Government

SF’s skatepark crisis

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By Justin Juul

After attending SF360 Film+Club’s recent screening of Freedom of Space — a film about the harsh realities of enjoying an illegal sport– and then meeting some friends in a Safeway parking lot for a midnight skate-jam on some shitty ramps, the only thing I can say is: Why the fuck hasn’t anyone built a decent skatepark in this city?

All the elements have been present for over a decade: thousands of people who would come to a park if there was one, business owners who are sick of calling the cops on skateboarders, cops who are sick of wasting their time, and a huge base of high-profile companies like High Speed Productions (Thrasher, Slap, Juztapoz), DLX Distribution (Spitfire, Thunder, Anti-hero, etc.), FTC and Huf that could easily ante up some funds for a project. And why doesn’t SF have something like The Burnside Project in Portland? Are SF skaters just too lazy, or is there some force working against them? Rather than go off on an un-researched rant about the SF skate community not doing its job, I thought I’d talk to someone who’s been in the trenches for a while.

Burnside_12.jpg
The Burnside Project in Portland

To find out more about the reality of SF’s skate park struggle I spoke to Rick Dinardo, Co-Founder of the Bay Area Skate-park Coalition.

SFBG: So Rick, my main question is: Why doesn’t San Francisco, the birth place of modern day street skating, have a decent park?

Rick Dinardo: Oh my god, how much time do you have? Before I get into it, though, you should realize that San Francisco finally is getting a good centrally-located skatepark. It’s going to be in Portrero Hill, right by the regular park that’s been there for years. As for why it’s taken the city 30 years to get off its ass and build one, well, that has to do with red tape, real estate, government corruption, lack of interest, and a whole lot of other bullshit, mostly money related.

SFBG: Well okay, I understand it’s difficult to get licenses and land and all that, but why haven’t all the huge skateboard companies, especially the ones that capitalize on their SF roots, why haven’t they gotten together and just fucking done the thing? It seems like they have enough money to at least fund a DIY project if not something as amazing as Rob Dyrdek’s deal in Kettering, Ohio.

Dinardo: First of all, I think you’re overestimating how much money these companies are making. These parks cost millions and millions of dollars, and that’s in places like Scott’s Valley where there is still open space for building. Land prices in SF are out of this fucking world. Whatever those companies chose to donate would be a drop in the bucket in a situation like this.

Also… I don’t think the companies you mentioned are very community oriented. I mean, this is capitalism we’re talking about, and they’re trying to make money, not sustain a community. I don’t think they care as much about supporting skateboarding in SF as they do about making the sport popular across the globe.

Rent control under attack

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› news@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s rent-control and affordable-housing laws could be struck down by a statewide initiative that appears to be headed for the June 2008 ballot.

The measure is sponsored by a coalition of conservative property rights advocates under the guise of limiting the government’s ability to seize property by eminent domain.

Cities and progressive organizations are fighting back by trying to qualify a competing ballot measure that would restrict the ability of governments to seize owner-occupied homes but would invalidate the more radical initiative. Groups from the San Francisco Tenants Union to the League of California Cities are actively mobilizing to gather the needed signatures by the Dec. 3 deadline.

SFTU director Ted Gullicksen told the Guardian, “180,000 rental units stand to be affected in San Francisco,” and argued that the invalidation of rent-control laws would rapidly gentrify the city. He noted that environmental groups have lined up against the measure because of ambiguous wording that “could also impact the revamping of the Hetch Hetchy Dam as well as the work on the levees and the delta.”

His group is mobilizing volunteer signature gatherers to qualify the competing measure — which would need more votes than the right-wing measure to quash the latter — and trying to educate the public through the Web site www.eminentdomainreform.com and a Nov. 14 rally planned for noon at the State Building at Van Ness and McAllister.

Eminent domain laws have been a hot-button political issue since 2005, when the US Supreme Court ruled in Kelo vs. City of New London that the Connecticut city could use eminent domain to seize land for a private development project. The furor over that decision triggered last year’s Proposition 90, which would have restricted eminent domain and defined “regulatory takings” so as to cripple local governments’ ability to enforce environmental laws and other restrictions on property use.

Prop. 90 was narrowly defeated (by 47.6 to 52.4 percent of voters statewide, but 29 percent in San Francisco), and advocates for the constitutional amendment titled Government Acquisition, Regulation of Private Property hoped to learn from the experience in crafting this new measure, for which they say they’ve gathered 850,000 signatures and plan to have one million by the Nov. 26 deadline for turning in 694,354 valid signatures of registered voters.

That measure “had a substantial amount of baggage in that it delved into regulatory takings,” Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, told the Guardian. The latest proposal, he said, “is a fairly tightly drafted measure that deals with eminent domain.”

Actually, as the Attorney General’s Office has concluded in its summary of the measure, it would also strike down rent-control laws, a key source of affordable housing in San Francisco, Berkeley, and a couple of other California cities. The measure’s broad prohibition on laws that “transfer an economic benefit to one or more private persons at the expense of the private owner” could also be interpreted as invalidating inclusionary housing laws, which require developers to create a set percentage of below-market-rate units, and other laws that regulate property.

Coupal admitted the measure attacks rent control and told us, “We think that’s part and parcel of complete property rights protection.” But he noted that units are only removed from rent-control protection when existing tenants move out. And he denied that the proposed act would affect inclusionary housing laws, citing a section that reads, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit or impair voluntary agreements between a property owner and a public agency to develop or rehabilitate affordable housing.”

Yet he also admits that it’s an open question whether affordable-housing requirements for developers will always be deemed voluntary. He said, “The issue of what is voluntary is currently being litigated in a number of courts.”

Green City: The bay-delta connection

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› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Until recently, politicians and the public tended to view the problems facing the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta levees as separate from the problems facing the San Francisco Bay. But now that human-made distinction is beginning to blur as scientists predict that rising sea levels and levee failures could have profound consequences for both ecosystems.

As wetlands scientist Philip Williams explained at the State of the Estuary Conference in Oakland last month, if the levees fail, a hole will open that will cause the northern area where the bay meets the delta (roughly from Richmond to Antioch) to fill with salt water and deepen, thereby eroding the delta’s valuable tidal marsh habitat.

This doomsday scenario has environmentalists clamoring for an increase in tidal marsh restoration efforts in the southernmost stretches of the bay, which are already home to the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project and a broader US Army Corps of Engineers effort to build levees and restore marshlands to protect property from flooding.

As Dr. Letitia Grenier of the San Francisco Estuary Institute said at the SOE conference, people aren’t the only ones who need habitat protection. The mosquito-eating Yuma bat, the California clapper rail, the least tern, and the chinook salmon are just a few of the many species that live around, fly across, or swim through the bay and the delta, and their survival depends on a mosaic of interconnected habitats.

Yet no agency has the clear authority to require that marshland marsh be restored, levees built, development prevented, and greenhouse gas emissions reduced.

In a recent report for the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, executive director Will Travis notes that while the BCDC, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Association of Bay Area Governments are working together as part of a Joint Policy Committee, "none of the four agencies has the authority to prohibit development in flood-prone areas [or] require that levees be constructed to protect low-lying areas, and BAAQMD does not have the authority to regulate emissions from vehicles."

Pointing out that the BCDC was created in 1965 to regulate bay fill and thus prevent the bay from becoming smaller, Travis writes that his agency "is neither legally responsible for dealing with this dramatic change of conditions that is making the Bay larger, nor does BCDC have any explicit legal authority to address this problem."

That said, in an Oct. 29 report posted on the BCDC’s Web site, Travis announced that his agency "has taken the initiative to formulate a broad outline of a comprehensive strategy for addressing climate change in the Bay region and identified changes that are needed in state law so that BCDC can play a productive role in implementing such a strategy."

This strategy includes mapping flood-prone areas, ceasing planned developments in such areas, identifying property that requires protection, and identifying areas that should be allowed to revert to tidal marsh and other types of natural habitat.

"Another probable impact of climate change is that more precipitation in the Sierra Nevada will fall as rain rather than snow, and the snow pack will melt earlier in the spring," Travis writes. This will in turn reduce the amount of late spring and summer runoff into the delta, allowing salt water to extend farther into the delta than it does now.

Travis predicts that sea level rise and higher flood flows resulting from climate change, as well as earthquake risk, will also increase the probability of catastrophic levee failure. Travis also notes that "pulling existing development back from the Bay shoreline and foregoing planned development of low-lying areas can provide an opportunity to expand the restoration of tidal wetlands."

To address these challenges, the BCDC is proposing an eight-year work program with the goal of achieving environmental accountability. "Any proposed new development within the area likely to be inundated by sea level rise should be required to obtain approval both from the local government and from BCDC."

But first, the BCDC or a new regional agency will need state legislation giving it that authority — and public recognition that seriously dealing with climate change means accepting some new regulation of private property.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Bechtel and Newsom: a fine pair

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What do Newsom and Bechtel have in common?

They both oppose Prop. E, which requires the next Mayor of San Francisco to appear before the Board of Supervisors for public policy discussions.

Up until now, Newsom has been framing Prop. E as work of Sup. Chris Daly that will only lead to “political theater.”

Then, boom, four days before the election, Bechtel goes and plonks down $5,000 to defeat Prop. E, on top of the last-0minute plonking down of $10,000 from Republican Warren Hellman, $20,000 from the San Franciscan Association of Realtors, $25,000 from the Committee on Jobs Government Reform Fund, and $1,000 from socialite Dede Wilsey.

Looking at all these “No on E” money bags, it’s hard not to conclude that what Newsom’s No on E “Let’s Really Work Together Coalition” is really working together on is avoiding having to publicly debate tough issues, like the lack of affordable housing, or the rising tide of violence, or mental health issues among the homeless–issues that folks who aren’t millionaires and realtors would like to see their elected representatives hash out with the Mayor, but that rich folks can chat privately with the Mayor over fund raising dinners.

What’s bizarre about all this is that when you actually get Newsom talking, he seems perfectly capable of carrying out a well-argued and coherent debate.

So why don’t his handlers want their boy to be drawn into public debates? Could it be that they understand that once you get drawn into an argument, and express your opinion, people will take sides? That’s it safer to maintain a remote, inaccessible position, while you prepare for the next big thing, like governor, senator, or President?

But this is San Francisco, where people thrive on debate. So here’s hoping that the next Mayor of San Francisco spares us the fake question time and does as voters requested last fall: show up before the Board and answer their gosh darn questions.

Endorsements: Local offices

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Mayor

1. QUINTIN MECKE


2. AHIMSA PORTER SUMCHAI


3. CHICKEN JOHN RINALDI


Let us be perfectly clear: none of the people we are endorsing has any real chance of getting elected mayor of San Francisco. Gavin Newsom is going to win a second term; we know that, he knows that, and whatever they may say on the campaign trail, all of the candidates running against him know that.

It’s a sad state of affairs: San Francisco has been, at best, wallowing helplessly in problems under Newsom, and in many cases things have gotten worse. The murder rate is soaring; young people, particularly African Americans, are getting shot down on the streets in alarming numbers. The mayor has opposed almost every credible effort to do something about it — he fought against putting cops on foot patrol in the most violent areas, he opposed the creation of a violence-prevention fund and blocked implementation of a community policing plan, and he’s allowed the thugs in the Police Officers Association to set policy for a police department that desperately lacks leadership. The public transportation system is in meltdown. The housing crisis is out of control; 90 percent of the people who work in San Francisco can’t afford to buy a house here, and many of them can’t afford to rent either. Meanwhile, the city is allowing developers and speculators to build thousands of new luxury condos, which are turning San Francisco into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Newsom only recently seems to have noticed that public housing is in shambles and that the commission he appoints to oversee it has been ignoring the problem.

The mayor is moving aggressively to privatize public services (including turning over the city’s broadband infrastructure to private companies), and he’s done little to promote public power. He’s cracking down on the homeless without offering adequate alternatives to long-term housing. Much of the time, he seems disconnected, out of touch with the city; he won’t show up and take questions from the Board of Supervisors and won’t even comply with the Sunshine Ordinance and release his daily calendar so the voters can see what he’s doing all day. He rarely appears in public, unless his handlers have complete control of the situation.

In fact, almost all of the significant policy discussions and initiatives that are happening in San Francisco today (including the universal health plan that Newsom likes to take credit for) have come from the Board of Supervisors.

There are good things to say about Newsom. We were among the huge number of San Franciscans who applauded when Newsom directed the city to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He did more than make a political statement, more than allow hundreds of couples to get married; he put one of the leading civil rights issues of our time on the center stage of the political agenda. And he made all of us proud to be San Franciscans. We were happy to see him stand up against the big international hotel chains and support striking hotel workers. In some ways, he’s brought modern management to the city — the 311 system, which connects callers directly to the proper city services, actually works, and sometimes works well.

But San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, and it’s in serious trouble, and the person in charge isn’t offering much in the way of leadership — and he certainly isn’t offering the sort of progressive agenda that this city ought to be showing the nation. Newsom doesn’t deserve another term.

And yet the progressives in the city, who have come so very far since the return of district elections in 2000, were unable to field an electable candidate. We could spend pages dissecting why that happened. Matt Gonzalez should have made a decision much earlier in the process. Ross Mirkarimi should have run. The entire movement needs to be better about developing and promoting candidates for citywide office. But right now the issue on the table is this: who should the progressives, the independents, the neighborhood activists, the tenants, the people who have been dispossessed during the Newsom years, who don’t like the prospect of this mayor waltzing into another term atop a landslide majority, vote for Nov. 6?

We aren’t in the habit of endorsing for a big-league elective office people who haven’t put in their time in the minors. And Newsom’s challengers are not exactly a varsity squad. But many of them are raising important issues that Newsom has ignored, and we commend them all for taking on the difficult task of mounting a campaign against a mayor who most observers say is unbeatable. Our endorsements are, to be honest, protest votes — but we hope they’ll send a message to Newsom that there are issues, communities, and ideas he can’t just ignore after his coronation. The smaller the mayor’s margin of victory and the more votes the candidates who are pushing the progressive agenda collect, the less of a mandate Newsom will take into a second term that could be a truly frightening time.

Quintin Mecke has the strongest progressive credentials and by far the best overall approach to issues facing the city. He’s never held elective office (and had never run before), but he’s been involved in local politics for a decade. A volunteer with Tom Ammiano’s campaigns for supervisor and mayor and with Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign, Mecke went on to serve on the civil grand jury and the task force on redistricting, where he helped stave off attempts to chop up progressive supervisorial districts. He helped organize the South of Market Anti-Displacement Committee and now runs the Safety Network Partnership, a nonprofit that works to fight crime and violence in the city’s neighborhoods. He’s on the committee that monitors the city’s homeless shelters.

Mecke told the Guardian that "it’s hard to find an innovative, non-PR-type initiative out of the Mayor’s Office." He supports community policing, a progressive gross-receipts tax that would exempt small businesses, and a moratorium on market-rate housing until the city can determine how it will build enough affordable units. He complains that there’s no standard of care in Newsom’s homeless shelters. He opposes the privatization of public programs and resources.

Mecke tends a bit to bureaucratspeak; he talked about "horizontal conversations" instead of taking some issues head-on. And we’re concerned that he didn’t seem serious or organized enough to raise the modest amount of money it would have taken to qualify for public financing and mount a more visible campaign. But he’s a solid candidate, and we’re happy to give him the nod.

Ahimsa Porter Sumchai is a remarkable success story, an African American woman who grew up in the housing projects and wound up graduating from UC San Francisco’s medical school. She’s running primarily on the issue of environmental justice for southeast San Francisco — and for years has been one of the loudest voices against the flawed Lennar Corp. redevelopment project at and the reuse plan for the contaminated Hunters Point Shipyard. Sumchai says the shipyard can never be cleaned up to a level that would be safe for housing, and she suggests that much of it should be used for parks and open space and possibly maritime and green-industry uses. She’s highly critical of the low levels of affordable housing in market-rate projects all over the city, arguing that the developers should be forced to provide as many as 25 percent of their units at below-market rates. Sumchai is a physician, and she talks like one; her scientific language and approach sometimes confuse people. She suggested that one of the main causes of the homicide rate in the city is mental illness. "You can medically address people who are violent," she told us, saying the first step is to properly diagnose and treat depression in men. "Just as we looked at AIDS as an epidemic," she said, "we should look at violence as an epidemic." Which is, at the very least, an interesting approach.

Sumchai has some innovative ideas, including a universal child-care program for the city, paid for with a "fat tax" on unhealthy food. She’s a strong supporter of public power and a longtime critic of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

She can be abrasive and temperamental, but she’s talking about critical issues that almost everyone else is ignoring. She deserves support.

Chicken John Rinaldi is the political surprise of the season, an artist and showman who has managed a traveling circus, run a bar in the Mission, put on unusual performances of every kind — and somehow managed to be the only person running for mayor who could qualify for tens of thousands of dollars in public funding. On one level Rinaldi’s campaign is a joke — he told us repeatedly he has no idea what he’s doing, and that if by some wild chance he were elected, he would hire people like Mecke and Sumchai to run the city. He’s the Dada candidate, with his entire run something of a performance art piece.

But Rinaldi has a real constituency. He represents a dying breed in the city: the street artists, the writers, the poets, the unconventional thinkers with economically marginal lifestyles, who were once the heart and soul of San Francisco. It’s hard to pin him down on issues since he seems to disdain any policy talk, but in the end, the very fact that he’s running speaks to the pressure on artists and the lack of support the unconventional side of the art world gets in this increasingly expensive city.

Rinaldi is the protest candidate of all protest candidates, but he’s going to get a lot of votes from people who think San Francisco needs to stop driving some of its most valuable residents out of town — and if that leads to a more serious discussion about artist housing, affordable housing in general, arts funding, and the overall crackdown on fun under Newsom, then it’s worth giving Chicken John a place on the ticket.

There are several other candidates worthy of consideration. Josh Wolf, a video blogger, served 226 days in a federal prison rather than turn over to the authorities tape of a demonstration he was filming. It was a bold and courageous show of principle (anyone who’s ever done time knows that spending even a week, much less month after month, behind bars is no joke), and it speaks to his leadership and character. Wolf is talking about some key issues too: he’s a big supporter of municipal broadband and sees the Web as a place to promote more direct democracy in San Francisco.

Lonnie Holmes, a probation officer, has roots in the African American community and some credible ideas about violent crime. He favors extensive, direct intervention in at-risk communities and would fully fund recreation centers, after-school programs, and antiviolence education in elementary schools. He thinks a network of community resource centers in key neighborhoods could cut the crime rate in half. He’s a little conservative for our taste, but we like his energy, commitment, and ideas.

Harold Hoogasian, a third-generation florist, registered Republican, and small-business activist, is a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative and law-and-order guy who complains that the city budget has skyrocketed while services don’t seem to have improved. Yet somewhat to our surprise, he told us he supports the idea of a moratorium on market-rate housing and a ballot measure that would force developers to build housing more in tune with San Francisco’s real needs (even if he wants to start with ownership housing for cops). He supports public power, wants more sunshine in government, and opposes privatization. He also brings a much-needed critique of the remaining vestiges of machine politics in this one-party town and speaks passionately about the need for outsiders and political independents to have a seat at the table. We’re glad to have him in the race.

In the end, though, our picks in this first ranked-choice vote for San Francisco mayor are Mecke, Sumchai, and Rinaldi — on the issues, as a political statement, and to remind Newsom that his poll numbers don’t reflect the deep sense of distrust and discontent that remains in this city.

District attorney

KAMALA HARRIS


We’re always nervous about unopposed incumbents. And since Kamala Harris unseated Terence Hallinan four years ago, running as an ally of then-mayor Willie Brown with the backing of a corrupt old machine, we’ve been nervous about her.

In some ways she’s been a pleasant surprise. Harris quickly showed that she has courage and integrity when she refused to seek the death penalty for a cop killer despite the fact that the police rank and file and much of the brass excoriated her for it. She remains one of the few district attorneys in the nation who oppose the death penalty in all situations. She’s created a public integrity unit and aggressively filed charges against Sup. Ed Jew. She’s made clear to the Police Department that she won’t accept sloppy police work. She talks constantly about making crime and criminal justice a progressive issue.

But there are plenty of areas in which we remain nervous. Harris hasn’t been anywhere near as aggressive as she could be in prosecuting political corruption. She doesn’t pursue ethics violations or Sunshine Ordinance violations. The San Francisco DA’s Office could be a national leader in rooting out and prosecuting environmental and political crime, but it isn’t.

Meanwhile, the murder rate continues to rise in San Francisco, and Harris and the police are pointing fingers back and forth without actually finding a workable solution.

And lately, Harris, to her tremendous discredit, has been stepping up the prosecution of so-called quality-of-life crimes — which translates into harassing the homeless. She’s made sure there’s a full-time prosecutor in traffic court, pressing charges for things like public urination, sleeping in the park, and holding an open container of beer. That’s a colossal waste of law enforcement resources.

We expect a lot more from Harris in the next four years. But we’ll back her for another term.

Sheriff

MIKE HENNESSEY


Mike Hennessey has been sheriff for so long that it’s hard to imagine anyone else holding the job. And that’s not a bad thing: Hennessey is one of the most progressive law enforcement officers in the country. He’s turned the county jail into a center for drug rehabilitation, counseling, and education (the first charter high school in America for county prisoners is in the SF jail). He’s hired a remarkably diverse group of deputies and has worked to find alternatives to incarceration. He’s openly critical of the rate at which the San Francisco police are arresting people for small-time drug offenses ("We’re arresting too many people for drugs in the city," he told us). He took a courageous stand last year in opposing a draconian and ineffective state ballot initiative that would have kicked convicted sex offenders out of San Francisco and forced them to live in rural counties without access to support, services, or monitoring.

We’ve had some issues with Hennessey. We wanted a smaller new jail than he ultimately decided to build. And we really wish he’d be more outspoken on local law enforcement issues. Hennessey told us he wants to stick to his own turf, but if he were more visible on police reform, criminal justice, and law enforcement, the city would benefit immensely.

Hennessey’s only opponent is David Wong, a deputy sheriff who was unable to make a case for replacing the incumbent. We’re happy to endorse Hennessey for another term — but since this might be his last before retirement, we urge him to take his progressive views and push them onto a larger stage.

What is torture, really?

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Waterboard3-small.jpg
Cambodian waterboarding photo by Johah Black from www.davidcorn.com
By Sara Knight, a Guardian intern
Our own Senator Dianne Feinstein announced today that she supports
Bush’s nominee for Attorney General, Michael “waterboarding may or may not be torture” Mukasey.

Due to his equivocating remarks about waterboarding – an interrogation technique that simulates drowning – Mukasey’s nomination was in danger of being stalled in the Judiciary Committee. Now, with Feinstein and Charles Schumer (D-NY) backing Mukasey’s nomination, a full Senate vote is inevitable and will probably result in confirmation.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, continues to oppose the Mukasey nomination. “No American should need a classified briefing to determine whether waterboarding is torture.”
Tell that to Mukasey, who hemmed and hawed over that question and ultimately refused to say one way or another.

And what is Feinstein’s justification for supporting Mukasey’s nomination? She and Schumer say the Justice Department is in desperate need of effective leadership.

The Justice Department needs many things, but expanding and exonerating the use of torture by our government under the guise of “effective leadership” is absolutely unacceptable.

Romania dreamin’

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Programmers in the film festival, cinematheque, and rep-house exhibition worlds are forever hunting for undiscovered cinematic flavors. They are like truffle-sniffing pigs. No offense intended — after all, truffles are valuable for their rarity. During the past few years, such programmers have witnessed a stunning renaissance of native film activity in Romania, which has no business being so exciting onscreen because (a) it’s Romania, for god’s sake, still hobbling out of Nicolae Ceausescu’s 20th-century dark ages, and (b) it only produces six features per year. They can’t all be good, can they?

Oh yes, they can. Romanian movies are sweeping international prizes and have even scored a couple of theatrical releases in a US art-house market resistant to intelligent, complex, starless films in a foreign tongue. Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days reaches US theaters next year, and Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’ is likely to follow.

You can catch California Dreamin’ now in the Pacific Film Archive’s "Revolutions in Romanian Cinema" series. The process of severance from the Ceausescu dictatorship — Communist Eastern Europe’s most paranoiac and corrupt — is, naturally, a frequent subject. Catalin Mitulescu’s warmly observed The Way I Spent the End of the World (2006) views the regime’s final chapter in 1989 from a teenage girl’s perspective. Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue (2006) is a gritty you-are-there reenactment of the street chaos and random shootings that occurred on the night of the government’s overthrow. Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08: East of Bucharest (2006) ingeniously reexamines the same events as antiheroic satire, with the contradictory recollections of a TV call-in show’s guests making hash of the revolution’s already mythologized story. Another fascinating flashback, Alexandru Solomon’s The Great Communist Bank Robbery (2004), provides documentary scrutiny of an infamous crime in a nation where folks were too terrified to rob anyone, let alone the all-powerful government, suggesting that the case was quite likely a frame-up designed to rid the party of its high-ranking Jewish members.

Other films look beyond Ceausescu to the more recent past and still-problematic present. Cristi Puiu’s acclaimed The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) is like Sicko as directed by Aki Kaurismäki, a deepest-black comedy whose hapless elderly protagonist complains of chest pains — though it’s his endless, Kafkaesque odyssey through a broken-down public health system that kills him. California Dreamin’, subtitled Endless because it will never truly be finished (its 27-year-old writer-director died in a car crash before completing the final edit), is nonetheless a marvelously accomplished, sprawling, affectionate, barbed canvas. Set in 1999, it finds a top-priority NATO mission commanded by gung ho veteran jarhead Cpt. Jones (Armand Assante) waylaid by provincial officials who stubbornly demand paperwork, even if the bureaucratic logjam creates an international incident. Forced to cool heels, the visiting soldiers enjoy free-flowing local booze and celebrations in their honor. This cross-cultural tragicomedy might have been shorter had Nemescu lived to complete postproduction. As is, it’s close to perfection.

These new Romanian films are special for their attentiveness to individual characters and larger social scales, for their balance of rueful humor and genuine sympathy, and for the unpredictable yet organic intricacy of their narrative courses. Technically, they’re all highly polished, without a whiff of the stylistically self-indulgent territorial pissing typical of young filmmakers. The new Romanian cinema isn’t personal in the familiar auteurist sense. It’s populist — a term not to be confused with stupid in this case — storytelling, accessible to anyone willing to brave the Balkan barrier of subtitles. *

REVOLUTIONS IN ROMANIAN CINEMA

Nov. 3–Dec. 9, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

A shot from the Sahel

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Many moons ago, when I moved as a child to Africa, my mother, my sister, and I resided in the Sahel. To be precise: we lived in Bamako, the vibrant capital city of Mali — not to be confused with the medieval empire of the same name. To reside there as a Western black was strange; our Americanness placed us in the novel position of being regarded as de facto aristos, somewhere between such elevated classes as wealthy, regal descendents of the Keita clan and the dispossessed, which included Imazighen exiles. To see beautiful but abject so-called Tuareg women and girls begging in the dusty streets of Bamako from the windows of our funereal Lincoln Town Car — the incongruity of them huddled at roadsides and traffic stops in their indigo or floral clothes, their grace surpassed only by the Wolof women to the northwest in Senegal — was a mind-blowing experience that has stayed with me in the decades since.

The complexities of centuries of intraracial warfare and political mayhem derived from poisonous North African colonial legacies were largely beyond my eight-year-old mind’s grasp. As Madame l’Ambassadeur, my late mother was the one to travel up-country and beyond, nearer the heart of the Sahara, and she worked tirelessly to have any impact on the volatile situation in the country. I was restricted by the quotidian business of school and play, but my far-roving mind began a lifelong romance with Mali’s two most fabled folk of the Western Sudan, the Dogon and the Imazighen. The star-walking Dogon were remote and mysterious at the Bandiagara escarpment, but the grave injustices being done to the proud, rebel Imazighen were plain to see in Bamako rush-hour traffic.

When I listen to the music of Africa’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, Tinariwen (translated from Tamasheq, "the deserts"), from L’Adrar des Iforas, this baggage comes with me, weighted with shame at not following in the career footsteps of my selfless Africanist mother and fear that people of the West will never truly comprehend the vital importance of the many Africas to their own humanity. With or without Tinariwen’s great Amassakoul and current Aman Iman (both World Village; 2004, 2007) on my iPod as I ride the Manhattan subway, when I see disenfranchised people begging down the aisle I am always jolted back to the visceral yet illusory sensation of extending my thin, childish arm through the steel of the Lincoln to help a reddish-brown-skinned Amazigh girl in elegant rags, no different than me in that she was the child of parents who wanted to be free.

Whereas my parents’ generation of young black revolutionaries sought to forge strong pan-Africanist links all the way from DC to Dar es Salaam, and their cult-nat elements experimented in folk, soul, rock, and funk genres to express the hopes and fears of the 1960s era of deliverance from Jim Crow, there in Bamako, as a child at the turn of the ’80s, I was witnessing at a remove the rise of radical culture spawned by Kel Tamasheq ishumaren (unemployed) forced to abandon traditional nomadic ways by poverty and drought. These black folks’ rebel music, tishoumaren, has found its apotheosis in Tinariwen since the group first emerged from a Libyan military camp in 1985, moving from guns to guitars in the process of wresting messages of uplift from chaos. They weave a sound web linking traditional instrumentation (like the tehardant, or lute), Maghrebi music (think Nass el Ghiwane), James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, and even rap ("Arawan" on Amassakoul) — superbad, indeed.

The droning, hallucinatory blues of the Blue Men of the Ténéré may have increasingly wowed exogamous audiences since the acclaim Tinariwen’s Kel Tamasheq musicians received from jamming with Robert Plant at the 2003 Festival in the Desert, but there lies a deep source of crisis beneath the band’s international success. Recorded in Bamako, Aman Iman‘s "Soixante Trois" captures guitarist-singer Ibrahim ag Alhabib recalling the brutally suppressed 1963 Imazighen rebellion against the government of newly independent Mali. Tinariwen’s spare sound brings great joy on purely aesthetic grounds, the masterful harnessing of rolling electricity and overlapping ululation indelibly making a mark on the diasporic continuum stretching from Mali’s Ali Farka Touré to Mississippi’s Otha Turner and back again.

Yet it must never be forgotten that the mysteries of Al Baraka, the hardships of desert life and the hardcore realities of war, inform these songs, and such has been the lot of the aboriginal peoples of Tamazgha from the time of Roman and Islamic imperial incursions onto the North African sands up through current attempts to further disenfranchise the Imazighen in order to appropriate their oil-rich ancestral lands. Aman Iman‘s very title — meaning "water is life" — refers not merely to the primal law of the desert but also to the very real, enduring crisis afflicting the region’s ecology and society. As you rightly enjoy Tinariwen on tour, please remember and act on the fact that for the headliners, the fight continues on every front. *

TINARIWEN

Sun/4, 7 p.m., $20–$55

Palace of Fine Arts theatre

3301 Lyon, SF

1-866-920-JAZZ

www.sfjazz.org

Transit or traffic

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Click here for the Clean Slate: Our printout guide to the Nov. 6 election

› steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco is at a crossroads. The streets are congested, Muni has slowed to a crawl, greenhouse gas emissions are at all-time highs, and the towers of new housing now being built threaten to make all of these transportation-related problems worse.

The problems are complicated and defy simply sloganeering — but they aren’t unsolvable. In fact, there’s remarkable consensus in San Francisco about what needs to be done. The people with advanced degrees in transportation and city planning, the mayor and almost all of the supervisors, the labor and environmental movements, the urban planning organizations, the radical left and the mainstream Democrats — everyone without an ideological aversion to government is on the same page here.

The city planners and transportation experts, who have the full support of the grass roots on this issue, are pushing a wide range of solutions: administrative and technical changes to make Muni more efficient, innovative congestion management programs, high-tech meters that use market principles to free up needed parking spaces, creative incentives to discourage solo car trips, capital projects from new bike and rapid-transit lanes to the Central Subway and high-speed rail, and many more ideas.

In fact, the coming year promises a plethora of fresh transportation initiatives. The long-awaited Transit Effectiveness Project recommendations come out in early 2008, followed by those from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority’s Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (an unprecedented, federally funded effort to reduce congestion here and in four other big cities), an end to the court injunction against new bicycle projects, and a November bond measure that would fund high-speed rail service between downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles.

But first, San Franciscans have to get past a few downtown developers and power brokers who have a simplistic, populist-sounding campaign that could totally undermine smart transportation planning.

On Nov. 6, San Franciscans will vote on propositions A and H, two competing transportation measures that could greatly help or hinder the quest for smart solutions to the current problems. Prop. A would give more money and authority to the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency while demanding it improve Muni and meet climate change goals.

Prop. H, which was placed on the ballot by a few powerful Republicans, most notably Gap founder Don Fisher (who has contributed $180,000 to the Yes on H campaign), would invalidate current city policies to allow essentially unrestricted construction of new parking lots.

New parking turns into more cars, more cars create congestion, congestion slows down bus service, slow buses frustrate riders, who get back into their cars — and the cycle continues. It’s transit against traffic, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

"If we are serious about doing something about global warming, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: people are going to have to drive less and take transit more" was how the issue was framed in a recent editorial cowritten by Sup. Sean Elsbernd, arguably the board’s most conservative member, and Sup. Aaron Peskin, who wrote Prop. A.

Peskin says Prop. H, which Prop. A would invalidate, is the most damaging and regressive initiative he’s seen in his political life. But the battle for hearts and minds won’t be easy, because the downtown forces are taking a viscerally popular approach and running against city hall.

The San Francisco Examiner endorsed Prop. H on Oct. 22, framing the conflict as between the common sense of "your friends and neighbors" and "a social-engineering philosophy driven by an anti-car and anti-business Board of Supervisors." If the Examiner editorialists were being honest, they probably also should have mentioned Mayor Gavin Newsom, who joins the board majority (and every local environmental and urban-planning group) in supporting Prop. A and opposing Prop. H.

The editorial excoriates "most city politicians and planners" for believing the numerous studies that conclude that people who have their own parking spots are more likely to drive and that more parking generally creates more traffic. The Planning Department, for example, estimates Prop. H "could lead to an increase over the next 20 years of up to approximately 8,200–19,000 additional commute cars (mostly at peak hours) over the baseline existing controls."

"Many, many actual residents disagree, believing that — no matter what the social engineers at City Hall tell you — adding more parking spaces would make The City a far more livable place," the Examiner wrote.

That’s why environmentalists and smart-growth advocates say Prop. H is so insidious. It was written to appeal, in a very simplistic way, to people’s real and understandable frustration over finding a parking spot. But the solution it proffers would make all forms of transportation — driving, walking, transit, and bicycling — remarkably less efficient, as even the Examiner has recognized.

You see, the Examiner was opposed to Prop. H just a couple of months ago, a position the paper recently reversed without really explaining why, except to justify it with reactionary rhetoric such as "Let the politicians know you’re tired of being told you’re a second-class citizen if you drive a car in San Francisco."

Examiner executive editor Jim Pimentel denies the flip-flop was a favor that the Republican billionaire who owns the Examiner, Phil Anschutz, paid to the Republican billionaire who is funding Prop. H, Fisher. "We reserve the right to change on positions," Pimentel told me.

Yet it’s worth considering what the Examiner originally wrote in an Aug. 2 editorial, where it acknowledged people’s desire for more parking but took into account what the measure would do to downtown San Francisco.

The paper wrote, "Closer examination reveals this well-intentioned parking measure as a veritable minefield of unintended consequences. It could actually take away parking, harm business, reduce new housing and drive out neighborhood retail. By now, Californians should be wary of unexpected mischief unleashed from propositions that legislate by direct referendum. Like all propositions, Parking For Neighborhoods was entirely written by its backers. As such, it was never vetted by public feedback or legislative debate. If the initiative organizers had faced harder questioning, they might have recognized that merely adding parking to a fast-growing downtown is likely to make already-bad traffic congestion dramatically worse."

The San Francisco Transportation Authority’s Oct. 17 public workshop, which launched the San Francisco Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study, had nothing to do with Props. A and H — at least not directly. But the sobering situation the workshop laid out certainly supports the assessment that drawing more cars downtown "is likely to make already-bad traffic congestion dramatically worse."

City planners and consultants from PBS&J offered some statistics from their initial studies:

•San Francisco has the second-most congested downtown in the country, according to traffic analysts and surveys of locals and tourists, about 90 percent of whom say the congestion is unacceptably bad compared to that of other cities.

•Traffic congestion cost the San Francisco economy $2.3 billion in 2005 through slowed commerce, commuter delays, wasted fuel, and environmental impacts.

•The length of car trips is roughly doubled by traffic congestion — and getting longer every year — exacerbating the fact that 47 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions come from private cars. Census data also show that more San Franciscans get to work by driving alone in their cars than by any other mode.

•Traffic has also steadily slowed Muni, which often shares space with cars, to an average of 8 mph, making it the slowest transit service in the country. Buses now take about twice as long as cars to make the same trip, which discourages their use.

"We want to figure out ways to get people in a more efficient mode of transportation," Zabe Bent, a senior planner with the TA, told the crowd. She added, "We want to make sure congestion is not hindering our growth."

The group is now studying the problem and plans to reveal its preliminary results next spring and recommendations by summer 2008. Among the many tools being contemplated are fees for driving downtown or into other congested parts of the city (similar to programs in London, Rome, and Stockholm, Sweden) and high-tech tools for managing parking (such as the determination of variable rates based on real-time demand, more efficient direction to available spots, and easy ways to feed the meter remotely).

"As a way to manage the scarce resource of parking, we would use pricing as a tool," said Tilly Chang, also a senior planner with the TA, noting that high prices can encourage more turnover at times when demand is high.

Yet there was a visceral backlash at the workshop to such scientifically based plans, which conservatives deride as social engineering. "I don’t understand why we need to spend so much money creating a bureaucracy," one scowling attendee around retirement age said. There were some murmurs of support in the crowd.

Rob Black, the government affairs director for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which is the most significant entity to oppose Prop. A and support Prop. H, was quietly watching the proceedings. I asked what he and the chamber thought of the study and its goals.

"We have mixed feelings, and we don’t know what’s going to happen," Black, who ran unsuccessfully against Sup. Chris Daly last year, told me. "The devil is in the details."

But others don’t even want to wait for the details. Alex Belenson, an advertising consultant and Richmond District resident who primarily uses his car to get around town, chastised the planners for overcomplicating what he sees as a "simple" problem.

Vocally and in a four-page memo he handed out, Belenson blamed congestion on the lack of parking spaces, the city’s transit-first policy, and the failure to build more freeways in the city. Strangely, he supports his point with facts that include "Total commuters into, out of, and within San Francisco have only increased by 206,000 since 1960 — more than 145,000 on public transit."

Some might see those figures, derived from census data, as supporting the need for creative congestion management solutions and the expansion of transit and other alternative transportation options. But Belenson simply sees the need for 60,000 new parking spaces.

As he told the gathering, "If someone wants to build a parking lot and the market will support it, they should be able to."

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) is generally allied with the downtown business community on most issues, but not Props. A and H, which SPUR says could be unmitigated disasters for San Francisco.

"SPUR is a pro-growth organization, and we want a healthy economy. And we think the only way to be pro-business and pro-growth in San Francisco is to be transit reliant instead of car reliant," SPUR executive director Gabriel Metcalf told me in an interview in his downtown office.

He agreed with Belenson that the free market will provide lots of new parking if it’s allowed to do so, particularly because the regulatory restrictions on parking have artificially inflated its value. "But the negative externalities are very large," Metcalf said, employing the language of market economics.

In other words, the costs of all of that new parking won’t be borne just by the developers and the drivers but by all of the people affected by climate change, air pollution, congested commerce, oil wars, slow public transit, and the myriad other hidden by-products of the car culture that we are just now starting to understand fully.

Yet Metcalf doesn’t focus on that broad critique as much as on the simple reality that SPUR knows all too well: downtown San Francisco was designed for transit, not cars, to be the primary mode of transportation.

"Downtown San Francisco is one of the great planning success stories in America," Metcalf said. "But trips to downtown San Francisco can’t use mostly single-occupant vehicles. We could never have had this level of employment or real estate values if we had relied on car-oriented modes for downtown."

Metcalf and other local urban planners tell stories of how San Francisco long ago broke with the country’s dominant post–World War II development patterns, starting with citizen revolts against freeway plans in the 1950s and picking up stream with the environmental and social justice movements of the 1960s, the arrival of BART downtown in 1973, the official declaration of a transit-first policy in the ’80s, and the votes to dismantle the Central and Embarcadero freeways.

"We really led the way for how a modern dynamic city can grow in a way that is sustainable. And that decision has served us well for 30 years," Metcalf said.

Tom Radulovich, a longtime BART board member who serves as director of the nonprofit group Livable City, said San Franciscans now must choose whether they want to plan for growth like Copenhagen, Denmark, Paris, and Portland, Ore., or go with auto-dependent models, like Houston, Atlanta, and San Jose.

"Do we want transit or traffic? That’s really the choice. We have made progress as a city over the last 30 years, particularly with regard to how downtown develops," Radulovich said. "Can downtown and the neighborhoods coexist? Yes, but we need to grow jobs in ways that don’t increase traffic."

City officials acknowledge that some new parking may be needed.

"There may be places where it’s OK to add parking in San Francisco, but we have to be smart about it. We have to make sure it’s in places where it doesn’t create a breakdown in the system. We have to make sure it’s priced correctly, and we have to make sure it doesn’t destroy Muni’s ability to operate," Metcalf said. "The problem with Prop. H is it essentially decontrols parking everywhere. It prevents a smart approach to parking."

Yet the difficulty right now is in conveying such complexities against the "bureaucracy bad" argument against Prop. A and the "parking good" argument for Prop. H.

"We are trying to make complex arguments, and our opponents are making simple arguments, which makes it hard for us to win in a sound-bite culture," Radulovich said.

"Prop. H preys on people’s experience of trying to find a parking space," Metcalf said. "The problem is cities are complex, and this measure completely misunderstands what it takes to be a successful city."

When MTA director Nathaniel Ford arrived in San Francisco from Atlanta two years ago, he said, "it was clear as soon as I walked in the door that there was an underinvestment in the public transit system."

Prop. A would help that by directing more city funds to the MTA, starting with about $26 million per year. "I don’t want to say the situation is dire, but it’s certainly not going to get better without some infusion of cash to get us over the hump," Ford told the Guardian recently from his office above the intersection of Market and Van Ness.

The proposed extra money would barely get this long-underfunded agency up to modern standards, such as the use of a computer routing system. "We actually have circuit boards with a guy in a room with a soldering iron keeping it all together," Ford said with an incredulous smile.

The other thing that struck Ford when he arrived was the cumbersomeness of the MTA’s bureaucracy, from stifling union work rules to Byzantine processes for seemingly simple actions like accepting a grant, which requires action by the Board of Supervisors.

"Coming from an independent authority, I realized there were a lot more steps and procedures to getting anything done [at the MTA]," he said. "Some of the things in Prop. A relax those steps and procedures."

If it passes, Ford would be able to set work rules to maximize the efficiency of his employees, update the outdated transit infrastructure, set fees and fines to encourage the right mix of transportation modes, and issue bonds for new capital projects when the system reaches its limits. These are all things the urban planners say have to happen. "It should be easy to provide great urban transit," Metcalf said. "We’re not Tracy. We’re not Fremont. We’re San Francisco, and we should be able to do this."

Unfortunately, there are political barriers to such a reasonable approach to improving public transit. And the biggest hurdles for those who want better transit are getting Prop. A approved and defeating Prop. H.

"It’s clear to people who have worked on environmental issues that this is a monumental election," said Leah Shahum, director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and an MTA board member. "San Francisco will choose one road or the other in terms of how our transportation system affects the environment. It will really be transit or traffic."

Shahum said the combination of denying the MTA the ability to improve transit and giving out huge new parking entitlements "will start a downward spiral for our transit system that nobody benefits from."

"We are already the slowest-operating system in the country," Ford said, later adding, "More cars on the streets of San Francisco will definitely have a negative impact on Muni."

But even those who believe in putting transit first know cars will still be a big part of the transportation mix.

"All of it needs to be properly managed. There are people who need to drive cars for legitimate reasons," Ford said. "If you do need to drive, you need to know there are costs to that driving. There is congestion. There are quality impacts, climate change, and it hurts transit."

"There are parking needs out there, and the city is starting to think of it in a more responsive way. We don’t need this to create more parking," Shahum said. "If folks can hold out and beat down this initiative, I do think we’re headed in the right direction."

Yet the Yes on A–No on H campaign is worried. Early polling showed a close race on Prop. A and a solid lead for Prop. H.

Fisher and the groups that are pushing Prop. H — the Council of District Merchants, the SF Chamber of Commerce, and the San Francisco Republican Party — chose what they knew would be a low-turnout election and are hoping that drivers’ desires for more parking will beat out more complicated arguments.

"The vast majority of San Franciscans call themselves environmentalists, and they want a better transit system," Shahum said, noting that such positions should cause them to support Prop. A and reject Prop. H. "But they’re at risk of being tricked by a Republican billionaire’s initiative with an attractive name…. Even folks that are well educated and paying attention could be tricked by this."

For Metcalf and the folks at SPUR, who helped write Prop. A, this election wasn’t supposed to be an epic battle between smart growth and car culture.

"For us, in a way, Prop. A is the more important measure," Metcalf said. "We want to focus on making Muni better instead of fighting about parking. We didn’t plan it this way, but the way it worked out, San Francisco is at a fork in the road. We can reinforce our transit-oriented urbanity or we can create a mainly car-dependent city that will look more like the rest of America."

Money and politics

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› sarah@sfbg.com

The upcoming election hasn’t generated much voter interest, with only a couple of measures that seem likely to have an impact. But corporate interests in San Francisco and beyond are still spending big money — in ways that are secretive, suspicious, and sometimes contradictory — to influence the election and win the gratitude of elected officials.

Although the final preelection campaign statements were due Oct. 25, the money continues to roll in. And perhaps most ominously, many campaign committees are spending far more than they are taking in, effectively using this accrued debt to hide contributors until after the election.

And almost invariably, the person at the center of such schemes — who facilitates the most creative and unsettling spending by downtown political interests — is notorious campaign finance attorney Jim Sutton, who also serves as Mayor Gavin Newsom’s treasurer (and didn’t return our calls for comment by press time).

Political donations are supposed to be transparent and reflect popular support for some campaign. But once again, this election is showing the disproportionate influence that corporations have on local politics and the difficulties faced in trying to accurately trace that influence.

There are "No on K" billboards all over San Francisco, showing a giant image of a man’s empty pocket alongside the dubious claim that "Proposition K will cut $20 million from Muni." The signs were created and funded by Clear Channel Outdoor.

Prop. K is an advisory measure that the Board of Supervisors placed on the ballot this fall to ask whether voters want to restrict advertising on public spaces like bus stops. But it was aimed at Clear Channel Outdoor’s contract to maintain 1,100 city bus shelters and sell advertising on them, which was approved by the Board of Supervisors on Oct. 23. In exchange, the CCO agreed to pay the Metropolitan Transportation Authority $5 million annually, plus 45 percent of its annual revenues from shelter ad revenues.

Nonetheless, the measure would put city voters on record as opposing the CCO’s basic business model, so the company fought back. The "No on K — Citizens to Protect Muni Services" filing suggests that there is no citizen involvement in the No on K campaign. So far, No on K has only received donations from Clear Channel Outdoor, including $120,000 in cash and $55,750 in in-kind contributions of radio time and ad space.

Maybe Clear Channel really is trying to help Muni get more money, rather than pad its own profits. After all, its parent corporation, Clear Channel International, donated $20,000 to support Muni reform measure Proposition A — authored by Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin — on Oct. 15, just days before Clear Channel Outdoor won its big bus transit deal with the city.

Yet following the corporate money even further makes it clear that altruism isn’t what motivates corporate spending. No on K also benefited from independent expenditures by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce 21st Century Committee, a general-purpose committee created in 1999, which received major funding this year from the Gap ($10,000), Pacific Gas and Electric Co. ($7,500), Bechtel ($5,000), Catholic Healthcare West ($5,000), and Clear Channel Outdoor ($1,000).

The 21st Century Committee also spent $716 for newspaper ads opposing Prop. A, which would net the MTA at least $26 million per year from the city’s General Fund. Sutton — a former chair of the California Republican Party — and his associates effectively control the 21st Century Committee, which is also helping Newsom, his top client, avoid facing the Board of Supervisors in public. The committee has made independent expenditures opposing Proposition E, a charter amendment that would require the mayor to make monthly appearances before the board, something voters approved last year as an advisory measure. According to Newsom spokesperson Nathan Ballard, defeating that measure is the mayor’s top priority this election.

"I think he’s focused on his own race and also Question Time. There’s where he’s spending his resources," Ballard said when asked why Newsom isn’t campaigning or fundraising for the Yes on A and No on H campaigns, even though he supports those positions.

The 21st Century Committee has also made independent expenditures in support of Proposition C (which would require public hearings for measures that the board or the mayor places on the ballot), Proposition H (see "Transit or Traffic," page 18), Proposition I (which would establish an Office of Small Business), and Proposition J (Newsom’s wireless Internet advisory measure).

Each of these ballot measures has a committee dedicated to raising funds, but as of Oct. 25, only the Small Business Campaign (Yes on C) appeared to have no outstanding debts, or accrued funds, as they are called in campaign finance circles. Maybe that’s because the Small Business Campaign got $10,000 from the 21st Century Committee, $5,000 from PG&E, $2,500 from AT&T, $8,500 from the SF Small Business Advocates, and $1,000 from the Building Owners and Manufacturers Association of San Francisco’s political action committee.

Yes on C also got a $7,500 contribution from the Committee on Jobs Government Reform Fund, which has ties to Clear Channel, the MTA, and efforts to influence local transportation policy. Records show that on Nov. 4, 2005 — just before the election — the Committee on Jobs Government Reform Fund reported a $6,900 "loan" for radio airtime and production costs from Clear Channel to help defeat a measure that would have split the MTA appointments between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors.

Fast-forward to Oct. 3 of this year, when the Committee on Jobs, which reported its "loan" as accrued funds for almost two years, reported that this debt has now been forgiven. Which is odd, given that, as of Oct. 25, the Committee on Jobs had a cash balance of $778,000 — and had just received $35,000 from financier and Committee on Jobs board member Warren Hellman, $35,000 from AT&T, and $50,000 from the Charles Schwab Corp.

Equally interesting is the fact that the day after the Oct. 25 preelection filing deadline, the Committee on Jobs gave $25,000 to the Sutton-controlled No on E: Let’s Really Work Together Coalition. Such large late contributions require a notice to Ethics that can often escape notice by the media and voters.

The donation perhaps went to help balance the committee’s books; despite receiving $85,084 in monetary contributions, including $10,000 from attorney Joe Cotchett and society maven Dede Wilsey, No on E spent $110,244 before Oct. 25, leaving it with $26,610 in accrued debt.

No on E isn’t the only Sutton-controlled committee whose spending has outpaced donations received: as of Oct. 25 the Yes on H–No on A pro-parking committee and Newsom’s WiFi for All, Yes on J committee, not to mention the Gavin Newsom for Mayor campaign, were all registering large amounts of accrued debt.

Having these debts isn’t illegal. And it’s not unusual for a campaign to have a pile of unpaid bills at the time of its last preelection finance filing. But as Ethics Commission director John St. Croix told the Guardian, accrued funds "shouldn’t be used to hide who your contributors are. The idea of disclosure is to let voters know ahead of elections who is trying to influence their vote."

St. Croix points to the fact that committees are required to make reports every 24 hours in the 16 days before an election "so you know what they are spending on…. But if committees don’t report campaign contributions and people fundraise after the election, that could be a de facto way to hide who the contributors are."

And while Sutton has been characterized by many, including the Guardian (see "The Political Puppeteer," 2/2/04), as the dark prince of campaign finance, St. Croix says he doesn’t automatically suspect something is wrong just because a campaign has a lot of accrued debt.

"But if people suspect that to be the case and they file a complaint, Ethics investigates," St. Croix said, adding that for him, "really massive accrued funds would be a red flag."

Asked what he meant by massive, St. Croix said, "It depends on the office. You might expect a lot more to accrue in a mayor’s race or large campaigns that tend to do a lot of last-minute spending."

As of Oct. 25, Gavin Newsom for Mayor had received $1.1 million and spent $1.3 million, had a cash balance of $457,994 — and was reporting $97,548 in accrued debt, with $46,500 owed to Storefront Political Media, the company run by Newsom’s campaign manager, Eric Jaye.

Noting that Ethics’ job is "to get people to file on time and chase after those who don’t," St. Croix said that those who don’t file and are making major expenditures right before an election are the ones who will face the biggest fines. "They could face $5,000 per violation, which could be $5,000 for every contribution that was made to finance a smear campaign and wasn’t reported," he said.

The biggest fine the Ethics Commission has ever issued was $100,000 for Sutton’s failure to report until after the 2002 election a late $800,000 contribution from PG&E to help defeat a public power measure.

Compared to other years, the amounts of accrued debt in this election may look small, but former Ethics commissioner Joe Lynn points to a disturbing pattern in which Sutton-controlled committees were insolvent before the election, then raised funds later or, as in the case of the Committee on Jobs, magically saw their debts forgiven.

"If I am a candidate running for mayor, like Gavin Newsom, and I personally rake up $100,000 in debt and have a big financial statement, then that means there’s a creditor willing to advance me those funds," Lynn said. "But if the debt has been raked up by a ballot measure committee, then who is responsible? Why would vendors spend $10,000 for that committee unless they knew that debt was wired from the get-go?"

But the result is the same: voters don’t know who donated to the campaign until after the votes have been cast. A clear historical example of this debt scheme can be seen in the June 2006 No on D Laguna Honda campaign. In its last preelection report, No on D had $59,750 in contributions, $18,664 in expenditures — and $130,224 in debt.

But during the 16 days before the election, No on D suddenly got $110,000 in late contributions from the usual suspects downtown, including $2,500 from Hellman, $15,000 from Turner Construction, $10,000 from Wilsey, $2,000 from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and $2,500 from the Building Owners and Manufacturers Association of San Francisco.

As Lynn explains, campaign finance laws only require disclosure of contributions, not expenditures, made in the 16 days before an election — and only $64,000 worth of the contributions used to pay off No on D’s accrued expenses were disclosed, with $10,000 each from the California Pacific Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente trickling in on or after Election Day.

This year campaign finance watchdogs like Lynn note that the Sutton-controlled Yes on H–No on A committee has been hiding its contributors. In its first preelection report, filed Sept. 22, Yes on H showed $113,750 in contributions, $111,376.18 in expenditures, and $69,806.98 in accrued debt.

A month later it has doubled its contributions, tripled its expenditures — and had increased its accrued debt to $77,509. Lynn predicts that Yes on H’s accrued debt will be paid down by late contributions after the election or forgiven later on.

"The solution to the debt scheme is twofold," Lynn said. "Prosecute people doing the scheme and pass a law prohibiting campaigns from making more expenditures than they have contributions. Technically there is nothing illegal about reporting more debt that you have the cash or contributions to pay, but no businessperson regularly offers services in situations where it isn’t clear that they will be paid."

Since the Oct. 25 filing deadline, late contributions have continued to pour into No on E big-time, for a total of $59,500. That includes $25,000 from the Committee on Jobs, $2,500 from Jonathan Holzman, $6,000 from Elaine Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis, $1,000 from Chris Giouzelis, $1,000 from Nick Kontos, $1,000 from Farrah Makras, $1,000 from Victor Makras, $1,000 from Makras Real Estate, $5,000 from John Pakrais, $1,000 from Mike Silva, $1,000 from Western Apartments, $5,000 from Maurice Kanbar, and $5,000 from the San Francisco Apartment Association PAC.

The Yes on A committee hasn’t used the accrued debt scheme, but it has been the second-largest recipient of late contributions. It received $57,000 in late contributions, with donations from Engeo ($1,000), Singer Associates ($2,500), Trinity Management Services ($10,000), Elysian Hotels and Resorts ($5,000), Luxor Cabs ($1,000), Marriott International ($15,000), the SF Police Officers Association ($2,000), Sprinkler Fitters and Apprentices ($1,500), Barbary Coast Consulting ($2,500), and SEIU International ($3,397.14).

No on H (Neighbors Against Traffic and Pollution) received $4,500 in late contributions, with donations from Norcal Carpenters, Alice and William Russell-Shapiro, and Amandeep Jawa. And in what looks like a classic case of hedging bets, Singer Associates has made a $2,500 late contribution to both Yes on H and No on H.

Steven Mele, who is treasurer for Yes on A and No on H, told the Guardian, "There’s some people that time their contributions, but their names are out there, reported on public sites. A lot of corporate money comes in prior to the last deadline, then some afterwards. If campaigns are running with a lot of accrued debt, then those people must have an idea of what money is going to come in."

Unlike the campaigns controlled by the Sutton Law Firm, Mele’s committees, which work with Stearns Consulting, are not carrying massive loads of unpaid debt. Yes on A had received $302,452 and spent $279,890 and had $17,749 in debt as of Oct. 25. No on H had received $134,458 and spent $124,088 and had no debt as of Oct. 25.
Mele also believes that while campaign finance rules were written to make the money trail more transparent, "They’ve resulted in the public being inundated with so much information that they tend to glaze over."

King of the dance

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet celebrates its 25th anniversary this weekend, but King’s influence on Bay Area dance goes back further than that. Veteran dancers remember his ballet classes for the musical combinations that he gave his students in the ’70s. One of them was Joanna Haigood, artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre, who said, "Alonzo was a spirit master who happened to be a dancer." While she loved the challenge of the technique, she was really in his class because "he taught us to live the dance."

Not only local performers knew about King’s poetic approach to ballet. Big stars like Fernando Bujones and Natalia Makarova never missed an opportunity to work with him when they were in town. But eventually, King needed to have his own company. These days, in addition to periodic guest artist Muriel Maffre, Lines Ballet performs with nine dancers. This year it toured from France to Poland, from Austria to Greece, in addition to performing in stateside engagements and two home seasons.

King also founded the SF Dance Center, initially to support his company financially; the now-independent center offers classes for adults in a variety of styles. He then created Lines Ballet School, which teaches according to his principles. Last year, in conjunction with Dominican University, King established a BA program that allows dancers to simultaneously pursue professional and academic studies. In other words, in addition to choreographing 74 works, King has created an institution. "I know now that we have grown so much it will be more difficult to balance humanity and creativity with effective business practices," he said in a recent phone interview. "But if I have my choice, I will go with the humanity."

Aside from his choreography, King’s greatest contribution might turn out to be his challenging of preconceptions about dance, specifically ballet. To question the status quo is perhaps the birthright of this son and grandson of prominent civil rights leaders in Albany, Ga. King grew up participating in civil rights marches. His mother introduced him to dance, while his father, a follower of 19th-century sage Ramakrishna, taught him about meditation.

For King, dance is the appropriate medium for exploring a universe that he perceives to be in flux, where opposites don’t stand against but hold one another in balance. Ballet for him is not a style but a language — one that, he says, would have to be invented if it didn’t exist already. Ballet is abstraction; ballet is science; ballet is geometry. After all, a pirouette is a perfect circle, a tendu (stretched foot) a line that reaches into infinity. To King, ballet is a tool to investigate creativity, which, he insists, is everyone’s birthright. Does he think everyone can become an artist?

"No, that’s not what I mean," he explained. "But just like we all have a brain, we all have creativity. We either tap into it or we don’t. For most people, when they are educated as children it is stripped away from them because they are trained to give the answer which the teacher wants, when there are multifarious choices that could be selected. The government doesn’t really encourage it, because if you give people the ability to ascertain thought, to really deconstruct ideas, that’s dangerous because no longer can they be sheep, but at that point they are discerning lions. And when you have 300 million discerning lions, [you’ve] got a problem."

King’s ballets are nonhierarchical — no predetermined gender roles, no fixed vocabulary — and what looks like balletic distortion is simply an emphasis on a constantly shifting center of gravity instead of a stable focus on the body’s vertical axis. Women can be strong, men tender. Early in his career he paired a tall woman with a much shorter man. It looked odd. Why, King asked, do we always see male-female duets in terms of gender relationships? Couldn’t a dance be about a mother and a child or a sky and a landscape?

He does follow one convention — putting women on pointe — though he noted that this doesn’t have to be a female prerogative. "If you look at most cultures, you see an appreciation of the idea of being elevated, of being above the earth. In Africa dancers use stilts. In Balkan countries men do dance on their toes." He often took barre on pointe, and during his training at Harkness House men took pointe class once a week. If enough training becomes available, one of these days King just might put men into pointe shoes.

For his anniversary premieres, King has choreographed two works, one to a new score by tabla master Zakir Hussein, the other to selections from baroque composers. The connection? Both types of music, to be performed live, allow for improvisation. According to the enthusiastic King, "That’s when the artists can go deep inside themselves and become fully who they are." *

ALONZO KING’S LINES BALLET

Fri/2, 9 p.m.; Sat/3 and Nov. 7–10, 8 p.m.; Sun/4, 7 p.m.; Nov. 11, 3 p.m.; $25–$65

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts theater

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Marginalia

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>paulr@sfbg.com

When the obituary of the Republican Party is written, it will be noted that the GOP died of war wounds, many but not all of them taken during the kamikaze mission in Iraq. For over the past half century, it has gone from being the party of cautious, America-first realism to one of reflexive belligerence; its embrace of militarism has been passionate and, perhaps, fatal. Over the same half century, meanwhile, the world’s great powers, except us, seem to have come to a gingerly understanding that war may not have much of a future on an environmentally brittle, densely interconnected Earth.

As for the obituarist: John W. Dean offers a strong audition. Dean, a self-described "Goldwater Republican," served as legal counsel in the Nixon White House and testified during the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973 that he’d warned the president about "a cancer growing on the presidency." After Nixon’s crash, Dean left political life for several decades, but he has forcefully returned in the past few years as the author of an accidental trilogy about the Republican Party’s long journey into night. The books have raised alarms about the extreme right’s taste for secrecy (Worse than Watergate, 2004), the psychopathology of authoritarian conservatism (Conservatives Without Conscience, 2006), and now the extent of constitutional ruin wrought by a party interested only in power, not governance (Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches, Viking, 352 pages, $25.95).

Dean’s critique carries particular weight because he is, simultaneously, a longtime Republican, a onetime White House insider, and a lawyer who understands that "proper process … produces good policy," while "compromised processes will lead to bad policy." This is a succinct definition of what is sometimes called process liberalism, the idea that if a society’s institutions are established and operated according to a set of rules and customs generally agreed on, those institutions will produce results that most of the population will be able to accept, if not always cheer. Related ideas in America are the rule of law — the notion that individuals, even self-styled wartime presidents and vice presidents, must respect certain institutional constraints — and the separation-of-powers doctrine, which contemplates that each branch of government will try to curb overreaching by the others.

It is beyond dispute that Republican abuses of process in the past 15 years have been unprecedented and calamitous. Dean is particularly interested in the Bush regime’s use of so-called signing statements to change the meaning of laws duly enacted by Congress. Neither the Constitution nor any statute gives the president such a power, and so such statements are, or should be, legally meaningless. But their plain political purpose is to create what Dean calls a "presidential autocracy"; the statements are (in the words of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe) "declarations of hegemony and contempt for the coordinate branches — declarations that [Bush] hopes will gradually come to be accepted in the constitutional culture as descriptions of the legal and political landscape properly conceived and as precedents for later action either by his own or by future administrations."

What invading body snatchers have turned the party of Lincoln and abolition into this freak show of power-crazed pod people? Dean doesn’t say, and perhaps he isn’t sure, but he is strangely silent on the military angle. The Constitution grants solely to Congress the power "to raise and support Armies," with the telling proviso that "no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years." The framers did not want a standing army sitting there like a loaded gun, waiting for some president to grab it and start shooting. And for nearly two centuries, the country’s practice was to demobilize after conflicts. As Doris Kearns Goodwin observes in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994), the US Army in 1940 was smaller than Belgium’s. But over the next decade the military was to swell unimaginably, and it remained swollen, even as the "military-industrial complex" a departing President Eisenhower warned us about became a cancer growing on our politics, while its propaganda affiliates assured us that, whether the problem was poverty, drugs, terror, or Manuel Noriega, the answer was war.

The Republican Party chose to dance with this soul-sucking devil at some Mephistophelian ball, only to find later that its throat had been slit and a dagger plunged into its back. For us, the only remaining business is to assign the obituary and then find some way to operate our rickety two-party system with just one party. Unless … some nervy Republican presidential aspirant acknowledges the obvious: that given a choice between democracy and empire, a true Republican — a true American — chooses democracy. A true Republican puts America first by cutting the military budget by 90 percent and redirecting that money into a crash alt-fuel program, into education and health care and environmental protection. Rebuild America. Assuming such a braveheart didn’t soon perish in a mysterious plane crash, next year’s presidential election would immediately become more interesting. *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The battle over propositions A and H isn’t just about transportation. Sure, Prop. A is about reforming Muni, and Prop. H claims to be about neighborhood parking, but as Steven T. Jones reports on page 18, this is really about whether a Republican billionaire can buy a San Francisco election with a populist-sounding theme.

And it’s about whether this city is mature enough and its residents smart enough to recognize that everything the George W. Bush administration (and the Ronald Reagan administration and the entire Republican establishment over the past quarter century) says is fundamentally wrong: Progress sometimes requires sacrifice. You can’t get something for nothing. And government can be the solution, not just the problem.

Everyone in this town knows that global warming is real and is a problem. Everyone knows that society has to make some changes. And everyone with any sense knows that one of those changes involves reducing the use of private automobiles, particularly in cities.

Transit planners can tell you that the relationship between cars and buses in San Francisco is brutal. Every car on the streets creates traffic, which slows down buses. Every time the buses slow down, more people want to drive their cars. And the further this loop of doom continues, the worse the impact on livability in the city and the viability of the planet will be.

Muni needs a lot of things to make it function better, and Prop. A includes some of them. But one of the biggest things it needs is less traffic downtown — which means fewer cars. That means the city ought to make it inconvenient and expensive to drive into the downtown area.

But Don Fisher, of the Gap fame, wants to give downtown developers the right to build as much parking as they want. That’s what Prop. H would do — and his campaign is deceptively appealing. He’s running against the "social engineers" at City Hall, trying to get everyone who hates looking for a parking space to support him.

That way leads to disaster. I hope we don’t listen.

Lawsuit can move forward

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The Bay Guardian has presented enough evidence of predatory pricing by the SF Weekly that our lawsuit against the paper and its chain owners can go forward to trial, a judge ruled Oct. 25.

Judge Richard A. Kramer denied three separate motions by Village Voice Media, the Phoenix-based 16-paper chain, that sought to dismiss the case.

In a suit filed in 2004, the Guardian charged that the Weekly and the East Bay Express had engaged in a pattern of selling ads below cost in an attempt to put the locally owned alternative paper out of business.

VVM sold the East Bay Express this year to local owners.

The case was filed under the state’s unfair business practices law, which bars the sale of any good or service for less than the price of producing it if that cut-rate selling is aimed at hurting a competitor.

VVM’s motions for summary judgment argued that the Guardian couldn’t prove any intent by the Weekly or VVM to injure the local competitor. In briefs and oral arguments, VVM lawyers claimed that the chain’s CEO, Jim Larkin, had denied any predatory plans or intent. And VVM insisted that the evidence collected by the Guardian so far was inadequate to take the case to trial.

The chain lawyers also argued that the Guardian’s suit was a threat to the First Amendment rights of the Weekly, because if the paper was forced to quit selling discounted ads it might have to cut editorial space and staff.

Ralph Alldredge, a Guardian attorney, noted that the Weekly had admitted selling ads below cost. And he said the evidence collected so far in the case shows strong indications of predatory intent.

Alldredge acknowledged that selling below cost isn’t always illegal; start-up businesses, for example, often lose money at first trying to attract customers. But he said the Weekly has been losing money every year since New Times/VVM bought it in 1995, and those losses have only increased over time, to as much as $2 million a year. It’s hard to imagine any good reason why a business would set its prices so low that it operated at a loss every year for more than a decade, Alldredge argued, unless the goal was to use chain resources to starve out a locally owned competitor.

Alldredge cited a deal between Clear Channel, which owns the concert promoter Bill Graham Presents, and the Weekly under which the Weekly paid to have its name on the Warfield theater, a BGP venue – and in exchange, the Weekly would get almost all of the advertising money that once went to the Guardian. He cited a memo showing that the deal would give the Weekly 85 percent of the ads, and the Guardian would get “15 percent to zero.”

James Wagstaffe, arguing for the Weekly, said that forcing the chain paper to sell ads at a higher rate would be the equivalent of the government deciding how much of the finite space in the publication could be devoted to news. He said an economic expert hired by the Weekly, Harvard professor Joseph Kalt, had determined that the ad market in San Francisco was so soft that the only way to increase revenues enough to cover the Weekly’s operating costs was to cram more ads onto every page.

Alldredge countered that courts have always agreed that basic economic regulations can apply to newspapers without a First Amendment threat.

“One hundred years of cases say that the mere economic regulation of newspapers is not unconstitutional,” he said. “There is nothing in the First Amendment that says you can engage in predatory behavior.

He also noted that Jed Brunst, the top finance officer for VVM, had testified in a deposition that the chain had prepared projections in 2005 to present to investors. Those projections showed that the Weekly could become profitable – if it raised ad prices. The paper would lose some ad volume to the Guardian, but would be able to retain the same percentage of editorial space to ad space and would be a profitable operation, Brunst’s report to the investors said.

In other words, the top people at the chain knew they could make money by ending their below-cost sales – but they continued with the predatory practice. That, Alldredge said, created a pretty reasonable presumption that the chain was out to harm a competitor.

Kramer rejected all of the SF Weekly’s claims. He said that the First Amendment didn’t allow newspapers to engage in “impermissible anticompetitive” behavior. And the question of intent, he said, was a fact for a jury to determine – and “a denial of improper activity by itself is not enough” to dismiss this case.

New Times Executive Editor Mike Lacey and Executive Associate Editor Andy Van De Voorde came from Phoenix to attend the hearing, and Van De Voorde wrote a lengthy piece that appeared on the Weekly’s website calling the Guardian’s three-year-old lawsuit “looney.” The piece put the chain’s spin on the hearing and laid out the Phoenix operators’ opinions on the Guardian claim.

But in the end, only one opinion mattered, and that was the opinion of Judge Kramer — who didn’t buy one bit of the Weekly’s argument.

Trial is set to begin early in January, 2008.

The Guardian is represented by Ralph Alldredge, E. Craig Moody and Rich Hill. Three VVM lawyers — Ivo Labar and James Wagstaffe of the San Francisco firm Kerr and Wagstaffe and Don Bennett Moon of Phoenix — were in the courtroom representing VVM.

Jim Rivaldo, 1947-2007

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› tim@sfbg.com

There aren’t many political consultants in the world who deserve the term "sweet person." There aren’t many who last in that often vicious and horrible business who care more about their personal political principles than they do about money. There aren’t many who are universally liked, even by the people they routinely oppose.

Jim Rivaldo was weird that way. I knew him for almost 25 years, since I began watching the nasty world of insider San Francisco politics, and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who had anything bad to say about him.

Rivaldo was one of the first openly gay political consultants in the country, an advisor and campaign manager for Harvey Milk and an innovator in the early days of the business of using graphic art and direct-mail technology to elect people to public office. He was the state’s first openly gay commissioner, serving as Milk’s regional representative on the Coastal Commission.

Rivaldo and his business partner, Dick Pabitch, managed the campaign that defeated the Police Officers Association juggernaut to create the Office of Citizen Complaints in 1983. He helped elect Milk and his successor, Harry Britt, helped found what is now the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, and was one of the key players who put gay politics on the map, making the queer community a force to be reckoned with in San Francisco. He was the treasurer of the first campaign to bring district elections to San Francisco.

Rivaldo was also one of the first political activists to make connections between the gay and the African American communities. He ran the campaigns of nearly every black politician elected to office in the 1970s and ’80s. In other words, his professional résumé was, by any standard, impressive.

But when you ask people today about him, what they remember most is his sense of humor, his passion for what he cared about — and the fact that he was, above all, a wonderful human being.

"He was such a great guy," said City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who hired Rivaldo to run his first campaign. "I think it’s a measure of the integrity of the man that everyone in town had a fond spot in their hearts for him."

"He had principles," San Francisco Information Clearinghouse activist Rene Cazenave recalled. "He was sort of a socialist, with a real understanding of class, and he really believed in it."

State senator Carole Migden said, "He was the sort of person who could cross all political lines. He was like a UN ambassador."

Rivaldo was born in Rochester, NY, in 1947. It wasn’t an easy place to be a young gay man, but he persevered, as he always did later in life, and wound up graduating from Harvard. He arrived in San Francisco in the early 1970s, just as the gay pride movement was getting into full swing, and quickly became a part of community politics.

He set up a political consulting firm when managing campaigns for money was still a new line of work — and quickly demonstrated that he had an innate skill for it. With Pabitch, he set up shop in a second-floor office in the 500 block of Castro Street and started promoting queer candidates as citywide contenders.

"He was the first one to use turquoise and hot pink for political fliers," Migden recalled.

And over the next two decades, as many of his industry colleagues began to make a lot of money — and some became very wealthy — Rivaldo always seemed to barely get by. After he and Pabitch split up he moved to a little office near City Hall and took on a string of candidates who were often barely able to pay their bills.

"He wasn’t the ruthless, get-ahead-at-all-costs type," Migden said. "That’s why he wasn’t rich."

I always liked talking to Rivaldo. He never called to talk trash about someone else. I didn’t always like his candidates, but I knew he always did; when he told me about someone he thought should be in office I always knew he was telling the truth. He actually cared about people and issues, and when things went badly (when, for example, a candidate he helped elect to the school board voted the wrong way on the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and infuriated the queer community) he felt personally let down, just like the rest of us.

AIDS has ravaged his generation of gay men in San Francisco, and there aren’t many people left in politics who are links to the days of Milk, who can remember and tell stories of a time when the idea of a queer person serving at City Hall was considered an astounding breakthrough. And it’s in part because of him that San Francisco now has two queer supervisors, two queer state legislators, and queer representation at virtually every other level of government.

But I think the most remarkable fact of Rivaldo’s life is that he was such a decent guy that he could be friends with so many people who were so often at odds, often to the point of not speaking. He talked to Jack Davis and Tom Ammiano, to Migden and Mark Leno, to Terence Hallinan and Kamala Harris. They all liked him; they all respected him. They’ll all miss him. And so will I.

Needed: a campaign against privatization

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EDITORIAL It’s time for San Francisco to declare war on privatization.

The local threat is very real: as we reported in last week’s special anniversary issue, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration has moved to turn over a long list of city services — from housing for the mentally ill to the operation of the public golf courses — to the private sector. Should this happen, if history is any guide, the city would wind up losing millions, the quality of services would decline, and the economy would suffer as hundreds of well-paid, unionized employees lost their jobs.

Equally important, the public would lose control over the institutions that were and are created and run for its benefit.

Privatization is a recipe for corruption. There always has been and always will be some level of graft, corruption, and incompetence in government operations; there will always be the occasional city employee who sleeps on the job, fudges time cards, doesn’t do the job right, and somehow manages to avoid being fired. But that sort of small-time problem amounts to peanuts in comparison to what happens when large amounts of public money are turned over to the private sector.

Private companies are out to make profits — and for the most part they keep their finances secret. Many of the worst scandals in American history have involved kickbacks, backroom deals, and bribery aimed at sending taxpayer dollars into the coffers of big contractors, and these continue today. And the argument that the private sector is more efficient often turns out to be utterly false; the absolute worst waste of money in the nation’s health care system, for example, is the phenomenal overhead involved in private insurance plans. As much as 30¢ of every dollar spent on private-sector health care goes to administrative overhead and profit. The public Medicare system operates on about 5 percent overhead.

Of course, the public has no way of keeping track of where most of the private health care money goes; the insurance companies keep that information to themselves. So do most other private contractors that take public money. And even if you don’t like the way the system is managed, you don’t have much choice — insurance executives aren’t elected by anyone and aren’t accountable to the community.

San Francisco has a history of allowing private operators to take over public resources, and the results have been almost universally bad. One of the reasons the 1906 earthquake caused such devastation was that the private Spring Valley Water Co. — looking only for quick profits and not at long-term maintenance or service — failed to keep its pipes in good repair. When the city really needed water, to put out the postquake fires, it wasn’t available. That fiasco led city officials to develop a municipal water system, which now delivers some of the best, cleanest, and cheapest water in the country.

Of course, Congress gave San Francisco the right to build that water system, which uses a dam in Yosemite National Park, only on the condition that it also develop public electric power. Instead, in the greatest privatization scandal in the history of urban America, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. wound up initially controlling much of the output of the dam, and it still controls the city’s electric grid. The result: some of the highest electric rates in the nation and terrible, unreliable service.

San Francisco officials led the way to the privatization of the Presidio, turning over a national park to an unaccountable quasi-private board that operates as a real estate developer. The results: A giant commercial office complex, built with a $60 million tax break. Plans for high-end condos. Traffic problems, neighborhood problems — and a stiff bill to the city’s taxpayers, who have to subsidize private businesses that operate in a federal enclave without paying local taxes.

And if Newsom has his way, the pattern will continue: the mayor’s signature project this past year, for example, has been an attempt to let a private company control the city’s broadband communications infrastructure. Tens of millions in city contracts go every year to private nonprofits that fight like hell to avoid sunshine and accountability.

Enough is enough — San Franciscans of every political stripe need to organize to fight back. This city needs a new political coalition, a campaign against privatization.

There are all sorts of specific policies and legislation that ought to be on the agenda. For starters, privatization expert Elliott Sclar, a Columbia University economist, argues that any private business that takes city money to provide public services ought to be required to abide by open-government laws. That means every scrap of information related to that contract — including financial projections, executive salaries, profit and loss statements, and operating overhead figures — would be public record. All meetings of boards, panels, or other policy-making entities involved in managing the contract would be open to the public. If a private business doesn’t want to abide by those rules, fine; it can stick to private-sector work and stop bidding on government contracts.

Beyond that, the city needs to set up a task force to look at every private contract San Francisco hands out and determine why the city isn’t doing the work itself. If selling electricity is so profitable (and it clearly is, or PG&E wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep its illegal monopoly), why can’t the city take over the job and bring in some revenue? If there’s money to be made building bus shelters and selling ads on them — and clearly there is, since Clear Channel Communications, a giant private company, went out of its way to get a contract with the city to do so — why can’t San Francisco make that money for the General Fund? If a private company can make money running the golf courses, why can’t the city?

Sure, there are times when it makes sense to bring in an outside contractor. We’d argue, for example, that the Board of Supervisors needs an independent budget analyst, not tied to City Hall, to monitor budgets and spending. But there are millions of dollars going out City Hall’s door every year to private outfits that aren’t accountable to the public. And there are millions of dollars that ought to be available for badly needed public services that the city is losing because some private operator is making a profit on public resources.

Organized labor has every reason to oppose privatization and ought to play a lead role in creating a new coalition. So should the public-power coalition and the folks who have been demanding sunshine for the nonprofits. But everyone who uses public services and pays taxes in San Francisco is affected when city money gets stolen, wasted, or diverted. It ought to be a broad-based coalition.

There’s an opportunity to turn things around here and make San Francisco the model city that it ought to be. There’s no time to waste.

Airlines demand corporate welfare

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› news@sfbg.com

The major airlines that serve the Bay Area, with the help of the Hotel Council of San Francisco, are trying to get out of paying millions of dollars in taxes to the city by claiming the right to use a law that was designed to help San Francisco’s poorest residents. And they’re threatening to prevent their employees from staying in the city if the Board of Supervisors doesn’t acquiesce to the corporate welfare demand.

At issue is the city’s 14 percent Transient Occupancy Tax, which is paid by hotel guests. It is the third-largest source of local tax revenue, after property taxes and payroll taxes, bringing in $177 million in the last fiscal year. The only major exemption from the tax is for permanent hotel residents, generally those on the brink of homelessness who live in the run-down single-room-occupancy hotels for months or even years on end.

Major airlines house hundreds of their employees in San Francisco’s hotels each night. They are arguing that because of past court rulings on corporate personhood — in which judges have deemed that corporations have the same rights as individuals — the airlines should be exempt from paying the tax when they rent blocks of rooms for their employees.

The airlines, in collusion with some hotels in the city, have long used the exemption to avoid paying taxes on many of the rooms they rent (about two-thirds, according to the Hotel Council, which translates into millions in lost city revenue every year). A few years ago city officials told the corporations that the exemption didn’t apply to them and that they should be paying the tax.

Enacted in 1960, the Permanent Resident Exclusion exempts from the tax individuals who occupy or have the right to occupy the same hotel room for at least 30 consecutive days. “We looked at the legislative history, and it was clearly put there to help formerly homeless people,” Treasurer José Cisneros told the Guardian. “The city has always said that 30 consecutive one-night stays are not the same as a 30-night stay by an individual.”

The hotels and airlines challenged that interpretation and had their case thrown out of court. So now they’ve turned to the Board of Supervisors in the hope that they can win this chunk of corporate welfare by using threats of an economic exodus.

 

CORPORATE SHAKEDOWN

In October 2004, American Airlines and the San Francisco Hilton filed a lawsuit against the city arguing that airline crew members staying in San Francisco hotels qualified for an exemption from the hotel tax. The lawsuit was dismissed in May 2006 without going to trial, with Superior Court Judge James Warren ruling that the plaintiffs “did not assert and did not present any evidence that any particular room at the Hilton was continuously registered to American Airlines for more than 30 days.”

To clarify any ambiguity in the law, Cisneros in May issued an interpretation stating, “Although an agreement between a person and a hotel may require that the person pay the hotel for a minimum number of ‘guaranteed’ daily reservations for the person’s employees over a period of time longer than 30 days, such an agreement does not create any permanent resident exemption for any guest rooms unless the above criteria are satisfied,” referring to criteria that include “a person is a registered hotel guest” and “that person or any of that person’s employees continuously occupy or have the right to occupy the same room for 30 days or more.”

Yet now, at the request of Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, the Board of Supervisors’ Government Oversight and Auditing Committee has scheduled a Nov. 19 hearing for the purpose of “explor[ing] the unintended consequences of this decision, including the loss of revenue to the City when the airlines inevitably move their crews to another location in the Bay Area where room rates are more competitive.”

That implied threat comes from Hotel Council executive director Patricia Breslin, who paints a doomsday scenario if the airlines have to pay the hotel tax on every room they rent. Breslin warns that if the Board of Supervisors does not offer concessions to the airline industry, it could bring about an “economic tsunami” that would hit hotels, restaurants, and city government.

Airline employees occupy an average of 1,050 hotel rooms per night in San Francisco, according to Smith Travel Research, an information and data provider for the lodging industry. Given that the tax is collected by the hotels, Cisneros doesn’t have data on how much the airlines should be paying the city. But assuming the airlines negotiate rates of about $100 per night, that would translate into more than $5 million per year.

“We pushed so hard to get them to pay it that they sued us,” Cisneros told us.

Breslin said the airlines have been paying about $1.7 million per year in hotel taxes and that sales taxes generated by airline employees bring another $1.4 million into the city, all money that would be lost if the airlines go elsewhere. She said the airlines have threatened to begin putting their employees in hotels in Peninsula cities near the airport, like Burlingame, San Mateo, and even San Jose, to cut costs. Already Mexicana Airlines has stopped using San Francisco’s hotels for its employees. Other airlines, such as Virgin Atlantic, United, Cathay Pacific, and Lufthansa, have threatened to follow suit.

Breslin said hotels would be forced to lay off cleaners, servers, and other low-income workers due to the loss of business that would accompany the exodus of airline employees. San Francisco, she argues, would “lose a significant revenue stream” if the airlines lose their appeal.

“It will change the economics of San Francisco,” she told us. “This is not a frivolous issue.”

 

CALLING THEIR BLUFF

Granting the exemption would cost the city millions of dollars, but that isn’t the only reason being offered for opposing the gambit. Some city officials simply don’t believe the airlines — or their employees, most of whom are union members, many of whom have contracts specifying their accommodations be in urban centers — will abandon San Francisco.

Sup. Chris Daly, who is on the Oversight and Auditing Committee, is against granting the exemption to the airlines. “They blow smoke all the time,” he told us, referring to major industries such as the hotel and airline industries. “That’s how they get away with not paying taxes.”

Cisneros argues the airlines’ threat to move their employees into suburban hotels isn’t logical, noting that San Francisco hotel rooms are already far more expensive than their suburban counterparts — with or without the hotel tax — and the airlines have always chosen to keep their employees here anyway.

“I just don’t think the threat is realistic at all,” Cisneros said. “If they were basing their decision on which hotels are cheapest, they would have never been staying in San Francisco.”

Recently compiled data and trends in tourism and hotel occupancy rates also suggest that Breslin’s warning of a crippling economic backlash are unfounded. According to an August article in the San Francisco Business Times by Ryan Tate, “Next year promises to be by far the most robust for leisure and business travel in San Francisco since the dot-com boom.”

He continues, “Convention business will reach more than 900,000 hotel rooms in 2008, well above the 740,000 room nights booked by conventions in 2007.” The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau forecasts that overall tourism will top 16 million visitors next year and that visitor spending will exceed last year’s record $7.8 billion.

The taxes the city collects from hotels go toward funding a wide range of public services. Some of the money is earmarked for the Convention and Visitors Bureau and for maintaining convention facilities. Some funds are allocated for low-income housing and rent supplements. The War Memorial Department, the Asian Art Museum, and the Arts Commission all receive funding through the hotel tax as well, with excess dollars poured into the city’s General Fund.

San Francisco’s tourism industry is the city’s largest industry and its second-largest employer, after the city and county government. “You want to make sure your number one industry is protected,” Breslin told us.

Yet the policy that she’s asking the city to enact runs counter to the policies in other major cities, including those thought to be less politically progressive than San Francisco. In Los Angeles, for example, only individuals can be granted exemptions from paying the hotel tax. In Chicago the exemption is even stricter and only applies to people who use hotel rooms as their domicile.

Jerry Brown gives City green light to sue Jew

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Jewsmall.jpg
Photo by Charles Russo

The sun may be shining, but it’s raining legal cats and dogs for suspended Sup. Ed Jew.

On the eve of a preliminary hearing by the City’s Ethics Commission into charges of official misconduct by Supervisor Jew, California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. has granted City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s application for leave to sue in quo warranto to remove Jew from the Board of Supervisors for failure to comply with the City Charter’s residency requirements .

The ruling comes a little more than three weeks after Mayor Gavin Newsom initiated official misconduct proceedings against Jew and suspended the District 4 supervisor, replacing him, at least for now, with political rookie Carmen Chu.

City Attorney Herrera says that in llight of the Ethics Commission’s preliminary hearing tomorrow, he intends, “to carefully evaluate” the legal options.
“In the coming days, I will decide how best to represent the City’s interest in concluding a crisis that has clouded the legitimacy of San Francisco’s representative government for too long,” Herrera said in a press release.

Tomorrow’s preliminary Ethics Commission hearing takes place at 1:30 p.m. in Room 416, City Hall.

More parking = more cars = gridlock

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I attended a Transportation Authority workshop last night on its new Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (which, among other things, might recommend a fee to drive downtown, just like London, Rome, and Stockholm have) — and I came away more convinced than ever that San Francisco is screwed if downtown greedheads fool people into approving Prop. H and defeating Prop. A.
Ours is one of five U.S. cities selected to collectively receive almost $1 billion in federal money to study and implement ways of reducing traffic congestion. Why? Because we’re the second most congested downtown in the country after Los Angeles. Preliminary studies show traffic congestion cost San Francisco $2.3 billion in 2005 (in delays, fuel, health impacts, and slowed commerce), congestion consistently ranks as people’s top concern in surveys, traffic has slowed our transit system to a crawl, congestion roughly doubles travel times, and half our city’s greenhouse gas emissions come from cars. And if Prop. H is approved, there will be unfettered new parking construction, putting up to 20,000 new cars on our clogged roads, according to the Planning Department. This is madness!
I’m baffled why the Chamber of Commerce supports this because the evidence is clear it will hurt business (perhaps they’re just blinded to reality by their slavishly doctrinaire devotion free markets and hatred of all things government). Study after study shows that more parking draws more cars, and in our built-out city, where there’s no room for creating more lanes, that means more traffic congestion. And therefore slower Muni, which will cause more people to want to drive or ride bikes, which will cause even more congestion — a feedback loop that leads to gridlock. C’mon everybody, think about this stuff for a second because it isn’t rocket science. You can support more traffic or better transit, your choice.

Our 41st Anniversary Special

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This week, the Guardian celebrates 41 years at the forefront of the battle against dirty backroom deals, sleazy sellouts, illegal buy-offs, and underhanded intrusions into the public domain — and the fight continues. Click below for summaries, current updates, and histories of San Francisco privatization issues.

>> Editor’s Notes
A point-by-point list of Newsom’s privatization fumbles
By Tim Redmond

>> The privatization of San Francisco: an introduction
The city should be a loud, visible, proud, and shining example of a different kind of America
By Tim Redmond

>> The perils of privatization: a cautionary history
Ronald Reagan started dismantling government 25 years ago, but his privatization legacy is alive and growing — even in San Francisco
By Amanda Witherell

>> Blast from the past
A few choice selections from our archives

>> Wrecked parks
Chronic underfunding has made the Recreation and Park Department a prime privatization target
By Sarah Phelan and Steven T. Jones

>> Psych out
Newsom administration pushes plan to privatize mental health treatment
By G.W. Schulz

>> Private practice
The Department of Public Health has taken privatization to a bizarre new level
By G.W. Schulz

>> Connect the Connects
Newsom uses a shadowy private organization to shield his administration’s actions from public scrutiny
By Steven T. Jones

>> Bilking the links
Public-golf revenue is up millions of dollars. But a costly public-private contract has swallowed most of the money
By J.B. Powell

>> Bus Stop
Muni remains a lucrative target for the private section
By G.W. Schulz

>> Privatize the airport?
Will SFO go on the block in 2011?
By G.W. Schulz

41st Anniversary Special: Bilking the links

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› news@sfbg.com

By now, even most nongolfing residents of San Francisco have heard the dire refrain coming from City Hall: San Francisco’s public golf courses are sucking millions of dollars from the city treasury! Dozens of media stories have trumpeted this bleak pronouncement, and city leaders are using the shortfall to push for outsourcing control of the century-old open spaces. But a Guardian review of the Golf Fund shows that the links are not nearly as down-and-out as pro-privatization forces have led us to believe.

Recreation and Park Department accounting documents we obtained show revenues at the city’s six publicly owned golf courses last year were up nearly $1.5 million from 2005 to 2006 and more than $2.2 million dollars from 2004 to 2005, an increase of nearly 30 percent. But the cost of a lavish contract with a large, out-of-state golf-management corporation has risen precipitously over the same time frame and drained most of these new funds.

For the 2006–07 fiscal year the city shelled out more than $3.25 million to Kemper Sports Management to operate the pro shop and clubhouse at the Harding Park Golf Course and its nine-hole neighbor, Fleming. By comparison, in 2004–05, Kemper’s tab at Harding and Fleming was a still eye-popping $2.07 million, but that number is nearly $1.2 million less than what the city had to pay last year. These increased costs, as well as a hefty loan repayment for Harding Park’s botched remodel in 2002 and 2003, have eaten up the links’ improved revenue and forced the city to throw in an extra $1.4 million from the General Fund to keep golf solvent.

"What’s going on up at Harding is a disaster," Bob Killian told the Guardian. Killian ran the city’s golf operations profitably for two decades until 2001. "When I was in charge we had contracts with various managers for the pro shops and the restaurants, and they made us money. They paid us. Now, Harding is run at a deficit. Where the fuck is the money going? What’s it for? Nobody knows. It’s all this big secret…. It’s a scandal."

Kemper’s seven-year deal is unique, to say the least. At every other publicly managed course, the city leases control of the pro shops and clubhouses to outside companies. In exchange for a flat fee paid into city coffers, those companies bear all of the risk and reap most of the rewards of operating the facilities. But at Harding, the city pays Illinois’s Kemper $192,000 per year, regardless of its performance, to act as an on-site manager, plus a 5 percent incentive fee for gross revenues over $6 million. But those guaranteed sums are only the beginning of the bill.

Kemper hires staff, rents golf carts, and orders the supplies to be sold in the pro shop and the clubhouse. Unlike in the city’s lease arrangements at other courses, though, the company bears none of the risk. It simply invoices the city for its expenses, and the city signs the tab. And the tab just keeps growing.

One public-golf insider who declined to be identified for fear of retribution said, "They’ve got this enormous staff there, managers and assistant managers and assistants to assistants of managers. It’s a golf course, not a hospital! I hear the payroll for the restaurant alone is like $600,000. And it’s only open for one shift a day…. They stock their pro shop with top-of-the-line gear that just sits there. If they order 20 Arnold Palmer shirts and only sell two, who cares? The city still pays for all 20."

In an e-mail to the Guardian, Kemper’s general manager at Harding, Steve Argo, told us it has between 60 and 80 employees, depending on the season. Citing this seasonal variability and "competitive reasons," he did not break down those numbers between management and nonmanagement, as we requested.

Both Argo and Katharine Petrucione, Rec and Park’s chief financial officer, attributed much of the added costs at Harding to the opening of a new permanent clubhouse there in late 2005. Argo said the increased revenues from the clubhouse have "more than covered the city’s increase in payments." But while Rec and Park’s ledgers do show that concessions revenues at Harding and Fleming have gone up since the clubhouse opened, the increase in Kemper’s bill has gone up nearly as much. All in all, with Kemper’s multimillion-dollar deal and loan payments for the over-budget remodel at the course, accounts still put the course at more than $500,000 in the red — even though a round of golf there now costs well over $100 and Kemper is still making a handsome profit.

It doesn’t end there. Petrucione said Kemper’s contract costs taxpayers even more than meets the eye. Because the company submits monthly and yearly budget projections as well as reams of invoices and expenses for reimbursement, Rec and Park staffers spend hours examining Kemper’s paperwork and activities — essentially managing the manager. When we asked her for an accounting of how much the Kemper contract costs the city in staff hours for these oversight duties, Petrucione replied, "It definitely requires more time and effort … than a lease agreement [like those at every other course] would."

During a recent radio interview, Sup. Jake McGoldrick called Rec and Park’s deal with Kemper "the worst contract I’ve ever seen." He added, "We don’t have a golfer problem. Golfers are coming out and playing. We have an accountancy problem."

The golf insider we spoke with echoed McGoldrick’s sentiments: "Business is up like 30 percent this year, but Kemper’s contract is jeopardizing the whole department…. If we redid the greens, tees, and fairways [at the other courses], just Band-Aid stuff like that, we would have the premier municipal system in the country. But instead they’ve given this cushy deal to a company from Chicago with no connection to San Francisco. It’s so unfair."

Despite the controversy over Kemper’s all-expenses-paid arrangement, Mayor Gavin Newsom, Rec and Park general manager Yomi Agunbiade, and others at City Hall have been using the deficits largely brought on by Kemper’s contract to push for more private control of the city’s links. In June the Mayor’s Office put forward a plan to outsource not just clubhouse and pro-shop management but all golf operations at the city’s premier courses, including Harding. The proposal was tabled after several contentious hearings at the Board of Supervisors, but many observers expect that it will make its way back to the board in the near future.

"In a perfect scenario, the city could [manage the courses efficiently], but the city has proven that it doesn’t have the ability to do it," Sup. Sean Elsbernd told us in July. Elsbernd has been one of the most vocal supporters of bringing in private golf management.

But McGoldrick, Killian, and other opponents of the idea point out that the city provided quality, inexpensive golf for nearly 100 years. They worry that private managers will find profit in higher greens fees, more part-time workers, and lower salaries and fewer benefits for full-time staff. But beyond those concerns, they see the mayor’s plan as yet another example of publicly owned assets being offered up for private gain.

The courses, McGoldrick told us, are "priceless…. We can’t just dump [them] because you’ve got folks from the Mayor’s Office and his Rec and Park Department who don’t want to be bothered."

In his endorsement interview with the Guardian, Newsom said about the golf courses, "You gotta deal with the reality of where we are and what our core competencies are. Golf courses do not reflect a core competency of government. We’re losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and about to lose over a million dollars a year, and that comes from somewhere. So rather than continuing to do what we’ve done and hope for a different result, we’re looking at best practices across the country and finding ways to manage our assets differently, and I’m not apologetic for exploring those things."

41st Anniversary Special: Private practice

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Low-income tenants cheered late last year when the San Francisco Department of Public Health ended its housing contract with the John Stewart Co. But no one expected the alternative would be a secret $5 million deal between DPH officials and a preferred vendor.

In fact, the DPH has opened a new chapter in privatization by creating a dubiously accountable, quasi-independent nonprofit while paying someone else to operate it with a sole-source contract.

The health department leases several single-room-occupancy hotels in San Francisco that house mental health and substance-abuse patients through a program called Direct Access to Housing, part of a laudable nationwide trend toward deinstitutionalizing such medical clients and changing how the formerly homeless receive services.

The Camelot on Turk Street and Le Nain on Eddy Street were among those managed by John Stewart until last autumn. Mercy Housing oversaw two more. But there were problems; tenants complained about the Stewart company’s management, and political organizers last year charged that desk clerks at some of the buildings prevented them from registering tenants to vote.

"If you’re part of a larger company that just sees themselves as a more generic property-management company," said Marc Trotz, director of the health department’s housing office, "there isn’t necessarily the training and skills development that needs to be there to handle the complexities that come up on a daily basis with the population we’re dealing with."

So the health department’s answer was to broker an exclusive $5 million contract with a nationwide nonprofit based in San Francisco known as the Tides Center. Tides doesn’t do any of the heartwarming outreach we tend to associate with nonprofits. Instead, the outfit handles the boring administrative functions like payroll and human resources for community projects created by others.

The project in this case is Trotz’s brainchild Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing, which essentially exists as a nonprofit only on paper. There’s no board of directors. There are no federal tax forms outlining expenses and revenue. And Tides doesn’t itemize projects like DISH in its annual financial statements. So there’s no easy way for the public to track the money that goes into the project.

Yet DISH has so far never been forced to compete for property-management contracts like any other nonprofit wanting to do business with the city. That means the DPH gets the best of both worlds, paying someone in the private sector to manage its books and not having to subject its pet project to the competitive atmosphere of contract bidding.

Further, since Tides is technically the employer of record for DISH’s 60 or so employees, they exist in an ethereal world where they don’t fall under the city’s salary and benefits structure, but unions can’t reach them unless they’re willing to organize all 200 projects managed by Tides nationally.

Needless to say, none of this is sitting well with the nonprofits and unions that insist they weren’t informed of the plan until it was off and running.

"I feel like at union nonprofits, the turnover’s much lower, the training’s higher, and if a manager is abusing a tenant, for instance, a union worker can make a complaint to a city agency, write them up, do something without being afraid for their jobs," said Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer, a former organizer for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. "And we just give better care."

The THC, whose workers are represented by Service Employees International Union Local 1021, says it was never formally invited to bid on DISH, despite the fact that it does extensive work with the city and manages more than 1,500 units of low-income housing.

"All they had to do to find out was send a letter or call us…. The fact that they made the effort to set up their own entity kind of shows that’s what they wanted to do," THC director Randy Shaw said.

The Tides contract so annoyed Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin that he drafted a resolution pointing out that Mayor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in 2004 calling for maximum competition in city contracts.

"This Board of Supervisors has been on record for years in wanting to make sure contracts are competitively and fairly bid," Peskin told the Guardian. "This whole thing seems rather bizarre. The government was in essence contracting with itself."

The health department’s Trotz dismisses this criticism, saying sole-source contracts were designed in the first place to allow for agreements like the Tides deal, which he calls a pilot project. Next time, he promises, the department will open the contract to bids. Trotz added that Tides is responsible if a DISH employee screws up, and it faces an annual monitoring probe by DPH staffers, just like any other contractor.

"I know now that THC and the union seem to be upset by this," Trotz said. "What we’re saying is we’ve heard that and we are doing what we always intended to do, which is run a two-year pilot and put a [request for proposals] out on the street and ready for people to apply to prior to the start of the next fiscal year."

Of course, no one’s suggesting Tides and DISH will necessarily do a poor job handling supportive housing. Shaw said lefties were the first to argue nearly three decades ago that nonprofits could address public health much more sensitively than did Dianne Feinstein’s mayoral administration of the 1980s. Last year the health department did $174 million worth of business with nonprofits. While unions have been slow to organize nonprofits, the trend is growing, but Tides and DISH seem structured to stiff-arm them when covert, sole-source contracts haven’t done that already.

"This obviously was a secret decision," Shaw said. "[The DPH] never consulted with anybody. They just did it. I don’t want to comment on the health department beyond what I’ve said. But this experience has left people very cynical about dealing with the health department [and] the way they handled the whole thing."

41st Anniversary Special: Wrecked park

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› news@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department has a long history of maintaining parks, community centers, and other recreational offerings. In fact, it controls more land in the city than any other entity, public or private. But after seeing its budget repeatedly slashed during lean fiscal years, the underfunded department has become a prime target for some controversial privatization schemes.

There are ongoing efforts to privatize city golf courses, supported by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Rec and Park general manager Yomi Agunbiade (see “Bilking the Links,” page 22). And there are ongoing fears that the city intends to privatize its popular Camp Mather vacation spot, something the RPD studied a few years ago and Sup. Jake McGoldrick has fought and highlighted.

Rec and Park has identified $37 million in needs at Camp Mather — the product of a private study the agency has been unable to fully explain to the public (see “From Cabin to Castle,” 4/4/07) — but left Camp Mather off a big bond measure planned for February 2008.

“They say $37 million you need up here, and how much you got in there for the ballot measure? Zip, zero,” McGoldrick told the Guardian. “It’s a familiar pattern: you underfund the hell out of something, and then you turn around and say, ‘We, the public sector, cannot handle taking care of this.'<0x2009>”

Rec and Park spokesperson Rose Dennis denies there are plans to privatize Camp Mather or that its omission from the bond measure is telling. “Many people disagreed — including you — with the funding needs and whether we could back it up,” she explained as the reason for its omission from the bond measure.

In his Oct. 1 endorsement interview with the Guardian, Newsom said, “We actually made some commitments just this last week with Sup. McGoldrick to help support his efforts, because he’s very protective of Camp Mather, and I appreciate his leadership on this, to help resource some of the needs up there without privatizing, without moving in accordance with your fears.”

And while Newsom said he hoped to avoiding privatizing Camp Mather, he refused to say he wouldn’t: “I’m not suggesting it’s off the table, because I’m not necessarily sure that the conditions that exist today will be conditions that exist tomorrow, and I will always be open to argument.”

But at least the Camp Mather and golf arguments have been happening mostly in public. That’s what voters intended in 1983 when they passed Proposition J, which requires public hearings, a staff study, and a vote by the Board of Supervisors before city services can be privatized. Yet over the past couple of years, there’s been an effort to quietly shift operations at a half-dozen rec centers away from city programs and toward private nonprofits.

It’s called Rec Connect. Its supporters bill it as an innovative effort to bring much-needed recreation programs to underserved, low-income neighborhoods. “This is a pilot program to see if a collaboration between a community-based organization and a rec center yields a richer program and a more engaged community,” said Margaret Brodkin, director of the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, which created the program and oversees that and other uses of the city’s Children’s Fund.

But to members of the Service Employees International Union Local 1021 — which includes most city employees and has filed grievances challenging Rec Connect — the program is a sneaky attempt to have underpaid, privately funded workers take over services that should be provided by city employees, who are better paid, unionized, and accountable to the public.

“The city took funds from the city’s coffers and gave them to the Department of Children, Youth and [Their] Families,” Margot Reed, a work-site organizer for the union, told the Guardian. “DCYF is using these funds, through Rec Connect, to contract out to private nonprofits work that rec staff were doing for a quarter of the cost.”

Brodkin was the longtime director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth — a perpetual thorn in the side of City Hall and the author of the measure that set aside some property taxes to create the Children’s Fund — before Newsom hired her to head the DCYF. She sees her current role as a continuation of her last one, and she sees Rec Connect as an enhancement of needed services rather than a privatization.

“There is a commitment that no jobs would be lost. I’m a big supporter of the public sector,” Brodkin said, while acknowledging that the RPD is chronically underfunded. “I am certainly aware of the resources issue at Rec and Park…. I’d be a happy camper if the Rec and Park budget was doubled. But I’d still believe in this program and say it offers a richer experience.”

Rec Connect began in 2005 with a study that looked at unmet recreational needs and evaluated facilities that might be good places to bring in community-based organizations to offer specialized classes. The whole program was financed through a mix of public funds and grants from private foundations. The three-year pilot program started just over a year ago.

“The Rec Connects,” Newsom told the Guardian, “are a way of leveraging resources and getting more of our CBOs involved and using these great assets and facilities, instead of limiting use to the way things have been done.”

Rec Connect director Jo Mestelle denied that the initiative is a privatization attempt.

“Rec and Park brings the facilities, the sports, and traditional recreation. The CBOs bring the youth-development perspective and nontraditional programming,” Mestelle said. “Hopefully, together we build a community that includes youth-leadership groups and advisory councils.”

Few would dispute the need for more after-school or other youth programs, particularly in the violence-plagued Western Addition, where some of the Rec Connect centers are. But the means of providing these programs is something new for San Francisco, starting with the fact that even though Mestelle works in the DCYF office, her salary is paid for entirely by private foundations.

That relationship and those funders aren’t posted anywhere or immediately available to the public, but Brodkin agreed to provide them to the Guardian. They include the Hellman Family Philanthropic Foundation ($50,000), the Hearst Foundation ($50,000), the San Francisco Foundation ($128,000), the Haas Foundation ($100,000), and the SH Cowell Foundation ($150,000).

Brodkin and Mestelle characterized those foundations as fairly unimpeachable, and Brodkin defended the arrangement as part of a national trend: “The thing that’s odd about SEIU’s perspective is this is happening all over.”

That’s precisely the point, SEIU’s Robert Haaland says.

“It’s been a strategy since the ’70s to, as [conservative activist] Grover Norquist calls it, ‘starve the beast,'<0x2009>” or defund government programs, Haaland said. “On a national level there is a lot going on that impacts us locally.”

Minutes from a recent Recreation and Park Commission meeting confirm that rec center directors have only about $1,000 each year to cover the cost of buying basketballs, team jerseys, referee whistles, and other basic sports and safety supplies. The SEIU grievance also notes that recreation staff positions have decreased by a third just as senior management positions increased by a third.

“We don’t have enough dollars for $20-an-hour rec center staff who are directly responsible for the kids and are well known to the community. We believe kids deserve great coaches, consistency, longevity, and commitment,” Reed said.

SEIU Local 1021 chapter president Larry McNesby is also the Rec and Park manager who oversees Palega Park, one of the Rec Connect sites. He told the Guardian that while his rec directors are “under pressure from the mayor to show him numbers of people that they are serving,” Rec and Park’s new online registration fails to reflect the “hundreds of drop-ins” that rec staff serve on a daily basis.

But he said the department has been set up to fail by chronic underfunding.

“I’d love Rec Connect and DCYF to be on a level playing field, because my directors could out-recreate theirs any day,” McNesby said. “You can’t just eliminate our jobs and replace them with someone who makes just above minimum wage.”

Actually, Brodkin and Mestelle note that negotiations with SEIU over Rec Connect have resulted in a guarantee that no jobs will be replaced and an agreement by the city as to 250 different tasks that the Rec Connect CBOs can’t perform. Still, they say the program brings innovation to a stagnant city agency.

“Before Rec Connect the rec centers always had a Ping-Pong table and some board games, but some of them were really poor, many were tired looking, none had computers or Internet. So we’ve had to think outside the box. Rec [and] Park is a big department, and it’s not always efficient,” Mestelle said.

Public records show that in 2006, the DCYF, whose primary function is to administer grants, sent $1 million in public money to Rec Connect from the Children’s Trust Fund, a pool of cash the city gathers each year by levying 3¢ per dollar of property tax.

Both Rec Connect and city workers stress the importance of offering a range of good programs to young people. “Our work is at a more social level,” McNesby says. “Every minute a kid spends in a rec center is a minute they’re not breaking into a car or victimizing someone or being victimized.”

The question is who should provide those programs. “It’s society’s value system that controls where the money goes,” Rec and Park spokesperson Dennis said. “It’s a really provocative discussion. There are some very compelling trade-offs argued in convincing fashion by intelligent people on both sides. These aren’t easy decisions.”

But the union people say that when it comes to Rec Connect, that discussion isn’t happening in public forums in a forthright way. As Reed said, “Gavin Newsom never went to the voters and said, ‘Here’s what we want to do: cut the rec staff and bring in private nonprofits.'”

41st Anniversary Special: Psych out

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> gwschulz@sfbg.com

San Francisco is a beautiful place. But it’s also a city where an extraordinary number of people suffer from mental health problems, sometimes quietly, sometimes visibly. City government has always taken on the burden of caring for those who really need it, but the Gavin Newsom administration has been trying to outsource that obligation in recent years.

Department of Public Health director Mitch Katz has tried for years to trim the number of psychiatric-care beds maintained by San Francisco General Hospital. He proposes to replace those services by contracting them out to local nonprofit Progress Foundation, which earned most of its $11.5 million in revenue last year from government sources.

The proposal is for Progress to develop and operate a community-based psychiatric treatment center as an alternative to SF General’s emergency-room and inpatient beds. A key difference would be that the alternative treatment would be voluntary and cater to those without severe symptoms.

Katz wants to eliminate 14 of SF General’s beds and reduce the number of patients it assesses by 30 percent. Add to that seven other beds that were stripped of funding two years ago, and it’s clear that mental health treatment in San Francisco is changing.

"It’s a problem we have to solve by coming up with alternatives," Katz told the board’s budget committee Oct. 10, "because it’s not right for that person, or for the cost to the system, that [they] be in a locked ward. It’s more downstream alternatives."

Opponents of the cuts, however, including psych nurses at SF General, led by the hospital’s chief of psychiatry, say the Progress proposal might complement SF General’s services but it would be dangerously shortsighted to think it can replace them.

Private-sector hospitals in San Francisco have already cut a combined 100 psych beds over the past 10 years, leaving behind only 75. Patients relying on Medi-Cal subsidies end up at SF General more than ever. Admissions, in fact, have climbed by as much as 50 percent in the past decade.

"I don’t want to be alarmist," said Alfredo Mireles, a psychiatric nurse at SF General who is opposing the cuts, "but we have this one guy who’s been in and out of here since his teens. He’s in his 30s now. He’s smart, college educated. But he has these violent outbursts with no remorse."

The man had assaulted a police officer just the night before, Mireles said. He recalled another patient who was so paranoid he wouldn’t come out of his room to eat. He had ended up in the emergency room after not eating for eight days.

Nonetheless, SF General’s psych ward maxed out last December for the first time in its history, forcing police offers to divert patients to jail or to hospitals unprepared to deal with them. All those facilities can do is strap down the patients or lock them in seclusion until a slot opens at SF General.

"You have to be very acute to get admitted," psych nurse Stacey Murphy said, referring to SF General. "But then we can’t get rid of people, because nobody wants them. They’re not acute enough to technically belong in our hospital, but they belong in a locked facility or in board and care."

Murphy explained that Progress won’t be able to handle certain patients now living in a sort of gray area at SF General — between being willingly and unwillingly hospitalized — such as the drug addled or violent. And that’s one problem with privatization in general: corporations and nonprofits will gladly take over profitable services, but the hard or expensive cases often fall to government … or simply through the cracks.

Progress argues that SF General spends too much time and money on patients who have serious mental health problems but aren’t so acute that they need to be locked up. Its idea is to put psych patients back into the city but help alleviate the misery they might otherwise endure alone or in a maddeningly sterile hospital. It seems to think the hard cases aren’t that hard.

"The time and resources devoted to this group of clients in a psychiatric crisis who are not hospitalized represents a cost to the mental health system that is unnecessary and avoidable if the intervention, triage, assessment, and treatment can occur in a community setting," the Progress Foundation’s June proposal reads.

"To the extent that there are people who would do better if we really wrapped services around them, shouldn’t we all focus on those people who would accept services voluntarily?" Katz asked the committee. "I think to focus a lot of our resources trying to convince people to take treatment against their will as outpatients when so many people would benefit from more loving, positive care, I don’t think it’s the right priority."

Piers Mackenzie still views Katz’s plan as poor public policy. His daughter, then 22, required a brief stay at SF General’s psych ward during a sudden mental health catastrophe four years ago. The event politicized Mackenzie, and he has since agitated against attempts by Katz to scale back psychiatric services at the hospital.

"I couldn’t think of a more retrogressive step, simple as that," Mackenzie said. "When there’s a proven need for more beds than there are presently, to cut them is just plain idiotic. I don’t understand it."

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