Mayor

The tragic tale of Tamesha Tobie

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

At first, police believed it was a terrible, self-inflicted mishap.

It happened April 15, just after the funeral held for a San Francisco man who’d succumbed to diabetes. Mourners were gathered in the Western Addition home of Tamesha Tobie’s grandmother, Edna Tobie. Tamesha, a 14-year-old first-year high schooler in town from Stockton for the funeral, was hanging out with two teenage boys, her cousins, in a bedroom — a room where, it turns out, another family member had stashed a powerful .357 Magnum revolver. Suddenly, the house filled with the sound of the gun’s pop.

Tobie’s aunt was cooking in the kitchen. She rushed to find out what was going on. The two boys met her in the hallway and told her there was a gun; she found Tobie on the bed, not moving. Nearby lay the pistol, with five live rounds and a shell still visible in the cylinder under the hammer.

The family dialed 911, and soon the area was packed with uniforms. Paramedics arrived with the police, as did a media flack who expected reporters, a crisis response team from the health department, the local medical examiner, and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, whose district includes Edna Tobie’s Oak Street home.

"These are vivid experiences you don’t lose," Mirkarimi said. "The gut-wrenching part is that it was a young girl."

Fox, CBS, the Associated Press, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported what the cops told them: Tamesha Tobie had accidentally shot herself with the gun.

But it turns out that wasn’t true. In fact, according to an autopsy completed by the medical examiner June 1, Tobie didn’t pull the trigger.

Her death has become another in a long list of unsolved homicides in San Francisco — and another sign that gun violence, both accidental and intentional, is raging out of control.

THE COPS DON’T KNOW


Months after the killing, the San Francisco Police Department didn’t seem aware that Tobie’s death was anything but an accident.

When we contacted the SFPD’s press office early in September, the staffers weren’t aware that her death had been ruled a homicide, nor was Lt. John Murphy, head of the homicide unit. Department spokesperson Sgt. Neville Gittens even requested that the Guardian fax him a copy of the report.

Now the SFPD acknowledges that Tobie was a homicide victim. "We believe it was done at the hands of someone else," Gittens said a week after receiving the report.

A homicide inspector assigned to the case said he learned of the medical examiner’s final report two weeks ago but explained that he’d already regarded Tobie’s death as suspicious.

Inspector Mike Johnson said he thinks one of the two cousins in the room with Tobie fired the weapon. Police have also concluded that the gun was used in an unrelated San Francisco homicide a few months prior by another young family member before being hidden in the home of Tobie’s grandmother.

Nobody has been arrested in that case either. Despite the fact that this gun has now been used to kill at least two people, Johnson conceded that not enough evidence exists to make an arrest in the first murder, even though a suspect has been identified — an exasperating fact for a city already near last year’s total of 85 murders.

If nothing else, the gun’s owner could possibly be guilty of negligence or child endangerment — but no charges are pending.

"The capacity of government not to do something about this at the pace that it is rocketing is what is absolutely alarming," said Mirkarimi, who’s pushed the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to provide better data on violent crime in the city, "because it’s not going to abate itself…. The way that the number is traveling out of the reach of the Police Department and the district attorney — I think we’re going to need to send red flares up, SOS."

DEADLY HORSEPLAY


The Tamesha Tobie case is tricky; there were only three people in the room, and one is dead. The boy who police believe accidentally ended Tobie’s life won’t confess, Johnson said. Some relatives dispute the police’s view that one of the boys mistakenly fired the weapon and instead believe the story the pair have stuck to so far — that the gun fired on its own from the bed as they horsed around, the bullet smashing through the right rear of Tobie’s jaw.

"Obviously the one boy who did it doesn’t want to say anything to us," Johnson said. "And the other boy is somewhat traumatized, and his parents are worried about any possible criminal charges against him for associating with the first boy. So right now we’re trying to corroborate the stories and what happened through other people who were in the house…. It’s kind of a sensitive thing at this point."

But either way, Tamisha Tobie is the ultimate victim of gun violence, and while her death likely wasn’t intentional, it’s joined the city’s steadily climbing homicide rate nonetheless.

Attempts to reach Tobie’s family for comment were unsuccessful.

Statewide in 2004, 10 kids were killed after being accidentally shot either by themselves or by someone else, according to figures maintained by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More recent figures won’t be available until later this year. But according to media accounts and calls to local police jurisdictions, over the past 12 months, three children died similarly just in the Bay Area.

In June a five-year-old boy in Oakland shot himself while playing with a relative’s gun, and a 28-year-old man was arrested for child endangerment — in notably less time than it took San Francisco to complete Tobie’s autopsy.

Just days after Tobie was killed, an 18-year-old girl accidentally shot a younger male teen in the city of Richmond with a revolver he’d found in the home where his death occurred. Last November a 16-year-old boy in Contra Costa County was killed after a friend accidentally shot him in the chest while playing with a .22-caliber revolver. Several other accidents occurred during 2006 in San Francisco and the East Bay, including one involving an Alameda toddler who that spring mistakenly shot his 20-year-old cousin with a .38 that belonged to a family friend.

The gun lobby complains that news stories depicting such deaths overstate the problem of accidents among kids and foster hysteria.

But Shawn Richard of the local nonprofit Brothers Against Guns has a response. The volume of deaths, he argues, isn’t the story.

"It could be a low number. It could be a high number," Richard said. "Regardless, it’s still ridiculous to deal with lives that are being taken by a gun."

Richard founded Brothers Against Guns after two of his siblings were shot to death in San Francisco during the 1990s. He joined the Mayor’s Office, District Attorney Kamala Harris, and the Legal Community Against Violence in drafting a batch of local antigun ordinances that passed the Board of Supervisors last month. One requires local firearms dealers to send inventories of their weapons to the police chief every six months, and another requires all handgun owners to disable their weapons with trigger locks.

Richard is also working with Assemblymember Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) to ban gun shows at the Cow Palace, which is located on state property near the Sunnydale housing project, where violent crimes are a frequent occurrence.

But would all of the antigun news releases in the world have saved Tobie? Homicide inspector Johnson wonders aloud whether they would.

"If the gun’s used in a homicide," Johnson said, "and it’s hidden in the house by children, who’s going to put a gun lock on it?"

Do wi-fi right — ourselves

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OPINION Although it’s only a "declaration of policy," Proposition J (the mayor’s wi-fi initiative) is garnering a lot of opposition. Taken at face value, the initiative seems like a no-brainer: of course we should have free, high-speed wi-fi for everyone, with adequate privacy and no public money, right now. The initiative makes it sound like all we have to do is bend over and pick up the golden wi-fi network lying in the street. Like other stories about precious paving, though, the reality is considerably less shiny.

Since Mayor Gavin Newsom filed Prop. J to whip up support for his proposed EarthLink network, that company pulled out of the San Francisco deal. EarthLink also pulled out of its agreement with Houston (paying $5 million in penalties) and laid off almost all of its municipal network division staff.

Prop. J was created to rally support for a deal that doesn’t exist anymore. Should we pass it anyway? Well, the problems that Prop. J points out are real. At least a fifth of San Franciscans have no home Internet access, and many more residents have only dial-up access.

Unfortunately, Prop. J is written to make a political point, not to ensure universal Internet access. In order to make that point, it insists on two features that were part of the EarthLink deal but don’t make sense if we’re actually trying to achieve access for everyone.

First, wi-fi is almost certainly not the technology on which to base a citywide network. It’s suited to quick-and-dirty outdoor networks or to extending indoor networks to multiple rooms, but as a network that’s supposed to cover large outdoor areas and reach into buildings, it’s got serious limitations.

A smarter approach would likely use wi-fi only where it makes the most sense as part of a larger network. A truly universal network would likely utilize a combination of wi-fi, the fiber-optic line that San Francisco already owns, and possibly other technologies, like copper wires or fixed-point wireless.

Second, Prop. J specifies that the network be built as a public-private partnership. The fall of the EarthLink deal proves that the fantasy of a company coming into San Francisco and giving everyone free Internet is just that: a fantasy. Simply declaring that we want a public-private partnership is not going to conjure some unknown company out of thin air to build a universal network in San Francisco.

Although the measure is not legally binding, many of its opponents, including several unions and a number of community groups, understandably fear that it’ll be used as an excuse to rush into a bad deal. If we’ve committed to a public-private partnership and "implementing … agreements as quickly as possible," we’re not exactly staking out a great bargaining position.

The mayor seems dead set on finding a private company to build this network, whether or not that makes sense. He’s likely to use Prop. J, if it passes, as a way to ignore the likelihood that we’re better off pursuing a city-run network. If ensuring that every San Franciscan has access to the Internet is something we really feel is important, it’s something that’s worth doing right, and if we want to make sure it’s done right, we should do it ourselves.

Sasha Magee

Sasha Magee is an activist who blogs at leftinsf.com.

A new planning director from Seattle

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rahaim.jpg
Meet the new boss, John Rahaim

In theory, the San Francisco city Planning Commission gets to decide who runs the department, but in practice, it’s up to the mayor — who has announced today that the new Planning Director will be John Rahaim, who now holds that same job in Seattle. Rahaim has apparently informed the folks in Seattle that he’s accepted the job, although I don’t think the commission has formally offered it to him. And, of course, he has to resign his new position immediately, before he even starts work. Welcome to San Francisco.

I don’t know much about Rahaim, but I found one interview that he did with a Seattle radio station in which he made it pretty clear who calls the shots in major development decisions:

MANY AMERICAN PLANNERS ADMIRE WHAT’S HAPPENED IN VANCOUVER. BUT THEY SAY STANDARD PRACTICE IN CANADA CAN’T FLY ON THIS SIDE OF THE BORDER.

RAHAIM: “Rightly or wrongly, in American society we rely on private developers to build.”

SEATTLE CITY PLANNER JOHN RAHAIM SAYS UNLIKE CANADA, WHERE THE GOVERNMENT DETERMINES HOW AND WHAT DEVELOPERS WILL BUILD, IN THIS COUNTRY WE RELY ON INCENTIVES TO ENCOURAGE DEVELOPERS TO CARRY OUT AN OFFICIAL VISION.

RAHAIM: “And it’s the only way to achieve some of these goals…We don’t nearly influence the market the way other governments do, where development is a privilege, not a right. But nonetheless we do. These programs, subsidies, do influence the market.”

Seattle’s had a downtown housing building boom, just like San Francisco, and of course, if the guy didn’t share Newsom’s basic philosophy, he wouldn’t have been offered the job.

UPDATE: My error on the process. In fact, the commission sent three names to the mayor, including Rahaim’s, and the mayor made the choice. That’s how it works. So Rahaim has the job — until, of course, he follows the mayor’s directive and resigns.

Newsom and Black Monday

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We’ve now been able to independently confirm what the Chronicle reported a couple hours ago: Mayor Gavin Newsom has asked for the resignation of all the city’s department heads, senior staff, and appointees to city boards and commissions, although Newsom reportedly told them he will only accept some of them. But the mayor’s office and press secretary Nathan Ballard has not returned our calls or e-mails to make sense of this or get details, despite the fact that the department heads who were told of this request in this morning’s weekly meeting were asked to refer all press inquiries to Ballard.

It’s all very strange and unsettling, and it appears that many of the people being asked to resign can just say no. The City Attorney’s Office issued this opinion in 2004 outlining how appointees may be removed, and most are allowed to finish their terms unless the mayor wants to level official misconduct charges against them, which he’s not even been willing to do with disgraced Sup. Ed Jew.

Feast: 7 slop shops for functioning alcoholics

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Our mayor isn’t the only one who (allegedly) leads a Jekyll-and-Hyde life of steadfast labor and drunken debauchery. It seems most San Franciscans are highly productive by day, yet totally hammered almost every night. And we don’t let all the booze stop us from staying in shape either. We are notoriously healthy and hedonistic at the same time. It seems impossible, but the facts are there. SF ranks near the top of almost every "healthy-smart city" list, and yet we allegedly consume more booze per capita than any other city in America. The magic lies in the unified opposition of our daytime and nighttime eating habits. Afternoons spent counting carbs and choking down organic salads are balanced by nights of chain-smoking, guzzling beer, and ingesting some of the greasiest foods money can buy. The laws of the working drunkard state that if you’re gonna drink, you gotta eat. Thus, within walking distance of nearly every great SF bar there sits an equally amazing food stand. Just be sure to avoid these places by day. Beer goggles make you see food the same way they do ugly faces and flat asses.

EL FAROLITO


You can find the line cooks at El Farolito seasoning meat with their own sweat long after most taquerias have flipped their signs to cerrado. The Little Light House serves traditional Mexican street fare — which ranges from humdrum (bean burritos) to hilarious (brain and tongue tacos, a perfect gift for your totally hammered friend who "lost his wallet" at the last bar) — until 1 a.m. on weekdays and until 3 a.m. on weekends. Oily tortilla chips and colon-cleansing salsa make this sedentary roach coach an obligatory pit stop for anyone hoping to flush their system before morning.

2777 Mission, SF. (415) 826-4870; 4817 Mission, SF. (415) 337-5500; 2950 24th, SF. (415) 641-0758

CREPES A-GO-GO


The Crepes A-Go-Go on 11th Street robs European burritos of their foreign mystique by serving them from a dirty trailer, the way God intended. You’re not going to find any lightly powdered Suzettes here, but you can score just about any other variation on the theme. Sweet, savory, sickening? Crepes A-Go-Go has it all. Equipped with multiple brands of hot sauce, "fresh" vegetables, meat, assorted cheeses, and jumbo jars of Nutella, this French chuck wagon and its chefs will have you digesting before your head hits the pillow … or sidewalk.

350 11th St., SF. (415) 503-1294

THE TAMALE LADY


You can’t plan every weekend around bars with food nearby, but your chances of topping off a bender with some down-home Mexican cuisine will grow exponentially if you stay within walking distance of the dives in this review. Virginia Ramos, the svelte tamale nymph, spends her weekends hawking cheap eats at Amber, Delirium, Zeitgeist, and bars all around Folsom Street from about 10 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. Pork, chicken, and vegetable are her specialties.

Mostly in the Mission and SoMa, SF.

THE BACON-WRAPPED HOT DOG MAN


San Francisco may not have a fleet of bacon-dog vendors roaming the streets as does Hollywood, but we do have a lone soldier. Adam Gonzales-Hernandez, better known as the Bacon-Dog Cart by his fans at yelp.com — where he’s listed as the fifth-best restaurant in SF — pops up in the right place at the right time (usually around Mission and 16th from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.). He can also be found later in the evening under the freeway by The Endup.

NAAN-N-CURRY


Indian chefs have yet to devise decent handheld versions of palak paneer, chicken curry, or mixed sabzi, so you should only stumble into Naan-N-Curry’s 24-hour downtown location if you’re cool with smelling like coriander and cumin for the next week or so. Cheap and reliable curry in a cup.

336 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 346-1443

ISLAND CAFÉ


When you’ve been knocking back pints of Guinness at Shannon Arms (or at any Irish pub in the Sunset) since noon, and it’s now 2:30 a.m., you’ve got a slim chance of avoiding a hellish hangover. Some people call their dealers, some give up and sacrifice a sick day, but the truly dedicated head over to Island Café, the city’s only 24-hour Hawaiian joint. Spam burgers, Polynesian nachos, pineapple milk shakes, and off-the-wall pork dishes will have your stomach pumping double time to rid itself of toxins.

901 Taraval, SF. (415) 661-3303

MR. PIZZA MAN


Don’t freak out if you’ve missed the Tamale Lady or forgot to tell your cabby to stop at one of the other spots on this list. Just stumble to your room, log onto Mr. Pizza Man’s Web site, and chillax with a snifter of Fernet as San Francisco’s patron saint of late-night delivery makes you a pie to order. Mr. Pizza Man’s got all the fixin’s — pineapple, jalapeño, and cheese make a tried-and-true hangover preventative — as well as locations within five minutes of almost every address in the city.

Locations across the Bay Area. 1-800-570-5111, www.mrpizzaman.com

Paging Dr. Sumchai

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› sarah@sfbg.com

If mayoral candidate Ahimsa Porter Sumchai were a superhero, she’d be Rescue Girl, her petite athletic form encased in a silver jumpsuit and cape as she swooped in, using her understanding of complicated medical and scientific issues as her secret weapon, to save high-risk communities from environmental racism, economic disenfranchisement, and social displacement.

Instead, she’s the candidate who claims to be thankful her name was excluded from the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Aug. 11 coverage of the mayor’s race, in which Gavin Newsom’s challengers were dissed as a peanut gallery of lunatics.

"I’m glad the Chronicle did not disrespect me in the context of ‘a chicken, a wolf, and a grasshopper’-style jokes, like the race is a big laugh," says Sumchai, 55, as I pick her up at the corner of Third Street and Palau Avenue, which lies a stone’s throw from Sumchai’s campaign headquarters in the heart of Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point and a five-minute drive from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund site at the Hunters Point Shipyard.

This intersection was the main drag for Navy operations when the shipyard was active, Sumchai explains as we pass rows of tightly packed houses and a sprinkling of churches — including Grace Tabernacle Church, which has recently become a rallying point for hundreds of residents concerned about exposure to toxic asbestos dust at Lennar Corp.’s Parcel A redevelopment work site at the shipyard.

Sumchai has made that exposure a central focus of her campaign.

"When I become mayor, Lennar will shut down at Parcel A, and I will establish a plan that includes a human safety component and testing of potentially exposed residents," says Sumchai, who also opposes what she calls "the dirty transfer of the shipyard," through which Newsom has proposed folding Candlestick Point into the shipyard so he can build a stadium for the 49ers — and Lennar can build 6,500 more condos at Candlestick.

Sumchai, whose grandparents came from St. Louis in 1939 and whose father was exposed to asbestos when he worked as a shipping clerk at the shipyard, is an academic success story, emerging from the Sunnydale housing project to graduate from UC San Francisco medical school in 1982.

But while Sumchai is incredibly bright, her eggheadedness sometimes seems to get in the way of letting her make concise, down-to-earth statements. Instead, she often comes across as if she spent too much time in the library, a trait that can leave audiences who don’t have science degrees utterly baffled and uncertain as to what point she just tried to make.

And while the odds are clearly stacked against her in the mayor’s race, Sumchai is using her candidacy to ask tough questions on behalf of a community that is beginning to rally for environmental justice after decades of exposure to pollution from two power plants, two freeways, the shipyard, and a sewage plant that impacts five percent of the city’s population with the smell of treating 80 percent of the city’s solid waste.

"To continue with activities that are harmful challenges the fundamental ethics of being a physician, says Sumchai, who practiced emergency medicine for 20 years.

It’s an experience that informs her current crusade to halt Lennar’s construction on Parcel A at the shipyard. The community’s exposure to dust adds up to "an epidemic," she says.

"It gets on their clothing. It’s airborne. And then there’s the geographic proximity to the site of exposure," Sumchai explains, gesturing to the schools, residences, and neighborhoods that lie downwind of Lennar’s site.

From Monster Park, we take the freeway, exiting at Sunnydale, where Sumchai’s family moved when she was seven.

"When we talk about ‘affordable housing,’ what we really mean is affordable to people making $80,000, while people making $12,000 to $20,000, which is the real average median income in the Bayview, have nowhere to go," Sumchai says. She argues that developers on city-owned land should be required to offer 30 percent to 45 percent of their units at prices affordable to very low-income residents.

Crime is another issue that’s important to the candidate. Sumchai, who used to take the bus from Sunnydale to the Lutheran church on Palau and still uses public transit three times a day, says the gangs she saw then had low-velocity weapons and knives, while today they potentially have access to access military assault weapons.

"The lethality of the gang activity has become enormously problematic," she says, noting that the likelihood of getting enmeshed in the criminal justice system lessens for kids involved in after-school activities more than two times a week.

Sumchai has never lived the posh, comfortable life that is often associated in the public mind with successful physicians. In fact, she’s had to be rescued herself from "critical stressors, major traumas [that] could have led me down a path that was not so productive."

In 1999, she had to surrender her medical license. As California Medical Board records tell it, a series of personal catastrophes hit, and Sumchai was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after she experienced insomnia, anxiety, emotional upwellings, and re-experienced traumatic moments "when threatened-stressed or exposed to reminders of her graphic experiences as a emergency trauma physician." These upwellings became "explosive outbursts of anger and paranoia" and contributed to Sumchai’s problems, according to her records, which indicate that she received a 116-day stint in county jail, three years’ probation, and a $200 fine for resisting arrest.

Claiming that she did not receive the medical care she needed when she was imprisoned, Sumchai says, "I have as a physician been to the mountaintop and also to the bottom of the pit in terms of my experiences of how the sick, disabled, homeless, and mentally ill are looked upon and treated."

Crediting the influences of key mentors "who had the courage to intervene and bring in resources and moral compasses," Sumchai says her medical license was reinstated in December 2005, but she has no interest or intention of returning to work in emergency or trauma operations. Today she works as a personal trainer, a sports nutrition consultant, and a fitness industry administrator in between writing for the San Francisco Bay View, meditating, doing Pilates exercises, and running for mayor.

And she’s still constantly in fights — even with her friends. Joe O’Donoghue, the fiery former head of the Residential Builders Association, hired her as a personal trainer and told her earlier this year — in confidence, he insisted to us — that former superintendent Matt Gonzalez was getting ready to enter the mayor’s race. The moment she left the gym, Sumchai called Gonzalez — and O’Donoghue promptly fired her.

For now, Sumchai is setting her sights on bringing about change by debating issues that otherwise aren’t being voiced on behalf of folks whose needs and concerns are being neglected.

Editor’s note: The original version of this story failed to note that Sumchai is a practicing physician as well as a personal trainer and nutrition consultant. She has an active medical practice in West Portal.

Censored in San Francisco

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Project Censored can’t cover everything — most of the stories the group looks at are national and international in scope. But there are huge local stories in every community that the mainstream media black out, ignore, or underplay. We’ve talked to political activists and media experts around the Bay and come up with a (short) list of Bay Area censored stories. We list them in no particular order.

THE MONOPOLIZATION OF LOCAL DAILY NEWSPAPERS


The deal that gave Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group control of almost every daily newspaper in the Bay Area made the business pages — but the impact on news coverage and the damage caused by the homogenization of local news to communities and the political debate were almost entirely ignored.

COMMUNITY CHOICE AGGREGATION AND PG&E’S ATTACK ON PUBLIC POWER


The importance of Community Choice Aggregation as an alternative to Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s private-power monopoly was badly under-covered — as was PG&E’s looming attack on CCA and public power.

GAVIN NEWSOM’S REAL RECORD


The daily papers love to talk about polls that show the mayor’s popularity (and they love to talk about his personal life), but nobody’s looking at his failure to fulfill many of his original promises.

SHUTTERED PUBLIC HOUSING


Until Mayor Newsom suddenly noticed the problems in local public housing last week, the major news media had overlooked the fact that hundreds of public housing units are shuttered while thousands of people wait for affordable housing.

THE ATTACK OF THE HIGH-RISES


The mainstream media reported with glee on the proposals for giant new towers at the Transbay Terminal, but failed to mention that at least 10 more giant towers are already in the works.

MORE HIGHWAYS, LESS TRANSIT


Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to talk green, but the news media haven’t compared his cuts to public transit with his plans to build more highways.

Newsom’s tin cup

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EDITORIAL We’re glad that Mayor Gavin Newsom is angry at the conditions in the city’s public housing projects. Denouncing the head of the Housing Authority as well as the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development made for good press, and it’s possible that Newsom will actually follow up and try to improve some of the third world conditions at places like Sunnyvale and Hunters View.

But his notion that the way to solve the problem is to bring rich people on a tour and hope they will donate money is embarrassingly wrong. It’s the sort of idea that sounds like it came out of the darkest recesses of the Bush White House — the notion that the wealthy will just come to the aid of the poor, volunteering to do what’s right, as soon as they recognize the need.

Let’s us be clear here: public housing has been a horrible mess for years now. If Newsom is suddenly upset about the conditions, it’s only because he hasn’t been paying much attention. As we reported back in October 2005 (see "A Place Called Despair," 10/19/05), the city’s housing projects have been an unimaginable mess: raw sewage flowing through the yards, toilets backing up into kitchen sinks, toxic mold, people living in apartments that are legally and morally uninhabitable, terrifying violence … the list goes on and on. And we haven’t heard a whole lot out of the Mayor’s Office until this sudden burst of righteous anger.

Let us also be clear: a few donations from a few of the many, many multimillionaires in San Francisco aren’t going to solve the problem. It’s pathetic to see the mayor of one of the world’s great cities begging for alms from the same people who have helped create the economic conditions that make it so difficult for the city to provide for its residents’ basic human needs.

There are exceptions, but for the most part, the wealthy and powerful of San Francisco — with the acquiescence of Newsom — have put their considerable resources to bear over the years pushing for low taxes, cuts in city services, and reductions in the money that goes to the poorest residents of this town. Care Not Cash, Newsom’s signature policy measure, was a cruel attack on welfare recipients. His budgets have put hefty raises for police officers above the needs of public housing residents. And now he acts like a little charity, a few crumbs from the swells, will turn things around.

If Newsom really wants to take his rich pals on tours of the city’s public housing wasteland, we can suggest a different educational monologue. Rather than trying to summon up some patrician pity, Newsom ought to say:

This is what the antitax policies that have fattened all your wallets have created. This is what happens when the city lets market-rate developers determine housing policy. This, frankly, is what you get when you rely on the private sector to set public policy.

And if he really wants to address the public housing problem, he should tell the powerful interests who support him that he wants their backing for some serious new revenue measures — say, a hefty increase in the real estate transfer tax — to fund affordable housing in San Francisco.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Isn’t it just great that San Francisco was about to enter into a long-term contract to turn part of our municipal infrastructure over to a company that is laying off 40 percent of its employees, floundering around trying to find a business plan, and getting entirely out of the line of work Mayor Gavin Newsom had in mind?

I feel good that the young mayor (who is acting more and more like a little kid every day) was so careful in preparing plans for a citywide wi-fi service that he never acknowledged, up to the very end, that his public-private partnership was poorly conceived and headed for the rocks.

And now it’s just so special that he wants to blame the Board of Supervisors for scrutinizing the contract — which is exactly what any decent legislative body is supposed to do at a time like this.

The EarthLink nosedive happened at the perfect time for San Francisco. If the company had hung on a little longer to its business plan for citywide wi-fi, the mayor might have managed to push enough supervisors to sign on to the deal. Or his November ballot measure might have passed, and the board might have been afraid to defy the voters. This might have been a grand little fiscal, legal, and political nightmare that could have stalled any progress on municipal broadband for years.

Newsom still insists that he was on the right track. "EarthLink would have been legally obligated to fulfill its promises to San Francisco, and we would have had a functioning wi-fi system by now," Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle.

But the reality is, a company that doesn’t want to do a job that no longer fits into its business strategy — and a company having enough financial problems that it’s had to cut its staff almost in half — isn’t what you would call an excellent partner. And we can all thank the fact that this Board of Supervisors is relatively independent of the Mayor’s Office for our not being stuck in a rotten deal.

San Francisco doesn’t have a terribly good record of negotiating public-private partnerships or development deals. Back in the early 1980s, then-mayor Dianne Feinstein personally took control of the negotiations with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. for a long-term contract to transmit the city’s power. The deal was about as bad as it could get — everything for PG&E, nothing for the city — but the mayor insisted it was an excellent contract, and she and PG&E’s lobbyists rammed it through a compliant Board of Supervisors. It’s wound up costing San Francisco tens of millions of dollars, and the city’s been trying to get out of it for years. PG&E’s franchise fee is the lowest that any city charges a private utility in California — and it was assigned in perpetuity by a compliant Board of Supervisors in the 1930s.

We’re supposed to be a little more sophisticated today. District elections have ended the mayoral rubber stamp at City Hall, and the mayor should understand that any time he works out a deal like this, the supes are going to give it a hard look. If it’s so great for everyone, then making the details public as early as possible, working with the board (instead of refusing even to show up), and sharpening the deal will make things even better.

That’s not how this mayor does business. And you can tell. *

Where is the love?

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OPINION Distant dreams of flowing colored scarves, glowing tie-dyed shirts, and rainbow dashikis commingling with mounds of facial hair and peace signs filled my mind as I walked through a deep recess of quiet green on a hidden trail in Golden Gate Park. It was 7 a.m. I was there to meet Mary X, an OG Summer of Love attendee, as she hastily closed her camp before, as she put it, "the po arrested me and stole all my stuff."

Despite the romantic images of the 1967 events, Mary’s campmates — black, brown, and white houseless elders, several of whom are veterans of the Vietnam War — were barely clothed in soiled flak jackets and torn tie-dyed shirts.

Further shattering the mythos of peace, human love, and community caring, many of these elders sported overlong beards that, unlike those in so many white-ified Jesus pictures, were filled with crumbs and spittle. Their hands were crippled with arthritis and barely able to hold their coffee cups, much less make a peace sign. "I was there," Mary stated plainly, her black eyes searching nervously for the next Department of Public Works truck or park police officer. "I was at the original Summer of Love in 1967." She stopped talking, picked up her backpack, and left without looking back at me.

Mary is a diagnosed schizophrenic, she told me during our original phone call, and like many poor folks in the United States — like my poor mama, Dee, who passed away last year — she has no money for mental health services. Her indigent program allows her a biannual visit with a disaffected psychiatrist who hands her a medication prescription she can’t afford to fill. Her only income is earned from long hours spent collecting cans and redeeming them for small change, very hard work that we at Poor call microbusiness — and a line of work that our magazine, in a recent exposé ("The Corporate Trash Scandal," 8/15/07), discovered is more likely to erase our collective carbon footprint that any corporate recycling company.

While Mayor Gavin Newsom continues with his daily sweeps of homeless people in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius writes weekly hit pieces that demonize and lie about the poor folks surviving in public spaces, equating them with the wild coyotes that roam the park. Nevius’s hit campaign begs the question for all of us: where is the love?

As thousands celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, how can we criminalize people for the sole act of living without a home and occupying public space? And who should really determine who belongs in open spaces like parks, beaches, streets, and sidewalks?

How have we in the United States come to equate cleanliness with a lack of poor human beings, and how are the people who have come to celebrate the Summer of Love — with their trash, picnic baskets, cars, belongings, and recreational drugs — any cleaner than the homeless folks who live and work in the park year-round and have nowhere else to go?

Tiny

Tiny, a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia, is the cofounder of Poor magazine and the Poor News Network (www.poornewsnetwork.org) and the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America.

Newsom won’t learn

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By Tim Redmond

The mayor now says he’s going to seek another private partner to build a wi-fi network in the city. Calls, he says, are pouring in..

So here we go again.

Wifi meltdown, Newsom meltdown

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By Tim Redmond

It’s no surprise that Earthlink has backed out of its deal to provide free wi-fi in San Francisco; we predicted this weeks ago.

What’s annoying is that the mayor is trying to blame the supervisors for delaying the contract. What — they should have rushed to approve it even as the prime vendor was telling the rest of the world that it wasn’t interested in this line of business any more? The supes should have done no due diligence and just gone along with what the mayor wanted?

Newsom’s big election-year initiative has just burned down, and he’s looking for a scapegoat. It’s your own fault, My. Mayor; it was a bad deal from day one.

Harm reduction in the park

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EDITORIAL Anyone with any sense knows that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s attempts to clear homeless people out of Golden Gate Park won’t work. It’s been tried before, under a series of mayors, and in the end, as long as there’s no suitable housing available, the park will have long-term residents. You can sweep them out one day and pack the park with cops the next, but eventually the extra attention will die down and the homeless will be back.

But in the meantime, as J.B. Powell reports in this issue, the backlash from the crackdown is hitting facilities like the needle-exchange service in the Haight. And that’s a big problem.

The mayor can play cat-and-mouse games with the homeless all he wants, but needle exchange is a crucial public health issue. Dirty needles spread AIDS, hepatitis, and other diseases; this is literally about life and death, and the medical evidence is clear that needle-exchange programs help. They also take a whole lot of dirty needles off the streets (and out of the park): drug users not only obtain clean syringes at the exchange, they also drop off their used ones.

Despite the best efforts of the needle-exchange programs, however, there are going to be users who simply inject, then look for a place to toss their rig. That’s why Newsom ought to tell the Recreation and Park Department to look seriously at putting safe, secure disposal facilities in or around Golden Gate Park.

This isn’t a radical idea — Santa Cruz, New York, Baltimore, Vancouver, and many other cities provide needle-disposal boxes in areas with high drug use. That keeps a lot of the needles from being discarded in areas where people and animals walk and play — another serious public health concern.

But Newsom and the folks at Rec and Park refuse to consider the idea — because they don’t think it would be politically popular. That’s a terrible way to approach a health crisis.

Yes, some park neighbors would complain about the presence of canisters designed to hold hazardous medical waste. And it’s possible, of course, that vandals could attack the sites and spread dangerous needles all over. But those downsides are relatively modest compared to what we’re facing right now: dirty needles are already being discarded in the park. And everyone, including city gardeners and maintenance workers, is at risk from an accidental needle stick.

The city has an official "harm-reduction" policy in place; since it’s not possible to stop all drug use, the city’s supposed to do whatever possible to prevent contagion and save lives. Secure needle-disposal facilities in and around Golden Gate Park won’t solve every drug-related social problem, but they could help save a few lives. And that makes the idea eminently worthy, whatever the political costs.<\!s>*

Sticking point

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The Homeless Youth Alliance (HYA) has quietly operated a drop-in center and needle exchange program in the Haight for the last 10 years. Until last month, very few people besides their clients even knew they existed.

Then the San Francisco Chronicle ran a series of overheated articles about used syringes littering Golden Gate Park. One of the pieces singled out HYA for handing out drug needles "by the double handful."

But the HYA and similar groups have long urged city leaders to deal with needle waste, urging them to install the type of needle collection receptacles used in other cities that share San Francisco’s official "harm reduction" approach to drug use. "We’ve been trying to get disposal boxes [for syringes] into the park for over a year and a half," HYA executive director Mary Howe said.

Yet Mayor Gavin Newsom and his administration have ignored that advice — apparently concerned about its political implications — and have instead ordered police and outreach workers to crack down on the homeless.

"Since the [Chronicle] articles, a few people have decided to stroll in off the street and tell us what they think of us," Howe told the Guardian. "Clearly, they want to think that the syringe problem is on me and on the needle exchange."

But Howe and other public health experts say San Francisco’s 15-year-old needle-swap program has not only dramatically contained HIV, Hepatitis C, and other deadly diseases among IV drug users, it also has actually reduced the number of cast-off needles in public spaces.

Santa Cruz, New York, Baltimore, Vancouver, and many other cities feature disposal boxes in drug hot spots. New York State Department of Health spokesperson Claire Pospisil told us her agency has more than 80 such receptacles around the state. While Newsom has borrowed get-tough programs like community court (for quality-of-life offenses generally committed by the homeless) and some aspects of his Care Not Cash plan from New York, his administration nixed requests to put the boxes in.

Instead, shortly after the first Chronicle articles appeared in late July, the city launched another crackdown on people sleeping in the park, as other mayors before him have done during election years. But several public health and law enforcement professionals told us the raids will never rid the park of addicts looking for a safe place to fix — or the occasional used needle that they leave behind.

"It’s one thing to sweep the park and displace an entire community if you have someplace to put them," Howe argued. "But they don’t have any place to put them."

Howe said her attempts to have syringe containers placed in the park are consistent with the San Francisco Health Commission’s seven-year-old "harm-reduction" mandate, which calls on city health workers and city-funded contractors like needle-exchange programs to minimize, as much as possible, the health dangers associated with drug abuse. Used needles, Howe contends, count as one of these dangers.

But Newsom spokesperson Nathan Ballard confirmed by e-mail that the administration has considered and rejected the idea for now. "The mayor is not eager to put such boxes in the park," Ballard wrote. He added that Newsom has asked the Health Department to consider installing "receptacles … in the right places," but when we asked him in a follow-up e-mail where such "right places" might be, he did not respond.

Rose Dennis at the Recreation and Park Department said that, in the past, the department "floated the idea" of disposal boxes at public meetings. But when it became clear that the containers would not be politically popular, the department quickly gave up on them. "People were really, profoundly opposed to it … and we just didn’t have the confidence that we weren’t going to be vilified for it," Dennis said. "We’re not just going to politically put our asses out there just because someone has an idea."

Several sources in the public health profession lamented this kind of political ass-covering. Dr. Alex Kral, a noted San Francisco epidemiologist, told us, "It’s not that we don’t have solutions to these problems. We have solutions. The problem is the politics…. If you take the politics out of it, we should have syringe disposal boxes in the park and wherever [IV drug users] congregate. At the very least we should have them at the edges of the park."

Even C.W. Nevius, the Chronicle columnist who stirred up the syringe controversy in the first place, supports Howe’s disposal box proposal. "What’s the downside of putting these boxes in?" he told us. "People might think that boxes would somehow encourage people to use drugs in the park, but the reason why [drug users] stay there would not be because there are these boxes."

Nevius added that Newsom called him after his columns came out and "yelled at me for 45 minutes…. He was very upset with the stories and the way they showed what’s happening."

Ballard touted the city’s aggressive new actions to clean up Golden Gate Park. He said that, in addition to the recent raids on homeless encampments, 13 new Rec and Park patrol officers will be dispatched to the park within a month, and "we’re adding additional HOT [homeless outreach] teams to connect more homeless people to the services they need."

Lt. Mary Stasko at the San Francisco Police Department’s Park Station explained how social workers in the HOT teams interact with park squatters during the early morning operations. "The outreach teams go with the police officers and the clean-up crews, and they tell people, ‘We can put you in a bed tonight, we can give you a hot meal right now if you come with us.’

But Stasko was doubtful that sweeps alone will stop homeless drug users from returning to the park. City shelters do not permit substance use, she reasoned, meaning anyone who wants to accept the HOT teams’ offers must choose immediate abstinence. "For the people who are interested in quitting, [the city’s new outreach efforts] are working like a charm. But then you have the hard-core people who don’t want to stop using. They’re the ones who end up coming back. Those are the types that have been in the park since 1967."

Canadian epidemiologist Dr. Evan Wood cited San Francisco’s "high-threshold," abstinence-only approach to services as a major factor in Golden Gate Park’s chronic cycle of homelessness and substance abuse. He has been involved with implementing Vancouver’s successful "safe injection site," where people can safely shoot up and dispose of their needles. Similar facilities are already widespread in Europe.

"Trying to simply eliminate these behaviors does not work," Wood went on. "You have to meet these people on their turf."

The death of Polk Street

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Click here to read about the Polk’s long, queer history

Kelly Michaels was following the San Francisco dream when she escaped her small Alabama hometown at 17 and hitchhiked westward. It was 1989.

"I had stars in my eyes," Michaels told the Guardian, sitting on the floor of her friend’s small single-room occupancy Tenderloin apartment, hints of a Southern drawl now paired with Tammy Faye mascara and bleached-blonde hair. "When you’re 16 or 17 and have dreams of being famous, you come to California — and you probably end up on Polk Street in drag."

Michaels arrived on Polk with little more than blue jeans, a bra, and rubber falsies to her name, making ends meet as a street sex worker. It wasn’t what she was looking for; the Polk was plagued with drugs and violence. But her dad was embarrassed by his transgendered daughter and didn’t her want her back. The neighborhood was a home.

She found a community at fierce Polk Gulch trans and boy-hustler bars like Q.T. and Reflections, where clientele included one "big, tall, black Egyptian transsexual hell-raiser" known to draw a gun. Scores of boy hustlers "coming in daily from the Greyhound station" danced naked on the bars. At the end of the night, Michaels’s new family members would pool their money and rent a hotel room for $30.

"The bars were the churches, the sanctuaries," Michaels’s friend Terri, an African American man in his 50s, told us. "You weren’t really going to be hassled there."

Not any more. "Polk Street is dead," Michaels told us. "Dead as fuck now."

THE NEW POLK STREET


The new kids on the block are calling it "revitalization."

After the three-decades-old gay bar Kimo’s is transferred to a new owner at the end of September, there will be only two queer bars left on a street that was San Francisco’s gay male center in the 1960s and a gritty, affordable home for low-income queers, trans women, and male sex workers in the following decades. Where scores of hustlers lined up against seedy sex shops and gay bars just a few years ago, crowds of twentysomething Marina look-alikes now clog the sidewalks in front of upscale clubs.

Polk’s queer residents and patrons are now being priced and policed out of their neighborhood — and their city — as business and tourism interests continue to eat away at the city’s center. Lower Polk Gulch, just blocks north of City Hall and one block east of Van Ness, has in the past few years succumbed to multimillion-dollar businesses, upscale lofts, increased rents at SRO hotels and apartments, and a new million-dollar city streetscape beautification plan. The related increase in policing and new efforts to clean up the street is making the area an unwelcoming place for the marginal queers who for so long called it home.

It has been the most down-and-out segments of the queer population — male sex workers, trannies, young people, poor people of color, and immigrants — who have often been the queer population’s boldest and most innovative actors, pushing the movement forward in new ways. What does queer San Francisco lose when our most marginalized members are pushed, policed, and priced out of the city?

HEART OF A COMMUNITY


Michaels stood under a neon purple Divas sign, advertising the three-story transgender club that has stood in Polk Gulch for more than three decades. Divas manager Alexis Miranda, a friend, stepped outside to chat, and a dozen characters from the neighborhood stopped by to shoot the shit. One man rubbed Miranda’s belly through her leopard bodysuit. "This is my baby," he told us jokingly.

Divas is as much a community center as it is a club. Girls from out of town and out of the country know to come to Divas when they step off the boat, plane, or bus. Many trans immigrants make a living as prostitutes, and while Miranda insists that she does not allow them to work inside the club, the close vicinity of San Francisco’s tranny prostitute district has meant tension for Divas.

Miranda told us the police have been targeting the club because of complaints from new merchants. "Some of the people who have new businesses don’t want the people who live here to stay. They want to close us down," she said. "They’re trying to gentrify the neighborhood."

Neville Gittens, a police spokesperson, told us that the San Francisco Police Department performs "regular enforcement in that area" but said any targeted operations cannot be discussed.

Theresa Sparks, a trans woman who chairs the Police Commission, said Miranda made the same claim at the commission meeting Aug. 15. "I don’t know if that’s true or not," Sparks told us. "My intent is to find out what is going on."

Sparks agreed that gentrification is driving trans people out of the Polk Gulch neighborhood: "It is very, very difficult for a transgendered person to survive in this city."

Miranda pointed to a bar across the street. Until 2000, the Lush Lounge was the cruisy trans and hustler bar Polk Gulch Saloon. Now, under a new owner, white twentysomething heterosexuals sip apple pie martinis.

Sonia Khanna, a 28-year-old trans woman with long, curly brown hair and mocha skin told us she doesn’t feel welcome there. "If you’re a tranny, they think you’re a whore," she said.

Miranda said the owner, Steve Black, ejected her when she went to welcome him to the neighborhood. Miranda, a former empress in San Francisco’s Imperial Court System, reported him to the Human Rights Commission. The inquiry was closed when the owner informed the commission that he allows transgendered people into the bar. He didn’t deny tossing out Miranda; he said he just disliked her personally.

The bigger problem may be the neighborhood’s increased property values. Divas owner and Polk Gulch resident Steve Berkey told us that rents have pushed out other established queer businesses on Polk. The only reason Divas stays open is that he owns the building. "It used to be that so many girls lived in the neighborhood," he said. "They packed the place. But now rents have driven them off."

CENTER OF THE STORM


The reasons behind the death of the queer Polk are complex, likely including the ascendance of the Internet as a social networking tool, rising property costs, and the aging of the bars’ core clientele and owners. But most of the community’s rancor has focused on the most visible manifestation of change: neighborhood associations representing new, upscale businesses working with police and the city to clean up the streets.

At the center of the storm is a glass-walled architecture studio at the bottom of Polk Gulch, around the corner from Divas. Two freshly planted palm trees in front of the studio are conspicuous on a site next door to a bleak, institutional homeless shelter outfitted with security cameras and across the street from a porn shop promising "Hot Bareback Action!"

Case+Abst Architects has been the workplace and home of husband and wife Carolyn Abst and Ron Case since they were lured by the area’s low cost in 1999. The trees were the first of 40 planted in a campaign they initiated last year as cofounders of Lower Polk Neighbors. Abst told the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2005 that she "wants a fruit stand [on Polk Street], and we’ll take a Starbucks too."

The group has had an impact: District Attorney Kamala Harris said at a recent community meeting organized by the LPN that she has responded to association agitation by having representatives of the District Attorney’s Office walk the neighborhood with police and installing high-tech surveillance equipment to gain more criminal convictions. Sup. Aaron Peskin has asked the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to include the Lower Polk in its Neighborhood Marketplace Initiative, a program designed to revitalize neighborhood business districts. As part of this program, a part-time staff person now acts as a liaison between Lower Polk merchants and police. Another city program is scheduled to spend $1 million on installing new lights and planting trees later this year.

Activists say the LPN focus is not on outreach, therapy, or support for the Polk’s marginalized residents but on pushing undesirables out of the neighborhood and ejecting outreach programs like a local needle exchange.

Last year Abst was the subject of a "wanted" poster put up on Polk by the group Gay Shame. The group calls the LPN a "progentrification attack squad" whose goal is to "remove outsider queers and social deviants from our neighborhood in order to accelerate property development and real estate profiteering."

The hustler bar Club RendezVous lost its lease in 2005 after the property was bought and razed. Its co-owner, David Kapp, didn’t return our phone calls seeking comment, but he told the Central City Extra in February 2006 that a "smear campaign" by the LPN stopped him from relocating down the street. A First Congregational Church is now being constructed where RendezVous once stood. The church was designed by Case+Abst.

Case told us that the Planning Department wanted to see neighborhood support for the RendezVous move. The LPN asked that RendezVous provide security, but the bar’s owners refused. "They always had younger, underage boys hanging out," Case said. "There are a lot of families in this neighborhood. We wished them well, but it’s also a community." He told us he wants not to gentrify the neighborhood but to make it clean and safe.

But safe for whom?

Chris Roebuck, a medical anthropologist at UC Berkeley, told us that the increased policing has also meant increased harassment of trans women. Sex workers, many of them immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand, are "increasingly being pushed into the alleyways, into unsafe spaces," he said. He’s also noticed a criminalization of what he called "walking while trans" in the six years he has spent interviewing trans women on Polk Street.

At a community meeting with the district attorney earlier this month, two trans women said the police, despite sensitivity trainings, do not take them seriously when they report a crime.

"Getting rid of the public space for trans women and drug users is not safe for them," Polk resident Matt Bernstein Sycamore (a.k.a. Mattilda) told us. "Deportation [of immigrant sex workers] is not a safe space. The needle exchange actually does make people safer. Getting rid of it does not make people safer."

Sycamore, editor of the book Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, is concerned with what he calls a "cultural erasure" in the area. "Polk Street has been the last remaining place where marginalized queers can come to figure out how to cope, meet one another, and form social networks," he told us. "That sort of outsider culture has been so dependent on having a public space to figure out ways to survive. That is the dream of San Francisco — that you can get away from where you came from and cope, and create something dangerous and desperate and explosive."

POLK VILLAGE?


When Kimo’s changes hands at the end of September, San Francisco will lose one of the last vestiges of a hustler culture housed on Polk Street since at least the early 1960s.

On a recent night, six gray-haired men sat chatting or reading the paper, relics of Polk Street’s heyday. A young man with a shaved head and black hoodie stood outside the front door and gave a suspicious look to a young blonde woman in bikini straps who breezed in with two friends, laughing, oblivious to him. A sign in front read "No Loitering In Front of These Premises."

The state’s Department of Alcohol Beverage Control mandated the warning, Kimo’s bartender John David told us. He said he thinks that was the result of pressure from the LPN. "Kimo’s is the new whipping boy," he told us. "RendezVous is out, and now it’s our fault that people are on the streets."

Case denies that his group had anything to do with the crackdown on Kimo’s.

A tall man with shaggy brown hair standing on the sidewalk near Kimo’s, who asked to be identified by his porn-actor name, Eric Manchester, complained that a way of life is coming to an end. Manchester said he started hustling on Polk at age 17 after leaving the "redneck, racist town" of Martinsville, Ind., in 10th grade and being stationed in San Diego by the Navy.

"It wasn’t just money for me," Manchester told us. "This was a good place to come and get advice, comfort, support. There are people that need people, and they’re going to take that all away. San Francisco is going down the tubes. All the heterosexual people are moving in. They like the police-state mentality."

Among the new arrivals is the owner of the $6.5 million O’Reilly’s Holy Grail Restaurant that stands just a few doors down Polk Street from Kimo’s. On a recent evening, a musician played soft jazz on a black grand piano, while men in starched pastel button-down shirts stood around on the hickory pecan floor.

Myles O’Reilly opened the restaurant two years ago, when he also transformed a low-rent residential hotel above the space into 14 European-style hotel suites. Neighbors point to the property as a tipping point in Polk’s transformation. But O’Reilly sounded almost defeated when he talked about his "multimillion-dollar jewel in the middle of the desert."

"We are only a couple blocks from City Hall and Union Square," he told us. "But tourism doesn’t come this way."

With the goal of transforming the area, he teamed up with John Malloy, the head of the recently founded Polk Corridor Business Association, who has also chaired the LPN.

One of their projects is on view outside the restaurant and along the street. Colorful banners read: "Welcome to Polk Village … working together to build a cleaner, safer, more beautiful community." The PCBA plans to circulate a petition to officially change the name of Polk Gulch to Polk Village in a few years, but O’Reilly isn’t waiting. He defiantly lists the restaurant’s address as 1233 Polk Village on his building.

That "village" will house a small army if these merchants have their way. "We need foot patrols up and down Polk Street," Malloy, who lives in the neighborhood, told us. "We’re going to get more police even if we have to go out there and hire them ourselves."

O’Reilly took out his cell phone and started showing me photos. "This is defecation on the sidewalk outside," he said, pointing to a smudgy image. "This is condoms on the sidewalk. You see this lovely photograph? That’s a condom in the flowerbed. That’s what my son had to see this morning. And nobody helps."

"There are 1,000 condos being built here," O’Reilly said. "Something has to be done to restrict the number of street people."

VANISHING NEIGHBORHOODS


The Tenderloin, and to a lesser extent Polk Gulch, risked being swallowed by the expanding downtown financial district and tourist industries in the late 1970s. But in the 1980s, community activism secured a moratorium on the conversion of residential hotel units, required luxury hoteliers to contribute millions of dollars in community mitigations, downzoned dozens of blocks of prime downtown property, and created a nonprofit housing boom.

It is these achievements that new merchants and residents point to when distancing themselves from the word gentrification. LPN cofounder Case told us that because apartments in the area are rent controlled, gentrification is "not possible."

Not so, said Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee. "Look at the Castro," he told us. "It’s full of rent-controlled buildings. All you have to do is evoke the Ellis Act, or you buy out the tenants."

Or look next to the Congregational Church construction on Polk. There stands an almost-completed four-story building whose 32 units are being sold for up to $630,000. A large glossy poster in its window advertises the units’ "open living and dining areas," along with "stainless steel appliances, custom cabinets, [and] granite counters."

Brian Bassinger, cofounder of the AIDS Housing Alliance, told us that in one of the buildings where his organization houses people a few blocks south of Polk Gulch, rent is now $1,700 a month, up from $1,325 just a few years ago.

Gayle Rubin, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and a historian of South of Market leather cultures, told us that gay neighborhoods are disappearing across the country as the core of major cities are transformed into high-value areas. This puts pressure on the economic viability of queer neighborhoods, most of which — despite the stereotype of the wealthy gay — have taken root in marginalized, poor neighborhoods.

"Polk Street is just one little battle in the war," Mecca told us. "The Mission was a working-class lesbian area. That whole lesbian culture got lost overnight. The bustling culture of queer artists in the Castro — all gone. The South of Market leather scene — gone. Parts of our culture, the very thing we came to San Francisco for, keep getting wiped out."

Kelly Michaels did develop a certain amount of celebrity as a performer at the famed club Finocchio’s and as a porn star; fans still post photos and gush over her online. And she remains drawn to the Polk, even if her relationship with the neighborhood is deeply ambivalent.

"It’s so evil, so dark, full of drugs and despair," she told us outside Divas. "But this is my home and my family."

"The people left here are going to fight for their home," she said. "Some people have been here forever. Their whole life is here. It’s impossible to get an apartment in other places of this city."

"This is a sanctuary," she said. "They’re taking the sparkle out of San Francisco."

Breaking a sweat

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When San Francisco took the national lead in eschewing consumer products made by workers forced to endure unsavory working conditions, Mayor Gavin Newsom positioned himself front and center on the issue.

Along with Sup. Tom Ammiano, Newsom coauthored the nation’s toughest municipal ordinance on the matter, requiring that the city and county of San Francisco purchase garments for its firefighters, police officers, Muni drivers, and others from manufacturers that can prove they don’t subcontract with sweatshops or mistreat workers themselves.

Putting the widely touted plan into action was another matter. Two years later, some appointees to the city’s newly formed Sweatfree Procurement Advisory Group, including former state senator Tom Hayden, say San Francisco is already failing to recognize its own commitment to human rights.

Several contractors who are set to provide the city with everything from bulletproof vests to uniforms for the Sheriff’s Department have received exemptions from the law, and nearly all of them have contracts lasting from three to five years — meaning it could be the next decade before the law has much impact.

The contracts in question total $7.2 million in value, according to city records.

"The waivers have no conditions attached," Hayden wrote in a recent letter to the mayor. "They give permission to continue avoiding compliance for several years…. We know from the city’s own staff that one supplier, Galls, produces in Colombia, a human-rights violator where scores of union leaders have been assassinated."

Hayden added in a phone interview that members of the advisory group have offered solutions to the city’s slow pace, but officials haven’t reacted. He met with American Apparel CEO Marty Bailey last month, and Bailey expressed interest in bidding on the city contracts, Hayden said, but the city hasn’t followed up with a meeting or conference call. Nor has it explored the option of joining contracts with "sweat-free" companies doing business with Los Angeles, Hayden contended.

"I’ve wondered if the procurement officials in San Francisco were being creative enough in looking for suppliers," Hayden said, "or whether they were looking at the same old handful of suppliers as if those people would change their ways."

Dozens of cities have such laws in place, but few have serious enforcement mechanisms. San Francisco was supposed to distinguish its ordinance in part by activating an agreement with the nonprofit enforcement body Workers Rights Consortium, which should already be inspecting manufacturing plants independently to ensure fair wages, benefits, and safety standards.

But enforcement, it turns out, is exactly where San Francisco’s law has so far fallen flat on it face, critics from the advisory group say. The group’s chair, Valerie Orth, an organizer for Global Exchange, said city bureaucrats promised to grant only short-term contracts until the law’s complex requirements were logistically workable.

Companies doing business with the city are often merely part of a supply chain that is coordinated with manufacturers abroad, so inspectors must track the conduct of subcontractors too.

The city, however, still doesn’t know the locations of some of the manufacturing plants where uniforms for sheriff’s deputies, meter enforcers, and many others are produced, Orth said, and with so many suppliers potentially receiving waivers, there’s no way to tell if, for instance, workers are getting a minimum wage.

Some businesses did provide info to the city on what outfits they subcontract with, but in one case the subcontractor, Fechheimer Brothers Co., didn’t comply with the law’s wage requirements, city records show.

According to Fechheimer’s Web site, the company has "manufacturing partners" in Central and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia that "complement our three union plants in the United States." Fechheimer is participating in a three-year contract to provide uniforms to the city’s fire department.

"We’ve been trying to implement this law since 2005," Orth told the Guardian. "They’ve had time to try and figure out the kinks."

Orth said an executive from Fechheimer attended a recent advisory group meeting and complained that disclosing the location of manufacturing plants abroad would make the firm less competitive.

Newsom’s government affairs director, Wade Crowfoot, was unhappy when he discovered last week that Hayden and Orth had distributed a news release outlining their complaints. When we contacted the mayor’s media flak, Nathan Ballard, with questions, he responded only with an exasperated letter that Crowfoot had sent to the duo.

"Far from the doom-and-gloom portrait painted by the press release, the city remains committed to advancing the most aggressive anti-sweatshop law in the country," Crowfoot wrote. "While it may be frustrating to implement this incrementally, our experience with other groundbreaking legislation such as requiring domestic partner benefits suggests that remaining focused on removing the barriers to implementation — and working together to do so — is the only way to make this law fully operative."

Crowfoot added that the city wants to modify the law to reward contract bidders who are mostly compliant, but Orth and Hayden still worry that the city is simply prioritizing suppliers who are the least costly. According to Orth, "Once [contractors] figure out how they can get out of complying with the law in a city like San Francisco … they can easily get out of complying with laws in other cities."

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s all unofficial at this point, but I’m hearing that Mayor Gavin Newsom is (finally) getting ready to appoint a new city planning director, a fact that sounds like an uninteresting bit of bureaucratic business but is actually one of the most important decisions he’ll ever make. And it will impact everyone who lives in the city, for years to come.

The director of city planning holds an immensely powerful job in this town. You wonder why there are too many cars on the streets and too many tall office buildings downtown, why there’s not enough affordable housing and not enough open space, why Muni is overcrowded and doesn’t run on time? I can trace all of those problems back to decisions made by the city’s planning directors over the past several decades.

In theory, the director reports to the Planning Commission, which sets policy on things like desirable types of development, where offices should go, where blue-collar jobs should be protected, and how many new people can be crammed into a geographic area without overwhelming the capacity of the streets and the transit systems. The way city planning textbooks talk about the job, planners develop visions of urban space, looking at what patterns of land use and development will improve the quality of life in a community, then set zoning rules to foster those visions.

In reality, here’s what’s been happening under the incumbent, Dean Macris, in San Francisco:

A developer who wants to make a lot of money building a project — these days, probably a high-rise full of expensive condos — hires a fancy architect and comes to the planning director with a proposal. The fancy architect talks about (to use the sort of language you actually hear inside the Planning Department) "a tall, slender shaft rising between the mounds of the downtown skyline" — no, I didn’t make that up — and next thing you know, Macris is in love. Oooh, he wants that tower — so he and his staff devise planning rules and guidelines to make it possible for the developer to build it.

(Of course, the way the Planning Department budget works only encourages that sort of behavior. Much of the money to run Macris’s fiefdom comes from developer fees. No developers, no fees.)

Then the activists come along and demand that the developer kick something back to the community. So the developer — who stands to make an absolute killing on the project — throws a few dollars around for a little bit of affordable housing and a few community amenities. And next thing you know, there’s an enormous high-rise under construction.

Developer-driven planning is, by definition, terrible. It was under Macris’s prior reign, in the 1980s, that something like 30 million square feet of high-rise office space was built downtown, driving up housing prices, attracting more traffic, overburdening Muni, and, since high-rise offices cost more to serve than they pay in taxes, hammering the city budget.

And now the city is poised to make some absolutely critical decisions about the future. We need a real planning director who isn’t a developer toady.

The search is down to two or maybe three candidates, at least one of them truly awful. And I hear from good sources that Newsom is listening to Macris’s advice on the choice. I fear for my city.<\!s>*

Supes should run redevelopment

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, scrambling to blunt community criticism of the Redevelopment Agency’s activities in Bayview–Hunters Point, has appointed a new agency director, Fred Blackwell. But the problem was not with the top of the agency (the outgoing director, Marcia Rosen, was neither corrupt nor incompetent) but rather with the entire direction that redevelopment has taken in San Francisco under several generations of mayors. It’s time to take seriously the suggestion of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — that the agency be taken out of the mayor’s control and given to the district-elected supervisors.

Redevelopment is a powerful tool that has been terribly misused all over the nation, and the scars in San Francisco are real and lasting. A rapacious Redevelopment Agency determined to wipe out low-income housing devastated huge swaths of the Western Addition and South of Market in the 1960s, and the communities still haven’t fully recovered. Some people argue that the entire program should be abolished — that redevelopment should be consigned to the dustbin of bad urban history.

But at a time when it’s terribly hard for cities like San Francisco to raise money for affordable housing, basic infrastructure (see accompanying editorial), and ambitious programs like public power, the legal advantages of redevelopment are too good to give up. A state-chartered redevelopment agency sells bonds and raises money with nothing to back up the bonds except the projected increase in property taxes expected from improving a blighted area. The city can’t do that on its own; if it could, then raising, say, a billion dollars for affordable housing would be relatively simple.

In theory, the redevelopment agency could also fund municipal wi-fi, public power, and all sorts of other major projects.

The problem, of course, is that a lot of people in low-income neighborhoods don’t trust redevelopment — and given the history, it’s hard to blame them. But part of the essential problem with the Redevelopment Agency in past years has been its utter lack of accountability; the Western Addition and SoMa plans were drawn up in secret and executed with little regard for community input.

As long as San Francisco supervisors are elected by district, they will be, by definition, more accountable, closer to the neighborhoods, and less corrupted by money than any citywide elected official. Giving the board control over redevelopment is a far better model.

Plenty of cities allow their legislature to run redevelopment. The city councils of both Oakland and Berkeley also function as the directors of those cities’ redevelopment agencies. It’s time to move San Francisco into that column. *

A vote on public broadband

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EDITORIAL It’s annoying that San Francisco progressives and good-government voters will have to spend time and money this fall trying to defeat Mayor Gavin Newsom’s phony wi-fi initiative. It won’t be easy, either: the mayor is, in the words of one blogger, Sasha Magee, promising free ice cream. He’s telling San Franciscans that they can have wireless Internet access everywhere in town without paying a dime. Hard to get people to turn down that deal.

But the mayor isn’t telling the truth — and when this battle is over, the progressives need to offer a much better alternative.

For many people, the promise of Internet access in the mayor’s plan will prove to be entirely false. The wi-fi deal that Newsom has put together will probably work fine for people checking their e-mail on laptops from park benches downtown and outdoor tables at sidewalk cafés. But people who live or work deep inside buildings, far from windows and walls, won’t get any signal at all. And anyone who lives or works more than two stories up won’t get a signal either.

And of course, the free signal, when it works, won’t be fast enough to do much but (slowly) check your e-mail, if there are no attachments to download. You want real broadband, you’re going to have to pay a monthly fee.

That, as we have reported over and over, is because this is a private-sector deal: the network (if it’s actually built) will be owned by EarthLink and Google, and the two companies will be trying to make money off it. They’ll do that by selling premium service (that is, service at a rate most people would consider tolerable) and by targeting everyone on the network with ads.

Although the ballot measure is vague and legally meaningless, it will be the vote of confidence Newsom can use to push the Board of Supervisors to approve his EarthLink-Google deal — that is, unless, as has been widely suggested in the business media, EarthLink shifts direction and decides not to pursue any more municipal wi-fi deals and the city is left holding the bag. So advocates of a true universal broadband alternative need to start working now to present another, better option.

And the best way to do that is to begin drafting a comprehensive citywide broadband initiative for the June 2008 ballot.

Broadband access is and ought to be part of the city’s basic civil infrastructure — something that, like water (and, someday, electricity), is offered through a publicly owned and controlled system at the lowest possible rates. Low-cost broadband would be an immense advantage to local businesses and a huge convenience for local residents and (unlike Newsom’s joke of a deal) would actually do something to address the digital divide.

Wi-fi would be a part of the package, of course, but the plan should also include a citywide fiber-optic network that would bring reliable, fast, and technologically up-to-date Internet access to every address in the city. And while it would cost the city some money up front to build it, the system would almost certainly pay for itself in just a few years. And it could be paired with the construction of a citywide public power system.

Next June may not be a high-turnout election statewide, but in San Francisco, Democrats will be out in force with one of the most contested primaries in local history, pitting Assemblymember Mark Leno against Sen. Carole Migden for the Third District senate seat. Both candidates will be pushing voter turnout — and both can be pressured to support publicly owned municipal wi-fi as a campaign issue (and to back the growing antiprivatization agenda in San Francisco).

Defeating the mayor’s plan is just step one — and the time to start with step two is today.<\!s>*

Redevelopment’s new face

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› sarah@sfbg.com

City Hall’s cavernous marble corridors echoed Aug. 14 with the footsteps of a band of sharply dressed African Americans, many of them ministers and all of them come to voice support for Fred Blackwell’s appointment as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

Blackwell, who has a master’s degree in city planning from UC Berkeley and has been working for the Mayor’s Office of Community Development since 2005, most recently as director, won’t be the first African American to occupy the agency’s top post.

But Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to nominate Blackwell was seen by many as a hopeful sign that the agency might proactively address problems that have torn apart the Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point community in the past year and continue to dog the agency in the Western Addition.

These concerns include the suspicion that Newsom’s plan to fold Candlestick Point into the already controversial Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project is less about wooing the 49ers to stay and more about jumping into bed with Lennar Corp., a deep-pocketed and politically connected development company (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07).

The deal gives Lennar the right to develop 6,500 new housing units and take over the cleanup of Hunters Point Shipyard — a move mayoral candidate Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai described as "the dirty transfer of the shipyard" (see "And They’re Off," 8/15/07).

A growing body of Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point residents has asked the city to temporarily shut down construction at the shipyard’s Parcel A because of concerns about the toxic dust being kicked up (see "Dust Devils," 8/1/07).

And then there’s lingering ill will from the 1960s, when redevelopment caused the massive displacement of African Americans from the Western Addition.

So will Blackwell be able to solve the agency’s deep-rooted problems? Newsom described Blackwell as "an outstanding choice" when nominating him Aug. 10, while agency commission president Rich Peterson called Blackwell "smart, of high integrity, well known by community leaders, and familiar with the unique opportunities as well as important lessons learned of redevelopment in the city."

But while commissioner Francee Covington declared that "a new day is dawning at the agency" shortly before the commission voted 7–<\d>0 to appoint Blackwell, the African American community still has its concerns.

Minister Christopher Muhammad, who has led the voicing of concerns about the Parcel A dust, was proud to see an African American in a position of leadership. "But we are still going to hold your feet to the fire," he said. "Redevelopment is not just about the redevelopment of physical structures but [also] about the redevelopment of human beings."

Noting that Blackwell is a 1991 graduate of Morehouse College, Rev. Amos Brown said, "I find no fault in this man, and you will not find any either in terms of fitness for this office," while local resident Randall Evans voiced his belief that "the only folks gonna take care of black people’s business are black folks."

Activist-journalist Ace Washington observed that Blackwell is "coming into a very hot seat. He needs some ice cubes to sit down. Only time will tell if he stands by his convictions. It doesn’t matter if the director is black, Latino, Asian, or white. All of us here are saying, ‘Ah, a breath of fresh air.’<\!s>"

Rev. Arnold Townsend said, "We trust the resources are there to help community — and not to tell the community what to do. Because until that dynamic changes, it won’t matter who is executive director."

Blackwell conceded that he had misgivings about heading an agency founded in 1948 to remove blight, a mission that many say has been tainted by racism since its inception. "I admit I was not leaping and jumping when my name first surfaced, but I look forward to working with you all," Blackwell told the commission.

Blackwell later told the Guardian he hopes "to foster a sense of equity and opportunity and a broader vision of community development."

"The legacy of redevelopment and urban renewal is not a good one," he said. "The residue is still there, but trust is only built through action."

Describing the Western Addition and Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point as "two bookends in terms of redevelopment," Blackwell said he hopes "to close out the agency’s relationship with the Western Addition and make sure responsibility is transferred seamlessly to the appropriate agencies."

As for Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point, "we should take stock of what we should and should not do, get on the right track, and create opportunities for people who live there," he said.

But Sumchai wants to put the agency under the control of the Board of Supervisors: "You could appoint Jesus of Nazareth and still have problems as long as the agency is locked into its current structure."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi says putting an African American at the head of the Redevelopment Agency "makes a lot of sense, considering the egregious and negative impact the agency has had on the African American community…. But no matter how well-liked Fred Blackwell is, that does not compensate for the deficiencies of the Redevelopment Agency’s aims and competence."<\!s>*

Naked Ambition and the Mayor’s Race: Full Frontal

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By Sarah Phelan
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George “Naked Yoga Guy” Davis started to take off his clothes the minute he filed for the Mayor’s Race, but last night he gave us the full scoop, beginning with the apron he wore during the mayoral debate that featured a full frontal shot of Michelangelo’s David, then getting down to his birthday suit inside City Hall around 7 PM, outside R. 200, which is the Mayor’s Office. Only this time, he struck a pose in the style of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, of course, was nowhere to be seen, having been whisked off hours earlier, presumably through a side door, since no one saw him leave the building. It was, for sure, a handy escape, since that way Newsom didn’t have to face Davis’ body, or other naked truths like the unflattering realities about Gavin’s San Francisco that emerged from the statements made by the eleven mayoral candidates who did show up outside City Hall. Lke the inimitable h.brown.
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Blogger H. Brown: “The city is being run as a developmental jewel for rich people.”

Or the words of former D7 supervisor Tony Hall.
tonyhall.JPG
“The Mayor is not representing people but special interests, his high dollar donors. The City is being sold to highest donors piece by piece, whether its Hunters Point Shipyard, Candlestick Point, Laguna or Harding Park.”

Then there was Juvenile Probation program manager Lonnie Holmes:
Holmes.JPG
“I’m a working class person looking for working class solutions. You will get more demonstration and less conversation out of a Holmes administration.”

Where’s our mayor?

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small newsom.jpg
Photo by Robert Altman from www.altmanphoto.com
By Steven T. Jones
Sunshine activist Kimo Crossman made an excellent point in an e-mail he blasted out this morning, citing a story in the New York Times that illustrates how mayors are usually held accountable for how they spend their days — and how our Mayor Gavin Newsom isn’t.
The story was about how Mayor Rudy Giuliani spent his time after 9-11 and whether it justifies his recent statements about spending more time at Ground Zero than many rescue workers, many of whom now suffer from debilitating respiratory problems as a result of their work, and the failure of Giuliani to properly safeguard their health.
Here in SF, Newsom has been repeatedly criticized by the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force (which, unfortunately, has no enforcement powers) for failing to disclose his complete public schedule, which most days lists a couple events at most. Today is a good example, with the mayor’s schedule listing only “Mayor Newsom will be conducting meeting in City Hall.” Wow, that’s helpful.
Compare that to the detail and specificity for the mayor of New York, and the mayors of many big cities, and you’ll get some insights into how Newsom feels about public accountability.

Newsom doesn’t understand wifi

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By Tim Redmond

Gavin Newsom was on Forum this morning. Although Michael Krasny was easy on him — not one tough question — a few choice tidbits came out. One of my faves, when Krasny asked him about the fall wifi ballot initiative:

“There are 200,000 people in the city who don’t have a computer or access to the internet at home.” His wifi plan, he insists, will addres the digital divide.

But Mr. Mayor: The wifi contract with Earthlink and Google isn’t going to give 200,000 people computers. Not even close. And many of those residents live above the second floor of a building (say, in the Tenderloin), where wifi won’t reach. This isn’t a digital-divide issue; if that was Newsom’s concern, he’d talk about fiber to the door, more community access to computers — and municipal wireless, which would be run as a public service, not for private profit.

I’d like to think Newsom is just dumb and doesn’t get it. I’m afraid he understands it all too well, and has simply decided to cast his lot with private partners who will offer a crappy service that will benefit only those who want to pay for a premium version.

Meanwhile, he says he doesn’t care what the supes do: If the board rejects the Earthlink/Google deal, “we’ll find away around it.”

Since I think Newsom’s measure is going to go down to defeat this fall, maybe the progressives should plan on putting a municipal broadband measure on the June, 2008 ballot. Let’s do it right.

PG&E’s latest lies

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EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which has made a lucrative practice over the years of co-opting environmentalists, is launching one of its boldest and most disgraceful initiatives yet — a campaign seeking to convince the Potrero Hill and Bayview–Hunters Point communities to oppose the city’s new peaker power plants by arguing that they’ll add pollution to the air.

Remember: This is the company that for many years ran the single worst source of air pollution in the region, a foul power plant that was finally shut down a few years back after a long and bitter battle. This is the same company that operates a nuclear power plant on an earthquake fault. The same company that polluted the wells in Hinkley, as depicted in the movie Erin Brockovich. This is a company that’s been lying to communities like Bayview–Hunters Point and Potrero for decades. Nobody should trust PG&E today.

We explained the background last week (see "Peaker Plants and SF’s Energy Future," 8/8/07), but the summary is this: San Francisco wants to install three small-scale power plants at the foot of Potrero Hill. The city’s argument: unless the peakers, which would provide backup power at peak demand times, are in place, the state’s regulators won’t allow the shutdown of the dirty Mirant power plant in the same neighborhood.

Some environmentalists, including San Francisco Public Utilities Commission member Adam Werbach, say San Francisco doesn’t need the peakers or the Mirant plant, but the powerful Independent System Operator, which controls the state’s power grid, disagrees.

That means Mirant will continue to spew poison unless the peakers operate — and PG&E is trying to stir up opposition with the threat that the neighborhood will wind up with both the peakers and Mirant. PG&E, of course, won’t own the peakers; they’ll be run by a company called J-Power USA for 10 years, at which point (if they’re still even needed) they’ll revert to the city. So the private utility is trying to stop the new plants to avoid future competition.

It’s a cynical ploy, but it might be effective — and there’s an easy way the city can stop it. The supervisors, the mayor, and the city attorney should simply announce that the contract with J-Power will state that the peakers can’t operate, even for a second, until the Mirant plant is shut down for good. It’s a simple, clean solution; what is everyone waiting for? *

PS As Amanda Witherell reports in this issue, the public San Joaquin Valley Power Authority has taken legal action against PG&E, charging that the company is vioutf8g state law by interfering with the creation of a Community Choice Aggregation program. There’s some solid evidence that PG&E is doing the same thing in San Francisco, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera should immediately open an investigation into whether this city should file its own complaint against PG&E.

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