San Francisco

Election security that works

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OPINION These are anxious times for election security and voting equipment. The system is truly broken, starting at the federal level with a lack of national standards, a chaotic testing regimen, untrustworthy vendors, a revolving door between the industry and government regulators, and a decentralized hodgepodge of election administration from coast to coast.

Into that abyss has stepped Debra Bowen, California’s secretary of state. Many of us have supported her call to make elections more secure, and Bowen came into office with the best of intentions. Yet her staff’s inexperience and misreading of the bigger picture have caused more chaos than necessary and now threaten to undermine San Francisco’s November election.

Bowen’s office is concerned that San Francisco’s precinct voting equipment can’t adequately read certain colors of ink. But precinct voters are given a special dark black pen to use to prevent any problems, so the tiny handful of voters potentially affected would be those who (1) drop the precinct pen and (2) use their own pen, which (3) doesn’t have black or dark blue ink.

Even for those voters, though, the voting equipment has an additional safeguard: its optical-scan technology includes an error notification that rejects a ballot with an undervote, such as that caused by invisible ink, and the voter is given a chance to re-mark the ballot. This defect has existed since the equipment was introduced in 1999, yet the secretary has presented no evidence that this has caused any problems.

Nevertheless, Bowen has imposed an excessively draconian condition — namely, that precinct ballots cannot be included as part of the official tally nor even included as preliminary results. The only results available on election night will be the handful of early absentee ballots processed prior to the election, and all ballots must be counted on another piece of equipment.

Ironically, this order undermines the very election security Bowen claims to be addressing. As Bev Harris of Blackbox Voting put it, "Anything that doesn’t get counted on election night is at high risk for fraud." That’s just one example; Bowen has imposed other conditions that will affect ranked-choice voting but reflect little understanding of how RCV works.

What’s really going on is that San Francisco is caught in a battle royal between the secretary of state and the city’s vendor, Election Systems and Software. Bowen is understandably upset with ES&S for recent transgressions, yet in response she has overreacted, ordering interventions that are not narrowly tailored to the specific problem.

Unfortunately, Bowen’s interventions to date, including her top-to-bottom review of all voting equipment in California, reflect a misunderstanding of the bigger picture. Bowen assumes that if she cracks down, the vendors will get better, and so will their equipment. There’s no evidence that will actually happen.

Besides appropriate interventions, what’s really needed is a new and bold approach. The state of California should become its own vendor, designing its own public-interest voting equipment using open-source software and the latest innovations. Los Angeles County has already created its own equipment, as have other countries.

If California became its own vendor, creating the best equipment available, it would put pressure on private vendors to step up to the new standard or lose contracts. This is the type of bold effort that Secretary Bowen should be leading, rather than venting her understandable frustration with private vendors at counties like San Francisco. San Franciscans should contact her at secretary.bowen@sos.ca.gov to express their deep concerns.

Steven Hill

Steven Hill is director of the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation.

Bad news for Ed Jew

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Ed Jew’s lawyer is bailing out. This can’t be good news for the suspended supervisor. Lawyer Bill Fazio cites “irreconcilable differences,” which in legalese generally means “my client wants me to do something that’s moronic or unethical and I’m not going to get caught in that swamp.” It could also mean “my client doesn’t want to pay my hourly rate anymore,” which, given the complexity and extent of Jew’s problems, isn’t a good sign either. But generally, when it’s about money the client just fires the lawyer. For Fazio to petition the court for the right to quit means things are probably going very badly.

The guy is not helping himself. I’m still convinced that if Ed Jew had resigned when all the trouble started, the San Francisco DA would have dropped the charges against him, and the feds might have just let it go. Now he’s facing serious federal charges, he’s out of office and almost certainly not coming back and he’s facing the real prospect of prison time. What, exactly, is he thinking?

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: The Sadies

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On the horn from his native Toronto, Sadies vocalist-guitarist-keyboardist Dallas Good sounds as courtly and old-world as any immaculately suited and Stetsoned gentleman picker doing time in Boys bands that go by the name of Blue Grass or Foggy Mountain. But make no mistake: Good’s combo is all about the here and now, as evidenced by its new full-length, New Seasons (Yep Roc), which nods to the fleet-fingered hillbilly hotshots of yesteryear ("What’s Left Behind") as well as ’60s-era native sons like the Dillards and the Byrds ("Yours to Discover") and roots de- and reconstructionists like guest Howe Gelb and producer Gary Louris ("Wolf Tones"). And then there’s the musician’s personal hall of fame. "So far it’s been our experience that we can appeal to audiences of drastically different musical styles," Good says, selecting his words as carefully as he might an instrument.

Everything from Black Flag to George Jones?

"Given that, bar none, those are two of my favorite artists," Good, 33, continues, perking up. "There’s no separation between my love for hardcore and country. The single greatest strength in West Coast music output is not what they did in the ’60s — that trophy would go to Texas, I’m afraid." He chuckles. "I would go with the ’80s and the SST roster. In any case, we don’t feel alienated from that audience, that’s for sure.

"We play as fast as anyone."

And they have as sensitive a touch as the Possum’s, which explains why Neko Case, John Doe, Ronnie Hawkins, and, as with their Oct. 5 show, the Mekons’ Jon Langford have asked the Sadies for backing. Such collaborators as Andre Williams, the Band’s Garth Hudson, and Jon Spencer’s Heavy Trash have also lined up to work with the group.

San Francisco will be the site of a kind of homecoming for Good and his brother, vocalist–guitarist–fiddle player Travis: their father, Bruce, is a member of the Canadian bluegrass ensemble the Good Brothers, who, coincidentally, were flown to the city by the Grateful Dead, friends from their mutual Festival Express outing, to record their 1972 debut for Columbia. "Long-haired bluegrass," Dallas describes it, adding that his father and his mother, Margaret, will join the Sadies onstage, as they did in the studio for New Seasons. "I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree." (Kimberly Chun)

THE SADIES

With Jon Langford

Fri/5, 10 p.m., $10

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

Sun/7, 11:45 a.m., free

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Star Stage

HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Smokin’ grass

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San Francisco’s biggest – and likely best – free outdoor music festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, returns for year seven, boasting such performers as Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, T Bone Burnett and friends like John Mellencamp, Los Lobos, Gillian Welch, the Knitters, Nick Lowe, Boz Scaggs and the Blue Velvet Band, the Flatlanders, Teddy Thompson, Hazel Dickens, the Mother Hips, Heartless Bastards, Steve Earle – the list goes on. Check out some of our favorites:

Bill Callaghan

Emmylou Harris

Charlie Louvin

The Mekons

John Prine

The Sadies

HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Take it sleazy

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CULT FILM Erstwhile cofounder of San Francisco’s late, lamented Werepad — a "beatnik space lounge" (among other things) — Jacques Boyreau, also a filmmaker (Candy Von Dewd), lives in Portland, Ore., these days. But he’s dropping into town again with a characteristic surprise package in the form of the Supertrash Peepshow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We’re promised a slide show and lecture revealing the "secret schools of design" in vintage exploitation movie posters and other pop ephemera, as showcased in Boyreau’s new coffee-table tome, Supertrash, a sequel to 2002’s eye-popping volume Trash. Then, to dive more deeply into the cinematic sleaze of yore, he’ll present a true rarity: the fragrantly named Fleshpot on 42nd Street, the final sexploitation epic of notorious grade-Z Staten Island auteur Andy Milligan. It was one of his few real hits — if only on the 1973 downtown grindhouse circuit — but has since become one of the least-remembered titles in an already obscure oeuvre (The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!, The Ghastly Ones), since only a single print survives.

Fleshpot juggles Milligan’s usual hysteria, misanthropy, crude technique, and ripe dialogue with more restrained, realistic aspects in line with mainstream counterculture downers of the period like The Panic in Needle Park and Go Ask Alice. Heroine Dusty (Laura Cannon, a.k.a. Diane Lewis) is a morally lax looker who splits when her latest sugar daddy asks her to, like, pick up after herself. She thus goes from "playing house with some guy in Queens" to playing house with a real queen: blond-fright-wigged Cherry (Neil Flanagan), a tranny hooker pal who says, "Why don’t we join forces? We could both turn quite a few each night if we play our cards right!"

Swapping abusive, money-pinching tricks, these two indelicate souls are well matched: she’s a petty thief who hates sex but would rather trick than work a regular job, and he’s an even crasser soul who sobs, "I’m no prize package: a cocksucker — not even a good one. Too weird to be called a man, too old to try and look like one!" It’s a shock when Dusty meets a guy who’s nice, employed, and genuinely likes her — Bob, played by no less than Deep Throat porn legend Harry Reems. Of course, in the Milligan universe this rare glimpse of happiness (let alone good, consensual intercourse) is doomed to end tragically. Lurid, lively, and cheap as a back-alley BJ, Fleshpot embodies a particular brand of movie entertainment that you can’t get anymore in a public space. When it’s over, you’ll want to be hosed off.

SUPERTRASH PEEPSHOW

Thurs/4, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Gay times

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A series of slide projections cycling through a gamut of theater posters greets audiences taking their seats at Theatre Rhinoceros’s 30th season opener. Ranging in design from the openly trashy to the quietly tony, many of these posters offer eye-catching portions of skin and equally intriguing titles: Cocksucker: A Love Story, Deporting the Divas, Pogey Bait, Show Ho, Intimate Details, Barebacking, and Hillbillies on the Moon. It adds up to a hefty if scantily clad body of work that owes its existence to a good extent to the advent of Theatre Rhinoceros. Begun in 1977 by Alan Estes in a SoMa leather bar with a production of Doric Wilson’s The West Street Gang, the Rhino today is the longest-running LGBT theater in the country.

Thirty years like these call for a moment of reflection, and the Rhino’s lasts a brisk and enjoyable 70 minutes. Conceived and directed by John Fisher, who became artistic director in 2002, Theatre Rhinoceros: The First Thirty Years takes a jaunty look back at a raucous, at times traumatic, but overall remarkable theatrical career intimately tied to the social and political history of the queer community. While making no attempt to be exhaustive, or exhausting, Fisher’s swift, celebratory pastiche (with dramaturgy by actor and associate artistic director Matt Weimer) neatly suggests the range of artistic output and the sweep of events and personalities that have gone into defining the theater and its times.

The bulk of the show comprises a choice selection of scenes and songs from productions past (with some original compositions and arrangements by Don Seaver and snazzy choreography by Angeline Young), put on by a capable five-person ensemble, all but one veterans of previous Rhino shows. Sporadically introduced by Fisher — who as MC strikes the right note at once, with a deadpan motorized entrance onto a stage decked out (by designer John Lowe) in a shimmering red glitter curtain worthy of Cher or Merv Griffin — the selections progress more or less chronologically, though the cast leads off with a rendition of "Dirty Dreams of a Clean-Cut Kid," from the musical of the same name by lyricist Henry Mach and composer Paul Katz, which was a hit for the Rhino in 1990. It’s an apt piece to introduce part one of the show, "Coming Out/Living Out," the first of four sections charting the development of the theater and its audience.

Other highlights include a scene from Theresa Carilli’s Dolores Street, an early lesbian-themed play that marked the Rhino’s (at the time somewhat controversial) turn to more inclusive queer programming. It’s a still tart and funny comedy about the relationships in a young lesbian household in San Francisco, at least judging by the scene expertly reproduced by Laurie Bushman and Alice Pencavel.

The live sequences come interspersed with videotaped interviews of Rhino founders and associates, including Lanny Baugniet, P.A. Cooley, Donna Davis, and Tom Ammiano. The cast also reads excerpts from letters to the theater from subscribers and some well-known playwrights, most offering praise and thanks, others caviling at the quality of a specific production, expressing indignation over liberties taken with a script, or offering resistance to the changes in programming that opened the stage to lesbian themes and, eventually, many other queer voices. (It’s indicative of how far things have come that a letter like this last one, which pointed to once serious divisions in the larger gay community, elicited only comfortable laughter from the opening night’s audience.)

In part two, "AIDS," the ensemble re-creates highlights from the Rhino’s historic long-running revue, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival. A collaborative venture between 20 Bay Area artists and an unprecedented, defiantly upbeat response to the terrifying onset of the AIDS crisis, the show took aim at the still largely repressed issue of safe sex through such numbers as Karl Brown and Matthew McQueen’s cheeky sizzler "Rimmin’ at the Baths" and their equally clever and forthright "Safe Livin’ in Dangerous Times" (both beautifully rendered by the full cast of Theatre Rhinoceros), as well as the terrible toll in drastically foreshortened lives (seen here from the perspective of a mother, affectingly played by Bushman, in Adele Prandini’s "Momma’s Boy"). The AIDS Show, which went on to tour the country and put the Rhino on the national map, premiered to packed houses in 1984, the year its creator and Rhino founder Estes died of the disease.

This show’s parts three and four deal with the growing diversity of voices and issues in the years of relative liberation and mainstream exposure for the LGBT population. A scene from Brad Erickson’s Sexual Irregularities (played by Weimer and Kim Larsen) broaches the conflict between homosexuality and religion, a theme increasingly explored in new work for the stage, while one from Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas (played by Larsen and Mike Vega) points to the increasing presence of minority voices, reporting on the gay experience from the perspectives of particular ethnic subcultures.

In the postmodern micropolitics of sexual identity characteristic of the new millennium (and spoofed hilariously by Weimer, Larsen, and Vega in a scene from Fisher’s Barebacking), queer theater is characterized by increasingly hybrid categories and a plethora of voices from all sectors of experience. The cast sums up the road thus far with a characteristically proud and wry glance at the possibilities ahead in the show’s final, original number, "The Rhino" (by Seaver, with lyrics by Weimer). But, to invoke an older song, anything goes.

THEATRE RHINOCEROS: THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS

Through Oct. 14

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7 p.m.; $15–$35

Theatre Rhinoceros

2926 16th St., SF

(415) 861-5079

www.therhino.org

Cecilia’s story

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In an age of assembly-line careers and endless credentialing, it’s good to be reminded that life itself is a credential. Cecilia Chiang didn’t go to cooking school or restaurateur school; she didn’t even reach these shores until she was 40 years old and didn’t open her famous restaurant, The Mandarin, until she was 44, in 1964. These facts do not mean she was a slacker or late bloomer. They do hint at drama, and that drama unfolds in the pages of Chiang’s new book, The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco (Ten Speed, 256 pages, $35), a singular combination of personal and gastronomic history richly laced with recipes from a restaurant that forever changed the tenor of Chinese cooking in San Francisco.

Chiang was born in 1920, and the Japanese invaded China in 1931, which means that, from early girlhood well into adulthood, her life was lived in a world churning with conflict: soldiers of the occupying Japanese rifling roughly through the family house, long overland flights to tenuous safe havens, even a postwar sojourn in the enemy capital, Tokyo, where Chiang politely tried sushi for the first time and found she liked it.

Chiang’s story is a gripping one. War is not, after all, a television show or a sequence of reports in the gray pages of newspapers; it’s a reality quite beyond the imaginings of everyday folk living everyday lives, at least until it engulfs those lives, which never happens here, or at least it hasn’t yet. But did Chiang’s youthful experiences — of fear, loss, flight, renewal — make her a better restaurateur?

The book sheds only indirect light on this question, but we can make some guesses. Like many immigrants, she saw the possibilities this country offered, and she was old enough, and had access to enough resources, to seize her chance when she saw it. And she took little for granted; she worked such long hours, in fact, that for her 50th birthday, her children bought her a bicycle, a red Schwinn, because, as her daughter explained, "you’ve been working so hard lately and we thought you needed a little exercise, a little something fun to do outside the restaurant."

I wish Chiang had not given her recipe for shark fin soup, an unconscionable dish. In this land of plenty, the occasional sacrifice is in order.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Guards hit streets

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› news@sfbg.com

More than 100 security guards from more than 20 buildings in the Financial District, including the Transamerica Building, participated in a three-day unfair-labor-practices strike before returning to work Sept. 27 as contract talks resumed.

After three months of working without a contract, security guards are seeking higher wages and access to affordable health care to be able to support their families, as well as proper training for the safety of buildings and their occupants.

Service Employees International Union Local 24/7 representatives were mostly pleased with the job action, although the union had to defend three guards who were locked out as the strike ended. Universal Protection Services had planned to permanently replace security officers Robert Ravare, Kevin Coleman, and Jesusa Villena, but the issue has since been resolved, and the three employees returned to work on the morning of Sept. 28.

Abbas Emady, a security guard for Universal, told the Guardian he resents security companies for not providing adequate training for their employees, which devalues the important role guards are likely to play in a disaster. And low wages and poor benefits exacerbate the problem by creating high turnover rates for guards.

"If there’s a terrorist attack or a fire, we’re the first to go," said Bobby Randall, who works for Securitas as a security guard at the 50 Fremont high-rise. Without sufficient training, security guards may have difficulty assisting police and firefighters in an emergency, a point the local police and firefighters unions reinforced with votes of support for the strike.

Security guards risk their lives to protect multibillion-dollar properties, yet they don’t receive the same wages or health coverage as janitors, window washers, parking attendants, or operating engineers who work in the same buildings. In fact, a security guard with two and half years of experience only makes $11.85 an hour, while a janitor with the same experience makes $17.05 an hour, according to the SEIU. A union-run "Justice for Janitors" organizing campaign a few years ago helped that group make progress.

"It’s an unacceptable double standard," SEIU Local 24/7 spokesperson Gina Bowers said.

Armando Yepez, who participated in the strike, told us he works two full-time jobs as a security guard, at a downtown high-rise and at a construction site, in order to pay for housing and other expenses. Yepez commutes between his home in Richmond and his job locations in San Francisco five times a week, leaving him with less than five hours of sleep each night.

Security officers often find themselves paying for medical expenses out of their own pockets because their health insurance does not cover all of their needs and does not provide family benefits.

On Jan. 1 security guards were offered a free but severely limited health plan with Aetna, which has a cap of $4,000 for outpatients. For Sue Trayling, a security guard working for Securitas, all it took was one night in the emergency room and a couple of doctor’s appointments to max out her Aetna plan. Trayling clocks in 421/2 hours a week yet still had to dish out $2,400 in cash to pay for additional medical expenses.

According to Trayling, security guards were offered health care plans with Kaiser Permanente for $26 per month before Jan. 1. Since then, however, premiums have gone up to about $140 per month, and the copayment has doubled from $20 to $40 per visit.

The first strike among private security officers in San Francisco found some official support — the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution Sept. 25 in favor of the security guards. Sup. Tom Ammiano stood before a small crowd of workers clad in purple T-shirts on the steps of City Hall and expressed the city’s support for higher wages, affordable health insurance, and proper training.

Mayor Gavin Newsom also issued a statement saying, "I urge the involved parties to work more diligently towards a fair and reasonable settlement — one that recognizes the economic concerns of the workers while at the same time respect[ing] the employers’ need for operating flexibility within the wide range of facilities in which they provide security services."

Newsom also asked commercial-building owners and managers to involve themselves in the negotiation process with the security companies in order to set new industry standards. The Building Owners and Managers Association did not return our call seeking comment on the strike and related issues.

The crime of being homeless

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Sleeping in the park, urinating in public, blocking the sidewalk, trespassing, drinking in public — these and about 10 other infractions are commonly and collectively known as "quality of life" crimes because they affect the condition of the common spaces we all share in San Francisco.

For a homeless individual, they’re also called "status" crimes, committed in the commons because there is no private place to sleep, go to the bathroom, or crack a beer. For years the District Attorney’s Office hasn’t bothered to allocate time or resources to prosecute these petty crimes, and advocates for the rights of homeless people have contended that to do so results in unfair persecution of those who have no place to call home.

Elisa Della-Piana is an attorney with the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and has spent much of the past three years in traffic court arguing against fines for homeless people who have received quality-of-life citations. As of this summer, Della-Piana said things have changed down at the Hall of Justice.

Now every time she stands up to represent a homeless person in traffic court, someone from the DA’s Office gets up too, fighting for the other side. Though there’s no way to tell from the traffic court calendar if the defendant is homeless, Della-Piana and Christina Brown, another attorney who represents through the Lawyer’s Committee, have witnessed prosecutors ignore quality-of-life citations that didn’t appear to have been collected by homeless people.

"When the person is homeless and the DA stands up and prosecutes, that’s selective prosecution. They’ve done that in the past with other populations in San Francisco," Jenny Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness said, citing historic crackdowns on queers and Asians.

Deputy district attorney Paul Henderson denied the DA’s Office is selectively prosecuting only quality-of-life citations received by homeless individuals. "We’re prosecuting all of them," he told the Guardian, confirming this is a new task for the office. "In the past the DA’s Office wasn’t staffed to have people in the courtroom. I think we’re there every day now." He said more staff has been hired, and a team he heads is now devoted to the issue.

When asked why this was a new priority for the DA’s Office, Henderson said, "We felt that people weren’t getting the help they needed. The public’s interest wasn’t being served. [These issues] were not getting addressed in the traffic court without the DA being there. Neighborhoods and communities have been complaining about the lack of responsiveness, and so we’re trying to address that."

Henderson called the day in court an open door for a homeless person to walk through and access services. "We want to handle them responsibly to make sure there’s some accountability for breaking the law, but try to do it in a way that’s an intervention."

But advocates for homeless rights say that’s not what happens.

"They’ll tell you we’re there to offer services to homeless individuals," Della-Piana said. "Which is a piece of paper. In fact, what they have is the same list of services the police pass out. They’re not actually doing anything to connect people to the services. They’re just offering the list. They could offer those services in the street. There’s no reason to go through the court system."

This list of homeless resources is updated every six months by the San Francisco Police Department’s Operation Outreach and is offered on the street, according to Lt. David Lazar, leader of the 20-officer branch of the SFPD that interfaces directly with the homeless population.

"The accountability is a problem, and the process they go through is not working," Lazar said. "There’s a large population we’re seeing that doesn’t want services." He listed three reasons: inadequacies in the shelter system, a desire to be left alone, and a mental health or substance abuse problem that impairs judgment. "If we could house absolutely everyone, what would they do during the daytime?" he asked. "You need intensive case management, job support, substance abuse support."

But homeless-rights advocates say the stability of housing is the first step toward improving the quality of life for the homeless. Della-Piana said, "Ninety-five percent of my clients come to me and say, ‘I’m getting social services.’ They point to something on the list and say, ‘I’m doing this.’ They’re doing everything they’re supposed to be doing, but they don’t have housing yet. That’s why people are still sleeping in the park."

Henderson said critics of the new tack "aren’t recognizing that laws are being broken. People’s qualities of life are being dragged down by these violations. If it’s your street, your door, and there’s feces on it every day, that affects your quality of life."

Ticketing the homeless is not a new thing. Two homeless-rights groups — Religious Witness with Homeless People and the Coalition on Homelessness — have a standing Freedom of Information Act request with San Francisco Superior Court that provides a monthly tally of the infractions likely committed primarily by homeless people. According to their data, for the past 15 years the SFPD has averaged about 13,000 quality-of-life citations per year. Last year Religious Witness released a study showing that more than 31,000 citations had been issued during Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration.

"For the police, the sheriff, and the court cost, we estimated it cost almost $6 million for those 31,000 citations," said Sister Bernie Galvin, executive director of Religious Witness. Galvin said a new study, to be released at City Hall on Oct. 4, shows that citations and costs have skyrocketed in the past 14 months. "Now we’re putting in the dramatic new expense of the DA," she said, adding, "Everyone wants to prosecute a greater number. It’s like it makes it justifiable to issue these 31,000 tickets if we can prosecute them. Actually, it makes it crueler and more expensive."

Media reports have characterized the tickets as empty pieces of paper, issued and then metaphorically shredded when a homeless individual fails to pay the $50 to $500 fine. In a recent San Francisco Chronicle story, Heather Knight reported that "all quality of life citations are getting dismissed." Yet when they don’t — and violators either don’t show up in court or can’t pay the fine — infractions become misdemeanors or an arrest warrant is issued, both of which become problems for people trying to access services.

"It backfires," said Christina Brown, an associate at O’Melveny and Myers who volunteers time in traffic court representing homeless people through the Lawyer’s Committee. "When people are served with warrants, they’re precluded from services." Even if the person cuts a deal with the DA to access services in lieu of paying a fine, they still have to return to court to prove they’ve done that. If they can’t get the paperwork or can’t make it to the court in time, it becomes a misdemeanor.

"The criminal justice system is actually making it harder if they want to find somewhere else to sleep," said Della-Piana, who related an anecdote of a client who had a few open-container infractions. The client was afraid to go to court when she couldn’t pay the fines, so a warrant was issued. She’d spent the past seven years on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s waiting list for public housing and got kicked off because of the misdemeanor.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi expressed concern that a dragnet is being created for arresting homeless people committing status crimes they have no control over. "We have to be very careful we’re not trying to legislate services through the criminal justice system. We do too much of that already," he said. "This approach assumes that if a person is in trouble, they’re more likely to accept the services. I haven’t seen that is true."

Henderson doesn’t necessarily agree that the criminal justice system shouldn’t play a role in assisting homeless people: "I want this citation to serve as a wake-up call for you." He thinks people need to be held accountable and would like to see the city adopt the plan for a Community Justice Center, modeled after New York City’s, a vision that his boss, District Attorney Kamala Harris, and Newsom also share.

"We believe San Francisco has a unique infrastructure and need for the Community Justice Center. That’s why we are proposing to pilot this initiative in the Tenderloin and South of Market area, where more than a third of the city’s quality of life offenses occur," Harris and Newsom wrote in a May 13 editorial in the Chronicle. "The center promises to give relief to the neighborhoods most affected by quality of life crimes."

During an Oct. 1 endorsement interview with the Guardian, Newsom said he hoped to open the new center by December. Lazar, who sits on the committee that’s still hammering out the details for how exactly the center would work, agreed with Henderson that it’s the next step in more direct connection with services: "We’re trying to put the criminal justice system and the social justice system together."

Della-Piana said this still ignores the black marks that misdemeanors leave, which become good reasons for some service providers to save their limited resources for people with clean records. "The two ideologies don’t mesh," Della-Piana said. "My homeless clients want housing. There currently is not enough of it to go around. Arresting them instead of citing them for sleeping and other basic life activities will not change the availability of the most needed services."

Green City: PG&E’s two faces

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY If Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is really working to become "the nation’s greenest utility," as it claims, why is it opposing more renewable energy in California? Pending legislation — which PG&E opposes — would require a larger percentage of the state’s energy to be produced from renewable resources by 2020.

The fact that PG&E is against Senate Bill 411 doesn’t jibe with its self-proclaimed goal of going green. Current law — established as the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) — requires investor-owned utilities like PG&E to procure at least 20 percent of their energy from renewable resources by the end of 2010. SB 411 would increase the amount of required renewable energy to 33 percent by 2020. It makes sense that a green-aspiring company would want to support renewable-energy generation, right?

Yet PG&E is struggling to meet the current deadline of 20 percent by 2010, as the Guardian reported in "Green Isn’t PG&E" (4/18/07) and San Francisco Chronicle business reporter David R. Baker wrote Sept. 27. By way of explanation, Baker wrote, "California currently doesn’t have enough windmills, solar panels, and geothermal fields to do the job."

Jim Metropulos, legislative representative for Sierra Club California, told us the issue is one not of resources but of priorities. "PG&E has continued to make investments in fossil-fuel generation while not investing as much as they should in renewables." In other words, PG&E is in danger of not meeting the RPS deadline — and actively opposing more renewable energy generation in our state — because it’s been choosing to put its money elsewhere (such as front-page "Green is …" ads in the Chronicle and other campaigns to greenwash its image and fight public power).

PG&E did not return our phone calls seeking comment, but the "opposition argument" against SB 411 listed on the California Senate Web site reads, in part, "Opponents argue the bill … eliminates opportunities for utilities to identify potentially less costly means of meeting requirements."

This is a seemingly innocuous sentence, but it brings to mind another piece of pending legislation, Assembly Bill 809, that is currently on the governor’s desk, awaiting his signature. This bill would enable utilities to meet the current requirement of 20 percent by 2010 by changing the legal definition of renewable energy. AB 809 would effectively dilute the definition of renewable and give investor-owned utilities renewable credit for power generated by environmentally destructive large dams.

Under current law, hydroelectric plants that produce fewer than 30 megawatts meet the standards of renewable. AB 809 would extend the definition of renewable to include larger hydro plants that implement "efficiency improvements."

Instead of investing in legitimately sustainable means of producing energy, PG&E seeks to water down the standards and gain RPS credit for already existing hydroelectric plants. Nice way to cut costs, eh? As Metropulos puts it, "PG&E supports AB 809 since they get a lot of power from hydro."

Again, the question at hand is: if PG&E is seeking the title of "the nation’s greenest utility," why is it working against green energy in California?

Aliza Wasserman of Green Guerrillas Against Green Washing said the answer is simple: "Their actions are blatantly hypocritical." She sees PG&E as a duplicitous entity, pandering to the public with its "Let’s green this city" marketing blitz while simultaneously lobbying against renewable energy.

Wasserman notes that while PG&E is touting itself as a friend of the environment and sponsoring "every environmental event and organization in town to appear green," it only generates 1 percent of its energy from solar and less than 2 percent from wind. Comparatively, 24 percent of its energy is from nuclear generation, an energy source that produces toxic by-products and harms aquatic ecosystems.

SB 411 comes up for vote again in January 2008, pending a feasibility report by the California Energy Commission. "This is a critical moment in history," Wasserman says. "Are our legislators going to sell out or step up?"

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Injunction dysfunction

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› news@sfbg.com

When seven people were shot in the span of 12 hours in June at the Friendship Village and Yerba Buena Plaza East housing complexes in the Western Addition, city and community leaders decided immediate action was necessary to remedy the increasing level of gang violence.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who represents the area, demanded 24-hour police patrols as a temporary measure. Rev. Regnaldo Woods of Bethel AME had a broader vision — get the gangs to call a truce. But City Attorney Dennis Herrera already had his own plan well in the works, a controversial approach that has nonetheless been embraced at City Hall by leaders desperate for solutions to the intractable and escautf8g problem of gun violence.

Herrera and his staff in July announced they were seeking civil gang injunctions in the Western Addition and the Mission District modeled on a similar effort last year against the Oakdale Mob in Bayview–Hunters Point. He went after alleged members of the Norteña gang in the Mission and targeted three gangs in the Western Addition, all centered on Eddy Street and the public housing complexes that stretch from Gough to Divisadero: Eddy Rock, Chopper City, and Knock Out Posse.

Two Superior Court judges, Patrick Mahoney and Peter Busch, heard arguments for and against the injunctions Sept. 18 and are expected to issue rulings at any time. The injunctions would prevent the alleged gang members they name from associating with one another within a prescribed area, among other restrictions.

The injunctions have pitted Herrera and his allies against Public Defender Jeff Adachi, civil liberties advocates, and some community groups, who have rallied to stop the injunctions and criticize them as a "criminalization of people of color," a charge Herrera stridently rejects and has publicly condemned as "race-baiting."

But beyond the emotional politics of this controversial tactic, there are some practical problems with the injunctions, particularly in the Western Addition, where they may stifle community-based solutions to the problem of gang violence.

"[The injunctions] slowed us down considerably," Woods, a life-long Fillmore resident, told the Guardian. "It’s going to impact the movement if it stays as it is. I think there needs to be changes."

Woods and other leaders from Bethel and from his nonprofit, Up from Darkness, met with the gang members a total of 43 times throughout the summer. When word of the injunctions spread, Woods said he had to restart from square one. Rather than bring people together for a dialogue, he had to explain why this was happening, what the injunctions meant, and how the injunctions would affect those included.

Woods planned to hold a summit, which "shot callers" from each of the gangs would attend and at which they would call a truce as well as receive access to employment guidance and mental health services. The summit never happened, but gang violence in the Western Addition nevertheless decreased rapidly in the following months. Northern Police District Capt. Croce Casciato said there hasn’t been a gang-related homicide in the district since May.

The American Civil Liberties Union says the injunctions will strip alleged gang members of due-process rights and give police a roving warrant to harass whomever they deem a gang member. Adachi and Kendra Fox-Davis, of the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, said their offices have received numerous complaints from youths in the Mission and the Western Addition that police are already using the injunctions to hassle people even before they’ve been approved.

"There’s been a tremendous amount of misinformation about the injunctions," Adachi said. He questions the effectiveness of injunctions and said these give police carte blanche to harass anyone they suspect of being affiliated with gangs. His biggest issue, though, is the fact that the alleged members don’t have the necessary resources to contest the label.

Herrera derided the racial implications levied by Adachi, and in an e-mail to us, press secretary Matt Dorsey wrote, "The fact is, the debate over these proposed injunctions — most especially the one in the Mission — has been characterized by increasingly dishonest and inflammatory rhetoric. This isn’t just someone’s innocent misunderstanding, either: ‘the criminalization of people of color’ is wildly misrepresentative, and it’s deliberate."

Herrera acknowledges people’s concerns, but he stands by his decision.

"I really wish it wasn’t necessary that it has come to this point where I say, ‘Hey, this is a tool we have to pursue,’" Herrera told us. "But the facts are the facts. We have a gang problem in San Francisco. I think I’d be neglecting my responsibility if I didn’t bring another tool to the table to help address the issue."

Woods doesn’t raise the same racial concerns that Adachi does, and he isn’t too animated about the civil liberties issues. To him, the injunctions are just too broad and counterproductive to the community-based approaches that have the best chance of addressing the problem. He thinks the gang members themselves must help solve the problems they’ve created.

"It’s us getting together every day and doing something positive," said Steve Johnson, a 27-year-old targeted member of Eddy Rock, which claims the Plaza East housing complex as its turf. "It has nothing to do with the injunction. We’re trying to get all the different complexes in the Western Addition together."

Paris Moffet, the alleged leader of Eddy Rock, added, "We’re the only ones stopping the violence. We needed to. We are going to stop this."

It may come as a surprise that reputed gang members might be helping to stop the violence that was once a part of their daily lives, and several members of Eddy Rock acknowledged they have a long way to go in reshaping their images.

But, they say, they are committed to reforming themselves, and they recently held a barbecue at the complex parking lot to display some of their positive work. In the small community center at Plaza East — locally known as the OC, for "Outta Control" — Eddy Rock, with the help of Woods and others, has created Open Arms, a nonprofit geared toward educating the younger kids in the complex about staying in school and computer literacy.

Asked about the sudden turnabout by Eddy Rock, Marquez Shaw, a 26-year-old alleged member of the gang, explained that the level of violence at Plaza East had taken its toll on everyone, not just uninvolved residents. "[The violence] affected me, very much so," he said. "There’s been more bloodshed here than anywhere else in the community. We’re the only ones man enough to do something."

But Herrera said the recent relative quiet in the area doesn’t make up for more than five years of chaos. "Has there been a lull? Yeah," he said. "But earlier in the summer there were some brazen shootings. June isn’t that long ago."

Woods acknowledged that the members shouldn’t be given a free pass, considering their troubled past. "They’re not angels," he said. "But let’s try to help them before they go to prison. That way you might save the old lady’s life. You might save a youngster’s life. If they had something to do, they wouldn’t do the shootings."

At the Aug. 14 Eddy Rock barbecue, about 50 or so people from the Plaza East complex snacked on ribs, chicken, hot links, and spaghetti. Two beat officers from the Northern Station stood in the distance and oversaw an impromptu football game between juveniles and alleged gang members.

A clipping of a newspaper article hangs on the wall in the community center; it’s about how director Spike Lee is urging inner-city youths to make films about their experience growing up with violence and to use the Internet to broadcast them to others.

Given a camera, Shaw has done just that. During a recent visit to Plaza East, he was using iMovie to edit a video that he planned to post on YouTube. On the video, an older black man says, "Now it’s time to look at what’s going on, not what’s happened in the past."

Nas’s "I Know I Can" plays on Hannibal Thompson’s video as he flatly explains how the area is deprived of proper resources and lacks preventative measures. Thompson, a 20-year-old named in one of the injunctions as a member of Eddy Rock, says six of his friends have been murdered since 2005 — three of them less than a block away, at Eddy and Laguna, where cameras affixed to streetlights are meant to deter criminal activity. He said increased police presence and the work of Woods have led to the decrease in violence, something he embraces.

"The best thing that ever happened to this community was the 24-hour police patrol. That’s way better than the injunction," he said. "They should have done that years ago."

Casciato doesn’t doubt that Eddy Rock, which has terrorized residents for years, might have turned the corner. But he calls the injunctions one additional tool to fight the long-term battle against gang violence. Casciato said it was too soon to tell how an injunction would affect regular police procedure. Like others in the community, though, he emphasized the effectiveness of outreach work.

"There has been a great collaborative effort on the community’s part," Casciato said. On gang members reforming themselves, he said, "I’m sure they did. Success is going to come from within, not from the outside. All our efforts are for naught if there’s no buy-in."

Under the current terms of the injunctions, the aforementioned barbecue would be prohibited, since it involved literally the whole gang. The targeted individuals could freely associate with one another inside the community center but would need to go in and out separately, which critics say is not a realistic scenario. If targeted members violate the injunctions, they can be charged with misdemeanors and put in jail for up to five days.

The injunction tactic "undermines antiviolence efforts of community advocates and organizations working in the Western Addition, like Woods, by effectively preventing the individuals most in need of support services from participating in them," Fox-Davis wrote in an e-mail.

Herrera and his deputies submitted more than 4,000 pages of evidence, including expert declarations from the gang task force, which detailed the reign of terror of the three gangs. He said they’ve been careful to name only shot callers in the injunctions and to carefully detail the case against them.

Fox-Davis and other critics contend the Western Addition injunction is too broad, unlike the first one in Oakdale, which only covered four square blocks. A total of 15 blocks are designated as the "safety zone" in the Western Addition, stretching from Eddy and Gough in the east to Eddy and Webster in the west, bordered by Turk and Ellis to the north and south, for Eddy Rock.

For Chopper City and KOP — which had in the past aligned themselves against Eddy Rock — the safety zone is a six-block area north of Turk to Ellis, between Divisadero and Steiner, which includes the Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King housing complexes. In Bayview, only one of 22 targeted members lived in the housing complex, whereas a total of seven of 19 identified members of Eddy Rock live within that purposed safety zone, according to the City Attorney’s Office.

"The restrictions that are proposed in this injunction go far beyond what is necessary to address the nuisance the city attorney claims is being caused by gang violence," Fox-Davis said.

But Herrera says the "nuisance" amounts to communities being terrorized by violence and his office would be remiss to not address the problem. A total of 11 homicides in three years have been linked to the three Western Addition gangs, according to court documents.

"I’ve never been one to say we should be dissuading communities from being involved and trying find solutions and making contributions to solving the problem. To me it’s not mutually exclusive. It’s not an either-or proposition. I think it’s important that we get the community to be a vital stakeholder in trying to stem the tide of violence," Herrera said. "But there has to be accountability."

To quell critics’ concerns, Herrera said his office has included numerous safeguards, including training cops to properly enforce the injunctions. Targeted members also have a "buyout option," meaning if they can prove that they are no longer involved in gang activity, they can appeal to have their names removed from the list.

Herrera points to the perceived success of the injunction in Bayview as proof that the tactic is effective in restoring calm and peace to neighborhoods once plagued with murder. Herrera also notes that the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution almost unanimously that supported injunctions by the city attorney.

Mirkarimi, however, said his support of the current injunctions being sought was "tentative at best" and said he considered them "an act of desperation." He too said community work and traditional police enforcement — like the 24-hour patrols — are better ways of addressing the root causes of gang violence.

The alleged members of Eddy Rock agree.

"We just need something to do," said Maurice Carter, 32. "We did the crime, we did the time. Now we just want a second chance."

Endorsements: Local ballot measures

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Proposition A (transit reform)

YES


This omnibus measure would finally put San Francisco in a position to create the world-class transportation system that the city needs to handle a growing population and to address environmental problems ranging from climate change to air pollution. And in the short term it would help end the Muni meltdown by giving the system a much-needed infusion of cash, about $26 million per year, and more authority to manage its myriad problems.

The measure isn’t perfect. It would give a tremendous amount of power to the unelected Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a semiautonomous agency created in 1999 to reform Muni. But we also understand the arguments of Sup. Aaron Peskin — who wrote the measure in collaboration with labor and other groups — that the MTA is free to make tough decisions that someone facing reelection might avoid. And the measure still would give the Board of Supervisors authority to block the MTA’s budget, fare increases, and route changes with seven votes.

We’re also a little worried about provisions that could place the Taxicab Commission under the MTA’s purview and allow the agency to tinker with the medallion system and undermine Proposition K, the 1978 law that gives operating permits to working drivers, not corporations. Peskin promised us, on tape, that he will ensure, with legislation if necessary, that no such thing happens, and we’ll hold him to it.

Ultimately, the benefits of this measure outweigh our concerns. The fact that the labor movement has signed off on expanded management powers for the MTA shows how important this compromise is. The MTA would have the power to fully implement the impending recommendations in the city’s Transit Improvement Project study and would be held accountable for improvements to Muni’s on-time performance. New bonding authority under the measure would also give the MTA the ability to quickly pursue capital projects that would allow more people to comfortably use public transit.

The measure would also create an integrated transportation system combining everything from parking to cabs to bike lanes under one agency, which would then be mandated to find ways to roll back greenhouse gas emissions from transportation sources to 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2012. And to do that, the agency would get to keep all of the revenue generated by its new programs. As a side benefit — and another important reason to vote for Prop. A — approval of this measure would nullify the disastrous Proposition H on the same ballot.

San Francisco faces lots of tough choices if we’re going to minimize climate change and maximize the free flow of people through our landlocked city. Measure A is an important start. Vote yes.

Proposition B (commission holdovers)

YES


Proposition B is a simple good-government measure that ends a practice then-mayor Willie Brown developed into a science — allowing commissioners to continue serving after their terms expire, turning them into at-will appointments and assuring their loyalty.

Members of some of the most powerful commissions in town serve set four-year terms. The idea is to give the members, many appointed by the mayor, some degree of independence: they can’t be fired summarily for voting against the interests (or demands) of the chief executive.

But once their terms expire, the mayor can simply choose not to reappoint or replace them, leaving them in limbo for months, even years — and while they still sit on the commissions and vote, these holdover commissioners can be fired at any time. So their jobs depend, day by day, on the whims of the mayor.

Prop. B, sponsored by the progressives on the Board of Supervisors, simply would limit to 60 days the amount of time a commissioner can serve as a holdover. After that period, the person’s term would end, and he or she would have to step down. That would force the mayor to either reappoint or replace commissioners in a timely manner — and help give these powerful posts at least a chance at independence. Vote yes.

Proposition C (public hearings on proposed measures)

NO


Proposition C sure sounds good: it would mandate that the supervisors hold a hearing 45 days in advance before putting any measure on the ballot. The mayor would have to submit proposed ballot measures for hearings too. That would end the practice of last-minute legislation; since four supervisors can place any ordinance on the ballot (and the mayor can do the same), proposals that have never been vetted by the public and never subjected to any prior discussion often wind up before the voters. Sometimes that means the measures are poorly written and have unintended consequences.

But this really isn’t a good-government measure; it’s a move by the Chamber of Commerce and downtown to reduce the power of the district-elected supervisors.

The 1932 City Charter gave the supervisors the power to place items before the voters as a check on corruption. In San Francisco it’s been used as a check on downtown power. In 1986, for example, activists gathered enough voter signatures to place Proposition M, a landmark measure controlling downtown development, on the ballot. But then–city attorney Louise Renne, acting on behalf of downtown developers, used a ridiculous technicality to invalidate it. At the last minute, the activists were able to get four supervisors to sign on — and Prop. M, one of the most important pieces of progressive planning legislation in the history of San Francisco, ultimately won voter approval. Under Prop. C, that couldn’t have happened.

In theory, most of the time, anything that goes on the ballot should be subject to public hearings. Sometimes, as in the case of Prop. M, that’s not possible.

We recognize the frustration some groups (particularly small businesses) feel when legislation gets passed without any meaningful input from the people directly affected. But it doesn’t require a strict ballot measure like Prop. C to solve the problem. The supervisors should adopt rules mandating public hearings on propositions, but with a more flexible deadline and exemptions for emergencies. Meanwhile, vote no on Prop. C.

Proposition D (library preservation fund)

YES


In the 1980s and early 1990s, San Francisco mayors loved to cut the budget of the public library. Every time money was short — and money was chronically short — the library took a hit. It was an easy target. If you cut other departments (say, police or fire or Muni or public health), people would howl and say lives were in danger. Reducing the hours at a few neighborhood branch libraries didn’t seem nearly as dire.

So activists who argued that libraries were an essential public service put a measure on the ballot in 1994 that guaranteed at least a modest level of library funding. The improvements have been dramatic: branch library hours have increased more than 50 percent, library use is way up, there are more librarians around in the afternoons to help kids with their homework…. In that sense, the Library Preservation Fund has been a great success. The program is scheduled to sunset next year; Proposition D would extend it another 15 years.

If the current management of the public library system were a bit more trustworthy, this would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the library commission and staff have been resisting accountability; ironically, the library — a font of public information — makes it difficult to get basic records about library operations. The library is terrible about sunshine; in fact, activists have had to sue this year to get the library to respond to a simple public-records request (for nonconfidential information on repetitive stress injuries among library staff). And we’re not thrilled that a significant part of the library’s operating budget is raised (and controlled) by a private group, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, which decides, with no oversight by an elected official, how as much as 10 percent of library money is spent.

But libraries are too valuable and too easy a budget target to allow the Library Preservation Fund to expire. And the way to fend off creeping privatization is hardly by starving a public institution for funds. So we’ll support Prop. D.

Proposition E (mayoral attendance at Board of Supervisors meetings)

YES, YES, YES


If it feels as though you’ve already voted on this, you have: last November, by a strong majority, San Franciscans approved a policy statement calling on the mayor to attend at least one Board of Supervisors meeting each month to answer questions and discuss policy. It’s a great idea, modeled on the very successful Question Time in the United Kingdom, under which the British prime minister appears before Parliament regularly and submits to questions from all political parties. Proposition E would force the mayor to comply. Newsom, despite his constant statements about respecting the will of the voters, has never once complied with the existing policy statement. Instead, he’s set up a series of phony neighborhood meetings at which he controls the agenda and personally selects which questions he’s going to answer.

We recognize that some supervisors would use the occasion of the mayor’s appearance to grandstand — but the mayor does that almost every day. Appearing before the board once a month isn’t an undue burden; in fact, it would probably help Newsom in the long run. If he’s going to seek higher office, he’s going to have to get used to tough questioning and learn to deal with critics in a forum he doesn’t control.

Beyond all the politics, this idea is good for the city. The mayor claims he already meets regularly with members of the board, but those meetings are private, behind closed doors. Hearing the mayor and the board argue about policy in public would be informative and educational and help frame serious policy debates. Besides, as Sup. Chris Daly says, with Newsom a lock for reelection, this is the only thing on the ballot that would help hold him accountable. Vote yes on Prop. E.

Proposition F (police pensions)

YES


We really didn’t want to endorse this measure. We’re sick and tired of the San Francisco Police Officers Association — which opposed violence-prevention funding, opposed foot patrols, opposes every new revenue measure, and bitterly, often viciously, opposes police accountability — coming around, tin cup in hand, every single election and asking progressives to vote to give the cops more money. San Francisco police officers deserve decent pay — it’s a tough, dangerous job — but the starting salary for a rookie cop in this town exceeds $60,000, the benefits are extraordinarily generous, and the San Francisco Police Department is well on its way to setting a record as the highest-paid police force in the country.

Now it wants more.

But in fact, Proposition F is pretty minor — it would affect only about 60 officers who were airport cops before the airport police were merged into the SFPD in 1997. Those cops have a different retirement system, which isn’t quite as good as what they would get with full SFPD benefits. We’re talking about $30,000 a year; in the end, it’s a simple labor issue, and we hate to blame a small group of officers in one division for the serious sins of their union and its leadership. So we’ll endorse Prop. F. But we have a message for the SFPOA’s president: if you want to beat up the progressives, reject new tax plans, promote secrecy, and fight accountability, don’t come down here again asking for big, expensive benefit improvements.

Proposition G (Golden Gate Park stables)

YES


This is an odd one: Proposition G, sponsored by Sup. Jake McGoldrick, would create a special fund for the renovation of the historic (and dilapidated) horse stables in Golden Gate Park. The city would match every $3 in private donations with $1 in public money, up to a total of $750,000. The city would leverage that money with $1.2 million in state funds available for the project and fix up the stables.

Supporters, including most of the progressive supervisors, say that the stables are a historic gem and that horseback riding in the park would provide "after-school, summer and weekend activities for families and youth." That might be a bit of a stretch — keeping horses is expensive, and riding almost certainly won’t be a free activity for anyone. But the stables have been the target of privatization efforts in the past and, under Newsom, almost certainly would be again in the future; this is exactly the sort of operation that the mayor would like to turn over to a private contractor. So for a modest $750,000, Prop. G would keep the stables in public hands. Sounds like a good deal to us. Vote yes.

Proposition H (reguutf8g parking spaces)

NO, NO, NO


It’s hard to overstate just how bad this measure is or to condemn strongly enough the sleazy and deceptive tactics that led Don Fisher, Webcor, and other downtown power brokers to buy the signatures that placed what they call "Parking for the Neighborhoods" on the ballot. That’s why Proposition H has been almost universally condemned, even by downtown’s allies in City Hall, and why Proposition A includes a provision that would negate Proposition H if both are approved.

Basically, this measure would wipe out three decades’ worth of environmentally sound planning policies in favor of giving every developer and homeowner the absolute right to build a parking space for every housing unit (or two spaces for every three units in the downtown core). While that basic idea might have some appeal to drivers with parking frustrations, even they should consider the disastrous implications of this greedy and shortsighted power grab.

The city has very little leverage to force developers to offer community benefits like open space or more affordable housing, or to design buildings that are attractive and environmentally friendly. But parking spots make housing more valuable (and expensive), so developers will help the city meet its needs in order to get them. That would end with this measure, just as the absolute right to parking would eliminate things like Muni stops and street trees while creating more driveways, which are dangerous to bicyclists and pedestrians. It would flip the equation to place developers’ desires over the public interest.

Worst of all, it would reverse the city’s transit-first policies in a way that ultimately would hurt drivers and property owners, the very people it is appealing to. If we don’t limit the number of parking spots that can be built with the 10,000 housing units slated for the downtown core, it will result in traffic gridlock that will lower property values and kill any chance of creating a world-class transit system.

But by then, the developers will be off counting our money, leaving us to clean up their mess. Don’t be fooled. Vote no.

Proposition I (Office of Small Business)

YES


Proposition I got on the ballot after small-business leaders tried unsuccessfully to get the supervisors to fund a modest program to create staff for the Small Business Commission and create a one-stop shop for small-business assistance and permitting. We don’t typically support this sort of after-the-fact ballot-box budgeting request, but we’re making an exception here.

San Francisco demands a lot from small businesses. It’s an expensive place to set up shop, and city taxes discriminate against them. We supported the new rules mandating that even small operations give paid days off and in many cases pay for health insurance, but we recognize that they put a burden on small businesses. And in the end, the little operators don’t get a whole lot back from City Hall.

This is a pretty minor request: it would allocate $750,000 to set up an Office of Small Business under the Small Business Commission. The funding would be for the first year only; after that the advocates would have to convince the supervisors that it was worth continuing. Small businesses are the economic and job-generation engines of San Francisco, and this one-time request for money that amounts to less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the city budget is worthy of support. Vote yes on Prop. I.

Proposition J (wireless Internet network)

NO


It’s going to be hard to convince people to vote against this measure; as one blogger put it, the mayor of San Francisco is offering free ice cream. Anyone want to decline?

Well, yes — decline is exactly what the voters should do. Because Proposition J’s promise of free and universal wireless Internet service is simply a fraud. And the way it’s worded would ensure that our local Internet infrastructure is handed over to a private company — a terrible idea.

For starters, San Francisco has already been down this road. Newsom worked out a deal a year ago with EarthLink and Google to provide free wi-fi. But the contract had all sorts of problems: the free access would have been too slow for a lot of uses, faster access wouldn’t have been free, there weren’t good privacy protections, and the network wouldn’t have been anything close to universal. Wi-fi signals don’t penetrate walls very well, and the signals in this plan wouldn’t have reached much above the second floor of a building — so anyone who lived in an interior space above the second floor (and that’s a lot of people) wouldn’t have gotten access at all.

So the supervisors asked a few questions and slowed things down — and it’s good they did, because EarthLink suddenly had a change in its business strategy and pulled out of citywide wi-fi altogether. That’s one of the problems with using a private partner for this sort of project: the city is subject to the marketing whims of tech companies that are constantly changing their strategies as the economic and technical issues of wi-fi evolve.

San Francisco needs a municipal Internet system; it ought to be part of the city’s public infrastructure, just like the streets, the buses, and the water and sewer lines. It shouldn’t rely just on a fickle technology like wi-fi either; it should be based on fiber-optic cables. Creating that network wouldn’t be all that expensive; EarthLink was going to do it for $10 million.

Prop. J is just a policy statement and would have no immediate impact. Still, it’s annoying and wrongheaded for the mayor to try to get San Franciscans to give a vote of confidence to a project that has already crashed and burned, and Sup. Aaron Peskin, the cosponsor, should never have put his name on it. Vote no.

Proposition K (ads on street furniture)

YES


San Francisco is awash in commercialism. With all of the billboards and ads, the city is starting to feel like a giant NASCAR racer. And a lot of them come from Clear Channel Communications, the giant, monopolistic broadcast outfit that controls radio stations, billboards, and now the contract to build new bus shelters in the city with even more ads on them.

Proposition K is a policy statement, sponsored by Sup. Jake McGoldrick, that seeks to bar any further expansion of street-furniture advertising in the city. That would mean no more deals with the likes of Clear Channel to allow more lighted kiosks with ads on them — and no more new bus shelter ads. That’s got Clear Channel agitated — the company just won the 15-year bid to rebuild the city’s existing 1,200 Muni shelters, and now it wants to add 380 more. Clear Channel argues that the city would get badly needed revenue for Muni from the expanded shelters; actually, the contract already guarantees Muni a large chunk of additional funding. And nothing in Prop. K would block Clear Channel from upgrading the existing shelters and plastering ads all over them.

On a basic philosophical level, we don’t support the idea of funding Muni by selling ads on the street, any more than we would support the idea of funding the Recreation and Park Department by selling the naming rights to the Hall of Flowers or the Japanese Tea Garden or the golf courses. On a practical level, the Clear Channel deal is dubious anyway: the company, which runs 10 mostly lousy radio stations in town and gives almost nothing of value to the community, refuses to provide the public with any information on its projected profits and losses, so there’s no way to tell if the income the city would get from the expanded shelters would be a fair share of the overall revenue.

Vote yes on K.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The mayor of San Francisco stopped by Oct. 1 to tell us why we should endorse his reelection, and I walked away with a lot of information. For starters, the mayor is unhappy about a lot of things: he’s unhappy about the murder rate, he’s unhappy about Muni, he’s unhappy about the Housing Authority … he’s even unhappy about his mayoral ride (the Town Car ought to be running on alternative fuel). In the hour-long interview, he must have said he was "not satisfied" a dozen different times.

Which at least shows that he recognizes that the city has a few problems. And there’s no doubt that Gavin Newsom has come a long way in four years. He’s much more self-assured and confident in his positions.

In fact, he was argumentative a lot of the time; he kept saying he wasn’t going to accept the premises of our questions, most of which had to do with major areas in which he’s falling down on the job — Muni, violent crime, housing, open government, public power, and overall leadership, among other things. You can listen to the entire interview, unedited, here. But let me talk a bit about housing, since that’s the biggest issue in the city — and Newsom’s comments were a perfect explanation of why things are getting worse.

I asked the mayor if we are moving in the right direction on housing, since most of what the city is building is housing for the very rich, the city’s General Plan says that 64 percent of all new housing should be below market rate, and there’s absolutely no city plan to get there.

"I’m not going to accept the frame of your question," Newsom said (although he didn’t explain why).

He talked about the money (much of it federal and state) that he’s spent on affordable housing, then went on to say, "Since I’ve become mayor, we have permitted more housing than we have literally in a generation…. We’ve also been building as a consequence of that more-affordable housing. Is it 67 percent? I’m not sure it is in Chicago, New York, or LA. Maybe it is in Belgrade, [Serbia,] but I’m not sure it is in the United States, and I’m not sure any city can achieve that ambitious goal overall."

Me: "What you’re building is expensive, for-sale condos … virtually no rental, virtually no families with kids…. You’re bragging about building 6,000 new units of market-rate housing [per year], but it’s not doing anything for the city."

Newsom: "I’m not bragging about it. I’m saying we can do better and we can do more…. [But] we are not a socialist society. We cannot come in and say we are just going to build this housing without the ability to fund it."

Allow me to translate: Newsom thinks a large part of the answer to the housing crisis is to build more condos and be happy that the developers give the city a few morsels. In other words, he’s OK with a city where 80 percent of the new housing is only for the rich. And he thinks that in capitalist America, we have no other choice.

But no developer has a divine right to build anything in this town, and there are all sorts of ways to raise money for affordable housing, and blaming it all on capitalism won’t fly. I’m sorry, Mr. Mayor, but I’m just not satisfied.

Today’s Ammianoliner

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No, No, Mr. Frank. Not ATM, FTM.

(On the voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano, a supervisor who happens to be gay, commenting on the San Francisco Chronicle’s lead story on today’s front page. Headline: “GAYS ANGERED BY SCALED-BACK RIGHTS BILL, House leaders remove transgender people to improve chance of passage–most advocacy groups withdraw their support.”

The lead by Carolyn Lochhead of the Chronicle’s Washington bureau, pointed out that “leading gay organizations withdrew their support Monday from a landmark gay civil rights bill after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) pulled transgender people from the legislation that would protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination.” B3

Meet the Candidates: Chicken John Rinaldi

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The Bay Guardian is interviewing the candidates for the 2007 elections. Unfortunately, our tape recorder crapped out during our hilarious interview with Chicken John, so we can only offer his info below. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.

Chicken John Rinaldi

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Chicken John asked us to endorse him for second place. When asked if his campaign was akin to a hamster running on a wheel, Rinaldi elaborated on the twin issues that he holds dear to his heart — art and innovation — by talking about innovative ways to streamline the current complexities that artists, performers, and others must face when trying to get a permit to put on an event in San Francisco.

“I’m running for the idea of San Francisco,” Rinaldi told us, and claims to be painting a campaign logo in the style of a mural on the side of his warehouse in the Mission district. “It’s going to say, ‘Chicken, it’s what’s for Mayor,’ or ‘Chicken, the other white Mayor,” Rinaldi said.

Click here for Chicken John’s video blog

http://voteforchicken.com

Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.

Newsom loves the Navy

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I realize that the mayor of San Francisco has all sorts of reasons why he doesn’t want to offend the United States Armed Services (might embarass Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein). And I realize that past mayors have been friendly to the Blue Angels and supportive of Fleet Week as a revenue-generator for the city.

But this letter , which the folks at PRO-SF got through a sunshine request, is over the top.

Gavin Newsom, Mr. same-sex marriage, saying that “My office and the community could not be more supportive of the Navy?” You gotta be kidding.

Why North Beach works

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It’s time to piss some more people off, esp. the folks who think that highrise housing=urban density=good.

The Chronicle just announced that the American Planning Association has designated North Beach in SF as one of the best neighborhoods in American Why?

The 41,000-member organization took note of the atmospheric collage of low buildings around such historic gathering places as Grant Avenue and Washington Square. They also acknowledged the tenacious way that residents have fought to keep out chain stores and development projects that might water down “its eclectic mix of mom-and-pop shops, nightclubs and polyglot character (that) make it one of the city’s most unique and authentic communities,” according to the announcement.

What’s the message here? North Beach is dense — one of the densest parts of San Francisco. But it’s a real neighborhood, with local stores, locally owned businesses and local character.

And there are strict rules against chain stores.

Now check out the new highrises south of Market. The stores are all chains. There’s no neighborhood feel. It’s like someone dropped in a bunch of luxury hotels in a faux San Francisco setting.

If the city wants to build density, fine: But build real neighborhoods, with a mix of people, with local businesses, parks, street lfe. The highrises we’re building don’t do that.

Okay, commenters: let the attacks begin.

The Guardian 2007 Endorsements

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There’s nothing on the state or national ballot, and there’s not much of a contest in any of the three races in San Francisco. That might spell a low-turnout election. But don’t toss your absentee ballot yet or make plans to be out of town Nov. 6: the mayor’s race has some interesting challengers, and there are a number of important ballot initiatives that could change the direction of the city, particularly on transportation, for years to come.

Click below for our endorsements:

>> Local offices
Mecke, Sumchai, and Chicken John for mayor

>> Local ballot measures
YES on Prop. A, NO on Prop. H, more …..

>> Our unedited interview with Gavin Newsom

>> The Guardian 2007 Election Center
Interviews with and information about the candidates, including Quintin Mecke, Ahimsa Sumchai, Harold Hoogasian, and more. PLUS: Interviews with Chris Daly, Aaron Peskin, Jake McGoldrick and others about the issues at stake in the November 6, 2007, election.

>> Who’s endorsing whom?
Endorsements by other local political bodies

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (10/01/07)

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For a breakdown of the positions that relevant politicians are taking on the war in Iraq, visit the slate.com link below. This chart gives a brief breakdown of each listed politicians original stance on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, current stance, views on the surge, suggested solution, and whether or not they’ve ever actually been to Iraq. Click here to view.

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

In a review of the misconduct of Blackwater USA, an independent security contractor being employed to do the job of U.S. Soldiers in Iraq, the debate among American officials over how much money Blackwater USA should pay the families of Iraqi civilians murdered by Blackwater employees came up, according to the New York Times. At the end of last year the State Department and Blackwater agreed on a figure of $15,000.

654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a Johns Hopkins University study.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

74,431– 81,119: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a list of recent events that have resulted in Iraqi casualties, visit :
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/recent/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

4,075: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

122 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

To view a breakdown of U.S. military casualties by state of residence, click here.

Iraq Military:

30,000?: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

200 journalists have been killed since the start of the war in March 2003, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Refugees:

Read a first hand account of how Iraqis are being treated when attempting to enter Jordan for a vacation: http://last-of-iraqis.blogspot.com/2007/08/jail.html

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

2.2 million: Iraqis displaced internally

2 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Incessant violence across much of Iraq’s central and southern regions has forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes every month, presenting the international community with a humanitarian crisis even larger than the upheaval aid agencies had planned for during the 2003 war, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

122,000: Wounded from 3/19/03 to 8/31/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (10/01/07): So far, $456 billion for the U.S., $57 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

For more information on what the war is costing the United States visit the American Service Friends Committee website here.

“Public Financing is like Teenage Sex”

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“Public Financing is like teenage sex.”

So says Chicken John Rinaldi, who has just spent the last month running around like the proverbial headless chicken, as he tries to reconcile reality, which is messy and imperfect, with public financing law, which is rigorous and well-ordered.

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Chicken John Rinaldi back in the pre-public financing day when he and his fake moustache had time to chill out at the Temple Bar and educate people, including Fog City’s Luke Thomas, on the correct way to pronounce Ri-NAL-di

“When I was 15 years old, I was very aware of what all those girls had, but there was no chance of my getting it,” said Rinaldi, on learning that his application for public financing in the Mayor’s race has been rejected. For now.

Because, and here’s the tease, the Ethics Commission has given Rinaldi another five days to try and satisfy public financing requirements and then, maybe, just maybe, he can get a piece of it.

“I’m reminded of teenage sex, because I am experiencing the same level of frustration,” said Rinaldi, who has spent the last few weeks knocking on contributors’ doors, trying to get photocopies of their driver’s license, so he can prove that those who each gave up to $100 to his campaign actually live in San Francisco.

And then there are his pesky problems with Paypal, since some efilings took over 48 hours to post, thereby blowing public financing deadlines along the way.

“It’s not the Ethics Commission’s fault, but the way the rules are written,” added Rinaldi, who, much like a horny teenage boy, isn’t about to give up on his quest. “Of course, I’m going to refile!”

Trans discrimination sparks fight

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By Amber Peckham

One of the first waves of protest over the move in Congress to remove transgender people from an anti-discrimination bill came from the labor movement. Members of Pride at Work, an LGBT-focused labor coalition and the newest member of the AFL-CIO, held a press conference Sept 28 to announce they are withdrawing their support from the ENDA bill, and encouraging other LGBT advocacy groups to do the same.

The advocacy is having an impact – already, more than 20 LGBT organizations have come out against the move, and it’s entirely possible that the one-time landmark workplace-discrimination bill will lose almost all of queer community support.

“The need for gender provisions in this bill doesn’t apply only to those who are transgender, but also to, say, effeminate gay men, or lesbians who are ‘too butch’” said Robert Haaland, a representative of Pride at Work. “By picking and choosing who to include in their non-discrimination bill, these legislators are discriminating. It’s self-contradicting.”

“With the transgender community as arguably the most marginalized part of the LGBT community, they are really the ones who need the support of this bill the most,” added Masen Davis, a board member of the Transgender Law Center board. “Over 60% of transgenders in San Francisco are unemployed.”
Davis also expressed gratitude for the support of the labor community.
“If anyone is familiar with the ‘divide and conquer’ tactics being used on the LGBT community right now, it’s the labor movement.” he said. “It really heartens me to hear this voice of support from the labor community, because it means that maybe the bill won’t have to be divided, it can stay one, unified proposition.”

Pride at Work is calling on Pelosi to withdraw her support for the bill if transgender provisions are removed before ENDA is voted on, and is holding a vigil outside her office. If she were to do so, it is likely the bill would not pack the punch required to make it through a Congressional vote, and none of the LGBT community would benefit.

“That’s how the labor movement works; if you injure one, you injure all.” said Haaland. “And it looks like that’s how this bill is going to end up working as well.”

Veg out

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By Amber Peckham

As summer bids a fond farewell to the city, getting the most out of the few beautiful days that are left is a must. If you’re looking for an activity suitable for groups of all sizes, take a jaunt over to the 8th Annual World Veg Festival at the county fair building in Golden Gate Park. The festival spans the whole weekend, and is free from 10-10:30, after which the suggested donation is $5.

The San Francisco Vegetarian Society puts the event together, and has over its eight year lifespan attracted other sponsors that also take part in the festivities. For example, this year’s co-sponsor is the group In Defense of Animals, adding pet adoption to the weekend’s other activities, speakers, and performances.

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Chicago’s Estrojam hits us where we secrete

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Margaret Cho rocked the mic – and her burleque bone – at Estrojam in Chicago.

By K. Tighe

An estimated 15,000 attendees flocked to venues around Chicago last week, Sept. 18-23, for the fifth annual Estrojam Music and Culture Festival to see women doing what they do best. E-Jam is no touchy-feely Lilith affair: the events ran the gamut from burlesque to boozing, hip-hop to rock, photography to film.

Margaret Cho lit up the festival with a raucous array of ta-tas, tattoos, and tassels. Many eyebrows were raised when the San Francisco-born comedienne took up belly dancing a few years ago, but this week’s stint at the Lakeshore Theatre proved that Cho has taken the cabaret world firmly by the fans and put together a stellar revue. Featuring seasoned pros like New York’s Dirty Martini and LA’s Princess Farhana, up-and-coming transgender comic Ian Harvie, and members of West Hollywood’s Gay Mafia Comedy Troupe, The Sensuous Woman is an edgier take on a burlesque variety show.

The opening fan dance was not your standard pink and frilly affair, but an irreverent pulsing precursor to the sexual themes of the show set to Peaches’ “Boys Wanna be Her.” Here’s the thing – everyone in the cast was flapping a fan, not just the pretty girls – it was clear that Cho intended to blur some lines. As she emerged from the feathered curtains, the audience went ape and Cho began a well-received stand-up routine with “I’m Margaret, Bitch.” Keeping on the current event tip, the comic called out the critics of Britney’s VMA performance, ascribing the commentary on the pop star’s weight to “a symptom of a diseased mind.” Going on to vividly and hysterically describe that fateful day in an airport bathroom for Sen. Larry Craig, Cho introduced her show as “Like Donny and Marie – but with an all-tranny chorus line.”

Bryter layter: Nick Drake’s Gabrielle Drake sheds a little light on her late sibling

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From the morning: Nick Drake as a teen.

One of the sweetest panels at the this year’s South By Southwest revolved around the late singer-songwriter Nick Drake: producer Joe Boyd, onetime-possible collaborator Vashti Bunyan, and sister Gabrielle Drake traded anecdotes about the talented mystery man, played music, and took questions to a transfixed crowd. Luckily you’ll get a chance to have a similar experience on Tuesday, Oct. 2, when Gabrielle Drake, Boyd, and singer-songwriter Jolie Holland give a similar talk as part of Noise Pop’s collabo with City Arts and Lectures. I spoke to Drake recently from her home in Shropshire, England.

Bay Guardian: The Nick Drake panel you were on at SXSW was one of my favorite things at the conference this year.

Gabrielle Drake: Thank you. This is a new world to me, because really acting is my world. The music world is new to me. But I do what I’m told! [Laughs]

I was asked to come out to San Francisco and to LA, and I’m glad to do that if it helps Nick and his music. I won’t do it very much because I find in a funny way, the more you go on talking about someone you knew and loved, the more removed from you they become.

BG: Are there a lot of misconceptions out there about him that you feel like you should clear up?

GD: I think there can be. And in the end his music speaks for itself, you know, and that’s great. The only questions I can answer really are questions about the childhood we shared together. Other people can answer questions about his music. But I don’t think there are any easy solutions to what made Nick the musician he was. I think the enigma continues really. No one can really come up with easy solutions, and I’m only there to clarify a part of the picture. That is perhaps an important part that needs to be clarified, so that we can go on from there.

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Gabrielle Drake.

BG: What was your childhood like?

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