Police

Protests turn to riots in wake of Mehserle verdict (VIDEO)

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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In the hours following the announcement of that Johannes Mehserle had been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for fatally shooting Oscar Grant in the back on a BART platform on New Year’s Eve 2009, downtown Oakland became a drama-filled scene that changed minute by minute.

In the early hours, rallies were held, with community leaders speaking out against the killing of Oscar Grant and police brutality in general. At least 1,000 protesters gathered peacefully at the intersection of 14th and Broadway streets to hear a series of speakers venting anger. Representatives from the nonprofit Youth UpRising and other groups tried to discourage violence, but anger and frustration erupted into acts of vandalism once the rally came to a close and the night set in. Around the same time, police strapped on gas masks, readied clubs, and issued a dispersal order.

Around 8:30 bottles started flying among shouts of “fuck the police,” and “no justice, no peace.” A window was smashed at a Foot Locker near 14th and Broadway, and another window came down at the Far East National Bank, across the street. Looting followed, as did graffiti tagging, and trash cans lit ablaze.

By 10 p.m., things descended into further disarray as smaller crowds advanced north on Broadway and Telegraph, with just a few hundred continuing to smash windows at Whole Foods, Sears, Starbucks, and several other locations. The Guardian was on the scene and caught much of the early activity and some of the later rioting on film. The videos are presented below in chronological order. The Guardian left a crowd of less than 50 rioters near Whole Foods at Bay Place and Vernon Street, around 10:30.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_t8w7-_bVc
Shortly after the verdict was announced, Oscar Grant’s sister-in-law, Yolanda Mesa, tearfully addressed a small crowd outside Oakland City Hall. Video by Wendi Jonassen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1qclrgIOtE
A rally being held in the middle of the intersection at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland dissolved into chaos when police in riot gear approached and announced through a megaphone, “We are here to assist you in your peaceful protest.” Video by Rebecca Bowe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si0sH_v0oq8
As a marching band played in the background, activists hoisted a sign onto a lamppost over the intersection of 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland. Video by Rebecca Bowe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9S144Tptbg
A protester challenging police in the midst of demonstrations in downtown Oakland was tackled by officers in riot gear. Video by Alex Emslie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4veyVC204E
Oakland City Council member Rebecca Kaplan gave an interview at the line between demonstrators and police as she linked arms with others at 12th Street and Broadway. Council member Jean Quan stood nearby. Video by Alex Emslie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiV2-kp5Gc8
Police declared the protest to be an unlawful assembly and issued an order to disperse just before 9 p.m. The police charged, and this reporter got caught in the fray. Video by Alex Emslie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBwMMiFEe-o
Rioters ignited a trash can and dragged it down 15th Street toward the police line at around 9:30 p.m. Video by Alex Emslie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2eIW9YTwzQ
The riots took a noticeable turn just before 10 p.m. Even as the crowds diminished, more fires were ignited and store front windows were broken between 15th and 17th streets on Broadway as and rioters began to move further North. Video by Alex Emslie

 

Riot awakening

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Riot awakening

arts@sfbg.com

FILM On the night of June 28, 1969, police embarked on what they thought would be a routine raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, the sleazy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. The ensuing three days of rioting — during which mostly young men and drag queens accustomed to being marginalized and hauled off to jail stood their ground and fought back — became what historian Lillian Faderman has called “the shot heard round the world” for LGBT activism: a spontaneous expression of street-level outrage that fueled the birth of a movement.

Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s solid documentary Stonewall Uprising takes a “just the facts, ma’am” approach to this historic flashpoint that makes for an information-packed, if at times dry, 80 minutes. Working around the paucity of photographic documentation of the actual riots (itself a testament to the marginalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s), Davis and Heilbroner make extensive use of period news footage and photography, reenactments, and most important, the first-person testimonies of who those who witnessed and participated in what one interviewee terms “our Rosa Parks moment.”

And what damning facts they are. Stonewall Uprising is most effective in its first half, when it vividly conveys the demonization and oppression queers regularly faced at a time when homosexuality was illegal in every state except Illinois. In one excerpted clip from a 1966 CBS investigative report that I’m sure Mike Wallace would just as soon have stricken from the record, the news anchor states matter-of-factly: “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous.” In another clip, a Florida detective sternly warns a gym full of middle school students that should any of them act on their same-sex desires, “you will be caught.”

Davis and Heilbroner’s contextual groundwork is as impressive for its archival research as it is repetitive in its message: pre-Stonewall life was hell. The documentary becomes more nuanced as it zeros in on reconstructing the first night of rioting via eyewitness accounts. Howard Smith and Lucian Truscott IV, journalists for the Village Voice whose offices were nearby, remember fearing for their lives when they found themselves barricaded inside the bar with the police. But it is former police deputy Seymour Pine who emerges as the night’s unofficial antihero, having ordered his officers to hold their fire to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. Pine’s interview — as much a mea culpa as a performance of self-assurance by an elderly man that he is on the right side of history — is Stonewall Uprising‘s true revelation. 

STONEWALL UPRISING opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

Transit troubles

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Transit troubles

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Peggy da Silva is an avid cyclist, public transit advocate, and member of the San Francisco Transit Riders Union — a new organization made up of several hundred San Franciscans who want to see improvements to Muni.

Yet even she admits that when it comes to getting to work, it takes just 15 minutes by car or an hour if she opts to go by bus. “I am committed to transit and cycling” for environmental reasons, she said, but “it gets really frustrating” to wait for the bus or light rail cars to arrive.

Da Silva could be considered lucky in that she can opt to drive if she feels it’s necessary, while many lower-income San Franciscans cannot afford a car and have no choice but to rely on Muni to get to work, buy groceries, or make doctor appointments. It’s even worse late at night when the buses run less frequently and the streets are dark and empty.

Speaking at a June 29 transit rally, the Rev. Norman Fong of the Chinatown Community Development Center joked that Chinatown is one of the city’s greenest neighborhoods — but “not by choice.” Most Chinatown residents just can’t afford to own a car, underscoring the point that Muni service cuts affect lower-income communities more significantly than those with more transportation options.

The perception that Muni is broken isn’t unique to transit advocates. Around City Hall, a number of proposals have been put forth to fix the ailing system, which has been mired in delays and overcrowding as fares have gone up and service was slashed. But determining what the root problems are, how they should be addressed, and what the best path forward may be has proved arduous.

Rather than a simple calculation or a study in efficiency, the debate surrounding Muni is spinning into an emotionally charged affair. For those aiming to protect low-income riders from service cuts or fare increases, it’s a discussion about social justice, calling into question why the city is asking more of bus riders than motorists in a city with a “transit-first” mandate in its charter.

The strong opposition to the cuts by supervisors and the public has led to a rollback. On June 30, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced that on Sept. 4, it would be able to restore half of the 10 percent systemwide service reduction that went into effect in May.

“Due to stronger than expected revenue streams, operational efficiencies, and new grant opportunities, staff is recommending the restoration of service on some routes and lines this fall,” according to an SFMTA press release. Buses that run all night would come more often, and the partial service restoration would help ease over-crowding.

While this was welcome news for anyone who takes transit, the expected improvement still leaves untouched many key issues plaguing the city’s public transit system. Two separate initiatives most likely destined for the November ballot seek to deal with systemic problems — but both have met with resistance.

On July 1, Sup. Sean Elsbernd announced that he had submitted some 75,000 signatures for a proposed charter amendment for the November ballot to change the way transit operator salaries are determined. Since they only needed 46,000 signatures, “presumably, we’ll qualify,” Elsbernd told us.

“It presses the reset button on all the [memorandums of understanding] and then puts the riders at the table,” he explained. “It also eliminates the side letters that allow the six leaders of the union to get full-time salaries and benefits without needing to drive.”

Elsbernd’s proposal would require operator wages and benefits to be set through collective bargaining, instead of the current guarantee that their wages be at least as high as the average wage rate for transit operators in the two highest paying comparable transit systems.

Yet his proposal is opposed by the city’s transit operators union, TWU Local 250-A, whose members feel they’ve been unfairly blamed for the MTA’s fiscal problems. Speaking at the June 29 rally, Ron Heintzman, the new international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, summed up the attitude of drivers who feel they are being asked to give up hard-fought gains in the face of an economic downturn.

“I’ve been told that here in San Francisco, the mayor for some reason clearly has his head up his ass,” Heintzman said. “It’s time to tell him to stop trying to balance the damn budget on the backs of the workers.”

Speakers at the rally voiced support for federal legislation that would bolster municipal transit budgets nationwide with a $2 billion emergency infusion. A second federal bill would allow local governments greater flexibility with federal transit funding that currently can only be spent on capital projects, not day-to-day operations.

“We’re asking them not to make us buy a bus when we can’t hire a bus operator to drive it,” explained Harry Lombardo, international president of the Transit Workers Union. “There’s no point in spending hundreds of thousands on a bus and letting it sit in mothballs. And believe me, it’s happening all over the country.”

Sup. David Campos, a cosponsor of a competing ballot measure that aims for more comprehensive Muni reform, joined the rally and criticized the notion that drivers should be blamed a dysfunctional, underfunded transit system.

“Those of you who live in San Francisco know that right now there is a climate at City Hall that is pointing the finger at drivers, blaming drivers and blaming the workers for the problems that this system has,” Campos said at the rally. “Muni is broken. But Muni is not broken because of labor. And we have to say no to that push to somehow create a division between riders and drivers…. We can’t ignore the fact that we have a system that is getting money that is not being used well.”

Campos has joined with Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, Eric Mar, and Board President David Chiu to propose a reform package that would remove the pay guarantee for Muni driver, but also create split appointments to the MTA Board of Directors, allocate a share of property tax revenue to the city’s Transportation Fund, and establish an Office of the MTA Inspector General to help reduce waste and ramp up efficiency. The proposal would be subject to voter approval in November.

The proposal to give the supervisors some appointments to an MTA board that is now solely accountable to the Mayor’s Office became an issue at the eleventh hour of budget negotiations between the supervisors and Newsom on June 30. The mayor strongly opposed that and two similar charter amendments that would establish split appointments for the Recreation and Park Commission and the San Francisco Rent Board, as well as a ballot measure that would require the police department to engage in foot beat patrols.

Many saw his stance as a quid pro quo that inappropriately tied mayoral support for the budget — which included funding restorations to community programs that progressive board members wanted to preserve — to these unrelated ballot proposals.

Dave Snyder, who directs the SF Transit Riders Union, viewed the move as an affront on Muni riders. “This particular mayor has managed to screw up Muni service through his complete control over the agency,” Snyder said. “And whatever it takes, Muni riders want to see that fixed.”

While he said he thought a split appointment for the MTA Board was important, “the most important thing is more money. That’s the key issue,” he added, noting the reform package would create more funding for Muni.

Members of the Budget and Finance Committee resisted the mayor’s demand and forwarded a budget to the full board that included their high-priority restorations. The proposed ballot measures will be considered by the board this month.

“If you ask me, I would say we should have commission reform across the board,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian. “The idea of having [equally balanced appointments] is a smart way for us to share the responsibility and the consequences.”

MTA’s fiscal problems aren’t unique to San Francisco. On July 1, Caltrain announced a menu of undesirable options to deal with big financial troubles facing the commuter railroad. Elimination of weekend service and certain weekday train stops, or a 25-cent increase to base fares or zone fares, will be the subject of public hearings this summer.

Noting that all the different sources that fund Caltrain have been slashed, spokesperson Christine Dunn told us, “It’s frustrating to not be able to provide the service you want to provide.”

Truce talks

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Truce talks

news@sfbg.com

All parties are hopeful for peace in the Guardian-labeled War on Fun after oppressive raids on SoMa clubs have stopped and the feuding sides — mainly the San Francisco Police Department and nightclub owners — are sitting down to truce talks brokered in part by the fledgling California Music and Culture Association (CMAC).

“I’m here to work with you,” Kitt Crenshaw, commander of SFPD’s new Entertainment Task Force, told the crowd at a Nightlife Safety Summit on June 30. “I’m not the enemy. I’m not the ‘War on Fun,’ as they call it. I’m not the Antichrist.” The summit was sponsored by the Mayor’s Office, Entertainment Commission, SFPD, Small Business Commission, and CMAC.

Club owners and the SFPD are attempting to find balance between stifling the entertainment industry with heavy-handed enforcement and doing something about the deadly gun violence plaguing neighborhoods around some San Francisco nightclubs. Owners and party promoters don’t want entertainment permitting power to go back to the SFPD, as Mayor Gavin Newsom has suggested. But recent shootings and the Entertainment Commission’s inability to immediately close problem clubs have city officials demanding change.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu introduced legislation in early June that would give the Entertainment Commission the authority to revoke the entertainment permits of noncompliant clubs that are consistently scenes of violence. Chiu’s legislation would further extend temporary suspension powers the board granted to the commission in 2009.

“There is strong consensus that the Entertainment Commission needs to do its job. And if this is what it takes to give it more tools, then so be it,” Chiu told the Guardian after the June 25 CMAC Insider Luncheon, where he participated in a forum with entertainment industry representatives. Chiu said he was feeling pressure from his constituents in North Beach to “come down like a hammer on the industry” following several shootings around the neighborhood’s nightclubs this year.

Terrance Alan, a longtime industry advocate and entertainment commissioner, told the Guardian he recently requested that the City Attorney’s Office help define when nightclub owners should be blamed for violence occurring near their business. “If we’re going to hold venues and security teams responsible, we have to tell them and make sure it’s legal,” he said. “The line of reasoning that blames the nearest business will force San Francisco to shut down. The first thing we have to do is stop blaming each other.”

Chiu, speaking to a crowd at the Nightlife Safety Summit, recounted a handful of incidents that pushed him to craft the new legislation. Since the last legislation was passed to strengthen the Entertainment Commission’s power to regulate nightclubs, eight people were shot outside the Regency night club Nov. 15, 2009; 44 rounds were fired outside club Suede, resulting in one death and four injuries Feb. 7; a shooting occurred on Broadway outside a strip club in mid-February; and a police officer was shot outside the Mission District’s El Rincon club on June 19. “And so on, and so on,” Chiu said.

Following the shooting at Club Suede, which had long been a site of violence prior to the gang-related carnage in February, officials were stunned to learn the commission did not have the power to revoke entertainment permits. The most it could do was suspend Suede’s permit to play music for 30 days.

“To hold the commission responsible for something it was never envisioned to do and never given the power to do is where the narrative has gone wrong recently,” Alan said of widespread criticism that the commission just didn’t simply “shut down” Club Suede.

Suede remains voluntarily closed as it bargains with the City Attorney’s Office, which filed a complaint against the club after the shootings. Alex Tse, the lead attorney for the city in the case, told the Guardian there was nothing he could legally do to prevent Suede from reopening before Aug. 10, when the court is scheduled to rule on a preliminary injunction (court mandated closing) the City Attorney’s Office filed. But he doesn’t expect them to reopen because Suede and the city are currently working toward settling the case.

If the incidents Chiu described represent a black eye for San Francisco’s entertainment industry, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and SFPD aren’t necessarily squeaky clean either. “I sat down with [ABC director] Steve Hardy and told him that where the state was focusing efforts in San Francisco was completely misguided,” Chiu said at the CMAC luncheon. “And I’ve spoken to [California Senator] Mark Leno to try to move them in the right direction.”

The break in the crackdowns of 2009, mostly attributed to severe tactics employed by SFPD Officer Larry Bertrand and ABC agent Michelle Ott, followed a widespread backlash to the sometimes brutal treatment legitimate business owners were receiving in the name of public safety. Back-to-back over stories in the Guardian (see “The new War on Fun,” March 23, 2010) and the SF Weekly, calls to the ABC from city officials, the formation of CMAC, and a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) suit filed against San Francisco and the rogue officers spurred officials to rein in Ott and Bertrand.

Hardy told the Guardian that Ott is no longer assigned to alcohol enforcement in San Francisco. Bertrand has traded in his plain-clothes for a uniform and hasn’t been seen busting into clubs, beating up the help, or confiscating DJ equipment for several months.

Mark Webb, plaintiff’s attorney in the RICO case, which was moved to the federal court by the City Attorney’s Office, said Bertrand is scheduled to give a deposition for the case July 26. Webb told the Guardian he plans to ask Bertrand questions relating to “a pattern of ongoing and repeated abuses” claimed in the complaint, which includes Newsom and ABC as defendants.

“We’re at a crossroads,” Chiu told the crowd at the Nightlife Safety Summit, adding that if the new power for the Entertainment Commission does not reduce club violence, stronger measures would be taken, whether it’s Newsom’s suggestion to scrap the commission entirely and give permitting power back to the police department or Chiu’s idea to create another “less politicized” body to issue entertainment permits made up of representatives from city department that are affected when nightlife entertainment goes wrong.

“There has been significant dissatisfaction with the Entertainment Commission due to many actual and apparent conflicts of interests,” Chiu said. “Frankly, this is why we may need to move to a different model of who actually makes decisions on permits, because often the people who want to make those decisions are the ones who stand to get the most benefit out of them.”

But club owners and party promoters argue that the police issuing entertainment permits, as they did prior to the Entertainment Commission’s creation in 2002, has a chilling effect on an important part of San Francisco’s economy.

Alan said a civil grand jury found the police department had a conflict of interest in being both the granter and enforcer of nightclub permits, a finding that spurred the creation of the Entertainment Commission.

“I’ve been in the industry long enough to remember when it was in the Police Department’s hands,” said Guy Carson, owner of Café Du Nord and director of CMAC. “Since the advent of the Entertainment Commission, more permits have been issued, which has vitalized the industry.”

Club owners and party promoters don’t want to be blamed for street violence over which they have no control, and they have some political support for that stance. “Clubs don’t create youth gun violence, society creates youth gun violence,” Sup. Bevan Dufty proclaimed to the crowd at the Nightlife Safety Summit, drawing thunderous applause from the room.

“There is a street scene and a club scene, and they do intersect. But a lot of the violence occurs in the street scene,” Carson said. “A lot of shootings that happen relate to people never inside the clubs. That’s a conversation CMAC looks forward to having — to have a little more accurate discussion.”

While he asserts that some nightclubs attract violence to the city from out of town, Crenshaw said he was pleased and surprised at the level of collaboration emerging between entertainment representatives and SFPD. “I got so much positive feedback from it [the Nightlife Safety Summit]. It was a bit overwhelming,” he told us. “I think the industry itself is tired of being labeled as a pariah. They want to change their image.”

Brit Hahn, owner of City Nights and SFClubs, agreed that working with district captains was in the best interest of any club looking to remain profitable. “When something bad happens at a nightclub anywhere in San Francisco, he said at the Nightlife Safety Summit, “it’s bad for all of our businesses.”

Naked fun in the sun!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Naked fun in the sun!

Entertainer Wavy Gravy and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg like Red Rock Beach; Marin Superior Court Commissioner Roy Chernus favors Bass Lake, and Marin County Sup. Steve Kinsey says he’s been naked at Red Rock, Bolinas, Hagmier Pond, and Mount Vision Pond.

“I’ve probably hit every nude beach in Marin,” says Kinsey, who has described his visits as “exhilarating and normal.” “My last dip was at Bass Lake last fall. It has beautiful, fresh water, and the swimming environment is wonderful. I look forward to the next opportunity.”

But on their next trips to the nude section of beautiful Muir Beach, visitors may notice something new: a warning sign is being erected by the county this summer to urge users to be “respectful” of each other and to notify authorities if there’s trouble.

The sign is the result of a compromise worked out by nudists, law enforcers, county officials, and local homeowners, some of whom wanted nudity stopped. Under the agreement, cops are making a few more visits than before. But through July 1, 2010, only four complaints about nudity and one citation for improper sexual conduct have occurred since January 1, 2009, and none since August 13, 2009, according to marin county sheriff’s office crime analyst Susan Medina. “We keep responding to complaints, but I can’t recall any recent citations,” says Lt. Cheryl Fisher, commander of the Marin County Sheriff’s Office’s West Marin Station. Fisher says the subjects are usually suited up by the time deputies arrive. “A deputy showed up on a very hot Sunday,” says regular visitor Michael Velkoff of Scotts Valley. “As soon as he left, everybody was naked again.”

“Of course, guys in spiked penis rings not parading themselves around also have helped,” says Sup. Kinsey, who, for now, has spiked his previous threat to fight back by starting an effort to make Muir and other beaches clothing-optional under a 1975 law giving Marin County the power to exempt areas from its anti-nudity provisions. “Sometimes the best thing we can do in government is to stay out of the way.”

Homeowners remain wary. One, who wants to remain anonymous, tells the Guardian: “We are optimistic” about being able to “coexist” with the naturists, “but we also remain very clear about what is legal and what will and won’t be tolerated.” And a former advocate of the ban told me that instead of not going to Muir Beach “a person wanting to use the beach nude might do it in a manner that doesn’t draw a lot of attention.”

As if the Marin mashup wasn’t enough, nervous naturists also got ready to do battle with state authorities, who they feared would eventually ban nudity at Devil’s Slide in San Mateo County and at Bonny Doon Beach near Santa Cruz, both of which are state beaches.

The jitters came in the wake of an October 2009 California high court ruling allowing a crackdown on nude sunbathing on state beaches, even in areas traditionally used for such activity. “All it takes now is an individual ranger with the desire to issue a citation,” warns R. Allen Baylis, a Huntington Beach attorney representing the Naturist Action Committee, the country’s biggest nudist lobbying group. “It could have a chilling effect [on nudity] on any state beach.”

“Our thin line of security has been overturned,” says Rich Pasco, head of the Bay Area Naturists, based in San Jose. “So let’s hope that in today’s economy, the thin level of state park staff has better things to do with their time than dealing with naturists.”

At press time, the NAC, along with BAN and 14 other nudist groups, were preparing, for the first time, to officially petition California to “designate clothing-optional areas” on one or more state beaches. Other efforts have, says Baylis, been “less formal.” “Do they really expect us to pack up and leave?” Baylis asks. “We’re going to fight back. This is our freedom they’re messing with!”

What’s the good news? Just like at Muir Beach, it doesn’t look like naturists have anything to worry about for now in Northern California. “In the short term, things at Bonny Doon are destined to continue the way they are,” says Kirk Lingenfelter, sector superintendent for Bonny Doon. He wants a better trail, stairs, and parking, but says the cash-starved state doesn’t have the budget to make even a preliminary plan or increase ranger visits. He said his staff have not issued any citations or warnings at the nude cove, which he calls one of the spots that “really give you the feeling of rugged, untouched majesty. It’s a very important feeling. Going to places like Bonny Doon helps you get recharged.”

And the Devil’s Slide police source, who wants to remain anonymous, told us: “Rangers aren’t going to be pursuing enforcement against nudity per se. Nothing’s changed.” Rangers will continue responding to complaints, he explained, but it usually means they arrive too late to do anything about them because cell phones don’t work on the beach. “We hear about it after the fact,” says another Devil’s Slide enforcer, Supervising State Park Ranger Michael Grant.

Want to contribute to the glad tidings? There’s still time for plenty of fun in the sun. You can donate your body to the record books, at least temporarily, by showing up Saturday, July 10 at the Sequoians Clothes Free Club (www.sequoians.com) in Castro Valley, when its annual attempt at setting a world skinny-dipping record, with 138 other nude locations, will be held. And if you’ve ever been dying to do a little light cleaning in the nude (no window-washing needed), here’s your chance: Your butt can be bare if you stop by Bonny Doon Sept. 18 to help fans pick up cigarette butts and other litter on the beach.

Speaking of good things, would you like to help improve our report? Please send brainstorms, your new beach “finds,” improved directions (especially road milepost numbers), and trip reports to garhan@aol.com or by snail mail to Gary Hanauer, c/o San Francisco Guardian, 135 Mississippi St., San Francisco CA 94107. Please include your phone number so we can verify that you’re not just another mirage in the nude beach sand.

>>BELOW ARE CAPSULE GUIDES TO POPULAR NUDE BEACHES. CLICK HERE FOR OUR COMPLETE GUIDE, INCLUDING MANY MORE

NORTH BAKER BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

Things are really cooking at San Francisco’s long, narrow North Baker, which is in good shape this year, with plenty of sand and an influx of young people and more women than five years ago, even though the beach is still heavily male. “If you want to see naked chicks and guys, it’s the place to go,” says aficionado Paul Jung. Although beach regulars like himself welcome all the new nude volleyball players, “some of them seem to make up rules as they go along,” he laughs. Fun activities: Look for dolphins that occasionally surface in the water off shore. And in low tide only, walk around the big rocks at the north end of the beach to check out Baker’s “secret” tide pools.

Directions: Take the 29 Sunset bus or go north on 25th Avenue to Lincoln Boulevard. Turn right and take the second left onto Bowley Street. Follow Bowley to Gibson Road, turn right, and follow Gibson to the east parking lot. Head right on the beach to the nude area, which starts at the brown and yellow “Hazardous surf, undertow, swim at your own risk” sign. Some motorcycles in the lot have been vandalized, possibly by car owners angered by bikers parking in car spaces; to avoid trouble, motorcyclists should park in the motorcycle area near the cyclone fence.

 

LAND’S END BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

Land’s End is just the beginning: it’s not just the ground that seems to “disappear” into the sunset at this little slice of paradise off Geary Boulevard. So do your clothes, if you want to be magically transported to another dimension, away from the cares of everyday constraints. Shorts, swimsuit, even work clothes during a quick lunch break — they all can be removed at this delightful cove, which features a mix of sand and rocks plus some of San Francisco’s best views. Better still, only a handful of people are usually present. Bring a windbreak for protection in case the weather changes.

Directions: Follow Geary Boulevard to the end, then park in the dirt lot up the road from the Cliff House. Take the trail at the far end of the lot. About 100 yards past a bench and some trash cans, the path narrows and bends, then rises and falls, eventually becoming the width of a road. Don’t take the road to the right, which leads to a golf course. Just past another bench, as the trail turns right, go left toward a group of dead trees where you will see a stairway and a “Dogs must be leashed” sign. Descend and head left to another stairway, which leads to a 100-foot walk to the cove. Or, instead, take the service road below the El Camino del Mar parking lot 1/4 mile until you reach a bench, then follow the trail there.

GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

Don’t come to Golden Gate Bridge Beach, also called Nasty Boy Beach, if you want privacy: dozens to hundreds of visitors show up on the hottest days at the site that some have likened to a “gay meat market.” Along with the guys, a smattering of women, straight couples, children and fishermen are spread out on the three adjoining rocky coves that make up the beach, whose stunning views of the Bridge will make you feel like you’re the star of your own postcard. “It’s really nice to walk in the water,” says a woman. “In low tide, you can sometimes go out 150 feet.”

Directions: Directions: from the toll booth area of Highway 101/1, take Lincoln Boulevard west about a half mile to Langdon Court. Turn right (west) on Langdon and look for space in the parking lots, across Lincoln from Fort Winfield Scott. Park and then take the new, improved beach trail, starting just west of the end of Langdon, down its more than 200 steps to Golden Gate Bridge Beach, also known as Marshall’s Beach.

 

FORT FUNSTON BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

If you try to be naked here on weekends, you’ll be barking up the wrong tree. The main creatures who go nude at Fort Funston, south of Ocean Beach, are dogs, but that hasn’t stopped a small band of stark naked sunbathers from hiding away in some sand dunes when rangers aren’t in the area. Authorities usually issue several citations a year here. But if you don’t make a fuss and visit on a weekday, you probably won’t be busted. If anyone complains, put on your beach gear right away. Two more fun activities at “Fort Fun”: watching hang-gliders take off from the cliffs and checking out a seemingly endless passing parade of people and their pets.

Directions: From San Francisco, head west to Ocean Beach, then go south on the Great Highway. After Sloat Boulevard, the road goes uphill. From there, curve right onto Skyline Boulevard, go past one stoplight, and look for signs for Funston on the right. Turn into the public lot and find a space near the west side. At the southwest end, take the sandy steps to the beach, turn right, and walk to the dunes. Find a spot as far as possible from the parking lot. Do not go nude here on the weekends. And if you don’t like dogs, go elsewhere.

 

LAS TRAMPAS REGIONAL WILDERNESS, CASTRO VALLEY

Nudity’s banned in the East Bay Regional Park District, but if you tell that to the nude hikers who will be once again walking across park land July 23 and Aug. 22 — at night — they may moon you en masse. On America’s only naked “Full Moon Hikes,” participants leave the grounds of the Sequoians Naturist Club in Castro Valley fully clothed at dusk and walk through meadows and up hills until the moon rises, before heading back down the slopes with their clothes folded neatly into their backpacks. Says Dave Smith, of San Leandro: “It’s truly wonderful. Except for deer, we’re usually the only ones on the path.” Agrees James, of Fremont: “It’s one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. You’re walking in this silvery light. The moonlight is flooding everything. You feel like you’re in the middle of a beautiful dream.”

Directions: Contact the Sequoians Naturist Club (www.sequoians.com) or the Bay Area Naturists (www.bayareanaturists.org) for details on how to join a walk. Participants usually meet at and return to the Sequoians Club. To get there, take Highway 580 east to the Crow Canyon Road exit. Or follow 580 west to the first Castro Valley off-ramp. Take Crow Canyon Road toward San Ramon 0.75 mile to Cull Canyon Road. Then follow Cull Canyon Road around 6.5 miles to the end of the paved road. Take the dirt road on the right until the “Y” in the road and keep left. Shortly after, you’ll see the Sequoians sign. Proceed ahead for about another 0.75 mile to the Sequoians front gate.

 

DEVIL’S SLIDE, MONTARA

Will they be having a devil of a time in paradise? For the first time, rangers say they’ll begin enforcing state anti-nudity regulations if offended beachgoers complain about the nudists who visit Gray Whale Cove, which is commonly called Devil’s Slide. The good news: It’s a nonissue because cell phones (used to summon rangers) don’t work on the beach, so by the time cops arrive, the offenders have long since suited up or left. And the beach’s top enforcer told us he won’t be telling rangers to bust nudists they see. Most visitors love the long sandy shore, where nudies, about 20 percent of visitors, hang out on the north end.

Directions: Driving from San Francisco, take Highway 1 south through Pacifica. Three miles south of the Denny’s restaurant in Linda Mar, turn left (inland or east) on an unmarked road, which takes you to the beach’s parking lot and to a 146-step staircase leads to the sand. “The steps are in good shape,” Ron says. Coming from the south on Highway 1, look for a road on the right (east), 1.2 miles north of the Chart House restaurant in Montara.

 

SAN GREGORIO NUDE BEACH, SAN GREGORIO

America’s oldest nude beach, near Half Moon Bay, offers two miles of soft sand and tide pools to explore, as well as a lagoon, lava tube, and, if you look closely enough on the cliffs, the remains of an old railroad line. Pets are allowed on weekdays. Up to 200 visitors may be present, but they’re usually so spread out, you may not even notice them. Gay men tend to hang out on the north side and in “sex condos” made of driftwood by visitors — a major annoyance to those who are easily offended. On the south end of the beach, there are sometimes dozens of straight couples and families, naked and clothed. For weather information, call (415) 765-7697.

Directions: Head south on Highway 1 past Half Moon Bay. Between mileposts 18 and 19, look on the right side of the road for telephone call box number SM 001 0195, at the intersection of Highway 1 and Stage Road and near an iron gate with trees on either side. From there, expect a drive of 1.1 miles to the entrance. At the Junction 84 highway sign, the beach’s driveway is just 0.1 mile away. Turn into a gravel driveway, passing through the iron gate mentioned above, which says 119429 on the gatepost. Drive past a grassy field to the parking lot, where you’ll be asked to pay an entrance fee. Take the long path from the lot to the sand; everything north of the trail’s end is clothing-optional.

 

BONNY DOON NUDE BEACH, BONNY DOON

Bonny Doon isn’t doomed. To the contrary, because the state has no plans to develop it or send rangers out to make anti-nudity patrols, it looks like it will remain Santa Cruz County’s prettiest nude beach, which should please the nudists who were on the edge of their towels wondering what would happen. Says Kirk Lingenfelter, sector superintendent for Bonny Doon and nearby state beaches: “Going to places like Bonny Doon helps you get recharged.” Naturists usually use the cove on the north end of the beach, which attracts more women and couples than most clothing-optional enclaves.

Directions: Head south on Highway 1 to the Bonny Doon parking lot at milepost 27.6 on the west side of the road, 2.4 miles north of Red, White, and Blue Beach, and some 11 miles north of Santa Cruz. From Santa Cruz, head north on Highway 1 until you see Bonny Doon Road, which veers sharply to the right just south of Davenport. The beach is right off the intersection. Park in the paved lot to the west of Highway 1; don’t park on Bonny Doon Road or the shoulder of Highway 1. If the lot is full, drive north on Highway 1, park at the next beach lot and walk back to the first lot. To get to the beach, climb the berm next to the railroad tracks adjacent to the Bonny Doon lot, cross the tracks, descend, and take the trail to the sand. Walk north past most of the beach to the cove on the north end.

 

2222, SANTA CRUZ

Size matters at 2222, which is the smallest nude beach in the U.S. — and probably smaller than your backyard. Not many people can fit into it and not many have heard about it, so not many are there, which is just fine with its mostly young crowd of local college students. Located across from 2222 West Cliff Drive, it’s a great place to sunbathe, read, relax, or even watch Neal the Juggler practice tossing balls, pins, and beanbags on the sand. But don’t attempt the very steep climb up and down the cliff unless you’re in good shape.

Directions: The beach is a few blocks west of Natural Bridges State Beach and about 2.5 miles north of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. From either north or south of Santa Cruz, take Highway 1 to Swift Street. Drive 0.8 miles to the sea, then turn right on West Cliff Drive. 2222 is five blocks away. Past Auburn Avenue, look for 2222 West Cliff on the inland side of the street. Park in the nine-car lot next to the cliff. If it’s full, continue straight and park along Chico Avenue. Bay Area Naturists leader Rich Pasco suggests visitors use care and then follow the path on the side of the beach closest to downtown Santa Cruz and the Municipal Wharf.

 

PRIVATES BEACH, SANTA CRUZ

Privates Beach, at 4524 Opal Cliff Drive, north of the Capitola Pier, is so private that it has a locked gate, security guards, and, unless you’re too cheap to pay and want to try another option, a $100 per year fee (cash only). The two coves are exceptionally clean and you’re likely to see families, kids, and dogs on the shore.

Directions: 1) Some visitors walk north from Capitola Pier in low tide (not a good idea since at least four people have needed to be rescued after being trapped by rising water). 2) Others reach it in low tide via the stairs at the end of 41st Avenue, which lead to a surf spot called the Hook at the south end of a rocky shoreline known as Pleasure Point. 3) Surfers paddle on boards for a few minutes to Privates from Capitola or the Hook. 4) Most visitors buy a key to the beach gate at Freeline Design Surfboards (821 41st Ave., Santa Cruz, 831-476-2950) 1.5 blocks west of the beach. Others go with someone with a key or wait outside the gate until someone with a key goes in. “Most people will gladly hold the gate open for someone behind them whose hands are full,” says Bay Area Naturists leader Rich Pasco. The nude area is to the left of the bottom of the stairs.

 

MUIR NUDE BEACH, MUIR BEACH

The mellowness of marvelous Muir Beach was marred last year when some homeowners verbally clashed with nudists over use of the sand. After a few meetings, it was decided that while bare buns on the beach wouldn’t be banned, a warning sign stressing “respect” for everyone and listing a phone number for complaints will be erected, most likely in July, near the border of the nude and clothed sections of the shore. The nude spot is pretty and curved and usually has excellent swimming conditions and access. Instead of a trail, you just walk along the water from the public beach and go around and over some easy-to-cross rocks.

Directions: From San Francisco, take Highway 1 north to Muir Beach, to milepost 5.7. Turn left on Pacific Way and park in the Muir lot (to avoid tickets, don’t park on Pacific). Or park on the long street off Highway 1 across from Pacific and about 100 yards north. From the Muir lot, follow a path and boardwalk to the sand, and then walk north to a pile of rocks between the cliffs and the sea. You’ll need good hiking or walking shoes to cross; in very low tide, try to cross closer to the water. The nude area starts north of it.

 

RED ROCK BEACH, STINSON BEACH

Bay Area fan favorite Red Rock is still rocking with an improved trail, more sand than last summer, Ultimate Frisbee games that last as long as three hours, a shower where you can cool down on a hot day, and up to 75 people a day. “More rock climbers than ever are coming to the beach,” says the Rock’s “ambassador,” Fred Jaggi. “You can get more privacy there.” Three nude women who were perched on a terrace overlooking the cove in June were recently anointed as the Cheerleaders by members of the fun, highly social crowd below.

Directions: The easiest way to find the beach is to go north on Highway 1 from Mill Valley, following the signs to Stinson Beach. At the long line of mailboxes next to the Muir Beach cutoff point, start checking your odometer. Look for a dirt lot full of cars to the left (west) of the highway exactly 5.6 miles north of Muir and a smaller one on the right (east) side of the road. The lots are at milepost 11.3, one mile south of Stinson Beach. Limited parking is also available 150 yards to the south on the west side of Highway 1. Take the path to the beach that starts near the Dumpster next to the main parking lot. The trail’s doable but moderately long, steep, and slippery, so don’t wear flip-flops.

 

BASS LAKE, BOLINAS

If you’re sleepless in San Anselmo, a cure might be to bare your bottom at Bass in Bolinas. “If you want to visit an enchanted lake, Bass is it,” says Ryan, of the East Bay. “Tree branches reach over the water, forming a magical canopy, and huge bunches of calla lilies bloom on the shore.” Even walking to Bass, 45-60 minutes from the lot over 2.8 relatively easy miles, can be an adventure like none other. You may see people with backpacks but no pants on the trail. Rangers once stopped and cited a clad man who had an unleashed dog but let the nudists continue. Says Dave Smith, of San Leandro, who unusually walks naked: “I came around a corner and there was a mountain lion sitting like Egypt’s Great Sphinx of Giza 50 yards down the path.” Bring a heavy towel or tarp for sitting on a somewhat prickly meadow near the water.

Directions: From Stinson Beach, go north on Highway 1. Just north of Bolinas Lagoon, turn left on the often-unmarked exit to Bolinas. Follow the road as it curves along the lagoon and eventually ends at Olema-Bolinas Road; continue along Olema-Bolinas Road to the stop sign at Mesa Road. Turn right on Mesa and drive four miles until it becomes a dirt road and ends at a parking lot. On hot days the lot fills quickly. A sign at the trailhead next to the lot will guide you down scenic Palomarin Trail to the lake.

 

RCA BEACH, BOLINAS

Couples love RCA Beach near Bolinas, and so do singles who long for a ruggedly isolated shoreline that doesn’t take long to reach. This summer, there’s even more to enjoy: the beach is reported to be about four to six feet wider than last year. But it has more gravel this season. “A downside is that it’s very exposed to the wind,” says regular visitor Michael Velkoff. “There’s so much driftwood on the sand that many people build windbreaks or even whole forts. The last time I went, somebody built a 30-foot-tall dragon.” The breathtakingly beautiful beach seems even bigger than its one mile length because, Velkoff says, “you might only see eight people spread out on the sand. Everybody’s like 100 feet apart. It’s great.”

Directions: From Stinson Beach, take Highway 1 (Shoreline Highway) north toward Calle Del Mar for 4.5 miles. Turn left onto Olema Bolinas Road and follow it 1.8 miles to Mesa Road in Bolinas. Turn right and stay on Mesa until you see cars parked past some old transmission towers. Park and walk a 0.25 to the end of the pavement. Go left through the gap in the fence. The trail leads to a gravel road. Follow it until you see a path on your right, leading through a gate. Take it along the cliff top until it veers down to the beach. Or continue along Mesa until you come to a grove of eucalyptus trees. Enter through the gate here, then hike a 0.5 mile through a cow pasture on a path that will also bring you through thick brush. The second route is slippery and eroding, but less steep.

 

LIMANTOUR BEACH, OLEMA

You can tour long, lovely Limantour in Point Reyes National Seashore while wearing only your smile and some suntan lotion. Few visitors realize the narrow spit of sand is clothing-optional. But unless there are complaints or if you beach your bare body too close to a parking lot or the main entrance, you shouldn’t be hassled. The site is so big — about 2.5 miles long — you can wander for hours, checking out ducks and other waterfowl, shorebirds such as endangered snowy plovers, gray whales in the spring, and playful harbor seals (offshore and on the north side). Dogs are allowed on six-foot leashes on the south end. Directions: Follow Highway 101 north to the Sir Francis Drake Boulevard exit, then follow Sir Francis through San Anselmo and Lagunitas to Olema. At the intersection with Highway 1, turn right onto the highway. Just north of Olema, go left on Bear Valley Road. A mile after the turnoff for the Bear Valley Visitor Center, turn left (at the Limantour Beach sign) on Limantour Road and follow it 11 miles to the parking lot at the end. Walk north a 0.5 mile until you see some dunes about 50 yards east of the shore. Nudists usually prefer the valleys between the dunes for sunbathing. “One Sunday we had 200 yards to ourselves,” says a nudist. But lately, the dunes have been more crowded.

Oakland and SF brace for reaction to Mehserle verdict

Sasha Cuttler
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Oakland and SF brace for reaction to Mehserle verdict

Oakland and San Francisco police and city officials are nervously awaiting the verdict in the murder trial of Johannes Mehserle, the former BART police officer who shot and killed Oscar Grant on a train platform last year, although the latest word is that verdict won’t come today (July 6), and probably not tomorrow, because of the absences of two jurors.

After demonstrations against Mehserle in Oakland last year turned into destructive riots, officials fear another outbreak of violence, particularly given the racial undertones to the crime, but they are urging calm and saying they will facilitate peaceful demonstrations in reaction to however the Los Angeles jury rules.

“We anticipate that regardless of the verdict reached by the jury, demonstrations will occur in downtown Oakland, and possibly throughout the city. The City of Oakland is committed to facilitating peaceful expression and demonstrations. The City of Oakland is also prepared to deal with the situation if it turns violent. Our goal is to protect public safety and property by minimizing the vandalism and violence,” reads a memo the Mayor’s Office distributed to Oakland city employees.

Of particular concern to Oakland officials is the area around Oakland City Hall, which they want evacuated before the demonstrations begin. As the memo said, “We learned from the January 2009 BART demonstrations that 14th & Broadway and the City Hall Complex are target areas and there is some indication that history may repeat itself. City management is concerned about the safety of our employees and it may be necessary to release some city staff earlier than normal. Similar planning efforts are being considered by the State and Federal buildings as well as private employers in the surrounding area.”

In fact, witnesses say that many Oakland business owners in the area have already started to board up their storefronts in anticipation of civil unrest. Police in both Oakland and San Francisco have been placed on alert and SFPD Officer Samson Chan said all officers, even plainclothed investigators, will be in uniform from now until the verdict.

SFPD Chief George Gascon held a press conference with African-American church leaders this afternoon urging calm and announcing that community centers throughout the city will be opened to give people peaceful opportunities to express their frustrations. “They all urged people to react to the verdict in a peaceful way,” Chan said.

In a public statement accompanying the internal memo, Mayor Ron Dellums expressed sympathy with the frustrations that people may feel if Mehserle is seen as getting a lenient verdict – “We understand that the community is grieving, and we are in this together. We will get through this together.” – but he ended the message by saying, “We are asking for the community to come together, look out for one another, and stay safe. We will not tolerate destruction or violence. We live here, and we love Oakland.”

COH sends in “hostage negotiators” during budget talks (VIDEO)

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Members of the Board of Supervisors, their legislative aides, and other City Hall regulars were all looking a bit sleep-deprived as they darted from office to office at City Hall July 1 after ongoing budget negotiations kept everyone up late the night before. Just as an agreement on the city budget seemed within reach on June 30, Mayor Gavin Newsom and his chief of staff, Steve Kawa, had expressed strong opposition to several initiatives that progressive members of the Board of Supervisors sought to place on the November ballot.

The mayor’s last-minute move was described by some as a quid pro quo that withheld support for an amended budget — which included about $40 million in restorations to community programs that are high priorities for members of the board — unless four different proposals were struck from the ballot. Three were proposed charter amendments dealing with commission appointments that would distribute power more evenly between the board and the mayor, and the fourth was a proposal put forth by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi that would have required the San Francisco Police Department to adopt a community-policing model and engage in neighborhood foot patrols, initially cast as an enlightened alternative to Newsom’s proposed law banning sitting or lying down on the sidewalk. 

“In so many words, he had expressed clear dissent, and that was made relative to our budget proceedings,” Mirkarimi said, noting that the mayor didn’t phrase it in a way that would have run afoul of a law prohibiting that kind of bargaining over legislation. Newsom Press Secretary Tony Winnicker dodged repeated Guardian questions about whether Newsom was demanding conditions unrelated to the budget, coming closest to a direct answer when he said, “Before discussions of vetoing would even come up there would have to be something at the full Board to consider or veto, and there’s not, so NO.”

Technically legal or not, Newsom’s move was enough to prompt members of the Coalition on Homelessness, an advocacy group, to decry it as “a hostage situation.” As if negotiators ping-ponging back and forth across City Hall weren’t jarred enough already, the Coalition on Homelessness and Budget Justice Coalition members opted to underscore their point by blasting heavy metal music outside the mayor’s office windows in order to “push the standoff to a close, and release the needed funds to safety.”

“The package of add-backs and cuts would have preserved the essential services San Francisco families rely on to survive the recession,” the Coalition wrote in a press statement that was released as budget negotiations wore on. “In order to leverage political gain on unrelated issues, the Mayor chose to hold hostage the package of restorations to vital senior health services, youth violence prevention programs, mental health treatment and cuts to waste.”

The heavy metal stunt only lasted about two minutes before deputy sherriffs put the kibosh on it, but “hostage negotiators” Patrick Flanagan (shown in the video wearing sunglasses), James Chionsini, Que Newbill, Lorraine Deguzman, Bob Offer-Westort, and Jennifer Friedenbach managed to make their way into the reception area of the mayor’s office. Mike Farrah, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, was sent out for a bargaining session with the pizza-bearing crew. We caught the whole tense situation on film, and here’s how it went:

The “hostage negotiations” session took place around 4 p.m. Around the same time, various members of the board were going in to meet with the mayor on what several described as “parallel conversations” regarding the charter amendments, and the roster of programs that supervisors wanted to see restored after Newsom proposed slashing them in his June 1 budget proposal.

As the Budget & Finance Committee prepared to meet around 6:30 p.m., the worst fears of the Budget Justice Coalition did not seem to be realized. City Controller Ben Rosenfield arrived to the board chambers with freshly printed copies of an add-back list that included most of the programs that were high priorities for progressive supervisors and community advocates. However, Newsom had not given that list his stamp of approval, so a final budget agreement between both parties remained elusive. Winnicker cast those add-backs as contrary to Newsom’s wishes: “Don’t for a second even try to suggest that it’s improper to raise concerns about the fiscal impact of a new $40 million setaside in the context of a discussion of the budget.”

As for the discussion about the charter amenments, Mirkarimi characterized it as “ongoing.” Avalos called the preliminary amended budget “a work in progress,” but members of the Budget & Finance Committee still voiced a round of thank-yous to one another and all of the community groups who were there to assist with the process.

The Budget & Finance Committee forwarded the budget, including the restoration package, to the full board. Using a variety of sources, supervisors were able to restore $32,941,541 in funding for programs ranging from homeless services, to mental health care programs, to programs that aid and assist impoverished single-room-occupancy hotel residents, and others. An additional $7.4 million meant to cover a variety of youth and senior programs will depend on a supplemental appropriation that won the committee’s preliminary approval. Sup. Sean Elsbernd dissented on both counts, but still made a point of thanking the other committee members for their work.

 



The good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa, the Fourth of July, 1940-1953

David Talbot
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(Note: In July of 1972, when the Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)

Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.

The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.

The calm of the summer dawn and the cooing of the mourning doves on the telephone wires would be broken early on July Fourth: The Creglow boys would be up by 7 a.m. and out on the lawn shooting off their arsenal of firecrackers. They were older and had somehow sent their agents by car across the state line and into South Dakota where, not far above the highway curves of Larchwood, you could legally buy fireworks at roadside stands.

Ted Fisch, Jim Ramsey, Wiener Winters, the Cook boys, Hermie Casjens, Jerry Prahl, and the rest of the neighborhood would race out of  their houses to catch the action. Some  had cajoled firecrackers from their parents or bartered from the older boys in the neighborhood: some torpedoes (the kind you smashed against the sidewalk); lots of 2 and 3-inchers, occasionally the granddaddy of them all, the cherry bomb (the really explosive firecracker, stubby, cherry red, with a wick sticking up menacingly from its middle; the kind of firecracker you’d gladly trade away your best set of Submariner comics for).

Ah, the cherry bomb. It was a microcosm of excitement and mischief and good fun. Bob Creglow, the most resourceful of the Creglow boys, would take a cherry bomb, set it beneath a tin can on a porch, light the fuse, then head for the lilac bushes behind the barn.

“The trick,” he would say, imparting wisdom of the highest order, “is to place the can on a wood porch with a wood roof. Then it will hit the top of the porch, bang, then the bottom of the porch, bang. That’s how you get the biggest clatter.”

So I trudged off to the Linkenheil house, the nearest front porch suitable for cherry bombing, to try my hand at small-town demolition. Bang went the firecracker. Bang went the can on the roof. Bang went the can on the floor. Bang went the screen door as Karl Linkenheil roared out in a sweat, and I lit out for the lilacs behind the barn with my dog, Oscar.

It was glorious stuff – not to be outdone for years, I found out later, until the Halloween eve in high school when Dave Dietz, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Bob Babl, and rest of the Hermie Casjens gang and I made the big time and twice pushed a boxcar loaded with lumber across Main Street and blocked it for hours. But that’s another story in my Halloween blog of last year.

Shooting off fireworks was, of course, illegal in Rock Rapids, but Chief of Police Del Woodburn and later Elmer “Shinny” Sheneberger used to lay low on the Fourth. I don’t recall ever seeing them about in our neighborhood and I don’t think they ever arrested anybody, although each year the Rock Rapids Reporter would carry vague warnings about everybody cooperating to have “a safe and sane Fourth of July.”

Perhaps it was just too dangerous for them to start making firecracker arrests on the Fourth – on the same principle, I guess, that it was dangerous to do too much about the swashbuckling on Halloween or start running down dogs without leashes (Mayor Earl Fisher used to run on the platform that, as long as he was in office, no dog in town would have to be leashed. The neighborhood consensus was that Fisher’s dog, a big, boisterous boxer, was one of the few that ought to be leashed).

We handled the cherry bombs and other fireworks in our possession with extreme care and cultivation; I can’t remember a single mishap. Yet, even then, the handwriting was on the wall. There was talk of cutting off the fireworks supply in South Dakota because it was dangerous for young boys. Pretty soon, they did cut off the cherry bomb traffic and about all that was left, when I came back from college and the Roger boys had replaced the Creglow boys next door, was little stuff appropriately called ladyfingers.

Fireworks are dangerous, our parents would say, and each year they would dust off the old chestnut about the drugstore in Spencer that had a big stock of fireworks and they caught fire one night and much of the downtown went up in a spectacular shower of roman candles and sparkling fountains.

The story was hard to pin down, and seemed to get more gruesome every year – but, we were told, this was why Iowa banned fireworks years before, why they were so dangerous and why little boys shouldn’t be setting them off. The story, of course, never made quite the intended impression; we just wished we’d been on the scene My grandfather was the town druggist (Brugmann’s Drugstore, “where drugs and gold are fairly sold, since 1902″) and he said he knew the Spencer druggist personally. Fireworks put him out of business and into the poorhouse, he’d say, and walk away shaking his head.

In any event, firecrackers weren’t much of an issue past noon – the Fourth celebration at the fairgrounds was getting underway and there was too much else to do. Appropriately, the celebration was sponsored by the Rex Strait post of the American Legion (Strait, so the story went, was the first boy from Rock Rapids to die on foreign soil during World War I); the legionnaires were a bunch of good guys from the cleaners and the feed store and the bank who sponsored the American Legion baseball team each summer.

There was always a big carnival, with a ferris wheel somewhere in the center for the kids, a bingo stand for the elders, a booth where the ladies from the Methodist Church sold homemade baked goods, sometimes a hootchy dancer or two, and a couple of dank watering holes beneath the grandstand where the VFW and the Legion sold Grainbelt and Hamms at 30¢ a bottle to anybody who looked of age.

Later on, when the farmboys came in from George and Alvord, there was lots of pushing and shoving, and a fist fight or two.

In front of the grandstand, out in the dust and the sun, would come a succession of shows that made the summer rounds of the little towns. One year it would be Joey Chitwood and his daredevil drivers. (The announcer always fascinated me: “Here he comes, folks, rounding the far turn…he is doing a great job out there tonight…let’s give him a big, big hand as he pulls up in front on the grandstand…”)

Another year it would be harness racing and Mr. Hardy, our local trainer from Doon, would be in his moment of glory. Another year it was tag team wrestling and a couple of barrel-chested goons from Omaha, playing the mean heavies and rabbit-punching their opponents from the back, would provoke roars of disgust from the grandstand. ( The biggest barrel-chest would lean back on the ropes, looking menacingly at the crowd and yell, “ Aw, you dumb farmers. What the hell do you know anyway?” And the grandstand would roar back in glee.)

One year, Cedric Adams, the Herb Caen of Minneapolis and the Star-Tribune, would tour the provinces as the emcee of a variety show. “It’s great to be in Rock Rapids,” he would say expansively, “because it’s always been known as the ‘Gateway to Magnolia.” (Magnolia, he didn’t need to say, was a little town just over the state line in Minnesota which was known throughout the territory for its liquor-by-the-drink roadhouses. It was also Cedric Adams’ hometown: his “Sackamenna.”) Adams kissed each girl (soundly) who came on the platform to perform and, at the end, hushed the crowd for his radio broadcast to the big city “direct from the stage of the Lyon County Fairgrounds in Rock Rapids, Iowa.”

For a couple of years, when Rock Rapids had a “town team,” and a couple of imported left-handed pitchers named Peewee Wenger and Karl Kletschke, we would have some rousing baseball games with the best semi-pro team around, Larchwood and its gang of Snyder brothers: Barney the eldest at shortstop, Jimmy the youngest at third base, John in center field, Paul in left field, another Snyder behind the plate and a couple on the bench. They were as tough as they came in Iowa baseball.

I can remember it as if it were yesterday at Candlestick, the 1948 game with the Snyders of Larchwood. Peewee Wenger, a gawky, 17-year-old kid right off a high school team, was pitching for Rock Rapids and holding down the Snyder artillery in splendid fashion. Inning after inning he went on, nursing a small lead, mastering one tough Larchwood batter after another, with a blistering fastball and a curve that sliced wickedly into the bat handles of the right-handed Larchwood line-up.

Then the cagey Barney Snyder laid a slow bunt down the third base line. Wenger stumbled, lurched, almost fell getting to the ball, then toppled off balance again, stood helplessly holding the ball. He couldn’t make the throw to first. Barney was safe, cocky and firing insults like machine gun bullets at Peewee from first base.

Peewee, visibly shaken, went back to the mound. He pitched, the next Larchwood batter bunted, this time down the first base line. Peewee lurched for the ball, but couldn’t come up with it. A couple more bunts, a shot through the pitcher’s mound, more bunts and Peewee was out. He could pitch, but, alas, he was too clumsy to field. In came Bill Jammer, now in his late 30’s, but in his day the man who beat the University of Iowa while pitching at a small college called Simpson.

Now he was pitching on guts and beer, a combination good enough for many teams and on good days even to take on the Snyders. Jammer did well for a couple of innings, then he let two men on base, then came a close call at the plate. Jammer got mad. Both teams were off the bench and onto the field and, as Fred Roach wrote in the Rock Rapids Reporter, “fisticuffs erupted at home plate.” When the dust cleared, Jammer has a broken jaw, and for the next two weeks had to drink his soup through a straw at the Joy Lunch. John Snyder, it was said later, came all the way in from center field to throw the punch, but nobody knew for sure and he stayed in the game. I can’t remember the score or who won the game, but I remember it as the best Fourth ever.

At dusk, the people moved out on their porches or put up folding chairs on the lawn. Those who didn’t have a good view drove out to the New Addition or parked out near Mark Curtis’ place or along the river roads that snaked out to the five-mile bridge and Virgil Hasche’s place.

A hush came over the town. Fireflies started flickering in the river bottom and, along about 8:30, the first puff of smoke rose above the fairgrounds and an aerial bomb whistled into the heavens. BOOM! And the town shook as if hit by a clap of thunder.

Then the three-tiered sky bombs – pink, yellow, white, puff, puff, puff. The Niagara Falls and a gush of white sparks.

Then, in sudden fury, a dazzling display of sizzling comets and aerial bombs and star clusters that arched high, hung for a full breath and descended in a cascade of sparks that floated harmlessly over the meadows and cornfields. At the end, the flag – red, white and blue – would burst forth on the ground as the All-American finale in the darkest of the dark summer nights. On cue, the cheers rolled out from the grandstand and the cars honked from the high ground and the people trundled up their lawn chairs and everybody headed for home.

Well, I live in San Francisco now, and I drive to Daly City with my son, Danny, to buy some anemic stuff in gaudy yellow and blue wrapping and I try unsuccessfully each year to get through the fog or the traffic to see the fireworks at Candlestick. But I feel better knowing that, back where I come from, everybody in town will be on their porches and on the backroads on the evening of the Fourth to watch the fireworks and that, somewhere in town, a little boy will put a big firecracker under a tin can on a wood porch, then light out for the lilacs behind the barn.

P.S. Our family moved in l965 from Daly City to a house in the West Portal area of San Francisco. There are, I assure you, few visible fireworks in that neighborhood. However, down where we work at the Guardian building at the bottom of Potrero Hill, the professional and amateur action is spectacular.

From the roof of the Guardian building at 135 Mississippi, and from any Potrero Hill height, you can see the fireworks in several directions: the waterfront fireworks in the city, fireworks on the Marin side of the Golden Gate bridge, fireworks at several points in the East Bay, fireworks along the Peninsula coast line.

And for the amateur action, parents with kids, kids of all ages, spectators in cars and on foot, congregate after dusk along Terry Francois Boulevard in San Francisco along the shoreline between the Giants ballpark and Kellys Mission Rock restaurant.

The action is informal but fiery and furious: cherry bombs, clusters, spinning wheels, high flying arcs, whizzers of all shapes and sizes. The cops are quite civilized and patrol the perimeter but don’t bother anybody. I go every year. I think it’s the best show in town. B3.

D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy, Tony Kelly and progressive planners blast Lennar’s plan

Mary Magee
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8

Recently, I spent some time talking with D. 10 candidates DeWitt Lacy and Tony Kelly about Lennar’s redevelopment plan for the shipyard and Candlestick Point. I also attended a Progressive Planners forum that addressed the massive development proposal. Those conversations and the issues they raised seem timely in light of the city’s crazily tight schedule for trying to ram final approvals for the project past government agencies this summer. And in light of three appeals that have been filed against the city’s recently certified final environmental impact report for the plan, raising concerns that the city will get bogged down in expensive and time-consuming litigation if it doesn’t get the plan right, while it still can.

(Lest other D. 10 candidates complain that they weren’t interviewed, too, I’d like to clarify that I’ll be covering the race between now and November, and I look forward to hearing what they all think at the Board’s July 13 meeting to hear appeals of the city’s final environmental impact report (FEIR) for the project. )

Both Lacy and Kelly are critics of Lennar’s plan, but not in a knee-jerk obstructionist way. Instead, they bring considered and informed critiques to the table at a time when the community desperately needs good advice and a workable strategy, if residents are to get needed amendments and concessions, before the developer get the green light, or before the Board puts  a moratorium on the project until the city’s FEIR flaws are ironed out.

Lacy is a bright and earnest candidate who learned lessons from the school of life, while growing up in San Jose in a working class family. Lacy says his father worked in an Adidas warehouse until he was injured on the job, and his mother worked as a secretary in Atari’s corporate office, but was laid off after two years.

Lacy recalls how his parents opened their own janitorial business, in the hope of making a better life for their six children.  He says that it was while cleaning homes alongside his mother, that he began to recognize the need for working class improvement and growth.

 In 1995, Lacy moved to San Francisco, where he has worked in the District Attorney’s office and formed his own law practice—experience that could serve District 10 well, since it’s home to many working-class residents and will be ground zero in the battle for construction-related contracts and environmental and economic justice, if Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan goes ahead,

“I know how to craft legislation for social justice,” Lacy said.

Lacy observes how Michael Cohen, Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor in the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, has repeatedly told folks that land transferred to Lennar will be subject to a “right of reverter.”
This means the Redevelopment Agency may re-take ownership of the land, if the developer fails to substantially complete the infrastructure in the time frame set forth in the city’s development and disposition agreement (the DDA)

But Lacy observes that this “nuclear option” isn’t likely to happen with so much riding on the Lennar deal, and he stresses that additional controls are needed, if the city is to ensure that the deal remains in the best interest of San Francisco, not just the developer.

Lacy’s probably right about that. (Remember how hard the community had to fight to just get an extra 15 days to read and comment on the project’s six volume draft EIR over the winter holidays?)

And how much political pressure was exerted to ram the city’s EIR for this project across the certification line on June 3, five days before Santa Clara voters decided to support a stadium for the 49ers near Great America.

“What’s needed is an impartial arbiter,” Lacy said. “The city needs regulatory controls and the capacity to fine Lennar if it breaks promises to build affordable housing, create jobs and hire locals. You’re not going to be able to hold their feet to the fire without that.”

“I’m not saying that we should be obstructionists, critics who are trying to prevent stuff for the sake of a political battle,” Lacy added. “But we need new blood. The benefit of my campaign is that I’m not downtown’s candidate. I’m a civil rights attorney, who can help the district by figuring out what battles we need to be fighting and which battles are winnable. And I want to make sure there are jobs and business opportunities for working-class folks in San Francisco. You shouldn’t have to be a doctor or lawyer to afford to live here.”

Lacy believes the Navy should remove the radiologically impacted landfill on the shipyard’s Parcel E2.
“That ground has to be taken out of there,” Lacy said. “I would hope the City Attorney’s Office would get involved and advocate for the people. But leadership is about taking a stance when no one else is.”

With the city suggesting that it can still win back the 49ers, Lacy said that he too, would love it if the 49ers decided to stay.
 
“But not at the cost of our health and safety,” Lacy said, referring to the city’s repeated claim that it needed to rush certification of the final EIR for Lennar’s project, if there was to be any hope of winning back the team.

“ I don’t think the solution is the rush,” Lacy said. “I say, let’s make sure we clean up the shipyard properly—and bring back the Warriors [a professional basketball team that relocated to San Francisco in 1962, until 1971, when it moved to Oakland].”

I also hung out with D. 10 candidate Tony Kelly, at an event that POWER hosted as part of a Progressive Planners Forum, the day after Lacy and I unsuccessfully tried to access the shipyard, and the same day that POWER was also blocked from the yard.

Kelly has been tracking issues in and around District 10 for years, and, much like Lacy,  he’s not afraid to speak his mind on the issues.

For instance, Kelly is incensed by the city’s attempt to ram through approval of the final EIR for Lennar’s development, when the Navy has yet to complete an environmental impact statement related to its proposed clean up activities at the shipyard..
“Is the EIS ever a trailer to the EIR?” Kelly asked. “It’s like planning on Mars.”

Kelly has also expressed concern over the developer’s plan to build two peaker plants in the community.

And he is worried about the consequences of the city’s plan to turn the entire Bayview into a project survey area for Lennar’s Candlestick/Shipyard plan.

“How do you pay for any other improvements in the Bayview, when the shipyard redevelopment plan sucks all the air out of the room?” Kelly said

But Kelly’s biggest concern right now is that once Lennar gets its final approvals this summer, “the developer will never talk directly to the community again.”

At the Progressive Planners Forum that Kelly attended, speakers also voiced measured criticisms of Lennar’s plan.

“The plan has some important elements, especially in the job areas, but I think it adds up to gentrification, which is disruptive to the surrounding community, families and the last bastion of the black community in San Francisco,” said Chester Hartman, who has authored over 18 books on race and urban planning, including the acclaimed City For Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco.

“There is a need for a response in terms of an alternative approach,” Hartman advised.
“It doesn’t have to be a detailed, but it should include a basic philosophy and goals, and retain good parts of the original plan.”

Peter Marcuse, Professor of Urban Planning at Colombia University, said the situation at the shipyard reminded him of the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf.

“Cap the land sounds like cap the spill,” Marcuse said, noting that in both cases the community is fighting to get folks who dumped toxins to clean them up.

Marcuse criticized the privatization of the planning process, as illustrated by the City’s claim that it has entered into a “public-private” partnership with Lennar,  and the community’s experience that the city and the developer keep ignoring or dismissing the public’s feedback and opinions.

 “There should have been a range of alternatives open for discussion,” Marcuse said. “Instead, there is a sense, of this mega project’s inevitability. And once the developer has title to the land, the city has to negotiate what should be a public matter.”

Marcuse critiqued the use of tax increment financing, which will use increased taxes on property throughout the Bayview to finance improvements in one relatively small area, the 770 acres of land that, as Marcuse put it, “got sold to Lennar for $1.”

“This is a form of government subsidy,” Marcuse warned.

“There have been some negotiations,” Marcuse continued. He pointed to the community-led Prop. F, which in the spring of 2008 sought to establish 50 percent affordable housing in the development. And the community benefits agreement (CBA) that the San Francisco Labor Council hammered out at in May 2008, in an attempt to nail down benefits for the community in exchange for the Council’s support for the Lennar-financed Prop. G in June 2008.

“But these negotiations with Lennar start on basis that Lennar’s interests have to be protected equally with those of the City and its residents,” Marcuse commented. “It ought to be a public responsibility to show the community what the alternates to Lennar’s vision are.”

Marcuse concluded by suggesting a moratorium on Lennar’s plan to allow for a community-based visioning process, in which residents could express their desire for housing, diversity, open space and protection against environmental hazards

‘The City should then come up with an alternative to Lennar’s plan—and listen to Lennar,” he said. “But this is a public responsibility, rather than a private negotiation with a corporation that has been a beneficiary of a huge subsidy and starts to make a huge profit, the minute its housing units begin to sell.”

Miriam Chion, who works for the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), also expressed concerns with Lennar’s massive plan, which proposes to build thousands of mostly luxury condos at Candlestick Point, with a smaller number on the shipyard.

“We are in the 21st century, how can we continue to use same mechanisms of displacement?” Chion said. “And how can we do that to the African American community, which we have displaced over and over, and which has managed to build a community here, in spite of everything?”

According to Lennar’s plan, 68 percent of its proposed 10,000 units will be built at market rate. Of the remaining 32 percent of units, only 15 percent will be built at truly affordable rates, with an additional 15 percent geared towards the working middle-class income levels, such as those enjoyed by police, fire fighters, nurses and teachers.

But two Bayview residents who attended POWER’s progressive planners’ forum expressed frustration at what they perceived as outsiders trying to tell locals what’s best.

“If you haven’t lived here, you don’t know about the Bayview,” one resident said. “If they are going to do what they are going to do, they should do it all the way, and change things for the better. I’m tired of seeing kids under 12, playing outside at 11 p.m. So, if you are not from here, you can’t come on my ground and pass judgment. If you’d been and lived here, I don’t think you’d see this negatively.”

“$700 million has been spent on cleaning up shipyard, and producing highly technical reports on it,”  another local resident said. “Highly intellectual discussions are not helping, we need some action today.”

“No one here is against development,” countered long-term Bayview resident Espanola Jackson, while a Bayview resident named Nyese resurrected longstanding concerns that the developer fatally broke community trust when it failed to control asbestos dust at the site, when it began grading the shipyard’s Parcel A .

“Four years ago, I found out that they were sending home workers at the shipyard, without informing the surrounding community,” Nyese recalled. “My son was having excessive nosebleeds, so it was phenomenally insulting that they didn’t not notify us.”
“Lennar is just a name, a conglomeration of shareholders,” Nyese further noted. “We need development. But we don’t need it on chemically toxic land.”

These competing concerns indicate that all the candidates in the D. 10 race are going to have to be asking critical questions as they track the progress of Lennar, the city and the Navy’s plans this summer. Failure to do so will cost them credibility within the community—and possibly the supervisor’s race this fall, though downtown money will pour in to support whichever candidate is deemed most likely to rubberstamp present and future development and contracting plans. Stay tuned. It’s going to be a (politically) hot July.

 

Political litmus test for Hunters Point Shipyard access?

Mary Magee
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4

Even though the U.S. Navy abandoned the Hunters Point Shipyard in 1974, the military has continued to control access to the shipyard that helped launch the A-Bomb. That’s because the Navy still owns most parcels of land on the shipyard and remains on the hook for cleaning up pollutants on these sites, including a radiologically impacted dump on Parcel E2, which has been deemed to be the dirtiest land on the site.

Currently, the Navy is proposing to cap, not excavate this landfill, despite repeated requests from the local community, and a citywide vote in support of Proposition P in 2000, which urged the Navy to clean up the land to the best extent possible, which would mean excavating the Parcel E2 landfill and replacing it with clean uncontaminated soil. And oddly, the City appears to want government agencies and officials to sign off on its final EIR for Lennar’s massive 770-acre redevelopment plan for the shipyard and Candlestick Point, even though the Navy has not yet completed an environmental impact statement (EIS) related to its proposed shipyard cleanup activities.

Currently, the Navy controls access to the facility beyond a couple of trailers that the city’s Redevelopment Agency has set up just within the yard’s main gate. And to gain access to the shipyard these days, you need to call or visit Redevelopment’s trailer and get a pass. Or, alternatively, if you know any of the artists who continue to rent studios at shipyard, you can call them to try and get the city to give you a pass.

Underlying these limits to accessing the shipyard are some legitimate safety concerns related to equipment and excavations on what is now an active clean up and construction site, along with fears that untoward characters could break into the abandoned buildings or bother the artists who still have studios in operation at the shipyard. But has an additional political litmus test been put in place when it comes to critics of Lennar’s redevelopment plan, who want to access to the yard? If so, does it mirror the tap dancing that the local community has had to undergo to get its voices heard as Lennar pushes to get final approval for its shipyard/ Candlestick Point redevelopment plan.

Those questions resurfaced last week when a private security guard manning the shipyard’s front gate denied access to D. 10 supervisor candidate DeWitt Lacy, who had dropped by hoping to take this reporter around the yard as part of an ongoing conversation about Parcel E2, which Lacy believes needs to be excavated completely, and how best to hold the Navy accountable for cleaning up a mess it created decades ago. The security guard told Lacy that folks who want to visit must get a pass at the Redevelopment Agency trailer.

At the Redevelopment trailer, Micah Fobbs, administrative assistant for W.B. Kennedy and Associates, which has a contract with Redevelopment’s Citizen’s Advisory Committee. told Lacy that without a preauthorized pass, he couldn’t let us onto the site. Fobbs added that he would be happy to take us on a tour himself, but he could not leave the trailer unmanned, since he was the only staff member there at the time. Fair enough. Though the rebuff gave us the feel that the City doesn’t want pesky investigative reporters that have been critical of the development running around the site. “And if they found out I was a civil rights attorney, they probably wouldn’t want me out here, either,” Lacy joked.

But the next day, I encountered what sounded like overt hostility to other critics of Lennar’s plan, when I tried to ride along on what had been billed as a “Toxic Tour of the Navy Shipyard” by POWER (People Organizing to Win Employment Rights). POWER had advertised its tour in an email which said it would involve 23 expert urban planners, who happened to be in the Bay Area for a Progressive Planning Forum. The tour was billed as happening on the morning of June 17, before an afternoon discussion at POWER’s Third Street office in the Bayview, which was to focus “on alternative approaches to the city’s current plan for development at the Shipyard/ Candlestick Point.”

Caught in traffic, I didn’t arrive at the Boys and Girls Club on Kiska Road in Bayview Hunters Point in time to join POWER’s kick-off get together. So, I headed direct to the shipyard, a move that meant I arrived alone and ahead of the school bus that POWER had rented for the occasion. At the gate, I was told by the security guard that I couldn’t get in, that another guard lost his job for letting unauthorized individuals onto the site, that POWER didn’t have a pass and that they’d been warned to watch for POWER “because they want to stop the development.”

“If you are not authorized with badges, you are not let through,” the guard said, giving me the telephone number of the Hunters Point Duty police officer, who in turn said I needed to call the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which in turn told me to call the folks at the Redevelopment Agency’s shipyard trailer. And so I called Fobbs again, who confirmed that the Navy still controls all the property, except Parcel A which has already been conveyed to the City which in turn has granted developer Lennar the right to develop thousands of condos on that particular parcel.

“As far as viewing the rest of the property, you have to put in a request, and no photography or videography is allowed,” Fobbs said. This stated ban on photography came as a surprise, given recent photos of the shipyard that ran in a New York Times article about Lennar and the city’s vision for the 770-acre property.

And the sudden difficulties in gaining media access seemed odd, given that Lennar’s PR firm, Sitrick and Company, offered to take the media on a tour on the morning of June 3—the day the Redevelopment and Planning Commissions subsequently approved the final EIR for Lennar’s plan to redevelop the rest of the shipyard, plus Candlestick Point, a FEIR that has now been appealed to the Board, on the grounds that it was rushed for political reasons, leading to fatal flaws in the final document.

“Well, if folks come here through Redevelopment or the Mayor’s Office, then they have been able to take photographs,” Fobbs said. “But we have had people trying to climb fences and get through doors of some of the buildings.” (Fobbs last comment was a reference to a recent climbing of the fence that the Nation of Islam’s Leon Muhammad engaged in, in an effort to determine if air quality monitoring devices near the Nation’s school and Oakdale public housing site were operating. (After Muhammad scaled the fence and reported that he’d found an empty bin where monitoring equipment was supposed to be, a kafuffle ensued, with the US EPA saying Muhammad was looking in the wrong place for the monitors which, it claimed, were in operation.)

Ultimately, Fobbs told me to call Redevelopment’s Audrey Kay if I wanted a tour, and several shipyard artists told me they would be happy to arrange a day pass so I can visit their studios and hear concerns that they will be required to move from a couple of shipyard buildings before replacement studios have been completed–an arrangement that would amount to a breach of promise that Lennar and the city previously made to the shipyard artists.

Shortly after I was turned away for a second time, POWER’s bus arrived at the gate, only to be blocked–a denial of access that meant 23 progressive planners were forced to view the shipyard from various remote viewing spots atop the hills that surround the site.

Together these episodes left me wondering what kind of political litmus test could end up being enforced at the site, if Lennar’s mega project gets the green light this summer, and what will happen if the Board decides to kick the plan back to the drawing board until the Navy completes a environmental impact statement and all of the community’s ongoing environmental and economic justice concerns are addressed.

So stay tuned, and don’t forget to mark July 13 on your calendar when the full Board of Supervisors is tentatively to hear appeals of the project’s final EIR, which the Planning and Redevelopment Commissions rubberstamped June 3. And, as always, it will be revealing to see which candidates in the hotly contested race for D. 10 supervisor, show up and speak truth to power.

 

 

Sparks reveals her conservativism in exchange with Walker

Sasha Cuttler
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26

During the District 6 supervisorial candidate debate that San Francisco Young Democrats held last week, a two-question exchange between two of the leading candidates – progressive Debra Walker and downtown-backed Theresa Sparks – offered a revealing look at their starkly different worldviews and priorities, which is more important in this race than people’s machine politics conspiracy theories.

During the second portion of the event, candidates were allowed to ask a question of another candidate, and Walker and Sparks focused on one another with pointed questions (this occurred at around the 30-minute mark, although the video doesn’t seem to allow users to forward to that point, forcing you to endure the often insipid commentary).

Walker went first, asking Sparks why, during her more than four-year tenure on the Police Commission – a body in charge of disciplining police officers accused of serious misconduct after citizen complaints are investigated and found valid by the Office of Citizen Complaints, with each case assigned to a particular commissioner – Sparks didn’t hold any hearings or act to punish any officers.

Sparks said the accusation wasn’t true, and that she did hold one hearing during that time, and then said that the Police Commission is prohibited by the city charter from intervening in the internal workings of the Police Department, implying that the body isn’t actually in charge of disciplining officers. Walker said Sparks was wrong and tried to ask a follow-up question and was cut off by moderator Melissa Griffin.

So this week, I called both candidates to try to get to the bottom of the dispute. “She indicated it’s not the commission’s job to focus on these things, and that’s absolutely not the case,” Walker said. “She was incorrect saying it wasn’t the job of commissioners to do this.”

And when I talked to Sparks, she didn’t dispute that fact, but conveyed how complicated the process was when officers are accused of serious misconduct (minor misconduct just goes to the chief), with lawyers seeking stipulated settlements and whatnot, and repeatedly emphasizing “it’s a bad system.” One reason it’s so bad is her own lack of qualifications: “You can’t have people like me, whose only legal background is watching Law and Order, trying to handle these cases.”

Sparks was appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is backing her supervisorial bid, which is also expected to have strong support from the San Francisco Police Officers Association. She wouldn’t say how many cases she was assigned during her tenure, but OCC records show more than 300 cases assigned to the commission during her tenure and the long backlog left in her wake has been the subject of criticism by everyone from Police Chief George Gascon to new Police Commission Jim Hammer.

Rather than supporting this civilian oversight of problem officers, Sparks wants to turn those duties over to Gascon’s office, telling us, “We need to give this chief more authority to fire officers rather than going through this ridiculous process.”

At the debate, after seeming stung by a question she jokingly called a “softball,” Sparks fired back by asking Walker whether she supported the proposed tax measures now being considered by the Board of Supervisors to help close the city’s large budget deficit, framing the question by saying they would hurt small business.

Walker answered by voicing her support for small business, but noting how essential city services such as public health programs were being deeply cut and that the city needed new revenue to deal with its structural budget deficit, although she said that she had yet to decide which of the tax measures she supported considering none have been approved for the ballot yet.

This week, Moody’s Investor Services lowered the citys’ credit rating precisely because Newsom’s budgets have not addressed that structural budget deficit, and even the Controller’s Office has ordered more than a $100 million placed on reserve because of doubts about the mayor’s revenue assumptions.

So for Sparks to characterize the need for new revenue as an unfair attack on small business indicates a short-sighted, right-wing approach to municipal finances, an approach Walker rejects, telling us, “I think we need to be responsible and do the right thing in dealing with the city’s needs…It’s going to cost us and the people who come after us more and more because of these cuts.”

When I spoke with Sparks, noting the Moody’s report, she seemed to back away from how she was trying the characterize the revenue measures at the debate. “I do think the city needs new revenue, but I don’t think that taxing small business is the way to go,” she said, referring to a proposal by Sup. David Chiu to tax commercial rents, which would be paid by the landlords.

So I asked Sparks whether she supported any of the proposals or if she was advocating any other revenues measures, and she said, “Quite honestly, I need to think about that because I do think we need more revenue.”

Which is pretty much the same answer Walker gave in a far more honest and direct way in that debate, without trying to pander to the fears of small businesspeople. The bottom line is that the downtown corporations who are backing Sparks have done nothing to help the city during this prolonged recession, while demanding even greater police responses to deal with poor people sitting on sidewalks and other perceived problems, and that hypocrisy should be front and center in this election.

Kim launches D6 campaign, stressing independence from “machine” politics

Sasha Cuttler
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45

Jane Kim launched her campaign for the District 6 seat on the Board of Supervisors last night during a spirited event at 111 Minna, showcasing some high-profile supporters and giving a speech that began with touting her early work on immigrant rights and homeless issues and ended with the declaration, “I’m not part of anyone’s machine and I’m certainly not a part of anyone’s master plan.”

That emphasis on her independence could be seen as a subtle dig at Debra Walker, another progressive who has been running for the seat for the last two years, who locked down early support from many progressive groups and officials, and whose supporters were unhappy with Kim’s late decision to enter the race, concerned it might split the vote and allow downtown-backed Theresa Sparks — who could be viewed as a “machine” candidate on the other end of the political spectrum — to steal the seat for the moderates.

When I asked what “machine” she meant and whether the comment was a reference to Walker’s supporters, Kim wouldn’t clarify the comment, refusing to criticize the Walker campaign and saying only, “I want to be a part of a new political process.”

And that new process seems to rely heavily on the energy of young people, including many of color, who dominated the crowd last night. Kim also signaled that she will be pushing a fairly bold progressive agenda that includes more city support for schools, Muni, immigrants, and low-income families, and making the streets more vibrant and democratic.

“The mantra of our campaign is to make our neighborhoods complete,” Kim said.

She proposed making substantial pedestian and bicycle improvements on several streets in her district, including 2nd, Folsom, Taylor, and Turk streets, creating more bikes lanes that are separated from car traffic, and turning many of the alleys in her district into more active public spaces. She called for the city to help fund youth programs and a longer school year and to offer more support to small businesses, which she called the city’s most important job generator.

Kim, a civil rights attorney and president of the school board, also emphasized the need to improve the tone of political debate in the city, which she helped accomplish on the school board (whose vice president, Hydra Mendoza, an employee of Mayor Gavin Newsom, was there in support). “People are disillusioned and disappointed with the process and the bickering,” Kim said.

Among Kim’s supporters at the event were Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, former Mayor Art Agnos, filmmaker Kevin Epps, Police Commissioner and immigrant rights activist Angela Chan, transportation activist Dave Synder, and representatives from a wide variety of community groups.

“She has epitomized the progressive values that I think all of San Francisco shares,” Chiu told the crowd, later adding, “She will be a part of the next generation of political leaders of San Francisco.”

“I’m really proud that Jane has put herself out there as a future leader and our supervisor,” said Epps, later adding, “I think Jane really has her ear to the streets.”

Kim pledged to run a clean campaign focused on her issues, and her only supporter to voice overt criticism of Walker was Agnos, who said he was impressed with Kim’s work with him last year in fighting Prop. D, which would have removed mid-Market from the city ban on new billboards, a measure that Walker supported.

“Prop. D for me was a tipping point, and Debra went with the commercial interests,” Agnos told the Guardian.

But Kim, 32, says her reason for running is to help push a progressive vision for the city and bring new blood into the political process.

“I have to tell you, I never wanted to go into politics,” she told the crowd. “But I had the desire to see some real change.”

Why SF cops shouldn’t have tasers

Zelda Bronstein
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19
Why SF cops shouldn’t have tasers

So let’s assume, arguendo as the lawyers say, the Johannes Mehserle is telling the truth, that he thought he had drawn his taser instead of his handgun when he shot Oscar Grant in the back. I’m not saying I believe him, but suppose that’s true.


It’s still an excellent argument against giving tasers to the SF cops.


So is this.


I don’t think anyone, even the still-clueless BART police, would argue that Oscar Grant had created a situation that justified the use of lethal force. He was unarmed, not an imminent threat to the life of a cop or a bystander. But a taser is just so convenient; you can zap someone who is just a little unruly. It’s a weapon that’s just too easy to justify.


If Mehserle didn’t have a taser, Grant might still be alive.


And I don’t care how much training you give the cops: As we saw with the BART cop zapping the fare evader, give them a weapon and they’ll use it.

CompStat vs. community policing

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
CompStat vs. community policing

By Alex Emslie


news@sfbg.com


Two competing visions for the San Francisco Police Department are central to a looming debate involving the mayor and his police chief, who favor the high-tech yet impersonal CompStat model, and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors who are pushing for a community-based, cops-walking-beats blueprint for SFPD.


District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi introduced a proposed ballot measure on June 7 that would require the police chief to institute foot patrols in all districts and ask the Police Commission to establish a written community policing policy. SFPD Chief George Gascón opposes the initiative, instead favoring a reliance on the new CompStat system to determine how best to use police resources.


The terms “CompStat” and “community policing” have become trendy buzz words, UC Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring told the Guardian, so they mean different things to the police departments that employ them, muddying the waters of the current debate.


“When labels get popular, they get pasted into lots of different things,” said Zimring, who wrote The Great American Crime Decline (Oxford University Press, 2006) and is working on a second book about the crime rate drop in the 1990s in New York City, where CompStat orginated. Yet the two models point to differing law enforcement philosophies.


At its most basic, CompStat uses computerized crime mapping software to drive police deployment decisions. It emphasizes lowering a city’s crime rate by centralizing authority, spotting statistical trends, and targeting crime hot spots. Community policing, a model embraced by many U.S. police departments in the 1980s and ’90s before CompStat swept the nation, grounds police officers in the neighborhoods they serve, decentralizing authority. The model seeks to prevent crime with regular patrols that develop relationships on their beats and lets the community help set law enforcement priorities.


“There is not community policing in San Francisco,” Mirkarimi — the only member of the board to go through the police academy — told the Guardian. “I don’t care what anybody says. If they say there is, then it is isolated. It’s unique to that particular experience or location.”


Proponents of CompStat insist the new model is really just a part of community policing. Gascón wrote a letter to the Board of Supervisors in February saying the proposed legislation “oversteps the jurisdiction of the legislative branch,” “attempts to give district station captains authority and discretion that rightfully belong to the chief of police,” and “will deprive the department of the flexibility it needs to address public safety throughout the city.”


Mirkarimi doesn’t oppose CompStat and said he sees merit in the program’s statistical collection, which has long been a shortcoming in the SFPD. “But I caution against any over-reliance on CompStat as a method that dictates how policing and public safety should be applied,” Mirkarimi told us. “Because the casualty of this over-reliance will be a compromising of any hopes of having true community policing.”


The SFPD website portrays CompStat as starting with data collection and then, similar to community policing, encouraging officers to find creative solutions to ongoing problems, anything from singular incidents of burglary to repeated graffiti or even a spike in murders. The crime triangle, a lasting symbol of community policing, illustrates that victims, suspects, and locations are all necessary for crime to thrive, and successfully policing even one of those factors can prevent crime. But CompStat programs often lack sustained commitment to building relationships with neighborhoods.


“Compstat seemed to engender a pattern of organizational response to crime spikes in hot spots that was analogous to the Whack-a-Mole game found at fairs and carnivals,” argued a 2003 study commissioned by the national Police Foundation titled “CompStat in Practice: An in-depth Analysis of Three Cities.”


The study found immediate contradictions in Lowell, Mass.; Minneapolis, and Newark, N.J. between beat officers’ new responsibility to “simply follow their superiors’ orders” and the community policing model that cast them as individual, authoritative protectors of their neighborhoods. CompStat centralizes authority with the higher echelons of SFPD. It includes bimonthly meetings in which station captains are grilled by SFPD brass and are expected to answer for the statistics in their district.


“Given the gap between the two models of policing, CompStat naturally tends to encounter the greatest resistance in departments that are most committed to community policing,” the study found.


Understaffed and poorly trained crime analysis units tasked with deciphering data patterns into useful correlations (for example, between drug crimes and murder) was another barrier to the success of CompStat outlined in the study. SFPD’s crime analysis unit consists of three civilians housed at the Hall of Justice, SFPD spokesperson Lt. Lyn Tomioka told us. They are not deployed to district stations and are supervised by a lieutenant who also has other responsibilities.


“There are a lot of rough edges. There’s a lot of non-fit there,” Zimring told the Guardian. “Who sets the priorities? CompStat priorities are always crime prevention, and they are set, and tactics are provided, by the chief of police. He is, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, ‘the decider.’ Community policing is supposed to be more cooperative and organic.”


Gascón initiated CompStat in San Francisco in October 2009, although Mayor Gavin Newsom has been touting the CompStat model since he first ran for mayor in 2003, when a campaign policy brief gushed about its “accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment, effective tactics, and relentless follow-up and assessment.” Initially, however, SFPD only took baby steps, using a confusing plot system to map crimes. That changed when Gascón took over as police chief last August, bringing experience in the program with him from the Los Angeles Police Department.


SFPD officials say vendor contract costs to start the system’s electronic crime mapping were less than $1 million, and an additional $1 million has been proposed for next year’s budget for technology upgrades in the CompStat unit. But the numbers so far haven’t backed up the boldest claims. SFPD reports 24 homicides this year as of June 12, up 20 percent from last year’s rate for early June. Homicide arrests are down from 12 last year to eight this year. Occurrences of rape are also up by 12 percent, but overall violent crime is down 2 percent compared to this time last year.


Gascón wrote that foot patrols are a valuable tool for community policing in San Francisco, but he doesn’t want to be forced to maintain them with limited staffing. Newsom’s proposed budget maintains current SFPD staffing, 2,317 sworn officers, while many other city departments received deep staffing cuts. Progressive supervisors have pledged to closely scrutinize SFPD’S budget.


Community policing was law enforcement’s response to civil unrest in the 1960s and ’70s, when police were seen as the enforcers of institutional power. Previous beat patrol methods largely ended when the 911 system came along, and the emphasis was placed on calls for service, statistics, and response times, leaving officers with little time to patrol and prevent crime.


The change to community policing emphasized neighborhood input and officers becoming an organic part of the community they served. Citizen contributions, generally through community meetings, began to drive decision-making. Foot patrols were revived and officers were once again expected to have a physical presence and a connection to the community they served.


That change was seen as particularly important in poor neighborhoods and communities of color, where police can sometimes be seen as an occupying army and residents were reluctant to cooperate with investigations. Officials hoped to prevent crimes by showing a presence in neighborhoods rather than simply reacting to them when someone called.


Mirkarimi says a CompStat-driven police force would be a return to that reactive model, potentially sacrificing the long-term commitment required to build trust between a neighborhood and its police department, which is central to community policing. “[CompStat] undermines the principles and practices of community policing because true community policing requires a discipline and a protocol that is sustained,” he said.


While either approach can theoretically result in the same practices, such as a foot beat patrol in a given neighborhood, Zimring said the reasoning behind it depends on the model. “CompStat to begin with is completely crime-driven,” Zimring said. “The reason you have it is to reduce crimes. It involves computerized mapping of crimes. It involves allocating resources to so-called hot spots, and it involves the police department imposing its own priorities as opposed to implementing community priorities.”


The Board of Supervisors will consider Mirkarimi’s measure and SFPD budget in July, airing a debate that could continue on to the November ballot, when voters would decide whether to maintain their faith in CompStat and the SFPD or ask for more community policing and foot patrols.

Judge orders UC police to hand over journalist’s photographs

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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2
Judge orders UC police to hand over journalist’s photographs

Remember when a crowd of angry student protesters surrounded the home of UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau last December, and broke some windows? And then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called them terrorists?

That eventful night touched off a months-long court battle for David Morse, a journalist who was arrested at the chancellor’s residence along with seven protesters but later had his charges dropped entirely. After a June 18 court ruling in his favor, Morse will finally have his photographs from the protest returned to him.

The win signifies a major victory for the First Amendment Project, which represented him pro bono, and strengthens the principle that journalists’ unpublished photographs and information should not be seized by police and used for law-enforcement purposes.

Morse was at the fiery Dec. 11 march not to protest, but to report on it for Indybay, the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center. He wore a press badge, and repeatedly identified himself as a reporter to University of California police officers when they detained him. Nonetheless, campus police seized his camera and arrested him, initially charging him with several felonies. “They said to me, ‘you were taking pictures of us. We want your camera,’” Morse recalled.

As the scene at the chancellor’s residence made headlines the following morning, Morse was sitting in jail in Santa Rita. “My voice as an eyewitness was completely silenced,” he told the Guardian when we interviewed him for an earlier story.

His charges were dropped, and his camera was returned within a few weeks. However, he’s been in court for about six months trying to get his digital photos back. 

State law prohibits the issuance of search warrants for unpublished journalistic materials. The idea behind this is to protect journalists from serving law enforcement’s agenda against their will, which could limit the flow of information by causing sources to clam up. Yet the UC police department obtained a search warrant for Morse’s unpublished photos, which were stored on a memory disc seized along with his camera.

The First Amendment Project stepped in on his behalf. FAP attorney Geoff King said the affidavit that triggered the issuance of the warrant failed to mention that Morse had identified as a journalist. It was a strange omission, King said, since the police report included several references to Morse’s assertion that he was there as a reporter. Since the affidavit didn’t describe Morse as a journalist, the judge had no way of knowing that the warrant was illegal.

On June 18, Morse and FAP claimed victory as an Alameda Superior Court judge quashed the warrant. The court also ordered UCPD to return all of Morse’s photographs, including any copies, and to declare under oath what other agencies had received copies.

While the decision is a major win for press freedom, UC police used the illegally obtained photographs for their own purposes in the interim. Morse’s photos of activists were uploaded onto a “Wanted” website maintained by UCPD, but have since been removed, King said. The university has also indicated that it wanted to use the photos in a series of disciplinary hearings targeting students who engaged in on-campus activism protesting tuition hikes.

In a San Jose Mercury News article, UCPD Capt. Margo Bennett was quoted as saying the department has not considered changing the way it deals with journalists.

Ammiano wants to clean up crime labs

Zelda Bronstein
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1
Ammiano wants to clean up crime labs

Why could the San Francisco crime lab operate with so many problems for such a long time? One reason: There’s little or no effective state oversight or regulation of local crime labs in California.


That seems like a glaring problem — crime labs can mean the difference between guilt and innocent, the difference between a long prison term and a free life, between an innocent party getting wrongly convicted and a guilty party getting away with murder.


Assemblymember Tom Ammiano told me he’s worried that problems in cities and counties are going to continue unless somebody’s paying attention — so he’s introducing a bill that would create some form of state oversight body to monitor crime labs and make sure they maintain credible standards.


“I think it’s like the BART Police, they aren’t going to reform unless the state tells them they have to,” Ammiano said. He’s going to have legislation drafted shortly.

No traffic lights on Market Street!

Zelda Bronstein
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3
No traffic lights on Market Street!

No stop signs, either. Just an amazing collection of horses, cars, trolleys and — yes! — bicycles crowding the city’s main drag, just four days before the 1906 quake. Check out the footage here. 


Bicycles sharing the street with cars (and also horses, and people who just run right out in front of traffic), police foot patrols, multi-modal transportation … good times. It’s great film, and fun to watch.


From the email Larry Fahn, former Sierra Club president sent me:


This film, originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly when it was shot. From New York trade papers announcing the film showing to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows indicating time of year & actual weather and conditions on historical record, even when the cars were registered (he even knows who owned them and when the plates were issued!).. It was filmed only four days before the quake and shipped by train to NY for processing. Amazing but true!


 

The Daily Blurgh: Frat douches, crank callers, Marx on soccer

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The Daily Blurgh: Frat douches, crank callers, Marx on soccer

Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Meg Whitman’s son is an asshat (surprised?).

*****

City passes moibile phone radiation law. As if you didn’t already know that your iThing was going to cause ear cancer.

*****

Report finds that UC Berkeley mishandled the police response to student protests in November. This wouldn’t be the first time.

*****

People have too much time on their hands: “Prosecutors say 53-year-old Kurtis Thorsted broadcast more than four dozen hoax distress signals over six months in 2008, costing the Coast Guard more than $102,000 for attempted searches. Thorsted pleaded guilty to broadcasting the “mayday” calls from his Salinas home and telling would-be rescuers he was stranded in an offshore kayak.”

*****

Terry Eagleton on soccer is no where near as fun as Roland Barthes on wrestling.

*****

Speaking of the World Cup, that buzzing sound you keep hearing during matches isn’t an incoming swarm of killer bees. Rather, its your new favorite spelling bee challenge: the vuvuzela.

 

San Franciscans decry Newsom’s public health cuts

Sasha Cuttler
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8
San Franciscans decry Newsom’s public health cuts

By Alex Emslie

More than 100 concerned citizens, mental health providers, SRO hotel representatives, and clients of San Francisco’s community behavioral health programs spoke to the Board of Supervisors yesterday at a Beilenson hearing, which the state requires of counties that slash public health services, decrying crippling cuts in the mayor’s proposed budget.

Mayor Gavin Newsom proposed cutting the Department of Public Health’s funding by close to $31 million in next year’s budget currently before the Board of Supervisors. The board can choose to add funding back into departments that were cut before approving the final budget by the end of July.

“These are all services that we value,” DPH director Dr. Mitch Katz said following nearly four hours of public testimony. “We have to make difficult choices because of the state of the city’s budget. We recognize that it is never desirable for us to make cuts.”

Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, said the city Budget Analyst’s Office was examining cost savings within the police and fire departments to free up money for the DPH. “I, as budget chair, am working with my colleagues to prevent these cuts that you are concerned about. We have to find cost savings in our budget across other departments.”

Avalos added that cutting other departments wouldn’t solve San Francisco’s looming deficit for years to come, and that taxation must be part of San Francisco’s budget solution. “If we don’t find a significant amount of revenue, looking at progressive forms of taxation, we’ll be in the same boat next year, but even worse, because we don’t expect to have the authorization of federal money [that the city received last year] to help us out.”

And now, the race to replace Kamala Harris

Zelda Bronstein
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2
And now, the race to replace Kamala Harris

David Onek, who has strong political connections and little courtroom experience, sent out a email today announcing that he wants to be San Francisco’s next district attorney:


As many of you know, District Attorney Kamala Harris is very likely to become California’s next Attorney General. DA Harris is a friend and I would never run against her, but her victory in November will open up the office as early as the end of this year. This means the time to get organized is right now.


He adds his name to the list of people, including former chief homicide prosecutor Jim Hammer, who want the job. But it’s going to be an unconventional campaign, to say the least. Because if Harris wins, her successor won’t be chosen by the voters of San Francisco.


There are three relevant scenarios here.


1. Harris loses the AG race. Entirely possible; she’s got a tough campaign ahead of her. Then all of this talk is moot; Onek clearly isn’t going to run against her, although Hammer might.


2. Harris wins the AG race, and Newsom loses his race for lieutenant governor. In that case, Newsom will be mayor of San Francisco when Harris resigns to move up to Sacramento — and under the City Charter, he will appoint someone to serve out the rest of Harris’s term.


3. Harris and Newsom both win — in which case there’s a fascinating legal issue. Do Harris and Newsom leave at the same moment — in which case the Board of Supervisors appoint the next mayor, who appoints the next DA? Or does Newsom try to fill Harris’s job before he resigns himself? In the end, Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera told me, “that’s a question that will be answered by the attorney general. Theoretically, it could get very complicated.”


Under the state Constitution, the governor, lt. governor and attorney general all take office the same day, the first monday after Jan. 1st, which in this case is Jan. 3. The constitution doesn’t say what time of day that happens. In theory, then, Harris could take the oath of office at 9 am, Newsom could wait until 10 am, and appoint a new DA in between. Then somebody who didn’t get appointed (or, frankly, any angry citizen of San Francisco) could sue — because if Newsom’s term technically starts at 12:01 am Jan. 3d, then at that moment, by city law, the president of the Board of Supervisors instantly becomes mayor, meaning David Chiu should be the one making the DA appointment.


Or Harris and Newsom (and whatever other parties wanted to play ball) could cut a deal. Harris could resign a day early, and Newsom could appoint her replacement with no legal consequences at all. That would look sleazy as hell and be a rotten way for the mayor to start his term as lieutentant governor, but he could do it.


Of course, that will all depend on an interpretation from the attorney general on when the AG and lt. gov. terms actually begin — and the AG at that point will be Jerry Brown, who may have just been elected governor on a ticket with Newsom and Harris.


What a clusterfuck.


At any rate, David Onek now has to build a campaign aimed not really at winning an election, but at convincing either Newsom or Chiu (or, potentially, the next mayor, who would be named by the supervisors) that he ought to be district attorney. Part of that calculation will hinge on whether he can hold onto the job when it comes up for a real election in November.


If it’s a simple deal with Newsom, Onek will be relying on his political allies. He notes:


A broad range of leaders in government, in law enforcement and in the broader criminal justice community have already pledged their support – including former San Francisco City Attorney and Police Commission President Louise Renne, former state Treasurer Phil Angelides, Supervisor Carmen Chu, School Board Commissioner Hydra Mendoza, former Mayor Art Agnos, former Police Chief Heather Fong, Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., Police Commission President Joe Marshall and former Chief Probation Officer Jeanne Woodford. 


Although I’m not sure that Newsom cares much these days what Louise Renne, Art Agnos or Phil Angelides think.


So what Onek — and anyone else who wants to be the next DA — needs to do is convince the next mayor that he’s not only going to be a good chief prosecutor (already a hurdle for someone with no background as a prosecutor) but that he has the political ability to convince the actual voters that he’s qualified. Otherwise he’s just another Kim Burton waiting to happen.


I haven’t been able to reach Onek yet to discuss all of this, but the minute he calls me I’ll post an update.

Rep Clock

David Talbot
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0

Schedules are for Wed/16–Tues/22 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $5-6. “OpenScreening,” Thurs, 8. For participation information, email ataopenscreening@atasite.org. Top of the Food Chain (Paisz), Fri, 8.

CAFÉ OF THE DEAD 3208 Grand, Oakl; (510) 931-7945. Free. “Independent Filmmakers Screening Nite,” Wed, 6:30.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8-13. Sex and the City 2 (King, 2010), Wed, call for times. San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, June 17-27. See film listings.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. Babies (Balmès, 2010), call for dates and times. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Oplev, 2009), call for dates and times. Looking for Eric (Loach, 2010), call for dates and times. Micmacs (Jeunet, 2010), call for dates and times. Touching Home (Miller and Miller, 2009), call for dates and times.

CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM 736 Mission, SF; (415) 655-7800, info@thecjm.org. Free with museum admission ($8-10). Sixty Six (Weiland, 2006), Sun, 2.

DE YOUNG MUSEUM Piazzoni Mural Room, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, Golden Gate Park, SF; (415) 488-1211, www.marinmindscapes.com. Free. Marin Mind/Scapes (2010), Sat, 2.

DECO LOUNGE 510 Larkin, SF; (415) 346-2025, www.decosf.com. Free. “Queer Cinema 101,” Mon, 10. Holly DeVille hosts this weekly show highlighting films that have had an impact on queer culture.

EXPLORATORIUM McBean Theater, 3601 Lyon, SF; http://asifa.net. Free. “A Tribute to the International Festival of Animation and to Prescott Wright: The Early Years,” Fri, 7:30.

FILM NIGHT IN THE PARK This week: Old Mill Park, 300 block of Throckmorton, Mill Valley; (415) 272-2756, www.filmnight.org. Donations accepted. Star Trek (Abrams, 2009), Fri, 8. Dolores Park, Dolores and 19th St, SF; same contact info and price. Grease (Kleiser, 1978), Sat, 8.

FORBIDDEN ISLAND TIKI LOUNGE 1304 Lincoln, Alameda; www.forbiddenislandalameda.com. Free. “Forbidden Thrills: Freaky Filipino Flix!”: •Mad Doctor of Blood Island (de Leon and Romero, 1968), Mon, 7:30, and For Your Height Only (Nicart, 1981), Mon, 9:15.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. Processed People (Nelson and Nelson), Wed, 7:30.

JACK LONDON SQUARE PAVILION THEATER 98 Broadway, Oakl; www.oakuff.org. Free. “Oakland Underground Film Festival: Leading Local Talent Local Shorts Showcase,” Fri, 7:30.

ODDBALL FILMS 275 Capp, SF; (415) 558-8117, info@oddballfilms.com (RSVP required as space is limited). $5-10. “Oddball Wants Children: A Matinee of Accidental Edutainment for Kids and their Adults,” Sat, 3 (kid-friendly matinee), 8.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (Green, 2010), Wed, 7:30. “Akira Kurosawa Centennial:” The Lower Depths (1957), Thurs, 7; The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Sat, 6:30; Ikiru (1952), Sun, 7:15. “Tales from the Golden Age: Recent Romanian Cinema:” Police, Adjective (Porumboiu, 2009), Fri, 7 and Sun, 5. “Brought to Light: Recent Acquisitions to the PFA Collection:” The Host (Bong, 2006), Fri, 9:15; Payday (Duke, 1972), Sat, 9:15.

RED POPPY ART HOUSE 2698 Folsom, SF; www.redpoppyarthouse.org. $10-15. “Mission Ear and Eye,” live film music by Lisa Mezzacappa and Nightshade, plus music by Katy Stephan, Adam Shulman, and the Holly Martins, and live film projection by Alfonso Alvarez, Fri, 9.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10. Mother (Bong, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 7, 9:35 (also Wed, 2). The Runaways (Sigismondi, 2010), Fri-Sat, 7:15, 9:30 (also Sat, 2). Smoked (The Movie), Sat, 4:20. Oceans (Perrin and Cluzand, 2010), Sun-Mon, 7:15, 9:25 (also Sun, 2). No One Knows About Persian Cats (Ghobadi, 2009), June 22-23, 7:15, 9:25 (also June 23, 2).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. Free-$10.75. The Full Picture (Bowden, 2008), Wed-Thurs, 7, 8:45. “San Francisco United Film Festival,” narrative and documentary films, Wed-Thurs.

“TEMESCAL STREET CINEMA” 49th St at Telegraph, Oakl; www.temescalstreetcinema.com. Free. Pelada (Fergusson, Boughen, Oxenham, and White, 2010), Thurs, 8. With free popcorn and live music.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. Bluebeard (Breillat, 2009), Thurs-Sat, 7:30; Sun, 2.

All is bacon

David Talbot
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0
All is bacon

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I had lunch with my agent, and then we talked all afternoon and wound up going to a party together. One interesting thing is that I don’t have an agent. I haven’t had an agent since the early ’90s.

"Write a novel. Write a novel. Write a novel," my old ex-agent used to say, because of course she couldn’t sell my short story collection.

So I wrote a novel, and she couldn’t sell it. In fact, she didn’t try. She read my manuscript and very efficiently dropped me, I think because my main character, who was pole-vaulting over a prison wall at the time, lost her nerve and, as a result, wound up suspended in the air for days — up over the barbed wire there, like a flag. As I recall, she was attempting to break into the prison. So that might have had something to do with it.

Anyway, I have never had an agent since then. Nor have I exactly needed one, thanks to my friend who isn’t my agent, but did help me get two of my books published in exchange for steak dinners. Which … I’m not sure, come to think of it, that I wouldn’t have gotten off easier at 15 percent.

Anyanyway, in a heroic effort to remind me to write another book, she came over. She brought me four books and a really pretty bra that doesn’t fit, but looks nice hanging from a hook in my closet. And then, as if that all wasn’t inspirational enough, she took me to lunch at Limon Rotisserie.

Where, though it is by no means a downscale establishment, you can eat half of an amazing chicken with two awesome sides for under $10!! Until they see themselves in Cheap Eats and raise the prices, that is.

In the interim, this will be my new favorite restaurant.

And my secret agent lady (slash) literary yenta Sally, or Sal the Pork Chop (as I call her for short) is my new favorite person — not only for bringing me book ideas that come with an editor already attached, and bras. This chick loves pork so much she dates a cop! With a pet pig! I mean, a cop with a pet pig!

Oh, but it ain’t so simple as it sounds. Get this. Um. Well, hmm, so the pig itself is technically the police officer’s ex‘s pet. He has custody. So let me see if I can say this without scrapping my last little shred of journalistic integrity …

Yes! You know how I sometimes substitute the word bacon for anything else in life that is divine and wonderful, such as good news, an amazing time, or love itself? In which case, one’s lover might also be described (by me) as their bacon. Right? Okay then. So one way of describing the situation would be that the pig’s ex-bacon’s pig is coming between the pig and the pork chop.

Necessitating couples therapy and so forth.

So I got to hear all about that, and she got to hear all about the other thing. But before I forget about this …

The rotisseried chicken at Limon, in addition to being the best bargain on the menu, is marinated in something heavenly, rubbed by pure herbal bliss, and spin-roasted to perfection. In other words, it’s bacon.

We also had the ceviche mixto, which was shrimp, calamari, and halibut, and delicious — but, to warn you, it’s a small plate for the same price as half a chicken.

For our sides we chose vegetales salteados and yuca frita — that’s the fried cassava root, and I’ve had it before elsewhere, but never as good as this. Perfectly seasoned, crunchy outside, and soft-centered. And the other one was just different-colored string beans, but it tasted like, like, different-colored bacon, or something.

I love it when something simple, like beans, makes you want to sing or write poetry and books. We were walking. There was a special police car with a big white star on it — Special Task Something Something — blocking the crosswalk.

"You don’t look special," Sal the Pork Chop sassed into the passenger cop’s open window. I just stared at the star itself, and made me a little wish. *

LIMON ROTISSERIE

Sun.–Thu.: noon–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat.: noon –10:30 p.m.

1001 South Van Ness, SF

(415) 821-2134

D/MC/V

Beer and wine

Sit /lie goes down at the Board of Supervisors

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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19

At the June 8 Board of Supervisors meeting, a controversial ordinance that sought to ban sitting or lying down on the sidewalk was voted down 8 to 3, with Sups. Michela Alito-Pier, Sean Elsbernd, and Carmen Chu voting in favor.

Proponents of the law, which was backed by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief George Gascon, framed it as a measure to promote “civil sidewalks.” Yet opponents believed that the law would be used as a tool against the homeless.

Alioto-Pier said the law was needed to give police a new tool for dealing with people who congregate on the streets and intimidate passersby, saying residents and businesses were bothered by “the presence of dogs or shouting.”

Yet a number of supervisors spoke forcefully against the ordinance, saying it was not an appropriate solution to the problems that Alioto-Pier and other sit/lie backers had raised concerns about.

“I don’t believe that this is the San Francisco way to to approach the challenges that we face,” said District 8 Sup. Bevan Dufty, who goes along with Newsom’s proposals more often than his progressive colleagues and is typically a swing vote on the board. Dufty referenced a former, similar San Francisco law that was ultimately repealed. “That was a law that didn’t want to see gay men congregating at 1 a.m. outside a bar,” he said. He called for a more substantive approach, saying, “We can do better.”

Sup. David Campos also spoke against it. “It doesn’t actually address the issue of civility,” he said. “The case for this legislation simply has not been made.” He noted that day laborers who wait for hours on the sidewalk in hopes of finding work could be targeted when they sit down to take a rest.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi said he thought greater enforcement of existing laws and community policing would be more effective than the proposed ordinance. Later in the meeting, he proposed a measure to be placed on the November ballot that would require police to adopt a foot beat patrol program and a community policing policy.

The board also voted unanimously in favor of a proposal by Board President David Chiu to create a neighborhood community justice task force “to make recommendations to the Board of Supervisors regarding the creation of restorative and community justice programs.” Chiu pitched the idea as a more meaningful response to hostile behavior on the streets in neighborhoods such as the Haight, where calls for a sit /lie ordinance originated.

“We’re very pleased about what happened today,” said Andy Blue, an activist who organized a citywide campaign opposing sit / lie. But he said it wasn’t over yet, since Newsom has already moved to place the proposal on the ballot. “We know we’re going to face an uphill battle,” he said, “because we’re going to be in a campaign with some very well-funded opponents.” But Blue said he felt confident that once the information got out to San Franciscans, “they’ll vote against it in November.”

 

 

 

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