Newsom

The battle for the forgotten district

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The battle for the forgotten district

sarah@sfbg.com

This November, when voters in District 10 — the largest, sunniest, and most diverse of the city’s 11 supervisorial districts — replace termed out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, they’ll be making a selection that could have pivotal implications for the entire city.

That’s because the next supervisor from southeast San Francisco inherits a district that is home to some of the city’s biggest environmental and public health challenges, as well as the most potential for development that will determine what kind of city San Francisco becomes.

District 10 is where you’ll find the most polluted and most underdeveloped lands in San Francisco, areas that could either be transformed into models of a sustainability or, in the words of Tony Kelly, the president of Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association, “be turned into a toxic Foster City.”

District 10 is where the slaughterhouses, tanneries, and glue factories set up shop and used the bay as a dumping ground. It’s where the smokestacks of coal and oil fired power plants polluted the air. It’s where the Navy filled the Bay, built a shipyard at Hunters Point and loaded parts of the first atomic bomb onto the USS Indianapolis in 1945.

District 10 is where the bottom fell out of this industrial economy in 1974, when the Navy left, taking with it people’s jobs, pay, and hopes for a home of their own and a better future, particularly for what was then a predominantly African American population.

And District 10 is ground zero for plans that will triple the population and double the number of homes — homes that likely will only be “affordable” to Google executives and retirees from Marin, forever changing the face of San Francisco’s southeast sector. Critics fear that will accelerate what has been a steady exodus of black residents, replaced by megadeveloper Lennar’s vision for a new D10.

It’s against this dark history and difficult present that a wide open field of more than a dozen candidates are vying to replace Maxwell, who came to power in 2000 and has had a mixed voting record in her decade on the board. Sometimes, Maxwell was the eighth vote that let the progressive majority on the Board override Mayor Gavin Newsom’s veto and pass trailblazing legislation. Other times, she was the swing vote that allowed the moderate minority to carry Newsom’s water.

So, in addition to D10’s many internal challenges, this seat could determine the political balance of power on the Board of Supervisors, placing all the more importance on voters in this long-marginalized part of town.

 

DISTRICT OF DISCONTENT

Eric Smith, a biodiesel activist who has thrown his hat in the D10 ring, says that there is a lot of frustration in the air, and looking at the problems the district is facing, it’s hardly surprising that it has what nearly every candidate agrees is a fractured political culture.

“The Bayview, the Hunters Point Shipyard’s toxic Superfund site, the homicide rate, unemployment, poor public transportation, dwindling services and community resources have made D10 one of the city’s largest melting pots of discontent,” Smith said.

Smith’s words were spoken while the Elections Department was verifying signatures earlier this month on a second failed effort to qualify a petition to recall Maxwell.

Bayview resident and D10 candidate Marie Franklin didn’t support the attempt to recall Maxwell, but she understood it as “a frustration movement.”

“People are sinking in the sand, we’ve already lost so many of them, and they felt Sophie wasn’t doing anything for them,” said Franklin, who praised Maxwell for helping get Franklin’s apartment building complex renovated — a job that was completed 18 months ago, at a cost of $65 million, creating 500 local jobs.

“There are 654 units here, and they were uninhabitable,” Franklin said. “There was black mold, rain falling inside. We had people living worse than Haiti.”

Franklin, who said she is running because she “knows the history,” came here in 1978, when she and her son were living in a car after a fire left them homeless. She said the Bayview was a totally isolated area, barely part of mainstream San Francisco.

“There were no taxis, no services,” she recalled. “Nobody would come here, it was the stigmatized area where no one was accountable to provide services.”

The Bayview — which in some ways is the heart of D-!0 — wasn’t always a black community. But African Americans have been living here for 70 years, dealing with all the racism, denial of services, poverty, and pollution. And it bothers Franklin that 85 percent of the 10,500 homes that Lennar plans to develop won’t be affordable to the elderly, disabled, unemployed and low-income people who currently live in the Bayview.

“We need to preserve the diversity of the community and make sure their issues and information will flow to City Hall,” she said. “You must give the people a handle. If you don’t reach out, they’ll slip. That’s why folks out migrated.

Whoever succeeds Maxwell will be a central player in addressing some very big and dirty issues: the future of the Navy’s radiologically impacted shipyard at Hunters Point, Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan for the Shipyard and Candlestick Point, the polluting power plants, replacement of stinky digesters at the sewage plant, and the SF Hope public lousing rebuild.

There’s also the chance to address violence and crime. James Calloway, a candidate who has long worked in Bay Area schools, told us he believes that education and jobs are part of the keys to rejuvenating the district.

“Job opportunities are not as plentiful in the district,” Calloway said. “When I was a kid, you could walk down Third Street at 2 a.m. Now I wouldn’t walk down it at 9 p.m., and I know the area.”

Calloway is hopeful that the massive redevelopment plan, if done correctly, could start the district’s comeback. “Not a lot of black folks stay here when they have extensive education,” he said. “But it’s not only them. Many were displaced by redevelopment and had no way to go back.”

 

ELECTION UP FOR GRABS

The largest of the city’s 11 electoral districts, D10 is a huge triangular piece of land in the city’s southeast sector that was used as an industrial dumping zone for decades. Today, the district runs from the Giants stadium at AT&T Park to the 49ers stadium at Candlestick Point and encompasses Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, India Basin, Portola, Little Hollywood, and Visitacion Valley. It’s also crossed by two freeways that isolate it from the rest of the city, and is home to a large number of crumbling housing projects that are in the process of being rebuilt.

Candidate Ed Donaldson grew up in the projects until he was 10 years old, when the Redevelopment Agency kicked his family out in the 1970s. “We landed on our feet, but others weren’t so lucky,” said Donaldson, who works as a housing counseling director at the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation.

“There is a sense that the Bayview and Visitacion Valley have not been included within the San Francisco family,” Donaldson said. “There is a sense of being forgotten.”

In 2007, Donaldson co-founded the Osiris Coalition to tackle the city’s dormant Certificate of Preference program, in which the Redevelopment Agency issued a document to displaced residents and businesses in the 1960s promising that they could return.

He also tried to rescue some 700 foreclosed properties and recycle them as affordable housing stock. And now he is trying to prevent the city from bulldozing seven SF Hope projects without guaranteeing residents that they have right to remain.

In 2007, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Maxwell convened an African American Outmigration Task Force that didn’t get a public hearing about its findings until August 2008. The timing angered some, who questioned why the report’s findings and implications for urban planning weren’t released before June 2008, when the residents of San Francisco voted for the Lennar-led Proposition G, a proposal to build 10,000 market rate homes at one of San Francisco’s last remaining black communities, which Newsom and Maxwell endorsed.

The taskforce didn’t publish its recommendations until the end of 2009, allegedly because of insider squabbling. Meanwhile, gentrification was going on actively, and many blamed Newsom, and by extension Maxwell, for failing to do anything with the group’s findings as D10 residents continued to suffer from high rates of asthma, cancer, unemployment and an ongoing black exodus.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1940s, the district’s black population exploded when migrants from the south and World War II veterans came to work at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Some moved to Alice Griffith Public Housing complex, or Double Rock, which was built as military housing in 1962. Others relocated to the Bayview when the Redevelopment Agency took over the Fillmore/Western Addition in the ’60s and ’70s as part of a controversial urban renewal effort.

But when the Navy abandoned the shipyard in 1974, unemployment hit the black community hard. Today, hundreds of the city’s lowest income residents live in Alice Griffith’s crumbling units and endure sewage backups, no heat, cloudy drinking water and leaking ceilings, as they wait for the projects to be rebuilt.

“Generations have been trapped in the silo of public housing and cannot get out, because of lack of opportunity and education, so when we legislate, we need to take that into consideration,” said candidate Malia Cohen, whose grandfather came from Texas to work at the shipyard where he met her grandmother, whose family came from New Orleans.

“My grandfather’s father was a longshoreman. He worked with the infamous Leroy King [a commissioner at the city’s Redevelopment Agency] and he has fantastically vivid stories of racism,” said Cohen, who works for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, previously served on the executive staff of Mayor Gavin Newsom, and has already raised over $18,000 in the D10 race and qualified for public matching funds.

“My family came here to work hard, they lived on Navy road in the projects, and then they bought a house here. My parents were born here, and we were all public schooled,” Cohen recalled as she took me on a tour of D10 that ended up in Visitacion Valley, an increasingly Chinese-American neighborhood that reflects a district-wide trend.

Census data show that by 2000, Asians were the largest racial group in the district (30 percent), followed by blacks (29 percent), whites (26 percent), and Latinos (19 percent). By 2003, according to the California Urban Issues project, the trend continued. Asians were the largest racial group (32 percent), followed by blacks (27 percent), whites (21 percent) and Latinos (17 percent) of the population.

This means that D10 candidates will have to garner support from more than one ethnic group to win. Over a dozen candidates have already filed papers in the race, but so far there is no clear front-runner.

Also frustrating the prognosticators is that fact that D10 has had the lowest voter turnout in the city, so the winner will also depend on who goes to the polls.

D10 candidate Geoffrea Morris, who is the grand daughter of longtime Bayview activist Charlie Walker, has been knocking on doors and participating in voter registration drives.

“We need new blood,” Morris said

Getting elected will be a complicated equation. Although Bayview’s population was 50 percent African American at the time of the 2000 census, it didn’t turn out the vote. In the 2006 election, only 14,000 of the district’s 37,000 registered voters went to the ballot, and 50 percent were from whiter, richer, and more Asian neighborhoods.

“It’s very important to the future of the city that the ethnicity diversity of the board be maintained and that the African American community have representation,” former Board President and current Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin told the Guardian.

Maxwell recently told the Guardian that she’s not ready to endorse any D10 candidates yet. “I’m waiting for people to have a better understanding of what this community is, what the common thread running through it is, and how to use rank choice voting,” she told us.

The only candidate who currently holds elected office is BART director Lynette Sweet, who had her answers down pat when we reached her by phone, and even used wording that was eerily similar to Maxwell’s words.

“D10 is a pretty diverse district, but there is only one common thread: the need for economic development,” Sweet told me. “That’s true in Potrero Hill, Portola, Dog Patch and the Bayview. It’s the same mantra: a lot of small businesses need help, and the only way to help them is through economic development. In Potrero Hill it’s about land use. In the Bayview, it’s about the shipyard and better transportation and truancies.”

 

THE COMMON THREAD

District 10 is ground zero for the Lennar’s $2.2 billion plan to develop 10,500 market rate condos at the Shipyard and Candlestick Point. The plan will allegedly create thousands of jobs and new parks, deliver on an historic community benefits agreement that labor groups claim is so “lawyered up” that the developer can’t renege on its promises.

The package is framed as the one and only way to revitalize the southeast’s formerly vibrant economic engine. Indeed, any time anyone tries to slow down the process—to take time to thoroughly read the draft EIR and see if it adequately addresses the impacts of this massive urban reengineering project — a chorus of “no delays” starts up, either from residents of the housing projects desperate to see their homes rebuilt, or the labor contractors who hope to get jobs.

“It’s as if the city is playing checkers, while Lennar is playing three-dimensional chess,” Eric Smith observed.

Lennar has stated that it will contribute $711 million to finance this massive project. The remainder will be leveraged by Mello-Roos bonds, state taxes based on the use and size of a property and intended to raise money for needed services, and tax increment financing, which creates funding for projects by borrowing against future property tax revenues.

The conceptual plan won Maxwell’s backing but environmental groups are critical of the draft EIR.

During DEIR hearing, environmentalists questioned the wisdom and the cost of filling the Bay to build a bridge over Yosemite Slough, and building condos on Candlestick Point state recreation area, the only open major open space in the district.

But the city’s Planning Department also has 20,000-30,000 units of housing in its pipeline. This means that if all these plans get approved in the next decade, they’d account for 80 percent of residential development citywide. And D10’s population could triple, further skewing the district’s already shifting demographics.

In other words, D10 as we know it could become nothing more than a historic relic in a few years, and the next supervisor will play a key role in deciding whether that happens. SFHDC’s Ed Donaldson warns that any supervisor who does not understand the complexity of the city’s largest district can expect a similar recall backlash in future.

“There is no one homogenous voice in the community,” Donaldson said. “The grass-roots organizing that brought about the recall effort was a result of a changing political structure in the area, but is not yet on par with other districts in town. We still allow our politics to be controlled from downtown.”

Fellow candidate Eric Smith warns that the issues—and politics—are complex.

“People were emotional, angry, and desperate because they feel no one listens to them,” Smith said. “That’s part of the problem here; they would rather have a supervisor go down swinging for them, rather than watch one seemingly side with Lennar, PG&E and the mayor on issues contrary to their interests. That’s the terrible irony and one of the biggest problems in District 10. Folks are so mad, they’re willing to do whatever it takes to make them feel they have a voice in the outcome, even if it’s potentially worse.”

Smith cited the sequence of events that culminated last year in the Navy dissolving the community-based shipyard Restoration Advisory Board (RAB), which for years has reviewed technical documents and commented on the Navy’s clean-up proposals. But in December, the Navy made its official decision to disband the RAB, citing dysfunctional behavior and off-topic discussions that got in the way.

“Some of the same folks who were frustrated by the process, tried to send a signal to the Navy that they weren’t being heard and for all their well-intentioned efforts got the RAB dissolved,” Smith said. “I truly feel for them, it’s absolutely heartbreaking, but at times, they can be their own worst enemy.”

One of the looming issues about the shipyard is that the land has been polluted and needs to be cleaned. The shipyard contains radioactive debris from ships towed to the shipyard, after a 90-foot wave washed over them during an atomic test gone awry. The Navy burned 610,000 gallons of radioactively contaminated ship fuel at the shipyard, and workers showered on the shipyard, raising concerns that radioactive materials got into the drains and sewers. And questions have been raised about radiological tests on animals at the yard.

 

LEAKS AND FLOODS

It’s not just the shipyard that’s toxic. Even the buildings that were constructed to house workers 50 years ago are a serious mess.

Realtor Diane Wesley Smith, who grew up in public housing projects, took me on a walking tour of Alice Griffith last week to see conditions that tenants will likely have to endure until at least 2014, if the city sticks to its plan to relocate people into a new replacement unit in the same geographical area, if not the exact same site.

What we found was pretty messed up.

“The water sometimes comes out brown and feels like sand. It’s been like that for a year,” one resident said.

“The water is cloudy, the bath tub isn’t working and the sink keeps stopping up,” said another.

A woman named Silvia showed us how the water from the tap in her elderly mother’s kitchen flows out cloudy and then doesn’t settle properly, like foamy beer.

“The roof’s been leaking for years, the sewage backs up, but they just fixed the lights,” Silvia said. A neighbor named Linda was using her oven as a heater.

“The toilet backs up a lot, and my grandson’s been coughing a lot from asthma,” Linda said.

“Roaches is always a problem,” said a woman named Stormi, dressed in black sweats and a black T-shirt that read, “Can’t knock the hustle.”

“They’re trying,” said Stormi, a member of the Alice Griffith Residents Association, as a couple of Housing Authority trucks pulled up to do repairs.

“They promise that you will not have to leave your unit, but if they try to move us down to the waterfront, well, there’s a reason there’s no housing there, and it’s because the land will flood,” Stormi said.

“If we don’t end up at the table, we’ll end up on the menu,” Wesley Smith warned, as she stopped to chat with a group of young men, who were worried they would pushed out of the Alice Griffith rebuild through the criteria being established.

“Fred Blackwell, the executive director of the Redevelopment Agency, assures me that’s not the case, but Alice Griffith is a Housing Authority property, and empty promises have the potential to be great promises provided they are made in writing,” Wesley Smith said as we walked out of the projects and onto the road where a yellow and black sign announced “flooded” next to Candlestick Point park, where Lennar wants to build.

Malia Cohen expressed concern about Hope SF residents, as we drove through the Sunnydale housing project.

“We have to be diligent and mindful that people are not pushed out,” Cohen said, noting the sweeping views at Gleneagles golf course above Sunnydale, and the value of housing for a golf course community. “When public housing gets taken offline, we must work with Redevelopment and the Housing Authority to make sure no one is changing the rules halfway. We have to make sure the talks and walks line up. We need to be equal partners. We cannot be bulldozed by City Hall.”

Geoffrea Morris is a Calworks employee, at the Southeast Community College facility on Oakdale, which was built to mitigate the city’s expansion of the sewage plant in 1987. She cited concerns about the literacy levels of people who live in the 2200 public housing units that cluster D10. “A lot of people in Alice Griffith don’t even know the dates or when it’s going to be reconstructed,” Morris said. “Folks like to be told stuff like that, but the city gives you a stack of papers. Some will read them, but others rely on folks they think are trustworthy. They need stuff in layman’s terms written on one sheet of paper.”

Morris is a fan of the Internet who posted a community survey online, and made sure every housing project got some literature telling people to get informed. She worries about the digital divide in D10:

“A lot of folks don’t have computers and access to important information,” Morris said. “And let’s talk about the way ‘affordable’ is used to trick people.”

Michael Cohen, Newsom’s top economic adviser, recently stated in a memo that over the expected 15-20 year phased build out, Lennar’s Candlestick-Shipyard development would include, “up to 10,500 residential units, about 32 percent of which (3,345) will be offered at below market rates.”

“But 892 units of this ‘affordable category’ will be sold to folks earning $100,000,” Morris said. “So if you subtract 892 units from affordable unit category, you’re back to 25 percent affordable.”

Candidate Kristine Enea, an attorney and a former RAB member, chairs the India Basin Neighborhood Association, which administers a US EPA grant to hire experts to translate the Navy’s cleanup documents into plain English and comment on them She was frustrated by the Navy’s decision to dissolve the RAB.

“The lack of a forum does nothing to bolster the community’s trust in the cleanup or the redevelopment process,” Enea said.

Enea generally supports the Lennar project, but has concerns about whether it will adequately mitigate increased car traffic, or result in commercial development that benefits her neighborhood.

“India basin is a pocket of Hunters Point right along the shoreline,” Enea said. “Right now, we have no shops or restaurants, no ATM, no groceries, nothing beyond one liquor store and a few industrial businesses.

Potrero Boosters president Tony Kelly told us that District 10 residents can think for themselves. “D10 residents don’t need to rely on corporations to solve their problems,” he said.

“Folks in the eastern neighborhoods came up with a better revitalization plan than what the city proposed and community activists managed to close the power plant, after the city said it was impossible,” Kelly recalled.

And there’s no shortage of good ideas.

Kelly suggested that an urban agriculture center could immediately put low-skilled folks to work by erecting greenhouses on unused land. Smith said the industrial zone could be “incredible eco-park made from sustainable sources.

‘D 10 is the dumping ground for everything, including all the city’s waste,” he said. “We could be a shining example, not just for D 10, but the rest of the state.”

The D 10 candidate line up includes Calloway, Cohen, Donaldson, Smith, Enea: civil rights attorney Dewitt Lacy, Morris, Potrero View publisher Steve Moss; District 7 BART director Lynette Sweet, Wesley-Smith. Bill Barnes, who works for Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, and Linda Richardson, who was appointed to the Human Rights Commission in 2007 by Mayor Newsom, have also expressed interest in the race.

In such a huge field, name identification will play a major role. Sweet is in office, but BART Board is not a high-profile job and won’t give her a huge advantage.

Cohen has a slight edge right now in that she’s raised $18,505, including $500 from former Newsom flak Peter Ragone, making her the first D. 10 candidate to qualify for campaign financing. The oldest of five girls, Cohen recalls how her mother got laid off from her city job as a school-based mental health worker and then rehired, as part of the city’s budget cuts.

“We felt that pinch and the frustrating games that are played out between the leadership and the rank and file,” she said.

Cohen who worked for Newsom in his first term as mayor, but has since left his administration , said she is uncomfortable at being framed as Newsom’s candidate.

“Because I’m not, but I am one of the few candidates who has seen how the mayor and the Board work—and don’t work—together,” she said.

Moss sees the city’s southeast as a “district in transition.” Over coffee at Farley’s in Potrero Hill, he told me that the southeastern neighborhoods could be “launching pads for environmentally sustainable growth.”

“The district’s been in a frozen period for 30 years, But despite the problems, people are deeply committed to and in love with their community.

“This district is the future of San Francisco and its social fabric—the diversity, income –and its problems are leftovers from the city’s industrial age.”

 

 

 

DISTRICT 10, BY THE NUMBERS

Total Acres: 5,650

Average household income: $85,000

Population: 73,000

Registered voters: 37,700

Average housing price: $335,000

Ethnicity (2003 figures): Asian 32%, African American, 27%, white 21%, Hispanic 17%

Development status of land: 18% residential, 38% is commercial, 38% undevelopable

All figures the latest available. Sources: SFGIS, Association of Bay Area Governments, U.S. Census, California Urban Issues Project. Ethnicity and income data is from 2003 and almost certainly has changed.

Editor’s Notes

David Talbot
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Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

Gavin Newsom never got any traction in the race for governor, in part because he completely alienated the progressive base in his hometown. And when you have unionized city employees holding protests outside your campaign fundraisers — and you’re in a Democratic primary in California — you’ve got serious problems.

And now, oddly enough, the progressives in San Francisco may be his biggest allies in the race for the second-place job of lieutenant governor.

There are some good reasons for that.

For starters, a lot of us thought that Newsom, whatever his positions on issues, wasn’t ready to run California — to deal with all of the massive problems the state faces and to take on the brutal politics of Sacramento. And I think his behavior during his brief gubernatorial campaign demonstrated that we were right.

But the Lite Guv job is a lot different. You don’t have to balance a state budget that’s $20 billion in the red; you don’t have to solve water problems. It’s a place where you can learn about state politics on the job, without really screwing things up.

And if his real goal is to run for U.S. Senate down the road, say, when Dianne Feinstein retires, he’ll be in a good place to launch that campaign.

But let’s face it. A lot of this is practical politics. With either Jerry Brown or Meg Whitman in the Governor’s Office, the state will continue to be screwed up and it will be even more important that cities take on their own economic destinies. And Newsom, as a bitter lame duck, simply can’t do that.

The progressive political community isn’t unanimous at all. But a lot of people are thinking that if Newsom’s ascension to Sacramento means that the district supervisors will have a chance to appoint a progressive mayor, it’s worth the trade-off.

No more silence on Prop. 16

David Talbot
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No more silence on Prop. 16

EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has found few allies in its effort to halt the spread of public power in California. The Sacramento Bee has come out strongly against PG&E’s initiative, Proposition 16 on the June ballot. Los Angeles Times columnists have denounced it. Six Democratic leaders in the California Senate have called for the company to withdraw the measure. Even the California Association of Realtors, hardly a radical environmental group, has come out strongly against the measure, in part because it’s so badly worded that it could halt residential and commercial development in large parts of the state.

But PG&E has already set aside $30 million to try to pass this thing — and since the cities and counties that would be hit hardest can’t use public money to defeat it, elected officials across the state need to be using every opportunity they have to speak out against it.

Prop. 16 is about the most anti-democratic measure you can imagine. It mandates that any local agency that wants to sell retail electricity to customers first get the approval of two-thirds of the local electorate. The two-thirds majority has been the cause of the debilitating budget gridlock in Sacramento, and it will almost certainly end efforts to expand public power or create community choice aggregation (CCA) co-ops in the state.

It actually states that no existing public power agency can add new customers or expand its delivery service without a two-thirds vote — which means, according to former California Energy Commissioner John Geesman, that no new residential or commercial development in the 48 California communities that have public power could be given electricity hook-ups.

It also, of course, eliminates the possibility of competition in the electricity business, making PG&E the only entity legally allowed to sell power in much of Northern California. That’s a radically anti-consumer position that most residents of the state would reject — if they understood it.

And there’s the problem. With PG&E spending $30 million (of our ratepayer money) promoting this, using misleading language and a campaign based on lies, and with very little money available for a counter-campaign, it’s going to be hard to get the message out.

That’s why every single elected official, candidate for office, and political group in the state that isn’t entirely bought off by PG&E needs to loudly oppose it, now.

And there’s still a lot of silence out there.

State Sen. Mark Leno and Assembly Member Tom Ammiano, to their credit, are not only opposing Prop. 16, they are helping lead the campaign against it. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has helped build the coalition that’s running the No on 16 effort. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has passed a resolution opposing the initiative. Sup. Bevan Dufty, who is running for mayor, is a public opponent. State Sen. Leland Yee’s office told us he opposes it (although he hasn’t made much of a big public issue of the measure). Same for City Attorney Dennis Herrera.

But where is Mayor Gavin Newsom? Where is District Attorney Kamala Harris, who is running for attorney general? Where’s Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer? Where’s the City Hall press conference with the mayor and every other elected official in town denouncing Prop. 16 and urging San Franciscans to vote against it?

The silence is a disgrace, and amounts to a tacit endorsements of PG&E’s efforts.

And it’s happening at the same time that the supervisors are pushing against a tight deadline to get the city’s Community Choice Aggregation program up and running.

San Francisco is the only city in the United States with a federal mandate to sell public power, and the city is moving rapidly to set up a CCA system. This is a monumental threat to the city — and everyone either in office or seeking office needs to recognize that and speak out. Prop. 16 and CCA ought to be a factor in every local organization’s endorsements for Democratic County Central Committee and supervisor this year, and any candidate who can’t stand up to PG&E has no business seeking office in San Francisco.

Editorial: No more silence on PG&E’s statewide power grab

David Talbot
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Every single elected official, candidate for office, and political group in the state that isn’t entirely bought off by PG&E needs to loudly oppose Prop. 16 – now

EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has found few allies in its effort to halt the spread of public power in California. The Sacramento Bee has come out strongly against PG&E’s initiative, Proposition 16 on the June ballot. Los Angeles Times columnists have denounced it. Six Democratic leaders in the California Senate have called for the company to withdraw the measure. Even the California Association of Realtors, hardly a radical environmental group, has come out strongly against the measure, in part because it’s so badly worded that it could halt residential and commercial development in large parts of the state.

But PG&E has already set aside $30 million to try to pass this thing – and since the cities and counties that would be hit hardest can’t use public money to defeat it, elected officials across the state need to be using every opportunity they have to speak out against it.

Prop. 16 is about the most anti-democratic measure you can imagine. It mandates that any local agency that wants to sell retail electricity to customers first get the approval of two-thirds of the local electorate. The two-thirds majority has been the cause of the debilitating budget gridlock in Sacramento, and it will almost certainly end efforts to expand public power or create community choice aggregation (CCA) co-ops in the state.

It actually states that no existing public power agency can add new customers or expand its delivery service without a two-thirds vote — which means, according to former California Energy Commissioner John Geesman, that no new residential or commercial development in the 48 California communities that have public power could be given electricity hook-ups.

It also, of course, eliminates the possibility of competition in the electricity business, making PG&E the only entity legally allowed to sell power in much of Northern California. That’s a radically anti-consumer position that most residents of the state would reject – if they understood it.

And there’s the problem. With PG&E spending $30 million (of our ratepayer money) promoting this, using misleading language and a campaign based on lies, and with very little money available for a counter-campaign, it’s going to be hard to get the message out.

That’s why every single elected official, candidate for office, and political group in the state that isn’t entirely bought off by PG&E needs to loudly oppose it, now.

And there’s still a lot of silence out there.

State Sen. Mark Leno and Assembly Member Tom Ammiano, to their credit, are not only opposing Prop. 16, they are helping lead the campaign against it. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has helped build the coalition that’s running the No on 16 effort. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has passed a resolution opposing the initiative. Sup. Bevan Dufty, who is running for mayor, is a public opponent. State Sen. Leland Yee’s office told us he opposes it (although he hasn’t made much of a big public issue of the measure). Same for City Attorney Dennis Herrera.

But where is Mayor Gavin Newsom? Where is District Attorney Kamala Harris, who is running for attorney general? Where’s Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer? Where’s the City Hall press conference with the mayor and every other elected official in town denouncing Prop. 16 and urging San Franciscans to vote against it?

The silence is a disgrace, and amounts to a tacit endorsements of PG&E’s efforts.

And it’s happening at the same time that the supervisors are pushing against a tight deadline to get the city’s Community Choice Aggregation program up and running.

San Francisco is the only city in the United States with a federal mandate to sell public power, and the city is moving rapidly to set up a CCA system. This is a monumental threat to the city – and everyone either in office or seeking office needs to recognize that and speak out. Prop. 16 and CCA ought to be a factor in every local organization’s endorsements for Democratic County Central Committee and supervisor this year, and any candidate who can’t stand up to PG&E has no business seeking office in San Francisco.

The attack on the SF left

Zelda Bronstein
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20
The attack on the SF left

If I were a political consultant hired by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the big developers and the landlords and Mayor Newsom, and my job was to launch an effective attack on the progressive movement in the city and undermine progressive control of the Board of Supervisors, here’s what I’d do:


1. I’d attack district elections. See, every time the downtown folks have tried to run candidates in swing districts under the existing system, they’ve lost. That’s in part because the business types can’t seem to find decent candidates, and part because money doesn’t rule in districts, so progressives who can mobilize at the grassroots level have a better chance.


So when you can’t win the game you try to change the rules. You can’t do it too directly, because the polls show that people like having district supervisors, so I’d come up with a “hybrid” plan — say, seven districts and four at-large supervisors. Since anyone who runs at large in this city needs gobs of campaign cash, that would pretty much guarantee that four board members would be accountable to downtown. Then draw the districts to create two moderate-conservative seats, and the progressives have lost control.


I’d launch this by planting stories in the San Francisco Chronicle about a “growing movement” to change the way the supervisors are elected — even thought there is no real grassroots movement.


But that creates the appearance that’s needed to begin raising money and preparing for a ballot initiative. It’s not hard to get the Chron to bit on something like this; C.W. Nevius, the local columnist who lives in the East Bay suburbs, never liked district elections, so he’ll play along and the Chron’s corporate ownership, which is close to the Chamber folks, never liked the system either. You can expect an editorial from the Chronicle Feb. 28th calling for a partial repeal of district elections.


The argument won’t have anything to do with the fact that the Chron doesn’t like the policies this particular board has passed; it will be all about the need for a “citywide perspective.” Now, that’s just horseshit, since the district boards have done an immense amount of work on citywide issues (like mininum wage and health care) that the at-large boards would never do.


But “citywide perspective” is a term that’s been focus-group tested and sounds good.


2. I’d look for a nice wedge issue for the November elections — something that could be used against progressives in swing districts. When Newsom ran for mayor the first time, he used “care Not Cash” — a well-funded attack on homeless people.


And gee, guess what? There’s another nice anti-homeless measure that’s recently been floating around, and it comes from the media-savvy police chief, George Gascon. It’s called a “sit-lie” law — legislation that would criminize the act of sitting on the sidewalk. It’s got a lot of populist zing to is, particularly since Gascon is talking about the need to clean up Haight Street, where some ill-behaved young people have been bothering the merchants and shoppers.


A November ballot initiative on a sit-lie law would allow downtown to raise a lot of money — and attack people like Rafael Mandelman and Debra Walker, candidates for supervisor in districts where a simplistic attack on the homeless might play. 


3. I’d try to split the city’s labor movement and drive labor away from the progressives. The obvious tactic: Construction jobs. I’d get every construction trade union member to campaign in District 10 for a supervisor who will support Lennar Corp.’s redevelopment project, and I’d attack any supervisor or candidate who supports limits on, say, buildings that shadow the parks and call them anti-jobs.


4. I’d launch a quiet effort to raise a big chunk of money to push pro-downtown candidates for the Democratic County Central Committee. The DCCC used to be something of a political backwater, but under progressive control, it’s become a significant force in local elections. The DCCC controls the local Democratic Party endorsements and money — which can be a big factor in district supervisorial races.


Now: I have no evidence that any individual consultant has created any such plan — but it’s sure an interesting coincidence, isn’t it?


What I see right now is a coordinated, orchestrated attack on the left — and I’m getting a little nervous that our current leadership on the Board of Supervisors isn’t doing enough about it.


 

This is what you get, Gavin

Zelda Bronstein
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0

For hiring a scorched-earth guy like Garry South, who will turn on you in a second.

Newsom’s getting closer

Zelda Bronstein
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19

There are really only two obstacles to Newsom’s jumping into the Lt. Gov.’s race. One is the possibility that he might lose, but he would be the instant front runner. The other is the supposed fear of leaving the city in the hands of whatever mayor the Board of Supervisors chose.

And according to the Chron’s politics blog, he’s gotten over the second hurdle:

“It’s no surprise I’m looking at running for another office,” he continued. “I’m out of here. I’m termed out anyway…I do take my job seriously, but I’m capable of doing a lot of things at one time. By definition, it’s a skill set I must have.”

He added that if people are so concerned about one of the supervisors becoming mayor for the year before the next scheduled mayoral election, maybe they shouldn’t have elected them to the board in the first place.

“If it’s just concern with me leaving, maybe they should look at who they elected,” he said.

 

 

Notes from the Sierra Club’s gala dinner

Sasha Cuttler
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0

While I focused on Jerry Brown’s disappointing speech to the Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter’s gala dinner on Wednesday night, there are a few more notable nuggets in my notebook worth posting here, starting with what appears to be the collapse of plans for a California Constitutional Convention.

The Guardian recently reported on the difficulties that the campaign was having, but consultant Clint Reilly told me that the effort is basically over, with fundraising shortfalls being the final nail in the coffin. That’s one more reason why “hope” seems to be in such short supply on the political landscape.

The event was held in the Merchant Exchange, a building owned by Reilly, who helped underwrite the gathering. So it was no surprise that the evening was MCed by his wife, Janet Reilly, who is running a strong campaign to replace Michela Alioto-Pier on the Board of Supervisors.

There were lots of political luminaries at the event (list to follow), but there was one particularly notable attendee and particularly notable absence. Los Angeles City Council member Janice Hahn was one of the few politicos from down south, making the rounds in support of her run for lieutenant governor. But Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is considering challenging her, didn’t show up.

Also a no-show was U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who appeared by video to address the gathering and express appreciation for being the recipient of the Sierra Club’s first Phillip Burton Badge of Courage Award for environmental stewardship. Accepting the award on her behalf was California Democratic Party chair John Burton, who was his usual salty self, taking a dig at the San Francisco Chronicle by referring to someone who wrote “for the Chronicle back when that was a newspaper,” and describing the award’s namesake thusly: “My brother was an outstanding environmentalist who didn’t like the outdoors much.”

He also made this funny, self-effacing crack at the start of his speech: “I think a third of the people in this room would like to see the accelerator stuck on the rug of my Prius.” I was not among that third.

There was a strong turnout of local political leaders, but tellingly, only from the left side of the political spectrum. The members of the Board of Supervisors who turned out were David Chiu, Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, Eric Mar, and John Avalos. Other political luminaries on hand included City Attorney Dennis Herrera, Sen. Leland Yee (Yee and Herrera are each running for mayor) City College trustee John Rizzo (who introduced Brown), Senator-turned-Oakland mayoral candidate Don Perata, District Attorney Kamala Harris, Rep. Jerry McNerney, and Sen. Loni Hancock.

Rambling Jerry Brown speech raises fear among Dems

Sasha Cuttler
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22
Rambling Jerry Brown speech raises fear among Dems

If Jerry Brown’s keynote speech last night to a gala environmentalist dinner is any indication, the Democratic Party faces an uphill battle to win this year’s governor’s race. The rambling, alternately vague and academic, and often pointless address did little to inspire or excite a large, sympathetic crowd that was loaded with top Democrats. In fact, some party luminaries were openly aghast at the poor performance, with one making this succinct (if off-the-record) assessment: “We’re fucked.”

Brown has never been a dynamic speaker, but the unscripted, half-hour speech – given at the Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter’s David Brower Dinner in San Francisco, a $250 per head affair that drew top Bay Area Democrats – illustrates the danger of letting a primary be decided by legend and money rather than political persuasion.

Brown’s fundraising prowess and strong poll numbers chased Gavin Newsom and other potential rivals out of the Democratic Party gubernatorial primary, even though Brown hasn’t really outlined his political vision for California, given many extended speeches since being discussed as a candidate for governor, or even officially declared his candidacy (he and others have until March 12 to do so).

“This thing is really daunting,” Brown said of the governor’s race toward the end of the speech, seemingly unsure that he was ready to run, but saying he would make an announcement sometime in the next couple weeks.

Brown started his speech by telling the crowd that he didn’t know what he was going to talk about, so when he arrived (late) for the speech, he asked San Francisco Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin what he should say, and Peskin told him to talk about how there were more salmon in the streams and better overall environmental health back when Brown was governor in the ‘70s.

But rather than taking that advice and giving a forceful call to strengthen environmental regulation or conjure up California’s better days, Brown meandered around and mused on that and other topics, feeding fears that the 71-year-old candidate might come off as a nostalgic, slightly senile former-Governor Moonbeam rather than an effective agent of needed change.

“During that period when I was governor, I’m not going to call it the golden age because some people think I’m in the golden age, so I don’t want to get people confused. That’s why I don’t want to talk about way back then, because there are a number of people I can see weren’t even born then, so it gets a little embarrassing and I like to pretend it was just yesterday. But in that period, California created almost twice as many jobs as the nation did. We created jobs at about 24 percent over eight years and the nation grew jobs at 13 percent, so almost twice as much. And then Deukmejian did pretty good, he had about the same, maybe half a percent more,” Brown rambled, ticking off statistics, hedging his point by noting how little governors can really do to create jobs, before working up to a decent line that was flatly delivered: “It was a time when the environment got its biggest boost, as far as public policy.”

Nobody applauded, so he continued. “I was thinking tonight, I was trying to figure out that if I did announce, what the hell would I say? And so I decided to go back and read my first announcement, January 24, 1974. I was 35 then, it was another time, I’m now a little older than that. But I talked about clean air, I talked about the energy crisis and getting new sources of energy. I talked about statewide land use planning” – that last item drawing some applause – “and I talked about jobs. And I was thinking, wow, we still got a jobs problem, we got an energy problem, we have a land use problem that feeds into the energy problem, and while the air is cleaner in many respects, it’s not clean enough, or it isn’t healthy enough.”

On substance, Brown had his moments. But even on the need for better statewide land use planning, he went off on a tangent, saying he didn’t even know what that meant when he filled out a Sierra Club questionnaire back in the ‘70s, and he’s not sure how to accomplish it now. 

“You have to make it easier to live closer to where you work,” Brown said in what of his few lines of the night that drew applause, although he didn’t begin to explain how he might achieve this goal. And on a controversial subject that is easily attacked by the right – big government wants more control over private property – Brown’s lackadaisical discussion of the issue was disconcerting.

He even rankled a few Sierra Club members by vaguely criticizing East Bay growth controls designed to reduce sprawl, which the Attorney General’s Office is seeking to overturn: “Pleasanton wants to create 50,000 jobs, but they have a housing cap – for all I know, Sierra Club probably supported that housing cap, so I want to just rub your nose in the housing cap for just a minute – the trouble with the housing cap is they want to create all these jobs.”

Brown tried to argue that allowing more housing in Pleasanton is a strategy for combating global warming because there are jobs there and it would reduce commutes, but he’s going to need to be more on his game than he is right now to win that argument. Instead, we get his fairly dismissive summary of this important issue: “Land use is a big deal, it’s difficult, lots to do on that.”

Against businesswoman Meg Whitman, the Republican gubernatorial primary frontrunner, there is real potential in Brown’s basic belief that markets need to be regulated and that running the government isn’t just like running a business. And somehow, Brown will need to find a way to better distill and deliver that message to counter the right’s pro-business sound bites. 

“There are people saying business knows best,” Brown said, meandering off about companies and widgets for a minute before continuing his point. “But when you look at what we really have to deal with, it’s not just about economics and the market. It’s also about ecology and morality, and morality is about customs, it’s about traditions, it’s about our deepest patterns of how we all relate to one another and that can’t just be assimilated into market incentives. The market assumes honesty, you meet your promises, and also assumes there’s a framework, because things can just run off the cliff and that’s exactly what’s happening. As you add more people, you have more cars, and when you have more cars, they burn fossil fuel and what’s happening in California is you have cars reproducing faster than people…That’s the real challenge here, that we’re trying to get the idea out that we’re trying to save the future.”

Transamerica condos: the mystery continues

Zelda Bronstein
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5
Transamerica condos: the mystery continues



I’m not going to actually suggest that anyone watch all four hours-plus of the Planning Commission hearing last week on the highrise condo tower at 555 Washington. But if you’ve got the time, it’s a fascinating video.


And here’s what’s most interesting: A lot of the discussion revolved around what Commissioner Michael Antonini said was a need to continue the item to a later date. That’s because three of the commissioners — the ones appointed by the Board of Supervisors — were dubious about the project’s environmental impact report, so it would take all four of the mayoral appointees to let the project go forward. But Commissioner Gwyneth Borden couldn’t make the meeting. Antonini went ballistic at one point, and stormed out of the room, saying that it was disrespectful to Borden not to grant a continuance.
 
That struck Commission Vice-President Christina Olague as kind of odd. “I was taken aback by the accusations that we were somehow being insensitive,” she told me. “To my knowledge, Commissioner Borden never made any request for a continuance. There was nothing in writing and she never communicated it to me.”


But then the strangeness started to happen. Commissioner Hisashi Sugaya moved not to certify the environmental impact report on the project. That motion was defeated, 3-2, with Antonini off in a huff somewhere and Borden absent.


Now, normally, in these situations, the president looks for a substitute motion. In this case, a motion to approve the DEIR could have been made, and that, too, would have been defeated. Once the motion to approve went down, the DEIR would be scuttled and the developer would have to start again.


But instead, the commission secretary simply announced that the matter would be continued to March 18. And a week later, I’m still trying to figure out how that was possible.


After all, the commission had decided — openly, in public — NOT to accept a continuance. Then all of a sudden, without a vote of the body, Antonini got his way. The DEIR will be heard again, presumably with the mayor’s fourth vote present.


This is a major project, and I’m not going to argue that it’s fate should hang on an issue of procedure. But nobody has been able to explain to me how a matter gets continued without a vote to continue. The best I can figure is that without any motion on the floor, and no action pending, the secretary had no choice but to continue the matter.


“It all happened so fast,” Olague said. “I want to go back and review everything to see exactly what ocurred.”


Attorney Sue Hestor, who opposes the project, told me that after the lengthy list of serious flaws with the DEIR, which were presented in great detail at the hearing, it will be hard for the commissioners to certify the document. But the pressure from the Mayor’s Office is intense — Michael Yarne, the mayor’s Economic and Workforce Development advisor, was at the meeting, cornering commissioners outside. And four of the members serve at the mayor’s pleasure.


 

The people vs. corporate power

Andrew Lam
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2
The people vs. corporate power

steve@sfbg.com

The June 8 election is shaping up to be one that pits the people against powerful business interests, a contest that will demonstrate either that money still rules or that growing public opposition to corporate con-jobs has finally taken root.

On the state level, the five ballot measures include two brazen money-making schemes and two experiments in election reform, along with primary races that are still in flux. In San Francisco, where the ballot measures still have a few more weeks to shake out, the election will feature two rarely contested judges races, recession relief for renters, City Hall fiscal reforms, and a fight for control of the local Democratic Party.

So far, only four local measures have qualified for the San Francisco ballot, all placed there by members of the Board of Supervisors. Progressives qualified the Renters Economic Relief package (which limits rent increases during recessions and sets conditions for landlords passing costs to tenants), an initiative establishing community policing standards, and one affirming city support for making Transbay Terminal the northern high-speed rail terminus. Supervisors were unanimous in supporting a charter amendment governing the Film Commission.

But the board is still hashing out changes to the more controversial ballot proposals, a debate that will continue at its Feb. 23 meeting. They include an overhaul of how the city funds its pension program and an effort to remove Muni salary minimums from the city charter, both by Sup. Sean Elsbernd; a $652 million seismic safety bond proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom; and a Sup. John Avalos charter amendment that would prevent the mayor from unilaterally defunding certain budget expenditures. All measures must be approved by March 5.

Also still forming up in the coming weeks are primary races for legislative seats (although no incumbents appear to be facing strong challenges) and all eight state constitutional offices, including governor (where Attorney General Jerry Brown seems poised to easily win the Democratic nomination), lieutenant governor, and attorney general (which District Attorney Kamala Harris is running for).

Candidates have until March 12 to declare themselves for statewide and legislative offices, as well as for the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, which could play a key role in this fall’s Board of Supervisors elections. Two years ago, a slate of progressives led by Aaron Peskin and Chris Daly launched a surprise attack to wrest control of the board away from the moderates who have long controlled it. Newsom, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and their downtown allies are expected to try hard to regain control over their party’s purse-strings and endorsements.

 

JUDGING THE JUDGES

Another struggle from two years ago is also being replayed. In 2008, then-Sup. Gerardo Sandoval successfully challenged Superior Court Judge Thomas Mellon, arguing the Republican-appointed jurist was too conservative (and the entire court is not diverse enough) for San Francisco. This time the target is Judge Richard Ulmer, a conservative appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ulmer is being challenged by two LGBT attorneys, Daniel Dean and Michael Nava, the latter endorsed by Sen. Mark Leno, Assembly Member Tom Ammiano, and Peskin, who chairs the Democratic Party and could be helpful in the race. “He’s a brilliant guy,” Leno said of Nava.

Leno also has endorsed deputy public defender Linda Colfax, a Latina lesbian, in a four-way race to replace retiring Judge Wallace Douglass. The other candidates are Harry Dorfman, Roderick McLeod, and Robert Retana. If no candidate wins a majority of votes, the top two finishers square off in a runoff election in November.

Leno said he’s thrilled to see a diverse crowd of attorneys seeking judgeships: “This governor has failed horribly in his appointments, not only with the LGBT community, but with communities of color as well.”

 

TWO COMPANIES TRY TO BUY CALIF.

The struggle between the broad public interest and the wealthy power brokers that have long-dominated California politics is most apparent in the state propositions, which have been certified and for which ballot arguments are now being collected by the California Secretary of State’s Office.

Two of those ballot measures, Propositions 16 and 17, are blatantly self-serving efforts by a pair of powerful corporations to increase their profitability, however deceptively and with overwhelming amounts of campaign cash they are presented.

Prop. 16, sponsored by Pacific Gas & Electric Co., would require local governments to get two-thirds of voters to approve creation of energy programs like Clean Power SF, San Francisco’s plan for developing renewable energy projects and selling that power directly to citizens.

As we’ve reported (“Battle royale,” Jan. 13, and “PG&E attack mailer puts City Hall on defensive,” Dec. 22, 2009), PG&E placed the measure on the ballot to avoid having to repeatedly crush public power initiatives around the state with multimillion dollar campaigns, even though political leaders like Leno and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi say the measure violates the state’s community choice aggregation law. That law allows local governments to create energy programs and prohibits PG&E from interfering with those efforts.

“The unregulated behavior of corporate arrogance is killing our democracy. Prop. 17, sponsored by Mercury Insurance, would let companies increase car insurance premiums for a variety of reasons that are now prohibited by the 1988 measure Prop. 103. Mercury has continuously attacked that landmark law, using lawsuits, huge political contributions, sponsored legislation, and, according to newly released documents from the California Department of Insurance (see “The malevolence of Mercury Insurance,” Feb. 10, Guardian Politics blog), blatantly illegal activity in setting premiums and excluding certain customers, such as artists, bartenders, and members of the military.

“The Mercury initiative is even more pernicious than what it was doing before,” Harvey Rosenfield, who wrote Prop. 103 and works for Consumer Watchdog, told the Guardian. “Under Mercury’s initiative, if you’ve never had prior insurance, you can be surcharged for the first time. Then they’ve thrown in some other tricks and traps.”

Mercury spokesperson Coby King told us the company has been unfairly maligned and denies that the measure is simply about boosting its profits: “Prop. 103 is the law of the land, but to the extent there are improvements that can be made that are pro-business and pro-consumer, Mercury has not been shy about acting in the public interest.”

Yet few public interest groups or public officials believe the claims being made by Mercury or PG&E, and they hope that the public won’t be fooled.

“These are measures designed to give a financial advantage to a specific industry or company,” U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, who battled Mercury as California’s first insurance commissioner, told us. He strongly opposes both measures, but did say, “Money talks. It always has, particularly in propositions.”

Yet Leno said he’s a bit more hopeful: “Californians have been savvy in the past, and I do believe they’ll be able to see through the tens of millions of dollars in misleading ads.”

“To me, it’s a classic case study of what’s going on with the initiative process in California and with politics in general,” said Derek Cressman, western regional director of California Common Cause. “There are two initiatives literally sponsored by corporations to push very narrow interests.”

Yet Cressman said recent events could help. There’s been a big public outcry in recent weeks over the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited corporate spending to influence elections, the role that insurance companies played in sinking federal health care reform efforts, and the way businesses interests are hindering efforts to deal with global warming.

“It makes people aware of the overwhelming role corporations are playing in dictating government policy,” Cressman said.

 

TAKE OUT THE MONEY

A pair of election reform measures might help lessen the influence of money and political parties. Prop. 14 is an open primaries measure that Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria) got placed on the ballot as a condition for breaking last year’s budget stalemate. It would create a single primary ballot and send the top two finishers to the general election, regardless of party.

Prop. 15, the California Fair Elections Act, takes direct aim at the corrupting influence of money in elections, creating a pilot public finance program in the secretary of state races for 2014 and 2018. The measure, which has broad support from politicians and good government groups in the Bay Area, is modeled on successful programs in Maine and Arizona.

“No elected official should be in the fundraising game the way they are now,” campaign chair Trent Lange told us. “This is a way to change how we fund elections.”

The idea is to create a model that will eventually be used for other offices. The campaign fund would be generated by a $350 annual fee on lobbyists, lobbying firms, and lobbyist employers. Currently lobbyists pay just $12.50 per year to register, which Lange said, “just shows the power of lobbyists in Sacramento.” *

 

The “Newsom wins” merry-go-round: What fun

Zelda Bronstein
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10
The “Newsom wins” merry-go-round: What fun

Gavin Newsom still hasn’t said for sure that he’s in the race for lt. governor, although just about everyone in town now thinks he’s going for it.

But the very prospect of the mayor leaving office before his term is up has the political classes speculating: Who gets that job? And how does it happen?

It’s actually pretty interesting.

Under the City Charter, the president of the Board of Supervisors becomes acting mayor in the event that the mayor leaves office before the end of his or her term. Then the supervisors, by a six-vote majority, can appoint someone else to the job.

Melissa Griffin lays out one piece of the scenario, which is that the board could appoint a new mayor in advance, without anyone serving as acting mayor.

But there’s much more to the story.

According to a fascinating city attorney’s opinion issued in 1978 (PDF), when George Moscone and Harvey Milk were killed and Dianne Feinstein was board president, no supervisor is allowed to vote on his or her own appointment. Which would mean that if, say, Board President David Chiu wanted the job, he’d need six votes not including his own.

Now the plot thickens. Suppose nobody can round up six votes — that is, a majority of the supervisors can’t agree on a new mayor? Well, Chiu, as board president, would be acting mayor — potentially for the entire duration of Newsom’s term, roughly a year. He’d also remain as board president. It’s the same as if the mayor goes out of the state and names an acting mayor in his place; that person is still a supervisor. So Chiu would have all the powers of both the mayor and the board president — and immense amout of clout for one person at City Hall.

But wait, there’s more: Chiu is board president only until the board elected in November of this year takes office, which would be about five days after Newsom would become lite guv. So unless the current board can choose a new mayor, with six votes (not including the vote of any supervisor being nominated), the new board would elect a new board president — who would instantly become acting mayor at the same time.

And since supervisors are allowed to vote for themselves for board president, any member would be allowed to vote for him- or herself for acting mayor.

Confused yet? Clearly, the folks who wrote the City Charter never actually envisioned this scenario (or didn’t think about it very much).

Of course, what that means that with the current board split the way it is, with exactly six solid progressive votes, someone who isn’t currently on the board (say, Aaron Peskin — or Tom Ammiano, or Mark Leno, or whoever) would have a better chance of getting a majority than a current member, who would need at least one of the moderate bloc votes.

And if Newsom runs, it will make the fall supervisorial elections even more important, because potentially those newly elected supes will be choosing not only a board president but a mayor.

Here’s another fun twist: If District Attorney Kamala Harris is elected attorney general, the mayor gets to appoint a new D.A. But suppose Newsom also wins and is sworn in a few minutes before Harris. Presumably acting mayor David Chiu (a former prosecutor who rumor has it might like to be D.A. himself someday) would choose the new D.A. — and suppose Chiu knows he doesn’t have six votes to be mayor. There’s no reason why he couldn’t appoint himself D.A., leaving a vacancy on the board and a vacancy for board president, which would be filled by anyone who could get six votes, who would then be acting mayor and could appoint a new supervisor to Chiu’s seat. Who could then be the deciding vote on who gets to be mayor.

Whoa. I can’t wait. Run, Gavin, Run.

Labor’s love lost

Andrew Lam
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4
Labor’s love lost

Note: This file has been corrected from an earlier version.

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Two recent events could have major implications for Service Employees International Union Local 1021 — San Francisco’s largest public-sector union and an important ally for progressives — for better or for worse. And this union’s fate seems closely tied to that of the progressive movement in San Francisco.

The first event was likened to a “nuclear bomb in the morning paper” by one observer, and might be interpreted as the kickoff to a fierce budget battle. Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that he is considering a plan to help solve next year’s budget deficit by laying off 10,000 full-time city workers and rehiring them at 37.5 hours, which would amount to a sweeping 6.25 percent pay cut for workers and an estimated $50 million in savings for a fiscally impaired city.

Though it was framed by Newsom spokesperson Tony Winnicker as one preliminary cost-saving option among many, the proposal received prominent front-page coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, even before official discussions were called between the mayor and public sector unions. Since SEIU Local 1021 represents 17,000 members in San Francisco and a majority of the city’s 26,000 total employees, it would likely absorb the greatest impact if such a plan went through.

At the same time the mayor’s startling announcement hit newsstands, SEIU was in the midst of mailing out ballots to its membership for union elections. “I don’t know whether it’s a coincidence, or if the city is taking advantage of the fact that SEIU is absorbed in its elections,” Sin Yee Poon, an SEIU chapter president for Human Services Agency workers, told us while pointing out that the events happened simultaneously.

With three separate slates of candidates vying for control of SEIU Local 1021, grudges between warring internal factions have intensified into bitter sparring matches. The timing is unfortunate — just as SEIU’s internal turmoil is coming to a head, one of its greatest battles is pending over an unprecedented $522 million budget shortfall that looms like a dark cloud over the city. The deficit will surely result in job losses, and the public sector union’s ability to mount resistance even as it wrestles with internal strife is shaping up to be a key question.

This pivotal moment carries wider political implications considering that the progressive organization has in the past helped seal an alliance between San Francisco’s left-leaning leaders and organized labor through the San Francisco Labor Council.

With SEIU besieged by infighting and soon to be hurting from wage slashes and layoffs, more conservative factions of the labor community, such as the San Francisco Firefighters Union and the Building and Construction Trades Council, have recently been butting heads with progressive members of the Board of Supervisors.

At the same time, forces on all sides are beginning to eye the coveted seats up for election in June at the Democratic County Central Committee, a Democratic Party hub that is a cornerstone of local political influence, as well as the seats that will open up on the Board of Supervisors in November. Negotiations between unions and the mayor are ongoing, and mayoral spokesperson Tony Winnicker was quick to note that Newsom is open to options, other than reconfiguring 10,000 city jobs, that organized labor brings to the table. At the same time, the Guardian heard from numerous sources that city workers felt outraged and blindsided by Newsom’s decision to air the plan in the Chronicle instead of bringing stakeholders to the table.

SEIU Local 1021 President Damita Davis-Howard told us she thinks the idea of taking $50 million out of the pockets of working people in a rocky economy is wrong-headed.

“This was devastating,” said Davis-Howard, who is running for a newly created union position called chief elected officer, which is different from the union president, and similar to an executive-director post. “The mayor might as well have raised their taxes, because if you decrease their pay by 6.25 percent, they will still have the same amount of work, they will still have to pay the same mortgage, they will still have to buy the same food, the same PG&E, and they’ll be doing it with a lot less money. If any idea like this were to go through, it would actually remove the very fabric or fiber of San Francisco. It would really cut to the core of the very being of San Francisco. … I don’t see how anybody could believe that we could continue being the city that we love being with this kind of action.”

Winnicker, the mayoral spokesperson, cast it as a plan that could avert hundreds or even thousands of layoffs. “This year the easy decisions are behind us,” he noted in a recent discussion with the Guardian.

Solving last year’s fiscal shortfall was far from easy — budget tussles between frontline city workers and the mayor got ugly, and even then, the city received millions in federal stimulus dollars to cushion the blow. A similar plan of sweeping hourly cuts was floated then too, but it didn’t gain enough traction to move forward.

“The mayor is facing a huge budget deficit, there’s no question about it — but he has not lifted one finger to raise a dime in revenue,” charged SEIU member Ed Kinchley, who works at San Francisco General Hospital. As for how the union might respond if such a proposal went through, he speculated, “I think it’s the kind of thing that could lead to a strike. A big fight.”

While the city charter bars strikes by public employees, Kinchley’s comment indicates the level of frustration among SEIU’s rank-and-file.

 

 

The proposal could present a common enemy and a rallying point for a union in disarray. Internal jockeying for elected positions can be fierce in any organization, but for San Francisco’s service-workers union, the rifts are particularly deep.

The elections, which will be decided Feb. 28, mark the first time since a radical restructuring in 2007 that members will collectively decide who should lead. In 2007, the face of SEIU was changed across California when the international president, Andy Stern, began consolidating dozens of far-flung locals into centralized, beefier entities in a bid to maximize political effectiveness (California comprises roughly one-third of the entire union’s membership).

Local 1021 came into existence when 10 locals were conglomerated into one 54,000-member giant — hence the “10-to-one” label — representing health care and frontline service workers from the Bay Area to the Oregon border. 

In San Francisco, where a large segment of its members are based, the shift was interpreted by some as a power grab, and it triggered a period of ongoing strife between those allied with Stern and the international wing on one side, and those dissatisfied with changes they saw as antithetical to the democratic ideals championed by Local 790, its predecessor, on the other.

In the years following the reorganization, Stern began trying to aggregate members by raiding other unions to consolidate power. But campaigns to bring in members from United Healthcare Workers (UHW) and fend off membership losses to the newly created National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) have consumed money and resources that some members told the Guardian would’ve been better spent bolstering national support for health-care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act. According to one source, SEIU spent $10 million on a Fresno battle against NUHW.*

A fight waged between SEIU Local 1021 and UNITE HERE Local 2, a hotel-workers union that was historically allied with Local 1021’s predecessor, left some members especially stung because it marred a longstanding relationship between two groups of frontline workers.

“Andy Stern has concentrated more and more power into the hands of a group of so-called elite members of the union,” Kinchley told the Guardian. Stern’s top-down leadership style and growth-oriented objectives “run pretty harshly against what many of us believe is in the best interest of our workers locally,” he added.

In recent weeks, divisions have deepened further. A staff person who preferred not to be identified for fear of retribution filed charges with the U.S. Department of Labor against a supervisor, who is aligned with the international faction, for alleged harassment and bullying. Another complaint was filed with union leadership alleging that union bylaws were violated when membership money was authorized, but not spent, to conduct a poll without proper approval.*

“There’s a fiscal rogue-ness about it. [Davis-Howard] does whatever she wants, and she spends our dues money without authorization from anybody,” Kinchley charged.

Stern appointed Davis-Howard, and now she is running for election on a slate aligned with the international wing. When the Guardian tried to reach her to discuss union elections, spokesperson Carlos Rivera told us that Davis-Howard found it inappropriate to publicly discuss internal divisions.

Sin Yee Poon is running as her opponent on a reform slate, formed by members disaffected by the international’s modus operandi. “For the whole reform group, we’re disappointed with the general direction of corporate unionism,” Poon told the Guardian. Stressing that she believes grassroots, democratic ideals have eroded since the restructuring, she said members in her camp are agitated when they see resources siphoned into raids on other unions such as UNITE HERE and UHW. “We want it to be member-driven,” she said. “The raiding of other unions is absolutely not OK.”

 

 

The internal strife could have a wider ripple effect. SEIU Local 1021 has historically been influential in securing an alliance between the city’s labor community and San Francisco’s progressive leadership. During the last round of elections for San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, Sups. John Avalos and Eric Mar campaigned and ultimately were elected with strong fundraising support from the labor council.

Yet in recent weeks, several skirmishes pitted certain factions of the labor community against progressive members of the Board of Supervisors. Outrage bubbled up from the firefighters — and ultimately the labor council as a whole — against a charter amendment proposed by Sup. John Avalos that would have extended the minimum number of work hours for firefighters.

Billed as a cost-saving measure, the proposal might have ultimately resulted in fewer firefighter jobs, but it was designed to spread the pain of budget cuts more equitably by grazing public safety departments instead of just inflicting blows on frontline and healthcare workers.

After Labor Council Executive Director Tim Paulson came out strongly against it, Avalos abandoned the idea. A source from within the labor council, who spoke on background only, described it as an opportunity for the labor council to come together and unite on class interests.

The political posturing that came out of that fight shook even Sup. David Campos, who vocally called for equitably sharing the pain during last year’s budget debacle. “This isn’t the way to do it,” Campos said when asked about Avalos’ failed charter amendment. “And I worry about the negative impact on labor and the progressive board. There are larger issues at play here. The entire progressive agenda is at stake. We need to think long-term about the specific issues plus the future of the progressive movement.”

Sup. Sean Elsbernd’s bid to reform the pension system to save money has provoked yet another fight with SEIU Local 1021. Union members argue that if they are asked to contribute to their own retirement funds, which would become mandatory under this proposal, then they should be given the same wage increase that other unions were granted when they agreed to similar terms.

But when Sup. Eric Mar tried to amend Elsbernd’s proposal by inserting language guaranteeing that pay increase, Elsbernd said it would cost the city millions more. If Mar’s amended version goes forward, “you’ll be going to the voters by yourself,” Elsbernd told the progressive-leaning supervisor at a Feb. 9 board meeting.

 

 

Another fight has erupted over 555 Washington, a tower proposed to go up beside the TransAmerica Pyramid, which was debated at a joint hearing Feb. 11 between the Planning Commission and the Recreation and Park Commission. For members of the Building & Construction Trades Council, which represents unionized carpenters, plumbers, and other workers in development-related trades, the project represented jobs — the screaming priority in an economy where funding for new construction has trickled to almost nil.

“There is, in general in San Francisco progressive politicians, a knee-jerk reaction to development projects,” Building & Trades Council Secretary Treasurer Michael Theriault told us. As a council representing people whose livelihoods depend on private sector construction, “We have a particular quandary,” he said. “We need politicians who at the same time are friendly to labor and understand that development is an economic tool that can help the city.”

The arm of labor representing Theriault’s council has been slammed with job losses due to the economic downturn, and he’s publicly expressed frustration when projects of this scale are shot down.

“What the mayor did, what Elsbernd did, and what Avalos did are all the same thing: They all staked out a position, put a provocative idea on the table, and forced unions to have a discussion with a gun to their head in a non-constructive way,” Mike Casey, president of UNITE HERE Local 2 and a member of the labor council’s Executive Committee.

A source familiar with the inner workings of the labor council said the tension between building trades and firefighters versus more left-leaning members of the labor community has been in existence for decades, and it isn’t anything new — particularly in the months preceding election season.

Casey challenged the very notion that there is a subculture of the labor council that isn’t progressive, pointing out that labor came together as whole to support Sups. Avalos, Mar, and David Chiu — “and I personally would do it again in a heartbeat,” he added. Internal catfights and struggles for control come with the territory in a democratic, diverse organization, he said. “As a group of working people, I have great regard for the membership [of SEIU Local 1021],” he said. “Occasionally there’s a dustup. In my experience, after the dust settles, more often that not, unions come out stronger for it.”.

*Corrections made to the original file.

Honor Joe Lynn’s life and work

Sasha Cuttler
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0
Honor Joe Lynn’s life and work

Friends and allies of Joe Lynn – perhaps the most diligent and public-spirited citizen ever associated with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, an agency he pushed hard to fulfill its campaign finance watchdog role – will celebrate his life Saturday, Feb. 20, during memorial services from 3-5:30 p.m. at the LGBT Center, 1800 Market Street.

Lynn died Dec. 9 after a long battle with leukemia and HIV-related ailments. As an Ethics Commission staffer and then an appointed commissioner, Lynn took seriously the mandate to root out and expose political corruption of all kinds, often defying powerful interests to do so. Much of his work was laid out in the pages of the Guardian, which regularly celebrated Lynn’s courage, insights, and hard work, as well of those of the protégés that he trained, Kevin De Liban and Oliver Luby (who is still with Ethics and carrying on Lynn’s work in the face of regular threats and sanctions from his bosses).

In fact, to mark what Lynn’s supporters see as the woefully lax and occasionally corrupt operations of the Ethics Commission under director John St. Croix and his chief deputy Mabel Ng (who, in 2004, ordered the destruction of documents implicated the Newsom for Mayor campaign in a money-laundering scheme), attendees will march on the Ethics Commission following the service.

For more on Lynn, see this obituary published in the Fog City Journal.

Editorial: How to create jobs in San Francisco

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If Newsom decides to solve the city’s $520 million deficit with cuts alone, he will be taking more than $1 billion out of the local gross domestic product

EDITORIAL If Mayor Gavin Newsom is serious about stimulating the San Francisco economy, he ought to start with a basic number that the city’s own economist, Ted Egan, passed along to us this week. The number is 2.11 — and Egan says that’s the multiplier effect of cuts in local public spending.
In other words, every dollar Newsom cuts from the city budget has a ripple effect of taking $2.11 out of the San Francisco economy. Which means that if the mayor decides to solve the city’s $520 million deficit with cuts alone, he’ll be taking more than $1 billion out of the local gross domestic product.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with the mayor’s economic stimulus package: it’s entirely aimed at the private sector, with no regard for how it will hit public spending.
A dose of reality here — public-sector jobs are also jobs. People who work in the public sector pay rent and mortgages and buy clothes and food for their kids and go shopping in local stores and go to local clubs and restaurants and pay taxes — and have the same economic impacts on the economy as private-sector workers. If you lay off nurses and recreation directors, those people stop spending money in town, and you continue the vicious cycle that has made this recession so deep and painful.
And if your entire economic stimulus program is aimed at cutting private sector taxes, it’s going to lead to public sector job losses. And those losses will undermine much of the impact of any gains you might get from private sector job growth.
Egan predicts that Newsom’s program of eliminating the payroll tax for new hires would create 4,330 new jobs in the city. We find that something of a stretch — it’s hard to imagine how any struggling small business would find eliminating a small tax enough reason to hire a new worker, and small businesses provide the vast majority of the private-sector jobs in San Francisco. But even if it’s accurate, it’s a fairly tiny gain. The city’s lost more than 35,000 jobs since 2007, and when the economy rebounds in the next two years, Egan predicts about 20,000 new jobs in the city even without the stimulus.
Egan also acknowledged to us last year that “the consensus among economists is that most of the time government spending stimulates the economy more” [than tax cuts].”
That’s particularly true in a city where the largest employers are all in the public sector (see opinion piece this page).
If the mayor and the supervisors actually want to create jobs in San Francisco, there are plenty of things they can do — starting with finding ways to close as much of the budget gap as possible without layoffs. Here are some possible approaches.
• Put a major revenue measure on the November ballot that saves city jobs without costing private sector jobs. There are several ways to do this, but all of them start with the well-demonstrated concept that transferring wealth from the rich to the poor and middle-class — that is, giving money to people most likely to spend it — is good for job creation. One option: shift the payroll tax to a gross receipts tax and charge bigger companies a higher rate. Another: a commuter tax on income earned above $50,000 a year would charge wealthier people who use city services and don’t pay for them.
• Issue infrastructure bonds. The notion that cities can’t borrow money the way the federal government does to fund economic stimulus programs is just wrong. San Francisco can sell bonds for a wide range of projects, from affordable housing to alternative energy projects to public works programs that are badly needed and could put San Franciscans directly to work. But it can’t be small-time projects; to make a difference, direct stimulus needs to be big, perhaps $1 billion. San Francisco’s property owners, who ultimately are on the hook for the bonds, are by and large (thanks to Prop. 13) entirely able to handle more payments.
• Lend more money to small businesses. The biggest obstacle to small business hiring isn’t taxes but a lack of credit. The $73 million Newsom is going to spend on tax cuts would create far more jobs as part of a city-sponsored microloan fund. Newsom’s efforts on that front are still very small scale.
There’s so much more the city can do — but cutting taxes and losing city jobs is the wrong way to turn around the economy.

Gavin watch: The Lt. Gov. rumors

Zelda Bronstein
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Gavin watch: The Lt. Gov. rumors

The rumors that Newsom is going to announce imminently that he’s running for Lt. Governor turned out to be a bit premature.

But I am still hearing from very solid sources that he’s seriously considering jumping into the race — and while the San Francisco left didn’t back his run for governor, this would be a very different campaign. The Lt. Gov. isn’t really in charge of anything, but has a certain amount of power, not just from the platform and the ability to issue press statements (one of Newsom’s favorite hobbies), but because that person gets a seat on the state Lands Commission (offshore oil drilling) and the U.C. Regents (education cuts). Newsom would most likely be fine on both issues.

And the truth is, we all know Newsom doesn’t really want to be a wine clerk.

And lieutenant governors are often well positioned to move on to higher offices it worked for John Kerry, for example (and for Gray Davis, if you call that working). I think Newsom would love to position himself to run for U.S. Senate when Dianne Feinstein, who will be 79 when her current term expires in 2012, decides to retire.

And, of course, from the perspective of progressives infuriated with what he’s done as mayor, it would get him out of town a year early, and let this district-elected board appoint a new chief executive.

That’s got all sorts of talk started, with the typical Chronicle-style “Oh My God Aaron Peskin could be mayor” stuff (and let’s be serious — Peskin would be a way better mayor than the current occupant of Room 200) to serious discussion about how this will affect the 2011 mayor’s race.

If any of the current contenders could round up six votes, it would be a major boost; that person could then run as an incumbent.

I don’t think this board would ever choose state Sen. Leland Yee, who is positioning himself for the run. City Attorney Dennis Herrera? Maybe — but given how pissed some of the progressives are about the Sanctuary Ordiance, it would be a stretch.

Sfist is running a poll, and right now it looks like the readers like Ross Mirkarimi but think Peskin or David Chiu is a more likely winner.

And trust me, even the thought of Gavin leading town has that scramble already heating up.

 

 

How to create jobs in SF

David Talbot
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10
How to create jobs in SF

EDITORIAL If Mayor Gavin Newsom is serious about stimulating the San Francisco economy, he ought to start with a basic number that the city’s own economist, Ted Egan, passed along to us this week. The number is 2.11 — and Egan says that’s the multiplier effect of cuts in local public spending.

In other words, every dollar Newsom cuts from the city budget has a ripple effect of taking $2.11 out of the San Francisco economy. Which means that if the mayor decides to solve the city’s $520 million deficit with cuts alone, he’ll be taking more than $1 billion out of the local gross domestic product.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with the mayor’s economic stimulus package: it’s entirely aimed at the private sector, with no regard for how it will hit public spending.

A dose of reality here — public-sector jobs are also jobs. People who work in the public sector pay rent and mortgages and buy clothes and food for their kids and go shopping in local stores and go to local clubs and restaurants and pay taxes — and have the same economic impacts on the economy as private-sector workers. If you lay off nurses and recreation directors, those people stop spending money in town, and you continue the vicious cycle that has made this recession so deep and painful.

And if your entire economic stimulus program is aimed at cutting private sector taxes, it’s going to lead to public sector job losses. And those losses will undermine much of the impact of any gains you might get from private sector job growth.

Egan predicts that Newsom’s program of eliminating the payroll tax for new hires would create 4,330 new jobs in the city. We find that something of a stretch — it’s hard to imagine how any struggling small business would find eliminating a small tax enough reason to hire a new worker, and small businesses provide the vast majority of the private-sector jobs in San Francisco. But even if it’s accurate, it’s a fairly tiny gain. The city’s lost more than 35,000 jobs since 2007, and when the economy rebounds in the next two years, Egan predicts about 20,000 new jobs in the city even without the stimulus.

Egan also acknowledged to us last year that “the consensus among economists is that most of the time government spending stimulates the economy more” [than tax cuts].”

That’s particularly true in a city where the largest employers are all in the public sector (see opinion piece this page).

If the mayor and the supervisors actually want to create jobs in San Francisco, there are plenty of things they can do — starting with finding ways to close as much of the budget gap as possible without layoffs. Here are some possible approaches.

• Put a major revenue measure on the November ballot that saves city jobs without costing private sector jobs. There are several ways to do this, but all of them start with the well-demonstrated concept that transferring wealth from the rich to the poor and middle-class — that is, giving money to people most likely to spend it — is good for job creation. One option: shift the payroll tax to a gross receipts tax and charge bigger companies a higher rate. Another: a commuter tax on income earned above $50,000 a year would charge wealthier people who use city services and don’t pay for them.

• Issue infrastructure bonds. The notion that cities can’t borrow money the way the federal government does to fund economic stimulus programs is just wrong. San Francisco can sell bonds for a wide range of projects, from affordable housing to alternative energy projects to public works programs that are badly needed and could put San Franciscans directly to work. But it can’t be small-time projects; to make a difference, direct stimulus needs to be big, perhaps $1 billion. San Francisco’s property owners, who ultimately are on the hook for the bonds, are by and large (thanks to Prop. 13) entirely able to handle more payments.

• Lend more money to small businesses. The biggest obstacle to small business hiring isn’t taxes but a lack of credit. The $73 million Newsom is going to spend on tax cuts would create far more jobs as part of a city-sponsored microloan fund. Newsom’s efforts on that front are still very small scale.

There’s so much more the city can do — but cutting taxes and losing city jobs is the wrong way to turn around the economy.

 

The Gavin and Leah Show

Sasha Cuttler
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0

With rampant rumors that Mayor Gavin Newsom will announce his candidacy for lieutenant governor as soon as today – and with San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum today announcing a leave of absence – it’s interesting to see the two paired up in Newsom’s latest You Tube video.

While Newsom has been a terrible mayor in many ways – from his frustrating fiscal conservatism to his petulant approach to politics and working with progressive supervisors – he’s actually not too bad on some of the greening initiatives he discusses in this video (which was the subject of our Nov. 18 cover story, “Seizing space”).

Newsom’s war on the public sector

David Talbot
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Newsom’s war on the public sector

 

By Calvin Welch

OPINION With the Feb. 10 release of the Controller’s Office economic analysis of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed tax cuts to businesses, combined with its December 2009 analysis of the Newsom administration’s proposed fee cuts to market-rate condo developers, we now have a clear and objective measurement of this administration’s response to the biggest economic collapse in San Francisco since the Great Depression: the mayor hopes to create 4,400 jobs (of the 39,000 jobs lost in San Francisco since the start of the downturn) and 40 to 50 new market-rate condos over the next two years at the cost of $72 million in lost tax revenues.

The plan includes no affordable housing — zero, zip, nada — below-market rate housing for moderate-income San Franciscans. Instead, the developer fees that fund parks, transit, and other critical neighborhood infrastructure projects promised for the Market Street, Octavia Street, and eastern neighborhoods plan areas will be postponed indefinitely.

Those impacts don’t include the loss of public sector jobs and services. The report rather coyly notes that “the potential impacts of the city revenue decline on public services, and indirectly on the economy, is not considered because the city could adjust to that impact in many ways.” The analysis warns: “However, if the stimulus does not directly incentivize job creation, it may not overcome the loss of public sector employment that the subsidy’s revenue would pay for.”

That last point that needs some attention.

Newsom’s “stimulus” is targeted solely at the private sector, with no requirement that the companies slated to get tax breaks and fee reductions actually perform — either through job growth or housing development. It cuts public sector employment and public sector-led infrastructure development — affordable housing, transit lines, parks and playgrounds — when it’s clear that both public employment and infrastructure development would be a direct stimulus to the local economy.

Quick, name the biggest employer in San Francisco. How about the second biggest — or fourth, sixth, or seventh? Well, they’re all in the public sector: the City and County of San Francisco, the University of California, San Francisco, the State of California, the San Francisco Unified School District, and the U.S. Postal Service top the list. As of 2008, some 85,000 jobs in San Francisco — 15 percent of all jobs in the city — were in the public sector. More than half were in education, and the bulk of the rest were in health and human services.

The Newsom administration’s war, and it is a war, on the public sector is economic suicide. We should look at stimulus as saving as many public sector jobs — especially in education and health and human services — as we can and finance as much local infrastructure development as we can afford. That’s real economic stimulus. What Newsom is proposing is the same old, inside-the-box, tried and failed trickle-down that got us in this ditch in the first place.

Calvin Welch has spent the last four decades working for sane economic development policies in San Francisco.

Newsom’s gonna run? That’s what we’re hearing

Zelda Bronstein
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2
Newsom’s gonna run? That’s what we’re hearing

Gavin Newsom’s going to announce his campaign for Lt. Governor in a few days.

That’s what inside sources are telling us, anyway. (And the rumor’s been circulating for a bit.) The mayor has been making a lot of phone calls in the past few days, checking in with supporters and lining up allies. And he’s ready to make the leap.

(Other sources say just the opposite, but such is San Francisco politics.)

The move makes a lot of sense from Newsom’s point of view; he’ll be termed out of office in two years, with nothing much to do on the horizion. And for a politician with heavy ambitions, that’s a bad place to be.

In the Lite Gov’s spot, he can keep a high profile, push education issues (the Lt. Gv. is a member of the UC Regents), make a bunch of speeches — and have no responsibility at all for actual follow through, which was never his strong suit.

And he’ll be positioned to run for an office like U.S. Senate should Dianne Feinstein decide to retire.

The issue has always been the local impact: If Newsom wins — and he would enter the race as the odds-on favorite — then he’d have to resign his job as mayor with a year left, and the supervisors would pick an new mayor, who could then run for re-election as an incumbent. Newsom’s money guys have never been happy with the prospect of leaving the city in the hands of a mayor appointed by a progressive majority on a district-elected board, but Newsom’s over that, our sources say. He’s thinking of his own future, and it looks like Sacramento.

So no confirmation, this is still at the rumor stage, but I’m betting he goes for it.

A gate so golden

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
A gate so golden

Van Dyke Parks — who’ll be perfoming Fri/12 at Swedish American Hall — boasts an outstanding resume as an arranger, producer, lyricist, and studio musician for the likes of the Byrds, the Everly Brothers, Randy Newman, Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Rufus Wainwright, Frank Black, the Doobie Brothers, Sonny and Cher, Joanna Newsom, Ringo Starr, Saint Etienne … the list goes on. Under the heading “additional experience,” Parks could include actor: he was a minor child star, appearing in the Grace Kelly vehicle The Swan 1956), and in 1990, he showed up on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. He’s also written film scores.

Considering this array of accomplishments, it’s surprising that Parks is still primarily renowned as a musical whiz within niche circles. Perhaps this is a consequence of his intricate and somewhat inaccessible solo albums, commercial failures to roughly the same the degree that they are creative successes. Whatever the case, he has a keen awareness of his legacy. “I prefer not being celebrated because I think that it brings only dangerous results,” he says, when the topic is broached during a recent phone interview. “It brings a self-importance. The best thing I can say is that I’ve created some works that I think have a shelf-life that is longer than a jar of yogurt.”

Born in Mississippi, Parks gravitated toward music early in life. He was deemed a child prodigy, and his interests led him to Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) in Pennsylvania. But California is his “adopted reality,” the place where he’s lived for more than 40 years. He began to fill up his now extensive resume as a studio musician, arranger and, songwriter in Los Angeles. In 1966, Brian Wilson commissioned him to write lyrics for the now-legendary SMiLE (Nonesuch). In 1968, at the age of 24, Parks released his first solo record, Song Cycle (Warner Bros.).

This year, Parks is finally adding “touring” to the “additional qualifications” section of his resume. For the first time, he’s going on the road with his material, from Song Cycle to Orange Crate Art (Warner Bros.), which was released in 1995.

When I called Parks to interview him, one of the first things we touched on was the similarity between our names. For me, multiple names make for a confusing mouthful. VDP explained that he was named for his paternal grandmother’s “beloved” cousin, who was killed over the English Channel by the Nazis the same week he was born. He also said he’s never sobered up — I think this was a joke — because he can’t take his name to AA meetings. Hearing this, I realized that the complications of having a two-part first name might be more inconvenient than a three-part last name. After VDP initiated questions about our names, he continued as an interviewer and asked me my musical tastes and my age, at which point we established that we have 43 years between us.

“My goal is just to try and create things that will stand the test of time, Parks said. “That’s always been my goal. I have a great work ethic, and I put my heart into everything I do hoping it’ll be my life-defining moment.” At the moment, Parks is finishing a new album that he hopes to put out at the end of the summer. It’s been more than 15 years since he has released any of his own material. “I believe my work is better than it’s ever been,” he asserts. “And in a town [L.A.] that celebrates and worships youth at the expense of any other consideration, I think I’m going to be able to prove that my best work is ahead of me — and that’s what gets me up every day.”

Parks’ manner of speaking has a similarity with the music he creates, nonchalantly integrating influences from far and wide. Explaining himself, he blends in metaphors and proverbs: “I’m a black ant on a watermelon.” “It’s like going from zero to hero.” “There may be snow on the roof, but a fire rages within.” When making music, he moves through and fuses musical genres from every direction, finding new points of entry and exit. In 32 minutes, Song Cycle spans almost every American musical genre, from bluegrass to jazz to show tunes. It’s an idiosyncratic soundtrack of America’s musical history.

Parks’ solo work has the feel of a soundtrack, or even a Disney score, with its oddball yet familiar style of joining orchestration and instrumentation (i.e. strings with banjo and harmonica, or French horn with mandolin). The literate and witty lyrics — “Palm Desert” turns L.A. into Never-Never Land; “San Francisco” is a lovers’ paradise “with a gate so golden” — conjure vivid imagery like a film projected onto the inside of one’s skull.

Perhaps VDP is a culture-sponge. As he says about his musical tastes, “I like it all. I eat everything that’s good.” But his gift is more complex than a talent for simply absorbing sounds and spitting them out again. He has a tendency to find connections in unlikely places and among unusual things. One man’s genius is another man’s idiot, or however it goes. But Parks doesn’t care what either of those guys think — he just wants to make songs.

“A song is the lightest piece of cultural goods,” he says. “You don’t need to pick it up in your hands. You can take it out in your head. It encourages you to do something, hopefully the right thing. It’s why we shall overcome. It’s what gives peace a chance. The song moves people to political or social action like nothing else because it has melody. And melody creates feelings, and the words, of course, address the thoughts. And no kidding, I want to keep writing and being surrounded with song forever. I want to bop till I drop.”

As the saying goes, genius is patience.

VAN DYKE PARKS

Feb. 12, 6:30 p.m., $22/25

With Clare and the Reasons and Josh Mease

Swedish American Hall

2174 Market, SF

www.swedishamericanhall.com

Newsom’s $72 million corporate giveaway

Sasha Cuttler
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Newsom’s $72 million corporate giveaway

City economist Ted Egan yesterday released his analysis of the payroll tax exemption for new hires that Mayor Gavin Newsom has proposed, one of several business tax cut proposals that we discuss in this week’s Guardian. Egan estimates that the net revenue loss (which takes into account taxes paid by the new hires) to the city would be $72 million over the next two years.

“The proposed policy will have a strong positive effect on local hiring, albeit at a steep costs the City’s General Fund,” Egan wrote, later adding, “The policy would also make the City’s serious current budget deficit worse, and likely lead to significant employment reductions in the City’s workforce.”

While the tax breaks amount to only about 1 percent of businesses’ payroll costs, Egan’s models predict they would spur the creation of 4,330 jobs, or about 5 percent of the jobs lost since 2007. Yet he also notes that the unemployment rate in San Francisco has been dropping in recent months and the economy is predicted to add about 20,000 jobs in the next two years even without this subsidy by taxpayers.

Both Newsom and Egan have tried to cast these tax breaks as similar to the approach being taken by President Obama. Egan writes, “The policy is a targeted tax cut that mirrors the President’s New Jobs Tax Credit, which is supported by a wide range of economists.”

But the big difference is that the federal government can deficit-spend and doesn’t have to reduce its own spending, which would have a negative impact on economy, as Egan’s report acknowledged a few pages later: “Because the City cannot run a fiscal deficit from one year to the next, the lost revenue would necessitate reductions in City staffing and services, like any revenue shortfall.”

The report specifically doesn’t analyze the impact of that reduced government spending on the local economy, with Egan writing that, “is not considered, because the City could adjust to that impact in many ways.” New taxes, for example, which Newsom has avoided proposing as a partial solution to the city’s gargantuan $520 million projected budget deficit.

In an interview with the Guardian this morning, Egan also affirmed what he has told us before, that the consensus among economists is that direct government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts, even though these tax cuts tied to new hiring are better than general tax cuts.

For example, Egan said that another current Newsom tax cut proposal – a $2,000 tax break for businesses that provide health care to employees – “would have a negative effect on the economy” because it doesn’t encourage hiring.

While the report is generally favorable to the notion of these targeted tax cuts, it doesn’t make a recommendation. And it does take away a key argument that Newsom and other believers in trickle down economics generally make, that the tax cuts will ultimately be paid for by increased economic activity. Instead, the report shows the cuts will cost $85 million of two years and the new hires will generate $12 million in increased sales, hotel, and other taxes. Even stretching that analysis out over 10 years, assuming the new hires remain employed after the tax exemption ends, the reports says the policy will still cost the city $42 million.

Sup. John Avalos, the chair of the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee who has been skeptical of Newsom’s tax cut proposals, has set a Feb. 24 hearing on the proposal.

Basically, this is a policy decision rooted in ideological beliefs: Should the city subsidize private companies at great cost to the public treasury, payroll, and services? Does the public sector exist solely to serve private corporations? Economic conservatives who are hostile to government generally think so, but progressives think it’s crazy to make deep cuts to government spending and services just to subsidize private sector economic growth, most of which is going to occur naturally anyway.

“Whatever happened to my sanctuary city amendment?”

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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“Whatever happened to my sanctuary city amendment?”

Yesterday, Sup. David Campos called for a status report on steps taken by San Francisco’s Juvenile Probation Department to implement an ordinance that the Board passed last fall to protect the confidentiality of juveniles’ immigration status.

And it already sounds like JPD has done nothing to implement it—and isn’t planning to, either, any time soon.

Campos announced that he met with Juvenile Probation Department (JPD) Chief William Siffermann today, and Siffermann told him that he had no intention of complying with the ordinance, which the Board passed Nov. 10, 2009.


JPD has had three months to figure out how best to implement the ordinance, which Campos helped author last year, and which seeks to give kids their day in court before handing them over tofederal immigration authorities for possible deportation.

Campos said he called the hearing so all the folks who worked to pass the legislation, and those it impacts, “have a public forum to hear about the decision not to implement it.”

Campos also requested a report on the impacts of JPD’s current policy towards suspected undocumented juvenile felons—a policy that Newsom ordered without public review and that JPD implemented on August 2008.

The report, Campos said, will include but is not limited to, the following:

1.    Determinations of cases of undocumented immigrant youth—original changes and final determination by the courts.

This will involve exploring not only what these youth were originally charged with at booking, but also what the local juvenile courts ultimately determined in their cases. So, expect to see a pattern in which the courts throw out or reduce the charges that resulted in these juveniles being reported to the feds at the moment of booking. Only, by the time the courts reach this determination, these kids have already been nabbed by the feds and transferred to detention facilities outside the city and/or state—a practice that has already resulted in the needless ripping apart of immigrant families.

2.    Policies, procedures and training provided to staff regarding inquiry into the immigration status of youth and compliance with the 1989 City of Refuge ordinance.

This exploration will likely lead to some eye-opening revelations as to how juvenile probation officers are expected, under the policy that Newsom ordered in 2008,  to question youth suspected of being undocumented, and how that contrasts/compares with the city’s original sanctuary ordinance which the Board implemented in 1989.
3.    The numbers of undocumented immigrant youth that have been reported to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Newsom ordered his change in sanctuary policy direction in 2008.

Up until now, it’s been almost impossible to discover exactly how many kids the city has handed over to ICE under Newsom’s new policy. Yes, even though the city is now spending local tax payer dollars to hand local immigrants’ kids over to the feds, the city has not told the public how many kids have been handed over or their current whereabouts. This information, coupled with information about the final determinations that local courts made in these kids’ cases, will likely be another mind blower.

4.    Changes in caseload and staffing as a result of implementing Newsom’s new sanctuary policy direction in 2008.
Again, expect to see some interesting patterns emerge. Has the city saved money by referring kids to ICE at the moment of booking? How about time? And just how well trained are juvenile probation officers in the intricacies of immigration law, anyway?

5.    Information about department financial and human resources dedicated to collaboration with ICE.

This is where the proverbial shit may truly start hitting the fan. Are we needlessly alienating the immigrant community?  Are we doing so in counter productive ways?

As chair of the Rules Committee, Campos promised to schedule this hearing as soon as possible, so watch the Board’s committee calendar and expect to see sparks fly.

Public employees feel blindsided by Newsom’s layoff scheme

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Public employees feel blindsided by Newsom’s layoff scheme

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to lay off 10,000 city employees and rehire them at lower pay is being met with outrage by some public-sector workers. The plan, crafted as a way of saving money to balance the city budget, would amount to sweeping pay cuts across the board for a significant number of city workers.

Formal discussions about it are in the earliest stages, and Tony Winnicker, the mayor’s press secretary, described it as “just one alternative that we’re investigating.” Nonetheless, some members of Service Employees International Union Local 1021 are furious that the mayor unveiled this plan in the San Francisco Chronicle instead of at a meeting with the city’s labor leaders.

“As far as we can tell, an idea he has ended up on the front page of the Chronicle that’s had a devastating ripple affect among the people who work for the city and county,” SEIU Local 1021 President Damita Davis-Howard told the Guardian. “We feel like we got a sucker-punch. … We really wish he had talked to us before he governed by press conference.”


Davis-Howard said she’s been inundated with phone calls from angry union members who read the article. “This is the same proposal he floated last year,” Davis-Howard said. “Most of our members believed that they gave up their holiday pay in order to avoid this very thing.”

The proposal, which was briefly considered last year but never moved forward, serves to illustrate just how hard financial woes are hitting San Francisco. The city is staring down a $522 million deficit, and Newsom’s proposal would make up for a mere $50 million in savings.

Winnicker declined to comment on Davis-Howard’s concerns about being blindsided by news of the layoff plan, brushing it off by saying the mayor did discuss it with “some folks in labor.” Instead, he suggested that Newsom is getting serious about solving the budget crisis while the Guardian is just focusing on irrelevant gripes.

“It is an unprecedented budget shortfall, and it is real,” Winnicker said, stressing that the gaping budget gap will have to be bridged without the infusion of federal stimulus dollars that cushioned the blow last year. “The easy choices are behind us.” This layoff plan could prevent “hundreds, if not thousands, of layoffs,” but the mayor is open to other ideas that labor brings to the table, he said.

“That logic is just flawed,” Davis-Howard said when asked about the assertion that the plan could prevent layoffs. “That’s not the way you re-stimulate the economy, by taking more dollars out of the economy. We can’t continue to balance the budget on cuts, because pretty soon the actual fiber of the city and county of San Francisco will be reeling because of the number of cuts that we sustained.”

When asked how SEIU Local 1021 would respond, she said, “I do believe we need to be open-minded, imaginative, and creative in coming up with some revenue-generating measures here.”

No doubt the mayor will receive plenty of suggestions as negotiations continue in the coming weeks.

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