Mayor

Holy shit! Josh wolf is running for mayor!

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By G.W. Schulz

So, people want to hate Josh Wolf for being what they perceive as a lawless anarchist. But he’s just so damn polite. He defies virtually every useless assumption about the actual history of anarchism (still little-known among many Americans).

Wolf is like the consummate Boy Scout, but with badges that feature political slogans and old crustcore bands instead. My mom would love this guy’s manners — the way he politely addresses everyone he communicates with and doesn’t seem to really have a hostile bone in his body.

And now he’s running for mayor. Jeez, Wolf’s already spent half the year in prison, and now he has to run against The Douchebag, because no one else wants to do it? (I have good reason for nicknaming Gavin “The Douchebag” — he’s always reminded me of the elitist bad guy from Better Off Dead who stole John Cusack’s girlfriend.) Good luck, Joshua. At least someone’s going to make The Douchbag work for it. Jello Biafra couldn’t even claim a prison stint when he ran for mayor back in 1979.

joshwolf1.jpg
The Gentleman*
vs.
The Douchebag
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Challenge to be reffed by Jello
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“There’s always room for Jello”

*Photo from www.joshwolf.net

Citizen planning

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› sarah@sfbg.com

The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan has become a high-stakes battleground involving anxious developers stalled by a temporary building moratorium, progressives who want more affordable housing, concerns about dwindling light-industrial spaces and an exodus of African American residents, environmental justice, and a list of other issues that are central to this sprawling section of the city.

But the folks in the neighborhood known as Western SoMa are just happy that they’re no longer a part of that mess. Instead, they’re excitedly experimenting with a new approach to planning using an innovative and largely untested grassroots model.

Five years ago, when the city Planning Department first announced its intention to rezone the Eastern Neighborhoods, a group of disenchanted SoMa residents decided that they wanted to secede from that process and develop an independent, more comprehensive, community-based plan.

"A lot of us were offended by the Planning Department’s top-down, autocratic process," Jim Meko, who later became chair of the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force, told the Guardian. "It was a bad process for everybody, but it was particularly bad for SoMa because the neighborhood had already been rezoned in the 1990s."

Meko survived three major demographic shifts within three decades: the AIDS epidemic that decimated SoMa’s gay community, the live-work loft zoning loopholes that gutted the artistic community, and the dot-com crash that displaced many techies. He feared that the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan would impose a "one-size-fits-all mode that treated all of SoMa like postindustrial wasteland."

So Meko set his sights on pressuring the Planning Commission to split his neighborhood from the rest of the Eastern Neighborhoods, which include the Mission District, Eastern SoMa, Showplace Square, Potrero Hill, and the Central Waterfront. Western SoMa is bordered by Mission and Bryant, 13th and Fourth streets, and Harrison and Townsend.

That dream became a reality in February 2004, and that November the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force formed, with a stated objective to "recommend zoning changes that will preserve the heart and soul of their neighborhood, while planning for the realities of 21st-century growth."

Since beginning its work in 2005, the 22-member task force has met as often as five times a month and has created a values statement; a set of planning principles; committees focusing on business and land use, transportation, and arts and entertainment; and a committee that integrates a variety of issues.

Its June 28 town hall meeting was the first time the task force threw the doors open to the community at large, although the occasion happened to come on the heels of a high-profile budget battle between Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly, whose district includes SoMa and who helped set up the task force.

Within five minutes of Meko’s kicking off the meeting, a small but vocal group of attendees began to heckle him midspeech. Perhaps they were there to confront Daly, who had been slated to attend but was out of town. Whatever the reason, while accusing Meko of "having an agenda" and "using the bully pulpit" to present his own views, this faction was anxious to know how many task force members are property owners and which particular group of them would be dealing with crime, the fight against which Newsom has made a top budget priority.

For one wobbly, tension-filled moment, it felt as if this first crack at a citizen planning forum might crumble. But then another participant saved the day by requesting a simple but basic meeting ground rule: no personal attacks.

From that moment, the mood in the room lightened. Pretty soon the rest of the 150 residents who had gathered in the multipurpose room of Bessie Carmichael School on Seventh Street to share their thoughts on Western SoMa were talking about what they liked and what could improve. Even the hecklers quieted down and seemed to meld into the discussion.

As Planning Commissioner Christina Olague put it at the meeting, "This is possibly one of the most exciting things going on in planning. No one understands the heart and soul of a neighborhood like the people who live there. We hope this is a model other neighborhoods will adopt, because a neighborhood plan without the involvement of neighbors who live and breath a community is chaos — just a bunch of buildings zoned in a language no one can read or feel."

But while residents were happy to create lists of neighborhood needs — more parks, bike lanes, affordable housing, child care facilities, and trees; wider sidewalks; and fewer homeless people — they were less keen on the idea of increasing building heights. One proposed means of financing improvements would be to increase allowable heights from 40 to 65 feet in some places.

Some locals complained about partygoers who urinate in the streets and play music loudly in cars instead of going home when the clubs close. But a youthful resident politely pointed out that "it may not be possible to stop young people from being young."

In the face of requests from senior citizens for more dinner theater and fewer nightclubs in SoMa, task force member and nightclub owner Terrance Allen observed that it’s probably only possible to "nudge existing conditions."

Recalling the battle that broke out between residents and partygoers after city planners decided to put affordable housing next to the wildly popular nightclub 1015 Folsom, Allen said, "You don’t want to start a war by putting subsidized housing next to the city’s biggest nightclub." Or as Meko put it, "We don’t want to set up conflicts by putting family housing across from the Stud."

By evening’s end, the consensus was that the meeting was a success. "We have much more in common than we have apart. That’s the whole key," said Marc Salomon, who sits on the task force’s transportation committee. As Meko told the Guardian the next day, "Wasn’t it a fantastic experience? It was the closest thing to a cocktail party without a bartender."

Meko said the task force is eager to complete its work and is shooting for having a draft plan ready by the next town hall meeting, on Oct. 24.

"But we need to do more community outreach," he added, noting that there weren’t many Filipinos at the first meeting even though they have a large presence in Western SoMa. "We’re looking at what SoMa could be like in 20 years. The other Eastern Neighborhoods are watching, and they are envious." *

The truth about housing money

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OPINION Just as in war, in 2007 San Francisco budget politics, truth is the first casualty.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the assertions by Gavin Newsom’s campaign minions that the mayor’s current budget proposal contains a $217.5 million city investment in affordable housing.

The purpose of these claims is to imply that Newsom has voluntarily allocated local tax dollars for this critical need — and that no more should be spent on affordable housing, especially some $10 million for lower-income rental housing production for families with children proposed by Supervisor Chris Daly and the Board of Supervisors.

The facts tell a different story.

First, the impression that this $217.5 million is all local tax money the mayor has voluntarily invested in affordable housing is false. Some $20 million is federal and state money that can be spent only on affordable housing. Another $25 million comes from local sources and also must be used for affordable housing. And $48 million comes from tax-increment funds mandated by a 2005 supervisors policy to go solely toward affordable-housing development.

So about 40 percent ($93 million) of the affordable-housing funding that the Mayor’s Office talks about was money that by law had to go to affordable housing. It wasn’t Newsom’s choice.

Nearly a third of the mayor’s budget for creating affordable housing — some $60 million — is in fact allocated to fund his Care Not Cash program, which was supposed to pay for itself. Indeed, more than twice as much money, $31 million, is earmarked to pay for privately owned, leased residential hotel rooms for temporary housing of the homeless (not producing one new affordable home) as is budgeted for the production of new, permanently affordable lower-income family rental housing ($15 million). The fact is, the 2007–08 Newsom budget cuts $24 million in funds earmarked for new affordable-housing production for families and seniors.

What is most distressing about the half-truths and nontruths in the affordable-housing budget battle of recent days is that the unity between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors — crucial to the expansion of affordable-housing opportunities for San Franciscans and which has characterized the city since the George Moscone administration (some 25,000 permanently affordable homes have been produced in the past 20 years, a figure unmatched in any other mayor American city) — has been placed in peril for short-term political advantage.

But cooler heads have prevailed inside and outside City Hall. Sometimes it is better to shut up and do what needs doing and let the credit fall where it may.

Which is why, when the dust settled last week, no one shouted about the $10 million that was quietly added back into the budget for permanently affordable family-housing production.

But we should all be clear: if we want San Francisco to be as economically diverse as we all claim, then we have only just begun to find the funds needed for more affordable housing. While it may or may not be true that you can never be too rich or too thin, it is most certainly true that San Francisco never allocates enough for affordable housing. *

Calvin Welch is an affordable-housing advocate who lives in San Francisco.

The golf club

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› news@sfbg.com

For the better part of a century, San Francisco’s public golf courses have offered players relatively inexpensive rates, belying the view of some that this is an elitist sport incompatible with progressive civic governance. But since a botched revamp of the Harding Park course several years ago, golf operations have landed in the rough, siphoning large sums from city coffers every year. Now Mayor Gavin Newsom and his Recreation and Park Department claim that private businesses would do a better and cheaper job of running three of the city’s most valuable links.

Sup. Jake McGoldrick and other privatization opponents say outsourcing control of the Harding, Fleming, and Lincoln courses would inevitably lead to less access for the general public and higher costs. "A lot of folks don’t realize that the Golden Gate Yacht Club and the St. Francis Yacht Club are public assets that are now run as private membership clubs, elitist things," McGoldrick told the Guardian. "That’s certainly the way this could go."

McGoldrick has called for the formation of a Golf Course Task Force to explore nonprivatization solutions, including converting some of the courses into parks or open space, as the Neighborhood Parks Council has urged. On July 10 the Board of Supervisors will decide between McGoldrick’s plan and Rec and Park’s "hybrid management" resolution, which would award leases of 20 to 30 years for the courses. Political handicappers say the vote could go either way.

In addition to their concerns about prices and accessibility at privately run links, McGoldrick and others have serious reservations about who will run the courses if the mayor’s plan succeeds. No one we spoke with could name potential bidders with any certainty, but if the past is prologue, the choice is likely to involve political cronyism.

Golf advocate Sandy Tatum engineered the deal that turned Harding Park over to the management of Kemper Sports, which has been accused of overspending public funds and turning the course into a huge drain on the city treasury. Kemper also rents space to Tatum’s First Tee program. More recently, another nonprofit started by Tatum and former city attorney Louise Renne initiated and funded a study for Rec and Park that recommended more privatization by turning over courses to entities such as theirs.

The SF Weekly, which has run stories critical of the city’s golf privatization scheme, revealed a 1990s deal that privatized a city-owned course near Burlingame and, in what it deemed a corrupt selection process, handed control of the course to former Willie Brown staffer Tom Isaak.

In 2004, Tom Hsieh, one of Newsom’s key campaign consultants, submitted the sole bid for control of Gleneagles Golf Course in McLaren Park. Neither Hsieh nor his business partner, real estate investor Craig Lipton, had ever run a golf course before winning the contract for Gleneagles. But what really raised eyebrows around City Hall were the terms of the deal. Any lease of more than 10 years would have needed approval by the Board of Supervisors, so Hsieh and Lipton were given a nine-year contract.

"That was a very obvious and blatant end run around the contract requirements of the Board of Supervisors," McGoldrick told us. Hsieh, he went on to say, "is one of the mayor’s good buddies, and he got himself a nice contract out there."

Rec and Park spokesperson Rose Dennis defended the lease agreement with Hsieh, telling us, "At the end of the day, he legally got the concession. It wasn’t like it was put down to a nine[-year contract] to screw anybody. That would suggest a level of sophistication that Rec and Park just doesn’t have."

Reached for comment, Hsieh bristled at the suggestion that he landed the contract because of his ties to the mayor, writing in an e-mail that the mere suggestion was "a scurrilous attack motivated by politics." Hsieh did not answer our repeated requests for information about wage levels at the Gleneagles course and the number of groundskeepers employed there. McGoldrick and sources in the industry assert that one of the main ways private managers would make money from the other courses would be to reduce labor costs.

Sup. Sean Elsbernd, one of the privatization plan’s strongest backers, conceded that some past golf contracts have been "questionable," specifically in the case of Hsieh’s deal. But he said the supervisors would oversee the leasing process this time to avoid cronyism and the kind of spending excesses allegedly committed by Kemper Sports. They would also mandate that new managers continue to employ union employees.

Unlike the city, Elsbernd argued, private businesses could invest large sums of money in rehabilitating the courses, especially Lincoln. "When it gets that kind of [cash] infusion," Elsbernd said, the course "is going to see a turnaround in revenue so that you can actually justify charging higher fees."

That is exactly the kind of scenario privatization foes fear: more exclusive golf courses on public land that raise greens fees beyond ordinary people’s means. "These courses are untapped gold mines," said golf instructor, former pro, and activist Justin Hetsler, who has formed a nonprofit group, Golf San Francisco, to lobby against the mayor’s plan. "But every penny spent at the courses should go back into them, not into someone’s pocket as profit." As for capital improvements, Hetsler, who also works as an accountant, argued, "The courses’ future revenue streams can secure credit for improvements. That does not require privatization."

For McGoldrick, this debate is about far more than golf courses. "I don’t even play golf," he told us. The push to outsource control of the links, he said, reflects a larger philosophical battle about what to do with publicly owned resources. "The mayor is a pro-privatization kind of guy. That’s his MO…. We’re seeing this happen all over the place, not just San Francisco. But for me, it’s just painful to watch city assets [be] given away. It really kicks me in the gut." *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Fourth of July week is supposed to be slow; when I worked for a daily newspaper, we used to do long stories on the fireworks displays just to fill space on the pages. Not here. There’s so much going on it’s hard to keep track of it all, but here’s a quick rundown on what San Francisco is facing this week:

A bill that would lift a veil of secrecy hanging over police misconduct cases is stuck in the Assembly Committee on Public Safety — and Fiona Ma is one of those holding it up. Ma is a protégé of John Burton, who wasn’t easily intimidated, but she’s acting as if she’s terrified of the police lobby, which has mounted a major effort to kill the bill. It’s crazy — Ma has a fairly safe seat, and unlike some Democrats in marginal districts, she doesn’t have to fear that the cops will back a Republican against her. This is one of the worst moments in her career in Sacramento thus far, and she needs to get off the fence and back the bill when it comes up for reconsideration.

The long-awaited draft environmental impact report for the Eastern Neighborhoods zoning project just came out, and it says just about what I and many others had expected: following the proposals that the City Planning Department is putting forward would wipe out a fair number of blue-collar jobs and would not provide anywhere near enough affordable housing to meet the city’s stated needs. This ought to be a central issue in the mayor’s race (if there ever really is one); I’m not willing to accept as inevitable the loss of working-class San Francisco, and neither should the mayor.

Mayor Gavin Newsom finally signed the Community Choice Aggregation bill (see page 10) — but not with the sort of fanfare you’d expect for a program that could profoundly change the city’s energy future. Sen. Carole Migden has come forward with a bill to ensure that the power from city-owned renewable-energy projects is available to the city and doesn’t have to go into Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s maw.

Speaking of Migden: who exactly is paying for all those billboards with her face on them, touting her leadership? As we discuss on the www.sfbg.com politics blog, it’s a fascinating question. Michael Colbruno, a spokesperson for Clear Channel, which owns the billboards, refuses to say. He insists that the ads are simply "issue advocacy," which means nobody has to disclose who paid the tab. I’m not going argue campaign law with Clear Channel, but I suspect that Migden knows who gave her this nice present, worth tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps she’ll share that information with the rest of us.

In the meantime, the folks at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce — those great champions of open government who love privatization and refused to support the Sunshine Initiative — have a sunshine measure of their own. They want the supervisors to hold hearings before placing anything on the ballot. That’s a direct attack on some recent ballot measures the chamber didn’t like.

I’m all for hearings. Hearings are good. But the law would require that the hearings be held 45 days in advance of the ballot, and that would be a serious drawback for progressives who want to get measures that couldn’t pass the board on the ballot. Frankly, I’m dubious about the chamber’s motives.*

Don’t privatize the golf courses

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom has been trying to sell off or privatize city assets for years, and his latest effort is aimed at San Francisco’s three public golf courses (see J.B. Powell’s story, page 16).

Harding, Lincoln, and Fleming aren’t in the greatest shape, and the city poured a bunch of money into spiffing up Harding a few years back and didn’t get much return. So the mayor — with the surprising support of progressive supervisors like Aaron Peskin — wants to hand the links over to private contractors.

That, of course, will mean higher fees at the few places where golfers who aren’t rich can still afford to whack a few balls. It will probably means cuts in unionized city staff. More important, it’s another giveaway of valuable public assets — on the grounds that city officials don’t seem to know how to manage them.

As Sup. Jake McGoldrick, a privatization foe, points out, the Golden Gate Yacht Club and St. Francis Yacht Club were once public assets, and they’re now elitist institutions run as private membership clubs. The golf courses would be the same.

Yes, the courses need some upgrades, which means some public money. But public golf courses around the country are crowded with players who can’t afford (or don’t qualify for) private clubs; there’s no reason the city of San Francisco can’t do just as well as a private contractor in making improvements, generating revenue, and managing the facilities.

If the city really wants to get out of the golf course business — which we think is a mistake — then the supervisors ought to consider the proposal that the Neighborhood Parks Council has put forward and turn some of the links into parks and open space. But this mad rush to privatization — selling off parks, golf courses, and other public assets — has got to end. The supervisors should go along with McGoldrick’s proposal to set up a task force to study the management of the city golf courses and reject the mayor’s privatization move. *

The City College shell game

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Part one in a Guardian series

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

The motto of San Francisco’s community college is "The truth will set you free."

For taxpayers, that’s a painful irony. Since 1997, the district has moved around $130 million in bond money in a fiscal shell game, taking funds that the voters were told would go to one set of projects and spending the money on others.

The half-billion-dollar bond program is now at least $225 million over budget, in part because of what the school admits was shoddy planning, and City College is considering asking voters to approve yet another set of bonds to catch up.

And all of this happened without a detailed performance audit.

Among the transfers and overruns we’ve discovered in a review of the bond program:

•<\!s>City College made up for a planned gym’s mammoth budget shortfalls by transferring more than $53 million from other projects, like the new Performing Arts Center, improvements to the Balboa Reservoir (that massive, sunken eyesore of a parking lot west of the Ocean Avenue Campus), and an academic partnership with San Francisco State University.

•<\!s>Construction on the Performing Arts Center was supposed to begin in 2004, but it’s gone nowhere. According to the school’s most recent estimates, the center now will cost $125.8 million, an increase of 152 percent from the original $50 million.

•<\!s>Two new campuses planned for the Mission and Chinatown neighborhoods are now running a combined $78 million over budget. School administrators this May requested an additional $6 million to complete the Mission campus. Plans for the Chinatown facilities were originally unveiled in 1997 to voters, who were later told construction would begin in 2006. Today the designs are mired in a political battle with neighborhood residents, and City College hasn’t broken ground on the project.

In at least one case, the school has acknowledged that a $1.3 million reallocation took place without prior authorization from its independently elected overseers, the Board of Trustees. Administrators later asked the board to consent to the transfer retroactively.

"We’re always asked to take this money and move it from here to here," complained trustee Milton Marks III, one of the few consistent critics on the board who in the past voted against such reallocations. "It may be justified…. But when I ask if there are programmatic changes, nobody can answer me."

The school calls the transfers "reallocations," and as of May the administration and the board had agreed to shift the bond money five times.

In one case, administrators asked for $70 million in transfers mere weeks after the 2005 election in which voters authorized the school to sell $246.3 million in bonds.

That January 2006 reallocation strongly suggests the office of Chancellor Phil Day knew the school wouldn’t be able to complete the projects described to voters but never corrected the ballot handbook or told the media and the public the truth.

Day agreed to a Guardian interview, then canceled it, citing a schedule conflict. But in board meetings he and his staff have insisted that the transfers were perfectly legal.

The school’s lawyers say reallocations are acceptable under Proposition 39, a state ballot measure passed by voters in 2000 that lowered the threshold in California for passing school and community college bonds.

Other districts have also relied on reallocations as the cost of construction materials has increased globally in recent years due to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing expansion of China’s economy.

But the San Francisco school has argued the logical extreme — that it can transform voter-approved projects in virtually any way it deems necessary.

"What obligation do we have in our reallocation considerations about making sure that those things get delivered — all of those projects we listed in both [the 2001 and 2005] bond measures?" former trustee Johnnie Carter asked during a meeting Jan. 12, 2006.

"You have no obligation to complete any of those projects," Mona Patel, a bond advisor for the school, responded. "You can complete one of those projects. You can complete all of those projects or anything in between…. It’s solely within the board’s discretion."

Despite that explanation, City College’s woefully short budget projections mean the school might have to return to voters a fourth time to secure funding for two projects already promised the last time City College went to the ballot, in November 2005.

One of those planned facilities was supposed to house a stem-cell-technology training program lauded by Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2005 as a way to help locals compete for jobs in the Bay Area’s growing biotech and life-sciences research industries. The school stripped $25 million authorized by voters from that project and directed it mostly to two other projects running a combined $105 million over budget.

Marks and new board member John Rizzo have urged an expansive performance audit of the bond money, which they say is required under Prop. 39 but had never been completed.

Rizzo and Marks both told us that if unforeseen construction costs, a low number of project bidders, and the lethargy of state regulators are all problems contributing to unpredicted costs, school administrators need to come up with a plan to fix the situation. But the performance audit proposed by Rizzo and Marks would first identify which problems are most severe. Not having it, Rizzo said, "is like flying blindly. We’re just writing checks."

Peter Goldstein, vice chancellor for finance and administration, insisted to us that state law, as interpreted by the school, doesn’t require the type of audit called for by Rizzo and Marks. It simply requires that the school prove it isn’t spending money on projects not presented first to voters. He added that the reallocations weren’t simple but said he couldn’t answer from memory specific questions about the 2005 bond election, including why the school chose to pursue tens of millions of dollars in reallocations so soon afterward, in January 2006.

"They’ve been very difficult decisions for both the administration and the board," Goldstein said. "[This has] not been some kind of snap judgment. We’ve really had to search and try to make sure there wasn’t some way to contain costs otherwise."

The trustees often seem just as confused as the voters may be about the cost overruns. The trail is laid out in thousands of pages of bond proposals and ever-changing explanatory documents, all complete with glossy schematics and computer-generated students looking gleeful as they head off to class at one or another of the new facilities.

The section of City College’s Web site dedicated to its bond projects is difficult to follow. A brief summary of the projects appears in voter guides, but the full bond proposals are filed with the San Francisco Department of Elections, and you’d have to go there to copy or read the tomes, which contain a lot of qualifying paragraphs that look like this one, which refers to an academic building planned in conjunction with San Francisco State University:

"The college will aggressively pursue state and federal funding to support the ‘joint-use’ concept with San Francisco State University. If funds are not forthcoming, the ‘local’ funds will be utilized to support the construction of the new Child Care Center and the new Student Health Service Center."

Such fine-print disclaimers enabled Chancellor Day and Vice Chancellor Goldstein to later depict multimillion-dollar transfers away from academic construction as entirely legal, even though the Child Care Center and health clinic never appeared as official stand-alone projects in bond proposals presented to voters.

Between 2001 and 2005 the school asked for a total of $40 million to construct in tandem with SFSU the joint-use facility, which was slated to include new classrooms and laboratories where students could work toward bachelor’s degrees in education, health care, and child development. The project is now $26 million over budget and remains in the design phase. Since 2003 about $20 million that voters were told was going to the project has been reallocated to other projects facing increased costs.

A facilities manager at San Jose–Evergreen Community College District, Robert Dias, was incredulous when we presented our findings to him. He said he’d heard of cost overruns statewide but "not to this extent."

"We have experienced rising costs, but we planned for it," Dias said. "Construction costs were going through the roof, but we did creative things to manage it."

On the other hand, Fred Harris, vice chancellor of the California Community College System, based in Sacramento, said the figures didn’t necessarily surprise him and that the state as a result has adjusted its guidelines for what individual school districts can claim as costs.*

CCA: FULL STEAM AHEAD

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by Amanda Witherell

Solar panel.jpeg

This afternoon Mayor Gavin Newsom signed legislation permitting the city to move forward with its plan for Community Choice Aggregation.

Rumors were flying around all week that Newsom might veto, especially after his press conference coup with PG&E last week. PG&E is none too keen on this CCA thing.

That’s because it intends to kick PG&E’s ass at the renewables game. But what’s a little friendly competition? The plan is for the city to build or buy 51 percent of our electricity from renewable sources, which is permitted under a state law pushed by Carole Migden in 2002, and some 30 percent more than what PG&E is offering. Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarimi have spent the last few years hammering out legislation and what they came up with was passed by nearly all their fellow board members. (Alioto-Pier and Jew were the no-go’s.)

Newsom issued a letter expressing his concern that the plan must “meet or beat” PG&E’s rates in the first 60 days, but ended on a lighter note with his commitment to “moving forward expeditiously.” He’s asked the SFPUC to get on it by July 15. They’ll be issuing a Request for Information, followed by a formal call for proposals for more wind, water, and sun power in the city.

Finally, a real Chicken takes on Newsom

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chicken.jpg
Chicken John’s was among the first “Faces of Burning Man”
the Chronicle ran as part of their series a couple years ago.
By Steven T. Jones
We’ve seen people dressed as chickens mocking Mayor Gavin Newsom and progressives who are too chicken to run against him, but now we have Chicken John announcing that he’s running for mayor. You know Chicken John, right? The showman, the provocateur, the facilitator of art and innovation, the guy with the fake mustache and the cool bus and Army Street address and the truck that runs on trash, the MC of the Ask Dr. Hal Show. Yeah, THAT Chicken, aka John Rinaldi. Well, he’s decided to run for mayor and called upon the San Francisco underground to rise up and support him. Will they? Will Chicken follow through if they don’t? What issues will this enigmatic political newbie stake out? Will Newsom debate him? I don’t know the answer to any of this or, frankly, how I feel about it. But there is one thing I do know: the mayor’s race just got a helluva lot more interesting.
Chicken’s announcement follows:

The Chronicle’s looney

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By Tim Redmond

The San Francisco Chronicle apparently thinks a retired Wall Street Journal reporter who now lives in Berkeley and who wrote a remarkably homophobic piece on San Francisco politics way back in 1995 is the perfect persion to comment on the current Board of Supervisors. His piece, on SFGate, has the headline “Clown Show: The Board of Supervisors SF deserves? His point, it appears, is that the large queer community in San Francisco and the looney liberals here have elected a bunch of crazies to the board.

I would ignore this shit, except that it comes in the wake of all the Chris Daly bashing (much of which is factually inaccurate — Daly never accused the mayor of doing cocaine) and will, no doubt, fuel a new attack on district elections.

So let’s be real here: This district-elected board is hardly a crew of wackos. The board has done exceptional work over the past few years, passing landmark legislation that has put San Francisco in the forefront of American cities on progressive policy.

Turning the tides

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› amanda@sfbg.com

On June 19 the Board of Supervisors cast its final ayes in favor of San Francisco’s new plan for public power, Community Choice Aggregation, which allows the city to own or purchase as much as 51 percent of the electricity for its residents and businesses from renewable sources. The plan’s goal is to meet or beat the rates of the city’s current provider, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which draws 13 percent of its power from renewable sources. CCA has become the popular choice for public power fans, who have long pushed the city to get a divorce from PG&E’s monopoly.

But across town the same day, it looked as if Mayor Gavin Newsom was renewing nuptial vows with the $12 billion utility. In front of the charming backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge, Newsom announced a partnership between the city and PG&E to look into tidal power. He promised "the most comprehensive study yet undertaken to assess the possibilities for harnessing the tides in San Francisco Bay."

PG&E committed as much as $1.5 million, which will bolster $146,000 from the city and a $200,000 grant from the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

The news conference had public-power advocates wondering about Newsom’s real commitment to renewable, locally owned power. "I’ve asked all the members of the Board of Supervisors," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian. "That press conference — nobody knew it was taking place." He said a mayoral aide later apologized that his office hadn’t been informed, but he added, "I don’t think it was a mistake that it occurred on the same day as the vote for CCA."

The Mayor’s Office said the scheduling was purely coincidental and had been on the books for at least three weeks, but it did not issue a news release about the news conference, and no media advisory was sent to us.

Parties involved in the deal say it will bring more money to researching a shaky, untested technology — even if it means that the power any project generates could be controlled by PG&E. "We’re always going to have that issue of ownership later, and I’d rather get the research data into the public domain," said Jared Blumenfeld, director of the city’s Department of the Environment (SFE).

Blumenfeld insisted that the deal would give the public direct oversight of all research, including work done by the private utility. The memorandum of understanding between San Francisco, PG&E, and Golden Gate Energy, which holds the permit license for tidal energy in the bay, makes it clear that all information will be shared by all parties and open to public scrutiny.

Newsom made a similar announcement in September 2006, when he called for the creation of a Tidal Power Advisory Group and allocated $150,000 for a feasibility study through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the SFE. But that program hasn’t gone far — and the little that has happened is secret.

A review of the agendas and minutes of SFPUC and SFE commission meetings shows only scant and passing mention of tidal power. The Tidal Power Advisory Group eventually came to fruition as one of five subcommittees of the Clean Tech Advisory Council, a 16-member board of local "green" business executives, entrepreneurs, and environmental experts that was formed at the call of the mayor in November 2005. Chaired by William K. Reilly, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator under George H.W. Bush, the council neither announces meetings or agendas nor makes public its minutes.

A special subcommittee devoted to tidal and wave energy has worked closely with the SFPUC to advance a feasibility study. The contract for that study went without bid to URS Corp. and will continue in conjunction with the new PG&E partnership.

URS, an international engineering, design, and construction firm based in San Francisco and formerly run by Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, has a long history with the city. The tidal power study was not subject to competitive bids and was awarded to URS because the company had undertaken significant computer models of the entire Bay Area for a past proposal to fill in part of the waterway to extend runways at San Francisco International Airport, Blumenfeld said. That plan was shot down, but the environmental impact report it spawned contains information relevant to studying tidal power.

Additionally, URS has an as-needed work agreement with San Francisco, Blumenfeld said, "and everything moves glacially" in regard to contracting with the city.

The kind of tidal power being considered — called "in-stream" and analogous to a wind farm of water-pushed turbines — is such a new technology that there is only one deployment in the world that’s generating more than one megawatt of energy. One megawatt is enough to power about 1,000 average homes. The Electric Power Research Institute released a study in 2006 concluding that the Golden Gate has the potential to generate 237 megawatts but suggesting that only 15 percent of that — about 35 megawatts — would be available without negative environmental impact.

"I think that number’s made up, personally," said Mike Hoover, a partner at Golden Gate Energy. "We know the energy that’s coming in and out of the bay is more than that."

URS, which has conducted no other tidal power studies in the United States, may support those findings, but the outlook at this point doesn’t bode well. "It appears EPRI used optimistic assumptions on water velocities," the SFPUC’s Power Enterprise director, Barbara Hale, wrote to officials in the Mayor’s Office and at the SFPUC and the SFE. "Our feasibility study estimates around 10 MW extractable power, peak, and five MW on average with a commercial plant." Additionally, Hale wrote, the cost per kilowatt-hour could be closer to 20 cents than the 5.5 cents the EPRI predicted.

Hale told us it’s difficult to say how much power would make dropping a pilot project into the bay feasible, and the best-case scenario has a pilot project four or five years away. An actual grid connection of any significance would be several years in the future.

Then there’s the huge issue of who would own the power. San Francisco Bay is considered a public trust — and under any reasonable policy scenario, the power generated by its tides should belong to the public.

After hearing about the mayor’s handshake with PG&E, Mirkarimi introduced legislation at the June 19 board meeting that would require any power harnessed in the bay to be publicly owned. He said tidal technology is still at an "embryonic stage," but the memorandum of understanding "that was unilaterally devised by the mayor and the PUC at the exclusion of the Board of Supervisors demonstrates an early intention to give the new technology to the profiteers, and that alarms me."*

Smoke and mirrors

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Compassion and Care Center employee and longtime medical marijuana activist Wayne Justmann proudly displays a framed "keep up the good work" letter from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco) in the second-story medical cannabis dispensary in San Francisco.

"Patients can sit and relax and get away from the problems of the world," Justmann told the Guardian in describing this half pharmacy, half community center, which features AIDS information brochures, a DSL Internet connection, the makings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and marijuana priced at $18 for an eighth of an ounce.

The CCC, which has been open both legally and illegally since 1992, is one of the numerous medical cannabis dispensaries that are having a hard time getting through the city’s onerous approval process. Under guidelines that the Board of Supervisors approved and the mayor signed in November 2005, all of the dispensaries have until July 1 to get the required permits, but none have successfully done so.

The supervisors recently voted to hold off enforcement for the dispensaries that have already applied for permits, which 26 of the 31 or so clubs had done at press time. Pending legislation by Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier would set a new deadline of Jan. 1, 2008, while also effecting procedural changes that could make it difficult for many facilities to ever get permits. She is proposing more stringent disability access requirements and wants to give the Mayor’s Office more control over which clubs must abide by them.

Justmann and many others in the medical marijuana community interviewed by us see the pending legislation as a mixed bag. It would remove the police inspection from an approval process that now requires clubs to deal with six city departments, easing some concerns of proprietors in this quasi-legal business. Yet the legislation would also require all clubs to meet the Americans with Disabilities Act’s standards for new construction, which could prove logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for most dispensaries, which are in older buildings. For example, the CCC would need to build an elevator in the aging building where it rents space.

Alioto-Pier told us the amendment — which will be heard by the Planning Commission on July 12 and the board thereafter — is necessary to place medical cannabis dispensaries on par with other medical facilities. "Specifically because they are medical, the board felt it’s important for MCDs to be accessible," she told us. "It’s what I think should have been across the city."

Under the amendment, dispensaries would have to ensure that their bathrooms, hallways, and front doors were wide enough for wheelchair access and that they had limited use–limited access elevators, which would disqualify vertical or inclined platform lifts. While dispensaries like ACT UP’s could aim to spend "tens of thousands of dollars" to meet the standards, co-owner Andrea Lindsay told us, others wouldn’t be able to comply, such as those that couldn’t afford the expense or whose landlords wouldn’t allow extensive remodeling jobs.

The CCC is accessible only by stairs and does not have the money or permission to do the work that the amendment would require. "Still, we provide the necessary services to the patient," Justmann said. He also cited the financial gamble in spending large sums on a business that — unlike other health care facilities — always stands the risk of being shut down by the federal government.

Stephanie (whom we agreed to identify only by her first name), an HIV-positive patient of the CCC for the past three years, told us the new accessibility standards could make affordable marijuana less accessible. "The places that will be able to be kept open will be price gougers," she said. "I won’t be able to afford it."

Some MCDs unable to meet the new standards could apply to the Mayor’s Office on Disability for waivers, giving Mayor Gavin Newsom — who has publicly said there should be fewer MCDs in town — more authority over medical marijuana. That arrangement would be a change from the procedure for other projects, which must submit waiver requests to the Access Appeals Commission, which is part of the Department of Building Inspection.

Kris Hermes of Oakland’s Americans for Safe Access expressed his skepticism about the switch. "The main concern of the people is that the MOD will have the ultimate discretion," he told us. But Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who sponsored the Medical Cannabis Act in 2005, seems to be supporting the Alioto-Pier legislation. "It’s important that the MCDs are consistent with other health care facilities and businesses," he told us. "We want to do everything in our power to make this not so cost prohibitive."

No dispensaries have acquired a permit yet, although five now have "provisional permits." Many MCDs in the waiting line cite red tape and already stringent requirements as barring them from recognition as official businesses. Clubs must pay $6,691 for a permit and cannot generate "excessive profit" when in business.

"I don’t know what we need to do next," said Lindsay, who paid ACT UP’s fees six months ago. "The city’s new to the process. We’re new to the process. It’s frustrating on both sides."

For Kevin Reed, owner of the Green Cross Dispensary, meeting the new standards would be a hard task to accomplish in the next six months. As he told us, "You’d pretty much have to knock down a building and rebuild it."*

A clear housing choice in the Mission

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OPINION On April 19 the San Francisco Planning Department approved a market-rate condo development with a 24-hour Walgreens store at the northwest corner of César Chávez and Mission. The project features 60 expensive ownership units and 67 residential parking spaces. To support the Walgreens, the developer is also including 24 customer parking spaces, 12 spaces for employees, and one car-share space.

The development as proposed is not in compliance with the city’s General Plan, the recent Eastern Neighborhoods planning requirements, or the January Board of Supervisors resolution calling for 64 percent of all new housing to be available at below-market rates — and there’s an alternative that offers true low-income family housing and community space. If the supervisors are serious about preserving affordable housing, they’ll reject this ill-conceived plan.

The developer, Seven Hills Properties, told the Planning Commission that families would be able to afford these simple, unadorned condos through the first-time home buyers services offered by the Down Payment Assistance Loan Program in the Mayor’s Office of Housing. The truth is that the developer is offering only nine below-market units affordable to working- and middle-class families. All of the other units will be priced at close to $550,000 for a studio and as much as $700,000 for a three-bedroom unit.

Think about those prices. A person or family making as much as $63,850 a year could qualify for the down-payment assistance. Such a person or family would have to come up with a $27,500 share of the down payment and would be paying about $3,000 a month for a mortgage — 55 percent of their income.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Back in December 2006, Seven Hills told the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition that it would be interested in selling the development rights at the site to MAC if MAC could come up with a development proposal. MAC then worked with us at the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, and together we created a viable offer — which Seven Hills dismissed as unrealistic.

Our proposal was to develop between 60 and 70 units of affordable housing, with community-service space below. Across the street, in 2001, the BHNC opened its Bernal Gateway development, 55 affordable family units with on-site community services that subsequently won two highly coveted national awards, with a financing strategy similar to the one we suggested for the Seven Hills property.

MAC has appealed to the Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to hear its appeal July 17. This is a neighborhood issue that has citywide implications.

The arguments couldn’t be more clear or compelling: The project doesn’t comply with the Planning Department’s own guidelines. It brings pricey housing and a chain store to a neighborhood that needs neither. And there’s a credible alternative that ought to be given a chance. *

Joseph Smooke

Joseph Smooke is the executive director of the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center. If you are interested in this issue, please contact Jane Martin, BHNC community organizer, at jmartin@bhnc.org.

Green City: Tapping the tides

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GREEN CITY Turning the tides that flow through the Golden Gate into a source of clean, renewable energy was contemplated long before Mayor Gavin Newsom partnered up with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to announce the latest study (see "Turning the Tides," page 11), even before Matt Gonzalez proposed the idea in his 2003 race against Newsom. Tidal power is an old concept now getting a new push, thanks to the climate change threat and the unique dynamics of San Francisco.

An independent study by the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute was conducted last year to assess the feasibility of tidal energy in North America and concluded that the Golden Gate is "the second largest tidal in stream energy resource" on the continent. A combination of the Golden Gate’s powerful currents and its proximity to existing power infrastructure makes San Francisco the most promising site for a tidal energy pilot project in the lower 48 states.

However, the EPRI’s analysis revealed the Golden Gate’s tidal power potential to be far less than the 1,000 megawatts first mentioned by Gonzalez, which would have more than covered the city’s annual energy needs. The EPRI estimates that the 440 billion gallons of water in the Golden Gate’s tidal stream hold a total of 237 megawatts of energy. The study also suggests that a tidal program in San Francisco could only safely extract 35 megawatts of that available energy without negatively affecting the surrounding environment.

At 35 megawatts, tidal power would meet roughly 4 percent of the city’s energy demands. Internal San Francisco Public Utilities Commission documents obtained by the Guardian revealed that SFPUC officials lack confidence in those numbers and place the estimate at only 1 percent of the city’s energy needs.

Regardless of the potential output, the major challenge is still establishing the proper technology to safely harness the power of the tides.

Tidal power, much like hydropower, harnesses the energy of water currents to create electricity. In the case of tidal power, the force of the ocean currents generated by the rise and fall of the tides spins turbines placed underwater.

La Rance Tidal Power Plant in France, operating since 1966, is the oldest such system in the world. It generates 240 megawatts of power a day, which is enough to cover 90 percent of Brittany’s demand. At 3.7 cents per kilowatt hour, the electricity generated by La Rance is among the most affordable in France, which relies heavily on nuclear power.

However, La Rance — like Canada’s Annapolis Royal Generating Station, built in 1984 — is essentially a hydroelectric dam that spans a river, capturing and releasing the tides, so it’s not a viable design for San Francisco. A tidal power project at the Golden Gate would have to be largely submerged to leave vital shipping lanes unobstructed. So far, there is no existing tidal power program similar to the one being proposed for San Francisco. There are many tidal technology projects under development around the world that use partial and completely submerged systems that could be compatible with the Golden Gate. None has a model that’s seen commercial use, except Verdant Power, which has a single test turbine submersed in New York City’s East River that powers a nearby parking garage and supermarket.

The EPRI study evaluated eight possible turbine designs for San Francisco. Among these designs, the maximum output per turbine is two megawatts. The installation and maintenance of a project using several of these turbines would not only be inherently expensive but also require the heavy lifting of barges, cranes, drills, and derricks as well as ongoing activity that likely would affect what went on above and below the surface of the sea.

Many of these turbine designs involve spinning blades, which can threaten marine life. The tides are also essential for transportation and the distribution of silt. A pilot project would address these challenges, perhaps demonstrating whether the planet’s natural flows can offer another key to slowing its warming trend.*

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

No PG&E tidal deal

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EDITORIAL On June 19, just as public power advocates in San Francisco were celebrating victory on the passage of Community Choice Aggregation, Mayor Gavin Newsom held a press conference at the privatized Presidio to announce that the city is forming an alliance with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to study tidal power.

Amazing. PG&E has been cheating the city out of cheap public power for more than 80 years now. The $12 billion utility is fighting the city in court over rights to sell power to customers in public buildings. Its energy mix is barely 15 percent renewable and includes one of the nation’s most dangerous nuclear power plants. And Newsom still wants to give his faith — and the city’s energy future — to PG&E.

It’s a terrible idea. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has offered legislation that would mandate that any publicly funded tidal power be owned entirely by the city, and the supervisors should pass that measure quickly to block this sellout deal. And Newsom — who absolutely must sign the CCA ordinance — needs to get a clue: San Francisco should never, ever do any business with PG&E. *

PS Call the mayor’s office at (415) 554-6131 and tell Newsom to give PG&E the boot.

Fix Newsom’s bad budget

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EDITORIAL Annual budgets can seem wonky and impenetrable, but they’re perhaps the most important statements of a city’s values and priorities. That’s why it’s critically important for the Board of Supervisors to make significant changes to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed $6 billion spending plan, which is out of step with what San Francisco should be about.

Ideally, this month’s budget hearings would be informed by an honest and open discussion of what Newsom proposed in his June 1 budget, how it affects residents and Newsom’s political interests, and where the board might want to make some changes.

Unfortunately, both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner have failed to offer a substantial analysis of the budget; instead, they’ve focused on sensational headlines about whether the mayor has used cocaine, personality conflicts between Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly (including a pair of over-the-top hit pieces on Daly in the June 23 Chron), and misleading spin coming from Newsom’s office and reelection campaign.

But there’s plenty of good budget analysis out there, thanks to the work of city agencies such as the Controller’s Office and the Board of Supervisors’ Budget Analyst Office, nonprofits like the People’s Budget Coalition, smart citizens like Marc Salomon, and reporting by the Guardian‘s Sarah Phelan ("The Budget’s Opening Battle," 6/20/07) and Chris Albon ("Newsom Cuts Poverty Programs," 6/20/07).

What that analysis shows is that the mayor’s much-ballyhooed "back-to-basics" budget — which prioritizes public safety, cityscape improvements, home ownership programs, and pet projects such as Project Homeless Connect — would make unconscionable cuts to essential social services and affordable housing programs, rely way too much on gimmicks and private capital to address public needs, and offer almost nothing that is innovative or befitting a progressive city at a crucial point in history.

Some specific examples and recommendations:

• Newsom’s 4 percent cut in the Department of Public Health budget — which his appointed Health Commission took the unusual step of refusing to implement because the fat has already been trimmed away in previous budgets — is unacceptable. It would slash substance abuse treatment, homeless and HIV/AIDs services, and other programs that would simply be unavailable if the city didn’t fund them. The board should fully restore that funding and even consider providing seed money for innovative new programs that would help lift people out of poverty. Only after the city fully meets the needs of its most vulnerable citizens should it consider cosmetic fixes like expanded street cleaning.

• The budget should strike a balance on cityscape improvements that is lacking now. Contrary to the alternative budget proposed by Daly, which would have cut the $6.6 million that Newsom proposed for street improvements, we agree with the SF Bicycle Coalition that many streets are dangerous and in need of repair. It’s a public health and safety issue when cars and bikes need to swerve around potholes. But the $2.9 million in sidewalk improvements could probably be scaled back to just deal with accessibility issues rather than cosmetic concerns. And we don’t agree with Newsom’s plan to add 100 blocks and $2.1 million to the Corridors street-cleaning program, which already wastes far too much money, water, chemicals, and other resources.

• As we mentioned last week ("More Cops Aren’t Enough," 6/20/07), the police budget doesn’t need the extra $33 million that Newsom is proposing, at least not until he’s willing to facilitate a public discussion about the San Francisco Police Department’s mission and lack of accountability. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi (a progressive who is strong on public safety and even clashed with Daly over the issue) was right to recently challenge the terrible contract that Newsom negotiated with the cops, which gives them a 25 percent pay increase and asks almost nothing in return.

• Newsom’s housing budget would move about $50 million from renter and affordable-housing programs into initiatives promoting home ownership, which is just not a realistic option for most residents and represents a shift in city priorities that serves developers more than citizens. Some of that change is specific to a couple of big owner-occupied yet fairly affordable projects in the pipeline for next year, but the budget also does little to address the fact that we are steadily losing ground in meeting the goal in the General Plan’s Housing Element of making 62 percent of new housing affordable to most residents, when we should be expanding these programs by at least the $28 million that the board approved but Newsom rejected. Similarly, the board should keep pushing the Housing Authority to apply for federal Hope VI funds to make needed improvements to the public housing projects rather than supporting Newsom’s Hope SF, which purports to magically turn a $5 million expenditure into $700 million in housing — as long as we accept the devil’s bargain of 700 to 900 market-rate condos along with the public housing units.

• Finally, there are lots of little items in Newsom’s budget that could be cut to find funding for more important city priorities. Don’t give him $1.1 million to hassle the homeless in Golden Gate Park or $700,000 for his New York–style community court in the Tenderloin.

The bottom line is that a progressive city should not be pandering to the cops, punishing the poor, and polishing up its streets when so many of its citizens are struggling just to find shelter and make it to the next month. Newsom has forgotten about the ideals that the Democratic Party once embraced, but it’s not too late for the Board of Supervisors to correct that mistake. *

Budget blowback

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› sarah@sfbg.com

People’s Budget Coalition member Esther Morales says she’s angry that the media obsessed over Sup. Chris Daly’s June 19 comments about whether Mayor Gavin Newsom has honestly addressed allegations that he’s used cocaine yet ignored hours of testimony that hundreds of San Franciscans gave at the very same meeting, a state-mandated hearing on the impact of Newsom’s proposed spending cuts on the city’s neediest populations, including those with drug and alcohol problems.

"There’s been so much press about that hearing, but it’s all been about what’s happening between Sup. Chris Daly and the mayor," Morales said, accurately observing that there has been no coverage by the mainstream media of the addicts who waited for hours that night but only got to talk for two minutes each about how they would have died had it not been for the substance abuse programs that Newsom plans to cut.

Nor has much been written about the folks who pleaded for Buster’s Place, the city’s only all-night homeless shelter, which was to close at the end of June unless the Board of Supervisors saved it from Newsom’s $1.6 million cut. Nor has much mention been made of the organizers from the city’s four single-room occupancy hotel collaboratives that showed up at City Hall a few days earlier to decry Newsom’s proposed $233,000 cut in their combined budgets.

As David Ho of the Chinatown Community Development Center told the Guardian, "These are programs for the poor and for public health, and they are always on the chopping block. The mayor talks about the need to preserve working-class families in the city, and here we are being left out of the budget."

Muna Landers of the Coalition on Homelessness said SRO hotel rooms were originally meant to be single dwellings, but now more than 450 families — 85 percent of whom are immigrants — live in such rooms without bathrooms or kitchens. "When one family moves out, three families move in," Landers said.

Meanwhile, in light of Newsom’s proposal to restore only 50 percent of a $9 million federal cut in San Francisco’s HIV/AIDS programs, San Francisco AIDS Housing Alliance director Brian Basinger accused the mayor of "playing bullshit games."

As Morales told us this week, "What’s really behind these fights between Chris and the mayor is the fact that Chris spearheaded the board’s $28 million affordable-housing supplement…. Without Daly’s footwork the $28 million supplemental would not have passed by an 8–3 majority, and the mayor only refused to sign it because it was Chris’s measure."

Morales works with 60 community-based groups as the organizer of the Family Budget Committee, one of seven committees of the People’s Budget Coalition, which unveiled its annual report June 21 on the steps of City Hall. The group values services for those struggling to get by.

"But this mayor’s budget is a law-and-order, streets-and-potholes, increasingly right-wing conservative budget that is not reflective of what San Francisco is about, and it will drive even more families out of town," Morales told us.

Months ago the Family Budget Committee met with the mayor’s staff to ask for a $30 million package of services, part of the People’s Budget Coalition’s $78 million request from the mayor’s record $6.1 billion budget.

"The mayor’s staff talked to us about how dismal the budget year looked, how the firefighters’, the police[‘s], and the nurses’ contracts are up for negotiations, and so they didn’t know how much money they would end up with," Morales recalled.

So the Family Budget Committee whittled down its needs, first to $20 million, then $10 million, and sent those priorities to the Mayor’s Office for consideration. Ultimately, it said, the mayor found just $1.5 million for its priorities, so it turned its attention to the Board of Supervisors.

Since board president Aaron Peskin removed Daly as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee on June 15 and took the reins himself, the body has restored $4 million in HIV/AIDS funding, and much more is on the way. Peskin told us that he intends to significantly change the mayor’s budget, promising more so-called add backs than the board has ever approved.

"It’s all about priorities," Peskin told us. He said Daly "never intended to actually cut" any of the mayor’s top-priority projects when he introduced his motion to slash $37 million from Newsom’s funding plans. It was simply a negotiating tactic that "backfired majorly" when the targeted constituencies rallied against Daly.

Yet board progressives haven’t been derailed by Daly’s actions, as many pundits predicted. At the same meeting at which Daly mentioned cocaine while making a point about substance abuse program cuts, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi led a challenge of Newsom’s proposed San Francisco Police Department contract on the grounds that it would grant cops a 25 percent pay increase but give the city little in return. And there are still eight supervisors who supported Daly’s affordable-housing plan.

Peskin told us, "I’m hopeful that by the end of the week you’ll be able to write that Peskin took the baton that Newsom handed him, and while it may not have been as pretty as we might have liked, I’m hopeful that after reversing cuts to health care and [making the additions requested by] the Family Budget Committee, we’ll even be able to dump money back into low-income, affordable, family, and rental housing." *

Daly won’t back down

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By Steven T. Jones
Sup. Chris Daly has been getting beat up by Team Newsom, the Chronicle, the Examiner, and Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, but at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, he showed no sign of retreat or remorse. In fact, he’s giving as good as he gets in some hilarious and poignant ways. As the meeting began, he distributed to the press copies of a letter to Mayor Gavin Newsom making clear “I did not accuse you of using cocaine” and asking for an apology, and handed out a printout of his latest blog post, in which he labels the concerted attack on him “Operation Eric Jaye” and chides Alioto-Pier for being an out-of-touch elitist who only seems to show up for work when it’s time to carry water for the mayor.
Journalists chuckled and pointed out the funniest passages to one another as the board rapidly fired through its business. But the real fun began when it came time for the supervisors to introduce new legislation and Alioto-Pier announced her previously announced proposal to create a code of conduct for supervisors.
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Guardian photo by Charles Russo

Court smacks SF Planning Dept.

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By Tim Redmond

The Chron buried the news deep in the local section, but a June 22 state Court of Appeal decision on the validity of the Housing Element of the city’s General Plan was a huge slap in the face to the mayor and the planning director.

In essence, the court ruled that the city can’t adopt the new Housing Element without doing an environmental impact report. You can read the decision here.

I’ll admit: The folks who sued, a group of West side homeowners who don’t want more density in their neighborhoods, are not my favorite activists. I’ve never thought it was fair that all the density had to go on the East side of town, and that nobody West of 19th Ave. even had to think about it.

That’s the essence of the suit: The Housing Element might encourage more housing on the West side of town, and might allow housing without a lot of parking, and that might lead to congestion and traffic issues. As my old friend Ron Curran used to say, Boo Fucking Hoo: The rest of us in town have lived with those issues for years, and anyone with any sense knows that new housing in this overdeveloped town will need to be transit-oriented and not car-oriented.

Still, the plaintiffs made an excellent point: The Planning Department should have done an EIR on the Housing Element. IN fact, the Planning Department should do a lot better in the environmental review department generally. You just go forawrd with these big projects and zoning changes and refuse to acknowledge the impacts, and you’re eventually going to get smacked.

Lennar’s Bad News Bears

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Marc McGuire, a tile contractor from San Diego, and CALPASC’s Brad Diede on CNBC this spring to discuss accusations that Lennar has been extorting its contractors

A few months ago, we reported how Lennar had been giving contractors a choice between a rock or a hard place: reduce their unpaid invoices by up to 20 percent—or be excluded from bidding work for a minimum of six months.
Today comes word that the company, which is poised to build condos on most of San Francisco’s underdeveloped lands, including Bayview Hunter’s Point and the decommissioned Hunters Point Shipyard, has just posted a second quarter loss–and it is expecting more losses this year.
Blaming high inventories and dropping real estate prices, and with his company reporting losses of $1.55 per share, Lennar President and Chief Executive Stuart Miller announced, “As we look to our third quarter and the remainder of 2007, we continue to see weak, and perhaps deteriorating, market conditions.”

This time last year, the nation’s biggest home builder was posting a profit of $324.7 million, or $2 per share. But Lennar not alone in its real estate woes. As its quarterly revenue slips 37 percent to $2.88 billion (compared to $4.58 billion this time last year,) the National Association of Realtors reports that sales of existing homes fell for a third straight month in May, the median sales price declined for a record 10th consecutive month and the inventory of unsold homes reached its highest level in 15 years.

Or as Miller put it, ” The supply of new and existing homes has continued to increase resulting in declining home prices across our markets.”

And here comes the part that should really sound the alarms in San Francisco, where a large number of subcontractors look to Lennar for their daily bread. Asked what Lennar intends to do about its financial picture, Miller said his company is “focused on expenses, reducing construction costs and pushing sales to manage inventory.”

With Mayor Gavin Newsom having hastily amended the BVHP redevelopment plan so the Navy could hand the hazardous shipyard over to Lennar for clean up, (despite the company’s ongoing problems monitoring asbestos dust on an adjacent parcel of land), all so he can try and keep the 49ers in town, here’s hoping all the agencies that regulate and oversee Lennar, and not just the local impacted communities, will be watching this project like hawks.

The Mayor’s Offensive

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By Sarah Phelan

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Photo by Charles Russo
Mayor Gavin Newsom only shows up to self congratulatory budget events that seek to make him look good

Mayor Gavin Newsom is happy to be center stage when it comes to attacking Sup. Chris Daly. At last week’s budget rally, Newsom made it look as if Daly had unilaterally decided to cut funding to pothole repairs and police academies. (In reality Daly was responding to Newsom’s cuts to affordable housing and public health.)
This week, Newsom made it look as if Daly had randomly decided to talk about unsubstantiated allegations that the mayor was doing cocaine, while sleeping with the wife of his campaign manager. (In reality, Daly was referring, in the context of Newsom’s proposed cuts to substance abuse treatment programs, to the mayor’s self-professed alcohol problem, as well as his refusal to deal head on with widespread whisperings about cocaine use.)
Either way, and without a declared challenger in the mayor’s race this fall, bashing Daly is a far easier for the Mayor than say, explaining to poor folks why you are proposing cutting funding for programs that help poor poeople, such as affordable rental housing in favor of increasing funding for programs that help the middle class, such as affordable homeownership. Or explaining why you are cutting the only 24-hour homeless shelter in town, when your proposal to add rangers to Golden Gate Park strongly suggests the homeless situation is getting worse.
So it came as no surprise that Mayor Gavin Newsom chose not to mingle with the hundreds of poor folks that lined up last night at City Hall to talk about the damage that his proposed cuts to affordable housing and public health will inflict on them and their already fragile communities.
As the rules stand, the Mayor doesn’t have to attend such hearings, but his absence from the trenches (he wasn’t around for Tuesday night’s Beilensen hearings either, when 300 people showed up to talk about the true cost of cutting substance abuse treatment and other public health programs–a hearing which has received almost no media coverage other than a fixation with Daly’s “cocaine” remarks) led Sup. Tom Ammiano to observe, “I think there is not a full accounting by the mayor himself to this budget when he does not have to attend these meetings.”
With Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier cooking up Ms. Manners rules of engagement for the Board of Supervisors following what she deems “offensive” comments by her colleague Sup.Chris Daly, how about her also asking the Mayor to be present for the annual budget hearings, during which folks wait for hours, just to speak on the record for a couple minutes?
Because Newsom’s absence, in the face of all this budgetary angst among people of very limited means, is beginning to come across as more than a tad offensive.

What is the new new “low” in city politics? It sure isn’t Daly, Newsom, and the cocaine use charges. Public Power SOS: scroll down for the news and the action alert

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

On the front page of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, June 2l, Mayor Gavin Newsom is pictured, grim, scowling, arms clenched, over this caption:

“Mayor Gavin Newsom denies Supervisor Chris Daly’s suggestion that he has used cocaine. “That’s how low politics now has gotten in this city, and I seriously thought it couldn’t get much worse.”
The story by City Hall Reporter Cecilia M. Vega had this head: “CITY HALL UPROAR AT COCAINE CLAIM,” with this subhead, “Angry Newsom blasts Daly for bringing politics to a new low.”

This jolly back and forth, I submit, is far from a new low. (See City Editor Steve Jones’s blog in our politics blog.)
For starters, I would submit there is a new new low and a most timely new new low at that. This new new low is the fact that Newsom, despite the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the crucial Ammiano/Mirkarimi CCA legislation approved by the Supervisors only last Tuesday, reversed his public pledges supporting CCA and public power and clambered into bed in hot embrace on Tuesday with PG&E. (See my previous blog.) He allowed PG&E to call the shots in a PG&E-arranged and PG&E- promoted press conference at the Presidio announcing that the city in effect was turning over its public study of tidal power to the private utility that has perpetuated the PG&E/Raker Act scandal for decades.

This is the new new low: the scandal of how the mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, after PG&E has privatized and stolen the city’s cheap, green Hetch Hetchy power, and after PG&E helped privatize and steal the Presidio, was in effect turning over the choppy waters of the bay and the ocean to PG&E to privatize and steal. Incredible. Newsom was doing his damndest to put PG&E in the catbird seat on the next giant step on power generation and to further entrench the illegal private utility in City Hall. No wonder Newsom gets so “agitated” over the handy dandy issue of whether he did or did not use cocaine.

White lines

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By Steven T. Jones
Sup. Chris Daly may have crossed a line by suggesting during a budget hearing that Mayor Gavin Newsom uses cocaine, but the mayor isn’t entitled to his overblown righteous indignation. Why? Because he’s the one who left open this question earlier this year when he responded to revelations of his sexual improprieties and alcohol abuse with the blanket dismissal “that everything you’ve heard and read is true and I’m deeply sorry about that.” Then he refused to answer any questions on either issue, with only a couple exceptions weeks later involving friendly journalists (including CBS’s Hank Plante, who asked about cocaine and Newsom didn’t directly answer, something Daly rightly called an “artful dodge”). Newsom is now simply reaping what he has sown. He has proven himself to be untrustworthy and willing to say or do anything to get out of a jam — or to simply avoid answering questions not to his liking — so it’s hard to put too much stock in statements like, “I am associated with something that I don’t do, never have, not even in the realm of reason should someone even accuse me of this.”

Sex, Lies and Videotapes

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By Sarah Phelan
with editorial research by Joseph Plaster

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photo by Terrie Frye
Admit it! Would you even be reading this story if Daly hadn’t said “allegations of cocaine use”?

For those few running dogs of the press who actually hung around for Tuesday night’s four-hour hearing on proposed cuts to public health programs, Sup. Chris Daly’s comments on Newsom’s substance abuse problems seemed, well, entirely appropriate.
As the two reporters who were actually there know full well, Daly’s speech, which lasted eight minutes, only spent 30 seconds referring to allegations of Newsom’s cocaine use. The rest of the speech focused on the reality that there’s been an annual ping-pong match going on between the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors, ever sinceNewsom came to power. In this match, Newsom proposes making cuts to public health programs–and the Board objects. Then those impacted have to show up to protest at City Hall. At which point, the Board’s Budget Committee responds by restoring funding to the programs that Newsom has once again targeted.

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