Ross Mirkarimi

Why foot patrols make sense

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By Tim Redmond

I had lunch with the chief of police yesterday. George Gascon is far sharper than the past few people to occupy that office, and seems to understand the need to reach out to the news media and to people who don’t agree with him. He’s actually a pretty skilled politician — which is a bit scary to folks who think he’s going in the wrong direction

And on a lot of things, I think he is.

We talked a lot about the sit-lie law that he’s been pushing, which I wrote about this week. Gascon insisted that he doesn’t want to use the law as a way to sweep homeless people off the streets; in fact, he told me, he doesn’t want to put anyone in jail, not at first, anyway. He’s rather use the law as a tool to get the young bullies and thugs (who are, by the way, a real problem on Haight St.) into the criminal justice system, where they might get access to services that could help them change their behavior.

I don’t see it working. What I see is either (a) the troublemakers will simply stand up when the cops arrive and walk to another part of the street or (b) some will get arrested, released, arrested, released, etc. — rejecting or ignoring all possible services — then ultimately, on the fourth or fifth offense, wind up in jail.

And all of of those arrests and court hearings are expensive.

In fact, Gascon and I agreed on two central points: (1) Putting two cops on foot patrol on Haight Street, between Buena Vista Park and Golden Gate Park, 13 hours a day, would end the problem pretty quickly and (2) the cost of doing that, which he put at close to $1 million a year (a bit high, I think), is probably lower than the cost of arresting, prosecuting, defending and incarcerating the Haight bullies.

This is something to look at.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi wants to hold a hearing on the issue, and I think he ought to ask the controller or the budget analyst to examiner the real costs: What’s the price tag of foot patrols in the Haight? What’s the cost to the district attorney, the public defender, the courts and the Sheriff’s Office of implementing a sit-lie law? And could the foot patrols be a cheaper way of solving this problem?

And whatever Gascon says about his intent, once you pass a law like this — a law making it a crime to sit or lie on the sidewalk — it’s there, on the books, ripe for abuse. Gascon won’t be the chief forever. And he has to answer to the mayor, who may want to use the law a little differently.

So before we go that route, why not try foot patrols? According to Gascon, the department can’t afford it; with a huge budget deficit and cuts on the way for every agency, spending a million bucks on Haight Street doesn’t make sense. But the supervisors should look at this citywide; spending $1 million on preventing crime with foot patrols (if that’s what it would really cost) may be a lot more cost-effective than spending $2 million arresting, prosecuting, defending, sentencing and incarcerating people.

It’s at least worth a try.

Editor’s Notes

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Editor’s Notes

I was in the Haight the other day, and saw something that would have made Police Chief George Gascón and Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius apoplectic. A group of young people, mostly men, were sitting right in the middle of the sidewalk. The scofflaws weren’t blocking my path since I was on Haight and they were a ways up Ashbury. But if I had wanted to walk in that direction, they would have been in the way. Which means they were already breaking the law, and if I’d complained and a cop had come along, they probably would have stood up and walked away. I can’t imagine they would have been arrested. In fact, if a beat officer had been walking Haight Street, they wouldn’t have been sitting there in the first place.

Gascón and Nevius are beating the drums for a “sit-lie” law, which would make it a crime to sit or lie on a public sidewalk. Since young thugs hassling residents, tourists, and shoppers in the Haight have become a problem, the sit-lie thing has legs; it could become this year’s version of Care Not Cash, the utterly bogus but politically catchy slogan that put Gavin Newsom in the Mayor’s Office.

There’s a populist anger about the poor behavior of a relatively small number of losers who are making life difficult for the generally upscale residents of the Haight, and progressives can’t ignore it. Frustration over decades of failed homeless policies made Newsom’s tough-love measure attractive. Explaining that it would never work, that it wasn’t a rational policy response, didn’t get the left anywhere.

That’s what we’re dealing with here. I can tell you, after watching Haight Street and its various generations of problems for more than 25 years, that a sit-lie law won’t solve anything. I can tell you that as soon as an officer approaches the troublemakers sitting on the street, they’ll do what any sane small-time crook would do: they’ll stand up. Then they’ll walk a few blocks away. If it keeps up, they’ll stop sitting down altogether. You can threaten, bully, and hassle people just as easily from a standing position.

And if they do get arrested, they’ll be released quickly (the city’s overcrowded jails, packed to the gills with the folks Gascón has rounded up in his Tenderloin sweeps, has no room for people charged with a minor crime like sitting on the sidewalk). Then they’ll be back.

I can tell you that the cost of arresting, charging, prosecuting, defending, and incarcerating these jerks would be way higher than the cost of having two cops walk up and down Haight Street all day, in uniform — a move that would absolutely solve the problem.

But this isn’t about rationality — it’s about emotion. Gascón has done a brilliant job, with the help of the Chron, of framing this as hard-headed law enforcement against the liberal supervisors.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, no fan of street crime, wants a hearing on the issue, to get some rational facts on the table. That’s a good start — but we need an alternative proposal. How about a test: try having two cops walk the beat every day for three months, a visible community policing presence on Haight Street. If that doesn’t work, we can always try something else.

Mirkarimi’s mandatory foot patrols ballot measure

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Text by Sarah Phelan

Mirkarimi.jpg

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, along with Sups. Eric Mar, David Chiu, John Avalos and David Campos, submitted a ballot initiative today that asks voters to require the San Francisco Police Department to implement community-based foot/ beat and MUNI patrols.

The legislation would require the Captain of each district police station, in consultation with neighbors, merchants and community stakeholders, to establish and assign officers to foot/beat patrols within their station’s
jurisdiction.

The measure would also require station commanders to coordinate with adjacent stations for the efficient policing of distressed MUNI lines.

“Foot/beat patrols work very well in deterring crime and building trust with the community – it’s proven throughout the United States,” Mirkarimi said in a press release. “Walking or bicycling police beats or riding Muni should not be a luxury for the one of the best funded per capita police departments in the nation.”

The measure, Mirkarimi said, would provide substantial discretion to the SFPD command staff and the City’s district stations to define and modify beats in response to crime statistics, community input and evolving realities on the street.

Mirkarimi also submittied a hearing request on the implementation of an “Anti-Sit/Lie” law.

“There has been a great deal of misinformation on how this law works – completely absent from the public
discussion is both the District Attorney and City Attorney to substantiate any of the presumed effects,” Mirkarimi stated. “There are questions that remain unanswered as to why current anti-loitering and
nuisance laws aren’t being enforced.”

Editorial: The mayor’s race starts now

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Ross and Jeff and any other progressive candidates need to decide soon if they are serious about running for mayor and either announce that they are running or step out of the way so someone else can step forward

EDITORIAL Back in 2007, when no leading progressive stepped in to run against Gavin Newsom, Sup. Chris Daly called a convention in the hope that someone would come forward and take up the challenge. All the major potential candidates showed up and spoke, but none announced a campaign.

Let’s not go there again.

We’re two years into Newsom’s second term, and the city’s a mess. After absorbing a round of brutal cuts last year, the budget’s still half a billion dollars out of whack. The mayor’s only answer at this point is to cut more (then raffle off to landlords the right to get rich by evicting tenants and turning apartments into condos). The Newsom agenda hasn’t created jobs or addressed the housing crisis or resolved the unfairness of the tax code or taken even the first steps toward energy self-sufficiency. Over the past year, he’s been largely inaccessible and hostile to the press, a mayor who won’t even tell the public where he is and what he does all day.

A candidate who wants to change the direction at City Hall should have no problem getting political traction in 2011. But the progressives are still floundering. And while the race is two years away, the more centrist candidates are already out the door. Sup. Bevan Dufty has announced he’s in the race, and state Sen. Leland Yee might as well have announced since everyone knows he’s running. Same for City Attorney Dennis Herrera. And at a certain point — in the not-too-distant future — those candidates will be starting to line up endorsers and making promises to major financial backers and constituency groups, which aren’t going to wait around forever for the progressives to settle on someone willing to make the immense effort to mount a serious campaign for mayor.

So the potential candidates — starting with Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and Public Defender Jeff Adachi — need to decide, soon, whether they’re serious about this or not, and either announce that they’re running or step out of the way so someone else can step forward.

With public financing, a candidate in San Francisco doesn’t have to be as well-heeled as Newsom was his first time around. It won’t take $6 million in contributions to win. But a progressive who wants to be the next mayor needs to demonstrate he or she can do a few key things, including:

•<\!s>Motivate and unite the base. Labor (or at least the progressive unions), the tenants, the left wing of the queer community (represented to a great extent by the Harvey Milk LGBT club), the environmentalists, and the progressive elected officials have to be fairly consistent in backing a candidate or downtown’s money will carry the day. So Mirkarimi and Adachi (and anyone else who’s interested) ought to be making the rounds, now. If that critical mass isn’t there, the campaign isn’t going to work.

•<\!s>Develop and promote a signature issue. Newsom won in part because he came up with the catchy “care not cash” initiative. Voters frustrated with years of failed homeless policies (and an incumbent, Willie Brown, who said the problem could never be solved) were willing to try something new (however bogus it turned out to be). Nobody’s developed a populist way to approach city finance. Nobody’s got a workable housing or jobs plan. What’s the central issue, or set of issues, that’s going to define the next progressive mayoral campaign?

•<\!s>Put together a central brain trust. This city’s full of smart progressives who have experience and ideas and can help put together a winning platform and campaign strategy. A good candidate will have them on board, early.

•<\!s>Herrera, Yee, Dufty, and others who might run (including Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting) are already out there looking for progressive supporters and allies, but none has yet offered an agenda the city’s left can support. Dufty pissed off the tenants by refusing to back stronger eviction protections. Herrera pissed off immigrant advocates by refusing to be as aggressive in supporting the city’s sanctuary law as he was in defending same-sex marriage (and because he hasn’t officially announced yet, he’s still not taking stands on political issues). Yee tried to sell off the Cow Palace. Ting has taken some great initiatives (forcing the Catholic Church to pay its fair share of property transfer taxes), but hasn’t developed or spoken out on the broader issues of city revenue. More of those candidates have been leaders in the public power movement.

It would be inexcusable if the progressives, who control the Board of Supervisors, are forced to pick a mayoral candidate by default. It’s time to end the speculation and dancing and find a candidate who can carry the progressive standard in 2011.

The next budget battle

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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.

Editorial: Sitting on the sidewalk is no crime

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Passing the new law might make the supervisors look tough on crime–but it’s not going to make Haight Street any safer

EDITORIAL The recent San Francisco Police Department crackdown on street kids in the Haight Ashbury conclusively proves two things:

1. Chief George Gascón is a media hound who will shift policy and priorities in an instant in response to a couple of newspaper stories, and

2. There’s no need for any new law against sitting on the sidewalk.

Even before the ink was dry on a column by the Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius, who lives in the East Bay suburbs, decrying the “aggressive punks” in the Haight, the Park Station had stepped up foot patrols in the neighborhood. Cops walking beats began making arrests, targeting young people who allegedly had threatened shoppers and residents.

And the crackdown has had an impact. “It proves exactly what I’ve been saying,” Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who represents the district, told us. “When you put cops out on the streets, walking beats on foot, you get results.”

One of the reasons you get results is simple deterrence: Beat cops may not be able to stop every gangland shooting in the Western Addition or the Mission or Bayview. But when you’ve got enough uniformed officers walking up and down Haight Street, life becomes a lot more unpleasant for small-time thugs. And while not every case will get prosecuted, not every case has to — this isn’t murder we’re talking about. It’s bad behavior by a group of people that will continue only as long as it’s tolerated.

Haight Street has attracted more than its share of social problems over the years, and neighborhood organizing has helped address many of them. Community leaders, merchants, and residents worked with the cops in the 1970s to drive heroin dealers out. A decade or so later, neo-Nazi skinheads met the same fate. In no case has the problem been solved by long jail sentences or tougher laws.

Yet with Nevius pushing the issue, there’s a call for a ban on sitting and lying on the sidewalk — a move to criminalize behavior that, for the most part, over many years, has not been a serious law-enforcement problem. We’ve seen this siren song before — in the early 1980s, when Dianne Feinstein was mayor, San Francisco police began conducting massive sweeps, arresting homeless people who congregated on the sidewalk and charging them with violating a law that banned blocking a thoroughfare. The ACLU took the city to court, the Guardian wrote several stories about it, homeless advocates complained loudly — and while the courts ultimately upheld the law, the sweeps came to an end.

And the misdirected law-enforcement did nothing to address the problem of homelessness. It didn’t make the streets safer — or put one more person in an affordable housing unit.

A law banning sitting on the sidewalk would have similar problems. “It gives the police a way to arrest people based entirely on the way they look,” said Alan Schlosser, legal director for the ACLU of Northern California. Homeless people, people who have no intention of doing anything violent or dangerous — anyone who happens to be sitting in the wrong place could be swept up and charged with a crime.

Passing a new law might make the supervisors look tough on crime — but it’s not going to make Haight Street any safer. There’s no reason to outlaw the nonviolent, non-threatening act of sitting on a public sidewalk — particularly when simply enforcing existing laws against harassment, assault, threats, and other violent behavior is a lot more effective. The supervisors should resist any move to pass a “sit/lie” law that will be hard to enforce, ripe for abuse, and probably won’t survive the inevitable (expensive) court challenge.

PG&E attack mailer puts City Hall on defensive

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PG&E attack mailer puts City Hall on defensive

GREEN CITY On a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. conference call in late October, with top PG&E executives and analysts from Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and other prominent investment firms on the line, PG&E president Chris Johns explained how a company-sponsored ballot initiative could save millions of dollars for the utility.

“We have faced potential takeovers multiple times over the last several years and we have had to expend significant resources to oppose these efforts,” Johns explained, referring to attempts by public agencies to set up independent electricity programs that threaten to compete with PG&E. “The success of this initiative, if placed on the ballot, could significantly reduce the need for taxpayers and utilities to oppose these local government takeover attempts.”

His comments appeared in a transcript from an earnings call posted on a financial Web site called SeekingAlpha.com. When pressed by an analyst about how PG&E had come up with the idea, company CEO Peter Darbee chimed in. “What occurred to us was we were repeatedly faced with this, and we were spending significant amounts of money year after year,” Darbee said, according to the transcript. “So we asked ourselves: what would be something that could discourage this over the longer term?”

What surfaced was a proposal for a statewide ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution to require a two-thirds majority vote at the ballot before any local government could develop its own electricity program. With such a high hurdle in place, efforts to move forward with publicly-owned power programs would essentially come to a standstill. But with San Francisco’s own stab at it expected to get underway long before the proposed initiative is placed on the ballot, PG&E is back to its default tactic of pouring millions into an opposition campaign.

San Francisco’s community choice aggregation (CCA) initiative, called CleanPowerSF, took a leap forward last month when a request for proposals (RFPs) went out to potential electricity service providers. The program aims to provide 51 percent renewable electricity by 2017, a meaningful step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But on the heels of this milestone, a wave of mailers bearing PG&E’s name in fine print crashed into San Francisco homes and businesses, screaming “Business Beware” in 1.5-inch type and proclaiming CleanPowerSF to be a “costly energy scheme.” The mailer cites a city controller’s report projecting that customer bills could be 24 percent higher under CCA.

But the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo), which is working in partnership with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to craft the emerging power program, responded in a press statement that this claim is misleading, since a fee structure has not yet been nailed down. While the controller’s report also noted that it was too early to say just what the pricing structure would be, it’s been a primary goal of the city’s CCA all along to offer customer billing rates that meet or beat PG&E prices.

Meanwhile, the city appears ready to fight back — and questions have already been raised about whether it was legal to distribute the attack mailer. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who chairs LAFCo, announced at the Dec. 15 Board of Supervisors meeting that he was requesting that the city attorney examine whether PG&E had violated state law by distributing the mailer. According to the state law that laid the groundwork for CCAs to exist, investor-owned utilities are required to “cooperate fully” with the public power efforts of cities. “PG&E has blanketed this city … with mailers that distort and misrepresent what CCA is doing,” Mirkarimi said. “I believe this is a potential violation of California Public Utility Commission law.”

Several days before Mirkarimi’s announcement, the Guardian received confirmation from City Attorney Dennis Herrera that his office is looking into the matter.

The mailer included a link to the Web site CommonSenseSF.com, launched by an entity called the “Coalition for Reliable and Affordable Electricity.” A call to Townsend, Raimundo, Besler & Usher, a Sacramento public-relations firm that has worked with PG&E in the past, revealed that this coalition is one of the firm’s clients, and that the person handling that client is Bob Pence. The proponent listed on the statewide ballot initiative is Robert Lee Pence — evidently the same person. The Guardian left a message for Pence inquiring who, besides PG&E, the coalition members are (the mailer claims there are 50,000), but he did not return the call. Multiple calls to PG&E were not returned either.

Meanwhile, the Guardian has received a handful of anecdotal reports that when clipboard-wielding signature gatherers were out on the streets circulating a petition in support of the PG&E-backed ballot initiative, people were fed some fishy stories about what the proposed constitutional amendment would actually do.

A voter who lives in Bakersfield contacted the Guardian to say she’d signed the petition because she was told that the ballot initiative would limit PG&E expansion — but she later did some research and found that PG&E was the primary force behind it, so she called the Registrar of Voters to have her name struck from the list.

Mark Toney of the Utility Reform Network told the Guardian that he’d also been misinformed. But as someone familiar with the issue, he knew better. “I ran across signature gatherers in Emeryville. They told me that if I signed the petition, I’d be supporting a two-thirds majority vote to raise PG&E rates,” Toney said. “I said, ‘Well that’s interesting. The language here doesn’t say PG&E at all.

John Srebalus of Pasadena wrote in an e-mail that he was also misled by a signature gatherer. After he signed a petition to legalize marijuana, he said the woman with the clipboard flipped a few pages and asked him to sign again, as if in duplicate. But there was a rubber band securing the top half of this second page, hiding the text. When he peeled it back, he found that it was actually PG&E’s ballot initiative, which he had already refused to sign once before.

According to a source familiar with the campaign who asked not to be named, the petition was a particularly hard sell for signature gatherers, many of whom stake their entire livelihoods on earning less than $2 per signature. According to this individual, the erratic sales pitches caught on like wildfire because without a compelling hook, it was nearly impossible to convince random passersby to support something that came off as convoluted and wonky. This person said PG&E became alarmed when it caught wind of all the distorted representations and tried to put a stop to them.

Campaign spokesperson Greg Larsen told the Guardian he hadn’t heard anything about that, but he did emphasize the importance of the signed document, as opposed to the signature gatherers’ pitch. “The hope is that you read what you’re signing,” he said. “That’s really what the issue is — it’s what’s on this piece of paper.” Larsen added that the campaign had submitted 1.1 million signatures, “far in excess of the number of required certified signatures” to have the initiative placed on the ballot.

The next budget battle

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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.

Police chief: SFPD dignitary security costs were a mystery even to him

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By Rebecca Bowe

San Francisco Police Chief George Gascon offered an explanation yesterday for why it took so long for the San Francisco Police Department to provide any figures whatsoever on how much it spends on security detail for elected officials: Apparently, no one really had any idea what the costs actually were.

“Quite frankly, when I first came here I asked multiple times, how much are we spending in dignitary protection? And I could not get the answer within my department,” Gascon told the Board of Supervisors yesterday.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi first began asking for this information back in July. “When we got the first cut of information approximately two weeks ago, I looked at it and I said, this information does not seem right,” Gascon recounted. “Go back and work on this.”

When his staff finally produced a figure of around $2 million for all dignitary security costs for the budget year ending in June 2009, Gascon says he immediately shared that figure with the media and members of the Board. This past weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story about the cost, which includes protection for the mayor, politicians visiting from outside San Francisco, and others.

“I don’t believe it is copasetic to allow a black ops budget to exist” within the SFPD, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi said at yesterday’s Board meeting, during a discussion about legislation he introduced to require elected officials to reimburse the city for the cost of bodyguards on the SFPD payroll when they’re out on the campaign trail.

Police showdown today

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By Tim Redmond

The Board of Supervisors vote today on Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s legislation requiring city officials to repay the taxpayers for the cost of police security while campaigning out of town is an early skirmish in next year’s budget battles.

The cops really, really don’t want this to pass, and they’re lobbying hard against it. They didn’t even want to release the annual cost of protecting the mayor and other dignitaries. Chief Gascon is treating this whole thing like the CIA’s black-ops budget — secret, untouchable, a matter of national security.

It’s silly: Yes, Mayor Newsom needs police protection; he’s a big-city mayor who supports same-sex marriage and there are all kinds of nuts out there. And San Francisco hosts politicians from all over the world, some of whom are controversial figures; they need security, too. But I don’t see how anyone’s safety is put at risk when the cops release the gross figures for the cost of that security.

And I don’t see how anyone could reasonably argue that when Newsom (or, say, District Attorney Kamala Harris) is out campaigning up and down the state for higher office, that campaign shouldn’t reimburse the city for police protection costs.

Part of what’s going on here, I think, is Gascon testing his political clout. The new chief has a lot of political capital right now, and he’s twisting arms to see if he can get some of the progressive supes to slide his way on this measure. If that happens, it could be an indication that the chief will be twisting the same arms to avoid any cuts to his budget.

Chances are that Newsom will veto the Mirkarimi bill anyway (at which point it may wind up on the ballot — and wouldn’t that be an interesting campaign?). But the breakdown of the vote today will be fascinating.

Coastal Commission denies enviros’ request to yank desalination plant permit

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By Rebecca Bowe

A coalition of environmental organizations argued yesterday that a permit issued to Poseidon Resources to build a massive desalination plant near San Diego should be revoked, because the company failed to provide complete information to California Coastal Commission staff.

At a CCC meeting held in the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Chambers in City Hall yesterday, commissioners listened as advocates from the Surfrider Foundation, San Diego Coastkeeper, and the Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation, who filed the request for permit revocation, argued that Poseidon purposely tried to mislead CCC staff by submitting incomplete and inaccurate information about technical aspects of its desalination facility.

The CCC granted Poseidon its permit in November of 2007. The 50 million gallon-per- day facility, which is under construction, has drawn sharp criticism statewide from labor and environment groups who argue that the expensive, highly energy intensive plant would contribute to higher greenhouse gas emissions and do nothing to encourage water-conservation efforts. Concerns have also been raised about the harm it could do to the marine ecosystem and the high price tag for tap water cycled first through a power-plant cooling system, and then through the desalination process.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger supports the construction of the facility as a reliable water source for arid Southern California, and his representatives were in attendance at yesterday’s meeting. Last month, the Metropolitan Water District agreed to subsidize costs for the privately owned and operated plant, and Poseidon will go before the state’s Debt Limit Allocation Committee (which consists of Schwarzenegger, the state controller, and the state treasurer) to request tax-exempt bond status in mid-January.

San Francisco Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who sits on the Coastal Commission, argued in favor of pulling the permit, saying it represented “a proper juncture for us to revisit the issue” and warned that the highly controversial project might be “rife with procedural and structural errors.”

Dufty loses the tenant vote

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By Tim Redmond

Sup. Bevan Dufty, the first candidate to formally enter the San Francisco mayor’s race, just took a big political hit. By voting against a bill that would have protected tenants from unjust evictions, he’s angered one of the city’s largest and most powerful voting blocs.

The bill, by Sup. John Avalos, was important to the tenant movement. It extends to renters in buildings constructed after 1979 the same protections that the occupants of older buildings enjoy. It’s particularly important now, when so many buildings are facing foreclosure; under city law, foreclosure isn’t a “just cause” for eviction, but some tenants are losing their homes after foreclosure actions anyway.

Dufty has never been a great tenant vote, but this one should have been easy. The Avalos bill doesn’t put any more housing under rent control, or limit rent hikes, or impose any taxes or fees. There’s no direct economic impact on any landlords.

I couldn’t reach Dufty for comment today, but if the Chronicle quoted him accurately, his explanation was pretty weak:

Dufty told The Chronicle he would have supported the legislation had it simply addressed foreclosure-driven evictions. He feared that as drafted, the proposed law “would have too many unintended consequences,” particularly when it comes to condominium owners who want to move back into units that have been rented out. The burden on owners who try to evict on that basis could prove too harsh when it comes to time and money, he said.

The problem with that arugment is that owner move-in has always been a just cause for eviction. The Avalos bill wouldn’t change that. You own a condo, you rent it out and you want to move back in, you can evict the tenant.

The real problem here is what landlords think of as “rent-control creep.” Once you start allowing eviction protections on newer buildings, they fear, the next step might be actual rent controls on those buildings. So they fought against the bill.

The landlords have money, and if they see Dufty as their ally, they may reward him with campaign contributions. But the progressive vote is going to be important in the next mayor’s race, and so far — unless Sup. Ross Mirkarimi or Public Defender Jeff Adachi jumps in the race — the progressives don’t have a clear candidate. And while there will be a lot of issues in the race, this will be a big one, and I think the vote will hurt Dufty.

Of course, that assumes there’s a more pro-tenant candidate — and that’s not clear at this point. The others who are widely mentioned as potential contenders are state Sen. Leland Yee, Assessor Phil Ting and City Attorney Dennis Herrera. Herrera has traditionally declined to comment on issues like this, in part because he’s the city’s chief legal officer and has to defend the legislation and also because city law bars him from endorsing candidates or taking stands on ballot measures. But he told me several weeks ago that if he announces for mayor, he will openly discuss any issues facing the city.

When I called him today, he made the same promise again — then told me that he hasn’t announced for mayor yet, and so is declining to comment on whether he supports the Avalos bill. Ting told me he wasn’t familiar enough with the bills details, although, like Dufty, he said he supports eviction protections for tenants in foreclosed buildings.

I’m still waiting to hear from Yee.

Pedaling forward

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Pedaling forward

steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY San Francisco’s top elected and appointed officials made the city a little greener — literally — Dec. 3. And they say the recent removal of restrictions on bicycle-related improvements will make San Francisco a lot greener over the long term.

A festive mood was in the air when officials and activists gathered at the intersection of Oak and Scott streets to paint the city’s first green bike box (marking a safe spot for cyclists to wait in front of cars at intersections) and celebrate the first bike lanes to be created in more than three years.

In the week since Superior Court Judge Peter Busch partially lifted an injunction that had banned all projects mentioned in the city’s Bicycle Plan — the court ruled that they needed to be studied with a full-blown environmental impact report, which the city completed earlier this year, although it has been challenged by another lawsuit set for trial in June 2010 — city crews worked at a blistering pace on bike improvements.

They created three new bike lanes (of the 10 Busch is allowing to move forward before the trial, holding up another 50 for now) and installed barriers between the bike and car lanes on Market Street near 10th Street. "So now we have the first separated bike lane in San Francisco," San Francisco Bicycle Coalition director Leah Shahum told the Guardian, happy over a safety improvement that encourages children and seniors to ride.

The crews also have been installing about five new bike racks and 20 shared traffic lane markings (known as "sharrows") each day. Mayor Gavin Newsom praised the rapid implementation and told the crowd, "You’re going to see more than you’ve seen in years be done in the next few months. The goal is to get from 6 percent of commutes in San Francisco up to 10 percent of all commutes by bicycle — and I think that is imminently achievable in the next few years."

Also on hand were Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, Bevan Dufty, and Sophie Maxwell, Department of Public Works head Ed Reiskin, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) board chair Tom Nolan, and SFMTA director Nat Ford, who declared the goal of making "San Francisco the preeminent city for bicycling in North America."

Mirkarimi, the only elected official to ride a bicycle to the event, told the crowd: "This is a delightful day…. We are all unified in the mission statement of making San Francisco bike-friendly."

Dufty, who chairs the Transportation Authority and pushed for the rapid implementation plan, said, "There’s a really great community here. First, my hat’s off to the Bicycle Coalition and all of their thousands of members who really keep the city honest and keep us moving forward."

Nolan also praised bike activists who pushing his agency to prioritize bike projects and prepare for the end of the injunction: "It was a very effective campaign. You did such a great job at making your case."

While anti-bike activist Rob Anderson, who sued the city along with attorney Mary Miles, regularly derides the "bike nuts" as a vocal minority pushing an unrealistic transportation option, the event showed almost universal support for bicycling at City Hall.

"I can say this is the best relationship we’ve had for years with the advocacy community, with the Bicycle Coalition," Newsom said. "We’ve begun to strike a nice balance where this is not about cars versus bikes. This is about cars and bikes and pedestrians cohabitating in a different mindset."

Bicycling in San Francisco has increased by 53 percent in the last three years, so Shahum said the plan’s projects and the growing legion of bicyclists will help the city in myriad ways in coming years.

"We know we can do this," she said. "We know the climate change goals this city has laid out, the public health goals, the livability goals that the city has laid out, will not be met without shifting more trips to bicycling, walking, and transit. And that’s why this day is so important."

Or as Maxwell said, "This is a great opportunity for San Francisco to finally take its place among world cities that recognize that cars are not the only mode of transportation."

Newsom talks about taxes, bikes, and SF’s future

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By Steven T. Jones
newsombox.jpg
Mayor Gavin Newsom, with Bike Coalition director Leah Shahum and Department of Public Works head Ed Reiskin, helped create new space for bikes yesterday.

As he helped paint San Francisco’s first green “bike box” and celebrate the creation of the first new bicycle lanes in more than three years, Mayor Gavin Newsom yesterday finally seemed to really reengage with the press and public for the first time since his failed gubernatorial campaign and the testy period that followed.

The occasion was right in Newsom’s sweet spot — urban greening and livability initiatives — and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition actually delayed this scheduled press conference for two days so the mayor could attend after returning from a trip to India. Also in attendance were Sups. Ross Mirkarimi (the only elected official who biked to the event), Bevan Dufty, and Sophie Maxwell, SFMTA director Nat Ford and SFMTA board president Tom Nolan, DPW head Ed Reiskin, and a variety of activists.

I’ll have more on the press conference and San Francisco’s quick pace for making bike improvements in next week’s Guardian, but for now I want to focus on Newsom’s extended conversation with journalists after the main event, which went almost 30 minutes and covered a variety of issues.

Newsom was still combative and petulant at times, and he continues to take a dismissive approach to those who say he must take a more active role in finding new revenue sources. But he took all questions and stayed engaged in the conversation until most of the journalists had peeled away.

And for those who remained, Newsom and Ford ended up announcing some significant news: Clear Channel Communication has failed to exercise its contractual right to create a bike-sharing program for San Francisco – a 50-bike proposal that the Guardian and activists had criticized as more symbolic than significant – and the city is now seeking a new vendor for a bike-sharing program that would include about 2,700 bikes.

Guarded secrets

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By Rebecca Bowe

mystery box.jpg
How much did the mayor’s security detail cost when he campaigned outside SF? SFPD isn’t telling.

When San Francisco Police Department Assistant Chief Jim Lynch spoke before the Rules Committee this morning, he mentioned that the Police Chief George Gascon was unable to attend because he was at the swearing-in ceremony of Los Angeles’ new police chief.

“Out of curiousity,” Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier asked Lynch, “How many officers went to L.A. with Chief Gascon?” She was referring to his security detail for an event that was clearly unrelated to San Francisco city business.

Lynch replied that he could not say. When pressed whether security had in fact been provided for him by SFPD, he gave the same response. Sorry. Can’t tell you.

It’s the same response that Sup. Ross Mirkarimi received for months when he tried in vain to get the dollar amount for Mayor Gavin Newsom’s security detail for campaign-related events outside city and state borders. According to the SFPD, divulging that information could compromise security tactics.

The discussion at this morning’s Rules Committee focused on legislation authored by Mirkarimi, co-sponsored by Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, and Chris Daly, which would require elected officials to reimburse the city for the cost of “dignitary security” (think bodyguards) when that protection is provided on the campaign trail outside San Francisco.

“It’s not about one elected official,” Mirkarimi noted, while acknowledging that Newsom’s frequent travel had sparked interest in the issue. “It’s about reviewing standard operating procedure,” he said, and creating a system for cost recovery when taxpayer dollars are used to send SFPD forces off to campaign-related events. With the General Fund already in rough shape, Mirkarimi added, “fiscal vigilance is demanded.”

Holiday blues

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Holiday blues

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Ethea Farahkhan lost her city job Nov. 29, when a round of city layoffs impacting front-line workers took effect.
Farahkhan, a woman of color who was an administrative assistant at San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth and their Families, said she would have a job if it weren’t for Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision not to spend money approved by the Board of Supervisors to save people from job losses during the holiday season.

The layoffs rippled through city government as DPH employees with seniority exercised “bumping rights” to replace employees like Farahkhan, who was hired three years ago.

“No one’s in a festive mood. We’re concentrating on making mortgages and buying food to put on our table,” Farahkhan told us when we caught up with her Thanksgiving eve. “I know San Francisco is not exempt from the economic crisis,” she added, “but I feel like our mayor is out of touch. He’s never been in this position.”

If DPH layoff had been covered by existing funds and incoming grant money, as directed by a veto-proof, 8-3 vote of the Board of Supervisors on Nov. 24, she said, “I would definitely have a job to go to.” Instead, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced after the board vote that he was refusing to spend the reallocated funding to halt the 478 DPH layoffs and reassignments.

Farahkhan’s union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021, spent months trying to save these jobs, finally winning over the final supervisor needed to overcome a veto, Sup. Sophie Maxwell, shortly before the vote. Then, for the second time in as many months, the head of the executive branch announced that he would simply ignore the legislative branch.

The impasse doesn’t bode well for a city that’s about to wrestle with a record midyear budget deficit again.
In October, Newsom declared that he would ignore the board’s passage of legislation — by the same 8-3 vote that could override a mayoral veto — to prevent deportation of undocumented youth in custody until they are convicted. It was the first of two actions that seemed to answer the question of whether the mayor is willing to work with the supervisors on the toughest problems facing the city.

That was the question raised last summer when the board discussed a budget analyst’s report that Newsom had either cut or refused to spend about $15.6 million of the $37.5 million that supervisors approved in budget add-backs for the 2008-09 fiscal year. With the mayor cutting 42 percent of program funding that the board fought to restore, trust was already eroding.

During budget deliberation, some progressive supervisors unsuccessfully tried to place hundreds of millions of dollars on reserve, which would give the board some leverage to force Newsom to honor his pledge to work with supervisors on midyear budget cuts, but the board ultimately decided not to do so.

The mayor’s latest rejection came after a long, embittered battle with the union. SEIU members resorted to drastic measures — staging protests in traffic intersections, distributing flyers outside Newsom’s PlumpJack restaurants, barging into his office unannounced singing civil-rights era ballads — to pressure the mayor. But neither those media stunts, nor compromise solutions developed by Sups. John Avalos, Bevan Dufty, and Board President David Chiu, could persuade Newsom to go along with revisiting the DPH cuts.

“Mayor Newsom cannot spend funds the city does not have,” Newsom’s press secretary, Joe Arellano, told the Guardian when asked for an explanation. “The board action didn’t provide any new money — it takes dollars already being used to pay other employees’ salaries.”

The money allocated by the board was already destined for salaries and benefits of other DPH employees, but Sups. Avalos, Chris Daly, and Ross Mirkarimi argued that new federal dollars en route to the city via state and federal channels would bring the department budget back into balance. An estimated $34 million in federal funding is expected to flow into city coffers for health services by mid-2010, but Arellano indicated that the mayor intends to use that money to help balance next year’s deficit.

As the city considers midyear slashes to cope with next year’s monstrous $522 million shortfall, the spirit of cooperation that Newsom publicly emphasized at the outset of last year’s budget cycle now seems dead. Chiu told the Guardian that the only way the board was able to achieve a palatable budget back in July was through controversial partnership with the Mayor’s Office. But when supervisors approached Newsom with alternative solutions for restoring the DPH layoffs, “the mayor was not interested in exploring these different options,” Chiu explained.

Now, Chiu said he’s worried by the implications of the mayor’s defiant approach to the board. “We have two branches of government — legislative and executive. Eleven of us are required to set laws for the city, and the mayor is supposed to carry it out. I hope and believe that the mayor would respect the roles of our respective branches,” Chiu said, carefully choosing his words when asked for his perspective on this trend. “I don’t know how we are going to get through next year if we can’t … not just agree to disagree, but figure out where we agree.”

Chiu’s persistent search for common ground stands in contrast to Daly’s more adversarial approach. In July, just before the board signed off on the 2009-10 budget, Daly floated a proposal to place $300 million on reserve — which would require additional board action to spend, thereby giving supervisors some leverage — but it failed to pass.

Daly also proposed a placing a charter amendment on the ballot that would have required the mayor to fund certain board-approved programs that supervisors deemed especially important. But that failed too when only Sups. Mirkarimi, David Campos and Eric Mar supported it. In a recent conversation with the Guardian, Daly indicated that this possibility could be revived. “It doesn’t matter how many supervisors it takes” to pass legislation, Daly said. “[The mayor] wants to govern unilaterally, and that’s not okay.”

As for the mayor’s latest announcement that he wouldn’t spend the money to restore DPH salaries, Daly said it’s not over yet. “There will be meetings. There will be discussions,” he said. “We’re going to move on this.”

At the same time, midyear cuts are speeding through the pipeline. By Dec. 4, city department heads will have to figure out how to slash their current budgets by 4 percent. By Feb. 20, Newsom is asking for plans to cut an additional 20 percent, plus an extra 10 percent in contingency funding in order to address next year’s gaping deficit.

Those “adjustments,” as they’re called in bureaucratic jargon, promise to be painful. As the next city budget squabble comes into focus on the horizon, the question of revenue measures is still out there and isn’t helped by the current acrimony at City Hall.

Progressive supervisors are also moving to tackle spending areas they deem wasteful, such as a surge in high-dollar management salaries or some of the mayor’s pet projects. Newsom is angling for opening the condo conversion floodgates by letting people buy their way out of the lottery system — a one-time moneymaker that progressives find repugnant because it depletes rental-housing stock.

As the city grows more financially anemic, accusations of mismanagement abound. After the board’s vote on DPH cuts, Newsom was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle saying that progressive supervisors are in a “reality-free zone.”

But Farahkhan and other SEIU employees who are facing layoffs during the holidays believe Newsom is the one who is living on a different planet. “He’s at the top of the pay scale,” Farahkhan said, “and out of touch with everyday working people.”

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MUNI CUTS BACK SERVICE

Service reductions that will affect about half of all Muni routes start Dec. 5, the result of San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s early summer deal to close a $129 million budget deficit for the current fiscal year. And that’s just the beginning of the bad news.
Less than halfway through this budget cycle, SFMTA is already looking at an additional $45 million deficit, partly because of the agency’s failure to follow through on plans to increase parking revenue, such as the stalled proposal to extend parking meter hours (see “We want free parking!” Oct. 28).
So additional layoffs and Muni service reductions or even another fare hike are possible, even though Muni fares have already doubled to $2 since Gavin Newsom became mayor. SFMTA officials say midyear budget reduction decisions will be made by the SFMTA Board of Directors over the next two months.
But for now, to find out how this week’s Muni service reductions will affect you, visit www.sfmta.com. (Steven T. Jones)

SF moves quickly on bike improvements

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By Steven T. Jones
sfbg bike.jpg
The latest bike lane is on Mississippi Street in front of the Guardian Building.

In the week since a judge freed San Francisco to finally do bicycle improvements, city crews have already installed three new bike lanes and dozens of bike racks and shared lanes markings, known as sharrows or bike boxes.

“This is huge. We’re really pleased with the pace the city is moving on. We’re thrilled to see so much on the streets already,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition director Leah Shahum told us.

The latest lane, still being striped as I write this, is on Mississippi Street, right in front of the Guardian building. Yesterday, crews converted one of two turn lanes at 9th and Howard streets into a bike lane. And on Monday, they created a bike lane on Scott Street through The Wiggle, a route popular with bicyclists.

Tomorrow at 1 p.m., SFBC will hold a press conference at Scott and Oak streets, where city crews are creating one of the new bike boxes (intersection spots where cyclists can safely wait for the light to change) going up around the city. Attendees will include Mayor Gavin Newsom, Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Bevan Dufty, and SFMTA chief Nat Ford.

“The SFMTA is poised to make San Francisco the pre-eminent city for bicycling in North America,” Ford said in a press release announcing the partial lifting of the three-year-old injunction against new bike projects. “Today’s action by the Superior Court will foster the responsible promotion of bicycling envisioned in the Charter-mandated Transit First policy.”

Gavin’s long honeymoon is way over

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Gavin Newsom’s long, long political honeymoon is crashing — and his recent secret escape to Hawaii hasn’t helped him a bit. Even the Chron is now getting a little snippy with the mayor, who showed up back at work today but wouldn’t talk to the press.

Heather Knight goes so far as to bring up the issue Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has been pushing for months:

Ballard wouldn’t say whether the SFPD’s mayoral security detail accompanied the Newsoms to Hawaii. The cost of guarding the mayor and his family has been a dispute at City Hall recently because the mayor’s office and police department won’t say how much taxpayer money is used on it.

But we’ve got to say, if the choice is going to gubernatorial fundraisers or lounging on the beach in Hawaii, we bet his security staff was pleased with the latter.

Think about that sort of press: The public gets the image of the mayor ducking comment, ducking his responsibilities, ducking the whole damn city — while his bodyguards lounge on the beach on the taxpayer dime.

It probably didn’t go down that way, but still: Lookin’ bad, Gav.

SF seeks green power alternatives to PG&E

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By Steven T. Jones and Rebecca Bowe

With a unanimous vote by the Board of Supervisors today, San Francisco took a big step into the clean energy business, approving the issuance of a Request for Proposals for projects that will be part of the Clean Power SF program that will compete for customers with Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

The city’s version of the so-called Community Choice Aggregation program has involved “seven years of preparing San Francisco to get into the green energy business,” said Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who has shepherded the program as chair of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo).

While PG&E has relentlessly attacked CCA efforts, both locally and through a statewide initiative campaign for would require a two-thirds popular vote for counties to create them, the 11-0 vote here seems to indicate Clean Power SF isn’t as controversial as PG&E would like people to believe.

“This step is a very important step and it’s been an eye-opening experience to serve on LAFCo,” Sup. Bevan Dufty, referring to opposition from PG&E and some of its business community allies and adding, “When the public understands the issues, they like competition and a more sustainable city.”

PG&E’s spooky stories headed to your mailbox

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0

By Rebecca Bowe and Rachel Sadon

At a Halloween-themed press conference on the steps of City Hall this afternoon, Supervisors Bevan Dufty and Ross Mirkarimi warned that PG&E plans to disseminate misleading information about the city’s Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) program.

The attack comes on the heels of the Board of Supervisor’s approval of a request for proposals for Clean Power SF, San Francisco’s own fledgling CCA, which seeks to provide competitively priced and significantly greener energy than PG&E. The CCA would challenge PG&E’s monopoly in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the utility is expected to fight it tooth and nail.

Sup. Dufty got a heads up from a PG&E employee this morning that mailers criticizing the program would be sent out tomorrow. Recalling last year’s multimillion dollar campaign against Prop H, an initiative for public power, Dufty emphasized that the city does not nearly have the funds to match a misinformation campaign.

Tom Ammiano denounced PG&E and their tactics as “avaricious, criminal, morally corrupt” and “a throwback to robber barons.”

Though the content of the mailers is unknown, it has already created a stir around City Hall and throughout the community that is advocating for community choice. At the press conference, which was scheduled with very little advance notice, Dufty and Mirkarimi were joined by Sup. David Campos, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission director Ed Harrington, state senator Mark Leno, and Sierra Club representatives Michael Borenstein and John Rizzo.

Mirkarimi, chair of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo), insisted that “San Francisco is steadfast in its commitment to Community Choice Aggregation,” and stressed that “PG&E continues to mock our commitment to green energy and will do everything in their power to circumvent the process.”

The case against Prop. D

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The case against Prop. D

OPINION Proposition D is a classic developer’s scam. It was written by a mid-Market Street property owner who is spending more than $250,000 million to push hollow propaganda pieces preaching the wonders of his bill. When you strip away the glossy photos and misleading language, Prop. D is an attempt by private real estate owners to put up huge, flashing billboards and keep virtually all the money for themselves.

There is all kinds of misleading information in this thing. Individual signs are limited to 500 square feet — but the legal text encourages property owners to cluster as many signs as they want to display a single, massive, synchronized, electricity-sucking advertisement. What really pisses us off about the campaign for Prop. D is how the backers market it as "for the kids." (Because what kind of monster would vote against helping the kids, right?)

But that’s all a bunch of non-binding fakery. The 20 percent to 40 percent of advertising revenue that doesn’t go straight into the property owners’ pockets would go to the Central Market Community Benefits District — a self-selecting, self-reguutf8g group made up of the very landlords who own the buildings on Market Street. Then the CBD would get to decide how to spend the money with no public input or regulation. There’s no definition of what the "youth programs" would be. The backers also plan on spending money on a new ticket booth and on their own staff and expenses.

Back in 2002, 77 percent of San Franciscans voted to ban new advertising signs anywhere in the city. The Planning Department has issued a brutal analysis of Prop. D, calling it an unprecedented power grab that would strip regulatory oversight of the billboards from the (public) Planning Department and hand it over to the private CBD.

The mid-Market area needs help, for sure. But Prop. D is not the way to do it. If you really want to clean up Market Street, it’s gonna require some actual elbow grease in the neighborhood, some community input, a comprehensive revitalization plan, and real solutions for homelessness. Prop. D has zilch. If developers are serious about helping the underserved youth of the Tenderloin, why is there no binding language requiring a mandatory minimum of money for community benefits? Since when have digital billboards ever improved the quality of life of anyone — let alone cured poverty or homelessness?

We’re pretty bummed at the miserable press coverage of this totally sneaky proposition. We’re joining with a diverse group of community leaders and organizations, including state Sen. Mark Leno, Assembly Member Tom Ammiano, Sups. John Avalos and Ross Mirkarimi, School Board Vice President Jane Kim, Community College Trustee Steve Ngo, SoMa Community Action Network, the Coalition on Homelessness, the Alliance for a Better District 6, Senior Action Network, League of Conservation Voters, Livable City, and others in saying a big "hell no" to Prop. D. If Prop. D somehow does pass, we plan on working to put something on the 2010 ballot that would put real community input and oversight into this clusterfuck.

Jeremy Pollock and Ali Uscilka are on the steering committee of the SF League of Pissed Off Voters, which empowers young people to become politically engaged and educated on the issues. Since 2003 we’ve been organizing broad-based coalitions to create permanent, progressive, grassroots change. Read our entire voter guide at www.theballot.org.

Editor’s Notes

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Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

The new police chief, who started out with a lot of promise, has been sending some very bad signals the past week.

Chief George Gascón told us earlier this month that he was sympathetic to the efforts of Sup. David Campos to protect immigrant kids from deportation. He also said he agreed that the cops and probation officers shouldn’t be deciding when to call in the federal immigration authorities. Yet now that the mayor said he will defy the Campos legislation (see page 11), Gascón told the San Francisco Chronicle he’s siding with Newsom. That’s a pretty cosmic wimp-out — and it only took a few days.

Then there’s the shake-up of top staff — which looks to me like a total cave-in to the Police Officers Association. The POA types (who have been associated with a lot of bad stuff over the years) got tough-guy cop Greg Corrales assigned back as captain of Mission Station (where he got in trouble during the Fajitagate scandal, but ultimately faced no discipline. They got Greg Suhr, who had been demoted on a pretty bogus technicality, a new career shot as captain of the Bayview station.

Paul Chignell, one of the rare almost-liberals in the department who was doing a good job at Taraval Station, has been exiled to the night shift. Al Casciato, who supported community policing, has been bounced out as captain of Northern Station in the Western Addition. "This completely belies Gascón’s promises about community policing," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told me. "These unannounced and unplanned rotations (of district captains) undermine the whole community-policing idea."

And perhaps most alarming, the chief wants to bring back the old SFPD intelligence unit — once again turning local cops into spies.

The intelligence squad was a nightmare. Back in the early 1990s, an intel cop was spying on Arab American and Palestinian groups and passing along the data to the private Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Cops were spying on peace activists and protesters. They even had a file on me. When all that started to come out, the city properly shut the spy shop down.

Now Gascón wants to bring it back, citing fears about terrorism. As if there aren’t enough government agencies spying on people already. And SFPD has enough trouble solving murders and keeping its own house in order — opening a spy agency is a really, really bad idea.

Gascón is also refusing to tell Mirkarimi and the other supervisors how much taxpayer money gets spent sending officers around with the mayor as he campaigns up and down the state. I could argue that the Newsom for Governor campaign ought to reimburse the city for those expenses — but Gascón won’t even produce a gross figure. His claim: Telling the taxpayers how much the mayor’s security detail costs threaten Newsom’s security.

I don’t buy it. We’re not asking for protection plans, schedules, deployments, or anything else — just a bottom-line cash number. SFPD doesn’t need spies or a black budget. If Gascón thinks that style is going to work here, he’s going to run into trouble, quick.

Mystery of the missing de la Plaza coroner’s report

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Text by Sarah Phelan

hugues11acb.jpg
Rumors mount that a third review of Hugues de la Plaza’s death exists, this time concluding it was a homicide. If true, these rumors also means his killer could still be walking the streets of San Francisco, knife at hand.

By most accounts, there exists a third but as yet undisclosed coroner’s report on the 2007 stabbing death of Hugues de la Plaza, a San Francisco resident with French and American dual nationality. Only this report allegedly concludes that de La Plaza’s death was a homicide, a finding that puts this review on the same page as a report that the French authorities released last year, and at odds with the findings of the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office, which classified it as “undetermined” cause.

According to de la Plaza’s ex-girlfriend Melissa Nix, the SFPD and Medical Examiner Venus Azar, are sitting on this third review which was carried out, over 18 months ago, in Feb. 2008 by Marin County Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Ferenc (who used to work with the SF Medical Examiner’s office) at the request of SFPD Deputy Chief of Investigations David Shinn (who is headed to SFO thanks to SFPD Chief George Gascon’s command staff shuffle).

Nix claims Ferenc completed his report pro bono in March 2008, gave it to both Shinn and Azar, then made repeated calls to Azar, but allegedly never heard back.

And the Chronicle cites Bill Fazio, the attorney for Hugues’ parents, saying that Ferenc’s report concludes that de la Plaza’s death was a murder.

But Fazio told us today that he has not seen the report, but simply heard about it from Ferenc, a few weeks ago.

“I need to get a copy,” said Fazio, adding that he hopes to have a three-way video conference between Azar, the French authorities and Ferenc, in the near future, third review in hand.

“Ferenc concludes without doubt that this was a homicide and doesn’t understand how anyone could think otherwise,” Fazio asserted.

While on the phone, Fazio pointed out that while the SFPD made a big deal of the fact that de la Plaza never called 911, as they sought to explain the SF Medical Examiner’s “undetermined cause of death” ruling, they did not make an equally big deal of the fact that de la Plaza was bleeding profusely and had a collapsed left lung, thanks to his knife wounds,.

But these two factors would have made it difficult for de la Plaza to breathe and speak, let alone call 911, before his death, Fazio said.

Noting that SFPD was also never able to explain why there was no knife in the apartment, if de la Plaza stabbed himself, then locked himself into his apartment to die, as was suggested, Fazio said, “I don’t understand why they don’t treat it as a homicide.”

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi also believes the Ferenc report exists and he wants to see it released as soon as possible.

“There are a number of independent testimonies that speak to its existence,” Mirkarimi said. “What’s unconscionable is if SFPD has been sitting on it all this time and not disclosing its existence. I think it’s stunning how these events have unfolded and been treated since day one. I am now wondering if there is an effort to cover up the dysfunctionality of how this case was treated.”

“As I have tried to stay on top of all the violent crimes in my district, this one never added up,” Mirkarimi continued. “It needs to be dealt with in an honest and professional way.”

Mirkarimi also noted that the unresolved status of the de la Plaza death speaks to a larger worry: the role of unresolved homicides in the SFPD.

To date, no one at SFPD has given up the alleged Ferenc report, or made its contents public. But the SFPD released preliminary findings from a report by the LAPD—carried out at the request of newly sworn-in SFPD chief and former LAPD member George Gascón– earlier this year, at which time SFPD claimed the LAPD report was leaning towards calling it a suicide.

But as Fazio notes, the LAPD report itself has not been made available nor has LAPD commented on it.

And as Fazio observes, at the very least, the release of the Ferenc report would constitute a tiebreaker, in a world where the French say that de la Plaza was murdered, the SFPD can’t say, and LAPD calls it a suicide.

And it would also offer de la Plaza’s family, who don’t believe he killed himself, some long-sought solace. Assuming the Ferenc report exists. On the other hand, if it exists and its findings prove true, then this means that Hugues de la Plaza’s killer may still be on the loose. Stay tuned.

Mayor to ignore San Francisco’s wishes

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Text and images by Sarah Phelan

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Sups. David Campos, Ross Mirkarimi and Bevan Dufty shortly after they joined Board President David Chiu and Sups. John Avalos, Eric Mar, Sophie Maxwell and Chris Daly in amending the city’s sanctuary policy. Dufty has said that Mayor Newsom threatened not to endorse Dufty’s bid for mayor, if he supported the amendment.

Yesterday’s celebration of the Board’s veto-proof amendment of the sanctuary ordinance felt similar to the joy that surrounded the city’s decision to start marrying same-sex couples. Only this time, instead of leading the civil rights charge, Mayor Gavin Newsom appears to be opposing it, citing fears that the city could be sued.

Following the supervisors’ vote, supporters of the Campos amendment poured out of the Board Chambers, chanting “Yes we can,” in Spanish and English, and into the second-floor rotunda, joined by Sup. David Campos.

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Campos and immigration attorney Francisco Ugarte celebrate the Board’s historic Oct. 20 vote.

But even as Campos talked to the crowd about the importance of fighting for civil rights and against the slippery slope of a two-tiered system of justice, mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard appeared to be belittling the work of Campos and numerous civil and immigration rights experts, while vowing to ignore the Board’s amendment.

“The Campos bill isn’t worth the paper it’s written on—it’s unenforceable and he knows that,” Ballard told the Chron.
‘We are not going to put our law enforcement officers in legal jeopardy just because the Board of Supervisors wants to make a statement.”

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Ana Perez the director of CARECEN SF, shares her thoughts on the Board’s vote with the media.

But can Newsom selectively ignore laws that have been passed by a veto-proof majority of the Board, and have been vetted as being legally tenable by the City Attorney?

“I don’t know,” Campos told the Guardian. ” I’m still trying to figure out whether the mayor can do that. We’re going into uncharted legal territory.”

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A crowd of supporters, including civil rights experts, immigration attorneys and community leaders, gathered in the rotunda to celebrate, even as the Mayor’s Office announced it intends to ignore the Board’s sanctuary amendment.

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