Supervisors

Lee ducks tough questions about Alvarez and diversifying SF’s economy

Sasha Cuttler
-
24
Lee ducks tough questions about Alvarez and diversifying SF’s economy

For a career bureaucrat who was appointed mayor supposedly as a sort of straight-shooting un-politician, Mayor Ed Lee today once again demonstrated a real talent for addressing tough questions with a whole lot of words that don’t seem to say much at all. First came his non-responsive answers during Question Time at the Board of Supervisors meeting, followed by the hollow filibuster with reporters asking about the Housing Authority scandal as he briskly walked back to his office.

Asked why he continued to stand by Housing Authority Director Henry Alvarez despite the scandals and accusations of mismanagement and unethical conduct on the job that have placed a cloud over the agency, Lee said he’s just waiting for the investigations and lawsuits to play out, dismissing “the so-called cloud that you referred to.”

Given the obvious problems that Alvarez is now having running an agency whose employees and clients have such a problem with his leadership, I asked whether Lee has considered suspending him, to which he responded that Alvarez hasn’t been convicted of any crimes. So, apparently professional misconduct is a personal matter, but personal misconduct unrelated to one’s job warrants suspension. This is all very confusing.

Even more bewildering was Lee’s answer to the question from Sup. John Avalos. He prefaced his question with one from constituent/comedian Nato Green asking what the city is doing to diversify its economy beyond “the highly paid finance or tech jobs and their low wage servants,” noting that City Economist Ted Egan also recently asked that question in a report calling for “a more balanced distribution of job opportunities.”

So Avalos asked, “What is your plan to create living wage jobs in local-serving industries to prevent the City’s working and middle classes from being displaced by people moving to the city for new upper income jobs in the creative (including high tech), financial, and professional services industries?”

It’s a great and important question that has been increasingly raised by those who understand the risks of placing all our eggs in one economic basket, particularly given this city’s experience with the last dot.com bubble bursting.

But even though Lee had plenty of time to think about the issue and develop an answer, he clearly didn’t have a good one, instead singing the praises of the booming tech industry and his Tech.SF program for training new tech workers, just like his main financier, tech mogul Ron Conway, wants.

Now, Lee did cite industry studies that every tech job sustains four other jobs in the city, mostly in restaurants and tourism-related sectors (ie the “low wage servants” Green mentioned). And Lee touted the construction jobs created by his developer buddies, praising Avalos for his local hire ordinance.

But even the much-praised local hire standard of 25 percent means that 75 percent of those workers are living outside the city. It’s a similar story for the restaurant, retail, and bar jobs that the influx of well-heeled new residents are creating demand for, none of which answers Avalos’ questions about how to diversify our economy and create good jobs for most San Franciscans.

“Trickle down economics can only get us so far and without a specific and far-reaching plan to create local living wage jobs for San Francisco’s working and middle classes, we’ll see us falling behind,” Avalos told the Guardian after hearing the mayor’s “answer.”

But instead of a plan or a direct answer, we got political platitudes from Lee such as, “We’ll be investing in the greatest asset of our city and that’s the residents, our people, and ensuring San Francisco stays a city for the 100 percent.”

To which Avalos responded, “His comment about the 100 percent really means that by favoring the 1 percent, the 99 percent benefit. Well, as a country, we’ve been doing that for years and wealth disparities have only widened.”

Willie Brown is so full of shit on Prop. 13

Zelda Bronstein
-
43
Willie Brown is so full of shit on Prop. 13

The Chron’s conflict-laden columnist made an interesting admission Dec. 9: The multibillion-dollar tax loophole that allows corporations to avoid reassessments under Prop. 13 was all his fault:

 After voters approved Prop. 13 in 1978, capping property taxes for landowners, we had to sit down in the Legislature and figure out how to implement it. One of the biggest questions was how and when properties could be reassessed. We decided that should happen whenever a property was “transferred.” When you sold your home, it was transferred to someone else. The home was reassessed, and the taxes for the buyer were increased accordingly. What we did not realize was that corporations don’t actually transfer property – they transfer the stock in the company that owns the property. And Prop. 13 didn’t apply to stock.

Wait: In 1978, Brown (a lawyer) and the office of the Legislative Counsel and the rest of the lawyer-heavy Legislature didn’t know how corporations transfer property? It was all a big mistake? There were no corporate lobbyists in Sacramento trying to make sure that the loophole was created? Just the poor undereducated elected officials who got snookered by their own lack of information?

And remember: That was 1978. Brown was elected Speaker of the Assembly in 1980, and served for 14 years. Somewhere during that era, someone must have noticed what was going on (every county assessor in California did). There was ample opportunity to close that loophole, if the immensely powerful Speaker Brown had any desire to do so.

But somehow, it never happened. Funny thing, that.

So now Brown agrees that this problem should be fixed — but he says the person carrying the bill, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, shouldn’t be doing the work because he’s too liberal and pro-tax. Which is either stupidity (and Brown’s many things, but normally stupid isn’t one of them) or he’s still bitter that Ammiano forced him into a mayoral runoff in 1999 and lead the rebellion that ousted all of the mayor’s loyal supervisors a year later. Vindictive? Yeah, we’ve heard that about Willie Brown.

“He doesn’t even understand the history of the bill,” Ammiano told me. “I introduced it last year and got it out of committee and to the floor, which was a miracle.” And now, with a two-thirds majority in both houses, the Democrats can approve it without the Republican minority veto.

“I have cosponsors and I’m going to get more,” Ammiano said. “We may be able to make it part of the budget process.”

And since local governments all over the state, and anyone who believes in tax fairness, is going to support this, I think it’s got a pretty good chance of getting to the desk of the governor.

Willie Brown, as is his practice, didn’t return my call seeking comment.

 

San Francisco’s slippery slope is chafing

Sasha Cuttler
-
71
San Francisco’s slippery slope is chafing

By Nato Green

This week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a ban on public nudity on a party line vote. By “party line,” I mean the Supes voting against nudity are the ones who never go to parties with lines of coke or conga lines. I’m not saying every single one of the progressive supervisors could be found in the naked suntan lotion massage yurt at Burning Man, just that it’s conceivable.

The ban was proposed by District 8 Supervisor Scott Wiener, and supported by the “moderates,” who are Very Serious about sensible governance. First of all, anyone who ever made fun of Supervisor Eric Mar’s happy meal ban owes him an apology. Second, obviously all other problems in the City have been solved, which has freed up the Supes to kowtow to the whims of the gayeoisie.

People are worried about the effects of aggressive nudity on children, but fortunately we’ve gentrified all the families out of the City. Now we’ll have to export nudists to Solano County if we want kids subjected to them. At any rate, during a nippy San Francisco winter it’s vitally important for children to learn about shrinkage.

Nudity doesn’t necessarily harm children. I grew up in San Francisco. In the ’70s. Naked people were everywhere, bare and unshaven. I didn’t see a fully-clothed adult until I was nine. I didn’t see nakedness as sexual, so much as simply covered in naked. Partly because then, as now, the specific naked people were not easy on the eyes. Not to promote normative body images, but if Christina Hendricks and Ryan Gosling showed up naked, the ensuing celebration by all sexualities would make the Giants Victory Parade look like a tupperware party.

Worst of all, nudity was banned in the Castro. If there’s one neighborhood that arguably draws its spirit from the brandishing of genitalia, it’s the Castro. Harvey Milk did not march so his grandchildren could sequester the penis. It’s almost as if the City wanted to abolish hippies sitting on the sidewalk in the Haight-Ashbury. (Damn you, sit/lie.)

If we’re going to ban sitting on the sidewalk in the Haight and nudity in the Castro, here are more options for possible legislation to achieve the goal of draining our neighborhoods of their distinguishing features.

We should also ban:

  1. Bernal Heights—dykes with dogs.

  2. Mission—fixed-gear bicycles, ironic mustaches, and salvadoreños.

  3. Marina—entitlement.

  4. Richmond—Irish pubs with actual Irish people.

  5. Noe Valley—strollers and handmade baby food.

  6. Western Addition—Black people. Whoops. Too late.

Comedian Nato Green (writer for “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell” on FX) headlines the San Francisco Punchline December 19 and 20. Tweet him @natogreen

Sorry, Chuck — HANC eviction hasn’t happened

Zelda Bronstein
-
14
Sorry, Chuck — HANC eviction hasn’t happened

The eviction of the Haight Asbury Neighborhood Council’s recycling center, which critics of the center said was scheduled to take place Dec. 5, hasn’t happened – and it’s entirely possible that the center could keep operating for several more weeks.

At the end of the day Wednesday, the doors were open, the center was continuing business as usual – and the office of Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who is charged with carrying out the eviction, was telling reporters that Dec. 5 was never a firm deadline.

Kathy Gorwood, Mirkarimi’s chief of staff, told us that the law gives tenants five days from the service of an eviction notice before any law-enforcement action can take place. “But that’s not a legal mandate that we evict on the sixth day,” she said.

The notice was served Nov. 30.

Gorwood said all evictions are planned with officer safety, tenant hardships and staff scheduling in mind – and on Dec. 5, the sheriff wasn’t ready to move.

“We surveyed the property, the sheriff personally surveyed the property,” she said. “We can’t say, and we don’t say, when an eviction will take place.”

Gorwood said Mirkarimi wasn’t defying the law or refusing to carry out the eviction. But since there are likely to be protests, possibly civil disobedience, the deputies need to be prepared and the schedule set carefully.

Mirkarimi has a history of supporting HANC. As a former supervisor of District 5, which includes the Haight, he voted to urge SF Rec and Park to and find a solution to keep the center in Golden Gate Park. The vote was nonbinding. He clearly wants to avoid a nasty confrontation, and if he can find a way to work out a voluntary move-out, it’s likely he’ll take the time to negotiate it.

For the past ten years, The Department of Recreation and Parks has aggressively sought to oust HANC.  Finally, this fall, Rec-Park filed an eviction through the City Attorney’s Office
Interestingly, the “Notice to Vacate” served on the center was signed off by the City Attorney’s Office on September 14, 2012. However, the actual eviction date that SF Rec and Park requested was December 5, 2012.

Why wait three months to evict a center that Rec-Park has been trying to get rid of for a decade?

Jack Fong, a spokesperson for the City Attorney’s office, declined to say if there were any procedural or administrative reasons that an eviction notice given to the sheriff in September would take three months to go through.

We called Phil Ginsburg, director of Rec and Parks, and Sarah Ballard, its spokesperson, to ask about the time disparity. We did not hear back from them before press time.

But you don’t need to be a genius to figure it out — just look at what was happening in November. Ginsburg was pushing Proposition B, which secured $195 million in bonds to shore up neglected playgrounds and open spaces in San Francisco’s parks. The measure needed a two-thirds vote – and Rec-Park was nervous about any bad publicity.

The measure passed by a landslide. Butousting HANC, eliminating a revenue stream for the poor, the homeless, and working class people, would have been bad publicity leading up the November election.

The Small Business Commission is scrambling to notify businesses in the area of their possible new role without the recycling center — they could all either become mini-recycling centers, or
face a $100 a day charge from the state of California.

Exactly how and when the commission will reach out to those affected will be discussed at the Small Business Commission’s December 10 meeting.

Regina Dick-Endrizzi, the executive director of the Small Business Commission, told us that one business in the SOMA, which she declined to name, faced three months worth of the $100-a-
day charge for not buying back recyclables from the state while trying to navigate applying for an exemption. Even after being granted the exemption, that’s a $9,000 charge, which for a small
liquor store or grocer is not chump change.

There’s a precedent for a San Francisco sheriff refusing to carry out an eviction notice. Sheriff Richard Hongisto, who later served on the board of supervisors for three terms, famously
refused to evict the Filipino and Chinese elderly tenants of the International Hotel in 1976. The scandal was even the subject of a documentary, “The Fall of the I-Hotel.

The International Hotel was sold to developers who were going to cast the elderly tenants out onto the street. News outlets as far flung as the New York and LA times wrote about the
mass eviction, and many consider it a black eye on San Francisco to this day.

In January 1977, Hongisto was jailed for five days for his refusal to evict the tenants. Eventually, he relented, leading a team of SWAT and other officers to clear the hotel of
protesters, and even swung an ax himself to bust open the hotel.

But this is a different situation: Mirkarimi hasn’t refused to follow the law, and in fact, Gorwood said that he has every intention of carrying out the eviction. The law, Mark Nicco, assistant counsel to the sheriff, told us, only says that an eviction has to happen in a timely manner – and there’s no definition of what that might be.

So if Ginsburg or the mayor think Mirkarimi is dragging his feet, the only recourse would be for Rec-Park to go to court and seek a judge’s order compelling the sheriff to evict the center in a stated period of time. All of which could take weeks.

So for the moment, HANC is still in business, Mirkarimi is avoiding an ugly eviction scene – and there’s still a chance for Rec-Park to come to its senses. But we’re not taking bets.

Additional reporting by Tim Redmond

Guns in Bayview

Andrew Lam
-
36
Guns in Bayview

The National Rifle Association’s bid to kill two San Francisco gun control ordinances — which a federal judge initially rejected last week, although that legal process continues — highlights differing views on the issue in the violence-plagued Bayview, where two prominent activists have opposing viewpoints.

One ordinance requires guns in the home to be locked up when not on the owner’s person and the second bans the sale of fragmenting and expanding bullets, affecting only the city’s sole gun store: High Bridge Arms, in the Mission district.

The first ordinance was introduced in 2007 by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and supported by Sheriff and then-Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and opposed by three supervisors: Ed Jew, Aaron Peskin, and Chris Daly. City Attorney Dennis Herrera was pleased at the judge’s ruling.

“The NRA took aim at San Francisco’s Police Code,” Herrera said in a press release. “I’m proud of the efforts we’ve made to beat back these legal challenges, and preserve local laws that can save lives.”

NRA attorney C.D. Michel told the San Francisco Examiner, “This is not over, not by a long shot…What if you’re old and need glasses in the middle of the night, or you have kids at home to protect? Why are they being forced to keep their guns locked up?”

Interestingly, its not the NRA’s name on the front of the lawsuit, entitled “Espanola Jackson v. City and County of San Francisco.”

Jackson, a San Francisco native and longtime Bayview Hunter’s Point civil rights activist, has been fighting for the rights of minorities since she was old enough to hold a picket sign. She was recognized last May by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission with a “Legacy Award for a Lifetime in Human Rights Advocacy.”

So why is she advocating for unlocked guns in the home, and more lethal bullets?

“I live in the Bayview and I’m 79 years old,” she told The Guardian. “We’re mostly single women, but we need to have protection.”

She cited a recent police report she’d read of an elderly woman being assaulted by several teenage girls, just blocks from her home, as one of the many reasons she feels she needs protection in her own neighborhood.

Jackson said she’s had a lifetime of training with her firearm, although she wouldn’t identify the kind of weapon she wield. Back in the ’60s, she said, “they were calling us pistol packing mamas.” It’s that history, she said, that makes her feel safest with a gun in her drawer, where she can easily get it in case of a robbery.

But Theo Ellington — a board member of the Bayview Opera House and the Southeast Community Facilities Commission — sees the issue differently. Notably, as a member of the Young Black Democrats, he led the opposition against Mayor Ed Lee’s proposal to introduce “Stop and Frisk” policing to San Francisco. Lee abandoned the idea after activists cited rampant civil rights abuses under the policy in New York City.

Ellington thinks that overturning the San Francisco’s gun ordinances would be a bad idea. “We face a much greater risk if we fail to take measures to prevent [gun] accidents,” Ellington told us. “The last thing we want is for any weapons to be in the hands of children or for potential misuse.”

He has reason to be worried about the Bayview. Recent city statistics show an upswing in most crime categories in the district from 2011 to 2012, from homicides and rape to vehicle theft and burglaries. National studies have shown gun owners or their family members are more likely to get shot by guns kept in homes than are intruders. Public safety means different things in different areas, Ellington said, especially “when we’re dealing with a population that is plagued by gun violence.”

Canned!

Andrew Lam
-
6
Canned!

news@sfbg.com

So much for the holiday spirit.

In a win for the NIMBY neighbors of the Haight neighborhood, the Haight Ashbury Recycling Center was gifted with its final eviction notice, ordering it out on the street by the day this story goes to print, Dec. 5.

But those who hoped this eviction would rid the neighborhood of poor people recycling bottles and cans may be disappointed — and so might local small businesses that could face some unintended consequences of the move.

The site, run by the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC), houses a community garden, native plant nursery, and recycling center. HANC battled eviction for nearly a decade as newer neighborhood associations complained to the city, saying the center was too noisy and attracted too many homeless people.

The recycling center is located at the edge of Golden Gate Park behind Kezar stadium, and has been crushing cans and busting bottles since 1974.

The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department issued several eviction notices to HANC over the years, and the process seemed to drag on, but the eviction notice from the Sheriff’s Department on Nov. 28 is likely the last nail in the coffin.

“We’ve exhausted our legal options,” Ed Dunn, HANC’s director, told us.

Even Sup. Christina Olague, who has championed HANC as one of their few supporters on the current Board of Supervisors, said that the recycling center was done, although representatives from Sup. Eric Mar’s office told us they were still hopeful the eviction could be delayed long enough to relocate HANC somewhere else.

Olague told us that she’d talked to Mayor Ed Lee about the issue many times, and they discussed many options. But with the finality of the eviction notice, she said, “I just don’t know what we can do.”

 

COAL FOR CHRISTMAS

The recycling center’s employees will lose their jobs just at the start of the winter holiday season. “The notion that they’d put people out of work before Christmas was horrendous,” Dunn said.

What will happen to HANC’s 10 employees is up in the air. “I have no idea what I’ll do,” HANC employee Brian McMahon told us, lowering his orange protective headphones to talk. He’s worked there since 1989, and his last job was at a Goodwill store. “The quote under my high school yearbook picture says ‘take it as it comes,’ and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Susan Fahey, the sheriff’s media relations officer, declined to discuss the details of how the officers would handle the eviction, saying only that “we plan accordingly.”

A staff report prepared for the Recreation and Park Commission’s Nov. 20 meeting estimated that just 0.1 percent of San Francisco’s recycling tonnage is processed at HANC, according to a report by citizen journalist Adrian Rodriguez. The agenda also said that the Department of Environment was confident that recyclers would use other nearby sites instead.

But the customers at HANC that we talked to didn’t agree.

“I think it’s necessary they have the [recycling center] here,” HANC customer Eugene Wong told us. Wong lives in the Haight, and hauls in his recyclables every six months or so for some extra pocket money. As Wong and his friend Bob Boston spoke, one of their Haight Ashbury neighbors, Rory O’Connor, surprised them as he walked up.

“Just droppin’ off my beer cans, man,” O’Connor said. Asked if he would make his way out to the Bayview recycling center when HANC closed, he said, “You’ll spend more on gas than you would even get back.”

There were quite a few neighborhood locals there that day, and more people drove into the recycling center than there were people pushing shopping carts. But it’s the folks with the shopping carts that had HANC’s opponents up in arms.

And though some — like Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius, a regular critic of HANC — are celebrating HANC’s demise, the unintended consequences should have all small businesses in the Haight Ashbury worried.

 

CLASS WARFARE BACKFIRES

State law requires that Californians have easy access to a “convenience zone,” basically somewhere nearby that they can collect the five-cent deposit all consumers pay for cans and bottles. HANC served that purpose for a half mile radius around its location on Frederick, near Stanyan.

“Whole Foods and Andronico’s were serviced by HANC’s existence,” Regina Dick-Endrizzi, the director of San Francisco’s Office of Small Business, told us. With HANC gone, “They will be required to buy back [bottles and cans] from local stores.”

San Francisco’s Department of Environment oversees recycling policy in the city, but did not respond to calls or emails.

The reason that HANC was being pushed out was due to a vocal few, like the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, complaining that HANC was a magnet to the homeless population looking to sell bottles and cans collected in shopping carts. That group didn’t respond by press time. Now those same poor folks may take their business from Golden Gate Park to the Haight neighborhood itself by recycling at the local Whole Foods, the new legal alternative to HANC.

Sometimes local grocery stores defy the state mandate, and instead choose to pay a state-mandated fee, Dick-Endrizzi said. If Whole Foods chooses not buy back recyclables, small businesses all over the Haight will be required by state law to do it themselves.

Suhail Sabba has owned Parkview Liquors on Stanyan Street, just two blocks from HANC, for nine years. He said that he doesn’t have the employees, storage, or scale “to handle even a portion of HANC’s customers.”

He may not have much of a choice. If small businesses don’t buy back the recyclables, they would face charges of $100 a day under California state law. A year gone without complying would lead to charges up to $36,000, an amount that large-scale businesses often factor into their budgets, but which could bankrupt a small store.

When contacted, Whole Foods representative Adam Smith said that the company was aware of the issue and was still deciding on a course of action.

The company has a 60-day grace period to make a decision that, for good or ill, would ripple through the Haight neighborhood. “I might go out of business,” Sabba said.

Store owners can apply for an exemption, but the process can be as lengthy as a few months and fines could still accrue, Dick-Endrizzi said. The Office of Small Business will soon reach out to the affected store owners, but she encourages them to contact her office directly at 415-554-6134.

 

GARDEN FOR A GARDEN

The HANC site houses more than the recycling center. It also encompasses a native plant nursery, run for the past decade by caretaker Greg Gaar, who we’ve profiled before (“Reduce, reuse, replace,” 5/30/12). Gaar raises Dune Tansy, Beach Sagewort, Coast Buckwheat and Bush Monkey — all native plants bred from the dunes of old San Francisco, which Golden Gate Park used to be.

Adjacent to the nursery is a community garden with 50 plots serving just more than 100 neighbors. But the odd part is, when the city is done tearing down the recycling center and gardens, it plans to put in, well, another community garden, at taxpayer expense.

The new plan does offer a few tweaks. There will be a small stone Greek-style amphitheater, and removing the recycling center will leave more green space for the site. The new community garden will feature 10 fewer plots. As of now, there is no formal plan to transfer the 100 gardeners from HANC’s community gardens to the new plots once they’ve been built.

Some of HANC’s current gardeners count among the local homeless population, said Soumyaa Behrens, HANC’s social media coordinator. Those few homeless use their plots to grow food.

“You meet people you wouldn’t meet anywhere else,” said Miriam Pinchuck, a writer who will soon lose her and her husband’s garden plot at HANC. “It’s very shortsighted, and it’d deprive us of a chance to meet our neighbors.”

Though Dunn and Gaar are in negotiations with city officials on their gardners’ behalf, at this point it looks like the current gardeners will need to sign up for the new plots, just like everybody else.

Gaar looks like he may be the only employee to work at the new garden site once it replaces the recycling center. He’d have to volunteer, but he said that doesn’t necessarily bother him.

“For me, gardening is a joy,” Gaar said, although he did voice one concern: “I just want the nursery to survive.” With HANC’s eviction, it seems like everyone has something to worry about.

Left-right punch knocks out increased development fees for Muni

Sasha Cuttler
-
148

A new and unusual coalition of nonprofit, religious, and corporate interests today killed a legislative effort to get more money for Muni through the Transit Impact Development Fee, which was going through its process of being reauthorized every five years and came to the Board of Supervisors today.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency was hoping to get millions of dollars more per year from the fee to help cover the increasing costs of Muni service, so the city last year commissioned a study establishing a nexus between new development projects and their impact on the public transit system as a way to set the fees developers would pay.

Using that study, Sup. Scott Wiener sponsored legislation that increased the cost per square foot of development for some business types – mostly notably hospitals, big retail and entertainment complexes, and Cultural/Institution/Education facilities – and ended the categorical exemption for nonprofit organizations.

Those who could be impacted by the increased fees banded together into an organization calling itself NOTT (Non-profits Opposed to the Transit Tax), a group that included the city’s major health care providers, religious institutions, and influential nonprofits such as Council of Community Housing Organizations and Chinatown Community Development Center.

“We are gravely concerned that elements of the forthcoming Transportation Sustainability Program (TSP), especially elimination of the non-profit fee exemption, have been selectively imbedded in the TIDF update legislation. Elimination of the non-profit exemption has not been considered through a thorough and transparent process and is not good public policy,” SF Chamber of Commerce President Steve Falk wrote in Nov. 27 letter to supervisors on behalf of the organization.

In the face of opposition from both downtown and progressive groups, and hoping to get SFMTA more money for its next budget cycle, Wiener appealed for support to sustainable transportation activists, who had mixed feelings on the legislation for reasons ranging from its exemption of parking garages and development in Mission Bay to its inclusion of organizations serving low-income communities.

So Sup. Sean Elsbernd – who spoke on behalf of Catholic schools and churches – was able to amend the legislation back to the status quo on a 9-2 vote, with only Wiener and Sup. Carmen Chu opposed (Sup. Christina Olague, who co-sponsored the measure with Wiener, even failed to support it in the end).

While that ends this effort for now, it is really only the first round of efforts that are just getting underway to find more funding for Muni, which is underfunded and at capacity on many lines, and implement the TSP when it is unveiled next year.

Ethics Commission wants to hide its own flaws

Zelda Bronstein
-
3
Ethics Commission wants to hide its own flaws

The Ethics Commission has serious problems. A detailed report by Board of Supervisors Budget Analyst Harvey Rose, comparing SF’s ethics rules and enfocement to that of Los Angeles, found a long list of ways that this city is falling short. The supervisors asked the commission to have a robust discussion of the findings and propose reforms.

Now Friends of Ethics, made up of a number of former commissioners, activists, and campaign-finance watchdogs, says that the commission is trying to hold a quick hearing that will gloss over much of the criticism of the Rose report. The group wants the hearing delayed until there’s a lot more time to bring a lot more people into the process.

Here’s the letter FOE sent over:

To the Ethics Commission and Staff:

Friends of Ethics is writing with objections and protests regarding the upcoming “Interested Persons” meetings scheduled for December 4 and 10, 2012.

The Commission notified “Candidates, Treasurers and Interested Persons” of meetings “to discuss recommendations of the Budget Analyst report (also known as the Harvey Rose report) comparing programs of the San Francisco Ethics Commission with those of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission.”

The notice was dated November 28, providing only three business days before the first meeting will take place.

The Friends of Ethics bases its protest and objections on the following facts, and by this memo, formally requests that Ethics postpone these meetings until February.

     The proposed Interested Persons meetings do not mention inclusion of a representative from the Board Budget Analyst office to present their report and to discuss its findings. Without their direct involvement, as well as the invited presence of Supervisor Campos who requested the Rose report, the Interested Persons meeting will have only the staff’s views of the report as a basis for discussion. We believe this fails to provide the direct interaction and communication that should be part of this process.

    Ethics was requested by the Board of Supervisors to conduct robust and inclusive outreach to all participants in San Francisco’s political life. Ethics provided Friends of Ethics with the list used to contact Interested Persons about this meeting. We believe the list provided is not an adequate outreach, includes no community-based organizations active in electoral politics, any of the chartered Democratic clubs or other partisan political organizations, or special focus organizations active in San Francisco elections. We believe the lack of an inclusive outreach as evidenced by this list denies the Commission of a full discussion of the issues and is weighted toward the regulated community. We are puzzled by the fact that many people who do receive the Interested Persons notices are not on the list provided by Ethics, and seek a clarification on whether additional lists were used that were not disclosed to us. We also note that the late Joe Lynn, while the Campaign Finance Officer for Ethics, not only conducted extensive outreaches for IP meetings, including contacting past treasurers and press and posting notices on local political blogs and chat boards, but also later informed Director St. Croix in writing about those practices for the purpose of encouraging the continuation of such outreach.

    Ethics provided insufficient time for a review and analysis of recommendations that are significant and meaningful for the operation and success of the Ethics Commission mission. We believe that Ethics has done the bare minimum of notice of a public meeting and failed to take a serious approach to this important issue. Providing notice three days before the meeting, particularly in the holiday period between Thanksgiving and the first of December, means that no organization has an opportunity to place this issue on their agenda for a discussion or to endorse comments to be provided to the Ethics Commission.

    Ethics prepared an agenda that omitted significant and critically important comparisons between the Los Angeles and San Francisco Ethics Commissions that were included in the Rose report. While Ethics did list specific recommendations from the Rose report, the report itself detailed a number of additional differences that are significant to the San Francisco political community as we know it, and that should be part of a discussion of the Rose report.

Among the omitted points are:

    Los Angeles has a private right of action for citizens to act when Ethics does not; in Los Angeles this can include penalties under a civil action. San Francisco has no such provision. We believe this is essential to meaningfully empower citizens to directly seek compliance with our laws.

    Los Angeles requires disclosure of contributors of $100 or more to groups making “third party” expenditures. San Francisco does not require public disclosure of this money stream. Disclosure of donors to third party committees would add transparency, particularly if this has become a strategy to allow city contractors to influence elections.

    Los Angeles prohibits contributions from those seeking permits, while San Francisco does not. Friends of Ethics has determined that over 90 percent of all City Hall lobbying involves permit decisions.

    Los Angeles prohibits commissioners from fundraising for candidates, while San Francisco does not. This is the heart of pay-to-play politics that infects city appointments as commissioners are often the first stop for fundraising on behalf of city elected officials. We note a recent case where a city commissioner hosted a fundraiser that included contributions from city employees from the same department. The candidate returned the contributions, recognizing that commissioners are prohibited from seeking contributions from city employees. However, this demonstrates the potential abuse and underscores that Los Angeles’ policy is a stronger and more easily enforced prohibition. We recommend it.

    Los Angeles prohibits fundraising from city contractors and those seeking city actions. San Francisco allows contractors to fundraise and serve on candidate finance committees, although they may not contribute their own funds. Currently San Francisco also does not require candidates to disclose the names of their Finance Committee members. However, we strongly prefer closing the loophole, as Los Angeles has done, by prohibiting city contractors and permit seekers from fundraising.

    Los Angeles requires a more robust disclosure of “paid by” notification on telephone messages when 200 or more people are called. San Francisco sets the threshold at 500 people. Therefore, “paid by” calls to members of political clubs during the endorsement process would be missed under San Francisco’s standard but included under LA’s standard.

    Los Angeles provides a “Guide for Contributors” that educates donors and reduces confusion on such issues as aggregate contribution limits, prohibitions on officers of organizations receiving city funds, and so forth. This is done at minimal cost and made available on the Internet with no printing or mailing costs. San Francisco does not provide a Guide. Instead, the Ethics staff has recommended that the Commission rewrite the law to overturn specific prohibitions, stating that contributors are confused about the rules. The best approach is Los Angeles, where an educational outreach to contributors is part of their program. We note that San Francisco provides guides and outreach to most others involved in political activities, including committee treasurers, candidates and others but does not include an educational outreach to donors.

    Los Angeles prohibits political contributions from being made at City Hall or other city offices, including offices rented with city funds. San Francisco allows contributions to take place in the mayor’s own office, supervisor’s offices, at Redevelopment, Planning, Port or other offices – in short, anywhere that a donor chooses to make a contribution. We believe allowing contributions to be made in the workplace of city officials undermines public confidence and is inconsistent with other restrictions on the use of city resources for political purposes.

    Los Angeles has a more robust view of what constitutes lobbying and includes attorneys who offer strategic advice even if they do not directly contact a city official. San Francisco does not require registering or disclosing clients from such attorneys involved in orchestrating a favorable result for a paying client. Attorneys who serve as committee treasurers also do not face the same level of public disclosure as lobbyists.

We believe this list of omitted topics, coupled with the unacceptable short timeframe provided for analysis and review by the political community, and the failure to provide adequate outreach, raises serious concerns that Ethics is not engaged in a serious effort to obtain the public’s views on its operations and policies based on the Harvey Rose report.

We further note that Ethics has not provided a public schedule of when it will complete a summary of the Interested Persons meeting and comments, or a schedule for consideration by the full Commission of any recommendations.

In addition, Friends of Ethics requests that the San Francisco Ethics Commission audio record the IP meetings regarding the Rose report and post the recordings on its website, as is done by the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission.  In the past, the San Francisco Ethics Commission made audio recordings of its IP meetings, though they were not posted online.  The Commission’s Directors later discontinued the audio recording altogether, which may have been motivated by valuing the privacy of attendees over public transparency.  Given that the Rose report IP meetings are about comparing San Francisco’s good government laws with Los Angeles’ to consider adopting improvements offered by Los Angeles, Friends of Ethics believes that the first improvement that San Francisco should adopt is the Los Angele set of standard practices for conducting IP meetings.  When it comes to the development of good government law and policy, the public’s right to know is paramount.  Therefore, Friends of Ethics requests that all future IP meetings held by the San Francisco Ethics Commission be audio recorded and the recordings promptly posted online.”

Our reasons for requesting a specific timetable for next steps is based on our observation of lengthy delays in staff action on issues even when raised by the Commission itself. We believe the political community will be unlikely to participate in a process that has no specific and public timetable for action but that could take more than a year to reappear.

For example:

    In July 2011, the Ethics Commission requested that staff draft proposals to close the loophole that allows committees seeking to draft a candidate to fall outside the normal reporting and disclosure requirements. However, staff did not produce a proposal until November 2012, 16 months later, and did so without an Interested Persons meeting to discuss their proposal.

    Also at the July 2011 meeting, the Ethics Commission requested that staff examine the loophole that prevented the Commission from acting in cases of Official Misconduct by a commissioner. Ethics staff still has not produced a proposal to close that loophole.

    Also in 2011, a Superior Court judge suggested that San Francisco adopt a policy prohibiting commissioners from recommending a specific lobbyist to parties seeking a contract or other decision from that commission. Ethics has not prepared any response to that suggestion.

    In June 2012, Rules Committee Chair Jane Kim requested that the Ethics Commission provide some information on the city’s Ethics laws in languages other than English, noting that the rules are as important to donors and committees as they are to the public. The Ethics Commission has taken no steps, including in the election just concluded.

Given this record, we believe that any public process to examine the Harvey Rose Report and build new recommendations must include proposed timelines for action if there is to be public confidence that this process is meaningful.

We also strongly recommend that the Ethics Commission set aside time to allow a full discussion before the Commission itself. We believe that such a discussion should not place a two-minute limit on public members making comments.

For the above reasons and cited facts, Friends of Ethics requests that the Interested Persons meeting on the Harvey Rose Report be postponed until February when the political community will have an opportunity to evaluate the proposals and endorse changes, that the Commission immediately engage in a more robust outreach effort that extends beyond the list provided by Ethics to us, that the conversation be broadened to include all topics of comparison between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and that a proposed timeline for a record of the Interested Persons meeting and action by the Commission be provided.

We submit this protest respectfully and with support for the work of the Commission and specifically for the thorough review of any steps that can improve the Commission and public confidence in our political process.

Signed:

Eileen Hansen, former Ethics Commissioner
Bob Planthold, former Ethics Commissioner
Paul Melbostad, former Ethics Commissioner
Sharyn Saslafsky, former Ethics Commissioner
Bob Dockendorff, former Ethics Commissioner
Joe Julian, former Ethics Commissioner
Oliver Luby, former Ethics Commission staffer
Aaron Peskin, past President, Board of Supervisors
Charles Marsteller, former SF Coordinator, Common Cause
Karen Babbitt, community advocate
Marc Saloman, community advocate
Larry Bush, Publisher, CitiReport

 

Alameda County’s spy drone

Zelda Bronstein
-
32
Alameda County’s spy drone

We all knew it was coming, but the ACLU has the docs to prove it’s about to start happening here: The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office is trying to buy a drone aircraft in part to spy on people.

Now: Sheriff Gregory Ahern has insisted in public statements and in communications to the Board of Supervisors that he wants to use said drone only for search and rescue missions, disaster response, and checking out things like wildfires. But the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have documents they obtained under the California Public Records Act that show the sheriff intends to use the drone for “intelligence and information sharing” — oh, and to prevent terrorism. Which he’s not going to do by flying over wildfires and looking for lost kids.

The documents, which will be released in full Dec. 4 at a press conference on the steps of the County Administration Building, include a grant application to the state’s Emergency Management Agency which outlines the proposed uses. “Clearly, if the sheriff’s certification to Cal-EMA is true, his office intends to use the drone for surveillance and intelligence gathering, a purpose not clearly disclosed to the Board,” staff attorney Linda Lye notes in a letter to the supervisors.

There’s an item on the Dec. 4 board agenda giving the sheriff the ability to apply for and receive grants for the drone, and the ACLU, for very good reasons, wants the item continued until there can be some more discussion on this.

Here’s the thing about law-enforcement tools: You give the cops a weapon, they’re going to use it. Give ’em Tasers, they’ll zap people. Give ’em a spy drone, they’ll spy on us.

Can you imagine having a spy drone circling overhead when Occupy groups were meeting to discuss actions and tactics? You want it flying near the offices of political groups that the sheriff may consider a threat to public safety? You want it equipped with cameras and listening devices?

The county supervisors at this point have no policy positions on how a drone can be used, because they haven’t had to address it yet. But here it is — the sheriff has already solicited bids from suppliers, and is itching to get that spy baby up in the air. This whole thing needs to slow down.

In fact, state Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) just introduced a bill to regulate drones in the state. “I am concerned because domestic drones have the potential to be used for surreptitious surveillance activities that infringe upon fundamental constitutional rights.  We must ensure that there are clear guidelines in place that protect the rights of all Californians,” Padilla says in a press release I just got in my email box.

Maybe the sheriff should hold off spending any money on this thing until there are state guidelines in place. At the very least, the county supervisors should hold off giving him approval until they have rules of their own — rules that specifically ban the use of the drone for spying. (Oh, and the flight logs need to be public records, so we can see what’s really going on with the eye in the sky.)

 

Dick Meister: A free choice for U.S. workers

-
32

By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom,  has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Now that the electioneering and political posturing is done with, it’s time for President Obama and congressional Democrats to finally deliver on their promises to enact the long delayed Employee Free Choice Act that’s at the very top of organized labor’s political agenda.

EFCA, as it’s sometimes called, has been stalled in Congress for three years. It would give U.S. workers the unfettered right to unionization that would raise their economic and political status considerably.  But that would come at the expense of employers, who have been able to block a large majority of workers from exercising the union rights that labor law has long promised workers.

EFCA would in essence strengthen the 78-year-old National Labor Relations Act – the NLRA – to make it easier for workers to form and join unions.  Which is the clearly stated purpose of the NLRA.

The lack of solid legal protection is a primary reason that, despite the higher pay and benefits and other obvious advantages of union membership, only about 12 percent of the country’s workers belong to unions.

 Surveys show that nearly one-third of all U.S. workers want to unionize but won’t try because they fear employer retaliation – and for good reason. Every year, thousands of workers who do try to unionize are illegally fired or otherwise penalized.

Employers faced with organizing campaigns commonly order supervisors to spy on organizers and force workers to attend meetings at which employers describe unions as dues-snatching outsiders, often asserting falsely that unionization will lead to pay cuts, layoffs, outsourcing of work or even force them out of business. Similar messages are delivered to workers one-on-one by supervisors, frequently along with threats of disciplinary action if they support unionization.

In many of the instances in which workers nevertheless vote for unionization, the employer simply refuses to agree to a contract with the union. Workers who strike to try to force employers to reach an agreement or otherwise follow the law face being permanently replaced.

The NLRA is supposed to protect workers from such actions. But employers have been able to blatantly violate the law because the penalties are slight – usually small fines at most, and they’re often not even imposed. Workers fear complaining to the government, knowing it usually takes months – if not years – for the government to act, and that meanwhile they may lose their jobs.

The most important provision of the Employee Free Choice Act would automatically grant union recognition on the showing of union membership cards by a majority of an employer’s workers – unless the workers opted to have recognition decided by an election.

As the law now stands, only employers can decide whether to use a membership card check or an election to determine their workers’ wishes. Employers almost invariably choose elections because of the opportunity the election campaign gives them to pressure workers into opposing unionization.

Other key provisions of the Free Choice Act would fine employers up to $20,000 for each violation of the law and call for arbitrators to dictate the terms of employers’ contracts with unions winning recognition if the employers stalled for more than four months in contract negotiations with the winners.

The act made it through the House shortly after it was originally introduced in 2003, but was blocked from Senate passage by a Republican filibuster. It seems unlikely that the bill would even get through the House now.

Labor, however, has not backed off, and can still expect the support of President Obama, other key Democrats and civil and human rights groups, religious organizations and other influential union allies to back its demand for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act or something very much like it.

But are labor’s political allies willing – and able – to finally do what they have long promised to do? Are they willing – and able – to join labor in assuring American workers the firm union rights that have too long been denied them?

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom,  has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Funding SFUSD’s graduation rescue

Zelda Bronstein
-
45
Funding SFUSD’s graduation rescue

The San Francisco school district’s achievement gap exploded into the news when district officials learned that as many as 1,900 High School juniors — the vast majority of them students of color — aren’t on track to meet the new graduation standards.

It’s a crisis: The district several years ago mandated that every high school graduate complete the A to G classes required by the California State University system — essentially a requirement that every graduate be prepared for college. It was going to be a tough standard to meet — and that was before the state whacked $77 million out of the SFUSD budget.

Now, with the new standards on the books, the class of 2014 is nowhere near ready. The city’s laudatory 82 percent graduation rate is at risk — and more important, there’s a real possibility that hundreds of kids won’t get a high school diploma, which will severely damage their employment opportunities.

To make things worse, the district’s funding for after-school classes to help students who are behind catch up — known as “credit recovery” — is ending in December.

The statistics are alarming: More than 80 percent of African American kids and 70 percent of Latinos aren’t on track to graduate. And while Prop. 30 passed, preventing any more cuts, it doesn’t add to the district’s funding.

So Sup. Jane Kim is asking the city to pick up the $2.7 million tab for the credit recovery program, which makes perfect sense: If 1,900 kids don’t graduate from high school, the impacts on the city, from crime, unemployment, and social-service needs to homelessness, will vastly exceed that number. 

“It’s part of violence and crime prvention,” School Board member Sandra Fewer explained.

It’s also an issue of civic responsibility — we, as San Franciscans, can’t just let those kids fail. “Remember, these are the ones who stuck it out, who are really trying,” Kim told me. “They aren’t the drop-outs.”

There is, of course, the question of whether this is going to be an ongoing problem — what about the class of 2015? Fewer thinks the numbers will be a lot lower then: “”We’ve learned a lot,” she said. “We’ve had early warning indicators and I don’t think we’ll see these numbers again.”

Kim said that at first she thought the appropriation request would be noncontroversial — it is, after all, a fairly modest amount of money, and the city’s budget picture is improving. “We’re doing fairly well,” Kim said. “One of the promises of all this tech growth was that we’d get some more revenue, and I think we need to spread that wealth.”

But the Mayor’s Office and some of her colleagues weren’t ready to go along. So, as often happens in these situations, somebody found some fiscal magic — the Mayor’s Office folks “discovered” that the city had put an additional $1.5 million into the school district’s allocation from the Rainy Day Fund. Gee, maybe that could cover part of the cost.

Now it gets tricky.

The Rainy Day Fund, which Assemblymember Tom Ammiano created when he was supervisor, requires the city to set aside cash in flush years to use when times are tigher — and part of it goes to the school district. That money has been used in the past few years to prevent teacher layoffs. (Another whole crazy issue — the district has to issue layoff notices in the spring, and then rescind them, which sucks for everyone, but at least the Rainy Day Fund money has made most of the recissions possible).

So the teachers union isn’t thrilled with the idea of taking money that would prevent layoffs and using it for another worthy program. “We’re in support of the $2.7 million allocation,” union staffer Ken Tray told me. “We can’t fail these kids. But we’re afraid that the money that would go for this very good thing would lead to teacher layoffs.”

Sup. David Campos has concerns, too: “I think the Rainy Day Fund should stand on its own terms,” he said. “If any time something comes up we say let’s take it from the Rainy Day Fund, it can become a problem.”

He supports spending city money to help the students: “If it’s a crisis, we should handle it as a crisis.”

Which makes perfect sense to me. This IS a crisis, and Kim has properly identified a small amount of money for a one-time effort to address it, and in the end, her allocation would save the city way more than it costs. I can’t see why the mayor and the supervisors have to play games here; this is serious, serious stuff, and if the district thinks it can address it in a serious way for a modest amount of money at a time when the economy is picking up and the city budget is improving, why not just do it?

A developer’s wet dream

Andrew Lam
-
90
A developer’s wet dream

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correct a statement from Sup. Scott Wiener about affordable housing.


tredmond@sfbg.com


Sup. Scott Wiener is proposing a dramatic overhaul of the city’s environmental review process that would limit the ability of citizen activists to appeal projects and could ease the path for major developments.


The new rules — some of which are fairly simple and routine, others more far-reaching — cover the city’s interpretation and implementation of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the state’s venerable land-use and environmental oversight law. The legislation is before the Planning Commission and could reach the supervisors in December.


According to city staff and outside analysts, the Wiener proposals would:


• Eliminate the public’s legal right to appeal a ruling by the Planning Commission if the Board of Supervisors has to approve any part of the project.


• Weaken the standard for environmental review by city planners.


• Weaken the public notice requirements for CEQA exemptions.


• Speed up the process for developments by compacting the time frame for CEQA appeals.


“Generally, the amendments decrease the opportunities for individuals and community groups with serious environmental concerns to provide input and assert influence on development projects as part of the CEQA process,” an analysis by Community Economic Development Clinic at Hastings College of the Law notes. “The amendments arguably would streamline the CEQA process for various projects, but at the cost of significantly curtailing public participation.”


Wiener told us that he wants to eliminate lengthy, sometimes unpredictable appeals. “The goal is to make sure we have a good CEQA process but also a more predictable process,” he said. “Right now it’s so chaotic and loose that we have unnecessary delays.”


Aaron Peskin, a former supervisor and neighborhood activist, calls the proposed legislation “a developer’s wet dream. It shuts off or makes impossible citizens’ ability to participate in the environmental review process.”


WHAT ARE THE ABUSES?


At issue is a critical part of city planning, mandated by state law and sharpened by years of court decisions. Before any project is approved, the city’s environmental review officer (ERO) must either determine that the proposal “could not have a significant impact on the environment” or is exempt by law from CEQA review. If not — if in fact the proposal could have an impact — then the project sponsor has to pay for a full environmental impact report.


If any member of the public thinks that the ERO’s decision is wrong — or believes that an EIR is inadequate — he or she can appeal to the Board of Supervisors. An appeal halts all work on the project until the supervisors resolve it.


If the board rejects the environmental review, it doesn’t kill the project — planners just have to go back and write, or rewrite, an EIR.


On a practical basis, appeals are relatively rare — the city, Peskin told us, makes tens of thousands of CEQA determinations every year, and at most a couple dozen get appealed. “I don’t understand what the abuses are,” Peskin said.


But in some cases, opponents of a project file a CEQA appeal after they’ve lost at all the policy bodies — and that, Wiener argues, just slows things down. “If you’re going to appeal, then appeal, but don’t wait around,” he said.


Wiener said his proposals would benefit not only private developers but also nonprofit affordable housing projects. “This will help prevent unnecessary challenges to affordable housing,” he told us.


But Calvin Welch, a member of the Council of Community Housing Organizations who has been working to build affordable housing for more than 30 years, told us he doesn’t see the problem. “CEQA never gets used to stop affordable housing,” he said. “It just doesn’t happen.”


CONSOLIDATED APPEALS


Perhaps the most profound change would eliminate any CEQA appeal for a project that has to go to the supervisors anyway. Wiener’s idea: if the board already has to sign off on, say, a zoning change or a special use district or any finances of a project, the environmental review can be done at the same time. “It’s as if there’s an automatic appeal,” he said.


But that conflicts with the concept of environmental review, critics say. No member of the public has the legal right to a sustainable or environmentally sound project; planning commissions, city councils, and county supervisors can, and often do, approve horrible projects.


But everyone has the right to a complete and fair environmental review. CEQA mandates that the decision-makers accept and acknowledge the consequences of their decisions — and if an EIR is flawed, those consequences can be understated.


Wiener would do away with the mandate that the supervisors hold a hearing, accept appeal briefs, and address CEQA questions as a distinct and separate part of a project approval. “The public would be denied the right to a hearing before the full elected body on the adequacy of an EIR or other CEQA determination,” a Planning Department staff analysis states. “And if a member of the public introduced new information at the committee hearing, there would be no way for the city to respond to or modify the environmental document.”


Among the projects that this provision would affect — where the public would lose the right to appeal an environmental determination: The America’s Cup, the Central Subway, the Parkmerced rebuild, the 8 Washington project, and the California Pacific Medical Center’s billion-dollar hospital proposal.


The proposal would also change the standard city planners apply when they review projects. The current rules require that the city show there is a “fair argument” that a project would have a significant environmental impact. The new language would mandate the staffers find “substantial evidence” that a full review is needed.


“It is likely more projects would require an EIR under the ‘fair argument’ standard and fewer projects would require an EIR under the ‘substantial evidence’ standard,” the Hastings analysis concludes.


And while the Board of Supervisors now has to certify that an environmental determination is accurate and correct, Wiener would change that to a determination that the city has made “an independent judgment” on the merits of the review. That, the Hastings lawyers state, “is a more discretionary standard that would be used to uphold an EIR certification decision even if the board determines that the conclusions and findings in the EIR are incorrect.”


MORE LAWSUITS?


A lot of the language in the complex package of CEQA changes involves public information and notice. Many of the lawyers and activists who have reviewed the legislation say it limits public notification of some CEQA determinations, particularly when the city concludes that a project is categorically exempt.


“If the ERO determines that a project is exempt from CEQA review, he may or may not be required to provide public notice of this determination,” the Hastings analysis states.


There’s no question that it would add to the complexity and burden of filing an appeal; and shorten the time frame for doing so — in a way that some say would actually encourage more lawsuits.


Kevin Bundy, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity, argues that “The proposed amendments create a situation where appellants will be required to file litigation prior to the board’s decision on appeal.”


It’s a complicated situation, but in essence, the new Wiener rules would set the timeline for project approval at the first stage of policy decision — and if the supervisors overturned an environmental appeal, the clock for the project would be set back to that day.


That could upset the statutory timeline for CEQA lawsuits — and thus lead to more cases.


Wiener acknowledged that there were a lot of technical issues like that one that still need to be resolved. “We will be conferring with the people who have commented on the legislation and making the appropriate changes,” he said.


He added, however, that he sticks by the essential parts of his proposal despite the opposition: “There are a lot of CEQA lawyers out there,” he said. “And they aren’t always right.”

Aggressive Warriors

Andrew Lam
-
0
Aggressive Warriors

steve@sfbg.com

No standard defensive strategy is likely to stop the Golden State Warriors, Mayor Ed Lee, and their huge team of partners and employees from dominating the game of approving construction of a new basketball and concert arena on San Francisco’s central waterfront. That became clear on Nov. 14, as the political operation overcame fire, darkness, and neighborhood-based opposition for the first big score.

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee was set to consider declaring the project, which the Warriors want to build on Piers 30-32 by the 2017 basketball season, to be “fiscally feasible,” recommending it move forward with more detailed environmental studies and a term sheet nailing down myriad administrative details.

Before the 11am hearing, the project team held a packed press conference to announce that the Warriors had volunteered to abide by the city’s local-hire standards for public works projects, hiring San Francisco residents or military veterans for at least 25 percent of total construction jobs and 50 percent of apprenticeships. A beaming Lee praised the deal as an “unprecedented” indicator of the Warriors’ willingness to partner with the city.

The event overflowed with union members in hard hats and orange “Build It Now!” T-shirts, as well as a full range of local political pros, from former mayoral and current project spokespersons PJ Johnston and Nathan Ballard to former aides to progressive supervisors, David Owen and David Loyola. Among the agreement’s four signatories were Joshua Arce, the Brightline Defense Project head who last year crusaded for Sup. John Avalos’s local hire ordinance, and building trades chief Michael Theriault.

Strikingly missing at the press conference was Sup. Jane Kim, in whose District 6 the project would be built — over the objections of many residents who are raising concerns about the loss of waterfront views, huge crowds attending what is projected to be more than 200 events per year, high interest rates paid by city taxpayers, the project’s accelerated approval schedule, and other concerns.

Kim is one of the three members of the Budget Committee, which held its meeting despite an electrical fire in the basement of City Hall that knocked out power to the building. Portable photography lighting was brought in to supplement the emergency backup lights, making it bright enough so the televised show could go on but giving a strangely surreal feel to the proceedings and reinforcing the urgency project supporters feel to move this forward without delay.

Kim raised the concerns of her constituents, winning support for amending the resolution to ensure the Citizens Advisory Committee — whose chair was given two minutes to convey how its members feel steamrolled by the accelerated process, asking it be delayed by a month or two — will be given chances to weigh in and pushing the EIR scoping meetings back a few weeks to January.

In the end, Kim and the committee voted to move the project forward. A few days later, on Nov. 19, the process repeated itself with another flashy press conference in the Mayor’s Office — with another important union endorsing the project — followed by the Land Use Committee responding favorably to the project.

The full Board of Supervisors was scheduled to approve the project’s fiscal feasibility the next day, after Guardian press time, but there was little chance that the full board would take any other action than giving the Warriors, Lee, and their huge roster of teammates what they want.

This despite unusual financing and some very real concerns about waterfront development.

 

 

JOBS, MONEY, AND SUPPORT

Mayor Lee — who has placed a high priority on this project since announcing his deal with the team in May — emphasized its job creation and contribution to the local economy during the Nov. 19 press conference.

“I remind people, this is a private investment of hundreds of millions of dollars,” Lee said of a project pegged to cost around $1 billion. “It means a lot of jobs, and that is so important to all of us.”

The project is expected to directly create 4,300 jobs: 2,600 construction jobs and 1,700 permanent jobs, including those at the 17,000-seat sports and entertainment arena and the 250-room hotel and 100,000 square feet of retail and restaurants that would be built as part of the project.

“We’ve been spending a lot of these last many months describing what it is we want to build,” Warriors President Rick Welts said at the press conference before casting the project in grander terms. “That’s not really what we’re building. What we’re really building are memories.”

But city residents and workers are looking for more tangible benefits than just the highs of watching big games or concerts. The building trades were already expected to strongly support the project, which only got stronger with last week’s local-hire deal. Labor’s support for the project was broadened on Nov. 19 with the announcement that the Warriors agreed to card-check neutrality for the hotel, making it easier for its employees to join UNITE-HERE Local 2.

“Thank you for being a partner and we’re looking forward to working with you in the future,” Local 2 head Mike Casey, who notably also serves as president of the San Francisco Labor Council, said to Welts at the event before the two signed a formal agreement.

In addition to allowing the hotel workers to easily organize, the Warriors agreed to card-check neutrality for vendors at the arena with at least 15 employees and those outside the arena with more than 45 employees, as well as giving those who now work Warriors’ games at Oracle Arena first dibs on jobs at the new arena.

“I think that speaks a lot about what the project is. It’s not just a San Francisco project, but a Bay Area project,” Casey said. He also said, “I want to thank the mayor for bringing people together and laying all this out.”

While Lee and the Warriors do seem to have this deal pretty well wired, this is still a San Francisco project, a complex one on the politically and environmentally sensitive waterfront that city taxpayers are helping to pay for and one for which the residents there will bear the brunt of its impacts.

 

PAYING FOR IT

Lee, Office of Economic and Workforce Development head Jennifer Matz, and other key project supporters have repeatedly claimed this project is funded completely with private money, noting how rare that is for urban sports stadiums these days.

But in reality, city taxpayers are spending up to $120 million for the Warriors to rebuild the unstable piers on which the arena will be built, plus an interest rate of 13 percent, an arrangement that has drawn criticism from a key source.

Rudy Nothenberg, who served as city administrator and other level fiscal advisory roles to six SF mayors and currently serves as president of the city’s Bond Oversight Committee, wrote a Nov. 12 letter to the Board of Supervisors urging it to reject the deal.

“Quite simply, I would have been ashamed of such a recommendation,” Nothenberg wrote of the high interest rate. “In today’s markets it is incomprehensible to have such a stunning recommendation brought to your honorable Board in such haste.”

Johnston and Matz each disputed Nothenberg’s characterization, citing a report by the project consultants, the Berkeley-based Economic and Planning Systems Inc. (EPS), that 13 percent is a “reasonable and appropriate market based return.”

Matz told us the rate was based on the risky nature of rebuilding the piers, for which the Warriors are responsible for any cost overruns. And she compared the project to the massive redevelopment projects now underway on Treasure Island and Hunters Point, from which the city is guaranteeing powerful developer Lennar returns on investment of 18.5 percent and 20 percent respectively.

Johnston, who was press secretary to former Mayor Willie Brown and worked with Nothenberg on building AT&T Park and other projects, told us “I have great respect for Rudy.” But then he went on to criticize him for taking a self-interested stand to defend the views from the condo he owns nearby: “They don’t want anything built in their neighborhood. They would rather leave it a dilapidated parking lot.”

But Nothenberg told us his stand is consistent with the work he did throughout his public service career in trying to keep the waterfront open and accessible to the public, rather than blocking those views with a 14-story stadium and hotel complex.

“I have a self-interest as a San Franciscan, and after 20 years of doing the right thing, I don’t want to see this rushed through in an arrogant way that would have been unthinkable even a year ago,” Nothenberg told us. “I spent 20 years of my life trying to deal with waterfront issues.”

He is being joined in his opposition by other neighborhood residents, land use experts such as attorney Sue Hestor, some opponents of the 8 Washington project concerned with the creeping rollback of waterfront development standards, and members of the Citizens Advisory Committee who have felt steamrolled by the rapid process so far and unable to thoroughly discuss the project or the neighborhood’s concerns.

“We would like to slow this process down,” committee Chair Katy Liddell told supervisors on Nov. 14. “Things are going so quickly.”

 

DETAILS OF THE DEAL

The $120 million plus interest that the city will owe the Warriors would be offset by the $30 million the team would pay for Seawall Lot 330 (the property across from the piers where the hotel would be built), a one-time payment of $53.8 million (mostly in development impact fees), annual rent of nearly $2 million on its 66-year lease of Piers 30-32, and annual tax and mitigation payments to the city of between $9.8 million and $19 million.

Kim raised concerns at the Budget Committee hearing about the more than 200 events a year that the arena will host, but she was told by Matz that’s necessary to make the project pencil out for the Warriors.

Many of the project’s financial and administrative details are still being worked out as part of a term sheet going to the Board of Supervisors for approval, probably in April. Other details will be studied in the project Environmental Impact Report, which is expected to come back to the board in the fall.

The Department of Public Works, Police Department, and — perhaps most critically given its impact on Muni and roadways — Municipal Transportation Agency have yet to estimate their costs.

“We do have a lot of concerns in the neighborhood about this project,” Kim told the Land Use Committee, singling out impacts to the transportation system as perhaps the most important, followed by quality-of-life issues associated with huge crowds of sports fans.

Kim noted that the area already has a problematic transportation infrastructure, with some of the highest rates of motorist-pedestrian collisions in the city and a public transit system that reaches capacity at peak times, and said that many residents worry this project will make things worse. The EIR will deal with the transportation details. But Kim praised how about half the space on the piers, about seven acres, will be maintained as public open space: “I think the open space aspect is incredible and it could actually increase access to the waterfront.” In the end, Kim urged project proponents to heed the input of the CAC and other concerned parties because, “This could be a very valuable project, or it could also be a disaster.”

Supervisors approve nudity ban on close vote

Sasha Cuttler
-
139
Supervisors approve nudity ban on close vote

Over the objections of progressive supervisors and under threats of a lawsuit from nudists and civil liberties advocates, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors today voted 6-5 to outlaw public nudity in the city. Supervisors voting against the ban were David Campos, Christina Olague, John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Jane Kim.

Sup. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the measure, cast it as a last resort to deal with what has become daily displays of nudity in the Castro district he represents (and most recently around City Hall as his legislation was being considering in committees), noting that, “Public nudity is part of San Francisco and is appropriate in some circumstances.” His legislation makes exceptions for permitted events such as the Folsom Street Fair and Bay-to-Breakers.

But Wiener said that “public nudity can go too far,” as he says it has over the last two years in the Castro’s Jane Warner Plaza, and that “freedom of expression and acceptance does not mean you can do whatever you want.”

Campos echoed some of the legal concerns that critics of the legislation have raised, noting that, “As a lawyer, I do worry about when you ban specific conduct and then you have exceptions to that.” He also questioned whether Wiener has done enough to try to mediate the increasingly divisive conflict he’s been having with the nudist community and whether this was an appropriate use of scarce police resources.

“I don’t believe we’re at the point of saying this becomes a priority over violent crime,” Campos said, noting that he’s been unable to get more police foot patrols to deal with a recent spate of violent crimes in the Mission, which shares a police station with the Castro.

Avalos said it was absurd to focus city resources on this victimless issue when the city is wrestling with far more serious problems, such as poverty and violence, and he played a clip from the film Catch 22 where a soldier goes naked to a ceremony to highlight that absurdity. “I will refuse to put on this fig leaf, I just can’t do it,” Avalos said.

Mar said he sympathized with Wiener’s concerns, but agreed with Campos that Wiener could have done more to mediate this situation before both sides dug in: “I really don’t think we need citywide legislation, particularly overbroad legislation, to deal with a problem isolated to one neighborhood.”

Wiener seemed stung by the comments and said he could cite example of each supervisor pushing resolutions or ordinances that dealt with similarly trivial issues, comparing it to refusing to deal with a constituent’s pothole complaint until that supervisor fixed Muni and solved the city’s housing problem. But Campos pushed back, calling the comparison ridiculous and saying there was no reason for a citywide ban to deal with such an isolated issue.

Nudists at the hearing reacted angrily to the approval and started to disrobe before President David Chiu ordered deputies to intervene and abruptly recessed the hearing. Now, it will likely be up to the courts to decide whether Wiener’s concerns about weiners can withstand legal scrutiny.

The nudists file suit

Zelda Bronstein
-
32
The nudists file suit

You all know the joke: What did the unsuccessful lawyer who joined a nudist colony never have? (A suit. LOL. Sort of.)

But a successful lawyer just filed a detailed suit trying to stop San Francisco from enforcing a ban on public nudity, and it makes a lot of interesting points. You can read the filing here (pdf). I’ll get beyond the fact that a legal argument over nudism uses the terms “prong” and “thrust” and “penal” all in a few short paragraphs, and get to the substance:

Attorney Christina DeEduoardo claims that her clients use nudity as a form of free speech and protest — and given who they are, it’s a pretty good argument. You’ve got a guy who ran as the nudist candidate for mayor and a woman who took her clothes off at a Board of Supervisors meeting for political reasons, and they contend that they have the right to appear naked in public.

The claim seeks a restraining order prohibiting the Board of Supervisors from enacting the law, but a federal judge already nixed that, according to City Attorney spokesperson Matt Dorsey. Instead, all parties have to wait unitl the supes approve the law, at which point this will become a motion for an injunction against the law taking effect.

So banning a handful of people, mostly older guys, from hanging out naked on Castro Street is going to become a legal battle that will cost the city a bunch of money. Unless sanity prevails and Sup. Scott Wiener, the city attorney and the nudists can reach a deal, which might be pretty simple:

It’s cool to get all nekkid (although it won’t be happening much in the next few months, way too cold). But maybe the Castro Guys can agree not to wear cockrings that attract attention to their dicks (and seem to be the proximate cause of all the fuss). Just be natural when you go au naturel, and we can all stop fighting over this.

You think?

 

 

Fell/Oak bike lane project appealed

Sasha Cuttler
-
56

Long-awaited bicycle and pedestrian improvements along Fell and Oak streets – a key east-west connection where fast-moving cars create sometimes-scary conditions for cyclists – approved last month by the Municipal Transportation Agency’s board suffered a couple frustrating setbacks last week.

First, on Nov. 5, the project was appealed to the Board of Supervisors by area residents Mark Brennan, Howard Chabner, and Ted Loewenberg, who charged that it violates state environmental laws and the Americans with Disabilities Act and should be subjected to a full-blown Environmental Impact Report rather than relying on the overall Bicycle Plan’s EIR.

The MTA is confident the appeal will be denied, so its crews went ahead with the project, removing the existing bike lane markings and then just leaving it that way for the last week, creating a confusing and potentially dangerous situation for both motorists and cyclists. It also raised fears among project supporters that the two developments were connected.

But MTA spokesperson Paul Rose told us there is no connection and “we expect to begin striping tomorrow, weather permitting.” He also said the agency heard the concerns from cyclists and this week put up signs urging motorists to share the road with cyclists and placing flyers on cars parked along the stretch.

As for the appeal, Rose said, “We have confidence that the environmental work that went into this project was appropriate and the appeal will be denied.”

Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition – for whom this project has been a top priority for years – echoed the optimism and emphasized the extensive outreach effort that has gone into this project.

“I think it’s unfortunate that there is the threat of delay to a project that has gone through so many years of community input and has such strong support,” Shahum said. “There are a few individuals who are trying to delay the project, but I’m happy to hear the MTA is moving it forward anyway.”

The appeals hearing has been tentatively set for Dec. 11. Once completed, this will be one of just a few cycletracks – or bikeways that are physically separated from automobile traffic – in San Francisco, something bike activists hope to see more of in the coming years.

Oh well, Pelosi’s going to stick around

Zelda Bronstein
-
32
Oh well, Pelosi’s going to stick around

For a while there some of us thought that Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who failed to win back a house majority for the Democrats, might decide her time was up and step down as minority leader (which would probably have meant retiring from Congress). That would have set off one of the hottest political battles in town; just about everyone knows that Pelosi’s daughter is interested in the seat, but there’s no way she was going to get it without a fight. There are lots of ambitious people in this town who would jump at a once-in-a-lifetime chance at a Congressional seat, starting with possibly all of our current state Legislators and a few supervisors.

Would progressives and independents sick of the notion of a Pelosi family dynasty get behind one candidate (say, Mark Leno)? Would Scott Wiener, who Leno has supported and mentored all these years, run anyway, arguing for a younger candidate who could be around for long enough to get seniority? Would Leland Yee, who will be termed out and didn’t get elected mayor, jump in the race? Would Tom Ammiano, who doesn’t seem at all ready to retire?

Lots of crazy speculation — and now it appears we’ll have to wait two more years to go through it again. Because, barring a huge upset in the Democratic Caucus, Pelosi’s sticking around.

I’m not so thrilled about that — and I swear it has nothing (well, almost nothing) to do with the amazing story that a contested race would create for political reporters. It’s just that Pelosi’s been a big disappointment to San Francisco; she cares more about her national constituency that about her district, and her legacy achievement is the privatization of a national park.

It would be nice to get someone representing San Francisco who represented San Francisco values.

Oh well.

Shit happened

Andrew Lam
-
0

CASH FOR TRASH

Recology, the city’s garbage monopoly, has a problem: It charges residential customers only for the black cans full of unrecyclable material headed for the landfill — but thanks to city policy and environmental consciousness, there’s less and less traditional trash out there. Ultimately, the company wants to get rid of the big black cans altogether.

So a business model based on offering free recycling and compost doesn’t work any more — and everyone has known for some time that it had to change.

But there was no discussion of rate changes earlier this year; in fact, Recology folks said there were no plans for an immediate rate hike in the works. That’s because the June ballot included a measure that would have created competitive bidding for the city’s garbage contract — and the last thing Recology wanted was the threat of a rate hike to drive voters toward amending the 1932 City Charter provision that gives just one company complete control over the lucrative waste franchise.

Ah, but the June election is long over, and Recology beat back that effort — so the rate hike we all expected is now on the table.

On Sept. 11, Recology informed the city that it intends to apply for a new rate structure — and while the process is long and convoluted, we’ll see the details in a few weeks, and you can expect to start paying more for your service by next summer.

There’s no formal proposal yet — that will come in December. The director of the Department of Public Works has to approve it, and so does a Rate Board made up of the city administration, the controller and the head of the Public Utilities Commission. But both Recology and the city say there will be some significant changes in the way San Franciscans pay to have their refuse removed.

“We can’t focus our financial operations on a black can if we’re trying to get rid of it,” Recology spokesperson Eric Potashner told us.

Douglas Legg, the finance director at the Department of Public Works agrees. “As we’ve been pushing diversion, the blue and green cans have been pretty heavily subsidized.”

But shouldn’t good habits, like recycling, be subsidized? Should people who recycle and compost more be penalized? “That’s the challenge,” Potashner said.

And in the end, it’s going to be more than a shift in which bins cost how much. There’s no doubt that your bills will be rising, perhaps by a significant amount. “I assume it will go up,” Legg said. “There hasn’t been a cost-of-living increase since 2010.”

Which, of course, brings back the competitive bidding point. If others had a chance to make a play for the city contract, might rates be lower? Or might the city get more out of the deal?

Retired Judge Quentin Kopp, who helped spearhead the campaign for competitive bidding, thinks so. “If we had competitive bidding,” he told us, “these rate hikes would be more moderate.”

OPENING THE LAST CLOSET DOOR

While most everyone’s attention was focused on electoral politics in late October, Supervisors David Campos and Christina Olague were talking about a different level of political issue, one that’s still a huge taboo: Gay men in professional sports. At an Oct. 30 press conference, the two LGBT supes joined with representatives of The Last Closet, an SF-based campaign that’s trying to get gay professional athletes to come out.

It’s remarkable (or maybe, sadly, it isn’t) that in 2012, not one openly gay man has played in any of the Big Five pro sports (football, basketball, hockey, baseball and soccer). There are, everyone knows, plenty of gay athletes, and the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and various soccer associations all have gay players. Some of them have come out after they’ve retired. But on the field (or on the floor, or on the ice)? No way.

Why does anyone care? Because youth sports are still, even in this town, full of homophobic language and homophobic attitudes, and it’s hard to imagine what young LGBT football or basketball players have to endure. Even one gay player could make a world of difference.

“What I saw with the San Francisco Giants, all of the Latino players, was such a source of pride to Latino boys and girls,” Campos told us. “We can’t feel that in the LGBT community. We know there are gay baseball players, but the LGBT youth don’t have those role models to look up to.”

The Last Closet campaign emerged out of a documentary film project that sought to look at homophobia in pro sports. “It became clear that some members of the sports hierarchy were not going to make themselves available to speak about this taboo subject,” the group’s website notes.

In fact, Fawn Yacker, one of the project directors, told us that nobody in a senior position in any sports organization was willing to talk — and that’s turned the movie into a political campaign. “We want the fans to push the sports leaders to address this,” she said.

In fact, all The Last Closeters want right now is for the commissioners of the major sports leagues to make a statement that homophobia is unacceptable and that the leagues will do everything possible to make sure that out gay players are accepted. Seems like a pretty simply no-brainer — but so far, not one sports official has gone along.

It’s pretty crazy, considering that it’s almost inevitable that a few major sports athletes will come out in the next few years — and the leagues are going to look foolish if they pretend it’s not going to happen. Any bets on which sport is going to be the first? “I don’t know,” Yackey said. “I think it might be hockey.” 

Sorting out a strange election

Andrew Lam
-
120
Sorting out a strange election

steve@sfbg.com, tredmond@sfbg.com

The way the San Francisco Chronicle pundits put it, Mayor Ed Lee was the clear winner in a grand San Francisco election. “All his measures on the ballot won hands down,” noted Willie Brown, the high-paid lawyer and political operative who also functions as a Chron columnist. “It was a great day for Ed Lee,” proclaimed columnist C.W. Nevius.

Well, not really.

There are a lot of ways to explain and analyze the inconsistent results of one of the most heavily propagandized elections in recent San Francisco history. But no matter how you look at it, the election was at best a wash for the mayor. Indeed, we’d argue that voters rejected the basic premise of the mayor’s political agenda – that tax cuts and favors for big business are the best economic policy – despite record-breaking outside spending selling that agenda and targeting those who stood in its way.

Let’s take a look at the real facts:

• Every single initiative backed by the mayor, the ones he’s getting credit for – from the City College parcel tax to the housing fund to the business tax – was either a compromise with progressives or a measure that originated on the left. There was nothing the mayor pushed that had any significant progressive opposition; his wins were equally, if not more dramatically, wins for the left.

• Both people the mayor appointed to office were soundly rejected by the voters. Rodrigo Santos, his high-profile appointee to the troubled City College Board of Trustees, spent almost $200,000 and finished a distant sixth. Sup. Christina Olague lost to the candidate Lee had rejected for appointment, London Breed, in a complicated race where the mayor’s actual role was unclear (he never withdrew his endorsement of Olague even as his allies trashed her in nasty ways).

• A million-dollar effort funded by some of the mayor’s allies to oust Sup. Eric Mar was a spectacular failure, suggested some serious problems in the mayor’s political operation, and undermined his emphasis on “civility.”

• The voters made clear on every level that they believe higher taxes on the wealthy and closing tax loopholes on big business are the right approach to the economy and to funding government. From Prop. 30 to Prop. 39 to Prop. A to Prop. E, the message was pretty clear: The tax revolt that started in California in 1978 may be winding down, and the notion of making property owners and the wealthy pay for education and public services is no longer a radical idea.

Robert Cruikshank, who writes for the Calitics blog, argues that the November election signals a major sea change in California. “[The] vote to pass Prop 30 — by a larger margin than most observers expected — does more than just provide $6 billion of badly needed funding to the state’s public school,” he wrote. “It brings to a close a 34-year long tax revolt that came very close to destroying California’s middle class, locking its low income families into permanent poverty, and left the state on the edge of financial ruin.”

That sounds like a progressive message. The agenda put forward by the mayor’s closest allies, including right-wing billionaire Ron Conway, who played a heavy-handed role in this election, not only failed to carry the day; the big-money types may have overplayed their hand in a way that will shape the political narratives going forward.

A LOT OF CONSENSUS

Let’s start with the ballot measures (before we get to the huge and confusing mess that was D5).

Proposition A, the parcel tax for City College, didn’t come out of the Mayor’s Office at all; it came from a City College board whose direction the mayor tried to undermine with the appointment of Santos, a pro-development engineer so conservative that he actually endorsed the Republican opponent of Assembly member Tom Ammiano.

Lee didn’t even endorse Prop. A until a few weeks before the election, and played almost no role in raising money or campaigning for its passage (see “Words and deeds,” 9/11/12). Yet it got a higher percentage of the vote than any of the three measures that Lee actively campaigned for: Props. B, C, and E.

Then there’s Prop. C, the Housing Trust Fund. Lee’s office played a central role in drafting and promoting the measure -– but it wasn’t exactly a Lee initiative. Prop. C came out of the affordable housing community, and Lee, who has strong ties to that community, went along. There were tough negotiations -– the mayor wanted more guarantees and protections for private developers -– and the final product was much more what the progressives who have spent decades on the housing front wanted than what the mayor would have done on his own.

The way the mayor envisioned business-tax reform, the city would have eliminated the payroll tax, which tech firms hate, and replaced it with a gross-receipts tax -– and the result would have been revenue-neutral. It was only after Sup. John Avalos and the progressives demanded that the tax actually bring in more money that the outlines of Prop. E were drafted and it received strong support from groups across the ideological spectrum.

“You had a lot of consensus in the city about these ballot measures,” political consultant David Latterman, who usually works with downtown-backed campaigns, said at SPUR’s post-election round-up.

The supervisorial races were a different story, with unprecedented spending and nasty messaging aimed at tipping the balance in favor of real estate and development interests. Mayor Lee didn’t get directly involved in the District 1 race, but he was clearly not a supporter of incumbent Sup. Eric Mar.

The real-estate and tech folks who are allied with Lee spent more than $800,000 trying to oust Mar — and they failed miserably, with Mar winning by 15 points. While Mar did have the backing of Chinatown powerbroker Rose Pak, who raised money and helped organize ground troops to help, Mar’s victory was primarily the result of a massive outpouring of support from labor and progressive activists, many reacting to the over-the-top effort to oust him.

Mar, who voted to put Lee in office, won’t feel a bit indebted to the mayor for his survival against a huge money onslaught. But in District 5, the story was a whole lot more complicated, and impact more difficult to discern.

THE D5 MESS

Before we get into what happened in D5, let’s dispel some of the simplistic and self-serving stories that circulated in the wake of this election, the most prominent being that Olague’s loss -– the first time an incumbent was defeated in a ranked-choice election –- was payback for crossing Mayor Lee and voting to reinstatement Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi.

It’s certainly true that Lee’s allies went after Olague and supported London Breed, and that they tried to make an issue of domestic violence, but there was much, much more to this district election. Breed is an SF native with a compelling personal story who ran a strong campaign –- and that three strongest progressive candidates in the race each had major flaws that hurt their electability. By most accounts, the Olague campaign was a disaster until the very end. Equally important, the progressive community was divided over D5, leaving room for Breed to slip in.

“It’s hard to unravel what happened here,” Latterman said.

San Francisco Women for Responsibility and an Accountable Supervisor was an independent expenditure group fronted by domestic violence advocates and funded by more than $100,000 from the families of Conway and fellow right-wing billionaire Thomas Coates. It attacked Olague’s Mirkarimi vote as being soft on domestic violence — but it also did a last minute mailer criticizing Olague’s vote for CleanPowerSF, muddling its message of moral outrage.

On election night, Olague told us she believed her split with the Mayor’s Office really had more to do with CleanPowerSF –- which the board approved with a veto-proof majority over the objections of Lee and the business community –- and with her insisting on new revenue from Prop. E than it did with Mirkarimi, whose ouster she dismissed as “a power play” aimed at weakening progressives.

“They don’t want to say it, but it was the whole thing around CleanPowerSF. Do you think PG&E wanted to lose its monopoly?” she said.

Yet Olague said the blame from her loss was also shared by progressives, who were hard on her for supporting Lee, courting his appointment to the D5 seat, and for voting with him on 8 Washington luxury condo project and other high-profile issues. “The left and the right both came at me,” she told us. “From the beginning, people were hypercritical of me in ways that might not be completely fair.”

Fair or not, Olague’s divided loyalties hurt her campaign for the D5 seat, with most prominent progressives only getting behind her at the end of the race after concluding that John Rizzo’s lackluster campaign wasn’t going anywhere, and that Julian Davis, marred as he was by his mishandling of sexual impropriety accusations, couldn’t and shouldn’t win.

Olague told us she “can’t think of anything I would have done differently.” But she later mentioned that she should have raised the threats to renters earlier, worked more closely with other progressive candidates, and relied on grassroots activists more than political consultants connected to the Mayor’s Office.

“The left shouldn’t deal with consultants, we should use steering committees to drive the agenda,” Olague said, noting that her campaign finally found its footing in just the last couple weeks of the race.

Inside sources say Olague’s relations with Lee-connected campaign consultant Enrique Pearce soured months before the campaign finally sidelined him in the final weeks, the result of his wasteful spending on ineffective strategies and divided loyalties once a wedge began to develop between Olague and the Mayor’s Office.

Progressive endorsements were all over the map in the district: The Harvey Milk Club endorsed Davis then declined to withdraw that endorsement. The Tenants Union wasn’t with Olague. The Guardian endorsed Rizzo number one. And none of the leading progressive candidates had a credible ranked-choice voting strategy — Breed got nearly as many second-place votes from Davis and Rizzo supporters as Olague did.

Meanwhile, Breed had a high-profile falling out with Brown, her one-time political ally, after her profanity-laden criticism of Brown appeared in Fog City Journal and then the San Francisco Chronicle, causing US Sen. Dianne Feinstein to withdraw her endorsement of Breed. That incident and Olague’s ties to Lee, Brown, and Pak may have solidified perceptions of Breed’s independence among even progressive voters, which the late attacks on her support from landlords weren’t ever able to overcome.

Ironically, while Breed and some of her prominent supporters, including African American ministers in the district, weren’t happy when Lee bypassed her to appoint Olague, that may have been her key to victory. Latterman noted that while Olague was plagued by having to divide loyalties between Lee and her progressive district and make votes on tough issues like reinstating Mirkarimi –- a vote that could hurt the D5 supervisor in either direction -– Breed was free to run her race and reinforce her independence: “I think Supervisor Breed doesn’t win this race; challenger Breed did.”

But even if Breed lives up to progressive fears, the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors could be up in the air. District 7 soundly rejected Mike Garcia, the hand-picked successor of the conservative outgoing Sup. Sean Elsbernd.

At press time, progressive favorite Norman Yee seemed headed for victory, although FX Crowley was within about 30 votes, making this too close to call. But either way, the once-solid conservative seat will now be a swing vote on many issues, just as Breed will be in the once-solid progressive D5.

“The Board of Supervisors as a whole is becoming a helluva lot more interesting,” was how political consultant Alex Clemens put it at SPUR election wrap-up. “Determining what’s going to happen before it happens just got more difficult.”

GOBS OF MONEY

The other big story of this election was money, gobs of it, and how it can be spent effectively — or used to raise suspicions about hidden agendas.

Third-party spending on D1 loser David Lee’s behalf was $454,921, with another $219,039 to oppose Mar, pushing total spending to defeat Mar up over the $1 million mark, roughly doubling the previous record. Labor groups, meanwhile, spent $72,739 attacking Lee and $91,690 backing Mar. But many political analysts felt that lop-sided spending only served to turn off voters and reinforce the idea that powerful interests were trying to buy the seat.

In District 5, the landlords, Realtors, and tech moguls spent $177,556 in support of Breed, while labor spent $15,067 attacking her as a shill for the landlord lobby. The only other D5 candidate to attract significant spending by outside groups was Olague, who had $104,016 spent against her, mostly by the families of Conway and Coates, and $45,708 spent in support of her by SEIU 1021. Yet ultimately, none of these groups bought very much with their money. Conway, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and San Francisco Association of Realtors each spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of their money, and the most obvious result was to convince San Franciscans that they’re working together to move an agenda in San Francisco. They may have the mayor on their side, but in a politically sophisticated city like San Francisco –- with its cost of living being driven up by the schemes of Lee, Conway, and the Realtors -– they seem to have a long way to go before they achieve they’re stated desire of destroying the progressive movement, particularly with its rising new leaders on the left, including Matt Haney and Sandra Fewer on the school board and Steven Ngo and Rafael Mandelman on the City College board. As Haney said on Election Night, “It was a good night for progressive San Francisco,” which stands for important egalitarian values. “We are the ones about equity and compassion. That’s what this city is about.”

The Latin dish

Andrew Lam
-
1
The Latin dish

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco is a literate community, always has been. Bookstores abound, perhaps not as much as bars, but that’s fish for another soup. The literary scene is uber-vibrant, as highlighted by the recent Litquake Festival with more than 800 writers reading in hundreds of venues.

But looked at from another perspective, the most recent study on adult literacy reveals startling numbers: Nationwide one in seven adults is illiterate, about 14 percent of the adult population. The same study cited San Francisco with an adult illiteracy rate of 18 percent, or nearly one in five adults (National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 2003).

One out of five adults in San Francisco is illiterate and we have 11 supervisors—it’s scary, right? If I think too much about this it keeps me up at night.

So I am proposing that our elected officials, especially our supervisors, post their reading lists on their websites, for the electorate to view, perhaps to even offer comments or questions.

Nothing reveals more about the human heart—who you are, your world view, your interests—than what you’re reading. Where do they get the recipes for all the laws they cook up? Do they read newspapers—I mean community newspapers? Poetry? Fiction? Non-fiction? Adrian Rich? Isabel Allende? Machiavelli? I would like to see the list of their dictionaries, and I hope to see lots of bilingual ones—like Spanish-English, Cantonese-English, Tagalog-Spanish-English, Russian-English. Caló. Me entiendes, Méndez? Or is it English-only dictionaries?

In the best of worlds we would find on their reading lists poetry, novels, history, art, philosophy.

One way out of this morass of violence brought to us in burning color by the powers that be…might just be a poem. Something created by another human being, easy to hold in one hand, or folded in the pocket—sometimes the gift of peace is as simple as that.

It’s not just about books, but writing and stories that speaks to us, our sense of who we are, who we have been—and, if there’s any time left on this planet, where we might be going.

One of the biggest problems in our society right now is that too many politicos run around downplaying reading and writing—proud of the fact they’ve never read a book, don’t know cacahuates about poetry or literature, much less art or music, and could care less. But we live in one of the great literary cities, rich with song and poetry going way back before any Euro cats showed up trapping beavers or digging for gold. So to ignore this heritage would be foolish for any politician. After all—as the wise poet once said, “Poetry is the best word in the best place.”

If we are truly a literate city—the City of Poets — then it must be all of us, from four-year-olds to 100-year-olds. We must all be good readers: From the Rammaytush songs still drifting in the fog that sweeps over Twin Peaks, to Maria Amparo Ruíz de Burton to Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Brown Buffalo, to Roberto Frost. Or any of the past poet laureates will do just fine, Ferlinghetti, Mirikitani, major, Hirschman, di Prima, a virtual all-star lists of voices, styles, visions.

As part of a literacy campaign aimed at city officials and our elected leaders, two poets Virginia Barrett and Bobby Coleman, have put together an anthology Occupy SF: poems from the movement that includes more than 100 poets, from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, devorah major and Jack Hirschman to many emerging poets. The two editors have launched a campaign to place this anthology in the hands of every city bureaucrat and elected official. They are operating as a nonprofit, and all proceeds go to benefit the evolving Occupy movement. The anthology is published by Jambu Press/Studio Saraswati, which can be contacted via email: saraswati.sf@gmail.com or snail mail at PO Box 720050, SF 94172.

And please, political leaders — no excuses about how busy you are. If that’s the case maybe you should retire so you can take some time to read.

 

 

A POETIC PAELLA

 

All the ingredients can be found

At your local bookstore

 

Take the honey from many languages

The poetic juice from many cultures

The crying songs of many lands

The spices of diverse foods

The love a parent has for a child

The love a child has for the wind

Include an image of bound feet

Discovered in a 19th century photo book

Plus the history of war crimes

Seasoned with the salt of exile

The lovers’ caress before sex

Blend them together In any order You will find wisdom in every bite

Alejandro Murguía is San Francisco’s poet laureate. His column will appear regularly.

Nudists to sue over Wiener law

Zelda Bronstein
-
62
Nudists to sue over Wiener law

Sup. Scott Wiener’s ban on public nudity hasn’t even come to a vote at the full board, but the nudists who oppose it are already planning to sue. A group of five plaintiffs, including former mayoral candidate George Davis and Gypsy Taub, who disrobed at a hearing on the issue, are arguing that the city lacks the legal authority to enact the ban, which they call a violation of protected free speech.

Christina DeEduoardo, the group’s attorney, told me she plans to file this week in federal court in San Francisco. “We’re going to ask for a temporary restraining order to prevent the supervisors from enacting this law,” she explained.

It’s not easy to get a court to pre-emptively block a law that hasn’t been approved, but DeEduoardo said she’s going to argue that state law pre-empts San Francisco from taking this type of action. “When a municipality does something at odds with state law, there’s a reason to prevent it,” she said.

California law already regulates lewd behavior, and the state courts have consistently held that mere nudity is not a violation of that statute. “Nothing says the city has to power to regulate dress,” she argued. “It’s the equivalent of the Board of Supervisors saying that in October the only colors you can wear are black and orange.”

Even if the state doesn’t pre-empt San Francisco’s right to ban nudity, DeEduoardo said, there’s a First Amendment issue here: “This purports to ban all nude expression. My clients engage in nudity as speech. The law is way over-broad.” There’s even an equal-protection argument: Wiener’s legislation specifically exempts major city events, like Bay to Breakers and the Folsom Street Fair — but those things cost a lot of money. “So the city’s saying if you have the money for a permit, you can engage in nudity, but if you can’t afford that, and you just want to go au naturel, then you are a criminal.”

Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office, told me he doesn’t expect any sort of injunction. “State law is very clear that injunctions can’t be granted to prevent a legislative act,” he said.

If a federal judge won’t issue a restraining order, the nudists are going to sue to overturn the law the minute it passes. So there’s likely to be a long, expensive legal battle — and it seems so silly. Particularly since it’s getting chilly out and the rainy season is about to start, and Mother Nature will be dealing with the naked guys pretty quickly.

1...192021...103Page 20 of 103

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org