Gavin Newsom

The floating peakers

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EDITORIAL The political fight over siting four city-owned power plants is heating up, and creating strange alliances. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission wants to put three of the plants — which are small natural-gas-fired turbines — in the southeast part of the city, adjacent to the pollution-belching Mirant power plant at the foot of Potrero Hill. The commission argues that the city-owned plants would run only at peak hours (thus the term "peaker plants") and would generate lower carbon emissions and noxious fumes than Mirant does. Supporters of the plants argue that the state’s Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), which controls the electricity grid, won’t allow Mirant to shut down unless the peakers are in place.

Sup. Aaron Peskin says the peakers will not only reduce emissions, but will give public power a kickstart. But Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, who normally supports Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plans, opposes the plants on environmental grounds, and Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly, who say the southeast has been a toxic dumping ground for years, appear to be siding with her. Add to this the cost of building a structure to house the turbines, which has varied from as high as $500 million to as low as about $250 million, and you have a confusing mess.

But as Amanda Witherell reports in this issue, there’s another solution, one Mirkarimi floated several months ago: why not put the peakers on barges and site them offshore?

It’s a fascinating idea. Floating power plants are common all over the world; Manhattan alone has more than 30. Putting the plants on a barge would, by some estimates, cost half as much as building a home for them on land — and they could be moved around so no one neighborhood has to suffer all the impacts. (The plants, for example, could spend some time in the Marina, maybe upwind of Mayor Newsom’s house, so the southeast doesn’t have to take all the emissions.) If the city follows its own plans and builds enough renewable energy to obviate the peakers in a few years, they could easily be shipped off and sold elsewhere. Or the city could lease them to other communities (bringing in some nice cash) when they aren’t needed here. And floating plants won’t face the serious seismic issues that plants on the unstable southern San Francisco shoreline do.

There are, of course, other issues with this, including the obvious problem of putting barges in the bay, which the Bay Conservation and Development Commission would probably object to. And where, exactly, would they go? This might not be the best idea in the end.

But given the lack of good options here, this is at least worth a second look. Mirkarimi needs to push his resolution calling on the city to review that option. It’s well worth a full study. In fact, the board ought to put all final consideration of the combustion turbines on hold until the SFPUC looks at the barge proposal.

Green dreams

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As we celebrate Earth Day in this era of all things green, it’s worth contemplating whether our enviro-guilt has gotten the better of our skepticism and critical thinking. Is “Green=Good” our sole metric these days, making us susceptible to self-serving spin from our politicians and corporations? After all, our Governator seems to have gone from bad to good simply by donning verdant armor and signing a landmark global warming measure that he long fought and watered down.
Closer to home, PG&E’s has been trying to greenwash away our knowledge of their penchant for polluting technologies and political corruption, a quest that our lazy but ambitious and ever image conscious Mayor Gavin Newsom has sporadically tried to piggyback on (ie tidal power, sponsored conferences, and solar everything). When Newsom tried to beef up the city solar commitment by robbing a seismic upgrade fund for renters and then the city’s own bank for building municipal solar panels, it was understandable that the Board of Supervisors balked.
But in today’s Chron, SPUR policy wonk Egon Terplan and righteous activist Van Jones whack the move and decry city plans for more fossil fuel generation. It’s not a bad point, although it is an oversimplistic one, like too many of our either-or green political debates these days. Indeed, we seem to lose the ability to see shades of gray when we talk green, and we too often forget that money is the other form of green in the equation.
As we’ve reported, San Francisco’s solar problems are complicated, just like our power generation problems (see our story in tomorrow’s paper for a more nuanced look at the peaker plant issue). To solve the problems, we need honest leaders speaking candidly to us and each other, rather than all the spin, self-interest, and political gamesmanship that has sullied San Francisco’s political dialogue in recent years.
Green can be good, or it can be the equivalent of snake oil or the IPO for a overhyped tech company that will never make any money. As an excellent recent cover story in Harper’s Magazine noted, the green economy could be the next great bubble after the housing and dot-com crashes, something that desperate capitalists and their political partners are eagerly trying to make so.
Maybe that will be a good thing, but let’s learn our lessons from the last couple bubbles and don’t simply assume that the green label is some kind of stamp of public interest approval.

I’m back

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After an epic five-week trip to Bolivia and Peru, I’m back manning the news desk here at the Guardian and trying to catch up on what’s happening. And it seems the biggest things that have changed in my absence are my perspective and energy levels.
The Republicans in Sacramento and Mayor Gavin Newsom here in San Francisco are continuing to push draconian cuts to government services rather than having the courage to challenge the mindless “no new taxes” mantra and have the wealthy pay their fair share. And neither the Democrats in Sacramento or Washington D.C., nor the Board of Supervisors here, seem to be doing much to challenge this race to the bottom. It’s not that they don’t understand. In the last two days, we’ve had Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi and Assembly member Loni Hancock in for endorsement interviews, and they powerfully sound the message that something needs to change and they’re willing to work for it. But with the labor unions distracted by infighting, Democratic politicians battling one another (such as Carole Migden and Mark Leno, who we have the unfortunate task of deciding between for our endorsements that come out April 30), the mainstream media both smaller and more trivial, and many other factors stacked against our species finally getting wise to the problems we face, it looks like an uphill battle.
Does all this make me want to flee back to South America? No, it makes me want to renew the fight for truth and justice. How about you?

Newsom’s wind shifts Obamaward?

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This morning I attended the grand opening ceremony of the pretty incredible-looking Hotel Essex, an 84-unit rehab completed by Community Housing Partnership and Mercy Housing that now houses 84 formerly homeless people in their own apartments (complete with kitchenettes!), with on-site counselling, recovery, and job-training services available. (Full disclosure: My bf works for CHP and helped put this all together.)

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The Essex was rehabbed with $22+ million dollars of city, state, and federal grants and loans — $1.1 million of which was federal, and very grudgingly contributed by an eviscerated HUD at the behest of Nancy Pelosi, who apparently can actually get some things done. Good for her!

This is the first homeless housing project completed under Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration (stuff takes time, folks) and naturally Newsie was there himself to make some remarks. I must say, despite his odious record on homelessness, Gavin was actually quite gracious to all involved and even acknowledged that he had been on the wrong side of many of the disagreements he’d with the progenitors of the project. But, of course, he’s charming like that.

And then came a very weird moment. With cautious enunciation and in the wake the whole Obama-elitism-San Francisco-oh my! panic, Newsom, a supposedly staunch Hillary supporter, said:

“We’re turning this problem around — or, as Barack Obama says: We’re turning the page, bringing real change — on homelessness.”

Hmm. Quoting Obama, really? Right now? Either this was a very misguided attempt to pull a Hillary and tar Obama with any reference to scandal possible — keeping the smear ball in play, as it were — or perhaps Mr. Newsom knows something we don’t about the way the superdelegate winds are blowing, and is waving around a little penance. Either way, many confused looks were shot across the room.

Back to the actual issue at hand: Darryl, one of the Essex’s residents, who unfortunately spoke last, well after Newsom had slipped out the back, was the most eloquent speaker, talking about how the Essex was giving him and others a chance at real community and about the power of a little faith and empowerment to help change lives.

C.W. Nevius was not present.

Leno on Newsom’s budget cuts

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Assemblymember Mark Leno, who is challenging state Sen. Carole Migden in the June primary, responded this afternoon to our editorial on Newsom’s budget cuts.

Migden responded earlier today.

Here’s Leno’s statement:

Dear Bay Guardian Editors,

You are absolutely right to assert that the Federal Government has turned its back on urban America and the Governor’s repeal of the Vehicle License Fee (VLF) has left our City in extremely challenged fiscal health. I agree with you, Tim, that new revenue is needed for the City. Current state law gives local government few options.

For that reason I have and am presently authoring legislation to bring more local control to our revenue streams, so that we can guarantee that San Francisco’s budget is not balanced on the backs of those who can least afford it.

In 2005, I authored AB 799, co-sponsored by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, SF Labor Council, Board of Supervisors and the Mayor, which would have allowed San Francisco voters to restore their own VLF which would have brought approximately 70 million new dollars to San Francisco. Unfortunately the Governor vetoed the bill.

I brought the bill back in 2007 as AB 1590. Unfortunately, it got held up in the Senate. I am working with all four co-sponsors to shake it loose this year.

Back in 2003, when cities and counties were faced with huge cuts, I authored AB 1690 to bring more revenue to the local level. The measure would have allowed voters to decide to levy a local income tax, which could have eased our way and pre-empted painful cuts to our local budget. That measure, though passed through the Assembly, was also held up in the Senate.

The Mayor and Board of Supervisors have a great challenge on their hands. The fiscal crisis we face is nothing short of tragic. I will continue to use my voice to argue that the cuts considered must be equitable, and those with the least should suffer the least.

I continue to argue that we have a revenue problem, not a spending problem. To forestall mean spirited cuts, we need to be as creative as possible to create new revenue streams. Otherwise, we will be continually faced with Sophie’s Choices.

Sincerely,
Mark Leno

And thanks to Mark for sending that, and for pushing for state legislation that would give cities more ways to raise revenue. I have always been impressed by his willingness to do that and his creative approaches.

I will note, for the record, that Leno declined to say anything critical of Gavin Newsom and his budget decisions.

Dark days

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› amanda@sfbg.com

› sarah@sfbg.com

Like a lot of San Franciscans, John Murphy wants to put solar panels on his roof. He’s worried about the environment, but it’s also about money: “I want it to pay for all my electricity,” he said one recent evening as we chatted in front of his house.

Murphy pays top dollar for power from Pacific Gas and Electric Co., every month hitting the highest tier of energy use and getting spanked 34 cents a kilowatt hour for it. He’s tried to cut costs by switching to energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs with motion sensors — with little incentive from PG&E’s billing department.

Murphy thought installing solar panels would be worth the up-front cost, especially if federal and state rebates made it more feasible. His roof — sturdy and pitched toward the south, unshaded by trees or other buildings, and located in the fogless hollow of the Mission District — seemed perfectly suited for solar energy.

So last fall he invited a representative from a local solar installation company to the house for a free consultation. He was told his roof could only fit a 2.8 kilowatt system, which would cover about 60 percent of his energy needs — and cost about $25,000.

Murphy is apoplectic about the results. “What’s 60 percent? That’s like going out with her for three-quarters of the night. I want to take her home,” he said.

While the federal incentive shaves $2,000 off the cost, the state rebate program — in place since January 2007 — is a set allocation that declines over time: the later you apply, the less you get. Today Murphy can get about $1.90 per watt back from the state, whereas at the start of the program it was $2.50 per watt. To him, the upfront costs are still too steep and the results won’t cover his monthly PG&E bill.

“The snake oil salesmen of yesterday are the solar panel installers of today,” Murphy said.

But Murphy still wants to install panels — and he’s not alone. The desire for clean, green energy runs deeply through San Francisco and the state as a whole. After the launch of the California Solar Initiative, the number of solar megawatts, represented by applications to the state, doubled what they’d been over the last 26 years. Almost 90 percent of the installations were on homes, indicating that citizens are jumping at the chance to decrease their carbon output.

Yet in San Francisco, where environmental sentiment and high energy costs ought to be driving a major solar boom, there’s very little action.

Back in 2000, then-mayor Willie Brown announced a citywide goal of 10,000 solar roofs by 2010. That would add up to a lowly 5 percent of the 200,000 property lots within the city of San Francisco.

But even that weak goal seems beyond reach: it’s now 2008, and the number of solar roofs in San Francisco stands at a grand total of 618 installations by the end of 2007. In terms of kilowatts per capita, the city ranks last in the Bay Area. The city’s total electricity demand runs about 950 megawatts; only 5 megawatts is currently supplied by solar.

 

WHAT’S WRONG?

Well, it’s not the weather. While heavy cloud cover can hinder panels, fog permits enough ambient light to keep panels productive. San Francisco’s thermostat isn’t much of a factor either — panels prefer cooler temperate zones, not blazing desert heat.

It’s also not for a lack of political ideas — Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing a major solar proposal and several others are floating around, too.

But Newsom is clashing with the supervisors over the philosophy and direction of his plan. It’s complicated, but in essence, the mayor and Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting put together a task force that included representatives of solar installers and PG&E — but nobody from the environmental community and no public-power supporters.

The plan they hatched gives cash incentives to private property owners, takes money away from city-owned solar installments, and does nothing to help the city’s move to public power.

While all this plays out, the solar panels so many San Franciscans want aren’t getting installed.

 

SUN AND SUBSIDY

What makes solar work, according to local solar activists, is a combination of sun and subsidies. “Almost every area in the United States has better sun exposure than Germany, and Germany is leading the solar market worldwide today,” said Lyndon Rive, CEO of Solar City, a Foster City-based solar installer.

The price per kilowatt hour, with current state and federal subsides, is about 13 cents for solar, just two cents more than PG&E’s base rate for energy produced mostly by nuclear power and natural gas.

Still, the average installation for the average home hovers between $20,000 and $30,000. For many, that kind of cash isn’t available.

“The biggest reason for lack of adoption [of solar energy] is that the cost to install in San Francisco is higher than neighboring cities,” Rive said. It’s about 10 percent more than the rest of the Bay Area, according to a December 2007 report of the San Francisco Solar Task Force.

Why? According to Rive, system sizes are smaller. Solar City’s average Bay Area customer buys a 4.4 kilowatt system, but the average San Franciscan — with a smaller house and smaller roof — usually gets a 3.1 kilowatt installation. The smaller the system, the more the markup for retailers amortizing certain fixed costs such as material and labor. On top of that, San Francisco’s old Victorians can have issues — weak rafters need reinforcement; steep roofs require more scaffolding; wires and conduits have to cover longer distances. It adds up.

“There’s an extra cost to doing business in San Francisco,” said Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar and a member of the SF Solar Task Force. “I can expect $100 in parking tickets for every job I do.”

That was the motivation for Ting to establish the Solar Task Force in 2007, with the goal of creating financial incentives, including loans and rebates, to bring down the costs of San Francisco solar. The 11-member task force came up with an ambitious program that involved a one-stop shop for permits, a plan to give property owners as much as $5,000 in cash subsidies, and a system to lend money to homeowners who can’t afford the up-front costs.

The task force said installing 55 megawatts of solar would combat global warming, improve air quality by reducing pollution caused by electricity generation, and add 1,800 green collar jobs to the local economy.

The streamlined permit program is in place. None of the rest has happened.

 

THE MAYOR’S MONEY

The first obstacle was the loan fund. Newsom and Ting wanted to take $50 million currently sitting unspent in a bond fund for seismic upgrades on local buildings. Sup. Jake McGoldrick wanted to know why the money wasn’t being used to upgrade low-income housing; the city attorney wasn’t sure seismic safety money could be redirected to solar loans.

Then Newsom decided to take $3 million from the Mayor’s Energy Conservation Fund to pay for the first round of rebates. Over the next 10 years, that could add up to $50 million. McGoldrick balked again. That money, he said, was supposed to be used on public facilities (like solar panels at Moscone Center and Muni facilities and new refrigerators for public housing projects). Why should it be diverted to private property owners?

There’s a larger issue behind all this: should the city be using scarce resources to help the private sector — or devoting its money to city-owned electricity generation? “In 10 years, there could be $50 million in the fund,” McGoldrick said. “That’s a lot of money, and it’s power the city could own.”

Sup. Chris Daly agrees. “I would support this program if we were running out of municipal [solar] projects,” he said. “But we’re not.”

In addition, the progressive members of the Board of Supervisors, who have all advocated a citywide sustainable energy policy known as community choice aggregation, or CCA, weren’t represented on the Solar Task Force.

The fund Newsom wanted to tap for his project is also the source of funding for the community choice aggregation program, which the progressive supervisors see as the city’s energy plan, which in turn constitutes a far more comprehensive response to climate change, with a goal of relying on 51 percent renewable energy by 2017.

Sup. Gerardo Sandoval is working on a loan program that would allow residents to borrow money from the city for renewable energy and efficiency upgrades for their homes and pay it back at a relatively low interest rate folded into their monthly tax bills. (See “Solar Solutions,” 11/14/07.) Sandoval’s plan would enable loans of $20,000 to $40,000 at 3 percent interest to people who voluntarily put solar on their homes.

The city of Berkeley is pursuing a similar plan. But the task force never consulted Sandoval — in fact, he told us that he had no idea Ting’s task force was meeting until a few months ago.

The supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee is slated to review Newsom’s plan April 16.

Solar installers aren’t happy about the delays: “I’m on the disappointed receiving end of that start and stop,” Cinnamon said.

While city officials duke out where the money should come from and who gets it, San Franciscans interested in purchasing panels are left in limbo. Jennifer Jachym, a sales rep from Solar City who used to handle residential contracts in San Francisco, said, “I have worked all over the Bay Area and I’d have to say it seems that the delta between interest and actual purchase is highest here.

“It was hard to get people to pull the trigger,” she continued. “What the San Francisco incentive program basically did was bring the cost incentives here to where they are everywhere else.”

The holdup has dispirited customers and solar companies. Cinnamon said he wasted 10,000 advertising door hangers because of the delay. Solar City also put on hold a handshake deal with the Port of San Francisco to rent a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in the Bayview District for a solar training academy that could turn out 20 new workers a month.

“As a San Francisco resident, I really want to see it happen there, but as a business, I have to think about it differently,” said Peter Rive, chief operating officer of the company. “Almost every city in the Bay Area is aggressively trying to get us to build a training academy in their city.”

 

TENANTS AND LANDLORDS

Another reason we don’t see more panels on San Francisco roofs is that most San Franciscans are renting and have no control over their roofs. “The landlord doesn’t care. They don’t pay the electric bill,” Cinnamon said. When asked if there were any inroads to be made there, he said, “Nope. That’s not a market I see at all.”

In spite of that, solar companies still are eager to do business here, which means there’s either enough of a market — or enough of a markup.

Rive wouldn’t tell us their exact markup for panels, but said, “The average solar company adds 15 to 25 percent gross margin to the installation. Our gross margin is in line with that.”

Rive’s company has another option for cash-poor San Franciscans, a new “solar lease.” In this scenario, Solar City owns the panels and leases them to homeowners for 15 years. The property owner pays a low up-front cost of a couple of thousand dollars and a monthly lease fee that increases 3.5 percent per year.

For Murphy, the price would be $2,754 down and $88 a month. The panels would still cover only 64 percent of his energy needs, so he would owe PG&E about $70 a month. Because he would be using less energy, PG&E would charge a lower rate, which is something Solar City typically tries to achieve with a solar system.

However, people can’t make money off their solar systems. “People ask about it all the time,” Jachym said. “Especially people in San Francisco. They say ‘I have a house in Sonoma with tons of space. Can I put panels there and offset my energy here?'”

The answer, unfortunately, is no, which means San Franciscans have no incentive to put up more panels than they need and recoup their costs by selling the energy to the grid. Unlike Germany, for example, where people are paid for the excess solar energy they make, California’s net metering laws favor utility companies. If you make more power than you use, you’re donating it to the grid. PG&E sells it to someone else.

If the law was changed — which could be a feature of CCA — citizens could help the city generate more solar energy to sell to customers who don’t have panels, helping the city to meet its overall goal of 51 percent renewable by 2017.

Under Solar City’s lease program, the company gets the federal and state rebates. If Murphy leased for 15 years he’d have an option to buy the used panels, upgrade to new ones, and end or continue the lease. If San Francisco launches the incentive program, the $3,000 from the city could cover the up-front cost and he could get the whole thing rolling for almost no cash. It sounds like a sweet deal.

Except it’s not going to work. Solar City only leases systems of 3.2 kilowatts or more, and only 2.8 could be squeezed onto Murphy’s roof. “I think it’s Murphy’s Law,” Jachym says wryly. “If you have a house that wants solar, a whole row of houses on the street nearby are better suited for it.”

She says the 3.2 cutoff has to do with the company’s bottom line. “If it’s any less than 3.2 the company is losing money.” Ironically, she tells me, “the average system size in San Francisco is even smaller” — usually less than 3.1. Solar City has set the bar high in a place where many people like Murphy are prevented from leasing.

He tells us he isn’t interested in a lease anyway: “I don’t own that.” He’s now more interested in a do-it-yourself situation and wishes the city would put some energy toward that. “If they were serious they would have a city solar store,” he said, imagining a kind of Home Depot for solar, where one could buy panels and wiring, talk with advisors, contract with installers, or just fill out the necessary paperwork for the rebates.

Some people are going ahead anyway, without city support. Nan Foster, a San Francisco homeowner now installing photovoltaic panels and solar water heating, says her middle-class family borrowed money to do these projects, “because we want to do the right thing about the environment and reduce our carbon footprint. It would be a great help to get these rebates from the city.

“The public money for the project would increase the spending of individuals to install solar — so the public funds would leverage much more investment in solar on the part of individuals and businesses,” Foster argued.

There’s another approach that isn’t on the table yet. Eric Brooks, cofounder of the Community Choice Energy Alliance, told us that the city, through CCA, could buy its own panels to place on private homes and businesses, giving those homes and businesses a way to go solar — free.

“Clearly there would be a much higher demand for free solar panels over discounted ones that are still very expensive,” he said. “And because the panels would be owned by the city, all of the savings and revenue could be put right back into building more renewables and efficiency projects, instead of going into the pockets of private property owners.”

Proponents of the mayor’s plan argue that the city can build more solar panels — faster — by diverting public funds to the private sector. “While on its face this is technically true, it is actually a dead-end path,” Brooks said. “Yes, a little more solar would be built a little more quickly. However, once those private panels are built the city will get nothing from them.”

Full disclosure: Murphy is Amanda Witherell’s landlord.

 

Nickels and dimes

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We get a lot of press releases announcing that San Francisco has made it to the top of another "greenest" list. Popular Science named SF the second-greenest city in the nation last February. Sustainlane.com called this place the second-greenest city in 2006. Reader’s Digest added honors for the fifth-cleanest city in 2005, the same year San Francisco hosted the UN’s World Environment Day.

The city’s ban on plastic grocery bags is spreading, and last year Mayor Gavin Newsom won a Green Cross Award from Global Green USA alongside Irmelin DiCaprio, the mother of film star Leonardo DiCaprio.

But none of that adds up to what the city really needs: cash.

Then the US Department of Energy in late March designated three more California cities — Sacramento, San Jose, and Santa Rosa — as new "Solar American Cities" — and this award came with money attached. And the DOE has dough: the agency requested $25 billion from Congress this year.

The solar grant was worth $2.4 million. The money was divided among 12 cities nationwide, leaving each municipality with just $200,000. And that was supposed to cover a two-year period.

Berkeley, San Francisco, and San Diego made the "Solar American Cities" list in 2007. San Francisco’s Department of the Environment received the money, and a conciliatory Johanna Partin, the renewable energy program manager there, said it was the only grant from Bush’s Solar America Initiative her office had actually applied for.

San Francisco at least will able to use the money to help the owners of large buildings assess what it would take to install solar technology. We’ve already digitally mapped the city’s grandest roofs.

Margie Bates, a project manager for the DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Program in Golden, Colo., told us that the grant includes $200,000 in additional credit for hiring local experts to advise building owners on the technology or retain the expertise of DOE officials themselves.

"The funding is allowing us to do some pieces of our solar program that we didn’t otherwise have funding for. So in that sense it’s good," she said. "But, you know, $200,000 over two years is not a lot of money."

A solar plan that works

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EDITORIAL Solar energy makes so much sense in San Francisco that it’s crazy this city didn’t figure out years ago how to get at least a quarter or more of its power from the sun. And it’s crazy that now, with the financial benefits of solar power improving, the technology improving, and the environmental mandate getting more profound by the day, the city still doesn’t have an effective citywide solar program.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, who wants to be known as a green mayor, has a solar proposal on the table that environmental groups like the Sierra Club are reluctantly supporting. But a lot of the supervisors have serious questions — and so do we. At its most basic, Newsom’s plan is a shift of solar resources from the public sector to the private sector and does little to promote a sustainable long-term energy policy.

There’s a way to do solar right in San Francisco, and we can outline a basic blueprint.

1. Start with all the interested parties. Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, with Newsom’s support, created a Solar Task Force in San Francisco — but none of the supervisors were invited. The Sierra Club wasn’t invited. None of the public power advocates were invited. Instead, it was dominated by solar industry people, with Pacific Gas and Electric Company along for the ride, guaranteeing that the proposals would run into political static.

2. Make it work as part of a public power plan. The future of San Francisco’s energy policy has to start and end with the notion that PG&E won’t be the long-term supplier of commercial electricity. The city has a community-choice aggregation (CCA) plan, and any solar programs should be designed to enhance and work with that plan.

3. Don’t shortchange public generation. Newsom is asking the city to take money away from a public-sector plan, which pays for solar panels on city-owned buildings, and shift it to a private-sector program, which would subsidize homeowners and commercial landlords who want to install solar panels. We’re all for encouraging solar on homes and office buildings, and we recognize that current state and federal law are skewed toward private projects. But the city has a huge interest in building its own generation capacity: city buildings now use Hetch Hetchy hydropower, and every kilowatt that can be replaced with solar frees up Hetch Hetchy power for retail sales to local homes and businesses and increases the financial rewards of public power.

4. Use the Berkeley model for private parties. The city of Berkeley is pursuing an excellent program. Homeowners and businesses would be able to borrow money from the city at very low interest (a city can raise capital at around 3 percent these days) to install solar panels and would pay the money back over 20 or 30 years through increased property taxes. This would cost the city nothing, encourages solar installations — and still leaves room for subsidies if they turn out to be necessary.

5. Look at using CCA to buy solar panels in bulk and install them free. Eric Brooks, a public power advocate, suggests this idea, and it’s a good one. A city power agency could buy panels and offer them free to property owners, with the energy going into the city grid. The residents and businesses would see their power bills drop, and the city would see environmental and financial benefits.

6. Demand two-way meters. PG&E doesn’t allow property owners to bank power that they generate beyond what they use. That means the owner of a solar system that’s actually generating surplus money is giving power free to PG&E. The city ought to be pushing for a change in state law to demand two-way electric meters. And as part of a public power plan, San Francisco could allow homeowners and commercial landlords not only to cut their power bills to zero but also to bring in cash by installing solar-generating systems.

7. Recognize that PG&E is part of the problem, not part of the solution. PG&E doesn’t want public power. The company doesn’t want widespread solar generation. In fact, the giant private utility has no incentive to do anything that keeps it from making money by selling power over its lines. You can almost judge a solar plan by one standard — if PG&E is OK with it, it must be a bad idea.

The supervisors are right to question Newsom’s plan, and in the end, they should reject it — and create a new one that meets the key tests of an effective long-term energy program for San Francisco.

Leno, Migden, and the Newsom cuts

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EDITORIAL The closure this week of the venerable Haight Ashbury Food Program, which for more than a quarter century has served hot meals to hundreds of people a day, is another bitter reminder of what a rotten time it is to be poor in San Francisco.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s approach to the city’s budget problems is to cut programs that serve the needy: Buster’s Place, the city’s only 24-hour drop-in center for homeless people, is closed. The public health nursing program is shutting down. Frontline city workers are getting laid off, and jobs will go unfilled. And there is no talk in the mayor’s office of any sort of comprehensive plan to raise new revenue to close what has become a structural budget gap of more than $300 million.

Yes, a big part of the fault lies in Washington DC and Sacramento. The federal government has abandoned American cities. The state is wracked with its own paralyzing budget problems (caused in large part by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to eliminate the vehicle license fee). So money that San Francisco used to get without any direct effort — that is, without asking local residents and businesses to pay for it — is gone. And while San Francisco’s representatives in Sacramento have worked hard to win back money for cities and force the governor to moderate his cuts, the fact is that it’s unlikely San Francisco can count on any outside help during the next few years. The ugly budget choices have to be made at home.

That’s why it’s critical that every progressive leader in town be willing to take on the mayor’s brutal budget cuts and push for humane alternatives. That includes the two people running in a highly contested race for state Senate.

Carole Migden and Mark Leno are both seeking progressive support in the June primary. Both have good cases to make based on their records. But we need to see more than just good votes (and good legislation) in the state capital; like a lot of voters, we’re also looking to see which candidate will use the powerful seat and its bully pulpit to promote progressive values in the city.

Both candidates have long connections to the powerful forces that seek to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Migden is close to Don Fisher, the Republican who pours huge gobs of money into regressive local measures and candidates. Leno has been endorsed by Newsom.

But with the election less than two months away, we’d like to hear both of them say, loudly and publicly, that the Newsom cuts are wrong and unacceptable, that the budget pain should be shared by the wealthy, and that the city needs to look at new taxes before it eliminates any more programs for the needy.

The price of the torch

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So Gavin Newsom’s torch episode — which disappointed almost everyone and pissed off a lot of us — cost the city $600,000 plus. That’s at a time when we’re laying off city staff by the hundreds and closing critical services.

Six figures to give China a video postcard. Nicely done, Mr. Mayor.

Newsom’s torch plays SF for fools

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First the route for the Beijing Olympic Torch relay was changed, following a brief opening ceremony.
Then, the closing ceremony was shifted to an undisclosed location.

These last minute changes left all the thousands of people who came to support, protest or simply witness the torch’s historic relay thwarted.

And they meant that China has got some relatively upbeat television footage to show back home, featuring an unencumbered torch being run through the protest-free streets of San Francisco! Talk about a far cry from reality.

“Disgraceful and shameful” said Board of Supervisor President Aaron Peskin of the City’s switch and bait.

‘I have every reason to believe this was a well developed plan by Gavin Newsom and his chief of police in conjunction with the government of China and the US State Department,” Peskin continued. “It was designed to please the government of China and give them the TV footage they want to portray to their people. The bottom line is that Newsom has deceitfully and repeatedly misled the public. Frankly, these are the tactics that the Chinese government uses on its people. It’s a move straight from the Richard Nixon playbook.”

Asked if there was evidence to support the City’s decision to redirect the torch relay and relocate the closing ceremony, Peskin said he’d seen and heard none.

“I went down the route at 11 am, the supporters and protesters were all peaceful. This was a large decoy operation. Only Newsom played the people of San Francisco for fools. I don’t care if you were a supporter or an opponent of the torch, people brought their children, families and friends to San Francisco for a once in a lifetime experience. This was the biggest charade perpetuated by any mayor in anyone’s memory and possibly in the history of this town. The only difference between Newsom and President Hu Jintao is none. Both manipulate, are deceitful and do not run transparent governments.”

The torch, which was variously concealed in a waterfront warehouse, shipped to Van Ness with a Quackers bus in tow, and diverted through the Marina to elude protesters, was taken to SFO for a surprise closing ceremony–presumably so it could be shipped out of SF as fast as possible, away from the whiskey and fandangos–and all those people, inconveniently protesting uncomfortable stuff like China’s abysmal track record of human rights abuses and its support of dictatorship in Burma and genocide in Darfur.

A big step for public services

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EDITORIAL The battle against privatization of public resources took a big step forward this week when Sup. Ross Mirkarimi introduced a measure to create a Public Services Advisory Board to monitor what he calls the creeping takeover of city government by private outfits.

The new agency would monitor outsourcing of public services and advise the supervisors on whether it makes fiscal and policy sense to turn city programs over to businesses and nonprofits.

It’s also a chance to push forward on public power, the disaster at the zoo, the move to privatize the golf courses and some parks, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s efforts to hand the city’s information technology infrastructure over to private companies, and the Presidio sellout.

The legislation is the first public effort of a new coalition called San Francisco Commons. The group includes labor, public power, neighborhood groups, and environmental activists and was formed to address the growing problem of the loss of public sector services. It’s a crucial new addition to the city’s political scene: the first organization specifically established to protect public services and public property.

The case against privatization is clear. Private entities aren’t required to make their finances public (even if they’re doing public service work with public money). And companies doing work on city contracts are motivated by profits, sometimes at the expense of the public interest. Typically, when private operators take over public services, the prices go up, worker pay goes down, and the quality of the delivery tanks. Just look at the Presidio, a national park that’s been turned into a private real estate development, or the zoo, where privatization has led to misspent funds, poor conditions for animals, and a tragic tiger escape. Or look at Edison School, the failed experiment in education privatization in San Francisco.

San Francisco ought to be in the forefront of the antiprivatization battle nationwide, and this new group and legislation is a good first step. The agenda for the new advisory board is extensive: the panel needs to look at every large and small privatization move at City Hall. It needs to evaluate and report to the supervisors on the flaws in the mayor’s schemes. It also needs to look forward actively at ways the city can bring more essential services under public control. That includes moving forward on community choice aggregation and then developing a plan to create a full-scale, citywide public power system. Public broadband service ought to be on the agenda, too.

The supervisors should approve Mirkarimi’s bill, and the sooner the better, before Newsom finds some more of San Francisco to put on the block.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Everybody knows the Democratic Party’s superdelegate problem: if Barack Obama wins the popular vote, as he probably will, and wins the highest number of elected delegates, as he almost certainly will, and the party leaders turn to Hillary Clinton instead, there will be a revolution in the rank and file that could damage the party for years to come.

But in San Francisco, that happens all the time.

The local Democratic Party is run by the Democratic County Central Committee, and 24 of the members are elected, democratically. But every Democrat who holds an elected office representing San Francisco, and every Democratic nominee for office, automatically gets a seat on the committee, too — so you’ve got another eight or so (it varies) people on the panel who are the local equivalent of superdelegates. US Sen. Dianne Feinstein is on the county committee. So is Board of Equalization member Betty Yee and state senator Leland Yee. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a seat. Rep. Tom Lantos was on the committee until he died; his replacement, almost certainly Jackie Speier, will take over his slot this week.

Of course, none of those high-powered types ever show up for committee meetings. They send proxies, either trusted advisors or staffers from their local offices. And often — all too often — those superdelegate proxies are the deciding votes on local issues.

See, the committee may not be the highest profile office in the land, but it has a fair amount of local clout. The central committee decides what position the Democratic Party takes on local issues — and that means both influence and money. The party endorsement on ballot measures can be influential, particularly when it comes with a place on the official party slate card.

These days the committee has a majority of elected progressives. But it’s not an overwhelming majority — since half the seats are apportioned by Assembly districts, half the grassroots members are from the west side of town and tend to be more moderate. And not all of the eastsiders are progressives.

So on key endorsements this year — for San Francisco supervisor, for example — the majority of the elected delegates will probably vote for the progressives. But a minority will support the slate backed by Mayor Gavin Newsom — and the superdelegates will mostly go along.

So the Newsom slate at the very least will block the progressives from getting the endorsements. In fact, for a progressive candidate or ballot measure to get the party nod in a contested race requires an almost impossible majority of the elected members.

It can be infuriating.

Supervisors Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin, who often don’t get along, are working together to get a solid progressive slate elected to the DCCC this June. It’s a good idea, and there’s a good chance many of the 24 slate members will win. But the will of the voters won’t matter if the superdelegates can still weigh in and screw up any real reform.

I suppose it’s possible to change to rules to kick the superdelegates off the committee, but that would be a brutal battle. And there’s a much easier solution:

The committee needs to eliminate proxy votes.

Feinstein can’t use a proxy to vote on the Senate floor. Pelosi can’t send a proxy to vote in the House of Representatives. Proxies aren’t allowed in the state Legislature. Why should the DCCC be any different?

If Dianne Feinstein really cares about Gavin Newsom’s slate of supervisorial candidates this fall, then she can show up at the committee meeting and vote. Otherwise the grassroots, elected delegates get to decide. Seems fair to me.

After Home Depot

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EDITORIAL The proposal to build a Home Depot store on Bayshore Boulevard was a textbook example of terrible city planning. The community never asked for a big-box chain store; no city plans ever discussed how big-box retail would help the local economy. Instead, about eight years ago the giant Atlanta-based corporation decided it wanted a store in San Francisco, hired Jack Davis, a political consultant close to then-Mayor Willie Brown, and, after a brutal and unpleasant battle, got permission to build a giant suburban-style outlet of more than 100,000 square feet with a massive parking garage in a city where transit and pedestrian access are considered primary land-use values.

And now that Home Depot has decided, based on its business projections, that the whole thing was a bad idea and is backing out, San Francisco has a chance to turn the big empty lot on Bayshore into something that serves the community. There’s a chance to make this a model for city planning, an example of how to do economic development right for a change. The mayor, city planners, and the supervisors need to insist on a credible process.

From the start, the fight over Home Depot was toxic, pitting small business owners, who feared that the discount chain would destroy local merchants, and Bernal Heights residents, who feared the traffic, noise, and pollution a car-dependent outlet would bring to the area, against Bayview-Hunters Point residents who desperately needed jobs. Home Depot lobbyists did their best to push the divide, arguing that employment opportunities at the store would help spur economic development in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Lost in the rhetoric was the fact that the chain promised only about 200 new jobs, and would offer only a "good-faith effort" to hire half of those people from the neighborhood. In other words, at best, an eight-acre project — one of the biggest retail developments in the city — would lead to 100 new jobs for Bayview residents. That was, to put it mildly, an abysmal deal.

An environmental impact report on the project essentially dismissed all of the neighborhood concerns, even arguing that air-quality impacts from increased car exhaust wouldn’t count as an impact. The report tossed aside the fate of small businesses, particularly hardware stores, by saying that the store owners could simply start selling something else. Still, the supervisors voted to approve the project.

But now, after all that bitterness and expense, Home Depot is walking away, citing a sluggish market for home-improvement products. Mayor Gavin Newsom is begging the company not to abandon the plans altogether; he’s urging Home Depot executives to put the project on hold until the economy improves. That’s tantamount to saying that the Bayshore site should stay vacant for a few more years — which does no good for anybody. Instead of whining and begging a big corporation to bestow its blessings on poor San Francisco, Newsom ought to look at this as an opportunity.

Sup. Tom Ammiano, whose district borders on the site and who led the opposition to Home Depot, is calling for a community planning process that would bring the key stakeholders to the table to talk about how that land should be used. Sup. Sophie Maxwell, a Home Depot supporter whose district includes the site, ought to join with him. The goal ought to be a planning process that starts with the right questions: What sort of development does the community want? What use would create the most jobs that best fit the local labor pool and the employment needs of the area? What would benefit the city’s economy without damaging small business? Should part of the site be used for affordable housing?

There are all sorts of possibilities, but given Newsom’s pledge to be a "green mayor" and the value of new green-collar jobs, one obvious idea might be turning the place into a solar-energy center. Proper zoning, incentives, and public encouragement might attract solar manufacturing, solar installation services, and a solar hardware store with do-it-yourself kits for homeowners.

The city obviously can’t dictate what sorts of businesses would want to move to Bayshore, but planners can set criteria to steer development. That process ought to begin now, openly, with every interested party involved — and it should have a bottom line: no more suburban chain stores in San Francisco.

McGoldrick wants Solar funds for low-income housing

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Sup. Jake McGoldrick just had an epiphany: install solar panels on affordable, low-income housing projects, citywide.

That way the City can green San Francisco, create local jobs and business opportunities—and eventually reduce to zero the utility bills of low-income folks.

McGoldrick’s moment of clarity came in face of increasing pressure from local solar businesses and work creation programs to support Mayor Gavin Newsom’s recently announced Solar Energy Incentive Program.

McGoldrick says he supports going green and hiring locally, but he balked at the lack of public discussion about the mayor’s program, which uses tax payer dollars to subsidize solar installation on private property.

Pitched as a pilot project, Newsom’s solar energy incentive program proposes to allocate $3 million between now and the end of June, and $3-5 million in subsequent fiscal years. That adds up to more than $50 million by 2018.

McGoldrick believes these monies would be better used subsidizing installations on public housing and non-profit-owned, low-income projects.

Supporters of Newsom’s proposed Solar Incentive program argue that could better leverage a portion of the SFPUC’s Mayor’s Energy Conservation Account, and get more out of Hetch Hetchy dollars spent in energy efficiency and solar.

But as McGoldrick observes, the Mayor’s current plan fails to address public ownership concerns.

‘That’s why I’m going to try and give these MECA funds to affordable housing projects,” McGoldrick said.. “That way, people get jobs, solar companies come here, the city goes green–and we do power purchase agreements.”

San Francisco only has a 30 percent home ownership rate. But since a portion of that percentage are absentee landlords, the City could only target an ever smaller fraction of the city’s roof tops for solar installation, under theMayor’s current Solar Energy Incentive Program.

‘Tenants can’t jump in and spend $25,000 to replace their roof, and you can’t have the question of jobs be the tail wagging the dog,” McGoldrick said.

Torched?

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How is Mayor Gavin Newsom going to maneuver his way through the controversial Beijing Olympic Torch relay in San Francisco on Wednesday?

Before he read the political writing on the wall, (or listened to the protesters that gathered beneath his window at City Hall each day to chant “Mayor Newsom don’t accept China’s Bloody Torch,) Newsom tried to get Sup. Carmen Chu, his most recent appointee on the Board, to squash Sup. Chris Daly’s recommendation that San Francisco’s top official (Newsom, presumably) accept the torch “with alarm and protest.”

When that attempt backfired–and the Mayor’s Office saw Sup. Chris Daly, not Newsom, swarmed by cameras, the Mayor realized which way the political winds were blowing—and decided to met with some Tibetans.

At that point, US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (Newsom’s aunt by marriage) had already been speaking out against China’s human rights abuses and thoroughly pissed off the Chinese authorities by visiting the Dalai Lama.

And now London has protested, Paris has snuffed the torch, protesters are scaling the Golden Gate Bridge, and Hillary Clinton, who Newsom is stomping for, is calling for Bush to boycott the opening of the Beijing games.

“These events underscore why I believe the Bush administration has been wrong to downplay human rights in its policy towards China,” Clinton said.

So, will Newsom accept the torch “with alarm and protest,” after all? Or hand the job off to a surrogate and head out on vacation? Either way, sounds like Newsom is gonna need a whole lot of extra hair gel to wiggle his way through this one.

Newsom’s Sunshineless Solar

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Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to be known as the Green Mayor. But he could go down in history as the mayor who secretly diverted public money from large municipally owned solar installations to subsidize privately owned solar panels.

Since January, Newsom has tried to kick start two questionably financed solar programs.

The first plan involved raiding $50 million from a seismic safety loan fund. That idea got shelved in the New Year, when the Board of Supervisors asked why these funds couldn’t be used to seismically retrofit affordable housing units, rather than subsidize private solar installations?

The second plan is involved diverting $3 million from the Mayor’s Energy Conservation Account, which was set up in 2001 to increase energy efficiency and reduce cost of energy use.

Since then, $39 million has been allocated to MECA with $10 million allocated in the current fiscal year, 2007-2008.
These monies come from the General Fund and are under the purview of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

Deputy Controller Monique Zmuda says so far all projects funded by MECA have benefited city facilities and PUC facilities.

“These funds have not been used to my knowledge to subsidize or loan funds to privately owned energy conservation projects,” Zmuda told the Guardian.

MECA funded projects include solar panels at Moscone, the replacement of refrigerators at the San Francisco Housing Authority, solar projects at MUNI, a new heating system at the central plant of San Francisco General Hospital, Solar projects at San Francisco Airport, a Solar project at North Point, and Port Energy Efficiency.

But under the Mayor’s Solar Energy Incentive Program, these public monies would be used to help subsidize the installation of solar panels on privately owned buildings and homes.The program places a $10,000 cap on the subsidizing of solar on private property.

Is Newsom hosting a dictator?

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You don’t hear as much about El Salvador these days as you once did in the Bay Area, but the Coalition in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador is still very active, and the issues in thyat impoverished country, run by the right-wing equivalent of a dictator, are very real.

And now CISPES is furious that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is, according to Salvadoran press reports, planning to meet with Salvadoran president Antonio Saca. “Newsom is set to declare April 4 as the Day of Antonio Saca,” a CISPES statement says. This “has outraged the Salvadoran community of the Bay Area and allies because of ongoing human rights violations and state repression in El Salvador.“

I can’t get the mayor’s press office to confirm this, despite two emails and a phone call. In fact, I was told that only Nathan Ballard, the chief of the press office, could talk about this, and although I asked for a response by Thursday night, and emailed him directly as well, I have heard nothing. So possibly the Salvadoran press is wrong — and possibly Newsom doesn’t want to get a lot of press on the visit.

But CISPES is mobilizing to send a message that President Saca is not welcome in San Francisco and that the City should not honor him, and the group plans a press conference and demonstration Friday at 12 noon outside City Hall.

If Newsom is indeed meeting with Saca, it will put him in league with Dianne Feinstein, who used to love to meet with dictators. In the course of just one year, she hosted Ferdinand Marcos, Jose Napoleon Duarte and Muhammed Zia Ul-Haq.

At the time I called it her “third-world dictators hat trick.”

Newsom ought to know better.

Rip up the mayor’s club-violence plan

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EDITORIAL Back in January, 34-year-old Clarence Corbin was shot and killed during a fight outside Jelly’s Dance Café nightclub in Mission Bay. Mayor Gavin Newsom leapt into action, announcing that this sort of violence was unacceptable. We’re with the mayor on that, although we wish he’d shown the same kind of energy in dealing with the epidemic of shootings in the Bayview and Western Addition over the past few years.

But his solution — a crackdown on nightclub promoters — is unlikely to do anything about violence and will almost certainly damage the creative underside of the city’s entertainment scene.

Sup. Sophie Maxwell is carrying the mayor’s legislation, which she introduced March 4. Some of the provisions just seem silly: the bill, for example, would ban "loitering" within 10 feet of a club between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. Of course, people stand outside clubs all the time — among other things, to smoke cigarettes — so the bill says smokers would be exempted. So would people who are waiting for cabs. People who simply wanted some fresh air or to make a phone call (or to make out away from the dance floor) would be subject to fines. The loitering law, like most similar laws, seems like a blueprint for discriminatory and illegal enforcement. (Will young African American men get cited more often than white people? Of course they will.)

How are the cops going to decide who’s really waiting for a ride (cabs can take half an hour to arrive on a Saturday night) and who’s just hanging out? Might potential troublemakers just light up a cigarette and thus be free from legal action? It’s hard to see the practical logic here.

Then there’s the provision that would require promoters who hold two or more club events a year to obtain a permit (and presumably, pay a fee). Applicants would have to have proof of $1 million in liability insurance.

That, frankly, would kill a whole lot of small-time events in San Francisco.

Although Newsom complained to the press about "fly-by-night promoters," the city’s full of well-established people who do shows at various clubs with various programs a few times a year or a few times a month — and most of them are small-time operators. Very few have ever had any problems with the law, or promoted a show that led to violence — but most of them would have to shut down, because the $1 million in insurance money would be too expensive.

The Bay Area Reporter suggested March 13 that the bill could harm nonprofit events promoters by forcing them to devote much of the charitable take from their shows to paying for insurance and security plans.

We just don’t see how any of this really addresses the problem of violence outside of San Francisco clubs (and we don’t really see that clubs are to blame for much of the violence in the city anyway). When Sup. Ross Mirkarimi tried to get Mayor Newsom to put cops on foot in high-crime areas, the mayor balked. When Sup. Chris Daly tried to create a violence-prevention program that might have actually gotten to the root causes of this horrible pattern of kids killing one another, the mayor rejected it.

Instead, he wants to create a strange and ineffective plan to give police an excuse to arrest the wrong people that will penalize the small promoters who every week give so much to the city’s cultural landscape.

If club owners are concerned about crowds fomenting violence outside their doors, then the problem needs to be addressed. But this is an ass-backward way to do it. The supervisors need to rip this plan apart and start fresh.

Sharing the pain

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EDITORIAL We’re generally not for cutting employee salaries to address the city’s budget deficit. And we’ve never been fond of claiming that doctors and lawyers who earn less-than-market wages working for the city of San Francisco should be penalized because they earn what appear in newspaper stories to be fat paychecks.

But Sup. Aaron Peskin was not on the wrong track when he suggested, only slightly facetiously, that Mayor Gavin Newsom ought to be looking for high-paid staffers to cut instead of slicing services for the poor. Peskin’s point was not so much that the top layers of city bureaucracy were outrageously overpaid (although a few of the mayor’s aides and some of the department heads he’s hired could fit in that category) but that all of the cuts have come at the bottom. Find 10 surplus bureaucrats making $150,000 a year and you could save the entire program that provides public-health nurse visits for chronically ill San Franciscans.

Sure, some of this is politics: Newsom is taking a stab at the mayor with a suggestion bound to win popular support. But it’s also a serious policy issue: when the city’s in the red, where should the burden fall? In Newsom’s current budget proposals, it falls almost entirely in the wrong places.

Eliminating a deficit of more than $300 million is daunting. Of course, the city wouldn’t have this problem if Newsom and his predecessors had been willing to look at obvious (and flexible) sources of new revenue. Public power alone would’ve brought in almost enough to cover this year’s shortfall (and would have earned the city so much cash during the better years that it could have been set aside in a rainy-day fund to prevent these kinds of budget roller-coasters). The city’s major taxes are a regressive mess; fixing the business tax alone (and making it more progressive) would help the economy and allow the city to raise cash from those most able to pay.

In other words, instead of axing nurses who help sick and housebound senior citizens, Newsom ought to be looking for money from the wealthy.

But right now, the mayor is talking only cuts — and for the most part, only cuts of lower-paid, front-line workers. The least the mayor could do is make a good-faith effort to share the pain. Looking for 10 useless high-paid execs in order to save public health nursing? How about former Sup. Bill Maher, who earns $144,838 out at the airport, where the last time we checked (see Here’s Bill; 5/26/06) he hardly ever showed up for work? Nine more patronage cronies, Mr. Mayor, and you’ll make the nut.

To China, with (tough) love.

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“If there is not alarm, if there is not protest, that too would be news, that would be San Francisco complicit,” said Sup. Chris Daly today.

Daly’s words came as he and Sups Tom Ammiano, Bevan Dufty, Jake McGoldrick, Sophie Maxwell, Ross Mirkarimi, Aaron Peskin and Geraldo Sandoval passed a resolution that condemns China’s human rights record and directs San Francisco to accept the Beijing Olympic torch, with “alarm and protest,” when it arrives April 9.

The 8-3 vote was met with applause and whoops of “Free Tibet” and came on the heels of Daly’s eloquent speech in which he highlighted China’s ongoing violations of human rights, its brutal pre-Olympic crackdown that left 140 dead in Tibet, its persecution of the Falun Gong, its suppression of democracy, as illustrated by students facing down the tanks in Tiennemen Square, and its support of genocide in Darfur and dictatorship in Burma.

“The torch is coming to our City. With it comes China’s record and the attention of the press. The eyes of the world will be watching San Francisco,” Daly said.

“Our mayor and the President of the United States share the notion that the Olympics and politics somehow need to be compartmentalized, that we should deal with them separately, but t that’s impossible with an event on this scale and this magnified ,” said Daly, as he referenced the Olympic Games of 1936, 1968, 1980 and 1984–all heavily loaded occasions

“Our history and politics are intertwined with the Olympics,” said Daly, who also referenced the “land use politics” that dogged the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Voting against Daly’s resolution were Newsom allies, Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd.
A second resolution to welcome the Olympic torch, the Human Rights Torch and the Tibetan Freedom Torch failed.

Mayor Gavin Newsom immediately sought to undermine the importance of Daly’s resolution, telling the Chronicle that “it’s only a statement and not a law,” as the Mayor’s Office tried to upstage Daly’s victory by releasing details of the torch’s route.

But Daly remained the hero of the hour, swarmed by a crowd of paparazzi as he left the Board’s Chambers.

Acknowledging that his resolution is “highly symbolic,” Daly gave the credit to US Speaker Nancy Pelosi for bringing the world’s attention to China’s human rights’ abuses, and expressed his hope that the Board’s vote, coupled with Pelosi’s actions and statements, andother protests along the way, “can lead to greater change.”

The April 9 torch relay start 1 p.m with an opening ceremony at McCovey Cove. The torch will then travel along 3rd Street from McCovey Cove to the Embarcadero and past Fisherman’s Wharf to Jefferson Street.
From Jefferson, the torch will turn left on Hyde Street and travel a short distance to Beach Street, then to Polk Street near Aquatic Park.
The torch will head up Polk to Bay Street, then back to the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building at Justin Herman Plaza, where an area is designated for protesters.Protesters will also be allowed in Union Square, Portsmouth Square, Civic Center and Washington Square.

But city officials also say that groups won’t need a permit and and that they are expecting more protesters along the torch’s relay route than in the designated “free speech” areas.

Home Depot, good riddance

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So Home Depot has pulled out of its plans to build a giant store on Bayshore Boulevard. I hope Gavin Newsom, Sophie Maxwell, Aaron Peskin and all the others who supported this terrible deal are paying attention and get the point: You do business with big national chains and you’re more than likely to get screwed.

It’s the same thing that happened with the mayor’s wi-fi proposal: City officials got all excited about a promise from a big private-sector operator that cares nothing for San Francisco – and when the dollars didn’t add up, the vendor bailed.

In both cases, the deal was bad for the city. Home Depot would have hurt small businesses, brought horrible traffic to nearby neighborhoods and done little for the local economy.

And the whole thing stunk of sleaze: Former mayor Willie Brown began pushing the deal after his political consultant, Jack Davis, was hired by the company to lobby him.

But the supervisors went along with it, by a 6-5 vote (with Peskin casting the swing vote for the chain) – and now the city is back to the drawing board. If the supes had rejected Home Depot, we could be well underway toward creating a community-based alternative for the site.

That’s what Sup. Tom Ammiano wants to start working on now. “We need to get a collaborative effort going to find the proper use for that site,” he told me.

Meanwhile, Newsom is calling Home Depot to make one last push. He wants to company to put its plans on hold, instead of abandoning them. In other words, he’s asking that the site be left empty for as long as Home Depot wants.

Talk about a stupid idea.

Raise your voice for nightlife!

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There’s some heinous new legislation targeted at pretty much killing independent nightlife in the city coming up, folks. Mayor Gavin Newsom and Supe Sophie Maxwell think it’ll curb violence happening outside some of the bigger clubs, but the proposals — requiring even the smallest promoters to apply for permits and show proof of $1 million in liability insurance, as well as citing anyone who stands outside a club for more than three minutes unless smoking or hailing a cab — would wipe out a ton of vital little parties and charitable events after dark. Read more about it here. (And look for our editorial on the subject in Wednesday’s Guardian.)

nightlife.jpg
Nightlife: Even Swedish kids like it!

Here’s your chance to speak up about this to the Entertainment Commision! Info courtesy of the fab DJ Raverpup, who’s spearheading the resistance.

Hi everyone,

Just a reminder that tomorrow, Tuesday, April 1, the Entertainment Commission meeting will have the new promoter permits on the agenda, and the floor will be open for members of the public to make comments for up to three minutes. We need to get a good turnout of independent promoters (and party people) to comment on this and make it apparent how this new legislation will affect us and San Francisco nightlife. The meeting will be at 4PM at City Hall; follow the link below for more information.

http://www.sfgov.org/site/entertainment_page.asp?id=78062

Torch debate: still burning

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By Megan Ma

Under pressure to reject any official welcome of the Olympic torch relay when it comes through town on April 9th, SF supervisors plan to vote on two competing resolutions tomorrow, April 1st, that will set the tone for the city’s stance on the controversy.

Board members have been wrangling over wording of potential resolutions for the past few weeks. On March 20th Sup. Chris Daly brought forward a version that called on his colleagues and Gavin Newsom to greet the torch with “alarm and protest at the failure of China to … cease the egregious and ongoing human rights abuses in China and occupied Tibet.”

Daly’s proposal was rejected the same day by Sups. Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd, both Newsom allies, who turned around and wrote a much milder version. Their proposal hacks out Daly’s list of grievances against China, and simply states that the city welcomes both the Olympic torch and the Tibetan Freedom Torch, which is slated to arrive a day earlier.

Daly’s offering runs 5 pages longer, and lists a number of China’s alleged human rights abuses, including its role in the Darfur genocide, its abuses against Falun Gong and the Burmese monk protests. He’s re-introducing his version at tomorrow’s meeting.

Dozens of protesters from Students for Free Tibet and Burmese American Democratic Alliance (BADA) lined city hall Friday, saying Tibet sympathizers would be there everyday until the torch arrives. And while the ultimate goal for many activists was for city officials to unanimously boycott the Olympics and reject the torch, UC Davis student Phuntsok Wangden said some would be “satisfied” with the approval of Daly’s “alarm and protest” resolution.

A representative from SF Team Tibet, an umbrella organization for Bay Area protestors, says Desmond Tutu and Richard Gere are scheduled to speak at a candlelight vigil for the Tibetan Freedom Torch on April 8 in the city.

Meanwhile, SFPD still hasn’t released the route of the torch yet.

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