Parks

Thinking outside the pipe

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OPINION Although it’s named the SF Sewer System Master Plan Project, San Francisco’s long-term wastewater program deals with a lot more than sewage. It addresses stormwater runoff as well as the used water that drains out of our residential and commercial sinks, toilets, showers, and washing machines. It offers us a choice between the high road of environmental justice, sustainability, and the emerging green economy and the heavily engineered “pump-and-dump” approach that has defined the city’s sewage and stormwater management practices since San Francisco was first settled.
The high road views the water that we use and that falls on our city as a resource that is too good to waste. San Franciscans now have a once in a generation opportunity to put that idea into practice through a range of innovative technologies, design techniques, and “out of the pipe” thinking. Just a few of the possibilities: building compact facilities to treat our wastewater closer to where it is first generated and where it can be reused, rather than pumping it all into one community where it can become a nuisance; transforming our streets, parks, and school yards into a network of green, healthy corridors that are vital parts of our drainage management system; and harvesting stormwater through green roofs, cisterns, and permeable surfaces.
The high road not only creates jobs for the skilled trade workers who will be needed to rebuild and upgrade the system but also provides opportunities for training and employment for younger and lower-skilled workers to maintain our green infrastructure. While many of the Public Utilities Commission staff have embraced these alternatives, public support will be critical to overcoming the institutional bias for the status quo.
Today stormwater and sewage are considered waste to be made invisible, quickly pumped somewhere for treatment, then dumped. The resulting wastewater system places 80 percent of San Francisco’s sewage treatment burden — and its accompanying problems — in the already mistreated Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood. During rains the water that falls on the streets is quickly routed down storm drains and toward the city’s treatment facilities. Under normal circumstances the stormwater and sewage are treated, then discharged 800 feet offshore into San Francisco Bay and into an “exemption zone” in the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, four and a half miles into the Pacific Ocean.
But rains overwhelm the system between 10 and 20 times every year, resulting in neighborhood flooding and overflows of more than a billion gallons of minimally treated sewage and stormwater along our waterfront annually. Since the rains are diverted into pipes instead of being absorbed into the ground, the west-side aquifer that supports Lake Merced and Pine Lake is starved of water.
The planning process now underway gives us an opportunity to address these problems. The sewer master plan provides a variety of ways for San Franciscans to get involved. They must do so to build the type of wastewater system that we can be proud of. SFBG
Alex Lantsberg
Alex Lantsberg is cochair of the Alliance for a Clean Waterfront (sfcleanwaterfront.org) and chair of the Public Utilities Commission’s Citizens Advisory Committee. For more information, contact him at lantsberg@gmail.com.

What booze ban?

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› amanda@sfbg.com
Outside of North Beach, the party is still on. That’s good news for San Francisco festivalgoers, but it leaves one outstanding question: What exactly is current city policy on promoting partying in public spaces?
Once again, the forum was the Recreation and Park Commission’s monthly meeting, this one July 19. It wasn’t exactly a reprise of the perplexing mess surrounding the North Beach festivals (see “The Death of Fun,” 5/23/06), but it did involve the same question of whether to allow drinking in city parks.
The commission approved a request from Seven Star to produce a two-day World Beat Music Concert in Sharon Meadow on May 19 and 20 next year. The application included codas for a modified sound policy and permission to sell beer and wine, which was granted without so much as a clarifying question, a scrutiny of beer garden site plans, testimony from event planners, or a peep of public comment.
This permit is practically identical to the permits submitted by the North Beach Festival and North Beach Jazz Festival for use of Washington Square Park, which incited no end of grief among event planners, neighborhood activists, local businesses, musicians, fans, and fun lovers throughout the city. The one apparent difference is that it’s not in Washington Square Park, whose use as a festival site has raised concerns among North Beach residents.
“That’s why it sailed right through,” said Dennis Kern, director of operations for the Recreation and Park Department. There are 56 greenways listed in Section 4.10 of the Park Code that prohibit consumption of alcohol. Introduced back in 1981, the code has been amended four times over the years to include additional parks. Washington Square joined the list in 2000, but in the case of the festivals, the code has historically been waived without fanfare.
This year, however, Kern broke with tradition by recommending that beer and wine not be sold in the park during the North Beach Festival and North Beach Jazz Fest. The festivals ultimately appealed, and a compromise was reached allowing alcohol sales outside the park.
When questioned by the Guardian as to whether future recommendations would follow suit, Kern said, “Yeah, probably. Each one is a separate case, but we’ll continue to follow the Park Code. The commission can always grant their exceptions.” SFBG

Habitat Potential

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The biggest deterrent for the east-west migratory subset of species homo sapiens is a lack of niche habitat in San Francisco. While a unique western habitat like San Francisco offers much “to do” for the migrating easterner, the difficulty has been ingratiation with local population. Repeatedly, the search is for “common ground.”

On a steamy Sunday afternoon bird walk along Land’s End, this is how the ecologists were rapping — about pigeon guillemots and oystercatchers, and not bereft New Englanders. But during the three hour tour from Suttro Baths along the cliffs toward China Beach, the crowd of twenty or so had a chance to get pretty chummy. My own recent migration from east to west has left me looking for a niche, and I felt a bit at home with this pack of ornithologists. I am not a bird nerd, but in my past life I spent some serious QT with researchers on an offshore island so I can at least feign binocular interest. Mostly I was there to hear what the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has planned for the area. Within the 49 square miles of San Francisco, there are 41 natural areas, some as well-known and loved as the Presidio, and others as small and locally cherished as Kite Hill. They are all considered potential habitats where a coyote, a California Quail, or a native live oak could find a home, and a human could find a place to connect with the wilder aspects of the city. Much of that area has been invaded by non-native species like eucalyptus, nasturtium, feral cats, and pet dogs, and on Wednesday, July 26, the Recreation and Parks Department will be holding a special meeting to decide how to proceed with protecting these areas. There’s been a lot of controversy between dog owners and native species advocates, and this is something of a final showdown between the two factions, so it should be interesting to see how the commission decides.

-Amanda Witherell
amanda@sfbg.com

A tale of two museums

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› amanda@sfbg.com
The Presidio, converted from military to civilian use 12 years ago, has six million square feet of former officers’ quarters, barracks, and buildings that make it unlike any other national park in the country.
This public space has become home to a mixed bag of occupants — primarily private citizens, a smattering of nonprofit organizations, and an increasing number of commercial enterprises — as the Presidio Trust pursues a controversial congressional mandate to be financially self-sustaining.
Two different museums have also vied for residence at the site of the park’s Main Post: the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center (CIMCC) and the Disney Museum. Both submitted viable proposals for exhibition space, representing starkly different futures for the Presidio.
This is the story of how one may get to stay and the other just had to go. This is also the story of how the Presidio Trust is transforming a prized national park into just another piece of real estate to be claimed by the highest bidder.
LOST HERITAGE
In Presidio Trust literature, the Main Post is called the “heart of the Presidio.” The centrally located seven-acre parcel includes an enormous parking lot surrounded by dozens of buildings that provide a steady stream of traffic pumping through the arteries of Presidio Boulevard and Doyle Drive. If you were hoping to attract a regular flow of visitors to your museum, the Main Post would be an ideal place to put it.
Photographs of classic Presidio architecture usually show the northwestern edge of the Main Post where Buildings 103 and 104 are a stately couple among a quintuplet of identical four-story brick structures. They are now empty, except for some temporary office space. Approximately 44,000 square feet each, the historic barracks were built between 1895 and 1897 to accommodate troops returning from frontier battles during the conquest of Native American tribes.
When the National Park Service was handed the Presidio in 1995, the CIMCC became one of the first “park partners” to set up office. For almost two years, the museum negotiated with the park service to lease additional space for the first living museum of Native American culture in California.
The museum planners took a shine to Building 103, paid for a $44,000 renovation study, and kicked off the necessary fundraising with a $2 million allocation from then–Senate president pro tem Bill Lockyer. Joseph Myers, a Pomo Indian, lawyer, and chairman of the CIMCC Board of Directors, said there was a lot of enthusiasm for the project.
“Even when we just had office space here we had international visitors wandering through, wondering when there would be a museum here,” he said.
Things were looking hopeful, and on Sept. 21, 1996, the Presidio, originally home of the Ohlone tribe, hosted a formal dedication of the return of a Native American presence to the park. Then-mayor Willie Brown attended the ceremony and pledged his support to the project.
Not long after, the Presidio’s power structure radically shifted. The park was split into two areas, with Area A along the waterfront managed by the park service and the inland Area B and the bulk of its buildings, including the Main Post, managed by the Presidio Trust — the result of a newfangled proposal by Rep. Nancy Pelosi that won acceptance in a Republican-controlled Congress.
The Presidio is the first national park with a mandate to pay its own way; the trust’s finances are governed by a board of seven presidential designees — initially chaired by downtown-friendly Toby Rosenblatt and including Gap founder Donald Fisher. The new landlords informed the CIMCC that all real estate negotiations were on hold.
“We tried very hard to convince them we would be good tenants,” Myers told the Guardian. “The Presidio is originally one of the places where Indians suffered at the hands of Spanish conquistadors. They were tortured and killed for not being good slaves. That’s old history, but it’s certainly morally and culturally acceptable to consider the Presidio a good place for a museum.”
But over the course of three years, serious discussions with the trust were delayed, and alternate plans and proposals for different buildings were ignored. In September 2000, at Myers’s insistence, the CIMCC finally met with Presidio staff and was encouraged to submit a proposal to renovate three dilapidated buildings near Lombard Gate.
The deadline to submit was short, but the CIMCC met it and museum planners say they were promised a decision within 14 days. Nine months later they received a formal response with, according to Myers, no solid answer. They continued waiting until an article in the San Francisco Chronicle informed them that the buildings had been leased to a private foundation from Silicon Valley.
The results of that deal now stand within sight of the Main Post: the Letterman Digital Arts Center, 850,000 square feet of space renovated and leased for $5.6 million a year by the private company Lucasfilm.
According to Presidio spokesperson Dana Polk, negotiations didn’t work out because the CIMCC couldn’t pay rent or put money into the work on the building. “They weren’t able to do either,” she said.
Somehow the museum was able to do it elsewhere. After withdrawing all proposals and vacating its office space, the CIMCC purchased a 24,000-square-foot building in Santa Rosa. The museum pays $10,000 a month in mortgage for the building, now worth $3 million, and it’s a better deal than the Presidio offered: a leased space at $50,000 a month after $10 million in renovations paid out from the CIMCC’s pocket. But it doesn’t lessen the irony or pain of the situation.
“The philosophy behind keeping the Presidio alive for public access was not for the purpose of George Lucas and Disneyland, but for California culture,” said Myers. “I think they have their own idea of what cultural projects are, and it’s not us.”
The new museum is still under construction in Santa Rosa and will include displays of indigenous art and archives. The National Indian Justice Center already calls it a home, and there are regular workshops on subjects like storytelling and art, current issues, and traditional uses of California native plants.
“That would have been a perfect fit for a national park,” said Joel Ventresca, chair of Preserve the Presidio, a watchdog group that’s fought past Presidio developments. He likened the CIMCC to exhibits in Yosemite where visitors can learn about the lives and legacies of local tribes. “Where is that in the Presidio? It’s nowhere.”
Actually, he’s not quite right. Directly in front of Building 103, there’s an old, paint-chipped sign with faded letters that reads, “Old Burial Ground. The area immediately to the west of this marker was used by the Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans to bury their dead — 1776–1846. The remains are now in the National Cemetery, Presidio of San Francisco.”
MICKEY MOUSE PROPOSAL
If the CIMCC had found a home in Building 103, Myers would be preparing to welcome a new next-door neighbor. The Disney Museum is the next bastion of culture vying for residence in the Presidio and it has designs on Building 104.
The proposal comes from the nonprofit Disney Family Foundation — a compendium of Walt’s family, headed by daughter Diane Disney Miller, that split from the Disney Company. Due to a curiosity about Walt Disney apparently unsatisfied by several theme parks around the world (one of which, at 47 square miles, is nearly the size of all of San Francisco), the family is looking for a place to display what remains of Disney’s personal artifacts.
Museum planners hope that by 2009 they can invite the public to view items like the Academy Awards he once won and the cars he once drove. Part of the Disney proposal includes renovating Buildings 108 and 122 as well, and the overarching plan is for office space and a reading room, gift shop, and café.
Walt Disney never lived in San Francisco, and when asked why the Disney Family Foundation selected the Presidio, trust spokesperson Polk said of the family, “They live relatively locally, in Napa. They’ve always enjoyed the Presidio and the history here.”
No agreements have been signed yet between Disney and the trust, and according to Polk the project is still subject to approval by the Presidio board. But the foundation has announced the plan on its Web site and held a celebration in November 2004, where Miller and trust staff answered questions about the project.
When the Presidio was first conceived as a national park in 1994, it was sold to the public as a “global center dedicated to the world’s most critical environmental, social, and cultural challenges.” Part of the National Park Service’s General Management Plan was to house people and organizations inspired by their unique setting to do good work for the public benefit. Then when Congress put a financial noose around the park and designed the Presidio Trust with a mandate for fiscal sustainability, that vision was blurred.
“This underlying issue of letting market forces come into play in a national park, it’s a terrible precedent,” said Presidio activist Ventresca. “People who have an important cultural story to tell are given the cold shoulder, and people with deep pockets are being given a place to build a monument to their father.” SFBG

World cup. Dolores Park. Amazing

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By Tim Redmond

That was one great party Sunday in Dolores Park. Some former teacher from Germany named Jens-Peter Jungclaussen organized it, and with nothing (as far as I could tell) except word-of-mouth and email promotion, at least 10,000 people showed up.

So yeah, soccer has hit the big time in San Francisco. But I have to wonder: why did some guy whose life’s work is called Teacher With the Bus have to organize this? What do they do all day at the Department of Recreation and Parks, anyway?

What’s the Damaged?

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Look, I tried — as much as any 35-year-old can be expected to try — to get excited by, or even minimally interested in, the Warped Tour. Excuse me — what I mean is the Vans Warped Tour, featuring the Volcom Stage, and the Guitar Center Warp Your Summer with NOFX contest, and the Energizer Encore, wherein you can vote to see your favorite Warped band play 10 minutes longer. Why, if I could only see Davey Havok’s frontal mullet, Cure fan circa ’86 hairdo for one-sixth of an hour longer, I think I’d need to change my underwear. Oh, wait — AFI aren’t playing? Well, I’m sure that haircut will be prominently featured on a good percentage of soul-crushing, woe-is-me, mall-rock bands out there on Piers 30 and 32 on July 8. They’ll be soaking in the ultraviolet-ultraviolent radiation of sun and prepubescent adoration, smashing the state, and killing you softly with their songs and pouty lips.
OK, you got me. For someone with a master’s degree in writing, a five-year-old kid, and a copy of Damaged on vinyl, poking fun at the Warped Tour is like hunting geriatric cows with a shotgun.
Warped just isn’t my thing, nor is it supposed to be. Like it or not, gramps, punk rock — and all of its attendant bastard children, Emo, Screamo, Puddin’, and Pie, and the rest of the seven dwarves — is big business. An uncool outcast who just can’t relate to mainstream society, man is the cool thing to be. The punks are now the jocks. The hipsters are the cheerleaders, and the whole thing plays in Peoria quite well, thank you. It plays in the food court as your little sister and her friends compare the bitchin’ spiked belts they just purchased over chicken nuggets and coconut-banana Frappucinos.
Having graduated from high school in 1989, I missed both the Sex Pistols at Winterland and the Warped phenomenon, and here I am — stuck in the middle with you. I had a couple friends who went one year, mainly to see the Descendents and Bad Religion, and I almost joined them, but discretion is the better part of valor, and the whole circus atmosphere just didn’t seem like it’d be fun. More specifically, it didn’t seem like it would be punk rock in the way that I thought punk rock was fun. It wasn’t a dark, dangerous club with dark, dangerous individuals singing from their dark, dangerous hearts about dark, dangerous things. Of course, all of this dark dangerousness has been an illusion since Iggy rolled around on broken glass during the recording of Metallic K.O. (Skydog, 1976). Nonetheless, punk rock shouldn’t require suntan lotion and plenty of hydration.
But that’s precisely the point. I can’t keep carrying this cross around. It’s covered in Iggy’s blood and Dee Dee Ramone’s track marks. The Warped Tour is not about punk rock. It’s about the kids having fun in the sun, and I’m no longer a kid. Point blank, whoot — there it is. It’s time to put the dharma where my mouth is — no more ignoring reality. I’m not a kid, but I’ve got one, a rock ’n’ roll kid who, like her dad, loves Joan Jett and would go positively ape-shit hearing “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” live for the first time.
Aside from Jett, there are a handful of other acts confirmed or rumored to be playing Warped who are actually worth checking out. Duane Peters’s band Die Hunns is performing, despite his vow to “never play that fuckin’ thing again,” and you know that’s got to be good — the Master of Disaster has no off switch, and his wife, Corey Parks, is a surgically augmented, tattooed, fire-breathing rock Valkyrie.
Peters told me that the Buzzcocks are playing, though I’ve yet to see it in print. They’re probably on a tiny stage in the back, next to the generator truck, the burrito shack, and the roadie break room. You know, where the good artists play. Artists like Mike Watt, God of the Thunderbroom and flannel-flying Pedro (that’s Pee-dro to you, youngster) good guy. And despite how bored you may be with lowbrow prankster punks turned political activists NOFX — the last time I saw them was at the Stone in ’86 — they are guaranteed to be entertaining.
Finally, the Warped tour features some bad-ass BMXers and skaters. I’m not really sure who, as finding a list of the athletes on the tour is harder than finding a complete band list. I will say that Vans sponsors skaters like flowmaster Tony Trujillo and tech king Bucky Lasek, as well as BMX wunderkinder Ryan Guettler and Scotty Cranmer, who can both do front flips 10 feet out of a spine, so it’d be worth it to go on the chance of seeing one of those guys. There’s bound to be enough wheeled heroics and side-stage real rock action that even a crotchety parental type like myself can get something out of the whole fandango. And that’s what I’m gonna do, 5-year-old daughter and 10-year-old niece in tow. Long live the new breed. SFBG
VANS WARPED TOUR 2006
Sat/8, 11 a.m.
Piers 30 and 32, SF
$29.99
(415) 421-TIXS
www.warpedtour.com

For bicyclists, some good news…

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› steve@sfbg.com
San Francisco’s southeastern waterfront is a natural jewel buried under the city’s industrial past.
The coastline is warm and often beautiful but marked mostly by collapsing piers, rusting skeletons of industrial centers, two power plants, and other long abandoned maritime projects.
But city and port officials, with the support of civic groups, are embarking on an ambitious effort to open up the waterfront with new bicycle and pedestrian trails, rotating public artwork, improved aquatic access, spruced up waterfront parks, rebuilt piers, and the transformation of industrial property into public spaces that would teach visitors about San Francisco’s past.
The recent opening of Pier 14, with the Passage sculpture from last year’s Burning Man festival as a temporary centerpiece, was a big step forward. And the imminent announcement of what the Farallon/Shorenstein development team is proposing for Piers 27–31 will be another important piece of the central waterfront puzzle.
Yet it is the so-called Blue Greenway initiative — which was formally launched June 24 with a bike and boat tour ending with a party at India Basin Shoreline Park on Hunter’s Point — that takes on the toughest terrain: the 13-mile coastline stretching from China Basin all the way down to Candlestick Point.
A Blue Greenway task force was set up six months ago by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Sophie Maxwell, with support from the Livable City Initiative and Neighborhood Parks Council. They shared their vision with a group of almost 100 bicyclists on a guided tour led by Newsom’s director of greening, Marshall Foster.
“We’re still imagining the way,” Foster said at the first stop of the Imagine the Way tour, Aqua Vista Park, where artist Topher Delaney is still covering the pier in shimmery blue sequins and installing horizontal bike rims trimmed with reflectors at the tops of colored poles.
Another art installment planned at Third Street and Cargo Way, Red Fish by William Wareham, was also not yet complete, like much of the Blue Greenway.
“You’ll notice on Illinois Street how there were no bike lanes. There were supposed to be bike lanes,” said Foster, noting how that project was recently appealed to the Board of Supervisors, only to have that and most other bike projects around the city stopped by a judge’s injunction (see sidebar).
At Pier 70 — once the main employment center of San Francisco, first with Union Iron Works and later Bethlehem Steel — getting access to the waterfront is nearly impossible now. The buildings are dangerous ruins and only broken pilings remain from the once-bustling piers.
“We think ultimately we can get in here and get access to the waterfront,” Foster said.
The Port of San Francisco’s planning and development director, Byron Rhett, who was also pedaling along on the tour, supported Foster’s hopes and said the port has consultants analyzing the site.
“We are just starting the process of declaring this an historic district,” Rhett said. “Bicycle and pedestrian access will be part of those discussions.”
Just south of Pier 70, the tour wound through the weed-strewn and graffiti-covered shoreline park and pathway at Warm Springs Cove. “This is a park that needs love,” said Michael Alexander, an historian and task force member who helped Foster narrate the journey.
A group of eight kayakers who were shadowing the bicyclists showed up while Alexander was talking, and he explained that there will be improvements to water access for them, both at Warm Springs and the next stop, Islais Landing, which was once a busy deepwater port channel, but which is now mostly hidden from view by roadways and underground culverts.
“We want to create places where we can open up Islais Creek,” Foster told the group.
The final two spots of the tour were on either side of the recently shuttered Hunter’s Point Power Plant: Heron’s Head Park and India Basin Shoreline Park, which are connected by a coastal trail that most San Franciscans probably don’t know exists.
At the final stop, Newsom, Maxwell, Assemblymember Mark Leno, and other luminaries gathered to promote the project.
“The Blue Greenway is already in each and every one of us, and we’re going to make sure that dream comes true,” Maxwell said.
The project will be a public-private partnership. Newsom committed the city to the effort but said the public has to get involved: “Without getting the enthusiasm to pull this off, it won’t happen.” SFBG
www.bluegreenway.org
www.sfbg.com on the Pier 14 opening.

Party on

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› amanda@sfbg.com

"San Franciscans will still be able to enjoy their beer in the park at the event," an elated Robbie Kowal told the Guardian on the afternoon of June 2, fresh out of a meeting in which the Mayor’s Office brokered a deal to save the North Beach Jazz Fest.

The event had been jeopardized by the May 30 decision by the Recreation and Park Commission to uphold a move by its staff and Operations Committee to deny the sale of alcohol in Washington Square Park. The San Francisco Examiner even erroneously declared the event dead on its June 1 cover.

But the Mayor’s Office intervened and hosted a long day of negotiations among the event organizers — Kowal, Alistair Munroe, and John Miles — and representatives from the commission, the Rec and Park staff, and the San Francisco Police Department.

In keeping with the commission’s May 30 decision, alcohol will not be sold in the park but on the street adjacent to the park in a gated beer garden. A portion of the park will be designated for people wishing to enjoy a glass of beer or wine while remaining near the live music.

"We’ve worked something out that allows everyone to move forward and the commission to stand by its policy," Yomi Agunbiade, general manager of the Rec and Park Department, told us.

"It doesn’t change the nature of the event," said Kowal, who had been concerned that a change in practice from minibars in the park to beer gardens in the streets would deter festivalgoers and detract from the general enjoyment of the event.

The organizers were prepared to fight for their vision of the festival and had filed an appeal with the commission to review the issue. Without the sale of alcohol, the festival anticipated losing between $20,000 and $40,000, enough to potentially necessitate calling the whole show off.

But after nearly four hours of public testimony at the last meeting about the jazz fest and the North Beach Festival, commissioners weren’t too excited about another round and were pushing for a compromise. "Everybody was interested in making sure the jazz festival folks knew the event was supported and that we wanted it to stay," said Agunbiade. "The right people were in the room."

Yet those not in the room were the North Beach NIMBYs who forced the booze ban, and it’s unclear how they’ll react to the decision. Event organizers around the city have been closely following the North Beach situation, concerned that it was the start of a conservative trend in policy and a new wave of intolerance for alcohol consumption in public (see "The Death of Fun," May 24).

Commissioner Jim Lazarus cited the inherent dangers of a hard-line policy, telling the Guardian, "The precedent could be very bad. I don’t know how we’re going to deal with it at other parks."

The San Francisco Outdoor Events Coalition, a newly formed group of events organizers and promoters, has been calling for a hold on radical changes in policy until after the summer festival season, and it seems as though that call has finally been answered at City Hall.

"What we all have learned from this process was we should have communicated earlier," Agunbiade said after the meeting. "What we will do after events are over this year is sit down and discuss any changes more in depth and evaluate how it went."

Agunbiade said they will be looking at each festival on a case-by-case basis and will try to work with the individual needs of the venues and events. He added that they plan to "communicate a lot sooner and a lot more often to make sure these kinds of situations don’t occur."

The compromise for the jazz fest has been extended to the North Beach Festival as well, but promoter Marsha Garland faces other obstacles. After the commission denied her festival a permit for booze sales in the park, Garland received permission from the Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation for additional beer gardens on the street.

But that decision has been appealed by Anthony Gantner, a local lawyer and president of the North Beach Merchants Association (rival to Garland’s North Beach Chamber of Commerce, which hosts the North Beach Festival).

Garland says she won’t breathe a sigh of relief until after the ISCOTT hearing June 8, just a week before the festival. SFBG

Newsom loses control

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› steve@sfbg.com

In the early days, the mayor tried to sound like a practical, hands-on executive who was ready to run San Francisco.

Mayor Gavin Newsom used his inaugural address on Jan. 8, 2004, to emphasize that he was a uniter, not a divider — and that he wanted to get things done.

"I say it’s time to start working together to find common purpose and common ground," he proclaimed. "Because I want to make this administration about solutions."

It’s a mantra he’s returned to again and again in his rhetoric on a wide range of issues, claiming a "commonsense" approach while casting "ideology" as an evil to be overcome and as the main motive driving the left-leaning majority of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

"Because it’s easy to be against something," Newsom said on that sunny winter day. "It’s easy to blame. It’s easy to stop…. What’s hard is to hear that maybe to come together, we need to leave behind old ideas and long-held grudges. But that’s exactly what we need to do."

But if that’s the standard, Newsom has spent the past 17 months taking the easy way.

It’s been a marked change from his first-year lovefest, when he tried to legalize same-sex marriage, reach out to Bayview–Hunters Point residents, and force big hotels to end their lockout of workers.

A Guardian review of the most significant City Hall initiatives during 2005 and 2006 — as well as interviews with more than a dozen policy experts and public interest advocates — shows that Newsom has been an obstructionist who has proposed few "solutions" to the city’s problems, and followed through on even fewer.

The Board of Supervisors, in sharp contrast, has been taking the policy lead. The majority on the district-elected board in the past year has moved a generally progressive agenda designed to preserve rental units, prevent evictions, strengthen development standards, promote car-free spaces, increase affordable housing, maintain social services, and protect city workers.

Yet many of those efforts have been blocked or significantly weakened by Newsom and his closest allies on the board: Fiona Ma, Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Bevan Dufty. And on efforts to get tough with big business or prevent Muni service cuts and fare hikes, Newsom was able to peel off enough moderate supervisors to stop the progressives — led by Chris Daly, Tom Ammiano, and Ross Mirkarimi — at the board level.

But one thing that Newsom has proved himself unable to do in the past year is prevent progressive leaders — particularly Daly, against whom Newsom has a "long-held grudge" that has on a few recent occasions led to unsavory political tactics and alliances — from setting the public agenda for the city.

Balance of power

The Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors are the two poles of power at City Hall — and generally the system gives a strong advantage to the mayor, who has far more resources at his disposal, a higher media profile, and the ability to act swiftly and decisively.

Yet over the past year, the three most progressive supervisors — along with their liberal-to-moderate colleagues Gerardo Sandoval, Jake McGoldrick, Aaron Peskin, and Sophie Maxwell — have initiated the most significant new city policies, dealing with housing, poverty, health care, alternative transportation, violence prevention, and campaign finance reform.

Most political observers and City Hall insiders mark the moment when the board majority took control of the city agenda as last summer, a point when Newsom’s honeymoon ended, progressives filled the leadership void on growth issues, problems like tenants evictions and the murder rate peaked, and Newsom was increasingly giving signs that he wasn’t focused on running the city.

"Gay marriage gave the mayor his edge and gave him cover for a long time," said Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a queer and tenants rights activist. "About a year ago that started to wear off, and his armor started to be shed."

Daly was the one supervisor who had been aggressively criticizing Newsom during that honeymoon period. To some, Daly seemed isolated and easy to dismiss — at least until August 2005, when Daly negotiated a high-profile deal with the developers of the Rincon Hill towers that extracted more low-income housing and community-benefits money than the city had ever seen from a commercial project.

The Newsom administration watched the negotiations from the sidelines. The mayor signed off on the deal, but within a couple months turned into a critic and said he regretted supporting it. Even downtown stalwarts like the public policy think tank San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association noted the shift in power.

"I think we saw a different cut on the issue than we’ve seen before," SPUR executive director Gabriel Metcalf told us. "Chris Daly is not a NIMBY. I see Chris Daly as one of the supervisors most able to deal with physical change, and he’s not afraid of urbanism…. And he’s been granted by the rest of the board a lot of leadership in the area of land use."

SPUR and Metcalf were critical of aspects of the Daly deal, such as where the money would go. But after the deal, Newsom and his minions, like press secretary Peter Ragone, had a harder time demonizing Daly and the board (although they never stopped trying).

Around that same time, hundreds of evictions were galvanizing the community of renters — which makes up around two-thirds of city residents. Newsom tried to find some compromise on the issue, joining Peskin to convene a task force composed of tenants activists, developers, and real estate professionals, hoping that the group could find a way to prevent evictions while expanding home ownership opportunities.

"The mayor views the striking of balance between competing interests as an important approach to governing," Ragone told the Guardian after we explained the array of policy disputes this story would cover.

The task force predictably fell apart after six meetings. "The mayor was trying to find a comfortable way to get out of the issue," said Mecca, a member of the task force. But with some issues, there simply is no comfortable solution; someone’s going to be unhappy with the outcome. "When that failed," Mecca said, "there was nowhere for him to go anymore."

The San Francisco Tenants Union and its allies decided it was time to push legislation that would protect tenants, organizing an effective campaign that finally forced Newsom into a reactionary mode. The mayor wound up siding overtly with downtown interests for the first time in his mayoral tenure — and in the process, he solidified the progressive board majority.

Housing quickly became the issue that defines differences between Newsom and the board.

Free-market policy

"The Newsom agenda has been one of gentrification," said San Francisco Tenants Union director Ted Gullicksen. The mayor and his board allies have actively opposed placing limitations on the high number of evictions (at least until the most recent condo conversion measure, which Dufty and Newsom supported, a victory tenants activists attribute to their organizing efforts), while at the same time encouraging development patterns that "bring in more high-end condominiums and saturate the market with that," Gullicksen explained.

He pointed out that those two approaches coalesce into a doubly damaging policy on the issue of converting apartments into condominiums, which usually displace low-income San Franciscans, turn an affordable rental unit into an expensive condominium, and fill the spot with a higher-income owner.

"So you really get a two-on-one transformation of the city," Gullicksen said.

Newsom’s allies don’t agree, noting that in a city where renters outnumber homeowners two to one, some loss of rental housing is acceptable. "Rather than achieve their stated goals of protecting tenants, the real result is a barrier to home ownership," Elsbernd told us, explaining his vote against all four recent tenant-protection measures.

On the development front, Gullicksen said Newsom has actively pushed policies to develop housing that’s unaffordable to most San Franciscans — as he did with his failed Workforce Housing Initiative and some of his area plans — while maintaining an overabundance of faith in free-market forces.

"He’s very much let the market have what the market wants, which is high-end luxury housing," Gullicksen said.

As a result, Mecca said, "I think we in the tenant movement have been effective at making TICs a class issue."

Affordable housing activists say there is a marked difference between Newsom and the board majority on housing.

"The Board of Supervisors is engaged in an active pursuit of land-use policy that attempts to preserve as much affordable housing, as much rental housing, as much neighborhood-serving businesses as possible," longtime housing activist Calvin Welch told us. "And the mayor is totally and completely lining up with downtown business interests."

Welch said Newsom has shown where he stands in the appointments he makes — such as that of Republican planning commissioner Michael Antonini, and his nomination of Ted Dienstfrey to run Treasure Island, which the Rules Committee recently rejected — and by the policies he supports.

Welch called Daly’s Rincon deal "precedent setting and significant." It was so significant that downtown noticed and started pushing back.

Backlash

Board power really coalesced last fall. In addition to the housing and tenant issues, Ammiano brought forward a plan that would force businesses to pay for health insurance plans for their employees. That galvanized downtown and forced Newsom to finally make good on his promise to offer his own plan to deal with the uninsured — but the mayor offered only broad policy goals, and the plan itself is still being developed.

It was in this climate that many of Newsom’s big-business supporters, including Don Fisher — the Republican founder of the Gap who regularly bankrolls conservative political causes in San Francisco — demanded and received a meeting with Newsom. The December sit-down was attended by a who’s who of downtown developers and power brokers.

"That was a result of them losing their ass on Rincon Hill," Welch said of the meeting.

The upshot — according to public records and Guardian interviews with attendees — was that Newsom agreed to oppose an ordinance designed to limit how much parking could be built along with the 10,000 housing units slated for downtown. The mayor instead would support a developer-written alternative carried by Alioto-Pier.

The measure downtown opposed was originally sponsored by Daly before being taken over by Peskin. It had the strong support of Newsom’s own planning director, Dean Macris, and was approved by the Planning Commission on a 6–1 vote (only Newsom’s Republican appointee, Antonini, was opposed).

The process that led to the board’s 7–4 approval of the measure was politically crass and embarrassing for the Mayor’s Office (see “Joining the Battle,” 2/8/06), but he kept his promise and vetoed the measure. The votes of his four allies were enough to sustain the veto.

Newsom tried to save face in the ugly saga by pledging to support a nearly identical version of the measure, but with just a couple more giveaways to developers: allowing them to build more parking garages and permitting more driveways with their projects.

Political observers say the incident weakened Newsom instead of strengthening him.

"They can’t orchestrate a move. They are only acting by vetoes, and you can’t run the city by vetoes," Welch said. "He never puts anything on the line, and that’s why the board has become so emboldened."

Rippling out

The Newsom administration doesn’t seem to grasp how housing issues — or symbolic issues like creating car-free spaces or being wary of land schemes like the Bayview–Hunters Point redevelopment plan — shape perceptions of other issues. As Welch said, "All politics in San Francisco center around land use."

N’Tanya Lee, executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, said the Newsom administration has done a very good job of maintaining budgetary support for programs dealing with children, youth, and their families. But advocates have relied on the leadership of progressive supervisors like Daly to push affordable housing initiatives like the $20 million budget supplemental the board initiated and approved in April.

"Our primary concern is that low- and moderate-income families are being pushed out of San Francisco," Lee told us. "We’re redefining what it means to be pro-kid and pro-family in San Francisco."

Indeed, that’s a very different approach from the so-called pro-family agenda being pushed by SFSOS and some of Newsom’s other conservative allies, who argue that keeping taxes low while keeping the streets and parks safe and clean is what families really want. But Lee worries more about ensuring that families have reasonably priced shelter.

So she and other affordable housing advocates will be watching closely this summer as the board and Newsom deal with Daly’s proposal to substantially increase the percentage of affordable housing developers must build under the city’s inclusionary-housing policy. Newsom’s downtown allies are expected to strongly oppose the plan.

Even on Newsom’s signature issue, the board has made inroads.

"In general, on the homeless issue, the supervisor who has shown the most strong and consistent leadership has been Chris Daly," said Coalition on Homelessness director Juan Prada.

Prada credits the mayor with focusing attention on the homeless issue, although he is critical of the ongoing harassment of the homeless by the Police Department and the so-called Homeward Bound program that gives homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town.

"This administration has a genuine interest in homeless issues, which the previous one didn’t have, but they’re banking too much on the Care Not Cash approach," Prada said.

Other Newsom initiatives to satisfy his downtown base of support have also fallen flat.

Robert Haaland of the city employee labor union SEIU Local 790 said Newsom has tried to reform the civil service system and privatize some city services, but has been stopped by labor and the board.

"They were trying to push a privatization agenda, and we pushed back," Haaland said, noting that Supervisor Ma’s alliance with Newsom on that issue was the reason SEIU 790 endorsed Janet Reilly over Ma in the District 12 Assembly race.

The turning point on the issue came last year, when the Newsom administration sought to privatize the security guards at the Asian Art Museum as a cost-saving measure. The effort was soundly defeated in the board’s Budget Committee.

"That was a key vote, and they lost, so I don’t think they’ll be coming back with that again," Haaland said, noting that labor has managed to win over Dufty, giving the board a veto-proof majority on privatization issues.

Who’s in charge?

Even many Newsom allies will privately grumble that Newsom isn’t engaged enough with the day-to-day politics of the city. Again and again, Newsom has seemed content to watch from the sidelines, as he did with Supervisor Mirkarimi’s proposal to create a public financing program for mayoral candidates.

"The board was out front on that, while the mayor stayed out of it until the very end," said Steven Hill, of the Center for Voting and Democracy, who was involved with the measure. And when the administration finally did weigh in, after the board had approved the plan on a veto-proof 9–2 vote, Newsom said the measure didn’t go far enough. He called for public financing for all citywide offices — but never followed up with an actual proposal.

The same has been true on police reform and violence prevention measures. Newsom promised to create a task force to look into police misconduct, to hold a blue-ribbon summit on violence prevention, and to implement a community policing system with grassroots input — and none of that has come to pass.

Then, when Daly took the lead in creating a community-based task force to develop violence prevention programs with an allocation of $10 million a year for three years — Measure A on the June ballot — Newsom and his board allies opposed the effort, arguing the money would be better spent on more cops (see “Ballot-Box Alliance,” page 19).

"He’s had bad counsel on this issue of violence all the way through," said Sharen Hewitt, who runs the Community Leadership Academy Emergency Response project. "He has not done damn near enough from his position, and neither has the board."

Hewitt worries that current city policies, particularly on housing, are leading to class polarization that could make the problems of violence worse. And while Newsom’s political allies tend to widen the class divide, she can’t bring herself to condemn the mayor: "I think he’s a nice guy and a lot smarter than people have given him credit for."

Tom Radulovich, who sits on the BART board and serves as executive director of Transportation for a Livable City (which is in the process of changing its name to Livable City), said Newsom generally hasn’t put much action behind his rhetorical support for the environment and transit-first policies.

"Everyone says they’re pro-environment," he said.

In particular, Radulovich was frustrated by Newsom’s vetoes of the downtown parking and Healthy Saturdays measures and two renter-protection measures. The four measures indicated very different agendas pursued by Newsom and the board majority.

In general, Radulovich often finds his smart-growth priorities opposed by Newsom’s allies. "The moneyed interests usually line up against livable city, good planning policies," he said. On the board, Radulovich said it’s no surprise that the three supervisors from the wealthiest parts of town — Ma, Elsbernd, and Alioto-Pier — generally vote against initiatives he supports.

"Dufty is the oddity because he represents a pretty progressive, urbane district," Radulovich said, "but he tends to vote like he’s from a more conservative district."

What’s next?

The recent lawsuit by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Committee of Jobs — urging more aggressive use of a voter-approved requirement that board legislation undergo a detailed economic analysis — shows that downtown is spoiling for a fight (see “Downtown’s ‘Hail Mary’ Lawsuit,” page 9). So politics in City Hall is likely to heat up.

"There is a real absence of vision and leadership in the city right now, particularly on the question of who will be able to afford to live in San Francisco 20 years from now," Mirkarimi said. "There is a disparity between Newsom hitting the right notes in what the press and public want to hear and between the policy considerations that will put those positions into effect."

But Newsom’s allies say they plan to stand firm against the ongoing effort by progressives to set the agenda.

"I think I am voting my constituency," Elsbernd said. "I’m voting District Seven and voicing a perspective of a large part of the city that the progressive majority doesn’t represent."

Newsom flack Ragone doesn’t accept most of the narratives that are laid out by activists, from last year’s flip in the balance of power to the influence of downtown and Newsom’s wealthy benefactors on his decision to veto four measures this year.

"Governing a city like San Francisco is complex. There are many areas of nuance in governing this city," Ragone said. "Everyone knows Gavin Newsom defies traditional labels. That’s not part of a broad political strategy, but just how he governs."

Yet the majority of the board seems unafraid to declare where they stand on the most divisive issues facing the city.

"The board has — really, since the 2000 election — has been pushing a progressive set of policies as it related to housing, just-taxation policies, and an array of social service provisions," Peskin said. "All come with some level of controversy, because none are free." SFBG

Downtown’s “Hail Mary” lawsuit

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EDITORIAL This one is way over the top: The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Committee on Jobs filed suit last week against the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, alleging that the supes won’t implement Proposition I, the 2004 ballot measure that was aimed at derailing progressive legislation. The suit makes little legal sense: The downtown crew is demanding that the city do something that it’s already doing, for the most part. But it shows an aggressive new strategy on the part of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s allies, who are out to scuttle three important bills that will probably win board approval.

Prop. I was designed to do two things: Delay anything that downtown might consider "antibusiness" and promote the political fortunes of Michela Alioto-Pier, who authored the ballot measure. The idea: Create an Office of Economic Analysis, under the city controller, with the responsibility to do an "economic impact analysis" of any legislation that comes before the board. Of course, that economic impact analysis will by definition be fairly narrowly focused; it won’t consider the social impacts or consequences of decisions.

That was always the flaw in Prop. I, and that was the reason we opposed the measure. Economic impact studies that show only how much a proposal would cost or how it might harm the "business climate" ignore the fact that a lot of government regulation improves things that aren’t quantifiable. And even when they can be measured, certain effects are ignored: Clean air has a tremendous value — but typical studies of antipollution measures focus only on the costs of compliance. Safe streets, nice parks, and good schools are worth a fortune — but a study that examines the tax burden required to pay for them won’t account for that.

Downtown spent a fortune promoting the measure (and sending out colorful flyers with Alioto-Pier’s face on them, which didn’t hurt her reelection efforts). It narrowly passed — but since Alioto-Pier never put in a request for the additional money the plan would cost, it took an entire city budget cycle to fund and hire the two staff economists who will do the work.

Now, for better or for worse, they’re on board, and the analyses are beginning — but downtown isn’t satisfied. Chamber spokesperson Carol Piasente told us the group wants to eliminate any board discretion in deciding what needs analysis and what doesn’t; right now, the board president can waive the analysis on relatively trivial things like resolutions and appointments.

But what’s really going on, according to Sup. Chris Daly, is that downtown is gearing up for a full-scale attack on three bills: Sup. Tom Ammiano’s proposal to require employers to pay for health care; Sup. Sophie Maxwell’s plan to better enforce the minimum wage laws; and Daly’s proposal to require additional affordable housing in all market-rate developments. "Downtown’s hail mary pass involves using the economic analysis to kill these socially critical proposals," Daly wrote in his blog.

Oh, and while the chamber is always worried about city spending, the group’s lawyer, Jim Sutton, is asking for attorney’s fees (likely to be a big, fat chunk of taxpayer change) if the suit prevails.

This is ridiculous. City Attorney Dennis Herrera needs to defend this aggressively, but that’s only the legal side. The mayor, who has become ever more closely allied with these downtown forces (see page 11), ought to join the supervisors in publicly denouncing the suit. SFBG

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was in upstate New York last weekend, flying low over farmlands and old industrial cities in one of those bumpy little "commuter" planes, then driving through small towns in areas that, I’ll say politely, have seen better economic days. And yet, everywhere I went, a landmark stood out: From the air and from the ground, the public schools seemed universally spacious and well maintained. They had nice baseball and football fields, all-weather tracks, and new playground equipment. I didn’t go inside, but I can tell you nonetheless that the schools in most of New York are way better than the schools in most of California.

And there’s a good reason for that.

My brother owns a house in Putnam Valley, a small town about two hours north of New York City. He bought it 15 years ago, for about $105,000, and while it has increased in value, it’s still assessed at way less than half of what I paid for my house in San Francisco. And yet he pays more property taxes than I do.

He’s a contractor, a small-business person, subject to the volatile whims of the home-building industry, and he’s trying to support two kids and save money for their college fund. He pays $5,000 a year in school taxes alone, and it’s a real burden.

But for that money, he gets to send his kids to public schools that are better than most $25,000-a-year private schools. He considers it a bargain.

In New York they spend about twice as much per student as we do in California. That money has to come from somewhere, and a lot of it comes from property taxes. This isn’t rocket science — even people educated in California should be able to figure it out: You want good schools, you have to pay for them.

Then I came back and met with Steve Westly, the state controller and the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for governor. Westly loves to talk about education — but he’s not even willing to commit to seeking changes in Proposition 13 that would allow for higher property taxes on commercial buildings to pay for the schools.

It’s this air of unreality we have in California. For 28 years, since the "tax revolt" movement was born in this state, politicians have pandered to the selfish among the voters (and that’s most of them, it seems) by saying they can have it all — for free. We’ve been promised a beautiful state with lots of parkland, top-rate public schools and colleges, massive spending on cops and prisons, stable union jobs for public employees, abundant water for thriving agriculture, extensive resources to meet urban problems … and low taxes for all.

Let’s party.

Westly’s Democratic opponent, Phil Angelides, is at least honest: He promises the same sorts of things Westly does, but he admits that somebody will have to pay for them. He’s focusing on the wealthy, which is the right idea — this is a rich state, and the millionaires have done quite well the past few years. But the rest of us will get hit a bit too, and I hate to say it, but we should.

Because the teachers don’t have to be underpaid, the roads don’t have to be crumbling, the parks don’t have to be overcrowded, the hospitals don’t need to be teetering on the edge of collapse. We can have high-speed rail to LA.

Taxes are a small sacrifice for the public good. My parents’ generation seemed to get that. California’s baby boomers apparently don’t. SFBG

Last call?

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› news@sfbg.com

Concerns about public drinking in North Beach and stifled public debate are conspiring to cripple a pair of popular outdoor festivals, possibly creating a troubling precedent for other events at the start of San Francisco’s festival and street fair season.

"We’ll have to cancel this year’s festival," Robbie Kowal, who runs the North Beach Jazz Festival, said of the possibility of not getting his alcohol permit. "Seventy-five percent of our funding comes from the sale of alcohol."

The Recreation and Park Commission’s Operations Committee is set to review the jazz festival’s permit May 3, and if sentiments among the three mayor-appointed commissioners haven’t changed, they might not allow Kowal and his partners, John Miles and Alistair Monroe, to set up bars and serve drinks to local jazz fans in Washington Square Park, as they’ve been doing without challenge for the past 12 years.

"We’ve never even had a hearing to get a permit before," Kowal said. "We’ve had no arrests and no [California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control] violations. We’re being punished when we haven’t done anything wrong. We’re caught up in this whole North Beach Festival situation."

Kowal was referring to a dispute involving the neighborhood’s other popular street fair, the North Beach Festival, a 52-year street fair that had its permission to sell alcohol in the park yanked this year. The festival is hosted by the North Beach Chamber of Commerce, whose director, Marsha Garland, is a political adversary of the area’s supervisor, Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin.

The problem started when parks general manager Yomi Agunbiade determined that a long-standing ban on alcohol in city parks should also apply during festivals. Two out of three members of the Rec and Park Commission’s Operations Committee agreed with that ruling during an April 5 meeting, and it became official policy.

Then, as the North Beach Festival permit went to the full commission for approval April 20, the words "permission to serve beer and wine" disappeared from the agenda item. Those words had appeared on an earlier version of the agenda, allowing the commission to grant what Garland had received with every permit for the last 20 years. The agenda change meant the commission couldn’t even discuss the alcohol issue, let allow issue a permit that allowed it.

Commissioner Jim Lazarus questioned a representative of the City Attorney’s Office about it and was told that the full commission couldn’t hear the policy if the general manager and Operations Committee were in agreement.

"I was taken aback by the fact that the full request of the applicant to serve beer and wine was not on the calendar," Lazarus told us. "I’ve been on the commission for three and a half years, and I’ve never seen that happen before for this kind of issue."

This story is still unfolding, but observers are openly wondering whether this is an isolated case of political sabotage or whether this battle over beer could hurt the summer festival season.

Wine and beer sales have always played a critical role in the financial viability of many of the city’s summer festivals. In a city that’s never been afraid of a liberal pour, many are beginning to wonder if the good times are over, and if so, why?

"The Rec and Park meeting was so disheartening, and if it’s used as a precedent in any way, it will harm other events. If the oldest street fair in this city can be chipped away at like that, who’s next?" said Lindsey Jones, executive director of SF Pride, the largest LGBT festival in the country.

Some North Beach residents think this Rec and Park procedural shell game is punishment for Garland and her organization’s opposition to Peskin, whom they blame for the change.

"Aaron Peskin would like to take Marsha Garland’s livelihood away," said Richard Hanlin, a landlord and 30-year resident of North Beach who filed a complaint over the incident with the Ethics Commission.

"They want to railroad Marsha," said Lynn Jefferson, president of the civic group North Beach Neighbors. "They want to see her out of business. If she doesn’t have those alcohol sales, she’ll personally go bankrupt."

At the heart of the Garland-Peskin beef is a 2003 battle over a lot at 701 Lombard St. known as "the Triangle," which the owner wanted to develop but which the Telegraph Hill Dwellers wanted for a park after they found a deed restriction indicating it should be considered for open space. Peskin agreed with the group he once led and had the city seize the land by eminent domain, drawing the wrath of Garland and others who saw it as an abuse of government power.

Peskin told the Guardian that it’s true he doesn’t care for Garland, but that he did nothing improper to influence the commission’s decision or agenda. However, he added that he’s made no secret of his opposition to fencing off much of the park to create a beer garden and that he’s made that point to Rec and Park every year since the festival’s beer garden started taking over the park in 2003.

“Just let the people use Washington Square Park. It’s the commons of North Beach,” Peskin said. “The park should be open to people of all ages 365 days a year. That’s just how I feel.”

Yet Peskin said that neither the North Beach Jazz Festival, which doesn’t segregate people by age, nor festivals that use less neighborhood-centered parks, like the Civic Center and Golden Gate Park, should be held to the same standard. In fact, he plans to speak out in favor of the jazz festival’s right to sell alcohol during the May 3 meeting.

Access became the buzzword this year, in response to last year’s decision by the San Francisco Police Department to gate two-thirds of the park off as a beer garden, effectively prohibiting many underage festivalgoers from actually entering a large part of the park. The section near the playground remained ungated, but many families were disillusioned by the penning of the party.

Enter the North Beach Merchants Association, a two-year-old rival of the Chamber of Commerce with stated concerns about booze. President Anthony Gantner learned that the park code banned alcohol from being served in any of the parks listed in Section 4.10, which includes Washington Square as well as nearly every other greenway in the city, unless by permission of the Recreation and Park Commission, which should only be granted as long as it "does not interfere with the public’s use and enjoyment of the park."

Gantner and Peskin both argue that the beer garden does interfere with the right of those under 21 to use the park. "The Chamber is basically doing a fair, and that’s it," Gantner said. "A lot of its members are bars, and they run a very large fair with beer gardens that result in incidents on the streets for merchants."

Though Garland contends that the festival is an economic stimulator, resulting in an 80 percent increase in sales for local businesses, Gantner claims that a number of businesses don’t benefit from the increased foot traffic. He associates alcohol with the congruent crime issues that crop up when the clubs let out on Broadway, and thinks that selling beer and wine in the park only accelerates problems in the streets after the festival ends at 6 p.m.

Gantner has the ear of local police, who are understaffed by 20 percent and looking for any way to lower costs by deploying fewer cops. "It used to be we could police these events with full staff and overtime, but now we’re trying to police them with less resources, and the events themselves are growing," Central Station Capt. James Dudley said.

He’s also concerned about the party after the party. The police average five alcohol-related arrests on a typical Friday night in North Beach, most after the bars close. But those numbers don’t change much during festival weekend, leading many to question the logic behind banning sales of alcohol in the park. Besides, if sales were banned, many festivalgoers would simply sneak it in. Even one police officer, who didn’t want to be named, told us, "If I went to sit in that park to listen to music and couldn’t buy beer, I’d probably try pretty hard to sneak some in."

At the April 20 Rec and Park meeting, Garland presented alternative solutions and site plans for selling beer and wine, which represents $66,000 worth of income the festival can’t afford to lose. Beyond her openness to negotiations, Rec and Park heard overwhelming support for the festival in the form of petitions and comments from 30 neighbors and business owners who spoke during the general public comment portion of the meeting.

Father John Malloy of the Saints Peter and Paul Church, which is adjacent to the park, spoke in support of Garland’s request. "I think I have the most weddings and the most funerals in the city," he said. "I’m praying that we don’t have a funeral for the North Beach Festival. If anyone should be against alcohol, it should be the priest of a church."

So who are the teetotalers? Testimony included 10 complaints from members of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, Friends of Washington Square, and the North Beach Merchants Association, as well as Gantner and neighborhood activist Mark Bruno, who came down from Peskin’s office, where he was watching the hearing, to testify.

Commissioner Megan Levitan said, "If anyone knows me, they know I like my wine," before going on to explain that she was born in North Beach and even used to serve beer at O’Reilly’s Beer and Oyster Festival. However, she said, she’s a mother now, and parks are important to her.

"It does change a park when alcohol is there," she said. "I do not believe we should serve alcohol in the park."

Will that still be her stance May 3 when the North Beach Jazz Festival requests its permit? The jazz fest has never had beer gardens, and the organizers don’t want them. Instead, they set up minibars throughout the park, which remains ungated, allowing complete access for all ages.

Although there is hired security and local police on hand, by and large people are responsible for themselves. The organizers say it’s just like going to a restaurant for a meal and a drink, except in this case it’s outside, with a stage and free live music.

Though Kowal remains optimistic, he’s rallying as much support as possible, even turning the May 3 meeting into an event itself on his Web site (www.sunsettickets.com). His partners, Monroe and Miles, were concerned enough to swing by City Hall to see Peskin, who agreed to testify and help the Jazz Festival retain the right to sell booze.

"The first person to write a check to start this festival was Mayor Willie Brown," Kowal said. "Peskin has always been a big supporter of the festival, which is why we think it will all work out."

The festival is a labor of love for the three organizers, who barely break even to put the event on; after expenses are covered, any additional profit from the sale of alcohol is donated to Conservation Value, a nonprofit organization that aids consumers in making smart purchases.

"We were the first fair to use Washington Square Park," Monroe, the founding father of the jazz festival, said. "We’re standing up for the right to access the park. It’s not about ‘he said, she said’ or who did what to whom. It’s about hearing free live music."

So now comes the moment when we find out whether this is about alcohol, parks, or simply politics, and whether future street fairs could feel the pinch of renewed temperance. If the jazz festival gets to sell booze, Garland’s supporters argue, that will represent a bias against the North Beach Festival.

The commission will hear Garland’s appeal at the end of May, just two weeks before the festival begins. With contracts already signed and schedules set, the stakes are high. Owing to lack of funds, Garland has already canceled the poetry, street chalk art, and family circus components of the fair. She did receive an e-mail from Levitan promising a personal donation to put toward the street chalk art competition. Even so, she’s preparing for a funeral.

And if alcohol is prohibited at the jazz festival, it could send out a ripple of concern among street fair promoters and lovers around the city. To be a part of the decision, stop by the meeting and have a say. SFBG

PS This weekend’s How Weird Street Faire, on May 7, centered at Howard and 12th Streets, will have beer gardens in addition to seven stages of music and performances. But organizers warn that it could be the last festival because the SFPD is now demanding $14,000, a 275 percent increase from the police fees organizers paid last year.

operations committee hearing

May 3, 2 p.m.

City Hall, Room 416

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF

(415) 831-2750

www.sfgov.org

Pombo on the issues

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To say that Richard Pombo is an environmental skeptic is putting it mildly. When asked if Pombo accepted the worldwide scientific consensus that global warming is a fact, his spokesperson, Wayne Johnson, shilly-shallied. "What I have heard him say is the jury is still out," Johnson cautiously ventured. "For those absolutely convinced, I would not put him in that category."

Pombo entered Congress determined to "reform" the Endangered Species Act and other tree-hugging depredations on the rights of private property owners. Before arriving in Washington, he cowrote a book titled This Land Is Our Land: How to End the War on Private Property, in which he declared that he’d become politically active after a skirmish with the East Bay Regional Park District about the creation of a public right-of-way through his property. He later switched his story to say that his family’s property values had been hurt when their land was designated a San Joaquin kit fox critical habitat.

Both claims were entirely without merit. But Pombo is not one to let the facts get in the way.

Pombo says the ESA, which is widely regarded as one of the more successful pieces of environmental legislation ever, is a failure. Pombo’s “reforms,” however, recently ran into a brick wall in the Senate. If passed, the reforms would have removed the concept of critical habitat from the ESA, which means that a threatened species would have been protected, but its home territory would not have received such protection.

Pombo has hit numerous other environmental high points. Among them was his idea to allow ham radio operators to erect antennae on the Farallones Islands. He proposed selling 15 sites within the national parks as a way of raising money for energy development. He was one of the original sponsors of the legislation to allow drilling on Alaska’s north slope.

And the 11th Congressional District representative has taken interesting stands on all sorts of other issues, from civil rights to drugs to gun control to gay rights. Because he has such a wide range of conservative interests, a short list of his Congressional voting record will suffice.

Pombo has opposed stem cell research, supports banning “partial birth” abortion, and has a 0 percent rating from NARAL, the pro-choice group. He voted for the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and against allowing gay adoption in Washington, DC.

He has voted in favor of making the PATRIOT Act permanent and supports a constitutional amendment to oppose flag burning and desecration. He supports more prisons, the death penalty, and more cops. He voted to prohibit medical marijuana and HIV-prevention needle exchange, in Washington, DC.

Pombo has a 97 percent approval rating from the US Chamber of Commerce. He opposes gun control and product-misuse lawsuits against gun manufacturers. He got an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association.

For a more in-depth appreciation of Richard Pombo’s politics, go to www.ontheissues.org/CA/Richard-Pombo.htm, which gives him a 70 percent hard-right conservative rating. (Tim Kingston)

Research assistance by Erica Holt

Pombo on the issues

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To say that Richard Pombo is an environmental skeptic is putting it mildly. Asked if Pombo accepted the worldwide scientific consensus that global warming is a fact, his spokesperson, Wayne Johnson, shilly-shallied. “What I have heard him say is the jury is still out,” Johnson cautiously ventured. “For those absolutely convinced, I would not put him in that category.”
Pombo entered Congress determined to “reform” the Engendered Species Act and other tree-hugging depredations on the rights of private property owners, and while he concentrated on that law, he has put his stamp on a host of other issues, from gay rights to gun control.  

Before he ran for Congress, Pombo co-wrote a book entitled This Land is Our Land: How to End the War on Private Property. Part of his book declared that he become active politically after a skirmish with the East Bay Regional Park district about the creation of a public right of way through his property. He later switched his story to say his family’s property values were hurt when family land was designated a San Joaquin Kit Fox critical habitat. Both claims were without merit.

Pombo says the ESA, which is widely regarded as one of the more successful pieces of environmental legislation ever, is a failure. Pombo’s “reforms,” however, recently ran into a brick wall in the Senate. If passed, they would have removed the concept of critical habitat from the ESA – meaning a species would be protected, but its home territory would not. The legislation called for a two-year recovery plan, but the recovery plan would have been voluntary rather than mandatory.

While this approach has resonated with many voters in the 11th district who agree that the ESA goes too far, it has local and national environmentalists screaming. It’s also upset his opponent, Pete McCloskey, who was involved in writing the original law.

Pombo has hit a number of other environmental high points during his tenure. Among them was his idea to allow ham radio operators to erect antennas on the Farallones Islands. He wants to lift the ban on off shore oil drilling. He has read a pro-whaling resolution into the Congressional Record. He has proposed selling off 15 sites within the national parks as a way of raising money for energy development (a proposal that advances Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Presidio privatization to a new level). He was one of the original sponsors of the legislation to allow drilling on Alaska’s north slope. And last but not least, wants to put a freeway over Mt. Hamilton in San Joaquin County.

Pombo also voted twice to protect MTBE manufacturers from being sued for environmental damage. MTBE helps engines burn cleaner, but has also been found to contaminate water supplies in California, necessitating huge clean-up costs. Why would Pombo vote to indemnify such manufacturers? Well, several of the companies are based on Tom Delay’s district in Texas.

But the 11th district representative has taken interesting stands on all sort of other issues, from civil rights to drugs to gun control to gay rights. Because there are so many, a short list of his congressional voting record will suffice.

Pombo has opposed stem-cell research, supports banning “partial birth” abortion, and has a 0% rating from NARAL the pro-choice group. He voted for the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and against allowing gay adoption in Washington D.C.

He has voted in favor making the PATRIOT Act permanent, and supports a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning and desecration. He supports more prisons, the death penalty and more cops. Pombo wants to prohibit medical marijuana and HIV-prevention needle exchange. He sponsored legislation that would require universities to allow military recruiters on campus, but he opposed a bill that would have boosted veteran-affairs spending by $53 million. He opposes gun control and opposes product-misuse lawsuits against gun manufacturers.

In 2003 Pombo got a 97 percent approval rating from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He also got an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association and a 92 percent rating from the Christian Coalition in 2003.
For a more in depth appreciation of Richard Pombo’s politics, check out On The Issues at www. ontheissues.org/CA/Richard-Pombo.htm, which gives him a 70% hard right conservative rating.

Research Assistance by Erica Holt

Follow the Money

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It’s an old, old adage, but that doesn’t make it any less true: follow the money. And in Rep. Richard Pombo’s case, that money leads to some very interesting places, such as Abramoff, oil and Indians.

According to the nonpartisan Open Secrets website, which monitors campaign contributions, Pombo received some $10,000 from the Keep Our Majority PAC, which is supported by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The former Capitol Hill power broker and convicted felon is also one of the six top donors to Pombo’s RICH Political Action Committee. And Pombo has received more than $500,000 in donations from Indian tribes, members and lobbyists, despite the fact that there are no Indian tribes in the 11th congressional district. Two of the tribes linked to Abramoff, the Saginaw Chippewa and the Mississippi Choctaw, have given Pombo more than $10,000.

Pombo is such a popular fellow with Washington D.C. lobbyists that he made a very special cut. In late 2005, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a liberal D.C. watchdog, named Pombo as one of the 13 Most Corrupt Members of Congress: “Pombo’s ethics violations include: misuse of the franking privilege, accepting campaign contributions in return for legislative assistance, keeping family members on his campaign payroll, and misusing official resources,” the group said.

Pombo spokesman Wayne Johnson, not surprisingly, disagrees both with CREW and those alleging that such donations are an indicator of any impropriety. He asserts there was a lot of “sloppy reporting” that in the original Abramoff stories that made a lot of unsubstantiated allegations. “There are Congress members who had a relationship with Jack and Richard was not one of ‘em,” he stated. “Abramoff gave Pombo $7,000 over a number of years and that was returned as soon as Abramoff was exposed.” As far as the Indian tribes go, Johnson says they supported Pombo because he helped the tribes get federal recognition, not because of any connection with Abramoff.

But Abramoff and Indian tribes are not the only people who directly or indirectly gave Pombo scads of cash. The two largest industrial contributors to Pombo are the agricultural and real estate sectors—which makes sense given that those are the dominant industries in his area. But his third largest source of campaign funds is the oil and gas industry, which has given him $178,788 since 1989. Pombo is chair of the house Committee on Resources, which oversees those industries. Chevron Texaco alone gave him $21,500. 

There are plenty of reasons for the oil giant to like Pombo. He opposed a Chinese bid to purchase Unocal — Chevron also wanted to buy Unocal – and has tried to lift the moratorium on oil drilling off the coast of California.

Early this year, investigative reporters with the Los Angeles Times uncovered two cases of what looks suspiciously like back scratching between Pombo and the extractive industries. In 1999, Pombo and Rep John Doolittle (R-Roseville) linked up to put the kibosh on a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation investigation of Charles Hurwitz, of Maxxam lumber clear-cutting infamy, over his involvement in a collapsed Texas savings and loan company. According to the Times the legislators, both known as “protégés of [Tom] Delay” subpoenaed documents from the confidential FDIC investigation of Hurwitz and promptly published them in the Congressional Record, styming the government’s case. Hurwitz subsequently gave Pombo $1,000 and Doolittle $5,000.

Another LA Times article noted that in late 2005, just three months before Pombo inserted language into a budget bill—without debate or hearings—that would have opened public lands, including national forests, to mining operations, Washington lobbyist Duane Gibson organized a $1,000 a plate fundraiser for Pombo. Gibson is a former aide to Pombo’s House Resource Committee and is now under scrutiny in the Abramoff scandal. While the total dollar amount raised that night is unknown, the paper revealed several mining companies made donations to Pombo. Gibson, who also personally contributed $1,000, also represented some of those companies.  

In 2004, Pombo wrote a letter to then Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton urging her to suspend environmental regulations that the wind-power industry opposed. He neglected to mention that his parents own a wind farm on the Altamont Pass, nor did he mention his own stake in his parent’s ranch. Although wind-farm regulation does fall under his committee, it would have been less unseemly had he acknowledged his potential conflict of interest.

In other family matters, Pombo got into hot water for trying to bill the taxpayers almost $5,000 for a two-week family RV vacation by saying it was government related business because he visited several national parks.

Pombo, like many representatives Democrat and Republican, believes in keeping it in the family. He has paid out $357,325 to his wife and brother for bookkeeping, fundraising, consulting and other services to his political activities.

Rep. George Miller (D-Vallejo/Concord) has twice written Pombo with requests that he investigate allegations of sweatshop conditions, prostitution and gambling on the Marianas Islands. No such investigation has been initiated, but readers might remember that Abramoff lobbied extensively to oppose the implementation of U.S. labor and immigration regulations in the Marianas, which are U.S. trust territories. According to Time magazine, Pombo received $8,050 from Northern Mariana islanders following a visit to the islands.

For further fun facts, check out www.opensecrets.org for who gives Pombo what money or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) www.citizensforethics.org.

Research assistance by Erin Podlipnik

 

Inside the belly of the dog

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I CARTOON DAZE

Homeland Security asked the usual dumb questions when I slapped my passport on the counter: what countries did you visit? Business or pleasure? The laser page did not trigger any alarms — yet. I advanced to the carrousel to pick up my luggage. My suitcase had burst apart in Mexico City, spilling incriminating documents all over the terminal floor. Now it came down the ramp swaddled in plastic. As I reached to pull it off, all hell broke loose — bells began to clang, buzzers burped jerkily, strobe lights flashed crazily on and off, and an automated voice on the intercom kept repeating “this is an emergency — walk do not run to the nearest exit.”

I did not walk, nor did anyone else in the San Francisco International arrivals terminal. We were under terrorist attack! The twin towers were coming down upon us! Young and old, some in wheelchairs even, stampeded for the sliding doors, luggage carts tipping, travelers stumbling, elbowing each other in their mad rush to escape as customs inspectors implored us to return to have our suitcases checked for contraband once the emergency had subsided. No one in his or her right mind ever did.

Meanwhile, the escapees kept jostling and tumbling and the bells and buzzers and whistles and lights kept yowling their siren song. Yow! Burrrp! Pow! It was like a Saturday morning kids’ cartoon.

Of course, in the end, the terrorist turned out be some poor schmuck caught smoking in the men’s room.

It was a prescient re-introduction to the land where my father croaked. My month inside the belly of the Dog was kind of like a perpetual cartoon. I often felt like poor Bob Hoskins surrounded by a world full of Roger Rabbits. Cartoons were, in fact, motoring worldwide mayhem. Bim! Baff! Boff! The irreverent Danish magazine Jyllns Posten had published a dozen blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad — in one, he wore a turban with a bomb in it, in another the Messenger of Allah was depicted as a pig (the magazine had reportedly turned down caricatures of Jesus Christ as being in poor taste.) The publication of the cartoons had opened the scab of Islamic wrath and the Muslim world was on a murderous rampage from Indonesia to well, Khartoum.

The religious leaders of 57 Islamic nations meeting in Mecca declared fatwa and jihad on the infidel Danes and their damned cheese. In Tehran, a smirking Ahmadinejad announced big-money competition for cartoons of the Holocaust (he doesn’t believe it happened) and spurious drawings appeared in Europe of Anne Frank in the sack with Adolph while she scribbles in her diary.

The Christian anti-Muslim cartoon backlash tumbled Muhammad’s rating to an all-time low in U.S. polls. The New York Times Style section reported that rebel youth were jumping out of the djalabahs and into “extreme Christian clothing.” In Nigeria, Christians slaughtered their Muslim brethren, daubing “Jesus Christ Is The Lord” on mosque walls in their victims’ blood.

Then came the anti-Christian, anti-Muslim cartoon backlash. Churches were neatly stenciled with icons equating the cross to the Swastika in Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) California. And to close the circle, three white boys in Alabama took the crusade a step up and just burned the tabernacles down to the ground.

If you don’t think our nation is being devoured by religious psychosis, consider two recent Supreme Court decisions. Just the other day, the Supremes voted unanimously, with Justice Roberts on board, to uphold the right of a religious cult to guzzle potions brewed from the hallucinogenic Amazonian root Ayahuasca while they gabbed with god. Last summer, that court, with Sandra Day O’Connor still in place, voted to deny brain tumor victims medical marijuana to ease their agonies.

The ultimate cartoon was Cheney plugging his hunting partner in the ticker just like good ol’ Elmer Fudd. Ping! Pong! Blamblam! Senator Lindsey Graham, who shares a similar war-mongering dementia with the veep, reports that Dick Cheney told him that killing small birds kept him “sane.” Blap! Splat! Shazam! The late night joke mongers had a ball with the caper: “This Just In! We’ve learned that Vice President Cheney tortured his hunting partner for an hour before he shot him!” Yuk! Yuk! Did you hear the one about the CIA agent caught rifling housewives’ panty drawers during working hours in Virginia (you could look it up)? Yok! Yok! The U.S. teaming up with Iran to keep Gays out of the United Nations? Tweet! Tweet! Bird flu in of all places, Turkey (and Iraq)? Kaplooey!

Elmer and Daffy Duck scoot off into the sunset and the screen rolls up into a little round porthole where Bugs is cackling, “th-th-th-the-that’s all folks!”

II SCOUNDREL TIME

The problem is that that’s not all folks, and this may be loony tunes but it certainly isn’t merry melodies. These bastards are for real and it’s not really very funny. The title of Lillian Hellman’s slim volume on how HUAC hounded her and Hammitt is an insufficient one to describe these scum and their perverted torture war.

Every day the Seattle Times runs a few inches slugged “Terrorism Digest.” Aside from the usual shorts on Moussaoui, a rumored attack during March Madness, and an elderly ice cream truck driver in Lodi California who is accused of planning to blow up skyscrapers in Hollywood, most of the news is not about terrorism at all but rather the torture of alleged terrorists, perhaps tens of thousands of them in secret torture chambers hidden away in U.S. client states like Bulgaria and Morocco.

Here’s one. Ali Shakal Kaisi was the hooded man on the box with the electric cables snaking from his limbs, the poster boy for the abuse at Abu Ghraib. The photo is now on his business card. Originally, he was arrested for complaining to occupation troops about throwing their garbage on a soccer field in his Baghdad neighborhood. The Pentagon, in a display of perhaps the most hideous chutzpah in the Guinness Book of Records, refuses to comment on Mr. Khaisi’s case because it would “a violation of his Geneva Convention rights.”

Connoisseurs concede that Bush et al (heretofore to be referred to as “the scum”) have added some innovative techniques to Torquemada’s little catalogue of horrors. The reoccurring sexual pathology is disturbing. One accused Jihadist at Gitmo was wrapped in an Israeli flag and forced to watch gay porn 24 hours a day by military interrogators who passed themselves off as the FBI. Sadistic commandants shove feeding tubes up the nose of hunger strikers and rip them out roughly as the men piss and shit all over themselves while restrained in what Rumsfeld euphemistically describes as “a rolling padded cell.”

Why are these men being tortured? We learn from 5,000 pages of heavily-blacked-out military depositions released on court order to the Associated Press that at least three were detained because they wore Cassio F91W watches that have compasses on their face pointing to Mecca. “But our chaplains here all wear the same watch” protested one detainee.

All of this pain and suffering is being orchestrated in the much shat-upon name of freedom, the “freedom” as Sub Marcos puts it, “to choose between the carrot and the stick.” You know, as in “free elections” — Iraq’s three fraudulent elections that have led to massive bloodshed in that benighted land being the role models. But elections are not “free” when the Bushwas don’t win, like Hammas and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez and most probably, Lopez Obrador in Mexico this July. Maybe free elections are not such a hot idea after all.

The third anniversary of this despicable war is only days away as I write these scabrous lines. Extrapoutf8g the Lancet study, it is probable that 150,000 Iraqis have been crucified in this infernal crusade. The 2,300 or so GIs who died with their boots on fill just a few slabs in the charnel house Bush has built in Iraq.

I suppose the up side is that two thirds of those Yanquis surveyed think he is a liar and a baby killer — but many more will have to fall before the infidels are finally run off. Clearly, the resistance is working on it. Blowing the Golden Dome sky-high was a malevolent stroke of genius by the terroristas to incite sectarian (not civil) war, a scenario designed to foil the White House’s scheme to pull out of this treacherous quicksand and start bombing before the body bags queer the November elections.

Will it work? Shia death squads operating out of the Interior ministry are kidnapping dozens of Sunnis every day now and hanging them for public consumption. We can expect roadside gibbets next. The imminent spread of Shia-Sunni hostilities into neighboring oil lands has Washington biting its nails. We’re talking $100 a barrel here.

Sasha has a Skype pen pal in Baghdad, call her Fatima. She is a medical-science professor at the University, a middle class, somewhat secular woman who lives in a high rise in a mixed neighborhood. She writes when there is power and an Internet connection — the last three generator operators on the block have been shot dead. Her absence on the screen is always a cause for alarm. Fatima says she no longer sits writing in her window to take advantage of daylight because she is afraid of being hit by a stray bullet. I am forever amazed how concerned she is for us. Last week, she wrote “I am sorry my dear for not writing. I am ok but I am more afraid than before. Things are going from bad to very bad.” If we never hear from Fatima again, the blood will be on George Bush’s hands.

Is George Bush impeachable? He has committed multiple felonies in spying on 350,000 unsuspecting citizens without a court order, a stain on the Constitution and way beyond the pale of even Nixonian paranoia. He sold the country an illegal war based on shameless perjury in collusion with oil barons and defense contractors who have grown obscenely fat on the blood of the Iraqi people.

And he sought to sell off vital U.S. ports to “Arab terrorists”! Or at least that’s what his fellow Republicans seem to perceive. Fanning the fumes of anti-Arab racism has come back to bite Bush and the corporate globalizers of the planet on the ass. Who does Bill Frist think was operating these ports up until now? The bloody Brits, that’s who! This is Globalization, Savage Capitalism, Dog eat Dog. It’s the American Way. What do you know about Sheik Mo? Vital elements of the food chain (Church’s Chicken and Caribou Coffee for example) have already fallen into the hands of “Arab terrorists.”

Where was I? The Bill of Particulars, right? I’m sorry — it’s my birthday and I’m on a vent fueled by the one good thing about this country, Humboldt County sinsemilla.

George Bush — guilty of nuclear proliferation! What else would you call giving India enough fissionable material to blow a hole in China and Pakistan?

George Bush — guilty of blatant racism and incalculable callousness, strumming his guitar while the levees were bursting down in New Orleans, an interval much like the goat story on 9/11 of which Osama has reminded us in a recent communique. J’accuse George Bush!

Will a mush-minded congress apparently dosed to the gills on Ambien, the new sleepwalking (and sleep voting) wonder drug, vote to impeach? “Que se vayan todos!” the cry of the 2002 Argentinazo, “that they should all be kicked out” is an anthem for our time.

III SLEEPING IN SEATTLE

I’ve spent the last month sleeping in Seattle. Daytimes, I’ve churned out tens of thousands of words on my soon-to-be-published-if-it-ever-gets-finished opus, “Making Another World Possible: Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006.”

Seattle has spectral vistas but at heart, it is a city without a soul. It has been bitterly cold here, the wind whipping off Puget Sound like The Hawk off Lake Michigan. A sullen rain falls most days. When the sun comes out in Seattle, they say the suicide rate goes up because people can’t deal with the brightness.

I have been lucky to have had Sasha’s cozy room and half to hole up in. A lot of people in this city don’t even have a roof over their head. Old men sleep rough in Pioneer Square these freezing nights, young tramps camp out under the bushes up here on Cap Hill. There’s a Hooverville under the Viaduct.

The merchants don’t care much for all these deranged pariahs dragging around ragged sleeping bags like batman capes or curled up in fetal positions in one of Starbuck’s many doorways. Seattle has more pressing matters on its mind. Howard (Starbuck’s) Schultz is threatening to move the Sonics if he doesn’t get a new arena free of charge from the city. Then there is Bill and Melissa, the world’s wealthiest nation.

This is a smug city that has grown soft and wealthy on the backs of software billionaires, where no one gives a damn about anything that is not on a screen. The Stranger ran the Muhammad cartoons and no one flinched. The next week, the paper ran a feature on a man who was fucked to death by a horse. Again, no one flinched. Meanwhile, the homeless are dying out there in the street.

On Valentine’s Day, Sasha and I died in on the City Hall steps — she was the 50th victim to have died on the streets of Seattle in 2005. I was the 53rd. The Raging Grannies died in with us. I dedicated my dying to the spirit of Lucky Thompson, who recorded with Miles and Bird and spent his twilight years sleeping in Seattle parks. Seattle has a way of damaging its black geniuses. Octavia Butler, the towering writer of “conjectural fiction” whose work hones in on race and class like a laser, fell down the steps of her home here a few weeks ago. She lived alone — she always lived alone — and no one found her until she was dead. There is a statue of Jimi Hendrix right down the street.

What’s been good is watching Sasha blossom as an organizer. She’s been busy 25 hours a day putting together the visit of Eman Khammas, a courageous Iraqi journalist who speaks to the plight of women in Bush’s genocidal war. I saw Khammas last summer at the Istanbul War Crimes Tribunal and she is a firebrand speaker. Eman is part of the Women Say No To War tour put together by Global Exchange, two members of the delegation who had lost their families to the occupation, were denied visas because they did not have enough family left to “compel” their return to Iraq.

On the third anniversary of this madness March 18th, Eman Khammas will be a speaker at the march and rally set for the Seattle Federal building. That evening, she will talk at greater length at Trinity Methodist Church in the Ballard district. The kick-ass rebel singer Jim Page will open. No one turned away. Some of the moneys raised will go to the Collateral Repair Project (www.collateralrepairproject.org) which Sasha and her pal Sarah have created to help out the family of Mahmoud Chiad, an ambulance driver in al-Qaim who was gunned down by Bush’s crusaders October 1st, the first day of Operation Iron Fist in al-Ambar province, as he raced to aid victims of the massacre. There’s a widow and six kids, and Collateral Repair hopes to buy them a piece of land and some goats.

So I’m in the air back to Make Sicko City. The globalphobes are acting out at the World Water (Privatizers) Forum, which kicks off this week and when last heard from, Sub Marcos was trying to break into a prison in Guanajuato. I’ve got to finish this damn book in the next six weeks.

And Sasha and I? Who knows? I wear her name on a grain of rice around my neck and her door key is still wedged deep in my pocket and maybe it will open her heart to me again someday. We met in Baghdad with Bush’s bombs on the way and the bottom line is that we continue to fight this heinous war together. That’s good too.

John Ross has landed. But these articles will continue to be issued at 10-day intervals until “Making Another World Possible” is done. The deadline is May 1st. “Making Another World Possible” will be available at cost to Blindman Buff subscribers this fall.

 

 

 

Concrete jungle

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THIS WINTER MAY kill Pokey. The HIV-positive 22-year-old lives in a tent in a city park. It’s not the best place for a man with a weakened immune system to dwell — especially not during the rainy season.

“I’ve basically given up,” says Pokey quietly, standing in the gutter of Haight Street near Stanyan.

About a year ago he had a little more hope. He had been clean and sober for six months and had graduated from a live-in drug program run by Walden House. He thought he had beaten his heroin addiction, and he began looking for an apartment. He’s lived on the streets since he was 12.

“I started looking the last three weeks I was [at Walden House],” Pokey says. Social workers and friends helped him look. “I tried day in and day out to get a place and a job. I couldn’t take it. I flipped out. From there I went all the way back down.” He is once again wrestling with heroin.

In his two years in San Francisco, Pokey estimates, he’s looked at between 30 and 40 apartments, with no success. Subsisting on $299 to $490 a month, depending on the whims of Supplemental Security Income administrators, he can’t even afford a room in a residential hotel. The smallest go for $400 to $500 a month, and there aren’t even many of those left; in the past five years the city has lost about 1,000 hotel rooms, most to demolition and renovation.

“How can I use my money on a hotel room when I’m not gonna have any money to eat?” Pokey says. “I’m supposed to eat three times a day, when I take my medicine.”

Less than 10 years ago, in 1989, the city put the number of people homeless on any given night at 6,000. Now that figure is estimated at between 11,000 and 14,000. Over the past decade homeless deaths have climbed from 16 in 1987 to 153 in 1996. A 1996 study by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty ranked San Francisco one of the five worst cities in which to be homeless; the report blamed harassing police practices.

About 3,000 shelter beds are available to San Francisco’s homeless population, including 600 in a giant warehouse on Mission Rock Road in China Basin. The Mission Rock shelter, which clients have dubbed “Prison Rock,” was opened last year in the wake of Mayor Willie Brown’s campaign to kick the homeless out of Golden Gate Park. The shelters are full or over-capacity nearly every night of the year.

“The city does nothing for families. It stands by as the affordable housing stock is destroyed,” says Sandra Stewart, project director of Families Rights and Dignity. Stewart, a mother of three who was once homeless, advocates for poor and homeless families. She says she’s seen a “mass exodus” of low-income families from San Francisco.

“Mabel Teng went on about this being the ‘year of the child’ — well, not for homeless children,” Stewart says. She’s angry that the city vetoed a $75,000 eviction-prevention program for families in a year when it had a $100 million budget surplus. According to Stewart, five years ago families could get emergency shelter on demand. Today the city’s 130 family-shelter beds are full, and the wait list stands at around 100 families. The average family on the list consists of a single parent and two children.

In the nation’s toughest housing market, the help offered by welfare programs isn’t much help at all. As of September 1997, 12,475 San Francisco families received subsidies from CalWORKS, the federally funded welfare program for families; a similar number of adults get General Assistance from the county. A family of three receives $565 a month from CalWORKS; G.A. recipients, including workfare workers, get $279 to $345. In the Bay Area $565 is barely enough to pay for a motel room — with almost nothing left for food and other necessities.

Many of those on the streets are there for want of an affordable apartment. Staffers at Youth Industry, a nonprofit that trains and employs homeless and formerly homeless young people, say that the lack of housing is the hardest problem to solve. The agency provides paid internships to 24 teens and twentysomethings, many of whom put in 40 hours a week only to sleep on the streets. According to Youth Industry managers, “very few” of the young interns have permanent housing.

“More and more of our youth are very — how do I say this? — high functioning,” says Vida Merwin, a youth service coordinator with the nonprofit. “They don’t have drug problems. They can hold a job — they’re proving it here. They have academic aspirations. But they’re forced to rely on [social] services.”

Youth Industry intern Jamie Allsup, 22, has spent most of the last three years on the streets of San Francisco. During his first three months on the job he slept in front of the Youth Industry office, using the arrival of his coworkers as an alarm clock. Since then Allsup has spent half his $800 monthly income on a residential hotel room, sharing a bathroom with 40 other residents. At the end of the month, after he’s paid his shelter, food, and old hospital bills, Allsup has $15 left — not much to put toward a deposit on an apartment. Since the hotel has no cooking facilities, he wastes money eating out every meal. As a single-room-occupancy tenant, Allsup has few guarantees that he’ll retain his room from one month to the next.

Cheeto, a mohawked 21-year-old, works at Pedal Revolution, the Youth Industry bike shop. He’s getting paid to learn to repair cycles, enthusiastically working six days a week and bedding down in parks and parking lots at night. Cheeto refuses to stay in hotels; he’s hoping to save money for an apartment in another city — maybe Oakland. Figures provided by the Department of Human Services show that the vast majority of those who get off the streets do so by leaving San Francisco.

Even in a cheaper market, Cheeto is going to have problems. He has no rental history or landlord references. He jokes about his credit record: “They could go down the street and ask everyone I know if I pay back the money I borrow.

“I don’t have any delusions about living in San Francisco unless I’m living like I am now,” he says. “This place is a playground for the rich.” 

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