Newsom

How healthy is Healthy SF?

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San Francisco is getting national attention for its attempt at universal health care. President Obama even applauded the city’s efforts in a speech: "Instead of just talking about health care, [San Francisco has been] ensuring that those in need receive it."

But Healthy San Francisco — a pioneering effort to do at the municipal level what the federal and state governments won’t — is running into some troubling problems, made worse by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s budget cuts.

The program was initiated by Tom Ammiano, now a state assemblymember, with backing from organized labor. Ammiano’s goal was to provide easy access to affordable health care for all of S.F.’s 60,000 uninsured. A local version of a single-payer program, he argued, could provide accessible primary and preventative care, alleviating the need for indigent patients to use the overcrowded and expensive San Francisco General Hospital emergency room as their primary medical provider.

Healthy San Francisco was launched on July 2, 2007, at two Chinatown clinics. It has grown dramatically, and now provides services to more than 34,000 residents at 27 clinics.

Although Newsom sat on the sidelines while Ammiano pushed the legislation, the mayor has now unashamedly claimed the program as his own to promote his gubernatorial campaign. On his Web site he boldly declares that "he’s created the only universal health care program in the country" — with no mention of Ammiano.

The $200 million-<\d>a-<\d>year program is partially funded by an employer-mandate requiring businesses with more than 20 employees either to provide health insurance or pay a fee to the city. The fees are broken down according to the size of the business; as of January 2009, employers pay between $1.23–<\d>$1.85 for every hour an employee works.

Like any traditional health insurance program, Healthy SF has annual fees and point-of-service charges paid by participants. The remainder of the program is funded through state grants.

Opposition to HSF surfaced immediately. The Golden Gate Restaurant Association sued the city even before the program started, alleging that the employer-spending mandate is a violation of federal law.

Kevin Westlye, the association’s executive director, claims his beef is not with the health care system, just with the employer mandate. He suggested that the city raise its sales tax to pay for the program — or that the financial burden should fall on the backs of the billionaires that run privatized health care and pharmaceutical companies.

But the city has only a limited ability to raise taxes, and any tax hike would require voter approval. The employer mandates and fees were much more politically feasible.

Deputy City Attorney Vince Chhabria, who is representing the city on the case, argues, "It is difficult to imagine, in these budget times, that San Francisco could provide universal coverage without employer health care spending requirements."

Federal courts sided with the GGRA initially, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the employer-spending mandate was legal. The GGRA appealed to the United States Supreme Court; the court will announce Oct. 5 whether it will hear the case.

That’s not the only litigation facing HSF. A group of low-income residents are suing the city, saying that the system’s annual fees and co-pays are too high. The program’s fees are scaled to the federal poverty level, which is currently set at an annual income of $10,830. A single person making between 101 percent and 200 percent of the federal poverty level — that is, between about $11,000 and $20,000 a year — pays $180 a year for HSF membership. People earning between $40,000 and $50,000 pay $1,350 a year.

There are also co-pays of $10 for medical visits and $5 to $25 for prescriptions — again, typical of health insurance plans.

Bay Area Legal Aid and the Western Center on Law and Poverty are representing three San Francisco residents who say those fees violate federal and state mandates, which stipulate that the city must provide free health care to those who can’t afford to pay. Healthy San Francisco is only one element of the lawsuit; it also claims that San Francisco General Hospital charges low-income people too much and that the city’s medical bills and collection practices aren’t fair.

One of the plaintiffs is Robyn Paige, a San Francisco resident with spine, foot, and hip injuries. Paige contends that she can’t afford the co-payments on her multiple medications each month and must either go without pain medication or borrow money. Lisa Qare, 21-year-old resident with MS, had to wait three weeks for medication for an eye condition that developed as a result of her condition.

A $10 co-pay may not seem like much, but when a patient needs several doctor visits a month and must pay $5 to $25 each for multiple prescriptions, it adds up. "As a result," Michael Keys, a Bay Area Legal Aid lawyer, told us, "those who can’t afford the charges are falling into medical debt or skipping services or medication."

And, not surprisingly, the cash-strapped city is having trouble finding enough staff and facilities to meet all the needs. Nancy Keiler, a Mission District resident and HSF participant, complains that clinic visits are too short, and that "the doctor is too hurried and has too many patients." (That’s a common complaint about private health plans, as well.) After waiting three hours, another HSF participant had to leave without her prescription to get back to work on time.

The long lines and waits will only get worse in the face of budget cuts. Pink slips were already handed out to several hundred San Francisco health care workers and 1,000 more may be laid off this fall.

Robert Haaland, who works with the Service Employees International Union Local 1021, told us the staffing cuts will make the situation much worse. Martha Hawthorne, a public-health nurse, said she thinks that there won’t be enough providers to provide good care — and that many health care workers losing their jobs will have to enroll in HSF themselves, putting even more strain on the system.

Ammiano, the author of the plan, is concerned too. "I’m very worried about it," he said. "It seems to me now that if there’s this budget pain, there will be impacts to San Francisco."

Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press secretary, tersely denied that HSF will feel any budget pain. Asked about critics’ allegations, he said, "They’re wrong. We are going to expand Healthy SF this year."

Earlier this month, insurance giant Kaiser Permanente joined HSF — meaning that the health care giant will now participate as a provider in the program. Haaland voiced concern about that move, calling it "privatizing through the back door."

Mitch Katz, the city’s public health director, agrees there are flaws to the system, but defends its success. "It is by no means a perfect program," he said, "but we’ve made a big impact." With national health care costs rising three times faster than wages (some believe that health care costs are rising five times faster than wages) the nation is starting to seriously talk about overhauling the entire system. San Francisco is being considered as a model for national health care reform.

Labor leaders have lauded the basic formula of HSF and pushed for the federal reforms to use it as a model. As San Francisco Labor Council executive director Tim Paulson said in a prepared statement, "In San Francisco we demonstrated that legislation providing public health access and corporate participation creates a real path to universal health care coverage."

Research assistance by Gabrielle Poccia

Bitter medicine

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The Democratic Party has been promising a major overhaul of the health care system for a generation or more. Now, with President Barack Obama and his party’s congressional leaders in a strong position to finally reach that elusive goal by next month, this should be a momentous time for the reform movement.

So why are so many health reform advocacy groups unhappy?

The answer involves policy and process. Rather than pushing for the single-payer system that many progressive groups demand and say is needed, Democratic leaders immediately opted for a compromise plan they hoped would be acceptable to economic conservatives and the insurance industry.

But Republicans are still calling them socialists for doing it, while the insurance industry — which loves the portion of the legislation that requires everyone to buy coverage — is still spending $1.4 million a day to either kill the complicated bills or turn them to its advantage.

When congressional Democrats unveiled America’s Affordable Health Choices Act (HR 3200) on July 14, many reformists thought a long-awaited, dramatic overhaul to a broken system was close at hand. The insurance companies would finally be made to adhere to ethical practices, and the Democrats would defend their plan to establish a government-run health insurance option that could compete with private insurers and keep them in check.

“American families cannot afford for Washington to say no once again to comprehensive health care reform,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who chairs the crucial House Education and Labor Committee.

The Democrats’ bill does address some critical flaws in the health care system. It would greatly expand Medicare to ensure coverage for low-income individuals, and would subsidize coverage for those earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, defined as $43,320 for an individual and $88,200 for a family of four. The bill would forbid insurance companies from denying coverage to patients based on a preexisting condition, age, race, or gender. It would eliminate co-pays for preventative care and establish a cap on annual out-of-pocket expenses. To pay for it, the proposal would create a graduated tax on households earning more than $350,000 a year, with the top bracket being a 5.4 percent levy on incomes of more than $1 million.

Progressive members of Congress threw their support behind the bill because — and only because — it included the public option. “The public option is central to our support of health care reform,” read a statement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), who chairs the CPC, was quoted in the Huffington Post as saying, “We have already compromised. More than 90 percent of the progressive caucus would vote today for a single-payer system. And so for us to compromise and get behind a really good strong public plan, I mean that’s as far as we’re going.”

While that statement indicates the precarious nature of the current legislation — which will likely be weakened further as it works its way through the process and merges with legislation from the more conservative U.S. Senate — many progressive groups aren’t even willing to go that far.

 

COVERAGE ISN’T CARE

Many single-payer supporters say some reform is better than none, and that the passage of HR 3200 would represent a major win. “We can advance many of the principles that we support with the House bill,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California and an organizer for the national reform advocacy group Health Care for America Now. The nation, he believes, needs to endorse principles such as universally covering Americans and making sure patients aren’t left alone “at the mercy of the private insurance industry.”

Yet other groups fear this cure would be worse than the disease, sending millions of new customers into a private insurance system that simply doesn’t work, and compounding existing problems.

“We’re still pushing for a national single-payer bill,” Dr. James Floyd, a health reform researcher with the nonprofit group Public Citizen, told the Guardian. “While we’re open to other options, we haven’t seen anything [in proposals by Democratic congressional leaders] yet that is acceptable.”

That position has plenty of support among the general public and reform-minded organizations, for whom single-payer continues to be the holy grail.

The current proposal “doesn’t change the system one bit,” said Leonard Rodberg, a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, who works in health policy. “These bills are requiring that people buy insurance, but there are no numbers about how much the insurance would cost. And if the cost of the insurance is still too high, you can remain uninsured.”

And as negotiations center on the government-run insurance option, the concept of scratching the status quo and offering free Medicare-like health care to every American instead has fallen to the wayside.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) got 84 co-sponsors for his single-payer bill, HR 676, and hearings were held in June to explore the option. But congressional leaders then took it off the table. The reasons why seem to be as much about political will as they are about campaign contributions from the insurance industry. As one high-level congressional staffer told us, many lawmakers won’t back a single-payer system in part because they “don’t want to have to respond to being accused of being a socialist by the right wing.”

Then there’s the insurance lobby. “They spend hundreds of millions,” the staffer said. “They lobby Congress, and they provide millions to campaigns. They have Fox News. But the single-payer movement is growing leaps and bounds.”

Rodberg said the insurance industry would love to see a mandate to buy insurance approved at a time when insurers are losing customers because the economy is shedding thousands of jobs each month. “This is a bailout for the insurance companies,” Rodberg told us. “But there’s absolutely nothing in this legislation that will control costs, because it just leaves it to the insurance companies and the market.”

Dr. Jim G. Kahn, president of the California Physicians’ Alliance and a professor at UCSF with expertise in health policy, told us he believes the proposed bill falls short of the goal of comprehensive, universal coverage. “‘Universal’ was recently redefined by [Montana Sen. Max] Baucus as 95 percent — i.e., 15 million uninsured,” Kahn told us via e-mail. “Reaching even that level will be hard, due to the complexity of enforcing an ‘individual mandate’ on families with only modest income (and hence no subsidies). And in eagerness to reach that level, more and more people will become underinsured, with inadequate coverage and a further boost in already high medical bankruptcy.”

Medical debt contributed to nearly two-thirds of all bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study in the American Journal of Medicine. The majority of those afflicted were solidly middle-class homeowners at the start of their illness, and most had private health insurance.

Health Care Now, a hub for single-payer grassroots groups, is planning a large rally in Washington, D.C., for July 30, the anniversary of the founding of Medicare, on which many single-payer plans would be based. “Single-payer is the only plan that would truly be universal and contain costs,” said Katie Robbins of Health Care Now, arguing that the current plan pushed by congressional leaders “doesn’t protect us from the ills of the insurance-based system as we know it.”

Other progressive groups are withholding judgment for now, hoping the good aspects will ultimately outweigh the bad. “We’re digging through them now. We support a bill that has a true public option, and the House bill has that,” said Consumer Watchdog’s Jerry Flanagan. “But we really dislike the individual mandate [to purchase health insurance]. The insurance companies really don’t want the public option, but they really want the mandate.”

 

LEAVING OPTIONS OPEN

Even if single-payer isn’t going to be the national model yet, advocates say it’s crucial that states such as California be allowed to experiment with the option anyway. Single-payer advocates in Congress have insisted the health care legislation be amended to explicitly allow states to do single-payer (otherwise, federal preemption laws and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act might prevent states from doing so).

On July 17, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) successfully inserted such an amendment into the bill that cleared the House Committee on Education and Labor with a 25-19 vote, which included significant Republican support. The amendment was opposed by Miller, indicating Democratic Party leaders oppose the change and may ultimately succeed in stripping it from the bill.

“George Miller is a longtime supporter of a national single-payer plan and health care reform. The truth is, however, there are not enough votes in the House or the Senate to pass a final bill that contains single-payer language. That is unfortunate but it is also the truth,” Miller spokesperson Rachel Racusen told the Guardian.

California is a hotbed of single-payer activism. Even a leading candidate for state insurance commissioner, Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) — who appeared on the steps of San Francisco City Hall on July 15 to receive the endorsements of a long list of local elected officials — has made single-payer advocacy a central plank in his campaign.

The movement is so strong in California that it actually had legislators vying for who would get to carry its banner. San Francisco’s own state senator Mark Leno, a longtime single-payer supporter, was selected this year to take over the landmark single-payer legislation previously sponsored by termed-out legislator Sheila Kuehl, which has passed twice, only to be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The more I dive into this issue, the more convinced I am that the answer has to be single-payer,” Leno told us. “The only reform that truly contains costs is single-payer.”

Leno doesn’t fault Obama for taking a more cautious stance — but he does believe the federal government shouldn’t block states like California from creating single-payer systems. “States should be incubators of trying different proposals. We have a great history with that,” Leno said.

But even with a Democratic governor, there’s no guarantee that single-payer would be approved. Mayor Gavin Newsom is running for governor, featuring health care reform in his platform. He chairs the U.S. Conference of Mayors National Health Care Reform Task Force, which is pushing for approval of the Obama plan. But even Newsom won’t promise to back the Leno plan.

“He doesn’t think single-payer is the best option now,” Newsom’s campaign manager Eric Jaye told us when asked whether Newsom would sign the legislation as governor. “He hopes and believes that as governor he will be supporting a national public option.”

But in the end, the governor may not matter. Leno said the political reality in California is that voters, rather than legislators, will need to approve the single-payer system. The funding mechanism for any ambitious health care plan would require a two-thirds vote in the legislature, a political impossibility.

“The difference in California is the voters will have the final say. And I’m excited about that. The voters of California will be able to say to the insurance companies, ‘We’ve had enough, now go away,'” Leno told us. He said he expects a ballot campaign in 2012.

Of course, it won’t be that simple. Leno knows that the insurance industry will spend untold millions of dollars to defend itself and a “status quo that is only working for them, not for anyone else. This is an enormously powerful industry and they control the debates.”

“Our effort here in California is an educational one. We have from now until the election in 2012 to make the arguments,” Leno said.

 

THE COST OF INSURANCE

Testifying at a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee in June, Geri Jenkins, a registered nurse and the co-president of the California Nurses Association, related the story of Nataline Sarkisyan. The 17-year-old girl needed a life-saving liver transplant, Jenkins explained to Congress members. “But CIGNA would not approve it,” she told them, “until I, and hundreds of others, protested. During one of the protests, I was with Hilda, Nataline’s mother, when she got the call of approval.”

Hilda’s relief didn’t last long. By the time the hurdle had been cleared, Jenkins testified, “it was too late. Nataline died an hour later.”

Nataline’s story sparked national outrage, and it has since become a flagship tale highlighting all that is wrong with this country’s health care system. But as the debate about health care reform continues inside House and Senate committee chambers, discussion about “universal health care” — a phrase with a simple ring to it — has grown murkier.

“We have a universal health care system now,” Flanagan said, referring to how all Americans with serious medical conditions have a right to treatment — even if that treatment comes with great expense in an overcrowded public hospital emergency room. “It’s just the most inefficient system imaginable.”

With the August congressional recess coming up fast and Obama leaning on Capitol Hill to shift into high gear on an issue that was a hallmark of his campaign, the pressure is on to vote on the historic health care reform legislation within weeks.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee passed a health care reform bill July 16 that is similar to the House bill, with the vote split along party lines. Now, national attention has turned to the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Baucus, which continued its efforts last week to achieve a bipartisan bill.

Many of progressive reform advocates simply don’t trust the players in Washington, D.C., to get this right, particularly Baucus. “He’s the voice of the insurance companies in the Senate,” Flanagan said.

A recent article in the Washington Post estimated that the insurance industry is spending an estimated $1.4 million per day to influence the outcome of the health care legislation, and pointed out that many of the lobbyists were Washington insiders who had previously worked for key legislators, such as Baucus.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group that tracks money in U.S. politics and operates the Web site opensecrets.org, launched an intensive study of health care sector lobbyist spending, including cataloguing industry contributions to individual candidates from 1989 to the present. Baucus received more industry campaign contributions in that time than any other Democrat, the CRP study reveals, with a total of $3.8 million. Henry Waxman (D-<\d>Los Angeles), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, received a total of $1.4 million in that same time, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) received $1.2 million.

Starting in the 2008 election cycle, the health sector gave more to Democrats than to Republicans, according to the CRP’s analysis.

To overcome that kind of money and influence, advocates say it was crucial to wield a credible single-payer option — a sort of death penalty for the insurance industry — for as long as possible.

“Having single-payer discussions on the table really informs the debate over the public option,” Flanagan said. “But by removing single-payer, it made the public option the left flank.”

Flanagan, like many, is worried about how a 900-page bill will turn out. “There are a thousands ways to get it wrong,” he said. “An easy way to get it right would be to just do a single-payer system.” ————

HEALTH CARE BY THE NUMBERS

• Uninsured Americans: 47 million

• Uninsured Californians: More than 6.7 million (about one in six)

• African Americans without health insurance in California: 19 percent

• Latinos without health insurance in California: 31 percent

• Whites without health insurance in California: 12 percent

• San Franciscans without health insurance: 15.3 percent

• Rise in health-insurance premiums from 2000 to 2007 in California: 96 percent

• Projected rise in health care costs per family without reform: $1,800 per year

• Percentage of bankruptcies attributed to an individual’s inability to pay medical bills: 62 percent

• Percentage of Americans who skip doctor visits because of the cost: 25 percent

• U.S. rank of 19 industrialized nations on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions: 19

• Jobs that would be created by extending Medicare to all Americans: 2.6 million

• Annual U.S. spending on billing and insurance-related administrative costs for health care: $400 billion

Sources: Health Care for America Now, American Journal of Medicine, Physicians for a National Health Program

It’s the insurance companies, stupid

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EDITORIAL It’s hard to imagine a better time for real, lasting health care reform. A popular president with a reform mandate has made it a top priority. The Democrats control both houses of Congress, with enough votes in the Senate to block a filibuster. Medical costs are soaring, driving individuals and businesses into bankruptcy. Even some big corporate executives, who recognize that the United States can’t compete in the global economy when companies have to spend so much on employee health insurance, are starting to come around.

So why is the bill working its way through Congress so incredibly weak?

One reason: the private insurance industry is still calling the shots.

In fact, from the very beginning, private insurers were involved in the policy discussions. Nancy Ann DeParle, President Obama’s senior health policy advisor and the White House point person on reform, brought the industry into the room on day one. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who heads the Finance Committee that is now considering the bill, received more contributions from the insurance industry than any other Democrat in the Senate.

And as long as the needs of an industry that makes profits by denying medical coverage to sick people matter more than the needs of the American people, there’s not going to be a decent reform bill.

The best experts all agree that the only way to hold down costs, insure everyone, and make the nation competitive again is to eliminate private insurance and create a government-run, single-payer system. That’s what almost every other industrialized country has — and it works. Canada spends far less than the U.S. does on health care — and the health outcomes for Canadians are far better by every measurable standard.

Yet single-payer health insurance was never on the table. The best Obama and Congress have to offer is a complex measure that increases some regulations on the industry and offers (for now) the prospect of a public option — that is, the ability of any citizen to buy a Medicare-style public insurance plan. The public plan is obviously an attractive option — private companies spend as much as 40 percent of every health care dollar on administrative overhead and profit. The figure for Medicare is about 2 percent. But even that option may not survive the final wording of the bill.

And in exchange for accepting a few new rules and (maybe) having to compete against the government, the insurers get a huge bounty: the plan would mandate that every American buys health insurance. Even if many people choose the public option (if it’s even available), the insurance industry will get millions of new customers.

And there’s no guarantee that those who are currently uninsured will be able to afford the plans they need. Many will probably buy a minimal policy and wind up vastly underinsured — which means they’ll go broke and fall onto the medical and social safety net if they get seriously ill. As Steven T. Jones and Rebecca Bowe report in this issue, the vast majority of the medical bankruptcies today involve people who have insurance.

The House Progressive Caucus is only willing to support the bill if it includes a strong, viable public option. We’d go even further: if Congress can’t offer a single-payer plan, it should at least allow the states to do that. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D–Ohio) has an amendment that would authorize single-payer in any state that wants to try it, and that must be part of the final bill. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who supports the current House package, should make clear that the Kucinich amendment must be part of the final package.

State Sen. Mark Leno has a single-payer bill in Sacramento that has passed twice but been vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger. Both Democratic candidates for governor, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Jerry Brown, need to pledge to sign that bill if they get elected.

There’s too much at stake here to accept an industry-backed plan masquerading as reform. If this crashes and burns, it will be years before reform comes back. Let’s get it right this time. *

Newsom figures out what a tax is (sort of)

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By Tim Redmond

This is a fun little gotcha moment from the SF Appeal. Newsom loves to say that he balanced the SF budget withour raising taxes — but then he admits that all those fees he raised (to avoid raising taxes) were actually … taxes.

Corporations co-opt “local”

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HSBC, one of the biggest banks on the planet, has taken to calling itself "the world’s local bank." Winn-Dixie, a 500-outlet supermarket chain, recently launched a new ad campaign under the tagline "Local flavor since 1956." The International Council of Shopping Centers, a global consortium of mall owners and developers, is pouring millions of dollars into television ads urging people to "Shop Local" — at their nearest mall. Even Wal-Mart is getting in on the act, hanging bright green banners over its produce aisles that simply say "Local."

Hoping to capitalize on growing public enthusiasm for all things local, some of the world’s biggest corporations are brashly laying claim to the evocative word.

This new variation on corporate greenwashing — local-washing — is, like the buy-local movement itself, most advanced in the context of food. Hellmann’s, the mayonnaise brand owned by the processed-food giant Unilever, is test-driving a new "Eat Real, Eat Local" initiative in Canada. The ad campaign seems aimed partly at enhancing the brand by simply associating Hellmann’s with local food. But it also makes the claim that Hellmann’s is local, because most of its ingredients come from North America.

It’s not the only industrial food company muscling in on local. Frito-Lay’s new television commercials use farmers to pitch the company’s potato chips as local food, while Foster Farms, one of the largest producers of poultry products in the country, is labeling packages of chicken and turkey "locally grown."

Corporate local-washing is now spreading well beyond food. Barnes & Noble, the world’s top seller of books, has launched a video blog under the banner "All bookselling is local." The site, which features "local book news" and recommendations from employees of stores in such evocative-sounding locales as Surprise, Ariz., and Wauwatosa, Wis., seems designed to disguise what Barnes & Noble is — a highly centralized corporation in which decisions about what books to stock and feature are made by a handful of buyers — and to present the chain instead as a collection of independent-minded booksellers.

Across the country, scores of shopping malls, chambers of commerce, and economic development agencies are also appropriating the phrase "buy local" to urge consumers to patronize nearby malls and big-box stores. In March, leaders of a buy-local campaign in Fresno assembled in front of the Fashion Fair Mall for a kickoff press conference. Flanked by storefronts bearing brand names such as Anthropologie and the Cheesecake Factory, officials from the Economic Development Corporation of Fresno County explained that choosing to buy local helps the region’s economy. For anyone confused by this display, the campaign and its media partners, including Comcast and the McClatchy-owned Fresno Bee, followed the press conference with more than $250,000 worth of radio, TV, and print ads that spelled it out: "Just so you know, buying local means any store in your community: mom-and-pop stores, national chains, big-box stores — you name it."


THE REAL BUY-LOCAL MOVEMENT


In one way, all of this corporate local-washing is good news for local economy advocates: it represents the best empirical evidence yet that the grassroots movement for locally produced goods and independently owned businesses now sweeping the country is having a measurable impact on the choices people make.

"Think of the millions of dollars these big companies spend on research and focus groups. They wouldn’t be doing this on a hunch," observed Dan Cullen of the American Booksellers Association, a trade group which represents about 1,700 independent bookstores and last year launched IndieBound, an initiative that helps locally owned businesses communicate their independence and community roots.

Signs that consumer preferences are trending local abound. Locally grown food has soared in popularity. The United States is now home to 4,385 active farmers markets, a third of which were started since 2000. Food co-ops and neighborhood greengrocers are on the rise. Driving is down, while data from several metropolitan regions show that houses located within walking distance of small neighborhood stores have held value better than those isolated in the suburbs where the nearest gallon of milk is a five-mile drive to Target.

In city after city, independent businesses are organizing and creating the beginnings of what could become a powerful counterweight to the big business lobbies that have long dominated public policy. Local business alliances — such as San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance, Stay Local! New Orleans, and Phoenix’s Local First Arizona — have now formed in more than 130 cities and collectively count about 30,000 businesses as members.

In San Francisco, the buy-local movement is strong. Voters and elected officials have erected bureaucratic barriers to new chain stores, and citizens have used those tools to fend off even respectable chains such as American Apparel, which earlier this year tried unsuccessfully to open a store on über-local Valencia Street. The San Francisco Small Business Commission runs a buy-local campaign that was created in December by such unlikely partners as the Guardian, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce (see "Shop local, City Hall," 5/6/09).

Through grassroots buy-local and local-first campaigns, these alliances are calling on people to choose independent businesses and local products more often. They also are making the case that doing so is critical to rebuilding middle-class prosperity, averting environmental collapse, keeping more money in the local economy, and ensuring that our daily lives are not smothered by corporate uniformity.

Surveys and anecdotal reports from business owners suggest that these initiatives are changing spending patterns. While the federal Department of Commerce reported that overall retail sales plunged almost 10 percent over the holidays, a survey in January by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (where I work) found that independent retailers in cities with buy-local campaigns saw sales drop an average of just 3 percent from the previous year. Many respondents attributed this relative good fortune to the fact that more people are deliberately seeking out locally owned businesses.

CORPORATIONS TAKE NOTE


None of this has slipped the notice of corporate executives and the consumer research firms that advise them. Several of these firms have begun to track the localization trend. In its annual consumer survey, the New York–based branding firm BBMG found that the number of people reporting that it was "very important" to them whether a product was grown or produced locally jumped from 26 to 32 percent in the last year alone. "It’s not just a small cadre of consumers anymore," said founding partner Mitch Baranowski.

Corporate-oriented buy-local campaigns that define "local" as the nearest Lowe’s or Gap store are now being rolled out in cities nationwide. Some represent desperate bids by shopping malls to survive the recession and fend off online competition. Others are the work of chambers of commerce trying to remain relevant. Still others are the half-baked plans of municipal officials casting about for some way to stop the steep drop in sales tax revenue.

Many of these Astroturf campaigns are modeled directly on grassroots initiatives. "They copy our language and tactics," said Michelle Long, board president of the San Francisco–based Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and executive director of Sustainable Connections, a seven-year-old coalition of 600 independent businesses in northwest Washington state that runs a very visible and — according to market research — very successful local-first program. "I get calls from chambers and other groups who say, ‘We want to do what you are doing.’ It took me a while to realize that what they had in mind was not what we do. Once I realized, I started asking them, ‘What do you mean by local?’ "

Examples abound. In Northern California, the Arcata Chamber of Commerce is producing "Shop Local" ads that look similar to the Humboldt County Independent Business Alliance’s "Go Local" ads, except they feature both independents and chains. Spokane’s "Buy Local" program, started by the chamber, is open to any business in town, including big-box stores. Log on to the "Buy Local" Web site created by the chamber in Chapel Hill, N.C., and you will find Wal-Mart among the listings.

But there’s a huge difference — even on strictly economic grounds — between shopping at a local chain store and a locally owned store. Studies have shown that $45 of every $100 spent at locally owned stores stays in the community, helping other local businesses and supporting government services, whereas only about $13 of every $100 spent in chain stores remains local.

When the city of Santa Fe, N.M., decided to launch a campaign to encourage people to shop locally, the Santa Fe Alliance, a coalition of more than 500 locally owned businesses that has been running a buy-local initiative for several years, signed on. At the kickoff in March, the alliance’s director, Vicki Pozzebon, emphasized the economic impact of shopping at a locally owned business versus a chain.

"After that, the city asked me not to push the $45 versus $13, but just say ‘local.’ " Pozzebon said.

The city’s message, according to Kate Noble, a city staffer who runs the program, is that shopping at Wal-Mart is fine, as long as it’s not Walmart.com. But Pozzebon said, "It has only diluted our message and confused people."

These sales tax–driven campaigns may well be doing more harm to local economies than good, according to Jeff Milchen, co-founder of the American Independent Business Alliance. "If you encourage people to shop at a big-box store that takes sales away from an independent business, you’re just funneling more dollars out of town."

The irony of trying to solve declining city revenue by trying to get people to shop at the local mall is that the mall itself may be the problem. While many California cities are facing budget cuts and even bankruptcy, Berkeley has managed to post a small increase in revenue. Part of the reason, according to city officials, is that Berkeley has more or less said no to chains and is instead a city of locally owned businesses that primarily serve local residents. That creates a much more stable revenue base. Berkeley hasn’t benefited from the temporary boom that a new regional mall might create, but neither has it gone bust.
Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the New Rules Project (www.newrules.org) and author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses (Beacon, 2006). This story was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), of which the Guardian is a member, and is also running in other AAN papers this month.

The Bush era

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

SAT IN YOUR LAP: THE LATEST DAUGHTERS OF KATE BUSH FLESH OUT THIS WOMAN’S WORK

By Marke B.

Kate Bush was gifted with a fierce female originality at a time when the rock world was starved of it: her golden run of eccentric achievement in the late 1970s and early 1980s placed her next to Joni Mitchell in terms of adventurous — if not always intellectual — influence in the minds of aspiring young women singer-songwriters. (And there’s some extremely perverse pleasure to be taken in the little factoid that her stunning 1985 EMI comeback album Hounds of Love snatched the top U.K. album slot from Madonna’s Like A Virgin.)

But that gift was also a curse: Bush was so original in so many ways that it’s easy to forget the myriad musical pathways she forged. This “artist in a female body” — as she famously protested when her panicked record company started pimping her rack on sleeves to shift units — has mostly been boiled down to spiritual oracle, swooping-voiced Sybil, and, ever since concept albums by women were banished to exile in Guyville, keeper of the idiosyncratic prog-rock flame. In other words, Stevie Nicks with a Fairlight synthesizer and a degree in Celtic mythology. Or else just plain weird.

Fortunately, musical weirdness is so much with us today that other Bush qualities are starting to be glimpsed through the babushka, including her production abilities, precocity, sincerity, humor, and unabashed gender-fucking. For the past three decades, it’s never been rare for artists to be compared to Bush — mostly for childlike vocalizations or way with a silver space suit and Circe metaphor. But in our post-neo-neo-soul moment (sorry Wino), a new crop of female British singers has arisen that takes its cues, mostly acknowledged, from Bush’s kaleidoscopic talent.

FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE

Without Kate Bush, flouncy freak-folker Florence Welch and her ever-changing backup band could be heard as a product of the unholy union of Devendra Banhart and Tori Amos — except those two probably wouldn’t exist without Bush either. Florence grounds her lyrics in the sexually frantic Bush. “I must be the lion-hearted girl,” she sings in the vid for “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)” just before her wedding banquet table folds up into her coffin.

www.myspace.com/florenceandthemachinemusic

MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS

Marina and the Diamonds, a.k.a. the singular singer Marina Diamandis has been gaining huge traction with her excellent “I Am Not A Robot” track, calling up the more vulnerably affirmative, “Don’t Give Up” Bush. But it’s her screwy, cuckooing “Mowgli’s Road” that effectively conjures up woozy Kate at a post-rave bonfire.

www.myspace.com/marinaandthediamonds

BAT FOR LASHES

Half-Pakistani lovely Natasha Khan works the gleaming edge of Bush’s dark underworld glamour, and grounds her post-goth balladry and soft electro sparks in the sensual world. Her single “Daniel” de-Eltons the title character and places him among Bush’s slightly menacing, jig-footed cosmic effigies.

www.myspace.com/batforlashes

MICACHU AND THE SHAPES

Mika Levi calls herself Micachu and spits out shiv-sharp blasts of dissonant micro-punk — seemingly the opposite of Bush’s epic dramas. But Levi echoes Bush both in the sheer Englishness of her lyrics, the knockout oddity of her instrumentation and starry-eyed gender-bending. Micachu’s rambunctious, exhilarating new album Jewelry (Rough Trade) could easily have been shaken out of Bush’s backing track outtake archives.

www.myspace.com/micayomusic

MICACHU AND THE SHAPES

With tune-yards, Tempo No Tempo

July 22, 8 pm., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com ————

MOTHER STANDS FOR COMFORT: KATE BUSH IN THE SOUNDS OF NOW

By Irwin Swirnoff

It’s always exciting when you sense universal consciousness in motion. Like so many around me lately, I can’t stop listening to Kate Bush. I play Hounds Of Love (EMI, 1985) from start to finish again and again, allowing a different song from the album to become my theme or guiding light for weeks at a time. I play The Dreaming (EMI, 1982) and let it spin in and out of my head. These songs are as dramatic as they are sincere. They conjure magic while maintaining an emotional core. Bush’s undeniable integrity travels through her songs like a force of nature, from soft-lit soap opera to primal realms.

Many great records by other artists in the last few years have been stamped with undeniable Kate Bush moments. A new generation of musicians is learning that avant and pop sensibilities can coexist in exciting ways and that it is possible to blend the organic and the mechanical to create songs that soar with a mission. Here are some of today’s cloudbusters.

GANG GANG DANCE

“House Jams” (from Saint Dymphna)

(from Saint Dymphna, Social Registry, 2008)

On its latest album, Gang Gang Dance not only embraces its love of the dance floor — it invites the spirit of Kate Bush to a psychedelic midnight rave.

M83

“Skin Of The Night”

(from Saturdays =Youth, Mute, 2008)

No strangers to teenage mellow drama and melodrama, M83 makes music with a cinematic quality, much in the same way that Kate Bush’s records sound like movies unto themselves.

PAAVOHARJU

“Kevatrumpu”

(from Laulu Laakson Kukista, Fonal, 2008)

This Finnish group roams through a landscape that varies from dusty fairytale to psychedelic future. This track is by far the most dancepop — and Bush-like — moment on a record that also channels Kurt Weill, Edith Piaf, and Robert Wyatt.

JOANNA NEWSOM

Ys

(Drag City, 2006)

Many eccentric female artists are compared to either Kate Bush or Björk by lazy critics, but few actually reach that kind of ecstatic individuality. Joanna Newsom is one. Her complete belief in her vision is apparent in these commanding, flawlessly executed songs.

TELEPATHE

“Drugged”

(from Dance Mother, IAMSOUND)

Much like their New York City neighbors Gang Gang Dance, Telepathe calls Bush to mind when it branches out from its experimental roots into a slow burning state that’s ready for the dancefloor.

CHROMATICS

“Running Up That Hill”

(from Night Drive, Italians Do it Better, 2007))

It takes major guts to cover this Bush composition, a contender for one of the most poignant songs of the last quarter century. The air of magic and mystery here is very Kate.

FEVER RAY

Fever Ray

(Mute)

The debut solo record from Karin Dreijer Andersson of the Knife is more internal and intense than the dance floor stylings of her well-known group. Andersson plays with different voices and personas while creating sounds that are creepy and comforting. The result feels like a perfect contemporary response to Bush’s explorations of 20 years ago.

The Ethics Commission fiasco

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Ethics Commission is a serious mess, and if Director John St. Croix can’t turn things around — quickly — he needs to resign and make room for someone who can.

Ethics has badly damaged its reputation in recent years by hounding small-time violators from grassroots campaigns and ignoring the major players who cheat and game the system as a matter of practice. A couple of festering examples:

In 2004, then-Ethics Director Ginny Vida and Deputy Director Mabel Ng ordered the staff to destroy public records that pointed to malfeasance on the part of the Newsom for Mayor campaign. The records — which the Newsom campaign sent to the commission by mistake — suggested that the newly-elected mayor was illegally diverting money from his inaugural committee to pay off his campaign debt.

St. Croix admits that the agency knew back in 2005 that public money was being laundered and improperly used in a City College bond campaign — but did absolutely nothing. Now, four years later, District Attorney Kamala Harris has indicted three college officials in that case.

In fact, Oliver Luby, an investigator with Ethics, says he brought the problem to St. Croix’s attention back when that bond campaign was still underway — and was told, in essence, to shut up. "He instructed me not to speak of my report," Luby wrote in a Nov. 4, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece.

But the well-paid operatives working for City College and Newsom never felt the sting of an Ethics investigation. Instead, the commission spent thousands of dollars hounding Carolyn Knee, the treasurer of a public-power campaign, threatening the volunteer who lives on a modest fixed income with more that $20,000 in fines. (The case wound up being resolved with a fine of $267.)

And now Luby — who was honored for his courage as a whistleblower by the Society of Professional Journalists — has been demoted, received a formal reprimand from Ng (for doing something other staffers have done routinely) and is under investigation on the basis of an anonymous complaint.

Luby’s technical violation: writing a letter from his Ethics e-mail account during work hours commenting on new regulations proposed by the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission. Ng, writing as Luby’s supervisor, claims in a reprimand letter that no employee has the right to speak for the agency, and that someone in Sacramento might have misjudged his personal comments as official Ethics Commission policy. (Nobody has suggested that his comments were anything but useful or that anything he said would damage the city’s reputation. And others in the agency comment on this sort of thing all the time, with no punitive repercussions.)

Now there’s an anonymous complaint against him raising the same issue, suggesting that he was using city resources for his own personal political causes. (Never mind that his job is working on the exact same issues as the FPPC rules cover and that he has absolutely no political or personal stake in the outcome.)

This city desperately needs aggressive enforcement of the political reform laws — and people like Oliver Luby ought to be getting praise and support from management and ought to be put in charge of ferreting out corruption. Instead, St. Croix and Ng are trying to hound him from his job.

The commission members need to tell St. Croix and Eng to drop the complaints against Luby, change the agency’s priorities and start going after the real scofflaws. The Board of Supervisors also needs to convene hearings on the problems at Ethics, something that Sups. David Campos and John Avalos have indicated a willingness to do.

P.S. : Since Ethics has refused to follow-up on the City College mess, the D.A.’s Office needs to pursue the case as broadly as possible, looking not just at the chancellor and his two aides but at anyone else who might have knowledge of the alleged criminal activity. And the Community College Board needs to move immediately to launch a fully public internal investigation and start complying with the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. *

Editorial: The Ethics Commission fiasco

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This city desperately needs aggressive enforcement of the political reform laws.

EDITORIAL The San Francisco Ethics Commission is a serious mess, and if Director John St. Croix can’t turn things around — quickly — he needs to resign and make room for someone who can.

Ethics has badly damaged its reputation in recent years by hounding small-time violators from grassroots campaigns and ignoring the major players who cheat and game the system as a matter of practice. A couple of festering examples:

In 2004, then-Ethics Director Ginny Vida and Deputy Director Mabel Ng ordered the staff to destroy public records that pointed to malfeasance on the part of the Newsom for Mayor campaign. The records — which the Newsom campaign sent to the commission by mistake — suggested that the newly-elected mayor was illegally diverting money from his inaugural committee to pay off his campaign debt.

Newsom sides with landlords. Again.

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By C. Nellie Nelson

In the late afternoon on Friday, Mayor Gavin Newsom stood by his earlier threat and vetoed pro-tenant legislation known as the Renter Relief Package. In June, the Guardian reported that the package, introduced by Sup. Chris Daly, had majority support on the Board of Supervisors. But the legislation was one vote short of the eight votes need to override a veto.

Daly told the Guardian that he was disappointed with the lack of any alternative or counter-proposal in the mayor’s veto message. “If you’re a renter in San Francisco in a recession, too bad,” he interprets the mayor’s actions.

No ethics in Ethics Commission

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By Steven T. Jones

The San Francisco Ethics Commission has long been accused of corruption, selective enforcement, and gross incompetence – charges supported by knowledgeable activists, whistleblowing employees, and Guardian investigations – but a pair of recent developments shows just what a public liability this agency has become.

When the District Attorney’s Office this week brought felony charges against three City College officials for laundering public funds into a slush fund and campaign account, the very thing that Ethics is supposed to regulate, it highlighted just how incompetent the agency is. After all, as the Guardian reported two years ago, Ethics Commission Executive Director John St. Croix admitted that he knew about the violations way back in 2005 – even before the Chronicle broke the story — and he did nothing.

Yet St. Croix (who has not returned our call for comment) and Deputy Director Mabel Ng – who should have been fired back in 2004 for illegally ordering the destruction of public documents that revealed another money laundering scheme, this one involving Gavin Newsom’s first mayoral campaign – have been actively trying to get rid of the agency’s most public spirited employee, Oliver Luby (the guy who first discovered the City College shenanigans), in the process opening the city up to legal liability by retaliating against a whistleblower.

Board approves sale of CTs – but there’s a twist

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By Rebecca Bowe

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve the sale of four city-owned combustion turbines, with a final vote on the matter still pending. But an amendment to the ordinance built in some wiggle room for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to reconsider as strategies advance to shut down the Potrero power plant.

The CTs — which can be used to produce electricity during periods of peak demand — were nearly used to develop in-city electric generating facilities last year that would have replaced the existing Potrero power plant. Those plans were ultimately abandoned, the units have been sitting in storage in Texas ever since, and the Potrero plant has continued running 24/7. When Mayor Gavin Newsom introduced his interim budget in June, he included the sale of the turbines for $10 million — much lower than market value, but the maximum amount the city is entitled to under the terms of a settlement agreement that turned them over to San Francisco in 2003.

During last year’s debate over the construction of the city-owned power plants, it seemed like the city had no choice but to live with either the Potrero plant or the city-owned peaker plants in order to satisfy the requirements of the California Independent System Operator, a quasi-governmental agency that oversees the electricity grid and determines the amount of power needed to ensure reliability during worst-case scenarios. But in May, Newsom, SFPUC General Manager Ed Harrington and several others sent a letter to the Cal-ISO outlining a plan to have it both ways: They proposed closing down the entire Potrero plant and employing upgraded transmission lines, instead of in-city generation, to bridge the electricity gap.

If that plan is accepted by the Cal-ISO, all four CTs can be sold off, and the Potrero plant could finally be shut down. But whether or not the Cal-ISO is open to that idea remains up in the air.

What’s wrong with San Francisco?

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EDITORIAL In the end, Mayor Gavin Newsom got his way. The San Francisco supervisors made some significant changes to the budget and saved some $40 million worth of programs that the mayor wanted to cut or privatize, but the Newsom for governor ads will still be able to proclaim that the mayor solved his city’s budget problem without raising taxes or cutting police and firefighters.

Instead, this fall some 1,500 city employees are slated to be laid off, 400 of them in the Department of Public Health. Many recreation directors will get pink slips. Human services will lose at least 100 people. Nonprofit service providers will see much of their city funding disappear. The money to pay for public financing of the upcoming supervisorial and mayoral races is gone. Newsom’s pet (and expensive) 311 service will still be open 24 hours a day (with a lot of the money coming from Muni).

Not one of the city’s hugely redundant fire stations will close, even for a few days at a time. The bloated police budget will see no significant cuts, and the cops and firefighters will still get raises. The mayor will continue to employ five people in his press office.

And the only new revenue in the budget comes from fee increases on Muni, public parks, after-school programs, street fairs, restaurants, and the like.

Sup. John Avalos, chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, told us this was the best deal the supervisors could get, and it’s true that the board forced Newsom to add back a lot of money he wanted to cut. But the committee stopped far short of doing what it should have done — fundamentally changing the priorities of the Newsom budget.

Campos told us that he had "mixed feelings" about the deal and expressed concern about the board’s ability to shape midyear cuts and the lack of commitment from Newsom to support support placing revenue measures on the November ballot. Mirkarimi said he was happy with the dollar amounts of the add-backs but proposed holding in reserve some funding for the mayor’s pet projects — a tool for ensuring that Newsom consults with supervisors on the midyear cuts as promised — but Avalos opposed the idea.

Avalos said he’s relying on Newsom’s commitment to him: "The mayor has given me the assurance that he will not make unilateral decisions." But Newsom has a history of breaking such promises.

And the supervisors have not included any new tax revenue in the budget projections. Which puts San Francisco far behind Oakland.

The Oakland City Council has plenty of problems, and the mayor of Oakland, Ron Dellums, has been missing in action on a lot of the city’s problems lately. But when the mayor and the council had to address the budget problems, they came up with a solution that includes at least $6 million in new taxes. While that sounds like a small number, it’s almost 10 percent of Oakland’s budget shortfall. And the new taxes, which will need voter approval in a special July 21 election, are included as part of the budget plan for fiscal 2009-10.

Two of the new taxes — a levy on pot clubs (which the clubs themselves strongly support) and a loophole-closing measure that forces big businesses to pay their fair share of real estate transfer taxes — require only a simple majority vote to take effect. The reason: the council voted unanimously to declare a fiscal emergency and put the measures on the ballot. That allowed the city to avoid the state law that requires a two-thirds vote on most new taxes.

Measures C, D, F, and H make up a generally progressive package that has the support of Council Members Rebecca Kaplan and Jean Quan and Rep. Barbara Lee. We’re happy to endorse all four.

Measure C is a 3 percent increase in the city’s hotel tax, which would rise from 11 percent to 14 percent. Half the new money would go to the Oakland Convention and Visitors Bureau while the other half would be split between the Oakland Zoo, the Chabot Space and Science Center, and cultural arts programs and festivals in the city. We could argue with the distribution (arts festivals should probably get more money and the Visitors Bureau less) but overall, it raises the hotel tax to the level of most other cities in the area and would raise money for the sorts of programs hotel taxes typically fund.

Measure D is a technical amendment to the Oakland Kids First law that mandates spending on programs for children and youth. It changes the spending requirement from 1.5 percent of total city revenues to 3 percent of the general fund. That’s slightly less money than the program currently gets, but a lot more than it has had over the past decade. The coalition that put Kids First on the ballot in 1996 (and modified it in 2008) supports this modest change.

Measure F is a creative new tax. It would impose a 1.8 percent gross receipts tax ($18 per $1,000 in sales) on medical marijuana businesses. Most efforts to hike business taxes face bitter opposition from business owners, but in this case, the pot clubs are happy to pay. In fact, the four dispensaries in Oakland are among the measure’s strongest supporters. Paying taxes tends to legitimize the clubs — and while it’s going to be tricky to track sales in what is still largely a cash business where records have in the past been kept vague to avoid the threat of federal prosecution, this is a strong step in the right direction.

Measure H would prevent big corporations from cheating Oakland out of real estate transfer taxes. Under current law, a business that owns property in Oakland and is bought by another business (or becomes part of a merger) doesn’t have to pay transfer taxes on the property it owns. Closing that loophole could bring in as much as $4.4 million a year.

There’s a lesson here for the much larger city across the Bay.

San Francisco desperately needs new revenue. And while the mayor has talked, in vague terms, about maybe supporting some sort of tax measures in November, he hasn’t committed to anything. There are several proposals floating around the board, the latest of which is a Labor Council-supported tax on alcohol consumption, but no coherent package. The progressives on the board — both those who support the compromise Newsom budget and those who don’t — need to set aside those differences, now, and get to work on finding ways to bring in enough new money to deal with the impacts of further state cuts and stave off some of the layoffs slated for the fall.

The main obstacles are Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier. Everyone who cares about saving services in this city needs to pressure them to back away from their GOP-style no-new-taxes stands. If those two would at least agree to let the voters decide on new revenue measures, the city would likely get a unanimous board — and the ability to raise taxes with a simple majority vote.

Oakland’s pot club tax and real estate transfer tax are great ideas that can be directly imported to San Francisco. The city’s business tax could be made more progressive (and bring in new revenue) with a simple change in the tax rates (higher on the big outfits, lower on the small ones). We’re dubious about a sales tax increase — even a half-percent hike would bring the local tax rate to 10 percent. And, even though the alcohol tax isn’t exactly progressive, those ideas could be acceptable as part of a package.

The main thing is that the city will need, at minimum, another $100 million this fall, and probably ought to be looking at raising twice that much. Oakland — a city with far fewer resources, a much smaller business base, and radically less wealth — is managing to fight its deficit with progressive taxes. What’s wrong with San Francisco?

P.S.: Sup. Chris Daly was outspoken in his criticism of the budget deal, blasting Newsom and even taking on his former aide and longtime ally, Avalos. But for all his bluster about the mayor, Daly couldn’t bring himself to oppose Anson Moran, Newsom’s nominee for the Public Utilities Commission. Moran was a staunch ally of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. when he was the PUC’s general manager, and the full board should reject him. *

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

There was plenty in the long New York Times Magazine cover story profile of Gavin Newsom to induce the Technicolor yawn. But the sentence I found most offensive was buried after the jump, down at the bottom of a page of type: "While generally considered a liberal by people outside of San Francisco, Newsom has not shied from confronting the left with tough love."

Say, what?

Whenever you read something in the Almighty Times that uses terms like "generally considered," you need to stop and think. Considered by whom? And what the hell does the Times mean by "liberal?"

You can define that word any way you want — Wikipedia has a long history, and outlines the difference between the classical liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo (much of which we would now call libertarianism) and the social liberalism of the postwar era. I think any honest definition, though, rests in significant part on the notion that unregulated free markets are not always the best way to allocate resources, that government has a role in helping the needy, and, perhaps most important, that one of the primary functions of government is to reallocate income and resources to increase equality — that is, to tax the rich to feed the poor.

Liberalism got a bad name in the 1960s, particularly when it was used to apply to politicians like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, who had the right ideas about using exceptionally high taxes on the very rich (the marginal rate in that era was more than 70 percent) to fund programs like the Great Society, but were utterly wrong about the Vietnam War and the use of U.S. military force abroad. And in the 1970s and 1980s, liberal politicians like Phil and John Burton in San Francisco became way too close to the real estate developers.

But words have to mean something, or the whole gig is over. And, as far as I’m concerned, a mayor who refuses to raise taxes to cover a huge budget deficit, and instead cuts wholesale from programs that help the poor, is not by any definition a "liberal."

He’s not terribly good at "tough love," either.

The Times uses his implementation of Care Not Cash as an example — the program, the magazine says, "essentially ended direct payments to homeless people and put the money into service agencies instead." Not exactly true — Newsom ended direct payments to homeless people, but the "care" part of the package was never really there. And it’s all gone in this latest budget. That’s not tough love — it’s just tough.

The idea that Mayor Newsom of San Francisco is a good liberal who is still willing to challenge the left every now and then is just mythology. Newsom (generally, to use the Times’ favorite word here) has no relations whatsoever with the left. That fact might help him in the campaign — Californians as a whole are not as progressive as San Franciscans. But let’s at least be honest about it.

And of course, the lavish story is another sign that the Newsom campaign is rolling ahead very nicely. "The fact that a national newspaper of the stature of the Times decides that Gavin Newsom is the story in the governor’s race is certainly a plus," Eric Jaye, Newsom’s chief political advisor, told me. I’d say that’s a bit of an understatement. *

Editorial: What’s wrong with San Francisco?

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The only new revenue in the budget comes from fee increases on Muni, public parks, after-school programs and the like.Meanwhile, Oakland is fighting its budget deficit with progressive taxes.

EDITORIAL In the end, Mayor Gavin Newsom got his way. The San Francisco supervisors made some significant changes to the budget and saved some $40 million worth of programs that the mayor wanted to cut or privatize, but the Newsom for governor ads will still be able to proclaim that the mayor solved his city’s budget problem without raising taxes or cutting police and firefighters.

Instead, this fall some 1,500 city employees are slated to be laid off, 400 of them in the Department of Public Health. Many recreation directors will get pink slips. Human services will lose at least 100 people. Nonprofit service providers will see much of their city funding disappear. The money to pay for public financing of the upcoming supervisorial and mayoral races is gone. Newsom’s pet (and expensive) 311 service will still be open 24 hours a day (with a lot of the money coming from Muni).

Nickel and dimed in SF

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By Steven T. Jones

On the gubernatorial campaign trail, Mayor Gavin Newsom has been touting the claim that he balanced city’s budget without any tax increases – not usually something liberals (which Newsom sometimes claims to be) generally boast about, particularly when it causes mass layoffs and service reductions – but there’s a plethora of fee increases.

Just look at tomorrow’s Board of Supervisors agenda, which includes 17 different increases in various fees and permit costs proposed by Newsom. So you’ll pay more if you need medical care, throw a street fair, use a city field, smoke cigarettes, sell art on the street, have a kid in an after-school program, or a number of other activities. The mayor’s proposed budget hiked fees by 41 percent.

But if you’re a rich out-of-town corporation, or wealthy property owner, or some other constituency that Newsom wants to protect from the dreaded T-word, don’t worry. He’s got your back.

Assessing the city budget deal

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By Steven T. Jones

Progressives aren’t feeling much joy over the city budget deal that was cut yesterday between Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sups. David Chiu and John Avalos (respectively the board president and chair of the Budget Committee), and that’s not just because it gave the gubernatorial candidate the chance to shamelessly crow, “The contrast is stark, isn’t it? In Sacramento, it’s a state of emergency. In San Francisco, a budget deal.”

It’s true that the deal to restore $43.7 million in Newsom-proposed cuts – more so-called “add-backs” than a Board of Supervisors has ever made to a mayor’s budget — was a real compromise, not coincidentally about half of what the board’s progressive majority was looking for, and it averted bloody budget standoff that neither side wanted.

But the cuts to progressive priorities are still deep and Newsom’s wasteful pet projects and taxpayer-funded political operation remain intact (Paul Hogarth has a good analysis of the numbers here). And the whole episode just feels a little like it was scripted by Team Newsom, starting on June 1 when the mayor unveiled his budget and said, “I count on you to add back a lot of the things I don’t want to see cut.”

Of course, that was followed by an aggressive butting of heads: the police and fire unions slammed the rookie supervisorial leaders hard, even running a sound truck through Avalos’ neighborhood calling for his recall, which progressive activists and union leaders responded to with increasingly confrontational tactics, even blocking Newsom’s Pride Parade vehicle with a “die-in.”

Ultimately, the clashes led to a compromise that Avalos described to us as: “It’s as good as we could possibly get.”

NYT Mag takes on Cali and The Gav

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By Steven T. Jones
newsom.jpg
It’s fitting that the just-posted New York Times Magazine profile on how colorfully fucked-up California is right now leads with our own Mayor Gavin Newsom, both with his words and image.

The most telling paragraph is the second one, describing Newsom’s initial confusion over an emergency call button on his desk: “Newsom says he has not had occasion to press the button since, although the mayor admits he is tempted to whenever meetings drag on or when reporters ask him annoying questions or when he becomes bored, something that happens easily.”

There are mountains of things to say about all this – from discussing Newsom’s carefully crafted media image to pushing back on the latest East Coast “wow, isn’t California weird” profile – but for now, just give this long piece a read and feel free to discuss. I was already working on another Newsom post for later in the day, and this is just one of many interesting items that have popped up in the last strange week.

Shifting gears

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

Bicyclists throughout the city cheered as the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board unanimously approved 45 new bike-network improvement projects June 26, a move that was hailed as a major step forward for cyclist safety on city streets and a win for the environment.

In a historic decision, SFMTA accepted the findings of an environmental impact review associated with the long-stalled San Francisco Bike Plan and green-lighted almost all of its near-term project proposals, a decision that could trigger the construction of 34 new miles of bike lanes throughout the city starting as early as August.

Plans also call for innovative improvements such as colored bike lanes, converting on-street parking spaces from cars to bikes, thousands of new bike racks, and an effort to ramp up education about safety for bicyclists and motorists. Three years after a court injunction came down on bike-network improvements in the wake of a lawsuit for failing to conduct a full EIR, the board’s vote was widely applauded as a pivotal moment for bicycling in San Francisco. Now that the EIR has been adopted, the process of lifting the injunction has been set in motion.

The vote followed more than three hours of testimony from avid San Francisco cyclists, who asked for more bike lanes and greater accessibility for would-be bicyclists such as children and seniors. Fewer than 20 people turned out in opposition and most people on the thumbs-down side voiced their general support for enhanced bike lanes, but took issue with some flawed aspects of one of the projects.

For a comprehensive design that could ultimately remove more than 2,000 parking spaces from city streets to accommodate bicycle infrastructure, there was remarkably little discussion about the loss of parking.

An old familiar debate about bikes vs. cars continues to grind away — but even Mayor Gavin Newsom called this squabble a thing of the past, touting the Bike Plan as progress for San Francisco and focusing his comments at a press conference on sustainability and livability instead the competition for space on city streets.

IF YOU BUILD IT …


Moments after the MTA Board announced its decision, a crowd of die-hard bike enthusiasts from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition exchanged hugs and congratulations outside the City Hall hearing room. The vote was hailed as a major, hard-won victory.

"This is a momentous day for better bicycling and a better San Francisco," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the 10,000-member organization. The city "has taken a significant step forward in proving its commitment to smart, sustainable transportation choices, and we expect to see the numbers of people choosing to bicycle to increase dramatically."

Still, there are undoubtedly some who only expect to experience a dramatic increase in frustration when looking for a parking space. There are 880 lane-miles of streets in San Francisco’s roadway network, and according to SFMTA spokesman Judson True, a total of 880 parking spaces throughout the city would’ve been removed if the MTA Board had approved all 46 Bike Plan projects. (The board okayed 45 out of 46 projects; the hotly debated Second Street project, which would have stripped out a handful of parking spaces to accommodate bike lanes, was continued for further study.)

Amid the hundreds of pages of comments submitted during the EIR process was a complaint that the Bike Plan — often touted as a win for sustainability — could adversely impact San Francisco’s air quality by causing more drivers to circle in search of parking.

"More time will be spent by persons in cars as a result of a lack of on-street parking (already at a critical lack of capacity) searching for an available parking spot or stuck in traffic jams due to removal of car traffic lanes," one member of the public complained.

In response, the EIR points to San Francisco’s Transit First policy, which essentially says that the city will provide more of an incentive to take public transit than drive. "The social inconvenience of parking deficits, such as having to hunt for scarce parking spaces, is not an environmental impact," the EIR notes. "There may be secondary physical environmental impacts such as increased traffic congestion at intersections, air quality impacts, safety impacts, or noise impacts caused by congestion. In the experience of San Francisco transportation planners, however, the absence of a ready supply of parking spaces, combined with available alternatives to auto travel … induces many drivers to seek and find alternative parking facilities, shift to other modes of travel, or change their overall travel habits. Any such resulting shifts to transit service in particular, would be in keeping with the city’s Transit First Policy."

The underlying idea is that the Bike Plan can help to clear the air, fight climate change, and boost public health by making it more convenient to go without a vehicle — and more of a headache to drive.

As one commenter pointed out, the Bike Plan could also make life easier for people with disabilities who have to drive by replacing cars with bikes and thus freeing space in traffic lanes.

BRAKING THE HABIT


There are, of course, many sound arguments for nudging people away from driving. At a June 26 press conference, Newsom noted that 54 percent of the city’s greenhouse-gas emissions are related to vehicle traffic on the city’s roadways — and reducing those carbon emissions would go a long way toward making the city more climate-friendly, not to mention healthier for cyclists and non-cyclists alike.

Meanwhile, Bert Hill, chair of the city’s Bicycle Advisory Committee, noted that 40 percent of car trips in the city cover two miles or less, a distance easily traversed by bicycle. If more people opt to go by bike, the result could be calmer traffic, cleaner air, and possibly a boost for business. "No one goes shopping on the highway," one commenter pointed out during the SFMTA Board hearing. For all of these overarching benefits to be realized, of course, many motorists will have to change their behavior by electing to leave the car at home.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition points to evidence suggesting that many frequent drivers are in fact ready to transform into frequent bicyclists. "New bike lanes will … attract tens of thousands of new bicyclists," an SFBC press release noted. "More than one-third of San Franciscans say they would ride if streets had more bike lanes and were more inviting for bicycling."

Newsom sounded a similar note, calling the Bike Plan "inevitable" and asserting that the debate that "used to be framed in terms of two wheels vs. four … that is behind us." Instead, he added, it’s time for "a new narrative of collaboration and partnership" between people who share the road.

Still, a battle continues to be waged against the implementation of the Bike Plan. Mary Miles, the attorney responsible for securing the three-year Bike Plan injunction (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07), momentarily ruined the party at the SFMTA hearing by showing up, casting an icy glare, and warning the SFMTA board to "just stop now. We are appealing these actions." In the overflow room on City Hall’s first floor, Miles’ comments elicited hoots of laughter from a crowd of cyclists.

Miles’ client, Rob Anderson, is known for his cynical view that most people will never be encouraged to ride a bike, and that the Bike Plan unfairly rewards cyclists, a "special interest" group, at the expense of the majority of people, who drive.

Anderson and Miles are expected to appeal the SFMTA’s decision, possibly throwing one last monkey wrench into the process of moving the Bike Plan forward. Construction of new bike lanes can’t begin until the legal issues are resolved and the injunction is lifted.

PARK(ING) IT


A frantic driver who has just found a parking space might be thrilled to seize it, but Matthew Passmore has sparked a different sort of appreciation for parking spaces. One of the founders of Park(ing) Day, Passmore helped draw international interest in 2005 by temporarily transforming a parking space in the Mission District into a public park.

Since then the trend has caught on all over the world: all it takes is some Astroturf, a couch, and a few coins to pay the meter fare — and suddenly the public space usually reserved for cars is transformed into an attractive mini-park for pedestrians and passers-by.

The Park(ing) Day exercise, an event that takes place in September, has since prompted the creation of some 600 parks, free clinics, and other temporary "spaces" as part of the wider commentary about the allocation of public space. In Passmore’s view, "far too much of our city is dedicated to the automobile," and Park(ing) Day is just one way of illustrating this point.

For the soon-to-be 79 miles of bike lanes in the city, after all, there are still 880 lane miles built for cars, and San Francisco streets still accommodate a whopping 320,000 parking spaces. For his part, Passmore characterizes the removal of a few parking spaces as mere "growing pains," but emphasizes that in the long run, the Bike Plan will benefit everyone — not just cyclists.

The nativists are restless

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news@sfbg.com

The comments sections of the Guardian‘s Politics blog and the San Francisco Chronicle‘s SFGate Web site have been lit up over the past week with angry (and sometimes overtly racist) denunciations of Latino immigrants, triggered by the latest Chronicle stories challenging San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies and by Guardian revelations that Chronicle writer Jaxon Van Derkeken accepted an award and substantial cash payment from a controversial nativist group.

While Van Derbeken, two Chronicle editors interviewed by the Guardian, and other critics of San Francisco’s longstanding policy of not notifying federal authorities about the arrests of undocumented immigrants have denied trying to stir up nativist furor, the tone and content of many of these comments seems to indicate they’ve done exactly that.

The saga began June 19 when we published “Chronicle accepts award and cash from anti-immigrant group” on our Politics blog. The story began: “San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken recently accepted an award and cash prize (he refuses to say how much) from the Center for Immigration Studies — which a Southern Poverty Law Center report in February 2009 criticized for its overtly racist roots and extreme anti-immigrant agenda — for his controversial articles on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies.

“CIS paid for Van Derbeken to accept the award at the National Press Club and conservative Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders to introduce him earlier this month, an appearance they used to make derogatory comments about San Francisco, its values, and local immigrant rights activists, while saying little to rebuke the group for stirring up hateful nativist furor around what has become perhaps the country’s most divisive issue.”

Van Derbeken would only address the issue by e-mail, sending us two terse replies to our inquiry and refusing to answer most of our questions, including much how cash he received for a prize that we discovered paid $1,000 in 2001 (the complete e-mail exchange is include in our post).

“No one should mistake their decision to endorse my work for my endorsement of theirs,” was Van Derbeken’s most substantive comment, although he refused to offer an opinion on CIS or the SPLC report, which he didn’t read until after accepting the award. “I haven’t drawn any conclusions about it.”

CIS executive director Mark Krikorian, author of The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal (2008, Sentinel), responded to our inquires with an e-mail blaming the “jihad against dissent from the elite consensus for open borders” and referring to a column he wrote for National Review Online criticizing SPLC’s fundraising.

But in the past, Krikorian has called for the federal government to cut off funding to San Francisco and even prosecute local elected officials, writing in his CIS blog, “Local neutrality on immigration is no longer possible. Every jurisdiction in the country has a choice to make: Either buttress federal efforts at immigration control or subvert them. San Francisco has chosen the second option. It should now learn the consequences.”

We did phone interviews with Van Derbeken’s editors, Managing Editor Steve Proctor and Assistant Managing Editor Ken Conner, who both defended the stories and the decision to accept the award. Neither would reveal how much cash was involved, and neither would admit that it represented validating a group that recently has been vying for mainstream legitimacy.

“All issues have proponents and opponents,” Proctor told us, equating the award to those given for education and legal affairs reporting and denying that the immigration issue is more divisive and controversial. “At the end of the day, it isn’t about this group but about Jaxon’s stories,” Conner told us.

Those stories continued in high-profile fashion a few days later as Van Derbeken essentially rewrote a June 21 Los Angeles Times scoop about how San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris allowed a half-dozen undocumented immigrants to enroll in a rehabilitation program rather than turning them over to the feds. The details became front-page lead news stories in the Chronicle on June 22 and 23.

Local immigrant rights activists criticized the Chronicle stories and the paper’s decision to accept the CIS award and money.

“When I read these kind of stories that lead us down a dark path and play on people’s fears and paint immigrants with a broad brush — as a threat, as criminals, as dangerous to the community — I do think that there are anti-immigrant nativist centers egging on reporters like Jaxon down this dark path by giving him cash awards,” Phil Hwang, a staff attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told us. “It’s part of the strategy these anti-immigrant groups are employing. It’s why they created this award. And if you look at who founded CIS and their vision, it’s clear that they believe America is under threat from non-white immigrants,”

Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus, whom Van Derbeken mentioned by name in his CIS award speech, said she is worried this latest round would weaken Harris’ support for Sanctuary City policies. That’s what happened to Mayor Gavin Newsom last fall, when Van Derbeken wrote the stories CIS honored.

“I’d hate to see another series of anti-immigrant scapegoating being used to make hasty policy decisions that violate the rights of immigrants, tear apart families, and increase the state of terror in immigrant communities,” Chan told us.

Harris, who is running for state attorney general, defended her decision to let undocumented immigrants complete the Back on Track program after their presence was brought to her attention, but has since changed the policy to bar them from enrolling. “No innovative initiative will ever be created without some unanticipated flaws to be fixed along the way, but this must not stop us from tackling tough problems with smart solutions,” she said in a prepared statement.

“These are tough economic times,” Hwang added. “People are very nervous about their jobs. And that is often when the [anti-immigrant] rhetoric ramps up.”

The Chronicle writer and editors and Krikorian stopped responding to Guardian inquiries. But the blogs were lit up with comments — hundreds of them from around the country at the bottom of Van Derbeken’s latest stories — that had some disturbing themes, accusations, and suggestions. They indicate that the radical nativists are using this issue — and the Chron‘s spin on it — to promote a dangerous agenda.

Here’s a small sampling:

•<\!s> “Illegal aliens are like a plague.”

•<\!s> “Kick out all Illegals, return the city to its rightful owners”

•<\!s> “For God’s sake, STOP pandering to the ILLEGAL ALIENS and get rid of them!”

•<\!s> “Anyone caught crossing the border illegally should be shot as a spy.”

•<\!s> “The border ought to be land mined.”

•<\!s> “What is this sham that diversity is great? It is tearing this country apart.”

Such sentiments — which we usually counter on the Guardian Politics blog — were met with silence by Van Derbeken.

Turning point

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MORE ON SFBG.COM

>>Deconstructing the politics of parking in San Francisco

>>Safer streets for cyclists cause growing pains for motorists

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco has been a "transit-first" city since 1973, when the Board of Supervisors first adopted the policy of officially promoting public transit, pedestrians, and bicycles over the automobile. But the label has really been in name only — until this year.

Through an unusual confluence of policy initiatives that have been moving forward for several years, San Francisco is finally about to have a serious discussion about the automobile and its impacts. And parking policies are being used as the main tool to reduce traffic congestion, better set development impact fees, increase city revenue, and promote alternatives to the automobile.

"Our parking requirements need to be revised to support this [transit-first] policy by limiting parking supply — the single greatest incentive to drive — where transit and other modes are viable alternatives," reads the city’s Better Neighborhoods Plan.

While the very notion of deliberately limiting parking will likely be met with howls of protest by many drivers — indeed, urban planners already acknowledge that it’s probably not politically feasible to make drivers pay for their full impacts — they also say it’s the only way to decrease the over-dependence on the automobile.

"Without limiting parking, people will choose an auto-oriented lifestyle and continue to drive. Traffic will continue to worsen, and we will never shift the balance in favor of ways of getting around that are more effective in moving people," the plan continues.

Yet the push isn’t as dire for drivers as its stark language suggests, thanks to some innovative initiatives that could ironically make it even easier to park in some areas than it is now, in the process easing traffic congestion by eliminating the number of cars circling the block looking for parking spaces, which studies show can often account for up to one-third of the cars on the road.

DEMAND-BASED PARKING PRICES


The SF Park program is scheduled to begin later this summer in eight pilot areas, providing real-time parking data to give drivers better information on where to find spots and controlling demand with a market-based pricing system that raises rates when spots are scarce, encouraging turnover and freeing up spaces.

It is just one of many current initiatives. The city is looking at extending meter hours to nights and Sundays and adding parking meters in Golden Gate Park (those are simply revenue measures aimed at city budget deficits). Another study is examining the nexus between parking and developer impacts that could be used to charge new fees for construction. There’s also a comprehensive study of on-street parking policies that will be going before the Board of Supervisors (sitting as the San Francisco County Transportation Authority) next month after nearly five years in the works.

Yet creating more progressive parking policies requires political will, which will surely be tested in the coming months. Indeed, this year’s battle over the Municipal Transportation Authority budget — whose $128 million deficit was closed by Muni fare increases and services cuts rather than parking increases by a ratio of about 4-1, thanks to pressure from drivers and Mayor Gavin Newsom — was an early indicator of the pitfalls that exist within the politics of parking.

Using a $20 million federal traffic congestion management grant, SFMTA has spent years developing the SF Park program, approving most of the details last fall and planning to roll it out by summer’s end.

"Under-regulated on-street parking results in limited parking availability, inefficient utilization of spaces, and excess vehicular circulation," begins the San Francisco On-Street Parking Management and Pricing Study Final Report, which is headed to the Board of Supervisors next month. "This program will assess the effectiveness of using pricing and complementary strategies as a way to manage demand for parking."

The program will be rolled out in eight areas, coordinating parking information in more than 6,000 street spaces and 20 city-owned parking garages, and using that information to adjust parking rates — charging more when spots are scarce and for additional hours — to try to achieve a parking occupancy rate of about 85 percent.

"An on-street parking occupancy of 85 percent has been demonstrated by parking experts … as the benchmark for the practical capacity of on-street parking. At 85 percent occupancy, approximately one available space is expected per block, thus limiting the cruising phenomenon and generally assuring the availability of a space," the study reads.

SFMTA spokesperson Judson True called SF Park "the future of parking management, adding that "we are taking a big bite of the parking management pie with SF Park, which is the most advanced parking management system of any U.S. city."

THE TRUE COST OF CARS


It’s just the latest work product from transportation planners that have spent years behind-the-scenes developing programs to deal with the city’s over-reliance on the automobiles. "It’s all part of a strategy of using parking as a demand management strategy," said Zabe Bent, a planner with the San Francisco County Transportation Authority.

She is working on the parking policies, as well as a proposal to charge motorists a congestion fee for driving into the downtown, which comes before the Board of Supervisors this fall (although implementation is probably at least three years away).

Bent said city officials are working on a number of fronts to shore up San Francisco’s "transit-first" status and prepare for growth in what is already one of the country’s most congested cities. So some of the decisions coming up are bound to be tough.

"It’s a tradeoff we need to make to achieve our goals," she said, noting that the central question transportation planners are wrestling with is, "How do we achieve a more sustainable growth pattern?"

Such noble intentions can always get hung up on politics, and the ever-present question of how to pay for it during an era of fiscal crisis. So it appears the city may have to get creative with funding its new approach to parking.

Alica John-Baptiste, the assistant planning director overseeing the parking impact fee study, said that while it does appear to be a big year for new parking policies, "this conversation has been underway for a number of years. A lot of the discussions we’ve had are now being studied."

Most recently it was the citizens committee that developed the Market-Octavia Plan — one of the first to cap how much parking developers may build along with the projects — that sought guidance about what the city could legally do to recover the full costs associated with automobiles.

"There were a bunch of questions that came up about parking as an issue," she said of the Market-Octavia process. So the Planning Department and other city agencies began to explore the cost of parking as part of the city’s update of the Transit Impact Fee that is charged to new development, with the idea of expanding that to include impacts to all modes of transportation.

"We are looking at parking as a land use and its impact to the [transportation] system," she continued. "This is a city that really wants to support other modes than just transit."

The contract for that parking nexus study was awarded to Cambridge Systematics earlier this month with initial recommendations expected by the end of the year. That study is expected to show that developers and drivers don’t come anywhere near paying for the full cost of the automobile to San Francisco. "These nexus studies usually suggest a much higher fee rate than is feasible to provide," she said.

In other words, drivers and developers would freak out if asked to pay for their full impacts, arguing that that doing so would stifle development, hurt the economy, punish those who need cars, etc. So the fees will likely be set lower than needed to cover the city’s costs.

Even in the short-term, simply extending meter hours into the evenings — as SFMTA is now studying to help the city deal with its budget deficit — is likely to trigger a pitched battle between progressive supervisors and politicians who side with some merchant groups that consider parking sacrosanct.
David Heller, president of the Greater Geary Merchants Association, will be one of those leading the charge. By way of argument, he criticized San Francisco as "a very business-unfriendly city" compared to competitors like Colma and Burlingame and laid out this scenario: "After 6 p.m., there are no power lunches going on. People want to relax. Imagine you sit down to a nice dinner. You’ve got your wine and are enjoying your appetizer and in the middle of your meal, you have to get up and feed the meter. When you return, the ambiance has been lost. What are the chances you’ll return to that restaurant?"
And so it goes with the politics of parking, where pressing realities clash with visceral reactions, driver prerogatives (such as the "right" to feed the meter, which actually isn’t legal), and other distracting entitlement issues.
Gabriella Poccia and Rachel Buhner contributed to this report.

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PARKING BY NUMBERS


Number of on-street parking spaces in SF: 320,000

Number these spaces that have meters: 24,000

Total parking spaces in San Francisco: 603,000

Number of cars and trucks registered in SF: 441,653

Annual revenue from meters and city-owned garages: $64.5 million

Annual revenue from parking citations: $90 million

Number of street spaces in 8 SF Park pilot zones: 6,000

Hourly meter rates in the zones, depending on demand: 25 cents to $6

Hourly garage rates in the zones, depending on demand: $1 to $10

Number of residential parking permits issued: 89,271

Cost of purchasing an on-street residential parking permit: $74 per year

Number of temporary permits: 2,867

Annual revenue from residential parking permits: $5.7 million
Cost of purchasing SF parking on Craiglist: $100 to $500 per month
Annual city revenue if residential permits were market-based: $320 million

Harris, Newsom duck on immigration

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EDITORIAL So let’s get this straight.

Kamala Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, has set up a laudable program called Back on Track that offers counseling and job training for first-time drug offenders who otherwise would be clogging up the local jail.

A handful of the people who went into the program were undocumented immigrants. Some completed the program successfully and were allowed to graduate.

This is a problem?

Apparently so — because between them the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner have devoted at least five major stories, one horrible column and at least one editorial to exposing the fact that some people who otherwise would have been jailed and deported for minor nonviolent crimes have been allowed to stay in the country, with new skills that might help them find jobs that don’t involve selling drugs on the street.

And Harris, who is running for state attorney general, is scrambling to cover herself, announcing that undocumented immigrants will no longer be allowed to go through the program. In other words, to get rehabilitation instead of jail time in San Francisco, you now have to submit proof of citizenship.

There’s a whole lot wrong with this picture. The critics attacking Harris claim that undocumented immigrants don’t deserve job training since they can’t work in this country legally anyway. That’s just silly — tens of thousands of immigrants who lack legal documentation are working in San Francisco right now, and tens of thousands will continue to work in San Francisco. And they’re generally a productive part of the economy and community. These immigrants already face barriers to attending college. The only thing that denying first-offenders job training does is increase the chance they will return to crime.

Yes, the L.A. Times was able to find one person enrolled in the program who went out and committed robbery and assault. He was the only one of seven undocumented people in the program who had legal problems while attending. The others were allowed to graduate, had their criminal records erased, and, given the overall results of the program, were far less likely than people who had served jail time to re-offend.

Unfortunately, the daily newspaper stories are just the latest attack on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policy, which is supposed to bar local law enforcement from turning people over to federal immigration authorities. Mayor Gavin Newsom has backed away from the sanctuary policy — and now Harris is backing away, too.

The district attorney says that allowing undocumented immigrants into her program was a mistake, and that it’s been "fixed." That’s the wrong approach. Prisons and county jails in California are jammed beyond capacity. The cost of incarcerating all those people is staggering and helping to bankrupt the state. And the threat of deportation has created a climate of terror and desperation in immigrant communities, where families are being ripped apart and lives shattered by overzealous federal agents.

And the weak responses by San Francisco city officials are just empowering the radical nativists, who want to blame all of society’s problems on immigrants.

Harris did nothing wrong and has no need to apologize or change her program. Job training as an alternative to jail is good public policy — for citizens and noncitizens. She and Mayor Newsom ought to be defending the Sanctuary City laws instead of running away from them. If this is what it takes to seek statewide office, the mayor and district attorney would better serve their constituents by staying at home. *

The massage parlor mistake

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OPINION Taking advantage of the recent turmoil over the huge city budget cuts, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Carmen Chu, have pushed though malicious legislation imposing criminal charges and restrictions on massage parlors. Many are outraged that this costly legislation was prioritized — we want to know why it was, and how much it will cost to implement. Lawyers are questioning its legality.

Under the guise of concern for women’s safety, Chu and Newsom falsely claimed that the law would stop sex trafficking. We’ve heard these lies before. Politicians who want to increase the criminalization of sex workers confuse prostitution, which is consensual sex for money, with trafficking, which is forced and coerced labor, sexual or otherwise. The reality is that most parlor employees work consensually and often collectively, without force or coercion. In Rhode Island, where indoor prostitution is legal, similar legislative maneuvers are in the works, also using the pretext of trafficking to make criminals of women working indoors.

Chu and Newsom claim they are targeting parlor owners, but by pushing the industry further underground, their legislation makes workers, many of whom are immigrant women, more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Workers will suffer most from the increased raids, arrests, and criminalization. Fearing arrest and/or deportation will mean fewer women will report rape or other violence and exploitation when they occur.

What is the real political agenda here? Chu and Newsom have said that the proposals "could make it easier to close the 50 or so city-licensed parlors suspected of selling sex." If and where sex is being sold, parlor closures would force women onto the streets — where it is 10 times more dangerous to work. Those who are arrested are likely to end up in prison — to the devastation of their children — or deported. What good reason is there to endanger women’s safety and break up families this way, especially during hard economic times?

San Franciscans question why, when most trafficking cases occur in the agricultural, construction, clothing, and domestic industries, anti-trafficking measures target immigrant sex workers working of their own free will. We suspect racist gentrification policies are behind this legislation. Developers will be allowed to seize land in the Tenderloin and downtown areas if massage parlors are forced to close. This deceitful, profiteering law imposes huge fines, criminal charges, and has a punitive clause making the parlors pay for unspecified enforcement charges against them.

Considering that not long ago, police were exposed for taking thousands of dollars from massage parlor workers, involving them in the licensing process creates fertile ground for increased corruption.

What is wrong with selling or buying sex if both parties consent? After all, 42 percent of San Franciscans voted last November for Proposition K, which would have decriminalized sex work, despite a campaign of fear mongering and misinformation by the mayor and district attorney. New Zealand successfully decriminalized prostitution six years ago to "promote occupational health and safety" and "protect from exploitation." There has been no increase in prostitution, pimps, or traffickers, and women are more able to report violence and insist on their rights. It’s time for San Francisco to do the right thing and stop criminalizing sex workers.

Rachel West works with the U.S. PROStitutes Collective.

Editorial: DA Harris, Mayor Newsom duck on immigration

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Harris and Newsom ought to be defending the Sanctuary Laws, not running away from from. If this is what it takes to run for statewide office, then Harris and Newsom would better serve their ccnstituents by staying home.

Kamala Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, has set up a laudable program called Back on Track that offers counseling and job training for first-time drug offenders who otherwise would be clogging up the local jail.
A handful of the people who went into the program were undocumented immigrants. Some completed the program successfully and were allowed to graduate.

This is a problem?

Renters demand ideas from Newsom

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By Megan Rawlins

As expected, Mayor Gavin Newsom has promised to veto the renter relief and protection legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors at last week’s meeting. And in response, renters will rally at the steps of City Hall at noon on Tuesday to demand that Newsom offer some alternative if he indeed kills the renters’ package.

The legislation, in descending order of controversy, suspended rent increases that would exceed one-third of a tenant’s income for those who had recently lost a job, had their wages decreased by at least 20 percent, or derived their income solely from government assistance; allowed the addition of a roommate without a resulting rent increase, and amended rent-banking rules to cap rent hikes at 8 percent annually.

Authored by Sup. Chris Daly, the changes are intended to address the precarious position of San Francisco renters, who constitute two-thirds of the city’s population.

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