Green

My Xmas Muzak or yours?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Santa Baby, I wanna know: when did holiday music get hijacked by small children and their grandparents? At least that’s what it looks like perusing this year’s yuletide Brandy Alexander coasters: there’s The Coolest Kidz Bop Christmas Ever comp (Razor and Tie) for the ankle gnawers, and then there’s the reissued My Favorite Time of the Year (Rhino) by Dionne Warwick (dang, D, why did you lose your way from Burt Bacharach?) for their doting oldsters. But what became of the holiday music product for everyone between 18 and 48? The prim ‘n’ proper Josh Groban — touting Noel (Reprise) — can’t be expected to satiate several ornery, ADD-diagnosed generations. Have my people been written off as cynical, rabidly downloadin’ freeloaders too immersed in World of Warcraft to notice the onset of Buy Nothing Day?

I confess, we’re a tough audience. "<0x2009>‘Christmas Time Is Here’ — that one song more than any heavy metal song or whatever has always made me want to kill myself," SF comic and spoken word slinger Bucky Sinister tells me after holding forth about his new What Happens in Narnia, Stays in Narnia (Talent Moat). "Hear that and ‘Little Drummer Boy’ back-to-back, and if you don’t feel shitty, you’re just dead inside. It’s like a kindergarten dirge."

Holiday music hammers all of our hot childhood buttons, inflamed by years of Xmas TV specials and deflated expectations regarding those flash lumps of coal at the bottom of our stockings. Still, I’m willing to suffer on the cross of lousy jingle-jangle juju, so you, dear reader, don’t need to. After listening to about a dozen new holiday discs, I’ve garnered a new appreciation for the recordings that eschew the obligatory sleigh bells and easy heart-warmers and employ less familiar classics (James Brown’s "Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto" pops up more than once), a sense of humor, or, sweet baby Jesus, new numbers.

SLEIGH BELL OVERKILL On Oh Santa! New and Used Holiday Classics from Yep Roc Records (Yep Roc), Los Straightjackets turn in a rousing "Holiday Twist," but they, along with half of Yep Roc’s finest, must have their sleigh bells taken away and destroyed. Worse, Jason Ringenberg and Kristi Rose’s "Lovely Christmas" massacres a goofy but venerable C&W he-said-she-said jokey duet tradition with saccharine cowpunk. The second half of the CD fares better with original, moody takes from the Apples in Stereo and Cities. On the opposite end of the bell-abuse spectrum, consider Disney Channel Holiday (Walt Disney), a cash channel dialed to tweensters and soccer mom ticket scalpers: the disc kicks off with Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana drawling "Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree" — and it’s decent in a relentlessly upbeat, cheerleader-on-a-sugar-high way. Cyrus has an adorable, slightly hoarse, Southern-inflected voice perfect for whoops and cheers, which stands out alongside the punky power pop Jonas Brothers and bubblegum Lucas Grabeel.

SMOOTH OPERATORS Christmas goes down as smoothly with R&B vocal stylings as Chivas and dorm room blowouts. I have to say, the glittery synth and silky vocoder action — very K-Ci and Jojo — made Keith Sweat’s A Christmas of Love (Sweat Shop/Rhino) the best of the lot in the mail. Dude totally sweats the C-word: six of the nine tracks must remind us that it’s Christmas by their titles. But Mariah fans will find more listening fun here — and enjoy would-be heartthrob Sweat’s bad posture on the cover and inner sleeve — than on, say, the more trad, jazz standards treatment of the Isley Brothers’ I’ll Be Home for Christmas (Island Def Jam). The Isleys are in fine vocal form — and furs! — though producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis definitely didn’t cut back the melisma meter. Nonetheless, the biggest disappointment has to be It’s Christmas, Of Course (Shout Factory) with Darlene Love. The voice of Phil Spector classics like "(Christmas) Baby Please Come" attempts holiday numbers made famous by the Pretenders, Tom Petty, and XTC, though her robust belt doesn’t quite mesh with the uninspired vanilla rock-pop backing. Better is Patti LaBelle’s Miss Patti’s Christmas (Island Def Jam), which has busy elves Jam and Lewis giving LaBelle well-upholstered grooves with touches of glittered Steinway. Primo for the mom who must get down.

THE ODDS ON THE ENDS Is that all there is? I ended up glomming on to unexpected offerings that dive into the kitsch-flavored eggnog, like Homeless for the Holidaze, a self-released benefit CD for Seattle homeless charities from an Ensemble of Lonesome Fellas (ELF). You have to love the intentional bad taste of pairing a hobo rant next to a holiday version of "The Stripper" and their goof take on "Super Freak," retitled "Jesus Super Freak." Hey, camp and Christmas belong together, like raised lighters and teased locks in flames; hence, a little love to the quickie-looking hair band comp Monster Ballads Xmas (Razor and Tie). Nelson massacre "Jingle Bell Rock," but ya gotta appreciate Dokken applying every candy metal cliché in the book to "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," including screaming axes and a malevolent "Watch out!" as if the imaginary big guy were a refugee from Goblin. And then there’s the schlockiday Muzak and sleigh bell dysfunction of Wreck the Halls/Christmas Rock Records, sister label of Rockabye Baby!, the geniuses who dreamed up lullaby versions of Nine Inch Nails, etc. Green Day’s "Holiday" sounds downright crazed, yet the pomp of Metallica’s "Nothing Else Matters" off … And Christmas for All! actually works, and the holidays take on a nice absurd tinge with a nerve-jangling version of AC/DC’s "Big Balls." *

BUCKY SINISTER

Sat/1, 9:30 p.m., $5

Edinburgh Castle

950 Geary, SF

www.castlenews.com

For more music picks, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Osteria and Bacco Ristorante

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When all else fails, we go to our neighborhood Italian restaurant. And since we’re staying in the neighborhood for dinner — whatever neighborhood that might be — we can walk. This means we can drink as much as we want without tempting the after-dinner fates by getting behind the wheel, not that we would dream of doing such a thing. Also, we can pretend we’re in Italy. The Italians spend a lot of time walking through their beautiful cities, at least when not scooting about on their Vespas. They tend not to drink too much, either. Wine in Italy is food, and is to be enjoyed like other food: heartily, but not to excess.

While in recent weeks the vanguard of the food involved have settled on just-opened Spruce near Laurel Village, like pigeons descending on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, we fluttered to a threshold nearby on a mild autumn evening. It was that of Osteria, a graciously homey restaurant of a certain age where the locals go when they’re not in the mood for trends like squab. (Squab is the food-involved word for pigeon.) The interior, a drawing-room assembly of hand-painted ceramic tiles, wallpapers, striped upholstery, and carved wood columns, has a terra-cotta luminousness, while chef-owner Vahid Ghorbani’s menu consists of well-constructed old friends, including a number of veal dishes.

Since veal has been banished from our home kitchen, mostly on grounds of animal cruelty, I find myself powerfully drawn to it in restaurants. Perhaps this is hypocrisy or some other moral failing. Perhaps I should not order veal and enjoy it — but I do and I do, and then that’s enough, at least until the next time. Osteria’s veal parmesan ($18) consists of several flaps of meat slathered in a garlicky tomato sauce, with slices of cheese melted on top. The meat was tender and tasty enough, if rather beefy, and it occurred to me that if I were making this dish at home, I would use turkey scallops, and they would be just as good. Elsewhere on the plate: neat piles of quartered carrot sticks and trimmed green beans, along with a lone boiled new potato. All handsome in a faintly apologetic way. One of the Dutch masters could have done something attractive with this colorful group.

The eggplant parmesan ($13) was essentially the same dish, with virtue substituted for the veal. I will never cheer for eggplant, but if the bitter juices are salted out and the slices are bathed in a tasty sauce, I can look the other way — backward, perhaps, at the fine first courses. One, an artichoke heart ($9) filled with bay shrimp and dressed like a sundae with a basil vinaigrette, was substantial enough to serve as a light main course, even without the heart of palm flute to one side. The other, a spinach salad ($8) with roasted almonds and gorgonzola, was given a note of insinuation by a dark and handsome balsamic vinaigrette.

For dessert: mocha torte ($6), basically a slice of coffee ice cream cake. Or just watch the people come and go, young and old, in groups big and small, even a table of bears with what could be a cub. Almost like Noe Valley!

Funny you should ask. For years the best Italian restaurant in Noe Valley was Bacco Ristorante (which opened in 1993). Of course, for years the competition was thin. Lately it’s intensified, with the arrivals of Incanto, La Ciccia, Pescheria (all on outer Church), and Lupa (just around the corner.) But Bacco’s owners, Paolo Dominici and Vincenzo Cucco, haven’t been lazing on their laurels. They’ve picked up a Zagat rating, for one thing, and, for another, they’ve replaced the terra-cotta paint scheme with one of sage and butter. There’s also now a beautiful interior Old World arch.

It would be difficult to improve on the food. We inhaled the crostino ($9.95), a pair of sizable toast rounds spread with a butterlike cannellini puree, then layered with garlic-sautéed broccoli rabe and shavings of pecorino cheese. A salad of wine red roasted beets ($11.95) — interpolated with sections of pink grapefruit and daubs of goat cheese — vanished with only slightly more ceremony.

Garganelli ($17.95) — pennelike pasta, tossed with smoked sausage and porcini in a spicy tomato sauce — was a gratifying country dish. Just a bit more exotic was a plate of fregola ($19.95), a pebbly pasta (like a Sardinian version of Israeli couscous), sauced with a mix of mussels and scallops in a saffron tomato sauce. If you squinted, you could convince yourself this was a seafood risotto made with especially fat grains of rice.

Dessert: a flourless chocolate torte ($8) with crème anglaise, raspberries, and mint, the colors of the Italian flag and the pizza margherita. Crowd: mixed and younger than Osteria’s, with more overt peculiarities. Middle-aged man with much younger man in beret: Son? Boyfriend? Other thoughts?

Our server asked me if I wanted a second glass of pinot grigio, which was peculiar, since on the first round I’d ordered vermentino ($8.50). The vermentino hadn’t tasted like vermentino; it was too plump, like an oaked California chardonnay or maybe a domestic pinot grigio. I demurred on a second glass, wondering if it would be rude to ask if it was poured right from the bottle. At Bacco’s prices, which are far from low, this wouldn’t seem unreasonable. Although we weren’t at all tipsy, we walked home — one of life’s loveliest luxuries.

OSTERIA

Tues.–Sat., 5–9:30 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

3277 Sacramento, SF

(415) 771-5030

www.osteriasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Slightly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

BACCO RISTORANTE

Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

737 Diamond, SF

(415) 282-4969

www.baccosf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

SF underground

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› news@sfbg.com

The proposed Central Subway project has arrived at a critical point in its planning stage, with the public comment period for its environmental documents coming to a close Dec. 10 after a series of recent workshops and meetings.

Proponents see the project as an important next stage of the Third Street Light Rail Project and a vital link to Chinatown, which was made less accessible when the Embarcadero Freeway was torn down. But even some transit advocates question whether the project, with a price tag of $1.2–$1.7 billion, has enough bang for the buck to be worth it.

The Central Subway would realize the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s long-standing vision for a subway system that links to the northeast sector of the city, alleviates traffic problems, and improves connections with BART and Caltrain.

This phase of the project, which proposes to connect the South of Market area to Chinatown by underground rail by 2016, has received the fiscal green light — $1.2 billion in state and federal funding is already pledged.

Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, whose District 3 includes Chinatown, called the Central Subway "a very good and wise investment in San Francisco.

"Any investment in public transportation is a good thing," he added. "Is it expensive? Yes. But so were" many other transit projects.

Rose Pak of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, an influential force in San Francisco politics, insists that the Central Subway project is imperative to the Chinatown community.

"It’s long overdue," she told the Guardian. "Over 70 percent of our people rely exclusively on public transit. It’s very important to them. They don’t own cars, but they still need to get here for work, to see friends and family."

But is a 1.7-mile stretch of subway the right priority for and the right way to spend San Francisco’s scarce transportation money? Tom Radulovich, elected BART board member and executive director of Livable City, said making the Central Subway a top priority is a "big mistake."

"If everything else was well with Muni, this might be a good project," he told us. "But we need to take care of first things first."

Radulovich emphasized that improving the existing Muni service is a better step toward resolving San Francisco’s transit problems. He pointed out that using state and federal government money for other projects would go a lot further in improving the overall system. He said the Central Subway project is prematurely being made a priority.

"It’s like trying to build a master bedroom suite on top of a foundation that needs reinforcement. It’s nice, but it doesn’t make much sense," he said.

When asked about the possibility of revamping the Muni bus lines that presently serve Chinatown, Pak explained that the existing bus service already functions at capacity.

"Stockton is one of the busiest streets in San Francisco," she said. "Have you ever tried to ride a bus there at rush hour? It’s almost impossible."

In fact, the project’s Supplemental Environment Impact Report states that bus service already runs at three-minute frequencies or better for most of the Central Subway corridor. It also affirms that the area is operating at capacity, "particularly Stockton Street."

Pak added that the Central Subway would allow for shorter transit times and a "minimum disruption of surface streets."

After the Embarcadero Freeway was disabled by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the decision was made to remove and not replace it. That angered many Chinatown merchants, who became the base of support for the Central Subway project.

At first the group "didn’t have the muscle nor the power," Pak told us. "But our community rallied. We did massive letter writing and postcard writing."

Now challenging the project or raising concerns about its cost or feasibility — which some critics and media reports have done — means doing battle with Pak and the Chinese American community, a substantial voting block. So Mayor Gavin Newsom, Sup. Peskin, and other top elected officials support the project.

At the San Francisco Planning Commission meeting held Nov. 15, David Chiu, a commissioner on the Small Business Commission (and candidate to succeed Peskin as District 3 supervisor), said he was "really looking forward to this project moving forward" but would like to see more detail in the SEIR about the process for relocating small businesses.

Commissioner Michael Antonini "strongly advised" extending the subway as soon as possible to North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf and all the way to the Richmond, arguing the current terminus in Chinatown doesn’t make long-term sense. But few at the hearing argued the project shouldn’t be built.

According to the SEIR, traveling from Fourth Street and King to Chinatown on the Central Subway would cut up to 12.4 minutes from the journey in 2030 — from the bus time projection of 17 minutes to less than five minutes in one subway alignment alternative.

Four "Alignment Alternatives," or designs for how the subway will be built, are laid out in the SEIR, which was released for public review Oct. 17 and made the subject of three community workshops and a Planning Commission hearing.

Options range from enhanced bus service and no subway to one that includes some surface rail along Fourth Street (with a new station at Moscone Center) to an option with more of the route underground and Chinatown stations in various spots.

Once an alignment plan is chosen, the SFMTA will vote on the final design next year. And if things go smoothly, construction on the project could start in 2010 and service begin in 2016.

www.sfmta.com/cms/mcentral/centralover.htm

Question of intent

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› sarah@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BUYING ALLIES


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how exactly is the mayor holding Lennar accountable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PAPER TRAIL


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRIGGER TIME


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LENNAR BY THE NUMBERS

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

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

Maximum fine Lennar faces: $28.7 million

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parcel A acreage: 63

Acreage Lennar controls on Treasure Island: 508

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

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

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

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

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

Lennar’s stock’s 52-week high: $56.54

Feed our students well

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Not long ago a green vegetable was a rare and startling sight on a lunch tray at a San Francisco school. Carnival-style food was the standard, with corn dogs as a regular entrée, packaged apple turnovers as the "fruit" course, and fried potatoes as the staple vegetable.

School lunches have come a long way since 2003, when San Francisco Unified School District parent volunteers, staff, students, public health professionals, and other community supporters joined together to begin creating the school district’s Wellness Policy. Lunches are fresher, tastier, healthier, and leaner, and the SFUSD’s "no empty calories" policy has been a role model in the nationwide effort to improve school food.

But even after all of those changes, a high school group recently surveyed more than 2,000 of their peers and learned that students still complain that school food doesn’t taste fresh and costs too much, and some question how nutritious it is.

So a growing movement argues it’s time to take the next step: the greening of school meals. Surely a food-savvy, health-conscious, environmentally aware city like San Francisco, which is located in one of the world’s most fertile agricultural regions, should be feeding its kids fresh, local organic produce at every meal.

But there’s an obstacle, and it’s green too. Government reimbursement for a free school lunch is just $2.71, nearly half of which goes to pay for labor. Other fixed overhead eats up another large chunk, leaving just about $1 to pay for the meal itself, including 34¢ for the required milk.

No wonder it’s hard to respond to requests for fresher, healthier food and more of it. New salad bars placed in three schools as part of a pilot program address these concerns, offering students mixed greens and raw vegetables, several kinds of fresh fruit, and whole grain breads and muffins, in addition to the hot entrée. When the first salad bar was created last year at Balboa High School, the average number of students eating its cafeteria lunch every day increased 26 percent, with virtually all of the new diners low-income students.

But that $1 per meal won’t cover a salad bar at every school, which is the SFUSD’s goal. The cost of just the equipment for a salad bar — the bar itself, added refrigeration and sinks, a couple more tables — can run more than $10,000 per school, depending on how much work needs to be done to reconfigure the lunch line. Organic produce drives the meal cost higher too.

Unfortunately, the SFUSD doesn’t have that money. Because it’s currently left to the school district to provide meals, the SFUSD must require that the Student Nutrition Department budget break even or else cut into classroom funds to cover the deficit.

The good news is that thanks to grants from the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families and Mayor Gavin Newsom, salad bars are being started in 25 SFUSD schools this year, stocked with seasonal, local produce. Still, despite this additional funding, only about 25 percent of district students will have access to the salad bars. Social justice demands that every student have equal access to a healthier school meal.

Most city officials and the greater community probably aren’t even aware of the situation. It’s time to put the need to feed our children adequately on the radar of the whole community and ask officials to step in with funding to ensure that our children can eat well without sacrificing classroom resources to cover the cost of their food. The Public Education Enrichment Fund, better known as Proposition H, provides a growing pot of city money aimed at improving the schools, and part of it could be used to fund the opening of more salad bars, so more school kids can enjoy the benefits of fresh produce and whole grains.

Providing the money to put salad bars in every school would pay off in healthier kids and related positive effects. Better nutrition is linked with higher academic achievement, improved behavior, and other benefits.

Let’s become a city that commits to teaching our children well, feeding them well, and promoting a greener food system. *

Paula Jones and Caroline Grannan are members of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee.

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

Play “The Mist” for me

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By Maria Komodore

Warning: this post may contain spoilers — if you haven’t seen The Mist yet, read on with caution.

The Mist, director Frank Darabontʼs third collaboration with writer Stephen King (the other two being 1994ʼs The Shawshank Redemption and 1999ʼs The Green Mile), is a blend of horror cult films such as Them! (1954) and The Fly (1958, 1986) — among many, many others — and John Carpenterʼs The Fog. And thatʼs exactly why itʼs sooo good.

But in the case of The Mist, keeping with the cult extravaganzasʼ marvelously ridiculous plots, the dangerous mystery that the fog holds doesnʼt involve peopleʼs past sins returning to mercilessly haunt them down. That would be way too simple. Rather, the threat engulfed in the thick white cloud is a number of apocalyptic and pre-historic looking creatures that found their way into our world when scientific experiments to open up windows to different dimensions got out of control. In other words, fears about science and the ways it has put us in serious trouble, a subject perhaps more urgent today than ever, make their triumphant return.

the-mistx-large.jpg
Just a guess, but whatever they’re looking at probably ain’t too friendly.

Green City: Early puberty’s toxic causes and effects

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY As if growing up weren’t hard enough, a new report published by San Francisco’s Breast Cancer Fund says girls, particularly African American girls, are hitting puberty earlier — and it’s lasting longer.

Environmental toxins, obesity, and psychological stressors are all cited as possible reasons for the trend in the report written by Ithaca College professor Sandra Steingraber. It was commissioned about a year ago to put together what she calls "pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle."

Steingraber found that many girls now start to develop breasts as early as eight years old — two years earlier than they did a few decades ago. On average, however, girls begin menstruating only a few months earlier than they once did — making puberty a lengthier process.

The consequences of growing up too soon are serious — depression and anxiety, eating disorders, sexual objectification, and early drug and alcohol abuse are just a few.

"As a mother of a nine-year-old girl," Steingraber says, "I was really impressed by the consequences, not just the causes. The world is not a good place for early-maturing girls."

The implications are not just psychological. According to Steingraber’s report, menarche before age 12 raises breast cancer risk by 50 percent.

"The data is pretty ample linking the two," she says. "The earlier a girl gets her breasts, the wider the estrogen window." Longer lifetime exposure to estrogen increases the risk of developing many forms of breast cancer.

Steingraber points to obesity and endocrine-disrupting chemicals (toxins that interfere with the hormonal system) as major factors in the new puberty equation. Phthalates, bisphenol A, and dioxin are a few of the culprits often cited by environmental health advocates as contributors to earlier puberty onset. These chemicals are often found in cosmetics and personal care products like shampoo, hand lotion, and sunscreen. They are also used in pesticides.

Dr. Tracey Woodruff, associate professor of reproductive health and environment at UC San Francisco, says the link has been researched and discussed anecdotally in scientific circles for the past 10 years, with the last major report issued in 1997.

A big obstacle to keeping kids safe, Woodruff says, is that most consumer products are not required to undergo US Food and Drug Administration approval before they are sold to the public, nor are companies required to disclose all ingredients.

"How chemicals are governed is somewhat archaic," Woodruff says.

Environmental health activists agree. In 2002 a national coalition of nonprofit organizations launched the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, an initiative to educate the public and influence policy. Marisa Walker of the Breast Cancer Fund — a founding member organization — says manufacturers jump through big loopholes in federal law to hide ingredients by claiming that chemicals are trade secrets.

An Environmental Protection Agency–administered program to test new chemicals was created more than a decade ago, but progress has been slow at best. In June the EPA announced it was still seeking comment on a draft list of 73 pesticides to be evaluated under the new screening program. Chemicals in consumer products are not slated for review.

The program has received widespread criticism, and in September the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform issued a letter to the EPA expressing its concern: "EPA’s actions have been a continued failure to protect the American public from these chemicals." The seven-page letter also requests that the EPA take immediate action.

Meanwhile, Woodruff, Steingraber, and many environmental health advocates point to Europe and neighboring Canada as better models of protecting consumer health. Their policies have a heavier emphasis on precaution. Woodruff says prevention can mean the difference between responding to a change in hormone levels and coping with a birth defect.

"At what point is there enough information to take action?" Steingraber asks. "Chemicals are turning up in the urine of some of these girls, and while more research needs to be done, we can’t even do more research until the industry gives us more data. The time of saying, ‘Hmmm, that’s interesting,’ is over. It’s time to take action." *

Chez Maman

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Chez Maman might not be spreading her arms just for you, but it sure feels that way. You step inside, and you are snuggled. There is no one else in her world but you — except, of course, those other inconveniently needy people who are lined up at the long bar and packed into the windowside tables, hungry for a taste of Mom’s cooking and competing for her attention, damn them. Mom in this instance is French, a stoveside exponent of la France profonde, a disher-up of various Gallic comfort food, though plainly Mom has been hoofing it around the world lately too, since, to judge by the menu card, she seems to have discovered the quesadilla, among other New World wonders.

Mom’s place used to be Just for You, a celebrated daytime, mostly breakfast-and-lunch venue that also served dinner but decamped a few years ago to Dogpatch. Space was presumably an issue in that move; the vacated premises were tight even by the standards of tight premises, and the advent of Chez Maman (an offshoot of Plouf offshoot Chez Papa, at the corner; now there are several Chezs Mamans) did not cause those premises to expand. The restaurant’s minimal dimensions seem to be exactly those of yesteryear. We were shown to a window-display table one noontime, and I felt as if I were being stuffed into a coach seat on United Airlines. The chairs were handsome enough — some kind of brushed steel or aluminum, very au courant — but I would have been happier with less metallic chic and more space in which to draw breath.

Yet the closeness of the quarters is what it is: an inherited condition. And there is something to be said for knee-knocking proximity, at least if you’re with somebody you like. If you’re not, there’s always the long counter (which affords an excellent view of the conversation-piece kitchen) and, in clement weather, the sidewalk tables. It has long been my sense that the concept of clement weather is generously understood in France; the French will sit at outdoor tables in the Place de la Bastille, sipping espressos or Kronenbourgs from tall glasses, even as February snowflakes twirl gently down around them. If they need further warming, they light cigarettes and denounce the government.

No snowflakes on Potrero Hill, of course, at least not of the meteorological sort — and not many cigarettes now either — but at Chez Maman there are excellent panini, including those classic French versions, croques monsieur et madame. You can’t go wrong with these, but how about a panino of merguez ($9.50), the spicy North African lamb sausage, presented (with sautéed onions and Gruyère) on immaculately fresh bread in the form of a boomerang? I never tire of merguez, but I particularly liked Chez Maman’s version, which had the coarse, chewy texture of the house-made kind.

The merguez panino plate, like that of the tuna panino plate ($9.50), was prettied up with balsamic-dressed mesclun — beautiful and tasty if rather austere. To balance this small touch of abstemious greenery, we sprang for the herbed frites ($5), which arrived in a hefty stack with a ramekin of aioli on the side and lasted beyond the end of the panini despite our enthusiastic plunderings: forkfuls, fingerfuls. The tuna sandwich was good, just not quite as memorable as its merguez sibling: the fish was mashed with aioli into a kind of salad dotted by bits of roasted red pepper and given a gentle edge by some parmesan gratings, though no capers.

If you accept the quesadilla as legitimate in a French (or French-plus) bistro, then you will also welcome, beforehand, guacamole and chips ($7). The guac is nicely chunky and lightly kissed by lime juice, but the fresh-from-the-fryer chips are a revelation — almost like pastry. No one can eat just one, and I should know. I could easily have eaten the whole stack, like a bag of Ruffles, without any guacamole at all. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had to share.

The quesadillas are wittier than the run-of-the-mill sort. I was especially taken by a vegetarian version ($10.50) filled with a sauté of red and yellow bell peppers and zucchini, and smears of goat cheese. The quesadilla, duly grilled, was cut into quarters and stacked like a club sandwich, which made it easier to share, sharing being a recurrent motif at Chez Maman, perhaps because of the close quarters or the sense of maternal vigilance.

Across the way, my friend took a deep whiff of his niçoise salad ($13.50), as if he were warming his face over a steamy bowl of soup.

"It smells fishy," he said with satisfaction, "like the real thing." The salad included fresh grilled tuna, naturally, to contribute to this authenticating perfume, but also anchovy fillets, whose aroma is indispensable in certain preparations. I have had niçoise salads, even good niçoise salads, without anchovies, but anchovies are, without doubt, an improvement. (The rest of the salad was satisfyingly standard-issue: quarters of hard-boiled eggs and tomato, green beans, potatoes, and black olives.)

Perhaps the most genuinely French aspect of the Chez Maman experience is the service. As those who’ve visited France know, the French tend not to fawn over restaurant customers. Service is generally crisp and correct, and servers are pleasant while avoiding the noisome American tic of pretending to be your friend. Chez Maman’s service offers a version of this brisk continental experience, which is intensified by the crowding smallness of the place into a blend of efficiency and urgency. Plates clatter, people come and go, and Maman reminds us, gently but firmly, not to talk with our mouths full. *

CHEZ MAMAN POTRERO HILL

Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 10:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

1453 18th St., SF

(415) 824-7166

www.chezmamansf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Behind the Bey empire

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Editor’s Note: The Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaboration of local media outlets including the Guardian, is investigating the circumstances surrounding the Aug. 2 murder of Bailey, an Oakland journalist who was reporting on the financial dealings of the Bey family’s Your Black Muslim Bakery at the time he was killed. For more information, including audio, video, and updates on the case, click here.

Since 2003, Esperanza Johnson, a former key figure within Oakland’s Bey organization, and her husband, Antron Thurman, have acquired nearly $2 million worth of East Bay real estate through a string of controversial deals tainted with allegations of deceit.

In five cases those deals led to litigation. Johnson, of Antioch, who also goes by the name Noor Jehan Bey, has twice been accused of fraud. Court records indicate that one of those transactions involved falsified documents.

One sale involving Johnson, a licensed real estate broker, led to criminal charges: Alameda County prosecutors in 2006 convicted a Johnson associate on fraud charges stemming from a deal that cost an East Oakland couple their home.

A broad array of characters have tangled with Johnson and Thurman in court, including a disabled Berkeley bus porter forced from his family home, an Antioch couple now facing foreclosure, and East Bay Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that builds homes for the poor and struggling. Combined, they claim to have lost at least $1.77 million in property, cash and equity in the deals.

The revelations about Johnson and Thurman come as authorities scrutinize the extensive real estate dealings of the Bey family and their bankrupt business, Your Black Muslim Bakery, including Johnson’s role as the broker for an Oakland woman named Paulette Arbuckle who is attempting to buy the bakery’s San Pablo Avenue headquarters. Johnson bore four of the Bey family patriarch’s dozens of children.

Bakery CEO Yusuf Ali Bey IV, 21, jailed without bail on kidnapping and torture charges, also is charged with real estate fraud: prosecutors say he bought an Oakland property under a false identity.

And bankruptcy trustee Tevis Thompson, who is overseeing the liquidation of Your Black Muslim Bakery’s assets, has claimed in court papers that Bey IV transferred $2.28 million in bakery properties to his mother, Daulet Bey, in a bid to “defraud creditors.” The trustee has sued for those properties’ return.

Devaughndre Broussard, a 20-year-old bakery associate, is charged with the Aug. 2 shotgun slaying of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey as he walked to work in downtown Oakland. Police say Broussard made a confession – later recanted – that he killed Bailey because the journalist was working on a story about the bakery’s finances and bankruptcy case.

Johnson, whose state business registration was suspended more than a year ago for failure to pay taxes and who with Thurman has more than $1 million in state and federal tax liens recorded against them, didn’t return numerous telephone calls and emails, and didn’t answer the gate at her Antioch home on two recent occasions.

Thurman refused to speak to reporters who approached him recently in Oakland.

A Los Angeles real estate consultant who reviewed Johnson’s transactions for the Chauncey Bailey Project said the trustee and judge handling the bakery’s bankruptcy should examine Johnson’s record.

They “should be made aware that a realtor on a transaction which requires the trustee’s approval has a murky… background,” said Eric Forster.

The attorney for the court appointed bankruptcy trustee charged with liquidating the bakery said Johnson’s transaction history would be probed.

“Obviously it is of some concern to us and we’re looking into it,” Eric Nyberg, attorney for trustee Tevis Thompson, said when informed of the cases.

He also noted that Arbuckle may not, in the end, be the highest bidder for the bakery. A hearing on her offer is scheduled for Nov. 29. If the $899,999 bid of Johnson’s client, Arbuckle, is successful and Johnson is “entitled to receive the commission, then we really don’t have an issue with it,” Nyberg said.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Real Estate, Tom Pool, wouldn’t discuss the Johnson and Thurman transactions.

Machado

Markus Machado and Gail Mateo said that when they wanted to buy a newer and bigger home in 2005, they went to a real estate broker they thought they could trust: Esperanza Johnson.

A Compton native, Johnson became involved with the Bey organization, a spin-off of the Nation of Islam, at the age of 12, taking the name Noor Jehan Bey.

She’s returned to using the name Esperanza Johnson, though she’s been listed in judgments against her by banks and credit-card companies as Nellie Bey, Nuri Bey, Noojean Bey and Noor Jehan Esperanza, a review of records by the Chauncey Bailey Project shows. And, in 2005 testimony, she said she still occasionally uses the name Noor Jehan Bey.

Johnson had hired Machado, a graphic artist, to create flyers for her Signature One Mortgage and Real Estate.

In a recent interview at his lawyer’s office, Machado described her as warm and gregarious – at first, anyway. Machado said Johnson arranged what seemed like an incredible deal: the couple could sell their 50-year-old Pittsburg house and move into a spacious four-bedroom home in a verdant Antioch subdivision, an ideal place to raise their three children and grow old together.

Johnson promised they’d pay about $1,600 a month for the new home, only a little more than their mortgage at the time. Machado said Johnson even agreed to forgo her usual commissions “because we were like family.”

They said Johnson had told them their credit was poor, and talked them into selling their Pittsburg house to one of her employees, Araceli Moreno, for $350,000 while putting the new home and mortgage in Moreno’s name as well. They expected to refinance the loan in about a year, when Moreno would sign the house over to them.

It seemed perfect – until the bills arrived.

The payments were $2,700 a month and soon ballooned higher, they now say in court records. And then Johnson – who in sealing the deal had diverted almost $58,000 of equity from their old home to others, and had won large commissions for herself by getting them an unfavorable mortgage – stopped taking their calls, Machado said as his wife sat next to him weeping.

The couple had trouble making the payments almost immediately and Moreno began receiving calls from the mortgage company. She sued Machado and Mateo last year.

“The point of (Moreno’s) lawsuit was to get them to refinance to get my client’s name off the loan and for her to go ahead and salvage what of her credit picture she could,” said Moreno’s attorney, Richard G. Hyppa of Tracy.

The couple counter-sued in November 2006, naming Moreno and Johnson as defendants, claiming that Johnson defrauded them. They are now months behind on the payments and stressed to exhaustion.

“I don’t sleep. Gail doesn’t sleep,” Machado said. “I was very naive. We were led down this primrose path because I trusted (Johnson) implicitly.”

After paying off what they owed on the Pittsburg house, about $190,000 was left over that should have been used for the down payment on the Antioch house. But the suit alleges that Moreno used only $77,973 toward the down payment.

Meanwhile, court records say Johnson arranged for another $10,000 to be paid out to Moreno, and for someone named Harry Hawkins to get $45,830 as “repayment of loans.” Machado’s lawyer, Ken Koenen, said attempts to locate Hawkins have been fruitless.

The suit also claims Johnson structured the Antioch mortgage so monthly payments would increase dramatically after a year, and so Machado and Mateo would have to pay an $18,000 penalty in order to refinance – thereby earning her a much larger commission.

Machado and Mateo now are several months in arrears on the mortgage in Moreno’s name. Default notices have arrived at the house.

“It’s an extremely painful thing,” Machado said. “We have been robbed of our peace of mind. We have to make decisions about whether to put food in the refrigerator or gas in the car. We’ve not even sure we’re going to have a place to live.”

Johnson hasn’t responded to the couple’s lawsuit and will likely be subject to a default judgment, Koenen said.

Chicago D&P
Johnson and Thurman in 2004 acquired a Hercules home after a federal judge had ordered it frozen as an asset of an investment company, Chicago D&P, that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had accused of fraud.
The property was supposed to be sold to help pay back investors – reportedly including at least 30 active-duty Marines and several churches – which had been cheated out of millions through Chicago D&P’s pyramid schemes.
The daughter of the company’s president had bought the property years earlier using a straw purchaser – a friend with better credit – as a front, according to court records.
That friend had been trying to get her name off the title for some time, and the daughter’s attorney – Githaiga Ramsey, who also worked for Thurman and Johnson on another case – persuaded her to sign the house over to them. Records shows Ramsey offered the friend $20,500 to complete the transaction but that the payment was never made.
The transfer of the house occurred after U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer ordered the property frozen. Thurman then turned around and sold it a month later to one of the employees of his bail bond business, Jamie Bonilla, for $460,000. Johnson filed Bonilla’s loan application.
Most of that money appears to have eventually gone to pay mortgages against the property when Thurman and Johnson acquired it for free. But first, Thurman received $60,213 from the deal’s escrow; and Ramsey got $31,000.
It remains unclear who lived in the house after Bonilla bought it.
Stephen Anderson, the receiver representing Chicago D&P’s bilked investors, wrote in April 2005 that he believed Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, had lived there.
Other documents show Madeeah Bey – another mother to several of patriarch Yusuf Bey’s children – used it as her mailing address in two December 2004 real estate deals.
It’s also unclear whether Thurman and Johnson knew of the court order freezing the house when they took possession of it. But in February 2005 Breyer held Ramsey in contempt of court for defying his order.
Ramsey and Thurman both repaid the money they received from the escrow when Thurman sold the house to Bonilla.
Bonilla, within a few months, then sold the house for $625,000 – a profit of $211,690 from a property that the receiver had originally wanted to sell to help repay the defrauded investors.
Anderson said a long legal battle to regain title to the house would’ve been too costly.
“We made an economic decision,” he said. “The objective of the receiver is to return as much money as possible back to the investors, and it was not difficult to determine we were going to get more money” by taking the $91,000 from Thurman and Ramsey than by “trying to unscramble that whole mess.”
Ramsey, who surrendered his law license while facing disciplinary charges from an unrelated case, wouldn’t discuss this case or others in which he was involved with Johnson and Thurman.
“My God, am I never going to get away from this?” he said. “I’m not involved and I don’t want to be. I’m not in contact with these people anymore.”
Bonilla could not be located.
Habitat for Humanity house
Antron Thurman married a woman named Sharon Clements in December 1987. Records show they separated seven months later and eventually filed for a divorce that was never made final.

In early 2000, Clements, as a single mother, moved into a home on 105th Avenue in Oakland built by the low-income housing nonprofit East Bay Habitat for Humanity. It gave Clements a no-interest $112,000 loan with no down payment.

Clements died in April 2003, leaving no will. Usually either there’s a clear legal inheritance, or else the nonprofit passes the deed to someone qualified for low-income aid, executive director Janice Jensen said. But Clements’ son was still a minor.

Clements’ home stood vacant for three years while her estate was sorted out in Alameda County Probate Court.

Then, in mid-2006, Thurman argued he was entitled to the low-income property as Clements’ surviving spouse, records show – even as he listed his address as Johnson’s Antioch home, and other records showed that in the previous few years he had bought and sold in excess of $1 million in East Bay real estate.

“Frankly, I didn’t even know about Mr. Thurman,” Habitat’s Jensen said. “I had no idea who he was or that he even existed until the attorneys got involved. When we looked at the deed, she was the only signature, so she bought that home herself.”

Still, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Marshall L. Whitley awarded Thurman the house, which had restrictions in place to preserve its affordability for low income people.

Thurman then sold it back to Habitat for Humanity for the $13,500 in equity that had accrued during the three years Clements owned it.

Alana Conner, an attorney for Thurman at the time, said she couldn’t independently recall details of the case and declined to discuss it.

Stewart

Mitzie Peters befriended Brandy Stewart in 2001, studying the Bible with her eventual victim, court records say.

Peters persuaded the cash-strapped AC Transit bus driver to deed the home at 1565 77th Ave. – which Stewart had inherited from her mother, and in which she, her husband and her three children lived – into Peters name and use Peters’ credit to get an equity loan. Peters promised to return the deed after a few days, keeping $12,000 from the loan as a fee.

“She said that because she loved me so much, she would never, ever think about doing this for anyone else, but she would help me to get the house refinanced,” Stewart would later testify.

Stewart deeded the house to Peters on March 11, 2003. But rather than sticking to the deal, Peters drained the property of all equity and gave nothing to Stewart, court records show.

Peters couldn’t have conducted the transaction without Johnson and her family.

As Peters’ broker, Johnson submitted a series of loan applications reporting Peters’ income as increasingly higher until the bank accepted the deal; she also allegedly coached Stewart in writing to the title company and falsely claiming Peters was her cousin.

Johnson’s sister, Ruquayya Jasmine Pennix, prepared Peters’ tax returns to send to the loan company, showing self-employment income that Peters later admitted was bogus; it’s unclear if Pennix knew that at the time.

Another of Johnson’s sisters – Fatima Ismail, who worked in Johnson’s office – drew up a phony lease showing Peters had derived rental income from Stewart’s house, according to court records.

Three months after she took title to Stewart’s house, Peters sold it to one of Johnson’s sons, Amir Bey. Under oath, Amir Bey later admitted he was just a straw buyer for his mother.

When arrested and charged with unrelated public benefits fraud, perjury and grand theft in July 2004, Peters made bail with Thurman’s Sinbad’s Bail Bonds.

As investigators also began probing her real estate activities, Peters gifted her Hayward condo to Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, who sold it a month later for about $400,000.

Peters then lived with Nisa Bey in Pittsburg until going to prison. Because her bail had been secured with the condo, Thurman later asked a judge to exonerate the bail and return more than $50,000 – to Nisa Bey.

The Alameda County District Attorney’s office interviewed Johnson, Thurman, and their attorney, Githaiga Ramsey – who had represented Peters until just two months earlier, and who had just arranged the Chicago D&P deal for them – in September 2004.

“Johnson seemed evasive when questioned about irregularities in the loan and application process,” inspector Paul Wallace wrote in court papers.

But Johnson wasn’t charged.

“We didn’t think we could prove the case against her beyond a reasonable doubt,” Deputy District Attorney Alyce Sandbach said. “We didn’t have enough to make her on a case of fraud… of having made knowing misrepresentations.”

Among additional charges filed against Peters in November 2004 was a felony grand-theft count for equity and title to the Stewarts’ home; she pleaded no contest to that and 15 other, unrelated counts a year later, and was sentenced in February 2006.

The Stewarts got the $50,374.10 bail money Thurman had tried to direct to Nisa Bey. A judge in January ordered Peters to pay $486,083.90 in the Stewarts’ civil lawsuit, but they haven’t seen a dime, their lawyers say.

Amir Bey and Johnson tried to evict the Stewarts, court documents show, but backed off when the couple obtained free legal help.

The Stewarts then sued Johnson, Peters and Amir Bey; Johnson eventually offered to deed the house back to Stewart, but with the equity drained, the Stewarts couldn’t afford the higher mortgage payments.

A judge in September 2006 ordered Johnson and Amir Bey to pay the Stewarts $100,000 – $20,000 up front and $1,667 per month for 48 months.

Rebecca Saelao, the Stewarts’ attorney, said this civil judgment became a lien on the house, and was subordinated to massive mortgages Johnson and Amir Bey had taken on the property and eventually defaulted on. The house was sold at auction last year for $80,900, public records show.

The Stewarts got only about $5,000 from the sale of the home they’d lost. They no longer live in the Bay Area, and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Taylor

Wrapped in a thin, sea-green blanket, Donald Taylor lay in a narrow bed at a Stockton nursing home recently, his frail 61-year-old body ravaged by diabetes and hypertension. His wheelchair was parked at his bedside, a walker he wants to learn to use, a few feet away.

Taylor is broke and relies on Medi-Cal, the state insurance program for the indigent, to bankroll his care and board at the Elm Haven Care Center.

His room is dingy and, fluorescent-lit with peeling blue wallpaper and a television, foil wrapped around its rabbit-ear antennae, issuing forth static-filled sound. He spends his days “just doing nothing.”

He said he wonders what his life might be like now if he never encountered Antron Thurman. “I think about it quite often, but there’s nothing I can do… I think about how they took the house from me,” Taylor said haltingly in a soft, gravelly voice that contained little emotion.

In the 1950s Taylor’s parents bought a cozy two-bedroom home on a tree-shaded street in north Berkeley. He grew up there and lived there still as an adult, while working as a bus-station porter. When his parents died, he and his sister, Loretta Alexander, inherited the house; the mortgage was paid off.

In early 2001, according to interviews and court documents, stepbrother Frederick Myers Jr., approached the siblings with a plan: He would help them form a company to manage the house and another property they had inherited, an undeveloped Lake County parcel.

Myers asked them to transfer the two deeds to the new corporation, which he would helm for them. Taylor said he agreed at his sister’s urging, believing the three of them could profit from development of the Lake County parcel.

But Myers suddenly sold the Berkeley house to Thurman, pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars and disappeared, court documents say, catching Taylor and Alexander completely off guard.

“I felt I had been cheated,” Taylor said, adding that he believes Thurman and Myers worked in concert. “Fred Jr. took the house and sold it to (Thurman) and it’s been downhill ever since. He sold it out from underneath us.”

Myers could not be located. Thurman, asked if he remembered Taylor, refused to answer as he climbed into a Cadillac Escalade outside a home in the Oakland hills.

Alexander’s son, Tony Cole, expressed disgust at the way his mother and uncle were played. “That property slipped right out from underneath them,” he said in a phone interview. “They didn’t have the business sense to know what was going on.”

Taylor and Alexander in 2004 sued to reclaim the house. Myers never appeared in court, but Thurman – represented by Githaiga Ramsey – responded by filing his own suit, claiming he had legitimately bought the property for $374,388 and demanding that Taylor pay $1,500 in monthly rent or get out.

Taylor and Alexander eventually settled the case for $55,000; it took Thurman 10 months to pay them, court records indicate. Taylor’s attorney, Frederic Harvey, refused to discuss the case.

The two-story, beige stucco house with a large garage has steadily appreciated in value. Public records show Thurman sold it in 2004 to Madeeah Bey – the same relative who used the Chicago D&P house in Hercules as her address – for $520,000; she sold it for $850,000 less than a year later. The house is now assessed at $867,000.

Alexander died last year. Taylor lost most of his possessions including photos of his mother when he left the property.

“I’d like to tell him to go (screw) himself,” Taylor said of Thurman, his legs twitching quietly under the blanket.

University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students Lisa Pickoff-White, Robert Lewis, Nick Kusnetz, Vianna Risa Davila, Marnette Federis and Lucie Schwartz contributed to this story.

Thomas Peele and Josh Richman are staff writers for the Bay Area News Group; A.C. Thompson is a free-lance reporter working for New America Media and Bay Area News Group-East Bay; Bob Butler is a freelance reporter and president of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association.

Sail away

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Jason Lakis is proving to be his own best bandmate. The former frontperson of Bay Area country-slowcore outfit the Red Thread, which split this summer after three stellar LPs, has lately reemerged as Mist and Mast — a solo act, though you wouldn’t guess it. Mist’s eponymous debut, which Lakis released on his Oakland Petting Zoo label, finds the artist playing every part — and sounding sneakily like some well-rehearsed group. On "Green Eyes," say, a sweet spell of country-tinged and harmony-heavy college rock, the so-called group might be the young REM with the vocalist seeming to shy away from the mic. How like the young Michael Stipe.

Being your own full band is becoming ever easier, thanks to increasingly sophisticated home-recording options, but that doesn’t make it any less weird. So when I met recently with the bespectacled, enthusiastic songwriter over Kronenbourgs at Whiskey Thieves in the Tenderloin, these were some of the first things I asked: Is it strange making music by yourself after all that time in bands? Do you even know how to play all the instruments?

"I’m not great…. I could just barely get by," Lakis said, speaking of his virtuosity, not his emotions, and reminding me that he used to drum with the late-’90s Bay Area brooders Half Film. "And I’m a big fan of the lo-fi stuff and, like, old Kinks stuff. They were great. I hate when I hear bands that just play so perfectly." He admitted that it may be a "cop-out" to prefer imperfection as an aesthetic when your skill level doesn’t allow much else. But Lakis seems to come by that taste honestly, and he’s put it to valid use on the record. The Kinks comment struck me because on Mist and Mast I’d heard occasional wisps of an even more affably imprecise ’60s British pop act: Syd Barrett–era Pink Floyd. Though the album has little of Barrett’s essential psychedelia, Mist‘s acoustic chords tend toward early Britpop’s shambling, lullabylike quality. Certainly, Lakis was excited by the notion. "I’m a huge Floyd fan!" he exulted.

On Mist that ’60s brand of slight sloppiness, whether by necessity or intent, makes an intriguing match with the more modern fumbling of Lakis’s native slowcore. Textured, plunky guitars were a Red Thread centerpiece, and they remain prominent in the solo work. The album shows its devotion to the theme by opening with a casually dueling pair. And yet, absent the band, the guitars don’t fix on any standard indie arrangement. They’re as likely to be married to ELO-style organ ("Campfire Went Out") as rollicking folk-rock rhythms ("Eyes Adjust to the Dark").

All of this interdependence stems from a new songwriting style, which Lakis described as a gathering of discrete pieces. "It was the first group of songs where I kind of felt when I was writing like I could hear all the parts," he told me. These arrangements were originally intended for a band, but given that Lakis was conceiving all tracks in advance, the collaborative process that fueled earlier Red Thread work seemed doomed. "I’m not [someone] who can easily tell people, ‘Hey, can you play this?’" the songwriter confessed. The seemingly casual recording he’d been doing in his Oakland home — "I would have my door shut, and my dog would be going grink, grink, grink at the door, and I’d have to put foamcore and a blanket up against the door, and it would get superhot in there" — suddenly became the main event.

Writing and recording piecemeal over an extended period of time and without the keel of a band and a studio can make for a messy album. And Mist and Mast is, at minimum, eclectic. The obvious outlier, "New Water," would surely have seen its programmed beats cut by another label. Lakis was fully aware of this. Rather conveniently, another thing he decided to dismiss — along with being good at everything he played — was having it all make sense together. The Red Thread albums, in contrast, were "really samey-samey," he explained. He chose to be content with Mist and Mast being, as he put it, "far from a concept album."

Was that another friendly cop-out, like calling shoddy playing charming because you "like the first Sebadoh albums"? A little, sure. But Lakis seems to be risking more by distancing himself from any single scene. How much simpler would it have been to play up the latent twang and latch onto an alt-country tag or trim a few bad moods and dub the music psych-pop? Instead, Mist and Mast feels more like a recent history of the man who made it, a trade we should be glad to make. *

MIST AND MAST

With the Dying Californian and the Winks

Sat/17, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Green City: Solar solutions

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› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY When Berkeley mayor Tom Bates recently announced a creative city plan to financially assist homeowners who want to dress their roofs in solar panels, people across the Bay wondered if San Francisco could come up with something similar.

It’s happening. Sup. Gerardo Sandoval is working with the City Attorney’s Office on legislation to make solar panels more affordable for property owners. "The idea with my proposal is the city would use its very high credit rating to borrow money at almost zero cost," the District 11 supervisor said. That money would be turned over to citizens as low-interest loans to be paid back through a monthly assessment, similar to a property tax, with a very low interest rate. "It’s going to be a lot cheaper than what homeowners can do on their own."

A photovoltaic array for a typical home can cost the owner as much as $40,000, though state and federal incentives can reduce the cost by about $10,000. Systems are typically guaranteed by the manufacturers for 20 to 25 years, and the cost is recouped over time in reduced energy bills.

But the initial investment is high enough to discourage many would-be solar users. "The main challenge for many homeowners is the substantial upfront cost. It could easily cost you up to $50,000 to upgrade your home," Sandoval said of the bill for items like insulation, solar panels, and wind generators that can help modify a building to use less energy more efficiently.

Under this new financial program, the entire city would be declared a tax assessment district — similar to a Mello-Roos, or community benefit, district — with a resident opting in by deciding to buy solar panels. Both Berkeley and San Francisco are charter cities, which gives them the ability to tweak state laws, like the one that permits the creation of Mello-Roos districts, to meet local needs.

The plan to help private property owners has a number of public benefits. By generating most of their power on their roofs, homeowners will draw less juice from the grid, which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels (and is ultimately inefficient, as much energy is lost through transmission from distant power plants).

San Francisco is fast closing in on its 2012 deadline to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels, and a July Civil Grand Jury report found the city would have to triple its current reduction rate to meet that goal. Sandoval’s plan would help. According to a federal study, one kilowatt of solar electricity offsets about 217,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Additionally, the city is aiming to provide 31 megawatts of solar power capacity through Community Choice Aggregation, which Sandoval sees as part of his plan.

"Both programs are about organizing our city to get off the grid and get off fossil fuels," he said, adding that he hopes this financing model will expand to all renewable-energy and efficiency upgrades to homes and businesses.

The plan is still in its nascent stages, and a few administrative and legal questions remain.

It’s unclear which city department would administer the program, although San Francisco Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Tony Winnicker said, "We already have a framework to administer something like this," citing the management infrastructure of the city’s water and sewer systems. The Department of the Environment has also been suggested. Sandoval said, "There are a lot of different city agencies who see benefits of administering the program." He was clear that it should remain in the public sector, with the possible assistance of community-based nonprofits that understand the local needs of their neighborhoods.

Sandoval also sees his proposed program as a way to foster the right kind of industry in San Francisco. The volume of solar business could bring more manufacturing companies, and City College of San Francisco and other educational programs could partner with manufacturers to train consultants and installers.

Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar, a Los Gatos PV installer, expressed enthusiasm and support for the plan. "It’s really commendable that cities like San Francisco and Berkeley are trying to find ways to do this."

Sandoval hopes to see the program up and running within a year, and said, "If no one accuses me of conflict of interest, I’ll be among the first to sign up."

Fisher fails

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› news@sfbg.com

The crowd at El Rio, the Mission Street dive bar, was reaching capacity election night when Sup. Aaron Peskin climbed onto an unstable bar stool to announce a political victory that had been very much in doubt just a few weeks earlier.

“They said it could not be done. We drove a Hummer over Don Fisher!” Peskin said, referring to the Republican billionaire and downtown power broker who funded the fight against progressives in this election, as he has done repeatedly over the years.

Indeed, the big story of this election was the improbable triumph of environmentalists over car culture and grassroots activism over downtown’s money. The battleground was Muni reform measure Proposition A, which won handily, and the pro-parking Proposition H, which went down to resounding defeat.

It was, in some ways, exactly the sort of broad-based coalition building and community organizing that the progressives will need to help set the city’s agenda going into a year when control of the Board of Supervisors is up for grabs.

“I just felt it at El Rio — wow, people were jazzed,” said campaign consultant Jim Stearns, who directed the Yes on A–No on H campaign. “We brought in new energy and new people who will be the foot soldiers and field managers for the progressive supervisorial candidates in 2008.”

Maintaining the momentum won’t be simple: many of the people in El Rio that night will be on opposite sides next June, when Assemblymember Mark Leno challenges incumbent state senator Carole Migden, and they’ll have to put aside their differences just a few months later.

Downtown, while soundly defeated this time around, isn’t going to give up. And some parts of the winning coalition — Sup. Sean Elsbernd, for example, who helped with west-side voters, and the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), which helped bring more moderate voters into the fold — probably aren’t going to be on the progressive side in Nov. 2008.

But there’s no doubt the Yes on A–No on H campaign was a watershed moment. “I’ve never seen this kind of coalition between labor and environmentalists in the city,” Robert Haaland, a union activist who ran the field campaign, told us. “New relationships were built.”

During his victory speech, Peskin singled out the labor movement for high praise: “This would not have happened if it were not for our incredible brothers and sisters in the house of labor.” He also thanked the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and environmental groups — and agreed that the labor-environmental alliance was significant and unique. “This is the first time in the seven years that I’ve been on the Board of Supervisors where I have seen a true coalition between labor and the environmentalists,” he said.

It’s not clear what we can expect in 2008 from Mayor Gavin Newsom, whom the latest results show finishing with more than 70 percent of the vote, better than some of his own consultants predicted. Newsom endorsed Yes on A–No on H, but he did nothing to support those stands, instead focusing on defeating Question Time proposition E, which narrowly failed.

Will Newsom continue to pay fealty to the biggest losers of this election, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and Fisher, who funded No on A–Yes on H and became this year’s antienvironmentalism poster child?

Or will Newsom — who has said little of substance about his plans for 2008 — step to the front of the transit-first parade and try to drive a wedge in the labor-environmentalist-progressive coalition that achieved this election’s biggest come-from-behind victory?

 

MONEY AND PEOPLE

The Yes on A–No on H campaign was a striking combination of good ground work by volunteers committed to alternative transportation and solid fundraising that allowed for many mailers and a sophisticated voter identification, outreach, and turnout effort.

“We worked the Muni a lot in the last days, particularly in areas where we thought there were a lot of young people,” Stearns said.

Polls commissioned by the Yes on A–No on H campaign showed that Prop. H, which would have deregulated parking and attracted more cars downtown, was winning by 54–39 percent as of Aug. 30. By Oct. 25 that lead had narrowed to 40–41 percent, a trend that gave the campaign hope that a big final push would produce a solid margin of victory, particularly given that more detailed polling questions showed support dropped fast once voters were educated on the real potential impacts of the measure.

Prop. A was much closer throughout the race, particularly given that both daily newspapers and left-leaning Sups. Gerardo Sandoval and Jake McGoldrick opposed it and even the Green Party couldn’t reach consensus on an endorsement.

“This could have meant a lot of arrows from a lot of directions,” Stearns said.

Campaign leaders Peskin, Haaland, and Stearns were so worried about Prop. A being defeated — and about not having the money for a big final telephone canvas in the final days — that they decided to make last-minute appeals for money.

“I’ve been a nervous wreck about this,” Haaland said of the campaign on election night.

On the evening of Nov. 3, he placed an anxious call to Peskin, suggesting that the latter make an appeal for money to Clint Reilly, a real estate investor who has often helped fund progressive efforts.

Peskin agreed and asked Stearns to help him make the pitch — and the two men drove to Reilly’s Seacliff home at 10 p.m. on Nov. 3.

“Prop. A just struck me as a nice, decent, positive message,” Reilly told the Guardian at the election night party, which he attended with his wife, Janet Reilly, a former State Assembly candidate.

Sharing Peskin and the campaign’s concerns that Prop. A was in trouble, Reilly cut a check for $15,000, which was enough to keep the phone banks going and help give the measure a narrow margin of victory.

But the money alone wasn’t enough for this mostly volunteer-run campaign.

“The push we made on the last five days of this campaign was just incredible,” campaign manager Natasha Marsh told us. “We had close to 500 volunteers on that last four days.”

 

A DIFFERENT CITY

The campaign also developed an extensive list of potentially supportive absentee voters — fully half of them Chinese speaking — who were then contacted with targeted messages.

Rosa Vong-Chie, who coordinated the voter outreach effort, said the messages about climate change, clean air, and Fisher’s involvement worked well with English-language voters. Chinese speakers didn’t care as much about Fisher, so campaign workers talked to them about improving Muni service.

The absentee-voter drive (and the push among Chinese-language voters) was unusual for a progressive campaign — and the fact that Prop. A did so well among typically conservative absentee voters was a testament to the effort’s effectiveness.

Elsbernd, one of the most conservative members of the Board of Supervisors, crossed many of his political allies to support the Yes on A–No on H campaign, and his involvement helped win over west-side voters and demonstrated that environmentalism and support for transit shouldn’t be just progressive positions.

“It’s great for public transit riders. It reinforces that this is a transit-first city…. Public transit is not an east-side issue,” Elsbernd told us, adding that the election was also a victory for political honesty. “It shows that people saw through the campaign rhetoric.”

The Fisher-funded rhetoric relied on simplistic appeals to drivers’ desire for more parking and used deceptive antigovernment appeals, trying to capitalize on what he clearly thought was widespread disdain for the Board of Supervisors.

“The attacks against the board didn’t work,” Peskin said, noting that in election after election the supervisors have shown that they “have much longer coattails than the chief executive of San Francisco.”

“I think it’s a pretty thorough rejection of Don Fisher’s agenda. He was not able to fool the voters,” said Tom Radulovich, director of Livable City and a BART director, who was active in the campaign. “This was about transit and what’s best for downtown. We should be very proud as a city.”

 

NOW WHAT?

The day after the El Rio party, at the monthly Car Free Happy Hour — a gathering of alternative-transportation activists and planners — there was excited talk of the previous night’s electoral triumph, but it quickly turned to the question of what’s next.

After all, progressives proved they could win in a low-turnout election against a poll-tested, attractive-sounding, and well-funded campaign. And given that the number of signatures needed to qualify an initiative for the ballot is a percentage of the voters in the last mayor’s race, it suddenly seems easy to meet that standard.

Some of the ideas floated by the group include banning cars on a portion of Market Street, having voters endorse bus rapid-transit plans and other mechanisms for moving transit quicker, levying taxes on parking and other auto-related activities to better fund Muni, and exempting bike, transit, and pedestrian projects from detailed and costly environmental studies (known as level of service, or LOS, reform to transportation planners).

“There’s a lot of potential to move this forward,” Haaland said later. “We can talk about creating a real transit-justice coalition.”

There’s also a downside to the low turnout: downtown can more easily place measures on the ballot or launch recall drives against sitting supervisors, which would force progressives to spend time and money playing defense.

But overall, for an election that could have been a total train wreck for progressives, the high-profile victory and the new coalitions suggest that the movement is alive and well, despite Newsom’s reelection.

Bodhi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

It would be possible to enjoy a visit to Bodhi without eating anything at all, and this is not because the restaurant’s Vietnamese food is unworthy, but because the setting itself is so rich in allure that just sitting there (perhaps in the company of a good conversationalist, just to be on the safe side) is pleasure enough. Bodhi’s atmospheric magic is the magic of Europe’s public squares and has to do with architecture, artfulness, and the weaving of the private threads of human lives into a community fabric.

Food is central too, of course, in the casting of this enchantment. But let’s begin with the building, a gracious old brick structure that’s been subtly brought up to date with a good sandblasting and new windows, which are to a facade what new glasses are to a human face. Inside, the restaurant consists of two boxy, high-ceilinged dining rooms, connected by a grand passageway, like a squared-off proscenium arch, and the walls are hung with colorful abstract art. I have my doubts about abstract art, but I have even graver doubts about restaurants with no art at all on the walls. Art in public spaces, even public spaces devoted to activities other than art appreciation, isn’t a luxury and shouldn’t be considered discretionary. It’s an indispensable ingredient in the flavoring of mood, the temper in which people gather to eat.

Years ago, when a freeway viaduct still blighted the area, the space was occupied by a pan-Asian restaurant called the Window. That enterprise moved to Cathedral Hill and then became a Chinese restaurant. The viaduct, meanwhile, came a-tumblin’ down, and, in the vicinity of Valencia and Duboce, it was as if the sun were finally peeping out after years of sullen cloudiness. It didn’t hurt, either, that the public housing project across the street was demolished and rebuilt according to a more humane ethic. Inner Valencia still has something of the flavor of undiscovered country, but if Bodhi is a predictor, then the Valencia restaurant corridor could soon reach all the way to Market Street.

Bodhi’s food, unlike the Window’s, is pretty much straight Vietnamese, as that cuisine has come to be understood in this country, although there are a few little cross-cultural twists and turns here and there: spring rolls filled with Peking duck, for instance, or grilled beef and pineapple, in a brief curtsey toward Hawaii. A representative introduction to the kitchen’s style is Bodhi’s sampler ($15), a likable hodgepodge of nibbleables and noshables whose members include crispy rolls (stuffed with pork, taro root, carrots, and onions), summer rolls (filled with shrimp, cucumbers, and lettuce and presented as stubby cylinders, like nigiri), sugarcane shrimp (which look like tiny corn dogs), noodle patties, and a long berm of lemongrass grilled beef, suitable for scooping up with lettuce leaves.

After all that, you wouldn’t necessarily be panting after soup, though we liked the sweet corn soup with Dungeness crab meat ($5), a kind of egg-drop number with cameos by a couple of big stars. (Seasonality buffs will notice that corn and crab are an awkward combination; the first is a summertime treat, the second a holiday season delicacy. If there is overlap, it would have to fall about now, in midautumn.)

Satay fish ($13) attracted my attention not least because I wondered if we were walking into a disaster. Delicate fish don’t always like being skewered and don’t always take kindly to the harsh, dry heat of the grill. One foresaw crumblings, disintegrations. But the whitefish filets (of tilapia?) turned out to have been marinated in coconut curry and threaded carefully onto the skewers, and the result was a surprising intactness, with sly but distinct flavors.

More in the extrovert line was citrus chicken ($10), a low mountain range of boneless cutlets that had been breaded and fried until tender gold, then drizzled with an orange reduction, like a spicy-sweet syrup. White rice or cold rice noodles made adequate accompaniments, but you’re not likely to miss them if they’re not there.

At lunch the servings are, if anything, even more generous than those in the evening. I struggled through a rather vast plate of garlic noodles ($7.50) tossed with shreds of sautéed beef, while a green papaya salad ($6.50) — a formidable mound in its own right — was augmented by steamed shrimp, halved lengthwise. The papaya in this salad was crisper than what I have found to be usual and also dressed with a bolder, more acidic lime vinaigrette than is typically the case. Only the seafood combo ($8), a jumble of shrimp and calamari in a lively amber sauce, with green beans and zigzaggy tabs of carrot thrown in for color, was reasonable enough in size to finish without being incapacitated for the rest of the afternoon.

Bodhi, as a culinary experience, isn’t the match of a place like Dragonfly, which lifts Vietnamese cooking to a sublime level without doing violence to its basic character. But even the grandest restaurant is never entirely about food; a meal in a restaurant is a holistic interval whose meaning and value turn not merely on what is eaten but on whom it’s eaten with and in what setting. In this enveloping sense, Bodhi is unlike any other place I can think of on Valencia Street’s ever-longer restaurant row; it’s the sort of place you go to when you want to keep talking to whomever you’re with long after the last platter has been cleared and the conversation has turned to the subject of art, abstract art, perhaps, pros and cons — cons first, please! *

BODHI

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–11:30 p.m.; Sun., noon–10 p.m.

211 Valencia, SF

(415) 626-7750

www.bodhisf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Carbon indulgences

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Airlines from Virgin Blue to Quantas have been touting new ecofriendly programs under which passengers paralyzed by enviroguilt over all of those jet-fueled carbon dioxide emissions can pay an extra carbon offset fee for tickets. The money these passengers pay — sometimes as little as $1 — is supposed to go to renewable energy or unspecified green causes and therefore make airline travel carbon neutral.

Carbon offset fees may be new, but the underlying notion goes back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church sold wealthy people indulgences to offset the spiritual cost of their sins and assure a place for them in heaven. And yet at least the kids in 1380 knew that indulgences were bullshit. Geoffrey Chaucer’s classic work The Canterbury Tales, written in the late 1300s, makes fun of the thoroughly corrupt pardoner character, a bombastic weirdo who constantly tries to sell everybody official-looking papers that would pardon them for their sins. Chaucer was just one of many thinkers at the time who criticized the idea that any sin can be forgiven with a little gold.

Polluting the environment isn’t a sin in the Christian sense, and yet carbon offset fees are clearly indulgences for a modern, scientific age.

I don’t mean to say that money doesn’t help ecocauses. But the problem is far more complicated than we want to believe. Our planet is in such sorry shape partly because humans are trying to better themselves. China is industrializing in order to make its citizens richer, but last week the Chinese National Population and Family Planning Commission published a report showing that environmental pollution from coal mining has caused the incidence of birth defects to jump 40 percent in the past six years.

There’s no carbon offset price you could pay to fix that. Nor is there an easy way to prevent such disasters from happening in the future if most of the world agrees that industrialization is the road to wealth. Do we use our carbon indulgence money to fund Chinese populations’ return to preindustrial life, thus dooming that nation to a second-class economic status? Perhaps we could use our money to fund education that teaches Chinese kids about alternative energy. But what kind of energy will they use in their classrooms while waiting for scientists to invent something that combusts cleanly and renewably forever?

Preservationist Marc Ancrenaz and his colleagues get it right in a recent article for PloS Biology in which they argue that preserving biodiversity must go hand in hand with eradicating poverty. "Most traditional conservation efforts were typically designed to exclude human residents," Ancrenaz’s group writes. "This failure to consider the interests of local communities has resulted in a general lack of support for conservation and subsequent degradation of protected areas." In other words, if you don’t help the people in a region, it doesn’t matter how many carbon offsets you buy — the area will still suffer.

Ancrenaz discusses two novel preservation programs that incorporate community development in their biodiversity agendas: the Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Project in Borneo and the Tree Kangaroo Preservation Program in Papua New Guinea. Both programs train and hire locals as researchers who can help preserve the habitats of orangutans and tree kangaroos, respectively. I don’t want to offer programs like these as panaceas. Improperly used, they are no better than carbon indulgences. But at least they aim to address the deep connection between human poverty and environmental suffering. Even better would be programs that help locals develop new sources of wealth without requiring them to engage in logging or factory farming to earn money.

I’m not saying you should quit buying your carbon offsets, because maybe some of that money will make it into the right hands. But you should recognize your actions for what they are: guilt-inspired payouts that assuage your conscience rather than thoughtful remedies for problems that won’t be solved with indulgences alone. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who once paid a Linux sysadmin to forgive her for using Windows.

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.

Finfine Ethiopian Restaurant

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PREVIEW There’s only one thing better than a mimosa brunch: a mimosa brunch you get to in time to eat. Which is not what happened when my friend K. and I attended a morning birthday celebration in Berkeley on a recent Sunday morning. Yes, we got there in time to see our friends in their pajamas — and one particularly fabulous pair of car-shaped slippers — although, alas, no matching Underoos. And yes, we got there in time for both mimosas and fantastic Bloody Marys. But we completely missed the breakfast train, as everyone was already full and lazy by the time we got our asses across the bridge.

So when K. and I left the daytime slumber party, we were famished. Enter Finfiné, an Ethiopian restaurant we happened to pass on our rambling path (read: we were lost) back to the freeway. To be fair, we were so hungry that an Egg McMuffin might’ve satisfied us. But Finfiné was so much better than melted cheese product on microwaved eggs. The Ye-Tsom Beyaynetu vegetarian sampler came with six different dishes, including savory collard greens, a spicy red lentil stew, a garlicky green lentil salad, and a chickpea concoction resembling hearty hummus. And the Ye-Doro Tibs proved to be perfectly cooked, high-quality cubed chicken in a spicy, but not overwhelming, sauce.

Plus, the combination platter featured enough food to provide K. and me with nearly two meals apiece. Show me a brunch that does that.

FINFINÉ ETHIOPIAN RESTAURANT Mon. and Wed.–Sat., 5–10 p.m.; Sun., noon–10 p.m. 2556 Telegraph, Berk. (510) 883-0167, www.finfine.com

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.

Step it Up!

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Tomorrow! Go to Dolores Park at noon and for the National Day of Climate Change. Woo hoo!

March or ride in the parade of bikes and electric cars and other great, green stuff that’s going down to UN Plaza. Carole Migden, Aaron Peskin, Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi are going to be there, as well as mayoral candidates Quintin Mecke, Josh Wolf and Chicken John Rinaldi.

According to the press release, “UN plaza will be transformed into a carnival-like atmosphere complete with a Recycle That! art show filled with recycled and reclaimed art, the Sustainable Living Roadshow’s Conscious Carnival, a carbon-eating generator from the Chlorophyll Collective and smoothies made on a solar powered van. Participants will call for real political leadership on global warming, and will ask San Francisco’s political leaders to pledge to the following:

Put a moratorium on new coal and nuclear plants
Cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050
Create 5 million new green jobs conserving 20% of our energy by 2015
Get back on track to meet San Francisco’s Climate Action Plan

This is a national event, started by super-eco-friendly-guy Bill McKibben, but San Francisco’s event tomorrow is extra-special because we’re pushing an anti-nuke future, despite the kinder, gentler image that nuclear power plants have been getting lately.

Here’s a fun/gross fact: every year vehicles in San Francisco emit more than 16,000 tons of nitrous oxide (nastiness that makes ozone). The Mirant peaker power plants that everyone’s in a tizzy to shut down emit 92 tons.

Hmmm. The take-away = quit driving. Vote yes on Prop A!

Tinderbox

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› paulr@sfbg.com

For more than a decade, the king of the hill over in Bernal Heights, restaurant-wise, has been Liberty Café, one of those marvelous places that bloomed in the city’s neighborhoods after the 1989 earthquake. The quake, by damaging roads and bridges, made it more difficult for would-be suburban diners to get to the city center and its glittering array of possibilities; it also depressed the real estate market, so that a diaspora of young chefs could afford to open places of their own in the city’s many residential villages.

Given the flow of wealth into Bernal in recent years, it was probably inevitable that a pretender to Liberty Café’s crown would emerge — and now one has, without benefit of earthquake. The restaurant is called Tinderbox, a "freestyle bistro" (per the menu card) opened by Ryan Russell and chef Blair Warsham toward the end of the summer on an easterly, sloping stretch of Cortland Avenue. The snug space is about as un-Liberty as could be; it’s spare and modern rather than neo-quaint: the walls are covered with recycled cork, the ceilings hung with light boxes of frosted glass, and the tables topped with burnished copper. There’s even a private dining room of sorts, a cozy nook (up a half flight of stairs) that resembles the captain’s mess on some clipper ship of yesteryear.

Warsham’s food is also wildly un-Liberty-like. While both kitchens bow to the gods of the local and sustainable, Tinderbox’s ethos is one of bold innovation. Warsham stops short of festooning his dishes with foams and gelées but isn’t at all shy about unlikely combinations — most of which (to perfect our theme of unlikeliness) work.

From the get-go, you are given notice of the restaurant’s bent for artful eccentricity. A basket of bread? Forget it: Your server brings you instead some popcorn, basted with a Thai-ish blend of coconut red curry, lemongrass, and galangal. You are a little wary at first but are quickly won over; the basket is soon emptied, and the server brings you another. (Extreme traditionalists will note that there is bread on the premises, and the staff will probably bring you some if you ask for it or your children insist.)

The menu offers a la carte and prix fixe options, but the latter — $35 for any appetizer, any main course, and any dessert or a glass of house wine — is too good a deal to pass up. The only excluded items are the ribeye steak, T-box tasting (a kind of appetizer sampler), and the lasagnette, a loose sandwich of saffron-chervil pasta leaves plumped out with either sautéed calamari ($15) or zucchini ($13) and dressed with a habit-forming sauce of fresh paprika pepper.

Some of the dishes, it must be said, are exemplars of austere virtue: a trio of whole grilled sardines ($11), say, on a bed of white-bean purée. Preserved Meyer lemon and thyme were said to lurk elsewhere on the plate, but what we noticed was the glistening plumpness of the fish, and that was what mattered. A rabbit hot pocket ($10) wasn’t quite austere, maybe, in its envelope of gold-fried pastry but was otherwise familiar despite the substitution of slightly exotic rabbit meat for something more quotidian, such as chicken. The halved hot pocket was plated with a luxuriantly glossy salsa verde and pitted castelvetrano (i.e. green) olives whose saltiness helped balance the blandness of the underseasoned rabbit meat.

Beets and figs, together on the same plate? A nightmare scenario for the beet-and-fig-hater, but the combination ($9) — beet coins laid atop fig coins and drizzled with beet vinaigrette — turned out to be surprisingly tasty, with an unusual harmony between the sharp sweetness of the figs and the earthy richness of the beets. Was the walnut blue cheese popper, a knobbly golf ball like a leftover from a caterer’s tray at some holiday party, necessary, or just an attempt at comic relief?

The only high-invention dish I came away with doubts about was the grilled avocado cutlet ($17). This turned out to the pitted, peeled halves of a whole avocado, grilled to a light char and filled with lightly caramelized cucumber dice. On the other side of the plate sat a beautifully browned risotto cake whose inner layer consisted of cojita and avocado cream, which lent the cake some creamy weight but made only a tenuous connection to the cutlet itself. As for the cutlet: Why grill a ripe avocado? Perhaps the thinking was that, since the grill benefits many a vegetable — many a fruit too — it would benefit the avocado. But this calculation overlooked the law of unintended consequences. A ripe avocado is already soft and doesn’t need grilling to make it softer, and it has an appealing butteriness that isn’t enhanced by grill char, no matter how pretty such char might be to the eye. A main dish concocted from avocado is a wonderful idea, but this dish isn’t it; the chef is too much with us.

Desserts, on the other hand, tend toward the extraordinary. A trio of fresh-doughnut-like raspberry beignets ($7) was simplicity itself. But a cannolo ($7) dribbled forth almond cream inflected with black pepper, and was plated amid reflecting pools of strawberry and basil oils. And a Kaffir lime panna cotta ($7), presented in what might have been a dog’s water dish as conceived by some designer in Milan, was all the more amazing — an engulfing denseness of cream, a bright muted acidity like filtered sunshine — for being a last-minute replacement to the scheduled star, a basil version. The sole holdover detail was the little chunk of honeycomb on top — the golden king of that particular hill.

TINDERBOX

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

803 Cortland, SF

(415) 285-8269

www.tinderboxrestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Surprisingly not too noisy

Wheelchair accessible *

Consumer biotech

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION When will we tire of the endless scandals over bricking iPhones, RSI-causing Wiis, and PlayStation shootings? I think the time is coming soon, my friends. In fact, the whole consumer electronics craze is about to die off and give birth to a new home-tech phenomenon. I refer, of course, to the consumer biotech revolution that’s just on the horizon.

Consumer biotech isn’t a new idea. Home pregnancy tests are a form of consumer biotech, as are Viagra and Prozac. Many diabetics administer insulin using small computers that measure their blood sugar levels and administer appropriate doses when necessary. I call this stuff consumer biotech because it measures and alters biological states for the mass market. And when smart phones become as boring as dumb ones, the lust for cool new biotech will replace the lust for new game consoles. Here are a few ideas about what will happen when consumer biotech goes beyond medical devices and into the realm of entertainment.

DNA Crystal Ball Already people are jumping at the chance to get their genome sequenced using cheapo services like GeneTree.com. Meanwhile, scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have invented a biosensor for identifying viruses that’s the size of an attaché case. So it shouldn’t be long before a company develops handhelds that identify sections of your DNA that offer hints of your distant parentage as well as what kinds of characteristics you’re likely to develop as you age. Of course, nobody really cares about the science behind this crap — they just want to be told a cool story that predicts what will happen to them based on their allele configuration. Thus Mattel will offer the DNA Crystal Ball, a little computer that will spit out pseudoscientific "predictions" about you based on poorly researched genomics studies. If you have this or that allele, you might become an artist! Or you might be quick to anger. Your ancestors might have been Indian princesses or African warriors! Since the device will be sold purely "for entertainment," it won’t give you, for instance, valuable information about a predilection for breast cancer. But you’ll metastasize happily knowing you’ve got the "gene" for friendliness.

Clonies! Kids love Shrinky Dinks, the plastic toys you color and stick in the oven, shrinking them into hard little plastic ornaments. So why not do the same thing with tissue engineering? Using techniques already perfected by a bunch of Australian tissue artists from a lab called SymbioticA, kids will create wee "clonies," tiny versions of themselves grown from their own skin cells using tissue-engineering edifices. Just culture a bit of your skin and grow it in a petri dish while you build a little model of yourself out of the foamy edifice. Once you’ve got a few inches of skin, drape them on the edifice, let them grow for a few days, and presto! A tiny version of you, made of your own skin! You’ll get days of fun, and then you can dispose of the clonie in a handy biohazard container (sold separately). Try it with your dog, and your friends!

Gene Expression Jam Session Remember how cool Garage Band was back when people thought playing with computer networks was as fun as playing with cellular signaling mechanisms? Jim Munroe has predicted that in the future every kid will have an Easy-Bake Oven for growing new animals, but Gene Expression Jam Session will be way cooler. Mix and match the genes of your choice using an easy user interface and rewrite your biology on the spot. Want to glow green for the evening or sprout hair all over your body? How about growing an extra pair of arms on your torso? Gene Expression Jam Session will produce the genes you need to do it, enclose them in a nifty virus-shell vector for quick delivery to your DNA, and shoot ’em right into your arm for fast-acting fun! Once you’re sick of your newly engineered appearance, you can buy a plug-in that reverses the effects of your newly added genes or adds extra genes to make you look even wilder!

And don’t get me started on the consumer nanotech revolution. You haven’t truly lived until you’ve turned your pet goldfish into a golf ball. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has this weird growth on her head that won’t stop flashing the Google logo until she pays for a Jam Session upgrade.

Are high-rises green?

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY High-rises are popping up fast in San Francisco, altering the skyline from one month to the next. But are these giants environmentally friendly? Do they make San Francisco more green or less?

One of the major advantages of using tall buildings in city design is the potential to reduce suburban sprawl: building up instead of out lessens the demand for single-family homes, creates dense neighborhoods where cars aren’t needed, and allows for more open spaces to be preserved.

Additionally, the concentration of people in high-rise clusters encourages the creation of acceptable transit systems. "The high density of high-rise neighborhoods — whether residential, office, or mixed-use — creates the necessary population density to support efficient transit service, allowing people to take transit rather than drive," said Lisa M. Feldstein, a local affordable-housing consultant who grew up in a residential high-rise in New York City’s East Harlem. "The reason that bus service is poor in suburbs and rural areas is not that people in those areas don’t like transit. It’s that the population isn’t sufficiently dense to support a fast, frequent, and efficient transit system, so people can’t rely on it."

Density puts demands on transportation, but that doesn’t guarantee public transit use. When people working in city centers like San Francisco can’t afford to live there, that can create cross-commute situations that clog big-city roadways, which may be even more environmentally damaging than suburban-style development. In fact, San Franciscans drive to work alone more than they use public transportation to get there, according to a 2006 US Census Bureau study.

High-density residents tend to use fewer resources than their low-density counterparts. Because walls, pipes, and other materials are shared, it can take less energy, for example, to heat a high-rise unit than a single family home.

But high-rises use energy in ways that single-family homes don’t — for example, in thousands of elevator trips from top to bottom every day. According to a study found on the US Department of Energy’s Web site, elevators consume up to 10 percent of the total energy used to maintain tall buildings. Furthermore, these buildings are usually climate controlled (in part to counteract the heat created by their elevators), whereas opening and closing windows can more effectively regulate temperatures in single-family houses and low-rise units. High-rise buildings also include common areas that often leave lights burning 24 hours a day.

Not having private yards in high-rises reduces the water and the toxic chemicals used to maintain them and forces people into public spaces. But there is another environmental cost to this void, said Lisa Katz, a planner with Design, Community and Environment in Berkeley. "People living in high-rises have less connection to the land; for example, they can’t grow their own food," she said. Raising food sources in agricultural communities and exporting them to cities uses exorbitant amounts of energy in the form of fuel and packaging.

High-rises, however, have the potential to achieve the highest level of green building ratings, according to Maria Ayerdi, executive director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, which on Sept. 20 approved the proposal for the new Transbay Transit tower, which will be the tallest building on the West Coast. "In tall buildings there are creative efficiency, recycling, and energy-generating opportunities that may not be possible in smaller buildings," she said. In fact, several high-rises around the country have been built according to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification standards, which demand energy and resource efficiency.

But Calvin Welch, a local housing activist, said it is "virtually impossible to conceive a green-materials building of any sort" that would meet the seismic requirements of high-rises in San Francisco. These include the use of "heroic construction techniques" involving extraenforced foundations to build on "Bay Area mud," high-tinsel steel, which is packed with carbon and takes loads of energy to produce (often using coal or gas ovens), and thousands of gallons of diesel for the transportation of materials to the city center.

"This is one of the most disastrous building techniques of mankind," Welch said of high-rise housing, noting that "the environmental debt, even if compensated by solar panels, etc., is too great." *

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

PG&E dropping the dime

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IMG00101.jpg
Last bus to Oakland! The cell phone photographer who sent us this shot said the driver of the rented vans had been hired by PG&E to bus people to City Hall from the East Bay to speak against the peaker power plants

Who got a robo-call last night about the city’s plan for new power plants? Was there something about three new fossil fuel power plants “right in the middle of the city” on your answering machine when you got home?

There was on ours:

“These new plants will further reliance of fossil fuels, add to global warming, and cost up to $500 million. And they aren’t even needed because there’s a green alternative. If you would like to join our efforts to stop the SFPUC, please press 1 or if you’d like more information please press 2. This call was paid for by the Close It Coalition with the proud sponsorship of PG&E. Find out more on closeitcoalition.org.”

PG&E…you’re so tricky. Your press office never has time to return our calls for comment but you’re dialing up half the city as part of your bogus campaign for clean energy.

The SFPUC will be discussing the peakers tomorrow — Wednesday Oct. 31 — at 2:30 in Room 400 at City Hall. Maybe PG&E will bus in some more people to speak against the peakers like they did for the last PUC hearing on Oct. 23.

Our source for that tidbit said he asked the driver of the rented Enterprise vans who had hired him and the response was PG&E and the A. Philip Randolph Institute. We asked APRI’s executive director Guillermo Rodriguez if they bought the vans. He denied it, and said he has complete control over APRI’s two credit cards and neither had been employed for such a task.

Up until two years ago, Rodriguez was Senior Director of Public Affairs for….Holy shit! PG&E. Last year, APRI received $85,000 in grants from PG&E. I wonder what they’re doing with all that money?

The peaker problem

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San Francisco is finally moving forward on a plan to put four small electric power plants into operation, three of them in Southeast San Francisco. In theory, there’s merit to the idea: The plants would be owned by the city, and thus part of a future public-power infrastructure.

They came as a settlement in a lawsuit against William[S] Power Co., so they aren’t supposed to cost much. And city officials say that when the plants are operational, the smoke-belching Mirant power plant will shut down, eliminating a major source of pollution in the city’s most environmentally beleaguered region.

But the devil is in the details, and if the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the Board of Supervisors aren’t careful, this could turn out to be the project from hell.

The power plants are known as combustion turbines, or CTs. In effect, they’re just large jet engines. The city’s owned them since 2003, but is only now figuring out how to get them up and running.
It’s been a complicated process: Although the city paid no cash for the turbines, they need to be placed in a specially constructed facility, which needs special wiring and plumbing. The state was supposed to pay some of that cost, but now has backed down, leaving the city with an estimated $61.4 million tab.

The SFPUC’s solution: Cut a deal with a Japanese outfit called JPower, which has agreed to put up the cash to build the facility if it gets to run it and sell the power for the next 13 years (30 years for the turbine that will run at the airport) The actual terms of the contract remain secret – although the city’s Sunshine Ordinance clearly states that sole-source contracts like this one must be released to the public, the SFPUC hasn’t responded to our public-records request for the documents. Which doesn’t tend to instill confidence.

Then there’s the Mirant issue. Community activists have been trying to shut down the plant for years, but the state won’t allow it. State regulators insist that some generation capacity be sited in San Francisco, and they won’t allow the plant to be shut down unless there’s an alternative.

However, Mirant has a lucrative state contract to fulfill that capacity needs, and state officials have agreed in writing that if the CTs are on line, they will terminate the deal. That ought to give Mirant an economic incentive to turn off the switch – but the company hasn’t made any promises and remains very vague about its future plans.

The politics of the plant siting are complicated, too. There’s an Astroturf coalition, entirely sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric Company, that opposes the plants and is claiming that they will add more fossil-fuel generation and noxious fumes to the southeast. A nonprofit called the Brightline Defense Project is suing to stop the plants, on behalf of the A. Philip Randolph Institute – and that organization received $135,000 in funding from PG&E over the past three years, $85,000 of it in 2006, according to PG&E’s annual statement to the California Public Utilities Commission. PG&E doesn’t want the competition from another energy provider – and really, really doesn’t want the city to build power generation that could be used in an effort to create a municipal utility. So some of the most visible critics have little credibility.

On the other hand, some legitimate environmental justice advocates and some longtime residents of the neighborhood fear that the worst of all possible outcomes could happen – the CTs AND the Mirant plant could wind up operating at the same time. The CTs, also known as peakers, would generate less pollution that Mirant in part because they’re designed to be operated only a few hours a day, during peak times of electricity demand. But the state license actually allows each plant to be run as much as 11 hours a day. And JPower will be trying to recoup its money as fast as possible, and will have every incentive to keep the juice flowing.
The combined impact of three new fossil-fuel power plants, running at maximum capacity, and the exiting Mirant plant would be an unacceptable burden for southeast San Francisco – and the SFPUC and the supervisors have to do more than rely on Mirant’s vague statements to prevent that from happening.

Ideally, we’d prefer no new fossil-fuel plants in the city at all, and we’re not convinced that San Francisco even needs the peakers. Conservation, along with new solar, wind and tidal power, could easily fill the rather modest gap between what San Francisco has now and what it will need in a Mirant-free future. But that decision is in the hands of California Independent System Operator, which controls the grid, and the CAISO insists that Mirant will stay open unless the peakers are running. That agency needs to be reformed, and the state Legislature should take it up next session. The CAISO should be required to consider increased efficiency, conservation and alternative generation as a viable alternative to building and running fossil-fuel plants.

In the meantime, there’s a simple solution here: The SFPUC should refuse to give the peakers a green light unless the city controls the on-off switch. Specifically, the contract should limit the number of hours the turbines can operate – and must state specifically that they can never be turned on until Mirant is shut off for good.

In a September, 2007, environmental assessment, the SF Department of Public Health noted that “it’s imperative that the city … obtains an agreement from Mirant to secure closure of the [Potrero] plant before the final approval of the SFPUC to site the new CTs.” That may not be possible, since Mirant isn’t cooperating – but the city has every right to set rules about when the CTs can run.

It’s simple: When Mirant throws the off switch, and that plant is cold and dead forever, JPower and the city can turn the peakers on. Not one minute before.

Palencia

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Palencia so nicely fills such an obvious niche in the city’s restaurant universe that we are left only to wonder why it wasn’t filled sooner. The niche is white-linen or upmarket Filipino cuisine, and it’s an obvious one in the sense that the connection between the Philippines and the United States — the West Coast in particular — has been strong for more than a century. It’s at least as obvious in the sense that Filipino cooking, like Singaporean, is an interesting mishmash to begin with, an earthy yet worldly blend of Asian, tropical, and European influences that takes well to a bit of California-style styling.

The restaurant (a project of the Palencia family) opened over the summer on a — comparatively — quiet and leafy stretch of 17th Street in the Castro. The nearby buildings are mostly residential rather than commercial, and on an autumnal evening of early darkness you could easily walk right past Palencia. There is, as of yet, no street signage beyond a panel of frosted glass bearing the restaurant’s name, along with a sheaf of menus posted at the door. Restaurant rows do have their advantages, among them the slowing down of foot traffic as prospective patrons move from one threshold to the next, pondering menu cards and making sure not to miss any. But there is an exhilaration in finding a restaurant all on its own, as if it’s a secret.

Palencia’s interior design adds to the sense of elegant hush. A votive candle flickers on each table, and the restaurant’s butter-colored walls dance with suggestive shadows cast by these small brightnesses. Dark wood trim gives a hint of medieval flavor, while whimsical light fixtures that resemble woven baskets remind us that yes, we are still somewhere in the Castro early in the 21st century.

Chef Danelle Valenzuela’s food matches up quite gracefully with the atmospheric setting. If your experience of Filipino cooking has heretofore been limited to eating fancified lumpia at Pres a Vi or the various tasty but plain adobos ladled over white rice at New Filipinas, you’re likely to find that Palencia’s kitchen has caught just the right tone. The dishes appear to be, by and large, authentic, but they are carefully prepared and plated, with dashes of artful juxtaposition.

If you love lumpia (the plump little pot sticker–burrito hybrids) but suffer from fried-food anxiety, you might open with Palencia’s "fresh" version ($7.50 for two), which are almost like soft tacos: steamed crepes, about the size of hot dog buns, enveloping leaves of red leaf lettuce enveloping shrimp and shredded carrots and cabbage. The dipping sauce on the side looks like the spicy peanut kind but isn’t; it’s made of garlic and soy and has a viscosity like that of homemade mayo.

While I cherish soy sauce as a reliable fund of umami, I felt it played too prominent a role in the chicken adobo ($8), boneless thigh meat and potatoes stewed to aching tenderness in what was meant to be a lively bath of garlic, red pepper, vinegar, and bay leaf. The broth was tasty enough; it just tasted a bit too much of soy saltiness. But this small off note was struck on an early visit; when we returned some weeks later we found no such imbalance in any of the dishes.

The least fried seeming of the fried items is probably ukoy ($7.95), an array of shaggy-looking shrimp-and-vegetable fritters served with a mignonettelike dipping sauce whose vinegary sharpness helps cut the fat. Once you reach the main courses you’re largely past the perils of the deep fryer. Simmering is a large motif, even beyond the adobos; the tongue-twistingly named guinataang kalabasa at hipon ($11.25) is a Thai-like coconut-milk curry studded with prawns and chunks of kabocha squash, along with a shower of dark green Chinese long beans, like the remains of a splintered river raft. (Spanish speakers will notice that kalabasa is just a respelling of calabasa — "squash" — and of course the Philippines were a Spanish possession until the Spanish-American War of 1898.)

Also Thai-ish in tone is the BBQ chicken ($10.95) on a triad of skewers. The marinated flesh takes a nice blistering from the grill but remains juicy inside. For textural and flavor contrast the skewers are plated with a small heap of achara: threads of pickled carrot and papaya. We were offered white rice to go with this dish, asked for brown rice instead, and settled for garlic rice ($3.50). The garlic rice nonetheless turned out to be at least as brown as most brown rice, and quite a bit tastier. Scooped from its cantaloupe-size bowl, it made a nice bed for the chicken skewers and prawn curry alike and was quite good on its own.

Although in the matter of dessert I am now a subprime customer who as often as not is pleased to settle for some chamomile tea — or nothing at all — I still feel a slight thrill in proclaiming an excellent sweet. Palencia has one: it’s the sans rival ($8) and looks like a peanut butter sandwich sliced in half and sexily posed. In fact, the sandwich consists of two layers of cashew meringue, separated by a narrow stratum of vanilla buttercream. It’s unusual and irresistible; all it needs is a little color on the plate, a sprig of mint, a splash of berry coulis. A lump of vanilla ice cream, on the other hand — as accompanies the turón ($8), a pair of crisp-fried crepes stuffed with bananas and jackfruit — would be overkill, even rivalrous. *

PALENCIA

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 2–5 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5–10:30 p.m.

3870 17th St., SF

(415) 522-1888

www.palenciasf.com

Beer and wine

Moderately noisy

MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

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