Mayor

Hold out for Hunters Point

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EDITORIAL In the late 1980s, Mayor Art Agnos put forward a plan for development at Mission Bay, which at that point was an underused plot of land that used to be a Southern Pacific railroad yard. He negotiated with the developer, Catellus Corp., and cut what he insisted was the best deal the city could possibly get. He insisted that any more demands — for, say, increased affordable housing — would have so damaged the project’s finances that nothing would ever be built.

Development opponents took the issue to the voters — and the mayor’s plan lost. Catellus promptly came back with a much sweeter deal.

It’s worth remembering that lesson, because next week voters will be faced with a stark choice for a massive Hunters Point–Bayview redevelopment plan. Mayor Gavin Newsom and his allies say the city has squeezed major concessions from the developer, Lennar Corp. The San Francisco Labor Council and two community groups have forced Lennar to sweeten the pot even more (see "Assessing the deal," page 11). At this point, the city’s supposed to have the best deal it can possibly get.

But with all due respect to the Labor Council, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and the San Francisco Organizing Project, it’s not good enough.

The battle — which is shaping up as a very close contest — involves dueling ballot measures Propositions G and F. Prop. G is the deal Newsom and Lennar are pushing; it would give the financially troubled developer the right to build 10,000 new housing units, office and retail space, and a new football stadium, along with 300 new acres of parks, in one of the city’s most economically depressed areas. Some of the new housing would be available at below-market rates. Prop. F raises the ante a big notch: it would require that half of all Lennar’s housing be available to people making less than the median area income, which is $75,000 for a family of four.

For the record, it’s worth noting that the new concessions labor got would never have happened if Sup. Chris Daly and a group of Bayview–Hunters Point activists hadn’t placed Prop. F on the ballot. In fact, organized labor wasn’t terribly involved in the redevelopment project until a couple of months ago. That’s when Lennar’s team of political consultants realized that they might be facing a shellacking at the ballot June 3.

The polls show that Prop. F is very popular — and for good reason. It’s a simple proposal that makes excellent intuitive and practical sense. As housing activist Calvin Welch likes to say, San Francisco doesn’t have a housing crisis — the city has an affordable-housing crisis. Multimillionaires don’t have trouble finding places to live. And unfortunately, much of the new housing being built in this city is targeted to the very rich: typical market-rate one-bedroom condos start at around $500,000 and soar quickly into the millions. The rest of the city is getting forced out, and the dramatic, profound gentrification is transforming San Francisco.

Even the city planning department recognizes what’s going on: the Housing Element of the city’s General Plan states that 64 percent — nearly two-thirds — of all new housing ought to be affordable.

But the vast majority of the residents of Bayview–Hunters Point could never afford the vast majority of the new housing units Lennar wants to build. Prop. F seeks to address the deep imbalance in the proposed housing mix.

Lennar is squealing, saying it can’t possibly make the project pencil out with that much affordable housing. The company’s political team pushed the Labor Council to side with them, and in exchange for endorsing G and opposing F, labor got some worthy goodies. The level of what Lennar calls affordable housing is now higher than 30 percent — but when you actually look at those numbers, only about half of the 30 percent is truly affordable to the neighborhood residents who face being forced out of town. There’s also a new job training program and a mandate that new businesses allow their staff to unionize through a simple card-check process (although the city would almost certainly mandate that anyway).

But the bottom line is that the deal labor cut doesn’t meet what ought to be the standard for all new housing in San Francisco. Even after all the concessions, roughly 70 percent of the new units will be available only to rich people. That’s not acceptable in a city that is rapidly losing its artists, writers, musicians, immigrants, students … just about everyone who makes San Francisco such an exciting place to live is now an endangered species. And labor’s deal fundamentally does nothing to change that.

Vote yes on F and no on G. And if Lennar won’t build enough affordable housing, let’s scrap this deal and find someone who will. *

Lennar coverage wins awards

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Just as San Francisco voters prepare to cast ballots that will determine whether controversial megdeveloper Lennar covers Candlestick and Hunter’s points in 10,000 new homes, the Guardian is being honored for stories that exposed the company’s local misdeeds. A series of stories by Sarah Phelan showed how Lennar (with the support of Mayor Gavin Newsom and other high-profile political allies) failed to monitor or control toxic dust at its Parcel A site on Hunter’s Point, allegedly retaliated against whistleblowers, and bought off allies in its campaign to avoid accountability for its actions. Phelan’s stories are being honored in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ prestigious “Investigation Reporting” category, while Guardian coverage of the MediaNews merger and its facilitation by Hearst Corporation (owner of the Chronicle) is a finalist for AAN’s first-ever Public Service Award. The project was led by staff writer GW Schulz and was supported by a Guardian lawsuit that made public previously secret corporate documents.
Phelan’s stories are also being honored by the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club (at whose June 5 awards banquet finalists will learn whether they won first place or were a runner up), along with stories by three other Guardian writers and editors: Tim Redmond, Steven T. Jones, and Diana Scott.

Starry-eyed and stripped

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW More than one witness has reported that Mayor Gavin Newsom, fiancée in tow, dropped by the jam-packed opening reception for photographer Ryan McGinley’s show at Ratio 3. The civic-minded pair joined the fray of cool kids and art world cognoscenti — I heard John Waters and Todd Oldham were there — and in some ways the appearance was apropos: the artist and politician share a lineage of tall, charismatic Irish Catholics who inspire others to action. Noting celebrity, political, and religious connections is admittedly a little suspect in a review of a contemporary art show; still, the youthful but stately mayor’s presence at a gallery on a somewhat gritty Mission side street has meaning as an expression of the widespread appeal of McGinley’s pictures. Who could resist lush images of nubile white boys and girls cavorting naked amid what seem like national parks and roadside America?

McGinley is a particularly American artist. One of the photographs on view is even a dead ringer for an Andrew Wyeth painting. Rather than Christina crouched in the wheat field, McGinley’s Running Field (2007-08) offers a lithe young woman dashing through golden rolling hills wearing only white sneakers. His choreographed vision is a brand of hipster organic purity, a dream of back-to-the-land naturalism and free love.

McGinley also manages to straddle a number of positions and demographics. Among the 16 pictures in this satisfying exhibition, there’s full frontal male nudity, and a wonderful image of a shirtless blond guy embracing a black bear, both of which unabashedly read as queer. A centrally placed picture of a group of hikers in a rocky canyon plays like a still from an update of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). McGinley’s photograph exudes cineaste hippie-spiritual vibes, as does the acid trippy image titled Blue Falling (2007-08), in which the silhouette of a male figure — the hair on his legs crisply visible in profile — is seemingly suspended in an intensely hued sky. Dakota’s Crack Up (2007-08), visualizing an ebullient male/female couple caught in an active moment of undressed while roller-skating, brims with both clothing-optional resort appeal and fashion photo bravado.

The youth and nakedness of this universe seems to be related to Larry Clark’s kid obsessions, except McGinley is still young himself — he had a solo show at the Whitney five years ago, when he was 24 — and his surprisingly wholesome pictures are more hooked on fresh air and community than the more troubled eroticism of the wizened though still dreamy-eyed elder artist. A cinematic influence also binds these two figures. Most of the photos in McGinley’s show blur the line between naturalism and studio artifice: the hikers on the rocks are positioned in light in such a way that they appear to have been inserted digitally, the woman in Fireworks Hysteric (2007-8) seems to be floating in a glittering, celestial space, as do other subjects who have been catapulted into thin air. And is that a naked dude embracing a stuffed animal or a real live bear?

According to the artist, the animal is a living thing, albeit a trained one. He also admits the colors in his works are achieved through an intense darkroom practice. That gray area between the real and the imagined works in the artist’s favor, lending his images a sense of the uncanny: the activities captured in his photos did happen, though they come across as otherworldly.

There’s also a performance art backbone to McGinley’s process. His photos depict a team of models, cast for their looks as well as their athletic abilities, who travel together for extended periods. The constant contact promotes intimacy and physical fearlessness, and while they are very believable as an actual pack of marauding, hopeful young people, they are in fact a constructed entity — a family of paid actors directed by an artist with a clear vision of a kind of communal lifestyle. McGinley assuredly realizes these images, but they don’t come off without some suspicion. Where can these photographs go from here? The likeability of the pictures — and models — is tinged with envy and perhaps a resentment of the cool high school kids who seem impervious to social or sexual obstacles. That McGinley’s models reportedly sustain their share of photo-shoot injuries only attests to his winning feats of fiction. It all appears so smooth and dreamy. I don’t know what the mayor thought, but in the end, McGinley’s work won me over, and I want the feeling to last. *

RYAN MCGINLEY: SPRING AND BY SUMMER FALL

Through June 21

Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

Ongoing threat

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› amanda@sfbg.com

The debate over city plans to build and own two combustion turbine power plants, a project Mayor Gavin Newsom has made a last minute effort to alter, shows that public power — and Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s fear of it — is still a significant issue at City Hall.

Newsom, a past advocate of the project, pulled the plug on its progress May 13. The proposal for the natural gas–fired power plants to handle peak energy demand (called "peakers") was up for approval at the Board of Supervisors until Newsom requested a one-week continuance.

Christine DeBerry, the mayor’s liaison to the board, told supervisors the mayor would use the time to aggressively pursue better options than the peakers, even though it’s an item that spent eight years on the planning block and was approved by the Newsom-appointed San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

"What can be aggressively pursued in the next week that hasn’t been aggressively pursued in the last few years?" asked Sup. Chris Daly, one of the four supervisors publicly opposed to the plan, questioning DeBerry on why the mayor and his SFPUC hadn’t put forth the best energy project.

"The mayor engaged in a full exploration of the options over the last several years," DeBerry said, but wants to ensure the city is considering all options.

"Are you anticipating there’s going to be a new technological breakthrough in the next several days?" Daly asked before casting the lone vote against granting the continuance. As of the Guardian‘s press time, the plan’s hearing was scheduled for May 20, but sources said June 3 would be more likely. Newsom Press Secretary Nathan Ballard would not confirm whether another continuance would be requested or discuss what alternatives the mayor’s office is pursuing.

But it appears that the new technological breakthrough being pursued by the mayor’s office is actually a retrofit of an older, existing power plant in Potrero Hill, owned by Mirant Corp.

Sam Lauter, representing Mirant on the issue, said the company has been answering questions about a retrofit from diesel to natural gas for its three turbines. Mirant already agreed to close the older natural gas units at its Potrero plant once the $15 million contract, which requires the plant to maintain the reliability of the power grid, is pulled by California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO). Lauter also said Mirant’s redevelopment of the site for commercial use would still happen if the board decides a retrofit of Mirant is a better deal than building city-owned power plants.

As of the Guardian‘s deadline, no sources could provide any solid numbers on what a retrofit would cost and if pollution would be more, less, or equal to what the city anticipates from the peakers. But, Lauter told us, "The cost is considerably less than the cost of the peakers."

The contract with Cal-ISO could mean that the costs of retrofitting the diesels would be passed on to ratepayers. As for the pollution, Lauter said it’s not an easy answer and depends on how often the units have to run: "It’s not exactly correct to say they’d be less polluting, and it’s not exactly correct to say they’d be more polluting."

Barbara Hale, SFPUC’s assistant general manager of power, agreed there are still many uncertainties about retrofitting Mirant, including permits for the plant, restraints on how much it could operate, exactly how much it would pollute, and if it would even meet Cal-ISO’s demand for 150 megawatts of in-city generation. "I’m told by engineers that when generators go through a retrofit, often their megawatt capacity goes down," Hale told us. Each Mirant diesel unit currently puts out 52 megawatts.

As for other options Newsom requested from the agency, Hale said they’re exploring how to get more demand response and efficiency from the existing grid.

That suggestion comes from Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which actively opposes the city’s peaker plan and sent representatives to meet with Newsom’s staff May 5 (while Newsom was in Israel with Lauter, who said the two did not discuss Mirant or the peakers while overseas), shortly before he sought the delay.

PG&E spokesperson Darlene Chiu confirmed the contents of the proposal as presented to the mayor’s staff, which includes ways to eke more from the grid as well as a new transmission line between two substations.

Tony Winnicker, spokesperson from the PUC, said of PG&E’s plan: "We absolutely support each of these projects, think they’re long overdue improvements to the city’s transmission reliability, and hope they are committing the necessary funding to begin and complete them."

He added that there is little in the plan that differs from a past PG&E proposal that Cal-ISO rejected — except the new transmission line. But, he said, its target completion date of 2012-13 was "very ambitious, given that they haven’t even started the permitting."

PG&E’s Chiu, a former spokesperson for Mayor Newsom, didn’t respond to a question about the time frame for such a project, nor did she comment on whether PG&E considers the city’s ownership of the peakers a threat to its jurisdiction.

She didn’t have to. While City Hall scrambled to come up with an alternative that hasn’t been vetted during the last eight years of community meetings, city studies, and negotiations, PG&E was telling its shareholders that the threat of public power is alive and well.

At the May 14 annual meeting of PG&E investors, held at the San Ramon Conference Center, CEO Peter Darbee assured the assembled, "I, too, am concerned about municipalization and community choice aggregation."

He was responding to a criticism from an employee and member of Engineers and Scientists of California Local 20, who said PG&E shouldn’t be contracting outside the company because it created an experienced proxy workforce ripe for employment by another entity, like a municipality, that would be a threat to PG&E’s jurisdiction.

In responding, Darbee recalled the recent efforts in Yolo County, where the county attempted to defect from PG&E and join the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. "Peter, it’s half-time, your team is down, you better get directly involved with this," he said of the potential loss of 70,000 customers. The company mustered 1,000 employees to volunteer their time, walking from house to house and knocking on doors, prior to the November 2006 vote. "I was one of them," he said. "That vote went overwhelmingly in favor of PG&E."

Beyond knocking on doors, PG&E dropped $11 million on the campaign, outspending the competition 10 to 1.

But Darbee said it was a real victory in a state like California. "There’s always been in the water a desire for public power," he said, adding that 30 percent to 40 percent of the population approves of municipally-owned utilities.

Customer service, Darbee went on to say, is the best defense against threats to PG&E. And for the past two years, PG&E’s corporate strategy has been focused on that. To that end, its ranking in an annual JD Power customer satisfaction survey rose from 51 to 43 last year for the residential sector, and from 46 to a lofty second place for business customers.

But the JD Power survey also ranks municipal utilities, and 2007 results show PG&E was outpaced by three municipalities — the Salt River Project, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which also took the highest ranking in the nation. *

Disclosure: Amanda Witherell owns 14 shares of PG&E Co. common stock.

We do

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› steve@sfbg.com

Less than two hours after the California Supreme Court announced its 4–3 decision legalizing same-sex marriage, San Francisco City Hall filled with smiling couples and local politicians of various ideological stripes to celebrate the city’s central role in achieving the most significant civil rights advance in a generation.

The case began four years ago in San Francisco when Mayor Gavin Newsom decided to have the city issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. City Attorney Dennis Herrera and his legal team built the voluminous legal case that won an improbable victory in a court dominated 6 to 1 by Republican appointees.

"In light of the fundamental nature of the substantive rights embodied in the right to marry — and the central importance to an individual’s opportunity to live a happy, meaningful, and satisfying life as a full member of society — the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all individuals and couples, without regard to their sexual orientation," Chief Justice Ronald George wrote in the majority opinion.

Newsom cut short a trip to Chicago to return home and make calls to the national media and join Herrera’s press conference, where hundreds of couples who got married in San Francisco City Hall were assembled on the City Hall staircase as a backdrop to the jubilant parade of speakers that took the podium.

"What a wonderful, wonderful day," a beaming Herrera told the assembled crowd, adding, "California has taken a tremendous leap forward."

Some speakers (as well as the next day’s coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle) emphasized the potential of the issue to embolden conservatives and the possibility that a November ballot measure could nullify the decision by, as a prepared statement by Rep. Nancy Pelosi put it, "writing discrimination into the state constitution."

But for most San Franciscans, it was a day to celebrate a significant victory. Herrera praised "the courageousness of the California Supreme Court." He also commended Deputy City Attorney Terry Stewart, who argued the case, legal partners such as the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the eight other California cities that supported San Francisco’s position with amicus briefs — and Newsom, who clearly soaked up the adulation and gave a fiery speech that could easily become a campaign commercial in his expected run for governor.

"I can’t express enough how proud I am to be a San Franciscan," Newsom said, later saying of the decision, "It’s about human dignity. It’s about human rights. It’s about time."

Newsom also emphasized that "this day is about real people and their lives."

Among those people, standing on the stairs of City Hall, was Emily Drennen, a current candidate for the Democratic County Central Committee and the District 11 seat on the Board of Supervisors, who was the 326th couple to get married in San Francisco, taking her vows with partner Linda Susan Ulrich.

"When it got nullified, something was taken away from us. It really felt like that," Drennen told the Guardian, adding that she was thrilled and relieved by the ruling. "I was just holding my breath this whole time, expecting the worst but hoping for the best."

Herrera spokesperson Matt Dorsey, who is gay, was similarly tense before the ruling, knowing how much work had gone into it but worried the court might not overcome its ideological predisposition to oppose gay marriage.

"For everyone who worked on this, it was the case of their lives," Dorsey told us. "Politically and legally, there was so much work that this office did that I’m so proud of, and I hope people understand that." *

The peakers vs. Mirant

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EDITORIAL In the late 1960s, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District made a terrible decision and began building a nuclear power plant. Rancho Seco started generating power in 1977.

But over the next 10 years, environmental activists put pressure on the elected board that runs SMUD — and in 1989, the public power agency shut down the nuke with 11 years left on its operating license.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. built Diablo Canyon nuclear plant about the same time — but despite massive public protests, it’s still running today. That’s a big difference between public power and private utilities — and its one the San Francisco Supervisors need to recognize as they debate power plants in the southeast part of town. Because right now, two big private power companies are setting the agenda for the city’s energy policy.

And if they’re in control, the environment will be the loser.

Over the past several weeks, Mayor Gavin Newsom has met with representatives of PG&E — which is desperately trying to keep the city out of the retail electric power business — and Mirant Corp., which seems quite happy to keep operating its power plant at the foot of Potrero Hill. And as a result, the mayor has changed his position, is backing away from a plan for three city-owned power plants, and is prepared to offer the worst possible alternative: he wants to retrofit the dirty Mirant plant and keep it running.

That’s unacceptable, and the supervisors need to reject it.

The background on this issue, for those who haven’t been paying attention, is fascinating and a bit complex.

For years, residents of the southeast neighborhoods have been trying to shut down the Mirant plant, which runs a natural gas-fired turbine and three diesel-powered auxillary generators. California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), which manages the state’s electricity grid, has balked at removing the only large-scale generating facility within city limits, saying San Francisco can’t bring all of its power in from outside.

Until recently, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission — with Newsom’s blessing — has proposed that the city operate three natural gas turbines, known as peaker plants, that would run only when demand for power is high. Cal-ISO says the peakers would fulfill the in-city reliability requirement, and if they’re built, the Mirant Plant would be shuttered.

The peakers (which the city already owns, thanks to a lawsuit settlement) are fossil fuel plants and release air pollution — not as much, the city says, as the Mirant plant, but not zero. So environmental justice activists want to stop the new plants, saying the city can make do with conservation, new renewable energy facilities, and a new power line across the Bay. So far, Cal-ISO disagrees, but the activists are pushing the city to try harder to make the state accept a greener option.

So PG&E and the environmentalists are both trying to stop the supervisors from approving the peakers. PG&E sees them as public power, and is funding a sophisticated lobbying and direct-mail campaign against the city peakers.

That effort has turned Newsom around: as Amanda Witherell reports on page 15, the mayor is apparently prepared to offer a new plan that would scrap the city-owned peakers in favor of retrofitting the diesel units at the Mirant plant. PG&E would bring more cables into the city and would work on conservation efforts.

Conservation is fine, and PG&E ought to be pushing those efforts anyway. But the proposal makes no sense.

For starters, all evidence suggests that even after a retrofit, the Mirant plant would still generate fossil fuel pollution, quite possibly more than the city peakers. So the southeast would continue to get dumped on, with no significant relief. And the plan would leave PG&E and Mirant in control of generating and distributing power in the city.

We’re sympathetic to the environmental justice arguments, and we’ve been consistent in our position that the city shouldn’t build or operate new fossil fuel plants unless the scientific evidence shows they’ll be cleaner than any reasonable alternative. We would much prefer that San Francisco refrain from any new fossil fuel sources and rely instead on a completely renewable portfolio. But for all the problems we have with the peakers, they would, at least, be owned by the city.

That’s a crucial issue: if San Francisco controls the plants, San Francisco can turn them off any time, the moment the city’s renewable efforts convince Cal-ISO that the peakers aren’t needed (or even before that, if we want to risk a legal fight with the state). If a private company owns the generators, the plant will continue to run as long as it makes money.

If there’s a credible way to avoid any fossil fuel generation, we’re all in favor. But if the choice is between the peakers and retrofitting Mirant, it’s a no-brainer. And the real lesson here is that the supervisors should be moving forward with Sups. Mirkarimi and Peskin’s charter amendment to create a full public power agency at City Hall. *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

When the ruling on same-sex marriage came down, I was in upstate New York, hanging out with my brother, who runs a small construction outfit in a working-class town. His employees are the people Democratic leaders worry about; a generation ago they were called "Reagan Democrats." They make extremely un-PC jokes and insult each other with terms that would make most San Franciscans cringe.

And you know what? They couldn’t possibly care less about same-sex marriage.

"The people in my crew have families to feed and payments to make on their houses," my brother told me. "They don’t care who marries who. It’s the most ridiculous issue in the world." (My brother, who got married on his lunch hour wearing overalls covered with concrete dust, also told me years ago that "marriage is like a horse with a broken leg; you can shoot it, but that doesn’t fix the leg." You get the picture).

Yes, there are gay couples living in his little community. The framers and roofers treat them like everyone else. The construction workers are not remotely disturbed about queers being threats to their traditional values or marriages. And they’re all voting for Obama because they’re sick of the war, sick of the recession, sick of the cost of health insurance, sick of the politics in Washington DC, and ready for something totally different.

I thought about all of that when I came back and read the San Francisco Chronicle stories repeating the old argument that same-sex marriage could be the bane of the Democrats in November. It’s the same thing Rep. Nancy Pelosi says about all kinds of social and economic issues: we can’t go too fast. We might piss off some swing voters.

Sure, you might do that. And I’m not a pollster, and my focus group, as it were, is fairly narrow here. But I don’t think I’m wrong when I say that among rapidly growing numbers of Americans, gay marriage is becoming pretty insignificant as a wedge issue. I used to say that in 20 years, people would look back at this era and wonder what the foes of marriage equality were thinking. Now I suspect we’ll only have to wait 10 years, maybe less, before this is totally accepted in the mainstream of American society.

When somebody like Mayor Gavin Newsom takes the lead on a civil rights issue like this, I think it’s pretty crass to question his motives. But you can’t dispute the outcome: Newsom may have been acting out of pure principle or out of political calculation. But in the end, his career is now tightly tied to an issue that is part of the future. He will never have to say he was sorry about this, and all of the weak and trembling little Democrats who are wringing their hands will all look like idiots one day. One day very soon.

If Newsom wants to be governor, this can only help him — but it won’t be enough. My brother’s point is that the country is in a deep recession, the economy is a disaster, economic inequality is ruining the American Dream, and social issues aren’t going to carry the day. A politician who won’t tax the rich to improve the lot of the poor and the middle class, who won’t offer comprehensive economic solutions, who has nothing to say to people who make their living building houses when the housing market is in free fall … that politician’s going nowhere. *

Go directly to court

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› news@sfbg.com

After nearly four hours of debate punctuated by boos and cheers from an impassioned audience, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee decided May 14 not to release $500,000 in reserve funds for Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed Community Justice Center.

The project, modeled after courts in Manhattan and Brooklyn and touted by Newsom for years, would be a tribunal for bringing in quality-of-life crime violators — usually the homeless or other street denizens — immediately after they’re cited and, in theory, getting them right into social services or community service work.

But the 3-2 committee vote against the project was based on this year’s big budget shortfall, Newsom’s opposition to other expenditures outside the normal budget process, lack of demonstrable savings or benefits from the program, and the fact that the social services it claims to offer are being cut.

"Let’s be clear here. We’re having this discussion while we’re contemputf8g some of the most draconian service reductions, at least that I’ve seen here, in seven-and-a-half years," Sup. Chris Daly said at the hearing.

He cited $3.3 million in cuts to senior services, $17 million in cuts to the Department of Health, closure of the homeless service center Buster’s Place, and a reduction in mental health services as examples.

In early May, Newsom vetoed an initiative sponsored by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi that would allocate $76,000 to record and post the proceedings of various municipal boards and commissions on the city’s Web site. The board voted 8-3 to successfully override that veto on May 13.

At the CJC hearing, Daly read a letter from Newsom dated April 30 saying he wanted to hold out on new spending initiatives like the Mirkarimi measure until new programs could be considered in the larger context of the 2008-09 fiscal year budget deliberations that begin in June.

"This is his veto message based on the dire budget situation," Daly said. "These words are directly applicable to the item in front of us."

Sup. Bevan Dufty and other Newsom allies on the board are expected to try to overcome the committee votes by introducing the proposal to the full board. Dufty told us, "I recognize there are members of the committee who aren’t comfortable with it, but I asked that the full board weigh in because I felt like everybody on the board ought to have a decision whether this moves forward or not."

Newsom Press Secretary Nathan Ballard blasted the committee vote, telling the Guardian, "It was cowardly for Chris Daly and his colleagues to vote against the Community Justice Center. They lack the courage to support this program that will help get low-level offenders back on the right track. Why? Their fear outweighs their capacity to care: they fear the idea of agreeing with Gavin Newsom more than they care about people in the Tenderloin who are suffering and need help. They ought to be ashamed of themselves."

But critics say the proposal is rife with problems. Peter Masiak, lead tenant organizer for the Central City SRO Collaborative, said the CJC plans did not call for enough staff members to handle all the cases on its own. The staff would therefore have to refer people to service providers like his group, whose budgets are on the chopping block.

"It does nothing if you’re creating an expensive mechanism for referring people to services you’re cutting," he said at the hearing. "I’m concerned I’m going to have to tell my clients the only way they can get services is to stand on the street and smoke crack."

Deborah Newman of the City Budget Analyst’s Office said the CJC would cost approximately $2.9 million annually to operate. The $500,000 discussed May 14 originally was set aside for two holding cells — one for men and one for women — subleasing the court space, tenant improvements to the space, and social services.

Newman said that after tenant improvements, social services salaries, new cells, and subleases, new expenses would cost the city $2.4 million, even with a $1 million federal earmark supplied by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. CJC supporters said savings produced by the court would justify these costs.

San Francisco Superior Court Commissioner Ron Albers said San Francisco has used problem-solving and collaborative courts for more than a decade, citing the award-winning behavioral health court for mentally ill offenders as one example of how these courts can stop the courts’ current revolving-door system.

"This is a difficult budget time, but we can target high-end users of expensive programs and save money," he said.

Albers added that under the current system, people charged with misdemeanors must wait two days for an arraignment, while those charged with felonies wait three days. At $152 per day per bed, taxpayers spend thousands of dollars a year on people whose charges are ultimately dropped.

A representative of the mayor’s budget office told the hearing that the CJC could also save money by eliminating the need to build more jail pods, thus lowering the sheriff’s budget. But Harvey Rose of the Budget Analysts’ office said the CJC has failed to document any actual savings.

"Savings means that a budget is going to be cut, and we have seen no cuts in any budget," Rose said.

Some Tenderloin residents said that because crime is so rampant in their neighborhood, it would unacceptable for the city not to take action in some way, and they urged approval of the CJC. Yet others object to the double standard of creating what they dub the "poverty court." *

Peakers delayed 2 weeks

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At the May 20 meeting, the Board of Supervisors agreed to a two-week hold on a plan to build two combustion turbine “peaker” power plants in the city. (Also known as the CTs.) The delayed legislation was also amended by Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who injected a 90-day due diligence period into the process.

Translation: if the Board, two weeks from now, passes the plan to build the peakers, a 90-day due diligence period kicks in. And if, during that period, the SFPUC general manager finds that another plan meets a certain list of criteria (which are included in the amendments and can be read here), then he can kill the city’s peaker plan and put forth the alternative. The alternative would still have to go through all the permitting and planning processes that the city’s peakers have already weathered, but the city’s peaker project would be dead.

Elsbernd’s amendments contain a list of qualifications that any alternative must meet, including an agreement that Mirant’s Unit 3 would still close (so the company can redevelop that site for some other profitable commercial use), and that any other “proposed project” would improve environmental quality and city control over energy supplies.

The language here is pretty careful: nowhere does it say that a new proposal must be as clean, if not cleaner, than the city’s peakers. Nor does it say it must be owned by the city.

Elsbernd asked for the two week continuance when introducing the amendments, to give the Board more time to get comfortable with them and “to make sure that the CTs are either the right thing or the wrong thing.”

Peskin, describing the motion before them, jabbed that the extra time was for any possible alternative “proposed by PG&E and/or Mirant.”

To which Elsbernd took issue, “Actually, I would disagree with your statement,” he said. “This is not a proposal from PG&E.”

After the item passed, with Sup. Chris Daly citing it as a delay tactic and dissenting, Elsbernd told the Guardian the amendments did not come from the Mayor’s staff. “They came from my pretty little head,” he said. “I asked the city attorney to draft them for me.”

RFK Jr. and NRDC part ways on power plants in SF

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On May 12, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, founder of Waterkeeper, senior counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and as big a wig as Al Gore in the environmental hall of fame, decided to weigh in on San Francisco’s plan to build two fossil fuel-burning power plants. He sent this letter to the Board of Supervisors, Mayor Gavin Newsom, the CPUC’s Mike Peevey, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, urging them to back away from a future hooked to fossil fuels.

“Given the size and impact of this project, I respectfully urge you to listen to the public interest and environmental groups such as Sierra Club and SPUR that are calling for an independent study to determine whether these power plants are truly required in 2008,” Kennedy wrote.

But, lest you get confused about how emphatically concerned an eco-heavy-hitter like NRDC is about San Francisco’s energy future, the group sent another letter three days later saying they don’t have a position on the controversial issue, and don’t plan on taking one. That letter was signed by Ralph Cavanagh, who handles energy issues for NRDC and has been a champion of decoupling — which utility companies love because it separates the profit-making from the energy-consuming, thus ensuring they still take home a pretty penny while encouraging customers to cut back on energy use.

Craig Noble, spokesperson for NRDC, explained the discrepancy by email, writing, “Bobby wasn’t representing NRDC in his official capacity when he took a position on that particular project. It was unclear to some people that he was speaking as a private citizen, so NRDC released a letter of clarification – we have not looked at this project and therefore have not taken a position.” He also wrote they probably wouldn’t, as they tend to focus on broader policy issues rather than individual projects.

A number of environmental and social justice groups have also allied against San Francisco’s plan to build the peakers, strongly urging city officials to step it up with renewables rather than natural gas, and sending letters with their eco-group stamps all over them. They also met with Newsom to express alternatives to the peakers, according to Josh Arce of Brightline Defense, one of the leaders of the environmental front.

But it wasn’t until Newsom’s staff met with PG&E, the quiet giant of the anti-peaker movement, that the Mayor put the brakes on the power plant’s approval process. After that meeting, Newsom intervened last week at the Board of Supervisors, temporarily pausing the approval process of the peaker plan while he called for the exploration of other alternatives.

PG&E’s peaker-less proposal

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For all those following the latest and greatest in the saga of San Francisco’s energy future, here’s a copy of the proposal PG&E put before Mayor Gavin Newsom’s staff on March 5, and which has been making rounds at City Hall. It outlines (though doesn’t go into too much detail) a number of energy efficiency measures, demand-response targets, and transmission upgrades.

Tony Winnicker, spokesperson for the SFPUC, seemed nonplussed by the plan, and said it only slightly differed from a past anti-peaker proposal from PG&E that Cal-ISO found wasn’t enough for San Francisco to forgo building two new combustion turbine power plants. The new plan includes a line connecting two substations in Potrero and Embarcadero, ultimately making our local grid a little more dynamic. But, said Winnicker, “There’s no indication from Cal-ISO that doing this would allow us to close Potrero without Cal-ISO’s consistent requirement of ‘in city, dispatchable, reliable’ generation.”

Cal-ISO’s Gregg Fishman said the new proposal had pros and cons they’d have to weigh, and introducing a new plan at this point could mean more delays on closing Mirant. “One drawback to a transmission alternative is that building a new major transmission project, instead of installing the peakers, will mean potentially years of delay in the closure of the highly polluting Potrero. Additionally, any new in-city resources, including demand response, would need to be available “around-the-clock” to meet national reliability standards the ISO is required to uphold. Currently, demand response is not available 24/7.”

Don’t know about you, but my Mission district mailbox has been bombarded by scary mailers from PG&E, posing as the Close It Coalition, screaming “NO NEW POWER PLANTS.” They claim environmental reasons but one inside source told me PG&E is “paranoid” about public power. Their 2007 annual report to shareholders includes a section detailing the risks of loosing customers to Community Choice Aggregation or municipalization of electricity services. (See pages 74-76 of this document. I also recommend page 56 for details on the fossil fuel burning power plants PG&E is also building, that are bigger and dirtier than the city’s would be.) Peter Darbee, CEO of the corporation, also expressed his own personal concern about public power at PG&E’s May 14 annual meeting (but you’ll have to tune into tomorrow’s Guardian for details on that.)

The perils of private wi-fi

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Tom Ammiano, who was just up in Portland, alerted me to this. That city’s ambitious plans to let a private company wire the entire area have fallen flat. The job is only one-third done. The company’s out of money. It’s a mess.

In other words, the critics of Mayor Newsom’s old Earthlink-Google wi-fi plan were absolutely right.

Yup, Newsom buckles to PG&E on Mirant plant

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

When PG&E spits, City Hall swims. Mayor Newsom to Potrero Hill: Drop dead.

For more than 40 years, the Guardian has watched every San Francisco mayor without exception buckle to PG&E and help the giant utility keep its illegal private power monopoly intact in San Francisco.

The latest to buckle, this time more openly and ignominiously than most, appears to be Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is revving up his campaign for governor and wants to keep PG&E nice and cuddly by his side.
Here’s the story as it leaked from City Hall this weekend. For 40 years, the people of Potrero Hill and the southeastern part of the city have fought to close down the fossil-burning Mirant power plant at the bottom of Potrero Hill. Newsom personally supported the plan to close Mirant and replace it with city-owned peaker power plants. And his Public Utilities Commission has spent years developing a plan to do just this. (Alas, the peakers were the PUC’s only alternative and the PUC demanded that they be sited at the Mirant plant, amongst the long suffering Potrero Hillians, never a serious thought to anywhere more uptown. This rightly agitated the environmental justice community, but that is another story.)

PG&E has been fighting the peakers because they would be PG&Es worst nightmare: a major public power beachhead in San Francisco. As the historic vote neared last Tuesday at the Board of Supervisors, PG&E counted the votes and found it did not have a 6-5 majority. And so it did what it has historically done to protect its illegal private power monopoly in San Francisco, It rolled out its heavy artillery, went directly to the mayor, and started pounding away on a weak and wavering Newsom.

This time, as reported in the Bruce and Tim Redmond blogs, seven lobbyists (you heard me, seven) called on him in his City Hall office and told him to kill the peaker proposal, or else, and offered him a blank check to do a Mirant retrofit. Newsom buckled.

PG&E got Newsom to ask for an extension on the vote, which he got for a week, and he lamely announced that he would be looking for some kind of last minute alternative to the peakers PG&E so dreads. The alternative appears to be the PG&E alternative: junk the peakers and do a retrofit of the existing Mirant plant. This would subject the Potrero Hill neighborhood, and the mushrooming Mission Bay population, to the ruinous plant for the duration.

As a City Hall source put it to me, “This is the dumbest of all options, retrofitting the Mirant plant so that it’s a little cleaner, but still nowhere near as clean as the peakers, way less efficient, and a waste of land to boot. It is the mayor’s choice to avoid upsetting PG&E.” The vote is scheduled again for this Tuesday, but it may be postponed again if neither PG&E nor the peaker supporters don’t have the votes.

Hey, remember Dick Sklar, the former PUC executive director who Newsom recently appointed to the PUC to peddle the mayor’s PG&E policies (and remember Sup. Chris Daly, who cast the deciding vote for Sklar’s confirmation.and said that Sklar was “neutral” on PG&E.) Sklar was right in there as expected, pumping away for PG&E and helping facilitate the latest mayoral cavein to PG&E. As the Guardian has maintained for years, if people at City Hall want to work for PG&E, they should be dispatched to PG&E so they can work for the utility directly, not work for PG&E on the city payroll.

The only real way out of this PG&E uber alles mess is for the people to kick PG&E out of City Hall and bring real public power to the city. As Guardian readers know since 1969, San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is required by federal law to be a public power city, because of the Raker Act that allowed the city to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park for the city’s water and power supply.

The best emerging plan is the public power initiative that Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, who opposes the peakers, and Aaron Peskin, who supports the peakers, are working on with public power forces to put on the fall ballot. Click here to read more about the initiative.

Question: Will Hearst corporate allow its reporters and editors to cover the PG@E/Raker Act scandal and the real public power story. Stay tuned for details and how the public can provide input and support.

To repeat: When PG&E spits, City Hall swims. Mayor Newsom to Potrero Hill: Drop dead.

P.S. Deadline summary: The vote lineup at blogtime, according to our check and City Hall sources. For: Peskin, Dufty, Maxwell, McGoldrick. Against: Mirkarimi, Ammiano, Daly, Alioto-Pier. Swinging away: Chu, Elsbernd, Sandoval. Prediction: The vote will be postponed again, probably until July or so, to give the PUC time to study the PG@E alternative put forth by Newsom. So PG@E may win this skirmish, but obviously the battle for public power and to enforce the Raker Act goes on.

B3, who watches the fumes from the Potrero plant every day from my office window at 135 Mississippi Street, courtesy of PG&E and Hearst journalism

A perfect San Francisco day

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The superlatives are flowing in San Francisco today. “What a wonderful, wonderful day,” was how City Attorney Dennis Herrera opened the giddy press conference in City Hall today, a love fest event discussing and celebrating this morning’s California Supreme Court ruling legalizing same sex marriage.
“What a day for San Francisco!” beamed a jubilant Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose decision to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in 2004 set off the legal struggle that resulted in the most important civil rights ruling in a generation. He told a large, smiling crowd how proud he was of this city, its values, and its courage to push hard for meaningful sociopolitical change.
“At the end of the day, that’s what I’m so proud of, San Francisco and the values we affirm,” Newsom said. “This is a great day for California, a great day for America, and a great day for the constitution.”
It was also a just plain great day, with hot weather contributing to a record-breaking Bike to Work Day. During the morning commute, a city survey counted twice as many bicycles as cars on Market Street, a 30 percent increase from the number of bicyclists last year.
Today is just one of those days when you fall in love with San Francisco all over again, when it feels like we have the power to really lead the rest of this troubled country in a new direction.

Same sex marriage legalized in California

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The California Supreme Court has legalized same sex marriage in California, ruling this morning on the case that stemmed from San Francisco’s move in 2004 to unilaterally allow gay and lesbian couples to get hitched. This is a big day for Mayor Gavin Newsom (who decided the city should go ahead and issue marriage licenses to everyone, which was by far the boldest and best thing he’s done from Room 200), City Attorney Dennis Herrera (who won the legal fight, making California just the second state to extend marriage rights to all Californians), and all residents of San Francisco and California.
The press conferences at City Hall kick off at noon and it’s likely to be quite a celebration down there (mixed in with some apoplectic opponents of gay rights, I’m sure), so ride your bicycle on down and help mark a historic day for San Francisco.

Ammiano: Parking meters for the homeless

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Mayor Newsom announces new homeless program. Parking meters for the homeless. Tow not cash.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Wednesday, May 14, 2008.) B3

The real energy-policy choice

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EDITORIAL According to City Attorney Dennis Herrera, if San Francisco wants to see the Potrero Hill power plant, which spews pollution over the southeast part of the city, close down next year, the city’s going to have to operate its own fossil fuel plants in the neighborhood. Some environmentalists say that’s not true — that the city could develop enough renewable energy and use existing backup systems to obviate the need for the so-called peaker plants.

Opposition to the plants comes from the Sierra Club, Supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi — and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

Even for people who spend an inordinate amount of time studying energy policy, it’s a confusing mess of a situation — and San Francisco, of all cities, shouldn’t have to be facing it.

The peaker dilemma exists for a reason: San Francisco has allowed private-sector companies like PG&E and Mirant, which owns the existing Potrero plant, to control the city’s energy systems. The good news is that the fight over the power plants is driving a new move for public power — a move that ought to bring together the public interest activists on both sides of the plant divide.

Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, a peaker foe, and Aaron Peskin, a peaker supporter, plan to introduce a Charter Amendment mandating that the city’s Public Utilities Commission create a plan to establish a retail power agency in San Francisco. The amendment would provide the badly needed kick start to get city officials to act on San Francisco’s historic mandate for a municipal electricity system.

Peskin and Mirkarimi may not agree on the three peaker plants the PUC wants to site at the foot of Potrero Hill, but they do agree that PG&E is up to no good here. The giant private utility desperately wants to keep the city from developing its own electric power plants: the city peakers would be competition for PG&E and would open the door for the city to get more directly into the electricity business. Although the fliers put out by the "Close It Coalition," funded by PG&E, talk about environmental issues, that’s just old-fashioned greenwashing. PG&E is building similar combustion turbine gas-fueled generators all over the state.

Why should this be the city’s only choice?

If there’s going to be a fight over energy policy in San Francisco, it ought to focus on the real long-term questions: Who should control the local grid, and the future supply of electricity, and the decision over how much of the local portfolio should be in renewable resources? Should PG&E continue to hold that power, or should the city take it over?

The movement for public power is exploding all over California. In Marin County, a group called Marin Clean Energy is mounting a sophisticated campaign for a community-controlled power agency that would use 100 percent renewable power. The South San Joaquin County Irrigation District is trying aggressively, against a full-scale PG&E political assault, to buy out PG&E’s distribution facilities and create a new public power system. Stockton is looking at becoming a public power city.

San Francisco is pursuing CCA, but needs to do much more. This is, after all, the only city in the nation that has a mandate under federal law to sell retail electricity.

If the city had created a public power agency years ago, the peakers wouldn’t be an issue. San Francisco would have been able to develop more extensive renewable power sources, create a long-term energy plan, and concentrate on shutting down fossil fuel plants instead of building them.

But whatever the outcome of that fight, it’s time to think about the future — and the future is community-owned energy programs. That’s the choice that ought to be on the ballot in November.

PS: Stop the presses — has Newsom buckled to PG&E? The mayor at the last minute May 13 has orchestrated a delay in the peaker vote — at the behest, we hear, of PG&E, which is begging the mayor to do anything to stop public power. Now he wants to retrofit the Mirant plant. That’s an unacceptable option and needs to be rejected.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was having lunch with an old friend the other day, and, as usual, we got through our lives and kids pretty quickly and wound up talking about tax policy. I’m a great date.

I was explaining to her — well, yeah, I was lecturing, at some volume — about the problem with sales taxes and the value of parcel taxes and income taxes, and somewhere along the line I realized that the progressive leadership in San Francisco needs to think a bit more about small business.

See, my friend’s husband runs a small company, and she isn’t happy about the way the city’s universal health plan is financed. "If this is so important to San Francisco," she asked, "why aren’t we all paying for it, instead of just businesses?" Her idea: finance the program with a new sales tax.

Well, I support Healthy San Francisco and I think that, all things considered, Sup. Tom Ammiano did an amazing job of putting together a plan that is actually working. Ammiano told me last week that more than 20,000 people — formerly uninsured people — have signed up. This is a very big deal.

I realize it’s also a pain for a lot of smaller businesses, in part because the rules — specifically designed to keep unscrupulous employers from cheating — are complicated and hard to follow. And for companies that are barely making it, the tab for insurance can be brutal.

That, of course, is the overall problem with employer-based health insurance. But it’s the system we’re working under, and the complexity of creating a completely different model in one city would be, to say the least, daunting. In fact, there were a lot of employers in this city, many big retail outlets and national chains, that could well afford to pay for employee health insurance but instead dumped their workers on the overburdened public health system.

And restaurants, which are whining the loudest, have managed to stick their customers with the added cost, which frankly isn’t such a terrible thing: people who eat out a lot can afford an extra buck so the kitchen help can see a doctor when they’re sick.

And as I (ever-so-gently and quietly) explained over my $12 sautéed prawns, sales taxes are horribly regressive, even worse than small-business taxes. I’m right; she’s wrong. We had a hell of a lunch.

But I think her frustration ran a bit deeper than this one issue, and I hear it from a lot of others too: small businesses don’t seem to be part of the progressive coalition.

I understand why: a lot of small business people are conservative, particularly on fiscal issues. It’s really annoying how often small merchants side with the Chamber of Commerce and the big downtown forces. You can’t get small business groups to support any new revenue measures.

And the progressive supervisors have done a lot for small businesses — starting with enacting limits on chain stores, which have protected locally owned shops in several commercial districts.

There’s a lot more we can do: I’m still pushing for a progressive business tax (cut taxes on the bottom, raise them on the top). And a city income tax would pay for health insurance and a lot more.

But right now, many community merchants are feeling ignored, and our next progressive candidate for mayor needs to think about that. It’s a potentially powerful constituency — but for all the wrong reasons, it’s going in all the wrong directions.

The Bike Issue: Don’t stop

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In the two miles between my home and office in downtown Boise, there are five stop signs and 10 traffic lights. On a good day, I can make the journey without coming to a complete stop.

That doesn’t happen in my car because, of course, I’m a law-abiding driver. Yet on my bicycle, it’s possible for me to cruise through all five stop signs and effortlessly cruise right on through the downtown corridor without once touching my feet to the pavement.

And in Idaho, it’s completely legal.

Although cycling commuters here often bemoan the city’s ineffective bike lane system and criticize the lack of public bicycle parking, nary a word is spoken about the state’s progressive bicycle traffic laws. Thanks to some forward-thinking state legislators a couple of decades ago, Idaho’s bike laws are the envy of cyclists throughout the country.

The concept is a simple one that allows bicyclists to keep their momentum without ever taking the right-of-way from motorists: basically, stop signs are treated a yield signs, and stop lights as stop signs. Bicycles can legally blow through stop signs as long as it isn’t another driver’s turn. And at red lights, bicycles must stop, but can proceed if the intersection is clear

"There are lots of good reasons for it," said attorney Kurt Holzer, who specializes in bicycle accidents. Aside from the fact that a waiting cyclist won’t trip a traffic light changing mechanism, Holzer said the laws are in place for safety reasons. "If you have a bike on the right side and a car wants to turn right, the law allows the bike through the intersection, through the area of conflict, so the biker can get out of the way."

Newcomers to Boise often muse that people are less defined by what they drive than what’s hanging from their bike racks. Boise’s mayor endorses the bicycle and is a regular bike commuter. Mayor Dave Bieter is often seen pedaling to City Hall on his red 1969 Schwinn Typhoon — the bike he got for his 10th birthday.

Rather than each faction exerting ownership over the pavement, cyclists should know and follow all the laws, while drivers should concede that bicycles are different from cars and should therefore be subject to different laws. Stopping at empty intersections is cumbersome for drivers and cyclists alike — but cyclists aren’t likely to kill pedestrians with their carelessness.

By drawing a legal line in the sand between cars and bikes, allowing them different rules in the same environment, Idaho’s bike laws ultimately foster a mutual respect between drivers and cyclists. In Boise it’s common to see road signs instructing drivers and cyclists to "share the road." It may be common sense advice for cyclists, but to motorists, it’s a subtle reminder that bigger shouldn’t mean better.

Rachael Daigle is a staff writer for Boise Weekly.

The Bike Issue: Behind the pack

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Also in this issue:

>>10 things Bay Area cyclists should know

>>Don’t Stop: Bike lessons from Idaho

› steve@sfbg.com

There’s a strange dichotomy facing bicycling in San Francisco, and it’s spelled out in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s "2007 Citywide Bicycle Counts Report," which features a cover photo of Mayor Gavin Newsom and me pedaling up Market Street together on Bike to Work Day two years ago.

That photo, its context, and the information contained in the report tell the story of a city that at one time set the pace for facilitating bicycling as a viable alternative to the automobile. But that city has been passed up since then by cities such as Chicago, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, and Portland, Ore.

San Francisco still has a higher per-capita rate of bicycle use than any major city in the United States, and that number has been steadily rising in recent years, even as construction of new bike facilities has stalled. The report’s survey found a 15 percent increase since the first official bicycle count was conducted in 2006.

"This increase is especially significant when viewed in light of the injunction against the City’s Bicycle Plan. This injunction has stopped the City from installing any new bicycle facilities since June 2006. Despite a lack of improvement or additions to the City’s bicycle route network, cycling use in San Francisco appears to be increasing," the report read.

It’ll take at least another year for city officials to wrap up the environmental studies on the 56 proposed bike projects and get Judge Peter Busch to lift the injunction (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07). But it’s still an open question whether San Francisco’s three-year hiatus will be followed by the rapid installation of new bike lanes and other facilities.

City officials express confidence, and there are some hopeful signs. Newsom has been focused on environmental initiatives, the MTA has beefed up its bike staff from six full-time slots to nine, advocacy groups like San Francisco Bicycle Coalition are at the peak of their numbers and influence, and all involved say promoting bicycling is a cheap, effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and traffic congestion.

"I’d be very surprised if, within six months after the injunction being lifted, we don’t see a record number of bike lanes striped," said MTA spokesperson Judson True.

Yet there are still political barriers to overcome in a city where cars are the dominant transportation option — and the first barrier is Mayor Newsom. He has yet to show a willingness to back his green rhetoric with policies that actually take space from cars, which many of the bike lane projects will entail.

"I think we have seen this mayor talk big on some environmental problems, but I’ve been disappointed that on transportation, that thinking hasn’t been turned into action yet," said SFBC executive director Leah Shahum, whom Newsom appointed to the MTA board but then removed earlier this year before her term expired, a sign of the complex and largely adversarial relationship between the mayor and bicyclists.

Newsom has been able to avoid tough decisions on bikes and cars for the past two years because of the injunction and the wait for Muni and traffic congestion studies, which are being released throughout 2008. But that’s about to change with the court’s ban on new bike projects slated to end next year. So will Newsom, who may be running for governor at the time, be willing to make controversial decisions that back up all his green talk? It’s an open question.

The common denominator in all the cities that have pedaled past San Francisco in recent years is that they’ve had strong mayors who have embraced cycling and partnered with bike advocates to change the rules of the road, often contracting them to work directly on projects.

"We’re poised for it, but will we act on it?" Shahum said of the potential for a bike boom in San Francisco. "It’s going to be a real test next summer and I think the mayor’s role is crucial."

THE GREEN BUG


Like many big city mayors, Newsom has become enamored of all things green at the same time that he’s trying to manage an overtaxed transportation system. He is pushing for Muni improvements and has voiced support for congestion pricing initiatives that could make driving a car more expensive.

"This trend of big city mayors focused on transportation to deal with environmental problems is spreading, and I think Newsom has caught that bug," Shahum said.

SFBC and other groups have been meeting regularly with Wade Crowfoot, the mayor’s new director of climate change initiatives, to push the bike plan work forward, create an aggressive implementation strategy, and craft new initiatives like the recently unveiled "Healthways" proposal to close down the Embarcadero to cars on summer Sunday mornings, an idea borrowed from Bogotá, Colombia.

It’s a sea change from that ride I took with Newsom two years ago, three days after he vetoed Healthy Saturdays, which would have created another day of car-free roads in Golden Gate Park. He labeled the bike advocates as "divisive," and told me his veto decision was influenced by "people in the neighborhoods who just came out in force in ways that, frankly, I didn’t expect."

Those feelings, held by the half of San Franciscans who use a car as their primary mode of transportation, haven’t gone away. Newsom’s advisers and the MTA staffers working on the Bike Plan acknowledge the political challenges in completing the bike network, which advocates say is an important prerequisite for convincing more people that cycling is a safe, attractive option.

I asked Oliver Gajda, who is leading the MTA’s bike team, whether the 56 projects he’s now working on would be queued up and ready to build once the injunction is lifted. While the technical work will be done, he said that most projects still will require lots of community meetings and negotiations.

"Some of the projects will take a couple years of work with the community, and some will take less," Gajda said. "When you discuss the potential of removing lanes or parking spots, there are lots of different interests in San Francisco that have concerns."

That’s where the rubber meets the road. Yes, everyone wants to see more cycling in San Francisco — Newsom two years ago even set the goal of 10 percent of all vehicle trips being made by bicycle by 2010, a goal that nobody interviewed for this article thinks the city will meet — but is the city willing to take space from cars?

"The public priorities are already correct, but we need political leadership to implement those priorities even when there’s opposition," said Dave Snyder, transportation policy director with the San Francisco Planning Urban Research Association.

Crowfoot said Newsom is committed to creating better alternatives to the automobile.

"The mayor is fully supportive of expanding the bike network and that will involve tradeoffs," Crowfoot said, acknowledging that some projects involve losing lanes or parking spaces to close the bike network’s most dangerous gaps. "To the extent that the bike network continues to be a patchwork, people won’t get on bikes."

But the mayor also has been fully supportive of the Transit Effectiveness Project’s proposal to reform Muni, even though he recently suggested opposition to proposed parking fine increases might mean that some TEP proposals need to be scaled back.

Skeptics also note that Newsom removed Shahum from the MTA and has appointed no one else with connections to the bicycling community since then, even though that body has sweeping new authority under last year’s Proposition A to implement the bike plan and make decisions about which transportation modes get priority and funding.

"I’m pushing for that, and we’ll see what happens," Crowfoot said of his efforts to get a complete bike network going during the Newsom administration’s reign, acknowledging that, "the proof is in the pudding."

ZERO-SUM GAME


San Francisco’s strong bicycle advocacy culture, the creation of lots of new bike lanes between 2000 and 2004, and innovations like Critical Mass and the sharrow (a painted arrow on the road indicating where bikes should safely ride) made this city a leader in the bicycling movement.

Yet it is only in the last few years, when San Franciscans have been sidelined by the injunction, that the movement really gained mainstream political acceptance and begun to make inroads into the dominant car culture of the United States, slowly and belatedly following the lead of European cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

"Interest in bike-friendly policies is surging, along with the growing number of adults who are riding more. Moreover, the movers and shakers of the biking scene are often smart, always passionate, and they believe strongly in what they are doing. Even when such groups are in the minority, they often enjoy significant political success, and they should never be discounted," J. Harry Wray, a political science professor from DePaul University in Chicago, argues in his new book Pedal Power: The Quiet Rise of the Bicycle in American Public Life (Paradigm, 2008).

Jeffrey Miller, executive director of Thunderhead Alliance, a national umbrella organization supporting regional bicycle advocacy groups, told us he’s pleased with the movement’s progress in recent years.

"There’s been an awakening by the decision-makers in both government and businesses that bicycling and walking can solve a lot of the environmental problems we’re facing," Miller said.

He cited Portland, Ore., Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, and New York as the cities leading the way in prioritizing bicycling and creating systems that encourage the use of bikes, and said he was sad to see the setbacks in San Francisco.

"But advocates in each of those cities will say there’s so much more work to be done," Miller said.

Most of that work centers on changing how drivers and planners think about cities, and especially with those who see the competition for space as a zero-sum game. Miller noted that it’s good for motorists when more people are encouraged to opt for alternate forms of transportation.

"If you just get 10 to 20 percent of the drivers to use those other modes, it frees the freeways up for cars as well," Miller said. "I don’t see why we go out of our way to favor cars over every other form of transportation."

Like many advocates, he said a strong and consistently supportive mayor is crucial to change the priorities in cities.

"We have an executive leader in Mayor Daley who believes strongly that the bicycle is a big part of the solution to our environmental problems," said Rob Sadowsky, director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation.

"We have an incredible partnership with the city," he said, noting that the organization often works directly on city contracts to create more bicycle facilities, something that happens in other bike-friendly cities like Portland and New York. But it doesn’t happen much in San Francisco.

"There’s a real sense that we’ve turned a critical corner and things that we’re been fighting for, for years now, are in sight," said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives in New York. "In the last year, there have been some significant policy advances."

Like Mayor Daley in Chicago, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has become a vocal advocate of green transportation alternatives and has been willing to stand firm against displaced drivers.

"Anything you give to cyclists is basically taken away from automobiles," White said, adding that New York officials "have not shied away from taking parking away, or even a lane on Ninth Avenue. And that shows how serious they are."

The problem isn’t just San Francisco’s, but California’s as well. It is the state’s decades-old California Environmental Quality Act that was used to stall the Bike Plan and make bike projects so cumbersome. Sadowsky said bike projects in Chicago are relatively easy to implement, with little in the way of hearings or environmental studies needed.

Oregon laws also helped make Portland a national leader, with a requirement that all new road construction include bike lanes, paid for with state funds. Yet here in the small, 49-mile square that is San Francisco, with ideal weather and a deeply ingrained bike community, many say the city could be on the verge of regaining its leadership role in the bicycle policy.

A poll conducted in November 2007 by David Binder Research found that 5 percent of residents use a bicycle as their main mode of transportation, and that 16 percent of San Franciscans ride a bike at least once a week. Even more encouraging is the fact that most reasons cited for not biking — not enough bike lanes or parking, bad roads, feeling threatened by cars — are all things that can be addressed by smart bike policies.

"If it’s going to happen anywhere, it’s going to happen in San Francisco — as far as making more bicycling a reality," Gajda told us. "I really feel like we’re poised after the injunction to take it to the next level."

GET INVOLVED

The SFMTA has a series of upcoming workshops on the city’s Bike Plan and network:

Central Neighborhoods May 21, 6–7:30 p.m., SoMa Recreation Center Auditorium, 270 Sixth St.

Southeastern Neighborhoods May 22, 6–7:30 p.m., Bayview Anna E. Warden Branch Library, 5075 Third St.

Western Neighborhoods June 3, 6–7:30 p.m., Sunset Recreation Center Auditorium, 2201 Lawton.

Northern Neighborhoods June 4, 6–7:30 p.m., Golden Gate Valley Branch Library, 1801 Green.

BIKE TO WORK DAY, MAY 15

Biking is easier and more fun than many people realize, so Bike to Work Day is the perfect excuse to try it on for size. There will be energizer stations all over town for goodies and encouragement, and lots of fellow cyclists on the road for moral support, including group rides leaving 11 different neighborhoods at 7:30 a.m. After work, swing by the SFBC’s Bike Away from Work party from 6–10 p.m. at the Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St. For more details, visit http://www.sfbike.org/

Here comes the public power initiative!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann (Scroll down to see the historic Mirkarimi/Peskin/City Attorney resolution)

Today, at the Board of Supervisors meeting, Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin introduced
a Charter Amendment mandating that the city’s Public Utilities Commission create a plan to establish a retail power agency in San Francisco and start the process of kicking PG&E out of City Hall and the rest of the city.

The amendment, as our editorial in Wednesday’s Guardian outlines, would “provide the badly needed kick start to get city officials to act on San Francisco’s historic mandate for a municipal electricity system.”

The move is prompted by the battle over whether the city should replace the ruinous Mirant private power plant with city-owned power plants called peakers at the foot of Potrero Hill. PG&E has quietly orchestrated a major political and public relations onslaught to kill the peakers because they would be what PG&E fears most: city-owned public power.

In fact, as Tim Redmond’s blog discloses, PG&E even marched seven lobbyists (yes, seven) into the office of would-be-green Mayor Gavin Newsom, who once personally backed the plan and whose Public Utilities Commission backs the plan. PG&E jacked Newsom around and muscled him into asking for a delay in today’s scheduled power plant vote to give PG&E more time to kill the peakers.

The rationale: some sort of vague and ridiculous idea of retrofitting the Mirant plant and keeping the PG&E uber alles status quo.

IF PG&E ultimately loses the peaker vote (and it will be close), PG&E will most likely run a referendum on the November ballot against this dread move to peaker public power. So the Mirkarimi and Peskin move is aimed at putting a counter initiative on the November ballot and breathing new life into the historic battle to enforce the federal Raker Act (which mandated San Francisco have a public power system) and bringing our own cheap Hetch Hetchy public power to the people of San Francisco. (See Guardian stories and editorials since l969.) The initiative would be timed to take advantage of the expected heavy turnout of Obama forces for the presidential election and for the election of supervisors.

The legislative digest sums up the amendment in a paragraph of City Hall legalese:

The amendment is to “address the need to change electricity production, delivery, and use to ensure environmentally sustainable and affordable electric supplies for residents, businesses, and city departments and to require the Public Utiliies Commmission to comprehensively study and determine the most effective means of providing clean, sustainable, reliable, and reasonably-priced electric service to San Francisco residents, businesses, and city departments.”

The amendment was written and signed by Deputy City Attorney Theresa Mueller and approved as to form by City Attorney Dennis Herrera. It was introduced by the president of the board (Peskin) and a powerful supervisor who is obviously running for board president and mayor (Mirkarimi). These references are important: when the public power movement was reinvigorated in the late l990s, it faced a massive lineup of PG&E stalwarts inside City Hall: City Attorney Louise Rennie, Mayor Willie Brown, the PUC executive director and PUC commission, and all the supervisors with the notable exception of Sup. Tom Ammiano.

Mikarimi led the two famous initiative campaigns as campaign manager in 2000 and 2001, which PG&E defeated with muscle, mutli milliions, and staunch daily paper support. Now, Mirkarimi is inside City Hall in a starring role leading the charge for community choice aggregation (CCA) and now a public power initiative. And the whole thing scares the hell out of PG&E.as never before.
.
Hurray! The battle is on!

P.S. PG&E marches in: You can see how PG&E works by seeing who was at the critical May 5 meeting in the mayor’s office. No public power people, nobody from the Sierra Club, and no environmental justice activists who are also opposing the peakers (but for understandable environmental reasons.) But standing tall at the secret meeting were seven PG&E lobbyists, led by Travis Kiyota, and such PG&E friendly folks as PUC Commissioner Dick Sklar (remember him?), Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, and a representative from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

PG&E and NRDC arranged to have a timely letter on NRDC letterhead, dated May 12 , come to the supervisors from Robert Kennedy Jr., with ccs to Newsom, President Michael Peevey of the California Public Utilities Commission, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The letter was of course released to the press and the public on the eve of the vote. PG&E, NRDC, and Kennedy had at least one line right: “Where San Francisco ultimately decides to invest its precious energy dollars is a choice that will send a message to cities around the country.”

The tipoff: nowhere do the PG&E supporters, including the Chronicle editorialists who suddenly took a down-with-the-peakers stand yesterday, nor the Examiner, with a wimpy story today on Newsom’s sudden change of plans, mention those dread three letters that divulge the secret agent at work (PG&E) nor that dread phrase that tells what the secret agent is really up to (killing public power.) C’mon, folks, this isn’t that hard to figure out. Is there some law somewhere that says the local media can’t cover what PG&E is doing to perpetuate the PG&E/Raker Act scandal and once again kill public power? (See “The Shame of Hearst” in previous Guardian and blog items.)

On guard. The pubic power forces are once again moving up to the front lines, muskets at the ready. B3 (who sees the fumes from the Mirant plant every minute of every day from my Potrero Hill office window)

Click here to read Mirkarimi and Peskin’s recent Charter Amendment.

Click here to read Redmond’s recent blog, PG&E offers Newsom a blank check

Click here for this week’s PG&E editorial.

PG&E offers Newsom a blank check

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newsom.jpg pg&e.jpg

Gavin Newsom is a mayor who hates to make the tough decisions, and the proposal for three new power plants in Southeast San Francisco is his worst nightmare.

Newsom’s own Public Utilities Commission is pushing the plan, and he’s backed it in the past. Environmentalists are making a stink about it, and that’s caused the mayor-who-wuold-be-green some headaches.

But the major reason he suddenly decided to ask for a delay in the power-plant vote may have nothing to do with environmental issues at all.

Seven lobbyists for Pacific Gas and Electric, led by Travis Kiyota, visited the mayor May 5th and told him that the giant utility would spend whatever it takes to stop the peakers, a reliable City Hall source tells me. Attending the meeting were Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier and PUC commissioner Dick Sklar, the source said.

According to this source’s account, PG&E offered to pay for more power cables into the city, for an expensive demand-management program … for just about anything that would prevent San Francisco from owning its own power plants.

I couldn’t reach either Sklar or Alioto-Pier this afternoon. But Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press secretary, confirmed that the meeting took place:

On Monday, May 5, PG&E participated in a meeting to provide substantive
expertise in the areas of energy efficiency, demand response and power
generation and transmission. Along with staff from the Mayor’s Office,
Board of Supervisors, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Department
of Environment, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, CA Public
Utilities Commission (CAPUC), and the National Resources Defense Council
(NRDC), we were able to engage some of the most creative and knowledgeable
experts in the room together as we work to identify alternatives to the
current action plan.

Ballard also said that retrofitting the Mirant plant — leaving the big privately owned polluter in place — was “one of the options on the table.”

As far as I can tell, there were no public-power advocates in the meeting.

So PG&E is still driving energy policy in the Mayor’s Office. How nice.

Two former mayors help Mirkarimi launch campaign

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As I predicted, Friday’s campaign kickoff event for Sup. Ross Mirkarimi wasn’t simply about whether he’ll be reelected to the Board of Supervisors. It was the launch of a movement to reshape San Francisco’s political landscape in a way that could maintain progressive control of the Board of Supervisors and propel Mirkarimi into the mayor’s office a few years from now.
Yet rather than relying strictly on a reenergized progressive movement, the event seemed to signal that Mirkarimi is aiming to create a bigger tent that capitalizes on his strength on criminal justice issues, among other domains of the moderates. Notably, those in attendance included two former mayors: Art Agnos (no surprise) and Willie Brown (big surprise, and a strong indicator that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s coalition is fraying).
As Sup. Aaron Peskin told the capacity crowd at Yoshi’s on Fillmore Street, “There may come a day when Ross is the chief executive of this city.”

More than just Mirkarimi’s kickoff

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ross.jpg
Image from sfgreenparty.org

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi kicks off his campaign for reelection this evening at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in the heart of the Fillmore. The Board of Supervisors’ only Green Party member is popular in his District 5 — made up of the super lefty Haight and crime-plagued Western Addition, where Mirkarimi has shown real leadership in pushing police foot patrols and other reforms — and is expected to cruise to a relatively easy victory.

But today’s event carries a far larger symbolic significance: it is the beginning of a long campaign to create a progressive narrative for San Francisco that counters the centrist and fairly superficial approach of Mayor Gavin Newsom. And that’s a struggle that will carry through this fall’s high-stakes supervisorial elections, into the vote for a new board president in January, and on into the next mayor’s race — all of which could feature Mirkarimi in a starring role.

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