Endorsement Interviews

Endorsement Interviews: David Chiu

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Endorsement Interviews: David Chiu

Board President and mayoral candidate David Chiu could well be the person most directly hurt by Mayor Ed Lee’s decision to run for a full term. It’s ironic, since Chiu supported Lee — on the basis that the former city administrator would not be a candidate in November. And he has the inside story on why Lee is in the race: According to Chiu, Lee told him that he didn’t really want to run, but “was having trouble saying no to Willie Brown and Rose Pak.”

Chiu has been in the center of the current board, moving away from progressives on some key issues — but he’s talking very much a progressive line in his campaign. He’s promising business tax reforms, transit justice, affordable housing and new revenue. Audio and video after the jump.

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Endorsement interviews: John Avalos

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Endorsement interviews: John Avalos

Sup. John Avalos is running a grassroots progressive campaign for mayor. He is, he says, the only candidate talking about working-class people, and he wans to “create an administration that puts neighborhoods and people first.” He wants to create a municipal bank to use money the city now dumps into Wells Fargo and Bank of America for loans to small businesses and economic development. He told us that by the end of his eight years in office, he’d like to see the city bringing in $500 million a year in new revenue — for education, child care, Muni, parks, public health and other services. Check out the interview (audio and video) after the jump.

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Endorsement interviews: Bill Fazio

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Endorsement interviews: Bill Fazio

Bill Fazio has been both a prosecutor and a defense lawyer — most recently working on the defense side — and his views on criminal justice have changed a bit since he first ran for District Attorney’s office in 1999. Back then, he was a supporter of the death penalty; today, he says it’s an expensive failure. He’s not a big fan of “buy busts,” and said he supports restorative justice (but in a limited way). He vowed to us that he’d appoint a team of investigators and prosecutors to go after municipal corruption. You can listen to the interview and watch the video after the jump.

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Endorsement interviews: Dennis Herrera

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Endorsement interviews: Dennis Herrera

Dennis Herrera has an interesting challenge: as city attorney, he’s been barred by law, legal ethics and custom from taking stands on a lot of the legislative and political issues facing the city. He couldn’t, for example, say he opposes a law that he might later have to defend in court. But now that he’s running for mayor, he’s liberated himself, and he’s started to talk about specific challenges facing the city.

Herrera told us he thinks this is the most important mayor’s race in the past 20 years and said that local government is going to have to play more of a role taking care of things that the federal and state governments will no longer do. He talked about the “culture of an organization” and his experience running a large office. He said that the city can’t cut its way out of its budget problems and he supports “additional revenues,” including a higher real-estate transfer tax, a more progressive payroll tax and (possibly) a commercial rent tax.

He supports an affordable housing bond — but wouldn’t call for a moratorium on market-rate housing and condo conversions.

Video and complete audio are after the jump.

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Endorsement interviews: David Onek

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Endorsement interviews: David Onek

David Onek has been running for district attorney pretty much since former D.A. Kamala Harris announced she was seeking the office of attorney general. He’s clearly, repeatedly and strongly said he opposes capital punishment and will never seek the death penalty. He told us he’s running because “the criminal justice system is broken” — and vowed, among other things, to start a restorative justice system for juvenile offenders.  And although he’s never been a prosecutor, he told us that “we’ve been arresting and prosecuting people just fine — now we need to reform the system.”

You can see a video of his opening statement and listen to the full interview after the jump.

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Endorsement interviews: Jeff Adachi

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Endorsement interviews: Jeff Adachi

Jeff Adachi is running for mayor — and running a campaign to change the city employee pension system. He told us he entered the race late because he was watching some of the debates, and “nobody was talking about the real reform issues.”

He talked about his pension plan and argued that it’s better for city workers than the plan the mayor (with the support of labor) has proposed. We asked him why he was so focused on one side of the equation — cutting pensions — and not on the other side — raising taxes ont he rich — and he said he wasn’t opposed to new taxes. But he didn’t offer any specifics.

He did, however, say he would set aside $40 million for micro loans to small local businesses, fully fund the Youth Works program and summer school and create partnerships with wealthy individuals to build affordable housing.

You can listen to the interview, and watch his opening statement, after the jump.

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You can watch a video of Adachi talking to us here:

 

Endorsement interviews: Phil Ting

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Endorsement interviews: Phil Ting

We’ve started interviewing the candidates for mayor, sheriff and district attorney, and, as usual, we’re taping the interviews and posting the audio feed unedited for your listening fun. We’re also putting up videos of the candidates’ opening statements.

mayoral candidate Phil Ting’s basic pitch: “The most progressive thing we can do is make government more efficient.” He talked a lot about his crowdsourcing website, Resetsf, which allows hundreds of San Franciscans to weigh in on the city’s problems — and offer solutions. Among his solutions: One minute of improved time on every Muni line would save $20 million a year. That means eliminating some bus stops to make the busses go faster.

He argued (with me) that San Francisco can eventually build its way out of the housing crisis by constructing more units on transit corridors. He vowed to reverse Gavin Newsom’s policy on sanctuary and told us he supports the central subway. Listen and watch after the jump.

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Watch Ting’s opening statement here:

The Guardian Final Forum — featuring the candidates

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The Guardian Final Forum — featuring the candidates

A chance for candidates for mayor to review the progressive platform we’ve developed in community meetings over the summer and tell us where they stand

Wednesday, September 21st from 6:00 – 7:30 pm

LGBT Center 1800 Market Street (at Octavia), San Francisco, CA
(Limited street parking.  MUNI METRO LINES J,K,L,M,N, the F STREETCAR, or MUNI BUS LINES 6,7,9, 10, 14, 21, 26, 47, 49, 66 and 71.  BART to SF Civic Center, then transfer to Muni Metro or F lines.)

Previously Discussed Issues
Issue One: Economy, Jobs and the Progressive Agenda
Issue Two: Budget, Healthcare and Social Services
Issue Three: Tenants, Housing and Land Use
Issue Four: Immigration, Education and Youth
Issue Five: Environment, Energy and Climate Change

 

PLUS: The Guardian’s mayoral endorsement interviews are underway, and you can get full audio versions of all the discussions on the politics blog.

ENDORSEMENTS 2010

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ENDORSEMENTS 2010

On every level — federal, state and local — the Nov. 2 election is critical. Californians will decide whether a billionaire with no political experience and a failed business executive with right-wing views should be the next governor and senator. They’ll address a long list of major ballot measures. In San Francisco, voters will decide the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors, weigh in on ballot measures that could deeply affect the local budget, and decide whether this city wants to allow a harsh crackdown on the homeless.

Absentee ballots are already in the mail. Vote early, vote often, and vote like your city and state depended on it. We’ll publish our Clean Slate clipout guide to take to the polls on October 27. Click below for our endorsements. (East Bay endorsements will be added next week.)

>>NATIONAL RACES

>>STATE RACES

>>STATE BALLOT MEASURES

>>SAN FRANCISCO CANDIDATES

>>SAN FRANCISCO BALLOT MEASURES

>>EAST BAY ENDORSEMENTS

Listen to our Endorsement Interviews with local candidates here

get the single page printable PDF in color or black and white

Endorsement interviews: James Keys

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Endorsement interviews: James Keys

James Keys, a former legislative intern in Sup. Chris Daly’s office now running for supervisor in D6, is making economic and social justice the centerpiece of his campaign. He talks, for example, about using city resources to make sure that SRO residents have a chance to move on to more traditional apartments. “We have a lot of housing in the pipeline,” he told us. “But I’m not sure if people are really moving in.”

Keys wants to see the city figure out some want to take over empty apartment buildings to use for housing for SRO residents. “Entities ought to be moving people through SROs and out,” he noted.

He’s a fan of community policing (“there are no cops on the beat in the neighborhood”) and wants to put unemployed people to work doing graffiti removal and cleaning the streets.

He also taked about offering free Muni service (although he had a little trouble explaining how the city would pay for that) and wants to combine the Sheriff’s Office and the Police Department.

You can listen to our interview here:

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Endorsement interviews: Janet Reilly

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Endorsement interviews: Janet Reilly

District 2 supervisorial candidate Janet Reilly is running to represent San Francisco’s most conservative political district, and even though she has the support of many progressive groups and the local Democratic Party, she’s running on a platform of mostly conservative positions. She opposes all the revenue measures on the November ballot and argues that closing the big budget deficits the city faces in coming years should involve “more fiscal discipline” and making cuts to wasteful city programs and the city money going to nonprofit groups.

But when asked how she’d be an improvement on incumbent Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, an uncompromising conservative who consistently votes against the board’s progressive majority, Reilly says that she has good relationships with local leaders off all political stripes and will therefore be able to play a key role in facilitating good policy discussions and compromises.

Reilly, who ran for the California Assembly on a platform of health care reform a couple years ago, also touted her recent efforts working with the Volunteers in Medicine Institute to open a free health clinic in the Excelsior District, which will open soon and offer no-cost health services to residents of that district and Daly City, two local region’s with the greatest need.

“It activates a potentially powerful group of volunteers in the city,” she said of the program’s volunteer doctors and nurses, many of whom have retired.

Reilly also emphasized the need to stimulate the local economy with business tax breaks and other mechanisms. You can listen to our full interview here:

 

 

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Endorsement interviews: Chris Jackson

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Endorsement interviews: Chris Jackson

In 2008, San Francisco voters elected Chris Jackson to the Community College Board, where he serves as Budget Chair. And from 2007 until spring 2010, Jackson worked as a policy analyst for the San Francisco Labor Council.
Those experiences helped convince Jackson, whose grandfather came from Mississippi to work at Hunters Point Shipyard, of the pressing need for the next D10 supervisor to promote progressive policies that help working class families remain in San Francisco.

“People in D. 10 aren’t asking for market rate housing, they are looking for job opportunities,” Jackson said, clarifying that he wants to see the creation of good-paying, entry-level jobs with health and retirement benefits and the shoring up of local hiring policies, so workers can support their families and stay in the local community.

Jackson plans to create a stable funding source for truly affordable housing. He wants to help Section 8 recipients to rent in San Francisco. He thinks the city needs a different vision of redevelopment—one in which the Redevelopment Commission is brought within the control of the Board. He thinks gang injunctions serve to accelerate gentrification in low-income communities of color. And he thinks the city needs to reduce the number of high-level management positions before it fires and rehires thousands of public health workers at lower wages.

“I believe that the role of the supervisor is to empower local residents and community groups to be voices for real transformative chang,” Jackson said.
You can listen to the full interview here:

 

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Endorsement interviews: Natasha Hoehn

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Endorsement interviews: Natasha Hoehn

Nataha Hoehn got her start in public education teaching junior high English in the South Bronx, and she’s now working for an education nonprofit. She chairs the After School for All Committee, and is a big fan of community schools for every kid.


Hoehn also wants to see more local control over education spending. The SFUSD, she pointed out to us, has to apply for state funds in 136 categories — textbooks, transportations, etc. “It ought to be a block grant,” she said.


She supports the new school assignment system, including the middle-school feeder; she argues that “moving students in cohorts is an important model.”


Hoehn doesn’t oppose charter schools, but questions the need for many of them, and suggests that the total be capped at 5-7 percent of the district. You can listen to our full interview here:


 

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Endorsement interviews: Elsbernd on Muni reform

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Endorsement interviews: Elsbernd on Muni reform

Sup. Sean Elsbernd came by to talk to us about Prop. G, his ballot initiative to change Muni workers’ pay, and threw in a pitch for Prop. F, a fairly minor change in the way the Health Service Board is elected.


His central argument on Prop. G: Muni workers are the only city employees with a salary guarantee in the City Charter. The law says the drivers have to be paid at the level of the second-highest-paying comparable urban transit district. It’s not that they make too much money, Elsbernd says; it that the Charter requirement puts the city in a bad place during contract negotiations and gives Muni management “zero leverage to make any changes in the egregious work rules.”


Interestingly, the drivers don’t seem to oppose the idea of taking their salaries out of the Charter and negotiating like other city employees. They’re upset about another provision of the Elsbernd measure — a binding arbitration rule. The city has binding arbitration for all labor negotiations, but under Prop. G, if the Muni unions and the city are at an impasse over work rules, the burden of proof would be on the union to demonstrate that its proposals won’t impact service.


“Fixing this,” Elsbernd says, “is central to fixing Muni.”


You can listen to the interview here.

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Endorsement interviews: Hydra Mendoza

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Endorsement interviews: Hydra Mendoza

Hydra Mendoza is running for a second term on the school board, and she told us that four years wasn’t enough time to get done all the work that she’s taken on. She’s pushing for the “career to college” program and for citywide preschool.


Mendoza supports the new enrollment process, saying it offers some certainty to parents. She’s a friend of Arne Duncan, the Obama Administration’s education secretary, whose policies have infuriated progressive educators, but she says he’s in a tough job: “It’s ahrd to set national education policy when you have states that are failures for kids.”


She supports the charter schools that the district currently has, although she argues that “I’ve yet to see a charter school that offers something we can’t do ourselves.”


You can listen to our full interview here:

Mendoza by endorsements2010

Endorsement interviews: Jane Kim

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Endorsement interviews: Jane Kim

Jane Kim’s top issues are economic development and jobs. She told us she wants to encourage small business in the district, starting with an “empty storefronts” campaign. She’s pushing local-first hiring for construction and development.


Kim said she wants the city to index affordable housing to market-rate housing and try to keep the ratio from getting too far unbalanced. She’s calling for a new affordable housing bond.


She recognizes that the city needs substantial new sources of revenue, and supports a transit fee on downtown businesses, a transfer tax hike for properties selling for more than $825,000, and would explore a city income tax. She said she’s open to congestion pricing for downtown drivers.


Kim supports the City Place project, saying that a lot of the residents of the Tenderloin want discount retail in the area.


She’s a fairly new arrival to the district, having moved in about a year and a half ago, but she told us: “D6 is a district you can run in without having lived there a long time.”


Listen to the full interview here:


 

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Endorsement interviews: Scott Wiener

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Endorsement interviews: Scott Wiener

Scott Weiner has a long record in District 8. He helped build the LGBT Center, was the president of the Eureka Valley Improvement Association, co-founded Castro Community On Patrol, was co-chair of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Club and chaired the San Francisco Democratic Party between 2006 and 2008.


He’s very much the political moderate; he told us he doesn’t want to see the city go into the retail electricity business with a full public-power system. He supports the sit-lie law (and opposes the ballot measure calling for community policing and foot patrols). He says he takes a “case by case” approach to taxes, and support the vehicle license fee, but doesn’t support the hotel tax increase. He’s got the support of the Small Property Owners, perhaps the most anti-tenant group in the city. He doesn’t think the city should go any further to stop Ellis Act evictions.


In fact, overall, Wiener thinks the city ought to address its financial problems with cuts and service reductions. “We have to live within our means …. Until the state gets its house in order, we can’t tax our way out of it,” he said.
You can listen to our interview here:



 

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Endorsement interviews: Bert Hill

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Endorsement interviews: Bert Hill

Bert Hill is running to represent western San Francisco on BART’s Board of Director, taking on incumbent James Fang, the city’s only Republican elected official. But even though Hill has the support of Democratic Party and a wide variety of progressive organizations, voters won’t see their party affiliation in this nonpartisan race. Instead, the race could be a referendum on an agency that Hill says isn’t responsive enough to the needs and experiences of riders.

“It’s important to figure out what are human needs on the trains,” Hill told us, citing the need to better accommodate passengers with bicycles and lots of luggage, the lack on working bathrooms and elevators in most stations, extending service beyond midnight on weekends, and the need for better station labels so passenger easily know when to get off.

Hill said BART is in need of major reforms in its financial planning (calling for the agency to build reserves during good times to avoid service cuts during recessions), its police force (saying the board should consider disbanding the BART Police and contracting out to local law enforcement agencies), and its transparency and accountability (telling a funny story about his own experience just trying to get permission to take a campaign photo by a BART train).

Listen to Hill full endorsement interview below. Fang has not responded to Guardian requests for an endorsement interview.

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Endorsement interviews: Theresa Sparks

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Endorsement interviews: Theresa Sparks

Theresa Sparks says her first priority is jobs and public safety. She wants to more agressively pursue clean technology, with tax breaks if necessary. She wants more development in the district (but “smart development.”) She argues that the city should do an “incubator,” to really focus on new technologies.


She’s also not a big fan of taxes — she supports the real-estate transfer tax, but not the hotel tax (“next year could be a great convention year,” she said, arguing that higher taxes would put that at risk.) She didn’t like Sup. David Chiu’s business tax reforms beause, she said, she thought it would replace private-sector jobs with public-sector jobs. And she said she thinks there’s more at City Hall to cut, particularly in the nonprofits that get city contracts.


She says she supports full staffing for the Police Department, wants to repair the “broken disciplinary” system — and supports sit-lie.  You can listen to our entire interview here:


 


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Endorsement interviews: Emily Murase

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Endorsement interviews: Emily Murase

Emily Murase has a lot on her plate. The mother of two daughters in the San Francisco public school system, she is also the executive director of the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women, a member of the Rosa Parks School Site Council, the Japanese Bilingual Bicultural Program Parent Teacher Community Council, and the Lowell Alumni Association Board of Directors; she also sits on the boards of the Lakeshore Acres Improvement Club, the San Francisco Girl Scouts, and Democratic Women in Action.

As if that weren’t enough, she’s running for school board, and has earned the endorsements of California Senators Mark Leno and Leland Yee, Mayor Gavin Newsom, five members of the Board of Supervisors, and United Educators.

When she met with the Guardian, Murase spoke about tackling the budget deficit, addressing the opportunity gap for African American, Latino, and Pacific Islander students, and fighting truancy. She said she’s in favor of reforming Prop. 13 to promote adequate funding for education, but in the short-term she envisions setting up a system to solicit ideas from people working within the school system to identify opportunities for savings.

Murase said she supports a parcel tax to generate more funding for schools. She’s also in favor of developing a formal system for evaluating teacher performance. Murase said she supported JROTC in the past, but would be interested in forging more robust partnerships between public schools and skilled trades in order to create a broader array of career pathways for students. School lunches should be prepared locally, she added, and this could also translate into a learning opportunity for kids.

Listen to the entire interview below.

 

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Endorsement interviews: Eric Smith

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Endorsement interviews: Eric Smith

Eric Smith’s passion is environmental justice. He’s the director of Green Depot, a coalition of biodiesel organizations, and has helped lead the city to switch its buses and official vehicles to the cleaner fuel. He’s working on ways to get the city to move its waste by train. And he talks about the important of green jobs (and not just green jobs for the top college graduates.)


Smith told us he’s not fond of the Lennar project, but he supports the Communit Benefits Agreement and would have voted for the project EIR. He’s concerned about the city’s plans to bring 40,000 more housing units, mostly high-end condos, to the neighborhood, particularly the threat to light-industrial jobs. He complains about the lack of centralization in city services and the sometimes overlapping jobs of nonprofits and public agencies. He’s an opponent of the gang injunctions and Sit-Lie.


You can listen to our interview here:


 

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Endorsement Interviews: Malia Cohen

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Endorsement Interviews: Malia Cohen

Malia Cohen has three priorities: She wants to keep District 10 residents working, healthy and safe.

Healthy means expanding open space in the district, creating more pocket parks and turning McLaren Park into more of a destination. Safe means more community policing and using nonprofits like TURF to help monitor streets and buses. “I’m a believer in the broken windows theory,” she said, arguing for brighter lights on Third Stree and San Bruno Ave. She’s also calling for community clean-up days to “change the culture of Third Street.” But she opposes the city attorney’s gang injunctions. Working means more jobs for local people from development and better educational opportunities, particularly for people who might not go on to college.

Cohen took some strong progressive stands — she’s against Sit-Lie, and for public power (although she wasn’t too familiar with Community Choice Aggregation.) She supports the hotel tax, the real estate transfer tax and the vehicle license fee.

But she has a decidedly conservative streak, too: She wouldn’t support any further limits on condo conversions, Ellis Act evictions, or TICs, saying those regulations would infringe on the rights of property owners. You can listen to our interview here:

 

 

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The Guardian 2010 election Endorsement Interviews

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The Guardian is interviewing candidates for the fall elections, and to give everyone the broadest possible understanding of the issues and our endorsement process, we’re posting the sound files of all the interviews on the Politics blog. Our endorsements will be coming out Oct. 6th. Click here to listen — page will be updated as we publish more interviews.

Endorsement interview: Tony Kelly

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Endorsement interview: Tony Kelly

Tony Kelly’s been involved in land-use and development battles in the district for more than a decade — and it shows. He talks about zoning, redevelopment, and urban finance with the ease of an expert. He complains that funding affordable housing just by asking developers to include a little bit in their market-rate units is “a sucker’s game.” He talks about the need for public-sector investment to handle the major influx of population projected for the district over the next 20 years. He’s also thought a lot about city finance, and suggests, among other things, that San Francisco demand that the University of California pay some sort of fee in lieu of the $60 million the giant institution doesn’t pay in local property taxes.


Kelly also talks about environmental justice in the district, and is willing to go as far as suggesting that the city look at ending I-280 at either Cesar Chavez or Alemany as part of a program to expand rail service along the corridor. You can listen to our interview here:


 


 

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