Mayor

The case for reinstating Mirkarimi

Andrew Lam
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113

EDITORIAL We know for a fact that on New Year’s Eve, 2011, Ross Mirkarimi, the elected but unsworn sheriff of San Francisco, had a physical altercation with his wife that left her with a bruised arm. We know she later complained about that bruise on a video lasting less than a minute. Beyond that, nobody except Mirkarimi and Eliana Lopez knows exactly what happened; there were no witnesses except the couple’s three-year-old son, no video taken during the fight, no audio recordings — nothing.

We know that Mirkarimi agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor false imprisonment — although we also know there was never any evidence that he actually imprisoned anyone.

That’s all we really know about the incident that has set off an expensive, drawn-out, political and legal battle that could change the city’s politics for years to come. If the whole thing seems a little overblown, that’s because it is.

There is nothing in the record that justifies Mayor Ed Lee’s move to suspend Mirkarimi, and nothing that would justify the supervisors voting to remove him from office. In fact, a removal vote would set a dangerous precedent for future mayors in a city that already gives its chief executive far too much power.

Let us examine the three main reasons why the board needs to vote to restore the elected sheriff.

1. If you believe Eliana Lopez, there’s no case.

The only person other than Mirkarimi who can honestly and accurately testify about the events of New Year’s eve is Lopez — and she has been clear, consistent, and convincing in her account.

Lopez acknowledges that she and her husband have had marital issues, that Mirkarimi wasn’t as supportive or her and their young son as he should have been, that he was away from home and working when she should have been sharing domestic duties. She was considering divorce — but was worried that Mirkarimi might gain custody of their boy.

She testified under oath before the Ethics Commission that Mirkarimi was never someone who “beats his wife” (to use Lee’s utterly inappropriate terminology). He had no history of domestic violence with her.

What he did was grab her arm during an argument, leaving a bruise. Inexcusable, but hardly a sign of serious assault. In fact, Lopez testified that she bruises so easily that just playing around with three-year-old Theo can leave marks on her.

Lopez testified that she made the video to use as a tool — a bargaining chip, so to speak — if Mirkarimi ever sought to gain custody of their son. She said she believed that her neighbor, Ivory Madison, who made the video, was a lawyer and that the video would be protected by attorney-client confidentiality. She said she never wanted to go to the police and never felt physically threatened by her husband.

The mayor charged Mirkarimi with attempting to dissuade witnesses and interfere with a police investigation, but those charges were based almost entirely on the testimony of Madison, whose rambling 22-page statement was so full of hearsay that the Ethics Commission tossed almost all of it. There was absolutely no evidence of witness tampering, and those claims were dismissed.

In fact, the only reason the commission recommended removal is the fact that Mirkarimi bruised his wife and pled to a misdemeanor — one that everyone knows he didn’t really commit. Remember: It’s legal, and common, in misdemeanor cases to plead to something you never did to avoid facing trial on more serious charges.

There’s no principled way to accept as credible the testimony of Lopez and still vote to remove the sheriff. If she’s telling the truth — and we believe her — the case should end right there.

2. Mirkarimi was chosen by the voters, and the voters can freely remove him.

Ross Mirkarimi was elected in November, 2011, with a clear majority in a contested race. The state Constitution provides an excellent remedy for replacing an elected official who has lost the confidence of the voting public; it’s called the recall. With a fraction of the effort that’s been spent on this case, people who feel Mirkarimi should no longer serve as sheriff could have collected signatures and forced an election.

The City Charter gives the mayor extraordinary authority — we would say too much authority — to unilaterally suspend an elected official and seek removal. That’s a power that should be wielded only in the most extreme cases, with great deference to the will of the voters.

Lee did no investigation before filing official misconduct charges. He based those charges on unsubstantiated claims, most of which were proven false. There’s a dangerous precedent here: If Mayor Ed Lee can suspend without pay Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi on such limited evidence, the ability of future mayors to misuse this power could be alarming. And remember: There is nothing in the Charter that allows anyone to suspend or seek removal of the mayor.

3. This case mangles “official misconduct.”

There’s another dangerous element to this case, and it’s not just a legal technicality. The New Year’s Eve incident occurred before Mirkarimi took the oath of office; on that day, he wasn’t the sheriff of San Francisco. He was a supervisor.

It’s hard to claim he was guilty of “official misconduct” on a day when he had no official duties. A fascinating, but unsigned analysis by somebody who clearly has a strong legal background is posted on the web (rjemirkarimi.blogspot.com). It notes:

“If the Supervisors approve what the Ethics Commission did on August 16, they will be handing a powerful new political weapon to all mayors, present and future. Good mayors may never misuse it, but other mayors might. No longer will such a mayor be limited to examining an opponent’s conduct while in office. He will have carte blanche and a strong motive to look farther back in time for personal misconduct that occurred before his opponent took office, and to use what he finds to suspend his opponent without pay and remove him from office — all while claiming (as undoubtedly he will) to be engaged in a noble pursuit of truth and justice.”

Let’s be serious: There have been San Francisco mayors with a long record of vindictive politics, or seeking any method possible to punish their enemies. There may well be again. Do we really want to have this case — this weak case driven more by politics than reason and evidence — set the precedent for the grave step of overriding the voters and removing an elected official?

Any of these three reasons ought to be grounds to vote against the mayor’s charges. Together, they make a sound enough case that it’s hard to imagine how the supervisors, sitting as a fair and impartial jury, could come to any conclusion other than returning Mirkarimi to office. We recognize that there are political implications, that Mirkarimi’s foes will target anyone who votes to support him. And just as it’s hard for some politicians to appear “soft on crime,” it’s nearly impossible to survive in San Francisco if you’re considered “soft on domestic violence.” But anyone who doesn’t want tough choices shouldn’t run for public office. It will take courage to do the right thing here — and in the end, that’s what should matter.

Critical Mass at 20

Andrew Lam
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20
Critical Mass at 20

steve@sfbg.com

I was in Zeitgeist on a Friday summer evening, at a planning meeting for the 20th anniversary of Critical Mass, when I first heard about the idea of kicking off the celebration week with a renegade bicycle ride over the Bay Bridge.

The people who first shook up the city’s commute two decades ago were going to take the idea of seizing space from cars a step further — and fulfill a longtime cyclist fantasy. They were going to take the bridge.

Chris Carlsson, the author/activist who helped found Critical Mass and has evangelized the concept around the world, reminded me of this super-secret ride last Wednesday when I finally got around to starting my reporting for this story. I was surprised that I’d forgotten about it — but yes, I told him, I still wanted to be there.

>>JOIN IN ON THE FESTIVITIES WITH OUR GUIDE TO THIS WEEK’S CRITICAL MASS EVENTS

“This will galvanize our sense of the week,” Carlsson told me, explaining that Critical Mass has always been about “opening up a space for a conversation,” whether it’s about how urban space is used or who gets to make that decision.

“There is a real necessity to have a place for people to start thinking creatively. That’s Critical Mass’s enduring contribution, 20 years ago and today.”

What started in September 1992 with 48 cyclists pedaling together through San Francisco has become an enduring worldwide phenomenon. On the last Friday of every month, without leaders or direction, this group bike ride simply meanders through the streets, riders smiling and waving at motorists often perplexed at the temporary alteration of traffic laws by a crowd too big to stop or ignore. While views of Critical Mass may differ, the conversation about urban cycling that it started has had an undeniable impact on how people see cities and their power to shape them, placing it high on the list of San Francisco’s proudest cultural exports.

Last Friday evening — a week before thousands of people are expected to show up for the 20th anniversary ride Sept. 28 — I rode over to a meeting in the back of the art gallery at 518 Valencia, the welcome center for the week. The first international arrivals were there: four Europeans who flew to Mexico City, where most of them built tall bikes to cycle up to San Francisco for the anniversary ride, arriving last week after a four-month trek.

They were veterans of Critical Mass events all over Europe, which borrowed the concept from the Bay Area, and they were happy to be going back to its core.

Andrea Maccarone is a 31-year-old Italian who lives in Paris when he isn’t bike touring, which he does quite a bit, last year riding to consecutive Critical Mass events in Paris, Toulouse, Rome, and Madrid. “It began here and spread everywhere,” he said. “A lot of my lifestyle — I’ve been a bike messenger and worked in bike kitchens — is based on what started here.”

His French girlfriend, Marie Huijbregts, described a cultural happening that began when she was 8 years old. “It’s a political movement of cyclists to release the streets from the cars,” the 28-year-old told me. “It’s environmental, do-it-yourself, and a great way to meet people.”

She said she wanted to be here “because it’s supposed to be the biggest one and all the world was invited. It’s symbolic and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Carlsson has watched the event he helped popularize spread to hundreds of cities around the world, from the Biciletada in Sao Paulo to the Cyklojizda in Prague. He loves to see young people who have been energized by Critical Mass and the larger renegade cyclist movement that grew up around it — from DIY bicycle kitchens and art bikes to creative political actions that seize public spaces — “who dream of San Francisco with stars in their eyes.”

But he often feels like we’re the “hole in the donut” of this international urban cycling movement, unable to retain the same intention and energy that it had when Carlsson, Jim Swanson, and a group of their bike messenger and anarchist cyclist friends conceived of the idea (originally called Commute Clot) in the Market Street office of a zine called Processed World.

Carlsson still hears the stories from people whose lives were changed by Critical Mass. But it was only in the last year or so, as the 20th anniversary approached, that he started regularly riding Critical Mass again, with a new generation of participants often drawn by confrontational yahooism, riding well-trod routes and rejecting efforts to suggest destinations as counter to its leaderless ethos.

“It’s extremely predictable now and I’m sick of it,” Carlsson admitted to me, a less diplomatic version of what he wrote in the introduction to the newly released book of essays he edited, Shift Happens: Critical Mass at 20, writing that the “euphoria of cooperative, joyful reinhabitation of urban space is hard to sustain after a awhile.”

Yet that powerful central idea is still there, and it remains as relevant as ever in cities dominated by fast-moving cars. People working together to create “an organized coincidence” can still change the rules of the road, opening up all kinds of new possibilities.

“It is an unpredictable space and you never know what’s going to happen,” Carlsson told me. That’s true of the history of Critical Mass around the world — with its storied clashes with cops and motorists, and its glorious convergences and joyful infectiousness — and it was true of our quest to take the Bay Bridge the next day.

 

 

TO THE BRIDGE

We weren’t just being daredevils. The idea of fighting for a freeway lane against six lanes of fast-moving cars, drivers distracted by that epic view of San Francisco, was conceived by Carlsson as a political statement protesting current plans to rebuild the Bay Bridge with a bike lane going only from Oakland to Treasure Island, leaving out that final 2.5-mile stretch into The City.

And for years, the Bay Bridge had been out there as a symbol of where bikes couldn’t go — and in dozens of demonstrations, riders have sought to make it up those ramps, particularly during the Bikes Not Bombs rides protesting the US invasion of Iraq, only to be blocked by police.

Carlsson handed out flyers headlined “A Bay Bridge for Everyone,” harking back to the early pre-Internet “xerocracy” that used flyers to promote Critical Mass ideas or suggest routes. A local historian, Carlsson included photos and descriptions of the Bay Bridge with three lanes of cars in each direction on the top deck, back when the lower deck had trains.

Why couldn’t we have one lane back for bikes? Well, it’s actually under consideration — sort of.

The idea of creating a bicycle/pedestrian lane on the western span is the subject of an ongoing $1.6 million study by Caltrans and the Bay Area Toll Authority, which are looking at attaching paths to the sides of the bridge. That would likely require replacing the decks on the bridge with a lighter new surface to compensate for the added weight, all at a cost of up to $1 billion.

Carlsson thinks that’s ridiculous overkill, and probably intended to scuttle the idea (or else put the blame on bicyclists for the cost of resurfacing the bridge). “For five grand, in three hours it could be done,” he said, arguing that all cyclists need is a lane, a protective barrier, perhaps a lowering of the speed limit — oh, and the political will to recognize that we have as much right to this roadway as motorists.

“It is a sad commentary on the nature of our government that the only way the state transit agency will take bicycling seriously as everyday transportation is when pressured by demonstrations and organized public demands,” Carlsson wrote on the flyer. “Why don’t they take the lead in opening space for cycling instead of doing everything to obstruct, deny, and prevent cycling?”

Even getting to Treasure Island for a bike ride isn’t easy for the car-free. Muni only allows two bikes at a time on its 108 bus, so Carlsson borrowed a van to shuttle almost 20 of us out there in multiple trips. Among the crew were the group that rode up from Mexico City, a Peruvian, and many regular local Critical Mass riders, including Bike Cavalry founder Paul Jordan and LisaRuth Elliott, a 10-year Critical Mass rider who helped edit Shift Happens and coordinate volunteers for the anniversary week, along with a couple of its very early adherents: Hugh D’Andrade and Glenn Bachmann.

“Nobody knew what we were doing,” Bachmann said of that first ride. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. But displacing cars left us this intense euphoria.

Elliott said she was drawn to Critical Mass shortly after she got into urban cycling, attracted by the sense of community that had developed around her transportation choice. She was later inspired to visit Paris and Marseille and other cities that adopted Critical Mass rides.

“They have taken charge and are leading their movements to better bicyclable cities. It’s an adaptable idea,” she told me as we prepared to load our bikes on the van bound for Treasure Island.

Once we were out there, we gathered for a picnic on the beach in Cooper Cove, where we got some sobering news from David Wedding Dress, who talked us through the ride and was going to be trailing our crew in his Mercedes as a safety measure.

“Prepare to be in jail until Monday morning,” he told us. There were also the high winds and dangerous gaps to contend with, offering a bleak prognosis.

A veteran radical activist and bicyclist, Dress has ridden the bridge before and been arrested most times, and he didn’t share Carlsson’s view that we were most likely to get away with it. When Carlsson arrived, he tried to shore up our spirits, saying we’d probably be okay if we maintained the element of surprise.

“We have a right to do this and make that point,” Carlsson said.

Elliott, who was already a wobbler going in, decided not to ride, but 16 of us decided to do it anyway, feeling nervous but excited. When a CHP patrol pulled over a car near our spot and it turned into an hour-long arrest and towing ordeal, which we were forced to wait out, we had plenty of time to think about what we were doing.

As D’Andrade told me as we waited to ride up to the bridge entrance, “What feels to me like the early days of Critical Mass is how scary this is.”

 

THE EARLY DAYS

In the beginning, the Critical Mass activists say their battle for space was a safety issue infused with a political message, delivered with a smile derived from the joyous new discovery that riding with friends made it much easier. San Francisco streets were designed for automobiles, and to a lesser extent public transit, with cycling relegated to the bike messengers and a few renegades seen by most as simply refusing to grow up.

Even the nascent San Francisco Bicycle Coalition of that era — which grew in numbers and power on a similar trajectory as Critical Mass, despite its policy of maintaining a defensible distance from that outlaw event — was initially dominated by the philosophy that urban cyclists should ride quickly with car traffic and didn’t need separate lanes.

“That’s what I like to remind people is how scary bicycling was in San Francisco in the early ’90s,” D’Andrade said.

I first encountered Critical Mass in 2001 when I was the news editor for the Sacramento News & Review, and Berkeley resident Jason Meggs brought the movement into automobile-centric Sacramento. My reporters and I covered those early rides, which were met with a harsh crackdown by police, who often cited every minor traffic violation.

But Meggs was committed to the concept, as he wrote in his Shift Happens! essay entitled, “The Johnny Appleseed of Critical Mass,” a role he has played over the last 19 years. “Critical Mass made me a video activist and filmmaker; it sent me to jail and then to law school, and again to graduate school for healthy cities. It provided us the space to build a vibrant bicycle culture, and to feel free and alive in cities that otherwise felt hostile, caustic, and alien,” he wrote.

Meggs calculates that he’s been arrested more than 20 times and received more than 100 traffic tickets during Critical Mass events, beginning with the Berkeley Critical Mass that he started in March of 1993, in part to protest plans to widen I-80.

“Those early rides were legendary — moment to moment ecstatic joy and street theater,” he remembered. “The combination of bike activists and freeway fighters with anarcho-environmentalists on wheels was a combination that couldn’t be beat. Like a newscaster once said of Critical Mass, back then we were drunk with power.”

Yet in almost city where it’s sprouted, Critical Mass has had to battle through crackdowns by police, which are often met with greater determination by the cycling community. San Francisco fought through a showdown with Mayor Willie Brown in 1997, when his threats to shut Critical Mass down turned out thousands of cyclists for the next ride.

In 2007, the San Francisco Chronicle sensationalized a conflict between a motorist and Critical Mass, beginning a media campaign that led Mayor Gavin Newsom to order a heavy police presence on subsequent rides — a show of force, but one without any apparent plan or directive — again increasing number of cyclists.

Each time, San Francisco city officials were forced to accept the inevitability of Critical Mass, opting to avoid the route of the harsh, sustained, and costly crackdowns employed in New York City, whose police and city officials essentially went to war with Critical Mass in 2004 and have all-but destroyed it. Portland has also had a tumultuous relationship with its Critical Mass, with police there essentially shutting it down.

Yet Carlsson noted in his Shift Happens essay that the bicycle activism that formed along with those rides still prevailed: “Both cities — not coincidentally I think — have implemented extensive and intensive street-level redesigns to accommodate the enormous increase in daily cycling that followed the rapid growth and ultimate repression of their Critical Mass rides.”

San Francisco has seen an even greater explosion in the number of cyclists on the roadways, so many that spontaneous “mini-Masses” of cyclists form up during the daily commutes on Market Street and elsewhere. But despite the near-universal City Hall support for cycling here, and the SFBC’s status as one of the city’s largest grassroots political advocacy organizations, Carlsson said San Francisco’s cyclists still lack the infrastructure and policies needed to safely get around the city.

That’s one reason why the challenge of Critical Mass is still relevant, he said, and one reason why we were determined to ride our bikes into San Francisco on the Bay Bridge.

 

ANOTHER DAY

The cops left a little before 6pm, so we massed up and headed for the Bay Bridge, pedaling single-file up a long hill. Soon, the long western span of the bridge came into view, stretching to the downtown destination that we all hoped to reach without incident or arrest, as we passed a sign reading “Pedestrians and Bicycles Prohibited.”

As we crested the hill and dropped down toward the freeway entrance, our pathway seemed clear, with the only real variable being coordinating with Dress in the Mercedes trail car, but Carlsson was on the phone with him and we all assumed that we were about to ride our bikes onto the Bay Bridge.

We were in a fairly tight pack, Maccarone smiling atop the tall bike that had traveled so far to this point, as we rounded the swooping right turn to the point where even cars make a dangerously quick entrance onto the bridge from a complete stop, merging into loud and dense traffic moving at freeway speeds.

We stopped, looked back for Dress, and he wasn’t there. A minute crept by, then another, as cars drove cautiously past us to get onto the freeway, their drivers giving us the same quizzical, confused looks that we’d seen on Critical Mass so many times. Another minute passed, then another, as Carlsson lit one of the road flares that we planned to use as a secondary safety measure to the Mercedes.

Then, a CHP patrol car rounded the bend, the officer sternly telling us over his PA system, “Don’t even think you’re getting on this bridge with those bikes.”

So we turned around and began to head back when Dress finally arrived in his Mercedes, presenting a moment of truth. Did we proceed anyway, even though we had been warned and knew the officer had probably radioed in our presence, taking away the element of surprise and increasing our chances of arrest?

There was dissension in ranks and a clear division among those urging opposite courses of action, but Carlsson and others continued to ride away after talking the Dress, who proceeded onto the freeway. Later, Carlsson said he was still game to go at that moment, but tried to be responsive to the collective: “I was not comfortable imposing going on the bridge on everyone.”

D’Andrade advocated for going anyway, but most felt it was too risky at that point, siding with Carlsson’s argument that is wasn’t about getting arrested: “I like to do something and get away.”

And so it was decided that we would choose a strategic retreat, some pledging to take the bridge some other day, hopefully with greater numbers. Besides, we all had a big week ahead of us, starting the next day with the first official event of Critical Mass’s anniversary week: the Art Bike/Freak Bike Ride and BBQ.

We gathered the next afternoon on the waterfront under sunny blue skies, our aborted bike crew increased in size 10-fold, joined by underground DIY bike crews from San Francisco’s own Cyclecide to the Black Label crews from Minneapolis, Oakland, and Los Angeles, infusing the ride with a countercultural edge.

Urban bike culture is now vast and varied — from the eco-warriors and urban thinkers to wage slaves and renegade tinkerers — and they’ve all found a regular home in Critical Mass. “Twenty years on, people are kinda nostalgic about it, even if they don’t ride in it or think it’s a good idea,” an activist name rRez told me during that beautiful Sunday ride, the one we were able to take because we weren’t in jail.

Carlsson told me on the ride that he was at peace with our failed mission of the day before, a sign that being radical isn’t the same thing as being reckless. “That was a good strategic retreat moment. It’s very adult,” he said. “It was a good experience for all of us, and nothing bad happened and nobody is in jail.”

In a way, that’s the essence of Critical Mass. It isn’t pure anarchy, and it’s not about fighting with the cops or the motorists, something Carlsson sees as straying from its original intent. It’s a joyful gathering, an exercise in the power of people who are willing to challenge the status quo and take well-considered risks to create a society of their choosing.

“In a modern capitalist society, the roads are the lifeblood,” Carlsson said, “and if you block them, you’re a threat.”

 

CELEBRATE 20 YEARS OF CRITICAL MASS

 

Wednesday 26

East Bay Ride, meet at West Oakland BART station, 11:45am. Ride along the east shore of the bay to the Rosie the Riveter monument in Richmond.

NOIZ Ride, McKinley statue on the Panhandle at Baker Street, noon. Bring food, drink, and layers for a several hour, non-strenuous ride featuring three live bands.

Shift Happens book release party and discussion, Main SF Library, Latino-Hispanic Room, 100 Larkin St, 5:45 p.m. Discuss Critical Mass and this new book with its writers.

Book release concert, Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF, $15, 8pm. Featuring Seaweed Sway, Aaron Glass and Friends, and Kelly McFarling

 

Thursday 27

Mosquito Abatement Ride, Meeting place TBA near 16th & Valencia, SF, 11am. One-hour rides with a cycling city contractor.

NYC Critical Mass discussion and video, 518 Valencia, SF, 2pm. Hosted by Times Up New York City.

Bike Polo, Jose Coronado Playground, 21st and Shotwell, SF, 7-9pm. Play with locals and visitors, share a beer.

Bikes, Bands, and Brew: CM’s 20th Bday party, CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, 7pm, $10-20. Bike cultural offerings and music by Grass Widow, Apogee Sound Club, The Rabbles, and Future Twin.

 

Friday 28

20th Anniversary Critical Mass Ride, Justin “Pee Wee” Herman Plaza, Market and Embarcadero, SF, 6pm

Vintage Bicycle Film Festival, Oddball Films, 275 Capp, SF, $10. Saturday 29 International Critical Mass Symposium, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission, Rooms 303/304, 5-8pm. Event will include an open mic and CM20 Anniversary Week photo contest at 7pm Sunday 30 Farewell Bike Ride and Party, 1pm departure from 518 Valencia, 2pm at Ocean Beach. Bring food and drink to share with your new friends and listen to bands on Rock the Bike’s pedal-powered stage. For more events and details, visit www.sfcriticalmass.org

Perjury charges don’t look so good for the mayor

Zelda Bronstein
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65
Perjury charges don’t look so good for the mayor

The Chron doesn’t think it’s important, but there’s some serious evidence in today’s Ex that the mayor wasn’t entirely forthcoming when he testified before the Ethics Commission. The declarations from Debra Walker and Aaron Peskin are attached at the end of the story; they’re worth reading.

Walker is very straightforward: She says she’s friends with Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi and his wife, Eliana Lopez. She’s also been close friends with Sup. Christina Olague:

Ms. Olague and I often got together for coffee or movies, and we talked often about land-use issues. I wrote a letter of support for Ms. Olague to Mayor Lee, asking him to appoint her as supervisor. At her request, I loaned her a painting to hang in her office when she took office.

All of that is consistent with what I’ve heard about their friendship, and it doesn’t sound like Walker was ever out to get Olague or to put her in a bad situation.

Then Walker  explains that during the week of March 6, she was talking to Olague and complained about the Mirkarimi case. “She said the mayor had asked her about the case when they were talking about other issues, and had asked her for her thoughts.”

The declaration goes on a bit, with plenty of backup to the idea that Olague and Lee had discussed how to deal with the sheriff. Which doesn’t surprise me — I have heard from other prominent people in the city that Lee reached out to them for advice on whether to suspend Mirkarimi.

But it’s a problem for two reasons. One is that Olague, sitting as a judge in this case, isn’t supposed to have talked to anyone else about it — certainly not the prosecuting authority, the mayor.

The other is that Lee denied under oath that he had talked to any of the supervisors about the case.

Debra Walker isn’t a fan of Ed Lee, but she would have had to go to considerable lengths to create this level of fiction. It rings honest to me, particularly when she notes that “on June 29, 2012, at 2:10 pm, I received a phone message from Supervisor Olague saying ‘Debra, the converstaion never happened.'”

Look: This is a sworn statement, made under penalty of perjury. So either Walker’s lying and guilty of perjury, or the mayor is. Which seems more likely?

Ditto for the Peskin declaration, which includes dates, times, places, and specific messages. Again: Did Peskin go out of his way to perjury himself — or did the mayor fail to tell the truth on the stand?

This is now part of the case, like it or not: The credibility of the mayor is one of the issues at hand — and more important, if Lee talked to Olague he probably talked to others. Who would then have to recuse themselves.

The gloves are coming off in competitive D5

Sasha Cuttler
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52
The gloves are coming off in competitive D5

Candidates in the District 5 supervisorial race – where one recent poll showed almost half of voters undecided about a field of imperfect candidates seeking to represent the city’s most progressive district – have been sharpening their attacks on one another, learning lessons about hardball politics, and fighting over key endorsements.

Christina Olague, the incumbent appointed by Mayor Ed Lee earlier this year, has been taking flak in recent debates from competitors who are highlighting the schism between her progressive history and her more conservative recent votes and alliances. That gulf was what caused Matt Gonzalez to pull his endorsement of Olague this summer and give it to Julian Davis.

London Breed has now suffered a similar setback when US Sen. Dianne Feinstein revoked her endorsement following colorful comments Breed made to the Fog City Journal, which were repeated in the San Francisco Chronicle, blasting her one-time political patron Willie Brown. Breed, whose politics have been to the right of the district, seemed to be trying to assert her independence and win over progressive voters who have different worldviews than her more conservative endorsers.

But she may have gone a bit too far when she told Fog City Journal’s Luke Thomas: “You think I give a fuck about a Willie Brown at the end of the day when it comes to my community and the shit that people like Rose Pak and Willie Brown continue to do and try to control things. They don’t fucking control me – you go ask them why wouldn’t you support London because she don’t do what the hell I tell her to do. I don’t do what no motherfucking body tells me to do.”

Shortly thereafter, Breed said she got a call from Feinstein’s people withdrawing the endorsement. “There were just some concerns about the kind of language I used in the article,” Breed told us.

Sources say Brown has been in payback mode ever since, urging Feinstein and others to stop supporting Breed and switch to Olague. Neither Brown nor Feinstein returned our calls. On the record, Breed was contrite when we spoke with her and reluctant to say anything bad about Brown or Feinstein, except to offer us the vague, “There are a lot of people who respect and like me, and they don’t like what they see happening.”

Breed went after Olague hard during a Sept. 18 debate sponsored by the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council and other groups, blasting Olague for her ties to Brown, Lee, and Chinatown power broker Rose Pak, claiming Olague is too beholden to that crew and D5 needs a more independent supervisor.

Asked to respond to the attack during the debate, Olague said, “I won’t dignify that with a response.” But it seems clear to anyone watching the race that Olague has been getting lots of support from Lee, Pak, and Brown and the political consultants who do their bidding, David Ho and Enrique Pearce, which is one reason many progressives have been withholding their support.

The Breed campaign this week trumpeted its endorsement by three prominent progressive activists: Debra Walker, Roma Guy, and Alix Rosenthal. But it has been Davis that has captured the endorsements of the most progressive individuals and organizations, including a big one this week: the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, which gave Davis is sole endorsement even though he’s straight and Olague is from the LGBT community.

Davis also snagged the number one endorsement of the San Francisco Tenants Union, a big one for D5, as well as the sole endorsements of Gonzalez, former Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin, and Sup. John Avalos. Assembly member Tom Ammiano also endorsed the Davis campaign, adding that to Ammiano’s earlier endorsement of John Rizzo, the other solid progressive in the race. Rizzo also got the Sierra Club and the number one ranking by San Francisco Tomorrow.

But Olague is enjoying quite a bit of union support, including snagging the sole endorsement of the San Francisco Labor Council, whose members in the trades like her controversial vote on the 8 Washington project more than progressives or her competitors, who all opposed the deal. Olague was also endorsed by the United Educators of San Francisco and California Nurses Association.

The biggest union of city workers, SEIU Local 1021, gave its unranked endorsements to Davis, Olague, and Rizzo, as did Sup. David Campos. Sup. Jane Kim – who has also occasionally parted ways with progressives after Ho and Pearce ran her campaign against Walker – gave Olague an early endorsement, but late this week also extended an endorsement to Davis.

“As someone who has championed rank-choice voting, it is important for me that progressives are thoughtful about how we strategize for victory.  I have known Julian Davis a long time, and I believe that he would be a strong leader that fights for progressive values that District 5 cares about, including sustainable streets and livable neighborhoods,” Kim said in a statement given to the Davis campaign.

Another important endorsement in D5 is that of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which carried a faint whiff of controversy this year. The group gave Olague its number one endorsement and Davis its number two, but some SFBC members have secretly complained to us that the fix was in and that Davis actually got more votes from SFBC members, which most people thought was how its endorsements are decided.

SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum told us she wouldn’t reveal who got the most member votes, but she did say that the SFBC Board of Directors actually decides the endorsements based on several factors. “The member vote is one of the factors the board took into consideration,” she said, listing a candidate’s record, relationship with SFBC, personal history, and other factors. “Nothing special was done in that vote, by any means.”

SFBC has been playing nice with Mayor Lee in the last couple years, despite his broken promise of getting the critical yet controversial Fell/Oak separated bike lanes approved by the SFMTA, which he first said would be done by the end of 2011, then by the end of 2012, but which lately seemed to be dragging into 2013.

At SFBC’s urging, Olague recently wrote a pair of letters to the SFMTA urging quicker action on the project, and it seems to have worked: Shahum said a vote on that project has now been scheduled for Oct. 16, and she’s hopeful that it might now be underway by the end of the year after all. As she said, “We’re thrilled.”

BTW, in case you’re curious, the Guardian’s endorsements come out on Oct. 3.

Supervisors set Oct. 9 to decide Mirkarimi’s fate

Sasha Cuttler
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Supervisors set Oct. 9 to decide Mirkarimi’s fate

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors officially received the official misconduct case against suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi yesterday, starting the clock on the 30-day deadline that the City Charter provides for that body to take action. Board President David Chiu announced a special meeting to consider the case on Oct. 9 at 2pm.

“The last day the Board of Supervisors can act on this is Oct. 17,” Chiu told his colleagues yesterday, reiterating the schedule the board had previous agreed to: a 10-minute presentation by the Ethics Commission, 20 minutes by representatives of Mayor Ed Lee (who brought the case), 20 minutes by Mirkarimi’s side, a five-minute rebuttal by Lee, public comment (which could last for hours), and then deliberation by supervisors.

In addition, attorneys for both sides have until Sept. 25 to submit any legal briefs they want the supervisors to consider, and Mirkarimi’s attorneys are expected to raise objections to an Ethics Commission summary they considered “one-sided,” as well as getting into the issue of whether Lee committed perjury during his sworn testimony in June.

It takes at least nine of the 11 supervisors to remove Mirkarimi, and there is an open question about whether some supervisors should recuse themselves from voting because of conflicts-of-interest, which would essentially count the same as a vote in Mirkarimi’s favor.

Lee was asked on the witness stand whether he spoke with any supervisors about removing Mirkarimi, which he denied. But Building Inspection Commissioner Debra Walker said her longtime friend and political ally Sup. Christina Olague told her Lee had sought her input on the decision. Confronted by journalists, Olague denied the charge but said, “I may have to recuse myself from voting on this.”

Lee was also asked whether he tried to get Mirkarimi a city job in exchange for his resignation, which Lee denied, but former Sup. Aaron Peskin has said that permit expediter and Lee ally Walter Wong (who has refused to answer questions from the media) extended that offer through him, which Mirkarimi didn’t accept. The Ethics Commission refused to consider the perjury allegations, calling them beyond its purview, but Mirkarimi attorney David Waggoner said he plans to submit sworn declarations by Peskin and Walker to the supervisors.

Another possible recusal from the vote would be Sup. Eric Mar, who just happened to be called as a juror in Mirkarimi’s criminal case before it was settled with a plea bargain. There have also been rumors that Board President David Chiu spoke with Lee about Mirkarimi at some point. Last month, Waggoner told the board that he wanted each supervisor to declare whether they have spoken with anyone about Mirkarimi, but their team is proceeding cautiously and wary of offending the supervisors who will now decide the fate of their former colleague.

“We’re going to respectfully ask each member of the board to state under oath who they’ve talked to about the case,” Waggoner told us.

Normally, jurors would be extensively questioned during the voir dire process, and those who had served on an elected body with a defendant for years would almost certainly be removed from the jury pool, which seems to have been the case with Mar’s disqualification on the criminal case. But that’s just one more example of how this unprecedented process is anything but normal, with city officials basically making up the rules as they go along.

Mirkarimi’s wife and alleged victim, Eliana Lopez, has consistently maintained that she was never abused, except by city officials who have sabotaged and humiliated her family and taken away its livelihood. She told the Guardian that the thin charges in this case shouldn’t warrant the removal of an elected official: “You can have different opinions about Ross’s behavior, and people can have different opinions about that, but the people of San Francisco should decide who represents them.”

Lopez said she’s been dismissed and mistreated by Lee, the Ethics Commission, and domestic violence advocates: “These self-appointed white women that are part of the Domestic Violence Consortium are doing everything they can to attack me and insult me while claiming to help me, and never once reaching out to me.”

But she said that she’s hopeful the supervisors will resist political pressure during an emotionally charged election season and do the right thing: “What we need from the supervisors is brave and honest supervisors. The people of San Francisco need that.”

Stop the presses: CleanPowerSF 8, PG&E 3

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Sometimes, the good guys (and gals) win.

And so, after the Guardian started the public power movement in 1969  with the pioneering Joe Neilands expose of the PG&E/Raker Act scandal, after three  initiative campaigns to kick PG&E put of City Hall and enforce the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act and bring our own Hetch Hetchy public power to our own people, after hundreds of people worked for years inside and outside City Hall for public power and clean energy,  the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 Tuesday  to formally launch a CleanPowerSF project that would for the first time challenge the decades-old power monopoly of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company.

It was a historic moment. And it was a historic veto proof vote that Ed Lee, the PG&E- friendly mayor, and his ally and mentor, former mayor Willie Brown, the unregistered $200,000 a year PG&E lobbyist, will have difficulty snuffing out this time around.

The CleanPowerSF 8 were Sups. David Campos, who sponsored the legislation, Scott Weiner, who cast the deciding swing vote, David Chiu, Eric Mar, Christina Olague, Jane Kim, Malia Cohen, and John Avalos, all of whom made helpful remarks during the debate. They also voted down an attempt by the PG&E bloc to continue the vote for a week and voted against crippling amendments.

The PG&E 3 were Sups.Mark Farrell and Carmen Chiu, who tried to dilute the legislation with the crippling amendments, and Sean Elsbernd, who was strangely silent during the debate. 

I use the phrase CleanPowerSF  8 and PG&E 3 to dramatize the crucial political point and toss in a bit of Guardian history on the story.  For years, as clean energy/public power proposals were routinely voted down as a result of PG&E political muscle and power lobbying, the Guardian would use variations of the phrase. PG&E l0, San Francisco l or whatever was the PG&E margin of victory. The phrase was accurate, pin-pointed the good and bad guys and gals, lifted our spirits, and sent the message that the battle was far from over.

The hero of the afternoon was Ed Harrington, the general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission who delayed his retirement to complete the project. He got a standing ovation after his testimony backing up his legislation and deft handling of  all questions.  As Campos said, Harrington’s legislation  was as “good as you are going to get.”  No one seriously questioned his plan, figures,  marketing strategy, or key argument that his plan was fiscally and environmentally sound.

PG&E was never mentioned during the discussion and it was difficult to determine its lobbying strategy. After the vote, I asked Eric Brooks, the crafty clean power leader at the meeting,  what happened to PG&E and  its strategy. He said that PG&E, after the San Bruno disaster and other notable mishaps, was not the monopoly power it once was and that perhaps the company had decided it would rather face the slower pace of  CleanPowerSF rather than another clean energy initiative it would have a good chance of losing 

Thanks and congratulations to the CleanPowerSF 8, David Campos, Scott Weiner, John Avalos, David Chiu, Eric Mar, Chritina Olague, Jane Kim, and Malia Cohen, who voted themselves into San Francisco history.  Five of them will face the electorate and PG&E in the November election (Campos, Avalos,  Chiu, Mar, and Olague.) and they acted and spoke as if voting for CleanPowerSF would be a significant advantage to their campaigns in their districts. And thanks and congratulatons to former Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who carried the public power flag as the unpaid campaign manager during the first two unsuccessful public power campaigns and then carried the CCA plan inside City Hall during his seven years as supervisor.  When he was voted in as sheriff last November, he handed the CCA baton to Campos who pushed the proposal through with style and solid argument that the issue was choice and providing necessary competition to PG&E’s monopoly.

The vote to start public power in San Francisco comes none too soon. The tear-down-tne-Hetch Hetchy dam forces have put the nice-sounding Proposition F to study draining the Hetch Hetch reservoir.on the fall ballot. This is the first step toward tearing down the dam.  The problem for the city is that it could ultimately lose the dam, if it isn’t moving to public power, because the Raker Act mandates that San Francisco have a municipal  system to distribute public power to its residents and businesses because the act allowed San Francisco to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. The Guardian’s position is that the dam is in place and  should only be torn down after the city has real public power and is able to find and afford an adequate new source for the city’s water and power supply. And that, let me emphasize,  will be a massive undertaking involving billions of dollars and incredible political challenges.   .

Much more to come in this saga that never ends,  b3

Here is Guardian City Editor  Steve Jones’ account of the vote: : http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/09/18/historic-veto-proof-vote-launches-cleanpowersf

And some Guardian background on the PG&E/Raker Act Scandal in my advance story: http://www.sfbg.com/bruce/2012/09/17/historic-pgeclean-energy-vote-today

Historic, veto-proof vote launches CleanPowerSF

Sasha Cuttler
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Historic, veto-proof vote launches CleanPowerSF

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors today cast an historic vote that was more than a decade in the making, approving the CleanPowerSF program – which challenges PG&E’s monopoly by offering 100 percent renewable energy directly to city residents – on an 8-3 vote that would be enough to override an implied veto threat by Mayor Ed Lee.

The outcome was far from certain throughout the two-hour hearing as conservative Sups. Mark Farrell and Carmen Chu led efforts to undermine the program, which was the final work product of retiring San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Executive Director Ed Harrington, who previously served as the city’s controller for 17 years.

The pair of supervisors offered a series of amendments challenging the state requirement that city residents must proactively opt-out of such community choice aggregation (CCA) programs if they want to remain with PG&E, offering convoluted language that would have required people to opt-in to the program before its launch, and requiring that the $13 million in reserve funds from the SFPUC be covered entirely by CleanPowerSF customers, which could increase its rates.

“It looks like the amendments would be harmful to the success of the program,” Sup. Eric Mar observed, prompting Farrell and Chu to flash broad conspiratorial smiles at one another.

Sup. Scott Wiener, who was undecided and considered a key swing vote in reaching a veto-proof majority, said he also had concerns about the opt-out requirement and wanted to better understand how the amendments would work and whether they were legal. “For me, I’m not interested in putting any poison pills in here,” he said.

Wiener posed questions about the amendments to Farrell and to Harrington, who said it was possible for the SFPUC to have CleanPowerSF customers repay the initial allocation of reserve funds over time but that he wasn’t sure how the opt-in change would work without sabotaging the program.

“It harms the ability to have an intelligent conversation with people,” Harrington said, noting that rates are based on the number of customers in the program, so it would be nearly impossible to survey everyone’s potential interest without being able to tell them how their bills would be affected.

As it is, the SFPUC has already done extensive surveys of which neighborhoods and demographics are likely to be interested in taking part in CleanPowerSF, initially paying about $10 more per month for 100 percent renewable energy (PG&E’s portfolio includes less than 30 percent renewable). “We’ve done extensive surveys already,” Harrington said. Based on that research, the city is initially rolling out the program to less than a third of city residents, who will be repeatedly notified about how to opt-out, anticipating about 90,000 customers remain in the initial program. 

The program has been repeatedly tweaked over the last eight years that it’s been in development, during which time Marin County launched a successful version of the CCA concept that was developed in San Francisco by legislators Tom Ammiano, Carole Migden, and Mark Leno.

“I feel pretty comfortable trusting Ed Harrington on whether the numbers add up,” said the measure’s chief sponsor, Sup. David Campos, arguing against the Farrell/Chu amendments, later adding, “With Ed Harrington leading this charge, this is as good as it gets. If you don’t like CCA under Ed Harrington, you’re not going to like CCA.”

Farrell claimed to support CCA in concept, but he strenuously objected to the opt-out requirements that Migden included in the enabling state legislation, which she had argued was the only way to make CCAs viable against PG&E’s proven willingness to spend tens of millions of dollars to sabotage would-be competitors.

“It’s the wrong way to legislate, the opt-out. It smells of coercion,” Farrell said. Campos countered that, “The best thing we can give the consumers in San Francisco is a choice, a meaningful choice.”

Wiener ultimately made a motion to delay the item by a week, something Mayor Lee yesterday told the Chronicle he wanted, in order to further study the opt-out issue, telling Farrell that his amendment “feels a little seat of the pants to me.”

Campos and other progressive supervisors who were supporting CleanPowerSF argued against the continuance, noting that it has been years in development and sitting in board committees since January, while the Farrell/Chu amendments weren’t offered until this meeting had already begun.    

“This is not going to change because we wait a week to make a decision,” Campos said. “The terms of this deal are not going to change.”

The motion for a continuance failed on a 4-7 vote, with Wiener joined by Farrell, Chu, and Sup. Sean Elsbernd (who offered no comments throughout the hearing).

Then, as the vote on the Farrell/Chu opt-in amendment came up for vote, Wiener said, “I don’t feel comfortable voting for amendments that I don’t know what they’ll do,” and it failed on a 3-8 vote.

Sup. Malia Cohen had earlier indicated a willingness to support the other Farrell/Chu amendment: saddling CleanPowerSF customers with paying the SFPUC back for reserve fund costs – which Harrington indicated could be dragged out over many years to minimize the impact on rates, and which might not be necessary at all if the initial program exceeds expectations.

That amendment was then approved on an 8-3 vote, with Sups. Jane Kim, Christina Olague, and John Avalos opposed. Another set of amendments that would keep low-income city residents out of the initial rollout and take other steps to reduce their rates if they opted in – which was developed by Kim, Cohen, and Sup. Eric Mar – was unanimously approved by the board.

Then it was time for the big vote on creating the CleanPowerSF program, approving the contract with Shell Energy Northern California to administer it, and authorizing the initial $19.5 million expenditure. Would there be eight votes to override a veto by Mayor Lee, who has been under pressure by PG&E and their downtown allies to kill the program?

“To be perfectly candid, I struggled mightily with this contract,” Wiener said, reiterating his concern about its opt-in requirement, noting that the measure wasn’t perfect, even though it was significantly improved from earlier versions. It sounded as if he were about to vote against it.

“What we have the opportunity to do is move forward with clean power,” Wiener said, noting that even Marin County supervisors who initially opposed its CCA have come around to supporting it. “This is something I believe we should try.”

And with that, the board voted 8-3 to launch the program in mid-2013, with Chu, Farrell, and Elsbernd opposed.

Campos said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the vote, while key supporters say they are cautiously hopeful it will stand up during next week’s final supervisorial approval on second reading and in a veto override vote, if that becomes necessary. Campos said he was thankful for the work of Harrington, who got a standing ovation after the vote as the board recognized him for his long service to the city.

Earlier in the meeting, Harrington told supervisors that while the program isn’t perfect, and it contains some risks that he considers reasonable, there is no other way the city has identified to meet ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals it has set for itself over the last decade. It is city policy to reduce emissions by 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2017 and 80 percent below those levels by 2050.

“This program before you has the only chance of reaching those goals. There’s nothing else,” Harrington said. He also said “it’s an incredibly efficient way to spend money,” noting that the city has spent $90 million on solar and other renewable energy projects that power fewer than 7,000 homes, whereas this $19.5 million will power 90,000 households, possibly without ever tapping into that $13 million reserve fund set aside to cover any losses by Shell, which will buy renewable energy, a role the city hopes to eliminate as it develops its own projects.

Harrington said the ultimate goal of CleanPowerSF is to develop a large enough customer base that the city could use revenue bonds to finance a wide variety of renewable energy projects – many using solar arrays along city-owned property connected to its water system stretching all the way to Hetch Hetchy Valley – that would pay for themselves.

“The real issue is can you build a facility that will have this rate structure support it?” Harrington said.

That’s the real power and potential of CleanPowerSF – finally taking action to address global warming, which will have a huge impact on San Francisco and future generations – as supporters noted in a rally outside City Hall before the meeting. Sen. Mark Leno said that he doesn’t usually weigh in on proposals before the board, but that, “This is an exceptional time and this is an exceptional vote. This is the time that we need to address our inconvenient truth.”

Beyond the video

Andrew Lam
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Beyond the video

steve@sfbg.com

The Board of Supervisors received the official misconduct case against suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi this week, with a majority of Ethics Commission members urging supervisors to give more weight to the 45-second video that started this sordid saga than the voluminous record they have compiled at great expense over five months of hearings.

Yet Chair Benedict Hur, the commission’s sole vote against finding that Mirkarimi committed official misconduct, last month argued that supervisors shouldn’t take such a narrow view of this decision, expressing concern about the “dangerous precedent” of removing an elected official for conduct unrelated to his job.

Ironically, Hur will be the one presenting the commission’s case to the board later this month, a decision his colleagues made because the other options weren’t good and because they said he has been so knowledgeable and fair-minded through the process. While Hur is likely to play it straight, the supervisors will have an opportunity to elicit his true perspective — raising questions that will be central to the sheriff’s future.

Will supervisors see their decision as a matter of showing zero tolerance for even minor acts of domestic violence, as Mayor Ed Lee and some women’s groups are urging? Or will they see this as governmental overkill in pursuing a punishment that doesn’t fit the crime, overturning an election and giving mayors too much power to go after their political rivals?

Is this just about Mirkarimi and his actions, or are there larger, more important principles involved in this unprecedented decision?

In the video, Mirkarimi’s wife, former Venezuelan soap opera star Eliana Lopez, displays a small bruise on her right bicep and tearfully tells the neighbor who filmed it, Ivory Madison, that Mirkarimi caused it the previous day, Dec. 31, and “this is the second time this is happening.” She also said that she wants to work on the marriage, but that, “I’m going to use this just in case he wants to take [her son] Theo away from me.”

Lopez last month spent more than three hours on the witness stand being grilled by Deputy City Attorney Peter Keith and Ethics commissioners, explaining why she made the video and how she believed Madison was an attorney and their conversations were confidential. She repeatedly insisted that she was not a victim of domestic violence and criticizing city officials and prosecutors for persecuting her family and taking away her husband’s livelihood.

There was nothing in the testimony that obviously impeached Lopez or hurt her credibility. To many observers -– particularly Mirkarimi supporters, who made up the vast majority of those giving public comments to the commission -– her testimony marked the moment when the city’s case began to unravel. Indeed, on Aug. 16 the commissioners voted unanimously to reject most of the charges that Lee filed, including witness dissuasion, abuse of authority, and impeding the police investigation.

In the end, there was just that video, and commissioners on Sept. 11 added a final statement into the record that they believed it more than anything Lopez has said since then. Even Hur said that he found it compelling, and that more may have happened on Dec. 31 than Lopez and Mirkarimi have admitted.

But there really isn’t much evidence to support that belief, and Hur said in August that it shouldn’t matter anyway. If the city’s vague and untested official misconduct language can apply to low-level misdemeanors unrelated to an official’s duties, he said, “we are opening this provision up to abuse down the road.”

 

Locking down reforms

Andrew Lam
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steve@sfbg.com

Realignment, California’s year-old program of diverting more inmates and parolees from state prison to county jails and probation offices, was borne of necessity: The state faced a severe budget crisis and had been ordered by the federal courts to reduce the population in its overcrowded prisons. But Realignment is proving to be a real opportunity to address inmates’ needs and reduce recidivism, particularly in San Francisco, where progressive notions of rehabilitation and redemption have deep roots.

“Realignment is the most significant criminal justice reform in decades,” says Assembly member Tom Ammiano, the San Francisco Democrat who chairs the Assembly Public Safety Committee and has helped oversee the process. “The motivation of many of us came from things that were thwarted, like sentencing and parole reform, in Sacramento for many years.”

San Francisco was uniquely positioned to thrive under the new system and to be a model for other counties that seek to improve on the 70 percent recidivism rate among state prison inmates, and the myriad problems and costs that spawns. Former Sheriff Michael Hennessey brought a variety of innovative educational and support services into the jail during his 32-year reign that ended last year (see “The unlikely sheriff,” 12/20/11).

“It’s more than an opportunity. It’s in line with the Michael Hennessey doctrine of enhancing public safety while elevating the idea of redemption, and I subscribe to that,” said suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who successfully ran as Hennessey’s endorsed heir before Mayor Ed Lee ousted him over domestic violence allegations. “Michael Hennessey made famous the rehabilitation programs inside the jail and outside the jail.”

San Francisco was also in a good position as both a manageably sized city and county, and one that had room for the influx of inmates. It was ordered by the courts in the 1980s to reduce its crowded jail population – the peak jail population of 2,300 is now down to about 1,550 – and gained even more capacity last year when the SFPD’s crime lab scandal resulted in hundreds of drug cases being thrown out by the courts.

“It’s something that makes sense for San Francisco,” Acting Sheriff Vicky Hennessy told us. “We’re doing better than most other counties because we had the bed space and we had community programs. Michael Hennessey is a visionary…and he got these community programs out there.”

Undersheriff Ellen Brin, who oversees the jail, said the main difference among inmates that San Francisco is dealing with under Realignment – a total of 2,258 in the jail over the last year, staying an average of 60 days each, and another 306 convicts under post-release supervision – is that they’re in local custody longer than before.

“It’s sort of the same population we’ve always dealt with, but maybe we’re dealing with them on a longer term,” she said.

That creates some challenges – Brin said there are more inmates who are a little more hardened and “more sophisticated” – but it also gives local programs more of a chance to help the inmates. That was one of the arguments for Assembly Bill 109, the main legislation that created Realignment, along with five other related bills.

“That was the whole plan about AB 109 is the counties do it better,” Brin said. “For us, we’ve been doing these programs for so long, with reentry and other community programs, so it’s easy for us to manage this population because they’re here longer.”

Realignment has also prompted more collaboration among the affected local agencies – particularly the Sheriff’s Department, Adult Probation Services, and the District Attorney’s Office – and their counterparts on the state level.

“We haven’t had an overarching initiative that we’ve all been required to sit around a table and work on. This has kind of brought us together, and we’ve discovered other areas where we need to work together as well,” Hennessy said.

That has sparked new programs. For example, San Francisco just started to bring those about to be paroled from state prison into the local jail before their release in order to integrate them into the San Francisco rehabilitation system. “We’re creating a reentry cycle for them so they aren’t just getting off the bus and landing here and going directly to Probation for an interview,” Hennessy said. “Now, we’re going to try to bring them here 60 days early and provide them with wrap-around services, so that we can get them established, get them housing, give them the best opportunity we can for a successful reentry.”

With counties now responsible for the people local judges send to jail, there’s more interest in reforming sentencing laws and exploring more progressive and community-based alternatives to incarceration, which is the focus of the new San Francisco Sentencing Commission that held its first meeting last month.

“District Attorney [George] Gascon is very supportive of Realignment, DA’s Office spokesperson Stephanie Ong Stillman told us. “He has said it could have the greatest impact on justice reform in decades. San Francisco is on its way to being a model for the state.”

But the flip-side of San Francisco’s advantages has been a growing backlash against Realignment in conservative counties with disproportionately high incarceration rates and a lack of capacity in their jails – which is often a byproduct of combining tough-on-crimes policies with anti-tax attitudes, something Ammiano is now dealing with in Sacramento.

“There is a lot of push-back from the Republican Party and alarmism over Realignment,” Ammiano said, noting that he’s just waiting to be hit with anecdotal stories about a transferred inmate committing some horrific crime, even though Realignment only involves low-level convicts who committed non-violent and non-sexual crimes.

Ammiano will work with a newly constituted Board of State and Community Corrections that will distribute funds to counties that need to beef up each their jail capacities or their treatment programs. That mix hasn’t been set yet, but Ammiano said he won’t support counties that simply seek more state resources to maintain high incarceration rates.

“In one way, it’s perturbing and the other way, it’s exciting,” Ammiano said. “For me, the more the county has programs, the more sympathetic I’ll be.”

Yet in this era of chronically underfunded government entities, even San Francisco is strained. Hennessy and Brin say Realignment has brought more inmates with serious mental health issues into the jails for longer periods of time — and that has stretched their resources.

“That’s where we lack, even before AB 109, and I’d like to get more people in there who are experts in the mental health field,” Brin said.

Hennessy agreed, but added, “The mental health program we have is extremely good, it’s just overtaxed because we’re seeing many more people, and this is across the state.” Mental health isn’t the only issue. “The other thing that is a concern is housing for people,” Hennessy said, explaining that the city needs both supervised housing and regular low-income housing for former inmates returning to the community. Maintaining the Sheriff’s Department progressive legacy in the face of new challenges is one reason why Mirkarimi sees danger in Lee’s decision to overturn that election and consolidate more power in the Mayor’s Office. “It’s important that the independence of the Sheriff’s Department be preserved,” Mirkarimi said. “Programs can easily be changed by successive mayoral administration if there isn’t that check on power.” But for now, Brin said San Francisco’s various law enforcement officials have been working well to realize the potential of Realignment: “The collaboration between the criminal justice partners has just been really, really great. Everybody is working together to try to accomplish the same thing.”

Ending the mayor’s commission monopoly

Andrew Lam
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EDITORIAL Ten years ago, San Francisco voters took a huge step toward decentralizing control of city planning, approving a measure that splits the appointments to the powerful Planning Commission between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors. A year later, a similar change gave the supervisors a role in appointing Police Commission members.

By any rational account, it’s been a complete success. The commissions better reflect the diversity of opinion in the city, function well and are no longer complete rubber stamps for the mayor and his planning director and police chief.

The mayor still controls the majority on both panels; his ability to set the direction of city policy hasn’t been harmed. But there’s a least a chance for a dissenting voice or two.

Compare that to, say, the Recreation and Parks Commission.

Rec-Park is a disaster. The seven members are all appointed by the mayor. Some have little or no past experience in anything related to recreation or parks. One actually works as Mayor Ed Lee’s scheduler. Commission votes are nearly always unanimous and the panel supports the director more than 90 percent of the time.

The mayoral appointees have overseen the rampant privatization of public space and a change in direction that undermines the entire concept of urban parks. Rec-Park staff have been directed to find increased ways to turn the parks into cash machines, prioritizing revenue over public access.

The result: So many people are angry at the department that it’s possible San Francisco voters will reject a bond act in November aimed at providing badly needed money to fix up ailing parks and facilities.

The discontent with Rec-Park stems in significant part from the perception that the commission is inaccessible and uninterested in public input. Since all of the members typically line up in lockstep on every decision, there’s little discussion and less chance for opposing opinions to get heard.

There’s a pretty easy fix — the supervisors could put a charter amendment on the ballot giving the board three of the seven appointments. But that would leave a long list of other key commissions unchanged — and there’s no reason to address the problem piecemeal. It’s time for the supervisors to push a comprehensive reform package that redefines how every policy commission in the city is structured.

The reason district elections of supervisors has been such an unqualified success (and remains incredibly popular) is that it guarantees not only neighborhood input on issues but a diverse board. Fiscal conservatives have a voice; so do left-progressives. You won’t find that on most mayoral commissions; it’s very, very rare for a mayor to appoint someone who doesn’t share his or her policy perspectives.

The mayor of San Francisco — who needs to raise huge gobs of money to get elected, leaving him or her deeply in debt to powerful and wealthy individuals and interests — has too much power. That’s a basic problem in the City Charter. The supervisors should start holding hearings now on alternative approaches to a more equally shared governance. Splitting appointments to all commissions would be a great start.

 

The historic PG&E/clean energy vote today

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And so, after a Guardian campaign that started in 1969 to kick PG&E out of City Hall and bring the city’s own Hetch Hetchy public power to San Francisco residents and businesses, the San Francisco Chronicle reported  in Monday’s edition ( 9/17/2012)  that San Francisco “is on the threshold of taking a major step into the public power realm.”

The lead story by John Cote, under a big front page head “Clean power plan would skirt PG&E,”  nicely laid out the CleanPowerSF program and even said that the plan “would effectively break Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s decades-old monopoly on the consumer power market in its headquarters city.”

He quoted Sup. David Campos, sponsor of the legislation, as saying that “This is about giving consumers a choice. And for the choice to be meaningful, it can’t be dependent on one company deciding the energy future of this city.”  The plan goes before the board on Tuesday (9/18/2012) and public power advocates say they have the votes for passage, despite PG&E’s furious lobbying inside and outside City Hall.

What Cote didn’t say, and what the Chronicle has been blacking out for decades, is the crucial point that this clean energy/ public power plan is no ordinary vote on an ordinary issue.  It is an extraordinary vote that would  start the process to enforce the federal Raker Act of 1913 that mandates that San Francisco have a public power system because the city dammed Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park for its cheap public water and cheap public power.  The city got the cheap Hetch Hetchy water, but it never got the cheap Hetch Hetchy power because PG&E stole it and forced the city to buy PG&E’s expensive private power all these years. The cost: billions of dollars for decades to the taxpayers and enduring structural corruption at City Hall. The Guardian has called this PG&E/Raker Act scandal the biggest urban scandal in U.S. history. It still is.

It’s quite a story and I urge you to check out the hundreds of investigations, stories, editorials, cartoons, and graphics the Guardian has used for years to illuminate the scandal and fight to enforce  the Raker Ac t and bring our own Hetch Hetchy power to our own people in San Francisco.

Buried in the Cote story is a key political point: Mayor Ed Lee, the man who became interim mayor on a phony premise and then lied his way into a full term as mayor, reiterated his “concerns” through a spokesperson that he is, gosh, golly, gee, “concerned about the opt-out provisions, the risks associated with the contract and the cost to residents.”

Marvelous. Simply marvelous. Lee is once again enunciating the PG&E line that mayors before him, notably Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom, have used to keep City Hall safe for PG&E and undercut the threat of public power coming to San Francisco and disturbing PG&E’s questionably legal monopoly. Brown, let me emphasize, was under PG&E’s thumb before, during, and after his mayoral tenure and now operates as an unregistered, $200,000-a -year PG&E lobbyist, Chronicle columnist, and key Lee confidant  and ally.

The current public power proposal isn’t as strong as the three public power initiatives that PG&E spent tens of millions of dollars to defeat.  PG&E would still own the lines and network, handle maintenance, and send out the bills.

But the proposal would provide l00 per cent renewable power to residents who want to pay a bit more for it, build a customer base and revenue stream for city-owned renewable power generation, advance the city’s greenhouse-gas reduction goals, and set aside $2 million to study public power options.  Most important, it would be a helluva good first step toward enforcing the public power provisions of the Raker Act and kicking PG&E out of City Hall.

The supervisors and Lee should approve the legislation and move it forward vigorously and without delay.

This is a historic moment and a historic vote in San Francisco history.  The question is, who is going to be on the right side of history and who is going to be on the wrong side of history with a PG&E vote that will live in infamy?  B3

P.S. A tip of the clean energy hat to Ed Harrington, who successfully wrestled  the proposal through the sea of crocodiles and hippos at City Hall.  He delayed his retirement as general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to finish up the proposal.  “This is the single biggest program that is even on the  horizon within the city and county of San Francisco to make any difference toward any of the goals that you have set as board members in terms of having a change in greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in San Francisco,” he told the supervisors’ budget committee last week as reported by Cote.  “This program can make a dramatic change.”  

And a tip of the clean energy hat to Sup. Campos, who put the proposal forward up against  fortress PG&E,  More: a tip of the clean energy hat and a  bow to all the many public power advocates who have fought for years to bring clean energy and public power out of the wilderness and to this position. Furthermore, I salute  Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who led the first  two public power initiative campaigns as the unpaid manager and then took on the herculean job of orchestrating the clean energy/cca proposal inside City Hall .when he became a supervisor. Mirkarimi is now paying the price for, among other things, successfully taking on PG&E and the PG&E establishment. His was an enormously courageous and important public service.  On guard,   B3

 

Ethics Commission rejects Mirkarimi delay request

Sasha Cuttler
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Ethics Commission rejects Mirkarimi delay request

The Ethics Commission – in a decision made by Chair Benedict Hur, to whom the commission had given the authority to make procedural decisions – today rejected a request by attorneys for suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi to delay transfer of his official misconduct case to the Board of Supervisors until after the Nov. 6 election.

Mirkarimi’s attorneys argued that the decision has been overly politicized during the election season, with supervisorial challengers turning the decision into a litmus test and interest groups polling voters on whether they would be more likely to reject supervisors who voted for reinstating Mirkarimi. The City Charter requires the board to act within 30 days of receiving the official record from Ethics, which will probably happen early next week.

“The fate of the sheriff has been made a key political issue in the election by the media, candidates, consultants, mayoral appointees to commissions, and others. Sending the record to the Board immediately prior to an election deprives the Sheriff of a neutral decision-maker, as guaranteed by the Due Process clauses of the 5th and 14th Amendments,” attorney David Waggoner wrote to the commission on Sept. 10, attaching eight articles and campaign pieces linking the Mirkarimi decision to the supervisorial races.

But Hur disagreed. “There is no evidence suggesting that any member of the Board of Supervisors will disregard the facts and the law and instead vote to sustain the charges based upon perceived political pressure,” he wrote. Actually, he argued that “granting the Sheriff’s request would cause the Commission to engage in the type of political maneuvering that it seeks to avoid. The commission will not manipulate the timing of the Board’s decision in a misguided attempt to predict the nadir of public pressure on the Supervisors.”

Mirkarimi told the Guardian that he was disappointed by the decision, noting that it was Mayor Ed Lee’s piling on of excessive charges that the commission found no evidence to support that have delayed the board’s deliberations until the height of the election season. “This is so vividly and transparently political.”

Committee approves CleanPowerSF over downtown opposition

Sasha Cuttler
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51
Committee approves CleanPowerSF over downtown opposition

The question of whether San Francisco creates a renewable energy program that offers an alternative to Pacific Gas & Electric got its first major hearing at City Hall today, with the business community claiming it’s too expensive and supporters arguing that the time has come for the city to address climate change and the long-term energy needs of city residents and businesses.

The Board of Supervisors Budget & Finance Committee voted 2-1 in favor creating CleanPowerSF, entering into a contract with Shell Energy Northern California to administer the program, and devoting $19.5 million from the San Francisco Public Utility Commission’s water fund to help launch it and buy clean power for city residents.

Sups. John Avalos and Jane Kim supported the project, while Sup. Carmen Chu was opposed. It now goes to the full Board of Supervisors next week, where it is expected to have progressive support and be opposed by the fiscal conservatives.

“I do think we will have the necessary majority to get this through,” the measure’s sponsor, Sup. David Campos, told us. But one open question is whether Mayor Ed Lee will veto a measure that his SFPUC appointees developed but his downtown allies are trying to kill, and if so, whether there are eight supervisors willing to override a veto.

But Campos noted that SFPUC officials testified today that CleanPowerSF is the only way they’ve identified to meet the city’s ambitious official goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which call for a reduction of 20 percent below 1990 levels by the end of this year and an 80 percent reduction by 2050.

Supporters who testified today included environmentalists, progressive groups, and young people who cast addressing climate change as the defining struggle of their generation. “This, not to go overboard, is the most important vote you’ll ever do,” said the Sierra Club’s Arthur Feinstein.

Those who spoke against the program included the usual array of downtown groups that have traditionally defended PG&E’s interests – including the Committee on Jobs, Golden Gate Restaurant Association, and Plan C – and they were joined by an unusually large number of elderly Asian individuals wearing stickers opposing the project.

“It’s a bad program that doesn’t meet even the basic elements of its original promise,” said Chris Wright, executive director of the Committee on Jobs, which PG&E has helped fund since its inception. Like most CleanPowerSF opponents, they have long opposed even the concept of community choice aggregation (CCA), the state law that allowed the city to create CleanPowerSF.

PG&E’s longtime support by local politicians has eroded in recent years because of its overkill campaigns against public power initiatives and supporters and its negligence in the deadly San Bruno pipeline explosion.

Even GGRA Executive Director Rob Black told the committee, “PG&E, a local company, candidly has its problems.” But he and other project opponents – and even a few supporters of the project – centered much of their opposition on the involvement of Shell, which has a bad reputation and environmental record, like almost every other multinational energy company.

“I have the same qualms about Shell that everyone else does,” said Katherine Roberts, who said that she nonetheless supports the project, calling it the only way for most San Franciscans to directly support the development of renewable energy sources. Shell was the sole bidder on a project that requires enormous financial wherewithal.

Campos calls the focus on Shell a diversionary tactic: “PG&E already buys energy from Shell. To the extent people don’t want Shell in the picture, Shell is already in the picture.”

Both the supervisors and the mayor will be under intense pressure to derail CleanPowerSF, with that campaign led by downtown groups and IBEW Local 1245, the union that represents PG&E workers. Sup. Scott Wiener, who says he’s still undecided, told us that his office was flooded with phone calls today, mostly in opposition to the project.

PG&E union mounts attack on Clean Power SF

Zelda Bronstein
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PG&E union mounts attack on Clean Power SF

The union that represents PG&E workers — and has opposed every single public-power initiative in modern San Francisco history — just launched an attack on Clean Power SF. And the union’s business representative is having a hard time explaining exactly why he’s working with PG&E to try to undermine this modest step toward public power.

Hunter Stern, with IBEW Local 1245, sent a press release out Sept. 11 announcing the start of a campaign to convince the supervisors not to approve the Clean Power SF plan. The line of attack: Shell Energy, which got the contract to supply sustainable energy to customers in the city, in competition with PG&E. The pitch:

San Francisco city government is considering a proposal to partner with Shell Energy of North America to inaugurate SF’s so-called “clean power” program. If the Board of Supervisors approves the proposal, San Francisco would pay millions to Shell, one of the most notorious environmental violators in business today.

Shell’s a pretty bad company. So is PG&E. So is just about everyone in the energy business. Not justifying Shell’s behavior, just noting: If you want a contractor to deliver electricty to San Francisco, you aren’t going to get a cool independent small business. You aren’t even going to get Google. These folks are evil, all of them.

Oh, and by the way: Shell Energy also sells power to PG&E (pdf). Stern’s boss has a contract similar to what the city is going to get. So the PG&E power we all pay for today is in part Shell power. And as Sup. David Campos points out, it wasn’t as if the city chose Shell over some better competitors: There was no other company out there anywhere in the world that responded to the city’s bid process and offered to work with Clean Power SF.

The key point here is that Clean Power SF is going to use Shell as a bridge — the private outfit will deliver power generated at renewable facililities to the city’s power operation, which will resell it to customers … for a while. The goal is to use the revenue stream from the sales of power to back bonds that will allow the city to build its own renewable energy system. Five, maybe ten years down the road, San Francisco will have solar generators on city property (including large swaths of Public Utilities Commission property in the East Bay), wind generators, maybe at some point tidal generators, and will be able to sell cheap, clean, local power to customers. Shell will be gone.

Let’s face it: this is a step on the path to creating a city-owned and city-run power system — that is, a step to eliminating PG&E as a player in San Francisco’s energy future. Public power will be cheaper and cleaner — and it’s going to take a while to get there. Which is why we need to start now.

PG&E knows this, too, and is fighting to block Clean Power SF, which comes before the board’s Budget and Finance Committee Sept. 12. Now IBEW is allied, as usual, with the giant company.

The Stern press release talks about how Clean Power SF will be expensive:

The average home can expect to see a rate increase of 77% over their current PG&E electricity generation rates. That comes out to an increase of over $200 per year.  The higher cost of power would eat up more and more of the City budget, forcing service reductions and costing San Francisco vitally needed jobs. Our local economy would take a multi-million dollar hit.

Actually, not true: The only people who will pay for Clean Power SF are the ones who want it. The idea is that a significant number of San Franciscans will be willing to pay a little more — maybe $10 a month — to help save the planet. The ones who want to stick with PG&E wil have every opportunity to do so. The city budget isn’t taking a hit — municipal services already use the city’s Hetch Hetchy hydropower. This doesn’t cost the city money or jobs.

It will, of course, hurt PG&E.

I called Hunter Stern to talk about all of this, and we had a long conversation. He was polite and answered all of my questions. Sort of.

He insisted that IBEW isn’t against community choice aggregation, that he’s only worried about the city budget and the impacts on ratepayers. And Shell. So we started going around in circles, like this:

Me: So you don’t oppose Clean Power SF?

Stern: We are not opposed to community choice aggregation. Just to this contract with Shell.

Me: I’m told Shell is the only contractor willing to fulfill this role.

Stern: That’s what I’m told, too.

Me: So if you support CCA, what should the city do?

Stern: Find somebody else.

Me: The city has made it clear there IS nobody else.

Stern: We should put this on hold and wait around until there is.

Me: Why is IBEW unhappy with Shell?

Stern: This is contracting out.

Me: Is Shell Energy a nonunion company?

Stern: They don’t generate power, they just buy and sell, so they don’t really have any employees who could be in IBEW.

Me: So what if they city can use this revenue to build its own renewables, with union labor?

Stern: We aren’t opposed to the city building its own renewables.

Me: But the idea here is to use the revenue stream from Clean Power SF to raise money for local renewables.

Stern: You don’t need revenue to build local renewables. Just creativity.

Me: But the city has a huge budget problem now. There’s no money to build local generation unless you have a revenue stream to bond against.

Stern: There are creative ways to do it.

Me: So you support CCA. You support building local renewables.Clean Power SF is a CCA program to build local renewables. Shell is the only company that answered the city’s call for bids for this project. You don’t have any labor issues with Shell. I don’t understand where you’re coming from.

Stern: I don’t disagree with your checklist.

Me: So why are you against this project?

Stern: We don’t think this is good for the city or for the ratepayers.

Me: But the ratepayers don’t have to be a part of it if they don’t want to.

Stern: I think the way the city is approaching that is a good strategy.

Round and round and round. It was making my head hurt. I wish I’d put it on tape so you could all listen.

I passed the press release along to Tyrone Jue at the SFPUC. He had a pretty clear response:

This attack is not surprising. IBEW is one of the largest unions at PG&E. They historically side with PG&E on all their issues. The fact is CleanPowerSF will not cost IBEW workers jobs. Ironically, the local renewable build out phase will be creating even more green union jobs. This happens while we weaning ourselves off dirty fossil fuel sources.San Franciscans want the choice to embrace a clean energy future. While PG&E shareholders stand to lose with CleanPowerSF, the consumer and environment stand to win.

He added:

Our ‘little creativity’ involves reinvesting revenue into aggressive energy efficiency and local renewable generation projects.  We’re simply not motivated to maximize profit at the expense of our customers or the environment.   Our common sense goal is to reinvest revenue into real projects that will reduce San Francisco’s carbon footprint, create local jobs, and build a sustainable energy future that is better for the environment and our customers.

Ugh. This is going to be a battle royal. I hope there are six votes on the board for Clean Power SF, which is imperfect but important. And then Mayor Lee will have to decide whether to side with his highly respected SFPUC general manager, Ed Harrington, who wants to make this happen, and PG&E, which doesn’t.

Oh, by the way: PG&E pays Willie Brown about $250,000 a year as a “legal retainer.” And I hear the mayor takes his phone calls.

Words and deeds

Andrew Lam
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Words and deeds

steve@sfbg.com

When Mayor Ed Lee appointed engineer and pro-development activist Rodrigo Santos to fill a vacant seat on the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees, both men talked about the urgent need to save this troubled but vitally important institution.

“Our economic future is directly tied to the success of City College,” Lee said at a press conference, touting the school’s critical job-training role.

But when you cut through all the politics and hyperbole, the school’s biggest single problem is a lack of money — and the mayor and his new trustee aren’t doing much to help.

Neither Lee nor Santos have yet endorsed or publicly supported Proposition A, the $79-per-parcel tax that would stave off deep cuts to a district whose accreditation has been threatened over its anemic cash reserves and reluctance to scale back its course offerings (see “City College fights back,” July 17).

Nor have they appealed for support from their deep-pocketed allies in the business community, which City College supporters say should be doing more to support the district.

And while some say Lee is finally getting ready to endorse Prop. A, he’s done nothing to help the campaign.

“It’s a shame because [the mayor] has pledged to support City College,” John Rizzo, president of the Board of Trustees and a supervisorial candidate from District 5.

Lee also refused a request the trustees made last year to ease the more than $2.5 million in rent and fees that the district pays annually to the city. That’s a stark contrast to the city’s generous support of the San Francisco Unified School District, which gets an annual subsidy from the city of around $25 million, thanks to a ballot measure pushed by city officials of various ideological stripes.

“K-12 is important, but when we try to get help from the city, it falls on deaf ears and I don’t know why. Maybe little kids are cuter,” Rizzo told us.

Sup. Eric Mar said that dichotomy is a real problem, particularly given City College’s current challenges and the important role it plays in providing low-cost training to local workers. Mar has called for a hearing this month before the Joint City and School District Select Committee, which oversees SFUSD’s relationship with the city.

“I support stronger city support for City College,” Mar told us.

Asked about Lee’s unwillingness to help with City College’s fiscal situation, mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey said Lee has offered logistical support from city officials to help City College overcome the threats to its accreditation and has been carefully monitoring the situation, but she didn’t directly address why he has withheld financial support or endorsed Prop. A.

“The mayor has not taken a position on the parcel tax and is focusing his efforts on supporting the college’s need for serious fiscal and management changes and protecting its accreditation,” she told us by email Sept. 7. “The mayor knows it is more important than ever that the City support City College to make sure they get back on their feet for the sake of current and future City College students and for all San Francisco residents.”

But City College officials aren’t buying it. “Talk and nice words don’t mean anything anymore,” Rizzo said.

Other Prop. A supporters agree.

“The mayor needs to step up and support this,” Trustee Chris Jackson told the Guardian, arguing that most of the district’s problems stem from steadily declining financial support from the state. “We have a revenue problem.”

“It is the workforce training vehicle for the city,” said Rafael Mandelman, a candidate for trustee who has been actively supporting Prop. A. “Maybe now is the time when the city shouldn’t say no to that.”

Falvey responded by saying, “The City supports all of our public education institutions in some capacity. Each public education institution also pays the city for some of the required services it is provided.”

Other Prop. A supporters say they are hopeful that Lee may still come around. Alisa Messer, president of American Federation of Teachers Local 2121, which represents City College faculty, told us, “The mayor says he supports City College and we’re hoping he will support the measure soon.”

Gabriel Haaland, who has been working on the measure for SEIU Local 1021, also told us as we were going to press on Sept. 10, that Lee seems to be coming around: “From what I understand, the mayor is about to endorse it.”

 

 

PROMISE OF SUPPORT

When Lee appointed Santos — who has raised an unprecedented amount of money for his race, $113,153 as for July 1, mostly from the real estate and development interests he represents as president of Coalition for Responsible Growth — some argued that it would bring needed financial support for the district and the Prop. A campaign.

“He is expected to bring his allies in these fields into the fight to save City College, which faces a critical 2/3 vote on a parcel tax this November,” Tenderloin Housing Clinic Director Randy Shaw wrote on his Beyond Chron blog on Aug. 22, a day after telling the Guardian how the parcel tax was essential to City College’s future and Santos was uniquely positioned to support it.

But Santos, whose campaign didn’t return Guardian calls on the issue, hasn’t appeared at any Yes on A campaign events or offered any discernible support for the measure, whose supporters had only raised a little over $20,000 as of July 1. While there is little organized opposition to Prop. A, the fact that it needs approval by two-thirds of voters is a challenge that requires strong support.

Rizzo said Shaw’s argument doesn’t hold up. “It’s a nice theory,” he said, “but I haven’t seen evidence of that, and I haven’t seen Rodrigo at any Prop. A events.”

Santos hadn’t been involved with City College or educational issues before deciding to run for trustee, and he’s widely perceived as an ambitious politico setting himself up to run for the Board of Supervisors. At his press conference, Santos pledged to aggressively fight for City College.

“I join an institution that must be saved, and I’m absolutely committed to that goal,” Santos said.

Lee assembled a variety of representatives from “the city family” at his press conference, including trustees Natalie Berg and Anita Grier, Interim Chancellor Pamila Fisher, representatives from the Controller’s Office, Board of Education, Department of Children Youth and their Families, and the Mayor’s Budget Office.

“They, after all, need our help, need our support and they will not be able to accomplish it all by themselves,” said Lee, who pointedly didn’t say anything about the parcel tax at the event, even though he sang the praises of the district. “It empowers those economic sectors that we consider most valuable to our future, especially in the area of health care, hospitality, biotech, and now technology in general. We have become dependent on City College for their ability to prepare future workforces.”

Lee also sounded a tough love theme, saying “any improvement means a change from the status quo” and praising Santos as “someone who shares my vision of reform and will support the tough decisions ahead.”

Indeed, the board members face a number of tough decisions in the coming weeks, from whether to abdicate some of their authority to a special trustee empowered to make unilateral decisions about what programs to cut or campuses to close. The college is responding to a threat from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges to live within its means or lose its accreditation.

Santos didn’t mention Prop. A during the press conference that followed his swearing in, instead offering vague platitudes and promises that he’s willing to work hard and make tough decisions, while also making some puzzling statements about the district’s current situation.

“We must support the interim chancellor, Pamila Fisher,” he said. “Our primary duty is to ensure she enjoys the support and tools needed to implement difficult reforms. At the same time, we will hold her accountable, we will help her, we will challenge her.”

He appeared unaware that Fisher’s tenure ends in just a few weeks, well before any reforms could possibly be approved or implemented.

Some Prop. A supporters are hoping Santos will also challenge his allies in the business community to open their wallets and support both Prop. A and ongoing operations at City College.

“It would be great for the businesses to step up in a big way because they are really benefiting from our workforce training programs,” Messer said. “It’s clear to me the business community understands how important City College is to this city.”

Now, City College’s biggest supporters say it’s time for the city and the business community to put their money where their mouths are.

“City College certainly gives back to the people of San Francisco,” Rizzo said, “and it’s time for the city to give back to City College.”

Commissioners sharpen Mirkarimi case and select unlikely rep

Sasha Cuttler
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Commissioners sharpen Mirkarimi case and select unlikely rep

 The Ethics Commission wrapped up nearly six months worth of proceedings on the official misconduct charges against suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi today, finalizing its findings of fact and choosing Chair Benedict Hur to make its presentation to the Board of Supervisors even though he was the sole dissenting vote against removing Mirkarimi from office. 

After making the key decisions during a marathon meeting on Aug. 16, today’s hearing was mostly about mopping up, and it was the most sparsely attended of the hearings so far. But there were still a couple of tough issues to hash out, and the commissioners who voted against Mirkarimi tried to strengthen their case at the last minute.
The City Charter mandates removal of an official if at least nine supervisors find he committed official misconduct. The commission had earlier discussed how they viewed that finding and the punishment as separate issues, but decided against recommending a punishment after discussing that charter language. 
Commissioner Beverly Hayon today sought to remove any doubt about where she stood, adding a personal statement into the record that she thought the sustained charges — its 4-1 finding that Mirkarimi’s grabbed his wife’s arm during a Dec. 31 argument and subsequently pleaded guilty to false imprisonment — warranted Mirkarimi’s removal.
In a sign that the commissioners are paying attention to the political climate that has formed up around their deliberations, she made a reference to a discussion and vote last month by the Commission on the Status of Women and sought to clarify any “confusion” about where she stood.
Commissioner Paul Renne also sought to sharpen the findings of fact by adding language indicating the commission found the testimony of Mirkarimi and his wife, Eliana Lopez, to be a less credible and compelling description of what happened on Dec. 31 than the tearful 45-second video that neighbor Ivory Madison helped her make days after the incident displaying the bruise on her arm and saying she wanted to document the incident in case they divorced and there was a custody battle over their three-year-old son. 
That language was inserted in the document without objection, a decision that drew a sharp rebuke from Lopez’s attorney, Paula Canny, during the public comment portion of the hearing. “My client wants you to know that you’re flat out wrong,” Canny said, criticizing the commission’s hostile treatment of both Lopez and Linnette Peralta-Haynes, Lopez’s confidante on the day Madison unexpectedly called the police. 
“It has to be Eliana is not credible to justify your finding,” Canny said, accusing commissioners of selecting facts to fit impressions they formed when watching the emotional video. “The only reason Eliana made that video is to be used in a custody dispute.”
Mirkarimi attorney David Waggoner tried unsuccessfully to make changes to a commission summary document that he called “very one-sided,” including trying to add language indicating that the commission had unanimously rejected most of the charges that Mayor Ed Lee brought against Mirkarimi, such as witness dissuasion, abuse of power, and interfering with a police investigation. 
Waggoner also objected to Hur’s suggestion that attorney Scott Emblidge, who is doing pro bono legal work on the proceedings for both the commission and the Board of Supervisors, calling it a conflict of interest given that the commission’s role is akin to that of prosecutor. And on that point, he found support from Renne, who was unaware that Emblidge will also be advising the supervisors, a dual role he found troubling. “I’m a little surprised and I don’t know why the board doesn’t have independent counsel,” Renne said.
Emblidge promised a “dry recitation” of the commission’s findings, but Waggoner recommended the commission’s executive director, John St Croix, when pressed by Hur for an alternative, a choice Hur rejected because St. Croix hasn’t been present at all the hearings. Finally, Renne suggested that Hur do the presentation, saying that he has been fair and represented all arguments well during the proceedings so far, something that Hayon and Commissioner Dorothy Liu enthusiastically agreed with. 
It was an unconventional decision given that Hur made strong arguments on Aug. 16 about the troubling precedent that he thinks the commission’s decision represents, saying it gives the mayor too much power and opens the door to political manipulation if the official misconduct provisions are construed so broadly.
But he accepted the duty, telling the commissioners: “I’m willing to do it. It is awkward given that I was in the dissenting view, but I’ll do my best.”The case is expected to be sent to the board by Sept. 18 and it will have 30 days to act, meaning the decision will be just a few weeks before an election in which five supervisors are running to keep their jobs.Mirkarimi’s team has sought to delay the transfer of the case until after the election, noting many political interest groups and supervisorial candidates have been publicly putting pressure on the supervisors to remove Mirkarimi.

Why Question Time is boring

Zelda Bronstein
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9
Why Question Time is boring

So Sup. Jane Kim isn’t sure Question Time is useful. And the press and some other board members think that, to quote Sup. John Avalos, it’s “deadening.”

Well, there’s a reason for that — the mayor doesn’t like the idea of appearing in an unscripted forum with board members, where he could face tough questions he doesn’t expect and engage in some real debate. And led by Board President David Chiu, the supervisors intentionally created a system that guarantees nothing valuable will happen.

The board sets the rules for Question Time. It’s in the law. And the mayor has to follow those rules.

The whole idea, when Sup. Chris Daly first brought this up, was to mandate that the chief executive interact with the board — and to provide an opportunity for the supervisors to engage in public discussion and debate with the occupant of an office that under Mayors Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom had become increasinly imperious.

Lee’s nowhere near as bad — but still, what Daly envisioned, and what the voters approved, was an open forum. Instead, we got a farce, a pre-scripted scene where the supervisors submit questions in advance, the mayor reads from a prepared answer, and there’s no follow-up or back-and-forth.

Yeah, it’s boring. No, it’s not useless. It’s just broken, because the supervisors didn’t have the guts to put into practice what the voters wanted. It’s simple: Change the rules. Get rid of the requirement that questions be sumitted in advance. Let the supervisors ask, challenge, debate, follow up. That would be a public service.

And the idea that the mayor can’t handle a few unscripted questions is insulting. Lee handles press conferences just fine. And I suspect the supes would be no worse than those wild, unpredictable hordes in the City Hall press corps.

Reinstate Ross! Reinstate Ross!

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More than l00 women supporters of suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi gathered on the City Hall steps Sunday  to stand with Ross in a show of support and  a photo shoot.

The women held signs reading “Stand with Eliana and Ross, Reinstate our Sheriff” and “I believe Eliana” in English and Spanish.

Ross told the women that Mayor Ed Lee was seeking his ouster as sheriff as a way to knock out the top elected progressives in the city and to consolidate power against the progressive community.

But, he said, “as a community we stand our ground and we maintain the principles of what is just and fair.”

He said that Lee was orchestrating the supervisorial vote on his ouster to come before the November election and thus put maximum pressure on the supervisors.  He called on the community to fight back, contact the supervisors and the media and let them know that the public wants Ross to be reinstated as sheriff.

His outreach information, distributed at the event, stated: “Let the Board of Supervisors and media hear from you on behalf of Ross Mirkarimi.  He is a good man who has dedicated himself for years to serve the citizens of San Francisco.  Ironically, although his career is in Justice, he has experienced the lack of Justice at the hands of City Hall.”

And: “We elected Ross and should be the only ones to determine who is our sheriff.  Not the mayor, not the Ethics Commission, but the voters.”

The statement noted that Ross got more votes in November than did Lee for mayor and that the voters have been disenfranchised by Lee.  It also noted that “there is no precedent for suspending an official without pay.  What a terrible, unjust thing to do to a man.”

Obama’s appeal to SF’s divided Left draws mixed reactions

Sasha Cuttler
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26

President Barack Obama has a divided political base, as local Democrats who showed up at the Laborers Local 261 hall last night to hear his nomination acceptance speech were immediately reminded by leftist protesters. And despite the belief by some true believers that his speech won over its target audience, I have my doubts.

Courage to Resist and its allies from Code Pink, the Occupy movement, and other groups targeted this Democratic County Central Committee watch party (and 24 others around the country) with an appeal that Obama free Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of turning over classified documents to Wikileaks who has been kept in solitary confinement for almost two years without trial.

“President Obama needs to live up to his promise to protect whistleblowers,” said Jeff Paterson, founder of Courage to Resist and himself a Gulf War resister (and coincidentally the ex-boyfriend of newly elected DCCC member Kat Anderson). For more on that protest, read this.

DCCC member Hene Kelly (and a phalanx of SFPD cops) helped keep the entrance clear – something the good-natured protesters didn’t seem to threaten – and said she understood their perspective: “They’re here because they have a right to ask President Obama to free Bradley Manning, and I agree with them.”

But inside, DCCC Chair Mary Jung wasn’t so happy about this rain on their parade, telling the Guardian that she supported the ideas behind Occupy but said, “I think the message is misdirected at us,” ticking off Democratic Party positions on same sex marriage, immigration reform, and other issues.

When I told her that the protest was actually about Manning, whose fate is pretty clearly in the hands of Obama and his appointees, she offered this hopeful assessment: “I would hope it’s going to work it’s way through the courts as it’s supposed to. There is a process.”

When I tried to get District Attorney George Gascon’s take on whether that process comports with normal legal and civil rights standards, he told us, “I have no opinion. I need to digest the information a little more.” (That was more than Willie Brown offered, with the former mayor, unregistered political lobbyist, and San Francisco Chronicle columnist responding to my questions with, “I’m a columnist. I don’t make comments to other newspapers,” after he gave a speech to the gathered Democrats.)

But it didn’t take Gascon long to digest Obama’s speech, telling us afterward, “I think he hit it out of park. If this doesn’t get the enthusiasm up, nothing will.”

Yet my reaction, and most that I’ve heard since then from people who listened to the speech, wasn’t quite so enthusiastic. Yes, Obama had some good lines, and yes, he fairly effectively countered many of the Republican misrepresentations of his record and ability to quickly turn around the failing economy he inherited. And yes, I think the substance and messaging were more progressive than his centrist acceptance speech of four years ago.

“Times have changed and so have I,” Obama declared at one point.

But this is a party that still shares the same basic paradigm as the Republican Party, this story of American exceptionalism, protected by noble military “heroes” and guided by altruistic virtues, working within an economic system that can just keep growing and expanding the prosperity of US citizens indefinitely – the kind of rhetoric that still drove the crowd to a jingoistic chant of “USA, USA, USA!” at one point.

Yet it was a crowd where not a single person in the local hall applauded or cheered for this line by Obama: “Our country only works when we accept our obligation to each other and future generations.” He’s right, but he’s also been running the country in a way that robs from future generations in many realms (debt, infrastructure, global warming, energy, education, etc.) and doesn’t address our obligation to the protesters out front and the valid perspective that they represent.

“There are many shades of blue in the Democratic Party. We’re all blue,” Jung told me.

Perhaps that true, because I felt a little blue coming away from this event, but maybe not in the sense that Jung intended.

The real issue for the Dems in November

Zelda Bronstein
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5
The real issue for the Dems in November

Lots of fun with convention democracy on Day Two, when the chair of the event, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, got caught up in the scam that happens almost every year, when the party rank-and-file doesn’t want to do what leadership says, and the unruly hordes have to be tamed. I’ve seen this happen at the state level (where Art Torres pulled a classic years ago to cut off party reformers at the knees) and it happens at the national level, too — typically not in prime time.

But this time around, the whole world got to see how it works.

It goes like this: When the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) decided that the party’s official platform wasn’t sufficiently radically pro-Israel, and President Obama started feeling the pressure, the party leaders realized that they had to make a last-minute change. Party platforms are drafted by a fairly broad group, and I suspect the majority of the party faithful are concerned that Israeli settlements are making any longterm peace agreement impossible and are getting a little impatient with the same old “Israel is always right” position. So the 2008 plank asserting that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel (a meaningless statement designed largely to appeal to the AIPAC crowd and infuriate Palestinian supporters, since at least three major religions consider Jerusalem a holy city and and both Israel and Palestine claim it as a political center) didn’t make it in this time around.

Oh, but AIPAC howled and the Romney camp was going to use that against Obama (that and the again-meaningless use of the word “God”), the it had to be amended. On the convention floor. Which requires a two-thirds vote.

But the way Davey D described in on KPFA — generally confirmed by video and other reports on the scene — Villaraigosa had a bit of a problem, namely that he didn’t have anywhere near two-thirds of the delegates behind him. He tried three times; every time, it appeared that the vote was, at best, even — and if he’d actually done a roll call, he probably would have lost. And then the president would be in the embarassing position of having his own party reject his efforts — and whoa, the Romney folks would have gone to town.

So Mr. Chair had no choice but to pretend he had the votes, to rule from on high that he’d heard two-thirds say Aye when everyone knew that was bogus, and just put the issue away. Gotta love it.

But that’s all sideshow. The real problem the Democrats face this fall — and it’s only starting to get any real attention — is the blatant efforts by Republicans to suppress the votes of African Americans, Latinos, seniors, and poor people. That’s the core constituency that elected Obama four years ago, and since the swing-state votes are going to be super close, all Romney needs is a few percentage points to take the White House.

The tactic of choice this year is mandating voter ID — that is, telling people they can’t vote unless the present a government-issued identification card. Rep. Karen Bass, the former California Assembly Speaker, was on KPFA talking about the problem, and she noted that there are probably 25 million Americans who don’t have a valid government-issued ID.

Granted, a lot of the states that have passed these laws (Texas, for example) were never going to go for Obama anyway. But there are voter-suppresion laws now on the books in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two critical battlegrounds. And while the courts have tossed out some, others are still in effect — and the ones that are on hold are also on appeal.

And even if the courts chuck the worst of the laws, the message will have gotten out: If you’re on the margins, don’t bother to try to vote.

Remember: It only takes a couple of percentage points, a few hundred thousand discouraged or disenfranchised voters, to swing the half-dozen states that will determine the direction of this country for the next four years. If I were Obama, I’d stop worrying about AIPAC and Jerusalem and God and put all of my efforts into making sure that my folks actually get to cast ballots. Because that could be the only issue that matters Nov. 6.

The park bond battle

Andrew Lam
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17
The park bond battle

yael@sfbg.com

Recreation and Parks clubhouses are privatized and cut off from public access. Public spaces like the Botanical Gardens and the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park are closed to people who can’t pay the price of admission. Event fees and permit processes have become so onerous that they’ve squeezed out grassroots and free events.

It’s been enough to infuriate a long list of neighborhood groups who have been complaining about the San Francisco Recreation and Park  Department for years.

And now those complaints have led to a highly unusual coalition of individuals and groups across the political spectrum coming together to do what in progressive circles was once considered unthinkable: They’re opposing a park bond.

From environmentalists, tenant advocates, labor leaders, and Green Party members to West Side Republicans and fiscal conservatives,  activists are campaigning to try to defeat Proposition B, the Clean and Safe Neighborhood Parks Bond. 

The bond would allow the city to borrow $195 million for capital projects in several parks around the city. It comes five years after the voters passed a $185 million park bond. 

Environmental groups like San Francisco Tomorrow and SF Ocean Edge oppose the bond, and even the Sierra Club doesn’t support it because “In recent years, we have had many concerns with management of the city’s natural places,” as Michelle Meyers, director of the Sierra Club’s Bay Chapter, told us.  

Matt Gonzalez, the only Green Party member ever to serve as Board of Supervisors president, is part of the opposition, as is progressive leader Aaron Peskin.  Joining them is retired Judge Quentin Kopp, darling of the city’s fiscal conservatives.

The San Francisco Tenants Union wrote a ballot argument opposing Prop. B. The left-leaning Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council and the more centrist Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods both want the bond defeated.

Many of the people opposing Prop. B have never before opposed a city bond act. “This is very difficult for me,” said labor activist Denis Mosgofian. “Some of us always support public infrastructure spending.”

When we called Phil Ginsburg, the director of Rec-Park, for comment, his office referred us to Maggie Muir, who’s running the campaign for Yes on B. She sent a statement saying: “Unfortunately, a small group of individuals are opposing Proposition B because they disapprove of Recreation and Park Department efforts to improve our parks and better serve San Francisco’s diverse communities.” The statement refers to Prop B’s opponents as “single issue activists”

 So who are these activists, and why have they come together to oppose the parks bond?

 Many started with, as Muir put it, a single issue.  Journalist Rasa Gustaitis  didn’t want to see fees to enter the Botanical Gardens and Arboretum in Golden Gate Park.  West of Twin Peaks resident George Wooding was upset that Rec-Park has been leasing public clubhouses to private interests. Landscape Architect Kathy Howard took issue with a plan to renovate Beach Chalet soccer fields, complete with artificial turf and stadium lighting.

After a few years of fighting these small battles, people like Gustaitis, Wooding, and Howard started to see a pattern.  Park property was being privatized.

THE ENTERPRISE

Some city departments, like the airport and the port, are so-called enterprise agencies. They don’t receive allocations from the city’s general fund, and operate entirely on money they charge users. In the case of the airport, most of the money comes from landing fees paid by airlines. The port charges ships that dock here, and takes in rent from its real-estate holdings.

Other departments, like Recreation and Parks, provide free services, funded by taxpayer money. In theory, the department creates and maintains open spaces for public use. The recreation side offers services like classes and after-school activities, many of which are centered in recreation centers and clubhouses in parks throughout the city. 

These have been staffed in the past by recreation directors, adults who coordinated and supervised play, in many cases becoming beloved community figures.

But some city officials want that mission to change. In a time of tight budgets (and facing significant cuts to its operating funds), Rec-Park has been looking for ways to increase revenue by charging fees for what was once free.

In fact, in a 2010 Rec-Park Commission meeting, interim General Manager Jared Rosenfeld said, “the sooner we become an enterprise agency, the better off we will be.”

In August 2010, the department fired 48 recreation directors.  In their place, Rec-Park hired part-time workers who were paid to put on programs but not to staff neighborhood rec centers. The department also hired six more employees in the Property Management Division, tasked with leasing out and renting parks property.

In 2010, the commission also approved a plan to impose a fee for non-residents and require residents to show ID to enter the Arboretum. The once-free public garden was on its way to becoming a cash cow (operated in part by the private San Francisco Botanical Society).

A fledgling group formed to fight the fees – and its members soon connected People from SF Ocean Edge, the Parks Alliance and SPEAK who were not pleased with a proposal to install artificial turf and floodlights at the Beach Chalet soccer field and people who opposed the leasing of clubhouses.

 Mosgofian, a member of the Labor Council and worker with Graphic Communications International Union Local 4-N, helped bring together many disparate groups who, they realized, have a common goal in halting the privatization of the parks system.

“It started with a number of different people who were involved in a number of different efforts to get the Rec and Park Department to do the right thing running into each other and eventually getting together,” said Mosgofian “People from these groups found themselves listening to each other’s efforts and got together.”

Subhed: The empty clubhouse

One of the turning points was the fight over J.P. Murphy Clubhouse in the Sunset.

 In July 2010, Rec-Park quietly began taking clubhouses, previously free and open to anyone in the neighborhood, and putting them up for lease. Nonprofits, some of them offering expensive programs,  took exclusive control of public facilities.

For Rec-Park, it was more money. For neighborhood residents, it was a sign they were being cut off from the resources their tax dollars built and funded.

“They would put a notice on the clubhouse door for a hearing, they would have four or five concerned mothers show up, and they would lease the facility,” said George Wooding, then-president of the West of Twin Peaks neighborhood group that got involved in opposing the clubhouse privatization.

The J.P. Murphy clubhouse in the inner sunset had benefitted from the 2008 bond. The building was renovated at a cost of $3.8 million. But when the shiny new rec center was finished, Rec-Park tried to put it up for lease.

Wooding helped organize strong opposition to the lease. They had already paid for the clubhouse through taxes and bond money, the opposition figured—why shouldn’t it be kept open to the public, free? 

 “I’d had enough. We felt, this is our park,  they just spent a ton of money. They fired the rec director. When Rec-Park came to rent out the facility, we just said no way,” Said Wooding.

The department gave up, and J.P. Murphy wasn’t leased. But without a lessee, the department simply closed the center. It’s empty and dark – although it’s available for $90 an hour rent.

Other similarly frustrating battles were going on around the city. 

Muir called the opposition “short-sighted.” 

“This opposition is punishing the people who use the facilities across the city, children who need safe parks to play in, seniors, and those who are disabled who need ADA compliance,” said Muir.

But Friends of Ethics, another group opposing the bond, argues that Rec-Park shouldn’t get another cent until the agency cleans up its act. In a paid ballot argument against Prop B, the group brought up the controversial process of leasing out the Stowe Lake Boathouse last year. The move to put Bruce McLellan, longtime operator of the family business that sold snacks and rented paddle boats, on a month-to-month lease before auctioning a new lease to the highest bidder created a serious backlash.

 On top of that, commission officials were accused of bias when they recommended a lobbyist, Alex Tourk, to one of the companies vying for the contract. 

 “It’s unseemly and it clouds public trust,” said No on Prop B proponent Larry Bush,  who publishes Citireport. 

The boathouse isn’t the only much-beloved tradition ended under the current Rec-Park administration’s reign. The Power the Peaceful festival, which brought big name musicians and thousands of attendants, all for free, has been priced out due to dramatic increases in fees. So has the Anarchist Book Festival. 

 Bob Planthold, a disability rights advocate who is also a member of Friends of Ethics, says that there are issues in the ADA compliance plans for the Parks Bond as well. Planthold says that money from the last bond measure in 2008 was misspent in terms of disability access.

 “Trails weren’t graded properly. There was no attention to whether there were tree roots that might be rising above the level of the trail that could trip somebody,” said Planthold. “They didn’t do a good, proper, fair job on making trails accessible.”

 The bond got unanimous support from the Board of Supervisors. That’s because it earmarks money for parks that desperately need it throughout the city. 

 But that doesn’t mean all the supervisors are pleased with the way Rec- is being run, either. In July 2010, Sup.  David Campos and then-Sup.  Ross Mirkarimi tried to pass a Charter Amendment to split the appointments to the commission among the mayor and the supervisors. 

 But they couldn’t get the measure through, and the commission remains entirely composed of mayoral appointees.  

So now the voters have a choice: Give more money to what  many say is a badly managed department moving toward the privatization of public property – or shoot down what almost everyone agrees is badly needed maintenance money. Of course, the critics say, Rec-Park can always change its direction then come back and try again in a year or two – but once public facilities become pay-per-use private operations, they tend to never come back. 

The Dems open with a contrast

Zelda Bronstein
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18
The Dems open with a contrast

You couldn’t have scripted it better (and that’s what it was, carefully scripted). The contrast between the mayor of San Antonio, Julian Castro, grandson of immigrants, child of a working-class family, and the first lady, Michelle Obama, daughter of a disabled blue-collar public employee, teling their life stories just reminded everyone about the life of that other candidate. Yeah, the one who told students to borrow money from their parents to start a business.

Castro was good because of who he is, and he’s a fine speaker, and the HuffPo  thinks he’s been vaulted into the national spotlight, but this wasn’t a speech that’s going to change anyone’s life. Not like the keynote eight years ago. It was good campaign speech, some nice slaps at the Republicans, and a good line: The GOP wants to take back America — back to what and to when?

But Michelle Obama stole the show. I was listening in the car with my daughter, on the way home from her gymnastics class, and Viv — who generally tolerates nothing on the radio except Katy Perry and Lady Gaga and Kesha and J. Lo and like that — was actually quiet for a few minutes, and at one point asked me the same question I was asking myself:

Why isn’t she the president?

But she isn’t and her husband is, and we all have a lot of issues with him, and I’m not here to defend this administration. But the stark contrasts between the candidates and the conventions can’t be ignored. Davey D, who’s doing an awesome job of covering both conventions, talked about walking around the RNC and not seeing any black people (Colorlines looked carefully and found exactly 89) and from his perspective (and he’s certainly not a Democratic synchophant) the DNC was worlds away.

By most accounts, Mitt Romney didn’t get much bounce from his nomination speech, but most accounts — that is, the national polls — mean very little at this point. The next election will be won or lost in about six swing states, and the GOP clearly thinks it will be a “base” election, that there are enough right-wing types in those states to make the difference if they’re motivated. I don’t know if Obama can say or do anything that will change that.

But for those handful of undecided voters, most of whom are not rich, the Dems have a tailored message. And so far, it’s working well.

 

Approve clean power SF

Andrew Lam
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20

EDITORIAL The clean energy plan for San Francisco isn’t perfect. It’s going to cost residents a bit extra to join a sustainable, city-run electricity system. Officials at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission figure that only about 100,000 residential customers will pay the premium to buy renewable energy — fewer if Pacific Gas and Electric Company launches a huge marketing effort to drive potential customers away. And PG&E will still control the distribution lines, the billing, the meters — and will make most of the profit.

It is, in other words, a long way short of a city-owned public-power system.

But it’s an important step in that direction, and the supervisors should approve the plan.

San Francisco has been talking about community choice aggregation for almost a decade, since the state approved legislation allowing cities and counties to form the equivalent of co-ops to buy electric power. The idea is that the city can purchase power in bulk — either at low rates or with a cleaner generation portfolio — and resell it to local customers. CCA programs don’t displace private utilities, which still own the power lines and charge a fee to deliver the electricity to customers.

But they do offer consumers choice: Right now, PG&E can’t even meet the weak, limited state standards for renewable energy, so San Franciscans are buying power from fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. Clean Power SF, as the city program is called, would offer as much as 100 percent renewable electricity — purchased through Shell Energy — at what at first will be a higher price.

But the goal of the program — and after years of wrangling, the SFPUC is now entirely on board with it — is to use the revenue stream from the early stages of electricity sales to build local renewable-energy facilities that can be brought on line to replace the power from Shell. Eventually, although it may be a decade or more down the road, San Francisco can probably generate enough power from solar, wind, and its existing hydroelectric dam to meet around 40 percent of the total power needs. If part of the program involves aggressive demand reduction, that number could go higher.

The locally produced energy would be cheap and green — and would bring down the price of the city alternative. If the city can build, operate, and make money from renewable energy plants, it will also demonstrate that running a municipal utility is entirely feasible. And the initial work of creating a full public power system will be in place.

It’s a modest experiment. Anyone who doesn’t want to pay extra for green power can opt out, and the city won’t even be trying to take on major commercial customers yet. But as the price of renewables comes down, and San Francisco commences its own build-out, it’s almost certain that Clean Power SF will be offering not only cleaner power but better rates.

For all its flaws, this is a program that community activists and city officials have spent years working out — and both sides are, for once, happy it. It needs strong support at the board, to send a message to the mayor that this is something San Franciscans want.

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