Supervisors Archives — Page 27 of 103 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Don’t water down campaign laws

Andrew Lam

-

June 5, 2012

EDITORIAL The San Francisco Ethics Commission, which is hardly aggressive about cracking down on campaign-finance violations, has suggested some rule changes that would water down the city’s ethics laws. The supervisors should reject most of the suggestions — and start talking about real reform.

The commission has asked Sup. Scott Wiener to bring the changes to the board, and Wiener told us that he has problems with some of them and is going to be working with his colleagues, particularly Sup. David Campos, to fix the package.

It will need a lot of amendments to be acceptable.

The current proposal would make life easier for campaigns and big donors, but would make it harder for the public to figure out who’s putting up the money and where it’s going. For example, it would exempt from the spending cap all money spent complying with the ethics laws. That sounds fair at first glance — but the amounts involved are huge. For a mayoral race, as much as $147,000 would be exempted. That’s a lot of money for “compliance.”

More important, the ethics proposal would eliminate the restrictions on how much a single donor can give in an election season. Right now, the cumulative limit is $500 for each office on the ballot, which limits the impact that a handful of big-money contributors can have on an election. Under the new rule, a wealthy person who wants to make sure that every politician in town owes him or her can donate the maximum to a long list of candidates, giving more power to a few.

Wiener says that under ranked-choice voting, donors should be able to give to more than one candidate for a single office. Fine — but the cap doesn’t have to be eliminated. It could easily be amended to account for RCV.

The plan would somewhat loosen the reporting requirements in the last days of a campaign, eliminating weekend disclosures. It would decrease the transparency rules for campaign committees that shuffle money back and forth to hide its true source. It would aalow more spending by independent committees with less disclosure.

In other words, it would undermine the ability of the voters to know who is funding which candidates and initiative campaigns. There’s no reason to do any of that.

The problem with the current law is not that it requires too much disclosure — it’s that, in many ways, the controls on political money are too weak. And if the supervisors are serious about reform, there’s plenty to be done.

Ethics laws currently bar anyone who is seeking a city contract from donating to local officials. But it’s still perfectly legal for someone seeking a permit or zoning change to throw around cash. And there are endless problems with developers who need city officials on their side. Extending the contribution ban to anyone seeking special zoning or permit approval for any project with construction costs above a certain threshold — say, $10 million — would exclude, say, homeowners who want to build a new deck, but would limit the role of real-estate money in campaigns.

The amendments need eight votes to pass; before it even gets to the full board, the Rules Committee ought to ship this mess back to the Ethics Commission and tell the supposed watchdogs to try again.

Vote yes on Prop A for competitive bidding for garbage and against Recology monopoly

-

June 3, 2012

12

As a reporter for the old Redwood City Tribune in 1965 or so, I got a call one day from the late Luman Drake, then an indefatigable environmental activist in Brisbane. “Bruce,” he said, “you are good at exposing scandals on the Peninsula, but you have missed the biggest scandal of them all. Garbage, garbage in the Bay off Brisbane, garbage alongside the Bay Shore going into San Francisco.”

He then outlined for me, his voice rising in anger, how the scavengers of an early era had muscled through a longtime contract to dump San Francisco’s garbage into the bay alongside the Bay Shore freeway. And, he said, they are still doing it. Why can’t you fight it? I asked naively.

“Fight it, fight it,” he replied. “The scavengers are the most powerful political force in San Francisco and there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about it.” I checked out his story, then and through the years, and he was right. Everyone driving in and out of San Francisco could watch with horror for years as the scavengers kept dumping San Francisco garbage into a big chunk of the bay. (Note the oral history from Drake and then Mayor Paul Goercke and others who fought the losing fight for years to kick out the scavengers from Brisbane.) http://legendarymarketingenius.com/oralhistorySBMW.html)

Five decades later, the scavengers are still a preeminent political power in San Francisco. The scavengers (now Recology) have operated since 1932 without competitive bidding, without regulation of its high residential and commercial rates, without a franchise fee, and without any real oversight. Finally, after all these years as king of the hill, Recology’s monopoly is being challenged by Proposition A, an initiative aimed at forcing Recology for the first time to undergo competitive bidding and thereby save city residents and businesses millions of dollars in rates and service.

Let me say up front that I salute former State Senator and retired Judge Quentin Kopp and Tony Kelly, president of the Potrero Hill Boosters and the Guardian’s candidate for District l0 election (Potrero Hill/BayView/Hunters Point). They have taken this measure on when nobody else would, without much money or resources, and up against a $l.5 million campaign by Recology and enormous, nasty political pressure. I also salute those who publicly signed on to their brochure: Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods, San Francisco Tomorrow, SF Human Services Network, David Bisho,Walter Farrell, George Wooding, Irene Creps, Alexa Vuksich, the San Francisco Examiner, SF Appeal.com, and the Guardian.

I was delighted to get a Yes on A brochure at my house in West Portal and find that Kopp and Kelly et al had money enough to make a strong statement in a strong campaign mailer. Kopp and Kelly persuasively summarized the key points for A and against more galloping Recology monopoly in the brochure. Meanwhile, the Recology forces have been using gobs of money, a massive mail campaign, robot calls, and deploying the kind of political muscle their predecessors used to keep dumping garbage in the bay off Brisbane for decades. Since the Yes on A camp has trouble cutting through the cannonading and the flak, let me lay out the A arguments verbatim from its brochure.

Question in the brochure: “Why is Recology spending millions to buy this election? Recology has contributed $l,580,292.70 against Prop A. (Form 460 SF Ethics Commission.” Answer in the brochure; “So they can raise your garbage rates after the election! ‘San Francisco Prepares For Recology to Raise Garbage Rates’ (Contract is Proof Recology Plans to Hike Garbage Rates Following Election’”) Then they laid out l0 reasons to vote Yes on A.

1. “71 Bay Area cities have competitive bidding or franchise agreements for garbage services. Because San Francisco doesn’t, residential trash collection rates have increased 136% in the last 11 years, with another massive increase coming after the election! We pay more than twice as much for garbage and recycling as San Jose, a city with twice the land and about 400,000 more people.

2. “The garbage collection/recycling monopoly now grosses about $220 million per year from the city’s residents and businesses, without any regulation of commercial rates.

3. “How did we end up paying so much? In 2001 the monopoly requested a 52% rate increase, Department of Public Works staff recommended 20% and the then DPW director (now Mayor) Ed Lee granted a 44 %rate increase. That’s why the Examiner said: ‘no-bid contracts generally make for dirty public policy, and this includes…The City’s garbage collection monopoly…’

4. “Don’t believe the monopoly’s 78% recycling rate claim backed only by its puppet city department. A former Recology recycling manager has testified under oath that fraudulent reporting, excessive state reimbursements and even kickbacks to and from Recology employees are behind this bogus claim. Another ‘whistleblower’ has revealed that even sand removal from the Great Highway was included in this 78%.

5. “With a far smaller population, Oakland receives $24 million each year as a franchise fee, which supports city services and prevents other tax and fee increases. San Francisco receives zilch from the monopoly holder in franchise fees for our General Fund.

6. “Proposition A is on the ballot through citizen/ratepayer time and effort, in the face of intimidation and harassment by the monopoly’s agents and its multi-million dollar campaign against it.

7. “Proposition A is simple: it authorizes the Director of Public Works and the Board of Supervisors’ Budget Analyst to prepare competitive bidding regulations for residential and commercial collection, recycling, and disposal, by modifying an outdated 1932 ordinance.

8. “Like all other competitive-bid city contracts, the winning garbage service bid will be ratified by the Board of Supervisors without any political tinkering. The winning bid will contain the best deal for city ratepayers.

9. “If the monopoly is truly the corporation portrayed in its expensive campaign to defeat Prop A, it would easily win every bid. As the Examiner stated last year, ‘…contracts won by competitive bidding are always better for the public in the long run.’

10. And then the list of endorsers ‘and tens of thousands of other ratepayers.’”

Kopp and Kelly et al are providing a major public service by challenging an arrogant monopoly of an essential public service and keeping alive the concept of competitive bidding on city contracts in San Francisco. I drink to them from a pitcher of Potrero Hill martinis. Vote early and often for Prop A. B3

Election turnout expected to be less than 40 percent

Sasha Cuttler

-

June 1, 2012

2

Election turnout expected to be less than 40 percent

If they held an election and nobody noticed, would it still count? Because that’s what this Tuesday’s presidential primary election is starting to feel like: the election that everyone ignored.

Okay, okay, not everyone is ignoring this election. San Francisco Elections Director John Arnst tells us that his department has received about 55,000 mail-in ballots so far out of the nearly 217,000 they sent out, a turnout of about 25 percent. And 1,110 voters have cast their ballots in person during early voting at City Hall as of this afternoon, a level lower than the 2010 or 2008 primaries “by quite a bit,” Arnst said.

That’s not really surprising given that both major political parties have already chosen their presidential candidates, there are no other offices being seriously contested, and the rest of the ballot consists of the Democratic County Central Committee (and its Green and Republican parties counterparts) races and a pair each of ho-hum statewide and local ballot measures. The most interesting one is Proposition A, which seeks to break Recology’s waste collection monopoly in San Francisco by requiring competitive bidding.

“If the garbage issue is the most exciting issue on the ballot, you know it’s the most boring election ever,” says Tony Kelly, who is leading the campaign for Prop. A.

With the exception of a press conference that Kelly and other Prop. A supporters held last week to accuse Recology of being complicit in an alleged recycling kickback scheme by some of its employees, there’s been little to indicate Prop. A has much chance of success given that almost every endorsing group (except the Guardian) opposes the measure.

“Goliath doesn’t lose very often, and we’re being outspent 100 to one,” Kelly said, expressing hopes that the measure can at least garner 35-40 percent of the vote to send a message that Recology should work with the city to allow competitive bidding on some of its contracts.

But with turnout expected to be low, Recology isn’t taking any chances. Its political consultant, Eric Potashner, says the campaign has been assembling up to a couple hundred volunteers and its SoMa headquarters each weekend and “we’re doing the full grassroots outreach.” He expressed confidence that the measure will be defeated: “Folks have been well educated on this issue.”

Arnst estimates that this will be a historically low turnout election: “Top end right now, comparing the last three presidential primaries, I’m looking at 40 percent as the top turnout possible.”

But you know what that means, right? Your vote could be more decisive than ever, particularly for the 24 members of the DCCC, the outcome of which could move the ideological center of that body before its important endorsements in the fall Board of Supervisors races. So click here to take a look at the Guardian’s endorsements and don’t forget to vote.

Lee avoids budget drama, but other fiscal fights loom

Sasha Cuttler

-

May 31, 2012

7

Lee avoids budget drama, but other fiscal fights loom

When Mayor Ed Lee unveiled his proposed $7.3 billion city budget today, it was a sharp contrast to the annual budget rituals of his predecessor, Gavin Newsom, both in style and substance. Not only did Lee present a budget without employee layoffs or cuts to critical social services, but he capped months of collaborative work with the Board of Supervisors by presenting his proposal in Board Chambers.

Newsom preferred to offer his budgets during press conferences in his office or at media-friendly events outside City Hall, and his budgets were developed with little input from supervisors and almost always included controversial cuts to programs favored by progressive supervisors or constituencies, triggering an angry backlash that created an air of acrimony around the board’s budget hearings.

“It’s a very good budget. We’re very pleased with the process the mayor followed, and with the outcome in most cases,” Sup. David Campos told us, later adding, “The fact that the budget was presented in chambers was a good thing and a real change.”

Flanked at the podium by Board President David Chiu and Budget Committee Chair Carmen Chu, Lee began his address to the capacity crowd of department heads and other interested parties by noting, “As many of you know, I’m a person who does not like a whole lot of drama.”

He thanked those who have worked on the budget over the last six months – which included tough negotiations with labor unions that were tempered by higher-than-expected city revenues – and said the budget “really is an expression of our values as a city.” And this time, it was a statement and set of priorities that even progressives could agreed with.

“At a time of state cuts, protecting our social safety net is more important than ever,” Lee said as he announced that his budget included full funding for public health, human services, and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs, all of which were cut by Newsom, with the supervisors then having to find funding to restore them.

Lee credited his economic development programs with this year’s budget turnaround – commenting that “San Francisco’s economy has recovered and our reserves are growing” – and it is true that the payroll taxes paid by businesses came in about $65 million above projections.

But an even bigger factor in this year’s projected budget deficit shrinking from $263 million to $170 million was the increase in the real estate transfer tax on properties over $5 million, proposed by progressives and approved by voters in 2010. The real estate transfer tax is expected to bring in more than $200 million in the coming fiscal year, $85 million more than this year. By comparison, the 5 percent across-the-board budget cuts that Lee ordered earlier this year amounted to just $58 million.

How to view the improving city budget situation is critical right now as Lee and his business community allies finalize negotiations over their fall ballot proposals to reform the city’s business tax structure and to create a housing trust fund to subsidize affordable residential development. Each needs to be in final form by the end of June, and Lee told us both are still being negotiated behind closed doors.

Lee has insisted the business tax reform be revenue-neutral, but SEIU Local 1021, the largest city employee union, wants it to bring in an additional $30-50 million per year, which represents how much the city has lost every year since 2001 when the biggest downtown corporations sued to invalidate the city’s gross receipts tax.

That union recently commissioned a study from researcher David Kersten of Kersten Communications that shows the city’s budget picture is actually better than presented in the mayor’s budget, which relies on revenue projections from March even though revenues have continued to increase since then. “I think it’s a little dishonest to put out deficit figures that are so out of date,” Kersten told us, arguing that it was a deliberate effort to maintain a sense of fiscal crisis in the city.

“We know that revenues are coming in higher than it was in March,” the union’s Gabriel Haaland told us. “They need to be honest with what the fiscal picture is.”

Indeed, despite the absence of the major doom-and-gloom that has marked past budget proposals, this year’s budget – the city first two-year budget proposal, thanks to voters approving Prop. A last year – continues to project a city government in decline in the coming years.

While Lee managed to avoid deep social service cuts, and propose a beefing up of the Police and Fire departments, it predicts that “General Administrative and Finance” functions will drop to $834.3 million in 2012-13 and $831.1 million in 2013-14, and that “General City Responsibilities” will fall to $615.2 million in 2012-13 and $579.7 million in 2013-14.

Campos said that it’s important to reverse the deep cuts that city government has undergone every year for more than decade, starting with a business tax reform measure that brings in new revenue as it broadens the tax base. “We can’t forget there have been sacrifices that have been made,” he said. “Revenue enhancement has to be part of the solution.”

Lee and his supporters in the business community have portrayed the stimulation of economic growth as the key to the city’s fiscal salvation, even as they create business tax exemptions for Twitter and other companies to create that growth. But tech companies with venture capital funding can end up increasing rents and other costs on the rest of the economy, as Lee acknowledged in his speech.

“I know there are anxieties out there because rents are starting to sneak up,” Lee said, arguing for a housing trust fund to subsidize “more housing for people at every income level.”

After his speech, Lee acknowledged that he still hasn’t struck a deal on the proposal – which commercial landlords are opposing because it would be funded by an increase in the real estate transfer tax – saying they were discussing the possibility of a new funding mechanism. “We have a little gap and we’re trying to figure that out,” Lee said.

Asked by reporters how he was able to avoid the deep cuts of previous budgets, Lee credited the improving revenue situation and said, “I think we’re incredibly lucky.”

Sup. Cohen answers some Impertinent Questions on sunshine

-

May 30, 2012

1

b3 Note: I sent some Impertinent Questions to the supervisors who voted against Bruce Wolfe, an excellent task force member, and for Todd David (See other sunshine blogs.) To their credit, Sups.Elsbernd and Malia Cohen responded, Sup. David Chiu said he could not make the deadline but would reply with a new deadline. Sups.Wiener and Farrell and Carmen Chiu have not responded.

Dear Bruce –
It was nice to see you the other night at the Potrero Hill Boosters dinner. I believe very strongly in the Sunshine Ordinance, transparency and efficiency in government. I also believe that the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force is an essential component of ensuring that our City departments are open with members of the public. As I mentioned in my comments on Tuesday, I have significant concerns with opinions of some of the Task Force’s members that the City Charter does not apply to them in the same manner as it applies to all other elected and appointed bodies in the City. I also have concerns about the inefficiency of Task Force meetings and the process by which complaints are adjudicated. I was encouraged by the qualifications of a number of new applicants that applied to serve on the Task Force. In particular I believe that the newly appointed members bring a diverse skill set in consumer advocacy, media relations and community involvement in governmental issues. It has also been one of my commitments as a member of the Board of Supervisors to increase the diversity of the membership of our City’s appointed bodies, whether that be on the Small Business Commission, Entertainment Commission or the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, and I believe that the new appointees bring a much needed level of diversity to this body. I also want to stress that we still have a number of seats that the Rules Committee has not yet recommended appointments to. I know that it is my intention and I would also bet that it is the intention of my colleagues to ensure that these remaining vacant seats meet the requirement to have a physically handicapped individual on the Task Force, as well as individuals who bring expertise and experience in the above mentioned areas.

Always at your service,
Supervisor Malia Cohen

B 3 comment: Your “strong” belief in the sunshine ordinance and task force is admirable but would be more so if you didn’t reject knowledgeable representatives from the organizations with open government and public access credentials and experience. And if you weren’t voting for the big development projects that want as little sunshine as possible on their contracts and operations and lobbying.

Stop the presses: Sup. Elsbernd blasts B3 for Impertinent Questions on sunshine

-

May 30, 2012

0

Elsbern answers Impertinent Questions from B3 and James Chaffee (Scroll down)

First off, to your reference about still looking for me at Que
Syrah, or one of the other great West Portal establishments, you have been
saying this to me repeatedly for a long time now. Initially, it was a bit
funny, a nice little inside joke (although since you post on your blog our
e-mail exchanges, not so “inside”) between a couple of people who really do
not see eye to eye on many issues.

However, as you continued to perpetuate
this inside joke, it transitioned from being a bit funny, to a bit odd. If
you’d like to meet with me, let’s schedule a time. Thus far, you have only
offered Que Syrah’s happy hour time, which I have explained to you, on at
least two occasions, does not work for me as it is a weeknight immediately
after work – a time I reserve for my wife and son. I can meet with you
during the day most week days, or later in the evening after I put my son
to bed

Now, if I am wrong here, and just misreading your intentions by
misunderstanding the tone in your e-mails, I apologize. I know you are a
journalist and like to write, but maybe we would do better if you picked up
the phone and called me rather than solely initiating communication with me
by e-mail. If it is simply your intent to catch me in the act of enjoying a
meal on West Portal, I plan on having breakfast there this Saturday at 8:00
am at the Village Grill with my son – come join us if you’d like, although
to warn you, breakfast with a 3 year old is not necessarily that conducive
to a productive policy discussion. (B3: Sorry I couldn’t make your date but let’s reschedule. I didn’t phone because I wanted your reply in writing and on the written record.)

Second, congratulations to you on the sale of the Guardian and the
associated real property, assuming the recent media reports are true. I am
thrilled that the economic climate in San Francisco is allowing you to make
a little bit of money. As an aside, I hope you complete the real estate
transaction before the November election; there is a proposed property
transfer tax increase on the November ballot that could hamper your

profits. B3: As a small business, the Guardian pays high business and property taxes.
We don’t get Twitter type tax breaks nor friendly PG&E/Recology monopoly concessions. And we are annoyed

that the wealthy individuals and businesses intown are shifting more and more taxes to small businesses and residents,

I hope you can work on this.

Third, on to the Chaffee letter and his points. I do agree with his
point that what happened on Tuesday has happened before. In fact, on March
8, 2011, at a meeting of the full Board of Supervisors, the full Board was
asked to approve the nominations of the Rules Committee for three seats on
the Citizen’s Committee on Community Development. Nicole Rivera was one of
the 3 nominees approved by the Rules Committee; Charles Scianmas applied
and appeared before the Rules Committee, but was not put forward as one of
the 3 nominees. At the full Board meeting, Supervisor John Avalos moved,
with Supervisor David Campos seconding the motion, to remove Ms. Rivera and
replace her with Mr. Scianmas. The full Board approved this motion to
amend (Avalos, Campos, Chiu, Kim, Mar, and Mirkarimi voting aye), and then
appointed Mr. Scianmas. They did all this without taking any public
comment on Supervisor Avalos’s motion. This is the exact same process
Supervisor Weiner used when he moved to amend the item on Tuesday.

Refresh my memory – did you write Supervisor Avalos an e-mail asking
him why he did this after the March 8, 2011 Board meeting without taking
public comment? Did you contact any of the other five Board members who
voted for this motion without taking public comment first? Did you blog
about why the Board majority took this action without taking public
comment? Did the Guardian publish an article about why the Board took this
action without taking public comment? Or, in the converse, did the Guardian
trumpet this move by Supervisor Avalos because it liked the result?

Obviously, the point I am making is that you are criticizing a
process today because you simply do not like the outcome. If the outcome

was one of which you approved, I doubt very much you would be forwarding meMr. Chaffee’s letter. And, in fact, your past practice proves my point. B3: Your coup sabotaged the sunshine ordinance and task force on behalf of the Willie Brown gang and the boys and girls in the back room. It particularly galls me and others when it is done in violation of the spirit and letter of the city’s sunshine ordinance. Your vote for the developer’s shady last minute maneuvers on the Park Merced deal in your district is a good example.

Finally, to your general concerns about replacing the Sunshine Task
Force incumbents with new citizens, I believe Supervisor Weiner articulated
the need for this action quite well during the Board meeting. Frankly,
let’s be honest, if any other City Board, commission, or task force decided
to take it upon themselves, ignore every bit of City Attorney legal advice
and every known precedent under the Charter and Robert’s Rules of Order, to
take official actions even when a quorum is not present, the Guardian would
be critiquing, if not execrating said body and all of its members. Wait, I
take that back. If LAFCO took that action, it would probably get a pass
too.
Sincerely,
Sean
P.S. Please let me know if I should get a booth for two or three this
Saturday morning.

From:        Bruce Brugmann <bruce@sfbg.com>
To:        Sean Elsbernd <sean.elsbernd@sfgov.org>
Date:        05/24/2012 10:57 AM
Subject:        On Guard: Some more questions on “The Return of Willie
   Brownism to the sunshine task force”

Dear Sup. Elsbernd, (Chaffee letter below) I am still looking for you
at Que Syrah and this morning at the Manor and last week at the Village
Grill
I am now sending you a copy of an open letter from James Chaffee to the
board (dated Tuesday, May 22, the day of the 6-5 vote) that was done with
the intention in my view (and that of many others) of knocking out the
knowledgeable and experienced people from the task force and in effect
gutting the body. I would appreciate your comments on his points that the
maneuvering and his point that the the vote “was the perfect example of a
failure to follow the Sunshine Ordinance that led to the sort of problem
that it was intended to forestall.” Chaffee served with me as the chair
on the sunshine task force and was the chair. He is a longtime proponent
of open government. I would also appreciate any comments you have on the
bruce blog I sent you earlier, “The Return of Willie Brownism to the
sunshine task force.”

In short, why are you and Sup. Wiener and Farrell making this attack on
open government and the sunshine ordinance/task force.? Many thanks, b3

—– Forwarded Message —–
From: “James Chaffee” <chaffeej@pacbell.net>
To: “board of supervisors” <board.of.supervisors@sfgov.org>, “Carmen Chu”
<Carmen.Chu@sfgov.org>, “Christina Olague” <Christina.Olague@sfgov.org>,
“David Campos” <David.Campos@sfgov.org>, “David Chiu”
<David.Chiu@sfgov.org>, “Eric L. Mar” <Eric.L.Mar@sfgov.org>, “Jane Kim”
<Jane.Kim@sfgov.org>, “John Avalos” <John.Avalos@sfgov.org>, “Malia Cohen”
<Malia.Cohen@sfgov.org>, “Mark Farrell” <Mark.Farrell@sfgov.org>, “Scott
Wiener” <Scott.Wiener@sfgov.org>, “Sean Elsbernd” <Sean.Elsbernd@sfgov.org>
Cc: mpetrelis@aol.com, Pmonette-shaw@earthlink.net, “rita august”
<rita_august@msn.com>, hopeannette@earthlink.net, hgarfolocgj@yahoo.com,
dougcomz@mac.com, amwashburn@comcast.net, kimo@webnetic.net, “jay costa09”
<jay.costa09@gmail.com>, “ben rosenfeld” <ben.rosenfeld@comcast.net>,
grossman356@mac.com, smanneh@newamericamedia.org, han467@yahoo.com,
editorcitireport@gmail.com, “mother ed” <mother_ed@bigeds.com>,
missforties@hotmail.com, libraryusers2004@yahoo.com,
derekonvanness@aol.com, bruce@sfbg.com, rwhartzjr@sbcglobal.net,
karenrolph@hotmail.com, sotf@brucewolfe.net, “Richard Knee”
<rak0408@earthlink.net>
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 12:18:34 AM
Subject: Chaffee — Perfect Example, Sunshine Appointment Today

Dear Friends,

Today’s Board of Supervisor’s meeting included an item for approval of
appointments to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.

Supervisor Weiner moved to amend the motion to delete Bruce Wolfe from the
recommendation that was passed out of committee and replace him with David
Todd. That amendment passed.

As almost everyone knows, there is no public comment on a motion that was
heard at a committee. It has been accepted by the Supervisors in the past
and acknowledged by the City Attorney’s Office that if the motion that was
heard in committee is changed substantially so that what is being
considered no longer reflects what was passed out of committee, public
comment needs to be taken again. This is designed to give people time to
lobby the supervisors, or point out any mistakes, and not to be subjected
to surprises. As a matter of fact, it has been past practice for the
Supervisors to list the appointee’s names on the agenda. This is the first
time I have noticed it was not done. Is this another example of the
Supervisors hiding a proposed action to give them “flexibility.”

Yet the Supervisors passed the amended motion without taking public
comment.

As probably everyone but Scott Weiner knows, the Sunshine Ordinance at
§67.30(a) states that: “At all times the task force shall include at least
one member who shall be a member of the public who is physically
handicapped and who has demonstrated interest in citizen access and
participation in local government.”

Bruce Wolfe has been filling that requirement on the Task Force. Is David
Todd physically handicapped? What plan do the supervisors have to assure
that this requirement is fulfilled?

If there had been the required public comment, someone could have brought
it up? As a matter of fact, the idea for public comment is not just to
make the commenter feel better. The primary idea is that public decisions
will benefit from the collective wisdom of the citizens.

This is the perfect example of a failure to follow the Sunshine Ordinance
that led to the sort of problem that it was intended to forestall, namely
the Supervisors taking an action without being informed of what they are
doing. If Scott Weiner and David Chui and the rest of the crew did not
consider the citizens the enemy and exercise judgment about whether they
were complying with the spirit of open government rather than just shaving
off letter of the law as closely as possible, this could have been avoided.

Of course, I don’t know for a fact that Todd David is not physically
handicapped. I took a look at his application and he is self employed as
an investor, obtained a B.A. from Stanford in 1993, has never attended a
Task Force meeting, and left the statement of his qualifications blank. I
took a look at the video of the May 17, Rules Committee meeting and he had
no obvious physical handicap. It is easy to see why Scott Weiner likes
him; he said it would be a long road before he would go against the City
Attorney’s office, and when it came to constitutional law he would place
the City Attorney’s opinion above his own because the City Attorney is an
“expert.”

James Chaffee

City attorney responds on sunshine task force attacks

-

May 30, 2012

4

B3 note: Here are responses from City Attorney Dennis Herrera to Impertinent Questions from B3 on why the city attorney helped facilitate the supervisorial attack on the sunshine ordinance and task force (See previous B3 sunshine blogs).

Regarding recommended SOTF candidates

Section 67.30 (a) of the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance provides that the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force’s eleven voting members be “appointed by the Board of Supervisors.” That same section designates that a total of four members be appointed by the Board from names submitted for consideration by: the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists; the League of Women Voters; and New California Media. I’m informed that when the Board’s Rules Committee conducted its hearing and interviewed SOTF applicants, only one person was recommended for each seat by these entities. The Rules Committee then continued action on those seats until the entities submitted additional names. Legally, there is nothing problematic about such a continuance.

Regarding designated seats

Section 67.30 (a) includes specific designations for each of the seats on the SOTF. It additionally provides that one of those seats be a person with a disability, although it does not prescribe which of the 11 seats be designated to a person with a disability. I’ll be honest here: I’m not aware of whether Mr. Todd has a disability or not. But given that the Board still has to fill four remaining vacant SOTF seats, it will comply with the Sunshine Ordinance so long as one of the SOTF seats is timely filled by “a member of the public who is physically handicapped and who has demonstrated interest in citizen access and participation in local government.”

Regarding public comment

Public comment occurs in board committees. Each SOTF applicant spoke at the Rules Committee, and members of the public had the opportunity there to offer their comments on all of the applicants. Although the Rules Committee forwarded six recommendations out of committee, the record transmitted to the full Board included the entire file — including all the other applicants. The City Attorney’s Office has long advised the Board of its authority to amend appointing motions, and to instead appoint someone else, so long as that appointee’s name and application was before the Rules committee, and so long as it was subject to public comment. That was indeed the case here. At the committee level, applicants speak; members of the public speak about the applicants; and then public comment is closed. The committee then decides on its recommended appointments — but public comment is not reopened to comment on the committee’s choices.

Regarding the role of the City Attorney

With respect to your question about why the City Attorney is “allowing” certain actions by clients, I should briefly address the role of the City Attorney under San Francisco Charter § 6.102. Beyond the particular set of circumstances addressed in this email, most questions about what the City Attorney “allows” or “disallows” really misinterpret the office’s function. In many contexts over many years, the office has reiterated that “[t]he City Attorney is not a policy maker.” (See: http://www.sfcityattorney.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=953 ) The City Attorney’s Good Government Guide (pages 19-21) addresses at length the role the City Attorney plays in providing legal counsel to the City and its elected officers, commissions and employees (See: http://www.sfcityattorney.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=686 )

This office provides legal advice to clients, while also acknowledging that the policy-making authority of the Board and Mayor includes the prerogative to assess for itself the relative legal risks of its actions, understanding that this office will defend its actions “so long as there are legally tenable arguments to support doing so.” In that sense, the role is no different from that of any lawyer providing advice to a client: attorneys counsel; but clients, ultimately, decide.

Best,
MATT DORSEY
Press Secretary to City Attorney Dennis Herrera

B3 comment: The city attorney has made the case for the task force to get independent legal advice and to bring in an independent attorney to represent the task force. More: It is yet another reason to have an independent attorney as a task force member who is strong enough to go up against the city attorney as appropriate on critical issues. This was the original reason for SPJ, with its experience in public access and First Amendment issues and litigation, to nominate an experienced attorney. This was the first time the supervisors rejected the SPJ nominee (and nominees from other organizations as mandated by the charter) without a proper explanation or apology or a nice word of thanks. .He helped Willie Brownism prevail for the first time with the sunshine ordinance and task force.

Sunshine eclipse: Supervisors ramp up their war on sunshine

-

May 30, 2012

1

And so the San Francisco supervisors ramped up their war on sunshine on Tuesday (May 22) when they rejected five qualified candidates for the sunshine task force and substituted five in experienced in candidates with no experience or visible qualifications.

The key vote was to reject Bruce Wolfe, an experienced task force member, and substitute Todd David, a self-employed investor whose application for the task force said he had never attended a task force meeting and left blank the statement of his qualifications. Here’s the story I wrote for the current Guardian:

http://www.sfbg.com/2012/05/30/sunshine-eclipsed

Housing and highrise offices

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

May 30, 2012

0

EDITORIAL It's something of a civic shame that the only way San Francisco can build a new transit terminal is to sell a private developer the rights to stick a 1,070-foot highrise office tower on public land. In fact, it's a sad statement on the city, state, and local government: Once upon a time — and it wasn't the long ago — tax dollars collected through a progressive system paid for major infrastructure projects.

But there's no easy way to raise $4 billion in tax money for the Transbay Terminal — even though it ought to be seen as part of the high-speed rail project, and the federal and state government ought to be picking up the tab. So San Francisco ambles forward, selling land and lease rights to the highest bidder.

In this case, Gerald Hines of Houston won the right to build the largest highrise west of the Mississippi on property owned by the Transbay Joint Powers Authority. There are all sorts of drawbacks to the deal — among other things, it will cast shadows on a number of city parks, all the way to Portsmouth Square in Chinatown. Like any massive office complex, it will put pressure on Muni, on city streets, on police and fire and other city services — and no commercial office building ever pays its fair share of that burden. And since in this case the major recipient of the money from the project will be the TJPA, the city's General Fund will suffer.

Oh, and the building is ugly.

Meanwhile, city planners want to increase height limits all around the Transbay Terminal and allow hundreds of units of new (luxury) housing and more commercial office space. It's going to be a new highrise neighborhood, complete with a rooftop park and a few little patches of ground-level open space, which won't get a whole lot of sun, particularly in the morning and evening.

And at this point, there's been very little focus on what ought to be the defining issue of this and the other major developments on the city's planning horizon, and that's affordable housing.

This city has a terrible jobs-housing mix. The vast majority of the people who currently work in San Francisco can't afford to buy a house here, and many of them can only rent if they pay for more than the federal standard of one-third of their income for housing. So people who work in hotels and restaurants and city, state and federal offices and hospitals and even financial district companies wind up living far from the city and commuting. Nobody thinks that's a sound environmental policy.

And this kind of full-scale rezoning and development will only make it worse. According to the City Planning Department, the Hines project will pay about $27 million into the city's affordable housing fund, enough to pay for maybe 60 or 70 housing units. That won't even begin to cover the need created by the thousands of employees who will fill that tower. The market-rate housing on the site will almost certainly be beyond the reach of most San Franciscans, and probably many of the office workers who fill the Hines building. And only 35 percent of the new housing — at maximum — will be affordable.

San Francisco has to get a grip. The city can't keep allowing more high-end housing and highrise office space without a plan to meet its housing needs. We're glad to see the mayor talking about a $50 million a year fund, but that will barely meet existing needs; it can't possible keep pace with new development.

So before the supervisors rush ahead to approve this ambitious new downtown district, they need to ask Hines, and the TJPA, and any other developer who comes along, how it intends to meet the demonstrated need for affordable housing that these projects will create — and demand a much higher level of payment that what's currently on the city's books.

Sunshine eclipsed

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

May 30, 2012

1

As an advocate for the passage of the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance in the early 1990s, I felt obligated to take my first and only City Hall position and serve as a founding member of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. I served for l0 years and helped with many other good members to build the task force into a strong and respected agency for helping citizens get access to records and meetings and hold city officials accountable for suppressing access and information.

The task force is the first and best local sunshine task force of its kind in the country, if not the world. It is the only place where citizens can file an access complaint without an attorney or a fee and force a city official, including the mayor, to come before the task force for questioning and a ruling on whether they had violated sunshine laws. The task force lacked enforcement powers, but it still annoyed city officials, including Mayor Willie Brown.

In fact, Brown spent a good deal of time trying to kick me off the task force. He used one jolly maneuver after another, even getting an agent to make a phony complaint against me for violating the ordinance with an email (The complaint went nowhere). I refused to budge and decided to stay on until Brown left office—on the principle that neither the mayor nor anybody else from City Hall could arbitrarily kick members off the task force.

That principle held until about 3pm last Thursday (May 17) at the meeting of the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee to appoint candidates to the task force. At that meeting, without proper notice, advance warning, explanation, apology, or even a nice word or two, the supervisors suddenly turned a normal drowsy committee meeting into an unprecedented bloodbath for the task force and its independence. Sup. Mark Farrell played the heavy, Jane Kim was the facilitating chair, and David Campos was the reluctant third party, working together to bring Willie Brownism back at the task force with a vengeance.

The committee rejected four qualified candidates from three organizations who are mandated by the Sunshine Ordinance to choose representatives for the task force because of the organizations’ special open government credentials. (Doug Comstock, editor of the West of Twin Peaks Observer; Attorney Ben Rosenfeld from the Northern California chapter of Society of Professional Journalists, sponsor of the ordinance; Allyson Washburn from the League of Women Voters and Suzanne Manneh from America New Media.)

The committee without blushing asked the organizations to come up with a “list of names,” a whiff of grapeshot aimed at members and organizations who had served the public well for years. Who wants to go before the supervisors on a list of names for a bout of public character assassination? Meanwhile, while knocking off the qualified, knowledgeable candidates, the committee approved four neophytes without experience and then unanimously appointed David Pilpel, a former task force member known for delaying meetings with bursts of nitpicking. He almost always comes down on the side of City Hall and against citizens with their complaints.

Farrell also tried to bounce Bruce Wolfe, an excellent member, but Kim and Campos supported him and his name was sent on to the full board for approval.

Then, when Wolfe’s name got to the board on May 22, it was a repeat of Willie Brownism and this time to the max. Sup. Scott Wiener moved to amend the motion and substituted Todd David. Farrell seconded. The vote was 6-5, meaning that Willie Brownism wiped the sunshine slate clean of anybody who would raise a pesky question of city officials and the City Attorney’s Office.

The infamous votes against Wolfe: Wiener (ah, yes, the heir of the Harvey Milk and Harry Britt seat in the Castro), Farrell (where is Janet Reilly when we need her?), Malia Cohen (who comes from the Potrero Hill/Bay View/Hunters Point district that needs all the sunshine it can get in facing an Oklahoma-style land rush of development), David Chiu (who was reportedly angry over the unanimous task force opinion finding he violated the Sunshine Ordinance with late submission of documents before the controversial vote to redevelop Parkmerced), Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd (neighborhood supes way out in West Portal and the Sunset who almost always vote the downtown line at City Hall). The good votes for Wolfe: John Avalos, Eric Mar, Cristina Olague, Jane Kim, and David Campos.

Campos told me that the organization candidates were “eminently qualified,” that they should have been appointed, and that he would fight for them. He advised the organizations to “stand by their candidates.” He is urging that the issue of organization candidates come back to the next Rules Committee.

Rick Knee, SPJ’s mandated journalist on the task force surveying the carnage, said the supervisors’ actions stem “partly from a desire by some supervisors to sabotage the task force and ordinance itself, and partly from a vendetta by certain supervisors after the task force found several months ago that the board violated local and state open meeting laws when it railroaded some last minute changes to a contract on the Parkmerced development project without allowing sufficient time for public review and comment.”

Knee is right, and it isn’t just Parkmerced, but all the high-stakes development deals flowing through City Hall these days, with their advocates preferring to cut backroom deals rather than being subjected to the full scrutiny of the public and the task force.

James Chaffee, a former chair of the task force, watched the board proceedings with outrage and fired off a letter to all supervisors later that day. He charged that the board in sacking Wolfe violated the Sunshine Ordinance on several counts. Among them: the board changed the committee recommendation on Wolfe without allowing public comment and it passed over Wolfe even though the ordinance requires at least one member of the task force to be “physically handicapped.” That was Wolfe.

Thus, Chaffee wrote, the orchestrated coup was “the perfect example of a failure to follow the sunshine ordinance that led to the sort of problem that it was intended to forestall, namely the supervisors taking an action without being informed of what they are doing. If Scott Weiner and David Chiu and the rest of the crew did not consider the citizens the enemy and exercize judgment about whether they were complying with the spirit of open government rather than just shaving off the letter of the law as closely as possible, this could have been avoided.”

Chaffee said he couldn’t tell if David was physically handicapped but he said nothing in his application for the task force nor was any disability apparent from the video of the rules committee meeting.

Chaffee said David’s application showed he was “self-employed as an investor, obtained a BA from Stanford in 1993, has never attended a task force meeting, and left the statement of his qualifications blank.”

Chaffee said, “It’s easy to see why Scott Wiener likes him. He said it would be a long road before he would go against the city attorney’s office and when it came to constitutional law, he would place the city attorney’s opinion above his own because the city attorney is an ‘expert.'”

I sent Chaffee’s letter and my Bruce Blog post ( “The return of Willie Brown to the Sunshine Task Force,” 5/21) to City Attorney Dennis Herrera for comment: How can his office sit by while the letter and spirit of the sunshine laws are being violated in the move to sabotage the sunshine ordinance and task force? I also sent Chaffee’s letter, with the Bruce blog, to the supervisors with similar questions: Why are you violating the sunshine laws to kick out the best candidates? For their answers (coming) and the latest on this evolving controversy, follow along at www.sfbg.com/bruce.

There you have it: the state of sunshine and open government in city hall in San Francisco in May of 2012. Todd David over Bruce Wolfe. David Pilpel uber alles. Five inexperienced candidates over five experienced candidates. David Pilpel uber alles. A city attorney who rolls over and over and over again. And a whiff of grapeshot for the three organizations mandated by the charter to have represenatives on the task force because of their open government and public access credentials (the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the League of Women Voters, and America New Media.) On guard, b3

Julian Davis announces for supervisor in the key battleground district for progressives (5)

-

May 22, 2012

29

Julian Davis, a widely known progressive activist and organizer in San Francisco since 2002, declared Tuesday his intention to run for supervisor in District 5, the city’s most liberal district and a battleground district for progressives seeking to regain control of the Board of Supervisors.

He joins eight other challengers to Sup. Christina Olague, appointed by Mayor Ed Lee to replace former Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. He was considered by many to be the board’s most reliable progressive. He succeeded Matt Gonzales, a strong progressive. The battle will center on which candidate will be the most reliable progressive vote–Olague, whose votes are being carefully watched by progressives, or by one of her challengers.

Davis, a Bay Area native, is a graduate of Brown University and UC Hastings College of the Law, where he graduated magna cum laude. He has worked in government and non-profit and legal sectors on community development, civil rights, social justice, public power, and environmental causes. He has worked on several candidate and ballot measure campaigns including John Avalos for mayor (20ll), Jane Kim for supervisor (2010), Prop H (2008), Clean Energy Act.) He also led a succeesful campaign in 2007 to free journalist Josh Wolf from federal prison for refusing to reveal sources in a demonstration he was covering.

“I was drawn to San Francisco by the creative energy and culture of the city–by what makes this place so special,” Davis said. “Over the past l0 years, I’ve devoted myself to developing healthy communities. I’m running for supervisor to keep the city a vibrant home for the every day people that make San Francisco real.” b3

The battle of 8 Washington

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

May 22, 2012

24

tredmond@sfbg.com

More than 100 people showed up May 15 to testify on a condominium development that involves only 134 units, but has become a symbol of the failure of San Francisco’s housing policy.

I didn’t count every single speaker, but it’s fair to say sentiment was about 2-1 against the 8 Washington project. Seniors, tenant advocates, and neighbors spoke of the excessive size and bulk of the complex, the precedent of upzoning the waterfront for the first time in half a century, the loss of the Golden Gateway Swim and Tennis Club — and, more important, the principle of using public land to build the most expensive condos in San Francisco history.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, calls it housing for the 1 percent, but it’s worse than that — it’s actually housing for the top half of the top half of the 1 percent, for the ultra-rich.

It is, even supervisors who voted in favor agreed, housing the city doesn’t need, catering to a population that doesn’t lack housing opportunities — and a project that puts the city even further out of compliance with its own affordable-housing goals.

And in the end, after more than seven hours of testimony, the board voted 8-3 in favor of the developer.

It was a defeat for progressive housing advocates and for Board President David Chiu — and it showed a schism on the board’s left flank that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. And it could also have significant implications for the fall supervisorial elections.

Sup. Jane Kim, usually an ally of Chiu, voted in favor of the project. Sup. Eric Mar, who almost always votes with the board’s left flank, supported it, too, as did Sup. Christina Olague, who is running for re-election in one of the city’s most progressive districts.

At the end of the night, only Sups. David Campos and John Avalos joined Chiu in attempting to derail 8 Washington.

The battle of 8 Washington isn’t over — the vote last week was to approve the environmental impact report and the conditional use permit, but the actual development agreement and rezoning of the site still requires board approval next month.

Both Mar and Olague said they were going to work with the developer to try to get the height and bulk of the 134-unit building reduced.

But a vote against the EIR or the CU would have killed the project, and the thumbs-up is a signal that opponents will have an upward struggle to change the minds of Olague, Kim, and Mar.

DEFINING VOTES

The 8 Washington project is one of a handful of defining votes that will happen over the next few months. The mayor’s proposal for a business tax reform that raises no new revenue, the budget, and the massive California Pacific Medical Center hospital project will force board members to take sides on controversial issues with heavy lobbying on both sides.

In fact, by some accounts, 8 Washington was a beneficiary of the much larger, more complicated — and frankly, more significant — CPMC development.

The building trades unions pushed furiously for 8 Washington, which isn’t surprising — the building trades tend to support almost anything that means jobs for their members and have often been in conflict with progressives over development. But the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union joined the building trades and lined up the San Francisco Labor Council behind the deal.

And for progressive supervisors who are up for re-election and need union support — Olague and Mar, for example — defying the Labor Council on this one was tough. “Labor came out strong for this, and I respect that,” Olague told me. “That was a huge factor for me.”

She also said she’s not thrilled with the deal — “nobody’s jumping up and down. This was a hard one” — but she thinks she can get the developer to pay more fees, particularly for parking.

Kim isn’t facing re-election for another two years, and she told me her vote was all about the $11 million in affordable housing money that the developer will provide to the city. “I looked at the alternatives and I didn’t see anything that would provide any housing money at all,” she said. The money is enough to build perhaps 25 units of low- and moderate-income housing, and that’s a larger percentage than any other developer has offered, she said.

Which is true — although the available figures suggest that Simon Snellgrove, the lead project sponsor, could pay a lot more and still make a whopping profit. And the Council of Community Housing Organizations, which represents the city’s nonprofit affordable housing developers, didn’t support the deal and expressed serious reservations about it.

Several sources close to the lobbying effort told me that the message for the swing-vote supervisors was that labor wanted them to approve at least one of the two construction-job-creating developments. Opposing both CPMC and 8 Washington would have infuriated the unions, but by signing off on this one, the vulnerable supervisors might get a pass on turning down CMPC.

That’s an odd deal for labor, since CPMC is 10 times the size of 8 Washington and will involve far more jobs. But the nurses and operating engineers have been fighting with the health-care giant and there’s little chance that labor will close ranks behind the current hospital deal.

Labor excepted, the hearing was a classic of grassroots against astroturf. Some of the people who showed up and sat in the front row with pro-8 Washington stickers on later told us they had been paid $100 each to attend. Members of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, to which Snellgrove has donated substantial amounts of money in the past, showed up to promote the project.

BEHIND THE SCENES

But the real action was behind the scenes.

Among those pushing hard for the project were Chinese Chamber of Commerce consultant Rose Pak and community organizer David Ho.

Pak’s support comes after Snellgrove spent years courting the increasingly powerful Chinatown activist, who played a leading role in the effort that got Ed Lee into the Mayor’s Office. Snellgrove has traveled to China with her — and will no doubt be coughing up some money for Pak’s efforts to rebuild Chinese Hospital.

Ho was all over City Hall and was taking the point on the lobbying efforts. Right around midnight, when the final vote was approaching, he entered the board chamber and followed one of Kim’s aides, Matthias Mormino, to the rail where Mormino delivered some documents to the supervisor. Several people who observed the incident told us Ho appeared to be talking Kim in an animated fashion.

Kim told me she didn’t actually speak to Ho at that point, although she’d talked to him at other times about the project, and that “nothing he could have said would have changed anything I did at that point anyway.” Matier and Ross in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Ho was heard outside afterward saying “don’t worry, she’s fine.”

Matier and Ross have twice mentioned that the project will benefit “Chinatown nonprofits,” but there’s nothing in any public development document to support that assertion.

Chiu told me that no Chinese community leaders called him to urge support for 8 Washington. The money that goes into the affordable housing fund could go to the Chinatown Community Development Corp., where Ho works, but it’s hardly automatic — that money will go into a city fund and can’t be earmarked for any neighborhood or organization.

CCDC director Norman Fong confirmed to me that CCDC wasn’t supporting the project. In fact, Cindy Wu, a CCDC staffer who serves on the city Planning Commission, voted against 8 Washington.

I couldn’t reach Ho to ask why he was working so hard on this deal. But one longtime political insider had a suggestion: “Sometimes it’s not about money, it’s about power. And if you want to have power, you need to win and prove you can win.”

Snellgrove will be sitting pretty if 8 Washington breaks ground. Since it’s a private deal (albeit in part on Port of San Francisco land) there’s no public record of how much money the developer stands to make. But Chiu pointed out during the meeting, and confirmed to me later by phone, that “there are only two data points we know.” One is that Snellgrow informed the Port that he expects to gross $470 million in revenue from selling the condos. The other is that construction costs are expected to come in at about $177 million. Even assuming $25 million in legal and other soft costs, that’s a huge profit margin.

And it suggests the he can well afford either to lower the heights — or, more important, to give the city a much sweeter benefits package. The affordable housing component could be tripled or quadrupled and Snellgrove’s development group would still realize far more return that even the most aggressive lenders demand.

Chiu said he’s disappointed but will continue working to improve the project. “While I was disappointed in the votes,” he said, “many of my colleagues expressed concerns about height, parking, and affordable housing fees that they can address in the upcoming project approvals.”

So what does this mean for the fall elections? It may not be a huge deal — the symbolism of 8 Washington is powerful, but if it’s built, it won’t, by itself, directly change the lives of people in Olague’s District 5 or Mar’s District 1. Certainly the vote on CPMC will have a larger, more lasting impact on the city. Labor’s support for Mar could be a huge factor, and his willingness to break with other progressives to give the building trades a favor could help him with money and organizing efforts. On the other hand, some of Olague’s opponents will use this to differentiate themselves from the incumbent. John Rizzo, who has been running in D5 for almost a year now, told me he strongly opposed 8 Washington. “It’s a clear-cut issue for me, the wrong project and a bad deal for the city.” London Breed, a challenger who is more conservative, told us: “I would not have supported this project,” she said, arguing that the zoning changes set a bad precedent for the waterfront. “There are so many reasons why it shouldn’t have happened,” she said. And while Mar is in a more centrist district, support from the left was critical in his last grassroots campaign. This won’t cost him votes against a more conservative opponent — but if it costs him enthusiasm, that could be just as bad.

Lee shows his pro-biz chops, but how is his balance?

Sasha Cuttler

-

May 22, 2012

22

Lee shows his pro-biz chops, but how is his balance?

Mayor Ed Lee is on the roll these days, with a string of recent pro-business successes capped off by today’s announcement that the Golden State Warriors are moving to San Francisco and building a new arena at Piers 30-32. But Lee faces a series of tricky balancing acts in the coming weeks as he tries to compensate for his strong economic development focus, which is driving up residential and commercial rents and threatening the city’s diversity and livability.

Lee has been overly enamored by tech companies since taking office, from pushing through last year’s tax breaks for Twitter and Zynga to his announcement a couple weeks ago that Yelp was expanding into a 100,000-square foot space in SoMa. “Yelp’s lease brings the total tally for technology leasing to more than two million square feet,” his office boasted in a press release. “Comparatively, this milestone was reached in the fall of 2011, indicating that the technology industry is increasing their role as a key driver in the office leasing marketplace and job creation in San Francisco.”

That’s great for residents who work in tech companies that are awash in venture capital from Ron Conway or the other billionaires who funded Lee’s mayoral campaign, or for the commercial landlords taking advantage of the latest tech bubble. But it’s not so great for the nonprofits and small businesses who are having a hard time with making rents that are being steadily driven up — or even for the cultural cache of a city being steadily overrun by boring Google-busers.

Contrary to right-wing fairy tales, policies that favor wealthy investors don’t really help the average San Franciscans much, and they need to be balanced by policies and taxes that see to the common good. That’s been crystal clear for a long time when it comes to San Francisco’s housing policy, which is why Lee today is submitting his proposal for a Housing Trust Fund to be placed on the November ballot.

Details are still being worked out even as I write this, but the Chronicle reports that it proposes to initially generate $20 million per year by slightly increasing the real estate transfer tax, diverting a bit of the city’s hotel tax, and then trying to set aside some future property taxes, with the goal of eventually reaching $50 million per year.

Unfortunately, that would barely put a dent the affordable housing needs identified in the city’s Housing Element, which says about 60 percent of all new housing construction should be affordable to prevent gentrification and its associated problems (more commuter traffic, loss of diversity, etc.), which the Board of Supervisors already exacerbated last week by greenlighting the 8 Washington project for the super-rich.

And Lee’s compromise with developers and the business community on his housing trust fund makes things even worse by diverting $15 million into a down payment assistance program for middle-class homebuyers (in a city where two-thirds of residents rent, and in a country that should have learned not to lure more families into overextending themselves to buy houses) and actually reduced the number of below-market-rate units that developers are required to build.

Granted, these are tricky problem fraught with complicated politics, particularly as we approach the deadline for submitting ballot measures for a fall election when only a simple majority is needed to pass revenue measures, a once every four year anomaly. As we reported last week, Lee is currently in the throes of final negotiations for his business tax reform measure, with labor and progressives putting the pressure on to back off his insistence that it be revenue-neutral.

That will be an important indicator of whether Mayor Lee will be content with simply catering to corporations and staying focused on his neoliberal economic development agenda – or whether he is serious about maintaining this city’s socioeconomic diversity (being a “city for the 99 percent,” as he said in his inaugural address) and taking a more balanced approach to governance.

Lee seems to understand the situation better than his predecessor, Gavin Newsom, who wasn’t willing to risk any political capital to solve the city’s most vexing problems or to make any big asks of downtown (or even to keep the 49ers in town). Whereas Newsom was willing to basically give Piers 30-32 away to Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison to secure the overhyped America’s Cup, Lee allowed that real estate deal to wither without losing the race and found what at first glance seems like a better deal for Piers 30-32: an arena built with private money.

But in the housing fund, business tax reform, CPMC’s massive hospital and housing project, and budget fights that will unfold in the coming weeks (the mayor’s budget is due June 1), Lee will demonstrate whether he has the political skills, the long-term vision, and the populist perspective to do right by all San Franciscans, or whether he’ll cling to his belief that a handful of business elites should be trusted with the future of this great city.

The war on sunshine

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

May 22, 2012

0

EDITORIAL The Rules Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors joined the war on sunshine May 17 when it rejected four qualified candidates from three organizations who are mandated by the ordinance to choose representatives for the task force because of the organizations’ special open government credentials.

The representatives served as experienced, knowledgeable members who were independent counters to the nominees of supervisors who were often promoting an anti-sunshine agenda. The committee asked the organizations to come up with more names.

That was a nasty slap at members and organizations that have served the task force well for years. And this arbitrary demand will make it virtually impossible for these organizations to come up with a “list of candidates” to run the supervisorial gauntlet. Who wants to go before the supervisors on a list for a bout of public character assassination?

Specifically, the committee:

• Unanimously moved to sack the two incumbents (Allyson Washburn from the League of Women Voters) and Suzanne Manneh (New California Media). The League was mandated to name a representative because of its tradition and experience with good government and public access issues. New California Media was mandated to name a member to insure there would always be a journalist of color on the task force.

• Unanimously refused to seat two representatives from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the sponsor of the ordinance with a long tradition in open government and First Amendment issues. One SPJ mandated representative was for a journalist (Doug Comstock, editor of the West of Twin Peaks Observer, one of the best neighborhood papers in town and a former chair of the task force.) The second mandated seat was for an attorney (Ben Rosenfeld).

• Tried to knock out incumbent Bruce Wolfe on motion of member Mark Farrell, but Wolfe survived on a 2-l vote.

• Voted unanimously for four new persons to the task force while sacking and refusing to appoint able members with experience and expertise without a word of thanks.

Committee Member David Campos later told me that he went along because he could see he didn’t have the votes. He said the organization’s candidates “were eminently qualified,” that they should have been appointed, and that he would fight for them. He said he would ask the office of Jane Kim, who chairs the committee, to set the issue for hearing at the next rules meeting or call for a special meeting.

We asked Campos what the organizations should do. “They should stand by their candidates,” he said. We concur.

The Society of Professional Journalists, the League of Women Voters, and California New Media and their open government allies should stand by their candidates, lobby for them with the rules committee and the full board, and get out the word about this attempted coup in the most important court of all, the court of public opinion.

The Sunshine Task Force has annoyed some elected officials with its dogged efforts to promote open government. City Hall is already trying to find ways to undermine it. That needs to end, now.

Editorial: The war on sunshine

-

May 22, 2012

7

EDITORIAL The Rules Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors joined the war on sunshine May 17 when it rejected four qualified candidates from three organizations who are mandated by the ordinance to choose representatives for the task force because of the organizations’ special open government credentials.

The representatives served as experienced, knowledgeable members who were independent counters to the nominees of supervisors who were often promoting an anti-sunshine agenda. The committee asked the organizations to come up with more names.

That was a nasty slap at members and organizations that have served the task force well for years. And this arbitrary demand will make it virtually impossible for these organizations to come up with a “list of candidates” to run the supervisorial gauntlet. Who wants to go before the supervisors on a list for a bout of public character assassination?

Specifically, the committee:

•Unanimously moved to sack the two incumbents (Allyson Washburn from the League of Women Voters) and Suzanne Manneh (New California Media now known as America New Media.) The League was mandated to name a representative because of its tradition and experience with good government and public access issues. America New Media was mandated to name a member to insure there would always be a journalist of color on the task force.

•Unanimously refused to seat two representatives from the Northern
California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the sponsor of the ordinance with a long tradition in open government and First Amendment issues. One SPJ mandated representative was for a journalist (Doug Comstock, editor of the West of Twin Peaks Observer, one of the best neighborhood papers in town and a former chair of the task force.) The second mandated seat was for an attorney (Ben Rosenfeld).

•Tried to knock out incumbent Bruce Wolfe, an excellent member, on motion of member Mark Farrell, but Wolfe survived on a 2-l vote.

•Voted unanimously for four new persons to the task force while sacking and refusing to appoint able members with experience and expertise without a word of thanks, explanation, or apology.

Committee Member David Campos later told me that he went along because he could see he didn’t have the votes. He said the organizations’ candidates “were eminently qualified,” that they should have been appointed, and that he would fight for them. He said he would ask the office of Jane Kim, who chairs the committee, to set the issue for hearing at the next rules meeting or call for a special meeting.

We asked Campos what the organizations should do. “They should stand by their candidates,” he said. We concur.

The Society of Professional Journalists, the League of Women Voters, and America New Media and their open government allies should stand by their candidates, lobby for them with the rules committee and the full board, and get out the word about this attempted coup in the most important court of all, the court of public opinion.

The Sunshine Task Force has annoyed some elected officials with its dogged efforts to promote open government. City Hall is again trying to find ways to undermine it. That needs to end, now.

The return of Willie Brownism to the sunshine task force

-

May 21, 2012

35

As an advocate for the passage of the San Francisco sunshine ordinance and task force in the early 1990s, I felt obligated to take my first and only City Hall position and serve as a founding member of the task force. I served for l0 years and helped with many other good members to build the task force into a strong and respected agency for helping citizens get access to records and meetings and hold city officials accountable for suppressing access.

The task force is the only place where citizens can file an access complaint without an attorney or a fee and force a city official, including the mayor, to come before the task force for questioning and a ruling on whether they had violated sunshine laws, The task force lacked enforcement power, but it still annoyed of city officials, including Mayor Willie Brown.

In fact, Willie spent a good deal of time trying to kick me off the task force. He used one jolly maneuver after another, even getting an agent to make a phony complaint against me for violating the ordinance with an email. (The complaint went nowhere.) I refused to budge and decided to stay on the task force until Willie left office—on the principle that that neither the mayor nor anybody else from City Hall could arbitrarily kick members off the task force. When Willie left office after two terms, I resigned with the hope that the Willie principle had been established.

The principle held, until last Thursday (May 17) when the board’s rules committee (Sup. Mark Farrell, Chair Jane Kim, and Sup. David Campos) brought Willie Brownism back to the task force with a vengeance. The committee moved to sabotage the task force by sacking or refusing to appoint four qualified candidates from three organizations who are mandated by the ordinance to choose representatives for the task force because of the organizations’ special open government credentials. Their representatives served as experienced, knowledgeable members who were independent counters to nominees of supervisors who were often promoting an anti-sunshine agenda. The committee asked the organizations to come up with more names. There was no explanation nor apology to the candidates nor to their organizations. It was a nasty slap at members and organizations that have served the task force well for years. And this arbitrary demand will make it virtually impossible for these organizations to come up with a “list of candidates” to run the supervisorial gauntlet. Who wants to go before the supervisors on a list for a bout of public character assassination?

Specifically, the committee:

+unanimously moved to sack the two incumbents (Allyson Washburn from the League of Women Voters) and Suzanne Manneh (California New Media.) The League was mandated to name a representative because of its tradition and experience with good government and public access issues. California New Media was mandated to name a member to insure there would always be a journalist of color on the task force.

+unanimously refused to seat two representatives from the Northern
California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, the sponsor of the ordinance with a long tradition in open government and First Amendment issues. One SPJ mandated representative was for a journalist (Doug Comstock, editor of the West of Twin Peaks Observer, one of the best neighborhood papers in town and a former chair of the task force.) The second mandated seat was for an attorney (Ben Rosenfeld.)

+tried to knock out incumbent Bruce Wolfe on motion of Farrell, but Wolfe survived on a 2-l vote.

+voted unanimously to approve David Pilpel, a former task force member who is known by observers for delaying meetings with is bursts of lengthy nitpicking on almost every item. He then usually votes against citizen complaints and for protecting city officials on the basis of spotting “onerous” burdens caused by the complaint

+voted unanimously for four new persons to the task force while sacking and refusing to appoint able members with experience and expertise without a word of thanks. The four new members are “a “a bunch of neophytes,” according Rick Knee, outgoing SPJ member for 10 years.

Knee, a former task force chair surveying the carnage, said that the committee’s actions stemmed “partly from a desire by some supervisors to sabotage the task force and the ordinance itself, and partly from a vendetta by certain supervisors after the task force found several months ago that the board violated local and state open meeting laws when it railroaded some last minute changes to a contract on the Park Merced development project without allowing sufficient time for public service review and comment.” He noted that the developer “had slipped in a 14-page package of amendments at the llth hour” to get board approval.

Knee said that the rules committee is recommending sacking two incumbents and apparently hopes to sack two more. Farrell wanted to push out a fifth but was outvoted by Kim and Campos. All five candidates, he said, “have done excellent work, each brought a unique perspective and, while we had our share of disagreements among ourselves, all shared a passion for open government and for making sure that everyone who came before us got a fair hearing.”

Hanley Chan, an outgoing task force member, backed up Knee’s point in an email. He wrote that “I spoke with Sup. David Chiu and he told me that the rest of the supervisors will not appoint any incumbent, because we defied the city attorney’s opinion (the Park Merced case). “”You should have made a right decision. I was told by the city attorney that it was legal, my aides explained it to the task force and you should have made a better judgment.'” Chan said that the rules committee ouster move was “retribution on how we voted that day.” Chan said that “Bruce Wolfe and all the task force members made a wonderful argument and stuck to their guns.” The task force vote was a unanimous 8-0 vote.The point: defy the supervisors and city attorney and the boys and girls in the back room and get blasted off the task force, bang, bang, bang, bang.

The committee choreographed the move smoothly. Farrell as the heavy would make the move. Kim would agree and facilitate as chair. Campos would go along reluctantly. The deputy city attorney would be supine through the process even though the supervisors were breaking precedent and misinterpreting the ordinance. Sunshine candidates and advocates in the audience were furious and emails have been crackling back and forth ever since.

Campos later told me that he went along because he could see he didn’t have the votes. He said the organization’s candidates “were eminently qualified,” that they should have been appointed, and that he would fight for them. He said he would ask Kim’s office to set the issue for hearing at the next rules meeting or call for a special meeting. Kim did not return calls for comment.

I asked Campos what the organizations should do. “They should stand by their candidates,” he said.

I concur. The Society of Professional Journalists, the League of Women Voters, and California New Media and their open government allies should stand by their candidates, lobby for them with the rules committee and the full board, and get out the word about this attempted coup in the most important court of all, the court of public opinion. Make this an election issue with all incumbents and candidates. Let public officials know there are serious consequences to supporting Willie Brownism on the sunshine task force, the first and best local task force of its kind in the country if not the world.

The good news is that the rules committee has demonstrated, with its sneak attack, the value of the task force for citizens and open government and why it is a San Francisco institution that needs to be saved and strengthened. All of this illustrates once again my favorite axiom of mine. In San Francisco, the public is generally safe, except when the mayor is in his office and the supervisors are in session. b3

Nite Trax: Yes, the 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Awards are real

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

May 21, 2012

0

Nite Trax: Yes, the 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Awards are real

… and apparently I am hosting them with Anna Conda on Thursday, May 31. What the heck are the 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Awards? No worries, they are magical, and you should totally go because it’s gonna be a fun party that supports the future of San Francisco nightlife. But let’s back up a minute.

A few weeks ago, my Nightlife Bat Phone started ringing off the Nightlife Bat Hook. “We were just nominated for a 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Award!” or “Why weren’t we nominated for a 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Award?” or “What the heck are the San 2012 Francisco Nightlife Awards?” said the chorus of voices into my Nightlife Bat Voicemail, because my Nightlife Bat Ringer broke when I dropped it in a vat of fake blood while vampire-wrestling for charity (gay).

It seemed like the awards had come out of nowhere. But I will reveal all! Or rather, Nathan Allbee of the California Music and Culture Association, which is putting on this year’s awards, will reveal all via my short interview (along with a complete list of nominees) below.

By way of introduction first, CMAC formed a couple years ago in response to the War on Fun, a series of misguided attempts by city officials and police to shut down the city’s nightlife. A group of partiers and bar and club owners got together to form a non-profit awareness-raising and lobbying association to try to keep fun alive, especially as one of our primary tourist industries and community-building activities. (In this way, CMAC is kind of like the great San Francisco Late Night Coalition of the late 1990s and early 2000s). Raves were getting busted again, permitted parties were being raided on the flimsiest of excuses, and perfectly anodyne street fairs were seeing their fees jacked up due to “increasing security.”

CMAC has helped achieve some awesome things — now the mayor praises homegrown nightlife, the supervisors support it, and a recent commissioned report noted that nightlife in SF generated an astounding $4.2 billion in 2010. Also, hi, people love it.

Now CMAC is using some breathing room to expand for the next fight, because you know there’s gonna be one, hunny. Thus, the 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Awards — this is the second annual edition — trying to bring people together and give recognition. Nathan Allbee says more:

SFBG Most people associate CMAC with efforts to save and bolster San Francisco nightlife — has there been a recent expansion of the mission over there? It seem like there’s a lot more people involved

Nathan Allbee Yeah, we’re really excited to be taking the next step organizationally. We just opened a physical office, brought on a full time Executive Director, Laura Hahn, and I came on as the Director of Events.

CMAC was really born out of crisis: the war on fun, which the SFBG wrote a lot about, was in full swing and we had a major hand in stopping it. Now that that particular crisis is behind us (hopefully) we’re able to devote more of our resources to building the organization and that includes reaching out to DJs and promoters who are the lifeblood of San Francisco nightlife and culture.

In addition to our 2nd Annual Nightlife Awards, we’re in the planning process for some other big events for the year – we’ve got a Bay Area-wide DJ competition, a battle of the bands, and we’re going to be working with the awesome people that throw the Bartenders Ball to really make that an even larger event. Tom Temprano from Hard French, who also does a lot of nightlife advocacy, is helping to coordinate our outreach strategies and events.

SFBG This is the second official CMAC Nightlife awards, yes? How on earth did I miss the first ones?

NA I don’t know Marke, we missed you last year.

SFBG How were the nominees for 2012 chosen?

NA We started with our Nominations Committee – DJs, promoters, venue owners – who developed a list of people and places that they were impressed with (which was massive and really hard to narrow down by the way) and our Board of Directors had the final say.

The criteria our Nominations Committee used as a guide included: creativity, popularity, and a positive representation of nightlife and entertainment.

SFBG There’s been some controversy over the fact that the nominees win by getting as many people as possible to pay to come to the party and vote for them. (I think this is kind of a promotional stroke of genius by the way, and if it weren’t all going toward a good cause, it would be pure evil!). Can you tell us where the money is going, and how this might be tied in to a sort of membership drive?

NA We really wanted this award to be democratic and not just be about who has the most fans on Facebook or the biggest email list –- like what often happens with online voting. Having people turn out to vote in person is the best way to assure that voters are actual participants in SF nightlife, and that winners are being honored by their peers. There’s also a place on the ballots for write-in candidates so that everyone can be included.

The door cover is going to cover our costs for the event, but we’ll also be doing the old-fashion non-profit ways of fund raising: a raffle, asking for donations and sponsorships.

And hell yeah this is a membership drive! CMAC wants more diversity in our membership and a larger variety of voices at the table. We’ll be working hard this year to get more DJs, promoters, door workers, bartenders, barbacks, musicians, performers, designers, photographers, and people who just love nightlife involved.

SFBG Um, I noticed there’s no ‘Best Nightlife Writer” category ….

NA Why bother? You would win it every year.

SFBG It’s an honor just to nominate myself. So what other kinds of deep involvement with the nightlife community can we expect from CMAC in the future?

NA We’re going to fight…for your right…to party. (RIP MCA)

2012 SAN FRANCISCO NIGHTLIFE AWARDS

Featuring DJs from Debaser, Future Perfect, Hard French, Lights Down Low

Hosted by Anna Conda and Marke B.

Thu/31, 8pm-midnight

Members $5, Non-Members $10, Join CMAC and get in for free! $25

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

Facebook invite, Ticket link

All voting for each category will take place at the event from 8pm to 10pm with the winners announced during a ceremony immediately after voting has ended. All attendees are welcome to vote.

Nominees:

Best Weekly Party

Blow Up

Booty Call

Future Perfect

Honey Soundsystem

Some Thing

Sweater Funk

Best Monthly Party

Debaser

Forward AM

Hard French

Icee Hot

Lights Down Low

Stay Gold

Best Promoter

A Plus D / Bootie Mashup

Ankh

Bus Station John

Earshot

Juanita More

Primo

Best Bar

Blackbird

Comstock Saloon

Dear Mom

Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem

Buckshot Bar

Lexington Club

Best Small Club

222 Hyde

El Rio

Make-Out Room

Monarch

Powerhouse

Rebel

Best Large Club

Vessel

Public Works

Beat Box

Mighty

DNA

Club 1015

Best Live Venue

Slims

Thee Parkside

Bottom of the Hill

Brick and Mortar

Cafe Du Nord

Yoshi’s

Best Festival

Treasure Island Music Festival

All Shook Down

Outside Lands

Folsom Street Fair

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

San Francisco Pride

Best Designer

Shane King

Corey Sleazemore

Alland Byallo

Design Soldiers

Stanley Frank

Kristen Gillette

Best Nightlife Photographer

Cabure A Bonugli

Allen Jordan

Jonathan Saunders

Demian Becerra

Misha Vladimirskiy/Butchershop Creative

Courtney Trouble

Best Production

Mezzanine

The Fillmore

The Independent

Mighty

The Fox

Outside Lands

Housing for the super rich approved, 8-3

Zelda Bronstein

-

May 16, 2012

111

Housing for the super rich approved, 8-3

The progressive movement and the battle for housing balance and economic justice in San Francisco got walloped May 15 when eight supervisors sided with a developer who wants to build condos for the massively rich on the waterfront.

I watched it all, minus a few minutes while I was putting the kids to bed, all seven and a half hours of testimony and discussion, winding up with a series of pro-developer voters a little after midnight. It was stunning: Opponents of the project came out in droves, many of them seniors, others tenant activists and neighbors. Former City Attorney Louise Renne, who is by no means an anti-development type or any sort of economic radical, led off the arguments in favor of scrapping the environmental impact report and denying the conditional use permit that are needed for 8 Washington to move forward. They brought up so many points that by the end there was nothing more to say: This meets no housing need in San Francisco, further screws up the city’s own mandates for a mix of affordable and market-rate housing, caters to the top half of the top half of the 1 percent, is too tall and bulky for the site, offers the city too little in community benefits and is one of the great development scams of our time.

Then the other side spoke — the city planners who defended the EIR and, briefly, developer Simon Snellgrove. His supporters lined up — and almost all of them talked about the same thing: Construction jobs. I get it, we need construction jobs — but is that a justification for such a bad project? As Sup. David Chiu pointed out, “apartment construction is booming. There are 22,000 units under construction and 50,000 more in the pipeline.”

Both sides were organized, but only one paid people to show up: At least five people seated in the front row, wearing pro-8 Washington stickers, confirmed that they’d been paid $100 each — in cash — to show up. They didn’t even speak, leaving once they realized that they were misled about the project. One source heard a construction worker say he knew nothing about the project and had been bused in from Sacramento.

And after hearing all of that, the supervisors did what they clearly had decided to do long before a word of testimony was uttered.

The vote to overturn the EIR went like this: favoring the developer were Supervisors Mark Farrell, Jane Kim, Eric Mar, Christina Olague, Malia Cohen, Carmen Chu, Sean Elsbernd and Scott Wiener. Opposing the project were Chiu, John Avalos and David Campos.

Approving the conditional use went along the same voting lines. Chiu couldn’t even get a continuance after arguing that there was no report from the budget analyst and no financial information about whether this is a good deal for the city.

That’s the lineup: Eight votes for the 1 percent. Three votes for the rest of us. I haven’t seen anything this bad in years.

Some fascinating information came out of the discussion. Chiu made clear that the developer doesn’t need the height-limit increase to make a profit off the deal. He estimated that the total sales revenue from the project would be around $470 million and construction costs about $177 million. That’s a huge profit margin, even if you add in another $25 million for upfront soft costs.

Snellgrove’s lawyer, Mary Murphy, tried to duck the financial issues, talking around in circles. Evenutally Chiu got Snellgrove to respond, and he said the costs would be higher and his profit would only be about $80 million. “The capital markets require a high return on these projects,” he said.
Still: $80 million is a lot of money. And while Snellgrove and his allies love to talk about the $11 million in affordable housing money for the city, that’s about 2.3 percent of his total revenue. Which doesn’t sound quite as juicy.

Chiu raised another good question: “Should a condo that sells for $5 million pay the same affordable housing fees as one that sells for $500,000?”
Mar, who is usually a strong progressive, was the big surprise of the night, not only voting the wrong way but teeing up softball questions for the city planners to make the project sound better. It was as if he was reading from the developer’s talking points.

In the end, he said he saw “a lot of benefits from this project,” but promised to work with the developer to advocate for “less bulk and less height.” Olague said the same thing.

But even if it’s a little smaller, this will still be a completely misalignment of housing priorities, a project entirely for the very rich. That’s not going to change.

If anything, they should push for more affordable housing money — a whole lot more. Because what we’re getting is enough for maybe 25 or 30 units, which means 80 percent of the new housing related to this project will be for multimillionaires and 20 percent for everyone else. Keep that pattern going — and there are few signs that it’s about to change — and imagine what this city will be like in 20 years.

It’s not over, not yet: The actual development agreement and the height-limit changes still have to come to the board early in June. And if the mayor signs off on it, opponents are talking serious about a ballot referendum that would be before the voters in November — just when Olague, Mar, Avalos, Campos, and Chiu will be up for re-election.

Tax equity

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

-

May 15, 2012

3

steve@sfbg.com, yael@sfbg.com

A broad consensus in San Francisco supports reforming the city’s business-tax structure by replacing the payroll tax with a gross receipts tax through a November ballot measure. But the devil is in the details of how individual tax bills are affected, which has divided the business community and given a coalition of labor and progressives the opportunity to overcome the insistence by Mayor Ed Lee and other pro-business moderates that any change be revenue-neutral.

Service Employees International Union Local 1021, San Francisco’s biggest city employee union, last month launched a campaign demanding that the measure increase city revenue, setting a goal of at least $50 million, which represents the amount the city has lost annually since 2001 when 52 large downtown corporations sued to overturn the last gross receipts tax. The union is threatening to place a rival measure on the fall ballot.

“This call for it to be revenue-neutral didn’t make a lot of sense given all the reductions in city services in recent years,” said Chris Daly, the union’s interim political director. “It’s fair to at least get the money back that we lost in 2001.”

The union and the city recently agreed on a new contract that avoids more of the salary cuts that SEIU members have taken in recent years, but workers could still face layoffs under a new city budget that Lee is scheduled to introduce June 1. Lee, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and business leaders working on the tax-reform proposal have until June 12 to introduce their ballot measure.

But they don’t yet have an agreement on what the measure should look like — largely because the technology sector (led by billionaire venture capitalist Ron Conway, the biggest fundraiser for Lee’s mayoral campaign last year), the traditional businesses represented by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and the small business community are pushing different interests and priorities.

“The technology industry has to realize they have a tax obligation like any member of the business community does,” Jim Lazarus, the Chamber’s vice president for public policy, told us.

Conway is reportedly using his influence on Lee to push for a model that keeps taxes low for tech companies — even if that comes at the expense of other economic sectors, such as commercial real estate and big construction firms, which will likely see their tax obligations increase. Yet some Chamber counter-proposals could end up costing small businesses more money, creating a puzzle that has yet to be worked out.

But one thing is clear: The business leaders don’t want to see overall city revenue increase. “If there’s anything that is unifying in the business community is that it’s revenue neutral,” small business advocate Scott Hauge told us. “We’re not going to increase revenues, that’s just a given, so if we have to do battle then so be it.”

SEIU and other members of progressive revenue coalition that has been strategizing in recent weeks are hoping to exploit the divisions in the business community and arrive at a compromise that increases revenue, and if not then they say they’re willing to go to the ballot with a rival measure.

“We’re working on trying to recover what we lost in the 2001 settlement and then some,” Sup. John Avalos, who has been working with the progressive coalition, told us. “We have to have something going to the ballot that is revenue generating.”

LABOR’S CAMPAIGN

For labor and progressives, this is an equity issue. Workers have been asked to give back money, year after year, despite the fact that big corporations have been doing well in recent years but haven’t contributed any of that wealth to the cash-strapped city. Labor leaders say that after they supported last year’s pension-reform measure, it’s time for the business community to support city services.

“When we talked about Prop C, we said if our members are doing this with our pensions now, we’ll see next year what businesses do with business tax,” said Larry Bradshaw, vice president of SEIU Local 1021. “Then we read about secret meetings where the labor movement was excluded from those talks.”

Anger over the “secret meetings” of business leaders that Lee assembled to craft the tax reform measure — meetings at which no labor leaders were included — helped inspire the fierce protest campaign that defined the SEIU’s recent contract negotiations.

In the first weeks of negotiations, workers were already up in arms. Protest marches at SF General Hospital and Laguna Honda Hospital brought hundreds of hospital workers to the streets. These hospitals serve some of the city’s poorest populations: Laguna Honda patients are mostly seniors on Medi-Cal and General is the main public hospital serving the city’s poor.

On April 5, city workers got creative with a street theater protest that involved six-story projections on the iconic Hobart Building. Protesters dressed as rich CEOs and handed out thank-you cards to commuters at the Montgomery transit station. SEIU’s “The City We Need, Not Downtown Greed” campaign included a website (www.neednotgreed.org), slick video, and direct mailers portraying CEOs as panhandlers on the street asking city residents, “Can you spare a tax break?”

The most dramatic civil disobedience came on April 18, when more than 1,000 workers rallied outside City Hall — along with several progressive supervisors — and then marched to Van Ness and Market. Protesters blocked the street, resulting in 23 arrests. At that point, increases in health care cuts and pay cuts to city workers were still on the table.

That was followed the next week by hundreds of workers staging noisy demonstrations in City Hall, and then again on May Day when SEIU workers were well represented in actions that took over parts of the Financial District.

In the end, the demands of union representatives were met in the contract agreement. Health care cost increases and pay cuts were eliminated, and a 3 percent pay raise will kick in during the two-year contract’s second year, a deal overwhelmingly approved by union members. Labor leaders hope to use that momentum to force a deal with the Mayor’s Office on the tax reform measure — which some sources say is possible. Otherwise, they say the campaign will continue.

“We may end up on the streets gathering signatures soon,” Daly said. “We need to figure it out in the next few weeks.”

THOSE DEVILISH DETAILS

The Controller’s Office released a report on May 10 that made the case for switching to a gross receipts tax and summed up the business community’s meetings, and the report was the subject of a joint statement put out by Lee and Chiu. “After months of thorough analysis, economic modeling and inclusive outreach to our City’s diverse business community, the City Controller and City Economist have produced a report that evaluates a gross receipts tax, a promising alternative to our current payroll tax, which punishes companies for growing and creating new jobs in our City'” the statement said. “Unlike our current payroll tax, a gross receipts tax would deliver stable and growing revenue to fund vital city services, while promoting job growth and continued economic recovery for San Francisco.”

Daly and Avalos say progressives agree that a gross receipts tax would probably be better than the payroll tax, and they say the controller’s report lays out a good analysis and framework for the discussions to come. But despite its detailed look at who the winners and losers in the tax reform might be, Daly said, “We haven’t seen an actual proposal yet.”

Lazarus made a similar statement: “Nobody likes the payroll tax, but the devil is in the details.”

But it’s clear some businesses those with high gross receipts but low payrolls — would pay more taxes. For example, the finance, insurance, and real estate sector now pays about 16 percent of the $410 million the city collects in payroll taxes. That would go up to about 21 percent under a gross receipts tax.

“Several industries that could face higher taxes under the proposal, such as commercial real estate, large retailers, and large construction firms, felt the increase was too sharp,” the report said under the heading of “Policy Issues Arising From Meetings with Businesses.”

The report highlighted how the change would broaden the tax base. Only about 7,500 businesses now pay the payroll tax (others are either too small or are exempt from local taxation, such as banks), whereas 33,500 companies would pay the gross receipts tax, which the report identified as another issue to be resolved.

“While some businesses appreciated the base-broadening aspect of the gross receipts proposal, others felt that too many small businesses were being brought into the Gross Receipts tax,” the report said. Hauge also told us that he fears a tax increase on commercial real estate firms could be passed on to small businesses in the form of higher rents. “I don’t want to see the business community split,” Hauge said, although it’s beginning to look like that might be unavoidable. The big question now is whether progressives and labor can find any allies in this messy situation, and whether they’ll be able to agree on a compromise measure that all sides say is preferable to competing measures.

Who’s running against Chris Daly?

Zelda Bronstein

-

May 15, 2012

8

I didn’t know former Sup. Chris Daly was running for state Assembly in the 19th District. Odd — I’ve been told he splits his time between Soma and Fairfield, but I had never heard anything about him moving to the West side of town.

But there he is, right on a flier produced by candidate Michael Breyer, who probably doesn’t deserve all the attention I’m giving him, but his campaign is so strange. First he’s for “old-fashioned San Francisco values” (whatever that means) — and now he’s running against Daly. Who, according to the latest data from the Department of Elections, isn’t in the race.

Breyer has a pic of Daly’s disembodied head surrounded by a happy meal, a goldfish and a Yellow Pages phonebook, three things that (other) supervisors have had issues with, mostly for very good reasons. Daly didn’t introduce the Happy Meal ban or the pet store legislation or the phone books limits; some of that happened after he left the board.

The flier compares Daly’s “Wild Antics” to “The Real San Francisco.” Which I guess is a conservative place “of old-fashioned neighborhood concerns.” (What — the west side of the city hasn’t changed in the past 40 years, since Breyer was a kid?)

Folks, please: Daly’s no longer in any public office. He was a good supervisor while he was there and willing to fight for his constituents. But now he owns a bar and works for a union. Aren’t we all getting tired of this shit?

Editorial: The business tax debacle

-

May 15, 2012

22

Labor and much of the progressive community worked with downtown and the Mayor’s Office last year to craft a pension-reform bill that took away benefits from city employees. The unions came to the table, recognized the city’s financial problems and bought into a compromise, even though it took money out of their pockets.

And now big business, with the support of Mayor Ed Lee, wants to reform the local business tax in a way that doesn’t bring the city a dime of new revenue (and hurts small business in the process).

In other words, it’s fine to seek compromise when it’s about cutting workers pay and city costs. When it’s about asking big business (and a lot of big businesses, particularly tech businesses, in this town are doing exceptionally well right now) to chip in just a little more, to do the right thing, address the revenue side of the ledger and pay a fair share, the answer is No.

That’s not ok — and the supervisors shouldn’t go along with it.

The essence of the proposal from the mayor’s office (orchestrated in significant part by billionaire Ron Conway) is to shift the city’s main business tax from a levy on payroll to a levy on gross receipts. There are winners and losers in that scenario, and the business community is split: High-tech firms tend to have high payrolls compared to gross receipts, and finance, insurance and real-estate tends to have high gross receipts compared to payroll. So the burden could shift from the likes of Twitter and Zynga, who would pay less, to the commercial office and financial-services sector, which would pay more. In other words, the new business elite likes the change, and the old guard doesn’t.

Small business doesn’t like it much, either — a lot of the tiniest companies in town now pay no tax at all, and would be hit with at the very least an annual license fee. So the percentage paid by the smallest would go up

You can certainly argue that tech is creating more jobs than other sectors of the economy these days. And while it’s fun to watch the Chamber of Commerce and Conway’s San Francisco Citizens for Technology and Innovation butt heads (and progressives are looking for ways to exploit those differences), the fight between Twitter and the Business Owners and Managers Association is a sideshow.

The real problem is that the mayor’s plan would be revenue-neutral — that is, the big business community, which has never paid its fair share of the city’s tax burden, would be doing nothing at all to help with the structural budget deficits that plague San Francisco. Labor gives up hundreds of millions of dollars. Neighborhoods suffer with service cuts. The poorest San Franciscans give up housing and health care and social services in the name of balancing the budget. And the wealthiest companies in town smirk and say: Sorry, we won’t help. Screw you, buddy.

That’s a nonstarter. A lawsuit by 52 big businesses over an earlier gross receipts tax, settled in 2001, cost the city as much as $50 million a year — and at the very least, this new tax should get that back. A plan that doesn’t at the very least bring in $50 million to $100 million a year of additional revenue from the big operators — tech, finance, real-estate, and the rest — amounts to the proverbial shifting of deck chairs on the Titanic. If the mayor won’t move, a grassroots alternative needs to be on the November ballot.

Why the May 15 vote on 8 Washington matters

Zelda Bronstein

-

May 14, 2012

128

Why the May 15 vote on 8 Washington matters

Brad Benson, the special projects director at the Port of San Francisco, took me on a tour of the 8 Washington project and gave me his pitch for why the city ought to allow a developer to put the most expensive condos in city history, housing for the top half of the top half of the top 1 percent, on a prime piece of waterfront land. He showed me the fence around the existing Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club (it’s not terribly attractive) and I watched a powerpoint presentation on the glories of the project.

His argument: The Port has no money, and no easy way to get any money, to do the roughly $2 billion worth of maintenance needed on the its piers and property. Residential development on a few seawall lots is part of the Port’s master plan and part of a waterfront plan that won approval of the Port Commission and the (mostly corrupt) Board of Supervisors in the 1990s.

The Port will eventually realize roughly $100 million from the deal. The city will get about $11 million for affordable housing. There will be new parks and open space, and a new, way fancier swimming pool and aquatic center. The tennis courts will be gone (Benson told me that tennis isn’t the best use for that valuable land) but the club will shuttle tennis players to another facility South of Market.

Just an aside: This is often deried as a private club, and it is — in the sense that you have to join and pay membership dues. It’s open to anyone who wants to pay, much as the YMCA is. It’s a bit more expensive than the Y, way more expensive than my gym (which has no tennis courts and a tiny two-lane lap pool) and a good bit less expensive than the high-end places lilke the Bay Club. It’s not a recreation facility for poor people, by any means. It has relatively middle-class users, particularly the folks who live in rent-controlled apartments at Golden Gateway, who get a discount. It’s not clear at this point if the club fees will go up when the fancy new version is unveiled, but I’d be shocked if the swim club attached to the priciest new housing in the city was affordable to the rest of us.

Now then: Back to the project. If you look at all the pretty architectural drawings and see all the amenities, like the new park and the wider sidewalks and the street-level retail and restaurants (ya think those will be a bit out of the normal person’s price range? Ya think?), it all looks lovely.

Money for the port. Money for the city’s general fund. Affordable housing money. What’s not to like?

Well, I told Benson, who used to work for Tom Ammiano is someone I’ve been friendly with for years, the same thing that I’ve told other city officials, including a few supervisors:

If this is the kind of housing we’re building, if this is the population our housing policy caters to, if this is what San Francisco is going to become, then nothing else really matters.There will be no progressive movement in this city. There will be no crazy, wild culture. To quote Calvin Welch: “Who lives here, votes here.” And the richer the city gets, the more conservative it gets.

And, frankly, the more boring it gets.

We’re seeing that already. The 20,000 new (rich) residents of District 6 voted for Jane Kim, and they may continue to vote for her as long as she supports things like the Twitter tax break, but they wouldn’t have voted for Chris Daly. And when Kim is termed out, the next D6 supervisor is likely to be a lot more conservative. The wild SOMA culture is going to vanish. How many of these condo-dwellers will go to, or even tolerate, the How Weird Street Fair? How many will want to put an end to the Folsom Street Fair?

Yeah, the rich who move into this city support same-sex marriage and like bicycle lanes on the streets. But they aren’t going to push higher taxes. They aren’t going to support politicians who have at their core a belief that narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor is the most important issue facing this city and this country today. They’d probably vote for Scott Wiener over David Campos for state Assembly. They’ll blent the city’s edge, make it just like so many other places in the world.

The city’s own policy makes clear that 60 percent of all new housing should be below market-rate. Every new project for the rich that we approve skews the balance a little further away from housing for the majority of people who work in the city. Teachers, firefighters, hotel workers — they can’t afford this stuff. So they move further out of town, taking longer commutes, using more energy … it’s all wrong.

That’s why the May 15 vote on this project matters. Not because most of us will ever swim or play tennis at the Golden Gateway club one way or the other. Not just because the new buildings are too tall. Not because 134 units of uber-rich condos at 8 Washington will gentrify the Mission. It matters because, day by day, wek by week, condo approval by condo approval, we’re losing San Francisco.

What the preservation vote says about the 2012 supervisors

Zelda Bronstein

-

May 10, 2012

64

What the preservation vote says about the 2012 supervisors

UPDATE: Important update at the end of this story

What does it mean that a historic preservation law favored by developers and promoted by Sup. Scott Wiener passed the Board of Supervisors 8-3? Maybe nothing. Historic preservation is a strange poliltical issue, favored by some of the wealthy white homeowner types who love pretty buildings (and aren’t so good on other issues), and this thing was sold as a way to help low-income people and affordable housing. But the reality is that the Wiener measure will make it harder to declare historic districts, and thus will take away a tool that the left can use to stop uncontrolled commercial development. And remember: The affordable housing community wasn’t pushing this bill, and, for the most part, hasn’t had problems with historic preservation. The most progressive political club in the city, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, came out strongly against the measure and urged Sup. Christina Olague, a co-sponsor, to oppose it:

We are extremely troubled that you appear to be buying into the flawed, bogus and self-serving arguments by SPUR and other supporters of this legislation that historic preservation is classist and leads to gentrification, interferes with the production of affordable housing and is a tool of San Francisco’s elite. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There was a way to address the issues of low-income people in historic districts without making it harder to block inappropropriate development, but Wiener’s bill went much further. And while I respect Scott Wiener and find him accessible and straightforward, and I agree with him on some issues, he isn’t someone whose basic agenda promotes the interests of tenants or low-income people. His supporters are much more among the landlord class and the downtown folks. The San Francisco Chronicle, which is a conservative paper on economic and development issues, loved the legislation.

So what happened when this got to the Board? Only three people — the ones the Chron calls “the stalwart left flank of the Board” — voted no.

John Avalos, David Campos and Eric Mar. They are now the solid left flank, the ones who can be counted on to do the right thing on almost every issue. Once upon a time, there were six solid left votes. Now there are three.

What does this mean for the other key issues coming up, including CPMC, 8 Washington, and the city budget? Maybe nothing. As I say, this issue is complicated. Olague told me, for example, that she’s really worried about working-class people who can’t afford to comply with the increased regulations that come with historic districts. Her vote doesn’t mean she’s dropped out of the progressive camp, or that she (or Sups. Jane Kim and David Chiu) can’t be counted on in the future. I really want to believe that this was just an aberration, a vote where I’ll look back in the fall and say: Okay, we disagreed on that one, but nobody’s perfect.

Still, it’s kind of depressing: The dependable progressive vote is down to three.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: I didn’t know when I posted this that Olague had spoken to the Milk Club leadership after the club’s statement went out and the club has since issued a correction:

Due to a misunderstanding, Supervisor Christine Olague’s position on the Historic Preservation Commission’s critical role in the life of San Franicsco was misrepresented in our weekly newsletter. Supervisor Olague is looking into ways to help continue Historic District status for the Queer community, the Filipino community in the South of Market area, and the Japantown area. She is specifically looking for wording that would help these plans remain viable and welcomes any questions on her position and on her plan. Our apologies to the Supervisor for this unfortunate mistake.

SEIU reps pleased with tentative contract

-

May 10, 2012

46

SEIU reps pleased with tentative contract

After heated negotiations, the city has come to a tentative two-year contract agreement with SEIU Local 1021.

The union, which represents 12,000 city workers, has staged large protests in recent weeks while negotiators worked on the contract. The union was opposed to pay cuts and increases in health care costs that the city originally proposed.

With the new agreement, city workers will get a three percent pay increase, to kick in next year.

The arbitrator of the negotiations also ruled in favor of the union on the issue of temporary workers, who mostly don’t currently enjoy benefits or job security. Now, temporary city workers who have worked 1500 hours over the past three years will be prioritized for permanent jobs.

The SEIU did compromise on some parts of the deal. The new contract won’t include travel pay previously provided to people who commute outside the city for work. There will also be new restrictions placed on union organizing, as union stewards will need to be “escorted” into what the city deems “confidential areas,” restricting union access to work environments.

Larry Bradshaw, 1021 Vice President, has been at the table since negotiations began in February. “I’m very happy with the results,” said Bradshaw. “Its the first agreement since 2009 where the city is not going to balance the budget on the back of working families.”

In the years since 2009, city workers have had deferred pay wages, wage concessions, and increased health care costs. Bradshaw says the new contract will put base wages back at 2009 levels.

“I think in the first years of the recession our members were willing to sacrifice,” said Bradshaw. “But then year after year, they don’t want to keep doing that when the city is not going after corporations. They’re just sitting on wealth and the city is not taxing that wealth.”

http://vimeo.com/39869973

That sentiment has led to the SEIU’s call for increased taxes on some corporations in the city. That’s the issue they address in the above video, which may become a TV commercial for what may become a ballot measure in November that would restructure the business tax code.

SEIU Local 1021 members are currently in the process of voting to ratify the contract. The vote will be done by Monday evening, just in time for the Board of Supervisors to ratify the agreement at their May 15 meeting.