Mayor Archives — Page 4 of 148 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Angry building owners threaten lawsuit over anti-speculation tax

Sasha Cuttler

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July 11, 2014

Angry building owners threaten lawsuit over anti-speculation tax

Opponents of the anti-speculator tax that will appear on the November ballot blasted the proposal in a City Hall hearing yesterday [Thu/10] — pledging to defeat the measure in court even if voters approve it — but they were overwhelmed by a strong turnout from supporters who said real estate speculation drives up the cost of housing without adding any value.

“We can sue you in court on the many of the unconstitutional aspects of this and we will do that,” Janan New, director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, said of the measure that would charge a 24 percent tax on properties flipped within a year of purchase down to a 14 percent tax if flipped within five years.

New and other allies — including San Francisco Association of Realtors, Small Property Owners of San Francisco, and Sup. Katy Tang — claimed that the measure is illegally retroactive because it affects those who recently bought property and that it doesn’t account for people who need to sell their properties because of job loss or other life changes.

“This is almost tantamount to a confiscation of property,” Peter Rich of SPOSF said at the hearing.

But Sup. David Campos — who placed the measure on the ballot along with Sups. Eric Mar, Jane Kim, and John Avalos — refuted allegations that the measure isn’t legally sound and carefully questioned City Attorney’s Office staff to clarify the laws that allow for the measure.

“I know there’s a lot of ulterior motives here because we do know this is going to be challenged in court, so I want to be very clear,” Campos said in response to a line of questioning from Tang, who continued to maintain, “So it’s retroactive in a sense” after being told by the deputy city attorney that it wasn’t retroactive because the tax only applies to future property sales.

The anti-speculation tax was first introduced by then-Sup. Harvey Milk shortly before his assassination in 1978 (Dianne Feinstein killed the measure after becoming acting mayor), and it was revived this year during a series of tenant conventions and sponsored by Mar.

“What we’re proposing is very reasonable to deal with the affordable housing crisis,” Mar said at the hearing, noting that it exempts single-family homes, projects larger than 29 units, and sales triggered by the death of the property owner. “It’s been crafted with enough exemptions to protect the small guy and really go after the profiteers.”

During the public comment period, where supporters on the measure vastly outnumbered opponents, several speakers referenced Harvey Milk and said housing in San Francisco wouldn’t be so expensive today if the measure had passed back then, a time when evictions and displacement were also on the rise.

“He was assassinated before it came to fruition. The parallels to that time and today are striking,” testified Tom Temprano, president of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, who urged supervisors to “honor the legacy of Harvey Milk by passing this thoughtful and well-crafted legislation.”

Brian Basinger, head of the AIDS Housing Alliance, played old video footage of Milk talking about the measure back in 1978, shortly after he was evicted from his Castro Street camera store by a landlord seeking higher rents, noting that profiteering forces San Franciscans to spend too much on housing and have too little left over for other needs.

“So when you look at that, it’s going to affect the larger economy,” Milk said of real estate speculation.

Gen Fujioka, who works at Chinatown Community Development Center and spoke for San Franciscans Against Real Estate Speculation, cited recent evidence of properties snapped up by speculators and quickly flipped for profits of 50 percent of more.

“Basically, what we’re seeing today is an escalation in the sales prices of multi-unit buildings beyond what people can pay in rent,” Fujioka testified, noting how that essentially forces landlords to evict rent-controlled tenants to make the investments pencil out. “That kind of price escalation is causing instability in our communities.”

But opponents lashed out at the measure and the characterization that they were profiteering in ways that hurt people. “It’s a housing tax and it doesn’t make sense to have a housing tax in the most expensive city in the country,” said Jay Chang of the Association of Realtors.

Aaron Jones said he and his wife invested their children’s college savings in a small apartment building, and that they’re good landlords who should be able to sell the property when they want to without penalty.

“We can’t sell until 2017 with this retroactive, punitive tax,” Jones said, saying there were many other small investors like him who were afraid to speak up because “in San Francisco, to be an investor — not a speculator — is to be the devil.”

But supporters of the measure say their intention isn’t to demonize property owners but to do something about the eviction and displacement crisis that is changing the face of the city, and to create a disincentive to bad behavior.

“It’s really the most vulnerable people who are being affected by evictions,” said Erin McElroy of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, citing her group’s research showing 72 percent of recent evictions have been of the elderly or disabled.

“Speculation is the commodification of housing and housing is essential,” said Chris Durazo of the Veterans Equity Center.

Campos said most landlords should support the measure as check against speculators that are pushing up the price of housing, triggering evictions, and creating a divisive politcal climate: “Speculators are giving landlords in San Francisco and property owners in San Francisco a bad name.”

Nonprofit workers shout down Board of Supervisors meeting, 11 detained

Erica Hanna

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July 8, 2014

28

Nonprofit workers shout down Board of Supervisors meeting, 11 detained

Nearly 100 nonprofit workers and their allies, hungry for a raise, marched through the corridors of City Hall today and shouted down the Board of Supervisors at its weekly meeting. “Supervisors can’t you see? Inequality is killing me!” the protesters shouted at the board. Protesters linked arms across the wooden barricade between the supervisors’ seats and the audience, and 11 were detained for their act of civil disobedience.

The nonprofit workers are taking aim at Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed budget, which gives the workers a 1.5 percent cost of living funding increase they say is not enough to offset rising rents, healthcare costs, and other expenses in San Francisco. After doing the math, they say, for-profit contractors are getting as much as a 3 percent boost, which they’re calling a double standard.

Mostly, the workers are feeling exhausted and underpaid. Darien Lomeli, a counselor at Progress Foundation’s Rypins House, helps mentally ill seniors connect with housing services and navigate exceedingly low incomes — but now she says she’s facing those same hurdles herself. Last year, she finally got a 1.9 percent raise, but had no raises at all for over six years.

“We can’t survive on what we’re paid,” she said. Lomeli grew up in San Francisco but was priced out to Redwood City some time ago.

Raw video clips of the nonprofit workers’ Board of Supervisors action today. Alysabeth Alexander of the SEIU is the first speaker, shortly before 11 protesters were cuffed (with plastic) and detained.

But it’s not just about individual challenges, she said, low pay engenders high turnover in the nonprofit sector, which hurts those she helps. “The turnover rate,” she said, “is skyrocketing.”

The homeless seniors she works with need help from people they trust. Navigating services is also exceedingly difficult for trainees, and constantly training new workers is a drain on resources, she said.

Nonprofit workers represented by the @SEIU disrupt a #SanFrancisco Board of Supervisors meeting, demanding fair pay. pic.twitter.com/lr6ce99khq

— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) July 8, 2014

Sup. David Campos told the Guardian a cost of living adjustment for nonprofit workers was on the table during budget negotiations, but was eventually dropped. Now he and Sups. Eric Mar and Norman Yee are working on a solution.

“It’s just a conversation at this point,” Nick Pagoulatos, an aide to Mar, told the Guardian. More research needs to be done to find the dollars in the budget that could go towards the funding increases, which the SEIU estimates would cost somewhere near $6.8 million annually. “The timing of when or if [an increase] could move forward is up in the air,” Pagoulatos said.

Cost of living is just the latest in a series of fiscal hits the nonprofit sector has taken to the chin in San Francisco of late. The tech sector boom downtown and in South of Market have raised the rents on many surrounding nonprofits, which some have said led to the closure of over 1,000 nonprofit agencies in San Francisco since 2011. Mayor Lee and the board provided $4.5 million in the 2014-15 budget to offset rent increases for nonprofits in the city.

The mayor of tiki

Michael Redmond

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July 8, 2014

1

culture@sfbg.com

WEEKNIGHTER The best tiki bar I’ve ever been to is Smith’s Union Bar in Honolulu’s Chinatown. It’s a shitty little tiki dive bar with even shittier karaoke. It’s also the oldest bar on the island. The night I was there it was full of Navy dudes, punk chicks, gay guys, and a big hulking, transgendered Pacific Islander. I had the crowd arm-in-arm singing “Tiny Dancer” and “Don’t Let Me Down” while cheering me on and buying me drinks after I sang. It was pretty much what I wish happened every night of my life.

While nothing can quite compare to Smith’s Union for obvious reasons, Trad’r Sam (6150 Geary Blvd, SF. 415-221-0773) is probably my second favorite tiki bar in the world. Sitting way out on Geary and 26th Avenue, Trad’r Sam got its start as a Trader Vic knockoff back in the 1930s. And it seems not much has changed since then. Cheap, powerful, colorful drinks come in punch bowls while wicker and cushion booths line the perimeter of the room. Cash is the only form of legal tender accepted and really drunk people abound. The bar itself is shaped in an irregular half circle with a lump, like a boob job gone wrong.

It was a foggy Tuesday night and Ashley and I had just come from Rockin Crawfish down the way. Neither of us make it out to the Richmond very often so it was an excuse to wander into places that she’s never been and I hadn’t been in years. As we walked in the door we were blown away by how busy it was. It seemed like the only business with any customers on that side of Park Presidio. “Damn, it’s busy,” I said to the door guy. “Is it always like this on Tuesdays?” I asked. He replied, “Pretty much.”

We were impressed. Most of the bars in that part of town, at that particular hour on a weeknight, had a client base consisting of old drunks pissing away what little money they had while staring into their beers. Somehow Trad’r Sam had every young and attractive person in the Richmond inside its walls that night. People of all ethnicities mingled together sipping flamboyant drinks while laughing, flirting, and grooving to music like MGMT.

“Can I touch your coat? Where’d you get it?” a girl asked as she approached us.

“Sure,” I said, “I got it at some thrift store.”

To which she responded by hugging me and saying, “I’m Jillian and you smell like garlic fries.” Jillian told us that Trad’r Sam was her favorite bar and since she lived nearby, she was there all the time. “Everyone here is so nice,” she told me, “Most of the time one of the bartenders walks me home. And if I black out I always make it home safely.” Blacking out is an easy thing to do at Trad’r Sam. Considering how many new SF bars have drinks that start at $12, the most expensive drink at Trad’r Sam is $16 and comes in a bowl meant for multiple people.

Walking out that night and towards the next bar on our adventure, I told Ashley about Smith’s Union and all the incredible things that happen there. “That’s all well and good,” she told me, “but I bet you never met the mayor there.”

“Huh?” I asked and she showed me her phone check in at Trad’r Sam. Apparently Jillian was the mayor on Foursquare. I never new smelling like garlic fries would lead me to meet such illustrious people. If you make it to Trad’r Sam, give the mayor a hug for me.

Endless Don

Michael Redmond

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July 8, 2014

0

arts@sfbg.com

FILM “Introducing Hollywood’s newest hunk-a-man!” crowed the ads for 1956’s Bus Stop, in which Don Murray made his film debut as the cowpoke besotted with Marilyn Monroe’s movie-mad hick — a plum role in a big hit opposite the reigning box-office queen. The actor even got an Oscar nomination for this start at the tippy-top. But he didn’t stay there long.

What happened? With “A Special Weekend With Don Murray … America’s Least-Remembered Movie Star,” the Roxie aims to provide an answer. The event is part of a larger project set to culminate by year’s end with the premiere of Don Malcolm’s feature Unsung Hero, a documentary tribute to “The Extraordinary Times and Exemplary Life” of the aforementioned. Both doc and retrospective feature an ad line, “He went from acclaim to obscurity in the blink of an eye,” that — like many of their subject’s performances — goes a bit hyperbolically overboard with the best intentions. Murray’s descent was gradual, owing mostly to some noble but commercially shaky vehicle choices. Even with better luck, would he have remained on Hollywood’s fickle casting A-list much longer? The “14 provocative performances” the Roxie revives this weekend suggest probably not.

Arriving post-Brando, pre-New Hollywood, he now looks like a transitional figure: Capable, earnest yet effortful, too often trying to overcome his classic leading-man looks via Actor’s Studio-style “intensity” that then passed as being more “real,” but now looks far from natural. The only child of stage veterans, Murray made his Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams’ 1951 The Rose Tattoo at age 21. After several years’ relief work as a Korean War conscientious objector, he’d barely resumed his career before Bus Stop put it in hyperdrive. After that smash, he could have done anything he liked. What he chose, however, was invariably heavier and less populist: Somber, “daring” issue-oriented dramas that required him to flex acting muscles as men torn between one thing (good) and another (bad). They were respectably received, but seldom attracted the rave reviews, awards or audiences hoped for.

Like Oscar-winning Marty (1955) before it, 1957’s The Bachelor Party was a big-screen version of a TV script by Paddy Chayefsky in his pathos-de-la-Average-Joe mode, with Murray as a young office worker panicked by his wife’s unexpected pregnancy. The same year’s A Hatful of Rain had him as a morphine-addicted Korean War vet sweating out another long dark night of the soul. Amid much theatrical hand-wringing, Tony Franciosa’s concerned brother is so hammy he required the balm of his own Oscar nomination. After a couple of ambitious Westerns and prestige TV plays, Murray portrayed an American medical student who winds up fighting for 1920s IRA leader James Cagney in Shake Hands With the Devil (1959). A good movie about another unpleasant subject, it was not a success.

So it was back to the Old West (in 1960’s One Foot in Hell, a title descriptive of all his roles then) before the actor realized a pet project he also produced and co-wrote. The Hoodlum Priest (1961) had him as a Jesuit rehabilitating ex-cons in St. Louis, including pre-2001 Keir Dullea’s surly delinquent. Melodramatic yet reasonably fresh thanks to future Empire Strikes Back (1980) director Irvin Kershner’s vivid location shooting, it was nonetheless poorly received — not least by its real-life inspiration, who found this screen portrait objectionable enough to sue over.

Fortunately 1961 also brought the actor his biggest hit since Bus Stop. He was the idealistic junior Senator who ends up paying the ultimate price for dirty Beltway politics (committing suicide when blackmailed over a past gay fling) in Otto Preminger’s all-star Advise & Consent. Yet apart from 1965 Steve McQueen vehicle Baby the Rain Must Fall (from which much of his part was cut), he didn’t appear in another major release until 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes — in which his monkey-hating mayor provided a cartoonish metaphor for the actor’s passionate interest in racial equality.

Between routine B movie and television assignments, several projects reflected that personal crusade. Crudely made but interesting 1967 indie Sweet Love, Bitter had him as an alcoholic jazzbo slumming on the Skid Row “wild side” his musician idol (Dick Gregory) can’t escape. Short-lived ABC series The Outcasts paired his former slave owner with Otis Young’s ex-slave as reluctant bounty-hunting partners after the Civil War. The unreleased Call Me By My Rightful Name reunited them as two sides of an interracial triangle, vying for white chick Cathy Lee Crosby.

Murray donned the cloth again to shepherd more little urban toughs (including Erik Estrada) in 1970’s The Cross and the Switchblade, his camp-classic directorial debut. He acted as if his life depended on it — i.e., with a little too much desperation — as a self-destructive rodeo clown in Cotter (1973) and a proto-Bad Lieutenant in Deadly Hero (1975), but hardly anyone noticed. Through nearly all of this he wrangled with The Confessions of Tom Harris, another criminal-redeemed-by-Christ story that was primarily shot (very poorly) by future Bo Derek mentor John Derek in 1966, then reworked and retitled (Childish Things, Tale of the Cock) for years afterward. It, and the even more obscure Call Me, will get rare screenings at the Roxie this weekend, alongside TV episodes and clips as well as most of the above-mentioned features.

There will also be Murray himself, who’ll turn a very hale 85 at month’s end. While he stayed fairly busy with medium-profile roles mostly on TV through millennium’s turn, the latest piece in the Roxie program dates from 33 years ago, and is probably still the movie anyone under 70 would be likeliest to remember him for: The original Endless Love (1981), in which his mean rich dad is the major obstacle between Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt, eventually causing the latter to go pyro. *

“A SPECIAL WEEKEND WITH ACTOR DON MURRAY”

Fri/11-Sun/13, $6.50-$11

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St, SF

www.roxie.com

Motorists fight back in “transit-first” San Francisco

Sasha Cuttler

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July 8, 2014

78

Motorists fight back in “transit-first” San Francisco

Believing that they’re somehow discriminated against on the streets of San Francisco, a new political coalition of motorists, conservatives, and neighborhood NIMBYs yesterday [Mon/7] turned in nearly twice the signatures they need to qualify the “Restore Transportation Balance in San Francisco” initiative for the November ballot.

It’s a direct attack on the city’s voter-approved “transit-first” policies and efforts to reduce automobile-related pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. It would prevent expanded parking meter enforcement unless requested by a neighborhood petition, freeze parking and permit rates for five years, require representation of motorists on the SFMTA board and create a Motorists Citizens Advisory Committee within the agency, set aside SFMTA funding for more parking lot construction, and call for stronger enforcement of traffic laws against cyclists.

“With 79 percent of San Francisco households owning or leasing an automobile and nearly 50 percent of San Franciscans who work outside of their homes driving or carpooling to work, it is time for the Mayor, the Supervisors, and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Board to restore a balanced transportation policy for all San Franciscans,” the group claims on its petition.

But given that drivers already dominate the space on public roadways, often enjoying free parking on the public streets for their private automobiles, transportation activists say it’s hard to see motorists as some kind of mistreated population.

“The idea that anyone who walks or cycles or takes public transit in San Francisco would agree that these are privileged modes of transportation is rather absurd,” Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and an elected member of the BART board, told the Guardian.

He said this coalition is “co-opting the notion of balance to defend their privilege. They’re saying the city should continue to privilege drivers.”

But with a growing population using a system of roadways that is essentially finite, even such neoliberal groups as SPUR and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce have long promoted the idea that continued overreliance on automobiles would create a dysfunctional transportation system.

“Prioritization of the single modes of transportation isn’t a matter of ideology, it’s a matter of geometry,” Radulovich said. “We’re all better off, including motorists, if we prioritize other modes of transportation and encourage people to get out of their cars.”

Still, the revanchist approach to transportation policy in San Francisco has been on the rise in recent years, starting with protests against parking management policies in the Mission and Potrero Hill, and continuing this year with Mayor Ed Lee successfully pushing the repeal of charging for parking meters on Sundays.

The coalition behind this ballot measure includes some of the combatants in those battles, including the new Eastern Neighborhoods United Front (ENUF) and old Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods. Other supporters include former westside supervisors Quentin Kopp, Tony Hall, and John Molinari, and the city’s Republican and Libertarian party organizations.

Spokespersons for the coalition didn’t return Guardian calls, but we’ll update this post if and when we hear back, and we’ll have a longer analysis of this issue in next week’s Guardian.

But Radulovich said that while conservatives are helping drive this coalition, anger over the city’s transportation policies is more of a throwback to a bygone era than it is based on conservative principles (for example, the SF Park program criticized by the coalition uses market-based pricing to better manage street parking and encourage turnover in high-demand areas).

As he said, “There are certain people who believe in the welfare state, but only for cars and not for humans.”

Taxing speculators

Michael Redmond

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July 8, 2014

18

steve@sfbg.com

Political tensions over evictions, displacement, real estate speculation, and rapidly rising housing costs in San Francisco are likely to heat up through the summer and autumn as a trio of November ballot measures are debated and combated by what’s expected to be a flood of campaign cash from developers and other real estate interests.

Topping the list is a tax measure to discourage the flipping of properties by real estate speculators. Known generally as the anti-speculation tax — something then-Sup. Harvey Milk was working on at the time of his assassination in 1978 — it was the leading goal to come out of a citywide series of tenant conventions at the beginning of this year (see “Staying power,” 2/11/14).

“To be in a position to pass the last thing Harvey Milk worked on is a profound opportunity,” AIDS Housing Alliance head Brian Basinger told us, arguing the measure is more important now then ever.

The measure has been placed on the ballot by Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Jane Kim, and Eric Mar and is scheduled for a public hearing before the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee on July 10 at 2pm.

“It’s an absolutely key issue for San Francisco right now. Passing this measure will create a seismic shift in what we’re seeing with evictions and displacement in the city,” Sara Shortt, director of the Housing Rights Committee, told the Guardian.

The measure creates a supplemental surcharge on top of the city’s existing real estate transfer tax, a progressive rate ranging from a 24 percent tax on the sale of a property within one year of its purchase to 14 percent if sold between four and five years later.

In addition to levying the tax, the measure would also give the Board of Supervisors the power to waive that tax “subject to certain affordability-based restrictions on the occupancy of the real property,” giving the city leverage to expand and preserve deed-restricted affordable housing.

Meanwhile, there’s been a flurry of backroom negotiations surrounding the City Housing Balance Requirement measure sponsored by Sup. Jane Kim, which would require market rate housing projects to get a conditional use permit and be subjected to greater scrutiny when affordable housing falls below 30 percent of total housing construction (with a number exemptions, including projects with fewer than 24 units).

That measure is scheduled for a hearing by the Rules Committee on July 24 and, as an amendment to the City Charter, it needs six votes by the Board of Supervisors to make the ballot (the anti-speculation tax is an initiative that requires only the four supervisorial signatures that it now has).

Mayor Ed Lee and his allies in the development community responded to Kim’s measure by quickly cobbling together a rival initiative, Build Housing Now, which restates existing housing goals Lee announced during his State of the City speech in January and includes a poison pill that would invalidate Kim’s housing balance measure.

Together, the measures will draw key battle lines in what has become the defining political question in San Francisco these days: Who gets to live here?

COMBATING SPECULATORS

In February, Mayor Lee and his allies in the tech world, most notably venture capitalist Ron Conway, finally joined housing and other progressive activists in decrying the role that real estate speculators have played in the city’s current eviction and displacement crisis.

“We have some of the best tenant protections in the country, but unchecked real estate speculation threatens too many of our residents,” Lee said in a Feb. 24 press release announcing his support for Sen. Mark Leno’s Ellis Act reform measure SB 1439. “These speculators are turning a quick profit at the expense of long time tenants and do nothing to add needed housing in our City.”

The legislation, which would have prevented property owners from evicting tenants using the Ellis Act for at least five years, failed in the Legislature last month. So will Lee honor his own rhetoric and support the anti-speculation tax? His Communications Director Christine Falvey said Lee hasn’t yet taken a position on the measure, but “the mayor remains very concerned about real estate speculators.”

Peter Cohen of the Council of Community Housing Organization said Lee and his allies should support the measure: “It seems so clearly aligned with the same intent and some of the same mechanics as Ellis Act reform, which had the whole city family behind it.”

“I think it would be very consistent with their position on Ellis Act reform to support the anti-speculation tax,” Shortt told us. “If the mayor and tech companies went to bat for the anti-speculation tax, and not against it, that would show they have real concern about displacement and aren’t just giving it lip service.”

Conway’s pro-tech group sf.citi didn’t returned Guardian calls on the issue, nor did San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, but their allies in the real estate industry strongly oppose it.

“As Realtors, our goals are to increase housing availability and improve housing affordability,” San Francisco Association of Realtors CEO Walk Baczkowski told the Guardian. “We don’t believe the proposal from Sup. Mar, which is essentially a tax on housing, will accomplish either of those goals.”

But supporters of the measure say real estate speculation only serves to drive up housing costs.

“We have been successful at bringing people around on the issue of real estate speculation,” Basinger told us. “But of course, there will be financed opposition. People will invest their money to protect their interests.”

“We know it’s going to be a fight and we’ll have to put in a lot of resources,” Shortt said, adding that it’s a fight that tenant activist want to have. “Part of what fuels all of this [displacement] is the rampant real estate speculation. We can’t put profits above people.”

MAYOR’S MEASURE

Falvey denies that Lee’s proposal is designed simply to negate Kim’s measure: “Build Housing Now specifically asks the voters to adopt as official city policy the Mayor’s Housing Plan to create 30,000 new homes by 2020 — the majority within reach of low, moderate, and middle income residents. This is not a reaction, but a proactive measure that lets voters weigh in on one of the mayor’s most important policy priorities.”

Yet the most concrete thing it would do is sabotage the housing balance measure, an intention it states in its opening words: “Ordinance amending the Planning Code to prohibit additional land use requirements such as conditional use authorizations, variances or other requirements on housing projects…based on a cumulative housing balance ratio or other similar criteria related to achieving a certain ration of affordability.”

Beyond that, it would have voters validate Lee’s housing goal and “urge the Mayor to develop by December 31, 2014 a Housing Action Plan to realize this goal.” The measure is filled with that sort of vague and unenforceable language, most of it designed to coax voters into thinking it does more than it would actually do. For example, it expands Lee’s stated goal of 30 percent of that new housing being affordable by setting a goal of “over 50 percent within reach of low and middle income households.”

But unlike most city housing policies that use the affordable housing threshold of those earning 120 percent of area median income (AMI) and below, Lee’s measure eschews that definition, allowing him and his developer allies to later define “middle income households” however they choose. Falvey told us “he means the households in the 50-150 percent of AMI range.”

The measure would also study the central premise of Mayor Lee’s housing policy, the idea that building more market rate housing would bring down the overall price of housing for everyone, a trickle-down economic argument refuted by many affordable housing advocates who say the San Francisco housing market just doesn’t work that way because of insatiable and inelastic demand.

“Within 60 days of the effective date of this measure, the Planning Department is directed and authorized to undertake an economic nexus analysis to analyze the impact of luxury development on the demand for middle income housing in the City, and explore fees or other revenue sources that could help mitigate this impact,” the measure states.

Shortt thinks the mayor’s measure is deceptive: “It’s clever because for those not in the know, it looks like a different way to solve the problem.” But she said the housing balance measure works well with the anti-speculation tax because “one way to keep that balance is to make sure we don’t lose existing rental stock.”

And advocates say the anti-speculation tax is the best tool out there for preserving the rental housing relied on by nearly two-thirds of city residents.

“It’s the best measure we have going now,” Basinger said of the anti-displacement tax. “Mayor Ed Lee and his tech supporters were unable to rally enough support at the state level to reform the Ellis Act, so this is it, folks.”

Garbage game

Michael Redmond

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July 8, 2014

8

San Francisco elected officials frequently celebrate the ambitious citywide goal of sending zero waste to the landfill by 2020, an environmental feat widely viewed as attainable since the current waste diversion rate stands at a stellar 80 percent.

Official city numbers — based on reporting by Recology, a company that has a monopoly on trash collection and curbside recycling in San Francisco — demonstrate that only 20 percent of all city dwellers’ trash ends up in a landfill, that unenlightened dead end for matter discarded from our lives, never to be reprocessed.

Yet a lawsuit against Recology exposed some inconsistencies in the company’s record keeping. It also shed light on how some material counted as “diverted” is routinely sent to a landfill anyway, a practice that muddies the concept of the city’s Zero Waste program but is nevertheless legal under state law.

On June 17, a San Francisco jury determined that Recology misrepresented the amount of waste diverted from the landfill in 2008, enabling it to collect an incentive payment of $1.36 million for meeting the goal. The verdict compels Recology to pay the money back to the city, since it was obtained after submitting a false claim.

The outcome of this lawsuit — brought by a former manager of the Tunnel Road recycling Buy Back facility, who also claims he was retaliated against for trying to expose fraud — highlights some larger questions. Was this inaccuracy unique to 2008, or are Recology’s numbers always a little fuzzy? Are there adequate safeguards in place to prevent the company from fudging the numbers, particularly when both company and city officials have an incentive to exaggerate the diversion rate? And if what’s on paper doesn’t quite square with reality, is San Francisco really keeping as much garbage out of the landfill as the city’s Department of the Environment says it is?

Attorney David Anton, who represented the former Recology employee, Brian McVeigh, said he found it odd that San Francisco officials didn’t show much interest in collaborating to recover the bonus money, even though millions of dollars was potentially at stake. Since damages are trebled under the False Claims Act, cited in the lawsuit, Recology could ultimately be made to fork over the incentive payment three times over.

“The city’s representative in the Department of the Environment actually testified that he hoped this lawsuit would be unsuccessful,” Anton recounted. He guessed that officials remained on the sidelines because in San Francisco’s political power centers, “relationships with Recology are so close and tight. It was a very strange thing,” he went on, “to be pursuing this lawsuit, trying to get money to the city, and the city’s representatives are saying, ‘we don’t want it.'”

Recology has filed post-trial motions in a bid to have the penalty reduced, “asking the court to decide whether there was any evidence at trial that there were public funds in the Diversion Incentive Account, and if so, how much,” explained Recology spokesperson Eric Potashner. “We expect a ruling this summer.”

Department of the Environment spokesperson Guillermo Rodriguez told the Guardian that Robert Haley, manager of the department’s Zero Waste team, was unavailable for comment before press time. With regard to the lawsuit, Rodriguez noted, “The city has been following the trial closely and is awaiting the judge’s ruling on post-trial motions before determining any reaction.”

FALSE CLAIMS

The False Claims Act is designed to recover damages to government when false statements are made to obtain money or avoid making payments. It has a provision allowing whistleblowers, such as McVeigh, to lead the charge on seeking civil enforcement action. The whistleblower may be eligible to receive a share of recovery.

Under the bonus incentive program, Recology sets aside extra cash — collected from garbage customers’ payments — in a segregated account. But it cannot withdraw funds from that account unless it hits the city’s established waste-reduction targets. Recology submitted paperwork to the city in 2008 showing that it met the diversion goals, so it was allowed to withdraw the money.

But the lawsuit demonstrated that Recology actually fell short of those goals — and apparently, nobody in city government ever followed up to check whether the reporting was accurate.

A key reason the jury ruled against Recology on this particular claim, according to Anton, was that it was found to have misclassified some construction and demolition waste as “diverted” material. Under state law, when ground-up construction debris is used to cover the top of a landfill — to prevent pests, fires, and odors, for example — it’s counted as “alternative daily cover.” Trash in this category winds up in a landfill, just like any other trash. But state law allows garbage companies to count it as “diverted,” just as if it were an aluminum can tossed into the blue bin.

The lawsuit claimed that Recology tried to count a great many tons of construction and demolition waste as “alternative daily cover” when in reality, it should have been counted as just plain trash.

Solano County records show that a landfill inspector had flagged an “area of concern” after discovering solid waste mixed in with construction debris Recology shipped to a landfill for use as that top layer. “It looks like they didn’t do a good enough job of cleaning out that material,” CalRecycle spokesperson Mark Oldfield noted as he pulled up the report from 2008 at the Guardian’s request.

Had the material gone to the landfill as just plain garbage, instead of “alternative daily cover,” Recology would have had to count it as waste sent to the landfill, instead of waste diverted from the landfill. That would have meant falling short of the waste diversion goal, hence losing out on the $1.36 million.

“Recology kept this completely secret from San Francisco,” according to Anton.

Potashner said it was actually a bit more complicated — the company challenged the inspector’s findings, he said. “The local enforcement agency in Solano County had questions about that material,” but Recology never received a cease-and-desist order, he added. “When we had talked to jurors after the fact, that was the issue that seemed to sway them. In 2008 we didn’t make that bonus by that much. They thought we shouldn’t have been able to count that as diversion because of this issue.”

Either way, the incident exposes a strange reality: When San Francisco city officials trumpet the citywide success of “diverting” 80 percent of all waste from the landfill, some portion of that 80 percent actually winds up in a landfill anyhow. Whether the construction debris counted as “alternative daily cover” has trash mixed into it or not, it’s still destined to wind up in a big, environmentally unfriendly trash heap.

CONCRETE NUMBERS

The lawsuit highlighted a few other red flags, too, raising more questions about the city’s true diversion numbers. For instance, the suit claimed that Recology was involved in a system of digging up concrete from its own parking lots, to be handed over to concrete recyclers as “diverted” waste.

“Recology facilities have large areas of concrete pads,” the complaint noted. “Management of Recology … directed Recology work crews in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 to cut out sections of concrete pads and deliver the removed concrete to concrete recyclers, to falsely inflate the diversion incentive reported to SF.”

The waste management company then “solicited cement companies to deliver and dispose of excess and rejected concrete loads to Recology, to fill in the removed concrete pad sections,” according to the complaint. Those shipments were brought in on trucks that weren’t weighed at entry, and then placed in the concrete pads. Management then had work crews remove the same concrete that had been delivered, shipped it to the concrete recyclers, and reported it “as diverted from being disposed in a landfill,” the complaint noted.

This account was corroborated by a Guardian source unrelated the lawsuit, but nonetheless familiar with the inner workings of the company. “They would take the concrete across the road — right across the street,” this person confirmed.

Asked to provide an explanation for this, Recology’s Potashner said, “it is clear, and wasn’t even challenged by the plaintiff at trial, that recycled concrete is diverted, whether it had been from Recology’s lots or anywhere else.”

McVeigh’s case stemmed from his realization, while working as a manager at Recology’s Tunnel Road recycling buyback facility, that employees there were routinely marking up the weights of recyclable materials brought in, in order to pay out certain customers more than they were actually owed. The suit suggests that these routinely inflated California redemption value (CRV) tags contributed to Recology missing its waste-diversion targets, but the jury ultimately sided against the plaintiff on this question since it amounted to a financial loss for Recology, not the city.

The complaint included tag numbers and logs of scale weights that didn’t match up, showing a pattern of fraudulent dealings at the buyback center. In November 2007, for example, “ticket reports showed that 23.4 tons of aluminum CRV cans were purchased at the Bayshore Buyback Center, yet only 16.56 tons existed and were shipped.”

Asked about these claims, Potashner acknowledged that there may have been some “knuckleheads” involved in messing with the scales at the buyback center, but asserted that such activity had since been addressed. He added, “If there were any staffing issues around theft, that was actually affecting Recology’s books,” not the public.

Oldfield, the CalRecycle spokesperson, noted that a long list of paperwork violations had been recorded in 2010, but he said the company appeared to have been in compliance since then — based on logs from inspectors’ visits once a year.

Another problem uncovered in the trial, Anton said, had to do with Recology misrepresenting tons of garbage from out of county, so that it would be counted outside the parameters of the waste diversion program. Potashner said that had been corrected, adding, “the out-of-county waste is really a small volume.”

But he confirmed that yet another practice brought to light in this lawsuit is ongoing, revealing a surprising end for some of the stuff that gets tossed into the green compost bins.

MANY SHADES OF GREEN

According to every colorful flier sent out by Recology, the stuff that goes into the green bin gets composted. The green bin is for compost. The blue bin is for recycling. The black bin is for trash that goes to the landfill. This is the fundamental basis of Recology’s waste collection operation and, taking the company and the Department of the Environment at face value, one would assume that 80 percent of all waste was being processed through the blue and green waste streams.

Instead, some of what gets tossed into green bins makes its way to a landfill.

The green-bin waste is shipped to a Recology facility where it’s turned into compost, a process that involves sifting through giant screens. But some of what gets processed, known as “overs” because it isn’t fine enough to drop through the screens, is routinely transferred to a nearby landfill, where it’s spread atop the trash pile. Once again, this six-inch topper of neutralizing material is known as “alternative daily cover.”

Although Recology could convert 100 percent of its green-bin waste into soil-nourishing compost, the practice of using partially processed green-bin waste for “alternative daily cover” is cheap — and it’s perfectly legal under California law. Roughly 10 percent of what gets tossed into the compost bins is used in this way, Recology confirmed.

“There are some people who will say using green waste isn’t really diversion,” acknowledged Jeff Danzinger, a spokesperson with CalRecycle, which oversees recycling programs in California counties. “There’s some people who say we should stop that practice because that just incentivizes a landfill solution for green waste. But if somebody’s saying green waste shouldn’t go into a landfill and get counted as diversion, it’s an opinion.”

Nor is it something the city objects to. The Department of the Environment is aware of this practice, Recology’s Potashner told the Bay Guardian. Yet the city agency has never raised formal concerns about it, despite a mandate under its composting program agreement that the company use green-bin waste for the highest and best possible use.

But there’s no incentive for anyone in city government to complain: Recology may legally count this discarded material as “diverted” in official reporting, thus edging it closer to an annual bonus payment. San Francisco, meanwhile, may count it as part of the 80 percent that was successfully diverted — thus edging it closer to the ambitious Zero Waste program goal.

“It’s great PR to say you’re the highest recycling,” noted the person who was familiar with the company, but wasn’t part of the lawsuit. “It’s almost a movement more than reality. But who’s really watching for the public on these numbers? There’s no watchdog. It’s all about bragging rights.”

Recology is “a political business”

Recology’s political connections in San Francisco run deep. Years ago, when former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown served as speaker of the California Assembly, he also worked as a lawyer for Recology, which was then known as Norcal Waste Systems.

Campaign finance archives show that when Brown ran for mayor in 1995, he received multiple campaign contributions from Norcal employees in what appeared to be a coordinated fashion.

Brown continues to be influential in the city’s political landscape due to his close relationship with Mayor Ed Lee, who himself came under scrutiny in his capacity as head of the Department of Public Works in 1999 when he was accused of granting Norcal a major rate increase as a reward for political donations to Brown.

In 2010, when Recology submitted a bid for a lucrative waste-disposal contract proposing to haul waste to its Yuba County landfill, Lee reviewed its proposal in his then-capacity as city administrator. As the Guardian reported (see “Trash talk,” 3/30/10), Lee recommended far higher scores for Recology than his counterparts on the contract review team, a key to the company winning the landfill contract over competitor Waste Management Inc. Before Lee declared his mayoral candidacy in 2011, news reports indicated that powerful Chinatown consultant Rose Pak had worked in tandem with Recology executives on a campaign effort, “Run Ed Run,” organized to urge Lee to launch a mayoral bid. Company employees had also been instructed to help gather signatures to petition Lee to run for mayor, news reports indicated, but Pak publicly denied her role coordinating this effort. David Anton, the attorney for Brian McVeigh, emphasized that Recology’s close ties to powerful city officials might have something to do with the city’s lack of interest in targeting the company for the improperly received incentive payments. Yet Recology spokesperson Eric Potashner called this assertion “completely untrue. Recology meets with the various city departments and regulators weekly. We are constantly improving our controls and practices for handling the city’s ever-changing waste stream; often at the behest of city regulators.” Recology and its predecessor companies have maintained the exclusive right to collect commercial and residential refuse in San Francisco since 1932, and rates are routinely raised for city garbage customers, based on the company’s own reporting that its costs are increasing. “I can tell you today, there will be another significant increase on July 21, 2016” — five years after the last rate increase — “because they have a monopoly,” said neighborhood activist and District 10 supervisorial candidate Tony Kelly, who previously worked on a ballot measure that sought to have the city’s refuse collection contract go out for a competitive bid. “When you have a closed system … then it’s entirely a black box. It’ll all be self-reported. It’s too powerful of an incentive.” An industry insider familiar with Recology echoed this point, adding that cozy relationships with local officials make it easier for the self-reporting to escape scrutiny. “It’s a political business,” this person said. “In San Francisco, they’re really a political organization.” Since the rate is guaranteed, this person added, the mentality is that there’s plenty of wiggle room for financial losses and expenditures such as generous political contributions. “If you’re losing any money, you just ask for it back when you do your next rate increase. The city doesn’t have any objection. The ratepayers just get stuck with it.” (Rebecca Bowe)

Stop Big Tech sprawl

Michael Redmond

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July 8, 2014

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EDITORIAL The footprint of Big Tech companies and their employees continues to spread through San Francisco, gobbling up the vast majority of commercial office space this year, driving up rents, and creating pressure to build ever more office towers. With Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors focusing so much wealth on this one economic sector, in this one once-dynamic city, this trend is threatening to squeeze out every other civic interest and sector in its path.

For example, city officials have long-struggled with how to preserve light industrial spaces in the city, known as Production Distribution and Repair (PDR) in the parlance of planners, who recognize the importance of such jobs and services to a city, even though they have a hard time competing with other economic sectors on rent. Indeed, despite efforts to protect it, San Francisco now has one of the lowest proportions of PDR uses of any big city in the US, a worrying sign for future economic prosperity.

Nonetheless, the new out-of-town investor-owners of the PDR-zoned San Francisco Design Center are trying to improperly use a loophole to evict most of its tenants to let Pinterest take over most of the building (which it bought at a bargain because of the zoning). Only the political will of politicians — who crave the campaign cash of capitalists — stands in the way of perversions like this. And without that will, which is severely lacking in the city right now, the economically strong will roll over everyone.

Let’s call it: Big Tech sprawl. Like urban sprawl — in which developers covered the cheapest land with housing and shopping malls, then let the public sector subsidize the roads and other infrastructure to serve it and passed the environmental costs on to future generations — the Big Tech firms favored by the Mayor’s Office will continue to expand ever outward if left unchecked.

Even conservative City Economist Ted Egan has warned against the city putting too many eggs in the basket of an industry known for its volatility and boom-bust cycles, repeatedly calling for the city to diversify its economy. As in nature, healthy ecosystems are marked by their diversity, while monocultures can be quickly destroyed by shocks to the system. Just like housing developers will build nothing but luxury condos if we let them — capital always seeks to maximize its returns, the most basic law of economics — Big Tech will continue to sprawl outward, greasing its path with political contributions, if San Franciscans don’t fight to maintain this great city’s diversity.

Supervisors reject Pinterest proposal, protect PDR businesses from eviction

Sasha Cuttler

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July 8, 2014

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Supervisors reject Pinterest proposal, protect PDR businesses from eviction

A spirited hearing before the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Economic Development Committee yesterday [Mon/7] on the San Francisco Design Center’s application for landmark status kept social networking site Pinterest out of the building, for now.

A number of tenants facing eviction from the building appeared before the committee, with a large contingent voicing its opposition and concern over the application and a separate group favoring the proposal for its alleged revitalization of the Showplace Square district.

The proposal — which was tabled by the committee, effectively killing it unless district Sup. Malia Cohen has a change of heart — would have declared the Design Center a landmark, which would have allowed the new owner to get around its Production, Distribution, and Repair zoning and allow in more lucrative office tenants, ostensibly to fund renovations with their higher rents. But with the committee rejected the application, with Cohen in particular expressing concerns about the loss of PDR-zoned properties in her district and around the city.

Prior to the lengthy public comment period, members of Bay West Development, the management firm representing building owner RREEF Property Trust, spoke to the committee about the support that would be put in place for the evicted tenants, conceding, “We recognize the communication with the tenants has not been perfect.”

That support would include relocation funding, lease extensions, and hiring commercial realty brokers for the evictees, according to Bay West. When asked by Chair Scott Wiener how realistic it would be for evicted tenants to stay in the district, Bay West didn’t provide specifics, assuring the committee, “There is good quality space in this district and there are tenants who will find homes in adjacent properties.”

That response didn’t satisfy many worried tenants, including Jim Gallagher, who called the Design Center a “shining example of what PDR services should be.”

Though one speaker mentioned Pinterest’s unfairly negative portrayal in the issue, the overwhelming message from the tenants and Cohen was that the “virtual pinboard” company wasn’t necessarily at fault. Rather, the displacement of longtime residents and the loss of PDR space was the main concern for many.

Former Mayor Art Agnos also made an appearance at the hearing, calling the ordinance a “commercial version of the Ellis Act,” the state law that allows residential building owners to evict tenants. Agnos said the proposed ordinance was “replacing people working in blue and white collar jobs” and urged the committee to “close the loophole, kill it, and come back to the issue.”

Some tenants voiced support for the measure, reasoning the addition of Pinterest—and the elimination of what one supporter called the “exclusivity of high-end design”—would revitalize the district and be the “best of both worlds,” with new and old economies coming together.

But Nancy Morgan, a tenant who was previously evicted elsewhere, opined that displacing the tenants would mean that the same customers wouldn’t continue to come back. She also noted that some would be displaced under the nearby freeway, which could be dangerous in addition to driving away customers, although a Dogpatch resident scoffed at this claim.

Cohen gave her own thoughts, saying she ultimately agreed that the Design Center deserves landmark status because it was “impeccably maintained through the downturn,” but she felt uncomfortable going forward with the plans to displace the longtime tenants. She believed the decision wasn’t necessarily about the designation of the building, and that displacing long-term residents wasn’t in the spirit of the code or the landmark legislation.

“This decision today sets an important precedent,” Cohen said, calling it “an added layer of certainty in a world of uncertainty.”

The Fourth of July: Remembering the good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa

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July 3, 2014

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Note: In July of 1972, when the Bay Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year by popular demand on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)

Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.

The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.

The calm of the summer dawn and the cooing of the mourning doves on the telephone wires would be broken early on July Fourth: The Creglow boys would be up by 7 a.m. and out on the lawn shooting off their arsenal of firecrackers. They were older and had somehow sent their agents by car across the state line and into South Dakota where, not far above the highway curves of Larchwood, you could legally buy fireworks at roadside stands.

Ted Fisch, Jim Ramsey, Wiener Winters, the Cook boys, Hermie Casjens, Jerry Prahl, Elmer Menage, and the rest of the neighborhood gang would race out of their houses to catch the action. Some had cajoled firecrackers from their parents or bartered from the older boys in the neighborhood: some torpedoes (the kind you smashed against the sidewalk); lots of 2 and 3-inchers, occasionally the granddaddy of them all, the cherry bomb (the really explosive firecracker, stubby, cherry red, with a wick sticking up menacingly from its middle; the kind of firecracker you’d gladly trade away your best set of Submariner comics for.)

Ah, the cherry bomb. It was a microcosm of excitement and mischief and good fun. Bob Creglow, the most resourceful of the Creglow boys, would take a cherry bomb, set it beneath a tin can on a porch, light the fuse, then head for the lilac bushes behind the barn.

“The trick,” he would say, imparting wisdom of the highest order, “is to place the can on a wood porch with a wood roof. Then it will hit the top of the porch, bang, then the bottom of the porch, bang. That’s how you get the biggest clatter.”

So I trudged off to the Linkenheil house, the nearest front porch suitable for cherry bombing, to try my hand at small-town demolition. Bang went the firecracker. Bang went the can on the roof. Bang went the can on the floor. Bang went the screen door as Karl Linkenheil roared out in a sweat, and I lit out for the lilacs behind the barn with my dog, Oscar.

It was glorious stuff – not to be outdone for years, I found out later, until the Halloween eve in high school when Dave Dietz, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Bob Babl, Jerry Prahl, Jack McBride, and the rest of the Hermie Casjens gang and I made the big time and twice pushed a boxcar loaded with lumber across Main Street and blocked it for hours. But that’s another story for my annual Halloween blog.

Shooting off fireworks was, of course, illegal in Rock Rapids, but Chief of Police Del Woodburn and later Elmer “Shene” Sheneberger used to lay low on the Fourth. I don’t recall ever seeing them about in our neighborhood and I don’t think they ever arrested anybody, although each year the Lyon County Reporter would carry vague warnings about everybody cooperating to have “a safe and sane Fourth of July.”

Perhaps it was just too dangerous for them to start making firecracker arrests on the Fourth – on the same principle, I guess, that it was dangerous to do too much about the swashbuckling on Halloween or start running down dogs without leashes (Mayor Earl Fisher used to run on the platform that, as long as he was in office, no dog in town would have to be leashed. The neighborhood consensus was that Fisher’s dog, a big, boisterous boxer, was one of the few that ought to be leashed).

We handled the cherry bombs and other fireworks in our possession with extreme care and cultivation; I can’t remember a single mishap. Yet, even then, the handwriting was on the wall. There was talk of cutting off the fireworks supply in South Dakota because it was dangerous for young boys. Pretty soon, they did cut off the cherry bomb traffic and about all that was left, when I came back from college and the Roger boys had replaced the Creglow boys next door, was little stuff appropriately called ladyfingers.

Fireworks are dangerous, our parents would say, and each year they would dust off the old chestnut about the drugstore in Spencer that had a big stock of fireworks and they caught fire one night and much of the downtown went up in a spectacular shower of roman candles and sparkling fountains.

The story was hard to pin down, and seemed to get more gruesome every year – but, we were told, this was why Iowa banned fireworks years before, why they were so dangerous and why little boys shouldn’t be setting them off. The story, of course, never made quite the intended impression; we just wished we’d been on the scene. My grandfather was the town druggist (Brugmann’s Drugstore, “Where drugs and gold are fairly sold, since 1902″) and he said he knew the Spencer druggist personally. Fireworks put him out of business and into the poorhouse, he’d say, and walk away shaking his head.

In any event, firecrackers weren’t much of an issue past noon – the Fourth celebration at the fairgrounds was getting underway and there was too much else to do. Appropriately, the celebration was sponsored by the Rex Strait post of the American Legion (Strait, so the story went, was the first boy from Rock Rapids to die on foreign soil during World War I); the legionnaires were a bunch of good guys from the cleaners and the feed store and the bank who sponsored the American Legion baseball team each summer.

There was always a big carnival, with a ferris wheel somewhere in the center for the kids, a bingo stand for the elders, a booth where the ladies from the Methodist Church sold homemade baked goods, sometimes a hootchy dancer or two, and a couple of dank watering holes beneath the grandstand where the VFW and the Legion sold Grainbelt and Hamms beer at 30¢ a bottle to anybody who looked of age.

Later on, when the farmboys came in from George and Alvord, there was lots of pushing and shoving, and a fist fight or two.

In front of the grandstand, out in the dust and the sun, would come a succession of shows that made the summer rounds of the little towns. One year it would be Joey Chitwood and his daredevil drivers. (The announcer always fascinated me: “Here he comes, folks, rounding the far turn…he is doing a great job out there tonight…let’s give him a big, big hand as he pulls up in front on the grandstand…”)

Another year it would be harness racing and Mr. Hardy, our local trainer from Doon, would be in his moment of glory. Another year it was tag team wrestling and a couple of barrel-chested goons from Omaha, playing the mean heavies and rabbit-punching their opponents from the back, would provoke roars of disgust from the grandstand. ( The biggest barrel-chest would lean back on the ropes, looking menacingly at the crowd and yell, “ Aw, you dumb farmers. What the hell do you know anyway? I can beat the hell out of any of you.” And the crowd would roar back in glee.)

One year, Cedric Adams, the Herb Caen of Minneapolis Star-Tribune, would tour the provinces as the emcee of local variety shows. “It’s great to be in Rock Rapids,” he would say expansively, “because it’s always been known as the ‘Gateway to Magnolia.” (Magnolia, he didn’t need to say, was a little town just over the state line in Minnesota which was known throughout the territory for its liquor-by-the-drink roadhouses. It was also Cedric Adams’ hometown: his “Sackamenna,” as Caen would say. Adams kissed each girl (soundly) who came on the platform to perform and, at the end, hushed the crowd for his radio broadcast to the big city “direct from the stage of the Lyon County Fairgrounds in Rock Rapids, Iowa.”

For a couple of years, when Rock Rapids had a “town team,” and a couple of imported left-handed pitchers named Peewee Wenger and Karl Kletschke, we would have some rousing baseball games with the best semi-pro team around, Larchwood and its gang of Snyder brothers: Barney the eldest at shortstop, Jimmy the youngest at third base, John in center field, Paul in left field, another Snyder behind the plate and a couple on the bench. They were as tough as they came in Iowa baseball.

I can remember it as if it were yesterday at Candlestick, the 1948 game with the Snyders of Larchwood. Peewee Wenger, a gawky, 17-year-old kid right off a high school team, was pitching for Rock Rapids and holding down the Snyder artillery in splendid fashion. Inning after inning he went on, nursing a small lead, mastering one tough Larchwood batter after another, with a blistering fastball and a curve that sliced wickedly into the bat handles of the right-handed Larchwood line-up.

Then the cagey Barney Snyder laid a slow bunt down the third base line. Wenger stumbled, lurched, almost fell getting to the ball, then toppled off balance again, stood helplessly holding the ball. He couldn’t make the throw to first. Barney was safe, cocky and firing insults like machine gun bullets at Peewee from first base.

Peewee, visibly shaken, went back to the mound. He pitched, the next Larchwood batter bunted, this time down the first base line. Peewee lurched for the ball, but couldn’t come up with it. A couple more bunts, a shot through the pitcher’s mound, more bunts and Peewee was out. He could pitch, but, alas, he was too clumsy to field. In came Bill Jammer, a farmer now in his late 30’s, but in his day the pitcher who beat the University of Iowa while playing for a small Iowa college called Simpson.

Now he was pitching on guts and beer, a combination good enough for many teams and on good days even good enough to take on the Snyders. Jammer did well for a couple of innings, then he let two men on base, then came a close call at the plate. Jammer got mad. Both teams were off the bench and onto the field and, as Fred Roach wrote in the Reporter, “fisticuffs erupted at home plate.” When the dust cleared, Jammer had a broken jaw, and for the next two weeks had to drink his soup through a straw at the Joy Lunch cafe, John Snyder, it was said later, came all the way in from center field to throw the punch, but nobody knew for sure and he stayed in the game. I can’t remember the score or who won the game, but I remember it as the best Fourth ever.

At dusk, the people moved out on their porches or put up folding chairs on their lawns. Those who didn’t have a good view drove out to the New Addition or parked out near Mark Curtis’ place or along the river roads that snaked out to the five-mile bridge and Virgil Hasche’s farm.

A hush came over the town. Fireflies started flickering in the river bottom and, along about 8:30, the first puff of smoke rose above the fairgrounds and an aerial bomb whistled into the heavens. BOOM! And the town shook as if hit by a clap of thunder.

Then the three-tiered sky bombs – pink, yellow, white, puff, puff, puff. The Niagara Falls and a gush of white sparks.

Then, in sudden fury, a dazzling display of sizzling comets and aerial bombs and star clusters that arched high, hung for a full breath and descended in a cascade of sparks that floated harmlessly over the meadows and cornfields. At the end, the flag – red, white and blue – would burst forth on the ground as the All-American finale in the darkest of the dark summer nights. On cue, the cheers rolled out from the grandstand and the cars honked from the high ground and the people trundled up their lawn chairs and everybody headed for home. b3

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Protect light industrial businesses from Big Tech sprawl

Sasha Cuttler

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July 2, 2014

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Protect light industrial businesses from Big Tech sprawl

[Editor’s Note: With the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee scheduled on Monday, July 7, to act on a proposal to allow the new owner of the San Francisco Design Center to evict existing tenants to accommodate tech company Pinterest, Jim Gallagher of Garden Court Antiques, one of those tenants, wrote the following guest editorial for the Guardian.]

The San Francisco Design Center has been a doing business at 2 Henry Adams street for the last 40 years. During that time it has created thousands of good paying jobs in the city. We are currently at risk of losing the majority of the building to tech office space. The building is zoned for PDR-Design but a loophole in the law is being exploited by the new owners, a Chicago based investment firm. This would lead to the loss of SF based small businesses and the jobs that they create.

We have worked with countless interior design firms, architects and contractors as a resource for their projects. In addition, we are an intrinsic part of a network of the PDR(Production, Distribution and Repair) businesses here in San Francisco. These are the upholsterers, fabrication workrooms, cabinet makers, finishers, metal workers, installers and movers that make up our industry. This industry offers above average paying jobs to a variety of people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds that don’t necessarily have college degrees. These jobs and those that work at them are being squeezed out of this city and when they are gone, we lose yet another piece of the soul of San Francisco.

There is no question that PDR space is being lost in San Francisco. A recent study of PDR space in SF, showed that we currently have the lowest available PDR space of any major American city at less than 7 percent. Mayor Lee along with Supervisors Cohen and Campos introduced legislation at the end of last year to expand the amount of PDR space and shore up the manufacturing and light industrial sector in the city. Why then, would the Board of Supervisors even consider giving up a quarter of a million square feet of PDR space that is currently 90% occupied with viable PDR businesses?

The sad reality is that it is a simple matter of corporate greed. The new owners of the Showplace Building at 2 Henry Adams bought the building as a PDR building, knowing the use limitations of designated PDR building and immediately began to find ways around the laws. The loophole that they discovered was the Landmark designation.

The Landmark designation was an exception put into the PDR protections in order to help with the cost maintaining some of the historic architecture that is often found in these PDR buildings. The idea being that PDR rents do not always bring in enough income to retrofit and maintain these old buildings. The Landmark status would allow the owners of PDR buildings to rent out part of the building as higher paying office space in order to offset the retrofit and maintenance cost. This sounds like a good idea until you bring in the greed factor. This Landmark exception has become the favorite loophole for corporate investors and greedy landlords to move out PDR businesses all over the city.

In the case of the Showplace Building, it is currently 90 percent occupied by PDR-Design businesses. According to the building owers, there are approximately 262,000 square feet of rentable space in the building. The Common Area Maintenance or CAM fees that tenants of the building pay beyond their monthly rent is $1.25 per square foot per month. This would mean that the owners of the Showplace building are currently bringing in nearly $3,500,000 just in Common Area Maintenance fees annually. In what universe is this not enough money to maintain a building that was fully retrofitted 15 years ago and is only five stories high?

The idea that this building needs to granted Landmark status from the city in order to create enough revenue to maintain the building just does not pass the smell test! This is a case of simple greed on the part of a Chicago based investment company. They believe that they can skirt the laws that are in place to protect San Francisco based small businesses and San Francisco workers. They do not have the best interest of our city or our workers in mind. They simply want to exploit this Landmark loophole in the PDR protections to line their own pockets.

I would hope that the members of the Board of Supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee do not let this happen. Please consider the consequences to our city. Do not choose to allow a Chicago based investment company to skirt our laws and exploit this loophole. Do not allow this greed to put several San Francisco small businesses out of business.

This building is 90 percent full of viable PDR businesses. We pay nearly $3.5 million dollars a year to maintain this building. This is the perfect example of what a well-run PDR building should look like. This building is this beautiful and well-maintained because of us. Please don’t allow the exploitation of the Landmark status to kick us out. We built our businesses here because we love this place and we want to continue to work and thrive here.

Google Bus sewers

Michael Redmond

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July 2, 2014

131

STREET FIGHT With most city officials supporting the accommodation of private transit in some form, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is now vetting where tech workers should board and egress the private corporate commuter buses that ply the 101 and I-280 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley suburbs. A list of proposed bus stops was circulated in June, and the first round of bus stop proposals is set for approval in August.

Short of a proper environmental study, which is the subject of ongoing litigation, the list deserves more scrutiny and deliberation because certain areas of the city — such as Hayes Street in the Western Addition and 18th Street in the Mission — might be effectively made into Google Bus sewers.

I hope SFMTA is open to reconsidering some of these proposed bus stops.

Rather than jamming oversized interstate highway-scale coaches on human-scaled, walkable, and bikeable streets with important Muni routes, SFMTA ought to steer them where they are more appropriate: on the wider, car-oriented streets that bifurcate the city.

For example, the current proposal for private commuter buses in the Western Addition is to have these mammoth and incongruent buses running on Hayes Street using Muni stops at Clayton, Steiner, Laguna, and Buchanan.

This is bad news for passengers on the 21-Hayes, a key neighborhood-serving electric trolley bus that has gotten short shrift in the city planning process. With 12,500 boardings daily, the 21-Hayes is often at capacity every morning before it crosses Van Ness.

Just last week, I was on a packed 21 that was blocked (illegally) by a huge corporate bus on Hayes. With an already dense and slow traffic situation, this added at least 30 seconds to the trip before the 21 could access its stop. Repeat that multiple times in the morning and afternoon and you can see that this will be a mess. It’s not worth the dollar the SFMTA collects for such stops, that’s for sure.

Concentrating the private buses on the 21 line (or the 33 in the Mission) will block Muni where Muni is already slow, unreliable, and overcrowded. It will also diminish walkability and bicycle safety on Hayes and other streets identified in the current list (including the commercial corridors on Divisadero and 18th Street in the Mission.)

Rather than streets such as Hayes, SFTMA should redirect the private buses to the multilane, one-way couplet on Fell and Oak streets, only one block south. Along the corridor, SFMTA could collaborate with the private systems to establish new bus stops (red paint) at Clayton, Masonic, Divisadaro, Fillmore, and near Octavia. This scheme would limit clunky turn movements onto neighborhood streets by oversized buses and contribute to traffic calming.

In the mornings, the buses would pick up passengers on Oak Street, starting along the Panhandle, then travel towards Octavia Boulevard before swinging onto the freeway southbound. In the evenings the buses would exit the freeway at Octavia, and stop at drop-off hubs on Fell, between Octavia and Laguna, and then stop incrementally toward Golden Gate Park.

Additionally, the city needs to consider a space for the underpaid, nonunionized drivers to pull over and rest before and after long segments of freeway driving. We want these buses to be safe.

Similar arrangements should be made to spare 18th Street in the Mission from reverting to a Google bus sewer, with emphasis on private corporate bus stops on South Van Ness or Guerrero-San Jose. Surely there are other examples in other parts of the city.

The urgent affordable housing crisis aside, this could be a win-win from a transportation perspective. Tech workers would no longer get blamed for blocking Muni and they can know that while waiting for their bus, they are contributing to calming erstwhile hazardous streets.

There’s a lot of opportunity to combine these new bus stops with traffic calming at dangerous intersections such as Fell and Masonic or Oak and Octavia, all without mucking up Muni or diminishing the walkable human scale of nearby neighborhood commercial streets. And hey, since this is all a “pilot program,” no pesky and expensive EIR is needed — right?

Thinking long-term, this scheme could be a template to jumpstart making this ridiculous private transit system into a regional public bus system modeled on AC transit or Golden Gate Transit, a service open to all. Our car-centric streets are ripe for express bus service and this would help relieve parallel lines like the N-Judah, while enabling the city to attain its aspiration of 30 percent mode share on transit.

And for Mayor Ed Lee and pro-tech-bus members of the Board of Supervisors, it helps with their “vision zero” rhetoric of increasing pedestrian safety because placing the buses on car-centric one-way couplets can help calm traffic.

With a little cajoling by the mayor, he could get his tech sponsors to underwrite streetscape and beautification at the bus stops along these kinds of streets.

After all, Mayor Lee needs to find the money, because last month he betrayed pedestrian and bicycle safety and Muni when he abandoned support for increasing the Vehicle License Fee locally this fall, all the while misleading the public about the important role of Sunday metering. Perhaps it’s time for a tax or license fee on the ad hoc private transit system?

SLOWING DOWN

Speaking of vision zero, Sup. Eric Mar deserves hearty thanks for proposing to reduce speed limits citywide. This is one of the most effective ideas to come from the progressive wing of the Board of Supervisors in a long time and should be implemented yesterday. Higher speeds maim and kill, and the faster cars go the more voracious the appetite for both fuel and urban space.

With reduced speed, the motorist would still be able to drive, just more slowly, perhaps with less convenience than now. But over time the options of cycling, of walkable shopping, and improved public transit would synchronize more seamlessly as car space is ceded to separated cycletracks and transit lanes.

My suggestion is to make the city navigable by car at no greater than 15 miles per hour, a speed deemed not only to be comfortable on calmed pedestrian streets, but also to minimize injury and fatalities when there are collisions. Ultimately, our efforts to curb global warming, reduce injury and death from automobility, and make the city more livable obliges us to slow down, so looking at speeds is a step forward.

Street Fight is a monthly column by Jason Henderson, a geography professor at San Francisco State University and the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco.

Guardian Intelligence: July 2 – 8, 2014

Michael Redmond

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July 2, 2014

0

GUARDIAN ON THE MOVE

There were a couple of big changes for the Bay Guardian this week. We and our sister newspapers within San Francisco Media Company — San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly — moved into the Westfield Mall. Yes, the mall, but in the fifth floor business offices formerly occupied by the San Francisco State University School of Business extension program. The company, owned by Black Press in Canada and Oahu Publications in Hawaii, also named Glenn Zuehls as the new publisher and Cliff Chandler, who worked for the Examiner for years, as the senior vice president of advertising. Zuehls, who comes from Oahu Publications, replaces Todd Vogt as the head of SFMC. Zuehls and Chandler told the staff of all three papers that their primary goal is to grow the company’s revenues.

QUEER SPIRIT ROILS PRIDE

Even as an awareness of the ever-growing commercialization of SF Pride dawned on younger participants, a spirit of activism also took flight. Community grand marshal Tommi Avicolli Mecca led a fiery parade contingent (above) of housing activists in Sunday’s parade, protesting skyrocketing evictions in San Francisco. The anti-eviction brigade staged a die-in in front of the official parade observation area. Friday’s Trans March was the biggest so far, and Saturday’s Dyke March featured a huge contingent marching under the banner “Dykes Against Landlords.” Meanwhile, hundreds of protestors targeted a Kink.com prison-themed party, saying it glorified a prison-industrial complex, which “destroys the lives of millions of people.” Seven of the protestors were arrested, and charges of police brutality are being investigated.

LESBIANS BASHED AT PRIDE

While there were some disturbing anecdotal reports of homophobic slurs and queer bashing at Pride this year (including one of a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence and her husband being attacked at Pink Saturday), San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Albie Esparza said police are only investigating one incident so far as an actual hate crime. It occurred on June 28 around 5:30pm near the intersection of Mission and Ninth streets when two young lesbians were subjected to homophobic taunts and then severely beaten by five young male suspects, all of whom remain at large. They’re described at 16 to 20 years old, two black, three Hispanic. Esparza said hate crimes are defined as attacks based solely on being a protected classes, so that doesn’t include robbery or assaults in which racism or homophobic slurs are used, if that doesn’t seem to be the motivation for the attacks.

LIFE’S A STAGE

Hark! It must be summer, because all the companies dedicated to outdoor theater are opening new productions in parks across the Bay Area. Aside from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Ripple Effect (see feature in this issue; www.sfmt.org), Marin Shakespeare is presenting As You Like It in San Rafael (pictured), with Romeo and Juliet opening later in July (www.marinshakespeare.org); Free Shakespeare in the Park brings The Taming of the Shrew to Pleasanton and beyond (www.sfshakes.org); and Actors Ensemble of Berkeley goes stone-cold Austen with Pride and Prejudice in John Hinkel Park (www.aeofberkeley). AS YOU LIKE IT PHOTO BY STEVEN UNDERWOOD

TEN YEAR GRIND

Kids and pro skaters from One Love boards tore up “the island” — between the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero — with flips, kick tricks and plants June 29, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the much loved skate spot. Local Hunters Point pro skater Larry Redmon sat watching the new generation of skaters and offering pointers. Sure downtown has more grind blockers then it did a decade ago, but as Redmon says, “We out here.” PHOTO BY PAUL INGRAM

THE WILLIE CONNECTION

Muni’s workers and the SFMTA reached a final labor deal over the final weekend of June, but Mayor Ed Lee is telling news outlets the real dealmaker was former mayor Willie Brown. “He’s someone who understands the city, understands labor, the underlying interests,” SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin told various news outlets. Reports say Brown went unpaid by the city for the deed. That’s hard to believe: Anyone who knows Slick Willie knows he seldom does anything for free.

WAXING NOSTALGIC

The new Madame Tussauds wax museum attraction opened June 26 at Fisherman’s wharf — and includes SF-specific figure replicas like Mark Zuckerberg, Harvey Milk, and, of course, our real mayor, Nicolas Cage (pictured). See the Pixel Vision blog at SFBG.com for more creepy-ish pics and a review.

SHARON SELLS OUT (THE INDEPENDENT)

Despite her catalog full of confessional songs about nasty breakups and other dark subject matter, Sharon Van Etten was all smiles during two sold-out shows at the Independent June 29 and June 30. Leaning heavily on songs from her new album, Are We There, Van Etten and her four-piece band even led the adoring crowd in a cheerful sing-along at one point. On her next pass through town, we expect to be seeing her on a much bigger stage.

UNION PROUD

If BBQ and black-market fireworks aren’t your idea of showing civic pride, make your way over to the Mission’s Redstone Building (2940 16th St. at Capp) for a street fair Sat/5 with local musicians, poets, visual artists, and more, to mark the 100th anniversary of the SF Labor Temple and call attention to current labor issues like the fight for a $15 minimum wage. Built by the city’s Labor Council in 1914, the building formerly housed SF’s biggest labor unions and was the planning center for the famous 1934 General Strike. This celebration is part of Labor Fest, now in its 20th year, which runs throughout July around the Bay Area — for more: www.laborfest.net

Don’t weaken protections against chain stores

Michael Redmond

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July 2, 2014

5

EDITORIAL As we reported two weeks ago (“Breaking the chains,” June 17), the San Francisco Planning Commission will soon consider rival measures to modify the city’s decade-old policies regulating chain stores (aka formula retail businesses) and giving neighborhoods the ability to reject them. This should be viewed as a chance to strengthen protections, not to weaken them at a time when small businesses need all the help they can get.

There are a number of important reforms in both the formula retail proposal by Sup. Eric Mar and the one developed by the Planning Department in coordination with the Mayor’s Office. Both expand on the types of businesses covered by the regulations, they close key loopholes, and they require more detailed economic studies to give the public and policymakers more information on how chain stores impact neighborhood commercial districts.

But in exchange for those protections, the Planning Department measure also makes concessions that are unacceptable and inconsistent with the formula retail standards that voters adopted through Prop. G in 2006. Specifically, planners are making the dubious claim that they have the authority to increase the threshold of what’s considered a chain from 11 stores now up to 20 stores, unilaterally rejecting a compromise number negotiated at the time between progressive leaders and the business community.

The logic offered for that change is equally questionable. The planners and backers of the change in the Mayor’s Office and business community say local businesses that grow beyond 11 outlets — such as Philz Coffee, Lee’s Deli, and San Francisco Soup Company — shouldn’t be “punished for their success” by enduring a lengthy and expensive conditional use permit process.

But gathering information and letting the community have a voice isn’t punishment. Larger businesses have more resources to go through the approval process, and the city rarely rejects formula retail applications anyway. Planners argue that the conditional use process is onerous and can take six months or more — but that’s an argument for reforming the process, not bypassing it. The Mayor’s Office should devote more resources to hiring more Planning Department staff to speed up this process, raising the fees on applicants to do so if necessary.

The Planning Department proposal also makes no effort to determine who owns the business that want to open here, allowing corporations to create endless subsidiaries and spinoffs to bypass the formula retail controls, something the city already has seen with the controversial Jack Spade application in the Mission District and other projects.

Corporations can be wily and predatory as the seek to endlessly expand into new markets, and if San Francisco’s nationally recognized controls are to have any relevance, they’ll need to adapt to changing circumstances. That means we need to strengthen and not weaken them.

Painting with more colors

Michael Redmond

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July 2, 2014

6

joe@sfbg.com

Not many plays feature an all-Latino cast, let alone all El Salvadoran. But Paul Flores’ Placas placed brown actors and a brown experience center stage. The 2012 production explored a father and ex-gang member’s struggle, leading his son out of a hard life of drugs, violence, and perhaps death.

The play garnered favorable but mixed reviews from critics, but among Salvadorans, it was a huge hit.

“You had older generations coming to see the play right alongside their grandkids,” Flores told the Guardian. The play’s premiere venue packed its 500-seat capacity, and sold out seven out of its eight nights in San Francisco. “We tapped a community thirsty to hear its stories told.”

Placas is the kind of creative work not being funded often enough by the city’s largest arts grant organization, critics are saying. At a contentious San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee hearing on June 20, artists told supervisors that programs serving diverse communities were severely underfunded, and alleged the city’s major arts funder, Grants for the Arts, awards money disproportionately to art forms favored by white audiences.

Spurred by public outcry and city studies, Sups. Eric Mar and London Breed recommended the transfer of $400,000 in unused funding from GFTA to another city arts funder, the Cultural Equity Grants (which funded Placas), to direct arts money to people of color.

The transfer won’t be approved until it goes before the full Board of Supervisors next month. But as San Francisco studio and housing rents soar, Mar said this was vital to keeping diverse artists in the city.

“I think the crisis for arts groups now is many of them are being displaced,” he told the Guardian. “How can the city subsidize groups with low rent or free rent, and how could we support small groups [to prevent them from] being displaced?”

"Arts inequity": San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst Report by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

Above is a PDF of the Budget Legislative Analyst’s report, as it breaks down lack of funding to diverse programs. The report has relevant sections highlighted.

The Guardian reached out to City Administrator Naomi Kelly for comment (her office ultimately directs arts grants funding). She was unavailable for an interview before we went to press, but her spokesperson Bill Barnes told us, “I don’t think we should be in a position of having governments regulate artistic content.”

But in a way, the government already does. The GFTA funding is made up of city dollars, and for decades its funding priorities have scarcely changed, favoring many of the largest mainstream organizations.

GFTA funds many arts organizations, but a recent report by the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office found it awarded about 70 percent of grants to organizations with mostly white artists who mostly cater to white audiences. The San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera, City Arts, the Exploratorium, the Museum of Modern Art, and the American Conservatory Theater received over one-third of GFTA funding over the past five years, the report found.

“The Bay [Area] will soon be 70 percent people of color,” Andrew Wood, director of the SF International Arts Festival, told the Guardian. “Why invest so heavily in organizations that are such a minority of the population?”

Taken on its face, the findings show a stark divide between funding for smaller, struggling minority arts groups and large, independently funded arts groups with predominantly white patrons. The report divided the diversity of GFTA arts funding into three categories: people of color (Asians, African Americans, and Latinos), ethnic minorities (Arab/Middle Eastern/Jewish), and LGBT organizations. The funding for these categories remained steady at about 20, 2, and 5 percent of arts funding, respectively, since 1989.

The lack of funding is one thing, but critics say the pattern indicates an outright dismissal of the broader community. In a mass email entitled “The State of the Arts in San Francisco” sent to the arts community from a group calling itself Arts Town Hall Organizing Committee said the outcry against critiques of GFTA’s diversity funding was “advanced by fringe members of the arts community.”

Realizing it called Black, Asian, and Latino artists a “fringe community,” the San Francisco Arts Alliance (a signatory to the email comprised of San Francisco’s symphony, opera, and other GFTA funded organizations) quickly backpedaled. It said the email was sent on their behalf by the public relations firm Barnes Mosher Whitehurst Lauter & Partners, a group that often runs astroturf campaigns for mainstream organizations.

One reason for GFTA’s inability to fund diverse arts groups may be a lack of trying: The BLA found the GFTA “does not have a definition or criteria for granting funds to people of color organizations.”

This color blindness is a problem, Wood told us. “[The money] the city invests in the War Memorial Opera House compared to the Bayview Opera House, also city owned, is completely out of whack,” he said. The Bayview Opera House was one among six “cultural institutions” to receive a portion of a $400,000 GFTA award, according to the organization’s 2013/14 annual report. Conversely, GFTA awarded the San Francisco Opera $653,000 the same year.

“They’re two different universes,” Wood said.

Allocating more funding for the Cultural Equity Grants was an oft-mentioned method for better supporting disadvantaged artists, the report found, even though GFTA and CEG share many of the same grantees.

Some say the report’s numbers don’t add up. San Francisco Arts Commission Director of Cultural Affairs Tom DeCaigny, a longtime local artist, disagreed with how the BLA defined which groups were white, ethnic, or otherwise.

“The methodology in the report assigns people an identity, and I know some of our grantees were referred to as white when they’re not,” DeCaigny told the Guardian. “We would want to see organizations self identify.”

Those faults undermine the value of the BLA’s findings, although he said, “I’m hesitant to comment on the value of that report.”

But some in the arts community felt DeCaigny’s opinion aligns suspiciously closely to the mayor’s priorities: funding the preferred arts organizations of his wealthy donors (like the symphony). We reached out to the San Francisco Symphony for comment but its representatives told us it would be unable to respond before our deadline.

DeCaigny defended the symphony, noting its annual Lunar New Year and Day of the Dead concerts serve diverse audiences. For the economically disadvantaged, he said, the symphony offers free concerts open to the public in Dolores Park, and that the symphony’s “artists are very diverse.”

DeCaigny pointed out the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s youth programs (shown above) are notably very diverse.

The donors are mostly white, he said, “but that’s true in other sectors as well. It has more to do with how wealth is distributed in our society.”

But Flores, Placas’ director, explained the need for ethnically diverse art was not just about who consumes it, but what message the art is sending to the audience. Nothing revealed this more, he said, then when he took Placas on tour across the United States. While in New York City, he conducted an informal poll.

“I asked ‘when I say San Francisco, what do you think of?’ They said the 49ers, the San Francisco Giants, the Golden Gate Bridge. They didn’t think gangs, pupusa, cumbia,” he said. That’s why Placas, which told the story of gang life among San Francisco Salvadorans, had such impact in the city and even beyond its borders.

“I love telling stories about San Francisco,” Flores told us. “The symphony doesn’t do that, the opera doesn’t do that. What does that? Locally generated art.”

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance committee is tentatively slated to hold a hearing on allegations made in the BLA report on July 16.

Jasper Scherer contributed to this report.

Civil Grand Jury report highlights gifts made on mayor’s behalf

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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June 30, 2014

25

Civil Grand Jury report highlights gifts made on mayor’s behalf

A major real-estate firm contributed $1 million to the America’s Cup Organizing Committee at the behest of Mayor Ed Lee, right around the time it sought city approval to expand a downtown tech office building that was already under construction.

Kilroy Realty, the developer of a 30-story building that will house more than 400,000 square feet of office space for Salesforce.com, won approval in August of 2013 to add an additional six floors to its 350 Mission commercial office space project. That building is one of three in the Transbay area that will house Salesforce.com offices.

Kilroy sent one check for $500,000 to the America’s Cup Organizing Committee on June 24, 2013, and a second one for the same amount on Jan. 31 of this year.

While it’s impossible to say for sure whether the generous gifts had anything to do with the request for approval for a major building expansion, the “behested payment” reports documenting the transactions did draw the attention of the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury, which included them in a report titled “Ethics in the City: Promise, Practice, or Pretense?”

In another example highlighted in the report, Mayor Lee accepted travel funds for a trip to China and Korea last October. Contributors who provided more than $500 apiece for that trip included Uber and Airbnb, both tech-based companies whose businesses stand to be directly impacted by city policies.

Uber has been sparring with the San Francisco International Airport over its drivers’ unauthorized passenger drop-offs as of late, while Airbnb long skirted its responsibility to pay the city’s hotel tax and is now the subject of legislation regulating short-term housing rentals. It’s interesting that each of these companies felt compelled to donate toward the mayor’s travel fund, given the city’s attempts to regulate them.

The Civil Grand Jury report highlights the shortcomings of the San Francisco Ethics Commission, an agency tasked with ensuring that government operations aren’t tainted by conflicts of interest or official misconduct.

Citizen watchdogs of San Francisco government have sought to eliminate pay-to-play politics for years.

Back in 2000, San Francisco voters approved a ballot measure seeking to bar elected officials from accepting campaign donations or gifts from corporations or individuals who had received city contracts or “special benefits.”

Known as Proposition J, that measure sought to eliminate the undue influence of deep-pocketed, well-connected players in local government.

It was popular and won by a landslide: No ballot arguments were registered against it, and the measure won with 82.66 percent of the vote.

Nevertheless, the Civil Grand Jury report noted, Prop. J was “amended out of existence” – through an effort led by none other than the Ethics Commission.

“The Ethics Commission proposed repealing Proposition J at their April 2003 meeting,” the report notes.

That proposal was part of an effort to “recodify conflict of interest laws,” the Civil Grand Jury found. Some laws were amended. Others were tweaked so that amendments could be made in the future, without voter approval.

After winning approval from the Board of Supervisors, that package of legislative changes became Proposition E on the 2003 ballot. “In 2003, voters approved Proposition E that recodified the ethics laws; however, it also had the undisclosed effect of deleting Proposition J language,” the Civil Grand Jury noted. “Thus, the concept of regulating public officials’ relations with those who receive ‘public benefits’ from them (Proposition J’s intent) was totally eliminated from San Francisco law.”

The report also takes the Ethics Commission to task for being too lax when it comes to addressing potential conflicts of interest.

It goes so far as to recommend that the agency hand over control of its major enforcement investigations to the Fair Political Practices Commission, a state agency with a more robust team of investigators who might produce better results.

“The Ethics Commission lacks resources to handle major enforcement cases,” the Civil Grand Jury notes. “These include, for example, cases alleging misconduct, conflict of interest, violating campaign finance and lobbying laws, and violating post-employment restrictions.”

The full report can be found here.

Will proposal to sell Hetch Hetchy power overshadow CleanPowerSF?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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June 30, 2014

24

Will proposal to sell Hetch Hetchy power overshadow CleanPowerSF?

Supervisors Scott Wiener and London Breed have proposed an ordinance to allow the San Francisco Public Utilities Power Commission’s Power Enterprise to sell hydroelectric energy from the Hetch Hetchy dam to retail customers — particularly large real estate developments. Sup. Wiener and Breed say the ordinance would both generate revenue for the PUC and further the city’s overall goal of achieving a 100 percent greenhouse-gas free power mix.

But how well does it fit into the city’s other clean energy goals? Some advocates of an existing citywide green energy plan worry that this new effort could cause a far more ambitious program to fall by the wayside.

For more than a decade, city government has been working toward implementing a clean energy plan through CleanPower SF, which aims to meet the city’s goal of 100 percent clean energy by allowing all San Francisco residents the choice of switching to a green power mix through the city-administered program, instead of remaining with PG&E. But CleanPower SF hangs in limbo, largely due to opposition from the SFPUC board, appointed by Mayor Ed Lee–whose regular meetings with PG&E officials have raised eyebrows.

The legislation proposing to broaden the sale of SFPUC’s hydroelectric power supply seeks to tackle some of the problems CleanPower SF might have addressed had it not been stalled. A press statement from Wiener noted that it aims to help build a large enough customer base for the SFPUC to generate sufficient revenues to maintain city infrastructure, as well as meeting the city’s overall target of 100 percent clean energy by 2030.

“My concern is that the Mayor’s office will say it’s something that will supplement CPSF [CleanPowerSF] and say that’s enough,” said Jason Fried, Executive Officer of the Local Agency Formation Commission. “I want to make it clear that it [proposed ordinance] is really meant to compliment CleanPower SF.”

But just exactly how—and how much—the proposal would complement CleanPower SF is still up for debate. Fried said Wiener’s new proposal complements CleanPower SF because it ultimately gives people more choices. “I don’t know how you can argue with giving people more choices,” he said.

But the legislation is targeted at large, private developments, rather than renewable energy options for community members. Which is why Fried emphasized that proposed ordinance shouldn’t been seen as a replacement to the city’s existing Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) program, CleanPower SF.

Eric Brooks, a long-time advocate of CleanPower SF, insists the legislation would complement CleanPowerSF only if, “CleanPowerSF was given first right to purchase Hetch Hetchy power from the PUC.” This would allow the ordinance to focus on community members rather than just large, private developments, he said.

“Being able to balance different types of power like solar, wind and hydro, and being able to furnish consistent hydro power during high usage together would also help keep rates lower so that the CleanPowerSF can deliver power at lower prices,” he added.

Officials from the Sierra Club echoed Brooks, saying that the Sierra Club “supports the legislation in concept,” but requests that the legislation incorporate the ability for CleanPower SF to purchase Hetch Hetchy power from the PUC Power Enterprise. “You have to look at it as peeling customers away from PG&E,” said John Rizzo, Sierra Club’s political chair. “The more you do that, the greener we can become.”

Although Brooks said he plans to meet with Sup. Wiener regarding how the ordinance could work in tandem with CleanPower SF, officials from Sup. Wiener’s office indicated that the ordinance is inherently separate from CleanPower SF. “[The ordinance] doesn’t further or hinder CPSF [Clean Power SF],” said Andres Power, Wiener’s legislative aide, who was involved in drafting the legislation. “It’s neutral from that perspective.”

Responding to questions about the legislation’s relationship with Clean Power SF (and whether or not collaboration might be a good strategy), Jeff Cretan, another of Sup. Wiener’s legislative aides, said, “Innovative solutions can come from multiple directions.” He further explained that, if passed, the legislation “could prove how other clean power initiatives can be successful.”

Grand Jury warns SF to prepare for rising seas

Sasha Cuttler

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June 25, 2014

19

Grand Jury warns SF to prepare for rising seas

Following its recent report criticizing the Port of San Francisco for being unduly influenced by wealthy developers and their allies in the Mayor’s Office, the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury today released its second report of the current session, calling on the city to do more to prepare for the impacts of global warming.

“Rising Sea Levels…At our Doorstep” assessed recognition and preparedness in a city where projections by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission show San Francisco International Airport, Treasure Island, and parts of Mission Bay and Hunters Point inundated by water by the end of the century. The report found that while most city departments and private developers were aware of and planning adaptive responses to the problem, far more needs to be done — including adoption of less intensive development strategies for flood-prone areas, such as Mission Bay.

“We are currently at the cusp of the future in terms of sustainability. It took the Loma Prieta earthquake to awaken San Francisco to the necessity of intensified seismic retrofitting. Let’s not wait for a major flooding disaster, like Hurricane Sandy on the east coast, to start addressing the serious threat of rising sea levels. The threat is real; the time to act is now,” the grand jury wrote. “For a start, San Francisco should, among other things, adopt a citywide comprehensive plan for adaptation to rising sea levels and amend the City’s Planning and Building Codes to include provisions addressing the impacts of sea level rise.”

The report urged city leaders to accelerate plans to implement recommendations of the Ocean Beach Master Plan, which among other things called for rerouting Highway 1 in sections where the coastline is now receding and creations of tidelands on the southern part of Ocean Beach.

2014 CGJ Report Rising Sea Levels by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

Net neutrality advocates arrested at Google HQ, call for national day of action

Erica Hanna

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June 25, 2014

1

Net neutrality advocates arrested at Google HQ, call for national day of action

Last night [Tues/24], a small group of protesters fighting for free speech on the Internet were arrested at Google’s Mountain View campus. The group is calling for a nation Internet blackout campaign on July 15 to demand the Federal Communications Commission solidify net neutrality.

Sgt. Kurtis Stenderup of the Santa Clara County Jail confirmed 10 protesters were arrested last night, and he indicated some may still be detained. “Most of the arrests were cited out for the trespassing charge,” he told us. “However, some arrests had outstanding warrants so I will have to look into their status.”

For the uninitated, the FCC recently proposed “fast lanes” for the Internet, which many allege would create a two-tiered access to Internet Service Providers’ pipelines. Having distributors of content (like Netflix, news websites, or individuals) pay for more bandwidth to distribute over broadband would stifle free speech, many allege, instead advocating a concept known as net neutrality. Basically, free speech is guaranteed by equal access, but those who control that access want to slap a price tag on distribution on the internet.

Though Google’s mantra, “don’t be evil” seems like a no-brainer, the protesters allege Google has only taken token gestures to address net neutrality. A damning report by the San Francisco Chronicle showed Google only spent about $280,000 in political contributions to sway regulators to maintain net neutrality (with their other net neutrality advocates’ money adding up to $600,000 spent). Conversely, the telecom industry (AT&T, Comcast and others) spent over $2 million to sway lawmakers to favor giving them more control over who pays for access to Internet usage.

They protesters believe Google should take the lead in the fight for net neutrality. From the group’s website:

“In 2012, Google created a petition as part of a campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act that collected over 7 million signatures. The massive online resistance in opposition to these two monstrous bills stopped them from becoming a reality.

Today, the Internet is once again under attack, this time by ISP’s who wish to capitalize on content providers and eliminate net neutrality. Though Google and other major companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft have come out in support of preserving a free and open web, we believe much more can be done.

Though many of us have concerns about the larger implications of Google’s effect on the world, as far as surveillance and ties to military technology, we are not here to protest Google.

Google, with its immense power, has a social responsibility to uphold the values of the Internet. We encourage Google to engage in a serious, honest dialogue on the issue of net neutrality and to stand with us in support of an internet that is free from censorship, discrimination, and access fees.”

At yesterday’s protest, 20 or so occupiers set up camp at Google HQ to convince the Googlers to take the lead on net neutrality. But as night fell, the Mountain View Police Department informed them it was time to leave.

A live video stream aired by Twitter user and Occupier @punkboyinsf revealed the conversation between police and protesters, which was mostly orderly, but the cops couldn’t see the protesters’ perspective. “We’re supporting them, we want them to support us,” one protester told police. One officer answered, “If you want to partner with them, just leave. Try to contact them tomorrow.” Peacefullly, almost pleadingly, one protester said “we just want to rap with them.”

At about 11pm, officers announced they’d make arrests. As @punkboyinsf caught the action on camera from a distance, an officer nabbed him as well. The occupier asked if he could at least put his camera in his bag, to which the officer replied “sir, it’s too late. Just relax, just relax,” and arrested him. @PunkboyinSF was one of the protesters released earlier this morning, he tweeted, and now the story has spread worldwide.

Seperate and loosely related protests outside Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco today are ongoing as of this writing. When we asked Mountain View Police Department spokesperson Saul Jaeger if the arrests were motivated by the MVPD, or because of a request from Google, Jaeger replied, “it was Google’s call.”

The protesters are calling for a national day of action on July 15, the end of the FCC’s public comment period on net neutrality. An Internet blackout campaign modeled after the anti-SOPA/PIPA online protests that managed to preserve Internet freedom in the past. Specifically, they wrote, they urge websites to do the following:

“Blackout their entire website for a day, replacing it with an info link to petitions and the FCC comment page.

Add a button to their website connecting users to information and petitions online.

Create their own creative way to connect their users to this issue and how to fight back.

We are committed to occupying the Google Headquarters until the company gets involved in honest dialogue on net neutrality, and until real action is taken to maintain a free and open internet.”

To his credit, Mayor Ed Lee recently championed net neutrality at the recent Conference of Mayors, this Monday. His resolution to urge the FCC to enshrine net neutrality as a right was signed by New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio and other mayors across the country.

“Net neutrality is critical for an innovation economy to thrive, because if the broadband companies could choose what web pages you can access, the Internet would lose its power as the most powerful communication tool we’ve ever known,” said Mayor Lee, in a press statement. “I am grateful to my cosponsors and the U.S. Conference of Mayors for adopting principles of a Free & Open Internet as the official policy of America’s Mayors. We believe in transparency and comprehensive non-discrimination, and we will fight for these values as the FCC writes regulations in the coming months. There are serious implications for commerce and democracy, and we’re making sure U.S. cities have a voice in this fight.”

It looks like Lee has a lot in common with the Occupy Google protesters.

Below we’ve embedded the arrest of @punkboyinSF

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

End corporate welfare

Michael Redmond

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June 24, 2014

15

EDITORIAL Big, powerful corporations seem to always find a way to get what they want out of City Hall, particularly under the administration of Mayor Ed Lee, and often at the expense of people who really do need the help.

For example, why is a city that projects annual budget deficits getting steadily bigger over the next five years spending almost $17 million annually on corporate welfare programs, including giving millions of dollars in tax breaks and other city perks to Twitter, a company worth $24 billion?

The Twitter-inspired payroll tax exemption zone in mid-Market cost the city more than $4.2 million last year, reaped by just 11 companies and their landlords (Twitter saved another $570,000 last when its stock options were exempted). By contrast, a tax break for small business in San Francisco cost the city almost $5.3 million last year, but that was spread among 2,488 businesses with less than $500,000 in annual revenue.

They’re all part of a package of business tax cuts that makes no sense in a city with record low unemployment and an overheating economy that is driving up rents and the cost of living. The tax breaks reported by the Tax Collector’s Office on June 23 even included a law adopted in the ’90s that requires the city to cut $3.5 million in tax rebate checks to employers when tax revenues rise more than 7 percent.

Yet the city desperately needs that money. It is still facing a $330 million budget deficit in just a few years, as well as huge funding shortfalls for Muni and the water, power, and sewer services operated by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

The SFPUC could have made money with its CleanPowerSF program to generate and sell renewable energy, but Mayor Lee sabotaged that program as a favor to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported on June 23, Lee has close and symbiotic relationship with PG&E, which funds Lee’s pet projects and so he shields the utility from competition, even at the expense of the city’s budget and greenhouse gas reduction goals.

Last year’s $17 million in corporate welfare didn’t even include the $5.5 million city taxpayer subsidy for the America Cup’s, where one the richest men in the world, Larry Ellison, was defending his title yet hoarding his cash. If the Mayor’s Office had its way, Ellison and his cronies would also now control Piers 30-32 and other valuable Port of San Francisco properties.

The Board of Supervisors thankfully shot down that proposal, but the Port is still way too beholden to wealthy suitors who want to appropriate waterfront property, a point that the Civil Grand Jury made last week in a report calling for reform, including giving the board two of the five appointments to the Port Commission. That’s a good idea that we should also apply to the SFPUC and SFMTA boards, which carry out the Mayor’s Office agenda on behalf of the rich.

The corruption and political giveaways have gotten obscene and something has to change.

Here’s an intriguing idea for Piers 30-32

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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June 23, 2014

39

Here’s an intriguing idea for Piers 30-32

Earlier this year, the Golden State Warriors abandoned its bid to construct a basketball arena and performance venue at Piers 30-32 along San Francisco’s waterfront, a proposal Mayor Ed Lee once championed as his “legacy project.”

The Warriors moved its ambitious project to a site in Mission Bay, to the great relief of a group of waterfront activists who viewed it as an inappropriate choice for the unique and historic 7.5-mile stretch of city waterfront that falls under the jurisdiction of the Port of San Francisco.

Nevertheless, that shift did send the Port back to the drawing board with the problem it’s encountered numerous times before: What to do with Piers 30-32, which span a 13-acre slab of crumbling concrete currently in use as a parking lot just a stone’s throw from the Bay Bridge.

In a recent Bay Guardian editorial, we called for a public process to consider the future use of that waterfront pier. Could it be turned into open space? Removed? Converted to a different use?

Turns out, others have been contemplating the same question. The San Francisco Civil Grand Jury, a volunteer body tasked with investigating civic matters, introduced a new idea when it issued a report on the operations of the Port of San Francisco.

Titled, “The Port of San Francisco: Caught Between Public Trust and Private Dollars,” the Civil Grand Jury report raised a few incisive questions, going so far as to suggest that the Port operates with undue influence from the Mayor’s Office, and that its governing commission ought to be restructured to resolve that. We are going to drill down more on these issues in a different post, after we’ve had a chance to interview a spokesperson from the Port.

But for now, here’s the Civil Grand Jury’s line on Piers 30-32: Why not look into using it as the site of a marine research institute?

From the report:

“Our suggestion is to investigate the possibility of building a Marine Research Institute on the pier. The project lead could be an educational institution such as Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution or Scripps Institute of Oceanography (UC San Diego), a conservation group such as Cousteau Society, Greenpeace, or Ocean Conservancy, or even government based groups such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“With close proximity to the Gulf of the Farallones, Cordell Bank, and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuaries to the west and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the east, a San Francisco Bay location presents a unique opportunity for marine and estuary study.

“The Cordell Bank and Gulf of the Farallones Sanctuaries today cover about 1800 square miles, but the proposed addition by NOAA will add an additional 2,000 square miles extending north.

“Funding could be derived not only from the sources mentioned above, but it may be possible to get donations from charitable foundations, such as Ford Foundation or Paul Getty Trust, and supplement large contributions by forming a coalition of the dozens of smaller advocacy and conservation groups—a form of crowd-funding on a large scale.”

A waterfront research institute that could aid scientists in studying the effects of climate change on ocean ecosystems? It couldn’t be farther from the sexy, spaceship-shaped sports arena previously proposed for that waterfront site. But it might not be such a bad idea.

Business tax breaks in SF jumped to nearly $17 million last year

Sasha Cuttler

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June 23, 2014

63

Business tax breaks in SF jumped to nearly $17 million last year

Employers in San Francisco received nearly $17 million in special business tax breaks from the city last year, with the biggest ticket corporate welfare categories being the Central Market Street and Tenderloin Area Exclusion — commonly known as the Twitter tax break after its catalyst and biggest beneficiary — and a tax break given to small businesses.

On Friday, the San Francisco Treasurer and Tax Collectors’ Office delivered to the Board of Supervisors the required annual reports for seven separate programs that reduce the payroll tax burden on local businesses, most of them approved since Mayor Ed Lee took office. This year’s corporate welfare total of nearly $16.8 million is up about $2.5 million from last year’s total.

The Net New Payroll Exclusion, a small business tax break for businesses with an annual payroll of less than $500,000 created in 2012 by legislation authored by Sups. David Campos and Mark Farrell, last year allowed 2,488 businesses to reduce their city tax burden by $5,258,572.

By contrast, just 11 businesses in the mid-Market market reaped $4,243,997 in payroll tax breaks last year, the biggest being Twitter. Taxpayer privacy laws prevent the city from naming the businesses involved in these tax breaks, but Twitter was also likely the sole company that reportedly benefitted from the exclusion of $37,922,531 in stock options from its tax obligation, saving another $568,837 there.

Biotech and Cleantech businesses also enjoyed tax breaks for their new employees, saving $1,595,687 and $765,360 respectively. Enterprise Zone Tax Credits saved another 176 businesses $780,686 in their payroll tax obligations.

Despite a booming local economy and record low unemployment, the city itself is still wrestling with annual budget deficits that are projected to continue growing for each of the next five years, from $66 million in the coming fiscal year to $339.4 million in 2017-18, according to estimates from the San Francisco Controller’s Office.

Even so, the city recently cut $500 tax rebate checks to 7,120 local business, for a total of $3,560,000, as part of the Surplus Business Tax Revenue program approved during the 1990s, which triggers a tax rebate when business tax revenues grown more than 5 percent in a year.

SF arts funding prioritizes symphony, other stuff white people like

Erica Hanna

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June 23, 2014

45

SF arts funding prioritizes symphony, other stuff white people like

Disadvantaged artists might be getting the short end of the paintbrush in favor of the city’s more affluent art community in Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed 2014-16 city budget.

That’s what a seemingly endless line of advocates expressed in a hearing in front of the San Francisco Budget and Finance Committee Friday [6/20] when given the opportunity to suggest ways to better apportion funding in the budget. According to a recent report from the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office, the dissenters might be onto something.

The report details the allocation of funding from Grants for the Arts, revealing that 76 percent of GFTA’s grant money will go to art organizations with primarily white audiences. This figure is right in line with the funding priorities from 1961, when the city’s population was 82 percent white.

Today, people of color make up 58 percent of the city’s population, while the white population has been nearly cut in half over the course of the five decades since 1961. But that hasn’t stopped GFTA from devoting more than three-quarters of its funds for art organizations whose audiences are predominantly white, the report found.

GFTA’s self-proclaimed goal is to “promote and support the widest possible variety of arts and culture activities in the City,” although it’s hard to imagine it had that in mind when devising the budget plan for the upcoming fiscal year.

This isn’t the first time GFTA has snubbed underprivileged artists. According to the Budget Analyst’s report, GFTA actually reduced its percentages of funding to arts organizations of color from 2006-07 to 2012-13, and the agency’s funding for those organizations has not improved over the last 25 years, despite the city’s radically shifting demographics and the lip service regularly given to diversity at City Hall. GFTA has no plans to improve its grant money allocation, according to the report. Officials at the agency declined to comment when contacted for this story.

When the Budget and Finance Committee heard public comment today about the mayor’s proposed budget, a great deal of the discussion centered on cultural equity and providing increased funding for disadvantaged citizens in the arts.

Numerous speakers cited the city’s changing demographics and the reality that the city isn’t made up of an enormous majority of white residents anymore, calling for more art funding for people of color, despite the budget’s lopsided allocation of funds to the white demographic.

In particular, the budget proposal allocates 19 percent of the 2014-15 budget to the San Francisco Symphony, which was enough for one speaker to state that “a lion’s share is going to the traditional organizations.” The message to the committee, simply put, was to “consider how you invest the money you’re spending,” as another speaker said, and that “public funding for the arts is not supposed to disempower by taking away the voice of the underrepresented.”

Allocating more funding for the Cultural Equity Grants was an oft-mentioned method for better supporting disadvantaged artists, with the project-based grant system receiving 25 percent of the commission’s budget in the 2014-15 fiscal year. The number of grants awarded each year has remained relatively stagnant in recent years, with 94 grants awarded in 2012-13, a projected 100 to be given out in 2013-14, and a target of 100 in both 2014-15 and 2015-16.

The number of street artists supporting themselves by selling their work isn’t progressing much either. The city issued 176 new licenses for such artists in 2012-13, but is projected to dole out only 122 in the current fiscal year. The new proposal targets similar numbers to those from 2012-13 (179 and 183 licenses in 2014-15 and 2015-16, respectively), further affirmation of the sluggish advancement of the mission to ensure that all cultures of the city are represented.

But disadvantaged residents in the arts aren’t the only ones who stand to be affected by the proposed budget, a fact that wasn’t lost on many concerned advocates. Lee calls for a budget of $13.9 million for the Arts Commission in 2014-15, a relatively minor 2 percent decrease from the 2013-14 budget of $14.2 million. The real drop-off occurs in 2015-16, however, when the Arts Commission budget decreases by a full 8.4 percent from the previous fiscal year. The Mayor’s Office declined to respond when contacted for this story.

Needless to say, members of the art community as a whole weren’t thrilled about Lee’s sharply declining emphasis on the arts, and they voiced their concern toward the Committee on Friday. The city’s lack of aid for the general art community, in addition to simply underprivileged artists, had many speakers understandably up in arms.

Below we’ve embedded Harvey Rose’s report on skewed arts grants funding.

"Arts inequity": San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst Report by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

As Ellis Act reform bill faced death, where was Ron Conway?

Erica Hanna

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June 19, 2014

26

As Ellis Act reform bill faced death, where was Ron Conway?

One week and one day — that’s how long Sen. Mark Leno has to push his Ellis Act reform bill through two committees in order for it to go before to the assembly floor, making its prospects for passage this year look dim.

The push would have been easier if it hadn’t lost yesterday’s vote, 3-4, in the Assembly Committee on Housing and Community Development. Now the bill’s passage is a herculean task that even Leno admits is a tough slog.

“I’d say it’s challenging,” Leno told us yesterday. San Franciscans have been displaced by real estate speculators, a dozen or more of whom are regularly “flipping” homes for profit and using the Ellis Act to clean out longtime renters. If passed, the bill would restrict the use of the Ellis Act to those who’ve owned their homes for five years or longer, allowing property owners to eventually get out of the rental business, as supporters of the Ellis Act say it was intended for.

“Bill Closing Ellis Act Loophole for San Francisco Fails in Assembly,” was the headline of Leno’s press release on yesterday’s action. But “fails” seems to imply a strong effort that fell short of the mark, when the reality of was that some of the bill’s highest profile and most powerful alleged supporters were missing in action: the tech industry and venture capitalist Ron Conway.

When Leno’s Senate Bill 1439 was announced in April, the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” Ron Conway stood before the microphone and cameras and announced the technology industry’s intent to protect tenants from being displaced by real estate speculators. Conway is a wealthy “angel investor” who cashed in big on companies like Twitter. Later on, he became Twitter’s greatest champion as he smooth-talked San Francisco government into providing big tax breaks to move Twitter into the mid-Market area.

In return, Mayor Ed Lee was counting on Conway and other tech titans to butress the other sectors of San Francisco, and to protect the people who were being evicted en masse.

Conway pledged as much when his tech group, SF.citi, started a petition drive to support Ellis Act Reform.

Part of the tech backlash occurring in SF right now is due to evictions by real estate speculators. Please help stop evictions in SF by having your Company sign on to the below letter for Senator Leno.

The bill would prohibit rental property owners in San Francisco of less than five years from invoking the Ellis Act, threatening to invoke the Ellis Act, or prosecuting an unlawful detainer (eviction) action based on the Ellis Act.

Real estate speculators are misusing California’s Ellis Act to evict long-term rent paying tenants, who have done nothing wrong but are casualties of a loophole in the Act that must be closed to prevent further displacement.

The Ellis Act was adopted to allow landlords to exit the rental business, not to give windfall profits to speculators willing to exploit the Act by entering the rental business just to exit it. These speculators are exploiting a loophole in the Act that allows them to buy a building and then immediately “exit the rental business” through mass evictions of low and middle-income tenants. The stories are heartbreaking, with families, seniors, and disabled San Franciscans losing their long-term homes.

We strongly support the passage of SB 1439.

Ron Conway

Chairman, sf.citi

Writing pretty words and posing for pretty pictures seemed to be the extent of Conway’s support. Meanwhile, the opposition built up its ranks.

At the committee hearing yesterday, lobbyists on behalf of the California Association of Realtors and very wealthy elderly folks told misleading tales of woe, crowding the room to convince the five California politicians to kill the Ellis Reform bill that would affect mostly just San Francisco.

“What we’re trying to do is keep honest, law-abiding San Franciscans in their homes,” Leno told the committee yesterday. But that wasn’t the committee’s concern. Ultimately, they were concerned about the bottom line. As Tim Redmond at 48hills reported yesterday, Committee Member Cheryl Brown, D-San Bernadino, said her brother told her the bill “is taking my property.”

Those who defended the bill were scant: Jeff Buckley of the Mayor’s Office, Dean Preston from Tenants Together, Sara Shortt of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, and Committee Member Tom Ammiano, among others.

Perhaps having a wealthy tech giant in the room, say, a Twitter representative or Conway himself, may have tipped the scales in Leno’s favor. Conway’s frequent lunch partner Mayor Ed Lee even sponsored the bill. But still, no tech workers, no tech CEOs, not even someone glued to their iPhone raised their voices to defend tenants at the committee. Not even Conway.

When we called and emailed Conway for a response, all we received was an automatic reply saying “I am currently traveling will read email sporadically during this time.”

It’s too bad he wasn’t traveling to Sacramento.