Supervisors

The right housing fees

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Chronicle has finally noticed what we reported a month ago: The Board of Supervisors has effectively put in place a moratorium on new market-rate housing on the east side of the city. We hear that city planners are looking for loopholes to undermine the temporary ban, but the intent of what the supervisors did is clear: Until there’s a detailed and valid review of how new high-end condos and lofts impact blue-collar jobs and low-income housing, the developers will have to let their demolition and excavation equipment idle.

Meanwhile, Sup. Chris Daly is moving to increase significantly the amount of low-cost housing that private developers have to build to win permission for future projects. Daly’s legislation is a good start and sets the right tone for the debate, but the board should go even further.

The Daly plan would apply to almost all new market-rate housing built anywhere in the city and would take effect whenever the moratorium ends. It would require most developers to offer 15 percent of the units of any project for less than market rates, and that number would jump to 25 percent if the affordable housing was built on another site. In other words, a builder who wants to put up 500 luxury condos in SoMa would have to build 125 affordable units somewhere else in the city.

That’s nice, but it’s not enough.

The city’s own general plan makes it clear that 72 percent of all new housing needs to be affordable to moderate- and low-income people. And the planning process for the eastern neighborhoods has still offered no proposals for how to make that happen.

At the same time, of course, the plans to intensely develop an area poorly served by transit and generally bereft of public infrastructure and open space utterly ignore the fact that it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create real neighborhoods (instead of clusters of heavily fortified, gated buildings).

Daly’s got the right idea: Developers are making a fortune building million-dollar condos in San Francisco, and they can well afford to give the city a whole lot back. But it’s worth taking a longer approach here and considering the price of bringing as many as 100,000 more people to SoMa, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, the central waterfront, and Bayview–Hunters Point — and figure out who is going to pay for it.

Daly could start by asking for a detailed independent study of what it really costs a developer to build new condo units in the city and what the current profit margins are. Then take the city’s affordable-housing needs, the need for public-sector development, and the estimated new tax revenue and compare: Can fair taxes and requirements on the developers raise enough money to meet the city’s needs?

And, if not, we get back to the question this paper has been asking for over a year: Why are we building any new market-rate housing, anyway? SFBG

 

Dede Wilsey’s whoppers

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An aggressive and misleading campaign against Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park by the Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums — spearheaded by its board president, Dede Wilsey — appears to be backfiring as the proposal heads for almost certain approval by the Board of Supervisors.

Yet the Healthy Saturdays proposal by Sup. Jake McGoldrick — which would close from May 25 to Nov. 25 the same portion of JFK Drive now closed on Sundays, a six-month trial period to study its impacts — still needs the signature of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has not yet taken a position.

And there are rumblings that even if the measure is approved — either with Newsom’s signature or an override of his veto — Wilsey and her supporters intend to attempt a referendum that would effectively kill the project if they can gather 20,000-plus valid signatures within 30 days. City law requires the targets of referendums to be placed on hold until the vote, which would occur this November.

The proposal got its first hearing April 14, when the Land Use Committee unanimously recommended it be approved by the full board (which will consider the matter April 25). The long and emotional hearing showed sharp divisions between the environmentalists and recreational park users who support closure and the de Young Museum benefactors and park neighbors who oppose it.

It also unmasked the deceptive tactics being employed by Wilsey and museum director John D. Buchanan, who coauthored an April 7 letter to de Young Museum members and April 4 memos to museum trustees and staff urging opposition to Healthy Saturdays and implying the museum’s survival was at stake.

"Closure of JFK Drive on Saturday has twice been voted down by the electorate and has been shown to be unpopular in polls for the last decade. While Sunday closure is a reality, road closures severely compromise access to the museum, particularly for seniors, families, persons with disabilities, and anyone who cannot afford the cost of the parking garage," they wrote. This information was parroted by many who argued against the closure.

Yet the letters were grossly misleading — and at least 16 museum members wrote angry letters to the museum protesting the Wilsey-Buchanan position. The Guardian obtained the letters through a Sunshine Ordinance request. One writer called the museum campaign "self-serving and deceptive," while another wrote: "I take issue with undertaking a letter campaign using my donations."

Contrary to what the April 7 letter implies, people with disabilities are allowed to drive on the closed roads, and McGoldrick has now incorporated into the measure all recommendations of the Mayor’s Office of Disability. The letter also never indicates that the closure is temporary, that free parking is available a short walk from the museum, or that the public voted on the proposal just once, albeit on two competing measures that were each narrowly defeated, in November 2000.

At that time, with polls showing public support for the Saturday closure proposed in Measure F, museum patrons tried to scuttle the closure by qualifying a competing Measure G, which would have delayed the Saturday closure until after completion of the parking garage. In the ballot pamphlet, Wilsey, the California Academy of Sciences, and other opponents of Measure F wrote arguments for the ballot handbook promising to support Saturday closure once the garage was completed, as it was last summer.

"The Academy supports the closure of JFK Drive on Saturdays once the efforts of Saturday closure have been studied, alternative transportation measures are in place, and the voter-approved, privately funded parking facility is built under the Music Concourse," one statement read.

At the hearing, McGoldrick asked Wilsey why she is reneging on her promise. Wilsey said that she wrote her statement in 1998 while her husband and dog were still alive, before she had raised $202 million for the museum renovation, and back when "we were not in a war against terrorism. Almost nothing that was true in 1998 is true today."

Wilsey did not respond to our request to clarify her response or explain other aspects of what appears to be a calculated campaign of misinformation. For example, she and other museum spokespeople have been saying publicly that museum attendance on Saturdays is far higher than on Sundays because of the road closure.

When we spoke with museum spokesperson Barbara Traisman, she said the de Young receives 15 to 20 percent more visitors on Saturdays than on Sundays. Yet she refused our request to provide the attendance data to support her statement — just as museum officials have ignored requests by McGoldrick for that data for the last three weeks — telling us: "That’s too onerous to ask someone to do that."

So on April 13, the Guardian made an immediate disclosure request for those records under the Sunshine Ordinance. The next day, just as the hearing was getting under way, Wilsey turned those records over to McGoldrick.

The documents showed that on 10 of the 23 weekends that the de Young has been open, attendance on Sundays was actually higher than on Saturdays. By the end of the hearing, even committee chair Sup. Sophie Maxwell — who had voiced concerns about Saturday closure and was not considered a supporter — voted for Healthy Saturdays, joining the board’s progressive majority of six that has already signed on as cosponsors. SFBG

 

Real tolerance

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OPINION On March 24, 2006, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to pass a resolution opposing the message that a group called Battle Cry for a Generation was set to deliver the following Friday on the front steps of City Hall. The appearance of Ron Luce’s teen program at the site had nothing to do with the group’s apparent reason for being in the city, which was to promote Christianity amid smoke machines and rock bands at SBC Park. Luce decided to rally on the steps of City Hall specifically because gay marriages had been performed there two years earlier.

The intent to somehow purify the steps with prayerful teens, the quick response by citizens of San Francisco, and the meaning of that entire encounter was lost completely as local journalists and former politicians rushed to smear the Board of Supervisors with labels like "clueless" and "intolerant."

In doing so, John Diaz at the San Francisco Chronicle and Joanna Thigpen at the San Francisco Sentinel both missed an opportunity to summarize for their readers the meaning behind the meeting of two groups. Instead, both city leaders and organizers of the counterprotest were admonished for their lack of tolerance.

For those in need of a working definition of tolerance, the American Heritage College Dictionary offers the following: "The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others." The key word within that sentence is recognize, which is hard to do if all you do when the Christian right comes to town is stay home and fume. Engagement (another version of recognition) is also a value, one that walks hand in hand with tolerance as the citizens of this fair city go forward in search of bigger and better expressions of human and civil rights. Showing up and shouting back don’t indicate intolerance. And staying away doesn’t display tolerance, just benumbed passivity.

Curiously, the charge was made that by issuing resolutions and press statements, both Sup. Tom Ammiano and Assemblymember Mark Leno were attempting to stifle Battle Cry’s right to free speech. Supervisor Ammiano’s office, which was the primary sponsor of the resolution, was contacted by neither the Chronicle nor the Sentinel. What he would have pointed out was that no one in city government made any attempt to silence anyone. The resolution was simply the progressive community’s proverbial two cents thrown into a debate Battle Cry started when the group assembled on City Hall’s steps. No public official ever came close to opposing Battle Cry’s right to frankly indict both queers and women who have chosen abortion or who support its legality.

Civic engagement like the sort displayed by Ammiano and Leno is what makes this city a haven for those who could not get tolerance for themselves, on their own terms, elsewhere. Far from impeding the right of Battle Cry to spread a message of hate disguised as love, we are forwarding the rights of speech to those whose voices are still being suppressed by fear and hate disguised as Christian love and tolerance.

Elizabeth Creely
Elizabeth Creely works with the Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights.

The condo war continues

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Planning Department is having a little trouble dealing with the fact that — for the moment — no more condo developers can build high-priced units in the eastern neighborhoods. In the wake of a Board of Supervisors decision demanding an extensive environmental review of a condo project at 2660 Harrison St., planners have been ducking and weaving around the reality that the supervisors have effectively put a moratorium on market-rate housing projects — and on anything else that could displace blue-<\h>collar jobs (see “A Grinding Halt,” 3/22/06).

The latest installment is a March 31 memo from Paul Maltzer, the department’s chief environmental review officer, who concluded that yes, indeed, all developments in the vast eastern neighborhoods project area that could affect affordable housing or jobs would need detailed environmental review. That’s an admission, of sorts, that no more market-<\h>rate housing can be quickly approved, but it comes with a caveat: The memo states that projects will be evaluated on a "case-by-case basis" and leaves an awful lot of wiggle room. It also suggests that as soon as the city’s official broad-based environmental impact report on the eastern neighborhoods rezoning is completed, the floodgates will be opened again.

That EIR is on the fast track: Maltzer projects that a draft will be completed by late this summer and a final report by March 2007. But there’s a huge problem: An EIR has to evaluate a specific project, and the "project" — a rezoning of some 3,800 acres of the city — is pretty damn vague at this point. For example, there’s nothing about affordable housing in the scope of work that was put forward for the EIR.

So it’s entirely possible that the Planning Department will produce a report next spring that glosses over the biggest issues surrounding the future of the eastern neighborhoods — and that developers will use it as a green light to begin a new building boom that will forever change the city.

We’d like to hold a few facts to be self-<\h>evident: San Francisco doesn’t need more million-<\h>dollar condos for young single people who work in Silicon Valley. The city can’t build the equivalent of another good-size town, with a population of perhaps 100,000 new residents, in eastern San Francisco without massive improvements in infrastructure, particularly transportation. The costs of the new streets, bus lines, train lines, and pedestrian walkways will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars — and there’s nothing anywhere in any Planning Department document about who will pay for it.

And there’s nothing in the current proposals for the eastern neighborhoods that’s consistent with the housing element of the city’s own general plan.

The housing element is clear: San Francisco needs a lot of new below-<\h>market housing — housing for families with kids, housing for people who work in the city and make moderate wages, housing for people living on fixed (and not gigantic) incomes. Housing for teachers and firefighters. Housing for the people who change the sheets at the hotels and clean the bathrooms at the convention centers that keep the city’s biggest industry thriving. In fact, it says, 40 percent of all new housing needs to be affordable for low- and very-low-<\h>income people, and another 32 percent needs to be affordable for families with moderate incomes. That kind of housing simply won’t be built under the current plans — and that means any EIR the planners (or any private developers) prepare will be fundamentally flawed.

There’s a solution here, and if the Planning Commission won’t demand it, then the supervisors must: Any final EIR on the eastern neighborhoods has to consider not only the current rezoning plans but also an alternative that would bring the city into compliance with its own general plan. Asking planners to comply with their own plans shouldn’t be a radical notion. And until the Planning Department can explain how that might happen, this entire process — and all new market-<\h>rate housing — needs to be on hold, indefinitely.

SF’s private police force

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Since long before the turn of the century, San Francisco has had a posse of private police officers patrolling the streets. Back in the 1870s, they were effectively vigilantes; by 1935 they’d become a bit more controlled in their behavior and won official recognition in the City Charter. They’re called patrol specials.

For years a fairly small number (there are now 41) have been walking neighborhood beats, hired by local merchants who don’t think the San Francisco Police Department is providing enough protection. Legally, the patrol specials are an odd amalgam: They’re licensed to carry handguns but not to make arrests. Most of them have some law-enforcement training, but not typically from a traditional police academy. In theory they report to the chief of police, but in practice they’re private businesspeople who are hired by, and do the bidding of, merchant groups.

The head of their association, Jane Warner, thinks they’re the future of neighborhood policing, and she, like other patrol special fans, openly calls for increased privatization of law enforcement. And the association is asking the San Francisco Police Commission to make it easier to expand its operations.

The patrol specials are mostly an archaic anomaly right now — but the trend toward privatizing the police force is frightening, and the commission ought to put a clear halt to it.

The rules governing patrol specials were forged in a very different era. The city is divided up into beats, and the patrol specials can buy up beats, then charge local businesses for protection. They can hire their own officers, subject to a background check and Police Commission approval. If they see any wrongdoing they’re supposed to call the cops — but in many cases they just go ahead and act like real police. "I’ve arrested hundreds of people," Warner, who owns beats in the Mission and West Portal, told the Guardian recently.

It’s more than a little bit weird to still have armed civilians, in uniform, with badges, walking around making arrests when they aren’t really accountable to anyone. The potential for problems is obvious: A merchant group might, for example, direct the local patrol special to focus on getting homeless people out of doorways — something that the city has established as not just a police priority but a social issue. The patrol specials aren’t taking orders from police headquarters though; they have to do what their customers want. And if they are accused of misconduct, they aren’t accountable to the Office of Citizen Complaints (OCC), which oversees all complaints against sworn officers; instead, the department’s Management Control Division — which has never been good at disciplining cops — is the final authority.

Nobody paid much attention to the patrol specials until the 1990s, when the San Francisco Police Officers Association — whose members make nice little chunks of change providing off-duty private security and saw them as competition — started complaining. Still, the policies haven’t really been updated in decades.

At the very least, the Police Commission needs to completely overhaul the rules for these quasi cops, establishing clear training guidelines, shifting disciplinary authority to the OCC, and demanding direct oversight over hiring and beat sales. But these kinds of private police fiefdoms make us very, very nervous — and the idea that the patrol specials’ turf may be expanding is a scary prospect.

The commission could make a clear policy statement opposing any privatization of local law enforcement, and that would be a positive step. But that agency can only go so far — the authority for the patrol specials is enshrined in the City Charter. So the supervisors need to take this up, posthaste — and amend the charter either to more tightly control and regulate the patrol specials, or eliminate them altogether. *

Don’t deregulate cabs

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It’s not a great time to be a San Francisco taxi driver. High gas prices are taking cash directly out of drivers’ pockets, and fares haven’t kept pace. The only thing that seems to be solid is industry profits: According to a December 2005 city controller’s office report, cab companies have been making healthy returns even in bad economic times.

The way the companies make money, of course, is by leasing cabs to drivers, who are independent contractors. The "gate" — the cash the driver has to pay for the right to use a legal, properly permitted cab — runs about $91 for a 12-hour shift. That’s a lot of money to collect in fares before the driver makes a single penny, and it’s one of the reasons why driving a cab is less attractive today as a long-term occupation. Each year, the United Taxicab Workers union says, up to 25 percent of the city’s drivers turn over, meaning that one out of every four drivers has less than a year’s experience.

It’s possible the situation will take a turn for the better this spring, if the city moves forward with a plan to require cab companies and permit holders — who have the lucrative license to lease out their cabs to other drivers for profit — to help pay for health insurance for the drivers. It’s also possible things will get substantially worse, if Sup. Fiona Ma manages to win approval for legislation completely abolishing city controls on gate fees and allowing cab companies to charge drivers whatever the market will bear.

What the cab industry needs is more regulation, not less. In fact, it’s astonishing to see a San Francisco supervisor who is running for state assembly propose such a Bush-style deregulation plan that would enrich a few at the expense of many.

The Taxi Commission is slated to discuss the health insurance plan March 28. There are several options for how payment would be allocated; ideally, the drivers, permit holders, and cab companies would all pick up a share. But the Health Department has concluded that a working plan is possible — and the commissioners and supervisors should make sure one is put into action as soon as possible. *

A deep breath for city planning

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It was, as housing activist Calvin Welch explained to the Planning Commission March 16, the “canary in the coal mine.” A decision by the Board of Supervisors demanding further environmental review of new market-rate housing projects has thrown the future of development on the eastern side of the city into doubt

In Melinda’s memory

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On her very first day at Next Door, a homeless shelter that occupies a nondescript building on Polk Street, Yalaanda Ellsberry met Melinda Lindsey.

"This is my first time in a shelter," Elsberry told us recently. "And I’ve found a lot of people are very closed off." Lindsey, however, was open and friendly, and they became fast friends.

Ellsberry knew that early on Christmas Eve, Lindsey was scheduled to catch a bus to go visit relatives near Monterey. So she was surprised to see Lindsey still in bed when the overhead lights were switched on at 6:30 a.m. She shook her friend’s shoulders, trying to rouse her.

"For some reason, this particular time, I just knew to check for rigor mortis," Ellsberry said. When Lindsey’s hand moved in response, "I thought, good – get that thought out of your head, girl." But when she touched her friend’s forehead, it felt cool.

Word of Lindsey’s questionable condition spread across the fourth floor of the shelter quickly. But, said Ellsberry and other residents we interviewed, staff members were slow to react and basically left the residents to try to revive Lindsey on their own. The residents summoned a woman who was staying there who happened to be a registered nurse, and she began to perform CPR.

The nurse, who asked us not to print her name, said she was dismayed to find that none of the standard medical equipment was available – neither face masks for performing CPR nor the defibrillator paddles that can sometimes shock a person back to life after a heart attack.

Forty-three-year-old Lindsey, who had serious heart problems, was pronounced dead soon after the paramedics arrived. Her body lay on the floor, covered by a blanket, for close to two hours before being picked up by the coroner.

Several Next Door residents told us they were horrified by the shelter’s response to the emergency. The nurse said that neither of the staffers who were there "would attempt CPR. They didn’t even go anywhere near her."

Ken Reggio, executive director of Episcopal Community Services (ECS), which holds the city contract to run Next Door, said that based on everything he’s reviewed, the shelter handled Lindsey’s death just fine: "I think we had a client who was seriously ill and passed away in her sleep." He added that residents stepped in to perform CPR while a staffer phoned the paramedics, but that the shelter’s whole staff is "trained in CPR and capable of administering it."

But no matter what exactly happened on Dec. 24, Lindsey’s death has prompted some residents to band together and demand that Next Door improve its plans for dealing with medical emergencies. They have appealed to outside groups and city government for help, saying they want to be treated more humanely.

"My thing is," Ellsberry said, "I want to see a change."

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Next Door – which used to be known by the catchy name Multi-Service Center North – is one of San Francisco’s largest homeless facilities. City officials often hold it up as a model program.

Today the shelter has room for 280 people, divided by gender, and a 30-bed "respite care" program, run in partnership with the Department of Public Health, that’s meant for homeless people with health problems. In the past couple of years, Next Door has been transformed into a longer-term shelter where residents can stay up to six months. That alone makes it more appealing than most city shelters, where beds are typically rotated every one to seven days.

Residents we interviewed said their main concern about Next Door is that it doesn’t seem equipped to handle medical emergencies. But they had significant gripes about aspects of everyday life at the shelter, including cleanliness and food. And their many and varied complaints had an underlying theme: that staffers often treat residents callously, as though they are something less than human – even when they’re dying.

"Workers here talk to us any kind of way because we’re homeless," said LaJuana Tucker, who has been living at Next Door for three months. She added that many of the people staying at Next Door are struggling with health issues but that staffers are not very understanding: "If [residents] aren’t feeling well and want to lie down, they give them a hard time."

The women we spoke with said the disparaging attitude was also apparent in the shelter’s response to Melinda Lindsey’s death.

Three days after her apparent heart attack, they told us, shelter director Linzie Coleman set up a "grief meeting." But the residents who attended say that before their grief was addressed in any way, Coleman emphasized that related complaints were to be handled internally and that residents should not take their concerns to people outside of the shelter hierarchy.

Coleman disputed their account, telling us she stopped by merely "to say that I had gotten their complaints and their complaints would be investigated."

She said first-aid kits and CPR masks are usually available throughout the shelter and just needed to be "replenished" and that staffers treat Next Door’s clientele with "dignity and respect."

"I’ve been here nine years and four months, and we’ve only had seven deaths at the shelter," she said. "And every one but this last one, the staff has done CPR."

.  .  .

Undeterred by what they say were efforts to silence them, in early January Next Door residents approached the Shelter Monitoring Committee, an oversight panel created by the Board of Supervisors, about Lindsey’s death. After taking verbal and written statements from several of them, the committee tried to gather more information from the shelter.

According to a Jan. 9 letter the committee sent to several city agencies, "We immediately contacted the Director to confirm details. Our representative was met with an unprofessional and demeaning attitude and a generally hostile response to his inquiry."

Coleman said she doesn’t understand the characterization of her response, but Diana Valentine, who chairs the Shelter Monitoring Committee, told us point blank, "We were treated very hostilely."

More important, she said that when members of her committee visited Next Door on Jan. 6, they found no first-aid kits or other medical equipment on the floors where most residents stay. When they asked staff people whether they’d been trained in CPR, she added, several said no. And in the short time since Lindsey’s death, the committee has received another complaint about a medical emergency at Next Door that "resulted in injury to the resident."

"There’s been no training, and there’s absolutely no first-aid supplies available – and this is weeks after this woman’s death," Valentine said. "We haven’t seen any changes, consequences, or accountability."

In its letter, the committee asked the Human Services Agency, the DPH, and ECS to launch inquiries into Lindsey’s death, Next Door’s general policies and conditions, and how city-funded shelters are supposed to respond to emergency situations.

Dariush Kayhan, director of Housing and Homeless Programs for the Human Services Agency, told us he’s waiting to see a final report from ECS on the Lindsey incident but that, at this point, the HSA has no reason to think anything improper occurred.

Regardless, Kayhan said, "we’re going to use what happened as a springboard," by asking the DPH to do a thorough review of the medical protocols, training, and equipment at each and every city shelter.

www.ecs-sf.org/shelters.htm

Enforcing a hidden anti-eviction law

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As the Board of Supervisors was in the process of approving a measure to require a public hearing before converting rental units into condominiums – a measure Mayor Gavin Newsom has shamefully pledged to veto – Sup. Chris Daly told his progressive colleagues they shouldn’t be cowed by accusations that they are against home-ownership opportunities.

He’s exactly right. The city’s building new condos at a rapid clip, with more than 9,000 for-sale units in the pipeline right now, while rental units are disappearing. It’s more fair to accuse Newsom and his allies of being hostile to renters than to somehow say progressives oppose home ownership.

In fact, as Daly pointed out Jan. 10, the city isn’t even using existing tools to help tenants.

Six months ago, the San Francisco Tenants Union and Sup. Aaron Peskin unearthed a 25-year-old city law that could prevent many future condo conversions. Section 1386 of the city’s subdivision code, approved in 1981, requires city planners to reject condo conversions in which evictions or steep rent hikes have been used to clear the building for sale.

The law is a bit outdated – it requires landlords to provide only a five-year history of building occupancy. The supervisors should amend it to allow city officials to consider how a building was cleared out of tenants, whenever that occurred, and if Newsom wants to be seen as anything more than a fan of evictions and a shill for speculators, he should direct planning officials to start aggressively enforcing the law’s provisions.

That’s just one step the supervisors can take to deal with a mayor who seems unwilling to take even modest steps to slow the flood of evictions and the loss of rental housing. Newsom insists smaller condo conversions – ones involving fewer than five units – shouldn’t even be subject to Planning Commission hearings because that august body needs to save its time and energy for larger land-use issues.

So tenant activists and Peskin are pursuing with the City Attorney’s Office the possibility of requiring public notice for all condo conversions, of any size, which would give tenant activists the ability to appeal those permits to the full Board of Supervisors. It’s a good idea: If the poor, overworked planners are too busy to protect rental housing, and the supervisors want to take on the job, it will be hard for Newsom to say no.

Bail out the schools – once

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The San Francisco school-closure process has been about as bad as it possibly could be. Information about the potential closings came late out of the district office. The criteria for inclusion on the closure list were hard to understand – and harder to comprehend. The district kept parents out of the process until the very end and then restricted community input to a few moments at a series of crammed hearings. In many instances, representatives from the endangered schools had only 10 minutes to make their cases at last-minute hearings attended by only a few of the school board members.

And in the end, all that came out was a short-term solution to a very long-term, pressing problem.

It’s no surprise that the proposed closure list has very real problems – and that community leaders in the Western Addition and Bayview-Hunters Point, which would be the hardest hit neighborhoods, are outraged. Now the board, which, on Jan. 12, decided to put off making the decision, is scrambling to find a way to restore some degree of fairness and credibility to the process.

It’s an impossible task: After the mess of the past month, there’s simply no way to make a fair decision about school closures right now. And the way things are going in the district these days, it’s likely the exact same ugly and poorly thought-out process will take place next fall, and the year after, and the year after that.

It’s time to put a halt to the madness, for good. Mayor Gavin Newsom should drop his opposition to bailing out the schools; the city needs to step in and give the district the cash to stave off most of the closures for a year. But there has to be a condition: The school board and administration must undertake a real, credible, effective long-term planning effort, starting now, to determine how to handle declining enrollment in a fair and comprehensive fashion.

.  .  .

Just about everyone agrees that some San Francisco public schools have to close. The district is losing roughly 1,000 students a year, and has been since the early 1980s. But schools aren’t just buildings; they’re communities, they’re part of their neighborhoods – and closing them down is by definition going to be traumatic.

So at the very least, there needs to be some overall logic and educational policy behind the decisions. And right now that’s badly lacking. The main criteria for closures – declining enrollment and low test scores – virtually guarantee that low-income neighborhoods will be the hardest hit. And the proposed mergers would bring together two small, low-performing schools to make one larger school that will still have the same (or worse) issues.

There are all sorts of other alternatives. Could some of the most popular schools, the ones with huge waiting lists and stellar test scores, be expanded to take over empty space in under-enrolled schools? Would mergers between top schools and low-performing schools give low-income kids a better chance?

More important, how many schools will San Francisco need in 10 years, and where should they be located? Is there a way to phase some schools out without shutting them down altogether? Is there a way to promise parents who want their children to stay in the public schools that their schools – their communities – won’t be destroyed next year, or the year after?

If – and only if – the district is willing to commit to a credible planning process, with parents, teachers, community leaders, and someone from City Hall (perhaps a member of the Board of Supervisors) involved from the start, to create a facilities plan for the next decade, the supervisors and the mayor should look for the $5 million it would take to stave off most closures for this year. And if the city won’t do that, the District should look into using reserve funds to cover the gap. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi had the right line when he testified at the Jan. 12 school board meeting: The city should help the schools out – as long as the district can promise that this utter disaster of a process will never happen again.

Does Mills make sense?

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It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

 When Virginia-based mall developer Mills Corp. used political pressure by then-mayor Willie Brown and a partnership with the YMCA to narrowly win Port of San Francisco approval, in 2001, for the exclusive right to build a shopping center and office park at Piers 27-31, the project was supposed to slide right through.

 The Board of Supervisors was effectively cut out. All that elected body – which includes some supervisors who have been critical of the Mills project – could really do was tinker with the environmental impact report, or maybe just refuse to certify it and risk getting sued.

 But that was before a little-noticed change in a fairly noncontroversial ordinance put the board in the driver’s seat.

 Now a clearly concerned Mills Corp. has launched an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign – including a series of full-page newspaper ads – urging the public to convince the board to certify that the project makes long-term financial sense when supervisors consider the matter next month. Otherwise, the project could be dead even before its EIR is complete, setting up the port to chose another developer when the Mills contract expires next year.

 Board president Aaron Peskin won approval last year for his Fiscal Responsibility and Feasibility Ordinance. "The whole notion of the ordinance is before you go headlong into these projects, let’s make sure the city has the resources to maintain it over time," Peskin told the Bay Guardian, noting how many projects in the city get built without solid plans for the long-term operating funds needed to maintain them.

 The ordinance covers projects that get over $1 million in public funds and other taxpayer-backed subsidies, and in July of this year, with the Mills project in mind, the board modified the measure to include in its definition of public funds the lucrative rent credits Mills is getting.

 "I think [Mills executives] are scared. They didn’t expect the board to be able to weigh in on this before the end," said Jon Golinger, who is leading the opposition to the project. "The board now gets to assess whether we can trust this company to do what they say they’re going to do."

 And trust seems to be a key issue in this case. Under state law and Prop. H, in which San Francisco voters required a recreation plan for the northern waterfront, Piers 27-31 are supposed to be geared toward offering recreational amenities to San Franciscans. Mills and port officials say the project’s YMCA and the "recreational retail" focus of its shops will meet that requirement.

 Critics in Golinger’s group say the project is little more than a glorified mall using the recreation label to pass legal muster, an accusation that Mills Corp.’s 2003 annual report does little to contest, calling the project "an attractive entertainment, dining, shopping and office center" and never once using the word "recreation" (a word added to the label in its 2004 report).

 An otherwise breathlessly laudatory economic study commissioned by the developers and released in July also indirectly raises the question of whether the 164,700 square feet of office space in the project will generate enough cash to pay for all the developer’s promises. Based on statements made by Mills executives, the report notes, "the project is unlikely to be built unless it can achieve minimum net rents of $35 per square foot which represents a major premium over current rents, that few if any existing tenants would be able or willing to pay."

 San Francisco has one of the highest office vacancy rates in the country, and rents average well below what these developers expect to receive. But Mills spokesman Dave D’Onofrio said the offices will be unlike any in the city, and "the market is clearly there" to support such high rents.

 In addition to these areas, Peskin said the board will consider Mills Corp.’s deal with the YMCA, which will be required to pay back the $30 million in capital costs fronted by the developer, on top of the ongoing operating costs needed to maintain this project as a recreational facility open to all.

 "They’re going to have to show how they’re going to fund the Y," Peskin said. He and others have noted that none of the financial documents released by the developer shed much light on that arrangement or other financial details of the project, although the port is currently preparing another financial document set for release to the board Sept. 28.

 Neither port nor YMCA officials returned our calls for comment, but D’Onofrio noted that the YMCA will pay just $1 per year in rent and that he is "utterly confident that the Y will be successful."

 Mills officials have publicly blamed opposition on businesses on Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf, who fear competition from the project. "But there’s no validity to that argument," said Chris Martin, whose family has owned The Cannery and has been involved in northern waterfront planning issues for more than 30 years. He said the northern waterfront is already a congested mess on weekends, and an intensive project like this will make things much worse.

 In response to our inquiries, Mills project manager John Spratley issued a written statement saying in part, "The Board of Supervisors will find that The Piers is financially strong and a tremendous economic benefit for San Francisco and the Port."

 Peskin said he has an open mind about the project but said it is incumbent upon the developers to provide more information showing how the open space, recreational amenities, and other public access aspects to this project will be maintained over the long run: "To them, I say that if your project is so great then it will be great in the future."

 E-mail Steven T. Jones at steve@sfbg.com.

Does Mills make sense?

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Does Mills make sense?

Peskin measure gives supervisors an early say over a controversial waterfront development
By Steven T. Jones

It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

When Virginia-based mall developer Mills Corp. used political pressure by then-mayor Willie Brown and a partnership with the YMCA to narrowly win Port of San Francisco approval, in 2001, for the exclusive right to build a shopping center and office park at Piers 27-31, the project was supposed to slide right through.

The Board of Supervisors was effectively cut out. All that elected body

The political puppeteer

Staff
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0

By offering envelope-pushing legal and political advice at key moments in the fall campaign, attorney Jim Sutton was perhaps the single most influential individual behind the victories of Mayor Gavin Newsom and District Attorney Kamala Harris.
In the process, Sutton solidified his reputation as the dark prince of San Francisco elections, a hired gun who helps downtown interests and well-funded campaigns continue to dominate the electoral field even after voters passed reforms that restricted campaign giving and spending and required more official disclosure.
“He knows more election law than anyone, and he knows it better than anyone else,” local political consultant David Looman told the Bay Guardian. “He is the guy you call.”
New era, new player
Sutton, 40, stepped on the political stage just as voters were going to the polls in the fall of 1997 to demand more transparency in campaigns, a reaction to the leadership of Mayor Willie Brown and the dealings of powerhouse consultants like Jack Davis and Robert Barnes. At the time Sutton worked for Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller, and Naylor, a Mill Valley firm that specializes in election law.
Sutton took on mostly big-money campaigns backed by downtown interests — such as Brown’s 1999 reelection and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s successful, multimillion-­dollar bids to squelch the public power movement in 2001 and 2002. Highly versed in the minutia of campaign finance law, he became a major player in electoral politics in San Francisco — and across the state.
“He is one of a small handful of very influential political law attorneys who typically represent moneyed, influential candidates,” California Common Cause executive director Jim Knox told us. “And he seems to be on something of a crusade right now.”
A search of the San Francisco Ethics Commission’s online database shows that over the past six years, Sutton has acted as treasurer or in another legal capacity for at least 20 campaigns and counts such heavily funded political action committees as the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, and the San Francisco Association of Realtors among his permanent clients. For that work, which doesn’t include the fall election, he earned at least $750,000.
Many of the city’s progressive activists and leaders see him as a dark agent — a tool only well-heeled interests can hire to navigate regulatory loopholes in order to spend as much as possible, even it means pushing the limits of the law, to sway voters.
“He’s an opportunistic lawyer who works against populist issues,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said.
Moreover, activists and state campaign finance experts say, he exerts an extraordinary level of influence over the city’s campaign regulators, including the top staff at the Ethics Commission and the deputy city attorneys who work with that agency.
“He is a high-powered fixer who has relationships with people in power that let him deliver for his clients in a way that leaves the less-connected among us flabbergasted,” said Marc Solomon, a Green Party member who worked on Sup. Matt Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign.
For his part, Sutton says that’s nonsense.
“There’s absolutely no proof or evidence of that,” Sutton told us. “I’m a professional, and I don’t want special access. I don’t need it, because I have a knowledge of the law.”
Rising to the top
By the time Sutton left his old firm last May to create Sutton and Associates, he had sealed his reputation as a go-to guy and counted among his clients the man who would be mayor. Sutton was everywhere. Consider:
• Having lawyered Newsom through the embarrassing flap in early 2003 over the $1 million loan from mentor Gordon Getty that (whoops!) Newsom neglected to disclose on his economic interest statements, Sutton served as treasurer to the Marina District supervisor’s mayoral campaign.
• When district attorney candidate Harris’s consultants realized their client was facing disaster if they couldn’t get her out of a legally binding pledge she signed in January 2003 to abide by the spending limits set in that race, they summoned Sutton, who got her out of the jam. The Ethics Commission’s decision to lift the spending limit was one of the agency’s most egregious acts in years and was truly an extraordinary event, activists say. It allowed Harris to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get past Bill Fazio in the runoff and eventually beat incumbent Terence Hallinan.
• Sutton handled the regulatory filing procedures for the California Urban Issues Project, a nonprofit lobbying outfit that churned out campaign mailers slamming Hallinan and mayoral contender Gonzalez for, among other charges, an unwillingness to crack down on the activities of homeless people. Though the group’s status prevents it from taking positions on candidates, the mailers clearly favored one candidate over the other. However, since the pieces didn’t actually include a “vote for candidate X” command, they fell within the bounds of the law as recently interpreted by the appellate courts, Sutton told us.
“What I do is say, ‘I am the lawyer. It’s my job to say this is what the law says. This is what it does or doesn’t allow,’ ” Sutton said. “It’s not about any kind of ideology on my part.”
• Sutton also served as treasurer for the campaigns behind two successful measures funded by downtown interests: the clean-streets initiative (Proposition C) and the controversial anti-panhandling legislation sponsored by Newsom (Proposition M). Interestingly, Harris particularly benefited because of her support for Prop. M. San Francisco pollster David Binder told us in December that her position on Prop. M helped her win over much of Fazio’s base and was key to her victory.
• Sutton’s expertise helped Newsom and Harris raise money in larger chunks during the runoff than they might otherwise have done. That’s because Sutton is keenly aware of a detail in the city’s campaign finance law that says if a candidate carries “accrued expenses” from the general election to the runoff, that candidate can collect $500 (instead of $250) from contributors. He should be — the ruling came as a result of his suggestion to local regulators.
For practical purposes, it can become a matter of shuffling the books. Newsom and Harris had so much cash behind their candidacies that it’s tough to believe they had any real debt. And in the case of at least Newsom, the amount of “debt” certainly seemed to be a moving target.
Shortly after the general election, Newsom campaign manger Eric Jaye told us he thought Newsom bore roughly $30,000 in accrued expenses. But when the campaign filed the paperwork, Newsom showed $225,322 in unpaid bills (see “Tainted Dough,” 12/03/03).
Neither Hallinan’s nor Gonzalez’s campaign took advantage of this provision in the law, even though Gonzalez treasurer Randy Knox brought it to the candidate’s attention. Gonzalez told us at the time that he didn’t consider such a move ethical.
Learning the ropes
A self-described politics nerd who interned in his state assemblymember’s office in high school, Sutton credits the rigors of the tight-knit environment of Pomona College — more than his three years at Stanford University Law School — with influencing the way he works today.
“I learned early I wasn’t going to get away without doing my homework,” he told us.
After clerking for former California Supreme Court Justice Edward Panelli from 1988 to 1989, he searched for a way to combine his legal degree with his keen interest in politics and government. In 1990 he found his way to Nielsen, Merksamer, though he lived, as he still does, in San Francisco.
Since he knew the city, he evolved into the firm’s attorney who dealt with San Francisco matters, he told us, even though he’s a member of the Republican Party — a rare bird here. In fact, he even served a stint as general counsel for the California Republican Party.
His first work in the city was on behalf of large institutions — the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum’s early bond campaigns, for example. He also made a key alliance with consultant Barnes, who was on his way to building a hugely influential career here and becoming closely connected to former mayor Brown.
In spring 1998, Sutton acted as treasurer for Bay Beautiful, a PAC aimed at defeating Proposition K, which former state senator Quentin L. Kopp put on the ballot to restrict Brown’s control of the development of Treasure Island. (Though the measure passed, the Brown-controlled Board of Supervisors failed to implement it.)
In November 1999, Sutton played a role in the orchestrated independent expenditure campaign on behalf of Brown’s reelection efforts in his handling of the Willie Brown Leadership PAC. The PAC directed some $55,000 into Brown’s bid for a second term (see “The Soft Money Shuffle,” 2/16/00).
At the time, Sutton had gone public with his strong opposition to efforts to restrict spending in political campaigns, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, “Not only does a spending cap decrease the quantity and quality of the issues discussed in the campaigns, it also infringes on First Amendment rights.”
One year after Brown’s reelection, the Leadership PAC, together with the pro-downtown Committee on Jobs, pumped some $67,000 into an unsuccessful bid to defeat Proposition O, which reinstated limits on independent expenditures and provided public financing for campaigns. Sutton handled the legal work for No on O.
No surprise there, Sutton’s critics say. Where money seeks to influence politics, that’s where you’ll find him. Sutton, though, says the list of campaigns he’s served doesn’t reflect his ideology as much as it does his skill set. He told us the best-funded campaigns “tend to have the more complicated legal questions, since they’re going to do more stuff.”
Money and politics
Advocates of campaign finance reform say Sutton has taken his opposition to campaign spending limits on the road, seeking to erode local ordinances that restrict spending.
“Sutton is active all over the state in his opposition to campaign finance reform,” said Paul Ryan, political reform project director for the Los Angeles–based Center for Governmental Studies.
Most recently Sutton testified before the San Diego Ethics Commission at a Jan. 21 hearing on a proposal to strengthen local campaign finance law. Sutton argued the commission should repeal the local law and replace it with the state’s version, which happens to be weaker.
“When we wrote the Political Reform Act of 1974, we put in there that local laws could be stronger than the state law,” Center for Governmental Studies director Bob Stern said. “What we have now is about 100 cities and counties that have gone beyond the state law. What [Sutton] is doing is pushing local jurisdictions to follow the state law only. And that’s unfortunate, because each local jurisdiction needs to deal with its own problems.”
Sutton said he just wants a uniform standard, with the minimal local amendments.
“[Cities and counties] keep making more and more laws, which are making things more and more complicated and difficult for anyone who wants to run for election to figure out,” Sutton said. “It has a dampening effect.”
Ryan and others are concerned Sutton might succeed in discouraging officials in municipalities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco from sticking by their stronger local laws. Compounding their concerns is that Sutton appears to have a great deal of influence over regulatory officials — at least in San Francisco.
Charlie Marsteller, who formerly headed up a San Francisco chapter of California Common Cause, believes the Ethics Commission has for more than a year failed to act on a complaint he filed against Sutton in late 2002, because of Sutton’s influence on the agency. (The complaint was over Sutton’s failure to disclose some $800,000 in contributions from PG&E to a committee aimed at defeating Proposition D, another public power measure.)
“It seems to me they are waiting until after February, when a seat on the commission is up and they’ll be able to replace [Bob Planthold] with a Sutton-friendly commissioner,” Marsteller said. (Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng is expected to name Planthold’s replacement any day now.)
More recent examples activists point to include the Harris spending-cap matter and the latest: a charge made Jan. 16 by two Ethics Commission staffers that director Ginny Vida ordered the destruction of documents accidentally e-mailed to the agency by a secretary in Sutton’s office. Those documents, which were first reported on in the San Francisco Sentinel, strongly suggest that funds raised by the San Francisco Swearing-In Committee (without contribution limits) for Newsom’s inauguration were used to pay off a long list of consultants who worked on the campaign — a charge Sutton has vehemently denied.
On Jan. 28, Sutton filed paperwork for the committee reporting contributions but not expenditures. The total raised was $317,850 and included donations of $10,000 to $20,000 from such downtown players as Shorenstein Co., Gap founder Don Fisher, the San Francisco Association of Realtors, and Clear Channel.
Though Sutton insists he enjoys no undue influence on local regulators, even one of Harris’s consultants told us Sutton was hired for just that reason. “Jim Sutton has a certain amount of influence with Ginny Vida. He doesn’t think [spending limits] are constitutional,” Looman said. “And I believe that worries her too.”
Vida was on medical leave and couldn’t reached for comment, but her deputy, Mabel Ng, said neither she nor Vida give Sutton special treatment.
“I don’t think he has any more or any less influence than anyone else,” Ng said.
Dealing with Ethics
Sutton’s most impressive act in the Harris controversy was convincing Vida and Ng that Harris didn’t know she was bound to the pledge she signed in January 2003 to stay under the spending cap. Had ethics officials concluded that Harris knew her pledge was binding when she blew the cap sometime in September, they could have disqualified her from the race, according to the terms of the city’s campaign finance law.
Instead the Ethics Commission signed onto a settlement agreement stipulating that Harris’s had been an innocent mistake — though there was plenty of evidence that her campaign officials fully knew the pledge was binding (see Campaign Watch, 9/17/03 and 10/08/03). But in buying into Sutton’s version of events, the commission allowed Harris to continue spending money that helped her win the race.
“To facilitate the needs of Sutton’s clients, [Ethics] staffers gave in to Sutton the way he wanted,” Marsteller said. “The commissioners dropped the ball in that they needed to request an audit to check out the veracity of the statements being made by Harris…. They could hardly decide that the violations by the Harris committee were unintentional absent an audit. It’s one of the greatest demonstrations of incompetence I’ve seen, and Sutton led them into it.”
For his part, Sutton disagrees that Vida gave him an easy of time of it. “They fined [Harris] $34,000, and they made sure we printed flyers and ads telling the public of the mistake,” Sutton said.
That’s true. But Ryan and others view the matter as strong evidence of Sutton’s influence.
“It appears as though many of the arguments he makes personally are then likewise made by Ginny Vida and Mabel Ng,” Ryan said. “It appears as though Jim Sutton is influencing the public policy and San Francisco and the interpretation of the city’s finance laws.”

The political puppeteer

Staff
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0

By offering envelope-pushing legal and political advice at key moments in the fall campaign, attorney Jim Sutton was perhaps the single most influential individual behind the victories of Mayor Gavin Newsom and District Attorney Kamala Harris.
In the process, Sutton solidified his reputation as the dark prince of San Francisco elections, a hired gun who helps downtown interests and well-funded campaigns continue to dominate the electoral field even after voters passed reforms that restricted campaign giving and spending and required more official disclosure.
“He knows more election law than anyone, and he knows it better than anyone else,” local political consultant David Looman told the Bay Guardian. “He is the guy you call.”
New era, new player
Sutton, 40, stepped on the political stage just as voters were going to the polls in the fall of 1997 to demand more transparency in campaigns, a reaction to the leadership of Mayor Willie Brown and the dealings of powerhouse consultants like Jack Davis and Robert Barnes. At the time Sutton worked for Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller, and Naylor, a Mill Valley firm that specializes in election law.
Sutton took on mostly big-money campaigns backed by downtown interests — such as Brown’s 1999 reelection and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s successful, multimillion-­dollar bids to squelch the public power movement in 2001 and 2002. Highly versed in the minutia of campaign finance law, he became a major player in electoral politics in San Francisco — and across the state.
“He is one of a small handful of very influential political law attorneys who typically represent moneyed, influential candidates,” California Common Cause executive director Jim Knox told us. “And he seems to be on something of a crusade right now.”
A search of the San Francisco Ethics Commission’s online database shows that over the past six years, Sutton has acted as treasurer or in another legal capacity for at least 20 campaigns and counts such heavily funded political action committees as the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, and the San Francisco Association of Realtors among his permanent clients. For that work, which doesn’t include the fall election, he earned at least $750,000.
Many of the city’s progressive activists and leaders see him as a dark agent — a tool only well-heeled interests can hire to navigate regulatory loopholes in order to spend as much as possible, even it means pushing the limits of the law, to sway voters.
“He’s an opportunistic lawyer who works against populist issues,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said.
Moreover, activists and state campaign finance experts say, he exerts an extraordinary level of influence over the city’s campaign regulators, including the top staff at the Ethics Commission and the deputy city attorneys who work with that agency.
“He is a high-powered fixer who has relationships with people in power that let him deliver for his clients in a way that leaves the less-connected among us flabbergasted,” said Marc Solomon, a Green Party member who worked on Sup. Matt Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign.
For his part, Sutton says that’s nonsense.
“There’s absolutely no proof or evidence of that,” Sutton told us. “I’m a professional, and I don’t want special access. I don’t need it, because I have a knowledge of the law.”
Rising to the top
By the time Sutton left his old firm last May to create Sutton and Associates, he had sealed his reputation as a go-to guy and counted among his clients the man who would be mayor. Sutton was everywhere. Consider:
• Having lawyered Newsom through the embarrassing flap in early 2003 over the $1 million loan from mentor Gordon Getty that (whoops!) Newsom neglected to disclose on his economic interest statements, Sutton served as treasurer to the Marina District supervisor’s mayoral campaign.
• When district attorney candidate Harris’s consultants realized their client was facing disaster if they couldn’t get her out of a legally binding pledge she signed in January 2003 to abide by the spending limits set in that race, they summoned Sutton, who got her out of the jam. The Ethics Commission’s decision to lift the spending limit was one of the agency’s most egregious acts in years and was truly an extraordinary event, activists say. It allowed Harris to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get past Bill Fazio in the runoff and eventually beat incumbent Terence Hallinan.
• Sutton handled the regulatory filing procedures for the California Urban Issues Project, a nonprofit lobbying outfit that churned out campaign mailers slamming Hallinan and mayoral contender Gonzalez for, among other charges, an unwillingness to crack down on the activities of homeless people. Though the group’s status prevents it from taking positions on candidates, the mailers clearly favored one candidate over the other. However, since the pieces didn’t actually include a “vote for candidate X” command, they fell within the bounds of the law as recently interpreted by the appellate courts, Sutton told us.
“What I do is say, ‘I am the lawyer. It’s my job to say this is what the law says. This is what it does or doesn’t allow,’ ” Sutton said. “It’s not about any kind of ideology on my part.”
• Sutton also served as treasurer for the campaigns behind two successful measures funded by downtown interests: the clean-streets initiative (Proposition C) and the controversial anti-panhandling legislation sponsored by Newsom (Proposition M). Interestingly, Harris particularly benefited because of her support for Prop. M. San Francisco pollster David Binder told us in December that her position on Prop. M helped her win over much of Fazio’s base and was key to her victory.
• Sutton’s expertise helped Newsom and Harris raise money in larger chunks during the runoff than they might otherwise have done. That’s because Sutton is keenly aware of a detail in the city’s campaign finance law that says if a candidate carries “accrued expenses” from the general election to the runoff, that candidate can collect $500 (instead of $250) from contributors. He should be — the ruling came as a result of his suggestion to local regulators.
For practical purposes, it can become a matter of shuffling the books. Newsom and Harris had so much cash behind their candidacies that it’s tough to believe they had any real debt. And in the case of at least Newsom, the amount of “debt” certainly seemed to be a moving target.
Shortly after the general election, Newsom campaign manger Eric Jaye told us he thought Newsom bore roughly $30,000 in accrued expenses. But when the campaign filed the paperwork, Newsom showed $225,322 in unpaid bills (see “Tainted Dough,” 12/03/03).
Neither Hallinan’s nor Gonzalez’s campaign took advantage of this provision in the law, even though Gonzalez treasurer Randy Knox brought it to the candidate’s attention. Gonzalez told us at the time that he didn’t consider such a move ethical.
Learning the ropes
A self-described politics nerd who interned in his state assemblymember’s office in high school, Sutton credits the rigors of the tight-knit environment of Pomona College — more than his three years at Stanford University Law School — with influencing the way he works today.
“I learned early I wasn’t going to get away without doing my homework,” he told us.
After clerking for former California Supreme Court Justice Edward Panelli from 1988 to 1989, he searched for a way to combine his legal degree with his keen interest in politics and government. In 1990 he found his way to Nielsen, Merksamer, though he lived, as he still does, in San Francisco.
Since he knew the city, he evolved into the firm’s attorney who dealt with San Francisco matters, he told us, even though he’s a member of the Republican Party — a rare bird here. In fact, he even served a stint as general counsel for the California Republican Party.
His first work in the city was on behalf of large institutions — the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum’s early bond campaigns, for example. He also made a key alliance with consultant Barnes, who was on his way to building a hugely influential career here and becoming closely connected to former mayor Brown.
In spring 1998, Sutton acted as treasurer for Bay Beautiful, a PAC aimed at defeating Proposition K, which former state senator Quentin L. Kopp put on the ballot to restrict Brown’s control of the development of Treasure Island. (Though the measure passed, the Brown-controlled Board of Supervisors failed to implement it.)
In November 1999, Sutton played a role in the orchestrated independent expenditure campaign on behalf of Brown’s reelection efforts in his handling of the Willie Brown Leadership PAC. The PAC directed some $55,000 into Brown’s bid for a second term (see “The Soft Money Shuffle,” 2/16/00).
At the time, Sutton had gone public with his strong opposition to efforts to restrict spending in political campaigns, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, “Not only does a spending cap decrease the quantity and quality of the issues discussed in the campaigns, it also infringes on First Amendment rights.”
One year after Brown’s reelection, the Leadership PAC, together with the pro-downtown Committee on Jobs, pumped some $67,000 into an unsuccessful bid to defeat Proposition O, which reinstated limits on independent expenditures and provided public financing for campaigns. Sutton handled the legal work for No on O.
No surprise there, Sutton’s critics say. Where money seeks to influence politics, that’s where you’ll find him. Sutton, though, says the list of campaigns he’s served doesn’t reflect his ideology as much as it does his skill set. He told us the best-funded campaigns “tend to have the more complicated legal questions, since they’re going to do more stuff.”
Money and politics
Advocates of campaign finance reform say Sutton has taken his opposition to campaign spending limits on the road, seeking to erode local ordinances that restrict spending.
“Sutton is active all over the state in his opposition to campaign finance reform,” said Paul Ryan, political reform project director for the Los Angeles–based Center for Governmental Studies.
Most recently Sutton testified before the San Diego Ethics Commission at a Jan. 21 hearing on a proposal to strengthen local campaign finance law. Sutton argued the commission should repeal the local law and replace it with the state’s version, which happens to be weaker.
“When we wrote the Political Reform Act of 1974, we put in there that local laws could be stronger than the state law,” Center for Governmental Studies director Bob Stern said. “What we have now is about 100 cities and counties that have gone beyond the state law. What [Sutton] is doing is pushing local jurisdictions to follow the state law only. And that’s unfortunate, because each local jurisdiction needs to deal with its own problems.”
Sutton said he just wants a uniform standard, with the minimal local amendments.
“[Cities and counties] keep making more and more laws, which are making things more and more complicated and difficult for anyone who wants to run for election to figure out,” Sutton said. “It has a dampening effect.”
Ryan and others are concerned Sutton might succeed in discouraging officials in municipalities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco from sticking by their stronger local laws. Compounding their concerns is that Sutton appears to have a great deal of influence over regulatory officials — at least in San Francisco.
Charlie Marsteller, who formerly headed up a San Francisco chapter of California Common Cause, believes the Ethics Commission has for more than a year failed to act on a complaint he filed against Sutton in late 2002, because of Sutton’s influence on the agency. (The complaint was over Sutton’s failure to disclose some $800,000 in contributions from PG&E to a committee aimed at defeating Proposition D, another public power measure.)
“It seems to me they are waiting until after February, when a seat on the commission is up and they’ll be able to replace [Bob Planthold] with a Sutton-friendly commissioner,” Marsteller said. (Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng is expected to name Planthold’s replacement any day now.)
More recent examples activists point to include the Harris spending-cap matter and the latest: a charge made Jan. 16 by two Ethics Commission staffers that director Ginny Vida ordered the destruction of documents accidentally e-mailed to the agency by a secretary in Sutton’s office. Those documents, which were first reported on in the San Francisco Sentinel, strongly suggest that funds raised by the San Francisco Swearing-In Committee (without contribution limits) for Newsom’s inauguration were used to pay off a long list of consultants who worked on the campaign — a charge Sutton has vehemently denied.
On Jan. 28, Sutton filed paperwork for the committee reporting contributions but not expenditures. The total raised was $317,850 and included donations of $10,000 to $20,000 from such downtown players as Shorenstein Co., Gap founder Don Fisher, the San Francisco Association of Realtors, and Clear Channel.
Though Sutton insists he enjoys no undue influence on local regulators, even one of Harris’s consultants told us Sutton was hired for just that reason. “Jim Sutton has a certain amount of influence with Ginny Vida. He doesn’t think [spending limits] are constitutional,” Looman said. “And I believe that worries her too.”
Vida was on medical leave and couldn’t reached for comment, but her deputy, Mabel Ng, said neither she nor Vida give Sutton special treatment.
“I don’t think he has any more or any less influence than anyone else,” Ng said.
Dealing with Ethics
Sutton’s most impressive act in the Harris controversy was convincing Vida and Ng that Harris didn’t know she was bound to the pledge she signed in January 2003 to stay under the spending cap. Had ethics officials concluded that Harris knew her pledge was binding when she blew the cap sometime in September, they could have disqualified her from the race, according to the terms of the city’s campaign finance law.
Instead the Ethics Commission signed onto a settlement agreement stipulating that Harris’s had been an innocent mistake — though there was plenty of evidence that her campaign officials fully knew the pledge was binding (see Campaign Watch, 9/17/03 and 10/08/03). But in buying into Sutton’s version of events, the commission allowed Harris to continue spending money that helped her win the race.
“To facilitate the needs of Sutton’s clients, [Ethics] staffers gave in to Sutton the way he wanted,” Marsteller said. “The commissioners dropped the ball in that they needed to request an audit to check out the veracity of the statements being made by Harris…. They could hardly decide that the violations by the Harris committee were unintentional absent an audit. It’s one of the greatest demonstrations of incompetence I’ve seen, and Sutton led them into it.”
For his part, Sutton disagrees that Vida gave him an easy of time of it. “They fined [Harris] $34,000, and they made sure we printed flyers and ads telling the public of the mistake,” Sutton said.
That’s true. But Ryan and others view the matter as strong evidence of Sutton’s influence.
“It appears as though many of the arguments he makes personally are then likewise made by Ginny Vida and Mabel Ng,” Ryan said. “It appears as though Jim Sutton is influencing the public policy and San Francisco and the interpretation of the city’s finance laws.”

The I-Hotel interviews

Staff
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Many lives ago, I remember standing in the back hallway of the International Hotel trying to fathom why it was that this funny, run-down place with these very sad, old, alone men had become the focal point of an enormous array of the concerted power of the state, city and business interests from across the world. And it was not easy then, and it is not easy now, because we were looking at the problem of progress, in some strange sense, and the sadness of one generation, the evils of one generation, seeking redress in another generation. Most of the residents of the I-Hotel were Filipino men who had come to work in the fields of the Central Valley, and had been refused the opportunity to bring over wives or sweethearts, had stayed perhaps too long and had lost their families, lost their wives, lost their sweethearts, lost anything except their companionship with each other, and their attachment to this funny place that they called home, that was not much of a home, but it was all that they had. And so the landowners that owned that prime piece of real estate in downtown San Francisco were being chided for taking away a precious place, which they looked upon as a rundown flophouse, from people who had been cheated of their lives by other landowners, hundreds of miles away. And if there’s any lessons to be learned, it’s the lesson that we are all connected, each to the other, and that everything we do has consequences, not only for ourselves and our immediate family and friends, the people who live in our immediate neighborhood or our city or our state, but across the world, across the century.

Richard Hongisto
Member, San Francisco Board of Supervisor; former San Francisco sheriff

I think that a larger population of voters in San Francisco have begun to see — in part from the I-Hotel — that we can’t continue to Manhattanize the city without destroying our quality of life. And I think that is in part responsible for the passing of Proposition M and other efforts to control density in our city.

We just have to keep pursuing the legislative remedies to prevent the destruction of existing housing stock and replacing it with higher-density construction, and to prevent the conversion of existing low-cost housing into high-profit commercial space and so on. We’ve done some of that already, but I think we can continue to do more. One of the things we need to do is get the right person in the mayor’s office, to get the right Planning Commission in there, which is one reason I’m supporting Art Agnos, because he’s the only person in the race who supported Proposition M.

I wouldn’t let my photograph be taken knocking down a door [if I had to do it over again], because the photograph was completely misunderstood. I was knocking the door panels out of the doors, so the minimum amount of damage was done to the doors, because we were hoping we could get the tenants back in. When we started to do the eviction, the deputies from my department started to smash in the whole door and the door frame, and ruin it. And what I did was I took the sledgehammer and said no, do it like this — just knock out one door panel, and that way if the tenants can get back in, they can take one little piece of plywood and screw or nail it in over the missing door panel. So I showed them how to do it and I got photographed in the act. The photograph has been attributed that I was running around smashing down the doors in hot pursuit of the tenants, when in fact the opposite was the truth.

I think that as a result of the fact that I refused to do the eviction immediately, and then getting sent to jail and sued — I had to spend about $40,000 in 1978 out of my own pocket to defend the suit — I think we made a real effort to forestall the eviction and give the city a chance to take it over by eminent domain and save the building for the tenants. It did not work out in the end, but I’m glad that we gave it the best shot.

Brad Paul
Executive director, North of Markert Planning Association

Well, let me just start by saying that I was there the night that it happened. It was pretty horrifying to watch people, basically, that I was paying — because I’m a taxpayer and they were police officers, paid by the city — to beat people up around me, and I saw people right in front of me have their skulls split open at taxpayers’ expense, so that this crazy person from Thailand, Supasit Mahaguna, could throw all these people out of their homes.

In retrospect, we’ve learned about the important role that nonprofit corporations can play in owning houses and there was a thing called a buy-back plan, which people thought was a scam. Today, you would think of something like a buy-back plan as just a normal way of buying residential property protection. I can’t think of any residential development ten years ago owned or operated by a nonprofit corporation. Today there are lots.

The eviction — I think people paid a very dear price for that. A number of those people are dead now, and I’m sure that the threat of that eviction didn’t help. A more recent case is 1000 Montgomery. The eviction of those people, I think, led to the death of one of the older tenants there. I think that’s one of the sad losses of things like the I-Hotel and 1000 Montgomery and all of them. I don’t think government officials pay enough attention to that when they make decisions on whether or not to let somebody do these things.

But for myself, I’d have to say that there were a number of things that I was involved in ten and 12 years ago that made me decide to do the kind of work I’m doing now. And I’d say one of the single things that had the biggest effect on me was being there that night and watching that, and saying we shouldn’t allow this to happen — that we need to all see that it never comes to this again.

Quentin Kopp
State senator, third district; former member, San Francisco Board of Supervisors

To me it was an unusual episode, and I’m not sure that it was a lesson of any kind. I don’t think it’s been repeated, has it? You know, I’m a believer in property rights, so it’s a difficult issue. On the other hand, I became convinced that there was genuine justification for maintaining the hotel for those who lived there and had an attachment to it. It was a collision of property rights versus feeling sorry for people who would lose their lodgings, lodgings to which they had become accustomed and attached. If I were the property owner, I would be indignant about the way the city treated me …

the tactics that were used, and the litigation — the litigation was horrendous.

Now, the broader social issue I would characterize as preservation, obviously, of low-income housing for a minority group, the Filipinos. [But] if the city had such a robust concern, sincere concern, then the proper act for the city was to condemn the property — to take it and preserve it …

for the people who lived there. But the city was not forthright, the city did not set out to do that — the city tried to strangulate the owner into doing that, by reason of, it’s what I consider a bit cutesy a legislative move — a political move.

So what have we learned? Well, I don’t think that anything has been learned, and not simply because this is sui generis (which is the Latin term for one of a kind that lawyers often employ), but because the city doesn’t have a consistent policy for preserving this kind of living space.

Richard Cerbatos
Former member, San Francisco School Board, San Francisco Board of Permit Appeals

Speaking as a Filipino American, I saw an attempt to destroy a cultural link within the Filipino-American community. It was clear there was an established community living there. The use of the hotel in that general community formed a network and a lifestyle that was identifiable for older Filipino men. The access to the cheaper restaurants in Chinatown, the ability to hang out and speak their language in pool halls — this was all proposed to be destroyed in one big demolition permit. They were in a community where some of their cultural values were intact, and the only thing that kept them intact was the fact that they were close to one another.

I think those sensitivities now are clearer to the general community. I still think there are areas of Chinatown where they’re still going to have to fight this battle….

We’re seeing this: That we can’t allow people to be displaced purely in the name of bigger and better developments, and namely, bigger and better profits. With Prop. M, we’re seeing some attempts at this, and I think the first evolution of this was the I-Hotel.

As far as my sensitivites go, my thing is, through just having lived through it, this was the first time that anyone took on the developers the way they did. There have been later battles, but that was the first one that became known to everyone city-wide. If we are going to put some control on growth, we can use these lessons.

Ed Illumin
Member, I-Hotel Tenants Association

The first eviction notice was posted in December of 1968, so we’re talking about an almost 19-year battle, here. Actually, a 19-year war, because there were little battles in between. But it comes down to the city and various segments of the Chinatown community and the developer, Four Seas, arriving at an agreement on the development for that lot that would include some replacement housing — affordable, low-income replacement housing. I mean really affordable and priority for those apartments going to former tenants of the I-Hotel, and those elderly and disabled. A number of [tenants] have died since that time, so really we’re talking about maybe a dozen or 16 people who are still around to taste the benefits of this long, long war. Some justice, even though it’s late, has arrived and I would say that we finally won the war. It was a long struggle, 19 years, but people will get a chance, if they live long enough, to move in on the 20th year, which is 1988, when the construction should be completed.

It certainly wasn’t positive for the Filipino neighborhood. There are remnants of Manilatown, but to a large extent that neighborhood was destroyed. There was a lot going on there, and the I-Hotel was the heart of the community in that area. The positive thing about it was that it kept the Financial District from encroaching into Chinatown. The Filipinos and the Chinese have had a long history of living together, co-existing, and I think it was pretty much a sacrifice of the Filipino community there to make sure that Chinatown was preserved.

Chester Hartman
Fellow in urban planning, Institute for Policy Studies; lawyer for I-Hotel Tenants Association

In a sense, I think the International Hotel, the tremendous interest and support that the eviction attempt generated over so many years, was a kind of a coalescing and symbolizing of resistance to changes in San Francisco — changes being obviously the downtown corporate world taking over the neighborhoods. I think the fact that so many people came to the aid of the hotel residents, even though they weren’t successful in preventing the eviction, was pretty much a strong building block in developing what has become an extremely strong housing movement in San Francisco, one that really has become very effective in influencing candidates and people in public office, and in getting some laws passed.

So that’s one important lesson — that sometimes victories take a while, and take different forms, but all these struggles are connected. Another, I guess, is really how long it takes to get any results — the absurdity of having a totally vacant lot there for ten years, at a time when people need housing so badly. The fact that a private developer like Four Seas is able in essence to hold on and do nothing with its land when there’s so much need for housing in the Chinatown-Manilatown area says a great deal about … the relationship of city government to private developers.

Curtis Choy
Producer, “The Fall of the I-Hotel”

About the eviction night itself — and I just have a dim recollection now — I remember being very numb, and the fact that I was hiding behind a camera made it easier, because I had something between me and the event. I think I’ve spent a lot of time getting it behind me and if I haven’t seen my own film for, say, half a year it scares the hell out of me to look at the eviction again. I feel hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

What can I say about lessons? It was almost, I shouldn’t say, it was almost worth that eviction, but I mean, that’s the only thing you can get out of something like that — I mean, basically, they killed half those guys by throwing them out.

The potential for revolution in the country was still in the back of our minds in the early ’70s. And here we were trying to use the system, trying to play ball with the system, and it sort of set us up for yuppiedom. It was sort of our last hope to get something together, and we had invested 12 years or so in the struggle. There was kind of a little mass depression that stuck, and that same kind of high energy has never come back.

Sue Hestor
Attorney, San Franciscans for Reasonable Growth

In retrospect, one of the issues that we should have raised and litigated was the lack of an adequate environmental review of the project. We’ve learned a lot since then, and I don’t want to say that people that were involved at that point made a wrong decision, but in 1987 that would be one of the first issues that would be raised.

Secondarily, I think what we learned is how the physical destruction of a building makes it very hard to keep the issue alive — after a while, the hole in the ground becomes something that has to be filled, and the focus of attention drifts away. It’s really striking how when you lose the building, it’s more than just a symbol — it’s the motivating factor in people’s lives.

Allison Brennan
Organizer, San Francisco Tenants Union

They [the city] could’ve taken the building by eminent domain and they didn’t do that — they didn’t want to do that. I mean, the issue is not so much what they could do to prevent it, but why they didn’t prevent it in the first place. And that is basically because San Francisco has very little interest in preserving low-income housing. Its interest, and the interest of most of the people from San Francisco, are in getting rid of low-income housing, “cleaning up” poor neighborhoods, and turning them into nice middle-class neighborhoods, and that’s the stated goal of most city legislation — poor people aren’t what we want.

I think that probably the most important thing that came out of [the I-Hotel struggle] was that, while we don’t have a real good situation for tenants in San Francisco, I think consciousness was raised, among at least a lot of tenants about the situation which tenants are in. And I think that to a certain extent, on a national level, the elderly are getting somewhat better consideration than they did previously.

Gordon Chin
Director, Chinatown Neighborhood Improvement Resource Center

I guess the lessons of the I-Hotel have to go back to 15 and 20 years, to the genesis of the issue. I personally think the I-Hotel symbolized a lot of very key development issues — housing issues, tenant empowerment issues — that gained a national reputation back starting in the 1960s. In some respects, it highlighted many of the particular facets of the housing problem very early on: the need to maintain and preserve existing housing; the threat of commercial and downtown developments; the encroachment into the neighborhoods; the issue of foreign investment and the role that can play in development encroachment; the critical importance of tenant organizing and tenant organization with a support base in the larger community; the need for diverse ethnic, racial, sexual, lifestyle communities to work together on an issue of mutual concern — in this case, Chinese, Filipino, white, all different kinds of people supporting the I-Hotel tenants and getting involved in the issues as they evolved over the last 15 years.The I-Hotel experience has had a positive effect on these issues in San Francisco, and probably across the country. ….

It was a very critical time for the city, and this is going back to the early ’60s, with the previous United Filipino Association, the International Tenants’ Association, the whole bit. You had a lot of environmental movement activity….

I think that’s the I-Hotel’s importance, not just what happened back then. It was the whole evolution of the issue, even after the demolition, when the focus then became — well, we’ve lost the building, but the fight must continue in terms of making sure whatever is built on the site becomes new, affordable housing — not just housing but affordable housing. And it’s culminated in the most recent development plan for the project, which has gained pretty wide-spread support. I guess part of the whole recollection, reflecting back on the ’60s in general, [is that] the I-Hotel was very symbolic of the whole movement — Vietnam, everything.*

Interviews for this story were conducted by: Nicholas Anderson, Heather Bloch, Eileen Ecklund, Mark Hedin, Craig McLaughlin, Tim Redmond and Erica Spaberg.

What are city officials and the Chamber of Commerce planning behind closed doors?

Staff
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San Francisco public officials and the Chamber of Commerce have launched a new Economic Development Corporation with the stated goal of charting and guiding the city’s economic future. But although the decisions the group might make would have dramatic impacts on all of San Francisco, the agency thus far has refused to conduct its business in public.

Although several city officials serve on the EDC’s board of directors in an official capacity and the corporation will be partially funded by the city, the agency’s first meeting, July 16th, was held behind closed doors at the Chamber’s California Street headquarters. A Bay Guardian reporter was told he could not attend the meeting, and no official minutes have been published. The meeting appears to violate the Ralph M. Brown Public Meetings Act.

Paul Wright, deputy executive director of the Chamber of Commerce and acting executive director of the EDC, insisted the meeting did not fall under Brown Act guidelines.

The EDC’s board of directors, however, includes Bill Witte, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Economic Development, Rudy Nothenberg, the city’s chief administrative officer and Nancy Walker, president of the Board of Supervisors. The Brown Act defines “legislative body” as “any board, commission, committee, or other body on which officers of of a local agency serve in their official capacity as members.”

Furthermore, the new EDC receives its funding in part from the Chamber and in part from MOHED. Presently, that funding is limited to “in kind” services such as preparing presentations and clerical services. Under the Brown Act definition, a legislative body must be “supported in whole or part by funds provided by such a public agency.”

The EDC was formed jointly by the Chamber and MOHED and will be incorporated as a nonprofit in the fall of this year. According to the agenda from the July 16th planning meeting, the corporation is designed to “help retain employers in San Francisco and attract appropriate new businesses to the City” and to maintain “a close working relationship between the public and private sectors in the economic development activity of the City.”

Terry Francke, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association and an expert on the Brown Act, told the Bay Guardian that the new EDC qualifies as a “legislative body” as defined under Government Code Section 54950 and therefore any meetings the EDC holds are subject to Brown Act requirements. “If the meeting is official enough to have public officials in attendance then it’s official enough to be open.”

Supervisor Walker was invited to the meeting but could not attend due to a previous commitment, according to staff aide Jean Mariani. Mariani said Walker’s office was seeking a city attorney’s opinion on the status of the EDC and told the Bay Guardian, “Supervisor Walker is concerned with this issue. We will have the situation resolved before the next meeting.” That meeting is scheduled for September 11th.

City Attorney Louise Renne told the Bay Guardian her staff was looking into the matter.*

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