Supervisors

Holiday blues

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Holiday blues

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Ethea Farahkhan lost her city job Nov. 29, when a round of city layoffs impacting front-line workers took effect.
Farahkhan, a woman of color who was an administrative assistant at San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth and their Families, said she would have a job if it weren’t for Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision not to spend money approved by the Board of Supervisors to save people from job losses during the holiday season.

The layoffs rippled through city government as DPH employees with seniority exercised “bumping rights” to replace employees like Farahkhan, who was hired three years ago.

“No one’s in a festive mood. We’re concentrating on making mortgages and buying food to put on our table,” Farahkhan told us when we caught up with her Thanksgiving eve. “I know San Francisco is not exempt from the economic crisis,” she added, “but I feel like our mayor is out of touch. He’s never been in this position.”

If DPH layoff had been covered by existing funds and incoming grant money, as directed by a veto-proof, 8-3 vote of the Board of Supervisors on Nov. 24, she said, “I would definitely have a job to go to.” Instead, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced after the board vote that he was refusing to spend the reallocated funding to halt the 478 DPH layoffs and reassignments.

Farahkhan’s union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021, spent months trying to save these jobs, finally winning over the final supervisor needed to overcome a veto, Sup. Sophie Maxwell, shortly before the vote. Then, for the second time in as many months, the head of the executive branch announced that he would simply ignore the legislative branch.

The impasse doesn’t bode well for a city that’s about to wrestle with a record midyear budget deficit again.
In October, Newsom declared that he would ignore the board’s passage of legislation — by the same 8-3 vote that could override a mayoral veto — to prevent deportation of undocumented youth in custody until they are convicted. It was the first of two actions that seemed to answer the question of whether the mayor is willing to work with the supervisors on the toughest problems facing the city.

That was the question raised last summer when the board discussed a budget analyst’s report that Newsom had either cut or refused to spend about $15.6 million of the $37.5 million that supervisors approved in budget add-backs for the 2008-09 fiscal year. With the mayor cutting 42 percent of program funding that the board fought to restore, trust was already eroding.

During budget deliberation, some progressive supervisors unsuccessfully tried to place hundreds of millions of dollars on reserve, which would give the board some leverage to force Newsom to honor his pledge to work with supervisors on midyear budget cuts, but the board ultimately decided not to do so.

The mayor’s latest rejection came after a long, embittered battle with the union. SEIU members resorted to drastic measures — staging protests in traffic intersections, distributing flyers outside Newsom’s PlumpJack restaurants, barging into his office unannounced singing civil-rights era ballads — to pressure the mayor. But neither those media stunts, nor compromise solutions developed by Sups. John Avalos, Bevan Dufty, and Board President David Chiu, could persuade Newsom to go along with revisiting the DPH cuts.

“Mayor Newsom cannot spend funds the city does not have,” Newsom’s press secretary, Joe Arellano, told the Guardian when asked for an explanation. “The board action didn’t provide any new money — it takes dollars already being used to pay other employees’ salaries.”

The money allocated by the board was already destined for salaries and benefits of other DPH employees, but Sups. Avalos, Chris Daly, and Ross Mirkarimi argued that new federal dollars en route to the city via state and federal channels would bring the department budget back into balance. An estimated $34 million in federal funding is expected to flow into city coffers for health services by mid-2010, but Arellano indicated that the mayor intends to use that money to help balance next year’s deficit.

As the city considers midyear slashes to cope with next year’s monstrous $522 million shortfall, the spirit of cooperation that Newsom publicly emphasized at the outset of last year’s budget cycle now seems dead. Chiu told the Guardian that the only way the board was able to achieve a palatable budget back in July was through controversial partnership with the Mayor’s Office. But when supervisors approached Newsom with alternative solutions for restoring the DPH layoffs, “the mayor was not interested in exploring these different options,” Chiu explained.

Now, Chiu said he’s worried by the implications of the mayor’s defiant approach to the board. “We have two branches of government — legislative and executive. Eleven of us are required to set laws for the city, and the mayor is supposed to carry it out. I hope and believe that the mayor would respect the roles of our respective branches,” Chiu said, carefully choosing his words when asked for his perspective on this trend. “I don’t know how we are going to get through next year if we can’t … not just agree to disagree, but figure out where we agree.”

Chiu’s persistent search for common ground stands in contrast to Daly’s more adversarial approach. In July, just before the board signed off on the 2009-10 budget, Daly floated a proposal to place $300 million on reserve — which would require additional board action to spend, thereby giving supervisors some leverage — but it failed to pass.

Daly also proposed a placing a charter amendment on the ballot that would have required the mayor to fund certain board-approved programs that supervisors deemed especially important. But that failed too when only Sups. Mirkarimi, David Campos and Eric Mar supported it. In a recent conversation with the Guardian, Daly indicated that this possibility could be revived. “It doesn’t matter how many supervisors it takes” to pass legislation, Daly said. “[The mayor] wants to govern unilaterally, and that’s not okay.”

As for the mayor’s latest announcement that he wouldn’t spend the money to restore DPH salaries, Daly said it’s not over yet. “There will be meetings. There will be discussions,” he said. “We’re going to move on this.”

At the same time, midyear cuts are speeding through the pipeline. By Dec. 4, city department heads will have to figure out how to slash their current budgets by 4 percent. By Feb. 20, Newsom is asking for plans to cut an additional 20 percent, plus an extra 10 percent in contingency funding in order to address next year’s gaping deficit.

Those “adjustments,” as they’re called in bureaucratic jargon, promise to be painful. As the next city budget squabble comes into focus on the horizon, the question of revenue measures is still out there and isn’t helped by the current acrimony at City Hall.

Progressive supervisors are also moving to tackle spending areas they deem wasteful, such as a surge in high-dollar management salaries or some of the mayor’s pet projects. Newsom is angling for opening the condo conversion floodgates by letting people buy their way out of the lottery system — a one-time moneymaker that progressives find repugnant because it depletes rental-housing stock.

As the city grows more financially anemic, accusations of mismanagement abound. After the board’s vote on DPH cuts, Newsom was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle saying that progressive supervisors are in a “reality-free zone.”

But Farahkhan and other SEIU employees who are facing layoffs during the holidays believe Newsom is the one who is living on a different planet. “He’s at the top of the pay scale,” Farahkhan said, “and out of touch with everyday working people.”

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MUNI CUTS BACK SERVICE

Service reductions that will affect about half of all Muni routes start Dec. 5, the result of San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s early summer deal to close a $129 million budget deficit for the current fiscal year. And that’s just the beginning of the bad news.
Less than halfway through this budget cycle, SFMTA is already looking at an additional $45 million deficit, partly because of the agency’s failure to follow through on plans to increase parking revenue, such as the stalled proposal to extend parking meter hours (see “We want free parking!” Oct. 28).
So additional layoffs and Muni service reductions or even another fare hike are possible, even though Muni fares have already doubled to $2 since Gavin Newsom became mayor. SFMTA officials say midyear budget reduction decisions will be made by the SFMTA Board of Directors over the next two months.
But for now, to find out how this week’s Muni service reductions will affect you, visit www.sfmta.com. (Steven T. Jones)

Black Friday indeed

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By Steven T. Jones
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Whether you mark the day after Thanksgiving as Black Friday or Buy Nothing Day (I tend toward the latter), the color of San Francisco today does seem colored by the darker hues on the spectrum. Maybe part of that is the fact that Black Friday this year falls on the anniversary of the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone.

Nonetheless, I just pedaled past our downtown shopping citadels a little while ago to take in the mood. The shoppers definitely outnumber the protesters of hyper-consumerism or fur, but neither side seemed particularly animated by their missions. Maybe it’s the gray day or the tryptophan hangovers.

But if you just want to go with the somber motif, you can join the march marking the Milk and Moscone deaths, which starts at 6 p.m. at Harvey Milk Plaza at Market and Castro. Speakers include Milk and Moscone relatives and two of Milk’s old allies on the Board of Supervisors, Harry Britt and Ruth Carol Silver.

Or if you’re feeling a bit more spirited and mischievous, Critical Mass starts just after 6 p.m. at Justin Herman Plaza, at the base of Market Street. Nothing says “thank you for shopping in San Francisco” like being blocked by bicyclists on the drive back to the ‘burbs.
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Newsom’s Shakespearean indifference

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By Rebecca Bowe

Here’s what Mayor Gavin Newsom told the Chronicle after yesterday’s 8-3 vote by the Board of Supervisors to temporarily save city workers from the bitter sting of job loss during the holiday season:

“As mayor, I don’t have to spend the money, so this is much ado about nothing.”

He also said the Supes who voted to allocate less than $1.9 million to temporarily preserve the jobs — representing approximately three hundredths of one percent of the city’s total $6.6 billion budget — are living in a “reality-free zone.”

Time for serious budget reform

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Time for serious budget reform

EDITORIAL Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, likes to say that politicians should never let a crisis go to waste — but that’s what happened in San Francisco last summer, when the mayor and the supervisors approved a budget deal that didn’t involve any real structural reform, didn’t solve any long-term problems, and didn’t even last six months.

Now there’s a new crisis, one that, if anything, is worse. Cutting almost a half-billion dollars from the city budget last year was absolutely brutal. But cutting another half-billion, which is what the controller is now talking about, seems almost inconceivable.

It’s time to quit with the patches, quit with the one-time solutions and fee hikes. And with the mayor missing in action, the supervisors simply have to take the lead here and begin working on major systemic changes that shift the way the city is financed and the way money is spent.

The biggest problem with last summer’s deal was the lack of any serious attempt at bringing in new revenue. Newsom and his advisors all said that tax hikes weren’t looking good in the polls and probably wouldn’t get voter approval, but election results around the Bay suggest otherwise: In city after city, voters approved new taxes to fund essential public services.

And Newsom never gave the revenue side of the equation a fighting chance. He never made any personal effort to lobby the three supervisors he had appointed to the board, who were all reluctant to put emergency tax measures on the ballot. He just let the idea die.

And now the city is paying the price. Everyone with any sense knew last summer that the recession wasn’t going to magically end in time to make this budget work. It was clear that property tax and sales tax revenue would drop even further — and that the only way to avoid brutal midyear cuts was to look for new sources of money. Now the mayor and the board have to slice close to $50 million to keep the red ink at bay, and next year’s deficit is pegged at 10 times that much.

The other glaring problem with the mayor’s budget approach is that it sought to cut only from the front lines. But the highest-paid workers, the folks who make way more than $100,000 a year, the management ranks that have become very well staffed in recent years, were largely untouched. And frankly, there are a lot of people in that category who don’t do much of anything that’s essential to the functioning of the city.

During the dot-com boom, when Willie Brown was mayor and the city was awash in cash, the ranks of the politically appointed managers grew dramatically. Some of those folks are still around. Newsom has added his own. And the structure of management and organization in this city has never been a model of efficiency. So if the mayor wants another round of deep cuts — 20 percent from every department — he should start with a management audit of some of the biggest departments and take a hard look at exactly what all those senior employees do all day — and whether their work might be less important than, say, nurse aides who take care of the sick elderly.

As a simple show of good faith, Newsom shouldn’t replace Nate Ballard, the press secretary, or Kevin Ryan, his criminal justice advisor. There are still four other people in the mayor’s press office, more than any mayor in modern history has ever needed. And the city already has a police chief, police commission, district attorney, and sheriff. Why the mayor needs his own criminal justice office is a mystery to us.

There are other policy issues that need to be examined. The current budget shortfall memo from the city controller notes that some departments are already over budget — the Sheriff’s Office, for example, needs an additional $2.7 million dollars. The public defender and the courts need and additional $4.9 million. Why? Well, one reason is the new police chief’s crackdown on drug sales in the Tenderloin — which is packing the jails. "We’re defiantly looking at a lot of new drug cases," Sheriff Mike Hennessey, who has had to open three new housing units to fit all the prisoners, told us. The crackdown may be good public policy (or not) — but there was never any discussion of how much it would cost. And the mayor and the chief never asked the supervisors to authorize adequate spending for it.

So as a matter of policy, the mayor apparently thinks it’s worth $7 million to arrest drug dealers — but not worth $7 million to keep public-health workers who save lives every day on the job. That’s a policy decision that was made arbitrarily — and that kind of discussion needs to happen on a dozen or more fronts.

The mayor told his department heads Nov. 19 to expect 20 percent cuts — and to prepare for as much as 30 percent. But that’s not going to happen across the board. Unless the police stop arresting people, for example, the sheriff won’t be able to cut 20 percent of his budget without letting prisoners go. The mayor won’t take the political heat for cutting that much from cops and fire. So the burden will fall on public health, Muni, human services, recreation and parks, and other smaller departments. And the level of cuts will render those agencies unable to provide basic services.

So let’s be honest: there is simply no way to close a deficit this large without new taxes. That’s just reality, and anyone who denies it is refusing to face facts. San Francisco can’t survive with basic services — like police, fire, and public health — intact on the amount of money the controller projects the city will collect in the next year.

Newsom will be guilty of destroying the entire social service infrastructure in this city if he refuses to push tax hikes. And he’ll be damaging the local economy if he does it piecemeal.

We’ve been clamoring for years for an overhaul of the city’s tax structure, and now there’s a hurricane-force fiscal storm forcing the issue. If Newsom doesn’t announce plans to hold open, public discussions and draft a new tax policy for the city (and we doubt that will happen) then the supervisors must act, now. Board President David Chiu already had a broad-based committee work on tax reform. Now the board needs to begin drafting comprehensive legislation to change the way the city collects money — with the aim of putting a measure on the ballot as early as possible next year.

The goal should be not only to bring in another $250 million (at least) in new revenue, but to shift the tax burden away from small businesses and the poor and middle class and onto the wealthy. A big first step: get rid of the flat business tax and replace it with a progressive gross receipts tax that charges the biggest companies a higher percentage. Other cities have found numerous other ways to raise money — such parcel taxes, which aren’t quite as fair as ad valorem property taxes, but at least tax property owners, who in general are a wealthier class. A properly written utility users tax would hit big companies that use (and sometimes waste) a lot of power. And of course, a tax on income earned in the city — which would cover commuters who use city services but don’t pay city taxes — is among the most progressive ways to bring in new money.

Meanwhile, let’s remember: fee hikes (for Muni rides, for use of city pools and playing fields etc.) are just hidden taxes — on the poor and middle class.

State law makes it hard to raise taxes; any measure would have to go to the voters. But a major tax-reform overhaul that doesn’t just raise a few taxes on a targeted group but makes the entire system more fair for everyone, ought to be a ballot-box winner — particularly if the mayor is willing to raise money and lead the battle to pass it.


In a Nov. 18 interview with Hank Plante, the KCBS political editor, a testy and impatient Newsom ducked specific questions about how he was going to solve the budget shortfall. After saying that he doesn’t read the newspapers (which, frankly, is either a lie or utterly shameful for a big-city mayor, and leaves him looking as ill-informed as former President Ronald Reagan) he simply said the deficit would be "a lot of work."

That’s an understatement — and Newsom needs to do more than sit in his office and whine about the media. He needs to be out in public, addressing the budget crisis — and he needs to let reporters and residents and business people and the supervisors ask questions and get straight answers.

It’s fine to say that at this point, nobody knows how to solve the problem. It’s not okay to say: trust me, I’ll get back to you on that. This is a citywide crisis, and it’s essential that the public feels involved.

This is the biggest crisis since Gavin Newsom took office. It’s time he started acting like it.

Supes vote to suspend public health layoffs for two months

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By Rebecca Bowe

Department of Public Health employees who are affected by budget cuts have reason to breathe a temporary sigh of relief after today’s Board of Supervisors meeting. Eight supervisors, the two-thirds majority needed to pass the item, voted to spend roughly $1.8 million in the Department of Public Health to push back pending layoffs until the end of January. Sup. David Campos suggested the compromise move, emphasizing that job loss is particularly bitter when it strikes during the holiday season.

Although the supervisors — excluding Sups. Carmen Chu, Sean Elsbernd, and Michela Alioto-Pier, who all voted no — have expressed their intentions to keep the public health workers in their jobs for now, many questions still remain.

The biggest one: What will Mayor Gavin Newsom do? He could veto the move, or, he could simply decide not to appropriate the money, as Sup. Elsbernd made very clear during the meeting.

In the corridor just outside the Board Chambers, City Controller Ben Rosenfield told the Guardian that he believes the layoffs will still go into effect. “Everything the mayor has indicated to me is that they do not intend to spend the funds,” he said. “This could be seen as partially an academic exercise.”

But several feet away, SEIU spokesperson Carlos Rivera sounded more optimistic: “Right now, we are just going to celebrate this, and hopefully the mayor will come around and not be the Grinch who Stole Christmas,” he said. “I know he has a big heart.”

Editorial: Time for serious budget reform

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It’s time to quit with the patches, quit with the one-time solutions and fee hikes

EDITORIAL Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, likes to say that politicians should never let a crisis go to waste — but that’s what happened in San Francisco last summer, when the mayor and the supervisors approved a budget deal that didn’t involve any real structural reform, didn’t solve any long-term problems, and didn’t even last six months.

Now there’s a new crisis, one that, if anything, is worse. Cutting almost a half-billion dollars from the city budget last year was absolutely brutal. But cutting another half-billion, which is what the controller is now talking about, seems almost inconceivable.

Supes to vote on restoring DPH cuts (again)

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By Rebecca Bowe

This afternoon, a special meeting of the Budget & Finance Committee will be held to determine whether to take roughly $8 million out of the Department of Public Health reserve — money that’s already spoken for, but that some Supervisors say will be replenished before the next budget cycle — in order to stave off layoffs and salary cuts to front-line city workers in the Department of Public Health. Directly after the special meeting, the item will go before the full Board for a vote at today’s meeting.

SEIU Local 1021, the union representing city workers who’ve been pitted in an ongoing battle with mayor since the budget cuts were announced, has done its best to line up the eight votes needed to restore the cuts, leaning heavily on Sup. Sophie Maxwell to reverse her prior position by robo-calling in her district and encouraging political heavyweights to urge her to support the item.

On a conference call yesterday afternoon, Assembly Member Tom Ammiano said the city should count on stimulus dollars generated by Assembly Bill 1383 to refund the roughly $8 million.

“There seems to be a dispute about those funds, but we took the extra step to get the funding,” Ammiano said, noting that he worked with Assembly Member Dave Jones on the legislation that secures the money for public health services. “They pulled the trigger much too early here,” Ammiano said, referring to the layoffs. Noting that the mayor seemed to be disputing the purpose of the funding, Ammiano said, “I thought the purpose was to prevent layoffs.”

When asked what the Mayor Gavin Newsom thought the money should be used for, his press secretary, Joe Arellano, indicated that Newsom disagrees that it should be applied to stave off immediate layoffs. “The funds will ultimately will be used to prevent layoffs and other cuts, since, assuming it comes to us in time to apply toward next year’s deficit, it will reduce the cuts we need to make in order to balance,” Arellano said.

Check back here later for an update.

Newsom talks taxes

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By Tim Redmond

And he appears to be against them. At least, that’s what a brief interview with SF Appeal suggests:

Although that doesn’t mean the Mayor is seriously considering EVERYTHING — especially not tax hikes. The same wisdom as before applies: tax hikes don’t poll well, therefore it’s probably a waste of time to present them to voters. Newsom doesn’t support browning out fire stations, and wants to protect police officers’ salaries (which increased by another 4 percent this year). A bigger sales tax only hits poor voters, Newsom said. The state’s already raising taxes, and the school district has its own parcel tax measure, so we’re back to controversial moneymakers like the condo-conversion fee.

“They hate it,” said Newsom, gesturing to Board members’ doors. Though the Mayor was quick to mention that he and Avalos have a good working relationship, something that might not always play well with Avalos’s progressive buddies on the board.

Ah yes, the condo conversion fees. The idea is to make it easier to turn rental housing into condominiums as long as you pay a fee. That would, of course, decimate the rental housing stock and lead to more evictions.

But the Examiner reports that the mayor seems to be ready to play some political hardball — he won’t talk about new taxes unless the supes give him his condo conversions and a equally bad plan to sell of taxicab permits:

Generating more revenue could soften the blow of the cuts. Newsom indicated he has not ruled out tax measures on the November ballot. But he also emphasized the need to approve two of his previous proposals that stalled after meeting opposition, including from members of the Board of Supervisors. Those proposals are charging a fee for people who want to do a condo-conversion right away, instead of having to wait for years, and auctioning off permits to drive taxicabs.

The thing about both of those items is that they represent short-term money. You’ll get a lot of fees quickly — but no structural fix.

And the supervisors won’t want to go for either of them.

Editor’s Notes

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Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

You can see the city’s next fiscal crisis, and all the bloodshed it will involve, sticking up its ugly head at the Board of Supervisors these days.

The immediate issue on the table is a supplemental appropriation of $7 million to save the jobs of some 500 frontline public health workers who are scheduled to receive pink slips this month. But the deeper issue is how the supervisors are going to deal with the fundamental unfairness of the mayor’s budget — particularly as the issue gets reopened this winter. Because the city’s finances are not improving, and it’s almost certain that there will have to be midyear changes. And — sadly — there’s no indication that Mayor Gavin Newsom is going to be any more willing to work with the board and look for progressive solutions than he was in the summer.

The budget deal the supervisors signed off on in June wasn’t such a good deal at all, in part because it rested on Newsom’s promise to work toward a revenue measure for the November ballot. In retrospect, San Francisco missed an opportunity here — lots of Bay Area cities went to the ballot with tax increases to head off service cuts, and voters approved nearly all of them.

But Newsom never tried very hard to convince his allies on the board to go along with that plan and let the whole thing slide, putting the city in the position where layoffs that will cut deeply into the public health infrastructure are moving forward.

And now seven supervisors — all of the progressives plus Bevan Dufty — are ready to take an emergency step to stop the layoffs. They’re willing to put $7 million in reserve money up front, now. And if they can convince Sophie Maxwell to change her position and join them, the board will put the ball right back in the mayor’s court.

The thing is, the city’s budget crisis never really goes away. It’s a structural imbalance; save for the occasional boom years, San Francisco simply doesn’t bring in enough revenue to cover the costs of services people in this city want and need. It’s much worse in a recession, of course, but it’s always bad. And it’s going to remain an annual problem until the folks at City Hall make some major structural changes.

If, for example, we really want to avoid raising any new taxes — Newsom’s line — then we have to downsize, and the only fair way to do that is to start at the top. There are highly paid management–level people all over this city who don’t do nearly as much work in a week as a typical nurse’s aide does every day. The rampant cronyism slowed down after Mayor Willie Brown left office, but it never went away. A lot of Brown appointees still have cush jobs, and Newsom has added to the list. None of those folks ever get laid off.

With the layoffs scheduled this month, more than 1,000 members of SEIU Local 1021 — the union that represents frontline workers — will have been laid off. How many members of the Management Employees Association? Exactly 25.

And if we’re not going to look at radical restructuring, starting with department organization and management, then we have to bring in more money. That’s taxes, Gavin. In fact, to make this city solvent for the future we should probably do both.

Nobody wants to talk about that, though. So the women who hold the public health system together get canned, the wealthy enjoy low taxes, and the crisis goes one, year after year.

I hope Sup. Maxwell realizes what this is about — because if she votes the right way, it might actually force the mayor to make some of those tough choices he loves to talk about.

Fixing police discipline

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Fixing police discipline

EDITORIAL San Francisco’s new police chief wants more authority to discipline problem officers. He’s been talking about it since the day he arrived, and he’s getting some political traction. Sup. David Chiu has called for a hearing in the next few weeks, and it’s likely that the chief will seek a Charter Amendment next year to redefine how the top cop and Police Commission handle personnel issues.

We have no problem giving the chief the right to fire a bad cop. In fact, if George Gascón wants to quickly rid the force of the small number of violent and unprofessional officers who are responsible for most of the serious discipline problems, more power to him.

But Gascón isn’t stopping there — he wants to reduce the power of the commission and possibly the Office of Citizen Complaints. And that’s a very bad idea.

Police discipline is one of the biggest problems facing the force. The city has paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements in police abuse cases. Rogue cops have beaten, harassed, intimidated, and sometimes killed innocent people. And because so few officers ever face serious penalties, the bad behavior goes on unabated.

Gascón recognizes that. He told us in an interview in October that he thinks there are 10 cops on the force who ought to be fired, right now. That would send a powerful message: in the past 20 years, fewer than five police officers have ever been fired for misconduct.

Right now only the Police Commission can terminate an officer; the most the chief can issue on his own is a 10-day suspension. And there’s a huge backlog of discipline cases. That’s partly the result of the system itself — commissioners are part-time appointees and discipline hearings are time-consuming. It’s also partly the fault of the department — previous chiefs have shown little interest in expediting discipline cases and have worked to thwart the ability of the Office of Citizen Complains to complete investigations.

Gascón told us he’d like to see the commission become an appellate body. The chief would make most discipline decisions, and if an officer thought the ruling was unfair, he or she could take it up with the civilian panel. We understand his frustration with the process, but his proposal doesn’t make sense.

If Gascón is serious about weeding out problem cops (and taking on the politically powerful Police Officers Association to do it), he’d be the first chief in decades to do so. His recent predecessors showed almost no interest in discipline, and even if Gascón turns out to be the toughest chief in history, he won’t be here forever, and his successor might return to the bad old days.

That’s why the current system allows the OCC to take cases directly to the commission if the agency director feels that the chief has failed to act. That ability is central to any civilian oversight process and must remain as part of any reform.

We don’t see why there has to be any conflict here at all. We’re fine with giving the chief the extra authority to fire cops — and leaving the rest of the system intact. Let the chief enact firm discipline — and if he doesn’t, let the OCC and commission do it. That would preserve the checks and balances in the system and allow Gascón to clear up some of the disciplinary backlog and get rid of the worst problem officers.

San Francisco has long operated under the proposition that civilians, not police officers, should conduct investigations of complaints against cops — and should have the final authority on the disposition of those complaints. The supervisors should be open to giving Gascón what he wants — but not if it means dismantling the heart of a civilian-oversight program.

And if Gascón wants the voters to trust him with front-line discipline, let’s see some action. Work with the commission to fire those 10 bad cops — now — and we’ll all have a lot more faith in your reform credentials.

DPH Budget Cuts: The saga continues

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By Rebecca Bowe

The ongoing saga of budget cuts affecting a majority of people of color and women in the city’s Department of Public Health took yet another twist this afternoon.

For now, the Budget & Finance Committee has voted to restore the cuts, but it won’t be heard by the full Board of Supervisors until next Tuesday, when eight votes will still be needed to pass the $8 million supplemental appropriation. Meanwhile, in the wake of the city controller’s dramatic pronouncement yesterday that the Board wasn’t allowed to take anything out of the General Fund reserve, Sup. Chris Daly had to do some fancy footwork to come up with a new way to restore the cuts.

At a special meeting of the Budget & Finance Committee this afternoon, Supervisors voted to restore the cuts — but since City Controller Ben Rosenfield said he was unable to certify a spending decision that would draw approximately $8 million from the General Fund reserve, Supervisors voted to dip into the $45 million that the Board placed on reserve across major city departments at the 11th hour of budget deliberations back in July. In the Department of Public Health, it represents about $11.9 million in salaries and benefits. Since drawing from this pot of money wouldn’t render the budget out of balance, the city controller can sign off on it as a legitimate move.

The idea to use the DPH reserve, instead of General Fund reserve dollars, was suggested by Sup. Chris Daly after City Controller Ben Rosenfield announced yesterday afternoon that he would not allow the Board to vote on a supplemental appropriation that spent General Fund reserve dollars because the city is projected to be in dire straits financially. “The previously appropriated spending no longer appears to be supportable,” Rosenfield told the Supervisors this afternoon. “The difference exceeds the value of the General Fund reserve.”

The city controller has never barred the Board from taking a vote on a supplemental appropriation due to a budget deficit. But Rosenfield said this afternoon that in the handful of instances when the controller has had to notify the city of a projected budgetary shortfall, this was the first time that a vote was pending on a supplemental appropriation.

Controller, in radical move, defies supes

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By Tim Redmond

In a move that’s unprecedented in modern San Francisco history, city controller Ben Rosenfield appears poised to try to block the Board of Supervisors from approving a $7 million supplemental budget appropriation to prevent 500 layoffs of frontline health department workers.

It’s the latest twist in a convoluted battle that pits SEIU Local 1021 and the progressives on the board against the mayor, who wants to lay off nurses aides and clerical workers.

In a budgetmessage posted today, Rosenfield says that the city is running $53 million in the red, and that “until this shortfall is addressed, the Controller’s Office will not be able to certify funds from the General Fund Reserve for other appropriations.”

Rosenfield, a Newsom appointee, is apparently relying on a very old City Charter section that looks like this:

S.F. Charter Sec. 9.113 (d) “General Fiscal Provisions”

No ordinance or resolution for the expenditure of money, except the
annual appropriation ordinance, shall be passed by the Board of
Supervisors unless the Controller first certifies to the Board that
there is a sufficient unencumbered balance in a fund that may legally be
used for such proposed expenditure, and that, in the judgment of the
Controller, revenues as anticipated in the appropriation ordinance for
such fiscal year and properly applicable to meet such proposed
expenditures will be available in the treasury in sufficient amount to
meet the same as it becomes due.

But in my 25 years of covering City Hall, I have never once seen this happen. There have been bad budget deficits before, and supplemental appropriations, and the controller has never told the supervisors that they can’t spend reserve money.

“About the only thing Rosenfield and I agree on is that this has never been done before,” Sup. Chris Daly told me this evening.

The controller’s report notes that several city departments are running over budget — but interestingly, Human Services and Public Health, the targets of the layoffs, are running a surplus of $8.1 million (exactly what the supervisors want to spend).

Among those departments facing shortfalls: The Sheriff’s Office, which is in the red because of “an increase in jail population” — possibly due to the new police chief’s crackdown on drug dealing in the Tenderloin.

I couldn’t reach Rosenfield tonight, but Daly notes that the same legislation was before the board last week, and Rosenfield didn’t object. “So he’s already certified it,” Daly said. “And I’m not sure how he can decertify it now.”

I’m not going to argue that the city has money to burn, but there are always mid-year budget changes in bad times. The supes and the mayor are going to have to make some budget adjustments. But there’s also unanticipated money coming in — for example, San Francisco stands to get about $33 million in federal stimulus money for the Department of Public Health in April, and that funding will be retroactive to the previous year. So this year’s shortfall will actually be $33 million less.

Tina Johnson, a legislative affairs staffer for the state Department of Health Care Services, confirmed the near-certain availability of that money in a Nov. 16th letter to state Sen. Leland Yee.

In any other year, I suspect the controller would follow the normal practice of informing the mayor and the supes that the budget was out of line (as it is, in one way or another, almost every year) and then allow them to come up with some mid-year corrections. But this battle between Local 1021 and the mayor has gotten ugly, and I’m sure there was pressure on Rosenfield.

Look for a showdown at the board meeting tomorrow (Nov. 17). Daly told me that whatever Rosenfield says, “we’re going to have a vote on this.”

Ballard is out, but will Newsom’s tone change?

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By Steven T. Jones

The Mayor’s Office has announced the departure of press secretary Nathan Ballard, a glib and caustic communicator who unnecessarily sowed division with members of the Board of Supervisors and various community groups. The question now is whether this represents an impending change in tone for the lame-duck mayor.

While this afternoon’s press release makes the split sound amicable, it’s hard to know what’s actually going on in this increasingly squirrely administration. But Mayor Gavin Newsom’s quote in the release is telling: “Nathan Ballard is unflappable, smart and a fierce advocate.”

I would agree with each of those adjectives, but it was the last one that really characterized his approach and its contribution to the bunker mentality that the Newsom Administration has developed over the last few years, with its Nixonian penchant to treat all potential opponents as enemies to be publicly scorned and belittled.

Sophie Maxwell’s big test

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By Tim Redmond

Shortly after the new supervisors were elected last fall, Sup. Sophie Maxwell came by the Bay Guardian to talk about the board presidency. She was a candidate, and she knew she needed progressive support to get the job. So she told us about her political views and accomplishments and asked why we didn’t consider her a “progressive.”

Well, we’ve had some (respectful) disagreements with Sup. Maxwell over redevelopment and Home Depot. But what really concerned us, then and now, was whether Maxwell was willing to defy the mayor and take a hard line on city budget issues.

And now comes a major test.

The progressives on the board — along with Sup. Bevan Dufty, who is often a more moderate vote — are pushing to force the mayor to rescind the layoffs of 500 front-line health-care workers.

The nurses aides and clerical workers are almost all people of color, mostly women, and mostly making less than $50,000 a year. Sup. John Avalos has proposed that the city take $7 million out of reserves to save their jobs. That’s a temporary fix — in the long run, San Francisco needs to raise taxes to get some more revenue in, or at least do layoffs more equitably.

The Avalos legislation requires eight votes. Union activists say Maxwell appeared to be on their side last week, but after meeting with the mayor’s chief of staff, Steve Kawa, she voted against the measure Nov. 10th. That left it one vote short of passage.

It also sparked a fight between Maxwell and Sup. Chris Daly, which isn’t doing anyone any good.

But it’s not over. The Avalos bill is back in committee, and will come before the board again in the next two weeks. And Maxwell has to face a tough decision.

The argument that there’s no money available to save these jobs doesn’t make sense to me. The city’s likely to receive $33 million in extra public health money next year through a state bill known as AB 1383.

Besides, the entire city budget is out of whack already; revenue isn’t up to expectations and the deficit is growing for next year, so the mayor could (and should) make some mid-year changes — like layoffs at the top.

I haven’t been able to reach Maxwell by phone. But this one’s going to go down as a litmus test: When it comes to saving the jobs of working-class people of color, or siding with the mayor, where will she come down?

It’s clear where all the progressives on the board are. And that’s where Maxwell should be.

John Ross at Modern Times

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By Tim Redmond

John Ross, author, poet, civic honoree and longtime Bay Guardian Mexico City correspondent, will be at Modern Times Nov. 18th to read from his new book, El Monstruo.

John is a San Francisco treasure, and his events are not to be missed. Here’s the scoop:

SAN FRANCISCO (Nov. 2nd) – Poet/author/journalist/ and globe-trotting troublemaker John Ross will present his latest cult classic “El Monstruo – Dread & Redemption In Mexico City” (Nation Books) on Wednesday, November 18th at Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District beginning at 7:00 PM.

“El Monstruo” (“The Monster”) tells the sordid tale of Mexico City, the most contaminated, corrupt, crime-ridden, and conflictive megalopolis in the Americas, where Ross has lived for the past quarter of a century. The narrative spans no less than 50,000,000 years, beginning way back in the Paleocene and time traveling all the way to last spring’s swine flu panic.

“John Ross sings a lusty corrido about a great betrayed city” writes Mike Davis, author of “City Of Quartz” and “Planet Of Slums.” “Ross has fashioned a stirring love letter and cautionary tale about his beloved Mexico City,” adds Kirkus Reviews.

John Ross is the author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction and an equal number of poetry chapbooks, the most recent of which is “Bomba!” (Calaca de Pelon, Mexico City.) “Iraqigirl”, a diary of a teenager coming of age under U.S. occupation that Ross developed and edited was published by Haymarket this July. John Ross is the winner of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Upton Sinclair Prize (The “Uppie”) for his 2005 phantasmagorical autobiography “Murdered By Capitalism – 150 Years of Life & Death On The American Left” and the 1995 American Book Award for “Rebellion From the Roots”, the first published account of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas that the author has accompanied from its earliest hour and about which he has written four books.

In addition to Modern Times, John Ross will present “El Monstruo” at Northtown Books, 957 Street in Arcata California on Friday the 13th at 7 PM and will bring the Monster to the UC Berkeley campus when he speaks at the Center for Latino Policy Research, 2547 Channing Way, on MonsY, November 30th at Noon.

In recognition for his decades-long accomplishments as an activist and writer, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently declared May 12th “John Ross Day.”

Declaring that San Francisco has become “a sanctuary city for the rich,” Ross declined the “honor.”

Inside the mayor’s office with SEIU Local 1021

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By Rebecca Bowe

Yesterday, around 4 p.m., 22 union members rushed into the mayor’s office (the plush reception area on the other side of those stately double doors) and demanded to meet with Mayor Gavin Newsom. Immediately blocked by security from continuing all the way to the mayor, they vowed to wait — and remained there for about two hours. The protesters were there as representatives or supporters of SEIU Local 1021, which has launched a months-long fight against Newsom in the wake of layoffs and deep salary cuts in the Department of Public Health inflicted by city budget cuts.

In the City Hall corridor just outside the mayor’s office, scores of other SEIU members gathered in support of those inside the reception area. Chants, cheers, and the refrain from Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” could be heard from outside. The SEIU members inside, meanwhile, circled up and prepared to be arrested. Meanwhile, the clerks working in the reception area continued diligently working away at their desks. (Each of the mayoral staffers declined to comment. At one point, mayoral spokesman Nathan Ballard walked through the room, and the union members hollered at him to please ask the mayor to show some leadership. “Will do,” he said with a smile, and disappeared behind a door.)

The mayor never showed. Nor did any clash take place between the union members and the plainclothes security officers who were coolly guarding the doors leading out to the corridor and back to the mayor’s actual office. The union members stayed until approximately 6:15 p.m., chanting, singing, delivering impromptu speeches, and resolving that they would keep up the fight. Here’s what it was like in there.

They finally negotiated an exit with the security officers, and joined the others outside the doors.

Then, they flooded into the street outside City Hall with the other workers and proceeded to circle around the intersection of Polk and McAllister. Sup. Chris Daly joined them and thanked them for their work, vowing to do what he could to restore the cuts.

At Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, supervisors voted seven to four to dip into the General Fund reserve to restore the jobs of certified nursing assistants and unit clerks in the city’s Department of Public Health.

But after it was announced that the ordinance had passed on first reading, and the SEIU workers who’d packed the Board Chambers let out a celebratory whoop, some one pointed out that eight votes were needed for approval. The measure had actually failed — and the disappointment in the room was palpable.

Housing cars or people?

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Housing cars or people?

news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has introduced legislation that would curtail the ability of residential property owners in Telegraph Hill, North Beach, and Chinatown to evict tenants and replace them with garages.

The ordinance, which is currently being reviewed by staff before it is considered by the Planning Commission, seeks to prohibit the construction of garages in rental properties that have been the site of a no-fault eviction in the past decade. Even if no evictions have occurred, owners would have to apply for a conditional use permit from the Planning Department to build the garage.

"We have seen a pattern of applications for garage installations following no-fault evictions," Chiu aide David Noyola explained.

The Ellis Act, a state law passed in 1986, gives owners the right to evict tenants if they decide to "withdraw from the rental market." The law specifies that all units in the building must be evicted. In 2005, the Board of Supervisors also began requiring landlords to pay $4,500 to each evicted tenant for relocation costs, with an additional $3,000 for seniors and the disabled.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenant Union, said the Ellis Act was intended to allow property owners to get out of the business of being a landlord, but "in practice it is utilized far more often by developers who are looking to rent the properties at considerable profit."

Although there are restrictions on re-renting property that has been cleared of tenants under the Ellis Act, a primary concern of tenant activists is the use of evictions to convert the building into a tenancy-in-common. A TIC is a form of joint ownership whereby multiple owners can buy the building and live in separate units.

"Often the real estate developer will try to make improvements following a TIC conversion to make it more sellable, and one of those is garages," Gullicksen said.

Malcolm Yeung, the public policy manager of the Chinatown Community Development Center, told us that "a garage generally increases the market value of a property by $30,000 to $50,000."

Yeung worked with Chiu’s office to develop the legislation after arguing in a discretionary review hearing before the Planning Commission that a particular Ellis Act eviction in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood was in violation of Sec. 101.1(b) of the San Francisco Planning Code, which states "that existing housing and neighborhood character be conserved and protected in order to preserve the cultural and economic diversity of our neighborhoods."

Following the distribution of Ellis Act notices to four low-income families, the property owner also filed for a garage add-on. Yeung successfully made the case that the eviction contradicted the Planning Code’s commitment to the preservation of economic diversity. He told us that the addition of garages "incentivizes owners to take on the financial costs of an Ellis Act eviction" and can "transform communities from long-term low-income residents to TICs, which go on the market at high value."

Gullicksen also said landlords often threaten an Ellis Act eviction and offer a buyout. "One of the benefits of the legislation is that it put tenants more in the driver’s seat when negotiating a buyout," he said. He also noted that homeowners are twice as likely to own cars as renters, which means that the conversions to TICs increase the number of vehicles in neighborhoods already congested with automobiles.

But like with all housing activity, there have been a greatly reduced number of both Ellis Act evictions and buyouts since the crash of the housing and credit markets a year ago, slowing to zero from March through May before slowly picking up in July.

Critics have decried the legislation as creating the burden of obtaining a conditional use permit and exacerbating the lack of street parking in the neighborhoods. But Noyola told us, "This problem has been around for a long time and will continue to be an issue when the market picks up again."

The legislation would also decrease the number of parking spaces that may be built with each new housing unit, part of a citywide trend. Noyola said the legislation is "progressive planning policy that prioritizes housing over parking, especially in the densest part of the city."

Crossing the line

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Crossing the line

sarah@sfbg.com

Estella (a fake name she used to protect her identity) is a single mother of five who came to the United States from Latin America when her oldest daughter was a baby, hoping for a better future for her family.

But thanks to a shift in San Francisco’s sanctuary policy that Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered last year, Estella’s daughter — we’ll call her Maria, now 15 — was seized by federal immigration authorities this fall, ripped from her family and community, and shipped to a detention center in Miami.

Her crime: she got in a fight with her younger, U.S.-born sister.

The experience shattered Estella’s dreams and terrified her family, whom immigration experts describe as "mixed status" because Estella also has U.S.-born children.

It also convinced Estella to speak out publicly to try to convince Newsom that legislation that ensures due process for kids like her daughter is the right thing to do.

Last month, a veto-proof majority of the Board of Supervisors voted to support amendments to Newsom’s current policy in an effort to make sure juveniles get their day in court before being hastily and needlessly referred to federal immigration authorities.

But the next day, Newsom vetoed the legislation introduced by Sup. David Campos, claiming it violates federal law. And now Newsom is refusing to debate the issue with Campos or meet with the community whose kids are at risk of being deported because someone in local law enforcement suspects them of being here without paperwork and accuses them of committing a serious crime.

Under Newsom’s policy, which he ordered without public review in June 2008, city officials are required to refer juveniles whom they suspect of being undocumented felons to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when they book them at Juvenile Hall.

Last month Newsom defended his policy, saying that the city’s sanctuary ordinance, as originally conceived and adopted, was designed to protect law-abiding city residents.

"It was never meant to serve as a shield for people accused of committing serious crimes in our city," Newsom wrote in his veto letter.

His comments followed close on the heels of a San Francisco Chronicle editorial claiming the majority of these juveniles detained are subsequently found guilty of serious crimes.

But this is not true: the Juvenile Probation Department’s 2008 statistics show that 68 percent of the young people arrested in San Francisco that year were found to be innocent.

And as Estella’s story shows, under Newsom’s policy juveniles who have not committed serious crimes are at risk of being reported and detained for possible deportation.

This means a teenager — a 15-year-old girl in this case — could get dropped off in a country she last saw when she was a baby, with no family to meet and take care of her. These kids are at risk of being preyed upon by criminal gangs or "coyotes," often-unscrupulous human traffickers known to abuse and abandon young people during the perilous border crossing.

Most kids in Maria’s situation would want to return to their U.S. home — to their parents, families, friends — the only community they know. But since the federal government has made border crossings increasingly perilous, getting back to the U.S. often requires several thousand dollars in smuggler fees — leaving teens open to harsh exploitation.

In other words, deportation — in Maria’s case, for the crime of a fight with her sister — could be a sentence to years of forced labor, life in a violent gang … or death.

BAD DAY AT SCHOOL


It’s not clear how Maria got into the altercation at school with her sister; fights between siblings and friends in high school are hardly a rare or even terribly remarkable experience. But in this case, Estella told us, a school official reported her daughters’ fight to a social worker, who brought a police officer to Estella’s house for questioning.

As a result, Estella’s daughter was taken to Juvenile Hall. A year ago, she would have had access to a lawyer, who would have helped sort things out. If the fight had been serious or violent, she might have been placed on supervised probation.

But thanks to Newsom’s new policy, probation officers referred her to ICE and its agents swooped in, seized her, and shipped her to Miami.

Ultimately, a juvenile judge in San Francisco recommended Estella’s daughter be put on probation — but by that time, Maria was already in Florida, in a detention center run by a private company under contract to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

Detainees have no right to a public defender or free legal services. It’s often hard for their families to find out exactly where they are, so detainees wait in detention for immigration officials to decide what to do next.

Maria was fortunate that ORR recommended temporary reunification. Immigrant advocates say that Estella’s daughter is now back in the Bay Area with her family, but is still under deportation proceedings.

They note that one way parents can get their kids back from ICE is by giving up information — including the names, fingerprints, and addresses of other family members — to federal immigration authorities. But parents are not always willing to do that, especially if it could lead to other family members, including children, being deported.

As of press time, a super-majority on the Board of Supervisors is planning to override Newsom’s veto of Campos’ legislation at its Nov. 10 meeting. But the mayor has said he intends to ignore the Campos legislation — a posture that is not only legally questionable, but leaves immigrant parents facing the ongoing nightmare that their teens could get deported to a country they never knew for a crime they didn’t commit.

Immigrant advocates cite the case of a 14-year-old boy who is under ICE removal proceedings after he brought a BB-gun to school, and a Mexican youth who was deported, even though the District Attorney’s Office dismissed the robbery charges against him.

Patti Lee, managing attorney for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office Juvenile Unit, described how the feds recently snatched a kid outside juvenile court, even though the District Attorney’s Office had dismissed his case.

"The kid was coming into court with his mother and the ICE agent had a photo of him, and grabbed him outside the building," Lee said. "His mom was hysterical and it was traumatic for our staff."

These are not isolated cases. ICE spokesperson Virginia Kice told us that 150 juveniles from San Francisco have been referred to ICE, and 114 have been taken into federal custody and transferred to detention facilities since Newsom ordered his policy change in 2008.

Immigration advocates say some of the kids have been sent to Yolo County, while others have been shipped to Oregon, Washington, Indiana, and Florida, making visits from family members, who may themselves be undocumented, extremely difficult.

Eric Quezada, an immigrant advocate and the executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, told us that while kids may try crossing the border to rejoin their families and friends, "lacking the serious dollars to come back, many are deported into extreme poverty or to be part of a gang."

Lee notes that federal immigration authorities have a duty to reunite children with their families. "But if the family is undocumented, its members are afraid to step forward, afraid to step into the Youth Guidance Center," Lee said. "So there are some children sent back to their alleged country of origin, without a family and resources. Because we can’t track them, that may be a death sentence."

DEATH MARCH


As a volunteer with No Mas Muertes (No More Deaths), a humanitarian camp in Arizona, SF Pride member Molly Goldberg has seen firsthand what being deported and trying to cross the border means to immigrants in terms of loss of dignity and life.

Arizona has been an immigrant rights testing ground for years. Shortly after its creation as an agency, the Department of Homeland Security provided millions of dollars to build a wall blocking the easiest terrain, forcing border crossers into the most rugged and dangerous areas, Goldberg said.

"They are bottle-necking it so folks cross in the most difficult, deadly area," she said.

Since the wall went up, the numbers crossing have gone down — but numbers dying have gone up. Goldberg said 184 people have died so far this year. But the numbers of dead could be much higher. "Because of the vultures and other scavengers, bodies are gone pretty quickly," she said.

This year, Service Employee International Union Local 1021 organizer Robert Haaland accompanied Goldberg to the border. Haaland says what he saw convinced him of the need for Campos’ amendment.

"I kept thinking about the Campos legislation in terms of seeing the impact of people crossing the border after being deported," Haaland said. He described a makeshift memorial to a 14-year-old El Salvadoran girl named Josseline whom smugglers left behind after she got sick from eating a bad can of tuna, according to her younger brother. He managed to cross the border, but Josseline died after wandering alone and without water in the border’s dry and inhospitable no man’s land for a week.

Others get left behind and die because they are wearing the wrong shoes and end up with badly blistered feet or are too weak to continue the grueling trek. Haaland recalled seeing water bottles that volunteers had left on the coyote trails but had subsequently been slashed, presumably by nativist vigilantes.

"The Border Patrol is using the desert as a weapon and harassing people who go to the border to give humanitarian aid," Haaland said.

That’s where some of the kids Newsom has sent for deportation will wind up.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?


Although Newsom has made it clear he intends to keep referring kids to ICE, their whereabouts and fate under his policy remains somewhat of a mystery.

Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesperson for ORR, which is responsible for detained juveniles deemed "unaccompanied" (a category they could be placed in if they refuse to divulge the whereabouts of undocumented family members in the U.S.) said he can’t divulge their precise whereabouts because of juvenile confidentiality rules.

Wolfe told the Guardian that kids could be placed in juvenile halls or shelter-like facilities run by private contractors, depending on their crimes. He said ORR is required to report to Congress annually about the program, but the report for FY 2008-09 won’t be available for a few months.

In the meantime, Wolfe e-mailed the Guardian a copy of ORR’s 2007-08 report, which includes a map featuring colored circles to represent the numbers of apprehended kids based on Department of Homeland Security referrals.

The map shows that in 2007-08, less than 100 juveniles were apprehended in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington; 100-250 were apprehended in San Diego; 1,000-1,600 in Phoenix; and 1,600-2,600 at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Presumably, next year’s map will include a colored circle around San Francisco, representing an apprehension rate similar to San Diego. But it probably won’t reveal which facilities these kids were sent to or whether they were ultimately deported, even though these kids were apprehended on the basis of referrals made by local city officials.

Nor will it show what the local community knows full well: that many deported kids cross back over the border to rejoin their families. Only now, because they have been deported, they are forced to go underground and are at risk if being recruited by gangs.

The federal government’s Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program was transferred from ORR to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. "The program is designed to provide for the care and placement of unaccompanied alien minors apprehended in the U.S. by Homeland Security agents, border patrol officers, or other law enforcement agencies and are taken into care pending resolution of their claims for relief under U.S. immigration law or released to adult family members or responsible adult guardians," reads the U.S. Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. "Resolution of their claims may result in release, granting of an immigration status (such as special immigrant juvenile or asylum), voluntary departure, or removal."

According to a 2008 ORR report, "a great number of UAC have been subjected to severe trauma, including sexual abuse and sexual assault in their home countries or on their journey to the U.S.: gang violence, domestic violence, traumatic loss of a parent, and physical abuse and neglect. In addition, UAC experience the increased probability of ongoing trauma as a result of their uncertain legal status and return to difficult life circumstances."

The report also notes that "UAC have indicated that, among other reasons, they leave their home countries for the U.S. to rejoin family, escape abusive family relationships in their home country, or find work to support their families in their home country."

ORR has approximately 7,200 UAC a year in its facilities, which are operated by organizations such as the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. There are more than 41 ORR-funded care provider facilities in 10 different states.

Last year’s ORR report noted that average length of stay in federal detention facilities is 55 days before children are released to family members and other sponsors, move into the adult system, or are returned to their home countries.

"As these programs increase and ICE increasingly places people in them, there’s a financial incentive to keep detaining people." Francisco Ugarte, an immigration lawyer with San Francisco Immigrant Legal and Education Network, told us.

But Abigail Trillin, staff attorney for Legal Services for Children, says ORR is doing a better job of handling juveniles than ICE did. "ORR has the right and obligation to try and place these kids in the least restrictive option," Trillin said. "But being reunified with your family does not in any way change the fact that you are under federal removal proceedings. So you still have a very significant risk of being deported alone to your country of origin."

Having a documented parent helps a juvenile make the case for staying in the U.S. permanently, as does having grounds for asylum. Having siblings who are U.S. citizens or having been here since you were a small child does not significantly help someone’s case.

But ending up in lockup can makes things worse. "If a child is in an ORR secure detention facility, they are less likely to fight their deportation case — a fight that could take up to two years — than if they were reunified with their family," Trillin said. "We have not yet seen a juvenile move from a secure facility to a foster home, but we have in the case of kids who are in ORR shelters for more than three months and have a legal case for staying."

Still, she said it’s possible a child could be flown to an airport in their country of origin without much subsequent support in most Latin American countries. "If they are Mexican, they are flown to the airport in Tijuana, and if there are no relatives, they are turned over to a child welfare agency in Mexico," Trillin said. "I don’t believe that level of cooperation exists elsewhere, though there might be some temporary shelters for them to wait in while their relatives are coming."

All countries of origin will have some involvement, Trillin noted, to the extent that they are contacted because all these kids need travel documentation. But that support is minimal. As she said, "Our country feels that it’s done its duty once the consulates are contacted."

LETTER OF THE LAW


In his Oct. 28 veto letter, Newsom claimed that the supervisors had changed the sanctuary ordinance by "restricting the ability of local law enforcement officers to report juveniles who are in custody after being booked for the alleged commission of a felony and are suspected of vioutf8g the civil provisions of our sanctuary ordinance."

But in a Nov. 2 response to Newsom’s veto, Campos countered that his amendment won’t shield anyone guilty of such crimes and he invited Newsom to publicly debate the issue. "The board and the people of San Francisco deserve to understand more fully why you intend to ignore this policy and the time-honored democratic processes followed in enacting it," Campos wrote. "At stake is the protection of innocent immigrant children that have been unjustly separated from their families."

He also accused Newsom of spreading misinformation about what federal law requires. "City officials have no affirmative legal duty under federal law to expend limited local resources and funding on immigration enforcement," Campos wrote, citing a July 1, 2008 public memo from the City Attorney’s Office and legal experts from Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, and UC Davis Law School who "have all agreed that there is no federal duty to inquire or report."

Noting that the City Attorney’s Office has made it clear that his proposed amendment is "a legally tenable measure," Campos concluded that "the point at which a referral of a minor is made to ICE is ultimately not a legal decision but a policy decision.

"Our criminal justice system rests on the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty; that is why providing youth an opportunity to contest a charge in court is a matter of basic due process," Campos continued. "The current policy is creating a climate of fear in immigrant communities, which means that immigrants who have been victims or witnesses to crimes are afraid to come forward."

The City Attorney’s Office has declined to comment on whether the mayor has the authority to ignore properly approved legislation. "We are not going to comment on legislation that’s still in the legislative process," City Attorney spokesperson Matt Dorsey told us.

But Campos believes the mayor lacks any such authority. "Can the mayor ignore legislation because he believes it’s illegal? Does he have the authority to have the final say? I don’t think so," said Campos, who is an attorney.

Trillin sees Newsom’s refusal to debate the issue with Campos as further confirmation that the Mayor’s Office doesn’t have a substantive argument that its sanctuary policy is a good one. "They can’t defend their position. They can’t win on substance," said Trillin, whose organization frequently provides legal guidance and support for immigrant youth.

She noted that the controversy that prompted Newsom’s policy change started with family reunification efforts. City officials were trying to reunite undocumented teenagers who were caught selling crack in downtown San Francisco with their families in Honduras when ICE officials intercepted them at George Bush Intercontinental/Houston Airport in December 2007 and May 2008.

These interceptions led U.S. Attorney Joe Russoniello, who opposed San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance when it was introduced in the 1980s, to claim that flying youth back to their families without first referring them to ICE was tantamount to harboring criminals.

After the apprehended city officials claimed they were acting in accordance with San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance, Russoniello convened a federal grand jury to investigate the city’s juvenile probation department. That investigation still hangs over JPD, even as Sen. Barbara Boxer mulls recommending candidates to replace Russoniello.

Meanwhile, right-wing activists have been blaming the city’s sanctuary policy for the tragic 2008 shootings of three members of the Bologna family, after they discovered that 23-year-old Edwin Ramos, the alleged killer and an MS-13 gang member, was apprehended by San Francisco’s juvenile justice system as a teen, but was never referred to the feds.

Facing this firestorm, Newsom caved to public pressure and followed the advice of Kevin Ryan, his Republican criminal justice director and the only prosecutor fired for cause during the 2006 U.S. attorneys firing scandal, by ordering that the city treat juvenile immigrants as adults, referring them to ICE at the moment of arrest on felony charges.

CHILDREN ON ICE


The same day supervisors approved Campos’ amendment, outgoing LAPD Chief William Bratton urged his department to keep its focus on fighting crime, not illegal immigration, plunging headfirst into the controversy over the federal 287(g) program.

Created in 1996 and expanded in the wake of 9/11 purportedly to counter terrorism and violent crime, the 287(g) program allows the federal government to enter into agreements giving local police the authority to enforce federal immigration laws. This has led many immigrants to mistrust and refuse to cooperate with local cops.

"My officers can’t prevent or solve crimes if victims or witnesses are unwilling to talk to us because of the fear of being deported," Bratton wrote in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece.

"I think what Chief Bratton is saying is different from what we are hearing in San Francisco" Campos said. "Mayor Gavin Newsom seems to be implying that San Francisco’s juvenile probation officers have no choice. But really, there is no law requiring them to refer kids to ICE. So it seems that what the mayor is doing is creating a de facto 287(g) program that gives local officers the power of federal agents."

That’s why Campos said it’s important for Newsom to participate in a public discussion of his intentions. "We need to ask the mayor if what he is saying is that JPD is an arm of ICE. If that’s the case, we need to know."

President Obama promised during the campaign that immigration reform would be part of his legislative agenda, but the White House hasn’t acted much on the issue. Yet immigration attorney Francisco Ugarte is hopeful that the tide is turning locally, as witnessed by the outpouring of support for Campos’ legislation. "Thirty-three percent of San Francisco residents are foreign-born," Ugarte observed. "That’s a really high number, a significant part of the constituency."

Russoniello told the Guardian that immigrants are not entitled to the same level of due process as citizens, implying that the U.S. has a two-tier criminal justice system. "There are citizens, and then there are people," Russoniello said.

Ugarte finds such arguments laughable. "The federal government has to make the argument that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to undocumenteds," Ugarte said. "These are hare-brained ideas that stem from hate and fear. The wonderful part of our country is that we have respect in the laws for all."

Ugarte believes that blaming the tragic Bologna murders on the city’s immigrant youth policy is like arguing that putting people on parole leads to crime. "Yes, there are going to be bad apples," Ugarte said. "But that doesn’t mean we can solve our problems by sending people to another country. L.A. thought it could get rid of gangs by deporting people to El Salvador. But guess what? They only grew the problem."

Patti Lee of the Public Defender’s Office doesn’t believe that the sanctuary policy will change unless the Board exerts financial pressure on Juvenile Probation. "I do not believe the policy will change because JPD is under orders from the mayor," Lee explained. "But JPD is supposed to comply with the legislation. So the Board of Supervisors, through its Public Safety Committee, could question JPD’s chief about his current process and why he isn’t complying with it. The board does have control over JPD’s budget, so it can put the squeeze on them."

"When police arrest and detain an undocumented child and bring them into detention charged with a felony, the minute they come in front gate, JPD has been directed to contact ICE," Lee said. "So we are not even aware until a day or two later, when we receive a police report or when we get a house list the next day, if someone is ICEed or not."

If the kids are unaccompanied and there are no family members in town, they typically go to juvenile lock-up for 30 days and then are released to ICE and get deported," Lee said.

"They are being ICEed even if they are adjudicated," Lee added, noting how her department got one youth’s charges reduced to misdemeanors but JPD reported the youth to ICE anyway, based on the current policy that any undocumented person booked on a felony should be reported at the moment of booking. "So they were ICEed without due process," Lee said. "And these are children."

Newsom: support just-cause eviction law

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Newsom: support just-cause eviction law

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, reeling from criticism of his disappearing act last week and his failure to quickly reengage with San Francisco, has an opportunity to repair some of his tattered image, particularly among progressives, and mend fences with the majority of the Board of Supervisors. It wouldn’t even require a dramatic or groundbreaking step — all he has to do is agree to sign legislation by Sup. John Avalos extending eviction protections to roughly 20,000 vulnerable San Francisco renters.

The Avalos legislation clears up a lingering loophole in the city’s rent-control ordinance, a leftover piece of a bad deal that tenants were forced to accept when the city first moved to limit rent hikes 20 years ago. Back in 1978, with greedy landlords taking advantage of a housing shortage to jack up rents by astronomical rates, the supervisors and then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein were under immense pressure to pass some kind of control. But the landlord-friendly mayor and at-large elected board were unwilling to do what Berkeley had done across the bay by setting permanent limits on how much landlords could raise prices. Instead, they approved a watered-down measure aimed largely at fending off a tenant initiative that would have gone further.

The deal capped rent hikes — but only for existing tenants, allowing landlords to raise rents whenever a unit became vacant. And, after the real estate industry whined that rent control would cause developers to stop building new housing in San Francisco (a dubious claim if ever there was one), the supervisors agreed to exempt all newly constructed housing (that is, anything built after 1979) from any rent regulations at all.

That housing is still exempt from rent control — and because the rent control law also includes eviction protections for tenants, the post-1979 housing stock is also exempt from those rules.

Most San Francisco tenants enjoy what’s known as "just-cause" eviction rules — that is, you can’t toss a tenant out on the streets without a reason. Failure to pay rent, of course, is legal grounds to send someone packing; it’s also okay to force a tenant out if the owner wants to move in.

But for the roughly 20,000 renters living in newer units, evictions can happen on a landlord’s whim — and one of the most dangerous problems is the lack of protection for people who live in a foreclosed building. Tenants in older, pre-1979 buildings have the right to continue to live in the property, under the same lease or rental agreement, after a sale or foreclosure. The Avalos bill would extend that protection (and the other just-cause protections) to all tenants in the city.

It’s hardly a radical idea — and given the boom in high-end housing construction in this city over the past decade (slowed only by the economic crash), the claim that tenant protections will doom new housing is demonstrably false. It would save vulnerable residents from losing their homes, protect people who live (through no fault of their own) in foreclosed properties, and restore a level of fairness to the local housing market.

The measure will almost certainly get six votes on the board, so the only real obstacle is the threat of a Newsom veto. The mayor should state publicly that he supports the measure and will sign it — which could be the start of a new, more promising chapter in Newsom’s political career.

Herrera to Russoniello: Back off or we’ll see you in court!

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By Steven T. Jones

In the wake of today’s Board of Supervisors vote to override Mayor Gavin Newsom’s veto of requiring due process to play out before city officials turn undocumented juveniles over to federal immigration authorities, City Attorney Dennis Herrera sent an fascinating letter to U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello, a conservative who had threatened to bring charges against employees who follow the new law.

Herrera is walking a thin line between Newsom, who unilaterally weakened the city’s long-standing Sanctuary City law last year under pressure from nativists and the San Francisco Chronicle; and supervisors and immigrant rights activists who say the mayor’s new policy violates the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty. Newsom has threatened not to enforce the new policy, which becomes law in 30 days, citing the legal threat to city employees.

But Herrera has now attempted to remove that threat by asking Russoniello to withdraw it, and issuing a threat of his own if the holdover Republican attorney doesn’t back down: San Francisco may turn to the courts to overturn Russoniello’s interpretation of federal law, which Herrera calls “broad.”

The important part of the letter states: “Because of the Board of Supervisor’s adoption of the Amendment, and in view of your earlier assertions that certain City officials may have violated federal criminal laws regarding their past handling of certain juvenile arrestees and your seemingly broad interpretation of the harboring statute, I ask that the U.S. Attorney’s Office provide an assurance that if the city proceeds to implement this Amendment in accordance with its terms, City law enforcement officers and employees will not be prosecuted for violating federal criminal laws. I would appreciate your timely response to this letter, preferably by December 7, 2009. If the U.S. Attorney’s Office does not provide us with an adequate assurance that it will not prosecute City officials or employees who would implement the Amendment, my Office may be compelled to explore with City policymakers other options regarding the implementation and enforcement of the Amendment, including the possibility of filing a declaratory relief action in federal court.”

For a complete interpretation of the frightening implications of Newsom’s policy stance, read tomorrow’s Guardian cover story.

Editorial: Newsom: support just-cause eviction law

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For the roughly 20,000 renters living in newer units, evictions can happen on a landlord’s whim.

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, reeling from criticism of his disappearing act last week and his failure to quickly reengage with San Francisco, has an opportunity to repair some of his tattered image, particularly among progressives, and mend fences with the majority of the Board of Supervisors. It wouldn’t even require a dramatic or groundbreaking step — all he has to do is agree to sign legislation by Sup. John Avalos extending eviction protections to roughly 20,000 vulnerable San Francisco renters.

The Avalos legislation clears up a lingering loophole in the city’s rent-control ordinance, a leftover piece of a bad deal that tenants were forced to accept when the city first moved to limit rent hikes 20 years ago. Back in 1978, with greedy landlords taking advantage of a housing shortage to jack up rents by astronomical rates, the supervisors and then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein were under immense pressure to pass some kind of control. But the landlord-friendly mayor and at-large elected board were unwilling to do what Berkeley had done across the bay by setting permanent limits on how much landlords could raise prices. Instead, they approved a watered-down measure aimed largely at fending off a tenant initiative that would have gone further.

Newsom and the next chapter

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By Tim Redmond

It’s a little weird that Gavin Newsom just disappeared after dropping out of the governor’s race. I had a feeling that he wasn’t going to hold up well under the pressure; he loves celebrity, loves to be on the A-List and loves to hear himself talk, but he can’t take a punch. And getting hit, a lot, is a big part of statewide politics. So I suspect that when he realized that this particular dream was over — clunk! — and that in two years, he’s not going to be anything but Gavin Newsom, citizen, he had a little meltdown.

This ought to be cause for concern: Somebody has to run the city for the next two years, and either Newsom is going to buck up, get back to work and try to change the way he does business — or he’s going to be a bitter lame-duck who can’t get anything accomplished except to go all Nixonian and attack his enemies.

I’m really hoping it’s the former — and now that he’s off his statewide horse, I think it’s safe to say that most of the supervisors, including the progressives he so disdains, would be more than willing to start working with him. I’d love to see the mayor come back from Hawaii with a clear understanding of what went wrong with his campaign. As we point out in an editorial today:

If the real Gavin Newsom had been anything like the campaign picture his handlers tried to present, he would have been a serious candidate. Newsom the candidate was a leader who brought San Franciscans together to get things accomplished. He was a progressive thinker who created universal health care and an effective budget process with a rainy day fund that prevented teacher layoffs. He was bold enough to challenge federal and state law on same-sex marriage and demand equality for all.

But Newsom the mayor was actually a snippy politician who refused to work with the Board of Supervisors and would never engage his opponents. He was great at press releases but short on accomplishments — universal health care and the rainy day fund were projects put together by Tom Ammiano, one of the supervisors the mayor disdained, who is now a state Assembly member. He refused to take a lead role fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to promote clean energy and public power. And for all his success in moving same-sex marriage forward, he never once managed to bring that kind of progressive energy or policy-making to economic issues. His budget this year was the same as Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget — cuts and fees only. No new taxes.

As a result, the progressives and independent voters in his own town didn’t support his campaign — and without the environmentalists, labor, tenants, and progressive elected officials from San Francisco behind him, there was no way he could generate an honest grassroots movement.

I’d love to see the mayor reach out to the folks who have been snubbed all these years. Let’s talk about making the city budget work for everyone — and if that means some new revenue sources (which lots of other cities seemed to be able to pull off), at least he doesn’t have to worry about running statewide after raising local taxes.

He can take a hard look at where his cuts have really hit and try to work with labor to spread the pain a little better and chop from the top, not just the bottom.

He can become a real, serious clean-energy leader by strongly supporting CCA and taking a visible public role in the campaign against PG&E’s anti-public-power initiative.

The city’s ready for a Gavin, Chapter Two. And he wouldn’t be the first politician to rebound from a defeat, learn his lesson and start his career up again.

Any bets on whether that’s going to happen?

The battle for District 6

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The battle for District 6

tredmond@sfbg.com

The race to replace Chris Daly — the always progressive, sometimes hotheaded supervisor who has dominated District 6 politics for almost a decade — is becoming one of the most important battles of 2010, with the balance of power on the board potentially in play.

Through whatever accident of politics and geography, San Francisco’s even-numbered districts — five of which will be up for election next fall — haven’t tended to fall in the progressive column. Districts 2 (Marina-Pacific Heights) and 4 (Outer Sunset) are home to the city’s more conservative supervisors, Michela Alioto-Pier and Carmen Chu. District 8 (the Castro) has elected the moderate-centrist Bevan Dufty, and District 10 is represented by Sophie Maxwell, who sometimes sides with the progressives but isn’t considered a solid left vote.

District 6 is different. The South of Market area is among the most liberal-voting parts of San Francisco, and since 2000, Daly has made his mark as a stalwart of the board’s left flank. And while progressive are hoping for victories in districts 8 and 10 — and will be pouring considerable effort and organizing energy into those areas — Daly’s district (like District 5, the Haight/Western Addition; and District 9, Mission/Bernal Heights) ought to be almost a gimme.

But the prospect of three progressive candidates fighting each other for votes — along with the high-profile entry of Human Rights Commission director Theresa Sparks, who is more moderate politically — has a lot of observers scratching their heads.

Is it possible that the progressives, who have only minor disagreements on the major issues, will beat each other up and split the votes enough that one of the city’s more liberal districts could shift from the progressive to the moderate column?

A FORMIDABLE CANDIDATE


A few months ago, District 6 was Debra Walker’s to lose. The Building Inspection Commission member, who has lived in the district for 25 years, has a long history on anti-gentrification issues and strong support in the LGBT community.

Jim Meko, who also has more than a quarter century in the district and chaired the Western SOMA planning task force, was also a progressive candidate but lacked Walker’s name recognition and all-star list of endorsements.

Then rumors began to fly that school board member Jane Kim — who moved into the district a few months ago — was interested in running. Kim has been a leading progressive voice on the school board and has proven she can win a citywide race. She told me she’s thinking seriously about running, but hasn’t decided yet.

Having Kim in the race might not have been a huge issue — in District 9 last year, three strong progressives competed and it was clear that one would be the ultimate winner. But over the past two weeks, Theresa Sparks has emerged as a likely contender — and if she runs, which seems more than likely at this point, she will be a serious candidate.

Sparks picked up the kind of press most potential candidates would die for: a front-page story in SF Weekly and a long, flattering profile in San Francisco magazine, which called her "San Francisco’s most electrifying candidate since Harvey Milk." Sparks does have a compelling personal tale: a transgender woman who began her transition in middle age, survived appalling levels of discrimination, became a civil rights activist and now is seeking to be the first trans person elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

She has experience in business and politics, served on the Police Commission, and was named a Woman of the Year by the California State Assembly (thanks to her friend Sen. Mark Leno, who would likely support her if she runs).

"Anyone who knows Theresa knows that she is smart, a formidable candidate, can fundraise, and will run a strong race," Robert Haaland, a trans man and labor activist who supports Walker, wrote on a Web posting recently.

She’s also, by most accounts (including her own) a good bit more moderate than Walker, Meko, and Kim.

LAW AND ORDER


Sparks doesn’t define herself with the progressive camp: "I think it’s hard to label myself," she said. "I try to look at each issue independently." Her first major issue, she told me, would be public safety — and there she differs markedly from the progressive candidates. "I was adamantly against cuts to the police department," she said. "I didn’t think this was a good time to reduce our police force."

She said she supported Sup. David Campos’ legislation — which directs local law enforcement agents not to turn immigrant youth over to federal immigration authorities until they’re found guilty by a court — "in concept." But she told me she thinks the bill should have been tougher on "habitual offenders." She also said she supports Police Chief George Gascón’s crackdown on Tenderloin drug sales.

And she starts off with what some call a conflict of interest: Mayor Gavin Newsom just appointed her to the $160,000-a-year post as head of the HRC, and she doesn’t intend to step down or take a leave while she runs. She told me she doesn’t see any problem — she devoted more than 20 hours a week to Police Commission work while holding down another full-time job. "I don’t know why it would be an issue," she said, noting that Emily Murase ran for the school board while working as the director of the city’s Commission on the Status of Women.

But some see it differently. "It would be as if the school superintendent hired someone to a senior job just as that person decided to run for school board," Haaland said.

Sparks’ election would be a landmark victory for trans people. For a community that has been isolated, dismissed, and ignored, her candidacy (like Haaland’s 2004 run in District 5) will inspire and motivate thousands of people. And it’s a tough one for the left — opposing a candidate whose election would mean so much to so many members of one of the city’s most marginalized communities could be painful. "A lot of folks will say that the progressives will never support a transgender candidate," Haaland noted.

But in terms of the city’s geopolitics, it’s also true that electing Sparks would probably move District 6 out of the solidly progressive column.

"If we lose D6, it’s huge," Walker noted. "This is where most of the new development is happening, where law-and-order issues are playing out, where we can hope to save part of the city for a diverse population."

More than that, if progressives lose District 6 and don’t win District 8, it will be almost impossible to override mayoral vetoes and control the legislative agenda. And that’s huge. On issue like tenants rights, preventing evictions, controlling market-rate housing development, advancing a transit-first policy — and raising new revenue instead of cutting programs — the moderates on the board have been overwhelmingly on the wrong side.

Kim, for her part, doesn’t want to talk about the politics of the 2010 elections — except to say that she’s thinking about the race and will probably decide sometime in the next two months. But she agreed with my analysis of how any left candidate should view this election: if she’s going to enter, she needs to present a case that, on the issues that matter, she’d be a better supervisor than either of the two long-term district residents with strong progressive credentials already in the race.

"I don’t have an answer to that now," Kim told me. "And when I make my decision, I will."

Editorial: The next Gavin Newsom

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Editorial: The next Gavin Newsom

EDITORIAL It’s possible that Mayor Gavin Newsom took a long look at himself, his life, and his future last week and decided that politics — intense, 24/7/365 politics — wasn’t what he wanted right now. It’s possible (as Randy Shaw noted in Beyondchron.org) that Newsom "now joins longtime adversary Chris Daly in putting family relationships ahead of one’s political career." It’s possible that he never really wanted a future in electoral politics and was driven to run for governor less by personal ambition than by the desire of his advisors to see him in a higher political role.

In that case, Newsom has a responsibility to do the best job he can over the final two years of his term as mayor, then step away and find something else to do with his life.

But since it’s also possible — even likely — that Newsom still hopes to have a political career, and that his decision to drop out of the governor’s race was as much about his failure to gain any traction as it was about his family obligations, it’s worth talking about why his campaign failed and what he can and should do next.

For starters, Newsom never expected to beat Attorney General Jerry Brown in the big-donor fundraising battle. He was hoping to put together a grassroots operation, to mobilize the Obama constituency, and build a war chest with tens of thousands of small donors organized through social media and technology. And that kind of effort could have worked — Brown has name recognition and money, but not much else. It’s hard to imagine large masses of young activists donating time and energy to his primary campaign.

The problem was, those legions of California activists weren’t terribly excited about Newsom either. And there are good reasons for that — reasons Newsom needs to understand if he wants to run for statewide elected office in the future.

If the real Gavin Newsom had been anything like the campaign picture his handlers tried to present, he would have been a serious candidate. Newsom the candidate was a leader who brought San Franciscans together to get things accomplished. He was a progressive thinker who created universal health care and an effective budget process with a rainy day fund that prevented teacher layoffs. He was bold enough to challenge federal and state law on same-sex marriage and demand equality for all.

But Newsom the mayor was actually a snippy politician who refused to work with the Board of Supervisors and would never engage his opponents. He was great at press releases but short on accomplishments — universal health care and the rainy day fund were projects put together by Tom Ammiano, one of the supervisors the mayor disdained, who is now a state Assembly member. He refused to take a lead role fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to promote clean energy and public power. And for all his success in moving same-sex marriage forward, he never once managed to bring that kind of progressive energy or policy-making to economic issues. His budget this year was the same as Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget — cuts and fees only. No new taxes.

As a result, the progressives and independent voters in his own town didn’t support his campaign — and without the environmentalists, labor, tenants, and progressive elected officials from San Francisco behind him, there was no way he could generate an honest grassroots movement in a Democratic primary.

Now he’s back from the campaign trail — and he has two years to pick up on the lessons of his ignominious political collapse. If he wants any kind of a political future, he needs to change. First, he needs to start engaging and working with the supervisors — even the ones who disagree with him. (Showing up for "question time" would be a huge step). He needs to take the city’s structural budget deficit seriously and present plans for progressive taxes to help close it. He needs to show he can take on big powerful local interests — PG&E, for example — by opposing the utility’s anti-public power initiative and putting his political capital on the line to support community choice aggregation.

Newsom the imperial mayor has, we hope, been a bit humbled. Let’s see if he comes out of this chapter as an embittered, angry (and ultimately unsuccessful) mayor committed to punishing his enemies — or a serious city leader who can live up to his own hype.

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