Supervisors

Republican who wants to overturn rent control pumps $200,000 into district elections

Mary Magee
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Republican who wants to overturn rent control pumps $200,000 into district elections

Thomas J, Coates, a big time investor in apartments and mobile homes, has dropped a total of $225,000 into five independent expenditure committees that are trying to push conservative-friendly candidates and measures over the victory line this fall.

Coates, a 56-year-old Republican (he donated $2,000 to George Bush in the 2004 presidential election) and yacht racing enthusiast, was the biggest single spender in the November 2008 election, when he contributed nearly $1 million to Prop. 98, a statewide measure that sought to repeal rent control in California and limit government’s right to seize private property by eminent domain.

And with only 11 days until the election, Coates has given local Republican war chests an enormous last-minute boost: He plunked $100,000 into Common Sense Voters, a committee in support of Mark Farrell in D2. He plunked $10,000 into the Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth’s committee in support of Scott Wiener in D8. He plunked $45,000 into the Alliance’s committee in support of Theresa Sparks in D6. He dropped $45,000 into the Alliance’s committee in support of Steve Moss in D10. And he dropped another $25,000 into San Franciscans for a Better Muni, a committee in support of Measure G, which attempts to reform Muni by focusing on transit operator wages.

As the Guardian previously reported, this Alliance has received thousands from the SF Police Officer’s Association, the Building Operators and Managers Association, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, and SEIU-United Healthcare Workers, which supports a mega-hospital on Cathedral Hill.

But Coates’ donation raises questions about his choices’ commitment to rent control. As Coates told the Chronicle in an interview in 2008, “There is a reason why 35 of 50 states expressly prohibit rent control by law – and the reason is it doesn’t work.”

Coates, who is a principal in Jackson Square Properties, which specializes in apartments and mobile homes, is also the founding partner of Arroya & Coates, a commercial real estate brokerage and investment firm whose clients include Walgreens, Circuit City, and J.P. Morgan Investment Management. And as campaign disclosures show, he’s dumped a large part of his money into the same conservative alliance that has already collectively spent almost $170,000 on Moss, Sparks and Wiener.

So far, labor has countered the Republican money by spending $70,000 in support of Debra Walker in D6 and $90,000 on Mandelman in D8, and the SF Tenants Union has spent a total of $20,000 on mailers opposing Moss, Sparks and Wiener. But collectively the downtown money, which is also being funnelled into several other independent expenditure committees, continues to massively outweigh the progressive bucks.

Coates’ phone line continues to register a “busy” signal, making it impossible to leave him a message, but I’d be happy to include his comments here, if and when I talk to him.

But Gullicksen said he was disturbed by Coates’ heavy spending on the supervisors’ races.

“Coates is the main funder of Prop. 98, his property is in Southern California, he’s pumping a lot of money into supervisors and he clearly has an agenda that we fear Moss, Sparks and Wiener share, which is to make the existence of rent control an issue the Board will take up, if those supervisors are elected.”

It will be interesting to see if Moss, Sparks and Wiener are prepared to pledge that they have no intention to attack rent control….so, stay tuned.

Meanwhile, labor is organizing a protest outside Coates office at 500 Washington Street at 5 p.m on Tuesday, Oct. 26.

“Be there or be evicted!” labor warned.

 

Newsom could be headed for victory

Sasha Cuttler
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11
Newsom could be headed for victory

Gavin Newsom seems poised to win his race for lieutenant governor, at least as indicated by his opponent Abel Maldonado’s increasingly desperate campaign tactics and Newsom’s string of newspaper endorsements, including the Spanish language La Opinion, which chose to pass over a moderate Latino that it has endorsed in the past. The only question now is voter turnout, and whether Newsom’s negatives would be enough to drag him down if the Democratic base stays home in this lackluster election.

In its endorsement in Sunday’s paper, La Opinion wrote, “We are deeply disappointed that in this election [Maldonado] has opted for an opportunistic strategy of using images of undocumented criminals to earn political points. This is unacceptable and his charges against Newsom on this issue are inaccurate.” The reference was to Maldonado’s wild charges in an Oct. 15 debate that Newsom created San Francisco’s sanctuary city policies and was responsible for the fatal shootings of Bologna family members, allegedly by an undocumented immigrant who had once been in city custody. The reality was that Newsom inherited the sanctuary city policy and unilaterally weakened it after the Bologna shooting, even refusing to implement legislation approved by the Board of Supervisors (which Newsom vetoed but the board overrode) to require due process before those arrested are turned over to the feds for possible deportation.

While the paper didn’t seem to understand that Newsom has snubbed his nose at San Francisco progressives and petulantly fed a particularly divisive style of politics here, they do rightfully give him credit for running a complicated city, unlike the conservative city of Santa Maria where Maldonado was mayor and always did the bidding of the Chamber of Commerce, something I observed while working at the Santa Maria Times at the time. “The Democratic candidate has implemented solid, progressive management while leading a diverse city during a deep budget crisis. Newsom has proven to be creative, resourceful, and sensitive while forging alliances that improve the quality of life for his city’s residents,” La Opinion wrote. 

Then yesterday, as the Los Angeles Times reports on its blog, when Newsom held a campaign event trumpeting his support by Latino leaders such as Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and labor leader Dolores Huerta, Maldonado showed up and sat in the back with his advisers during the event. Now that’s just strange.

A California Democratic Party e-mail blast this afternoon used a series of rhetorical questions to describe the campaign’s episodes: “So was Maldonado’s bizarre behavior an egotistical attempt to intimidate other Latinos who came to the event to support Newsom? Does he feel entitled to the appointed position now that he actually has to compete for voters in a real election? Is he desperate for media attention? Or does he just enjoy being a spectator, watching his opponent secure key Latino endorsements while his own campaign falls apart?”

But the real question is whether Democrats can mobilize enough voters to overcome Newsom’s negatives, from his arrogance to his personal foibles. When I did a search for Gavin Newsom’s name on Yahoo, which automatically guesses what you’re asking for based on past queries, the first three that listed were “Gavin Newsom girlfriend,” “Gavin Newsom divorce,” and “Gavin Newsom affair,” an apparent reference to his admitted affair with Ruby Rippey Tourk, who worked for him and was married to his reelection campaign manager.

So, if you support Newsom for this office — or even if you’re just anxious for him to leave San Francisco a year before his mayoral term expires — don’t forget to get out there and vote.

On the margins

Andrew Lam
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3
On the margins

Sarah@sfbg.com

Franklin is a 20-something computer programmer who shares an apartment with 10 other people around his age, an arrangement that helps him and his housemates come up with $3,500 each month for rent in the Mission, a rapidly gentrifying part of town.

“Everyone is pretty much working, but they are in and out at different times so the house isn’t ever really empty. But there’s usually only three or four of us at a time, ” Franklin told the Guardian, speaking on his cell phone as he rode his bike to work.

But how does an apartment that officially has only one bedroom sleep 10 people? Franklin said there are other rooms in the house — including a dining room and a double parlor that splits into two with sliding doors — and that each of these spaces has a couple sleeping in it. “And there is one person sleeping in a closet and another sleeping in a space atop the bathroom.”

While overcrowding has been a problem in immigrant communities in San Francisco, it’s reaching a new area: young people who have for generations flocked to the city to escape uncomfortable home lives, find a supportive community, and make a new start in life.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, said at least 1,250 housing units annually were lost to condominium and tenancy-in-common conversions in the dot.com and housing bubble years, a loss rate that has slowed only slightly since then.

“Right now, it’s about 1,000 units a year,” he said.

It’s become more common for young people to struggle to pay rent in a town where well-paying jobs are scarce and educational programs have been cut — a triple whammy that means youth with additional challenges are at risk of becoming homeless and getting trapped in vicious cycle of abuse and incarceration.

COMPOUNDING THE PROBLEM

Sherilyn Adams, executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services, which provides housing, medical, social, and educational services to at-risk homeless and runaway youth, says all young people in San Francisco face the same basic challenges.

“And if, in addition, these youth are part of a group like LGBTQ youth, or are youth of color, or immigrant youth, documented or not, then the circumstances and barriers are much more exacerbated,” she said.

Adams said San Francisco has done a lot to add resources for transitional age youth, a group that traditionally has been defined as ages 12 to 24. “But there is still a significant gap in resources, especially for the more disenfranchised groups, because the longer you’ve been on the street, the more complex your issues in terms of substance abuse and mental health.”

Civic leaders, including California Assembly member Tom Ammiano, recently held a rally and candlelight march to raise awareness of the tragic rise in homelessness and suicides among LGBTQ youth. Shortly after, Adams told us, “Youth who came here escaping homophobia in their family or city then face the harsh reality of San Francisco.”

Adams understands that some people see Proposition L, legislation on the November ballot to criminalize sitting or lying on city sidewalks, as a way to address disruptive and aggressive behavior on the streets. “But it becomes part of the larger divide, because youth who come here and are on the street are mostly there because they have no other place. So penalizing them in the absence of services, housing, and education is ineffective at best and really harmful at worst,” Adams said.

Many young people on the brink of homelessness are “somewhat invisible,” and therefore at high risk, she said. “Youth will double, triple up. They will couch surf as a way to be off the streets. And we hear the stories where youth are faced with a Sophie’s choice: Do you sleep on the street, or do you barter with what you have available so as to get shelter? And LGBTQ youth are at particular risk because the more disenfranchised and disconnected you are, the more you have to make impossible choices to survive.”

Jodi Schwartz, executive director at Lyric, an SF nonprofit that focuses on building community and inspiring change in LGBTQ youth, said the group serves 500 youth and reaches out to 800 to 1,000 more each year. “We go into classrooms and talk about hate speech, putting it in the context of racism and other forms of oppression,” she said.

“There’s a misconception that because we live in San Francisco and have a lot more dialogue and interaction with the LGBTQ community, that young people’s experience here is so much better. It may be different, but I wouldn’t say it’s better,” Schwartz said, noting that harassment levels, especially for transgendered youth in local schools, are very high.

HELPING THOSE IN NEED

Young women are another at-risk group, especially if they are pregnant, have kids, or are in the foster or juvenile justice system.

As executive director of the Center for Young Women’s Development in San Francisco’s gritty SoMa district, Marlene Sanchez tries to stabilize at-risk young women, then engage them in policy work so they can advocate for other young people they know.

“We work with young women who are involved in the underground street economies, doing prostitution, drug sales, and selling stolen goods like clothes,” Sanchez said. “We try to reach them on the streets and inside Juvenile Hall, so we take an inside-outside approach.”

Leajay Harper, who coordinates CYWD’s Young Mothers United program, works with young pregnant women inside Juvenile Hall.

“We have all experienced poverty, parents on drugs, and having to take care of younger siblings,” Harper said. “When young moms get incarcerated, they are at risk of having their children taken away at much higher rates. So we started parenting classes that are age and culturally relevant.”

City records show that while only about 12 percent of Juvenile Hall detainees are female, they are twice as likely as their male counterparts to land back in custody for probation violations.

“There are lots of young women with felonies struggling to pay their bills and feed their kids who look out the window and see they can sell drugs. And that often seems like the only option,” Sanchez explained.

City statistics also show that of the overwhelmingly male population at Juvenile Hall, almost half is African American, and that many are inside for what appear to be gang-related offenses.

Easop Winston, a 35-year-old local musician, church pastor, and member of the Visitacion Valley Peacekeepers, regularly visits young men inside Juvenile Hall, where gangs are a topic of discussion every week.

“The same guys that they have been fighting with, they are now incarcerated with,” Winston observed. “So one of the approaches I try to take is rehabilitating how they think about their neighbor. You are killing/fighting with someone who lives one block over. It’s plain genocide”

He credits the juvenile justice system for doing its best, but worries that it fails to rehabilitate youthful offenders with jobs skills, education, and counseling before sending them back into society.

He blames the churches for not doing a better job of making youth feel welcome. “Churches are part of the fabric of our community,” he said. “They need to do more outreach and not have so many rules. They need to accept youth as they are, with their tattoos, piercings, and styles of clothing.”

Winston believes politicians need to do a better job of making sure community-based organizations deliver on their promises to help working class communities of color. At the same time, as he acknowledges, “We can’t cure the world in one day.”

“Over the last five to 10 years, the African American population in SF has shrunk,” he observed. “Everybody is moving to Antioch and Fairfield because people can’t afford to live here. People are losing their jobs. And San Francisco has almost become impossible to live in unless you have a college degree. A lot of what I hear from youth is about economics. They want jobs. They want to be trained.”

PUSHING THEM OUT

Political disputes over the city’s sanctuary city policies on undocumented immigrants — which have left in limbo the question of whether arrested immigrants will get their days in court before being turned over to the federal government for possible deportation — have also been a source of instability for immigrant teens, many of whom are homeless and/or LGBTQ.

Police Commissioner Angela Chan, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, decried Mayor Gavin Newsom for refusing to implement Sup. David Campos’ due process legislation, which the board approved in November 2009.

“It’s been a little bit upsetting for the many groups that took the democratic process seriously. But these groups are still very committed to these kids,” Chan said. “We are hoping to work with the new U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag to clarify this issue and explain that the top priority of the Obama administration is not to deport undocumented youth.”

Other so-called tough-on-crime initiatives also threaten local at-risk young people. In September, City Attorney Dennis Herrera secured an injunction against 41 alleged gang members in Visitacion Valley, a strategy that progressives fear will accelerate the ongoing displacement of the African American community.

Court documents show that 66 percent of the men named in the injunction are 18 to 25 years old and that many have children in public housing, where lease holders are predominantly women of color.

San Francisco City College Trustee Chris Jackson, 27, is running for the District 10 seat on the Board of Supervisors. Noting that the southeast SF district has some of the highest numbers of poor people and children citywide, Jackson said that youth issues are similar to challenges that other voters face.

“But the context is different,” said Jackson, who previously served on the San Francisco Youth Commission. “Young people care about safe streets because it’s us or our friends who are on them. We care about schools because we are in them and want to go to college. And we are concerned about the future of employment because how do you tell folks to go to school if there are no jobs?”

Jackson notes that in the Bayview-Hunters Point, home to the city’s largest remaining African American community, kids don’t come back if they leave for college. “We see a brain drain. It’s really difficult to retain young people, so it’s important to first make sure that youth’s housing needs are met. And they also need access to careers so that when they graduate, they know there is a job in the city. But right now, youth can’t even find a summer job because of the recession.”

He called for city policies that are based on the needs of current city residents rather than developers’ profits or the desires of well-off outsiders to move here.

“San Francisco is more of an opportunity for Silicon Valley residents than for youth who were born and raised here. And part of the problem is city policies, ineffective programs, and a failure to provide job opportunities for youth,” he said. “Everything for youth has been gutted.”

And those evaporating opportunities are compounded by punitive policies like Prop. L, Jackson said, further alienating young people. “It comes down to how much money you have,” Jackson observes. “If you are rich, you can enjoy the parks, the clubs, the transit. But if you are low-income, especially low-income youth of color, it’s very hard to take advantage of everything the city has to offer.”

Noting that both City College and the San Francisco Unified School District canceled their summer school program, Jackson said, “it doesn’t look like youth are prioritized.”

Jackson was recently at Double Rock (a.k.a. the Alice Griffith Public Housing Project) and he saw four kids under 10 who were at home while their parents were at work. “Why aren’t they in school or in child care? And don’t give me the line that these are hard to serve communities. We have to serve them.”

N’tanya Lee, executive director of Coleman Advocates, agrees that while all young people are struggling in the city, African American children and youth are having one of the worst times.

“We don’t need 5,000 different strategies and initiatives when 90 percent of these kids live in extreme poverty, mostly concentrated in public housing, and you could fit the city’s entire black high school student population into one auditorium,” Lee said.

She wants the city to create a database of these youth and develop specific strategies to help this population before it’s too late.

“No one in city government feels accountable for the outcomes for black children and youth,” she said. “Instead you have one group who are about young people and another who are about economic development — and they have nothing to do with each other. Meanwhile, we’ve lost half of all black families with children in this city in the past 20 years.”

Our 44th Anniversary Issue also includes stories by Rebecca Bowe on ageing out of the foster care system, Caitlin Donohue’s account of the Haight street kids, and Tim Redmond’s editorial on the issues facing our rising generation

Get angry and make ’em do it!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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9
Get angry and make ’em do it!

After crashing the country’s economy and turning the world against us, Republicans are clawing their way back into power by stoking voter anger at political and economic systems that are stacked against the common citizen, a tactic that progressives need to adopt if we ever hope to move our agenda forward.

“Anger, not hope, is the fuel of political and economic change,” Jamie Court, head of Consumer Watchdog, writes in his new book, The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell: How to win grassroots campaigns, pass ballot box laws, and get the change we voted for (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010).

Court writes that progressives are rightfully disappointed and disillusioned that after helping to elect President Barack Obama, he and Congressional Democrats turned around and gave Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and the health insurance companies everything they wanted, with Obama even caving in on requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance, something he opposed as a candidate.


Yet Court said politicians never do the right thing and push progressive political change unless they’re forced to do so. He opened the book with a scene in which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with progressive political leaders, listened to their proposals, and then told them, “I agree. I am all for your plan. Now make me do it.”

It’s a concept that the conservative Tea Party movement understands well, and even though they may be crazy and wrongheaded in their utterly unsustainable and destabilizing policy agenda, they have effectively used anger as a political tool, and as a result, the NY Times reports they are poised to wield a disproportionate amount of political power after this election.

It’s the same story on the local level, where the only real anger in this election cycle is coming from those mad at public employee unions and their pension deals, and vagrants who sit uncivilly on sidewalks. These people will keep pushing for what they expect, but many progressives act as if it’s enough to prevent truly heinous Republicans like Meg Whitman from taking power, rather than trying to push Jerry Brown or Board of Supervisors’ progressives from day one to start empowering people over corporations.

“After the vote, power vacuums fill with familiar values, if not faces. Promises give way to fiscal realities, hope succumbs to pragmatism, and ambition concedes to inertia. The old tricks of interest group – confuse, diffuse, scare – prevail over the better angels of American nature,” Court writes, relaying a familiar electoral pattern.

Yet in this election, when the best outcome seems to be simply dodging a bullet, is there any hope for progressive political change? Isn’t the system just too broken? I asked Court these questions when he stopped by the Guardian office for a chat recently, and he retains a belief that with the right kind of tactics and agenda, progressives can still seize the political initiative and power.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3RD0YObHok

“I wrote it to reengage progressives because they are so despondent,” Court told me. “It’s about how to use anger and focus anger…Politicians don’t answer polite mobs, they only answer angry mobs and the Tea Party is the only angry mob in the room.”

Progressive have understandable doubts about the responsiveness of the current political system, but Court said, “I know if we don’t try to make it work, we’re never going to get there.”

And his book lays out the path to get there, step by step, based on some of the legislative and political successes that Consumer Watchdog and other progressives have had in recent years, such as rejecting the well-funded corporate con jobs in Propositions 16 and 17 earlier this year. Yet it involves an approach based on principle and not parties, and with being relentless in pursuing the kind of world we need.

“If you want to fight corporate power, you have to fight Democrats and Republicans,” Court said.

Specifically, Court is calling for progressives to push a California ballot measure that would establish a public health care option here, the very thing that Obama and the Democrats failed to include in their health reform package, and which will dash any hopes of it working if the people are forced to rely on unregulated insurance company products.

“The biggest thing is mandatory health insurance, which is a ticking time bomb,” Court said, one set to go off in 2014 when that aspect of Obama’s health care reform kicks in.

Corporate and political power working together seem to be a force too strong to overcome, but as Court writes, “Public opinion is the most powerful force in the world. While it can be muted, distracted, and co-opted, it cannot be controlled, except by the public.”

Willie Brown and accusations of machine politics in D6

Sasha Cuttler
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Willie Brown and accusations of machine politics in D6

A political mailer promoting progressive supervisorial candidate Jane Kim was funded primarily by former Mayor Willie Brown through a campaign committee that Kim consultant Enrique Pearce helped start and which was located in his office, the latest strange development in a race that is dividing the progressive movement at a crucial moment and prompting a nasty public debate over political “machines.”

It’s illegal for campaigns to coordinate activities with independent expenditure committees such as New Day for SF, which put out the glossy mailer proclaiming “Another renter supports Jane Kim for District 6 Supervisor” and calling her “The people’s candidate.” The most recent campaign finance statements, filed Oct. 4, listed the group’s treasurer as USF student Brent Robinson and the contact number being that of Pearce’s Left Coast Communications, where Robinson worked.

Pearce told the Guardian that he was involved in starting New Day for SF, but that he severed ties with the group and Robinson “about a month ago” when it seemed they might support Kim. “When it started to go down that path, we said that we can’t do that,” Pearce said, adding that he didn’t know why the forms still listed his phone number or why the receptionist in his office took a message for Robinson from the Guardian, although Pearce said they share a receptionist with other organizations. On Oct. 5, a day after the intial filing, the group filed a form to amend Robinson’s phone number.

The campaign finance form shows the group raised $9,200, including $5,000 from Brown on Sept. 30 and $2,500 from Twenty-Two Holdings LLC, which last year applied for a liquor license for the Wunder Brewing Co. Robinson did not return our calls for comment.

The Bay Guardian and other progressive voices used to decry the corrosive influence on San Francisco politics of the Democratic Party political machine established by Brown and former California Senate President (and current state party chair) John Burton. Although that machine is dormant now, the concept of machine politics has been revived in this election cycle by Kim and her allies, adding an ironic note to her support by Brown.

“I’m not a part of anyone’s machine and I’m certainly not a part of anyone’s master plan,” Kim declared during her June 24 campaign kickoff party, where Brown and former Mayor Art Agnos made an appearance. When I highlighted the remark in my coverage of the event, and its inference that Kim’s progressive rival Debra Walker was supported by a budding progressive political machine, it triggered a raging political debate about the concept that continues this day.

The nastiest salvos in that debate have recently been fired at the Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Democratic Party Central Committee – accusing us of being part of a political machine supporting Walker and excluding Kim (who got the Guardian’s #2 endorsement) – by Randy Shaw on his Beyond Chron blog. Shaw is one of two staff writers on the blog, along with Paul Hogarth, a Democratic Party activist and Kim campaign volunteer.

Shaw founded and runs the nonprofit Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which has millions of dollars in city contracts to administer SRO leases through Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Care Not Cash and other programs. He started BeyondChron a few years ago with seed money from Joe O’Donoghue, who was then president of the Residential Builders Association, a developer group that has sometimes clashed with Walker in her capacity as a member of the city’s Building Inspection Commission.

On Oct. 5 and then again on Oct. 12, Shaw wrote and prominently posted long stories promoting Kim’s candidacy and attacking us and the DCCC for not supporting her more strongly. In the first one, “In District 6, Jane Kim takes on the machine,” Shaw defended Burton but shared the Guardian’s criticism of how Brown behaved as mayor.

“Brown’s power was strictly personal, as became clear when his chosen Supervisor candidates were defeated in the 2000 elections,” Shaw wrote, criticizing political machines and writing that the progressive political movement is not “served when those seeking to run for office feel they must choose between ‘playing ball’ with political insiders and giving up their dreams.”

But is it possible that Shaw’s strident campaigning against Walker – indeed, his protege Hogarth planned to challenge Walker before Kim decided to get into the race – was prompted by Walker’s unwillingness to “play ball” with Shaw and his RBA backers? Should we be concerned that it’s actually Shaw who’s trying to build his own little political machine?

I’ve tried to discuss these issues with Shaw and Hogarth, including sending them a detailed list of questions (as has Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond), but they’ve been unwilling to respond, just as they were unwilling to contact us before writing two divisive hit pieces that were riddled with inaccuracies that they’ve refused to correct.

I’ve also left messages with Kim and others in her campaign to discuss machine politics and its implications – as well as Sup. Chris Daly, asking about the sometimes close relations that some progressive supervisors have had with Shaw and RBA developers over the years [UPDATE BELOW] – and we’re waiting to hear back.

But Pearce said voters shouldn’t read too much into a relatively small political contribution from Willie Brown, or from the “colorful writing” of Randy Shaw, emphasizing Kim’s independence and saying that was always what she intended to stress when she raised the specter of machine politics tainting the race.

“Randy Shaw is not a part of this campaign, and Willie Brown is certainly not a part of this campaign,” Pearce told us. In fact, Pearce even noted that his office is not a part of the Kim campaign, that they’re merely consultants to it. And he offered his hopes and belief that in 19 days when this campaign is over, progressives would overcome their differences and find a common agenda again. Let’s hope so.

UPDATE: Daly and I just connected and he had an interesting take on all this. He noted that when Brown was mayor, the base that he brought together included the RBA, Rose Pak and the Chinatown power brokers (who also seem to be backing Kim, who used to work as an activist/organizer in that community), and, improbably, both Labor and Downtown.

“But that’s not Gavin’s alignment, his alignment is just downtown. The RBA guys hate Gavin, mostly just because of who is is, a silver spoon guy who never worked a day in his life,” Daly said. So Matt Gonzalez, the board president who ran against Newsom in 2003, formed an alliance with the RBA and O’Donoghue, who already had a long relationship with Shaw, both personal and financial.

Daly also said that he thinks it’s a personality clash more than anything else that is driving Shaw’s opposition to Walker: “He just doesn’t like Debra.” In turn, that sort of personality-based politics — more than any differences in ideology, vision, or qualifications — is souring people in the two political camps on one another as this close election enters the home stretch. But will those resentments linger after this election? Probably, Daly said, although he plans to actively try to mediate the divide once the dust clears on this race.

“Luckily, we have a lot of young people entering the progressive movement,” Daly said. “There’s always a rejuvenation going on and one day the new leaders will be like, ‘Why do that guy and that guy hate each other?’ ‘I don’t know, I think it had something to do with the 2010 election.”

Waiting to inhale

Andrew Lam
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0
Waiting to inhale

news@sfbg.com

Much of the controversy around Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana in California for even nonmedical uses, involves speculation about what comes next. Hash bars on Market Street? Packs of joints next to the cigarettes in Mission District bodegas? Bags of green buds available with the bongs for sale on Haight Street? They are questions that have yet to get serious consideration in the city where the medical marijuana movement was launched.

The measure would give local governments almost complete control over how to regulate recreational-use cannabis sales in much the same way that cities set their own standards for medical marijuana dispensaries, a realm in which San Francisco has shown real leadership and created a well-functioning, successful, and legitimate industry (see “Marijuana goes mainstream,” Jan. 27).

But San Franciscans have been slow to prepare for the post-Prop. 19 world, with some other Bay Area cities leaving it in the dust on these issues. Oakland City Council Member Rebecca Kaplan, who is now running for mayor, not only spearheaded that city’s ballot measures on taxing recreational pot sales and permitting large scale growing operations, she’s actively talking using the Amsterdam model to revitalize the city’s downtown business district.

“[Hash bars] absolutely potentially would be part of the mix,” Kaplan told us when we asked about the issue during her mayoral endorsement interview, seeing it as part of a multipronged economic development strategy.

When asked if Oakland should have places where people could go to blaze legally, something Oakland doesn’t allow in its medical marijuana dispensaries, Kaplan said, “Yes. Oh yeah, we’re definitely gonna have those. The only question is gonna be whether the consumption facilities are separate from [those for] sales,” or if they’re under the same roof.

Kaplan thinks this will be part of the winning strategy that takes cannabis use off street corners while acknowledging its appeal to visitors and “synergy with the restaurants. When I talk about wanting to replicate the Amsterdam model in Oakland … it doesn’t just mean that you have … a regulated cannabis facility. You also have restaurants, shops, pedestrian safety, nice lighting, patio dining, musicians, artists.”

She points out that although an Oakland-regulated cannabis industry may use current alcohol regulation as a template, the two substances would not be sold alongside each other. “Frankly, ABC [California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control) will freak out.” That means, at least in Oakland, you won’t be able to purchase cannabis at bars, liquor, or grocery stores.

On this side of the bay, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — who wrote the regulations on the city’s medical marijuana facilities — says it is “extremely premature” to contemplate Amsterdam-esque hash bars. “That would have to occur within a strong regulatory framework,” he said, one the Board of Supervisors has yet to envision. San Francisco attorney David Owen, who has helped advise some medical marijuana purveyors, said some dispensaries currently allow on-site medication, and San Francisco might legislate to extend the practice to bars.

Meanwhile other California cities such as Berkeley and Oakland are anticipating Prop. 19’s passage much more proactively. Berkeley’s Measure S would tax cannabis businesses, applying different rates to for profit med-use cannabis businesses, nonprofit med-use businesses, and rec-use businesses (which won’t exist unless Prop 19 passes). The measure would secure medical-use cannabis for low-income patients and tighten regulations on Berkeley’s current med-use dispensaries and cultivators regardless of how Prop. 19 fares. There’s also a Measure T on the ballot that would establish a new committee that, in the event that Prop. 19 passes, would advise city officials on how to implement it.

Berkeley City Council Member Kriss Worthington said planning for the post-Prop. 19 world is smart to “synchronize a forward movement on the state and local level” and to “hit the ground running,” a sentiment that Kaplan also voiced for Oakland and one shared by other cities.

Stockton’s Measure I would tax rec-use cannabis businesses at a higher rate than med-use businesses. Sacramento’s Measure C is similar, containing a provision for a rec-use tax range if Prop. 19 passes. Richmond’s Measure V would tax 5 percent of gross sales of cannabis, and could apply to rec-use businesses too. Oakland’s Measure V would add a 5 percent tax to other taxes already on med-use cannabis, and put a 10 percent sales tax on rec-use cannabis. Measure H, on Rancho Cordova’s ballot, would tax personal cultivation at a higher tax on any square footage beyond the 25 square feet that Prop 19 specifies. Long Beach’s Measure B would establish a business license tax on the city’s potential recreational cannabis businesses. Even Albany, which has no dispensaries, would tax for-profit and nonprofit dispensaries differently through its Measure Q.

But Mirkarimi said he would like to tax marijuana cultivation, and has even voiced support for med-use cannabis dispensaries working directly with SF General Hospital to provide to patients, “thereby segregating a special use” and keeping cannabis prices low or nonexistent based on patient needs.

So if Prop. 19 passes, where will San Franciscans be able to purchase rec-use cannabis? Current med-use dispensaries may be a logical choice. “We already have the infrastructure,” said SF dispensary Medithrive co-owner Daniel Bornstein.

Whereas alcohol purveyors are accustomed to providing one barrier to purchase (when they card the buyer), dispensaries such as Medithrive offer many. “We already card and only accept patronage from those with a valid doctor recommendation. We also require he/she become a member of the dispensary and limit to one visit per day.”

When he contemplates whether Medithrive might provide rec-use cannabis in the future, Bornstein says “If [the city adopts] a responsible statute that’s fair, we would welcome the opportunity to offer a broadened service to more people.”

That avenue troubles Mirkarimi. “I don’t know how that works,” he said. Rec-use cannabis purchase would require no doctor’s notes and could occur within a for-profit business model. How would dispensaries legally reconcile making money under their nonprofit status? “I don’t want to put that burden on them,” Mirkarimi said.

Prop. 19 offers other potential implementation conundrums. For example, the measure will only give local governments the option to legalize the limited cultivation/sale of cannabis. Legalization won’t be compulsory. Therefore, it is likely that a post-Prop. 19-approved California will become a patchwork of alternating “dry” and “wet” municipalities.

So let’s say you’re on a road trip and you pass through many cities that all treat cannabis differently. Bornstein and his Medithrive partner Misha Breyburg worry about such a “patchwork of legal complexity.” But Prop. 19 provides for the legal transport of cannabis through cities that prohibit its sale, and California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano has already proposed legislation to smooth out the rough spots in Prop. 19 and answer open questions.

So for now, everyone is just waiting to see what state voters do.

 

Janet Reilly wants a centrist mayor. Ick.

Zelda Bronstein
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Janet Reilly wants a centrist mayor. Ick.

Janet Reilly’s the overwhelming frontrunner in District 2, and has the support of just about everyone in the Democratic Party establishment, including U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and Mayor Gavin Newsom. But she seems to be nervous that someone might suggest she would support a progressive (like, Gasp! Aaron Peskin) for mayor if Newsom leaves the city for Sacramento and the Lt. Guv’s office.


So she sent out an email to her supporters today, announcing that she wouldn’t support any current member of the board — or any former member of the board who has served with any current member of the board. You following? Here’s the message:


I would strongly support a true interim Mayor who pledges not to seek
re-election to a 4-year term. The interim Mayor’s sole ambition should
be to successfully steward the city until the people choose the next
Mayor. I believe this person should be a senior statesperson or a
non-partisan city official with unquestioned expertise and integrity.
There may be others who have never been elected who would be suitable
for the position.

In recent years, I have disagreed with the divisive politics of the
Board. Therefore, if given the chance, I will not cast my vote for
interim Mayor for any currently sitting or former Supervisor who has
served with any member of the current Board. We need a caretaker Mayor
who will guide San Francisco until voters choose long-term leadership in
the November 2011 election. This should be a thoughtful decision.

The next mayoral election will give the city an important opportunity to
chart its future. I think we need to let this debate take place without
any one candidate enjoying the advantage of incumbency.

If I am elected and called upon to vote on this matter, I will vote “no”
on any current member of the Board of Supervisors for interim Mayor, and
I will also vote “no” on any past Supervisor who has served with any
member of the current Board.

I would look for a moderate, custodian Mayor who will govern from the
center for all San Franciscans.


Gawd — governing from the center. What a joke. There is no center in San Francisco politics today, not for the mayor who has to decide whether to raise taxes or cut services, whether to deal with police and fire or stick public health, the schools, human services and rec-park with all the cuts. There are tough decisions coming up, and they’ll require a mayor to take a stand.


And if all Janet Reilly really wants is someone who can duck like a champion, it won’t be in the interest of any San Franciscans.


(I’ve tried to call Reilly for comment on this, but she hasn’t gotten back to me. She’s probably watching the Giants game, which is what I should be doing instead of blogging on this fine Monday afternoon. But I’ve got it on the radio. Go Giants.

Get a clue, Randy Shaw

Zelda Bronstein
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Get a clue, Randy Shaw

I read BeyondChron every day, and Randy Shaw, who operates the site, and Paul Hogarth, his managing editor, often have interesting commentary. But I’m constantly annoyed by people who run what by any stretch is a journalistic operation, but don’t follow the basic rules of (even alternative, activist) journalism: When you’re going to say something nasty about somebody, you call that person for comment.


Randy never called me, or Steve Jones, or Bruce Brugmann, before he launched an attack on the Guardian as part of a political machine. If he had — or if he’d done any reporting work and called around town — he might have learned something.


Randy’s argument is that the “machine” — including the Bay Guardian — is trying to block Jane Kim’s election as D6 supervisor. Let’s examine that for a minute.


There are plenty of people in San Francisco who would love to have a political machine. But it’s just not happening. The very fact that Jane Kim has the support of so many progressives — including the Board president, David Chiu, and Supervisors Eric Mar and John Avalos (all part of what Shaw calls the “machine”) suggests that nobody has to clout — not even me — to tell a candidate whether she can run for office, to control (or cut off) campaign contributions, or to wire an election.


In the days when Willie Brown ran San Francisco, the machine really did keep people from running for office. It really did close off avenues to political advancement. And if the machine was against you, it was really hard to raise money. If Brown were still the boss, and he didn’t want Kim to run, she would have been frozen out of much of the support and money she has today. Instead, Brown was at her campaign kickoff — and nobody’s manged to intimidate her many supporters and campaign contributors.


And guess what? The Guardian — the axis of the machine evil trying to freeze out Kim — endorsed her as our second choice.


I stand by what I said months ago — there’s nobody in San Francisco today — and no cadre or group — with the clout to operate as a political machine.


Nobody can line up six automatic votes on the Board of Supervisors. Even the progressives on the Democratic County Central Committee can’t always seem to get it together (note that Aaron Peskin, the chair and supposed machine honco, supported Tony Kelly for supervisor, and the DCCC didn’t put Kelly on its slate).


Right now, power in this city is fairly diffuse. That’s both a good and a bad thing. Good because machines are exclusionary, bad because it means the progressives can’t always function on a level that gets the right candidates elected and the right legislation through. Good because the left in this city is aggressively, almost happily disorganized and politically diverse, full of characters, voices, interest groups, candidates and elected officials who don’t always agree with each other and take orders from nobody. Bad because when we’re disorganized, we tend to lose.


Jane Kim didn’t get the DCCC endorsement. Nobody talked to me about that; I’m not on the panel and none of the members called to ask my advice. I would have said what the Guardian said in our endorsement package: There are exactly two progressive candidates who are qualified to be the next D6 supervisor, and their names are Debra Walker and Jane Kim. I still don’t understand why Kim entered the race against an established candidate with whom she has no substantial policy disagreements; I think that, before Kim moved to the district and entered the race, Walker was the clear consensus candidate of progressives, and as a matter of strategy, since Kim and Walker are both on the same side on the key issues, it might have made more sense for the left to unite behind one candidate.


But that’s not the issue anymore; Kim had every right to run, and now any cogent, honest ranked-choice voting strategy includes both her and Walker.


That statement alone makes clear that the Guardian’s not exactly in synch with the DCCC or any of Shaw’s other “machine” operations. The DCCC decided that the top candidate in D10 should be DeWitt Lacy, and left Tony Kelly off the slate entirely. We endorsed Tony Kelly as our first choice. The labor activists on the DCCC (and in the “machine”) are dead set against Margaret Brodkin winning a seat on the Board of Education; we endorsed her.


I would have explained our positions to Randy Shaw if he’d called or emailed me; I’m really easy to reach. And slapping people around without talking to them is bad journalism and bad progressive politics. Randy and I have disagreements, but I don’t consider him the enemy; we’re both part of a larger progressive community, and while I love (and thrive on) disputes in that community, we ought to be civil about it.


(I always contact Randy before I write about him. I did that yesterday, and asked him a series of questions, including why he never called me for comment. His non-response: “I write 3-4 articles a week and have published three books. You are free to quote from anything I have written without asking me about it.”)


Herb Caen used to say (somewhat in jest) that if you “check an item, you lose it.” In other words, once you start talking to everyone involved in an issue, you sometimes find out that the story isn’t at all the way you heard it.


That’s what should have happened with Shaw’s completely inaccurate claim about Steve Jones.


BeyondChron says that Jones was trying to get Kim to challenge Carmen Chu in D4 because they’re both Asian-American, ” in effect saying that as an Asian-American Jane should run among ‘her people,’ implying that demographics prevailed over issues and political stands.”


I talked to Steve about it; he did, indeed, talk to Jane Kim when Kim was shopping around for a district to run in. What he told her — and would have told Randy Shaw — was that it would be great for Kim, a school board member with citywide name recognition, to knock off Carmen Chu and expand the progressive majority rather than going after a strong progressive candidate in a solidly progressive seat. Race had nothing to do with it.


In fact, just about everything we’ve written about Kim comes down to the same argument: Sometimes, you have to think about the larger progressive movement, not just about yourself.


I sometimes wish the all the people who say the Bay Guardian is part of a powerful Peskin Machine were right: I’d love to pass a city income tax, hit the wealthy up for about half a billion dollars a year, eliminate the budget deficit without cutting services, municipalize PG&E (and have municipal cable TV and broadband), ban cars on a lot of streets, create 25,000 units of affordable housing … I’ve got a great agenda. And the Guardian’s so powerful that none of it ever happens.


Randy Shaw and I were both around for the tail end of the Burton Machine, and I think he gives the brothers Phil and John Burton too much credit. They were great on national issues, progressive champions in Congress. But they weren’t progressive leaders on local issues.


The Burton Machine was nowhere on the fights against overdevelopment and downtown power. Phil Burton rarely used his clout to support progressive causes and candidates at home. The machine got Harvey Milk fired from a commission appointment when he announced he was going to run for state Assembly against Art Agnos. The machine came together to make sure that Nancy Pelosi, an unknown who had never held office, got elected to Congress instead of Harry Britt, the most progressive elected official in the city at the time. The machine never helped out on public power, the numerous anti-highrise initiatives, rent control, or much of anything else that challenged the real estate interests like Walter Shorenstein, who gave vast sums of money to the Democratic Party.


Yes, George Moscone, a Burton ally, supported district elections, but once he got elected he stopped challenging downtown power.


And, of course, when Willie Brown emerged as heir to the machine throne, he was a disaster for progressives. He also at one point controlled an unshakable majority on the Board of Supervisors; he could call up votes whenever he needed.


The progressives in San Francisco today share an ideology on local issues — tough local issues that involve powerful economic forces at home.


And honestly, Randy: It’s not all about Jane Kim.


 

ENDORSEMENTS 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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ENDORSEMENTS 2010

On every level — federal, state and local — the Nov. 2 election is critical. Californians will decide whether a billionaire with no political experience and a failed business executive with right-wing views should be the next governor and senator. They’ll address a long list of major ballot measures. In San Francisco, voters will decide the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors, weigh in on ballot measures that could deeply affect the local budget, and decide whether this city wants to allow a harsh crackdown on the homeless.

Absentee ballots are already in the mail. Vote early, vote often, and vote like your city and state depended on it. We’ll publish our Clean Slate clipout guide to take to the polls on October 27. Click below for our endorsements. (East Bay endorsements will be added next week.)

>>NATIONAL RACES

>>STATE RACES

>>STATE BALLOT MEASURES

>>SAN FRANCISCO CANDIDATES

>>SAN FRANCISCO BALLOT MEASURES

>>EAST BAY ENDORSEMENTS

Listen to our Endorsement Interviews with local candidates here

get the single page printable PDF in color or black and white

Endorsements 2010: San Francisco ballot measures

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Endorsements 2010: San Francisco ballot measures

PROP. AA

VEHICLE REGISTRATION FEE

YES

Proposition AA would add $10 to the existing annual fee for vehicles registered in San Francisco, which would bring in about $5 million a year in desperately needed funds for public transit and other environmentally friendly modes of transportation. Proceeds would help to fund new bike infrastructure, pedestrian crosswalks, and transit reliability projects. Some would also be spent on street repairs — with top priority given to streets with bikeways and public transit routes. Unless Muni and bike infrastructure improves, it’s hard to persuade drivers to leave their cars at home and choose greener ways of getting around. Prop. AA is in line with the city’s transit-first goals, and it will be a step toward reducing traffic congestion and helping public transit. Vote yes.

 

PROP. A

EARTHQUAKE RETROFIT BOND

YES

This $46.15 million general obligation bond to support seismic upgrades for wood-framed buildings is an important means of protecting San Franciscans in an earthquake and preserving affordable housing. A 2009 report by the Department of Building Inspection found that 151 buildings that received government affordable housing support — 8,247 units in all — could be destroyed in the next big earthquake.

Unfortunately, most of these buildings are break-even ventures for their owners, who have no incentive to put the money into needed seismic upgrades. This measure would fund those improvements with grants and deferred loans, which would accrue interest but would only need to be paid back if the owner makes a profit or tries to convert the building to another use, providing further guarantees that the housing will remain affordable even after an owner’s obligation to the state or federal governments ends. Vote yes on Prop. A.

 

PROP. B

CITY RETIREMENT AND HEALTH PLANS

NO, NO, NO

Back when the great national health care reform debate was raging, the Guardian advocated for a single-payer system, which would have cut out health insurance companies altogether. What we got instead was a bill that requires everyone to buy health insurance. Now endlessly rising health insurance costs pose a problem for the city — in years of financial stress, it must make ever-larger payments to cover public employees’ health benefits. The blame for this dysfunctional system should be pinned on health insurance companies, not public employees. After all, the industry spent millions lobbying federal lawmakers to preserve a system in which they are solidly guaranteed to make millions off the backs of taxpayers.

But Prop. B, introduced by Public Defender Jeff Adachi, asks public employees to bear the brunt of these ballooning costs. It would also require them to contribute up to 10 percent of their pay to fund retirement benefits. One of the most compelling arguments against Prop. B was articulated by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano in a recent Guardian editorial: “A single mother will be forced to pay up to $5,600 per year for her child’s health care — in addition to the $8,154 she already pays.” That cost would be the same whether the employee earns $40,000 or $100,000 annually — and that’s just unfair. Prop. B would deal the greatest blow to the people who have the least. But there’s a broader consequence, too — take this kind of money out of the pockets of working people and you’ve done just the opposite of stimulating the economy.

Adachi wrote and circulated his measure without negotiating with city employee unions or seeking a solution that would be less harsh and regressive. We’re all for reviewing the city’s pension and health care costs. But making the lowest-paid city workers take the same hit as the overpaid managers is no answer. Vote no on B.

 

PROP. C

MAYOR APPEARANCES AT BOARD

YES

If you feel like you’ve seen this measure before, that’s because you have — an advisory measure asking the mayor to show up once a month and answer questions at the Board of Supervisors passed overwhelmingly in 2006. But Mayor Gavin Newsom ignored it, and a tougher measure failed the next year after Newsom raised $250,000 to defeat it.

Now the problem is worse than ever. In a year in which back room negotiations and underhanded political tactics marred the city budget approval process and other legislative initiatives, progressive supervisors are again trying to get Newsom and future mayors to engage in a political dialogue, in public, to determine what’s best for the city. This is precisely how the people’s business should be done, in an open and transparent way that respects the role that these two branches of government are supposed to play in running the city. Besides, won’t it be fun to watch? Vote yes.

 

PROP. D

NONCITIZEN VOTING IN SCHOOL BOARD ELECTIONS

YES

Sponsored by Board President David Chiu and Sups. David Campos, Eric Mar, John Avalos, Ross Mirkarimi, Sophie Maxwell, Chris Daly, and Bevan Dufty, this charter amendment would extend the right to vote in local school board elections to San Francisco residents who are parents, guardians, and caregivers of children who attend school in San Francisco, regardless of whether these residents are U.S. citizens.

One-third of San Francisco residents are foreign-born. Parental involvement has been determined as a critical factor in children’s education — and this measure only applies to elections for the Board of Education. Vote yes.

 

PROP. E

ELECTION DAY VOTER REGISTRATION

YES

In an era of growing political apathy and cynicism, anything that draws more people into the electoral process is a good thing. So this common sense measure by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi to remove one more barrier to participation in elections is a positive step.

Current state law requires eligible voters to register at least 15 days before an election. Prop. E would allow any city resident to simply show up at a polling place on Election Day, register to vote, and participate in a municipal election. Eight other states currently offer same-day voter registration. Vote yes.

 

PROP. F

HEALTH SERVICE BOARD ELECTIONS

NO

Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who sponsored this measure, says it will save the city money be consolidating elections for the board that oversees the city employee health care fund. But it won’t save much — $30,000 a year, at most — and the unions that represent the people who are served by this board say risks turning board elections into more expensive and complex political contests. Vote no.

 

PROP. G

TRANSIT OPERATOR WAGES

NO

We understand the motivations behind this measure — Muni drivers are the only city employees who don’t have to engage in collective bargaining for wages and work rules. Instead, the City Charter guarantees them the second-highest salary level of all comparable transit systems in the nation. Although that’s not an unreasonable salary level given that Muni is perhaps the country’s most challenging transit system and San Francisco has one of the highest cost of living price tags in the country, no city workers should have their salaries set this way.

We also agree that many of Muni’s work rules need to be changed and that removal of the salary guarantees would give the city more leverage to make those changes. We even agree that Transport Workers Union Local 250 hasn’t done itself any favors and should have been a better partner in this year’s difficult city budget process.

But we oppose Prop. G, which inappropriately seeks to blame Muni’s problems on its drivers and would set a new standard for collective bargaining that could hurt workers and perhaps make Muni more dangerous to pedestrians and others.

Like all city employees, Muni drivers are banned from going on strike. In exchange, the city agrees to binding arbitration if contract talks reach an impasse. But this measure adds a factor that exists in no other city union contract: the arbitrator would have to consider whether a proposed contract could negatively affect service.

While that might seem benign or even appropriate, the reality is that everything from driver rest breaks to assisting those with disabilities to the expectations of how fast drivers can complete a route all potentially affect service, forcing the arbitrator into positions of agreeing with city officials who have been choosing the politically expedient path of trying to squeeze more out of Muni without trying to give it the resources it needs to operate safely, efficiently, and reliably.

Earlier this year, progressive supervisors tried to craft an omnibus Muni reform measure that removed driver pay guarantees from the charter while also trying to get it more money and make critical changes in how the system is governed, an effort the TWU supported but that the supervisors ultimately abandoned. That’s the kind of balanced approach the system needs and it ought to be revived. In the meantime, vote no on G.

 

PROP. H

LOCAL ELECTED OFFICIALS ON POLITICAL PARTY COMMITTEES

NO

This one’s a pure political vengeance act by Mayor Newsom, who is unhappy that the local Democratic Party is controlled by progressives who oppose his initiatives. The measure would bar elected officials in San Francisco from serving on the Democratic or Republican County Central Committee. It’s almost certainly unconstitutional — the parties get to decide their own membership rules — and has no rationale at all except the mayor’s personal sour grapes. Vote no.

 

PROP. I

SATURDAY VOTING

YES

Okay, we’re suspicious of Prop I. The sponsor is Alex Tourke, a political consultant whose client list isn’t exactly a roster of progressive San Francisco. And it’s a little funky — it calls for an experiment in opening the polls the Saturday before the next mayoral election, with the costs covered by private donations. And the idea of private interests paying for an election strikes us as bad policy.

But at its base, the idea is sound. Tuesday voting is a very old idea that makes no sense in the modern age. We’d much rather see Election Day held at a time when most people aren’t working. In fact, we’d rather see the polls open for a week, not just one day. And this is a one-time test to see if weekend voting might increase turnout. Vote yes.

PROP. J

HOTEL TAX CLARIFICATION AND TEMPORARY INCREASE

YES

There are two competing hotel taxes on the November ballot: Prop. J and Prop K. Prop. K contains a poison pill: if both measures pass, whichever gets the most votes take effect. Both J and K try to address legal insufficiencies in San Francisco’s existing hotel tax, but Prop. J also asks visitors to pay a slightly higher tax — about $3 a night (the cost of a latte) — for the next three years.

Currently the way hotel taxes are assessed allows some online customers to avoid part of the tax. When a customer books a hotel room through an online booking service like Expedia or Orbitz, the hotel tax is only assessed on the amount that a hotel receives, not the amount that the website charges the customer. In other words, if a website sells a room to an online customer for $150 a night, but only $120 of that goes to the hotel, the customer is charged hotel tax on the lower amount. If Prop. J passes, the customer will have to pay a hotel tax on the full amount paid to the online booking service. The measure would also eliminate a loophole that allows airlines to book rooms for flight crews without paying any tax. Those changes are expected to generate at least $12 million a year. The $3 increase in the hotel tax will generate another $26 million.

The Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Visitors Bureau say the measure could hurt tourism — but it’s hard to imagine how somebody will decide not to visit San Francisco because of a $3 a night fee. Vote yes.

 

PROP. K

HOTEL TAX CLARIFICATION

NO

Put on the ballot by Mayor Newson at the behest of large hotel corporations, Prop. K also seeks to close loopholes in the hotel tax. But Prop. K doesn’t include a tax increase, meaning that it will contribute millions less to the city’s General Fund at a time when San Francisco is having trouble balancing its budget, leading to ongoing cuts in city staff and services.

Prop. K’s a direct attempt to undermine Prop. J. Vote no.

 

PROP. L

SITTING OR LYING ON SIDEWALKS

NO, NO, NO

What kind of a city is San Francisco? If proponents of Prop. L, the Civil Sidewalks Ordinance, were to be believed, it’s a city where nothing is done when uncivil people harass pedestrians, drink on the sidewalk, or pee in public. Even though Prop. L purports to address this kind of behavior, all it really does is outlaw sitting or lying on public sidewalks.

We think San Francisco is the kind of city that is smart enough to reject this dumb idea. The Prop. L proponents like to say it’s about public safety, but there is nothing inherently unsafe about sitting or lying down on the sidewalk. Street poets sit at their typewriters to sell sonnets to tourists. The tamale lady sometimes sits while selling her tasty Mexican treats. Day laborers sit when they get tired of standing around waiting for work. Many people who live on the streets lie down to sleep beside their shopping carts. If Prop. L passes, there is nothing to guarantee that buskers, day laborers, homeless people, partygoers, people with bad knees, or anyone else would not be harassed by police for the simple act of sitting.

But even if there are people squatting on the sidewalk harassing passersby, how is this law going to change that? All they have to do is stand up — which would still be legal. If they persist, and the police arrest them, the city will be on the hook for millions of dollars in costs for prosecution, defense, and incarceration.

The notion that the ordinance would only be used against troublemakers is problematic too, since a law that is selectively enforced could open the door to legal headaches. Prop. L is misguided, draconian, unnecessary, and the wrong direction for San Francisco. Vote no.

 

PROP. M

COMMUNITY POLICING AND FOOT PATROLS

YES

Prop. M offers an enlightened alternative to Prop. L. Introduced by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, it would require the chief of police to establish a comprehensive beat patrol program, with cops on the beat, to deal with the safety and civility issues Prop. L seeks to address. It would also direct the Police Commission to adopt a written community policing policy, involving police interactions with the community, focusing police resources on high crime areas, and encouraging citizen involvement in combating crime. Prop. M also has a poison pill: if the voters adopt both M and L and M gets more votes, then the law against sitting or lying down on the sidewalk would not take effect. So a yes vote for Prop. M is kind of like another no vote against Prop. L. Vote yes.

 

PROP. N

REAL PROPERTY TRANSFER TAX

YES

With the city facing a massive structural budget deficit, it’s hard to argue against a measure that would bring in an average of $36 million without hurting anyone except the buyers and sellers of very high-end property — that is, big corporations and exceptionally wealthy individuals. Prop. N would slightly increase the tax charged by the city on the sale of property worth more than $5 million. Vote yes.

 

>>BACK TO ENDORSEMENTS 2010

Endorsements 2010: San Francisco candidates

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Endorsements 2010: San Francisco candidates

SUPERVISOR, DISTRICT 2


JANET REILLY


Frankly, we were a little surprised by the Janet Reilly who came in to give us her pitch as a District 2 supervisorial candidate. The last time we met with her, she was a strong progressive running for state Assembly as an advocate of single-payer health care. She was challenging Fiona Ma from the left, and easily won our endorsement.


Now she’s become a fiscal conservative — somewhat more in synch with her district, perhaps, but not an encouraging sign. Reilly seems to realize that there’s a $500 million budget deficit looming, but she won’t support any of the tax measures on the ballot. She’s against the hotel tax. She’s against the real estate transfer tax on high-end properties. She’s against the local car tax. She opposed Sup. David Chiu’s business tax plan that would have shifted the burden from small to larger businesses (even though it was clear from our interview that she didn’t understand it).


She talked about merging some of the nonprofits that get city money, about consolidating departments, and better management — solutions that might stem a tiny fraction of the red ink. But she wouldn’t even admit that the limited tax burden on the very rich was part of San Francisco’s budget problem.


Her main proposal for creating jobs is more tax credits for biotech, life sciences, and digital media and more public-private partnerships.


It’s too bad, because Reilly’s smart, and she’s far, far better than Mark Farrell, the candidate that the current incumbent, Michela Alioto-Pier, is backing. We wish she’d be realistic about the fiscal nightmare she would inherit as a supervisor.


On the positive side, she’s a strong supporter of public power and she has good connections to the progressive community. Unlike Alioto-Pier, she’d be accessible, open-minded, and willing to work with the progressive majority on the board. That would be a dramatic change, so we’ll give her the nod.


We were also impressed with Abraham Simmons, a federal prosecutor who has spent time researching city finance on the Civil Grand Jury. But he supports sit-lie, Prop. B and Prop. S, and opposes most new tax proposals and needs more political seasoning.


 


DISTRICT 4


NO ENDORSEMENT


We’ve always wanted to like Carmen Chu. She’s friendly, personable, intelligent, and well-spoken. But on the issues, she’s just awful. Indeed, we can’t think of a single significant vote on which she’s been anything but a call-up loyalist for Mayor Newsom. She even opposed the public power measure, Prop. H, that had the support of just about everyone in town except hardcore PG&E allies.


She’s running unopposed, and will be reelected. But we can’t endorse her.


 


DISTRICT 6


1. DEBRA WALKER


2. JANE KIM


3. GLENDON “ANNA CONDA” HYDE


CORRECTION: In our original version of this endorsement, we said that Jim Meko supports the sit-lie ordinance. That was an error, and it’s corrected below.


A year ago, this race was artist and activist Debra Walker’s to lose. Most of the progressive community was united behind her candidacy; she’d been working on district issues for a couple of decades, fighting the loft developers during the dot-com boom years and serving on the Building Inspection Commission. Then School Board member Jane Kim decided to enter the race, leaving the left divided, splitting resources that might have gone to other critical district races — and potentially helping to put the most pro-business downtown candidate, Theresa Sparks, in a better position to win.


Now we’ve got something of a mess — a fragmented and sometimes needlessly divisive progressive base in a district that’s key to holding progressive control of the board. And while neither of the two top progressive candidates is actively pursuing a credible ranked-choice voting strategy (Kim has, unbelievably, endorsed James Keys instead of Walker, and Walker has declined to endorse anyone else), we’re setting aside our concern over Kim’s ill-advised move and suggesting a strategy that is most likely to keep the seat Chris Daly has held for the past 10 years from falling to downtown control.


Walker is far and away our first choice. She understands land use and housing — the clear central issues in the district — and has well thought-out positions and proposals. She says that the current system of inclusionary housing — pressing market-rate developers to include a few units of below-market-rate housing with their high-end condos — simply doesn’t work. She supports an immediate affordable housing bond act and a long-term real estate transfer tax high enough to fund a steady supply of housing for the city’s workforce. She told us the city ought to be looking at planning issues from the perspective of what San Francisco needs, not what developers want to build. She’s in favor of progressive taxes and a push for local hiring. We’re happy to give her our first-place ranking.


Jane Kim has been a great SF School Board member and has always been part of the progressive community. But she only moved into District 6 a year and a half ago — about when she started talking about running for supervisor (and she told us in her endorsement interview that “D6 is a district you can run in without having lived there a long time.”) She still hasn’t been able to explain why she parachuted in to challenge an experienced progressive leader she has no substantive policy disagreements with.


That said, on the issues, Kim is consistently good. She is in favor of indexing affordable housing to market-rate housing and halting new condo development if the mix gets out of line. She’s for an affordable housing bond. She supports all the tax measures on this ballot. She’s a little softer on congestion pricing and extending parking-meter hours, but she’s open to the ideas. She supports police foot patrols not just as a law-enforcement strategy, but to encourage small businesses. She’d be a fine vote on the board. And while we’re sympathetic to the Walker supporters who would prefer that we not give Kim the credibility and exposure of an endorsement, the reality is that she’s one of two leading progressives and would be better on the board than the remaining candidates.


Hyde, a dynamic young drag queen performer, isn’t going to win. But he’s offered some great ideas and injected some fun and energy into the race. Hyde talks about creating safe injection sites for IV drug users to reduce the risk of overdoses and the spread of disease. He points out that a lot of young people age out of the foster-care system and wind up on the streets, and he’s for continuum housing that would let these young people transition to jobs or higher education. He talks about starting a co-op grocery in the Tenderloin. He proposes bus-only lanes throughout the district and wants to charge large vehicles a fee to come into the city. He’s a big advocate of nightlife and the arts. He lacks experience and needs more political seasoning, but we’re giving him the third-place nod to encourage his future involvement.


Progressives are concerned about Theresa Sparks, a transgender activist and former business executive who now runs the city’s Human Rights Commission. She did a (mostly) good job on the Police Commission. She’s experienced in city government and has good financial sense. But she’s just too conservative for what remains a very progressive district. Sparks isn’t a big fan of seeking new revenue for the city telling us that “I disagree that we’ve made all the cuts that we can” — even after four years of brutal, bloody, all-cuts budgets. She doesn’t support the hotel tax and said she couldn’t support Sup. David Chiu’s progressive business tax because it would lead to “replacing private sector jobs with public sector jobs” — even though the city’s own economic analysis shows that’s just not true. She supports Newsom’s sit-lie law.


Sparks is the candidate of the mayor and downtown, and would substantially shift the balance of power on the board. She’s also going to have huge amounts of money behind her. It’s important she be defeated.


Jim Meko, a longtime neighborhood and community activist, has good credentials and some solid ideas. He was a key player in the western SoMa planning project and helped come up with a truly progressive land-use program for the neighborhood. But he supports Prop. B and is awfully cranky about local bars and nightlife.


James Keys, who has the support of Sup. Chris Daly and was an intern in Daly’s office, has some intriguing (if not terribly practical) ideas, like combining the Sheriff’s Department and the Police Department and making Muni free). But in his interview, he demonstrated a lack of understanding of the issues facing the district and the city.


So we’re going with a ranked-choice strategy: Walker first, Kim second, Hyde third. And we hope Kim’s supporters ignore their candidate’s endorsement of Keys, put Walker as their second choice, and ensure that they don’t help elect Sparks.


 


DISTRICT 8


RAFAEL MANDELMAN


This is by far the clearest and most obvious choice on the local ballot. And it’s a critical one, a chance for progressives to reclaim the seat that once belonged to Harvey Milk and Harry Britt.


Mandelman, a former president of the Milk Club, is running as more than a queer candidate. He’s a supporter of tenants rights, immigrants’ rights, and economic and social justice. He also told us he believes “local government matters” — and that there are a lot of problems San Francisco can (and has to) solve on its own, without simply ducking and blaming Sacramento and Washington.


Mandelman argues that the public sector has been starved for years and needs more money. He agrees that there’s still a fair amount of bloat in the city budget — particularly management positions — but that even after cleaning out the waste, the city will still be far short of the money it needs to continue providing pubic services. He’s calling for a top-to-bottom review of how the city gets revenue, with the idea of creating a more progressive tax structure.


He’s an opponent of sit-lie and a supporter of the sanctuary city ordinance. He supports tenants rights and eviction protection. He’s had considerable experience (as a member of the Building Inspection Commission and Board of Appeals and as a lawyer who advises local government agencies) and would make an excellent supervisor.


Neither of the other two contenders make our endorsement cut. Rebecca Prozan is a deputy city attorney who told us she would be able to bring the warring factions on the board together. She has some interesting ideas — she’d like to see the city take over foreclosed properties and turn them into housing for teachers, cops, and firefighters — and she’s opposed to sit-lie. But she’s weak on tenant issues (she told us there’s nothing anyone can do to stop the conversion of rental housing into tenancies-in-common), doesn’t seem to grasp the need for substantial new revenues to prevent service cuts, and doesn’t support splitting the appointments to key commissions between the mayor and the supervisors.


Scott Wiener, a deputy city attorney, is a personable guy who always takes our phone calls and is honest and responsive. He’s done a lot of good work in the district. But he’s on the wrong side of many issues, and on some things would be to the right of the incumbent, Sup. Bevan Dufty.


He doesn’t support public power (which Dufty does). He says that a lot of the city’s budget problems can’t be solved until the state gets its own house in order (“we can’t tax our way out of this”) and favors a budget balanced largely by further cuts. In direct contrast to Mandelman, Wiener said San Franciscans “need to lower our expectations for government.” He wants broad-based reductions in almost all city agencies except Muni, “core” public health services, and public safety. He doesn’t support any further restrictions on condo conversions or TICs. And he has the support of the Small Property Owners Association — perhaps the most virulently anti-tenant and anti-rent control group in town.


This district once gave rise to queer political leaders who saw themselves and their struggles as part of a larger progressive movement. That’s drifted away of late — and with Mandelman, there’s a chance to bring it back.


 


DISTRICT 10


1. TONY KELLY


2. DEWITT LACY


3. CHRIS JACKSON


District 10 is the epicenter of new development in San Francisco, the place where city planners want to site as many as 40,000 new housing units, most of them high-end condos, at a cost of thousands of blue-collar jobs. The developers are salivating at the land-rush opportunities here — and the next supervisor not only needs to be an expert in land-use and development politics, but someone with the background and experience to thwart the bad ideas and direct and encourage the good ones.


There’s no shortage of candidates — 22 people are on the ballot, and at least half a dozen are serious contenders. Two — Steve Moss and Lynette Sweet — are very bad news. And one of the key priorities for progressives is defeating the big-money effort that downtown, the police, and the forces behind the Van Ness Avenue megahospital proposal are dumping into the district to elect Moss.


Our first choice is Tony Kelly, who operates Thick Description Theater and who for more than a decade has been directly involved in all the major neighborhood issues. He has a deep understanding of what the district is facing: 4,100 of the 5,300 acres in D10 have been rezoned or put under the Redevelopment Agency in the past 10 years. Planners envision as many as 100,000 new residents in the next 10 years. And the fees paid by developers will not even begin to cover the cost of the infrastructure and services needed to handle that growth.


And Kelly has solutions: The public sector will have to play a huge role in affordable housing and infrastructure, and that money should come from higher development fees — and from places like the University of California, which has a huge operation in the district and pays no property taxes. Kelly wants to set up a trigger so that if goals for affordable housing aren’t met by a set date, the market-rate development stops. He supports the revenue measures on the ballot but thinks we should go further. He opposes the pension-reform measure, Prop. B, but notes that 75 percent of the city’s pension problems come from police, fire, and management employees. He wants the supervisors to take over the Redevelopment Agency. He’s calling for a major expansion of open space and parkland in the district. And he thinks the city should direct some of the $3 billion in short-term accounts (now all with the Bank of America) to local credit unions or new municipal bank that could invest in affordable housing and small business. He’s a perfect fit for the job.


DeWitt Lacy is a civil-rights lawyer and a relative newcomer to neighborhood politics. He speaks passionately about the need for D10 to get its fair share of the city’s services and about a commitment to working-class people.


Lacy is calling for an immediate pilot program with police foot patrols in the high-crime areas of the district. He’s for increasing the requirements for developers to build affordable housing and wants to cut the payroll tax for local businesses that hire district residents.


Lacy’s vision for the future includes development that has mixed-use commuter hubs with shopping and grocery stores as well as housing. He supports the tax measures on the ballot and would be willing to extend parking meter hours — but not parking fines, which he calls an undue burden on low-income people.


He’s an outspoken foe of sit-lie and of gang injunctions, and with his background handling police abuse lawsuits, he would have a clear understanding of how to approach better law-enforcement without intimidating the community. He lacks Kelly’s history, experience, and knowledge in neighborhood issues, but he’s eminently qualified and would make a fine supervisor.


Chris Jackson, who worked at the San Francisco Labor Council and serves on the Community College Board, is our third choice. While it’s a bit unfortunate that Jackson is running for higher office only two years after getting elected to the college board, he’s got a track record and good positions on the issues. He talks of making sure that blue-collar jobs don’t get pushed out by housing, and suggested that the shipyard be used for ship repair. He wants to see the city mandate that landlords rent to people with Section 8 housing vouchers. He supports the tax measures on the ballot, but also argues that the city has 60 percent more managers than it had in 2000 and wants to bring that number down. He thinks the supervisors should take over Redevelopment, which should become “just a financing agency for affordable housing.” He wants to relocate the stinky sewage treatment plant near Third Street and Evans Avenue onto one of the piers and use the area for a transit hub. He’s still relatively unseasoned, but he has a bright political future.


Eric Smith, a biodiesel activist, is an impressive candidate too. But while his environmental credentials are good, he lacks the breadth of knowledge that our top three choices offer. But we’re glad he’s in the race and hope he stays active in community politics.


Malia Cohen has raised a lot of money and (to our astonishment) was endorsed No. 2 by the Democratic Party, but she’s by no means a progressive, particularly on tenant issues — she told us that limiting condo conversions is an infringement of property rights. And she’s way too vague on other issues.


Moss is the candidate of the big developers and the landlords, and the Chamber of Commerce is dumping tens of thousands of dollars into getting him elected. He’s got some good environmental and energy ideas — he argues that all major new developments should have their own energy distribution systems — but on the major issues, he’s either on the wrong side or (more often) can’t seem to take a stand. He said he is “still mulling over” his stand on sit-lie. He supports Sanctuary City in theory, but not the actual measure Sup. David Campos was pushing to make the policy work. He’s not sure if he likes gang injunctions or not. He only moved back to the district when he decided to run for supervisor. He’s way too conservative for the district and would be terrible on the board.


Lynette Sweet, a BART Board member, has tax problems (and problems explaining them) and wouldn’t even come to our office for an endorsement interview. The last thing D10 needs is a supervisor who’s not accountable and unwilling to talk to constituents and the press.


So we’re going with Kelly, Lacy, and Jackson as the best hope to keep D10 from becoming a district represented by a downtown landlord candidate.


 


SAN FRANCISCO BOARD OF EDUCATION


MARGARET BRODKIN


KIM-SHREE MAUFAS


HYDRA MENDOZA


Three seats are up on the School Board, and three people will get elected. And it’s a contested race, and in situations like that, we always try to endorse a full slate.


This fall, it was, to put it mildly, a challenge.


It’s disturbing that we don’t have three strong progressive candidates with experience and qualifications to oversee the San Francisco Unified School District. But it seems to be increasingly difficult to find people who want to — and can afford to — devote the time to what’s really a 40-hour-a-week position that pays $500 a month. The part-time school board is an anachronism, a creature of a very different economic and social era. With the future of the next generation of San Franciscans at stake, it’s time to make the School Board a full-time job and pay the members a decent salary so that more parents and progressive education advocates can get involved in one of the most important political jobs in the city.


That said, we’ve chosen the best of the available candidates. It’s a mixed group, made up of people who don’t support each other and aren’t part of anyone’s slate. But on balance, they offer the best choices for the job.


This is not a time when the board needs radical change. Under Superintendent Carlos Garcia, the local public schools are making huge strides. Test scores are up, enrollment is increasing, and San Francisco is, by any rational measure, the best big-city public school district in California. We give considerable credit for that to the progressives on the board who got rid of the irascible, secretive, and hostile former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman and replaced her with Garcia. He’s brought stability and improvement to the district, and is implementing a long-term plan to bring all the schools up to the highest levels and go after the stubborn achievement gap.


Yet any superintendent and any public agency needs effective oversight. One of the problems with the district under Ackerman was the blind support she got from school board members who hired her; it was almost as if her allies on the board were unable to see the damage she was doing and unable to hold her accountable.


Our choices reflect the need for stability — and independence. We are under no illusions — none of our candidates are perfect. But as a group, we believe they can work to preserve what the district is doing right and improve on policies that aren’t working.


Kim-Shree Maufas has been a staunch progressive on the board. She got into a little trouble last year when the San Francisco Chronicle reported that she’d been using a school district credit card for personal expenses. That’s not a great move, but she never actually took public money since she paid back the district. Maufas said she thought she could use the card as long as she reimbursed the district for her own expenses; the rules are now clear and she’s had no problems since. We don’t consider this a significant enough failure in judgment to prevent her from continuing to do what she’s been doing: serving as an advocate on the board for low-income kids and teachers.


Maufas is a big supporter of restorative justice and is working for ways to reduce suspensions and expulsions. She wants to make sure advanced placement and honors classes are open to anyone who can handle the coursework. She supports the new school assignment process (as do all the major candidates), although she acknowledges that there are some potential problems. She told us she thinks the district should go back to the voters for a parcel tax to supplement existing funding for the schools.


Margaret Brodkin is a lightening rod. In fact, much of the discussion around this election seems to focus on Brodkin. Since she entered the race, she’s eclipsed all the other issues, and there’s been a nasty whisper campaign designed to keep her off the board.


We’ve had our issues with Brodkin. When she worked for Mayor Newsom, she was part of a project that brought private nonprofits into city recreation centers to provide services — at a time when unionized public employees of the Recreation and Parks Department were losing their jobs. It struck us as a clear privatization effort by the Newsom administration, and it raised a flag that’s going to become increasingly important in the school district: there’s a coming clash between people who think private nonprofits can provide more services to the schools and union leaders who fear that low-paid nonprofit workers will wind up doing jobs now performed by unionized district staff. And Brodkin’s role in the Newsom administration — and her background in the nonprofit world — is certainly ground for some concern.


But Brodkin is also by far the most qualified person to run for San Francisco school board in years, maybe decades. She’s a political legend in the city, the person who is most responsible for making issues of children and youth a centerpiece of the progressive agenda. In her years as director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, she tirelessly worked to make sure children weren’t overlooked in the budget process and was one of the authors of the initiative that created the Children’s Fund. She’s run a nonprofit, run a city department, and is now working on education issues.


She’s a feisty person who can be brusque and isn’t always conciliatory — but those characteristics aren’t always bad. Sup. Chris Daly used his anger and passion to push for social justice on the Board of Supervisors and, despite some drawbacks, he’s been an effective public official.


And Brodkin is full of good ideas. She talks about framing what a 21st century education looks like, about creating community schools, about aligning after-school and summer programs with the academic curriculum. She wants the next school bond act to include a central kitchen, so local kids can get locally produced meals (the current lunch fare is shipped in frozen from out of state).


Brodkin needs to remember that there’s a difference between being a bare-knuckles advocate and a member of a functioning school board. But given her skills, experience, and lifetime in progressive causes, we’re willing to give her a chance.


We also struggled over endorsing Hydra Mendoza. She works for Mayor Newsom as an education advisor — and that’s an out-front conflict of interest. She’s a fan of Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, whose policies are regressive and dangerous.


On the other hand, she cares deeply about kids and public education. She’s not a big supporter of charter schools (“I’ve yet to see a charter school that offers anything we can’t do ourselves,” she told us) and while she was on the wrong side of a lot of issues (like JROTC) early in her tenure, over the past two years she’s been a good School Board member.


There are several other candidates worth mentioning. Bill Barnes, an aide to Michela Alioto-Pier, is a good guy, a decent progressive — but has no experience in or direct connection to the public schools. Natasha Hoehn is in the education nonprofit world and speaks with all the jargon of the educrat, but her proposals and her stands on issues are vague. Emily Murase is a strong parent advocate with some good ideas, but she struck us as a bit too conservative (particularly on JROTC and charter schools.) Jamie Wolfe teaches at a private school but lacks any real constituency or experience in local politics and the education community.


So given a weak field with limited alternatives, we’re going with Maufas, Brodkin and Mendoza.


 


SAN FRANCISCO COMMUNITY COLLEGE BOARD


JOHN RIZZO


The San Francisco Community College District has been a mess for years, and it’s only now starting to get back on track. That’s the result of the election of a few progressive reformers — Milton Marks, Chris Jackson, and John Rizzo, who now have enough clout on the seven-member board to drag along a fourth vote when they need it.


But the litany of disasters they’ve had to clean up is almost endless. A chancellor (who other incumbent board members supported until the end) is now under indictment. Public money that was supposed to go to the district wound up in a political campaign. An out-of-control semiprivate college foundation has been hiding its finances from the public. The college shifted bond money earmarked for an arts center into a gigantic, expensive gym with a pool that the college can’t even pay to operate, so it’s leased out to a private high school across the street.


And the tragedy is that all three incumbents — two of whom should have stepped down years ago — are running unopposed.


With all the attention on the School Board and district elections, not one progressive — in fact, not one candidate of any sort — has stepped forward to challenge Anita Grier and Lawrence Wong. So they’ll get another term, and the reformers will have to continue to struggle.


We’re endorsing only Rizzo, a Sierra Club staffer who has been in the lead in the reform bloc. He needs to end up as the top vote-getter, which would put him in position to be the board president. Rizzo has worked to get the district’s finances and foundation under control and he richly deserves reelection.


 


BART BOARD OF DIRECTORS, DISTRICT 8


BERT HILL


It’s about time somebody mounted a serious challenge to James Fang, the only elected Republican in San Francisco and a member of one of the most dysfunctional public agencies in California. The BART Board is a mess, spending a fortune on lines that are hardly ever used and unable to work effectively with other transit agencies or control a police force that has a history of brutality and senseless killing.


Fang supports the suburban extensions and Oakland Airport connector, which make no fiscal or transportation sense. He’s ignored problems with the BART Police for 20 years. It’s time for him to leave office.


Bert Hill is a strong challenger. A professional cost-management executive, he understands that BART is operating on an old paradigm of carrying people from the suburbs into the city. “Before we go on building any more extensions,” he told us, “we should take care of San Francisco.” He wants the agency to work closely with Muni and agrees there’s a need for a BART sunshine policy to make the notoriously secretive agency more open to public scrutiny. We strongly endorse him.


 


ASSESSOR-RECORDER


PHIL TING


San Francisco needs an aggressive assessor who looks for every last penny that big corporations are trying to duck paying — but this is also a job that presents an opportunity for challenging the current property tax laws. Phil Ting’s doing pretty well with the first part — and unlike past assessors, is actually stepping up to the plate on the second. He’s been pushing a statewide coalition to reform Prop. 13 — and while it’s an uphill battle, it’s good to see a tax assessor taking it on. Ting has little opposition and will be reelected easily.


 


PUBLIC DEFENDER


JEFF ADACHI


Adachi’s done a great job of running the office that represents indigent criminal defendants. He’s been outspoken on criminal justice issues. Until this year, he was often mentioned as a potential progressive candidate for mayor.


That’s over now. Because Adachi decided (for reasons we still can’t comprehend) to join the national attack on public employees and put Prop. B on the ballot, he’s lost any hope of getting support for higher office from the left. And since the moderate and conservative forces will never be comfortable with a public defender moving up in the political world, Adachi’s not going anywhere anytime soon.


Which is fine. He’s doing well at his day job. We wish he’d stuck to it and not taken on a divisive, expensive, and ill-conceived crusade to cut health care benefits for city employees.


 


SAN FRANCISCO SUPERIOR COURT


SEAT 15


MICHAEL NAVA


To hear some of the brahmins of the local bench and bar tell it, the stakes in this election are immense — the independence of the judiciary hangs in the balance. If a sitting judge who is considered eminently qualified for the job and has committed no ethical or legal breaches can be challenged by an outsider who is seeking more diversity on the bench, it will open the floodgates to partisan hacks taking on good judges — and force judicial candidates to raise money from lawyers and special interests, thus undermining the credibility of the judiciary.


We are well aware of the problems of judicial elections around the country. In some states, big corporations that want to influence judges raise and spend vast sums on trial and appellate court races — and typically get their way. In Iowa, three judges who were willing to stand on principle and Constitutional law and declare same-sex marriage legal are facing what amounts to a well-funded recall effort. California is not immune — in more conservative counties, liberal judges face getting knocked off the bench by law-and-order types.


It’s a serious issue. It’s worth a series of hearings in the state Legislature, and it might be worth Constitutional change. Maybe trial-court elections should be eliminated. Maybe all judicial elections should have public campaign financing. But right now, it’s an elected office — at least in theory.


In practice, the vast majority of the judicial slots in California are filled by appointment. Judges serve for four-year terms but tend to retire or step down in midterm, allowing the governor to fill the vacancy. Unless someone files specifically to challenge an incumbent, typically appointed judge, that race never even appears on the ballot.


The electoral process is messy and political, and raising money is unseemly for a judicial officer. But the appointment process is hardly pure, either — and governors in California have, over the past 30 years, appointed the vast majority of the judges from the ranks of big corporate law firms and district attorney’s offices.


There are, of course, exceptions, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been better than his predecessor, Democrat Gray Davis. But overall, public interest lawyers, public defenders, and people with small community practices (and, of course, people who have no political strings to pull in Sacramento) have been frustrated. And it’s no surprise that some have sought to run against incumbents.


That’s what’s happening here. Michael Nava, a gay Latino who has been working as a research attorney for California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno, was going to run for a rare open seat this year, but the field quickly got crowded. So Nava challenged Richard Ulmer, a corporate lawyer appointed by Schwarzenegger who has been on the bench a little more than a year.


We will stipulate, as the lawyers say: Ulmer has done nothing wrong. From all accounts, he’s a fine judge (and before taking the bench, he did some stellar pro bono work fighting for reforms in the juvenile detention system). So there are two questions here: Should Nava have even filed to run against Ulmer? And since he did, who is the better candidate?


It’s important to understand this isn’t a case of special interests and that big money wanting to oust a judge because of his politics or rulings. Nava isn’t backed by any wealthy interest. There’s no clear parallel to the situations in other areas and other states where the judiciary is being compromised by electoral politics. Nava had every right to run — and has mounted an honest campaign that discusses the need for diversity on the bench.


Ulmer’s supporters note — correctly — that the San Francisco courts have more ethnic and gender diversity than any county in the state. And we’re not going to try to come to a conclusion here about how much diversity is enough.


But we will say that life experience matters, and judges bring to the bench what they’ve lived. Nava, who is the grandson of Mexican immigrants and the first person in his family to go to college, may have a different perspective on how low-income people of color are treated in the courts than a former Republican who spent his professional career in big law firms.


We were impressed by Nava’s background and knowledge — and by his interest in opening up the courts. He supports cameras in the courtrooms and allowing reporters to record court proceedings. He told us the meetings judges hold on court administration should be open to the public.


We’re willing to discuss whether judicial elections make sense. Meanwhile, judges who don’t like the idea of challenges should encourage their colleagues not to retire in midterm. If all the judges left at the end of a four-year term, there would be plenty of open seats and fewer challenges. But for now, there’s nothing in this particular election that makes us fear for the independence of the courts. Vote for Nava.


 


>>BACK TO ENDORSEMENTS 2010

Endorsements 2010: State races

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Endorsements 2010: State races

GOVERNOR

EDMUND G. BROWN

We have issues with Jerry Brown. The one-time environmental leader who left an admirable progressive legacy his first time in the governor’s office (including the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, the California Conservation Corps, and the liberal Rose Bird Supreme Court) and who is willing to stand up and oppose the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant has become a centrist, tough-on-crime, no-new-taxes candidate. And his only solution to the state budget problems is to bring all the players together early and start talking.

But at least since he’s started to debate Republican Meg Whitman face to face, he’s showing some signs of life — and flashes of the old Jerry. He’s strongly denouncing Whitman’s proposal to wipe out capital gains taxes, reminding voters of the huge hole that would blow in the state budget — and the $5 billion windfall it would give to the rich. He’s talking about suing Wall Street financial firms that cheated Californians. He’s promoting green jobs and standing firm in support of the state’s greenhouse-gas emissions limits.

For all his drawbacks (his insistence, for example, that the Legislature shouldn’t raise any taxes without a statewide vote of the people), Brown is at least part of the reality-based community. He understands that further tax cuts for the rich won’t solve California’s problems. He knows that climate change is real. He’s not great on immigration issues, but at least he’s cognizant that 2 million undocumented immigrants live in California — and the state can’t just arrest and deport them all.

Whitman is more than a conservative Republican. She’s scary. The centerpiece of her economic platform calls for laying off 40,000 state employees — thereby greatly increasing the state’s unemployment rate. Her tax plan would increase the state’s deficit by another $5 billion just so that a tiny number of the richest taxpayers (including her) can keep more of their money. She’s part of the nativist movement that wants to close the borders.

She’s also one of the growing number of candidates who think personal wealth and private-sector business success translate to an ability to run a complex state government. That’s a dangerous trend — Whitman has no political experience or background (until recently she didn’t even vote) and will be overcome by the lobbyists in Sacramento.

This is a critically important election for California. Vote for Jerry Brown.

 

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR

 

GAVIN NEWSOM

Why is the mayor of San Francisco running for a job he once dismissed as worthless? Simple: he couldn’t get elected governor, and he wants a place to perch for a while until he figures out what higher office he can seek. It’s almost embarrassing in its cold political calculus, but that’s something we’ve come to expect from Newsom.

We endorsed Newsom’s opponent, Janice Hahn, in the Democratic primary. It was hard to make a case for advancing the political career of someone who has taken what amounts to a Republican approach to running the city’s finances — he’s addressed every budget problem entirely with cuts, pushed a “no-new-taxes” line, and given the wealthy everything they wanted. His immigration policies have broken up families and promoted deporting kids. He’s done Pacific Gas and Electric Co. a nice favor by doing nothing to help the community choice aggregation program move forward.

Nevertheless, we’re endorsing Newsom over his Republican opponent, Abel Maldonado, because there really isn’t any choice. Maldonado is a big supporter of the death penalty (which Newsom opposes). He’s pledged never to raise taxes (and Newsom is at least open to discussion on the issue). He used budget blackmail to force the awful open-primaries law onto the ballot. He’s a supporter of big water projects like the peripheral canal. In the Legislature, he earned a 100 percent rating from the California Chamber of Commerce.

Newsom’s a supporter of more funding for higher education (and the lieutenant governor sits on the University of California Board of Regents). He’d be at least a moderate environmentalist on the state Lands Commission. And he, like Brown, is devoting a lot of attention to improving the state’s economy with green jobs.

We could do much worse than Newsom in the lieutenant governor’s office. We could have Maldonado. Vote for Newsom.

 

SECRETARY OF STATE

 

DEBRA BOWEN

California has had some problems with the office that runs elections and keeps corporate filings. Kevin Shelley had to resign from the job in 2005 in the face of allegations that a state grant of $125,000 was illegally diverted into his campaign account. But Bowen, by all accounts, has run a clean office. Her Republican opponent, Damon Dunn, a former professional football player and real estate agent, doesn’t even have much support within his own party and is calling for mandatory ID checks at the ballot. This one’s easy; vote for Bowen.

 

CONTROLLER

 

JOHN CHIANG

Chiang’s been a perfectly decent controller, and at times has shown some political courage: When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to cut the pay of state employees to minimum-wage level, Chiang refused to go along — and forced the governor to back down. His opponent, state Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Los Angeles), wants to use to office to promote cuts in government spending. Vote for Chiang.

 

TREASURER

 

BILL LOCKYER

Lockyer’s almost certain to win reelection as treasurer against a weak Republican, Mimi Walters. He’s done an adequate job and pushed a few progressive things like using state bonds to promote alternative energy. Mostly, though, he seems to be waiting for his chance to run for governor — and if Jerry Brown loses, or wins and decides not to seek a second term, look for Lockyer to step up.

 

ATTORNEY GENERAL

 

KAMALA HARRIS

This is going to be close, and it’s another clear choice. We’ve had our differences with Harris — she’s trying too hard to be a tough-on-crime type, pushing some really dumb bills in Sacramento (like a measure that would bar sex offenders from ever using social networking sites on the Internet). And while she shouldn’t take all the blame for the problems in the San Francisco crime lab, she should have known about the situation earlier and made more of a fuss. She’s also been slow to respond to serious problem of prosecutors and the cops hiding information about police misconduct from defense lawyers that could be relevant to a case.

But her opponent, Los Angeles D.A. Steve Cooley, is bad news. He’s a big proponent of the death penalty, and the ACLU last year described L.A. as the leading “killer county in the country.” Cooley has proudly sent 50 people to death row since he became district attorney in 2001, and he vows to make it easier and more efficient for the state to kill people.

He’s also a friend of big business who has vowed, even as attorney general, to make the state more friendly to employers — presumably by slowing prosecutions of corporate wrongdoing.

Harris, to her credit, has refused to seek the death penalty in San Francisco, and would bring the perspective of a woman of color to the AG’s office. For all her flaws, she would be far better in the AG’s office than Cooley. Vote for Harris.

 

INSURANCE COMMISSIONER

 

DAVE JONES

Jones, currently a state Assemblymember from Sacramento, won a contested primary against his Los Angeles colleague Hector de la Torre and is now fighting Republican Mike Villines of Fresno, also a member of the Assembly. Jones is widely known as a consumer advocate and was a foe of Prop. 17, the insurance industry scam on the June ballot. A former Legal Aid lawyer, he has extensive experience in health-care reform, supports single-payer health coverage, and would make an excellent insurance commissioner.

Villines pretty much follows right-wing orthodoxy down the line. He wants to replace employer-based insurance with health savings accounts. He argues that the solution to the cost of health insurance is to limit malpractice lawsuits. He wants to limit workers compensation claims. And he supports “alternatives to litigation,” which means eliminating the rights of consumers to sue insurance companies.

Not much question here. Vote for Jones.

 

BOARD OF EQUALIZATION, DISTRICT 1

 

BETTY YEE

The Board of Equalization isn’t well known, but it plays a sizable role in setting and enforcing California tax policy. Yee’s a strong progressive who has done well in the office, supporting progressive financial measures. She’s spoken out — as a top tax official — in favor of legalizing and taxing marijuana. We’re happy to endorse her for another term.

 

SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION

 

TOM TORLAKSON

We fully expected a November runoff between Torlakson and state Sen. Gloria Romero. Both Democrats had strong fundraising and political bases — and very different philosophies. Romero’s a big charter school and privatization fan; Torlakson has the support of the teachers unions. But to the surprise of nearly everyone, a wild-card candidate, retired Los Angeles educator Larry Aceves, came in first, with Torlakson second and Romero third. Now Aceves and Torlakson are in the runoff for this nonpartisan post.

Aceves is an interesting candidate, a former principal and school superintendent who has the endorsement of the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Green Party. But he’s too quick to take the easy line that the teachers’ unions are the biggest problem in public education, and he wants the unilateral right to suspend labor contracts.

Torlakson wants more charter-school accountability and more funding for primary education. He’s the far better candidate.

 

STATE SENATE

 

DISTRICT 8

Leland Yee

Yee’s got no opposition to speak of, and will easily be re-elected. So why is he spending money on a series of slick television ads that have been airing all over San Francisco, talking about education and sending people to his website? It’s pretty obvious: The Yee for state Senate campaign is the opening act of the Yee for San Francisco mayor campaign, which should kick into high gear sometime next spring. In other words, if Yee has his way, he’ll serve only a year of his next four-year term.

Yee infuriates his colleagues at times, particularly when he refuses to vote for a budget that nobody likes but everyone knows is necessary to keep the state afloat. He’s done some ridiculous things, like pushing to sell the Cow Palace as surplus state property and turn the land over to private real estate developers. But he’s always good on open-government issues, is pushing for greater accountability for companies that take tax breaks and then send jobs out of state, has pushed for accountability at the University of California, and made great progress in opening the records at semiprivate university foundations when he busted Stanislaus State University for its secret speaking-fees deal with Sarah Palin.

With a few strong reservations, we’ll endorse Yee for another term.

 

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 12

 

FIONA MA

A clear hold-your-nose endorsement. Ma has done some truly bad things in Sacramento, like pushing a bill that would force the San Francisco Unified School District to allow military recruiters in the high schools and fronting for landlords on a bill to limit rent control in trailer parks. But she’s good on public power and highly critical of PG&E, and she has no opposition to speak of.

 

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 13

 

TOM AMMIANO

Ammiano’s a part of San Francisco history, and without his leadership as a supervisor, we might not have a progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors. Ammiano was one of the architects of the return to district elections, and his 1999 mayoral campaign (against Willie Brown) marked a turning point in the organization, sophistication, and ultimate success of the city’s left. He was the author of the rainy day fund (which has kept the public schools from massive layoffs over the past couple of years) and the Healthy San Francisco plan.

In Sacramento, he’s been a leader in the effort to legalize (and tax) marijuana and to demand accountability for the BART Police. He’s taken on the unpleasant but critical task of chairing the Public Safety Committee and killing the worst of the right-wing crime bills before they get to the floor. He has four more years in Sacramento, and we expect to see a lot more solid progressive legislation coming out of his office. We enthusiastically endorse him for reelection.

 

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 14

 

NANCY SKINNER

Skinner’s a good progressive, a good ally for Ammiano on the Public Safety Committee, and a friend of small business and fair taxation. Her efforts to make out-of-state companies that sell products in California pay state sales tax would not only bring millions into the state coffers but protect local merchants from the likes of Amazon. We don’t get why she’s joined with Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates to try to get rid of Kriss Worthington, the most progressive member of the Berkeley City Council, but we’ll endorse her for re-election.

 

STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 16

 

SANDRE SWANSON

Swanson’s a good vote most of the time in Sacramento, but he’s not yet the leader he could be — particularly on police accountability. The BART Police murdered Oscar Grant in Swanson’s district, yet it fell to a San Franciscan, Tom Ammiano, to introduce strong state legislation to force BART to have civilian oversight of the transit cops. Still, he’s done some positive things (like protecting state workers who blow the whistle on fraud) and deserves another term.

 

>>BACK TO ENDORSEMENTS 2010

The D6 Ranked Choice debacle

Zelda Bronstein
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The D6 Ranked Choice debacle

I must admit, I was pretty astonished when I read that Jane Kim had endorsed two other candidates in District 6, and Debra Walker wasn’t among them.


I understand that there’s bad blood here — Walker’s supporters are pissed that Kim moved into the district and entered a race that Walker had been working on for years. She effectively challenged another progressive with whom she has no substantive policy disagreements, and it looked a lot like personal ambition trumping progressive strategy. And the Walker team managed to keep Kim off the Democratic County Central Committee slate.


But please, folks: The real issue here is Theresa Sparks — and the possibility that we’ll lose D6 to a downtown candidate. And there are only two people in the race capable of beating Sparks, and they’re Walker and Kim. I’ve been wrong before, but I don’t think I’m wrong here — this is a three-person race at this point. And two of those people are qualified progressives.


It took me a while to reach Jane Kim, but I finally talked to her today, and I had one basic question: Does she really think her candidates would be better supervisors than Debra Walker? Well, she said her endorsement strategy was only to support people who were also doing ranked-choice endorsements, and Walker had declined to do that. (Correct: I called Walker, who told me she’s not endorsing anyone for the second and third slots).


But come on: If you want to be a progressive leader, you have to be responsible not just to yourself but to the movement — and the only way we’re going to save D6 is if Walker or Kim wins the election. And the best way to help Theresa Sparks is for Kim to snub Walker and urge her supporters to vote for someone who isn’t likely to win.


I’m one of the people who has publicly questioned whether Kim should have entered this race, and I’ve argued — to Kim, and to anyone else willing to listen — that while she had every right to run for supervisor, and is by any account a qualified progessive candidate, she risked splitting progressive resources and energy and, purely from the perspective of a larger progressive movement, running against Walker might not have been the smartest strategy. Kim’s response: Well, that’s why we have ranked-choice voting, so nobody becomes the spoiler.


Again: True. And that’s why when you use ranked-choice voting, you don’t play the spoiler.


Kim told me that if Walker would also do ranked-choice, she’d reconsider her endorsements. (That’s tough, too — what, is she going to un-endorse someone?) And honestly, it’s better for Walker to do no endorsements than to endorse two candidates and leave Kim off. But at this point, with big money pouring into the district for Sparks, everyone’s got to take the high road and work on the real issue. 

Downtown money hits district races

Zelda Bronstein
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Downtown money hits district races

Downtown cash is pouring into the district supervisorial races.

Ethics Department filings show that an alliance backed by the Chamber of Commerce, the SF Police Officers Association and United Health Care Workers West is dropping major money on Steve Moss in D10, Scott Wiener in D8 and Theresa Sparks in D6. 

Called the “Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth,” the coalition supports the building of a mega-hospital on Cathedral Hill.

The independent expenditure alliance puts UHW, part of the Service Employees International Union, in the odd position of using membership money to attack progressive politics in San Francisco – potentially undermining years of work by another SEIU affiliate, Local 1021.

Campaign disclosure forms show that the Chamber-Police-UHW alliance has spent $20,000 on bilingual (English/Chinese) door hangers for Moss that feature photos of Chamber of Commerce President Steve Falk and United Healthcare Workers political director Leon Chow.

These same interests also spent $20,000 on robo-calls for Moss, with a heavy focus on Visitacion Valley in an effort to secure the Asian vote in the crowded D10, where there is a strong likelihood that the race will be decided by second and third place votes

Word on the street in the Bayview is that former Mayor Willie Brown is pissed off that the Chamber is backing Moss, instead of African American candidate Lynette Sweet, and that termed out D10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell is angry that big corporations are trying to buy an election in the poorest and most ethnically diverse district in town.

But unlike the rumor mill, the money trail doesn’t lie. And from that perspective this is looking like a replay of the June 2008 election, when big businesses bought support for Lennar’s Candlestick Point/shipyard development by claiming it would create thousands of jobs building condos that most workers can’t afford—jobs that have yet to materialize.

This time the battle cry is for jobs building a massive hospital, even though few workers will likely get service from this hospital, which is designed to serve as a regional center for high-end health care.

So far, the same alliance of police and corporate money has plunked down $17,000 for bilingual (English and Chinese) door hangers in support of Theresa Sparks in D6 and another $17,000 for bilingual robo-calls in support of Sparks.

And so far, Scott Wiener has gotten the relatively short end of the corporate money stick: the Alliance has only spent $15,000 on a door hanger in support of Wiener.

This means that the alliance spent $90,000 in a two-week period in September. The numbers lend credence to DCCC Chair Aaron Peskin’s belief that the alliance has a war chest of $800,000, which it intends to use to put pro-downtown candidates into power.

Asked about the support of this alliance, Sparks, Wiener and Moss gave markedly different replies that reveal as much about each candidate as the money behind them.

D6 candidate Theresa Sparks suggested that the Alliance was spending more on her and Moss’ D10 campaign, because it felt Wiener was further ahead in the D8 race than she is in D6 or Moss is in D10.

And Sparks was openly supportive of the Cathedral Hill hospital project. “I’ve been very supportive of that project,” Sparks told us.

Sparks also observed that it was logical that the Chamber would support her.

“D6 has one of the largest numbers of small businesses and one of my biggest platforms has been economic growth, and I think the Chamber has been very supportive of job creation,” Sparks said.

By comparison, Scott Wiener told the Guardian that he has not taken a position on CPMC’s proposed mega hospital on Cathedral Hill.

“Those kind of issues could come before the Board, in terms of CEQA issues, and so I could be conflicted out,” Wiener said.

When the Guardian noted that the Alliance has so far not spent any money on phone banking for Wiener in D8, Wiener said, “I have volunteers doing phone banking.”

As for Moss, he told the Guardian that said he doesn’t have a position on the mega-hospital.

“I haven’t seen the plan,” Moss said. “But I understand that there seems to be an agreement that would maintain St. Luke’s with about 300 beds, but that there is a deep suspicion among the nurses that it’s not economically viable. And there seems to be a much greater need for a hospital in the southeast.”

Moss, however, is with downtown on other key issues: He supports the sit-lie legislation on the November ballot. He also reiterated that he likes the rabidly anti-tenant Small Property Owners Association, whose endorsement he called a “mistake” during a previous interview with the Guardian.

“Landlords feel that they are responsible for maintaining costly older buildings and that they are not provided with ways to upgrade their units in ways that share costs with tenants,” Moss, who sold a condo on Potrero Hill in 2007 for the same price that he paid for the entire building in 2001, and owns a 4-floor rent-controlled apartment building in D8, near Dolores Park, that he bought for $1.6 million in 2007, and where he lived from December 2007 to February 2010.

Moss refused to provide a copy of the lease on his current rental at Vermont and 18th St—something that the Guardian requested in light of an email from his wife that indicated that the family intended to move back to Dolores Park of Moss loses the race.
‘That’s private information,” Moss said, claiming that he does not plan to move back into his apartment building in D8, if he loses in November.

Moss claimed that UHW endorsed him because his position on politicians and unions.
“I agreed that politicians should get not involved in union politics,” Moss said. “The United Healthcare Workers seem to be a worthy group,” he added. “All they said was that they wanted to make sure that they had access.”

All this campaign money drama is playing out against the backdrop of a punishing battle between United Healthcare Workers West and the rest of SEIU. And as these recent filings show, UHW is spending a huge amount of its membership dues to undermine the city’s progressive infrastructure by trying to elect candidates who are not progressive, even though its progressive sister union has endorsed Rafael Mandelman in D8.

SEIU 1021 member Ed Kinchley, who works in the Emergency Room at SF General Hospital, is furious that UHW is pouring all its money into downtown candidates like Moss, Sparks and Wiener and trying to undermine everything that its progressive sister union is trying to do.

“UHW basically isn’t participating in the Labor Council, it’s just doing its own thing,” Kinchley said.

Kinchley noted that UHW is currently in trusteeship, and is being controlled by its International, and not its local membership, thus explaining why it’s doing this dance with forces like the Chamber and the Building Owners and Managers Association, which have long been the enemy of labor.

“Sutter wants a monopoly on private healthcare, and people like Rafael Mandelman in and Debra Walker have been strong supporters of public healthcare,” Kinchley said, Kinchley also noted that he wants supervisors who are willing to state their support for public health care, rather than dodging the issue and hedging their bets, right now.

“I want someone who can straight-up say, here’s what’s important for families in San Francisco, especially something as important as healthcare,” Kinchley said. “but it sounds like UHW is teaming up with the Chamber and supporting people who are not progressive.”

“And it’s not OK for somebody in D10 to say they haven’t seen CPMC’s plans, when people from D10 use St. Luke’s all the time for healthcare, because it sounds like Sutter wants to change St. Luke’s into an out-patient clinic for paying customers,” he continued.

SEIU 1021 activist Gabriel Haaland accused the Chamber, the Building Owners and Managers Association, UHW and the Police Officers Association of putting together a massive political action committee, “to try and steal the election through corporate spending.”

All this leaves the Guardian wondering how Leon Chow, the political director of UHW, who has done good work in the past on health care issues, is feeling about seeing his photograph spreads all over town alongside that of Chamber of Commerce President Steve Falk on door hangers in support of Sparks, Wiener and Moss.
 
As of press time, Chow had not returned our calls, but if he does, we’ll update this post.

Who’s trying to fast-track Parkmerced?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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6
Who’s trying to fast-track Parkmerced?

At a Sept. 30 Planning Commission meeting, several commissioners and community members raised concerns that project approval for Parkmerced, a development that will add thousands of new housing units to an existing residential complex, had been scheduled before anyone was really prepared to discuss it. It’s since been pushed back, but the attempt to rush it through drew fire nonetheless.

Land use attorney Sue Hestor said she’d discovered the day before the Planning Commission meeting that a final project EIR would be made available Oct. 7, with an approval hearing scheduled just two weeks later, on Oct. 21. That came as a surprise even to Hestor, who closely monitors development projects. “You cannot just drop a complex legal document on people two weeks before the hearing and say that is sufficient,” Hestor said. “Two weeks for a staff report for this project is insulting.” Prior to this notice, the hearing on Parkmerced was widely expected later in the year.

Christina Olague, vice-president of the Planning Commission, said during the meeting that the accelerated timeline was highly unusual. “I was hearing that we were going to be attempting to initiate this project on the 7th of October with an approval calendared for the following week,” she said. “And I was concerned that it felt, at that point, that it was a little bit out of the hands of the planning commission. When it comes to projects of this size, I just felt like that was too much of a rush to get it through, especially given that we are in the middle of CPMC with comments due the 19th of October.”

Olague said the process made her uncomfortable. “I felt a lot of our say was being removed from our realm and there were outside forces … other departments in the city that were kind of influencing it in a way that didn’t feel comfortable to me,” she said. “Also, historically … we have never done it that way. Usually we calendar an item for one week and then there’s a 20-day noticing period that allows members of the public to digest the information and review the information.” She added, “I just didn’t want the public to get the impression that we were favoring one project over other projects.”

Calvin Welch, an affordable housing activist, noted that Parkmerced developers have a laudable goal of preserving onsite rent-controlled units at the housing complex — but he had yet to see a draft of a development agreement outlining the details of that plan. The planning commissioners hadn’t seen that document, either. Welch suggested more time was needed to review the terms of the agreement.

If the Planning Commission had approved Parkmerced on this accelerated schedule, it might have gone to the Board of Supervisors for approval before the end of the year, so the votes would’ve easier to count than if the project went before a new class of Supes in 2011.

The Guardian reported earlier this month that Mayor Gavin Newsom received a $1,000 campaign contribution for his bid for lieutenant governor from Craig Hartman, a design partner for Parkmerced, plus $2,000 from two executives associated with the project. AECOM, which is completing technical studies for the project, gave him campaign donations totaling $13,000.

Speaking to a crowd of real-estate professionals and representives from the business community a couple weeks ago, Newsom urged them to get involved in district elections in order to avoid “a dramatic shift” that would occur if the wrong people get elected to local office in November.

Did the mayor’s office lean on the planning department to rush the approval of Parkmerced in order to ensure a more predictable outcome? We emailed Newsom’s press secretary, Tony Winnicker, with questions, and we’ll be sure to post a response if we receive one.

 

The pummeling of SF Labor

David Talbot
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18

Click to read sidebar, Brown or Whitman? No contest

With five supervisorial seats open and only one incumbent running, the Labor Council has had a tough time picking the right pro-labor candidates. The easy choices were incumbent Carmen Chu in District 4, with no opposition, and Raphael Mandelman, an exceptionally promising newcomer in District 8. But Janet Reilly in District 2 opposes the Labor Council’s revenue measures. In District 6, where long-time activist Deborah Walker has been endorsed, and in District 8, where Malia Cohen and Chris Jackson are #1 and #2, there are a multitude of candidates, many of them labor friendly.

It’s not an easy year.

Prop. B on San Francisco’s November election ballot confronts the city’s working people and their unions with an unprecedented challenge. The measure, sponsored by Public Defender Jeff Adachi, would severely weaken public employee unions and undoubtedly lead to other serious attacks on workers and unions in private as well as public employment nationwide.

The proposition is by no means the only dangerously anti-labor measure on the ballot, but it ‘s the worst from labor’s point of view, as it very well should be. It’s a prime example of the public-employee bashing that’s become a favorite theme in election campaigns everywhere and, if passed, would set a clear national precedent.

Actually, Prop. B might better be described as a pummeling rather than bashing – and one coming, furthermore, just a few months after city employees took a voluntary $250 million pay cut. Prop. B would steeply raise the employees’ contributions to their pensions unilaterally and prohibit bargaining on the issue in the future as well.

It would arbitrarily lower city contributions to the employees’ health plans, especially dependent care. What employees pay for health care coverage for children and other dependents would be as much as doubled.

The steep rise in the employees’ share of their health care coverage could quite possibly force families to drop city coverage and try to get cheaper coverage on their own. That, of course, is a primary goal of the corporate anti-labor forces and others who seek to balance the budgets of public entities on the backs of their employees.

So what if workers can’t afford to take the kids to the doctor.  Cutting taxes and balancing budgets is a lot more important. Besides, there’s always the emergency room and charity.

But wait! There are yet more major Prop. B flaws. For example: If city health care coverage is changed by increasing the premiums paid by employees, as the proposition requires, the city Health Service system (HSS) would have to forfeit new $23 million-a-year federal grants intended to reduce premiums for employees and retirees covered by the HSS. The system includes, not just city employees, but also school and community college district and SF court system employees and retirees.

There’s even more, much more than enough to energize labor’s troops. They are angry. Very angry. Unions citywide have at least temporarily set aside their sometimes considerable differences and feuding over tactics, jurisdictions and other matters. They’ve come together tightly along with a substantial number of labor’s Democratic Party allies to oppose Prop. B.

And watch out for Prop. G. It’s another favorite of the anti-union, anti-public employee crowd, led in this case by Sean Elsbernd, a very politically ambitious member of the SF Board of Supervisors.

Elsbernd and friends claim their intent is to “fix the Muni,” one of the nation’s most complex transit systems. The Municipal Railway, overseen by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), is indeed badly in need of fixing. But the principal blame for that does not rest with Muni’s bus and streetcar operators – most of them people of color – as proponents of Prop. G claim. Most of the blame rests with Muni’s overpaid managers, headed by $336,000-a-year executive director and CEO Nathaniel Ford.

As President Irwin Lum of the Muni operator’s union said in a Guardian interview,  “Muni needs to be changed from the top to the bottom.” He sees Muni’s problem as mainly a lack of resources and the political will to pursue them.  Muni officials might also avoid lots of problems if they’d deign to consult regularly with community groups and their leaders on their transit needs.

The public rightly complains of buses not arriving on time, of being passed up while waiting at bus stops, of grumpy drivers and of other certainly legitimate matters.  Naturally, they blame the drivers. But drivers do not make schedules. Under pressure to keep to the schedules made by others, they sometimes speed by waiting passengers. Sometimes they’re slowed by heavy traffic, sometimes by problems with faulty, broken-down down buses or slowed by having to deal with violent passengers. Sometimes, managers making out the schedules don’t properly anticipate such probable delays.

Oh, yes, those grumpy drivers.

Wouldn’t you be grumpy if you had to work a full shift without going to the bathroom? If you had to listen to loud complaints from unruly passengers who sometimes got rough with you and each other?  If you had to weave through heavy traffic for hours at a time? If you had to time your work to unrealistic schedules you had nothing to do with making?

It’s not the drivers who are in charge of replacing badly worn buses and streetcar tracks and equipment, not the drivers who are in charge of negotiating with Muni suppliers for a reduction in ever-escalating fuel prices and other costs. In short, it’s not the drivers who run Muni – though Muni, of course, could not run without them.

So, what do Elsbernd and his anti-labor cohorts want to do to the Muni’s invaluable workers? Here’s the deal:

The City Charter now requires that Muni operators be paid at least as much as the average salary of operators at the two highest paying similar transit systems in the country.  And if benefits granted Muni operators are worth less than those of operators at similar transit systems, the difference is paid to the operators from a trust fund established for that purpose.

Under Prop. G, operators’ pay and benefits would be set by bargaining between union and MTA representatives. If they couldn’t agree, the dispute would be submitted to an arbitrator, whose decision would be binding.

The arbitrator would be required to consider the possible impact of disputed proposals on Muni fares and services. But though all other city unions are also subject to arbitration, there’s no requirement that the arbitrator consider how their proposals would affect the services provided by the union’s members – an unusual requirement that’s virtually unheard of elsewhere.

Prop. G backers presumably see the proposition as a step toward their goal of being able to set, change or eliminate Muni work rules without bothering to consult workers or their unions. They are, you might say, “unilateralists.”

 Taking on Muni operators is only part of Supervisor Elsbernd’s anti-labor romp. He’s also sponsoring Prop.  F, a deceptively simple charter amendment that would seriously impact the 105,000 members of the Health Service System. It’s a stealth proposition, difficult to understand and explain, and thus often brushed aside as a minor ballot measure of no particular consequence.

But Prop. F is capable of doing major long-term damage to HSS members by weakening their position in negotiating with powerful health insurers such as Blue Shield on the size of the premiums HSS members have to pay for coverage and the benefits they receive.

All politicians stretch the truth. It’s part of their game. You needn’t look further than Elsbernd for evidence of that.  He actually claims he put Prop. F on the ballot strictly to save the Health Service System money by eliminating two of the four elections in which HSS members vote for representatives on the HSS Board. This seemingly small change would eliminate the overlapping terms that provide the continuity essential to successful negotiations with health insurers.

The savings would average a mere $30,000 a year, and would not even be available until 2016. Nor is there a guarantee that any of the money would go to the HSS. $30,000? What’s the real motive here?

As for the rest of San Francisco’s ballot measures and candidates, union supporters could hardly do better than to follow the recommendations of the AFL-CIO’s local Labor Council, which almost invariably backs the propositions most likely to be labor-friendly and opposes those that are not. This time, the Labor Council is saying “no” to those decidedly unfriendly Propositions B, G and F.

And don’t forget Props. J, K and N. Hotel workers and others are supporting Prop. J, which is meant to stop the travel industry practice of using online hotel booking to avoid paying SF’s hotel tax. Prop. J also would increase the city’s hotel tax for the first time in 14 years in order to raise some most welcome revenue for the city’s general fund.

However, Prop. K – introduced by Mayor Newsom – could stand in the way. Since Prop. K makes no change in the hotel tax rate, apparently it’s intended to confuse and distract the voters so they won’t approve Prop. J.

The other major revenue measure strongly supported by labor – Proposition N – would increase the city’s transfer tax rate on the sale of property worth more than $5 million from 1.5 percent now to a range of 2 to 2 ½ percent for a property worth $10 million or more. This would also generate millions for the city’s general fund.

Rarely has so much been at stake for San Francisco’s working people and their unions.

Dick Meister, former Labor Editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV, has covered labor and politics for a half-century, Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.

Arlington & Santa Clara join SF in requesting S-Comm opt-out

Mary Magee
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1
Arlington & Santa Clara join SF in requesting S-Comm opt-out

The County Board in Arlington, Virginia and the Santa Clara Board of Supervisors both voted unanimously September 28 to opt out of S-Comm, a controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data-sharing program also known as Secure Communities.

This means San Francisco is no longer the only municipality requesting to opt out of ICE’s S-Comm program. (Washington, D.C’s metropolitan Police Department is the only jurisdiction to date to successfully terminate its S-Comm Memorandum of Agreement with ICE.) The program automatically shares fingerprints with ICE that are taken by local law enforcement immediately after individuals are arrested, even if criminal charges are eventually dismissed or were the result of an unlawful arrest.

The opt-out resolutions in Santa Clara and Arlington came a day before 578 national and local organizations delivered a letter to President Barack Obama condemning the merger of criminal justice and immigration systems and demanding an end to practices that harm diverse communities throughout the country.

S-Comm has already met with opposition from civil rights organizations, law enforcement, and city officials from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, over concerns it is being forced on hundreds of counties without oversight or accountability.

As a result of this opposition, ICE issued a statement in August that confirmed that local jurisdictions have a right to opt out by sending a written request.

And recently, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder also confirmed in writing that local jurisdictions can opt of S-Comm by requesting to do so in writing.

San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennessey has already submitted this request in writing on at least two occasions, most recently on August 31st. And on May 18, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a resolution to opt out of S-Comm.

And Angela Chan, staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, repeated her request that ICE comply with its own opt-out procedure for all requesting counties.

“SF has done everything required of us to opt out,” Chan said in a press release. “Sheriff Hennessey and our Board of Supervisors have voiced our request to opt out of S-Comm loud and clear. It’s now ICE’s turn to follow through on their word and allow counties to do what has been within our right all along. Only then will we be able to focus our local resources back on local law enforcement. S-Comm has no place in our counties because it makes immigrant victims and witnesses afraid to come forward and cooperate with local law enforcement.”

In response to Santa Clara’s opt-out request, ICE’s Assistant Director David Venturella sent a letter to Santa Clara’s legal counsel Miguel Marquez in which he sought to clarify how S-Comm works:

“Secure Communities is ICE’s comprehensive strategy to improve and modernize the identification and removal of criminal aliens from the United States,” Venturella wrote. “As part of this strategy, ICE uses a federal biometric information sharing capability to more quickly and accurately identify aliens when they are booked into local law enforcement custody.”

“ICE uses a risk-based approach that prioritizes immigration enforcement actions against criminal aliens based on the severity of their crimes, focusing first on criminal aliens convicted of serious crimes like murder, rape, drug trafficking, national security crimes, and other “aggravated felonies,” Venturella continued.

But critics of S-Comm have noted that the majority of folks identified by this program are not criminal aliens at all. These critics argue that the program is undermining community policing efforts, since a person who has not committed a serious crime can now be referred to ICE simply because they were arrested (perhaps falsely) of a crime—and ICE can initiative deportation proceedings before that person can prove that they aren’t a felon.

And as Venturella acknowledges in his letter to Santa Clara, “Under this strategy, ICE maintains the authority to enforce immigration law.”

But Venturella confirmed that local municipalities have the right to request that their jurisdictions S-Comm program not be activated. And he clarified that ICE won’t be requiring local jurisdictions to sign statements of intent, or any other document to participate in S-Comm.

He also explained that ICE defers to the California State Attorney General on how state, county and local law enforcement agencies within California will share biometric data.

Venturella clarified that the purpose of local law enforcement receiving a fingerprint “match message” is to provide any additional identity information about the subject, including aliases, from the Department of Homeland Security’s biometric database. This database stores over 100 million records that, according to Venturella’s letter, “may not have been available based only on a criminal history check.”

But he noted that “receiving a ‘match message’ does not authorize or require any action by local law enforcement.”

“ICE views an immigration detainer as a request that a local law enforcement agency maintain custody of an alien, who may otherwise be released, for up to 48 hours (excluding Saturdays, Sundays and holidays),” Venturella explained. “This provides ICE time to assume custody of the alien.”

Venturella noted that ICE is not responsible for the incarceration costs of such individuals and does not reimburse localities for detaining any individual until ICE assumes custody.

But he points out that there is no statutory requirement that localities notify ICE if a subject is to be released 30 days in advance of any release or transfer.
‘The notification of ICE of inmate transfer or release within 30 days is pursuant to ICE’s request for such information,” Venturella stated.

Venturella clarifies that there is a legal basis for requiring ICE officers to conduct inmate interviews “to determine alienage and any possibilities for relief or protection from removal.”

But he also points out that local officials are not required to assist the feds in acquiring information about detainees.
“Assisting ICE in acquiring detainee information is not a legal requirement,” Venturella states.

Getting our rocks off: a historical perspective

Andrew Lam
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4
Getting our rocks off: a historical perspective

San Francisco is waiting for its Boogie Nights. Unbeknownst to Hollywood, our fair berg was the infant creche of hardcore pornography, spawning a subculture of porn theaters that thrived despite police harassment and political pressure.

We were number one! Luckily, a few brave men are resurrecting our porn golden age money shot – read on for a first look at documentary The Smut Capital of America and an interview with the director himself, Michael Stabile.


Smut Capital is by no means Stabile’s first porn rodeo. The co-editor of Gay Porn Blog, he and Smut Capital editor-cinematographer Ben Leon are both mainstays in the SF gay porn scene. The two were researching their upcoming doc on the life of gay smut powerhouse Falcon Studios founder Chuck Holmes when Stabile came across a New York Times article that inspired the title of their new project, which is a work in progress for which the team is fundraising in order to release the finished film in 2011.

“Until then I’d always thought of it as an industry that emerged from LA, but San Francisco was actually the city that birthed the porno theater. It was the beginning of the sexual revolution, and in a lot of ways these directors were documenting this newly found freedoms.” Stabile attributes the renaissance to hippie women “with really no hangups,” a progressive zeitgeist that had seized the city in the late sixties and early seventies, and film processing studios that were willing to develop sexually explicit material. By the era’s zenith in 1972, there were porno film theaters in neighborhoods across the city.

Not that everyone was down to get all that action on screen. Dianne Feinstein, first in her post as the city’s first female president of the Board of Supervisors and then as SF’s first female mayor, led a crusade focused on cleaning up the Tenderloin, which incidentally included sweeping the neighborhood free of its supply of adult movie houses. What ensued was an orchestrated harassment policy that different porn theaters dealt with in different ways.

Established theaters, Stabile says, actually benefited from the police and media persecution. “They’d come in with cameras, it’d be on the five o clock news and it would be great for them,” he says. “Advertising was very limited at the Chronicle. Feinstein would come in with her troops and would detail everything that was going on. Suddenly there was a way to talk about it, so people would flood into the theaters.” The Mitchell Brothers grew so adept at playing the cat and mouse game, he says, that they would post Feinstein’s office number on their marquee under the words “call for a good time.”

But not everyone prospered. Smaller theaters that depended on a few workers to operate, like Alex DeRenzy’s Screening Room, suffered when police would take key staffers on pointeless joyrides around town before booking them on charges of vice crime. Eventually factors like these, and more importantly the advent of video porn in the 1980s pulled the adult film business down to Los Angeles.

The move shifted the purpose of sex films away from their original role in the Sexual Revolution. Says Stabile “People were doing it here because they enjoyed it, because they wanted their own sexualities represented. It’s not like that in LA for the most part, where even a lot of the gay studios are owned by straight men looking to turn a profit.”

But don’t worry, the party’s not over. One of Stabile’s main goals with the film is not just to highlight good sex gone by, but that which cums and goes even today. When asked whether SF is still a presence in the world of porn, he had no equivocation. “Its one of the great untold stories in the local media – San Francisco has a huge porn presence. Raging Stallion, Falcon, Hot House – seven of the top ten gay porn studios are located up here, there’s Kink.com, porn writers like Violet Blue,” he says.

It appears that the tech savvy and sexual freedom that led to our capital crowning are still alive and well on these city streets. Phew! Now you may now go back to your regularly scheduled local porn browsing.

Needed: a public health master plan

David Talbot
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1

California Pacific Medical Center’s plan to build a massive new regional hospital on Van Ness shouldn’t be under the jurisdiction of the Planning Commission

EDITORIAL More than 100 people showed up at the Planning Commission Sept. 23 to oppose California Pacific Medical Center’s plan to build a massive new regional hospital on Van Ness Avenue. Most were neighborhood residents who raised an excellent point: what, exactly, would the shiny new $2.5 billion hospital offer for low-income people in the Tenderloin?

And that’s just the starting point for discussion. The new project is a piece of a much larger plan: CPMC wants to shut down part of its Laurel Heights campus, reduce the number of beds and the scope of service at St. Luke’s, turn Ralph K. Davis into a specialty facility, and reshape the way health care is provided in San Francisco.

That’s a huge deal — but right now, the city is looking at the projects piecemeal. That’s poor public health policy and poor land-use planning. In fact, there’s no real way to evaluate the Van Ness hospital in its proper context — the Planning Commission, which will rule on the development issues, is hardly the best venue in which to discuss the future of health care in San Francisco.

So new legislation by Sup. David Campos is critical to injecting some sanity into this, and the larger, health facilities debate. The Campos legislation would mandate a citywide Health Care Services Master Plan and would require that all new hospital development, public or private, be consistent with that plan. It’s a pretty basic concept, and it’s hard to imagine that nobody’s suggested this before.

San Francisco has a large, complex network of facilities providing health care — a big public hospital, a university hospital system (University of California San Francisco), a series of public and nonprofit community clinics, half a dozen private hospitals run by two competing chains (CPMC and Catholic Healthcare West), and one health maintenance organization (Kaiser). Some provide unique services, some provide competitive services — and there are some critical services that are hard to find anywhere.

It’s hard to say whether the city needs what CPMC is proposing — a gigantic medical center that some have described as the Mayo Clinic of the West, designed to attract patients from all over the region — without any sort of overall plan. How would the new facility and the CPMC restructuring affect services at St. Luke’s, a critical part of the health care infrastructure in the Mission? Where would patients who rely on Davies for emergency and clinical care in the Castro district wind up? How about all the medical office buildings and doctors’ offices situated near hospitals that are about to change?

How will CPMC’s moves affect low-income-patient care? How does the project fit in with the new Obama health care policies and the city’s own Healthy San Francisco program? Will a new hospital on Van Ness increase access to primary and emergency care for residents of the Tenderloin — or will they be shuttled somewhere else while the high-end facility caters to better-off patients seeking expensive specialty procedures?

Those aren’t land-use decisions — and while some Cathedral Hill residents argue that the new hospital will cause traffic problems, the biggest issues go beyond the scope and expertise of the city Planning Department.

Under the Campos bill, the Public Health Department would develop a master plan (which public health director Mitch Katz says can be done with existing resources), the Health Commission would review that plan, hold public hearings, and sign off on it — and city planners and health officials would have to make sure that new health-related development met existing and future public needs.

The supervisors should pass the bill and get the process going as quickly as possible. And they should refuse to sign off on any final version of the hospital plan until there’s a city framework in place — or at the very least, until CPMC can demonstrate that its citywide infrastructure plans are designed to meet public health needs. *

 

Needed: a public health master plan

David Talbot
-
0
Needed: a public health master plan

EDITORIAL More than 100 people showed up at the Planning Commission Sept. 23 to oppose California Pacific Medical Center’s plan to build a massive new regional hospital on Van Ness Avenue. Most were neighborhood residents who raised an excellent point: what, exactly, would the shiny new $2.5 billion hospital offer for low-income people in the Tenderloin?

And that’s just the starting point for discussion. The new project is a piece of a much larger plan: CPMC wants to shut down part of its Laurel Heights campus, reduce the number of beds and the scope of service at St. Luke’s, turn Ralph K. Davis into a specialty facility, and reshape the way health care is provided in San Francisco.

That’s a huge deal — but right now, the city is looking at the projects piecemeal. That’s poor public health policy and poor land-use planning. In fact, there’s no real way to evaluate the Van Ness hospital in its proper context — the Planning Commission, which will rule on the development issues, is hardly the best venue in which to discuss the future of health care in San Francisco.

So new legislation by Sup. David Campos is critical to injecting some sanity into this, and the larger, health facilities debate. The Campos legislation would mandate a citywide Health Care Services Master Plan and would require that all new hospital development, public or private, be consistent with that plan. It’s a pretty basic concept, and it’s hard to imagine that nobody’s suggested this before.

San Francisco has a large, complex network of facilities providing health care — a big public hospital, a university hospital system (University of California San Francisco), a series of public and nonprofit community clinics, half a dozen private hospitals run by two competing chains (CPMC and Catholic Healthcare West), and one health maintenance organization (Kaiser). Some provide unique services, some provide competitive services — and there are some critical services that are hard to find anywhere.

It’s hard to say whether the city needs what CPMC is proposing — a gigantic medical center that some have described as the Mayo Clinic of the West, designed to attract patients from all over the region — without any sort of overall plan. How would the new facility and the CPMC restructuring affect services at St. Luke’s, a critical part of the health care infrastructure in the Mission? Where would patients who rely on Davies for emergency and clinical care in the Castro district wind up? How about all the medical office buildings and doctors’ offices situated near hospitals that are about to change?

How will CPMC’s moves affect low-income-patient care? How does the project fit in with the new Obama health care policies and the city’s own Healthy San Francisco program? Will a new hospital on Van Ness increase access to primary and emergency care for residents of the Tenderloin — or will they be shuttled somewhere else while the high-end facility caters to better-off patients seeking expensive specialty procedures?

Those aren’t land-use decisions — and while some Cathedral Hill residents argue that the new hospital will cause traffic problems, the biggest issues go beyond the scope and expertise of the city Planning Department.

Under the Campos bill, the Public Health Department would develop a master plan (which public health director Mitch Katz says can be done with existing resources), the Health Commission would review that plan, hold public hearings, and sign off on it — and city planners and health officials would have to make sure that new health-related development met existing and future public needs.

The supervisors should pass the bill and get the process going as quickly as possible. And they should refuse to sign off on any final version of the hospital plan until there’s a city framework in place — or at the very least, until CPMC can demonstrate that its citywide infrastructure plans are designed to meet public health needs.

Newsom campaign also plugging Sparks

Sasha Cuttler
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9

UPDATED WITH RESPONSE FROM SPARKS.

Gavin Newsom’s campaign for lieutenant governor might have a tough time beating moderate Latino Republican Abel Maldonado – indeed, even many of his local allies privately tell us they fear he’s going to lose – but it is still using some of its significant resources and energy to promote the candidacy of Theresa Sparks, whom Newsom endorsed to replace Chris Daly on the Board of Supervisors.

“I’m hoping we can count on your vote for Gavin Newsom for lieutenant governor and Theresa Sparks for District 6 supervisor,” a volunteer with the Newsom campaign said during a call that I received today, the first I’ve gotten from the Newsom campaign.

As of Sept. 23, the Sparks campaign reported having $29,361 in the bank, about half of what her main District 6 rival Debra Walker had on hand on that date ($57,895), even though Sparks has out-fundraised Walker $124,000 to $110,000, according to the most recent campaign finance reports.

Yet even these strong local fundraising totals pale in comparison to what a statewide candidate like Newsom can pull down. As of the last full campaign report that extended through June 30, Newsom’s campaign had $494,000 in the bank after raising $1.4 million, and his recent late contribution reports show hundreds of thousands of dollars more rolling in since then.

Among the recent Newsom contributors are downtown political players such as the San Francisco Apartment Association ($3,500 on 9/16), Shorenstein Realty Services ($6,500 on 9/16), Recology (the company bidding on SF’s big garbage contract, $2,500 on 9/16), San Francisco Building Owners and Managers Association ($5,000 on 9/1), and Sen. Dianne Feinstein ($5,000 on 9/4) – all of which far exceeds the $500 local limit on campaign contributions

It’s unusual for a local and statewide candidate to share a phone-banking operation, and clearly a sign that Newsom would really like to deal with a more ideologically friendly (that is, less progressive) Board of Supervisors if he doesn’t move to Sacramento in January. And from a campaign finance perspective, both campaigns will probably need to document where the resources came from for this shared campaigning when the next pre-election statements are due on Oct. 5.

“Generally speaking, if they share resources they should be apportioning those costs,” Mabel Ng, deputy director of the San Francisco Ethics Commission, told the Guardian. Yet she also noted that California Gov. Code Section 84310 makes a distinction between automatic robo-calls and the kind of live “volunteer” that the caller identified himself as. “If it’s a live person, some of these rules don’t apply,” Ng said. If that’s the case, Sparks might be in for lots of no-cost campaigning during the final pre-election push.

The Newsom campaign has not responded to a Guardian inquiry about the issue, but Sparks returned our call after this article was initially posted. Although she took issue with the implication that there was anything wrong with her benefitting from calls by the Newsom campaign, comparing it to the support Walker has received from the Democratic County Central Committee, she admits to the coordination on the matter between her campaign and Newsom’s.

“Newsom had a volunteer phone bank and he asked if he shoudl add my name to it and I said yes,” Sparks told the Guardian, adding that she’s been pleased with the response to this effort and her own campaign’s phonebanking efforts.

Meanwhile, while Sparks just got a boost from above today, so did Newsom, who was the subject of an e-mail blast from former President Bill Clinton, who wrote, “We have a tremendous opportunity in Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, two leaders who realize the promise of their state and will get it back on track. Please join me in helping these candidates win in November.”

Still no peace treaty in SF’s War on Fun

Sasha Cuttler
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1
Still no peace treaty in SF’s War on Fun

Boiling outrage over the city’s boundary-pushing crackdown on San Francisco nightlife may have slowed to a simmer since the spring, when overzealous enforcement efforts (harassing club owners, confiscating computers from DJs, dumping booze down the drain like Prohibition Era agents, etc.) prompted back-and-back cover stories in the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly. But the fallout is still unfolding in ways that could eventually cause real problems for the city.

A trial date has been set for a year from now in what could be an expensive and ground-breaking racketeering lawsuit brought on behalf of several victims of the plain-clothed, party-crashing duo of San Francisco Police Officer Larry Bertrand and California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control Officer Michelle Ott.

Since their aggressive and seemingly moralistic crusade against clubs and parties was publicized, both have had their wings clipped by their supervisors, but the damage was done and the check still hasn’t been paid. Attorney Mark Webb, who brought the lawsuit, has deposed both Bertrand and Ott and he says they gave testimony that was damaging to themselves and the city’s legal position. And Webb says he’s just getting warmed up.

“I still want to take [Mayor Gavin] Newsom’s deposition,” Webb told us. “He’s a named defendant and I want to know what he knew about this.”

The SFPD didn’t seem chastened by the bout of bad publicity, at least if their recent cancellation of the Lovevolution parade was any indicator. And Board of Supervisors President David Chiu this week introduced legislation that would require party promoters to register with the city and require that clubs work only with registered promoters, an apparent reaction to the shooting of a German tourist near Union Square and other episodes of nighttime violence.

“The lack of oversight of fly-by-night party promoters has led to avoidable tragedies,” Chiu said in a press release announcing the legislation.

Meanwhile, the organization that formed to counter the crackdown and scapegoating of nightlife purveyors, the California Music and Culture Association, has continued to advocate for a more reasoned response to problems that Chiu and other politicians have sought to blame on nightclubs.

Tomorrow (Fri/24), CMAC will host its latest event, a Meet the Press Luncheon at which I and other journalists will be appearing to discuss nightlife issues and how they are covered in the media, with some supervisorial candidates also expected to attend. The event is at noon at Mezzanine, 444 Jessie Street, SF.

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