Newsom

Shoot me instead!

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By G.W. Schulz

It’s not healthy for the press to be relentlessly pessimistic. In that spirit, hats off to Gavin Newsom for introducing a new plan designed to counter the city’s surge in violence. Critics, including this newspaper, have repeatedly demanded a bold plan, and the mayor appears to be stepping up to the plate. Here’s part of it.

There are a few problems with the plan, however. Newsom intends to enforce a controversial city curfew for kids 13 and under that’s already on the books. He says he’s willing to expend the political capital necessary to make it work. We’re proud of you for being bold, Gav. Seriously. This city needs strong leadership.

Terrorizing the peace marches

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
If any questions remain today as to how the law enforcement establishment views antiwar activists in the post–Sept. 11 world, just follow the money for answers.
The San Francisco Police Department was paid $3.3 million from the US Department of Homeland Security to cover overtime costs for officers who patrolled the major antiwar demonstrations of early 2003.
After months of haggling, the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security finally turned key records over to the Guardian. They showed that the money came from a federal “critical infrastructure protection” grant and covered police overtime costs that were incurred by the city between March 2003 and October 2004.
The overtime payments concentrated mostly on more than two weeks’ worth of large protests that occurred in San Francisco around the outset of the war in Iraq. On March 23, 2003 — the first full day after the war began, when the city was nearly shut down by the demonstrations and there were nearly 2,000 arrests — the overtime costs covered by terror money alone reached nearly $800,000.
Other days’ payment ranged from $5,000 to as much as $500,000. Most of the Police Department records included in one file the Guardian obtained describe the events as “anti-war demonstrations,” but one protest is identified as an “alternative bicycle event,” while another is listed as a “Global Exchange Protest of Fox News.”
To obtain the federal antiterror funding, local governments must first spend their own money and follow up with a request for reimbursement from the feds. While the critical infrastructure protection grant exclusively covers overtime expenses, the records we obtained happen to show the full amounts motorcycle patrol officers earned to work the protests: sometimes up to $80 an hour.
San Francisco already pays out millions of dollars annually for overtime expenses from the city’s General Fund to cover chronic staff shortages at the Police Department. The San Francisco Office of the Controller predicted in March that overtime expenditures generated by the department would climb to around $20 million by the end of fiscal year 2005, $7 million more than the year before.
During the spring budget process, police officials asked the city for $12.5 million to send 250 new wannabe cops through academy classes. But the department hopes to hire 350 to 400 more sworn and nonsworn employees over the next three years. Mayor Gavin Newsom made new police recruitments a top priority in his proposed budget for fiscal year 2006–07.
In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that then-mayor Willie Brown intended to cover some of the costs of the city’s widely publicized antiwar protests through federal terror funds. An agreement for the total award between San Francisco and the state, which administers the federal funds, was signed in August 2003 by former budget director Ben Rosenfield, who worked for the both Brown and Mayor Newsom. Spokespeople for Newsom and the Police Department did not answer our inquiries in time.
At the time of the protests, Brown seemed to really stretch in his attempt to link them to a terrorism threat. According to the Chronicle, Brown said, “Terrorists could use the demonstrations as a ‘cover’ to get near the bridges or targeted buildings in the Financial District or Civic Center area.” (G.W. Schulz)

Progressive Voter Index

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By Steven T. Jones
Despite Mayor Gavin Newsom’s rhetorical efforts to dismiss the importance of ideology in San Francisco politics, this is a town the is deeply divided between progressives and Establishment moderate-to-conservatives. And the battle we fight is an important one that will determine whether San Francisco remains open to low-wage workers, tolerant of diversity, and a leader in combatting the dismal and divisive policies being perpetrated on the state and federal levels.
OK, OK, maybe y’all know that. But to get more insights in where the battlelines are drawn in San Francisco — right down to the level of individual precincts and neighborhoods — you’ll need to spend a little time studying the latest version of the Progressive Voters Index. Kudos to political scientists Rich DeLeon and David Latterman — and the good folks over at www.sfusualsuspects — for providing this valuable resource.

The cost of harassing the homeless

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has always talked about treating homeless people with compassion, is allowing the cops to do just the opposite — and it’s costing the city millions. As Amanda Witherell reports on page 11, the San Francisco Police Department under the Newsom administration has issued 31,230 citations for so-called quality of life offenses like sleeping on the streets, sleeping in the parks, and panhandling. In a pioneering study, Religious Witness with Homeless People reports that issuing and prosecuting those citations cost taxpayers $5.7 million over the past two years.
This is a reminder of the failure of the Newsom administration’s housing policy — and a terrible waste of law enforcement resources. The mayor needs to put a stop to it now.
Think about it: most homeless people are living on the streets because they don’t have the money for housing in this famously expensive city. In the vast majority of the cases, giving someone who’s broke a ticket for $100 is a colossal waste: the offender isn’t going to be able to pay anyway, so the unpaid ticket turns into an arrest warrant. The next time around, the police can nab this person and put him or her in jail (costing the city $92.18 a day, according to the Sheriff’s Department). In the end, 80 percent of the citations are dismissed anyway — but not before the police, the courts, the district attorney, and the sheriff run up a huge tab.
In some cases, it’s just another hassle for homeless people. In other cases though, these seemingly minor tickets can rob someone of the last vestiges of a semitolerable life. The list of quotes from homeless people included with the study is, to say the least, depressing:
“They wake me up in the morning and threaten to arrest me if I don’t stand up and start walking. The drop-in centers are full, so I either walk or get ticketed. I can’t walk all day long.”
“They took my vehicle away because I slept in it in the mornings while waiting to get another construction job. Losing my truck was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I can’t get a job without my truck, so now I’m on the street.”
“Just one ticket for sleeping can violate my parole, and then I’ll be in [prison] with murderers.”
“I went to Project Homeless Connect, and they really helped me. Two days later, they arrested me for not paying my tickets.”
The city is facing a homicide epidemic. The police brass constantly complain that there aren’t enough uniformed officers to keep the streets safe. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is having to fight to get approval for a modest pilot program that would put exactly four officers on foot patrols in high-crime neighborhoods; that program could be funded for less than one-tenth what the city is spending harassing the homeless.
It makes absolutely no sense for the police to be wasting time issuing these sorts of citations. Sure, violent people who are a threat to the public need to be kept off the streets — but that’s only a very small number of the homeless in San Francisco. Letting people sleep in the parks or in their cars isn’t a solution to the homeless problem — but it’s hardly a massive threat to the city’s populace (and certainly not when compared to the growing murder rate).
Newsom, of course, could and should make a public commitment to spending that $5 million in a more useful and productive way. And the Police Commission should look into the Religious Witness study and direct the chief to order officers away from giving quality-of-life citations.
If none of that happens, the supervisors ought to look into this too. If the cops have the money to be chasing panhandlers and car sleepers, the budget committee should look at the department’s allocation and see if some of those resources can’t be better spent fighting actual crime. SFBG

EDITOR’S NOTES

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
There are people at the daily newspapers around here who bristle when I accuse them of ignoring important local stories, particularly ones involving powerful political, business, or social figures (and most particularly, involving the newspapers themselves). No representative of the Hearst Corp. stands in the newsroom door announcing that stories about management will be sent to New York for prior censorship. Nobody tells the Chronicle’s reporters that they can’t cover a pressing story.
And I believe all that. I really do. I know it doesn’t work that way.
Carl Jensen knows that too. When he started Project Censored back in 1976, he knew he’d get a lot of criticism. “Censored” is a pretty strong word; it evokes a mirthless military guy with a pair of scissors and a big black pen, preventing real news from emerging out of a pressroom bunker somewhere.
But what Jensen has been trying to say for years is that the stories cited by Project Censored represent choices made by editors and publishers about what’s important in today’s world. That’s what the front page of a newspaper is — a set of choices. Is the confession of the purported killer of JonBenet Ramsey more important than the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping of millions of Americans? Is the latest news about Brad and Angelina more important than the latest news from Iraq? Is one man’s quest to take control of every daily newspaper in the Bay Area worth more than a first-day story and a few tiny news briefs?
Editors are paid to make those decisions — and the ones who want to keep their jobs know what the rules are. That’s why some stories get more coverage, more play, and more attention and some get deeply buried or published in one place and never picked up by anyone else.
Anyone who reads political blogs knows about stories like the ones on this year’s Project Censored list (see page 15). Nobody blacked out the news with a big rubber stamp; it just never got reported in the first place.
For a Sunday afternoon on a Labor Day weekend, it was truly impressive: I counted at least 300 people at the Delancey Street events room for the Sue Bierman memorial. Just about everyone on the local left seemed to be there, along with a few luminaries like John Burton, Gavin Newsom, and Willie Brown, who were Bierman’s friends even when they were wrong and she was right.
Newsom, who was often at odds with Bierman, looked out over the crowd and made the point succinctly: “This is what happens,” he said, “when you’re nice to people.”
There were many funny and moving stories. Burton, who showed up in his usual sartorial splendor (striped sweatpants and an untucked shirt, which makes me respect the guy as much as anything he’s ever done in politics) talked about how Bierman always, always enjoyed herself, even in the most boring political drudgery. It was wonderful to see her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren there (and wonderful for them to see how many people were part of Bierman’s San Francisco community).
Calvin Welch, her Haight Asbury neighbor, friend, and longtime comrade in arms, reminded us all that Bierman “created the neighborhood movement in San Francisco” — and that she did it in her own style, always believing that “fun is important.”
A lot of people go to political funerals because they have to; most of us went to this one because we wanted to. Thanks, Sue. SFBG

Homeless disconnect

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› amanda@sfbg.com
The shelter of a slim door frame, the outstretched palm asking for a dime: this is how hundreds of San Francisco’s homeless get by, once the soup kitchens close and the shelters cry “No Vacancy.”
But panhandling, blocking the sidewalks, and lodging in public are a few of the 15 quality-of-life violations for which the San Francisco Police Department regularly issues citations. In the 30 months that Mayor Gavin Newsom has been in office, the cops have issued more than 31,000 such tickets.
And according to a study by Religious Witness with Homeless People, it’s been a colossal waste of money.
The study — released at a City Hall press conference Aug. 31 — revealed that more than $5.7 million in taxpayer money has been spent on police, paperwork, and court staff issuing and prosecuting these violations.
The group reviewed documents from the Police Department, Sheriff’s Department, district attorney, public defender, city attorney, and the Traffic and Criminal divisions of the SF Superior Court, as well as interviewing nearly 200 homeless people about their experiences being swept off the streets and into the courtrooms and jails. According to Sister Bernie Galvin, who founded the interfaith coalition in 1993, no study of this scope and magnitude has ever been conducted in San Francisco.
“Most of these people haven’t committed a crime,” Galvin said. “They’ve received [tickets] for simply existing: the crime of being poor and on the street.”
Approximately 80 percent of the citations are dismissed in the courts when the violator fails to show or can’t pay the $100 fine, but then a warrant is issued for the person’s arrest. Here’s the rub: with an active arrest warrant, a homeless person can’t access city services, the very essentials that eliminate the need to sleep in the park and pee on a tree.
“We’re spending all this money, and the result is counterproductive,” said Elisa Della-Piana, a legal advocate for the homeless.
Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan, one of several religious leaders, lawyers, and homeless advocates at the press conference, pointed out that a simple background check for employment or housing would reveal the arrest warrant. “Housing, jobs, drug treatment, federal and state benefits are all threatened by these little green pieces of paper,” he said, gesturing to the mountain of paper violations stacked on a nearby tabletop.
“If you’re homeless on the street and receive a citation for over $100, this is a Kafkaesque moment,” he went on to say. Homeless people are currently granted $59 of public money a month under Newsom’s Care not Cash program, down from $419.
Newsom has said he’s reduced the number of quality-of-life citations by 17 percent; however, Galvin contends that number draws from a pool of eight possible violations when there are actually 15 that fall in the category. Within that 15, some have doubled in number, with public camping violations having tripled.
While Galvin made a point of commending the work Newsom’s Project Homeless Connect has done in galvanizing volunteers and reaching about 1,000 people in need, she said, “Until we have the capacity to meet the needs of all these other people, it’s morally unjust to criminalize them.”
“I went to Project Homeless Connect, and they really helped me. Two days later, they arrested me for not paying my tickets,” said one of the homeless people interviewed for the study. Another said, “I never got a ticket in my life for anything, then I lost my job, couldn’t pay my rent, became homeless. I got tickets now and probably warrants all for just being in the park. They just keep beating you down.”
Galvin added that Newsom has not responded to four letters requesting a meeting. “This is the first mayor who’s refused to meet with us,” she said of Religious Witness, which got its start fighting Mayor Frank Jordan’s tough-love Matrix policy of the ’90s. “Mayor Newsom is responsible for this city,” she said. “He must stop enforcement of these unjust laws.” SFBG

Discs, man

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com SEPT. 5 Criss Angel, Criss Angel: Mindfreak (Koch) Tell us this recording by TV’s erect-nippled goth heat-throb and full-tilt-boogie cheesenheimer is only an illusion. Audioslave, Revelations (Epic) Their politics check out, though an unboring album will be a revelation. Beyoncé, B’Day (Music World Music/Sony Urban Music/Columbia) The result of a two-week break for artistic freedom, but a Clive Davis overseer might have helped — she sounds like a stressed-out laser on the leadoff single. Grizzly Bear, Yellow House (Warp) Inspired sounds with bite by Brooklyn DIYer Edward Droste, whose queerific perspective brings a burly new hue to his moniker. Iron Maiden, A Matter of Life and Death (Columbia) Count on the barbed Bruce Dickinson to come with confrontation on this wartime studio outing. The Rapture, Pieces of the People We Love (Strummer/Universal UK) Danger Mouse coproduces the new piece from dance punk ex–San Franciskies. Tony Joe White, Uncovered (Swamp/Sanctuary) The original blue-eyed soulster gives it another poke, accompanied by Eric Clapton and Michael “Yah Mo B There” McDonald. SEPT. 12 Basement Jaxx, Crazy Itch Radio (XL) Still all they’re jacked up to be? Black Keys, Magic Potion (Nonesuch) The rock duo ain’t dead. Merle Haggard, Hag: The Best of Merle Haggard (Capitol/EMI) Go back to the origins of the Bakersfield sound and travel through “Okie from Muskogee” all the way up to the anti–Iraq War present. Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye (Domino) Whether you compare them to old New Order or current Booka Shade, their follow-up to 2004’s Last Exit is already garnering raves. Jordan Knight, Love Songs (Trans Continental/Element 1/EMI) Love Handles might be a better title, though at least Brigitte Nielsen isn’t a guest vocalist. Deborah Gibson does have a cameo. Mars Volta, Amputechture (Universal) Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez may bring it live, but can they pull off another concept album? Pigeon John, Pigeon John and the Summertime Pool Party (Quannum Projects) He claims to be dating your sister. Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds (Jive) He and Timbaland use Beastie Boys– or Mark E. Smith–like crackly megaphone vocal effects on the first single; the album title seems both very ’90s and very OutKast wannabe. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope) David Bowie and Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino bake it up for the increasingly dance-pop Brooklynites. Xiu Xiu, The Air Force (5RC) An army of three hones a pop attack, with backup from producer Greg Saunier of Deerhoof. Yo La Tengo, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (Matador) Fighting words and lengthy psych jams from the indie softniks. SEPT. 19 Clay Aiken, A Thousand Different Ways (RCA) The long wait for the Claymates is over. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony (Koch) They were twisting tongues long before Twista. Who’s your favorite: Layzie or Bizzy or Wish or Flesh or Krayzie? Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Then the Letting Go (Drag City) Does this title refer to shaving — or inhibitions? Chingy, Hoodstar (Slot-A-Lot/Capitol) I once saw a bunch of people at 16th and Mission dancing around a boom box blaring “Holiday Inn.” DJ Shadow, The Outsider (Universal) The North Bay’s Josh Davis comes out of the shadows, hepped to the hyph of guests Keak Da Sneak and Turf Talk. But ditch that Urb stylist. Fergie, The Dutchess (Will.I.Am/A&M/Interscope) And you thought pop music couldn’t be more heinous than the Black Eyed Peas? The microwaved hollabacks of the atrocious “London Bridge” are here to prove you wrong. Hidden Cameras, Awoo (Arts & Crafts) Peekaboo, I see you. Kasabian, Empire (RCA) The band named after Linda Kasabian testify on their own behalf with a new album. Jesse McCartney, Right Where You Want Me (Hollywood) Past his TRL sell-by date? We shall see. Mos Def, Tru3 Magic (Geffen) Somewhere between his first solo album and his second, Mos Def started to act like he knew he was cute. Here’s hoping he thinks of music as his true love rather than a step on the road to Hollywood. Pere Ubu, Why I Hate Women (Smog Veil) But at least a few women still love Ubu. Misogyny evidently rules for the post-punk belligerents. Bobby Valentino, Special Occasion (Disturbing Tha Peace/Def Jam) Ludacris’s R&B man speeds up enough to record a sophomore album. Zutons, Tired of Hanging Around (Deltasonic) The Liverpool antsy-rockin’ roots trendoids try their luck on this side of the puddle. SEPT. 22 Thermals, The Body, the Blood, the Machine (Sub Pop) PPP (post-pop-punk) protesting a purely protestant panorama. SEPT. 26 Emily Haines, Knives Don’t Have Your Back (Last Gang) Unsheathe ’em? A Metric cutie ventures out alone. Janet Jackson, 20 Y.O. (Virgin) And acting it. Sean Lennon, Friendly Fire (Capitol) Son of John returns with help from Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda. Ludacris, Release Therapy (Disturbing Tha Peace) If the first single, “Money Maker,” is anything to go by, Luda better watch out, because he’s skating dangerously close to Hammer-like lame flossin’. Scissor Sisters, Ta-Dah (Universal) Good news: guest appearance by Bryan Ferry. Bad news: cameo by Elton John. Either way, there’s no justice when they are more popular than the Ark. Sparklehorse, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (Astralwerks) Get a stomachful of Tom Waits alongside sound-alike Mark Linkous. Mario Vazquez, Mario Vazquez (Arista) Question: What is better than a beauty-school dropout? Answer: An American Idol dropout — especially one who has been spotted at la Escuelita. He gets bonus points for having the cutest messed-up teeth. Wolf Eyes, Human Animal (Sub Pop) Bagging some inhuman noise. OCT. 3 Beck, The Information (Interscope) Nigel Godrich does the knob twist and fader jive on this new dispatch from “Loser” man. Tim Buckley, The Best of Tim Buckley (Rhino/Elektra) Further proof that “Song to the Siren” is eternal. Decemberists, The Crane Wife (Capitol) Colin Meloy is still finding inspiration in the most unexpected crannies: here, in a Japanese folk tale. The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America (Vagrant) Someone can’t help waving a flag. Jet, Shine On (Atlantic) Substitute “Music” for “Money” in the title of the first single, “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.” The Killers, Sam’s Town (Island) Bet they don’t bargain-shop at Sam’s Club. Gladys Knight, Before Me (Verve) Still sounding great while some of her contemporaries rasp and squawk, she covers legends like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone. Lady Sovereign, Public Warning (Def Jam) After “9 to 5” (not a Dolly Parton cover), she drops her debut. Will she hit it big or wind up MIA? Monica, The Makings of Me (J) Add a little bit of Twista, some T.I. for extra heat, a touch of Missy, and Dem Franchize Boys, and you’ve got the makings of a Monica album. Robin Thicke, The Evolution of Robin Thicke (Star Trak/Interscope) Move over, Jon B, and make way for the son of Alan Thicke. OCT. 10 Blood Brothers, Young Machetes (V2) Fugazi player Guy Picciotto and Sleater-Kinney producer John Goodmanson get Bloody. Melvins, A Senile Animal (Ipecac) We didn’t use the s-word first. Robert Pollard, Normal Happiness (Merge) Is there happiness after a decade-plus beer haze? Young Jeezy, The Inspiration: Thug Motivation 102 (Def Jam) The Snowman has recorded 62 tracks for this opus. OCT. 17 Badly Drawn Boy, Born in the UK (XL/Astralwerks) Could BDB have a Broooce fixation? Diddy, Press Play (Bad Boy/Warner) If Danity Kane are anything to go by, it’s officially past time to press eject when it comes to Mr. Combs. Jeremy Enigk, World Waits (Lewis Hollow/Reincarnate/Sony BMG) One wonders how God figures in the latest by the Sunny Day Real Estate and Fire Theft chief. Fantasia, TBA (J) Following in the footsteps of greats such as Patty Duke and Joan Rivers, she recently starred in a TV movie about her own life. Fat Joe, Me Myself and I (Terror Squad) He’s big enough to refer to himself at least three different ways. Frankie J, Priceless (Columbia) Having even survived a cover of Extreme’s “More than Words,” the li’l guy returns to sing more sweet-verging-on-extremely-saccharine nothings. JoJo, The High Road (Blackground/Universal) The li’l pop dynamo and Xtina-to-be with Lindsay Lohan–like looks has sung for our current president, which seems more like visiting an inferno than taking the titular route. Nina Simone, Remixed and Reimagined (RCA/Legacy) More modern folks start fussing with Dr. Nina. Snoop Dogg, Blue Carpet Treatment (Doggystyle/Geffen) Stevie Wonder, the Game, and R. Kelly hop a soul plane. Squarepusher, Hello Everything (Warp) More spastic jazz-dappled emanations from Tom Jenkinson. OCT. 24 Brooke Hogan, Undiscovered (SoBe Entertainment/SMC) The daughter of Hulk Hogan puts all those dark-haired and dark-skinned girls in their place in her first video — after all, no one is more soulful than a putf8um blond. A surefire sign of the apocalypse or just another day in Bush-era pop culture? The Jam, Direction Reaction Creation (Polydor UK) Paul Weller and pals get the big box-set treatment they deserve. John Legend, Once Again (C) Ever heard “My Cherie Amour”? Apparently the billion people who bought the clumsy and far-more-prosaic “Ordinary People” haven’t. The Who, Endless Wire (Polydor) And then there were two. The first studio album since 1982 includes Greg Lake, partially filling in for the deceased John Entwistle, and Ringo spawn Zak Starkey, cospotting the late Keith Moon. OCT. 31 The Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury (J) Famlay and friends return, but what will it be like now that the producer who hit it big with them — a certain Pharrell — is so over-overexposed? Barry Manilow, The Greatest Songs of the Sixties (Arista) Will he cover “Gimme Shelter”? The mind boggles. Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose (Virgin) Breathe easy — the legal tussle between the Loaf and Jim Steinman over the title phrase is through. Paul Wall, Get Money, Stay True (Atlantic) The Houston metal mouth gabs again. NOV. 7 The Game, The Doctor’s Advocate (Geffen) Not that Dre needs one, even if everyone and their moms wonder what the hell happened to the long-awaited and eventually cancelled Rehab. Lucinda Williams, The Knowing (Lost Highway) Bill Frisell and Dylan sidekick Tony Garnier guest on the latest disc by the proud princess of rasp. NOV. 14 Marques Houston, Veteran (T.U.G./Universal) No longer “Naked,” he returns for 106th and Park duty wearing his stripes. Maroon 5, TBA (Octone/J) You have been warned. Joanne Newsom, Ys (Drag City) The sprite of the harp, produced by pigfucker Steve Albini. DEC. 19 Akon, Konvicted (SRC/Universal) Will we want to shoot up or shoot ourselves when Eminem appears on Senegalese ex-“kon” Aliaune Thiam’s “Smack That”? SFBG

Fiber vs. wi-fi

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› steve@sfbg.com
San Francisco’s top officials want to get the city more directly involved in creating a better telecommunications infrastructure. Their goal is to overcome the digital divide and pump up the city’s overall bandwidth without waiting for the private sector to maybe get around to it.
But Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors have focused on distinctly different pathways to the whiz-bang future they both envision. And the agency in charge of getting the city there — the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) — has moved the mayor’s big idea at high speed while inching the board’s plan along at a snail’s pace.
Newsom first proposed a citywide wireless Internet system that would be free for the city and its residents during his State of the City speech Oct. 21, 2004. At the time it was just an ambitious promise that seemed to languish, until late last summer when the DTIS issued a request for information to a variety of high-tech firms.
By the end of 2005 the city had settled on trying to negotiate a deal with a partnership between Google and Earthlink to build the system, which they will finance largely with revenue from targeted advertising and users who pay a fee for faster connections. City officials are still in negotiations with Earthlink and expect to have a proposal ready for the board to consider by the end of the year.
Yet three weeks before Newsom announced his intention to pursue wireless, Sup. Tom Ammiano and a coalition of public interest nonprofits announced a plan to have the city build and run a municipal broadband system by laying fiber-optic lines as city officials open up the streets for the planned sewer system replacement and other projects.
It was an ambitious idea never realized by a big city in the United States, one that would put tremendous bandwidth directly under city control and be a potential source of millions of dollars in annual revenue and cost savings.
Now, almost two years after the Board of Supervisors ordered a study on the plan, the DTIS has finally hired consultants — the Maryland-based Columbia Telecommunications Corp. (CTC), which works exclusively on fiber-optic projects for public agencies. The first draft of the plan is expected to be available for public comment by the end of the year.
“We consider both the wireless and fiber projects to be important,” Brian Roberts, the DTIS senior policy analyst for both projects, told the Guardian. “But we thought wireless would be something that could be accomplished in a relatively short timeline.”
Roberts and others involved in the projects say the two ventures aren’t mutually exclusive — that any wireless system would actually get a big technological boost from city-owned fiber, San Franciscans will likely use up whatever bandwidth they can get, and wireless reaches mobile users in a way that fiber can’t.
But activists of various stripes have catalogued a number of concerns with Newsom’s wireless plan: the secretive nature of the early negotiations, private sector control over the system, the mayor’s relationship with the Google founders (who proposed the idea in the first place), the exposure of residents to increasingly sophisticated advertising campaigns, shortcomings in serving the poor and truly breaching the digital divide, and problems associated with wireless technology (mainly involving reliability, health, and capacity concerns).
The fact that these two plans are coming before the Board of Supervisors at the same time — which Roberts said is purely coincidental — is likely to renew the age-old debate about privatization and public interest.
Should the city be pursuing the public-private partnerships favored by Newsom, which can be delivered to voters quickly and at seemingly little cost to government? Or should it be focusing on long-term strategies that will give the city more control over the resources its citizens need — from electricity to information technology — without having to depend on the profit-driven private sector?
The DTIS announced the commencement of the municipal broadband study during a little-noticed public meeting Aug. 15, during which a dozen or so of the most committed activists, representatives for Comcast (which aggressively opposes most municipal broadband initiatives), and downtown building owners heard from the consultants.
CTC founder and principal analyst Joanne Howis outlined the scope of her firm’s study and sang the praises of what’s known in her industry as Fiber to the Premises (FTTP), noting that it’s the most reliable, high-capacity broadband technology and that the price of delivering it to people’s homes has fallen tremendously in recent years, to the point where it’s the best all-around broadband delivery system.
“Fiber is better, and wholly controlled fiber is better still,” she said. “That’s an article of faith with us.”
Later, activists pushed the point on wireless versus fiber. “Fiber can do many of the things wireless can’t do, but it can’t go mobile,” Howis said, also noting that fiber is essential to a reliable public safety system. “Fiber and wireless speak to different needs and are used in different ways.”
But when asked what’s better for residential users, she said, “Anyone who can have fiber or wireless to their homes will choose fiber.”
“Unless it’s free,” Roberts interjected.
But public interest media advocates like Media Alliance say the city is going about this backward. The group has been critical of the city’s wireless plans and has studied the potential for municipal fiber, arguing in the just-released report “Is Publicly Owned Information Infrastructure a Wise Public Investment for San Francisco?” that the city could pay for its investment within five years and make $2 million per year thereafter by leasing space on the network. So all sides are happy to see the fiber study finally moving forward.
“We met with a lot of resistance to the study, but the good thing was we got the money for the study from the Mayor’s Office,” Ammiano told the Guardian. “While I’m disappointed that it’s taken so long, I’m heartened that it’s now moving.”
Meanwhile, Google last week got a free citywide wireless system up and running in its native Mountain View. The system is faster than the free service it intends to offer to San Franciscans, who will have to pay a bit more if they want anything faster than the targeted average speed of 300 kilobytes per second.
“Google is putting up a lot of money to make the service free in San Francisco,” Chris Sacca, who is heading up the project for Google, told the Guardian. He estimated that the company has spent over $1 million to develop the San Francisco plan.
While the fiber study will analyze the benefits to the city itself, Sacca said the wireless proposal began with consumer demand. “At Google we start with the end-user problem, then work backward from there.” SFBG

Public power returns

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EDITORIAL Just when it looked like the public power movement had stalled, along comes the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission with a surprise announcement that it will create a public power demonstration project in the most appropriate part of town and reinvigorate efforts to kick Pacific Gas and Electric out of the city.
The agency has tentatively cut a deal to provide power directly to the 1,600 housing units and businesses that Lennar Homes is about to start building on Parcel A of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard — bringing clean, green (it comes from city hydroelectric and solar projects), affordable public power to a part of town that has long been besieged with environmental injustices.
We commend director Susan Leal and the rest of the SFPUC for this project and their promise to do the same thing on Treasure Island, once that property is officially in San Francisco’s jurisdiction. SFPUC officials say they’ll be able to beat PG&E’s rates while delivering power that is more environmentally sustainable than what we’re getting from the company’s aging fossil fuel plants.
The agency is now finalizing details with Lennar and waiting for PG&E to sign an interconnection agreement to transfer city power to the site, something that federal law requires the company do for a “reasonable” fee. If all goes well, the contract will go to the Board of Supervisors for approval in a couple months, creating the first living example of how the city would be better off without PG&E.
As such, we fully expect the company to try to sabotage the deal, so we urge all city officials to help shepherd this one to completion. Mayor Gavin Newsom should help make sure Lennar doesn’t get cold feet, City Attorney Dennis Herrera should be ready to fight if need be, and the SFPUC should be on the lookout for more such projects. Good work! SFBG

Don’t call the feds

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EDITORIAL It’s bad enough that the federal government is aggressively infringing on the rights of three Bay Area journalists, the sovereignty of California, and the freedom of San Franciscans to choose — through the elections of our district attorney, sheriff, and mayor — how laws should be enforced in this city. It’s even worse that the San Francisco Police Department has actively invited the feds in to abuse the city’s citizens.
Now is the time for Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief Heather Fong to strongly, clearly, and publicly spell out when the officers under their control are permitted to federalize investigations rather than turning them over to the District Attorney’s Office. Particularly during this dark period when the Bush administration has shown a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, those in positions of public trust within San Francisco must safeguard the rights and liberties that generations of Americans have fought hard to win.
Specifically, Newsom and Fong should join the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in calling for a federal shield law similar to the one enshrined in the California Constitution, which allows journalists to protect their sources and unpublished notes and other materials. Until that happens, it should be the policy of San Francisco to refuse to cooperate with federal prosecutions of journalists, an action that would be similar to existing police policies of refusing to take part in raids on marijuana dispensaries or in operations targeting those suspected of vioutf8g immigration laws.
Instead, in the case of videographer Josh Wolf — who has been jailed for refusing to turn over his work to a federal grand jury — it appears that the SFPD was the agency that used a dubious interpretation of the law to bring in the feds for this unconscionable witch hunt. This is a disgrace and an affront to local control and basic American values.
As Sarah Phelan reports in this issue (“The SFPD’s Punt,” page 10), the cowboys who run the SFPD have been so intent on nailing those responsible for injuring an officer during a protest last year that they have deceptively morphed the investigation into one involving a broken taillight on a police cruiser. The idea was to argue that because some federal funds helped purchase the cruiser, then it was legitimate to turn this case over to the feds — which was simply a ruse to get around the California shield law. Perhaps even scarier is that it was done under the guise of fighting terrorism, even though the cops knew they were talking about homegrown anarchists who have legitimate concerns about US trade policies.
Over and over — in openly defying local beliefs about drug and sex laws and the death penalty — SFPD officers have shown contempt for San Francisco values. Even Newsom and Fong said as much during last year’s police video scandal, when they chastised officers for making videos that mocked Bayview residents, the homeless, Asians, and transgender people.
Yet that incident wasn’t as obscene as the decision by the SFPD to turn the murder investigations of Bayview gangs over to the feds rather than allow them to be prosecuted by District Attorney Kamala Harris, with whom the SFPD has feuded. The still-high murder rate in this city is a problem that will only be solved when we come together to address it as a community, rather than simply calling in heavy-handed outsiders.
It’s no wonder that communities of color in this city don’t trust the SFPD, which bypasses the black woman we’ve elected as our district attorney in favor of the US Justice Department and its facilitator of empire, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Newsom has already demonstrated that he’s willing to stand up to unjust state and federal laws, as he did on same-sex marriage, pot clubs, and illegal wiretapping by the Bush administration. Now it’s time for him to say that we’re not going to invite unjust federal prosecutions into this proudly progressive city. SFBG
PS We also must strongly condemn the federal prosecution of Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada. They are facing jail time for refusing to reveal how they obtained grand jury information that indicated San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds knowingly took steroids. Journalists must be allowed to fully investigate important stories, particularly those involving public figures, without fearing they will be jailed for their work. Again, this case strongly begs for a federal shield law.
PPS Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition summed up the argument well in a commentary now posted on the Guardian’s Web site, www.sfbg.com, calling the prosecutions “a wholesale usurpation of state sovereignty. The Bush administration, which has been justly criticized for attempting to enhance executive power at the expense of Congress, is now eviscerating states’ rights in order to expand the power of the federal government. William Rehnquist, the conservative former chief justice of the US Supreme Court and intellectual champion of American ‘federalism,’ is no doubt turning over in his grave.”

Daly hit piece

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By Steven T. Jones
We knew that SFSOS and other front groups that shill for downtown and right-wing interests would go hard after Sup. Chris Daly, but even we were surprised at the shrill and misleading hit piece “The Case Against Daly,” penned by Ryan Chamberlin, a former Republican political operative from the Midwest who did dirty tricks work for the Newsom campaign before becoming the errand boy and protege for SFSOS head Wade Randlett. And it was carried by the San Francisco Sentinel’s Pat Murphy, who is unapologetic about aggressively trying to oust Daly, although he claims it’s some kind of principled stand against incivility instead of the fact that downtown front groups make up the lion’s share of his advertising (and therefore get full access to publish their screeds without abiding those pesky journalistic standards like fairness and accuracy — such as the recent Committee on Jobs anti-government screed).
According to Chamberlin, Daly is bad because he is too hard on developers and because they’re supporting him, he isn’t nice enough to his political enemies, there are supposedly too many potholes in Dist. 6, he supports housing for the rich and the poor but not the middle class (despite Daly strengthening the inclusionary housing ordinance, which creates housing specifically for median income families), and that “he is manipulative and domineering.”
And Chamberlin ought to know a little something about being manipulative, seeming to have no sense of either fair political play, logical arguments, or the campaign finance laws that govern producing documents like this.
“Any reasonable citizen reading this collection should find that each of its contents truly stands on its own merits,” Chamberlin wrote. And on this point we agreed. This piece of garbage truly stands on its merits, or lack thereof. I don’t want to get into a point-by-point refutation of this thing, but if you read it and see any points that seem irrefutable to you, drop me and e-mail (steve@sfbg.com) and I’ll address them.

Why WiFi?

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By Steven T. Jones
Mayor Gavin Newsom and his administration are so intent on following through with their promise to deliver free wireless Internet to SF residents that they’ve basically dispensed with seeking input from the public or Board of Supervisors, locked into private and protracted negotiations with Google and Earthlink, and simply decided not to do the board-approved study of Sup. Tom Ammiano’s plan for a municipal broadband system. The unilateral, secretive approach has driven journalists and activists nuts. But there is an opportunity tonight at 6 p.m. to weigh in during a hastily called and little noticed hearing before the Department of Telecom and Info Services. Media Alliance has been raising hell over the issue and this week the group is releasing a study showing that the city could make $2 million per year with a municipal Internet system, as opposed to going with Newsom’s so-called “free” system, which wouldn’t make the city any money and would subject citizens to targetted advertising. The tradeoff might be worth it, but there are still too many unknown details to know that, so show up this evening to talk about it.

Why WiFi?

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By Steven T. Jones
Mayor Gavin Newsom and his administration are so intent on following through with their promise to deliver free wireless Internet to SF residents that they’ve basically dispensed with seeking input from the public or Board of Supervisors, locked into private and protracted negotiations with Google and Earthlink, and simply decided not to do the board-approved study of Sup. Tom Ammiano’s plan for a municipal broadband system. The unilateral, secretive approach has driven journalists and activists nuts. But there is an opportunity tonight at 6 p.m. to weigh in during a hastily called and little noticed hearing before the Department of Telecom and Info Services. Media Alliance has been raising hell over the issue and this week the group is releasing a study showing that the city could make $2 million per year with a municipal Internet system, as opposed to going with Newsom’s so-called “free” system, which wouldn’t make the city any money and would subject citizens to targetted advertising. The tradeoff might be worth it, but there are still too many unknown details to know that, so show up this evening to talk about it.

The Race is On: Candidates for local Nov. 7 races

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By Sarah Phelan

Sixty-six took out papers. Forty-one filed, meaning that over one-third of the potential candidates in local races in the Nov. 7 election, bailed before the train even left the station.

So who’s in the running?

On the Board of Supes front, there are five races.
District 2 incumbent Michela Alioto-Pier, who has not accepted the voluntary expenditure ceiling and does not intend to participate in the public financing program, faces one lone challenger: business management consultant Vilma Guinto Peoro, who has accepted a voluntary expenditure ceiling and intends to participate in the pubic financing program.

In District 4, seven candidates are vying to fill the vacancy Sup. Fiona Ma created as Democratic nominee for Assembly District 12, (where she is running against the Green’s Barry Hermanson.) Mayor Gavin Newsom has endorsed Doug Chan, who lent his name to PG&E’s anti-Prop. D campaign, has not accepted voluntary expenditure ceiling and does not intend to participate in public financing campaign. Chan, who also got Ma’s endorsement and has served on the San Francisco Police Commission, Board of Permit Appeals, the Rent Board and the Assessment Appeals Board, has promised to return SFPD to its legally-required numbers (it currently operates 15 percent below voter-mandated leval), and upgrade policies, practices and technology, and would likely become the establishment conservative on the Board,

Other contenders are business consultant Ron Dudum, who lost against Ma in 2002 and against then Sup. Leland Yee in 2000, anti-tax advocate Edmund Jew, who would also be popular with the district’s conservative base, and San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commissioner and Fiona Ma-supporter Houston Zheng, David Ferguson, Patrick Maguire and Jaynry Mak, though Neither Maguire nor Mak, who has already raised $100,000, had filed papers as of Aug. 11, perhaps because District 4 has a Aug. 16 filing extension, thanks to departing incumbent Ma.

District 6 incumbent Chris Daly, who has accepted voluntary expenditure ceiling and intends to participate in public financing campaign, appears to face the biggest fight—at least in terms of numbers, with seven challengers hoping to fill his shoes. Of these Mayor Gavin Newsom has portrayed former Michela Alioto-Pier aide Rob Black, who has accepted voluntary expenditure ceiling and intends to participate in public financing campaign, as “the best contender to lessen divisiveness in the district.”
Fellow challengers are Mathew Drake, Viliam Dugoviv, Manuel Jimenez , Davy Jones, Robert Jordan and George Dias.

District 8 incumbent Bevan Dufty faces stiff opposition from local resident and Oakland deputy city attorney Alix Rosenthal, who was instrumental in turning around the city’s Elections Department, has worked on turning the former Okaland Army Base over to the Redevelopment Agency and has helped rebuild the National Women’s Political Caucus. Rosenthal, who is running on a platform of affordable housing, sustainability and violence prevention, also wants to keep SF weird.

In District 10, Incumbent Sophie Maxwell, who says a November ballot measure opposing the Bayview Redvelopment Plan is based on fear and unfairness, has five challengers: Rodney Hampton Jr., Marie Harrison, Espanola Jackson. Dwayne Jusino, and former Willie Brown crony Charlie Walker. Of these, the most serious are Harrison, helped shut down the Hunter’s Point PG&E plant and has worked for decades to fight all the pollution that’s being dumped on southeast residents, and Espanola Jackson, who has fought for welfare rights, affordable housing, seniors and the Muwekma Ohlone.
In other races, Phil Ting runs unopposed as Assessor-Recorder.
18 challengers are fighting over three seats on the Board of Education, one of which is occupied by incumbent Dan Kelly, and six candidates are vying for three seats on the Community College Board, one of which is occupied by incumbent John Rizzo.

{Empty title}

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Bad social failures eventually come back to haunt you. That’s what’s happening in the California prison system, where decades of lock-’em-up legislation, stupid drug laws, and governors who are terrified of the political consequences of paroling inmates have filled the jails with aging prisoners who require extensive medical care. Tens of thousands of people will die in state prisons in the next few years, not of murder or abuse but because they’re serving life sentences — and it’s going to cost a fortune to take care of them in their declining years. The state may have to set up special geriatric cell blocks and hospital wards for inmates who did something pretty bad a long, long time ago and never got another chance at life.
And so it is, apparently, with San Francisco’s homeless population.
According to a new study by the University of California, San Francisco, the median age of the city’s homeless people has gone from 37 in 1990 to about 50 today. The thousands of people who live on the streets are getting older and older — and their health is failing. Many of them, it seems, have been there at least off and on since the 1980s, when the federal government under Ronald Reagan stopped spending money to help cities provide low-cost housing.
If the study, reported in the Chronicle on Aug. 4, is accurate, there are some important policy conclusions that we need to be looking at. For starters, it suggests that many of the homeless people in San Francisco are not arriving here because of friendly programs and attitudes; we are not a “magnet” for the homeless. In fact, the people living on the streets are … San Franciscans. Some have been living here as long as I have. They are part of our community, part of our city. They just don’t have a roof over their heads or a place to go and shut out the world.
Then there’s the fact that harsh cutbacks in spending on low-income populations only create more, and more intractable, problems. The aging homeless are going to need a lot more expensive medical care over the next few years, and the only way they’re going to get it is at taxpayer expense. By the time the baby boomer generation of homeless people has died, I bet San Francisco will have spent so much money on caring for them in their later years that it would have been cheaper to just give them all a decent welfare payment, health insurance, and a decent place to live.
Building housing is expensive. Building so-called supportive housing — residential units with social services on-site — is more expensive. Treating people in hospitals who are literally dying of homelessness is even more expensive than that.
You want to be a cold-eyed conservative? The cheapest solution is to radically raise the general assistance payment to the point where homeless people can afford an apartment. That also happens to be the most humane.
Once upon a time, what a lot of homeless people needed was cash, not care. Cash, not care. Now they need care — and the people who elected Gavin Newsom and who complain about the homeless are going to be paying for that care. SFBG

Do you support the Olympic Games?

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Olympic Question
BY Sarah Phelan
“Do you support the Olympic Games?”
That ‘s the question that Sup. Gerardo Sandoval believes Mayor Gavin Newsom should, but is afraid, to ask.

“”I love sports and I’d love nothing more than to have the Olympics come to San Francisco,” said Sandoval at the Aug. 8 Board of Supes meeting. “But as a supervisor I want to ask the voters whether it should be SF’s policy to host the 2016 Olymoics, given the costs and benefits.Why is the Mayor’s Office afraid to do so?” said Sandoval, noting that academic studies show only a “very modest gain,” whereas Chambers of Commerce-related reports cite “huge gains” for cities that are Olympic hosts.
“We shouldn’t be afraid to ask,” said Sandoval, criticizing the mayor’s “behind doors conversations,” on matters such as the financing of the 49ers stadium–a stadium, which as Sandoval noted, is to be included as an venue in the mayor’s vision for the 2016 Olympics.
“I’m happy the mayor has acknowledged that we need to ask the voters,” said Sandoval, adding that Newsom believes it’s “premature to ask right now”.
“Premature implies maturity,” said Sandoval, suggesting that the Olympic question will be asked some time in the future, as he tabled his own motion “to ask voters” for now. But feel free, SF, to tell us what you think about the plan . We’re not afraid to hear it. Heck, it might even reveal what people do and don’t know.

Do you support the Olympic Games?

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Olympic Question
BY Sarah Phelan
“Do you support the Olympic Games?”
That ‘s the question that Sup. Gerardo Sandoval believes Mayor Gavin Newsom should, but is afraid, to ask.

“”I love sports and I’d love nothing more than to have the Olympics come to San Francisco,” said Sandoval at the Aug. 8 Board of Supes meeting. “But as a supervisor I want to ask the voters whether it should be SF’s policy to host the 2016 Olymoics, given the costs and benefits.Why is the Mayor’s Office afraid to do so?” said Sandoval, noting that academic studies show only a “very modest gain,” whereas Chambers of Commerce-related reports cite “huge gains” for cities that are Olympic hosts.
“We shouldn’t be afraid to ask,” said Sandoval, criticizing the mayor’s “behind doors conversations,” on matters such as the financing of the 49ers stadium–a stadium, which as Sandoval noted, is to be included as an venue in the mayor’s vision for the 2016 Olympics.
“I’m happy the mayor has acknowledged that we need to ask the voters,” said Sandoval, adding that Newsom believes it’s “premature to ask right now”.
“Premature implies maturity,” said Sandoval, suggesting that the Olympic question will be asked some time in the future, as he tabled his own motion “to ask voters” for now. But feel free, SF, to tell us what you think about the plan . We’re not afraid to hear it. Heck, it might even reveal what people do and don’t know.

Sunshine magnified

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By Steven T. Jones
It was good to see the Sentinel today amplifying our story about how the mayor’s office gave us seven contested e-mails that Sup. Chris Daly has been trying to get for months. But Pat Murphy is a bit off mark to imply that Daly got snubbed or that our obtaining the documents was anything more than solid reporting work by reporter Amanda Witherell (who confronted the mayor on a Saturday with facts that supported the release of the documents, an action that he then ordered). The mayor’s office told us Daly would also be receiving the e-mails. For his part, Daly was happy about our successful efforts to pry loose the docs, calling it “a great victory for sunshine in San Francisco.” He also told me, “It was always unclear to me, unless the administration was trying to cover something up, why they were unwilling to release the e-mail, whether or not they were compelled to do so under the Sunshine Ordinance.” And it turns out the e-mails do show an effort by the Mayor’s Office of Communications to bury news of Newsom’s veto of an eviction notification measure, who was so popular that voters approved it as Prop. B in June.

Whew! What a Best of Party last night!

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What a splendid Best of Party last night at Club Six down in the inner Mission in San Francisco. Almost all of this year’s Best of winners were there, more than 300 of them, to pick up their Best of certificate, and to pose in a group photo that will stand as one of the year’s most eclectic gatherings in San Francisco and certainly the Best San Francisco photograph of 2006. (We will publish the photo in next week’s Guardian).

There was Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Sam Barry from the Rock Bottom Remainders, Chris Middlestadt of the Fruit Guys, the best beer-soaked bingo brigade, local heroes Tony Kelly of thick Description Theater, Barry Hermanson and the Greenaction Gang of closing-down-the-Hunters-Point-power-plant fame, (Marie Harrison and Bradley Angel), the best drag queen who plays the accordion, Breda Courtney of the Best Bloomin’ Thespians, Robin and Joe Talmadge and Cinder Ernst from World Gym, the Primitive Screwheads (best goofy gore), Press Secretary Peter Ragone and other reps from the mayor’s office (yes, Mayor Gavin Newsom did win an award, the best mayor we love to hate), best neighborhood newspaper publisher (Ruth Passen of the Potrero View), and scores more of the city’s best and brightest and most diverse.

The Keeping it Real with Will and Willie gang were there from the Quake (Comedian Will Durst, Ex-Mayor Willie Brown, producer Paul Wells) to accept their award as the “Best Herb Caen column on the radio.”
They exemplified the spirit of Caen by being “visible” at the party (a key Caen quality in his man about town role at the old Chronicle) and by talking genially to everyone who came in range in the massed crowd, including some who have tilted politically with Willie through the years. Caen had to do that, whether he liked it or not, because he was a target and a celebrity wherever he went. One key difference is that Will and Willie, out on the town regularly, can comment and do their reviews the next morning. Caen’s nocturnal adventures were always in his column a day later in the morning Chronicle. Caen also had l,000 word columns. Will and Willie have three hours every week day morning, from 7 to l0 a.m. in prime time, and can handle lots of live interviews in the studio or on the phone. Most important, Caen could only hint at his political proclivities, but Will and Willie announce they are Democrats and go after Bush and the war and local sacred cows with great glee.

This morning, Will and Willie led off their show on 960 the Quake with a report on the event, which they obviously enjoyed. My journalistic point: There will most likely never be another Herb Caen in San Francisco, or probably on any other daily paper, because he was a creature of another era, the hell-for-leather competitive newspaper wars in San Francisco, which were some of the most colorful in the country. Once the old Hearst Examiner and the old Chronicle formed a JOA in l965, they had no more real use for Caen but the Chronicle kept him on because of his ability and reputation. The Chronicle family owners were always nervous and often agitated about Caen and his enormous influence but they really couldn’t do much about him. Now, with the new Hearst Chronicle as the dominant daily here, with the coming of Singletonland in the Bay Area, no publisher has any use for a powerful independent talent such as Caen, particularly a strong union voice. Al’as.

The Caen formula lives

Will and Willie demonstrated the point again in this morning’s show with a snapshot of Caen’s San Francisco with a nostalgic interview of Mort Sahl, who Caen helped make a celebrated fixture at Enrique Banducci’s Hungry I. They were making the most of the fact that Sahl was reemerging in San Francisco and opening tonight at the Empire Plush Room (Willie said he would in the front row). And Sahl responded with some good political jokes: The Democrats are proving they can defeat Democats, he said of the Lieberman race. But can they defeat Republicans? Jerry Brown is putting Oakland “up for adoption.” On the Mel Gibson incident, Sahl said there was talk in Hollywood that he would now be boycotted. But Sahl quoted Jack Warner of Warner Brothers about an earlier star: “He’ll never work in this town again– until we need him.” And Sahl mused at one point, “Just how many wars are we fighting today.”

Sahl also had some news. Banducci was alive and well in Hayward, sharp as ever. Sahl lived in San Francisco and Sausalito for many years and is now living in LA and working regularly. The I in Hungri I stood for Intellectual. ON and on, making the point on the show that Sahl is back. Hurray!

Back on the monopoly journalism front

Just in: story from the Mercury News by Pete Carey with the arresting head: “Area’s new media king is having fun, industry leader started with one small paper at age 20.”

He quoted Singleton as telling a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Seattle in April, on a podium he shared with McClatchy’s Gary Pruitt,
“We do a lot of things because they’re fun.” Impertinent questions: who else is having fun as Singletonland comes to town? Is there no way that any of the reporters covering Singleton on any of his papers can utter a discouraging or realistic word about his form of discount journalism, or find someone who can do? (Carey, incidentally, a veteran reporter, has done the best job of covering the sale of Knight-Ridder and subsequent developments).

The newspaper unions have been quiet and have not even commented on what happened to their offer to buy the Merc and the other McClatchy castoffs. And the few statements they have issued took the line of the Hearst unions in San Francisco in dealing with its monopolizing issues: lay low and wait till negotiations on the next contract (when, from my point of view, it may be too late.) The Merc employees are working without union contracts. The crunch will come when Singleton starts “consolidating” and making the deep cuts in production and newsrooms and quality that he must do, sooner or later, probably sooner, with his mountains of debt, his unmanageable forest of papers and presses, and his “lean Dean” cost-cutting modus operandi. Stay tuned. B3

Halloween Not a Friendly Ghost

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by Amanda Witherell
amanda@sfbg.com

At the Guardian’s Best of the Bay party last night, we caught up with city officials fresh from a meeting on what to do about that pesky Halloween party in the Castro. Supervisor Bevan Dufty’s attempt to quash the celebration last week caught the ear of Mayor Newsom, who quickly mobilized city department heads including the SFPD and the Entertainment Commission, to brew up an agreement that protects the sacrosanct Castro event.

The Entertainment Commission took the stance that cancelling the city-run event would never work: it is ingrained in the Bay Area psyche to report to the Castro for All Hallow’s Eve, whether the people who live there like it or not. Police Chief Heather Fong said she would cancel cop vacation time instead and a full force would be dressed in blues and billy clubs for October 31. The plan is to shift the event from Castro to Market Street, but most importantly, the right to costumed revelry is no longer under attack.

The vanishing Tenderloin

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Casey Mills in beyond Chron has a nice little tidbit on how Gavin Newsom’s press release endorsing the little-known Rob Black for District Six supervisor conveniently omits any mention of the Tenderloin.

Newsom, it’s time to end the Sunshine wars

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EDITORIAL For months now, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press office has been fighting with Sup. Chris Daly over a series of internal memos that Daly claims ought to be public record. The memos involve the mayor’s position on tenant legislation that would make some kinds of evictions more difficult.
Daly had to take the case to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, which held a hearing and deliberated for more than an hour before finding the Mayor’s Office in violation of the law. And still, Daly — an elected official — couldn’t get a copy of the memos.
Then on July 29, Guardian reporter Amanda Witherell confronted Newsom outside a town hall meeting in the Richmond District. The mayor said he wasn’t even aware of the details of the battle — then promptly ordered his press office to release the records (see “Sunburned,” page 15).
Good for Newsom — but why did it take this long? Why did Daly, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, and no doubt the City Attorney’s Office have to spend so much time on a fight that clearly made no sense?
Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of how the Mayor’s Office — and so many other city agencies — is handling public-records requests: it’s a struggle for anyone to get anything.
A handful of aggressive, single-minded activists like Kimo Crossman, who is trying to get records on the city’s wi-fi negotiations, have been driving the Mayor’s Office and City Attorney Dennis Herrera crazy with reams of document requests. Why? Because they’ve asked for some simple, basic stuff — and have been refused. Thousands of hours of city time have been wasted fighting battles that don’t need to be fought.
Newsom can put an end to a lot of this pretty quickly. He should announce that he’s told the press office to comply immediately with every public-records request unless there is a clear, serious reason to withhold the information — and he should make it clear that he wants to be personally informed any time a request is denied so that he can make the final determination.
Newsom should also direct every city department under his jurisdiction to follow the same policies and support reforms in the Sunshine Ordinance to end all of these delays. SFBG

Sunburned

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› amanda@sfbg.com
The Mayor’s Office of Communications has for months been fighting with Sup. Chris Daly and several unrelated activists over the release of public documents. By denying and ignoring Sunshine Ordinance requests — including some by the Guardian — the office has garnered a reputation for secrecy that has transformed a disparate group of activists into a united force pushing the boundaries of the city’s landmark open government law.
The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force (SOTF) on July 25 found the MOC in violation of the Sunshine Ordinance on two counts, but the mayor’s spokespeople defied its decision and refused to release seven pages of MOC e-mails that Daly requested. Jennifer Petrucione, who spoke for the mayor at the meeting and left before a final decision had been reached on one of the violations, told the Guardian, “I was contemptuous of the process.”
Her view and that of mayoral press secretary Peter Ragone, as they explained to the Guardian, is that the voluminous nature of some requests and the political motivations of document requesters like Daly violate the spirit of the Sunshine Ordinance, which voters passed in 1993 to encourage public access to how decisions are made in city hall. Instead of disclosing documents, the MOC has found loopholes in the broadly written law permitting them to hide information.
“We have the right to withhold certain documents if they are recommendations,” Petrucione told us July 28, even though the task force generally supports disclosure of such documents. In another case of ignoring a request, she chalked it up to an accident: “That was not us trying to avoid Sunshine, it was us doing it too quickly and overlooking things.”
While both Ragone and Petrucione insisted it’s their policy to release everything they can, even if it’s logistically difficult given the volume of requests they receive, they’re still having a hard time producing documents in a timely fashion. So some activists have reacted to early inaction with ever more voluminous and complicated requests.
The day after we discussed the MOC Sunshine Ordinance policies with Petrucione and Ragone, Mayor Gavin Newsom appeared at a town hall meeting in the Richmond, where we asked him about the dispute with Daly’s office. “I haven’t been privy to the details,” he told us. “I would like to see us readily provide whatever information is being requested. I said, ‘Peter, just send all the information, even in the spirit of the ordinance. We have nothing to hide.’”
Two days later, Petrucione called the Guardian to say the mayor had ordered her office to release the disputed documents after all. She told us, “You guys want to make an issue of it, so we decided to just put them out there.”
BURIED DOCUMENTS
The disputed e-mails requested by Sup. Daly involve Ragone’s purchase last year of a tenancy in common (TIC) from which two disabled residents had been evicted by a landlord evoking the Ellis Act, as first reported by the blog www.beyondchron.org.
Daly was curious if there might be any connection between Ragone’s new digs and Newsom’s vetoes of proposals that would have protected tenants from those kinds of evictions. Daly’s office filed an immediate disclosure request for any documents regarding evictions or condominium conversions.
After the MOC initially responded that they didn’t have any such documents, which Daly’s office didn’t believe, the issue dragged out over four months in front of the SOTF, with the MOC eventually turning over about 25 relevant documents but withholding seven e-mails, with Petrucione citing Section 67.24 of the Sunshine Ordinance: “Only the recommendation of the author may, in such circumstances, be withheld as exempt.”
Daly appeared at the meeting to speak on his own behalf. “I’m not attempting to have a gotcha on the Mayor’s Office. I’m attempting to form a decision,” he said.
The task force doesn’t have the power of subpoena or investigative authority — its members can’t look at the e-mails and decide if they’re public — so the matter was referred to the Ethics Commission, which does. Petrucione, who had the documents at the meeting, could have just handed them to Daly. She told the Guardian, “We’re not concerned about what the e-mails say. We’re trying to adhere to the letter and the spirit of the law.”
In fact, the documents contained only mildly embarrassing information, with a pair of e-mails from Petrucione plotting ways to overshadow the news of Newsom’s tenant protection veto last September by releasing word of the veto late on a Friday and coupling it with a high-profile announcement of San Francisco’s Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, “which will bury any interest in the Ellis release.”
But the MOC’s resistance to disclosure — both to Daly and to activists also seeking information during that same time period — has only served to galvanize those seeking public records.
ACTIVISTS’ SUNRISE
Everyone starts with a little kernel of concern, a reason to wonder or worry about what those elected officials are up to. Kimo Crossman last year wanted to know more about the sketchy municipal wi-fi deal with Google and Earthlink that Newsom was proposing. After hitting initial roadblocks when making requests for specific information like a copy of the contract, Crossman started asking for reams of documents, anything remotely related to the TechConnect plan. His concerns have now expanded to disaster preparedness issues and finally to the Sunshine Ordinance itself.
Last week at the SOTF meeting, where Crossman is now a regular member of the audience, he filed a complaint that the mayor had not provided the opportunity for public comment at a Disaster Council meeting June 5. After reviewing video and transcripts of the meeting and hearing Petrucione’s evolving explanations, the task force found a violation.
Crossman — who at one time was being considered for “vexatious litigant” status by city officials who wanted to tone down his voluminous requests — was pleased and said, “I thought it was a success that the mayor was held accountable to Sunshine just like everyone else in the city.”
Perhaps the violation will inspire the Mayor’s Office to fulfill the outstanding records requests of other citizens, like Wayne Lanier, who had a little home improvement issue.
About a year ago, Lanier and a few of his neighbors repaired the sidewalk around a few trees and planted some flowerpots in front of their homes. Then the city slapped them with a $700 tax, under the Occupancy Assessment Fee for Various Encroachments.
The ordinance was introduced by the mayor and passed the Board of Supervisors in July 2005. It was designed to tax property owners who eat up the public right-of-way with stairways and fences, but the ordinance became what Lanier likes to call the “tree and beauty tax.”
Lanier wanted to know what kinds of meetings and discussions had led up to this ordinance, so in March he sent a Sunshine Ordinance request to Newsom. “I requested his calendar prior to July,” Lanier told the Guardian. “A very simple e-mail request under the Sunshine act.”
Lanier says he has yet to receive an answer to his request, let alone any correspondence or acknowledgement from the Mayor’s Office that they’re working on it. Later, he had concerns about avian flu, where he was again rebuffed in his attempt to get documents.
THE PRICE OF DELAY
The frustrating stories of Crossman and Lanier eventually caught the interest of Christian Holmer, who championed their causes and set out with Crossman on a project they think could streamline the practice of releasing public documents.
Holmer is the secretary of the Panhandle Residents Organization Stanyan Fulton, which has a Web site compendium of all the Sunshine Ordinance requests he knows about. He posts a running countdown of how many days each request has been outstanding, as well as details on the runaround and excuses he receives from city officials.
His goal is to standardize how various departments produce documents and make them more easily accessible to the public “in as few keystrokes as possible,” as he puts it. And to do that, he’s made lots of Sunshine Ordinance requests, which MOC officials argue are too onerous for them to deal with, particularly given Holmer’s lengthy, heavily annotated e-mails, which he fires off to a variety of city departments on a daily basis.
As the many city reps who receive these e-mails will attest, it can take well over an hour to read the entire contents of one e-mail, only to find out it includes enough attachments to keep the reader busy for the better part of a day.
Petrucione and Ragone, who have received Holmer’s request for the mayor’s daily calendar but not yet answered it, cite the difficulty in figuring out exactly what Holmer wants. However, even the Guardian’s simply worded requests for that same information, as well as documents related to the recent health care measure, weren’t filled by the timelines set out by the ordinance.
Ragone says his office is just trying to keep up with the deluge of document requests. He raised the possibility of reforms, such as a designated Sunshine Ordinance officer or standardized form, but the MOC hasn’t formally proposed any.
Matt Dorsey of the City Attorney’s Office is wary of standardizing the system: “I don’t think the law should create a barrier — a ‘you didn’t sign this so I don’t have to answer it’ situation.” SFBG

The press censors the press

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Well, well. Today’s Chronicle/Hearst had some big stories on its front page, including a story by its City Hall reporter headed “SF Residents asked to volunteer for a day.” The lead: “Mayor Gavin Newsom today will call on all San Francisco residents to take time out and give a day to their city.” And there were at the top of the page some teaser heads, “After 25 years-still want your MTV? C. W. Nevius on Mel Gibson’s tirade. Bruce Jenkins on baseball’s busy day.” And a big across- the- front – page story, framed in yellow with a white sun, saying, “If you thought last week was hot…More heat, rising ocean, loss of snowpack forecast by the state for 2l00.” Nifty. All legitimate stories.

But way inside on the business page was the hottest local story for San Francisco, the region, and the newspaper business. It was Hearst’s joyful policy announcement story headlined “Bay Area papers cleared for sale to MediaNews, Federal agency’s antitrust review ends with approval.” Our earlier two blogs pointing out the lousy Hearst coverage (and lousy coverage by the other papers involved in the deal) must have done a bit of good. I emailed the obvious questions in my blog to Hearst, but Hearst didn’t reply and Hearst and the other participating papers didn’t answer the questions in their stories, but they did do a bit better with the DOJ story. At least, after I chided them for leaving out a key point in their minimalist stories reporting how a federal judge refused to grant a temporary restraining order in the Clint Reilly/Joe Alioto suit, they asked Alioto if he and Reilly were going to press on with their suit. They are, as I reported exclusively on my blogs. Finally, Hearst et al did publish this fact in their stories. The Mercury-News put it as the last paragraph to its story.

However, the stories by Hearst and the other participant papers read as if nobody ever bothered to check the court documents in the case or at least the Alioto reply memorandum in support of his motion for a temporary restraining order.
What Alioto argued is that Hearst and MediaNews (Singleton), and the other billionaire partners (Gannett and Stephens), have no use for facts nor principles in their move to regional monopoly. Case in point: Back in 2000, when Reilly tried to block Hearst from buying the family-owned Chronicle and shutting down its own Examiner and establish a morning monopoly, Hearst argued that there was no reason to fear a newspaper monopoly in San Francisco because competitors from other Bay Area cities, such as the San Jose Mercury-News and Contra Costa Times, would provide serious competition.

“Specifically,” Alioto stated, “Hearst argued that all of the Bay Area newspapers compete with each other in the Greater Bay Area, and that this competition, both actual and potential, has a tempering effect on the behavior of the competing papers.”

Now, of course, Hearst is arguing the opposite-that these outlying papers are not competitors with the Chronicle and never will be. Alioto pointed out that Federal Judge Vaughn Walker, in ruling against Reilly and for Hearst in that case, agreed with Hearst’s argument and quoted extensively from Walker’s decision. Alioto continued that, “at the very least, this court ought to hold a hearing on a motion for a preliminary injunction, if not a trial, to find out why Hearst and the other defendants are now ignoring and running away from the position taken by Hearst in the prior lawsuit.”

Alioto also pointed out why the contention of Hearst et al that there will be no allocation of markets and anti-competitive behavior is “ludicrous on its face.” Let me give you the precise quote that ought to have been in every honest story on this case:

“Although defendants disclaim the existence of their agreement to allocate markets, and Hearst professes that it will have no role in the combination’s subsequent stewardship of Bay Area newspapers, the claim is ludicrous on it face. Hearst cannot expect this court or anyone else to believe that it is shelling out $263,200,000 simply to buy and deliver the Monterey Herald to its Bay Area competitors to gain an interest in its competitors’ markets outside the Bay Area, without receiving any assurance or reaching any understanding that it will be protected against future competition in the Bay Area from its new partners. Such a claim strains credibility to say the least. Indeed, the role of Hearst in this combination, coming to the aid of its competitor MediaNews, can be explained most logically and cogently only by Hearst’s participation in the combination alleged in the complaint. Otherwise, Hearst’s motivation is truly mystyifying and Byzantine. If ever Occam’s razor ought to be applied, it is here.”

Let’s have a show of hands. Has anyone seen this quote and point, or a summary thereof, in any Chronicle, Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury News, Monterey Herald or Associated Press story, or any other Hearst/Singleton/Gannett/Stephens/McClatchy paper anywhere in the country? The larger question: will you ever see this quote as the suit plays out and the messy facts begin to emerge about one of the sorriest chapters in American journalism?

Today, John Simerman of the Contra Costa Times reported breathlessly, in a story headlined “MediaNews looks to set standard for papers online,” that Media News “hopes to harness its newfound Bay Area newspaper dominance on the internet into a regional website that aims to be a model for how old guard newspapers can work and make money online.” He also reported that MediaNews was in “very preliminary” talks with Hearst “about a joint Internet venture that could be run under the BayArea.com name.”

I suggest they first learn to cover local news.

Repeating: one city monopoly is now becoming regional monopoly and the monopolizing powers are now censoring the news toward that end. Alas, that is a terrible harbinger for Bay Area communities, for journalism, and for the free press provisions of the First Amendment. Let us all hoist a Potrero Hill martini for Clint Reilly and Attorneys Joe Alioto and Daniel Shulman.
Check the story yourself and in particular the Alioto/Shulman filings. Click here. B3

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