Supervisors

Sunshine and shadows

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Sunshine and shadows

tredmond@sfbg.com

It was, the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed, the end of the world for development in the city, or at least something close to that. A ballot measure, sponsored by Sup. David Chiu, restricting new buildings from casting shadows on city parks “could imperil major development projects,” a Jan. 28 article by John Cote said. “Everything from a new wing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the expansion of the Moscone Center and creation of a new downtown core around a rebuilt Transbay Terminal could be affected.”

A lot of that is wildly exaggerated. The Chiu ordinance, which has since been pulled from the ballot pending a city study of the issue, would hardly have halted all development — or even all high-rises — in San Francisco. It wouldn’t have gutted the Transbay Terminal plan (although it might have forced planners to reduce the height of a tower that would soar 400 feet above the tallest building in San Francisco). In fact, the real story is how Chiu has managed — for now — to stop a backroom attempt by developers to undermine a 25-year-old environmental law. We found some fascinating evidence of how Mayor Gavin Newsom has been working with the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to undermine Chui’s efforts — using broad threats to try to get his way.

Chiu’s legislation sought to clear up a couple of loopholes in a landmark 1984 law, which passed on the ballot as Proposition K. The measure, authored by then-Sup. Bill Maher, essentially barred any new construction that would cast a significant shadow on a city park.

In 1989, the final implementation guidelines were approved, and they’ve stopped literally hundreds of proposed projects from casting dark shadows on public open space.

But in the past year, city planners have been meeting with lawyers for big developers and looking for a way to change the rules. Citing new technology that better measures the curve of the earth and complex algorithms that calculate sunlight, the Planning Department has since proposed revising the Prop. K guidelines — in a way that would allow taller buildings and more shadows without getting the approval of voters or supervisors.

Chiu told us he’s been trying for months to find out exactly what the proposed guidelines would do — how many new buildings, at what heights, would be able to shadow which parks. “I was unable to get any answers,” he said.

The measure he drafted would have barred any new guidelines that allowed more shadows — and would have required the Board of Supervisors to sign off any changes. It would still allow the city to make case-by-case exemptions for projects that cast minor shadows but are otherwise deserving of approval — affordable housing developments, for example.

But downtown went nuts — and Newsom joined the fray.

The crux of the opposition came from the Chamber — and is outlined in an e-mail from Chamber Vice President Rob Black to members of the Chamber board.

“The mayor was very direct and clear about the need to defeat the measure,” the e-mail, which we obtained, states. “The mayor was also very clear that he was in no mood for deal-making on the issue and that he would look very unfavorably on any developer or anyone else who tries to cut a deal with David Chiu on the issue. He literally said, you will be on your own for the next two years if you go there.”

Black confirmed that the e-mail was in fact his — but said the version we’d obtained “has been edited. Some words were changed and other omitted.” He refused to say what the changes were, saying that the e-mail was meant to be a confidential communication to his board. However, he confirmed that the basic message and descriptions of a meeting with Newsom were accurate.

Tony Winnicker, Newsom’s press secretary, confirmed that Newsom had been directly involved in trying to scuttle the ordinance — and didn’t deny the mayor had made those threats.

“The mayor made clear the importance of asking the supervisor to withdraw the measure,” Winnicker wrote in an e-mail to us. “The mayor was clear that backroom deal-making should not be tolerated on the issue.”

Chiu was somewhat aghast at the mayor’s statements. “The context for all this is that the developers and their lawyers were trying to change the rules,” he said.

Aaron Peskin, the former supervisor and longtime North Beach neighborhood activist, told us that the “hysteria around this is factually untrue. This isn’t about stopping development — it’s about making sure development doesn’t have an adverse impact on the city’s common space.”

So now Chiu has agreed to hold off — but only if the key stakeholders (not just developers) have some input into how planning devises new shadow rules. And he’s ready to go back to the ballot in November if the developers try to play games again.

That makes sense, Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, told us. “There should be a heavy burden of proof on the people who want new rules,” he said. “And there should be a heavy burden of proof for anyone who wants a ballot measure.”

In other words, Prop. K — as it is, as it’s stood all these years — is working pretty well. And if the developers hadn’t tried to sneak in some big changes, none of this would have happened in the first place.

The “jobs” shell game

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The “jobs” shell game

Written with Nima Maghame

news@sfbg.com

While many San Francisco city officials have been trying to figure out how to close a projected budget deficit of more than $520 million, Mayor Gavin Newsom has spent the last month trying to make that spending gap even larger by aggressively pushing a variety of business tax cuts that economists say will do little to improve the local economy and could actually make it worse.

Newsom first proposed his so-called “local economic stimulus package” a year ago during his ill-fated run for governor, just as President Barack Obama was pushing his own economic stimulus plan. But unlike the federal government’s $787 billion plan, about a third of which involved tax cuts demanded by conservatives, Newsom proposed to cut local business taxes while also deeply slashing local government spending and laying off hundreds of city workers.

Most economists say that’s a terrible idea. In fact, a report issued at the time by Moody’s Investor Services made it clear that every dollar of direct government spending adds about $1.60 into the economy (or $1.73 if it’s on food stamps, the most stimulative spending government can make), whereas business tax cuts add only about $1 to the economy for every dollar spent.

We clashed with the Mayor’s Office at the time on our Politics blog (see “Mayor Newsom doesn’t understand economics,” 2/13/09), with Newsom’s spokesperson telling us the mayor was relying on the input of City Economist Ted Egan. But when we interviewed Egan about the issue, he agreed that it’s a bad idea to slash government spending to pay for tax cuts.

“We were in no way saying you should cut taxes to stimulate the economy, particularly if it means reducing government spending,” Egan told us then. And when we asked directly whether it’s better for San Francisco’s economy for the city to directly spend a dollar on payroll or to give that dollar away in a private sector tax break, he told us, “The consensus among economists is that most of the time government spending stimulates the economy more.”

The Board of Supervisors basically ignored Newsom’s proposal. But he revived it last month, expanding the proposals with even more private sector subsidies and making them the centerpiece of his Jan. 13 State of the City speech, publicly pushing it since then with a series of public events at businesses located in the city.

And this time — with the local economy still slow, projected city budget deficits bigger than ever, and little serious talk about how the city can bring in more money — it appears the proposals will be the subject of a series of hearings before Board of Supervisors’ committees in the coming weeks.

Newsom’s tax cut proposals include a proposal to waive the 1.5 percent payroll tax (the city’s main business tax) for all new hires; extend and expand the payroll tax exemption for biotech companies (see “Biotech’s bonanza,” p. 12); give small businesses tax credits for their spending on health plans; and allow developers to pass one-third of their affordable housing in-lieu fees onto future homeowners.

Newsom and his Press Secretary Tony Winnicker have spoken euphorically about the proposals, saying they’re desperately needed to spur the local economy. “We believe that enacting these tax incentives, particularly the payroll tax credit for new hires, is one of the single biggest things we can do for economic growth,” Winnicker said.

Despite repeated questions about the economists’ concerns over financing tax cuts with government spending cuts, we couldn’t get them to address the tradeoff directly. “The mayor will support critical public services,” was all Winnicker would say about the deep cuts that Newsom is expected to announce in his June 1 budget.

Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee, expressed more skepticism about the mayor’s proposals. “Do tax breaks have the intended effect of stimulating the economy? As we underfund government services, are we getting a net gain or are we getting something taken away? For the very small businesses in my district, it’s going to be trickle-down economics. It’s very unrelated and unmeasurable in benefit,” he told us.

David Noyola, board aide to President David Chiu, said his boss is supporting the biotech tax credit but reserving judgment on the rest. “It’s going to be a cost-benefit analysis,” Noyola said. “When we’re talking about jobs, we’re talking about public and private sector jobs, always.”

While Egan’s economic analysis predicts tax cuts will encourage some economic growth, even he is circumspect about the good it will do, particularly without finding a way to avoid deep cuts in city spending. “The truth of the matter is that our stimulus efforts are small because the city has relatively small power to affect the local economy,” Egan told us.

That’s the consensus economic opinion. Huge federal spending can help a national economy a little bit, but local economies are just different animals that local governments are largely powerless to really alter, particularly through tax cuts.

“I agree with Egan: city government has little power over the local economy,” Mike Potepan, an urban development economist at San Francisco State University, told the Guardian.

Both economists agree that tying tax cuts to job creation or development stimulus is better than general tax cuts, but that neither is good if it means laying off more city workers.

“Research shows that by cutting taxes you have more business activity where studies show it is likely to effect employment,” Potepan said. “On the other side, you have to think about revenue. Cities are going to have to balance their budgets, which could mean a cut in services.”

Author Greg LeRoy expresses a more critical perspective in his book The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation (1995, Berrett-Koehler), amassing evidence from economic studies and CEO surveys that corporate tax breaks, even those tied to new job creation, have almost no effect on private companies’ decisions about where to locate and whether to hire.

“How can companies get away with this? Because the system is rigged. Corporations have it down to a science. They have learned how to chant ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ to win huge corporate tax breaks — and still do whatever they wanted all along,” LeRoy writes. “That’s the Great American Jobs Scam: an intentionally constructed system that enables corporations to exact huge taxpayer subsidies by promising quality jobs — and lets them fail to deliver. The other benefit often promised — higher tax revenues — often proves false as well.”

While proposing to forgo collecting millions of dollars in payroll taxes (the Controller’s Office is still working on a projected total for the tax cut package), the Mayor’s Office also wants to spur development of new housing with a proposal that would delay collection of needed affordable housing money by more than a decade.

After hearing mostly from a large crowd of desperate developers and construction workers during a Jan. 21 hearing on the proposal, the Planning Commission approved the package on a 4-3 vote, with the mayor’s appointees in agreement and the board’s appointees in dissent. It will be considered by the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee sometime after Feb. 12.

The most controversial part of the fee reform package involves reducing the fee developers pay to support affordable housing by 33 percent, then charging a 1 percent transfer tax to subsequent buyers of those homes. Egan estimates developers would save almost $20,000 per housing unit, and that it would take an average of 16 years for the city to recover that money. But for high-rise luxury condos, the city would eventually recover about $27,000 per unit.

“It’s a classic make-an-investment-now-to-get-more-later strategy,” Michael Yarne, who crafted the policy for the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development at Newsom’s direction, told the Guardian.

“If it makes it feasible for projects to be started, then it is worth passing,” Tim Colen, a representative of San Francisco Housing Action, said at the Planning Commission hearing, expressing hope that it will help create desperately needed construction jobs and new market rate housing.

But affordable housing advocates and some progressives criticize the policy as completely backward, saying that affordable housing development is desperately needed now, during these tough economic times, rather than a policy that encourages more market rate housing and bails out bad investments made at the height of the real estate bubble.

“What the city needs to do is directly build affordable housing, for which there is a demand,” affordable housing activist Calvin Welch told us. “The problem is that the banks don’t want to lend these guys money because they know nobody can afford to buy houses at the prices that these guys are demanding.”

Debra Walker, who is running for supervisor from District 6 and voted against the proposal when it came before the Building Inspection Commission (the sole vote on a commission dominated by mayoral appointees), agrees.

“The whole argument is that it stimulates development, but it doesn’t,” Walker said, arguing that the incremental gains (about 25 housing units per year, Egan estimates) will be offset by delayed affordable housing construction. “There would be more economic stimulus by using the fee to build more affordable housing.”

Instead, it simply shifts resources to favored entities: from home owners to developers, in the case of the affordable housing fees, or in the case of the tax credits, from the public to the private sector. But Newsom’s office just doesn’t see it that way.

“The Guardian believes in protecting public sector employees over private sector employees,” was how Winnicker formulated our understanding of what the economists are saying. “Most people don’t work for the city, and if we can support private sector jobs, that adds to sales tax revenues and benefits the economy. Despite a short-term impact of the tax credit, that’s a benefit.”

Adam Lesser contributed to this report

 

Biotech’s bonanza

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Biotech’s bonanza

By Adam Lesser

news@sfbg.com

It’s difficult to measure the value a biotechnology company receives from locating in San Francisco. Most measures are qualitative: scientists talk about synergy with other biotech companies in the area, the intellectual community that thrives at the University of California-San Francisco, and support offered at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3).

But the quantitative costs are easier to calculate, beginning with rents that often are two to three times higher than in the East Bay or South Bay. Add San Francisco’s 1.5 percent payroll tax, and companies can begin to attach a dollar figure to the premium of being in San Francisco.

To incentivize biotech companies to locate in San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom is asking the Board of Supervisors to extend the six-year-old Biotech Payroll Tax Exemption. The exemption allows any new biotech company to get a full 7.5 years without paying local business taxes as long as it files for the exemption by Dec. 31, 2014.

At a time when San Francisco city officials are struggling to close a budget deficit of more than $500 million — for which Newsom hasn’t offered any significant revenue proposals to help bridge the gap — some are questioning why the city should continue giving millions of dollars in tax breaks to the thriving biotech industry.

The core question of whether the payroll tax credit has worked in bringing more biotech companies to San Francisco is complex. While Newsom boasted of attracting 54 new biotech companies in the last five years during his Jan. 13 State of the City address, analysis of the credit by Ted Egan, the city’s chief economist, indicated that only eight companies had applied for the credit by the end of 2008.

The thriving research environment at UCSF-Mission Bay and the establishment of the state taxpayer-funded California Institute for Regenerative Medicine have played significant roles in creating a favorable environment for young biotech companies. The last five years also have seen broad growth in biotech as scientific discoveries have accelerated. Would biotech companies have come to San Francisco regardless of the payroll tax exemption?

The city’s Office of Economic Analysis looked at the question of how effective the payroll tax exclusion actually has been in spurring biotech growth. Because the size of the incentive — an exemption from paying a 1.5 percent tax on its total payroll — is relatively small, Egan felt that there could not be a conclusive link between the exemption and biotech growth. But he did feel there was some benefit, writing in his analysis that “in fact, the primary worth of the incentive may lie in its marketing value and how it signals to the industry that San Francisco is a credible location for biotechnology.”

Between 2004 and 2008, the biotech tax credit cost the city $1.2 million. If costs stay on pace with 2008, the existing Biotechnology Tax Exclusion will cost at least an additional $2 million. There are no cost estimates yet on extending the credit to give all biotech companies the full 7.5 years of payroll tax exclusion.

The extension faces opposition. Sup. John Avalos, chair of the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee, has expressed concern about the effectiveness of tax credits.

“I’m not sure the city is going to be able to show a direct connection between taxes and the growth of the biotech industry. The verdict is still out for me,” Avalos told the Guardian. “We’ve created the whole infrastructure for the industry around Mission Bay. That could have a lot to do with companies coming to San Francisco.” The city donated a portion of the land the UCSF-Mission Bay campus was built on.

Allopartis Biotechnologies is a small biotech startup in QB3 at UCSF-Mission Bay that has received venture capital funding. It saved $3,670 in 2009 by qualifying for the payroll exclusion. Allopartis has six employees and focuses on developing technologies to convert biomass into sustainable fuels.

“You pay a premium to be in the city, and it’s worth it,” said Robert Blazej, cofounder of Allopartis. “We’d like to stay close to this nexus of innovation and collaborators. But it’s going to be challenging with the cost of square footage.”

Interviews with other growing San Francisco businesses showed that their biggest concern was the cost and availability of commercial real estate. Zynga, a social gaming company in Potrero Hill, plans to add 800 jobs over the next two years. Newsom has asked for an additional waiver on payroll taxes for all new hires over the next two years, regardless of industry.

“We considered moving out of San Francisco for a couple reasons. One is the availability of commercial real estate. The other is the payroll tax,” said Chief Financial Officer Mark Vranesh. “The large blocks of space we would be looking for are hard to find.”

But as the city tries to plug gaps in dwindling city services, concerns are mounting about how much the city can give away to companies under the premise that tax credits create new jobs. In the debate about the biotech tax credit, objections have been raised about the fundamental fairness of giving a tax break to one industry while others still pay their share. Similar next generation industries with large up-front research and development costs such as solar energy or fiberoptic Internet do not receive payroll tax waivers.

Economists such as the Tax Foundation’s Patrick Fleenor are quick to point out that there are no political advantages to taxing everyone equally. “The problem is a political one. If you tax everyone the same, there aren’t politicians creating little fiefdoms. There aren’t ribbon-cutting ceremonies,” he said.

Avalos has equated judging the effectiveness of tax credits at creating jobs to looking into a crystal ball. But the price tag of each tax credit is borne in the present as the city contemplates laying off hundreds of city workers.

Adding to the political infighting have been public complaints by Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier that Newsom is trying to take credit for the biotech payroll exclusion, which she originally proposed and helped legislate in 2004. She requested an extension for the biotech tax credit in November. Her office has defended the bill. “We’re creating a hub so that other biotech companies can come to San Francisco,” said Bill Barnes, Alioto-Pier’s legislative aide. “When she was courting biotech, she was hearing that the payroll tax was an impediment.”

But other cities charge local business taxes comparable to San Francisco’s payroll tax. And if there was ever an industry that has been heaped with support from the public sector, it is biotech.

Proposition 71 passed with 59 percent voter support in 2004 and established the CIRM, which provides grants and loans for stem cell research. Stem cell research is an area within biotech that has seen significant political support, particularly since the time of the Bush administration, when federal funding for embryonic stem cell research was heavily restricted.

But appearing to be doing something about the economy remains politically important, even if the actual benefits are somewhat dubious.

“It’s a big political game that the mayor is playing. He wants to paint progressives as anti-jobs, which is ridiculous, and paint himself as the mayor for jobs,” Avalos told us. “We would be cannibalizing government services for the private sector.”

Newsom has been vague about whether he accepts that tradeoff or even understands its implications to city coffers and the local economy. Newsom Press Secretary Tony Winnicker recently told us, “He thinks it’s good policy to spur private sector job growth.”

Later, he added: “While not every company has taken advantage of it, we feel extending it sends the right message,”

Editorial: The attack on district elections

David Talbot
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0

Nobody can honestly say that the district supervisors have ignored citywide issues or that they don’t have a citywide perspective.

The Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor’s Office, and the San Francisco Chronicle have created, apparently out of whole cloth, a new attack on district elections of supervisors. And although there’s no campaign or formal proposal on the table, the new move needs to be taken seriously.

And it’s important to understand from the start what this is really about.

The Chamber and the Chron are talking about the need for more “citywide perspective,” trying to spin the notion that supervisors elected by district care only about micro-local, parochial issues. But after 10 years of district elections, the record is exactly the opposite. District-elected supervisors have devoted themselves to a long string of exceptional citywide reform measures and have been guilty of very little district pandering.

Consider a few examples:

• Healthy San Francisco, the local effort at universal health care that has drawn national attention and plaudits from President Obama, was a product of the district board, led by then-Sup. Tom Ammiano. So was the rainy day fund, which has provided millions to the public schools and prevented widespread teacher layoffs.

• The district board reformed the makeup of the Planning Commission, Police Commission, and Board of Appeals.

• District-elected Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s legislation restricting the use of plastic bags has been hailed by environmental groups all over the country.

• The district board passed the city’s minimum wage and sick day laws.

• The district board created a citywide infrastructure plan and bond program.

• Community choice aggregation, a direct challenge to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. that will bring San Francisco clean energy and lower electricity rates, is entirely a product of the district board. So is campaign finance reform, sanctuary city protecting for immigrants, a long list of tenant-protecting laws … the list goes on and on. What significant policy initiatives came out of the previous 10 years of at-large supervisors? Very little — except the promotion of hyper-expensive live-work lofts; the displacement of thousands of tenants, artists, and low-income people; and the economic cleansing of San Francisco, all on behalf of the dot-com boom, real estate speculators, and developers.

People can agree or disagree with what the board has done in the past decade, but nobody can honestly say that the district supervisors have ignored citywide issues or that they don’t have a citywide perspective.

No, this has nothing to do with citywide issues vs. district issues. It’s entirely about policy — about the fact that district supervisors are more progressive. About the fact that downtown can’t possibly get a majority under a district system — because with small districts, big money can’t carry the day.

Under an at-large system, nobody can seriously run for supervisor without at lest $250,000, and candidates who start off without high name recognition need twice that. There’s only one way to get that kind of money — and it’s not from protecting tenants and immigrants and fighting developers and PG&E.

In a district system, grassroots organizing — the stuff that labor and nonprofits and progressive groups are good at — is more important than raising money. So district supes are accountable to a different constituency.

Polls consistently show that people like having district supervisors — and for good reason. With at-large elections, the only people who have regular, direct access to the supervisors are big donors and lobbyists who can deliver money. District supervisors are out in the neighborhoods, take phone calls from community activists, and are far more accessible to their constituents.

So instead of trying to repeal the district system, the Chamber has come up with this “hybrid” effort. The idea would be to reduce the number of districts to seven and elect four supervisors citywide.

What that means, of course, is that a third of the board, elected on a pile of money, will be pretty much call-up votes for downtown. With two more from the more conservative districts, you’ve got a majority.

So this is about money and political control, and about the political direction the city is going, and about who’s going to set that direction. That’s the message progressive leaders need to start putting out, now. And every incumbent supervisor, and every candidate for supervisor, needs to make preservation of district elections a public priority

 

The attack on district elections

David Talbot
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3
The attack on district elections

EDITORIAL The Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor’s Office, and the San Francisco Chronicle have created, apparently out of whole cloth, a new attack on district elections of supervisors. And although there’s no campaign or formal proposal on the table, the new move needs to be taken seriously.

And it’s important to understand from the start what this is really about.

The Chamber and the Chron are talking about the need for more “citywide perspective,” trying to spin the notion that supervisors elected by district care only about micro-local, parochial issues. But after 10 years of district elections, the record is exactly the opposite. District-elected supervisors have devoted themselves to a long string of exceptional citywide reform measures and have been guilty of very little district pandering.

Consider a few examples:

• Healthy San Francisco, the local effort at universal health care that has drawn national attention and plaudits from President Obama, was a product of the district board, led by then-Sup. Tom Ammiano. So was the rainy day fund, which has provided millions to the public schools and prevented widespread teacher layoffs.

• The district board reformed the makeup of the Planning Commission, Police Commission, and Board of Appeals.

• District-elected Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s legislation restricting the use of plastic bags has been hailed by environmental groups all over the country.

• The district board passed the city’s minimum wage and sick day laws.

• The district board created a citywide infrastructure plan and bond program.

• Community choice aggregation, a direct challenge to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. that will bring San Francisco clean energy and lower electricity rates, is entirely a product of the district board. So is campaign finance reform, sanctuary city protecting for immigrants, a long list of tenant-protecting laws … the list goes on and on. What significant policy initiatives came out of the previous 10 years of at-large supervisors? Very little — except the promotion of hyper-expensive live-work lofts; the displacement of thousands of tenants, artists, and low-income people; and the economic cleansing of San Francisco, all on behalf of the dot-com boom, real estate speculators, and developers.

People can agree or disagree with what the board has done in the past decade, but nobody can honestly say that the district supervisors have ignored citywide issues or that they don’t have a citywide perspective.

No, this has nothing to do with citywide issues vs. district issues. It’s entirely about policy — about the fact that district supervisors are more progressive. About the fact that downtown can’t possibly get a majority under a district system — because with small districts, big money can’t carry the day.

Under an at-large system, nobody can seriously run for supervisor without at lest $250,000, and candidates who start off without high name recognition need twice that. There’s only one way to get that kind of money — and it’s not from protecting tenants and immigrants and fighting developers and PG&E.

In a district system, grassroots organizing — the stuff that labor and nonprofits and progressive groups are good at — is more important than raising money. So district supes are accountable to a different constituency.

Polls consistently show that people like having district supervisors — and for good reason. With at-large elections, the only people who have regular, direct access to the supervisors are big donors and lobbyists who can deliver money. District supervisors are out in the neighborhoods, take phone calls from community activists, and are far more accessible to their constituents.

So instead of trying to repeal the district system, the Chamber has come up with this “hybrid” effort. The idea would be to reduce the number of districts to seven and elect four supervisors citywide.

What that means, of course, is that a third of the board, elected on a pile of money, will be pretty much call-up votes for downtown. With two more from the more conservative districts, you’ve got a majority.

So this is about money and political control, and about the political direction the city is going, and about who’s going to set that direction. That’s the message progressive leaders need to start putting out, now. And every incumbent supervisor, and every candidate for supervisor, needs to make preservation of district elections a public priority.

Why Newsom drives me nuts

Zelda Bronstein
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2

This is the kind of thing that drive me nuts about the Newsom administration.


A few days ago, SF Appeal ran an item on a speech Newsom gave about condo conversions. The mayor wants to let more people turn rental units and tenancy-in-common units into condominiums; that, Newsom argues, will bring more revenue into the city treasury (those conversion permits are expensive).


But there’s a reason why the city limits to 200 the number of units that can be converted in any one year. Turning a rental unit into a condo reduces the number of rentals available, and turning a rent-controlled unit into a condo (or into a TIC and then a condo) cuts into the affordable housing stock.


And a majority of the supervisors, who recognize the impact the mayor’s plan would have on tenants (by making it easier to take rental units off the market), are dubious.


Okay, that’s a difference of opinion. You don’t have to make it personal. And yet, at his press conference, the mayor insisted that



“Half of the members of the board have been beneficiaries of condo conversions, and yet they deny it to other people.”


As the Appeal pointed out, that’s simply untrue.




A majority of Board members own their homes, according to a check of property records: mayoral allies Michela Alioto-Pier, Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu all enjoy the benefits of owning and equity, as do Sophie Maxwell and progressive Budget chairman John Avalos.



Eric Mar and David Chiu rent, according to a City Hall source. Chris Daly lives in a condo, but “my condo has always been a condo,” according to the supervisor (and according to the Assessor-Recorder’s Office, Daly at least bought his condo as a condo and not a tenancy-in-common or conversion).


By all accounts, progressive Ross Mirkarimi is on the condominium-conversion waitlist (an older news report says Ross owns a TIC and is on the conversion list; we’ll check in with him to confirm, he is at this moment still in committee). Mirkarimi and Bevan Dufty would be the two Board members conflicted-out of any votes on condo-conversions; Dufty went from a condo to a TIC after his daughter was born.


“And nobody was evicted,” the Bev told us today.


Okay, as I see it only one supervisor is even in a position to benefit from the condo conversion law. So I asked Tony Winnicker, the mayor’s press secretary, whether Newsom had been misquoted. Apparently not. So why did ne make an innacurate statement that insulted half the members of the board?


Winnicker:



His comments came in the context of the polarized politics of San Francisco which pit tenants vs homeowners to the benefit of no one. He was speaking that many Boardmembers enjoy the benefits of homeownership and that opposing the condo conversion proposal denies those benefits to others who are already living in TICs and displacing no one through condo conversion.


But there’s a big distinction between what Winnicker is talking about and what Newsom actually said. It’s entirely possible to be a homeowner in this city without evicting anyone and without taking a rental unit off the market. That’s what most of the homeowning board members have done.


As for TICs “displacing no one,” that’s wrong, too. The number one cause of no-fault evictions in this city is the use of the Ellis Act to clear the tenants out of a building to create a TIC. The only thing holding the TIC epidemic in check is the fact that the TIC ownership model is complex and a bit tricky. The minute you can convert those TICs into condos, you open the floodgates for a lot more of them — and that means a lot more evictions.


Newsom can make the case for condo conversions just fine without making factually inaccurate statements that insult the supervisors. Instead he pulls this shit. And then he complains about the supervisors not wanting to work with him


Drives me nuts.


 


 


 


 

Newsom’s perplexing attack on San Francisco’s economy

Sasha Cuttler
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4
Newsom’s perplexing attack on San Francisco’s economy

There’s a crazy disconnect in City Hall these days over how to help the local economy. Mayor Gavin Newsom has spent much of the last month focusing on “jobs” and “local economic stimulus,” proposing to give a few million dollars in tax breaks to local companies while refusing to discuss new tax measures to help close the city’s $522 million budget deficit.

As we explain in detail in tomorrow’s Guardian, economists just don’t think the tax cuts will help the economy much at all – particularly if the city is reducing its spending and payroll to do so — but even some progressive supervisors are playing along to appease the anxious business community. For example, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu supports an extension of the biotech tax, denying city coffers the benefit of efforts by the city and UCSF to become an important hub for the industry.

Then, in today’s Chronicle, Newsom floats the idea of unilaterally shortening the workweek for city employees in order to save $50 million in payroll costs, firing 10,000 workers and then rehiring most of them to do so. But let’s be clear about this: that means removing $50 million from San Francisco’s economy, or even more once you figure in the multiplier effect that would more than double that loss.

As much as Newsom and his Chamber of Commerce allies love to bash government, the city is one of San Francisco’s largest employers, a clean industry with good-paying jobs. And it just makes no sense why they prefer to inflict mass layoffs on that employer – not to mention the reduced city services that will hurt even private sector productivity — rather than increase taxes on large corporations that ship their profits out of the city and therefore offer minimal benefits to this city’s economy.   

 

Gavin for Lite Guv?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Gavin for Lite Guv?

Willie Brown thinks it’s a good idea. And you can tell Newsom wants to consider it, since he knows there’s nothing else obvious for him to do once his term as mayor is up — and there are going to be a lot of options not too far down the road. Sen. Dianne Feinstein isn’t getting any younger, and at some point she’ll retire. If Jerry Brown doesn’t get elected governor, the Democrats will be looking for someone very different in four years. But once a politician like Newsom is out of office and out of the spotlight, he’ll have a hard time coming back.

So he could sit up there in the Lite Gov’s office, doing what John Garamendi did — taking on issues like cuts to the University of California (the Lt. Gov. sits on the Board of Regents) and making speeches about reform, and maybe he could get out in front of this constitutional convention stuff, and keep his name in the news, without having to make a single difficult or unpleasant decision that he can be blamed for later.

You know he wants to do it ….

But there’s this problem, and for Newsom, it’s very real.

As people close to the mayor have told me repeatedly, the money people who helped put the mayor in office — and who would have to be around to help him run for any other office — are not at all pleased with the prospect of Newsom leaving San Francisco a year early. See, that would give the district-elected supervisors the chance to fill the mayor’s job for the last year of Newsom’s term, and the person they appointed would be able to run as an incumbent.

And while it’s not clear who could get six votes (David Chiu? David Campos? Ross Mirkarimi? Aaron Peskin?) it’s pretty clear that the new mayor would not be an ally of Newsom’s pals.

Sure, when he was running for governor, it seemed fine — having their guy in charge of the state was worth the loss of the San Francisco mayor’s office. But for a relatively powerless job? I think they’d crucify him.

Dick Meister: Combating workplace violence

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Organized labor and its allies are rightly alarmed over the high incidence of on-the-job accidents that have killed or maimed many thousands of workers. But they haven’t forgotten – nor should we forget – the on-the-job violence that also afflicts many thousands.

Consider this: Every year, almost two million American men and women are the victims of violent crime at their workplaces. That often forces the victims to stay off work for a week or more and costs their employers more than $60 billion a year in lost productivity.

The crimes are the tenth leading cause of all workplace injuries. They range from murder to verbal or written abuse and threatening behavior and harassment, including bullying by employers and supervisors.

Women have been particularly victimized. At least 30,000 a year are raped or otherwise sexually assaulted while on the job. The actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since it’s estimated that only about one-fourth of such crimes are reported to the police.

Estimates are that more than 900,000 of all on-the-job crimes go unreported yearly, including a large percentage of what’s thought to be some 13,000 cases annually that involve boyfriends or husbands attacking women at their workplaces.

The Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union (RWDSU), which represents many of the victimized workers, cites that as an example of the job violence problem that is often distorted by media coverage that “would lead us to believe that most workplace violence involves worker against worker situations.”

The union says that has focused many employers “on identifying troubled employees or disgruntled workers who might turn into violent predators at a moment’s notice. But in fact, 62 percent of all violence at worksites is caused by outsiders.”

As you might expect, those most vulnerable to the violence are workers who exchange money with the public, deliver passengers, goods or services, work alone or in small groups during late night or early morning hours in high-crime areas or wherever they have extensive contact with the public.

That includes police, security guards, water meter readers and other utility workers, telephone and cable TV installers, letter carriers, taxi drivers, flight attendants, probation officers and teachers. Convenience store clerks and other retail workers account for fully one-fifth of the victims.

The American Federation of Teachers is so concerned that it has provided each of its 1.4 million members a $100,000 life insurance policy payable if the teacher dies as the result of workplace violence.

The major violence victims also include health care and social service workers such as visiting nurses, and employees of nursing homes, psychiatric facilities and prisons. They suffer two-thirds of all physical assaults. Many of the victims regularly deal with volatile, abusive and dangerous clients, often alone because of the understaffing that’s become all too common.

It could get even worse, at least for some workers. The RWDSU warns that today’s troubled economic times create additional threats. The danger is especially great for retail workers whose stores are likely to face increased incidents of theft, some involving gun-wielding robbers.

The RWDSU and other unions have been pushing for recognition of workplace violence as an occupational as well as criminal justice issue. That would put it under the purview of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and state job safety agencies.

The federal and state agencies could then issue enforceable regulations designed to lessen the on-the-job dangers of violence, as they do for other hazardous working conditions. A few states do that already, but only for a very limited number of industries.

OSHA has issued guidelines for workers in late-night retail jobs, cab drivers and some healthcare workers, but the guidelines are strictly voluntary. Although the unions’ top priority is for legally binding regulations, they also are pressing employers to meanwhile voluntarily implement violence prevention programs.

Currently, only about one-fourth of them have such programs or any guidelines at all. The RWDSU ‘s Health and Safety Department is offering to help the other employers develop programs.

We have federal and state standards, laws and regulations designed to protect working Americans from many of the serious on-the-job hazards they face daily. Yet we have generally failed to lay down firm guidelines for protecting workers from the workplace violence that’s one of the most dangerous hazards of all.

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

The attack on district elections begins

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The attack on district elections begins

I knew it was coming. After ten years of district-elected supervisors promoting progressive policies (minimum wage and sick day laws, universal health care, tenant protections, public power, development limits, affordable housing etc.) downtown has finally figured out how to launch a counter-attack. It was announced this morning in the pages of the Chronicle

I knew it was coming. After ten years of district-elected supervisors promoting progressive policies (minimum wage and sick day laws, universal health care, tenant protections, public power, development limits, affordable housing etc.) downtown has finally figured out how to launch a counter-attack. It was announced this morning in the pages of the Chronicle

The idea is to replace some of the district supes with at-large representatives – say, four of the 11. That Chamber of Commerce is doing a poll on the issue. Expect a November ballot initiative.

C.W. Nevius chimed in, too, arguing in favor of the “hybrid” (sounds so much like an eco-friendly car) system.

The line is going to be this: District supervisors don’t pay attention to citywide issues.

“People like the idea of being able to talk to a district supervisor about neighborhood problems, but also feel that they want someone they can go to with broader, citywide concerns,” said Steve Falk, president and CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.

Or as Nevius puts it:

The truth is that San Francisco has more supervisors than any county in California. Is it too much to ask that a few of them have the entire city’s best interest in mind?

Let’s consider for a moment what this is really about.

For starters, get rid of the nonsense about a “citywide perspective.” Even Nevius didn’t try to push that too hard when I emailed him with the facts, to wit: Over the past ten years, district-elected supervisors have devoted themselves to a long string of exceptional citywide reform measures and have been guilty of very little district pandering.

Consider a few examples:

Healthy San Francisco
The Rainy-Day Fund
Reforming the makeup of the Planning Commission, Police Commission and Board of Appeals
Restricting the use of plastic bags
Minimum wage and sick day laws
A citywide infrastructure plan and bond program
Community choice aggregation and green energy
Campaign finance reform
Sanctuary city protecting for immigrants

The list goes on and on.

You may agree or disagree with what this board has done, but nobody can honestly say that the district supervisors have ignored citywide issues or that they don’t have a citywide persoective. No: This has nothing to do with citywide issues vs. district issues. It’s entirely about policy – about the fact that district supervisors are more progressive. About the fact that downtown can’t possibly get a majority under a district system – because with those small districts that Nevius complains about, big money can’t carry the day.

In a district system, grassroots organizing – the stuff that labor and nonprofits and progressive groups are good at – is more important than raising money. So district supes are accountable to a different constituency.

I watched an at-large board for almost 20 years, and it was, by and large, a collection of sold-out hacks who did exactly what the mayor and the downtown donors said. It was really pathetic.

The polls have consistently shown that people like have district supes, so now there’s this “hybrid” effort.

Here’s what it means:

Right now, there are three districts that will generally elect a more conservative representative – D 2 (Michela Alioto-Pier) D- 4 (Carmen Chu) and D-7 (Sean Elsbernd). Districts 8, 10, 11 and 1 are swing districts, and the rest are going to go generally progressive.

So the odds are under this system that the left-leaning constituencies will have at least six votes, and in good times, as many as eight.

Now take four of those votes away, pretty much forever. Set it up so that four supervisors, elected citywide, will be guaranteed downtown call-up votes. Then add in one or two more from the more conservative districts, and you’ve got a majority.

That, my friends, is exactly what this is about, and any effort to frame it as anything else is just spin.

I asked Nevius what the hell he was doing buying the bogus argument that we need citywide perspective – since the district board has already demonstrated that, consistently. Here’s his response:

First, I’d envision the city-wide supes as made to order swing votes. When a district supervisor had a good idea, let’s say Healthy San Francisco, it might not be an issue of critical interest for a district supervisor. But it would be right in the wheelhouse for a city-wide official, who is looking for broad stroke issues to back. And, although you didn’t advance the idea, I’d reject the notion that whomever it was that was elected city-wide would be incredibly conservative and obstructionist. The most moderate politician we’ve elected in this city is Gavin Newsom. Although the Guardian doesn’t agree with him much of the time, he’s still advanced some very progressive ideas. Everyone jumps on the Chris Daly example as why district elections are a problem, but I think we can look beyond that. I think he’s been an aberration. District supes like David Campos and David Chiu have proved they can compromise and govern so I think that’s a good thing. I would never advocate that we get rid of representation in the neighborhoods. But c’mon, 11 little districts in a very small city? As Jim Stearns said, some of the districts are no more than a mile square. Combining some of them would still let residents have someone they could call to get the potholes fixed, but also spread out the areas.

Okay, I didn’t say citywide supes would be conservative. Sean Elsbernd is (relatively) conservative. He’s also independent of any big-money interest and does what he thinks is right. He doesn’t need half a million dollars to get elected in his district.

What I say is that citywide supes would be in hock to big money. I’ve seen it, lived with it. Suffered from it.

And guess what: Healthy San Francisco didn’t need any citywide supes; it passed just fine with the district board.

So what this is about is money and political control, and it’s about the political direction the city is going and who’s going to set that direction. Let’s get that straight and be honest about, and then we can have this discussion.

Recalling Sophie Maxwell

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Written with Adrian Castañeda

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Does it make sense to try and recall termed-out D. 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell?


A group of District 10 residents has turned in 8,008 signatures in an effort to recall Sup. Sophie Maxwell. Election department staff says that 7,529 signatures must be verified for the recall attempt to go forward.

‘We think it’s going to be a little tight,” said an election department worker, who preferred to remain anonymous.

Department of Elections staff have 30 days to count and verify the submitted signatures, but they predict the process could be completed as early as Thursday afternoon (Feb. 4) or Friday morning (Feb. 5).

Meanwhile, Maxwell is termed-out in January 2011–a mere 11 months away. And 15 candidates have already filed to enter the D. 10 race this fall, with a dozen others variously threatening to throw their hats in the ring.

But if the recall effort gets the green light and is placed on the June 8 ballot, and if Maxwell actually gets recalled as a result of that vote, Mayor Gavin Newsom would then get to appoint his choice of successor to her seat. And if that successor happens to be one of the candidates vying for Maxwell’s seat, wouldn’t that person have an enviable edge come the November election?

Bayview activist Daniel Landry insists the recall effort would be effective. 
“We’re sending a message to anyone who wants to be a supervisor of D-10, you must recognize the will of the voters,” Landry said.

D 10 candidate Ed Donaldson warns that any supervisor that does not understand the complexity of the city’s largest district can expect a similar backlash. He says the recall effort is evidence of District 10’s diversity.
“There is no one homogenous voice in the community,” Donaldson said.
He says that the current grass-roots organizing that brought about the recall effort is a result of changing political structure in the area, but is not yet on par with the other districts in town.
“We still allow our politics to be controlled from downtown,” Donaldson observed.

D 10 candidate Espanola Jackson warns that if Newsom appoints someone, that person had better listen to the wishes of the community, or else they will face a similar fate to Maxwell.

“What the mayor needs to understand is that if we can get the signatures in two weeks to recall Sophie, we can get them on whoever he appoints as well,” Jackson said.

But D 10 candidate Eric Smith worries that the recall effort will backfire. He cites a recent community meeting in the Bayview on the Department of Park and Recreation’s budget, as an example of why folks are turning to this seemingly desperate strategy.

“People were emotional, angry and desperate, because they feel no one listens to them,” Smith said. “That’s part of the problem here; they would rather have a supervisor go down swinging for them, rather than watch one seemingly side with Lennar, PG&E and the Mayor on issues contrary to their interests. At the DCCC [Democratic County Central Committee] last week, everyone except Chris Daly voted against the recall in support of Sophie.”

Smith added that Daly’s vote, “likely had more to do with his belief that this was a waste of time and had no chance of actually succeeding, but you’ll have to ask him.”

Daly, for his part, says he doesn’t believe the recall effort will qualify.

“Jake McGoldrick introduced an item in committee when he was a supervisor that the Board then passed that doubles the numbers of signatures required for a recall to qualify,” Daly said, noting that under the old recall rules the current effort would likely have succeeded in getting onto the ballot.

“And I don’t think the DCCC’s resolution against the recall effort was accurate,” Daly added. “It was long on the fact that Sophie isn’t guilty of malfeasance, but the truth is that a recall is a tool of democracy that is available and can be applied in cases where a representative is not being responsible to the needs of their district. So, while I’m not supportive of recalling Sophie, it would be patronizing for me to say that thousands of D. 10 residents don’t know what they are doing. The Democratic Party (with a capital D) is working against democracy (with a small d) in a patronizing way in a district that has a disproportionately high number of low-income folks and people of color. There is a significant level of disgruntlement, if that is a word, in District 10, and its residents have lodged a pretty real and significant complaint.”

Aaron Peskin, who chairs the DCCC’s executive board and is the former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, also predicts that the effort to recall Maxwell is probably headed nowhere.

“There’s no way they got the numbers,” Peskin said. “You’re lucky if 50 percent of that shit runs.”

Peskin proffers three reasons why recalling Maxwell is against the community’s own interests.
“First, recalls are an instrument to be used when a representative has committed malfeasance, and not because you disagree with the political positions of a person who has been duly elected three times,” Peskin said. “Second, this elected official is in her last eleven months in office. So, it’s a huge waste of time and money. And third, for those not satisfied with their current supervisor, any representative that the mayor might nominate would be far, far worse.”

Smith also worries that the recall effort is akin to the community shooting itself in the foot.

“If Sophie gets recalled, (and that is a very big if), the Mayor will insert someone and we may be right back where we started from, or worse. That’s the terrible irony and one of the biggest problems in District 10. Folks are so mad, they’re willing to do whatever it takes to make them feel they have a voice in the outcome, even if it’s potentially worse. The same thing happened with the Navy and the Restoration Advisory Board. Some of the same folks who were frustrated by the process, tried to send a signal to the Navy that they weren’t being heard and for all their well- intentioned efforts, got the RAB dissolved. I truly feel for them, it’s absolutely heartbreaking, but at times, they can be their own worst enemy.”

To Smith’s mind, a recall has the potential for exacerbating the very problems the effort is purported to be about.

“This isn’t about malfeasance, or not showing up for work,” Smith observed. “It’s about being heard, respected and listened to. I don’t think any other Supervisor has ever had the challenges that Sophie has had to face here; the Bayview, the Hunters Point Shipyard’s toxic super-fund site, the homicide rate, unemployment, poor public transportation, dwindling services and community resources have made D10 one of the City’s largest melting pots of discontent. It’s just one of the reasons I’m running. The health, welfare, quality of life issues and the environment are the things I put above everything else out here, particularly above special interests and big money.”

“We will soon know how valid those signatures are; I can tell you that the many of the folks behind it feel very confident about it,” Smith continued. “But Sophie still has a lot friends in D10 who will not vote her out, so even if this makes the ballot, there is no guarantee it will carry. There are many, many folks who still love and support Sophie, so the folks who signed the recall petition will have to overcome the balance of the 37,000 D.10 voters who may not want to see her go and have a vested interest in seeing a fair electoral process in November, untainted by a Mayoral appointee, an appointee that would have implied advantage over any of the candidates in November.”

Smith has asked many folks why they are launching a recall when Maxwell only has 10 months left on the job.

“For them, it’s about making a statement; they want everyone to know that ‘They’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore,’” Smith said. “They also want to send a signal to the D10 candidates that this is what you will face if you don’t listen to them. D10 is not for the squeamish, those easily intimidated or the faint of heart.”

On a side note, Smith observed that “we will need the world to come out to defeat Proposition 16″, the PG&E ballot measure in June. “And, depending on the turn out, many of the folks needed to come out for that, may also play a role as it relates to Sophie’s recall.”

Asked what she thought of the effort to recall her, Maxwell characterized it as “strange” and “destabilizing.”

‘It seems to me that this effort is destabilizing the community,” Maxwell said. “When you undercut the leadership, you destabilize a community in transition. At a time when these folks could have something to say about the future, they are looking at the past. It’s about backward thinking. It’s about not having the best interests of the community. It’s about egos. Because if this is for the community, then why not bring something to the table that’s about bringing some direction to the district?”

One of the last straws, in the minds of some recall signature gatherers, was Maxwell’s 2009 vote against a resolution that would have advised the Navy to restore its community-based Restoration Advisory Board. This board, which was established in 1994, had consistent access to the many technical and environmental documents surrounding the proposed clean-up of the heavily polluted Hunters Point Shipyard.

The RAB, whose primary fucntion was to share information on investigations and clean-ups at the shipyard, was also able to vote on the Navy’s proposed solutions and to request more information and/or speakers and experts so its members could educate themselves on related public health and safety issues. But early last year, the Navy announced that it was dissolving the RAB, citing dysfunctional behavior and off-topic discussions that were getting in the way of the RAB’s intended purpose.

The move to dissolve the RAB came just as the Navy was poised to take a series of important decisions on some of the most polluted and radiologically-impacted parcels on the shipyard. And many in the community saw the timing of the RAB’s dissolution as evidence that the Navy was going to ignore their wish to have these parcels dug out and hauled away, and not capped (a wish shared by the 87 percent of voters who supported Prop. P in 2000.)

But despite the outcry that followed the RAB’s 2009 dissolution, Maxwell voted to tell the Navy to either restore the RAB or find other ways to involve the community–thereby giving the Navy the choice, some felt, to ignore the community’s desire to reinstate the RAB.

And last night, the Navy, along with a flotilla of police and special agents, showed up at the Bayview YMCA to share its plan to reformulate the Navy’s original Community Involvement Plan—a plan that angered many meeting goers ( the majority of which were former RAB members,) since it didn’t appear to aim at reinstating the RAB. But to give the Navy credit, once it became clear that meeting attendees were underwhelmed by its plan, Navy officials scrapped their original agenda and allowed the community to speak instead about their wounds from the past and their hopes for the future. It remains to be seen where the Navy will go next, but those interested in tracking these developments can visit the Navy’s website for updates.

Maxwell for her part defended her vote–and pointed the finger at the Navy.

“The Navy has an obligation to get out its plans to the public,” Maxwell said. “People are getting information in many ways, these days, not just by coming to meetings. The Navy has just got another $92 million towards the shipyard clean up, but does anyone know what this means? It means that instead of taking years to clean up groundwater at the shipyard, we can spend that money on it, now. And if folks knew what capping really means, maybe they wouldn’t be against it. Mission Bay is capped. Schlage Lock will be. And all of them are brown fields.”

Maxwell worries that democracy is not currently being well served within her district, but not by her.
“There are folks who are trying to block real information from getting out, and if only your view can get out, that’s not democracy,” Maxwell said.

But so far, she’s not willing to publicly support anyone in the November D. 10 race.
“I’m waiting for people to have a better understanding of what this community is, what the common thread running through it is, and how to use rank choice voting,” she said.

And despite the current recall effort—and the insults regularly hurled her way with a voracity and meanness not generally seen in other supervisorial districts, Maxwell said she has truly enjoyed serving as D. 10 supervisor.

“When people say that it’s an honor to serve as an elected official, I really know what they mean, because I really feel that. Democracy is challenging, it’s messy and it’s invigorating. I think a lot of what’s going on in my district is about people using people. But what has changed for these folks? Their lives have gotten worse, not better. And they are going after me, because I am not part of their group. I have tried to stay focused on the issues.”

 

On pension reform, a way forward

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On pension reform, a way forward

EDITORIAL Sup. Sean Elsbernd is taking on one of the most complicated and politically tricky issues in San Francisco — reforming the pension fund and health care system for retired city employees. He’s right that the system needs reform — but his measure has some serious drawbacks and needs some significant amendments.

The problems facing the system are so confusing, and the legal and financial aspects so arcane, that it’s hard for anyone to grasp the full situation. But we can sum it up pretty simply:

San Francisco’s pension fund is in far better shape than pension funds in many cities and is a long way from any financial crisis. But over the next few years, thanks to weak stock market performance, the city’s cash obligation — the amount of general fund money that must be paid into the retirement system — is going to rise quickly into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The retiree health care system is in a lot more trouble — with the rising cost of care, the city will be on the hook for a serious amount of money over the next decade or two. And since the obvious answer — a single-payer system that would cut costs immensely — isn’t anywhere on the immediate political horizon, the San Francisco supervisors need to address the problem.

Elsbernd’s proposed fix is also complicated; the main legislation runs 61 pages. But in essence, he wants to make sure all city employees pay directly into the system; raise the amounts new employees, cops, and firefighters contribute; and set up a rainy-day fund to divert excess pension revenue in good years into a trust that could fund health care pension obligations in down years. He’s also going after a scam common in the police and fire departments where people about to retire get sudden promotions and big salary bumps for a few months, then collect pensions based on the higher pay scale.

The first part is — and should be — almost certainly dead. Members of the Service Employees International Union local 1021 agreed several years ago as part of contract negotiations to give up a pay hike; in exchange, the city agreed to take over the workers’ obligation to pay into the pension fund. Changing that, and outlawing any similar deals in the future, is unacceptable to labor and could drag down the whole proposal.

It’s also tricky to raise pension contributions for “new employees” since Mayor Gavin Newsom has been firing people then rehiring them at lower pay rates. Do those people lose their pension seniority? That has to be fixed.

But given the sweet deal cops and firefighters have, it’s entirely appropriate to ask them to contribute more to retirement. And while some city employees actually get and deserve raises in their final year of work (and the language in Elsbernd’s bill doesn’t address this and needs work), pension spiking is a problem that tends to give extra cash to people who are on the higher end of the pay scale at the expense of lower-paid workers.

And the heart of his proposal — to set up a trust fund for excess money in good years — deserves serious consideration. Yes, it’s a set-aside, and yes, there are legal complications. But the cost of doing nothing is too high to ignore.

Elsbernd should have done this differently — he should have met in advance with all the stakeholders and sought to hammer out a compromise. Even so, there’s a lot for progressives to work with here. If Elsbernd is willing to engage with labor and the board majority, and the progressive supervisors are willing to acknowledge the problem and look for amendments that make this bill acceptable, there’s a way for the city to come out ahead.

Sup. David Campos has moved to “split the file” — that is, to turn the Elsbernd bill into two identical measures. The move gives the progressives a chance to make amendments even if Elsbernd doesn’t want to go along, and could wind up giving the supervisors a choice between two competing measures. We’d prefer that Elsbernd work with his colleagues on a measure everyone can back. But in the end, the best option is a charter amendment that fixes the problems Elsbernd has identified — without being unfair to city employees.

And if Elsbernd and the progressives can come to a deal, there’s a lesson here for the mayor: if you try to work with your opponents, you can actually get things done.

Progressives should care about pension reform

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Progressives should care about pension reform

OPINION In today’s failing economy, with double-digit unemployment and huge government deficits, progressives have a strong interest in ensuring that San Francisco’s pension system remains viable.

After years of working and contributing a percentage of their income to a pension fund, city employees receive a guaranteed annual pension based on an employee’s years of service and his or her pay level at retirement. In the private sector, most employees participate in a 401(k)-type of retirement plan, in which the pension is based on the amount contributed to the fund.

Under the city charter, the city is only required to pay into the pension fund when its liabilities exceed its income. When the fund loses money, as it has in recent years, the city is required to make up the difference.

In 2005, investments losses brought the fund below the break-even mark, requiring the city to pay $175 million in retiree pension and health premiums. Today, that number has grown to $525 million — an increase of 200 percent. Two years from now, in 2013, the amount will grow to $675 million, eclipsing what it costs to run San Francisco General Hospital for one year.

While headlines reporting pensioners who receive $100,000 or more raise the public’s ire, most retired city workers receive modest pensions. Still, there are abuses to the pension system that must be eliminated. A recent civil grand jury report found that some police and firefighters engage in pension “spiking” by promoting employees in their last year of service to increase the amount of their pensions. That practice has cost the city $132 million.

The question of how to address the city’s growing pension liability is now before the Board of Supervisors. A proposed charter amendment would change the contribution levels for police and fire employees hired after July 2010 from 7.5 percent to 9 percent and base pensions on the last three years of the employee’s salary to reduce pension spiking.

Some argue that the measure unfairly targets labor and city workers by eliminating pension formulas that have been used for decades. But with the city’s $522 million budget deficit, if San Francisco’s pension problem isn’t fixed, escalating pension costs will ultimately force city officials to confront this choice: make huge service cuts and layoffs or be unable to meet the city’s retirement obligations to its retired workers. That’s why we have to act now.

Other pension funds have faced this reality. One San Francisco union leader whose fund is paid by its workers told me that his union voted to reduce future pension benefits while increasing the amount of employees’ contributions. “It was a bitter pill, but we knew we had to do it,” he said.

The proposed charter amendment doesn’t go this far and only has a minimal impact on the city’s present pension liabilities since it only changes contribution levels for future employees. However, if the amendment reaches the June ballot, these modest reforms should not become a wedge issue.

Having a sustainable pension fund that protects the futures of workers without bankrupting the city is a progressive value. Progressives should also support ending pension abuses that only benefit a small number of workers at the expense of taxpayers and other workers who contribute to the fund. Pension reform is one step, among others, that must be taken to restore San Francisco’s fiscal stability.

Jeff Adachi is San Francisco’s public defender.

Editor’s Notes

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Editor’s Notes

The mayor of San Francisco is mad that the Board of Supervisors won’t even schedule a hearing on his proposals to stimulate business and job creation in San Francisco. He ought to be happy. If this loopy plan ever gets to the point of open, full discussion, Gavin Newsom will wind up with a real political embarrassment.

Let’s analyze, for example, the suggestion that the city waive payroll taxes for biotech companies. That’s supposed to make those companies more likely to hire new people. After all, any economist knows that taxing something discourages people from doing it, so taxing a payroll ought to make companies less likely to hire. And getting rid of that tax ought to create jobs.

Well, since one of the things I do is help run a small business in San Francisco, let me explain how it actually works.

Say you’re a biotech company that wants to hire a new entry-level worker at a modest $35,000 a year. Can you afford it? Let’s cost it out.

There’s the salary, of course. Then there’s the 7.5 percent you’re paying in federal Social Security tax. That’s $2,626 more. And since you’re in San Francisco, you’re paying for health insurance; that’s probably between $2,000 and $4,000 a year, depending on the plan, but let’s peg it at the city’s minimum mandate, which is $1.09 an hour, or $2,267.

So now your $35,000 worker costs $39,893. Then there’s unemployment and disability insurance and workers’ compensation. The person’s going to need a desk and a chair, or a lab bench and a stool (and they have to be ergonomically correct), and probably a computer, a phone line, and software. And you’re going to have to spend some money on training. You’re going to offer a couple weeks of paid vacation, right? And you have to give sick days. So you have to account for the money you’re spending to cover your new worker when he or she isn’t working. If it all pencils out at less than $42,000, you’re doing well.

Oh, wait, I forgot — there’s the damn city payroll tax. That job-killing factor that could make the difference between hiring and not hiring. Better account for that; it could be a deal breaker.

Are you holding your breath? Ready for the ax to fall? Here you go: the payroll tax on your new hire is a whopping $525 a year. About $10 a week. You probably spent more on the help wanted ads.

So let’s be honest — the payroll tax may sound awful (and actually, I think a gross receipts tax would be more fair, for a lot of reasons). But suspending it won’t create a single new job. It’s too small a factor to count as more than decimal dust in anyone’s hiring decisions.

Here’s what suspending the payroll tax for biotech companies will do: reduce city revenue, almost certainly by enough to force more program cuts, and that means more job cuts for city workers. So you gain no private sector jobs — zero — and you lose public sector jobs. How, exactly, is that encouraging employment growth?

Quit complaining, Mr. Mayor — the last thing your proposals need is real public scrutiny.

Sitting boundaries

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Sitting boundaries

Aggressive lobbying efforts by the San Francisco Police Department and some of its allies who are pushing a proposed sit/lie ordinance have irked some current and former members of the Board of Supervisors.

The legislation was privately created by new Police Chief George Gascón and then played up in the mainstream media. It would make it illegal to sit or lie down on public sidewalks. Supporters say it would make it easier for cops to target people who harass neighborhood residents.

But in other cities where similar laws have been passed, protests have erupted from homeless-advocacy organizations and civil liberties groups, which say criminalizing this behavior unfairly (and unconstitutionally) targets homeless people who have nowhere else to go.

In Portland, Ore., a similar law was enacted then overturned by the courts. In Los Angeles, an ordinance against sleeping on the sidewalk was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union, resulting in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2006 that unless adequate shelter is available for homeless people in L.A., arresting them for sleeping on the sidewalk amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

But an e-mail action alert included in SFPD Central Station Capt. Anna Brown’s monthly community newsletter encouraged people to contact the mayor and the Board of Supervisors to support the creation of a sit/lie ordinance. “Naturally, there is resistance from the left-leaning Board of Supervisors who feel this is an attack on the homeless population,” it noted.

That unusually overt political plea caught the eye of Aaron Peskin, former president of the Board of Supervisors and current chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, who called it “funky.” Peskin told us he’d never seen an advocacy pitch like this go out in a captain’s newsletter before, and he questioned whether this was an appropriate use of city resources.

But the City Attorney’s Office says this doesn’t fall under city laws banning electioneering by city employees, who are barred from using government resources to endorse a candidate or ballot initiative, or from doing any campaign-related work on city property.

Yet this kind of pitch “is not considered political activity,” Jack Song, a spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, told the Guardian.

But Sup. David Campos, a former police commissioner, frowned upon it nonetheless. “Something like this is not really helpful to the Board of Supervisors and the Police Department working together,” Campos said.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi took a similar view. At a recent Board of Supervisors meeting, he requested a hearing about the ordinance because he said the media-driven public debate had occurred without formal discussion. Anti-loitering and public nuisance laws are already on the books, Mirkarimi pointed out.

“What makes those laws inadequate?” he asked. “How would the proposed law augment what is already in effect?”

The alert wasn’t actually written by Capt. Brown, who included it in her newsletter. It was drafted by the Community Leadership Alliance, an organization headed by David Villa-Lobos, a longtime resident of the Tenderloin and a candidate for the District 6 Supervisor seat.

Since Gascón floated the idea of creating a sit/lie ordinance, CLA has kicked into high gear to mobilize support, most recently issuing its action alert e-mail to 8,000 recipients. Police captains were included in the e-mail blast, Villa-Lobos told us, but each captain decides independently what to include in his or her newsletter.

People sitting and lying on sidewalks is “a really, really big problem, especially in the crime-ridden areas,” Villa-Lobos said. “God bless the homeless, but it’s a big problem there too.” Several years ago, his organization tried to mount a campaign for a sit/lie ordinance, but it didn’t go anywhere. “People came out and said we were trying to violate civil rights,” he said.

The Community Leadership Alliance is active in the Tenderloin, SoMa, and the mid-Market Street area, and the group occasionally holds monthly meetings at the Infusion Lounge, an upscale nightclub owned by Scott Caroen, the chair of the organization.

Gascón worked with deputy city attorneys to draft the ordinance and all district police stations have submitted to their commanders a list of areas that they feel could benefit from the law, according to a Tenderloin district newsletter. Mirkarimi told the Guardian that some supervisors were kept in the dark for weeks about the fact that an ordinance had been drafted. “This wasn’t collaborative at all,” Mirkarimi told us. “We never received it until we demanded to see it.”

The Haight-Ashbury, where residents and visitors have been complaining about harassment from wayward traveling youth, has been ground zero for discussion about a sit/lie ordinance. A small group of irate residents there and the Park Station Capt. Teresa Barrett have rallied in support of the law, saying it would give police a new tool to target these disruptive street kids.

But it’s clear that the ordinance’s supporters want to see it applied broadly and to be used to roust the homeless in neighborhoods throughout the city.

“CLA feels that our sidewalks should be enjoyable and a place of social gathering, and that the ordinance could go a long way in helping our neighborhoods feel safer,” reads the Community Leadership Alliance alert that was included in the police captain’s newsletter. “It may also reduce the overall homeless population in San Francisco by discouraging people from coming to the city to beg for money.”

Meister: Obama’s promise to women

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It’s time to enact the Paycheck Fairness Act that would allow women to negotiate with employers for equal pay with men

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century.)

One of the most important promises made by President Obama in his State of the Union address has been largely overlooked – his promise to “crack down on violations of equal pay laws, so that women get equal pay for an equal day’s work.”

The need for that is great. Despite the 47-year-old law that promises women equal pay, their earnings remain well below men’s pay. They average only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, even though their work is obviously every bit as valuable to employers and society at large as the work of men.

The pay discrepancy is even greater for women of color. African American women earn 63 cents and Latinas 52 cents for every dollar earned by men.

It’s estimated that if women were granted equal pay, they could earn as much as $2 million more over the whole of their working lives. It’s also estimated that if women were paid equally, the number of families living in poverty could be reduced by as much as half. Women’s earnings are needed by most families, and in many cases, women are their family’s only breadwinner.

Even women doing the same work as men, or work that’s as valuable to employers as that of their male counterparts, almost always are paid less. It’s as bad for women in the professions as for others. Female nurses, for instance, physicians and surgeons, professors, school teachers and lawyers earn as much as 30 percent less than men in their fields.

President Obama already has signed a bill that should help narrow the male-female pay gap. It was, in fact, the very first bill he signed after taking office – the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act. It’s named for a retired tire plant supervisor in Alabama who discovered after nearly 20 years on the job that she was being paid less than male supervisors.

Ms. Ledbetter sued for discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the law requires workers to sue no later than 180 days after their discriminatory pay rate was set – even if, like Ms. Ledbetter, they don’t discover the pay discrimination until years later. As the result of the decision, hundreds of pay discrimination cases were thrown out of court.

Shortly after the Supreme Court acted, the House passed a bill that would have overturned the court’s outrageous decision. But Senate Republicans, claiming the bill would lead to a flood of unfounded suits against employers, blocked a vote, and President Bush vowed to veto the bill if it ever crossed his desk.

The bill that finally reached Obama’s desk for signing provides that the 180-day time limit for filing lawsuits under the Civil Rights Act doesn’t begin to run until the last discriminatory act by an employer.

What’s most needed now is enactment of the Paycheck Fairness Act that’s been pending for a dozen years. The bill made it through the House last year, but was blocked by Senate Republicans. Obama, who voted for the bill as a senator, is certain to sign the new bill – if it’s not kept from him by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

The Fairness Act would close loopholes in the 1963 Equal Pay Act that have made it relatively easy for employers to pay women less than their male co-workers holding the same jobs. The law would empower women to negotiate with employers for equal pay; prohibit retaliation against workers who share salary information with co-workers; strengthen government outreach, education and enforcement, and generally make the law much stronger.

There ‘s no doubting President Obama’s firm support for the act. As he’s said, “We won ‘t truly have an economy that puts the needs of the middle class first until we ensure that when it comes to pay and benefits at work, women are treated like the equal partners they are.”

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

Back to the mat for Ting and the Catholics

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By Ryan Thomas Riddle

What city officials called the “second largest transfer tax event in our city’s history” is set to go back before the Transfer Tax Review Board. The Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco has filed an appeal, contesting the delinquent tax value of the board’s Dec 4. ruling that states an estimated $14.4 million in transfer taxes are owed to the city.

Last month, the board ruled 3-0 in favor of Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting’s assertion that the church has to pay transfer taxes for its extensive 2008 property shuffle. Ting told the Guardian that particular decision isn’t what’s being challenged here. While the church has threatened to challenge the basic ruling in court, it is also contesting the exact value of the delinquent transfer taxes owed, he said.

In fact, Ting went before the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Jan. 26, to begin lien proceedings against the Archdiocese for the money owed. However, the church’s recent appeal has tabled that for now.

Marijuana goes mainstream

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Marijuana goes mainstream

I’ve smoked marijuana on and off for most of my adult life, usually in the evening to help let go of the anxieties associated with being a progressive wage slave in an increasingly conservative capitalist country.

Buying my pot, which is California’s biggest cash crop, has always been a criminal transaction: in hushed tones or coded language, I arrange to meet a dealer I’ve been set up with through friends. And when I meet him (they’ve always been men), I give him cash in exchange for an eighth- or quarter-ounce of whatever kind of pot he’s selling.

I don’t know what variety I’m buying, who grew it, or how it was grown; whether violence or environmental degradation have occurred along the supply chain; or even whether it is an indica or sativa, the two most basic cannabis families that have differing effects on users.

I’ve been completely in the dark, both in terms of what I was buying and who was benefiting from the transaction, but that changed recently. I obtained a doctor’s recommendation to legally smoke weed — honestly citing anxiety as my affliction — and set out to explore the area’s best cannabis clubs.

It was a little strange and disorienting at first, this new world of expert purveyors of the finest Northern California marijuana and the various concentrates, edibles, drinkables, and other products it goes into. But what eventually struck me is just now normal and mainstream this industry has become, particularly in San Francisco, which has long led the movement to legalize marijuana.

Unlike in cities such as Los Angeles, where the rapid proliferation of unregulated pot clubs has made headlines and raised community concerns, San Francisco years ago made its clubs jump through various bureaucratic hoops to become fully licensed, permitted, and regulated, free to join the mainstream business community, pay their taxes, and compete with one another on the basis of quality, price, customer service, ambiance, and support for the community.

As Californians prepare to decide whether to decriminalize marijuana for even recreational use — on Jan. 28, advocates plan to turn in enough valid signatures to place that initiative on the fall ballot — it’s a good time to explore just what the world of legal weed looks like.

Pretty much everyone involved agrees that San Francisco’s system for distributing marijuana to those with a doctor’s recommendation for it is working well: the patients, growers, dispensary operators, doctors, politicians, police, and regulators with the planning and public health departments.

“It works and it should continue to be replicated,” Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who created the legislation four years ago that led to the current system, told us. “It’s now mainstream.”

Public health officials agree. “In general, we’re very happy about our relationship with the industry and their commitment to the regulations,” said Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, San Francisco’s environmental health director. “We did this well and we did it cooperatively with the clubs.”

Bhatia said there are now 22 fully-permitted clubs (and two more under review) in San Francisco, less than half the number operating when the regulations were created. He also said the city no longer receives many complaints from neighbors of clubs.

Misha Breyburg, managing partner of the nonprofit Medithrive, which opened just a few months ago on Mission Street, supports the process too. “The regulations generally are not easy, but I think that’s okay,” he said. “The process was long and cumbersome and stressful, but very fair.”

Martin Olive, director of the Vapor Room, one of the city’s largest and best dispensaries, agrees that the permitting process professionalized the industry: “I’m proud to be here because the city government has been amazing.”

Richard Lee — founder of Oaksterdam University in Oakland, which teaches marijuana cultivation and is the main financial backer behind the initiative to legalize and tax pot — said San Francisco and Oakland have demonstrated that cannabis clubs can function like any other legitimate industry and become a real asset to their neighborhoods and the local economy.

“Once they started legalizing the clubs, they had no more problems,” Lee told us. “It really is boring and really not a big deal. It’s only the prohibition that makes it exciting and a little scary.”

In fact, Lee said that normalizing and legalizing the marijuana industry is the best way to deal with the problems associated with the illegal drug trade, such as violence, creation of a criminal class, respect for law enforcement, wasted public resources, lost tax opportunities, unsafe growing operations, and environmental damage.

“We need to end cannabis prohibition to end the violence,” Lee said.

Bringing marijuana above ground also has created an artisanship that’s similar to the wine industry, elevating cultivation practices to an art form, improving the science behind it, and making users more sophisticated about subtle differences in taste and effect among the dozens of varieties now on the market.

But the growers themselves still exist in a murky gray area. Although they can get some legal cover as registered caregivers to a cooperative’s members, they’re still exposed to thefts, shakedowns, logistical difficulties, and raids by federal agents or even local police, such as the series of raids in the Sunset District last fall that targeted even legitimate growers for the clubs.

“Right now, cultivators have no air cover at all and they’re getting mixed messages,” Mirkarimi said, calling for the city to better protect growers and even consider getting into the business of growing pot for the clubs and patients. “General Hospital should dispense medical cannabis.”

That issue and others related to the city’s relationship with the industry are currently the subject of a working group convened by Sup. David Campos, a byproduct of which is the proposal to create a Medical Cannabis Task Force to advise the Board of Supervisors, an item the board was scheduled to vote on Jan. 26.

Mirkarimi said he’s also concerned about current rules that ban smoking in clubs that are within 1,000 feet of schools or drug treatment facilities, which has served to prohibit smoking in all but a few San Francisco clubs. Oakland bans smoking in all its clubs. “That’s where the laws could be modified, because you don’t want to take away that social vibe,” Mirkarimi said. “San Francisco needs to be a leader in activating the next step.”

Olive, whose club allows smoking and has a great social scene, agrees that something is lost when the clubs are forced to be simply transactional.

“This is a social healing medicine, and we’re here to promote an inviting atmosphere where people can share their stories,” Olive said. “The whole point is not to just come in and get your medicine, but to be a part of a community.”

That community can range from young stoners to dying old patients, who can both benefit from their communion. “It’s the hippies and the yuppies. Everyone comes here,” Breyburg said. Or as Olive told me, “There is something intrinsically rewarding to sharing a joint with someone, as silly as that sounds.”

The voter-approved Proposition 215 and state law are deliberately vague on what ailments qualify for a doctor’s recommendation, spawning a sub-industry of physicians who specialize in pot, like the ones at the clinic I visited, Dr. Hanya Barth’s Compassionate Health Options in SoMa.

The busy clinic charges around $130 for an initial visit and patients walk away with a legal recommendation, which is all state law requires to legally use marijuana (the clinic recommended also buying a $100 state ID card or a $40 card from the Patient ID Center in Oakland, but I didn’t need them to enter any of the clubs I visited).

The long forms patients fill out even suggest anxiety as an affliction that pot can help, but the clinic also asks patients to sign a waiver to obtain detailed medical records supporting the recommendation. When Barth learned that I have a shoulder separation for which I underwent an MRI a few years ago, she requested those records and added “shoulder pain” to my “anxiety” affliction.

“My goal is not just to give people a recommendation. I look at how I can help or support the person beyond just giving them a recommendation,” Barth told me, illustrating her point by showing me two packs of cigarettes from patients whom she said she convinced to quit smoking.

Her vibe combines the healer and the old hippie, someone who sees a plethora of uses for marijuana and generally thinks society would be better off if everyone would just have a puff and chill out. The clubs also don’t draw distinctions based on their customers’ reasons for smoking.

“There is a distinct difference between medical use and recreational use,” Olive said, telling stories about amazing turnarounds he’s seen in patients with AIDS, cancer, and other debilitating diseases, contrasting that with people who just like to get high before watching a funny movie, which he said is also fine.

But Olive said there’s an important and often under-appreciated third category of marijuana use: therapeutic. “They use cannabis to cope, to unwind, to relax, to sleep better, or to think through problems in a different way,” Olive said.

This third category of user, which I officially fall into, seems to be the majority people I encountered in the local clubs. And while it may be easy for cannabis’ critics to dismiss such patients as taking advantage of laws and a system meant to help sick people, Olive says they play an important role.

“They make it easier for the cannabis clubs to give it away to the people who really need it,” Olive said, referring the practice by most clubs of giving away free weed to low-income or very sick patients, which is supported by the profits made on sales.

The Vapor Room is widely regarded as having one of the best compassionate giving programs, and Olive estimated that the operation gives away about a pound per week through local hospice programs and by giving away edibles and bags of cannabis vapor at the club.

Some of the profits are also used to offer free massage, yoga, chiropractic, and other classes to their members, a system being taken to new heights by Harborside Health Center in Oakland, which has fairly high prices but uses that revenue to offer an extensive list of free services and laboratory analysis of the pot it sells, identifying both contaminants (such as molds or pesticides) and the level of THC, the compound that gets you high.

Olive said there’s also a positive psychological impact of legitimizing the use of marijuana: “It no longer feels like you’re doing a bad thing that you have to be sneaky about.”

As I created my list of the clubs I planned to review, I found abundant online resources such as www.sanfranciscocannabisclubs.com and www.weedtracker.com. But an even better indicator of how mainstream this industry has become were the extensive listings and reviews on Yelp.com.

I combined that information with recommendations from a variety of sources I interviewed to develop my list, which is incomplete and entirely subjective, but nonetheless a good overview of the local industry and the differences among the clubs.

Also, like our restaurant reviewers, I didn’t identify myself as a journalist on my visits, preferring to see how the average customer is treated — and frankly, I was amazed at the high level of friendly, knowledgeable customer service at just about every club. To comply with city law, all the clubs are fully accessible by those with disabilities.

So, with that business out of the way, please join me on my tour of local cannabis clubs, in the (random) order that I visited them:

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DIVINITY TREE

While the reviews on Yelp rave about Divinity Tree (958 Geary St.), giving it five stars, I found it a little intimidating and transactional (although it was the first club I visited, so that might be a factor). But if you’re looking to just do your business in a no-frills environment and get out, this could be your place.

The staff and most of the clientele were young men, some a bit thuggish. One worker wore a “Stop Snitching” T-shirt and another had “Free the SF8.” But they behaved professionally and were knowledgeable and easy to talk to. When I asked for a strain that would ease my anxiety but still allow me enough focus to write, my guy (patients wait along a bench until called to the counter) seemed to thoughtfully ponder the question for a moment, then said I wanted a “sativa-dominant hybrid” and recommended Neville’s Haze.

I bought 1/16 for $25 and when I asked for a receipt, it seemed as though they don’t get that question very often. But without missing a beat he said, “Sure, I’ll give you a receipt,” and gave me a hand-written one for “Meds.”

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: three years

Price: Fairly low

Selection: Moderate

Ambiance: A transactional hole in the wall

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Moderate

Access/Security: Easy. Membership available but not required

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GRASS ROOTS

Located at 1077 Post St. right next to Fire Station #3, Grass Roots has the feel of a busy saloon. Indeed, as a worker named Justin told me, many of the employees are former bartenders who know and value customer service. With music, great lighting, and nice décor, this place feels comfortable and totally legit. Whereas most clubs are cash-only, Grass Roots allows credit card transactions and has an ATM on site.

The steady stream of customers are asked to wait along the back wall, perusing the menus (one for buds and another with pictures for a huge selection of edibles) until called to the bar. When asked, my guy gave me a knowledgeable breakdown of the difference between sativa and indica, but then Justin came over to relieve him for a lunch break with the BBQ they had ordered in and ate in the back.

Justin answered my writing-while-high inquiry by recommending Blue Dream ($17 for a 1.2-gram), and when I asked about edibles, he said he really likes the indica instant hot chocolate ($6), advising me to use milk rather than water because it bonds better with the cannabinoids to improve the high. Then he gave me a free pot brownie because I was a new customer. I was tempted to tip him, but we just said a warm goodbye instead.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: five years

Price: Moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: A warm and welcoming weed bar

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy

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HOPENET

Hopenet (223 Ninth St.) is one of the few places in the city where you can smoke on site, in a comfortable, homey style, as if you’re visiting a friend’s apartment. In addition to the loveseat, two chairs, and large bong, there is a small patio area for smoking cigarettes or playing a guitar, as someone was doing during my visit.

Although the small staff is definitely knowledgeable, they all seemed stoned. And when I asked about the right weed for my writing problem, a gruff older woman impatiently dismissed any indica vs. sativa distinctions and walked away. But I learned a lot about how they made the wide variety of concentrates from the young, slow-talking guy who remained.

He weighed out a heavy gram of White Grapes for $15, the same price for Blue Dream, and $2 cheaper than I had just paid at Grass Roots. That was in the back room, the big middle area was for hanging out, and the front area was check-in and retail, with a case for pipes and wide variety of stoner T-shirts on the walls.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: seven years

Price: Low

Selection: Moderate

Ambiance: Like a converted home with retail up front

Smoke On Site: Yes!

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy

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VAPOR ROOM

Vapor Room (607A Haight, www.vaporroom.com) is San Francisco’s best pot club, at least in terms of feeling like an actual club and having strong connections to its community of patients. It’s a large room where customers can smoke on site, giving this collective a warm, communal vibe that facilitates social interaction and fosters a real sense of inclusiveness.

Each of the four large tables has a high-end Volcano vaporizer on it, there’s a big-screen TV, elegant décor, and large aquarium. There’s a nice mix of young heads and older patients, the latter seeming to know each other well. But, lest members feel a little too at home, a sign on the wall indicates a two-hour time limit for hanging out.

Its early days in the spot next door were a bit grungier, but the new place is bright and elegant. It has a low-key façade and professional feel, and it strongly caters to patients’ needs. Low-income patients are regularly offered free medicine, such as bags full of vapor prepared by staff. Mirkarimi said the Vapor Room is very involved in the Lower Haight community and called it a “model club.”

But they’re still all about the weed, and they have a huge selection that you can easily examine (with a handy magnifying glass) and smell, knowledgeable staff, lots of edibles and concentrates, a tea bar (medicated and regular), and fairly low standardized pot prices: $15 per gram, $25 per 1/16th, $50 per eighth. And once you got your stuff, grab a bong off the shelf and settle into a table — but don’t forget to give them your card at the front desk to check out a bowl for your bong. As the guy told me, “It’s like a library.”

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: six years

Price: Moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: Warm, communal hangout

Smoke On Site: Yes!

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy, but membership required

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MEDITHRIVE

The newest cannabis club in town, MediThrive (1933 Mission, www.medithrive.com) has a bright, fresh, artsy feel to it, with elegantly frosted windows and a welcoming reception area as you enter. This nonprofit coop takes your photo and requires free membership, and already had almost 3,000 members when I signed up a couple weeks ago. Tiana, the good-looking young receptionist, said the club recently won a reader’s choice Cannabis Cup award and noted that all the art on the walls was a rotating collection by local patients: “We’re all about supporting local art.”

The decorators seemed to have fun with the cannabis concept, with a frosted window with a pot leaf photo separating the reception area from the main room, while the walls alternated wood planks with bright green fake moss that looked like the whole place was bursting with marijuana. There’s a flat-screen TV on the wall, at low volume.

The large staff is very friendly and seemed fairly knowledgeable, and the huge selection of pot strains were arranged on a spectrum with the heaviest indica varieties on the left to the pure sativas on the right. Lots of edibles and drinkables, too. The cheapest bud was a cool steel tin with a gram of Mission Kush for $14 (new members get a free sample), while the high rollers could buy some super-concentrated OG Kush Gold Dust ($50) or Ear Wax ($45) to sprinkle over their bowls.

Prepackaged buds

Open for: three months

Price: Moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: Professional, like an artsy doctor’s office

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Very low

Access/Security: Easy, but membership required

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KETAMA COLLECTIVE

At 14 Valencia St., Ketama is a testament to how silly it is that clubs within 1,000 feet of schools aren’t permitted to allow smoking on site. This former café has a large, comfortable seating area and full kitchen, both of which have had little use since a school opened way down the street last year, causing city officials to ban smoking at Ketama.

Pity, because it seems like a great place to just hang out. Yet now it just seemed underutilized and slow. The staff is small (one door guy and a woman hired last summer doing sales), and we were the only customers during the 20 minutes I was there (except for the weird old guy drinking beer from a can in a bag who kept popping in and out).

But it still had jars of good green bud, several flavors of weed-laced drinks and edibles, and a pretty good selection of hash and kief at different prices, and the woman spoke knowledgeably about the different processes by which they were created. To counteract the slow business, Ketama has a neon sign out front that explicitly announces its business — another indication the industry has gone legit.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: five years

Price: Low

Selection: Limited

Ambiance: Dirty hippie hangout, but with nobody there

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy, but free membership required

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MR. NICE GUY

Belying its name, Mr. Nice Guy (174 Valencia St.) thrilled and scared me, but not necessarily in a bad way. Located across the street from Zeitgeist, the thug factor here was high and so was the security, allowing no human interaction that wasn’t mediated by thick Plexiglass, presumably bulletproof.

After initially being told by a disembodied voice to come back in five minutes, I submitted my doctor’s recommendation and ID into the slot of a teller’s window, darkened to hide whoever I was dealing with. Quickly approved, I was buzzed into a small, strange room with three doors.

I paused, confused, until the disembodied voice again told me, “Keep going,” and I was buzzed through another door into a hallway that led to a large room, its walls completely covered in brilliant murals, expertly painted in hip-hop style. Along the front walls, a lighted menu broke down the prices of about 20 cannabis varieties.

Then finally, I saw people: two impossibly hot, young female employees, lounging nonchalantly in their weed box, like strippers waiting to start their routines. The only other customer, a young B-boy, chatted them up though the glass, seemingly more interested in these striking women than their products.

I finally decided to go with the special, an ounce of Fever, normally $17, for just $10. I opened a small door in the glass, set down my cash, and watched the tall, milk chocolate-skinned beauty trade my money for Fever, leaving me feeling flushed. It was the best dime-bag I ever bought.

Prepackaged buds

Open for: ???

Price: Moderate, with cheap specials

Selection: High

Ambiance: Hip hop strip club

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: High

Access/Security: High security but low scrutiny

————-

BERNAL HEIGHTS COLLECTIVE

Bernal Collective (33 29th St. at Mission) seemed both more casual and more strict than any of the other clubs in town — and it also turned out to be one of my favorites.

After refusing to buy pot for a guy out front who had just been turned away, I entered the club and faced more scrutiny than I had at any other club. It was the only club to ask for my doctor’s license number and my referral number, and when I tried to check an incoming text message, I was told cell phone use wasn’t allowed for “security reasons.” On the wall, they had a blown-up copy of their 2007 legal notice announcing their opening.

But beyond this by-the-book façade, this club proved warm and welcoming, like a comfortable clubhouse. People can smoke on site, and there’s even a daily happy hour from 4:20–5:20 p.m., with $1 off joints and edibles, both in abundant supply. Normal-sized prerolled joints are $5, but they also offer a massive bomber joint with a full eighth of weed for $50.

The staff of a half-dozen young men were knowledgeable about the 20 varieties they had on hand and offered excellent customer service, even washing down the bong with an alcohol-wipe before letting a customer take a rip from the XXX, a strong, sticky bud that was just $15 for a gram.

Buds weighed at purchase

Open for: five years

Price: Fairly low

Selection: High

Ambiance: A clubhouse for young stoners

Smoke On Site: Yes

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Fairly tight

————-

LOVE SHACK

This longtime club (502 14th St.) has had its ups and downs, the downs coming mostly because of its location on a fairly residential block. After taking complaints from neighbors, the city required Love Shack to cap its membership, although that seems to be changing because the club let me in, albeit with a warning that next time I would need to have a state ID card. It was the only club I visited to have such a requirement.

Once inside this tiny club, I could see why people might have been backed up onto the street at times. But the staff was friendly and seemed to have a great rapport with the regulars, who seemed be everyone except me. The knowledgeable manager walked me through their 20-plus varieties, most costing the standard street price of $50 per eighth, or more for stronger stuff like Romulan.

On the more affordable end of the spectrum was the $10 special for Jack Herrer Hash, named for the longtime legalization advocate who wrote The Emperor Wears No Clothes, a classic book on the history of the movement.

Buds weighed at purchase

Open for: eight years

Price: Moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: Small, like a converted apartment

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Moderate

Access/Security: Tight

————-

COFFEE SHOP BLUE SKY

Blue Sky (377 17th St., Oakland)is based on the Amsterdam model of combining marijuana dispensaries with coffee shops, although it suffers a bit from Oakland’s ban on smoking. Still, it’s a cool concept and one that Richard Lee sees as the future of marijuana-related businesses because of the synergy between smoking and grabbing a bite or some coffee.

Most of Blue Sky is a small coffee shop and smoothie bar, but there’s a little room in back for buying weed. “We’ve got the best prices around,” said the guy who checked my ID, and indeed, $44 eighths and $10 “puppy bags” were pretty cheap. Customers can also sign up to do volunteer political advocacy work for free weed.

The only downside is the limited selection, only four varieties when I was there, although the woman at the counter said the varieties rotate over the course of the day based on the club’s purchases from growers.

Prepackaged buds

Open for: 14 years

Price: Low

Selection: Very limited

Ambiance: A fragrant little room behind a coffee shop

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy

————–

HARBORSIDE HEALTH CENTER

I have seen the future of legitimized medical marijuana businesses, and it’s Harborside (1840 Embarcadero, Oakland). With its motto of “Out of the shadows, into the light,” this place is like the Costco of pot — a huge, airy facility with a dizzying number of selections and even a “rewards card” program.

All new members are given a tour, starting with sign-up sheets for daily free services that include yoga, chiropractic, acupuncture, reiki, consultations with herbalists, and classes on growing. Then we moved to a section with the clones of dozens of pot plant varieties available for purchase (limit of 72 plants per visit), along with a potted marijuana plant the size of a tree.

Harborside is also blazing the trail on laboratory services, testing all of its pot for contaminants and THC content, labeling it on the packaging just like the alcohol industry does. Some of the smaller clubs don’t like how over-the-top Harborside is, and they complain that its prices are high. But those profits seem to be poured back into the services at this unique facility.

Prepackaged buds

Open for: three years

Price: High

Selection: Huge

Ambiance: A big, open shopping emporium

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Tight

————-

SANCTUARY

The people who run Sanctuary (669 O’Farrell St.), the first club to fully comply with the new city regulations and get its permanent license, have been active in the political push for normalizing medical marijuana, as a wall full of awards and letters from politicians attests. Owner Michael Welch was commended for his work by the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, where Sanctuary employee Tim Durning has been an active longtime member and former elected officer.

Sanctuary has a generous compassionate giving program and caters to lots of poor residents of the Tenderloin neighborhood. While the club is prohibited from allowing smoking, they fudge the restriction with a Volcano vaporizer. “A lot of patients are on fixed income and live in the SROs, where they can’t smoke, so we let them vaporize here whether they buy from us or not,” Durning told us.

Those who do buy from them find a huge selection — including 20 different kinds of hash and 17 varieties of buds — at a wide price range. Staffers know their products well and take their business seriously, giving a regular spiel to new members about responsible use, which includes maintaining neighborhood relations by not smoking near the business.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: five years

Price: Low to moderate

Selection: High

Ambiance: Campaign headquarters for the marijuana movement

Smoke On Site: No, but vaporizing OK

Thug factor: Low

Access/Security: Easy

————–

GREEN DOOR

If low prices or a huge selection of edibles are what you seek, Green Door (843 Howard St., www.greendoorsf.com) could be the club for you.

Eighths of good green buds start at a ridiculously low $25 and go up to just $50 (the cheapest price for eighths at many clubs and also the standard black market price). If that’s not low enough, super-broke users can buy a quarter-ounce bag of high-grade shake for $40.

If you didn’t already have the munchies going in, you’ll get them perusing the huge menu of edibles: from weed-laced knockoffs of Snickers bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for just $5 to cupcakes, ice cream, or Chex party mix. They have lots of hash and other concentrates as well.

Somehow, the club also manages to have a strong compassionate giving program and contibutes to local civic organizations that include the Black Rock Arts Foundation, Maitri AIDS Hospice, and Friends of the Urban Forest.

The club itself is a little sterile and transactional, with an institutional feel and employees stuck behind teller windows. But even though that and the steady flow of tough-looking young male customers raise its thug factor a bit, the employees all seemed friendly and helpful, giving free edibles to first-time customers.

Prepackage buds

Open for: 8 years (4 here, 4 in Oakland)

Price: Cheap

Selection: High for edibles, moderate for weed

Ambiance: Like a community bank of cheap weed

Smoke On Site: No

Thug factor: Moderate

Access/Security: Easy access, high security

————–

RE-LEAF HERBAL CENTER

While I had heard good things about Re-Leaf (1284 Mission St.), my first impression was that it’s a little sketchy. As the door guy was checking my recommendation card and ID, I asked whether they allow smoking on site. He looked as if this was a difficult question, paused, and finally told me to ask the people behind the counter.

The small club was blaring gangsta rap when I entered, after a while lowering the volume to compete less with the blaring television set to an ultimate fighting match. It had two small fridges filled with tasty-looking edibles and lots of vaporizers and other merchandise for sale, but only eight varieties of marijuana.

But the service was good, and after knocking $5 off my gram of Jim Jones (a variety I only found here) because I was a first-time customer, he told me it was OK to smoke on site. I sat down on the couch, but there were no bongs, vaporizers, pipes, or even ashtrays to use.

Buds weighed on purchase

Open for: two years (three years at previous SF location)

Price: Fairly low

Selection: Limited

Ambiance: A loud head shop that also has some weed

Smoke On Site: Yes and no

Thug factor: Moderate to high

Access/Security: Easy

Scraping bottom

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Scraping bottom

The job of scrubbing down a city bus after it’s gone out of service is no picnic. At a Jan. 20 Budget and Finance Committee hearing called by Sup. Chris Daly to discuss health and safety impacts related to Municipal Transportation Agency layoffs, supervisors took a virtual tour of a Muni bus that was trashed on multiple levels: tagged inside and out, soiled with vomit, and strewn with garbage. Among the roughly 100 Muni workers who will lose their jobs to midyear budget cuts are 10 “car cleaners” — those unsung heroes who scrub away late into the night, tackling the residue left behind by the Sharpie-wielding, litterbug masses.

“We do send out all of our vehicles clean,” MTA spokesperson Judson True told the Budget and Finance Committee members at the hearing. “We do not send out any of our vehicles with any health issues … and we will not.” Despite his assurances, members of the Board of Supervisors and some Muni staffers voiced fears that with fewer and more overworked car cleaners, the overall experience of riding public transit could suffer.

It’s just one small example of on-the-ground impacts of painful budget cuts inflicted to solve a steep shortfall affecting the city’s transit agency. The fiscal woes aren’t unique to Muni. In coming months, San Francisco city departments across the board will have to contend with revenue shortfalls and find ways to continue providing services with diminished resources.

But with layoffs and other proposals such as raising fares, reducing service, and charging more for discount passes on the table, many are raising objections — including several members of the MTA Board of Directors, a body that is wholly appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom. In a rare show of defiance at a Jan. 19 MTA Board meeting, several directors even resuscitated the idea of extending parking-meter hours and raising meter fees to generate new transit revenue, an idea Newsom previously rejected.

$49 MILLION IN THE RED

Muni has lost $180 million in state funding over the last three years due to “the nightmare in Sacramento,” as True put it, and no one seems to believe the fiscal crisis can be resolved without some degree of pain.

At the Jan. 19 MTA Board meeting, transit agency Chief Financial Officer Sonali Bose outlined the dismal financial picture, explaining that Muni has been hit hard by declining parking and taxi fees and impacts to the city’s general fund, leaving it about $49 million in the hole for the current budget cycle. After the layoffs, Muni will still face a $17 million problem. To solve it, suggestions include jacking up the historic F Line trolley fare from $3 to $5, charging $30 for discount monthly passes for seniors and passengers with disabilities, and reducing service.

Even against the gloomy fiscal backdrop, the prospect of eliminating jobs to make up for the losses drew serious concerns from MTA directors. “Once somebody’s gone, they’re gone,” Director Shirley Breyer Black noted. “I think moving forward with cuts in these classifications will send us into deeper fiscal crisis.”

All the affected workers — most of them frontline employees — are slated to lose their jobs by May 1, and around one-third of them were dismissed Jan. 22.

Muni Executive Director and CEO Nathaniel Ford emphasized that the decision to cut jobs was not made lightly. But at a Budget and Finance Committee meeting the following day, progressive members of the Board of Supervisors expressed alarm after hearing union members sound off about how the cuts disproportionately affect lower-paid classifications. The majority of layoffs target members of Service Employees International Union Local 1021, San Francisco’s largest labor union, which represents frontline workers across city departments.

“I understand that there are no good decisions,” Daly told the Guardian, adding that a certain group of workers seem to bearing the brunt of the cuts. “What progressive supervisors are calling for is for the budget to be handled more evenly,” he said.

A single Municipal Executives’ Association (MEA) employee — an MTA manager earning between $105,950 and $135,200 per year — was let go during this latest round of about 100 Muni layoffs, according to an agency memo. In the past year, MTA reduced its upper-level management team from 108 to 96 employees. In contrast, 33 members of SEIU Local 1021 — the majority frontline workers earning between $45,656 and $64,272 a year — will be affected by the cuts.

“Unfortunately, when MTA discovered that they had a budget problem, they didn’t bring all parties to the table,” SEIU Organizer Leah Berlanga testified at the Budget and Finance Committee hearing. “The way we got invited was via pink slips. That’s the only time they will talk to people who do direct services.”

When asked whether Muni had assessed mid- and upper-management level jobs to even the scales, True responded that a few mid-level managers were included in the latest round of cuts. One reason the layoffs seem disproportionate, he added, is that there are so many more frontline workers than others. “The budget picture has affected the entire agency,” he said. “No one is happy about these decisions.”

But SEIU Local 1021 characterized the layoffs as misguided, and attempted to identify waste and mismanagement within the agency in a packet of alternative cost-saving measures it submitted to MTA. At the top of the list was the suggestion that the agency eliminate 35 retired Muni employees, who are allowed to work up to 960 hours per year and earn wages in addition to their pensions. And according to the union, there are 21 temporary workers in the agency who’ve exceeded a two-year limit for short-term employment. SEIU recommended that those temps be dismissed too.

SEIU also criticized the decision to lay off 24 parking control officers (PCOs) — uniformed workers who have the unenviable job of issuing parking citations to bring in revenue for the city. “To me, if you do the simple math, it doesn’t make any sense. They make most of the money for the MTA,” said a PCO who testified at the hearing.

According to SEIU’s calculations, eliminating 24 employees who dole out parking tickets could result in a $7.2 million loss for the city in parking revenue. But True said MTA disagrees with this figure, and pointed to an internal memo showing how revenue from parking citations dropped in recent years even as more PCOs were hired. Nonetheless, at the urging of SEIU, the MTA Board agreed to postpone those 24 layoffs until February to buy time to study the impact. For other positions, negotiations between MTA and the union are ongoing. The details on still more layoffs, which will affect transit operators, is yet to come.

Sup. David Campos is asking for a management audit to see if Muni is spending its money efficiently. “I think we should look at best practices and how we’re operating before we finalize any cuts,” he said.

THE PARKING POLITICS

During a round of MTA budget talks last fall, the idea of extending city parking meter hours and raising meter fees was floated as a means of recouping losses — but Newsom balked at the idea, saying higher parking fees could harm small businesses. Now MTA Director Bruce Oka has revived — and endorsed — the concept.

“I can hold my nose and vote on anything, but I refuse to vote on something when I believe we have not looked under a rock for every source of funding,” Oka said at the meeting. “We have to extend the parking meter hours — we have to find dollars. If Room 200 [i.e. Newsom] doesn’t want that to happen, well then … he’s got to come up with a way to do what we need to do. If he’s not going to raise parking meters or extend parking meter time, he’s got to come up with some money.”

Tom Radulovich, executive director of nonprofit Livable City and one of the individuals who helped to create MTA in 1999, summed up Oka’s comments with a note of surprise: “He really called out the mayor,” he said. “I haven’t seen MTA Board members do that — they usually cover for him.”

Radulovich — who is also on the BART Board — says targeting motorists for more revenue instead of transit riders would be more equitable, sustainable, and in keeping with the city’s Transit First goals in the long run. Proposition A, passed November 2007, established “a strong mandate to reduce transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions,” he pointed out. But, he noted, with layoffs that could affect the qualify of service and possibly deter people from riding, “We don’t see how MTA is going to get to those voter-mandated transit goals.” *

MUNI MEETINGS

PUBLIC MEETINGS ON SFMTA BUDGET

Saturday, Feb. 6, 10 a.m. to noon

Tuesday, Feb. 9, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Saturday, Feb. 20, 10 a.m. to noon

One South Van Ness Ave. at Market Street, 2nd Floor Atrium

SFMTA BOARD MEETINGS

Friday, Jan. 29, 10 a.m.; discussion of FY10 options, including Muni service reductions

Tuesday, Feb. 16, 11 a.m.; public hearing on proposed FY10 budget actions

Tuesday, Mar. 2, 2 p.m.; public hearing and possible board approval of FY10 budget actions

Location: City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 400

Why foot patrols make sense

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By Tim Redmond

I had lunch with the chief of police yesterday. George Gascon is far sharper than the past few people to occupy that office, and seems to understand the need to reach out to the news media and to people who don’t agree with him. He’s actually a pretty skilled politician — which is a bit scary to folks who think he’s going in the wrong direction

And on a lot of things, I think he is.

We talked a lot about the sit-lie law that he’s been pushing, which I wrote about this week. Gascon insisted that he doesn’t want to use the law as a way to sweep homeless people off the streets; in fact, he told me, he doesn’t want to put anyone in jail, not at first, anyway. He’s rather use the law as a tool to get the young bullies and thugs (who are, by the way, a real problem on Haight St.) into the criminal justice system, where they might get access to services that could help them change their behavior.

I don’t see it working. What I see is either (a) the troublemakers will simply stand up when the cops arrive and walk to another part of the street or (b) some will get arrested, released, arrested, released, etc. — rejecting or ignoring all possible services — then ultimately, on the fourth or fifth offense, wind up in jail.

And all of of those arrests and court hearings are expensive.

In fact, Gascon and I agreed on two central points: (1) Putting two cops on foot patrol on Haight Street, between Buena Vista Park and Golden Gate Park, 13 hours a day, would end the problem pretty quickly and (2) the cost of doing that, which he put at close to $1 million a year (a bit high, I think), is probably lower than the cost of arresting, prosecuting, defending and incarcerating the Haight bullies.

This is something to look at.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi wants to hold a hearing on the issue, and I think he ought to ask the controller or the budget analyst to examiner the real costs: What’s the price tag of foot patrols in the Haight? What’s the cost to the district attorney, the public defender, the courts and the Sheriff’s Office of implementing a sit-lie law? And could the foot patrols be a cheaper way of solving this problem?

And whatever Gascon says about his intent, once you pass a law like this — a law making it a crime to sit or lie on the sidewalk — it’s there, on the books, ripe for abuse. Gascon won’t be the chief forever. And he has to answer to the mayor, who may want to use the law a little differently.

So before we go that route, why not try foot patrols? According to Gascon, the department can’t afford it; with a huge budget deficit and cuts on the way for every agency, spending a million bucks on Haight Street doesn’t make sense. But the supervisors should look at this citywide; spending $1 million on preventing crime with foot patrols (if that’s what it would really cost) may be a lot more cost-effective than spending $2 million arresting, prosecuting, defending, sentencing and incarcerating people.

It’s at least worth a try.

Editor’s Notes

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Editor’s Notes

I was in the Haight the other day, and saw something that would have made Police Chief George Gascón and Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius apoplectic. A group of young people, mostly men, were sitting right in the middle of the sidewalk. The scofflaws weren’t blocking my path since I was on Haight and they were a ways up Ashbury. But if I had wanted to walk in that direction, they would have been in the way. Which means they were already breaking the law, and if I’d complained and a cop had come along, they probably would have stood up and walked away. I can’t imagine they would have been arrested. In fact, if a beat officer had been walking Haight Street, they wouldn’t have been sitting there in the first place.

Gascón and Nevius are beating the drums for a “sit-lie” law, which would make it a crime to sit or lie on a public sidewalk. Since young thugs hassling residents, tourists, and shoppers in the Haight have become a problem, the sit-lie thing has legs; it could become this year’s version of Care Not Cash, the utterly bogus but politically catchy slogan that put Gavin Newsom in the Mayor’s Office.

There’s a populist anger about the poor behavior of a relatively small number of losers who are making life difficult for the generally upscale residents of the Haight, and progressives can’t ignore it. Frustration over decades of failed homeless policies made Newsom’s tough-love measure attractive. Explaining that it would never work, that it wasn’t a rational policy response, didn’t get the left anywhere.

That’s what we’re dealing with here. I can tell you, after watching Haight Street and its various generations of problems for more than 25 years, that a sit-lie law won’t solve anything. I can tell you that as soon as an officer approaches the troublemakers sitting on the street, they’ll do what any sane small-time crook would do: they’ll stand up. Then they’ll walk a few blocks away. If it keeps up, they’ll stop sitting down altogether. You can threaten, bully, and hassle people just as easily from a standing position.

And if they do get arrested, they’ll be released quickly (the city’s overcrowded jails, packed to the gills with the folks Gascón has rounded up in his Tenderloin sweeps, has no room for people charged with a minor crime like sitting on the sidewalk). Then they’ll be back.

I can tell you that the cost of arresting, charging, prosecuting, defending, and incarcerating these jerks would be way higher than the cost of having two cops walk up and down Haight Street all day, in uniform — a move that would absolutely solve the problem.

But this isn’t about rationality — it’s about emotion. Gascón has done a brilliant job, with the help of the Chron, of framing this as hard-headed law enforcement against the liberal supervisors.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, no fan of street crime, wants a hearing on the issue, to get some rational facts on the table. That’s a good start — but we need an alternative proposal. How about a test: try having two cops walk the beat every day for three months, a visible community policing presence on Haight Street. If that doesn’t work, we can always try something else.

Some Muni layoffs postponed for a month

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By Rebecca Bowe

Two dozen Muni parking control officers (PCOs) can hold onto their jobs for another month, the Municipal Transportation Agency Board decided Tuesday. The PCOs are those ever-popular uniformed workers who go around issuing parking citations (maybe you’ve seen the bumper-sticker slogan — “Good people, Tough jobs” — just after getting slammed with an outrageous parking ticket). A round of 24 PCO layoffs was previously scheduled to go into effect at the end of this week, as part of midyear cuts made to balance the city budget. But the MTA Board agreed to push the layoff date back to Feb. 26, according to Steve Stallone, a spokesperson for Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which represents the workers. MTA spokesperson Judson True confirmed that the layoffs were postponed.

The PCO layoffs represented a hot topic at last Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, when a long line of city employees formed during public comment to raise objections. Abraham Davis, a PCO, told supervisors that each officer issues an average of 30 citations a day, which he said brings in roughly $2,000 for the city. Accounting for all 24 workers, “that’s $960,000 a month,” he said, “and that’s a low average.” He described one of his own bad days: “That’s the day I got spit on, almost run over, and came back to the hall with 60 citations,” he said. “Do the math.”

Stallone says today’s MTA Board decision was made because SEIU Local 1021 presented new figures outlining why cutting city workers who generate revenue for the city is a bad business decision. “We crunched the numbers differently,” he told the Guardian. “[MTA] staff just plain had it wrong.” We haven’t heard back yet on how SEIU’s numbers differ from MTA’s numbers — but it’s clear that the MTA Board is willing to look at what the union brought to the table.

At Sup. Chris Daly’s request, a hearing will be held at Wednesday’s Budget & Finance Committee meeting to discuss Muni layoffs and “the impacts on public health and safety concerns,” according to the meeting agenda. Some of those concerns revolve around the fact that PCOs direct traffic in emergency situations or special events when they aren’t issuing parking tickets, Stallone explained. And since another group of affected Muni workers includes the people who clean the buses, maybe the case will be made that riding around in grimy buses won’t exactly help San Franciscans combat swine flu and other contagious maladies. That’s just a guess. “It’s a good guess,” Stallone said. But he took a broader view, saying, “You’re going to lose ridership if the buses suck.”

Newsom’s corporate giveaway

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By Steven T. Jones
state of city.jpg
After going through a ridiculous security check (I waited 15 minutes for an “escort,” but they never even inspected my bag) to get into Mayor Gavin Newsom’s invite-only State of the City speech last night in the Asian Art Museum, I chatted with my colleague Melissa Griffin, the blogger and Examiner columnist, as Newsom worked the room.

The mayor eventually wound his way over to me, and when I turned to greet him, he gave me a playful shove, knocking me off balance and telling me, “Be nice!” Just minutes into his speech, in which he promoted corporate tax breaks and a discredited “local economic stimulus package,” I understood what he meant.

When he introduced this trickle-down economics initiative almost a year ago, we cited studies showing that it was a political gimmick that didn’t work and shot down Newsom’s claim that the city’s economist supported this giveaway of public funds to the private sector.

But last night, Newsom chided the Board of Supervisors for not scheduling hearings on his proposal to waive payroll taxes for new businesses and new jobs, create tax credits for health insurance costs, and extend current tax breaks for biotech companies, seemingly oblivious to the fact that such actions will add to the massive budget deficit that he barely mentioned.

The Chronicle today quoted gleeful Chamber of Commerce head Steve Falk and the chilly reaction that this strange initiative got from supervisors, but San Francisco Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin went even further, this morning telling us, “I am so disappointed that the mayor of San Francisco is taking a page from the playbook of the Republican Party. This sounds like Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economics. In an era when some of the richest corporations have made zillions of dollars and the U.S. government just gave them zillions more, now we’re going to close hospitals and say we can’t pave our streets.”

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