Privatization

On Feb. 26, the cab industry changes, radically

Zelda Bronstein
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16
On Feb. 26, the cab industry changes, radically

The San Francisco taxi industry will undergo a major change starting Feb. 26, when the Municipal Transportation Agency is expected to adopt a complete transformation of how cab medallions — the permits needed to operate a taxi in the city — are allocated. You can read the proposal here. In essence, it would allow cab medallions — which are now allocated to individual drivers on the basis of seniority on a waiting list — to be sold on the open market.

It’s a tricky proposition. But the mayor appoints the MTA board, and the mayor wants this — both to help with the city’s budget problems and because, well, he’s always supported privatization of some public assets, and that’s what this proposal amounts to.

And here’s a little stinker that’s part of the deal: The MTA currently has 30 of the valuable medallions just sitting around in a desk. Those are permits that could be issued to the top 30 drivers on the waiting list — many of whom have been driving for 15 years or so while they slowly rose to the top of the list.

Instead, if the proposal passes, those medallions — or at least some of them — will be sold off, over the counter, at prices that could reach $400,000.

Judson True, the MTA’s spokesperson, confirmed that there were 30 unallocated permits on hand right now and that at least half would likely be sold at market rate. The MTA is budgeting $15 million for direct permit sales.

So if you’re, say, number 16 on the waiting list, and 15 people ahead of you get permits that are currently available — and the next 15 are sold, and you can’t afford it — you’re SOL. Until someone else dies and another permit comes up — unless that permit is sold, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SF Weekly mangles Mexican politics

Zelda Bronstein
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1
SF Weekly mangles Mexican politics

The SF Weekly, in its continuing effort to make everything the progressives in San Francisco do look stupid, just stepped in a major turd. A piece by Matt Smith seeks to trash the supes for passing a resolution supporting Mexican electricity workers against an effort by the Mexican government to privatize the nation’s electricity system.

He notes:

However, the government of Mexico felt this one to be so egregious as to warrant fact-checking. As it happens there was no privatization. The government transferred Luz y Fuerza del Centro to a much larger power utility called the Comision Federal de Electricidad — which is, you guessed it, also government-run.

 His single source for that information? The (utterly unbiased, of course) Mexican consulate.

Well, John Ross, our Mexico City correspondent, who has lived there more more than 25 years, has written several books on Mexican politics and is nationally known an expert in the area, has written about this issue extensively. I just sent him Smith’s blog post, and here’s how he responded:

Consul general Carlos Felix Corona’s response to the Board of Supervisors resolution re Felipe Calderon’s efforts to break the mexican electricity workers union (SME) is disingenuous. The Luz y Fuerza Company was forced to buy electricity from the federal electicity commission (CFE) at an exorbitant price, with the costs then passed along to the consumer by presidential fiat. The CFE itself now buys a third of the electricity it generates from private corporations — in violation of the Mexican Constitutionl, which ascribes electricity generation as a state function, thus privatizing electricity generation in Mexico City and five other states in the center of the country. According to the SME, whose workers were forced out of the generating plants and which the Mexican Labor Commission has now stripped of its authority to represent the workers, Luz y Fuerza lines will now be sold off to W Communications, a Madrid-based transnational represented in Mexico by two ex-energy secretaries (Calderon himself is an ex energy secretary). W Communications is expected to install fiber optic cables on the old Luz y Fuerza lines. The Calderon administration will no doubt wait several months to seal this deal until the clamor about priviatization recedes. But the contracts have been signed, so don’t be fooled by the consul’s disingenuous response that Luz y Fuerza has not yet been privatized. Now that US unions and the SF Board of Supes have expressed their solidarity with the electricity workers, Felix Corona, a shill for calderon, seeks to bamboozle San Franciscans that all is honky dory South of the border and that protest marches that regularly turn out a quarter of a million Mexicans are just the work of a few malcontents  

So there’s another side to this story, Matt, and the consulate is hardly a trustworthy source.

 

Editor’s Notes

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0
Editor’s Notes

A year ago, we were dancing in the streets celebrating Barack Obama’s election. Now we’re marching in the streets protesting his escalation of the war in Afghanistan — and a lot of us are calling for the defeat of his signature legislation. That’s a failure that goes well beyond a couple of bad policy decisions, and it threatens more than just the next few years of Obama’s presidency.

The late philosopher Herbert Marcuse used to say that the worst disaster of the Vietnam War was the division it created between the baby boomers and their parents, the generational distrust that would last well beyond the final artillery fire. And I fear that the worst legacy of Afghanistan and the mess that is health care reform will be another deep blow to whatever fragile faith remains among young Americans that a well-meaning president and his party can make a difference, the faith that government can accomplish something worthwhile — and that the public sector is worth the fight it takes to save it from a well-organized and lavishly funded effort to continue the privatization of the United States.

The fight over the public option in the health care bill wasn’t just about containing costs, or preventing tax hikes, or mandating fair competition. The insurance industry knew that from the start.

One of the reasons the radical right has always hated Social Security is that it’s a government program that helps people, one that tens of millions of citizens rely on and support. When the government sends you a check every month, you tend to think of the folks in Washington as something other than crooks, liars, and villains.

And if the government offered health insurance that cost less than the private companies, covered more, and was less of a hassle to use, then millions more American voters would begin to realize that the public sector can do some things very well — much better than private industry. And that would be a social transformation on the scale of the New Deal.

So that’s why the insurers and their toadies wouldn’t allow it to happen — and why, in the wake of the Afghanistan fiasco, Obama’s failure to force the issue is such a momentous disappointment.

Just look around the streets of San Francisco at any antiwar demonstration and you see the problem. We’re mad at the president, not at the insurance industry. Nobody’s marching in front of the headquarters of the handful of big companies that have — as a matter of course and intentional policy — destroyed the health care system in America. We figure: hey, they’re just big businesses, doing what they do.

So instead, we’re going to be pissed off for a long time at the man who — maybe for just a moment, one bright shining moment — had the ability to turn around about 50 years of cynicism and distrust that has poisoned American politics. And we should be pissed, because he let us down. He promised us hope. Now he’s giving up, without even putting up much of a fight.

The next budget battle

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0
The next budget battle

EDITORIAL There is some good news — in a manner of speaking — about Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed midyear budget cuts: they don’t just affect Muni, recreation and parks, human services, and public health. The departments that have been hammered hardest in the past year still face spending reductions — but so do police and fire. The $6 million in Police Department cuts and $1.7 million in Fire Department cuts actually exceed the $7.4 million that the Department of Public Health will have to absorb.

That, of course, requires some context — over the past few budget cycles, DPH has lost far more money than public safety. And the Fire Department has far more fat than its modest cut reflects. And the Human Services Agency is still taking a $3.3 million hit. And the mayor is still keeping five press secretaries. And it’s not at all clear how much of the cuts will involve paring the bloated management ranks, and how much will be the further elimination of front-line services.

And this is just the start — the budget deficit for next year is more than $400 million, and the blood on the floor by the time that’s resolved will make this round look easy.

But the very fact that some of the sacred cows of San Francisco are facing their own financial pain sends an important message: this budget crisis won’t be solved just by screwing the poor — and the unions representing the cops and firefighters are going to have to step up and work with the rest of organized labor to push for some new revenue. And they’ll need to put up some money and reach out to the more conservative voters to promote the tax increases San Francisco desperately needs.

Now it’s up to the supervisors to put in motion the process to take substantial changes in the way the city is funded out of the discussion stage and into the policy arena.

When Newsom was running for governor, it was almost impossible to get him to talk seriously about raising revenue; he clearly wanted to be the candidate who could talk about balancing a city’s budget without raising taxes. Now that he’s not looking for votes in the Central Valley, he’s been a little more open to the idea that a cuts-only budget won’t work the next time around.

Unfortunately, the two main ways he wants to raise money are both terrible ideas. Newsom is talking about gutting the condominium conversion limits and allowing anyone who pays a fee to get a permit to turn an apartment into a condo. That would have a devastating impact on the city’s rental housing stock. He also wants to sell off taxicab permits — a plan that would undermine the city’s longstanding policy of allowing working cab drivers to use the permits at a modest fee and create a structure where the right to drive a cab would be determined at auction and given to the highest bidder.

The condo conversion plan is unlikely to get six votes, and the progressive supervisors should make it clear that a taxi privatization proposal isn’t the best way to solve the budget crisis, either. Then the mayor and the board can start working on a progressive tax plan to put before the voters next year.

The Budget Committee will be ground zero for the debate. Sup. John Avalos chaired that committee through last year’s harrowing budget battles, but in the past the job has rotated. If Board President David Chiu intends to appoint a new chair for next year, he should name one of the two qualified progressives with background on the committee. Either Sup. Ross Mirkarimi or Sup. David Campos would be an excellent choice.

Editor’s Notes

-
0
Editor’s Notes

A year ago, we were dancing in the streets celebrating Barack Obama’s election. Now we’re marching in the streets protesting his escalation of the war in Afghanistan — and a lot of us are calling for the defeat of his signature legislation. That’s a failure that goes well beyond a couple of bad policy decisions, and it threatens more than just the next few years of Obama’s presidency.

The late philosopher Herbert Marcuse used to say that the worst disaster of the Vietnam War was the division it created between the baby boomers and their parents, the generational distrust that would last well beyond the final artillery fire. And I fear that the worst legacy of Afghanistan and the mess that is health care reform will be another deep blow to whatever fragile faith remains among young Americans that a well-meaning president and his party can make a difference, the faith that government can accomplish something worthwhile — and that the public sector is worth the fight it takes to save it from a well-organized and lavishly funded effort to continue the privatization of the United States.

The fight over the public option in the health care bill wasn’t just about containing costs, or preventing tax hikes, or mandating fair competition. The insurance industry knew that from the start.

One of the reasons the radical right has always hated Social Security is that it’s a government program that helps people, one that tens of millions of citizens rely on and support. When the government sends you a check every month, you tend to think of the folks in Washington as something other than crooks, liars, and villains.

And if the government offered health insurance that cost less than the private companies, covered more, and was less of a hassle to use, then millions more American voters would begin to realize that the public sector can do some things very well — much better than private industry. And that would be a social transformation on the scale of the New Deal.

So that’s why the insurers and their toadies wouldn’t allow it to happen — and why, in the wake of the Afghanistan fiasco, Obama’s failure to force the issue is such a momentous disappointment.

Just look around the streets of San Francisco at any antiwar demonstration and you see the problem. We’re mad at the president, not at the insurance industry. Nobody’s marching in front of the headquarters of the handful of big companies that have — as a matter of course and intentional policy — destroyed the health care system in America. We figure: hey, they’re just big businesses, doing what they do.

So instead, we’re going to be pissed off for a long time at the man who — maybe for just a moment, one bright shining moment — had the ability to turn around about 50 years of cynicism and distrust that has poisoned American politics. And we should be pissed, because he let us down. He promised us hope. Now he’s giving up, without even putting up much of a fight.

The next budget battle

-
0
The next budget battle

EDITORIAL There is some good news — in a manner of speaking — about Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed midyear budget cuts: they don’t just affect Muni, recreation and parks, human services, and public health. The departments that have been hammered hardest in the past year still face spending reductions — but so do police and fire. The $6 million in Police Department cuts and $1.7 million in Fire Department cuts actually exceed the $7.4 million that the Department of Public Health will have to absorb.

That, of course, requires some context — over the past few budget cycles, DPH has lost far more money than public safety. And the Fire Department has far more fat than its modest cut reflects. And the Human Services Agency is still taking a $3.3 million hit. And the mayor is still keeping five press secretaries. And it’s not at all clear how much of the cuts will involve paring the bloated management ranks, and how much will be the further elimination of front-line services.

And this is just the start — the budget deficit for next year is more than $400 million, and the blood on the floor by the time that’s resolved will make this round look easy.

But the very fact that some of the sacred cows of San Francisco are facing their own financial pain sends an important message: this budget crisis won’t be solved just by screwing the poor — and the unions representing the cops and firefighters are going to have to step up and work with the rest of organized labor to push for some new revenue. And they’ll need to put up some money and reach out to the more conservative voters to promote the tax increases San Francisco desperately needs.

Now it’s up to the supervisors to put in motion the process to take substantial changes in the way the city is funded out of the discussion stage and into the policy arena.

When Newsom was running for governor, it was almost impossible to get him to talk seriously about raising revenue; he clearly wanted to be the candidate who could talk about balancing a city’s budget without raising taxes. Now that he’s not looking for votes in the Central Valley, he’s been a little more open to the idea that a cuts-only budget won’t work the next time around.

Unfortunately, the two main ways he wants to raise money are both terrible ideas. Newsom is talking about gutting the condominium conversion limits and allowing anyone who pays a fee to get a permit to turn an apartment into a condo. That would have a devastating impact on the city’s rental housing stock. He also wants to sell off taxicab permits — a plan that would undermine the city’s longstanding policy of allowing working cab drivers to use the permits at a modest fee and create a structure where the right to drive a cab would be determined at auction and given to the highest bidder.

The condo conversion plan is unlikely to get six votes, and the progressive supervisors should make it clear that a taxi privatization proposal isn’t the best way to solve the budget crisis, either. Then the mayor and the board can start working on a progressive tax plan to put before the voters next year.

The Budget Committee will be ground zero for the debate. Sup. John Avalos chaired that committee through last year’s harrowing budget battles, but in the past the job has rotated. If Board President David Chiu intends to appoint a new chair for next year, he should name one of the two qualified progressives with background on the committee. Either Sup. Ross Mirkarimi or Sup. David Campos would be an excellent choice.

The human right to water

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The human right to water

rebeccab@sfbg.com

At a recent San Francisco conference in a plush downtown hotel packed with big-business representatives, venture capitalists, and public relations practitioners, some insiders from high-profile multinational beverage corporations spoke about the moments they realized how crucial water is as a resource.

For Harry Ott, who formerly worked for the Coca-Cola Company, the epiphany struck in 1998 when he arrived at a Coke bottling plant in Darussalam, Tanzania for a routine inspection.

"When we walked into the plant … I noticed that there was no one there," Ott explained in a careful, Southern-accented voice. "And I said to the plant manager there, ‘Is it a holiday? Did I mess up in scheduling this?’ And he said, ‘No, we had a real severe outbreak of amoebic dysentery and all the employees have been affected by it.’ At that moment it really brought it home to me … every human should have access to clean water and sanitation to be able to maintain a healthy lifestyle."

But then Ott seemed to disavow this last statement, which implied support for what water rights activists have been pushing for: an inalienable right to clean drinking water, unmediated by corporations. As he told the crowd, "I don’t necessarily agree with the term ‘human right to water,’ because then the lawyers jump in here … and become rich off of this back-and-forth, knocking-heads process."

For corporations and advocacy groups alike, defining a human right to water is more than just a legal battle or academic exercise. As bottled-water companies weather mounting criticism for depleting aquifers to sustain profits and nongovernmental organizations point to the pitfalls of water privatization, control of the ultimate life-sustaining resource is becoming an increasingly important issue.

Widespread industrial contamination means less potable water to go around — particularly in developing countries, but in parts of California too — and intensifying drought due to climatic change means water scarcity is becoming a bigger problem. Water issues now represent a big financial risk for multinational companies and the top priority for communities that depend upon groundwater for their survival, so battle lines have been drawn for a struggle that is a matter of survival.

The second annual Corporate Water Footprinting conference, part of a corporate conference series called Action for Sustainable America, cost approximately $2,000 to attend. Unlike last year, when conference organizers denied press passes to both the Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle, they opted to allow reporters in this time — perhaps as a show of goodwill after being publicly critiqued for a lack of transparency (see "Tap dreams," 12/10/08). The event was held at Le Meridien, a swank Financial District hotel, and was attended by businesspeople from a variety of high-profile companies.

Representatives from Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestle portrayed their respective corporations as model stewards of the environment, the opposite of the bad raps they’ve been branded with by social justice advocates, who complain that these corporate entities are responsible for exacerbating water shortages in drought-prone areas. Rather than profit-driven behemoths sapping communities of a critical resource, the spokespeople described their companies as environmentally-minded leaders acutely aware of the widespread lack of access to clean water and actively trying to hatch solutions to alleviate it.

Dan Bena, director of sustainability, health, safety and environment for PepsiCo International, kicked off with a presentation about how an estimated 1.5 billion impoverished people living in developing countries worldwide lack access to safe drinking water. Showing images of African children swimming naked in a river, he stressed the frequently repeated statistic that once every 15 seconds, another child in the developing world perishes from waterborne illness.

To hear Bena tell it, PepsiCo is emerging as a corporate trailblazer in protecting people from such a fate. In addition to its conservation efforts, it has donated to an organization that provides microloans to families for small-scale water infrastructure projects, he said. And at the urging of one of its shareholders, it recently agreed to sign a commitment supporting "the human right to water."

But when asked whether PepsiCo, the parent company of Aquafina, has a strategy for reducing the widespread use of bottled water — a flashpoint for environmentalists because it taxes aquifers, requires extensive shipping, and uses tons of plastic to produce — Bena didn’t have a straight answer. "We are evaluating it, but I can’t tell you," he said. "The critics are certainly very strong, but we think that people, by and large, want the convenience that bottled water provides."

In San Francisco, some of the beverage companies’ harshest critics organized a counter-conference to the 2008 Corporate Water Footprinting conference. This year, one of the counter-conference participants was seated on the same panel with Bena and the former Coca-Cola representative.

Mark Schlosberg, California director of Food & Water Watch, made it clear that he views the human right to water through a very different lens than the other panelists. "The ‘human right to water’ is not a concept for corporations to implement," Schlosberg said, relaying what was perhaps an unpopular message to a tough crowd. "Just as free speech is not a concept for corporations to implement. The human right to water is a concept which says that nobody should be denied access to clean water for basic human needs. It’s not a question of whether or not a corporation wants to adhere to that. It’s the responsibility of governments to create laws, and of corporations to follow laws. I don’t think that the basic human right to water … is alienable, just like certain constitutional rights are also inalienable and can’t be contracted away."

Speaking by phone several days later from New Delhi, India, Amit Srivastava, executive director of the India Resource Center, explained his perspective on the human right to water: "For us, the right to water means the community has control over its water resources. It is our fundamental human right to live free of pollution of water." As for PepsiCo’s efforts, "It sounds all good, but what is the reality on the ground?"

Srivastava, the driver behind the counter-conference to last year’s Corporate Water Footprinting Conference, spends half the year in India working in rural agrarian villages, where he says the impacts of Coca-Cola’s operations are hugely detrimental to people’s interests. PepsiCo has caused its share problems in India too, Srivastava said.

"Seventy percent of Indians make a living with agriculture," he explained. "They rely on groundwater — the same groundwater Coca-Cola uses to meet its production needs." Tens of thousands of farmers have been affected by a dearth of water in communities where Coca-Cola plants are sited, he says, and many have also been adversely affected by water contamination linked to the manufacturing facilities. As water becomes scarce, crops dry out and women must walk farther away to haul fresh water back home.

On Nov. 30, Srivastava said the India Resource Center helped bring 1,000 people out to a rally against Coca-Cola. "We’ve launched an international campaign to hold Coca-Cola accountable," he said, explaining that the goal is to "apply market pressure for the abuses they continue to commit in India."

Of particular concern is the village of Kala Dera, located in an area that was identified as a water-stressed region more than a decade ago, Srivastava said. Nonetheless, the construction of a new Coke bottling plant forged ahead there in 2000. A severe drought plagued the region this year, and Kala Dera experienced the sharpest drop in groundwater levels ever recorded, according to Srivastava. "When the rains didn’t come, the crops failed, and there was a sharp increase in the use of groundwater," he said. "For all its talk, Coca-Cola continued to mine for water, even as the community did not have ready access."

According to Denise Knight, a Coca-Cola Company representative who spoke at the Corporate Water Footprinting Conference, the multinational giant uses a total of 313 billion liters of water annually to produce 129 billion liters of soft drinks, juice, water, and other beverages.

Knight said Coca-Cola is committed to "replenish" the places it operates by returning the equivalent of the water it uses to communities and water bodies. Trumpeting a splashy green catchphrase, "Water Neutrality," Knight acknowledged that the term itself might be somewhat misleading because, "as our business grows, no matter how efficient we are, we’ll still use more water." This program essentially consists of making it a goal to live up to its self-guided wastewater treatment standards (wastewater is treated in 80 percent of its 1,000 facilities, Knight noted), stepping up conservation efforts and funding small-scale projects like rainwater harvesting.

Knight couched it in terms of fiduciary responsibility: in the past decade, Coca-Cola’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings have listed water shortages and poor water quality as financial risks to company profits. A third area of risk for the company is public perception, an uphill battle in India.

Srivastava summed up his opinion of Coca-Cola’s "Water Neutrality" pitch as "hogwash." In reality, the company is extracting clean, drinkable water from poor communities that need it, leaving behind processed wastewater that people can’t drink and calling it "neutral."
"It really is lies dreamed up by their PR department," he said. "They’re trying to suggest that Coca-Cola has no impact whatsoever on water resources. This is outrageous."
Srivastava said the conference is essentially a scam. "We see the Corporate Water Footprinting conference as nothing more than a greenwashing effort by companies that are the biggest abusers of water. We see it as just you guys in suits and ties. The communities that are suffering as a result, their voices are never there."

Killing the dream

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Killing the dream

tredmond@sfbg.com

When the first issue of the Bay Guardian hit the stands in 1966, it was still really possible to talk about the California dream. The state had seemingly limitless potential and was in many way a model for the nation — a free public university system that was the envy of the world, an economy that provided jobs to hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, the beginnings of what would be the nation’s premier environmental movement pushing to save San Francisco Bay, save the coast, save Lake Tahoe … and the Free Speech Movement, the Summer of Love, the United Farm Workers Union, and so much more that was transforming politics and culture in the United States from the West Coast.

Twelve years later, it was all falling apart. Eight years of Gov. Ronald Reagan and then the passage of Proposition 13 launched a very different kind of movement out of the West, a movement that sought to dismantle the public sector and the social safety net, to treat government as the enemy, and to use culture wars to convince working-class Americans to vote against their own economic interests.

And now California is being described as the nation’s first failed state. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — the second Republican actor to hold that role — has driven the state to the brink of bankruptcy. The University of California is drowning in red ink, raising fees and turning away students. The state’s water system is a mess; cities and counties are in fiscal collapse; the economy’s in the tank; and nobody seriously talks about a California dream anymore.

The story of how that happened — and how the diseases of tax-revolts, privatization, government corruption, and public disempowerment spread east from California — is the focus of this 43rd anniversary issue. It’s both enlightening and a bit scary to read through old issues, because in hundreds of stories over the past four decades, the Guardian has warned of exactly what was to come.

The very first issue of the Bay Guardian talked about the "historic election" pitting the incumbent, Democrat Pat Brown, against Reagan. A lot of people in the emerging "new left" were arguing that there wasn’t a bit of difference between the two, and that you might as well sit out the election. But the Guardian had a different take. The election was really about the direction California wanted to go, the paper said, a choice between a state that cares about the public sector and social welfare and a state where those things don’t matter.

"Reagan’s stands typify the temper of the cause," the Nov. 7, 1966 editorial stated. "He is on record, at various times, in opposition to the progressive income tax, Social Security, Medicare, the anti-poverty program, farm subsidies, the TVA, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, public housing, federal aid to education, and veterans hospitalization for anything other than service-connected disabilities. How can a man or a movement govern the state of California with such a political philosophy?"

Reagan’s election may have seemed like a fluke, but it was nothing of the sort. By the mid 1960s, with the counterculture — and equally important, the economic left — looking to make major inroads in American policy, the broad outlines of a right-wing attack plan were in place.

That’s something the Guardian always recognized — that powerful people who moved the levers of government typically did so with a long-term plan.

In San Francisco, part of that plan was the transformation of a human-scale city to a West Coast version of Manhattan. The idea: tear up South of Market (then mostly low-income housing) for a shiny new convention center and hotels. Dump dozens of big high-rise office buildings downtown. Construct a fixed-rail system to carry suburban commuters into the dense downtown. Drive up property values — massively — and if that means blue collar jobs and working class people had to go to make way for wealthier office workers, so be it. In the end, of course, the architects of the plan — landowners, developers, bankers, and big business leaders — became immensely wealthy.

On the state and national level, their plans were broader. Even so, they had one major aim: throttle the pubic sector. Cut off the funding for government programs, reduce regulations, undermine any concept of a welfare estate — and cut taxes on the rich.

As we report on page 8, the architects of this plan are happy today to talk about how it worked — how Reagan launched his war on government back in the 1970s, how a group of well-funded think tanks developed plans, and political consultants took advantage of people’s fears (and the Democratic Party’s failures) to put those plans into action.

The movement really got off the ground in 1978 with the passage of Proposition 13.

Prop. 13 emerged from a state in the middle of a massive growth spurt and a heated political cauldron of money, race, and Legislative failure. Howard Jarvis, a Republican landlord lobbyist who hated taxes, hated government, hated public schools, and disdained most Californians — "63 percent of [public school] graduates are illiterate" and would have no need for public libraries, he once quipped — took advantage of a gaping hole in political leadership and set off a movement that would cripple the United States of America.

The measure marked the final, fatal end in California of the era known as the ’60s — a period when the left was ascendant, when taxes on the wealthy funded education, infrastructure and programs for inner cities, and when economic and cultural liberalization seemed to be spreading across the nation.

Rising property values, driven by rapid population growth, were driving up property taxes — and the problem was real. Long-time residents, particularly people on fixed incomes, saw their taxes rise so high they couldn’t afford to stay in their homes. The Legislature could have addressed that (with, say, a split-roll measure that taxed residential and commercial property at different rates) but utterly failed to move on the crisis.

A series of assessor’s office scandals didn’t help, either. And, at the same time, the California Supreme Court ruled that rich school districts had to share revenue with poor districts, infuriating wealthy white property owners.

Jarvis and his partner Paul Gann circulated petitions to roll back property taxes and make it almost impossible to raise taxes in the future. It passed with 65 percent of the vote.

Of course, big businesses (particularly utilities) were the big winners. As the Guardian pointed out on June 1, 1978, the top five utilities in California alone (including Pacific Gas and Electric Co.) would gain billions from the tax cuts.

But beneath it all was a simmering discontent with government — something Jarvis had set afire and would later be used by Ronald Reagan and the right-wing operatives who backed him to undermine the New Deal, the social safety net, and the basic social contract in America. The antitax folks played to white people who didn’t want to see their money going to minorities, to the middle-class folks who thought (thanks to the assessor scandals) their tax money was being wasted by corruption — and to a lot of younger people coming out of the 1960s who had learned from Vietnam, COINTELPRO, and Watergate not to trust government.

The Bay Guardian opposed the measure strongly: "Most analyses indicate that without replacement taxes, hundreds of thousands of California public servants would be thrown out of work (which is exactly what Howard Jarvis intends) … " a May 18, 1978 editorial noted. "Vote for Prop. 13 only if you favor decreased government services (including cutbacks in everything from libraries to schools to street-cleaning crews and possibly police and fire departments) and are fond of half-baked measures that favor the rich."

Prop. 13 set off a national movement to cut taxes — and riding that wave, Reagan was elected president in 1980. He immediately set about attempting to slash taxes on big business and the wealthiest Americans, and eliminate environmental, workplace safety, and employment regulations.

You can see the results in California — and across the nation. The very strategies that emerged in this state and that the right has supported over the years have come very close to destroying the United States economy, leaving millions out of work — while the gap between the rich and the poor has risen to unsustainable levels.

Part of the reason this national attack on government and the public sector worked was the failure of Democrats to recognize that corruption matters. It was no small wonder that Californians were losing faith in government — in the 1970s and 1980s, the state Legislature, under the Democratic control of Speaker Willie Brown, was awash in sleaze, paralyzed by lobbyist influence and campaign money. Yet leading Democrats, fearful of Brown’s power, did little to reign in the appalling corruption.

In fact, when Brown became mayor of San Francisco, the entire Democratic Party, from the president of the United States on down, seemed to treat him as royalty — despite the fact that he was selling the city to every developer and corporate lobbyist who waved money under his nose. When taxpayers knew that a large part of their money was going to fund juicy jobs for Brown’s cronies and pet projects, it was hard to argue for higher taxes.

And it was the Democratic Party leadership in San Francisco who presided over two of the greatest examples of privatization of public resources in modern history: the Presidio and the Raker Act. Rep. Nancy Pelosi was the author of the bill that, for the first time, turned a national park over to the private sector — and hardly a Democratic leader in the city dared to lift a finger in opposition. And for decades — since the Guardian first broke the story in 1969 — the city’s Democratic power brokers have bowed and genuflected to PG&E and allowed the private utility to control the local electric grid and block implantation of the federal law that mandates public power for San Francisco.

And now PG&E wants to pull off one of the greatest feats of privatization in American history. The company has launched a ballot initiative that would wipe out any further attempts at public power in California, essentially guaranteeing that private companies, not the public sector, control the vast, critical resource of electric power in this state.

It’s the latest big battle between two divergent visions of America — and this time, the folks who have done so much damage to this state and this nation can’t be allowed to win. In fact, maybe the campaign against PG&E can be the turning point, the time when California realizes that privatization, attacks on the public sector, tax cuts for the rich, and political sleaze are a formula for disaster.

Prop. D and privatization

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By Tim Redmond

Randy Shaw has a piece in Beyond Chron today that takes issue with our endorsement on Prop. D.

It’s a fair discussion and a reasonable debate — I understand why some progressives support Prop. D, and I don’t think they’re wrong or evil for doing so. This one’s a tough call — I’m willing to accept stuff like electronic billboards that I don’t want to see in most parts of the city if it will really bring new life mid-Market, which desperately needs investment and energy.

But Shaw’s piece brings up a larger issue, one that’s part of the topic of our anniversary issue next week, so it’s worth comment.

Here’s what he wrote:

The San Francisco Bay Guardian said many good things about Prop D, but urged a No vote after focusing on the CBD factor: “But the process this measure describes isn’t at all democratic. The CBD board selects its own members, and the only oversight the city has is the ability of the Board of Supervisors to abolish the agency.”

Of course, any funding allocation process used by Prop D could have been similarly attacked. Would the Guardian prefer that the Mayor’s Office allocate Prop D funds? If so, its editorial board should reread my pieces on the Newsom Administration’s rigged RFP/RFQ processes.

Hard to argue with that, on the surface: Yes, the bidding process out of the Mayor’s Office is fucked up. Yes, there is almost always some level of corruption at City Hall (any City Hall).

But that doesn’t mean that the private sector ought to take over thing like zoning and resource allocation.

Private nonprofits like the Central Market Community Benefits District play a role in the city’s life, and that’s fine. Some nonprofits (like the one Randy Shaw runs) get city contracts to do work the city can’t do very well, and that’s also fine.

But the public sector — however flawed, however corrupt at times — still has to have the final say over regulations and the way money gets spent on public services. That’s how democracy works.

I remember once when we were intervieweing a very appealing, smart and generally progressive candidate for city assessor a few years back, and we asked him how he would go about bringing in more revenue. He told us he wasn’t sure that was a good idea, because “Willie Brown and his friends will just waste it.”

True — Brown and his friends wasted a lot of money. And that kind of corruption in government has helped the right wing push its anti-public-sector agenda. And people who says that “at least Willie Brown made the trains run on time” miss the point – corruption undermines faith in government.

But overall, using that argument to push for privatization of public resources is a dangerous way to go.

Remember: The money that would be paid by billboard owners to the CBD amounts to a tax on the new billboards. That tax ought to be collected by the city, and elected city officials should decide how it’s spent. Proponents of the measure told us they didn’t want to let the supervisors hold hearings, write the legislation or put it on the ballot because the city would then have control over the final shape of the measure. For example, Sup. Chris Daly wanted much of the billboard money to go for low-income housing — which isn’t where the CBD folks wanted it to go.

Sorry, but that’s a decision for elected officials to make. I’ll support new billboards when I know that there will be a public process (and public-sector process) determining how the boards are sited, how they’re taxed and where the extra cash is spent.

Avalos on the budget process

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Editors note: Sup. John Avalos sent this letter in response to criticism (including criticism from the Guardian) of the city budget process.

By John Avalos

Responding to Tim Redmond’s editor’s notes posted on July 22: Robocop is one of my favorite movies too, especially for its anti-privatization message. Over the last 5 years that I worked in City Hall, I have actively opposed efforts to privatize City services like the security at the Asian Art museum and custodial work at City Hall. This year, when Jail Health Services were threatened to be contracted out to a for-profit corporation, I led the effort to push back, visiting both jails and meeting directly with those most impacted by the move.

As of June 29th, the night of the last Budget and Finance Committee hearing on the mayor’s budget, the Budget Committee had freed up only $20 million in cuts to prevent the massive cuts imposed by the Mayor. This was nowhere near enough to stop all the Prop J’s, the Mayor’s effort to contract out services, and restore cuts to essential services. Stopping the Prop J’s alone cost over $20 million.

Late that night, I met with a broad array of budget constituent representatives: seniors, youth, SRO tenants, city workers, homeless advocates, to get their input on priorities and strategies before President Chiu and I went headlong into negotiations with the Mayor’s office.

By the night of July 1st, we had $43 million to stop ALL the Prop J’s and restore over 23 million in other priorities.
We kept shelters open 24 hours, restored substance abuse and mental health services such as the single standard of care for mental health, continued immigrant rights and tenant services, protected seniors from losing meal programs and having to pay social workers to help them with their finances, prevented cuts to family support and violence prevention services, restored rec director jobs, rejected charging families for their child’s detention at YGC, reoriented the Mayor’s administration towards community development, promoted transit first parking policies, and set aside millions of dollars for job programs at the airport, port and PUC.

But I would not credit two newbie supervisors’ negotiating skills for restoring an unprecented $43 million in restorations in the worst year possible.

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

All the great sci-fi and comic book movies have some sort of larger social metaphor. Robocop, one of my all-time favorites, was really about the privatization of public resources. Our hero gets mangled in a firefight because Detroit turned its police department over to Omni Consumer Products Corp., which cut staffing to boost the bottom line and there’s no backup available.

So when I was editing this week’s cover package on the battle over health insurance, I couldn’t help thinking about The Incredibles. See, Mr. Incredible is this great superhero, but liability lawsuits force him to retire and he winds up as a claims clerk in an insurance company, where he sits around all day stamping "denied" on health insurance claims. Then he gets in trouble for quietly telling customers how they can appeal.

I’ve always imagined that real health insurance offices look exactly like that. People sit around all day and get paid to make sure that other people don’t get health care. And if they deny enough claims, they get a nice bonus. If they approve too many claims or help the poor customers appeal, they get fired.

The thing is, the bonus part is true. Many insurance companies pay their staff based on how much they have done to keep costs down — that is, to make sure expensive medical treatments are denied. I’ve been through this. The medical insurance won’t pay for the anesthesia my son needs for complicated oral surgery because the procedure happens in a dental office. The dental insurance won’t pay because the drugs are administered by an anesthesiologist, who is a doctor, not a dentist. Someone is smiling in both the medical and dental insurance offices; they just saved $1,000. Bonus on the way.

Sound familiar? I bet you’ve been through it too.

This is why the only way health insurance is going to get better is if the profit is taken out of it. And why it’s absolutely nuts that the insurance industry is still considered part of the solution.

The city budget didn’t come out well. The cops, the mayor’s press office, the mayor’s 311 call center, the places where there is still a lot of bloat, saw no real cuts. Public health and human services, which have already been cut to the bone, got hacked even more. And there is no concrete plan to even try to raise new revenue this fall.

There are some lessons here, and let me start with an obvious one. The final deal went down with two people — Sups. John Avalos and David Chiu, both new to the board — in the room with the mayor’s staff. Same thing in Sacramento — five people cut the deal. There’s got to be a better way. *

“Common sense is radical” on Reverend Billy Day

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By Steven T. Jones
billpreach.jpg
Photo by Brennan Cavanaugh

Reverend Billy Talen isn’t just a Green Party candidate for mayor of New York City and performance artist-turned-pastor of the Church of Life After Shopping. He’s also a creative product of the San Francisco’s rich tradition of political theater. And for all these reasons, the Board of Supervisors plans to declare today Reverend Billy Day at its afternoon meeting.

“WHEREAS, Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping teach that consumerism, commercialism, privatization, and corporate greed are destroying our cities, nation and planet,” reads one of the whereases.

If you want to see Rev. Billy in action, stop by board chambers in City Hall this afternoon around 3:30 p.m. or attend his political fundraiser tonight at the DNA Lounge, where a bevy of Bay Area performers will round out the evening’s entertainment. In the meantime, here’s more of the extended interview I did with Rev. Billy in his SoHo campaign office a few months ago.

Paving the way for privatization

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news@sfbg.com

City officials are considering shutting down the municipal asphalt plant — the source of material for repaving roads and fixing potholes — in order to facilitate construction of a private plant on the waterfront that the city would agree to help finance and support over the long term.

While the privatization plan is being billed by project proponents as a way to save money during tough financial times, it raises questions about whether relying on the private sector for this essential material could hurt the city’s ability to make emergency repairs and ultimately end up costing taxpayers even more.

For the cash-strapped Port of San Francisco, which will make millions of dollars leasing land for the new facility, this is unquestionably a good deal. But for the rest of the city, which is losing a potentially valuable public resource it has operated since 1909 when the first municipal plant opened, the answer is a bit less clear.

Douglas Legg, manager of finance and budget at the Department of Public Works (DPW), argues that the municipal plant is not cost-effective and that the city would pay less if it contracts with an outside vendor. In a 2006 study, Legg found that the city’s cost to produce a ton of asphalt was $75 while private plants offered it for $67.

"It’s true that E.B.I. Aggregates and Graniterock are a little cheaper because they have a market advantage: they own their own gravel quarries," admits Ben Santana, who has managed the municipal plant in the Bayview for the last 21 years. But he still thinks his facility plays an important role. "Otherwise they would have gotten rid of us long ago. We can mobilize in a few hours and city trucks don’t have to wait in line with other clients."

In the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the municipal plant proved to be a valuable asset. "The plant wasn’t damaged. We sent our crews to take care of cracks and voids that had suddenly opened up," Santana recalls. "So the city didn’t have to go south to get material, or pay to get the private plants to open."

Indeed, in 2006, DPW held off the proposed shutdown in order to maintain its access to asphalt in emergencies. Officials worried about being dependant on plants outside city limits, especially since E.B.I. in Brisbane was slated to cease operations in the upcoming years, which would have left Graniterock potentially enjoying a monopoly that could result in price increases.

Although the agency recognizes that it has to have an asphalt plant inside city limits to function well, it is losing the political will to maintain its own. So when port officials approached DPW with their plan to attract a private asphalt operator, the threat to close down the municipal plant resurfaced.

The port has issued a request for proposal (RFP) for an asphalt-batching plant to be built on Pier 94. The selected bidder would be bound to negotiate a long-term contract with the city guaranteeing it would supply asphalt at a price tied to the Northern California asphalt price index.

The port and DPW assume the potential market for asphalt in the city will be large enough to draw private operators. But that belief seems to contradict the rationale behind the decision to close the municipal plant in the first place, which was that it couldn’t produce volumes large enough to bring the price per ton down.

"The demand from the street resurfacing program was nowhere near as high as we thought it would be," Legg says. In 2004, DPW installed two silos on the site to store hot asphalt and increase production. DPW was hoping to generate additional revenue for the department by selling asphalt to private contractors and other agencies. But two years later, Legg concluded in his report that the plant not only failed to turn a profit, it was facing a $100,000 shortfall to repay its investment.

Demand might be picking up, though: city officials expressed their intention to make up for years of neglect in the upkeep of San Francisco streets by introducing a $368 million safe street and road repair bond measure for the November ballot. The plan would boost the number of blocks to be resurfaced from 100 to 400 for the next 10 years, something that might make the city-owned plant more cost-effective. But Legg skeptically points out that the plant still requires replacement of some key components.

"Last year we had a $60 million capital budget for all capital improvement needs in the city from the general fund sources. This year, we’ve got $22 million," Legg says. "They’re scarce dollars. I can’t speak for what the Board [of Supervisors] will chose to do, but it’s challenging to get capital money."

Legg also noted the city plant’s "frequent breakdowns" and limited capacity to store raw materials, criticism countered by Santana. "The plant was modernized in 1993. Sure, some equipment does date to 1953, and I’ve been pushing to replace them for years. But it’s nothing the city can’t afford. Yes, it does sometimes go down. That’s part of operating a plant. But we’ve never run out of material because I always make sure to have some on ground or en route."

Brad Benson, project manager at the Port of San Francisco, discounts the recent limited asphalt consumption in the city, noting major development proposals in the city’s future. "Think about shipyard development, Treasure Island development, Caltrain, parking lots," Benson says. "If there’s not the demand, there won’t be bids. No one is going to invest $3 [million] to $10 million, whatever it costs to build an asphalt plant, if they don’t perceive a market."

But what might also hook prospective bidders is the provision, stated in the RFP, that the "risk capital to construct the facility (may be offset by city financing)." Benson explains that "this concept was introduced here in the midst of the financial crisis when people were having trouble finding sources of capital. The city may have access to some lower cost sources of debt."

Benson said he doesn’t know if city financing would be needed. "Obviously, the port prefers bidders that come in with their own sources of financing. That has been the model to build the neighboring concrete plants. The only reason to consider it is if the city combines lower-cost financing and could get lower cost asphalt in return. Then it might be worth doing."

It’s an interesting paradox: the city wouldn’t have funds to upgrade its plant, but would be ready to chip in to outsource?

But there are other issues driving the proposal. Karen Pierce, a Bayview- Hunters Point community activist who sits on the port’s Southern Waterfront Advisory Committee, told us she would "like to see the municipal plant move away from where people live. There needs to be a buffer area. A newer plant on port property would be further away, and we would have the opportunity to make sure it uses technologies that reduce the amount of pollution."

The municipal asphalt plant, which has never received complaints for pollution, currently incorporates 15 percent of recycled asphalt in its production. The RFP requests its potential tenant raise this amount up to 45 percent.

The proposed lot is also three times bigger than the existing one on Jerrold Avenue and has the advantage of being located near a maritime terminal where sand and gravel, the aggregates mixed with tar to produce asphalt, are imported. Also, there are two concrete batching plants and a construction material recycling center in the vicinity.

"Co-locating businesses that share each other’s products and reducing long-haul truck trips are the kernels of a broader idea for an ecoindustrial park that the port is developing in this area of the waterfront," Benson says.

If the asphalt plant project falls through, the port does have a backup plan: it is considering leasing the site to yet another concrete plant. Bids on both proposals are due in September, after which the Board of Supervisors will consider whether to close the city’s plant.

Is SF privatizing legal defense for the poor?

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By Tim Redmond
Adachi_Head_Shot3.jpg
SF Public Defender Jeff Adachi

The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office is facing a budget cut of about $1.9 million — small change compared to the city’s half-billion deficit. But the reduction comes at the same time as the San Francisco Superior Court is budgeting an additional $1.2 million for handling cases that the public defender can’t.

And that’s led to some serious intrigue in the Hall of Justice. Among other things, Public Defender Jeff Adachi has charged that the presiding judge of the Superior Court, James McBride, is trying to take all of the misdemeanor cases away from the PD’s office and give them to private defense lawyers.

Like most privatization schemes, this one would either save the city money or cost money, depending on who’s doing the figures. But it would mark a dramatic change in the way San Francisco provides legal defense for indigent people.

Fireworks at the DCCC

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By C. Nellie Nelson

The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee heard a resolution urging city agencies to not privatize city services last night. It’s the sort of measure that would normally pass without much debate — the local Democratic Party has always taken the side of the unions on contracting-out disputes.

But in the midst of the budget mess, the head of the firefighters’ union, John Hanley, showed up to berate the committee members, some of whom are also supervisors, over the latest budget moves.

As Hanley raged about putting firefighters’ lives on the line, committee chair Aaron Peskin and other members tried to make the point of order that this resolution was about privatizing city services, not changes to the budget. Hanley raised his voice louder yet, and, with his face a deep shade of red, he waved a pointed finger around as he yelled about $80 million in cuts.

At that point DCCC member and supervisor Chris Daly rose from his chair and pointing his finger at Hanley demanded, “Don’t point at me!” Hanley became even further agitated, and some committee members demanded that both Daly and Hanley leave. Both then ultimately quieted down, and neither was forced to leave.

In spite of the jarring display and repeated attempts to bring the focus back to the privatization of city services, commenters continued to speak on budget concerns. Former DCCC member and Deputy Sheriff David Wong said the Democratic Party should be for working people, and asked to not have the sheriff’s budget cut. Committee member Robert Haaland asked him if he supported or opposed contracting out sheriff services, but Wong didn’t answer.

Several SEIU members and Department of Public Health workers followed, speaking of seniors missing meals, nursing-to-staff ratios at SF General that result in less skilled workers doing responsibilities above their level of training, and even clients who had just been killed while on a wait list for city services.

When public comment closed, committee members addressed the hotly contended budget decision in a general way. Peskin began, “I want to refute the politics of fear and demagoguery,” referring to Hanley’s intimidating style of speaking. “There’s no question the pie has shrunk,” he continued, reiterating that in a fundamental notion of fairness, all departments must share the pain.

Haaland noted that 1,500 people would be laid off in the Department of Public Health, and that just wouldn’t be true of all departments. He said that cutting the DPH by $100 million would gut the Healthy San Francisco program, and result in $4 million cut from HIV services.

Peskin followed, declaring flatly, “I don’t want my house to burn down either.” He urged everyone to be part of the solution.

The members moved to take out language referring to specific professions that might be privatized, and with those changes, overwhelmingly passed the resolution against privatizing city services.

This one’s ugly

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news@sfbg.com

The most painful and divisive city budget season in many years was just getting under way as this issue went to press, with dueling City Hall rallies preceding the June 16 Board of Supervisors vote on an interim budget and the board’s Budget and Finance Committee slated to finally delve into the 2009-10 general fund budgets on June 17.

Both sides have adopted the rhetoric of a life-or-death struggle, with firefighters warning at a rally and in an advertising campaign that any cuts to their budget is akin to playing Russian Roulette, while city service providers say the deep public health cuts proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom will also cost lives and carry dire long-term costs and consequences.

Despite Newsom’s pledges in January and again on June 1 to work closely with the Board of Supervisors on budget issues, that hasn’t happened. Instead, Newsom’s proposed budget would decimate the social services supported by board progressives, who responded by proposing an interim budget that would share that pain with police, fire, and sheriff’s budgets — which Newsom proposed to increase.

Rather than simply adopting the mayor’s proposed budget as the interim spending plan for the month of July, as the board traditionally has done, progressive supporters proposed an interim budget that would make up to $82 million in cuts to the three public safety agencies and use that money to prevent the more draconian cuts to social services.

“It’s the start of a discussion to figure out what that number should be. I don’t know where we’re going to end up,” Sup. David Campos, who sits on the budget committee, told us.

Board President David Chiu said Newsom did finally meet with him and Budget Committee chair John Avalos on June 15 to try to resolve the impasse. But he said, “We didn’t hear anything from the mayor that would change where we were last week.” They planned to meet again on June 19.

“What we proposed represents the magnitude of the challenge we face this year,” Chiu said of the interim budget proposal, seeming to indicate that supervisors are open to negotiation.

The real work begins the morning of June 17 when the Budget and Finance Committee dissects the budgets of 15 city departments, including the Mayor’s Office, of which Avalos told us, “I don’t think the mayor has made the same concessions as he’s had other departments make.”

The next day, another 13 city departments go under the committee’s microscope, including the public safety departments that were spared the mayor’s budget ax and even given small increases, and the budget of the Public Defenders Office, where Newsom proposes cutting 16 positions.

“This creates a severe imbalance in the criminal justice system,” Public Defender Jeff Adachi told us. “Why is he cutting public defender services while fully funding police, fully funding the sheriff’s department, and essentially creating a situation where poor people are going to get second-rate representation?”

That theme of rich vs. poor has pervaded the budget season debate, both overtly and in budget priorities that each side is supporting.

 

BUDGET JUSTICE

Hundreds of people whose lives would be affected by cuts marched on City Hall under the banner Budget Justice on June 10. Some of San Francisco’s most vulnerable citizens, including homeless people, immigrants, seniors, and public housing residents, turned out for the march, chanting and waving signs asking the mayor to “invest in us.”

Sups. John Avalos and Chris Daly delivered resounding speeches mirroring the anger in the crowd, and promised to fix the budget by reallocating money to protect the city’s safety net. Daly charged that even as services to the city’s vulnerable populations are being slashed, “the politically connected and the powerful get huge increases.”

Avalos took the podium just before heading into City Hall to lead the Budget and Finance Committee meeting and implored the hundreds of people gathered out front to make their voices heard. “Mayor Newsom, he told us, he said, ‘We have a near-perfect budget.’ Do we have a near-perfect budget?” Avalos asked, and then paused while the crowd cried out, “Nooo!!!!!”

During an interview discussing Newsom’s budget priorities, Avalos twice made references to The Shock Doctrine, using the Naomi Klein book about how crises are used as opportunities to unilaterally implement corporatist policies. “We have a budget deficit that is real, but it’s being used to do other things,” Avalos said. “I look at it as a way to remake San Francisco. It’s a Shock Doctrine effect.”

He referred to the privatization of government services (an aspect of every Newsom budget), promoting condo conversions and gentrification, defunding nonprofits that provides social services (groups that often side with progressives), and helping corporations raid the public treasury (Newsom proposed beefing up the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development by a whopping 32 percent).

“It’s things that the most conservative parts of San Francisco have wanted for years, and now they have the conditions to make it happen,” Avalos said.

Much of that agenda involves slashing services to the homeless and other low-income San Francisco and de-funding the nonprofit network that provides services and jobs. “There’s an effort to say nonprofit jobs aren’t real jobs, but they are an important economic engine of the city,” Avalos told us. Those cuts were decried during the June 10 budget rally.

“What people don’t realize,” Office & Professional Employees International Union Local 3 representative Natalie Naylor said, “is that everything that’s being proposed to be cut from the city is creating no place for homeless people to go during the daytime. I don’t think Newsom’s constituents realize that we’re going to see more homeless people on the street than ever before.”

Pablo Rodriguez of the Coalition on Homelessness told the crowd that he was furious that the mayor would make such deep cuts to social services. “Stop riding on the back of the homeless, and the seniors and the children and all the community-based organizations,” Rodriguez said. “Why make the poor people pay for the rich people’s mistakes? The poor people didn’t make the mistakes.”

 

WHOM TO CUT?

The public safety unions were equally caustic in their arguments. An announcement for the Save Our Firehouses rally — which was heavily promoted by members of the Mayor’s Office and Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign team — claimed that “the Board of Supervisors voted to endanger the progress that we’ve made in public safety by laying off hundreds of police officers, closing up to 12 out of 42 fire stations and closing part of our jail.”

Actually, all sides have said the interim budget probably won’t lead to layoffs, station closures, or prisoner releases, but those could be a part of next year’s budget.

Tensions temporarily cooled a bit in the days that have followed, but the two sides still seemed far apart on their priorities, mayoral spin aside. Asked about the impasse, Newsom spokesperson Nate Ballard told the Guardian, “The mayor has already included over 90 percent of the supervisors’ priorities in the budget. But he’s against the supervisors’ efforts to gut public safety. He’s willing to work with people who have reasonable ideas to balance the budget. Balancing the budget with draconian cuts to police and fire is unreasonable.”

Campos disputed Ballard’s figure and logic. “I don’t know where that number comes from,” Campos said. “A lot of the things we wanted to protect, the mayor cut anyway.”

Campos said Newsom’s slick budget presentation glossed over painful cuts to essential services, cuts that activists and Budget Analyst Harvey Rose have been discovering over the last two weeks. “I felt the mayor has done a real good job of presenting things to make it look like it’s not as bad as it really is,” Campos said.

 

COMMITTEE WORK

Avalos expressed confidence that his committee will produce a document to the full board in July that reflects progressive priorities.

“We’re going to pass to the full board a budget that we have control over,” Avalos said, noting that a committee majority that also includes Sups. Campos and Ross Mirkarimi strongly favors progressive budget priorities.

He also praised the committee’s more conservative members, Sups. Bevan Dufty and Carmen Chu, as engaged participants in improving the mayor’s budget. “I think the tension on the committee is healthy.”

Ultimately, Avalos says, he knows the board members can alter Newsom’s budget priorities. But his goal is to go even further and develop a consensus budget that creatively spreads the pain.

“Ideally, I want a unanimous vote on the Board of Supervisors,” Avalos said.

In the current polarized budget climate, that’s an ambitious goal that may be out of reach. But there are some real benefits to attaining a unanimous board vote, including the ability to place revenue measures on the November ballot that can be passed by a simply majority vote (state law generally requires a two-third vote to increase taxes, but it makes provisions for fiscal emergencies, when a unanimous Board of Supervisors vote can waive the two-thirds rule).

Avalos has proposed placing sales tax and parcel tax measures on the fall ballot. Other proposals that have been discussed by a stakeholder committee assembled by Chiu include a measure to replace the payroll tax with a new gross receipts tax and general obligation bond measures to pay for things like park and road maintenance, which would allow those budget expenses to be applied elsewhere.

But Avalos said Newsom will need to step up and show some leadership if the measures are going to have any hope of being approved. “To get the two-thirds vote we need to win a revenue measure in this bad economy is going to be really hard,” Avalos said.

“The mayor is open to new revenue measures as long as they include significant reforms and are conceived and supported by a wide swath of the community including labor and business,” Ballard said.

Sup. Sean Elsbernd — one of the most conservative supervisors — has repeatedly said he won’t support new revenue measures unless they are accompanied by substantial budget reforms that will rein in ballooning expenditures in areas like city employee pensions.

“Pension reform. Health care reform. Spending reform. One of the above. A combination of the above,” Elsbernd told the Guardian when asked what he wants to see in a budget revenue deal.

Avalos says he’s mindful that not every progressive priority can be fully funded as the city wrestles with a budget deficit of almost $500 million, fully half the city’s discretionary budget. “It’s a crappy situation, and we can make it just a crummy situation.”

Shrinking government

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steve@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom released his proposed 2009-10 city budget June 1, proclaiming it far better than doomsayers predicted and emphasizing how he minimized cuts to health and human services that he once said could be as deep as 25 percent in order to bridge a $438 million budget deficit.

"It doesn’t come close to balancing on the backs of our health and human services agencies, as some had feared," Newsom told the department heads, elected supervisors, and journalists who were tightly packed into his office for the announcement event.

But there’s still plenty of pain in a city budget where the General Fund — the portion of the budget local officials can control — would be reduced by more than 11 percent, its only reduction in recent memory. And at a time when every reasonable Democrat in Sacramento has been nearly begging for tax hikes to prevent budget blood, San Francisco’s Democratic mayor proudly proclaimed that there are no new taxes in the budget.

"We didn’t raise taxes, and we didn’t borrow," he said. You can almost hear that line being repeated in the ads he’ll be running as he campaigns for governor.

Newsom proposes slashing the city’s public health budget by $128.4 million, or 8 percent (a total of 400 employees), while the human services budget would take a $15.9 million hit, or 2 percent. "That’s a lot, but by no means is it devastating," Newsom said, noting that he restored some of the deepest cuts that were the subject of alarming public hearings. "I listened to the public comments at the Board of Supervisors… Things got a lot better than the headlines and the hearings."

The proposed budget includes 1,603 full-time-equivalent layoffs, or a 5.8 reduction in the city’s workforce, trimming more than $75.5 million from the general fund budget. In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services is cutting back its workweek to 37.5 hours to further trim costs.

"The smoke hasn’t cleared yet and there’s a lot of devastation in this budget that isn’t being talked about," Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the Board of Supervisors Budget Committee, said at the event. Newsom’s budget will be analyzed and then face its first committee hearing June 17, with approval by the full board required by July 31.

"The mayor told us a lot about what’s in the budget, but not a lot about what’s not in the budget, so we’ll spend a few days figuring that out," board President David Chiu told the Guardian.

The budget was aided greatly by more than $80 million in federal stimulus funds and other one-time revenue sources (such as $10 million from the sale of city-owned energy turbines) that were used to plug this year’s gap and offset cuts by the state and depressed tax revenue.

Although Newsom doesn’t want to raise taxes, licenses and fees would go up 41 percent, increasing revenue by $64 million to $220 million. Some of those proposed fee hikes range from the cost of parking in city-owned garages to admission fees for city-owned facilities such as the Strybing Arboretum. Muni riders will also see fares hiked to $2.

There will also be deep cuts to some key city functions. The Department of Emergency Management would take a 24 percent cut under the mayor’s plan, while the Department of Building Inspection faces a 20 percent cut to expenditures and a 29 percent reduction in staff.

The Planning Department would also take a hit of about 7 percent, with most of that focused on the department’s long-range planning functions, which were slashed by 19 percent to $4.7 million.

But it’s not an entirely austere budget. The police and fire departments have status quo budgets with no layoffs. Travel expenses would increase 13.5 percent to $2.9 million and the cost of food purchased by the city would rise 127 percent to $7 million.

The Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development — which often uses public funds to subsidize private sector projects — would get a 32 percent increase, to $24.7 million.

It’s unclear how much the Mayor’s Office has shared the budget pain. During the presentation, Newsom said his office’s budget has been cut by 28 percent, but he later clarified that was spread over the five years he has been mayor. Yet even that is tough to account for given that some functions have been shuffled to other departments.

The document shows a proposed 60 percent increase in the Mayor’s Office budget, although the lion’s share of that comes from the Mayor’s Office of Housing’s one-time financial support for some long-awaited projects, including rebuilding the Hunters View housing and support services project for low-income people connected to the Central YMCA, and an apartment project on 29th Avenue for people with disabilities.

Avalos has said he will look to find money by cutting some of the highly paid policy czars and communications specialists added to the Mayor’s Office in recent years, as well as Newsom’s cherished 311 call center and the Community Justice Court he created. Supervisors are also expected to resist Newsom’s penchant for privatization. Newsom proposed to privatize seven city functions, from jail health services and security guards and city-owned facilities, and to consolidate another 14 functions between various city departments.

Newsom pledged to work with supervisors who want to change the budget, continuing the rhetoric of cooperation that he opened the budget season with in January, which supervisors say hasn’t been matched by his actions or the secretive nature of this budget. "This budget is by no means done," Newsom said. "It’s an ongoing process."

In fact, Newsom warned that the budget news could be even worse than his budget outlines. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is talking about new cuts that could total $175 million or more for San Francisco only, although Newsom only included $25 million of that in his budget because it went to the printer on May 22 and the total hit is still unclear. "So," Newsom said, "we’re by no means out of the woods."

CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival

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PREVIEW Moving in its fourth year from autumn to an early summer slot, San Francisco’s CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival now provides an apt alternative-entertainment prelude to Memorial Day — because what, after all, is more patriotic these days than asking the question, "What are we fighting for?" Fittingly, the opener is about Big Oil. Sandy Cioffi (who’ll be present) at one point spent five days in the custody of Nigerian security forces while making Sweet Crude, an investigation of Shell Oil Corp. and other companies’ violence and environmental ruination in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Likewise, Robert Cornellier’s Black Wave documents the seemingly neverending efforts to exact justice from ExxonMobil over the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 20 years ago. Other highlights in this year’s all-documentary edition of CounterCorp include Sam Bozzo’s Blue Gold: World Water Wars, about the escalation of conflict and privatization around that most precious (and vanishing) natural resource; Steven Greenstreet’s Killer at Large, which analyzes the industrial agribiz/food processing causes behind an obesity epidemic that has begun reversing Americans’ previously steady trend toward longer life expectancies; and Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a "mash-up movie" about the wars between copyright law and free expression. No doubting where Gaylor stands on that issue: his entire movie is already available to download and remix yourself at www.opensourcecinema.org.

COUNTERCORP ANTI-CORPORATE FILM FESTIVAL Thurs/28–Sat/30, $5–$10. Victoria Theater, 2961 16th St., SF. www.countercorp.org

How to fix public transit

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OPINION As San Franciscans deal with the shock of ever-worsening budget cuts, it’s time we look to fundamental structural changes in the way government does business. That’s a scary thought because, as Naomi Klein warns, free market ideologues use shocks to accomplish a very damaging type of structural change that cuts public service, increases privatization, and strengthens class division. Those of us who support collective responsibility and a strong public sector had better work together to propose our own structural change.

In transportation, to reduce driving — which accounts for 47 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in this city — we must increase public transit ridership dramatically. Yet the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is cutting its budget by 16 percent. The solution is simple, but not easy: car transportation will have to cost more, in terms of money and time. Transit, walking, and bicycling will have to be easier, faster, and safer. We can use the funds from increases in driving costs to fund improvements to other forms of transportation.

The alternative is an abandonment of the great equalizer that is public transit — and a kind of privatization that provides the automobile as an option for the middle class but at the cost of miserable transportation for the 30 percent of San Francisco households who don’t have cars.

For this to work, public transit must be not just a little bit better, it must be a great deal better. It must remain affordable for families and serve the whole city efficiently, at all hours of the day. Residents should need cars so rarely that transit costs, plus occasional car-sharing and car rentals, are cheaper alternatives than car ownership.

With a higher gas tax and tolls on freeways (measures a recent San Francisco Planning and Urban Research analysis shows to be among the most cost-effective policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), we can make public transit work better. SFMTA should implement its proposed rapid network on the routes that carry 80 percent of Muni’s passengers, speeding up the vehicles by at least 20 percent. That will cost car drivers some time: mixed traffic lanes will have to be converted to bus lanes. Turns will have to be restricted and parking will have to be removed.

The city also must make bicycling safe and easy. Our bikeways need to be safe for 8-year olds, who need systems that forgive mistakes and allow for slow and easy riding, and seniors, who are not physically able to ride fast and cannot afford to make emergency stops that may cause a fall. That means we need effective 18 mph traffic-calmed zones and a system of car-free bike paths, including one down Market Street.

Transportation is a regional issue that San Francisco cannot solve on its own. We must do a better job of matching our regional development patterns to our needs to promote walking, bicycling, and transit.

To make all this work, we must stop sprawl immediately and concentrate growth in cities and existing suburbs. More density in cities means more people to support transit (through fares and a higher tax base) and more people to support local shops so that walking to your grocery store is an option for more people.

Dave Snyder is transportation policy director at SPUR.

Cab drivers rally against privatization

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By Tim Redmond

One of the tricky ways Mayor Gavin Newsom is going to try to pretend to balance the city budget is by selling off taxi medallions, the permits needed to operate a cab in the city. And the drivers, with the help of Sup. Eric Mar, are organizing to fight back.

Mar, the Asian Law Caucus, the United Taxi Workers and others will hold a demonstration tomorrow, Tuesday May 21, on the steps of City Hall to denounce the plan. This is going to be an epic battle — the mayor sees the permits as a source of tens of millions of dollars, and drivers and their advocates say a public resource is being put on the auction block — and that ordinary drivers will get screwed.

I’m glad to see that Mar is taking this on — cab-industry politics is complicated and often rough, and the anti-privatization folks in the cab industry need an ally at City Hall.

Weighing in on the “Wrecked Park Department”

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By Ben Terrall

Hundreds of Recreation and Park Department workers and their supporters, family, and friends packed a Recreation and Park Commission hearing on proposed budget cuts to the department on Thursday. Overflow attendees watched the hearing on a large screen in another room.

They warned that the cuts will decimate violence prevention programs and have other serious long-term costs to San Francisco, while criticizing the purported privatization savings as a costly illusion. And still, the commission voted unanimously to approve the package of cuts.

Take off

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

With more than two dozen headliners mashing and hanging together, The Spirit of Apollo (Anti-) promises pop ecstasy of the heavenly, spatial variety. DJ Zegon and Squeak E. Clean, the two wheelers and dealers behind the project, aspire toward a greater good, namely, bringing together people of disparate musical and geographical backgrounds — hence the name North America–South America (N.A.S.A.).

The Spirit of Apollo arrives a decade after Prince Paul’s double whammy of all-star concept albums, A Prince among Thieves and his collaboration with Dan "the Automator" Nakamura, Handsome Boy Modeling School’s So, How’s Your Girl? (both Tommy Boy). At the time, A Prince among Thieves — praised in a memorable Guardian essay by Oliver Wang titled "A Great Day in Hip-Hop" — towered as a complex opera of friends turned enemies, a Greek tragedy performed in the urban street.

N.A.S.A. seems inspired by that earlier era of overstuffed musical junkanoos. But they don’t get too deep. After all, the global village should be fun, right? So instead of dense narratives on international privatization, outsourcing, and proxy wars, Zegon and Squeak produce party fodder such as "Samba Soul," with Del the Funky Homosapien and DJ Q-Bert, and "There’s a Party," with George Clinton and Chali 2na. The songs emphasize good, clean fun. A few of the rappers — notably Method Man on "N.A.S.A. Music" — sneak in f-bombs, but most are on their best behavior. Even Amanda Blank, notorious in club circles for waxing lyrical about poontang and peckers, keeps it PG on "A Volta."

The Spirit of Apollo appears safe for urban bourgeoisie with small children, but will anyone else find it listenable? Squeak built his name producing albums for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — he’s a producer of the engineering-and-microphone-placement variety, not a beatmaker à la Kanye West. Zegon’s musical career in Brazil is less known. As a result, the music doesn’t really boom and bump, instead opting for peppy skitters of funky hip-hop.

The duo soars, however, by launching incongruously great combinations. As two artists devoted to grotesqueries of the criminal and pornographic kind, Tom Waits and Kool Keith make a perfect match, even if the Gorillaz-like lurch of their "Spacious Thoughts" is hardly provocative. And the hipster dream pairing of West, Lykke Li, and Santogold over the Madonna-lite electro-pop of "Gifted" makes for a shining pop moment.

It’s that all-celebrities-are-friends-with-one-another myth that makes The Spirit of Apollo an intriguing dinner party — or, more accurately, a VIP-clogged backstage at Coachella or South by Southwest. Naturally, West and company talk about how cool they are and the burdens of fame. But with an hour-and-20-minute runtime, The Spirit of Apollo talks your ear off. It’s as if you got to the party early, got stuck cleaning up afterward, and at the end could only conclude, "Damn, that was a long-ass album."

N.A.S.A.

With Flosstradamus, Wallpaper, and DJ Morale

Feb. 28, 9 p.m., $18 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

Wrecked park department

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› news@sfbg.com

On Feb. 13, in a fourth floor hearing room in City Hall, large crowds of San Francisco Recreation and Park Department workers and supporters showed up on short notice to hear how the department was going to be gutted by deep budget cuts.

Overflow crowds of spilled into adjacent rooms to hear interim department director Jared Blumenfeld announce impending cuts to staff and hours. Although the department’s Web site stresses that "all parks, playgrounds, recreation centers, pools, golf courses, gyms, art centers, senior centers, and clubhouses will remain open," the cuts are so deep that all involved knew that the services and facilities will be shadows of their former selves.

Many people told the Guardian that they are also concerned that the process is intended to facilitate privatization of many Rec and Park functions, giving city jobs to contract workers who will not be able to duplicate the experience or connection to communities of the city workers they replace.

The Rec-Park Commission will have another hearing on the cuts at 2 p.m. Feb 19 in City Hall, Room 416, with more time for public comment. Activists working for more equitable cuts will stage a protest rally beforehand across from City Hall at 1 p.m.

At the meeting, numerous youngsters and their parents spoke of recreation directors mentoring kids who have few other positive influences in their lives. Many of these Rec and Park workers will be on the receiving end of pink slips at the end of the month. Blumenfeld announced that 51 full-time equivalent recreation director positions would be cut (the actual number of layoffs will be even higher given than many of the workers are part time).

Blumenfeld explained that $11.4 million needs to be cut from Rec and Park’s budget of the total budget about $140 million. He described some new ways to raise revenue, including charging entrance fees for the Botanical Garden, increasing pool fees, and charging the SF Public Library rent for the 32,000 square feet where local branches operate on public park land.

But even critics of the department say Blumenfeld is more accessible than his predecessor, Yomi Agunbiade, who was forced out last year after he came under fire for some of his privatization schemes and personnel issues. But raiding library funding, which is protected by voter-approved budget set-asides, is likely to create a backlash from the public.

Blumenfeld said he regretted tapping library funds, but said the move is being forced by budgetary realities. "Ultimately, this is a Lord of the Flies situation," he said.

Leah Grant of the group Friends of Potrero Hill told the Guardian at the hearing that the playground near where she lives was recently chained shut, leaving at-risk kids locked out. In an e-mail after the meeting, she wrote that it is "very, very difficult to accept that the programs for the disabled and at-risk children are going to be thrown under the bus while the privatization continues to the advantage of the wealthy and the taxpayers of San Francisco are literally being robbed of our public parks."

Grant also expressed concern that the City Fields Foundation, backed by Gap, Inc. founder Donald Fisher, a controversial funder of conservative causes in San Francisco, has essentially been taking over parks across the city and would further benefit from this year’s restructuring by filling the void with privatized services.

Blumenfeld insisted that "rumors" of privatization were unfounded, but admitted that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s nonprofit public-private partnership Rec Connect model is a key part of the mix in the new budget arrangements. As the Guardian reported ("Connect the connects," Oct. 17, 2007), the Rec Connect model is "private, funded by undisclosed corporate donations, staffed by volunteers who are often city employees or [Newsom’s] campaign donors, and unaccountable to any internal controls or outside scrutiny."

One department employee, who spoke off the record due to concerns about job security, told the Guardian that "there is not the same level of accountability for those in the Rec Connect program. If they leave the building where they are working, there is not necessarily anyone who is watching them."

Sources within the department say there will be 10 new Rec Connect sites opened to offset the budget cuts, a move that comes at a time when Newsom is trying to raise significant money for his nascent gubernatorial campaign.

"I feel like they’re using the financial crisis to push something they’ve been trying to accomplish for a long time," the source said. "And with this model, there are three to four layers of paid bureaucracy before these monies get to the kids. What they aren’t telling the public is that it is actually cheaper to allow Rec and Park workers to do our job than to pay the nonprofits, even though the workers the nonprofits contract out are making a lower hourly wage."

Lorraine Hanks, a recreation director who has worked with Rec and Park for 16 years, shared similar dissatisfaction with the Rec Connect program. In a phone interview, Hanks told us that "Rec Connect was supposed to come in and create innovative programs. They didn’t do that. They wound up doing the same things we were already doing."

Rec Connect spokesperson Jo Mestelle didn’t return Guardian calls for comment by press time.

Hanks also noted that "under Proposition J, 50 percent of funding was supposed to go to Rec and Park, and 50 percent was supposed to go to DCYF [Department of Children, Youth and their Families]. If we had that original 50 percent, we wouldn’t have to lay anyone off."

On the way out of Friday’s meeting, Betty Traynor of Friends of Boeddeker Park told us that many seniors and youngsters in the Tenderloin will have no park or safe public space to go to if the proposed cuts to hours go through, and that important programs for kids and seniors will be eliminated. Traynor added that the cuts "will also reduce hours for adult users of the park who have no other open green space in the Tenderloin."

Rec and Park employee Brando Rogers said the cuts would hurt youth who have developed relationships with employees and value these after school programs. "These are long-term relationships," she told us. "They can’t be replaced by seasonal contract workers. I’m worried that if these precious mentors have their jobs eliminated, the neighborhoods will just be decimated."

Don’t privatize cab permits

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EDITORIAL In tough times, political leaders with no backbone for making hard decisions tend to look for easy, short-term fixes. And Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to auction off taxicab permits to the highest bidder is just that — a quick fix with serious long-term problems. In fact, it amounts to the privatization of a lucrative public asset.

A bit of background: since 1978, when then-Sup. Quentin Kopp authored a measure called Proposition K, San Francisco has issued some 1,500 taxi permits, known as medallions, to working cab drivers. Under Prop. K, the medallions can’t be owned by corporations, and they can’t be bought and sold as speculative commodities. They’re owned by the city, and only people who actually drive cabs for a living can use them.

There’s a logic to that. The permits are valuable — a medallion holder not only has the right to drive a cab, he or she can lease that permit to other drivers for additional shifts. Since a taxi can be on the road 24 hours a day, the lease income is substantial, roughly $30,000 a year. But only active drivers get that benefit; nobody can hold a permit, sit at home (or work another job), and just collect that cash.

The process isn’t perfect. The waiting list for a medallion takes more than 10 years. Some medallion holders cling to their permits long after they should have retired (and thus keep driving when they should no longer be on the road). There’s no process for compensating a permit holder who becomes disabled.

But those are issues that can be addressed. The basic fact is that San Francisco has taken the position that the public benefit — a license to drive a cab for hire — should be given only to those who are using it. Prop. K prevents consolidation of ownership in the industry, prevents speculators from turning medallions into a new form of securities (which worked out so well with mortgages), and gives people who have spent 10 years or more driving a cab a chance to reap the full benefits of their work.

Newsom, however, sees those permits as a gold mine. If the city auctioned them off, they might bring $100,000 apiece. Under Newsom’s plan, much of that money would go to the city, although some would go to current medallion holders.

The plan is full of problems.

For one, it could completely change the cab business in San Francisco, shifting control of the industry away from drivers and giving it to big businesses and investors. Very few working drivers (who are lucky to clear $30,000 a year) could afford to buy permits, particularly at auction. So the first people in the market would be the cab companies, which for years have wanted the right to own and control the medallions. Private investors — wealthy individuals and institutions — would see the permits as an asset likely to appreciate, and would buy up medallions, then seek to raise the lease fees for drivers. The only way drivers could buy permits would be to seek the equivalent of mortgage loans — but the banks that handle that sort of loans typically require 20 percent down, putting many drivers out of the running. Unless, that is, some shadowy characters come along with cash loans — or unless the cab companies handle that payment, thereby getting further control).

Unless medallion ownership is limited to drivers, the entire process will get corrupted. People will drive for a minimal period of time, bid on medallions, then go into another line of work — and keep the medallion. Newsom’s office says he’s going to do that, but there are no details on the plan yet.

Cab drivers in the city talk about the need for security and retirement income. After years of driving with a medallion, they want the right to sell it for a chunk of cash. But under the current system, drivers are — and most of them like being — independent contractors.

Freelance writers, consultants, small business owners, and many others who are self-employed are responsible for their own retirement planning. Why should cab drivers get a special deal from the city?

Privatizing the permits is just a bad idea. Newsom promised last year — in writing — that he wouldn’t seek to change Prop. K. It’s infuriating to see him so quickly break that promise.

The supervisors should reject this proposal.

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