EDITORIAL The state Department of Water Resources released a long-awaited study July 19 concluding that restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley would cost at least $3 billion and possibly as much as $10 billion.
Let us put this in perspective.
The state of California is facing extreme pressure on its electrical grid because of record high heat. If this is an early sign of rapid and dramatic climate change (and that’s a very possible scenario), then the problem is going to get worse before it gets better. Most electricity in this country is generated by burning fossil fuels, which contributes to global warming, which puts more pressure on the grid…. It’s getting so bad that some desperate environmentalists, flailing around for answers, are starting to argue that nuclear power might be an option.
Renewable energy? Gee, the experts say: It’s just not financially feasible right now.
And with some very scary problems looming, the state is actually talking about tearing down a hydroelectric dam that provides clean electricity for 200,000 homes — and spending $10 billion to do it.
This is insanity.
The O’Shaughnessey Dam, which holds back the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, flooded a spectacular Sierra valley, breaking the heart of conservationist John Muir. Even the San Francisco Chronicle, which supported the dam and attacked Muir about 100 years ago, now agrees that it was a mistake.
But there’s a lot more to the story. For starters, the compromise legislation that gave San Francisco the right to build the dam required the city to use it as the centerpiece of a public power system — a legal mandate that the city defies to this day. As long as the dam is generating power, it offers a huge opportunity for San Franciscans to get out from under the private power monopoly of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. And while hydroelectric dams have serious environmental problems, they don’t create greenhouse gases — and a dam that’s been around this long is actually a fairly ecologically sound way to generate power.
The price tag for wiping out the dam is staggering — and from a purely environmental perspective, spending that cash on this scheme would be a gigantic mistake. For $10 billion, California could undertake a huge crash program in developing renewable energy, spurring a lucrative industry that would create tens of thousands of jobs. With that kind of money behind it, solar power would not only be competitive, it would be cheaper than other forms of electricity. And the state would be leading the nation into a new era of safe, clean power.
Sure, in 50 years when solar, wind, and tidal power provide 90 percent of the state’s energy needs, and California has joined Nebraska in outlawing private electric utilities, and there’s money to burn … then restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley will be a fine idea. But for now it’s time to put this foolishness to rest. San Francisco — which, after all, owns the dam — should take the lead here. The supervisors should pass a resolution stating that the city will not consider any further proposals to tear down the dam — at least not until the city’s and nation’s energy policies have advanced a long way in a very different direction. SFBG
Supervisors
No more dam discussion
Come on, Mr. Sheriff
By Tim Redmond
Here’s a great idea: Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarmimi are pushing for a resolution that would call on the San Francisco sheriff to refuse to carry out Ellis Act evictions. Sheriff Mike Hennessey doesn’t seem so hot on this; he says he doesn’t want to face a contempt of court citation and wind up in his own jail.
But hey, it’s a San Francisco tradition: Back in 1977, then-Sheriff Dick Hongisto refused to evict the residents of the International Hotel, and spent five days in jail before relenting. The worst that would happen to Hennessey: He’d be stuck for a few days in his own clink, where I suspect he’d be treated well (and would learn a bit about how the inmates feel day to day). Eventually, he’d probably have to relent, too — but what a glrious legal battle. It would be an other great example of what we call Civic Disobedience — using the clout of the city and the full legal resources of the city to defy an immoral law. Gavin Newsom did it with same-sex marriage. Now, Hennessey has a chance to make history. Go for it, Mike.
Hot times
By Steven T. Jones
I finally got around to seeing An Inconvenient Truth on Friday night, just as the realities of global warming couldn’t be more clear. It was downright balmy at 10 pm when I stepped out of the theater and the weekend only got hotter from there, breaking heat records all over the country. I spent Sunday with my kids in Modesto and endured 115 degree heat, the kinda weather that convinces some bodies to simply drop dead. And it’s only going to get worse, a truth both incontrovertible and inconvenient to our status quo political and media establishment, which love to mock progressive voices like the Guardian who urge radical change. Even here in San Francisco, we’re still fighting about whether to facilitate bicycling and other measures that discourage driving cars. It’s maddening. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi will this Friday at 1:30 hold a hearing on Peak Oil before LAFCO — which will likely be belittled by the Chron and the Ex’s resident blowhard Ken Garcia. They prefer small potatoes BS like clean streets and playing nice with downtown and love to mock supervisors who talk about war, human rights, or saving the planet. But in the absence of leadership at the state and federal levels on the most important issues of the day, maybe it does become incumbent on San Francisco to step up and lead. Maybe radical proposals have become the most reasonable. And for the rest of us, even the small stuff will help.
Hot times
By Steven T. Jones
I finally got around to seeing An Inconvenient Truth on Friday night, just as the realities of global warming couldn’t be more clear. It was downright balmy at 10 pm when I stepped out of the theater and the weekend only got hotter from there, breaking heat records all over the country. I spent Sunday with my kids in Modesto and endured 115 degree heat, the kinda weather that convinces some bodies to simply drop dead. And it’s only going to get worse, a truth both incontrovertible and inconvenient to our status quo political and media establishment, which love to mock progressive voices like the Guardian that urge radical change. Even here in San Francisco, we’re still fighting about whether to facilitate bicycling and other measures that discourage driving cars. It’s maddening. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi will this Friday at 1:30 hold a hearing on Peak Oil before LAFCO — which will likely be belittled by the Chron and the Ex’s resident blowhard Ken Garcia. They prefer small potatoes BS like clean streets and playing nice with downtown and love to mock supervisors who talk about war, human rights, or saving the planet. But in the absence of leadership at the state and federal levels on the most important issues of the day, maybe it does become incumbent on San Francisco to step up and lead. Maybe radical proposals have become the most reasonable. And for the rest of us, even the small stuff will help.
Don’t move the mayoral elections
The Board of Supervisors is slated to vote July 25th on a plan that’s attracted little press attention, but could have a profound impact on San Francisco politics. Sup. Jake McGoldrick has proposed a charter amendment that would move mayoral elections to coincide with presidential elections. The idea, McGoldrick says, is to increase turnout: In 2004, when John Kerry was running against George W. Bush, more than 70 percent of San Franciscans voted. When Matt Gonzalez ran against Gavin Newsom for mayor in 2003, only 55 percent showed up at the polls.
It sounds good, and generally, we’re for anything that increases voter turnout. But there are some real tricky questions about this proposal, and there hasn’t been enough public discussion around it. So the supervisors should vote against placing it on this fall’s ballot.
Our main concern with the plan is that it might diminish local interest in the mayoral contest. When the presidential race is at the top of the ticket, and likely a U.S. Senate race at the same time, the news media tends to focus on those campaigns, and the public’s attention is focused on them, too. The advantage of having a San Francisco mayor’s race in what is otherwise an off-year for elections is that all the energy in local politics centers on a high-stakes local campaign (The district attorney’s race is also on the ballot, and that might totally get lost in the presidential-year madness).
Some critics oppose the plan because, in practice, it would give the next mayor – at this point, probably Gavin Newsom – an additional year in office. That shouldn’t be an issue, really: This is about more than one mayor, and more than one year. It’s about the future of politics in the city.
It shouldn’t be about the Democratic Party, either. Some people worry that party money – always big in a presidential year – will flow to the anointed Democratic mayoral candidate, drowning out the voices of (say) a Green candidate, or a democrat who didn’t get the party’s nod. Maybe – but maybe all the money will go to the top of the ticket, and there will be less local cash spent on the San Francisco mayor’s race. And the power of the Democratic Party in a presidential year didn’t stop Ross Mirkarimi – a green – from getting elected supervisor from District Five in 2004.
Both supporters and opponents of the plan are trying to calculate how it would help or hurt progressive candidates, but there’s another factor here. Mayoral races are about more than just winning. The 1999 campaign, in which Tom Ammiano lost to Willie Brown, was a turning point in progressive politics in San Francisco. The runoff between Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzalez in 2003 created an immense outpouring of community activism and brought thousands of new people into local politics. In a presidential year, some of that excitement – which is, in the end, crucial to any progressive movement – might have been diffused.
We don’t see any clear mandate or case for making the change right now, and we see some serious downsides. After extensive hearings and public debate, we might be convinced that this is a good idea, but that hasn’t happened yet. So for now, we urge the supervisors not to place it on the November ballot.
Don’t move the mayoral elections
The Board of Supervisors is slated to vote July 25th on a plan that’s attracted little press attention, but could have a profound impact on San Francisco politics. Sup. Jake McGoldrick has proposed a charter amendment that would move mayoral elections to coincide with presidential elections. The idea, McGoldrick says, is to increase turnout: In 2004, when John Kerry was running against George W. Bush, more than 70 percent of San Franciscans voted. When Matt Gonzalez ran against Gavin Newsom for mayor in 2003, only 55 percent showed up at the polls.
It sounds good, and generally, we’re for anything that increases voter turnout. But there are some real tricky questions about this proposal, and there hasn’t been enough public discussion around it. So the supervisors should vote against placing it on this fall’s ballot.
Our main concern with the plan is that it might diminish local interest in the mayoral contest. When the presidential race is at the top of the ticket, and likely a U.S. Senate race at the same time, the news media tends to focus on those campaigns, and the public’s attention is focused on them, too. The advantage of having a San Francisco mayor’s race in what is otherwise an off-year for elections is that all the energy in local politics centers on a high-stakes local campaign (The district attorney’s race is also on the ballot, and that might totally get lost in the presidential-year madness).
Some critics oppose the plan because, in practice, it would give the next mayor – at this point, probably Gavin Newsom – an additional year in office. That shouldn’t be an issue, really: This is about more than one mayor, and more than one year. It’s about the future of politics in the city.
It shouldn’t be about the Democratic Party, either. Some people worry that party money – always big in a presidential year – will flow to the anointed Democratic mayoral candidate, drowning out the voices of (say) a Green candidate, or a democrat who didn’t get the party’s nod. Maybe – but maybe all the money will go to the top of the ticket, and there will be less local cash spent on the San Francisco mayor’s race. And the power of the Democratic Party in a presidential year didn’t stop Ross Mirkarimi – a green – from getting elected supervisor from District Five in 2004.
Both supporters and opponents of the plan are trying to calculate how it would help or hurt progressive candidates, but there’s another factor here. Mayoral races are about more than just winning. The 1999 campaign, in which Tom Ammiano lost to Willie Brown, was a turning point in progressive politics in San Francisco. The runoff between Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzalez in 2003 created an immense outpouring of community activism and brought thousands of new people into local politics. In a presidential year, some of that excitement – which is, in the end, crucial to any progressive movement – might have been diffused.
We don’t see any clear mandate or case for making the change right now, and we see some serious downsides. After extensive hearings and public debate, we might be convinced that this is a good idea, but that hasn’t happened yet. So for now, we urge the supervisors not to place it on the November ballot.
Fair fees for rich developers
EDITORIAL The information that emerged from the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee on July 12 was mind-bending: According to a new city report, private developers will not even consider going forward with a big housing construction project unless the profit margin is at least 28 percent.
Think about it: Without a guaranteed profit about three or four times larger than what most normal businesses strive for, the developers won’t pour an ounce of concrete. And they still complain that the city wants them to build more affordable housing.
As housing activist Calvin Welch pointed out at the hearing, it used to be illegal in most states to charge that much interest on loaned money. The word for it was usury.
And in much of the construction industry, profit margins are far, far slimmer than that. On big public-works projects, like the Bay Bridge retrofit and the construction of the new terminal at San Francisco International Airport, the margin was designed to be about 5 percent.
As Steven T. Jones reports on page 15, this information, which has received very little press attention, ought to be the strongest boost yet for advocates of what’s known as “inclusionary housing” legislation — rules that would require developers building market-rate housing units to set aside a percentage of those units for sale or rent at levels that are affordable to nonwealthy San Franciscans. The current law requires that 12 percent of the units in any project have to be priced below market rate. (That goes up to 17 percent if the affordable units are built somewhere off-site or if the developers simply pay a per-unit fee into a city low-cost housing fund.)
Sup. Chris Daly, who has long been an advocate of inclusionary housing, forced the developer of One Rincon Hill, a high-rise condo project, to hike the affordable-housing share to 25 percent last year — and that convinced him that the city’s legal requirement was too low.
So now the supervisors are looking at increasing the levy, and as part of the discussion, a task force operating under the Mayor’s Office of Housing hired a consultant to look at industry finances and standards. If the report is correct, and 28 percent margins are considered a minimum in San Francisco’s private-sector housing market, then the rather modest increases the supervisors are looking at (a hike from 12 to 15 percent of below-market-rate units and some tighter rules for enforcement) are eminently reasonable. In fact, the legislation isn’t nearly ambitious enough.
Suppose the city mandated 25 percent below-market-price units in all new housing projects of more than, say, 20 units. Would the developers really walk away, saying that profits of, say, 20 percent just weren’t enough? Somehow, we doubt it — in fact, we suspect there are plenty of builders out there who would be more than happy with that level of return. And suppose the market for high-end, million-dollar condos — which clearly aren’t serving the unmet housing needs of the city anyway — started to dry up. So what? San Francisco doesn’t need more housing for the very rich. In fact, the overall impact of these luxury housing projects on the city is almost certainly negative — that sort of housing tends to drive out blue-collar industry and is already turning parts of the city into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley.
Daly argues that without these new market-rate projects, very little affordable housing will be built. And he has a point. Government subsidies and nonprofit programs are immensely valuable, but there’s never enough public cash to meet the stratospheric need for affordable housing in San Francisco.
But there’s no reason for the city to be held hostage by developer profits that exceed all reason. At the very least, the board should approve Daly’s proposals — and should look seriously at jacking up the requirements even more. SFBG
Windfalls and compromise
By Steven T. Jones
For anyone who could sort through the sometimes mind-numbing minutiae of land use economics and regulation, today’s Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee contained some interesting insights. Sup. Chris Daly has been trying to strengthen the city’s inclusionary housing ordinance — which now requires most developers build some below market rate units in their projects (12 percent if done on-site, 17 percent for off-site, or an in-lieu fee) — by increasing the percentages to 20-25, changing who qualifies to buy them and how they’re sold, and a few other tweaks. But a consultant report that came out Friday concluded that developers wouldn’t build at that level because that would drop their take below their minimum required 28 percent profit margin for big high rises (or a profit of around $250 million). Daly and housing activists who worked on the ordinance, including Calvin Welch, expressed astonishment developers required that much profit before they’d build, but they read the political handwriting and lowered their percentages to 15 and 20 percent, which pencil out. “What we were confronted with last Friday was political death,” Welch told me. But now, after that and a change grandfathering in current projects, the ordinance has the support from both the Mayor’s Office and leaders in the development community, although the committee punted it for a week to deal with a few details. There’s lots more to say about all this, but I’ll save most of it for my article in next week’s paper.
Downtown’s deceptions
By Steven T. Jones
The rancorous debate over providing health care to all San Franciscans finally comes to the Board of Supervisors for a vote tomorrow, culminating a truly ugly political spectacle. The business community has aggressively gone after the measure’s sponsor, Tom Ammiano, angrily accusing him of not listening and not caring.
Now, it’s understandable that some small business people on the verge of going under would be upset about having to give health coverage to their employees. It’s a legitimate concern, but it’s also a valid point that Ammiano’s measure makes: providing a living wage and health coverage to employees is a reasonable cost of doing business in this city, and if you can’t afford to do these things, then your business plan doesn’t really pencil out, sorry.
This might have been a good political debate to have, but unfortunately, the issue has been sullied and convoluted by the intentional deceptions of a few downtown groups (notably the Committee on Jobs, Golden Gate Restaurant Association, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce), distorted and inaccurate presentations of the issue by the Chronicle and Examiner, and the political cowardice of Mayor Gavin Newsom.
If you’ve been reading the Guardian then you know that the “Newsom plan” was simply one component of the “Ammiano plan,” not the workable stand-alone plan that the dailies and business elites tried to present it as (by itself, Newsom’s plan didn’t pay for itself and it threatened to make the number of uninsured in the city grow by providing the perverse incentive for businesses to drop their employees’ health insurance in favor of cheaper but less comprehensive access to city clinics). Even the dailies finally got around to saying the two plans relied on one another last week after playing up the deceptive competition for weeks.
Here’s the bottom line: Ammiano’s plan got eight co-sponsors because it was an honest attempt to deal with a serious problem using an approach (employer mandates) popular with most citizens (as shown by 69 percent of the people voting for a statewide mandate in Prop. 72). But downtown has done nothing but obstruct and obfuscate the issue. And they’re loud and have tons of money, so they’ve managed to bring out Newsom’s most cowardly instincts and they’ve cowed the media into bearing false witness to what’s going on.
Will they also peel off a supervisor or two who have already pledged their support? I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.
No more taxicab cheating
EDITORIAL The embarrassing spectacle of the San Francisco Taxi Commission firing its executive director in a secret 2 a.m. session June 28 demonstrates how out of control the cab industry in this town is. And it shows that the cab companies need much tighter regulation and monitoring.
The commissioners — all but one of them appointees of former mayor Willie Brown, all of them serving despite expired terms — decided to fire Heidi Machen for the crime of actually doing her job: auditing (and often pissing off) the cab companies.
This all happened while the mayor, who had handpicked his former aide Machen for the job, was either not paying attention or not sufficiently engaged (a problem that’s becoming all too common these days). In the end, Newsom replaced two of the commissioners, and Machen is getting her job back — but the message that was sent here was atrocious.
The cab industry in this city operates under unique rules, established almost 20 years ago by then-supervisor Quentin Kopp. Nobody can drive a cab without a permit, called a medallion; that’s standard for most cities. But in San Francisco the scarce and prized medallions are only issued to active drivers, who have to wait as long as 15 years to qualify. They can use the permits only while they still drive a cab. The permits can’t be bought or sold, and revert to the city upon the death of the holder.
But even active drivers only work part of the time, and since cabs are on the streets 24-7, the holders can lease those permits to other drivers for the shifts they aren’t working. The lease fees alone are worth about $70,000 a year; it’s a nice juicy income for the holders.
The idea was to get the benefits of the medallions into the hands of working drivers. In practice, permit holders use all sorts of tricks to keep from actually having to drive a cab — why work when you can earn that much money without lifting a finger? And some companies, like Yellow Cab, manage to hold on, one way and another, to a huge number of medallions; Yellow alone controls one-third of all the permits in the city.
Past taxi commission directors have operated on a friendly basis with the companies and the permit holders, letting some amazing scams go on without any crackdown. Machen took the radical step of auditing the companies to make sure that the medallion holders were people who actually drove cabs. The industry was furious, and has been trying for some time to get her canned.
When the late Arthur Jackson was president of the commission, the companies got nowhere. A principled straight shooter, Jackson supported his staff and took no guff from the companies. After he died several months ago, Martin Smith, who manages Big Dog City Taxi Service, took over the top job, and Machen has been under pressure ever since.
But there were no grounds to fire her — she’s been doing her job, by the book. So the cab companies started getting personal.
Somebody — possibly a private investigator — pulled some old court records and found out that one of Machen’s aides was arrested 15 years ago and charged with burglary. It turns out his conviction was later expunged, and the guy’s had no further run-ins with the law, but no matter: Cab company representatives, including Jim Gillespie, who runs the San Francisco Taxi Association, hand-carried copies of the original charges (minus the later order dismissing them) to several supervisors to stir up trouble. (They showed the same stuff to Commissioner Jackson before he died; he checked the story out and sent them packing.)
Then company representatives showed up at the hearing to toss out vicious, wildly exaggerated allegations that went way beyond anything in the court records in an effort to smear Machen by association.
The mayor, to his credit, supported Machen in public (after the dismissal), and at press time was planning to reappoint her to the job. But he needs to go further: He should denounce the character assassination by the cab companies and publicly endorse a full and complete audit of every single company and medallion holder’s driving record. The penalty for willful and egregious violations of the law should be the permanent loss of taxi permits. And the district attorney ought to open an investigation into whether the cab companies and medallion holders have conspired to cheat ordinary drivers and the public out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. SFBG
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Just about everybody in the “respectable” news media is going to call Sup. Chris Daly’s latest charter amendment a crackpot idea, so I might as well join the crackpots right now. I think it’s wonderful.
Daly wants to require the mayor of San Francisco to appear once a month at a Board of Supervisors meeting and answer questions. That’s it — no decisions get made, no policies change. The mayor just has to stand up in public, in front of the district-elected legislators, and explain himself.
It’s a longstanding tradition in England, where the prime minister has to show up at Parliament for “question time.” It makes for outstanding politics and great TV. It’s often pretty rough: The PM gets interrogated by the opposition and fires back. When the smoke clears, the public knows a little more about the government’s policies, and the nation’s chief executive is a little more accountable.
Imagine if G.W. Bush, who doesn’t like press conferences, embodies the imperial presidency, and hates having to answer in public to anything, had to endure question time before the House of Representatives. Imagine Maxine Waters or Barbara Lee or John Murtha asking him about the war. (For that matter, imagine Bill Clinton avoiding impeachment by hashing the questions out in front of a Republican Congress long before it ever got to that.)
There’s a lot to like about parliamentary democracies, and one of the best things is the relatively weak executive branch. Question time in England helps keep the prime minister under control.
And of course in San Francisco mayors are pretty powerful and tend to be pretty aloof. Willie Brown just ignored critics. Gavin Newsom talks to the press but doesn’t get into active debates that much. So it wouldn’t hurt the mayor — any mayor — to have to spend an hour a month in a public session responding to the supervisors’ questions; it wouldn’t hurt the city either. It would do wonders for fighting the inclination toward secrecy in the executive branch. And you know you’d want to watch.
Yeah, Chris Daly is not a fan of Gavin Newsom, and the political consultants working for the mayor will have all sorts of reasons to call this a personal attack and an assault on separation of powers (if not on the very nature of American democracy). But come on — if the prime minister of England can find time to handle this while leading one of the world’s great powers, the mayor of San Francisco can fit it into his tight schedule.
Onward: The deal that gives Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group control over most of the Bay Area dailies is now complete — and already there’s word that Singleton and the Hearst Corp., which owns the ostensibly competing San Francisco Chronicle, will be doing a joint web venture together.
From the June 29 Contra Costa Times:
“MediaNews executives revealed the company is discussing with Hearst Corp. a joint venture to begin a new Web site involving the Bay Area online products of the Times and Mercury News; of the MediaNews publications in the Bay Area; and of the Hearst-owned Chronicle.”
Monopoly marches on.
Funny: I didn’t see anything about this in the Chron. SFBG
Don’t give the tides to PG&E
EDITORIAL It’s been three years since former supervisor Matt Gonzalez suggested that the city build a tidal energy plant, but the mayor is finally catching on. Gavin Newsom told the Chronicle editorial board last week that a new study shows San Francisco could generate a phenomenal amount of electricity from Ocean Beach waves and the tides under the Golden Gate Bridge. If it can be done without disturbing marine life, it’s a great idea — as long as the power stays in public hands.
The legal and philosophical case is simple: Nobody owns the tides, the wind, or the waves. The energy contained in these renewable resources is and should always be in the public domain. Economically it’s clear: Once the power plant is built, the energy would be free — and could be a tremendous boon to the city’s treasury and to local business.
Politically the issue is even stronger: San Francisco is the only city in the nation with a congressional mandate to operate a public–power system, and any new energy resources the city taps should be used to help extract residents and businesses from under the expensive private–power monopoly of Pacific Gas and Electric Company. So why is the mayor even considering other options?
According to the Chronicle’s Phil Matier and Andrew Ross, the mayor’s staff is looking at the possibility of allowing PG&E (or “a little-known Florida firm, operating as Golden Gate Energy, that has already landed a federal license to bring the ocean technology to the bay”) to build and operate the plant. That would be a near perfect repeat of the Hetch Hetchy scandal, the deal that kept public power generated from public water at a publicly built dam in a public national park (Yosemite) under the private control of PG&E.
The Board of Supervisors needs to weigh in on this quickly with a resolution stating that no private company can develop, control, or profit from energy generated through wind, tides, waves, or any other renewable resource in or around the city of San Francisco. And if Newsom tries to treat the Golden Gate tides the way his predecessors treated Tuolumne River water, it will be the worst moment of his political career. SFBG
The best health care plan
EDITORIAL The health care model that’s been established, largely by default, in the United States is an utter mess. Most working people get their insurance through their employers. That means people who have jobs that don’t provide insurance are out of luck, and people who don’t have jobs are out of luck, and the self-employed are stuck with crazy bills, and small businesses are getting hit harder and harder with rising insurance rates that they can’t afford.
It’s a ridiculous way to handle health care: In most other western democracies, everyone is part of a national health care program, and under the best systems, the government is the single insurer and pays all the bills.
Among other things, that prevents the sort of crisis that San Francisco faces today, where the large numbers of uninsured residents have no choice but to seek care at the overburdened San Francisco General Hospital. That leaves the taxpayers on the hook for more than $100 million a year.
For businesses, particularly small businesses, that scrape and suffer to provide health insurance for their workers, the system is fundamentally unfair: Those companies pay twice, first for their own employees, and then again in higher taxes to cover the costs of the uninsured. Businesses that can well afford health insurance (the Wal-Marts of the world) but don’t pay are forcing others to cover their costs.
In a perfect world, with national health insurance, this wouldn’t be an issue. But it’s almost impossible for a single city to implement a single-payer system — which is why Mayor Gavin Newsom is struggling to present a functional health plan, and why Sup. Tom Ammiano’s employer mandate plan is absolutely necessary.
But the small business advocates who complain about the burden of paying more than $100 a month for each uninsured employee have a point, too — and this entire plan ought to be linked (at least in the long run) to Sup. Aaron Peskin’s proposals to change the city’s business tax.
Newsom’s dramatic announcement last week of a complex plan to cover all residents won overwhelmingly favorable press coverage. But so far, the plan itself is little more than a glorified press release. There are a lot of devilish details, particularly when it comes to funding.
There’s no new money in the mayor’s plan. He argues, correctly, that San Francisco currently spends $104 million on health care for the city’s 82,000 uninsured, and shifting that money into a city-run health care program will underwrite a significant amount of the cost. But that money can’t just be moved like a chess piece — it’s part of the San Francisco Department of Public Health budget, and if everyone does not sign up for the new program and very sick patients (including, say, undocumented workers who don’t understand or fear enrolling in the city plan) keep showing up at General, there won’t be enough money to go around.
There’s also the very real prospect that some unscrupulous employers will simply quit paying health insurance premiums and dump their employees into the city plan. That would overwhelm the program and push it quickly toward financial ruin.
So the mayor’s plan has no chance at success unless Ammiano’s employer mandate passes, too. The Ammiano plan would offer additional funding for the program by requiring that employers either provide private health insurance or pay into a city pool — and would prevent businesses from tossing their health expenses into the city’s lap.
Ammiano’s plan isn’t perfect — no employer-based plan ever will be. The health insurance requirement would hit all businesses with more than 20 employees, and that might be a bit low. The plan already has some progressive gradations (companies with more than 100 employees would pay a higher fee), but linking the costs more directly to the size of the business (in other words, hitting the large outfits — which can well afford health insurance — a bit harder and giving more of a city subsidy to the smallest companies) could help ease the burden on struggling merchants.
But in the end, his plan — which would have no impact on employers who already offer health insurance to their workers — is crucial to any effort to get the uninsured into a decent health program (and to end the stiff taxpayer subsidy for companies that don’t provide insurance). The supervisors should approve it.
Still that’s not the end of the story. At the same time that Ammiano’s addressing health care, Peskin has floated a proposal for a new gross receipts tax on local business. Here’s the way to proceed: The supervisors need to fund a complete study of how much gross revenue local firms take in; write a new tax that allows the city to eliminate the payroll tax; add a progressive gross receipts tax; and use the next tax policy to help deal with the costs of health care. Big, rich companies pay a lot (enough to help subsidize the citywide health plan). Small firms pay less (and the reduced tax burden helps offset the costs of paying for health insurance). In the end, San Francisco would be the first US city to launch a progressive system for providing health insurance to all. SFBG
How to end the violence
OPINION Despite its loss at the polls earlier this month, the spirit of Proposition A, the homicide prevention charter amendment on the June 6 ballot, lives on. Prop. A would have mandated that the city invest $10 million in violence prevention efforts. Instead of the typical police response to violence, Prop. A sought to address the root causes of violence, the social isolation and limited opportunity that are so endemic to the neighborhoods most impacted by street violence.
Prop. A offered a menu of strategies, including community outreach and organizing, job training and job creation, and reentry services so that ex-offenders have more than a couple hundred dollars in their hands when they leave prison. It was clear to everyone involved in the Prop. A campaign that this was about ameliorating the harmful effects of poverty and racism.
Even before the election, Prop. A was having an effect. Just two months after saying that no further investment was necessary to stem the tide of violence, Mayor Gavin Newsom crafted an ordinance with Sup. Fiona Ma to increase funding for violence prevention efforts. Responding to community groups, the Board of Supervisors stripped from the original Ma-Newsom legislation a bunch of police department goodies, including a ropes course, surveillance cameras, and bookmobiles — and beefed up the provisions on jobs and workforce training and added school-based violence prevention efforts, street outreach programs, and reentry services.
Overall the Board of Supervisors invested close to $6.9 million in programs and services. That’s a great initial investment but not enough, especially when a significant portion of the new funds can only be used for people under the age of 18.
The budget process offers the opportunity to serve the 18-and-older population and build on the foundation set earlier this spring. To this end, the budget committee added back over a million dollars to save San Francisco’s Trauma Recovery Center for the victims of violence and sexual assault. Now as a result of great advocacy from the violence prevention community and some unprecedented collaboration between the district attorney, the public defender, and the sheriff, the budget committee can program outside the box.
Before the committee Thursday, June 29, will be proposals to increase street-violence prevention outreach efforts, wraparound case management for victims at San Francisco General Hospital, housing relocation services for families impacted by violence, and reentry programs for ex-offenders. All of these programs can be part of a national model for other cities to emulate.
Contrary to the mayor’s line that the city does not need to contribute more resources to violence prevention, I believe city-sponsored resources make a dramatic change in how people caught up in all sides of the epidemic can have better choices and a dignified way out of these mean streets.
Violence is solvable if we make the right choices. SFBG
John Avalos
John Avalos is a legislative aide to Sup. Chris Daly. He dedicates this column to Andrew Drew Elle, a.k.a. DJ Domino, who was shot to death on Tuesday night, June 20, at 24th Street and Folsom.
Put away the cameras
EDITORIAL The rate of violent crime in San Francisco, including murder, is climbing, and it’s way past unacceptable. Progressives aren’t generally known for their crime-fighting plans, but in this case the left flank of the Board of Supervisors, led by Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly, has offered a real, functional plan: an increase in community policing and additional funding for violence-prevention programs. However, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the cops are against that, and they helped knock it down on the June 6 ballot.
So what does the mayor want to do? He wants to put surveillance cameras — perhaps as many as 100 new surveillance cameras — all over the city, recording everything that happens in big swaths of public space, 24 hours a day.
The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the mayor to drop the plan. We agree.
For starters, there’s no evidence that cameras deter crime. Studies in England, where crime cameras are ubiquitous, show no decrease in criminal activity that can be linked to the cameras, and even studies in the United States suggest that criminals aren’t deterred by them. It’s possible cameras will help identify killers, particularly in neighborhoods where it’s almost impossible to find witnesses willing to talk — but it’s also possible (even likely) the bad guys will know exactly where the cameras are and either move somewhere else or wear masks.
And in exchange for this dubious benefit, San Franciscans will give up an immense amount of privacy.
We already live in a society where surveillance is an ugly fact of life. Credit card customers, grocery shoppers, cell phone and FasTrak users — almost all of us have our names and other details of our lives in electronic files, controlled by private firms and (as we’ve seen in the post–Sept. 11 era) easily accessible by government agencies.
The cameras offer such a huge potential for abuse. Will local or federal authorities use them to monitor political protests? Will they become a tracking device for people the feds consider a “threat”? Will they be used to monitor and suppress perfectly legal political activities and private associations?
No matter what the mayor and the San Francisco Police Department say, those cameras will be recording in public spaces, and those video files will exist somewhere, and even if they’re regularly erased (and given the SFPD’s record on following its own rules in other areas, we don’t trust that for a second), all it takes is a visit from the Department of Homeland Security to overrule all the safeguards. And anybody who thinks that won’t happen has been utterly out of touch with the state of the body politic in the past six years.
Another possibility the ACLU raises: Those videos could be considered public record in California — meaning stalkers, angry ex-spouses, and people planning violent crimes will have access to the daily movements of their potential victims.
The supervisors have, to their credit, tried to come up with rules to limit the potential abuses. But these sorts of technologies have a way of expanding, and law enforcement agencies have a way of avoiding oversight and scrutiny. There are much, much better ways to deter and fight violent crime. The best solution here is to simply cut the funding for the mayor’s cameras from next year’s budget. SFBG
A take on A
By Steven T. Jones
The biggest heartbreak on election day — Measure A being defeated by just over 1,000 votes — should become the biggest opportunity for progressives now that this election is done. This measure was an effort to get needed funds into social programs that would deter street violence and, equally important, to get the communities of color and street-level activists most affected by this problem involved in finding solutions. Blame for this measure’s defeat falls squarely on Mayor Gavin Newsom, his four supporters on the Board of Supervisors (plus Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who was on the wrong side of this one), and the Police Officers Association (and to an unknown degree, whoever attacked and crashed the Guardian site yesterday and kept our endorsements unavailable for much of the day). It’s understandable why the POA wants to pursue only a top-down, more-cops approach to the high murder rate. But what’s unfathomable to me is why Newsom and his political allies continue to do nothing to reform a Police Department that is dysfunctional, arrogant, and understandably doesn’t have the confidence the parts of the community with which it should be working most closely.
A full-time school board
EDITORIAL The San Francisco Board of Education oversees a budget of more than $400 million. Its seven members attend regular board and committee meetings, analyze complex financial documents, visit school sites, meet with parents and administrators, attend conferences and trainings … and try to find a little bit of time to think about the future of public education in a very difficult urban situation. It’s one of the most important jobs in the city. And the board members get paid about $500 a month.
The members have no staff, just a secretary who handles messages and administrative duties for the entire board.
And you wonder why superintendents can run amok without proper oversight, why the budgets get passed with very little scrutiny, why the board members aren’t more actively involved in dealing with complex community issues like school closures. They just don’t have the time. Most of the board members have actual jobs; some, like Mark Sanchez (who teaches at a public school on the peninsula), have to use their vacation time to visit San Francisco schools.
It’s time to recognize what almost everyone in town concluded about the Board of Supervisors several years ago: This is a full-time job and ought to be treated as one.
Sure, paying the seven board members full-time salaries would cost some money, and the district is pinching every penny it has these days. But when you consider the benefits, the price tag is insignificant:
•Full-time board members would be able to carefully manage district finances. Right now, the members get a budget document of more than 1,000 pages just days before they have to vote on it. There are almost certainly millions of dollars in that document that could be better spent, but only the administration — the superintendent and his or her staff — has the time to figure out what’s really going on.
•The opportunity for public input would increase dramatically. School board meetings are once every two weeks, which is about all a part-time board can handle. Committee meetings are less frequent, and even when there are huge issues (like school closures) on the agenda, not all the members manage to show up. A full-time board could meet every week, hold regular committee meetings, and hold plenty of public hearings to get input on decisions.
•Oversight would be transformed. When there are issues or problems involving San Francisco city departments, the supervisors can hold hearings, bring in the relevant parties, and get to the bottom of what’s going on. That never happens with the school board — but it could, and with full-time board members, it would.
•The city would get better candidates for the job. Right now it’s really hard for anyone who has a full-time job and kids in the public schools to sit on the school board. There are hundreds of people who would make excellent school board members who won’t even consider running because they just can’t afford to serve.
•Full-time board members could actually market the schools. The SF schools badly need some goodwill ambassadors to show more parents the value of public education (and thus increase enrollment). That’s a perfect job for board members — and a more functional board would present a much better image for the schools.
If the school board members were paid as much as San Francisco supervisors (roughly $80,000 a year), and if they each had one full-time staff aide, the total tab would run to around $1 million a year. We’re convinced that the resulting improved oversight and public input would allow the board to find far more than $1 million a year in savings elsewhere in the budget.
Giving the board members a huge raise is a tough sell when schools are closing and teachers are getting laid off. But it would transform the public schools — and parents, teachers, and students would all be much better off. SFBG