GREEN CITY At long last, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission appears to be moving forward with plans to address long overdue environmental justice issues (“It Flows Downhill,” 08/08/06) that are directly related to its sewage treatment plant in the city’s southeast sector.
At a May 27 SFPUC meeting, SFPUC staff recommended that the agency build a new digester facility in the southeast part of town and divert 12 percent of its sewage flow to the west side’s Oceanside plant, (which, incidentally, a current signature-gathering campaign hopes voters in November will rename the George W. Bush Sewage Treatment Plant).
For decades residents of Bayview–Hunters Point have endured foul smells, thanks to the close proximity to their homes of the Southeast treatment plant. The site treats 76 percent of the city’s sewage in facilities that are almost entirely outdoors. By contrast, facilities at the Oceanside plant, in a wealthier side of town, are mostly indoors and/or underground.
It’s an unequal division that has long had southeast residents claiming environmental racism. To make matters worse, the Southeast plant contains nine pancake-shaped digesters that could experience problems in an earthquake, with worrisome corrosion on the undersides of the digesters’ covers.
Cost estimates for a new digester facility range from $700 million to $1.3 billion. This variation depends on the location choice for the new digesters: if the agency builds new digesters on the south side of its existing Southeast plant, the agency is looking at the cheaper end of the scale.
But if the SFPUC follows another option to build a new facility on the back lot of Pier 94, a Port of San Francisco property, it would remove the plant from a residential neighborhood but be left facing a near doubling of the cost.
Replacing the digesters was a pet cause of former SFPUC General Manager Susan Leal, and continues to be a priority for District 10 supervisor Sophie Maxwell, so it’s likely to remain a key focus for former City Controller Ed Harrington, who took over as general manager of the agency after Mayor Gavin Newsom ousted Leal.
"You’ll see immediate work on the digesters," Harrington assured the commissioners. "The PUC is suggesting doing on an environmental impact report on both sites."
That report likely won’t be complete until 2010, when the agency leaders will have to choose an option. PUC project manager Jon Loiacono seems to be keenly aware of the thorny issues at play and told the commission that "staff would like to work with an advisory group and hire a consultant sensitive to community issues to find the best solution."
"It would almost certainly be less expensive to rebuild on the current site, but we don’t want anyone to make the digester decision based on cost," PUC spokesperson Tony Winniker told the Guardian.
"We really want it to be a public health and safety decision," PUC Citizens Advisory Committee chair Alex Lantsberg told the Guardian.
The digester replacement cost represents a significant chunk of the total estimated price tag of the PUC’s proposed sewer system master plan, which ranges from $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion. PUC staff is also outlining plans to send some of the waste westward in what the PUC currently calls "the Upper Alemany diversion."
The plan involves building a tunnel near Cayuga Creek, where runoff water tends to back up, and carrying it to the Oceanside plant. So, is this the return of the dreaded cross-town tunnel, an idea that had irate Bernal Heights residents waving plungers at City Hall three decades ago? PUC staff claim it is not.
"It’s a different concept, but similar," Loiacono said of the current plan.
"This reduces how much waste is treated in the Bayview and shifts it to a plant where there is excess capacity," Winniker explained, further noting that while the old cross-town tunnel would have run under Bernal Heights, this diversion will use city rights of way.
The project would improve drainage for the Cayuga and divert about 10 million gallons of sewage per day from the Southeast plant to the Oceanside plant, PUC spokesperson Tyron Jue told us. The alignment hasn’t been chosen yet, but Jue said, "we’re considering different routes, like Brotherhood Way or Ocean Avenue."
Whatever path the SFPUC pursues, the project won’t be cheap — economically or politically.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera made San Francisco the first government entity in the nation to accuse two major players in the pharmaceutical drug industry of conspiring to illegally manipulate the price of prescription drugs when he filed a lawsuit May 20. Connecticut followed Herrera’s lead days later, and filed an almost identical suit making the same charges.
The cases could have far-reaching implications. If Raymond Hartman, an economist and visiting professor at Boalt Hall School of Law who testified in a related case filed by a group of East Coast labor unions two years ago is correct, then consumers, insurers, and Medicaid administrators nationwide have overpaid for prescription drugs by billions of dollars as a result of the price manipulation scheme (see “Big Pharma’s Shadow,” 12/20/06).
To explain the highly complex litigation, consider how goods are usually priced. Take the 99¢, three-ounce bags of chips that are reliably available at the corner store near your house. Cool Ranch Doritos. Chili Cheese Fritos. Sour Cream and Onion Ruffles. It wouldn’t be a true bodega if there wasn’t a rack of them situated near the front door or register.
For as long as anyone can remember, it seems, they’ve cost just 99¢, regardless of the local cost of living, from Richmond, Va. to San Francisco. That’s because the suggested retail price of 99¢ is printed ubiquitously by the manufacturer on the packaging.
So you’d notice if a sticker suddenly appeared, lazily affixed to your bag of Sun Chips, stating a new price: $1.99. The manufacturer didn’t place it there because behind the sticker you can still see the old printed price. And the counter clerk didn’t place it there, because he knows the true suggested retail price is still just 99¢ and the laws of supply and demand never called for a price increase.
Instead, a local company that buys chips from the manufacturer and distributes them to the bodega in your neighborhood put it there. The bodega owner didn’t complain because now it’s possible for him to earn an extra dollar for each bag. In fact, as a result of the new sticker, he’s more likely to take his business back to that particular distribution company over a competitor since that company is willing to artificially inflate the retail cost of a bag of chips on his behalf simply by putting a new price tag on the bag.
Now imagine that the product isn’t a cheap bag of chips but billions of dollars worth of pain-reducing or life-saving pharmaceuticals. And the distributor isn’t a local guy who drives a delivery truck full of boxes of chips but a multinational corporation, headquartered in San Francisco, that’s ranked 18th on the Fortune 500 list, with $93.6 billion in annual revenue and a CEO, John Hammergren, who received compensation in 2007 worth more than $22 million after presiding over the company’s record profits that year.
Imagine, too, that the distributor is powerful enough to slap new price stickers on cartons of drugs around the country, not just at your corner bodega, so you can’t simply elect to shop elsewhere to protest the new prices. Neither can you just stop consuming needed medicines the way you can snack chips.
Herrera’s federal civil suit probably has escaped media attention due to its esoteric nature (not to mention a potential conflict of interest at the San Francisco Chronicle, but we’ll get to that in a minute). It charges that McKesson Corp., along with a tiny drug data publisher based in San Bruno called First DataBank, conspired in an "elaborate scheme" to unfairly mark up the price on more than 400 name-brand prescription drugs. The conspiracy allegedly resulted in the San Francisco Health Plan being forced to make thousands or even millions of dollars in excess payments to cover the cost of such medications.
The SF Health Plan is not the same as Healthy San Francisco, the city’s historic 2006 bid to grant universal health care to the 82,000 adults here who live without insurance. The SF Health Plan extends mental, medical, and dental health coverage to about 50,000 people, including approximately 28,000 children in the city, and offers in-home support workers to the disabled and elderly. The plan is funded through a combination of federal and state dollars known in California as Medi-Cal and elsewhere as Medicaid.
The programs help low-income residents get health care, but its public subsidies are being endangered by a massive state budget deficit. So making sure the SF Health Plan is paying the appropriate price for prescription drugs, a $200 billion industry in the United States, is more important than ever.
McKesson and First DataBank, the lawsuit alleges, placed new stickers on drug packages so that everyone — from private insurers to Medi-Cal to consumers without insurance who simply walk up to a pharmacy window and cover their drug treatments with cash — paid far more than they should have, based on an industry calculation that’s similar to the suggested retail price printed on our analogy of a bag of chips. Herrera says he took on the suit because San Francisco is not alone in overpaying for pharmaceuticals and he saw a chance to force greater reforms in the system.
"We make our decisions based on the facts and the law, and we do our best to protect consumers, taxpayers, and businesses alike," Herrera told the Guardian. "This impacts a lot of things. It’s about protecting consumers from having high drug costs passed on to them. It’s about protecting taxpayer dollars since this is the San Francisco Health Plan, and it’s something that emanates out of a city program. But it’s also about protecting businesses, because a lot of businesses and health plans are the ones footing the bill for increased drug costs."
First DataBank is not listed as a defendant in Herrera’s suit but is described as "an unnamed co-conspirator." The company is a little-known subsidiary of the private, New York–based media conglomerate Hearst Corp., which owns dozens of major publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Esquire, and The Oprah Magazine. Spokespersons for McKesson and First DataBank refused to comment for this story.
As far as revenue is concerned, First DataBank is a bit player in the world of pharmaceuticals. Court records in a related 2006 suit describe its annual pretax income as just $19 million, barely enough to cover the McKesson CEO’s compensation last year.
But the company is nonetheless important to people who rely on prescription drugs. It’s one of the few major companies in the United States that maintains a sophisticated electronic database of information on tens of thousands of prescription drugs. Plus, First DataBank possesses a virtual monopoly on the market because the company merged with its only real competitor, Medi-Span, in 1998. Its database includes numbers, for instance, on what a drug manufacturer like Aventis might charge distributor McKesson for the allergy medicine Allegra, a figure known as the "wholesale acquisition cost."
Because it’s almost impossible to track every transaction between McKesson and retail chain pharmacies that McKesson distributes bulk drugs to, like Rite Aid and CVS Caremark McKesson, it’s First DataBank’s job to survey the distributors and come up with an "average wholesale price."
After you obtain a bottle of Allegra with a co-pay to take care of your stuffy nose, your insurance provider, say, Blue Cross or Kaiser Permanente or the SF Health Plan, refers to First DataBank’s massive catalog of drugs — for which they’ve paid a hefty subscription fee — to make sure the price they’re paying for your allergy medicine is the one properly set by the market.
First DataBank claimed for years that it was surveying multiple drug wholesalers like McKesson to come up with its average published prices and that it was increasing the number of surveys it conducted. But there aren’t that many wholesalers to actually survey because so many of them have merged with one another in recent years. Also, two out of the nation’s three top wholesalers apparently declined to participate in the surveys as a matter of policy.
Troy Kirkpatrick, a spokesperson for Cardinal Health, one of McKesson’s few competitors, said his company doesn’t give out proprietary information to anyone, let alone First DataBank.
"We have a long-standing policy of not providing confidential pricing information to external sources," Kirkpatrick said. "So if we get asked to share that type of information, we decline."
By 2001 it appeared that First Databank wasn’t really surveying several wholesalers or even the two major companies that compete directly with McKesson, according to court records. First DataBank allegedly conspired with McKesson to establish an artificial baseline markup on hundreds of drugs that didn’t accurately represent their true suggested retail price
.
But if the bodega, or in this case, the retail pharmacy, is benefiting from the new stickers, then what’s in it for McKesson?
Herrera’s suit contends that if pharmacies like CVS and Rite Aid saw McKesson pressing the scales for them, they’d return to McKesson with their business instead of its two other major American wholesale competitors, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen.
The three companies aggressively compete with one another for business just like they’re supposed to in good ol’ free-market America. But now it appears that McKesson has found a way to game the system and edge ahead of its two rivals. Indeed, McKesson is narrowly beating them in total revenue according to the Fortune 500 list.
Profit margins from drugstore chains were sagging at the time the alleged scheme between McKesson and First DataBank took off, and chain pharmacies had been pressing manufacturers to help them earn higher profit margins. According to the lawsuit, distributor McKesson came to the rescue.
So the final question, then, is whether the drug stores were enriched by all this.
Longs Drugs last year made more than $5 billion in revenue. About 20 percent of that, or $1 billion, came from the government-subsidized health care programs Medicare and Medicaid, according to company records.
In its most recent annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Longs admits that if insurers began using a different benchmark than the prices published by First DataBank, such as a pricing guide that more accurately reflected market prices, there could be a "material adverse effect on our financial performance."
EDITORIAL If you think the June ballot was busy, wait until November. San Francisco will be electing six district supervisors. The mayor and organized labor are going to be pushing the mother of all bond acts, roughly $1 billion to rebuild San Francisco General Hospital. There’s likely to be a public power charter amendment mandating that the city mount a real effort to take over the electric grid. There will probably be a major affordable-housing initiative that includes a set-aside for low-income housing and perhaps some affordable-housing bond money. It’s shaping up as an election that will change the city’s direction for years to come — but there’s still a crucial piece missing.
There’s no money.
Public power will, of course, generate vast amounts of new revenue, but not immediately: the process of setting up the system and fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in court could drag out for several years. That, of course, is all the more reason to get started — if the city had done this years ago, we wouldn’t have a budget crisis today.
But in the meantime, right now, San Francisco needs cash — and there needs to be a November ballot measure that brings in new revenue to pay for more affordable housing and to save the services Mayor Gavin Newsom is cutting.
It’s tough to pass new taxes in California. Most of the time, state law mandates a two-thirds majority vote by the people to enact any new form of taxation. But it’s a bit easier when the supervisors are up for election; on those ballots, the threshold is only 50 percent. And with at least four tightly contested supervisorial races bringing out voters, labor bringing out the troops for the General Hospital bond, and the Democratic Party pushing to get voters out for Barack Obama, the turnout should be excellent.
So if there’s ever a good time to try to pass a tax measure, November 2008 ought to fit the bill.
All sorts of tax proposals have floated around City Hall in recent years and some of them — for example, a higher real-estate transfer tax — were defeated at the ballot. Some groups will oppose any tax proposal, and it’s hard to find constituencies that want to work hard for higher taxes.
So the key to crafting a revenue measure is to ensure that it’s as progressive as possible, and that it takes into account the concerns of those small businesses and homeowners who aren’t rich and can’t afford huge new levies. We see two good options:
1.A city income tax. This hasn’t been seriously discussed since the 1980s, but it ought to be. California law bars cities from collecting traditional income taxes — that is, San Francisco can’t tax the incomes of everyone who lives here. But in 1978 the state Supreme Court ruled that cities can tax income earned from employment in the city. The upside is that a San Francisco employment income tax would hit commuters, a huge group who use city services and don’t pay for them. The downside is that people who live here but work, say, in Silicon Valley would escape the tax.
But overall, income taxes are the fairest method of collecting revenue, and a city tax could be set to hit hardest on the wealthiest. The city could exempt, say, the first $50,000 of earned income, levy a modest (say, 1 percent) tax on the next $50,000, then increase the marginal percentage so that people with enormous salaries pay as much as 2 or 3 percent.
The beauty of this: most of the people who paid the top-end income tax would simply write it off their federal income taxes — meaning this would be a direct shift of cash from Washington DC to San Francisco. And it would come primarily from people who have already received a huge tax windfall from the Bush administration.
Yes, some people would cheat. Some businesses would try to claim their employees all really worked out of a satellite office in another city. But New York City has a municipal income tax. So does Philadelphia. They manage to deal with the cheaters. The supervisors at least ought to consider the idea.
2.A new business tax. Almost everyone agrees that San Francisco’s business taxes are unfair. The city places a flat tax on businesses — a small merchant pays the same percentage as a giant corporation — and some partnerships, like law firms, get away with paying no city taxes at all. The best way to fix that may be to create a single, progressive business tax (probably on gross receipts), with no loopholes, that exempts the first $100,000 or so and actually lowers the levy on small businesses while significantly raising it on big ones. Most small businesses would get an actual tax cut while the big guys would pick up the tab.
Together, a tax package like this could bring in the $250 million a year or so the city needs — and some of the money could go to cutting, say, Muni fares or reducing the sales tax so working-class San Franciscans would pay less.
Almost everyone at City Hall knows the current tax system is unfair, regressive, and inadequate. We’ve been calling for the supervisors to do something about it for years now. November 2008 seems like an excellent time.
I think it’s safe to say that most people in the real estate business tend to oppose raising taxes on real estate. And generally speaking, you don’t find the industry well represented at dinners for urban environmental groups. But John Barry is different. He’s a Sunset District Realtor who is full of ideas about how to get the city more revenue, and after I ran into him at the San Francisco Tomorrow dinner May 21, he sent me a proposal he says would bring in more than $5 million a year.
Barry was digging around in property records recently and learned that a parcel out on 19th Avenue sold a year ago, in June 2007, for $2.5 million — and the new owners still hadn’t received a property tax bill. The owner "most likely won’t be getting the bill until July or later," Barry wrote. "He will then have another 30 to 90 days to come up with his payment."
Although the city will eventually get the money, the late property tax bill means that cash is sitting in a property owner’s bank account, earning interest that ought to go to the city. At the current tax rate of 1.141 percent of market value, which is typically the sale price, the lost interest on this one property is about $2,800. Multiply that times all the commercial and residential sales in the city, and Barry estimates San Francisco is losing some $5 million in interest every single year.
"Who is to blame? All of us," he wrote. "If taxpayers had been raising a fuss, the city would have found ways to do this all quicker."
When property changes hands, it typically goes through a title company and an escrow procedure and, at closing, a bunch of money changes hands. The buyer pays a whole list of fees — to the title company, the broker, the mortgage company, etc. Why can’t the city be in the mix?
Here’s how it could work, Barry suggests: "The title company calls the tax collector and says, ‘We are closing a sale in two days. The sale price is $1 million. Send us an interim estimated tax bill.’ The tax collector multiplies .01141 [the property tax rate] against $1 million and instantly prints an interim bill of $11,410 and e-mails it to the escrow officer."
Makes sense to me.
So the day I got Barry’s e-mail, I called Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting and left him a message saying I’d found him $5 million. He called back right away. I ran Barry’s idea by him, and he told me it was worth pursuing.
It’s a bit more complicated than it seems, he said, particularly with commercial property — which is where the big money is, anyway. In many cases the city doesn’t accept the sales prices as the actual value, and under Proposition 13, you can’t raise a tax bill once you set it. But I have great faith that City Attorney’s Office can figure a way around that.
Of course, Ting has another problem: he doesn’t have the staff to catch up on the existing backlog — and Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to cut his budget. "Nobody wants to stand up and fight to fund the tax man," he told me. That, of course, is lunacy. If you’re short of money, you don’t cut the folks who are bringing it in.
It’s hard to talk about taxing anyone, even in San Francisco. "I write this," Barry said, "because I am a founding member of the How a Realtor Can Commit Professional Suicide Club." But you know he’s right.
REVIEW The Contemporary Jewish Museum was founded in 1984 as the Jewish Museum San Francisco, and "starchitect" Daniel Libeskind’s building design, which seemingly bursts out of an 1881 vintage brick facade opposite Yerba Buena Gardens, began taking shape nearly a decade ago. But for all intents and purposes, the CJM’s opening this week marks the launch of a new art space that must affirm its brand identity on our cultural landscape. The folks behind this identity-based museum aim to instill a sense of belief in the place as a meaningful institution and to lure repeat visitors — Jews and non-Jews alike. With a prominent public location — and what could be a decent café — the odds are in its favor.
Other factors might continue that momentum. The building itself is a bold yet restrained move by an architect whose Jewish Museum in Berlin tends to overshadow its contents. The CJM, however, succeeds in feeling both formidable and intimate. The spaces balance form and function: they look good and seem like they can accommodate and contextualize the works within. Still, the programming itself should be the primary element in attracting viewers.
The opening offerings include a delightful survey of work by the New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, and a sound series selected by John Zorn. But the centerpiece exhibition, "In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis" — an ambitious, CJM-organized conglomeration of newly commissioned installations and historical and contemporary artworks and artifacts — is a clear sign the admin is taking the museum’s challenge seriously and thinking big.
The show is designed to offer entry points to a range of viewers, its biblical foundation rooted in the Old Testament volume of Genesis, which speaks to Christians and Jews and allows the concept of creation to relate to art, religion, and science. The curators — museum director Connie Wolf, deputy director Fred Wasserman, and assistant curator Dara Solomon — abide by an imperative not to restrict exhibited works to pieces by Jewish makers. "In the Beginning" unfolds in a hallway antechamber with a flat-screen monitor displaying a grainy video of images of the Earth and the moon as seen from Apollo 8, television footage widely seen on Christmas Eve 1968, with audio of the astronauts reading the opening verses of Genesis. The inclusion points to a curatorial openness to pop-cultural artifacts as part of a contemporary art dialogue.
The seven commissioned installations are the headliners in the expansive temporary exhibition space, and they’re by a deliberately diverse group of artists. There are pieces by Matthew Ritchie and Trenton Doyle Hancock, artists who set down complex personalized cosmologies that essentially are their own elaborate creation myths, and both manage to create works with visual appeal. For a piece titled Day One, Ritchie uses a couple of gently angled walls for a graphically ornate mural that accommodates orb-shaped projections of roiling, animated landscapes, sun flares, flocks of ambiguous black shapes, and a soundtrack of the artist pondering existence and creation. A more rambunctious spirit pervades Hancock’s In the Beginning There Was the End, in the End There Was the Beginning, which is set against dizzying cartoonlike wallpaper and depicts a mythological narrative involving characters called Mounds and lowly Vegans.
The exhibit’s inspiration is literary, and text appears frequently, as in the somewhat vertigo-inducing animated work by Shirley Shor, an ex-Bay Area resident who swirls projections, in English and Hebrew, of Web-gathered references to Genesis down a wishing-well structure. Ben Rubin contributes God’s Breath Hovering over the Waters (His Master’s Voice), a sound sculpture inspired by an antenna developed by Bell Labs physicists in the 1960s that, according to the artist, led to audible evidence of the Big Bang. A Kabbalistic-inspired work by Mierle Laderman Ukeles is the show’s most spiritual, and involves layered audience participation including forging a personal covenant with the artist, the public, and the self.
Filmmaker Alan Berliner adds a more crowd-pleasing form of participation with Playing God, a satisfying interactive, seven-channel video — one for each day of creation — installation that emulates a slot machine as it generates phrases with words from Genesis. Audio-visual jackpots can be had, and pushing the glowing buttons quickly becomes addictive.
The show’s inclusion of historical and archival material is a riskier gambit. While designed to enrich the exhibition themes, adding objects such as a 15th-century biblical manuscript page, a Tiepolo drawing, Tom Marioni’s shadowbox assemblages, and Barnett Newman’s 1948 painting Onement II starts to seem cluttered, or, as they say in Yiddish, ungehpotchkeyed. Still, the "something for everyone" approach clearly stems from a gracious perspective or brand, not an obfuscating one. And that’s a curatorial position worth a return visit.
CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM
Opening exhibits include "In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis," Sun/8–Jan. 4, 2009; opening events include "Dawn 2008," Sat/7, 8 p.m., $10-$15 with Dengue Fever and Jonathan Safran Foer; grand opening Sun/8, 10 a.m. ribbon-cutting, 11 a.m. doors, free.
I push off and head down a makeshift plywood runway, compressing as I roll over the edge and into the Technicolor graffiti of the drainage ditch. The transition between the banked wall and the flatbottom has an abrupt kink in it, enough to send you to your face if you’re caught sleeping. I take some weight off the front end and try to maintain my speed as I pump into the opposite corner and carve the far end of the ditch where there’s an over-45-degree wall that runs behind what my friends and I call the "death pit" — a gaping cutaway in the bottom of the culvert, five feet deep, filled with broken glass, and frequently used as a urinal. Since I’m at the apex of my backside carve, up a wall 10 feet above last week’s Miller Time, I’m jolted by the crackle of a loudspeaker:
"You are trespassing. Leave the area at once or you will be arrested."
My concentration shot by the sheriff’s announcement, I jump off my deck and over the chasm at the base of the bank, barely clearing the skater’s version of a Vietnam tiger pit, and land on the rough concrete beyond the edge. My board bullets straight in, though, so I’ve got to lower myself — gingerly — into the mostly dry detritus and rescue it before my friends and I jet out of the spot and into the manicured back nine of Pleasanton’s Castlewood golf course. We get to the car, throw the boards in the trunk — mine has a "Skateboarding Is Not a Crime" sticker on the bottom — and head to the next spot, a ditch called the Rat Trap.
The year is 1987. I’m 16, in high school, and living with my parents in Fremont. The scene plays out over and over in much the same way: a drainage ditch, a nicely painted curb or ledge at a shopping center, the occasional backyard pool, and night sessions at the Tar Banks, a set of embankments around a loading dock with curbs at the top. It’s an underground railroad of repurposed architecture, none of it designed with a skateboard in mind but all of it highly skateable.
Taking the $4.7mil Cunningham skatepark. Video by Jarrod Allen, www.jarrodallen.com
Every weekend my crew hits as many spots as we can, and the constants shape up like this: urethane, aluminum, Canadian hard rock maple, concrete, and asphalt. Maybe blood, maybe beer — we’re teenagers after all — but nearly always: cops.
Skateboarding may not be a crime, but it sure as hell feels like one.
Flash forward 20 years. I’m with a different crew as I pull onto a street in suburban Redwood City, and I’m no longer rollin’ in my mom’s Plymouth Sundance, but my own truck. The other thing that’s changed is the number of wheels per head. There are four heads to eight wheels, and we’re here to ride the Phil Shao Memorial Skatepark. On bikes.
The park does not disappoint. There are a million kids trying tech ollie flip tricks around the perimeter of the park, but the bowl is what I’m about. Big and shapely with almost burlesque hips poured into her concrete, I’m in love as soon as I roll in. There are a few local bikers who have the place dialed, nonchalantly airing a few feet out and throwing the bars before heading back down the tranny. The only two skaters riding the bowl are a tall skinny teenager and his little sister, who looks to be about 10, and they have it on lockdown: lipslides on the spine, grinds, rock and rolls — everything smooth and fast. "Yeah!" I yell as they take their runs, stoked on their skills.
I know the times have changed when I see the little girl come up out of the bowl in the $450,000 public piece of silky-smooth concrete perfection, walk over to her mother, who’s posted up on a ledge, get a cell phone and make a call. Not five minutes later there are seven (I counted) Redwood City police officers converging on the bench where my friends and I are sitting. They randomly collar my buddy Scott — though I was the last one to drop in — and write him a ticket for $100. I have to admit, I’m flabbergasted.
Guess what: skateboarding isn’t a crime anymore — it’s gone mainstream. Successful companies hire lobbyists to promote the sport, and communities spend big bucks building new facilities for skaters. And now some skaters, many of them kids who never had to live in the underground world that I did, are using their legitimacy to push out the new outlaws — people who ride BMX bikes.
It’s crazy — two cultures that share so much, fighting over how many wheels they ride.
"Is that your daughter’s bike?"
The question comes from one of my coworkers, and, believe it or not, it’s not intended to be snarky. I can’t ride in public without someone saying "cute little bike," while giggling to themselves — or laughing and pointing. Seeing a six-foot-tall, 200-pound, bald-headed, tattooed white dude on a "kid’s bike" is like being passed on the sidewalk by a bear on a unicycle. At one point reactions like these would’ve rubbed me the wrong way, but nowadays, I nod and smile. Sometimes, I try to explain what constitutes a "full grown" BMX bike. While it’s got small wheels — 20 inches in diameter — the top tube, from the seat to the stem, measures 21 inches, and the handlebars are considered pro-sized at eight inches high by 28 inches wide.
Bicycle motocross, or BMX, is purported to have started in 1963 when the Schwinn corporation of Chicago unveiled the Stingray, which was basically a downsized version of the company’s balloon-tired cruiser-type bikes. Kids pretended to be grown-ups by aping Roger DeCoster and other moto heroes — launching their bikes off jumps, racing in empty fields and abandoned lots, and cranking wheelies down the sidewalks of Anytown, USA.
"It all began the way most individual sports start," motorcycle customizer Jesse James says in a voiceover at the beginning of the 2005 BMX nativity story/documentary Joe Kid on a Stingray, "kids pretending to be grown-ups, but acting like big kids."
I have been riding since I was seven. After three decades, one truism remains, and I can’t candy-coat it. I’ve got to speak it like a true BMXer: BMX is rad. It is and always has been an entity unto itself, progressing from wheelies, skids, and bombing hills to encompass myriad styles and surfaces, from streets to pools to dirt jumps to ramps to the balletic grace of flatland freestyle.
This summer, big kids on little bikes will be jumping 30-foot gaps at as many miles per hour as BMX pays homage to its racing roots at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. On June 12 in New York’s Central Park, Kevin Robinson will try to break the legendary Mat Hoffman’s record for the highest quarter-pipe air on a bike — 26 feet, 6 inches.
It doesn’t take death-defying world records, the X Games, the Olympics, or the stupefaction of squares with cameras to make BMX legit. That feeling of overcoming fear and doubt by jumping a little farther, a little higher, the rush of nailing a trick, or carving a bowl, hasn’t changed in half a century. The legitimacy lies in that feeling, behind your breastbone, and it doesn’t change as you get older. Your wrists hurt, your ankles hurt, and your back hurts, but the feeling is the same. Kid’s bike? Hell yeah, it’s a kid’s bike.
It’s not as though I was blissfully unaware of a beef between bikers and skaters that day in Redwood City. Ask any BMXer to tell you a story of friction between the two and four-wheeled sets, and it’s not going to take them long to come up with something.
"When I was 12 years old, a skateboarder threw my bike out of the bowl at Ripon skatepark," says Jackson Ratima, now 19, a Daly City rider sponsored by Fit Bikes. "He was, like, 20 years old or something."
Tim "Wolfman" Harvey, 21, another up-and-coming pro, tells a similar story about a visit to the Bay Area from his native Massachusetts, when a local skater hassled him at the Novato skatepark. "I didn’t even know anything about California. It was my first time out bike riding, period. The guy was giving me all kinds of crap, yelling at me."
Ironically, Harvey, as friendly and easygoing a guy as you could hope to meet, almost turned pro for skateboarding before an ankle injury made it nearly impossible to ollie, an essential trick in street skating. He now lives in Petaluma and is a member of the painter’s union in San Francisco, where he’s a familiar face at street spots, but now on a bike. Back then, though, he "thought California was a scary place."
The Bay Area — and SF in particular — may be the worst place for bikers seeking a vibe-free session. "I’ve never experienced hostility like it is out here," Ratima says.
Smoldering after the Redwood City incident, I began to fixate on the "Skateboarding Is Not a Crime" slogan from my youth. Originally a bumper sticker made by Transworld Skateboarding magazine in the mid ’80s, Santa Cruz Skateboards currently makes a deck with that written on it, so the skate community has gotten a lot of mileage out of being oppressed.
"Skateboarding isn’t a crime?" I’d ask myself. You’re damned straight skateboarding isn’t a crime: it’s the law. BMX is a crime. There isn’t a biker alive who rides transition who hasn’t rolled into a taxpayer-funded park and had a knee-high grommet point to the sign and say, "Bikes aren’t allowed."
Not allowed, huh? Son, I skated my first pool when you were doing the backstroke in your papa’s ball bag.
Look: I love skateboarding and always will. Both skaters and bikers are doing the same thing, copping that same feeling rolling over the same terrain. The war makes no sense.
"We have religion and race and class dividing us. I refuse to be divided by what type of wheel size I have," says Jon Paul Bail, a local at Alameda’s Cityview skatepark.
Bail, 40, is the artist and pundit behind politicalgridlock.com. Through the Home Project, a program run through the Alameda Unified School District, Bail helped raise $150,000 to build the park, $8,000 of which came directly from his company’s coffers. He helped design the park, and he helped pour the concrete in the park, which opened in 1999. Mixed sessions of bikers and skaters were going down for six months with minor tensions but no major incidents when then–City Attorney Carol Korade advised City Hall that mixed use was too dangerous, and shut the bikers out.
My call to Corinne Centeno, Redwood City’s Director of Parks, Recreation, and Community Services, got off to a rough start: "I understand [the Phil Shao Skatepark] is not bike-legal, right?"
"Right. It was built as a skatepark," she replied, subtly italicizing the first syllable with her tone of voice.
"It wasn’t designed for bikes," she repeated, before adding, "but their having been prohibited from the start hasn’t necessarily kept people out." In an effort to do just that, the city is building a fence around the park, with bids currently ranging from $23,000 to $60,000.
The semantic argument — "it’s called a ‘skatepark,’ not a ‘bike park’<0x2009>" — is usually reserved for laypeople who don’t know enough about skateboarding or bike riding to see its inherent lack of logic.
Drainage ditches are not called a "skating ditches," nor were they designed for skating. Swimming pools are not called "skating pools." Yet, therein lie the roots of the modern skatepark, along with full pipes, which are based on industrial-size drainage systems also not intended for wheels. Every day skateboarders and bikers transcend these limits through creative repurposing.
Collision, and the fear of collision, is the main thing public officials cite when shutting bikers out of parks. "It’s unnerving," Vancouver pro skater Alex Chalmers wrote in a 2004 Thrasher manifesto, "BMX Jihad: Keep It in the Dirt."
"BMXers cover so much ground so quickly, especially when they’re pedaling frantically to blast a transfer, that it’s particularly hard to gauge these collisions," he wrote.
But the fact is that in any given park BMXers and skaters take different lines, and the best way to acclimate each group to the other is through exposure. If bike riders are banned, it increases the risk of collisions when a few bikers decide to chance the ticket or brave the vibe-out and ride anyway. A lot of bikers hit parks early in the morning because they don’t want to deal with hassles. During the overlap in "shifts," this leads to bewildered skaters who aren’t used to the lines a biker takes, and vice versa.
And the head-on menace is greatly overstated, largely disappearing when a park is integrated, if only unofficially. At Cityview, the police have displayed somewhat less zeal in ticketing bikers during the past few years. "They treat us like gays in the military," says Bail. "Don’t ask, don’t tell." And yet everyone manages to coexist.
At the new $850,000 skatepark in Benicia, which opened in October, integration isn’t a big deal. "From its conception, we designed it to be a skateboard park and also for bikes," says Mike Dotson, assistant director of parks and recreation. Technically, the park has designated bike hours, but since it’s largely unsupervised, there’s a mildly laissez-faire approach to enforcement. "In the very beginning there was a lot of concern about the use of both bikes and skateboards," Dotson says, stating that the park was packed the first few months. "Initially we had one or two calls on it. Since then I can say I haven’t had any calls on it — in relation to bikes and skateboards being in it at the same time or other complaints."
And there are mixed-use parks all over the world, as far away as Thailand and as nearby as Oregon: "You go to Oregon, and you can ride wherever you want," says a stunned Maurice Meyer, 41, lifelong San Francisco resident and founding member of legendary bike and skate trick team the Curb Dogs. Long Beach, Las Vegas, Phoenix, even Alex Chalmers’ hometown of Vancouver — all have parks where bikes and skates legally ride at the same time. What’s up with the Bay?
Lawyers, insurance underwriters, and city hall types may never understand how a park works. "It’s out of ignorance," Bail says. "To them it looks like chaos. To anyone who has skate etiquette — which is everyone — we all take turns."
Besides, let’s face facts: a skatepark is a dangerous place — to different degrees at different times, and for different reasons. "I swear to God, every time I go to the skatepark I see a hundred boards flying all over the place," Ratima says, "and I’ve never seen a bike go flying and land on a guy’s head." It’s not an inflatable jumpy house — it’s fun, but it’s not made out of cotton balls and your mother isn’t here. Usually.
Rose Dennis, press liaison for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, seemed baffled that someone would want to ride a bicycle inside the skatepark part of the new Potrero del Sol. Perhaps as a way of distracting me from my damn-fool idea, she kept hyping the park’s "other amenities."
I live three blocks from Golden Gate Park — if I want to play Frisbee, I’m not going to drive across town. I want to ride. When I brought up the possibility of scheduling bike-only sessions in the yet-to-be opened park, she suggested I draft a letter to general manager Yomi Agunbiade, before adding that "the facility wasn’t designed for that type of recreation."
When I (graciously, I thought) let her know that it would be not only possible to ride a bike there, but highly gratifying, she got a little heated: "At the end of the day, the buck stops with us. If one of you guys breaks your skull open and you’re bleeding all over the place, believe me, no one’s going to have any sympathy for Rec and Park if they make really nonjudicious decisions."
In other words, like a lot of city officials, she’s worried about getting sued.
But you know what? There’s actually less chance a BMXer will successfully sue the city. I give you California Government Code Section 831.7, which states the following: "Neither a public entity nor a public employee is liable to any person who participates in a hazardous recreational activity … who knew or reasonably should have known that the hazardous recreational activity created a substantial risk of injury to himself or herself and was voluntarily in the place of risk."
The law lists "bicycle racing or jumping" as being a "hazardous recreational activity." It’s on a fairly extensive list, along with diving boards, horseback riding, and the ever-popular rocketeering, skydiving, and spelunking, which, as I’m sure you’ve heard, are all the rage with the kids these days — much more popular than BMX.
But the words "skateboarding," "skateboarder," and "skateboard" are not listed anywhere in the text of the Hazardous Recreational Activities law, commonly called the HRA law. In fact, the International Association of Skateboard Companies has been lobbying to get the bill amended to specifically include "skateboarding" since 1995, when Assemblymember Bill Morrow (R-San Diego) took up the issue. Morrow’s bill was rejected by the state Senate Judiciary Committee in 1996. In 1997, Morrow and skateboard association lobbyist Jim Fitzpatrick gave up on amending the HRA and instead pushed Assembly Bill 1296, which added Provision 115800 to the state’s Health and Safety Code, which states, in part and in much less forceful language — without using the word "liable," for instance — that owners or operators of local skateparks that are not supervised must require skaters to wear helmets, elbow pads, and knee pads, and that they must post a sign stating said requirement.
It doesn’t say anything about "if one of you guys breaks your skull open and you’re bleeding all over the place" while wearing a helmet, then you can’t hold the operator liable.
When I asked San Francisco Deputy City Attorney Virginia Dario-Elizando how the law might apply to the city’s skateparks, she told me, "This question has never come up. I must tell you, I’ve never even seen the rules for the skateparks — no one’s ever asked me to look at them."
BMXers are willing to compromise if that’s what it takes. In May, San Jose opened the 68,000-square-foot Lake Cunningham skatepark, built by the same design firm (Wormhoudt) as the Benicia park at a price of $4.7 million, and the place has bike hours. Like any park, there are rules. Like some parks, there’s supervision, so the rules are enforced: separate bike sessions; helmet, elbow, and knee pads required at all times; brakes required on bikes; no smoking; no songs with swear words over the park soundsystem; no bikes in the three bowls with pool coping even though they only allow plastic pegs, which are undoubtedly softer on coping than metal skateboard trucks … it’s a long list of restrictions. It’s inconvenient for guys who don’t like pads or don’t run brakes, and there’s some griping, but we’ve got our eyes on the prize: the place is amazing, with a huge full pipe, massive vert bowls, and a decent street course.
I would like skaters to realize a couple of things: skating and BMX aren’t so different from each other, at least in the feeling each gives you, right there, behind your sternum, where your heart beats.
Bikers are going to ride no matter what, just like skaters are going to skate. Legal or not, we’re not going to go away. "I got arrested for riding there when I was 14," Ratima says of the Daly City skatepark. "They took my bike and threw it in the back of the car. I just kept going every day, and finally they just gave up."
"I’ve ridden bikes on vert," Thrasher editor Jake Phelps tells me during a phone conversation. "I can ride a bike in a pool, I can do that. I’m stoked when I ride a bike in a pool. Feels hella fun to me. Catching air on a bike is awesome, no doubt about that."
This, from the longtime editor of the bible of the "fuck BMX" set. It’s either baffling or heartening. I can’t decide which. "I don’t mind people that are just regular," he says. "If they’re skateboard people or they’re bike people too, I’ll respect anybody that respects me."
That’s what it comes down to: respect. I respect the fact that skateboarders did not come into this age of skateparks easily. I faded out when there was nothing, and I came back when they were in small towns across America, and I missed all the politicos and dreary meetings. It’s time for bikers to stop feeling like second-class citizens and demand a seat at the table. In the words of Black Flag, it’s time to rise above.
Lime on Market Street near Castro was crowded with Mark Leno supporters when the candidate took the microphone just before midnight. He had already taken the concession calls from Carole Migden and Joe Nation and was primed to celebrate his victory over an incumbent senator, whom Leno supporter Bevan Dufty had just taken a couple subtle digs at as he introduced Leno, suggesting that Migden didn’t listen to her constituents or play by the rules.
Leno then gave a speech that demonstrated the unique package of issues, enemies and allies that he has turned into a winning coalition. “Tom Ammiano, it’s gonna be a helluva lot of fun serving with you,” Leno said of the man who will succeed him with his endorsement. “I just heard Prop. E passed,” Leno continued, referencing the measure that will submit the mayor’s SFPUC appointments to Board of Supervisors approval. “As an early supporter, I was happy to see that.” That stand was already a hopeful sign of his independence from Mayor Gavin Newsom and PG&E, but then he really went after the company, which had funded a hit piece mailer by a group calling itself Californians to Protect Children, trotting out some old sleaze about Leno being soft on pedophiles because he resisted right wing efforts to capitalize on crime fears.
“When you attack one gay man like this, you attack all gay men,” Leno said. “All gay men should be outraged with PG&E tonight.” He thanked Dennis Kelly of United Educators of San Francisco for giving his campaign early credibility. Then Leno returned to the LGBT community, promising to heal the rift his challenge of Migden opened by leading the fight against the fall ballot measure that would ban same sex marriage. “I invite you to join together to defeat the religious right,” Leno said.
He then thanked a long list of leaders who endorsed him, from Mayor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to District Attorney Kamala Harris and former SFPUC director Susan Leal to members of the late night entertainment community, which rallied for Leno with signs on nightclubs all over town. And then he thanked his campaign consultants, the downtown darlings BMWL, affectionately naming a list of people from there and saying of the campaign they created: “It was clean, it was smart, it was effective.”
And Leno’s final name check was to the presidential candidate he supports, who also had a good night: “The winds of change are blowing tonight. Let me congratulate Barack Obama on his victory.”
Having just left the HQ of the F is for Fairness campaign in the Bayview, I must report that the vibe was generally optimistic despite the fact that Prop F was decidedly dragging it’s feet through the election mud. Members of the campaign were staying positive as they gathered in a rented space on 3rd street, eagerly refreshing the SF Departments of Elections results page. Here’s a glimpse of the evening:
As I was uploading these images I now find that Prop F has officially failed. Which makes the above pictures out dated and bittersweet.
While talking with members of the campaign, many of whom happen to also be members of the Grace Tabernacle Church in the Bayview, I was struck by a specific emotional aspect of Prop F that I hadn’t previously considered. In speaking with Jesse, a congregation member who wore a “YES on F” T shirt in Spanish, and a windbreaker jacket proudly emblazoned with an “I voted!’ sticker, I really got a sense of what this decision could actually mean for this community. Jesse spoke of raising his 9 children in the neighborhood (who are now raising his 27 grandchildren), coaching baseball, and looked on with pride and affection at the group of teenagers sitting across the hall from us.
If Lennar has its way with the Bayview and Hunter’s point neighborhoods of San Francisco, all those things which Jesse and many others hold dearest to them: children, family, and fostering a tight knit community, will be replaced by an overpriced playground for yuppies. Lennar will take its mountain of paper money and replace children and community with materialism and greed. And what’s a city without children? Futureless, directionless and growthless.
I must say, the results are somewhat disheartening. But given the optimism I witnessed this evening, I have some renewed faith that this community wont give up without a fight.
When the chill wind of early returns showed Prop. G leading Prop. F in the polls, (67 percent to 33 percent ) the folks at the Prop. F campaign HQ put it down to all the money that Lennar spent to influence the election.
Inside the Prop. F party at 5030 Third Street, supporters munched on pizza, listening to the Nation of Islam’s Minister Christopher Muhammad expounding on “the $4 million of known money that Lennar has spent, not to mention the unknown slush funds.”
“I’m encouraged just by the fact that we forced them to spend so much,” Muhammad said, berating, “the Labor Council’s leadership for selling out its leadership in a backroom deal.”
Muhammad was referring to the community benefits agreement that the SF Labor Council negotiated with Lennar at the last minute, with Lennar promising to develop 32 percent affordable housing units at Bayview/Candlestick Point.
Bishop Ernest Jackson joined Muhammad in casting aspersions on Lennar ‘s deal with the SF Labor Council, by pointing to what he called Mayor Gavin Newsom’s “secret press conference” about the 2008-09 budget at the Hunters Point Shipyard on June 2, as a clue to why Labor capitulated to Lennar and Newsom’s demands.
Noting that Newsom announced his budget in a “police station surrounded by all kinds of weaponry and armored personnel carriers,” Jackson claimed that Newsom “held the unions hostage”.
“Newsom used the budget cuts as veiled threats over people of conscience,” Jackson said. “But the Prop. F movement proves there is another constituency in the Bayview. The City had no idea it would have its own cyclone in the southeast sector. This same groundswell can look at its supervisor and say, you’re not doing the right thing.”
Meanwhile, Muhammad was expressing his belief that San Francisco is going to the dogs, literally, a view he aired in the heart of the Bayview, earlier this week, as the following video shows:
“There are now more dogs than blacks living in the city,” Muhammad said, “San Francisco is becoming a playground for young urban multimillionaires.”
PREVIEW Stephen Pelton’s full-bodied and thoughtfully structured choreography fits his dancers like second skins. It’s one of the most appealing aspects of the work from this longtime San Francisco artist who now spends half of his time in London. Another of his gifts is choosing music — whether it’s Radiohead, Schubert, or Edith Piaf — that supports his purposes ever so smoothly. Often drawing inspiration from literary sources, Pelton is a storyteller in the manner of poets who suggest, evoke, and analogize — but don’t spell out. The results are dances that resonate like a Zen bell. He may be best remembered for The Hurdy-Gurdy Man (1998), that strangely haunting solo drawn from documentation of Hitler’s body language. He also has created such epics as The American Song Book (1997), which uses popular American music to evoke three different periods in US history. But Pelton’s choreography is most at home in intimacy, full of contradictory impulses in which violence looks lyrical and tenderness totters at the edge of the abyss. A note of melancholy and resignation permeates much of it; perhaps this is not unexpected from an artist who came of age during the worst days of the AIDS crisis. Pelton describes and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me, this season’s premiere, as a meditation on aging. Performed solo and as an ensemble, the piece grew out of a World War II poem by Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice. The work’s accompanying music is from the English composer Gavin Bryars. This program includes a preview of next year’s Citizen Hill, last season’s Tuesday, Not Here (created for the remarkable Nol Simonse in 2003), and Christy Funsch in her reworked 2007 Solo for Somebody.
The Great American Music Hall was a bit sedate when I showed up for the Yes on A party. The measure to fund teacher salaries with a parcel tax needed a two-thirds vote and it was a few points shy, but moving up since the conservative absentee ballots were counted. “I wish it weren’t this close,” school superintendent Carlos Garcia told me, lamenting the high vote threshold. “It’s too bad. But I still have faith in San Francisco.”
A few minutes later, that faith was rewarded when the new results came in: 69.6% yes with 88.8% of votes counted. The room erupted.
School board member Hydra Mendoza started to loudly whoop it up into the microphone, calling up her colleagues to say a few words and help celebrate. “These numbers show that people believe in public education. They believe in what we’re doing,” Garcia said. School board member Mark Sanchez recognized the measure’s chief fundraiser: “Let’s give a big shout out to Warren Hellman.”
Mendoza closed: “Turn on the dance music. Wooooo!”
REVIEW From this side of the planet, as many in the American art world see it, Berlin is currently the art world’s utopia. Things are happening there: experimentation and funding can be had, as well as cheap studios, alternative-gallery spaces, and thriving collectives galore. But this scene didn’t just fall from the sky like a space virus and infect the German capital in the past few years. It’s been brewing for some time. One collective, known as a hub that links dozens of contemporary German artists, is Starship. In 1998 it began publishing a self-titled alternative-art magazine with conceptually-themed issues, including images and writing generated by its community. San Francisco gallerist Jessica Silverman befriended Starship founding members Ariane Müller, Martin Ebner, and Hans-Christian Dany five years ago, and Silverman Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in its former Dogpatch location showcased their work.
The collective’s current show at Silverman is a mixed-media gathering that includes drawings, text, sculpture, back issues of Starship’s magazine, and a selection from the group’s poster series titled The Like of it now happens, which focuses on the subjects of excess and sustainability. Judith Hopf’s Singing Frogs — a photo collage of frogs with frogs in their throats — and Klaus Weber’s Ultra Moth provide weirdly funny, surreal social commentary in the tradition of propaganda posters. Because the group chose to not plaster its work around San Francisco — a city not known to embrace guerilla art kindly — they created a faux "outside" for them to exist in. Visitors entering Silverman are confronted by a large, silver, barred cube, like an astral reproduction of the gallery space. Sit on the space’s floor and thumb through the relatively recent Starship issue, The year we went nowhere (2005), and it feels like browsing a travel guide: you might get a sense of these Berliners’ flourishing art boom.
WRITTEN ON SPIDERS Through June 14. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Silverman Gallery, 804 Sutter, SF. (415) 255-9508, www.silverman-gallery.com
Well, we got walloped on Props. G and F, but other than that, it’s shaping up as a fascinating night for progressives — and not all bad. The progressive slate nearly swept the DCCC in the 13 Assembly District. Prop. A, the school tax, won handily. Prop. E, the PUC reform, won pretty handily.
And it now appears that Mark Leno’s big gamble paid off and he will be the next state Senator from District 3. And it seems like a decisive victory; with 70 percent of the precincts reporting, he’s got 43 percent of the vote. At lot of progressives backed Carold Migden, and if Leno and Migden has split the vote in a way that gave Joe Nation the seat, Leno would have been blasted as the guy who, by challenging Migden, cost San Francisco and the queer community a state Senate seat.
But he didn’t do that — he pulled together the coalition he needed to defeat Nation.
He now has a huge challenge on his hands: He needs to reach out to the progressives who supported Carole Migden. How he does that (and I think this is something that Leno is good at) will define his career and success over the next few years.
Mark Leno’s election night party has been a stark contrast to what we saw earlier tonight at Joe Nation’s event, which was situated at the unfortunately named “Wipe Out” restaurant in Greenbrae. Leno’s campaign office in San Rafael is packed wall-to-wall, the crowd noisy and erupting in frequent applause when new figures from the secretary of state show up on a projector putting Leno ahead.
He told a radio reporter earlier tonight that overall during the election, he’s had to raise $1.2 million (we’ve seen it in the piles of slick, anti-Nation mailers that have mounted in our mailbox). But he says there’s got to be a way to overcome the cost of operating a modern campaign election, most of which put people with big ideas but no connections out of the bidding. Leno just thanked a litany of campaign staffers and volunteers for backing him over the last 15 months before heading off to San Francisco where we’ve heard he also has an event planned for the Lime club in the Castro.
We were situated in a Leno war room with campaign staffers — including Leno’s manager, Tom, described by colleagues as “eternally pessimistic” — who still seem wary of calling the election for Leno. The numbers, however, are looking more and more inevitable. If he wins, Leno’s gonna have to work on the music he rock, representing a district like this and all, which includes San Francisco. Someone just put the Dirty Dancing theme on the sound system. Not good. As far as North Bay events went tonight, Leno’s has been much more electric than what Nation had going on earlier.
On the left, Leno field organizer Carole Mills, and on the right, volunteer coordinator Evelyn Woo.
Marriage equality activists and Leno supporters Dolores Caruthers, on the left, and Laura Espinoza, on the right.
Now Leno’s back ahead with 37 percent of the vote (district wide) to Nation’s 35.8. This one’s going to be close.
In San Francisco, on Election Day, it’s all Migden and Leno in San Francisco, and Leno is way ahead. Leno’s got 62 percent of the San Francisco election-day vote, and Migden has 37 percent. So it’s looking good for Leno, who has to win SF very big.
After taking heat for weeks after the Guardian failed to endorse Carole Migden, I approach her party with a bit of trepidation, particularly after seeing her trail both Mark Leno and Joe Nation in early returns. She is speaking when I arrive, saying her thank yous. “Thank you, thank you, thank you San Francisco,” she closes. Afterward I see one of her most prominent supporters, Senator Darrell Steinberg, the incoming president pro tem, whom I know a little from my Sacramento days.
“She’s been a great legislator and whatever happens tonight, she has everything to be proud of. I’m happy to stand with her,” Steinberg tells me. I catch the latest district numbers on the screen: Leno 37.2%, Migden 30.6%, Nation 32.2%, with 3.4% of precincts reporting. Soon, I bump into the most powerful backer of Migden’s legislative career, former Senator John Burton. Feeling a need to be forthright, I introduce myself and say clearly that I’m from the Bay Guardian.
“The Guardian must be overjoyed. She carried their water for 20 years and they fucked her when she needed them,” Burton bellows, asking me to make sure to pass his words on to publisher Bruce Brugmann, which I’m now doing.
Carole is a bit more magnanimous. She greets me with a hug. I tell her I’m sorry we couldn’t be with her, poise my notebook, and ask how she’s feeling about tonight. “I feel great and I have an enthusiastic crowd and I’m very proud of my years of service,” she says, nods at me, and turns away.
We have about 20 percent of the vote in now, and here’s how it looks:
Prop. A has gone up to 63 percent, and will probably pass.
Sandoval has picked up a bunch, is now at almost 40 percent, and now looks to be coming in first in that race, but not with enough votes to avoid a runoff.
F is still losing, G still winning, and that won’t change.
Joe Nation is now leading Mark Leno — not in San Francisco but district wide. Must be a bunch of north bay precincts reporting, because he’s doing well in SF.
County Central Committee, D 13:
Campos
Chiu
Katz
Peskin
Spanjian
Haaland
Wiener
Mandelman
Walker
Daly
Goldstein
Julian
This is a near-sweep at this point for the Peskin-Daly progressive slate; the only two people winning who weren’t on the slate are Leslie Katz (former supervisor) and Scott Wiener, the DCCC chair. So this is looking very good right now, and could be a bright spot for progressives looking toward the fall supervisorial elections.
Oh my. For all you folks that have been following the controversy around building new power plants in San Francisco, it just got even better.
Mayor Gavin Newsom sent a letter to the Board of Supervisors today outlining a “more promising way forward than the current proposal” to build two natural gas-burning “peaking” power plants in the city.
The way forward: retrofit three existing diesel turbines at the Mirant-Potrero Power Plant, while at the same time shutting down Unit 3, the most polluting part of the power plant, as soon as the Transbay Cable comes online.
“On Friday, May 23, Ed Harrington [General Manager of the SFPUC], City Attorney Dennis Herrera and I met with president of Cal-ISO – Yakout Mansour, the chairman of the CPUC – Mike Peevey, the CEO of Mirant – Ed Muller, the CEO of PG&E – Bill Morrow, and our respective staffs. In this meeting we vetted the possibility of retrofitting the diesel turbines [currently owned and operated by Mirant] and asked each stakeholder to give us the necessary commitments to advance this alternative,” Newsom wrote to the Board.
For anyone who’s been closely following the nuances of this argument, this is a significant change in position from the California Independent System Operator [Cal-ISO], and it should be noted that it took — not just the Mayor sitting down at the table — but top dogs from PG&E and Mirant (who both stand to lose money by the city building its own power plants), as well as the CPUC’s Peevey, who’s never expressed a positive opinion about the true need for more power plants in the city.
Now, suddenly, Cal-ISO is departing significantly from all previously expressed demands that we build power plants.
The background: The state, through Cal-ISO, has for the last several years insisted that San Francisco needs 150 megawatts of peak electricity at the ready. We currently get this from Mirant-Potrero, but Unit 3 of that facility has a bad rep as the greatest single source of pollution in the city. People in the Bayview neighborhood, which have carried more of their fair share of pollution, have been waiting a long time for the plant to close. Stakeholders have been meeting for over seven years, working on ways to close the plant, and much of the leadership on the issue has come from Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the Bayview district.
Cal-ISO has insisted that the only way to close Unit 3 is to build new peakers, which would be owned and operated by the city, run cleaner and more efficiently, and still supply that 150 MW of peak power. Even when the 400 MW Transbay Cable was approved, Cal-ISO insisted San Francisco would still need the peakers.
But in a June 2 letter, Cal-ISO suddenly had a different response for the Mayor.
Tonight’s election results will demonstrate how much money matters in local politics, and whether megadeveloper Lennar is able to essentially buy exclusive development rights for southeast San Francisco. That’s because the $3.9 million and counting that Lennar has spent to approve Prop. G and kill Prop. F could be the most expensive local measure campaign in California history, according to former Common Cause of SF head Charles Marsteller.
To confirm that, I called Bob Stern at the Center for Governmental Studies — the guru of California electoral reform — who had a more qualified answer. Campaign finance records show PG&E spent almost $10 million last year to defeat a package of four public power measures in Yolo and Sacramento counties. PG&E also spent more than $3 million to defeat the Prop. D, the 2002 public power measure in San Francisco. And Stern was trying to get final figures for an expensive 2006 ballot fight in Sacramento over a new stadium. Yet he said Lennar is way up there, well beyond anything he’s seen in his native Southern California.
“It is clearly one of the most expensive,” Stern said. “It’s an enormous amount of money for a local race.”
At today’s Local Homeless Coordinating Board meeting, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s homelessness “czar,” Dariush Kayhan, briefed the group on new ideas for improving city-funded shelters that he and the mayor have been hashing over.
There were just a few, and most of them seem like they need coordination more than cash, but they all answer, to some extent, some of the calls for help that have been coming from the city’s homeless shelter system.
All of this comes from a Feb. 14 announcement by Mayor Newsom that he’d like to redesign the city’s shelters, (the day after SFBG published an expose on conditions inside.) At the announcement, Newsom discussed possibly consolidating shelters into larger facilities, offering more medical respite care, and bringing Project Homeless Connect into the shelters. Ultimately, he called on the people working in San Francisco’s homeless services industry to come up with for how to make shelters better.
Since then, a series of long, comprehensive meetings have been held to gather ideas from homeless people, shelter clients and employees, non-profit groups, medical and mental services providers, and advocates. Meetings were held at shelters and other places convenient to the homeless population (though at all the meetings I attended there was a lot of criticism that the forums weren’t drawing in enough actual homeless people.) Topics tackled included problems accessing the shelters and the quality of medical and other support services — and suggestions were plenty. The Local Board pulled together a report, outlining the most frequent, concrete, and consensual, the most repeated being: don’t reduce the number of beds. (Too bad: The Human Services Agency cut the shelter at Ella Hill Hutch from their budget, which means, as of June 30, 100 fewer mats will be available every night unless advocates rally the Board of Supervisors to put the funding back.) The other biggest cry was for more services in general, made more easily accessible, and a number of really smart ideas came out for how to do that and are included in the report [PDF].
Kayhan said he and the Mayor would be putting together an official response to the report with more concrete details of their vision. In the meantime, he threw a few ideas to the meeting.
We loves us some Michael Tilson Thomas — we better, because she’s everywhere, darling — but it must be hard to live and gesticulate passionately for the San Francisco Symphony in the shadow of the great MTT. It’s not a competition! I know! Still, it’s a treat to see SFS program a night specifically dedicated to some of the other stellar conducting talents it retains, especially for a total symphony queen like moiself.
Three great classical (bow-tied) tastes: Gaffigan, Bohlin, and Shwartz
The three-day “SFS Conductors on the Podium” series will see Associate Conductor James Gaffigan (who blew me and several thousand peeps away in Dolores Park a while back, conducting the 1812 Overture), Resident Conductor and total cutie Benjamin Shwartz, and fierce Chorus Director Ragnar Bohlin take the stage for a nice, slightly challenging change.
Benjamin Shwartz, making beautiful music
Particularly interesting will be the world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s jazzy-sounding Three Asteroids: The Torino Scale, Juno, Ceres, conducted by Schwartz, and the sure-to-be-spectral a capella double-choir performance of Poulenc’s Figure humaine — a haunting setting of Paul Eluard’s poems about war and spirituality, conducted by Bohlin. Gaffigan conducts Bartok’s seldom-heard Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, and the Thursday and Saturday programs will also feature Prokofiev’s ragged, fiery Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, also conducted by Gaffigan and featuring SFS concertmaster and string-whiz Alexander Barantschik. Should be a revelation.
SFS Conductors on the Podium
Thursday, June 5 at 2:00pm
Friday, June 6 at 6:30pm
Saturday, June 7 at 8:00pm
$25-$125
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness
(415) 864-6000 www.sfsymphony.org
I’ve gotten a lot of calls about the two redevelopment measures, and while I think our endorsements make the case for F and against G pretty well, let me add something else.
In many ways, this is the first of a long series of battles that will determine whether Southeast San Francisco becomes a high-end residential community. That’s what Gavin Newsom wants to see, and it’s what a lot of downtown and big-money forces want to see, and frankly, it’s what the more moderate and conservative political activists want, too.
Because the more rich people you bring into San Francisco, and the more poor and working-class people you drive out, the more likely to are to change the progressive voting patterns of this town and get rid of politicians who want to tax big business and provide public services to the needy.
This is not conspiracy thinking — dontown political strategists talk openly about it. As Calvin Welch likes to say, “Who lives here, votes here.” W e know that; they know that.
I appreciate the fact that labor got some concessions out of the Lennar Corporation . But in the end, even if the labor deal holds up, the numbers are brutal: If Lennar agrees to build about 32 percent affordable housing, that means that 68 percent of the new housing in Bay View Hunters Point will be exclusively for millionaires.
That’s the calculus. A developer promising to build one-third affordable units is also promising that two-thirds of the new housing will be affordable only to the very richest segment of American society, the top tenth of the top tenth, the people who can put down $200,000 cash and pay a mortgage of $6,000 a month on a one-bedroom condo. If two thirds of the next generation of San Franciscans are people with that kind of money, the city will change, dramatically.
Sup. Chris Daly’s call in Prop. F for 50 percent affordable ought to be the absolute minimum floor. Again, that means half the new housing will go to the superrich, and only the superrich.
Lennar says it can’t do the project at that level. I personally think that’s horseshit — remember, they’re getting the land essentially free. But if the best Lennar can do is build housing two-thirds of which is unreachable to the vast majority of the people who make this such a wonderful, diverse and creative city, then we need to send Lennar packing and find someone who can do better.
This is the future of San Francisco, folks. That’s why I’m yes on F and no on G.
About 100 art lovers gathered at the University of San Francisco (USF) on Memorial Day, May 26, to participate in a bus tour around the city to see 10 billboards by 10 artists from around the world that showcase their visions of what peace looks like, as part of the San Francisco Peace Billboards Project. The tour was headed by USF visual art professor Richard Kamler who first conceived the idea for the billboard project after wondering, in his words, “Why confine these images to the walls of a museum when we can take them to the community and have a significant impact?” The billboards will continue to be on display until June 22nd throughout San Francisco.
Peace billboard by Israeli artist Uzi Broshi at 22nd Ave and Irving
Peace billboard by Japanese artist Betty Nobue Kano at Masonic Ave. and Fulton
Artist Betty Nobue Kano
Iranian artist Taraneh Hemami (left) with USF visual art profesor Richard Kamler
Peace billboard by Iranian artist Taraneh Hemam at Divisadero Street and Hayes Street
Peace billboard by Tibetan artist Jamyoung Singye at Mission Street and 6th Street
Nobody is quite ready to anoint Cal product Brian Horwitz as the next Lou Gehrig. But last Sunday – on the 83rd anniversary of the start of the Yankee legend’s Herculean 2,130 consecutive game streak – the San Francisco rookie made the type of dramatic big league entrance the “Iron Horse” would have been proud of.
In his debut big league start, the 25-year-old outfielder drilled his first two major league hits and scored the tying run on Sunday in a thrilling 4-3 comeback win over visiting San Diego. The second knock, a solid 10th inning single off all-time-saves leader Trevor Hoffman, fueled the game winning rally.
Brian Horwitz, slugger
“I couldn’t have written it any better than today,” said Horwitz, who has scratched and clawed his way through the Giants minor league season since his ignominious beginnings in pro ball in 2004. “I know I can hit up here. I have the confidence in myself to get the job done.”
In this current season of Giants rebuilding, Horwitz – who is married, stands 6-foot-1, 187 pounds and has longish straight black hair that parts naturally in the middle – is the latest of a troop of farmhands the club has auditioned. By the end of September, San Francisco hopes to have separated the prospects from the suspects.
If Horwitz’s track record is any indication, when 2008 is done he should land in the former category.
Heading into this season Horwitz brought a sizzling .322 career minor league average.
It was on June 1, 1925 that the almost 23-year-old year-old Gehrig pinch-hit in a game for the Yankees. He started the next day, when, according to legend, regular New York first baseman Wally Pipp begged out of the lineup with a headache. Gehrig batted 3-for-5. It would be 13 seasons before Gehrig missed another game.
Horwitz’s consecutive game streak was not expected to last nearly as long. Talented left fielder Fred Lewis – the man Horwitz spelled on Sunday – stroked a very un-Pipp-like game tying pinch-hit, two-run triple to drive in Horwitz in the 10th inning Sunday
But the fact that Horwitz has managed to slip on a Giants jersey this season marks a significant accomplishment for the Southern California native.
