Tom Ammiano

Why WiFi?

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By Steven T. Jones
Mayor Gavin Newsom and his administration are so intent on following through with their promise to deliver free wireless Internet to SF residents that they’ve basically dispensed with seeking input from the public or Board of Supervisors, locked into private and protracted negotiations with Google and Earthlink, and simply decided not to do the board-approved study of Sup. Tom Ammiano’s plan for a municipal broadband system. The unilateral, secretive approach has driven journalists and activists nuts. But there is an opportunity tonight at 6 p.m. to weigh in during a hastily called and little noticed hearing before the Department of Telecom and Info Services. Media Alliance has been raising hell over the issue and this week the group is releasing a study showing that the city could make $2 million per year with a municipal Internet system, as opposed to going with Newsom’s so-called “free” system, which wouldn’t make the city any money and would subject citizens to targetted advertising. The tradeoff might be worth it, but there are still too many unknown details to know that, so show up this evening to talk about it.

Why WiFi?

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By Steven T. Jones
Mayor Gavin Newsom and his administration are so intent on following through with their promise to deliver free wireless Internet to SF residents that they’ve basically dispensed with seeking input from the public or Board of Supervisors, locked into private and protracted negotiations with Google and Earthlink, and simply decided not to do the board-approved study of Sup. Tom Ammiano’s plan for a municipal broadband system. The unilateral, secretive approach has driven journalists and activists nuts. But there is an opportunity tonight at 6 p.m. to weigh in during a hastily called and little noticed hearing before the Department of Telecom and Info Services. Media Alliance has been raising hell over the issue and this week the group is releasing a study showing that the city could make $2 million per year with a municipal Internet system, as opposed to going with Newsom’s so-called “free” system, which wouldn’t make the city any money and would subject citizens to targetted advertising. The tradeoff might be worth it, but there are still too many unknown details to know that, so show up this evening to talk about it.

Sue Bierman memorial, Sept. 3

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By Sarah Phelan
A memorial will be held for Sue Bierman on Sunday, Sept. 3, 2-4pm at Delancey St, 600 Embarcadero.
News that former San Francisco Sup. Sue Bierman died on the afternoon of Monday August 7 after her car crashed into a dumpster in the Cole Valley, got the current supervisors sharing memories of her at the August 8 Board of Supes meeting.
Sup. Gerardo Sandoval said “volumes could be written about the accomplishments” of this woman, who was “probably a grandmother/sister figure to many of us.”
Sup. Aaron Peskin called her “an incredible person, an FDR-type Democrat,” who was behind the demolition of the old Embarcadero freeway.”Said Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, “she was a hero in so many battles in San Francisco..most recently, when we were trying to bring attention to excessive, disproportionate closure of schools, Sue Bierman and her daughter were on the front line. She was very disarming, but very strong. I will miss her dearly.”
Sup. Sean Elsbernd acknowledged that “should she and I have served on the board together, we would have had a few disagreements. I’ll miss her look.”
Sup. Tom Ammiano recalled how,”When Carole Migden put on lipstick, Sue would follow, You knew something was going to happen, as if a secret handhske was involved…I don’t know if there’s a highway to heaven, but thanks to Sue it ain’t a freeway.”
Sup. Dufty remembered how she had a lot of influence over Mayor Willie Brown. “If you heard him cussing at Sue, you knew she’d won one over him.”
Sup. Alioto-Pier, noting how she and Bierman often did not agree when they were both on the Port Commission said, “She very eloquently told you, she was very forceful, she was always the first person to call, it was dismaying to hear her voice on the machine, saying, “michela,” in a shaky voice.
Sup. Daly said she was the champion of young adults–and renters.
‘She understood what made San Francisco great.”
And Gloria Young, clerk of the board, recalled trying to get Bierman, who served on the board from 1992-2000, to vacate her office at noon on the day she was termed out, so to tidy up before the new supe [Peskin] arrived.
“Absolutely not,” bierman is said to have said. “I’ll be working until the end of the day, It’s immportant to acknowledge thew constituents who put us in office.”
“And she left me with a big stack of books,” added Peskin. “They’re still on the shelf.”

Peskin’s political playbook

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By Steven T. Jones
Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin helped engineer the placement of some solid progressive measures on the fall ballot yesterday — and unsuccessfully tried to derail one that would give sick days to all SF workers. The Golden Gate Restaurant Association had been trying to weaken the measure with fewer sick days (five, rising to 10 after an employee works three years in the same job, which few in this category of worker do) and exemption of part-time employees (which, again, is most workers who don’t get sick days). Measure advocates say they were willing to compromise a little on the former request, but not the latter. So Peskin at the last minute not only said he won’t support the measure (after advocates say his aides said he probably would), but he also convinced Sup. Sophie Maxwell to pull her support, even though she’d already signed on the dotted line. That might have left advocates without the four supervisors needed to place the measure on the ballot, but they convinced Sup. Jake McGoldrick to lend his support. But in the end, election law requires all sponsoring supervisors to agree to let a colleague withdraw, and since Sup. Tom Ammiano couldn’t be found as the 5 p.m. deadline neared, the measure ended up going to the ballot with supervisors Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, Ammiano and Maxwell as sponsors.
So what happened here? Well, it’s more than meets the eye.

Farewell, Sue Bierman

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I never had the honor of meeting Sue Bierman, but news that the former San Francisco supervisor died Monday afternoon after her car crashed into a dumpster in the Cole Valley, got the current supes sharing memories of her at the August 8 Board meeting. leaving me with the impression of a much loved, sometimes feared, outspoken and universally respected 82-year old.
Here’s just a sampling of some of the many tributes made:
“Volumes could be written about the accomplishments of this woman,” said Sup. Gerardo Sandoval said. “She was probably a grandmother/sister figure to many of us.”
Sup. Aaron Peskin called her “an incredible person, an FDR-type Democrat,” and the woman responsible for stopping the expansion of the freeway into the panhandle.
Said Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, “she was a hero in so many battles in San Francisco..most recently, when we were trying to bring attention to excessive, disproportionate closure of schools, Sue Bierman and her daughter were on the front line. She was very disarming, but very strong. I will miss her dearly.”
Sup. Sean Elsbernd acknowledged that “should she and I have served on the board together, we would have had a few disagreements. I’ll miss her look.”
Sup. Tom Ammiano recalled how,”When Carole Migden put on lipstick, Sue would follow. You knew something was going to happen, as if a secret handshake was involved…I don’t know if there’s a highway to heaven, but thanks to Sue it ain’t a freeway.”
Sup. Bevan Dufty remembered how Bierman had a lot of influence over Mayor Willie Brown. “If you heard him cussing at Sue, you knew she’d won one over him.”
Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier noted how she and Bierman often did not agree when they were both on the Port Commission.
“She very eloquently told you, she was very forceful, she was always the first person to call, it was dismaying to hear her voice on the machine, saying, ‘Michela,’ in a shaky voice,” Alioto-Pier recalled.
Sup. Chris Daly said bBerman was the champion of young adults–and renters.
‘She understood what made San Francisco great.”
And Gloria Young, clerk of the board, recalled trying to get Bierman, who served on the Board from 1992 until she was termed out in 2000, vacate her office at noon on the last day , so to tidy up before the new supe [Peskin] arrived.
“Absolutely not,” Bierman is said to have said. “I’ll be working until the end of the day, It’s important to acknowledge the constituents who put us in office.”
“And she left me with a big stack of books,” added Peskin. “They’re still on the shelf.”

Farewell, Sue Bierman

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By Sarah Phelan
News that former San Francisco Sup. Sue Bierman died Monday afternoon after her car crashed into a dumpster in the Cole Valley, got the current supervisors sharing memories of her at the August 8 Board of Supes meeting.
Sup. Gerardo Sandoval said “volumes could be written about the accomplishments” of this woman, who was “probably a grandmother/sister figure to many of us.”
Sup. Aaron Peskin called her “an incredible person, an FDR-type Democrat,” who was behind the demolition of the old Embarcadero freeway.”Said Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, “she was a hero in so many battles in San Francisco..most recently, when we were trying to bring attention to excessive, disproportionate closure of schools, Sue Bierman and her daughter were on the front line. She was very disarming, but very strong. I will miss her dearly.”
Sup. Sean Elsbernd acknowledged that “should she and I have served on the board together, we would have had a few disagreements. I’ll miss her look.”
Sup. Tom Ammiano recalled how,”When Carole Migden put on lipstick, Sue would follow, You knew something was going to happen, as if a secret handhske was involved…I don’t know if there’s a highway to heaven, but thanks to Sue it ain’t a freeway.”
Sup. Dufty remembered how she had a lot of influence over Mayor Willie Brown. “If you heard him cussing at Sue, you knew she’d won one over him.”
Sup. Alioto-Pier, noting how she and Bierman often did not agree when they were both on the Port Commission said, “She very eloquently told you, she was very forceful, she was always the first person to call, it was dismaying to hear her voice on the machine, saying, “michela,” in a shaky voice.
Sup. Daly said she was the champion of young adults–and renters.
‘She understood what made San Francisco great.”
And Gloria Young, clerk of the board, recalled trying to get Bierman, who served on the board from 1992-2000, to vacate her office at noon on the day she was termed out, so to tidy up before the new supe [Peskin] arrived.
“Absolutely not,” bierman is said to have said. “I’ll be working until the end of the day, It’s immportant to acknowledge thew constituents who put us in office.”
“And she left me with a big stack of books,” added Peskin. “They’re still on the shelf.”

SF Badpublicity

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
At a July 21 event recognizing the passage of one full year since the popular Castro bar the Pendulum closed, a group of about 25 concerned citizens, including several City Hall heavyweights, asked why embattled Pendulum owner Les Natali has done nothing with the space for so long.
Sup. Bevan Dufty, who represents the Castro, was nowhere to be seen.
The Pendulum was known in Dufty’s district as a popular spot for African American gay men, and rumors abounded as to why Natali was allowing it to sit empty. Natali, who owns at least $6 million worth of property around the city according to public records, had kept the bar open for over a year after he bought it in 2004, then abruptly shut it down.
Natali has since taken out numerous construction permits for the place, city records show. But progressive supervisors, including Tom Ammiano and Chris Daly along with board candidate Alix Rosenthal (who’s running against Dufty), all showed up for the small rally saying nothing was happening and they wanted to make sure there was somewhere in the Castro for gay black men to go.
Confusion about the status of the Pendulum has been replaced with speculation, due in part to an April 2005 city report that alleged that Natali discriminated against African Americans, Latinos, and women at his establishments, which include the Detour on Market Street and SF Badlands, located just across the street from the Pendulum at 4121 18th St.
At the time, Dufty waved the report and declared that he wouldn’t tolerate business establishments in his district that discriminated against any of their employees or patrons. So where is he now?
“At this point I have a larger objective: that I want to work with Mr. Natali and the broader community so that when the Pendulum reopens, it will be open to all,” Dufty said in a phone interview with the Guardian. “Sometimes I work behind the scenes and sometimes I work out in front,” he responded when asked about his silence on the Pendulum issue. “This time I worked behind the scenes.”
But Calvin Gipson, a past president of the SF Pride Parade Committee and a self-described close friend of Dufty’s, says he doesn’t know how Dufty intends to handle the political powder keg that is Les Natali or how the Castro can again create a new home for gay black men.
“Bevan confuses me,” Gipson said. “He says all of the right things, but he has not put forth a plan.”
The controversy, for its part, has clearly left a fissure in the community.
In the summer of 2004, customers and former employees of other Natali-owned Castro bars alleged to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission that the proprietor systematically attempted to screen out African Americans, Latinos, and women from his venues.
The HRC conducted an investigation and eventually issued a report summarizing the complaints and finding that Badlands had indeed violated the city’s antidiscrimination ordinances. Some Natali critics accepted the report as gospel and declared that it made official rumors about the club impresario that had persisted for years. Dufty and the complainants from Badlands, who eventually formed a group called And Castro for All, demanded that the place be shut down by city and state officials.
The report, however, was technically preliminary, as the HRC now sees it, and the agency chose not to issue its “final determination” after the complainants later worked out a settlement with Natali, according to a letter from HRC director Virginia Harmon obtained by the Guardian last week.
Natali sued the HRC last month to have its findings voided, and that’s what the legalese in Harmon’s July 21 letter appears to attempt to do — without establishing that the claims made in the report are patently untrue.
“The April 26, 2005, finding is no longer operative and does not represent a final legal determination of the HRC director or the commission,” the letter states.
After interviewing several customers and former Badlands and Detour employees, the HRC originally found that Natali’s bars required multiple IDs from some African American customers, selectively applied a dress code, and generally discouraged “non-Badlands customers” — what the complainants insisted meant black folks — from patronizing the bars. According to the report, Natali prohibited VJs from playing hip-hop and mostly hired only “cute, young, white guys.”
Natali eventually asked that the HRC reconsider its findings, which it did. He responded to the allegations by stating that he didn’t want his bars to air music that promoted drug use, violence, or homophobia, and he charged that the claims against him were either outdated or leveled by embittered former employees.
An attorney who helped Natali formulate the response, Stephen Goldstein, said the HRC’s investigation was “superficial and already headed toward a foregone conclusion.”
“They had a certain agenda they wanted to substantiate…. They could have had a more careful study of the events, which didn’t add up to much,” Goldstein said. He said Natali wasn’t given a chance to have his case “aired and tried.” Attempts to reach Natali through his attorneys failed.
Instead of issuing a “final determination,” which would have included an account of Natali’s retort, the HRC encouraged the parties to go into the mediation that eventually led to a settlement. The settlement allowed the HRC to avoid issuing a final conclusion.
After the release of the HRC’s early finding, meanwhile, Dufty had called for Badlands to be shut down and urged the Alcoholic Beverage Commission to take into account the report before determining whether Natali would receive a liquor license transfer for the Pendulum.
After a months-long investigation that included state officials going into Badlands undercover, the ABC chose not to punish Natali.
“After reviewing all the findings of its investigation and the HRC report, the ABC has determined there is not enough evidence to support a license denial in an administrative proceeding,” the agency announced last year.
Nonetheless, queer progressive activists and organizers from the National Black Justice Coalition held protests outside Badlands every week for about four months last summer. After the January settlement, according to local LGBT paper Bay Area Reporter, the parties agreed not to discuss any of the terms publicly, but they did announce to the press that all grievances were handled.
The settlement’s undisclosed terms have obviously left unanswered questions, however, because Natali’s lawsuit against the HRC appeared to reopen wounds and startle nearly everyone. The settlement had presumably meant the complaints were withdrawn, but the HRC had initially denied a request by Natali in April 2005, around the time the report was released, to reconsider its own findings, Natali’s suit insists.
“It just seemed like everything had been put at rest and now it’s all being dredged up again,” said longtime queer activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca, who went to last summer’s protests. “It just seemed so strange for someone who was trying to put all this behind him.”
Natali’s suit declared he’d been “falsely labeled a racist by San Francisco’s official civil rights agency” and essentially asked that the report’s findings be very clearly and publicly deleted.
But the still-empty Pendulum has allowed criticism of Natali to continue. Another Natali-owned space called the Patio Café has been closed now for years.
“The tone [of the July 21 rally] was that people don’t trust Les Natali, nor do they feel that he has the best interests of the community in mind,” Gipson said. “Being that the Patio has been closed for that long, it’s difficult to trust that Pendulum will be open soon, and it’s difficult to trust that it will be a welcoming place for African Americans.” SFBG
Editor’s note: Alix Rosenthal is the domestic partner of Guardian city editor Steven T. Jones. Jones did not participate in the assigning, writing, or editing of this story.

Come on, Mr. Sheriff

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By Tim Redmond

Here’s a great idea: Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarmimi are pushing for a resolution that would call on the San Francisco sheriff to refuse to carry out Ellis Act evictions. Sheriff Mike Hennessey doesn’t seem so hot on this; he says he doesn’t want to face a contempt of court citation and wind up in his own jail.

But hey, it’s a San Francisco tradition: Back in 1977, then-Sheriff Dick Hongisto refused to evict the residents of the International Hotel, and spent five days in jail before relenting. The worst that would happen to Hennessey: He’d be stuck for a few days in his own clink, where I suspect he’d be treated well (and would learn a bit about how the inmates feel day to day). Eventually, he’d probably have to relent, too — but what a glrious legal battle. It would be an other great example of what we call Civic Disobedience — using the clout of the city and the full legal resources of the city to defy an immoral law. Gavin Newsom did it with same-sex marriage. Now, Hennessey has a chance to make history. Go for it, Mike.

Don’t move the mayoral elections

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The Board of Supervisors is slated to vote July 25th on a plan that’s attracted little press attention, but could have a profound impact on San Francisco politics. Sup. Jake McGoldrick has proposed a charter amendment that would move mayoral elections to coincide with presidential elections. The idea, McGoldrick says, is to increase turnout: In 2004, when John Kerry was running against George W. Bush, more than 70 percent of San Franciscans voted. When Matt Gonzalez ran against Gavin Newsom for mayor in 2003, only 55 percent showed up at the polls.

It sounds good, and generally, we’re for anything that increases voter turnout. But there are some real tricky questions about this proposal, and there hasn’t been enough public discussion around it. So the supervisors should vote against placing it on this fall’s ballot.

Our main concern with the plan is that it might diminish local interest in the mayoral contest. When the presidential race is at the top of the ticket, and likely a U.S. Senate race at the same time, the news media tends to focus on those campaigns, and the public’s attention is focused on them, too. The advantage of having a San Francisco mayor’s race in what is otherwise an off-year for elections is that all the energy in local politics centers on a high-stakes local campaign (The district attorney’s race is also on the ballot, and that might totally get lost in the presidential-year madness).

Some critics oppose the plan because, in practice, it would give the next mayor – at this point, probably Gavin Newsom – an additional year in office. That shouldn’t be an issue, really: This is about more than one mayor, and more than one year. It’s about the future of politics in the city.

It shouldn’t be about the Democratic Party, either. Some people worry that party money – always big in a presidential year – will flow to the anointed Democratic mayoral candidate, drowning out the voices of (say) a Green candidate, or a democrat who didn’t get the party’s nod. Maybe – but maybe all the money will go to the top of the ticket, and there will be less local cash spent on the San Francisco mayor’s race. And the power of the Democratic Party in a presidential year didn’t stop Ross Mirkarimi – a green – from getting elected supervisor from District Five in 2004.

Both supporters and opponents of the plan are trying to calculate how it would help or hurt progressive candidates, but there’s another factor here. Mayoral races are about more than just winning. The 1999 campaign, in which Tom Ammiano lost to Willie Brown, was a turning point in progressive politics in San Francisco. The runoff between Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzalez in 2003 created an immense outpouring of community activism and brought thousands of new people into local politics. In a presidential year, some of that excitement – which is, in the end, crucial to any progressive movement – might have been diffused.

We don’t see any clear mandate or case for making the change right now, and we see some serious downsides. After extensive hearings and public debate, we might be convinced that this is a good idea, but that hasn’t happened yet. So for now, we urge the supervisors not to place it on the November ballot.

Don’t move the mayoral elections

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The Board of Supervisors is slated to vote July 25th on a plan that’s attracted little press attention, but could have a profound impact on San Francisco politics. Sup. Jake McGoldrick has proposed a charter amendment that would move mayoral elections to coincide with presidential elections. The idea, McGoldrick says, is to increase turnout: In 2004, when John Kerry was running against George W. Bush, more than 70 percent of San Franciscans voted. When Matt Gonzalez ran against Gavin Newsom for mayor in 2003, only 55 percent showed up at the polls.

It sounds good, and generally, we’re for anything that increases voter turnout. But there are some real tricky questions about this proposal, and there hasn’t been enough public discussion around it. So the supervisors should vote against placing it on this fall’s ballot.

Our main concern with the plan is that it might diminish local interest in the mayoral contest. When the presidential race is at the top of the ticket, and likely a U.S. Senate race at the same time, the news media tends to focus on those campaigns, and the public’s attention is focused on them, too. The advantage of having a San Francisco mayor’s race in what is otherwise an off-year for elections is that all the energy in local politics centers on a high-stakes local campaign (The district attorney’s race is also on the ballot, and that might totally get lost in the presidential-year madness).

Some critics oppose the plan because, in practice, it would give the next mayor – at this point, probably Gavin Newsom – an additional year in office. That shouldn’t be an issue, really: This is about more than one mayor, and more than one year. It’s about the future of politics in the city.

It shouldn’t be about the Democratic Party, either. Some people worry that party money – always big in a presidential year – will flow to the anointed Democratic mayoral candidate, drowning out the voices of (say) a Green candidate, or a democrat who didn’t get the party’s nod. Maybe – but maybe all the money will go to the top of the ticket, and there will be less local cash spent on the San Francisco mayor’s race. And the power of the Democratic Party in a presidential year didn’t stop Ross Mirkarimi – a green – from getting elected supervisor from District Five in 2004.

Both supporters and opponents of the plan are trying to calculate how it would help or hurt progressive candidates, but there’s another factor here. Mayoral races are about more than just winning. The 1999 campaign, in which Tom Ammiano lost to Willie Brown, was a turning point in progressive politics in San Francisco. The runoff between Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzalez in 2003 created an immense outpouring of community activism and brought thousands of new people into local politics. In a presidential year, some of that excitement – which is, in the end, crucial to any progressive movement – might have been diffused.

We don’t see any clear mandate or case for making the change right now, and we see some serious downsides. After extensive hearings and public debate, we might be convinced that this is a good idea, but that hasn’t happened yet. So for now, we urge the supervisors not to place it on the November ballot.

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
It’s your Guardian. That’s the message we posted on the cover today, and I mean it: The new sfbg.com website is designed to be fully interactive. You can post your comments on every article, every review, every editorial. You can join in on five new blogs. In a few weeks, we’ll have a reader’s blog, just for you.
Newspaper publishing should never be a one-way communication. For more than 20 years, I’ve been hearing from readers (yeah, I answer my own phone), and your ideas and suggestions (and complaints) are what make this paper great.
And now you can share your thoughts with all the other readers, too. Argue, fight, tell me I’m full of shit, point out great San Francisco ideas that ought to be in the mix … It’s easy. Registration takes about 30 seconds. And keep coming back – there’s going to be more, much more, rolling out in the next few weeks.

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The first thing I did when I learned that private housing developers in San Francisco were demanding 28 percent profit levels (see page 5) was to call my brother Mike, who runs a small business building houses in New York. He almost dropped the phone.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “These guys say they need 28 percent profit?” That’s the minimum, I told him.
“Shit, sign me up,” he laughed. “I’ll take the whole crew and we’ll be on the next plane.”
Mike is thrilled when he walks away with 10 percent profit on a job. So is everyone he knows. So are most small businesses (and quite a few large ones). The only ones who can get away with demanding that sort of return are oil companies, daily newspaper publishers, and, it appears, San Francisco real estate developers.
This isn’t really shocking news: We’ve known for a long time that developers make a killing in an inflated housing market. Compared to the boom years of the 1980s, when the office market was running rampant and out of control, the 28 percent margins aren’t that outrageous – high-rise office developers made even more.
But there’s a bottom line for the city: These folks aren’t just getting rich; they’re getting really rich – purely off a market that exists simply because of the appeal of San Francisco. They owe it to the city to give more than a pittance of that back.
Now this: Just about every small-business owner in San Francisco is sitting down with a spreadsheet and trying to figure out how much Sup. Tom Ammiano’s health care legislation is going to cost. A lot of them seem to be nervous – in part because of the fearmongering campaign put out by the Chamber of Commerce and the Committee on Jobs.
But when you actually look at what the law says, it’s not that scary. I’ve gone over the final language, and here are some key points:
1. The requirement that employers pay for health care doesn’t affect anyone with fewer than 20 employees, which is most of the small businesses in town.
2. Nobody’s going to have to pay anything until July 2007, and companies with between 20 and 50 employees aren’t going to have to pay anything until April 2008.
3. There’s a 90-day waiting period before anyone has to pay for a new employee.
4. Nobody will have to pay for employees who either have health insurance already (from a spouse, say) or who voluntarily decline health insurance.
5. Employers will pay based on how many hours an employee works, so the price for a part-timer will be comparatively small.
6. If you have more than 20 employees and don’t currently provide health insurance for all of them (or the amount you pay for that insurance is low), you’ll have to ante up, either by buying insurance in the private market or paying into the city plan. For companies with 20 to 99 employees, the city plan will run about $1.12 an hour next year for anyone who works more than 12 hours a week. Pencil it out; it may not kill you.
It’s absolutely an imperfect system. Employer-based health insurance is the wrong model. But for now it’s all we have – and this is a way to offer at least basic primary health care to everyone in the city. It’s worth the price. SFBG

Healthy Compromises

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Sup. Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom took another step today towards making health care accessible to all uninsured San Franciscans.
The San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance, which Ammiano and Newsom announced their joint support for July 11, offers access to comprehensive medical services, while requiring that medium and large business meet minimum spending requirement on employees’ health care.
While the agreement is optimsitic, it wasn’t reached without compromise on the employer spending mandate.
From July ’07, when the ordinance would become law, until Jan. 2008, employers will have to provide healthcare for employees who work 12 hours or more. That requirement tightens to 10 and then 8 hours, in Jan. ’08 and Jan.’09, respectively.
Meanwhile, medium sized businesses, (20-50 employees) have until March 31 2007, to start making mandatory payments, (which amounts to about a $1 an hour per worker.
Other tweaks: employers won’t have to make health insurance payments, if their employee has coverage elsewhere (through a parent, a spouse, or presumably another job), but the employee decides who pays.
Of all three compromises, the 12-10-8 compromise spells the greatest danger for the local labor pol (what if stores cut workers’ hours to 11 each per week?)
A special Budget and Finance Committee meeting is set for Monday July 17 at 1pm, and the full Board will discuss it July 18, with a final vote expected on July 25.
With Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier continue to stand on the sidelines? Will Mayor Gavin Newson step inside the county supes’ chambersn? and How many signatures does the business community need to get a referendum on this matter launched by August 9? Stay tuned.

Ammiano’s health care plan is fair

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OPINION Universal health care. These days, most people want it, but no one wants to pay for it.
But like it or not, we all share in the expense of providing health care. We pay for it directly in our health care premiums or indirectly from higher costs for goods, services, and taxes. According to the activist group Health Care for All, “We spend over $6,000 per person in the US — two to three times the amount spent in other countries that insure everyone and have better health outcomes.” Our health care system, if you can call it that, is currently based on a corporate, for-profit model that increasingly leaves large numbers of people uninsured — and they must rely on taxpayer-subsidized public health programs.
Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing for universal health care in San Francisco, and there are three ways on the table to fund it.
The Committee on Jobs, Chamber of Commerce, and Golden Gate Restaurant Association champion a plan in which all businesses pay a set fee, whether or not they are providing health care for their employees. Under this plan, large businesses that are not providing health care for their employees will save big money. Small businesses — and every business already doing the right thing — would subsidize the minority of large businesses that don’t provide health care.
In fact, 63 percent of the projected $50 million in revenue raised by this plan would come from businesses with fewer than 20 employees. A full 80 percent would be paid by employers with fewer than 50 employees.
The local papers say Newsom supports a voluntary plan. I assume that means employers can choose whether to pay. I’m surprised anyone would propose this with a straight face. Most employers do provide health care. This legislation is about those that don’t. They haven’t volunteered to pay for their own employees’ health care; why would they pay for a city plan?
Then there’s Sup. Tom Ammiano’s proposal.
Ammiano’s plan includes a minimum spending requirement for health care services for all employers with 20 or more employees. Small businesses with less than 20 employees (the vast majority of registered businesses in San Francisco) don’t have to pay anything. Of the three proposals, Ammiano’s seems the fairest to the majority of employers that already provide health care.
The Committee on Jobs tells us that small businesses will be hurt by this plan. I’m always suspicious when a well-funded organization that exists to lobby for the interests of the largest corporations in San Francisco leads with an argument related to the impact to the small business community.
The SFSOS thinks that any decision on Ammiano’s health care plan will be made “predominantly by people who have never worked in retail business, never managed a staff, nor ever had to make a payroll.”
I operated a temporary employment business in San Francisco for 25 years. Ammiano’s plan levels the playing field for all businesses.
For the record, many of my former colleagues within the small business community provide very generous health care benefits. Employees in small businesses, after all, are like family. Many small business owners think that those who do not provide health care have an unfair competitive advantage.
If we’re going to have universal health care, everyone should pay. SFBG
Barry Hermanson
Barry Hermanson is running for state assembly in District 12 on the Green Party ticket.

Amalgamated health care

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› sarah@sfbg.com
Mayor Gavin Newsom has taken credit and sought the national spotlight for a plan he touts as an innovative way to deliver universal health care access to the city’s uninsured. Yet Newsom has consistently ducked the vitriolic public debate over how to the pay for the plan, which a companion measure by Sup. Tom Ammiano would cover with a controversial employer mandate.
But as the measures were headed for the first of at least two hearings before the Board of Supervisors (on July 11 after Guardian press time), a board committee and Newsom’s public health director, Dr. Mitch Katz, finally made it clear that Newsom’s plan can’t stand alone, as much as the business community would like it to.
“The two pieces of legislation were created to and do fit together,” Katz said at a July 5 Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee hearing. “One can’t successfully move forward without the other.”
Katz made the comments after budget analyst Harvey Rose said the mayor’s plan doesn’t contain a specific funding mechanism. Rose’s admission prompted Sup. Ross Mirkarimi to characterize the mayor’s proposal as “a one-winged aircraft that doesn’t fly.” Sup. Chris Daly added that “It’s time to be up front that [the San Francisco Health Access Plan] only works if it has significant contributions from outside sources, including Ammiano’s plan.”
Neither Newsom nor his spokesman Peter Ragone returned repeated calls for comment on the issue. The Mayor’s Office also has not fulfilled a June 22 request by the Guardian for public records associated with the plan in violation of deadlines set by the city’s Sunshine Ordinance.
“Celebrating one resolution while pooh-poohing the other is disingenuous, because if they don’t work together, nothing works,” Mirkarimi added at the hearing, shortly before he, Daly, and a mostly mute Sup. Bevan Dufty voted to combine both proposals into one health care plan: the San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance.
“After today’s meeting,” Ammiano wrote in a follow-up press release, “I’m confident that the citizens of San Francisco and the media will understand that the Worker Health Care Security Ordinance and the Health Access Program are one comprehensive health care plan, and are now codified as such in a single bill.”
The decision to amalgamate left small business owners voicing fears over the economic impact of the employer spending mandate, which would raise an estimated $30 million to $49 million of the $200 million cost of providing health care access for San Francisco’s uninsured.
As the controller’s Office of Economic Analysis points out, most of the financial burden of the employer mandate “falls on businesses with 20 to 49 employees, since these firms currently are less likely to offer health care benefits to their workers.”
With the cost of covering 20 full-time employees’ health care estimated at $43,000 to $65,000, many business owners fear the mandate will result in layoffs, economic downturns, and the erosion of their already marginal profits.
Although the controller predicts a “nearly neutral impact” on the city’s economic picture — a loss of 60 to 590 jobs from staff cuts or business closures mitigated by 140 to 250 new health care–related positions — small businesses worry about the controller’s “moderately adverse impact” prediction for employers who currently aren’t offering health care benefits at mandated levels.
“It’s going to add another $50,000 to my already high health care costs,” John Low, who runs a small company in the Tenderloin, said at the hearing. San Francisco Soup Company owner Steve Sarver claimed the mandate could force him to abandon expansion and hiring plans: “Projects that I was borderline on, I’m now going to go toward eliminating those jobs.”
As written before the July 11 hearings, the mandate would kick in January 2007 for large businesses and the following January for small businesses. Mirkarimi says the board should be “extremely sensitive” to the small business community’s concerns.
“The business community knows best how to speak about profit margins. Right now, an employer spending mandate is the only option in orbit. If there are other options, great, but so far all we’re hearing is nothing but distortion,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian. He said the proposal by some downtown leaders to increase the sales tax by a half cent — an alternative to Ammiano’s mandate — comes from “the same community who would sabotage any attempt to enact a tax-based funding mechanism.”
Mirkarimi told us the mayor’s plan was “prematurely pitched through the media on a national stage,” while Ammiano’s legislation, “which is really the heart and soul of the plan, has struggled to get any notoriety locally.” Mirkarimi told us he hopes Newsom will directly address small business concerns — including the reality that his health access plan can’t work without Ammiano’s mandate.
“The mayor needs to make an effort to show small business that he intends to mitigate the negative financial side effects of his plan. But what is the mayor’s communication? And why is he relying on the Board of Supes to fill in the blanks? The mayor needs to exercise leadership, to admit that for his plan to work somebody has to pay, and decide who that somebody is going to be, then build confidence that he has adequate answers. But right now, he’s deflecting that responsibility onto the board.”
Dr. Katz, who was a member of the Universal Healthcare Council that created the plan to offer health access to all the city’s uninsured residents, said he neither hopes nor believes that all 82,000 of the city’s uninsured will enroll.
“We hope that large employers continue to chose commercial health insurance,” Katz said at the meeting, noting that 95 percent of businesses with more than 100 employees already have commercial health insurance.
“If people enroll in a commercial health insurance plan, the city doesn’t get the revenue, but we also don’t get costs,” said Katz, who believes the city can offer health access to all uninsured residents without building additional health centers.
“All existing clinics and facilities have shown a desire to join the program and accept people,” Katz said, noting that the $104 million the city already spends on San Francisco’s uninsured is on the lowest-income individuals, plus a minute subsidy to small- and medium-size business but no subsidy for large businesses.
“Most of SF’s 82,000 uninsured residents are getting care right now, but not in a rational way,” Katz explained. “I look at how much capacity could we add to health centers by only paying for additional providers, like nurses, doctors. And the answer is a lot. We’re not doing evenings or Saturdays, so we just need to open for more hours and hire more doctors, nurses.”
Acknowledging that the Department of Public Health already saw 49,000 uninsured residents last year, Katz said that doesn’t mean that people are getting what he calls “rational care.”
“So when we create a system, we’ll create a demand,” he said. “It’s not just the woman with a bad cough who comes in, but now she’ll also get a pap smear.” SFBG
For coverage of the July 11 hearing and other updates on the health plan, visit www.sfbg.com.

Downtown’s deceptions

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By Steven T. Jones
The rancorous debate over providing health care to all San Franciscans finally comes to the Board of Supervisors for a vote tomorrow, culminating a truly ugly political spectacle. The business community has aggressively gone after the measure’s sponsor, Tom Ammiano, angrily accusing him of not listening and not caring.
Now, it’s understandable that some small business people on the verge of going under would be upset about having to give health coverage to their employees. It’s a legitimate concern, but it’s also a valid point that Ammiano’s measure makes: providing a living wage and health coverage to employees is a reasonable cost of doing business in this city, and if you can’t afford to do these things, then your business plan doesn’t really pencil out, sorry.
This might have been a good political debate to have, but unfortunately, the issue has been sullied and convoluted by the intentional deceptions of a few downtown groups (notably the Committee on Jobs, Golden Gate Restaurant Association, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce), distorted and inaccurate presentations of the issue by the Chronicle and Examiner, and the political cowardice of Mayor Gavin Newsom.
If you’ve been reading the Guardian then you know that the “Newsom plan” was simply one component of the “Ammiano plan,” not the workable stand-alone plan that the dailies and business elites tried to present it as (by itself, Newsom’s plan didn’t pay for itself and it threatened to make the number of uninsured in the city grow by providing the perverse incentive for businesses to drop their employees’ health insurance in favor of cheaper but less comprehensive access to city clinics). Even the dailies finally got around to saying the two plans relied on one another last week after playing up the deceptive competition for weeks.
Here’s the bottom line: Ammiano’s plan got eight co-sponsors because it was an honest attempt to deal with a serious problem using an approach (employer mandates) popular with most citizens (as shown by 69 percent of the people voting for a statewide mandate in Prop. 72). But downtown has done nothing but obstruct and obfuscate the issue. And they’re loud and have tons of money, so they’ve managed to bring out Newsom’s most cowardly instincts and they’ve cowed the media into bearing false witness to what’s going on.
Will they also peel off a supervisor or two who have already pledged their support? I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

The best health care plan

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EDITORIAL The health care model that’s been established, largely by default, in the United States is an utter mess. Most working people get their insurance through their employers. That means people who have jobs that don’t provide insurance are out of luck, and people who don’t have jobs are out of luck, and the self-employed are stuck with crazy bills, and small businesses are getting hit harder and harder with rising insurance rates that they can’t afford.
It’s a ridiculous way to handle health care: In most other western democracies, everyone is part of a national health care program, and under the best systems, the government is the single insurer and pays all the bills.
Among other things, that prevents the sort of crisis that San Francisco faces today, where the large numbers of uninsured residents have no choice but to seek care at the overburdened San Francisco General Hospital. That leaves the taxpayers on the hook for more than $100 million a year.
For businesses, particularly small businesses, that scrape and suffer to provide health insurance for their workers, the system is fundamentally unfair: Those companies pay twice, first for their own employees, and then again in higher taxes to cover the costs of the uninsured. Businesses that can well afford health insurance (the Wal-Marts of the world) but don’t pay are forcing others to cover their costs.
In a perfect world, with national health insurance, this wouldn’t be an issue. But it’s almost impossible for a single city to implement a single-payer system — which is why Mayor Gavin Newsom is struggling to present a functional health plan, and why Sup. Tom Ammiano’s employer mandate plan is absolutely necessary.
But the small business advocates who complain about the burden of paying more than $100 a month for each uninsured employee have a point, too — and this entire plan ought to be linked (at least in the long run) to Sup. Aaron Peskin’s proposals to change the city’s business tax.
Newsom’s dramatic announcement last week of a complex plan to cover all residents won overwhelmingly favorable press coverage. But so far, the plan itself is little more than a glorified press release. There are a lot of devilish details, particularly when it comes to funding.
There’s no new money in the mayor’s plan. He argues, correctly, that San Francisco currently spends $104 million on health care for the city’s 82,000 uninsured, and shifting that money into a city-run health care program will underwrite a significant amount of the cost. But that money can’t just be moved like a chess piece — it’s part of the San Francisco Department of Public Health budget, and if everyone does not sign up for the new program and very sick patients (including, say, undocumented workers who don’t understand or fear enrolling in the city plan) keep showing up at General, there won’t be enough money to go around.
There’s also the very real prospect that some unscrupulous employers will simply quit paying health insurance premiums and dump their employees into the city plan. That would overwhelm the program and push it quickly toward financial ruin.
So the mayor’s plan has no chance at success unless Ammiano’s employer mandate passes, too. The Ammiano plan would offer additional funding for the program by requiring that employers either provide private health insurance or pay into a city pool — and would prevent businesses from tossing their health expenses into the city’s lap.
Ammiano’s plan isn’t perfect — no employer-based plan ever will be. The health insurance requirement would hit all businesses with more than 20 employees, and that might be a bit low. The plan already has some progressive gradations (companies with more than 100 employees would pay a higher fee), but linking the costs more directly to the size of the business (in other words, hitting the large outfits — which can well afford health insurance — a bit harder and giving more of a city subsidy to the smallest companies) could help ease the burden on struggling merchants.
But in the end, his plan — which would have no impact on employers who already offer health insurance to their workers — is crucial to any effort to get the uninsured into a decent health program (and to end the stiff taxpayer subsidy for companies that don’t provide insurance). The supervisors should approve it.
Still that’s not the end of the story. At the same time that Ammiano’s addressing health care, Peskin has floated a proposal for a new gross receipts tax on local business. Here’s the way to proceed: The supervisors need to fund a complete study of how much gross revenue local firms take in; write a new tax that allows the city to eliminate the payroll tax; add a progressive gross receipts tax; and use the next tax policy to help deal with the costs of health care. Big, rich companies pay a lot (enough to help subsidize the citywide health plan). Small firms pay less (and the reduced tax burden helps offset the costs of paying for health insurance). In the end, San Francisco would be the first US city to launch a progressive system for providing health insurance to all. SFBG

Shotgun marriage

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› sarah@sfbg.com
Mayor Gavin Newsom has garnered media accolades for his San Francisco Health Access Plan, which would provide the city’s 82,000 uninsured residents a package of health care services, including preventative, primary, specialty, and emergency care, lab work, X-rays, pharmaceuticals, and inpatient hospitalization.
All of this sounds good until you consider how the press has glossed over serious flaws in Newsom’s plan, which was coauthored by Sup. Tom Ammiano. And SFHAP could be doomed to fail unless coupled with the more controversial Ammiano-authored health care legislation: the Worker Health Care Security Ordinance (WHSCO).
Ammiano’s ordinance would require employers operating within the city that have at least 20 employees (or 50 employees for nonprofits) to provide health care coverage for their workers. Predictably these mandatory spending requirements have the business community screaming its opposition — and Newsom, who is up for reelection next year, pussyfooting around the issue.
But the truth is that Newsom hasn’t detailed how to fully pay for his plan or avoid its policy pitfalls without the financial and structural boost that WHSCO’s mandates provide.
“There is no separation between the two pieces of legislation except in the way they’ve been presented. They’re joined at the hip, and there will be no funding gap with both pieces of legislation working together,” Ammiano told the Guardian.
Here’s how the plans work: To cover the estimated $200 million cost of Newsom’s sliding scale SFHAP, the city would contribute the $104 million it currently spends on the uninsured, hoping that more preventive care would efficiently translate into lower emergency room costs.
Add that to an estimated $60 million that the city thinks higher income enrollees will pay, plus an additional $10 million in estimated savings from increased federal cost-sharing. But even if all that works out, there’s a $30 million shortfall.
Enter Ammiano’s plan, which would generate an estimated $30 million to $40 million in employer contributions. There’s also another key piece of Ammiano’s plan that saves the one Newsom is touting: Unless Ammiano’s plan becomes law, there’s nothing to stop employers who already offer health insurance from saving money by dumping their workers into Newsom’s newly minted program, thus expanding the number of uninsured and potentially overwhelming the city’s clinics.
While Ammiano’s plan requires businesses with more than 20 employees to cover 50 percent of workers’ health care costs ($1.06 an hour), and those with more than 100 employees to cover 75 percent of those costs ($1.60 an hour), it also offers employers a wide array of health care expenditure options, including providing insurance, creating health savings accounts, or paying into the Health Access Plan.
There’s a reason for these options: the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act. The act prevents cities and states from specifying which health care plan employers must provide. But as Ammiano discovered, municipalities can stipulate how much employers must spend on health care.
Asked why he thinks Newsom isn’t giving Ammiano’s mandatory plan his public blessing, Ammiano waxes diplomatic.
“I asked the mayor, ‘So, what could you live with?’ and the answer was the Health Access Plan, in which everyone is covered, and there are no preexisting conditions,” Ammiano told us.
But the business community latched onto the idea as if it existed in a vacuum. Nathan Nayman of Committee on Jobs helped develop the Newsom plan but continues to slam Ammiano’s ordinance. At a Budget and Finance Committee hearing on June 26, Nayman called Ammiano’s ordinance “a full frontal assault on small and medium businesses.” But when challenged by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi over how killing the ordinance would incapacitate Newsom’s plan, Nayman suggested “putting both plans on hiatus.”
Ammiano said he’s running out of patience with Nayman and his downtown allies.
“They didn’t lift a finger except to come in at the last minute with a proposal that was neither progressive nor legally viable,” he complained, referring to an 11th-hour suggestion that businesses be charged a license fee. The fee would have fallen heavily on businesses with less than 20 employees — which don’t have to provide health insurance — and likely would have been challenged as a tax in disguise, thereby triggering a ballot.
Not that the Ammiano camp is afraid of voters. In 2004, 69 percent of San Francisco voted for Proposition 72, which would have provided employer mandated health care had it not narrowly failed statewide. So while Ammiano anticipates resistance from the business community, he isn’t expecting a “monolithic rebellion.”
“They’ve been doing their own polling, so they know if [mandatory health care spending] goes to ballot, it’ll pass, and they’ll only get much more rigid legislation,” Ammiano told us.
Ken Jacobs, who Ammiano describes as the brains behind WHSCO and who was also part of the mayor’s 37-member Universal Healthcare Council that developed SFHAP, told us WHSCO not only helps workers who don’t have health care access but also serves to stop the erosion of employer-sponsored coverage.
Jacobs — who is deputy chair of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center — said it’s important not to erode the 85 percent of SF-based businesses already providing employee health care benefits. Even Newsom’s health director, Mitch Katz, has publicly said that good health insurance is better than the access plan Newsom is touting.
Crediting San Francisco’s existing clinic system for making SFHAP conceptually possible, Jacobs noted that its estimated $200 million annual cost is based on “a fully ramped-up program in which every uninsured resident is enrolled” — something he believes won’t happen immediately.
Jacobs also points out that if employers who currently don’t offer medical benefits sign up for private insurance because of WHSCO’s mandate, their employees will no longer be uninsured, thus reducing the public system costs. He also believes that because WHSCO makes large employers spend $274 a month, it’s unlikely they’d opt for SFHAP because that plan is limited to care in San Francisco.
Conversely, SFHAP requires participants to be willing to apply for state and federal benefits. They also must pay monthly fees ranging from a nominal $3 for those earning below $19,600 to $35 for those earning between $19,600 and $40,000 to $201 a month for those earning over $50,000.
There’s also one more reason why Newsom will likely to be forced to accept the marriage with Ammiano’s plan, despite the grumbling from his business community supporters: Eight supervisors have now signed on as WHSCO cosponsors, giving it a veto-proof majority.
Newsom’s spokespeople did not return our repeated calls for comment, but Eileen Shields of the Department of Health confirmed that “Ammiano’s legislation supports making the SFHAP a reality financially.” SFBG

The cable that bind s

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Oakland, San Francisco, and other California cities have in recent years tried to negotiate maximum public benefits under their franchise agreement with cable television provider Comcast, but all have backed down when the telecom giant threatened costly litigation.

The latest episode played out May 30 at the Oakland City Council meeting when the council voted to repeal an ordinance that would have required franchisees like Comcast to allow workers to decide whether they want to form a union.

Comcast — dubbed the “Wal-Mart of Telecom” by the American Right to Work Foundation — not only sued Oakland over the ordinance but also decided to void a tentative franchise agreement with the city that had taken three and a half years to work out.

Comcast officials claim the company walked away from the contract because two years had elapsed since major parts of the agreement had been hammered out and during that time the competitive field had shifted.

As for the lawsuit, company officials argue that Oakland’s union ordinance is preempted by federal law and that the city doesn’t have a “proprietary interest” in its franchise.

A proprietary interest occurs when a city has to manage critical public rights-of-way, such as streets, alleys, and utility easements, and must make sure it receives fair compensation for the ongoing use of those public properties by private entities, like Comcast.

In such situations, a city must ensure the efficient and cost-effective management of its public rights-of-way and must maximize benefit and minimize risk, including the risk of a labor-<\h>management conflict that could arise from a union organizing campaign.

That, at least, was the argument the city of Oakland made when it drew up its labor ordinance, and it was the argument that city council president Ignacio De La Fuente continued to make at the May 30 council meeting.

Councilmember Desley Brooks managed to sound like a Comcast apologist by claiming the city had been wrong to pass the ordinance in the first place.

“We knew that when this ordinance was passed, we had no basis to do it,” Brooks said. “We can try and justify why we did it, but federal law is settled in this matter.”

But De La Fuente was joined by Councilmember Jane Brunner and Vice Mayor Jean Quan in insisting that the city wasn’t backing down because it was wrong, but because it couldn’t afford to fight with a deep-<\h>pocketed monopoly in court.

That was the same argument that led the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to narrowly approve a four-year contract extension with Comcast last September, rather than negotiate better public access and other community benefits as part of the contract.

San Jose, Walnut Creek, and other cities have also been tied up in expensive litigation with Comcast, which has virtually unlimited resources and a willingness to spend big in court fights and the political arena. But a bill now moving through the California State Legislature has the potential to shake up the cable television playing field — some say, in ways that are hard to predict.

The Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act, authored by Assembly speaker Fabian N??ñez, seeks to allow telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon to provide television services through fiber-<\h>optic lines and thereby compete with Comcast and other cable providers.

The landmark bill, AB 2987, cleared the Assembly on a 70–<\d>0 vote the day after the Oakland City Council repealed its ordinance. It is now awaiting consideration — and possible modification — by the Senate.

It is being watched carefully by Communications Workers of America, which represents 700,000 workers nationally, including 2,000 in the Bay Area, and is one of the few labor unions that is growing.

As CWA field coordinator Lisa Morowitz explained, for cities to take on Comcast individually, as Oakland, Walnut Creek, and San Jose have tried without success to do, is like David fighting Goliath.

“It’s one step forward, two steps back,” Morowitz told the Guardian. Nevertheless, she believes Oakland has substantial leverage in future negotiations with Comcast, precisely because of the N??ñez bill.

“CWA supports AB 2987,” Morowitz said, “because we believe it’s going to create conditions more favorable for cities, communities, and workers by bringing competition to video service.”

She acknowledged that the bill won’t directly address the issues raised during Oakland’s ordinance battle, but, she said, “theoretically, it will create more accountability.”

CWA argues that in addition to creating competition in the video services marketplace, the bill will replace city-by-city franchising deals that have led to steep rate increases, protect revenue streams for local governments, and expand local tax bases.

But Sydney Levy of San Francisco–<\d>based Media Alliance worries that it will simply help the titans of industry and not the communities they supposedly serve.

“I understand that labor thinks it has a better chance of being able to organize within companies if there’s more competition and AT&T is pitted against Verizon is pitted against Comcast,” Levy told us. “But I disagree with CWA on how to have that competition be fair. It’s like energy deregulation. It sounded cute, but it wasn’t. So, we can’t be stupid this time around. We need to do it in a way that’s good for cities, consumers, and communities.”

The goal of franchise agreements that cities enter into with cable companies is to ensure that providers cover the entire city, provide public affairs programming, and pay for their use of public rights-of-way.

“But with the new bill, there’s no enforcement, no contractual obligations, no timetable,” claimed Levy, who worries that under the proposed arrangement Comcast’s competitors could say, “We can’t put fiber everywhere; we’ll upgrade as we see fit.”

“But that’s not good enough,” said Levy, who also worries that the bill will screw up community media locally and that redlining — providing new services in higher-<\h>income neighborhoods while bypassing areas already underserved by broadband services — may well occur.

And then there’s the sticky matter of ceding control to Sacramento.

“If we don’t have the ability to complain at the city level, then we’ll have to take all our fights to Sacramento, where we don’t have equal access,” Levy said. “That would be disastrous for local decision making.”

To his mind, AB 2987 is about cable vs. phone companies, and not about what’s best for the public interest.

“Having competition is a good thing for cities, consumers, and communities, but having competition that is unfair to communities and dismantles protections is not. We need to fix what’s in the Senate version,” he argued.

Levy believes that Comcast is playing a wait-and-see game as the N??ñez bill makes its way through Sacramento and that Oakland should continue to negotiate with Comcast for the best franchise deal possible.

“Because it may be the last franchise deal Oakland gets,” he explained, warning that if AB 2987 passes unmodified in the Senate, “we’re going to go from an irresponsible monopoly system to one that’s a system of unfair competition.”

But N??ñez deputy chief of staff Steve Maviglio told the Guardian that without the N??ñez bill, “cities have as much choice as they did in the former Soviet Union…. This bill is a powerful incentive for other providers.” Maviglio said that the bill language could still be modified in the Senate, but that its basic goal is clear.

“We hope this bill will save consumers money, lead to more competition, and prevent redlining,” he said. “We want to make sure under<\h>served communities don’t get left out of the digital picture.”

Comcast is the 800-pound gorilla lurking behind the vote in Sacramento, the force that all cities are looking to find some leverage against.

San Francisco supervisor Ross Mirkarimi told us that the Board of Supervisors had tailored legislation that mimicked Oakland’s union-<\h>organizing ordinance but abandoned it on the advice of CWA and the SF Labor Council because of what was happening to Oakland at the hands of Comcast.

To Mirkarimi’s mind, the best solution is neither piecemeal ordinances nor statewide laws, but for cities to municipalize their telecom and Internet systems.

“We would not be facing these kind of legal challenges if San Francisco was able to municipalize,” he told us.

And that’s precisely what San Francisco is now pursuing. A proposal by Sup. Tom Ammiano to study the creation of a citywide municipal broadband system — to be installed as streets are opened up for sewer lines or other infrastructure needs — was recently put out to bid.

Ammiano told the Guardian he expects to get some preliminary indications as to whether the system would be viable as soon as this summer, and he’s confident San Francisco will ultimately be in the position to offer television and other broadband services to city residents.

Mirkarimi, who supports the proposal, said it’s the best hope to “redeem our utility democracy as it pertains to our cable industry.” SFBG

Newsom loses control

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› steve@sfbg.com

In the early days, the mayor tried to sound like a practical, hands-on executive who was ready to run San Francisco.

Mayor Gavin Newsom used his inaugural address on Jan. 8, 2004, to emphasize that he was a uniter, not a divider — and that he wanted to get things done.

"I say it’s time to start working together to find common purpose and common ground," he proclaimed. "Because I want to make this administration about solutions."

It’s a mantra he’s returned to again and again in his rhetoric on a wide range of issues, claiming a "commonsense" approach while casting "ideology" as an evil to be overcome and as the main motive driving the left-leaning majority of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

"Because it’s easy to be against something," Newsom said on that sunny winter day. "It’s easy to blame. It’s easy to stop…. What’s hard is to hear that maybe to come together, we need to leave behind old ideas and long-held grudges. But that’s exactly what we need to do."

But if that’s the standard, Newsom has spent the past 17 months taking the easy way.

It’s been a marked change from his first-year lovefest, when he tried to legalize same-sex marriage, reach out to Bayview–Hunters Point residents, and force big hotels to end their lockout of workers.

A Guardian review of the most significant City Hall initiatives during 2005 and 2006 — as well as interviews with more than a dozen policy experts and public interest advocates — shows that Newsom has been an obstructionist who has proposed few "solutions" to the city’s problems, and followed through on even fewer.

The Board of Supervisors, in sharp contrast, has been taking the policy lead. The majority on the district-elected board in the past year has moved a generally progressive agenda designed to preserve rental units, prevent evictions, strengthen development standards, promote car-free spaces, increase affordable housing, maintain social services, and protect city workers.

Yet many of those efforts have been blocked or significantly weakened by Newsom and his closest allies on the board: Fiona Ma, Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Bevan Dufty. And on efforts to get tough with big business or prevent Muni service cuts and fare hikes, Newsom was able to peel off enough moderate supervisors to stop the progressives — led by Chris Daly, Tom Ammiano, and Ross Mirkarimi — at the board level.

But one thing that Newsom has proved himself unable to do in the past year is prevent progressive leaders — particularly Daly, against whom Newsom has a "long-held grudge" that has on a few recent occasions led to unsavory political tactics and alliances — from setting the public agenda for the city.

Balance of power

The Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors are the two poles of power at City Hall — and generally the system gives a strong advantage to the mayor, who has far more resources at his disposal, a higher media profile, and the ability to act swiftly and decisively.

Yet over the past year, the three most progressive supervisors — along with their liberal-to-moderate colleagues Gerardo Sandoval, Jake McGoldrick, Aaron Peskin, and Sophie Maxwell — have initiated the most significant new city policies, dealing with housing, poverty, health care, alternative transportation, violence prevention, and campaign finance reform.

Most political observers and City Hall insiders mark the moment when the board majority took control of the city agenda as last summer, a point when Newsom’s honeymoon ended, progressives filled the leadership void on growth issues, problems like tenants evictions and the murder rate peaked, and Newsom was increasingly giving signs that he wasn’t focused on running the city.

"Gay marriage gave the mayor his edge and gave him cover for a long time," said Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a queer and tenants rights activist. "About a year ago that started to wear off, and his armor started to be shed."

Daly was the one supervisor who had been aggressively criticizing Newsom during that honeymoon period. To some, Daly seemed isolated and easy to dismiss — at least until August 2005, when Daly negotiated a high-profile deal with the developers of the Rincon Hill towers that extracted more low-income housing and community-benefits money than the city had ever seen from a commercial project.

The Newsom administration watched the negotiations from the sidelines. The mayor signed off on the deal, but within a couple months turned into a critic and said he regretted supporting it. Even downtown stalwarts like the public policy think tank San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association noted the shift in power.

"I think we saw a different cut on the issue than we’ve seen before," SPUR executive director Gabriel Metcalf told us. "Chris Daly is not a NIMBY. I see Chris Daly as one of the supervisors most able to deal with physical change, and he’s not afraid of urbanism…. And he’s been granted by the rest of the board a lot of leadership in the area of land use."

SPUR and Metcalf were critical of aspects of the Daly deal, such as where the money would go. But after the deal, Newsom and his minions, like press secretary Peter Ragone, had a harder time demonizing Daly and the board (although they never stopped trying).

Around that same time, hundreds of evictions were galvanizing the community of renters — which makes up around two-thirds of city residents. Newsom tried to find some compromise on the issue, joining Peskin to convene a task force composed of tenants activists, developers, and real estate professionals, hoping that the group could find a way to prevent evictions while expanding home ownership opportunities.

"The mayor views the striking of balance between competing interests as an important approach to governing," Ragone told the Guardian after we explained the array of policy disputes this story would cover.

The task force predictably fell apart after six meetings. "The mayor was trying to find a comfortable way to get out of the issue," said Mecca, a member of the task force. But with some issues, there simply is no comfortable solution; someone’s going to be unhappy with the outcome. "When that failed," Mecca said, "there was nowhere for him to go anymore."

The San Francisco Tenants Union and its allies decided it was time to push legislation that would protect tenants, organizing an effective campaign that finally forced Newsom into a reactionary mode. The mayor wound up siding overtly with downtown interests for the first time in his mayoral tenure — and in the process, he solidified the progressive board majority.

Housing quickly became the issue that defines differences between Newsom and the board.

Free-market policy

"The Newsom agenda has been one of gentrification," said San Francisco Tenants Union director Ted Gullicksen. The mayor and his board allies have actively opposed placing limitations on the high number of evictions (at least until the most recent condo conversion measure, which Dufty and Newsom supported, a victory tenants activists attribute to their organizing efforts), while at the same time encouraging development patterns that "bring in more high-end condominiums and saturate the market with that," Gullicksen explained.

He pointed out that those two approaches coalesce into a doubly damaging policy on the issue of converting apartments into condominiums, which usually displace low-income San Franciscans, turn an affordable rental unit into an expensive condominium, and fill the spot with a higher-income owner.

"So you really get a two-on-one transformation of the city," Gullicksen said.

Newsom’s allies don’t agree, noting that in a city where renters outnumber homeowners two to one, some loss of rental housing is acceptable. "Rather than achieve their stated goals of protecting tenants, the real result is a barrier to home ownership," Elsbernd told us, explaining his vote against all four recent tenant-protection measures.

On the development front, Gullicksen said Newsom has actively pushed policies to develop housing that’s unaffordable to most San Franciscans — as he did with his failed Workforce Housing Initiative and some of his area plans — while maintaining an overabundance of faith in free-market forces.

"He’s very much let the market have what the market wants, which is high-end luxury housing," Gullicksen said.

As a result, Mecca said, "I think we in the tenant movement have been effective at making TICs a class issue."

Affordable housing activists say there is a marked difference between Newsom and the board majority on housing.

"The Board of Supervisors is engaged in an active pursuit of land-use policy that attempts to preserve as much affordable housing, as much rental housing, as much neighborhood-serving businesses as possible," longtime housing activist Calvin Welch told us. "And the mayor is totally and completely lining up with downtown business interests."

Welch said Newsom has shown where he stands in the appointments he makes — such as that of Republican planning commissioner Michael Antonini, and his nomination of Ted Dienstfrey to run Treasure Island, which the Rules Committee recently rejected — and by the policies he supports.

Welch called Daly’s Rincon deal "precedent setting and significant." It was so significant that downtown noticed and started pushing back.

Backlash

Board power really coalesced last fall. In addition to the housing and tenant issues, Ammiano brought forward a plan that would force businesses to pay for health insurance plans for their employees. That galvanized downtown and forced Newsom to finally make good on his promise to offer his own plan to deal with the uninsured — but the mayor offered only broad policy goals, and the plan itself is still being developed.

It was in this climate that many of Newsom’s big-business supporters, including Don Fisher — the Republican founder of the Gap who regularly bankrolls conservative political causes in San Francisco — demanded and received a meeting with Newsom. The December sit-down was attended by a who’s who of downtown developers and power brokers.

"That was a result of them losing their ass on Rincon Hill," Welch said of the meeting.

The upshot — according to public records and Guardian interviews with attendees — was that Newsom agreed to oppose an ordinance designed to limit how much parking could be built along with the 10,000 housing units slated for downtown. The mayor instead would support a developer-written alternative carried by Alioto-Pier.

The measure downtown opposed was originally sponsored by Daly before being taken over by Peskin. It had the strong support of Newsom’s own planning director, Dean Macris, and was approved by the Planning Commission on a 6–1 vote (only Newsom’s Republican appointee, Antonini, was opposed).

The process that led to the board’s 7–4 approval of the measure was politically crass and embarrassing for the Mayor’s Office (see “Joining the Battle,” 2/8/06), but he kept his promise and vetoed the measure. The votes of his four allies were enough to sustain the veto.

Newsom tried to save face in the ugly saga by pledging to support a nearly identical version of the measure, but with just a couple more giveaways to developers: allowing them to build more parking garages and permitting more driveways with their projects.

Political observers say the incident weakened Newsom instead of strengthening him.

"They can’t orchestrate a move. They are only acting by vetoes, and you can’t run the city by vetoes," Welch said. "He never puts anything on the line, and that’s why the board has become so emboldened."

Rippling out

The Newsom administration doesn’t seem to grasp how housing issues — or symbolic issues like creating car-free spaces or being wary of land schemes like the Bayview–Hunters Point redevelopment plan — shape perceptions of other issues. As Welch said, "All politics in San Francisco center around land use."

N’Tanya Lee, executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, said the Newsom administration has done a very good job of maintaining budgetary support for programs dealing with children, youth, and their families. But advocates have relied on the leadership of progressive supervisors like Daly to push affordable housing initiatives like the $20 million budget supplemental the board initiated and approved in April.

"Our primary concern is that low- and moderate-income families are being pushed out of San Francisco," Lee told us. "We’re redefining what it means to be pro-kid and pro-family in San Francisco."

Indeed, that’s a very different approach from the so-called pro-family agenda being pushed by SFSOS and some of Newsom’s other conservative allies, who argue that keeping taxes low while keeping the streets and parks safe and clean is what families really want. But Lee worries more about ensuring that families have reasonably priced shelter.

So she and other affordable housing advocates will be watching closely this summer as the board and Newsom deal with Daly’s proposal to substantially increase the percentage of affordable housing developers must build under the city’s inclusionary-housing policy. Newsom’s downtown allies are expected to strongly oppose the plan.

Even on Newsom’s signature issue, the board has made inroads.

"In general, on the homeless issue, the supervisor who has shown the most strong and consistent leadership has been Chris Daly," said Coalition on Homelessness director Juan Prada.

Prada credits the mayor with focusing attention on the homeless issue, although he is critical of the ongoing harassment of the homeless by the Police Department and the so-called Homeward Bound program that gives homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town.

"This administration has a genuine interest in homeless issues, which the previous one didn’t have, but they’re banking too much on the Care Not Cash approach," Prada said.

Other Newsom initiatives to satisfy his downtown base of support have also fallen flat.

Robert Haaland of the city employee labor union SEIU Local 790 said Newsom has tried to reform the civil service system and privatize some city services, but has been stopped by labor and the board.

"They were trying to push a privatization agenda, and we pushed back," Haaland said, noting that Supervisor Ma’s alliance with Newsom on that issue was the reason SEIU 790 endorsed Janet Reilly over Ma in the District 12 Assembly race.

The turning point on the issue came last year, when the Newsom administration sought to privatize the security guards at the Asian Art Museum as a cost-saving measure. The effort was soundly defeated in the board’s Budget Committee.

"That was a key vote, and they lost, so I don’t think they’ll be coming back with that again," Haaland said, noting that labor has managed to win over Dufty, giving the board a veto-proof majority on privatization issues.

Who’s in charge?

Even many Newsom allies will privately grumble that Newsom isn’t engaged enough with the day-to-day politics of the city. Again and again, Newsom has seemed content to watch from the sidelines, as he did with Supervisor Mirkarimi’s proposal to create a public financing program for mayoral candidates.

"The board was out front on that, while the mayor stayed out of it until the very end," said Steven Hill, of the Center for Voting and Democracy, who was involved with the measure. And when the administration finally did weigh in, after the board had approved the plan on a veto-proof 9–2 vote, Newsom said the measure didn’t go far enough. He called for public financing for all citywide offices — but never followed up with an actual proposal.

The same has been true on police reform and violence prevention measures. Newsom promised to create a task force to look into police misconduct, to hold a blue-ribbon summit on violence prevention, and to implement a community policing system with grassroots input — and none of that has come to pass.

Then, when Daly took the lead in creating a community-based task force to develop violence prevention programs with an allocation of $10 million a year for three years — Measure A on the June ballot — Newsom and his board allies opposed the effort, arguing the money would be better spent on more cops (see “Ballot-Box Alliance,” page 19).

"He’s had bad counsel on this issue of violence all the way through," said Sharen Hewitt, who runs the Community Leadership Academy Emergency Response project. "He has not done damn near enough from his position, and neither has the board."

Hewitt worries that current city policies, particularly on housing, are leading to class polarization that could make the problems of violence worse. And while Newsom’s political allies tend to widen the class divide, she can’t bring herself to condemn the mayor: "I think he’s a nice guy and a lot smarter than people have given him credit for."

Tom Radulovich, who sits on the BART board and serves as executive director of Transportation for a Livable City (which is in the process of changing its name to Livable City), said Newsom generally hasn’t put much action behind his rhetorical support for the environment and transit-first policies.

"Everyone says they’re pro-environment," he said.

In particular, Radulovich was frustrated by Newsom’s vetoes of the downtown parking and Healthy Saturdays measures and two renter-protection measures. The four measures indicated very different agendas pursued by Newsom and the board majority.

In general, Radulovich often finds his smart-growth priorities opposed by Newsom’s allies. "The moneyed interests usually line up against livable city, good planning policies," he said. On the board, Radulovich said it’s no surprise that the three supervisors from the wealthiest parts of town — Ma, Elsbernd, and Alioto-Pier — generally vote against initiatives he supports.

"Dufty is the oddity because he represents a pretty progressive, urbane district," Radulovich said, "but he tends to vote like he’s from a more conservative district."

What’s next?

The recent lawsuit by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Committee of Jobs — urging more aggressive use of a voter-approved requirement that board legislation undergo a detailed economic analysis — shows that downtown is spoiling for a fight (see “Downtown’s ‘Hail Mary’ Lawsuit,” page 9). So politics in City Hall is likely to heat up.

"There is a real absence of vision and leadership in the city right now, particularly on the question of who will be able to afford to live in San Francisco 20 years from now," Mirkarimi said. "There is a disparity between Newsom hitting the right notes in what the press and public want to hear and between the policy considerations that will put those positions into effect."

But Newsom’s allies say they plan to stand firm against the ongoing effort by progressives to set the agenda.

"I think I am voting my constituency," Elsbernd said. "I’m voting District Seven and voicing a perspective of a large part of the city that the progressive majority doesn’t represent."

Newsom flack Ragone doesn’t accept most of the narratives that are laid out by activists, from last year’s flip in the balance of power to the influence of downtown and Newsom’s wealthy benefactors on his decision to veto four measures this year.

"Governing a city like San Francisco is complex. There are many areas of nuance in governing this city," Ragone said. "Everyone knows Gavin Newsom defies traditional labels. That’s not part of a broad political strategy, but just how he governs."

Yet the majority of the board seems unafraid to declare where they stand on the most divisive issues facing the city.

"The board has — really, since the 2000 election — has been pushing a progressive set of policies as it related to housing, just-taxation policies, and an array of social service provisions," Peskin said. "All come with some level of controversy, because none are free." SFBG

Downtown’s “Hail Mary” lawsuit

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EDITORIAL This one is way over the top: The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Committee on Jobs filed suit last week against the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, alleging that the supes won’t implement Proposition I, the 2004 ballot measure that was aimed at derailing progressive legislation. The suit makes little legal sense: The downtown crew is demanding that the city do something that it’s already doing, for the most part. But it shows an aggressive new strategy on the part of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s allies, who are out to scuttle three important bills that will probably win board approval.

Prop. I was designed to do two things: Delay anything that downtown might consider "antibusiness" and promote the political fortunes of Michela Alioto-Pier, who authored the ballot measure. The idea: Create an Office of Economic Analysis, under the city controller, with the responsibility to do an "economic impact analysis" of any legislation that comes before the board. Of course, that economic impact analysis will by definition be fairly narrowly focused; it won’t consider the social impacts or consequences of decisions.

That was always the flaw in Prop. I, and that was the reason we opposed the measure. Economic impact studies that show only how much a proposal would cost or how it might harm the "business climate" ignore the fact that a lot of government regulation improves things that aren’t quantifiable. And even when they can be measured, certain effects are ignored: Clean air has a tremendous value — but typical studies of antipollution measures focus only on the costs of compliance. Safe streets, nice parks, and good schools are worth a fortune — but a study that examines the tax burden required to pay for them won’t account for that.

Downtown spent a fortune promoting the measure (and sending out colorful flyers with Alioto-Pier’s face on them, which didn’t hurt her reelection efforts). It narrowly passed — but since Alioto-Pier never put in a request for the additional money the plan would cost, it took an entire city budget cycle to fund and hire the two staff economists who will do the work.

Now, for better or for worse, they’re on board, and the analyses are beginning — but downtown isn’t satisfied. Chamber spokesperson Carol Piasente told us the group wants to eliminate any board discretion in deciding what needs analysis and what doesn’t; right now, the board president can waive the analysis on relatively trivial things like resolutions and appointments.

But what’s really going on, according to Sup. Chris Daly, is that downtown is gearing up for a full-scale attack on three bills: Sup. Tom Ammiano’s proposal to require employers to pay for health care; Sup. Sophie Maxwell’s plan to better enforce the minimum wage laws; and Daly’s proposal to require additional affordable housing in all market-rate developments. "Downtown’s hail mary pass involves using the economic analysis to kill these socially critical proposals," Daly wrote in his blog.

Oh, and while the chamber is always worried about city spending, the group’s lawyer, Jim Sutton, is asking for attorney’s fees (likely to be a big, fat chunk of taxpayer change) if the suit prevails.

This is ridiculous. City Attorney Dennis Herrera needs to defend this aggressively, but that’s only the legal side. The mayor, who has become ever more closely allied with these downtown forces (see page 11), ought to join the supervisors in publicly denouncing the suit. SFBG

SFPUC: Get on the stick

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EDITORIAL The goal of San Francisco’s energy policy ought to be to remove all private interests from the generation, distribution, and sale of electric power, and the fastest way to get there is to condemn, buy out, and municipalize Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s local grid. But community-choice aggregation — a system under which the city acts as the equivalent of a buyer’s cooperative and purchases power in bulk to resell at a discount to consumers — is a good first step.

Even Mayor Gavin Newsom seems to realize that. Under pressure from CCA advocates, including Sup. Tom Ammiano, Newsom has earmarked $5 million in his next budget to begin implementing an aggregation system that the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), under chair Ross Mirkarimi, has been putting together.

Now it seems the last roadblock is the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, whose members suddenly and unexpectedly had issues with the budget allocation when it came up a couple of weeks ago. They wanted more information. They wanted to hold hearings. We understand their concerns — CCA is complex and important, and it has to be done right.

But the SFPUC should have been the lead agency pushing for public power years ago. The commissioners should have been holding hearings long ago — on the high costs of PG&E power, on the city’s legal mandate to run a public-power system, and on the value of CCA. They should have been pushing the mayor to allocate a few million dollars for a full public power feasibility study and pushed for this CCA allocation as part of their regular budget discussions.

Instead, it’s been up to the supervisors to analyze, promote, and advocate for the program, and it’s been Ammiano, Mirkarimi, and the LAFCO people who have done most of the work.

It’s really annoying that the mayor is willing to put up $5 million for CCA when advocates have had to fight tooth and nail for a few hundred thousand dollars for a municipalization study. But it’s the first time in decades that any mayor has done anything but stand in the way of anything that looked even a tiny bit like public power, so it’s a historic moment (of sorts). The SFPUC needs to actively support this project and begin talking about the next step — how to get rid of PG&E for good. SFBG

In SF, health care for all

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OPINION The question before us as San Francisco voters, health care providers, activists, legislators, and consumers is: "Can our community provide access to health care for people who work?"

In a surprising, welcome, and wise political partnership, Sup. Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom have joined their hearts and minds in a two-pronged approach to improve health access. The scope of the problem is simple.

In San Francisco, 84 percent of workers are privately insured. Employees contribute through premiums and co-payments. But there are now 82,000 uninsured adults in San Francisco. They rarely use preventative or primary care health services and (because of cost) only pursue health services when acutely ill. The overwhelming majority find their way to the overburdened emergency department at San Francisco General Hospital, where the taxpayers pick up the cost, estimated at more than $29 million a year.

It’s difficult and prohibitively expensive for individuals to get private health coverage. So group insurance is the obvious solution — and right now, that means insurance from employers.

The first of two complementary endeavors, initiated in November 2005 by Supervisor Ammiano, is the Worker Health Care Security Ordinance. It would direct employers with 20 employees or more to provide health insurance or contribute financially toward paying the cost of health care services for uninsured employees who work at least 80 hours a month.

The second part of the initiative comes from Mayor Newsom, who appointed a 37-member Universal Health Care Council, which will submit recommendations by May 2006 for a "defined benefits plan" establishing a "medical home" for the uninsured. It will also clarify the scope and cost of defined services, such as prevention and primary care, including behavioral or mental health services, dental health services, and prescription drugs, all in a plan delivered by the Department of Public Health clinics and the nonprofit coalition of community clinics.

San Franciscans overwhelmingly support universal health care.

By May the Universal Health Care Council, led by Sandra Hernandez, who runs the San Francisco Foundation, and Lloyd Dean, CEO of Catholic Health Care West, will recommend the scope of a plan, and health care benefits and costs, for both uninsured employees and the unemployed. For uninsured employees, this defined benefit plan could be heard at the same time as the final hearings on the Worker Health Care Security Ordinance currently in the budget and finance committee.

The opportunity to legislate a defined health care benefit for 30,000 uninsured working people in San Francisco is a historic step forward in improving the health status of all San Franciscans. Let us join both Sup. Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom to make history by the summer of 2006 and expand health coverage to working San Franciscans. SFBG

Roma Guy is a member of the clinical faculty of the Health Education Department at San Francisco State University and a city health commissioner.

Real tolerance

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OPINION On March 24, 2006, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to pass a resolution opposing the message that a group called Battle Cry for a Generation was set to deliver the following Friday on the front steps of City Hall. The appearance of Ron Luce’s teen program at the site had nothing to do with the group’s apparent reason for being in the city, which was to promote Christianity amid smoke machines and rock bands at SBC Park. Luce decided to rally on the steps of City Hall specifically because gay marriages had been performed there two years earlier.

The intent to somehow purify the steps with prayerful teens, the quick response by citizens of San Francisco, and the meaning of that entire encounter was lost completely as local journalists and former politicians rushed to smear the Board of Supervisors with labels like "clueless" and "intolerant."

In doing so, John Diaz at the San Francisco Chronicle and Joanna Thigpen at the San Francisco Sentinel both missed an opportunity to summarize for their readers the meaning behind the meeting of two groups. Instead, both city leaders and organizers of the counterprotest were admonished for their lack of tolerance.

For those in need of a working definition of tolerance, the American Heritage College Dictionary offers the following: "The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others." The key word within that sentence is recognize, which is hard to do if all you do when the Christian right comes to town is stay home and fume. Engagement (another version of recognition) is also a value, one that walks hand in hand with tolerance as the citizens of this fair city go forward in search of bigger and better expressions of human and civil rights. Showing up and shouting back don’t indicate intolerance. And staying away doesn’t display tolerance, just benumbed passivity.

Curiously, the charge was made that by issuing resolutions and press statements, both Sup. Tom Ammiano and Assemblymember Mark Leno were attempting to stifle Battle Cry’s right to free speech. Supervisor Ammiano’s office, which was the primary sponsor of the resolution, was contacted by neither the Chronicle nor the Sentinel. What he would have pointed out was that no one in city government made any attempt to silence anyone. The resolution was simply the progressive community’s proverbial two cents thrown into a debate Battle Cry started when the group assembled on City Hall’s steps. No public official ever came close to opposing Battle Cry’s right to frankly indict both queers and women who have chosen abortion or who support its legality.

Civic engagement like the sort displayed by Ammiano and Leno is what makes this city a haven for those who could not get tolerance for themselves, on their own terms, elsewhere. Far from impeding the right of Battle Cry to spread a message of hate disguised as love, we are forwarding the rights of speech to those whose voices are still being suppressed by fear and hate disguised as Christian love and tolerance.

Elizabeth Creely
Elizabeth Creely works with the Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights.

Make Wal-Mart pay

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EDITORIAL According to the University of California’s Labor Center, the state spent $86 million last year paying for heath care and social services for the families of people who work at Wal-Mart. That’s right: Wal-Mart pay is so low, and so few of its workers have decent health insurance, that a lot of employees wind up using public health clinics — and the taxpayers foot the bill.

It’s unfair not only to the Wal-Mart employees and the rest of us who have to pay the bills for one of the most successful and lucrative companies in the world, but also to other employers in the state, particularly small businesses that struggle to provide health insurance.

State senator Carole Migden has introduced a bill that would force Wal-Mart to quit demanding millions in public subsidies. SB 1414 would require any business with 10,000 or more employees in California either to put 8 percent of its total payroll into health insurance for workers or pay an equivalent amount of money to the Department of Industrial Relations. That’s still a fairly low payment — a lot of companies spend far more than 8 percent on health benefits, and Wal-Mart can well afford to do better. But it’s a good start, and it sends the message that employers who won’t pay a living wage can’t just count on California to make up the difference.

Wal-Mart is under fire from activists around the country for its cutthroat competition and its attempts to keep unions out and wages low. But it’s by no means the only employer that is trying to get out of paying health benefits. Migden’s bill would only hit the biggest of the big, but it’s similar to legislation proposed by Sup. Tom Ammiano that would force San Francisco businesses (including much smaller companies) to provide some sort of health care.

In the end, all of this is the wrong model: Employer-based health insurance is an unstable, inefficient, and hugely expensive way to cover medical bills. At some point, even the Wal-Marts of the world should realize that paying taxes to fund a national single-payer health system is cheaper and better for everyone.

But that’s not happening today, and Wal-Mart’s corporate welfare is. The legislature should pass Migden’s bill posthaste.

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