Newsom

The bridge isn’t the only problem with Lennar’s plan

Mary Magee
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I’m glad to see the New York Times circle back to the Candlestick-Shipyard development with an article that was a tad more critical than their previous piece.

But while I enjoyed NYT’s joke about how the proposed bridge over the Yosemite Slough “has become a 950-foot-long chicken bone that keeps getting stuck in San Francisco politicians’ throats,”  I’m afraid the Board is in greater danger of choking on the bones of red herrings that they have been fed about this project,  along with last week’s bombshell that the Board won’t be able to amend Lennar’s plan, after all, when it votes July 27 on this massive proposal..

D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly says if that bombshell turns out to be true, it’ll be another example of what he calls, “The bait and switch and switch,” on the deal.

“I’m worried that the Board is getting advice that is less about a case of not being able to vote, and more a case of, if you vote, you could open up the city to liability,” Kelly said.

“Back in 2008, folks were told, just vote for Prop. G because it’s just a concept and we’ll have a robust conversation about the plan itself, but they’ve been running away from that promise ever since,” Kelly explained. “And during the EIR hearings, we were told that folks were simply approving the environmental impact report, not the plan itself.”

Kelly’s critiques of Lennar’s plan and the process by which it has been winning final approvals helped him win former Board President Matt Gonzalez’s endorsement last week in the pivotal race to replace termed-out D. 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell.

But Kelly worries about the fallout that the next D. 10 supervisor will be left to mop up, if the Board goes ahead and approves Lennar’s plan, as is.
 
“What I’d dread to see happen is that this plan get bullied through on an up and down vote, and then a fifth, or even a tenth of people’s concerns prove to be true, and the next D. 10 supervisor spends the next 4-8 years apologizing to the people of the Bayview, because they won’t be able to do anything else for the area, and this plan keeps lumbering along and doesn’t even work,” Kelly explained.

He says he wants to know who can amend the plan, if it’s not the Board and when.

“ My concern is that after the July 27 vote, the city and Lennar will never have to come before the Board again,” Kelly said, pointing to the uncritical endorsement of the project EIR that the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions, the lead agencies on the plan, made June 3, and who would likely be tasked with any additional studies and findings.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi confirmed today that the Board has been told that it has limited reach because of Redevelopment law, which supercedes municipal law.”
“But, nonetheless, I’m going to try to make some amendments,” Mirkarimi said.

He noted that the five amendments that Board President David Chiu introduced July 12 during a Land Use Committee hearing were “very benign.”

‘They mostly restated what was already in the project agreement or project EIR,” Mirkarimi said. “So, they don’t amend much, because they are statements of what has already been evaluated or pre-agreed to by Lennar and the city. And they are very benign because they do not require any changes to the plan.”

Mirkarimi observes that the current process by which the city is trying to push this deal through is designed to lock the Board out.

“There are larger questions in play here about our relationship with the Redevelopment Agency and redevelopment law,” Mirkarimi continued. He notes that San Francisco is one of only a few counties in California where the Board is not the same entity as the Redevelopment Agency.

“It’s long overdue that we return to the idea of having the Board have authority over the Redevelopment Agency, it’s been a problem for 40 years,” Mirkarimi said,  referring to Redevelopment’s disastrous handling of the Fillmore, which resulted in the massive and mostly permanent displacement of the Western Addition’s African American community—a negative consequence that many fear will be repeated by the plan for Candlestick-Hunters Point.

“There is a real capitalization on a starving population which is desirous of and at times desperate for positive changes and for jobs and housing, which is understandable,” Mirkarimi continued. “But absent of any alternative, it’s logical that this plan would move forward.”

In an effort to improve the plan, Mirkarimi says he will try to introduce a range of amendments at the Board’s July 27 meeting.

‘These include an attempt to make sure that whatever changes the Board makes are indeed enforceable,” he said. “And I am not satisfied with the discussion on the bridge, and how the gate has been left open on a bridge of any kind.”

Mirkarimi notes that there has been a lot of fanfare surrounding a community benefits agreement that various community-based organizations, labor and the project proponents entered into, in spring 2008.

“But I think they can do better, especially in reaching out to a community that has a high ex-offender population, and connecting to other disadvantaged communities throughout the city,” Mirkarimi said.

He also wants to ensure that if public power is not implemented, or fails, then Community Choice Aggregation program would automaticcally take over.

Mirkarimi is further concerned that there is nothing in the current plan that defines the percentages of housing units offered for rental and for home ownership.

“We are proposing to build 10,500 units but we have no idea what percentage is rental,” he said, noting that he also has concerns about air quality, air monitoring and parcels of land that have not yet been cleaned up to residential standards.

“Parcel E-2 is the most famous, but it’s not the only one,” he said. “The bridge and Parcel  E-2 have become major distractions in that they have sucked the oxygen out of other areas of these gargantuan project.”

So, is it true that elected officials on the Board can’t amend a plan sent to them by the Redevelopment Agency, whose commissioners are all political appointees of the mayor?

“It’s a yes or no vote, if you will,” a deputy City Attorney told the Guardian, on background, noting that the Board could tell Redevelopment that it doesn’t like the plan and wants the Agency to make some changes and bring it some amendments.

“Ultimately, the Board has the final say, but it has to have gone through the Redevelopment process and its PAC (project area committee) and have seen a plan that has been referred to it by the Planning Commission,” the deputy city attorney continued.“So, they could communicate their dissatisfaction and the agency would have to take their view into account. It’s not that the Board has no authority, but it can’t decide unilaterally.”

The City Attorney’s Office also confirmed that under Redevelopment Law, local jurisdictions can decide how to implement redevelopment plans.

“In a number of jurisdictions, the city council has made itself a Redevelopment entity, just as our Board is also the Transportation Authority in San Francisco,” the deputy said.“And if the same body proposes the plan, it probably will be satisfied.”

The City Attorney’s office noted that if agencies that regulate permits to fill the Bay, as is  required to build a bridge over Yosemite Slough, deny the city those permits, then the city would require amendments to its planning documents, but no further environmental impact review would be required, if the bridge was gone.

With the Board’s July 27 vote around the corner, D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly says he has a bunch of concerns that include, but are not limited to the bridge, starting with the projects financing mechanisms.

Kelly points to the fact that city staff recommended and the Board approved July 13 that “significant blight in the project area cannot be eliminated without the increase in the amount of bonded indebtedness from $221 million to $900 million and the increase in the limitation on the number of dollars to be allocated to the Agency from $881 million to $4.2 billion.”
 

Kelly wants the city to explain to the Board how much tax increment financing money will be left for the Bayview, now that the area’s debt ceiling has been tripled.

“Does this mean that all BVHP property tax revenues for the next 30 years will go towards paying down this debt and nothing else?” Kelly asked. “And what will that mean for the rest of BVHP in terms of service and programs it won’t be able to afford?

Kelly would also like to see the Board request an audit of Lennar’s record on Parcel A. As Kelly points out, the Navy conveyed Parcel to the city in 2004, and the city gave Lennar the green light to develop 1,600 mostly luxury condos on that parcel, in 2006.

“But no one has ever done an audit of Parcel A,” Kelly said. “Given the scrutiny that the Board usually brings to five figure numbers, the supervisors should be demanding this information, since we are dealing with a ten-figure number ($4,220,000,000) in future.”

It would be helpful if the City would also brief the Board as to who it believes will be investing in the project,  including the investment companies’ names,  their board of directors, and whether these companies are based in the US. Rumors are swirling that some project proponents have entered into side-deals that involve limited liability companies that are selling Lennar’s proposed condos to folks in China, and that a $1 million investment in a condo could translate into a work permit for the condo owner or occupant.

Kelly worries that the city and Lennar’s joint redevelopment plan is being allowed to squeak past the Board’s financial review simply on the basis of vague estimates.
“They rely once again on promises that won’t show up,” Kelly said, pointing to a recent report that emerged from the Controller’s Office.

Arc Ecology’s Saul Bloom notes that the Controller used averaged figures in that report, an approach that neatly obscures the fact that many of the project’s alleged and benefits– will not be created or felt for years. Bloom for his part is hoping the Board can introduce a maritime uses amendment. This would allow relatively unskilled jobs to be created at the shipyard in short order, compared to vague promises of  building a green tech office park there, some day.

Last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor Michael Cohen suggested that plan amendments would delay project construction.

But Cohen was quick to add that, “702 acres of waterfront land in San Francisco is an irreplaceable asset. It’s not a question of if—but when—it gets developed.”

Others are less sure that Cohen’s much promoted vision will ever translate into reality.

So, here’s hoping the Board will grill Cohen and city staff over the financial details, including the internal rate of return (IRR) that Lennar is demanding, and what will happen to promised community benefits, if the IRR doesn’t pencil out. D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy, Chris Jackson and Tony Kelly have suggested that some form of liquidated damages  are needed, but if the City believes these are unnecessary, it should explain why.

And then there are questions about the impact on air quality of the traffic related to an additional 24,500 residents and 10,000 workers into the city’s southeast.

Personally, I was fascinated by an April 2010 report from the Redevelopment Agency in which the agency discussed the challenges of driving piles through contaminated soil, which is what could happen if a bridge is built over the Yosemite Slough. In the past, the city made the argument that the NFL and the 49ers were requiring this bridge.

But last week, in the wake of Santa Clara’s vote in favor of a new stadium for the 49ers near Great America, the city began arguing that the bridge would make the project more attractive to financers, because employers want to get their employees quickly in and out.

This was the first time I ever heard city staff make that particular argument and they made it when it’s still not clear who these employers even are.

 So, let’s flesh out the list of potential employers, so the Board can determine if design decisions are being made in the interest of the local community or out-of-state businesses.

And then there’s the fact that it appears that this proposed $100 million bridge would only save commuters a few minutes, while permanently filling the San Francisco Bay.

Today, the Sierra Club, the Golden Gate Audobon Society, the California Native Plant Society and San Francisco Tomorrow released a report that asserts that the Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard EIR “misrepresents the need for a bridge.”

“A statistical review demonstrates that a route around Yosemite Slough could be as efficient as a bridge route while being better for the environment,” stated a letter that the Sierra Club-led environmental coalition released today. “It’s time for the Board of Supervisors to reject the bridge alternative and insist that the feasible upland route around Yosemite Slough be seriously considered.”

The letter argues that a regression model result found in the Transportation Study Appendix F of the Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Phase 11 EIR provides “no statistically significant evidence to support the claim that a 5 minute increase in transit travel time would lead to a 15 percent decrease in transit ridership, or, indeed, to any decrease in ridership.”

“Therefore, routing the BRT around Yosemite Slough is as consistent with a transit-first redevelopment goal as a bridge alternative, but without the environmental damage wrought by the bridge,” the Sierra Club-led report states in summary. “The results of the regression analysis used in the EIR and relied upon to support the bridge alternative have been misinterpreted in such a way that even if they were statistically significant they are off by a factor of ten: the decrease in transit ridership associated with 5 extra minutes of transit time would be predicted to be approximately 1.5 percent, not 15 percent,” it concludes.

“When the analysis [presented in the Sierra Club’s letter] is combined with previous analyses by LSA Associates (which estimate the increase in travel time would be approximately 2 minutes, rather than the 5 minutes in the final EIR) and other available information, one must reach the conclusion that the FEIR misrepresents the effect on travel time and ridership that would result from a route around Yosemite Slough. Overall, it poses further questions about the need for a bridge over San Francisco’s largest wetland restoration project.”

The Sierra Club-led report lands two weeks after Board President David Chiu introduced his July 12 package of amendments which seeks to narrow the bridge, not eliminate it, and require the Board to hold hearings before the Navy transfers Parcel E-2 to the city.

It’s a good idea for the Board to require hearings before E-2 is transferred to the city. But does this mean the Board will be able to direct the Navy, when it’s time to decide whether to cap or excavate the contamination in that parcel? The answer appears to be no. All the Board can do is to reject the Navy’s proposed solution.

But how would this work? What would happen then? And Parcel E-2 isn’t the only parcel on the shipyard where seriously nasty stuff has been found and is still be cleaned up.

The good news is that at this point, the project still doesn’t belong to the Board.

The bad news is that, as of tomorrow, it could belong to them, if the supervisors opt to approve Lennar’s plan with a simple up-down vote. And given the rush and the political pressure that the process has been subjected to since 2006, it’s almost certain that some scandal will engulf the project, some time in the future. And this Board of Supervisors’ names will be on it. Even if nothing ever gets built at the shipyard.

“How can the city say nothing will be built for years, because we have promised so much, when they say out of the other side of their mouth, that the only way that we can make these promises to the community, is if the community supports the plan?” Kelly asks. “On what planet do we think this makes sense? I think we are moving out of the solar system with every passing week.”

There’s no crime in members of the Board admitting tomorrow that they have not read the entire plan and don’t understand all the details. As the folks in Alameda humbly admitted last week, when they kicked out developer SunCal, it took them years to understand what was being proposed—including the fact that the project might leave their city in the hole, financially.

But it would be a crime for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to vote yes on this massive proposal without first having done that homework. Yes, I’ve heard supervisors say in the past they are deferring to Sup. Maxwell, since the project lies in her district. But Maxwell is termed out, and the project will impact all of the city, especially in terms of its ethnic and economic diversity, in future. So, as we’ve said, buyer beware!

 

Rumors fly that Board can’t amend Lennar deal, after all

Mary Magee
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For the past month, fireworks and deals have been going on at City Hall as the Board prepares to vote on Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan for Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard. And recently, the Board vowed to make a slew of amendments to the plan, even as they approved the project’s environmental impact report.

But now it’s beginning to look like the only winners could be the developer—and perhaps those folks at city hall who are staking their political careers on jamming this deal over the finish line, come hell or high water, before the November election comes around and they go into the private sector as real estate developers.

I say this because two weeks ago, the progressives on the Board were saying that they had been told that they couldn’t amend the EIR July 14, but that they could amend the actual redevelopment plan when it comes before them on July 27. It was for this reason, they said, that they decided to vote to accept the EIR in an 8-3 vote, with only Sups. John Avalos, Chris Daly and Eric Mar, voting to reject the project’s key environmental document.

But today, with less than two working days before the Board’s July 27 meeting, I’m hearing rumors that the Board will only be able to take an up and down vote, when they consider Lennar’s actual redevelopment plan.

In other words, the only way the Board would be able to change anything would be to reject the plan in its entirety.But everyone knows that this is a pigs-may-fly scenario, given the massive pressure the Mayor’s Office, labor and Lennar have been exerting on the Board.

So, if these “up-and-down-vote only” rumors turn out to be true, folks who care about environmental and economic justice better start sounding the alarm. Because there is a plethora of unresolved issues that Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Chris Daly, Eric Mar, and Ross Mirkarimi identified July 13 as needing shoring up, before the actual redevelopment plan would ever pass their sniff test.

These concerns included fears that the project’s financing plan amounts to daylight bank robbery, that the proposed bridge across the Yosemite Slough is unnecessary, and that the amount of projected air pollution related to the development is unacceptable.

And then there’s the fact that the Controller’s “economic benefits” report only used averaged figures, and therefore did not give any details about how many jobs and benefits the project would create in this economically depressed community in the next few years.

And did I mention the part about liquidated damages and watershed concerns? Or the fact that there are no maritime uses in the current plan, even though these uses could translate directly into relatively unskilled jobs, if old ships were broken up at the shipyard.

But despite the hours of discussion on July 13 that the Board sat through last week, I do not recall anyone from the Mayor’s or City Attorney’s Office advising the supervisors that they would not be able to amend the actual plan when it comes before them July 27.

Right now, a lot of confusion is swirling as folks point to the fact that Board President David Chiu introduced five amendments at a July 12 Land Use Committee hearing that eight supervisors subsequently voted to accept. This move led the rest of the Board to believe that they too could make amendments to the final plan.

But a review of Chiu’s amendments and the project’s EIR suggests that these changes are in fact repackaged pieces of the EIR, and that the move misled other supervisors into believing that that they would have a chance to amend the actual redevelopment plan.

So far, no one from the Mayor’s Office has returned my calls seeking clarification on this process. But if it turns out that the only way the Board can have input is to kick the plan to the curb, or ask the Planning Commission to make new findings, then democracy in San Francisco has been replaced with an empty charade.

“The Board can make changes along the line that David made in the Land Use Committee, “ Chiu’s legislative aide Judson True told me today. But he wasn’t clear on the process next week, and suggested that I call Cohen’s office, which I did (only to find myself shunted to Cohen’s voice mail.)

So, what gives? And why would the Board allow an out-of-town developer in partnership with the Mayor’s Office to sidestep its responsibility in this way?

“We were told we could not make amendments to the EIR, but could make amendments to the plan that we will be voting on this Tuesday,” Campos told me today, noting that he and Mirkarimi were prepared to make changes July 13, but were then told they could not do that.

“The biggest fear I have with this project, and any project this size in this economy, is that a lot is promised, but will anything get developed, or will we be stuck holding the bag,” Campos added.

Similar questions led the Alameda city council to kick developer SunCal to the curb last week. Ironically, the move could open the door to a developer like Lennar to try and swoop in and pick up the pieces in the island city across the Bay from San Francisco.

But folks in Alameda are pointing to San Francisco as an example of how difficult it is to nail down developers, noting that Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top financial advisor, recently admitted that investment money is scarce, even though the city’s EIR for the project has been approved.

Actually, Cohen went a step further by intimating that all the benefits that the community wants out of the plan would deter investors even more—comments that were perhaps just a precursor to this potential bombshell that the Board won’t actually be able to amend the deal, after all? Stay tuned.

Unions say grand juror unethically helped Adachi measure

Sasha Cuttler
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Unions say grand juror unethically helped Adachi measure

San Francisco’s police and fire unions are taking a lead role in opposing Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s November initiative to make city employees pay more of their pension and health care costs, despite the fact that both unions have recently renegotiated their contracts to exempt their members from paying those increased costs until 2013.

The unions and Bob Muscat from the San Francisco Labor Council recently formed the group Stand Up for Working Families to run the opposition campaign to Adachi’s SF Smart Reform, yesterday holding a press conference at City Hall to highlight the allegedly unethical role that a grand juror has played in pushing the Adachi measure.

Civil Grand Jury member Craig Weber led the committee that in June released a report on the city’s pension system called “Pension Tsunami: The Billion Dollar Bubble,” warning that employee pension costs to the city would more than double in the next five years and “fundamental adjustments must be made to the City’s employee pension program.”

Yet by the time that report came out (following a similar grand jury report from a year earlier), Weber was already working as treasurer for the Adachi’s signature-gathering campaign, which City Attorney Dennis Herrera called an inappropriate conflict of interest and which Muscat says that raises questions about data manipulation and access to secret grand jury proceedings.

“I have serious concerns in this particular instance that Mr. Weber’s dual roles create a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of conflict of interest, which would undermine the integrity of any Civil Grand Jury investigation into these issues,” Herrera wrote in a June 14 letter to Presiding Judge James McBride, relating how Weber had sought advice from Herrera’s office on the matter in March and that both Weber and the Grand Jury chair refused to heed his advice that Weber recuse himself from working on the report.

“We believe he used his position on the Civil Grand Jury to manipulate the civil grand jury report,” attorney Peter Saltzman, who represents opponents of the measure, said at the press conference.

But Adachi called the charges “just smoke and mirrors,” telling the Guardian that his initiative was based on data from the Controller’s Office and that the measure was written and publicly available before the latest grand jury report was released. “We received zero information from the grand jury,” Adachi told us. “We relied on public information that we received from the Controller’s Office.”

He has claimed the measure will save the city about $167 million per year by making city employees pay more into their pensions and health care costs for their dependents, although that figure will be lower for the next two years because of exemptions that were written into five police and fire memorandums of understanding that the Board of Supervisors approved last week, agreements negotiated by the Mayor’s Office and opposed by Sups. David Campos and Chris Daly (Sup. Ross Mirkarimi also voted against the MOU for Fire Department executives) because of the exemption.

Police union head Gary Delagnes, who was at the press conference, told the Guardian that the special consideration for those two unions – both of which are key supporters of Mayor Gavin Newsom — was simply a function of negotiating their MOUs later than the other unions. “By the time we and the firefighters were in there, this thing [Adachi’s campaign] had really picked up steam,” he told us.

During the press conference, Muscat highlighted how billionaire Michael Moritz, managing partner of Sequoia Capital, put almost a quarter-million-dollars into qualifying the Adachi measure for the ballot and said, “This is a measure not in the interests of anyone in San Francisco and it represents the interests of people outside of San Francisco” who are attacking public employee unions for political reasons.

Janet Reilly should stay in the race

Zelda Bronstein
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Janet Reilly should stay in the race

Now that a judge has ruled that Michela Alioto-Pier can run again for her District Two seat, a wide-open race has become a little strange. Janet Reilly had already rounded up the endorsements of Democratic Party heavies like Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, along with Gavin Newsom. Of course, Newsom has always supported Alioto-Pier in the past; he no doubt backed Reilly because he figured (as did a lot of us) that City Attorney Dennis Herrera was right and Alioto-Pier was termed out. Same goes for Feinstein and Pelosi, who won’t want to be in the position of opposing an incumbent supervisor who has always sided with the downtown establishment.

So now what do all those people do?

Add in the fact that Herrera, who still thinks his position was correct, might decide to appeal, and the state Appeals Court might still intervene and kick Alioto-Pier off the ballot, and anyone who switches endorsements after this ruling might have to do it again after that one, and you’ve got quite a political mess.

The only thing that gets the entire power structure of the local Democratic Party off the hook is if Reilly drops out and says she doesn’t want to fight Alioto-Pier. There’s going to be immense pressure on her to do just that; I bet someone from Pelosi’s office has already called.

But Reilly needs to hang tough. She’s a good candidate who could mount a serious challenge to Alioto-Pier, who needs a challenge. District Two isn’t going to elect a left-progressive, but Reilly would be a much more independent supervisor. I couldn’t reach her today, but she told the Chron she was going to make up her mind this fall. My advice: Don’t spend a lot of time debating (which leaves all your supporters up in the air). Announce right away that you’re in the race for good, that you’re in it to win and that you look forward to a lively debate on the issues facing the city. And if Pelosi and Feinstein back off from their endorsements, they look bad and you look fine.

 

Board reverses mayor’s mental health cuts

Sasha Cuttler
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San Francisco’s $6.5 billion budget, which the Board of Supervisors approved late Tuesday nigth, included a complete restoration of outpatient mental health services funded through the city’s Department of Public Health. The board is expected to finalize the same budget after a second reading scheduled for July 27.

The board reversed a more than $4.1 million cut to community behavioral health services proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom in early June, which would have affected a dozen agencies and approximately 1,000 patients. As the Guardian reported on June 8, Newsom’s massive cut to the DPH would have resulted in a much greater loss to community nonprofits that leverage federal dollars from city funding to treat San Francisco’s most severely mentally ill homeless and poor.

Sup. Bevan Dufty told the Guardian he was very impressed by Citywide Case Management and Community Focus after walking rounds with one of the nonprofit’s caseworkers. Citywide is one of the San Francisco’s best performing mental health nonprofits, according to DPH reviews, and it would also have been the hardest hit under Newsom’s plan.

“It’s clear to me that this is a program that we ought to be doubling rather than cutting,” Dufty told us. “The more that people saw what they were doing, the more people would get behind what they were doing. Other cities are building models based on what Citywide Case management is doing now.”

Citywide Director Dr. David Fariello wrote the Guardian this letter about restoration of funding to his program to the Guardian: “We have good news for the supporters of Citywide Case Management and Community Focus mental health services. As you remember we were facing the prospect of 38 percent budget lose and cutting services to 240 of the severely mentally ill clients that we treat. On July 20, the Board of Supervisors voted for a full restoration of outpatient mental health services. This means that we will not need to cut services to the clients we serve.
“Your article, as well as phone calls, emails, and letters from supporters made clear to the Mayor’s Office and to the Board of Supervisors how critical our services are. Citywide/Community Focus supporters generated more input than any other budget cut issue. The Mayor restored 40 percent of our cuts, even after submitting his budget to the Board of Supervisors. Ours was the only cut to be so restored. The Board restored the remainder along with other outpatient mental health programs.
“Thank you for your support. In return, we are rededicating ourselves to providing comprehensive, cutting-edge, quality treatment to those San Franciscans at highest risk because of their mental illness.”

Laura’s Law’s reactionary backers demonize progressives

Sasha Cuttler
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San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius often gets things wrong in his columns, sometimes painfully so. Nobody’s perfect and we all make mistakes. But what’s less excusable is the fact that Chuck’s erroneous reporting, prominently presented by his newspaper, almost always serves a conservative political agenda. Even worse is that he won’t admit when he gets something wrong, even when directly confronted with accurate information – a cardinal sin for anyone who considers himself a journalist.

I experienced Chuck’s incurious intransigence at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, the same day his column on Laura’s Law – which Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier is proposing to implement in San Francisco — appeared in the paper. Laura’s Law is a controversial measure that would allow counties to force medication and other psychiatric treatments on individuals who show signs of schizophrenia and other serious mental health issues, but who haven’t committed any crimes.

As with a Chronicle editorial the day before, Nevius took an overheated whack at progressives for not wholeheartedly supporting the measure: “Laura’s Law, which provides court-ordered mental health treatment for those individuals, is the kind of bold, breakthrough idea the city was once known to promote. But today, when it is considered by the Board of Supervisors, it will face an uphill battle. This is San Francisco at its worst, protecting small constituencies, worrying about legal consequences and letting lobbyists carry the agenda. It is an embarrassment for the city that used to know how to take a courageous stand.”

But none of that was true. The reality is that forcing treatment on mental health patients is an issue that divides that community and raises civil liberties concerns. This is an issue on which reasonable people can disagree, but Nevius’s column never aired that perspective, and it didn’t even mention that forced medication was an aspect of this law, so I asked him why and whether he understood that.

Nevius vehemently denied that forced medication was part of Laura’s Law, even though Dr. James Dillard from SF General Hospital had just testified that “medication is the single most important aspect of this care,” given that the patients involved are often exhibiting psychotic behavior, testimony on which Nevius took no notes and seemed to be playing with his phone during.

So I pulled out my own Iphone and quickly pulled up this recent article by the Chronicle’s Kevin Fagan, where the opening sentence defines the purpose of the law as “to compel the mentally ill to take medications.” Still, Nevius didn’t believe it, illogicaly quibbling over the definition of “compel,” and we stepped out into the hall to argue for a moment. There, representatives for the California Network of Mental Health Clients were gathered to oppose implementation of the law, distributing literature calling it, “an outdated, coercive, unproven, and divisive law that codifies involuntary outpatient commitment.” I left them to educate Nevius and went back inside, but after a few minutes he pulled me out to listen to one guy say that the law didn’t have strong enough teeth, thinking this supported his point. But when I asked point blank whether the law was about involuntary treatment, he agreed it was – and still Nevius wouldn’t relent.

Now, this is a complex issue, and Laura’s Law may actually be a good idea on balance. But rather than relying solely on horrific anecdotes of mentally ill people who commit crimes, as both Nevius and Alioto-Pier are doing, a smart and thorough legislative process will take into account a broad array of issues, including civil liberties concerns.

That’s what the progressive supervisors who Nevius tried to demonize did during the hearing, asking many questions for which Alioto-Pier didn’t have good answers. Dr. Mitch Katz, who runs the city’s Department of Public Health, the agency that would implement the law, opposes Laura’s Law but neither Alioto-Pier or Nevius could explain why in a way that made sense, and Katz was out of town during the hearing.

So rather than be pressured by these hyperventilating reactionaries, the board did the right thing and – over Alioto-Pier’s objections — delayed consideration of the item by two weeks, expressing support for the notion of improved pubic safety and mental health treatment, noting that the budget proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom would have slashed mental health treatment services in the city, and asking for more information to reach a well-considered decision.

Nevius loves to paint progressives as wild-eyed ideologues who won’t listen to reason, but once again, this episode seems to show that it is this city’s so-called “moderates” that are most prone to going off on half-cocked ideological crusades using the most reactionary arguments.

Redevelopment requires “duty of loyalty” from Arc Ecology

Mary Magee
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Redevelopment requires “duty of loyalty” from Arc Ecology

As a longtime member of the Mayor’s Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC), Scott Madison took exception to a “duty of loyalty” clause in Arc Ecology’s most recent contract with the Redevelopment Agency.

This new requirement in Arc’s contract came up for discussion during the CAC’s July 12 meeting, Madison said.The rest of CAC did not rise up in support of his concerns, Madison adds. But he is convinced the requirement will harm the community that surrounds the 770-acre area that the city and Lennar want to develop with their massive Candlestick-Shipyard redevelopment plan.

The Board of Supervisors will consider that plan at their July 27 meeting, along with suggestions that Arc and the Sierra Club have been making for years. These suggestions include strengthening the terms governing the transfer of Parcel E-2, the most polluted shipyard site, and removing what Arc and the Sierra Club believe is an unnecessary bridge over the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough.

Arc has been monitoring the environmental impacts of the shipyard since 1984, and has provided neighborhood groups with information and technical support related to cleanup and redevelopment since 1986. And more recently, Arc Ecology opened a “community window on the shipyard cleanup” on Third Street, which is also accessible online, to provide information and resources for more meaningful community involvement in the cleanup.

Arc hosts environmental education discussions and community workshops and submits written comments to the Navy about the cleanup and to appropriate agencies on related shipyard redevelopment and reuse plans.

“We are working with the BVHP community to ensure that the transfer, redevelopment, and reuse are to the maximum benefit of the neighboring community,” Arc’s website states.

But in the past few years, as Lennar’s political Candlestick-Shipyard juggernaut has been gathering speed, Arc has ruffled feathers in the Mayor’s Office by developing Alternatives For Study, a document that explores detailed alternativesto the current Candlestick-Shipyard plan.

None of ARC’s alternatives are opposed to the development, but they all suggest ways to improve it, including an option that would not involve building a bridge over the slough, or a stadium on the shipyard, and would prevent the taking of 23 acres of state park land which Lennar wants so it can build luxury waterfront condos in the middle of the current Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, a plan that would be unthinkable if it was proposed for Crissy Field.

But the city, and in particular Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, view these alternatives, as signs of disloyalty, as they seek to rush Lennar’s massive 770-acre redevelopment plan over the finishing line, while arguing that any further amendments will make the plan more difficult for Lennar to shop around to investors, especially in light of the depressed economy.

The growing coziness between the city and the developer was put on full public display last week, when Sup. David Campos asked the project’s proponents to step forward at the Board’s July 13 hearing on the project’s EIR.

As Lennar Urban’s Kofi Bonner began to rise from his seat in the public seating area, Cohen, who had just finished answering Campos’ questions about the bridge and the project’s financing liabilities from the city’s bullpen in the Board’s chambers, raced over to the podium before Bonner had a chance to speak.

This uneasy closeness between city and developer, along with Arc’s extensive background in shipyard related matters, are why Madison believes the city’s residents are best served when Arc can express its opinions freely, even if that involves critiquing plans that the city seems to have grown increasingly defensive about, ever since it entered into a partnership with the Florida-based Lennar.

“Yes, it’s true that the city is paying for this contract with Arc, but it seems to me that this particular contractor’s responsibility should be primarily to the Citizen’s Advisory Committee, and not the city,” Madison said. “What if Arc reaches a conclusion that is odd with the developer, city agencies and other consultants? Would Arc be prohibited from making it public?”

Madison says the city has claimed that Arc would not be prohibited from such activities, and that the contract contains standard language. But he also adds that certain parties who are boosters for the city’s redevelopment plan object to what Arc and Bloom are doing in terms of raising valid science-based concerns.

“At the meeting, Al Norman said he hopes the Redevelopment Agency handcuffs Saul, not just by the hands but by the ankles,” Madison claimed.

And Bloom said that after his group made a video of him walking around wearing a “Can I buy your park?” billboard to illustrate what Lennar’s plan will do to the only state park in San Francisco, he was told that if Willie Brown was still mayor, Arc would have lost its contract, and all department heads who had been supportive of awarding it to Arc, would have been fired, too

Bloom notes that under Mayor Brown, he was awarded several contracts and helped author Prop. P, the measure that voters approved in 2000, which called upon the Navy to clean up the shipyard to the highest levels practical.

“Even Willie understood the need for balance,” Bloom said.
 
Bloom protested the city’s “duty of loyalty” requirement at the CAC’s July 12 meeting, but has apparently decided that the clause isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, because he has apparently since signed the contract. UPDATE: I just spoke to Bloom who told me that he has not yet signed the contract and is still working to get Redevelopment to see the problem with this requirement.

“At the CAC meeting, the committee endorsed the proposal to give us the contract,” Bloom explained. “But it’s up to the Redevelopment Commission to approve the contract, something they are set to consider at their September 7 meeting. We are making the argument that they need to think about the contract in broader terms.”

And Madison notes that it’s common sense that if you want a truly independent voice advising Redevelopment on the shipyard cleanup plan, then that voice should be allowed to be genuinely independent.

“The fact that the city is paying the bill for the contract shouldn’t require an organization to sign an extraordinary Duty of Loyalty, which conflicts with its true loyalty to the surrounding community,” Madison said.

The Guardian’s recent immediate disclosure request to Redevelopment should reveal the exact terms of Arc’s Duty of Loyalty requirement. And Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office says such clauses are rare.

“We are unaware of any confidentiality requirements being made, except in very rare circumstances, such as contracts related to the airport where there may be terrorist concerns,” Dorsey said. Stay tuned.

Newsom’s extortion

Zelda Bronstein
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Newsom’s extortion

The mayor really wanted the supervisors to get rid of two reform measures that would have shifted to the board some of the appointments to the Recreation and Park Commission and Municipal Transportation Agency. The landlords really wanted the board to scrap a plan to reform the Rent Board. And both got exactly what they wanted.


I agree that the budget has some good news, that Newsom has agreed to fund more than $40 million worth of necessary services that he initially wanted to cut. But the price was high: The supervisors had to go along with Newsom’s attempt to undermine structural reforms at two city agencies. The mayor essentially held the board hostage: If he didn’t get his way on issues totally unrelated to the budget, then he’d refuse to pay for a long list of things that the supes wanted. (And these weren’t pet projects of board members; we’re talking about life-saving essential services. The mayor in effect said that he’d allow desperately sick people to die on the streets for lack of a bed at SF General if the board tried to take away his ability to pack Rec-Park and MTA with his favorite political hacks. Sweet guy, huh?)


Is balanced representation on two important city agencies worth the price of $43 million in cuts to essential programs? That’s a nasty question, and the mayor put the board in a very bad position. In the end, the supes could have stood up to his extortion, and didn’t.


Meanwhile, the landlords threatened to spend millions to defeat a measure reforming the Rent Board — and then they threatened to also pour money in to supporting Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s pension measure, which labor is really nervous about. And there was always the implied threat that landlord money would go into the district supervisor races. So progressives decided that they couldn’t win that battle and the rent board measure died


And, of course, Newsom’s sit-lie law and his plan to kick members of the Board of Supervisors (but not himself) off the Democratic County Central Committee are both still on the ballot. He didn’t give up a thing.


So the landlords and the mayor won this round, but the supes can still fight back. What Newsom did was unconscionable; it’s not as if he was negotiating a tax hike measure against cuts, or a measure that would have mandated new spending against reductions somewhere else. He took two items that had nothing to do with finance and made them bargaining chips in the budget discussions.  If the supervisors did that, they’d be violating state law, which forbids vote trading.


So what San Francisco needs now is a law that bars the chief executive from vote-trading, too. Let’s get that introduced and approved — and see if Newsom wants to veto it.

Deal time

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Deal time

sarah@sfbg.com

Lennar Corp.’s massive redevelopment plan for Candlestick Point-Hunters Point cleared a critical hurdle July 14 when the Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 to affirm the Planning Commission’s certification of the project’s final environmental impact report, with Sups. John Avalos, Chris Daly, and Eric Mar opposed

Board President David Chiu called the vote "a milestone." Termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose District 10 includes Candlestick Point and the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, saw the vote as evidence that city leaders support the ambitious plan. Yet many political observers saw the vote as proof that Lennar and its Labor Council allies have succeeded in lobbying supervisors not to support opponents of the project.

"I’m concentrating on pushing this over the finish line," Maxwell said at the hearing in the wake of the vote, which came in the wee hours of July 14 after a 10-hour hearing. Supervisors can still amend Lennar’s development plan during a July 27 hearing and project opponents are hoping for significant changes.

Mar said he wants to focus on guaranteeing that the city has the authority to hold Lennar responsible for its promises. "I want to make sure that we have the strongest enforcement we can," he said.

Lennar’s plan continues to face stiff opposition from the Sierra Club, the Golden Gate Audubon Society, the California Native Plant Society, San Francisco Tomorrow, POWER (People Organized To Win Employment Rights) and CARE (Californians for Renewable Energy).

Representatives for these groups, whose appeals of the EIR certification were denied by the board, say they are now weighing their options. Those include taking legal action within 30 days of the board’s second reading of and final action on the developer’s final redevelopment plan, which will be Aug. 3 at the earliest.

Supervisors are expected to introduce a slew of amendments July 27, when they consider the details of the proposal and its impacts on the economically depressed and environmentally polluted.

Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, admitted July 19 that all these various demands will likely delay project construction. "But 702 acres of waterfront land in San Francisco is an irreplaceable asset," Cohen reportedly told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It’s not a question of if — but when — it gets developed."

Chiu already has introduced five amendments to the plan in an effort to alleviate concerns about shipyard toxins, Lennar’s limited financial liability, a proposed bridge over Yosemite Slough, and the possibility that local residents will need more access to healthcare and training if they are to truly benefit from the development plan.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian that he expects the board will require liquidated damages to ensure the city has some redress if the developer fails to deliver on a historic community benefits agreement that labor groups signed when Lennar was trying to shore up community support for Proposition G, the conceptual project plan voters approved in June 2008.

Mirkarimi said the board would also seek to increase workforce development benefits. "Thirty percent of the target workforce population are ex offenders. So while they might get training, currently they won’t get jobs other than construction," Mirkarimi observed.

He supports the health care access amendment and the public power amendment Chiu introduced July 21, pointing to Mirkarimi’s previous ordinance laying the groundwork for public power in the area. "This ordinance established that where feasible, the City shall be the electricity provider for new City developments, including military bases and development projects," Mirkarimi said. "PG&E was ripped when we pushed that through."

But Sierra Club activist Arthur Feinstein isn’t sure if additional amendments will help, given intense lobbying by city officials and a developer intent on winning project approvals this summer before a new board and mayor are elected this fall.

"Chiu’s amendments gave us what we asked for over Parcel E-2" Feinstein said, referring to a severely contaminated section of the shipyard for which Chiu wants an amendment calling for a board hearing on whether it’s clean enough to be accepted by the city and developed on.

But Feinstein is less than happy with Chiu’s Yosemite Slough amendment, which would limit a proposed bridge over it to a width of 41 feet and only allow bike, pedestrian, and transit use unless the 49ers elect to build a new stadium on the shipyard. In that case, the project would include a wider bridge to accommodate game-day traffic.

"The average lane size is 14 feet, so that’s a three-lane bridge. So it’s still pretty big. And it would end up filling almost an acre of the bay," Feinstein said.

Feinstein thanked Mirkarimi and Campos for asking questions that showed that the argument for the bridge has not been made. "But it’s disappointing that a progressive Board would be willing to fill the Bay for no reason," Feinstein said.

He concurred with the testimony of Louisiana-based environmental scientist Wilma Subra and environmental and human rights activist Monique Harden, who challenged the wisdom of the Navy digging out toxins while the developer installs infrastructure at the same site.

Subra said contamination is often found at Superfund sites after they have been declared clean when contractors to later dig into capped sites and expose workers and the community to contamination. Harden said the plan to begin construction on some shipyard parcels while the Navy removes radiological-contamination from shipyard sewers is "like a person jumping up and down on a bed that another person is trying to make."

But Cohen, who has aggressively pushed the project on Newsom’s behalf, countered that there is no scientific evidence to support such concerns. "It’s a very common situation," Cohen said. "It’s the basis for shipyard artists and the police being on the site for many years … It’s safe based on an extraordinary amount of data."

But Feinstein pointed to his experience working for the Golden Gate Audubon Society at the former Alameda Naval Station. He recalls how a remediation study was completed, but then an oil spill occurred at the site, which had been designated as a wildlife refuge.

"The military didn’t know about everything that happened and was stored on site, and it’s easy to miss a hot spot," he said. "And who’ll be monitoring when all these homes are built with deeds that restrict the renters and owners from digging in their backyards?"

Feinstein said he’s concerned that only Campos seemed to be asking questions and making specific requests for information around the proposed project’s financing

"Lennar is paying city staff and consultants and promising labor huge numbers of jobs. When you are throwing that much money around, it’s hard for people to resist — and the city has been co-opted," Feinstein said. "And how much analysis and resistance can you expect from city commissions when the Mayor’s Office is the driving force behind the project? So we don’t have a stringent review. The weakness of the strategy of ignoring our bridge concerns is that when we sue, we may raise a whole bunch of issues."

Arc Ecology director Saul Bloom says Chiu’s bridge proposal "screwed up the dialogue. We were close to a deal," Bloom claims. "But while that amendment allowed one board member to showboat, it prevented the problem from being solved."

Bloom is concerned that under the financing deal, the project won’t make any money for at least 15 years and will be vulnerable to penalties and bumps in the market — an equation that could lead the developer to build only market rate housing at the site.

"It’s a problematic analysis at best," he said.

"The bigger the development, the more it benefits people who have the capacity to address it — and that’s not the community," Bloom said. "So there’ll be more discussion of the bridge, and that’s where the horse-trading is going to be."

He also said the bridge has now taken on a symbolic value. "The thing about the bridge is that it’s not actually about the bridge any more," Bloom added. "It’s about Lennar telling people, ‘You will support us.’ If they get the bridge, it will give them free rein, an unencumbered capacity to do as they see fit. They are willing to make deals, but they have to have the bridge because it defeats the people who have been the most credible and visible — and then they have no opposition."

Booze or mismanagement?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Booze or mismanagement?

news@sfbg.com

The centennial celebration of the Bay to Breakers race and party is once again being targeted for a crackdown on alcohol. But many participants say the problem is mismanagement more than booze or public urination.

Organizers this month announced that all racers and revelers in possession of alcohol will be cited and possibly detained by the San Francisco Police Department. Those pushing floats or, as event spokesperson Sam Singer put it, “alcohol delivery devices,” will be cited as well.

After hearing concerns from residents along the race route and losing corporate sponsor ING, executives from organizer AEG said its decision to curb excessive drinking is an attempt to save the venerable event.

“We received significant complaints from neighbors and residents about people peeing, puking, and passing out on their doorsteps who were not registered to race but were there to take advantage of the event and stage an open street party at expense of the community,” Singer told us. “Bay to Breakers will be 100 [years old] next year and, unless we take steps to ensure public safety, we are concerned for its future.”

Drawing more than 100,000 spectators and racers annually, Bay to Breakers is one of the largest races in the world. Even greater than its size is the reputation it has garnered as one of the city’s premier street parties, where revelers wear ridiculous costumes or sometimes nothing at all.

That reputation caused ING to pull out, announcing that it “evaluates its sponsorship programs and strategies to make sure they align with the goals of the business. The decision to not renew our sponsorship was based simply on ING’s shifting priorities.”

The company and others associated with the event last year tried unsuccessfully to ban kegs and glass bottles along with alcohol carried on floats. But opposition from participants and area Sup. Ross Mirkarimi saved the party.

Yet Singer said the outcome of the failed ban only strengthened organizers’ conviction to prohibit alcohol in subsequent years. “After the ban was put forward, a negotiation between people who are the party element took place and we ultimately allowed alcohol that year,” Singer said. “However, because alcohol was originally banned and the ban was later eased, the confusion contributed to having a safer experience. Most of the drinking element stayed away, which led us to realize we have to prohibit alcohol to keep a certain type of people away from the race.”

That “certain type of people” who seek to uphold the lenient alcohol precedent last year banded together to form Citizens for the Preservation of Bay to Breakers. CPBB cofounder Edward Sharpless said the group considers the ban a simplistic distraction from AEG’s gross mismanagement of an event whose biggest problems could be easily mitigated.

“They have no respect for the event and no interest in preserving the San Francisco tradition of Bay to Breakers,” Sharpless said. “They have failed to provide an adequate amount of Porta Potties or set up appropriate barriers. It has nothing to do with booze or floats. They are merely trying to mask their incompetence by pointing the finger yet again.”

According to the race website, AEG provided only 705 portable toilets last year. Although that number may be sufficient for the 30,000 racers, it proved too few for the more than 100,000-person event. Even Mayor Gavin Newsom last year ran in the event without registering, he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

“They just aren’t addressing issues,” Sharpless said. “Their mind-set has been to support only the 30,000 registered runners, and once those people have gone by it’s everyone else’s problem. It doesn’t work like that.”

Wayne Lanier, a resident at 256 Ashbury St., last year tried to stop a young man from urinating in his yard, informing him that he would take a photograph and notify the police. “He responded with, ‘I don’t care, I’m from L.A.,'<0x2009>” Lanier told us. “They had an attitude that expressed their right to party and who were we to question it. It was just unbelievable.”

Sharpless said he wants to heed residents’ complaints. “The management is supposed to be professional, so something like public urination and a little bit of public drunkenness should be dealt with,” Sharpless said. “The priority is the neighbors, their private property, and their well-being. Just sticking your head in sand and turning a blind eye to the problem is not a solution.”

Sharpless and others met with officials in the Mayor’s Office July 12, seeking a dialogue between community groups, residents, city officials. and AEG. Some press coverage framed the meeting as simply about drunkenness, but Sharpless said mismanagement of the event was a key topic.

“The meeting was scheduled two weeks ago, before AEG decided to announce the ban,” Sharpless said. “The reason Sam announced the ban subsequently is because he wanted to make it look like it was about a ban on alcohol when really it was a focus group on neighborhood damage.”

AEG is expected to present a plan for next year’s event toward the end of summer. “We will be working with the police department on having a larger and more strategically placed police force to help ensure safety,” Singer said. “We are also planning on doing extensive outreach and advertising to inform the public of this year’s new rules.”

Sharpless remains confident that the party will go on. “It looks like we have a good, constructive start,” he said. “Of course we don’t support the alcohol ban. This isn’t just a 12K race. This is Bay to Breakers. This is a civic institution that represents the uniqueness of San Francisco, and we will fight to save it.”

Adachi and the real politics of pension reform

Sasha Cuttler
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Adachi and the real politics of pension reform

While downtown-oriented politicos and out-of-touch corporate columnists tout the political potential of targeting public employee unions with pay reductions and pension plan take-aways – and say the Public Defender Jeff Adachi may be mayoral material for doing so – they forget that electoral success requires coalitions, particularly in savvy San Francisco.

Unlike his cheerleaders, Adachi seems to understand this, downplaying the personal political upside when he talked to the Guardian and other media outlets. Sure, he might just be sandbagging, as his boosters hope he is, but there’s good reason to believe that this move could hurt Adachi’s chances of becoming mayor more than it helps it.

Much has been written and said about how Adachi’s move alienated labor unions and much of the progressive movement. “They urged me not to do it,” Adachi told the Guardian in the final days of his successful signature-gathering effort for a measure that would save the city about $167 million per year by taking that amount out of employees’ paychecks.

It’s not that pension reform isn’t needed. Indeed, San Francisco voters just approved a measure in June to increase the pension contributions for all new city employees, and politicians ranging from Sups. John Avalos and David Campos on the left to Sup. Sean Elsbernd and Mayor Gavin Newsom on the right all agree that more needs to be done, pledging to work with unions on the issue. And given the surly mood of the electorate, Adachi’s measure will probably pass.

But that still doesn’t make him mayoral material. Unlike Newsom, whose Care Not Cash initiative to take money from poor people helped propel him into Room 200, Adachi doesn’t have a strong constituency behind him, unlike the full strength of downtown and the Willie Brown machine that Newsom had behind him.

Downtown will never get behind a mayoral campaign for Adachi, a heavily tattooed defender of criminals who has a strong independent streak, even if they like the fact that he’s socking it to the public employee unions, an effort they helped fund. And progressives will now have a hard time ever trusting Adachi to work with them, seeing him now as someone hostile to political process and coalition-building, much like Newsom.

And even Newsom has come out against Adachi and his proposal, even though he loves the pension reform issue and shares some stylistic similarities with Adachi, including a certain political petulance. “Mayor Newsom has been clear that effective, long-term pension reform will come by doing it with our public employee unions, in partnership, not to and against them, in contrast to the Adachi measure,” Newsom Press Secretary Tony Winnicker wrote to the Guardian this week. It was a laughingly hypocritical statement from a mayor who has repeatedly demonized unions and refused to work cooperatively with them, but it’s a true statement nonetheless.

Finally, while socking it to public employees may be in vogue right now, during this moment of real economic uncertainty and political myopia, this sort of divisive politics might come to be seen more as opportunistic than courageous. And it’s hard to see how the approach that Adachi has taken will somehow add up to an effective political coalition capable of stealing the Mayor’s Office from wily politicians like Mark Leno, Leland Yee, or Aaron Peskin.

Consider the fact that even the Police Officers Association – the most conservative, downtown-oriented employee union in San Francisco – also opposes the Adachi measure and other efforts to blame the city’s fiscal problems on employees, rather than the large financial institutions that don’t even pay any kind of business tax to the city.

So I leave you with the words of POA President Gary Delagnes, writing in the May issue of the POA Journal, sounding a bit like a Guardian editorial writer on this politically sensitive issue: “Even more problematic is the rapidly developing notion that public employee pensions serve as the root of all evil, and are almost solely to blame for all of our economic woes.

“Opportunistic Wall Street insiders, politicians, and robber baron CEOs have manipulated and pilfered our country’s financial well-being. They have unconscionably – if not also illegally – lined their deep pockets with the hard-earned savings and pensions of the middle class working man and woman. Accountants from coast to coast have coached multi-millionaires on the art of avoiding paying their true tax obligations. Millions of people were allowed to qualify for mortgage loans by greedy bankers and mortgage brokers that led to trillions of dollars in bailout money. The result is a public incensed about fat cats taking advantage of them. Now, the backlash has set up public pensions and the unions that negotiated them as the scapegoats for his anger.

“Those of use who long ago made the decision to forgo large salaries in exchange for a life of public service, are now being portrayed as greedy and self-centered, taking unwarranted pensions and benefits after 30 years of service as firefighters, police officers, teachers, and nurses. These are shameful accusations, and utterly without merit.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, but unlike one of our editorials, this is the perspective of cops and other unions and progressive constituencies that will shape their actions in elections to come.

Newsom’s one bright spot (and even it’s a bit dingy)

Sasha Cuttler
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8

Covering Mayor Gavin Newsom’s devious exploits for this story last week, watching as the ever-ambitious Newsom sacrificed the city’s fiscal future on the altar of political expediency and his increasingly rigid anti-tax ideology, it seemed as if there was nothing remotely redeeming about this callow, self-serving man. But then he does this, appointing Cheryl Brinkman – a strong and respected advocate for promoting alternatives to the automobile – to the Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors.

I’m not saying this one act redeems Newsom, not even close. In fact, some have speculated that he’s trying to coopt a qualified progressive or burnish his green credentials, an echo of the responses to when he appointed San Francisco Bicycle Coalition director Leah Shahum to the MTA board a couple years ago, a tenure Newsom ended prematurely after they clashed over creating more car-free spaces. Or maybe he’s trying to head off support for a ballot measure being considered by the Board of Supervisors to split appointments to the MTA. Who knows with this guy?

Yet it’s also true that being open to democratizing the streets of San Francisco has been a bright spot in Newsom’s otherwise dismal record as mayor. And I think that’s because the cost of admission to this movement is so low. He’s embraced temporary car-free spaces, supported more bicycling, and moved forward other green initiatives – all of which have little to no cost involved and no real political downside. So it’s been easy for Newsom to strike green poses when he chooses, just as it was easy for him to make the supposedly “courageous” decision to legalize same-sex marriage, which involved no heavy lifting and greatly improved Newsom’s political prospects.

But we’re reaching a moment of truth for San Francisco, a point at which the easy answers are evaporating and the bill is coming due – just as Newsom prepares to leave San Francisco for Sacramento. After doubling Muni fares since he became mayor and reaching a level where they really can’t go up anymore without diminishing returns and serious political consequences, Newsom and his appointees have run out of easy options for maintaining Muni in an era of declining state and federal support.

Now, the choices aren’t as easy: charge motorists more for parking, permits, or driving in the most congested times or places; cut Muni service or raise rates more; find ever more ways to nickle-and-dime everyone with various fee increases; or find more general tax revenue, which Newsom has been steadfastly unwilling to do, even though the big banks and financial services companies that caused the Great Recession are exempt from city business taxes.

Brinkman, who tells us that the Mayor’s Office placed no conditions on the appointment, now has a tough job, as do all of this city’s elected and appointed officials. But this is the moment when they must have the courage to make the tough choices about what’s best for San Francisco, choices that Newsom has been unwilling to make.

Hotel Fairness Initiative qualifies for fall ballot

Sasha Cuttler
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10
Hotel Fairness Initiative qualifies for fall ballot

By Brittany Baguio

The Department of Elections has announced that the Hotel Fairness Initiative was approved for the November ballot. Labor and community groups last week turned in 10,544 signatures, a little more than the required 7,168 signatures needed to put an initiative on the ballot. The Department of Elections did a sample of 500 signatures to check the validity and reported that 478 of the 500 signatures sampled were valid, resulting in a 95.6 percent accuracy rate.

The Hotel Fairness Initiative would increase revenue by imposing a 2 percent hotel tax on San Francisco hotel rooms temporarily for 4 years, with an average surcharge of $3 per hotel room per night, and close loopholes that let some visitors avoid paying the hotel tax. The hotel tax is currently 14 percent. According to the Controller’s Office, if the Hotel Fairness Initiative passes, it is expected to raise $25 million a year in revenue.

The hotel tax is one of five measures proposed to help close the budget deficit, which we discuss in more detail in this week’s paper. Mayor Gavin Newsom has also placed a measure of the ballot to also close the loopholes that lets airline employees and those who book hotels online avoid paying hotel taxes, as the Hotel Fairness Initiative would also do, but it includes a provision that would invalidate the hotel tax if his measure gets more votes.

Supporters of the Hotel Fairness Initiative claim that online booking companies and airline companies have been using corporate loopholes that have cost the city about $6 million per year. In total, online booking companies have escaped paying $70 million in hotel taxes through its loophole of taking the hotel tax out of a portion of the money the hotel receives, rather than the total amount the customer pays.

For example, Internet booking companies would charge customers $200 for a room and then pay the hotel $170. Internet booking companies argue that the hotel tax comes from a portion of $170, instead of $200. Similarly, airlines have avoided paying hotel taxes by renting blocks of rooms for its flight crews and claiming that airline companies are protected by the Permanent Resident Exclusion law. This law was originally intended to help the homeless and states that individuals who occupy a room for at least 30 days are tax exempted. However, airlines have been taking advantage of this law by moving different flight crews in and out of their hotel rooms rather than an individual person occupying the room for 30 consecutive days that is implied by the law.

Opponents of the Hotel Fairness Initiative, such as the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Hotel Council, contend that the hotel tax would hurt tourism to San Francisco as well as cause job cuts. In a press release, Steve Falk, President & CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce said, “This misguided effort will discourage travel to San Francisco, hurt our city’s largest industry, and eliminate many of the union jobs the Labor Council seeks to protect. Raising city revenue at the expense of hotels and hospitality workers is not the answer to the city’s fiscal problems.”

A Hotel Council press release states that “the Hotel Fairness Initiative will lead to 7.3 jobs lost for every million dollars in revenue gained.” If this is true, about 182 jobs could be lost as a result of this initiative, offset by the city being able to save many public sector jobs and services with the revenue. The hotel industry already fluctuates in the number of positions available as a result of the market. According to California Labor Market Info’s latest data, the average amount of hotel jobs lost per month in 2009 was 143 jobs.

Although the Hotel Council and the Chamber of Commerce claim that the initiative would eliminate jobs, one of the biggest supporters of the hotel tax is UNITE HERE LOCAL 2, a union of hotel workers. UNITE HERE representative Ian Lewis emphasized that opponents of the issue are conveniently ignoring the lack of fairness in current hotel booking practices. “Hotel workers live in San Francisco,” Lewis told the Guardian, “We’re taxpayers like everyone else. We are in a severe budget crisis and everyone needs to carry their fair share.”

Community groups, retirees, and hospital workers all volunteered their time to collect signatures supporting the Hotel Fairness Initiative. Community groups such as UNITE HERE collected 1700 signatures, Keep the Arboretum Free collected 1000, and a collection of nonprofit groups collected more than 4000. With the efforts of these community groups, the coalition was able to collect an estimated 15,000 signatures.

Family health advocate for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, Bobbi Lopez, said she found that those who signed the petition saw the hotel tax as a necessary step in closing the budget deficit, “They understood that the necessity of fighting the cuts, particularly the cuts to MUNI, to parks, and to hospitals,” Lopez told us, “I think that they were getting the idea that in desperate budget times, we need a temporary solution and long term solution and that’s exactly what the Hotel Fairness Initiative is.”

Community groups remain optimistic that this grass roots effort will pass. Brenda Barrows, a health care provider at San Francisco General Hospital, told the Guardian, “My hope is that in November it passes and the city’s financial situation gets better so that people who live in the city don’t have to suffer and also people who work for the city don’t have to suffer.”

Lopez told us she thinks that the initiative will pass if there is an ongoing effort on the issue. “We want to remind folks that this is just the beginning and now we have to embark on a long term campaign,” Lopez told us, “so it’s really about sustaining the energy that we had on June 1 when we kicked off and reminding folks that its going to necessitate all the same volunteers to work together and make it reality.”

 

Board accepts EIR, but vows to amend Candlestick-Shipyard plan

Mary Magee
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14

Text by Sarah Phelan, images by Luke Thomas


At the end of a ten-hour hearing to appeal the final environmental impact report  for the city and Lennar’s massive Candlestick-Shipyard redevelopment project, the Board voted 8-3 to accept the FEIR, with only Sups. John Avalos, Chris Daly and Eric Mar voting to reverse certification of what they said was a flawed document.


But the vote does not mean the Board has voted to accept the city and the developer’s final redevelopment plan. That plan will come before the Board on July 27, and the supervisors are expected to introduce a slew of amendments, in addition to  five amendments that Board President David Chiu introduced earlier this week.


These amendments are intended to address longstanding concerns about toxins at the shipyard, limited liability on the part of the developer, the questionable need for a bridge over Yosemite Slough, the reality that Bayview residents may be cut out of any upcoming jobs, and the desire to nail down efforts to use public power at the site


“We can’t do the amendments here, we are frozen out, all we can do is an up and down vote on the EIR for now,” Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian last night. 
Mirkarimi anticipates that the Board will seek additional mitigations, such as requiring liquidated damages to shore up a community benefits agreement that Labor entered into with Lennar in May 2008.


Mirkarimi said the Board would also seek to increase workforce development benefits.
“Thirty percent of the target workforce population are ex-offenders, so while they might get training, currently they won’t get jobs other than construction,” Mirkarimi observed.


Mirkarimi was proud of the Public Power amendment that Chiu has already lintroduced, pointing to an ordinance that he and then Sup. Gerardo Sandoval introduced and Mayor Gavin Newsom signed into law, in March 2006. This public power ordinance established that “where feasible, the City shall be the electricity provider for new City developments, including military bases and development projects.”


“PG& E was ripped when we pushed that through,” Mirkarimi said.


During yesterday’s marathon hearing, the supervisors grilled city staff on issues that have proved to be key sticking points, as the city seeks to win final project approvals, even though they cannot address these issues with amendments until the July 27 meeting.


The Board questioned the wisdom of moving forward with development on the Shipyard, as the Navy continues to clean up radiological contamination and other toxins at the site, including Parcel E-2, which contains some of the nastiest pollution at the yard.


“Why not just wait until the CERCLA process is completed?” Sup. Campos asked, referring to the fact that the Navy is responsible for shipyard clean up, under CERCLA, which is also known as the Superfund Act.


Campos question came after acclaimed environmental scientist Wilma Subra and national environmental human rights lawyer Monique Harden, challenged the sanity of having the Navy digging out toxins while a developer simultaneously installs infrastructure at the same site.


Subra, who works in Superfund sites throughout the U.S, warned the Board that it’s very common to find contamination at these sites after they have been declared clean.


“So, the number of samples isn’t the magic answer,” Subra said, referring to the city’s constant refrain that the Navy has taken thousands of samples at the site. Subra also warned that it is not uncommon for a contractor to dig into an area that has been capped, thereby potentially exposing workers and the community to contamination and resulting in legal stand-offs, as various parties argue as to who has responsibility to fix the resulting mess.


Harden, who is based in New Orleans but also has an office in D.C., expressed concern over the plan to begin construction on some shipyard parcels, even as the Navy continues to remove radiologically contaminated sewers and other deep infrastructure at the site.
“That’s like a person jumping up and down on a bed that another person is trying to make up,” Harden said


But Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s chief economic advisor countered that there was no scientific evidence to support Subra or Harden’s concerns.


“It’s a very common situation, especially on brownfields,” Cohen said, (though the Shipyard is a Superfund site that’s been contaminated with radiological waste that was sandblasted off ships returning from a Bikini Atoll atomic testing experiment gone awry.)


“It’s the basis for shipyard artists and the police being on the site for many years,” Cohen continued. “It’s safe based on an extraordinary amount of data.”


But Cohen did agree that language in Chiu’s Parcel E-2 amendment should be changed from “should” to “shall” to indicate that city oversight is a requirement, not a request, when it comes to final decisions over the transfer of this particular parcel.


Mark Ripperda of U.S. EPA assured the Board that his agency is not going to permit transfer of parcels for development until cleanup is completed.
“We are not going to allow any transfer until we are convinced it’s safe,” Ripperda said.


Sup. Eric Mar chastised the EIR for its apparent failure to adequately discuss the impacts of the proposed development on schools in the surrounding area.


“There is less discussion of the impacts on schools than there is of the A-Bomb, which was held at the Shipyard for 1 to 2 days,” Mar said. “The analysis seems very weak.”


And Daly expressed frustration that the Board was being asked to take a decision when it lacked sufficient information about and understanding of the project.


“How do we know it’s safe? ” Daly asked, noting that, “Money talks, bullshit walks.”
(His point resonated as City staff scrambled to find key information within the 7,000 pages of comments and responses in the massive FEIR documents, and Amy Brownell of the city’s Public Health Department rattled off a series of measurements and schedules that few on the Board seemed to understand.)


“The risks are acceptable,” Brownell said. “And the only people allowed on the property [during the development] will be the ones doing the work.”


The Board also challenged the need for a bridge over the environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough, especially in the wake of the June 2010 election in which Santa Clara voters approved building a new stadium for the 49ers near Great America.


“One reason I’ve been given for [the need for the bridge] is the financial viability of this project,” Campos said.


Cohen replied that if the city does not to build the bridge, “it elevates the financial risk.”


“Parcel C [on the shipyard] has been zoned for green tech, and for major employers, having that direct connectedness to BART and the T-Third is very important.”


Cohen also indicated that, thanks to the project’s huge reliance on tax increment financing, the loss of the bridge would translate into lost property tax revenues.


“Some of the repayment comes from generation of tax increment financing, so the failure to have a bridge here, degrades the potential of property tax revenues, and so you get much less tax increment,” Cohen stated.


The Board also expressed concerned that under the current terms of the deal they are now set to consider July 27, the developer has limited liability—an arrangement that has got supervisors worried that the city, and Bayview residents whose increased property taxes will help pay for the development, could end up on the wrong end of the financial hook.


Campos pointed to the disposition and development agreement (DDA) that the city drew up with Lennar.
“I’m specifically worried about a provision that on the face of it limits the developer’s liability,” Campos said, pointing to language that seems to say that “monetary damages are inappropriate”—conditions that Campos deemed, “Very unusual.


Cohen responded that the deal reflects the reality that, “the Navy, not Lennar is responsible for the cleanup.”
He added that the city retains the legal ability to sue, various remedies and, ultimately, “the right of reverter” (which folks call the “nuclear option” since it involves kicking out the developer, but losing everything in the process.)


“This is an incredibly frontloaded project,  in which we have the ability to terminate the developer at the cost of millions of dollars,” Cohen said.


But while the city and the developer ultimately affirm EIR certification, the decision left the Bayview community deeply divided, with many concerned that the FEIR failed to address their concerns, while others rejoiced, believing that they will benefit from jobs that will be created during the development’s 10-15 year build out and beyond. Only time will tell how it all plays out, but stay tuned as the Board prepares to try and make the plan the best it can in face of all these competing concerns.


 

Bad faith

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Bad faith

steve@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom and his business allies are actively trying to sabotage the various revenue measures that have been put forth by the labor movement and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors, employing deceptive rhetoric, sneaky tactics, and a refusal to bargain in good faith.

In fact, Newsom — the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor — is so averse to supporting anything that could be called a “tax” that he rejected a hard-won compromise measure created by powerful developers, affordable housing advocates, a pro-business think tank, the building trades, and his own directors of housing and economic development.

Just as that story was breaking in the New York Times (produced by Bay Citizen) on July 9, members of the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee discovered that Newsom’s proposed ballot measure to close loopholes in the city’s hotel tax that favored airline employees and online travel companies — a widely supported change, but one worth just $6 million per year — contains language that would nullify any increases in the hotel tax. Earlier in the week, labor unions turned in signatures on an initiative to increase the hotel tax by 2 percent, which would bring in more than $30 million per year.

“This poison pill is an intentionally deceptive, underhanded move,” Gabriel Haaland, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which sponsored the hotel tax, told us. “It’s so frustrating. It’s not even a good faith fight. He’s trying to create confusion and fool the voters. If our measure passes fair and square, it should be implemented.”

Meanwhile, Newsom and business groups have been attacking a reform measure by Board President David Chiu that would make the currently flat payroll tax more progressive, exempt more small businesses from paying it, and create a commercial rent tax to spread the tax burden more widely than the 10 percent of businesses who now pay tax to the city.

Critics complained that the measure would hurt local businesses — but that’s just not true. The city’s Office of Economic Analysis concluded that Chiu’s original proposal would have no effect on private sector jobs and would generate $34 million annually for the city, preserving some government jobs and spending.

Then Chiu amended the measure to spare even more small businesses. Now the OEA says that the measure would actually create private sector jobs — and still bring $28 million in to the city. Yet Newsom and the business community are still withholding their support.

This trio of Machiavellian moves comes just a week after Newsom pulled out of budget negotiations with board progressives concerning about $40 million in board add-backs to programs that Newsom proposed to cut after they wouldn’t agree to his precondition that they withdraw unrelated measures proposed for the November ballot, such as splitting appointments to the Rent, Recreation and Park, and Municipal Transportation Agency boards and requiring police officers to do foot patrols.

The series of events has led many progressives to say that conservative ideological blinders — a knee-jerk opposition to anything that saves government jobs and services or that Republicans might criticize — is the only logical explanation for the intransigent stance adopted downtown and by Newsom.

“It’s ideological. It’s not economic, and it’s not even political,” said Calvin Welch, the affordable housing activist who helped negotiate the transfer tax compromise with developer Oz Erickson, San Francisco Planning Urban Research Association director Gabriel Metcalf, Mayor’s Office of Housing Director Doug Shoemaker, and others.

That measure would have created a transfer tax on sales of properties over $875,000 and generated approximately $50 million annually for affordable housing (funds that were drastically reduced in Newsom’s proposed 2010-11 budget) while cutting in half the current requirements and fees on market-rate developers to create below-market-rate units. The plan would have stimulated both types of housing and created desperately needed construction work — an approach those involved called an elegant solution to several problems.

“To me, this was a win-win, solving two problems that are each a big deal,” Metcalf told us. “I don’t know what his reasons were for not supporting it. I was surprised.”

But Welch said, “It collapsed straight up because the mayor didn’t want to support a tax.” Although Newsom told the Times it was because there wasn’t broad enough consensus yet, “the mayor’s reason is whole-cloth bullshit,” Welch said, noting the role of the Mayor’s Office in brokering the deal. “The mayor walks away from it because everyone wasn’t in the room? Well, it’s your room, motherfucker. Show some leadership.”

Newsom Press Secretary Tony Winnicker refused to discuss these issues by phone, responding to our written inquires by noting that Newsom opposes taxes and thinks the best way to address budget deficits are privatizing city services and pension reform (although he opposes Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s initiative, the only pension reform measure on the fall ballot).

“The mayor is opposed to the Board of Supervisors’ proposals to increase taxes because they’re not needed to balance the budget and they will strangle our still young economic recovery,” Winnicker wrote, refusing to answer follow-up questions or support a statement about Chiu’s measure that the OEA concludes is not accurate.

Like many political observers of all stripes, those from downtown and progressive circles, Welch criticized Newsom for his lack of engagement with city business and its long-term fiscal outlook, contrasting him with former Mayor Willie Brown, who met regularly with former Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano even as the two ran a bitter campaign for mayor against one another in 1999. “They dealt with the city’s business like two adults who cared about the city,” he said.

Welch acknowledged that there was still work to be done building political support for the transfer tax measure. He and other progressives would have had to win over city employee unions who wouldn’t like the budget set-aside aspect, and Erickson and Metcalf would need to placate some of their downtown allies who oppose taxes on ideological grounds. But given how downtown groups are behaving right now, that might not have been an easy sell.

“There are members of the small business community that are averse to any taxes,” said Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the city’s Office of Small Business and staffer to the Small Business Commission, which was withholding a recommendation on the Chiu measure but planned to meet again to consider it July 12 (look for an update on the sfbg.com Politics blog). She said the small business community is having tough times and “they are just not sensitive to keeping city workers employed.”

Larger commercial interests are being even more forceful in opposing the revenue measures. While a parade of workers, social service providers, and progressive activists testifying at the July 9 Budget Committee hearing implored supervisors to place all the proposed revenue measures on the ballot, representatives from the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) and San Francisco Chamber of Commerce were the only two speakers urging supervisors to drop the measures and focus instead on creating private sector jobs.

“You’re trying to create a little revenue here and it’s not going to work,” said Ken Cleaveland, director of BOMA SF, arguing that big banks and financial services companies — entities exempt from the payroll tax that Chiu is hoping to target with the commercial rent tax — will buy their buildings to avoid paying the tax. “They aren’t going to create more jobs and they really aren’t going to create more revenue.”

Yet Chiu noted that it was the business community and fiscal conservatives who pushed to create the Office of Economic Analysis, whose work they have regularly used to attack progressive legislation. Now that the office has concluded that a piece of progressive legislation is good for the local economy, Chiu told Cleaveland and the Chamber spokesperson Rob Black at the hearing, “I ask you to respect the work this office has done.”

Black said the Chamber board will consider Chiu’s amended legislation, but said businesses are in no mood to help the city. “How many times have you gone to your neighborhood merchant and had them say, ‘Gee, my rent’s too cheap’?<0x2009>” he said during his testimony.

Yet Chiu said landlords of small tenants (those paying less than $65,000 in rent per year) are exempt from the rent tax and only 26 percent of SF businesses would pay any city business tax under his plan. “I hope the mayor will support this proposal and the business community will give it a good look,” Chiu said as the hearing ended.

At the beginning of the hearing, Chiu framed the dire situation facing San Francisco, citing Controller’s Office figures showing this year’s $500 million budget deficit (out of a $6 billion total budget) will be followed by a $700 million deficit next year and a $800 million gap the following budget cycle as a result of a deep structural budget imbalance.

“We have budget deficits as far as the eye can see,” Chiu said at the hearing. “We have to consider measures that will provide more stable sources of revenue.”

He also noted that city employee unions have agreed to give back about $250 million in salary and had their ranks reduced by about 2,000 workers in the last two years. So he and the other progressive supervisors say it’s time for the rest of San Francisco to help address the problem.

“We, as a city, should not be trying to balance this budget simply through cutting,” Sup. David Campos said.

Sup. John Avalos, the committee chair, amended his transfer tax measure in the wake of Newsom’s rejection of the deal by making it a simple 2 percent tax on properties that sell for more than $5 million, and 2.5 percent tax on properties over $10 million. He estimates it will bring in about $25 million per year from the city’s wealthiest corporations and landlords.

“That’s who we’re socking it to,” Avalos told us, saying he was disappointed the compromise fell through. “The amendment is going to be more progressive than what was originally planned.”

Even Sup. Sean Elsbernd, a strong fiscal conservative who announced early in the hearing, “You want to do that [balance future budgets] by adding taxes, but I want to do it through ongoing service cuts,” later told the Guardian that he was intrigued by the amendments Avalos and Chiu made to their measures and has not yet taken a position on them.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is also sponsoring a measure to increase the city’s tax on parking lot operators from 25 percent to 35 percent, the first change to that tax in 30 years, and will include valet parking for the first time. The measure would bring in up to $24 million per year, and OEA analysis shows it would decrease the number of cars trips by 1.3 percent, another benefit.

SFMTA supports the measure, with board member Cameron Beach testifying that the money will be used to subsidize Muni and “it links the use of private automobiles and is consistent with the city’s transit-first policy.” Mirkarimi, who chairs the Transportation Authority, also has proposed a $10 local vehicle license fee surcharge that would bring in another $5 million per year for Muni.

All the revenue measures require six votes by the full Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to consider them July 20, after which they would need a simple majority approval by voters in November to take effect.

The mayor has the authority to directly place measures on the ballot, so the committee hearing on his hotel tax loophole measure and a $39 million general obligation bond that he’s proposing to create a revolving loan fund for private sector seismic improvements were mere formalities, so supervisors criticized aspects of each but were unable to make changes.

Avalos even grudgingly acknowledged the hotel tax poison pill was an effective way to kill that revenue source, saying at the hearing, “This is very smart. I don’t agree with it, but it’s very smart.”

Haaland was less charitable, criticizing a provision designed to confuse voters. “This kind of move means both measures won’t pass because now we have to oppose [Newsom’s measure],” he said, criticizing the mayor for running away from the hard decisions facing the city. “He won’t be around next year, when we have an even bigger structural budget deficit, to clean up this mess. Absent new revenue sources, this city starts to fall apart.”

Board votes on Candlestick-Shipyard project EIR appeal today

Mary Magee
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3

All images by Luke Thomas

The Chronicle’s suggestion that the city’s massive Candlestick-shipyard project may be facing smoother sailing seems like wishful thinking to those who attended a July 12 noontime rally that was organized by POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) and featured two Louisiana-based advocates who protested the project’s EIR and shared many of the longstanding concerns about project cleanup, infrastructure and financing.

The Chronicle was of course referring to five amendments to the city’s massive redevelopment proposal that Board President David Chiu introduced during yesterday’s July 12 meeting of the Board’s Land Use committee. The Chron interpreted these amendments as a sign that Chiu plans to approve the project’s environmental impact report, which comes before the Board today, after several groups appealed the final EIR that the Planning Commission approved last month.

But while city officials fear the developer will walk, if the Board does not approve the final EIR, some environmental advocates hope a better plan could be reached.

At POWER’s July 12 rally, nationally acclaimed environmental scientist Wilma Subra called on the District Attorney’s environmental justice department to “step up.” Subra claimed that the project’s final EIR “failed to evaluate and assess the cumulative impacts of exposure to children, adults and the environment as a result of exposure to all of the chemicals at the site.”

Monique Harden, co-director and attorney for Advocates for Environmental Health Rights (AEHR) of New Orleans, Louisiana, pointed to “deep flaws in the environmental regulation system,” as a reason why low-income communities of color should be concerned about the proposed plan.
“Why in the middle of an environmental crisis caused by BP in the Gulf am I coming to San Francisco?” Harden asked. “Because San Francisco is providing unequal environmental protection to its residents. As a resident of New Orleans, I’m concerned that San Francisco is careening towards making a decision that can crush the future of Bayview Hunters Point,”

But as local Bayview resident Jose Luis Pavon began talking about seeing gentrification occur in his lifetime within San Francisco, he and others got shouted down by a group of yellow and green-shirted project supporters, who were led by a guy calling himself Bradley Bradley and Alice Griffith public housing resident Stormy Henry.
“This is the devil’s trick in the last hour,” Henry said of the POWER rally.

Henry shared her heartfelt belief that if the Board approves the project’s final EIR, she and other Alice Griffith residents will get desperately needed new housing units. even if it takes some years to build them. Others in her group were unable to answer media questions: they had difficulty speaking in English, but were clutching neatly written statements in support of the project that they later read aloud at the Board’s Land Use Committee hearing.

As these project supporters prepared to move inside to attend the Land Use Committee meeting and lobby supervisors for their suppor, D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly shared his concerns that the Navy has a demonstrated history of finding nasty things at the shipyard years after they say everything’s clean, and that this pattern could jeopardize the plan.

“This happened at Parcel A,” Kelly said, referring to the first and only parcel of land that the Navy transferred to the city for development in 2004. “Since then, Parcel A has gotten smaller and as they found stuff on sites they then renamed as new parcels, like UC-3, which has radiological contamination in a sewer line that goes into the Bayview. So, that means the contamination is now in the Bayview.”

Kelly is concerned that the city is trying push through EIR certification before the Navy completes an environmental impact statement (EIS) related to shipyard cleanup activities. “The EIS is supposed to go before the EIR, as far as I know,” Kelly said

At the Land Use Committee meeting, Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes Candlestick and the Shipyard,said, the project was about “revitalization and opportunity.”

She noted that the certification of the project’s final EIR has been appealed to full Board’s July 13 meeting. She further noted that she intends to introduce legislation next week to address concerns that Ohlone groups have expressed.

The next two hours were full of testimony from a bevy of city officials, beginning with Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor in the Office of Workforce and Economic Development.

“Every single element [of this project] has been discussed and debated at countless meetings,” Cohen claimed, as he sought to quell fears that the community had not been properly consulted with over the plan. “As we get closer to a vote, all of a sudden pieces of paper start circulating, criticizing project and suggesting that community involvement just began,” he continued. ” That’s factually untrue.”

He also sought to reassure the supervisors that the Board will have a say-so as to whether the city accepts early transfer of shipyard parcels from the Navy.
“Neither the city nor the developer have any specific authority over the cleanup,” Cohen said, noting that the cleanup is governed by specific rules set out in CERCLA [Comprehensice Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, aka Superfund].

“Regardless of what we do, CERCLA will continue to be the regulatory tool,” Cohen said. ” I urge you not to be confused by CEQA and CERCLA.”

So, how can the city implement Prop. P, which voters overwhelmingly supported in 2000, urging the Navy to clean up the shipyard to highest attainable standards.
“Prior to any transfer, US EPA and DTSR have to concur in writing that the shipyard is safe,” Cohen explained, noting that, thanks to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the Navy has already spent over $700 million on shipyard cleanup efforts.

“We have 250 artists at the shipyard….but not a shred of scientific evidence to say that the shipyard is not safe,” Cohen claimed. “It’s safe to develop the shipyard in precisely the manner we are proposing.”

When Sup. Eric Mar raised the question of radiological contamination on Parcel UC-3, Cohen downplayed Mar’s concerns.
“The exposure levels are lower than watching TV,” Cohen claimed. “The primary source is very low level radiation from glow-in-the-dark dials.”
Indicating a map that showed a network of old sewers (in blue) and old fuel lines (in red) under the entire development area, Cohen said, “The radiological contamination that has and will be addressed at the shipyard is quite low level. You have radiation, you get nervous. We asked EPA to come out and do a scan to deal with the issue.”

IBI Group’s David Thom, the lead architect and planner for the project said the plan is designed “to connect new development back into the Bayview.”
“And this plan connects the Bayview through to the water.”

Tiffany Bohee, Cohen’s deputy in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, insisted that project’s proposed bridge is better than Arc Ecology’s proposed alternative route, which would not involve constructing a bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough.
“The non-bridge route increases the number of intersections,” Bohee said, seeking to turn an environmental question (the impact of bridge on wildlife and nature experience) into a public safety issue.”
She claimed the BRT route over bridge was 5-10 minutes faster than Arc’s proposed alternative, “because there are fewer turns, it can go at higher speeds.” But Arc’s studies suggest the BRT route over the bridge is only a minute faster, and would cost over $100 million.

Bohee noted that $50 million from the sale of 23 acres of parkland for condos at the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area (CPSRA) will be “set aside for the state, and won’t be able to be raided by the city,” with $40 million going to improvements, and $10 million to ongoing operation and maintenance costs.

She also cited additional benefits that the project would bring to the community, including thousands of construction job opportunities.

“We are working with City Build to make sure they are for local residents,” Bohee said.“And there is absolutely no displacement for the rebuild,” Bohee continued referring to proposal to place current Alice Griffith public housing iresidents n new units, on a 1-1 basis

Eric Mar said he was impressed by many elements of the plan, but continued to express reservations.
“I’m still concerned that is seems to serve newcomers as proposed to existing residents,” he said. “And I’m still not convinced that the bridge is the best for existing residents.”

Rhonda Simmons, who works in Cohen’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development,  tried to flesh out details of the project’s job creation promises.
“The most immediate workforce is related to the construction site, and as you know, this project goes over a 15-20 year span,” Simmons said, pointing to green tech and retail as job opportunities that will exist once the project is built.

Mar expressed concern that the jobs may not be at the level of D.10 residents
“How is this gonna bring their skill level up?” he asked.
“The idea is that training gives first level entry at a variety of building trades,” Simmons said, pointing to the project’s large solar component.

“What about women?” Sup. Maxwell asked
Simmons pointed to retail opportunities,
“The idea of the training is to give folks job readiness skills, like getting there and showing up on time,” she said

Mar wanted to know who would have oversight of monitoring and compliance.
“In the city we have a tapestry of folks who do contract compliance,” she said. “The oversight will come from a variety of places.”

After Kurt Fuchs of the Controller’s Office listed the estimated economic benefits of the project, Board President David Chiu observed that the city is “at a crossroads.”

“I do not plan to prejudge,” Chiu continued, as he introduced his five amendments to regulate the Parcel E-2 cleanup, the size of a proposed bridge over the Yosemite Slough, expand healthcare access in the Bayview, create a workforce development fund and lay the groundwork for bringing public power to the project.

During public comment, Bayview resident Fred Naranjo pleaded for project support.  

“Please don’t let the train leave the station,” Naranjo said. “If Lennar leaves, the Bayview will never be developed.”

And Tim Paulson, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council expressed hope that an agreement was getting closer.
“There really is a path to getting this done,” Paulson said. “This really is a model project in many ways for the rest of the United States.”
But D. 10 resident Linda Shaffer with the Yerba Buena chapter of the California Native Plant society indicated the huge pressure exerted on folks to support the project
“I do not want to be classified as an opponent, but we have concerns,” Shaffer said, noting that her group has filed an appeal of the project’s final EIR.

And while the Sierra Club’s Arthur Feinstein thanked Chiu for proposing to reduce the size of the bridge, he pointed out that Chiu’s amendment wasn’t really a compromise.
“That’s because it’s still a bridge,” Feinstein said, as he explained how noisy the area surrounding the slough will become as traffic whizzes by.

Connie Ford of the Labor Council accused some project critics of being “disrespectful.”
Ford took particular issue with claims that the project will gentrify the area
“The neighborhood is changing,” she said. “Since 1990, African American families have been leaving the Bayview in huge numbers. I encourage you to see this project as a good plan.”

Gabe Metcalfe of SPUR expressed his unconditional support for the plan,
“This plan is being asked to fix a huge number of problems,” he said.
Noting that the bridge continues to be a sticking point, Metcalfe said he sees opposition to every transportation project these days.
“We seem to be in a moment when you can’t build anything without it being opposed.”

But other speakers from the Sierra Club reiterated their stance that there are better and viable options to the bridge, noting that it is too costly, and that the surrounding community and wildlife would be better off without it.”

All these competing viewpoints suggest that whatever decision the Board makes today, it will take some time and create plenty of uproar. So, here’s hoping the Board votes in a way that will truly benefit the D. 10 community, not career politicians, city officials and out-of-state developers. It’s about time.

Sunday Streets creates public benefits from private labors

Sasha Cuttler
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2

By Kristen Peters

San Francisco locals will take to the streets this weekend as main roads in the Mission neighborhood are closed to automobiles for the sixth installment of Sunday Streets. On July 11, a three-mile route from 17th and Valencia to Dolores Park to Potrero Avenue will be car-free from 10 am until 3pm.

Taken from Bogota’s weekly ciclovía, in which nearly 100 miles of city streets are reserved for pedestrians and other recreationalists, Sunday Streets began in San Francisco almost two years ago. Since then, the tradition has made its way to other California cities including Los Angeles and Oakland.

“In San Francisco we have our own unique style,” event coordinator Susan King, who works for the nonprofit group Livable City, said. “We have different routes and we hit different neighborhoods year after year. In each neighborhood, the featured events have their own flair.”

This Sunday, revelers can look forward to performances by Grupo Azteca as well as capoeira and salsa dancing lessons, not to mention the countless restaurants in the area opening their doors early to the public. While the event has some support from the city and its San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, mostly in the form of permit fee waivers, it is run by Livable City and funded from corporate donations.

“Our corporate sponsors provide everything from durable goods, in-kind donations and cold, hard cash,” King said.

City officials have even curtailed helping with hanging “no parking” signs, leaving that task to volunteers from the SF Bicycle Coalition. That job was usually designated to the San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic, but they have now stopped providing that service to an event that Mayor Gavin Newsom trumpets as something he’s bringing to the people. But King still calls Sunday Streets a good example of a public-private partnership.

“Everybody brings something to the table,” King said. “It’s a real cooperative entity with everyone pulling together to produce something really special.”

According to King, the benefits are widespread. Not only is it refreshing for the public to ditch their cars for a few hours, but it also reinvigorates the local economy. “It’s a real boom for the city,” King said. “Lots of people on the street means lots of eating. It’s good for business and good for the community.”

Acting executive director for the SF Bicycle Coalition Renee Rivera said that the Mission in particular has benefited from the crowds at Sunday Streets. “Everyone is enjoying the outdoor activities the event has to offer but, at the same time, are going to get ice cream, stopping for tacos or getting to enjoy all the merchants on 24th and Valencia,” Rivera said.

There are three more Sunday Street events following the Mission neighborhood closure. The Great Highway and areas of Golden Gate Park will be closed on August 22 followed by the Western Addition on September 19. The series will conclude on October 24 with the closure of the Civic Center and Tenderloin areas.

Newsom’s ambitions trump local needs

Zelda Bronstein
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1
Newsom’s ambitions trump local needs

I guess that’s nothing new, and I could have written the same headline dozens of times over the past couple of years. But in this case, the Bay Citizen has a nice scoop — Newsom personally scuttled a deal that would have created a $50 million annual stream of affordable housing money because he didn’t want to be on record supporting any new taxes.


The Bay Citizen story, which also ran in the New YorkTimes, doesn’t go quite as far as to say that the tax issue scuttle the whole thing, but I think it’s pretty clear that’s what happened. The deal — a highly unusual agreement between warring parties — involved an increase in the real-estate transfer tax on high-end buildings. The private developers agreed to support it — if the housing advocates would allow some of the money to be used to subsidize the requirement that developers build affordable housing along with market-rate units.


I’m no so into subsidizing private housing developers, but the money would be coming from people who sell high-end properties. At any rate, whether it was a good deal in the end or not, Newsom’s own staff was involved in making it happen — and the mayor only killed it for one reason.


He doesn’t want his Republican opponent this fall to accuse him of raising taxes.


That’s a hell of a way to run a city. 

SF business community just opposes government

Sasha Cuttler
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21

Mayor Gavin Newsom and his business community allies often accuse progressive members of the Board of Supervisors of being too “ideological” in their proposals, particularly when they involve revenue or regulations. But a looming battle over reforming the city’s business tax – one of three new revenues set for a special Budget & Finance Committee meeting tomorrow (7/9) at 11:30 am – shows that an ideological aversion to taxes of any kind drive Newsom and the business community more than their stated concern for “jobs” and the “economy.”

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu crafted his measure – which creates a progressive structure for the currently flat payroll taxes and uses small commercial rent tax to spread the tax burden among more businesses (only 10 percent of which now pay the payroll tax) — specifically to decrease the business tax burden on small businesses and protect private sector jobs while also bringing in about $35 million more into the city, which will save some city jobs and thus help the local economy.

City Economist Ted Egan and the Office of Economic Analysis confirmed that Chiu’s carefully crafted measure does just that, noting that it was based on recommendations made last month in a report by his office and two private accounting firms that was jointly commissioned by both Chiu and Newsom.

“The proposed legislation modifies the Progressive Payroll option in the Controller’s report, to achieve greater revenue growth while minimizing private sector job growth,” concludes Egan’s analysis. And that’s the idea of this legislation, to save some city jobs and services without hurting the private sector. Egan found this tax reform would on balance have no impact on private sector jobs.

But the Small Business Commission, driven by anti-government zealots in their community, wants even greater concessions and to minimize government revenues, demands that Chiu is now considering giving in to, with sources close to the negotiations saying they will amend the plan to exempt more small businesses and lower the revenue projection to more like $28 million.

“There are members of the small business community that are averse to any taxes,” Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the city’s Office of Small Business (which staffs the commission), told us.

She said the commission isn’t opposing or supporting the measure, and while she said the business community isn’t ideologically opposed to government, she did admit that “they are just not sensitive to keeping city workers employed.”

And that’s a terribly selfish and self-defeating attitude that hurts the local economy and the services we all depend on. The problem is the small business community — which is supported by the Bay Guardian and beloved by all as a key job creator — is being used by conservative ideologues and large corporations and lured into joining their anti-government crusade. This has to change, and this legislation is a good opportunity to talk about the real ideological barriers that are hindering common sense solutions to this city’s problems.

Sorting out the Adachi initiative

Zelda Bronstein
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37
Sorting out the Adachi initiative

Lots of press on the Adachi pension-reform measure, a proposal that would amount to cutting the pay of city workers during a recession. It turns out even Gavin Newsom doesn’t like the plan:


The mayor also attacked Adachi’s pension plan, arguing that the public defender never discussed it with the employee unions, city officials or others affected by the measure and that it could have “unintended consequences” for the city.


And while I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that the Adachi measure “could reshape national politics,” Randy Shaw makes a good point:


Adachi’s measure would join with Sean Elsbernd MUNI charter amendment to create a one-two punch against public employees on San Francisco’s November ballot. The national media will have a field day with the prospect of “liberal” San Francisco, and Nancy Pelosi’s home turf, voting to cut public employee compensation.

While this is not the message Adachi wants to send, it will likely be the one that is heard. It emerges at a time when the entire Republican Party and corporate Democrats are in a full-fledged media campaign to redirect public anger over the fiscal crisis toward excessively compensated public employees, and away from banks, oil companies, hedge fund managers, and an under taxed and poorly regulated private sector.


Shaw also says that the campaign will “bitterly divide progressives,” and I’m not sure it has to turn out that way. There’s always the danger that liberal voters who work in the private sector, and are struggling to keep their jobs and health insurance, will be seduced by the notion that public-sector employees are too well paid already. And the donwtown folks, who will soon be fully on board with the Adachi measure, will seek to divide the nonprofit sector and labor by arguing that nonprofit workers don’t get the same benefits as city employees — and city funding for nonprofits is threatened by the budget deficit. Both those things are true, but it’s also true that there’s a growing movement to challenge that approach. This battle will be a test for the city’s progressive movement, but I think the overwhleming majority of progressive leaders, activists and nonprofits will stick together and oppose Adachi.


The more important political impact will be felt in the tightly contested district-election contests, where city-employee pensions could join the sit-lie measure as wedge issues that the moderates will use against progressives. When Adachi came down to see us, I asked him if he was worried about that; he didn’t really seem to think it was important.


But there’s a reason we talk about a “progressive movement” (and don’t start on the “machine” stuff again, we had that debate over here). We all ought to be concerned about how one campaign affects the larger goal of building a better and more sustainable city. And while I hate to say it, I have to agree with Gavin Newsom: This thing could have “unintended consequences.”


 

Ariel, part 2: Think Pink!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Ariel, part 2: Think Pink!

MUSIC Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real Ariel Pink.

The Los Angeles musician’s first few 2004-06 releases on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label were the stuff of indie water cooler infamy, but they also collected recordings (2002’s House Arrest and Lover Boy; 2003’s Worn Copy) that Pink had made years before. It wasn’t until early 2009 that the world had the chance to hear any new output from the notoriously mysterious musician.

Until then, the talk about Pink largely focused on how serious he was — or wasn’t. Built from lengthy experimentation and goofy gimmicks, such as drum noises made with his armpits, his lo-fi music wasn’t just a byproduct of bedroom recording, it was a reimagining of 1970s and ’80s radio jingles and easy listening sounds. Jingles are disposable by definition, yet anyone familiar with some from the ’70s has to admit they are designed to remain in your brain. They were touchstones for the young Pink, and through a love for them, he picked up a knack for great hooks and memorable choruses.

Catchy though they may be, the repetitive nature of Pink’s early songs nonetheless made some listeners wonder whether he was just monkeying about and marketing lo-fi weirdness to those with nostalgic impulses. A sweeping ballad that might mark a poignant moment in a Sunday night made-for-TV tearjerker, “For Kate I Wait” is one of the best songs from his 2004 debut The Doldrums (Paw Tracks). But the damn thing does not need to be over four minutes long, considering it consists of a single idea: sentences that rhyme with the title.

On Pink’s new album Before Today (4AD), he takes the leap to a larger label, drops a lot of the lo-fi scuzz and delivers smoothly succinct pop songs. The lo-fi isn’t gone completely, but it is refined. And while his vocals remain muddy and hidden behind other sounds, half the fun is guessing just what he’s going on about. You can’t take the weird out of a man, and Pink has spent too many years purposely being strange for Before Today to suddenly strip him of all idiosyncrasy. Keen-eared listeners will pick out stream-of-consciousness mutterings like “Make me maternal, fertile woman/Make me menstrual, menopause man/Rape me, castrate me, make me gay/Lady, I’m a lady from today” on “Menopause Man,” and while the tongue-in-cheek imagery conveys to listeners that Pink is still in on his own joke, the album really shines when he manages to play it straight.

The cover art for Before Today’s chief single “Round and Round” may sport a lovingly drawn image of a man french-kissing a dog, but the track itself is so masterfully clean and structured that it transcends homage, becoming one of the year’s best songs. The gifted flair for a sound and a hook that made Pink’s early works so catchy is still there, but he switches up tempo and groove so many times that the composition never outstays its welcome despite its five-minute length. Likewise, “Can’t Hear My Eyes” is easy-listening heaven, with echoed vocals and sharp piano flourishes that recall the Alan Parsons Project’s more radio-friendly fare, like “I Wouldn’t Wanna Be Like You.” These particular songs stand out for their devotion to time and place, but all of Before Today is a sprawling run through the dollar bin at Amoeba Music, and Pink makes it his own by picking apart the best bits and reimagining 2010 as it might have been if Fleetwood Mac and Cherry Coke still ran the radio.

Pink is often casually tossed in the freak-folk category of knowing eccentrics, alongside the likes of Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. Both Banhart and Newsom have recently taken a more classic approach to their respective crafts — to great success — while remaining true to their unique personalities. It’s likely that the freak-folk tag’s death and in turn these artist’s survival resides in the realization that weirdness doesn’t have to define you as an artist. Mark down 2010 as the year Pink decided to take his turn at bat, cutting the shit and showing the world Ariel Pink cooks with fire.

Transit troubles

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Transit troubles

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Peggy da Silva is an avid cyclist, public transit advocate, and member of the San Francisco Transit Riders Union — a new organization made up of several hundred San Franciscans who want to see improvements to Muni.

Yet even she admits that when it comes to getting to work, it takes just 15 minutes by car or an hour if she opts to go by bus. “I am committed to transit and cycling” for environmental reasons, she said, but “it gets really frustrating” to wait for the bus or light rail cars to arrive.

Da Silva could be considered lucky in that she can opt to drive if she feels it’s necessary, while many lower-income San Franciscans cannot afford a car and have no choice but to rely on Muni to get to work, buy groceries, or make doctor appointments. It’s even worse late at night when the buses run less frequently and the streets are dark and empty.

Speaking at a June 29 transit rally, the Rev. Norman Fong of the Chinatown Community Development Center joked that Chinatown is one of the city’s greenest neighborhoods — but “not by choice.” Most Chinatown residents just can’t afford to own a car, underscoring the point that Muni service cuts affect lower-income communities more significantly than those with more transportation options.

The perception that Muni is broken isn’t unique to transit advocates. Around City Hall, a number of proposals have been put forth to fix the ailing system, which has been mired in delays and overcrowding as fares have gone up and service was slashed. But determining what the root problems are, how they should be addressed, and what the best path forward may be has proved arduous.

Rather than a simple calculation or a study in efficiency, the debate surrounding Muni is spinning into an emotionally charged affair. For those aiming to protect low-income riders from service cuts or fare increases, it’s a discussion about social justice, calling into question why the city is asking more of bus riders than motorists in a city with a “transit-first” mandate in its charter.

The strong opposition to the cuts by supervisors and the public has led to a rollback. On June 30, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced that on Sept. 4, it would be able to restore half of the 10 percent systemwide service reduction that went into effect in May.

“Due to stronger than expected revenue streams, operational efficiencies, and new grant opportunities, staff is recommending the restoration of service on some routes and lines this fall,” according to an SFMTA press release. Buses that run all night would come more often, and the partial service restoration would help ease over-crowding.

While this was welcome news for anyone who takes transit, the expected improvement still leaves untouched many key issues plaguing the city’s public transit system. Two separate initiatives most likely destined for the November ballot seek to deal with systemic problems — but both have met with resistance.

On July 1, Sup. Sean Elsbernd announced that he had submitted some 75,000 signatures for a proposed charter amendment for the November ballot to change the way transit operator salaries are determined. Since they only needed 46,000 signatures, “presumably, we’ll qualify,” Elsbernd told us.

“It presses the reset button on all the [memorandums of understanding] and then puts the riders at the table,” he explained. “It also eliminates the side letters that allow the six leaders of the union to get full-time salaries and benefits without needing to drive.”

Elsbernd’s proposal would require operator wages and benefits to be set through collective bargaining, instead of the current guarantee that their wages be at least as high as the average wage rate for transit operators in the two highest paying comparable transit systems.

Yet his proposal is opposed by the city’s transit operators union, TWU Local 250-A, whose members feel they’ve been unfairly blamed for the MTA’s fiscal problems. Speaking at the June 29 rally, Ron Heintzman, the new international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, summed up the attitude of drivers who feel they are being asked to give up hard-fought gains in the face of an economic downturn.

“I’ve been told that here in San Francisco, the mayor for some reason clearly has his head up his ass,” Heintzman said. “It’s time to tell him to stop trying to balance the damn budget on the backs of the workers.”

Speakers at the rally voiced support for federal legislation that would bolster municipal transit budgets nationwide with a $2 billion emergency infusion. A second federal bill would allow local governments greater flexibility with federal transit funding that currently can only be spent on capital projects, not day-to-day operations.

“We’re asking them not to make us buy a bus when we can’t hire a bus operator to drive it,” explained Harry Lombardo, international president of the Transit Workers Union. “There’s no point in spending hundreds of thousands on a bus and letting it sit in mothballs. And believe me, it’s happening all over the country.”

Sup. David Campos, a cosponsor of a competing ballot measure that aims for more comprehensive Muni reform, joined the rally and criticized the notion that drivers should be blamed a dysfunctional, underfunded transit system.

“Those of you who live in San Francisco know that right now there is a climate at City Hall that is pointing the finger at drivers, blaming drivers and blaming the workers for the problems that this system has,” Campos said at the rally. “Muni is broken. But Muni is not broken because of labor. And we have to say no to that push to somehow create a division between riders and drivers…. We can’t ignore the fact that we have a system that is getting money that is not being used well.”

Campos has joined with Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, Eric Mar, and Board President David Chiu to propose a reform package that would remove the pay guarantee for Muni driver, but also create split appointments to the MTA Board of Directors, allocate a share of property tax revenue to the city’s Transportation Fund, and establish an Office of the MTA Inspector General to help reduce waste and ramp up efficiency. The proposal would be subject to voter approval in November.

The proposal to give the supervisors some appointments to an MTA board that is now solely accountable to the Mayor’s Office became an issue at the eleventh hour of budget negotiations between the supervisors and Newsom on June 30. The mayor strongly opposed that and two similar charter amendments that would establish split appointments for the Recreation and Park Commission and the San Francisco Rent Board, as well as a ballot measure that would require the police department to engage in foot beat patrols.

Many saw his stance as a quid pro quo that inappropriately tied mayoral support for the budget — which included funding restorations to community programs that progressive board members wanted to preserve — to these unrelated ballot proposals.

Dave Snyder, who directs the SF Transit Riders Union, viewed the move as an affront on Muni riders. “This particular mayor has managed to screw up Muni service through his complete control over the agency,” Snyder said. “And whatever it takes, Muni riders want to see that fixed.”

While he said he thought a split appointment for the MTA Board was important, “the most important thing is more money. That’s the key issue,” he added, noting the reform package would create more funding for Muni.

Members of the Budget and Finance Committee resisted the mayor’s demand and forwarded a budget to the full board that included their high-priority restorations. The proposed ballot measures will be considered by the board this month.

“If you ask me, I would say we should have commission reform across the board,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian. “The idea of having [equally balanced appointments] is a smart way for us to share the responsibility and the consequences.”

MTA’s fiscal problems aren’t unique to San Francisco. On July 1, Caltrain announced a menu of undesirable options to deal with big financial troubles facing the commuter railroad. Elimination of weekend service and certain weekday train stops, or a 25-cent increase to base fares or zone fares, will be the subject of public hearings this summer.

Noting that all the different sources that fund Caltrain have been slashed, spokesperson Christine Dunn told us, “It’s frustrating to not be able to provide the service you want to provide.”

Truce talks

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Truce talks

news@sfbg.com

All parties are hopeful for peace in the Guardian-labeled War on Fun after oppressive raids on SoMa clubs have stopped and the feuding sides — mainly the San Francisco Police Department and nightclub owners — are sitting down to truce talks brokered in part by the fledgling California Music and Culture Association (CMAC).

“I’m here to work with you,” Kitt Crenshaw, commander of SFPD’s new Entertainment Task Force, told the crowd at a Nightlife Safety Summit on June 30. “I’m not the enemy. I’m not the ‘War on Fun,’ as they call it. I’m not the Antichrist.” The summit was sponsored by the Mayor’s Office, Entertainment Commission, SFPD, Small Business Commission, and CMAC.

Club owners and the SFPD are attempting to find balance between stifling the entertainment industry with heavy-handed enforcement and doing something about the deadly gun violence plaguing neighborhoods around some San Francisco nightclubs. Owners and party promoters don’t want entertainment permitting power to go back to the SFPD, as Mayor Gavin Newsom has suggested. But recent shootings and the Entertainment Commission’s inability to immediately close problem clubs have city officials demanding change.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu introduced legislation in early June that would give the Entertainment Commission the authority to revoke the entertainment permits of noncompliant clubs that are consistently scenes of violence. Chiu’s legislation would further extend temporary suspension powers the board granted to the commission in 2009.

“There is strong consensus that the Entertainment Commission needs to do its job. And if this is what it takes to give it more tools, then so be it,” Chiu told the Guardian after the June 25 CMAC Insider Luncheon, where he participated in a forum with entertainment industry representatives. Chiu said he was feeling pressure from his constituents in North Beach to “come down like a hammer on the industry” following several shootings around the neighborhood’s nightclubs this year.

Terrance Alan, a longtime industry advocate and entertainment commissioner, told the Guardian he recently requested that the City Attorney’s Office help define when nightclub owners should be blamed for violence occurring near their business. “If we’re going to hold venues and security teams responsible, we have to tell them and make sure it’s legal,” he said. “The line of reasoning that blames the nearest business will force San Francisco to shut down. The first thing we have to do is stop blaming each other.”

Chiu, speaking to a crowd at the Nightlife Safety Summit, recounted a handful of incidents that pushed him to craft the new legislation. Since the last legislation was passed to strengthen the Entertainment Commission’s power to regulate nightclubs, eight people were shot outside the Regency night club Nov. 15, 2009; 44 rounds were fired outside club Suede, resulting in one death and four injuries Feb. 7; a shooting occurred on Broadway outside a strip club in mid-February; and a police officer was shot outside the Mission District’s El Rincon club on June 19. “And so on, and so on,” Chiu said.

Following the shooting at Club Suede, which had long been a site of violence prior to the gang-related carnage in February, officials were stunned to learn the commission did not have the power to revoke entertainment permits. The most it could do was suspend Suede’s permit to play music for 30 days.

“To hold the commission responsible for something it was never envisioned to do and never given the power to do is where the narrative has gone wrong recently,” Alan said of widespread criticism that the commission just didn’t simply “shut down” Club Suede.

Suede remains voluntarily closed as it bargains with the City Attorney’s Office, which filed a complaint against the club after the shootings. Alex Tse, the lead attorney for the city in the case, told the Guardian there was nothing he could legally do to prevent Suede from reopening before Aug. 10, when the court is scheduled to rule on a preliminary injunction (court mandated closing) the City Attorney’s Office filed. But he doesn’t expect them to reopen because Suede and the city are currently working toward settling the case.

If the incidents Chiu described represent a black eye for San Francisco’s entertainment industry, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and SFPD aren’t necessarily squeaky clean either. “I sat down with [ABC director] Steve Hardy and told him that where the state was focusing efforts in San Francisco was completely misguided,” Chiu said at the CMAC luncheon. “And I’ve spoken to [California Senator] Mark Leno to try to move them in the right direction.”

The break in the crackdowns of 2009, mostly attributed to severe tactics employed by SFPD Officer Larry Bertrand and ABC agent Michelle Ott, followed a widespread backlash to the sometimes brutal treatment legitimate business owners were receiving in the name of public safety. Back-to-back over stories in the Guardian (see “The new War on Fun,” March 23, 2010) and the SF Weekly, calls to the ABC from city officials, the formation of CMAC, and a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) suit filed against San Francisco and the rogue officers spurred officials to rein in Ott and Bertrand.

Hardy told the Guardian that Ott is no longer assigned to alcohol enforcement in San Francisco. Bertrand has traded in his plain-clothes for a uniform and hasn’t been seen busting into clubs, beating up the help, or confiscating DJ equipment for several months.

Mark Webb, plaintiff’s attorney in the RICO case, which was moved to the federal court by the City Attorney’s Office, said Bertrand is scheduled to give a deposition for the case July 26. Webb told the Guardian he plans to ask Bertrand questions relating to “a pattern of ongoing and repeated abuses” claimed in the complaint, which includes Newsom and ABC as defendants.

“We’re at a crossroads,” Chiu told the crowd at the Nightlife Safety Summit, adding that if the new power for the Entertainment Commission does not reduce club violence, stronger measures would be taken, whether it’s Newsom’s suggestion to scrap the commission entirely and give permitting power back to the police department or Chiu’s idea to create another “less politicized” body to issue entertainment permits made up of representatives from city department that are affected when nightlife entertainment goes wrong.

“There has been significant dissatisfaction with the Entertainment Commission due to many actual and apparent conflicts of interests,” Chiu said. “Frankly, this is why we may need to move to a different model of who actually makes decisions on permits, because often the people who want to make those decisions are the ones who stand to get the most benefit out of them.”

But club owners and party promoters argue that the police issuing entertainment permits, as they did prior to the Entertainment Commission’s creation in 2002, has a chilling effect on an important part of San Francisco’s economy.

Alan said a civil grand jury found the police department had a conflict of interest in being both the granter and enforcer of nightclub permits, a finding that spurred the creation of the Entertainment Commission.

“I’ve been in the industry long enough to remember when it was in the Police Department’s hands,” said Guy Carson, owner of Café Du Nord and director of CMAC. “Since the advent of the Entertainment Commission, more permits have been issued, which has vitalized the industry.”

Club owners and party promoters don’t want to be blamed for street violence over which they have no control, and they have some political support for that stance. “Clubs don’t create youth gun violence, society creates youth gun violence,” Sup. Bevan Dufty proclaimed to the crowd at the Nightlife Safety Summit, drawing thunderous applause from the room.

“There is a street scene and a club scene, and they do intersect. But a lot of the violence occurs in the street scene,” Carson said. “A lot of shootings that happen relate to people never inside the clubs. That’s a conversation CMAC looks forward to having — to have a little more accurate discussion.”

While he asserts that some nightclubs attract violence to the city from out of town, Crenshaw said he was pleased and surprised at the level of collaboration emerging between entertainment representatives and SFPD. “I got so much positive feedback from it [the Nightlife Safety Summit]. It was a bit overwhelming,” he told us. “I think the industry itself is tired of being labeled as a pariah. They want to change their image.”

Brit Hahn, owner of City Nights and SFClubs, agreed that working with district captains was in the best interest of any club looking to remain profitable. “When something bad happens at a nightclub anywhere in San Francisco, he said at the Nightlife Safety Summit, “it’s bad for all of our businesses.”

Newsom and the board’s challenge

David Talbot
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0

Newsom needs to decide whether he’s serious when he says he wants to work with the supervisors on a budget

EDITORIAL The San Francisco supervisors took a huge step with the city budget this year: they essentially told the mayor that his approach was unacceptable, and that they were going to do it themselves.

The result — the document that the board’s Budget Committee approved and sent back to Mayor Gavin Newsom — isn’t perfect. But the members of that panel saved $40 million worth of programs from the mayor’s budget ax and got rid of two particularly bad plans: privatizing health care at the county jails and allowing more condominium conversions.

The board members are also looking seriously at putting as much as $100 million in new taxes — progressive taxes — on the November ballot. Current plans include a modest increase in the hotel tax, an increase in the real-estate transfer tax on high-end properties, and a tax on commercial rents of more than $200,000 a year, which would be paired with a reduction in the payroll tax for small businesses.

Now Newsom, who is busy running for lieutenant governor, needs to decide whether he’s serious when he says he wants to work with the supervisors on a budget everyone can accept.

On one level, the mayor doesn’t have a lot of choice — if he vetoes the proposal the board sent him, there’s a good chance the supervisors will override the veto. What he’s more likely to do is simply refuse to spend the additional money the board wants to allocate — allowing his cuts to take effect, allowing critical services to die and community-based nonprofits to close, while that money just sits in a reserve fund (or gets allocated to the mayor’s other priorities).

That would be a terrible statement for someone who claims he can be a positive force in Sacramento and who clearly wants to run for governor some day. The board has presented a budget that’s still fairly moderate — the tax hikes aren’t included in the spending plan, and most of what Newsom asked for is. It’s the kind of plan that a Democrat who wants to run California some day ought to be embracing. Unfortunately, Newsom insists on running on the Republican platform of cuts only, no new taxes. (Although he’s stuck a lot of hidden taxes, called fees, on small businesses.)

The mayor also has tried to use the budget process to kill some several ballot measures he doesn’t like. He wants the supervisors to get rid of proposals that would give the board shared appointments to the Rent Board and the Recreation and Park Commission along with a plan mandating community policing. In essence, he’s asked the supervisors to abandon other good-government reform policies in exchange for saving critical public services. That’s apparently not illegal (although offering to trade votes is). At the very least, however, it’s unseemly, and the board needs to make clear that it won’t accept this sort of hostage-taking.

It the mayor wants to have any kind of a productive year — and show that he can actually work with legislators — he needs to sign the budget the board sends to him and agree to spend the money the way it’s earmarked. Otherwise he’ll be acting like the governor of California — and that politician’s approval rating is about the lowest on record.

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