Newsom

Newsom and the board’s challenge

David Talbot
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Newsom and the board’s challenge

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.

COH sends in “hostage negotiators” during budget talks (VIDEO)

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Members of the Board of Supervisors, their legislative aides, and other City Hall regulars were all looking a bit sleep-deprived as they darted from office to office at City Hall July 1 after ongoing budget negotiations kept everyone up late the night before. Just as an agreement on the city budget seemed within reach on June 30, Mayor Gavin Newsom and his chief of staff, Steve Kawa, had expressed strong opposition to several initiatives that progressive members of the Board of Supervisors sought to place on the November ballot.

The mayor’s last-minute move was described by some as a quid pro quo that withheld support for an amended budget — which included about $40 million in restorations to community programs that are high priorities for members of the board — unless four different proposals were struck from the ballot. Three were proposed charter amendments dealing with commission appointments that would distribute power more evenly between the board and the mayor, and the fourth was a proposal put forth by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi that would have required the San Francisco Police Department to adopt a community-policing model and engage in neighborhood foot patrols, initially cast as an enlightened alternative to Newsom’s proposed law banning sitting or lying down on the sidewalk. 

“In so many words, he had expressed clear dissent, and that was made relative to our budget proceedings,” Mirkarimi said, noting that the mayor didn’t phrase it in a way that would have run afoul of a law prohibiting that kind of bargaining over legislation. Newsom Press Secretary Tony Winnicker dodged repeated Guardian questions about whether Newsom was demanding conditions unrelated to the budget, coming closest to a direct answer when he said, “Before discussions of vetoing would even come up there would have to be something at the full Board to consider or veto, and there’s not, so NO.”

Technically legal or not, Newsom’s move was enough to prompt members of the Coalition on Homelessness, an advocacy group, to decry it as “a hostage situation.” As if negotiators ping-ponging back and forth across City Hall weren’t jarred enough already, the Coalition on Homelessness and Budget Justice Coalition members opted to underscore their point by blasting heavy metal music outside the mayor’s office windows in order to “push the standoff to a close, and release the needed funds to safety.”

“The package of add-backs and cuts would have preserved the essential services San Francisco families rely on to survive the recession,” the Coalition wrote in a press statement that was released as budget negotiations wore on. “In order to leverage political gain on unrelated issues, the Mayor chose to hold hostage the package of restorations to vital senior health services, youth violence prevention programs, mental health treatment and cuts to waste.”

The heavy metal stunt only lasted about two minutes before deputy sherriffs put the kibosh on it, but “hostage negotiators” Patrick Flanagan (shown in the video wearing sunglasses), James Chionsini, Que Newbill, Lorraine Deguzman, Bob Offer-Westort, and Jennifer Friedenbach managed to make their way into the reception area of the mayor’s office. Mike Farrah, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, was sent out for a bargaining session with the pizza-bearing crew. We caught the whole tense situation on film, and here’s how it went:

The “hostage negotiations” session took place around 4 p.m. Around the same time, various members of the board were going in to meet with the mayor on what several described as “parallel conversations” regarding the charter amendments, and the roster of programs that supervisors wanted to see restored after Newsom proposed slashing them in his June 1 budget proposal.

As the Budget & Finance Committee prepared to meet around 6:30 p.m., the worst fears of the Budget Justice Coalition did not seem to be realized. City Controller Ben Rosenfield arrived to the board chambers with freshly printed copies of an add-back list that included most of the programs that were high priorities for progressive supervisors and community advocates. However, Newsom had not given that list his stamp of approval, so a final budget agreement between both parties remained elusive. Winnicker cast those add-backs as contrary to Newsom’s wishes: “Don’t for a second even try to suggest that it’s improper to raise concerns about the fiscal impact of a new $40 million setaside in the context of a discussion of the budget.”

As for the discussion about the charter amenments, Mirkarimi characterized it as “ongoing.” Avalos called the preliminary amended budget “a work in progress,” but members of the Budget & Finance Committee still voiced a round of thank-yous to one another and all of the community groups who were there to assist with the process.

The Budget & Finance Committee forwarded the budget, including the restoration package, to the full board. Using a variety of sources, supervisors were able to restore $32,941,541 in funding for programs ranging from homeless services, to mental health care programs, to programs that aid and assist impoverished single-room-occupancy hotel residents, and others. An additional $7.4 million meant to cover a variety of youth and senior programs will depend on a supplemental appropriation that won the committee’s preliminary approval. Sup. Sean Elsbernd dissented on both counts, but still made a point of thanking the other committee members for their work.

 



D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy, Tony Kelly and progressive planners blast Lennar’s plan

Mary Magee
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Recently, I spent some time talking with D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy and Tony Kelly about Lennar’s redevelopment plan for the shipyard and Candlestick Point. I also attended a Progressive Planners forum that addressed the massive development proposal. Those conversations and the issues they raised seem timely in light of the city’s crazily tight schedule for trying to ram final approvals for the project past government agencies this summer. And in light of three appeals that have been filed against the city’s recently certified final environmental impact report for the plan, raising concerns that the city will get bogged down in expensive and time-consuming litigation if it doesn’t get the plan right, while it still can.

(Lest other D. 10 candidates complain that they weren’t interviewed, too, I’d like to clarify that I’ll be covering the race between now and November, and I look forward to hearing what they all think at the Board’s July 13 meeting to hear appeals of the city’s final environmental impact report (FEIR) for the project. )

Both Lacy and Kelly are critics of Lennar’s plan, but not in a knee-jerk obstructionist way. Instead, they bring considered and informed critiques to the table at a time when the community desperately needs good advice and a workable strategy, if residents are to get needed amendments and concessions, before the developer get the green light, or before the Board puts  a moratorium on the project until the city’s FEIR flaws are ironed out.

Lacy is a bright and earnest candidate who learned lessons from the school of life, while growing up in San Jose in a working class family. Lacy says his father worked in an Adidas warehouse until he was injured on the job, and his mother worked as a secretary in Atari’s corporate office, but was laid off after two years.

Lacy recalls how his parents opened their own janitorial business, in the hope of making a better life for their six children.  He says that it was while cleaning homes alongside his mother, that he began to recognize the need for working class improvement and growth.

 In 1995, Lacy moved to San Francisco, where he has worked in the District Attorney’s office and formed his own law practice—experience that could serve District 10 well, since it’s home to many working-class residents and will be ground zero in the battle for construction-related contracts and environmental and economic justice, if Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan goes ahead,

“I know how to craft legislation for social justice,” Lacy said.

Lacy observes how Michael Cohen, Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, has repeatedly told folks that land transferred to Lennar will be subject to a “right of reverter.”
This means the Redevelopment Agency may re-take ownership of the land, if the developer fails to substantially complete the infrastructure in the time frame set forth in the city’s development and disposition agreement (the DDA)

But Lacy observes that this “nuclear option” isn’t likely to happen with so much riding on the Lennar deal, and he stresses that additional controls are needed, if the city is to ensure that the deal remains in the best interest of San Francisco, not just the developer.

Lacy’s probably right about that. (Remember how hard the community had to fight to just get an extra 15 days to read and comment on the project’s six volume draft EIR over the winter holidays?)

And how much political pressure was exerted to ram the city’s EIR for this project across the certification line on June 3, five days before Santa Clara voters decided to support a stadium for the 49ers near Great America.

“What’s needed is an impartial arbiter,” Lacy said. “The city needs regulatory controls and the capacity to fine Lennar if it breaks promises to build affordable housing, create jobs and hire locals. You’re not going to be able to hold their feet to the fire without that.”

“I’m not saying that we should be obstructionists, critics who are trying to prevent stuff for the sake of a political battle,” Lacy added. “But we need new blood. The benefit of my campaign is that I’m not downtown’s candidate. I’m a civil rights attorney, who can help the district by figuring out what battles we need to be fighting and which battles are winnable. And I want to make sure there are jobs and business opportunities for working-class folks in San Francisco. You shouldn’t have to be a doctor or lawyer to afford to live here.”

Lacy believes the Navy should remove the radiologically impacted landfill on the shipyard’s Parcel E2.
“That ground has to be taken out of there,” Lacy said. “I would hope the City Attorney’s Office would get involved and advocate for the people. But leadership is about taking a stance when no one else is.”

With the city suggesting that it can still win back the 49ers, Lacy said that he too, would love it if the 49ers decided to stay.
 
“But not at the cost of our health and safety,” Lacy said, referring to the city’s repeated claim that it needed to rush certification of the final EIR for Lennar’s project, if there was to be any hope of winning back the team.

“ I don’t think the solution is the rush,” Lacy said. “I say, let’s make sure we clean up the shipyard properly—and bring back the Warriors [a professional basketball team that relocated to San Francisco in 1962, until 1971, when it moved to Oakland].”

I also hung out with D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly, at an event that POWER hosted as part of a Progressive Planners Forum, the day after Lacy and I unsuccessfully tried to access the shipyard, and the same day that POWER was also blocked from the yard.

Kelly has been tracking issues in and around District 10 for years, and, much like Lacy,  he’s not afraid to speak his mind on the issues.

For instance, Kelly is incensed by the city’s attempt to ram through approval of the final EIR for Lennar’s development, when the Navy has yet to complete an environmental impact statement related to its proposed clean up activities at the shipyard..
“Is the EIS ever a trailer to the EIR?” Kelly asked. “It’s like planning on Mars.”

Kelly has also expressed concern over the developer’s plan to build two peaker plants in the community.

And he is worried about the consequences of the city’s plan to turn the entire Bayview into a project survey area for Lennar’s Candlestick/Shipyard plan.

“How do you pay for any other improvements in the Bayview, when the shipyard redevelopment plan sucks all the air out of the room?” Kelly said

But Kelly’s biggest concern right now is that once Lennar gets its final approvals this summer, “the developer will never talk directly to the community again.”

At the Progressive Planners Forum that Kelly attended, speakers also voiced measured criticisms of Lennar’s plan.

“The plan has some important elements, especially in the job areas, but I think it adds up to gentrification, which is disruptive to the surrounding community, families and the last bastion of the black community in San Francisco,” said Chester Hartman, who has authored over 18 books on race and urban planning, including the acclaimed City For Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco.

“There is a need for a response in terms of an alternative approach,” Hartman advised.
“It doesn’t have to be a detailed, but it should include a basic philosophy and goals, and retain good parts of the original plan.”

Peter Marcuse, Professor of Urban Planning at Colombia University, said the situation at the shipyard reminded him of the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf.

“Cap the land sounds like cap the spill,” Marcuse said, noting that in both cases the community is fighting to get folks who dumped toxins to clean them up.

Marcuse criticized the privatization of the planning process, as illustrated by the City’s claim that it has entered into a “public-private” partnership with Lennar,  and the community’s experience that the city and the developer keep ignoring or dismissing the public’s feedback and opinions.

 “There should have been a range of alternatives open for discussion,” Marcuse said. “Instead, there is a sense, of this mega project’s inevitability. And once the developer has title to the land, the city has to negotiate what should be a public matter.”

Marcuse critiqued the use of tax increment financing, which will use increased taxes on property throughout the Bayview to finance improvements in one relatively small area, the 770 acres of land that, as Marcuse put it, “got sold to Lennar for $1.”

“This is a form of government subsidy,” Marcuse warned.

“There have been some negotiations,” Marcuse continued. He pointed to the community-led Prop. F, which in the spring of 2008 sought to establish 50 percent affordable housing in the development. And the community benefits agreement (CBA) that the San Francisco Labor Council hammered out at in May 2008, in an attempt to nail down benefits for the community in exchange for the Council’s support for the Lennar-financed Prop. G in June 2008.

“But these negotiations with Lennar start on basis that Lennar’s interests have to be protected equally with those of the City and its residents,” Marcuse commented. “It ought to be a public responsibility to show the community what the alternates to Lennar’s vision are.”

Marcuse concluded by suggesting a moratorium on Lennar’s plan to allow for a community-based visioning process, in which residents could express their desire for housing, diversity, open space and protection against environmental hazards

‘The City should then come up with an alternative to Lennar’s plan—and listen to Lennar,” he said. “But this is a public responsibility, rather than a private negotiation with a corporation that has been a beneficiary of a huge subsidy and starts to make a huge profit, the minute its housing units begin to sell.”

Miriam Chion, who works for the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), also expressed concerns with Lennar’s massive plan, which proposes to build thousands of mostly luxury condos at Candlestick Point, with a smaller number on the shipyard.

“We are in the 21st century, how can we continue to use same mechanisms of displacement?” Chion said. “And how can we do that to the African American community, which we have displaced over and over, and which has managed to build a community here, in spite of everything?”

According to Lennar’s plan, 68 percent of its proposed 10,000 units will be built at market rate. Of the remaining 32 percent of units, only 15 percent will be built at truly affordable rates, with an additional 15 percent geared towards the working middle-class income levels, such as those enjoyed by police, fire fighters, nurses and teachers.

But two Bayview residents who attended POWER’s progressive planners’ forum expressed frustration at what they perceived as outsiders trying to tell locals what’s best.

“If you haven’t lived here, you don’t know about the Bayview,” one resident said. “If they are going to do what they are going to do, they should do it all the way, and change things for the better. I’m tired of seeing kids under 12, playing outside at 11 p.m. So, if you are not from here, you can’t come on my ground and pass judgment. If you’d been and lived here, I don’t think you’d see this negatively.”

“$700 million has been spent on cleaning up shipyard, and producing highly technical reports on it,”  another local resident said. “Highly intellectual discussions are not helping, we need some action today.”

“No one here is against development,” countered long-term Bayview resident Espanola Jackson, while a Bayview resident named Nyese resurrected longstanding concerns that the developer fatally broke community trust when it failed to control asbestos dust at the site, when it began grading the shipyard’s Parcel A .

“Four years ago, I found out that they were sending home workers at the shipyard, without informing the surrounding community,” Nyese recalled. “My son was having excessive nosebleeds, so it was phenomenally insulting that they didn’t not notify us.”
“Lennar is just a name, a conglomeration of shareholders,” Nyese further noted. “We need development. But we don’t need it on chemically toxic land.”

These competing concerns indicate that all the candidates in the D. 10 race are going to have to be asking critical questions as they track the progress of Lennar, the city and the Navy’s plans this summer. Failure to do so will cost them credibility within the community—and possibly the supervisor’s race this fall, though downtown money will pour in to support whichever candidate is deemed most likely to rubberstamp present and future development and contracting plans. Stay tuned. It’s going to be a (politically) hot July.

 

Sparks reveals her conservativism in exchange with Walker

Sasha Cuttler
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During the District 6 supervisorial candidate debate that San Francisco Young Democrats held last week, a two-question exchange between two of the leading candidates – progressive Debra Walker and downtown-backed Theresa Sparks – offered a revealing look at their starkly different worldviews and priorities, which is more important in this race than people’s machine politics conspiracy theories.

During the second portion of the event, candidates were allowed to ask a question of another candidate, and Walker and Sparks focused on one another with pointed questions (this occurred at around the 30-minute mark, although the video doesn’t seem to allow users to forward to that point, forcing you to endure the often insipid commentary).

Walker went first, asking Sparks why, during her more than four-year tenure on the Police Commission – a body in charge of disciplining police officers accused of serious misconduct after citizen complaints are investigated and found valid by the Office of Citizen Complaints, with each case assigned to a particular commissioner – Sparks didn’t hold any hearings or act to punish any officers.

Sparks said the accusation wasn’t true, and that she did hold one hearing during that time, and then said that the Police Commission is prohibited by the city charter from intervening in the internal workings of the Police Department, implying that the body isn’t actually in charge of disciplining officers. Walker said Sparks was wrong and tried to ask a follow-up question and was cut off by moderator Melissa Griffin.

So this week, I called both candidates to try to get to the bottom of the dispute. “She indicated it’s not the commission’s job to focus on these things, and that’s absolutely not the case,” Walker said. “She was incorrect saying it wasn’t the job of commissioners to do this.”

And when I talked to Sparks, she didn’t dispute that fact, but conveyed how complicated the process was when officers are accused of serious misconduct (minor misconduct just goes to the chief), with lawyers seeking stipulated settlements and whatnot, and repeatedly emphasizing “it’s a bad system.” One reason it’s so bad is her own lack of qualifications: “You can’t have people like me, whose only legal background is watching Law and Order, trying to handle these cases.”

Sparks was appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is backing her supervisorial bid, which is also expected to have strong support from the San Francisco Police Officers Association. She wouldn’t say how many cases she was assigned during her tenure, but OCC records show more than 300 cases assigned to the commission during her tenure and the long backlog left in her wake has been the subject of criticism by everyone from Police Chief George Gascon to new Police Commission Jim Hammer.

Rather than supporting this civilian oversight of problem officers, Sparks wants to turn those duties over to Gascon’s office, telling us, “We need to give this chief more authority to fire officers rather than going through this ridiculous process.”

At the debate, after seeming stung by a question she jokingly called a “softball,” Sparks fired back by asking Walker whether she supported the proposed tax measures now being considered by the Board of Supervisors to help close the city’s large budget deficit, framing the question by saying they would hurt small business.

Walker answered by voicing her support for small business, but noting how essential city services such as public health programs were being deeply cut and that the city needed new revenue to deal with its structural budget deficit, although she said that she had yet to decide which of the tax measures she supported considering none have been approved for the ballot yet.

This week, Moody’s Investor Services lowered the citys’ credit rating precisely because Newsom’s budgets have not addressed that structural budget deficit, and even the Controller’s Office has ordered more than a $100 million placed on reserve because of doubts about the mayor’s revenue assumptions.

So for Sparks to characterize the need for new revenue as an unfair attack on small business indicates a short-sighted, right-wing approach to municipal finances, an approach Walker rejects, telling us, “I think we need to be responsible and do the right thing in dealing with the city’s needs…It’s going to cost us and the people who come after us more and more because of these cuts.”

When I spoke with Sparks, noting the Moody’s report, she seemed to back away from how she was trying the characterize the revenue measures at the debate. “I do think the city needs new revenue, but I don’t think that taxing small business is the way to go,” she said, referring to a proposal by Sup. David Chiu to tax commercial rents, which would be paid by the landlords.

So I asked Sparks whether she supported any of the proposals or if she was advocating any other revenues measures, and she said, “Quite honestly, I need to think about that because I do think we need more revenue.”

Which is pretty much the same answer Walker gave in a far more honest and direct way in that debate, without trying to pander to the fears of small businesspeople. The bottom line is that the downtown corporations who are backing Sparks have done nothing to help the city during this prolonged recession, while demanding even greater police responses to deal with poor people sitting on sidewalks and other perceived problems, and that hypocrisy should be front and center in this election.

Cake throws down to bring solar to Telegraph Hill

Sasha Cuttler
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Cake throws down to bring solar to Telegraph Hill

The high-water mark in the unsuccessful 2008 campaign to pass Proposition H, the Clean Energy Act – a partial public power measure that Pacific Gas & Electric buried with a deceptive, $10 million propaganda blitz – was arguably when the hit band Cake played a benefit concert for the measure at The Independent.

Tonight (July 1), the ever eco-conscious Cake returns to that venue with a similar mission, this time dubbed Climatepalooza 2010, with the goal of building a solar roof at the Telegraph Hill Community Center, honoring a request by Telegraph Hill political powerhouse and San Francisco Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin and Prop. H campaign manager Julian Davis, who has a personal relationship with some band members.

“Climatepalooza 2010 promises to be a wonderful event. It give folks a chance to hear some great music and do the right thing for the environment, and it also supports Tel-Hi, a vitally important neighborhood institution,” Peskin said in a statement released by the nonprofit group One Atmosphere, which has also been involved in organizing the event.

That group, which has worked Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, and other party bigwigs also got a quote from Mayor Gavin Newsom (who opposed Prop. H): “It’s great to see San Francisco putting together events like Climatepalooza. It combines the best of San Francisco – caring for your neighbors, doing something positive for the environment, and having a great time. Everyone needs to help in the fight against global warming. This is a terrific way for people to get involved.”

Apparently Cake and the power of the sun can create unlikely bedfellows.

Is there still a political machine in San Francisco?

Zelda Bronstein
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2

There’s some interesting discussion going on about Jane Kim, Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, and political machines here. Check it out if you haven’t read it already.

SFBG Radio: Meg ducks debates, Gav’s oil money and crazy CEO pay

Zelda Bronstein
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2
SFBG Radio: Meg ducks debates, Gav’s oil money and crazy CEO pay

Today, Johnny and Tim talk about why Meg Whitman is ducking debates, why Gavin Newsom has money invested in oil company stocks — and why a corporate CEO can buy an $8 million resort property the same week he lays off 8,000 workers. You can listen after the jump.

sfbgradio6/30/2010 by bgedit

Stories highlight Newsom’s hypocrisy

Sasha Cuttler
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Stories highlight Newsom’s hypocrisy

A pair of interesting stories in today’s Chronicle paint Mayor Gavin Newsom as a self-serving hypocrite, highlighting how his cuts-only budget proposals ignore the city’s long-term needs and have led Moody’s to lower the city’s credit rating, and how his green rhetoric is belied by his oil industry investments, including in the company responsible for the ongoing oil leak in the Gulf.

The Guardian has long noted how fiscally irresponsible Newsom’s budgets have been, with our latest editorial calling for Newsom to finally offer support for some of the revenue measures now being explored by the Board of Supervisors, which will need strong support from everyone in City Hall to have a chance of winning voter approval.

The Controller’s Office and now Moody’s have confirmed that Newsom’s reckless and gimmicky budget leaves a long-term budget hole even as it does short-term damage to the city’s social safety net and public health programs. But instead of acknowledging that reality, Newsom flak Tony Winnicker is still offering snide, Republican-style put-downs of the supervisors who are actually working hard to improve the city’s fiscal health while Newsom is out running for state office, afraid he will be criticized for supporting the tax revenue this city desperately needs.

As for Newsom’s oil industry investments, well, they speak for themselves. His whole political career, and even the restaurant and bar career before that, was built on a foundation of oil money heaped upon him by the Gettys. And even after he found there was political gold to be mined from green rhetoric, he has continued to financially support and profit from the oil industry.

Many Guardian readers have long said that we should just give up on Newsom, calling him a shameless and self-serving politician of the very worst sort. Maybe they’re right. But if Newsom wants to earn our support in his race for lieutenant governor – whose most important responsibilities are his key votes in deciding whether to support new offshore oil drilling in California and whether to continue pushing myopic cuts-only budgets for the public university systems – then now is the time for him to show some political courage by disinvesting from the oil industry and supporting a responsible city budget that includes new revenue measures for which he should actively campaign this fall.

Powder keg

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Powder keg

news@sfbg.com

Ask any pollster, political consultant, or academic who studies the American electorate about the mood of the voters this year and you’ll get the same one-word answer: Angry.

Everyone’s pissed — the liberals, the conservatives, the moderates, the people who don’t even know where they fit in. It’s an unsettled time and, potentially, very bad news for a progressive agenda that seeks to address issues ranging from poverty and war to the long-term health of the public and the planet.

The Democrats, who swept into power with an enormously popular president just 18 months ago, may lose control of Congress. The tea partiers have driven the Republicans so far to the right that some candidates for Senate are openly talking about eliminating Social Security. The unemployment rate — the single most important factor in the politics of the economy — remains high and doesn’t show any signs of improving.

And the progressive left seems frustrated and demoralized, particularly in California. The Golden State, which once led the nation in innovation and enlightened social policy, now seems to be leading the politically dysfunctional race to the bottom.

The nation could be headed for a dangerous era, rife with the potential for right-wing demagoguery and other nasty political schisms. The state of the economy could easily fuel a more powerful movement to shrink the scope of government and a continuing backlash against the public sector — and the financial backers of the antitax and antiregulation movement are drooling at the prospect.

But there’s also a chance for progressives to seize a populist narrative and shift the discussion away from traditional disagreements and toward those areas, particularly the destructive influence on government by powerful corporations, where the grassroots right and grassroots left might actually agree.

The anger that voters feel toward a government that isn’t meeting their needs is starting to find other outlets. People are as mad about the abuses of big business — the Wall Street meltdown, the bailouts, the BP oil spill, the political manipulation — as they are about the failures of Congress and the president. If you ask Americans of every political stripe who they least trust — big government or big business — even conservatives aren’t so sure anymore.

For 30 years, the central narrative of American politics has revolved around the size and effectiveness of government. Now there’s a chance to shift that entire debate in American politics toward the largely unchecked power of corporations. It is, populist writer Jim Hightower told us, “an enormous opportunity handed to us by the bastards.”

But so far, none of the Democratic leaders in California are taking advantage of it to start dispelling damaging myths and crafting political narratives that might begin to create some popular consensus around how to deal with society’s most pressing problems.

 

THE PEOPLE WANT TAXES

There have been many polls gauging voter anger, but one of the most comprehensive and interesting recent ones was “Californians and Their Government,” a collaborative study by the Public Policy Institute of California and the James Irvine Foundation that was released in May.

It shows that Californians are mad about the state’s fiscal problems, disgusted with their political leaders, divided by ideology, and deeply conflicted over the best way forward. An astounding 77 percent of respondents say California is headed in the wrong direction and 81 percent say the state budget situation is a “a big problem.”

But the anti-incumbent message isn’t necessarily an anti-government message. Most Californians are willing to put more of their cash into public-sector programs, even during this deep recession. When asked to name the most important issues facing the state, 53 percent mentioned jobs and the economy . The state budget, deficit, and taxes only got the top billing of 15 percent.

And contrary to the conventional wisdom espoused by moderate politicians and political consultants, most voters say they are willing to pay higher taxes to save vital services. “Californians tell us they continue to place a high value on education and want education to be protected from cuts. And they’re willing to commit their money to help fund that,” PPIC director Mark Baldassare told the Guardian.

The survey found that 69 percent of respondents say they would pay higher taxes to protect K-12 education from future cuts, while 54 percent each say they would pay higher taxes to prevent cuts to higher education and to health and human services programs. In other words, voters seem to recognize where we’ve cut too deeply — and where we haven’t cut enough: only 18 percent of respondents would be willing to pay higher taxes to prevent cuts to prisons and corrections.

Baldassare said the June primary results also showed that people are willing to pay more in taxes for the services they value. “Around the state, there was a lot of evidence that people responded favorably to requests by their local governments for money, particularly for schools,” he said.

Both the California Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are held in very low esteem with voters, according to the PPIC study, and Schwarzenegger’s 23 percent rating is the lowest in the poll’s history.

Barbara O’Connor, political communications professor who heads the Institute for the Study of Politics and the Media at Sacramento State University, told us that voter unhappiness with elected leaders is no surprise. Right now, most people are afraid that their basic needs won’t be met over the long run.

“The common narrative is fear, and fear channels into anger,” O’Conner said.

And that fear is being tapped into strongly this year by the Republican candidates, who are trying to scare voters into embracing their promises to gut government and keep taxes as low as possible.

“If there’s any lesson to be learned from Meg and Carly’s early ads, it’s fear-mongering, fear-mongering all the time — and that doesn’t create a very positive narrative,” O’Connor said of gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina.

O’Connor noted that Barack Obama’s campaign had great success in using a positive, hopeful message and said she believes the right leader can also do so in California. “I talked to Jerry [Brown]’s people about it and said you can’t just run a negative campaign because that’s what Meg is doing.”

Despite the tenor of the times, O’Connor said she’s feeling hopeful about hope. She also believes Californians would respond well to a leader like Obama who tried to give them that hope — if only someone like Brown can pick up that mantle. “I think the environment is right for a positive message. But the question is: do we have people capable of delivering it?”

She said the no-new-taxes, dismantle-government rhetoric has started to wear thin with voters. “The real fiscal conservatives are badly outnumbered in Californian,” O’Connor said. As for the corporate sales jobs, O’Connor said voters have really started to wise up. “They aren’t going to be scammed.”

The results of the June primary election showed that voters across the spectrum were also disturbed by big special-interest money. Proposition 16, backed by $46 million from Pacific Gas and Electric Co., went down to defeat — even in counties that tend to vote Republican.

And this fall, with two rich former CEOs spending their personal wealth to win two of California’s top elected offices and energy companies pushing a measure to roll back California’s efforts to combat global warming, there could be great opportunity in a narrative targeting those at the top of our economic system.

 

THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM

Some observers say that whatever their shared feelings about corporate scams, conservatives and liberals in the state are just too far apart, and that there’s little hope for any substantive agreement. “People are becoming more polarized,” said consultant David Latterman, who often works for downtown candidates and interests. “I think we’re beyond compromise.”

Allen Hoffenblum, a Los Angeles-based Republican strategist, agreed. “The voter are all mad, but they’re mad at different things. I just don’t see where they come together.”

But Hightower, who has spent a lifetime in politics as a journalist, elected official, author, and commentator, has a different analysis.

“As I’ve rambled through life,” he wrote in a recent essay, “I’ve observed that the true political spectrum in our society does not range from right to left, but from top to bottom. This is how America’s economic and political systems really shake out, with each of us located somewhere up or down that spectrum, mostly down.

“Right to left is political theory; top to bottom is the reality we actually experience in our lives every day — and the vast majority of Americans know that they’re not even within shouting distance of the moneyed powers that rule from the top of both systems, whether those elites call themselves conservatives or liberals.”

In an interview, he told us he sees a lot of hope in the fractured and potentially explosive political ethos. “There’s all this anger,” he said. “People don’t know what to do. And I think the one focus that makes sense is the arrogance and abuse of corporate executives.”

In fact, Hightower pointed out, the teabaggers didn’t start out as part of the Republican machinery. “Wall Street and the bailouts sparked the tea bag explosion,” he said. It wasn’t until big right-wing outfits like the Koch brothers, who own oil and timber interests and fund conservative think tanks, started quietly funding tea party rallies that the anti-corporate, anti-imperial edge came off that particular populist uprising.

“At first, the teabaggers didn’t even know where the money was coming from,” Hightower said. “You can’t be mad at the teabaggers; we should have been out there organizing them first.”

There’s plenty of evidence that anger at big business is growing rapidly — and rivals the distrust of big government that has defined so much of American politics in the past 30 years. The bailouts were “the first time in a long time that people have been slapped in the face by collusion between big business and its Washington puppets,” Hightower noted.

Then there’s the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. In January, a sharply divided court ruled 5-4 that corporations had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money supporting or opposing political candidates. Progressives were, of course, outraged — but conservatives were, too.

Polls show that more than 80 percent of Democrats think the decision should be overturned. So do 76 percent of Republicans. “This is a winner for our side,” Hightower noted. “But our side’s not doing anything about it.”

Sure, President Obama denounced the ruling in his State of the Union speech and promised reform. But the bill the Democrats have offered in response does nothing to stop the flow of money; it would only increase disclosure requirements. And in response to furor from the National Rifle Association, it’s been amended and is now so full of holes that it doesn’t do much of anything.

Political consultants advising Whitman are clearly looking for ways to direct the voter unhappiness into a demand for lower taxes and smaller budgets. She’s already vowed to fire 40,000 state workers, and her most recent campaign ad attacks Brown for expanding public programs and raising the state deficit.

So far Brown hasn’t challenged that narrative — and some Democrats say he shouldn’t. It would be safer, they say, for Brown to get out front and demand his own cuts in Sacramento. “Going after public-sector pensions is a winner,” one Democratic campaign consultant, who asked not to be named, told us. “If Whitman beats Brown on those issues, she wins.”

But that approach is never going to be effective for Democrats. If the argument is over who can better cut government spending, the GOP candidates will always win. The better approach is to see if progressives can’t shift the debate — and the anger — toward the private sector.

As Hightower put it: “You can yell yourself red-faced at Congress critters you don’t like and demand a government so small that it’d fit in the backroom of Billy Bob’s Bait Shop and Sushi Stand, but you won’t be touching the corporate and financial powers behind the throne.”

That’s where the discussion has to start. And there’s no better place than California.

The Golden State is a great example of what happens when the tax- cutters win. In 1978, the liberals in Sacramento, operating with a huge state budget surplus, couldn’t figure out how to derail the populist anger of property tax hikes. So Proposition 13, the beginning of the great tax revolt, passed overwhelmingly. Over the next decade, more antitax initiatives went before the voters, and all were approved.

Now the state is heading toward fiscal disaster. The schools are among the worst-funded in the nation. The world-famous University of California system is on the brink of collapse. Community colleges are turning away students. The credit rating on California bonds have fallen so far that it’s hard for the state to borrow money. And there’s still a huge budget gap.

The tax-cut mentality that led to the so-called Reagan revolution started in California; a political movement that shifts the blame for many of the state’s problems away from government and onto big business ought to be able to start here as well. And it’s potentially a movement that could bring together people who normally find themselves on opposite sides of the fence.

A case in point: the measure the oil companies have put on the November ballot to repeal the state’s greenhouse gas limits. The corporations backing the initiative, led by Valero, argue that California’s attempts to slow climate change will cost jobs. That’s a line we’ve heard for decades. Every tax cut, every move toward deregulation, is defended as helping spur job growth.

But the past four presidents have done nothing but cut taxes and reduce regulations — and the result is facing Americans on the streets every day. There is also growing evidence that even Republican voters don’t believe everything big businesses tell them anymore. And they’re starting to grasp that sometimes deregulation leads to outcomes like larcenous CEOs and unstoppable oil leaks.

So the potential for a successful progressive populist movement is out there. But it’s not going to happen by spontaneous combustion.

 

SF SHOWS THE WAY

On the national level, one of the factors creating this gloomy electorate is the failure of President Obama to keep the coalition that elected him active and engaged. The intense partisanship in Washinton has turned off many independent Obama voters, while his progressive supporters have been disappointed by issues ranging from his escalation in Afghanistan to tepid reforms on health care and Wall Street.

“One of the narratives now is where are the Obama voters and will they participate?” Jim Stearns, a San Francisco political consultant who works mostly on progressive campaigns, told us. “They still love Obama but they’re not moved by him anymore.”

Perhaps more important, they have lost the sense of hope that he once instilled. The Republican Party’s descent into right-wing extremism and the strong anticorporate narratives that have emerged in the last year — from BP’s oil spill to PG&E’s political manipulation to Goldman Sachs’ self-dealing to the prospect of unrestricted corporate campaign propaganda unleashed by the Citizens United ruling — have created the possibility that the negative narratives by the left may crowd out the positive ones.

“Meg Whitman is someone you can hate. She’s the rich Republican CEO trying to buy her way into office,” Stearns said. “But it’s a depressing message.”

But Stearns said there is another, most hopeful political narrative that is emerging in San Francisco, one that might eventually grow into a model that could be used at the state and federal levels. “We’re lucky in San Francisco. Progressive voters are engaged.”

He noted that San Francisco’s voter turnout was higher than expected in the June primary, and far higher than the record low state number, even though there really weren’t any exciting propositions or closely contested races on the local ballot — except for the Democratic County Central Committee, where progressives maintained their newfound control. And it’s because of the organizing and coalition-building that the left has done.

“What you’ve seen over the last few years is a coalition of labor, neighborhood groups, environmentalists, and the progressives now operating through the Democratic Party. That’s a great coalition with a lot for people to trust,” Stearns said.

Meanwhile, downtown has all but collapsed as a unified political force. “They don’t really have a political infrastructure,” Stearns said of downtown. “Normally it would be the mayor who gets everyone in line and working together.”

Even Latterman, the downtown-oriented consultant, agrees that the business community is no longer setting San Francisco’s agenda because it’s become fractured and unable to push a consistent political narrative: “There’s certainly been a lack of coordination.”

He also agrees that progressives have become more organized and effective. “Clearly, the Democratic Party of San Francisco has become a conduit for progressive politics and politicians, but not issues,” Latterman said. “What a lot of people get wrong in the city is the difference between politics and policy.”

Part of the reason is economic. With scarce resources, a high threshold for approving new revenue sources, and a fiscally conservative mayor unwilling to talk taxes, it’s been difficult to move a progressive agenda for San Francisco. And in Sacramento, it’s barely part of the discussions.

“The people of California have been held hostage by a handful of Republicans who are making us cut everything we care about,” while in San Francisco “Newsom is taking an entirely Republican approach to the budget,” Stearns said.

Looking toward the fall races, Stearns said the progressive coalition and majority on the Board of Supervisors will be tested on issues such as Muni reform, and the question will be whether fiscal conservatives like Sup. Sean Elsbernd can blame Muni’s problems on drivers, or whether progressives can create and sell a broader package that includes new revenue and governance reforms.

“The drivers are going to get their guarantee taken out of the charter, that’s going to happen. But people know that isn’t all that’s wrong with Muni,” Stearns said.

But to craft a more comprehensive solution, he said the progressives are going to need to use their growing coalition to connect the dots for voters. “We need to run a citywide campaign around a whole constellation of issues,” Stearns said, citing Muni, schools, taxes, resistance to mean-spirited measures like sit-lie, and the larger issues raised by the Brown and Barbara Boxer campaigns. “We need to figure out a way to put all that in the same coalition and run one campaign around it. And we can do that because progressives retained control of the DCCC.”

 

THE STRUGGLE AHEAD

Although they’ve made great strides, San Francisco progressives are still struggling with a mayor who sees the solution to every budget crisis as cuts — and with a growing number of efforts to blame public employees for the city’s fiscal problems. Even Jeff Adachi, the public defender once considered a standard-bearer for progressive causes, is pushing a ballot measure that would require city workers to pay more for their pensions.

Gabriel Haaland, who works with Service Employees International Union Local 1021, made the right point in the pension debate. “Big financial institutions crashed the stock market,” he said recently, “and now they want to blame city workers.”

In a blog post on the political website Calitics, Robert Cruickshank put it clearly: “The notion that ‘everyone needs to give back’ just doesn’t make sense given our economic distress. We’ve already given back too much. We gave back our wages. We gave back our ability to afford health care and housing and transportation. We gave back the robust public- sector services that created widespread prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. We gave back affordable, quality education. And too many of us have given back our future.

“No, it’s time for someone else to give back. It’s time for the wealthiest Californians and the large corporations to give back. For 30 years now they have benefited from economic policy designed to take money and benefits from the rest of us and give it to those who already have wealth and power.”

That’s a message that ought to appeal to anyone who’s hurting from this recession. It ought to cross red and blue lines. It ought to be the mantra of a new progressive populism that can channel voter anger toward the proper target: the big corporations that created the problems that are making us all miserable.

If Jerry Brown could adopt that narrative, he could change the state of California — and the state of the nation.

Editorial: Put new taxes in the budget

David Talbot
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5

Mayor Gavin Newsom still wants to balance this year’s municipal budget with no new taxes (although he’s happy to raise the fees to use city facilities). The supervisors are looking at a different approach: John Avalos, chair of the budget committee, told us he’d like to see $100 million in new revenue on the table.

Some of that might come from a fee on liquor sales. There’s a hotel tax measure being circulated, and the supervisors are also looking at a raising the real estate transfer tax on high-end properties and imposing a commercial rent tax. All but the liquor fee would require a majority vote on the November ballot.

So far, Newsom hasn’t given any indication that he’ll support any new taxes — and that’s due in significant part to his campaign for lieutenant governor. The mayor doesn’t want to get hit by his Republican opponent as a tax-and-spend liberal, so he’s holding the line, cutting essential services instead of looking for progressive ways to bring in new revenue.

But voters up and down the state have shown their willingness to approve new taxes to save essential services, and it’s likely that San Franciscans will do the same — particularly if the folks at City Hall are united in their support.

So here’s an idea for the supervisors: why not include that new revenue as part of this year’s budget?

There’s no legal reason the budget can’t be balanced in part on the assumption of new income. November is almost halfway through the fiscal year, but more than $50 million of that revenue would be available for the 2010-11 budget.

There are distinct advantages to including that money in the budget, starting with fewer budget cuts and layoffs now. There’s also a clear political advantage: if the voters realize what’s at stake — that the money has already been earmarked and that voting it down would mean immediate reduction in vital services — the message of the importance of approving the tax measures would be even stronger.

Equally important, it would force the mayor to show his hand. Newsom would almost certainly prefer to duck the issue, to take a neutral stand on the tax measures (“let the voters decide”). He might wind up opposing all of them. But if the money’s already in the budget, what can he do? Without that tax money, the budget won’t be legally balanced. Without his support, that tax money might not come through.

It’s a risky move. If the voters reject the tax hikes, the supervisors and the mayor would be forced to make painful midyear cuts. But they’ll have to make those cuts anyway, either now or in November. And once you shut down services or eliminate nonprofit contracts, it’s much harder and more expensive to start them up again.

So this might be the year to take the calculated gamble: assume that money’s going to be there. Then everyone, including the mayor, can help make sure that it actually is.

Put new taxes in the budget

David Talbot
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2
Put new taxes in the budget

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom still wants to balance this year’s municipal budget with no new taxes (although he’s happy to raise the fees to use city facilities). The supervisors are looking at a different approach: John Avalos, chair of the budget committee, told us he’d like to see $100 million in new revenue on the table.

Some of that might come from a fee on liquor sales. There’s a hotel tax measure being circulated, and the supervisors are also looking at raising the real estate transfer tax on high-end properties and imposing a commercial rent tax. All but the liquor fee would require a majority vote on the November ballot.

So far, Newsom hasn’t given any indication that he’ll support any new taxes — and that’s due in significant part to his campaign for lieutenant governor. The mayor doesn’t want to get hit by his Republican opponent as a tax-and-spend liberal, so he’s holding the line, cutting essential services instead of looking for progressive ways to bring in new revenue.

But voters up and down the state have shown their willingness to approve new taxes to save essential services, and it’s likely that San Franciscans will do the same — particularly if the folks at City Hall are united in their support.

So here’s an idea for the supervisors: why not include that new revenue as part of this year’s budget?

There’s no legal reason the budget can’t be balanced in part on the assumption of new income. November is almost halfway through the fiscal year, but more than $50 million of that revenue would be available for the 2010-11 budget.

There are distinct advantages to including that money in the budget, starting with fewer budget cuts and layoffs now. There’s also a clear political advantage: if the voters realize what’s at stake — that the money has already been earmarked and that voting it down would mean immediate reduction in vital services — the message of the importance of approving the tax measures would be even stronger.

Equally important, it would force the mayor to show his hand. Newsom would almost certainly prefer to duck the issue, to take a neutral stand on the tax measures ("let the voters decide"). He might wind up opposing all of them. But if the money’s already in the budget, what can he do? Without that tax money, the budget won’t be legally balanced. Without his support, that tax money might not come through.

It’s a risky move. If the voters reject the tax hikes, the supervisors and the mayor would be forced to make painful midyear cuts. But they’ll have to make those cuts anyway, either now or in November. And once you shut down services or eliminate nonprofit contracts, it’s much harder and more expensive to start them up again.

So this might be the year to take the calculated gamble: assume that money’s going to be there. Then everyone, including the mayor, can help make sure that it actually is.

Editor’s Notes

David Talbot
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23
Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

Jane Kim, the San Francisco school board president running for supervisor in District 6, has a tough question to answer. When there’s already a solid progressive in the race, Debra Walker, someone who has lived in the district for years and agrees with Kim on almost all the key issues, why is Kim running?

She gave a hint at her campaign kickoff June 24 on how she’s going to portray herself: "I’m not part of anyone’s machine, and I’m certainly not part of anyone’s master plan." It’s an attractive statement — nobody likes machine politics — and the idea that she’s an independent candidate makes her all the more appealing.

Except that it also says something about the progressive movement in San Francisco — and that’s a little disturbing. Because no matter how you try to spin it, when you say you aren’t part of anyone’s machine, you’re implying that maybe your opponents are.

Let me take a step back here, because this is important stuff. There’s a fine line between an effective, organized political coalition that can actually win elections and a political machine, which stifles political innovation and grassroots candidates. And in part it’s about motivation.

When Willie Brown ran San Francisco, it was all about Willie Brown. I’ve never believed the guy had much of an ideology or that any political cause really mattered to him; he loved power, he knew how to use it and he didn’t want to give it up. That was the bottom line.

Now that he’s pretty much out of the picture — although he was at Kim’s party, he’s not a factor anymore — there’s a very different power balance in this city. There’s nobody at City Hall (or in Sacramento, or Washington, or downtown, or anywhere else) who has machine-style control of local politics.

There are people who can build coalitions that work — Aaron Peskin, for example, did exceptionally well with putting together a campaign to elect progressive Democratic County Central Committee elections. And there are people who would love to be power brokers.

But I’ve been around politics here a long time, and I can tell you: Aaron Peskin doesn’t have a machine. Neither does Mark Leno, or Gavin Newsom, or Tom Ammiano, or David Chiu, or anyone else. Thanks in part to district elections, there aren’t many call-up votes on the Board of Supervisors these days. In fact, the left in San Francisco is famously unable to agree on much of anything half the time. Note, for example, the fact that Chiu — often called a Peskin ally — is not supporting Peskin’s candidate in D-6. He’s with Jane Kim.

The thing is, unlike the players in a typical political machine, most of the progressives care about issues. It’s about a shared ideology more than it’s about power. That’s a hugely important difference.

The way the mainstream media has it, the San Francisco left is either fatally fractured and can’t do anything — or it’s becoming a machine. For the moment — a great moment — neither is true. Let’s all keep that in mind. Because when we beat each other up with words like "machine," we undermine the whole progressive movement.

Bad way to start a campaign.

Fiscal solidarity

David Talbot
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0
Fiscal solidarity

OPINION As Mayor Gavin Newsom prepares to skip town for the bleak limelight of Sacramento, he has left a resounding parting shot with massive budget cuts to those San Franciscans most in need of public aid: seniors, youth, homeless people, folks with mental illnesses, health clinic patients … the list goes on.

Newsom has balanced his final budget (and his campaign for lieutenant governor) largely on the backs of the poor, working-class, multiracial, and immigrant San Franciscans, as well as the nonprofits and city workers who deliver vital services.

The Newsom budget actually adds costs: by cutting services for the treatment and prevention of substance abuse and for youth crime prevention and supportive housing, for instance, it destabilizes lives and forces people right back into the treatment systems that are being cut — adding new human and fiscal costs.

"Every cut has a constituency," Newsom’s PR people say repeatedly. And that’s precisely what the mayor is counting on — that each "constituency" will fight on its own, for its own fiscal scraps. He’s wrong.

As members of a broad coalition of community and neighborhood-based organizations, labor unions, and civic leaders and residents across the city, we stand together in opposition to Newsom’s cuts-only budget and his attempts to divide "constituencies."

Fiscal solidarity means we recognize that an injury to one is an injury to all. "Constituencies" are in fact people whose lives cut across multiple budget line items. Cutting city parks is also a senior issue, as well as a youth issue. Closing mental health programs for the poor is not only an unnecessary moral outrage — it’s a public health and safety issue.

As members and supporters of unions and nonprofits, which are sometimes pit against each other in budget cut wars, we declare mutual support. The mayor’s cuts will mean drastically reduced services for those who need them most and deep staff cuts for city employees and nonprofit workers. We may work for different institutions under different budget line-items, but we’re fighting together as one community — one big "constituency."

Budget wars artificially divide communities that overlap and intermingle. Expressions of unity are put to the test by the budget "add-back" process that forces community groups to scuffle for scraps of cash — groups serving populations in critical need are set against each other, and whole communities are reduced to line-items.

We’re standing against fiscal wedge politics and demanding a real alternative. The budget must protect those most in need and be balanced by cutting first from the top instead of the bottom.

We are united for solutions — progressive tax measures on key wealth sectors that can and must pay their fair share to keep San Francisco the beautiful, thriving, diverse, and culturally rich city it is. We’re standing up for the city Newsom’s leaving, for the communities he’s cutting, and for progressive revenue — a tax to make downtown hotels pay their fair share, and a gross receipts tax on large businesses for starters.

Mayor Newsom: if you cut one of us, you cut us all.

This statement was signed by Christopher Cook, Budget Justice Coalition; Gabriel Haaland, SEIU 1021*; Gordon Mar, Jobs with Justice*; Eric Quezada, Dolores Street Community Services*; N’Tanya Lee, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth*; Jennifer Friedenbach, Coalition on Homelessness; Guiliana Milanese, Jobs with Justice*; Christina Olague, Senior Action Network*; Sheila Tully, California Faculty Association, SF State*; Chelsea Boilard, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth*; Joseph Smooke, Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center*; Carl Finamore, delegate, SF Labor Council*

* names for ID purposes only

Raising revenues on the backs of the East Bay/working class

Mary Magee
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32

If you are one of the many thousands of people who commute the Bay Bridge each day, then you already know that the  toll is going to increase on Thursday, July 1 to $6 during commute hours, and that the car pool is going to stop being free and start costing $2:50 (and you’ll need a Fastrak pass to use it). Tolls will also rise to $5 on Antioch, Benicia-Martinez, Carquinez, Dumbarton, Richmond-San Rafael and San Mateo-Hayward bridges. What you may not know is that San Francisco is also planning to start charging fees this summer to  “out-of-towners” to access certain facilities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCivf4OMuqY

As an East Bay resident and a member of San Francisco’s workforce, I understand the logic behind all these toll and fee increases: raise tolls to get cars off roads, people onto public transit, and spare the air in the process. And raise entrance fees for tourists, so as to generate revenue for cash-strapped city departments.

And yet, it feels like working-class folks who can’t afford to raise their families in San Francisco keep getting stuck with the bill for the excesses of the city’s real estate market, while the folks who made money gaming the real estate market in the ’90s and the Noughties keep leading the “no new taxes, lots of new fees” mantra.

That extra $2 a day to get to work is going to cost working folks about $500 more a year, at a time when wages are either stagnant or being cut. So, don’t be surprised if we stop spending any money on buying food in the city, to make ends meet. But should we also plan to stop visiting fee-charging city facilities?

I ask because a recent article in the Chronicle pointed out that “Out-of-town visitors will have to start paying an admission fee to San Francisco’s tranquil and well-tended Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park, now that the Board of Supervisors signed off on the proposal after months of heated public debate.”

San Francisco residents will continue to get free entry, the article reported, but other adults will have to pay $7 to get into the Botanical Garden, starting in late July or early August. (Discounts will be offered to seniors and youth.)

“The total price for a family will be capped at $15,” the Chron reported, ” and the money-making initiative is expected to generate $250,000 a year for the city’s strapped Recreation and Park Department, officials say.”

It’s not clear from that report whether the city’s commuters who now account for more than 50 percent of the city’s workforce) are classified as “out-of-towners?” And if it turns out that we are not, I’ll post an update here in short order. But I suspect we are, since we don’t actually live here, (even if we do spend half our lives working in a building within city limits).

Update: Lisa Van Cleef, public spokesperson for the Botanical Gardens (a former SFBG worker, when the Guardian was still on York Street) confirmed that Mayor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign the Botanical Gardens fee hike legislation by the end of this week.

“All San Francisco residents have free admission,” Van Cleef emailed. “Non-residents including those who work in SF, will pay the $7.00.”

In her email, Van Cleef made a great case for visiting the Botanical Gardens.

“It is very different than a park,” she wrote. “With 26 distinct gardens and collections, our visitors can experience incredible rarities from  Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Central and South America, and South Africa, plus our award-winning California Native Plant Garden 
complete with a century-old redwood forest. Hundreds of our plants are rare and/or endangered in the wild.Right now, the Passionflowers, Chilean, Australian and Perennial gardens are looking exceptionally great with lots in bloom.”

So, I guess I’ll be tempted to visit, fee or no, even as I wish for a more equitable way to generate new city revenues, in future.

Now, it’s easy to demonize folks who drive to work from the East Bay, as being irresponsible climate change inducing air polluters. But I can’t help noticing that many folks on the road alongside me each morning are driving beat-up pick-ups full of work tools and cars full of infant seats and toys. These are working class family-oriented folks who definitely pay their “entrance fee” into the city each day. (And then there’s the fact that we are paying to cross a bridge that no longer feels entirely safe to drive across, but that’s a whole other story.)

But when out-of-town commuters use public transit, it can take several hours each way–between bad connections and cut services–unless we live and work close to BART. And those hours spent waiting for the T-Third or changing buses adds up to precious time we don’t spend with our families, and costs a lot in child care.

That’s why I’m getting sick of the  “cyclists v drivers” debate in San Francisco. Because it’s a divisive, misleading debate. There are saints and sinners on both sides of that debate’s equation, but when it comes to actually getting folks off the road and onto public transit, the real issue continues to be the cost of housing and the lack of a truly comprehensive public transit system in San Francisco. And I’m not seeing the kind of planning in the pipeline that would allow working-class families to move back into town and/or make traveling to and from the East Bay less of a nightmare.

Instead, there are plans to build thousands and thousands of condos where a couple could possibly raise one child–until the crying and the constant bits of Lego underfoot in the condo’s swag carpetting get them fleeing to the Oakland hills, and beyond.

So, go ahead and bite me and the rest of the working class commuters with more fees, both at the toll booths and at the entrance gate to  the Botanical Gardens. We don’t have much choice but to pay them, if we want to keep our jobs in the city, and enjoy ourselves in our downtime before making the return commute. But milking us is not going to solve the underlying problem in a city that sold out to the highest bidder a long time ago. Yes, this is a bit of a “whine” piece, and it’s coming from someone who enjoys navigating her “London Taxi” as I like to call my anonomobile, through the roughest of city streets. But seriously folks, when is someone going to have the balls to raise taxes on the rich in this richest of cities and stop sticking it to the poor?

“No new taxes,” but fees and restrictions may apply

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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The agenda for the June 29 Board of Supervisors meeting reads like the fine print of a credit card statement, with fees piled upon more fees.  Mayor Gavin Newsom is proposing a slew of increases to sums that must be forked over for a wide array of city services or permits as a way to bridge a gaping budget gap. With major cuts to critical services in the face of a dramatic revenue shortfall, it’s not surprising that the city is tightening its squeeze to make up for some of the damage.

Some of the proposals make a certain amount of sense. There are higher fees proposed for an underground parking lot at Golden Gate Park, which could potentially help dissuade motorists and promote more environmentally friendly transportation options. There are higher fees for tow truck operators, which most anyone who’s ever involuntarily had their car towed could get behind. And the fee for discharging a cannon may go up from $400 to $636. While we’re pretty sure that last one is more likely to irk people who attend military ceremonies, we nonetheless take delight in imagining a rambunctious crew of pirates spilling into the board chambers to oppose it.

But this roster of Newsom’s new hidden fees begs an important question: Why is a mayor so adamantly against raising taxes bent on vacuuming more money out of the pockets of small business owners with higher fees? After all, many of these proposed increases will squeeze struggling, Mom-and-Pop businesses just a little tighter. City permits for auto wreckers, billiard parlors, junk dealers, and massage establishments may go up significantly. The fee for taking an EMT course may get higher. Permits for selling food on the street, driving a pedicab, dealing in second-hand auto parts, or operating a shooting gallery could also increase. Even the annual permit fee for street artists (several of whom we wrote about in our Streets Issue) is getting more expensive.
 
The list of fee hikes is on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, and was referred to the full board by the Budget & Finance Subcommittee. Supervisors recently proposed a number of new revenue generating measures including a nickel-per-drink tax on alcoholic beverages, an increase to the hotel tax, and a restructuring of the business payroll tax.

“There are no new taxes in this budget,” Newsom declared during a June 1 announcement in which he unveiled his 2010-2011 budget. “I know some folks just prefer tax increases. I don’t.”

But why reject taxes outright and then quietly propose a bunch of fees that will place a higher burden on the individuals they impact?

“No new taxes” may sound like music to the ears of a public awash in financial woes, but Newsom’s hidden fees are not unlike taxes. Under this philosophy, it’s not desirable to ask everyone to pitch in an extra nickel the next time they buy a cocktail, but there’s no problem with asking the bar to fork over hundreds more annually for a health inspection. That doesn’t seem to be as simple as a campaign-ready “no new taxes” slogan, but then again, there’s a reason credit card companies bury their hidden fees in the fine print.

Supreme Court rejects Healthy SF challenge

Sasha Cuttler
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Supreme Court rejects Healthy SF challenge

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to consider a challenge to the Healthy San Francisco program that provides low-cost health coverage to city residents, partially funded by employers who refuse to provide health insurance for their employees, a mandate that prompted a lawsuit from the Golden Gate Restaurant Association.

The decision was a big victory for low-wage workers in the city, as well as California Assembly member Tom Ammiano, who was the driving force behind the program as a member of the Board of Supervisors, taking abuse from the business community for almost a year and holding firm on the need for employers to take responsibility for their employees. Without that mandate, Ammiano successfully argued, businesses that didn’t offer health benefits would enjoy a competitive advantage and their employees’ health care costs would often end up be paid by city taxpayers.

“Today’s Supreme Court decision is an affirmation of San Francisco’s landmark efforts to provide affordable health care to the uninsured. With over 50,000 people receiving health care services and prescription drugs, Healthy San Francisco is a national model for what can be accomplished when the public and private sector work in partnership towards a common goal”, Ammiano said in a prepared statement.

Mayor Gavin Newsom was eventually persuaded to support the mandate and he worked with Ammiano in crafting the final program, which he has since trumpeted as his own while campaigning for governor and then lieutenant governor, for which he won the Democratic nomination.

“The Supreme Court’s rejection of the challenge to Healthy San Francisco is a victory for the 53,000 San Franciscans who have healthcare today through our groundbreaking universal healthcare program. Healthy San Francisco is a model for healthcare reform that works. The High Court’s decision today ensures we can continue providing health care coverage to thousands who would otherwise go without care,” Newsom said in a prepared statement.

Newsom is a former restauranteur and GGRA member, but he did little to dissuade the group from bringing the lawsuit or in urging them to drop it. Many restaurants in San Francisco have taken to adding surcharges on customers’ bills, explicitly citing the increased cost of offering health insurance. But no restaurants that I know of include explicit surcharges for the membership dues they pay to GGRA or the extra contributions some restaurants made to continue pushing this lawsuit after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the city’s favor.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who personally lobbied the Obama Administration to change the federal government stance on whether employer mandates violate federal law, also released a statement thanking the relevant players and singling out businesses that opposed the GGRA lawsuit: “I applaud Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom for their leadership in crafting this policy.  We should be very thankful to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, too, whose thorough decision powerfully affirmed our arguments that Healthy San Francisco’s spending provisions were reasonable, fair and legal.  I would finally express my gratitude to all those from the business community who voiced their support for this program — especially Zazie and Medjool Restaurants, and Nibbi Construction, which filed amicus briefs on our behalf.”

Agnos: “I think Gavin’s gonna lose”

Sasha Cuttler
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Agnos: “I think Gavin’s gonna lose”

Former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos told the Guardian last night that he’d welcome the chance to be appointed a “caretaker mayor” for a year if Mayor Gavin Newsom wins his race for lieutenant governor, but he doesn’t think he’ll get that chance because “I think Gavin’s gonna lose.”

Agnos is one of several names that have been bandied about in the discussions of who the Board of Supervisors might appoint as acting mayor for a year if none of the top candidates running for mayor in 2011 – such as Aaron Peskin, Mark Leno, Leland Yee, or Dennis Herrera – are able to get six votes on the board in January 2010, when Newsom would vacate the Mayor’s Office if he moves on to Sacramento.

“I’m available, but I don’t need it,” Agnos said, noting that he would agree to not run for a full-term in 2011, which would be the main criteria for a caretaker mayor, a concept that would prevent any mayoral candidate from gaining the advantage of incumbency.

But Agnos said that Abel Maldonado, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, will be a tough challenge for Newsom, both because he’s a moderate Latino with a compelling personnel story, and because rich Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman will likely give Maldonado all the money and support he needs so she doesn’t have a Democratic rival as lieutenant governor.

As Agnos told us, “She will give him whatever he need to bury Newsom.”

Kim launches D6 campaign, stressing independence from “machine” politics

Sasha Cuttler
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Jane Kim launched her campaign for the District 6 seat on the Board of Supervisors last night during a spirited event at 111 Minna, showcasing some high-profile supporters and giving a speech that began with touting her early work on immigrant rights and homeless issues and ended with the declaration, “I’m not part of anyone’s machine and I’m certainly not a part of anyone’s master plan.”

That emphasis on her independence could be seen as a subtle dig at Debra Walker, another progressive who has been running for the seat for the last two years, who locked down early support from many progressive groups and officials, and whose supporters were unhappy with Kim’s late decision to enter the race, concerned it might split the vote and allow downtown-backed Theresa Sparks — who could be viewed as a “machine” candidate on the other end of the political spectrum — to steal the seat for the moderates.

When I asked what “machine” she meant and whether the comment was a reference to Walker’s supporters, Kim wouldn’t clarify the comment, refusing to criticize the Walker campaign and saying only, “I want to be a part of a new political process.”

And that new process seems to rely heavily on the energy of young people, including many of color, who dominated the crowd last night. Kim also signaled that she will be pushing a fairly bold progressive agenda that includes more city support for schools, Muni, immigrants, and low-income families, and making the streets more vibrant and democratic.

“The mantra of our campaign is to make our neighborhoods complete,” Kim said.

She proposed making substantial pedestian and bicycle improvements on several streets in her district, including 2nd, Folsom, Taylor, and Turk streets, creating more bikes lanes that are separated from car traffic, and turning many of the alleys in her district into more active public spaces. She called for the city to help fund youth programs and a longer school year and to offer more support to small businesses, which she called the city’s most important job generator.

Kim, a civil rights attorney and president of the school board, also emphasized the need to improve the tone of political debate in the city, which she helped accomplish on the school board (whose vice president, Hydra Mendoza, an employee of Mayor Gavin Newsom, was there in support). “People are disillusioned and disappointed with the process and the bickering,” Kim said.

Among Kim’s supporters at the event were Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, former Mayor Art Agnos, filmmaker Kevin Epps, Police Commissioner and immigrant rights activist Angela Chan, transportation activist Dave Synder, and representatives from a wide variety of community groups.

“She has epitomized the progressive values that I think all of San Francisco shares,” Chiu told the crowd, later adding, “She will be a part of the next generation of political leaders of San Francisco.”

“I’m really proud that Jane has put herself out there as a future leader and our supervisor,” said Epps, later adding, “I think Jane really has her ear to the streets.”

Kim pledged to run a clean campaign focused on her issues, and her only supporter to voice overt criticism of Walker was Agnos, who said he was impressed with Kim’s work with him last year in fighting Prop. D, which would have removed mid-Market from the city ban on new billboards, a measure that Walker supported.

“Prop. D for me was a tipping point, and Debra went with the commercial interests,” Agnos told the Guardian.

But Kim, 32, says her reason for running is to help push a progressive vision for the city and bring new blood into the political process.

“I have to tell you, I never wanted to go into politics,” she told the crowd. “But I had the desire to see some real change.”

CompStat vs. community policing

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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CompStat vs. community policing

By Alex Emslie


news@sfbg.com


Two competing visions for the San Francisco Police Department are central to a looming debate involving the mayor and his police chief, who favor the high-tech yet impersonal CompStat model, and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors who are pushing for a community-based, cops-walking-beats blueprint for SFPD.


District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi introduced a proposed ballot measure on June 7 that would require the police chief to institute foot patrols in all districts and ask the Police Commission to establish a written community policing policy. SFPD Chief George Gascón opposes the initiative, instead favoring a reliance on the new CompStat system to determine how best to use police resources.


The terms “CompStat” and “community policing” have become trendy buzz words, UC Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring told the Guardian, so they mean different things to the police departments that employ them, muddying the waters of the current debate.


“When labels get popular, they get pasted into lots of different things,” said Zimring, who wrote The Great American Crime Decline (Oxford University Press, 2006) and is working on a second book about the crime rate drop in the 1990s in New York City, where CompStat orginated. Yet the two models point to differing law enforcement philosophies.


At its most basic, CompStat uses computerized crime mapping software to drive police deployment decisions. It emphasizes lowering a city’s crime rate by centralizing authority, spotting statistical trends, and targeting crime hot spots. Community policing, a model embraced by many U.S. police departments in the 1980s and ’90s before CompStat swept the nation, grounds police officers in the neighborhoods they serve, decentralizing authority. The model seeks to prevent crime with regular patrols that develop relationships on their beats and lets the community help set law enforcement priorities.


“There is not community policing in San Francisco,” Mirkarimi — the only member of the board to go through the police academy — told the Guardian. “I don’t care what anybody says. If they say there is, then it is isolated. It’s unique to that particular experience or location.”


Proponents of CompStat insist the new model is really just a part of community policing. Gascón wrote a letter to the Board of Supervisors in February saying the proposed legislation “oversteps the jurisdiction of the legislative branch,” “attempts to give district station captains authority and discretion that rightfully belong to the chief of police,” and “will deprive the department of the flexibility it needs to address public safety throughout the city.”


Mirkarimi doesn’t oppose CompStat and said he sees merit in the program’s statistical collection, which has long been a shortcoming in the SFPD. “But I caution against any over-reliance on CompStat as a method that dictates how policing and public safety should be applied,” Mirkarimi told us. “Because the casualty of this over-reliance will be a compromising of any hopes of having true community policing.”


The SFPD website portrays CompStat as starting with data collection and then, similar to community policing, encouraging officers to find creative solutions to ongoing problems, anything from singular incidents of burglary to repeated graffiti or even a spike in murders. The crime triangle, a lasting symbol of community policing, illustrates that victims, suspects, and locations are all necessary for crime to thrive, and successfully policing even one of those factors can prevent crime. But CompStat programs often lack sustained commitment to building relationships with neighborhoods.


“Compstat seemed to engender a pattern of organizational response to crime spikes in hot spots that was analogous to the Whack-a-Mole game found at fairs and carnivals,” argued a 2003 study commissioned by the national Police Foundation titled “CompStat in Practice: An in-depth Analysis of Three Cities.”


The study found immediate contradictions in Lowell, Mass.; Minneapolis, and Newark, N.J. between beat officers’ new responsibility to “simply follow their superiors’ orders” and the community policing model that cast them as individual, authoritative protectors of their neighborhoods. CompStat centralizes authority with the higher echelons of SFPD. It includes bimonthly meetings in which station captains are grilled by SFPD brass and are expected to answer for the statistics in their district.


“Given the gap between the two models of policing, CompStat naturally tends to encounter the greatest resistance in departments that are most committed to community policing,” the study found.


Understaffed and poorly trained crime analysis units tasked with deciphering data patterns into useful correlations (for example, between drug crimes and murder) was another barrier to the success of CompStat outlined in the study. SFPD’s crime analysis unit consists of three civilians housed at the Hall of Justice, SFPD spokesperson Lt. Lyn Tomioka told us. They are not deployed to district stations and are supervised by a lieutenant who also has other responsibilities.


“There are a lot of rough edges. There’s a lot of non-fit there,” Zimring told the Guardian. “Who sets the priorities? CompStat priorities are always crime prevention, and they are set, and tactics are provided, by the chief of police. He is, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, ‘the decider.’ Community policing is supposed to be more cooperative and organic.”


Gascón initiated CompStat in San Francisco in October 2009, although Mayor Gavin Newsom has been touting the CompStat model since he first ran for mayor in 2003, when a campaign policy brief gushed about its “accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment, effective tactics, and relentless follow-up and assessment.” Initially, however, SFPD only took baby steps, using a confusing plot system to map crimes. That changed when Gascón took over as police chief last August, bringing experience in the program with him from the Los Angeles Police Department.


SFPD officials say vendor contract costs to start the system’s electronic crime mapping were less than $1 million, and an additional $1 million has been proposed for next year’s budget for technology upgrades in the CompStat unit. But the numbers so far haven’t backed up the boldest claims. SFPD reports 24 homicides this year as of June 12, up 20 percent from last year’s rate for early June. Homicide arrests are down from 12 last year to eight this year. Occurrences of rape are also up by 12 percent, but overall violent crime is down 2 percent compared to this time last year.


Gascón wrote that foot patrols are a valuable tool for community policing in San Francisco, but he doesn’t want to be forced to maintain them with limited staffing. Newsom’s proposed budget maintains current SFPD staffing, 2,317 sworn officers, while many other city departments received deep staffing cuts. Progressive supervisors have pledged to closely scrutinize SFPD’S budget.


Community policing was law enforcement’s response to civil unrest in the 1960s and ’70s, when police were seen as the enforcers of institutional power. Previous beat patrol methods largely ended when the 911 system came along, and the emphasis was placed on calls for service, statistics, and response times, leaving officers with little time to patrol and prevent crime.


The change to community policing emphasized neighborhood input and officers becoming an organic part of the community they served. Citizen contributions, generally through community meetings, began to drive decision-making. Foot patrols were revived and officers were once again expected to have a physical presence and a connection to the community they served.


That change was seen as particularly important in poor neighborhoods and communities of color, where police can sometimes be seen as an occupying army and residents were reluctant to cooperate with investigations. Officials hoped to prevent crimes by showing a presence in neighborhoods rather than simply reacting to them when someone called.


Mirkarimi says a CompStat-driven police force would be a return to that reactive model, potentially sacrificing the long-term commitment required to build trust between a neighborhood and its police department, which is central to community policing. “[CompStat] undermines the principles and practices of community policing because true community policing requires a discipline and a protocol that is sustained,” he said.


While either approach can theoretically result in the same practices, such as a foot beat patrol in a given neighborhood, Zimring said the reasoning behind it depends on the model. “CompStat to begin with is completely crime-driven,” Zimring said. “The reason you have it is to reduce crimes. It involves computerized mapping of crimes. It involves allocating resources to so-called hot spots, and it involves the police department imposing its own priorities as opposed to implementing community priorities.”


The Board of Supervisors will consider Mirkarimi’s measure and SFPD budget in July, airing a debate that could continue on to the November ballot, when voters would decide whether to maintain their faith in CompStat and the SFPD or ask for more community policing and foot patrols.

Danger zone

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Danger zone

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Rita Connolly, a registered nurse who has worked with inmates in San Francisco jails since 1985, says she’ll never forget the time she had to act fast to save a prisoner’s life.

The man had just arrived from a different jail and was waiting to go through intake. He was slumped over and looking ill, too weak to voice a complaint. Several worried inmates beckoned Connolly over, and once she examined him, she realized he was in the midst of a heart attack. He was rushed to the emergency room. He lived — but sustained irreversible heart damage.

“He could have been someone who didn’t live,” Connolly told the Guardian, but he also could have had a better outcome. The inmate had alerted someone that he was having chest pains earlier in the day, she later learned, as he was boarding a bus from an Alameda County Jail. A medical services worker examined him just before the bus left, but allowed him to proceed. By the time he arrived in San Francisco, the warning signals had progressed to a full-blown heart attack.

The story highlights an extreme example of a trend Connolly said she observes regularly — inmates from counties that use privatized jail health services aren’t receiving the same standard of care that San Francisco provides. Sometimes, there are obvious signs that the care is inadequate, placing inmates’ health at risk.

Alameda’s jail health services contractor, Tennessee-based Prison Health Services Inc. (PHS), has made headlines before for a track record marred by inmate deaths and lawsuits alleging negligence. PHS has expressed interest in contracting with San Francisco if the city opened the door to privatization, which Mayor Gavin Newsom has once again proposed in his latest budget.

That budget also calls for cuts to community-based health and human service programs that threaten to erode the safety net for those battling mental health issues, drug addiction, and chronic health problems, all proposals now being weighed by the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee.

But it is the debate over whether to make a $11 million cut to jail health services that raises the most thorny and telling questions about what sacrifices are considered acceptable — and what populations can be the most easily targeted — in the quest to balance a budget without the tax increases that Newsom opposes.

 

OPEN WOUNDS

In San Francisco, the city’s Department of Public Health contracts with the Sheriff’s Department to address inmates’ medical needs. Privatized jail health care would be cheaper, though by how much is a moving target. But nobody is arguing that the care would be better.

Newsom’s budget proposes switching to a private firm as early as January 2011 to help solve a daunting budget deficit. The proposal originated with the Mayor’s Office, and Sheriff Mike Hennessey — whose department would realize the potential savings — went along by including the item in his departmental budget.

In years past, the Board of Supervisors has repeatedly resisted the proposal and is likely to do so again — but rejecting it would mean finding up to $11 million in savings elsewhere.

“The fear is that when you bring privatization into the picture, there is a financial pressure to cut corners. And even though that may end up saving some money … the price that comes with it is too high,” Sup. David Campos said at a recent budget hearing. Referencing stories about inmates who died needlessly in jail under the care of for-profit firms, Campos said he isn’t willing to risk a similar tragedy occurring in San Francisco.

The proposal has been floated repeatedly since as far back as the early 1990s, according to healthcare workers whose jobs have been jeopardized by privatization before. Newsom proposed the cut last year, and the year before.

“In absence of the budget problem, [Hennessey] probably would not have proposed this, nor would we have proposed this,” Newsom’s budget director, Greg Wagner, told members of the Budget and Finance Committee at a May 26 hearing, adding that the mayor shares concerns about prisoner safety. Newsom’s office did not return multiple calls requesting comment for this story.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to a hear an appeal by the state of California to the federal court ruling that substandard medical care in California prisons constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and necessitates the early release of about 40,000 prisoners. At the May 26 hearing, healthcare workers familiar with the interiors of county jails and state penitentiaries came forward with horror stories.

“Every week I receive at least one inmate who has an open gunshot wound. They have not seen medical care in the county jails,” Dr. Elena Tootell, chief medical officer at San Quentin state prison, told committee members. “It’s quite surprising to me that they send inmates with gunshot wounds to prison. They just walk off the bus. They often have paper towels stuck to their bodies, seeping the blood. And then we are obligated to take care of them. This does not happen from San Francisco County, I’m going to tell you that right now.”

Tootell said she’d observed a significant difference between those counties using private firms and those using public health care. “They will have a fracture — they’ve never been splinted, they’ve never seen a doctor. They’re on anticoagulation [medication], but haven’t had their blood checked in weeks and have bruises all over their body.”

Connolly echoed similar concerns. For example, she told the Guardian, she’s found herself asking questions like, “You were on AIDS medication before you got arrested and now you’re not?”

Susanne Paradis, a healthcare research contractor with SEIU Local 1021, rejects the premise that the same services could be provided at a lower price. Under a private model, she says, the priority is to keep costs low — and that means doing less.

A key issue, Paradis said, is that private firms tend to rely more heavily on licensed vocational nurses (LVNs) — lower-paid medical staffers who aren’t trained to assess patient’s medical needs and cannot administer the same care that registered nurses (RNs) can. Using PHS data, Paradis found that in Alameda, there is one RN for every 92 inmates, compared with one RN per 32 inmates in San Francisco.

“An RN has the ability to assess, observe, and determine if there’s emergency care needed,” Paradis explained. “An LVN does not have the ability to do that.”

John Poh, a nurse practitioner stationed at a jail in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, explained the difference this way: “The more RNs you have working for you, the fewer deaths you have.”

PHS, an obvious point of comparison with San Francisco since it serves Alameda, declined to answer questions about its services. Instead, media spokesperson Pat Nolan e-mailed a brief statement. “We are excited to hear that San Francisco is considering the contracting of correctional health care,” he wrote. “Should the city choose to go through an RFP process, we would look forward to participating. We think it is the right thing to do for the city and its taxpayers.”

 

LINES OF DEFENSE

While those incarcerated in San Francisco jails can be thought of by some as criminals, nuisances, or miscreants, those requiring medical attention are patients in the eyes of the jail healthcare workers.

Inmates routinely enter the system with diabetes, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, heart problems, liver disease, and substance abuse issues, Connolly said. On occasion, a woman will arrive in jail only to learn that she is pregnant. Mental health problems are common, and some battle psychiatric issues in combination with physical ailments.

“Overall, our patient population has had little access to health care. For many people, we’re the only show in town,” Connolly noted.

Poh said some problems could spiral out of control if jail health staff didn’t nip them in the bud. If an inmate is exhibiting signs of tuberculosis, for instance, they’ll immediately get a mask and be sent to the hospital for screening. Sexually transmitted diseases are also a priority for treatment. “You don’t want that person going out infected,” Poh explained.

The city takes a proactive stance when it comes to treating inmates, Poh said, because at the end of the day, county jail is a revolving door. “Everybody leaves county jail. They’re either going home, to a program, or to prison.” If people are released back into the community with contagious, untreated health problems, the risk of exposure can spread beyond jailhouse walls.

San Francisco’s current system is considered a first line of defense, in which inmates are “seen as members of the community who happen to be in jail right now,” Paradis said.

Privatizing jail-health services would constitute a blow to a wider public health safety net in San Francisco that is already weathering painful cuts. At a June 15 Beilenson Hearing, a state-mandated opportunity for community members to explain the impacts of proposed health and human services cuts to the Board of Supervisors, people came out in droves to protest cuts to programs serving vulnerable residents.

Kristie Miller, executive assistant of the Standing Against Global Exploitation (SAGE) Project, told the Guardian that her organization serves 350 clients a year who are victims of human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation. The organization stands to lose its mental health funding, so Miller had come out to speak against the cut. “It provides trauma-focused psychotherapy for survivors who’ve experienced a lot of abuse, violence, and exploitation,” she said.

Jeff Schindler, chief development officer for the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, said he was there protesting a 79 percent funding cut to his organization’s 108-bed residential program on Treasure Island. “We won’t have a place for people to actually go into residential treatment for their mental health and substance abuse issues,” he said. “These are individuals who are going to get their needs met somehow, somewhere, and generally that’s going to be at San Francisco General Hospital.”

It’s in this context that the proposal to contract out for jail health services is being proposed. “It’s easy to dismiss prisoners as probably the least valued sector of our society,” Deirdre Wilson, of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, noted at a May 26 hearing. “But the right to health care is a human right.”

 

FOR THE RECORD

According to an estimate prepared by the Sheriff’s Department, the city could save anywhere from $11 million to $14 million by contracting out for jail health services, and Newsom’s budget assumes a savings of “over $11 million per year.”

However, the Controller’s Office continues to revise that figure as the debate shifts and concerns are raised about the skill mix that a private firm would use. “We don’t really know what it would cost to contract out, unless there was an RFP and a response to the proposal and some discussion about what the staffing requirements would be,” Deputy City Controller Monique Zmuda explained at a June 17 hearing. She added that the potential range of savings spanned from $3 million to $11 million annually, depending on decisions that would have to be made about acceptable staffing levels.

San Francisco’s inmate population has shrunk in the wake of the crime lab scandal, and a city-owned facility in San Bruno has been temporarily shuttered. Sheriff Hennessey told the Guardian he believed medical care in the jails could be provided either by city workers or a private firm, but added that he’s “quite happy” with the status quo. Noting that 25 of the 58 counties in California already use private firms, he added, “It’s not an unusual or unique thing.” Hennessey also said the decision was linked to a broader philosophical and political question, and that he doubted there was support on the board for the proposal to go forward.

Mitch Katz, director of the city’s Department of Public Health, did not directly say whether he supported Newsom’s proposal. “I think our Jail Health Services does a great job, but I do understand that the city is facing an extremely difficult budget year and that ultimately the budget must be balanced,” Katz wrote in an e-mail.

Gabriel Haaland, who represents SEIU Local 1021 union members whose jobs would be affected by the proposal, voiced strong opposition at a June 17 Budget and Finance Committee meeting. “‘We don’t care about these people because they’re poor and they’re in jail.’ That’s the message” in the decision to contract out, Haaland charged. The item was continued and will be revisited as budget deliberations unfold.

SF mayoral analysis in the NY Times misses the mark

Sasha Cuttler
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SF mayoral analysis in the NY Times misses the mark

I have praised Bay Citizen’s early work and I think Gerry Shih is a smart young reporter, but I think their analysis of who will be San Francisco’s next mayor – which ran in today’s New York Times – was off the mark and shows they don’t yet have a good grasp of this city’s political dynamics. And a big reason for that is – just like the Examiner and the Chronicle – they relied too much on downtown players who consistently misread those dynamics, at least in recent years.

The one thing it got right was naming Aaron Peskin as one of the frontrunners to succeed Newsom if he is elected lieutenant governor. Peskin is really the only politico in town he has been putting big plays together these days, whether it be keeping Democratic Party leadership in progressive hands or defeating the 555 Washington project. So he might be the only one who can count to six with this current progressive-dominated board.

But nobody really thinks David Chiu is a frontrunner, despite Shih’s claim. Chiu has been a pretty good board president, but remember that he was elected as a compromise candidate (with lots of help from Peskin) after the then-frontrunners, Ross Mirkarimi and Bevan Dufty, couldn’t put the votes together. And since then, he has disappointed his progressive colleagues on several votes, making them unlikely to support him for mayor.

Besides, it will be difficult for any supervisor to get six votes when they can’t vote for themselves, which also makes me scoff at Shih’s contention that John Avalos and David Campos are running for mayor (two supervisors who are close to the Guardian and have never indicated to us that they’re running, even when we’ve asked, although they might each eventually become mayors). Ross Mirkarimi is more likely and wants the job, but would have a tough time getting a board majority to give is to him.

Shih told the Guardian that he’s been getting lots of critical feedback on his article today, and while he said Chiu and Peskin are names that kept coming up in his interviews, Shih admits that the attractive narrative of the protege challenging his mentor perhaps skewed the final analysis: “The relationship between those two guys ended up getting played up in the story.”

The article makes several other mistakes as well (and not just the obvious factual errors, like getting the mayoral election year wrong, as well as the year Feinstein left office, both of which have since been corrected online). It left City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s name out entirely, despite the fact that he’s already declared his intention to run for mayor and could certainly be a compromise candidate. Public Defender Jeff Adachi also wasn’t mentioned, even though he has a better chance than half the people on Shiu’s list, such as Willie Brown or Ed Harrington, who downtown may like but progressives really don’t.

Two strong possibilities for mayor – Mark Leno and Leland Yee – were given only passing mention in the article even though they are far more likely choices than Chiu. Both Leno and Yee have aggressively worked both the centrist and progressive sides of the aisle and are in great positions to run for mayor or be appointed by the board.

The hopes for a Chinese-American mayor that Shih placed with Chiu are probably better placed with Yee, who has worked with Rose Pak and other business interests while also having a history of endorsing progressive candidates, which he’ll be able to call in when he runs (and yes, unlike other candidates on Shih’s list, Yee has actually declared his intention to run).

Similarly, Leno has good relations with progressives on the board, which will be tested a bit this fall as he campaigns for moderate supervisorial candidate Scott Wiener and navigates the wedge issue minefield, but it’s easy to see how with the right outcomes this fall and key deals cut, Leno could emerge as the frontrunner.

The dynamics of this thing are incredibly complicated, but if I was in Shih’s shoes and was asked to name the two frontrunners, I’d probably say Peskin and Leno, with Yee a close third and Herrera as an outside possibility. Or it could be none of them if nobody can count to six and the option of a caretaker mayor who agrees not to run later (such as an Art Agnos) seems like the only way forward.

As politicos Alex Clemens and David Latterman said in their post-election analysis on June 10, this is very complicated and will be the subject of many deals by experienced insiders (of which Chiu really isn’t one just yet). “Everyone is gaming this thing out and trying to figure out what happens,” Clemens said.

But there is one scenario in which I could see Chiu figuring prominently, and that’s in what happens if both Newsom and Kamala Harris win their respective state races. Chiu has expressed a desire to be District Attorney, a chance that he might get if he can help play kingmaker with whoever becomes our next mayor.

So perhaps that qualifies him as a frontrunner of sorts after all.

Following Recology’s $$$ to Environment Commission and DCCC

Mary Magee
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7
Following Recology’s $$$ to Environment Commission and DCCC

If you’ve been looking for a financial connection between the city’s tentative decision to award the next landfill disposal contract to Recology, which plans to dispose of our trash in Yuba County, then you’ll be interested in this campaign finance item: Because records show that Recology contributed $5,000 last year to SF Forward, a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce political action committee, which also got Money  from Bechtel, Medjool, PG&E, Charles Schwab, and Shorenstein Realty.

Recology Vice President and Group Manager John Legnitto is Chamber’s Chair Elect.

In the last two years, the Chamber contributed $10,000 to Plan C, a political action committee that advocates for more condo conversions and less tenants’ rights.And Plan C gave Commission of the Environment President Matt Tuchow $3,300 for his failed 2010 Democratic CCC bid.

So, while the transactions were legal, with the money laundered twice in between, these dollar connections will probably have folks opposed to the city’s plan to dispose of its waste in Recology’s landfill in Yuba County asking if this explains why Tuchow decided to limit public comment to only one minute when folks wanted to voice concerns at a March 23 hearing at the Environment Commission about an alleged lack of fairness and transparency in the decision to award the contract to Recology.

Especially those folks who drove three hours from Yuba County, which is where Recology proposes to send our trash. And folks who helped negotiate the city’s current trash disposal contract and were shocked that the city would set a one-minute time limit on what they claim is a $1 billion contract, once you factor in the cost of transportation, new trash processing facilities and an as yet unbuilt rail spur that Recology needs inYuba County to transfer trash from the Union Pacific line to its landfill in Wheatland,

Tuchow, who works in the Global Compliance and Ethics Division of McKesson Corporation in San Francisco, had not returned calls as of blog post  time, but if and when he does, I’ll be sure to post an update here.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t look as if Recology’s bucks and/or Mayor Gavin Newsom’s powergrabbing antics, are going to be able to help shoehorn Tuchow onto the DCCC, even in light of Newsom’s newly hatched plan for dominion for the following reasons:

1. Results from the June 8 election show that Tuchow was fourth failed runner up in the DCCC 12th district. (Milton Marks, Sup. Eric Mar, Melanie Nutter, Arlo Smith, Connie O’Connor, Tom A. Hsieh, Jane Morrison, Mary Jung, Sandra Lee Fewer, Michael Bornstein, Sup. John Avalos and Bill Fazio were the top vote getters to win seats, beating out Larry Yee, Jake McGoldrick, Hene Kelly and then Tuchow, in that order.)

2.. It’s not clear if Newsom’s plan for the DCCC is even legal.

3. Even if Newsom’s plan survives a legal challenge, it’s not clear that the law would have the retroactive effect necessary to oust Mar and Avalos.

4. And even if it did, under state law,  DCCC Chair Aaron Peskin would get to appoint folks to fill those vacancies,
“This is about clean money and good government,” Newsom spokesman Tony Winnicker told reporters of Newsom’s DCCC plan.

So, let’s hope the Mayor’s Office applies the same standards when it comes to opening the landfill disposal contract bids this summer and shining light on the money that’s influencing the city’s garbage disposal contract. 

Meanwhile, Peskin, who was reached by cell phone somewhere near Moab, in Utah, where he’s taking his annual camping and hiking trip with his wife, told the Guardian that Newsom “is not thinking very far ahead” with his latest dominion scheme.

 

 

Newsom’s plan for DCCC domination

Zelda Bronstein
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4
Newsom’s plan for DCCC domination

Gavin’s not quite ready to take over the world, or even California, but he’s not leaving office without trying to mess up the progressive majority on the Democratic County Central Committee. The plan he hatched June 15: Ban elected city officials from sitting on the DCCC. The idea: Get rid of Supervisors David Campos, David Chiu, John Avalos and Eric Mar. The overall plan: With the progressive supervisors — who have high name recognition and thus get easily elected — gone, the Newsom allies can take back control of the local Democratic Party.


It’s a pretty blatant move — far beyond Aaron Peskin’s so-called coup. And I must say, it’s a bit hypocritical.


See, the DCCC isn’t just made up of 24 elected members. Every San Francisco Democrat who holds state or national office — or who is a candidate for state or national office — is also an automatic member. So Senator Diane Feinstein is a DCCC member; so is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and Sen. Mark Leno. And guess who gets a seat this fall? Lt. governor candidate Gavin Newsom. People like Feinstein and Pelosi never show up; at best, they send a proxy. They rarely pay much attention to the local party, don’t help out much with party fundraising, don’t even come to the party’s annual dinner (Newsom didn’t show this year, even though he’s the mayor of a Democratic city.)


There have been members of the Board of Supervisors on the DCCC for years. The late Sue Bierman was always a member, and actually cared about and paid attention to the local Democratic Party. Leslie Katz was a member as a supe, and still is. It’s never been that big a deal to anyone — until the progressives starting winning seats. Then suddenly it’s a horrible conflict.


The real conflict has nothing to do with city officials sitting on the committee; it’s the fundraising issue. The city’s campaign finance rules don’t apply to DCCC races, so candidates for DCCC who are also running for supervisor — Scott Wiener, Rafael Mandelman, Debra Walker — can raise unlimited money for their DCCC races and use that additional name recognition for the fall elections. The thing is, I think most of the candidates who benefit from this loophole agree that it needs to be fixed; Mandelman certainly does, and he’s told me that several times. I couldn’t reach Walker or Wiener this morning, but I’d be very surprised if both of them wouldn’t endorse some kind of contribution limits for DCCC races.


I asked Newsom’s press spokesperson, Tony Winnicker, if the mayor would support fundraising limits. Apparently he doesn’t (or at least, he doesn’t want to push the issue):


“For this November’s local ballot, which the Mayor can place an initiative on, we propose eliminating the potential conflict that exists between City officeholders also holding office as elected County Party Committee members.”


How about getting rid of all the elected officials, and creating a real grassroots county committee? No, that won’t fly with Newsom either. Winnicker:


It’s appropriate for state and federal Democratic elected officials from San Francisco to serve on the Democratic County Central Committee.


The city/local offices — Mayor, Board, Treasurer, Assessor, City Atty, Sheriff, District Atty, Public Defender — are nonpartisan offices who have direct oversight over City business. That’s the difference and conflict. This is a local initiative, so our focus and concern is local good government and local conflicts or appearance of conflicts.


From everything I can figure, Newsom doesn’t want campaign-finance reform and doesn’t want to put the party in the hands of local activists; he just wants to get rid of the supervisors who take positions he doesn’t like. That seems like a pretty bad way to make public policy. 


UPDATE: Just talked to Scott Wiener, who told me he agrees that the whole issue of DCCC campaign spending ought to be on the table. And he said he is not at this point prepared to support Newsom’s initiative. “I have concerns with the number of elected officials on the DCCC,” he said, “but there are times when it’s entirely appropriate to have people who have a demonstrated commitment to the DCCC and then get elected supervisor to stay on it.”

San Franciscans decry Newsom’s public health cuts

Sasha Cuttler
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San Franciscans decry Newsom’s public health cuts

By Alex Emslie

More than 100 concerned citizens, mental health providers, SRO hotel representatives, and clients of San Francisco’s community behavioral health programs spoke to the Board of Supervisors yesterday at a Beilenson hearing, which the state requires of counties that slash public health services, decrying crippling cuts in the mayor’s proposed budget.

Mayor Gavin Newsom proposed cutting the Department of Public Health’s funding by close to $31 million in next year’s budget currently before the Board of Supervisors. The board can choose to add funding back into departments that were cut before approving the final budget by the end of July.

“These are all services that we value,” DPH director Dr. Mitch Katz said following nearly four hours of public testimony. “We have to make difficult choices because of the state of the city’s budget. We recognize that it is never desirable for us to make cuts.”

Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, said the city Budget Analyst’s Office was examining cost savings within the police and fire departments to free up money for the DPH. “I, as budget chair, am working with my colleagues to prevent these cuts that you are concerned about. We have to find cost savings in our budget across other departments.”

Avalos added that cutting other departments wouldn’t solve San Francisco’s looming deficit for years to come, and that taxation must be part of San Francisco’s budget solution. “If we don’t find a significant amount of revenue, looking at progressive forms of taxation, we’ll be in the same boat next year, but even worse, because we don’t expect to have the authorization of federal money [that the city received last year] to help us out.”

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