Planning

Chemicals and quarantines

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› sarah@sfbg.com

As the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) pushes ahead with plans to aerially spray the Bay Area with pheromones to eradicate the light brown apple moth (LBAM), the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has signed onto state senator Carole Migden’s efforts to ask CDFA to put a moratorium on the spraying.

"We haven’t seen this level of concern and debate since the medfly days of then governor Jerry Brown," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian. "At this point, spraying sounds premature and reckless, even though I understand this is a nasty invasive pest."

Meanwhile, four members of the California State Assembly, including San Francisco’s Mark Leno, are working collaboratively on a group of LBAM-related measures to address health, scientific, and efficacy issues that remain unresolved since the agency’s multimillion-dollar eradication campaign began last year.

Leno’s part in this collaboration with fellow assembly members John Laird, Loni Hancock, and Jared Huffman involves demanding that CDFA complete an environmental impact report (EIR) before being able to apply pesticide in an urban area for LBAM eradication, which can be a lengthy process.

"By making this an urgency measure, it would take immediate effect," Leno told the Guardian. "We recognize that urban areas are concerned about health and safety, that LBAM is a real threat to the agricultural industry, and that the other side must be considered."

Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and CDFA both gave LBAM emergency status after the tiny, leaf-rolling Australian native was found in a Berkeley backyard, the first time it was confirmed in the continental United States.

As the USDA’s Larry Hawkins told the Guardian, the federal declaration of emergency allowed his department to access the Commodity Credit Corporation, a federally owned and operated entity within the USDA that supports and protects farm income and prices.

So far, the USDA has allocated $90 million to cover the costs of what Hawkins called "an expensive regulatory program," along with those of developing suitable pesticides and a nationwide survey to see if the moth has spread beyond California.

Hawkins claims the state separately declared an LBAM emergency — a move that allowed CDFA to go ahead and abate the pest — and that impacted the state’s normal EIR process.

"Emergency status doesn’t relieve [CDFA] of EIR requirements, but it allows them to do it simultaneously," Hawkins explained.

Since then some citizen activists have challenged the moth’s emergency status, claiming that there is no evidence that LBAM has severely damaged or infested local crops. But Hawkins says this purported lack of evidence proves that the government’s eradication program is working.

"We know the insect exists, that it destroys crops in other countries, and now you find the same insect here," said Hawkins, whose department has predicted that LBAM could inhabit 80 percent of the United States and nibble on 2,000 plant species.

"So, we can logically conclude it will cause damage here. The reason you haven’t seen major damage here is because we’ve found it early enough to deal with it before it becomes substantial. And the reason you won’t find reports of major LBAM damage in New Zealand or Australia is because they are constantly using pesticides," Hawkins said.

Asked if the USDA will fully disclose the ingredients of any product the state plans to use aerially, Hawkins said, "We cannot force a private company to reveal all their ingredients. But we have told all those companies that hope to provide products that they should expect to reveal them all."

Critics of the state’s pheromone spraying program observe that Suterra LLC, which manufactured the spray used over Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, refused to release the full ingredients until it was sued — and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger demanded immediate full disclosure.

These same critics also note that Schwarzenegger, who continues to support CDFA’s LBAM-eradication program, received $144,600 in campaign contributions from Los Angeles–based Roll International owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who control Suterra, Fiji Water, Paramount Agribusiness, and the Franklin Mint.

Records show the Resnicks donate broadly, mostly to Democrats — including the gubernatorial campaigns of Steve Westly and Phil Angelides, and US Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama — with a lesser-size donation to Republican presidential front-runner John McCain, proving they play both sides of the fence.

With researchers testing a variety of LBAM-related products in New Zealand, Hawkins hopes to have a product formulated for California by June 1, which is when spraying is scheduled to resume in Santa Cruz and Monterey; spraying in the Bay Area is set for Aug. 1.

"We would like to give communities maximum notice, but we’re also working towards a beginning-of-June date, and as much as we’d like to insert artificial time frames, the insect couldn’t care less. It’s on a biological time table and is multiplying every day," Hawkins said.

David Dilworth of the Monterey nonprofit group Helping Our Peninsula’s Environment, which advocates the use of targeted pheromone-baited sticky traps, conceded that even if CDFA was forced to stop the aerial spraying, the USDA could spray anyway.

"But it would take them several months to organize, and we don’t believe they have the constitutional power," claimed Dilworth, whose organization is preparing a 60-day notice of intent to sue the USDA and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile, organic farmers find themselves in an uncomfortable limbo that continues to shift. Take the Santa Cruz–based California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). Last fall, CCOF supported the aerial pheromone spray after the National Organics Program approved it, meaning sprayed farmers didn’t lose organic certification

But March 4, CCOF spokesperson Viella Shipley told the Guardian that the group is about to release a revised position on the spraying, and could not comment further "because CCOF’s government affairs committee has not yet approved this revised position."

"We lobbied for an organically approved product and supported it last fall when lots of our members were suffering because they were in quarantine and couldn’t sell beyond county lines," was all Shipley would say.

Meanwhile, organic farmers who spoke on condition of anonymity largely supported aerial spraying for economic and environmental reasons.

"If the moth isn’t dealt with now, it’ll become a bigger problem, from both an environmental and toxic perspective," one farmer told us, citing the already high costs of controlling such bugs as coddling moths and medflies.

"This is somebody else’s pest at the moment, a nonnative pest," he said. "If farmers have to start dealing with LBAM as well, they’ll be ruined."

He also cited his belief that there aren’t 40 million pheromone-soaked twist ties on the market, which is what the CDFA claims is needed to blanket infested counties from the ground up with female pheromones to confuse the males.

Nigel Walker, an organic farmer in Dixon, recalled the devastating costs of quarantine thanks to a medfly-infested mango that someone brought back from Hawaii.

"Their vacation cost me $60,000 because of lost sales," Walker said. "So, for God’s sake, don’t bring, mail, or FedEx fruit and vegetables into California, because border inspectors are looking for bombs and terrorists, not produce and moths.

"We live in a global economy, and we have trade agreements that say if one person gets a pest, you have to do something about it," Walker added. "Nobody wants to be sprayed. Even when I spray organic seaweed on my fruit trees, I wear a mask. So I understand the gut reaction. But by refusing to be sprayed, you’re punishing the wrong person — the farmer — who already has to deal with the vagaries of the weather, the marketplace, and pests like the medfly."

Chris Mittelstaedt, who lives in San Francisco with his family and runs Fruitguys, a small business that delivers organic fruit to offices, said he’s personally against the spraying. "But as a company, we are going to wait a few weeks before letting people know what we officially think or endorse as a plan of action," Mittelstaedt told us.

Other city dwellers are less ambivalent. Frank Eggers, a former Fairfax mayor who is organizing a group called Stop the Spray, said, "[World Trade Organization] stuff is driving this so-called moth emergency.

"We’re allowing other countries to quarantine our produce. And with the global economy, climate change, and travel, we’re going be facing this issue continuously. But we can’t keep putting poison on our land, or say we’ll put you in quarantine if you don’t accept our aerial bombardment," he said.

Paul Schramski, state director of Pesticide Watch, worries that the state and federal agencies are still not listening to the people of California.

"If this is not being driven by trade agreements, then I’m not sure what is the driver. We don’t have all the facts. But it’s not being driven by actual crop damage," Schramski said. "We agree that this invasive moth should be controlled, but it’s a false premise to believe that the choice is between aerial spraying or nothing. The state has known since August that the public was opposed to spraying, so why aren’t we producing more twist ties?"

CDFA, which used $500,000 in USDA funds to hire PR agency Porter Novelli last November at the height of public outcry, is currently researching pheromone products that last up to 90 days and is also planning to use pheromone-loaded twist ties, sticky traps, and stingerless parasitic wasps in its LBAM program.

"We believe this to be a biological emergency," CDFA public affairs supervisor Steve Lyle told us. "If we waited a year or two, so we could first do an EIR, we would lose the battle and become generally infested."

Ironically, California’s best hope for not being sprayed ad infinitum may lie in the discovery that the moth has spread to other states.

"It would make a significant impact if we were to find the insect established in other places," the USDA’s Hawkins told us. "It doesn’t mean we would throw up our hands and walk away, but it would remove some of the argument that the rest of America is at risk from California if other states already have it."

But until that time, Hawkins warned that if state legislators demand a moratorium, forced spraying won’t be the federal government’s only option: "Maybe California would have to be quarantined. And now we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars."

Prince Harry and the Bush twins

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The breaking news about 23-year-old Prince Harry secretly being deployed in Afghanistan as a battlefield air controller created a public sensation in Britain. It also resulted in the quick return home of the prince – third in line to the British throne – for security reasons.

The episode pointed to the British tradition of expecting the sons of British kings and queens to enter military service when their country is at war.

The same was true in the United States during World War II, when four of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sons entered the armed forces, as did General Dwight Eisenhower’s son, John Eisenhower.

Since the expansion of the number of women in the military, what about George W. Bush’s daughters – Barbara and Jenna? Their father repeatedly describes the war in Iraq as crucially important to protect the United States and to spread democracy in the Middle East.

President Bush also repeatedly asserted that the losses of life and the costs of the Iraq war are “worth the sacrifice.” Whose sacrifice?

Certainly not that of the family in the White House. There have been no indications in this town of 24/7 gossip of either the parents urging or the daughters considering joining the armed forces.

Recently, a Midwestern mother, who lost her son in Iraq, declared, half weeping, “Why am I planning for a funeral when George W. Bush is planning for a wedding?”

Is this mother being unfair? Or is she reflecting a feeling that there is a double standard operating here?

There is a certain moral authority to governing — setting an example, sharing in the sacrifice initiated by the White House — that escapes both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Both were early draft dodgers who were gung-ho for the Vietnam war so long as someone else in their age group was doing the fighting. They both have children who have declined to serve during the Iraq war-occupation.

It would be a different question if the Bush and Cheney offspring had come out publicly against the war or were conscientious objectors. No signs of these positions thus far.

There is a simple safeguard regarding the decision to make war while leaving the younger adult sons and daughters of Congress and the White House enjoying civilian life as the casualties and illnesses of the “other Americans” keep mounting. Ask your member of Congress to introduce a one page bill that says the following: Whenever Congress and the White House take our country to war, all able-bodied military-age children of every member of Congress, the President and the Vice-President will be conscripted automatically into the armed forces.

When politicians’ children are required to go off to war, it tends to concentrate their minds toward waging peace.

Newsom’s beds keep burning

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Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil

Poor Gavin Newsom. Even when he finally finds a seemingly noncontroversial, competent, normal guy to hire as planning director, John Rahaim, he turns out to have a whack job boyfriend.

Lance Farber is still in jail after allegedly setting the bed on fire in the historical SF Fire Chiefs Residence, where Rahaim was staying, and smearing canned tomatoes on the walls.

I met Rahaim, who came from Seattle, last month at an open space forum and invited him to stop by the Guardian to share his vision for the city (John, you never called). But he seemed like a good guy: personable and smart, if not the most dynamic speaker in the world. I actually wondered at the time how such a button down guy would fare in such a high profile position in this combative town.

But apparently, greedy developers and angry activists are the least of his concerns.

Grrrl power chords

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Bay Area filmmakers Shane King and Arne Johnson totally know what you’re about to ask them, because it’s the question everyone springs right off the bat: What are a couple of dudes doing behind the camera of Girls Rock!, a film about an all-girls rock ‘n’ roll camp?

The answer is so meaningful that the pair don’t seem to mind sharing it (again). Once King and Johnson (friends since fifth grade) heard about Portland, Ore.’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, they were irretrievably inspired. In the process of scouting out documentary subjects, Johnson caught a talk by Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein. Someone asked her if she thought rock was dead, and in response she discussed her experiences teaching at the camp. "The idea that somebody of Carrie Brownstein’s stature would be stumbling around with a bunch of eight-year-olds, teaching them windmills, was just — well, I called Shane up [immediately]," he says.

Having grown up in Portland, where they recall "enthusiastically slam-dancing at L7 shows," King and Johnson felt particularly connected to the topic and eagerly moved forward — though wooing the camp proved difficult at first.

"The camp was, understandably, very skeptical [of us] and protective of the girls," King remembers. The duo shot footage of the camp’s after-school program, Girl’s Rock Institute, and interviewed teachers and young participants; the resulting short proved promising.

The bulk of Girls Rock! takes place in the summer of 2005, focusing on four campers as they practice instruments, form bands, write songs, and build confidence and social skills: teens Misty (a former meth addict) and Laura (a headbanger who worries about her appearance), and eight-year-olds Palace (a girly-girl with anger issues) and Amelia (a budding noise-rocker who has trouble sharing the spotlight). King and Johnson took care in choosing which girls to follow, though they knew they wanted first-time campers.

"We realized that [the camp] really had a huge impact on girls the first time they went," Johnson says. "One father described his daughter as ‘going supernova’ after the camp. So we knew that was going to be the most dramatic thing to show." King and Johnson traveled around the country, meeting 25 girls who were planning on attending camp for the first time.

"From talking to the camp staff, we knew that it was important to girls in ways that weren’t just about music," Johnson says. "Laura was the first person we interviewed, in Oklahoma. She was like, ‘I really love death metal, and I can’t find any boys who will let me be in a band.’ Suddenly we realized there was another metaphor happening, about the tension between our culture and these girls."

The themes of Girls Rock! are further illuminated by fellow Bay Area filmmaker Liz Canning’s animated collages. The sequences spell out what young girls are up against, with colorful graphics backdropping an array of sobering statistics, like "The number-one wish of teenage girls is to lose weight."

"People have told us, having seen the film, that it was upsetting to see those pieces, and that they wish we hadn’t included them — like, ‘Why not just celebrate the girls and leave all that stuff behind?’<0x2009>" Johnson says. "Our response is that we’re two liberal, feminist guys, and we didn’t know these things. How can we assume that everybody else is going to be able to see these girls’ struggles, and contextualize them?"

The filmmakers hope Girls Rock! will lead to camps springing up all over the country — as well as nudge grown-ups toward a new embrace of feminism. Most important, "The [campers] are cool, and loud, and angry, and funny, and sloppy — and yet nobody is saying they’re stupid or ugly," Johnson says. "[If there is] a girl in Indiana or somewhere who’s trying to form a rock band or do something that she thinks she can’t do, if she sees this film, she might think, ‘Wait a minute — why am I afraid of this?’ Then I’ll feel like we’ve done what we came to do."

GIRLS ROCK!

Opens March 7 in Bay Area theaters

www.girlsrockmovie.com

Where to now, SFPUC?

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Months after Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his intention to get rid of San Francisco Public Utilities Commission general manager Susan Leal, his appointees on the SFPUC board finally made if official on Feb. 20.

But the reasons for the previously unexplained move that have finally started coming from Newsom and his surrogates have only added to the confusion and concern over why Leal got canned and whether Newsom has compromised this important agency’s work for political reasons.

Leal was terminated without cause and is thus entitled to the $400,000 severance package from the contract Newsom used to convince her to move from city treasurer to SFPUC chief in 2004. Nonetheless, in the days leading up to the Feb. 20 hearing, the Mayor’s Office made a series of unsubstantiated allegations, including the claim that Leal botched negotiations with JPower over combustion turbines in Potrero Hill, that she was too much of a political animal and not enough of a team player, and that she didn’t focus enough on Newsom’s environmental initiatives like tidal power.

At first, Leal tried to handle her termination gracefully: for example, she told the Guardian that tidal power "is really expensive, doesn’t generate much power, and is a difficult process to get approved, environmentally speaking."

But then Newsom told reporters that city officials had discussed terminating Leal for cause, so that the SFPUC could avoid paying her severance, but eventually decided against it to avoid potentially expensive litigation costs. At that point, with the implication that she had done something wrong, Leal’s gloves came off.

"I really wanted to go out on the high road," Leal told us after Newsom’s latest allegations hit. "It’s unfortunate that the Mayor had to resort to 11th hour innuendo to try and justify what he did."

Leal notes that city officials never undertook a performance evaluation of Leal or the SFPUC, which would usually form the basis for an expensive effort to remove a high-profile public official. So why did Newsom really dump Leal?

Was it her creation of public power projects that earned her the scorn of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.? Was it her environmental initiatives, ranging from a biofuels program to a ban on bottled water, which seemed to show up Newsom? Was it the fact that she was a strong and independent woman in a male-dominated political landscape?

One clue can be found during the agency’s Nov. 14, 2007, meeting — just before Newsom announced he wanted Leal gone — in which SFPUC president Dick Sklar ripped into Barbara Hale, the assistant general manager for power, after she made a presentation on the agency’s long-term energy goals.

Sklar objected to Hale’s presentation, claiming, "It implied adoption of principles stating that the SFPUC was going to be in the public power business and take over public power generation in the city, making statement of principles totally inconsistent with anything the commission had adopted."

Equally disturbing to staff was the abusive way Sklar delivered his message.

"It was very painful," Leal told us. "It got so bad I had to intervene. I’m not going to allow my staff to be yelled at."

At issue was the agency’s plan to underground gas lines in Bernal Heights and extend its transmission lines, which Leal described as "a gimme. We have the easement all up the peninsula."

Beyond her openly pro–public power stance, Leal speculated that her friendly working relationship with the Board of Supervisors, including board president Aaron Peskin and Sups. Bevan Dufty and Sophie Maxwell, tweaked the mayor, who at times has seemed to have a personal vendetta against his former board colleagues.

"Maybe the mayor thinks that I’m too close with them. But we did more than just talk about climate change. We actually addressed it," said Leal, who convened a world-renowned climate change conference in San Francisco last year — on the same day Newsom was confronted by his then campaign manager Alex Tourk about the affair Newsom had with Tourk’s wife, Newsom’s commission appointments secretary Ruby Rippey-Tourk.

"Why am I fighting back, not going quietly?" said Leal, whose removal is effective March 21. "Because this is too big not to. I actually really like this job and will be going in to work for the next 30 days."

Addressing allegations that she mismanaged the JPower negotiations, Leal explained that PUC staff drew up a term sheet with JPower and presented it to the commission’s governing body. And it was at that point, said Leal, "that Commissioner Sklar popped off," claiming that the contract’s terms were terrible and should be renegotiated.

In the end, all five commissioners approved a description of the contemplated transaction with JPower, including a brief description of Sklar’s preferred alternative, which, as it turned out, had problems of its own.

"So, there never was a deal," Leal told us. "JPower was pushing the city to pay more money up front because it knows PG&E will do everything it can to make the implementation of JPower’s contract tough, and the city was pushing to pay the money later and so reduce its own risks."

Today, the PUC continues to work with JPower on a contract that has taken years to formulate and that, Leal notes, will ultimately allow the city to own the plant.

"So, if we want to shut it down, or run it on alternative fuel, we’ll have control," Leal told us. "My goal was to make the PUC as viable and green as possible."

She believes Sklar didn’t turn against her leadership until she started to push things that infringed on PG&E’s monopoly. "Did PG&E get me fired? If I was PG&E, I’d want me fired," Leal said.

Maxwell is a strong advocate of the Newark-to–San Francisco transmission line Leal sought, not just because it would help reduce environmental burdens in Maxwell’s heavily polluted southeast district but also because it would give the entire City more ability to bring in cleaner power.

"We could do large-scale solar in the Central Valley, as well as wind and geothermal energy. It would allow us to hook renewable power into statewide grid," Leal said, noting that the link would also allow the city to import the electricity it generates at Hetch Hetchy without using PG&E’s expensive lines.

Leal noted that under her leadership, the PUC tripled the city’s municipal solar generation. "But we don’t control residential solar. PG&E does," she said, noting the city is lagging at getting solar panels on homes but leading at doing in on public buildings. "It’s too bad PG&E couldn’t have made it easier for people."

Maxwell says she’ll miss Leal.

"I don’t think we’re going to be better off without her," Maxwell told us. "Susan is independent, a straight shooter, a grown up woman trying to make a difference and listening to all sides. She knew we had to be involved regionally. She also understood we have to have relationships with both sides of the hall."

Convinced that PG&E had something to do with Leal’s demise, Maxwell also believes the stinky sewage digesters, which sit down the road from her own house, need to be removed, not retrofitted, as Sklar recently advocated.

"The digesters need to go," Maxwell told the Guardian. "No other place in the nation, to my knowledge, has digesters within 25 feet of people’s homes."

Noting that Controller Ed Harrington, whom Newsom has nominated as the next general manager of the PUC, has a financial background, Maxwell says the question of what to do with the digesters should not be about money.

"We need to do the best we can for people, in the most economic and financially prudent was possible, but people must come first, "Maxwell told us.

Maxwell said these recent power struggles at the PUC convinced her to join seven other Supervisors in placing a charter amendment on the June ballot that will make it easier for supervisors to block mayoral appointees to the agency and will also require that PUC nominees have appropriate awareness and skills.

With a proposed $4.3 billion program in the works to upgrade the aging Hetch Hetchy system, which provides water to 2.4 million Bay Area residents, will the newly nominated Harrington be able to address water conservation, efficiency and recycling, without causing further harm to the Tuolumne River — all while dealing with battles over public power and wastewater concerns?

Noting that he began his City Hall career as Assistant General Manager for Finance at the PUC, a position he held for seven years before becoming City Controller 17 years ago, Harrington told us, "This is not the perfect way to walk into a position. Susan and I are old friends, she’s been very gracious, and has made it known that I had nothing to do with her removal. And I’m trying to be gracious. There’s no need to criticize her."

Leal, who calls Harrington a friend, said she believes Harrington "will push a little bit, but how much independence he can take and preserve remains the question."

Neither Sklar nor representatives from the Mayor’s Office returned calls from the Guardian. But Sup. Chris Daly, who saved Sklar’s neck by leaving the board one vote short of the supermajority required to reject a PUC mayoral appointee, told us, "I don’t think Sklar is Newsom’s tool. He’s bigger than that. If I thought he was not independent from PG&E, I wouldn’t have voted from him."

In fact, he said perceived lack of PG&E independence was why he joined seven other supervisors in voting against reappointing Ryan Brooks, who Newsom then nominated to the Planning Commission on the same day Leal was fired.

Building green in SF

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Wind turbines and solar panels may soon sprout on San Francisco rooftops as the city considers rival plans to implement mandatory green design standards for new residential and commercial buildings.

One ordinance proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Green Building Task Force would require new commercial construction of more than 5,000 square feet, residential buildings above 75 feet, and renovations to buildings of more than 25,000 square feet to be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certified by 2012, the second-highest designation.

The U.S. Green Building Council developed the point-based LEED system based on numerous green factors. The lowest green standard is LEED Certified, followed by Silver, Gold, and Putf8um. The new Academy of Sciences building, with the country’s largest living roof, is LEED Putf8um.

Newsom’s legislation would start off by mandating requiring only the lowest standard, LEED Certified, which requires 26 points, and gradually move to LEED Gold by 2012. But Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin has introduced an ordinance that would require the same buildings to immediately earn LEED Gold certification.

According to the LEED system, most existing buildings already have between 18 to 22 points, so Newsom’s proposed goal should be fairly easily attainable. A bike rack outside a building qualifies for 1 point. Proximity to mass transit gains another point, and Muni runs within two blocks of 90 percent of all San Francisco residences, according to the Municipal Transportation Agency.

At a green building standards workshop Feb. 20 at the San Francisco Green Party’s office, about 20 people voiced their concerns with the ordinances in front of three city commissioners.

"We need to correct the language to include all buildings," said panelist Patricia Gerber, a member of the city’s Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force. The San Francisco Office of Economic Analysis last year concluded both proposed ordinances would impact only 38 percent of the construction industry. "We should look to Europe for inspiration," Gerber recommended. "They have much stricter standards."

Some European nations started mandatory green construction in the mid-’90s, but critics say the United States has lagged.

"There are no minimum requirements on windows, insulation, and leaks," Gerber told the Guardian, describing the proposed ordinances. "LEED is a joke."

But Mark Westlund, spokesman for the Department of the Environment, defended Newsom’s longer LEED certification timeline. "We want to develop a green building plan that business can work with," he told us.

The Green Building Task Force claims that businesses need time to adjust to the higher costs associated with green materials, such as EnergyStar windows, can reduce heating costs by 30 to 40 percent. "They’re expensive because they’re used on a small scale. The minute they require it, it will become cheaper," John Rizzo, Green Party member and City College Trustee, told the audience. "It would be great if this could be done on a statewide level."

Panelists noted that green buildings save money in energy costs over the long run. Another criticism raised at the workshop was the Newsom plan’s loopholes. "Even if a project is approved green, it might not end up green," Gerber told us. If a construction company runs out of money for example, it can ask the planning director to waive LEED certification.

In addition, the event attendees questioned the credibility of the mayor’s Green Building Task Force, which does not include any environmentalists. Rather, it is composed of developers, financiers, architects, and engineers.

"We feel it represents a good variety of industry people, and so far we haven’t received any negative responses on the ordinance," Mark Palmer, San Francisco’s green building coordinator, told us.

Smaller residential buildings in San Francisco will not require LEED certification, but could be required to follow a GreenPoint scorecard developed by Berkeley nonprofit Build It Green.

Newsom’s ordinance will be presented March 19 at the Building Inspection Commission, which has already forwarded Peskin’s measure to he Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee. According to Peskin’s office, the two ordinances will likely be combined once supervisors decide which standard to seek.

The Market-Octavia mess

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EDITORIAL A remarkable thing is happening in the area surrounding Market and Octavia streets: middle-class neighborhood groups, often accused of being NIMBYs, are actually asking for more affordable housing and less parking.

The Duboce Triangle Neighborhood Association, one of the oldest community groups on the east side of the city, and the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, want the city to make some important changes in the sweeping Market-Octavia plan, which will transform the area with close to 6,000 new housing units.

And what they’re asking for is eminently reasonable, entirely in sync with the city’s existing planning policies, and perhaps the only way to make the comprehensive area plan acceptable. The City Planning Commission refused to go along with the neighbors; the supervisors need to change that.

This isn’t a tiny neighborhood issue: the Market-Octavia plan is not only a huge policy issue involving a large chunk of the city; the outcome will set the stage for the epic battle over the Eastern Neighborhoods plan, which will guide development in the city’s last urban frontier.

City planners have been working on the document since 2000, and it’s gone through many different drafts. The current version, which will come before the Board of Supervisors next week, has the elements of a progressive plan, developed with neighborhood input. But it’s badly lacking in several key areas:

•<\!s>Affordable housing. The plan calls for constructing 5,960 new residential units over the next 20 years — and 460 of those will be built under the direction of the Redevelopment Agency whether the plan is approved or not. So the Market-Octavia plan by itself involves 5,500 units — and only 960 of those will be sold below market rate.

Let’s remember here: market rate is upward of $500,000 for a studio or small one-bedroom unit. And only a fraction of the "affordable" units will be available to people making less than about $70,000 a year.

So most of what is planned here is housing for the rich. And if the pattern we’ve seen with market-rate condos downtown and South of Market continues here (in a neighborhood with easy access to the freeway), this will be housing for rich commuters who work in Silicon Valley, and rich out-of-towners who want a pied-à-terre in the city.

The city’s only General Plan — the document that’s supposed to drive all land-use policy — states very clearly that 64 percent of all new housing ought to be affordable. If that standard were applied here, 3,520 affordable units (not 960) would be included in the plan. That means the plan is 2,560 affordable units short of meeting existing city policy.

Housing activist Calvin Welch has put together a work sheet on this, and he concludes that developers would have to pay about $60 per square foot to the city to meet that standard. Over the 20 years slated for the Market-Octavia project, the cost of meeting those affordability goals would reach $1.3 billion.

There’s another side to this too: A December 2006 study by Keyser Marston Associates, prepared for the Planning Department, shows that every 100 new market-rate condo units built in San Francisco creates an additional demand for 25 new affordable units. Why? The new wealthy residents spend money on goods and services (from restaurants to laundry) that create much lower-paying jobs. Those workers need a place to live too — or they wind up commuting from the far suburbs, placing additional pressure on transportation systems and undermining efforts at building an environmentally sustainable community.

Part of the Market-Octavia plan includes new retail outlets. Where will those workers live?

Welch, the neighborhood groups, and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who is spearheading the drive for more affordable housing, agree that it’s probably unrealistic to force developers to pay $60 a square foot. But they also agree that the plan on the table today does little to meet the needs of the community or the city as a whole. They’re proposing a very modest new fee of $10 a square foot — money the developers can absolutely afford — to help the city meet a small portion of the affordability burden.

That supervisors need to approve that fee. Without it, the plan is a farce.

•<\!s>Parking and transportation. This is supposed to be a transit-first plan, and in the early drafts it was. Now, at the final stages, the Planning Department has changed it to add a lot more parking.

That creates two problems: Obviously, it encourages car use (and makes it more likely that the units will be sold to commuters who see San Francisco as a bedroom community). It also drives up the price of housing: building garage space for cars can add as much as $150,000 per unit to the construction costs — and frankly, condos with parking cost more than condos without parking.

In a lot of neighborhood development battles, the current residents are the ones demanding more off-street parking. In this case, the neighborhood groups totally get it: they have asked that parking be strictly limited, with only one parking space allowed for every four units in some areas (and as much as three spaces for every four units under some conditions in other areas). The Planning Commission wants much more parking — in fact, the department’s proposal would allow one space for every two-bedroom unit. That’s supposed to help families — but in many cases, those second bedrooms will become home offices for the wealthy, who will drive their cars to work.

That makes no economic or political sense. (In fact, less than half the housing units in the neighborhood today have off-street parking.) The supervisors should go with the neighborhood option.

The board also needs to mandate that the actual public transit infrastructure that’s needed gets built out as the new housing is constructed.

•<\!s>Street-level environmental impacts. The plan envisions 400-foot residential towers in the area closer to Van Ness and Market — and that part of town already has serious problems with high-rise-driven wind gusts. The federal government had a chance to build its new office building at 10th and Market streets, but refused the site because its wind studies showed the gusts would actually be a physical hazard to people walking to the building. The city needs to do a real study of how shadows and wind affect people on the street before it approves any more high-rises.

•<\!s>Jobs for the community. The plan needs to include written mandates that the developers offer construction jobs to local residents, particularly to unemployed San Franciscans in the eastern neighborhoods. This is the sort of thing that project sponsors always promise and rarely deliver; it needs to be codified in law.

The Market-Octavia plan could be a tremendous success, a way to take land that was once in the shadow of a freeway and turn it into a thriving, sustainable community. But the supervisors first have to fix the mess that the Planning Department created by adopting Mirkarimi’s amendments — and if they can’t do that, this entire thing needs to be put on hold and rewritten.

Ryan Brooks plays Musical Chairs

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Yesterday, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced he was appointing Ryan Brooks to the Planning Commission.
That announcement necessarily meant that someone else on the Planning Commission was about to get bumped.

And today, the Planning Commission announced that the Mayor had accepted the resignation of Planning Commission President Dwight Alexander.

The latter move wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the shenanigans that occurred behind the scenes at the Planning Commission earlier this year.
And nor was the former, given that Sups. Sophie Maxwell and Bevan Dufty both expressed support for the idea of appointing Brooks to another commission, when they rejected his reappointment to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission last week.

But with Alexander gone, it remains to be seen who ends up as the new Commission president, and what course the Commission—and the Planning Department’s new director John Rahaim—choose to steer in 2008…Stay tuned.

No shelter from the budget storm

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› news@sfbg.com

Arriving at the steps of Buster’s Place on a cold night is a familiar, comforting act for many of the city’s chronic homeless people. Or rather, it was until recently, when a sign was posted informing clients the facility will be closing its doors for the first time in almost a year.

Buster’s Place, the only centrally located 24-hour drop-in center in San Francisco, is on the chopping block to meet the demands of one of the city’s most drastic midyear budget cuts in recent history. The $1 million cut (roughly the one-year operating cost of Buster’s) is only a piece of the $9.25 million the city’s Department of Human Services must trim from its annual spending.

Buster’s has logged more than 34,000 visits from an estimated 700 clients in the past year. The center serves all walks of life, from lonely elders to those who cannot manage the complex shelter reservation system to newcomers who don’t know where to turn. While staff and resources are limited, Buster’s provides easy access to essential facilities like showers, bathrooms, and laundry rooms. It’s the stop of last resort, as I learned during my recent undercover investigation (see "Shelter Shuffle," 2/13/07, and "Search for Shelter," on the Guardian‘s SF blog).

"There’s a need for this place," Louis Ramon, who is the only case manager working at Buster’s and has been at the center since it opened, told the Guardian. "This is where the too sick, the too paranoid, the too mentally ill come who cannot be housed. Nobody is working with these clients — the really hardcore ones."

Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director for the Coalition on Homelessness, has been a leading advocate for 24-hour homeless centers and is pressuring city hall to reinstate funds to carry Buster’s through the end of the year.

"It’s frustrating when the mayor makes random and arbitrary decisions without consulting relevant community-based organizations or the homeless themselves," Friedenbach told us. "This is another attempt by the mayor to put a nail in the coffin of overnight shelters."

In a Feb. 14 press conference Mayor Gavin Newsom held with Dariush Kayhan, his newly appointed homeless czar, Newsom discussed plans to redesign the city’s shelter system, as well as the midyear budget cuts. "We’ve got a lot of resources that are being spent, but they could be spent more wisely by coordinating strategies," he said.

"With respect to 24-7 access, we’re going to have that with the [Mobile Assistance Patrol] vans, to ensure that people still have that. People can, in rare instances, come to the shelters directly if they’re in a dire emergency and access a bed if needed," Kayhan said. "And we also want to engage those folks because we don’t think sitting in chairs, around the clock, at night — and especially since a lot of those folks are seniors and disabled — that’s not a proper place to be."

Less than five months after it opened last year, Buster’s was slated to close during the regular fiscal-year budgeting last June. Homeless advocates came to Buster’s rescue and had the Board of Supervisors reinstate most of the funding for the center.

However, many homeless advocates and Department of Public Health officials are less optimistic about this round of budget reductions. For one thing, midyear cuts are generally more reactionary, made with little public deliberation, and made because the deficit is bigger than expected.

"This year is much different because the amount of money we need to cut is much more severe," said David Nakanishi, coordinator for community programs at the DPH and responsible for spearheading the planning of Buster’s Place. "Last year Buster’s was the only cut being made to homeless programs, so the community could rally around that one issue. The fiscal situation is much more dire this year. The supervisors will probably not reinstate the money."

Sup. Chris Daly, whose District 6 includes Buster’s Place, isn’t optimistic. "I will fight, but I won’t be successful," he told us, referring to his reduced power on the board after being removed as chair of the Budget Committee last year. "The cut list resembles very closely the list of board priorities from last year. The board cannot compel the mayor to spend."

Over the past year, Buster’s Place has had an uncertain future. The center was created after the temporary closing of the McMillan Drop-in Center, the city’s previous 24-hour drop-in center, at 39 Fell Street. Homeless-rights advocates campaigned for the creation of a 24-hour facility until Daly lobbied the DPH to keep an all-night drop-in center open. The city then contracted the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics to open Buster’s.

However, since the DPH established the center on a short timetable, it did not follow standard procedures for awarding the contract. The DPH is now going through a request-for-proposals process for a 24-hour drop-in center. Of course, if the midyear cuts are approved, this process will stop.

During a night at Buster’s, visitors can count on a few things: hard plastic chairs, restless sleep (if any), and good conversation with familiar faces. While Buster’s provides 24-hour shelter, it also serves as an important social hub for the homeless community. Elisa Frank, who handles shelter reservations through the city’s CHANGES system at the 150 Otis Street administrative office, sends up to 60 people per night to wait for beds at Buster’s.

"Buster’s is a community for a lot of people. They want supervision so they’re not just on the street doing dirt. Some people even have houses. Some who are in [single-room occupancies] and even some who just live alone come to Buster’s just for company," she told us.

One 31-year-old homeless client at Buster’s told us he has been in and out of shelters and illegal housing for most of his life. He has been staying at Buster’s occasionally over the past year and hopes to get his own apartment.

"When I don’t have a place to stay, I get suicidal," he told the Guardian on a chilly night outside Buster’s. "More people are going to die on the street if this place closes."

Moth Madness

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adultLBAMoth.jpg
Good to see the plan to spray the Bay Area with Little Brown Apple Moth-related pesticide get major ink in the Chronicle.

While the debate rages over as to whether spraying a pheromone-containing pesticide over urban areas is an efficient and public health-protective way to deal with the moth, one thing is for sure.

Having small planes fly low over your home for hours on end is extremely unpleasant.

“It was like an air raid,” is how a friend who lives in Santa Cruz described her experience of the aerial spraying that took place in Santa Cruz last fall, using crop dusters. in a questionable effort to completely eradicate this tiny moth.

“Their engines sounded like motorbikes, only overhead,” says my source, adding that though she did experience any adverse health effects, “the experience was very invasive.”

“The worst part is knowing it could happen again and again, for years,” she adds.

To find out what the California Department of Food and Agriculture is planning for your region, check their website

And to see what citizens opposed to the spraying think, check out the California Alliance to Stop the Spray‘s site.
adultLBAMoth.jpg

Team Newsom’s $$$ value. More or less.

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Before we get to the juicy details of how much money Team Newsom is taking home, it’s worth noting that Mayor Gavin Newsom spent last Friday handing out draft copies of the report in which these figures can be found–a report that Budget Analyst Harvey Rose drew up at Sup. Jake McGoldrick’s request to figure out the impacts that staff changes within the Mayor’s Office would have on the City’s budget–changes Newsom announced Jan. 4.

It’s also worth noting that Rose didn’t know that Newsom Chief of Staff Phil Ginsburg was standing around last Friday telling the press that his report was a piece of “bull-.”, until the press called him later that same day and asked him for a comment.

And that all this unauthorized report distribution and undefended “bullshit” calling was happening just five weeks after Newsom announced that the City is facing a $229 million budget deficit and that therefore the city must implement an immediate hiring freeze and across-the-board departmental budget cuts.

Unlike Sups. Chris Daly or Aaron Peskin, who are more typically the targets of the mayor’s famously snippy wrath, Rose isn’t a politician, but a widely respected analyst, and so Team Newsom could hardly accuse him of “political theater”.

Instead, Ginsburg told the Chronicle that, “The budget analyst has no understanding of how salaries work in this city,” while Newsom made the vague claim that, “It’s personal.”

But however much they tried to put a negative spin on Rose report, Team Newsom could not deny that it paints an unflattering picture of the Mayor’s Office as a place that is using over $1 million from other departmental budgets to make new hires and increase the salaries of staff that are assigned to the Mayor.

As Rose reports “The Mayor’s practice of including positions assigned to the Mayor’s Office, but funded in the budgets of the Municipal Transportation Agency, the Human Services Agency and the Planning Department Budgets, understates the Mayor’s Office’s budgeted and actual costs for such positions, while such costs are overstated in those three other Departmental budgets.”

Rose’s report found that

a) The estimated total increased annual salary and fringe benefits costs of the 17 newly-appointed department directors to replace existing directors, and the ten Mayor’s Office staff appointments, two of which are completely new functions, are $553,716.

b) Other City departments fund about $1.34 million in annual salary and fringe benefits for ten positions assigned to the Mayor’s Office, including the mayor’s new climate change director Wade Crowfoot and new Homelessness Policy Director Dariush Kayhan.

c) The costs of appointing Ed Harrington, as General Manager of the SF Public Utilities Commission, Ben Rosenfield as Controller, Mirian Saez, as Interim Director of the San Francisco Housing Authority, and Jordanna Thigpen, as Acting Director of the Taxi Commission have yet to be announced.

d) Terminating Susan Leal, General Manager of the SF PUC, without cause, as is Newsom’s stated intention, will add a further $401,392 to City costs.

e) the mayor’s Office is also recruiting for a replacement to the CityBuild Director, at a cost of $144,596.

In face of these dicey accounting practices, Rose suggests that the Board of Supervisors rescind funding for positions assigned to the Mayor’s Office but included in other departments’ budgets, and the cost of these positions, estimated to be $898, 718, could then come from the Mayor’s General Fund monies.

The Board, says Rose, could also eliminate MTA funding for Mayor’s Office positions which do not directly benefit the MTA’s core functions. Those positions could then be funded, Rose reports, to the tune of $240,943, from the Mayor’s Office’s General Fund monies.

Rose’s report also notes that, “The newly appointed Climate Protective Initiatives Director is a new function unrelated to the MTA’s Safety and Training Unit,” even though the position if currently being funded through monies set aside for that unit.

And now, here are the figures, taken directly from Rose’s report, which show who, on Team Newsom, is making more or less, compared to previous directors and appointees:

Team Newsom t heads making more than Predecessors (the “Gimmee More” gang)

Kevin Ryan, Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice: $160,862—$42,848 more.

Joyce Hicks, Director Office of Citizen Complaints: $$171,262—$42,276 more.

John Rahaim, Director Planning Department, $210,000—$34,422 more.

Michael Cohen, Director Mayor’s Office of Economic And Workforce Development,
$193,570—$33,930 more.

Mike Farrah, Director Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services: $120,900—$28,340 more

Adrienne Pon, Director Mayor’s Office of Community Development: $143,123—$12,993 more.

Luis Cancel, Arts Commission Director: $140,000—$8,648 more.

Chris Iglesias, Director Human Rights Commission: $149,058—$3,146 more.

Team Newsom members making less than Predecessors:

Ed Reiskin, Director, Department of Public Works: $195,000—$25,419 less

Fred Blackwell, Director, SF Redevelopment Agency: $178,724—$18,000 less

Nancy Alfaro, Director, 311, $149,058—$15,942 less

Micki Callahan, Director, Human Resources, $195,000—$9,672 less.

Anita Sanchez, Executive Director, Civil Service Commission, $128,752—$6,986 less.

Cristine Soto-DeBerry, Mayor’s Liasion to the Board of Supervisors: $91,000—$6,084 less.

Appointments to New Functions

Dariush Kayhan, Homeless Policy Director, $169.624
Wade Crowfoot, Climate Protection Initiatives Director, $130,112

Appointments to Existing Functions

Nancy Kirschner Rodriguez, Director of Government Affairs, $143,123—$19,207 more.

Dwayne Jones, Director of Community Engagement and Communities of Opportunity: $143, 123—$14, 371 more.

Catherine Dodd, Deputy Chief of Staff for Health and Human Services: $143, 123—$4,513 more.

Maya Dillard-Smith, Violence prevention Director, $91,520—$4,342 more)

Astrid Haryati, Greening Director, $111, 228—no change.

Jason Chan, Mayor’s Liasion to Commissions, $81,276 ($13,442 less.

Erin Hicks, State and Federal Affairs, tba.

The Salary ‘To Be Announced” Gang.
Ed Harrington, General Manager, SF PUC—tba
Ben Rosenfield, Controller
Mirian Saez, Interim Director, SF housing Authority,
Jordanna Thigpen, Acting Director, Taxi Commission.

Super lessons

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› news@sfbg.com

The Super Fat Tuesday presidential primary election in San Francisco was marked by some portentous trends and factors that could have a big impact on who becomes the Democratic Party nominee — and whether that person will be accepted as the people’s legitimate choice.

Consider the scene the night before the election. A small army of young people made its way up Market Street carrying signs and pamphlets supporting their candidate, Barack Obama, taking up positions outside Muni and BART stations and on high-profile corners to spread the message of change.

Meanwhile, inside the Ferry Building, Mayor Gavin Newsom and former president Bill Clinton convened one of several "town hall meetings" held simultaneously around the country to promote the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who checked in on a satellite feed.

Among the many luminaries on hand was State Sen. Carole Migden, a superdelegate (one of 71 from California) who has not yet pledged her support to either Clinton or Obama and who could ultimately play a huge role in determining the nominee. Migden made a show of exchanging pleasantries with the former president, warmly embracing him in front of a crowd of about 250 people and more than a dozen news cameras before taking a seat nearby.

But Election Day was for the regular citizens, and once their votes were counted and analyzed, a couple of things became clear. Clinton won California with the absentee ballots that she had been banking for weeks thanks to her deeply rooted campaign organization. Her margin of victory among early voters was about 20 percentage points.

Yet a late surge of support for Obama caused him to win at the polls on Election Day, leading to his outright victory in San Francisco by a margin of about 15,000 votes, or almost 8 percentage points. It was a symbolic victory for progressives on the Board of Supervisors, who backed Obama while Newsom campaigned heavily for Clinton (see "Who Wants Change?," 1/30/08).

Obama and Clinton were close enough in California and the rest of the Super Fat Tuesday states that they almost evenly split the pledged delegates (those apportioned based on the popular vote). But if present trends continue, even after Obama’s sweep of four states that voted the weekend after California, neither he nor Clinton will have captured the 2,025 delegates they need to secure the nomination before August, when the Democratic National Convention convenes in Denver.

That means the nomination could be decided by superdelegates such as Migden, a group comprising congresspeople and longtime Democratic Party activists, from party chair Art Torres down to those with key family connections, such as Christine Pelosi and Norma Torres.

And that could be a nightmare scenario for a party that hopes to unify behind a campaign to heal the country’s divisions.

Political analyst David Latterman, president of Fall Line Analytics in San Francisco, said this election was marked by a higher than expected turnout and more people than usual voting on Election Day rather than earlier. In San Francisco turnout was more than 60 percent, including an astounding 88.4 percent among Democrats.

"In the last couple weeks there was a strong get-out-the-vote push by Obama’s people," Latterman said during a postelection wrap-up at the downtown office of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), which he delivered along with campaign consultant Jim Stearns.

Latterman said that Obama surge, which drew out voters who were generally more progressive than average, may have been the margin that pushed Proposition A, the $185 million parks bond, to victory. It trailed among absentee voters but ended up less than five points above the 66.6 percent threshold it needed to pass.

"I don’t know if this would have passed or not if it had not been for the Obama push at the end," Latterman said.

Stearns agreed, saying, "In some ways, we should name every park in the city Obama Park."

At the measure’s election-night party at Boudin Bakery on Fisherman’s Wharf (where some of the bond money will renovate Pier 43), Yes on A campaign consultant Patrick Hannan told us he was worried as the initial results came in.

"That is a high threshold to hit," he said of the two-thirds approval requirement for bond measures.

But as the crowd nibbled on crab balls and sourdough bread, the results moved toward the more comfortable level of around 72 percent support, prompting great joyful whoops of victory.

Recreation and Park Department executive director Yomi Agunbiade acknowledged that the decision to place the measure on the February ballot rather than June’s was a leap of faith made in the hopes that the presidential election would cause a high turnout of Democrats.

"We’re excited," Agunbiade said at the party. "This was a hard-fought race that involved getting a lot of people out in the field and letting folks know what this was about — and we’re definitely riding the wave of high voter turnout."

The strong turnout helped Obama win half of the Bay Area counties, Sacramento, and much of the coast, including both the liberal north coast and the more conservative Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

But Clinton’s advantages of socking away early absentee votes and her popularity with certain identity groups — notably Latino, Asian, and LGBT — helped her win California.

Yet Obama’s appeal reaches beyond Democratic Party voters. He got some late support from prominent local Green Party leaders, even though their party’s candidates include former Georgia congressional representative Cynthia McKinney and maybe Ralph Nader (see "Life of the Party," 1/16/08).

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a founder of the California Green Party who also worked on Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, announced his endorsement of Obama at the candidate’s Super Fat Tuesday event at the Fairmont San Francisco. Mirkarimi also noted the support of Greens Mark Sanchez, president of the San Francisco Board of Education, and Jane Kim, the highest vote getter in the school board’s last race.

"I registered Green because I felt their values were closer to mine," Kim, who left the Democratic Party in 2004, later told the Guardian. "But I’ve always endorsed whoever I thought was the best candidate for any office…. I saw Obama as a candidate taking politics in a different direction that I hadn’t seen a national candidate take things before."

If Obama’s campaign can continue to develop as a growing movement running against the status quo, he could roll all the way into the White House. But it’s equally possible to imagine the Clintons using their deep connections with party elders to muscle the superdelegates into making Hillary the nominee.

Stearns said this scenario could hurt the party and the country: "I can’t imagine a worse outcome for the Democratic Party than to have Obama go into the convention ahead on delegates he’s won and have Hillary Clinton win on superdelegates."

Amanda Witherell and David Carini contributed to this report.

Accidental tranny

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Guilty! I’m totally real-time guilty. Yeps, frenz, I’m that spastic whore on the dance floor whooping like a neon cough, flinging my Mary Kate triceps up when a thump drops in the mix. If a club has one of those heinous black lights at the door, I sneak in the back so no one spots the glowing spunk on my skirt or my phosphorescent VCR. I always ask for extra antioxidant-rich lychees in my pomegranatini, to offset the American Spirits. OK, I’ve blown the DJ. And although I’ve never stuffed a tube sock down my sequined thong or Botoxed my rosy areolae, those are my fake digits you just beamed into your contacts, sweetness. Thanks for the pomegranatini. Call me!

Also, I take things for granted. Some parties in this town have been around since Y2K was ripped-knee-high to a troll doll (New Wave City, 1984, Popscene, Death Guild, Red Wine Social, Qoöl). I’ve surely enjoyed them all. But in my ravenous quest for novelty I’ve watched them gradually fade from my schedule, like tears of joy evaporating on a monitor. Thus I was shocked when word squirted down the pudding pipe that — after 12 years of lunatic antics at the Stud — weekly trash-drag frenzy Trannyshack was slamming its barn door shut in August. Just where the heck will club pervs get their weekly fix of "two trannies, one cup"?

"I never intended to become a professional drag queen, Marke B. It was almost an accident," Trannyshack hostess Heklina said, laughing groggily into the phone when I rang for dish. I’d woken her up: it was 2 p.m. "I was merely dabbling in drag when the Stud approached me a dozen years ago to fill the Tuesday night slot. It’s been wonderful, but I’m ready for a change — and I’m too much of a control freak to let Trannyshack go on without me."

The lady was feeling candid. "I’m done with punk-rock drag," she added. "I’m tired of feeling like I have to haul in my own amps, manage the entire bar, and clean up afterwards. At this point I simply want to walk onstage and have the light show ready and the sound board all cued up. And I want more challenges, to work more in theater, expand my horizons, travel, figure myself out. You get trapped in a persona. This great thing comes along, people love it, and then suddenly it’s your whole life. For 12 years. Time for a breather!"

Hold on to your panicked panties, though. "Trannyshack the brand isn’t going away," Heklina continued. "I’m working on making it a monthly party somewhere nice, and we’ll still do big events like the annual pageant, Trannyshack Reno, international gigs, and maybe bring back the cruise." The weekly Trannyshack’s planning to go out with a bang too: a countdown of greatest hits and command performances has begun, with Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters hosting Feb. 12 and an explosive 12th-birthday blowout Feb. 19.

Heklina is one of the OG rave-era club kids who made San Francisco fabulously unsafe at any speed, and Trannyshack freed drag from its Judy Garland fetters, flooding punk spirit — and oodles of bodily fluids — into the stalls of gay nightlife. The ‘Shack’s now venerable enough to be thought mainstream by some young turks, but it still feels like the scene’s bloody wig’s been yanked off.

TRANSPORTING How’s this for a leap of global proportions? The papacito of the nightlife’s global grooves movement, DJ Cheb i Sabbah — himself a proprietor of one of SF’s longest-running parties, 1002 Nights (now at Nickie’s in the Lower Haight on Tuesdays) — has just released another stunningly internationalist CD, Devotion (Six Degrees), and he’ll be throwing down, celebration-wise, at the huge returning one-off Worldly at Temple. Boosting Cheb’s subcontinental turntable wizardry live will be Pakistani vocalist Riffat Sultana and percussionists Salar Nadar and Mitch Hyare. Also trading on the tables: electrotabla etherealist Karsh Kale and bhangra breakster Janaka Selekta. Fold dem paper planes and twirl.

TRANNYSHACK

Tuesdays, 9 p.m., $8

Stud

399 Ninth St., SF

(415) 866-6623

www.studsf.com

www.trannyshack.com

CHEB I SABBAH AT WORLDLY

Sat/9, 10 p.m., $8

Temple

540 Howard, SF

www.templesf.com

www.chebisabbah.com

Chancellor Bling-Bling

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Outgoing City College of San Francisco chancellor Phil Day presided over major institutional changes during his decade-long tenure, although he leaves under a cloud of financial scandals involving the misuse of public funds. Now a Guardian review of public records shows the decision to reward Day handsomely and neglect recommended internal auditing controls set the scene for the problems to come.

Day’s high-end compensation and accompanying expense account allowed him to live well. His total compensation last year eclipsed that of the heads of 18 other two-year colleges across California surveyed by The Chronicle of Higher Education, which included community colleges for the first time in its 2007 analysis.

Day’s earnings totaled $403,441 for the fiscal year ending in 2007 and included $25,448 in retirement pay plus $31,975 in deferred compensation. He received $12,000 to cover housing expenses — one of only two chancellors who were awarded the benefit — and the state paid $7,200 more for a car.

No one else surveyed from California came close. The runner-up, at Rancho Santiago Community College, made $80,000 less than Day and received nothing for a home or a car. Chui L. Tsang, head of a two-year college in Santa Monica, where the median home value is higher than in San Francisco, received about $30,000 toward housing and automobile expenses but earned a whopping $140,000 less than Day in total compensation.

Darroch Young, former chancellor of the community college district in Los Angeles, which has more students than any other in the country, earned almost $100,000 less than Day, who first joined City College in 1998. Day even made more money than the chancellors at six University of California campuses, including San Diego, Irvine, Davis, and Santa Cruz.

"Raw politics" was how trustee Julio Ramos described it to the Guardian. "The chancellor has had the majority on the Board of Trustees at City College," Ramos said. "Like with any majority, he can dictate the terms of his compensation package."

Trustee Milton Marks, who along with Ramos represents a frequently critical minority on the school’s independently elected board, added that the terms of Day’s contract were crafted before Marks and others ran for open seats on a reform slate.

As long as the board extended Day’s contract each year, it was difficult to slow his salary increases without convincing a majority to start from scratch and reevaluate his performance to determine if his compensation was reasonable. But it’s too late for that now. Day is leaving the school March 1 for a new job on the East Coast, but Marks wants the next chancellor to receive increases "that are not so rigidly tied to a formula."

Day’s compensation is a small fraction of the school’s $375 million budget. But it reflects the district’s priorities, and a recently unveiled 232-page internal probe of campaign law violations at the college stemming from a 2005 bond election offers a telling look at how the school has been operated under Day’s leadership.

To conduct the investigation, the school hired Steven Churchwell of the multinational law firm DLA Piper, the same group that examined steroids in major-league baseball for former senator George Mitchell. One of first things Churchwell did when he arrived at the school was to search for City College’s internal auditor. He soon discovered, however, that the college doesn’t have an internal auditor or an audit committee.

"It’s very common to have an internal auditor at an entity of this size," Churchwell told the school at a Jan. 24 meeting.

Outside auditors inspect the school’s books annually as required by law to make sure it’s following the rules of basic money management, a limited review compared to what an internal auditor, working full-time for the district, might check.

The Guardian reviewed the school’s annual outside audits going back several years and discovered that each of the reports between 1998 and 2003 advised the school to hire someone to do the job year-round internally.

"Regular internal audits enable timely detection of accounting inconsistencies and deviations from established policies and procedures," the reports state year after year. But each year the inspectors found anew that their recommendations were "not implemented."

Regarding the headline-grabbing mess that began when two school bureaucrats in separate instances illegally diverted public funds to a campaign committee, Churchwell said its causes were mistakes due more to ignorance than knowing attempts to break the law.

"It’s almost like lightning striking twice," Churchwell told the school.

But now it appears the storm might have been averted if Day and others in his administration had listened to the school’s outside auditors 10 years ago. Churchwell concluded that an internal auditor might have immediately caught election law violations but without one "no one person has a firm grasp on all the accounts that are open, what they are used for, or who can deposit checks into them," leading to a "glaring lack of oversight of the college’s involvement in fundraising from college contractors."

Day didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did trustees Lawrence Wong or Anita Grier. But vice chancellor Peter Goldstein argued that the school would set the agenda for an internal auditor, so such a person might focus on how the district reports student attendance or manages financial aid, not necessarily on accounts receivable.

"My response would be that this is a very large and complicated institution from several different perspectives, including the financial one," Goldstein told the Guardian. "While no single person may have a complete understanding of every single account, I believe that we have enough professional staff at the right level with the right background over all the accounts."

It could be that like many bureaucrats, Day is threatened by the possibility of an efficiency expert roaming the school’s halls and compromising the administration’s control over its bank accounts. But Day complained at the Jan. 24 meeting that City College just didn’t have the resources to hire an internal auditor, even though auditors often find enough ways to reduce wasteful spending that they cover their own expense and much more.

Not to mention that if Day had earned as much in compensation as his equivalent in Los Angeles, City College would have had about $100,000 left over for an internal auditor. A district report from 2000 even concluded that an internal auditor at that time would have cost about $105,000.

Two vice chancellors implicated in the election law violations, James Blomquist and Stephen Herman, earned about $200,000 and $170,000 respectively during the 2007 calendar year, compensation figures obtained by the Guardian through a records request.

Blomquist worked as a regular consultant to the school before earning $175,000 his first full year as a City College administrator in 2005. His firm, Blomquist Consultancy, made $401,074 from the college between April 2002 and May 2004, records show.

As for Day, his largest pay increase came after the 2005 bond election, when he was given an 18 percent raise for the 2006 calendar year. He received a 17 percent raise during the year of the 2001 bond election, when the school asked voters for $195 million.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed points out that compensation for community college presidents lags behind what the heads of four-year institutions tend to earn, despite their growing responsibilities, like courting major donors and lobbying legislators. The extreme exception, however, is Day, who last year ranked third nationally in earnings among 68 other community college heads.

"Do I feel guilty at all about being one of the highest-paid college presidents in the country?" Day asked the education rag’s surveyors in November 2007. "Absolutely not."

His supporters argue that Day has attracted millions of new dollars from Sacramento to the district, and along with the school’s trustees, he helped promote a February ballot initiative designed to ensure that a greater portion of the state’s General Fund go toward community colleges. The current formula used by the state for financing two-year schools hinges on how much money is set aside for California’s K–12 system.

Day also took over a school with crumbling buildings, some constructed in the early 20th century. When Day inherited the more than 90-year-old John Adams Campus in the Haight, its bricks were "falling off the side of the building," he said in a glossy 12-page advertorial the college ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Dec. 19, 2007.

The school floated two bond measures totaling about $458 million in 2001 and 2005 to complete projects citywide, but the latter was badly rushed. Poor planning and rising construction costs have forced the school to cancel projects promised to voters.

Diana Muñoz-Villanueva, a student representative on the Board of Trustees, said she lives on about $600 per month, "so I know there are ways to survive on less" than what the chancellor makes. But based on his duties, she said, "I think it’s fair. I hope to make that much money someday."

Day could nonetheless be taking a substantial pay cut for his new job in Washington DC, at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. According to its tax forms, the organization’s last president, Dallas Martin, who led the nonprofit for more than 30 years, earned about $250,000 during 2006 in pay and benefits.


—————————–

DAY FLIPS FROM THE FRYING PAN TO THE FIRE

Chancellor Phil Day’s departure from City College of San Francisco is not an indication that he’s easing into retirement. Instead, he’s crossing the country to join a controversy potentially hotter than anything he faced in politically rancorous San Francisco.

Day announced at the end of 2007 that he will be leaving the college in early March to accept the top job at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, one of the nation’s most powerful lobbying groups on issues related to higher education.

But the Washington DC nonprofit has spent the past year mired in a nationwide scandal over how student loan administrators at individual colleges promote certain bank lenders to students in exchange for kickbacks.

Six student loan administrators were fired or resigned and dozens of schools ceased entering into revenue-sharing agreements with lenders following an extensive investigation by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo.

Several schools agreed to reimburse borrowers — i.e., college students — millions of dollars as part of a series of settlements with Cuomo’s office, which is still investigating how major lenders market their products to needy students.

The organization Day is poised to take over has been suffering embarrassing waves of unwanted attention as a result. Officials from Cuomo’s office physically monitored the group’s annual convention last July to ensure that corporate sponsors from banking institutions didn’t ply student loan administrators with lobster dinners, iPods, DVD players, nighttime parties, or trips to vacation resorts, all types of incentives offered to attendees in the past.

In other cases, school employees in charge of handling student loans simultaneously held thousands of shares of stock in lending companies, earned tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from them, and served on their advisory boards.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has followed the investigations closely and quoted a lobbyist in mid-January describing the NASFAA as "radioactive" on Capitol Hill due to the widening tumult. A congressional inquiry led by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) revealed last September that a University of Southern California official accepted Rose Bowl tickets from Citibank, a major national player in student lending.

Aid officials at the University of Texas "were treated to ice cream, lasagna, barbecue, candy bars, popcorn, happy hours, birthday cakes, cookies, and other personal benefits," according to the report.

A spokesperson for the NASFAA refused to comment beyond a statement released following Day’s appointment. But Day told the group’s members in a recent e-mail that national headlines regarding the kickbacks "have diminished the significance of our contributions," and he hopes to ease the criticism by holding "listening sessions" around the country.

"We need to develop a public relations/marketing and communications offensive that paints a more complete and compelling picture of the difference we can make in students’ lives," Day wrote.

The scandal erupted around what are known as preferred lenders lists, which colleges and universities distribute to students struggling to navigate the complex world of school loans, where private banks compete aggressively with direct lending offered by the federal government.

Most students rely on their school’s list of preferred lenders to make a decision, so banking institutions do whatever it takes to get their name on those lists (or their logos on school paraphernalia), from showering student-loan bureaucrats with lucrative gifts to exclusively sponsoring athletic departments and alumni associations.

Schools and lenders have promised to abide by a new list of ethics rules, drafted by Cuomo’s office in addition to other settlement terms, to regulate their conduct, and to restore faith in financial aid administrators.

G-Spot: U R mine … and so are U

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› culture@sfbg.com

Whether you’re single or attached, Valentine’s Day can be rough: either you’re planning that perfect date, which can’t possibly meet your special someone’s expectations, or you’re lamenting the fact that you don’t have a special someone to disappoint. Either way, it’s nothing compared to what the polyamorous have to deal with.

In case you don’t know, polyamorous (despite sounding like some kind of chemical compound) is a term referring to people who are comfortable having multiple loving relationships in which all parties are aware of what is happening (i.e., Gavin Newsom’s arrangement doesn’t count). The word was coined by Morning Glory Ravenheart Zell in the late ’90s.

"I love the word," says Dossie Easton, coauthor of The Ethical Slut (Greenery Press, 1998), the how-to bible on polyamory. "It’s a beautiful word meaning ‘loving many.’<0x2009>"

But what does loving many people mean when it comes to Valentine’s Day, the holiday set aside to celebrate romantic love?

As you might expect, Valentine’s Day is not a simple affair for many members of the nonmonog community. The holiday, like the year-round polyamorous lifestyle, requires patience, tact, and one hell of a good scheduling system.

In fact, nature photographer and polyamorist Joe Decker says many of his peers call PalmPilots "PolyPilots." "You certainly hear a lot of jokes about it," Decker says. (Kind of changes your view of the middle-aged businessperson with a handheld planner, doesn’t it?)

L, a polyamorous woman from San Francisco who wishes to remain anonymous, agrees that Valentine’s Day can be complicated by time constraints. "Though your capacity for love might be great and unlimited and encompass a great number of people, you still only have 24 hours in your day," L says, noting that in some relationships the primary partner gets Valentine’s Day and the secondary gets the day before or after. In another case, one involving one woman and two men, the woman splits Valentine’s Day between her partners.

"Time management is definitely an issue," L says. "A day planner is a necessity."

In addition to the difficulties inherent in scheduling, Decker says, the way he chooses to celebrate Valentine’s Day can sometimes result in unintended tension between him and people who are unfamiliar with the polyamorous community. For example, one year he ordered flowers for two girlfriends and his wife — all at the same time. "There was nervous laughter on the other end of the phone. The teleflorist dealt with it pretty gracefully," Decker says.

But not all polys feel that holidays need to be complicated. According to Easton, who has practiced polyamory since 1969, celebrating Valentine’s Day is not that hard. "What you should do for Valentine’s Day is have a big party with a very large box of chocolates. Everybody can wear red — I love it — and practice openheartedness," she says. She points out that in a polyamorous relationship structure, there isn’t necessarily a need to choose whom to revel with. "There’s no reason why a dozen people can’t get together and celebrate Valentine’s Day," she says. "There’s no reason why you choose. Are we going to tell the kindergartners they can only give one Valentine’s Day card because they can only have one friend?"

Others point out that while there may be some extra scheduling and unique circumstances for people with multiple lovers, the basic principle of arranging a good Valentine’s Day — understanding partners’ expectations — is the same as for a conventional couple. For example, Decker makes an effort to find out what his lovers expect for Valentine’s Day ahead of time. In his case, one particular partner doesn’t care for the holiday, so they don’t celebrate it. "What I want to do in a relationship is something that’s a function of the other person’s want. I don’t just do whatever they want, but if a partner doesn’t like Valentine’s Day, it doesn’t give me a lot of joy to make her celebrate it," he says.

While talking with these people, I was struck by a couple of things. First of all, holidays for the polyamorous must get pretty expensive, if, for instance, Decker’s buying three bouquets for V Day is anything like a widespread practice. It seems a good idea for anyone considering polyamory to set aside some savings first, or maybe wait until the Christmas–Valentine’s Day season is over. And second, as someone who can barely manage her sock drawer, I don’t think I could handle the level of organization needed to maintain several relationships. And without the organization, says another anonymous polyamorist, B, jealousy problems (the biggest obstacles in poly relationships) are more likely to arise. I’m not sure I want to add day planner to the list of things I think of — candles, flowers, scented oils — when I imagine romance.

This Valentine’s Day, I think I will use my meager time-management skills to plan a simple holiday evening for me and myself: watching the original Star Trek series on DVD before falling asleep in front of the TV. No PalmPilot required.

Newsom’s fixers

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom is acting more and more like his predecessor, Willie Brown. It’s an alarming trend, and Newsom needs to take some steps right away to assure the public that he’s not letting political fixers run the city.

We’ve been seeing signs that Newsom is becoming more of an imperial mayor for months, ever since he launched his new administration with a demand that all of the department heads and commissioners resign. The idea, he said, was to bring a fresh start and new ideas to his second term — but he never explained exactly what those new ideas were or why the current city officials weren’t living up to them. And it was clear that some of his moves were motivated by nothing but politics: ousting Susan Leal as head of the Public Utilities Commission had nothing to do with her job performance and everything to do with the fact that she had been willing to challenge Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s power monopoly.

The shenanigans continue. As Sarah Phelan reported on sfbg.com last week, Newsom just attempted a coup at the Planning Commission, moving behind the scenes to oust Christina Olague, a progressive appointed by the supervisors, from her post as vice president. Newsom and his crew wanted to install his loyalists, Sue Lee and Mike Antonini, as president and vice president of the panel.

That move, sources told us, was orchestrated through Dean Macris, the former planning director who needs to get the hell out of that department. Macris still has his fingers firmly planted in the planning pie; he maintains an office in the department as a "liaison to the mayor."

The mayor has also managed to pad his own office’s budget while cutting key city services — and has, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported Jan. 25, used funny accounting to divert money from Muni to the Mayor’s Office payroll. And he continues to use the San Francisco International Airport as a place to put highly paid employees who have, at best, unclear job descriptions.

This is the sort of thing that led to Brown’s downfall: the voters, infuriated by backroom deals, voted nearly all of Brown’s allies out of office in 2000 and elected a Board of Supervisors that had a mandate to block the mayor’s worst initiatives.

Newsom has always insisted he’s a different type of politician than his predecessor and onetime mentor, and his future political career will depend on his ability to make that image stick. Brown’s reputation for corruption was the main reason he never had any hope of seeking or winning a statewide office.

If Newsom wants to avoid that fate, he can start with a few significant changes:

•<\!s>Knock off the secrecy and sleaze. If Newsom has a reason to replace a department head or commissioner — and there are good reasons to fire a bunch of them — he needs to make that public. If someone isn’t carrying out his policies, fine: explain what the policies are and where he and the official in question part ways. Don’t pull out the knives and do the dirty work of PG&E and the developers behind closed doors.

•<\!s>Be open about the jobs and the money. If the mayor really believes he needs a bunch of new $150,000-per-year aides, fine: take that money out of the General Fund and tell the public where it’s coming from. Budgets are displays of political priorities, especially in tight years, and the voters have a right to know what the mayor cares about most.

•<\!s>Keep the operatives out of City Hall. Brown had lobbyists and consultants cutting deals in room 200 almost every day. Newsom needs to make it clear that campaign advisors aren’t making policy or personnel decisions.

We have four more years of Newsom to go, and if he keeps up this kind of crap, he’s going to find himself fighting the board — and the voters — at every step.

Attempted Power Grab at the Planning Commission

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A mayoral power grab was narrowly thwarted at the San Francisco Planning Commission in a 4-3 vote, Jan. 17.

Commission Vice President Christina Olague led the counter charge against perceived interference from the Mayor’s Office, questioning why there was a proposal to continue election of the Commission’s President and Vice President to Feb. 7, 2008.
According to Commission regulations, the election of these officers typically takes place on the first meeting after January 15, and Olague said she saw no point in postponing the election, which had originally been scheduled for January 17.

Olague acknowledged that Mayor Gavin Newsom requested the mass resignation of his department heads and commission appointees, last fall. But she also noted that the January 7, 2008 deadline for Newsom to accept the resignations had already come and gone.

More video art: Malkoff and Mix-a-lot

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In honor of our cover story about video art, I’ve decided to share my favorite videos of the week. Are they worthy of a SFMOMA installation? Probably not. But are they art? I say yes. Here’s why:

Mark Lives in IKEA

So comedian/filmmaker Mark Malkoff (famous for going to every Starbucks in Manhattan in one day) decides to move into an IKEA while his apartment gets fumigated. And they let him.

The genius of this? First, that he thought of the idea at all. Second, that he actually convinced IKEA to let him do it. And most importantly, the amount of work and planning it must’ve taken to compose and edit these “reality” segments (including getting IKEA staff and even his wife involved), which are actually quite funny and endearing. If Mark weren’t in New York, already married, and likely to put the whole thing on YouTube, I’d totally hit that – for his brilliance alone (and cuz I like the geeky glasses thing).

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There’s a January report from the San Francisco Controller’s Office that says the city’s transportation policy is failing.

It doesn’t say that in so many words — that might have gotten some media attention — but the implication is clear.

The report is on the taxicab industry, always a fascinating topic, and it’s filled with charts and graphs discussing how much money the cab companies make and how little the drivers make. But in the middle of all of that is a remarkable paragraph that says:

"The resident population in San Francisco appears to be increasing. Since 2000, the Department of Finance reports it has grown by 4.7 percent, or by approximately 0.6 percent per year. Although the Census Bureau believes San Francisco lost population from 2000 to 2005, it too has reported population increase since 2005. Muni trips have slightly declined over the same period — a cumulative negative change of 2.5 percent — while vehicle registrations in San Francisco have increased by 1.5 percent. This suggests that residents may be substituting away from mass transit and into private and personal transport modes."

That reads like, well, a Controller’s Office report, but here’s the translation: More San Franciscans are driving cars. Fewer are taking Muni. It’s not exactly shocking news to anyone who pays attention to traffic patterns in town, but it’s a serious indictment of city policy.

The statistics show a couple of things. One is that the city is, indeed, getting richer — generally speaking, wealthier people are more likely to use private cars. Another is that Muni hasn’t been performing: all of the national and local data show there’s a direct correlation between on-time transit service and ridership (and of course there’s a direct, or rather inverse, correlation between the number of people riding Muni and the number of cars on the streets.)

But what it says to me is that city hall doesn’t really consider the car glut a top priority.

There is no official city goal to reduce the number of cars in town or the number of car miles traveled or the number of vehicles on the streets. The city Planning Department continues to base its land-use decisions on projections of increased car traffic (which has to be accommodated with more garages). Nobody’s calling for a five-year plan to turn the trend around.

It’s going to be a big year for transit policy: the city’s Transit Effectiveness Study comes out in February, and the report on congestion management should be done in June. Perhaps the supervisors can use that information to create goals, timelines, and programs that will reduce — instead of accommodate — cars on the streets.

I’m part of the problem, and I know it: I drive a car, and I drive it too often. I do it because it’s difficult to get my kids to and from school on a bus.

That’s one of the tricky parts of this equation (school buses in a city where everyone has choice and kids from any neighborhood can go to any school), but I have to say, the parking lot at McKinley Elementary School is packed every single morning with people driving schoolkids. You’d think the city could work with the San Francisco Unified School District — maybe organize car pools. Maybe the mayor’s $130,000 per year global warming coordinator could get involved.

We could start with a citywide survey: Why do you drive? Where? What would get you out of your car? Aim for 5 percent per year. It’d be better than what we’re doing now.

Showdown at 55 Laguna

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Time is running out on attempts by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, State Sen. Carole Migden, and Assemblymember Mark Leno to secure greater affordable-housing levels from the University of California, which wants to build private residential units on its UC Berkeley Extension campus at 55 Laguna in San Francisco.

Since the school site closed more than three years ago, critics have questioned how the UC’s plan for the campus, which served a public use for more than 150 years, will benefit the community, while preservationists succeeded in getting the campus awarded historic landmark status.

But with the UC claiming "unrestricted power to take and hold real and personal property for the benefit of the university" in a public statement, the city’s regulatory power is limited. The San Francisco Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the project Jan. 17, including the demolition of Middle Hall Gymnasium, the oldest building on the campus, and Richardson Hall Annex. But local and state legislative officials are focused on trying to get more affordable housing at the site.

Although negotiations were still ongoing at Guardian press time, the UC’s plan was to demolish the two historically landmarked buildings on the 5.8-acre Hayes Valley campus and build 450 new housing units, 16 percent of them to be offered below market rates, about the minimum number under the city’s inclusionary-housing law.

"But we’re pushing hard at the bottom line," said Mirkarimi, who, along with Migden, Leno, the city’s Planning Department, the Mayor’s Office of Housing, and affordable-housing activists, has been meeting with developer A.F. Evans and Openhouse, a local nonprofit that intends to build an 80-unit, market-rate, LGBT-friendly, senior residential community on the site.

"And we are trying at a separate venue to appeal to the UC Regents to be more sensitive and cooperative in what their bottom line profitability level is," Mirkarimi, whose District 5 includes Hayes Valley, told the Guardian.

Mirkarimi said he’s in favor of preserving all five buildings at the site but that both the Planning Commission’s Landmark Advisory Committee and the Board of Supervisors have voted to preserve only three. "We are trying to be pragmatic yet clear as to what our objectives are in trying to make a complex deal that’s triangulated by UC Berkeley, A.F. Evans, and Openhouse, with UC as the big daddy in the room.

"UC can do almost what UC wants. But the city’s leverage comes from UC asking for housing to be built and requesting a zoning change at a site that has become a magnet for grime and crime," Mirkarimi said. "It would also be negligent for UC to let this site remain in its current condition.

Under state law, the UC is exempt from city and county zoning and building codes if it builds educational facilities or projects that are deemed to be in the public interest. But according to officials with the City Attorney’s Office, the UC is not exempt from such codes if it turns over its land for private development.

And then there’s the city’s claim that it never conveyed the title to Waller Street, which lies between Buchanan and Laguna streets and is essential to the project, giving opponents some leverage. The UC disputes the city’s claim, but Mirkarimi maintains that the Board of Supervisors’ control of the street "provides a contingency plan if we are not making progress. And either way, UC is going to have to pay for the right to Waller."

The UC’s 55 Laguna project manager Kevin Hufferd confirmed that he is having "ongoing discussions with state and city officials" but declined to comment further.

"Frustrating" is how queer affordable-housing activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca described the last-minute discussions about the 55 Laguna development plan. "A.F. Evans claims it won’t be making any money and that they can’t do any more," Mecca told the Guardian. He attended a Jan. 11 meeting with the company at which, he claims, the developers offered to increase affordability levels to 19.5 percent but Mirkarimi pushed for more.

"To his credit, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi keeps saying this is unacceptable," Avicolli Mecca said, also lauding the Mayor’s Office of Housing for trying to make Openhouse’s project "100 percent affordable."

Currently, Openhouse’s development includes no below-market-rate units, a situation Avicolli Mecca claims the MOH hopes to change "through bringing in subsidies."

"Obviously, we are not against queer senior housing," Avicolli Mecca said. "The issue is that this is a lousy deal. What are we getting? Nothing, but UC gains a lot of money. There’s a crazy need for affordable housing and no way to justify this plan."

Filmmaker Eliza Hemingway, whose documentary Uncommon Knowledge records how the UC shuttered 55 Laguna with no input from — and little concern for — staff, students, and the surrounding community, believes that people have lost sight of the public use issue.

"They are worn down by the struggle, by trying to find a compromise because the space is empty, but the question remains: why is a public campus being privately developed?" Hemingway told us. She mourns the loss of educational programs and spaces that benefited the community and the lack of transparency that has marred the UC’s plans.

"For there to have been such huge barriers to the public process over what is a huge amount of public land is unfortunate," Hemingway said.

Cynthia Servetnick of the Save the UC Berkeley Extension Laguna Street Campus told us her group is prepared to file a lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Act if the project as currently proposed is approved.

"We’d rather see a project that has 40 percent affordable housing at 50 percent [area median income] than a lawsuit, but $38,000 a year [which would be the annual income requirement for seniors, the disabled, and people with AIDS to be able to afford one of Openhouse’s units] is too high," she said, noting that the proposed units are small but could go for $4,000 a month, rising to $7,000 monthly for those who need more services and staff.

Claiming that recognition of the campus as a historic landmark assists project sponsors in accessing preservation incentives, including federal tax credits, Servetnick said, "A.F. Evans has its [environmental impact report] complete and is clearing the way for 450 units, but they could do that and save all the historic buildings, thus having the same profitability but more affordability. It’s now or never. This is a new term for the mayor, we have a new city planning director, John Rahaim, and officials open to negotiating a win-win."

Migden was even more blunt. "Poor old queers need a place to retire too," she said. "Either Evans and the UC up the affordability level to 40 or 50 percent and guarantee that some of the senior LGBT units are subsidized, or the project dies."

As of press time, A.F. Evans, Openhouse, the SF Planning Department, and UC representatives had not returned the Guardian‘s calls.

Deferring to Mirkarimi to make an official announcement, Leno said, "I know that the meetings have been ongoing and that the issue of affordability is a priority, and I’m hopeful that we will have an agreement among all stakeholders shortly."

Portrait of the artist as an old cop

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Imagine Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, pondering the impact of abstract expressionism on the American zeitgeist with a far-off gaze. Or picture him dressed in fashionably tight jeans, walking his fixed-gear bike to the San Francisco Academy of Art University with a leather portfolio tucked under his skinny arm.

Does that seem incongruous to you? It does to us as well. After all, Delagnes is the very antithesis of an art school student. So why are the POA and Delagnes, a brutish former narcotics officer, lobbying the San Francisco Planning Commission on behalf of the Academy of Art?

The academy, which has been rapidly snapping up properties around town to accommodate its ambitious expansion plans, has become an entity of increasing concern in San Francisco’s dicey world of land-use politics.

The for-profit school, which costs students around $16,500 per year to attend, today owns or controls more than 30 properties across the city, half of which are used to house its students, and expects to take over nearly a dozen more to accommodate approximately 14,500 students by 2017.

In the meantime, the school is facing several enforcement actions initiated by the Planning Department for brazenly making building conversions without bothering to obtain proper permits.

Delagnes was nonetheless first in line at a September 2007 commission meeting held to address the academy’s pending enforcement cases and praised the school as a tremendous asset to the academic community.

"I think that their reputation in San Francisco is unquestioned as some of the finest, true San Franciscans that I know," Delagnes said of the wealthy Stephens family, which owns the Academy of Art. "They are heavily involved and invested in the city of San Francisco and care deeply about its future."

Delagnes’s lobbying on behalf of the academy surprised and appalled at least one commissioner, Hisashi Sugaya, who told the POA president that he was "really offended" someone representing law enforcement was carrying water for a private art school that had flouted the law by racking up alleged planning and building code violations.

Responding in the union’s newsletter, POA vice president Kevin Martin reached a dizzyingly patriotic pitch in denouncing Sugaya as a liberal and demanding he apologize not just to Delagnes but also to the entire union for "demeaning our president" and "censuring his freedom of speech."

Delagnes admitted to the Guardian that his testimony was essentially a "quid pro quo." The academy has supported the POA, even offering special summer apprenticeships to the children of its members. "I’m sure that they were thinking, ‘You know what? The POA is a pretty powerful organization. It wouldn’t hurt to get close to them,’<0x2009>" Delagnes said. "Here came this problem with the Planning Commission. They called me and said, ‘Hey, would you mind going up there and basically saying that we’re a good organization? We’re good people.’<0x2009>"

During the meeting, school president Elisa Stephens, who did not return calls, portrayed the academy as a simple mom-and-pop business ignorant of planning politics and intending to fully cooperate with the city.

"My grandfather was an artist…. We’re an integral part of this community," Stephens told the commissioners. "I live in this community. We’ve been here since the late 1800s. We’re dedicated to this city…. I apologize for not being involved in city politics. I’m involved in education."

But city staffers implied there’s more to the academy’s troubles than a few honest mistakes. In March 2007, the school was hit with a litany of alleged code violations, including 14 properties converted without conditional-use permits and seven made into group housing or modified for other school uses without building permits, Planning Department records show.

Before last year the academy had never submitted an institutional master plan to the city, even though San Francisco’s Planning Code has required them from universities since the 1970s, particularly for a scattered campus that’s in a position to dramatically alter the face of downtown, where the school is primarily located and its private transit buses are ubiquitous.

The academy finally turned one over in 2007 after city planners issued a citation in summer 2006. Afterward the department visited all of the school’s properties and discovered multiple problems with use permits, plus an additional property the academy had recently acquired but didn’t include in its plan.

Code enforcers tried to negotiate with the school, planning staffer Scott Sanchez told the commission. But after department personnel outlined the March 2007 violations for the academy, it simply continued onward, converting 601 Brannan for its own use without any building permits and doing the same at the Star Motel on Lombard, this time without a conditional-use application.

As the department worked to keep up, the academy purchased four new buildings and put its eye on another, all between spring and fall 2007.

"All of our information about their new facilities came from members of the public…. It wasn’t actually through the academy, with whom we thought we had a dialogue about their institutional master plan," Sanchez told the Guardian. "We had something ongoing with them, yet they were not informing us of their new acquisitions, and they weren’t obtaining proper permits for them."

The school, in fact, is accelerating plans to convert 575 Sixth St., known as the San Francisco Flower Mart, into studio space, despite opposition from the Mayor’s Office, the Planning Commission, and the Board of Supervisors. The 30 floral business tenants that currently inhabit the building received eviction notices dated Christmas Eve 2007.

A future academy gymnasium is slated for 620 Sutter, but building it would result in the eviction of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, a 25-year-old institution specializing in African American stage performances. The academy already converted part of the building to group housing without a permit.

So what else is the POA getting for its support of the arts? For one, the Academy of Art was a $5,000 putf8um sponsor of the POA’s 2007 charity golf tournament at the StoneTree Golf Club in Novato, beating out dozens of other donors for the top of the list. The exclusive title was used for only three other contributors.

The union’s November 2007 newsletter, which appeared just after Delagnes voiced his support for the school, announced that academy president Stephens had also given POA members working at the police department’s Southern Station in SoMa 15 free underground parking spots on Bluxome, just a short walk from the Hall of Justice and the union’s headquarters.

And that’s the art of politics in San Francisco.

Consolidating power

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› amanda@sfbg.com

A proposal to consolidate some of the permitting functions of 10 city departments into one is currently floating through Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration as a result of his call to department heads for bold initiatives. It was developed by a department head who is receiving harsh criticism from his staff.

Isam Hasenin, the director of the Department of Building Inspection, originally unveiled the idea in a Dec. 3, 2007, memo presented to the mayor that calls for a shift into Hasenin’s department of the permitting currently reviewed by the Fire Department, the Planning Department, the Bureau of Street Use and Mapping, the Public Utilities Commission, the Redevelopment Agency, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, the Port, the Airport, the Bureau of Urban Forestry, and the Municipal Transportation Agency.

The reason offered for such massive consolidation is customer service. "A single city-wide permitting department will be better equipped to manage the needs of our citizens and deliver a more efficient, reliable, consistent and timely service with a focus on excellent customer service," the memo reads.

Hasenin told us the idea was in response to a solicitation from Newsom. "The genesis of this idea came about as a general commitment from the Mayor’s Office to improve the city … to reinvigorate and streamline the processes of the city," he said.

It follows policy pledges made by the mayor since his first run for office. In campaign literature from 2003, Newsom wrote that his economic plan would "direct city agencies to streamline regulations and meet accelerated schedules for approving worthy new public and private projects, without compromising standards."

More recently, Newsom addressed a Dec. 19, 2007, Building Inspection Commission meeting at which this memo came up. "Systemically, the organization of things are such that institutionally they can’t change to the degree that we’d like to see them change," Newsom said. "So we have to break the institutions … in order to make the kinds of changes all of us in the city expect."

Several department spokespeople contacted by the Guardian had only heard vague suggestions about consolidation. Hasenin stressed that the proposal was still in an early, conceptual stage and that discussions among staff and all of the relevant stakeholders had yet to occur.

One department that hasn’t held back criticism of the proposal is the San Francisco Fire Department. "The administration, the Fire Commission, and Fire Fighters Local 798 are all aligned. We’d be concerned about any changes," department chief Joanne Hayes-White told us.

She first learned of the plan at an impromptu Dec. 6, 2007, meeting with the mayor at which, she says, she outlined several immediate concerns with the idea, including the fact that it may not be legal. She reported this to the Fire Commission at a Dec. 13, 2007, meeting: "There is specific language in the state’s Fire Code that the authority for these types of inspections rests with the Fire Department and the fire chief or the fire marshal."

Hayes-White also said, "I think it is important also — which we pointed out to the mayor — that there be appropriate checks and balances … and that there is no rubber-stamping of things." The Fire Commission echoed her sentiments and sent a letter to the mayor on Dec. 19.

Newsom’s Sept. 10, 2007, call for his senior staff to offer letters of resignation has had a chilling effect on his remaining administration, with some heads contacted by the Guardian reluctant to speak out against a policy that’s perceived to be coming from him. In some ways, that’s given the mayor even more power to advance potentially controversial ideas. Among those recently replaced by Newsom are the heads of the Planning Department, the Department of Public Works (which oversees the Bureau of Street Use and Mapping), the SFPUC, and the Redevelopment Agency.

"There’s an opportunity right now because of all these resignations to manipulate policy," said Debra Walker, president of the BIC. She stressed that she wasn’t sure whether that was an intention of this proposal, but she was unaware of the memo until concerned members of the Fire Department brought it up at the Dec. 19 meeting of the BIC. She said her department has since received a copy but has yet to discuss its implications as a commission.

Hasenin is a relatively new employee who joined the city about nine months ago from a previous post in San Diego. His leadership has already garnered a lengthy anonymous letter addressed to Newsom from a contingent of DBI staff outlining a raft of concerns about their new leader, including specifics like "Plan check engineers are afraid they will be fired unless they keep up with unreasonable turn around times and sign off on plans that are not ready for issuance because they do not comply with code."

The Zoo Blues

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This story was first published May 19, 1999

IN EARLY 1997, the San Francisco Zoo had a serious public-relations problem. The zoo wanted San Francisco voters to approve a $48 million bond measure to overhaul the facilities. But the Asian elephant exhibit was making the zoo look bad.

Tinkerbelle the elephant had been living alone since April 1995, when her longtime companion, Pennie, was put to sleep. Animal activists had been complaining that, for an animal that herds and has complex social interactions in the wild, life alone was cruel and unacceptable. According to the minutes from a board meeting of the San Francisco Zoological Society, the private group that manages the zoo, executive director David Anderson decided it was time to find a friend for Tinkerbelle. He thought he found her in Calle.

Calle was about 30 years old and on exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo. She had put in her time entertaining humans, working shows in Las Vegas and giving rides to kids at the San Diego Zoo. Animal advocates in Los Angeles were trying to get her to a sanctuary in Tennessee. But Anderson decided he wanted her in San Francisco.
Animal rights advocates hated the idea. Gretchen Wyler, executive director of Endocino-<\h>based Arc Trust came to San Francisco to check out the zoo’s facilities. “I was devastated when I saw how small and barren it was,” Wyler told the Bay Guardian.

S.F. Zoo curator David Robinett denies that the decision to move Calle to San Francisco had anything to do with the timing of the bond campaign. “We were anxious to move ahead and get a companion for Tinkerbelle,” he told us.
Either way, the zoo was in a hurry — and it wound up with a huge problem on its hands. Before leaving Los Angeles, Calle was tested for tuberculosis. According to Susanne Barthell, who ran the Council for Excellence in Zoo Animal Management until her death last fall, the elephant population at the L.A. Zoo was known to have problems with T.B., a claim Robinett denies. But S.F. Zoo officials did not wait for the test results to come back before they brought Calle north on March 19, 1997.

The tests came back positive. The zoo had just bought a tuberculous elephant.

As soon as she arrived, Calle had to be quarantined from her new companion. And the financially troubled zoo got hit with elephantine medical bills. Calle’s treatment would run from $60,000 to $65,000 a year, curator Robinett told the city’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare in July.

It got worse. In separating the elephants, zoo workers put Calle in the cushier exhibit quarters, which at least had some vegetation and a watering hole. Tinkerbelle was moved to neighboring quarters, without vegetation or water. She had to poke her trunk through a hole in the wall to refresh herself. (Only this month was the electrified barrier between the two areas removed permanently. Calle is cured, and the two elephants can now interact.)

The elephant debacle is all too typical. San Francisco’s zoo has never been one of the country’s best — but six years after it was placed in private hands, it’s in worse shape than ever. Privatization was supposed to save the zoo; instead it has failed it. A Bay Guardian investigation based on interviews and documents shows:

* Dozens of animals live in squalid, substandard conditions: primates have died because of disease-<\h>ridden cages, orangutans are cooped up in tiny cement boxes, rare rainforest mammals are losing hair.

* The number of zoo employees charged with taking care of the animals has plummeted — while the number of other employees has doubled.

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture is so frustrated with the S.F. Zoo’s animal mistreatment, it is threatening to fine the zoo thousands of dollars — and one foundation that had given hundreds of thousands to the zoo has withdrawn its funding.

* Thanks to a string of expensive bond issues, the public is still paying for the zoo, but zoo executive director David Anderson has seen his own salary substantially boosted.

* Marketing expenses have skyrocketed, and the zoo is heavily dependent on amusement park–<\d>type rides and other non-educational attractions to break even.

* City officials have become so skeptical of the zoo society’s ability to manage itself that Board of Supervisors president Tom Ammiano called for an audit last spring. Stanton W. Jones, an auditor who works for budget analyst Harvey Rose, is expected to release the audit late this summer.

In fact, the zoo is a case study of everything that is wrong with privatization.

A bad place to live


The push to privatize the zoo got rolling in 1990, when David Anderson was brought in from New Orleans’s Audubon Park and Zoological Garden. The zoo’s infrastructure was crumbling, and its finances were in bad shape. Sources in the Recreation and Park Department say Anderson enthusiastically advocated privatization as a solution.
Without accepting bids from other organizations, Rec and Park handed over control of the zoo to the private San Francisco Zoological Society, which had been raising money for the zoo since 1954. In the summer of 1993 the society agreed to lease the premises and take over management of the zoo, promising to balance its budget by June 30, 1998 (see “Sold!,” 10/19/94).

Anderson has made out handsomely from the deal. In 1994 the society paid him $81,443; by 1997 his total compensation had gone up to $148,500, including a $25,000 bonus — in a year when the zoo was still losing money.

The animals have fared much worse.

Within the past two months the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which governs animal care in zoos, has issued the society a warning. According to the USDA, inspectors have repeatedly notified zoo administrators about problems. If those problems aren’t corrected, the agency is now threatening to fine the zoo.

“We made it clear that they are not doing a good job on maintenance,” Wensley Koch, supervisory animal care specialist with the USDA’s western sector office, told the Bay Guardian. “Basically there’s a management problem.”
Records of inspection reports dating back to 1990 reveal problems throughout the zoo facilities — from the big cats’ lairs to the monkeys’ quarters. Wood is rotting; fences are rusting. Rats get into food areas and leave droppings.
Many of the problems are associated with the primate center, which has been a trouble spot since it was built in 1985. The colobus monkeys’ metal climbing bars were grooved. Since keepers couldn’t clean them of feces, the monkeys got sick from contact with their own excrement. The colobus population was decimated. According to Sandra Keller of Citizens for a Better Zoo, which was watch<\h>dogging the zoo at the time, 53 of the 85 primates in the center died.

“Once they opened it, the animals started dying,” Keller told the Bay Guardian. “They didn’t quarantine the new animals sufficiently when they were brought in. They basically wiped out the whole primate collection. It was heartbreaking.”

But turning the zoo over to the private society didn’t help. If anything, conditions are worse. A September 1996 USDA inspection found feces all over outdoor structures in the primate center. And in April 1997 an inspector noted that rat feces were found in the gorillas’ indoor housing area and that weeds and bushes grew out of control in the outside exhibit.

Inspectors frequently found that problems they had repeatedly brought to the society’s attention had not been addressed. For example, rotting wooden structures in the primate center went unrepaired for years between inspections; wire mesh fences keeping the colobus monkeys from escaping the exhibit continued to rust for a year after the USDA-imposed deadline to fix them.

Indeed, records from the past three years show that the zoo was regularly blowing its USDA-imposed deadlines on fixing facilities.

“When you’ve been writing ‘rust up’ for 10 years, most people get the message,” Koch told the Bay Guardian. “We’re at the point where, if the zoo doesn’t shape up, we might be forced to take an action against them. We can fine them up to $2,500 per violation.”

“If we’re looking at a monkey enclosure and we explain that a rusty enclosure is a problem and we note they also have rust at the zebra site, then the next time we come out, we don’t want to see a rusty elephant enclosure,” she said. “What becomes obvious is that either they don’t care about complying or they have decided not to. When they’re doing that, they’re using us as a quality control agency. The impression is that they have no quality control themselves.”

A 1993 incident involving an orangutan named Chewbacca sheds light on how zoo officials have tended to respond to agency involvement. Responding to an anonymous complaint, the USDA found that zoo officials had been planning to keep the 150-pound Chewbacca confined to a four-by-six-foot converted entryway for more than a year while they used his quarters to breed chimpanzees.

“From my perspective it appears that the project with the chimpanzees has been ill conceived,” William DeHaven, a sector supervisor with the USDA, noted on Oct. 12 of that year. “If you do not have sufficient space to conduct a breeding program properly, we feel it should not be conducted at all.”

USDA veterinary medical officer Richard Spira found Robinett to be uncooperative in dealing with the situation. “Incredibly, David Robinett took exception to my observation that the temporary night quarters were cramped at best,” Spira wrote to Koch. “This … is to give you a little taste of the double<\h>speak I’m getting at the zoo.”

The zoo has been no quicker to respond to problems brought to its attention by private citizens. On January 23, 1997, Barthell complained to both the zoo and the USDA. Barthell, an outspoken critic of the zoo, reported that she had seen a herd of six blackbuck standing in a driving rainstorm with no shelter, not even a tree. She also noted that 12 kangaroo were soaked and huddling against a wall for protection, their shelters too small to protect them.
Robinett responded to her concerns in writing. “This is not atypical of antelope,” he wrote. “In fact, many species react to inclement weather by seeking open space rather than cover.” He also said the kangaroo shelters were fine.

The USDA didn’t see it that way. The agency informed the zoo in February 1997 that shelter provided for both the blackbuck and the kangaroos was inadequate.

Robinett denied that the zoo has a cavalier attitude toward facilities problems.

“A lot of it is the age of the enclosures,” Robinett told us. “It is also a problem of limited resources. When you’re patching the patch of a patch — that’s when there are problems.”

He said that the zoo had to choose carefully how to spend its funds and that it gave the highest priority to the ones that officials there felt posed the greatest hazard to animals. And Wayne Reading, the society’s chief financial officer, says the infrastructure improvements are well underway, funded by donations and bond revenues.

Private zoo, public funds

When the society assumed control of the zoo in 1993, it was on the verge of collapse. City officials had neglected at least $10 million in facility maintenance; the number of paying visitors was in decline.

According to the zoo society’s lease, the city agreed to keep paying the zoo $4 million a year (to help cover the cost of civil service employees). In exchange, the society was supposed to take over the zoo and make it financially viable.

The society was not able to pull the zoo out of the red. In the spring of 1997, after four years of losing money, zoo officials admitted to acting parks director Joel Robinson that they were paying operating expenses with a loan of roughly $2.5 million from Wells Fargo as well as with money raised before the zoo went private. And in November of that year, Reading told the Rec and Park Commission that the marketing expenses for that fiscal quarter were over budget by $47,000. The society raised admissions prices in spring 1998 to cover an immediate $250,000 shortfall.

The society had already started going after an infusion of public funds. The minutes of society meetings show that for more than a year, the group devoted almost all its energy to getting a $48 million bond issue passed. According to the lease, the city agreed to sell at least $25 million in bonds to improve crumbling facilities. The society was supposed to raise $25 million from private funders by the time the bonds were sold. (To date, the society has raised $17 million.)

In June 1997, voters passed the $48 million bond issue. The zoo expected the bonds to start selling in late fall 1998, but they were delayed by a lawsuit seeking to overturn voter approval of the 49ers stadium bonds, which passed in the same election. That litigation was thrown out of court; the zoo bonds are expected to be sold this summer. The society has also taken $26 million from bonds issued for rebuilding after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The city’s Recreation and Park Department responded to the zoo’s financial troubles by looking the other way. Rather than conduct an audit of the zoo or monitor the operation more closely, the department announced that it would no longer scrutinize the zoo’s budgets at all (see “The Secret Zoo,” 11/26/97, and “Don’t Feed the Zoo Society,” 12/10/97).

Rec and Park’s former finance director Ernie Prindle, who had been checking the zoo’s budgets until 1997, told the Bay Guardian that Anderson seemed to want the zoo to have the advantages of being run by a private organization while still being covered by a public one. When the zoo admitted in the fall of 1997 it was further in debt than it should have been, Anderson asked why the department could not just take care of the deficit and make the numbers work as it had done in the days when it was part of the city system, Prindle said.

“We had to tell him it does not work that way anymore, now that the zoo is a private contractor,” Prindle said.

Carnival or classroom?

By the end of October 1998 the zoo was in the black for the first time since the society took it over. But with that success has come controversy. Instead of investing in the animals, the society has capitalized on theme rides, such as the merry-go-round, the Puffer Train, and the Tiger Express ride.

Amusement-park attractions and a pricey marketing campaign — costing the zoo almost $3 million from 1995 to 1998 — have brought more visitors to the zoo. That plus higher ticket prices means more money. And Anderson is certain that with this increased revenue, the zoo will ultimately be able to shed its carnival atmosphere and focus on its true mission: education to foster environmental activism among visitors.

But if environmental activism is Anderson’s goal, he has a strange way of showing it. For example, when the zoo brought in a lorikeet exhibit in April 1998, it allowed its sponsors to place a display — a shiny Ford sports utility vehicle — near the site.

“If you’re setting yourself out as an educator, then you’ve got to have a source of funds,” Anderson told the Bay Guardian.

Some of Anderson’s more straightforward forays into environmental education have had trouble. One of his pet conservation projects is the Madagascar Fauna Group, head<\h>quartered at the San Francisco Zoo. Among other things, the group supports the protection of Madasgascar’s Betampona National Reserve and hopes to re-introduce zoo-bred lemurs and other endangered primates, such as aye-ayes, to the island nation’s wilds.

Since 1994, when the society assumed control of the zoo, it has spent $785,222 on its Madagascar projects.
In August 1997 Anderson brought two aye-ayes from Duke University’s primate center to San Francisco. Merlin and Calaban are the only male-female aye-aye pair in any zoo in the United States. Zoo officials hope to breed them.
Anderson speaks proudly of the work the zoo has done to educate people in Madagascar about protecting aye-ayes. But he hasn’t done such a great job protecting the ones in his care.

In Madagascar, aye-ayes spend time more than 60 feet high in the rainforest canopy, where they pull bugs from trees with their long fingers. In San Francisco, they live in an eight-foot-tall glass case.

Male aye-aye Merlin has had an ongoing problem with hair loss on his hind legs. As a result the zoo’s vet put him on steroids periodically from 1997 to 1998. Zoo officials blame the hair loss on two factors: premature separation from his mother, which took place while Merlin was at Duke, and the stress of being introduced to a new female.
Anderson told the Bay Guardian the hair loss wasn’t a big deal; some activists feel differently.

“That’s a shame,” Shirley McGreal, director of the International Primate Protection League, located in South Carolina, told the Bay Guardian. “Those guys cover a good distance of territory in the wild.”

But the aye-ayes haven’t been a huge success with zoogoers either. Aye-ayes are nocturnal creatures and extremely timid; Merlin and his mate, Calaban, rarely leave the shelter of leafy branches. The best chance you’ll get to see an aye-aye at the zoo is in the gift shop, on a sweatshirt or a postcard.

Paying the price

Luckily for the society, hardly any of its donors know about how the zoo animals live; it’s hard to woo grants with rusty fences, feces-filled cages, and cramped cement cells. But one funder did find out.

In September 1994, the zoo announced the opening of its $2 million Feline Conservation Center. Keepers had already raised questions about the new facility; some thought it was unsafe for the keepers because the animals could reach through the fence to the service area with their paws and claws.

When zoo administrators brought in Denver Zoo curator John Wortman, he had the same concerns. In his final evaluation to the Zoo Society, written in October 1994, Wortman stated, “I hate to sound like a broken record, but the old safety issue rises again. The repairs should have been made prior to the felines moving unto the enclosures. Fortunately, enough of the lock system functioned and no person or creature was hurt during the shake-down period.”

The keeper at the time, Terry Moyles, was fired by the zoo March 1995. Barthell and other animal advocates suspected he was dismissed because he was outspoken about the inadequacy of the facility; Robinett denied the charge.

In a Jan. 30, 1995, letter to the charitable foundation that was funding the center, Wortman described the Feline Conservation Center as “a poor design and dangerous exhibit for both the animals and the zoo keepers.”
The center’s problems got its funders’ attention. In a Feb. 19, 1999, letter to city auditor Jones, executives from the Redmond, Wash.–based Leonard X. Bosack and Betty M. Kruger Charitable Foundation blasted the zoo.

After the foundation made initial grants of more than $200,000 for the center, the letter states, “the Foundation Board also pledged two payments of $162,000 to be made in 1994 and 1995 contingent on continued progress reports. The Foundation rescinded the pledge of $325,000 in 1995 after years of unsatisfactory response from the Zoo Executive Director and the Board of Directors.”

The letter goes on to lay out how the zoo hired a contracting firm with no experience in building wildlife care facilities, how it wasted funds, and how it ignored the recommendations of its consultant.

“As John Wortman noted, the `major problem was the inability of the S.F. staff to design a modern animal facility,’” the letter stated.

Robinett denies that the zoo staff is to blame. “To say this was a screwup in design — I think that is incorrect,” Robinett told the Bay Guardian. “We have had success [with the center], especially with breeding. It’s been a very good exhibit.”

It is that attitude that makes some people worry about making animals pay the costs of privatization.
Privatization “has not helped animal care,” Ron Lippert, a longtime animal health technician and former member of the city’s Commission on Animal Control and Welfare, told the Bay Guardian. “What privatization has done is allowed the society to do more things on their agenda — without the public scrutiny they had before. It seems like this is [Anderson and the society’s] kingdom and palace, and they want to see how much they can show it off.

“But the bottom line is that with the cold, windy, and wet climate at the zoo, it’s the wrong city. It’s the wrong location. Animals who aren’t used to handling ocean climate have to handle it day in and day out. Maybe we just shouldn’t have a zoo here. The zoo society was supposed to do all this great stuff. But as far as zoos go, this one still sucks.”

Bob Porterfield contributed to this story.

Newsom taps law-and-order Republican

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ryan.jpg
Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to hire former U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan to head the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice speaks volumes about his administration’s philosophy and priorities.
It’s bad enough that Ryan is a Republican (Newsom has appointed several Republicans to important positions, including his disgraced former OES director AnnaMarie Conroy and Planning Commissioner Michael Antonini, but never any Greens). But Ryan is a right wing ideologue and Bush loyalist who incompetently ran the U.S. Attorney’s Office here into the ground and wrongfully imprisoned citizen journalist Josh Wolfe. This is the guy who will handle law enforcement policy in progressive San Francisco? Did Newsom know this stuff? Did he care? As the mayor begins his second term with nary a signal as to his intentions, Newsom isn’t offering much hope that he knows what he’s doing or that he plans to act in the best interests of all San Franciscans.

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