Tax Breaks Archives — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Lee and UC Berkeley institute take on income inequality

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2014

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) and U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society are teaming up today [Wed/10] in Washington DC to release and discuss the institute’s first policy prescriptions for reducing inequality.

The policy brief—the first to be issued by the Haas Institute—will introduce research-based approaches suggested by a diverse array of economists looking at inequality through different lenses.

The policy brief calls for the integration of regions through land use rezoning to decrease inequality, an increase in public investments in preschool programs, raising the minimum wage, and the reformation of unfair tax policy that favors the wealthiest 1 percent.

“Inequality is a defining issue for America’s future,” John Powell, director of the Haas Institute, said in a press statement. “The good news is that we know variation in inequality and mobility imply that local, state, and federal policies can have an impact. Therefore, the solution is within reach, but only if policymakers learn from and apply researched based initiatives.”

While this is the Haas institute’s first policy brief, it is far from being Lee’s first foray into the issues of inequality. In fact, it’s become an area of her expertise. Lee, will give this morning’s keynote address, has been introduced two bills to curb the growth of inequality.

The first, the Income Equity Act (H.R. 199), would limit the tax deductibility of executive compensation packages. Currently, the more a firm pays its CEO, the more the firm can deduct from its taxes, leaving “cash-strapped taxpayers picking up the tab,” said Lee in a 2013 blog post.

“Despite record corporate profits, none of it is being shared with the American working class—the strongest work force in the world,” Jim Lewis, Lee’s press director, told the Guardian. “We’re pushing for research-based initiatives that are realistic when implemented.”

Locally, state Sens. Mark DeSauliner (D-Concord) and Loni Hancock (D-Oakland) introduced a pay-disparity bill (SB 1372) in April, which would tax companies with a wide income gap between CEOs and workers, and give tax breaks to companies with lower income disparities.

The second, Lee’s Pathways Out of Poverty Act (H.R. 5352), addresses unemployment in minority communities, namely African Americans and Latinos. It aims to create good-paying jobs and increase social mobility while strengthening the social net for those still struggling.

Research based solutions seem like a perfectly practical way to go about solving our evident wealth gap, but “1 percenter” and “the 99 percent” have only been part of the national lexicon since 2011’s Occupy protests.

A Gallup poll from January this year revealed that Democrats and independents are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with income and wealth distribution, as well as a majority of Republicans. The poll also found that only slightly about half of Americans are satisfied with the opportunity to get ahead by working hard.

“For many years, income inequality was viewed as an important factor and byproduct of growth,” said Powell. “That has been largely discredited by economists. It’s not a necessary byproduct of technological advances and globalization.”

All of this comes at a time when the wealth gap in the United States—and especially in the Bay Area—is reaching exorbitant proportions.

In June, the San Francisco Human Services Agency released a report stating that while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the city’s middle class—those earning around the median household income of $72,500—is disappearing altogether.

A recent study by the Brookings Institution revealed that between 1990 and 2012, the city’s middle class has shrunk from 45 percent of the population to 34 percent.

“There’s no need for this kind of gap, it’s unsustainable,” Powell said. “We need to work on a local level, especially when we have a more liberal legislature in California. Closing the gap can enhance economic growth. It can bring the country together.”

Tom’s legacy

Michael Redmond

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September 2, 2014

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steve@sfbg.com

At a moment when San Francisco politics has slid toward the slippery center — when one-time progressives align with business elites, the political rhetoric seems hollow, and the vaunted value of “civility” in City Hall increasingly looks more like a deceptive power grab by the Mayor’s Office — it feels so refreshing to talk with Tom Ammiano.

For one thing, he’s hilarious, always quick with quips that are not only funny, but often funny in insightful ways that distill complex issues down to their essence, delivered with his distinctive nasally honk and lightning timing. Ammiano developed as a stand-up comedian and political leader simultaneously, and the two professional sides feed off each other, alternatively manifesting in disarming mirth or penetrating bite.

But his humor isn’t the main reason why Ammiano — a 72-year-old state legislator, two-time mayoral candidate, and former supervisor and school board member — has become such a beloved figure on the left of state and local politics, or why so many progressives are sad to see him leaving the California Assembly and elected office this year for the first time since 1990.

No, perhaps the biggest reason why public esteem for Ammiano has been strong and rising — particularly among progressives, but also among those of all ideological stripes who decry the closed-door dealmaking that dominates City Hall and the State Capitol these days — is his political integrity and courage. Everyone knows where Tom Ammiano will stand on almost any issue: with the powerless over the powerful.

“Don’t make it about yourself, make it about what you believe in,” Ammiano told us, describing his approach to politics and his advice to up-and-coming politicians.

Ammiano’s positions derive from his progressive political values, which were informed by his working class upbringing, first-hand observations of the limits of American militarism, publicly coming out as a gay teacher at time when that was a risky decision, standing with immigrants and women at important political moments, and steadily enduring well-funded attacks as he created some of San Francisco’s most defining and enduring political reforms, from domestic partner benefits and key political reforms to universal health care.

“He has been able to remain true to his values and principles of the progressive movement while making significant legislative accomplishments happen on a number of fronts,” Sup. David Campos, who replaced Ammiano on the Board of Supervisors and is now his chosen successor in the California Assembly, told the Guardian. “I don’t know that we’ve fully understood the scope of his influence. He has influenced the city more than most San Francisco mayors have.”

So, as we enter the traditional start of fall election season — with its strangely uncontested supervisorial races and only a few significant ballot measures, thanks to insider political manipulations — the Guardian spent some time with Ammiano in San Francisco and in Sacramento, talking about his life and legacy and what can be done to revive the city’s progressive spirit.

LIFE OF THE CAPITOL

Aug. 20 was a pretty typical day in the State Capitol, perhaps a bit more relaxed than usual given that most of the agenda was concurrence votes by the full Senate and Assembly on bills they had already approved once before being amended by the other house.

Still, lobbyists packed the hall outside the Assembly Chambers, hoping to exert some last minute influence before the legislative session ended (most don’t bother with Ammiano, whose name is on a short list, posted in the hall by the Assembly Sergeant-at-Arms, of legislators who don’t accept business cards from lobbyists).

One of the bills up for approval that day was Ammiano’s Assembly Bill 2344, the Modern Family Act, which in many ways signals how far California has come since the mid-’70s, when Ammiano was an openly gay schoolteacher and progressive political activist working with then-Sup. Harvey Milk to defeat the homophobic Briggs Initiative.

The Modern Family Act updates and clarifies the laws governing same-sex married couples and domestic partners who adopt children or use surrogates, standardizing the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved. “With a few simple changes, we can help families thrive without needless legal battles or expensive court actions,” Ammiano said in a press statement publicizing the bill.

Ammiano arrived in his office around 10am, an hour before the session began, carrying a large plaque commending him for his legislative service, given to outgoing legislators during a breakfast program. “Something else I don’t need,” Ammiano said, setting the plaque down on a table in his wood-paneled office. “I wonder if there’s a black market for this shit.”

Before going over the day’s legislative agenda, Ammiano chatted with his Press Secretary Carlos Alcala about an editorial in that morning’s San Francisco Chronicle, “Abuse of disabled-parking program demands legislators act,” which criticized Ammiano for seeking minor changes in a city plan to start charging for disabled placards before he would sponsor legislation to implement it. The editorial even snidely linked Ammiano to disgraced Sen. Leland Yee, who is suspended and has nothing to do with the issue.

“I’ve had these tussles with the Chronicle from day one. They just want people to be angry with me,” Ammiano told us. “You stand up for anything progressive and they treat you like a piñata.”

He thought the criticism was ridiculous — telling Alcala, “If we do a response letter, using the words puerile and immature would be good” — and that it has as much to do with denigrating Ammiano, and thus Campos and other progressives, as the issue at hand.

“Anything that gets people mad at me hurts him,” Ammiano told us.

But it’s awfully hard to be mad at Tom Ammiano. Even those on the opposite side of the political fence from him and who clash with him on the issues or who have been subjected to his caustic barbs grudgingly admit a respect and admiration for Ammiano, even Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who told the Guardian as much when we ran into him on the streets of Sacramento later that day.

Ammiano says he rarely gets rattled by his critics, or even the handful of death threats that he’s received over the years, including the one that led the San Francisco Police Department to place a protective detail on him during the 1999 mayor’s race.

“You are buoyed by what you do, and that compensates for other feelings you have,” Ammiano said of safety concerns.

Finally ready to prepare for the day’s business, he shouts for his aides in the other room (“the New York intercom,” he quips). The first question is whether he’s going to support a bill sponsored by PG&E’s union to increase incentives for geothermal projects in the state, a jobs bill that most environmental groups opposed.

“That is a terrible bill, it’s total shit, and I’m not going to support it,” Ammiano tells his aide. “It’s a scam.”

As Ammiano continued to prepare for the day’s session, we headed down to the Assembly floor to get ready to cover the action, escorted by Alcala. We asked what he planned to do after Ammiano leaves Sacramento, and Alcala told us that he’ll look at working for another legislator, “but there would probably be a lot more compromises.”

SPARKING CHANGE

Compromises are part of politics, but Ammiano has shown that the best legislative deals come without compromising one’s political principles. Indeed, some of his most significant accomplishments have involved sticking to his guns and quietly waiting out his critics.

For all the brassy charm of this big personality — who else could publicly confront then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at a Democratic Party fundraiser in 2009 and tell him to “kiss my gay ass!” — Ammiano has usually done the work in a way that wasn’t showy or self-centered.

By championing the reinstatement of district supervisorial elections and waging an improbable but electrifying write-in campaign for mayor in 1999 (finishing second before losing to incumbent Willie Brown in the runoff election), Ammiano set the stage for progressives to finally win control of the Board of Supervisors in 2000 and keep it for the next eight years, forming an effective counterbalance to Gavin Newsom’s pro-business mayoralty.

“I just did it through intuition,” Ammiano said of his 1999 mayoral run, when he jumped into the race just two weeks before election day. “There was a lot of electricity.”

After he made the runoff, Brown and his allies worked aggressively to keep power, leaning on potential Ammiano supporters, calling on then-President Bill Clinton to campaign for Brown, and even having Jesse Jackson call Ammiano late one night asking him to drop out.

“That’s when we realized Willie really felt threatened by us,” Ammiano said, a fear that was well-founded given that Ammiano’s loss in the runoff election led directly into a slate of progressives elected to the Board of Supervisors the next year. “It was a pyrrhic victory for him because then the board changed.”

But Ammiano didn’t seize the spotlight in those heady years that followed, which often shone on the younger political upstarts in the progressive movement — particularly Chris Daly, Matt Gonzalez, and Aaron Peskin — who were more willing to aggressively wage rhetorical war against Newsom and his downtown constituents.

By the time the 2003 mayor’s race came, Ammiano’s mayoral campaign became eclipsed by Gonzalez jumping into the race at the last minute, a Green Party candidate whose outsider credentials contrasted sharply with Newsom’s insider inevitability, coming within 5 percentage points of winning.

“I just bounced back and we did a lot of good shit after that,” Ammiano said, noting how district elections were conducive to his approach to politics. “It helped the way I wanted to govern, with the focus on the neighborhoods instead of the boys downtown.”

Perhaps Ammiano’s greatest legislative victory as a supervisor was his Health Care Security Ordinance, which required employers in San Francisco to provide health coverage for their employees and created the Healthy San Francisco program to help deliver affordable care to all San Franciscans.

The business community went ballistic when Ammiano proposed the measure in 2006, waging an aggressive lobbying and legal campaign to thwart the ordinance. But Ammiano just quietly took the heat, refused to compromise, and steadily lined up support from labor, public health officials, and other groups that were key to its passage.

“Maybe the early days of being a pinata inured me,” Ammiano said of his ability to withstand the onslaught from the business community for so long, recalling that in his 1999 school board race, “I really became a pinata. I got it in the morning from the Chronicle and in the afternoon from the Examiner.”

Ammiano kept Newsom apprised of his intentions and resolve, resisting entreaties to water down the legislation. “I kept talking to him and I told him I was going to do it,” Ammiano said. “Eventually, we got a 11 to zip vote and Newsom couldn’t do anything about it. That was a great journey.”

In the end, Newsom not only supported the measure, but he tried to claim Ammiano’s victory as his own, citing the vague promise he had made in his 2007 State of the City speech to try to provide universal health care in the city and his willingness to fund the program in his 2007-08 budget.

But Ammiano was happy with the policy victory and didn’t quibble publicly with Newsom about credit. “I picked my battles,” Ammiano said, contrasting his approach to Newsom with that of his more fiery progressive colleagues. “I tried to go after him on policy, not personality.”

Ammiano isn’t happy with the political turn that San Francisco has taken since he headed to Sacramento, with the pro-business, fiscally conservative faction of the city controlling the Mayor’s Office and exerting a big influence on the Board of Supervisors. But San Francisco’s elder statesman takes the long view. “Today, the board has a moderate trajectory that can be annoying, but I think it’s temporary,” Ammiano said. “These things are cyclical.”

He acknowledges that things can seem to a little bleak to progressives right now: “They’re feeling somewhat marginalized, but I don’t think it’s going to stay that way.”

FLOOR SHOW

Back on the Assembly floor, Ammiano was working the room, hamming it up with legislative colleagues and being the first of many legislators to rub elbows and get photos taken with visiting celebrities Carl Weathers, Daniel Stern, and Ron Perlman, who were there to support film-credit legislation

“Ron Perlman, wow, Sons of Anarchy,” Ammiano told us afterward, relating his conversation with Perlman. “I said, ‘They killed you, but you live on Netflix.’ I told him I was big fan. Even the progressives come here for the tax breaks.”

When Little Hoover Commission Chair Pedro Nava, who used to represent Santa Barbara in the Assembly, stopped to pose with Ammiano for the Guardian’s photographer, the famously liberal Ammiano quipped, “You’ll get him in trouble in Santa Barbara. Drill, baby, drill!”

Ammiano chairs the Assembly Public Safety Committee, where he has successfully pushed prison reform legislation and helped derail the worst tough-on-crime bills pushed by conservatives. “We have a lot of fun, and we get a chance to talk about all these bills that come before us,” Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, told the Guardian when asked about Ammiano. “You can see how these bad bills get less bad.”

Ammiano gave a short speech when his Modern Family Act came up for a vote, noting that it “simplifies the law around these procedures,” before the Assembly voted 57-2 to send it to the governor’s desk, where he has until Sept. 30 to act on it. “I think he’ll sign it,” Ammiano told the Guardian, “even though it’s about reproduction and naughty bits.”

“He’s a hoot,” Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) said of Ammiano, whose desk is right behind his own. Jones-Sawyer said that he’d love to see Ammiano run for mayor of San Francisco, “but he’s waiting for a groundswell of support. Hopefully the progressives come together.”

Jones-Sawyer said Ammiano plays an important role as the conscience of a Legislature that too often caters to established interests.

“There’s liberal, progressive, socialist, communist, and then there’s Tom,” Jones said. “As far left as you can go, there’s Tom, and that’s what we’re going to miss.”

Yet despite that strong progressive reputation, Ammiano has also been an amazingly effective legislator (something that might surprise those supporting the campaign of David Chiu, which has repeatedly claimed that ideological progressives like Ammiano and Campos can’t “get things done” in Sacramento).

Last year, Ammiano got 13 bills through the Legislature — including three hugely controversial ones: the TRUST Act, which curbs local cooperation with federal immigration holds; the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights; and a bill protecting transgender student rights in schools, which was savaged by conservative religious groups — all of which were signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown.

“A lot of it is personal relationships, some is timing, and some is just sticking to it,” Ammiano said of effectiveness.

Some of his legislative accomplishments have required multiyear efforts, such as the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which was vetoed in 2012 before being signed into law last year with only a few significant changes (see “Do we care?” 3/26/13).

“Tom Ammiano was so incredible to work with,” Katie Joaquin, campaign coordinator for the California Domestic Workers Coalition, for whom the bill had long been a top priority, told the Guardian.

The large grassroots coalition backing the bill insisted on being a part of the decision-making as it evolved, which is not always easy to do in the fast-paced Capitol. But Joaquin said Ammiano’s history of working with grassroots activists made him the perfect fit for the consensus-based coalition.

“That’s difficult to do in the legislative process, and working with Tom and his office made that possible,” Joaquin told us. “He wanted to make sure we had active participation in the field from a variety of people who were affected by this.”

When the bill was vetoed by Gov. Brown, who cited paternalistic concerns that better pay and working conditions could translate into fewer jobs for immigrant women who serve as domestic workers, Joaquin said Ammiano was as disappointed as the activists, but he didn’t give up.

“It was really hard. I genuinely felt Tom’s frustration. He was going through the same emotions we were, and it was great that he wanted to go through that with us again,” Joaquin told us. “Sometimes, your allies can get fatigued with the long struggles, but Tom maintained his resolve and kept us going.”

And after it was over, Ammiano even organized the victory party for the coalition and celebrated the key role that activists and their organizing played in making California only the second state in the nation (after New York) to extend basic wage, hour, and working condition protections to nannies, maids, and other domestic workers excluded under federal law.

“He has a great sense of style,” Joaquin said of Ammiano, “and that emanates in how he carries himself.”

COMING OUT

Ammiano came to San Francisco in 1964, obtaining a master’s degree in special education from San Francisco State University and then going on to teach at Hawthorne Elementary (now known as Cesar Chavez Elementary). He quickly gained an appreciation for the complex array of issues facing the city, which would inform the evolution of his progressive worldview.

“In teaching itself, there were a lot of social justice issues,” Ammiano said. For example, most native Spanish-speakers at the time were simply dumped into special education classes because there wasn’t yet bilingual education in San Francisco schools. “So I turned to the community for help.”

The relationships that he developed in the immigrant community would later help as he worked on declaring San Francisco a sanctuary city as waves of Central American immigrants fled to California to escape US-sponsored proxy wars.

Growing up a Catholic working class kid in New Jersey, Ammiano was no hippie. But he was struck by the brewing war in Vietnam strongly enough that he volunteered to teach there through a Quaker program, International Volunteer Service, working in Saigon from 1966-68 and coming back with a strong aversion to US militarism.

“I came back from Vietnam a whole new person,” he told us. “I had a lot of political awakenings.”

He then worked with veterans injured during the war and began to gravitate toward leftist political groups in San Francisco, but he found that many still weren’t comfortable with his open homosexuality, an identity that he never sought to cover up or apologize for.

“I knew I was gay in utero,” Ammiano said. “I said you have to be comfortable with me being a gay, and it wasn’t easy for some. The left wasn’t that accepting.”

But that began to change in the early ’70s as labor and progressives started to find common cause with the LGBT community, mostly through organizations such as Bay Area Gay Liberation and the Gay Teachers Coalition, a group that Ammiano formed with Hank Wilson and Ron Lanza after Ammiano publicly came out as a gay teacher in 1975.

“He was the first public school teacher to acknowledge that he was a gay man, which was not as easy as it sounds in those days,” former Mayor Art Agnos told us, crediting Ammiano with helping make support for gay rights the default political position that it became in San Francisco.

San Francisco Unified School District still wasn’t supportive of gay teachers, Ammiano said, “So I ran for school board right after the assassinations [of Mayor George Moscone and Sup. Harvey Milk in 1978] and got my ass kicked.”

Shortly thereafter, Ammiano decided to get into stand-up comedy, encouraged by friends and allies who loved his sense of humor. Meanwhile, Ammiano was pushing for SFUSD to name a school after Milk, as it immediately did for Moscone, a quest that dragged on for seven years and which was a central plank in his unsuccessful 1988 run for the school board.

But Ammiano was developing as a public figure, buoyed by his stand-up performances (which he said Chronicle reporters would sometimes attend to gather off-color quotes to use against him in elections) and increased support from the maturing progressive and queer communities.

So when he ran again for school board in 1990, he finished in first place as part of the so-called “lavender sweep,” with LGBT candidates elected to judgeships and lesbians Carole Migden and Roberta Achtenberg elected to the Board of Supervisors.

On the school board, Ammiano helped bring SFUSD into the modern age, including spearheading programs dealing with AIDS education, support for gay students, distribution of condoms in the schools, and limiting recruiting in schools by the homophobic Boy Scouts of America.

“I found out we were paying them to recruit in the schools, but I can’t recruit?” Ammiano said, referencing the oft-raised concern at the time that gay teachers would recruit impressionable young people into homosexuality.

As his first term on the school board ended, a growing community of supporters urged Ammiano to run for the Board of Supervisors, then still a citywide election, and he was elected despite dealing with a devastating personal loss at the time.

“My partner died five days before the election,” Ammiano said as we talked at the bar in Soluna, tearing up at the memory and raising a toast with his gin-and-tonic to his late partner, Tim Curbo, who succumbed to a long struggle with AIDS.

Ammiano poured himself into his work as a supervisor, allied on the left at various points in the mid-late ’90s with Sups. Sue Bierman, Terrence Hallinan, Leland Yee, Mabel Teng, Angelo Alioto, and Carole Migden against the wily and all-powerful then-Mayor Brown, who Ammiano said “manipulated everything.”

But Ammiano gradually began to chip away at that power, often by turning directly to the people and using ballot measures to accomplish reforms such as laws regulating political consultants and campaign contributions and the reinstatement of district supervisorial elections, which decentralized power in the city.

“People frequently say about politicians, when they want to say something favorable, that they never forgot where they came from,” Agnos told us. “With Tom, he never forgot where he came from, and more importantly, he never forgot who he was…He was an authentic and a proud gay man, as proud as Harvey Milk ever was.”

And from that strong foundation of knowing himself, where he came from, and what he believed, Ammiano maintained the courage to stand on his convictions.

“It’s not just political integrity, it’s a reflection of the man himself,” Agnos said, praising Ammiano’s ability to always remain true to himself and let his politics flow from that. “A lot of politicians don’t have the courage, personal or political, to do that.”

WHAT’S NEXT

Ammiano’s legacy has been clearly established, even if it’s not always appreciated in a city enamored of the shiny and new, from recent arrivals who seem incurious about the city’s political history to the wave of neoliberal politicians who now hold sway in City Hall.

“Tom has carried on the legacy of Harvey Milk of being the movement progressive standard bearer. He has, more than anyone else, moved forward progressive politics in San Francisco in a way that goes beyond him as an individual,” Campos said, citing the return of district elections and his mentoring of young activists as examples. “He brought a number of people into politics that have been impactful in their own right.”

Campos is one of those individuals, endorsed by Ammiano to fill his District 9 seat on the Board of Supervisors from among a competitive field of established progressive candidates. Ammiano says he made the right choice.

“I have been supportive of him as a legislator and I think he’s doing the right things,” Ammiano said of Campos, adding an appreciation for the facts that he’s gay, an immigrant, and a solid progressive. “He’s a three-fer.”

Ammiano said that Campos has been a standout on the Board of Supervisors in recent years, diligently working to protect workers, tenants, and immigrants with successful efforts to increase tenant relocation fees after an eviction and an attempt to close the loophole that allows restaurants to pocket money they’re required to spend on employee health care, which was sabotaged by Chiu and Mayor Lee.

“I like his work ethic. He comes across as mild-mannered, but he’s a tiger,” Ammiano said of Campos. “If you like me, vote for David.”

But what about Ammiano’s own political future?

Ammiano said he’s been too busy lately to really think about what’s next for him (except romantically: Ammiano recently announced his wedding engagement to Carolis Deal, a longtime friend and lover). Ammiano is talking with universities and speakers bureaus about future gigs and he’s thinking about writing a book or doing a one-man show.

“Once I get that settled, I’ll look at the mayor’s race and [Sen. Mark] Leno’s seat,” Ammiano said, holding out hope that his political career will continue.

Ammiano said the city is desperately in need of some strong political leadership right now, something that he isn’t seeing from Mayor Lee, who has mostly been carrying out the agenda of the business leaders, developers, and power brokers who engineered his mayoral appointment in 2011.

“Basically, he’s an administrator and I don’t think he’ll ever be anything but that,” Ammiano said. “We are so fucking ready for a progressive mayor.”

If Ammiano were to become mayor — which seems like a longshot at this point — he says that he would use that position to decentralize power in San Francisco, letting the people and their representatives on the Board of Supervisors have a greater say in the direction of the city and making governance decisions more transparent.

“I don’t believe in a strong mayor [form of government],” Ammiano said. “If I was mayor, all the commission appointments would be shared.”

But before he would decide to run for mayor, Ammiano says that he would need to see a strong groundswell of public support for the values and ideals that he’s represented over nearly a half-century of public life in San Francisco.

“I don’t want to run to be a challenger,” Ammiano said. “I’d want to run to be mayor.”

End corporate welfare

Michael Redmond

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June 24, 2014

15

EDITORIAL Big, powerful corporations seem to always find a way to get what they want out of City Hall, particularly under the administration of Mayor Ed Lee, and often at the expense of people who really do need the help.

For example, why is a city that projects annual budget deficits getting steadily bigger over the next five years spending almost $17 million annually on corporate welfare programs, including giving millions of dollars in tax breaks and other city perks to Twitter, a company worth $24 billion?

The Twitter-inspired payroll tax exemption zone in mid-Market cost the city more than $4.2 million last year, reaped by just 11 companies and their landlords (Twitter saved another $570,000 last when its stock options were exempted). By contrast, a tax break for small business in San Francisco cost the city almost $5.3 million last year, but that was spread among 2,488 businesses with less than $500,000 in annual revenue.

They’re all part of a package of business tax cuts that makes no sense in a city with record low unemployment and an overheating economy that is driving up rents and the cost of living. The tax breaks reported by the Tax Collector’s Office on June 23 even included a law adopted in the ’90s that requires the city to cut $3.5 million in tax rebate checks to employers when tax revenues rise more than 7 percent.

Yet the city desperately needs that money. It is still facing a $330 million budget deficit in just a few years, as well as huge funding shortfalls for Muni and the water, power, and sewer services operated by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

The SFPUC could have made money with its CleanPowerSF program to generate and sell renewable energy, but Mayor Lee sabotaged that program as a favor to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported on June 23, Lee has close and symbiotic relationship with PG&E, which funds Lee’s pet projects and so he shields the utility from competition, even at the expense of the city’s budget and greenhouse gas reduction goals.

Last year’s $17 million in corporate welfare didn’t even include the $5.5 million city taxpayer subsidy for the America Cup’s, where one the richest men in the world, Larry Ellison, was defending his title yet hoarding his cash. If the Mayor’s Office had its way, Ellison and his cronies would also now control Piers 30-32 and other valuable Port of San Francisco properties.

The Board of Supervisors thankfully shot down that proposal, but the Port is still way too beholden to wealthy suitors who want to appropriate waterfront property, a point that the Civil Grand Jury made last week in a report calling for reform, including giving the board two of the five appointments to the Port Commission. That’s a good idea that we should also apply to the SFPUC and SFMTA boards, which carry out the Mayor’s Office agenda on behalf of the rich.

The corruption and political giveaways have gotten obscene and something has to change.

Business tax breaks in SF jumped to nearly $17 million last year

Sasha Cuttler

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June 23, 2014

63

Business tax breaks in SF jumped to nearly $17 million last year

Employers in San Francisco received nearly $17 million in special business tax breaks from the city last year, with the biggest ticket corporate welfare categories being the Central Market Street and Tenderloin Area Exclusion — commonly known as the Twitter tax break after its catalyst and biggest beneficiary — and a tax break given to small businesses.

On Friday, the San Francisco Treasurer and Tax Collectors’ Office delivered to the Board of Supervisors the required annual reports for seven separate programs that reduce the payroll tax burden on local businesses, most of them approved since Mayor Ed Lee took office. This year’s corporate welfare total of nearly $16.8 million is up about $2.5 million from last year’s total.

The Net New Payroll Exclusion, a small business tax break for businesses with an annual payroll of less than $500,000 created in 2012 by legislation authored by Sups. David Campos and Mark Farrell, last year allowed 2,488 businesses to reduce their city tax burden by $5,258,572.

By contrast, just 11 businesses in the mid-Market market reaped $4,243,997 in payroll tax breaks last year, the biggest being Twitter. Taxpayer privacy laws prevent the city from naming the businesses involved in these tax breaks, but Twitter was also likely the sole company that reportedly benefitted from the exclusion of $37,922,531 in stock options from its tax obligation, saving another $568,837 there.

Biotech and Cleantech businesses also enjoyed tax breaks for their new employees, saving $1,595,687 and $765,360 respectively. Enterprise Zone Tax Credits saved another 176 businesses $780,686 in their payroll tax obligations.

Despite a booming local economy and record low unemployment, the city itself is still wrestling with annual budget deficits that are projected to continue growing for each of the next five years, from $66 million in the coming fiscal year to $339.4 million in 2017-18, according to estimates from the San Francisco Controller’s Office.

Even so, the city recently cut $500 tax rebate checks to 7,120 local business, for a total of $3,560,000, as part of the Surplus Business Tax Revenue program approved during the 1990s, which triggers a tax rebate when business tax revenues grown more than 5 percent in a year.

As Ellis Act reform bill faced death, where was Ron Conway?

Erica Hanna

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June 19, 2014

26

As Ellis Act reform bill faced death, where was Ron Conway?

One week and one day — that’s how long Sen. Mark Leno has to push his Ellis Act reform bill through two committees in order for it to go before to the assembly floor, making its prospects for passage this year look dim.

The push would have been easier if it hadn’t lost yesterday’s vote, 3-4, in the Assembly Committee on Housing and Community Development. Now the bill’s passage is a herculean task that even Leno admits is a tough slog.

“I’d say it’s challenging,” Leno told us yesterday. San Franciscans have been displaced by real estate speculators, a dozen or more of whom are regularly “flipping” homes for profit and using the Ellis Act to clean out longtime renters. If passed, the bill would restrict the use of the Ellis Act to those who’ve owned their homes for five years or longer, allowing property owners to eventually get out of the rental business, as supporters of the Ellis Act say it was intended for.

“Bill Closing Ellis Act Loophole for San Francisco Fails in Assembly,” was the headline of Leno’s press release on yesterday’s action. But “fails” seems to imply a strong effort that fell short of the mark, when the reality of was that some of the bill’s highest profile and most powerful alleged supporters were missing in action: the tech industry and venture capitalist Ron Conway.

When Leno’s Senate Bill 1439 was announced in April, the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” Ron Conway stood before the microphone and cameras and announced the technology industry’s intent to protect tenants from being displaced by real estate speculators. Conway is a wealthy “angel investor” who cashed in big on companies like Twitter. Later on, he became Twitter’s greatest champion as he smooth-talked San Francisco government into providing big tax breaks to move Twitter into the mid-Market area.

In return, Mayor Ed Lee was counting on Conway and other tech titans to butress the other sectors of San Francisco, and to protect the people who were being evicted en masse.

Conway pledged as much when his tech group, SF.citi, started a petition drive to support Ellis Act Reform.

Part of the tech backlash occurring in SF right now is due to evictions by real estate speculators. Please help stop evictions in SF by having your Company sign on to the below letter for Senator Leno.

The bill would prohibit rental property owners in San Francisco of less than five years from invoking the Ellis Act, threatening to invoke the Ellis Act, or prosecuting an unlawful detainer (eviction) action based on the Ellis Act.

Real estate speculators are misusing California’s Ellis Act to evict long-term rent paying tenants, who have done nothing wrong but are casualties of a loophole in the Act that must be closed to prevent further displacement.

The Ellis Act was adopted to allow landlords to exit the rental business, not to give windfall profits to speculators willing to exploit the Act by entering the rental business just to exit it. These speculators are exploiting a loophole in the Act that allows them to buy a building and then immediately “exit the rental business” through mass evictions of low and middle-income tenants. The stories are heartbreaking, with families, seniors, and disabled San Franciscans losing their long-term homes.

We strongly support the passage of SB 1439.

Ron Conway

Chairman, sf.citi

Writing pretty words and posing for pretty pictures seemed to be the extent of Conway’s support. Meanwhile, the opposition built up its ranks.

At the committee hearing yesterday, lobbyists on behalf of the California Association of Realtors and very wealthy elderly folks told misleading tales of woe, crowding the room to convince the five California politicians to kill the Ellis Reform bill that would affect mostly just San Francisco.

“What we’re trying to do is keep honest, law-abiding San Franciscans in their homes,” Leno told the committee yesterday. But that wasn’t the committee’s concern. Ultimately, they were concerned about the bottom line. As Tim Redmond at 48hills reported yesterday, Committee Member Cheryl Brown, D-San Bernadino, said her brother told her the bill “is taking my property.”

Those who defended the bill were scant: Jeff Buckley of the Mayor’s Office, Dean Preston from Tenants Together, Sara Shortt of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, and Committee Member Tom Ammiano, among others.

Perhaps having a wealthy tech giant in the room, say, a Twitter representative or Conway himself, may have tipped the scales in Leno’s favor. Conway’s frequent lunch partner Mayor Ed Lee even sponsored the bill. But still, no tech workers, no tech CEOs, not even someone glued to their iPhone raised their voices to defend tenants at the committee. Not even Conway.

When we called and emailed Conway for a response, all we received was an automatic reply saying “I am currently traveling will read email sporadically during this time.”

It’s too bad he wasn’t traveling to Sacramento.

“E” is for “evidence”

Michael Redmond

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June 3, 2014

9

Former Mayor Willie Brown was infamous for keeping the workings of San Francisco government secret. Now his successor, Mayor Ed Lee, has codified government secrecy into written policy.

A Bay Guardian review of Lee’s newest public records retention schedule found the mayor granted himself the ability to destroy public records with broad power: deleting emails deemed “routine,” drafts of legislation, and records of telephone calls to the office of the mayor.

The policy should have anyone interested in government transparency up in arms. It potentially flouts the California Public Records Act, as well as the city’s Sunshine Ordinance, state and local laws granting citizens and journalists alike the legal right to keep tabs on what goes on under the hood of the political machine.

Emails, which Lee’s policy says the Mayor’s Office can destroy, are a particularly powerful tool for keeping government in check.

“Sources can be less than reliable, but an email speaks for itself,” said James Wheaton, senior counsel for the First Amendment Project, a group that defends the public’s right to government information. “Emails are a unique window into the way an institution functions. We call these things ‘paper trails.'”

But the paper trail used to track the mayor is kept in the shadows by his new policy, the most recent crack to appear in an eroding wall of public trust in open government.

LET THE SUNSHINE IN

Reporters and engaged citizens depend on access to public records to do the everyday dirty work of keeping an eye on government.

In 2010, reporters from the Los Angeles Times investigated the town of Bell’s corrupt network of city officials (including the mayor and police chief), who swindled money from city coffers. Public record requests of their emails revealed brazen exchanges: “I am looking forward to seeing you and taking all of Bell’s money?!”

Closer to home, public records allowed a Sacramento Bee investigative reporter to uncover perilous corrosion in the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, leading to a public outcry over a threat to public safety.

The Guardian, long critical of mayoral backdoor deals, often requests emails from government agencies to track people in power. “Behind the Tweets [3/11],” relied on emails obtained from the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to chronicle how Twitter wrangled local lawmakers into weakening the benefits it had to supply the city in exchange for its much-contested tax breaks.

A recent Guardian investigation led us to the mayor’s newly minted policy. When Guardian Editor in Chief Steven T. Jones requested email correspondence from the Mayor’s Office, we were told the emails may have been deleted, leading us to ask a reasonable question.

“What the hell?!”

VANISHING PAPER TRAIL

On April 22, the Guardian made a Sunshine Ordinance request to the Mayor’s Office for communications involving Tenderloin power broker Randy Shaw and the Tenderloin Museum project that he and Lee launched at a press conference the previous day.

A week later we obtained two emails from Shaw copied to city government officials: one supporting Ellis Act reform, and another calling for a city crackdown on the Turk and Leavenworth Smoke Shop.

We spoke to Kirsten Macaulay, who handles Sunshine requests for the Mayor’s Office, and asked about something quite curious: Even though Lee and his office were involved in a press event with Shaw on April 21, there were no emails or other messages setting up that event or coordinating when the mayor would speak.

We asked where those emails were, and got an astounding answer: They may have been deleted, she said, a regular practice for emails deemed to be “routine.”

“We don’t have a record retention policy against deleting emails,” she said.

That seemed to explain a number of suspicious responses to routine records requests we’ve made after politically charged decisions.

After a controversial behind-closed-doors political move by power broker (and Lee ally) Rose Pak to replace progressive Police Commissioner Angela Chan with a former Ed Lee campaigner, Victor Hwang, the Guardian requested emails from the mayor’s office concerning either candidate.

“This office is confirming that we do not have any responsive documents,” Macaulay wrote in reply to our request.

When we made similar requests of city supervisors, we received more than 70 emails per supervisor, supporting and decrying both candidates. The emails were like a trail of bread crumbs leading back to power broker Pak, revealing all the community members who had stepped in as proxies on her behalf to flex political muscles.

No such luck with the mayor.

The idea that not a single soul would send an email to Lee, nor would he or his staffers send a single email regarding the appointment of Chan, or of her opponent, just isn’t credible.

The Guardian pushed on the issue and obtained a copy of the records retention policy from the Mayor’s Office. The Mayor’s Office drafted a new version of that policy, which was quietly approved by Lee’s Chief-of-Staff Steve Kawa as well as City Attorney Dennis Herrera in February.

We’ve been pushing for more information on how that policy differs from previous versions, and whether it complies with state and local public records laws. But the staff member from Herrera’s office who dealt with the policy was unavailable for comment, and we haven’t gotten a straight answer from the mayor himself.

“San Francisco has the strongest open government and sunshine laws in the country,” Christine Falvey, a spokesperson for the mayor, told us. “The Mayor’s office fully complies with the spirit and letter of the law.”

She would not grant us a direct interview with the mayor. When the Guardian asked the mayor if he has the legal right to delete his emails when we saw him outside a campaign party Tuesday night, he said “I’ll answer your questions later,” and shut his car door in front of us.

One thing is for sure: The new policy has holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through, and that has open government advocates worried.

POLICY EXPERTS WEIGH IN

The most troubling language in the mayor’s new “Records and Document Retention and Disposal Schedule,” as it’s formally called, can be found on page two under the heading “No Retention Required.”

This section details which documents the Mayor’s Office believes it may destroy.

“Documents and other materials (including originals and duplicates) that are not required for retention, are not necessary to the functioning or continuity of the Department and which have no legal significance may be destroyed when no longer needed,” the section states. “Specific examples include telephone message slips, notes from ongoing projects, preliminary drafts that have been superseded by subsequent versions, routine emails that do not contain information required to be retained under this policy, miscellaneous correspondence not requiring follow-up or departmental action, notepads and chronological files.”

Emphasis ours. Attorneys we spoke with were concerned the exemptions would keep the public in the dark.

“The city should be retaining all records that bear on the operations of government and public oversight thereof,” David Greene, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told us. “The listing of telephone message slips — which sometimes might be the only record of a communication — is a disturbing example. Same for ‘routine emails’ — whatever that means.”

Terry Francke, lead counsel at open government group Californians Aware, went further, saying the records the Mayor’s Office claims it can destroy flouts state law.

“State law,” he said, “sets a minimum retention period of two years for any records of a city or county.”

We asked, does that mean any records destroyed in under two years would run afoul of state retention policies?

“Other than duplicates,” he said, “yes.”

He pointed to California Government Code 34090, which states cities cannot destroy records affecting the title to real property, court records, and records required to be kept by statute. Importantly, cities also cannot destroy records that are less than two years old.

Contrary to that law, emails the Mayor’s Office said may have been deleted were less than a few months old.

Rick Knee, a longtime member of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, was cautious.

Alarmingly, he said, “the list of documents of which retention is not required allows the destruction of records that should remain open to public scrutiny, and gives the mayor’s office far too much discretion to decide what is or is not ‘necessary to the functioning or continuity of the department.'”

The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force is the only city body specifically tasked with enforcing government transparency laws, which are in place to ensure that government conduct remains open to public scrutiny. But the power of that entity to act effectively is under threat, as city supervisors recently rejected two strong new appointments from the Society of Professional Journalists, one of whom litigated against the federal government to obtain public records regarding the National Security Agency, domestic drones, and more.

San Francisco politicians interested in deleting documents wouldn’t benefit from strong government watchdogs on the task force.

We can only hope local open government advocates and journalists alike will challenge the mayor’s policy, which potentially flouts state and local open government laws. But that may not be enough.

Even if we had ironclad rules safeguarding government email, Wheaton, an attorney with the First Amendment Project, pointed out there are ways around transparency.

Two months ago, the California Court of Appeals ruled in City of San Jose v. Superior Court (Smith) that personal emails and text messages of government officials are not public record.

“It’s just handing every corrupt politician an absolute get out of jail free card,” Wheaton said. “Now all they have to do is get a Gmail account to stay out of the public eye.”

Or, corrupt politicians could take the route of Mayor Brown, who barred digital devices in his presence during staff meetings and famously does not use email.

In his column for the San Francisco Chronicle, Willie’s World, Brown explained his position on email to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“These days, Schwarzenegger appears to be more into tech than politics. Do I do Twitter? he eagerly asked me. Do I do e-mail?

‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘Let me remind you of something, governor. Do you know what that ‘E’ in e-mail stands for?

‘No.’

‘Evidence.‘”

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

UPDATE: The Bay Guardian was given a brief quote by Christine Falvey, the mayor’s spokesperson, for this story on Monday. Though we used the quote in the print version of this story, an error on our part led to it not being included in the web posting. We have corrected the web posting and apologize for the error.

Below we’ve embedded the document retention policy for download and viewing.

San Francisco Mayor's Office Record Retention Policy 3.7.14 by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

Cash backwards

Erica Hanna

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May 28, 2014

36

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco is moving into the heart of city budget season, with the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee holding detailed budget hearings over the next month to modify the $5.9 billion budget that Mayor Ed Lee introduced on May 1. Lee’s budget had a $66.7 million shortfall in the General Fund for the coming year, which he needs to close with a revised budget by June 1, as well as a $133.4 million budget hole the following fiscal year.

We at the Bay Guardian are here to help, because this is a mismanaged city that has some severely misplaced fiscal priorities right now. Although San Francisco’s booming economy means this will be a far less painful budget season than previous years, the city still has a structural budget deficit and lingering damage from the administration of Gavin Newsom, who slashed services and raised a variety of fees to address big budget deficits without raising taxes.

The moment is now, when we have more revenues than expected — and more money than we’re likely to have again for awhile given boom-bust business cycles and our over-dependence on the volatile tech sector — to finally create a city budget that sees to the needs of all San Franciscans.

WHAT WE SHOULD BE FUNDING

Medical Examiner’s Office Families now have to wait at least six months to find out how their loved ones died in San Francisco, which is new, preventable, and unacceptable. Short staffing and slow turnaround times have led the National Association of Medical Examiners to downgrade this office’s accreditation from “full” to “provisional.” The city budget should provide the staffing needed to process autopsies and medical reports as quickly as the examiners and laboratories can perform them and help give grieving families the closure they’re being denied for budgetary reasons.

Infographic: Click here for the full page inforaphic (also in this week’s print edition) of Cash backwards.

Public health In a recently issued report, nurses at San Francisco General Hospital represented by SEIU Local 1021 publicly warned of dangerously low staffing levels. “Our patients frequently do not receive the level of care required by state law, hospital policies, or modern safety standards,” they wrote. The concerns are especially worrisome in the Emergency Department, where core staffing of 22 nurses per shift dropped to 17 in recent months, or sometimes down to 11. “As a result, an average of 11 the Emergency Room’s 26 beds are closed while the Hospital goes on diversion,” turning away ambulances. “Over the year, our trauma center, SFGH, uses 3 percent more beds than budgeted—which indicates a dangerous lack of ‘surge capacity’ to absorb extra patients in the event of a natural disaster.” The report noted that vacant positions are technically budgeted in, but lingered filled.

911 dispatchers California law mandates that 90 percent of 911 calls be answered in 10 seconds or less; in San Francisco, that number often drops to 60 percent or lower. In early April, 911 dispatchers gathered at the city’s Department of Emergency Management to say that chronic understaffing is forcing dispatchers to put distressed San Franciscans on hold, or to force new callers to wait longer than 10 seconds before answering. “When a mother calls 911 because her baby isn’t breathing, 10 seconds matter. San Francisco 911 dispatch department is understaffed and needs to be improved,” say dispatcher Sean Dryden, calling for the city to put more resources into the system.

Activating surplus property Last week, the California State Assembly passed legislation that would give affordable housing developers the right of first refusal for “surplus” lands owned by local governments, thereby strengthening an existing priority for use. San Francisco has at least 42 surplus properties that could conceivably be converted into affordable housing projects, if resources were dedicated toward facilitating such partnerships and prioritizing this important need. “There is very little land available for affordable housing development,” says Assemblymember Phil Ting, who authored the legislation, which is now headed to the Senate for final approval. “These precious properties should become homes for working people.”

Homeless services In the past 10 years, San Francisco has lost about one-third of its homeless shelter beds, while about half of the city’s drop-in center capacity was also slashed, longtime advocate Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, told us in a recent interview (see “San Francisco’s Untouchables,” March 24, 2014). The city can and should do more to provide a safety net for those in the precarious position of sleeping on the streets. And on a related note, city contracts for providing short-term stabilization beds for the homeless should not be awarded to slumlords who have been cited so many times for Health Code violations that they’re being sued by the City Attorney’s Office. Surely city agencies can find landlords who don’t endanger their tenants’ health and wellbeing through chronic neglect of their properties.

Pedestrian safety San Francisco spends $15 million annually on pedestrian injuries, according to the Department of Public Health, and 20 pedestrians were killed by vehicles on the streets of San Francisco in 2013 (including 6-year-old Sofia Liu on New Year’s Eve). Investments in safe streets for pedestrians saves the city money, and saves lives — but all of that counts on making the right investments. WalkFirst, the city’s pedestrian safety program, identified San Francisco’s most dangerous intersections, main in the Tenderloin and downtown, where there is a crucial need for safety modifications. Though the mayor pledged $50 million over five years to improve those intersections, that money depends on November transit ballot measures (including the vehicle license fee increase he’s now waffling on even placing on the ballot). If they fail, only $17 million will be available for pedestrian safety work. But even that amount barely scratches the surface: WalkFirst identified $240 million worth of street improvements needed to make San Francisco safe for walking.

Bike infrastructure The city has made strides in recent years to build out its bike infrastructure, but it still has miles of roadway left unsafe for bicyclists. The city identified many intersections and roadways in need of better bike infrastructure in its 2009 Bicycle Plan. Five years later, many of the identified “near term” projects still need big improvements: the Broadway tunnel; Golden Gate Avenue and Turk corridors; Division and 13th Street corridors; and “The Hairball” between Cesar Chavez and Potrero. Some of these improvements would cost the city $1 million or more, but others would cost as little as $100,000. Even the low-cost bike improvements languished since 2009, a clear failure.

A higher minimum wage In 2012, when San Francisco’s minimum wage was $10.24 per hour and rents were lower than they are today, the Department of Public Health published a map showing how many minimum-wage jobs a toiling soul would have to work in order to afford a market-rate two-bedroom apartment in a given neighborhood. To live in SoMa? 7.4 jobs. The Sunset? 3.8 jobs. The Mayor’s Office opposes increasing the city’s minimum wage to $15 on the grounds that it would increase the costs of city contracts with nonprofit organizations to provide various city services. It’s bad enough that the city has privatized essential public services, but to make the argument that the workers who provide these services aren’t even entitled to a living wage is obscene.

Crucial infrastructure The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is desperately trying to come up with $625 million to replace 19-mile-long Mountain Tunnel, a critical conduit for city water from Hetch Hetchy that is in danger of imminent collapse, which would be devastating to residents of San Francisco and other Bay Area jurisdictions that rely on it. And that just one of many items on the long list of capital improvement projects — from failing sewer lines near our bayfront to overdue transportation infrastructure improvements — that get funded each year based on politically influenced budget decisions rather than what the city actually needs to be functional and forward-thinking.

Affordable housing When voters approved creation of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund in 2012, Mayor Lee and his allies in the business and development communities congratulated themselves on finally addressing affordable housing. The only problem was the city contribution of $20 million per year, eventually rising to $50 million annually, was a drop in the bucket compared to the actual need for subsidized housing construction. The city’s Housing Element calls for 60 percent of new housing to be below market rate to meet the needs of city resident, yet less than 20 percent of housing in the pipeline is affordable. Even the mayor’s grand promise to have a third of new housing built by 2020 be affordable turned out to be a lie, with the San Francisco Public Press recently reporting that he’s counting rehabilitation of existing public housing units. Sup. John Avalos is now working on devoting more city funding in this budget to affordable housing and we hope the full board supports his efforts.

MISSPENT PUBLIC DOLLARS

Business tax cuts The Mid-Market Tax Exclusion Zone — more commonly known as the Twitter tax break after the company whose threat to leave the city extorted millions of dollars from city coffers — is just one of series of business tax breaks aimed at the booming technology industry by Mayor Ed Lee and his allies. Not only did they also get stock options excluded from taxation (repealing a law signed by tech-friendly ex-Mayor Gavin Newsom), but they also subtly crafted 2012’s Proposition B, the complicated business tax reform measure approved by voters, to give the tech sector a substantial tax cut with little public discussion about that provision.

Central Subway We at the Bay Guardian are huge fans of public transit, and we generally believe this is all money well spent. That said, the Central Subway is a costly boondoggle whose false promises and high cost per rider we’ll all be covering for years to come. That money could have been better on a variety of other transit projects that would improve service to Chinatown and other hard to access parts of the city. And the cost overruns in the project — which have been hidden from public view by sneaky and unethical according tricks, as the SF Weekly reported this spring — are likely to continuing sapping resources from Muni and the SFMTA for a generation to come.

Repeal of Sunday metering It made no sense for Mayor Ed Lee to insist that the SFMTA repeal having to pay for parking meters on Sunday, a program that the agency found was causing more turnover and thus more parking availability and less traffic congestion in busy commercial corridors. Drivers, businesses, and Muni riders all benefited from the paid meters. That repeal will cost taxpayers about $11 million per year while transit riders are paying Muni fares that are being increased to $2.25 and the SFMTA is claiming to have no money to provide free transit service to senior and those with disabilities. This decision amounted to a $11 million annual expenditure with negative environmental impacts that were never studied — a violation of the California Environmental Quality Act, as the Board of Supervisors should rule when they hear that appeal this summer. This is money that could be better spent.

Nonprofit Inc. The city spends millions of dollars every year on hundreds of contracts with nonprofit organizations, much of which goes to politically connected groups in a sort of political patronage system. For example, Randy Shaw and his Tenderloin Housing Clinic have dozens of contracts with the city to perform a variety of services, all while he writes glowing puff pieces on Mayor Lee for his Beyond Chron blog. Shaw even recently got a $20,000 city contract to help find tenants for commercial spaces in the Tenderloin — as if that’s actually a problem in a booming city with an overheating economy. The city’s contracts should be thoroughly reviewed by an independent party — in addition to the Board of Supervisors — to weed out the political patronage.

Promoting tourism San Francisco takes in almost $300 million per year on its transient occupancy tax, then it turns around and spends a significant portion of that promoting tourism by funding the San Francisco Travel Association (including its high-paid President Joe D’Alessandro), the Moscone Convention Center and its current expansion plans, and a variety of other tourism outreach efforts. The private sector that receives the biggest benefits from tourism (tourists spend $25 million a day in the city, according to the SFTA) should be funding more of the city’s tourist promotion and the hotel taxes should be treated as a general revenue source to improve Muni, roads, and other services that tourists also use.

Subsidies for automobiles Even in this transit-first city, where the SFMTA claims to be trying to reduce the percentage of total trips taken by car from about 60 percent now down to 50 percent, city policies subsidize automobiles (as well as the Google buses and other private shuttles). Drivers get free parking on public streets throughout the city, particularly on the west side. Most housing development projects are still required to provide on-site parking, which increases the cost of housing even for residents who don’t drive, despite some early progressive reforms that try to de-link parking from housing. And motorists contribute far more than other residents to wear-and-tear on our roads, adding to the Department of Public Works budget — with the very worst offender being those massive Google buses, whose impacts on the city budget are far more than the $1 per stop they’re now paying. There are tricky legal restrictions around making drivers pay for their impacts, but there are ways of doing so if the political will is there.

Hiring bad construction contractors According to an audit published by the City Controller’s Office, San Francisco has budgeted more than $25 billion for its capital improvement plan in the next 10 years — but doesn’t bother to check whether a contractor has done a good job in the past before passing out lucrative contracts. “City departments do not adequately assess contractor performance and do not consider past performance in the construction contract award process,” the audit found. “Although 70 percent of surveyed city construction staff have at least occasionally encountered city contractors that they considered poor performers, the City’s Administrative Code does not require departments to assess the performance of construction contractors, and past performance is not considered.” The result? “Project delays, substandard work, and higher likelihood of claims and litigation.” Oh, and that great flushing sound as tax dollars are whooshed away.

Subsidizing events for the wealthy Can anyone fathom why San Francisco used taxpayer dollars to fund Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s super-rich boy America’s Cup last year? Ellison pulled in a $96.2 million salary in 2012, and is worth billions. Yet Mayor Lee put up general fund money to the tune of $20 million for the billionaire’s yacht race, according to a report by the city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst. What was the city supposed to get out of it? A major tax revenue windfall, for starters, but that turned out to be a myth. San Francisco lost $6 million in general funds, and Larry Ellison won the cup, and our money. City taxpayers also subsidize the symphony, the opera, blue-blood gatherings in City Hall, and other events their wealthy attendees should be paying for themselves.

Treasure Island San Francisco purchased contaminated Treasure Island for $105 million in 2009, spent millions more on planning and contracting work to prepare for private developers to build about 6,000 homes on the island, agreed to stake an additional $700 million in bond money against future property taxes, and then basically gave the whole thing away to politically connected developers to build up the island with towers that will rise up 60 stories, developer who will take their customary 15-20 percent profits on what they put into the deal. All of this on a island that current climate change projections show will be underwater by the end of the century, requiring acres of landfill and buffering against the elements to avoid this fate, even though San Francisco is under state mandate to remove bay fill and live in more harmony with the natural world. Is this really a good idea? Rainy day fund Why is the Mayor’s Office proposing to stick $125 million into the Budget Stabilization Fund, aka the Rainy Day Fund, when city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund is falling woefully short of building the below-market-rate housing that San Franciscans right now. With this city displacing its more diverse populations and becoming steadily more affluent, which will forever change its socioeconomic and political dynamics, it’s raining now — raining the will of the wealthy, a downpour that is flooding the rest of us out of the city of St. Francis.

Renting isn’t sharing

Michael Redmond

-

May 20, 2014

71

steve@sfbg.com

Last week’s two-day Share conference in San Francisco came at an auspicious moment for companies that define themselves as part of the new “sharing economy,” which ranges from peer-to-peer services and products brokered online to various cooperative ventures designed to minimize resource consumption.

Most of these growing companies are part of San Francisco’s technology industry, using web-based interfaces to conduct their economic transactions. And some have been making local enemies and headlines recently by disrupting key aspects of urban life, from Airbnb impacting the housing and hotel markets to Lyft and Uber upending the taxi industry.

In fact, the biggest battle brewing at City Hall these days is over widely watched legislation by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu to regulate and legalize the short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb and similar companies. And state agencies based in San Francisco are now working on regulations that would affect Lyft and its ilk.

So we decided to listen in as disciples of the sharing economy talked among themselves about the challenges and opportunities facing what they call the “new economy,” one that is at an important crossroads that will determine whether the interests of communities or capital guide its evolution.

CHIU DECLARES WAR

When Chiu took the stage at the Share conference, he was joining a sharing economy community that, he said he would probably be a part of today if he hadn’t gone into public service, citing his own experience with tech startups before running for supervisor.

“I believe we are becoming the capital of the sharing economy,” Chiu said, citing examples of San Francisco’s “ethos of sharing” that include the Summer of Love, Burning Man, and the fact that “we are a community that wants to foster trust among strangers to build what I think is one of the most amazing cities in the entire world. But we’re also a city that is expensive. The rent is too damn high.”

Chiu spoke proudly of San Francisco’s environmentalism and his own legislative contributions to that legacy. And he said “we are a city of innovation,” lauding the technology industry. “We understand that keeping up with the Joneses may not be the way to go,” he said. “In fact, sharing with the Joneses, I think, is the better path.”

In Chiu’s formulation, the sharing economy is the synthesis of all of these values and goals. By using computers and smartphones to facilitate the sharing of goods and services, we use less stuff and consume fewer resources, in the process opening up economic opportunities for more people.

He sounded like the most enthusiastic of sharing economy true believers, but with a couple of caveats, acknowledging how those “pesky taxes” on most of these economic transactions go unpaid, and how Airbnb and similar companies have removed apartments from the housing market for local residents.

“Shareable housing has both helped and exacerbated our housing crisis,” Chiu said, describing how he spent more than a year working on legislation that would regulate and legalize short-term housing rentals in San Francisco, where they are now considered illegal “hotel conversions” (see “Into thin air,” 8/6/13, and dozens of other Guardian stories and blog posts on the issue).

Chiu’s legislation would require Airbnb hosts to register with the city, rent out only their primary residence, and occupy that space for at least 275 days per year (which Chiu has said limits Airbnb hosts to just 90 rental nights per year, although critics dispute that interpretation).

“I thought this was a reasonable solution, but two weeks later there was a major press conference attacking it,” Chiu told Share attendees, referring to the coalition of landlord, neighborhood, labor, and affordable housing groups that have come out against the legislation, calling it a blanket rezoning of residential property around the city, pledging an initiative campaign challenging it.

“In part, this is politics. I’m in the midst of a race for the state Assembly this year, my opponent has supporters who have been protesting the Twitter headquarters, throwing rocks at Google commuter shuttles, vomiting on Yahoo buses, referring to tech workers as not real San Franciscans,” Chiu said.

Then Chiu ramped up his rhetoric, equating progressive concerns about the tax breaks and special treatment that Chiu, Mayor Ed Lee, and others have extended to tech companies in San Francisco with a war on the sharing economy and the forced deportation of its workers.

“They are calling for war on you, even though they don’t realize that what you are doing is helping to make sure we’re addressing our income inequality, we’re empowering everyday people by building community and using technology,” Chiu said. “All of you need to get involved in the political debate. You’re busy trying to change the world, but status quo interests are actively trying to ship you to Menlo Park, Oakland, and San Jose.”

In the end, Chiu did urge those starting up companies to “think early about how your paradigm meshes with existing laws and regulations,” but that tepid call for civic responsibility and good corporate citizenship did little to dull his feeding of techie exceptionalism, fearmongering, or appeals to vaguely libertarian values.

AIRBNB’S BOOSTERS

The pep rally atmosphere of the session got pumped up even more by Airbnb’s Douglas Atkin and venture capitalist Ron Conway, both of whom had nothing but glowing praise for the burgeoning industry and its customers, offering none of the caveats put forth by Chiu or the speaker who followed him, White House staffer Greg Nelson, who talked about the challenging access, equity, and regulatory issues facing the industry.

“We at Airbnb and PEERS think the sharing economy is a jolly good thing,” Atkin said in a charming British accent, presenting the sharing economy as an unstoppable and uniformly positive force that is replacing “the old economy, the last economy.”

As an advertising executive in that old economy, “I was the devil,” Atkin said. Now playing the role of savior, he spoke with an evangelical flair as he flashed Airbnb slides and videos, telling the crowd “there’s been a decentralization of wealth, control, and power” because “you can’t do this new economy without creating community.”

It was easy to forget that Atkin represents a company that Wall Street analysts have valued at $10 billion, despite having a business model that is illegal in many cities, causing some hosts to be evicted and others to evict their tenants, while the company and its investors move quickly to cash out with an initial public stock offering.

Among those who would profit handsomely from that IPO is Conway, a billionaire who already got far richer late last year from being “an early investor in Twitter,” as he described himself to the crowd after being introduced as someone who “has really led the way of connecting the tech industry to the public sector.”

Indeed, Conway spoke proudly of funding the politicians who pushed the package of tax breaks for Twitter and other technology companies that followed it into the mid-Market area, most notably Mayor Ed Lee, the biggest beneficiary of Conway’s largesse among San Francisco politicians.

Conway speaks the language of the technology sector that he’s been sponsoring with angel investments since the early days of the last technology boom, making seemingly common sense appeals that hide his conservative ideology, just as he switched his political party registration from Republican to decline-to-state when he became active in San Francisco politics (see “The Plutocrat,” 11/27/12).

But for the careful listener familiar with San Francisco political history, there were some intriguing revelations in his address that were probably lost on the average techie in attendance that morning.

For example, Conway talked about his role following up his advocacy for the Twitter tax break with behind-the-scenes work helping to craft the business tax reform measure in 2012 — which the Controller’s Office analysis found just happened to give the technology companies that Conway was invested in a substantial tax cut.

“Now all the companies enjoy this,” Conway said in reference to Twitter’s tax break, “because Prop. B was passed a year and half ago.”

He also then admitted that Airbnb owes its phenomenal growth to the widespread economic desperation triggered by the financial collapse of 2008 and an economic recovery that still hasn’t reached the average citizen struggling to cover their housing costs.

“Airbnb, for example, would not be here today if there wasn’t an economic crisis and a recession in 2008 in New York, where people had to decide to rent out a room in their house or I get foreclosed on my mortgage. It was that basic. Airbnb wouldn’t be here today if people all over New York didn’t save their mortgages and start using this product. And then by word of mouth it spread around the world because it is so convenient and so practical,” Conway said.

Conway is conservative on financial issues, but more moderate on social issues, and he talked about his advocacy work on gun control and immigration reform. Yet even on those issues, where it is almost exclusively Republicans who are blocking the changes Conway says he wants, he turns the gridlock into an anti-government argument.

“We need term limits in Congress,” the former Republican said, citing a standard conservative trope that got a big applause from the Share conference crowd.

Finally, he elevated the current struggles in San Francisco over the sharing economy into key battles that will shape the future of the new economy.

“This [Airbnb] legislation that David Chiu has proposed, which in the next few months will go to the Board of Supervisors is crucial legislation the whole country will watch,” Conway said, calling for everyone in the crowd to get involved and lobby their supervisors. “David Chiu needs help. This would not pass if it went to a vote today, it wouldn’t come close to passing. So we have to change this. We want to do on the local level what we have to do on the national level: Organize and conquer!”

ACCESS AND EQUITY

After Conway came an intriguing panel discussion about equity and environmental issues with Nikki Silvestri of Green for All, Vien Truong with the Greenlining Institute, and Adam Werbach, the former Sierra Club executive director who started the stuff-sharing company Yertle.

It was moderated by GreenBiz.com editor Joel Makower, who cited information from the previous day’s sessions about how it’s mostly middle class white people who use the sharing economy. “The reality is it’s not that inclusive,” he said, and all his guests agreed and talked about the need to broaden its benefits.

“How do you marry the economy with people?” Truong said as she discussed that challenge. And it’s an urgent need, as Werbach said while answering a question about how the sharing economy could help bring about a new kind of environmentalism aimed at producing and consuming less stuff.

“What’s wrong with the old environmentalism is we’re not achieving our mission. Climate change is what’s wrong with the old environmentalism,” he said.

Werbach cited the goal of replacing about a quarter of the things we now buy with shared goods, even though Amazon and other companies have made it easier than ever to have new products shipped around the world: “It is cheaper, faster, and easier to get something new than to get something used from right next door.”

But Silvestri said the limited participation in the sharing economy makes it difficult to see it as the solution yet, calling for the sharing economy to address access and equity issues, something that marginalized groups would respond to if it was based on true values of sharing.

“Coming from my own background, African Americans had to share because white people wasn’t giving us nothing,” she said. By that same measure, she also said that low-income people feel wary of being taken advantage of by sharing companies and customers: “When you’re in survival mode, you’re wary of people taking from you.”

That’s one reason why Silvestri said that black communities are slower to adopt sharing with strangers, whether it be their homes or cars, something that could be overcome with more personalized outreach: “If I look you in the eye, you might not come take my shit.”

She said that for all the talk at the conference about “community,” the community of strangers that makes up the sharing economy isn’t a true community, something that needs to change to realize the lofty goals that many espouse.

“The sharing economy is new enough that if we figure out this problem early then all of us can actually participate,” Silvestri said.

Werbach agreed, saying the sharing economy has great potential, but only if it makes the right moves now. “This is the beginning of a movement, but the people aren’t here yet,” he said. “We’re at the very beginning of this story.”

He defines the struggle of the moment as one between human and economic values, hoping the sharing economy’s customers will determine its values: “There is an interesting wild west movement now. We need people to do the recruiting so Wall Street doesn’t do the recruiting.”

STRAIGHT TALK

The closing plenary session at Share illustrated the divergent attitudes and goals that mark the sharing economy, in which some members feel a collective responsibility to meet important societal goals, while others seem more interested in just making money and mouthing the rhetoric of sharing.

New York University economics professor Arun Sandararajan, who runs the Collaborative Economy Project that studies and promotes the sharing economy, said it has the potential to develop in ways that will either exacerbate or reduce the income inequality that has become such a growing public policy concern.

Sandararajan expressed hopes that the sharing economy could increase the economic growth rate and lower the wealth gap by broadening access to capital and opportunities for entrepreneurship. But he also argued that the sharing economy has the potential to change the terms of the debate by giving more people access to goods and services than their incomes might otherwise allow.

“We have to go beyond measuring inequality in terms of income and wealth,” he said, offering a conception likely to appeal to the wealthy, but probably not those struggling to get by, even if they were able to get more hand-me-downs through Yerdle or odd jobs through TaskRabbit.

Others on the panel illustrated the dichotomy between do-gooders and profit-seekers more clearly, showing how broadly those in the sharing economy are trying to define it these days.

Jose Quinonez runs the nonprofit Mission Asset Fund, a nonprofit on Valencia Street that assists with peer-to-peer microlending, an amazing program that seemed to have little in common with the investor-backed companies that dominated the agenda. “I didn’t know I was part of the sharing economy until today,” he told the crowd.

In an earlier session, Quinonez called out the self-congratulatory tone by some boosters. “As we talk about the word inclusive it’s very easy to forget the people not invited to the party…We have to make sure we’re not making an exclusive sharing economy.”

Next came Denise Cheng, an academic who has been studying the sharing economy for the MIT Center for Civic Media, and she had perhaps the most poignant and insightful answer to the question the conference posed about what will best catalyze the sharing economy.

“Straight talk will catalyze the sharing economy,” Cheng said.

She discussed how the broad label of the sharing economy gets claimed by everyone from small idealists who truly want to promote the idea of sharing to self-interested corporations who use the label for political cover and really mean “renting.”

“When we say sharing economy, we actually mean a lot of things,” she said. “Companies that adopt the sharing economy label are not necessarily adopting the values of the sharing economy.”

Compounding that deception is the fact that companies like Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb are profiting from business models that are often illegal on the local level, but doing little to help drivers or hosts who get in trouble with local authorities: “When someone has to answer on the local level, it’s the providers who are on the front line.”

There was a very different tone and message that came from the subsequent guests to join the panel, who shamelessly promoted their companies and didn’t seem to take heed of Cheng’s call for straight talk.

“Sharing cars is how we can catalyze the sharing economy,” Jessica Scorpio, wearing a T-shirt of the car-sharing company she helped found, Getaround. She called car-sharing “a gateway drug to the sharing economy,” noting that car-sharing customers often go on to use other sharing economy products and services.

“Sharing cars is transforming the fundamentals of our transportation system,” Scorpio said, claiming that each shared car takes up to 32 cars off the road, a figure that doesn’t square with the body of peer-reviewed research on the subject, which places the actual number at nine to 13 cars.

Hyperbole and exaggeration are common among the biggest boosters of sharing economy companies, as are the sins of omission and misdirection — all of which are perhaps what prompted Chang’s “straight talk” prescription.

Sunil Paul, co-founder and CEO of the ridesharing company Sidecar, gave a long and detailed presentation on the supposedly ambiguous definition of “commercial transactions,” calling for what he called a “safe harbor” for sharing activities, without once mentioning the word that he was actually talking about and dancing around: taxes.

“There are certain activities that should be beyond the commercial reach of government,” Paul said, describing his clients who drive customers around the city like taxi drivers less than full time. “We need a safe harbor for sharing that protects these activities from being considered commercial.”

Paul said that Sidecar and other sharing economy companies have “blurred the line between what is personal and what is commercial,” comparing the activities his company facilitates to carpooling and arguing that people should be able to cover the annual cost of driving, say around $10,000, without it being considered a commercial activity (i.e. a taxable transaction).

“As long as you don’t make a profit from it, it’s not a commercial transaction,” Paul said, redefining the very concept of commercial.

And remember, this is a company that is already having a profound impact on the regulated taxi industry — of which Sandararajan said, “I think the taxi service as we know it will largely cease to exist in a few years” — just as other sharing economy companies steal market share from other industries, as Airbnb is doing to the hotel industry, also while avoiding taxes on those transactions.

FROM TALK TO ACTION

“One of the things we like to do in the sharing economy is talk about the sharing economy — a lot!” Jesse Biroscak, an Airbnb host and founder of BayShare, said during a session at Share entitled “Shareable Cities: From Concept to Action.”

It was the first thing I heard upon arriving at the conference, but I already knew it was true after covering this movement over the last couple years, a point that was emphasized strongly by the excited evangelism that I heard again and again over the next 24 hours.

But for all the talk that those in the so-called sharing economy do about the sharing economy, there is often a deliberate vagueness to it that tries to mask its many contradictions and paradoxes.

Its biggest proponents are anxious to go big — defined by a strange mix of idealism (for environmentalism, libertarianism, economic and social equity, and an odd and often contradictory assortment of other goals) and the desire to cash in on the new gold rush — before the opportunities slip away (thanks to competitors, government regulators, or an economic downturn).

“I’m tired of talking about it, I want to do things,” said Biroscak, a regular Airbnb host from San Francisco, without ever really defining the things he wants to do.

BayShare also seems to have a vagueness of purpose, defining itself on its slick website as “an organization whose mission is to make the Bay Area the best place on the planet for sharing. As this movement grows, BayShare will explore how city stakeholders and the sharing community can work together to help the Sharing Economy flourish in the Bay Area to benefit the city, businesses, and communities. The organization looks to be a resource for the Mayor’s Working Group on the Sharing Economy.”

But that working group, which Mayor Ed Lee announced when Treasurer Jose Cisneros was holding hearings two years ago to determine whether Airbnb and other companies should pay the city’s transient occupancy tax, never actually convened. It was simply a stall tactic that evaporated after Cisneros ruled that the tax was indeed owed.

Still, BayShare lists many of the biggest sharing economy companies among its “members,” including Airbnb, RelayRides, Lyft, Yerdle, Vayable, City Car Share, Suppershare, and Get My Boat. Biroscak described the advocacy work that he and BayShare do, work that he urged all of the attendees to get involved with, so that public agencies understand and support this growing economic sector.

“This is called lobbying, and that’s okay. Lobbying is not a dirty word,” Biroscak told the crowd.

Lobbying may not be a dirty word, but it is a regulated activity in San Francisco and other cities, and neither Biroscak nor BayShare are registered lobbyists with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, which they should be if they are indeed lobbying.

Biroscak even boasted of a partnership with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management that BayShare secured last year on behalf of its member companies to provide their services to local residents in the event of an emergency.

“The sharing economy was born here, and partnering with BayShare, we are committed to ensuring that San Francisco supports this emerging sector’s success and nurturing even greater civic involvement,” Mayor Ed Lee said last June in a press release announcing the partnership, while Chiu said, “I’m confident that BayShare will improve the communication between this emerging sector and local government as ‘collaborative consumption’ evolves and grows in San Francisco.”

But when we reached Biroscak by phone, he said that BayShare doesn’t really have any agreements with the city, and that it doesn’t actually represent its “member” companies or get any money from them. And he said BayShare “definitely does not consider itself a lobbying organization,” instead defining it more vaguely as “a convener and facilitator.”

But as a self-styled spokesperson for the movement — “I try to speak for the San Francisco sharing economy as an industry,” he said at the conference — Biroscak issued a call to action to a crowd that mostly seemed to be puttering on their electronic devices and only half paying attention: “We need to stand up for what we want, but we want to do it in a coordinated way.”

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.

No real answers at question time

Michael Redmond

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May 20, 2014

4

NO REAL ANSWERS AT QUESTION TIME

At last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Mayor Ed Lee showed up for Question Time, that scintillating moment when the city’s top-ranking official reads off a written response to a pre-submitted question. Despite knowing in advance that District 1 Sup. Eric Mar would ask him how much he was considering raising the minimum wage, Lee still didn’t fully answer.

“Mayor Lee, San Francisco is now the city with the fastest-growing gap between rich and poor … Some labor groups in the City have proposed to increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour,” Mar noted, referencing a ballot initiative led by Service Employees International Union Local 1021 to ask voters to approve that increase. “Can you share what level you are currently considering increasing the minimum wage to and how you plan on mitigating impacts on small businesses and nonprofits?”

But Lee did not respond by naming a concrete dollar amount, instead saying he hoped all stakeholders could “work together” to arrive at a mutually agreeable figure. “I am, along with Sup. [Jane] Kim and others, working closely with labor unions, advocates, business leaders, and nonprofit representatives to craft one consensus measure that we can put on the ballot this November,” Lee said. “I am completely committed to increasing it this year, and I hope we can all work together to support one consensus measure.”

OAKLAND FAST FOOD WORKERS JOIN INTERNATIONAL STRIKE

Hundreds of Bay Area fast food workers joined in protests against McDonald’s and other chains that exploit low-paid workers as part of a day of action that spanned 150 US cities and 33 countries across the world.

In Oakland, a march targeted a McDonald’s on East 12th Street and a Burger King at 13th and Broadway, among other locations. KFC worker Jose Martinez helped organize a similar march in Oakland last year. Since then, he said, his bosses have shown little inclination to help workers.

“Nothing has changed,” Martinez said. “I’ve been working there four years, and I haven’t had a raise — $8.25 is nothing, I can’t live on that.”

Martinez is a student, and says the pay isn’t enough to cover basic needs while he focuses on his studies.

Meanwhile, other workers rely on fast food restaurant jobs to support their families.

“I haven’t had a raise in three years,” a McDonald’s worker who identified herself as Markeisha told us just after she went out on strike from an Oakland McDonald’s in December. Markeisha said she’s the sole provider for her two children.

Fast food workers also contend they are a vulnerable workforce. Wage theft, low salaries, slashed hours, and punitive measures for speaking out are among the grievances they allege against chains including McDonald’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell.

“One thing we found when talking to fast food workers was wage theft issues were high,” Service Employees International Union Local 1021 Political Director Chris Daly told the Guardian. “When you’re making $8-11 an hour, a couple shifts can be the difference between paying the rent or not.”

APPEAL FILED IN SUNDAY METER DEBATE

Transit advocacy groups filed an appeal May 14, challenging a controversial vote by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Board of Directors last month to end paid Sunday meters.

The appeal argues that the paid Sunday meters program was highly beneficial, and charges that the decision to terminate it was made without adequate review under the California Environmental Quality Act.

It was filed by transit groups Livable City, The San Francisco Transit Riders Union, and an individual, Mario Tanev. It will now go to the Board of Supervisors, for a vote to approve or deny review under CEQA.

“The enforcement of parking meters on Sunday in San Francisco has been doing exactly what it was designed to do,” the appeal argues, “reduce traffic congestion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase parking availability, and increase revenues in the City and County of San Francisco.”

SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told the Guardian, “We’ll take a look at the appeal, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment at this time.”

The Sunday meters program brought in $11 million, more than enough to cover proposed programs such as free Muni for seniors and disabilities.

At the meeting where the program was shot down, many seniors told the SFMTA board that the rising cost of living in San Francisco, combined with declining federal assistance and retirement funds, are making it tough to afford basic needs such as transportation on Muni.

CHIU ACCUSES CAMPOS OF STARTING A WAR ON TECH

Speaking to an audience of tech enthusiasts at last week’s Share conference, Board of Supervisors President and California Assembly candidate David Chiu aggressively courted votes — by accusing his opponent, Sup. David Campos, of declaring war on the tech sector.

“They are calling for a war on you, even though they don’t realize you are addressing our income inequality,” Chiu said of Campos and his progressive allies.

Chiu was the only elected official invited to address this $795-per-person conference on the “sharing economy,” the term adopted by companies that facilitate peer-to-peer online economic transactions.

Before the session began, meanwhile, a Chiu campaign worker stood outside the conference entrance to hand out photocopies of an anonymous May 11 hit piece, titled “3 Things Every Tech Worker Should Know About Supervisors David Campos.”

Also speaking at that session was venture capitalist Ron Conway, a key investor supporting many of these companies and a financial backer of Mayor Ed Lee. Conway’s spouse, Gayle, chairs an independent expenditure committee that funded a mailer attacking Campos for voting against the ouster of Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi in October of 2012. At that time, Mirkarimi faced possible removal for official misconduct, following charges of domestic abuse stemming from an incident in which Mirkarimi grabbed his wife Eliana Lopez’s arm and left a bruise. The mailer features a photo depicting the mother of a murder victim killed by a domestic abuser. The vote, legally speaking, was held to decide whether the charges rose to the level of official misconduct.

“For someone who says he tries to bring people together, David Chiu is trying to scare people into thinking there’s a war going on. I don’t know where that comes from,” Campos said in response. “The idea that we have a war on the techies and the tech industry is ridiculous.”

Instead, he said he and progressive allies have been trying to address the eviction and displacement crisis that is connected to the tax breaks and other special treatment that Chiu, Mayor Lee, and supporters delivered to tech companies.

“Asking that they pay their fair share doesn’t mean we’re against them,” Campos said. He added: “It seems that David Chiu and Ron Conway are joined at the hip.”

Chiu and his allies ramp up their rhetoric, warning of a “war” on techies

Sasha Cuttler

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May 14, 2014

130

Chiu and his allies ramp up their rhetoric, warning of a “war” on techies

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu and his campaign for the California Assembly aggressively courted votes and support from the technology community this morning [Wed/14] at the two-day Share conference, accusing opponent David Campos and his progressive allies of “calling for a war on you.”

Chiu spoke at the Opening Plenary session, the only elected official invited to address this $795 per person conference on the “sharing economy,” the term adopted by Airbnb, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Yerdle, Uber, and the rapidly growing list of companies that facilitate peer-to-peer online economic transactions.

Also speaking at that session was venture capitalist Ron Conway, a key funding source of many of these companies and Mayor Ed Lee’s political ambitions — and someone whose household just funded a nasty independent expenditure mailer attacking Campos for his vote last year against removing Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi from office.

Conway called on attendees to lobby their supervisors to support current legislation by Chiu to legalize and regulate Airbnb’s business model in San Francisco. “This legislation by David Chiu is crucial, legislation the whole country will be watching,” Conway said. “David Chiu needs your help. This would not pass if it came to a vote today.”

While it’s unclear how much support the measure has, it is true that there’s a lot riding on this for Airbnb, which has been valued at $10 billion by Wall Street as it moves toward an initial public stock offering, even though the short-term rentals it facilitates are illegal in its home city of San Francisco.

Chiu spent more than a year crafting his Airbnb legislation, which was greeted with mixed reactions last month, including being slammed by a coalition that has pledged to put a rival measure on the November ballot, a campaign that Chiu today implied Campos was part of (Campos told us he has not taken a position on either the Chiu legislation or the proposed ballot measure).

“I thought it was a reasonable solution, but two weeks later there was a press conference attacking it,” Chiu told Share attendees, ramping his rhetoric in describing “people throwing rocks at Google commuter shuttles” and other alleged local hostilities directed at the tech industry.

“They are calling for a war on you, even though they don’t realize that what you are doing is helping to make sure we’re addressing our income inequality, we’re empowering everyday people by building community and using technology,” Chiu said.

Before the session began, a Chiu campaign worker stood outside the conferene entrance at the Marine Memorial Building handing out photocopies of an anonymous May 11 hit piece on the new blog called SF Techies Who Vote entitled “3 Things Every Tech Worker Should Know about Supervisor David Campos.”

Campos told the Guardian that the attacks, including the Conway-funded mailer that just hit mailboxes today, shows that Chiu and his supporters are desperate with just 20 days until the primary election, but that Chiu’s tone belies his claims to focus on civility and getting past the divisive political rhetoric of old.

“For someone who says he tries to bring people together, David Chiu is trying to scare people into thinking there’s a war going on. I don’t know where that comes from,” Campos said. “The idea that we have a war on the techies and the tech industry is ridiculous.”

Instead, Campos said that he and his progressive allies have been trying to address the eviction and displacement crisis that is connected to the tax breaks and other special treatment that Chiu, Mayor Ed Lee, Conway, and their allies have given to big technology companies.

“Asking that they pay their fair share doesn’t mean we’re against them,” Campos said, noting how overtly Chiu has recently been casting his political fortunes with Lee, Conway, and their economic policies. “It seems that David Chiu and Ron Conway are joined at the hip.”

We at the Guardian will have much more coverage for the Share conference and its claims to be the “new economy” that will change everything — including some revealing interviews that I did at last night’s reception at the Airbnb headquarters — in next week’s Bay Guardian.

Guardian Small Business Awards 2014

Michael Redmond

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May 13, 2014

1

San Francisco’s small businesses are being threatened by the forces of gentrification and displacement like never before — at the same moment that they are more important than ever. This is the troubling paradox at the center of this year’s San Francisco Small Business Week.

Economists warn the city needs to diversify an economy that has become too concentrated in the vulnerable technology, finance, and land development sectors. Small businesses epitomize diversity. They are the backbone of the local economy, circulating far more of their revenues here than any corporate chain, while distinguishing San Francisco’s commercial corridors from their sterile counterparts in other cities.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and fiscally conservative politicians love to trot out the plight of small businesses to elicit public sympathy or attack progressive regulations benefitting workers or the environment, but it is the self-interested pursuits of wealthy corporations and investors that really poison the pond in which small businesses flourish.

Just consider the headlines in San Francisco’s daily newspapers. On May 8, the San Francisco Chronicle had a story about Flax, an awesome art supply store that’s been in business for 37 years, being displaced from its iconic store at Market and Valencia streets by a 160-unit condo project. The story described the waves of new condo projects hitting the Upper Market area that are displacing small business such as Home Restaurant and the Arthur J. Sullivan Funeral Home. “They are just rolling over us — it’s unstoppable,” Judy Hoyem of the Castro/Eureka Valley Neighborhood Association told the Chronicle.

The cover story of the next day’s San Francisco Examiner was about the eviction of Marcus Books, the country’s oldest African American bookstore. Inside that issue, Mayor Ed Lee wrote a guest editorial ironically entitled “Small businesses shaping our city’s future.”

It was a happy-talk celebration of the same small business community that his economic development policies — with big Wall Street corporations worth billions of dollars driving up rents on small business and getting local tax breaks in the process — have been threatening.

“San Francisco’s commitment to small businesses and local manufacturing continues to gain momentum,” Lee wrote. Yes it does, like a tidal wave of corporate cash sweeping through the city. So during this year’s annual Guardian Small Business Awards, we’re saluting the survivors, those small business people who are riding out the storm through their tenacity, creativity, and refusal to let the forces of gentrification drive them out.

The current business cycle will pass, along with its upward pressure on commercial rents and unfair competition from chain stores. But until it does, please continue to support these and other homegrown small businesses, the soul of San Francisco commerce.

Guardian Small Business Awards 2014

Tale of two tech titans

Sasha Cuttler

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April 17, 2014

19

San Francisco Magazine just published an intriguing interview with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and Benioff’s attitude and approach to San Francisco seems to be a striking contrast to the city’s other top tech titan, venture capitalist Ron Conway, who we profiled over a year ago.

While Conway burst onto the political scene a few years ago with a pledge to destroy the progressive movement in San Francisco, sponsoring Mayor Ed Lee and his allies as the main vehicle for those ambitions, Benioff is a San Francisco native who seems to understand this city’s values and accept the responsibilities that come with great wealth and power.

“I say, if you want to be in this city and take advantage of all this great infrastructure—our mass transit, our schools, our hospitals, the safety and stability that we have—then also give back. These are the table stakes for doing business here. This is not a new idea,” Benioff told San Francisco Magazine Editor Jon Steinberg in this extended Q&A.

The news peg for the article was a new Benioff initiative in which he’s asking local tech companies to contribute $500,000 each to Tipping Point Community, which funds local community service programs, an effort that Benioff calls SF Gives.

“The first person I called was Ron Conway. I said, ‘Ron, what we’re going to do is get companies to give $500,000, and I’m going to raise $10 million, and we are going to give back to S.F. en masse with money from organizations, not just individuals.’ He said, ‘This is never gonna work. I run sf.citi [a political advocacy group for 500 local tech companies], and people won’t even pay their dues. You’re not going to raise millions of dollars,’” Benioff told the magazine.

The difference is that Conway is pushing an aggressive political agenda, seeking business tax breaks and special treatment from City Hall for the companies he’s invested in while being tone-deaf to the political backlash it’s causing in San Francisco, one that Benioff acknowledges and says the industry must address.

“Because this is not about any political agenda. It’s not. It’s about pure-play philanthropy: giving back to nonprofits and NGOs that can make a difference in S.F,” was how Benioff answered the question about why companies are more willing to donate to SF Gives than sf.citi.

As we documented in our profile of Conway, this guy is a old school conservative with a history of right-wing politics who conveniently dropped his Republican Party affiliation when he arrived in San Francisco pushing an aggressive pro-business agenda.

As we wrote in our article about an event seven years ago when Conway burst onto the scene and declared his intentions: “’This guy stood up and said that we have to take the city back from the progressives,’ [former Mayor Art] Agnos told us. ‘I barely knew who he was. I’ve been in San Francisco since 1966, and here he comes telling us what to do.;”

To understand this tale of two tech titans, contrast that approach with this comment from Benioff: “It’s a city of innovation, of flamboyance, of transformation, and during boom times, S.F. always changes and evolves. But tied into that has always been generosity: the Haas family, the Hellmans, the Fishers, the Shorensteins. During every one of these boom times, the people who benefited the most were also giving back the most. But this time around, we haven’t been able to talk about a broad philanthropic effort to couple with the growth. So this seemed like a great opportunity.”

Covered San Francisco unveiled

Michael Redmond

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April 8, 2014

2

At the tail end of a long Board of Supervisors meeting last week, Sup. David Campos introduced legislation to create Covered San Francisco, a city healthcare option designed to remedy a coverage gap that will be created under the Affordable Care Act.

Lately, we’ve gotten reports of San Franciscans hoping to enroll in Covered California — the state-run health insurance marketplace created under the ACA — leaving meetings with enrollment counselors in tears of frustration. Even though these would-be enrollees are technically eligible for Covered California — which makes them ineligible to stay in Healthy San Francisco — the insurance cost is nevertheless too high to be a realistic option.

“In high cost-of-living cities like San Francisco, many will simply not be able to afford it,” Campos said when he introduced the legislation. “The most authoritative study says 40 percent of San Franciscans who are eligible for Covered California still will not be able to afford it.”

Co-sponsored by Sups. John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Jane Kim, the legislation seeks to address the problem by creating a new option for employees to receive subsidies to purchase health insurance under Covered California through the Department of Public Health. The funding would be derived from an employer spending requirement already in place under the city’s Health Care Security Ordinance, the law that created Healthy San Francisco.

The proposal also seeks to close a loophole that Campos said incentivizes employers to set up health reimbursement accounts for employees that cannot be used to purchase Covered California insurance plans. To discourage the use of these accounts, the proposal would make spending irrevocable, meaning employers would be unable to claw back funding they’ve contributed. (Rebecca Bowe)

PG&E INDICTMENT DOESN’T GO FAR ENOUGH

A federal grand jury in San Francisco issued a criminal indictment against Pacific Gas & Electric for negligence in the 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people and destroyed an entire neighborhood. But that falls far short of what this rapacious company and its conniving executives — none of whom face personal criminal charges — should be facing.

The indictment omits key details of what happened leading up this tragic and entirely preventable explosion, buying into the fiction that there is a meaningful difference between PG&E Co., the regulated utility, and PG&E Corp., the wealthy and powerful Wall Street corporation. This is a stark example of how corporations are given all the rights of individuals, but accept few of the responsibilities, with the complicity of the political and economic systems.

The 12-count indictment focused on violation of the Pipeline Safety Act, which requires companies to maintain their potentially dangerous pipelines, including keeping detailed records and doing safety inspections that would detect flaws like the faulty weld that caused the San Bruno explosion on Sept. 9, 2010 — work the company negligently failed to perform.

But PG&E’s wanton disregard for public safety, combined with the greed and shameless self-interest of then-CEO Peter Darbee and other executives, goes far deeper than that. A report by the California Public Utilities Commission released in January 2012 found that $100 million in ratepayer funds that had been earmarked for pipeline maintenance and replacement, including this section in San Bruno, was instead diverted to executive bonuses and shareholder profits.

“PG&E chose to use the surplus revenues for general corporate purposes,” the audit said, noting that the company was flush with cash at the time and there was no good reason to neglect this required maintenance. (Steven T. Jones)

911 DISPATCHERS STRESSED

The controversial tax breaks given to tech companies in San Francisco in 2011 came under fire again last week, as emergency dispatchers protested crippling budget shortages on April 2 in front of the Department of Emergency Management.

“When you call 911, there should be enough people working to pick up the phone,” said Ron Davis, an emergency dispatcher in San Francisco for 13 years. “It’s upsetting when you or someone you love is in a life-threatening emergency and you’re put on hold for 30 seconds, 45 seconds, or even a minute and longer.”

The department receives, on average, nearly 3,000 phone calls per day, and the workers who spoke at the rally described long hours and inadequate coverage for the volume of calls that they receive. California law mandates that 90 percent of 911 calls be answered in 10 seconds or less, but in San Francisco that number often drops to 60 percent or lower. Davis said that on particularly busy nights, such as New Year’s Eve, there can be up to 20 calls in the queue waiting for an available dispatcher.

The rally was organized by SEIU Local 1021 and was part of the union’s contract negotiations with the city. Larry Bradshaw, vice president for the San Francisco region of the union, said workers were willing to make sacrifices during the recession but now, “we just want to recoup our losses and make up for lost ground.” (Brian McMahon)

WILL AIRBNB PAY UP?

Airbnb has agreed to start collecting and paying the transient occupancy tax in San Francisco sometime this summer — finally acknowledging that’s the only workable way to meet the tax obligation it shares with its hosts. But that leaves open the question of whether this $10 billion corporation intends to pay the tax debt it has accumulated for years while trying to duck its responsibility to the city.

That’s at least several million dollars that the city could really use right now. As we’ve previously reported, Airbnb commissioned and publicized a study in late 2012 claiming its San Francisco hosts collected $12.7 million from Airbnb guest in fiscal year 2011-12, meaning they should have collected and remitted to the city $1.9 million.

In early 2012, the San Francisco Tax Collector’s Office held public hearings to clarify whether the TOT applies to the short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb and similar companies, ruling in April 2012 that the TOT does apply to those stays and that it is a “joint and several liability” shared by the hosts and Airbnb, which conducts the transaction and takes a cut.

As we also reported, despite heavily lobbying during the hearing and being acutely aware of the outcome and its resulting tax obligation, Airbnb simply refused to comply and tack the 15 percent surcharge onto its transactions, as similar companies such as Roomorama were doing.

So if Airbnb was really being the good corporate citizen that it’s now claiming to be, it would not only start charging the 15 percent fee and sharing that money with the city, it would also cut San Francisco a check for around $4 million, or whatever the tax would be on what this growing business has collected from its guests since April 2012. (Steven T. Jones)

BURSTING THE MONTEREY SHALE BUBBLE

“We’ve been told that there’s a great oil boom on the immediate horizon,” billionaire investor Tom Steyer noted at the start of a March 27 talk in Sacramento.

But Steyer (who has pledged to spend $100 million on ad campaigns for the 2014 election to promote action on climate change) wasn’t there to trumpet the oil industry’s high expectations. Instead, he introduced panelists who dismissed the buzz on drilling the 1,750-square-mile Monterey Shale as pie-in-the-sky hype.

Dr. David Hughes, a geoscientist with the Post Carbon Institute, and researcher Robert Collier had been invited to speak by Next Generation, a policy group focused on climate change that was co-founded by Steyer.

Both experts questioned the findings of a University of Southern California study that wound up being cited time and again as the basis for the oil industry’s arguments, in the context of a statewide debate on fracking.

Partially funded by the Western States Petroleum Association, the USC report outlined a rosy economic outlook stemming from oil extraction in the Monterey Shale, estimating that it would create 2.8 million jobs and $24 billion in tax revenues, findings that were “echoed by politicians of both parties,” Collier noted.

Yet prominent economists could find no basis for certain claims. “They said: ‘We cannot see any justification for these incredible numbers,” Collier reported. “They seem too big to be believable.” The Post Carbon Institute and Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy published their own report challenging the findings, titled Drilling California: A Reality Check on the Monterey Shale. (Rebecca Bowe)

A tale of two Google buses

Michael Redmond

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April 8, 2014

5

joe@sfbg.com

At the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on April 1, an environmental appeal hearing on the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s commuter shuttle pilot program elevated the so-called Google Bus into a powerful symbol with two narratives — of gentrification and displacement, or the misguided belief that tech workers are to blame for those trends in San Francisco.

Those weren’t the only divergent tales to emerge at the seven-hour long, emotion-packed hearing. While the buses were praised as good alternatives to San Franciscans driving to work in the Silicon Valley, there was also a surprising level of consensus that they’re causing conflicts at local bus stops and need to be better regulated by the SFMTA.

The tale of the Google Bus as told by the tech industry is this: the buses ferry the workers of a bourgeoning economic sector in a city that now leads the world in innovation. At its most basic, the Google Bus reduces wasteful driving, an environmental boon to the region.

But activists decrying displacement have beaten down a Google Bus effigy in the form of a piñata, and the morning before the hearing, protesters in clown costumes blockaded another Google Bus. Their tale of the Google Bus is about monstrous private transports that hurt low-income San Franciscans by clogging up Muni stops and driving up the price of nearby housing.

Protesters dressed as clowns blockade a Google bus the day the CEQA hearing was held.

In this increasingly economically polarized city, A Tale of Two Cities is oft-mentioned in progressive political circles. But now A Tale of Two Google Buses has become the story of the moment, a story whose moral depends on one’s perspective.

SILENT ON SHUTTLES

Carli Paine, who manages this and other pilot programs at the SFMTA, listened to over an hour’s worth of public complaints about the shuttles at the hearing before enduring a tough grilling by Sup. David Campos and others.

“I don’t have a problem with tech workers, but the arrogance of the tech companies,” a woman who identified herself as a nurse said at public comment. “I’m on the Muni bus that’s packed to the gills that’s held up behind a Google bus.”

Paine has heard many variations on that since the Google buses arrived six years ago. The shuttles blocked Muni buses, held up traffic, and blocked bike lanes, but Paine said the SFMTA’s early efforts to cite buses for illegally using Muni stops weren’t working.

“That’s not a comprehensive policy,” she told us in a phone interview after the hearing. “It’s reactionary. We recognized we needed a policy to address commuter shuttles.”

In 2010, the SFMTA applied for grants to measure shuttle impacts, receiving funding in 2011. The first step was to go to the tech companies — Google, Facebook, Yahoo and their ilk — to get the data. The questions were basic, asking for counts: the number of shuttles, stops, riders, and trips. The tech industry flatly ignored SFMTA’s inquiries.

“Some data was private, they felt,” Paine said. “One of the reasons we’re doing the pilot is there’s information we haven’t been successful in getting voluntarily.”

Tech companies were incommunicado at the hearing as well. Hundreds of people, from technology workers to activists to everyday San Franciscans showed up, but representatives of the technology sector did not announce themselves.

“I think it’s worth pointing out how absent the tech companies are,” Sup. Malia Cohen said at the hearing, contrasting that with three years ago, when Twitter and other companies sought city tax breaks. “The tech executives were swarming City Hall.”

That night, the public finally got a peek at the fruits of Paine’s research. The Budget and Legislative Analyst Office released a report aggregating data from many sources, including the SFMTA. The findings tell the story of the damage caused by commuter shuttles on city streets.

BIG BAD BUSES

The BLA’s report makes one thing clear: while the commuter shuttle plot program applies to all privately owned shuttles, the main public debate is directed at regional shuttle buses ferrying workers to Silicon Valley.

The BLA estimates there are 131 regional shuttles with 8,030 boardings (to San Francisco and back) per a day. Of the shuttles making 273 trips to and from San Francisco daily, the lion’s share (57) are owned by Google. Its workers represent just over half of daily boardings.

The invading buses are also enormous. Taller than a Muni bus, the BLA reports that the Google buses weigh 31 tons when fully loaded, nearly twice the weight of a big rig truck. That’s also a far cry from the seven-ton intra-city shuttles used by the likes of the Academy of Art University and Kaiser Permanente. That size comes with a cost.

“The Department of Public Works staff concur that heavier vehicles contribute to faster roadway deterioration,” the BLA wrote. The damage a shuttle makes on the pavement with a single trip accounts for $1.08 out of the $1 million it will ultimately cost the city to reconstruct a mile of pavement. A typical personal car will cause $0.00023 of damage to pavement over its entire lifetime. So one shuttle trip is “equivalent to 4,700 passenger vehicles driving over the same lane.”

But the city isn’t allowed to charge for that damage. The SFMTA is precluded from charging a fee for road damage pursuant to California Vehicle Code, the BLA report wrote, which restricts local governments for taxing use of city streets.

The SFMTA could opt to collect money by fining shuttle scofflaws. The BLA reports that, “half of the known stops” for all private shuttles take place in Muni bus zones, which is against city law — stops can only be made in white zones, and Muni stops are striped red.

“These are pirate shuttles,” said Richard Drury, the attorney who appealed the program on behalf of the SEIU Local 1021 and other appellants. “They are illegal.”

But at the hearing, the BLA reported that of 13,085 citations made to vehicles in red zones since January 2014, only 45 were issued to commuter shuttles. Campos fired verbal salvos at Paine and SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin, demanding to know why red zone parking laws weren’t enforced.

“Was there a policy not to cite the buses?” Campos asked, pointedly, to which Reiskin replied, “There was not.”

SFMTA dir. Ed Reiskin answers the $1 million question: Out of 13,000 traffic citations, why only 45 to #googlebus? pic.twitter.com/Od8IaibL4A

— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) April 2, 2014

But in an email obtained by Tim Redmond of 48Hills.org (and formerly of the Bay Guardian), a vice president at Bauer (a shuttle provider contracting with tech companies) wrote to Paine in January asking her to dismiss its shuttle citations. “As I assume you know, we have had a ‘handshake’ agreement with SFMTA for many years that allowed us to use stops under a ‘Muni First’ condition.”

Paine refused to comment on whether the shuttles had permission to use the stops. But the practice of using them has definitely had an impact on the cost of nearby housing as tech employees pay top dollar for the convenience.

HOUSING BOOMLETS

From 2010 to 2012, San Francisco’s population increased by more than 20,000, the BLA reported, and consequently, “The demand for housing has increased.”

“We’re bussing wealthy, predominantly white adults into low-income neighborhoods, where they in turn displace low-income people,” Drury said at the hearing. “This is the reverse of affirmative action.”

The BLA cites multiple studies demonstrating a spike in rental prices immediately around the shuttle stops. On Lombard in the Marina, rents soared by 30 percent near the shuttle stops, as opposed to 17 percent in the rest of the neighborhood. Near the Dolores Street shuttle stops, rents soared by 43 percent, as opposed to 23 percent just a few blocks away.

Even a cursory search of Craigslist shows higher rents at listings that advertise “easy access for commuters and 10 minutes to Apple/Google/Yahoo shuttle bus stops!”

I drew the #PirateShuttle because somebody had to. #Googlebus #CEQA pic.twitter.com/WrrbdYzODR

— Julia Wong (@juliacarriew) April 2, 2014

The BLA admits this anecdotal evidence doesn’t “show causation.” But at the hearing, a tech worker named Martin MacKerel pleaded with his colleagues to recognize the shuttles may hurt San Franciscans, despite the industry’s best intentions.

“I’m here to talk to my fellow tech workers here,” he said. “We’ve got to consider that we’re displacing people into Antioch, San Pablo, the East Bay. If they have to drive in to San Francisco, we need to know that.”

Tech worker Andrew Textor delivered a different message at the hearing, decrying the villainization of tech workers.

“I’ve lived in the city for 10 years, I’ve been riding the shuttles four and a half,” he said. “Please let this program go forward. I’m not a new arrival, I don’t like being called ‘techie.’ I’m still a San Franciscan.”

In the Tale of Two Google Buses, the shuttles are symbols of populist anger and economic frustration, but also real vehicles that harm San Francisco in ways that can be measured and regulated, which officials claim the 18-month pilot program will do. The supervisors denied the environmental appeal on an 8-2 vote.

“We don’t want to stop the buses,” Cynthia Crews of the League of Pissed Off Voters said at the hearing. “We just want the companies to pay their fair share.”

Tech worker Andrew Textor “I’m not a new arrival, I don’t like being called ‘techie.’ I’m still a San Franciscan.” pic.twitter.com/sq3kG8P0JJ

— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) April 2, 2014

This is 911, please hold

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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April 3, 2014

119

The contentious tax breaks given to tech companies in San Francisco are under fire once again, as emergency dispatchers protested crippling budget shortages yesterday (Wed/2) in front of the Department of Emergency Management.

With sweeping budget cuts across all public sectors over the past few years, everyone is clamoring for more money wherever they can get it. But these protesters, organized by SEIU Local 1021, made some pretty compelling arguments for being prioritized.

“When you call 911, there should be enough people working to pick up the phone,” said Ron Davis, who has been an emergency dispatcher in San Francisco for 13 years. “It’s upsetting when you or someone you love is in a life-threatening emergency and you’re put on hold for 30 seconds, 45 seconds, or even a minute and longer.”

The department receives, on average, nearly 3,000 phone calls per day, and the workers who spoke at the rally described long hours and inadequate coverage for the volume of calls that they receive. California law mandates that 90 percent of 911 calls be answered in ten seconds or less, but in San Francisco that number often drops to 60 percent or lower. Davis said that on particularly busy nights, such as New Year’s Eve, there can be up to 20 calls in the queue waiting for an available dispatcher.

“I don’t even go out on holidays,” Davis said. “I’m too afraid that if something happens to me or someone in my family, we won’t get through to 911.”

Protesters directed much of their frustration at the tech companies, especially those which received massive tax breaks as an incentive to remain in San Francisco. The estimated tax break for Twitter alone, estimated to be $56 million, is greater than the entire annual budget for the DEM.

The rally is a part of “Worker Wednesdays,” a series of events created by SEIU Local 1021 in response to Mayor Ed Lee’s Tech Tuesday meetings with local technology leaders. The goal is to draw Lee out to meet with and prioritize city workers. Since the mayor did not attend the rally himself, the protesters chanted and yelled at a seven-foot cardboard cutout of a smiling Lee.

The emergency dispatchers are just a part of the union’s contract negotiations with the city, as SEIU Local 1021 represents over 13,000 employees in San Francisco. Larry Bradshaw, vice president for the San Francisco region of the union, said that so far they had made no progress in their bargaining with city leaders. The contract is set to be written by May 2. After that, union members will decide whether or not they accept the terms.

Workers were willing to make sacrifices during the recession, Bradshaw said. But now that the economy has turned around, “we just want to recoup our losses and make up for lost ground.”

A concurrent meeting of the Budget and Finance Committee at City Hall brought up many of the same points. A report from the City Controller, Ben Rosenfield, confirmed that the economic growth in San Francisco has been among the fastest in the nation and that he expects the progress to continue.

Sup. London Breed specifically asked how emergency services play into this recent boom, and a representative from the Mayor’s Budget Office said that the DEM is currently working with the mayor’s office on a revised budget, which should be released later this month or early May.

SF’s culture of corruption

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April 2, 2014

12

EDITORIAL The extent of the charges in the criminal complaint against Sen. Leland Yee, political consultant Keith Jackson, and others are shocking and sensational: international arms trafficking, drug dealing, money laundering, cavorting with organized crime figures, murder for hire. But the basic allegation that Yee and Jackson practiced a corrupt, transactional kind of politics wasn’t surprising to anyone who knew how they operated.

What’s worse, they were simply a more extreme — and now, thanks to FBI wiretaps and undercover agents, a better documented — example of the political corruption that is endemic to San Francisco and some other high-stakes American cities. The city of St. Francis gets sold out to the highest bidders everyday, by politicians who value wealthy constituents over the vast majority of us who are just trying to get by — and over the interests of city finances and governance.

Part of the problem is inherent in our money-driven political system, in which politicians are constantly hustling for cash from people who want things from them. Politicians deny they take actions with political contributions in mind, but well-heeled capital and labor interests don’t spend millions of dollars on contributions out of the goodness of their hearts. These are business transactions.

We wholeheartedly support the call Senate President Darrell Steinberg made for fundamental political reform during the March 28 vote to suspend Yee and two of his allegedly corrupt colleagues. These cases aren’t aberrations, they are indicative of how power get wielded when it’s based on wealth. That’s the reality that has gotten even uglier since the Citizens United decision equated money with political speech and upped the ante for would-be public servants.

But much of the problem is particular to San Francisco, where cozy relationships between politicians and corporate interests are often feted in plain view. Former Mayor Willie Brown — a lawyer and unregistered lobbyist who won’t reveal his huge corporate client list despite having an influential weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle — helped install his longtime City Hall functionary Ed Lee into Room 200 to guard against anyone asking too much of the rich and powerful. Yee and Lee represented rival Chinatown economic factions, both wanting to use the power of the Mayor’s Office for their interests.

In his March 22 column, Brown once again repeated a joke he’s used before, that the “e” in email stands for “evidence,” which is really only funny in a sick political culture that celebrates slick rule-breakers. And it was from Brown that Lee learned it was acceptable to brazenly give tax breaks and regulatory passes to the tech companies that his top fundraiser, venture capitalist Ron Conway, are invested in.

Megadeveloper Lennar Urban used its wealth and political connections to take control of San Francisco’s biggest tracts of undeveloped and underdeveloped land, including Hunters and Candlestick points and Treasure Island, paying off community groups and hiring Jackson and other political henchmen to get the job done.

In fact, the FBI complaint says Jackson was working on behalf of that project when he approached accused Chinatown gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow for support, leading to their alleged involvement in a string of wild criminal conspiracies. Meanwhile, Chow was getting public commendations from San Francisco-based politicians including Lee, Yee, Gavin Newsom, Dianne Feinstein, Fiona Ma, and even Tom Ammiano. Chow courted political legitimacy the same way politicians seek cash, and mainstream media outlets were happy to play along.

Throughout his political career, Yee has carried water for Pacific Gas & Electric, perhaps the most corrupting contributor to political campaigns in the city’s history. PG&E’s influence at City Hall had thankfully waned in recent years as a result of overreach and deadly criminal negligence, until Lee and his appointees last year killed CleanPowerSF (see “Challenge Mayor Lee and his lies,” 9/17/13) on a pretext so thin it could only be gift to PG&E.

In many ways, San Francisco hasn’t changed. It’s still the old Barbary Coast, ruled by capitalist thugs and corrupt politicians, only with glossy modern spin created by armies of well-paid political consultants. But we all deserve better.

Yee and Jackson should go to prison if there’s even a slice of truth to the allegations against them. And maybe they’ll cut deals and take other political figures down with them, giving us more of a peek behind the curtain of political power. But it’s up to all of us to break the close ties between economic and political power and begin to restore the democratic power of everyday people.

SF supervisors reject challenge of Google bus pilot program

Erica Hanna

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April 1, 2014

75

SF supervisors reject challenge of Google bus pilot program

An appeal of the Google bus pilot program’s exemption from environmental review was denied at a contentious Board of Supervisors hearing Tuesday night that went on for six and a half hours straight. The vote was 8-2 to move forward with the 18-month pilot program without environmental review, with only Supervisors David Campos and John Avalos voting nay.

“You can’t say that you support the shuttles but don’t support their ability to pick people up and drop people off,” Sup. Scott Wiener said at the end of the hearing. “I disagree with the appellants.”

Sup. David Campos, who voted in favor of the environmental review, criticized the lack of public input in shaping the flawed program and said the city would likely lose in a future lawsuit on the issue: “If this is denied, there may be a legal victory for the appellants in court.”

The decision followed a heated, hours long public hearing on the environmental impacts of the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency’s commuter shuttle pilot program at City Hall, called for after an environmental appeal was filed in February by the SEIU Local 1021, The League of Pissed Off Voters, and the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. The pilot program will measure the impact of regional commuter shuttles at 200 bus stops around San Francisco, paid for by charging the shuttles $1 per stop, which the SFMTA said is the cost of administering the program.

The appellants had one goal: to call on the city of San Francisco to study how regional commuter shuttles affect San Franciscans.

“These are pirate shuttles, they are illegal,” Richard Drury, the attorney for the appellants filing the CEQA review, told the supervisors. “We’re bussing wealthy, predominantly white adults into low-income neighborhoods, where they in turn displace low-income people. This is the reverse of affirmative action.”

Importantly, a distinction was made between intra-city shuttles, like those for hospitals and colleges, and intra-city or regional shuttles, which are largely run by tech companies located outside San Francisco.

Those present were there to discuss the impact of the regional shuttles, whose larger size (measured in tons) more greatly impacts road wear and tear, uses diesel fuel in lieu of gasoline, and, the appellants say, displaces communities wherever they regularly stop.

I drew the #PirateShuttle because somebody had to. #Googlebus #CEQA pic.twitter.com/WrrbdYzODR

— Julia Wong (@juliacarriew) April 2, 2014

Pictured above, a journalist tweets an artist rendering of the pirate shuttles.

An Anti-Eviction Mapping Project study found 69 percent of no-fault evictions occurred within a four-block radius of the shuttle stops. CEQA recognizes displacement of people as an environmental impact, and the debate that night centered around whether or not to study if shuttle stops caused displacement of middle to low income residents. Some of the supervisors defended the tech companies to the nines, especially Wiener.

Wiener most ardently argued against the CEQA review, and he stuck it to the appellants’ attorney, Drury.

“It’s not a CEQA issue,” Wiener said. “There’s a certain set of assumptions that technology workers are not real San Franciscans. That they’re part of some invading force that is not part of the city, and aren’t one of us. Isn’t it part of your contention that people on these shuttles aren’t San Franciscans? That’s how [the environmental appeal] reads.”

Drury said it’s not about hating tech workers, or some sort of cultural rift. What this is about, he said, is tech companies paying for the impact they have on communities.

“Let me clarify: CEQA doesn’t mean stop the project,” Drury told Wiener. “It means study the project before you take action, and when you take action impose mitigation measures with eyes wide open.”

Sup. Jane Kim said the SFMTA could have used the pilot program as an opportunity to ask for smaller shuttles, use of white zones (as opposed to Muni stops), or any number of changes to the shuttle program. “There’s a lot more,” she said, “that the pilot could have done.”

Video of a Google protest the morning before the hearing shot by Guardian News Editor Rebecca Bowe.

Alysabeth Alexander of the SEIU 1021 said that overlooking the displacement the buses are causing in San Francisco is downright insulting.

“A handful of wealthy companies should not be able to come into our city and make a private infrastructure and ask San Franciscans to step aside,” she told the room.

Activists, city workers, and San Franciscans of all stripes aired their concern for skyrocketing rents in the areas immediately around regional commuter shuttle stops — the stops of the tech buses.

The supervisors also used the hearing as an opportunity to stick it to the concept that the buses would only cost $1 per stop.

Ultimately some 50 or so supporters of the environmental review came out, who all had gripes about the Google buses, as they’ve come to be called. Later in the night past about 8pm the tech workers finally got to have their say.

There weren’t many of them, but those who spoke were impassioned.

Andrew Textor, a tech worker who did not want his employer named, said “I’ve lived in the city for 10 years, I’ve been riding the shuttles four and a half. Please let this program go forward. I’m not a new arrival, i don’t like being called ‘techie.’ I’m still a San Franciscan.”

But Textor was one of only a few tech workers in attendance by the time the counter argument to the review was heard (hours later), most remaining were paid public relations persons. Sup. Malia Cohen called out the tech companies for not showing up to the meeting and participating in their community.

“I think it’s worth pointing out how absent the tech companies are,” she said, differentiating this hearing from when Twitter was seeking tax breaks three years ago. “The tech executives were swarming City Hall when they wanted something.”

SFMTA dir. Ed Reiskin answers the $1 million question: Out of 13,000 traffic citations, why only 45 to #googlebus? pic.twitter.com/Od8IaibL4A

— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) April 2, 2014

When asked why the SFMTA did not ticket commuter shuttles when in red zones in violation of state law, SFMTA Diretor Ed Reiskin said “I don’t know.”

That’s a point that tech worker Martin MacKerel touched on while speaking during public comment earlier.

“I’m here to talk to my fellow tech workers here, I’m asking you to reconsider this,” he said, speaking of opposing an environmental review. “We’ve got to consider that we’re displacing people into Antioch, San Pablo, the East Bay. If they have to drive in to San Francisco, we need to know that. We need a real study.”

But that’s not the way the night went. The supervisors voted against the environmental review. Campos’ remarks before the vote sounded like a eulogy.

“This is about a small group of people going to the city behind closed doors,” Campos said. “As long as we keep doing that, we’re only going to exacerbate the tension that’s out there. Working with the tech industry does not mean you roll over and give them everything they ask for.”

The 18-month pilot program will move forward and launch July 1, barring intervention by the courts.

Tweets from the night, some from the Bay Guardian, some not:

No matter what dog and pony show is going on at SF City Hall tonight. The money Google is putting up for #googlebus is a CHEAP price to pay.

— Jeffrey Taylor (@jeffreytaylor) April 2, 2014

Sarcastic #googlebus commenter is the best commenter. THANKS for “displacing Latinos, no public input, breaking laws” pic.twitter.com/SCEWdFsgUb

— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) April 2, 2014

Tech worker Andrew Textor “I’m not a new arrival, I don’t like being called ‘techie.’ I’m still a San Franciscan.” pic.twitter.com/sq3kG8P0JJ

— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) April 2, 2014

Damn. Malia Cohen suggests MTA skirt the state law limiting permit fees to cost recovery instead of state law on red zones #googlebus

— Julia Wong (@juliacarriew) April 2, 2014

#muni @EdReiskin would love to charge #googlebus more than $1 but prevented by state law Others say pilot breaks law pic.twitter.com/GcgUGYaxEn

— Steve Rhodes (@tigerbeat) April 2, 2014

The #GoogleBus hearing is so long, @TechCrunch said “fuck it!” and published a story midmeeting, before anyone voted: http://t.co/EWI9bXdCTN

— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) April 2, 2014

Woman in wheelchair talks about not being able to get on #muni because of #googlebus http://t.co/rTAzOd4W1x

— Steve Rhodes (@tigerbeat) April 2, 2014

Cynthia Crews of the League of Pissed off Voters reminds everyone this would study shuttle impacts, not stop shuttles pic.twitter.com/GahlTnsfRJ

— Joe Fitz Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter) April 2, 2014

Just a reminder that Scott Weiner doesn’t like #CEQA “abuse” http://t.co/rXU7D8eCi2 #googlebus

— Julia Wong (@juliacarriew) April 1, 2014

MTA sheet on #googlebus pilot program (https://t.co/t3riiub3l2) appears to be citing data from 130-rider Cal study (http://t.co/NMprdv63sL)

— Ellen Huet (@ellenhuet) April 1, 2014

Literature from this a.m.’s Google bus block at 24th & Valencia in SF #Gmuni #freeMUNIforall pic.twitter.com/MDH33Gi0mN

— Cindy Milstein (@CindyMilstein) April 1, 2014

Boom for whom?

Michael Redmond

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March 25, 2014

77

steve@sfbg.com, joe@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s economy is booming these days, fueled by the latest dot-com bubble and a hot real estate market, sending more than expected tax revenue into city coffers. So why doesn’t San Francisco have a big budget surplus to help address the gentrification and displacement triggered by the boom?

The lack of satisfying answers to that question is adding to the populist political outrage that is now animating the city, from the regular street protests against evictions and rising income inequality to the corridors of City Hall, where labors leaders and progressive activists are calling for a repeal of the corporate welfare policies adopted by the Mayor’s Office.

The city’s charter-mandated, biannual Five Year Financial Plan Update, released March 6, shows projected annual city budget deficits growing steadily from $66.7 million in 2014-15 to $339.4 million in 2017-18, demonstrating that even the hottest of economies can’t overcome the city’s structural budget deficit.

Revenues are indeed growing, but not nearly as fast as the cost of running the city, a mismatch that has only been exacerbated by tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks given to Twitter and other growing companies along mid-Market Street and those that offer stock options.

Changing the business tax from a payroll to gross receipts tax also failed to address that structural deficit, and it may have even exacerbated it, particularly for the big tech firms that came out ahead in the switch. Bottom line: The city isn’t bringing in enough revenue to balance its bottom line, even in good years.

Last week, members and allies of the largest city employee union, Service Employees International Union Local 1021, stormed through City Hall demanding its share of the city’s wealth, promising to return this week when a delayed Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee hearing will finally be held.

This year’s city budget process could emerge as a key narrative in the tale of two San Franciscos that is being told here and by watchers around the world.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Nearly 300 SEIU members and their supporters protested the business tax breaks on the steps of City Hall on March 19, in advance of the scheduled budget hearing inside. Their chants took a unique twist on a familiar theme.

“Whose city?!” Sup. David Campos asked the crowd. “Everyone’s city!” they shouted back.

And that’s the rub. It’s not about excluding tech and corporations from San Francisco, the protesters said, it’s about fairness.

“There’s a great deal of wealth in San Francisco, and it’s wealth that leaves behind many of us,” Campos told the crowd of purple-clad protesters. “It’s time to put working people in front of the line.”

The giveaways to corporations and the tech industry are at a breaking point, the protesters said. Twitter alone is getting an estimated $56 million tax break, with millions more going to the companies in its orbit. The Google buses are only paying a dollar per stop, bringing in budgetary decimal dust from a corporation worth $390 billion. City taxpayers paid $5.5 million to subsidize Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s America’s Cup last summer.

The numbers are adding up, and the union workers were asking how the city can give away hundreds of millions of dollars to the wealthy tech industry while the city struggles to provide basic services while bridging budget deficits. Mayor Ed Lee and his allies emphasize his economic policies stimulate the economy and create jobs, but the workers say that’s only increasing the cost of living here.

“I have a family of five and I couldn’t afford to stay here,” said Brandon Dawkins, an employee in the Department of Public Health. “I was born and raised in San Francisco and we had to move to Oakland. And now that’s expensive and we’re going to have to go to Sacramento and I’ll commute here for work.”

Tech-driven job creation doesn’t do anything for Dawkins. “I don’t know why they’re helping Twitter when they sure aren’t helping us,” he said.

And it’s not just about the money. SEIU Political Action Chair Alysabeth Alexander said tech titans turn a blind eye to workers when they defend their corporate shuttle program on environmental grounds.

“The companies using the shuttles often say that the shuttles move hundreds of cars off the road,” she told the crowd. But she cited studies showing housing prices increase around the shuttle stops, forcing displaced workers to commute into San Francisco so tech workers can have convenient, private transportation options.

“Safe and sustainable transportation should be available for everybody,” she shouted as the crowd erupted into a wave of cheers.

Companies like Google are beginning to help the city with its budget problems, recently donating $6.8 million to support the Free Muni For Youth program. San Francisco native Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, is also calling on his tech brethren to do more. But the protesters were dubious about such calls to charity.

“Donations, first of all, are really skewed to whatever the corporate interests feel like funding. There’s not a fair and equal public policy [for where to spend], it’s all corporate driven. And ultimately the donations don’t make up anywhere near the amount they’ve gotten in terms of tax breaks,” said Mike Casey, president of UNITE HERE Local 2.

He’s describing the great donation swindle. The tech companies deprive the city of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax giveaways, then sprinkle a few million here and there to look like heroes, likely writing it off from their federal taxes anyway.

“They get a lot of good publicity, but they’re not paying their fair share,” Casey said.

SEIU pledges to continue pushing this narrative, announcing another big event at City Hall on Tax Day, April 15.

“If Twitter really feels like they’re part of the community, they should remit those tax breaks and give back that revenue,” SEIU spokesperson Carlos Rivera told the Guardian, sending a clear message that corporate welfare won’t be tolerated anymore. “We’re telling them those days are over.”

STRUCTURAL DEFICIT

City officials say the budget picture is better because of the economic boom than it otherwise would have been, and they credit the business tax breaks with helping that boom.

“We’re in better shape than we were a few months ago,” Controller’s Office Director of Budget and Analysis Michelle Allersma, one of three authors of the five-year budget projection, told the Guardian.

Revenues are up, but not as much as might be expected given the current boom and its costly byproducts. The city’s six-month budget report projects business taxes coming in at $534.7 million this year, rather than the $533 million budgeted. Property taxes are showing a $21.6 million increase over the budgeted $1.1 billion, sales taxes are showing a $2.7 million hike to $128.4 million, and the hotel tax is showing the biggest percentage jump, up $22 million over budget to a projected $296.9 million. But the parking and utility users taxes are together bringing in $3.1 million less than what was budgeted.

“The big picture from our perspective is we’re predicting significant revenue growth over the [next five-year] period, it’s just that the pace of our expenditures exceeds that growth,” Allersma said.

She said the biggest drivers of that expenditure growth are employee retirement expenses, lingering costs from the 2008 financial crisis, delayed infrastructure and maintenance costs, rebuilding depleted reserves, and one-time costs such as equipment for the new General Hospital.

Yet if the city can’t meet its obligations even in good years, doesn’t that mean the budget has a structural imbalance that it should address? Couldn’t the city have addressed that two years ago when Mayor Ed Lee crafted a business tax overhaul that was basically revenue-neutral, or now by ending tech’s tax exemptions?

“Thanks to sound economic policies and a strong rebounding economy, the City has avoided the deep cuts to social services we experienced in the past and we could even backfill for cuts to state and federal programs that serve low income families and people with HIV and AIDS,” Mayor’s Office Press Secretary Christine Falvey wrote in response to our list of questions about why the boom hasn’t created a budget surplus. “Business tax is significantly increased and in addition to social service programs, the City can now invest in capital projects and in paying down debt and increasing reserves. Unfortunately, our increase in revenues did not keep pace with the increases in City costs.”

The five-year budget report is a conservative one, as its authors describe it, with its first “key assumption” being “No major changes to service levels and number of employees,” even though the city is going through a big growth spurt, its skyline dotted with construction cranes. And for the employees serving that growth, it assumes only salary increases that keep pace with inflation.

But the report notes that the city could be in trouble if there’s a downturn in the tech industry. “Our city revenue is really volatile. When we do well, we do really well, and when we do bad, we do really bad. Tech is inherently volatile and tourism can quickly dry up,” Allersma told us.

Yet Falvey said the mayor plans to stay the course with his pro-business agenda. “Job creation remains key,” Falvey wrote to us. “The mayor continues to believe that there is no bigger income gap than between someone who has a job and someone who does not. As the budget is crafted over the next few months, the mayor will be meeting with a number of groups to make sure the budget reflects the needs of the city and that we close a deficit while providing the services people need.”

Brian McMahon contributed to this report.

Cleaning up poor people

Michael Redmond

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March 18, 2014

23

steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco has a long history of campaigns to “clean up” its poor neighborhoods, which is often code for displacing low-income residents of color and replacing them with gentrified housing and businesses. It happened in Western Addition and Yerba Buena starting about 50 years ago, and it’s happening now in the mid-Market Street corridor and in the heart of the Mission District.

Clean Up The Plaza is the latest group to decry poor people with bad habits congregating in public places, in this case the 16th and Mission BART plaza. Last summer, it launched a campaign with mailers and window placards that echo its lobbying of city officials to get tough on drug dealing, public urination, robberies, and other crimes.

With more homeless and other people showing up on the street in the Mission District these days, partly because of the increased policing along mid-Market since Twitter and other tech firms moved there in recent years, there are legitimate crime and quality-of-life concerns there, as the district’s Sup. David Campos acknowledges and has been taking steps to address.

“But there’s a difference between focusing on violent crime, as we have on 16th, and criminalizing poor people,” Campos told us. “What we haven’t done is kick poor people out of the plaza or removed benches or anything like that.”

FRONT FOR DEVELOPERS?

There is more to Clean Up The Plaza than meets the eye, thanks to the secretive involvement of notorious developer-connected political consultant Jack Davis, whose support the Bay Guardian exposed last week. The group’s figurehead, political neophyte Gil Chavez, lives in Davis’ house in the neighborhood and has told Bay Guardian sources that he and others are being well-paid by Davis.

Asked by the Guardian whether he is being paid by the developers — Maximus Real Estate Partners, which has proposed building a 10-story, 351-unit housing project that would tower over the plaza — Davis told us, “That’s between me and the IRS.”

Actually, the Ethics Commission confirmed that it is also looking into the group’s activities given that it hasn’t filed any paperwork in association with political fundraising or its lobbying. Davis denies that the group is in violation of any disclosure laws, and referred questions to high-priced attorney James Perrinello, who hasn’t returned our calls.

Local activists have long suspected this is simply a front group financed by developers to lay the political groundwork for approving the controversial project.

“I wasn’t surprised. I always knew there was some big money behind this,” Laura Guzman, who heads homeless outreach and services for Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, told the Guardian. “This is clearly about displacement. It invoked to me that my guys are in danger.”

“The minute I saw those placards and the flyers with the ‘clean up’ rhetoric, I got nervous because anyone who’s lived in this town for any length of time and paid attention knows exactly what those things mean. The clean up rhetoric almost always means, ‘let’s remove these people,'” said Cleve Jones, a progressive activist who has worked on housing rights issues since the ’70s, when he was a legislative aide to the Sup. Harvey Milk. “What people don’t understand is how completely this is driven by developers, and when you look at who benefits, it’s always the developers…The power of the developers here is enormous and the profits are enormous.”

Housing Right Committee Executive Director Sara Shortt calls Clean Up The Plaza “a fake grassroots campaign that is misleading this community.”

Asked about the group’s relationship with Maximus, Chavez told us, “They’re in communication with us and we’re in communication with them, but they haven’t funded us.” Davis and Chavez say their only motivation in running the group is improving public safety. “I’m happy to talk about what Clean Up The Plaza is,” Davis told us. “I live at 17th and Mission and I’ve been mugged.”

“If you didn’t know Jack Davis’ history in politics in San Francisco, you might be able to take that at face value,” Shortt said of Davis’ claims to be simply a concerned citizen. “Given his ties to big developers, it’s not very believable.”

‘CLEAN UP’ DEFINED

Clean Up The Plaza barely conceals what it’s trying to “clean up,” recently writing to supporters, “A recent BART survey counts about 250 homeless who make daily visits to the plaza. There are 43 SROs in a 4 block radius that add to the plaza population.”

Campos said he’s been working to address bad conditions in some of the Mission SROs, acknowledging that, “You would be hanging out in the plaza too if you didn’t feel safe in your SRO apartment.”

Davis forwarded the Guardian a letter from a local supporter of the group describing to the SFPD his personal crusade against those who hang out in the plaza and urinate outdoors, writing, “There are those of us who ARE LOOKING FORWARD to the new condos and retail space set to be developed at the Plaza. I hope the new retail/condo space helps to improve the area but there are no guarantees.”

But activists call this argument a well-worn ruse used to push development and gentrification.

“Cleaning up so-called ‘blighted’ areas has long been used to push through development projects,” Shortt said, decrying the “false dichotomy” presented by development advocates: “You can walk in puddles of urine or we can save you with a big development project.”

Ironically, the problem has gotten worse in Mission because of previous “clean up” efforts along mid-Market.

“The clean up of mid-Market resulted in more people in the Mission, which nobody is talking about,” Guzman said, noting that the increasing homeless population hasn’t been greeted with increased services, only scorn. “If ‘cleaning up’ really means helping, that’s not helping.”

The mid-Market neighborhoods of the Tenderloin and SoMa and the Mission District neighborhood around 16th and Mission are some of the last places left in the city that are still welcoming of poor people, thanks to the dozens of SROs there, many of them run by nonprofits under city contracts.

The Tenderloin’s 94102 ZIP code has a median household income of just $22,000, while the 16th and Mission’s 94103 ZIP has a median income of $44,000, both significantly less than the citywide median of $74,000, according to data culled by the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing as part of its ambitious push to build 30,000 new homes by 2020.

Yet if “clean up” is really code for displacement, that raises a troubling question for San Francisco: Will there be any neighborhoods left in this gentrifying city that still welcome the poor?

LAST STOPS

Most of those most actively involved in pushing development and “clean up” narratives wouldn’t discuss it with us.

Randy Shaw, whose Tenderloin Housing Clinic administers millions of dollars in city contracts to run SROs in the neighborhood and who was the biggest private sector architect and cheerleader of the tax breaks offered to Twitter and other big tech firms three years ago, said “I’ll pass” when we asked to interview him about his advocacy for “cleaning up” the Tenderloin.

But we did talk with Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, who has parroted some of Clean Up The Plaza’s rhetoric and referred to its petitions during two of his recent debates against Campos for the Assembly District 17 seat.

Chiu told us he heard about Davis’s involvement with the group “a couple months ago,” but that he raised the issue because “my friends in the Mission have alerted me to the crime issues.”

Chiu said there are “several robberies a day” and “more stabbings than any part of the city” in the plaza (actually, the SFPD reports 10 robberies and nine assaults in February) and that “my focus has always been on crime,” both in the Mission in the mid-Market area, where Chiu was one of the leading advocates at City Hall for using tax breaks and increased police presence to “clean up” the area.

“What I think we need to clean up are the violent crimes,” Chiu said, defending his approach of using economic development tools to turn neighborhoods around. “The mid-Market area has been challenged for decades. We needed to do more to revitalize the area.”

But Shortt said that’s just another way private sector profits take priority over human needs and compassion.

“It’s absolutely no coincidence that Twitter moved in and over 60 tenants in that building [1049 Market St.] received eviction notices,” Shortt said. “There is a clear nexus between new construction and rising real estate values.”

That same phenomenon has already transformed the Castro from a welcome enclave for LGBT outsiders into a middle class neighborhood with skyrocketing home prices.

“In a few years, the only thing gay about the Castro will be the flag,” Jones said. “I feel so vulnerable right now. Where do we go? For my generation of gay men, it’s very frightening.”

“‘Clean up’ to us means displacement, increased violence, and increased stress,” Guzman said. “It’s changing completely the character of the city.”

Campos, who opposed the mid-Market tax breaks and has been skeptical of the rhetoric behind them, said he’s long been working to improve the police presence and social services in the plaza.

“We have been working on 16th and Mission for quite some time,” Campos said. “I want to address it in a way that is independent of any developer’s project.”

SFBG Wrap

Michael Redmond

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March 4, 2014

1

No coal for Oakland Port

A company that operates a coal mine in Colorado has been looking to ship its fossil fuel products to Asia via the Port of Oakland.

A coalition of environmental organizations sounded the alarm that the Board of Port Commissioners was considering a lease proposal from Bowie Resource Partners to operate a coal export facility at Oakland’s Charles P. Howard Terminal.

Another proposal submitted for consideration, from California Capital Group/ Kinder Morgan/ MetroPorts, could also lead to coal exports, said Jess Dervin-Ackerman, conservation organizer for the Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club.

“We’ve really reduced our use of coal in this country, but that means we’ve just been sending it to Asia,” Dervin-Ackerman noted.

In addition to the global concerns about exacerbating climate change by shipping coal to be burned in power plants in Asia, where there are weaker environmental protections, environmentalists are worried that Oakland neighborhoods could be impacted by pollution from rail operations and fine coal dust that could leave airborne traces behind as it is transported to the marine terminals.

Bowie proposed to ship not only coal, but petroleum coke, a pulverized fossil fuel that is illegal to burn in California. Already 128,000 barrels of this product, called petcoke for short, are shipped daily from throughout the state.

Port of Oakland staff, however, has recommended rejecting the proposals from both entities.

“Staff believes that Bowie’s proposed use and operation of the property raises environmental concerns related to the handling of commodities such as coal. Environmental concerns about handling commodities such as coal stem primarily from issues of fugitive dust and climate change,” a staff report noted. “Port staff believes that operations such as those proposed by Bowie conflict with recently adopted Port policies and programs intended to create or support environmental sustainability.”

In the face of opposition from environmentalists and the staff, the board voted against the proposals on Feb. 27. (Rebecca Bowe)

Register your bike

A new program registering San Francisco bicycles and their owners enrolled just over 500 bicyclists in its first two weeks, a small success story in the effort to reunite riders with their stolen bicycles.

The program in question is Safe Bikes, a joint venture between the SFPD and SF Safe. Cyclists can log onto its website, register their bike’s make and model, and when victims report a bike theft to police they can be reunited with their two-wheeled friend just as easily. There are 75,000 bike riders a day in San Francisco, according to the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office, a buffet of tantalizing goods for bike thieves.

More than 500 bikes are a small dent in that number, but for only a two-week start it isn’t too bad. Safe Bikes Manager Morgan St. Clair said it’s only just begun its outreach. Next month, it plans to host an event at Twitter headquarters, where it will give away 50 Kryptonite locks, funded by the San Francisco Police Officers Association.

“We’ve only gone to three bike shops so far,” she said. But in the coming months St. Clair and her team of 15 volunteers have a city full of shops they plan to visit.

An estimated 4,000 bicycles were stolen from riders in 2012, though only 812 were reported to police. St. Clair said there is a perception problem.

“They think the police department isn’t doing anything and say ‘oh, what the heck,’ and don’t think they’ll ever get it back,” she said. “We’re trying to change that mentality.”

In fact, the SFPD has been a strong driver of getting bikes back into the hands of owners, mostly at the behest of Officer Matt Friedman. He runs @SFbiketheft, a Twitter handle that tries to recover stolen bicycles and link them to owners.

“We really want people to report more bicycle thefts,” St. Clair said. And to have those reports be effective, people need to register their bikes. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Newsom misses the train

As California struggles to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and meet the long-term transportation needs of a growing population, officials from Gov. Jerry Brown to Mayor Ed Lee have steadfastly supported the embattled California High-Speed Rail Project, which Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently withdrew his support from. California now has until July 1 to find funds to match the federal grants.

It’s not exactly surprising that this calculating and politically ambitious centrist would cave in to conservatives like this, particularly as Newsom tries to set himself up to succeed Brown in four years. But it’s a sharp contrast to more principled politicians like Brown, and to those trying to create the transportation system future generations will need, as President Barack Obama took a step toward doing by announcing new federal transportation funding.

US Transportation Secretary Anthony Fox is also taking part in the three-day High Speed Rail Summit, sponsored by the United State High-Speed Rail Association, that began Feb. 25 in Washington DC. Its theme was Full Speed Ahead.

“Secretary Foxx’s experience at the local level as mayor of Charlotte is extremely valuable for shaping national transportation policy. We look forward to working with the Secretary to advance high speed rail in America across party lines,” USHSRA President and CEO Andy Kunz said in a press release.

While Newsom’s new tack may play well with myopic, penny-pinching, car-dependent moderate and conservative voters, many of his allies and constituents were furious with his about-face on a project that promises to get riders from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles in less than three hours.

Among those unhappy is San Francisco resident Peter Nasatir, who forwarded the Guardian a letter that he sent to Newsom’s office, which concluded, “High-speed rail is coming. The economy demands it, the environment demands it, and Central Valley population growth demands it. You may get some votes from moderates in the short run, but in the long run, you have positioned yourself as the most prominent person in the state to be on the wrong side of history.” (Steven T. Jones)

App for homelessness

Mayor Ed Lee, Sup. Jane Kim, and representatives from tech firm Zendesk gathered at St. Anthony’s in the Tenderloin Feb. 28 to announce the launch of a new smartphone tool, Link-SF, to help homeless and low-income people access services.

Zendesk is a customer-service software company near Sixth and Market streets. It was the first tech company to move into mid-Market in 2011 and take advantage of the city’s Central Market Payroll Tax Exclusion Zone (aka the “Twitter tax break”), a controversial bid to attract tech companies to an area that has historically had the city’s highest concentration of poverty.

Financially speaking, Zendesk is doing quite well. In 2012, it raised $60 million in new funding and hired 160 new employees. That same year, the city’s Central Market tax exclusion resulted in about $1.9 million in forgone revenues that the city would have otherwise collected from 14 companies that took advantage of the payroll-tax exclusion zone. Zendesk has 350 San Francisco employees, and Public Affairs Director Tiffany Maleshefski told the Bay Guardian that the company has contributed a collective 1,400 hours of volunteer service to uphold the company’s end of a community benefit agreement deal with the city, a requirement for those receiving the local tax breaks. “Link-SF was part of the community benefit agreement,” Maleshefski confirmed. The smartphone app, designed for use by homeless and low-income people seeking services, provides data on food, shelter, medical, or employment assistance programs. “It’s empowering for the users.” (Rebecca Bowe) RIP, Bush Man II San Francisco has lost one of its own. Gregory Jacobs passed away of heart failure on Feb. 23. He’s less known by his full name, but better known by his moniker, “The Bush Man.” No, he’s not the original Bush Man. That would be David Johnson, who’d been there for 36 years, compared to Jacobs’ 30. Little matter. Jacobs was a San Franciscan through and through. Like many San Franciscans, he came here from somewhere else, in his case the “somewhere else” was Arkansas. But Jacobs was known and loved here in the city. The man was dedicated to his work: sitting along Jefferson street and spooking tourists by shouting “boo!” from behind two large and bushy tree branches. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Twitter tax break beneficiary Zendesk launches app to help the homeless

Sasha Cuttler

-

February 28, 2014

157

Twitter tax break beneficiary Zendesk launches app to help the homeless

Mayor Ed Lee, Sup. Jane Kim, and representatives from tech firm Zendesk gathered at St. Anthony’s in the Tenderloin this morning to announce the launch of a new smartphone tool, Link-SF, to help homeless and low-income people access services.

Zendesk is a customer-service software company located near Sixth and Market streets. It was the first tech company to move into mid-Market in 2011 and take advantage of the city’s Central Market Payroll Tax Exclusion Zone (aka the “Twitter tax break”), a controversial bid to attract tech companies to an area that has historically had the city’s highest concentration of poverty.

Financially speaking, Zendesk is doing quite well. In 2012, it raised $60 million in new funding and hired 160 new employees. That same year, the city’s Central Market tax exclusion resulted in about $1.9 million in forgone revenues that the city would have otherwise collected from 14 companies that took advantage of the payroll-tax exclusion zone.

Zendesk has 350 San Francisco employees, and Public Affairs Director Tiffany Maleshefski told the Bay Guardian that the company has contributed a collective 1,400 hours of volunteer service to uphold the company’s end of a community benefit agreement deal with the city, a requirement for those receiving the local tax breaks.

Sup. Jane Kim praises Zendesk during a press conference at St. Anthony’s.

“Link-SF was part of the community benefit agreement,” Maleshefski confirmed. The smartphone app, designed for use by homeless and low-income people seeking services, provides data on food, shelter, medical, or employment assistance programs. “It’s empowering for the users,” Maleshefski said.

The users of this software, of course, will be people experiencing dire straits in San Francisco at a time when housing prices are sky-high and housing assistance for low-income people is at a minimum. Of all the kinds of services that exist to remedy the problem of being homeless, permanent housing ranks at the top of every list. But the daunting lack of affordable housing is San Francisco’s greatest challenge.

Zendesk software engineer Ken Nakagawa explained that a team of collaborators worked for months to try and understand the needs of poor San Franciscans and build an app to help them connect with services. According to a media advisory, 45 percent of people who utilize St. Anthony’s technology training program own smart phones.

While helping people to connect with services is a good step, tech companies could put more energy toward a long-term solution that would result in fewer people having to rely upon services for basic survival (many of these services, meanwhile, have diminished in recent years due to steep funding shortfalls).

Just after the press conference ended, homeless and low-income clients lined up for lunch outside St. Anthony’s, which serves roughly 2,500 meals every day to people in need. It was raining, and people had to wait outside in line since there were so many. Even though the dining room was packed full, Volunteer Coordinator Barbara Montagnoli said it was a relatively quiet day there since a lot of assistance funds had just been disbursed.

Thirty-three percent of homeless people interviewed for a study reported winding up homeless because they lost a job, and the people who are most likely to wind up homeless are those trying to subsist on less than $16,000 per year in San Francisco. (To illustrate the deep economic divide, a Zendesk software engineer living in the same city earns somewhere between $96,000 and $120,000 per year, a search on Glassdoor shows.)

The fact that tech companies want to be part of the solution is great. These deep-pocketed multinational companies have been criticized for their role in transforming the city in ways that are quite painful for many of its long-term residents, and it’s encouraging to see members of the tech sector find ways to be engaged in the community.

That said, there is a serious problem in San Francisco that’s only getting worse due to a widening wealth gap and simmering affordability crisis – and if it is going to be solved, those who set out to find solutions have to genuinely want to solve it, for the sake of restoring a general sense of health, fairness, and wellbeing to the city’s less fortunate. If helping out only comes from a desire to look good in front of the cameras, the actions will be empty.

Tech must support Ellis reforms

Michael Redmond

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February 25, 2014

26

EDITORIAL

San Francisco is facing an eviction crisis, a reality that politicians of all ideological stripes have finally begun to address. It was good to see our two best representatives to the California Legislature introduce bills to reform the Ellis Act in the last week, but these will be empty gestures unless the political class and its allies in the technology industry and the larger business community step up and offer strong support for the effort.

This is a small but difficult first step in addressing the displacement that is hurting the city’s diversity and driving out its working class. San Francisco is one of the few cities in the California that has rent control, which the Ellis Act was designed by landlords and the real estate industry to subvert.

So the political dynamics of reforming the Ellis Act are difficult in Sacramento, and it will take business community support to get this done. Twitter and other SF-based tech companies have gotten big local tax breaks to stay here, while Google and other Silicon Valley companies use San Francisco to house their high-paid employees, both feeding the frenzy of real estate speculation behind the current eviction epidemic.

This is their chance to show that they want to be a part of San Francisco’s community, rather than just seeing this city as a resource to exploit for their own ends.

In introducing his Senate Bill 1439 outside a Chinatown apartment building on Feb. 24, Sen. Mark Leno cited city figures showing that more than 300 apartments were cleared of residents using the Ellis Act in 2013, more than half of those involving landlords who owned the building for less than a year, half of those for less than six months.

“These are not the landlords the Ellis Act was designed to help,” Mayor Ed Lee said in support of SB 1439.

Leno’s bill would require landlords to own a building for at least five years before using the Ellis Act to evict tenants. Assemblymember Tom Ammiano also introduced a bill on Feb. 21, Assembly Bill 2405, which would allow San Francisco voters or the Board of Supervisors to declare a moratorium on Ellis Act evictions if city affordable housing goals aren’t met.

Both are small, sensible reforms that would easily pass in a society less consumed by greed than ours is now. Tech leaders should welcome the opportunity to show they understand what’s happening in this city and have compassion for those being displaced, rather than tacitly supporting the real estate speculators.

But it’s also just a first step. The Ellis Act needs to be repealed, not just reformed. More than 1,000 rent control units have been lost in San Francisco in the last two years, affordable housing converted into speculators’ profits. This must end, or the righteous populist anger that is consuming the city will only get worse.

The Goldies: What we’re fighting for

Michael Redmond

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February 18, 2014

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EDITORIAL If you want to understand what we at the Bay Guardian and activists from the broader progressive movement mean when we say that we’re fighting for the soul of San Francisco, just peruse this issue’s 25th annual Goldies awards. The artists that we profile and celebrate are the very people that this city in now in danger of losing.

It’s never been easy for the idealists, those artists and activists whose passionate pursuits create our unique, world-renowned culture. San Francisco has always been an expensive city and creative types often have to struggle to remain here, pouring cocktails for tourists, delivering packages by bike, or helping corporations throw their parties in order to make ends meet.

But in the hyper-gentrification now underway, the city is at a tipping point. Every rent-controlled apartment that a real estate speculator takes off the housing market represents the loss of someone from the working or creative classes, each lost unit a lost opportunity to create a space for a young person with something important to say.

City Hall has gone to great lengths to keep big tech companies like Twitter and Zynga from leaving the city, offering tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks that have helped drive up both residential and commercial rents, squeezing out the individuals and institutions that aren’t motivated primarily by money. But the people who really need the help aren’t getting it.

If we simply allow the logic of the market shape San Francisco, it will lose everything that makes it great, becoming a sterile landscape of chain stores, expensive boutique restaurants, and disengaged citizens who work too hard and play too little. The Elbo Room and other great music venues will become condos, something the owners of that building are studying (but the club is strenuously resisting), something that might make economic sense even though it tears at the soul of the city.

Read our profile of Sara Shelton Mann, to whom we’ve awarded a lifetime achievement award for encouraging generations of local artists to express their creativity, thus helping the rest of us better understand and appreciate the human condition, in all its wondrous and challenging complexity.

That’s what it means to live in a major metropolis, rather than some suburban bedroom community. Cities are where we come together to engage with one another and with the struggles of our times, embracing messy urban realities rather than trying to scrub them away. This is where we figure it out, with the help of the artists and activists who are here to keep us honest and aware.

We need to find ways to preserve and expand the opportunities for creative, passionate people of all kinds to live in San Francisco. We need to make that our chief political task for 2014, as if our very soul depended on it.

The trouble with compromise

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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February 4, 2014

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“It takes no compromise to give people their rights… It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.” — Harvey Milk

OPINION As I sat in the audience at the Jan. 23 San Francisco Young Democrats meeting and watched the first debate between David Campos and David Chiu in their race to represent San Francisco’s 17th Assembly District, I was disturbed to hear the words “compromise” and “consensus” come out of David Chiu’s mouth more often than the words “eviction” and “displacement.”

During the debate, a line in the sand was drawn by the two candidates: Campos was on the side of the underdog, a voice to the voiceless; and Chiu, by his own admission, was all about compromise and “getting things done.”

Don’t get me wrong. True compromise can be a good thing. Unfortunately, what has been coming out of City Hall, from both President Chiu’s Board of Supervisors chamber and the Mayor’s Office, hasn’t been real compromise. It’s been a wholesale selling of our city to the highest bidder. The only thing that our leadership’s compromises have yielded is a compromised San Francisco.

Compromise gave corporations millions of dollars in tax breaks and it has forced nonprofits and small businesses out of our neighborhoods. Compromise has not resulted in any substantive action to curb Ellis Act evictions, instead serving to green light the building of luxury condo towers throughout the city. Compromise has allowed queer youth shelters and our parks to be closed to the people who need them as a last resort, as our bus stops have been opened up to billionaires for little more than pennies.

Chiu’s compromises have cost this city dearly. His compromise with developers on Parkmerced will lead to the demolition of 1,500 units of rent-controlled housing. His compromise on Healthy San Francisco allowed restaurant owners to continue to defraud consumers and to pocket money that should have gone to health care for their employees. His compromise on Muni killed a much-needed ballot initiative that would have resulted in an additional $40 million for the agency — a ballot initiative that he originally co-authored.

Please forgive me if I am fed up with compromise and am demanding actual leadership from my representatives.

Now is the time to stand with people of color, with members of the LGBTQ community, with our youth and elders, with artists and with small businesses, all of whom are being forced out of our city.

Thankfully, we have another choice. Sup. David Campos has shown that real change comes not from compromising your values but standing up for your principles. His legislative accomplishments include providing free Muni for low-income youth, protecting women’s right to choose at the Planned Parenthood Clinic, and preventing teacher layoffs at our public schools.

Campos has demonstrated that he, not Chiu, is the right choice to follow Tom Ammiano’s footsteps to Sacramento. Ammiano, who had 13 of his 13 bills signed into law this past year, is the perfect example of the success that can come from leading with your principles and not compromising your integrity.

San Francisco needs a leader representing us in the capital. Successful victories in reforming the Ellis Act and closing the Prop. 13 tax loophole will take a leader who can stand up to landlords and corporations, not a compromiser who will sit down at the table in a backroom with them.

That is why I will give my all to make sure that David Campos is our next representative in Sacramento. Pardon me if I refuse to compromise.

Tom Temprano is president of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.