Supervisors Archives — Page 86 of 103 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Who wants change?

January 30, 2008

› steve@sfbg.com

On the rainy afternoon of Jan. 8, Mayor Gavin Newsom strode through the familiar Delancey Street Foundation complex’s main courtyard — a bodyguard holding his umbrella over him — and entered a conference room filled with local political luminaries just as the taiko drummers finished their performance.

A few hours earlier Newsom had taken the oath of office and given his second-term inaugural address during a lavish ceremony at City Hall, where he told the crowd, "Here in San Francisco our point of reference is often our minor political disagreements." But now he joined his fiancée, Jennifer Siebel, in the front row of a relatively spare ceremony to watch District Attorney Kamala Harris take her oath of office.

Although Newsom and Harris are more like political rivals than allies, their speeches sounded similar themes — accountability, unity, addressing systemic problems with common sense governance — and were liberal by national standards but safely centrist by San Francisco’s metric.

Yet these two top politicians, like many others in the Bay Area, have cast their lots with two very different national political movements, as the well-connected crowd was subtly reminded when Sen. Dianne Feinstein prepared to administer Harris’s oath of office.

The choice of Feinstein already seemed notable to those who remembered when she publicly chastised Harris for refusing to seek the death penalty for a cop killer in 2004. It was the old, white, establishment stalwart hectoring a rising black star from a new generation for a gutsy decision to stick with her professed progressive values.

But Feinstein now spoke admiringly of how women run the District Attorney’s Office and Police, Fire, and other departments. "San Francisco today is in the hands of women. Who would have thought?" the former mayor said, extending her hopeful assessment to mention that "a woman is likely to be our nominee for president of the United States."

There were murmurs from Harris’s corner and an awkwardness that hung thick in the air. This was because unlike Feinstein, Newsom, and most of the powerful establishment Democrats in San Francisco, who have endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, Harris was an early and high-profile supporter of Barack Obama.

That difference seems especially significant to San Francisco progressives and others who are wary of another Clinton returning to the White House and excited about the upstart candidacy of a younger black man who got into politics pounding the streets of Chicago as a community organizer.

Political endorsements are often like ideological tea leaves. Sometimes support stems from a personal relationship with the candidate, but usually it signals more of a philosophical affinity, a desire to either take a chance with something new or stick with a known quantity, which seems to be the case with this presidential primary election.

"It boils down to this: are you part of the Willie Brown, John Burton political machine, in which case you’re with Hillary, or are you part of the free-thinking folks who really want to see change?" Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin — who considers himself part of the latter group and has endorsed Obama — said to the Guardian.

Peskin noted that all of the elected officials in San Francisco who got their jobs through a Newsom appointment — Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier, Assessor Phil Ting, and Treasurer José Cisneros — have endorsed Clinton, whose campaign has been notorious locally for pressuring top Democrats to get on board.

"We are the campaign of inspiration, not obligation," said Debbie Mesloh, a former Harris spokesperson now on loan to the Obama campaign. "I think people are really tired of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton."

But Elsbernd — like many other Clinton endorsers — played down the differences between the top two candidates and doesn’t see much symbolism in the endorsements, although he does acknowledge that those who prefer to work within the system tend to support Clinton, while those "who are always pushing the system to go further" seem to be backing Obama, or John Edwards in some cases.

"If Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton were on the Board of Supervisors, they’d probably be to the right of me," said Elsbernd, whom most observers consider the board’s most conservative member, later adding, "Whoever wins the nomination, San Francisco will be heavily supportive of [him or her]."

But Sup. Chris Daly — who, like Peskin and many others, backed Edwards four years ago and supports Obama this time — thinks an Obama victory would be hugely important both locally and nationally in terms of opening up the Democratic Party and the country to new ideas.

"Hillary Clinton clearly represents the establishment, closely aligned to the [Democratic Leadership Council], and Obama represents a change from that. If Obama wins, it would send a serious wave of change through the Democratic Party and open up opportunities for progressives," Daly told us.

He also said progressive Democrats are "like the redheaded stepchildren of the party," consistently marginalized by leaders like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Feinstein, and Newsom. Daly said he liked the policies and messages of Edwards and Dennis Kucinich but identifies with Obama’s roots as a community organizer and feels he’s the best hope for change. Daly said an Obama victory would "mainstream activist politics, which is what I practice."

Many Clinton supporters aren’t afraid of the establishment label, which progressives often use as an epithet and indicator of a brand of politics mired in status quo constructs.

"To me, that’s one of her strengths. She knows how government works and will be ready to lead on day one, and if that’s called establishment, that’s OK with me," said Laura Spanjian, a vocal Clinton campaigner and elected member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee.

There are some mainstream candidates who have bucked the norm. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is definitely to Feinstein’s left, and Pelosi have decided not to endorse any of the Democratic primary candidates. And Sup. Bevan Dufty, who is often a Newsom ally, has endorsed Obama.

"I truly feel he is unique among the candidates as far as being able to repair our relationship with the rest of the world," said Dufty, who said he identifies with African American politics, having been raised by a civil rights activist and later working for groundbreaking Congressperson and presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm and former mayor Willie Brown. "I think Obama is much better situated to bring about a new dynamic."

Eric Jaye, owner of Storefront Political Media and the top consultant to Newsom’s two successful mayoral campaigns, told us, "There’s no doubt that prominent endorsers, like Kamala Harris for Barack Obama or Gavin Newsom for Hillary Clinton, stake some political capital in their endorsements. But I don’t think it matters that much."

In fact, rather than altering local political dynamics or the careers of aspiring politicians, Jaye said, the split endorsements of local officials is positive: "We’ve hedged our bets, so whoever wins is going to love San Francisco and our top leaders."

Running on empty

January 29, 2008

› news@sfbg.com

The fourth floor of San Francisco’s City Hall feels remote. Dimly lit and strangely quiet, it conveys a sense of isolation from the powerful people who do their work in the lower levels of the building.

Here, in an unremarkable conference room, is where the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force is conducting its second meeting. Two of its officers are absent, and only one member of the public has turned up to participate. It is an atmosphere that belies the issue’s cataclysmic potential.

The day’s breaking news headlines of oil reaching $100 per barrel for the first time in history is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. One year earlier the price was $58 per barrel. This dramatic increase in such a short span would devastate economies around the world if it continued at anywhere close to that rate.

Chairperson Jeanne Rosenmeier, an articulate, contemplative woman, reiterates the task force’s purpose: "Our charge is to examine how the city is going to handle rising oil prices and possible shortages. That is what we have been asked to do."

The assessment seems like an understatement, perhaps suggesting that the group is merely looking for solutions to how the average citizen could function better without an automobile. Yet in a society built on oil, the consequences of such an energy crisis are likely to be far more sweeping and problematic than merely high gas prices.

While considering models for the study the task force will prepare, Rosenmeier points to Portland, Ore.’s recently completed peak oil report and talks about limiting San Francisco’s effort to outlining the range of scenarios, from small impacts to large. She’s reluctant to acknowledge the extralarge scenario — massive worldwide social unrest and full-scale anarchy in the streets of San Francisco — which she argues would be harmful to the group’s focus.

Jan Lundberg, the task force member in charge of "societal functioning," politely disagrees. Insightful and exuding a sort of deeply ingrained experience, Lundberg has a goatee and a big mane of blond hair that make him look like a Berkeley-ish version of billionaire Virgin CEO Richard Branson. The resemblance is strangely apt when you consider that Lundberg has defected from more lucrative ventures. His family’s business, the Lundberg Survey, has been one of the premier oil industry research authorities in the world for the past few decades, but today Lundberg is volunteering his time to the task force.

"You have to look honestly at what we are up against," Lundberg tells the Guardian. "Only then can you come up with intelligent responses to what is occurring. If it is a tsunami coming, then you take action for a tsunami."

It might come as news to most San Franciscans that a team of seven relatively unknown, politically appointed volunteers is hashing out the hard realities and dire implications of a potentially massive energy crisis. When the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution (with Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier absent) in April 2006 to acknowledge the looming phenomenon of the global oil supply being exceeded by demand, San Francisco was the first city in the country to do so. It was a precedent that received little attention from the media, perhaps shrugged off as just another wacky resolution steeped in San Francisco values.

For the next 10 months the task force will be preparing a study of mitigation measures to be considered by the city government for implementation into law. Much like the phenomenon of peak oil, their work will also be best assessed in hindsight. For now, some will see them as a team of Chicken Littles sketching a contingency plan for when the sky falls.

Yet if the scientific insights that compelled the Board of Supervisors to form the group prove prescient, then the report that the task force is producing may well be crucial to San Francisco’s very survival.

SLIPPERY SLOPE

Oil has acquired a bad reputation in recent years, as if the resource were not a fossil fuel found in the earth’s crust but a corrupt corporate tycoon spurring international conflicts and gleefully dismantling the ozone layer. Like addicts who blame the substance rather than the habit, we have come to forget that oil is one of the best resources the planet has offered.

"Oil is amazing stuff. The 20th century was basically founded on the wonders of petroleum," explains Richard Heinberg, a professor at New College of Santa Rosa and author of several books, including The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society Publishers, 2003). "Oil is very energy dense and can be made into an amazing range of chemicals and products. Our entire way of life is soaked in petroleum," he says.

This point tends to get lost in the shuffle. It is often forgotten that more than just powering our cars, petroleum is deeply woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Adding up to a global consumption rate of about 86 million barrels per day, oil plays a starring role in agriculture, industry, infrastructure, and transportation. It heats our homes, paves our roads, and grows our food.

So what happens when the global demand for oil begins to outpace the supply? That’s the peak oil question.

"Peak oil is not theoretical. Everyone knows that oil is a nonrenewable resource," Heinberg explains, "so at some point our ability to continue increasing the supply will cease. Everyone knows that it will happen. It is just a matter of when."

Peak oil is inherently a geological concept, formulated by renowned geophysicist Marion King Hubbert. In 1956, as a researcher for Shell Oil, Hubbert presented his theory to the American Petroleum Institute, claiming that the oil output in the mainland United States would peak in the late 1960s or early ’70s. Though dismissed by his colleagues at the time, Hubbert was vindicated when US oil production peaked in 1970 and the nation became forever dependent on foreign sources of petroleum to meet its energy needs.

Hubbert had explained that the production of any petroleum reserve — a single oil well, a particular country, or even the entire planet — follows a similar bell-shaped curve (now referred to as the Hubbert curve). The logic is that as the supply is first tapped, there is a steady increase of oil output that ascends to a peak (or plateau), which represents the maximum amount of oil that will ever be produced from the designated source. As production descends the other side of the curve, the supply is not exhausted, but future yields will always be lower and more expensive to obtain.

For the past 10 years — as the price of crude oil has gone from $12 to $100 per barrel on the world market — scientists, geologists, petroleum experts, and concerned citizens have increasingly pondered the point at which the global oil supply will not only begin to wane but fail to keep up with surging demand.

Proponents of preparing for the impending peak in worldwide petroleum output often cite the steady decline of major oil field discoveries since the 1960s and the alarming number of oil-producing countries that have already hit their peaks. Considering the widespread role petroleum plays in the general day-to-day functioning of our society, an impending decline in overall global production is — to put it mildly — severely worrying.

"People assume that the other side of the peak will be an orderly transition," Lundberg tells us, "but we have no other experience to compare it to."

In 2005 the United States Department of Energy completed a study it had commissioned on the topic of worldwide petroleum depletion titled Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management. Popularly known as the Hirsch Report (for principal author Robert Hirsch), the study consulted a wide range of scientific and oil industry experts.

It painted a startling portrait: "The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking."

"It is one of the most important government reports of the last half century," Heinberg explains, "because it clearly indicates that this global event of peak oil is going to change everything."

Unfortunately, the Hirsch Report has been mostly ignored by Congress, the George W. Bush administration, and the DOE itself (which did not even publish the study for more than a year after its completion). However, the most troublesome aspect of the report is the fact that a sizable selection of the scientists and activists concerned with the topic believe that we’ve already hit the peak. They believe peak oil is happening right now.

PITCHING THE PEAK

"Most people in this country are energy illiterate," David Fridley says. "We can’t substitute millions of years of fossil fuels with something that we can manufacture in a factory, like biofuels. So most people don’t get this sense of anxiety about the situation we’re in."

Fridley knows a fair amount about energy. Currently a staff scientist leading the China Energy Group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he has spent a large portion of his career working in the Asian oil industry. His deep concern over the implications of peak oil incited him to play a key role in the formation of San Francisco’s task force.

"Having spent a year just thinking about this on my own," Fridley tells us, "and everyone around me telling me I was nuts, I decided to join a local group where I could at least meet up with others and see if we might educate people rather than just talking amongst ourselves."

In 2005, Fridley met Dennis Brumm — a veteran San Francisco activist with an address book containing an A-list of the city’s prime political players — who was looking to raise the city’s awareness of the issue.

Together with local activists Jennifer Bresee and Allyse Heartwell, they set their sights on bringing the issue of peak oil before the Board of Supervisors.

"Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee is a friend of mine," Brumm explains, "so I invited him over to my house one night and had him discuss with us the personalities and quirks of the supervisors and their aides."

Having charted the terrain, Brumm’s small group soon began spending its Thursdays and Fridays for the next six months lobbying the supervisors at City Hall. When technical questions were asked, the group referred to Fridley’s decades-long experience in the industry for expert scientific analysis.

In April 2006, with backing from District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and District 1 Sup. Jake McGoldrick, the board passed Resolution Number 224, recognizing "the challenge of Peak Oil and the need for San Francisco to prepare a plan of response and preparation."

For Fridley, the resolution and the formation of the task force were matters of appropriate preparation. "We have two oil tankers come under the Golden Gate every day to fill up the local refinery tanks to produce the fuels that keep the Bay Area running," he says. "What would happen if those tankers don’t come in? Or they don’t come for a week? The city has no plan for that, but we have the ability to be better prepared."

HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL?

When discussing the phenomenon of peak oil, Lundberg prefers to use the term petro collapse. It is a turn of phrase that quickly provides insight into his considerable sense of alarm for the days ahead.

"It is going to be a globally historic event," Lundberg says. "Imagine a nationwide version of [Hurricane] Katrina."

Although ominous in its predictions, Lundberg’s perspective is based on a long road of experience. While he ran the Lundberg Survey with his father in the 1970s, their widely read insider journal for the oil industry predicted the second great oil shock of the decade (in 1979). In the mid-1980s he moved on from the family business to form the Sustainable Energy Institute nonprofit in Washington DC, a move USA Today marked with the headline "Lundberg Goes Green."

As suggested by the title of the online magazine he currently edits — Culture Change — Lundberg has come to view the peak oil phenomenon as being primarily an issue of the American consumer lifestyle.

"We have this crazy way of life based on limited resources that are clearly becoming constrained," he says, "and we’re holding on to yesterday’s affluence without realizing that we have already walked off the cliff."

Chairperson Rosenmeier, one of Lundberg’s colleagues on the task force, is wary that such an explicitly bleak viewpoint may scare public attention away from the matter.

"You have to be careful with peak oil that you don’t immediately leap to ‘We’re all doomed and our economy is doomed,’<0x2009>" she says. "I think there is an intermediate phase, which is what we are being asked to address: the transition from business as usual."

An accountant by trade and a longtime Green Party activist, Rosenmeier ran for state treasurer in 2002, garnering about 350,000 votes. Setting an ambitious pace for her contribution to the report, she recently met with the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to request an analysis of how oil prices are related to the orientation of San Francisco’s economy. For this reason, she appears less concerned with predictions than with producing a heavily researched and well-structured report.

"I have a very strong vision of what I want the report to look like," Rosenmeier says. "I want us to have a uniformity and a more quantitative approach. I do not want to address the disintegration of our society."

The disparity between the views of Lundberg and Rosenmeier reflects the vast spectrum of opinions on how peak oil will manifest, although the extremes go well beyond them: some call peak oil a liberal hoax, while others have converted all of their assets to gold and prepared well-stocked and well-armed bunkers where they can ride out the social and economic storm.

The Web site LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net is now getting as many as 23,000 hits per day. Creator Matt Savinar, a graduate of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, abandoned his law career as a futile concern when compared to the implications of peak oil.

"It is pretty simple," Savinar tells us. "What do you think is going to happen when the oil-exporting countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran say, ‘We cannot export any more because we need to keep it for our own people’? The US will react by starting a war."

Although Savinar gravitates toward the most drastic of peak oil’s potential implications, his concerns are shared by some high-profile figures. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), who has started the small but significant Peak Oil Caucus in Congress, has quoted Savinar’s work in congressional session, while billionaire Richard Rainwater told Fortune magazine he regularly reads Savinar’s site.

Pessimistic about the prospect of mitigating the effects of peak oil, Savinar characterizes the efforts of the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force as "throwing a wet rag at a forest fire." In swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum, the vast chasm between opinions on the matter manifests more clearly. Peter Jackson, the senior director of oil industry activity for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, recently published the results of an in-depth analysis of more than 800 oil fields worldwide, concluding that the declining output rate of established fields is about half as low as originally expected.

"I think the danger of a peak [in global oil production] in the short term is minimal," Jackson tells the Guardian. "I think there are plenty of new developments on the books of oil companies, and the prospects for growth are good."

While Jackson acknowledges that at some point in the future it will be difficult to increase production, his optimistic viewpoint of the current situation helps to flesh out the dynamics of the overall discussion. As Heinberg explains it, "The debate really is between the near-peak and the far-peak viewpoints."

Yet even as Jackson attracts the ire of near-peak proponents such as Heinberg, he still acknowledges the need for swift preparation efforts. "There is still time to think about these issues and plan for the future," Jackson says. "But the sooner we do that the better."

EATING OIL, GROWING FUEL

Toward the end of the task force’s most recent meeting, the group discusses the city’s potential options for producing its own food supply. As Lundberg points out some of the particulars for pulling up pavement to plant crops, the exchange seems like an excerpt from Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia (Bantam, 1990).

"Streets cannot be pulled up as easily as driveways or parking lots," Lundberg explains. "There is soil immediately below a concrete driveway, whereas the earth beneath a street is much farther down."

This talk of tearing up asphalt to transform the city’s urban landscape into a viable agricultural venture may seem strange, until one considers how overreliant modern agribusiness has become on cheap fossil fuels.

"About one-fifth of all the petroleum we use goes into some part of our agriculture system," explains Jason Mark, the task force member focusing on the city’s food supply. "Whether that is through transportation and shipping, tractors and farm machinery, or the making of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides — it all demands oil."

Mark notes that the average American meal travels an estimated 1,500 miles from the farm to the dinner table, a startling figure that can be partly attributed to federal policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement that have encouraged export crops rather than diversified farming for local consumption.

"There is no way that San Francisco is going to feed itself in the short term," Rosenmeier says. "Food is going to be a gigantic issue."

In a larger sense, it already is. This past December the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations urged governments to take immediate steps to mitigate "dramatic food price increases" worldwide. Meanwhile, a recent cover story in the New York Times ("A New, Global Quandry: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories," 1/19/08) cited "food riots" in more than half a dozen countries and asserted, "Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it around the world."

In the US, the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index cited a 5.6 percent increase of national grocery store prices in 2007, echoing sizable domestic price spikes in milk, corn, and wheat supplies.

"In a situation where you have sharp increases in the price of fossil fuels, you are going to see spikes in the costs and perhaps even the availability of food," explains Jason Mark, a former employee of Global Exchange and a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz’s renowned ecological horticulture program.

Mark now splits his time between editing the environmental quarterly Earth Island Journal and comanaging Alemany Farms. In his task force research, Mark plans to focus on two key challenges: increasing food production within San Francisco and improving both production in and distribution from the farms in the Bay Area.

"The city is pretty lucky because we are surrounded by all of this incredibly productive agricultural land," Mark explains. "If you were to draw a 100-mile radius around Potrero Hill, you could still have a pretty amazing diet."

Of course, the situation is far from simplistic. Climate change has proven to be a wild card in the equation, periodically negating dependable food supplies. Most recently, the entire Australian wheat crop collapsed due to a massive drought, affecting food imports around the world.

Less noticeable, though equally problematic, is the strain that biofuels are putting on food supplies. As increases in oil prices are stimuutf8g demands for alternatives, governments must decide whether crops should be used as food or fuel.

"Increasing our production of ethanol or biodiesel means direct competition with the food supply," Heinberg says. "In other words, we may see millions of people around the world going hungry so that a small percentage of the population can continue to drive their cars."

While such factors translate into a predicament as delicate as it is complex, Mark manages to elude pessimism. "I’m not one of these apocalyptic fetishists inciting for some sort of Mad Max scenario," he explains. "[The task force] is going to come out with a document that, although cautionary in scope, will be really optimistic about how SF can exist as an oil-free city."

GLOBAL WARNING

Amid a vast disparity of opinions from scientists and industry experts expounding both sides of the debate, the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force plans to release its final report in October.

As with the issue of climate change almost two decades ago, the task force members face a long climb toward making an impression on an American population that has shown considerable reluctance to alter its lifestyles.

And while the deliberation over the onset of peak oil is likely to see little decline among skyrocketing energy costs and increasing geopolitical hostilities, the underlying truth may already be far less complicated.

"The era of cheap oil is over," Lundberg says. "Period." *

The next meeting of the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force will be on Feb. 5 at 3 p.m. in room 421 of City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF. Members of the public are strongly encouraged to attend.

————————————————————–

OIL ALTERNATIVES

In the event of sudden petroleum shortages, how do the alternatives stack up?

Ethanol: The Republican choice for weaning the nation off oil is a lucrative venture for red state constituents in the Midwest. However, the drawbacks are numerous. Corn ethanol requires almost as much oil energy to produce as it is meant to replace. Furthermore, it will require 4.8 billion — yes, billion — acres of corn to match the world’s current rate of annual oil consumption.

Hydrogen fuel cells: Touted by conservatives as some kind of miracle fuel because its tailpipe by-product is simply water vapor, hydrogen is a long way from being a viable fuel for cars, if that’s even possible. It takes even more energy to produce than ethanol and can explode in collisions.

Nuclear: Expensive and unpopular, nuclear power faces numerous logistical hurdles (particularly safety and long-term waste storage) that make it infeasible in the short and middle terms.

Natural gas: A major source of current United States energy consumption (25 percent nationally), natural gas is extremely difficult to ship, making importation from far-off sources impractical. Its supplies are running low in the US, and this nonrenewable fossil fuel is likely to parallel oil in its decline.

Wind: This clean power source is being quickly developed around the world as a major generator of electricity. Currently in the US, it accounts for about 1 percent of domestic electricity production, so offsetting the loss of fossil fuel plants would require a massive commitment. Downsides include the danger to migrating birds and the fact that sometimes the wind doesn’t blow.

Solar: This is Marion King Hubbert’s choice for replacing fossil fuels. It is a renewable generator of electricity, yet the shortcomings so far have been with finding more efficient and less toxic battery technology to store it. But improving research and strong consumer demand for solar panels point to a promising future.

Setting standards

January 29, 2008

› amanda@sfbg.com

Toilet paper. First aid kits. Drinking water. These are just a few of the essential supplies one might expect to find in high-traffic facilities owned or paid for by the city that serve more than a thousand people per night.

But San Francisco’s homeless shelters, which have been around for about 25 years, have repeatedly fallen short of meeting basic standards or even living up to the policies outlined in their city contracts.

Since 2004, regularly scheduled and surprise spot checks conducted by the 13-member Shelter Monitoring Committee have turned up a range of deplorable and deteriorating conditions in regard to cleanliness, nutrition, and humane treatment of residents — from bloody shower curtains and broken toilet seats to clogged drains and kitchen counters cluttered with dirty dishes. A survey of health and hygiene conditions — from functional sinks to the posting of proper hand-washing techniques — found that only 6 of 19 facilities met basic requirements.

"The Shelter Monitoring Committee makes reports to the Rules Committee, and their reports about conditions in the shelters were very, very disturbing," Sup. Tom Ammiano told the Guardian.

To fix that, Ammiano and a cadre of city staff, homeless-rights advocates, and Shelter Monitoring Committee members are drafting legislation that would require shelters to meet basic standards of care, force compliance through $2,500 fines, and formalize a swifter complaint process.

The Health Services Agency last year had $69 million to spend on housing and the homeless, a portion of which funds nine year-round single adult shelters and four family shelters, as well as four resource centers where homeless people may not find a bed but should be able to access other services, like showers, laundry, phones, and the shelter reservation system.

The management of the facilities is contracted out by the HSA to different nonprofit organizations, including some well-known national groups like the St. Vincent de Paul Society and Episcopal Community Services. The Department of Public Health also handles two of the contracts.

Those contracts stipulate a number of policies, including providing clients with access to electricity for cell phone charging, a guaranteed eight hours of sleep per night, toiletries and feminine hygiene products, first aid supplies, and Spanish translations of printed materials; and a mandate to treat all clients with "dignity and respect."

That doesn’t always happen, and the monitoring committee isn’t the only watchdog saying so.

The Coalition on Homelessness has been fielding complaints from shelter residents for more than 20 years. A recent increase prompted it to investigate deeper. In May 2007 the group published Shelter Shock, a report based on surveys of 215 shelter residents. The findings: 55 percent of people reported some kind of physical, sexual, or verbal abuse. One-third had no access to information in their native language. Thirty-five percent had nothing to eat.

"The Mayor has actually pointed to these problems as reasons to close the shelters," the report states. "Responsible bodies — the Board of Supervisors and the HSA — have failed to take corrective action. There has been a silence around shelters, giving the impression that shelter residents have been forgotten by the administration and the public at large."

Mayor Gavin Newsom, in his Jan. 8 inaugural speech, identified chronic homelessness and panhandling as high priorities of his second term and promised he’d be "redesigning our city shelter system so that they are no longer just refuges of last resort but spaces where homeless San Franciscans can find job training, drug treatment, and encouragement they need to exit homelessness. We’re getting out of the shelter business." At no point did he mention implementing shelter health and safety standards.

James Leonard, a member of the Shelter Monitoring Committee who has spent the past 18 months homeless in San Francisco and San Diego, won’t stay in the shelters anymore. All of his possessions were stolen three times. He missed several job interviews because he couldn’t charge his cell phone. Frustrated, he hit the streets again. The Homeless Outreach Team found him, officially dubbed him "shelter challenged," and gave him a stabilization bed, which he hopes will eventually transition into a lease in a single-room-occupancy hotel.

He told us the lack of standards contributes to the problem of chronic homelessness because more people would stay in the shelters, off the street, if they were safe and treatment were consistent from facility to facility.

"People keep looking at what’s wrong with those homeless people and keep skipping over what’s wrong with those shelters and some of those staff members," he said. "It’s a system set up to fail unless it has standards."

The issues extend beyond each shelter’s four walls. It’s a matter of public health for all San Franciscans. "Even if the shelters exist for a minute, they have to be healthy and humane," said Dr. Deborah Borne, medical director of homeless programs at the HSA’s Tom Waddell Health Center. "Because if they aren’t, they’re a danger to themselves and to others."

She cited the example of sitting on a Muni bus beside someone whose bag may be carrying bedbugs. "Everyone in San Francisco is affected by the fact that we have health issues in the shelters."

Borne moved from New York to San Francisco about a year and a half ago. On her fourth day on the job at Tom Waddell, a resident died at Next Door, which houses about 250 people per night and is one of the city’s largest shelters. She said the death was not the fault of any specific department, agency, or person, but it could have been avoided if some basic health and hygiene practices were standard for shelter staff and residents.

She brought together several key people, secured $300,000 in funding through HSA director Trent Rhorer, and launched the Shelter Health Initiative, a pilot project that included some of the standards that are part of Ammiano’s legislation specifically targeting health and hygiene.

Next Door and Hamilton Family Center participated, were surveyed on needs, and received adequate supplies of things like soap, hand towels, sanitizer, and gloves. "Up to the date of the training, they still didn’t have available the basic equipment required to protect themselves," said Jill Jarvie, a public health nurse from Tom Waddell who ran the pilot program.

It’s not enough to have cases of rubber gloves and hand sanitizer. They have to be used, and used properly. "Something like a cold virus can stay alive for a couple of days," Jarvie said. Close conditions in shelters compound the risk. "When you’re working in a place that sees 300 people a day, how you wash your hands can really make a difference," she added.

Thorough hand-washing techniques and procedures for cleaning up bodily fluids taught to staff trickle down to residents, and so far, it’s working. According to Jarvie, Next Door has reported a decrease in illnesses. "It’s been exciting to see we can actually do this," she said. The price of the pilot was about $15,000, a cost that would fall over time through bulk purchasing of supplies and as training becomes more standardized. Soon public health officials will be launching another phase, focused on bedbugs and scabies.

An initial budget analyst’s report, based on information provided by the HSA, predicted a $6.2 million price tag to fully implement standards throughout the city’s shelter system. Many say it’s an overinflated estimate based on assumptions that need more vetting.

"We were all stunned by the budget analyst’s report," said Quintin Mecke, secretary of the Shelter Monitoring Committee and head of its subsidiary work group on the legislation. "When you look at some of the assumptions, they’re just not true." For example, the HSA interpreted security to mean staffing all the shelters with full-time guards, when other mitigations like locks and staff training could be implemented instead.

Mecke and the work group believe that although there will be hard costs associated with the legislation, many are onetime and others are simply the price of complying with what’s supposed to exist already. Ammiano’s aide Zach Tuller said, "We expect the cost to come in under half a million because HSA claims so many of the services are already being provided. We’re looking to prevent slippage."

Dave Curto, head of contract compliance for the HSA, said the department agreed with some of the legislation and was still talking through specifics. He confirmed that policies do exist and shelters are provided with training manuals to enforce them.

"I think they are happening," he said of the HSA policies. "That’s why we’re a little confused."

A list of those policies is included in the budget analyst’s report, which Mecke said sent a conflicting message. "It creates the impression that things in the shelter system are other than what we found," he told a recent meeting of the standard of care work group, which is redrafting some of the legislation in preparation for a February hearing of the Budget and Finance Committee. "We want to be very clear at the Board of Supervisors that they don’t come away with the impression that these things exist, because they don’t."

Ammiano said this is a necessary first step toward making the shelters more humane, at a time when many assume they already are.

"I think one of the most annoying things that I read was C.W. Nevius [in the San Francisco Chronicle] taking this rather orchestrated Disneyland tour with Trent Rhorer and saying how wonderful the shelters were and then blaming the homeless for not wanting to be in them," Ammiano said. "But obviously C.W. Nevius and Trent Rhorer have something to wipe their ass with."

Newsom’s fixers

January 29, 2008

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom is acting more and more like his predecessor, Willie Brown. It’s an alarming trend, and Newsom needs to take some steps right away to assure the public that he’s not letting political fixers run the city.

We’ve been seeing signs that Newsom is becoming more of an imperial mayor for months, ever since he launched his new administration with a demand that all of the department heads and commissioners resign. The idea, he said, was to bring a fresh start and new ideas to his second term — but he never explained exactly what those new ideas were or why the current city officials weren’t living up to them. And it was clear that some of his moves were motivated by nothing but politics: ousting Susan Leal as head of the Public Utilities Commission had nothing to do with her job performance and everything to do with the fact that she had been willing to challenge Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s power monopoly.

The shenanigans continue. As Sarah Phelan reported on sfbg.com last week, Newsom just attempted a coup at the Planning Commission, moving behind the scenes to oust Christina Olague, a progressive appointed by the supervisors, from her post as vice president. Newsom and his crew wanted to install his loyalists, Sue Lee and Mike Antonini, as president and vice president of the panel.

That move, sources told us, was orchestrated through Dean Macris, the former planning director who needs to get the hell out of that department. Macris still has his fingers firmly planted in the planning pie; he maintains an office in the department as a "liaison to the mayor."

The mayor has also managed to pad his own office’s budget while cutting key city services — and has, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported Jan. 25, used funny accounting to divert money from Muni to the Mayor’s Office payroll. And he continues to use the San Francisco International Airport as a place to put highly paid employees who have, at best, unclear job descriptions.

This is the sort of thing that led to Brown’s downfall: the voters, infuriated by backroom deals, voted nearly all of Brown’s allies out of office in 2000 and elected a Board of Supervisors that had a mandate to block the mayor’s worst initiatives.

Newsom has always insisted he’s a different type of politician than his predecessor and onetime mentor, and his future political career will depend on his ability to make that image stick. Brown’s reputation for corruption was the main reason he never had any hope of seeking or winning a statewide office.

If Newsom wants to avoid that fate, he can start with a few significant changes:

•<\!s>Knock off the secrecy and sleaze. If Newsom has a reason to replace a department head or commissioner — and there are good reasons to fire a bunch of them — he needs to make that public. If someone isn’t carrying out his policies, fine: explain what the policies are and where he and the official in question part ways. Don’t pull out the knives and do the dirty work of PG&E and the developers behind closed doors.

•<\!s>Be open about the jobs and the money. If the mayor really believes he needs a bunch of new $150,000-per-year aides, fine: take that money out of the General Fund and tell the public where it’s coming from. Budgets are displays of political priorities, especially in tight years, and the voters have a right to know what the mayor cares about most.

•<\!s>Keep the operatives out of City Hall. Brown had lobbyists and consultants cutting deals in room 200 almost every day. Newsom needs to make it clear that campaign advisors aren’t making policy or personnel decisions.

We have four more years of Newsom to go, and if he keeps up this kind of crap, he’s going to find himself fighting the board — and the voters — at every step.

Tale of two transportation agencies

January 29, 2008

The Mayor on Muni small.jpg
While the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency’s politically intimidated leaders have allowed public transit funds to be used as Mayor Gavin Newsom’s personal piggy bank, the city’s other major transportation agency has been quietly advancing plans to improve traffic flow and make drivers pay their full costs (thus encouraging alternative forms of transportation such as bikes and Muni).
The San Francisco County Transportation Authority — which administers transportation projects for the city and is governed essentially by the Board of Supervisors, albeit with Sup. Jake McGoldrick as chair and Sup. Bevan Dufty as vice chair — held a quarterly press breakfast this morning. McGoldrick, Executive Director Jose Luis Moscovich, and SFTA staffers detailed the agency’s progress on Bus Rapid Transit plans for Geary Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue (which would decrease transit travel times by 30 percent), $20 million worth of signal upgrades and pedestrian improvements along dangerous 19th Avenue, and congestion pricing initiatives that will be coming forward this summer.
“We are at a very important moment in terms of national transportation policy,” Moscovich warned, describing ongoing efforts in Washington D.C. to set new standards for how federal transportation funds get allocated over the next 30 years. Are you listening, Mr. Mayor? It’s time to stop playing games and start working with other city leaders and our congressional delegation to build a 21st century transportation system for San Francisco.

Newsom takes a trip…and all the credit

January 23, 2008

Last year in Davos, Newsom’s avatar was interviewed in Second Life, the highlight of his trip.
While Mayor Gavin Newsom was jetting off to Switzerland to play celebrity and attend his fourth World Economic Forum – where on Friday he’ll lead a panel discussion entitled “How Cities Are Aiming For Sustainable Growth” – smart growth activists here were working with Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin to actually create sustainable growth policies for San Francisco.
In fact, the legislation Peskin has introduced to limit the amount of parking that will be built with housing downtown (and to delink parking from the housing price, thereby lower housing costs for most and making drivers pay for their impacts) is the kind of thing that Newsom has blocked or ignored in the past.
But as Peskin noted in the Examiner article, this is a smart solution that should be embraced by both environmentalists and developers. That means, no doubt, that after Newsom watches others do the work and take the political hits for being bold, he’ll swoop in later to claim the program, just as he did with Sup. Tom Ammiano’s health care measure.
BTW, on Friday morning, Newsom will be taking part in the “World Class Health Care for World Class Cities,” led by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who willingly meets for a monthly Question Time with his city’s legislature and has led the way in the traffic congestion pricing program that San Francisco will consider adopting this summer (and which Newsom recently got on board with after Sup. Jake McGoldrick and others did the heavy lifting over the last two years).

How to save the Housing Authority

January 23, 2008

OPINION After repeated media attention to the myriad problems at the San Francisco Housing Authority, Mayor Gavin Newsom asked the agency’s director, Gregg Fortner, to resign. An interim director, Mirian Saez, was appointed to fill his shoes until a national search is conducted to find a permanent replacement. The mayor has announced replacements for two of the seven commissioners; one of the new appointees, Dwayne Jones, is a senior Newsom staffer.

As an affordable-housing advocate who works with residents of public housing, I am overjoyed at the prospect of change at the agency. No matter who is chosen to be the new director, a few key changes should be seriously considered for the city’s largest low-income-housing provider. Here are some suggestions:

1. Appoint commissioners who get it and care. The mayor could have made sweeping changes after he asked the SFHA commissioners to submit letters of resignation. Instead, he used the opportunity to appoint someone who is on his payroll. As long as political connections continue to trump experience, understanding, and compassion, tenants will suffer. What about having a public process in which residents and the community can nominate candidates? How about sharing the power to appoint housing commissioners with the Board of Supervisors, as is done with some other city commissions?

2. Listen to the residents, damn it! While it is refreshing to see the mayor look for solutions to the rampant problems at the SFHA, a panel of national experts is hardly necessary. The best experts are right here. They are residents, and they are clamoring to have their voices heard. Conduct a local survey, have regular open meetings, encourage the formation of resident councils, work with service providers and community groups that reach out to residents, and allow for resident participation as much as possible.

3. Talk among yourselves. The same lessons we learned after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina apply to this disaster as well. City agencies that serve public housing residents are often unaware of the major issues at public housing developments. The Departments of Building Inspections and Public Health, for instance, should be monitoring conditions and reporting to the mayor and the supervisors. The Mayor’s Office of Housing should be working closely with the Redevelopment Agency, the Office of Community Development, and the Human Service Agency as they plan for the demolition and rebuilding of distressed projects. City officials and agencies shouldn’t have to pull teeth to get basic information from the SFHA.

4. Tell Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues to fight like hell. Whoever leads the Housing Authority in the future will always have a defense against charges of not addressing poor conditions because Congress keeps hacking away at the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget. We have powerful congressional representation in San Francisco; let’s push harder.

5. Step up to the plate to provide local resources to improve public housing. As hard as we fight to leverage more federal funds, it is nearly certain that the SFHA will still be severely underfunded. We can no longer rely solely on federal funds to house our lowest-income residents. A commitment to creative and innovative local funding solutions must continue or we will see an increase in the exodus of African American families, which the mayor claims to be committed to curbing.

Sara Shortt

Sara Shortt is executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

From fryers to fuel

January 23, 2008

› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY At Ar Roi Thai in Nob Hill, about 75 gallons of oil are left over every month from the creation of the restaurant’s deep-fried cuisine, according to manager Theresa Shotiveyaratana. But instead of dumping it, the business donates its gunk to the newly established SFGreasecycle, which converts it into biodiesel that is now used to power San Francisco city vehicles such as Muni buses and fire engines.

As of Dec. 31, 2007, the city completed a yearlong project proposed in Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Biodiesel Initiative, which called for all 1,600 municipal vehicles to run exclusively on B20, a mixture of 20 percent pure biodiesel and 80 percent traditional petroleum diesel. The blend is compatible with most modern-day diesel engines and reduces carbon monoxide emissions by 12 percent and the particulate matter found in smog by 20 percent.

But most of that biodiesel hasn’t been generated locally: the city is halfway through its three-year master fuel contract with San Francisco Petroleum, which gets the stuff from soybean oil produced in the Midwest.

"It’s really not enough that a city looks at using biofuels to offset fossil fuels," said Karri Ving, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s biofuels coordinator and one of SFGreasecycle’s three staff members. "We don’t want to go from one environmentally disastrous fuel to another. We want less shipping miles from the middle of the country."

That’s where SFGreasecycle, a $1.3 million program put into action by the SFPUC last month, comes in. It picks up used fats, oils, and grease (known in the program as FOG) at no charge from wherever people are willing to spare them. The list currently comprises mostly eateries, from chains like Baja Fresh and locals like Ar Roi, but also households, high schools, a synagogue, and museums such as the de Young.

About 170 restaurants have signed up so far, allowing the organization to collect an average of 5,000 gallons of so-called yellow grease — or what comes straight from the frying pan — per month. Furthermore, its efforts are a way of keeping congealed grease out of sewer pipes, which costs the city roughly $3.5 million in cleanup efforts per year, according to the SFPUC.

Ving said the organization has even loftier goals in mind. By the beginning of 2010 it aims to collect 100,000 gallons of grease per month. That’s about 20 percent of the five to six million gallons of diesel that the Department of the Environment estimates the municipal fleet burns per year.

Mark Westlund, the spokesperson for the Department of the Environment, said using the grease as a replacement for the imported fuel is a real possibility as they have "an almost one-to-one conversion rate."

SFGreasecycle uses four biodiesel treatment plants in the Bay Area to convert the grease to usable fuel. And sticking with its zero-waste goals, it donates the small amount of unusable, low-quality grease to the plants, which convert it into methane, which in turn powers these facilities.

Eric Bowen, chair of the city’s Biodiesel Access Task Force, shares Ving’s sentiment that "not all biodiesel is created equal," he told us. The task force is working with the Board of Supervisors to expand the local sources of biodiesel when the fuel contract expires in 18 months and to look into building a production facility in the city, where none currently exist.

The United States Department of Energy estimates that biodiesel contains roughly 8 percent less energy per gallon than petroleum diesel, although that translates into only about a 1 percent difference in mileage and performance.

Bowen said using biodiesel is a win-win situation since it acts as a natural solvent to clean fuel filters. And "the improved lubricity extends the vehicle life," he said. But before they use biodiesel for the first time, diesel tanks must be cleaned out, which the Fire Department found costs $2,000 to $3,000 per tank.

SFGreasecycle also complements the city’s Climate Action Plan, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. "The goal is not just to make San Francisco sustainable," Ving told us, "but to develop a program that can be implemented by other municipalities."

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Endorsements — Alameda County

January 23, 2008

Measures A and B (Children’s Hospital bond)

NO

The history of this pair of ballot measures speaks to the reasons to oppose them: Children’s Hospital, a private outfit, hired signature gatherers and put Measure B — a special tax to fund a $300 million bond to help rebuild the hospital, which needs a seismic upgrade — on the ballot without even consulting the county supervisors. The supervisors then came back with a compromise plan, Measure A, which Children’s is now supporting — but none of the supervisors have endorsed.

We’re not big on using public bonds and tax money to rebuild a private hospital (especially when the county’s public health system has so many needs of its own). And none of this was very well thought out. Vote no; if there’s a good reason to rebuild Children’s Hospital, there needs to be a much better public process to fund it.

Measure E (Albany pool bonds)

YES

Measure E would authorize $10 million in bonds to rebuild the public pool at Albany High School. It also includes money for new classrooms. The Alameda Green Party thinks the pool should have solar heat and use alternatives to chlorine, and we agree — but that’s not reason enough to block a modest measure to improve a widely used facility. Vote yes.

Measure G (Oakland school tax)

YES

This is a parcel tax that would charge property owners in Oakland $195 per year, with the money going to the public schools. Yes, the Oakland schools are still controlled by a state administrator, who can ultimately decide where the money will go, and yes, parcel taxes aren’t perfect, but with school funding in the state as dire as it is, we support almost any sort of tax that helps education. And while parcel taxes allow big commercial landlords to pay the same rate as small homeowners, there is a low-income-resident exemption. Vote yes. 2

For national, state, and San Francisco endorsements, click here.

Fixing the cab problem

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January 23, 2008
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EDITORIAL Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier and Gerardo Sandoval are both proposing changes that would allow taxi companies to raise the fees they charge drivers to lease cabs. Alioto-Pier’s plan seems entirely wrongheaded, and Sandoval’s could use some work. But both proposals fail to address the much bigger issues facing the industry.

Most San Francisco cabdrivers are independent contractors: they pay the taxi companies a "gate," or lease fee, every shift, buy their own gas, and keep whatever’s left from the fares customers pay. The city regulates both the meters and the gates.

But over the past few years the meter rate — the amount the drivers actually collect — has been mostly flat, while gates have risen and the cost of gas has soared. So the drivers are being squeezed. And, of course, as contractors they have no health insurance.

That’s obviously bad for the drivers, but it’s bad for the city too: if driving a cab doesn’t pay a decent wage, the quality of the drivers is going to decline. The long-termers, who know the city and have plenty of experience behind the wheel, are going to leave, and more of the remaining drivers will be scrambling (often at the risk of accidents) to get from one stop to the next as fast as possible so they can squeeze in more fares per shift.

Alioto-Pier’s legislation as originally introduced would have allowed the big companies in town to raise gates by $18.50 per shift, from $91.50 to $110. That would have cost the average full-time driver almost $5,000 per year. Since most drivers aren’t making big money these days anyway, that sort of a pay cut would be brutal.

Alioto-Pier is now amending the bill, and it’s not clear how extensively she’ll change it, but even a small gate increase is unacceptable. Even if the cab companies need more money, they shouldn’t take it from the drivers; while tourists and some residents would complain about a fare increase, the Board of Supervisors should accept no plan that doesn’t at least ensure that the drivers come out even.

Sandoval wants to allow very modest gate hikes for companies that switch to clean-energy cabs, which is a fine idea but needs to go further. Many of the companies rely on big, gas-guzzling cars; even if those vehicles ran on natural gas, they’d still be wasting fossil fuels. If the city wants to fight taxi pollution, the board should require all new cab purchases to meet tough mileage standards and should provide incentives to get the aging clunkers out of the fleet. (Cars that use less gas would help the drivers save on costs too.)

But the real issue here is that drivers continue to get screwed by the big cab outfits, and the supervisors need to take that on directly. There should be no gate increase until there’s a driver health care plan in place — and in the future, all gate increases should be linked to fare hikes. If the companies get more money, the drivers should too; that’s only fair.

Reject Sklar and Brooks

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January 23, 2008
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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom’s pledge to bring new ideas into his second administration apparently doesn’t include public power. Not only has he ousted Susan Leal, the (modestly) pro–public power director of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission; he’s also reappointed to the panel two commissioners who have been Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s best friends. Ryan Brooks and Dick Sklar can only be rejected if eight members of the Board of Supervisors vote against them, and that’s what needs to happen.

For years the PUC has been a less-than-stellar panel dominated by political allies of the mayor, which is crazy: The agency is overseeing a $4 billion plan to reconstruct the city’s entire water system (which requires a certain degree of management). And it’s in the middle of a growing move to build a sustainable, environmentally sound power system for the city. The PUC is overseeing San Francisco’s move to community choice aggregation. It’s managing the installation of city-owned power plants. And it could be involved in a long list of renewable-power projects, from wave generation to solar.

That last thing the city needs is PUC commissioners who are opposed to (or weak on) moving into the energy business.

Unfortunately, Sklar (who served as ambassador to the United Nations under Bill Clinton) and Brooks (a vice president of Viacom Outdoor) have shown such reluctance to promote public power that they might as well be on PG&E’s payroll. Their reappointments, announced Jan. 15, are a sign that Newsom will not tolerate any move by his commission to get San Francisco into the retail electricity business (although a federal law — the Raker Act — requires the city to run a public power system).

It may be that public power advocates will ultimately have to go around the PUC; as long at the mayor controls that panel, it’s unlikely that anyone who wants to promote real energy alternatives will be appointed. And it’s essential that the supervisors move forward on a City Charter amendment that would give the board the right to appoint three of the five commissioners.

But in the meantime, it’s crucial to send Newsom a message: his ouster of Leal and his attempt to ensure a PG&E-safe PUC are not acceptable.

The appointments don’t require board approval — but the supervisors have the right to veto them with an eight-vote majority. Sups. Aaron Peskin, Sophie Maxwell, and Bevan Dufty have vowed to introduce a resolution to reject Sklar and Brooks, and their colleagues should join in. We don’t expect Newsom to suddenly turn around and name active public power supporters in the place of Sklar and Brooks, but if the board sends the message that PG&E allies aren’t OK, the next two appointments might be a little better.

The supervisors should reject Dick Sklar and Ryan Brooks as quickly as possible.

Editor’s Notes

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January 23, 2008
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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There’s a January report from the San Francisco Controller’s Office that says the city’s transportation policy is failing.

It doesn’t say that in so many words — that might have gotten some media attention — but the implication is clear.

The report is on the taxicab industry, always a fascinating topic, and it’s filled with charts and graphs discussing how much money the cab companies make and how little the drivers make. But in the middle of all of that is a remarkable paragraph that says:

"The resident population in San Francisco appears to be increasing. Since 2000, the Department of Finance reports it has grown by 4.7 percent, or by approximately 0.6 percent per year. Although the Census Bureau believes San Francisco lost population from 2000 to 2005, it too has reported population increase since 2005. Muni trips have slightly declined over the same period — a cumulative negative change of 2.5 percent — while vehicle registrations in San Francisco have increased by 1.5 percent. This suggests that residents may be substituting away from mass transit and into private and personal transport modes."

That reads like, well, a Controller’s Office report, but here’s the translation: More San Franciscans are driving cars. Fewer are taking Muni. It’s not exactly shocking news to anyone who pays attention to traffic patterns in town, but it’s a serious indictment of city policy.

The statistics show a couple of things. One is that the city is, indeed, getting richer — generally speaking, wealthier people are more likely to use private cars. Another is that Muni hasn’t been performing: all of the national and local data show there’s a direct correlation between on-time transit service and ridership (and of course there’s a direct, or rather inverse, correlation between the number of people riding Muni and the number of cars on the streets.)

But what it says to me is that city hall doesn’t really consider the car glut a top priority.

There is no official city goal to reduce the number of cars in town or the number of car miles traveled or the number of vehicles on the streets. The city Planning Department continues to base its land-use decisions on projections of increased car traffic (which has to be accommodated with more garages). Nobody’s calling for a five-year plan to turn the trend around.

It’s going to be a big year for transit policy: the city’s Transit Effectiveness Study comes out in February, and the report on congestion management should be done in June. Perhaps the supervisors can use that information to create goals, timelines, and programs that will reduce — instead of accommodate — cars on the streets.

I’m part of the problem, and I know it: I drive a car, and I drive it too often. I do it because it’s difficult to get my kids to and from school on a bus.

That’s one of the tricky parts of this equation (school buses in a city where everyone has choice and kids from any neighborhood can go to any school), but I have to say, the parking lot at McKinley Elementary School is packed every single morning with people driving schoolkids. You’d think the city could work with the San Francisco Unified School District — maybe organize car pools. Maybe the mayor’s $130,000 per year global warming coordinator could get involved.

We could start with a citywide survey: Why do you drive? Where? What would get you out of your car? Aim for 5 percent per year. It’d be better than what we’re doing now.

Showdown at 55 Laguna

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January 16, 2008
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› sarah@sfbg.com

Time is running out on attempts by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, State Sen. Carole Migden, and Assemblymember Mark Leno to secure greater affordable-housing levels from the University of California, which wants to build private residential units on its UC Berkeley Extension campus at 55 Laguna in San Francisco.

Since the school site closed more than three years ago, critics have questioned how the UC’s plan for the campus, which served a public use for more than 150 years, will benefit the community, while preservationists succeeded in getting the campus awarded historic landmark status.

But with the UC claiming "unrestricted power to take and hold real and personal property for the benefit of the university" in a public statement, the city’s regulatory power is limited. The San Francisco Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the project Jan. 17, including the demolition of Middle Hall Gymnasium, the oldest building on the campus, and Richardson Hall Annex. But local and state legislative officials are focused on trying to get more affordable housing at the site.

Although negotiations were still ongoing at Guardian press time, the UC’s plan was to demolish the two historically landmarked buildings on the 5.8-acre Hayes Valley campus and build 450 new housing units, 16 percent of them to be offered below market rates, about the minimum number under the city’s inclusionary-housing law.

"But we’re pushing hard at the bottom line," said Mirkarimi, who, along with Migden, Leno, the city’s Planning Department, the Mayor’s Office of Housing, and affordable-housing activists, has been meeting with developer A.F. Evans and Openhouse, a local nonprofit that intends to build an 80-unit, market-rate, LGBT-friendly, senior residential community on the site.

"And we are trying at a separate venue to appeal to the UC Regents to be more sensitive and cooperative in what their bottom line profitability level is," Mirkarimi, whose District 5 includes Hayes Valley, told the Guardian.

Mirkarimi said he’s in favor of preserving all five buildings at the site but that both the Planning Commission’s Landmark Advisory Committee and the Board of Supervisors have voted to preserve only three. "We are trying to be pragmatic yet clear as to what our objectives are in trying to make a complex deal that’s triangulated by UC Berkeley, A.F. Evans, and Openhouse, with UC as the big daddy in the room.

"UC can do almost what UC wants. But the city’s leverage comes from UC asking for housing to be built and requesting a zoning change at a site that has become a magnet for grime and crime," Mirkarimi said. "It would also be negligent for UC to let this site remain in its current condition.

Under state law, the UC is exempt from city and county zoning and building codes if it builds educational facilities or projects that are deemed to be in the public interest. But according to officials with the City Attorney’s Office, the UC is not exempt from such codes if it turns over its land for private development.

And then there’s the city’s claim that it never conveyed the title to Waller Street, which lies between Buchanan and Laguna streets and is essential to the project, giving opponents some leverage. The UC disputes the city’s claim, but Mirkarimi maintains that the Board of Supervisors’ control of the street "provides a contingency plan if we are not making progress. And either way, UC is going to have to pay for the right to Waller."

The UC’s 55 Laguna project manager Kevin Hufferd confirmed that he is having "ongoing discussions with state and city officials" but declined to comment further.

"Frustrating" is how queer affordable-housing activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca described the last-minute discussions about the 55 Laguna development plan. "A.F. Evans claims it won’t be making any money and that they can’t do any more," Mecca told the Guardian. He attended a Jan. 11 meeting with the company at which, he claims, the developers offered to increase affordability levels to 19.5 percent but Mirkarimi pushed for more.

"To his credit, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi keeps saying this is unacceptable," Avicolli Mecca said, also lauding the Mayor’s Office of Housing for trying to make Openhouse’s project "100 percent affordable."

Currently, Openhouse’s development includes no below-market-rate units, a situation Avicolli Mecca claims the MOH hopes to change "through bringing in subsidies."

"Obviously, we are not against queer senior housing," Avicolli Mecca said. "The issue is that this is a lousy deal. What are we getting? Nothing, but UC gains a lot of money. There’s a crazy need for affordable housing and no way to justify this plan."

Filmmaker Eliza Hemingway, whose documentary Uncommon Knowledge records how the UC shuttered 55 Laguna with no input from — and little concern for — staff, students, and the surrounding community, believes that people have lost sight of the public use issue.

"They are worn down by the struggle, by trying to find a compromise because the space is empty, but the question remains: why is a public campus being privately developed?" Hemingway told us. She mourns the loss of educational programs and spaces that benefited the community and the lack of transparency that has marred the UC’s plans.

"For there to have been such huge barriers to the public process over what is a huge amount of public land is unfortunate," Hemingway said.

Cynthia Servetnick of the Save the UC Berkeley Extension Laguna Street Campus told us her group is prepared to file a lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Act if the project as currently proposed is approved.

"We’d rather see a project that has 40 percent affordable housing at 50 percent [area median income] than a lawsuit, but $38,000 a year [which would be the annual income requirement for seniors, the disabled, and people with AIDS to be able to afford one of Openhouse’s units] is too high," she said, noting that the proposed units are small but could go for $4,000 a month, rising to $7,000 monthly for those who need more services and staff.

Claiming that recognition of the campus as a historic landmark assists project sponsors in accessing preservation incentives, including federal tax credits, Servetnick said, "A.F. Evans has its [environmental impact report] complete and is clearing the way for 450 units, but they could do that and save all the historic buildings, thus having the same profitability but more affordability. It’s now or never. This is a new term for the mayor, we have a new city planning director, John Rahaim, and officials open to negotiating a win-win."

Migden was even more blunt. "Poor old queers need a place to retire too," she said. "Either Evans and the UC up the affordability level to 40 or 50 percent and guarantee that some of the senior LGBT units are subsidized, or the project dies."

As of press time, A.F. Evans, Openhouse, the SF Planning Department, and UC representatives had not returned the Guardian‘s calls.

Deferring to Mirkarimi to make an official announcement, Leno said, "I know that the meetings have been ongoing and that the issue of affordability is a priority, and I’m hopeful that we will have an agreement among all stakeholders shortly."

Endorsements

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January 16, 2008
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President, Democrat

BARACK OBAMA

This is now essentially a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, and no matter how it comes down, it’s a historic moment: neither of the front-runners for the White House (and by any standard, the Democratic nominee starts off as the front-runner) is a white man. And frankly, the nation could do a lot worse than either President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama.

But on the issues, and because he’s a force for a new generation of political activism, our choice is Obama.

Obama’s life story is inspirational, and his speeches are the stuff of political legend. He can rouse a crowd and generate excitement like no presidential candidate has in many, many years. He has, almost single-handedly, caused thousands of young people to get involved for the first time in a major political campaign.

The cost of his soaring rhetoric is a disappointing lack of specific plans. It can be hard at times to tell exactly what Obama stands for, exactly how he plans to carry out his ambitious goals. His stump speeches are riddled with words like change and exhortations to a new approach to politics, but he doesn’t talk much, for example, about how to address the gap between the rich and the poor, or how to tackle urban crime and poverty, or whether Israel should stop building settlements in the occupied territories.

In fact, our biggest problem with Obama is that he talks as if all the nation needs to do is come together in some sort of grand coalition of Democrats and Republicans, of "blue states and red states." But some of us have no interest in making common cause with the religious right or Dick Cheney or Halliburton or Don Fisher. There are forces and interests in the United States that need to be opposed, defeated, consigned to the dustbin of history, and for all of Obama’s talk of unity, we worry that he lacks the interest in or ability to take on a tough, bloody fight against an entrenched political foe.

Still, when you look at his positions, he’s on the right track. He wants to raise the cap on earnings subject to Social Security payments (right now high earners don’t pay Social Security taxes on income over $97,000 a year). He wants to cut taxes for working-class families and pay for it by letting the George W. Bush tax cuts on the rich expire (that’s not enough, but it’s a start). He wants to double fuel-economy standards. His health care plan isn’t perfect, but it’s about the same as all the Democrats offer.

And he’s always been against the war.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that. Obama spoke out against the invasion when even most Democrats were afraid to, so he has some credibility when he says he’s going to withdraw all troops within 16 months and establish no permanent US bases in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton has far more extensive experience than Obama (and people who say her years in the White House don’t count have no concept of the role she played in Bill Clinton’s administration). We are convinced that deep down she has liberal instincts. But that’s what’s so infuriating: since the day she won election to the US Senate, Clinton has been trianguutf8g, shaping her positions, especially on foreign policy, in an effort to put her close to the political center. At a time when she could have shown real courage — during the early votes on funding and authorizing the invasion of Iraq — she took the easy way out, siding with President Bush and refusing to be counted with the antiwar movement. She has refused to distance herself from such terrible Bill Clinton–era policies as welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and don’t ask, don’t tell. We just can’t see her as the progressive choice.

We like John Edwards. We like his populist approach, his recognition that there are powerful interests running this country that won’t give up power without a fight, and his talk about poverty. In some ways (certainly in terms of campaign rhetoric) he’s the most progressive of the major candidates. It is, of course, a bit of a political act — he was, at best, a moderate Southern Democrat when he served in the Senate. But at least he’s raising issues nobody else is talking about, and we give him immense credit for that. And we’ve always liked Dennis Kucinich, who is the only person taking the right positions on almost all of the key issues.

But Edwards has slid pretty far out of the running at this point, and Kucinich is an afterthought. The choice Californians face is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And Obama, for all of his flaws, has fired up a real grassroots movement, has energized the electorate, and is offering the hope of a politics that looks forward, not back. On Feb. 5, vote for Barack Obama.

President, Republican

RON PAUL

We have a lot of disagreements with Ron Paul and his libertarian worldview. He opposes the taxes that we need to make civil society function and the government regulations that are essential to protecting the most powerless members of society. From its roots in the Magna Carta and Adam Smith’s economic theories to the Bill of Rights, it’s clear the United States was founded on a social compact that libertarians too often seem to deny. And Paul compounds these ills in the one area in which he departs from the libertarians: he doesn’t support federal abortion rights. He’s been associated with some statements that are racially insensitive (to say the least). He clearly shouldn’t be president.

But he won’t — Paul isn’t going to win the nomination. So it’s worthwhile endorsing him as a protest vote for two reasons. His presence on the ballot serves to show up some of the hypocrisies of the rest of the GOP field — and he is absolutely correct and insightful on one of the most important issues of the day: the war.

Paul is alone among the Republican candidates for president in sounding the alarm that our country is pursuing a dangerous, shortsighted, hypocritical, expensive, and ultimately doomed strategy of trying to dominate the world militarily. He opposed the invasion of Iraq and thinks the US should pull out immediately. It’s immensely valuable to have someone like that in the GOP debates, speaking to the conservative half of our country about why this policy violates the principles they claim to hold dear.

Paul is absolutely correct that if we stopped trying to police the world, ended the war on drugs, and quit negotiating trade deals that favor multinational corporations over American families and workers, we would be a far more free and prosperous nation.

President, Green

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY

We endorsed Ralph Nader for president in 2000, in large part as a protest vote against the neoconservative politics of the Bill Clinton administration (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, welfare "reform," etc.). And Nader’s Green Party campaign had a place (particularly in a state the Democrats were going to win anyway). We’ve never been among those who blame Nader for Al Gore’s loss — Gore earned plenty of blame himself. But four years later we, like a lot of Nader’s allies and supporters, urged him not to run — and he ignored those pleas. Now he may be seeking the Green Party nomination again. Nader hasn’t formally announced yet, but he’s talking about it — which means he still shows no interest in being accountable to anyone. It’s too bad he has to end his political life this way.

Fortunately, there are several other credible Green Party candidates. The best is Cynthia McKinney, the former Georgia congressional representative, who has switched from the Democratic to the Green Party and is seeking a spot on the top of the ticket. McKinney has her drawbacks, but we’ll endorse her.

The real question here is not who would make a better president (that’s not in the cards, of course) but who would do more to build the Green Party and promote the best course for a promising third party that still hasn’t developed much traction as a national force. We’ve been clear for years that the Greens should be working from the grass roots up: the party’s first priority should be electing school board members, community college board members, members of boards of supervisors and city councils. Over time, leaders like Mark Sanchez, Jane Kim, Matt Gonzalez, and Ross Mirkarimi can start competing for mayor’s offices and posts in the State Legislature and Congress. Running a presidential candidate only makes sense as part of a party-building operation. (That’s what Nader did in 2000, and for all the obvious reasons he’s incapable of doing it today.)

But the Greens insist on running candidates for president, so we might as well pick the best one.

McKinney has a lot to offer the Greens. She’s an experienced legislator who has won several tough elections and taken on a lot of tough issues. As an African American woman from the South, she can also broaden the party’s base. She was a solid progressive in Congress, where she was willing to speak out on issues that many of her colleagues ducked (she was, for example, one of the few members to push for an impeachment resolution).

McKinney has her downside — in recent years she’s been flirting with the loony side of the left, getting a bit close to some Sept. 11 conspiracy theories that hurt her credibility (although she’s also made some very good points about the attacks and the lack of a serious investigation into what happened). And some of her supporters have made alarmingly anti-Semitic statements (from which, to her credit, she has attempted to distance herself). But she has to come out now, strongly, to denounce those sorts of comments and show that she can build a real coalition.

With those (serious) reservations, we’ll give her the nod.

Proposition 91 (use of gas tax)

NO

Prop. 91 is essentially an effort to ensure that revenue from the state’s gas tax goes only to roads and highways. It’s a moot point anyway: Proposition 1A, which passed last year, did the same thing, and now even proponents of 91 are urging a No vote.

But we’re going to take this opportunity to reiterate our opposition to Prop. 1A, Prop. 91, and any other ridiculous effort to restrict the use of gasoline tax revenues.

It should be clear to everyone at this point that the widespread overuse of automobiles is having far bigger impacts on California than just wear and tear on the roads. Cars are the biggest single cause of global warming, and they kill and injure more Californians than guns do, causing enormous costs that are borne by all of us. Driving a car is expensive for society, and drivers ought to be paying some of those costs. That should mean extra gas taxes and a reinstatement of the vehicle license fee to previous levels (and extra surcharges for those who drive Hummers and other especially wasteful, dangerous vehicles). That money ought to go to the state General Fund so California doesn’t have to close state parks and slash spending on schools and social services, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing.

Proposition 92 (community college funding)

YES

Prop. 92 is another example of how desperate California educators are and how utterly dysfunctional the state’s budget process has become.

The measure is complicated, but it amounts to a plan to guarantee community colleges more money — a total of about $300 million a year — and includes provisions to cut the cost of attending the two-year schools. Those are good things: community colleges serve a huge number of students — about 10 times as many as the University of California system — many of whom come from lower-income families who can’t afford even a small fee increase. And, of course, as the state budget has gotten tighter, community college fees have gone up in the past few years — and as a result, attendance has dropped.

Part of the way Prop. 92 cuts fees is by divorcing community college funding from K–12 funding — and that’s created some controversy among teachers. Current state law requires a set percentage of California spending (about 40 percent) to go to K–12 and community college education, but there’s no provision to give more money to the community colleges when enrollment at those institutions grows faster than K–12 enrollment.

Some teachers fear that Prop. 92 could lead to decreased funds for K–12, and that’s a real concern. In essence, this measure would add $300 million to the state budget, and it includes no specific funding source. This worries us. In theory, the legislature and the governor ought to agree that education funding matters and find the money by raising taxes; in practice, this could set up more competition for money between different (and entirely worthy) branches of the state’s public education system — not to mention other critical social services.

But many of the same concerns were voiced when Prop. 98 was on the ballot, and that measure probably saved public education in California. The progressives on the San Francisco Board of Education all support Prop. 92, and so do we. Vote yes.

Proposition 93 (term limits)

YES

This is pathetic, really. The term-limits law that voters passed in 1990 has been bad news, shifting more power to the governor and ensuring that the State Assembly and the State Senate will be filled with people who lack the experience and institutional history to fight the Sacramento lobbyists (who, of course, have no term limits). But the legislature isn’t a terribly popular institution, and the polls all show that it would be almost impossible to simply repeal term limits. So the legislature — led by State Assembly speaker Fabian Núñez, who really, really wants to keep his job — has proposed a modification instead.

Under the current law, a politician can serve six years — three terms — in the assembly and eight years — two terms — in the senate. Since most senators are former assembly members, that’s a total of 14 years any one person can serve in the legislature.

Prop. 93 would cut that to 12 years — but allow members to serve them in either house. So Núñez, who will be termed out this year, could serve six more years in the assembly (but would then be barred from running for the senate). Senators who never served in the assembly could stick around for three terms.

That’s fine. It’s a bit better than what we have now — it might bring more long-term focus to the legislature and eliminate some of the musical-chairs mess that’s brought us the Mark Leno versus Carole Migden bloodbath.

But it’s sad that the California State Legislature, once a model for the nation, has been so stymied by corruption that the voters don’t trust it and the best we can hope for is a modest improvement in a bad law. Vote yes.

Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97 (Indian gambling compacts)

NO

We supported the original law that allowed Indian tribes to set up casinos, and we have no regrets: that was an issue of tribal sovereignty, and after all the United States has done to the tribes, it seemed unconscionable to deny one of the most impoverished populations in the state the right to make some money. Besides, we’re not opposed in principle to gambling.

But this is a shady deal, and voters should reject it.

Props. 94–97 would allow four tribes — all of which have become very, very wealthy through gambling — to dramatically expand the size of their casinos. The Pechanga, Morongo, Sycuan, and Agua Caliente tribes operate lucrative casinos in Southern California, spend a small fortune on lobbying, and convinced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to give them permission to create some of the largest casinos in the nation. Opponents of this agreement have forced the issue onto the ballot.

The tribes say the deals will bring big money into the state coffers, and it’s true that more gambling equals more state revenue. But the effective tax rate on the slot machines (and this is all about slot machines, the cash engines of casinos) would be as little as 15 percent — chump change for a gambling operation. And none of the other tribes in the state, some of which are still desperate for money, would share in the bounty.

The big four tribes refuse to allow their workers to unionize. While we respect tribal sovereignty, the state still has the right to limit the size of casinos, and if the tribes want the right to make a lot more money, they ought to be willing to let their workers, not all of them Indians, share in some of the rewards. We’re talking billions of dollars a year in revenue here; paying a decent salary is hardly beyond the financial ability of these massive operations.

The governor cut this deal too fast and gave away too much. If the tribes want to expand their casinos, we’re open to allowing it — but the state, the workers, and the other tribes deserve a bigger share of the revenue. Vote no on 94-97.

Proposition A (neighborhood parks bond)

YES

This $185 million bond has the support of a broad coalition of local politicians and activists, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and every member of the Board of Supervisors. It would put a dent in the city’s serious backlog of deferred maintenance in the park system.

The measure would allocate $117.4 million for repairs and renovations of 12 neighborhood parks, selected according to their seismic and safety needs as well as their usage levels. It would also earmark $11.4 million to replace and repair freestanding restrooms, which, the Recreation and Park Department assures us, will be kept open seven days a week.

The bond also contains $33.5 million for projects on Port of San Francisco land, including a continuous walkway from Herons Head Park to Pier 43 and new open spaces at regular intervals along the eastern waterfront. While some argue that the Port should take care of its own property, it’s pretty broke — and there’s a growing recognition that the city’s waterfront is a treasure, that open space should be a key component of its future, and that it doesn’t really matter which city agency pays for it. In fact, this bond act would provide money to reclaim closed sections of the waterfront and create a Blue Greenway trail along seven miles of bay front.

One of the more questionable elements in this bond is the $8 million earmarked for construction and reconstruction of city playfields — which includes a partnership with a private foundation that wants to install artificial turf. There’s no question that the current fields are in bad repair and that users of artificial turf appreciate its all-weather durability. But some people worry about the environmental impact of the stuff, which is made from recycled tires, while others wonder if this bond will end up giving control of 7 percent of our parkland to the sons of Gap founder Don Fisher (their City Fields Foundation is the entity contributing matching funds for city-led turf conversions). Although the Rec and Park Department has identified 24 sites for such conversions, none can take place without the Board of Supervisors’ approval — and the supervisors and the Rec and Park Commission needs to make it clear that if neighbors don’t want the artificial turf, it won’t be forced on them.

Prop. A also earmarks $5 million for trail restoration and $5 million for an Opportunity Fund, from which all neighborhoods can leverage money for benches and toilets through in-kind contributions, sweat equity, and noncity funds.

And it includes $4 million for park forestry and $185,000 for audits.

With a 2007 independent analysis identifying $1.7 billion in maintenance requirements, this is little more than a start, and park advocates need to be looking for other, ongoing revenue sources. But we’ll happily endorse Prop. A.

Proposition B (deferred retirement for police officers)

YES

We’ve always taken the position that relying exclusively on police officers to improve public safety is as useless as simply throwing criminals behind bars — it’s only part of the solution and will never work as an answer all on its own.

But we’re also aware that the city is suffering a dramatic shortage of police officers; hundreds are expected to retire within a few short years, and those figures aren’t being met by an equal number of enrollees at the academy.

So we’re supporting Prop. B, even if it’s yet another mere stopgap measure the police union has dragged before voters, and even though the San Francisco Police Officers Association is often hostile to attempted law enforcement reforms and is never around when progressives need support for new revenue measures.

Prop. B would allow police officers who are at least 50 years of age and who have served for at least 25 years to continue working for three additional years with their regular pay and benefits while the pension checks they’d have otherwise received collect in a special account with an assured annual 4 percent interest rate.

The POA promises Prop. B will be cost neutral to taxpayers, and the city controller will review the program in three years to ensure that remains the case. Also at the end of three years, the Board of Supervisors, with a simple majority vote, could choose to end or extend it.

POA president Gary Delagnes added during an endorsement interview that department staffers in San Francisco who reach retirement age simply continue working in other police jurisdictions. If that’s the case, we might as well keep them here.

No other city employees are eligible for such a scheme, which strikes us as unfair. And frankly, one of the main reasons the city can’t hire police officers is the high cost of living in San Francisco — so if the POA is worried about recruitment, the group needs to support Sup. Chris Daly’s affordable-housing measure in November.

But we’ll endorse Prop. B.

Proposition C (Alcatraz Conversion Project)

NO

We understand why some people question why a decaying old prison continues to be a centerpiece of Bay Area tourism. A monument to a system that imprisoned people in cold, inhumane conditions doesn’t exactly mesh with San Francisco values.

But the Alcatraz Conversion Project, which proposes placing a half–golf ball–like Global Peace Center atop the Rock, is a wacky idea that looks and sounds like a yuppie tourist retreat and does little to address the island’s tortured past. People don’t have to support everything with peace in the title.

The proposal includes a white domed conference center for nonviolent conflict resolution, a statue of St. Francis, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and an array of what proponents call "architecturally advanced domed Artainment multimedia centers."

We agree with the ideal of dedicating the island to the Native Americans who fished and collected birds’ eggs from this once guano-covered rock for thousands of years and whose descendants carried out a bold occupation at the end of the 1960s. But this proposal seems based on wishful thinking, not fiscal or environmental realities.

The plan is backed by the Global Peace Foundation, which is a branch of the San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, a Mill Valley nonprofit founded by Marin resident and Light Party founder Da Vid. It’s just goofy. Vote no.

Next week: Alameda County endorsements.

Daly’s affordable housing power play

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January 15, 2008
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Sup. Chris Daly appears to be coming up just short in a power play to force affordability standards on the 10,000 housing units that Mayor Gavin Newsom, Lennar Corp., and other top power brokers are trying to build through a June ballot measure. Daly has been working with Bayview-Hunters Point activists — including those with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) and Center for Self-Improvement — to craft a ballot measure that calls for rental housing in the area to be affordable by those making half the city’s median income or less and for housing sales to be affordable by those at 80 percent of the median income or less. Daly needs the signatures of four supervisors by 5 p.m. today to place it on the ballot, but right now he only has Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. Supporters of the measure just minutes ago lined up to testify during the public comment portion of today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, citing the dire need for affordable housing to stem the black exodus from the city, while the African-American ministers who have been close to Lennar and Newsom urged the supervisors not to sign it. While Daly tells us there’s still a chance to get signatures from Tom Ammiano and/or Gerardo Sandoval (who at one point, Daly said, seemed inclined to support it but may have gotten worried about how it might affect his run for judge at the same time), but it doesn’t look good. Lennar representatives and their allies have been circulating through City Hall since the measure was completed on Friday, lobbying hard against it. Now, activists may have to gather signatures if they hope to qualify the measure for the June ballot.

How Oakland’s fearful politicos enabled waste: Part II

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January 11, 2008
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E.M. Health Services, a home health care company founded by a high-ranking member of Your Black Muslim Bakery, opened for business in July 1996, flush with a $1.1 million loan from the city of Oakland.

But shortly over a year later, signs of trouble already plagued the business — and a review of documents shows that the founders of the struggling company paid themselves lavish salaries, and lucrative consulting contracts went to bakery associates and family members.

More than a decade later, the city hasn’t received one penny in repayment for the loan, and questions remain over why city officials granted the loan in the first place.

Under the terms of E.M.’s loan, the company wasn’t scheduled to make principal payments for two years — until 1998 — but just 15 months after getting the money, CEO Nedir Bey asked to defer repayments until 2000.

The city, which had already questioned several invoices submitted by the company, did not approve the extension. Instead, officials responded by requesting an audit of E.M.’s books.

In his request for an extension, Bey did not mention that in May 1997, E.M. Health had applied to the California Department of Insurance for a $2 million loan to purchase a 4,000-square-foot office building on 17th Street in downtown Oakland.

In his application to the state, Bey cited Oakland’s loan approval as proof of his good reputation, even though by then the city was already questioning tens of thousands of dollars in operating expenses claimed by his company.

The $1.1 million loan agreement called for E.M. Health to begin repaying monthly interest and principal payments of $19,692 on May 1, 1998, the date the company was projected to have enough billable clients to break even.

But May came and went with no payments.

And, documents show, E.M. Health would ask for more.

But the story of how the business, a subsidiary of the now-bankrupt Your Black Muslim Bakery, received the money despite a flawed business plan and a disturbing criminal incident in Nedir Bey’s past illustrates the extent politics and pressure played in officials’ decision to approve the loan.

Bakery members also have been linked to several violent incidents, including the Aug. 2 shooting death of journalist Chauncey Bailey, as well as alleged real estate and welfare fraud and child rape.

Details of the company’s financial growth were outlined in correspondence between Nedir Bey and various city staff who reviewed documentation to support the original $1.1 million loan application, as well as documents surrounding Nedir Bey’s later attempts to obtain a $2.5 million loan that was never granted.

In a January 1997 letter to the city, E.M. Health said it had contracts with 13 patients between October and December 1996, which should have generated more than $23,000 in revenues for the three-month period.

The same letter said seven would-be home health aides had graduated from a training program run by a different company. Those aides could not be sent out to care for Medicare/MediCal patients until they passed their certification exams that month, the letter said.

The letter also reveals that E.M. Health had a goal of generating $1.2 million in income in 1997 by providing services to 50 clients. The company instead reported large losses in 1996 and 1997.

It started to pull in more revenue early the following year, according to a letter from former Economic Development Chief Bill Claggett addressed to then-City Manager Robert Bobb.

Clagget’s letter stated that the company had a net profit of $30,068 for the first two months of 1998, but was still experiencing delays in receiving reimbursements for its Medicare/MediCal clients.

By June 17, 1998, Nedir Bey stated in a letter to city loan department manager Teri Robinson-Green that E.M. was “doing about $80,000 a month.” In another letter listing E.M.’s achievements, Bey claimed the company had hired 55 people, trained 30 people and served more than 200 patients.

But still no loan payments.

E.M. Health’s agreement with the city stated that the company and its employees, many of whom were also trusted bakery associates and family members, would not profit from the business. Any extra income after expenses would be funneled back into Qiyamah, a nonprofit organization founded by the bakery to further Yusuf Bey’s community work. Qiyamah was E.M. Health’s parent company.

But the salaries, car lease and billing rates charged by bakery members who moonlighted as consultants to E.M. Health coupled with too few billable clients and delays in reimbursements by Medicare and MediCal all but ensured there wouldn’t be enough money left over to pay back the city’s loans.

“It’s interesting how that millionaire from the skating rink got $12 million and declared bankruptcy and never paid the city back,” Nedir Bey said, referring to the builders of Oakland’s downtown ice rink, who defaulted on an $11 million loan before E.M. Health Services was funded. The city took possession of the rink. “Is the city calling him and trying to ask him those kind of questions?

“The bottom line for me, I’m trying to move forward with my life. Everything that you’re discussing is in my past,” Bey said.

A popular message

E.M. Health’s business model resonated with Oakland’s black politicians who were eager to even the playing field for black businesses that had not gotten an equitable share of city contracts and loans. They lauded the accomplishments of Yusuf Bey — the controversial but charismatic founder of Your Black Muslim Bakery — and viewed the health care proposal as a continuation of his good works.

The plan also resonated with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and appeared to meet its criteria for loan funding. E.M. Health’s $1.1 million loan came from a $44 million pot of money the federal agency offered Oakland to fund start-up organizations that sought to provide jobs in low-income communities.

Still, in a June 4, 1996, letter to Kofi Bonner, Oakland’s then-director of community development, local HUD director Steven Sachs wrote that “E.M. Health Services business plan is still being developed …” with many “issues still to be worked out.”

Sachs urged the city to consider “providing a much smaller amount of financial assistance to this start-up business.”

That same night, despite Bonner’s warning that Nedir Bey had not yet provided several documents the city required for the loan, nor procured a provisional license from state health officials, the council voted to give the company a $275,000 advance on the $1.1 million HUD loan.

In fact, even though E.M. Health was $63,000 in arrears in its business taxes, the company ended up getting $538,000 in interim loans from the city of Oakland over the next six months, before HUD officials reimbursed Oakland for the money in April 1997.

Nedir Bey relied on that type of sentiment when he approached the city in February 1998 and asked for an additional $2.5 million — half loan, half grant — to buy a shopping center in West Oakland to house a new urgent care clinic, in addition to funds he sought unsuccessfully from the state department of insurance.

The shopping center plan lacked numerous financial details and included no downpayment or personal investment by Nedir Bey.

Nonetheless, he lined up his supporters and produced letters of recommendation from well-respected medical experts, including David Kears, director of the Health Care Services Agency for Alameda County; Michael Lenoir, president of the Ethnic Health Institute at Alta Bates/Summit Hospitals; and H. Geoffrey Watson, president of the Golden State Medical Association, which represents 2,000 African-American physicians in California.

Claggett said he would have loved to have someone revitalize that blighted shopping center, but nothing about E.M.’s finances by then suggested it could support a new business venture. City records show that E.M. Health incurred losses of $425,000 during 1996 and $343,000 in 1997.

E.M. Health was already three months behind on the payments for the $1.1 million loan, and a mere six months later, E.M. Health’s parent, the Qiyamah Corporation, would default on a

$100,000 bank loan originally signed by Saleem Ali Bey, also known as Darren Wright.

‘I don’t think they ever gave up’

Nedir Bey nonetheless again pressured the city into rushing the review of his new loan request. By July 1998, he sought direct backing from then-Mayor Elihu Harris, whose father was an E.M. Health patient for a short time, according to company records on file with the city.

“Staff should be more inform (sic) on the procedures and policies of the city of Oakland as opposed to me having to check with the mayor and then letting you know what you can and cannot do,” Bey said in a July 1998 letter to Gregory Hunter, now Oakland’s redevelopment agency director, apparently unhappy that the request had not yet been forwarded to the loan review committee.

Kears recalls Nedir Bey first approached him for a letter of recommendation, but that evolved into a request for money to finance outreach efforts for new patients. The county wound up giving Bey a $25,000 contract, the most it could provide without approval from the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Kears said he doesn’t know whether E.M. Health ever submitted invoices to use any of the money.

The $2.5 million loan application eventually stalled as Nedir Bey failed to produce documentation requested by the city related to the first infusion of cash, the repayment of which was falling further and further behind.

By the time the city sent its first default letter to E.M. Health in December 1998, the payments were eight months past due and the company had crumbled.

City employees would later discover that the company’s offices had been cleaned out, office furnishings and computer equipment pledged as collateral gone.

Claggett said that not long afterward, he was questioned by the FBI about E.M. Health and Nedir Bey. The FBI’s San Francisco office did not return a call seeking comment about the probe.

No way to collect

The Oakland city attorney sued E.M. Health

in December 2000 in an attempt to recover $1.45million in loan funds and $98,600 in unpaid interest. The city won a default judgment, but no one could collect on it, in part because there was no personal guarantee made when the loan was awarded.

City Attorney John Russo said recently that it is up to the city’s Finance Department to collect on the $1.5 million judgment, which remains unpaid today.

The city wasn’t the only one left holding worthless paper when E.M. Health deteriorated. Orthopedic and Neurological Rehabilitation, Speech Pathology Inc. of Los Gatos sued Nedir Bey and Cecil R. Moody, an E.M. Health agent listed among business registration records, in 2000 to recover $8,700 worth of services it provided to the company’s patients over a two-month period. According to the lawsuit, E.M. Health billed MediCal and Medicare but never reimbursed the company.

In May, Daulet Bey, a Muslim wife of Yusuf Bey and mother of current bakery CEO Yusuf Bey IV, 21, and her daughter Jannah Bey filed papers to revive Qiyamah’s state business license. It’s not clear whether bakery associates plan to use Qiyamah to attempt a new business venture.

The license was promptly suspended again by the state Franchise Tax Board for failing to file an information report in 2005, according to spokeswoman Denise Azimi.

Nedir Bey’s costly experiment was finished and thousands in unaccounted for public funds were left in his wake.

MediaNews investigative reporters Thomas Peele and Josh Richman, KQED reporter Judy Campbell, and radio reporter Bob Butler contributed to this report. Cecily Burt is a MediaNews staff writer. G.W. Schulz is a staff writer at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Jew resigns; Newsom cagey about replacement

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January 10, 2008
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Sup. Ed Jew, shown here at a previous court appearance, has been under pressure to resign since last May.
Photo by Charles Russo

Nearly eight months after FBI agents found $40,000 in allegedly extorted cash during raids on his home and office, Ed Jew has resigned from his District 4 seat on the Board of Supervisors, effective at noon tomorrow.

The negotiated deal – announced today by Jew attorney Stuart Hanlon and City Attorney Dennis Herrera – calls for the city to drop its official misconduct and quo warranto actions against Jew in exchange for his resignation, relinquishing any potential claims against the city, and pledging not to seek any public office for at least five years.

“I cannot continue to fight all the battles I’m now facing,” Jew said in a statement read by Hanlon, referring to the criminal prosecutions that are still active, including federal charges of extorting money from the Quickly tapioca stores that faced permitting problems and local charges of perjury and voter fraud for allegedly not living in San Francisco when he ran for supervisor, which was the basis for the city’s efforts to remove him.

Mayor Gavin Newsom suspended Jew in September, replacing him with interim Sup. Carmen Chu. But during a press availability following the announcement of the Jew deal, Newsom was cagey about whether the job now belonged to Chu: “I will be meeting with Supervisor Chu later this afternoon and tomorrow I’ll make my determination.”

Challenging Newsom’s power grabs

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January 9, 2008
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In the wake of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s meddling with the leadership of the supposedly independent San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency Board of Directors, activists and members of the Board of Supervisors are engaged in active behind-the-scenes debates about how to respond.
Generally, they’re resigned to accepting that SFPUC general manager Susan Leal is out (the SFPUC commission has yet to actually remove Leal, who is on disability leave after being hit by a car in front of City Hall, but Newsom is thought to have the votes lined up), and so are his MTA appointees Leah Shahum, Wil Din, and Peter Mezey (Why those three? Read item two here for a possible explanation). The ousted trio submitted the resignation letters that Newsom requested, thereby giving up their legal right to finish out their fixed terms (two of which ended in just a couple months anyway).
But the supervisors and activists still may exact a price for Newsom’s hubris and short-sighted power grab.

Newsom’s gambit

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January 9, 2008
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Gavin Newsom, flanked by his sister, Hillary Newsom Callan, her two young daughters and his fiancee, Jennifer Siebel, prepares to be sworn in for a second term as Mayor of San Francisco by his father, retired Judge William Newsom.

Promises, promises. Newsom takes the oath, using an old family Bible, held by Siebel.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s 2008 inaugural address under City Hall’s caverous domed rotunda looked like a rehearsal for his upcoming wedding to actress Jennifer Siebel, what with the choir trilling, the reverend pronouncing his blessings, the family Bible, the bucket loads of roses, and Newsom’s sister’s cute little kids running all around.

Siebel clutches Newsom’s niece, Talitha Callan, while the Mayor listens to event emcee Carlos Garcia, before launching into his hour-long inaugural address

Less adorable was the fact that Newsom’s speech contained a not so thinly veiled attack on the November 2008 charter amendment, which seeks to set aside $2.7 billion in city funds for affordable housing over 15 years.

The amendment would give affordable housing the same baseline of funding that the city already allocates to the Recreation and Park Department Fund and the Library Preservation Fund—and less than it already sets aside for the Children, Youth and Families Fund.

Sounds reasonable to those of us who have no hope of owing a home in San Francisco and are either having difficulty cobbling together the rent each month for our lowly studio/room/apartment/shack in the City, or are already displaced to the East Bay.

It’s a point that a super majority of the Board of Supervisors, along with State Senators Carole Migden and Leland Yee, and Assemblymembers Mark Leno and Fiona Ma, all seem to get, given their support for the affordable housing set aside.
But not, apparently, Newsom, who smeared this amendment as “a political gambit,” while pushing a Lennar-backed measure that promises to build 10,000 housing units at Candlestick Point, but does not specify what percentage of these units would be below market rate, for rent, or affordable, to people who currently live in the Bayview.

“In the next four years we are going to keep offering real solutions on affordable housing, not fall prey to political gambits that offer attractive promises but not sound policy,” Newsom said, during his address.

But is the newly resworn-in Mayor’s resistance to the Board’s affordable housing charter amendment rooted in the fact that it would require the Mayor’s Office of Housing to prepare an affordable housing plan every three years, present an annual affordable housing budget and do so before the rest of the Mayor’s annual budget proposals are finalized?

All these steps are crucial, in terms of transparency, accountability–and ensuring that the affordable housing needs of low-income and working class folks get top priority, instead of becoming an annual political football. They are also logical steps, for those seeking sustainable solutions to homelessness and climate change, as Newsom claims to be doing.

But instead, Newsom continues to lend his support to the Lennar-backed measure on the June 2008 ballot, even though Lennar broke its promise to build rentals at its Hunters Point Shipyard Parcel A site, where it is constructing 1,500 condominiums, and failed to live up to its promise to proactively protect local residents from asbestos dust.

Let’s Newsom sees the light, uses his political capital to support the affordable housing charter amendment, and thus lives up to his promise to protect all of the City’s residents, for the next four years.

Portrait of the artist as an old cop

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January 9, 2008
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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Imagine Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, pondering the impact of abstract expressionism on the American zeitgeist with a far-off gaze. Or picture him dressed in fashionably tight jeans, walking his fixed-gear bike to the San Francisco Academy of Art University with a leather portfolio tucked under his skinny arm.

Does that seem incongruous to you? It does to us as well. After all, Delagnes is the very antithesis of an art school student. So why are the POA and Delagnes, a brutish former narcotics officer, lobbying the San Francisco Planning Commission on behalf of the Academy of Art?

The academy, which has been rapidly snapping up properties around town to accommodate its ambitious expansion plans, has become an entity of increasing concern in San Francisco’s dicey world of land-use politics.

The for-profit school, which costs students around $16,500 per year to attend, today owns or controls more than 30 properties across the city, half of which are used to house its students, and expects to take over nearly a dozen more to accommodate approximately 14,500 students by 2017.

In the meantime, the school is facing several enforcement actions initiated by the Planning Department for brazenly making building conversions without bothering to obtain proper permits.

Delagnes was nonetheless first in line at a September 2007 commission meeting held to address the academy’s pending enforcement cases and praised the school as a tremendous asset to the academic community.

"I think that their reputation in San Francisco is unquestioned as some of the finest, true San Franciscans that I know," Delagnes said of the wealthy Stephens family, which owns the Academy of Art. "They are heavily involved and invested in the city of San Francisco and care deeply about its future."

Delagnes’s lobbying on behalf of the academy surprised and appalled at least one commissioner, Hisashi Sugaya, who told the POA president that he was "really offended" someone representing law enforcement was carrying water for a private art school that had flouted the law by racking up alleged planning and building code violations.

Responding in the union’s newsletter, POA vice president Kevin Martin reached a dizzyingly patriotic pitch in denouncing Sugaya as a liberal and demanding he apologize not just to Delagnes but also to the entire union for "demeaning our president" and "censuring his freedom of speech."

Delagnes admitted to the Guardian that his testimony was essentially a "quid pro quo." The academy has supported the POA, even offering special summer apprenticeships to the children of its members. "I’m sure that they were thinking, ‘You know what? The POA is a pretty powerful organization. It wouldn’t hurt to get close to them,’<0x2009>" Delagnes said. "Here came this problem with the Planning Commission. They called me and said, ‘Hey, would you mind going up there and basically saying that we’re a good organization? We’re good people.’<0x2009>"

During the meeting, school president Elisa Stephens, who did not return calls, portrayed the academy as a simple mom-and-pop business ignorant of planning politics and intending to fully cooperate with the city.

"My grandfather was an artist…. We’re an integral part of this community," Stephens told the commissioners. "I live in this community. We’ve been here since the late 1800s. We’re dedicated to this city…. I apologize for not being involved in city politics. I’m involved in education."

But city staffers implied there’s more to the academy’s troubles than a few honest mistakes. In March 2007, the school was hit with a litany of alleged code violations, including 14 properties converted without conditional-use permits and seven made into group housing or modified for other school uses without building permits, Planning Department records show.

Before last year the academy had never submitted an institutional master plan to the city, even though San Francisco’s Planning Code has required them from universities since the 1970s, particularly for a scattered campus that’s in a position to dramatically alter the face of downtown, where the school is primarily located and its private transit buses are ubiquitous.

The academy finally turned one over in 2007 after city planners issued a citation in summer 2006. Afterward the department visited all of the school’s properties and discovered multiple problems with use permits, plus an additional property the academy had recently acquired but didn’t include in its plan.

Code enforcers tried to negotiate with the school, planning staffer Scott Sanchez told the commission. But after department personnel outlined the March 2007 violations for the academy, it simply continued onward, converting 601 Brannan for its own use without any building permits and doing the same at the Star Motel on Lombard, this time without a conditional-use application.

As the department worked to keep up, the academy purchased four new buildings and put its eye on another, all between spring and fall 2007.

"All of our information about their new facilities came from members of the public…. It wasn’t actually through the academy, with whom we thought we had a dialogue about their institutional master plan," Sanchez told the Guardian. "We had something ongoing with them, yet they were not informing us of their new acquisitions, and they weren’t obtaining proper permits for them."

The school, in fact, is accelerating plans to convert 575 Sixth St., known as the San Francisco Flower Mart, into studio space, despite opposition from the Mayor’s Office, the Planning Commission, and the Board of Supervisors. The 30 floral business tenants that currently inhabit the building received eviction notices dated Christmas Eve 2007.

A future academy gymnasium is slated for 620 Sutter, but building it would result in the eviction of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, a 25-year-old institution specializing in African American stage performances. The academy already converted part of the building to group housing without a permit.

So what else is the POA getting for its support of the arts? For one, the Academy of Art was a $5,000 putf8um sponsor of the POA’s 2007 charity golf tournament at the StoneTree Golf Club in Novato, beating out dozens of other donors for the top of the list. The exclusive title was used for only three other contributors.

The union’s November 2007 newsletter, which appeared just after Delagnes voiced his support for the school, announced that academy president Stephens had also given POA members working at the police department’s Southern Station in SoMa 15 free underground parking spots on Bluxome, just a short walk from the Hall of Justice and the union’s headquarters.

And that’s the art of politics in San Francisco.

Money for parks

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January 9, 2008
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› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY A broad coalition of politicians and activists is supporting Proposition A, the $185 million parks bond on the February ballot, with the rare unanimous support of the Board of Supervisors and Mayor Gavin Newsom.

But just how big an impact can this bond, which requires 66 percent voter approval, make? The city has spent the $110 million bond that voters approved in 2000 to repair parks and recreation centers, and an independent 2007 analysis identified $1.7 billion in backlogged park needs.

"This is one of an ongoing series of measures that we need to do every five or so years," board president Aaron Peskin told the Guardian.

The bond allocates $117.4 million for repairs and renovations of 12 neighborhood parks that were selected, Recreation and Park Department director Yomi Agunbiade told us, according to seismic and physical safety needs and usage levels.

The bond also earmarks $11.4 million to replace and repair freestanding restrooms. Noting that his department added 35 custodians in the last budget cycle, Agunbiade said, "So when we fix a bathroom, we’ll have staff to keep it open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week."

Some aren’t keen on the bond’s inclusion of $33.5 million for Port of San Francisco land projects, including the Blue Greenway, a continuous walkway from Heron’s Head Park to Pier 43. San Francisco Community College trustee and Sierra Club member John Rizzo supports the measure but raised concerns about projects on Port land, particularly improvements at Fisherman’s Wharf.

But Peskin sees the Port lands inclusion as overdue: "For the first time there’s the recognition that the Port should not be treated as a stand-alone enterprise that has to do everything itself." As for the improvements around Pier 43, which is in his district, Peskin said, "Fisherman’s Wharf, like Union Square, is one of those geese that lay the golden egg" in terms of revenue from tourism.

The bond also earmarks $8 million for improvements to playing fields. Agunbiade said many fields are in terrible shape and in desperate need of work, "but this bond only affects about 7 percent of the city’s park land."

Some Potrero Hill neighbors are sounding environmental alarms about plans to install artificial turf at their local recreation center, but Agunbiade said there are also environmental benefits to turf, including decreased water and pesticide use.

Arthur Feinstein of the Sierra Club and San Francisco Tomorrow told us he strongly supports Prop. A, largely because it earmarks $5 million for trail restoration.

"The evidence is not in on the ill effects of artificial turf," Feinstein said, "but its ability to be in constant use frees up land for other uses, such as trail reconstruction, which makes a huge difference not just for native species and plants but people too, who need nature, especially in densely urban areas."

Isabel Wade, executive director of the Neighborhood Parks Council, says her nonprofit supports Prop. A, and she cited its inclusion of $5 million for an Opportunity Fund from which all neighborhoods can apply for matching funds for small park projects.

"A lot of little parks are not on the list because the capital costs of seismic repairs are so great, so how do you even get a bench or a toilet? Why not leverage money?" Wade said, observing that in-kind contributions, sweat equity, and noncity funds can be matched by the Opportunity Fund.

The bond includes $4 million for park forestry, along with $185,000 to do bond audits. This last item didn’t quell the objections of the San Francisco Taxpayers Union, a small group of conservative real estate interests that filed the sole opposition argument to Prop. A, courtesy of Barbara Meskunas, former legislative aide of suspended supervisor Ed Jew.

"Prop. A is a jobs program disguised as a parks bond," Meskunas wrote, also arguing the 2000 park bond money wasn’t properly spent. "The Parks Dept. needs new management, not new tax money."

But Peskin said this opposition from conservatives is unsurprising: "The Taxpayers Union opposes every tax and bond. They have never wanted to pay their fair share."

Learn what the measure would do for the eastern waterfront by bicycling the Blue Greenway on Jan. 13 with Prop. A supporters starting at 10 a.m. at Heron’s Head Park on Hunters Point and finishing at noon at Fisherman’s Wharf. For more info, call (415) 240-4150.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Sneak attack on public power

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January 9, 2008
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EDITORIAL This is Mayor Gavin Newsom’s idea of shaking up his administration: fire a Public Utilities Commission director who has been doing a pretty decent job, then replace her with a city controller who has been pretty good at his job but will most likely be terrible at hers. The result should please nobody but Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

We’ve had our concerns about PUC director Susan Leal; she’s been tiptoeing oh-so-cautiously around public power when she ought to be leading the charge to kick PG&E and its illegal monopoly out of town. But at least she’s moving in the right direction, generally — and the fact that PG&E wants to get rid of her is a sign that she’s the kind of person the city ought to have at the helm of this crucial agency.

The logic of firing Leal makes so little sense. She has little more than a year left on her contract, and to pay her mandatory severance will cost the city $500,000, which the treasury can ill afford. And Newsom hasn’t pointed to anything she’s done wrong.

But city hall insiders say PG&E thinks she’s too aggressive about public power, and the giant utility can’t tolerate that. So Newsom quietly announced Friday afternoon, Jan. 4, that she was going to be replaced.

Of course, Newsom technically can’t fire the PUC general manager — only the commission can do that. And under the Brown Act, the state’s open-meetings law, the mayor can’t call them all and seal the deal; the commissioners have to hold a meeting and talk about it. That meeting ought to be open to the public. The commissioners will try to close the doors, arguing that the general manager’s future is a confidential personnel matter — but that privilege exists to protect the employee, not the commissioners, and Leal has every right to waive it. She should fight back here, demand that the panel meet openly and discuss in public why she is being dismissed — and take the opportunity to challenge any claims against her and to make her case both for public power and for her continued employment.

This is far more than a simple dispute between an executive employee and an appointed commission; there are key policy issues at stake here — public power, community choice aggregation, and the city’s energy future — and they shouldn’t be settled in secret.

Ed Harrington has been a decent controller in many respects — but he’s never shown any indication of supporting public power. In fact, he’s done the opposite — every time the issue has come before him, he’s found a way to help PG&E. His estimates of the cost of public power ballot measures have been so wildly inflated as to be professionally embarrassing. For more than five years he’s refused to do what Sup. Chris Daly has requested and calculate the cost to the local economy of high PG&E rates. And Harrington was a senior PUC staffer when the sellout contracts with PG&E, Turlock, and Modesto were negotiated.

The Board of Supervisors should hold a hearing on these personnel changes and demand that Harrington appear and discuss publicly his position on CCA and PG&E. At the very least the voters should have the right to see this for what it appears to be: a Newsom-PG&E sneak attack on public power. And the board should pass Sup. Sophie Maxwell’s proposal to give it the authority to appoint some members of the PUC.

Take back the zoo

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January 9, 2008
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EDITORIAL It may be months before we know just how Tatiana the tiger escaped and killed Carlos Sousa Jr. Since nobody seems to have the incident on video, none of the witnesses are talking, and the event is bound to be the subject of multimillion-dollar lawsuits, the exact details may never come out.

But it’s safe at this point to say one thing: the privatization of the San Francisco Zoo has been a failure.

When the city turned the management of the place over to the San Francisco Zoological Society in 1997, all of the lingering financial problems were supposed to be solved. The society could raise money: big donors would pay for what the city couldn’t. Animal welfare would be improved; facilities would be brought up to modern standards.

And indeed, there are some new habitats for the animals and some fancy amenities for the humans, including a spiffy $3 million Leaping Lemur Café and an educational center.

But when you look at what’s happened with the animals, the record is pretty shoddy. We’ve been reporting on this for almost a decade (see "The Zoo Blues," 5/19/99, and "The Zoo’s Losers," 5/7/2003). Mark Salomon has compiled a nice updated list of all of the problems in this week’s Op-Ed piece. And the moment the tiger escape happened, we saw exactly why a private agency shouldn’t be running this sort of public facility: a lid of Pentagon-style secrecy was clamped on every aspect of the disaster. Employees were forbidden to talk to the press. Key records weren’t available. The Zoo hired a private public relations firm that immediately began spinning like crazy.

As Craig McLaughlin, a former Guardian editor and tiger expert, reports on page 15, there are endless questions about the escape — and there’s plenty of evidence that the Zoo should have known long ago that the tiger grotto wasn’t secure. This wasn’t the first tiger escape; at least once previously one of the big cats was found outside the fence, and at least twice tigers have come close to jumping over the wall. It appears as if the Zoo didn’t even know how tall the walls were or whether the setup was adequate (and frankly, containing tigers isn’t that difficult or expensive).

Privatization has been good for the director, Manuel Mollinedo, whose total compensation last year came to $339,000, according to the Zoological Society’s federal tax forms. But Mollinedo’s comments about the escape haven’t been encouraging; he seemed mystified at first about how the tiger could have gotten free, then denied the facility was unsafe, then admitted he didn’t know whether it was safe or not. At no point did he say or do anything to give the public confidence that this highly paid executive was willing to take responsibility for a problem or move effectively to solve it.

And, of course, while the city has no real oversight or authority over the Zoo, San Francisco taxpayers will probably have to foot the bill for the gigantic legal settlements that will come out of this fiasco.

This is no way to run a public facility.

The Board of Supervisors ought to hold hearings on the Zoo right away, and the budget analysts should do a management audit of the Zoological Society. But in the end, the city needs to sever its contract with this private nonprofit. If there’s going to be a zoo in San Francisco, it needs to be run by and for the public.

PS Sam Singer, the Zoo’s hired gun, has made a mess of the situation, making apparently false accusations about the victims and refusing to come clean on the facts. He can sling dirt, but he wouldn’t answer the 20 key questions we posed to him. He’s an example of what’s wrong with privatization.

The Zoo Blues

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January 9, 2008
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This story was first published May 19, 1999

IN EARLY 1997, the San Francisco Zoo had a serious public-relations problem. The zoo wanted San Francisco voters to approve a $48 million bond measure to overhaul the facilities. But the Asian elephant exhibit was making the zoo look bad.

Tinkerbelle the elephant had been living alone since April 1995, when her longtime companion, Pennie, was put to sleep. Animal activists had been complaining that, for an animal that herds and has complex social interactions in the wild, life alone was cruel and unacceptable. According to the minutes from a board meeting of the San Francisco Zoological Society, the private group that manages the zoo, executive director David Anderson decided it was time to find a friend for Tinkerbelle. He thought he found her in Calle.

Calle was about 30 years old and on exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo. She had put in her time entertaining humans, working shows in Las Vegas and giving rides to kids at the San Diego Zoo. Animal advocates in Los Angeles were trying to get her to a sanctuary in Tennessee. But Anderson decided he wanted her in San Francisco.
Animal rights advocates hated the idea. Gretchen Wyler, executive director of Endocino-<\h>based Arc Trust came to San Francisco to check out the zoo’s facilities. “I was devastated when I saw how small and barren it was,” Wyler told the Bay Guardian.

S.F. Zoo curator David Robinett denies that the decision to move Calle to San Francisco had anything to do with the timing of the bond campaign. “We were anxious to move ahead and get a companion for Tinkerbelle,” he told us.
Either way, the zoo was in a hurry — and it wound up with a huge problem on its hands. Before leaving Los Angeles, Calle was tested for tuberculosis. According to Susanne Barthell, who ran the Council for Excellence in Zoo Animal Management until her death last fall, the elephant population at the L.A. Zoo was known to have problems with T.B., a claim Robinett denies. But S.F. Zoo officials did not wait for the test results to come back before they brought Calle north on March 19, 1997.

The tests came back positive. The zoo had just bought a tuberculous elephant.

As soon as she arrived, Calle had to be quarantined from her new companion. And the financially troubled zoo got hit with elephantine medical bills. Calle’s treatment would run from $60,000 to $65,000 a year, curator Robinett told the city’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare in July.

It got worse. In separating the elephants, zoo workers put Calle in the cushier exhibit quarters, which at least had some vegetation and a watering hole. Tinkerbelle was moved to neighboring quarters, without vegetation or water. She had to poke her trunk through a hole in the wall to refresh herself. (Only this month was the electrified barrier between the two areas removed permanently. Calle is cured, and the two elephants can now interact.)

The elephant debacle is all too typical. San Francisco’s zoo has never been one of the country’s best — but six years after it was placed in private hands, it’s in worse shape than ever. Privatization was supposed to save the zoo; instead it has failed it. A Bay Guardian investigation based on interviews and documents shows:

* Dozens of animals live in squalid, substandard conditions: primates have died because of disease-<\h>ridden cages, orangutans are cooped up in tiny cement boxes, rare rainforest mammals are losing hair.

* The number of zoo employees charged with taking care of the animals has plummeted — while the number of other employees has doubled.

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture is so frustrated with the S.F. Zoo’s animal mistreatment, it is threatening to fine the zoo thousands of dollars — and one foundation that had given hundreds of thousands to the zoo has withdrawn its funding.

* Thanks to a string of expensive bond issues, the public is still paying for the zoo, but zoo executive director David Anderson has seen his own salary substantially boosted.

* Marketing expenses have skyrocketed, and the zoo is heavily dependent on amusement park–<\d>type rides and other non-educational attractions to break even.

* City officials have become so skeptical of the zoo society’s ability to manage itself that Board of Supervisors president Tom Ammiano called for an audit last spring. Stanton W. Jones, an auditor who works for budget analyst Harvey Rose, is expected to release the audit late this summer.

In fact, the zoo is a case study of everything that is wrong with privatization.

A bad place to live

The push to privatize the zoo got rolling in 1990, when David Anderson was brought in from New Orleans’s Audubon Park and Zoological Garden. The zoo’s infrastructure was crumbling, and its finances were in bad shape. Sources in the Recreation and Park Department say Anderson enthusiastically advocated privatization as a solution.
Without accepting bids from other organizations, Rec and Park handed over control of the zoo to the private San Francisco Zoological Society, which had been raising money for the zoo since 1954. In the summer of 1993 the society agreed to lease the premises and take over management of the zoo, promising to balance its budget by June 30, 1998 (see “Sold!,” 10/19/94).

Anderson has made out handsomely from the deal. In 1994 the society paid him $81,443; by 1997 his total compensation had gone up to $148,500, including a $25,000 bonus — in a year when the zoo was still losing money.

The animals have fared much worse.

Within the past two months the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which governs animal care in zoos, has issued the society a warning. According to the USDA, inspectors have repeatedly notified zoo administrators about problems. If those problems aren’t corrected, the agency is now threatening to fine the zoo.

“We made it clear that they are not doing a good job on maintenance,” Wensley Koch, supervisory animal care specialist with the USDA’s western sector office, told the Bay Guardian. “Basically there’s a management problem.”
Records of inspection reports dating back to 1990 reveal problems throughout the zoo facilities — from the big cats’ lairs to the monkeys’ quarters. Wood is rotting; fences are rusting. Rats get into food areas and leave droppings.
Many of the problems are associated with the primate center, which has been a trouble spot since it was built in 1985. The colobus monkeys’ metal climbing bars were grooved. Since keepers couldn’t clean them of feces, the monkeys got sick from contact with their own excrement. The colobus population was decimated. According to Sandra Keller of Citizens for a Better Zoo, which was watch<\h>dogging the zoo at the time, 53 of the 85 primates in the center died.

“Once they opened it, the animals started dying,” Keller told the Bay Guardian. “They didn’t quarantine the new animals sufficiently when they were brought in. They basically wiped out the whole primate collection. It was heartbreaking.”

But turning the zoo over to the private society didn’t help. If anything, conditions are worse. A September 1996 USDA inspection found feces all over outdoor structures in the primate center. And in April 1997 an inspector noted that rat feces were found in the gorillas’ indoor housing area and that weeds and bushes grew out of control in the outside exhibit.

Inspectors frequently found that problems they had repeatedly brought to the society’s attention had not been addressed. For example, rotting wooden structures in the primate center went unrepaired for years between inspections; wire mesh fences keeping the colobus monkeys from escaping the exhibit continued to rust for a year after the USDA-imposed deadline to fix them.

Indeed, records from the past three years show that the zoo was regularly blowing its USDA-imposed deadlines on fixing facilities.

“When you’ve been writing ‘rust up’ for 10 years, most people get the message,” Koch told the Bay Guardian. “We’re at the point where, if the zoo doesn’t shape up, we might be forced to take an action against them. We can fine them up to $2,500 per violation.”

“If we’re looking at a monkey enclosure and we explain that a rusty enclosure is a problem and we note they also have rust at the zebra site, then the next time we come out, we don’t want to see a rusty elephant enclosure,” she said. “What becomes obvious is that either they don’t care about complying or they have decided not to. When they’re doing that, they’re using us as a quality control agency. The impression is that they have no quality control themselves.”

A 1993 incident involving an orangutan named Chewbacca sheds light on how zoo officials have tended to respond to agency involvement. Responding to an anonymous complaint, the USDA found that zoo officials had been planning to keep the 150-pound Chewbacca confined to a four-by-six-foot converted entryway for more than a year while they used his quarters to breed chimpanzees.

“From my perspective it appears that the project with the chimpanzees has been ill conceived,” William DeHaven, a sector supervisor with the USDA, noted on Oct. 12 of that year. “If you do not have sufficient space to conduct a breeding program properly, we feel it should not be conducted at all.”

USDA veterinary medical officer Richard Spira found Robinett to be uncooperative in dealing with the situation. “Incredibly, David Robinett took exception to my observation that the temporary night quarters were cramped at best,” Spira wrote to Koch. “This … is to give you a little taste of the double<\h>speak I’m getting at the zoo.”

The zoo has been no quicker to respond to problems brought to its attention by private citizens. On January 23, 1997, Barthell complained to both the zoo and the USDA. Barthell, an outspoken critic of the zoo, reported that she had seen a herd of six blackbuck standing in a driving rainstorm with no shelter, not even a tree. She also noted that 12 kangaroo were soaked and huddling against a wall for protection, their shelters too small to protect them.
Robinett responded to her concerns in writing. “This is not atypical of antelope,” he wrote. “In fact, many species react to inclement weather by seeking open space rather than cover.” He also said the kangaroo shelters were fine.

The USDA didn’t see it that way. The agency informed the zoo in February 1997 that shelter provided for both the blackbuck and the kangaroos was inadequate.

Robinett denied that the zoo has a cavalier attitude toward facilities problems.

“A lot of it is the age of the enclosures,” Robinett told us. “It is also a problem of limited resources. When you’re patching the patch of a patch — that’s when there are problems.”

He said that the zoo had to choose carefully how to spend its funds and that it gave the highest priority to the ones that officials there felt posed the greatest hazard to animals. And Wayne Reading, the society’s chief financial officer, says the infrastructure improvements are well underway, funded by donations and bond revenues.

Private zoo, public funds

When the society assumed control of the zoo in 1993, it was on the verge of collapse. City officials had neglected at least $10 million in facility maintenance; the number of paying visitors was in decline.

According to the zoo society’s lease, the city agreed to keep paying the zoo $4 million a year (to help cover the cost of civil service employees). In exchange, the society was supposed to take over the zoo and make it financially viable.

The society was not able to pull the zoo out of the red. In the spring of 1997, after four years of losing money, zoo officials admitted to acting parks director Joel Robinson that they were paying operating expenses with a loan of roughly $2.5 million from Wells Fargo as well as with money raised before the zoo went private. And in November of that year, Reading told the Rec and Park Commission that the marketing expenses for that fiscal quarter were over budget by $47,000. The society raised admissions prices in spring 1998 to cover an immediate $250,000 shortfall.

The society had already started going after an infusion of public funds. The minutes of society meetings show that for more than a year, the group devoted almost all its energy to getting a $48 million bond issue passed. According to the lease, the city agreed to sell at least $25 million in bonds to improve crumbling facilities. The society was supposed to raise $25 million from private funders by the time the bonds were sold. (To date, the society has raised $17 million.)

In June 1997, voters passed the $48 million bond issue. The zoo expected the bonds to start selling in late fall 1998, but they were delayed by a lawsuit seeking to overturn voter approval of the 49ers stadium bonds, which passed in the same election. That litigation was thrown out of court; the zoo bonds are expected to be sold this summer. The society has also taken $26 million from bonds issued for rebuilding after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The city’s Recreation and Park Department responded to the zoo’s financial troubles by looking the other way. Rather than conduct an audit of the zoo or monitor the operation more closely, the department announced that it would no longer scrutinize the zoo’s budgets at all (see “The Secret Zoo,” 11/26/97, and “Don’t Feed the Zoo Society,” 12/10/97).

Rec and Park’s former finance director Ernie Prindle, who had been checking the zoo’s budgets until 1997, told the Bay Guardian that Anderson seemed to want the zoo to have the advantages of being run by a private organization while still being covered by a public one. When the zoo admitted in the fall of 1997 it was further in debt than it should have been, Anderson asked why the department could not just take care of the deficit and make the numbers work as it had done in the days when it was part of the city system, Prindle said.

“We had to tell him it does not work that way anymore, now that the zoo is a private contractor,” Prindle said.

Carnival or classroom?

By the end of October 1998 the zoo was in the black for the first time since the society took it over. But with that success has come controversy. Instead of investing in the animals, the society has capitalized on theme rides, such as the merry-go-round, the Puffer Train, and the Tiger Express ride.

Amusement-park attractions and a pricey marketing campaign — costing the zoo almost $3 million from 1995 to 1998 — have brought more visitors to the zoo. That plus higher ticket prices means more money. And Anderson is certain that with this increased revenue, the zoo will ultimately be able to shed its carnival atmosphere and focus on its true mission: education to foster environmental activism among visitors.

But if environmental activism is Anderson’s goal, he has a strange way of showing it. For example, when the zoo brought in a lorikeet exhibit in April 1998, it allowed its sponsors to place a display — a shiny Ford sports utility vehicle — near the site.

“If you’re setting yourself out as an educator, then you’ve got to have a source of funds,” Anderson told the Bay Guardian.

Some of Anderson’s more straightforward forays into environmental education have had trouble. One of his pet conservation projects is the Madagascar Fauna Group, head<\h>quartered at the San Francisco Zoo. Among other things, the group supports the protection of Madasgascar’s Betampona National Reserve and hopes to re-introduce zoo-bred lemurs and other endangered primates, such as aye-ayes, to the island nation’s wilds.

Since 1994, when the society assumed control of the zoo, it has spent $785,222 on its Madagascar projects.
In August 1997 Anderson brought two aye-ayes from Duke University’s primate center to San Francisco. Merlin and Calaban are the only male-female aye-aye pair in any zoo in the United States. Zoo officials hope to breed them.
Anderson speaks proudly of the work the zoo has done to educate people in Madagascar about protecting aye-ayes. But he hasn’t done such a great job protecting the ones in his care.

In Madagascar, aye-ayes spend time more than 60 feet high in the rainforest canopy, where they pull bugs from trees with their long fingers. In San Francisco, they live in an eight-foot-tall glass case.

Male aye-aye Merlin has had an ongoing problem with hair loss on his hind legs. As a result the zoo’s vet put him on steroids periodically from 1997 to 1998. Zoo officials blame the hair loss on two factors: premature separation from his mother, which took place while Merlin was at Duke, and the stress of being introduced to a new female.
Anderson told the Bay Guardian the hair loss wasn’t a big deal; some activists feel differently.

“That’s a shame,” Shirley McGreal, director of the International Primate Protection League, located in South Carolina, told the Bay Guardian. “Those guys cover a good distance of territory in the wild.”

But the aye-ayes haven’t been a huge success with zoogoers either. Aye-ayes are nocturnal creatures and extremely timid; Merlin and his mate, Calaban, rarely leave the shelter of leafy branches. The best chance you’ll get to see an aye-aye at the zoo is in the gift shop, on a sweatshirt or a postcard.

Paying the price

Luckily for the society, hardly any of its donors know about how the zoo animals live; it’s hard to woo grants with rusty fences, feces-filled cages, and cramped cement cells. But one funder did find out.

In September 1994, the zoo announced the opening of its $2 million Feline Conservation Center. Keepers had already raised questions about the new facility; some thought it was unsafe for the keepers because the animals could reach through the fence to the service area with their paws and claws.

When zoo administrators brought in Denver Zoo curator John Wortman, he had the same concerns. In his final evaluation to the Zoo Society, written in October 1994, Wortman stated, “I hate to sound like a broken record, but the old safety issue rises again. The repairs should have been made prior to the felines moving unto the enclosures. Fortunately, enough of the lock system functioned and no person or creature was hurt during the shake-down period.”

The keeper at the time, Terry Moyles, was fired by the zoo March 1995. Barthell and other animal advocates suspected he was dismissed because he was outspoken about the inadequacy of the facility; Robinett denied the charge.

In a Jan. 30, 1995, letter to the charitable foundation that was funding the center, Wortman described the Feline Conservation Center as “a poor design and dangerous exhibit for both the animals and the zoo keepers.”
The center’s problems got its funders’ attention. In a Feb. 19, 1999, letter to city auditor Jones, executives from the Redmond, Wash.–based Leonard X. Bosack and Betty M. Kruger Charitable Foundation blasted the zoo.

After the foundation made initial grants of more than $200,000 for the center, the letter states, “the Foundation Board also pledged two payments of $162,000 to be made in 1994 and 1995 contingent on continued progress reports. The Foundation rescinded the pledge of $325,000 in 1995 after years of unsatisfactory response from the Zoo Executive Director and the Board of Directors.”

The letter goes on to lay out how the zoo hired a contracting firm with no experience in building wildlife care facilities, how it wasted funds, and how it ignored the recommendations of its consultant.

“As John Wortman noted, the `major problem was the inability of the S.F. staff to design a modern animal facility,’” the letter stated.

Robinett denies that the zoo staff is to blame. “To say this was a screwup in design — I think that is incorrect,” Robinett told the Bay Guardian. “We have had success [with the center], especially with breeding. It’s been a very good exhibit.”

It is that attitude that makes some people worry about making animals pay the costs of privatization.
Privatization “has not helped animal care,” Ron Lippert, a longtime animal health technician and former member of the city’s Commission on Animal Control and Welfare, told the Bay Guardian. “What privatization has done is allowed the society to do more things on their agenda — without the public scrutiny they had before. It seems like this is [Anderson and the society’s] kingdom and palace, and they want to see how much they can show it off.

“But the bottom line is that with the cold, windy, and wet climate at the zoo, it’s the wrong city. It’s the wrong location. Animals who aren’t used to handling ocean climate have to handle it day in and day out. Maybe we just shouldn’t have a zoo here. The zoo society was supposed to do all this great stuff. But as far as zoos go, this one still sucks.”

Bob Porterfield contributed to this story.

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