 9, 2006, inspection notes.

On Sept. 21, seven weeks after McIntyre’s transfer, Brownell issued Lennar an amended notice of violation when it came to her attention that construction-dust monitors hadn’t been in place for the first two months of heavy grading.

On Dec. 8, 2006, five months after McIntyre’s reassignment, Lennar got slapped with another violation after DPH industrial hygienist Peter Wilsey observed on Nov. 30, 2006, that "dust from the work, particularly from the trucks on the haul road, was crossing the property boundary."

And on Aug. 17, a year after McIntyre left, the DPH issued Lennar its most recent violation for not controlling dust properly. But this time the notice included a 48-hour work suspension period to establish a dust-control plan monitor to be supervised by DPH staff, with costs billed to Lennar.

"The issuance of notices of violations shows the regulatory system is working," Brownell told the Guardian. "Dust control on a gigantic project like this is a continuous, everyday process that every single contractor has to do properly. That’s Lennar’s issue and problem. At DPH, we feel we have enough tools to do inspections, which Lennar gets billed for. And if they violate our requirements again, we’ll shut them down again. Or fine them."

So far, the DPH has not chosen to fine Lennar for any of its Parcel A dust violations.

"We considered it for this last violation but decided that shutting them down for two days was penalty enough," Brownell says, adding that while she’d "never just rely on air monitors, a monitor helps when you’re having problems with dust control, because then you can say, ‘Here’s scientific proof.’<0x2009>"

And scientific proof, in the form of monitoring data during the long, hot, and dusty summer of 2006, would likely have triggered numerous costly work slowdowns and stoppages. According to a memo marked "confidential" that the Guardian unearthed in the air district’s files, Lennar stated, "It costs approximately $40,000 a day to stop grading and construction" and "Gordon Ball would have to idle about 26 employees at the site, and employees tend to look for other work when the work is not consistent."

After Rev. Muhammad began to raise a storm about dust violations next to his nonprofit Muhammad University of Islam, Lennar Urban senior vice president Menaker accused him of being a "shakedown artist" when he refused an offer to temporarily relocate the school.

But Muhammad told the Guardian he refused the offer "because I didn’t want the school to be bounced around like a political football. And because I was concerned about the rest of the community."

Muhammad said he’s trying to sound the alarm about Lennar before it takes over all of Hunters and Candlestick points. As he told us, "This city is selling its birthright to a rogue company."

TRIGGER TIME


So what does the BAAQMD intend to do about Lennar’s enforcement record past, present, and future?

At an Oct. 29 hearing on asbestos dust, the BAAQMD Board of Directors unanimously instructed staff to pursue the maximum fines possible for Lennar’s Parcel A violations.

Air district staff tried to reassure the public that the "action levels" the BAAQMD set at the shipyard are health protective and provide a significant margin of safety.

Health impacts from unmonitored exposures, BAAQMD staffer Kelly Wee said, "are well within the guidelines," claiming a "one in three million" chance of developing asbestos-related diseases.

BAAQMD board member Sup. Chris Daly, who as a member of the Board of Supervisors voted July 31 to urge a temporary shutdown of Lennar’s Parcel A site, praised the air district for "moving forward with very conservative action levels.

"But these levels are political calls that are not necessarily scientific or health based," Daly added. "The initial violation, the one that, according to Lennar, CH2M Hill is responsible for, we don’t know what those levels of asbestos were, and that’s when the most significant grading occurred.

"The World Health Organization and [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] scientists are very clear that any level of exposure to asbestos comes with an increased health risk, and if you are already exposed to multiple sources, this becomes more serious," he said, referring to the freeways, power plants, sewage treatments plants, and substandard housing that blight the community, along with the area’s relatively high rate of smoking.

The BAAQMD’s Wee told the organization’s board that Lennar did not conduct proper oversight of its contractors and did not properly document the flow of air through its monitors but did discover and report its lapses in August 2006.

"Lennar exceeded the air district’s work shutdown level on at least 23 days in the post–Aug. 1, 2006, period, which is when the developer was monitoring asbestos dust," Wee observed, noting that the air district has two additional notices of violation pending against Lennar for 2007: one for overfilling dump trucks, the other for failing to maintain enough gravel on truck-wheel wash pads.

BAAQMD spokesperson Schkolnick later confirmed to the Guardian that the air district issued Lennar a notice of violation on Oct. 26 for failing to control naturally occurring asbestos at Parcel A, where grading is finished, but Lennar subcontractor Ranger is digging up the earth again to lay pipes.

"It’s time for the board to make sure the air district is as aggressive as possible to protect residents and sensitive receptors," Daly said. "Asbestos is carcinogenic. The state and federal government knows it. That was why there was an asbestos-dust mitigation plan. The air district asked for air monitoring because of the site’s proximity to a school. The air monitors were sold not just to the city but to the public as the major safeguards to the community, especially sensitive receptors, but during the most gigantic grading period and perhaps the most gigantic exposures, we don’t know what the levels of asbestos were."

Fellow BAAQMD board member Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who was a key swing vote against urging a Lennar work stoppage at the Board of Supervisors meeting in July, is now joining Daly in demanding full enforcement of the law.

"The July 31 resolution had no way to force Lennar or the SFRA to do anything," McGoldrick told the Guardian, explaining why he’s now taking a stronger stance. "It seemed that we’d reached the conclusion that the community didn’t want to shut down the project, since it included 31 percent affordable housing, and that the work was essential in terns of revitalizing the area and that the evidence presented seemed to show that everything is now under control."

But because the coalition of Lennar supporters — who didn’t mention they are on Lennar’s payroll until after the July 31 resolution failed — is now pushing a ballot measure to vastly expand Lennar’s control in our city, McGoldrick is demanding answers and accountability.

"We want to look into whether Lennar screwed up deliberately, and if so, fine them to the hilt," McGoldrick said. "But let’s get the project on Parcel A going, because the grading has been completed and it will be beneficial to the community."

McGoldrick claimed that in July he and Daly knew they had an air district hearing coming.

"And we knew where the strongest action could be taken in terms of sticking it to Lennar and showing them we won’t just be looking over your shoulder, we’ll be standing on it," McGoldrick told us.

"A fine means we have warned you — and we’ve got a gun to your head. It means if you don’t act properly, we can pull the trigger," McGoldrick said, noting that at the time of the July 31 vote the Parcel A grading was essentially done and no one could present any solid evidence that the public health had been harmed.

"So now the question is: did you or did you not do this? [A maximum fine of] $75,000 a day for 383 days, even if it’s not a lot of money to Lennar — it’s a lot of embarrassment," McGoldrick said.

But if Lennar tries to delay settling with the air district to avoid fines until after the June 2008 election, will its perceived unwillingness to face consequences backfire at the ballot box — and soil Newsom’s reputation as a great environmentalist in the process?

As McGoldrick observed, "Some of us are having serious second thoughts about going forward with Lennar. Our feeling is, you should sit down and cooperate with the air district and settle this thing with them. And you know darn well that we are standing there, ready to pull the trigger."

He framed the issue this way: "We’re saying to the Mayor’s Office, you guys have a responsibility [to ensure Lennar is accountable] before you give them another 350 acres — on top of the 63 acres they already have — just to save the mayor’s butt, since he blew it with the Olympics and the 49ers."

LENNAR BY THE NUMBERS

Number of days Lennar Corp. had been in violation of air district monitoring rules, according to the Sept. 6, 2006, citation: 383

Fine, per day, for vioutf8g the air district’s plan: $1,000–$75,000, depending on intent

Maximum fine Lennar faces: $28.7 million

Fine, per day, for vioutf8g the city’s construction-dust plan: $5,000

Number of cited violations of city’s construction-dust control plan: 5

Daily cost Lennar claims for stopping work at Parcel A: $40,000

Amount Lennar paid subcontractors for grading Parcel A: $19.5 million

Amount Lennar paid Sam Singer Associates for public relations work in 2005: $752,875

Amount Lennar paid CH2M Hill for environmental consulting work: $445,444

Parcel A acreage: 63

Acreage Lennar controls on Treasure Island: 508

Percentage of rental units promised at Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island: 27

Number of rental units Lennar is building at Parcel A: 0

Acreage in the Bayview Jobs, Parks and Housing Initiative: 780

Number of rental or below-market-rate homes in Bayview initiative: Unknown

Lennar’s share price Nov. 26: $14.50 (a 52-week low)

Lennar’s stock’s 52-week high: $56.54

A real public voting system

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EDITORIAL San Francisco, it appears, will have new voting machines in place for the February 2008 presidential primary, thanks to a deal that doesn’t really thrill anybody. But the city should take this opportunity to start looking at the long term — and the Board of Supervisors ought to consider abandoning its reliance on the private sector and bringing voting technology back to the public itself.

The November municipal election was a mess: Election Systems and Software, the vendor with the contract to provide local voting equipment, couldn’t meet the requirements of the secretary of state, so the city’s polling equipment was invalid and votes had to be counted by hand. Now City Attorney Dennis Herrera has initiated legal action against the company, and the city is prepared to hire a new vendor. Sequoia Systems of Oakland is poised to get a four-year contract to provide voting equipment that will meet state standards, handle the local ranked-choice-voting system, and, presumably, make election results available within a few hours after the polls close.

There are problems with the deal: Sequoia, like all private election-machine makers, refuses to release its source code. So the public (and city officials) has no way of knowing if the software is accurate, susceptible to hacking, or easily corrupted. Sequoia has agreed to let the city pick a neutral third party that will be given access to the code for the purpose of verifying its quality, but ideally, the source code for something as critical to democracy as a voting machine ought to be made public as a matter of course. And as long as private companies, which consider their code a trade secret, control the market for voting machines, that’s never going to happen.

Steven Hill, director of the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation, has an excellent idea: the state of California or some group of cities ought to create a public, open-source election system. If San Francisco did that, the city could even franchise it — act as a vendor and make a little money licensing the program to other municipalities.

Creating a voting-machine system isn’t cheap or easy; in fact, most experts say it would take several years. But San Francisco has several years now — the Sequoia contract will carry through 2012. That ought to be enough time to either create our own system or form a consortium with, say, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and a few others to finance and build a true public voting system that can be vetted by outside experts, approved by the secretary of state, modified for new projects like RCV, and used for years at little or no additional cost. An open-source system would give the public confidence in the results. And it would put control of voting back where it belongs — in the public sector.

The supervisors should create a task force to begin looking into this, with the idea of having an operational alternative available when the Sequoia contract runs out.

Prop. 83 will never work

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The LA Times reports that “Jessica’s Law,” which mandates electronic tracking of all sex offenders, is never actually going to work.

The law — which was nothing but a Republican bid to embarass Democrats in a key election year — is too expensive, impractical and unenforceable, the Times reports:

“I don’t know of any agency that has the resources to track and monitor . . . in real time,” said Vacaville Police Chief Richard Word, president of the California Police Chiefs Assn. “You’ll need an air traffic controller to track these folks.”

That’s what happens when Republicans push a dumb law and most Democrats are too chicken to fight it.

(Thanks to David Dayen at Calitics for catching this.)

Obama’s moment

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When presidential hopeful Barack Obama came to San Francisco on Nov. 14, it was a potentially pivotal moment in his campaign, a make-or-break opportunity to become the one transcendent candidate who can offer hope for moving the country in a new direction. “In this moment, in this election, let’s reach for what we know is possible,” Obama said. Guardian City Editor Steven T. Jones was there and reports on a campaign struggling to find the resonance it needs to win.
– Read the main story: Obama’s moment
– Read the breaking news sidebar: Obama’s new Iraq position
– Listen to Obama’s speech
– Check the latest presidential primary polls
– Read The Atlantic cover story: Why Obama Matters
– Read Tom Hayden’s Nov. 9 letter to Obama

obama

Guardian photo by Lane Hartwell

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