Jane Kim

The return of Willie Brownism to the sunshine task force

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As an advocate for the passage of the  San Francisco sunshine ordinance and task force in the early 1990s, I felt obligated to take my first and only City Hall position and serve as a founding member of the task force. I served for l0 years and helped with many other good members to build the task force into a strong and respected agency  for helping citizens get access to records and meetings and hold city officials accountable for suppressing access.

The task force is the only place where citizens can file an access complaint without an attorney or a fee and force a city official, including the mayor, to come before the task force for questioning and a ruling on whether they had violated  sunshine laws, The task force lacked enforcement power, but it still annoyed of city officials, including Mayor Willie Brown.

In fact, Willie spent a good deal of time trying to kick me off the task force. He used one jolly  maneuver after another, even getting an agent to make a phony complaint against me for violating the ordinance with an email. (The complaint went nowhere.) I refused to budge and decided to stay on the task force until Willie left office—on the principle that that neither the mayor nor anybody else from City Hall could arbitrarily kick members off the task force. When Willie left office after two terms, I resigned with the hope that the Willie principle had been established.

The principle held, until last Thursday (May 17) when the board’s rules committee (Sup. Mark Farrell, Chair Jane Kim, and Sup. David Campos) brought Willie Brownism back to the task force with a vengeance. The committee moved to sabotage the task force by sacking or refusing to appoint four qualified candidates from three organizations who are mandated by the ordinance to choose representatives for the task force because of the organizations’ special open government  credentials. Their representatives served as experienced, knowledgeable members who were independent counters to nominees of supervisors who were often  promoting an anti-sunshine agenda. The committee asked the organizations to come up with more names. There was no explanation nor apology to the candidates nor to their organizations. It was a nasty slap at members and organizations that have served the task force well for years. And this arbitrary demand  will make  it virtually impossible for these organizations to come up with a “list of candidates” to run the supervisorial gauntlet.  Who wants to go before the supervisors on a list for a bout of public character assassination?

 Specifically, the committee:

+unanimously moved to sack the two incumbents (Allyson Washburn from the League of Women Voters) and Suzanne Manneh (California New Media.)  The League was mandated to name a representative because of its tradition and experience with good government and public access issues.  California New Media was mandated to name a member to insure there would always be a journalist of color on the task force.

+unanimously refused to seat two representatives from the Northern
California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the sponsor of the ordinance with a long tradition in open government and First Amendment issues.  One SPJ  mandated  representative was for a journalist (Doug Comstock, editor of the West of Twin Peaks Observer, one of the best neighborhood papers in town and a former chair of the task force.) The second mandated seat was for an attorney (Ben Rosenfeld.)

+tried to knock out incumbent Bruce Wolfe on motion of Farrell, but Wolfe survived on a 2-l vote.   

+voted unanimously to approve David Pilpel, a former task force member who is known by observers for delaying meetings with is  bursts of lengthy nitpicking on almost every item.   He then usually votes against citizen complaints and for protecting  city officials on the basis of spotting   “onerous” burdens caused by the complaint

+voted unanimously for four new persons to the task force while sacking  and refusing to appoint able members with experience and expertise without a word of thanks. The four new members are “a “a bunch of neophytes,” according Rick Knee, outgoing SPJ member for 10 years.

Knee, a former task force chair surveying the carnage,  said that the committee’s actions stemmed “partly from a desire  by some supervisors to sabotage the task force and the ordinance itself, and partly from a vendetta by certain supervisors after the task force found several months ago that the board violated local and state open meeting laws when it railroaded some last minute changes to a contract on the Park Merced development project without allowing sufficient time for public service review and comment.” He noted that the developer “had slipped in a 14-page package of amendments at the llth hour”  to get board approval.

Knee said  that the rules committee is recommending sacking two incumbents and apparently hopes to sack two more. Farrell wanted to push out a fifth but was outvoted by Kim and Campos.  All five candidates, he said,  “have done excellent work, each brought a unique perspective and, while we had our share of disagreements among ourselves, all shared a passion for open government and for making sure that everyone who came before us got a fair hearing.”

Hanley Chan, an outgoing task force member,  backed up Knee’s point in an email. He  wrote that “I spoke with Sup. David Chiu and he told me that the rest of the supervisors will not appoint any incumbent, because we defied the city attorney’s opinion (the Park Merced  case). “”You should have made a right decision. I was told by the city attorney that it was legal, my aides explained it to the task force and you should have made a better judgment.'”  Chan said that the rules committee ouster move  was “retribution on how we voted that day.”  Chan said that “Bruce Wolfe and all the task force members made a wonderful argument and stuck to their guns.” The task force vote was a  unanimous 8-0 vote.The point: defy the supervisors and city attorney and the boys and girls in the back room and  get blasted off   the task force, bang, bang, bang, bang. 

The committee choreographed the move smoothly.  Farrell as the heavy  would make the move. Kim would agree and facilitate as chair. Campos would go along reluctantly. The deputy city attorney would be supine through the process  even though the supervisors were breaking precedent and misinterpreting the ordinance.  Sunshine candidates and advocates in the audience were furious and emails have been crackling back and forth ever since.

Campos later told me that he went along because he could see he didn’t have the votes. He said the organization’s candidates “were eminently qualified,” that they should have been appointed, and that he would fight for them. He said he would ask Kim’s office to set the issue for hearing at the next rules meeting or call for a special meeting. Kim did not return calls for comment.

I asked Campos what the organizations should do. “They should stand by their candidates,” he said.

I concur. The Society of Professional Journalists,  the League of Women Voters, and California New Media and their open government allies should stand by their candidates, lobby for them with the rules committee and the full board, and get out the word about this attempted coup in the most important court of all, the court of public opinion. Make this an election issue with all incumbents and candidates.  Let public officials know there are serious consequences to supporting Willie Brownism on the sunshine task force, the first and best local task force of its kind in the country if not the world.

The good news is that the rules committee has demonstrated, with its sneak attack,  the value of the task force for citizens and open government and why it is a San Francisco institution that needs to be saved and strengthened.  All of this  illustrates once again my  favorite axiom of mine. In San Francisco, the public is generally safe, except when the mayor is in his office and the supervisors are in session. b3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Housing for the super rich approved, 8-3

Zelda Bronstein
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Housing for the super rich approved, 8-3

The progressive movement and the battle for housing balance and economic justice in San Francisco got walloped May 15 when eight supervisors sided with a developer who wants to build condos for the massively rich on the waterfront.

I watched it all, minus a few minutes while I was putting the kids to bed, all seven and a half hours of testimony and discussion, winding up with a series of pro-developer voters a little after midnight. It was stunning: Opponents of the project came out in droves, many of them seniors, others tenant activists and neighbors. Former City Attorney Louise Renne, who is by no means an anti-development type or any sort of economic radical, led off the arguments in favor of scrapping the environmental impact report and denying the conditional use permit that are needed for 8 Washington to move forward. They brought up so many points that by the end there was nothing more to say: This meets no housing need in San Francisco, further screws up the city’s own mandates for a mix of affordable and market-rate housing, caters to the top half of the top half of the 1 percent, is too tall and bulky for the site, offers the city too little in community benefits and is one of the great development scams of our time.

Then the other side spoke — the city planners who defended the EIR and, briefly, developer Simon Snellgrove. His supporters lined up — and almost all of them talked about the same thing: Construction jobs. I get it, we need construction jobs — but is that a justification for such a bad project? As Sup. David Chiu pointed out, “apartment construction is booming.  There are 22,000 units under construction and 50,000 more in the pipeline.”

Both sides were organized, but only one paid people to show up: At least five people seated in the front row, wearing pro-8 Washington stickers, confirmed that they’d been paid $100 each — in cash — to show up. They didn’t even speak, leaving once they realized that they were misled about the project. One source heard a construction worker say he knew nothing about the project and had been bused in from Sacramento.

And after hearing all of that, the supervisors did what they clearly had decided to do long before a word of testimony was uttered.

The vote to overturn the EIR went like this: favoring the developer were Supervisors Mark Farrell, Jane Kim, Eric Mar, Christina Olague, Malia Cohen, Carmen Chu, Sean Elsbernd and Scott Wiener. Opposing the project were Chiu, John Avalos and David Campos.

Approving the conditional use went along the same voting lines. Chiu couldn’t even get a continuance after arguing that there was no report from the budget analyst and no financial information about whether this is a good deal for the city.

That’s the lineup: Eight votes for the 1 percent. Three votes for the rest of us. I haven’t seen anything this bad in years.

Some fascinating information came out of the discussion. Chiu made clear that the developer doesn’t need the height-limit increase to make a profit off the deal. He estimated that the total sales revenue from the project would be around $470 million and construction costs about $177 million. That’s a huge profit margin, even if you add in another $25 million for upfront soft costs.

Snellgrove’s lawyer, Mary Murphy, tried to duck the financial issues, talking around in circles. Evenutally Chiu got Snellgrove to respond, and he said the costs would be higher and his profit would only be about $80 million. “The capital markets require a high return on these projects,” he said.
Still: $80 million is a lot of money. And while Snellgrove and his allies love to talk about the $11 million in affordable housing money for the city, that’s about 2.3 percent of his total revenue. Which doesn’t sound quite as juicy.

Chiu raised another good question: “Should a condo that sells for $5 million pay the same affordable housing fees as one that sells for $500,000?”
Mar, who is usually a strong progressive, was the big surprise of the night, not only voting the wrong way but teeing up softball questions for the city planners to make the project sound better. It was as if he was reading from the developer’s talking points.

In the end, he said he saw “a lot of benefits from this project,” but promised to work with the developer to advocate for “less bulk and less height.” Olague said the same thing.

But even if it’s a little smaller, this will still be a completely misalignment of housing priorities, a project entirely for the very rich. That’s not going to change.

If anything, they should push for more affordable housing money — a whole lot more. Because what we’re getting is enough for maybe 25 or 30 units, which means 80 percent of the new housing related to this project will be for multimillionaires and 20 percent for everyone else. Keep that pattern going — and there are few signs that it’s about to change — and imagine what this city will be like in 20 years.

It’s not over, not yet: The actual development agreement and the height-limit changes still have to come to the board early in June. And if the mayor signs off on it, opponents are talking serious about a ballot referendum that would be before the voters in November — just when Olague, Mar, Avalos, Campos, and Chiu will be up for re-election.

What the preservation vote says about the 2012 supervisors

Zelda Bronstein
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What the preservation vote says about the 2012 supervisors

UPDATE: Important update at the end of this story

What does it mean that a historic preservation law favored by developers and promoted by Sup. Scott Wiener passed the Board of Supervisors 8-3? Maybe nothing. Historic preservation is a strange poliltical issue, favored by some of the wealthy white homeowner types who love pretty buildings (and aren’t so good on other issues), and this thing was sold as a way to help low-income people and affordable housing. But the reality is that the Wiener measure will make it harder to declare historic districts, and thus will take away a tool that the left can use to stop uncontrolled commercial development. And remember: The affordable housing community wasn’t pushing this bill, and, for the most part, hasn’t had problems with historic preservation. The most progressive political club in the city, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, came out strongly against the measure and urged Sup. Christina Olague, a co-sponsor, to oppose it:

We are extremely troubled that you appear to be buying into the flawed, bogus and self-serving arguments by SPUR and other supporters of this legislation that historic preservation is classist and leads to gentrification, interferes with the production of affordable housing and is a tool of San Francisco’s elite.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

There was a way to address the issues of low-income people in historic districts without making it harder to block inappropropriate development, but Wiener’s bill went much further. And while I respect Scott Wiener and find him accessible and straightforward, and I agree with him on some issues, he isn’t someone whose basic agenda promotes the interests of tenants or low-income people. His supporters are much more among the landlord class and the downtown folks. The San Francisco Chronicle, which is a conservative paper on economic and development issues, loved the legislation.

So what happened when this got to the Board? Only three people — the ones the Chron calls “the stalwart left flank of the Board” — voted no.

John Avalos, David Campos and Eric Mar. They are now the solid left flank, the ones who can be counted on to do the right thing on almost every issue. Once upon a time, there were six solid left votes. Now there are three.

What does this mean for the other key issues coming up, including CPMC, 8 Washington, and the city budget? Maybe nothing. As I say, this issue is complicated. Olague told me, for example, that she’s really worried about working-class people who can’t afford to comply with the increased regulations that come with historic districts. Her vote doesn’t mean she’s dropped out of the progressive camp, or that she (or Sups. Jane Kim and David Chiu) can’t be counted on in the future. I really want to believe that this was just an aberration, a vote where I’ll look back in the fall and say: Okay, we disagreed on that one, but nobody’s perfect. 

Still, it’s kind of depressing: The dependable progressive vote is down to three.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: I didn’t know when I posted this that Olague had spoken to the Milk Club leadership after the club’s statement went out and the club has since issued a correction:

Due to a misunderstanding, Supervisor Christine Olague’s position on the Historic Preservation Commission’s critical role in the life of San Franicsco was misrepresented in our weekly newsletter. Supervisor Olague is looking into ways to help continue Historic District status for the Queer community, the Filipino community in the South of Market area, and the Japantown area. She is specifically looking for wording that would help these plans remain viable and welcomes any questions on her position and on her plan. Our apologies to the Supervisor for this unfortunate mistake.

Mayor Lee signs watered-down limits on SFPD spying

Sasha Cuttler
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Mayor Lee signs watered-down limits on SFPD spying

Flanked by members of Coalition for a Safe San Francisco, Police Chief Greg Suhr, and Sup. Jane Kim, Mayor Ed Lee today signed legislation that calls for San Francisco Police officers working with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to respect privacy rights in the California Constitution and local laws and calling for annual reports on SFPD-FBI activities.

Coalition members trumpeted what they called “historic civil rights legislation,” but this watered-down version of legislation that Lee vetoed last month doesn’t offer the same guarantees and codification of privacy principles as the previous version, which was approved on a 6-5 vote of the Board of Supervisors, whereas this new version won unanimous approval.

Its endorsement by the most conservative supervisors – those most deferential to the SFPD, politicians who routinely vote against even the most innocuous progressive legislation – is a sure indicator that the legislation doesn’t really do much to clips the wings of the SFPD, which initiated this controversy with a secret 2007 agreement with the FBI that federalized local officers.

That was precisely the objection to the initial legislation that were offered by Lee and Suhr, that it codified local privacy protections with specific limits on SFPD officers engaging in surveillance on citizens who had broken no laws, and that it subjected any future agreements with the FBI to approval by the Police Commission. The new legislation is far more vague.

“It is a step in the right direction, there’s no doubt it’s progress, but whether it’s real progress depends on the implementation,” says John Crew, an expert on police practices with the American Civil Liberties Union-Northern California, which unearthed the 2007 secret memo.

Crew has worked on this issue for years and has been troubled by the FBI’s claims that local laws don’t apply to federalized agents, with the SFPD’s resistance to allowing specific limits to be codified in local law, and with the deferential position Lee has taken to the SFPD. Crew said the strongest part of the new ordinance is the explicit statement that local officers can’t ignore local and state laws, but the details of how that’s applied weren’t really addressed in this new version.

“The question now is will there be a vigilant, meaningful, and sustained effort to implement this law and will there be sufficient transparency,” Crew said.

Two of the strongest advocates for the new law, Nasrina Bargzie of the Asian Law Caucus and Zahra Billoo of CAIR-SFBA, say the compromise version addressed their main issues and is worth celebrating, but they agree with Crew that its strength will ultimately depend on how it is implemented.

“We don’t see this as the end. We need to make sure it is implemented properly,” Billoo said, calling it a “watered down version” of the stronger and more specific initial legislation.

For example, the legislation calls for annual reports on FBI-SFPD activities, but it doesn’t go into much detail on what those reports will include.

“Part of what we’re going to do is communicate with the stakeholders about what we expect those reports to look like,” said Nasrina Bargzie, a coalition member from the Asian Law Caucus, noting that they would like to base them on the work that has been done in Portland, Ore., which has been a leader on the issue. “It’s going to require us to watch those trouble spots during implementation.”

While the vetoed legislation would have given the Police Commission more authority over future SFPD-FBI agreements, the signed version simply calls for public hearing before the Police Commission when there are new agreements. “Ultimately, it will come down to political will at the Police Commission” to enforce privacy protections, Crew said.

He called San Francisco “one of the strongest communities of concern about civil rights in the country,” and as long as that remains the case then this legislation could be an important vehicle for protecting civil rights. But the real question is what happens when there’s another terrorist scare and the JTTP decides civil liberties are secondary to beliefs that the police state and its surveillance efforts needs to be beefed up. Or when the police state decides to simply refuse to disclose is activities.

The two defining votes of 2012

Zelda Bronstein
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The two defining votes of 2012

The Board of Supervisors will be facing two votes in the next couple of months that will define this board, establish the extent of the mayor’s political clout — and potentially play a decisive role in the political futures of several board members.

Oh: They’ll also have a lasting impact on the future of this city.

I’m talking about 8 Washington and CPMC — one of them the most important vote on housing policy to come along in years, the other a profound decision that will change the face of the city and alter the health-care infrastructure for decades to come.

Both projects have cleared the Planning Commission, as expected. Neither can go forward without approval from a majority of the supervisors. And there will be intense downtown lobbying on both of them.

The 8 Washington project would create what developer Simon Snellgrove calls the most expensive condos ever built in San Francisco. A piece of waterfront property would become a gated community for the very, very rich, many of whom won’t even live here most of the time. If it’s approved, the economy won’t collapse, neighborhoods won’t be destroyed — but it will make a powerful statement about the city’s housing policy. The message: We build housing for the 1 percent. We are a city that caters only to one very tiny group of people. We are willing to let the needs of the few drive our policy over the needs of the many.

Face it: There is no shortage of housing for the people who will buy Snellgrove’s condos. There’s a severe shortage of housing for most of the people who actually work in San Francisco. And the city’s housing policy is so scewed up that it’s making things worse. That’s the message of 8 Washington.

Then there’s CPMC. California Pacific Medical Center wants to put a snazzy state-of-the art new medical center on Van Ness, which is all well and good. But the giant nonprofit Sutter Health, which operates CPMC, has been openly hostile to some of the city’s demands (for housing, transit and other environmental mitigiation) and the proposal that Mayor Ed Lee has signed off on is way out of balance. There’s not anything even close to a reasonable link between jobs and housing — which will impact the entire city. You bring in a lot of new workers and don’t help build enough housing for them and everyone’s rent goes up.

CPMC also wants to radically downsize St. Luke’s Hospital, the only full-service facility on the south side of town except for the overcrowded and overloaded SF General. Health care for a sizable part of the city will suffer.

This is a very big deal, and the Chamber of Commerce is pushing hard for the supes to approve it. A lot of labor and the entire affordable housing community is against it.

So put those two votes in front of a board where the progressive majority has been very shaky of late — and where Lee will be working hard to line up six votes — and you’ve got potential political dynamite. Supervisor John Avalos told me he has serious concerns about both projects. Sup. David Campos told me he feels the same way. Sup Eric Mar is unlikely to vote for 8 Washington and unlikely to oppose the health-care workers and the progressive leaders who want to block the CPMC deal and make Sutter come back with a better offer, but some elements of labor are pushing hard for 8 Washington and Mar is up for re-election in one of the city’s swing districts.

Sup. David Chiu is against 8 Washington. I’ve called Sups. Jane Kim and Christina Olague (who was not a fan of the project when she was on the Planning Commission) but they haven’t gotten back to me. Olague is running for re-election this fall in the city’s most progressive district, one that’s right on the edge of the CPMC project site; Kim’s district is on the other edge.

You can’t really count to six on either of these projects without getting Chiu and/or Kim and/or Olague. Chiu has no progressive opposition, but if he supports the CPMC deal, someone may decide to challenge him. If Olague supports either project, it will give her opponents plenty of fodder for the fall campaign (John Rizzo, who is running against her, told me he opposes both). If Olague opposes the two projects, it’s going to be much harder for anyone to run against her from the left since she will have demonstrated that she can stand up the mayor on tough issues.

I’ll let you know if I hear more.

 

 

 

Lee veto protects the SFPD’s ability to spy on you

Sasha Cuttler
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Lee veto protects the SFPD’s ability to spy on you

Mayor Ed Lee yesterday vetoed legislation that would have banned San Francisco Police Department officers working with the FBI from conducting covert surveillance on law-abiding citizens. Not terrorists, not criminals, not foreign spies, but people like you (well, people like you who are Muslim, protesters, visitors to certain websites, or people who otherwise have caught the attention of the FBI) who are not even suspected of criminal activity.

While Lee says he will support a so-called “consensus ordinance” introduced yesterday by Sup. Jane Kim, the sponsor of the vetoed measure, his veto letter makes clear that he wants San Francisco to reserve the right to spy on whoever the FBI wants to, echoing post-9/11 fear-mongering and right-wing bait-and-switch tactics while still trying to placate civil libertarians with his rhetoric.

“This ordinance intends to amend the Administrative code to require the San Francisco Police Department to either terminate a counterterrorism Memorandum of Understanding with the Federal Bureau of Investigation or materially restrict the interaction between the two law enforcement bodies,” his veto letter begins.

That MOU with the FBI is the one that the SFPD secretly entered into back in 2007 (which was exposed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union after a long public records court battle) that placed SFPD officers under FBI control without recognizing state and local privacy and civil rights restrictions. The resulting scandal caused the SFPD to apologize and work with the Police Commission on a general order clarifying that local officers must obey those restrictions, which Lee, Police Chief Greg Suhr, and some supervisors have maintained is good enough.

But six members of the Board of Supervisors didn’t agree with this “trust us” approach, noting that future chiefs and Police Commissioners can change the policy at any time, and saying protecting the privacy and civil rights of city residents and visitors is an important enough issue to be formally codified in local law.

John Crew, the police practices expert for the ACLU, has said that the only reason to oppose the ordinance is if officials want to reserve the right to spy on law-abiding citizens, and Lee seemed to signal as much by writing “the restrictions it places on our Police Department overly constrain their ability to protect our City from very real threats.” And he enumerated those “threats” by equating those being spied on for their political beliefs or because of their ethnicity with terrorists who want to blow us up.

“Recently, the United States Department of Homeland Security raised San Francisco’s risk rating – we are now considered the fourth-highest terrorism target risk in the nation along with cities like New York and Washington, DC. Protecting San Franciscans is the most important responsibility I have as Mayor. This goal, however, does not justify a trampling of constitutionally protected principles, and we have a government structure in place to ensure this dichotomy never materializes,” Lee wrote.

See what he did there? There was nothing in this measure that limited the FBI or SFPD’s ability to monitor suspected terrorists, which they’re already free to broadly define, particularly since 9/11 and the USA Patriot Act and other police state changes, including the very creation of the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security. But civil libertarians have been trying to hold the line and prevent the FBI – which has a long and sordid history of spying on law-abiding citizens and using that intel for political sabotage – from going after anyone who looks different or criticizes this country’s leaders or policies.

It’s great that Lee, who was a civil rights attorney decades ago, gives lip service to that concern and says he’s willing to work with the Coalition for a Safe San Francisco on legislation that would allow a hearing by the Police Commission of any future JOAs with the FBI after it’s been signed. But Kim’s statement that, “It’s a compromise that essentially will accomplish the same thing” just isn’t true, as the activists who pushed this tell us. The vetoed measure was already a compromise, with Kim making many amendments at the request of Suhr and repeatedly delaying final consideration of the measure so any other concerns could be addressed.

The JOA should have been suspended and rewritten, as the city of Portland, Oregon did when these same concerns were raised there, with no detriment to its relationship with the FBI. But even that request to suspend our JOA had already been removed from the watered down ordinance that Lee vetoed. “When we work together to create solutions that represent our shared values, we make San Francisco a safer, better City together,” Lee piously wrote, glossing over his unwillingness to work with the coalition before vetoing the measure. “He won’t even meet with civil rights groups on this,” Crew told me last week, as the Coalition was trying to talk with Lee to head off a veto.

Activists like Shahid Buttar, executive director of Bill of Rights Defense Committee and a member of the Coalition, are trying to look on the bright side and they say they’re happy that Lee now wants to work with activists on the issue. But the compromise and consensus are what’s been happening over the last several months – now, it’s simply Lee bowing to the SFPD rather than trying to regulate it and trying to save face on a bad veto.

As Buttar told us, “It’s disappointing that Mayor Lee would choose to overrule the voice of residents of the city and their representatives on the Board of Supervisors.”

Supervisors hope to halt foreclosures with new resolution

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John Avalos introduced a resolution today urging support for homeowners facing foreclosure in San Francisco. The resolution calls for several actions, including suspending all foreclosures until state and federal measures to protect homeowners are in place.

Sponsors of the resolution Avalos, David Chiu, Jane Kim, Eric Mar, and Christina Olague joined a coalition of community organizations to explain the resolution at a press conference.

The resolution would call for support of a statewide Homeowners Bill of Rights, a series of bills that would address predatory loans and robosigning, as well as California Attorney General Kamala Harris’s campaign for a statewide suspension on foreclosures in properties controled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It also “urges all city and county officials and departments to work proactively to ensure that San Francisco residents do not fall victim to unlawful foreclosure practices,” as Avalos explained.

Supervisors cited a report released in February by Assessor Phil Ting as one of the reasons for the resolution. The report found “irregularities” in 99 percent of foreclosure documents in San Francisco between 2009 and 2011, and “what appear to be one or more clear violations of the law” in 84 percent of cases. 

The resolution’s language also names “predatory banking practices that disproportionately targeted racial and ethnic minority communities, especially working class African Americans and Latinos” as an impetus for the resolution, noting that “from 2007 to 2008, Wells Fargo, and mortgage lenders it has since acquired, was 188 percent more likely to put African American borrowers and 117 percent more likely to put Latino borrowers into higher-cost, subprime loans.”

“What we see around foreclosures is that we have a systemic problem,” said Campos. Over 1,000 homes in San Francisco are currently in the process of foreclosure, 

Supervisor Kim connected the issue to another systemic problem affecting San Francisco, that has been a recent topic of discussion at City Hall: family flight. 

“We do have many low-income families that are actually homeowners in the city, primarily in the southeast sector. But how they afford to buy homes is by squeezing often two to three families in these homes in the southeast. So we’re talking about not just one household when we foreclose on a home, we’re often talking about two, three families with multiple youth and seniors,” said Kim.

“This is something that has been an important issue for many of our supervisors across the political spectrum, is how to retain families in San Francisco. Stopping foreclosure has to be a key part of that.” 

A few supervisors congratulated community organizers for focusing on the foreclosure crisis.

“I want to thank Occupy Bernal for not only shedding light on what’s happening in Bernal Heights, but realizing that the foreclosure crisis that we’re facing is something that involves all of us. Every single neighborhood,” said Campos.

The resolution was introduced to the Board of Supervisors March 20. It will be discussed further at the Land Use and Economic Development committee meeting April 2. 

If it eventually passes the Board of Supervisors, the resolution will be non-binding; a citywide foreclosure moratorium is likely not imminent. Yet many supporters expressed urgency and commitment for city action to address foreclosures. 

“When speaking with the sheriff about how we can stop evictions, what struck me most was he said that sometimes when we walk into these homes, we’ve found that people have committed suicide before the sheriffs even come in,” said Supervisor Kim. “This is a life and death issue for many of our residents.”

 

Supervisors ban illegal SFPD spying, but veto threat looms

Sasha Cuttler
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The Board of Supervisors today gave initial approval to legislation that would prevent the San Francisco Police Department from working with the FBI to spy on law-abiding citizens, but the 6-5 vote wouldn’t be enough to overcome a possible veto by Mayor Ed Lee, which would take eight votes.

SFPD officials have said the measure is unnecessary because Police Chief Greg Suhr and the Police Commission last year approved a Department General Order requiring officers to obey state and local privacy laws, which they say supercedes the MOU that the SFPD secretly signed with the FBI in 2007 placing local officers under federal control. That secret document was unearthed last year by the ACLU, causing a local furor.

But supervisors who support the measure and the broad coalition that is supporting it, ranging from the Asian Law Caucus to groups representing Muslims who have been targeted with federal surveillance since 9/11, say it is important to enshrine these protections in city law and they don’t understand the SFPD resistance to doing so.

“If this is that important to us, if we believe in these values, then it deserves to be codified in our laws,” said Sup. Jane Kim, the measure’s main sponsor. “I was shocked to discover our city entered into a secret agreement with the FBI,” said President David Chiu, adding that while he trusts Suhr to oppose illegal spying, this legislation was about ensuring successive chiefs and members of the Police Commission uphold that standard.

Sups. Scott Wiener, Malia Cohen, Sean Elsbernd, Mark Farrell, and Carmen Chu voted against the measure, but Wiener was the only one who tried to explain his vote, much to the disappointment of the large coalition that showed up to support the legislation.

“This has been a tough issue for me and I’ve struggled with it,” Wiener said, sharing Chiu’s outrage over the secret memo and his position on the government spying on citizens who aren’t suspected of a crime. “We have our own local policies that SFPD officers are required to comply with,” Wiener said. “The question for me is whether this needs to be legislated.”

The legislation is set to receive final approval at next week’s board meeting, after which Mayor Lee will have 10 days to sign it or issue the second veto of his run as mayor (the first, also controversial, was over legislation to close a loophole in the Health Care Security Ordinance that allows businesses to at the end of the year raid employee health savings accounts they set up to comply with city law requiring employee health coverage).

Before the vote, as he was leaving his monthly Question Time session with the board, I asked Lee about his position on the SFPD spying measure and he said, “I’ll be getting an update. The chief who I appointed has been working directly with the supervisor on this and he’ll be reporting to me all his efforts soon so I can make a determination. I’d like to have input for our Police Commission as well before announcing what we’re going to do about it.”

After the vote, I asked Kim about the threat of a veto and she said, “It’s definitely a concern and we as a community need to think about what our next steps are.” Activists said they plan to lobby supervisors who opposed the measure and the Mayor’s Office. “Talk to your communities, let them know the supervisors who supported it and the supervisors who didn’t support it,” Fairuz Abdullah, former president of the Bay Area Association of Muslim Lawyers, told the group of about two dozen. “This is a great showing, but it needs to continue.”

SFPD-FBI spying restrictions could face mayoral veto

Sasha Cuttler
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SFPD-FBI spying restrictions could face mayoral veto

If the San Francisco Police Department isn’t working with the FBI to secretly spy on law-abiding local residents – as a secret document released last year indicated they had the authority to do – then why are Police Chief Greg Suhr, Mayor Ed Lee, and others opposing legislation that would ban such surveillance?

That’s the question that longtime police policy expert John Crew of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is asking as he tries to get two more members of the Board of Supervisors to join the six current co-sponsors of the legislation, which the board will consider on Tuesday, in anticipation of having to override a mayoral veto.

“What’s the harm?” Crew told us. “There’s something that doesn’t add up here.”

As we reported at the time, the ACLU last year obtained a 2007 memorandum-of-understanding between the SFPD and the FBI establishing procedures for the Joint Terrorism Task Force, in which SFPD personnel would be under the command of the FBI, circumventing local and state restrictions on domestic surveillance of people who haven’t committed any crimes.

After the ensuring controversy and under pressure from members of the Police Commission, Police Chief Greg Suhr issued Bureau Order #2011-07 to clarify that SFPD personnel are bound by local and state privacy protections. “With this Bureau Order, the language of the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding no longer applies and SFPD personnel are bound by the provisions of the 2011 Order,” SFPD Public Information Officer Albie Esparza told us last month.

Suhr and Lee have each made public statements indicating that the new legislation – developed by the ACLU and carried by Sup. Jane Kim with five progressive supervisors as co-sponsors – is redundant and unnecessary. But Crew and the ACLU made a Sunshine Ordinance request for any modifications to the MOU or communications with the FBI indicating that SFPD’s contractual obligations no longer apply, and there were no such documents.

“When you talk about civil rights, you put it in writing,” Crew said. “This really doesn’t add up. We’re getting conflicting explanations. And the bottom line is this problem has been solved in Portland.”

When a similar issue arose in Portland, Oregon, civil libertarians pressured the city to withdraw from its MOU with the FBI and create a new one that includes restrictions on the surveillance of people who were not suspected of any crimes, but who may have been subjected to FBI attention because they were Muslims or because of their political beliefs. And Crew said it didn’t harm the relationship of the two policing agencies.

At an emotional hearing last week before the Public Safety Committee, a long string of representatives from groups that have been singled out for FBI surveillance that violated protections under the California Constitution – Muslims, anarchists, anti-war activists, Occupy demonstrators, immigrant groups, environmentalists, animal rights activists, etc. – urged supervisors to stand up for them. The legislation has a long and diverse list of organizational supporters.

Sup. Scott Wiener – one of two supervisors that Crew is hoping to win over – told us, “I agree that local surveillance rules should govern. But I’m not convinced that we need this legislation.”

Wiener said he still hasn’t made up his mind, and he plans to speak with Portland’s mayor before Tuesday’s hearing.

So why wouldn’t he support legislation that simply made his position official city policy? Wiener said he’s wary of telling SFPD how to do law enforcement and with “reducing the ability of the department to be flexible in the future.”

Crew said representatives of the Mayor’s Office, which did not respond to our calls for comment, have told him that Lee would defer to the SFPD’s determination of whether to sign the legislation. “That’s a pretty stunning claim,” Crew said, “which does not bode well in terms of reasonable civilian control of the SFPD for the next few years. I sure hope they back off that.”

Kim, who has a good relationship with the Mayor’s Office, also did not return calls for comment. But Crew was incredulous about why anyone who believes in civil liberties would oppose this legislation, telling us, “This is not a radical stand here.”

Sorting out the America’s Cup re-do

Zelda Bronstein
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Sorting out the America’s Cup re-do

I have to say this for Mayor Ed Lee: He’s not so stubborn or egotistical. He’s willing to listen. And when something really, really doesn’t make sense, he’s willing to let it slide.

Not like Gavin Newsom.

If Newsom were still the mayor (ick! gasp!), he’d be desperately trying to keep together the deal that gave five pieces of the waterfront to the sixth richest person on Earth for more than two-thirds of a century. He’d refuse to admit that maybe the promises of vast wealth accruing to the city from what’s really an untested event might be a little lower than projected. He’s be sucking up madly to Larry Ellison, promising him more and more city money if only His Larryness would bestow the greatness of his hotel, restaurant and condo manna upon us poor lowly San Franciscans.

The current mayor has a little more sense. But then, I don’t think Ed Lee spends much time dreaming about the Oval Office.

So now that Ellison’s team realized they weren’t going to be guaranteed enough of a profit on waterfront development and Lee realized that giving away any more of the store, or rushing this through any faster, was bad for the city, we have a deal that’s based on San Francisco hosting a sports event, not on extensive real-estate development on the waterfront. It’s better than it was, and I give the mayor credit for that.

But a few things are worth remembering:

The proverbial devil is in the proverbial details, and right now they aren’t so proverbial. There’s the minor matter of about $15 million worth of upgrades and repairs to the waterfront that’s needed for the race — and the city’s on the hook for it. Right now, it’s not clear where that money’s going to come from.

One option: The city could go back to giving Ellison some property or development rights. The Chron quotes Jennifer Matz, the mayor’s economic development director, saying that the rights to Seawall Lot 330 are still on the table (bad, bad idea). Stephanie Martin, spokesperson for Ellison’s operation, told me there are no long-term development plans included at all. Maybe the city will just pay cash from the General Fund to Ellison (seems unlikely; I’d love to watch that Budget and Finance Committee meeting.) Maybe the Port will sell revenue bonds and pay Ellison out of the projected new income from the event.

Or maybe some other deal that will be bad for the city and good for Larry will emerge, and we’ll all have to fight that one.

I realize that, if the attendance figures are anywhere near what’s projected, the city will still wind up millions of dollars to the good.

But I still don’t understand: Why are we paying Ellison to hold his race here? Yeah, it will bring tourists to the city — but as former Sup. Aaron Peskin points out, we don’t pay the Navy to bring Fleet Week and the Blue Angels to town. If anything, we should be charging these folks for the right to use so much public property for their own commercial gain. (Yes, the America’s Cup involves commercial gain. Ellison does it because he loves yacht racing and likes to win shit, but you don’t think that giant Oracle logo in 80 million pictures in newspapers and on TV isn’t worth a whole lot of money?)

Why isn’t a guy who counts as one of this generation’s great industrialists, with a fortune rivaling the Rockefellers and the Morgans and that gang, donating anything at all to San Francisco? Those old robber barons built libraries and museums and stuff for the benefit of the public. Come on, Larry — step up and help out here. Do the race, defend your Cup, then give something back to the city instead of asking the taxpayers to cover your tab.

PS: I read Randy Shaw’s attack (if that’s what this odd little piece was) on Aaron Peskin, and I wonder — what’s wrong with being a maverick who works from the outside to try to defend the city’s interests? I don’t always agree with Peskin (see: Home Depot) but I can tell you: There are a lot of people inside City Hall who are really, really happy that he’s out there doing what he’s doing. If nobody on the outside was taking on the America’s Cup deal, the city would absolutely be worse than it is. Peskin’s trying to save the city money. Why is that a bad thing?

Here’s what made me really laugh, though: Shaw criticizes Peskin for failing to support Malia Cohen and Jane Kim for supervisor, saying that he could have been mayor if he’d been working for candidates who ended up winning. Huh? Don’t progessives usuall go after pols who sell out their principles for political gain? If Peskin thought that Debra Walker and Tony Kelly would be better supervisors than Cohen and Kim, shouldn’t he be working for them instead of thinking about his own political future?

Odd where Randy Shaw is going these days.

 

 

What’s wrong with the America’s Cup deal? A lot

Zelda Bronstein
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What’s wrong with the America’s Cup deal? A lot

Let’s start out with a premise that even Larry Ellison’s minions have come to accept: The race is happening here. Too late now to move it to another city. Worst-case scenario, according to Stephen Barclay, the point person for the world’s sixth-richest man: “If we don’t meet those dates, the teams will be forced to relocate to other places around the bay.”

That’s right — the teams will relocate to other places around the bay. The host city will still, for all practical purposes, be San Francisco; the races will happen off SF’s waterfront (where the Coast Guard is willing to allow them and the conditions are right) and the rich tourists will stay here, not in Burlingame or Fremont.

If Ellison decides the city’s not giving him enough, he won’t put up $55 million to fix up some of the waterfront piers. The city may decide that a development deal of some sort with him makes economic sense. But it’s a real-estate deal at this point, not a deal for the race. At least, that’s what the Ellison team seems to be confirming.

And I fear that the real-estate deal that the Board of Supervisors Finance Committee sent forward yesterday, 2-1, is a bad deal for the city.

The terms are really complicated, and it makes my head hurt just trying to figure it all out — and still, the supes are expected to vote on the 120-plus-page document Feb. 28. Here’s what we do know, though:

The supervisors originally came to a deal with the America’s Cup Event Authority back in December. The concept was — and is — pretty straightforward, the same sort of deal the city has done (or, certainly, the Redevelopment Agency has done) many times in the past. In exchange for putting cash into renovating several piers, Ellison’s group would get long-term leases and development rights on the property. The idea: The city can’t afford to fix the piers. Ellison’s organization can. And once the property is renovated, the developer can make back that initial investment, and a profit, by building commercial space, condos and whatever else the Port decides to allow.

In a perfect world, San Francisco (and the state and the feds) would tax the hell out of people like Ellison, and there’d be public money to rebuild the waterfront as public open space, recreational facilities and the like. And wouldn’t that be utterly cool? Wouldn’t this city have the most awesome waterfront in the world?

But no: The only way the piers are going to anything but a place to park cars until they fall into the bay is if some private developer gets the rights to build something that I won’t like.

Supervisors Jane Kim and Mark Farrell, who don’t agree on a lot of things, both agreed with my basic analysis of the politics here: We shouldn’t let the excitement over the prospect of a boat race get in the way of analyzing this for what it is: A financing tool for the Port to get its infrastructure fixed up. Without a private investor, “they just don’t have the capacity to do that,” Kim told me.

So let’s just stipulate for a moment that this is the best, maybe the only way the city can restore the Port. Then it comes down to the real issue: Has the Mayor’s Office negotiated a good enough deal? Is San Francisco getting enough out of this? Or is everyone so hyper-buzzed about fancy carbon-fiber boats in the water (and I admit, they’re pretty cool) and free-spending tourists in the hotels and restaurants that we’re letting Mr. Ellison — who didn’t get so stinky rich by being a weak negotiator — walk away with most of the cookies?

Remember: Ellison’s not doing the city any favors. He’s only fixing up the piers that he will effectively own (as least for most of the rest of this century).

Back in December, the rough outlines looked like this: A corporation set up by Oracle, called the America’s Cup Event Authority, would put $55 million into repairing and renovating piers, then would get  66-year leases and development rights on piers 30-32, 26 and 28, as well as seawall lot 330, across the Embarcadero, which Ellison’s team wants to turn into more condos for rich people. If that’s not enough to pay for Ellison’s investment, Ellison’s heirs or successors get half the rent for the piers for another 15 years. That’s 81 years.

The original deal mandated that the city would collect a 1 percent fee on the re-sale of the new condos. It also had a requirement that Ellison share with the city any profits he made by flipping the long-term leases.

That’s a big deal, because almost nobody in the city actually holds onto development entitlements anymore. A developer wins the right to build an office building — and next week, he or she sells that right to somebody else. It’s almost certain that at some point, Ellison — whose sole goal here is going to be making a profit off city land — will decide that the best way to make money is to cash out. He’ll keep his 66-year leases for a few years, maybe lobby his way to approvals for office, condos, time-shares (gasp! yeah, they’ll do that if it’s legal) restaurants or whatever — then sell the remaining time on the leases, plus the development rights, to somebody else. And because he’s Larry Ellison, he’ll wind up making a nice tidy profit.

That used to be what happened with Port property (see: Pier 39) but lately, the Port’s gotten a bit wiser and has, in some cases, insisted that part of the profit from flipping a lease goes back to the city. In the original discussions, Ellison was going to have to pay the Port 15 percent of any net gains he made from the almost inevitable sale of the valuable leases.

But that’s gone now. After the board approved Newsom’s deal, the former mayor — who was always terrible at negotiation with the rich and powerful and always gave away the store — went back and monkeyed around with it. He and Sup. David Chiu insisted that the changes were just technical, not substantive enough to require a new board vote — but the current deal has no 15 percent cut for the Port, and the 1 percent levy on condo sales only applies after the second owner sells — which will be years down the road.

Then there’s the part where the city has to reimburse Ellison if the cost of renovating the piers exceeds what’s expected (oh, and we have to pay him 11 percent interest, which is about ten times what I get on my bank account; how about you?) There’s no cap on what the city might have to pay. And Ellison gets to develop a new marina.

And while Pier 29 is no longer a part of the deal, the city has to give Ellison $12 million — or rights to a pier to be named later. (Maybe Ellison figures that in a few years the people who opposed Pier 29 development will be out of office and he can convince the new mayor and supervisors to give Pier 29 back. It’s not legally excluded.)

Kim told me she’s going to insist that the final deal include a local-hire provision, which the rest of the board would be crazy not to support (and which Ellison, despite his company’s problems with local labor laws in the past, would be crazy not to accept).

But overall, Kim — who with Sup. Carmen Chu was part of the 2-1 majority sending the package to the full board — told me she thought the city got a good deal. “It took me a while,” she said. “But [Port Director] Monique Moyer convinced me that this was good for them.”

Sup. John Avalos, the dissenting vote on the Finance Committee, isn’t convinced. He’s got a long list of concerns, starting with the fact that he thinks the projected attendance and economic benefits are a bit delusional. “The figures seem farfetched,” he told me. “I’m seeing a lot of pumped up numbers. And those numbers drive whether this is a good deal for the city or not.”

He’d like to see the 1 percent rule apply to the second condo sale, not the third. He’d like to see the Port get 15 percent of the profits from any sale. And he’d like a cap on the reimbursements the city has to give to Ellison.

But here’s the problem: When the development agreement comes before the board, sitting as a Committee of the Whole Feb. 28, it will be hard to put any of that back in the agreement. This is a contract, and while the board can pass a resolution asking for more, in the end, it’s a matter of voting it up or down.

Vote yes and it’s done — more or less as is — although Kim says there will be another chance to make changes down the road, since the board and the Planning Commission will have to sign off on whatever type of development Ellison wants to do. The problem with that scenario? Ellison’s lawyers will wave this development agreement around like a Giants victory towel and proclaim that it binds the city and limits any ability to demand any more changes later. That’s how these people operate.)

Vote no and the ball goes back to Larry’s Court: His group can sit down with the Mayor’s Office and make some changes, or they can walk away (and build their boat sheds in …. where? Oakland? Foster City? Who’s got waterfront that can handle this?)

When the Finance Committee send the package to the full board, Avalos said, “we pretty much lost our ability to influence the agreement. Now we have to decide if we want to call [Ellison’s] bluff.”

PS: One of the lingering issues is whether the America’s Cup Organizing Committee can raise the $30 million-odd that is needed to make the numbers pencil out. If I were a rich person and Mark Buell, the ACOC point person, called me for money, here’s what I’d say:

How much is Larry Ellison contributing?

See, Ellison’s improvements on the waterfront aren’t charity. He’s looking to make a buck off everything he does. In past eras, the great robber baron capitalists would donate civic monuments — libraries and museums and stuff — and by any traditional standard of great wealth, Ellison ought to be writing a personal check for that $30 million. Or at least for some of it.

But so far, he hasn’t given a penny. The sixth richest man in the world isn’t actually donating anything to San Francisco. Yeah, he’s gracing us with his lordly presence, but cash? Nada.

Good luck with that one, Mark.

PPS: This whole concept that the city needs to fix the “crumbling” piers ought to be examined. First of all, nobody’s ever said that Pier 29 was in anything but fine shape. But beyond that, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission considers piers to be bay fill, and in the long term, wants San Francisco to get rid of some of them. “Maybe it’s a good thing if some of the piers fall into the bay,” former Sup. Aaron Peskin told me. “Then we’ll have more leeway with BCDC when we want to fix up some of the others.”

Research assistance by Royce Kurmelovs

Meet the new supervisor

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Meet the new supervisor

Christina Olague, the newest member of the Board of Supervisors, faces a difficult balancing act. She was appointed by Mayor Ed Lee, whom she supported as co-chair of the controversial “Run Ed Run” campaign, to fill the vacancy in District 5, an ultra-progressive district whose voters rejected Lee in favor of John Avalos by a 2-1 margin.

So now Olague faces the challenge of keeping her district happy while staying on good terms with the Mayor’s Office, all while running in her first campaign for elected office against what could be a large field of challengers scrutinizing her every vote and statement.

Olague has strong progressive activist credentials, from working with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition to protect low-income renters during the last dot-com boom to her more recent community organizing for the Senior Action Network. She co-chaired the 2003 campaign that established the city’s minimum wage and has been actively involved in such progressive organizations as the Milk Club, Transit Riders Union, and the short-lived San Francisco People’s Organization.

“One of the reasons many of us are so supportive of Christina is she is grounded in the issues of low-income San Franciscans,” said Gabriel Haaland, who works with SEIU Local 1021 and accompanied Olague to a recent interview at the Guardian office.

She also served two terms on the Planning Commission — appointed by Board of Supervisors then-President Matt Gonzalez in 2004 and reappointed by then-President Aaron Peskin in 2008 — where she was known for doing her homework on complicated land use issues and usually landing on the progressive side of divided votes.

“Coming from the Planning Commission, she can do a lot of good,” said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a supporter who has worked with Olague for 15 years. “We lost a lot of collective memory on land use issues,” he said, citing the expertise of Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin. “We do need that on the board. There is so much at stake in land use.”

Olague disappointed many progressives by co-chairing Progress for All, which was created by Chinatown power broker Rose Pak to push the deceptive “Run Ed Run” campaign that was widely criticized for its secrecy and other ethical violations. At the time, Olague told us she appreciated how Lee was willing to consider community input and she thought it was important for progressives to support him to maintain that open door policy.

In announcing his appointment of Olague, Lee said, “This is not about counting votes, it’s about what’s best for San Francisco and her district.” Olague also sounded that post-partisan theme, telling the crowd at her swearing-in, “I think this is an incredible time for our city and a time when we are coming together and moving past old political pigeonholes.”

With some big projects coming to the board and the working class being rapidly driven out of the city, progressives are hoping Olague will be a committed ally. There’s some concern, though, about her connections to Progress For All campaign’s secretive political consultant, Enrique Pearce.

Pearce has become a bit of a pariah in progressive circles for his shady campaign tactics on behalf of powerful players. In 2010, his Left Coast Communications got caught running an independent expenditure campaign partly funded by Willie Brown out of Pearce’s office, even though Sup. Jane Kim was both its beneficiary and his client — and that level of coordination is illegal. Last year, Pearce was hired by Pak to create the “Run Ed Run” campaign and write the hagiographic book, The Ed Lee Story, which also seemed to have some connections with Lee’s campaign. The Ethics Commission hasn’t fined Pearce for either incident, and he didn’t return a Guardian call for comment.

Olague told us not to worry. “He’s a friend…and I think it’s an exaggerated concern,” she said, confirming but minimizing his role so far. Yet she hired one of Pearce’s former employees, Jen Low, as one of her board aide. Olague’s other aides are Chris Durazo from South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN) and Dominica Henderson, formerly of the SF Housing Authority.

Debra Walker, a progressive activist who served on the Building Inspection Commission and has worked with Olague for decades, said she’s a reliable ally: “She’s from the progressive community and I have no equivocation about that.”

Olague makes no apologies for her alliances, saying that she is both independent and progressive and that she should be judged by her actions as a supervisor. “People will have to decide who I am based on how I vote,” she said, later adding, “I support the mayor and I’m not going to apologize for that.”

 

OLAGUE’S PRIORITIES

Olague was born in Merced in 1961 to a Mexican immigrant father who fixed farming equipment and a stay-at-home mother. She went to high school in Fresno and moved to the Bay Area in 1982. She attended San Francisco State University but had to drop out to help support her family, working at various stock brokerage firms in the Financial District. She later got a degree in liberal studies from California Institute of Integral Studies.

In 1992, Olague’s mother was in serious car accident that left her a quadriplegic, so Olague spent the next seven years caring for her. After her mother died, Olague left the financial services industry and became a community organizer for the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, battling the forces of gentrification and then-Mayor Brown and becoming an active player in the ascendant progressive movement.

But Olague never abided progressive orthodoxy. She backed Mark Leno over the more progressive Harry Britt in their 2002 Assembly race and backed Leno again in 2007 when he ran for state Senate against Carole Migden. She also voted for the Home Depot project on Bayshore Boulevard despite a progressive campaign against the project.

Olague worked with then-Sup. Chris Daly to win more community benefits and other concessions from developers of the Trinity Plaza and Rincon Tower projects, but now she is critical of Daly’s confrontational tactics. “Daly’s style isn’t what I agree with anymore,” Olague said, criticizing the deals that were cut on those projects to approve them with larger than required community benefits packages. “I think we romanticized what we got.”

So how does Olague plan to approach big development proposals, and is she willing to practice the brinksmanship that many progressives believe is necessary to win concessions? While she says her approach will be more conciliatory than Daly’s, she says the answer is still yes. “You push back, you make demands, and if you don’t think it’s going to benefit the city holistically, you just fucking say no,” Olague said.

Walker said Olague has proven she can stand up to pressure. “I think she’ll do as well as she did on the Planning Commission. She served as president and there is an enormous amount of pressure that is applied behind the scenes,” Walker said. “She’s already stood up to mayoral pressure on some issues.”

Yet even some of Olague’s strongest supporters say her dual — and perhaps dueling — loyalties to the Mayor’s Office and her progressive district are likely to be tested this year.

“It’ll be challenging for her to navigate,” Radulovich said. “The Mayor’s Office is going to say I want you to do X and Y, and it won’t always be progressive stuff, so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.”

But he said Olague’s land use expertise and progressive background will likely count for more than any bitter pills that she’s asked to swallow. “Sometimes, as a policy maker, you have to push the envelope and say we can get more,” he said. “It helps if you’re willing to say no to things and set boundaries.”

When we asked Olague to lay out her philosophy on dealing with land-use issues, she said that her approach will vary: “I have a very gray approach, project by project and neighborhood by neighborhood.”

Only a couple weeks into her new role, Olague said that she’s still getting a lay of the land: “I’m in information gathering mode, meeting with neighborhood groups to try to figure out what their issues are.”

But Olague said she understands that part of her job is making decisions that will disappoint some groups. For example, after Mayor Lee pledged to install bike lanes on Fell and Oak streets to connect the Panhandle to The Wiggle and lessen the danger to bicyclists, he recently stalled the project after motorists opposed the idea.

“I’m a transit-first person, for sure. I don’t even drive,” Olague said of her approach to that issue, which she has now begun to work on. “We’ll try to craft a solution, but then at some point you have to fall on one side or the other.”

 

THE “JOBS” FOCUS

One issue on which Olague’s core loyalities are likely to be tested is on the so-called “jobs” issue, which both Lee and Olague call their top priority. “Jobs and economic revitalization are very important,” she told us.

Progressives have begun to push back on Lee for valuing private sector job creation over all other priorities, such as workers’ rights, environmental safeguards, and public services. That came to a head on Jan. 26 at the Rules Committee hearing on Lee’s proposed charter amendment to delay legislation that might cost private sector jobs and require extra hearings before the Small Business Commission. Progressives and labor leaders slammed the proposal as unfair, divisive, unnecessary, and reminiscent of right-wing political tactics.

But when we interviewed Olague the next day, she was reluctant to criticize the measure on the record, even though it seemed so dead-on-arrival at the Board of Supervisors that Mayor Lee voluntarily withdrew it the next week.

Olague told us job creation is important, but she said it can’t squeeze out other priorities, such as protecting affordable rental housing.

“We always have to look at how the community will benefit from things. So if we want to incentivize for businesses, how do we also make it work for neighborhoods and for people so that we don’t end up with where we were in the Mission District in the ’90s?” she said.

Olague also said that she didn’t share Lee’s focus on jobs in the technology sector. “There’s a lot of talk of technology, and that’s fine and I’m not against that, and we can see how it works in the city. But at the same time, I’m concerned about folks who aren’t interested necessarily in working in technology. We need other types of jobs, so I think we shouldn’t let go of the small scale manufacturing idea.”

Local control of cops

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Local control of cops

news@sfbg.com

Sup. Jane Kim has introduced legislation to the Board of Supervisors calling for a re-examination of the San Francisco Police Department’s participation in some aspects of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which was created by the Federal Bureau of Investigations to do domestic surveillance.

The proposed ordinance would prohibit the SFPD from working with the JTTF to collect intelligence on individuals in the absence of criminal wrongdoing, which has been a concern of civil libertarians since last year when a secret memo revealed that local officers were under FBI command and not bound by local and state restrictions on such surveillance (see “Spies in blue,” 4/26/11).

Kim said the ordinance was necessary to ensure the “requirement of reasonable suspicion before we do any type of investigation of criminal activity. And we don’t base it on ethnic identification or religious practice as some of the members of the community have been experiencing the last couple of years.

“Our office is sponsoring this because many members of the Arab, Asian and the Muslim community worship in the district and own many small businesses,” she said.

Critics of the relationship between local and federal law enforcement agencies, facilitated through participation in the JTTF, have long raised concerns about racial profiling and unnecessary spying ordered at the federal level, and carried out by SFPD inspectors assigned full time to the task force.

Federal regulations governing FBI intelligence gathering are weaker than standards set by San Francisco and California’s Constitution. In 1990, the San Francisco Police Commission established rules requiring that intelligence-gathering involving any First Amendment activity be based on reasonable suspicion of significant criminal activity. Those rules reflect the California Constitutional requirement of an “articulable criminal predicate” before law enforcement agencies engage in intelligence-gathering activity.

However, because the SFPD inspectors assigned to the JTTF work under the direction of the FBI, the local regulation and control of law enforcement is effectively limited in JTTF investigations.

“It’s important that a clear prohibition against policing based on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion applies to all of our officers, all of the time,” said John Crew, police practices expert for the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is one of more than 30 civil rights and community organizations participating in the Coalition for Safe SF, which helped develop the proposed ordinance.

According to the coalition, current rules prevent the SFPD from barring its inspectors assigned to the JTTF from joining FBI agents in collecting intelligence on San Franciscans without any “particular factual predication.”

“The purpose of this legislation is to restore local control, civilian oversight, and transparency over the SFPD’s participation in FBI intelligence-gathering,” stated attorney Nasrina Bargzie of the Asian Law Caucus, which is part of the coalition.

The coalition was a major participant in the San Francisco Human Rights Commission hearing in 2010 on the issue of baseless spying and racial profiling in JTTF investigations. The result was a comprehensive report, endorsed by the Board of Supervisors last spring.

But in 2011, the ACLU and Asian Law Caucus learned that key protections for civil liberties — including civilian oversight of intelligence activity and safeguards to limit intrusive tactics — were thrown out the window and replaced by a secret Memorandum of Understanding with federal law enforcement in 2007.

Under the MOU, SFPD paid officers work out of the local FBI office. The secure nature of their work means they must seek federal permission to even talk to their superiors in the SFPD about their work, effectively removing them from the local chain of command. Despite mandated requirements on local law enforcement, the MOU does not allow for any civilian oversight of the work of officers assigned to the JTTF.

San Francisco Chief of Police Greg Suhr said he believes that the concerns have already been addressed. In his first days in office, Chief Suhr issued a binding Bureau Order #2011-07 setting forth the requirement that officers comply with local standards.

An excerpt of the order reads, “SFPD officers shall work with the JTTF only on investigations of suspected terrorism that have a criminal nexus. In situations where the statutory law of California is more restrictive of law enforcement than comparable federal law, the investigative methods employed by SFPD officers working on JTTF investigations shall conform to the requirements of such California statutes.”

“With this Bureau Order, the language of the 2007 Memorandum of Understanding no longer applies and SFPD personnel are bound by the provisions of the 2011 Order,” SFPD Public Information Officer Albie Esparza told the Guardian.

But Crew said that as long as the MOU between the SFPD and federal law enforcement remains in place, Suhr’s order at best creates contradictory policy. “The Memorandum of Understanding is a binding legal contact with the federal government. Which do you think will take legal precedence when it comes up against a local police chief’s departmental order?” said Crew, who urged the department to clarify the matter by withdrawing from the MOU, a step the SFPD has thus far been unwilling to take.

A letter from Sept. 28 of last year to Coalition for Safe SF from FBI Special Agent Stephanie Douglas regarding the contradiction clarifies the matter. “I do retain the right to assign FBI JTTF cases,” states Douglas, who goes on to assert it is she who makes the confidential judgment of which cases fall afoul of the state and city rules and which do not.

After years of intelligence-gathering authorized under a secret memorandum, public mistrust in the SFPD’s relationship to federal law enforcement persists. Kim says she believes the proposed ordinance will still help make San Francisco safer. “It increases the trust of the community members that are working with public safety in reporting, and in cooperating around many of the actual criminal activities that might be going on in the city,” she said.

The proposed legislative approach of regulating the scope of local participation in federal JTTF work is not unprecedented. The city has the option of terminating the MOU with 30 days notice, a step that the city of Portland, Oregon has taken to prevent its police force from spying on citizens in violation of local and state law.

In December, the city of Berkeley suspended its agreement with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (an arm of the Joint Terrorism Task Force) as part of a broad review of that city’s relationship to other local and federal law enforcement agencies (see “Policing the police,” 12/13/11).

“What this is about is maintaining local control of law enforcement and ensuring the civil liberties of the people of San Francisco,” Crew said. “Don’t San Franciscans deserve the same protection of their civil liberties as the people of Portland?”

Kim was joined by Sups. David Compos and John Avalos in sponsoring the ordinance. Supervisors are expected to vote on the whether to adopt the ordinance this spring after the measure is heard by the city’s Public Safety Committee following the normal 30-day hold. The measure seems to have the support it needs to pass the Board of Supervisors, but it remains unclear whether Mayor Ed Lee, who did not answer our inquiries, will sign it.

Mayor Lee’s call for more hearings gets wary reception

Sasha Cuttler
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Mayor Lee’s call for more hearings gets wary reception

Labor and the Left came out strongly against Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed charter amendment to require all city legislation be delayed and subjected to hearings by the Small Business Commission and other commissions if it might cost private sector jobs, putting its prospects of making the ballot in doubt.

 “This legislation is one, unnecessary; two, unbalanced; and three, divisive,” Mike Casey, president of the San Francisco Labor Council – whose executive committee voted unanimously to oppose the legislation – said during today’s Rules Committee hearing on the measure.

He and other labor leaders noted that members of the business community have plenty of opportunities to weigh in on legislation it opposes, but Lee’s proposal would elevate employers’ interests far above those concerning the environment, consumers, public health, or workers. “This legislation gives one stakeholder undue power in the democratic process, which is undemocratic,” said Kate Hegé of La Raza Centro Legal, which represents day laborers and other immigrants.

Teacher Ken Tray of United Educators of San Francisco said, “Often times ‘jobs’ is used as a red herring to divert the city from doing what it needs to do.” It was a common theme, as opponents of the proposal noted that paid sick leave, the local minimum wage, and requiring employee health benefits were all fiercely opposed by the business community. “Anything that raises workers up, we’re told it’s a job killer,” said Larry Bradshaw of SEIU Local 1021.

Small business representatives – a bit sheepishly, given the tenor of the hearing, and without support from their downtown brethren – said they were simply looking for the ability to express their concerns. “We’ve tried to let small business have a voice at the Board of Supervisors,” said longtime small business advocate Scott Hauge, a regular at City Hall.
Keith Goldstein of Potrero Dogpatch Merchants Association said, “We feel we don’t have a say in this process.”

Mayor’s Office board liaison Jason Elliott emphasized that Lee’s charter amendment would create a delay and an extra hearing or two, but that supervisors would still be free to approve the legislation anyway. “This is about public participation and feedback,” Elliott said.

But Sup. David Campos, who led the questioning of Elliott, wasn’t buying it. “What’s the reason behind this? Is there a specific reason the Mayor’s Office has decided to do this now and through a charter amendment?” Campos said, probing for instances in which the Mayor’s Office thought the business community hadn’t been heard.

Elliott continued to say it was about emphasizing jobs and taking more public input, but he couldn’t explain what’s lacking currently or what’s muting employers. Campos thanked the Mayor’s Office for being willing to work with supervisors and accept amendments – including many introduced today, which delayed the vote on the measure until next week.
But Campos questioned the need for the legislation, comparing it to the hollow jobs rhetoric from the current field of Republican presidential candidates. “It’s not just the number of jobs you have, it’s the quality of those jobs,” Campos said.

(Side note: the Mayor’s Office issued a press release today celebrating the first two businesses to take advantage of last year’s controversial mid-Market payroll tax exemption, Zendesk and Pearl’s Deluxe Burgers, which created 56 jobs between them. And to help create those great burger joint jobs, Pearl’s got Redevelopment Agency assistance, a low-interest city loan, and an exemption from the payroll tax. For hiring burger flippers that probably make minimum wage. But I digress…)

Campos said that everyone in City Hall wants to see more good jobs in the city, “but I don’t believe this is a constructive approach.” Sup. Jane Kim echoed the sentiment, saying private sector job creation isn’t the only imperative. “Lowering our minimum wage to $3 or $1 an hour would create plenty of jobs in San Francisco,” she said.

Even the more conservative third committee member, Sup. Mark Farrell, said he tends to agree with his committee colleagues and made the motion to continue the item until next week, when its prospects for passage look weak unless Lee can convince them that there’s more to this measure than just political grandstanding.

The new board committes: Not great news

Zelda Bronstein
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The new board committes: Not great news

Board President David Chiu has released the new committee assignments for 2012, and they aren’t a whole lot different from last year’s — except in a few areas. And they aren’t exactly an indication of progressive power.

The three most conservative supervisors — Mark Farrell, Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu — all were named to chair committees. Supervisors Eric Mar and John Avalos also are committee chairs, although David Campos was relegated to the joint City and School District Select Commitee, which is important but takes no votes and has no role in the legislative process.

Word is, however, that Campos may wind up chairing the Transportation Authority.

The Budget and Finance Committee is run by Chu, but Avalos and Jane Kim are also members, giving a majority to the progressives. But during the budget season, that panel expands to five members — and the additional two, Scott Wiener and Malia Cohen, are both decidedly on the moderate side. That means progressives will not have a majority on the panel that plays the central role in setting the city’s budget.

The Rules Committee is improved from last year — Kim is the chair, joined by Campos and Farrell. But Land Use and Economic Development — possibly the second most important committee after Budget and Finance — is dominated by moderates; Mar is the chair but Cohen and Wiener will have a 2-1 majority.

State Assemblymember Tom Ammiano told me he’s concerned that the two openly gay members of the board, Campos and Wiener, aren’t in more prominent roles. “It seems like there are two very hardworking people who were slighted here,” he said.

But Chiu disagrees, saying that the assignments “reflect the diversity of the board and the city.” He added: “Last year (when conservatives were given key posts) everyone thought the sky would fall, and it didn’t.”

The sky falling is pretty dramatic; I suspect it won’t. But there’s a difference between the sky falling and the progressive agenda moving forward.

 

 

Should city commissioners live in San Francisco?

Sasha Cuttler
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Should city commissioners live in San Francisco?

Overriding the Rules Committee recommendation and dissing Sup. Scott Wiener – who has taken a lead role on protecting nightlife from critical cops and NIMBY neighbors – the Board of Supervisors yesterday voted to appoint Glas Kat Supper Club owner Steven Lee to the Entertainment Commission, even though he doesn’t live in the city and needed a special residency waiver. UPDATE (1/12, 3 PM): Sup. Sean Elsbernd informs us that the City Attorney’s Office has ruled residency waivers can’t be used with Charter Commissions such as Entertainment, thus invalidating this appointment. 

Why would supervisors do so when Castro club owner Tim Eicher, Wiener’s pick and the Rules Committee’s choice, was well-qualified, anxious to serve, and actually lives in the city? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that sources say Chinatown political fixer Rose Pak and Pak protege David Ho are close to Lee and have been lobbying on his behalf. Or that Wiener said Lee supporters have been making the argument that there are already too many gay men on the commission.

“Nightlife issues are important tot he LGBT community,” Wiener said, noting that he was disappointed that Lee supporters have made that argument, particularly because he noted the LGBT people are underrepresented on many city commissions, particularly the powerful Planning and Airport commissions, where there are none.

Whatever the case, it made for a tense discussion at the board yesterday, followed by a vote that didn’t break along normal ideological lines. The motion by Sup. Eric Mar to substitute Lee for Eicher was approved on a 6-5 vote, with Sups. David Campos, Carmen Chu, Sean Elsbernd, Mark Farrell, and Wiener opposed.

Lee supporters noted that he has lived and worked in San Francisco for decades even though he has recently moved down the peninsula to help care for an aging father and disabled brother. For three generations, Lee’s family has been opening and operating businesses in San Francisco, including nightclubs.

“I felt his experience was somewhat superior,” Sup. John Avalos said of his reason for backing Lee.

But those who voted against Lee said it’s a troubling precedent to choose an out-of-towner over a city resident. “To grant a residency waiver for someone when we have a qualified San Francisco candidate is something we just don’t do,” Farrell said.

Sup. Jane Kim cited examples of other appointees that had such waivers, but Elsbernd angrily retorted that those were for seats that no city residents had applied for. And if Sup. Malia Cohen gets her way, there will be even more non-residents being appointed to city commissions. She said that she intends to recommend African Americans who have left the city to serve on various commissions, and she told her colleagues that she expects their future support for that effort.

After the hearing, both Lee and Ho downplayed Pak’s role in the move, telling the Guardian that Lee had key supporters in many of the supervisorial districts. “I’ve been doing this on my own,” Lee said. “I never asked Rose to help me.”

As for his priorities on the Entertainment Commission, Lee said, “Obviously, our main goal is public safety, but also working with the neighbors.”

Mirkarimi takes the oath

Zelda Bronstein
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Mirkarimi takes the oath

The room was packed for the inauguration of Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, and for the most part, the crowd wasn’t talking about what Mirkarimi referred to as the “cloud” hanging over the event. He mentioned the investigation into possible domestic violence only that once, then joked that he’d managed to get a lot of press to his event.


There was music, dancing, former Mayor Art Agnos administering the oath of office, a long, long Mirkarimi speech on criminal justice policy (please, Ross, 15 minutes would have been plenty). Most of Mirkarimi’s progressive colleagues (including supervisors John Avalos, David Campos, Jane Kim, and Eric Mar, state Sen. Mark Leno and Assemblymember Tom Ammiano) were on hand. And the press conference afterward was surprisingly mild.


Mirkarimi was asked what happened the night in question, and he declined to talk about it, saying the criminal justice system would work its way through the process. Then his wife, Eliana Lopez, interrupted, took the mike, and announced that this was a “family matter” and she would have no more to say – except that she has no complaints about her husband.


That was it. No shouted questions as the sheriff walked away, no 1000-watt camera flashes in his eyes, nothing to indicate that this is the gigantic scandal that it’s become in the daily papers.


But Mirkarimi did make one statement that’s worth mentioning: He said that there were forces in the department (I think he meant the Police Department) that didn’t want to see him as sheriff. That’s absolutely true.


Let me make a few points here.


First, for the record: There’s no excuse for assaulting anyone, and there’s less excuse for assaulting your wife. Domestic violence is a serious, under-reported problem, something all too often dismissed by the authorities – with catastrophic results. Women die because batterers are not held to account. I have close friends who have been in abusive relationships, and it’s not pretty and it’s not a joke and it’s not something to take lightly.


That said: I don’t know what happened that night at Mirkarimi’s house. But I do know that the minute the cops were brought in, it became political.


See, the cops, for the most part, are not Mirkarimi fans. He beat their guy, former Police Officers Association president Chris Cunnie, in the race for sheriff. He’s demanded changes in the department (including foot patrols, which a lot of old-timers don’t like). He also beat a sheriff’s captain. He’s a civilian who is going to run a law-enforcement agency as a civilian, which means he’s not part of the Fraternity.


The news reports about the incident were clearly leaked by the SFPD. So, I’m sure, was the search warrant (that’s a public document, but I honestly don’t think the Examiner tracked it down, I think it was delivered to the paper by a source in the department). Nothing wrong with that – cops (and politicians) tip reporters to stories all the time. I’m not blaming the Chron or the Ex for doing the story – it’s news, you have to report it.


And, of course, if the cops had ignored the case or downplayed it, they would have been criticized for covering up an incident involving the new sheriff.


Again: I’m not excusing Mirkarimi’s behavior (alleged behavior — we don’t know what actually happened). But the way the story and the details were leaked reflects the political reality that the cops don’t love the new sheriff, and a lot of them would be thrilled to take him down. That’s just political reality.


Which means Mirkarimi needs to be very, very careful – there are people watching every single move he makes, every day. And they’re not interested in policy debates.


PS: The D.A. and the cops managed to finish this particular investigation in record time. I wonder what’s happened to the investigation into possible vote fraud in the Ed Lee campaign. Months have passed. Nobody is facing any charges. There are no police leaks about anyone involved. Funny, that.

Mayor Lee, Sharp Park, and Gavin Newsom

Zelda Bronstein
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Mayor Lee, Sharp Park, and Gavin Newsom

So Ed Lee’s going to veto the Board of Supervisors resolution on Sharp Park. Of course he is. And there’s more than snakes and frogs at issue here.

The veto, I think, sets the tone for what we’re going to see over the next four years, which is: Gavin Newsom.

For four years, the progressive bloc on the board — that is, the shaky sometimes-majority that can pull together six votes on an issue — is going to run slam into a mayoral veto a good deal of the time.

In this case, John Avalos, David Campos, David Chiu, Jane Kim, Eric Mar and Ross Mirkarimi — that’s the list of the six — all supported a plan to negotiate with the National Park Service to take over the property, which would probably mean the end of the golf course. It’s an environmental issue, mostly, and also a public-resource issue — but the main thing is that it’s an issue that split the board along the left-center/right lines that we’ll see again and again over Lee’s term. And Lee is siding with the right.

That’s what we came to expect from Newsom — every progressive initiative was a struggle; often, bill sponsors had to line up eight votes, not six, because there was always the threat that Newsom would shoot it down. And I’m getting the feeling that we’ll be facing the same thing with Mayor Lee.

 

A step forward and step back for SF’s homeless families

Sasha Cuttler
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A step forward and step back for SF’s homeless families

As San Francisco grapples with a record-high number of homeless families seeking shelter space during the holiday season, a pair of homeless policy discussions at yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting highlighted shortcomings and missed opportunities in the city’s approach to the issue.

Mayor Ed Lee announced that he is opening up more shelter space and public housing units for homeless families, finally relenting to weeks of pressure to address the pressing problem. Yet the board also narrowly approved turning surplus city property over to neighborhood residents rather than using proceeds from selling it to benefit homeless families, as city policies call for.

The property in question, 341 Corbett Avenue, is a vegetated hillside near Upper Market that the city declared a surplus property in 2004, transferring it to the Mayor’s Office of Housing to either develop as housing for poor families or to put the proceeds from its sale toward that purpose. Providing housing for the homeless is what city policy calls for surplus property to be used for, according to 2002’s Surplus City Property Ordinance. The property was assessed at $2.2 million, but it wasn’t developed because of costs associated with the steep hillside, nor was it listed for sale.

Neighbors of the property have sought to use the property for open space and a community garden, so the district’s Sup. Scott Wiener authored legislation to facilitate a community garden by transferring it to the Department of Public Works. The transfer would involve no money, leaving homeless advocates concerned about depriving homeless families of any revenues from the property.

“There are a lot of public assets we could sell if we wanted to fund this need or that,” Wiener told his colleagues, noting that neighbors would rather see a community garden on the site and that Upper Market lacks adequate open space.

But Sups. Jane Kim and Eric Mar led the opposition to the move, saying they didn’t object to that kind of community use of this property, but that city policies need to be followed, particularly considering the dire need for more resources to address the needs of homeless families. “I do have concerns about the precedent we set and also being consistent,” she said, arguing for a delay in the action until city officials find a way to compensate MOH for at least some of the property’s value.

“Overriding the surplus property ordinance is not something I want to do right now,” Sup. John Avalos said.

But the board voted 6-5 to approve the transfer, with progressive Sups. Kim, Avalos, Mar, David Campos, and Ross Mirkarimi in dissent. Housing advocates upset by the action directly their ire at the swing vote, one-time progressive Sup. David Chiu, with activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca sending out an e-mail blast saying, “david chiu betrayed us again — he wouldn’t support continuing the 341 Corbett item so that affordable housing advocates could try and work out a better deal with the Mayor’s Office on Housing and others.”

Meanwhile, the skyrocketing number of homeless families has become a big issue in town since the Guardian broke the story on Oct. 13, with repeated stories in the Chronicle, Examiner, and other media outlets, and homeless advocates staging rallies outside City Hall and unsuccessfully pushing for a meeting with Mayor Lee on the issue.

During yesterday’s monthly mayoral question time, Kim asked Lee what he was doing to address the “alarming rate” of homeless families in the city – with 267 families now on a wait list for emergency shelter space, a 356 percent increase since 2007 – specifically challenging him to expand the city’s Rental Subsidy Program by 50 families and open new emergency winter shelters. She also noted three recent suicides in the city by individuals facing homelessness.

“I share your concern about family homelessness in San Francisco. My staff has been hard at work for a long time now trying to proactively respond to this very serious challenge and I’m proud to offer some very constructive, tangible solutions,” Lee said. He announced that his administration had just this week starting expediting the placement of homeless families into vacant public housing units, with 18 families now being processed and a goal of placing about 30 of the 79 families now in shelters into public housing units.

Lee also said that SalesForce.com CEO Marc Benioff is donating $1.5 million to the Home for the Holidays program the city is creating to provide rent subsidies and case management to 160 families, a donation that the city will match. “Their generosity is inspiring,” Lee said.

He also pledged to open up an unspecified number of new family shelter spots and, somewhat bizarrely, tried to wrap this issue into his relentless focus on promoting private sector job creation, mostly through tax breaks that actually cut into the city’s ability to provide direct assistance to homeless families. As Lee said, “The long-term goal is to increase these families’ incomes and to place them into permanent unsubsidized housing.”

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