Supervisors

Gearing up for war

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joe@sfbg.com

A tear gas canister explodes as citizens flee from the gun-toting warriors, safely guarded behind their armored vehicles. Dressed in patterned camo and body armor, they form a skirmish line as they fire projectiles into the crowd. Flash bang explosions echo down the city’s streets.

Such clashes between police and protesters have been common in Ferguson, Mo., in the past few weeks since the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by a police officer. But it’s also a scene familiar to anyone from Occupy Oakland, where Iraq veteran Scott Olsen suffered permanent brain damage after police shot a less-than-lethal weapon into his head, or similar standoffs in other cities.

police embed 1As the country watched Ferguson police mobilize against its citizens while donning military fatigues and body armor and driving in armored vehicles, many began drawing comparisons to soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan — indeed, viral photos featuring side-by-side comparisons made it difficult to distinguish peace officers from wartime soldiers.

So how did law enforcement officers in police departments across the country come to resemble the military? And what impact is that escalation of armaments having on otherwise peaceful demonstrations? Some experts say the militarization of police actually encourages violence.

Since the ’90s, the federal Department of Defense has served as a gun-running Santa Claus for the country’s local police departments. Military surplus left over from wars in the Middle East are now hand-me-downs for local police across the country, including here in the Bay Area.

A grenade launcher, armored command vehicles, camera-mounted SWAT robots, mounted helicopter weapons, and military grade body armor — these are just some of the weapons and equipment obtained by San Francisco law enforcement agencies since the ’90s. They come from two main sources: the Department of Defense Excess Property Program, also known as the 1033 loan program, and a multitude of federal grants used to purchase military equipment and vehicles.

A recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union, “The War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” slammed the practice of arming local police with military gear. ACLU spokesperson Will Matthews told us the problem is stark in the Bay Area.

“There was no more profound example of this than [the response to] Occupy,” he told the Guardian. He said that military gear “serves usually only to escalate tensions, where the real goal of police is to de-escalate tension.”

The ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and others are calling for less provocative weaponry in response to peaceful demonstrations, as well as more data to track the activities of SWAT teams that regularly use weaponry from the military.

The call for change comes as a growing body of research shows the cycle of police violence often begins not with a raised baton, but with the military-style armor and vehicles that police confront their communities with.

 

PREPARING FOR BATTLE

What motivation does the federal government have to arm local police? Ex-Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Stephen Downing told the Guardian, “I put this at the feet of the drug war.”

The initial round of funding in the ’90s was spurred by the federal government’s so-called War on Drugs, he said, and the argument that police needed weaponry to match well-armed gangs trafficking in narcotics. That justification was referenced in the ACLU’s report.

After 9/11, the desire to protect against unknown terrorist threats also spurred the militarization of police, providing a rationale for the change, whether or not it was ever justified. But a problem arises when local police start to use the tactics and gear the military uses, Downing told us.

When the LAPD officials first formed military-like SWAT teams, he said, “they always kept uppermost in their mind the police mission versus the military mission. The military has an enemy. A police officer, who is a peace officer, has no enemies.”

“The military aims to kill,” he said, “and the police officer aims to preserve life.”

And when police departments have lots of cool new toys, there is a tendency to want to use them.

When we contacted the SFPD for this story, spokesperson Albie Esparza told us, “Chief [Greg Suhr] will be the only one to speak in regards to this. He is not available for the next week or two. You may try afterwards.”

 

“CRAIGSLIST OF MILITARY EQUIPMENT”

Local law enforcement agencies looking to gear up have two ways to do it: One is free and the other is low-cost. The first of those methods has been heavily covered by national news outlets following the Ferguson protests: the Department of Defense’s 1033 loan program.

The program permanently loans gear from the federal government, with strings attached. For instance, local police can’t resell any weapons they’re given.

To get the gear, first an agency must apply for it through the national Defense Logistics Agency in Fort Belvoir, Va. In California, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services is the go-between when local police file grant applications to the DLA.

The bar to apply is low. A New Hampshire law enforcement agency applied for an armored vehicle by citing that community’s Pumpkin Festival as a possible terrorism target, according to the ACLU’s report. But the report shows such gear is more likely to be used against protestors or drug dealers than festival-targeting terrorists.

“It’s like the Craigslist of military equipment, only the people getting this stuff are law enforcement agencies,” Kelly Huston, a spokesperson of OEMS, told the Guardian. “They don’t have to pay for this equipment, they just have to come get it.”

Troublingly, where and why the gear goes to local law enforcement is not tracked in a database at the state level. The Guardian made a public records requests of the SFPD and the OEMS, which have yet to be fulfilled. Huston told us the OEMS is slammed with records requests for this information.

“The majority of the documents we have are paper in boxes,” Huston told us, describing the agency’s problem with a rapid response. “This is not an automated system.”

The Guardian obtained federal grant data through 2011 from the OEMS, but with a caveat: Some of the grants only describe San Francisco County, and not the specific agency that requested equipment.

Some data of police gear requested under the 1033 loan program up to 2011 is available thanks to records requests from California Watch. The New York Times obtained more recent 1033 loan requests for the entire country, but it does not delineate specific agencies, only states.

Available data shows equipment requested by local law enforcement, which gravitates from the benign to the frightening.

 

TOYS FOR COPS

An Armament Subsystem is one of the first weapons listed in the 1033 data, ordered by the SFPD in 1996. This can describe mounted machine guns for helicopters (though the SFPD informed us it has since disbanded its aero-unit). From 1995 to 1997, the SFPD ordered over 100 sets of fragmentation body armor valued at $45,000, all obtained for free. In 1996, the SFPD also ordered one grenade launcher, valued at $2,007.

Why would the SFPD need a grenade launcher in an urban setting? Chief Suhr wouldn’t answer that question, but Downing told us it was troubling.

“It’s a pretty serious piece of military hardware,” he said. “I’ll tell you a tiny, quick story. One of the first big deployments of SWAT (in Los Angeles) was the Black Panthers in the ’60s. They were holed up in a building, well armed and we knew they had a lot of weapons in there,” he said. “They barricaded the place with sandbags. Several people were wounded in the shooting, as I recall. The officers with military experience said the only way we’ll breach those sandbags and doors is with a grenade launcher.”

In those days, they didn’t have a grenade launcher at the ready, and had to go through a maze of official channels to get one.

“They had to go through the Governor’s Office to the Pentagon, and then to Camp Pendleton to get the grenade launcher,” Downing told us. “[The acting LAPD chief] said at the time, ‘Let’s go ahead and ask for it.’ It was a tough decision, because it was using military equipment against our citizens.”

But the chief never had to use the grenade launcher, Downing said. “They resolved the situation before needing it, and we said ‘thank god.'”

The grenade launcher was the most extreme of the equipment procured by local law enforcement, but there were also helicopter parts, gun sights, and multitudes of armored vehicles, like those seen in Ferguson.

By contrast, the grants programs are harder to track specifically to the SFPD, but instead encompass funds given to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the Sheriff’s Department, and even some schools. That’s because the grants cover not only allow the purchase of military surplus vehicles and riot gear, but also chemical protective suits and disaster-related supplies.

But much of the requested gear and training has more to do with active police work than emergency response.

San Francisco County agencies used federal loans to purchase $113,000 “command vehicles” (which are often armored). In 2010, the SFPD purchased a $5,000 SWAT robot (which often comes equipped with cameras and a remote control), as well as $15,000 in Battle Dress Uniforms, and $48,000 for a Mobile Communications Command Vehicle.

In 2008, the SFPD ordered a Bearcat Military Counterattack Vehicle for $306,000.

The Lenco website, which manufactures Bearcats, says it “may also be equipped with our optional Mechanical Rotating Turret with Cupola (Tub) and Weapon Ready Mounting System, suitable for the M60, 240B and Mark 19 weapons system.”

Its essentially an armored Humvee that can be mounted with rotating gun turrets.

police embed 2

Department of Homeland Security grants were used to purchase Type 2 Mobile Field Training, which Department of Homeland Security documentation describes as involving eight grenadiers, two counter-snipers, two prisoner transportation vans, and 14 patrol vehicles.

All told, the Bay Area’s many agencies were awarded more than $386 million in federal grants between 2008 and 2011, with San Francisco netting $48 million of those rewards. Through the 1033 loan program, San Francisco obtained over $1.4 million in federal surplus gear from 1995 to 2011.

But much of that was received under the radar, and with little oversight.

“Anytime they’re going to file for this equipment, we think the police should hold a public hearing,” Matthews, the ACLU spokesperson, told us.

In San Francisco, there is a public hearing for the procurement of military weapons, at the Police Commission. But a Guardian analysis of agenda documents from the commission shows these hearings are often held after the equipment has already been ordered.

Squeezed between a “status report” and “routine administrative business,” a March 2010 agenda from the commission shows a request to “retroactively accept and expend a grant in the amount of $1,000,000.00 from the U.S. Department of Justice.”

This is not a new trend. In 2007, the Police Commission retroactively approved three separate grants totaling over $2 million in funding from the federal government through the OEMS, which was then called the Emergency Management Agency.

Police Commission President Anthony Mazzucco did not respond to the Guardian’s emails requesting an interview before our press time, but one thing is clear: The SFPD requests federal grants for military surplus, then sometimes asks the Police Commission to approve the funding after the fact.

Many are already critiquing this call to arms, saying violent gear begets violent behavior.

 

PROVOCATIVE GEAR

A UC Berkeley sociologist, with his small but driven team and an army of automatic computer programs, are now combing more than 8,000 news articles on the Occupy movement in search of a pattern: What causes police violence against protesters, and protester violence against police?

Nicholas Adams and his team, Deciding Force, already have a number of findings.

“The police have an incredible ability to set the tone for reactions,” Adams told us. “Showing up in riot gear drastically increases the chances of violence from protesters. The use of skirmish lines also increases chances of violence.”

Adams’s research uses what he calls a “buffet of information” provided by the Occupy movement, allowing him to study over 200 cities’ police responses to protesters. Often, as in Ferguson, protesters were met by police donned in equipment and gear resembling wartime soldiers.

Rachel Lederman is a warrior in her own right. An attorney in San Francisco litigating against police for over 20 years, and now the president of the National Lawyers Guild Bay Area chapter, she’s long waged legal war against police violence.

Lederman is quick to note that the SFPD in recent years has been much less aggressive than the Oakland Police Department, which injured her client, Scott Olsen, in an Occupy protest three years ago.

“If you compare OPD with the San Francisco Police on the other side of the bay,” she told us, “the SFPD do have some impact munitions they bring at demonstrations, but they’ve never used them.”

Much of this is due to the SFPD’s vast experience in ensuring free speech, an SFPD spokesperson told us. San Francisco is a town that knows protests, so the SFPD understands how to peacefully negotiate with different parties beforehand to ensure a minimum of hassle, hence the more peaceful reaction to Occupy San Francisco.

Conversely, in Oakland, the Occupy movement was met by a hellfire of tear gas and flash bang grenades. Protesters vomited into the sidewalk from the fumes as others bled from rubber bullet wounds.

But some protesters the Guardian talked to noted that the night SFPD officers marched on Occupy San Francisco, members of the city’s Board of Supervisors and other prominent allies stood between Occupiers and police, calling for peace. We may never know what tactics the SFPD would have used to oust the protesters without that intervention.

As Lederman pointed out, the SFPD has used reactive tactics in other protests since.

“We’ve had some problems with SFPD recently, so I’m reluctant to totally praise them,” she said, recalling a recent incident where SFPD and City College police pepper-sprayed one student protester, and allegedly broke the wrists and concussed another. Photos of this student, Otto Pippenger, show a black eye and many bruises.

In San Francisco, a city where protesting is as common as the pigeons, that is especially distressing.

“It’s an essential part of democracy for people to be able to demonstrate in the street,” Lederman said. “If police have access to tanks, and tear gas and dogs, it threatens the essential fabric of democracy.”

Who will run Gleneagles Golf Course? If it’s not the city, who cares?

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As we watch today’s Recreation and Park Commission meeting on extending political insider Tom Hsieh’s no-bid contract to run the once-public Gleneagles Golf Course — which is being contested by a rival group headed by venture capitalist Brian Smith and notorious landlord attorney Andrew Zacks — we can only hope that both sides lose and the public interest somehow reemerges from this muck and mire.

Particularly disgusting is how poor children of color are being used as bargaining chips in this clash of political and economic elites, as public speaker after speaker (mostly from groups with ties to the Mayor’s Office, where Hsieh has long and deep political ties that allowed him to take over this public space nine years ago without a competitive bidding process) tries to make this decision about teaching poor kids from nearly Sunnydale housing project how to golf.

Yes, that’s what these kids really need, to learn how to play one of the most expensive and elitist sports out there, because with a little support from the First Tee program, they can all become the next Tiger Woods, right? Oh, and of course, given that the Mayor’s Office is in on this strange scheme, it’s also about jobs, jobs, jobs, with the building trades unions also supporting Hsieh and his buddies in the Mayor’s Office.

By all accounts, even CW Nevius’ column in today’s Chronicle and earlier coverage by that paper, Gleneagles is in bad physical shape and has been poorly maintained by Hsieh. Nonetheless, Hsieh blamed rising water rates related to the drought for his problem, last month threatening to close the course unless he got a more lucrative deal with run the course, triggering Smith’s bid for the course and his accusations that Hsieh and his buddies in the Mayor’s Office are pulling a fast one.

“This is a city resource and it is apparently being mismanaged,” Smith told the commission this morning, noting that he only wants to help bring golf to the masses (his side echoes Hsieh’s ruse about “the children” as part of its sales pitch) because “nobody gets into a water-dependent business during a drought, I can tell you that.”

That raises a good question: Why are we devoting city resources to such a water-dependent use of public space during a drought, in an era of global warming when droughts will only become more frequent? But the broader question is this: Why don’t we just return Gleneagles to the city and let it be managed as part of the large McLaren Park that it’s a part of?

Members of the McLaren Park Collaborative spoke at the hearing, urging the commission not to view Gleneagles separately from McLaren, even as they voiced support for Hsieh and thanked him for his fundraising support of their citizen-based group. That’s Hsieh’s main forte, raising money from the rich, which he has done on behalf of the last three mayoral adminitrations and other political schemes by downtown interests and the city’s various political power brokers.

This whole issue stinks, and it’s hard to even care what’s now being said as the commission heads into a closed session discussion of what to do with Gleneagles, particularly given there’s almost no chance that this mayoral appointed commission of political climbers will vote to reclaim this public space for the broad public interest. 

UPDATE: The commission voted unanimously to extend Hsieh’s lease of Gleneagles for another nine years, a decision that must be confirmed by the Board of Supervisors next month. 

San Francisco Democratic Party decides on endorsements for November election

At a meeting lasting about four hours last night [Wed/13], the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, the steering committee of the city’s Democratic Party, decided on its endorsements for the Nov. 4 election.

A lengthy round of voting followed nearly two hours of public comment, in which San Franciscans chimed in on everything from school board nominations to Proposition L, a motorist-friendly proposal that amounts to a step backward for the city’s transit-first policy. (The formal oppositional campaign slogan is “No on Gridlock, No on L,” but opponents who spoke at the meeting shortened it to the edgier “’L No.”).

Prop. L went down handily. Prop. E, the sugary-beverage tax, easily won the DCCC’s endorsement, as did Prop. J, the proposal to increase the city’s minimum wage.

But Prop. G – a measure crafted to stem the tide of Ellis Act evictions, known as the anti-speculation tax – was a close contest.

Before the DCCC members got down to the business of voting, many local advocates voiced support for Prop. G.

Housing activists lined up across the room while Dean Preston, executive director of Tenants Together, called for meaningful action on the city’s housing affordability crisis.

But the proponents’ show of support was followed by the opposite plea from a second group, which included a contingent of Asian property owners, who crowded into the front of the room to tell DCCC members that they felt the proposed increase was unfair. “We don’t deserve this!” A speaker said, conveying anger and frustration. “Look at our faces, we work hard for our properties.”

In the end, the vote came down to four abstentions, 13 votes for “no endorsement,” and 15 votes in support, tipping the scales in favor of Prop. G by a tiny margin.

Among those who abstained on that vote were Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jackie Speier, and Assemblymember Phil Ting, all of whom voted by proxies. Sup. Scott Wiener voted “no endorsement,” while Sup. Malia Cohen abstained.

Decisions in the races for Board of Education and the city’s Community College Board were time-consuming, since it took several elimination rounds before the final candidate lists were settled.

The school board candidates to emerge with DCCC endorsements were Shamann Walton, Emily Murase, and Trevor McNeil. Notably, that list didn’t include Hydra Mendoza, an incumbent who also serves as education advisor to Mayor Ed Lee.

Endorsements for Community College Board, meanwhile, went to Amy Bacharach for a two-year term, and Thea Selby, Anita Grier, and Rodrigo Santos for four-year terms.

Things got interesting in the contest for BART board of directors, between longtime Republican director James Fang and a well-funded Democrat, Nick Josefowitz, who is in his early 30s.

The vote was complicated since SEIU Local 1021, a labor union with a long history of backing progressive causes in San Francisco, is pulling for Fang, who supported workers during last year’s BART strike. Yet Josefowitz has the backing of other progressive organizations, including the Sierra Club. “I think that BART needs new blood,” Sierra Club representative Rebecca Evans said during public comment.

In the end, the DCCC voted “no endorsement,” with that selection getting 17 votes, five abstaining, and 10 voting in favor of Josefowitz. The votes followed a round of comments.

“The Democratic Party is a means to an end,” DCCC member Rafael Mandelman said. “And the end that we are using the Democratic Party to achieve is a more socially just and better world… There are few local entities [to advance that] than SEIU Local 1021. I think it is acceptable for us to take ‘no’ position in this race.”

Several piped up to say they thought Josefowitz deserved the endorsement of the Democratic Party simply because he’s a viable candidate and registered Democrat in a race against a Republican.

But DCCC member Arlo Hale Smith weighed in to critique of Fang’s performance as a director. “I used to hold this BART Board seat 24 years ago,” Smith said. “He’s missed a third of the meetings and he doesn’t return phone calls. He hasn’t returned my calls in a year. This is not the kind of person who should be reelected. Period.”

In races for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and citywide offices, endorsements went to incumbents Carmen Chu for assessor-recorder, Jeff Adachi for public defender, Sups. Mark Farrell for District 2, Katy Tang for District 4, Jane Kim for District 6, Wiener for District 8, and Malia Cohen for District 10. No second- or third-place endorsements were made in the Board of Supervisors races despite multiple challengers.

Just before voting for endorsements began, DCCC member Alix Rosenthal admonished her colleagues for scant attendance during the candidate endorsement interviews, which were held the previous Saturday. “Only 12 out of 32 people showed up for interviews,” she noted. Half-jokingly, she added, “I know Outside Lands was happening.”

Vigil at 3:33pm tomorrow for Feather, faerie found beaten near Duboce Park

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The life of Bryan Higgins, 31, know among his radical faerie community as Feather, will be celebrated tomorrow at 3:33pm with a vigil at Duboce Park — the exact moment his family wishes to remove him from life support at SF General Hospital.

Feather is the John Doe whom police were attempting to identify this weekend in a viral campaign, whose unconscious, critically injured body was found near Duboce and Church streets at 7:30am on Sunday morning, and who has been sustained through life support at SF General while friends, family, and fellow faeries have streamed through to wish their goodbyes. Until now, Feather has not been identified in the press. In a personal interview today with his husband, Brian Hagerty, I learned more about how this central figure in the faerie community will be ushered into the next life. 

Feather’s family has not been talking to the police or the press — Feather’s husband spoke to me in an effort to get the word out about the vigil tomorrow. Police are now considering Feather’s death an attempted homicide via assault with a deadly weapon; according to sources, they are looking for a white male in a dark-colored hoodie, who was captured on Muni and surrounding businesses’ security footage around the time of the assault. (Anyone with relevant info please contact 415-575-4444 or text TIP411 with “SFPD” at the start of the message.)

 “We haven’t been in contact with anyone other than those immediately involved in Feather’s passing,” Hagerty told me today as we walked near New Rosenberg’s Deli, where Feather worked, and where mourners were gathered wearing “I Believe: Feather 1983-2014” t-shirts sporting Feather’s image.    

Hagerty, visibly shaken but acknowledging tremendous support of family and the faerie community, said he didn’t have any other information about the circumstances of Feather’s horrendous beating. “Right now, we are just concerned with his spirit, and making sure everyone has a chance to say goodbye,” he said. “Too many factors came together in this situation. But the truth is he has left us.”

Hagerty declined to reveal any more medical information, and no more information was available from the police at the time of this writing. The Guardian will be following the case as it develops.

Feather’s case has drawn attention from the media as violent crime in San Francisco seems to be taking an upswing, especially in the gay-friendly Castro District. Supervisors and gay community members are weighing the possibility of radical changes to June’s Pink Saturday celebration, and the area around Church and Duboce has become especially fraught with crime lately, as the surrounding neighborhoods undergo profound changes.

But mostly the shock of such a stalwart of the faerie community — one dedicated to gentleness, peace, and spiritualism — being beaten, possibly to death, is what’s drawing attention and disbelief.

A friend who was in the hospital room as Feather’s husband said goodbye described the scene in a series of texts:

“There are young gay men going in and out of the room holding and kissing his hands; whispering in his ear; family walking in and crying and massaging his feet; relatives encouraging their crying children to say goodbye to him. People meeting each other and hugging, watching TV in the waiting room, handing each other Kleenex in the hospital room. It is so fucking beautiful and sad.

“His husband put a black, white, and tan African dye-print scarf around Feather’s neck, and stretched it out over his shoulders and arms and body with his beautiful face above it…. like he is a bird/spirit preparing to fly.”     

Update 8/14: Photos and coverage of Feather’s memorial can be found here.

Shahum leaving SF Bike Coalition to study Vision Zero

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San Francisco cyclists are losing a key advocate — but this and other US cities may next year gain a knowledgable new leader for Vision Zero, the ambitious program for eliminating all pedestrian deaths — with today’s announcement by Leah Shahum that she is stepping down as executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition at the end of the year.

Shahum has been accepted into the German Marshall Fund Fellowship, a four-month program where she will study European success stories in the Vision Zero concept, focusing on cities in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany, before returning to the US to work on programs that reduce traffic-related fatalities.

“They’ve made huge progress after they started with Vision Zero in the late ‘90s,” Shahum told the Guardian. “I’m really passionate about the potential of Vision Zero in San Francisco and other US cities.”

At the SFBC, Shahum worked her way up from a volunteer to becoming executive director 12 years ago, presiding over the organization becoming the city’s largest grassroots, member-based advocacy organization, one that has a strong influence at City Hall.

Shahum has also sought to broaden the SFBC’s mission, working closely with organizations such as Livable City and Walk San Francisco to challenge paradigms and funding models that heavily favor the automobile on the streets of San Francisco.

“The work we’ve been doing at the Bike Coalition has long been broader than just biking,” Shahum said. “The work we’re doing benefits all road users and I think it’s important to bring everyone into this discussion.”

Walk SF Director Nicole Schneider said Shahum’s departure is bittersweet news.

“It’s really sad to see her go and we’ll dearly miss her tenacity and leadership in San Francisco,” Schneider told the Guardian. “But I’m thrilled that she’s working on Vision Zero and she’ll be a huge asset in this country.”

While the Board of Supervisors adopted the goals of Vision Zero earlier this year, that program has yet to be fully defined or funded, particularly after Mayor Ed Lee ditched a fall ballot measure that would have increased the local vehicle license fee, which would have dedicated some funding to pedestrian safety improvements.

“We need to really figure out what Vision Zero means for a US city, so we can learn a lot from European cities,” Schneider said. “In order to implement Vision Zero, we’re going to need funding to replace our obsolent traffic infrastructure that valued speed over safety.”

Shahum said it was a good time to make the transition and focus on Vision Zero, which will be the subject of an international conference she’ll attend this November in New York City, which has been leading the way on the concept among major US cities.    

“It’s at the valuable crossroads of injury prevention and sustainable transportation,” Shahum said. “I’m excited to take Vision Zero to the next level, not just in San Francisco, but around the nation.”

SFBC put out a statement commending Shahum for her 17 years of work with the SFBC and announcing it will be conducting a nationwide search for a new director.

“We thank Leah immensely for leading our community’s efforts to make San Francisco a safer, more inviting place to bike and a better place for all of us to live,” SFBC Board of Director President Lawrence Li said in the statement. “Leah leaves behind a legacy of one of the most bike-friendly big cities in America and one of the most well-organized and effective membership groups in the country.”

Shahum said she’s not sure exactly what form her post-fellowship work will take, but that she’s excited about the possibilities of this opportunity.

“I think it’s time for some new adventures,” Shahum told us. “As much as I love what we’re doing in San Francisco, things have to move faster to be meaningful.”

Airbnb must work with SF

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EDITORIAL

Airbnb and other companies that facilitate illegal short-term apartment rentals to tourists visiting San Francisco need to engage in a more honest and direct dialogue with this city’s political leaders and stakeholders, something that became clear during last week’s Planning Commission hearing on legislation that would legalize and regulate short-term sublets.

This is a complicated, vexing issue that defies simple solutions, as Board of Supervisors President David Chiu learned as he and his aides spent more than year developing the legislation. They did a pretty good job at striking a balance between letting people occasionally rent out their homes and preventing Airbnb from being used to remove apartments from the already strained local housing market.

A key provision for striking that balance was to limit rentals to no more than 90 nights per year, but the Planning Commission — dominated by appointees from Mayor Ed Lee, who has long coddled Airbnb’s scofflaw approach to the city (see “Into thin air,” 8/6/13) — removed that provision, which the Board of Supervisors should reinstate.

The commission also seemed to side with landlords who want to prevent their tenants from renting out rooms, calling for landlords to be notified when their tenants seek to become Airbnb hosts, another provision the board should reject. Landlords using Airbnb to get around rent control laws is at least as bad as tenants who violate their leases by subletting rooms, and this legislation shouldn’t favor one group over the other.

If the city decides to end its decades-old ban on short-term apartment rentals, it should have a compelling reason to do so. Maybe we want to allow struggling city residents to make some extra money while they’re out of town, or to have some flexibility in renting out rooms without taking on permanent tenants, which are legitimate if difficult policy questions.

But it seems like much of the discussion is about how to rein in the widespread violation of city housing and tax laws caused by Airbnb, which has refused requests to share more of its occupancy data, dodged its obligation to collect the city’s transient occupancy tax, and failed to even send a high-level representative to last week’s hearing. Yet the legislation would require the company’s cooperation to help enforce the regulations.

If Airbnb and its hosts want the city to legalize lucrative short-term rentals in San Francisco, then the company should be willing to engage in high-level public discussions with city leaders to shape this important legislation, rather than simply whipping its hosts into a libertarian frenzy with deceptive public relations campaigns.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has gotten rich with a business model that is illegal in its home city, so the very least he can do is show up at City Hall next month to make a good faith effort to help solve the divisive problems that his company is creating.

 

Chiu’s proposed Airbnb regulations clear Planning Commission

Board President David Chiu’s proposed legislation regulating short-term rentals facilitated by tech companies Airbnb and VRBO won approval from the San Francisco Planning Commission on Aug. 7.

At the start of a public hearing, Chiu gave an overview, explaining that it would allow permanent residents – defined as San Franciscans dwelling in the city for at least nine months out of the year – to legally post their residences for short-term rent up to 90 days out of the year, legitimizing a practice that is technically prohibited under a city law prohibiting rentals of less than 30 days.

Under the proposed regulations, hosts would be required to register with the city, pay all associated taxes and sign up for liability insurance.

Anyone in violation, for example by posting a unit on Airbnb.com without registering, could be subjected to fines. While Chiu noted that he thought short-term rentals ought to be regulated to limit the threat Airbnb rentals pose to affordable housing in pricey San Francisco, he sought to strike a balance, saying, “Home sharing has allowed struggling residents to live in our expensive city.”

Public comment on the measure lasted for several hours. A host of speakers came out to share stories about how short-term rentals had helped them earn supplementary income and remain in San Francisco (as the Guardian previously reported, Airbnb sought to line up supporters via an online campaign effort called Fair to Share).

Yet opponents of the measure raised concerns that the new rule legitimizing short-term rentals via Airbnb could exacerbate San Francisco’s tremendous affordability crisis, by allowing residential spaces to be further commodified.

“There’s no hope we’re going to be able to control the adverse impacts of this legislation,” said Doug Engmann, a former planning commissioner. “This ill-conceived way of rezoning the city … causes all sorts of problems about how you’re going to be able to regulate this going forward.”

Ian Lewis, of hotel workers’ union Unite Here Local 2, warned of the impact on those employed by the city’s hotel industry.

“This legislation in one fell swoop is a green-light to legalizing short-term rentals,” said Lewis. “No one is more affected by this than hotel workers.”

Land use attorney Sue Hestor warned that Mayor Ed Lee’s proposal to construct 30,000 housing units “will be a farce … without a requirement that they really be rented or occupied as housing,” and suggested prohibiting the new units envisioned under this plan from being listed as short-term rentals on Airbnb.

Others raised concerns about the regulation’s lack of enforceability, and were critical of the provision allowing for 90 days of short-term rentals (many believed it was too permissive, but advocates who came out expressing support for Airbnb said it should be increased to 180 days).

The Board of Supervisors will take up the legislation in September after returning from August recess.

Alternative event to National Night Out shifts focus away from surveillance

Aug. 5 marks National Night Out, an annual event promoted by local governments and law enforcement agencies geared toward ending neighborhood violence and promoting public safety.

In San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee is scheduled to join Police Chief Greg Suhr and District Attorney George Gascon at a Visitacion Valley playground for a National Night Out gathering. A host of other neighborhood block parties are scheduled throughout San Francisco and Oakland as well.

National Night Out gatherings, which are sponsored by the National Association of Neighborhood Watch, are scheduled to take place nationwide. Block party attendees are encouraged to come out and meet their neighbors as a way of banding together against crime. Yet some have questioned the heavy emphasis this event places on suspicion and surveillance as tools for promoting neighborhood safety.

To offer a different perspective, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has organized a community gathering Aug. 5 at the Lake Merritt amphitheater, billed as the Second Annual Night Out for Safety and Democracy.

“We still want to have a celebration of the community – but we really want to reframe the message that it’s not all about setting up a neighborhood watch program,” said Maria Dominguez, a community organizer with the Ella Baker Center. She added that a mass effort to encourage suspicion and neighborhood surveillance can lead to unintended consequences, such as actions that are unnecessarily based in fear, or racial profiling.

Instead, the Ella Baker Center hopes to emphasize restorative justice practices, youth job training programs, and reentry services as tools for promoting community safety. The group is also highlighting the need for more resources to be dedicated toward these programs as state funding becomes available.

“Safety really goes hand in hand with the lack of economic opportunity in our communities,” Dominguez said. This coming fall, she noted, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors will begin discussing allocation of some $30 million in state realignment funding. Historically, only about a fourth of this has gone toward community-based organizations focused on efforts such as reentry services, with the rest being devoted mainly to law enforcement agencies.

“We want to make sure there’s more funding allocated for community based organizations providing restorative justice initiatives, and other organizations that focus on employment and workforce development opportunities,” Dominguez said.

“With the recent rise in local surveillance initiatives and private patrols, it’s more important than ever to encourage neighbors to build connections with one another so that they can see each other,” said Ella Baker Center executive director Zachary Norris, “rather than watch each other.”

The evening’s event will feature talks by practitioners in restorative justice practitioners and representatives from organizations working around reentry programs. There will also be food, art, voter information, and a performance by Turf Feinz. They’re turf dance performers whose moves – consisting of “elaborate footwork, gliding, gigging, contortion and acrobat,” according to the event description – have been known to liven up BART commutes. 

“Rain,” Turf Feinz’ video from 2009 created in memory of a friend, got more than six million YouTube hits.

Time for change

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news@sfbg.com

Christy Price doesn’t want to work forever. At 60, the security guard has worked in formula retail stores for 25 years. She says she has trouble making a living due to cuts in her work schedule, a setback that could prevent her from retiring for the foreseeable future.

Price, who has been with her current company for a decade, works at various retailers her company contracts with. Her shift from full- to part-time work is typical for employees of formula retailers in the city, many of whom are half Price’s age and attempting to support families or make their way through college.

“I’m more or less in the same predicament as [the retail workers], in terms of hours,” Price said. “It’s scary, and it’s awful sad. You’ve got people who want to work and contribute, but they aren’t given the opportunity.”

Sup. Eric Mar’s recently proposed Retail Workers Bill of Rights aims to change that. Unveiled at a July 29 press conference at San Francisco City Hall, the legislation seeks to boost prospects for retail workers “held hostage by on-call scheduling, diminished hours and discriminatory treatment by employers,” according to a statement issued by Mar’s office. There are also plans to expand the legislation to include employees of formula retail contractors, like Price.

“We’re here today because raising the minimum wage isn’t enough,” Jobs with Justice Retail Campaign Organizer Michelle Lim said at the press conference. That same day, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to place a measure on the November ballot to raise the San Francisco minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2018.

The current trend is for retail employers to hire part-time workers, spreading the hours thin and requiring employees to be on call for many more hours of work than they actually receive. That creates unpredictable schedules, making it difficult for workers to pay the bills.

Having stable work hours makes it possible for formula retail employees to plan for other parts of their lives, like earning college degrees, spending time with family or working other jobs — which is often a necessity for lower wage workers. Plus, as Price notes, companies with too many part-time employees aren’t getting the most out of their workers.

“If you keep undercutting them and cutting their hours, you’re not going to get the customer service that you’re looking for,” Price said. “You’re going to get what you pay for. You do need that skill; some people can do it, some people can’t.”

At the press conference, Mar was joined by fellow lead sponsor Board President David Chiu and co-sponsor Sup. John Avalos, along with speakers from local labor advocacy groups and a host of current and former formula retail workers.

As Lim explained, the proposed Bill of Rights package has four provisions. The first calls for “promoting full-time work and access to hours.” It would require formula retail employers to offer additional hours of work to current part-time employees, before hiring additional part-timers.

That would help prevent situations like those mentioned by retail employees speaking at the press conference. One Gap employee noted that part-time workers are often expected to commit to up to 30 hours of availability a week, yet would only be offered as little as 10 hours, despite being required to remain on call.

Another formula retail employee, Brian Quick, had a particularly rough experience while working for Old Navy at the clothing retailer’s flagship store. Having worked in retail for four years, he said his schedule for the upcoming week would come out on Thursday night, and the hours constantly fluctuated.

“It’s hard to plan anything such as doctor appointments when you aren’t even sure when you work,” Quick said. “Some weeks I would work 35 hours, and the next I’d get 15 hours. How am I supposed to pay bills?”

Last-minute notices became routine for Quick, who sometimes received calls informing him he didn’t have a shift anymore the night before he was scheduled to work.

“One day I came into work and they cut my hours right then and there,” Quick said. “Seems like everything is based on sales and not the well-being of the people who make the sales happen.”

Quick had other troubling experiences while working for Old Navy, including when he was denied Christmas vacation despite applying for it three months in advance. He eventually got the time off, but only through persistence and “the last-minute intervention of a sympathetic manager.”

“We know that consistent and reliable scheduling is important to our employees,” said Laura Wilkinson, a spokesperson for Gap Inc. “We are exploring ways to increase scheduling stability and flexibility across our fleet of stores. For example, last month we announced a pilot project with Professor Joan Williams of [University of California] Hastings College of Law to examine workplace scheduling and productivity.”

Gap Inc., the corporation that owns Old Navy, could be at the forefront of improving conditions, but the legislation’s supporters aren’t counting on retailers to make the necessary changes.

Instances like Quick’s are common in formula retail all over the country. Many retail employees, including some of Quick’s co-workers, must support families despite the unpredictable hours and low wages.

The second provision of the Retail Workers Bill of Rights attempts to fix that. It calls for “discouraging abusive on call practices” and aims to “encourage fair, predictable schedules.” Specifically, that would entail employers posting core schedules in advance with reasonable notice and providing premium pay “when an employer requires an employee to be ‘on-call’ for a specific shift, or cancels a shift with less than 24 hours notice.”

The third provision looks to improve conditions for part-time workers, calling for “equal treatment.” That means prohibiting employers from discriminating against employees “with respect to their rate of pay,” among other things like promotion opportunities and paid or unpaid time off.

It also addresses a chief concern for many part-time workers: ensuring that employees unable to maintain “open availability,” or being available at any time for a shift, are not denied employment. That’s especially significant for students and parents who have to balance their lives outside the retail industry with its demanding work hours.

“These policies, I feel, will have a huge impact on the lives of tens of thousands of our services workers, many of them low-wage workers who live with uncertainty and fear about their schedules and their other responsibilities in life,” Mar said as he introduced the legislation.

“Many of my family members and close friends are in that category, [along with] single moms, students in college and others that really deserve fair scheduling and a fair chance at economic justice.”

The final provision seeks to protect workers’ job security when their companies are bought or sold, requiring a 90-day trial period for existing employees if a formula retail business is acquired. This is meant to prevent companies from simply forcing out previous employees, allowing the workers a grace period to search for new work.

The legislation would impact an estimated 100,000 workers at approximately 1,250 stores across San Francisco. Those that qualify as formula retail businesses under city law include fast food businesses, restaurants, hotels and banks, and they must meet requirements in Section 703.3 of the San Francisco Planning Code.

In short, the law will apply to businesses considered to be chain stores, such as Target, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Wells Fargo and other major companies doing business throughout the city.

But the Retail Workers Bill of Rights’ supporters believe its impact will be felt beyond San Francisco, citing the city’s history of starting nationwide movements.

“San Francisco has always led the way when it comes to policies that protect working people,” Lim said. “The Retail Workers Bill of Rights is a commonsense proposal to bring stability to some of our city’s most marginalized workers.”

The supervisors sponsoring the ordinance have received plenty of help from Lim and Jobs with Justice San Francisco, a worker’s rights organization that has played an integral role in the city’s fight to improve labor conditions.

In 2013, Jobs with Justice mobilized labor support for the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, legislation not unlike Mar’s proposed legislation. In September 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Domestic Workers Bill into law, making California the nation’s first state to mandate overtime pay for domestic employees, specifically designating time-and-a-half pay for those working more than 45 hours a week or nine hours a day.

Even more support has come from the San Francisco Labor Council, Service Employees International Union Local 87 and Young Workers United, among many others, all of which have endorsed the legislation.

The proposal will come back into play in September, when the board returns from its summer recess. The process will start with public hearings, at which Mar said he looks forward to “really lively public conversation.”

That will give workers like Julissa Hernandez, a Safeway employee for 13 years and a veteran of the retail system, a chance to have their voices heard.

Speaking at the City Hall press conference, Hernandez said, “We should let retail workers know that they are not alone in this fight.”

 

Guardian Intelligence: August 6 – 12, 2014

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GOOD VIBES

Jerry Day, when deadheads spanning generations congregate around the Bay Area to celebrate the legacy of SF native Jerry Garcia, should maybe start going by Jerry Week: Friday, Aug. 1 saw sold-out crowds at Berkeley’s Greek Theater and San Rafael’s Terrapin Crossroads for performances led by Warren Haynes and Stu Allen, respectively, while the official 12th annual Jerry Day celebration on Aug. 3 brought the masses to the city for Melvin Seals & the JGB and tons more at McLaren Park. Missed ’em? Don’t worry: Aug. 12 is Jerry Garcia Tribute Night at AT&T Park.

AIRBNB’S GAFFE-STROTURF?

Last week, Airbnb sent out an email blast proclaiming: “Big News: Launching Fair to Share San Fransisco!” [sic]. Misspellings happen, and hey, we all make mistakes. But what is Fair to Share? It’s “working for fair rules for home sharing,” according to the blast, linking to an online petition “urging the Board of Supervisors and San Francisco leaders to enact rules that let people share the home in which they live.” More to the point, this “coalition” seems focused on weakening enforcement provisions in legislation moving forward to regulate short-term rentals. So there you have it, SF’s newest grassroots movement — backed by a company valued at $10 billion.

SENIORS VERSUS SHUTTLES

Octogenarians unite! On the first day of the tech shuttle pilot program, last Friday a group of 25 or so seniors and people with disabilities blocked two Mission tech shuttles from making their morning tech sojourn to Silicon Valley. “Stop the senior evictions!” they shouted, alleging that 70 percent of no-fault evictions since 2011 were within four blocks of the shuttle stops, and two thirds of those evictions were of seniors. The 30-something tech workers looked ignored their elders, smartphones in hand, safely ensconced in their corporate buses.

REMEMBERING THE I-HOTEL

Nearly four decades ago, thousands of San Franciscans blockaded sheriffs from evicting seniors from the International Hotel, the last vestige of the Filipino community known as Manilatown. Eventually the sheriffs were successful, but the shameful displacement helped spur many San Francisco rental protections we enjoy today. Last week, the International Hotel Manilatown Center honored the anniversary of this dark mark on the city’s history. “We fought as long as we could,” Peter Yamamoto told us, who was 23 when he fought the evictions so long ago. “That night was like electricity.”

ON A HIGH NOTE

The San Francisco Opera kicks off its 92nd season Sept. 4 with a new production of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, starring soprano Sondra Radvonovsky, pictured, as the Druid priestess who falls in love a Roman soldier (spoiler: it doesn’t end well). The fall season — which also includes the work that started it all for SF Opera back in 1923, Puccini’s La Bohème, in November — continues Sept. 6 with the opening of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, with another stellar soprano, Patricia Pacette, playing the falsely accused Appalachian heroine. Opening weekend also includes the ever-popular “Opera in the Park” Sept. 7 in Sharon Meadow, for those who prefer their arias free and open-air. www.sfopera.com. PHOTO BY MARTY SOHL

WEINER TAKES ALL

Did you hear the pitter-patter of little feet over the weekend? If it wasn’t your child (or your pesky biological clock playing tricks on you), it was most likely the Wienerschnitzel Wiener Dog Race Nationals — the Bay Area regionals portion of which drew hundreds to the Santa Clara County Fair. They scampered! They leapt! The totally got distracted and lost interest in that cute little wiener dog way! Who put the most “dash” in “dachshund”? Why, Wally the Wiener of Gilroy, who took home $250 and a trip to San Diego for the national races.

HEY, SUGAR DADDY

We’re normally weirded out by pop culture-food trend tie-ins, but when Tout Sweet Patisserie (Macy’s Union Square, 170 O’Farrell St., 3rd Fl, www.toutsweetsf.com) chef Yigit Pura announced the launch of the “Hedwig Schmidt” macaron — in honor of beloved Tony-sweeper Hedwig and the Angy Inch — we totally bit. Bourbon-orange marmalade ganache with a brandied cherry center, covered in edible red glitter? Danke, mister!

IRON MAN: APP DEVELOPER?

Because San Francisco doesn’t have enough tech CEO megalomaniacs, Marvel Comics had to fictionalize one: Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, is headed to the city by the bay. Okay, not actually (sorry fellow geeks, Iron Man is fictional), but in the comic book world, the Manhattan-based metallic hero will develop apps by day, and rocket about in his new all white, iPod-esque armor by night. But why not an everyman superhero, like say, Spiderman? Remember, Peter Parker is a photographer: He’d probably move to Oakland.

 

Arguments against minimum wage increase are out of touch

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EDITORIAL

“Will the SF minimum wage hike kill our restaurants?” Zagat SF tweeted last week.

No, Chicken Little, it won’t. Not even if you tweet it.

Two days earlier, the Board of Supervisors had unanimously approved a measure for the November ballot to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2018, up from where it stands at $10.74.

Zagat may be fine for restaurant reviews, but this attack on raising the minimum wage — which parroted fearmongering about high-priced burgers and relied heavily on a narrative served up by a powerful business lobby, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association — was enough to cause heartburn.

And it’s only one example of the backlash directed at low-wage workers since the bid to boost the minimum wage has picked up steam. A now-infamous billboard that popped up in SOMA, funded by conservative lobbying group Employment Policies Institute, taunted minimum-wage workers by claiming they would be replaced with iPads if they didn’t give up the fight for higher pay.

The proposed minimum wage increase, actually a compromise that turned out weaker than an initial proposal spearheaded by a progressive coalition that would have delivered $15 an hour a year earlier, is backed by business-friendly Mayor Ed Lee. Even the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has expressed support for it. Still, some conservative interests seem bent on ensuring that minimum-wage workers never achieve living-wage status — demonstrating how out of touch these naysayers are.

Once better known for its rich labor history and track record of holding employers accountable for wage theft and discriminatory practices, San Francisco is better known these days as one of the nation’s highest-ranking cities for income inequality.

Scraping by at a minimum wage job translates to a stressful existence. Even if minimum-wage earners were currently earning $31,000 a year, the amount a full-time $15-an-hour job would bring in before taxes, it wouldn’t begin to stretch far enough to rent a market-rate apartment. Earlier this year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition pointed out that a renter’s got to earn at least $29.83 an hour — or $62,046 annually — to afford a San Francisco one-bedroom at market rate.

Meanwhile, those spouting doomsday scenarios over a higher minimum wage seem blind to the fact that the city is regularly populated with hordes of tourists and well-compensated San Francisco professionals with a penchant for fine food, even if it’s pricey.

Just for a sense of how much cash is pumping through the local economy, the San Francisco Center for Economic Development reports that San Francisco claimed 40 percent of all venture capital investment in the Bay Area last year, with nearly $5 billion in VC funding invested in 2013. Meanwhile, 16.5 million visitors flocked to the Bay Area last year — can anyone really claim with a straight face that a higher minimum wage for restaurant workers will prevent this army of tourists from chowing down at local restaurants?

Instead of having a debate about whether we ought to raise the minimum wage, a better conversation would focus on the consequences of allowing the city’s sharp inequality to continue unchecked.

Mayoral meltdown

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joe@sfbg.com

When he launched an unexpected mayoral bid in 2011, Mayor Ed Lee campaigned on a platform of changing the tone of San Francisco politics. The appointed mustachioed mayor claimed he put the civility back in City Hall, marking a sharp departure from the divisive tone of city politics as progressives battled former Mayor Willie Brown, followed by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

“We’ll continue the high level of civility in the tone we’ve set since January, and solve the problems with civil engagement,” he told Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, then his mayoral opponent, at a 2011 debate.

Yet over the past two weeks, Mayor Lee has started swinging hard against supervisors who have introduced measures that go against his own priorities. So much for civility at City Hall.

 

COMPROMISE EVERYTHING

When asked about the outcome of her newly revised affordable housing measure, Sup. Jane Kim did not sound enthusiastic.

“It was definitely a compromise,” Kim said. But compromise is a word you use when you find a middle ground. By most accounts, Mayor Lee weakened the measure by hammering the right pressure points.

Kim crafted a novel solution to the city’s housing affordability crisis for the November ballot. Her initial Housing Balance Requirement would have established controls on market-rate housing construction, requiring a reevaluation whenever affordable housing production falls below 30 percent of total construction. The goal was to ensure that a certain amount of affordable housing would be built — but it was unpopular with housing developers.

Lee immediately drummed up a ballot measure in opposition to Kim’s, the Build Housing Now Initiative. The nonbinding policy statement asked the city to affirm his previously stated affordable housing goals. So what was the point?

It contained a poison pill which would have killed Kim’s Housing Balance Requirement. If Lee’s measure was approved, Kim’s would fail. The two politicians were in heated negotiations, trying to diffuse this ballot box arms race up to the very moment Kim’s measure went before the Board of Supervisors for approval at its July 29 meeting.

By the end of that process, Kim’s measure had been gutted.

Mirroring the mayor’s Build Housing Now Initiative, the new Housing Balance Requirement is a nonbinding policy statement asking the city to “affirm the City’s commitment” to support the production or rehabilitation of 30,000 housing units by 2020, with at least 33 percent of those permanently affordable to low or moderate income households.

Kim said she’d won funding pledges and promises for a number of affordable housing projects from the mayor. But Lee did not sign any agreement.

Essentially, the revised measure is a promise to promise, a plan to plan. Kim told us flatly, “We didn’t get the accountability we wanted.”

Political insiders told us the Mayor’s Office put pressure on affordable housing developers, who backed the original measure but later asked Kim to revise it to reflect the mayor’s wishes. The Mayor’s Office allegedly threatened to cut their funding next year, or divert projects to other affordable housing organizations.

Everyone acknowledged the mayor was pissed.

Tenants and Owners Development Corporation, an affordable housing developer in SoMa, sat in on the negotiations. The city paid $170,961 in contracts to TODCO last year, according to the City Controller, and over $250,000 the year before. John Elberling, president of TODCO, and Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, denied the mayor influenced them to ask Kim to revise her measure.

“I didn’t hear my phone ringing saying we’ll pull funding for affordable housers if you don’t do X, Y and Z,” Cohen told us. Yet he acknowledged the mayor “brought certain leverages to bear” in the closed-door negotiations to “compromise” on Kim’s ballot measure. Then everything changed.

“Yes,” Cohen said, “we then convinced the lead supervisor to change her position.”

Despite being labeled as a “compromise,” many observers read this as a sign that Lee had prevailed. Now the same hammer is coming down on Sup. Scott Wiener.

 

BALLOT BATTLE

“I agree with the mayor on many things,” Wiener told us. But the mayor is targeting Wiener’s new Muni funding ballot measure, hoping to knock it off the ballot.

“It’s not personal,” Wiener said. “It’s a policy disagreement.”

The mayor has a transportation bond on the ballot, asking voters to pony up $500 million to fund Muni. But Lee already blew a $33 million hole into Muni’s proposed budget when he decided to pull a Vehicle License Fee measure off the ballot. When that measure began to poll badly, he got cold feet, and withdrew it.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s budget outlined a doomsday scenario if the funding ballot measures failed to pass. It would be impossible to improve transit travel time, reliability, or to fund pedestrian and bike safety projects, the SFMTA staff noted in recent budget presentations.

Seeing the potential fallout due to the mayor pulling the VLF measure, Wiener placed his own measure on the ballot, tying expansion for Muni funding to the city’s growing population. If passed, Muni could see a $22 million bump just next year.

Openly, the mayor told reporters he would hold the supervisors who supported Wiener’s ballot measure “accountable.” Lee then initiated a conversation about slashing funding to city programs, signaling that supervisors’ favored projects could be jeopardized.

“Last week, the Board of Supervisors sent a measure to the ballot that the budget does not contemplate,” Kate Howard, the mayor’s budget director, wrote in a memo. She directed departments to cut their budgets by 1.5 percent, and asked for “contingency plans” including a “revisit” of hiring plans and scaling back existing programs and services.

Wiener issued a statement describing the move as “an empty scare tactic.”

“For whatever reason,” he wrote, “the Mayor’s Office felt the need to issue these emergency instructions now — a full year before the fiscal year at issue, in the middle of an election campaign, without even knowing whether the measure will pass.”

John Elberling, president of TODCO, recalled when then-Mayor Willie Brown used the same schoolyard-bully tactics to ensure his favored measures passed.

“The punchline is there were competing ballot measures, one from our side and one from Willie’s side,” Elberling told the Guardian. “There was an effort to reach a compromise, but that failed. I was in the meeting where he shot it down.”

“He said ‘I will make the decisions,’ quote unquote. ‘There is no compromise unless I say there’s a compromise.’ That was quite memorable,” Elberling recalled.

When things didn’t go his way, “Willie Brown took a housing project away from us,” Elberling said.

But Mayor Lee’s bluster and anger is new, and Elberling said it should be taken with a grain of salt. “Is it a bluff? That’s always a question. Real retaliation like Willie did, that’s a real thing. But huff and puff, that goes on all the time.”

 

Read the memo detailing Mayor Ed Lee’s punishment of supervisors who supported Muni

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The story is snowballing.

Mayor Ed Lee is furious at supervisors who voted for Sup. Scott Wiener’s Muni funding measure, and told reporters Monday he would hold them “accountable.”

News of the mayor’s retribution has circled round, and the timing of a memo issued by Kate Howard, the mayor’s budget director, has raised eyebrows. The memo directs city departments to prepare for budget cuts she said are called for due to Wiener’s measure.

The Guardian has obtained the memo and is embedding it below.

“Last week, the board of supervisors sent a measure to the ballot that the budget does not contemplate,” Howard wrote. “As a result of this unanticipated measure, the Mayor’s Office is directing departments to propose contingency plans that could be implemented should the measure pass.”

Howard is referencing Wiener’s new Muni funding measure, which would raise the transit agency’s funding with the population. The cost is estimated to be about $22 million annually.

Now it seems the mayor is playing for keeps. Following through on his promise to hold supervisors “accountable” for supporting Wiener’s measure, Howard directs city agencies to prepare to make cuts to new programs, hiring plans, and to “scale back existing services.”

But what Howard’s memo doesn’t say is that Muni has its own budget problems, caused not by Wiener’s new ballot measure, but by Mayor Ed Lee.

It’s really a case of the pot calling the kettle black: Lee is saying Wiener’s ballot measure will hurt the General Fund, but supervisors contend Lee hurt Muni’s budget when he pulled his Vehicle License Fee measure off the ballot.

Wiener’s new Muni funding measure was a contingency plan after Lee dropped the VLF, which blew a $33 million hole in Muni’s proposed budget.

The SFMTA outlined the consequences of a failure to pass multiple ballot measures (of which the VLF was one) in its proposed 2015/16 budget. The proposed cuts are a doom and gloom list that would make any Muni rider cut up their Clipper Card in disgust. 

 The agency said such an outcome would make it impossible to improve transit travel time and reliability, and fund pedestrian safety projects. It would also mean fewer buses and lightrail vehicles, a decline in existing infrastructure, and less funding for bicycle infrastructure, among other problems.

In other words, without ballot measures to increase Muni funding, the SFMTA is screwed. 

But when Lee’s license fee measure initially polled poorly, he got cold feet and yanked it. Yet he continued to push forward with a $500 million transportation bond measure, which remains on the ballot. Now he’s feverishly hoping to stop any competing ballot measures which may have the remote possibility of hurting its chances to succeed. 

I agree with the mayor on many things,” Wiener told the Guardian. But, “ultimately the mayor is elected and I have to exercise my best judgment. It’s not personal, it’s a policy disagreement.”

We asked Sup. David Campos if there’s a fear that these cuts would only hit projects the supervisors favor.

“I think there’s definitely that fear,” he told us. But he noted something important.

“When we’re talking about punishing, you’re not punishing a supervisor, you’re punishing a district they represent,” he said. “Ultimately, you’re punishing constituents.”

Still, at this point, it’s not entirely clear the directives from Howard will target specific supervisor’s projects. 

“We’re concerned,” Campos said, “but we need to ask the budget director what this means.” 

Update [8/1]: Supervisor Scott Wiener sent an email to press today giving further backstory on the memo from Kate Howard regarding the budget.

From his email:

On Wednesday, in what can only be described as an empty scare tactic, the Mayor’s Office announced that due solely to the transit measure (totaling .25% of the budget), all departments were directed to formulate emergency 1.5% contingency cuts for the 2015/16 fiscal year. The Mayor’s Office further indicated that the cuts will be directed at the “priorities” of the six Supervisors who voted to place the measure on the ballot.

For whatever reason, the Mayor’s Office felt the need to issue these emergency instructions now – a full year before the fiscal year at issue, in the middle of an election campaign, without even knowing whether the measure will pass, and regarding an amount of money that is tiny in the context of the budget. Moreover, there will be a full budget process next spring for the 2015/16 fiscal year, and if the measure passes, the $22 million at issue will simply be part of that budget.

What the Mayor’s Office neglected to mention in its announcement is the existence of a $32 million hole in MTA’s budget for the 2015/16 fiscal year. If this gap isn’t filled – and [Supervisor Wiener’s] measure will fill two-thirds of it – MTA will have to forego plans to purchase new vehicles, rehabilitate run down vehicles, replace failing train switches and signals, rehabilitate broken station elevators, make needed pedestrian safety improvements, and implement the Embarcadero Bikeway.”

Kim’s affordable housing ballot measure gutted then approved

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Housing is out of whack in San Francisco, and Sup. Jane Kim’s affordable housing ballot measure would’ve gone a long way towards fixing it. But that was then. Now, things are more uncertain. 

At yesterday’s [Tues/29] Board of Supervisors meeting, the board unanimously approved Kim’s Housing Balance proposal. But this was not her original ballot measure: it was gutted. Or as Kim told the board, “We were not able to come to an agreement on everything I wanted to see.”

Her originally proposed ballot measure required new housing developments to provide 30 percent affordable housing, with an opt-out mechanism possible through a hearing. Currently, developers can provide on-site affordable housing or pay money into a pot of affordable housing funding. That’s the system we’ve got now, and you can check San Francisco’s soaring rents and home prices to see how well that’s working out.

The 30 percent requirement was a strong, clear ask which may have spurred much-needed housing for middle and lower-income San Franciscans. Too strong, apparently. 

Kim’s negotiations with the affordable housing community and Mayor Ed Lee hit more than a few snags, sources told us. The mayor, frankly, didn’t like it. 

We reached out to the Mayor’s Office but didn’t hear back from them before press time. But it doesn’t take a soothsayer to see the mayor wanted the measure dead: He sent a strong signal by creating a rival ballot measure, which, if approved by voters, contained a “poison pill” which would’ve killed Kim’s measure.

We were still negotiating down to the last minute what we’re announcing today,” Kim told the board. 

Kim’s new ballot measure no longer includes the 30 percent affordable housing requirement. In exchange for dropping the strong mandate, Kim said she wrested a number of concessions from the mayor, including: 

 

  • Pledges of a 33% affordability housing goal for all new development in Central SoMa and future area plans
  • Interim planning controls in the Central SoMa to prevent displacement in advance of the approval of the Central SoMa Plan
  • The creation of a Neighborhood Stabilization Trust to fund Affordable Housing Acquisition & Rehabilitation program
  • Commitment to identify new revenue to accelerate affordable housing projects languishing in the City’s pipeline and land acquisition strategies, including tiered in-lieu fees
  • Pledges to find sufficient funding to jumpstart public housing rehab and HOPE SF –without tapping the Affordable Housing Trust Fund
  • A legislative path forward to continue goals of Housing Balance Act, including unit count

 

Peter Cohen, co-director of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations, put the compromise this way: What the supervisor ended up doing [through negotiation] is forcing the city to commit itself to substantive policies for real action, in exchange for that conditional use trigger [contained in the original legislation, which would have subjected market-rate projects to addition scrutiny when affordable housing dropped below 30 percent].”

“Obviously,” Cohen said, “some people think thats a bad tradeoff.”

So Kim lost the 30 percent trigger, but gained a number of compromises. So were they a big win for affordable housing advocates? 

Sources told us the Neighborhood Stabilization Trust is a long sought-after goal of the affordable housing community, but so far no plans have been revealed about how the trust (or any of the other proposals) would be funded. The ballot measure may offer Kim some leverage to make sure those promises are funded by Lee, especially considering San Francisco’s impending 2015 mayoral race. 

We’re presenting [voters] a ballot measure that constitutes our core values and memorializes the agreement,” Kim told the board. “Housing balance had a large journey, and it does not stop today. Thirty percent: this is a goal we should commit to as a city. Our voters want this.”

Earlier Tuesday, Kim stood with Lee at the unveiling of 60 new affordable housing units on Natoma street. Now, without a mandate, the only guarantee the city will build more affordable housing is the mayor’s word.

Reducing phone charges helps inmates connect with families

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OPINION

It’s expensive being poor. Families of inmates often live on the edge of insolvency.

I know a mother of two, married to a man doing time in the San Francisco jail, who is trapped between the domino effect of poverty and the desire to maintain her children’s relationship with their father. The trouble began when her credit rating dropped due to late bill payments, which triggered the repossession of her car, which put her job at risk because public transit couldn’t get her to work on-time.

Now she relies on loan centers that charge high interest rates or paying the rent on her dilapidated apartment late, all while trying to stave off eviction. She says she contemplates leaving San Francisco on a daily basis. To do so would improve her financial situation, but would reduce her children’s already limited access to their father.

Depending if they can afford the time it takes to take transit to County Jail 5 in San Bruno for a weekly visit, or the unreasonable cost of a phone call, this family must literally choose between putting food on the table or connecting with their loved one.

Research shows that inmates who preserve ties with their families, especially their spouses and children, have a much better chance of staying out of jail once released. Keeping in touch is almost an impossible reality considering the jolting cost of making a $1 per minute in-state, long-distance or pre-paid collect call.

Until a cap on interstate calling rates was introduced earlier this year by the Federal Communications Commission, the telephone companies providing inmate phone services were largely unregulated. As a result, correctional facilities allowed inmate phone service providers to charge jacked-up calling rates in exchange for a cut of the revenue, paid to the facility in the form of a phone commission. Because these commissions are used to fund services for inmates, this decades-old practice created a paradoxical relationship between inmates, inmate phone service companies, prisons, and county jails.

In the San Francisco Sheriff Department’s most recent contract with its phone service provider, Global Tel*Link (GTL), we broke this counterproductive cycle and changed the way we do business. We’ve dramatically reduced calling rates and surcharges for inmate phone calls, including a 70 percent reduction for a 15-minute collect or pre-paid collect, in-state, long-distance call, from $13.35 to $4.05, and a 32 percent reduction for a 15-minute debit, in-state, long-distance call, from $5.98 to $4.05.

Given the city’s longtime dependence on phone commissions to fund rehabilitative programs, like Resolve to Stop the Violence and the One Family visitation program, reducing inmate calling rates endangers program stability while spotlighting an addiction that’s shared by almost every prison and jail in the country: balancing incarceration budgets on the backs of people who can afford it least. According to the US Department of Justice, 80 percent of families who have a member incarcerated live at or below poverty levels.

Fortunately, our department recently won a settlement against GTL’s predecessor, enabling us to fund programs for several years without taking a hit. But, in the long run, City Hall must realize that gouging poor people doesn’t improve public safety. It punishes innocent children by limiting their communication with their family, subordinates the healing value of family reunification to profit, and strengthens the inter-generational resentment that is laced between impoverished communities and the justice system that is supposed to protect them.

Gratified with the unanimous support of our phone rate reform by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department is proud to be one of the first county jail systems in the nation to dramatically reduce its telecom rates.

Our next policy reform will be the unregulated, exorbitant cost of inmate commissary fees and commissions.

Ross Mirkarimi is elected Sheriff of San Francisco

Article details bullying and retribution by the Mayor’s Office

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People are talking about this article from Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle about how much three fall ballot measures will cost the city, but many progressives and political outsiders are more focused on the juicy details lower down in the article about the spiteful, bullying political tactics practiced by the Mayor’s Office these days.

Mayor Ed Lee and his top aides are said to be “fuming” that Sup. Scott Wiener and five of his colleagues placed a measure on the fall ballot that would give Muni more money as the city’s population increases — and that “the mayor’s office seems to be hinting that it will target programs important to the six supervisors who voted to place Wiener’s proposal on the ballot.”

The measure is retroactive to 2003, the last time Muni had an increase in its funding from the city General Fund, so it would mean an immediate funding bump of $20 million or more, which the mayor is disingenuousnessly casting as budget buster. Keep in mind this same mayor unilaterally ended Sunday meters this year, costing Muni about $10 million a year, and supports corporate welfare programs that cost the city $17 million last year.

This spiteful and retaliatory approach to public policy by Lee, the elected official with the most control over the city’s pursestrings, and his minions was also a big factor in Sup. Jane Kim’s capitulation to the Mayor’s Office on her housing balance measure. Sources tell the Guardian that affordable housing advocates were threatened with reduced city funding from the Mayor’s Office if they continued to push for Kim’s original measure.

The Chronicle article was based largely on a Controller’s Office memo claiming the three ballot measures — the Muni measure, a proposal to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2018, and reauthorization of the Children’s Fund — would be the “largest voter-directed increase in general fund spending in a single election in city history,” costing $104 million by 2018.

More than half of that is from the minimum wage increase, which will increase the city’s cost of contracting low-paid nonprofit workers to perform public services. But in this increasingly expensive city, does anyone really think $15 per hour is an unreasonable wage? Should the city itself be exploiting workers?

After the city recently slashed building and planning fees charged to developers, and in a city that continues to coddle big corporations and landlords rather than tax them fairly, the Mayor’s Office ire over policies that help low-wage workers and Muni riders is particularly telling of its values and priorities.  

Housing ballot measures would weaken city policy

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EDITORIAL Under the misleading guise of encouraging the development of more affordable housing in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee and Sup. Jane Kim have sponsored a pair of fall ballot measures that actually weaken existing housing policy in San Francisco. It’s a ruse that shouldn’t fool politically savvy San Franciscans.

Lee has the authority to place his Build Housing Now measure on the ballot, although he may withdraw it under his backroom deal with Kim. But the Board of Supervisors should reject Kim’s City Housing Balance measure, a once-promising proposal that she last week made toothless and counterproductive. What she called a “compromise” was actually a capitulation to developers and the Mayor’s Office [Editor’s Note: The board was scheduled to consider Kim’s measure on July 29 after Guardian press time, which is why we posted this editorial early at sfbg.com, where print readers can check for an update].[UPDATE: The board unanimously approved the amended measure.]

Kim’s original measure called for market-rate housing developers to get conditional use permits and perform additional economic studies on their projects when affordable housing production falls below 30 percent of total production. She then weakened it with several exemptions, yet it was still a check against runaway development of luxury housing.

But her new measure, much like Lee’s, is little more than a wishful policy statement calling for the city to seek the goal of 33 percent of housing affordable by moderate income San Franciscans and below (usually defined as those making 120 percent of area median income or less) and 50 percent by the more vaguely defined “working middle class.”

While neither measure includes any enforcement or funding mechanism to help reach that goal, it’s noteworthy that the goals themselves weaken those the city set for itself in the Housing Element of the General Plan, which call for 60 percent of new housing construction to be affordable to those with moderate incomes and below. The board adopted an amended version of this Housing Element just last month.

This is politics at its very worst: Politicians claiming to be doing one thing in order to score points with voters and appear responsive to their concerns, while they actually do just the opposite and try to disguise that fact with disingenuous rhetoric.

Kim’s allies in the labor and progressive political communities tell us they’re disappointed in her capitulation at such a crucial moment in determining whether San Francisco becomes a city of the rich or whether it can retain its socioeconomic diversity.

We were also disappointed, although we weren’t surprised. There’s an ugly, money-driven brand of politics being practiced at City Hall these days, and Kim has repeatedly shown herself to be more concerned with her future political prospects than living up to the progressive values she has long espoused.

Tenants target Airbnb rentals before hearings on regulatory legislation

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As the San Francisco Planning Commission prepares for an Aug. 7 hearing on Sup. David Chiu’s widely watched legislation to legalize and regulate short-term apartment rentals through Airbnb and similar companies, the San Francisco Tenants Union tomorrow [Tues/29] launches a “citizen enforcement” campaign against these currently illegal rentals.

Seeking to highlight the fact that “hundreds of tenants have been evicted and thousands of rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco have been illegally converted to hotel rooms in violation of two San Francisco laws,” SFTU announced it will begin posting signs on illegally converted buildings to warn tourists that the rentals are displacing city residents.

The campaign starts tomorrow at noon at 1937 Mason Street, a three-unit building where SFTU says all tenants were evicted under the Ellis Act so the units could be rented out through Airbnb and other online rental services. It’s the latest step in SFTU’s campaign to highlight illegal conversions, filing more than 50 complaints with the city and threatening further legal action. [UPDATE: A senior Airbnb official told the Guardian that no Airbnb hosts have rented out units at this address. Gullicksen said the units were rented out through VRBO.com, an Airbnb competitor].

“San Francisco is facing a severe housing crisis with soaring rents and evictions,” said SFTU Director Ted Gullicksen said in a press release. “It’s intolerable that the City is tolerating thousands of illegal conversions and thus facilitating hundreds of evictions.”

Apartment rentals of less than 30 days have long been illegal under city laws, including Administrative Code 41A, in order to protect the city’s rental stock for permanent residents. SFTU worked with Chiu’s office in crafting legislation that would legalize short-term rentals in residential areas but set a number of conditions, including a requirement for hosts to register with the city and limit rentals to no more than 90 days per year.

Airbnb is headquartered in San Francisco, but it has long defied city law and refused to collect required transient occupancy taxes on its rentals even after the city definitely ruled they were owed. The company pledged to finally start collecting the taxes sometime this summer and it has sought to make over its scofflaw public image with new branding and outreach efforts.

But with the company facing similar criticisms of its business model in New York City, Berlin, and other cities with strong housing demand, San Francisco’s regulatory effort is expected to be a high-stakes and high-profile struggle that will ultimately be decided by the Board of Supervisors, probably sometime this fall.

Meanwhile, some enterprising young disrupters have decided use Airbnb and state laws protecting tenants to start squatting in the properties of some of their hosts, creating big legal headaches for the owners and payoffs for the squatters. And just because we at the Bay Guardian were the first newspaper to suggest this idea, we seek neither blame nor credit. 

SF voters to weigh in on Beach Chalet turf war

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A city project that would install artificial turf and stadium lighting at the Beach Chalet soccer fields at the west end of Golden Gate Park has survived numerous challenges over the last four years, including appeals to the California Coastal Commision and the courts. But this November, San Francisco voters will have the final say.

A citizens’ initiative that would block the project this week qualified for the ballot after turning in more than 16,000 signatures, collected by the Coalition to Save Golden Gate Park. Yet city officials and supporters of the project — including the City Fields Foundation, which has been installing artificial turf on playing fields around the city in recent years — aren’t taking any chances, creating a rival measure sponsored by six members of the Board of Supervisors.

Not only would the supervisors’ measure invalidate the citizens’ initiative if it gets more votes — it contains a so-called poison pill, an increasingly common electoral tactic — but it would make it more difficult to challenge future trail, playground, and playing field projects that would increase the number of users by 50 percent or more.
“We think it’s a terrible measure that disenfranchises voters all over the city,” Jean Barish, a spokesperson for the Coalition to Protect Golden Gate Park, told the Guardian. “It would give the Recreation and Park Department a lot more authority than they have now.”

Patrick Hannan, a spokesperson for the City Fields Foundation, worked with supervisors on the rival measure and he denies that it would limit citizens’ rights to challenge future projects.

“The legislation in no way curtails any kind of appeals process,” Hannan said. “It says you can’t pass a law to stop projects from going forward after they’ve been approved.”

But Hannan couldn’t cite any examples of approved projects being later stopped by legislation, and the vaguely worded measure doesn’t make clear whether it would preclude citizens from challenging approved projects by initiative or referendum.

Mike Murphy, the official proponent behind the iniative that seeks to stop the Beach Chalet project, said the intent of the supervisors’ measure seems to be to limit the public’s right to challenge artificial turf projects, which the city measure explicitly said city bodies “shall approve” if they increase playing time and have an approved environmental impact report.

He called on the supervisors sponsoring the measure — Sups. David Chiu, Eric Mar, Mark Farrell, Katy Tang, Scott Wiener, and London Breed — to remove their names before next week’s electoral deadline.   

“This is a highly politicized issue and it always has been,” Murphy said. “We need to refocus the debate not on why [the city needs more playing fields] but on what’s being done at this site.”

Opponents of the Beach Chalet project say articificial turf can be toxic and unhealthy and that it shouldn’t replace natural grass. But supporters of this and other artificial turf projects say that they substantially increase the available playing time on fields that are desperately need to keep up with demand, particularly by youth sports.

“Artificial turf is safe and this project is cleared to proceed,” Hannan said. “The question is whether the city wants to give more kids more fields they can use.”

He cited studies showing that because the artificial turf his group has installed on city-owned fields since 2011, available playing time on fields has increased by 30 percent: “That’s a direct result of our project.”

And now, voters will get their chance to weigh in on this ongoing, highly charged turf war