San Francisco

Editor’s Notes

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› steve@sfbg.com

I’ve been obsessed with high-speed rail for a couple of months now. It started in March when I was in France and had my first experience on the TGV trains that zip between Paris and Lyon in less than two hours, about a third of the time it takes by car. The ease with which I stepped onto the train made my airport experiences seem like torturous tests of my capacity to endure long lines, inexplicable delays, nosy cops, bureaucratic madness, and fellow travelers made cranky by it all.

As the French countryside flew past me at 200 mph, I wondered why California has been unable to build a high-speed train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, cities quite similar to Paris and Lyon in terms of distance and cultural importance. So I researched the issue and learned that the single biggest obstacle is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as I reported recently in "The Silver Bullet Train" (4/18/07), a story that the San Diego CityBeat then ran as its cover article in its last issue.

So I was intrigued to hear what Schwarzenegger had to say on the subject last week when he came to speak in a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. auditorium for an event sponsored by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. When asked about it, the governor said, "I’m a big believer in mass transit. I’m a big believer in high-speed rail. I think this high-speed rail is a great possibility, but I want us working on the public participation — private partnerships — then we can commit to the $10 billion to put in from the public sector."

Which, of course, is complete bullshit. The governor’s budget made big cuts in mass-transit spending, including chopping $28 million from BART and $36 million from Muni. And it proposed gutting the California High Speed Rail Authority, which has long planned for the need for private-sector funding support that Schwarzenegger claims will preclude next year’s $10 billion high-speed rail bond measure. Those who know the issue know how ridiculous the governor sounds.

"Based upon your encouragement, we have prepared the financing plan. If your support for an appropriate level of funding in 2007–<\d>08 is contingent upon securing specific commitments of funding from various public and private entities, you are the logical leader who can bring together California Congressional leaders and private financiers," CHSRA chair Quentin Kopp wrote to Schwarzenegger on May 25.

And still Schwarzenegger does nothing to support the project, which the downtown think tank San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) makes the focus of its June newsletter under the headline "High Speed Rail Essential to Keep California on Track: Trains Offer Best Bet for Fast, Clean Transport as State Grows."

It’s time for Schwarzenegger’s deeds to start matching his words, particularly on this crucial project.*

Exclusive to SFBG.com

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The ongoing layoffs at the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News are a human drama as well as a financial one, particularly given the relationship between the parent companies of those two publications: the Chron’s Hearst Corp. and Merc owner MediaNews Group.

An anticipated 160 journalists and their editors are being cut from the Chron and the Merc, which means, of course, less news for you. The names of which editors were slashed by the Chron surfaced first on the local blog Ghost Word while the rest made it to the Web in an internal Bronstein memo leaked to industry watchers, a painful irony considering what news execs say is killing journalism jobs.

Those who have been let go paint an interesting picture of what happened and what’s to come. “When Frank Vega, the new publisher, got here a couple of years ago, he said only three things can happen: We can fix it. We can sell it. Or we can shut it down. They haven’t fixed it yet, so those other two things are what they have to be considering,” John Curley, a deputy managing editor let go from the Chronicle recently after more than two decades with the paper, told the Guardian.

An annotated photo of Curley’s desk at the Chron appeared on Flickr.com last week and elicited two successive waves of heartfelt e-mails and calls after the popular industry blog Romenesko linked it.
Early in his career, Curley worked in New Jersey under David Burgin, who was famously fired and rehired several times by MediaNews honcho Dean Singleton at a number of the company’s papers before briefly working at the San Francisco Examiner, once owned by Hearst before it took over the Chronicle. Curley also worked for Jim Bellows, an influential editor in American journalism, at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
“Even though this is officially termed a ‘reduction in force,’ I am surprised and dismayed that the organization thinks it can have a future without me,” Curley wrote below the photo on his Flickr profile. “To be honest, I thought I’d get the chance to help lead the paper where it needed to go to compete successfully in the digital age. But instead, off I go.”

Insiders told us managers at the Chronicle reiterate over and over that the paper will never be the New York Times. To be fair, Bronstein likes to change up his low expectations from time to time. Last year, he told media hound Michael Stoll in a piece for the SF Weekly that the daily can’t be another Los Angeles Times either.

Sunday editor Wendy Miller, an industry veteran of more than two decades who spent her last seven years at the Chron before being let go just recently, told us, “There’s no answer to that except, ‘Of course we can’t be the New York Times. But we could be the very best regional paper we could be and as good at doing in-depth regional stories as the national papers are at doing what they do. There’s not a lot of imagination in Chronicle management. They’re not a very flexible group.”

Chron executive editor Phil Bronstein told Editor & Publisher that the paper will focus more on local news, but he said it will also have to do fewer stories now. And staffers told us he’s admitted during recent meetings that he’s not quite sure what to do in order to save the paper.

The Chron has lately continued its strong coverage of police misconduct in San Francisco but chose to relegate a superb story about one problem officer to the back of the June 7 edition in the local section. The riveting tale of a scandalous trust-fund lawyer by long-time crime reporter Jaxon Van Durbeken was placed far from the June 10 Sunday edition’s front page as well.

Miller told us she was displeased with what the daily was choosing to promote on its Sunday front-page and wished it would more often showcase thorough local reporting done by beat reporters.

The Chron’s financial desperation is well-known by now, confirmed months ago by Hearst attorneys in federal court when local businessman Clint Reilly was suing the company along with MediaNews to stop – or at least limit – a $300 million investment scheme the two would-be competitors planned that has since enabled MediaNews to dominate most of the Bay Area’s newspapers outside of the Chron.

Hearst lost approximately $1 million a week last year, and all told, they’ve more or less dumped $1 billion into the paper, including its purchase price, since buying it in 2000. Sources say the losses are now closer to $2 million a week.

The company first announced in May that it was eliminating 100 newsroom employees out of its 400 total. We’re told that some guild cuts were officially enacted June 8 with more expected soon afterward, but no one’s entirely sure who’s accepted buyouts so far and much uglier terminations could take place soon. At the same time, nine editors were sent packing.

The Chron’s managing editor Robert Rosenthal announced he was leaving before the axe fell on the newsroom proclaiming that he couldn’t stomach the bloodshed.

The coincidence couldn’t be more profound. He spent much of his career at the respected Philadelphia Inquire before joining the Chron after growing dissatisfied with the Inquirer’s decision in 2001 to downsize more than 100 people under former owner Knight-Ridder, which also once owned the Merc.

“What I believe is that the real innovators are the journalists,” Rosenthal told us. “In the industry, the people who are not the innovators are on the business side. They’ve looked at this as a very traditional challenge and now they’re getting caught up in a whirlpool of change.”

At the Merc, expected cuts for the paper were first disclosed by John Bowman, who quit recently as editor of the San Mateo County Times, also owned by MediaNews Group. Bowman had grown angry over what the cuts had done to his own paper, and opened up like a geyser to GradetheNews.org telling them that shortcuts on copy editors were causing egregious errors even in headlines.

State workplace safety cops are investigating the San Mateo paper’s offices where Bowman contends the building is without air and rats are a concern. Spokesperson Dean Fryer of the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health wouldn’t discuss the case while it remains open. But federal records show MediaNews was fined $800 last fall for an asbestos-related complaint at the company’s nearby Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

The Merc and the Times are run by a consortium of companies called the California Newspapers Partnership with MediaNews at the helm and include the Contra Costa Times and the Oakland Tribune. Online ad revenue actually went up last quarter for MediaNews along with its general profit margin while the cost of newsprint is going down, all good signs for Singleton’s wallet.

But print ad income and circulation, which continue to butter the company’s bread, remain on a downward march, according to earnings statements, and Singleton still must service the hundreds of millions in debt he accrued in recent years storming the nation in a frenzied haste to buy up both daily and weekly papers big and small.

In fact, the business press in recent stories about the company’s performance failed to point out that the Denver-based company is doing yet more big deals with Hearst in other cities. The two joined efforts last quarter to purchase the News-Times in Danbury, Conn. for $80 million in an arrangement very similar to what the companies created here, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. A few newsroom job cuts were announced recently at the News-Times.

MediaNews already owned the Connecticut Post, located about 20 miles away, and the deal included another nearby paper in New Milford. Combined, the three make a cluster, just as Singleton likes them, which enable him to thin and share staff and other resources between the publications as he’s been doing in the Bay Area.
Thin, of course, equals cutting more journalists.

Paper trail

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Up to 160 journalists and editors being cut from the payrolls of the Bay Area’s biggest two daily newspapers will flood a shrinking media job market, forcing many from their homes and making it difficult to pay their rents or mortgages.

But it also means something else: less news, and therefore less accountability and diminished democratic debate.

That was the sad conclusion of many observers and media professionals after the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News both revealed recently that they’d be laying off about a quarter of their respective newsroom staffs.

"Something has to give," Chron editor Phil Bronstein told Editor and Publisher recently. "If you have 15 priorities, sometimes the bottom three or four don’t get done. You may have to do fewer stories, and you can do that."

The disturbing pronouncements by their parent companies, the Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group, even led some veterans who weren’t immediately facing pink slips to leave on their own accord, unable to stomach the sorry state of their profession. Yet even as the bloodletting began in earnest at the Chron last week, Bronstein hadn’t presented much of a game plan for how Hearst actually expects to continue operating a major metropolitan newspaper.

"There’s no question that with the Bay Area — like other big metro markets — the diminishing number of journalists will definitely impact the public," just-departed managing editor Robert Rosenthal, who announced he was leaving two weeks ago as the cuts were about to begin, told the Guardian.

The paper even started a blog for fallen staffers to exchange leads on new opportunities. Among the first posts was a public relations gig in San Francisco, which to many earnest reporters is like crossing over to the dark side.

Despite its lagging finances, the Chronicle has still been the city’s main paper of record — based mostly on its extensive resources and large newsroom — no matter how many blogs, online journals, and alt weeklies claw at its heels, or whether people consider it a poor paper.

But Sunday editor Wendy Miller, who was squeezed out last week, told us that the paper has been promoting sensationalism while failing to put some of its best stories from beat reporters high on the Sunday front page. As an example, she pointed to Carrie Sturrock’s regular education coverage, like recent stories on far-flung alternative-energy research at Stanford University and the punishing collection tactics of student-loan agencies.

"That front page too often is driven by crime and tabloid and goofy local stories," said Miller, an industry veteran of more than two decades who spent her last seven years at the Chron. "I think this is too sophisticated of a market for a front page like that. While I do think there’s a lot of good work that we do, we don’t play it well…. We don’t put our very best work on the cover often."

Now the situation could grow worse, as changes are certain at the paper along with the layoffs. It’s not clear, for instance, that its Sunday edition will contain an Insight section anymore, laid-off editor Jim Finefrock, who spent more than 30 years at the paper, told us last week just after he cleaned out his desk.

Washington bureau chief Marc Sandalow was let go after more than 20 years at the Chronicle, 13 of them inside the Beltway, and the paper has also made an effort to cut the job of fellow longtime DC reporter Edward Epstein. The moves would halve the bureau’s staff and cast doubt on how the Chron would continue its knowledgeable stories on some of the most powerful members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who are only now attaining major leadership positions.

"I always knew it would mean extremely unpleasant belt-tightening," Sandalow told the Guardian, referring to the paper’s hundreds of millions of dollars in losses since Hearst took it over in 2000. "I just didn’t think it would be suffocation."

Bronstein apparently is unsure of how the Chron can even begin to change the course of its unique money-losing trajectory. Despite the industry being wounded by fleeing subscribers and competitive Web outlets, most newspapers are still making big profits, with the Chron being a fairly rare exception. Sources add that the job cuts might save just $8 million or so per year, not nearly enough to make up for the paper’s staggering losses, for which no one had any reasonably good explanations.

"Something’s not right with our structure," John Curley, a deputy managing editor who’d been at the paper for more than 20 years, told the Guardian. "There isn’t another metropolitan daily that has a dominant position the way the Chronicle does that loses money."

Indeed, SFGate.com is among the most regularly visited newspaper sites in the country, and the model has greatly expanded the paper’s readership. But Curley explained that local advertisers "don’t necessarily want to reach someone in Zurich who might be interested in reading our political analysis." For most papers, online ads still generate remarkably little revenue.

The company initially announced in May that it was eliminating 100 newsroom employees out of its total of 400. We’re told that some guild cuts were officially enacted last Friday, with more on the way, but no one’s entirely sure who has accepted buyouts so far, and much uglier terminations could take place soon. "People are terrified," one source said. "Their phone rings, and they don’t want to answer."

At the same time, nine members of the top brass, including two deputy managing editors, Curley and Leslie Guevarra, were sent packing. Bronstein worked hard to appear assured of the paper’s future in Editor and Publisher, telling the journal recently that the Chron would be focusing more on local news as part of its strategy, with less of a "buffet-style," but he offered few specifics. He nonetheless told staffers during recent meetings that he doesn’t really know what to do and invited them to offer their own solutions.

The mood’s been decidedly glum at a modest SoMa dive known as the Tempest, where Chron staffers are known to commonly lurk and where some of the recent sendoffs for departing staffers have been held.

"Business has been very good for me this week," a bartender there said late at night on June 8. "But I know 25 percent of these people won’t be coming back. This won’t be good for business in the long run."

As for the Merc, www.GradetheNews.org fueled the rank and file’s worst fears by first reporting that 60 newsroom positions at that paper would get the ax, in addition to the 35 union employees who were shoved out last December.

The paper got the tip from John Bowman, now former executive editor of the San Mateo County Times, also owned by MediaNews, who disclosed the layoffs to the public after deciding he was "fed up" with MediaNews honcho Dean Singleton’s slash-and-burn business strategy.

Amid the chaos, the Merc‘s brand-new top editor, Carole Leigh Hutton, sent a memo to staffers begging them to remain calm and "focus some of that energy on doing the journalism we do so well" instead of indulging in rumors at the watercooler about what was planned.

Furious over cuts at his paper, Bowman decided to quit the same day that he talked to GradetheNews about an April meeting he attended with other MediaNews editors at which the layoffs were discussed.

Singleton, the industry’s undisputed king of consolidation, months ago cut some copyediting jobs and moved others to a single hub in Pleasanton where its Tri-Valley Herald was formerly located. Bowman told GradetheNews the move had caused "an incredible number of errors," including glaring geographical mistakes even in headlines.

"You want copy editors who know your city, who know your beat, who can ask great questions and help make your story better," Luther Jackson, executive officer of the San Jose Newspaper Guild, told us. "That’s just a general rule, I would say. Copy editors are really underappreciated in general."

Jackson added that Bowman’s figure of 60 isn’t set in stone, and while the paper has admitted it plans to initiate more layoffs soon, it still hasn’t decided how many. GradetheNews also interviewed reporters at "several of the chain’s papers" who echoed Bowman’s complaints and wrote that some of the papers are dreadfully short of reporters, including beat writers who specialize in specific local subjects.

We never heard back from Bronstein, Singleton, California Newspaper Publishers Association executives George Riggs and Kevin Keane, or former Merc executive editor Susan Goldberg, who high-tailed it out of San Jose recently for a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

But Merc business reporter Elise Ackerman, who’s worked at the Peninsula daily for seven years, told us the paper’s union plans to provide execs with suggestions on how to improve the paper and boost income, though she didn’t give details.

"I do think that this is really just a rough transition, and I was really impressed with Carol Leigh Hutton," Ackerman said carefully. "She’s communicating very clearly…. I don’t think that she’s going to preside over the bloodletting that we saw at the Chron." *

For more on this evolving story, visit www.sfbg.com.

Jew charged with felony perjury, voter fraud

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By Steven T. Jones
District Attorney Kamala Harris has filed nine felony charges against Sup. Ed Jew. A release from that office indicates that Jew is being charged with perjury, falsifying government documents, and voter fraud, all related to his allegedly false claims to be a San Francisco resident (voting and running for office here) when he listed Burlingame as his primary residence of federal tax forms.
A warrant has been issued for Jew’s arrest and bail has been set at $135,000. This will likely remove Jew from office even before we get word from the FBI about whether they will recommend criminal charges for the raid on his office last month in which they reportedly recovered $40,000 cash that Jew had requested from a constituent with regulatory issues.
Harris press release follows:

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/11/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/11/07): Three U.S. soldiers killed. Twelve Iraqi soldiers killed.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

U.S. military:

Three U.S. soldiers killed today in bridge bombing in Baghdad, according to BBC news.

3,757: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

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

111 : 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

Iraq Military:

At least 12 Iraqi soldiers were killed today by a suicide bomber in Baghdad, according to the Associated Press.

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Iraqi civilians:

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

65,116 – 71,328: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 3 June 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/47/

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

Journalists:

Journalists abducted in Baghdad found dead, according to Reporters without borders.
177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

164: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

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.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

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

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (6/11/07): So far, $433 billion for the U.S., $54 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.”

Cllint Reilly debuts a new form of newspaper column–the antitrust special

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last Tuesday June 5, a mysterious column popped up in the ll Singleton/Media News dailies that ring the bay. It was the debut of Clint Reilly and the first of l56 weekly columns that he will write for the Singleton papers, according to the terms of the Reilly/Hearst/Singleton antitrust settlement.

A “paid advertising” line adorns the top of the column, but Reilly says he will get no bills and won’t pay them if he does. At the bottom of the column is an identification that Reilly wrote himself: “Clint Reilly is a San Francisco businessman and commentator on public affairs. The views expressed in this column are Clint’s alone and do not represent the views of MediaNews or any MediaNews paper.”

Riley writes about how Bill Honig 25 years ago this June won election as state superintendent of public instruction, against incumbent Wilson Riles, a popular superintendent, because of the power of newspaper endorsements.
Riley managed Honig’s campaign. He writes that “newspaper endorsements cut through the confusing array of promises and attacks and offer a seemingly objective evaluation based on the public interest.”

Why didn’t he point out that the newspaper landscape has changed, as his suit charged, and that voters today would be faced with a conservative Singleton dailies and the Chronicle/Hearst? Why didn’t he write about his suit? Or explain why his picture and column were mysteriously appearing simultaneously on Tuesday in ll regional dailies?

“I have l55 columns to go,” Riley told me. B3

Click here to read Reilly’s editorial.

Pro-Palestine protesters poke Pelosi

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By Ross Moody
Protesters converged outside the Burton Federal Building in downtown San Francisco yesterday to mark the 40th anniversary of the Arab-Israeli 6-Day War, targeting their message to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whose district office is inside. The pro-Palestinian group was confronted by another group that supports Israel, and the ensuing ruckus led to both groups getting kicked off the property.
palpic.jpg
Photo courtesy of 60/40 Campaign

Connect the recall dots

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gr_staff_johnny_120.jpg
Consultant Johnny K. Wang

By Steven T. Jones
The political consultant handling the recall campaign against Sup. Jake McGoldrick, Johnny K. Wang’s JKW Consulting, has a client list that is raising questions about the real motives behind bumping off McGoldrick. For starters, there’s the reelection campaign of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who would get to appoint the replacement. Then there’s Google and Earthlink, which Newsom wants to contract with to provide free wireless Internet service to city residents, a deal that McGoldrick has taken the lead in scrutinizing. Finally, there’s a pair of malevolent downtown players, Citizens for Reform Leadership (an attack group created by Newsom moneyman Jim Sutton) and the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group (which represented the big downtown hotels that locked out their workers instead of bargaining with them in good faith). And this is the campaign about which co-chair Keith Wilson said, “This is not being funded by downtown money, this is a grassroots indigenous effort.” Sure, an effort that just happens to dovetail perfectly with downtown interests.

And now Matt Smith and the SF Weekly/New Times/Village Voice Media claim the progressives were soft on AIDS. Where in the world do they get this stuff?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I always read Matt Smith, the star columnist of the SF Weekly/New Times/Village Voice Media, with interest. But he often puzzles me. For example, in his column of May 30, he was banging away at his favorite target, those dread progressives, (“Lacking (Progressive) Definition, Lefty factions and a phony convention do not an effective political party make”). And he dropped this puzzling nugget:

“For more than a generation (liberals have been) opposing growth, while snubbing traditional liberal causes such as uplifting gays or African-Americans.

“When San Franciscans, for example, were dying en masse from AIDS during the l980s, progressives’ minds were more preoccupied with opposing ‘Manhattanization,’ the term they coined for new office buildings. Today, when African-Americans in the Bayview District are losing their sons, nephews, friends, and neighbors to drug-related
street violence, progressives’ official political pamphlet is concerned primarily with enacting a moratorium on construction of market-rate apartments.”

The truth, as anyone who was here and had friends and loved ones dying of AIDS knows, the progressives in San Francisco put together a world-renowned system for caring for people with AIDS and pressing for prevention and research funding. The ‘San Francisco Model’ did not come from Washington or Sacramento or Dianne Feinstein. The progressives, led by people like Harry Britt and Cleve Jones and leaders of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club etc., did it themselves. Progressives did, indeed, oppose Manhattanization (and fight for rent control and police oversight and a lot of other good causes) in that era, but AIDS was very much a centerpiece of the progressive agenda.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/05/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/05/07): 90 Iraqi civilians killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

At least 90 Iraqi civilians were killed or found dead today, including 61 bullet-riddled bodies believed to be the result of a sectarian death squad, according to the Associated Press.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

64,776 – 70,934: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 3 June 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/47/

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:

3,740: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

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

111 : 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

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

Journalist abducted in Baghdad found dead, according to Reporters without borders.
177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

164: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

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.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

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


The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (6/05/07): So far, $431 billion for the U.S., $54 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.”

Gunning for Boots

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Where have all the outlaws gone? Now that Paris Hilton seems like the highest-profile sorta-one-hit wonder to run afoul of the law, it’s easy to believe that pop’s rep for rebellion is seriously in question. (And with Warner Bros. jettisoning the overexposed jet-setter, who knows if she should even make the tally?) Yet just how disturbing or subversive is it to glom on to corporate punks like Good Charlotte or hitch your fortunes to soaking-in-it onetime gangstas like Snoop "Soul Gravy Train" Dogg? How revolutionary is it to play music your parents might approve of, à la white-bread soul poppers Maroon 5?

But those petty pop-crit worries wane on hearing about the Coup mastermind Boots (né Raymond) Riley’s Memorial Day misfortune. In the early-morning hours, long before most locals were firing up the grill and chugging microbrews, Riley was looking down the wrong end of a San Francisco Police Department gun barrel while innocently attending a get-together at a friend’s warehouse in SF’s Dogpatch-Waterfront zone. Why? Likely for nothing more than driving while black.

Riley had just parked his car near the warehouse when he was blinded by flashlights, and he realized that he was surrounded by cops. "They were saying, ‘Don’t fucking move, don’t fucking move,’ and came straight at me," Riley told me from his Oakland home, where he had just fed his kids their Sunday breakfast. "They put my hands above my head, searched me, and searched my car, even though they were looking for someone who was stealing tires. You know, if they had a description of a light-skinned black man with a big Afro and sideburns, maybe they should have taken me in. But they were yelling, ‘Are you on probation? Do you have a warrant?’ And every time I said no, they said, ‘Don’t lie to us. Don’t fucking lie to us.’"

Neighbor Hoss Ward had been walking his dog by the warehouse when he spied officers with flashlights lurking between parked cars amid the trash on the street. "I thought that was weird. They didn’t question me, but I’m a white man," he said later, verifying that Boots parked, got thrown against his car, and had guns pulled on him. "It’s not unusual for someone to pull up in a beater car," Ward said. Yet this incident smelled like racial profiling: "That’s what the vibe felt like."

"I walked over there and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’" recounted Riley’s friend Marci Bravo, who lives at the warehouse. Eventually Riley was released, but, Bravo continued, "It was really messed up. We fire off fireworks, burn things in the street, and there’s been no problems with cops. They’ve actually come and hung out before.

"It’s just a nasty case of police profiling."

In the end, Riley said, the officers didn’t even check his ID. At press time, police representatives had not responded to inquiries about the incident, and Riley was planning on filing a grievance with the city watchdog agency the Office of Citizens Complaints, a process that the longtime activist is, unfortunately, familiar with. After a 1995 Riverside performance with Method Man, Riley and kindred local hip-hoppers Raz Caz, E-Roc, and Saafir were pulled over and pepper-sprayed in their car seats following a yelling argument at a club. Then there was the incident during the Coup’s 2006 tour around, ironically, their Epitaph album Pick a Bigger Weapon. Shortly after the tour manager urinated next to a semi at a Vermont rest stop, the tour vehicles were stopped by plainclothes officers who claimed to be surveilling a cocaine deal in the truck. "Half the band woke up with guns in their faces," the Coup leader recalled.

Riley’s experiences in and out of our enlightened — for some — city bring home the ugly, everyday reality behind the entertaining anecdote with which the Arcade Fire’s Win Butler regaled the Greek Theatre crowd June 2: he was almost arrested for the first time that day when Berkeley police dragged him out of a rec facility for arguing over the use of a public basketball court. "They called for backup and everything," Butler marveled onstage.

"There are stories all the time," Riley offered matter-of-factly. "Everyone knows you used to get fucked with in San Francisco and Berkeley."

"Usually it’s not anything with me specifically being a rapper," he continued. "I might have even more protection because of that. Like at this get-together, somebody came up and said, ‘Don’t you know who this is? This is Boots Riley.’ They might not have known who I am, but they realize this isn’t the regular case where they can do whatever they want." *

ALIGN YOUR CHAKRAS, CAMPERS

Talk to underground trance DJs, and they’ll point to the Harmony Festival as the hot spot forest ravers will be orbiting. Indeed, one of the main organizers, Howard "Bo" Sapper — who, along with Sean Ahearn, Scott McKeown, and Jeff Kaus, is putting on the 29th music and camping fest — agrees that a healthy, fire-breathing portion of the expected 40,000 at the three-day event will be die-hard burners drawn to the seven-year-old techno tribal night. Sapper also points proudly to the diversity of the musical lineup, including Brian Wilson, Erykah Badu, Rickie Lee Jones, the Roots, Common, moe., and Umphrey’s McGee. "I’m not sure if we’re going mainstream or the mainstream is coming to us," Sapper said, listing the green exhibits and this year’s theme, Promoting Global Cooling. "It’s part of the paradigm shift going on in America."

OVERNIGHT MUST-HAVES


•Earplugs

•Air mattress

•Plenty of water

•Patience

HARMONY FESTIVAL

Fri/8–Sun/10, $20–$500

Sonoma County Fairgrounds

1350 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa

www.harmonyfestival.com

Nerves of Chrome

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Whatever happened to all the cyberpunks? Once upon a Blade Runner, it looked like neo-noirists and novelists from the early 1980s were finally getting turned on to George Orwell’s vision, predicting a dystopian, nightmarish future in which humans were subject to conditioning and control. Even musicians were getting it: perhaps inspired by Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (Buddah, 1975), such artists as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Pere Ubu were dabbling in a postapocalyptic music world by the close of the ’70s. But if there was one band that dared to define the genre back then, Chrome was it.

Lauded by critics and fans as one of the pioneers of industrial rock, the San Francisco outfit coupled psych-punk and electrodub with lyrical themes of alienation, paranoia, and ’50s sci-fi cinema, though its sound mirrored bands like the Sonics and Wipers when drummer Damon Edge and bassist Gary Spain came together in 1976. Following the release of its debut, The Visitation (Siren), later that year, the group folded once its members realized the album was a sales flop. Everything changed, however, once Spain and Edge hooked up with Helios Creed, a guitarist whom Spain had jammed with during the early ’70s. As Creed explained over the phone, "Chrome was the only band that was doing something I was interested in … space rock, punk rock, and the sci-fi kind of thing."

"It was really psychedelic, and it wasn’t in to be psychedelic back then. It was just punk and Budweiser," he continued. "Psychedelia would remind punks of the hippies, so they wouldn’t want anything to do with that. And I said, ‘Well, that’s great, ’cause acid punk doesn’t exist.’"

Creed also revealed that a falling-out during the recording sessions for Chrome’s sophomore effort, Alien Soundtracks (Siren, 1978), resulted in Spain’s exit in 1977 and subsequently ushered in a radical shift away from the band’s protopunk beginnings.

"Damon started playing some tapes that they had made a year or two before that were outtakes from The Visitation, and I said, ‘God! This stuff is fucking great!’" Creed said, laughing. "I liked it better than The Visitation, and I suggested that we make stuff like that and integrate it into our punk set."

Alien Soundtracks‘ 1979 follow-up, Half Machine Lip Moves (Siren), adhered to this formula as well. Joining scratchy, three-chord guitars and trash can–like drums with Creed’s growled vocals and an excess of waterlogged-sounding effects, the result mirrored some otherworldly murky realm. By the time Creed and Edge’s final collaboration, 3rd from the Sun (Siren), was released in 1982, the combo was heading in a more gothic direction, similar to that of contemporaries Killing Joke and Swans.

Chrome remained a duo until its ’83 demise, though the bandmates adopted a taped drum machine nicknamed Johnny L. Cyborg as their third member and briefly enlisted John and Hilary Stench from Pearl Harbour and the Explosions. During this period the group was primarily a recording project and only played live twice, to sold-out crowds in San Francisco and at a Bologna, Italy, festival. Edge moved to Europe to start another version of Chrome, while Creed remained stateside to work on his solo career, angry that he was left behind.

After Edge died in 1995, Creed carried on with the band because he felt he was just as entitled as his ex-bandmate to put out Chrome records. Since 1996, Creed has recorded a handful of full-lengths under the Chrome moniker but tends to focus more on his solo material. His current West Coast tour will include Chrome and Helios Creed songs, and he revealed he hasn’t ruled out a future full-on Chrome tour. Creed also wanted to set the record straight about his strained partnership with Edge.

"Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate Damon. We just went through some shit," he clarified. "I forgive and love everybody." *

CHROME

With Battleship

Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $12

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

There’s no business …

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

One of the most entertaining books ever written about the commercial theater is Ken Mandlebaum’s Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops (St. Martin’s, 1992). There’s something inherently fascinating about the backstories and eventual fates of big stage musicals. The egos involved and the radical revisions that take place during tryouts and previews (a process far more public than movie retweaking) make for high drama, even before you add the Russian roulette economic factor.

While Mandlebaum wrote from a dedicated fan’s orchestra-seat perspective, the absorbing new documentary ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway goes way backstage — director Dori Berinstein is a Tony-winning stage producer (her latest hit is Legally Blonde) and has privileged access. Her team reportedly shot more than 250 hours of footage, encompassing virtually every Broadway show of the 2003 to 2004 season, then narrowed the focus to the development and destinies of four high-profile musicals.

The quartet spotlighted here spans artistic ranges and commercial fates. The $14 million spectacular Wicked, a schlock-sentimental version of Gregory Maguire’s revisionist Oz fantasy, got no critical love during its closely observed San Francisco tryout — erstwhile Godspell composer Stephen Schwartz admits to making significant changes between that run and the Broadway opening. But while Wicked proved neither a reviewers’ nor a Tony favorite, it’s a rare case in which those factors don’t matter. It’s a massive million-dollar-a-week hit whose geek-empowerment message particularly resonates with younger girls. Those whose parents can afford Broadway prices, that is.

On a whole other plane, the Tony Kushner–Jeanine Tesori project Caroline, or Change was an emotionally complex, stirring, major high-culture event. Its producers, as New Yorker critic John Lahr puts it, "agreed to lose a little money so this very good thing which doesn’t fit the commercial formula [could] be seen." If only for a few months: with its more bitter than sweet emphasis on racial inequity and family dysfunction, no amount of acclaim could turn it into a tourist attraction.

While practically a Broadway bargain at merely $3.5 million in production costs, Avenue Q was considered the season’s longest shot — a Sesame Street parody whose relatively youthful target audience isn’t big on theatergoing. Wags anticipated an off-Broadway show that belonged off Broadway. Its triumphant critical reception and eventual clutch of Tony Awards turned such expectations upside down. Cocreators Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez are the giddiest protagonists here, their can’t-believe-our-luck exuberance offering a contrast to the sober insights delivered by such experienced hands as Schwartz and Caroline‘s director, George C. Wolfe.

Finally, there’s Taboo, a $10 million total loss for producer Rosie O’Donnell, who shepherded it to Broadway after loving a smaller-scale London staging of the gender-bending, Boy George–scored musical. Was it just too gay for Broadway? (No, that’s not an oxymoron.) Was it simply not very good? (A devoted cadre of mostly punk-goth fans would vehemently disagree.) Did negative press attention to O’Donnell and an apparently turbulent production process unfairly brand it a flop before the opening? We may never know — Taboo sure ain’t coming to a theater near you anytime soon. One of ShowBusiness‘s most poignant threads focuses on young unknown Euan Morton, who wins raves in a star part in the huge show. After its closure, his US work visa is revoked; he’ll have to restart his career back in England from square one.

ShowBusiness covers everything from playwriting to rehearsals to street buzz to critics, but one wishes it had more depth. Berinstein’s insiderdom gets her access but perhaps also limits her willingness to bare all. Clocking in at 102 minutes, her documentary is almost a dirt-free zone. It’s refreshing when Marx and book writer Jeff Whitty admit they could barely stand each other while collaborating on Avenue Q — though success certainly improves their rapport. And ultimately, their multiple Tony Award wins provide a dramatic highlight. At the ceremony, Carol Channing and LL Cool J copresent an award. It’s a showy moment whose mix of the sublime and the surreal encapsulates how unpredictable the business Berinstein examines can be. *

SHOWBUSINESS: THE ROAD
TO BROADWAY

Opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.showbusiness-themovie.com“>www.showbusiness-themovie.com”>www.sfbg.com

Call the docs

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Now in its ninth year, the San Francisco Black Film Festival continues to expand its scope, with two long weekends of narrative films and documentaries plus several shorts programs. If you didn’t catch The Last Days of Left Eye during one of its recent VH-1 airings, it’s well worth a look on the big screen. After struggling through years of alcoholism and an abusive relationship (you know, the one where she burned the dude’s house down), hip-hop icon Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes found herself, kinda, through rehab and multiple trips to a faith healer in Honduras — the site of her fatal 2002 car accident. Composed mostly of footage shot for a documentary that was in progress when Lopes died, Last Days — directed by Lauren Lazin, an Oscar nominee for 2003’s Tupac: Resurrection — offers an unguarded look at the fragile megastar.

Another doc worth checking out is The Clinton 12, a PBS-esque look at the events leading up to the 1958 bombing of the first court-ordered integrated high school in the South. After segregation was outlawed, low-key Clinton, Tenn., saw an uptick in hate (cue the Ku Klux Klan) and played host to a media frenzy as the first day of school approached; a "home guard" was formed by veterans and other concerned Clinton citizens to help keep peace in the city, though the National Guard soon stepped in as well. Even if you don’t factor in James Earl Jones’s narration (and a dramatic score), Keith Henry McDaniel’s film has plenty of gravitas.

Octavio Warnock-Graham’s Silences also looks at racial tensions, but on a much smaller scale: within one family, all white except for the filmmaker, the mixed-race product of his mother’s short-lived relationship with an African American dancer. In his 25-minute film, Warnock-Graham travels from Ohio to the Bay Area in search of his long-lost father and draws his mother’s family into a discussion of what’s clearly been an elephant in the room since his birth.

SAN FRANCISCO BLACK FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/7–Sun/10 and June 14–17, most films $10

See film listings for showtimes and venue info

www.sfbff.org

Myconos

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Our town, for all its glories, does have its little shortages here and there. We are, in particular, not as rich as some of the bigger cities in the "littles" and "towns" that give those great metropolises their distinctive scents of ethnic potpourri. Oh, we do have a Chinatown and a Japantown, and our Little Italy can be found living under a pseudonym in North Beach. There’s even a remnant of a French quartier on lower Nob Hill, along a run of Bush Street that includes the Alliance Française, the French consulate, and the Église Notre Dame des Victoires. But for all San Francisco’s affinity for the Mediterranean, many of the Mediterranean cultures are virtually invisible here. I was reminded, after visiting Chicago recently, that we have not only no Greektown but hardly any Greek restaurants, hardly any place where your cheese can be set on fire before your eyes with a cry of "Opa!"

Flaming cheese (not to be confused with the Flaming Homer) is known by the Greeks as saganaki, and it is on the menu at Myconos, a Polk Street stalwart that has survived since the 1970s and preserves an authentic sense of Greek rusticity, as such latecomers as Kokkari and Mezes do not. Greece, we should remember, is one of the poorest countries in Europe; it is quite near both Africa and the Middle East and was ruled rather harshly for several centuries by the Ottoman Turks. (One enduring monument to the struggle against the Turkish occupation is the semiruined Parthenon in Athens, which had been built in the golden age of Pericles in the fifth century BCE and stood intact for two millennia, until, in the 17th century, the occupiers turned it into a munitions dump, which then exploded.) If we ever start wondering why the argument between Christianity and Islam is so bitter, we can get much of our answer simply by considering the Greek case.

Fortunately, everybody likes saganaki, with the possible exception of the American Heart Association. ("I wish they’d never invented fried cheese!" Marge Simpson says in a fantasy graveside scene in which Homer has died of obesity and is being buried in a piano crate lowered by a crane. These are her last words, for the crane then gives way and the crate crushes everyone.) Myconos’s version ($9.95) isn’t detonated tableside, but it does reach the table still spitting blue flames, and it does develop a wonderful golden crust that contrasts nicely with the cheese’s natural citrusy (and not too salty) tang.

Saganaki is probably about as good for you as dessert, so after your sinful beginning, you will be relieved to find that the rest of the menu is dotted with salads, legume dishes, and vegetarian choices. We found the hummus ($4.95) to be non–Middle Eastern despite the accompanying warm pita bread; the chickpea puree was coarse rather than peanut-butter smooth and seemed not to have been mixed with tahini, the sesame seed paste. The dominant flavors, instead, were those of lemon and garlic.

The restaurant’s version of a Greek salad — mixed greens tossed with roma tomato coins, crumblings of feta cheese, and onion slivers — turns up beside many of the main courses. Among these is a rather splendid pastitsio ($11.95), a kind of Greek lasagna that combines layers of tubular pasta, seasoned ground beef, and béchamel cheese sauce into a shape that resembles a large square hamburger (with the béchamel cheese sauce looking like the top half of the bun). The wind blows from the east across the pastitsio, bringing the scent of nutmeg, perfume of the Middle East and even points beyond. This is not surprising; as Elson M. Haas, MD, instructs us in Staying Healthy with Nutrition (Celestial Arts/Ten Speed, $39.95), "the Middle Eastern nations consume a variant of the Indian diet," and Greece is on the fringes of the Middle East.

Novices, neophytes, and the inattentive might be forgiven, in fact, if they mistook the Greek condiment tzatziki — a sauce of yogurt, shredded cucumber, garlic, and onion — for the Indian condiment raita, a sauce of yogurt and cucumber. Tzatziki is the salsa of Greek cooking and has a way of turning up everywhere, but we found it only as an accompaniment to garides souvlaki ($15.95), two brochettes of grilled shrimp plated with roasted potatoes and salad.

I was not impressed with the falafel ($5.95 at lunch), despite the massiveness of the plate: five Titleist-size balls arrayed on a carpet of pita and topped with a blob of hummus that looked like lumpy gravy. The falafel balls were unwarm and undersalted; worse, they recurred on the vegetarian platter, which offered (in addition to the falafel and in place of the cottage potatoes) a dolma — a torpedo of seasoned rice swaddled in grape leaves — and a round of spanikopita, the phyllo pie stuffed with spinach and cheese. These teaser items were tasty enough to distinguish themselves from the falafel but not substantial enough to make up for it.

The wine list is brief but does include a variety of Greek bottlings both red and white, and these tend to be quite good value. Although the Greeks have been making wine since time out of mind, the country’s modern wine industry had fallen into disrepair until recently and was known mostly for retsina, whose turpentine quality can be overwhelming. There is also a selection of Greek beers, including a lovely golden lager from Hillas. After a few of these, even Homer might nod. *

MYCONOS

Mon.–Thurs., noon–10 p.m.; Fri., noon–11 p.m.; Sat. 1–11 p.m.; Sun., 1–10 p.m.

1431 Polk, SF

(415) 775-7949

www.sfmyconos.com

DC/MC/V

Beer and wine

Can get loud

Wheelchair accessible

Pet projects

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

"If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who deal likewise with their fellow men."

St. Francis of Assisi

His name is Sylvester. He’s quite handsome and charismatic, for a cat.

Sylvester is believed to be about eight years old, and the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has been his home since last July. He’s a simple domestic shorthair, with a jet-black coat aside from some snow-white blotches on his chest and left arm.

Also doing time at the SPCA is a slightly bashful orange tabby named Jitters, who has awaited a home since April. A long-haired tortie named Minna, with somber green eyes and a splash of umber on her nose, has been at the SPCA for a year and a half.

In many cities Sylvester, Jitters, and Minna would be on death row. In San Francisco they’re guaranteed a chance to live until they find a family, as long as they’re deemed adoptable by the SPCA and don’t develop a life-threatening disease or unmanageable behavior traits. They are the legacy of pioneering former president Richard Avanzino, regarded by most as the originator of the national "no-kill" movement.

Avanzino spent 20 years making the San Francisco SPCA a national leader in saving animals, including forging a pact with the city in 1994 to work toward guaranteeing every adoptable cat and dog a home, a remarkable promise during a time when few places across the nation were willing to make saving the lives of companion animals a priority. Most shelters euthanized tens of thousands of kittens, puppies, dogs, and cats every year to save space and money. Quite a few still do.

But after Avanzino left in 1998 to spread his no-kill philosophy nationally through the Alameda-based nonprofit Maddie’s Fund, the local SPCA has steadily retreated from the cutting edge. Rather than continuing to push toward the goal of saving all the animals, the two presidents who succeeded Avanzino have focused the organization on a private hospital project that has turned into an expensive boondoggle that’s sapped the organization’s energy and resources and angered the local veterinary community.

"San Francisco likes to say it’s the safest city in the United States to be a dog or cat," said Nathan Winograd, a widely recognized proponent of the no-kill philosophy and former director of operations for the SPCA, who left the organization in late 2000. "That is no longer true. There are other cities that are doing much more in terms of lifesaving. That’s one of the reasons I chose to leave San Francisco."

The SPCA’s eighth president, Jan McHugh-Smith, finally arrived in April after the shelter had spent nine months with an interim head, and the question now is whether she can turn this troubled yet still revered organization around.

Only in recent years have cities nationwide begun enacting policies intended to stop — or at least dramatically slow — the senseless slaughter of animals that are the defenseless victims of the public’s love of adorable newborns and specialized breeds. That trend started in San Francisco.

Avanzino calls welfare groups like the SPCA "safety valves" that relieve pressure on animal control officers and traditional municipal shelters. In an editorial last year for Maddie’s Fund he wrote that saving healthy and treatable shelter pets is the "minimum no-kill standard" and that communities today should strive to go beyond no-kill.

"Tompkins County, New York is a case in point," he wrote. "The Tompkins County SPCA maintains a 92 percent live-release rate. It saves all of the county’s healthy and treatable shelter pets and feral cats. Should this be our life-saving goal? I think it should."

Tompkins County, it turns out, is exactly where Winograd went after leaving the San Francisco SPCA in frustration. "When I left, we just had to save 500 or 600 more treatable dogs and cats every year, and we would have been just about there," Winograd said. "We were a whisper away."

Edwin Sayres, who succeeded Avanzino as president, told the shelter’s board of directors that the SPCA could remain in the vanguard of reducing pet overpopulation and saving abandoned animals while at the same time building a prestigious, state-of-the-art veterinary hospital that would rival one of the few other comparable facilities anywhere in the United States, Angell Memorial Hospital in Boston.

The Massachusetts SPCA, however, spends millions of dollars more each year simply running its three Angell facilities than the San Francisco SPCA’s entire budget. Originally expected to cost just $15 million, the price tag of the latter’s Leanne B. Roberts Animal Care Center has now shot to $32 million. The SPCA will finally break ground on the new facility in October.

Critics feared the hospital idea was a potential disaster, and they complained that the nonprofit had become top-heavy under Sayres. They pointed to the shelter’s money trail, detailed in its required annual tax-exempt disclosure forms, to emphasize where they believed the shelter’s priorities now rested.

While earning $200,000 a year in salary and benefits, Sayres created new executive positions that cost the shelter hundreds of thousands of dollars more in compensation than was spent during Avanzino’s tenure. That might not have seemed like such a big deal in 1997, when the nonprofit was taking in several million dollars more in donations from the public than it was spending to cover operational expenses.

But by the end of the 2002 fiscal year, when donations to the SPCA and many nonprofits were lagging, the shelter had fallen $2 million short of covering its $14 million in expenses, which had climbed by the millions annually.

At the same time, the city failed to reach its goal of releasing alive 75 percent of the animals it impounded; 2,075 animals were killed that year for a variety of reasons, according to city records. The SPCA also missed its target that year for the number of animals it would take in from the city’s municipal shelter and make available for new homes through its unique adoption center.

Meanwhile, several cities across the country were embracing the no-kill cause, inspired at least initially by San Francisco’s example. They did so with considerable help from Winograd, who worked briefly as a Marin County prosecutor before traversing the nation to help shelters come as reasonably close to no-kill as they could.

Tompkins County; Charlottesville, Va.; and Reno are all boasting live-release rates of around 90 percent after promising to find homes for adoptable and treatable animals, the latter a key category that includes animals with behavior problems, serious illnesses, and injuries that require extra care.

In other words, as San Francisco struggled to maintain its sense of direction, other communities began to implement and even redefine the meaning of no-kill. San Francisco has averaged a 70 to 80 percent save rate annually for several years — and the difference between this and what Winograd and others have hoped for the city of St. Francis means hundreds of animals being killed each year.

While avoiding any searing critique of the shelter, Avanzino told the Guardian that he perhaps would not have promoted the hospital scheme. However, he said, plenty of his own bold ideas at the SPCA once made him a target of criticism, like the shelter’s posh $7 million adoption center, composed of 86 kitty condos and doggy apartments.

"I know it sounds like I’m ducking the issue, and I am," Avanzino told us. "But the bottom line is that new leadership and the policy makers for the organization believe with everything in their being that this is an important next step for the San Francisco SPCA and [that] it is going to do more to help the animals. They have not kept me in the loop."

Nonetheless, when Sayres led the nonprofit, between 1999 and 2003, it spent at least $1.7 million just on architects and veterinary consultants moving the planned hospital forward. Meanwhile, programs like humane education and law and advocacy, the latter at one time a half-million-dollar program, saw deep cuts in their budgets or simply shriveled up and disappeared altogether, while public relations and promotional expenses retained brisk support to the tune of at least $1 million annually for several years before those expenditures were finally trimmed too.

Further, the shelter’s 17-member board of directors granted Sayres a $400,000 home loan and gave him 30 years to pay it off, although he cleared the debt before leaving for a new job in June 2003 at the American SPCA, which is independent of the San Francisco SPCA.

As the summertime explosion of kittens loomed in the spring of 2003 and Sayres prepared to leave, he sent an e-mail to the SPCA’s nearly 1,000 volunteers blaming the economy’s ongoing downturn and a 10 percent drop in public donations for the shelter’s money woes. The jobs of at least 15 employees were cut, and others were merged into one, including two major volunteer-coordinating positions.

In e-mails circuutf8g at the time, copies of which we’ve obtained, volunteers agonized over whether to inform the press of what was going on internally, nearing the point of insurrection over cuts in shelter services — including a one-of-a-kind dog behavior and training program. The truth, some feared, would turn donors away. Some argued that executive salaries should be trimmed to save money before ground-level staffers were dispatched with pink slips. Others were furious over the planned hospital’s burgeoning costs.

"I certainly think a new center is exciting and overdue," a volunteer wrote to Sayres. "But it annoys me [to] no end to see billboards all over the city about the center and nothing about the situation we’re in."

Sayres never responded to several detailed questions sent to him by e-mail and was unable to make time for a phone interview. But he admitted in a 2002 San Francisco Business Times story that he’d "tried to move forward with my vision too quickly."

"I should have taken more time to listen and absorb the culture," Sayres said in the story. "Now I’m more mindful of the contributions that people have made here over the decades."

New president McHugh-Smith insists the shelter can still balance the hospital plan’s most recent incarnation and a continued focus on the agency’s raison d’être: preventing cruelty to animals.

"One thing I’m really proud of is our hospital provides one and a half million dollars’ worth of charity care to homeless animals and people who can’t afford veterinary care for their pets," McHugh-Smith said. "What a critical service for this city. There are a lot of people here who can’t afford the care their animals need. They shouldn’t have to give up their pets for that."

Recent troubles aside, even the SPCA’s fiercest critics contend that much of the nation still lives deep in the shadows of its extraordinary achievements.

The San Francisco SPCA was officially chartered in 1868 as the first humane society west of the Mississippi River. But more than a century later, in 1978, its leadership had grown tired of the organization’s serving dual roles as a killer and a savior of animals.

Backing out of its long-standing shelter contract with the city meant losing more than a fifth of its annual budget, but then-president Avanzino felt the group’s agenda no longer fit with the city’s mechanized handling of hapless animals. Thousands were still being killed by the city each year.

"For 101 years, the reputation of the SFSPCA was, ‘That’s the place where animals are killed,’" Avanzino said in a 2000 interview he gave to Maddie’s Fund. "That was not the purpose of our organization. You can’t be the animals’ best friends and be their principal killer."

The city was forced to create a separate municipal shelter, known today as the Department of Animal Care and Control, which cites abusers, seizes dangerous dogs, and maintains its own adoption program. The SPCA then proceeded to vastly expand its spaying and neutering services, particularly for juvenile animals, as well as its medical facilities and treatment for animal behavior previously regarded as severe enough to warrant a trip to the death chamber, in which dozens of animals were killed at once. A technician withdrew oxygen from a decompression room until they died.

The SPCA led the way in taking animals waiting for adoption out into the community, and while some early skeptics feared mobilized adoptions would inspire impulse buying and high turnovers, many groups nationwide started to follow Avanzino’s lead after seeing how well it worked here.

On its sweeping Mission property at 16th and Alabama streets, where the SPCA has been located for almost a century, the shelter did away with cell-style kennels, which encourage erratic behavior and reduce the chances that an animal will find a home. In 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, the city found homes for 4,500 dogs and cats, with the SPCA handling three-fourths of those adoptions.

And guaranteeing homes for cats and dogs defined as adoptable, let alone those who are arguably treatable with the right commitment of energy and resources, was almost unheard of in the mid-’90s, when San Francisco made its promise. Under San Francisco’s agreement with the SPCA, animals considered adoptable include cats and dogs eight weeks and older, those without "temperamental defects," and those not suffering from life-threatening diseases or injuries.

However, while a 100 percent adoption rate is probably not possible, Winograd and others worry that the bedrock of the nation’s no-kill movement has failed to reach its full potential since Avanzino left, and they say the San Francisco SPCA could at least aspire to a save rate of more than 70 to 80 percent.

"I think the agency went through some times they weren’t used to, not having a long-term leader that really understood the history of the organization and the goals of the organization," Carl Friedman, director of Animal Care and Control, said of the SPCA. "But that happens everywhere. I think it took a little bit of a toll on the organization."

Friedman worked at the SPCA for several of its most memorable years before moving to the city’s municipal shelter in 1988, after the SPCA relinquished its role as the proverbial dogcatcher. He says that most euthanized animals in San Francisco are cats and dogs struck by automobiles or those suffering from parvovirus and distemper, both preventable with early vaccinations.

It’s worth noting that the agreement between Friedman’s office and the SPCA forbids each of them from speaking critically of the other, and many of the people we talked to balked at speaking on the record.

"People are afraid of getting sued, and they’re afraid of what will happen," Winograd said. "There are people in San Francisco who need these agencies. They’re not willing to be forthright, because they’re afraid. I’m a lawyer, so anybody who wants to sue me, good luck. But the truth is the truth."

The shelter’s problems that started under Sayres continued under his handpicked successor, Daniel Crain. And they reached a zenith in August 2004 when one of the SPCA’s leading veterinarians, Jeffrey Proulx, committed suicide in horrific fashion, delivering a psychic blow to longtime SPCA volunteers and staffers.

The morning Proulx was discovered, a Marin County coroner found an empty box of Nembutal injectable solution on the kitchen counter of his San Rafael home. Nembutal is a barbiturate used in physician-assisted suicides, but it’s also used to euthanize animals, and a bottle of it was missing from the shelter’s medicine cabinet the day Proulx died.

Proulx was the hospital’s chief of staff and was overseeing the expansion project. The task was apparently wearing him down, and on the day of his death, he threatened to resign.

Groundbreaking was supposed to occur in 2004. Then 2005. Then 2006. In the meantime, a private animal hospital providing 24-hour emergency care — San Francisco Veterinary Specialists — moved into the neighborhood, just blocks away, casting doubt on whether the facility’s service load could justify the project.

After Proulx’s death, the SPCA announced that it had chosen another architectural firm to take charge of the hospital: Rauhaus Freedenfeld and Associates. By then the organization had spent nearly $4 million on veterinary consultants and architects, according to tax records, and even today hardly a single wall has been erected.

A previous architecture firm, ARQ Architects, which designed the shelter’s adoption center, has earned more than $2 million from the SPCA since 2000, but there’s no telling what happened to any of the designs the firm crafted. Nonetheless, according to the shelter’s newest tax records, provided at the Guardian‘s request, Rauhaus was paid more than $500,000 last year, and another $330,000 went to a project manager, CMA. A new veterinary consultant was paid $90,000 last year as well, after a previous consultant, Massachusetts-based VHC, was paid at least $925,000 over a three-year period.

After Proulx died, Crain lasted just two more years as president. He left last August, and attempts to reach him at various phone numbers, a fax number, and a last-known San Francisco address in Bernal Heights were unsuccessful.

Crain joined the shelter in 1999 as a human resources director but quickly — despite little evidence of nonprofit management experience and only a brief stint running human resources — became the SPCA’s vice president under Sayres, earning well into six figures. In 2003, after Sayres’s departure, he became the SPCA’s top administrator following a board vote, which brought his compensation to more than $200,000 a year.

Ken White, director of the Peninsula Humane Society, said he never forged the bond with Crain that he did with the leadership of Marin County’s municipal shelter and its major East Bay animal welfare counterpart. White worked for nearly a decade at the SPCA, until 1989, when San Francisco created the separate animal-control entity that exists today.

Although reluctant to speak critically about the SPCA, White explained that the Peninsula shelter treats about 1,000 injured wildlife animals from San Francisco annually under a very modest contract with the city that’s nowhere near enough to cover his costs. The SPCA focuses primarily on cats and dogs, and the Peninsula shelter has more space.

People like Winograd, who now directs a nonprofit in San Clemente called the No Kill Advocacy Center, say the shelter’s campaign to build a modern but almost prohibitively expensive hospital diverted funds away from "God’s work": caring for animals so they may be adopted out.

"I didn’t feel the city needed another specialty hospital," Winograd said, "and my fear was that the energy and dollars and all the effort that would be put into the hospital would pull the agency away from its core mission of patching together the sick and injured dogs and cats."

"They still think that’s the next big thing," said Karin Jaffie, a former public relations coordinator and longtime volunteer. "For the cost of the hospital, you could have trained a lot of people’s dogs or spay-neutered the city’s pit bull population for free."

An early plan for the hospital included 24-hour emergency care and critical services like oncology, cardiology, and neurology — services that shelter execs argued pet owners would never pursue otherwise to help save their animals.

Yet the plan had a significant catch: it called for aligning the hospital’s nonprofit component with a for-profit network of veterinary specialists who would lease space inside the facility and help cover its overhead by paying some of the utility bills. Private specialty veterinary care was among the fastest-growing segments of the industry at the time, and the SPCA’s eager citywide promotional campaign for the hospital raised the ire of private vets working in the Bay Area, including their industry group, the California Veterinary Medical Association.

McHugh-Smith admitted that "after much evaluation" the complex for-profit plan was scratched completely, and the shelter had to more or less start over after spending millions. "It wasn’t going to help our mission, so that project was put to rest," she told us.

Not everyone was quick to offer a negative opinion of the shelter’s past leadership. Kelley Filson, a former humane-education director, said that all nonprofits experience periodic lulls in funding and that her program was never short of the resources it genuinely needed to help Bay Area youth understand why it’s necessary to treat animals humanely. Like in K-9 behavior training, she says, SPCA supporters should focus on the shelter’s historic milestones.

"It was not a direct-care program," Filson said of humane education, which endured budget cuts in recent years. "When there are 10 puppies that need medicine and treatment, that’s a very immediate need, so I think that people [misunderstand] when an organization has to look at the immediate needs of suffering animals versus education goals. Until you’re in the position of running that organization, you don’t often understand the decisions that are being made."

Skepticism aside, the shelter’s existing 70-year-old animal care hospital, where it treats injured and abandoned animals, could certainly benefit from a makeover. It still provides a range of services for a relatively minimal fee, including limited emergency care for the pets of some low-income San Franciscans. In 1978 the shelter’s spay-neuter clinic was the first in the nation to provide the service at a reduced cost, and it continues to alter feral cats brought in by a citywide network of caretakers for free.

"The demands on that hospital have grown large over the years," McHugh-Smith said. "Our surgical [unit] is on the second floor, and we have to carry the animals upstairs…. It’s just not very efficient or effective any longer."

The emergency and specialty hospital San Francisco Veterinary Specialists now does what the SPCA originally hoped to. Previously at odds with the SPCA’s for-profit scheme, the private vets will now donate certain specialty services that the SPCA isn’t able to cover under its current plans. Dr. Alan Stewart, a founder of SFVS, told us they’ve already helped several animals.

Construction on the Roberts Center is slated to begin in October. McHugh-Smith promises the new plan will enable San Francisco to expand its definition of a treatable homeless animal by expanding the range of treatment the city can administer. Now the $32 million will go toward simply renovating a massive warehouse on the shelter’s campus and giving its current facility another 40,000 square feet of space. The feral cat project, which today operates out of a former lobby, will get its own designated area, and McHugh-Smith says the shelter will also act as a university hospital where veterinary students can learn to treat the approximately 25,000 animals that pass through annually.

McHugh-Smith, the shelter’s first female president, has worked in animal welfare for more than two decades. She spent 12 years as CEO of the humane society in Boulder, Colo., and built that city’s live-release rate up to 86 percent.

Because of the Bay Area’s supercharged political tendencies, she faces constant and varying obstacles. Wildlife supporters loathe the SPCA’s long history of backing feral cat populations and off-leash dogs on federal parkland such as the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Even the phrase "animal welfare" is politically loaded — it’s often used specifically to separate pet lovers and the wealthy benefactors of big nonprofit shelters from "animal rights" factions perceived as too radical. Plus, there’s the fact that higher save rates translate into greater challenges in dealing with the final 20 or 30 percent of animals, which can require treatment before being adoptable.

"The higher you get, the more difficult it gets, and the more resources you need," McHugh-Smith said of the city’s save rate. "Hence, the hospital is going to be a really critical part of that."

Avanzino says San Francisco could still do a much better job presenting records to the public of which animals are killed and why. Are hyperthyroid or feral cats untreatable? Are otherwise healthy pit bulls made "unhealthy" merely by irresponsible owners? For years, transparency in terms of what constitutes a treatable or healthy animal has been a major tenet Avanzino has advocated.

"If we’re really going to empower the public to be part of the solution and see that the job gets done, we’ve got to give them the data," he told us. "Are the dogs and cats that we call family members getting justice from us? If not, then we have failed them, and in San Francisco that should never happen. It’s the city of St. Francis." *

Hazy recall

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› steve@sfbg.com

They gathered May 30 in the Richmond District’s Lee Hou Restaurant to voice their anger and outrage at Sup. Jake McGoldrick, calling him incompetent, unaccountable, hostile to the will of the voters, and a "born liar." They blamed him for everything from potholes to the state of the economy.

Yet a closer examination of why the Citizens for the Recall of Supervisor Jake McGoldrick say they are trying to get rid of the elected official reveals that this campaign is based on just a few controversial issues that animate these two dozen fairly conservative people.

Primarily, they’re mad at McGoldrick for sponsoring Healthy Saturdays, which sought a second day of closing some Golden Gate Park roads to cars, and for his support for studying a Bus Rapid Transit system on Geary Boulevard, which some merchants fear will disrupt their business.

"The problem with Jake McGoldrick is he does not allow us to have our issues," said David Heller, a Geary Street merchant who has led the charge against BRT and who ran against McGoldrick three years ago but has since moved from the district.

"Jake McGoldrick has not been responsive to our needs. He’s not there when we need him," said Paul Kozakiewicz, the Richmond Review publisher whose inflammatory and misleading front-page commentaries "The Case for Recalling McGoldrick" over the past two months have been the main rallying point for the recall effort.

As he spoke at the press conference kicking off the recall drive, Kozakiewicz was flanked by Heller and Howard Epstein, a member of the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee, the only political group to endorse the recall drive so far. Democratic Party clubs have all opposed the effort, as did the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee on a rare unanimous vote.

McGoldrick and his supporters say this isn’t about accountability but about his policy disagreements with a handful of particularly vocal constituents. "What you have here is some folks who just have to have it their way," McGoldrick told us. "The bottom line is we have a situation where some folks disagree on some issues. But to use this to threaten a politician into backing off these issues is an abuse of the recall."

There’s also an ironic note to all of this: if Kozakiewicz had been more truthful in his high-profile attacks, his readers might know that McGoldrick actually watered down the BRT study to appease the Geary merchants and that he resolved the long-simmering park road closure issue in a way that maintains full auto access to the museums and prevents alternative-transportation advocates from reviving the fight for at least five years, much to the chagrin of many walkers, skaters, and bicyclists.

Recalling McGoldrick would require the valid signatures of 3,573 registered voters from District 1, or 10 percent of the total, according to the city’s campaign services manager, Rachel Gosiengfiao. The campaign has until Sept. 14 to gather signatures, although Gosiengfiao said that if recall supporters want to make the November ballot, they need to submit the signatures for verification by June 22.

If the signature drive is successful and a majority of voters then decide to remove McGoldrick, Mayor Gavin Newsom will appoint a replacement who will stand for reelection at the end of next year, when McGoldrick’s term expires.

"We’re not getting involved with replacing the supervisor," Kozakiewicz said. "We’re going to leave that up to the mayor."

Kozakiewicz’s "The Case for Recalling McGoldrick" started with this description of how the effort began: "In March, a dozen community leaders from a broad cross-section of the community gathered for breakfast at the Video Cafe on Geary Boulevard. The topic of discussion was the district’s supervisor, Jake McGoldrick, and what should be done to limit the perceived damage the supervisor was doing to the City."

He then went through a litany of supposed abuses, presented in a seemingly factual and straightforward way — BRT, Healthy Saturdays, various "Attacks on Families and Property Owners." At least, they might appear objective to those not familiar with the details. The approach sparked more interest in the recall.

"This is a new venture for me, so I’m a little nervous," Richmond resident Margie Hom-Brown said at the event before attacking McGoldrick’s Healthy Saturdays stand. "Two-thirds of San Francisco has voted repeatedly not to close the park. He went on year after year and made it his number one priority…. The actions seem to me rather unethical."

Kozakiewicz used the November 2000 vote against park closure to conclude that McGoldrick "ignores the will of the voters" and used a large, bold pull quote to feature the Measure G question and the fact that 62 percent of the voters rejected it. But what Kozakiewicz doesn’t say is that the measure was placed on the ballot by closure opponents trying to defeat Measure F, which called for immediate closure (before construction of the garage that has since been built) and got 46 percent of the vote (a figure Kozakiewicz conveniently leaves out).

Because of the confusing nature of the two measures, it’s impossible to know how many voters wanted permanent closure at some point, let alone the six-month trial period that Healthy Saturdays called for. But Kozakiewicz has no use for such nuance in his conclusions, remarking at our questions during a phone interview, "Now you’re going into shades of gray."

Similarly, he casts McGoldrick as "forcing BRT on [the] district without notification," despite the fact that the project has been contemplated for decades and that it is now being studied with plenty of future opportunities for public input rather than being a done deal created through some secret McGoldrick plot.

In fact, transit advocate Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, said Kozakiewicz’s commentary is misleading in several ways, most notably in that it fails to say that McGoldrick, as chair of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, actually prevented the BRT study from looking at light rail because of his fears that it would be too disruptive for the Geary merchants.

"The sensitivity of merchant concerns is one reason why the best option isn’t even being studied," Radulovich said. "It’s ironic that he’s being recalled over this. In a way, you could say Jake is kowtowing to the merchants too much and dismissing good transportation options."

Nonetheless, the recall has a decent shot at qualifying, particularly given the fact that the committee has already raised about $24,000, including $5,000 from the Residential Builders Association and $1,500 from the Small Property Owners of San Francisco. It has also hired a firm called JKW Political Consulting, which is not registered with the city as required.

"In reality, the 10 percent threshold is pretty low. Whether you’re paying people or using volunteers, you can get that," McGoldrick campaign consultant Jim Stearns said. "So I told Jake we need to be prepared to fight the recall."

And McGoldrick said he is. "We’re talking here about ultraconservative, right-wing Republicans," McGoldrick said of the recall proponents. "And they’ve said that I vote far more progressively than my district…. But I’m trying to do some things that are good for the entire city." *

Downtown’s sneaky parking plan

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OPINION Two years ago this week, the mayors of many of the world’s largest cities gathered in San Francisco for World Environment Day and pledged to make their cities more livable and sustainable places.

San Francisco justly prides itself on being an environment-minded city made of diverse and livable neighborhoods. Thanks in large part to the city’s historic neighborhoods, designed around walking and public transit, San Franciscans generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions per capita than residents of any city in the country except New York.

Unfortunately, one of the most environmentally unfriendly measures to come along in a decade may be headed to the ballot. A shadowy coalition of downtown interests is gathering signatures for a measure, the brainchild of Republican financier Don Fisher, that would impose a one-size-fits-all parking "solution" on San Francisco’s distinct neighborhoods while removing protections for pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit from the city’s Planning Code.

This measure, blandly titled the Parking for Neighborhoods Initiative, threatens to reverse decades of progress toward a sustainable and livable San Francisco.

If this measure becomes law, it will negate the ability of neighborhoods to plan their own future, to provide affordable housing options, and to make their streets safe and livable. It will, in a stroke, overturn many years’ worth of neighborhood-based planning efforts, from downtown and South of Market through Hayes Valley and the Mission to Balboa Park.

Reduced-parking requirements, limitations on creating new parking spaces, have become a useful tool for decreasing traffic congestion, encouraging walking, cycling, and public transit use, and making housing more affordable in the city’s most dense and transit-rich neighborhoods. The city’s Downtown Plan, adopted in the 1980s, encouraged the area to grow as a diverse commercial, industrial, and residential district, oriented to transit rather than the automobile.

Many neighborhoods may not choose reduced-parking requirements, but where they fit, residents have embraced them as a way to preserve their neighborhoods’ livability, character, and affordability. Nearly a third of San Francisco households live without a car. A UC Berkeley study showed that units without parking spaces are affordable to twice as many households as units with them.

The measure would also prohibit programs to make San Francisco’s mean streets safer places for all of us, particularly children, elders, and the disabled. It arrogantly asserts the right of developers to cut new driveways and garage entrances wherever they want, regardless of the number of pedestrians, cyclists, and Muni riders who would be inconvenienced or even endangered.

Proponents of the measure are trying to give it a green gloss, invoking provisions about car sharing and low-emission vehicles. Don’t be fooled — this ill-conceived measure will make our city less sustainable, less livable, less affordable, and less safe. Don’t sign the petition! *


Tom Radulovich is executive director of Livable City (www.livablecity.org).

Dining listings

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Welcome to our dining listings, a detailed guide by neighborhood of some great places to grab a bite, hang out with friends, or impress the ones you love with thorough knowledge of this delectable city. Restaurants are reviewed by Paul Reidinger (PR) or staff. All area codes are 415, and all restaurants are wheelchair accessible, except where noted.

B Breakfast

BR Saturday and/or Sunday brunch

L Lunch

D Dinner

AE American Express

DC Diners Club

DISC Discover

MC MasterCard

V Visa

¢ less than $7 per entrée

$ $7–<\d>$12

$$ $13–<\d>$20

$$$ more than $20

DOWNTOWN/EMBARCADERO

Bocadillos serves bocadillos — little Spanish-<\d>style sandwiches on little round buns — but the menu ranges more widely, through a variety of Spanish and Basque delights. Decor is handsome, though a little too stark-<\d>modern to be quite cozy. (PR, 8/04) 710 Montgomery, SF. Spanish/<\d>Basque, L/D, $, MC/V.

Boulevard runs with ethereal smoothness — you are cosseted as if at a chic private party — but despite much fame the place retains its brasserie trappings and joyous energy. (Staff) 1 Mission, SF. 543-6084. American, L/D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Brindisi Cucina di Mare cooks seafood the south Italian way, and that means many, many ways, with many, many sorts of seafood. (PR, 4/04) 88 Belden Place, SF. 593-8000. Italian/<\d>seafood, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Bushi-tei melds East and West, old and new, with sublime elegance. Chef Seiji Wakabayashi is fluent in many of the culinary dialects of East Asia as well as the lofty idiom of France, and the result is cooking that develops its own integrity. The setting — of glass, candles, and ancient lumber — shimmers with enchantment. (PR, 3/06) 1638 Post, SF. 440-4959. Fusion, D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

Café Claude is a hidden treasure of the city center. There is an excellent menu of traditional, discreetly citified French dishes, a youthful energy, and a romantic setting on a narrow, car-free lane reminiscent of the Marais. (PR, 10/06) 7 Claude Lane, SF. 392-3515. French, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Chaya Brasserie brings a taste of LA’s preen-and-be-seen culture to the waterfront. The Japanese-<\d>influenced food is mostly French, and very expensive. (Staff) 132 Embarcadero, SF. 777-8688. Fusion, D, $$$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Cortez has a Scandinavian Designs-<\d>on-<\d>acid look — lots of heavy, weird multicolored mobiles — but Pascal Rigo’s Mediterranean-<\d>influenced small plates will quickly make you forget you’re eating in a hotel. (Staff) 550 Geary (in the Hotel Adagio), SF. 292-6360. Mediterranean, B/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Cosmopolitan Cafe seems like a huge Pullman car. The New American menu emphasizes heartiness. (Staff) 121 Spear, SF. 543-4001. American, L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

NORTH BEACH/CHINATOWN

Da Flora advertises Venetian specialties, but notes from Central Europe (veal in paprika cream sauce) and points east (whiffs of nutmeg) creep into other fine dishes. (Staff) 701 Columbus, SF. 981-4664. Italian, D, $$, MC/V.

Dalla Torre is one of the most inaccessible restaurants in the city. The multi<\d>level dining room — a cross between an Italian country inn and a Frank Lloyd Wright house — offers memorable bay views, but the pricey food is erratic. (Staff) 1349 Montgomery, SF. 296-1111. Italian, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Enrico’s Sidewalk Cafe remains a classic see-and-be-seen part of the North Beach scene. The full bar and extensive menu of tapas, pizzas, pastas, and grills make dropping in at any hour a real treat. (Staff) 504 Broadway, SF. 982-6223. Mediterranean, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Gondola captures the varied flavors of Venice and the Veneto in charmingly low-key style. The main theme is the classic one of simplicity, while service strikes just the right balance between efficiency and warmth. (Staff) 15 Columbus, SF. 956-5528. Italian, L/D, $, MC/V.

House of Nanking never fails to garner raves from restaurant reviewers and Guardian readers alike. Chinatown ambience, great food, good prices. (Best Ofs, 1994) 919 Kearny, SF. 421-1429. Chinese, L/D, ¢.

SOMA

Le Charm might be in San Francisco, but it has a bistro authenticity even Parisians could love, from a wealth of golden wood trim to an enduring loyalty au prix fixe. The chicken liver salad is matchless, the succinct wine list distinctly Californian. Ponder it in the idyllic, trellised garden. (PR, 9/06) 315 Fifth St, SF. 546-6128. French, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Chez Spencer brings Laurent Katgely’s precise French cooking into the rustic-<\d>industrial urban cathedral that once housed Citizen Cake. Get something from the wood-<\d>burning oven. (Staff) 82 14th St, SF. 864-2191. French, BR/L/D, $$, MC/V.

Fly Trap Restaurant captures a bit of that old-time San Francisco feel, from the intricate plaster ceiling to the straightforward menu: celery Victor, grilled salmon filet with beurre blanc. A good lunchtime spot. (Staff) 606 Folsom, SF. 243-0580. American, L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

*Fringale still satisfies the urge to eat in true French bistro style, with Basque flourishes. The paella roll is a small masterpiece of food narrative; the frites are superior. (PR, 7/04) 570 Fourth St, SF. 543-0573. French/Basque, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

India Garden indeed has a lovely garden and an excellent lunch buffet that does credit to South Asian standards. (Staff) 1261 Folsom, SF. 626-2798. Indian, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

NOB HILL/RUSSIAN HILL

Acquerello reminds us that the Italians, like the French, have a high cuisine — sophisticated and earthy and offered in a onetime chapel with exposed rafters and sumptuous fabrics on the banquettes. Service is as knowledgeable and civilized as at any restaurant in the city. (PR, 3/05) 1722 Sacramento, SF. 567-5432. Italian, $$$, D, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Ah Lin offers Mandarin-style Chinese cooking in an easy-to-take storefront setting on Cathedral Hill. The dishes are well behaved and tasty, with only an occasional flare-up of chile heat. The roast duck is one of the best deals in town. (PR, 10/06) 1634 Bush, SF. 922-5279. Chinese, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Alborz looks more like a hotel restaurant than a den of Persian cuisine, but there are flavors here — of barberry and dried lime, among others — you won’t easily find elsewhere. (Staff) 1245 Van Ness, SF. 440-4321. Persian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Bacio offers homey, traditional Italian dishes in a charmingly cozy rustic space. Service can be slow. (PR, 1/05) 835 Hyde, SF. 292-7999. Italian, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Cordon Bleu has huge portions, tiny prices, and a hoppin’ location right next to the Lumiere Theatre. (Staff) 1574 California, SF. 673-5637. Vietnamese, L/D, ¢.

CIVIC CENTER/TENDERLOIN

Mangosteen radiates lime green good cheer from its corner perch in the Tenderloin. Inexpensive Vietnamese standards are rendered with thoughtful little touches and an emphasis on the freshest ingredients. (PR, 11/05) 601 Larkin, SF. 776-3999. Vietnamese, L/D, $, cash only.

Max’s Opera Cafe Huge food is the theme here, from softball-<\d>size matzo balls to towering desserts. Your basic Jewish deli. (Staff) 601 Van Ness, SF. 771-7300. American, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Mekong Restaurant serves the foods of the Mekong River basin. There is a distinct Thai presence but also dishes with Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and even Chinese accents. (PR, 1/06) 791 O’Farrell, SF. 928-2772. Pan-<\d>Asian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Olive might look like a tapas bar, but what you want are the thin-crust pizzas, the simpler the toppings the better. The small plates offer eclectic pleasures, especially the Tuscan pâté and beef satay with peanut sauce. (Staff) 743 Larkin, SF. 776-9814. Pizza/<\d>eclectic, D, $, AE/DISC/MC/V.

HAYES VALLEY

Frjtz serves first-rate Belgian fries, beer, crepes, and sandwiches in an art-<\d>house atmosphere. If the noise overwhelms, take refuge in the lovely rear garden. (Staff) 579 Hayes, SF. 864-7654; also at Ghirardelli Square, SF. 928-3886. Belgian, B/L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Hayes Street Grill started more than a quarter century ago as an emulation of the city’s old seafood houses, and now it’s an institution itself. The original formula — immaculate seafood simply prepared, with choice of sauce and French fries — still beats vibrantly at the heart of the menu. Service is impeccable, the setting one of relaxed grace. (PR, 7/06) 816 Folsom, SF. 863-5545. Seafood, L/D, $$$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Sauce enjoys the services of chef Ben Paula, whose uninhibited California cooking is as easy to like as a good pop song. (PR, 5/05) 131 Gough, SF. 252-1369. California, D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Suppenküche has a Busvan for Bargains, butcher-<\d>block look that gives context to its German cuisine. If you like schnitzel, brats, roasted potatoes, eggs, cheese, cucumber salad, cold cuts, and cold beer, you’ll love it here. (Staff) 601 Hayes, SF. 252-9289. German, BR/D, $, AE/MC/V.

*Zuni Cafe is one of the most celebrated — and durable — restaurants in town, perhaps because its kitchen has honored the rustic country cooking of France and Italy for the better part of two decades. (PR, 2/05) 1658 Market, SF. 552-2522. California, B/L/D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

CASTRO/NOE VALLEY/GLEN PARK

Firewood Cafe serves up delicious thin chewy-<\d>crusted pizzas, four kinds of tortellini, rotisserie-<\d>roasted chicken, and big bowls of salad. (Staff) 4248 18th St, SF. 252-0999. Italian, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Los Flamingos mingles Cuban and Mexican specialties in a relaxed, leafy, walk-<\d>oriented neighborhood setting. Lots of pink on the walls; even more starch on the plates. (PR, 11/04) 151 Noe, SF. 252-7450. Cuban/<\d>Mexican, BR/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Fresca raises the already high bar a little higher for Peruvian restaurants in town. Many of the dishes are complex assemblies of unusual and distinctive ingredients, but some of the best are among the simplest. The skylighted barrel-<\d>ceiling setting is quietly spectacular. (PR, 7/05) 3945 24th St, SF. 695-0549. Peruvian, L/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Gialina offers fabulous thin-crust pizzas in the nouveau-quaint heart of Glen Park’s village center. Toppings reflect the companionable spirits of innovation and playfulness. For dessert: chocolate pizza, though beware the danger of starch overload. (PR, 3/07) 2842 Diamond, SF. 239-8500. Pizza/Italian, D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

Hamano Sushi packs them in despite a slightly dowdy setting and food of variable appeal. The best stuff is as good as it gets, though, and prices aren’t bad. (Staff) 1332 Castro, SF. 826-0825. Japanese, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

HAIGHT/COLE VALLEY/WESTERN ADDITION

Alamo Square is an archetype for the "good little place around the corner." Five different kinds of fish are offered next to three cooking techniques and five sauces. (Staff) 803 Fillmore, SF. 440-2828. Seafood, D, $, MC/V.

Ali Baba’s Cave Veggie shish kebabs are grilled fresh to order; the hummus and baba ghanoush are subtly seasoned and delicious. (Staff) 531 Haight (at Fillmore), SF. 255-7820; 799 Valencia, SF. 863-3054. Middle Eastern, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

All You Knead emphasizes the wonderful world of yeast — sandwiches, pizzas, etc. — in a space reminiscent of beer halls near Big 10 campuses. (Staff) 1466 Haight, SF. 552-4550. American, B/L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Asqew Grill reinvents the world of fine fast food on a budget with skewers, served in under 10 minutes for under 10 bucks. (Staff) 1607 Haight, SF. 701-9301. California, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Bia’s Restaurant and Wine Bar proves hippies know what’s what in matters of food and wine. An excellent menu of homey items with Middle Eastern and Persian accents; a tight, widely varied wine list. (PR, 11/04) 1640 Haight, SF. 861-8868. California/<\d>Middle Eastern, L/D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

Blue Jay Cafe has the Mayberry, RFD, look and giant platters of Southernish food, including a good catfish po’boy and crispy fried chicken. Everything is under $10. (PR, 4/04) 919 Divisadero, SF. 447-6066. American/<\d>soul, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

Brother-in-Laws Bar-B-Cue always wins the "Best Barbecue" prize in our annual Best of the Bay edition: the ribs, chickens, links, and brisket are smoky and succulent; the aroma sucks you in like a tractor beam. (Staff) 705 Divisadero, SF. 931-7427. Barbecue, L/D, $.

Burgermeister uses top-grade Niman Ranch beef for its burgers, but nonetheless they’re splendid, with soft buns and crisp, well-<\d>salted fries. Foofy California wrinkles are available if you want them, but why would you? (PR, 5/04) 86 Carl, SF. 566-1274. Burgers, L/D, $.

MISSION/BERNAL HEIGHTS/POTRERO HILL

Cafe Phoenix looks like a junior-<\d>high cafeteria, but the California-<\d>deli food is fresh, tasty, and honest, and the people making it are part of a program to help the emotionally troubled return to employability. (Staff) 1234 Indiana, SF. 282-9675, ext. 239. California, B/L, ¢, MC/V.

Caffe Cozzolino Get it to go: everything’s about two to four bucks more if you eat it there. (Staff) 300 Precita, SF. 285-6005. Italian, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Caffe d’Melanio is the place to go if you want your pound of coffee beans roasted while you enjoy an Argentine-<\d>Italian dinner of pasta, milanesa, and chimichurri sauce. During the day the café offers a more typically Cal-<\d>American menu of better-<\d>than-<\d>average quality. First-rate coffee beans. (PR, 10/04) 1314 Ocean, SF. 333-3665. Italian/<\d>Argentine, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Il Cantuccio strikingly evokes that little trattoria you found near the Ponte Vecchio on your last trip to Florence. (Staff) 3228 16th St, SF. 861-3899. Italian, D, $, MC/V.

Chez Papa Bistrot sits like a beret atop Potrero Hill. The food is good, the staff’s French accents authentic, the crowd a lively cross section, but the place needs a few more scuffs and quirks before it can start feeling real. (Staff) 1401 18th St, SF. 824-8210. French, BR/L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Circolo Restaurant and Lounge brings Peruvian- and Asian-<\d>influenced cooking into a stylishly barnlike urban space where dot-<\d>commers gathered of old. Some of the dishes are overwrought, but the food is splendid on the whole. (PR, 6/04) 500 Florida, SF. 553-8560. Nuevo Latino/<\d>Asian, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Couleur Café reminds us that French food need be neither fancy nor insular. The kitchen playfully deploys a world of influences — the duck-<\d>confit quesadilla is fabulous — and service is precise and attentive despite the modest setting at the foot of Potrero Hill. (PR, 2/06) 300 De Haro, SF. 255-1021. French, BR/L/D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

*Delfina has grown from a neighborhood restaurant to an event, but an expanded dining room has brought the noise under control, and as always, the food — intense variations on a theme of Tuscany — could not be better. (PR, 2/04) 3621 18th St, SF. 552-4055. California, D, $$, MC/V.

Dosa serves dosas, the south Indian crepes, along with a wealth of other, and generally quite spicy, dishes from the south of the subcontinent. The cooking tends toward a natural meatlessness; the crowds are intense, like hordes of passengers inquiring about a delayed international flight. (PR, 1/06) 995 Valencia, SF. 642-3672. South Indian, BR/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Double Play sits across the street from what once was Seals Stadium, but while the field and team are gone, the restaurant persists as an authentic sports bar with a solidly masculine aura — mitts on the walls, lots of dark wood, et cetera. The all-<\d>American food (soups, sandwiches, pastas, meat dishes, lots of fries) is outstanding. (Staff) 2401 16th St, SF. 621-9859. American, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack offers a tasty, inexpensive, late-night alternative to Pasta Pomodoro. The touch of human hands is everywhere evident. (Staff) 18 Virginia, SF. 206-2086. Italian, D, $, cash only.

Esperpento is as authentic a Spanish-style tapas restaurant as you’ll find in San Francisco, but even better — the paella is good! (PR, 4/07) 3295 22nd St, SF. 282-8867. Spanish/tapas, L/D, $, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Foreign Cinema serves some fine New American food in a spare setting of concrete and glass that warms up romantically once the sun goes down. (Staff) 2534 Mission, SF. 648-7600. California, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Front Porch mixes a cheerfully homey setting (with a front porch of sorts), a hipster crowd, and a Caribbean-inflected comfort menu into a distinctive urban cocktail. The best dishes, such as a white polenta porridge with crab, are Range-worthy, and nothing on the menu is much more than $10. (PR, 10/06) 65A 29th St, SF. 695-7800. American/Caribbean, BR/D, $, MC/V.

MARINA/PACIFIC HEIGHTS/LAUREL HEIGHTS

Greens All the elements that made it famous are still intact: pristine produce, an emphasis on luxury rather than health, that gorgeous view. (Staff) Fort Mason Center, Bldg A, Marina at Laguna, SF. 771-6222. Vegetarian, L/D, $$, DISC/MC/V.

*Harris’ Restaurant is a timeless temple to beef, which appears most memorably as slices of rib roast, but in other ways too. Uncheap. (PR, 5/04) 2100 Van Ness, SF. 673-1888. Steakhouse/<\d>American, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Kiss is tiny, industrial, not particularly Anglophonic — and serves some of the best sushi in the city. Warning: the very best stuff (from the specials menu) can be very pricey. (Staff) 1700 Laguna, SF. 474-2866. Japanese, D, $$$, MC/V.

Letitia’s has claimed the old Alta Plaza space and dispensed with the huge cruise mirror. The Mexican standards are pretty good and still pricey, though they don’t seem quite as dear in Pacific Heights as they did in the Castro. (PR, 6/04) 2301 Fillmore, SF. 922-1722. Mexican, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Mezes glows with sunny Greek hospitality, and the plates coming off the grill are terrific, though not huge. Bulk up with a fine Greek salad. (Staff) 2373 Chestnut, SF. 409-7111. Greek, D, $, MC/V.

Out the Door is the takeout-friendly child of the Slanted Door, and the food reflects the same emphasis on first-quality ingredients. You can eat in if you want or shop for hard-to-find Asian groceries at reasonable prices. (PR, 1/07) Westfield Center, 845 Market, SF. 541-9913; One Ferry Bldg, SF. 861-8032. Vietnamese, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Plump Jack Café If you had to take your parents to dinner in the Marina, this would be the place. A small but authentic jewel. (Staff) 3127 Fillmore, SF. 563-4755. California, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

SUNSET

Marnee Thai A friendly, low-key neighborhood restaurant — now in two neighborhoods — that just happens to serve some of the best Thai food in town. (PR, 1/04) 2225 Irving, SF. 665-9500; 1243 Ninth Ave (at Lincoln), SF. 731-9999. Thai, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Masala means "spice mixture," and spices aplenty you will find in the South Asian menu. Be sure to order plenty of naan to sop up the sauce with. (Staff) 1220 Ninth Ave, SF. 566-6976. Indian/<\d>Pakistani, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Nan King Road Bistro laces its mostly Chinese menu with little touches from around Asia (sake sauces, Korean noodles), and the result is a spectacular saucefest. Spare, cool environment. (Staff) 1360 Ninth Ave, SF. 753-2900. Pan-<\d>Asian, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Park Chow could probably thrive on its basic dishes, such as the burger royale with cheese ($6.95), but if you’re willing to spend an extra five bucks or so, the kitchen can really flash you some thigh. (Staff) 1240 Ninth Ave, SF. 665-9912. California, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

Pisces California Cuisine brings a touch of SoMa sophistication to an Outer Sunset neighborhood in need of paint. (You can’t miss the restaurant’s black facade.) The kitchen turns out a variety of seafood preparations — the clam chowder is terrific — and offers an appealing prix fixe option at both lunch and dinner. (PR, 8/06) 3414-3416 Judah, SF. 564-2233. Seafood, L/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

P.J.’s Oyster Bed Of all the US regional cultures, southern Louisiana’s may be the most beloved, and at P.J.’s you can taste why. (Staff) 737 Irving, SF. 566-7775. Seafood, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Pomelo Big portions of Asian- and Italian-<\d>inspired noodle dishes. If you need something quick, cheap, and fresh, pop in here. (Staff) 92 Judah, SF. 731-6175. Noodles, L/D, $, cash only.

Sabella’s carries a famous seafood name into the heart of West Portal. Good nonseafood stuff too. (Staff) 53 West Portal, SF. 753-3130. Italian/<\d>seafood, $, L/D, MC/V.

Sea Breeze Cafe looks like a dive, but the California cooking is elevated, literally and figuratively. Lots of witty salads, a rum-rich crème brûlée. (Staff) 3940 Judah, SF. 242-6022. California, BR/L/D, $$, MC/V.

So Restaurant brings the heat, in the form of huge soup and noodle — and soupy noodle — dishes, many of them liberally laced with hot peppers and chiles. The pot stickers are homemade and exceptional, the crowd young and noisy. Cheap. (PR, 10/06) 2240 Irving, SF. 731-3143. Chinese/noodles, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Tasty Curry still shows traces of an earlier life as a Korean hibachi restaurant (i.e., venting hoods above most of the tables), but the South Asian food is cheap, fresh, and packs a strong kick. (PR, 1/04) 1375 Ninth Ave, SF. 753-5122. Indian/<\d>Pakistani, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Tennessee Grill could as easily be called the Topeka Grill, since its atmosphere is redolent of Middle America. Belly up to the salad bar for huge helpings of the basics to accompany your meat loaf or calf’s liver. (Staff) 1128 Taraval, SF. 664-7834. American, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Thai Cottage isn’t really a cottage, but it is small in the homey way, and its Thai menu is sharp and vivid in the home-<\d>cooking way. Cheap, and the N train stops practically at the front door. (PR, 8/04) 4041 Judah, SF. 566-5311. Thai, L/D, $, MC/V.

*Xiao Loong elevates the neighborhood Chinese restaurant experience to one of fine dining, with immaculate ingredients and skillful preparation in a calm architectural setting. (PR, 8/05) 250 West Portal, SF. 753-5678. Chinese, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Yum Yum Fish is basically a fish store: three or four little tables with fish-print tablecloths under glass, fish-chart art along the wall, and fish-price signs all over the place. (Staff) 2181 Irving, SF. 566-6433. Sushi, L/D, ¢.

RICHMOND

Eva’s Hawaiian Café re-creates the Hawaiian lunch-plate experience in a Clement Street storefront done up in primary colors worthy of a 1970s-era middle school. The food is excellent and inexpensive, the service skilled and cheerful, the setting immaculate. What’s not to like? (PR, 3/07) 731 Clement, SF. 221-2087. Hawaiian, L/C, ¢, MC/V.

Katia’s, a Russian Tea Room evokes the bourgeois romance of old Russia, and the classic Slavic food is carefully prepared and presented. Silken Crimean port is served in a tiny glass shaped like a Cossack boot. (PR, 12/04) 600 Fifth Ave, SF. 668-9292. Russian, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Kitaro This Japanese restaurant, unlike many others, has a lot of options for vegetarians. (Staff) 5850 Geary, SF. 386-2777. Japanese, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Lucky Fortune serves up a wide variety of Chinese-<\d>style seafood in a cheerfully blah setting. Prices are astoundingly low, portions large. (Staff) 5715 Geary, SF. 751-2888. Chinese, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Mai’s Restaurant On the basis of the hot-and-sour shrimp soup with pineapple alone, Mai’s deserves a line out the door. (Staff) 316 Clement, SF. 221-3046. Vietnamese, L/D, ¢, AE/DC/MC/V.

BAYVIEW/HUNTERS POINT/SOUTH

Bella Vista Continental Restaurant commands a gorgeous view of the Peninsula and South Bay from its sylvan perch on Skyline Boulevard, and the continental food, though a little stately, is quite good. The look is rustic-stylish (exposed wood beams, servers in dinner jackets), and the tone one of informal horse-country wealth. (PR, 3/07) 13451 Skyline Blvd., Woodside. (650) 851-1229. Continental, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Cable Car Coffee Shop Atmospherically speaking, you’re looking at your basic downtown South San Francisco old-style joint, one that serves a great Pacific Scramble for $4.95 and the most perfectest hash browns to be tasted. (Staff) 423 Grand, South SF. (650) 952-9533. American, B/BR/L, ¢.

Cliff’s Bar-B-Q and Seafood Some things Cliff’s got going for him: excellent mustard greens, just drenched in flavorfulness, and barbecued you name it. Brisket. Rib tips. Hot links. Pork ribs. Beef ribs. Baby backs. And then there are fried chickens and, by way of health food, fried fishes. (Staff) 2177 Bayshore, SF. 330-0736. Barbecue, L/D, ¢, AE/DC/MC/V.

BERKELEY/EMERYVILLE/NORTH

Ajanta offers a variety of deftly seasoned regional dishes from the Asian subcontinent. (Staff) 1888 Solano, Berk. (510) 526-4373. Indian, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

La Bayou serves up an astounding array of authentic New Orleans staples, including jambalaya, (greaseless!) fried catfish, and homemade pralines. (Staff) 3278 Adeline, Berk. (510) 594-9302. Cajun/<\d>Creole, L/D, ¢-$, MC/V.

Breads of India and Gourmet Curries The menu changes every day, so nothing is refrigerated overnight, and the curries benefit from obvious loving care. (Staff) 2448 Sacramento, Berk. (510) 848-7684. Indian, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

OAKLAND/ALAMEDA

Connie’s Cantina fashions unique variations on standard Mexican fare — enchiladas, tamales, fajitas, rellenos. (Staff) 3340 Grand, Oakl. (510) 839-4986. Mexican, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Garibaldi’s on College focuses on Mediterranean-<\d>style seafood. (Staff) 5356 College, Oakl. (510) 595-4000. Mediterranean, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Gerardo’s Mexican Restaurant offers all the expected taquería fare. But a main reason to visit is to pick up a dozen of Maria’s wonderfully down-home chicken or pork tamales. (Staff) 3811 MacArthur, Oakl. (510) 531-5255. Mexican, B/L/D, ¢-$. *

Web Site of the Week

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www.progressiveliving.org


The San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and other corporate media outlets in the Bay Area regularly act like they’ve never heard the term progressive, as if the San Francisco left were trying to pull a fast one on everyone. Actually, progressivism has a long and proud history in the United States, as this site and others like it outline.

Ghostbusters

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Entertainment commissioner Audrey Joseph is, by her own assessment, a tough cookie. She successfully beat back a developer’s efforts to close her old SoMa nightclub. She attended her first Halloween in the Castro as a windup doll. And when skinheads targeted the famously gay Halloween event in the late 1980s, Joseph helped form the Gay Guards. But for all that, she is the first to admit that her latest gig — which involves helping Sup. Bevan Dufty and Mayor Gavin Newsom move Halloween festivities out of the Castro — won’t be easy.

"Sometimes I feel like a whipping post," Joseph told the Guardian the day after she gave the city’s first public presentation of the Dufty-Newsom plan to move the event into a parking lot behind AT&T Park — a lot that just happens to lie in the district of Newsom nemesis Sup. Chris Daly.

With Dufty stuck in traffic, though he did show up later, and Newsom nowhere in sight, Joseph was flying solo May 30 as she laid out their plan to an audience that was composed primarily of middle-aged Castro business and property owners. The city won’t close Market and Castro streets, and it won’t provide portable toilets or entertainment in the Castro, but it will police the area, and Castro merchants will be asked to voluntarily close early.

"We’d love to see the Castro dead," Joseph said as she laid out plans to lure Halloween revelers into the stadium parking lot by holding a concert featuring an as-yet-unnamed mainstream entertainer.

Some Castro residents expressed ambivalence about killing off what one attendee said amounts to "a sacred holiday" for the gay community, others pointed out that it would take a major hip-hop artist to lure the bridge-and-tunnel crowd to a concert that will cost $10 to $25 a pop, and bar owner Greg Bronstein questioned the sanity of closing early on what is the busiest business night of the year. Deputy police chief David Shinn pointed out that unlike New York’s 30,000-strong police force, which can encircle the Big Apple’s Halloween parade, the San Francisco Police Department’s 2,400 officers cannot ring the Castro.

"We’ve heard everyone’s cries about wanting Halloween out of the Castro," Joseph told the crowd. But her headache stemmed from the fact that her audience represented a small but highly vocal fraction of the 49,839 registered voters in Dufty’s district — and similarly small but vocal groups exist in Daly’s district too. Rincon Tenants Association president David Osgood decries the proposed plan as "the worst case of NIMBYism."

"This is an obvious effort by one neighborhood to get rid of their own event," Osgood told the Guardian. "But people are going to go to the Castro anyway. Halloween in the Castro has a flamboyance you don’t get anywhere else. Moving Halloween to the Embarcadero is like trying to move Mardi Gras out of New Orleans to Omaha. It’s just not going to work. It needs to be planned where it is."

But Joseph has high hopes for AT&T Park as a Halloween site, even though she has had a hard time finding event promoters. "The site is bigger, there’s less residential impact, it’s right on a Muni line, and we won’t have to stop traffic on the Embarcadero during rush hour when we’re setting up," she said.

Defending the lack of community meetings about Halloween in the past six months (something Newsom and Dufty had promised), Joseph said, "The city had to debrief from last year’s event, make a plan, and get Supervisors Dufty and Chris Daly to sign off on it, since both districts are involved, then meet with the mayor, the port, and a string of musical promoters."

As for concerns that people will just show up in the Castro or drift there once the city pulls the plug on the stadium parking lot concert at 10 p.m., Joseph said, "I’m open to suggestions. I’m trying to create a safe and fun environment where people say, ‘Wow, this is a great party!’ instead of coming to the Castro, looking terrified, and holding on to each other — for the thrill of what? Being stabbed or shot?" *

Cab it forward

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Eight San Francisco cabbies fed up with their money-devouring gas guzzlers have founded a taxi company that is friendly to the environment and to workers.

Green Cab hit the streets April 25, flaunting its ideology with bright paint jobs. The driver-owned cooperative has about 14 drivers and three hybrid vehicles, and it plans to purchase two more cars next month.

"We’re the only cab company in San Francisco where every driver is going to have an opportunity to participate in the decision-making process," cofounder Mark Gruberg, a taxi driver of 20 years, said. "We’re driver owned and driver operated."

The business is blazing a trail that others may soon follow if Mayor Gavin Newsom realizes the goal he announced last October of having all SF taxis be clean and green by 2011. On June 12 the San Francisco Taxicab Commission will discuss ways of meeting this goal of, in a sense, transitioning the city’s cabs from yellow to green — or at least greenish. Of the 1,351 taxis in 34 fleets that operate in the city, there are 140 Crown Victorias that run on compressed natural gas (CNG), which is made mostly from the greenhouse gas methane, and 40 hybrids, most of which are Ford SUVs. By October of this year, another 25 alternative-fuel or hybrid taxis are expected to be on the streets.

Heidi Machen, executive director of the Taxicab Commission, told us that taxis are required to be replaced after they’ve clocked 350,000 miles. On April 24 the commission decided to hold off on a policy that, she said, "would have restricted any replacement vehicles to be hybrid or alternative-fuel vehicles."

A key reason the policy was not approved, Machen said, was concern that the replacement alternative-fuel vehicles would be mostly those that run on CNG, which burns more cleanly than gasoline but still produces greenhouse gases and gives vehicles worse fuel efficiency than hybrids have. "[CNG] is an improvement, but only an improvement over something terrible to start with," Gruberg said.

Hybrids, unlike purely gas-powered vehicles, have engines that switch to electric power when the cars are stationary due to, for instance, traffic jams or stoplights. According to Gruberg, hybrids get about 40 miles to the gallon for city driving — a drastic improvement over the 12 mpg of standard Crown Victorias. Hybrids emit 13 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for every 30 miles they drive, compared with the 40 pounds that Crown Victorias produce.

So, besides hybrids, what’s the next efficient upgrade to the Green Cab fleet: Hydrogen? Electric? Biodiesel? "We’re open to anything that’s going to have beneficial effects to the environment," Gruberg said, adding that the company’s always looking for more ideas — and envirofriendly car donations.

Joe Mirabile, another Green Cab cofounder, emphasized the urgency of the company’s role in fighting or at least lessening the adverse effects of global warming.

"We have to move fast," Mirabile said. "Hybrids aren’t going to do everything, but they’re one small piece of the puzzle."

At its next meeting the Taxicab Commission will discuss possible monetary incentives, such as a higher gate fee, to make it easier for cab companies to purchase green vehicles. Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard also told us that grant money is the key to putting more Priuses on the street.

"The Mayor has made a commitment to seek additional grant funding at the federal, state and regional levels to help taxi companies finance the more expensive vehicles," Ballard wrote in response to Guardian questions.

But even if Newsom can’t get those grants or otherwise fails to meet his goal, at least San Franciscans have Green Cab, which Gruberg said has been getting 50 to 60 customers per day and lots of goodwill from passersby. "People will wave and honk in the street," Gruberg said. "They’ll come up to the window and say, ‘How can I support you?’ A lot of drivers are asking if they can work for the company. Why wouldn’t they? Instead of paying $40 to $50 a day for gas, they can be paying $10 to $15." Machen likewise expressed her enthusiasm for the growing fleet.

"[Green Cab] is a business model," she said. "They show the direction the industry is going and the direction San Francisco is going." *

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

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s too bad that acting superintendent Gwen Chan didn’t want to stick around a bit longer at the helm of the San Francisco public schools. She brought a lot of stability to the district after the insanely acrimonious final years under Arlene Ackerman (who won’t go away and is still suing the district for back pay, which is disgusting considering all the money she took out of the district).

But I ran into school board president Mark Sanchez at the Progressive Convention June 2, and he was all smiles about the guy the board seems ready to hire for the job. The almost-new superintendent is Carlos Garcia, who was the principal of Horace Mann Middle School from 1988 to 1991 and most recently was the head of the Las Vegas school district.

I have a son going into third grade and a daughter going into kindergarten, and I’m an unabashed fan of and advocate for public education in San Francisco. So I hope he’s everything the board members say he is.

But since he’s not taking press calls right now, I’m going to give him a little free, and public, advice.

There are real, lingering problems in the local schools, the biggest of which is the achievement gap. White kids and Asian kids and kids from wealthier families do far better than black kids and Latino kids and kids whose families don’t have much money. That’s unacceptable, and the new superintendent needs to make resolving that problem a priority.

He also needs to understand some facts of San Francisco life.

For starters, this city doesn’t like or tolerate arrogance or secrecy. The schools chief needs to be accessible, approachable, willing to listen, and willing to admit mistakes. Not everything you try will work, Mr. Superintendent; when you screw up, you can’t get your pants in a wad and refuse to say you’re sorry.

You’ve got some tough decisions to make, and they won’t all be popular. People are going to shout and protest and complain. Some of those people will be your own school board members. We like to air our disputes in public around here; it’s a political town, and we expect the people who run community institutions to work with their critics and their friends alike. It’s hot in the kitchen; get used to it before you arrive or this isn’t going to work.

And do not — do not — continue the previous superintendent’s policy of building a wall between the press and the district. Ackerman had a gag order in place and wouldn’t allow staffers to talk to reporters without her prior consent. Scrap that — publicly — your first day. Make it clear you have nothing to hide: records are open, your door is open, and your public relations staff exists to promote the schools, not your personal career.

Remember when you walk in the door: There’s a lot wrong with the district, but there’s also a lot right. There are some brilliant principals and a lot of wonderful, devoted teachers. Don’t make their lives any harder than they already are.

And please: for the sake of all of us, don’t make the San Francisco schoolkids lab rats for your pet educational theories. This isn’t a social-science experiment or a doctoral thesis you’re taking on. These are people’s lives. Have a little respect for that, and we’ll get along fine. *

Beyond the Progressive Convention

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EDITORIAL The Progressive Convention didn’t produce a candidate for mayor, which wasn’t really a surprise: by the time the show opened, it was pretty clear that none of the leading contenders was ready to enter the race that day. And that, of course, will give the mainstream news media plenty of opportunity to say that the San Francisco left is disorganized, discouraged, and unable to mount a challenge to Mayor Gavin Newsom.

But Sup. Chris Daly actually did a very positive thing in pulling this event together. It wasn’t a nominating convention and never should have been, but it did serve as a reminder of the large and growing number of ideas, activists, and elected officials that make up that amorphous bloc known as the San Francisco progressives.

Daly, in a closing speech, noted that he’s heard over and over again how weak the movement is, but reminded the 400 or so attendees that "the state of the progressive movement is strong." Progressives control the Board of Supervisors and the school board. More than half the elected officials in the city generally fit under the progressive banner. And of the successful policy initiatives that have come out of this city in the past two years, almost none were from the Mayor’s Office.

Ten years ago, this event couldn’t and wouldn’t have happened. The city was stuck under the tight rule of a political machine, and only a handful of elected officials dared defy the kingpin, Willie Brown. Although the progressives have come a long, long way, winning a citywide race for mayor when the incumbent has soaring approval ratings and an essentially endless supply of money still isn’t an easy task. So it’s no surprise that there aren’t many takers.

In fact, there are some on the left who argue that it’s best to just give Newsom a pass and focus on the next round of supervisorial elections, in 2008. But that would be a mistake.

For starters, we’re still not convinced of Newsom’s invulnerability. The mayor may have great PR, but he has a lousy record. The city’s facing a long list of serious problems, from the murder rate to the Muni meltdown, and Newsom has done almost nothing to address them. The right candidate could mount a real challenge.

And even if it’s a long shot, San Francisco needs a mayor’s race. Newsom has gone into hiding of late; he won’t face the press, won’t appear before the supervisors to answer questions, and holds only farcical community meetings where all the questions are planted or screened ahead of time. A challenge would force him into the open and give the voters a chance to hold him accountable.

If it’s done right, a campaign could energize the legions of disenfranchised and create the sort of momentum the progressives need to retain control of the Board of Supervisors next year. And it would ensure that the left turn out for the election in November — which will be crucial if some downtown-backed initiatives and an attempt to recall Sup. Jake McGoldrick are on the ballot.

It’s late, and it’s getting very late for a candidate to enter the race, but there’s still a short window of time. Former supervisor Matt Gonzalez is still thinking about a run, and if he’s going to do it, he should be talking now to some of the progressives whose support he’ll need. Frankly, he has some fence-mending to do from his last race and from his decision to leave the board, and he should start that now.

We still think Ross Mirkarimi ought to run, and despite his official reluctance, he still can. A win would shake up city hall like nothing in years; a loss might still position the supervisor well to try again when Newsom is termed out. Daly at this point has taken himself out for family reasons, which is understandable — but he could also mount a strong campaign.

In his convention speech, Mirkarimi kept saying that "somebody" needs to take on the mayor. Ross, Matt, Chris … we’re waiting. *

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